There was a programme about a poor young widow with two children, who played out ‘the eternal conflict between a mother’s duty and a woman’s heart’. The children were never heard from – perhaps because child actors would be in school at the time the programme was relayed – and the young widow sometimes went off for days at a time to follow some twist of the plot, without thought of her Mother’s Duty, but such details did not matter in the larger drama of the soap operas. The children had probably played an important part at the beginning of the series – heaven knows how long ago – and after the script writer got tired of them no one thought of changing the announcement record about the Mother’s Duty and the Woman’s Heart. The public would not have wanted it changed, anyway. It was the kind of public that likes to know where it is.
There was a sinister cripple in this programme, who talked in a snarl and never threw a decent word to anybody. All the characters had to be like that – all bad, or all good, or always funny. They never said anything out of character, in case listeners should think someone else was talking.
The machinations involved to prove that the widow’s boy friend was not married to the cripple’s sister had been going on now for several months, and looked like going on for ever, with a fresh twist of tragedy or hope whenever the plot slackened. Of course you knew it would come out right in the end, because the widow was a Good character, who said things like: ‘Whatever terrible things have happened to us, I think we shall all be better people for it.’ She was also apt to tell her friends that she was looking for stars in the crown of heaven. It was very affecting.
To point up the drama in these programmes an organ was used for the incidental music. This was cheaper than having an orchestra, as its suspenseful chords could be used to make any speech momentous.
A character would say:’ We have come to a crossroads in our lives -’ Boom! from the organ. ‘There is something I have to tell you’ – careening arpeggios – ‘I’ve met someone else.’ Boom, boom, boom! with all the stops pulled out.
A love scene could be accompanied by a tremulant rendering of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, the vox humana could help Mom when she made another of her sacrifices to keep the home together, and the carillon dinged out at any mention of religion, for God was cast quite frequently for a minor role in the soap operas.
Each programme was sponsored by some product, and began and ended with a commercial announcement. The words of the commercial were on a record and were always the same, so that you got to know them so well that you did not hear them any more, which is one of the reasons why people are able to bear with sponsored radio. Some of the advertisements were set to music. Christine heard them so often that they printed themselves on her brain. When she was doing housework she sometimes found herself singing: ‘Veeto – says No, no – to Underarm O!’ or, to the tune of Ach, du lieber Augustine: ‘Mrs Filbert’s margerine, margerine m argerine. Mrs Filbert’s mar gerine – buy some today!’, or ‘Brush your teeth with Colgate’s – Colgate’s dental cream. It cleans your breath – what a toothpaste! – while it cleans your teeth!’
Such was Christine’s life during these first months in Washington. When she stopped to think about herself she was surprised to find how quickly she had settled down. She had thought that life in America would be very strange for a long time. Although she was still frequently surprised by things she saw or heard, the new routine of her life was becoming so familiar that the old rhythm of her days in England was already like a far-off song, only half remembered.
She was less bored and lonely when she began to make friends with her neighbours in the apartments. The woman who lived opposite was a large and amiable hausfrau with short stiff blonde hair and a husband who could not sit down without grunting. They were called Mr and Mrs Pitman R. Preedy and they seemed to spend most of their time eating. Christine met the wife staggering up the stairs with brown-paper bags full of food, and often when the husband came home from work, he too carried a paper bag with a salami or a bottle of cream sticking out of the top.
Mrs Preedy was for ever making cakes, and sometimes she baked an extra one for Christine. In the course of a conversation across the hall from front door to front door, which was how they usually talked, for Mrs Preedy always said she had no time to step into Christine’s apartment, and she never asked Christine into hers, Christine had told her that she never made cakes. Mrs Preedy did not know that this was because Vinson did not like them. She thought it was because Christine did not know how to make them, and so about once a week Christine would answer the door bell to find a large iced cake sitting on her doormat, and Mrs Preedy retreating to the shelter of her own front door, stretching her orange-tinted lips in delight at her good-neighbourliness.
She was very sorry for Christine, because she had come from England. She thought that everyone in England was starving. The thought of the meat ration moved her almost to tears – and the toilet paper! A friend of hers had been to England, and the stories she had told her about that! She treated Christine as if she were an African native, newly come from some benighted jungle village. Once when she met Christine in the supermarket, buying quite ordinary things like milk and eggs and butter, Mrs Preedy had said: ‘I think it’s wonderful how you know what to buy. Do they have milk in England?’
Christine never knew what to do with Mrs Preedy’s cakes. Sometimes she ate a piece for her lunch, but Vinson, who had liked her figure in England, had begun to notice that she was too plump in comparison with American girls, and she was trying hard to reduce although she did not think it would suit her. She usually gave the cakes to Maxwell, and once, when she and Mrs Preedy went out together to go shopping, Maxwell was sitting on the grass at the side of the apartments with the plate at his side and a large piece of cake half-way to his dusty pink mouth.
Christine did not know whether Mrs Preedy had seen, but the cakes continued to arrive outside her front door, although less frequently, as if Mrs Preedy might be having a struggle to make her good-neighbourliness overlook the incident.
