Geoffrey pointed out again to his wife that Julie Thompson’s position was unassailable. She had inherited the flat from her parents, who had lived there since 1942. She had lived there all her life, first as a daughter, then with her husband and the parents, after she married. Now she had two children and no husband and her parents had retired to the South Coast. She paid the rent, rent-controlled at twenty pounds a week, she gave no trouble and, Geoffrey said, Judge Jeffreys couldn’t get her out. She had refused offers made by the previous landlord and had, six months before, also refused the Lombards’ offer, knowing that she was infinitely better off, with children aged four and seven, in a rent-controlled flat paid for by the DHSS than she would be searching for a flat in London with that sum of money and no prospects of a mortgage. When making the offer Anna Lombard had insinuated that the sum would cover the cost of a small house in Margate, where her parents lived, to which Julie had said that as soon as the children were a little older she would be looking for a full-time job. There was, she said, less chance of finding one in Margate.
‘It’s that boyfriend of hers,’ Anna had told Geoffrey gloomily. ‘That’s what’s keeping her here. She wouldn’t see much of him in Margate.’
‘Perhaps he’ll marry her and they’ll take our offer to put down on a house,’ suggested Geoffrey.
Anna shrugged. ‘To think we’re hanging on the decisions of Julie Thompson and that hooligan,’ she said.
‘He seems quite respectable,’ Geoffrey had said. ‘He’s a builder. He usually seems to be in work, from what you can see.’
‘Nevertheless –’ Anna sighed.
‘The plain fact is, Anna, that if we want Julie to go we’d have to offer her more money. Which we don’t want to,’ Geoffrey pointed out.
It was true they were lucky to have got this pretty period house at a price they could afford, after Geoffrey’s previous wife, Pauline, had taken the lion’s share of the price of their old flat, so that she could buy a three-bedroomed house in Bromley for herself and their three children. Only a generous donation from Anna’s parents, and Geoffrey’s good job at the Treasury, had secured them the house. At first they congratulated themselves on having it. Now, territoriality being what it is, they resented having to share the garden with Julie, the noise she and the children made. In hot weather Julie and her friends lounged fully clothed about the garden in elaborate pastiches of ‘50s styles playing music on a transistor, while the Lombards, stripped down, on smart lounging furniture, attempted to start a good tan for their holidays in the Algarve. Julie cooked a lot of chips. Julie accepted state assistance, a ludicrously low rent and a general lack of forward planning as the norm. The households were incompatible. The Lombards felt that one way or another they were paying for her entire life, and, being now settled after the divorce, they wanted to get rid of Julie Thompson and start on some rebuilding. The snag was – Julie wouldn’t go.
Downstairs, after some more argument between Julie and the children, the door slammed.
‘If I said I had to take in Jessica’s children for a while –’ Anna murmured. She had suggested this before. Geoffrey said what he had said the last time she proposed it. ‘Jessica’s children aren’t pathetic little mites – they’re huge. And an unsuccessful move would only stiffen Julie’s resistance. Anyway, where would she go?’
‘The Council –’ Anna murmured.
‘Well,’ said Geoffrey, unwilling to say again what he had said before about temporary accommodation in firetrap hotels which they both knew about from documentaries on TV. A man with some imagination, Geoffrey saw Kevin coughing bronchitically on a small bed in the corner of a damp room, while Julie went for the doctor with the other child and flames began to take hold in the basement.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Anna said easily. Geoffrey wondered as usual if he was being unintelligent or weak in the face of a normal difficulty. For some reason his mind went back to that morning’s meeting at the Treasury. Reluctantly he stood up and said. ‘I’ve remembered an hour’s work I have to do. I’ll get it over with, then come down and we can listen to some music.’
