The Man Who Understood Women

by Rosemary Friedman

  In those days home had been a minuscule flat in Earls Court, which had nothing in its favour save that it was centrally situated and no one had to be ferried anywhere. They did not in fact own a car, which perhaps was just as well as there was no space to park within half a mile. She could not now remember when exactly they had decided to make the break. Certainly not when the flat had become too small. That had been a gradual and insidious process, starting with the three children in one bedroom and ending with ironing in the sitting room, books in the kitchen, everything in the bathroom, and no corner that any one of them could call his own. She supposed there must have been a time of optimum strain when carrying shopping and babies up and rubbish and babies down three flights had taken its maximum toll; when the dirt and the noise and the traffic haze, which never quite cleared even in summer, had become unbearable, but she could recall no precise moment at which Richard had said, ‘Let’s go.’

  When visiting friends who lived ‘out’ in their neat little semis or ‘ranch-style’ moderns, they had caught the last train back to town muttering never, not even for the dubious pleasure of park and patio and somewhere to hang the washing. ‘I should turn into a cabbage,’ she remembered saying once to Richard. ‘London is where things happen.’

  ‘They do come up to town,’ Richard said. ‘It doesn’t take long in a car,’

  ‘But the effort! I’m quite sure that after a while you’d simply vegetate, the high spot being meeting your husband at the station and taking him home to something that had taken hours to prepare and which he’d be far too tired to eat!’

  Yet here she was in the station wagon with Flip, secure in the canine knowledge that the train was not yet due, asleep on the back seat, dinner in the oven, the three children in their own rooms settled down (she hoped) to homework, and Nicolette applying her false eyelashes when she should have been laying the table.

  In Earls Court she might have spent the afternoon in the British Museum or the National Gallery, or upstairs talking to Paul who came from Guadeloupe and painted, or downstairs with Madeleine who had five children and was a researcher and still found time to teach an evening class twice a week. Today she had come from the Wednesday Club where young wives like herself from the right little tight little community met suitably clad and coiffed to gossip and, when they could remember, to raise money for worthy causes.

  And yet and yet and yet … from the vast windows of their split-level open-plan house with its laundry room and shower room and place for the wellingtons, you could watch the changing of the seasons no matter where you looked: from the bare branches to buds and blossom that left you breathless, then overpowering verdure sheltering a long hot summer, to brown and gold and russet and the inevitable regrets. In Earls Court there had been only chimneypots with no life cycle and, outside, the multiracial occupants of bedsitter land, treading the pavements with layabouts and artists and typists and down-at-heel ladies who had known better times trailing shopping baskets on wheels. Now, like the Wednesday Club, her milieu was homogenised. The children could mix with anyone they were likely to meet; their mothers, although they picked and chose, arrived with the same selection of items at the supermarket checkout each week, and even the dogs knew each other from walking on the common.

  At first Richard and she had gone no less to the theatre. After a while it had become a chore. They had the car, it was true, but she disliked meeting Richard in town, feeling an outsider, she disliked the long drive back, and it was simpler to sit down comfortably and watch television and read the reviews in the Sunday papers so that she could hold her own at the Wednesday Club. For the children, as Richard had promised, it was bliss. There was skating on the ponds in winter, tobogganing on the common, picnics in summer, blackberries far into the autumn. For herself too: everything stayed clean and fresh, and there was pleasure in opening the windows.

  She found, however, that she read and listened to records less and was surprised to catch herself gossiping for hours on the telephone, tearing to shreds reputations about which she couldn’t care a hang in the first place, or hadn’t. Now they had become her world – Pat and Wendy and Marcia and Lola – until there were times when she could recall only with difficulty spaghetti hoops from a tin with Paul and trailing to the launderette where conversation was far more stimulating than at the Wednesday Club, although no one gave you home-made chocolate cake for tea.

