A Commonplace Killing by Siân Busby Read Free Book Online Page B

wondered if she might actually cry. If she started she might never stop, so she pulled herself together and put on her skirt and jacket and inspected herself in the mirror. Motherhood had not ruined her figure, like it did for so many other women; when she was dressed – ideally with a good foundation garment – she still had the semblance of a good figure.
    She tied a patterned scarf around her hair in a sort of artistically arranged turban. It was hard to believe that there had ever been a time when she would no more dream of going out without a hat on than she would of flying to the moon and back; the war had caused so many standards to slip. She checked that her seams were straight and slipped on a pair of high-heeled black and white calf shoes; a pair of white lace gloves and the pigskin handbag completed the look. She checked the whole ensemble in the mirror. Coo, what it is to have sex appeal, she thought as she went downstairs.
    The hall was damp and gloomy: brown linoleum worn at the edges, ochre wallpaper. The whole house was hideous, dingy, a dead or dying thing, breathing a redolence of shell-shock, abandonment , neglect.
    “I’m off!” she cried. Her voice resounded in the indifferent silence. She stood there for a moment, at the top of the stairs, acknowledging the turmoil of her nerves, her frustration; the injustice of her situation. She closed her eyes telling herself that she could scream. Curiously, the thought settled her.
    Outside was bright and warm, the breezeless air thick with gasometers and railway smuts. In the heat there was the smell of something decaying. As she walked along the road, she thought how there was a terrible loneliness about the abandoned houses; how it was impossible to believe that things might ever be nice again. As she prepared to cross towards Nag’s Head, she could see that the line of badly dressed women formed outside the baker’s shop already extended past the tobacconist’s and the draper’s. Some people have nothing better to do than to stand in a queue all day, she thought. A few of the women, the narrow-minded ones, were looking her up and down as she took her place at the back of the queue. They were thinking how there was nothing austerity about her: how the powdered nose and the slick of black-market vermillion marked her out as one of those women who had had “a lovely war”. How she pitied them, with their headscarves tied under their chins like Russian peasant women and their patched and darned stockings kept up with threepenny bits. A bus passed by on the other side of the road, a flash of red breaking the monotony of the greyness of everything else. Muswell Hill, it said on the front, and briefly she wondered what it would be like to cross the street and board it; she was picturing herself alighting somewhere that had been largely untouched by the war, somewhere green and airy: somewhere nice. She could find a nice little room somewhere and a job in a hat-shop. On Saturdays she would go to the pictures. She would have lunches in nice places. She would meet gentlemen for cocktails. Nice men; handsome men, who were looking for a little harmless diversion. It would be just like the war again, only without the bombs and the filth.
    She snatched an admiring glimpse of herself in the draper’s window, the pigskin handbag swinging from her arm with elegant insouciance. Why shouldn’t she have those things? Other people did, so why not her? She dwelt gloomily on the drabness of her life, wishing Mother dead, Walter gone. Why were there always so many obstacles in her life? Why did nothing ever go right for her? She knew that she ought to be grateful for them all having come through the war when so many others hadn’t; she ought to be grateful, but she really wasn’t. This was the deep, dark secret of her soul.

7
     
     
    T hey had crossed the Holloway Road and now they were turning down a depleted side street over which hung a thick cloud of engine steam,