The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  But from the look Mother gave me as we walked together into the sitting room, I knew that wasn’t the end of the story.

  I didn’t care, either.

  I’d worked on my first case, and solved it, too, and I knew that some day Freud and I would make quite a team.

  No Time for Love

  IT WASN’T CONVENIENT for me to fall in love.

  This new job of mine had taken a lot of getting, and rather than use my newly gained prowess at shorthand and typing as a secretary in the orthodox way, I had made do with a series of stopgap occupations.

  Then, out of the blue, my chance had come along.

  I wrote an article called ‘Emancipation in the Seventies’, and on the strength of this I was interviewed and given a job as a writer on a magazine.

  I had arrived. I was a female Godfrey Winn, and it was just a matter of time before my genius was noticed and I was given my own column. Or my own page. Then would follow the television panels, the cosy chats on Woman’s Hour, and my opinions would be sought by all.

  I allowed myself roughly five years in which all this could, and definitely would, happen. Then I met Joe.

  I had been sent to the opening of a new boutique in one of the streets behind Regent Street. The boutique was just like any other. Upturned lobster baskets, bright green netting hanging from the ceiling, and everyone there, me included, dressed like fugitives from Carmen.

  There were camera bulbs flashing, and the usual flow of champagne. A tall young man with a bare brown midriff and dangling gypsy earrings was airing his views on fashion to a gaggle of reporters from fashion magazines. But he wasn’t Joe.

  Joe was in a corner, wearing a suit that looked exactly like a suit, with a neatly knotted tie, and his brown hair brushed back into a length that even my mother would have approved of. He looked as out of place as a curate at a love-in, and as I stared at him, wondering what on earth he had to do with such a scene, our eyes met.

  There were no soaring violins, only the canned music playing a selection from Hair, but we started to walk towards each other like a couple in a slow-motion television advertisement,

  ‘My name is Joe Collinson,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Becky May,’ I told him, not quite truthfully, that being the name I had chosen to write under, deeming it more eye-catching in print than my own.

  He repeated it, then he waved an expressive hand at the bizarre scene. ‘How crazy can one get? But Pedro is my friend, and I’m a sort of partner in this venture of his. We share a flat, and I’ve been roped in to do the books, being three-quarters of the way chartered as an accountant.’

  ‘Pedro?’ I asked stupidly, and he nodded towards the exotic young man with the dangling earrings. ‘That isn’t his real name, surely?’

  ‘Mortimer James, but not to be breathed to a soul.’ He grinned, and I laughed with him.

  His voice was low, and he had the sort of hesitation in his speech that is usually part of a stutter, and although I discovered later that it was part of a carefully concealed shyness, at the time it just meant that I had to stand close to him and almost lip-read him as he spoke. I noticed his teeth were small and white and even, and his mouth lifted at the corners, giving the impression that he was smiling even when he was being serious.

  ‘Are you part of this happening?’ he asked, and I told him proudly that in a way I was, and showed him my press card.

  ‘A writer?’ he asked, suitably impressed, and I nodded, mentally coupling myself with Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and my favourite of the moment, Jilly Cooper.

  Joe put his hand firmly underneath my elbow, and propelled me towards the door. ‘Have you all the material you need?’ he asked. Patting my notebook importantly, I nodded.

  ‘Care for a coffee?’ he continued, and I readily agreed that would be lovely. We walked together along the busy street, our steps matching, as close as if we’d been holding hands.

  I should have known from that first moment the way it was going to be. But I had no warning signs, no breathless feeling, no tinkling of a little bell in my brain that said, ‘This is it.’

  I had written, and had rejected, lots of romantic stories where girl meets boy, but they’d been done with my tongue partly in my cheek. I believed that love was like a plant, needing cherishing so that it could grow in strength and beauty. And anyway, my whole raison d’être was my career. I knew exactly where I was going, and I was going all the way alone . . .

  ‘Is that a wig?’ Joe asked as soon as we were settled in a little glass booth with two glass cups of frothy coffee.

