“Let’s go to the Copper Kettle.”
“No. No. I can’t. I have to … Which way are you going?”
“Oh, down the High Street. Are you going down the High Street?”
“No … Must dash home, do some work …” He peered at me through the flag of hair that continually fell over his eyes. He combed it through with his fingers and said, “Gosh. You’ve changed.”
“Have I?” I should have said no, I haven’t, and told the truth.
“Yes. Well… Goodbye.”
I was sad, but not heart-broken. He had often behaved like this in the past. On my way home I called in at the factory to see my father. He greeted me warmly, and for the first time the clerks stood up when I came in. “I’m just going to do the tour,” he said — every week he went round seeing every man, woman and boy, this was his great argument for private enterprise — “Come along, they’d like to see you.”
So he conducted me round the factory — seeming to forget that I had known it all my life, every dry-smelling, dusty corner of it — and introduced me to the men, most of whom had let me work their looms since my arms were eight inches long, many of whom had saved me from being scalped in the rope-walk or stabbed to death by the great matting needles. I appreciated this, realizing that I had a new status. I bowed gravely to the Mongol boy who wound the rope round huge reels; his top-heavy head nodded like a mandarin and his arms made winding motions all the time he was awake. I sat on a stool in the office, with its water-colours of Kashmir and the Punjab, and examined my grandfather’s quill pens, pretending it was the first time. “I suppose it’s not impossible,” my father said, as we drove home for lunch, “for a woman to run a business …” Then he made a wry face and patted my knee, rejecting the idea.
I didn’t see the clergyman’s son again until Christmas Day. He and his mother — a silly, insipid woman I thought her — sat in the pew in front of us in church, and all though the service I loved, with a new element of pain, the tender back of his neck, the shoulder-blades in the school suit, the raw, clumsy hands clasped (was he praying?). As we filed out of the church he smiled at me, and in the porch he said. “Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas.”
“What did you get?”
“Oh … lots of things. A gramophone. What did you get?”
“I got a gramophone too.” It was a delightful coincidence. We were really pleased. I longed so much to kiss him that I felt weak, almost tearful in spite of my pleasure.
“We might go to the flicks next week,” he said.
“Oh, yes. Yes, that would be lovely.”
“I’ll come round on Wednesday.”
“Yes … But oh no, I can’t! I can’t on Wednesday! I’ve got to go to this awful old Rotary thing with my father — ”
“It doesn’t matter.” He had already turned away.
“But it does matter! You see, Mummy hates going, so he said this year he’d take me, and I don’t want to go either! Can’t we go on Tuesday?”
“No, I can’t go on Tuesday,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.” And he was off across the churchyard in his navy blue overcoat and new Christmas scarf. Six months before, I would have run after him. Now I stood still among the church-goers, my gloved hands clenched in my pockets, calling out inside myself don’t go, don’t go, please, I love you so much …
“You’ll ruin the hang of that coat,” my mother said, “if you put your hands in the pockets like that. You must learn that good clothes have to be worn well, otherwise you’ll always look a little rapscallion.”
So on Wednesday my father took me to the Rotary dinner, where I was given a gilded powder compact engraved with my mother’s initials. It was intensely boring, but they all made a great fuss of me and I began to think that perhaps it was better to be bored and admired than interested and miserable. I tried flapping my eyelashes and was amazed when old men I had known all my life went pink, and giggled, and even offered me cigarettes. “She behaved beautifully,” my father told my mother, who was waiting up with Ovaltine. “A perfect lady. It’s something, you know, to have a daughter you can be proud of.”
“Handsome is as handsome does,” my mother said. “You shouldn’t say such things in front of the child, George. She’ll get swollen headed.”
I did, a little. The next week my mother took me to London for the day and bought me an evening dress at Debenhams, yellow net with a yellow taffeta underskirt and a clutch of hard yellow rosebuds on the bodice. I was stupid enough to long for the clergyman’s son to see me in it, though if he had, he would have run a mile. On Saturday night my father took me to the Masonic Ball.
