Patrick Parker's Progress

by Mavis Cheek

  5

  Scar Tissue

  'You are cleverer than your brother’ whispered Apsu's mother to her, ‘I>ut you must not let him know it. You are a girl.'

  Immediately Apsu rushed to the door of her brother's room and shouted at the top of her lungs: 'I am cleverer than you, I am cleverer than you. And I am a girl.'

  Her brother threw his much chewed pencil at her. She caught it, and laughed.

  She needed to heal both physically (there was an infection) and emotionally. It seemed a good time, therefore, to return to England and visit her parents. Edwin suggested it and Audrey welcomed it. He, also, would go to England and visit his mother. This simple statement caused Audrey a sharp pang, reminding her of how she was the first time they met. How excited she felt, how delighted with her he was. Now she had learned so much, and presumably still had so much more to learn.

  London was different. Everyone, it seemed, who was anyone, was young. Even the Queen wore skirts above her knee. Audrey had already passed her quarter of a century and she suddenly felt very old. She watched the laughing long-haired youths and the wide-eyed mini-skirted girls and saw that the world belonged to them. She felt even more angry with Patrick for abandoning her. For abandoning this. It was exactly the way of living he believed in, talked to her about - it was what all those books and posters and plays were driving towards - a dream of the future - the future he would design and build for and which together they would be a part of. Brave New World. All that. And now here she was outside it. All cried out. Seeing the colours and the joyful silliness as if she was staring through a goldfish bowl. The Revolution was here and she had missed it. Free Love, it said in the headlines.

  But she was charging for hers.

  Mr Wapshott shifted from foot to foot as they waited for Dolly to come back from the florist's. Dolly had gone to get some flowers to put in a vase for her room. Audrey felt strange. She did not want to be treated like visiting royalty she wanted to feel normal.

  'I'll make a pot of tea,' she said, for what could be more normal than that?

  'You will not,' said her father. 'Your mother would skin me alive. You sit there and I'll do it.'

  If her father was prepared to make the tea, then what hope was there for normality? But it was better once Mrs Wapshott returned. Excited she might be, but there was little outward manifestation of this. She gave her daughter one, long look and said that she looked peaky. This was, apparently, all the fault of that foreign food - the oil, the garlic, the frogs' legs - she'd read about them. And she set about putting it right in the English way. She baked a ham and she mashed potatoes with plenty of butter and the top of the milk, and she laid out the pickles. Audrey, who still seemed to see babies in everything, poked at the bright pink, fleshy ham and tried to go back to being the girl she had been, the girl who would have eaten it up without blinking. But she could not. 'I wonder,' she said, without considering the consequences, 'if I could just have a little cheese?' Mrs Wapshott's mouth puckered and Audrey knew that she was thinking along the lines of Hoity-Toity. A large piece of yellow cheddar was placed on the table, along with half a dozen Jacob's cream crackers and the glistening, even yellower, butter.

  Years later, if ever she began the torture of self-doubt and was casting around for something, anything to remind herself that she was better than that, she remembered that particular meal and how -against all odds of gravity - the cheddar, the biscuits, the butter, they all stayed down, along with the milky tea and baked rice pudding. In one of those peculiar twists of reason, she thought that if she ate of the foods at the table of her mother, it might - somehow - compensate her mother for what she, without knowing it, had lost. A daughter who would one day get married, put into practice all the skills her mother had taught her (like baking a ham) and produce grandchildren to be spoilt.

  Staring at the pink meat she had pushed aside on the plate, she suddenly understood that Edwin meant every word. There would be no marriage, and there would be no children - his loving and his cherishing were real, but they were finite. Now she could never come back here (she stared, as if through a stranger's eyes, at the cream-painted kitchen, the old polished Rayburn, the multi-coloured plastic strips hanging at the back door that supposedly kept out flies); she had moved on from this and into a never-ending twilight. She was a princess in a cage who would never be Queen.

