The Word Cloud

With a small sigh of relief, Isabelle Jeffreys folded the ironed shirt in the military fashion on which Arnold insisted and placed it in the ironing basket, on top of its thirteen fellows. As always, she found herself trying to evade the smell that wafted past her nostrils. She disliked intensely the smell of warm, clean ironing: it should speak of homely, domestic tasks undertaken with love for one’s family, but the inevitable slight hint of her husband’s odour, released by the warmth of the iron, always lingered as well, no matter how clean the laundry. It had the faintly rancid smell of sweat exuded by a person who spent their days on the edge of fear, anger – a person ready to take offence at the least imagined slight. Then, as she stood back from the basket, ready to carry it upstairs to the airing cupboard, she reminded herself again that this was the last time ever that she would have to undertake this unpleasant task. She had always disliked ironing; given her own way, she would live in polo shirts and jeans but her husband disapproved of women wearing trousers and so she had to wear skirts and ironed blouses – just to keep the peace - and also to deny him the chance of picking yet another argument that would end in yet another beating. Whenever these thoughts crossed her mind, her hand went automatically to her fringe, worn longer than she would have liked at her age, but which nevertheless covered the scar across her forehead which was the result of one terrible beating that had, for once, frightened her husband so much that he had taken her to casualty to have it stitched. Lies, of course had followed: ‘She tripped over a mat and hit her head on the corner of a table, didn’t you, Isabelle?’ he had said, in answer to the concerned enquiry of a doctor. And she had replied, ‘Yes, of course,’ when she had been too terrified to say the truth: ‘No! He hit me! He hit me because I dared to give him sausages when he had said he’d wanted lamb chops for supper this evening! There weren’t any lamb chops in the butcher’s! Honestly, there weren’t! But he won’t believe me, he won’t believe me!’ and then she had fainted and had spent a blissful night of sleep, without fear, in a hospital bed: and the next day - home, to the same bullying routine.

Well, enough of daydreaming. She must get on or she’d miss the train and that didn’t bear thinking about. She looked at the kitchen clock as it ticked away the last few minutes of her marriage. It was half past nine; the train left at five to eleven and she had to catch a bus to the station. The bus stop was only twenty yards from their house, a semi-detached villa in a road that seemed to stretch for ever into the horizon, comprised of similar dwellings built by a speculative builder in the pre-war years. She briefly wondered how much money those men had earned in the construction of these monstrously ugly houses, and what happened to them? No - enough of daydreaming! It might, literally, be the death of her, if, for some reason, Arnold should catch her in the middle of her plans! She fought down a flash of unreasoned panic – how could he possibly know what she intended to do? She’d planned it all so carefully, for months now, and by the time he came home this evening, back from work as usual, she’d have been gone for about eight hours, quite long enough to have disappeared out of his life forever, leaving no forwarding address...

As can happen sometimes, it had been a chance overheard remark that had been her point of liberation. She was coming home from town, sitting on the bus with her shopping bags piled around her – Arnold had completely vetoed the idea that she should learn to drive: that would give her too much freedom – and she was listening, unwillingly, but the two ladies involved had rather carrying voices – to the conversation of the women in the seat in front of her:

‘Yes, you know, she had an awful time with him before she left him.’

‘What’s she like now?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t recognise her! No, she’s not with anyone else, she’s by herself but just to be away from him was enough. She’s so happy – got a little flat of her own and a part time job, and that with her pension is all she needs! And she’s even got herself a cat! You know she always wanted a cat but he wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘Good for her! I call that really brave, you know, just to up and go like that. But then, I think everyone’s entitled to a bit of happiness on this earth before they’re under it!’

...Everyone’s entitled to a bit of happiness... it could have been one of those moments of enlightenment such as saints experience at their conversion – a bit of happiness – it occurred to Isabelle, sitting surrounded by her shopping on a number 37 bus, that not since she was a little  girl had she been happy. And then the sequence of thoughts succeeded each other in a nano-second:

‘I’m very, very unhappy.’

‘Why am I so unhappy?’

‘Because I live with a man who has changed out of all recognition in the forty-odd years I’ve known him, from being a gentle, loving boy to a monster of sixty-three whose only pleasures are watching old war films and re-enacting them on his wife!’

‘What can I do about it?’

‘Stop feeling sorry for him and leave him before he destroys me, body and soul.’

‘I’ll do it!’

‘How?’

