Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  Mickey lost a stone in weight the first month she knew David, and became so fashionably thin she went out and bought the sort of clothes she would not have considered in her former soft-hued days, clothes that would have intimidated her just sitting on the rail. She arrived in the living part of her life like a beautiful insect emerging from what had been a semi-interesting caterpillar.

  David loved her, and she loved him, and herself. She couldn’t imagine how she had managed to exist so long in the grey zone of no love. They saw each other every night for a month, most evenings going to David’s sports club where there was a nice bar and always a crowd. They would stay there for a couple of hours and then go back to Mickey’s flat or David’s house, and as the month progressed they found it increasingly irksome to have to leave one another’s bed in the middle of the night in order to return to their own.

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ David said, one night. ‘You’d better come and live here.’

  ‘So enticingly put!’ Mickey said, leaping from his bed.

  He followed her to the bathroom and stood by the door, watching her wash.

  ‘Please David,’ she murmured, ‘I feel embarrassed, you standing there.’

  ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I would like you to come and live here.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t just want a housekeeper?’ she said, her back to him, knowing the question to be unfair and hoping that perhaps it would anger him. She wanted extremes from him – raw feeling, intensity, a hundred per cent of him.

  ‘Well, that too,’ he answered her, moving forward, sliding his arms round her naked waist.

  ‘I was trying to annoy you,’ she said, leaning her head back into the curve of his shoulder.

  ‘Were you?’ he said, starting to kiss her.

  She made a token protest about it being late and having to go to work in the morning, but his hands were over her breasts, then turning her round.

  ‘You will come and be my housekeeper, won’t you? he said.

  Being clever about it was David’s defence mechanism. Falling in love had been as surprising and original to him as it had to Mickey, although she did not seem to realize this. She asked him small, neatly phrased questions designed to elicit large pieces of information. She wanted to know more than there was to find out. It might have been tedious if he hadn’t loved her, although David was a patient man and generally more phlegmatic than it would have suited Mickey then to realize. She seemed to think, even want to believe, that he must have had many passionate affairs, whereas, in truth, he had not. There had been other girls, he was far too attractive and easy mannered for there not to have been, but he had never put any great effort into these relationships. They had come to him rather than he pursuing them, and even if they had not, it was unlikely the positions would have been reversed. He probably would not have bothered over much because first and foremost David was a sportsman. He needed sport. It was essential to his existence, although as he’d never had to lessen his commitment to games he had not had to confront his dependence on playing them. Girls had been watching him from the side lines since his teens and that was where they had remained until Mickey.

  He didn’t actually think about it but even if he had there would have seemed to be no reason to alter the major part of his life. It had been assumed, quite naturally, that Mickey would be drawn into the social life of the club and she made a good start, entering when she did, heroine of the courtroom, clever and attractive, a new conversation piece, a breath of fresh air.

  David’s life had been charmed since birth, or so it seemed. Viewed from outside, it might have appeared narrow, but then was there any point in looking beyond when within the smaller orbit he was one of the chosen, liked and respected, envied and admired, and selected, every week, without fail.

  David came from a family of sportsmen, generations of weekend cricketers with wives who watched and applauded and made the teas. His father had been renowned for his bowling, his mother for her teabread. The name Evans was part of the fabric of the club and indeed appeared in many places on the varnished plaques that proclaimed members of the First Eleven through the years, from 1937 into the eighties.

  As soon as he learnt to run, David was given a bat and it settled in his hands as if put there by nature. At school, he spent more time on the games field than anywhere else and when he left was selected to play for the county, which, unfortunately, was only a minor one. But much as he loved cricket, David was an all-round sportsman, enjoying rugby, hockey, squash and tennis, and it would not really have suited him to concentrate on one alone. Besides, although he took all these games seriously, they were also a pleasure and he would not have liked them to become otherwise. He therefore remained with his club and went into insurance, and he could not have chosen a more compatible means of earning a living as most of his business was conducted at the club and with his fellow members. He was the automatic choice for every mortgage, life policy and pension.

  Throughout his charmed life, which he was wise enough to appreciate and cherish, the worst thing to befall him was the incident that led to his finding Mickey, and in retrospect it appeared that even so small a cloud had for David, yielded a silver lining. Apart from falling in love, it didn’t take him long to recognize Mickey as the woman he wanted to marry. She was, perhaps, not quite the sort of person he might have been expected to choose. For a start, she was an outsider, and as far as the club was concerned, an intellectual. To David she was simply Mickey, and she fitted the bill.

  The essential difference between them was that in coming together David did not feel any different in himself. He was very happy, but he had never been unhappy, and being with Mickey did not change his life or the way he was, it merely enhanced what he already had. For Mickey it was quite different. She felt quite different. She felt as if a new and separate entity had come into being that was her and David combined. It cancelled out the old Mickey, who had been only half-alive without knowing it, but strangely, it never occurred to her that David might have been different before. Subconsciously, hers was the psyche of the second sex, but everything was too new and exhilarating for her to trouble with such introspection, and for a person who had fought alone for so long there was a certain amount of initial joy in subordination.

