As Time Goes By

by Hilary Bailey

‘You were right,’ Ajax said.

  Dermot joined Kate and Polly. Kate said to Polly, ‘How are the children? And Rufus?’

  ‘Val’s fighting the Council about the conditions on the William Thackeray Estate. I wish she’d marry Max and go up to Cambridge. Living conditions couldn’t be as bad there as they are here. She’s sticking it out to get this degree but I wonder if it’s worth it, considering what both of them have to put up with. That bloody place isn’t safe. They have two muggings a week, on average. The lights are always smashed so you can’t see what’s coming up behind you. It’s like Dodge City. Everyone’s been given a Chubb lock as well as an ordinary one because of the break-ins, but the doors are like matchwood – it’s shocking. I grew up in a sweetshop off Brixton Market and I can remember robberies, lads in gangs, half-bricks chucked, people even carried razors, but, I don’t know, this seems worse. Maybe it’s my age. The trouble is these estates are so isolated. At least in my day as long as you got out of some streets and never went into an alley you were OK. These things happen on estates, where people live. They’ve got to go there. I suppose Val’s young enough to cope, if she’s lucky.’

  ‘At that age you think you’re immortal,’ Dermot said.

  ‘Another year and she’ll have her qualification,’ Polly said. ‘I don’t know. I sometimes look at Rufus and tell myself not to get too attached to him. In two years’ time he could disappear into the wild blue yonder. A disagreement between Max and Val and bingo, that’s it, Val’s off with Rufus and it’s as if he’d never been. I can’t imagine why I’m demanding all this stability from them, when God knows, I’ve never produced any stability for anybody around. Has it ever struck you that having to grow up is a mean trick someone played on you?’

  The phone rang and it was Polly’s daughter, Margaret, sounding shaky. ‘Can you come back, Mum?’ she said. ‘I think there’s someone prowling around in the garden. I keep hearing these noises and the cat’s just dashed in through the cat-door, looking scared.’

  ‘Right,’ Polly said. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told the others. ‘There’s a rapist breaking into houses from the back. I expect you’ve heard. They can’t catch him. I should have thought before.’

  ‘Why don’t you both come back?’ suggested Kate.

  Polly said, ‘I’ll try,’ and left with Dermot, who offered to come with her in case there was a real prowler outside in the garden when she got back.

  ‘Katie was worried about that man while we were in Africa,’ Dermot said as they crossed the grass. ‘She knew her sister would be as careful as she was, if not more so, but she felt her magical mother’s presence was required. Still, she’s back now, and that’s that.’ He sounded gloomy.

  ‘A decent housekeeper,’ suggested Polly, who was in fact beginning to despise herself for constantly offering brilliant but impossible solutions to the Mulvaney predicament. More truthfully, she said, ‘Well, I suppose not. It’s a dream really. Who’s going to handle the normal business of the household, plus knowing that peculiar thing that happens to the cistern which means you have to kick it three times and replace the Elastoplast on the joint unless you want a plumber to charge £300 and dig up all the floorboards and who’s going to make sure the homework gets done and remember to ask why the history teacher’s suddenly teaching ‘A’ level biology, and make sure people go to the dentist from time to time and know they come up in a funny rash if they eat this and that? Then there’s checking for drugs, anorexia, pregnancy etc., which any child can conceal until they suddenly collapse in a bus or have a baby at King’s Cross tube station – you can’t cope with it yourself. You’d have to pay someone else a million a year to try.’

  In the doorway a tall, anxious figure with red hair streaming down her back was peering cautiously down the garden at them. ‘I think he’s gone,’ Margaret said.

  ‘If he was ever here in the first place, which I doubt,’ said Polly. To Dermot she said, ‘Thanks for coming. Have you got time for a drink?’

  He accepted saying, ‘I ought to be getting back.’

  ‘Five minutes,’ said Polly. ‘No harm in that.’

  Upstairs, the video of Casablanca had been playing. Margaret, to take her mind off her fears, must have been driven to showing it. ‘I don’t know what’s right any more. You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us,’ said Ingrid. Polly turned it off, shuffled her papers together and threw them behind the table in the window. She poured a drink for herself and Dermot. Margaret settled down with a Coke. She found herself talking about the Casablanca project. To her surprise he took it fairly seriously. ‘If they buy it,’ he said, ‘your problems are virtually over.’

