No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  It was a long room like a schoolroom, with some fifty desks at which people sat with their legs twined round the chairs, hunched forward and sucking their pens as if they were struggling with a Matriculation paper. At the teacher’s desk sat a middle-aged policeman with grey hair and benevolent spectacles.

  Christine found an empty desk and sat down to look at the question paper lying on it, taken back all at once to the moment of panic at the start of school examinations, when all you had studied fled from you, and you hardly dared to look at the question paper for fear that the fiends had tricked you after all and were asking that impossible one about: ‘Compare the Medieval Guilds with modern Trade Unions. What was the main difference? Describe the influence of Christianity on both these movements.’

  The driver’s permit test, however, was more like an elementary intelligence test for backward children. There were three alternative answers to each question. They were written out, and all you had to do was to put an X in the space opposite the one you thought was right, so that, provided you could read, it did not matter whether you could write or not.

  Some of the people round Christine did not look as if they could read or write. They sat at the desks hopelessly, as if they had come to the end of their powers and could go no farther. One man looked as if he had been there several days. His face was unshaven and his hair was on end from the amount of times he had pushed his pen through it. The floor round him was littered with cigarette butts. From time to time he fetched up great sighs, like a man in travail.

  One or two bright boys were finishing their tests and taking them up to the policeman at the teacher’s desk, looking as smug as the loathsome candidates at school examinations who keep going up for more writing paper, when everyone else is struggling to think of enough to fill the paper they have been given.

  Christine determined to get full marks. The questions were mostly very simple, even if you had not read the book of traffic rules. One of them was: ‘If a streetcar stops in front of you, would you (a) Stop and wait for the people to descend? (b) Blow your horn to hurry them up? (c) Drive on and make them get out of your way?’

  Another was: ‘If an automobile comes up to pass you on your left, would you (a) Increase your speed? (b) Pull over to your right to give him room? (c) Swerve left and crowd him out?’

  The desks were close together, and Christine saw the man next to her ponder a long time over this question, and finally put his X in the space marked (a). She wondered if he would get his permit. He looked as if he might want to be a truck driver, and would need it.

  When she had finished she took her paper up to the policeman, who glanced through it briefly, made some cryptic calculations and came up with the score of ninety-five. She did not think she had made any mistakes, but perhaps you were never given full marks, in case it looked like cheating.

  The policeman covered each of her eyes in turn and made her read some letters on a chart and tell him the colours of a set of red, amber and green lights. As they were placed in the familiar order of traffic lights, you could have got it right, anyway, even if you had been colour blind. Then he told her that she had a pretty English accent, lady, asked her if she was in the diplomatic service and passed her on to a window where she waited in a line for a rattled woman with hair escaping all over a grey cardigan to take her papers.

  She sat with Vinson and waited half an hour for her name to be spelled out over the loudspeaker. The rattled woman could not trust herself to pronounce any name more complicated than Smith. Then she had to go to other windows and wait for other half-hours until she was finally given a fistful of papers and sent to take her driving test. There seemed to be more red tape and forms than in Socialist England.

  Vinson was inordinately proud of her for having got ninety-five out of a hundred. It was nice that he was pleased, but not very flattering that he had expected her to say that she would have mown down crowds at a streetcar stop, or pushed cars off the road if they tried to pass her.

  Waiting in the big car park where the driving tests were held they watched a red-faced man in a very old Ford trying to park the car between two white posts, while policemen and examiners looked cynically on.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Vinson. ‘Those markers are awfully close. You’ll never make it, honey.’

  ‘Of course I will. Just because I scraped a fender the other day by bad luck. You’ve never got over that scratch. Don’t belittle me, Vin. You make me nervous.’

  ‘Don’t be. Just take it easy. Don’t lose your head. Make a fresh try if you ball it up first time. Don’t be nervous.’

  ‘I’m not, but you’re making me. Please, Vin, don’t watch while I’m doing it.’

  He promised not to look, but she felt that he was standing behind her watching when her turn came. It took her three tries to get the car parked properly, but at least she did not knock the poles down and run over a policeman’s toe, as the man in the Ford had done.

  An examiner wearing a pair of blue jeans and an old leather flying jacket climbed wearily into the car with her and said, without looking at her: ‘Go ahead, lady. I’ll tell you where.’

  Christine had been driving for fifteen years, but with his jaundiced presence on the seat beside her and his turgid eye looking through the windscreen at the course she took she felt as if she had hardly been in a car before. It felt odd to be driving so primly and carefully, making exaggerated hand signals and letting every pedestrian in Washington pass in front of her.

  With no alteration of his countenance the examiner shifted his gum to the other cheek and began to try tricks on her. He told her to turn left when there was a sign saying NO LEFT TURN. He told her to turn right when the street on the right said DO NOT ENTER. He said: ‘Go on. Go ahead’, when a green light changed to amber. Vinson had warned her that the examiner might play games like this, so she was careful, and he shifted his gum back to the other side, foiled.

  They drove round the city blocks for about ten minutes. Christine dared not talk to him, in case it was against the rules, as if you were trying to curry favour, and he did not offer any conversation except the statement that she was British and must be in the diplomatic corps.

