As Time Goes By

by Hilary Bailey

  They bought some old vases, a set of cutlery with the carving knife missing, an evening suit and two stools. There had been no need for the girls’ help, really, but it grew dark early these days. There was no point in her getting murdered. It was a nuisance but she’d have to be careful, going into people’s houses after dark. In McDonald’s she looked at her daughter, bent over a hamburger, and hoped it would be all right. She had spent years looking at her children and hoping for the best.

  It always pleased me, coming down my stairs, soft and pale-carpeted past the Chinese water colours. Geoffrey would be late tonight. He had a meeting. I had sat at my beautiful mirror, in front of my beautiful dressing-table. There was a rose in the case there, and the cut glass bottles left by Geoffrey’s mother. I had done my hair a new way, I had looked at my face and not found the finest line. I could smell the light scent I wore mingling with the smell of new bread as I came down the stairs. Beef, tomatoes and mushrooms were stewing quietly in their casserole. I felt quite happy, that day.

  Nevertheless, when I went into the living-room and drew the blue curtains against the dark outside, I felt dissatisfied again. The fact was that, nice as it all was, we were still eating in the kitchen; and that was far too close to the sitting-room. The smell of food tended to linger during the evening. The kitchen should have been downstairs, overlooking the garden. We could perfectly well eat there, at a table near the french windows over looking the garden, or in the garden in fine weather. Summer evenings could be spent pleasantly in the garden, winter evenings upstairs. It was nice, with a few pieces from Geoffrey’s old home I’d captured from his sister Ursula (who would have got her daily spraying the wood with plastic furniture polish and let her children run their cars across the little table) and the fresh paint and flowers – well, it was very nice, but the garden was needed for the summer.

  All I had to do was hold off Harriet and then think of something to do about Julie. It didn’t make sense, her living there in the basement, at that ludicrous rent. I dreaded to think what was happening to the building.

  Meanwhile, I lit a sly cigarette and began to contemplate Christmas. I didn’t want to go to my parents in Scarborough much, although that was what we’d vaguely agreed in October. But my father wasn’t in good health so I thought we’d only be an extra burden on my mother and I’d much have preferred to go down to Wiltshire, where Geoffrey’s uncle Roger lived in a big old eighteenth-century house. He had interesting friends and some competent staff. He was on the board of the National Theatre, so he tended to know directors and actors and arts administrators, people like that. There’d be the chance to dress up a bit, meet some stimulating people, play charades with a famous actor or actress. But in Scarborough, in that huge, ugly house, all we’d get would be the saga about how Mrs Enwright had to get away at eleven to cook her own family’s dinner and start ‘shifting for ourselves a bit’. Not much chance to keep up my diet and exercise regime there, either, while being pressed constantly to Christmas pudding and another mince pie and another glass of wine – ‘Come on – it’s Christmas and you’re too thin anyway.’ All that nonsense. At Roger Lombard’s no one was going to check every bite and there’d be other people there who preferred to eat healthily. The point was, I was down to eight stone four pounds now and I didn’t want to sacrifice the weight loss because I had to pretend to be a greedy child again.

  Geoffrey and I couldn’t afford a Scarborough Christmas, with my father not well, and my mother fussing and the weather doing its worst. It would be too gloomy. We needed a little luxury, a little glamour and as much privacy as possible. You could get that at Roger’s. There were lots of rooms, bathrooms attached to each bedroom and a group of guests, like a house party, afforded a couple more peace than a family gathering with everybody staring at each other and God knows what skeletons coming out of cupboards. I needed to restore my relationship with my husband, not have to defend it against gloom and despondency. I knew when Geoffrey looked at my mother he suspected what I’d be like twenty years from now and didn’t like it. I didn’t want that.

  At this stage I quickly put out my cigarette and got rid of the evidence. All I had to do, I thought, was get Geoffrey to agree to ring Roger and say we’d like to come and then tell my mother Roger wanted us to come because he needed some advice on a picture he was going to sell. She wouldn’t be very pleased but it got us off the hook, that was the chief thing.

  Then Geoffrey didn’t come, not at seven thirty, when he said he would, or at eight, and by quarter to nine I was getting frantic. I rang his number at the Treasury, but nobody answered. I had visions, somehow, of him sitting there and not answering the phone. It was awful.