Anna smiled at him and sat perfectly still until the door closed. Then her smile faded and her expression became more resolute. She stood up and went to the window, studying the dark garden with the air of a woman looking at a rail of blouses in a store. She really wanted to get rid of Julie, as long as it wouldn’t make anything go wrong for her and Geoffrey. Julie, after all, would be a lot better off somewhere a bit further out of London, where the air was fresher for the children and the roads less dangerous. Geoffrey would be happier if he had a garden to look after, if they could sit out on summer evenings with friends. And to think of the madness of that woman, refusing a large sum for which she had done exactly nothing – it didn’t make sense. They owned the house didn’t they? Paid rates, paid out for repairs? And she just sat there, on the dole, paying £20 a week and waiting for a better offer. Anna, planning the garden in advance, said to herself, ‘She’s got to go.’
‘Phew,’ said Polly Kops, breathing out heavily, ‘another one from Alexander Kops.’ She crammed the letter back in the envelope, as if to pretend she hadn’t opened it, then pushed it into the pocket of her blue candlewick dressing-gown. She was sitting at the kitchen table where lay eleven used cups, a teapot, a milk-bottle, a jar of instant coffee, a heavily cut-at loaf on a breadboard, a packet of butter, opened and attacked, a jar of marmalade and some cheese. She lit a Silk Cut.
Pam Kops, child of the man referred to, was putting hairspray on her hair in front of the kitchen mirror. She said nasally, trying to avoid breathing in too much of the spray, ‘Don’t tell me anything, Mum. I don’t want to be dragged into it.’
‘Tell me that when we’re all in the street due to your father’s manipulations,’ said Polly.
‘What do you think?’ she said to Sue, who had just come in. Sue, head on one side, studied her sister’s hair and said, ‘Bit too punk.’
Sue’s hair was organised bird’s-nest style. This and her swathed dark clothing and startling make-up gave the impression she was an unfortunate, about to be crept up on in a dark alley by Jack the Ripper. Pam had gone for a starker style. Her hair stood up spikily as if she had just come from the hands of outraged French patriots after the Liberation. In spite of the dark clothing, the chalky faces, the heavy eye make-up and the attempt to look wasted and degenerate, their appearance betrayed a long history of wholemeal bread, orange juice and educational trips to the Natural History Museum. They were on art and printing courses but Polly, their mother, was not hopeful that the end of these courses would coincide with either of them being employed as artists or printers. Now, here in her pocket was a letter from Alexander’s solicitors, a heavy-sounding team with offices in the City of London, Paris, Tokyo and New York, stating that in the event of a sale of number 1, Elgin Crescent, their client would expect an equitable share of the proceeds, the house being in his name as well as Polly’s. Polly remembered putting it in his name as well as hers although she couldn’t remember why. Guilt, no doubt. What with her debt to the bank and Alexander’s claim, and his lawyers probably getting a piece of the action, there wouldn’t be much left over from the sale of the property to re-house the family. She’d be lucky if Clancy didn’t make a claim as a live-in lover. She and her children would be stripped to their socks. It was funny, she thought, how men always ended up with the time and money and women with the children. Then when the situation almost inevitably deteriorated into a muddle of debts and mortages and part-time jobs it was generally held that the woman had arrived at this state through muddleheadedness and a poor head for figures, instead of through lack of training and experience, Brownie uniforms, chickenpox, hospital appointments and badly paid jobs which did not cover the outgoings. How to tell all this to Pam and Sue, she wondered. Would they believe her if she did? She decided they knew already, then plodded up the stairs to turn on the video.
As soon as she sat down with her
pad and the set running – ‘In Casablanca, human life is cheap’, it said – the phone rang. Arnold Simpson, who had put her on to this job in the first place, as often she wished he hadn’t, since otherwise she might have gone and got another job with proper wages, said to her, ‘Jay Honeycutt’s just a little disturbed he hasn’t heard from you.’
‘Yes,’ said Polly. ‘The trouble is, I haven’t finished yet.’
‘Well, I hear he’s very eager to see what you’ve done –’
‘I thought I might as well finish it first,’ Polly said.
‘OK – right – that’s right,’ agreed Arnold. ‘But – and I don’t want to hurry you – is there any chance you could give him some kind of date? Or maybe a draft, some part of what you’ve done? Well, put it another way, are there any problems? I mean, I’d be very happy to –’
‘Er –’ said Polly. ‘It’s difficult. I’m right in the middle – I mean, I think I can get finished quite soon. Why don’t you,’ she said ingeniously, ‘ring me back in a week or two. Then I ought to be able to give you a progress report.’
