No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  When the product advertised was toothpaste or deodorant or headache pills, someone inevitably came on the screen wearing the Cossack-necked white coat peculiar to American medicine, and terrorized you about what would befall you if you did not use the sponsor’s product. Cigarettes were also advertised by men dressed up as doctors or pharmacists. The tobacco business seemed to have outgrown the selling point of which cigarette would give you most pleasure. Now it was only which one would do you the least harm. One firm went so far as to claim that their cigarette must be the best, because if you pulled a strip of paper off the side the tobacco would not fall out, which was all right if that was what you wanted cigarettes for.

  Christine soon got to know all the television commercial slogans by heart, just as she had learned the ones on the radio, but she did not sing the irritating catchy tunes as she cleaned about the house or worked with her sewing-machine. Nowadays she hardly ever bothered to use the machine on which she had made so many baby clothes. In the evenings Vinson always had the television on, and she would usually sit beside him and watch the wrestling or the quiz programmes or the musical farragos, to save herself having to think of anything else to do.

  On the evening before she left for England they were watching a television play, just as if it were an ordinary evening and they were not parting tomorrow. At a dramatic moment the picture went off, the voices stopped, and the announcement of a breakdown appeared on the screen.

  Nothing happened for quite a long time. ‘Let’s try the radio,’ Vinson said. ‘We haven’t had that on for quite a time. Turn it on, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘Turn it on yourself,’ Christine said, ‘if you want it.’ She was still a little cross with him for what he had said at supper. They had been talking about her trip to England and Vinson had started to grumble, not about her leaving him – that would have been all right – but about the expense of the fare.

  ‘It was you who suggested I should go,’ she had said. ‘It’s a bit late to think of the expense now.’

  ‘I have to think of these things,’ he said. ‘It’s a good thing someone in this family does.’

  ‘You talk as if I was madly extravagant. I seem to be wasting my efforts trying to be so careful in the shops. Oh Lord, how I wish I had some money of my own! I tell you what, Vin; when I get back I shall have my permanent visa, and I really am going to get a job then.’

  ‘I told you,’ he said, putting down his fork, ‘a commander’s wife doesn’t go out to work. And soon I hope you’ll be a captain’s wife. That will make it even more impossible.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a captain’s wife,’ she said sulkily. ‘I think it will be hell.’

  ‘Christine,’ he said, calmly finishing his food, ‘you talk like a child. Compared to American women of your age you’re really very immature.’

  How could he talk to her like that when she was going away tomorrow? The thought that perhaps he did not mind rankled with her all evening. She would not get up and turn on the radio for him.

  When he turned it on it was the ‘Stop the Music’ programme, on which they played or sang a tune and rang people up anywhere in the United States to ask them what it was. If you could name the tune, you won a first prize and were given a chance to guess the ‘Mystery Melody’, and if you got that right yours was the earth and everything that’s in it. The compère was announcing the prizes: ‘Sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier that leaves your clothesline for the birds, an unbreakable, washable plastic rocking-chair, a super-magnificent broilomatic, boilomatic, bakeomatic kitchen range with a left-off – excuse me, friends – ha, ha! – lift-off oven door, a holiday for two in Nassau….’ The list went staggeringly on.

  How wonderful to be someone who won a prize like that! Even if you had to pay income tax on it all you would still have a lot to play with. People were telephoned in Alaska, in Montana, in Big Spring, Texas – all sorts of out-of-the-way places – but never in Washington, D.C. It was never you. It was always someone else.

  The telephone rang, and Christine went to it. It would be Lianne, calling to say good-bye.

  ‘Is that the residence of Commander Vinson Gaegler, U.S. Navy?’ said a professional operator’s voice, refining a Brooklyn accent. ‘Is Mrs Gaegler home? May I speak with her, please? Oh, hullo, Mrs Gaegler. This is your “Stop the Music” operator in New York calling.’

  ‘Vinson!’ Christine hissed. ‘It’s us!’