  After they got back from McDonald’s at eight, Polly, time being short, began to watch Casablanca again while Pam, Sue and Margaret, huddled in jumpers in front of the electric fire, discussed Clancy’s leaving. Polly, scribbling, heard Sue say, ‘Bet he’s got a spare set of keys, though.’

  ‘Poor old Clancy,’ Pam said.

  ‘He ought to be in prison,’ said Sue.

  ‘So should lots of people,’ Pam said. ‘Oh, what about Harriet? Mum – can Harriet come for the weekend? She can sleep in my room. She says she’ll take a turn on the stall. We need the help with Christmas coming up and it being so cold.’

  ‘I suppose that means you’re not coming so you’re sending a substitute,’ Polly said.

  ‘Well, sort of,’ Pam told her. ‘Anyway, Harriet’s trying to get a folder together for her exams and she can’t get any space in her own house.’

  ‘All right,’ Polly said.

  ‘She’s got to see her dad, you see,’ Pam explained.

  ‘What’s that got to do with helping on the stall?’

  ‘She’s got to keep on trying. Her stepmother won’t let her in the house. She thinks if she stays here she can catch her dad off guard and get to talk to him.’

  ‘Why can’t she just ring him up at work?’ asked Polly.

  ‘Because he’ll arrange to meet her, then he’ll tell her stepmother, then she’ll block it or just turn up herself. She wants to make a surprise attack. All she wants is a little room in the attic for term-time. You can’t say they’re overcrowded.’

  ‘The woman’ll say she was planning to turn the room into a sauna,’ Polly said. ‘Or might have to take in her cousin’s orphan children.’

  ‘There’s even a bathroom they don’t use,’ Pam continued remorselessly.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on Harriet if she’s got Anna Lombard against her,’ Polly said, turning back to the video, thinking the chances of this branch of the children’s crusade to be less than good.

  Clancy’s friend Arnold, the man who had got her the scriptwriting job, rang. ‘Jay Honeycutt’s keenly looking forward to receiving the script,’ he told her.

  ‘I suppose he is,’ bluffed Polly. ‘And it won’t be long.’

  ‘If anything’s holding up progress maybe we should meet,’ he offered. She realised his anxieties, but if they had a meeting she would have a breakdown. She looked at the scattered notes. She knew every person in every corner of Rick’s Bar and wished she didn’t. ‘If you need me, I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll be through by Christmas.’

  ‘Can I tell them that?’

  ‘Oh Christ – all right. Tell them.’

  She ran her hands through her hair, picked up her old handbag from the floor and paper-clipped her bills together in order of priority. On second thoughts, she paid a red letter from Thames Water, put it in a brown envelope with a second-class stamp on it, designed to delay its inevitable refusal by the bank, while proving to Thames Water that she was still in residence, conscious of their demand and capable of signing her name. It comforted creditors to know you were still there, still caring. She added up the bills on the back of the envelope of one of them, worked out her possible profit from the stall that Saturday, came up with the normal shortfall. The bank would cover all this once the hous
e was definitely on the market, she thought. All I want is a little lock-up shop, a few hundred quid to get started and no debts, she thought. Perhaps there’d be a couple of thousand dollars from Honeycutt when this Casablanca débâcle was over. It might help to buy some stock. Anyone who could fit in over the shop could fit in, anyone who couldn’t would have to go elsewhere. She could put up a summerhouse in the yard and pretend it wasn’t accommodation – run a cable, maybe get a plumber who was a friend of somebody to bung in some plumbing at dead of night. That would be another room for someone. It wasn’t a problem when you thought about other people’s problems these days. The problem was that she felt like the scattered remains of a takeaway some animal had dragged out of a dustbin – silver foil container, old bones, bits of rice scattered round the bin. On the other hand, she was trying, because it was slightly better than not trying, and lucky to have the chance when you thought about other people’s problems these days.