  ‘That’s what I keep on saying,’ Margaret told him. Polly, a woman incapable of believing anybody but herself, looked at them incredulously. ‘Things aren’t like that,’ she said. ‘You’d better believe me, Margaret.’

  ‘You always think you’re right,’ said Margaret. ‘I’m going to bed. Are you in, now, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, I’m in,’ said Polly.

  ‘Take care about the rapist,’ Margaret warned.

  ‘What makes you think, the way I’m feeling, that I wouldn’t kill him?’ asked Polly.

  Dermot was looking at her kindly. She said, ‘Honestly, Dermot, if you’ve spent so long in different countries among people with completely different religions, don’t you wonder why you and Kate are letting yourself be crucified by all these rules and regulations?’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’d be there, facing all that suffering, trying to help, if it weren’t for my own rules and customs,’ Dermot told her. ‘I can’t accept one bit of my faith and discard the rest because it’s inconvenient.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Polly said. ‘Still, I’d have thought you and Kate deserved a little happiness.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t make the rules.’

  ‘Well, the rules aren’t my speciality,’ Polly said.

  ‘As well as telling you what to do,’ he told her, ‘they do lay down guide-lines about how other people should behave towards you.’ Then he said, ‘I’d better go. If I go round by the street I may be able to stop Patrick from letting my tyres down.’

  ‘Does he?’ she asked.

  ‘Some extensive scratches of the kind made by keys have recently appeared on the paintwork – put down to local vandals, but I’m afraid I saw him doing it out of the lavatory window.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything?’ asked Polly.

  Dermot stood up. ‘I didn’t think it would help. But now I suspect he’s planning another assault – if I could catch him it might be a chance to open, as they say, a dialogue.’

  ‘Siobhan’ll open a dialogue with him shortly, I should think,’ Polly said. ‘All you’ll have to do is put cotton wool in your ears.’

  After he left she wondered what he’d meant about rules also laying down how other people should behave towards you. It sounded like one of those gifted analytical things total strangers say on trains, just before getting out at Watford. Perhaps it didn’t mean much, but it sounded as if it did. The thought made her feel a bit sick. If she started asking herself who’d been entitled to do what to whom, there’d be no end to it. At that moment she heard the door open and Clancy’s steps coming upstairs. She dreaded the confrontation and, as she prepared for it, heard Dermot’s words in her head.

  I was furious when I heard that Harriet, instead of going back to Bromley, had moved in next door for the weekend. I didn’t object to the Kops girls, although I couldn’t imagine where their lives were going under the guidance of their mother, who, I must say, I did dislike. She seemed such a silly woman, always dressed in that untidy, out-of-date hippie style, all huge fur coat and boots and flying scarves. She ran some kind of a market stall, had, in fact, approached some friends of ours in Camden for junk, I knew it was her from the description. She’d apparently stood on the step haggling for an Edwardian enamel bowl and jug they no longer wanted – ridiculous, they’d said. It was obvi
ous she couldn’t keep up the house and all I wanted was for the sale to come soon, so that more reasonable people could move in. I’d spoken to her once about a fellow art historian at the Simpson who wanted a house in the locality for himself, his wife and two children. She’d looked at me vaguely and said she’d bear it in mind but it was quite obvious she didn’t intend to. Still, Polly Kops, I thought, when the crunch comes you’ll be asking for their names all right, no doubt about it. Apparently she’d once been married to Sir Alexander Kops, the banker, before his father died and he took over his father’s position. What had happened of course was that he’d moved on and she’d remained stranded in the past, peace and love and never mind the state of the roof. Someone told me at least one of the children wasn’t his. The father was that incredibly seedy musician who also lived in the house, with whom she sometimes had rows so loud that you could hear them through the wall, thick as they are in these houses. Frankly, it was like living next to a camp of gypsies and I was horrified when I found out Harriet was there.

