Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Dear Sir,

     With reference to her legs encased in sheerest nylon, she turned the left one over, knees together, parting the flow of shimmering buti-silk boudoir coat in three colours, angel-blue, love-grey and mutation, to expose a cream smooth thigh to Gerald’s pulsating gaze. His breath came in sobs as with arms wide Sandra yet averted her lowered eyes, tempting him, so near Gerald so far, while the head-long scent of Shadowsweet No. 2 rose all around to madden his brain, and the long-player throbbed muted strains of Yours, Yours.

                                                 Yours faithfully,

                                               Sandra (Marjorie) Lee

     Her hands dropped from the typewriter keys and her eyelids, loaded with green grease, raised themselves to let water-wet eyes look through the window at white tiles all over the office well.

     Beyond, where endlessly the range of grimed dairy-like bricks ended, a grey December sky flooded down cold light: inside, behind her, the grey suits of men bowed over grey letters, ledgers.

     It was the end of another year.

     ‘Grey skies grey as my eyes,’ Sandra suddenly sang in her mind, ‘snap out of it!’

     Because, however long the year had been, it was going to be a long day today. It was Friday December the Twenty-third. It was the day of the Office Party. The afternoon would be a rout, a riot. Already it was absurd to call the office grey, for round each desk and in drawers everywhere there lay parcels and tissue-wrapped bottles, and where these touched a radiator the heat sent out festive crackle-sounds of crinkly paper, red and green, jolly-holly Christmas crackle.

     Yet — would she, she Sandra, ever see this Party? Now her heart gulped again, right into her throat, as it had all morning, to think of what was most momentous: her boy, her man, her Bun asking her to throw up everything, to leave at lunch, to drive away with him and get married to him, that very day, or at least to face together her parents today and then start seeing registrars and things about a quick wedding soon after Christmas. Bun had to go and lay electric cables all over Sarawak. That was why.

     And she was not sure. It had all boiled up and over too quick. How could a girl say Yes so suddenly? Especially to a man she knew so well, over so many years. Especially, yes, to a steady — so steady they had never even bothered to get engaged.

     Quiet bell-sounds punctured the rubbery office air as typing and duplicating machines chattered to and fro: and underneath and away, like the pounding of engine-room pistons, a muffled thumping of deep motor traffic blotted up any edges of silence. A light smell arose from paper, ribbon-ink, pencils, lubricating oil and from the extraordinary metal presence, like the slow thick taste of tin on the tongue, of the filing cabinets.

     And, moreover, she was already dated to lunch with Nevile Wrasse, with dark-eyed Nevile who would drive her in his low white car to a smart lunch in the powder-scented West End.

     There indeed was a problem. And it was marked now or never, neck and crop, neck or nothing. Not that Nevile mattered. It was the Decision that mattered. And Bun would be ringing at eleven. If then she said Yes, she must leave at lunch and not come back. Goodbye to all, hello Sarawak.

     Yet how to take the final step?

     There was, at least, half-an-hour yet. Better to think? Better not to think?

     She looked down at the paper beneath her, on which was typed, under a stamped letter-heading THE ALLASOL MISSION, LTD., simply: ‘Dear Sir, With reference to’ and the rest of the page mind-blank.

     But then as she raised her hands to begin once again, she saw a purple ribbon-stain on her oyster index nail. Automatically the other hand reached down and took from the drawer a little bottle of nicotine-remover, fluffed some into cotton-wool — and then dropped a drop of remover down on to her lap. The wet drop stared up from among the many polka-dots that made up the pattern of her dress. ‘Oh NO!’ she said, and added, ‘Oh no, Sandra!’ as she foresaw the big pale rim with which this fierce stain-remover would stain her dress and began to worry: Will another spot matter among all these real spots, will it ever be seen? It had fallen on a nasty awkward place, though. She needed a mirror and rose to leave for what at Allasol they called the Red Hell — the Staff Powder Room.

     She rose from her small square nest of dark wood desk, wire baskets, piled paper, and the big grey typewriter to stand, fleshy and exotic, against a wall of mud-green steel files. Her hair, dyed bright brown and piled into a strange sharp fashionable shape, her silk-seeming dress and stockings, her high shoes and low neck played a most female essence against the dry office furnitures. In the cold light shed from white tiles outside, make-up made a mask of her face, for each layer of unguent or powder intended for tender café-light became as individually marked as the painted stripes on the face of a celebrant savage. It was difficult in any light ever to know what her face was doing beneath this mask: it was so thick and static that only tears or smiling teeth could send forth recognizable signals.