  ‘Hallo, hallo! Are you still on the line? Your name has been picked to be a contestant tonight in the “Stop the Music” radio programme. Do you care to participate?’

  Did she care! Christine stammered into the telephone. She could hardly hold the receiver.

  Non-committally, as if she were used – which, of course, she was – to offering someone the chance of winning sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier, a plastic rockingchair, a stove with a lift-off oven door, a holiday for two in Nassau, the operator explained the rules of the contest, asked Christine if she was listening to the programme, and told her to continue to listen to the telephone.

  ‘If you hang up or leave the phone,’ she said in her ritual voice, ‘you cannot be telephoned again.’

  Christine glued one ear to the telephone and the other to the radio. Vinson was leaning forward watching the radio as if it were the television. His face was flushed with excitement, and Christine’s was on fire. Sixteen hundred dollars in cash! Now he need not grumble about her fare to England. They were finishing with another competitor – Mr Duane P. Bamburger of Boise, Idaho, who had failed to guess an obvious tune and would only get a few cartons of cigarettes.

  Christine pitied Mr Bamburger fleetingly, but hated him for getting a tune she would have known. The one she got might be – ‘Vin, listen!’ They had started another tune. What was it? It sounded familiar. A girl sang the words, humming when she came to the title line ‘Da da da da da.’ It was a relic from the past. Christine remembered doing homework to it when she was at school. What was it? Something like I’ll never leave you … I won’t forget you … You’ll always find me….

  What was it? What was it? Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me this one, she prayed silently. If you should ask me…? I’ll always want you…? I never–’

  ‘Stop the MUSIC!’ bellowed the compère. A telephone bell was ringing through the song. ‘Hallo … hallo …!’ she heard him say through the loudspeaker, and then there was a click in her other ear and his voice was coming through the telephone.

  ‘Is that Mrs Gaegler of Arlington, Virginia? Hallo there, Mrs Gaegler! How’s everything in Arlington, Virginia? Pretty swell?’ he roistered, although Christine had not been able to find the voice to answer. ‘Well, that’s fine. Just fine.’ She could hear his voice coming out of the radio a fraction of a second before it came out of the telephone. ‘Now, Mrs Gaegler, we want to give you a chance to win this wonderful jackpot of prizes. Can you name that tune we’ve just played?’

  ‘I – er –I – er – could you play a bit of it again?’

  ‘Sure thing.’ The girl sang a phrase or two.

  ’I’ll never leave you,’ Christine blurted out. She was sure. The prize was hers. Sixteen hundred dollars in cash, an electric clothes drier –

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, Mrs Gaegler. No. I’m afraid you haven’t hit the jackpot this time.’

  Christine rang off while he was promising her cartons of cigarettes. On the radio she could still hear him talking to her with undiminished bonhomie. She switched it off, very near tears.

  ‘Oh, Vin–’ She turned to him for sympathy, but his voice was angry.

  ‘You idiot,’ he said, ‘losing a chance like that. Why didn’t you get it? I thought you knew all the tunes. You’ve got all day to listen to that damn radio.’

  ‘I didn’t know it,’ she said miserably.

  ‘Well, you ought to have.’ He stuck out his lower lip.

  ‘Did you?’

  He turned away from her as
the television suddenly came on again with a burst of sound, just in time for the commercial.

  He had no right to be so cross, but he was, and so was she -cross with herself as well as him. The glittering haul that had been dangled before her had been too tempting. It was not fair to tantalize people like that. They were doing it all the time. It was the modern American tragedy.

  She and Vinson were still a little cross with each other when they drove to New York the next day. Christine had to keep reminding herself that she was leaving him for several weeks, that she loved him, that he was her husband, that she would undoubtedly miss him as soon as he was not there.

  And then on the dockside, as she turned at the foot of the gangway and saw his face left behind among the crowd, and it had the look on it that he had not meant her to see, she did not have to remind herself of these things. She wanted to run back and say she would not go, that she would come with him to Coco Solo, Panama; but her legs took her on up the gangway, and when she went to the rail to lean over and wave, his face was back to normal again.

