by Weldon, Fay
Even as the notion occurred to her Thompson was off over the brow of the hill and though she yelled for a good five minutes he did not return. A cold wind had got up: the hills were hostile. She did not belong here. She thought she would leave Thompson to find his own way home. He was more part of the elements than she was: leaping and bounding into the chilly blast, exhilarated. The thought that he was Timmy’s dog, and she was responsible for him, oppressed her. She could see down to the harbour below, and the docks and the grey sea, and the slow movement of the toy cranes, and on the next fold of hills the Base itself, with its squared-off roads and pretty bungalows and the thin tracery of the high wire fence, and outside it a kind of muddy unevenness, presumably where the Peace tents were pitched, or slung, or whatever they were. She was too far off to make out detail.
It’s nothing to do with me, she thought, let them get on with their games, and leave me out of it. Leave me to love my husband, and walk my dog, and get on with my life. And she ran bounding down the hill.
By five that evening Thompson had not returned and the postman, delivering an envelope marked with many red bands, said, ‘A farmer will have got that dog with a gun, forbye. Out there worriting sheep again.’
‘He doesn’t worry sheep,’ Meg said.
The red bands induced her to open the letter and she found inside notification that Timmy’s Visa Card had been withdrawn for non-payment of dues. She discovered that they owed the Company £843.72 and at 12½% accumulative interest, too. Timmy had told her to use the card to buy wallpaper, paint, carpets and so forth. She had used it the day before, down on the Base, to buy groceries, finding funds in the joint account she shared with Timmy running low. Timmy’s monthly salary had not for some reason shown up on the balance.
Meg shivered. Cold had somehow got into her bones. She put on more jerseys and piled wood on the fire – though stocks were surprisingly low – but kept opening the door to see if she could see Thompson bounding home, which of course she didn’t.
Night fell. No Thompson. Meg telephoned Tony and wept over the receiver.
‘I’ll come right up,’ he said.
Thompson arrived home at the same time as Tony. He stood at the door laughing and panting and dropping and picking up a dead rat, for the death of which he expected to be congratulated.
‘I hope he hasn’t been worrying sheep,’ said Tony. ‘They shoot dogs for that round here.’
Tony removed the rat from Thompson’s mouth, made Meg look for worm pills and thrust one down Thompson’s throat. Then he told Meg what to write to Visa and gave her the number of the Families’ Officer on the Base who looked after the financial affairs of the wives while their husbands were away. He claimed that submariners were notoriously impractical in money matters and, indeed, in most domestic matters.
‘Their minds ebb and flow in tune with the mighty currents of the deep, I expect,’ said Meg. ‘Their wives have pathetic little sharp foamy wavelet minds. All detail, no grandeur.’
‘Not so pathetic,’ said Tony.
He put his hand into something he called a soot box in the Rayburn flue and told her the chimney needed sweeping, and he would send a man up to do it, and to fix a cowl to stop the smoke blowing back when the wind was from the north.
He told her he would bring up stores from the Base so she could sit out a snowstorm: otherwise they’d have to send a helicopter to fetch her down and she wouldn’t like that, would she? And neither would he. He for one would like to see someone make a go of living independently, outside the Base. The Navy owned too much of people’s souls: it had no business to.
He said he’d lend her a television set, and she said she didn’t like TV, and he said oh she would, she would. By the time the New Year was here, and her husband back.
He said he expected nothing from her. He liked to be of use. He was a solitary kind of person, really. So was she. Let them both circle each other for a time.
And he went away, leaving Meg warm and comforted and stirring inside. She tried to remember what Timmy’s face looked like, and was not able to. It was as if the presence of another man in the croft, his coat hanging on the back of the chair, seeing to things, doing things, had somehow driven out the lingering feel of Timmy.
‘Did you know,’ said the captain – they were back up in the Pacific now, and coral less of a problem than ice, though still tricky – ‘that we nuclear submariners outnumber the blue whale? American, Russian, Chinese by the hundred! We’re the rarity – the ones with the GB plates. Every city in the world with a missile pointed at it. Our five just provide extra cover for the major capitals: a drop of wine in the child’s glass, to stop him making a fuss, to make him feel grown up.’