     She passed between old Miss Cook in her fussy, cardiganed corner and the desks of Mr Mansford and big Mr Tiny Hearst, who stood together conferring over some photographic enlargements spread out on Mansford’s desk.

     But she paused as an atmosphere of gossip rather than work invaded her sensibilities.

     ‘It’s nothing to do with us, is it old man?’ said Mansford, a good-looking young man, darkly brilliant and piratical, who nevertheless was contentedly married and thus looked all wrong and wasted.

     Big pink-and-white-faced Tiny Hearst lowered his pale porker’s eyes and echoed Mansford’s words, drawing back his head a few inches the better to survey the photographs: ‘We’re old enough to know better, aren’t we old man?’

     ‘In her birthday suit, eh?’

     ‘In the buff.’

     ‘And to think that the original of this, ahem, art study is now sitting large as life, one floor beneath us in the typing pool!’

     ‘They have to strip to type down there? Didn’t know the old pool was wet as that.’

     Sandra (Marjorie) Lee leaned forward by Ralph Mansford to peep-bo at the photographs. They showed the back of a naked young woman, squatting so that her bottom should not show too much, and the outline of one breast showing round from the front, but with the nipple painted off. ‘You mean that’s Sue Blair, is it really?’ she asked, eyelids working up and down. ‘However could she? In the office, too.’

     ‘In the Studio,’ Mansford said. ‘She went along with the PRO to take notes and the model didn’t turn up so Sue volunteered.’

     ‘No!’

     ‘Yes.’

     Tiny put in: ‘Took off her thingummies there and then and click, it was all over. Painless and professional. They say she’d done it before.’

     ‘Sue Blair’s been done like that before?’ said Sandra, a kind of hot envy rising through her first shock.

     ‘Magazines, they say. Thumbies.’

     ‘What?’

     ‘What you thumb over when the tobacconist isn’t looking.’

     Sandra put a look of shock across her face, and raised her voice: ‘Well of all the barefaced —’

     The two men turned and looked at her very hard.

     From elderly Miss Mavis Cook’s corner, from among her ‘little home’ made up of a calendar of bluebells and a cardigan on a hangar and a big red tartan biscuit tin, a lightly laughing voice pealed to the rescue: ‘Really, if the girl wants to make an exhibition of herself, then let her, say I. And after all, if she’s got a lovely body. . . we’ve all got bodies, haven’t we?’

     There was an embarrassing silence.

     ‘We-ell,’ said Sandra, ‘she looks kind of cold for Christmas. My, I must run!’ and she had already taken six quick tight-skirted steps onwards to the powder room when there came a shout from a door among glass partitions behind.

     ‘Marge!’ a smart red-haired woman cooed at her. ‘Here a second, can you?’

     ‘Damn her,’ thought Sandra, who had changed her name from Marjorie only a year before, and to whom the word Marge now cut like fingernails on glass. But she instantly smiled, ‘Coming!’ and tacked quickly over towards this Monica Naseby, who was H.J.’s personal assistant, and who had emphasized the forbidden name on purpose. Monica was thirty, and thus ripe enough to scorn any affectation in the young. ‘Hell and hell and hell,’ Sandra-Marge thought, as she looked down quick again at the stain-remover spot, which was already drying—but all her teeth opened in sweetness: ‘Sure Monny, what can I do you for?’

     She passed within the glass partition which served as a protective vestibule to the closed polished doors of the directors’ rooms beyond. ‘Mr Deane,’ said Miss Naseby pinning papers together offhand, ‘said you had asked to leave early, before lunch. He says yes all right, only wanted a word with you first.’

     ‘Oh—now?’

     Monica now came smiling through official Miss Naseby. Very regular pearly teeth arrived among dimples strongly assuring benevolence, as, upon embracing you, a python might smile. ‘Really, Marge, you shouldn’t worry Mr Deane with staff details. He’s got more than enough, especially as we’re hurrying to clear the decks for the Party. Come to me next time, eh?’

     Nothing showed through Sandra’s mask but again smiling teeth — and what finally is a smile but a kind of bite, loving or not? ‘Don’t I know,’ she agreed, ‘but I was just with him, and I thought not to appear rude missing his Personal Message —’

     ‘Of course, love,’ said Monica to cut her short, and rose like a chic tube in her dark career suit to go and tap on H.J.’s door. Here and there the tube was slightly swollen, as if a woman inside was waiting to flower after hours.