‘Don’t know yet, but I’ll do it!’

That had been a year ago. She had planned her escape meticulously; indeed, she had quite surprised herself as to how enterprising she could be. First, she had devised her plan: she was going to leave him and go somewhere – anywhere – she neither knew nor cared. She had no friends in whom to confide (Arnold’s behaviour when she had, as a young wife, brought a few girlfriends home had made sure of that) and there was certainly no-one with whom she could stay. In any case, she didn’t want to; she wanted to go somewhere that she could not be traced.

She decided to leave her destination in the lap of the gods: on one of her shopping days, she went to the reference section of the public library and asked for a map of England. Well, she had thought, there are limits – she didn’t fancy living anywhere in the UK apart from England – not at the moment, at least, although later she might spread her wings. Then, taking the map to a quiet desk that afforded her some privacy, she surreptitiously took a large pin out of her handbag, closed her eyes, waved the pin over the map a few times, said a short prayer to Saint Christopher (patron saint of travellers) and Saint Jude (ditto of lost causes) and stuck it in the map. She vowed that wherever the pin had landed, thither would she go. She hoped fervently that it was neither Bodmin Moor nor Birmingham. Both sounded equally inhospitable. Cautiously, she opened her eyes. Avoiding the alarmed glance of a young librarian who happened at that moment to be shelf-stacking, she squinted down at the map. ‘Please, oh please, don’t let it be either of the two Bs!’ she prayed. She looked more closely. The pin was stuck firmly in what seemed at first to be the middle of a green bit that looked like fields and her heart sank. ‘Christopher and Jude,’ she thought, ‘You’ve let me down, boys.’ Then she peered more closely. Just a minute – no, in fact the pin was on the edge of a road, one of those roads shown only by two parallel lines which, in this map at least, denoted a minor road. It was in the county of Worcestershire, leading to a village called Brotherton, near a slightly larger settlement – well, at least the name was in bold type – called Ottersdon. ‘Well, boys,’ she thought, ‘I’m sorry I doubted you! If that’s where you want me go, I’ll go!’ And from that moment, she felt safe. She had a goal in view, somewhere to aim for, somewhere that she felt, albeit unreasoningly, that she was ‘meant’ to go.

The feeling gave her a tremendous boost of confidence. She felt liberated. One chance remark had broken the spell of her bondage and she realised, once and for all, that she was not the useless person her husband had told her she was. She also understood, with a feeling of compassion that did nothing to deter her from her decision to leave him, exactly why he felt compelled, physically and mentally, to hurt her so much. ‘It’s nothing more than the pecking order,’ she thought. ‘Just the same as chickens. If a stronger chicken pecks a weaker one, that one just goes and finds one that’s weaker and gives it a peck. It lessens the humiliation, I suppose. Funny, I’ve never thought of chickens feeling humiliated. I know Arnold does. It can’t be fun working as a salesman when you’re getting on, knowing the younger chaps are getting better bonuses than you – but there again, he’s been like this since he was a young man, and he just has no right to peck me just because some young salesman has ruffled his feathers! It’s about time he grew up!’

She was astonished to find herself thinking these new, liberating thoughts. It was her epiphany: she realised, too, that she could dissemble, keeping Arnold in complete ignorance about her new life. As long as she behaved in exactly the same pattern to which he was accustomed, and in which he insisted, he would not be aware of her new daily routine which, as her confidence grew, had somewhat changed. Summoning up her courage, she enrolled in a ‘Computers for the Terrified’ course, held at the library each Thursday afternoon. Since this was, in any case, her shopping day, Arnold suspected nothing. She loved the course and to her delight sailed through, displaying no terror at all. She loved the fact that, using a computer, she was in charge, she could call the shots. The machine had to obey her commands and, once she had assimilated the fundamentals of computer use, she understood how it opened the world for her. She took another course, the next step up, learning how to use the internet with confidence as well as word and spreadsheet programming. She found that she was very good at her new skills and she decided that, once established in her new home, she would look for a job where she could use them. She was awarded a certificate for this last course; she realised that it might stand her in good stead when she was job-hunting. Of course, she said nothing about her award and stashed it in her hiding-place – she had discovered two loose floorboards under her bed (it was years since she and Arnold had shared the same bed; for a couple of decades they had occupied twin beds in the front bedroom overlooking the street). Her ‘treasures’ were quite safe there; Arnold, certainly, would never do any housework and so was highly unlikely to discover loose floorboards by dusting under the bed.