  She’d turned up without warning at nine on Saturday morning and I could tell from the overstuffed bag on her shoulder that she was planning to stay for at least a night. I didn’t want it, particularly that evening, when we had friends coming to dinner, even more so because I’d decided that Geoffrey and I should start seeing more of other compatible couples. So I had carefully composed a party – Charles Fenton, a colleague of Geoffrey’s, and his wife, Harry and Joan Johnson from the Slade and Vivian Morton, an old schoolfriend of mine who’s an archaeologist and had just got back from Pakistan. The last thing I needed was Harriet sitting in judgement at the table. – Not that the party went well, or that’s to say, it did until after dinner when Vivian began to drone on about the high mortality rates for Pakistani girls between five and nine, how they were being killed by their parents, their screams ringing round the villages and so on and so forth, and then, to crown it all, produced a wallet of marijuana, rolled a joint and started trying to pass it round. No one but Harry Johnson accepted, thank God, and I suppose he’s famous enough to feel he can do as he likes and old enough to think these habits are smart. Then Vivian began to hint that while she had been away Casper had taken up with someone else and was now planning to divorce her – not what anyone really wanted to hear and no doubt everybody thought that a woman who goes off on field trips three months of the year is quite likely to get that kind of an unpleasant shock when she returns.

  Anyway, at the time I didn’t want Harriet about creating an atmosphere at the dinner party. And to put it bluntly, I didn’t want to have to explain who she was. So although I had to ask her in I told her that Geoffrey was out shopping and offered to make her some coffee while I went out for some last-minute items. I didn’t need to, but the last thing I wanted was a conversation with her. She countered quite bluntly by saying could she have a word with me, so what could I do? And before I’d even had the chance to think she launched into an obviously prepared speech about what a nuisance it was to have to get the Southern Region train daily back and forth to the Slade and how they were overcrowded at her house, there was nowhere to paint, she had to put her easel up in the garden shed, the windows were too small, it was too cold in the winter and so on and so forth. I tried to interrupt before she got to the punchline, since I knew too well what this was all leading up to, but, again, she rushed on like a train and before I knew anything about it she was putting her scheme to me – inevitably, that she was planning to move into the top floor, would only be there in term-time, wouldn’t be a nuisance, would pay a small rent, get a small electric cooker to use up there, would pay for an electric meter to be put in, would only use the lavatory on the top landing, bath elsewhere, if necessary, move out and go home if we needed the rooms for visitors – I had to sit and listen to this, very much regretting that I’d never got round to furnishing the other small room at the top of the house as a kind of private work-room and sitting-room. I’d been quite happy doing what marking and letter-writing I had to do at the desk in the sitting-room, there at the centre of the house. In fact I hadn’t wanted to tuck myself away at the top of the house like some hard-pressed executive, where I’d be unavailable to Geoffrey, if he wanted to talk to me. Now I wished I’d fitted the room up properly, so that at least it looked as if I used it. In the end I just said it wouldn’t be very convenient for any of us if she moved in, and that Geoffrey and I weren’t in a position to take proper responsibility for her because we were so often away, which would leave her alone at the top of a large house in London, which could be dangerous, and that in the end I was sure she was better off with her family. She sat there, looking pasty and a bit overweight but as I went on I could see her expression hardening and finally she burst out, interrupting me, ‘So you don’t want me? I thought it’d be like that.’ So I said, ‘Harriet – it’s not like that.’ And she said, ‘Oh no? What is it like then?’ and told me she was going to wait and see Geoffrey and ask him herself if she could move in. I knew quite well that if she caught him unexpectedly and probably began to cry – she was on the verge of tears already – he might agree without thinking about the consequences. Which would be for me to deal with in the end, needless to say. I had visions of evenings sitting with Harriet, or doors banging, music playing upstairs and her friends trekking in and out, her going to Geoffrey for advice and help every time she had a problem. Who could believe that once she was settled in there, up at the top of the house, she’d even go back to Bromley in the holidays? There’d be one excuse after another – she’d never go home. I couldn’t face it. I simply couldn’t face that great big girl lumbering about the house bleating for her father and the constant interruptions and disturbances to our life, especially when I was so worried about our marriage. And don’t tell me it wouldn’t have cost money – I would have been working to fund Pauline Lombard’s child, not at a distance this time, but close to. Goodness knows why she’s never married that ghastly social worker she lives with and plonked some of the financial responsibility on his shoulders. Why shouldn’t she marry him? And frankly, I hate sharing my name with her. She’s no right to it now.