  A few days before she gave up the flat, Laura and Lawrence came round on a Saturday afternoon while she was clearing out cupboards and filling cardboard boxes. They looked very alike, Laura and her boyfriend, the same size and almost the same shape, both wearing baggy trousers and overlarge sweaters, both wearing make-up.

  ‘Can we help?’ Laura asked, energetically, and Mickey knew there was an ulterior motive to the visit.

  ‘You can turf out that cupboard into one of the boxes if you like,’ she said, although she would have preferred to have done it herself and knew Laura and Lawrence had no real enthusiasm for the job. Nevertheless, she was pleased to have them there and no longer felt old with them, as she had before, or irritated by their constant, surreptitious fingering of one another, although she still thought Lawrence too ‘down market’ for Laura and noticed his poor grammar more than she should.

  Conditioning, she thought, it still clings, like the remnants of packaging. Lawrence was sweet and nice and his parents had probably bought him a great many toys of the sort her father’s factory made, which in turn had bought the expensive accents displayed by Laura and herself. For a moment Mickey, watching Lawrence piling unwrapped plates into a box, listening to him dropping his aitches, thought: would I love David if he spoke like Lawrence and didn’t look as he does – am I that shallow?

  Her thoughts moved on, the question unanswered. She saw that Laura had evolved a style with Lawrence, slightly offhand, slightly petulant, but responding all the time, vitalizing the relationship with insult. It was rather uncomfortable to observe although she had no doubt that Laura was immensely keen on Lawrence and he on Laura, even though the Laura she seemed to be showing him was not the one Mickey knew.

/>   Have I done this with David, she thought, produced a person I’m not? And yet I feel different.

  It was an interesting notion, a sort of schizophrenia within the bounds of normality.

  ‘Are you going to marry David?’ Laura was asking.

  ‘No. Maybe. He hasn’t asked me.’

  ‘Nosy, aren’t yer?’ Lawrence said.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Laura said.

  ‘Why don’t you!’ Lawrence retorted.

  They glared at one another for a moment.

  ‘I’m gerna get some smokes,’ Lawrence said.

  When he had gone Laura pursued the question, with a note of hope, as if the state of marriage was desirable.

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in it,’ Mickey said.

  ‘I don’t, in principle,’ Laura said.

  ‘There’s no answer to that.’

  ‘I don’t believe in bigoted opinion either. I mean, if you want to marry David I think that’s fine.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘What I mean is that it would be alright for you because you’ve got your own life, you’re a solicitor.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘If you and David got married it would be a side issue to what you already are, not like mother and father; mother’s just a side issue to father’s life, she’s got nothing else.’

  ‘I don’t think she’d see it like that.’

  ‘Of course she wouldn’t, her horizons are too limited, but that’s only because she’s been married to father so many years. She’s abdicated responsibility for her life by being married.’ Laura was beginning to shout. She was seventeen and desperate to find some purpose to her life. She didn’t know what she wanted to do and hated not knowing. She wanted to ‘be’ something and anyone who had managed to exist without such identity seemed to pose a threat to her, the possibility that an answer was not always to be found.

  ‘It’s alright for you’, was a recurrent phrase in her conversation with Mickey which usually included some sort of tirade against their mother. Mickey had always listened more than contributed, part of her, a part she did not like, taking satisfaction from her sister’s discontent, because Laura, she felt, had always been their mother’s favourite. But equally, this satisfaction was dissatisfying and made her feel guilty so that invariably she gave way to Laura in most things, as she did a few minutes later when Laura revealed the reason she and Lawrence had come to the flat. They wanted to use it that night which meant they would sleep in Mickey’s bed.

  ‘I am over the age of consent,’ Laura said, reading Mickey’s doubt.

  She felt ‘old’ again and protective towards her ‘little’ sister. It was instinct now but once it had been the device she used to overcome the jealousy she’d suffered as a child. By identifying with their mother in her feelings towards Laura, the rivalry had been with Molly for Laura’s affection rather than with Laura for Molly’s.

  Now, with Laura standing before her, looking more than usually waif-like in her overlarge clothes, Mickey could hardly bear the thought of what would be done to her in the bed, but knew if she refused they would only find somewhere else and at the same time think her unnecessarily mean. She couldn’t wait to go and meet David at the club and, by being with him, switch to feeling vulnerable herself and deliciously silly.

  At eight o’clock she left Laura and Lawrence at the flat. They’d looked sheepish in spite of their determined efforts at offhandedness. She drove to the club and by the lack of cars realized David and the team were not yet back.

  The Second Fifteen rugby players were at the bar, already well advanced in their purpose for the evening, to get drunk. They’d had a win that afternoon and their spirits were high and their voices loud as the jug of beer slopped back and forth between them. They greeted Mickey, still a novelty to the club, with noises of appreciation which both embarrassed and pleased her as she weaved round them to the bar where a group of girls were talking among themselves. Like her, they were friends of players, all except Josephine, who didn’t belong to anyone and probably never would.

  Josephine was a person to be suffered. People had strong feelings about her, usually dislike, although Mickey was rather drawn to her. Emotionally Josephine was a mess: unpredictable, embarrassing, over the top in most things, inviting hostility even though what she most wanted was to be liked.