‘Ours not to reason why,’ said Jim. ‘Ours just to do and die—’
‘Only we won’t be doing the dying,’ said Timmy. ‘That’s for those at the end of our doing.’
Men get meditative at the bottom of the sea. On some days even haute cuisine fails. Rating Hoskins played good guitar, but only knew peace-songs from the sixties; which made everyone maudlin.
Meg said to Tony, ‘The trouble with Thompson is, he acts as if I were his sister, not his mistress. He doesn’t respect me.’
‘I don’t act as if you were my sister,’ said Tony. He was in bed with Meg. He had just got in; for warmth, he said. The man who came to sweep the chimney said the whole thing was about to fall down and the fire mustn’t be lit until he’d come back, which he would do the following day, with materials to rebuild it.
Cold had struck afresh into Meg’s bones. The Families’ Officer had explained to her that nearly all Timmy’s monthly salary cheque was bespoken on Credit Purchase arrangements, mortgage payments and so forth. There was next-to-nothing left over for daily living; and she, Meg, had been living like a spendthrift, buying cream when top-of-the-milk would do, sending letters first-class, buying wallpaper when whitewash would serve. He would advance her money, of course, against Timmy’s next salary. The Navy, he said, believed in looking after wives – and frequently had to. Naval pay was designed to keep single men in beer, not married men in homes. But where was it all to end? If only Meg would agree to sell the croft and come and live on Base, she’d find the living more economical. Meg told the Families’ Officer she’d think about it. Tony said he’d pay off the Visa, and they wouldn’t tell Timmy. Meg agreed. Meg crept into bed not caring whether Tony followed.
Tony did follow, with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you spent most of the last three months in bed with Timmy.’
‘Not necessarily in bed,’ said Meg. ‘It was warmer then – outdoors was always very nice and we grew fond of under the kitchen table, except for Thompson.’
‘When it suddenly stops,’ he said, ‘it must be very hard.’
‘Of course it’s hard,’ said Meg, crossly.
He had all his clothes off. Meg had taken off her jeans, for comfort’s sake, but had her other clothes on, the usual vests and body warmers. (And winter not even truly started.) She was in bed for warmth and comfort, nothing else.
‘I wish you wouldn’t act like some kind of servicing agency,’ she said, shaking off his enquiring hand. ‘For all I know you’re put in by Security to keep me happy.’
‘Security don’t want people to be happy,’ he said. ‘Merely silent.’
‘It’s much the same thing,’ she said, ‘when it comes to wives.’
And she sat up and accepted the proffered champagne.
‘You aren’t really Security?’ she asked, fascinated and a little alarmed.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘How paranoid you are. Would they really go to such lengths for the simple wife of a simple navigator?’
‘They have to occupy themselves somehow,’ said Meg. ‘And he is one third of an Attack Team: that is, one fifteenth of Britain’s Independent Nuclear Deterrent.’
‘Is he really Attack Team?’ asked Tony. ‘How do you know?’
‘Zelda told m
e,’ said Meg.
‘Ah, Zelda,’ said Tony. ‘Zelda would never go to bed with a man wearing a body warmer and a thermal vest.’
‘Well, you’d know,’ said Meg. He did not deny it.
He removed her body warmer and thermal vest.
‘I haven’t said I will,’ she warned him. ‘You got into this bed on your own account. I didn’t ask you in.’
‘You didn’t get out of it either,’ he said. ‘A man takes these little hints to heart. You have lovely nipples. Pinkish. Much nicer than Zelda’s.’
‘I wish you’d be serious,’ she complained. ‘How am I going to survive this life? How can Timmy afford to leave the Navy, if he doesn’t try and save?’
‘Dear heart,’ said Tony, ‘I am serious, and Timmy doesn’t want to leave the Navy.’
‘Oh yes he does.’ She covered her breasts with the sheet.
‘Consciously perhaps, but not deep down in his subconscious, where it really counts.’