Vinson did not like Mrs Preedy, although she called him Commodore and always asked politely after the Navy when they met on the stairs. He said that the Preedys were not the type of people you expected to find living opposite you, and the apartments must be going down in tone. One Saturday morning when he was at home he had heard Christine and Mrs Preedy calling loudly to each other across the hall about Mr Preedy’s gastroenteritis, and he had called Christine inside and asked her if she was trying to disgrace him.
When he said things like that to her he used a voice that reminded Christine of her headmistress at school and her matron in the hospital, and it made her laugh. Then Vinson was a little sad, and told her that it was only because he loved her and was proud of her that he wanted her so much to measure up to the right standards.
‘What standards?’ Christine asked, still laughing at his pursed-up mouth and serious, unblinking stare. ‘The standards of a commander’s wife, I suppose you’ll say.’
‘If you like.’
‘Well, don’t you ever be made an admiral, Vin. I’d never live up to it.’
‘I sincerely hope that I shall some day. It’s the crown of every professional naval officer’s career. And you’ll make a fine admiral’s wife. I know it.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Christine, making a rude face. ‘I’ll wear pompous hats and be a wet blanket at junior officers’ parties and stand in a corner looking down my nose at all the bootlicking women whose husbands want promotion.’
‘Now, honey,’ said Vinson uneasily, for he did not like her to talk that way about the sacred Mrs Hamer.
‘It will be bad enough when you’re a captain. I don’t seem able to behave like a commander’s wife, but it will be worse trying to be a captain’s wife. I hope I don’t get like that woman downstairs.’
‘Now, honey,’ Vinson said. ‘Captain and Mrs Decker are very fine people, and she’s been very friendly towards you.’
‘I don’t like
her. She’s got a face like a crab and she’s always telling me stories about people I’ve never heard of, and what good families they come from, and the other day she drove me to the shops when it was raining, and because I wanted to go to Woolworth’s – only for just a moment – she wouldn’t wait for me and I had to walk back.’
‘I’d still be happier to see you making friends with her instead of some of the wives you run around here with.’
‘What’s wrong with them? I love old Mrs Minter. She knows how to make tea the English way. And Nora Beckley is a dear although I know she looks a bit odd. But you needn’t have been so offhand to her that time she was here when you came home. Her husband’s got cancer.’
‘Well, don’t look at me as if it was my fault. I’m certainly sorry for her, but I do want you to make the right kind of friends, darling.’
‘What’s wrong with Lianne then? She’s the nicest person I’ve met since I came to America. Life around the flats – sorry, apartments – has been much more fun for me since I’ve known her. I suppose you don’t like me being so friendly with her because her husband’s only a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve.’
Vinson did not answer. If an accusation was true he did not deny it or try to defend himself. He just ignored it, so that you never knew whether you had scored a point off him or not.
Christine had met Lianne Morgan one day when she was in the basement laundry putting her washing into the machine. A very tall slim girl with a wide mouth and a lot of flopping brown hair had come down with a basket full of dirty clothes and an even dirtier small boy in a cowboy hat covering her from behind with a couple of pistols.
‘Hi,’ said the girl to Christine at once. ‘I’ve seen you before. You’re the English girl who’s married to the good-looking Commander, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Christine. ‘How did you know?’
‘Oh, I know most things that go on around these tenements. We’ve been here since way back. You’d be surprised at some of the things I could tell you. Dick – that’s my husband – says I’m too nosy, but I can’t help it. We live in the block across the playground from you, but our laundry’s full of yacketyyacketing women this morning, so I came over here. Let me dump these things – and come up and have some coffee, won’t you? Quiet, child,’ she said to the little boy, who was killing washing machines – bang, bang – right and left. ‘He’s home from school because he said he was sick, but I found out afterwards that he’d held the thermometer under the hot faucet. Pretty cute at his age, don’t you think? I’ve got a little girl who’s older, but she isn’t half as smart.’
Christine knelt down to the little boy, who had a round bright face under the dirt, and reminded her of her nephew Clement. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. The boy looked at his mother.
‘He’s called Perrin, poor little brute, because it’s one of Dick’s family names and his father insisted on it. I call him Peter, but Dick has to call him Perrin, in case we’ll forget when the old man comes.’
‘Well, he doesn’t call me that too much,’ said the little boy, mitigating the case against his father. ‘Mostly he calls me that evil child.’
Christine went up to Lianne’s apartment, and found it the same shape inside as her own, but looking quite different because of the state it was in. Christine’s apartment was very tidy. She had plenty of time to keep it so, although it went against her nature. She had been brought up by Aunt Josephine on the theory that there was no sense in putting things away only to have to get them out again. Her father had been allowed to keep his study in a mess of books and papers, and the drawing-room at ‘Roselawn’ had always been littered with mending, newspapers and dog pills ready to hand. If you brought down glue to mend something, or nail varnish to do your nails in front of the fire, the bottles might stand around for days, and people would look at them as they passed and say: ‘I must put that away some time.’