She put the certificate in her going-away luggage. This comprised a holdall; it was soft and could be easily hidden, squashed into a restricted space. She had bought it for pennies in a charity shop about six months ago. It was old and shabby; ‘but then,’ thought Isabelle, ‘so am I – well, at least, middle aged and shabby.’ In it, she had squirreled away the essentials she would need: clothes she had acquired from charity shops, also for pennies, the type of clothes no-one wanted: out-of-fashion polo shirts and faded jeans (At last!’ she rejoiced), a couple of sets of pyjamas - she had even steeled herself to buy second-hand underwear. She had recognised two vital facts: Arnold must not be aware of any sudden disappearance in her personal items – his paranoia noticed anything that was not where it should be – and she also had to make her meagre housekeeping allowance stretch to accommodate its usual expenditure as well as the items she needed to buy. She had had another ‘liberating’ moment in that respect: she realised that she could buy ‘own brand’ goods from supermarkets and cheaper cuts of meat and he never noticed the difference.  She silently blessed the supermarkets for starting their ‘Value’ ranges of goods and saved sufficient money by her secret economies to buy the things she was going to need. She was secretly very proud of her efforts. It was also a huge boost to her self-esteem: another personal triumph. As was her acquisition of a bus pass when she turned sixty. This made a huge difference to the amount of money she could save and, by putting aside the difference as though she was still spending it on the fare to town, she managed to save up for a senior citizen’s rail card. Little by little, for the first time in her life, she began to enjoy a modicum of freedom. These items were totems of independence; they would enable her to find liberty, wherever she chose to go – well, as long as there wasn’t a rail strike or ‘the wrong sort of leaves on the line’ – yes, that would disrupt her plans. Hardly likely though, she comforted herself.

Isabelle carefully put the shirts in the airing cupboard, closed the door (‘For the last time’, she thought. ‘Everything now is for the last time.’) and went into the bedroom. She bent under the bed and hauled out the holdall and a change of clothes that she had previously decided were to be her ‘going-away clothes’ from their hiding place, carefully replacing the boards. Even when she had gone, she did not want Arnold to know how she had achieved her freedom. It would burst the bubble of her new joy, which she wanted to hug to herself, keep it safe, like a loved child.

Child – now was the time to put into the holdall the photograph of Philip, their only son, who had left home as soon he was able, choosing to study at a university way up in the north of England. He had not wanted to leave her but she had insisted, telling him that his own life must not be hurt any more than it had been already, that she would find a way of surviving. That had been two years ago; with their son’s departure she lost her only companion. She had been left in utter despair and Arnold’s viciousness towards her had increased; any overt vulnerability on her part brought out the worst in him. He needed her strength and yet he attacked it, like a small child in a tantrum hitting its mother.

‘I’m not enough for you, is that it?’

‘It’s not that, Arnold, but he’s our son – I love him.’

‘And not me, I suppose? You don’t love me?’

When she could not truthfully answer, the inevitable blow came. Well, as soon as she was settled, she would contact Philip, and let him know she had escaped. There should have been other babies but the beatings had put paid to the pregnancies. At the hospital, they thought she was just ‘one of those unlucky mothers who only manage to carry one baby’. Of course, it was all a long time ago. Perhaps, nowadays, the bruises would be commented on. Perhaps... even Philip had only escaped serious injury as a baby because, when he used to cry, she would throw herself across the cot and take the blows herself. Afterwards, it was as if Arnold had not realised what he had done. He would look at her, bruised and bleeding, and wander out into the garden. And she would take her baby in her arms and weep.

‘Well, it’s not going to be like that any more! And when Philip meets a nice girl and I’m a grandma, I’ll be able to give my grandchildren all the love I would have given those other babies.’  The thought comforted and sustained her during her months of planning.