  By nine I was very anxious about Geoffrey. He’d told me he’d be late but he’d said 7.30. But if he’d gone out for a drink with colleagues after the meeting, he would have phoned. Had he had an accident? If so, there was nothing I could do. You can’t start ringing the police because your husband’s an hour or two late back from work. In any case, I didn’t believe there had been an accident. I knew he was with someone, and if he was, why hadn’t he phoned? Who was he with? Colleagues – James? Robert Smith? Julia Chumley? What did Julia Chumley look like? I’d tried, unobtrusively, to find out, but Geoffrey hadn’t told me. About thirty-seven, he’d said. Divorced. Exactly what every wife dreads in fact – the desperate, late thirties divorcee who works with her husband, the last chance to get a new husband and no scruples about whether he belongs to someone else or not.

  I started to add up how often he’d been late recently, how many after-work drinks he could have scored up without my knowing, not to mention the lunches. I had to admit it didn’t come to much of a total. And when he came in from work he had obviously not gone out for a drink. He just looked tired. But then there was Gillian Jacobson, from the Foreign Office, though I couldn’t see Geoffrey going for a woman who dressed like that, all old black skirts, badly dyed hair and teenage children in trouble. But there were the others, the ones I never heard of – the temp from the typing pool, the actress taking round the tea trolley while she waited for a part, people’s sisters, the women friends of other men at the Treasury. Suddenly I saw Theresa Montague, wife of Geoffrey’s immediate superior whom I had met – about twenty-seven, wearing enviable pearls, family money, probably, long slim legs and a complexion like a schoolgirl’s. Breasts, too. I could just see her with those legs curled round a bar stool, running those pearls through her beautiful ivory hands, leaning forward towards Geoffrey. I felt sick when I thought how easy it would be to deceive me, if he really wanted to. All he had to say was that he’d been to someone’s club.

  I stood in the window, looking down at the garden, the rusty tricycle Julie left out as often as she brought it in, the hole her children had dug right in the middle of the scruffy lawn. There were their plastic spades beside it, a couple of toy cars – you could see them in the light from our windows. The tree-tops were visible in that muggy, lurid glow you get from the sky in London in November. Why were we here, I thought? We ought to be together in the country somewhere.

  I moved to the other window and drew back the curtain just a little bit and looked down into the street. ‘Men don’t like to think they’re being spied on,’ Mother had told me. Nevertheless, she always managed to find out everything – the name of my father’s secretary and where she lived, who he played golf with and details of the men’s wives and families, even the personal history of the man who serviced the car. She found out, she remembered and she put a stop to anything she thought threatened her home, stopped him drinking a Sunday pint at the Feathers when she found out something dubious about the landlord’s wife, simply by going with him every time. Once she’d caught that jovial masculine reference to the landlady of the Feathers she’d had to pay Mrs Enwright extra to come in and do the Sunday dinner, but by the time some of the other wives caught on, and started to turn up at the pub too, the men transferred their custom to a quiet country pub seven miles from the town – and mother had won. ‘Discreet supervision,’ she called it. She went through my father’s pockets regularly, clearing them out for the cleaners. I don’t suppose he realised she scrutinised every railway ticket or bill he’d stuffed carelessly in his pockets. She cleared out his wallet, too, to save the leather from becoming overstretched, and went through that, too. She tidied his desk, scrutinising everything with a brooding air, going through the bank statements thoughtfully, although she publicly claimed she had no knowledge of money or business, that my father kept her in complete ignorance of his working life and that she had no head for figures – ‘I can just about add up the household accounts,’ she used to say. All this attention used to baffle me slightly, because my father seemed the least likely man in the world to go off the rails. It seemed a bit like keeping a close eye on the family cat, in case it suddenly turned into a tiger. Still, who’s to say that this probing, checking and steering didn’t prevent something from happening? She told me plenty of stories of respectable couples breaking up in unsavoury circumstances. Men you’d never believe had the desire for anything but a whisky or two too many, suddenly, it seemed, took off with their secretaries or were discovered to be regular clients of a call-girl in Manchester. She’d say things like ‘Thank goodness your father’s not like that. Still, his wife was a fool to trust him, that’s what I’ve always thought.’

