The Pumpkin Eater

by Penelope Mortimer

  There was a long pause.

  “And then?” he asked coldly.

  “Then? Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents. I had Dinah there. Of course he was dead by then.”

  “And did that upset you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose it did. Naturally. It must have done.”

  He slumped in his chair. He seemed tired out. I said, “Look, need we go on with this? I find it tremendously boring, and it’s not what I’m thinking about at all. I just don’t think about those husbands except …”

  “Except when?”

  “I never think about them.”

  “We’re almost at the end.” The smile had grown even weaker. “I’m sorry if it’s a painful for you, but it helps to know the facts. Who was the next one?”

  “Giles. He was a professional violinist. I suppose he still is. He came with some quintet to play chamber music in the Town Hall, something to do with C.E.M.A. or E.N.S.A. or one of those things. Anyway, the Major had left me £200 in his will and Giles seemed to think he could manage the children. I don’t think I ever loved anyone in the way I loved Giles — except maybe a boy once, when I was very young.”

  “Then …”

  “Why? I don’t know.”

  “Was it something to do with the children?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “Did you insist on having children — which he didn’t want?”

  “No! He loved children!”

  “Why did it go wrong, then? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened! I’ve told you, that was the thing about that time — nothing happened!”

  “And yet after four years you were ready to leave … Giles and marry Jake. Something must have happened.”

  “I just had to go on, that’s all! When I stopped wanting …”

  “Wanting?”

  “To go to bed with him. Then there was nothing. No future. Nothing to look …”

  “But why did you stop wanting to go to bed with him? Because he didn’t want any more children, and sex without children was unthinkable to you, a kind of obscenity? As it is with Jake, now? Isn’t that true?”

  “No! It’s not true!”

  “Don’t you think sex without children is a bit messy, Mrs. Armitage? Come now. You’re an intelligent woman. Be honest. Don’t you think that the people you most fear are disgusting to you, and hateful, because they are doing something for its own sake, for the mere pleasure of it? Something which you must sanctify, as it were, by incessant reproduction? Could it be that in spite of what might be called a very full life, it’s sex you really hate? Sex itself you are frightened of? What do you think?”

  “You really should have been an Inquisitor,” I said. “Do I burn now, or later?”

  He laughed heartily. “I’m glad to see your sense of humour flourishing.” Everything about his face, except the jovial mouth, was as cold as mine. “Now, I was going to give you a prescription, wasn’t I?” The pen flourished again. “One twice a day … There you are. I think they’ll deal with those little weeps of yours. But keep them away from the children.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.”

  “And don’t be down-hearted. Great progress is being made. Great, great progress.”

  9

  Although he has no use for Freud (“all that cock”), Jake would unhesitatingly say that I longed all my life for a husband like my father: practical, positive, a man with a work bench, reliable. But then, my father was not like this. His reliability was invented by Jake. My father was a complete provincial. His ideas sprang directly from his own actions, and his actions were necessary to the way he lived. Nothing from the outside ever touched him. He had to engage a woman — my mother — to cook for him, but beyond this he was as near self-supporting as it is possible for a twentieth century Englishman to be. Among his few failures was an attempt to grow his own tobacco.

  My grandfather died when my father was twenty, leaving him the family business, a small tent and rope factory in Bedfordshire. The factory made many things besides rope and tents: string, matting, canvas, anything that could be made out of hemp. This hemp was grown on a plantation in India, managed in my childhood by one of my father’s cousins, a tall, remote man whom we called Uncle Ted. If I had an ideal, Uncle Ted approached it far more than my father. He was lean and burnt out, with colourless eyes like diamonds and enormous feet. I always liked men with big feet, but never married one. Jake’s are small, arched, short-toed, inclined to be dainty. When I first met him I thought he was queer, because of the size of his feet and the crumpled little suede shoes he wore on them.

  Uncle Ted, my first love, was almost completely silent. Possibly this was because he was stupid, but since he never returned from India after his last journey back in 1936, I don’t know. When I was a small child he seemed to me wise. If he is still alive — and there has been no sign of him for twenty-six years — he must be about seventy. In my first term at school I used to carry a photograph of him in my blazer pocket. It was taken against the Indian sun, and screwing up his eyes he looked reasonably boyish. I told the more credulous girls that he was my young man. As I was very fat and plain at the time, even they didn’t believe me.

  When I grew thinner I fell in love. For two years I loved the son of the local clergyman and he, sporadically, loved me. Although I was only thirteen at the beginning of this romance — he kissed me abruptly on a bus coming back from the cinema in Luton — my parents seemed to approve. I realized later that if they had seen us in bed together they would have thought we were playing sardines. We did not, of course, go to bed together. It didn’t occur to us. But we struggled together in the backs of cars, in attics and summer houses and my father’s rope yard at night, and in the organ loft. In the term time we wrote to each other, and for the first days of the holidays never sought each other out but waited, with desperate anxiety, to meet by chance in Smith’s or Woolworths or outside the bicycle shop, where we would often stand stroking the gleaming handlebars of speedy bicycles.

