Free The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

to have it waved, or to wear white, or have any fuss.
    ‘I can’t ask Charlie to come all the way back from Australia to give me away,’ she’d said. Philip believed that she wanted a quiet wedding because of her parents. It was understandable. Isabel’s mother should be sitting in the front pew, between smiles and tears, while Isabel’s father walked her proudly up the aisle. If they were not there, why go through with the whole performance? The quiet wedding suited Philip well enough, never mind if it didn’t please his mother. To be married to Isabel was all he cared about.
    ‘Come here,’ he said.
    ‘I’ve got to do the washing-up.’
    ‘It can wait—’
    ‘Just listen to her! That bloody woman! It’s like living with a gaoler.’
    The landlady was walking again.
    ‘She hasn’t enough to do, that’s what it is,’ said Philip.
    ‘No, it’s not, can’t you see? She’s doing it on purpose. She knows it drives me mad.’
    ‘Why, have you said something to her?’ he asked in alarm.
    ‘Of course I haven’t. But anyone would know, if they were marching up and down on top of other people.
Can’t
we get somewhere else, Phil?’
    ‘We’d lose money. We paid three months’ rent in advance. We’ve got to save every penny or we’ll never have our own house.’ He wasn’t taking her seriously. His handsome face was worried, but only because she was upset. ‘Forget about her, Is. Let’s go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep for once.’
    Isabel didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Why would anyone walk like that,’ she said, as if to herself, ‘Unless she had a bad conscience?’ Maybe the landlady wasn’t a gaoler. She might be a prisoner. Prisoners walked like that, pacing their cells, so many steps one way and so many steps the other, until they could walk it in their sleep. ‘Perhaps that’s what it is, Philip!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Perhaps she sleepwalks. She goes on all night sometimes – haven’t you heard her?’
    ‘No. Besides, somnambulism is much rarer than people imagine.’
    In bed that night Isabel lay stiffly on her side of the mattress. Philip had rolled off her and fallen deeply asleep. Her thighs were sticky, and cold. But I’ll never have a baby, as long as we stay here, she thought. It was as if the landlady’s spirit was everywhere, in the fabric of the house and in the waves of sound that beat against Isabel’s eardrums. Philip said he couldn’t hear it, but she didn’t believe him. He was trying to pretend that there was nothing wrong.
    The darkness of the bedroom brushed against her wide-open eyes. Of course it was not really dark. After a while, the bulk of the chest of drawers and wardrobe shouldered out and became visible. She thought of the blackout, and how there was complete darkness then, pushing itself into mouth, eyes and ears. She remembered hearing footsteps behind her in the blackout when she was walking home. Suddenly she’d realised that they were keeping time with her own. She stopped, and the footsteps stopped too. There was a breathing, waiting silence. She realised that the man was waiting to hear her again, so that he could follow her. Silently, she stooped and took off her shoes. She’d walked on silently, on tiptoe in her stockinged feet, not daring to run.
    The bedroom hung over her, heavy and permanent. They’d come here so lightly, full of their own happiness, setting up camp, accepting that it would do for the time being. They’d both believed that it didn’t really matter what the place was like, because it was temporary. They were on their way elsewhere. Perhaps people always have to think that, Isabel thought. For an instant she allowed herself to think of the places where a woman might end up. She saw her mother’s face, unrecognisable, in the landscape that Isabel had pieced together from newsreel and newspaper articles, after the war in Japan ended. She saw skin and bones, shovelled into a grave that wasn’t deep