The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  ‘How I wish I’d worn my brogues!’

  Stung to something approaching anger, he did a quick mental calculation; when he spoke, his voice to his own ears sounded as loud as a trumpet fanfare:

  ‘Get your coat, and I’ll wait for you outside. We’ll take a taxi.’

  The brown eyes appraised him, and he saw hesitation flicker for just a moment, then she laughed. ‘That will be very nice, David.’

  The suburban-sounding address she gave to the taxi-driver surprised him.

  ‘I happen to like my parents, and see no reason why I shouldn’t go on living with them for a long time yet,’ she said as if reading his thoughts.

  David settled back in his corner and studied her profile.

  ‘When I first saw you,’ he said half to himself, ‘I thought, “There goes another girl who shares a flat in town with two or three friends.”’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me. There’s a lot I don’t know about myself. For instance, why do I go to these crazy parties Saturday night after Saturday night?”

  ‘Because you hope that at one of them you may meet someone like me,’ David said, and she giggled.

  ‘That’s the first funny remark you’ve made all evening. I’d just about given you up as a real old sobersides.’

  David folded his arms and scowled at the driver’s neck. He wanted to tell her, but knew he would never dare, that her brittle sophistication actually frightened him . . .

  She had it all – the elegant look, the shining look, the London Look as he privately called it.

  But when the driver pulled up in a quiet cul-de-sac, and they stood together at her garden gate, David put up a clumsy hand and shyly touched her hair.

  ‘Come out with me next Saturday,’ he said huskily, ‘and I’ll book for a show.’

  She clicked open the front gate and leaned over it, a princess granting a favour to her most humble subject.

  ‘All right then, Saturday. But there’s no need for you to come out here. I’ll meet you in town.’

  ‘I’ll come for you,’ David said stubbornly. ‘Around seven o’clock.’

  ‘Don’t be late,’ she teased, running lightly up the path. ‘I can’t bear to be kept waiting . . .’

  He didn’t move until the front door had closed behind her, then he started off on the long walk home.

  ‘You actually walked?’ Graham said, waking up around noon the next day. ‘Why, any one of half a dozen of the blokes there would have given her a lift. It’s an unwritten law that none of the girls goes home alone, and besides, I think that old Bernard lives out her way.’

  ‘Tell me about old Bernard,’ David said, pretending fascinated interest in the instructions on a packet of prawn curry.

  Graham yawned and borrowed David’s dressing gown without asking. ‘Well, everyone knows old Bernard. He’s always around. A big, shaggy bloke with drooping jowls.’ He opened the door and did a quick survey of the landing. ‘His real name’s Jim.’

  David smiled into the curry, and leaving it so simmer, went over to the window and stared down into the deserted Sunday street.

  The minute Graham came back he would ask him about last-minute theatre tickets. He was determined to plan every minute of his Saturday date with the meticulous attention to detail usually afforded to military manoeuvres. Nothing must go wrong.

  He leant his forehead against the cool glass, remembering her.

  She had laughed at him, thought him slow, teased him, and yet she was everything he had ever wanted.

  Jenny. He said her name over and over again, tasting the sound of it on his lips.

  Graham came back from the bathroom just in time to rescue the curry from burning. He promised to see a friend of his about tickets for a Shaw play, and he described a tiny French restaurant tucked away behind Leicester Square.

  ‘But no girl’s worth all that fuss,’ he added. ‘Anyway, there’s Tom’s sherry party on in Hampstead. Cooking sherry, of course, but the company’s good.’

  David shook his head. ‘Jenny isn’t cooking sherry; she’s sparkling champagne . . .’

  Graham choked on a mouthful of curried prawn, and then with a great effort, and an uncharacteristic display of tact, said a commendable nothing.

  By Friday all the details were finally arranged, and after the last lecture of the day David ran up the two flights of stairs to the flat.