  It was all right for Richard. He had the garden and golf on Saturdays, though she had not yet brought herself to be one of the wives who went too, and each day he made the exciting voyage into the big City, hating it, he said, leaving her with the trees and the open spaces. In imagination she followed him to the dirt and the noise and the crowded streets and comfortable discomfort of the lovely convoys of large red buses.

  She did not complain. First because she felt it to be unjustified. She had wanted to be married and to have a family, and why should she deny them the opportunity to be reared in beautiful surroundings? And, second, she knew that she was not the only one to have made a sacrifice, only what it was exactly that she had sacrificed she was not quite sure.

  Each evening found Richard, the latest copy of The Motor on his lap, examining the specifications of Maseratis and Lamborghinis, while outside in the double garage stood a perfectly serviceable station wagon absolutely ideal for the life they led and going on holiday with the children and the dog. Lamborghini might be written on the page but Katie was well aware that all Richard saw was the mortgage and S.E.T. and income tax and Joanna’s dancing classes and the central heating oil and Simon’s extra French.

  Richard worked hard and had a flourishing legal practice; had he remained single, the Lamborghini could well have metamorphosed from fantasy to reality. As it was, he bore the burdens of a wife and children and an au pair and a split-level house and a large garden and a dog and lessons for this and lessons for that, repairs to this and repairs to that and the fares that went up and up while his fees did not.

  Most of the misgivings concerning their removal to the pseudo-country Katie had kept within herself, realising that it was the best for the most. It was necessary almost to admit now that she positively enjoyed the life and even the Wednesday Club had a certain conviviality and was not so crashing and ludicrous a bore as at first it had seemed. It was more than pleasant on sunny days to sit on the terrace with neither haze nor smog, watching the children screaming with enjoyment under the hose, which played upon the lawn. It was good to spend the afternoon in the hairdresser’s knowing that it was Wendy’s turn or Lola’s to pick up the children from school or take everyone to dancing class. If she had missed out, she wasn’t sure on what. She had never really given room to her thoughts or vague misgivings, which were all they were, until today. But today they had come rushing to the fore like flood-waters, previously dammed, swamping her brain and giving rise to bitterness and recrimination.

  It was their wedding anniversary and Richard had forgotten. Last night he had sat till late, The Motor before him, dreaming of Lamborghinis. This morning, as on any other, she had driven him to his train, he had pecked her cheek like all the other ‘peckers’ and disappeared into the station. It was the first time he’d forgotten, and she scarcely believed it possible.

  In London they had celebrated, in the early days, at a Chinese or Indian restaurant, seedy but romantic, later graduating to French and Italian places with strung-up fishing nets and Chianti bottles. Since they had moved it had been the Bell or the Orchard or the Old Oak Manor, to which people came from far and wide, even from town, and there was dancing. Never, ever, since the very first had he forgotten and never, ever, had there not been roses. It was early for roses and he always apologised laughingly for the small buds that withered and died, or those that had drooping heads, but would not yield them to any other more easily obtained yet less romantic flower. In Earls Court he used to bring them in person, taking the three flights two stairs at a time in his haste to present them, to take her in his arms …
Since they moved they had been delivered, decorously, from the local florist, wrapped hygienically in cellophane, the card with its message of love meticulously attached with an outsize pin.

  All day she had waited for the bell. There had been the fishmonger, the dog’s-meat man, a parcel from Harrods that looked hopeful but which had turned out to be hockey socks she had ordered for Jennifer, a telegram for Nicolette to say that her mother was ill (unlikely) and would she return home forthwith, and, finally, silence. She could not believe it. Fourteen years was a long, long time, it was true, but it was unlike Richard to forget and beneath her pride to remind him. She blamed it somehow on the split-level and the trees and the laundry room. It was all mixed up in her mind and she felt, unrealistically, that in Earls Court it could never have happened. They could not have stayed there; that she knew. Could not possibly have afforded anything larger or more suitable in town. Perhaps he no longer cared; perhaps there was somebody else while she occupied herself with the hairdresser and the Wednesday Club; perhaps he had a little love nest in town? It was not unheard of. One or two husbands of the Club members had gone off the rails at one point or another, on their own admission; others, according to gossip, were highly suspect. Not Richard though. It was her imagination taking wing. He would step briskly out of the station in the forefront of the next little exodus bearing red roses.