  'You look very down in the jib,' said her mother more softly.

  'It'll be the travelling,' said her father.

  'Yes,' she said.

  And everyone was content.

  If Audrey was worried about how to avoid talking about her job in the days that followed, and the telling of more lies, the difficulty never materialised. Of all the conversations she and her mother had at the kitchen table, or queuing at the Co-op, there never was one that asked her, outright, exactly what she did. Dolly was much more interested in whom she knew.

  'And have you seen any more of Princess Margaret?' she asked her loudly one day, when they were taking the bus up to the Junction.

  Audrey decided to indulge her. 'Oh no,' she said, 'we only meet skiing.'

  Dolly looked around at the passengers in the bus in triumph. She was no longer herself to anyone. Not even her mother.

  Edwin did not care very much for the Beatles. He thought they were brash in their music, rude in their manners. In Paris, if she listened to them at all, it was on her own. Now, in London, they were everywhere, flooding the city the shops, the radio, with wonderful, raw sound. By comparison her French chic was old-fashioned and alien in the London streets. She bought herself a mini-skirt - Edwin did not like her to wear them too short (though she noticed how his eyes lingered on the Lulus who wore them) - and she bought herself a pair of wine-coloured patent knee-high boots.

  She was stared at, whistled at by builders, asked out by the postman and Dolly raised her eyebrows - but it did not go beneath the skin. This was all disguise. Underneath she was, and always would be, an alien. Avortement. Abortion. They were the same in either language. Article-declasser. Reject. Those, too. No matter what the clothing, the person stayed the same. When she returned to Paris she donated the skirt and the boots to Sandy's new girlfriend, a plain, friendly, dumpling of a girl who was sure the skirt could be made to fit. Dolly approved of her - she was very good at sewing.

  In the kitchen one evening, not long after she arrived, and when her father was at the pub and her mother was relaxed, Audrey dared to bring up the subject of Women's Things.

  'Did you mind,' she said, tracing the squares on the tablecloth as if she were not really there, 'that you only had two children, Mum?'

  Her mother laughed but without much joy. 'Why should I? Two's more than enough.'

  'Yes - but - well - there might have been - well -’I thought -'

  'Thinking doesn't do,' said Mrs Wapshott pointedly.

  Audrey was still in slight pain from the infection. She put her hand over her lower stomach, feeling the comfort of the warmth of her palm. 'I've - um -' She squeezed the place. She was desperate to talk about it. Mrs Wapshott was not.

  'You need an aspirin for that,' she said, and got up and fetched one, as relieved to do so as one who is drowning is suddenly relieved at her toes touching sand.

  'Did you -' said Audrey as she took the tablet, 'um - ever have -' she whispered, 'an - infection?'

  There, it was out. And along with it came the tears. What Audrey had heard as she dressed after the painful examination - that sotto voce conversation between Edwin and Doctor Claude - returned to her, and the tears increased. 'It might,' Doctor Claude whispered, 'mean that the matter is out of our hands.'

  'In what way?' the anxious Edwin had asked.

  'In the possibility of any future - er - such mistakes.'

  'Explain?'

  'Scar tissue, Monsieur Bonnard, and the damage to - er -' Afterwards she had looked up the whispered French 'trompe de Fallope' and then she had looked up the function of that part of the anatomy, and then she h
ad understood. The good doctor was telling the good lover that her fecondite might be gone for good.

  She stared at her mother, willing her to answer. Her mother shook her head, then she stood up again, took the kettle and shook it, a gesture so familiar that Audrey in her jittery state could barely stop the tears. She put it on the Rayburn and began making the tea things dance. Audrey was nearly beside herself.

  'Infection?' her mother said uncomfortably. 'Not that I know of.' And then, with her back to her daughter, and as if addressing the cups and saucers, she added, more softly, 'It's natural to feel it a bit down there. It'll be better when - well - when you get married.'