Meg believed him and her hand lost its will. The sheet dropped. There was a noise at the door, a scraping sound, and the fragile catch gave way. Thompson lumbered in and lay beneath the bed.
‘That’s it,’ said Meg. ‘Please get out of this bed, Tony.’
‘Why? He can’t talk,’ said Tony.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Meg.
So Tony got out of bed and dressed, forgetting his tie. Thompson dragged that under the bed and chewed it a little, having been deprived of his rat, and needing some small revenge.
Meg felt quite fond of Thompson, for having rescued her. At the same time the rain had started to fall, and the ground around the croft, disturbed by months of building work, had turned to mud. Whenever Thompson went out, which seemed to be every fifteen minutes, he took shafts of expensive hot air with him; and when he came in, clouts of mud. He would run upstairs to the bedroom and shake himself there. If she tried to keep him in, or out, he would holler and bang like a naughty child until she let him out, or in. She was plastering and papering the kitchen and it was, because of Thompson, taking twice as long as she had estimated.
Meg’s mother- and father-in-law came to visit and admire and sympathise – they were the nicest and remotest of nicest remote people – and she suggested they take Thompson away with them. They seemed surprised, even – had they been a little less nice – a fraction shocked.
‘But he’s company for you. And protection!’
He is disorder, Meg longed to reply: he is distraction and debacle. He is expensive – 75p a day to feed – he is dirty, and what’s more, he is Timmy’s. And Timmy, she longed to say, having the uncomfortable feeling that somehow they had shifted the whole responsibility of their son on to her, is yours more than mine. It was you two, after all – and she knew she was being childish – who thought Timmy up.
She smiled sweetly and made drop-scones on the stove which, thanks to Tony, roared warmingly and cooked beautifully and was no trouble at all except when Thompson lay too close to it, filling the air with the smell of singeing dog hair. They went away, patting Thompson.
Four more weeks and Timmy would return. Perhaps even in time for Christmas!
‘I bet you know when Second Crew’s coming back,’ she said to Tony, when she met him down at the Base, outside the library. But he only shimmered a smile and said to ask Zelda. She didn’t see much of Zelda. She thought Zelda to blame for practically pushing her into Tony’s bed (or rather Tony into hers). She was sorry for Zelda’s husband, Jim, that nice, simple, beaming man. Wives ought to be virtuous: it was a kind of magic which kept disaster away.
The Peace Women struck camp and moved off, and she felt the magic had worked. When Tony came to help her tile behind the kitchen sink and ran his hand up the back of her jumper she slapped him down very hard, so that tears came to his eyes.
‘I didn’t expect quite that,’ he complained. ‘You’re so unpredictable.’
‘I don’t sleep very well.’
‘You know the cure for that.’
‘It’s not that. I think I have cystitis or something. I keep having to get up in the night to spend a penny.’
‘You’re pregnant,’ he said, and took her down to the doctor, who confirmed the diagnosis.
‘I wish it was my baby,’ said Tony. ‘I love babies. But now I’m going south, for a month or so.’
Meg phoned Zelda to tell her the news.
‘Should I tell the Families’ Officer?’ she asked. ‘Then he could send a telegram.’
‘No point,’ said Zelda. ‘They’ll be back in a few days. And he’ll be in a bad temper. They always come back cross. Be warned.’
Timmy stepped out on to firm land, which rocked beneath his feet, and breathed rich cold air which stunned him. It seemed to him that no time at all had passed since he had gone on board. He had two quite different lives. One up here, one down there. It was safer down there, longing for ever for journey’s end. He took his bicycle from the security shed. It had been kept well-oiled, he was glad to see. Zelda was waiting for Jim and as Timmy cycled past she said, ‘Meg’s pregnant,’ and he whooped with – what? Pleasure, surprise, shock? – Or just the strength of life in this clean cold unfetid place? He stopped at the Base wine shop to buy champagne. When he got home Meg was in bed and asleep and he got in beside her – as did Thompson, half-mad with ecstasy. Thompson, Timmy observed, had put on weight. Meg couldn’t be giving him enough exercise.
