by Marie Joseph
No, Susan hadn’t had nearly long enough to worry about him yet; he’d sit there and smoke another cigarette. He would smoke it right down to its tip, then he’d go in and forgive her.
It was a pity that he would have to knock at the door and be let in. To show someone who was boss required more finesse.
He was lucky. The sound of footsteps on the gravel path reminded him that the widow living alone in the upstairs flat came home around that time.
So, without stopping to think what he must look like appearing round the side of the house without a coat and with his wet hair plastered to his head, he strolled casually up behind her.
‘Good evening,’ he said, and was proud of his easy nonchalance. ‘A dreadful evening, although I suppose we must expect it now that November is here.’
‘Yes, and it’s dark so early now. Still we must be grateful not to have a fog,’ she said, fumbling in a large green handbag for her key.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he smilingly agreed, and followed her into the beef-tea-coloured hall.
He waited until she’d rounded the bend of the stairs, then stood still, savouring the moment when he walked into the flat and Susan rushed into his arms . . .
And it was all as he had planned. She was kneeling on the rug, not doing anything; just kneeling there. She turned round when she heard him, and like a child jumped up and ran straight into his arms.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, right on cue. ‘I didn’t mean to be cross, but I was tired and wet and cold, and I love you so much.’
‘I love you, too,’ he told her, turning her face to his and smiling into her eyes. They looked bigger than ever, framed by eyelashes spikey with tears, and he held her close to him, feeling the familiar languor of her in his arms.
‘I thought you were never coming back,’ she said at last. ‘I thought such dreadful things. Where have you been?’
Gently he stroked her neck under the soft weight of her hair. Now he could tell her how he had tramped the dark, wet streets like a man demented, how he had even considered the possibility of staying out all night. And would it be overdoing it to say that he had only come back to get his coat?
But she was clinging to him, and her mouth was warm and sweet against his cheek.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked him again.
He looked down at the soft curve of her rounded cheek, and knew that he couldn’t hurt her any more, so he told her the truth.
‘I tried to walk away from you, but I couldn’t. I had to come back, and I was there, just outside the window, all the time. I’ll always be there, as near to you as possible, and now you know and you can laugh at the thought of me sitting out there in the cold shed.’
But she wasn’t laughing at all. She was unbuttoning his wet jacket, and pulling him across to the armchair, and switching on the electric fire, all three bars.
‘I’ll never shout at you again. Never, I promise you,’ she said, snuggling against his knees. And he smiled into her hair.
Oh, yes, you will! he thought. You’ll shout at me when you’re tired, and I’ll shout back when I’m worried about money and this awful flat we live in, and then we’ll make up. But we’ll go on loving each other more and more, learning tolerance and understanding, that is the meaning of marriage.
And after a meal of plaice burnt only at the edges, and potatoes that were just a little hard in the middle, they went to lie together on the settee that looked exactly what it was – a bed.
A strand of her long hair tickled his nose, and he blew it away, then he traced gently with his finger the outline of her wide sweet mouth.
‘If you’d known I was out there in the shed, you’d have come out for me, wouldn’t you?’
But instead of answering him she pulled his head down and kissed him.
She would never tell him that she had known all the time that he was there. That his cigarette had given him away, glowing there like a miniature beacon in the darkness. She had left him there to sort things out for himself, to come back to her of his own accord when, and only when, he was ready.
A wife might only just have passed her eighteenth birthday, but she had her pride after all . . .
Home for Sale
IRENE HAD BEEN married to Don for twenty-two years. Long enough to discover that his mind, faced with any kind of problem, took a decidedly practical turn . . .
So when she decided to tell him that the time had come for them to move out of the house they had lived in all their married life into a modern, easy-to-run flat, she approached the subject with a great deal of wariness.
First she sat down with pencil and paper and worked the whole thing out, point by point.
Then she chose the right moment to break the news.