  I was so startled, I told him the truth.

  ‘A half one, the front is mine.’

  ‘It doesn’t quite match,’ he said, and I felt stung, and told him that as a matter of fact I’d actually modelled in it the week before.

  ‘It’s a countdown to a girl’s wedding day,’ I explained, a little pompously, ‘the day before she has her own hair set for the great day, when she’s too engrossed in wrapping presents and writing thank-you letters to have time to spend on her own hair.’

  ‘I see,’ said Joe, obviously not seeing at all, and his brown eyes twinkled. ‘Are there any other bits of you that aren’t quite real?’

  I thought of the spiky eyelashes applied with care that morning, and the foam-rubber lining to my bra, and blushed. It’s a habit of mine.

  ‘A girl as pretty as you doesn’t need camouflage.’ He grinned. ‘You looked as out of place back there at that fiasco –’

  ‘As a curate at a love-in,’ I finished for him, and he threw his head back and laughed out loud.

  I was still annoyed about the blush, so I didn’t join in. ‘I expect you’re the type who likes girls to scrub their faces and polish their hair with a silk handkerchief?’ I said cattily, and he said what a fascinating picture that conjured up.

  ‘I like you, Becky May,’ he said, and under the steady influence of his brown gaze, I told him my real name.

  ‘My real name is Joan Entwistle,’ I confessed, and he considered it gravely.

  ‘I like you, Becky May,’ he said again. ‘Suits your image, I agree.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘What image?’

  ‘The image you’re striving so hard to attain.’

  I hated him for being so observant, but he was so right.

  ‘You’re far too perceptive. For an accountant,’ I said, then I told him it was time for me to go. He paid the bill, hailed a taxi for me, and waved me off, but didn’t ask to see me again, or even where I lived.

  Back at the office I wrote a thousand-word article on ‘The Superiority of the Male Sex’. The Editor accepted it as it stood, and told me that I was coming along very well, a remark that should have sent my hopes soaring sky-high, but left me as depressed as if I’d bought a pair of expensive tights with two left legs . . .

  For the next few weeks, I worked flat out at furthering my image. I acquired a false plait as long as a clothesline; I bought a long-sleeved, high-necked dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Californian Gold Rush. And I went to a smoky jazz club with a boy from the Art Department who wore a bead-hung nightshirt.

  And all the time I thought about Joe.

  I was quite firm with myself. The only reason I couldn’t forget him, I reasoned, was that he was so different from the crowd I was going round with. Refreshingly different, almost like the boy next door. And that thought put me to thinking about the boy next door back home, in my Yorkshire village, and I felt a wave of homesickness so acute I telephoned my mother. I told her I would be coming home the following weekend.

  It wasn’t really a success. Even without the spiky false eyelashes and the plait I’d left behind in London, I felt out of place. And the boy next door, a Boy Scout type I’d loved for one whole summer, was away at university, resplendent with bushy black beard, my mother told me, and too busy arranging sit-ins and demos to come home. He was worrying his parents halfway to death.<
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  ‘I hope you aren’t getting involved in anything,’ my mother said, and I assured her that the only thing I was addicted to was my typewriter. I thought how much she would have liked Joe.

  ‘No boyfriends?’ she persisted. I assured her none, and she looked wistful and said that three of my friends from school were married, and one was ‘expecting’, but only after the correct length of time, of course.

  I travelled back to London in a slow, Sunday train that went a long way round because of line repairs. After what seemed a lifetime, I climbed the stairs to my bedsitter, feeling unaccountably depressed. I analysed a short story by D. H. Lawrence, and wondered how on earth he’d managed to write so beautifully when his early background was even more mundane than mine.

  ‘There’s someone on the other phone for you,’ one of the girls from Fiction told me the next morning, and I went in and picked up the receiver without even the slightest premonition.

  ‘Joe here,’ the slow, hesitant voice said into my ear, and I found out that legs turning to cotton wool wasn’t a cliché after all.

