by Katie King
Then there was the briefest whiff of a strong floral perfume that had a chemical hint to it.
‘I wonder if you might be so good as to point me in the direction of Margaret Delbert?’ somebody addressed Peggy in quite posh tones, cutting abruptly through her reverie and the sensation of the scent in her nose. This sounded like a voice belonging to someone very used to getting her own way.
Peggy’s eyes flicked open. How cringeworthy. To be discovered enjoying with such abandon what was obviously a private moment felt wrong and as if she had been caught doing something illicit and oddly intimate. And in bare feet too!
Standing before her was a stranger who was appraising her intently. This woman had tightly curled hair as if by a semi-permanent, heavily pencilled eyebrows and ruby-red lips painted on with a dry-looking lipstick. She was wearing an expensive, well-tailored summer dress and her leather brogues were carefully polished and looked practically spanking new, while over her left arm bent across her front she’d slung what looked to be a jacket made out of the same patterned material as her dress. She wore white kid summer gloves on each hand and carried a neat leather handbag in her right hand that looked as if it had been made to partner her shoes, while gold earrings were clipped onto her earlobes and a matching, slightly too ostentatious gold brooch was glinting insistently at Peggy in the sunlight filtering down through the trees beside a décolletage exposed to just, but only just, the right side of propriety for walking around on an ordinary summer’s afternoon.
While Peggy wouldn’t have described the woman as pretty or sweet-looking, as the overall combination of everything added up to give a well put together and stylish although slightly harsh impression, nevertheless Peggy would have said this person standing before her was incredibly well presented and very possibly affluent, and that she had taken a great deal of care with her appearance.
Peggy had no idea who this woman was, and she was so unused to hearing her own name said in full that, for an instant, Peggy found herself wondering who this Margaret Delbert could be as she hadn’t seen anyone around who would answer to that, and wasn’t it funny that there was another woman with the same surname as she in this same street?
The woman continued to stare, her eyes slightly narrowing in concentration, and Peggy found herself frowning – this stare was verging on the nosy rather than the curious, and it didn’t feel polite in the slightest as the two women stood now openly assessing each other.
And then Peggy’s mouth opened in a soft ‘O’ as she realised that she herself was of course the Margaret Delbert that the woman wanted to speak to.
‘Are you looking for me?’ she said with a slight hesitation, and then she broke the mutual stare as she looked downwards to fumble herself back into her old sandals that very much needed a polish, without unbuckling the strap, which led to a bit of forcing of each foot inside, so that one shoe’s back collapsed under Peggy’s heel, although it felt like too much of a loss of face to lean down before this fashionable woman to sort it all out.
‘If you are Margaret Delbert, in that case I am indeed looking for you,’ said the woman. She sounded curt and determined, and as if she had an agenda that Peggy at that moment could only guess at.
‘It’s Peggy.’
She wondered briefly if she were dreaming as this unexpected meeting seemed so improbable. She had dreams occasionally that seemed very real and where she would be caught in public without a necessary item of clothing on, usually a hidden item of her underwear, which Barbara had told her were anxiety dreams and not naughty ones, and so it could be that whatever was going on at this moment was a variation of that particular family of worry-dreams.
The woman put her handbag in the hand holding the jacket and removed her glove, and as she stepped forward she spat ‘Take that’ from between clenched teeth and with her right hand she delivered a hard and stinging slap to Peggy’s cheek.
Peggy gasped loudly in shock, and Gracie, who must have been in the garden on the other side of the privet hedge that Peggy was obscured by in order to take a peek at the babies and how well Connie and Angela were looking after them, called out sharply, ‘Peggy? What’s goin’ on?’
The buzzing pain Peggy felt in her jaw – the woman had absolutely thrown her weight into the slap – insisted that the meeting between the women was no peculiar dream, and Peggy felt her cheek immediately flush and redden where the woman had struck her. She hadn’t been at all prepared for such a blow and it had forced the top row of her teeth to clash uncomfortably against her lower row, and she had a faint ringing sound in her left ear. She shook her head as if to banish the ring and put a hand to her mouth, but although painful, it didn’t feel the sort of pain to signify that any lasting damage had been done.
Peggy felt dumbfounded. To her knowledge she had never seen the woman before, and she had absolutely no idea who she might be.
‘How dare you?’ the woman said, her head pitched forward and close to Peggy’s. ‘How dare you?’ Her tone was low at this point, indeed almost quiet, but it oozed venom and ill will, and the deep pitch of her current tone made the words all the more sinister. The words were expelled with such force that little tiny droplets of spittle were sprayed over Peggy’s face and Peggy caught a whiff of sour breath. She couldn’t help but lean back a little in the face of this woman’s aggression.
‘Excuse me,’ Peggy tried a bit feebly to rally, ‘but I think you are most terribly mistaken. I have no idea who you are or what you could possibly want with me.’
‘You are Margaret Delbert, wife of Bill Delbert?’ the woman questioned commandingly.