  The letter with the Yorkshire postmark lay on the mat, just behind the door. The writing was unfamiliar, and as he slit the envelope he felt a sudden sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  Miss Winifred Oakes, who for the past two years had occupied his mother’s first-floor bedsitting room, felt it her duty to inform him that his mother, after suffering ‘untold agony’ for a whole week, had been taken to the cottage hospital for an emergency appendix operation . . .

  David called Directory Enquiries, and had a call put through to the cottage hospital. From what sounded like the other side of the world an efficient voice informed him that his mother was ‘as well as could be expected’ and able to receive visitors.

  ‘And her first one will be me,’ he told Graham. ‘Be a pal and find out the time of the first train in the morning for me. I have things I must do.’

  And like a whirlwind he tore from the room, flying downstairs, and banging the big front door behind him until the old house rocked to its very foundations.

  Outside in the street, he swung himself on to a bus, peering anxiously through the window at the unfamiliar streets, and getting off at what he calculated to be the nearest spot to Jenny’s home.

  Turning into the quiet cul-de-sac, he recognised the house by the tall rowan tree in the front garden. The door was opened to his ring by a small, rounded woman with soft brown hair, and a streak of flour on her nose.

  ‘Jenny’s in the dining room,’ she told him, making a valiant effort not to look surprised, then she opened a door at the end of the hall, motioned him inside, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

  Jenny was sitting at a writing desk, hunched over an exercise book – a school exercise book, David realised in one startled glance.

  When she saw him standing there a slow blush stained her cheeks, and a hand flew to her mouth in dismay.

  She was wearing a navy blue gym-slip shiny at the back, a white regulation school blouse, and a tie of vivid purple fastened down by an enamel badge with the word ‘Prefect’ emblazoned on it in gold. Her brown hair was flopping over a shiny, rounded forehead in an untidy fringe, and now that the blush was receding a little, he saw that her nose was sprinkled with tiny brown freckles.

  Her lovely eyes, innocent of make-up, regarded him with horror.

  ‘I thought . . .’ she began, pushing at her hair with an ink-stained finger. ‘I thought it was tomorrow night . . .’ Her voice tailed off into a miserable silence, and David, watching her embarrassment, felt his big bones almost liquefy with tenderness.

  Gone was the teasing voice, the light laugh, the elegant look.

  Across the top of her gymslip was sewn a strip of pale blue ribbon. David pointed to it, the teasing note in his own voice this time: ‘DFC and bar?’

  She bit her lip, the dimples at the corners of her mouth making the briefest of appearances. ‘Vice Games Captain, hockey and netball.’ Then she pointed to the enamelled badge pinned alongside. ‘House Prefect, Upper Sixth. And now you know what I meant when I told you that I looked different on Saturdays, and I’ve another six months to wear this ghastly get-up before I can leave and go to college.’ She gave a violent push to a large, red volume of The History of the American Nation, and it fell with a resounding crash to the floor. Something suspiciously like tears sparkled at the back of her large brown eyes.

  Then David did what he had wanted to do right from the very beginning.

  He took her in his arms.

  And because he was a Yorkshire man, and called a spade a spade, he told her that he thought he had fallen in love . . . Thought,
because Yorkshiremen are cautious, too.

  Then, when all was said and settled, and the real reason for his visit explained, she raised herself on tiptoe, and the kiss on his cheek was as soft and sweet as a butterfly’s breath.

  She came to the gate to say goodbye – to wish him Godspeed. Glancing back as he walked away from the house, he saw her lean over the gate to wave. There it was, he thought. His London look . . . A look he would cherish for a very long time to come.

  It seemed, in that moment, not in the least inappropriate that the prefect’s badge on her tie was glinting and sparkling in the rays of the sun.

  A Matter of Pride

  SUSAN ALWAYS GOT home first, but that wet Monday evening in late November, Steve could sense the emptiness of the flat before he opened the door.

  Shrugging himself out of his wet raincoat, and letting it drop over the back of the nearest chair, he switched on two bars of the electric fire, remembered the last bill, and switched one off again.

