The Lives of Women Read Online Free Page B

wrote letters to the letter page in newspapers; some of them had even been published. Even the men listened to her in mixed conversation. While she spoke about China, her mother made muttery, agreeable sounds. Elaine felt a pang under her ribs. Her mother wasn’t an intelligent woman – in fact she could be quite stupid. That was something else she had almost forgotten.
    Â 
    The pub – a dirty dive: damp, clumpy sawdust over a black-speckled floor. An ungentlemanly stink from the gentlemen’s toilets. A man on his own, throwing rings at a board. Further away, another lone man, using both hands to forklift his glass from the table to his face.
    The barman told them it was too early to open the lounge: if they wanted a drink, they’d just have to put up with it – counter service only. Oh, but Mrs Shillman
much
preferred these old fashioned bars, so full of charm and character – wouldn’t he agree?
    He looked at her with a blank, pasty face and waited for her order. Elaine followed her mother to a table. Mrs Shillman began seeing to the drinks. A large gin and tonic for herself, a large vodka and lime for her friend and ‘What about you, Elaine dear, what would you like?’
    Elaine would like nothing. Elaine would like to go home, get into bed, put her head under the covers. But she didn’t want to spoil things and so ordered a Coke. But no, her mother said, a Coke was out of the question; a soda water was the only thing for an invalid’s delicate stomach. Then she lit up a cigarette and sent a good thick whack of it across the table.
    Elaine turned her face to the window. In the hospital she had forgotten about seasons; now she saw it was summer outside. People passing by, coatless and sleeveless. Girls in sunglasses. Children in shorts and sandals. Inside, the barman swiped a tea towel over his sweaty face. A man in shirtsleeves pushed through the door and shouted for a chilled pint of lager. Her mother fanned her throat with a beer mat; Mrs Shillman drew the side of her glass along her forehead. Elaine pulled her big winter coat about her and blew into the cold cup of her hands.
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    She followed the minutes on the clock behind the bar until ten of them had edged by. Mrs Shillman wondered, then, if they wouldn’t be better off having one for the road to allow the traffic a chance to clear? The traffic at this hour can be simply horr
endous
, she said. Her mother considered this for about a half a second before heartily agreeing, her face dropping then at therealisation that, this time, she would be the one to go up to the counter.
    Her mother was unused to pubs, to walking across bar-room floors and standing at a bar counter, waiting on a strange, sweaty man to notice her there, before ordering a round of drinks in broad daylight. There would be the worry of fumbling through her money – her housekeeping money at that. The worry of how to get the drinks safely back to the table. And the worry too that some -how she was being watched – by her husband, the neighbours, Mr Hanley even, who had once told her she was his idea of ‘the perfect lady’.
    For a moment Elaine considered offering to go up to the bar on her behalf. But she felt exhausted suddenly and more than a little bewildered. The room was too big and too brown. There were too many red stools bleeding into her vision. And everywhere she looked she saw dirt: cigarette stubs on the floor, beer splashes on the wall, a bluebottle sniffing a crusted blob of mustard on the table. And as for the noise! The rubber rings banging off the ring board. The woman on the television screaming out the news. Martha Shillman yelling a story about her husband called Shillman and a funny incident that had occurred on a golf course in a city she’d never even heard of.
    From the corner of her eye, she kept a nervous watch while her mother’s shape moved gingerly across the floor, the trembling tray of drinks