     Sandra looked down at her spot, and the thoughts pounded into an agonizing race. What was he asking her in for? Was it to receive her Personal Message now, as it were, personally? (The Personal Message was the way H.J. liked to think of the Christmas Bonus Packet, which he always delivered in person.) And would H.J. see her spot? No, at least not that — and she whisked up a sheet of blotting paper to hold it in place when the call came. And what — worst of all — was she going to say about going off early? Because she had asked about this only because of Bun and his idea to drive straight off — and she had asked it particularly casually, as a possibility, as a perhaps. But now was H.J. about to expand it into a concession? Was it to be Yes or No in the next two or three minutes? It seemed like Fate forcing her hand. But did she like Fate forcing her — unless she had already made up her own mind, when Fate became a different matter, more like a delicious helping hand itself?

     Because if she went to lunch with Bun she would not only be missing the Party if not also the Personal Message, but missing as well what was much more important and fluttered and banged against her mind this morning like a cloud of big moths — missing Life. It was terribly plain from Bun’s new stern look and from a kind of extension to his jaw, as if he were throttling on a new collar-stud, that it was for life this time. Marriage, it was. And that would be wonderful, it was where deeply and happily with Bun she wished to head. And Sarawak, perhaps, was wonderful too. But it would be all twice as wonderful if something had happened first. Or if were there time yet for something to happen. Something. Anything. An event in her life, a romance, an accident, a ‘something’ to look back upon. Something outrageous, something terrible, something exciting, something even just bad.

     For life had been uneventful. The truth was that Sandra, despite her appearance, which differed little from how a whore might be thought to look, was a good girl. And she was already twenty-two years old. While one side of her sent a white Sandra willingly pure into her future husband’s arms, another side deplored this. Should so much be sacrificed all at once? All the desires and dreams of her growing years, all she had tended so carefully in mirrors everywhere, all the Sandra she had made, inside and out? Marriage, they say, is an adventure. But it did not seem to have quite the line of other adventures. Desperately she wished for a past with which to face the future.

     Then the door began to open — just as a big girl came whisking past in a glow of pink-washed cheeks and rose-fresh powder. Fine strong calves halted, sensibly-pleated skirt swirled to a stop as Jill Jenkins her desk-neighbour paused to whisper at Sandra’s ear: ‘Has Bun phoned yet?’

     Sandra shook her head, and pointed a finger at the door. Jill smiled her huge fresh smile, tossed back chestnut curls and whispered: ‘Who’s a now-or-never girl? Why, Sandra Sarawak!’ And swirled off humming the first bars of the ‘Wedding March’.

     ‘Now or never’ drummed at her mind as she went forward to H.J.’s room, and whether it was the predicament itself or the predicament plus the spot on her dress, or other things as well, like the sudden strong daylight striking in from H.J.’s door and blinding her, and a ruck in the carpet that gave a tug at her heel that tugged right up to her belt — she suddenly flushed with quick anger: ‘Why, it’s wrong a man should lay down terms like that. Shouldn’t he be on his knees asking? Who is this Bun? Where is this Sarawak?’

     ‘Yes, Mr Deane?’

     ‘Miss Lee? Yes.’

     They were alone. Godfrey Deane, a big-built man whose initials H.J. stood for Honest Jack, a device of the staff born of the large twinkle he put into eyes to simulate friendliness, Godliness, even Cleanliness in the murky business of merchandizing — this big good-looking fifty-year-old leaned athletically back in his chair, arms wide on the chair-arms, all chest and tie, and twinkled.

     ‘Can you keep a secret, Miss Lee?’

     Holding her blotter casually in place, Sandra thought quickly: Say, cynically, ‘I’m a woman, Mr Deane.’ Say, jollily, ‘Cross my heart, Mr Deane.’ Say, poker-faced, ‘What’s it worth to you, mister?’

     ‘A secret, Mr Deane?’ she said.

     A tired look of wear and tear washed the twinkle from Mr Deane’s eye.

     ‘I see I can trust you. It’s just this,’ he said, and upended a small packet with a significant finger, than let it drop as though worthless. ‘It’s the bonus. We’ve not had a bad year, but, quite frankly, it’s not come up to expectations. We’ve all got to tighten our belts that much. I’m afraid this — which we offer you now with our best wishes for a Happy Christmas — is only half what you might usually expect.’

     Now Sandra’s make-up stood her in good stead, not a sign of disappointment showed through. And she managed to say, evenly: ‘I’m only sorry for Allasol’s sake, Mr Deane,’ while Half-oh-God-Half wailed at the back of her quite honest concern.

     But now Mr Deane was writing on the packet, and at the same time extending his free hand towards her stomach.

     ‘Blotter,’ he said, ‘I’ve lost my ballpoint.’