  When they had finished the tour he got out of the car without saying anything, wrote something on his papers, gave them to her and went away without a word.

  Vinson came up with an anxious face. ‘I’ve passed!’ she told him, and kissed him in front of everybody, which he did not like when he was in uniform.

  Now that she could drive she often took the car into Washington to go shopping or do a little gentle sightseeing, but she soon found that the difficulty of finding somewhere to park was almost as much nuisance as the dreary ride in the streetcar. Parking lots and garages were expensive, but every space on the street seemed to be taken by people who dashed into town at nine o’clock and stayed there all day. When you did see a space it was always on the wrong side of the road, and by the time you had described a complicated geometrical figure round the block to get to it someone else’s big fat car was always there.

  The only empty spaces were the ones that said NO PARKING. Christine sometimes risked them, until one day she came back to the car to find a police ticket stuck under the windscreen wiper.

  It was Vinson’s boast that he had never had a parking ticket in Washington. When Christine got hers he was almost as upset as if it were a prison sentence.

  ‘I knew you shouldn’t be driving here,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d get into trouble.’

  ‘It isn’t trouble. Everyone gets tickets. Nancy Lee gets one every week. She told me.’

  ‘What Art’s wife does and what my wife does are two very different things,’ Vinson said. He had never liked Nancy since she had taken Art away from him when they were sharing an apartment in Bethesda five years ago.

  He wanted to go to the police station with Christine. He said he might be able to do some talking, but Christine thought she would rather do it herself. There was no talking to be
done, however. She walked in and put her ticket on the high counter, an officer in shirtsleeves with his heavy badge sagging the front of his shirt said: ‘Three dollars’, she paid up, another officer stopped filing his nails to write her name and address in a ledger, and that was that. No muss, no fuss, as the corn-remover advertisements said.

  When she wanted to use the car she had to take Vinson to work in the morning and fetch him at night. She had already driven with him on the maze of roads that surrounds that mammoth temple of Mars, the Pentagon, and she had got over her first alarmed surprise at the thousands of cars going from every direction along the roads that loop over and under each other like a fantastic model railway.

  She had not known what it was like at eight o’clock in the morning, however, when half the military might of America was converging on its desks to fight for freedom and democracy. The first time she took Vinson to work at the Arlington Annexe, just above the Pentagon, she could hardly believe there were so many cars in the world, let alone merely going to work for the U.S. Government.

  From the jammed Key Bridge onwards you could hardly see the road for cars. They drove in a solid mass, and when they left Rosslyn and came out on to the rolling green open space that exists solely for the purpose of containing the criss-crossing loops and swirls of roads that are necessary to get people to and from the Pentagon there were cars everywhere as far as the eye could see. Cars rushing, cars crawling, cars going in every direction like ants with an unknown purpose, and cars drawn up in their thousands in cindered car parks, as if the biggest football match in creation was going on.

  She did not think she would ever find her way home. When she left Vinson at the Annexe he told her to go back the way they had come, but all the roads looked the same to her. She missed a vital turn and found herself going round and round the Pentagon with no hope of ever finding the way out. You could not stop anywhere on the road, so she drove into a car park, took a deep breath and surveyed the landscape, trying to figure out a way back to the Key Bridge. But in this traffic system the road you should take probably did not run in the direction you wanted to go. It was liable to swoop upwards in a clover leaf to get you across a bridge over another road. She ventured out again and thought she was more successful. She had the river and the bridge in sight, but the road took a sudden turn and plunge and she was back again at the Pentagon, going round in circles.

  When she was a child she had been lost in the Hampton Court Maze. She remembered how she had run round and round, crying because she was lost to the world for ever. Crying and screaming had brought her mother then, but it would do nothing for her now. She went back into her car park, wondering if she would have to stay there all day until it was time to fetch Vinson.

  An Army officer drove up in a green Chevrolet and told her peevishly that she was in his parking space. His eyes looked bruised and bloodshot as if he had a hangover, but he told her how to get back to the bridge, and this time she managed it. It had taken forty minutes to drive out to the Annexe with Vinson. It took her an hour and a half to get home.

  She was so unnerved that she did not take herself for the drive she had planned, but parked the car with the aid of Maxwell, who was cutting grass, and went back to bed and slept for the rest of the morning.

  She allowed herself plenty of time to go back and fetch Vinson. He had said to her once: ‘My wife must never be late. Nothing looks worse than a man waiting around for a woman.’

  ‘Except a woman waiting for a man.’

  ‘You know you’ve never had to wait for me.’ It was true. He was never late. Christine had always been late for everything all her life, but with Vinson she made great efforts to be on time. By luck she found the right road to the Annexe at the first attempt and was there much too early. She backed the car into Vinson’s numbered parking space and listened to the radio until it was nearly half past four and she could begin watching the doors for her husband.