Peggy nodded and then realised with a shudder who this person had to be. How could she have been so dim not to guess immediately? She risked a glance down at the woman’s stomach and, sure enough, she could see a rounded bump at the white-belted waist of her dress.
‘MaureenFromTheNAAFI,’ said Peggy flatly, and then could have kicked herself for addressing Maureen as such, but this derogatory running of the words into one was how she and Barbara had taken to calling her, and it had just slipped out before Peggy could stop it. She didn’t like the woman, but this was a rude way to speak to her, no doubt about that, and Peggy didn’t consider herself to be a rude person, no matter how provoked.
‘My name is Maureen Creasey, or Mrs Maureen Creasey to you,’ came the carping reply. ‘And before you make any insinuations, I would have you know that I am a widow and a free agent.’
‘A pity you weren’t so respectful over my husband’s position then as you set such store by insinuations, as he wasn’t a widower or a free agent,’ Peggy replied before she could stop herself. Even though there was past history lurking under the surface that Peggy would have been super-human not be antagonised by, there was something incredibly riling about this woman’s imperious attitude that was nothing to do with what she’d been getting up to with Bill, that was just rubbing salt into an already open wound.
Now she was so close, and had turned slightly so that her face and scrawny neck were lit by the sun, Peggy could see that Maureen was significantly older than she, perhaps even as much as forty or perhaps a year or two on top of that. She was bony to the point of emaciation, although her extended belly looked quite large and buoyant. And although her hair had been expertly coloured and primped, when a shaft of bright sunlight fell across it Peggy could see that a significant proportion of it must be grey to judge by the variation showing through the colourant.
Peggy remembered Bill’s plaintive ‘her hair reminded me of yours’, and she felt affronted at being compared with this dry and over-styled hairstyle. Not only was Bill stupid, but he was also clearly blind, she muttered to herself.
Maureen’s face had a downy texture to it too, exaggerated by each of these minute hairs being individually coated with a fine face powder. Up close Peggy was struck by the many small crinkles in the skin around her eyes, as well as the sheer depth of the unhappy-seeming lines that fanned out from Maureen’s nose towards her li
ps, and the first signs of nipped-in lines around her current slackly open mouth that were beckoning her lipstick to feather into. Her teeth were large and in good condition, but Peggy couldn’t help but stare at them until she could convince herself that Maureen’s gnashers were starting to show the yellowing of age right before her eyes.
Peggy felt that she herself had seen better days in the looks department but as she studied Maureen, she couldn’t imagine for a moment what her husband had seen in her, or why such a posh woman as she had even been working in the NAAFI at all. She supposed it was to do with how people were volunteering in the war effort. Whatever, in comparison Peggy felt age on her side, which was a nice feeling, and that she personally had a freshness of attitude about her (or at least she hoped she did) that had none of the desperate feeling that Maureen was exuding. Bill had described Maureen as fun but this person before Peggy looked as if she would be more at home sucking a lemon than cracking a joke or even saying something nice. But all the same, if Maureen had been the preferred option to herself, for the briefest of seconds Peggy felt as if she could happily lie in front of a bus and end it all, her world seemed so bleak.
Then she reminded herself that she wasn’t going to let Bill win, and she had the biggest asset of all: Holly.
‘So now we both know who the other is,’ said Peggy cautiously, ‘I’m still at a loss as to why you have come all this way to see me. Immediately Bill told me about you and your pregnancy I severed all contact with him, which I assumed was all for the best, at least as far as the pair of you were concerned. I presumed you and he were carrying on as you had been doing and that these days you were awaiting your baby together.’ It cost Peggy quite a lot to say this, but it was the truth and so she didn’t see any point in trying to pretend otherwise.
‘If only that were the truth of it. Don’t you see? Don’t you see! I thought it would be so, but Bill tells me all the time now that you are nothing short of a saint, and a wonder, and the best thing he’s ever known. I can’t compete with that, and now he hardly looks at me,’ said Maureen, taking a belligerent step forward, which caused Peggy to step back as she didn’t want another slap. ‘He moons after you, and tells me I’m half the woman you are, and that I’m dried up and past it.’ Maureen’s voice was increasingly loud – where had the whispering gone of a few seconds previously? – and it had a note of anguish about it that indicated all too clearly to Peggy the very deep depths of despair that this woman had been plunged into by Bill’s lack of commitment. ‘It’s not true that I’m past it, and I want you to tell him to make it right with me.’
For an instant Peggy felt the tiniest twinge of sympathy with Maureen. She clearly was frightened about possibly bringing up her baby alone, and terrified at the thought that Bill hadn’t turned out to be the man she had thought he was. Join the club, Peggy thought, but then the full meaning of what Maureen was really asking her sunk in, and she pushed these thoughts aside for ones much harder and uncaring.
‘Excuse me?!’ If Peggy had thought she was shocked before, it was nothing to what was growing inside her now. The damn cheek, the sheer bloody gall of this woman to come all the way to Tall Trees expecting to be able to hector Peggy into doing her bidding. Peggy felt herself losing her temper. ‘Excuse me!’ she repeated, much more loudly than before.