     Panicked, she drew it back. Then fearfully extended the blotting paper. It was awful. And the cold grey sunlight blinding her through the window.

     ‘I’ve added — And a Happy New Year. I hope it will be, for all of us. I’ve great plans for expansion. You know, Miss Lee, when we first formed Allasol, it was to be called Allasol Beauty Products Ltd. But that did not seem enough. It had to be bigger — and finer. You know, The Allasol Group of Companies, The Allasol Organization, Allasol Initiatives. Something that had — well, call it class.’

     He leaned even further back, staring vaguely at her stomach. A visionary blur clouded his eyes: ‘And then I thought, the thought came to me, Miss Lee — The Allasol Mission! And so it was. And that’s just what we are — a mission. we have a mission to perform for our public. And so if we all pull our weight — but I need say no more to you, Miss Lee, need I?’ And back came the twinkle while his eye searched her up and down for one of the personal and friendly touches with which he believed the staff were welded to the firm’s inmost fibre. ‘That’s a pretty dress you have on,’ he said, and clamped his twinkle right on the spot itself, where now her hands were clasped. ‘And that’s oyster Sleek if I’m not mistaken! Good match.’

     He had only seen Allasol’s new polished grey varnish on her nails! God bless Allasol. But he was continuing: ‘When I said a “secret”, I meant just don’t tell anyone about the bonus for a moment. It’s better coming from me, when I come round. I don’t want to put too much of a damper on the Party. Advance information to you only because you’re leaving early.’

     And suddenly, looking at him there, the hard-wearing big man with his boney brow and strong black eyebrows, she noticed in that cold daylight that his hair was thinning in front, and she thought: The cares and worries of the poor man. And suddenly she said:

     ‘No Mr Deane, I want to stay. I’m very sorry Allasol’s in such straits. I’m staying right here to help make the Party go.’

     A flush of loyalty coloured down on her neck below the white mask, which stayed white, so that for a moment she looked terribly pale, about to faint. But that was not the reason for a startled light in H.J.’s eye.

     ‘Now don’t be saying we’re in straits, Miss Lee! That’s a purely domestic matter. Within these four walls — you understand? It’s just that for once we can’t pass so much on. We’re consolidating. And expanding.’

     ‘I quite understand, Mr Deane,’ she said firmly, and felt a grave welling of tears, as at an anthem.

     ‘See you later then,’ he said, and nodded as he picked up the photographs of Sue Blair’s back. ‘I’ve got to get these Shadowsweet displays decided before we . . . hm . . . hm . . .’

     Deftly she turned and left, her chin high with pride. But once through the glass vestibule and into the paler world of the outer office her new loyalty remembered the old. She quailed, her heart gave its great gulp again.

     ‘Oh what have I done? That’s done Bun. I can’t go early now.’

     ‘Hi, Sandra, quick — it’s your Bun,’ Jill called from the telephone between their desks. ‘I’ve been holding the fort — what’ve you two been doing in there, founding a family? No, not you Bun,’ she said to the receiver. ‘Private call too, quick!’

     Dazed, with bridges burned, Sandra took up the telephone firmly and angrily:

     ‘Sandra here. Bad news, Bun, I can’t get away. No . . . it’s too difficult. Let nothing what stand in the way? Not at a moment like this? Well, Bun, there are moments and moments is all I can say. Mm . . . Mm . . . I know dear, and I’m terribly terribly sorry. Really I am . . . Well if that’s all you can say, you can ring right off . . . No, I’ve not got the curse!’

     She banged down the receiver — muttering ‘Curse, curse it,’ to cover that word and sucking her finger as if she had hurt it on the receiver.

     The voice of Miss Cook came evenly across: ‘Did Deane actually ash you to stay then dear?’ But behind her glasses her eyes looked more than usually anxious.

     ‘Not really, I volunteered because of the bo —’ and then her lips snapped holding the secret back. To have forgotten in that short time! But here was another loyalty at stake — here she was against her fellow-workers, with the boss’s secret! ‘Because of the Party,’ she almost shouted. ‘Because I’d like to be here, with you all, after the year!’ And she hurried away at last to the Powder Room, though this was no longer necessary, for round a few of the starry spots on her stomach a big white ring now shone, a strange new planetary phenomenon.

     Jill Jenkins whirled up after her.

     ‘Thank God at last,’ Mansford swore, reaching for the free telephone.