  At exactly four-thirty the high glass doors opened. A woman came out, then two coloured men, a naval officer, three girls, and then suddenly a whole horde of people, who poured down the steps in a solid stream and made for the gate in the wire fence. They were also coming out of another door farther along the building, and that stream joined the stream from the main doors, until there was a floodtide of hurrying people, some white, some black; girls, men, naval officers, cripples, hunchbacks, even a neatly clad dwarf or two. No rush hour that Christine had ever seen was anything like it. It was all humanity, jammed into one building and all gushing out at the same moment as if someone had opened a sluice-gate.

  She did not see Vinson at first. There were so many naval officers dressed like him, and so many with his slight build and springy walk. She had already waved to two strange men, and was wondering whether to wave to another who looked like Vinson from a distance, when his head suddenly came in at the car window, with his white teeth shining and his flecked brown eyes eager to see her.

  Driving home with him seemed so easy that she wondered how she had ever missed the way that morning. She soon learned her way to the Annexe and back, but she always had to keep her mind on the road. If she let it wander while she was driving she was apt to find herself carried away on a curving branch road that might lead her back to Washington, or out to Alexandria, or descending again on the Pentagon to drive round and round that hopeless merry-go-round designed by someone far cleverer than the driver of any car.

  When she did not have the car she waited in the apartment for Vinson to come home. She always changed her dress and did her face, tidied away her ironing-board or her sewing, because, although it pleased him to see her busy at domestic tasks, he liked her to be unemployed when he came home, and ready to open the front door as soon as she heard his whistle on the stair. He had a special whistle for her, two rising notes, such as one might use to call a dog. He trained her to answer this promptly, and he got her so attuned to it that even when he whistled very softly she could hear it, as a dog will answer to a high-frequency whistle that the human ear cannot detect.

  Sometimes, when they were sitting with people, he would whistle very softly from across the room and Christine would raise her head and look at him, although the person to whom she was talking had not heard. Vinson liked to show off this trick in public. It made him feel like Svengali.

  Christine had to be ready in the evenings in case he came home punctually, but more often he stayed on to finish some work when the other people in his office had gone, and Christine waited, and worried whether the supper would spoil, and wondered whether, if she had a drink and cleaned her teeth afterwards, he would notice. He did not like her to drink alone. He liked her to wait until he came home and made his special brand of martini, which took a lot of trouble and pouring back and forth from different jugs, but tasted no different to her from any other.

  She always looked forward to seeing him. Her days were often long and lonely, and she saved up small items of news for him during the day and planned how she would tell them to him. But sometimes, after he had kissed her and pressed her hard against the brass buttons of his tunic, when she started to tell him something she had been saving up, he made the wrong kind of answer, or interrupted her, and it fell flat. That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself – theirs as well as yours – and then, of course, they don’t know their part.

  Often Christine looked forward eagerly to chattering round Vinson in the kitchen while he went through his methodical motions of mixing martinis, and often she was disappointed because he did not think the same things funny, or was not as interested as he should have been in what the man at the drugstore had said.

  Sometimes when he told her a piece of news from his day, she heard herself making the wrong comment on it, and was immediately sorry, because he, too, might have been planning while he was driving home how he would tell it to her, and now she had disappointed him, and she knew how it felt.

&n
bsp; In the afternoons, while she waited for it to be time for Vinson to come home, she listened to the radio programmes that she had learned to call soap operas. These were a series of domestic dramas, each lasting a quarter of an hour, during which time a set of characters with easily distinguishable voices went through a chain of emotional crises. They were supposed to represent ordinary families - ‘people just like people you all know’ – but if any ordinary family had experienced so many ups and downs as these radio characters suffered from day to day they would all be in a psychiatric ward before long. The B.B.C. programme ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’ was a direct descendant of these soap operas, but while Mrs Dale and her tedious suburban family led a fairly eventful life they never experienced anything like the intrigue, murder and illicit passion in which their American counterparts indulged.

  Some of the soap operas had been going on for years, but the characters in them never seemed to get any older or wiser. They were suspended in time, like the eternal Bob Cherry and Billy Bunter in the English boys’ weeklies, who had been in the Remove at Greyfriars as long as Christine could remember. They had a faithful listening audience, who had followed their fortunes from the beginning and perhaps knew more about the radio characters than they did about their own husbands. At the same time, however, the script writer had to cater for the listener who might be hearing the programme for the first time and would not know who was who. A character, therefore, would have to refer, even with intimates, to ‘my wife Ethel’, or ‘the landlady, Mrs Gooch’, or ‘Paula Revere, the leading lady in my current Broadway show’, which struck a stilted note in an otherwise free-and-easy dialogue.

  Since more and more soap operas had hit the air to sell detergents and deodorants and headache pills, it was the fashion in America to condemn them for the nonsense they were, but Christine suspected that more people listened to them than would admit it. She herself, being new on their onslaught, was fascinated, and followed the fortunes of the various sets of characters with deep interest. Sometimes she tried to tell Vinson about them, but he did not want to hear, and if the programme was going on when he came home he would switch it off, so that Christine would have to wait until the next day to know whether Joanne had finally agreed to marry Anthony (with the H pronounced) or whether Leslie (pronounced Lesslie) had freed himself from the ropes in time to go after the burglar who had stolen the secret formula for the wonder drug.