Selected Stories

Sidney passes into streets with closed shops and minimarkets, dentists and chiropodists advertised, the Regina take-away, the Queen’s Arms at a corner, Joe Coral’s betting shop. Then there is a quiet neighbourhood, the yellow caravan still parked in the garden, the open space that’s not quite a park, litter sodden on its single path. The film was French Connection 2. He went to see it as soon as he saw the photograph, so that he knew the plot.

On the bus Sidney feels like sleep because last night, being Friday, was one of his late ones. But he doesn’t sleep because he hates waking up on a bus. Once he went past his stop and had to pay the extra, but that hasn’t happened since. Something wakes him, some worry about having to pay the extra again; one stop before his own he always wakes now, but even so he’d rather not sleep. He closes his eyes though, because he wants to go back in his thoughts, to run it again, to make sure it’s all still there: usually after he has been to the Scheles’ he does that. ‘The ice-cream girl was going round,’ he said, and every word was written down. ‘The lights were up.’

He needn’t have sat next to her but he did, he explained. He wanted to; soon’s he saw the hair he wanted to, soon’s he looked along the row and saw her lips, moving as it happened, sucking a sweet maybe, or chocolate. ‘You make a practice of this, Sidney?’ the sergeant asked. Well, once or twice before, he said, a woman he liked the look of.

The bus draws in again, three people get off, two men and a girl, the men much older, as if one of them’s her father. ‘You’re certain, Sidney?’ the sergeant pressed him, and he said the ice-cream girl took her time, not that anyone was buying from her, a good five minutes it was the lights were up. And there was afterwards too, of course. No way he wasn’t certain, he said. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘Oh, yes.’ The other man came in then, and asked the same questions all over again. ‘You tell us what clothes she was wearing, Sidney? Take your time now, son.’ It said in the paper about the clothes, and he remembered because he’d learnt it off.

The club is in darkness when he reaches it, but he turns the lights on as soon as he’s inside. He tidied this morning, the time he always tidies. Everything is ready. Alfie and Harry arrive, and he makes them Maxwell House the way they like it, and they sit there, drinking it and smoking. Tomorrow he’ll go back, Sidney says to himself, tidy up that rose that’s come down.

The Sunday bells of a church are sounding for an early service when Vera glances from the kitchen window and there he is, cutting up the big rosebush that the wind brought down. A warmth begins in Vera, spreading from some central part of her to her shoulders and her thighs, tingling in her arms and legs. It is the warmth of Vera’s passion, heat in her blood that such an unexpected glimpse always inspires. He came to help yesterday. Why today also? The blown-down rosebush could have waited.

‘Sidney’s come,’ her father says, having looked out too. ‘Twenty-five years, that rosebush. High as a tree and now we must begin again.’

‘Oh, I’m not sorry it’s gone. It darkened the garden. Sidney, you like some coffee?’ Vera calls from the back door and Sidney waves and says in a minute.

‘Is Sidney wearing the garden gloves?’ Mr Schele fusses. ‘You need the gloves with a rose.’

‘Sidney knows.’

Once, working in the garden, sawing up old planks of wood, he got a splinter under a thumbnail and Vera saw to it: Sidney’s hand laid flat on the kitchen worktop, a light brought specially in, a needle sterilized in a match flame, TCP and tweezers. In her night-time fantasies she has comforted Sidney, whispering to him, asking him to talk to her. Sometimes, when he has worked all through a weekend morning, she turns the immersion heater on early in case he’d like to have a bath before he goes. The time he cut his hand she staunched the blood flow with a tourniquet.

‘Ready, Sidney,’ Vera calls from the back door. ‘Coffee.’

Mr Schele senses something in the air. His thoughts reflect Vera’s: unsightly though it is, the thicket of twisted branches on the grass could easily have stayed there for a week. It is Sidney’s pretext, Mr Schele tells himself; it is a reason to come back so soon. He pours hot milk on to his bran flakes and stirs the mixture with his spoon, softening the flakes because he does not like them crispy. Is this, at last, the Sunday of the proposal? He watches Vera at the stove. She remembers her fluffy slippers and hurries away to change them. The glass disc rattles in the milk saucepan and Mr Schele rises to attend to that. He cannot last for ever; each day, at seventy-eight, is borrowed time. What life is it for a woman alone?