‘Er – right – right –’ he said without any certainty. ‘But call me if you need any help. Will you do that?’
Polly promised. She thought Arnold’s mid-Atlantic accent was a bit much, seeing that he’d only ever written a series of sit-coms for Thames TV and a few unfilmed films for Hollywood. She knew she’d only got the job of writing the script for the remake of Casablanca because he was too fed up to do it, which meant that there was something wrong with it. Probably he knew the film would never be made. Still, she ought to have finished it a month ago, and now instead of proceeding with it she put her head in her hands, while on the set Humphrey Bogart said: ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine –’ Polly rocked to and fro, saying ‘Oh God, Oh God.’
The three women lecturers from the Simpson Institute of Fine Arts were having a lunchtime meeting, called by Victoria Churchill-Smith, at Tiffin’s Wine Bar, Dover Street, to discuss how to make the Simpson system fairer to women. The subjects to be discussed ranged from the provision of a crèche for staff and students to the sexist questions asked by Professor Hugh Fairclough at the admissions interviews. The bepalmed wine bar, with its overhead fans now static on the ceiling, was full of young execs of both sexes in suits, trying to impress each other, and it was in this atmosphere of tired competitiveness that the women met over Caesar salads and a glass of white wine. They resolved, firstly, to take personal testimony from woman students about the course of their interviews, with particular reference to the questions asked by Professor Fairclough; secondly, to ask for a breakdown on promotions over the past five years, which would almost undoubtedly prove that two men had been promoted to every one woman; and, thirdly, to address a letter to the governing body asking for a crèche. Their last request had already been turned down by the principal, Miss Jennifer Stokes OBE, who had said the children’s nursery in the vicinity of the Simpson ought to be enough. ‘Try getting into it,’ Victoria Churchill-Smith had said. ‘That old Jennifer Stokes is the queen bee – I’m here, you get back, that’s her motto.’
Anna Lombard, although she did not say so, failed to see why the women at the Simpson expected a crèche. Surely if they wanted to have children they should make proper arrangements for them? On a deeper level, where thoughts and emotions fight each other in the swamp, the winners being allowed out, washed and brushed and taught to eat with a knife and fork before being presented to the conscious mind, she knew that her life was being ruined by children – Geoffrey’s – that he had to pay for, especially Harriet, who was a mess, and Julie Thompson’s two noisy sons in her basement. She was tired of paying lip service to the proposition that children and their mothers had to be specially looked after. People shouldn’t have children, she thought, if they were going to need all these concessions.
‘I won’t forget the way they asked me at the interview if I was planning a family,’ said Victoria Churchill-Smith.
‘Not such a stupid question, considering present circumstances,’ said Angela Sims staring over the table at her colleague’s billowing skirt. She had two grown-up children, had never stopped work and was allowed to say these things.
‘Am I taking any more leave than my annual due?’ Victoria asked fiercely. ‘I’m not even taking my full entitlement of maternity leave. This is my decision. It won’t affect anybody else.’
Angela Sims, who knew about broken nights, childhood ailments and absconding au pairs and nannies, said nothing. She knew colleagues at work had a great deal more tolerance for a sick dog or cat or even a hampster on a mercy-dash to the vet than was ever forthcoming for a child with an urgent appointment in the fracture department. People would enquire for ages about the pet. No one wanted to hear about the results of the X-ray or how long you’d had to wait.