This, the peak of the town’s New Year celebrations, was held in the largest hotel, one of remarkable dinginess and squalor. That night, with streamers and balloons, changing spotlights, and a band dressed in satin Cossack shirts, it was transformed. I danced with my father, who did a surprisingly elegant slow foxtrot, and with the bank manager and the manager of Boots and a reporter who was not a Mason but had to write about the Ball for the local paper. I was sipping fruit cup, a little out of breath, when Mr. Simpkin asked me for the pleasure.
He was a small, square man, Mr. Simpkin, with too much face for the size of his features: his little sparking eyes and snub nose and small, fat mouth sat very close together in a great expanse of cheek. As though to fill up his face he wore a thin, spiky moustache, gingerish. His hair, thinning, was fixed across the top of his head in separate strands. He held me quite differently from the others, clasping my hand close and gently pressing his hard, round stomach against me. He was a beautiful dancer, and his patent leather feet seemed to draw mine after them like magnets.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“Oh yes. Yes, I am.”
“I’m an old friend of your father’s, y’know. I saw you at the Rotary do last week. I suppose they all tell you you look like Hedy Lamarr?”
“No. No, no one does.” Curious, I flapped my eyelashes a little. “Why? Do I?”
“You do indeed.” He held me a little closer. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Sixteen,” I lied.
“Still at school, I suppose?” He murmured these questions, hardly opening his mouth.
“Yes. But I’m leaving soon. I’ve had enough of school.” This was true, but I had never even thought it before. The music stopped and we clapped, but he did not lead me away.
“Let’s have the next,” he said, twinkling. “Your father knows you’re quite safe with me.”
It seemed that Mr. Simpkin was the manager of a nearby paper works.
“You must come along sometime,” he said. “I’ll show you around. There’s a lot to interest a bright girl like you. How about it, one afternoon? Then we could have a spot of … tea, and I’ll deliver you back safe and sound.”
“It’d be simply lovely.”
“That’s a date, then. Keep it to ourselves, shall we? You’d better give me a ring.”
It was almost an assignation. He must have felt my delight because he cooled off a little, and after that dance took me to meet his wife. She was sitting with the other wives on a sofa in a kind of crypt just off the ballroom. Mr. Simpkin introduced me as “George’s little girl — you remember?” and she talked to me kindly. All I saw of her was a mottled turkey neck hung with pearls and rough, working hands which she had tried to cover with talcum powder.
After this, the holidays settled down, more boring, more empty than they had ever been before. I waited for the clergyman’s son to call, but he didn’t come. I loved him more, if anything, but my love now grew anxious, sharp, even resentful. I even told myself that I hated him, which was an elaboration of love that I couldn’t understand and which filled me with misery. Twice I met him in the town, but the first time he stumbled into the fishmonger’s and the second time he ran as though all the hounds of hell were after him across the churchyard. Still I couldn’t believe that he didn’t want to see me. I defied the women’s magazines an
d rang him up, but his mother answered and said that he was working and she was very, very reluctant to disturb him since everything depended on his passing the Higher Certificate since without the Higher Certificate he would be unable to go to Oxford, which would be a great deprivation since his father was quite set on him going to St. John’s which was his father’s old college and had quite a remarkably pretty garden, I must go and see it if ever I went to Oxford, but in the meanwhile … So I wrote him smudged letters, and tore them up. My mother said I had had too much excitement, and for some reason became angry with me. The days at home were stiff and hostile and I spent hours in my hot bedroom, wishing I could die.
Two days before the end of the holidays my mother went to a meeting of the Townswomen’s Guild, leaving me alone in the house. I walked from room to room looking for something to do. My body ached. I wanted to run, leap, stretch, exhaust myself, but somehow I was too tired. I made faces at myself in the hall mirror. Suddenly, without any warning, the afternoon became intolerable. It was something I couldn’t live through, an impossibility. Wondering at myself, but with a curious sense of obedience, I telephoned Mr. Simpkin at the paper works.
