No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  ‘I wouldn’t, but Vin–’

  ‘He’ll never know. I’ll bring the car back before he’s due home. Honest. You will? Ah – that’s a girl; that’s a girl, Chris. I knew you’d come through.’

  After Matthew had fetched the car Christine worried all afternoon. She worried that he would have an accident, although he assured her that he had driven a car without brakes all the time he was at college, and she worried that Vinson would come home before Matthew and the car, and all her news about the baby and her plans to make up the quarrel would be as nothing compared to his wrath.

  When she came back from the supermarket she took out a canvas chair and sat on the only bit of lawn that was not sloping to watch for the car. Which car? Hers or John Tanner’s? It was four-thirty. Vinson might be home at five o’clock if he came out punctually to suit John Tanner. Every car that came along the road brought her to her feet. Here came one much too fast, with another car following it. That couldn’t be John Tanner, who was a solid family man, and cautious.

  Matthew whipped the car round the corner into the driveway and pulled it to a slithering stop with the emergency brake outside the closed garage doors. He jumped out as Christine came over the lawn towards him with the slow tread that now was hers.

  ‘Got to run, Chris,’ he shouted. ‘Bob followed me down. He’s driving me to the airport and I’m late as hell.’

  ‘All right. I’ll drive the car in.’

  ‘Thanks a million for everything. I had a swell time. Everything was swell. Carol – she – well, I’ll write you about it. You’re a honey, Chris. Best sister-in-law I ever had.’ He kissed her and bounded down the slope and over the side of Bob’s open convertible, which jumped ahead like a racehorse at a starting gate.

  Christine felt quite breathless. She had to pause for a moment to recover. Then she opened the garage doors and got into the car to drive it inside before Vinson came home and saw it.

  There was no ignition key. Matthew must have slipped it into his pocket from habit when he jumped out. She could not start the car. She could not drive it into the garage, and Vinson might be home at any moment.

  It did not matter about the key. Vinson had his own, and she could say she had lost hers until she got Matthew to send it back. But the car! She would have to push it into the garage. It was standing on the level where the driveway flattened out. She could do it.

  Putting her hands on the fat shiny trunk of the car, she pushed. Nothing happened. She went round and took off the brake and then tried again. Still the big heavy car would not move. No time to go for Mr Meenehan. He would be watching the television in the rumpus room in his slippers. It would take ages to get him organized. She pushed again. If only it was a sensible little English car instead of this gross American monster…

  Straining with all her might, she struggled, panting. As the car at last rolled slowly into the garage she stood upright, swayed dizzily with a spinning head, and knew that she was either going to faint or be sick.

  She never could remember afterwards how she got into the house and on to the sofa, where Vinson found her with the pains beginning when he came home whistling and calling for her to show the quarrel was forgotten. She thought she must have crawled there, because when the nurses washed her in the hospital she heard them exclaiming gently about the grazes on her knees and hands.

  Chapter Seven

  It was a rough crossing. The ship rolled sickeningly, unceasingly as it ploughed through the heaving waters, away from the country of Christine’s unhappiness; but her unhappiness went with her. She had not left it behind. She could not escape it just by getting on a ship and travelling the slow Atlantic miles to England.

  The blanket of depression that had settled on her after she lost her baby was said by the doctors to be a perfectly natural phenomenon.

  ‘Purely a pathological symptom,’ they told her. ‘Naturally a woman feels sad to lose her baby, but the particular depression she experiences after a miscarriage is a normal physical manifestation - like the after-effects of jaundice, or grippe.’

  It annoyed her when they said grippe instead of influenza. Everything annoyed her when she was recuperating, even the Americanisms to which she was accustomed. The doctors annoyed her, the nurses with their red nails and impertinent caps annoyed her, the poor eclamptic woman who shared her room infuriated her. Vinson annoyed her, her house, when she returned to it, annoyed her, but most of all she was annoyed by everyone’s insistence that the depression which weighed on her night and day was only an ordinary physical symptom.

  What if it was? That did not make it any easier to bear. ‘You’ll shake it off,’ they told her, ‘as you grow stronger’; but she grew stronger and she did not shake it off. She began to think that it would be with her for the rest of her life, this hopelessness, this weary spirit.

  Vinson’s depression was almost as great as her own, but no one could tell him that it was only a pathological symptom. Their common misfortune should have brought them together, and for a moment at the beginning it did, when Vinson was first allowed to see her in the hospital while she was having the second tranfusion, and told her that it did not matter, that nothing mattered as long as she was all right. But when she was no longer in danger, and they both began to think about the loss of their hopes and plans, they each withdrew into an egotistical despondency from which neither could put out a hand in mutual comfort.

  When Vinson was ordered to Panama for a few weeks, he suggested that Christine should go to England while he was away ‘to try and get over it’. She willingly agreed. It was the one thing she wanted to do. Her family, her friends, the country she knew and loved - all the familiar things that had made her happy before would surely break the thread of her depression and make her happy again.