  All these things she thought of as she lay in her bunk and braced her tired body against the rolling of the ship. At night she took sleeping pills to make sure that she would not lie awake and go on thinking, but when she slept she dreamed of Jerry. She had not dreamed of him for months, but on the ship she dreamed of him every night. On the last morning she woke believing that he was still alive. When reality seeped back to her she lay for a while quite still, thinking that she might recapture the dream if she did not move. Then she realized that she was able to lie still, that she was not being shifted from side to side of the bunk. The sea was calm, the boat sailed evenly on, and outside her porthole the early-morning sun glittered on the sea and on an unpretentious coastline of low cliffs and little white houses. She had come home to England.

  Roger met her at Waterloo wearing his hairy winter overcoat that made him look like a bison. Sylvia had not come up from Farnborough because it was her ironing day. She also had Mr Cope still in bed recovering from an attack of bronchitis.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Roger said, as he drove his sedate black family car heavy-handedly along the Portsmouth road, ‘the old chap really has been pretty bad this time. Syl didn’t tell you just how bad in her letter, because we didn’t want to worry you. It was just after you… you know.’

  ‘After I lost the baby, you mean.’

  Roger cleared his throat. Although his jokes were often coarse, he was never free about mentioning the realities of such things. ‘Bad business,’ he said gruffly. ‘Damn bad luck. Awfully sorry and all that.’

  ‘Thanks, Rodge.’ Christine felt miles away from him. She was glad to see him. He was uncomplicated and solid and just the same; but if she had thought that by coming back to England she could slip immediately into the familiar pattern of life, she was wrong. She felt out of place, a stranger in the car which was so small and upright and so very different from the one she was used to in America. Although she had been away from England less than a year, driving on the left was just as strange and frightening as driving on the right had been at first.

  ‘I tell you, my old woman and I were quite upset when we got your cable. We were in the garden at the time, putting in some bulbs for next year, and when Syl came back from the phone and told me, I must say it was quite a shock.’ Roger remembered with some pride how he and Sylvia had stood among the garden tools and bags of bulbs and been upset.

  ‘Oh, look,’ Christine said. ‘There’s that lovely old pub with the thatch and pink walls. I’d forgotten about it.’

  ‘You talk as if you’d been away for years.’

  ‘I feel as if I had. I’d almost forgotten there were such things as thatched roofs and real beams. And hedges,’ she said, as they left the village and the country opened quietly out into its jigsaw pattern of little fields climbing towards the low hills. ‘You never see a cut-and-laid hedge in America. Oh, Rodge, how I do love England!’

  He grunted. He never responded very well to any outburst of emotion. He picked up his train of thought. ‘If only you’d been over here. We didn’t like to think of you in one of those Yank hospitals. They tell me all the nurses are blacks.’

  Christine laughed. ‘Only some of them. As a matter of fact, the coloured nurse I had on night duty was better than any of the others.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t like one of them to lay her great black hands on me, I know that,’ Roger said, with a shudder that ill-befitted the son of an empire-building race.

  ‘Most of the hospitals there are much better than anything we’ve got over here,’ Christine said.

  ‘Oh, naturally, my dear old soul, naturally. It’s your country now, after all, so I’m sure everything over there is bigger and better than anything poor gone-to-seed old England has got.’

  Christine looked at him in surprise. It occurred to her that he and Sylvia had decided that she would come back quite changed, praising everything American and belittling everything English.

  She was right. Sylvia had a defence mechanism all prepared to take the wind out of any high-flown sails Christine might try to set. She had squandered the whole week’s meat ration, had bought vegetables and fruit out of season to make a brave show for the homecoming, but she dispelled Christine’s appreciation by saying with a sniff that was part sinus trouble, part sarcasm: ‘Of course this won’t be anything to you. I dare say you can have this sort of thing every day.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Christine said, ‘because we can’t afford it’, but they did not believe her. She was the American, the visitor from the land of boastful plenty.