  For one moment of confused astonishment, Audrey had a vision of herself dressed in a frock made up entirely of white crocheted daisies As Worn By Mary Quant, walking down the aisle to meet her bridegroom, while carelessly chucking away bottles of aspirin and packets of Anadin over her shoulder into the smiling congregation.

  'Er - how will it... How different?' she mumbled to her mother's back.

  Mrs Wapshott continued to busy herself. 'You know.' ‘I am asking.'

  'When you are - well. Married.'

  Back came the crocheted daisies. 'I don't understand.'

  Mrs Wapshott sighed into the tea-caddy. 'You - and your husband - the honeymoon - it's what married people do.'

  'What? Go on holiday?' said Audrey incredulously. She was practically hysterical. 'You mean going to Bournemouth for a week?'

  'A bit more than that.'

  'A bit more than what?'

  Her mother tutted with embarrassed irritation. I'm talking about what they do on holiday -'

  Audrey's hysteria grew. 'What? Make sandcastles? Ride donkeys? What mother, what, what, what?'

  Mrs Wapshott was defeated. She picked up the steaming kettle and poured its contents into the pot. 'You'll find out soon enough,' she said, with a wearily kind - but definitely dismissive nod. 'Now have a cup of tea.'

  As if to cheer her daughter up even further Mrs Wapshott produced a packet of chocolate digestives, hidden behind the flour bin and for very special occasions, and from a kitchen drawer she removed a newspaper. 'I was saving this for you,' she said, as if it were priced beyond rubies. Audrey took it and spread it out on the table. Mrs Wapshott turned a page and - lo - there - suddenly - was Patrick's smiling face.

  'He's won a foreign medal for something. Florence is over the moon. And now he's off doing something else.' She went on talking, oblivious to Audrey's hungry reading of the piece. Not a mention of his wife, she noticed, not a mention of anything beyond the fact that Patrick Parker was the youngest engineer ever to win the Globo de Milano.

  'Only a foot and bicycle bridge,' said Dolly. 'And it's only in Italy. Early days, Florence says Patrick says.'

  The headline read 'Genius of the Juniors'. And Patrick himself was quoted as saying that he had a very long way to go to match his hero, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He had designed his footbridge for the Thames at Erith when he was three years younger than Patrick. That it was little known about and never built was immaterial. It was and always would be a very fine design . . . Patrick was pictured on the steps of his workplace in the City. He looked every inch a part of Swinging London. Sharp shoulders to his suit, wide lapels, big cuffs - hair curling over his ears. What Edwin called, in Paris, a brave young buck. Last time Audrey saw him he was wearing corduroy jackets, sweaters and jeans. To be more accurate, she corrected, the last time she saw him he was wearing nothing.

  'It's good that he's got on,' she said, as calmly as she could.

  'He'd have been hard put not to given all that effort his mother put into him,' said her mother waspishly.

  "Then why,' said Audrey, 'didn't you do the same for me?'

  The cry rang out in the kitchen. Her mother paused. Looked at the tablecloth, looked at her cup. And then she softened her voice and said, 'It wasn't your fault he went and got someone else in trouble. Or you'd be in clover with him now.'

  'In clover? In clover? You show me one mention of Peggy Boxer in this.' She stabbed the article with her finger and her nail broke. That was appropriate.

  Dolly blinked.

  'Why didn't you do for me what Florence did for Patrick? Why didn't you say Yes to me? Instead of always saying No? I might have built something, too.'

  Dolly looked at her incredulously, as if her daughter had gone raving mad. Audrey immediately backed down and apologised. Which just about summed everything up. And that was an end of it.

  When Audrey came to pack, she put the newspaper cutting at the bottom of her case. She also took from her room some of the books that Patrick had lent to her to help her expand her mind - books on Brunel's projects, books on planning and building and conquering and the heroism of design - all those things that Patrick set his star by. He had requested that she send them back and she never had. A little rebellion. A mini-revenge. Hers by right.