Anna Lombard changed the subject to the complaint of the women students that the staff, male and female, spent more time on the men students’ work. She averted her eyes from Victoria’s stomach. One side of her wanted and needed to bear a child, although she flinched from the swelling up, the sore legs, the general pregnant-woman air of being a burdened animal. At the same time a child would turn the marriage into a family. A child would carry Geoffrey’s blood and, if a boy, his name, forever. Although she knew Geoffrey turned to her with relief after the complications of a badly run home and three disorderly children, she sometimes saw herself, not as his companion, lover, producer of an easeful home, but more like a self-supporting mistress, while the real business of life, unbearable as it was, lay elsewhere. Wasn’t the fact that he did not seem to want her to bear his child just a sign that to him she was a less than serious part of his life? At the back of her mind the feeling that the birth of a child would give her more status in Geoffrey’s life warred with the fear that if he had once failed under the burden of domestic life, might he not do it a second time? Not, she told herself, that her situation, if she had a child, would in any way resemble Pauline’s. Pauline had been inefficient, resentful, bringing up three children in the overcrowded flat in Camden Town, where the baby crying and someone’s piano practice prevented Geoffrey from working during the evenings, where a fresh shirt and a pressed suit were by no means instantly available, where Pauline’s anger had spilled over constantly, leading to terrible rows. When she met him, Geoffrey had been desolate.
Whatever his fears, she, Anna, would not let things develop like that. Yet, she reflected, she couldn’t really make a decision as long as Geoffrey didn’t say anything. He had responded to none of her tentative probings about a baby. Either he couldn’t see what she was driving at, or, if he did, he didn’t want to discuss it.
Anna resolved the confusion by strongmindedly refusing apfelstrudel or chocolate cake and saving her companions from weakening. Hungry but resolute they walked back to the Simpson, to which men who had spent their lunchtime in pubs or clubs would return later full of beer, beef, wine and bread and butter pudding. They would unalertly give lectures or conduct the business of the Institute, uneasily and intermittently aware that like some corrupt and slothful old Empire they were subject to incursions by a resolute tribe trained on hard exercise and scanty rations.
Entering the brightly lit building Anna explained that she would have to leave the next moves in their campaign to the others, on account of her heavy workload, caused, as they all knew, by the fact that her immediate superior in the Fine Arts department was a heavy drinker involved in his second divorce; ‘until George sorts himself out –’ she said. They nodded, although, just as they knew about George, they also knew that Anna did not want to have too much to do with the campaign. Angela Sims was married to a surgeon and solid as only a woman can be when she has held down her job while bringing up children at a time when the climate of opinion at the Institute was fairly overtly against it. Victoria Churchill-Smith was having a baby by a research student all knew to be unreliable. Angela had nothing to lose by
challenging the establishment and was tough and respected enough to hit back hard if touched, and Victoria, with everything to gain, had to risk it. Anna’s safest position was to support the moves in principle, but stay away from direct action.
Back in her over-bright office, where the white paint and neon quarrelled with the prints on the wall and other touches she had applied to make the room look less severe, Anna sat down at her desk and pulled towards her a pile of students’ essays for marking.
At the same moment Polly Kops, who had been forced to go out and buy new towels, since the old ones were actually tearing as people wiped their faces, was, as she came back from the tube station in the dim light of a November afternoon, accosted in a blurry Irish accent by a drunk young man, sitting, unshaven, in an old anorak and cracked shoes in a cleft in the wall next to the bank. She had just given twenty pence to a young man with a shaven head and camouflage jacket at the entrance to the tube station. She ignored the drunk and the subsequent abuse. She went down the busy street, where the cars and buses already had their lights on, looking at the old coats people were wearing, the pale women with pushchairs, an old man with an old dog, a couple of boys who ought to have been at school, swinging a ghetto blaster. ‘The place is getting worse,’ she thought despondently. ‘What’s going to happen?’ Answering her own question she thought, ‘Nothing.’
There was scaffolding everywhere, old houses were being done over, ripped out, painted up, for use as smart little flats, but the activity seemed to be only on the fringes of a centre of sadness, disillusioned apathy and confusion. When completed the flats would be let off to struggling, besuited young, ‘yes – I am ambitious’ people. But, behind their small white partitioned rooms, pot plants and glass coffee tables still lay the dreaded council flats, huge and ill-lit, where all but the strongest had to watch out for themselves on these long dark nights. And in a block like this, thought Polly Kops, the young woman she called her daughter-in-law for the sake of convenience, though she was not married to her son, and her eighteen-month-old grandson were struggling to live. A young black man twisted and turned on skates through buses and vans watched by two punks in black leather, heavy studs and coloured hair.
As Time Goes By Page 3
