The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

by Margaret Forster

  Rose was nervous. No need to apologize to a child, of course, but she found herself saying silly things like ‘It’s a bit untidy’ and ‘It’s not like your house Amy’. But Amy wasn’t listening. She accepted the fact that the door into the rest of the house was closed, to Rose’s relief, and then turned to all the cupboards she could see. Laughing, Rose ran round closing the ones with dangerous things inside until they came to the shoe cupboard and there she left the doors open. Amy was already half inside, pulling out shoes and slippers and shoe-horns and shoe-trees in a frenzy of exploration. When she had everything out including some boxes, she sighed and sat and looked at the mound around her and began turning over each item. Rose sat and watched her. Each time Amy showed signs of boredom, she selected something different and quietly slipped it to her. And she talked, as she hadn’t talked for years.

  ‘Shoe? Yes, that’s my shoe, and what a good one it’s been. I bought those shoes ten years ago Amy and they aren’t done yet. I’ve had them mended often enough but the uppers are still good. Yes, horn – that’s a horn, a shoe-horn, can’t you say horn? It’s for putting your shoes on properly, look, you put it behind your heel like this, see, and it slips into the shoe and Bob’s your uncle. Now, what have we got in this box? Do you want to rattle it? Eh? There, a lot of old dominoes, that’s what’s in there. It’s a game but we don’t play games now. Mind that lid, it’s sharp, it should have been thrown out but my husband won’t throw anything out, it’s hoard, hoard, hoard, till I’m sick of the sight of all his rubbish. Now you know what that is, Amy? What is it? Ball, say ball, that’s right, come on, we’ll go and play ball.’

  They played ball till Amy got bored and Rose was exhausted with all the running and catching. They made a lot of noise as they played, each of them outdoing the other in shouts and squeals. Rose was breathless and giggling. She kept saying, ‘Oh dear me,’ and, ‘Oh goodness,’ and shook her head a lot. Her hands got scratched with all the times she had to delve among the brambles for the ball and her stockings were dirty at the knees where she’d knelt to get underneath them. When Amy lay down in the grass and began to close her eyes and suck her thumb, she was glad. Tenderly, she gathered the small hot bundle into her arms and went to the wall. ‘Hello,’ she called. Should she add Mrs Oram or Alice? She was relieved that neither was necessary – the girl came running out at the first sound, effusive in her gratitude, falling over herself to express it. ‘That’s all right,’ Rose said, graciously. ‘I thought it would give you a bit of a break.’

  Alice could hear her singing as she went back into the house. She put Amy in her cot, trying to stifle the vague irritation she felt at Mrs Pendlebury’s attitude. Why did she have to pretend that she’d had Amy over to do her a favour when it was quite obvious she’d had her over for her own pleasure and loved every minute of it? It made her cross, but then she knew she always expected other people to be as open as she was herself and that was a mistake. One must be charitable. If Mrs Pendlebury needed such an excuse then she must grant it to her. Old people, she had noticed, needed to keep their pride even more than children. She carried on washing down the kitchen walls, reflecting on the hypocrisy underlying all relationships. Except marriage. That, she decided, was the true virtue of marriage – within it there was no need for pretence or pride-saving or any other of those exhausting social practices. At least Mrs Pendlebury had Mr Pendlebury. It was the old ones who weren’t married that worried Alice. She saw them everywhere in this neighbourhood, tottering about half-crippled, with nobody to talk to. At least Mrs Pendlebury had Mr Pendlebury.

  At the precise moment that Alice was drawing comfort from this thought, Rose was lashing into Stanley on his return from his Club on exactly the same subject.

  ‘I’ve talked more to that child this afternoon than I have in a year to you,’ she shouted, at him. ‘You won’t never discuss nothing. I say things to you and you pay no attention, there’s more response from that baby. I get sick and tired of it, there now.’

  The ‘there now’ was accompanied by a slap as she slammed down Dolores’ wedding invitation.

  ‘We’ve had this three weeks,’ she said. ‘When are you going to do something about it?’