  My friends at school, during this period, were Betty Maclaren, Irene (pronounced Ireen) Douthwaite, Angela Williams and Mary White. Their fathers, like mine, were business men. Their fathers drove twelve-horsepower Standard or Vauxhall cars and wore navy blue suits, trilby hats and mackintoshes. Their mothers all had new permanent waves, made up their faces with vanishing cream and “natural” face powder, wore fur coats all the year round. Their brothers went to Oundle or Repton and were gods.

  When these friends went to stay with each other in the holidays they invented interesting situations between themselves and their friends’ brothers. Sometimes a brother would write, “Give my regards to the fair Angela,” or “my humblest respects to Miss I. Douthwaite, I hope she is in good health.” Then giggling attacked us like a plague, all day we were wracked with it, spluttering into our handkerchiefs, doubled up over our prayers, not daring to catch each other’s eyes for fear of a new bout beginning. I had no brothers, and therefore took it for granted that none of my friends would want to come and stay with me. There had to be a sexual incentive for everything: that was why we went to church and were fairly attentive in scripture, biology and English literature. None of us, at that time, could concentrate on mathematics or geography and we plodded on with Latin only in the faint hope that we might one day be able to understand Ovid. We had not yet encountered medical text-books, which would have provided a sharper spur.

  My friends knew, of course, about the clergyman’s son. I told them that he was nineteen, since we were only interested in older men, but otherwise I was fairly truthful. “You wouldn’t like him,” I said airily, keeping my great love for him to myself. “He doesn’t care a bit about films or dance music or anything like that.”

  “Oh, I like clever boys best,” Ireen said, sucking up to me.

  “I dote on clever boys,” Mary White said. She had an aunt in London who was going
to present her at Court. This same aunt had already taken her to a play by Noel Coward and a Cochran revue. Mary White regarded herself as a civilizing influence and kept telling us that her parents were going to be divorced. She was not to be trusted.

  “Well, you wouldn’t like him,” I said.

  “Why do you, then?”

  “I don’t, all that much. You know how it is. One gets so dreadfully bored.”

  “Oh my goodness,” they sighed, lolling about over their beds and hitting their open mouths, “so bored, my deah, so too too too bored …”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said, and sulked for the rest of the day, stalking about with my blazer collar turned up and my lower lip sagging, to show contempt.

  A few days later, when this tiff had been forgotten, Ireen found me in the library where I was sitting puzzling over a cross-section of a mighty liner in the Illustrated London News.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “I’ve just had the most awful news.”

  “What news?”

  “Well, you know we were going to Spain these hols — ”

  “Yes. Well?”

  “And Roger was going to bring Brian and maybe the Maclarens were going to come with Eric and David — ”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Well! Now it seems we can’t go because of this stupid old war! It just seems we can’t go and that’s all there is to it!” She threw a crumpled letter down on the green baize. “I just got this letter.”

  “What war?” I asked, disbelieving.

  “Don’t ask me! Some old General’s invaded it or something.”

  “Invaded what?”

  “Spain, you clot. I don’t know. Nobody ever tells you a thing in this place. I don’t see why we can’t go anyway. I mean nobody’s going to shoot us or anything, are they?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “They wouldn’t be allowed to.”

  “Well, of course they wouldn’t. But Pa says it’s quite out of the question and we’ve just got to resign ourselves and go to Littlehampton.”

  “How awful for you,” I said vaguely. I had never been abroad, and Littlehampton sounded rather distinguished to me.

  “Awful? I could die! Of course Roger won’t ask Brian there. I mean, there’s nothing to do in Littlehampton. Honestly, I could kill that Franco!”

  “Who’s he?”

  “This old General who’s invaded Spain. I mean, it’ll probably ruin the rest of my life, not spending these holidays with Brian. I should think we might have got engaged quite easily.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s jolly bad luck for you.”

  “Well, it’s all right for you. You’ve got Him to think about.”

  “Yes,” I said fondly.

  “There’ll be no one to talk to in Littlehampton and you know what the boys are like, common, and anyway Mummy’ll have her eye on me every minute. When I’m with Roger she thinks I’m safe, if only she knew. Oh, I hate that Franco, I hate him, I just hate him!” She plunged her face in her hands and appeared to cry. I was very sorry for her. It seemed brutal to be going home to the intense and uncertain pleasure of the rope-walk and organ loft, and although I had no intention of sharing them with Ireen it did seem to me that she might be quite harmless at the swimming baths or on bicycle rides or in the cinema. It might, in fact, make me seem more independent and casual to the clergyman’s son if I took a friend along (that’s what I would say: “I brought my friend along”). Also, although she would discover that he was only seventeen, she would certainly be impressed by his tweed jacket with the leather elbows and the nonchalant way he smoked Gold Flake, without coughing. Then, too, she would help to fill in the unendurable days when he was in one of his moods. We could even go and call at the Vicarage, if there were two of us. We might even be allowed up to his room.

  “Would you like,” I blurted. “Would you like to come and stay with us for a few days, I mean I know it’s not Spain or anything like that, but it might be a bit more fun than Littlehampton, I mean for a bit. Well, you could ask your mother, couldn’t you?”

  She looked up in the middle of a sob. “Will He be there?”