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked foolishly. ‘I mean, how did you know where to find me?’

  The familiar chuckle sounded in my ear. ‘Elementary. I rang round a few magazines, yours happens to be the fourth. Persistence paid off. It usually does.’

  I stood there, with typewriters clacking all around me, and the sun shining in through the big window; the buildings across the way seemed to be floodlit with gold.

  ‘Written any good books lately?’ he then said, and I could imagine him smiling. I could feel him smiling, and I tried frantically to think of a scintillating reply – but all I could say was, ‘Not really.’

  ‘Short of copy, is that it?’ he laughed, and the office junior, who looks more like Mary Hopkins than Mary Hopkins does, tapped me on the arm to signify that my Editor-in-Chief was standing by my desk, holding a sheaf of notes in his hand.

  Private calls are not encouraged in our office and I murmured something about having to go. Quick on the uptake, he said could he meet me after work. I said yes, and when I went back to my desk, my Editor said, in a mocking tone, if I was quite ready, and if it wasn’t too much trouble . . .

  At five o’clock it started to rain, and the square inch or so I managed to get for myself in the cloakroom mirror showed me that my fair hair was due for its twice-weekly wash. To top that, my blusher had gone on in streaks, so I had to wipe it all off and start again. Finally I gave up, and told myself that if what Joe really liked was an English-rose type, then that was what he was going to get.

  He came towards me as soon as I ran down the steps, and this time, through the low-hanging grey clouds, I distinctly heard the twang of harps, if not the soaring of violins. He was taller than I had remembered, and with a shorty raincoat over his suit he looked different, but his smile was the same, slow and sweet, and kind.

  He took my umbrella from me, unfurled it and, walking on the outside of the pavement, held it over me. I marvelled at his beautiful manners, and thought once again how my mother would have approved of him.

  ‘I went home this weekend,’ I told him, and he said that he’d been home too, and I was enchanted to find that he was also a Northerner, from Cumberland.

  I digested the amazing coincidence along with the mixed grill we were served in a restaurant near Piccadilly Circus. He also told me he shared a flat in Kew along with three friends, Pedro, the gypsy boutique owner, a dentist in his final year, and a Glaswegian with an accent as thick as an undercooked haggis.

  ‘Plenty of copy there,’ he joked. ‘Their love lives are so complicated, they would run into at least twenty instalments.’

  ‘And yours?’ I asked, as casually as I could.

  ‘Too busy studying up to now,’ he told me. ‘I pipped the last exam, and that means I have to take the whole lot again, but after this week I should be able to concentrate. On my love life, I mean.’

  We went out into the rain and into a cinema, and I sat through a film I’d seen before. In fact, I’d written a rather scathing review of it for the magazine, but seeing it with Joe, it was a beautiful film, and every word the lovers said seemed to be symbolic.

  Of what? I asked myself afterwards, and the answer came pat. Of the way I felt about Joe, and the way I knew he was beginning to feel about me.

  After that week I saw him every day for a fortnight, and the first time he kissed me, it was as though all that was heaven rocked round me. I thought how much more realistic my stories would be from then on . . .

  I was prepared to live just for the moment, not thinking about the future. Then, on a quiet Sunday evening walking in the park together, he asked me to marry him.

  ‘The firm I am with has a branch in Germany,’ he told me, ‘and they want me to go out there. Almost at once,’ he said, seemingly as an afterthought. ‘I want you to go with me, as my wife.’

  I remembered there was an old lady wearing a cast-off maxi-coat, even though the air was as warm as brushed velvet. She was feeding the birds with crusts from a crumpled paper bag.

  ‘I can’t come to Germany with you,’ I answered. ‘I couldn’t possibly leave my job.’ The biggest bird was getting more than his fair share of the bread. ‘It’s not the kind of job that I could carry on with anywhere but here in London. You can see that surely?’

  Joe smiled, and I think it was the way he smiled that made me mad.

  ‘Your job,’ he said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. ‘You could get work out there as a secretary if you wanted to, but there’s no need. I’ll have a good salary. How’s your German?’