  He stared round the room, appalled at its shabby disorder. This, then, was how it must look to Susan . . . The hastily made bed that was supposed to look like a settee during the day, but never did; the previous day’s newspapers scattered over the coffee table, and, just visible in the cupboard that they called a kitchen, the breakfast dishes stacked in the plastic washing-up bowl.

  He was making a half-hearted start on the dishes when the door opened suddenly, and Susan was home.

  An obstinate smear of egg clung to a plate, and working away at it with the pan-scrubber, he said over his shoulder: ‘You’re late tonight, lovey. What kept you?’

  Just seven words, said quite calmly, a straightforward question, requiring, he thought, a straightforward answer.

  There was, he told himself afterwards, no excuse at all for the way she flared up. No excuse at all for the way she almost threw the shopping bag at him.

  ‘What kept me? I’ll tell you what kept me – an inconsiderate brute of a boss who thinks nothing of dictating a long letter at twenty minutes to five, a queue as long as a snake at the delicatessen, and a bus that didn’t come, and when it did it was full up.’

  She paused for a necessary breath. ‘And that’s what kept me, if you must know.’

  Said with all the emphasis sarcastically on the must.

  He wiped his hands on the tea cloth and went to take her in his arms. She looked so little standing there, with her dark hair hanging in damp fronds round her face; so little and bedraggled, and so infinitely precious.

  He would unbutton her raincoat, lead her over to the armchair by the fire, kneel down and pull off her silly shoes, and perhaps even rub her cold feet gently between his hands.

  He saw himself doing those things before he had actually taken a step forward, but she pushed him aside and went over to the bed, unfastening her coat with furious fingers.

  ‘What’s the matter, lovey?’ he said, and he meant it kindly, he honestly wanted to know.

  So, sitting there on the edge of the bed, peeling off her wet nylons, she told him.

  Apparently, everything was the matter. Her job. She had never wanted to work for an accountant in the whole of her life. And what on earth did she work for anyway?

  Just so that her wage could go straight into the bank to save up for a deposit on a house they’d be paying for for the rest of their lives.

  Did he know that she hadn’t had a new dress since their wedding day, eight months ago? Not that she needed any new clothes, oh no! All she did was rush round all day at the office, then dash home, doing the shopping on the way, and then nearly kill herself trying to have a slap-up meal on the table ready for him when he came in.

  He shook his head in honest and genuine bewilderment.

  ‘I never knew you felt like that,’ he said. ‘I thought that things were working out fine. And who said that I wanted a slap-up meal? Anything would do. Baked beans on toast, a poached egg, anything!’

  She got up and preened herself, like an outraged mother hen.

  ‘Have I ever given you baked beans on toast, or a poached egg for supper? Answer me that!’

  ‘No,’ he said honestly, ‘but I wouldn’t have minded. I get really quite a decent lunch in the canteen.’

  ‘Much better than I make for you, I suppose?’

  ‘Now I didn’t say that.’

  She marched smartly into the kitchen, flung several frozen fillets of plaice into the frying pan, and turned the gas up high.

  ‘No, but you meant it,’ she said.

  Well enough is enough, and he was also tired, tired and hungry, because, in spite of what he’d said about the canteen lunches, most days he made do with a cup of coffee and a bun, just to be able to put an extra pound or so in the bank at the end of the week. It always helped.

  ‘I meant nothing of the kind, and you know it,’ he said, then immediately wondered what he had said that she had thought he meant. Oh, it was so unreasonable.

  ‘You did, too!’ she shouted.

  ‘I did not!’ he shouted back, and as if joining in the battle, a spurt of hot fat splashed out of the frying pan on to her bare arm.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ she yelled angrily, holding out her arm accusingly. ‘See, it’s beginning to blister already.’

  It was true there was a red, angry circle about the size of a sixpence, and there were two outraged tears trembling on the edge of her long, sooty eyelashes.