  It was probably this sudden memory of my mother chatting on like this in her chintz chair which sent me upstairs – by then it was twenty past nine – to the study, where I found myself looking at Geoffrey’s desk, then opening the file marked ‘bank statements’ in the drawer. Although I had money left to me by an aunt on deposit at another bank, this account was a joint one in both our names and both our salaries were paid into it. The bank statements came addressed to both of us but Geoffrey always opened them and paid the bills. Now I stood in his dark green study, where the Roman bust of some old senator stood, gleaming white, on a shelf in an alcove with a light over it. It had been a wedding present from his Uncle Roger – I appreciated it but I didn’t really want it in the living-room. Now the bust of the old Roman, with his badly-mended nose and little cold eyes, stared down at me as I went through the statements. He looked as if he’d been staring at people secretly looking through documents for the last two thousand years. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first, then I spotted it. I suppose I was looking for a large unexplained sum. The only thing like that I came across was one for £750, which I remembered was the bill for my own winter coat. But the bust kept on staring at me. I had my ears pricked for the sound of the car drawing up at the front of the house. It must have sharpened my wits. I suddenly noticed the standing order payments to awful Pauline, Geoffrey’s previous wife, had gone up from £200 a month to £350. What mattered wasn’t so much that Pauline had extracted more money from him – although I begrudged it to her, I must say; after all, she was working and so was that dismal social worker she was living with, you’d have thought they could have managed – but that she must have made contact with Geoffrey, and he hadn’t told me, and then he’d decided to give her more money, and hadn’t told me that either.

  I felt very cold. I put the statements back carefully, just as I’d found them, closed the drawer and went downstairs again. I had to accept that Pauline had to be paid but, I thought, fancy increasing the sum for Sainsbury’s plonk and velours track suits for her and her saggy lover and, above all, fancy not telling me. And I was very upset. It was the first secret Geoffrey had ever kept from me and it involved his ex-wife. What else might be going on? He might be with Pauline now. He must have been when this agreement was made. And if he’d signed the form for the increase by himself it wasn’t even legal, because I was
co-signatory to the account. I took a grip on myself and decided to say and do nothing. Not until I understood better what was going on. And just then in he came, full of apologies, saying he’d had to take some papers to Bob Montague’s house in Hampstead that afternoon, since Montague’d broken his ankle the day before digging some trenches for potatoes. He’d tried to ring me to say he’d be delayed but he found out our phone was out of order. It was, as it turned out, so everything he said was probably true, but after what I’d discovered about the bank I wasn’t able to believe anything he said completely. I pulled myself together and acted normally, poured him a drink, asked questions about his day, got the casserole, a bit worse for wear, out of the oven and we sat down. I didn’t eat much. He asked me why not and I said I wasn’t hungry. ‘You eat too little,’ he told me. ‘Sometimes it worries me.’ I felt a little better then. Then I thought of Pauline shoving some huge dishes of pasta or rice on the table, with some other bowl of yuck to go with it, and some vast bowl of natural yoghurt or heaven knows what, and five people filling their plates, then pouring out gallons of coke or litres of cheap red wine – all of them tucking in and slurping away with gusto on our £350 a month. I had a hard job not to burst out. Instead I just said, ‘Well, you’d hate it if I got fat, wouldn’t you Geoffrey?’ Geoffrey didn’t like fat women. I always hoped this helped to put him off Harriet. I think it did.

  The next Saturday saw Polly standing in the yellow light of the overhead lamps at four in the afternoon, as fog-laden dark came down, wearing boots, gloves, an anorak and a woolly hat, dreaming of her lock-up shop and debtless existence. Suddenly the thought of abandoning the high, in-need-of-decoration rooms, the crumbling plaster, the damp walls, the rotting window frames, the cold passages and landings, the graceful crumbling portico, began to appeal to her. All she wanted was a little shop she could open every day, and little brown envelopes she could also open, without fear, every day, instead of that great crumbling place, wolfing her earnings down like a big, greedy dog, and then looking round for more it could grab and steal, gnawing the table, the curtains, chewing holes in the sheets. She looked blindly at Mrs Ofani on her jewellery stall, Christian with his second-hand books, Heliotrope with her ’40s and ’50s dresses and coats. They stared back, not seeing her either. There was a limit to the amount of interest you could take in the neighbouring traders when you were all cold, with runny noses, stamping your feet to keep warm, half hypnotised by the hazy lights above.