Don had retired to his favourite chair in the lounge, fortified by a large steak and as generous a helping of chips as his expanding waistline would allow.
Irene saw that his coffee, sugared, stirred, and requiring nothing more than to be lifted to his lips, stood at the ready on a small table by his elbow. His pipe, tobacco, and the heavy glass ashtray he preferred were placed in position by the Radio Times, which she folded neatly at the correct page.
‘What more can a man want?’ he asked, unwittingly feeding Irene with a perfect opening line.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she began. ‘This house – it’s far too big now that there are just the two of us. Parts of it, you must admit, are literally dropping to bits. Take the garage. Ours is the only house in the whole of the avenue without an integral brick-built garage.’
‘Built-on you mean?’ said Don.
‘What else?’ said Irene, producing the list from behind a cushion. ‘I just jotted a few things down – you know what my memory is like these days, dear.’
And Don, who didn’t, but who was still feeling comfortably replete, sat back and waved a tolerant hand at her. ‘Carry on, I’m all agog,’ he said.
Irene cleared her throat.
‘One. This house is not centrally heated. Now we’re getting older, we need more warmth in the wintertime.’
Don grinned at her. ‘I thought one had to be senile before one’s blood ran thin? We’ve a few years to go yet, lovey.’
She ignored him. ‘Two. The dining room is too large, and as hard to heat as an outsize tomb. A bowl of soup is cold before you’ve had time to pick up your spoon. The last time the Johnstons came to dinner she kept her coat on all through the meal. It was most embarrassing.’
The corners of Don’s mouth twitched. ‘But we eat in the kitchen most of the time. It’s warm and cosy there. Admit it now.’
‘Three. The house itself lacks character. Whoever built it had no imagination. It’s a box, one of a whole row of boxes. A path, a front door, a long hall and doors opening off it into guess what? A lounge and a dining room. A kitchen with a boiler that consumes more coke than an ocean liner. Do they still consume coke, by the way? And a pantry that looks overcrowded when it contains a couple of tins of baked beans and a sliced loaf.’
She was well into her stride now, but was unable to assess Don’s reaction, on account of the cloud of smoke he was busily puffing out from his pipe.
That was another thing she had learned about him over the years.
When confronted with a difficult situation, he would draw furiously at his pipe, throw out a smoke screen, and disappear behind it.
Four, five, six . . . She had worked her way through the house, and was now outside in the garden. ‘Big enough’, she said, ‘to hold a royal garden party, and who in their right senses wanted a rockery as big as the Grand Canyon outside the French window, hiding the flowerbed beyond?’
Don’s pipe was drawing so fiercely now that ominous crackling noises came from it.
‘And the vegetable garden.’ Not that she wanted to sound disparaging, or to belittle the hard work he had put into it. But was its total crop last summer really worth all that effort? Eight tomatoes, one red and seven green, a row of cabbages that had ‘bo
lted’ almost over the next garden wall, a few boilings of string beans, string being the operative word, and a cluster of beetroots no bigger than grapes.
‘Ah, the garden,’ said Don, emerging wraith-like from the smoke. ‘Now there you have a point . . .’
Quickly Irene took advantage of it. Until now, he had shown no glimmer of enthusiasm.
‘Some of the modern flats, the ones they’re building by the station, have a gardener written into the agreement, if you know what I mean. They have full central heating – waves of warmth waft out from little grilles in the wall – and there’s a waste-disposal unit underneath the sink. It grinds all the rubbish and gets rid of it, just like that!’ She snapped her fingers triumphantly, then leaned forward in her chair.
‘I’ve given this a lot of thought, dear, and I know I’m right. This house was all right when the children were at home, but now there’s just the two of us. It’s Saturday tomorrow, and if you call in at the estate agent’s on your way to the bank, he can set the ball rolling.’
She sat back and folded her arms with the satisfied air of a prosecuting counsel who knows he has just presented a watertight case.