‘Champagne in bed,’ said Meg. ‘We’re supposed to be saving. It’s unbearably extravagant.’
That hurt him.
‘Of course I’m glad to see you home.’ She shouldn’t have said it: it made it sound forced. They had made love furiously and fast and were left uncompanionable and dissatisfied.
‘You’ve put on weight,’ she said next, and shouldn’t have. ‘And you’re pale.’
‘It’s just that the rest of the world is over-coloured,’ he said, retreating, wanting peace, and the gentle lilt of expected life. Just the captain, Jim and himself.
‘What do they give you to eat under the sea? Baked beans and corned beef?’
‘More or less,’ said Timmy.
‘I made us a nice cottage pie,’ she said. And then: ‘Put your head on my tummy. All that life going on down there!’
‘It doesn’t feel any different,’ he said, and shouldn’t have. ‘I’m glad you forgot your pills,’ he added, to make things better.
‘How much did the champagne cost?’ She returned to the theme of his extravagance. She wished he’d go away again.
‘I think you should have trained Thompson to stay out of the bedroom,’ said Timmy. ‘He’s not a poodle or a lapdog; he’s a gun dog.’
‘I love him being in here,’ said Meg. ‘I even like the sound of him scratching his fleas.’
‘Fleas?’ said Timmy in alarm.
‘All dogs have fleas.’
‘Not if they’re properly looked after.’
It was intolerable. Meg shrieked and Timmy shouted. She said she was going home to her mother: he said he was going back to sea. She said she’d have a termination and he said good. When both had voiced exhaustion and outrage, and Thompson had stopped pattering and whuffling and fallen asleep with a dribble of saliva drying on his jowls, Timmy laughed.
‘Sorry about all that,’ he said. They went to bed and to sleep, twined, then woke up and made love again, in a calmer way, and seemed able to resume their life where they had left off. Except not quite. Timmy was alarmed at the consumption of fuel for the Rayburn and said the new chimney was responsible: she shouldn’t have had it done. He said she’d have to keep the damper in and she said ‘then it smokes’ and he said ‘nonsense’ and she said ‘allow me to know my own stove’ and he said ‘but I installed it’ and she said ‘badly’ and then he laughed and they both stopped, and kissed.
‘I’m not supposed to upset you,’ confided Meg. ‘The Families’ Officer said so. Save him from worry: for the sake of the Navy, for the sake of the country,
for the sake of the world. He didn’t mention for your sake, or mine. But that’s what I’m thinking of. See my smile? Set fair for you?’ And so it was, until the last day of the leave.
Then, when Timmy had been home for nearly three months, Thompson, cross no doubt because he’d been put on a diet and run off his feet, dragged Tony’s tie from under the bed and laid it by Timmy’s face as Timmy did his press-ups.
The telephone rang as Timmy stared at the tie. He answered it, listened, said ‘yes’ and put the receiver down.
She said, ‘is that them?’ and he said ‘yes’ again and went on staring at the tie. It was late March. It had been a mild winter, with very little snow. Tony had not been seen, nor mentioned by anyone, except as the person who’d recommended the builder who’d done the damage to the chimney. Timmy had had to rebuild it. They’d spent Christmas with Timmy’s nice remote parents, and the New Year with Meg’s vaguely reproachful mother. Meg was six months’ pregnant.
‘How did that tie get there?’ asked Timmy.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s very dusty.’
‘How long has it been there? About six months? You were on the pill. How do women get pregnant when they’re on the pill? You got pregnant after I left, by a man who wears a green tie with red stars on it. Christ!’
Meg laughed, from shock. She shouldn’t have.
‘And now you’re laughing. No wonder. You have my income, is that it? But you don’t have to have me!’
He had on his hard cold face. Meg felt her own grow hard and cold.
‘Is your objection to the quality of the tie?’ she asked. She did not deign to defend herself.
He did not reply. He was packing his few things. The gun was under his arm. Perhaps he’ll shoot me, she thought, and part of her hoped he would.
