by Marie Joseph
‘I was unreasonable,’ he said, ‘to expect you to marry me just like that and give up your job, I’m sorry, Becky.’
‘The name’s Joan. Joan Entwistle,’ I said, ‘and how long would it take to arrange things? Is it possible to get married and a new passport in just over a week?’
And without a single backward glance or thought of gratitude to all those gallant women who had chained themselves to railings just for girls like me, I held up my face for Joe’s kiss.
If I Lost You . . .
DAVID PICKED GARETH up as arranged, the Saturday before Christmas at a quarter to two. Joy’s mother came to the door, holding her little grandson by the hand, disapproval edged on every line of her strong features.
‘He’s had a cold,’ she said, ‘so Joy hopes you won’t keep him out too long. Say goodbye to Grannie, darling.’
‘I’d have liked a word with –’ David began, but his mother-in-law was bending down, planting a smacking kiss on Gareth’s upturned, rosy face, and before he knew it David found himself dismissed, the front door shut in his face.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the twitch of a curtain. Well, it followed. Joy had always been afraid of her mother, even though during one of their demoralising rows she had hotly denied it.
‘Of course they’re on my side,’ she’d said. ‘It isn’t easy for them having us living here with a teething, howling baby disturbing their nights. Now that Daddy’s retired, they should be enjoying what’s left of their lives, not staring over again with a pram in the hall, and nappies in the kitchen.’
‘We’ll find somewhere,’ he’d promised. ‘One room, anything, just to be on our own. Can’t you see that living here with them is destroying us? Do you know something? The only time, the one and only time I felt ashamed of our love, was at our wedding in the Register Office, when I turned round and saw your mother’s face.
‘The tears were running down her cheeks, but she was crying for herself, because you weren’t being married in white, with all her friends and relatives sitting in rows in a crowded church. She was crying because she’d been done out of her day, and because she knew what the neighbours would be thinking. Can’t you see?’
‘How can you be so ungrateful?’ Joy had stormed, her small face blotched with tears. ‘After all they’ve done for us? They’ve even promised to put a deposit down on a house for us, when we can find one at the right price, and in the right kind of district. It isn’t their fault that we can’t get a big enough mortgage on what you earn. They’re not responsible for the way things have turned out.’
‘One room,’ he had said, ‘a place of our own, with a rent I can manage until I’ve finished my apprenticeship.’ He’d reached for her then, and held her tightly, close up against him.
‘Oh, Joy, I love you, and you love me, and this wasn’t the way we meant things to be, but it happened. We allowed it to happen, and we’d be happy on our own, I know we would. Didn’t we always say that material things mean less than nothing?’
‘I’ve got Gareth to think about,’ Joy had said, her mouth tight and prissy, and it seemed to him that even as he held her close, her voice echoed her mother’s. ‘One room, and a cooker on the landing, and no garden. How can you expect me to give up all this for that?’
Holding tightly to his little son’s hand, David walked down the long avenue of semi-detached houses, turning right into the High Street, and crossing over to the bus stop.
Gareth’s hair, as fair as his own, wisped out in soft and curly tendrils from beneath the snug little hood of his navy blue quilted anorak.
‘Time they had those curls cut off, young man,’ he said, and for a wild, illogical moment toyed with the idea of marching the two-year-old boy straight into the barber’s shop there and then.
But he’d given up all right to make decisions, even about the length of his son’s hair, the day he’d walked out to fend for himself in one room, with a cooker on the landing, and not so much as a blade of grass growing in the yard outside.
‘Want to go upstairs?’ he asked, as the red bus drew up at the kerb.
‘Yass,’ said Gareth, this word and ‘No’ being, apparently, the full extent of his vocabulary. David lifted him tenderly up into his arms.
All the world seemed to be going shopping that Saturday afternoon before Christmas. Harassed housewives clutching cavernous holdalls, whole families out for a final spending spree, overexcited children bundled up like mummies against the cold.