But Don was shaking his head. ‘Not so fast, lovey. It needs a bit of thinking about. There may be something in what you say, but we can’t rush a thing like this. Remember, I look at things in a more practical way. I’ll give it some thought, I promise you.’
Then, blowing out another stream of smoke, he withdrew from the proceedings.
The house agent, Mr Grange of Grange and Goldwater, a portly, pink little man, and his secretary, a well-preserved maiden lady with flyaway diamanté spectacles, arrived to give their assessment much too early on the following Monday morning, just as Irene was stringing out the washing.
Flustered and wiping her hands on her apron, she showed them into a lounge not yet rid of its scatter of Sunday papers, and with the smell of Don’s pipe pervading every corner.
‘Not to worry, it’s the basic details we require,’ Mr Grange told her, his bright eyes darting methodically from wall to wall as he dictated rapid measurements to his secretary.
Feeling superfluous, Irene followed them round the house, trying to give the right answers to questions such as, was the loft insulated, and was it a 13 amp ring main?
They rounded off their tour by pacing out the garden, causing Irene to curl up inside with shame when Don’s wet pyjama leg slapped Mr Grange’s balding head as he skirted the potting shed.
When, at the front door, she ventured to ask timidly how much they could expect to get for the sale of the house, he mentioned a sum so astronomical that her knees almost gave way beneath her.
‘Five times as much as we gave for it in 1946,’ she told Don that evening before he’d had time to shed his overcoat and drop his briefcase in the hall.
He stooped and gave her a more than usually absent-minded kiss. ‘We buy in the market we sell, lovey,’ he reminded her.
Irene regarded him sadly and wondered where his spirit of high adventure had gone to. The spirit that had made him pay out the whole of his wartime gratuity on the house and start married life with a bed, a table, two chairs and an old-fashioned treadle sewing machine.
‘They certainly haven’t allowed any grass to grow underneath their feet,’ he said that night as they undressed for bed. ‘Before we know where we are the house will be sold, and we’ll be out on our heels.’
‘That’s silly,’ said Irene, but wasn’t so sure when, by the early post the next morning, a brochure arrived setting out their property in such glowing terms that she had to check twice that the address at the top was indeed their own.
This highly desirable residence, it began, and fascinated, she read on:
Storm-protected front entrance with quarry tiles, it said.
Irene raised amused eyebrows. ‘And to think that for all these years we’ve called it the porch,’ she said. Then her mouth formed itself into a round O of surprise.
‘I hope you know that the corner of the kitchen in which you are now eating your breakfast, is the “dinette”, and that the sun room you put up five years ago is a “well-constructed conservatory, with double-casement doors to a delightful garden”.’
Don waved a hand in front of him, and she clasped it round the marmalade jar.
‘And upstairs I bet you never guessed that we have a “spacious landing and a low-level suite”.’
Don pushed back his chair. ‘Sometimes it takes another person to count our blessings out for us,’ he said, with uncharacteristic sensitivity.
Irene lifted her face for the ritual of the good-morning kiss, and thoughtfully poured out her third cup of tea.
She didn’t linger over it, however, determined that the next time the house was thrown open to inspection it would be as neatly set out, as tastefully arranged as a show house at the Ideal Home Exhibition.
Her efforts were not wasted. She had just finished wiping over the ‘enamel sink unit with fitted cupboards’, and hung a brand-new tea towel over the ‘tiled recess with solid fuel boiler’, when the telephone rang.
It was Mr Grange of Grange and Goldwater himself.
‘I have with me’, he began, ‘a Mr and Mrs Farley-Jones. They called on me this morning, and by a great stroke of luck, your house seems to fall into the category of their requirements. Would it be convenient if they came straight round to view?’
When Irene put the telephone down she found her heart was beating rather fast. She gave a quick glance over the hall, with its ‘cloaks cupboard and lino-tiled floor’, then raced upstairs to give a final polish to the bathroom – ‘half-tiled walls, panelled bath’.