  By the time she set off to meet Edwin in London she was better, or at least, resigned. Dolly told her to go carefully (the outburst in the kitchen she privately put down to nerves) and Audrey thought how apt the warning was. After so long apart, Edwin was bound to be ardent. Better than cold, anyway. So she shed London. Shed the zesti-ness - shed the feeling of being young again - shed the skirt and the boots which had been like dressing up and being someone different -and now it was back to work. She was certainly physically better, anyway, which as she told herself on the train was just as well. No good returning with dud currency. She was a different person, though. Scarred. It really did not do to venture in this life unless you were feeling strong. And she was feeling particularly weak. Weak and Scarred, then. But she smiled, composed herself before the train pulled into the station, and she remained smiling and composed as Edwin walked eagerly along the platform to greet her. Smile, smile. Though something burned inside her - flaring up in moments when she was alone -making her restless and downright angry, without her quite knowing why. Paris, she hoped, would make her feel calm - real - again.

  Edwin had a car to take them to Gatwick and she found that a comfort. He had bought her a gift - a dress - she found that a comfort, too. Now she knew where she was again. La Dame aux Cadeaux. When he asked her if she had had a good time, she said, very brightly, that she had. She really and truly had. She hung on his arm as she hung on his words. She smiled, she laughed. The thought of Edwin going out of her life now was more than she could bear.

  In the plane he asked her, very pointedly, if everything was now 'all right'. She knew what he meant.

  'Everything is absolutely settled,' she said, with complete conviction, and she damped down the familiar little fire that began flaring. 'One hundred per cent fine.'

  The matter was not referred to again.

  Patrick was just a press cutting, a mound of books in her case. He had escaped. She was forever locked in.

  6

  A Touch of Rebellion

  Apsu began to notice her environment. The buildings. The streets. At the age of eleven, about to start senior school, a large comprehensive close to home, she began to walk around her neighbourhood of London, along by the river, the desolate areas, and slowly she saw that she was part of a whole, yet an individual, and the walking gave her a vision of both the journey and the beyond. Her grandmother talked about the past, how their lives might have been, the baking, the growing things, the days of heat and cold. Her parents cared only for the future and she felt that she was somewhere in between. A mixture of ancient and modern. She could not put this into words, but she could put it into drawings. Which she did. And in every drawing of every cityscape, real or imagined, she put people at the centre. 'This girl has a special talent,' said her new teachers. 'Of course she has,' said her parents and her grandmother, and they left her alone. She wrote in her notebook, alongside her drawings, 'Our present way of building and living is one that denies what we hold to be natural in so many ways ... I would like to change such things.'

  Back in her apartment, in famil
iar, delightful Paris, as the year passed and another and another, she began to wonder what had made her so unhappy. The lovely sitting room was always filled with flowers, the bedroom was sweetly orderly and inviting, the bathroom gleamed and glistened, and Edwin was loving. She worried about nothing material. And as she became more involved in the life she and Edwin led together, she became more important to him. He trusted her. She trusted him. They had a contract. If it was not marriage, then it was as good as. Peggy did not appear in Patrick's professional life, she did not appear in Edwin's. They were both little pendants.

  Audrey became more and more - so Edwin said - indispensable to him. She spent time at his office. The others there, if they knew of her role in his life beyond the office walls, looked the other way. Indispensable was a good word - it made her feel safe. And it took away the days of boredom. She involved herself more, arranged his travel if he was to be away, reminded him of things left undone, sent gifts and thanks to whoever required it, dealt with his tailor, his shoemaker, his hatter - even his dentist and his barber. If, on occasion, he was late for a meeting at his offices, or a meeting overran, she engaged the waiting appointment in general conversation and called for coffee or cognac or tea to placate. I work for my living, she told herself, and felt better about herself for that. I am, in all senses - save one - his dutiful wife.