She forced herself to concentrate on the job in hand. Kissing his picture, in which he looking so serious with his university scarf casually draped around his neck, looking every inch the first-year student, she placed the photograph carefully amongst her second-hand treasures. These shabby items represented freedom: worth but a few pennies, to her they were priceless. Well, she thought, as she closed the zip, this bag contained all she needed. It contained her future. She took a final look around the bedroom, remembering with a shudder of disgust all the unhappiness she had endured within its walls. Her eyes lingered briefly on her husband’s bed. She had made it neatly as usual this morning, even changing the sheets. ‘That’s one less job he’ll have to do, although he’s going to have to learn in future’, she thought with a wry smile. Her own bed she had stripped, folding the blankets neatly (Arnold would not allow duvets in the house, no matter how much warmer or easier to use they were), putting the dirty linen in the laundry basket (‘He can wash it’, she thought, ‘only he’ll have to find out first how to operate a washing machine.’), bringing the counterpane back up so that unless you knew, you would think her bed was as neatly made-up as ever. Then – and she had been looking forward to this moment for so long, cherishing it in her darker moments during the past year – she changed her clothes, casting away the hated tights, blouse, skirt, in which she had dressed that morning before Arnold went off to catch the 7.30 bus to town. Her hands were trembling, with excitement and not a little fear, now that the moment of departure was drawing closer. ‘I’ve lived for this for so long,’ she thought, ‘Oh, come on, fingers, just undo these horrible fiddly buttons!’

In the end, she just wrenched off the wretched things, tearing the blouse, and reached out for her ‘new self’ – a pair of ladies’ trousers which, though slightly worn, were of good quality and which she had chosen carefully for their respectability, modesty - but above all, their cost - then a pink polo shirt that she had fallen in love with at the charity shop, and a mauve cotton jumper. She had also had to buy socks and these she now pulled on. Her old shoes were fine; she always wore ‘sensible shoes’ so, thank goodness, she had not had to go to the expense of new footwear.

Then, with a slightly malicious thrill, she pulled back the counterpane and dumped her old clothes in a heap just below the pillow, forlornly denuded of its pillow-case.

‘Old clothes, old life!’ she said to the world in general. ‘Stay there and rot, for all I care!’

She glanced at the bedside clock, standing on the little table between the twin beds. Ah, nearly ten o’clock, and she still had one more job to do before she caught the bus at ten-thirty. Taking her precious holdall, without looking back, she left the bedroom. She shut the door and went downstairs into the living room, which was the room directly beneath the bedroom, from the windows of which you could see straight down the road, each way, past the bus stop and its opposite companion, where Arnold alighted after each day’s work. How many times had her heart sunk as she watched him get off the bus, wondering what his mood would be – whether they would be able to get through the evening tolerably well because he had managed to earn some commission or whether his younger workmates had made his life so unbearable that he would have to take it out on her. Pecking order...well, now for her, it had been ‘packing order’... amused by her own silly little joke, and amazed that she was rediscovering the sense of zany humour in which she had delighted as a girl, she sat at the shabby writing bureau that had been her father’s. He, too, had loved silly, gentle little jokes... on a summer’s day, if Mother had made a salad for lunch, he always called her in with the same words:

‘Issy! Come in, dear, your salad’s getting hot!’ and then she would hear him chuckling to himself...

Now, she took a writing pad from the bureau and looked for a pen. Should it be pen or pencil? Suddenly, it seemed important: pen was for keeps, pencil was ephemeral. If he chose to, Arnold could erase her pencilled words. She chose a cheap ball-point and wrote, her heightened nervousness making the writing shake, the letter that she had mentally rehearsed for so long but which, until now, she had never dared bring into being:

After recording the date and the time (this, too, was important, so momentous was her undertaking),  she wrote: ‘Dear Arnold, I decided some time ago that living with you was unbearable for me. I know why you are so cruel, after all, you did warn me (She remembered, with a pang of pity and regret and with a sense of mourning for their lost innocence, the night before he had left her to go away for National Service. He had laid his head in her lap; he was eighteen, she a year younger and they had been ‘childhood sweethearts’. He had wept because he knew he would lose himself, that his soul would be crushed and he had not the strength to prevent it. She had tried, in her inexperience and with the hope of youth, to comfort him, telling him that she would wait for him and that when he came back, they could look forward to a life of happiness together. He had been posted to Korea; when she next saw him, two years later on his demob, the person whom she met at the station was a stranger, the eyes into which she peered for recognition of her lover still seemed to be seeing unimaginable horrors. She remembered wondering: who was this monstrous changeling and – not who, but what - had killed the boy she had loved.).

But all that was a long time ago and you have never, ever tried to get over it. I have to leave while I am still young enough to enjoy at least a part of my life. Please don’t try to find me. I’ve been planning this for months and, believe me, Arnold, there’s not much chance of you finding me and even if you did, I would not come back to you. And don’t try asking Philip because I haven’t told him any of this. It’s been my secret (she felt triumphant as she wrote those last words; they were to show him that, in spite of all his cruelty, he had not broken her spirit).