  She never minded waiting at the station. It was nice to sit down and it was a chore that always amused her. From six o’clock onwards the courtyard was a kaleidoscope of movement, Minis vying with staid saloons and saloons with station wagons for position. Clashing with each little posse of tired businessmen returning to their homes, and heading in the opposite direction, were the wives, fastidiously groomed, going up for an evening in town. They always looked incongruous, Katie felt – although she had been often in the same situation – in their patent shoes and their clean white gloves going through to the grimy trains. What else could they do? Once at the theatre or San Frediano’s or L’Epée d’Or they would be congruous again.

  Another train came in and Flip awoke; it must be getting near time. She switched on the ignition as the woman in the Mini in front received her evening peck upon the cheek and drove away. Katie eased up to take her place, and Flip, having stretched, put a paw upon her shoulder and hung his head out of the window so that he could watch the entrance to the station. The newspaper woman was busy, not so much selling papers to the wives going up to town – they did not want to dirty their white gloves on newsprint – but giving messages that had been left with her during the day to schoolchildren that their mothers might be late, or to husbands that the car wouldn’t start and would they walk or queue up for the bus.

  As each man came out he looked with some anxiety left and right for the familiar car, the familiar wife, though each, Katie thought, with her deep freeze at home and identical report of the day’s events, was somehow interchangeable.

  She felt Flip become agitated. Bemused by her thoughts, she had neglected to keep vigil. There on the pavement, looking to right and left, was Richard. There were no roses.

  He said good evening first to Flip, then to her. He took his place beside her in the car.

  Don’t you know what day it is?

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked. ‘I’m starving. All day in court. Didn’t stop for lunch.’

  I did not, would not, she thought, put candles on the table, serve dinner à deux, your favourite moules; there is cottage pie.

  ‘Children all right?’

  Children? What about me? Flip and the children and the dinner and I the producer, the metteuse en scène who made it all happen but remained in the background.

  He greeted Nicolette, the children, helped Jennifer with her chemistry, had a second helping of cottage pie.

  I shall not cry.

  There was a television programme he wanted to watch; they watched it, endlessly. She had no idea what it was about. I shall not cry.

  Nicolette went out. The children one by one to bed. Flip to his basket.

  This is our day.

  He held out his hand. She realised there was something in it: a box, a small box. Taking it from him, she opened it.

  A rose, but made of diamonds: perfect; exquisite; costly to excess.

  ‘For all the roses that have died,’ he said.

  Now she cried, and he could not understand, because men never did, that in women it could be a sign of happiness.

  Do You Remember?

  1974

  They had not gone out after the wedding; John had not suggested it. He had not thought of a very special table for two at any eating place familiar or surprise. Thus it was after a day of action, reaction and mixed emotions that Helen found herself, with a blue and white butcher’s apron over her rose wild silk, standing in the kitchen, champagne corks littered like the confetti there had not been, poring over the magazine article ‘Cooking for two: that first dinner’.

  The illustration showed a polished wood table complete with flowers and candles.

  The dining room table, at present groaning under its load of French casseroles with cast-iron bottoms, fancy chopping boards, and multifarious fondue sets, was out for a start. That left the kitchen, at whose counter top with its remains of tired smoked salmon sandwiches she looked wearily, or a tray in the sitting room in front of the television. The article permitted no compromise: best china, best silver, prettiest mats.