David found a seat at the front and settled Gareth on his knee, rubbing the steamed-up window with his hand, and pointing out the decorated trees blazing from almost every shop window.
The child leaned against him, and David tightened his grip on the small, sturdy figure, smelling the warm little boy smell of him. Judging by his bulk, Gareth was wearing at least three sweaters underneath the anorak, and his round cheeks shone red just like polished apples.
Pushing back the hood, David sighed as he saw the way the fair hair hung in curls almost down to his shoulders.
Ironically, the length of his own hair had been just one bone of contention between him and his in-laws, and because it was one small thing he could defy them with, he had stubbornly refused to have it cut.
He remembered the day his son was born, six months after the wedding, and the way in the hospital, Joy’s mother had held the tiny, wrapped bundle in her arms, pulling the swaddling sheet up round his downy head.
‘Wouldn’t he have made a lovely girl?’ she’d sighed.
‘Would you like to see Father Christmas?’ David asked, and gravely, but without comprehension, Gareth nodded.
‘Yass,’ he said.
‘And what would you like Daddy to buy you for Christmas?’ He smiled as his son’s blue eyes immediately narrowed into slits of fierce concentration.
‘A car? A fire engine? A tractor?’
Gareth blinked slowly, giving each suggestion the consideration it deserved.
‘Sweeties,’ he said at last, and David laughed out loud.
‘Them too,’ he said at last, ungrammatically, and as the bus stopped and started, then stopped again in the long queue of traffic moving slowly down Oxford Street, he carried Gareth down the stairs, and lifted him on to the pavement.
When the little boy tried to knock his hand away, he bent down and spoke sternly to him.
‘Glad to see you’re growing independent old son, but today you hold my hand. See? And before we go to the toy department, we’re going to buy a present for your mummy, so you’ll have to be patient for a minute. OK?’
‘Sweeties?’ Gareth said, hopefully, as they were swept on a wave of shoppers towards the swing doors, but David ignored him and made for the cosmetic counters.
There was a bewildering array of bottles, all shapes and sizes, and a girl behind the counter with a skin of porcelain, and eyelids weighted down with a thick black fringe of false eyelashes. Pushing his way to the front, David held up a small box with its lid bent back to display a tiny, waisted bottle nestling on a bed of pleated satin.
‘How much?’ he asked.
Trying to serve three customers at once, the girl disdainfully pointed out the ticket. David gave a low whistle. ‘Four pounds fifty for that much?’
Hastily he put it down again. It wasn’t that he hadn’t got four pounds fifty. He’d been saving for Christmas for a long time, but how could a tiny bottle like that cost so much? True it was French, and Joy liked anything French . . . They’d planned to go to Paris for their honeymoon if things hadn’t turned out differently.
But that was a long time ago. All they’d been able to manage was a long weekend in Bournemouth.
David picked up the box again, supposing vaguely and quite seriously that a drop would go a long way.
He imagined Joy’s face when she opened it. He saw, in his imagination, the way she would unscrew the gold stopper, and the way she would put a drop behind each ear – such prettily shaped ears, small and close to her head.
He remembered how, in the hospital, they had unwrapped Gareth when they thought no one was looking, unwrapped him and examined him, exclaiming over his perfect little body.
‘He’s got long toes like yours,’ Joy had said with a giggle.
‘And ears like yours, not huge, sticking-out ones like mine,’ he’d said.
His mind made up, David put his hand inside his jacket for his wallet, paid for the perfume, put it away in his pocket, then looked down to tell Gareth that they would go on the moving staircase up to the toys – and knew, in one split second, that it wasn’t just a cliché that blood ran cold, because his actually did.
For Gareth had disappeared.
David told himself firmly not to panic. The little boy couldn’t be all that far away. All the time he’d been examining the perfume and trying to make up his mind, he’d kept tight hold of Gareth’s hand. He’d felt it, hot and sticky, in his own.