“I must see you,” I said. “Immediately.”
“Well, well. My goodness. And how are you, my dear?”
“I want to see you straightaway.”
“Is something … the matter?”
“Shall I come to the works?”
“No, no. No, don’t do that.” There was a short pause. “You’re at home, I take it?”
“Yes, but they’re all out.”
“Well… I don’t think I should come to the house.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the end of the drive. We can go up Sam’s lane.”
Sam’s lane was the nearest childhood walk. I don’t think I imagined Mr. Simpkin and me trudging down it for the good of our health. I don’t think I imagined anything. Sam’s lane was the obvious place to go, since it was out of the town, which was ugly, and not right in the country, which was too far. I went upstairs and put on a jersey dress, cut on the bias, which I thought suited me, and my school mackintosh. Something told me that this would be more appropriate than my new, well-hanging overcoat. Then, giving Mr. Simpkin exactly time to tell his staff that he was going out for a while, to put on his coat and hat and drive from the paper works, I walked down to the gate.
Not, as my mother thought afterwards, to my doom — Mr. Simpkin merely kissed me, his moustache grazing my gums like a toothbrush, and fumbled a little with the unyielding navy gaberdine. Obviously he thought that this was what I wanted, and looking back on it I could not blame him if he had raped me. But rape, thank God, is not for the Mr. Simpkinses of this world. They are level-headed men, sane men, men who know what’s what. A little flirtation with a willing partner, even if it’s a schoolgirl who telephones you at three in the afternoon, is just as far as a reasonable man like Mr. Simpkin cares to go on his home ground. On a business trip, of course, it’s different — well, a man’s got to have a bit of sport, a good story to take back to the boys, what the wife doesn’t see the wife doesn’t grieve over and there’s nothing nasty about it, you understand, nothing what you might call sexual. Much of this, in that ten minutes up Sam’s lane, I began to understand.
“I think you’d better take me home now,” I said.
“Oh, come on, duckie.” He was panting heavily and his moustache was wet. “Give me another kiss.”
“If you don’t take me home, I shall walk,” I said.
“What’s the matter? You said you wanted to see me!”
“Well. I’ve seen you. Please will you take me home?”
So he did, as far as the bottom of the drive. He looked puzzled.
For the rest of the day I lay on my bed, or more accurately rolled and tossed and curled up like a spring on my bed, in a state of horror. My mother cajoled, shouted, even slapped me at one point, but I was speechless. Whenever she went out of the room I called desperately on the clergyman’s son to save me, but when she came back again I simply howled and hiccuped, feeling as though there were a great gale in me which I could not contain, a storm so violent that I need not even try to control it. I must be saved, I thought, I must be saved. From what? I didn’t know, but later I began to know. The nervous boy, whom I loved, was good. Mr. Simpkin was evil. I wanted to be delivered from evil by love, and never to touch it again for the rest of my life. Not for me the sofa at the Masonic Ball, the dirty joke, the quick bash; not for me spite, deceit, disgust. Save me, I implored the clergyman’s son, please save me. I didn’t know, of course, that this conception of salvation was completely idiotic, and that no man, woman or child can be another’s saviour. I did not even know this twenty-six years later, when I talked to Bob Conway in my own delightful sitting room and recognized once more the brutality that for half a lifetime I had called Mr. Simpkin.
Around supper time my mother called the doctor in. He said it was my age, and gave me a couple of pink pills. Before I went to sleep I told her all about it. She was exceedingly shocked and said we must keep it from my father. She didn’t know I even knew about such things, she protested; she didn’t know I had a side like that to my character at all. Whatever came over me, she asked, whatever possessed me? I sobbed into my slimy pillow that I didn’t know. I never saw Mr. Simpkin again. Possibly he left the neighbourhood. Eighteen months later, in the clergyman’s church, I was married to the reporter I had met at the Masonic Ball. The clergyman’s son passed his Higher Certificate and went up to Oxford, where he became a homosexual. I had a great affection for him, for many years.