  She’d been especially friendly to Mickey from the start, although in her own particular way which involved asking a lot of questions, not listening or even always waiting for the answers, and talking, endlessly, about herself and her problems.

  It was her disarming candour that attracted Mickey, her pinpointing of precise perspectives on life which were often self-denigratory, revealing the baser motivations common to most but rarely admitted. Josephine talked about greed and lust, envy and spite, in others and herself. She spoke the unacceptable truth and people didn’t like her for it. They were made to feel uncomfortable and threatened, and to counteract this it was put about that Josephine was mad.

  Tonight she was more than usually vitriolic.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ she exclaimed when she saw Mickey, ‘Intelligent company.’

  Mickey felt herself colour, but allowed Josephine to manoeuvre her away from the others to the far end of the bar. She didn’t want a scene but could see Josephine was in the mood for one.

  ‘Why are all the men so boring?’ she said rhetorically, in a voice loud enough to be generally heard. ‘Oh Mickey, I’m so depressed,’ she continued, in a quieter tone. ‘Really, really fed up. There are no decent men about, I feel fat and I’ve got the curse. And don’t say I’m not fat because I know I am. I’ve got good legs, my face is alright, but the bit in between is disgusting. I’m on a diet but that bitch, Emily, has been trying to push cake down my throat all afternoon because she wants me to be as overweight as she is.’

  It was all completely accurate.

  ‘And where’s the beautiful David?’ she continued without pausing. ‘Evidently not returned. They’ve been playing Castle Hill, he won’t be back till midnight.’

  Mickey looked at her questioningly.

  ‘Castle Hill put on a stag night special when our lot go over. It’s take your clothes off time. Public performances. They get in a couple of strippers.’

  ‘David didn’t say,’ Mickey murmured.

  ‘I’m sorry. Am I being a bitch? It’s all fairly harmless. I don’t know why they don’t do it here, it would liven things up a bit.’

  ‘But it’s nice here, as it is.’

  ‘It is for you,’ Josephine countered, bitterly. ‘I spoilt it for myself years ago.’

  ‘Surely it’s not as bad as that,’ Mickey said, knowing from what David had said that it was.

  ‘It is, but I’ve nowhere else to go and even if I did it would be the same. People are so small-minded in places like this, so parochial.’

  Mickey had already heard Josephine’s life story, a potted version of which was about to be repeated – the splendour of her childhood in British embassies with servants and nannies; her father’s early death from some esoteric tropical disease; her mother’s resort to the bottle. Good times to bad times, riches to poverty, dignity to despair. An education thrown away, the right opportunities lost, the wrong ones pursued (if that was possible). Men who treated her badly, men with wives and children elsewhere. Life in London as the complete cosmopolite until all opportunities, good and bad dried up and the remnants of dignity and inherited pride forced her to look for survival wherever it could be found.

  That point was reached five years ago when she took a job cataloguing the library of a stately home. The task had taken three of the five years and for the past two she’d been running the gift shop opened by the impoverished noble family who lived in the great house. ‘Fart-arsing’ about was their chief occupation, according to Josephine, who delivered the vulgar term in her archest voice. Yet nobody else could say anything against the earl and his fami
ly without Josephine flying at their throat. In her own way she was fiercely loyal and a shocking snob.

  Mickey observed her as she talked, and felt tolerant because she was so pleased with life herself. Fat-bodied, thin-legged, curly orange hair springing from her head like an extension of the fury in her face, Josephine was angry and bitter about everything, especially the things she couldn’t have, the chief among these being David.

  Mickey didn’t know then that Josephine fancied herself in love with David. She was insufficiently experienced in the games people played to see beyond the vaguely snide observations Josephine made about the ‘beautiful David’.

  Contrary to Josephine’s prediction, he arrived back at the club at half-past eight. Mickey saw him come in and felt her heart flutter like the heroine in a romantic story. He just did look so splendid.

  The evening passed quickly and pleasantly, although they spent most of it apart, talking in separate groups. Mickey didn’t mind too much. David’s presence was enough, and she was getting to know the others. They had names like Simon and Steve and there were a lot of Johns, though Mickey thought of them more particularly. There was the apocryphal storyteller, the bad loser, the misogamist, and the ‘meany’ who never bought a round of drinks. And she liked them all and listened to them talk at her. She heard about the grandfather who’d died on a touring holiday in Italy and been stowed in the boot of the subsequently stolen car (she’d heard it before but why lessen her appeal by saying so). She listened to tales of injustices perpetrated by blind referees, and the general propensity of women to ruin a good sportsman.

  She listened to them, the Johns and the Simons and the Steves and felt they liked her too. They were wholesome-looking young men with beer mugs cradled to their chests as they talked about bodies in boots, cretinous refs and girls who didn’t understand. But all the while Mickey was aware of David, just a few feet away, cornered by Josephine, although that didn’t particularly worry her. The bar became crowded, more noisy, more smoky, building to a Saturday night crescendo. It was like a long-awaited feast for Mickey – a feast of other people, practised, as she was not, in the act of having a good time. It was still new and exhilarating, most of all because she felt so included.