To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

would have her half day. We would eat lunch in her kitchen and spend the afternoon in bed, eat supper, or make toast off the gas fire in the front room, watch TV, kiss and cuddle and drink gin. Have an early night.

The piano was in the front room too. That is where I heard her play and sing. I will admit, the first occasion she announced she’d play to me, I had been rather concerned.

As I’ve said, my father was an all right if not inspiring pianist. As for any singing, I had had at least one grim experience of the impromptu turns of friends in pubs, when a piano was present. It was pretty awful, if not much worse than the fiascos perpetrated by modern karaoke.

So when Maureen sat down and skimmed off a piece of Debussy, flawlessly, beautifully, my already engaged heart lifted like a kite.

She didn’t sing to me until I’d known her nearly two months. When I heard her voice I wished I had been able to marry her, was worthy of marrying her. This is a fact. But then, I was young.

I was never in love with Maureen. But did I love her? I believe so.

And sex with her was what sex should be.

She enjoyed sex for its own sake. She made no secret of that. She’d picked me up that night because the fat man, to whom she referred only as that bugger Reg, had let her down. She said I had “Something” she liked, something she “took to”. But if I am scrupulously honest I must suppose “anything in trousers”, i.e. reasonably OK and equipped with male genitals plus a will to use them, would have done. But she was kind, too. She once said to me she had never had a kid and I cheered her up, not that I, she hastened to add, was in anyway like a kid to her, but my youth she valued. “Keeps me young,” she said, “being with you young ones.”

She had a lovely body. Not anything like any model girls, heaven forbid, all tightness and bones. Maureen was – voluptuous, I think is the best expression. She was like a day of full summer.

On the mantelpiece over the gas fire in the twelve by nine front room were a few photographs in frames. One of these was of a fair-haired, good-looking man in his twenties, with an unmistakable Maureen, then about twenty too, on his arm.

“That’s Graham,” she said. “My ex.”

They had married when she was eighteen. He was a steelworker and brought home a good pay packet. She hadn’t had to work, and had devoted herself to tending the home. But they had wanted children, or had thought they did, and none came along. In the end Graham started on a succession of affairs. She put up with this, she said, because he still brought the pay packet in and slept regularly with her. This was during the miraculous sixties, when sexually transmittable diseases were both less known or, if they occurred, no longer lethal, and well before the universal phantom of AIDs. But it made her unhappy, of course, and in the end the last straw floated on to the camel’s back. “Carol,” Maureen said. Carol was the last straw. They lived in Charlton by then. Carol had lived six doors down, husbandless, childless, mindless, and red-haired. Carol had a russet aura that she displayed regularly to randy Graham, along with endless faulty lights and fridges he could repair, and a lot of flesh. “She just,” said Maureen, “kept on smouldering at him till in the end he caught fire.”

Maureen was capable of interesting phrases like this one. I confess to storing many of them in a corner of my mind, and using them years later in my work. I’m not sure I could have invented word choices of such significance.

Anyway, inevitably Graham left with Carol, while Maureen was left with all the bills and the unpaid rent. Somehow she picked up her life and reassembled it. I once asked her why she kept his photograph. “Same reason I keep my wedding ring, Charlie,” (she still sometimes called me that), “part of my life. My life. Don’t throw the baby out with the water, eh?”

Now she lived over the Co-op and I came to call on her once or twice a week.

She had other callers. I didn’t and don’t deceive myself. Again, in that era, there wasn’t much physical danger that any of us knew of. If danger for the heart, we risked it, one and all.

Maureen encouraged me too with my writing. My parents had never taken any interest: I ‘scribbled’. They didn’t mind so long as I had a proper job. Actually I am unfair to my mother here. Left to herself I think she might have been not unapproving, in a careful sort of way. If it was my hobby, she would perhaps have congratulated me as she had my piano efforts earlier. “That’s nice, Roy.” But naturally my mother followed my father’s example. People at work I could never have spoken to. There were enough books on the groaning library shelves, no one needed any more written by such as Roy Phipps.

But Maureen was keen to know. She used to get me to read her what I’d done. She would sit spellbound – to this moment I really believe she was – gazing at me, devouring every word with her ears, eyes, and her forthright intelligence.

“Roy – I was on the edge of my seat. Send it – look, I found this magazine advertised in the paper – try them. That really gave me the shivers.”

And I would duly send, and duly get back the soulless rejection slip, and Maureen would say, “What do they know? You’re brilliant. You’ll be another Ellery Queen one day, you’ll see. Then they can eat their Y-fronts.”

Love. Yes, I loved Maureen. In memory I still do. She was my good angel perhaps.