  Because he loved her, his instinct was to comfort her, to soothe away the pain with murmured tender words, but because he was human, he also lost his temper, and found that his voice was trembling on the verge of lost control.

  ‘It serves you right! Yes it does, it serves you right!’

  ‘I hate you!’ she said, quite distinctly, and rushed past him into the little box of a bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  He was quite calm. He even remembered to turn off the flame underneath the frying pan, and to slam the door as he went out, just that bit harder than she had slammed the bathroom door.

  The impetus of his white-hot fury carried him all the way down the narrow hail with its ugly brown linoleum, and out into the tiny strip of front garden.

  He was halfway down the avenue, striding along with his head bent against the driving rain, before a sudden thought made him slow his steps almost to a standstill.

  It was all very well bursting out of the house like that, but where exactly was he supposed to be going to? Where could he go?

  Stopping by a bus shelter, he made a fifth in a tidy little queue. He was not quite in and not quite out of the shelter, so that the rain from its sloping roof ran in a miniature deluge down his neck.

  And when the crowded bus rumbled to a halt, he wasn’t in the least put out to find that the conductress, an aggressive blonde in tight trousers, rang the bell in triumph and told him that the next bus would be along in twenty-five minutes.

  He hadn’t really intended to catch the bus, anyway. People caught buses because they had somewhere to go . . .

  He stood there alone in the shelter, thinking hard.

  Where did husbands go when they had quarrelled with their wives? Being their very first real quarrel since they were married, it was all new to him, unbroken ground.

  Rain dripped off his nose as he tried to remember the aftermath of quarrels in plays on television. Usually the husband made for the nearest pub and drowned his sorrows. But he wasn’t a drinking man; he could never understand the mentality of men who gathered nightly round a bar, all boys together, buying drinks for each other, and exchanging their smutty stories.

  All he had ever wanted was Susan.

  Slowly he began to retrace his steps. He could, of course, walk his anger off – that was what they sometimes did, returning weary and footsore to their repentant wives.

  But surely it wasn’t always raining as hard as this?

  He had reached his own gate by now, and walked slowly towards the big front door.

  He was putting his hand in his
raincoat pocket for his key when he remembered that his raincoat was still where he had dropped it, over the back of a chair.

  A husband couldn’t possibly return to demand an apology from a contrite wife looking exactly like a drowned rat and knocking at the door to be let in.

  A man had his pride . . .

  So, hands in pockets and muttering to himself, he took himself and his foolish pride round the side of the house to the little garden shed.

  It was rather damp in there, and cold, and it smelt strongly of earth and paint, and rusty nails, but he sat down on a tool box, and felt in his pockets for a cigarette.

  There were five left in the packet, and he would smoke the lot, one after the other, even though he had promised Susan that he would cut them down to two a day. She was developing into a nagger as well as a shrew, and she would have to be taught a lesson.

  He would have to take steps to show her that he intended to be master in his own house.

  Doggedly he puffed away at the cigarette, flicking the ash into an empty plant pot, then lighting a second from the stub.

  It was dark inside the shed, and cold, very cold, and uncomfortable, perched there on the tool box. He began to wonder just what Susan was doing . . .

  Perhaps her arm really had blistered by now. He pictured her alone in the flat, worrying about him, frantic with pain and anxiety.

  Perhaps he ought to have insisted that she went straight round to the doctor’s? Burns were nasty things, they should be covered up to keep out the air. Or had he read somewhere that running the cold tap on them was the thing?

  And a fine husband he’d turned out to be . . .

  No wonder Susan’s mother had cried bitterly all through the wedding ceremony. And when they’d gone into the vestry to sign the register, she’d stared at him accusingly from underneath her flowered toque.

  ‘Take care of my little girl,’ she’d said pleadingly.

  She hadn’t thought to tell him what a bad temper her little girl had – how she would fly at him and scream at him for no reason at all. That, he supposed, simply hadn’t occurred to her.