by Marie Joseph
‘I SHALL GO for the interview’, said Barnie, ‘in a dark grey suit, with a whiter than white shirt, and my old boy’s tie. I’ve shaved off my beard.’
‘And you’ve had your hair cut,’ said Anna, which he had, but not, of course, short back and sides like her father. Even so she had to hold her stomach and tell him that the baby was laughing too.
‘A three months’ embryo can’t laugh,’ said Barnie, ‘and, anyway, I am bringing him up to have respect for his old dad. I will teach him to show me deference, right from the start.’
‘You showed my father deference,’ Anna reminded him sadly, ‘and that didn’t work, did it?’
They were walking from the station, along the quiet Sunday-afternoon avenues, to have tea with her parents, a ritual that was expected of them, and to which Barnie acquiesced, she knew, because he loved her.
Anna, a cherished and only child, knew, and the knowing made her at times deeply unhappy, that her parents only tolerated him because they realised that to ignore him would be to lose her also, but they still treated him with the same reserve they had shown from the first.
Perhaps the fact that at the time he had been wearing red flared trousers and a maxi-length fur-trimmed coat had influenced them, but she hadn’t been able to see why.
‘A person is what he is, not what he wears,’ she had told them, ‘and Barnie is the kindest boy I have ever known. He likes everyone – no, more than that, he loves everyone.’
She turned to her mother. ‘You always used to tell me that kindness was the one quality that really matters, and Barnie is kind. I am going to marry him.’
She saw the way her father’s face flushed with anger, and she felt her own temper rise.
‘I am going to marry Barnie, not because we think that marriage is necessary, but because he understands that you would be affronted if we just lived together. He is considerate of your feelings, in spite of the fact that you won’t even try to know him.’
‘I almost wish you weren’t marrying him,’ her mother had said, ‘because if you lived with him, you would get him out of your system and come to your senses.’
‘Tell me what you have against him,’ Anna would say, over and over again, and her father would begin to tell her, until he was nudged into silence by her mother, who would look away.
But because Anna loved her parents, she would persist: ‘Well? Just try and tell me why you dislike him so much.’
Her mother’s voice was carefully controlled. ‘He has a degree in engineering, which he spent three years at university to study for.’
‘Being subsidised by the taxpayer,’ her father added.
‘So why won’t he get a decent job? What was the point of all that time studying if he doesn’t use his qualifications? Why is he working on a building site, like a navvy, when he could be holding down a good job? We’ve tried to understand, but we can’t.’
Anna had almost felt sorry for them, sitting there in their lounge, with the busy patterns on the carpet and the hectic geometrical designs on the floor-length curtains. They went abroad each year and brought back a memento from the country they’d visited, and there, around the house, they were displayed.
Again she’d tried to explain: ‘Barnie learned nothing at university except how to study and assimilate the facts. He’s been a student all his life, and students are immature, they know nothing about people and life – they might have degrees, but what do they signify in terms of human relationships? Nothing.’
‘You can say that they’re immature again,’ her father said, thinking, she knew, of demos, drugs and sex, so she gave up trying to make them see.
Not long after she’d married Barnie, her mother had said:
‘You never have a proper holiday. Where did you go this year? To the Yorkshire Dales with a tent. Four of you sleeping in a wet field, and the other two not even married . . . Is that what you want from life? Is that all he’s prepared to give you? What kind of husband is he?’
And Anna had watched them, sitting there, newly browned from their recent visit to Ibiza, surrounded by what her mother called her precious ‘bits and pieces’ . . . She saw them sitting there, honest bewilderment written plain on their familiar features, and she gave up.
Just as they turned a corner into the long avenue of houses bordering the Green Belt, she caught her foot in a loose stone. Immediately Barnie’s arm steadied her, and they walked on.