  She had expected to feel more cheerful as soon as she got on the boat, but she did not. She was too tired by the journey to New York and the tedium of the formalities of embarkation, and by the strain of saying good-bye to Vinson, who at the last minute had let his face slip and looked suddenly lost and almost afraid. When she was tired the sorrows came crowding in unopposed. (‘Physical, purely physical,’ the smooth doctor had said. ‘When you are stronger, your unhappy thoughts will leave you.’)

  It began to be rough on the first day out. Christine took to her bed, because there seemed no point in struggling about when you could not keep your feet and struggling down to the dining saloon when you did not want to eat. She lay in her bunk and dozed and woke and dozed and woke to the creak of the panelling and the hiss of the sea and the crashing of crockery in the stewards’ pantry, and with her still was the depression she had thought she could leave behind in the little house in Arlington.

  She never wanted to go back to that house, although, of course, she would have to, because Vinson would be in Washington for some time after he came back from Panama. They had both been so unhappy in that house. Could they ever start again there and build some hope into their marriage? They had been happy there when she was expecting the baby, she with her sewing machine and her nest-making domesticity, he with his carpentry and his painting and his home-made nursery in the basement.

  After she came back from the hospital he never went into the basement unless he had to fetch something. He did not want to do anything about the house at all, could not be bothered to put a new washer on a dripping tap or repair a loose shelf in a cupboard. He behaved as if the purpose of his home life had been taken from him and nothing was worth while.

  In the evenings he was at a loose end. He did not want to read. He did not want to listen to the radio. He went back to his naval technical manuals and his notebooks. He got out the dictaphone again and put it by the bed, and sometimes at night Christine would wake from a heavy dream and hear him dictating incomprehensible things into it. The Navy was the only thing that could console him. If he could not look forward to his baby he would fix his eyes on getting his promotion to captain. He stayed later and later at the office, and when h
e did come home it was often difficult to find things to talk about now that they did not have plans about the baby to discuss.

  The doctors had assured Christine that she could have another child later on, but she did not believe them. She felt in her heart that she was finished as a normal happy woman. She had had her chance and lost it. She had lost weight during her illness and it did not suit her face. She would not be pretty and fresh-skinned any more, and people would not say to Vinson: ‘Your charming wife.’ She would be just a wife, growing middle-aged in a meaningless marriage, and she often thought of what Stevenson wrote: ’Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.’

  Long and straight and dusty… that was how she saw her future. She was morbid. She knew it, but she could not shake it off, could not laugh herself out of it, because there seemed to be nothing to laugh at.

  Her conviction that she would not have another baby was partly due to Vinson. She had not told him or anyone else about pushing the car, and because he knew no reason why she should have had a miscarriage he got it into his head that she was incapable of carrying a baby to its birth. They never talked about the baby which was lost, but if Christine ventured to say: ‘Perhaps we’ll have another one’, Vinson looked gloomy and said: ‘I doubt it’, and Christine was ready to believe him.

  He had been so solicitous and indulgent of her when she was pregnant that it was hard to bear the difference now that she had failed him and no longer deserved coddling. Sometimes she asked for things which he might have granted before, but now he raised objections.

  She was so lonely all day. ‘I wish we could have a dog,’ she said one evening. ‘I’d feel better if I had a dog.’

  ‘It would be a nuisance,’ he said. ‘Look what a pest that little beast of Mother’s was.’

  ‘Poor Honeychile. You shouldn’t speak of her like that,’ Christine said, for while she was in the hospital Vinson had left a window open when he went to work and Honeychile had jumped out and run yapping at the wheels of a car, which had killed her. Mrs Gaegler, coming out of the hospital the next day, had flown back to Kansas in a fury and would probably never forgive Vinson.

  ‘I didn’t mean a dog like that, anyway,’ Christine went on. ‘I meant a proper dog. Like my Timmy. He was a great joy to me.’

  ‘You were a spinster then,’ he reminded her. ‘Sublimating your frustrations.’

  ‘I wasn’t! It’s natural to love a dog. I noticed you pretended to like the dogs all right when you were after me. You put on quite a good act, I must say - you and your tins of ham and your candy bars.’ They often spoke to each other like this nowadays. They never had another violent quarrel like the one which stormed up after Christine had been out with Matthew, but they did not mind saying caustic things to each other.

  ‘There were far too many animals in that house you lived in,’ Vinson said. ‘If I let you have a dog, next thing this house will be just the same. You’ve got the goldfish, and they’re bad enough. They stink to high heaven.’

  ‘You always used to change their water,’ Christine said sadly. ‘Now you don’t bother.’

  Neither of them seemed to bother about anything very much these days. Some evenings Christine did not bother to come out of the kitchen to kiss him when he came home. He did not seem to notice. At the beginning of their marriage they had always been so conscious of each other’s presence, but now Christine sometimes thought that he did not know if she was in the room with him or not. He did not give her his special whistle any more for the pleasure of seeing her look up to a sound no one else could hear.

  One morning, when she woke very tired, he said: ‘Don’t bother to get up. I’ll get my own breakfast’, and she let him. After he had gone she remembered that she had once thought that when you did not kiss your husband good-bye and hullo, and did not get up to give him his breakfast, it was the beginning of the end. She was only thirty-five. This could not happen to her marriage. After that she always got up when he did and was always punctilious about kissing him in the morning and evening, and he did not seem to notice the difference between a kiss that you wanted to give and a kiss that was a duty.