11
“What is Jake’s … background?” the doctor asked.
“Background?”
“Is his background the same as yours or is there a … conflict there?”
“Why do you always ask me about Jake? I come here and all you ask me is about Jake. I’ve only known the man for thirteen years, he’s not my father, my brother, he’s not even my Uncle Ted. Perhaps it’s Jake you should be seeing. Not me.”
I looked at him quickly, to catch him out. He was staring rather drearily at some point in the air between us: his eyes saw so far, no further. I thought he held his sight on a leash, pulling it in or extending it at will. I wanted him to see me, but didn’t know how to attract his attention. “What has Jake to do with me?” I asked, realizing too late that the question sounded biblical and absurd.
His sight retired, tortoise-like, into his head. He could now see no further than the inkstand and gold-embossed leather blotter in front of him.
“I don’t want to talk about Jake,” I explained. “I want to talk about myself.”
“Carry on.” He made a vague, conducting gesture. “Please. Carry on.”
I sat for a long time, unable to think of anything. At last I said, “I’m much better, you know. By the time Jakes comes back I shall be … quite better.”
“You find the tablets a help?”
“Yes. A great help.”
“Good, good. Don’t get in the habit of taking them.”
“But you told me to take two a day.”
“Yes, of course. But don’t get in the habit.”
I tried again. “Don’t you think I seem better?”
“Of course. Every day and in every way …” Then he became solemn. “However, you must realize that at the moment we are simply putting stepping stones, shall I say, over a raging torrent. Our task is to divert that torrent. To divert it, as it were, to some other area where it is badly needed. To do that, we must find its source. That can’t be done in three or four weeks, you know. We must trace the course of the torrent.” He raised his hands, palms together, and snaked them through imaginary valleys. “We must trace the course carefully until one day, hidden under some insignificant rock, we shall come upon a small spring and then, then, we can talk about getting better.”
I thought about this for a few moments. Then I asked, “What torrent?”
; “We might call it your will to self-destruction.”
“And we have to divert that?”
“We have to turn it into creative channels, yes.”
“I don’t honestly know what you’re talking about. I mean …” I frowned, trying to think of a kinder way of putting it, “I mean, I don’t have any will to self-destruction.”
“Not consciously, of course. But the pain, the danger you experience in childbirth, for instance, isn’t that…?”
“Oh, really!” I said. “It’s absurd!”
He nodded, smiling, and wrote in his book.
“You can’t say it’s destructive to have children. Not if you want them. Not if you can keep them.”
“But there was a time when you couldn’t keep them?”
“We went into that last time,” I said. “I could always keep them.”
“But at the cost of at least two marriages.”
“Let’s talk about the torrent,” I said. “It really makes more sense.”
He bowed his head, and for a moment I felt sorry for him. Poor man, the butt of everyone’s anger, I should be nicer to him. “Jake’s parents,” I said, “were quite different from mine.”
“They’re dead?”
“His mother is. She died when he was quite young, he doesn’t remember her, he doesn’t even know what she was like. In the photographs she looks like one of those woman novelists in the ’20’s, with shirt-waists and those great jackets with slits up the back, like men’s. He was looked after by housekeepers, women who didn’t really care. There wasn’t a loving one among them. I suppose that’s why he loved his father so much. I mean, he still loves him. His father treats him like a child, you know, he nags him and baits him, he keeps all the bad notices of Jake’s pictures, never the good ones. But it doesn’t make any difference. They’re the same person. If you want to know what Jake will be like in another thirty years … there he is. He’s more or less retired now, but he used to write crime stories — he wrote hundreds, they were very successful, he made a lot of money. He called himself Max English. Perhaps you read them?”
The Pumpkin Eater Page 8