  Stanley stared at the invitation. Slowly, he reached into his inner jacket pocket and took out his spectacles but before he could put them on Rose had snatched the invitation away again.

  ‘What do you want to read it for? You know it off by heart or should do the times you’ve looked at it. What I want to know is when are you going to have the courtesy to reply to it, eh?’

  ‘I don’t see there’s any call to reply,’ Stanley said, ‘seeing as how they’ve been told we’re coming.’

  ‘Oh!’ gasped Rose. ‘Oh! Stanley Pendlebury, you’re the limit. Have you never heard of ordinary good manners? Have you never heard of decency? I want that invitation replied to at once, sharp. So there.’

  Stanley took his time getting envelope and ink and pen and paper. Watched by a fierce Rose, he spread it all out on the table and coughed. He knew better than to ask what he should write, but he was damned if he could find the right words. It seemed silly going all formal to his own sister. Did Rose really want him to put ‘Mr and Mrs Stanley Pendlebury have great pleasure in accepting . . .’ and so on? A note would do. ‘Dear Elsie,’ he wrote, ‘Thanks for the very nice invite and of course we are glad to accept.’ He signed it with a flourish and handed it to Rose. She took it disdainfully.

  ‘I don’t want to see it,’ she said. ‘I should hope you would know how to reply to an invitation.’ But she peered at the sheet and something about it disturbed her.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Read it,’ said Stanley, rather rudely.

  ‘I can’t, you know I can’t, but it looks funny – what have you said? – you’ve put dear something, I can tell –’

  ‘You want glasses,’ Stanley said.

  ‘I may want glasses and if I do it’s my business but I don’t need glasses to see that’s not right.’

  In the end,, he did it as she wanted and took it to the post to post it at once. All that fuss. Life with Rose was one long fuss. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that she didn’t have enough to do, not enough of the right kind of things that is. If only they had grandchildren near, that was what she needed, somebody to do something for. Once, he’d suggested she might help out doing the tea trolley at the hospital because he’d heard somebody at the Club talking about them needing help. She’d been furious – said he’d be wanting her to go round giving bread to the poor next. All day she’d kept exclaiming, ‘The very idea, the very idea,’ over and over. It had puzzled him. She liked helping people, nobody was kinder, but when he paused and wondered who Rose helped he discovered to his amazement it was only himself. It disturbed him to have to admit it. He listened more carefully at the Club and was astonished at all the things Rose’s counterparts seemed to do. A lot of their activities centred either on the Club or the church, which of course explained it. Rose hated clubs. Stanley knew if only he could get her down there she would love it but he’d never manage it in a month of Sundays. The church was impossible. Neither of them had ever had any truck with churches. Rose thought all parsons interfering snobs, and though he wasn’t prepared to go that far he wasn’t drawn to them either.

  On the way back from the post-box, which was a mere two streets away, Stanley was seized with a small fit of rebellion. He wouldn’t go home straight away even if it was nearly tea time and even if he had just got back from the Club. He fancied a walk. Assuring himself that he wanted and needed the exercise, he about-turned and walked in the direction of the High Street. He’d look in a few shops, might even buy something. It was nobody’s fault except her own if Rose couldn’t also wander off on her own to the shops. If she had glasses she’d be able to. At the thought, he had another daring idea – he would make an appointment at the optician’s for Rose, then she’d have to go. With a smile of triumph he d
id just that. It took two minutes of decisive action. Afterwards, he stood and smirked on the doorstep of the shop and then, in the same mood of resolution, stepped out into the street not knowing what he might do next.

  What he did shattered him. He walked into a travel agents and got all the particulars on going to Australia – all the leaflets on boats and aeroplanes and prices and times. They made a big bundle for his now sweating hands to carry. He kept clicking his tongue to register his admiration at his afternoon’s work and was so excited that he actually went into a pub that was just opening and had a whisky. There’d be hell to pay but there was going to be hell to pay anyway. Rose wasn’t against alcohol but she was against pubs. Too bad. He might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. With that comfortable platitude on his lips, Stanley sauntered home.

