A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens

Hawkins said, which explained her share of the question as well as answering his. A few women came into the hall to inspect the damage and to pick up the crockery pieces that had scattered over the lino floor. It was no place for an intimate discussion. Staring past him, Miss Hawkins noticed an old woman standing on top of the stairs. ‘Brian,’ she croaked, ‘what’s happened?’ He turned and made a step towards the stairs. Then helplessly he turned again. There were too many things for him to handle. ‘Please go,’ he said. ‘My mother will see you.’ Then seeing the disbelief on her face, he added by way of compensation, ‘I’ll see you in the library in half an hour.’
    She was gone before he could change his mind, dusting the tea-leaves off her coat and with a spring in her step, and with a warm glow in her heart, not so much that Brian was so patently alive, but that the little red tick in her diary was now a distinct possibility. He would certainly be at the library to meet her, and the only hurdle to the tick was the kiss. But Miss Hawkins was confident. This was surely her lucky day.
    She wondered whose funeral she had attended, and who was the old woman she had mistaken for Mrs Watts. Brian would no doubt explain everything and they would laugh together, and it would be a recurrent topic of conversation for many meetings. But the thought was soured by the memory of Brian’s fear that his mother would see her. He could hardly get her out of the house quickly enough. She was suddenly angry, and quite automaticallyand with a natural impulse that horrified her, she not only wished the old woman good and dead, but she happily saw her own hand in her undoing. And together with this thought came the accompanying recall of matron. She noticed how rage had clenched her fists, and she had to stop by a lamp-post on the kerb and lean against it to still her fury. She was glad when the bus came for the sheer physical occupation of boarding and finding a seat, and searching meticulously through the contents of her handbag for the exact fare. When that was paid, she took out her compact and made running repairs on her face. She took her time with the powdering, so that when she was finished she was only one stop from the library and she used the time to walk slowly down the bus. She was anxious not to spend one second with nothing to do, so she marked time with her feet on the platform until the bus came to a stop. Her violent thoughts had deeply disturbed her, for she sensed with fearful premonition that one day they might well leak out of her control. It would happen in a moment of idleness, she thought, when boredom would dilute the strength she would need for their containment. I must start knitting, she thought to herself. And I shall knit a scarf that shall never never end. She made a note to order her diary to send her to the wool shop but such an order was kids’ stuff, she thought. It would have done a few months ago when the orders were timid and fulfillable. Now she had a mind only for risk, for the element of chance in each day’s entry. At the same time, she realised that she could not live at risk every single day, and there must be many dry days when a viable order would come in very handy. But she decided that whatever she had in mind to do, whether of trivial or adventurous intent, her diary would so order her, simply to give herself the infinite pleasure of the red tick.
    She went up the library steps, which had by now assumed for her a domestic familiarity. At the top, she waited, and after a while, felt herself idling, so she went quickly to the fiction shelves and picked out a book. She read the words, but gathered from them little understanding. Nevertheless she read on, consuming the meaningless print in desperate occupation. In thismanner, she lapped four or five pages, and in the middle of a sentence replaced the book on the shelves knowing that