  ‘Non-existent,’ I told him coldly, ‘and I’m not the secretary type anyway.’

  He was still refusing to take me seriously. ‘I know, you’re the creative type.’

  And then I said it, the crazy stupid remark that was the culmination of all the live-for-today attitude I’d been trying to persuade myself into ever since we’d met.

  ‘It isn’t convenient for me to be in love. Or to marry you. Not for a long time yet,’ I said.

  He gripped my shoulders then, and turned me round to face him. The hurt look in his brown eyes was more than I could bear.

  The old lady with the crusts stopped feeding the birds, and watched us, fascinated.

  ‘If you’d told me that you didn’t love me, I think that would have been easier to take,’ he said, and he released the grip on my shoulders, and we walked back along the path together. The sun had started to go down, and there were long shadows across the grass.

  Being Joe, he took me all the way back to my room, but he left me at the door, muttering something I couldn’t quite hear when I asked him humbly when we were to meet again.

  There was a disconsolate droop to his shoulders, and I went inside and surveyed the Sunday-evening loneliness of my room, and my eyes ached with tears I wouldn’t allow to fall.

  A week later he phoned and his voice was like that of a stranger.

  ‘It’s come through, the job in Germany, and I’m going very soon.’ There was a long pause. ‘So I’ll be pretty busy till then.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and although I couldn’t see him, I knew that this time he wasn’t smiling.

  ‘How’s the job going?’

  I said it was fine thank you, which wasn’t strictly true, because I was experiencing the awful dearth of ideas that comes to writers who try to write when their minds are in turmoil. Back at my desk, I sat down at my typewriter and wrote an article advising the jilted girl what to do when it seems that life isn’t worth the living.

  It was a good article, written from my experience, but not one of the snippets of advice worked for me.

  There were no letters to tear up, and I didn’t feel like changing my hairstyle, or buying a new dress, or joining pottery classes. But my Editor patted me on the shoulder and said he’d make a writer of me yet, and the next week he sent me round the hostels interviewing girls who’d left home and were finding life in s
winging London unbearably lonely.

  Listening, and taking all those sob stories down in shorthand in my little blue notebook, it seemed to me that London was full of lost souls, wandering about in search of love.

  ‘We All Need Love’, I called the article, and I was summoned into the inner sanctum and told that if I went on doing as I was doing, I could be made a feature writer on a new magazine which might come out next year . . .

  That was it! The chance I’d lived for. The chance to see my name in black capitals at the top of my own page. I wrote to tell my mother about it, then I lay back on my bed and thought about Joe.

  I would work so hard that before long I would hardly be able to remember his name, or the way he looked, or the gentleness in his voice, or how his mouth seemed to be smiling even when he was serious.

  I told myself that it wasn’t fair. His job was important, but then so was mine. This was why all those dauntless women had chained themselves to various railings all those years ago. I had a right to my ambitions, just as he had a right to his.

  But by the time the weekend came I knew that I could never forget Joe. I walked alone in the park, then sat on a bench and fed the birds, wondering how long it would be before I looked like the old lady, wearing a maxi-coat on a warm summer’s day. I fed the birds with the toast I hadn’t been able to eat for my breakfast, I stared at the lovers happily lying on the grass, and I thought about Joe making love to a German girl, and I wanted to die.

  Before I left for work on the Monday morning I had a letter from my mother, and she told me the boy next door had shaved off his beard, been home for the weekend, and taken his sister to a dance at the Young Conservatives Club. She said he was hoping to see me the next time I went home. I tried to remember his face, but the face I saw was Joe’s . . .

  He was waiting for me when I finished work, and I ran down the steps to the sound in my ears of a full orchestra, backed by a heavenly choir.

  ‘I had to see you,’ was all Joe said, and a man rushing past us to catch his bus nearly knocked me down. Joe put out an arm to steady me, and his smile was sweet, and there was still the same slow hesitancy in his quiet voice.