In the airing cupboard, you will find a fortnight’s clean shirts. That will see you through while you make up your mind what to do next. You will also find tonight’s supper in the fridge, only you’ll have to cook it yourself. It’s lamb chops, your favourite.  Goodbye, Arnold, and good luck.’

With a sigh of relief that the deed was done, she folded the letter once, searched for an envelope, inserted the letter and sealed it. As she was doing so, she happened to glance out of the living room window. She saw someone alight from the bus from town; idly turning over in her mind whether it was anyone she knew, she realised, with a terror so great that it felt like a stab in her stomach, that it was Arnold. Good God! What was he doing, coming home at this time of the day! From that moment, she acted on instinct: almost sobbing with fear, she fled into the kitchen and propped the incriminating letter on the teapot. She realised, in the dreamlike way that terror can engender, that she had not yet put away the iron or ironing board. Common sense prompted her to check the iron was turned off but that was all she intended to do. Grabbing her holdall, she fled down the passage towards the garden door, by the side of which they kept their coats and shoes. Fingers fumbling with fear, and every now and then giving a little moan of fear, she struggled into her lace-ups – long ago decided upon as the most sensible shoes for a long journey – then flung herself into a three-quarter length dark green woollen jacket. She had also decided that she must give, as far as she could, the ‘smartish but sensible’ older –lady look, to be the sort of person who would attract as little attention as possible on her journey so that, should Arnold try to trace her, no-one might remember her. She had taken the precaution of buying her train ticket a few days ago, at a busy time of the day; she considered that in this way, it was less likely that she would be remembered at the ticket office. But now – oh God, please help her to get to the ticket office! At the moment, it seemed as unreachable as Alice’s beautiful garden in Wonderland.

At last, she felt she was ready. She picked up her holdall and, turning the handle as quietly as she could, for she had no idea where Arnold was – he could be coming down the front path for all she knew – she let herself out into the garden. There was a long alley-way at the back of the gardens, each ordered rectangle of statutory grass and herbaceous border terminating in identical access gates. Before today, she had often had occasion to dislike the alley, a cat’s highway to neighbours’ gardens other than their own, to be used as lavatories, but now it was a blessing, it was her passage to paradise. She fled down the garden path and then, trying the handle, remembered they always kept the door locked. ‘The key! Where do we keep...oh yes! Oh thank God!’ Panic had momentarily prevented her from thinking clearly. She reached up to the hook on the right of the door, found the key and unlocked the door. As she passed through, it occurred to her to lock it again since this might deter Arnold, should he try to follow her. She did so then hurled the key into a garden on the opposite side of the alley. It would take Arnold some time to find it – if he ever managed to - then she fled down the alley. Just as she turned out of it, into the road up which she would now have to walk in order to reach the bus stop, she was sure she heard Arnold’s voice:

‘Isobel? Isobel, where the hell are you? Where are those papers I was working on last night? I forgot them. Isobel? Isobel!’

She let him shout. He’d shout even more when he read her letter. She reached the corner of the road. She did not dare put her head round the corner, in case he was in the road, looking for her. If he had seen her letter and read it, he would certainly come looking. Oh dear God! Would that bus never...

There it was, coming down the road. It seemed to take forever but she timed herself so that, as she ran from the corner, she was at the stop as it drew up. Since she had had to wait a little while, she was not out of breath. This was good; it made her less conspicuous. As she mounted the platform, she has her bus pass ready. She gave the driver a little smile; he said, ‘That’s OK, love, just take a seat.’

How pleasant people could be. As the bus pulled away from the stop, she felt compelled to turn, to take one last look at her old house, her past life. As she did so, the front door opened. Arnold came out and stood on the pavement. He had not even taken off his jacket. He was holding her letter in his hand and he was looking towards the bus; she could not see his face clearly but she felt sure that he was crying. ‘Good thing if he is,’ she thought. ‘It’ll do him good, after all these years’.

As for herself, she closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.  The past seemed to dissolve away. Turning her head, she pressed her brow against the bus window and watched people going about their everyday tasks in the crowded streets until the bus pulled into the station. Clutching her holdall, she alighted from the bus and walked into the railway station, into a new life.

This is by Gerry Ewan - I'm uploading it for her.