Pat Barker - Life Class

The band were playing a military march: ‘Men of Harlech’. He sat down and listened and after a while he did start to feel better. Probably Abbott was right. It was the beer, and he hadn’t had anything to eat. Perhaps he should get something. A bag of chips would do. When the band took a break, he stood up intending to buy some food, but as he turned to go, his attention was caught by reflections in a tuba. Distorted figures, chairs, caravans. He shifted his weight from side to side and the images changed. A face loomed up behind his face in the shining metal, and, ashamed of the childish game he’d been caught playing, he turned away.

He sensed that he was being followed. Almost as if some menacing doppelgänger had jumped out of the tuba and was pursuing him. Paul slowed down, striving to appear unconcerned. He felt if he showed any sign of fear the other would feed on it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that it was the tall man with the ginger moustache, the man he had not yet allowed himself to call Halliday The other slowed too, marching in step. What a ridiculous situation. Paul wanted to get away, but he didn’t want to go too far from the bandstand, since he’d arranged to meet Abbott and the girls here.

Oh, to hell with it. He turned on his pursuer. He wasn’t as tall as he’d seemed from a distance, but he was powerfully built. He wouldn’t be easy to take on. If it came to that — at the moment he was grinning. A flush of anger prickled Paul’s face and chest. ‘Do I know you?’

Eyes like polished black pebbles. ‘No, but we’ve got a fair bit in common. You’re fucking my wife.’

So this was it. Halliday It was nothing like he’d expected. In the early days when he’d imagined meeting Teresa’s husband, he’d envisaged a short, sharp, violent encounter in the basement or the street outside her flat. Leave my wife alone, you bastard. THUMP. Instead, here he was, not ten inches away, showing his teeth. Grinning. Paul walked away. He didn’t want a fight — he needed to feel right was on his side before he could hit out, and it was difficult to feel that here. Teresa was married to this man. He strode along, weaving his way through the crowd, knowing Halliday was close behind. Without warning, he lunged forward and grasped Paul’s arm. Paul stopped immediately, making no attempt to pull away. He was close enough to see the hairs in Halliday’s nostrils. Close to, like this, close enough to smell the hot, beery fug of his breath, Paul could see how frayed and grubby his shirt was. His eyes were bloodshot, his speech slurred. The man was a wreck. Not just down on his luck, but terribly, terminally stricken.

‘You can’t just walk off like that.’

He sounded reasonable, even friendly.

They stared at each other. Paul said, ‘All right, spit it out. What do you want?’

‘I want my wife back.’

‘That’s up to her.’

‘Oh, I suppose you’ve nowt to do with it?’

‘She was already separated when I met her.’

‘ I saw you.’

‘What do you mean, you saw me?’

‘Fucking my wife.’

The gap in the bloody curtains. ‘You can’t blame me for the state of your marriage.’

‘I don’t. I blame her.’

For a moment Halliday’s grin disappeared in a blaze of misery. Almost immediately, he was smirking again. Paul could have understood anger, but despite Halliday’s words what he saw in his face was not anger but a kind of jeering complicity. He seemed more like a pimp than an outraged husband.

And, God, he was drunk. It hadn’t been so apparent at first, but now he was swaying on his feet. ‘You’re one of a long line. Don’t you go thinking there’s owt special about you. She’s had more men than I’ve had hot dinners.’

‘Aw, piss off. And if I catch you following me round again –

‘You’ll do what?’

Suddenly Halliday’s fists were clenched. Paul walked on again and this time he knew he wan’t being followed. When he looked back Halliday hadn’t move. He stood, shabby, burly, bereft, in front of the bandstand where now, under the conductor’s raised baton, the band was tuning up again.

He had to tell Teresa. Tell her what? That Halliday was following him around, that he was angry, that he wanted her back; but she already knew all that. All the same he had to go to see her. Halliday was pathetic, with his swearing and his grinning and his melodrama and his filthy shirt, but he was angry and persistent, and he’d seen them making love. That would goad almost any man into action.

Why, with all her dressmaking skills, did she not run up a pair of curtains that met in the middle? It wouldn’t have taken her more than an hour. Or get bolts fitted on the doors? Or live in a first-floor flat? At the moment he felt guilty for ever having doubted her, but when he stepped back a little he saw that her behaviour was every bit as odd as Neville had said.

He would put bolts on the doors. That was one practical thing he could do to help. And although his meeting with Halliday had left him more bewildered than ever, he didn’t feel he could end the affair now.

In the distance he saw Elinor, with a bunch of pink candyfloss in her hand, standing a little to one side as Abbott and Ruthie talked. Waving, calling her name, he struggled through the crowd to join her.

That evening Teresa sat at a corner table in the Café Royal, staring all around her, noticing who was in tonight. She never seemed to get tired of the place, but Paul had begun to hate it. He felt all the time that, as Teresa’s latest lover, he was being assessed, and he had no independent status to make the verdict a matter of indifference to him. A young man with a flushed, familiar, subtly jeering face came up and spoke to her, but she ignored him, and he rapidly withdrew. She had immense self-confidence with men, though with women she often seemed wary. She’d have said this was because she liked men better, that she preferred their company, but really it was all based on contempt. On long, hard experience of men as sexual predators. In Teresa’s eyes, every man she met, from the waiter who served their drinks to the Archbishop of Canterbury, shuffled towards her with his trousers round his ankles and his dick pointing at the sky.

Paul kept his back to the room, leaning forward, trying to get her full attention. He wanted to talk to her, and he knew she was resisting him.

‘Oh, look,’ she said ‘there’s Gus.’

She raised a hand to wave, but Paul caught hold of her wrist. ‘No, don’t do that.’

She sat back, sullenly. ‘You never want to meet anybody else. You only like being with me when we’re on our own.’

‘That’s not true. You could have come to the fair with us.’

‘The fair?’

He could see she wanted to pick a quarrel. Well, she could have one, but not about their social life. ‘I saw Jack this afternoon.’ He thought she changed colour, though in this golden light it was hard to tell.

‘Oh? Did he see you?’

‘Yes, we bumped into each other at the fairground.’

‘By accident?’

‘What do you think?’

She shrugged. ‘What happened?’

‘What do you mean, what happened?’

‘Did he try to start a fight?’

‘No.’ He was watching her curiously. ‘He seemed a bit pathetic, actually.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. Sort of a mangy-tiger feel about him.’ She winced and turned her head away. ‘For what it’s worth, I think he’s still very much in love with you.’

‘Then he’s got a bloody funny way of showing it.’

Tears, almost. Not quite.

‘So you say. But he never actually does anything, does he?’

She stood up. ‘I’m going to say hello to Gus. Come if you want.’