  She had come back to refresh herself with the familiarity of her own family and country. She wanted everything to be as it had always been. She wanted to slip back without effort into the family group, but Roger and Sylvia held off a little warily, as if they suspected that she had only come back to patronize.

  Even the children treated her differently. They were at the age when a year can make a startling change in appearance and behaviour. They were not her babies any more. She could no longer wash their faces and hands for them, or retie the bow that always slipped off Jeanette’s forelock. Jeanette was growing her hair now, and wore it scraped back unbecomingly into a slide at the neck which never came undone. She was going to a new school, and had picked up all the high-school mannerisms. She talked very fast. She giggled a lot and hitched up her stockings. She made prissy mouths when anyone said something she thought was ‘feeble’. She had taken up tennis and did not want Christine to bowl cricket balls to her on the lawn any more. She and Clement did not want to play any of the games that Christine used to play with them. They did not hang around her and treat her as if she was more fun than their parents. She had gone away from them. She had deserted them, and now they held aloof from her a little as if they did not entirely trust her any more.

  She had brought chocolate for them, and American sweaters, and pistols and half a dozen boxes of chewing gum. They stayed with her until everything had come out of her suitcase, and then they went away to mull over their booty, abandoning her when she had no more to give, shamefully embodying the anti-New Dealer’s imaginary picture of Britain’s reaction to dollar aid.

  Sylvia and Roger were more gracious about the presents Christine had brought for them, although Sylvia doubted whether the nylons would fit her now that her feet had swollen from so much running up and downstairs after poor Copey.

  Christine heard a lot about how difficult it had been to Manage when her father was ill. The maid had been on holiday, and the daughter of My Mrs Hatchett, the morning woman, had elected to give birth to twins at the most inconvenient time, so that Sylvia had had to Manage on her own, with the erratic help of My Mrs Hatchett’s other daughter, who was a little weak in the head and could not be trusted with the children.

  You would not have thought that Christine had been away for nearly a year to marriage in a fascinating, unknown country. Sylvia and Roger did not want to hear
her news; they wanted to tell her theirs. Christine could have told them things that would make their eyes stand out of their heads, but they were too busy telling her about the crockery broken by My Mrs Hatchett’s unmarried daughter, the confinement of the other daughter (rumoured to be also unmarried), the ups and downs of the meat and cheese ration, the improvement of the lawn and the disappointment of the prize gladioli, the contest between Roger and the garage over the price of reboring, and Roger’s triumph in the local golf championships, in which he had defeated the famous Henry Slater – ‘My good sister, you must remember Slater. You’ve met him here. Chap with the handlebar moustache. Real Pilot-Officer Prune type. Hell of a chap.’

  Only her father was genuinely pleased and absorbed in Christine’s homecoming. Only her father wanted to hear all that she could tell him about America, and insisted on being assured that she was really happy in her new life.

  Since his illness Mr Cope had become less irritable and argumentative. He was much older and more feeble; and although they had been apart for so long, Christine felt a more sympathetic intimacy between them than there had ever been when they lived together at ‘Roselawn’.

  Mr Cope had grown a short grey beard during his illness, and had not bothered to shave it off when he got better. His hair had become whiter, the smudges round his eyes darker, his mouth more vague and his skin more loose and crinkled as the flesh had thinned away from his sick bones.

  Christine got a shock when she saw him, propped up among snowy linen (Sylvia changed all her sheets twice a week and was for ever complaining about laundry bills), his glasses far down his nose, his hands idle on the counterpane, his eyes riveted on the door as if he had turned them there at the first sounds of her arrival.

  Christine’s first thought was: How could I have gone away? How could I have gone away and left him? Although she knew that if she had stayed he would not have loved and needed her as much as he did because she had gone away. Mr Cope had always been inclined to pin his faith on something that was not there, to think that everything would be all right if only … to sigh for the things he had not instead of accepting the things he had.