     He gave the number of a nearby hospital and asked whether there was any news yet? For Mrs Mansford was at that time in labour, and all the morning he had spent dully sharing his wife’s agony along with the November figures of a cosmetic sales survey, angrily wishing to protect her from so cruel an attack from within, tenderly feeling for the sweet sudden defencelessness of women who thus on the brink of motherhood seemed more than ever to be just young girls, and at the same time fearfully suppressing other thoughts that doomily loomed: ‘Will I bear it? The nappies, the prams, the rubber ducks? The school fees? What kind of a dark happiness is this?’

     ‘Napoo,’ he said brightly to Hearst as he rang off, ‘Mafeking not yet relieved.’

     Hearst popped his eyes from under their white lashes. He smiled a knowing, kindly, curly smile: ‘Then perhaps we’d better have a —’

     His hand reached down to where a bottle lay ready for the Party. But stopped. It came back to him about last year’s party when old Merrydew had thrown the L — M file out of the window, said the President was passing and rated a paper welcome. Christ, what a shambles — and they were jiving like bloody Bacchantes all over the Typing Pool and Mansford had thrown up in Mavis Cook’s waste paper basket, got it all in though, neat job.

     No, better not start as early as this.

     ‘I feel wretched,’ Mansford muttered.

     ‘The gentlemen,’ Mavis Cook said, ‘always have the worst of it. I don’t suppose anyone has a rubber?’

     In the terribly scarlet powder room, painted thus by a Time and Motion man to keep the staff from spending too much time there, and thus occasioning the office pleasantry: ‘No Time for a Motion’, Sandra was dabbing her new ring with water.

     ‘It’s done for,’ she said. ‘Water’s no good. So do I get another remover to remove the remover? Hell, what a morning.’

     ‘You certainly gave Bun a flea in his ear,’ Jill said, looking in the glass at her face all pink from the red walls, ‘I look as if I’d sold my soul to the Devil.’

     ‘I think I have,’ Sandra murmured. ‘I’m afraid I was all confused about something and then I had to take it out on poor Bun. Still, he needn’t have been quite so sure of himself saying a thing like that.’

     ‘Oh Sandra you can understand him — with the car ready and all your plans made?’

     ‘It was always Bun’s point,’ Sandra said rubbing away, ‘that we were to present the parents with the whole idea early today, to motor down now for lunch, so they could get to know about it easily over lunch, give them time. And then go ahead about the licence later in the afternoon.’

     ‘Well he’s right if you’re going to get hitched before he flies off.’

     ‘What he’s not right about is giving the parents time. They’ll agree like flashes. Good heavens, they’re mad about giving their dear daughter her freedom. I think they go away for weekends specially to leave me the house free to turn into a one-girl brothel — so modern. Trouble is I never have.’

     ‘Sandra!’

     ‘No, I mean I’m simply not free enough in myself, Jill. Oh why do we know so much about ourselves nowadays?’

     ‘I don’t know, we know what we’re doing, don’t we?’

     Sandra stood up and went to the glass too, so that two faces stared at each other with the red wall reflected behind. ‘I’m not sure I do know what I’m doing. I mean, how can I want to marry Bun and then keep putting him off? Oh Lord, if only something would happen.’

     Jill said: ‘If he wants you, dear, he’ll stick. You’re in your rights to give him a chase. It’s — what is it? — biologically correct.’

     ‘Come again?’

     ‘Oh well, it’s usual. Though there’s something unusual about you, my girl. Personally, I hae me doots.’

     ‘About what?’

     ‘Whether you’re really in love with him.’

     Sandra gave a weary Oh sound.

     ‘How can you be so obtuse,’ she said.

     This last was a word she had found in a magazine article. The word had startled her, and stuck. But she was not going to try to explain it now. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you’re not taking the risk — oh my God look at the time, and I’ve got seven odourless old Fresh! stickers to finish up before we break.’

     ‘You could come out of this place with red rims round your eyes — I’ve only got my Sleek to do. But will you go down with Bun later then?’

     ‘I don’t know.’

     She took a last jabbing dab at her dress. ‘I really just don’t know.’

     Jill-in-the-mirror then put her face forward to see at Sandra closer.

     ‘Oh my pet,’ she said, ‘oh Sandra darling, you’re crying. And I thought it was the red.’

     ‘I’m not, I’m not,’ Sandra sobbed, ‘I’m not,’ pursing her lips into a little pudding, and dabbing, dabbing, dabbing at her spot. ‘But I do know one thing,’ she said, coming to herself, ‘I do know I can’t go about like this all day. For two pins I’d go right out and get another dress. But for the two pins.’

     And then she turned to her friend and her lips slowly opened in a big, sly smile:

     ‘Jill,’ she said. ‘Times are hard. Can you keep a secret?’