  Chapter Six

  THE RAIN BEGAN on the twentieth of October, causing great excitement everywhere since it ended the longest dry spell for thirty-seven years. Everyone remarked they’d had a good run for their money (especially Stanley Pendlebury) and must now expect to pay for it. They paid for it. Three inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours. There were floods in Cornwall, floods in Wales, and the M4 was closed to traffic. Naturally, the temperature also dropped, first five, then ten and finally, by the end of the third day, twenty degrees. In one brief week summer had given way to winter.

  The Oram family were hard hit by the transformation. Their doors and windows were closed tightly for the first time in four months and immediately they were aware of the smell – a fusty, musty, old smell that spoke of dirt and rot and general decay. Floorboards that had been pleasantly cool to bare feet were suddenly cold and rough. The lack of curtains mattered when the scene outside was so dreary. Eating outside, they had not realized how makeshift their kitchen arrangements were, and now they fell over boxes and bags that cluttered every available floor space. Amy cried because she could not go out and talk to Mrs Pendlebury and when in desperation Alice rushed out with her to prove there was no one there she cried all the harder. It was horrible. The roof let in on the second night and they had to put buckets under the worst leaks. In the night, Alice forgot about the buckets and tripped over then and cut her head on a nail. She sat and cried in the swamp she had created.

  There began a long, depressing series of phone calls to builders. Six promised to come. None came. The family across the road gave them the name of their builder who did come, but that only made them more miserable because he rhymed off a terrifying list of all that needed doing and said, proudly, he was much too busy to tackle it. Doggedly, they kept on asking and searching until a man was found to do a temporary job. The rain stopped coming in. Thankfully, they paid sixty pounds – which brought their bank balance down to fifteen pence – and closed the door on him.

  Rose Pendlebury always went crazy when the first rain of the winter cascaded through the ceiling of the top room, where the distemper was discoloured brown, but Stanley calmed her with his commonsense approach. He pointed out the damage never got any worse and it was in a room that was never used, so why worry? The time to start worrying was when the downstairs rooms were affected. That was a cue for Rose to rush and show him the big damp patches all the way round the living-room skirting-board but he explained, as he always did, that that was rising damp. All these houses had rising damp. Nothing could be done about it, Stanley assured her. Rose wished Frank was at home. It made Stanley irritable. Frank was handy, Stanley had never denied that, but to hear Rose talk one would have thought he was a miracle worker. He could do just as well as Frank himself but she wouldn’t let him. She maintained he would fall off the ladder and other unlikely disasters. Her attitude was very useful all the same – he saw no reason to decorate: what was on the walls was perfectly all right.

  The mention of Frank’s prowess almost put him off wanting to go to see him at all, but then the knowledge that the actual going was such a long way off cancelled out his reluctance. He brought the matter up after breakfast on Monday morning – a silly time to choose, as he later realized. Rose was always depressed in bad weather and never more so than at ten o’clock in the morning, when a grey, dismal day with nothing to do stretched ahead. At least in the evening the edge of her gloom had been blunted and, however much she said she hated it, there was always television to look forward to. Nevertheless, he had broached the subject and must take the consequences as, by midday, he was doing.

  He’d taken the brochures out of their envelope and spread them on the white tablecloth. They looked gay and exciting. He just left them there, to speak for themselves, while he finished his third cup of tea. Rote was taking dishes into the back kitchen. Every time she lifted a dish she couldn’t help touching one of the leaflets but, without the glasses she was sorely in need of (and, he smiled to himself, would soon have), they meant nothing to her.

  ‘What’s all this rubbish come through the door then?’ she grumbled. ‘You shouldn’t even look at it – straight in the dustbin, that’s what I do.’

  ‘It isn’t rubbish,’ Stanley said, for a starter.

  ‘You wouldn’t know the difference,’ Rose scoffed. ‘They can take you in with any cheap offer. It’s all a con these days if only you had the wit to see it, but of course you haven’t. Put them in the dustbin.’