He couldn’t be more than a few yards away, and any minute now he’d discover that he was lost and start to cry, and when Gareth cried, he cried properly, with total abandon, his mouth wide, making a noise as loud as any clarion call.
The crowd around the perfume counter was three deep, and David pushed his way through them, causing a stout lady in a hairy coat to mutter something to her companion, an undersized man in a dusty bowler hat. David looked first to the right and then to the left, uncertain which way to go.
He wouldn’t panic, he told himself again. Gareth would be frightened by now, and someone would notice him. Someone was bound to notice a tiny boy in a navy blue anorak wandering alone in the big and crowded store. Someone would – suppose someone already had . . . ?
He was such a friendly little boy. If he were offered sweeties, Gareth would go with anyone. Anyone. And he was such a pretty little boy. With the hood of his anorak pushed back, and with the soft curls tumbling round his face, he could have been mistaken for a little girl . . .
Feeling the blood draining from his face, David retraced his steps back to the swing doors, almost knocking over a girl loaded with holly-sprigged parcels.
‘Watch it,’ she giggled, and her friend giggled too. Outside on the pavement, David stood irresolute, feeling the ice-cold clutch of fear take a hold in his stomach as the traffic rumbled by.
If Gareth tried to cross the road . . . He was like lighming, and when he ran, his fat legs moved like pistons. He’d walked before he was one.
What would Joy say? What would her mother say? As he turned blindly to go back into the store, David’s imagination painted gruesome pictures of himself going back to that house in the long avenue of houses – without Gareth.
This time they’d be justified in what they said about him. He wasn’t fit to have a son. He felt sick; he could easily have been sick right there . . .
But he wasn’t going to panic! He would find someone in authority; yes, that was the wisest thing to do. There would be an office where lost children were handed in, to be reclaimed like parcels. He’d laugh about this some day.
But Gareth was so little . . .
They would ask him to tell them his name, and it would be broadcast over a loud-speaker, and all he’d have to do would be to go and – Then, as he ran back into the store, David remembered that Gareth only spoke two small words. ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. And ‘Sweeties’. . .
No one would hurt a tiny little boy. Not one single one of these people, pushing, milling round the counters, buying last-minute gifts and sheets of holly-sprigged wrapping paper. Not one of them would hurt a little boy with golden hair curling round his rosy face.
‘The Enquiry Desk?’
His voice sounded strange in his ears. It was as though he were listening to a stranger making the enquiry, detecting the near hysteria in it, and the woman, middle-aged, fat and cheerful, said she was sorry, but she couldn’t help him.
‘Something wrong, ducks?’ she asked, and at the sympathy in her voice David felt the actual prick of tears behind his eyes.
‘It’s my little boy. I’ve lost him. I was over by the perfume counter, and he must have moved away when I let go of his hand. He’s only two years old . . .’
As he spoke he glanced wildly around him, and then saw himself reflected in a mirrored pillar. No wonder the woman had been looking at him strangely. Could that be him; that long-haired, unkempt figure wearing a battledress top over jeans that looked as if they’d been slept in? A boy who looked far younger than his twenty years, with angry spots on his chin, and a thin face, white as chalk?
He left her standing there, mouth agape, to push his way through the crowd, the uncaring, festive crowd. Joy’s mother had been right. He hadn’t earned the right to call himself a father.
Leaving Joy while he had his nights out with the boys, drinking too much, working out his resentment on her because he felt trapped into a marriage he hadn’t been ready for, and feeling no end of a fellow because he was taking out his little son to buy him a Christmas present . . . Responsibility? He didn’t know the meaning of the word.
‘Let me find him. Please let me find him,’ he muttered aloud to the God he’d sworn didn’t exist. And as he rounded a counter piled high with coloured scarves, he saw Gareth.
He was crying, sobs shaking his over-padded little frame, as if they would break him in two. A youngish woman was on her knees, talking to him, trying to make him understand. Almost knocking her off balance in his haste, David quickly lifted Gareth up into his arms.
‘Daddy’s here, old son,’ he said. ‘It’s all right – Daddy’s here.’