  Anyway, the long and short of it was that I had to get rid of her at once, before Geoffrey came back and committed himself in the heat of the moment, before we’d had a chance to discuss it. I couldn’t have him submitting to tears and blackmail before we’d talked about it properly. So I told her she’d better go now and I’d discuss it with Geoffrey later and he’d ring her. She shouted, ‘You’ll turn him against me like you’ve always done. You know you can do that – that’s why you want to get rid of me first.’ I told her she was becoming hysterical and if she thought her father would be influenced by her in that state she was mistaken. She’d better go away and calm down. Then we could talk it over rationally. I felt awful, though, very cold, as though everything and everyone was plotting to take away my happiness. I just had to get her out of the house. I talked and talked and by sheer will-power I got her to leave. Actually I was more desperate than she was. I was shattered, and even more so when I went to the kitchen window later and saw her standing under a tree outside the house, talking to the Kops girls. All it needed at that point was for Geoffrey to come back and ask what she was doing. Then she went in with the girls and I was angry, so angry I nearly frightened myself. If I talked to Geoffrey about her and didn’t have time to explain things properly before she left the Kopses’ he might go racing round and offer her a home with us. If I didn’t tell him she’d come, and why, he might run into her anyway and wonder why I hadn’t mentioned it. In any case, I needed time. And Harriet could pop round and ring the doorbell whenever she felt like it. I pulled myself together and decided if I tackled the matter in haste I’d say all the wrong things and trigger just the wrong response. I needed to get Geoffrey in a peaceful mood, and rushing things wouldn’t help. Luckily that afternoon after lunch he said he had a bit of a headache so I told him to go upstairs and lie down, whereupon I switched off the doorb
ell and was downstairs to answer the phone if it rang. Then it was dark, then the dinner party – after I’d let in the guests I quickly switched off the doorbell again. Small wonder, with this problem on my mind (it was as likely as not that Harriet would have gone out with the others and gone back with them to spend the night, so I wasn’t out of the wood yet) – small wonder I hadn’t got the strength of mind to prevent the dinner party from deteriorating, with Harry Johnson and Vivian smoking pot and carrying on about the bourgeoisie, and divorce, like a couple of drunks while the others’ faces froze and they tried to change the subject. Harry Johnson on the evils of the present government and witchcraft, plus Vivian on the way her husband had betrayed her and the slaughter of little girls in Pakistan for good measure – what an evening. Also, couples can often laugh about these things afterwards, but Geoffrey wouldn’t even talk about it when they’d all gone home, didn’t seem to think it worth mentioning. He went into his frozen condition, as he was seeming to a lot at the time, said he felt he’d had too much brandy, went upstairs and fell asleep while I was clearing up.

  Next day I couldn’t stand the thought that Harriet might still be about, so I rang the Kopses’ and asked if she’d got back to Bromley all right, she’d been upset when I last saw her. That stupid girl Margaret showed all the brains and efficiency you could expect from the Kopses and said yes, as far as she knew. In fact, of course, she hadn’t left at all. Believing she’d gone I got Geoffrey to come for a walk to the park with me when the worst thing in the world, as it seemed to me at the time, happened. We rounded a bend in the path and there was Harriet, with the two Kops girls, all laughing their heads off and trying to entice a rabbit towards them through the fence. And Geoffrey dropped my hand the minute he saw her, the smiles were wiped off the faces of the girls and my heart turned to a stone inside me when I felt the warmth of his hand leave mine. How could he do that to me? Suddenly I saw that dreadful Pauline, Harriet’s mother, standing in her kitchen at Bromley stirring up a cauldron of Bolognese sauce. I could almost smell the awful smell.—Then, as Geoffrey called ‘Harriet,’ sounding pleased to see her, the Kops girls were urging her away. Pam had her hand and Sue was sort of jostling her from the back and they were both talking to her in low voices, like a couple of witches. Harriet, allowing herself to be pulled away, called ‘I’ve got to get back, Dad. I’ll ring you in the week.’ And Geoffrey, a bit stunned, called ‘All right!’ and then they were gone. All I knew was that the Kops girls and Harriet had laid a plan, Harriet was going to try to get Geoffrey on his own, for lunch perhaps, and put her story to him while I wasn’t there. It was a conspiracy against me.