  ‘You might be sorry if I did that,’ Stanley said, enjoying being enigmatic.

  ‘Oh might I indeed? What’s so special about this lot then?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in one word,’ Stanley said, ‘Australia.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been to the travel agents. This is all the literature on Australia – how to get there, how much it would cost and all that. I thought we might go in the spring.’

  ‘Pigs might fly,’ said Rose, but it was an automatic response. She seemed quite calm as she sat down at the table and spread out all the booklets. ‘Now then,’ she said sternly, ‘where do I start?’

  It was all going so well Stanley was lulled into a false sense of security. Down he sat with her and with great patience read through all the information. The enthusiastic blurbs sounded ridiculous read out in his flat, monotonous voice – so much so that Rose laughed out loud and said he would be the death of her and wiped the corner of her eyes with the edge of her apron. Outside the rain attacked the windows like a swarm of bees, bouncing angrily against the panes, and inside Rose and Stanley sat and read about the golden sunshine of Australia. When finally he had finished, she made another pot of tea.

  ‘This is unexpected,’ said Stanley, happily.

  ‘About time,’ Rose said. ‘We’re in a rut. We’ve been in a rut ever since Frank left. We never do anything unexpected. I’m sick of it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Stanley, drooling over what was to become his fourth cup of tea in an hour, ‘at our time of life.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’ Rose asked, crumpling a list of prices.

  ‘Well,’ said Stanley, ‘when you get to seventy you should be slowing down, taking it easy.’

  ‘When have we ever done anything else? When have we ever just got up and done what we wanted? Never, that’s when. I tell you I admire these young folk just going after what they want, not getting in a rut. If I was forty years younger I’d do just what they do instead of always playing it safe. That’s been our trouble – we’ve always gone for safety, never risked a thing.’

  ‘We haven’t done so badly,’ Stanley said.

  ‘Haven’t we? You call this not doing so badly? Stuck in here like two animals, nobody caring, never seeing anybody, never doing anything?’

  ‘We’re going to Australia,’ Stanley said. She was hurting his feelings and didn’t seem to care, but she’d run on like this many times before and he knew it would be fatal to mention feelings. The thing to do was distract her before it got to tears.

  ‘All right then,’ she said loudly, ‘when are we going? What day? How? Tomorrow?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Stanley said. ‘You know it will all n
eed arranging. It will take time. You can’t go to Australia just like that.’

  ‘Why not? Other people do, other people just turn up and buy their tickets and off they go, other people –’

  ‘You need passports for a start,’ shouted Stanley. Her voice was getting on his nerves. Every word she spoke was more shrill and piercing than the last. ‘And maybe a visa, I’m not sure. Then there are vaccinations and health certificates – oh, there are lots of things, lots of paperwork to be done.’

  She was silent. Slowly, she gathered up all the leaflets into a neat bundle, then she put her head in her hands and looked at the tablecloth. The parting in her hair showed pink as she bent over. Now that she was quiet, he regretted slapping her down. He had overdone it, forgetting that quietening her down was so much easier than cheering her up.

  ‘I’ll get cracking today,’ he said. ‘We’ll get the forms from the post office for passports.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said, her voice muffled by her hands.

  ‘We’ll fill them in and get them off straight away. It’s the quiet season now, we’ll have them in no time.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said again.

  ‘I’ll do yours,’ he said, consoling her, thinking it was the writing involved that worried her.

  ‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘They aren’t likely to give me a passport, not in my state of health.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Rose – anybody can get a passport, anybody at all. They can’t refuse you.’

  ‘Health certificate then, I’ll never get that.’

  ‘I’m not sure you need one, I’m not sure what’s needed, I told you.’

  ‘Stands to reason there’ll be some health check and that’ll be that.’

  ‘But you’re in good health. You always have been.’

  ‘Little you know, just because I don’t go on about what’s wrong with me like some people I could mention.’

  ‘I’m the one more than likely not to get through a medical.’