‘When they hear about the baby and the interview, and see my hair, and I tell them about the suit and the white shirt, they won’t be able to help liking me,’ he said, quite without irony, and they giggled. Again Anna asked him was he sure that he wanted the job, even if he got it, and she reminded him how happy he’d been all that summer, cutting the grass verges in front of houses.
‘If I am to be a father, I must also be a solid citizen,’ Barnie told her seriously, ‘and computers are with us to stay, you know. Think about them, swallowing and digesting all those facts, and me extolling their virtues all round the country in my white shirts and old boy’s ties. I shall buy myself a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles with thick sides, and take them on and off as I talk.’
‘But your eyesight is perfect,’ Anna said as they rang her parents’ bell.
‘There won’t be any glass in them,’ Barnie told her, deadpan, and they were leaning on each other, laughing, as her mother opened the door.
It was a sunny day, and so they had tea in the garden. Whilst Barnie and her father sat in deckchairs, making uneasy conversation, Anna watched them through the window.
She thought, as she always did on her Sunday visits home, of their two-roomed flat, with its poster-patterned walls and the blue mugs hanging from the shelves that Barnie had put up crookedly – their saucerless existence, and their happiness.
Inside the kitchen, her mother took down from the cupboard the silver-plated teapot which she polished on Fridays to use on Sundays. Watching her, Anna had a flash of insight.
Perhaps doing these things was just as important to her mother as not doing them was to her? And so, in that rare moment of understanding, she told her about the interview, then about the baby, in that order, which seemed important somehow.
She found herself enveloped in a fern-scented hug – all her mother’s toiletries had matching scents – and she tried not to pull away.
Even as a tiny child she had refused to be cuddled. Any form of physical contact had seemed to repel her until she’d met Barnie.
She glanced through the window, and saw him sitting there, missing her, not talking now, because her father had obviously given up trying to find any point of contact.
She saw, too, the way one of Barnie’s big, work-roughened hands trailed in the grass, listless, like a dead hand, and she thought of the way he caressed her, his touch sweet and familiar, and how that very morning, lying together in bed, he had stroked her slightly swelling stomach, and told her he was going to be there when their baby was born.
‘Because he is my child, and I am responsible for him, from that very first moment.’
‘A piece of dry toast,’ her mother was saying, ‘nibbled before you raise your head from the pillow,’ and Anna smiled at her, and in the new mood of tenderness didn’t disillusion her by saying she felt wonderful.
As they carried the tea things into the garden, she remembered how her father had been at a football match when she was being born, and how her mother had told the story until it had become a family joke.
Barnie jumped up straight away and took the tray from her mother, and when she put the teapot down on the grass, her father removed it quickly to a flat stone on the nearby rockery, because he explained it would make a mark on his lawn.
If I hadn’t met Barnie, Anna wondered silently, would the little things that didn’t matter have begun to matter to me?
‘Have you heard our marvellous news?’ her mother was saying, telling, as Anna herself had done, about the interview before the baby.
And it see
med that her father knew all about the firm with their computers, and what excellent prospects there would be if Barnie survived the interview. Then, gravely, Barnie told about the suit and the tie, and for the first time ever they were a united family, meeting on common ground. For the first time, they accepted Barnie as a son-in-law, and listening to them, Anna felt immeasurably ashamed.
‘I always thought there was a nice face lurking behind all those whiskers,’ her mother said, trying to be jolly, and Anna held her breath, fearing that her father was going to offer money towards the new suit.
The last time he had given them money Barnie had spent all five pounds of it on fruit for the old lady who lived alone in the ground-floor flat.
‘Old people don’t have enough vitamin C,’ he’d told her seriously, and she’d loved him even more.
‘You must take the car,’ her father was saying now. ‘Even though it’s only five miles away.’
And her mother’s hand pouring out the tea, was stilled.
To Anna’s father, the car was more than a means of getting from one place to another; it was an extension of himself.
‘That is why I never learned to drive,’ Anna had told Barnie, ‘because my father would never have allowed me to drive his precious car. Oh, how can they live surrounded by inanimate objects which don’t matter?’