‘Peggy, what’s goin’ on? You don’t sound right,’ said Gracie from somewhere on the other side of the privet hedge.
But Peggy wasn’t listening to Gracie. She took a deep breath and marshalled all her inner strength.
‘I think you seem to be forgetting, Mrs Creasey, that it was my husband that you had relations with, and so by rights it should be me telling you to take a running jump, baby on the way or no. And in fact Bill still is my husband, I’ll have you know, the lanky streak of, well, you know… It’s rich coming from a strumpet like you, telling me how I should be speaking to my husband when it was you who couldn’t wait to leap into the bed of a married man who had a pregnant wife at home.’ Peggy’s voice was louder than she intended but somehow she couldn’t seem to control it, and she could hear Connie saying to Angela that she was going to get Roger and Mabel.
Gracie had sidled up the drive to the warring women by now and she was standing protectively beside Peggy.
Then Gracie said in the rude and bolshie way that only someone of sixteen years of age can manage, ‘What’s this rude bint want wi’ you, Peggy?’
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that, you good-for-nothing little piece of skirt,’ screamed Maureen at Gracie, and quick as a whippet, slapped her face too. Maureen was very skilled at face-slapping, it had to be said. Peggy wondered if Bill had also been treated to the odd swipe; it would be poetic justice if he had, and she hoped it was so.
Gracie, who could be a bit uppity at the best of times, made as if she was going to leap at Maureen and do her a mischief, and Peggy had to fling herself at Gracie to put herself between the pair of them, shouting, ‘Stop, Gracie, stop – the silly woman is expecting a baby!’
Gracie stood still and looked menacingly at Maureen over Peggy’s shoulder, while she rubbed her flushing cheek. But before she could inflame the situation further with any inopportune words, Maureen lost control, grabbing Peggy’s arm and shaking her as if she were a terrier with a rat, as she began to yell.
‘Your husband doesn’t want you! He never would have strayed if he’d been happy. You look like you’d be a sack of potatoes between the sheets, and he was grateful for everything I did with him in the bedroom. I taught him things he’d never even heard of, let me tell you, things a woman like you couldn’t even dream of, and he was so grateful for it that he kept coming back for more, and then more on top of that. And then you had to go and say to him that your marriage was over, and he couldn’t see his daughter, and it killed everything in him with me, and I hate you for that. Hate you, do you hear?! He’s obsessed with you, and he won’t give me the time of day. Bill doesn’t know it, but what he wants is me!’ Maureen shrieked at the top of her voice, summoning the four boys to the gateway.
There was the sound of Roger and Mabel bustling over to them too, and a mortified Peggy could see several neighbours coming to their own front gates to see what all the fuss was about.
‘And I’m having his baby, and what are you going to do about that, Miss Prissy Knickers? Miss Frigid Goody Two Shoes,’ Maureen’s voice was so loud that nobody could be in any doubt as to what had gone wrong in Peggy’s marriage.
Peggy felt humiliated and cut right down to her very quick. She’d believed that she and Bill had enjoyed a mutually satisfying life in the bedroom, but being called a sack of potatoes in such a vicious way beggared that assumption (so publicly too!), and she dreaded to think what Bill might have said to Maureen about the most private areas of their marriage. There was a fleeting instant when Peggy wondered what the things that Maureen had taught Bill might be, and which he’d been so grateful for.
Then Peggy pushed these thoughts aside as she realised that what was even more disturbing about what she had just heard was that Maureen had said Bill still thought of her, and so maybe the personal side of things (between the sheets at least) hadn’t been so bad. And in addition, Peggy found herself flooded by more complicated feelings threatening to surface to do with Bill still being sorry that their marriage had floundered. Even the mere suggestion of this made Peggy feel peculiar and as if she shouldn’t think about any of it just now – Bill’s letters had now dropped off and he’d not telephoned Tall Trees for a while and so she’d assumed he was making the most of his time with MaureenFromTheNAAFI. She hadn’t allowed herself to think of how he might have been feeling, she was far too caught up in the mire of her own despondency, but this had probably been (another) mistake as she felt rather as if she had been punched anew in the stomach.
As the people from the other side of the street actually shuffled forward to stand on the pavement to watch the goings-on at the gate to Tall Trees more closely, Peggy’s cheeks fl
ushed and she didn’t know where to look. It wasn’t very becoming behaviour at the entrance to a rectory but she felt powerless to do anything about it.
‘Oh, come now, I don’t think there’s any call for that sort of language,’ Roger chipped in before Maureen could launch into her next tirade. ‘And I don’t think this particular conversation needs to be continued out in the middle of the street any longer, especially in front of the, er, children.’
The children had gathered in the short drive to Tall Trees and all looked disappointed when Roger swiftly held an elbow to walk a now-deflated Maureen hurriedly into Tall Trees and on into his study, as they’d been rather taken by Maureen’s salty turn of phrase.
Roger asked Mabel to fetch a glass of water for both Maureen and Peggy, and then he told Maureen to sit down.