  “Oh yes,” I said recklessly. “He’s always there. He’s working very hard, you see. For his Higher.”

  “Has He got a friend, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t actually know his friends. But I mean he must have some friends. Well, we could ask.”

  “I’d love to come,” she said. “I really would. I do think you’re sweet.” She added brightly, and without conviction, “You must come and stay with us one holidays too. I think you’d get on awfully well with Roger. You’re just his type.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I should think this stupid war or whatever it is will be over jolly soon. Then you could come to Spain.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “That would be lovely.”

  But the war went on and Littlehampton was inescapable for Ireen. She wrote me many anguished letters in which she said that the only thing that prevented her from suicide was the prospect of coming to stay with me “and meeting Him.” I told the clergyman’s son, “My friend, the one who’s coming to stay, is terribly unhappy. She was going to Spain, you know. Then she couldn’t, because of this war.”

  “Gosh,” he groaned, “Gosh, I wish I would go to Spain.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait till after the war, won’t you?”

  “There won’t be any point after the war,” he said. “You idiot!”

  I grew increasingly nervous as the time for Ireen’s visit came nearer. I hoped he wouldn’t call me an idiot in front of her. He was so unpredictable. My mother, sensing what she felt to be a lack of confidence, arranged for me to have a permanent wave. I refused, and she began to worry about me, dabbing at me all the time to tuck me in or straighten me up or smooth me down. I heard her say to my father, “She doesn’t seem to be like other girls,” and he said, “Count your blessings, Mame, she’s a beauty.” This hardly comforted me. I was not worrying about myself.

  Ireen’s train arrived in the early evening, so luckily I did not have to make any plans for that day. Tomorrow I would take her round the factory and meet the clergyman’s son at the Copper Kettle for what my parents called “elevenses” and perhaps play tennis in the afternoon. I knew she didn’t like reading, and rather doubted whether she would have the patience for mahjong. What would I do with her if rained? Worrying, I did not notice her as she came up the platform. In any case, I was looking for someone else.

  Ireen was wearing what I later heard her describe as a powder blue costume. Her hair was rolled in a perfect sausage at the nape of her neck, and another bobbing over her rather low forehead. She wore high heels, a necklace and lipstick. She was carrying a handbag as well as a suitcase. I thought she looked perfectly frightful. I was horrified. I hardly heard a word she said as we went out of the station and I didn’t dare look at the ticket collector, whom I had known all my life. All the way home in the taxi — my father had gone in the car to a meeting of the Cricket Club — I answered her in terrified monosyllables, keeping my bare toes clenched inside my sensible sandals, feeling the sweat of embarrassment behind my knees and in the barely perceptible folds of my breasts. Oh God, I prayed, make her have a bath, make her put on some proper clothes — oh God, please don’t let her be like this. She had gone to the fair, she said, with a boy from the chemist’s and her mother had been simply livid. “Gosh,” I said dully, hoping we would have a crash in which our corpses would be mutilated beyond recognition. Her lipstick, newly applied, had come off on her front teeth. I felt sick with shame for her.

  My mother, after a slight buck of astonishment, took Ireen very well.

  “Of course you’re a good deal older than this one,” she said, giving me a brisk pat. She frequently called me “this one”, as though I were one of a litter, and always accompanied it with this affectionate cuff which was sometimes quite painful.

  “She’s not,
” I said bleakly. “She’s younger.”

  “I’m fourteen and a half,” Ireen said, “but of course everyone thinks I’m at least eighteen.” She gave me a nasty, tolerant look and added, “In the holidays.”

  “Well, there you are!” my mother exclaimed pointlessly. “This one will be fifteen in November and look at her!”

  They both looked at me and I hated them. I was clean, I was thin, and — a great rush of warmth came over me — I was loved. For all my lack of waves and beads and grubby swansdown puffs and lilies of the valley, I was loved, which was more than they were. I couldn’t say this to my mother, but she seemed to sense it because she gave me a quick, conspirator’s smile and I almost thought she winked. “Of course there are those,” she said, slapping my bottom as she passed by, “who can put up with her …”

  It was not so bad, after that, being left alone with Ireen. She talked incessantly as she unpacked, and I sat on the window sill looking down at the ugly town with its church spire soaring steady and grave above the mess of houses. In one great leap from here I could alight on the spire; then swoop, with a graceful diving motion, through his bedroom window, drifting about his bent head like vapour, pouring myself into his ears and mouth, wreathing myself round him warm, searching, invisible as air…

  “Are you meeting Him tonight?” Ireen asked.

  “No. Tomorrow.”

  “I simply can’t wait. I’m sure he’s absolutely gorgeous.”

  “We might play mahjong if you like tonight. My father’s got a craze for it.”

  So after supper, indeed, we played mahjong. My father was very courteous to Ireen, explaining about the four Winds and so on, and he even built her wall for her, which I thought was unnecessary. She had changed into a sort of crepe dress, which I guessed had once belonged to her mother. She giggled a great deal, just as she did at school; but while at school it seemed perfectly natural, I found myself wondering now what she found so funny, and why the simplest word from my father could set her off on this uncontrollable spluttering.