  She cleared a space on the Formica counter top, noting with distaste distinct evidence that the bride, at the last moment, had trimmed the bridegroom’s hair using the kitchen scissors so to do, and applied herself to the next paragraph headed ‘Food. Not the time to experiment’. She had never felt less like experimenting and decided without difficulty on fresh grapefruit in deference to John’s waistline. Right. Next? ‘Give garlic a miss, although a well-seasoned but simple dish is suggested.’ Medallions de boeuf, beans and duchesse potatoes; breaded lamb chops (with little frills on their tails); escalopes of veal, depicted with a yellow-eyed fried egg atop. Sighing, she closed the magazine and went to the larder. The top shelf held huge chip pans, giant casseroles neither French nor cast-iron bottomed, a fish kettle of truly noble proportions. She was not used to cooking for two. She decided it was an occasion for a hideously expensive can of chicken in aspic, followed by the peaches in brandy she always kept on the shelf but never felt justified in using on an ordinary day.

  Dinner for two it certainly was. Using the tin opener, she wondered how it would be alone with her man. It would not, of course, be the first occasion by any stretch of the imagination, but this time it was for keeps. The feelings that the situation evoked were, to say the least of it, mixed. What would they talk about? Thank heavens for television, although that was a disgraceful admission to have to make. What plans would they discuss? What decisions were there to take? Just herself and John. Such a frighteningly small unit, a unit that had today given away its final chance to enlarge its potential. Why Jane of all people, Jane who would never leave home, Mummy’s baby, Jane, had had to fall in love with and marry a New Zealander was one of fate’s unkinder cuts, on which Helen did not care to dwell. Not if they were to get any dinner at all, that was. It was different with the boys. One half expected it in a way, although not one of her friends could match one son in Nova Scotia and another in Nepal. But Jane! Little, fond, loving Jane. Had they been such frightful parents? John’s friend in psychiatry said, on the contrary, the children were so well adjusted they were able happily and confidently to cut the apron strings, which was the best for everybody. Thinking of the upstairs flat, which once had been the nursery floor and which Helen had always secretly hoped might house the newly married Jane, she wished perhaps they might have been a shade less understanding, a fragment perhaps more cruel.

  Of course, the world had shrunk, yet you could not exactly, with impunity, pop over to, or telephone too frequently, New Zealand or Nepal. She hated her friends, most of them at any rate, in particula
r Iris, with her four children living within spitting distance, and Geraldine who dragged a steadily increasing bevy of grandchildren through the toy departments at Christmas. She imagined herself trying to buy holly-sprigged wrapping paper in August, or something equally ridiculous (she wasn’t quite sure how long parcels took, but she knew the time to be outrageous), and remembered the radio’s yearly admonitions about final dates for posting overseas mail. One could of course keep in contact but where was the substitute for the smiles or tears on a dear face, the feel of a small, warm, confidently clutching hand?

  Feeling herself becoming maudlin, she picked up the peaches in brandy, wondering how best to attack the lid, and thought of the wedding. Wedding! Well, the most weddingly thing about it had been her own outfit. Not that it hadn’t been a jolly affair. Jolly to the point of being bizarre. But not a wedding such as one was accustomed to.

  The register office ceremony had been over in the wink of an eye. Lucky actually that Jane had made it at all. She was blow-drying her hair until half an hour before. The bridegroom, all husky six-foot-plus of him, had not aspired to a tie and at the reception, by request of the indubitably happy couple, there had not been one speech.

  Times, one could not say otherwise, had changed. New Zealand, Nova Scotia. When she and John had got married, you were considered lucky if you got so far as your own shores. There was none of this trekking to French valleys and Greek mountains with not a worry and scarcely a change of clothes. The whole ethos had changed, come to think of it. In her day if you went to a party you stayed at it. You also knew the name of the host and afterwards wrote a polite thank-you note. When you danced you made physical contact with your partner and when the music stopped you clapped. Today the music never seemed to stop at all, if you could call it music, that was, that dreadful noise that shattered the eardrums every time you turned on the radio.