She had snuggled closer into his broad back as they lay in bed.
Barnie’s voice had come muffled from his pillow: ‘They never had their time of not caring. The war made them middle-aged before they’d been young, can’t you see? And when your father came back, if he came back, they were determined to have all the things they couldn’t believe they’d ever have – a house, a car, ornaments – they spell security.’
‘Security is you loving me,’ she had said, not understanding at all, and he had turned to her and said he would love her for ever.
‘Why did you agree to borrow the car?’ she asked him as they walked back to the station.
‘For two good reasons,’ said Barnie, leaving her side for a moment to stroke a fat cat sitting on a low garden wall. ‘Because when someone offers you their most prized possession, you don’t refuse, and because already, in your father’s eyes, I have become a solid citizen.’
‘How can you laugh about it?’ she asked him as they walked into the station forecourt together, arms around each other. ‘You are still you, and they should have liked you as you were before.’
‘Your mother kissed me, and your father shook my hand,’ he said. ‘Great, isn’t it?’
But she turned her head away, not wanting him to see her tears . . .
Rain in the morning
‘IF IT RAINS,’ says my wife, Lucy, and shudders, ‘there will be twenty children in the house, and the Punch and Judy man in the sitting room . . .’
Then she smiles at me, the smile that always begins in her dark eyes before widening her lovely mouth into an urchin grin: ‘But the sun will shine this afternoon, you’ll see,’ she adds with confidence.
I reach for my briefcase, and with the other arm, pull her as close to me as time and her present condition will allow. I look up at the darkening sky.
‘It’s far from promising, love,’ I say. ‘I’ll try to come home early, but if I can’t manage it, I’ll ring.’
I am worried for her, because to give a children’s party six weeks before our third baby is due is ridiculous, and I have already told her so.
‘You’ll be home early,’ she tells me, and stands there on the doorstep as she always does, in her blue quilted dressing gown, looking enormous, because Lucy’s babies always show almost right from the beginning. When I reach the corner I turn, as she knows I will, and she waves, as I know she will, and blows me a kiss before going in and closing the door.
I glance at my watch and know I will have to sprint all the way to the station if I want to catch the eight-fifteen. As I jog along the avenues I ask myself, as I seem to have grown into the habit of asking lately – what is a man to do?
What is a man to do married to a wife like Lucy, who refuses to accept defeat in any form, who lives in a world of magic and charm, a wife who has allocated the five pounds I gave her to the quite unnecessary booking of the Punch and Judy man for Joanna’s fourth birthday party?
Abbie, our two-year-old, had raided her mother’s dressing-table drawer, squashed all her lipsticks, eaten half a jar of face cream, and emptied a box of powder down the lavatory. The five pounds was to replenish the damage. I had said so, quite distinctly, and tried hard to be angry, because handing out five pounds willy-nilly, when one’s bank balance shows red, is not a thing one does lightly.
‘A Punch and Judy show!’ I had shouted. ‘And what for? Tell me that. Just to keep up with the Joneses, that’s what!’
Lucy’s brown eyes had widened at me.
‘But we are the Joneses,’ she said, and I couldn’t argue with that.
The young girl who lives across the road from us catches up with me, long legs flying, school beret squashed down flat on her mane of dark hair.
‘Good morning, Mr Jones,’ she says, and runs past me. I think, not for the first time, how much she reminds me of Lucy when I first met her – actually not all that long ago.
Who would have thought that I, a seasoned bachelor of twenty-five, a man who had weathered one engagement and two near-misses, would have married an eighteen-year-old girl straight from school, taken on a house with a mortgage that swallowed up most of my salary and, within five years, produced Joanna, small, dark and serious, Abbie, fat and flirtatious, and the unexpected bonus, now only six weeks away?