But Vinson did not like that kind of thing. If yesterday’s newspaper was still lying about when he came home, he would take it out to the kitchen before he sat down. He was a very tidy man. He always put his clothes away and his shoes neatly in line, so Christine had to do the same. If she left underclothes lying about he was quite capable of putting them away himself, and she did not like him to do that, in case he saw that there was still a pin on her knickers where a button should have been.
The Morgans’ apartment, however, was in chaos. ‘Forgive it,’ Lianne said, waving a hand round the living-room as they came in. ‘It isn’t always like this.’ Christine suspected that it usually was. A child’s night-clothes were thrown half on and half off the sofa, books had been pulled out of the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and one male shoe stood on the table. In the porch was a battered model railway track, which ran in and out under the chairs, some broken toys, children’s books thrown down open with the pages crumpled, a litter of scrawled drawing-paper and some dirty glasses and ashtrays. Two wooden handles hung from coiled wires on the wall.
‘That’s Dick’s muscle builder,’ said Lianne pulling on them with a backward swing of her long body. ‘He has to do something now that he’s back in the Navy in command of a large steel desk. But he will do it out here with no clothes on. He swears he can’t be seen through the screens, but of course he can. I’ve been outside to look. The Captain’s wife who lives below you has bought herself a pair of fieldglasses.
‘We had a party last night,’ she said, to explain the state of the kitchen. Christine liked it. It was the first untidy kitchen she had seen in America.
‘Some people over here wouldn’t dream of letting you into their homes unless they’d spent all day cleaning them up,’ she said.
‘I know it,’ said Lianne.’ Maybe I should be like that. I don’t know. Are you that way?’
‘Not by nature,’ Christine said. ‘But I try, because my husband thinks that I -'She stopped, realizing that what she was going to say might sound critical of Vinson. Lianne gave her a quick look and then turned to the cupboard to see if she could find two clean cups.
After that visit Christine often went over to Lianne’s apartment, or Lianne came to hers after the children had gone to school. Sometimes they went out together in the afternoon, and once, when they had been to an affecting film, they had both cried so much that when they came out they had to go and have a drink. Lianne had told the children to go to a neighbour’s apartment when they came back from school, so they did not hurry home. They had three cocktails and giggled all the way back on the streetcar, and when Christine got home she found Vinson there before her for the first time since their marriage.
He was not pleased. He did not come to the door to greet her. He sat in his chair swinging one foot, and waited for her to come to him.
She kissed him and was ready to apologize, but he pulled back his head and said in his matron voice: ‘Where have you been?’
‘Out with Lianne. We went to a movie. It was –’
‘You could at least have left a note for me.’
‘I would have, but I didn’t know I’d be so late, or that you’d get back so early.’
‘Why shouldn’t I, when I wanted to hurry back and see my wife?’
‘Please don’t make me feel bad about it, darling. You know I’ve never not been there when you come home. I thought you’d understand, just this once. Give me a kiss and tell me you love me.’
He stiffened. ‘You’ve been drinking, Christine.’
‘Well, we had to have a drink, because the movie upset us so much. What’s wrong with that? You talk as if I was a nun or something.’
‘You go off drinking down-town with your trashy friends while I sit here and worry about whether anything’s happened to you.’
‘You make it sound so terrible. I’m sure you weren’t worried. You just say that because you’re cross that I was late. I’m sure Dick isn’t cross with Lianne, although he’s bound to have been home before she was. He doesn’t work so late as you, being only a lieutenant.’
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‘That boy will never get anywhere,’ Vinson muttered. ‘He’s irresponsible.’
Christine had by now got so far out of her role as humble and obedient wife that she could not get back into it.
‘Well, I like Lianne and Dick,’ she said, incensed now and unable to stop herself provoking him, ‘even if you don’t. You have your friends – and I don’t like all of them. I can’t bear that fat Willie who drops peanuts down the cracks of my sofa – so why shouldn’t I have mine? You’re jealous, that’s what it is. You’re jealous of my being friendly with Lianne because I can talk to her intimately. Why shouldn’t I have someone to talk to? I gave up friends like Margaret and Rhona in England to come out here to you, and I don’t see why I –’
‘Christine,’ he said, looking at her out of his odd, tortoiseshell cat eyes, ‘are you trying to quarrel with me? You’re wasting your breath if so, because you know I won’t quarrel with you.’
‘I wish you would.’ She felt her face flushing. ‘I wish you would quarrel sometimes, instead of being so smug.’
Even this did not rouse him. He shook his head and smiled. ‘I’m not going to spoil my marriage that way.’
‘Well, you’d better look out,’ Christine said, almost shouting, ‘or you’ll find you are spoiling it!’
She ran away because she was crying. She ran into the bedroom and lay on the bed and cried and felt sorry for herself. When she had got her breath back and was lying there pouting and trying to squeeze out another tear she realized that she was having to make an effort to go on feeling sorry for herself. She was in the wrong. She had come home late. She had tried to quarrel. She violently wished unsaid those things that she had worked herself up to say because she thought it would do Vinson good to hear them.
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