Gareth’s arms then came round his neck, and as the tear-wet face pressed itself against his own, David knew a moment of love so great, so overwhelming, he could have died of it. And by the time they reached the toy department, Gareth had completedly recovered from his fright. As he saw the display of cars, coloured balls, and brightly boxed games, his eyes grew round with delight.
It was no easy task, choosing and buying the biggest fire engine he could see, and paying for it without relinquishing his hold on the excited small boy, but David managed it and in the bus, parcel and boy held tenderly on his knee, he rehearsed in his mind what he was going to say to Joy.
Let her mother listen, let the whole world listen. What he had to say was important, perhaps the most important speech he had ever made in his life.
‘I lost him,’ he told Joy. ‘For less than five minutes I lost him in the store, and it was as though I’d lost you too. I love you, Joy. I love you, and I love Gareth, and if you’ll have me, I’ll come back here and live, until we can find a place of our own.’
He turned to his mother-in-law, speaking quickly before she could say anything. ‘Things will be different. I was selfish, but I promise . . . I realise now . . .’
He couldn’t go on, and as the tears came, sliding unmanfully down his cheeks, Joy’s arms were instantly round him.
‘Oh, no, David. You won’t come back here. I’ll come to you. We’ll manage somehow. I was selfish too.’
He waited for her mother to have her say, he stared at her over his wife’s bowed head, and saw with amazement that she was leading Gareth quietly from the room, actually smiling at him, and closing the door quietly behind her.
And when all was said and settled, he remembered the perfume, and it was all as he’d imagined, with Joy unscrewing the gold stopper, and dabbing a tiny drop behind each ear.
‘It’s only one room,’ he reminded her, ‘with a cooker on the landing, and no garden. You’d be much more comfortable here, love.’
‘It won’t be for long,’ she said. ‘And you’ll take good care of us. A happy Christmas, David.’
She was only nineteen, but already in years she was so much wiser than he. And she smelt gorgeous . . .
‘A happy Christmas, Joy,’ he said, and bent his head and kissed her again with husbandly devotion.
August Is A Month For Loving
NOW I AM more or less myself again, but last summer, newly widowed, determi
ned not to be a ‘burden’ on my family, fighting fiercely to be independent, I took myself off on a package tour to Portugal. Self-pity I have always believed to be a destroying emotion. I would have no part of it.
‘But you can’t go alone, Mother,’ my two married sons told me. ‘Come away with us. The children would love it.’
And I was tempted, but I knew that it was, for me, a testing time, so I made my reservations.
‘I’m sure to make friends,’ I told the anxious faces of my sons. ‘You know me, I always do.’
And so it was to be . . .
Edna Beresford, a widow like myself, holidaying with her daughter, took me to her ample bosom in the departure lounge at Gatwick as we waited with the rest of our fellow ‘packagers’ for our flight to be called.
Edna exuded confidence from the backcombed splendour of her mauve-rinsed hair to the elegant fit of her trouser suit.
Her daughter, Laura, was a small girl who could have been anything from eighteen to thirty. She was abysmally plain. Her features had a flat and formless quality about them. To hide, I guessed, an almost paralysing shyness, she smiled incessantly, showing what seemed to be far too many teeth.
The contrast between Laura and her mother was so pronounced as to be ludicrous, and when she left us to go to the ladies, walking splayfooted, an ugly fawn midi-cardigan flapping round her trousered legs, Edna turned to me.
‘Laura is so shy,’ she confided. ‘She goes everywhere with me. Doesn’t seem to want friends of her own. She agrees to whatever I suggest we should do. Sometimes I think I shall have a baby on my hands for the rest of my life.’
She seemed to say this with satisfaction, sighing and patting the built-up splendour of her hair before going on: ‘She’s got a degree, but she teaches at a primary school in one of the poorer districts, you know, and the children love her. She’ll do anything for them, from wiping their dirty little noses to buying them presents on their birthdays.’