The train is in, and by running up the steps, across the bridge, and down the other side like a gold-medal sprinter, and flinging myself into a compartment, I catch it. It is not until the train has left the station that I realise I am the only male in the compartment. I become aware of a frozen stare from a large-hatted female opposite me, and the giggles of a couple of white-booted girls in the corner, and I see the notice on the window – Ladies Only.
Wanting to assure them that rape is the last thing in my mind, I stare fixedly at the floor until the next station, then get out and into the next compartment.
Women, women, women . . . Three at home, and a dog that is a bitch, and a feeling in my bones that tells me the next one will be female also. I gloom through the window, seeing the spatter of rain, and think about the newly decorated sitting room, subjected to the ravages of twenty screaming children. A Punch and Judy booth set up in the corner, crumbs trodden into the carpet – the only one in the house that actually stretches from wall to wall – and the floorboards threatened by an orgy of musical bumps.
Joanna, four years old this very day, had refused to eat her breakfast. She had looked decidedly wan and I knew she would be sick before lunch. I had thought how lovely Lucy was looking. Lucy is a morning girl, waking up bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, her soft brown hair tumbling round her face looking far prettier than it does when she smooths it down with brush and comb.
‘D’you know?’ Joanna had said, leaning her elbows on the table and staring with suspicion at the scrambled egg congealing on her plate, ‘Jane is bringing me a handbag – red I think – and it might have a bottle of scent in it. I just hope it has a bottle of scent in it, that’s all.’
Nowadays Joanna starts every sentence with ‘D’you know.’ I told her it was not polite to anticipate presents, and that she must not disgrace herself by asking her guests what they had brought the minute they arrived. But Joanna was not listening.
Abbie, eyes fixed firmly on her plate, was wolfing down cornflakes as if they were the first food she had been given for a week, and I watched her bulging cheeks and masticating jaws with a morbid fascination. How had we, Lucy and I, managed to produce a child like Abbie, who, if she continued to grow at the rate she was doing, would turn out to be the only lady blacksmith in the county?
‘I feel sick,’ Joanna had said just then, and was. Lucy coped with the
mess like the earth mother she is, although when we were first married she had told me quite seriously that she could not stand the sight of blood and things like that, and had assured me that even putting her hands into greasy washing-up water was sheer hell. Now here she was cleaning up the mess without turning a hair.
It is raining heavily now, and at the next stop five people get into our already full compartment. I give up my seat, and a lady wearing a green plastic raincoat that looks and smells like wet lettuce sits down, without thanking me. I feel it is symbolic somehow. After all, who am I? Just a man who goes to work every day to earn enough money for giant-size packets of cornflakes, and Punch and Judy shows.
The grass in our back garden would soon be soaking wet. Lucy likes to take her shoes off and walk on the grass when it is damp. Our garden is not a bit like other people’s – not nice and tidy, with rows of flowers, and an apple tree or two. Lucy grows herbs; grows them casually, so that there, in the middle of rose bushes, are beds of parsley and feathery tops of carrots, while a lone rose raises its red splendour amidst a wilderness of mint.
‘D’you know, daddy?’ Joanna had said. ‘We’ve got paper plates and everything, and serviettes with Andy Pandy on, and Gillian is bringing me a jigsaw puzzle, but she says there’s a piece missing because she’s done it first, and now they can’t find it anywhere.’
Usually I carry a folding umbrella in my briefcase, but now, as I come out of the station into the rain-wet London street, I remember seeing Abbie tucking it into her doll’s pram, crooning to it softly as she laid its leather handle on the pillow. Abbie has no use for dolls, and even goes to bed with a carpet-sweeper! I turn up my coat collar and, bending my head against the fierce driving rain, start to walk hurriedly to the office.
Mrs Howarth, the char, is in my room, winding the flex round her vacuum cleaner and looking even more injured than usual. ‘Good morning, Mr Jones,’ she says sadly.
‘How’s the boy?’ I ask her, and the boy, it seems, is out of work again, and will only eat breast of chicken and halibut – if he eats fish at all – and had that very morning kicked the cat.