By the time she opened the front door she was shaking with the rush of it all, and the house was so tidy that it was almost impossible to believe that anyone actually lived in it.
Mr Farley-Jones was a short, round-shouldered man with the pathetic air of someone always trying to please.
Mrs Farley-Jones was tall, with a large, putty-coloured face, and an air of taking it for granted that everyone would try to please her.
Feeling rather foolish, Irene showed them into the lounge, pointing out the power plugs and the white bookshelves, the product of two whole winters’ attendance by Don at woodwork evening classes.
Mrs Farley-Jones’s long nose twitched. ‘They would have to come down. Too many books make a place look untidy, and there’s a broken tile in the hearth.’ She pointed the rounded toe of her sensible shoes at the offender.
Mr Farley-Jones looked embarrassed. ‘It doesn’t really show,’ he said.
His wife quelled him with a glance, and went over to the window, poking at the paintwork with a long fingernail.
Irene stood by the hearth, staring at the tile.
It had been broken at Susan’s fifteenth birthday party. That was the year when skirts were worn full, over stiff petticoats, or even hoops, and the boys had turned up, but had refused to participate in anything, clustering together in the hall, smoking furtive cigarettes in cupped palms.
How shy Sue had been, and how desperately anxious that everything should go according to plan; that not one minute of the proceedings should deviate one iota from the many parties she had attended.
As far as Irene could make out, the party had been a dismal failure, but Sue had stoutly maintained that it had been a hilarious success, offering to pay for the replacement of the tile out of her meagre pocket money.
Seeing her standing there, tall and thin, wearing the wrong shade of lipstick, and with two inches of nylon petticoat showing beneath her dress, Irene’s heart had ached for her, and the broken tile had never been referred to again.
In the dining room, Mrs Farley-Jones folded her arms and made a noncommittal noise.
Irene concluded that she could find no fault with the whitewashed walls and low brick fireplace.
‘That tree ought to come down,’ she said, nodding towards the French windows. ‘It would give this room twice as much light.’
Mr Farley-Jones looked ashamed of her, and Irene hovered miserably in the background. They had planted the lilac tree the year Emma was born.
Every year it hung heavy with scented blossoms, a promise that summer was almost there.
Sue, the imaginative one, had written a poem about it and had it published in the school magazine. Irene had thought it quite superior to anything Shelley and Keats had ever written, and showed it proudly to all her long-suffering friends. She tried to remember the first line.
‘The purple lilac, ponderous with sleep . . .’
Mrs Farley-Jones was moving majestically towards the kitchen, and Irene told her quite truthfully that the boiler would keep in night and day, supplying constant hot water in both the kitchen and bathroom with the minimum of attention.
Mrs Farley-Jones sniffed and said that the red-tiled floor looked cold, and if they took the house the first thing she would do would be to have it covered with linoleum or something similar.
Irene wondered how many times over the years she had cleaned and polished the red tiles. Dirty footmarks from the garden, crumbs from a baby’s high chair, muddy pawmarks from the little spaniel puppy that they had kept when the children were young.
Even to this day, the kitchen stools still bore the unmistakable imprint of a puppy’s teeth.
‘I see you eat in the kitchen,’ said Mrs Farley-Jones.
The landing window she declared to be too small, and Irene remembered the Saturday nights when she had stood there shivering in hr dressing gown, straining her eyes in the darkness watching for the returning sweep of headlights, or listening for the girls’ footsteps as they hurried up the path.
Mrs Farley-Jones actually liked the big front bedroom, praising the wide fitted wardrobes with their sliding doors.
Irene took a malicious delight in not telling her that unless treated with extreme caution the doors would bounce off their preordained course, and that to lift them back was a marathon task.
The smallest bedroom was dismissed as hardly bigger than a box, and Irene smiled at the recollection of how not so many months ago it had contained a bed, a single wardrobe, dressing table, record player, piles of records, masses of books, a hand sewing machine, and Emma’s outsize teddy bear.