  Ever since they came to the house Mrs Meenehan had been pressing them to get a television set. ‘I can’t think how you can live without one,’ she said. ‘I’d just die without mine.’ It did not occur to her that she had lived quite happily for many years before television was invented. She was an addict, a fanatic. The routine of her life was geared to the programmes. She could not iron or sew or write letters or read the newspapers unless the television was turned on. She and Daddy took most of their meals at an uncomfortable plastic-topped table in front of the set in the rumpus room, and all their visitors were forced willy-nilly to sit down in semi-darkness and watch the lighted screen.

  Christine’s experience of television in England had already prejudiced her against it as a time waster and an intruder of homes, and living next door to the Meenehans had done nothing to change her mind. If having a television set meant letting it rule your life, she did not want one.

  She was quite happy with the radio. She still listened to the soap operas in the afternoon, although the first novelty of them had long worn off. They were old friends now, coming up as regularly as the milk on the doorstep and the newspaper hurled from the road by a small boy with a hand-cart. The noble young widow, who undoubtedly would get no older or plainer if the programme went on for twenty years, was still trying to resolve the eternal conflict between a mother’s duty and a woman’s heart. The homey smalltown barber was still giving out a lot of advice which nobody wanted to take. The man who announced the programme about the sage, cosy Mom who was the hub of the household was still saying: ‘Imperious man, look in your heart and dwell on this: Without the woman in my house, what would I be?’

  It was all just the same. It went on day after day for the comfort of hardworked housewives all over the United States. It was a harmless vice, a drug to stop women thinking too much about their lot.

  Vinson, although he had once remarked wistfully that theirs was the only house in the road without a television aerial, had not wanted a set either, perhaps because it would cost too much, perhaps because anything that Mrs Meenehan recommended he automatically rejected.

  On Christine’s birthday he unaccountably bought her a television set, a mammoth thing of varnished wood with almost as many knobs as a cinema organ. The installation men brought it one afternoon while Vinson was at work, hooked it up, fixed up the aerial and went away, leaving Christine moving the set about the room on its castors, trying to find a place where it would not be in the way.

  When Vinson came home she did not know what to say. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said. ‘It’s much too big a present.’

  ‘Well,’ he mumbled, embarrassed, ‘I thought it would be nice for you. Your life is kind of dull now.’

  ‘Oh no it isn’t, Vin.’ They never admitted that anything was wrong.

  ‘Yes it is. I know it is!’ he burst out, and suddenly he held her very tightly. ‘Darling, darling, what’s wrong with us? I want us to be happy.’

  Now was the time. They could have been close now and drawn some help from each other to get over this bad time together, but Christine, cursing herself as she heard her voice say it, answered: ‘Nothing’s wrong. We’re perfectly happy’, and the chance was lost.

  Although Vinson had bought the set for her, he was the one who looked at it most. When she discovered that there were other programmes besides the ones the Meenehans liked, Christine began to overcome her prejudice, but she did not want to have the set playing all the time, night after night like an unwelcome lodger.

  Vinson, however, took to it like a duck to water. As soon as he had taken off his uniform cap and jacket at night, he would turn on the television and squat in front of it, fiddling with the knobs and making the pictures jitter or chase each oth
er up the screen like slowly wound film. The set would be on while they had their cocktails, and after Christine had wrenched him away to eat his dinner Vinson would go back and spend the rest of the evening in front of the screen, his naval manuals forgotten.

  Christine was glad that he bad found something to keep him happy, but she hoped that he would get over his enthusiasm when the novelty wore off. Some of the television programmes were very good, with all the top talent that beer or soap or floor wax could buy, but some of the programmes were very bad, and the lengthy commercials that were forced on you in the middle did not make them any better.

  All the oldest films in the world seemed to have been gathered together in the studios for the entertainment of an unprotesting public. On the television screen Jackie Coogan was still a small child, and Bebe Daniels was a mere slip of a girl with a sideways ogle and hair pulled low on the forehead. Waists were low and hats were cloche and the worn-out soundtracks grated like an early phonograph. Cowboy films of all vintages filled the screen in the early evening, for the children of America had long since given up going out to play when they could be crouched indoors watching the pintos gallop and the guns snap from the hip and the good cowboy get the sweet young girl from the bad cattle rustler.

  The television commercials were far longer than the ones on the radio, and far more irksome, because you could see the eulogizers as well as hear them. On the screen, husbands in tweed jackets came home from work as cleanly shaved as when they had set out in the morning, were greeted with a glass of beer by arch little women in frilly house dresses, and downed the foaming nectar with genteel smacking of lips and knowing winks at the camera. White-capped butchers lectured you about cuts of meat, aproned grocers held up cans of peas and packets of margarine, blonde studio models who looked as if they had never been in a kitchen in their lives took cakes and biscuits out of the oven wearing a delighted air of astonishment, as well they might, seeing that someone else had made them.