by Rose Tremain
My Mum wasn’t too interested in chronometers, actually. But I don’t think it was that. I mean, you wouldn’t leave someone because they weren’t interested in something, would you? I think it was definitely the other girl he met. She was some sort of secretary at the engineering works where he worked. I only saw her once, but I think she was quite kind of posh an’ spoke all terrific an’ wore skirts with linings in them. Know the type I mean? She wasn’t specially pretty or anything. Not that I could see. But she was lots younger than my Mum. I’d say she was twenty-eight or nine. And I think she hypnotised Eddie by being this different kind of person and he’d come home and start correcting my Mum’s grammar. And my Mum got scared. I mean, this was the pitiful thing. She got frightened she’d say things wrong. She wanted her grammar to be better, to please Eddie. And food. He bought my Mum a book called French Cooking Explained. She tried to do things from it for a bit till she sussed the flippin’ insult in all that. Then she put the book in the oven and the oven caught fire and that was the first time I ever saw Eddie really angry with her. I heard him yelling at her and I came down and the kitchen was covered with white stuff from the fire extinguisher, and then my Mum rushed past me and up to the toilet and sicked up. I think she knew that was the end with Eddie. I don’t think she’d heard about the girl at work by then. But she knew it was all over for her. I mean, you do, I think. Don’t you think? One minute you don’t know and then another one minute passes and that’s the crucial one, like going into a ghost train, know what I mean? Like this one minute is much longer than even longer, darker things like ghost trains. D’you get it? I got it there and then. I could see that was the crucial minute and our lives wouldn’t go on like they were.
My Mum blames Eddie. She thinks she’s finished now. She’s only forty-four. Eddie left some socks and things behind and she burned these in the yard. I started going off her when she did this. Up till then, I’d felt really sorry for her. I’d hear her crying through the wall. I used to make a tray of tea and go and sit on her bed. Waste of time though. She’d just snivel about ‘getting even’ and I went off her when she’d start on this. ’Cos it’s Eddie’s life as well as hers, isn’t it? Like in my case it’s Alan’s life as well as mine. Least, that’s what I’ve had to tell myself. No one’s got control. You can be a king of somewhere or the head of a billion-pound corporation or whatever and still get clobbered. Only thing is you’ve got money if you’re a king or something or the head of a billion-pound whatsit. So you can go to art college. Providing they’ll take you. You don’t have to write begging letters to people. And you’ve got O-levels.
My Maths got terrible. I’d relied on Eddie, hadn’t I? I couldn’t get myself to think in spirals or whatever. I lost the knack. So I knew I wouldn’t get Maths O. Not even a C or something. I could have got biology because my drawings were good, I mean they looked professional and the drawings are half of it with biology: cross-section of the broad bean, mucor heads, habitat of the brown water beetle . . . I don’t know about Eng Lit. I might have got it. As You Like It we did. Alan told me As You Like It is quite an important play, but I kept thinking, I don’t know what they’re doing exactly.
I think I’m attracted to people who want to help me. Or they’re attracted to me. Alan wanted to help me. I went to get my Mum out of the pub one night, ’cos she couldn’t move. She was sitting in a corner, sweating. She used to dribble when she got to this state. Dribble and burp and sometimes sick up. Now I can’t stand to see a person drunk. Specially her. I run a mile. I can’t go near them or touch them. Alan helped me out with her. I got her to bed and Alan stayed. I don’t mean he forced himself on me. I mean, what I did was talk. Like I’m talking to you, but better, because I was deeply attracted to Alan. I mean I’d had some boys, Badger Reid from school and Billy Tansley who thought he was Don Juan ’cos he’d got a second-hand Suzuki! But they were for laughs. Rubbish! Alan was older, see. I mean he was a mature man.
He had this cottage. It’s called Green End. It’s down a track, miles from anything. He thinks the world of it. He says if he lived in town, he’d wind up killing someone. I don’t think he likes people. He likes women. He’s a very attractive man.
He didn’t seduce me or anything. It was five or something in the morning when I shut up talking and he just lay me down where we were in front of the fire in the front room. I was wearing my school skirt and he came all over it so as not to come inside me. He said coming on my skirt was the most exciting sexual experience he’d ever had. Men say these things, don’t they? They say things to make you feel special. I mean, I know that now, but I didn’t exactly know it then. So I’ve learned something haven’t I? Means it wasn’t all just a waste.
Alan had this handmade kiln in his garden. He’d built it himself, brick by brick. It was fate he was in the pub that one night, because he didn’t go out hardly ever. He stayed at Green End and did his pottery. He let me make a pot once, but it was rubbish. He had a university degree from Oxbridge. I knew Oxbridge was two places by the time I met Alan, but I used to think they were one place. I don’t think my Mum even knows what Oxbridge is! If you said, what’s Oxbridge, Mum? she’d say something like stock cubes. Eddie once told me she was ignorant. Eddie said it was sad when young people got older not knowing anything. He tried to make me promise I’d go on to A-levels and get to university if I could. He said qualifications were everything these days.
My Mum got ill that night after Alan came. I had to stay home from school and try to stop her drinking, the doctor said. What a laugh, eh? I had to stop her going out to buy beer. Fat chance. She was down the off-licence soon as she could stand up, then down the pub. She looked like death. Like a suet roly-poly. She wasn’t cared, though, was she? An’ she never give me a thought, what I’d done for her. I mean, the day Eddie left, she lost interest in me.
Billy Tansley gave me a lift on his bike to Alan’s place. Charged me a quid for the ride, greedy little bugger. Nothing’s for nothing, he said. Wanted to charge me another quid for promising not to tell where I was, but I wasn’t playing. You tell the whole effing street, if you want to, Billy, I said.
Alan got really excited when he saw me arrive. I mean, to have me coming to him and asking him to help me just gave him a gigantic hard-on. I’d put my uniform on again and I’d washed and ironed the skirt and he just grabbed me by the shoulders the minute he saw me and took me into his kitchen and fucked me against his fridge. You could hear bottles or something falling over inside the fridge ’cos we jogged it so hard. And I thought, God, this guy’s the most fantastic person. I mean passionate. I mean, I got him really hyped up, you know, like a desperate animal.
He loved cooking, Alan. He made this terrific vegetarian thing for me the first evening I was there. He said I had beautiful breasts. He wanted me to eat his meal with my tits showing. He told me he had dreams of girls like me when he was married. He said they got in the way of normal marital relations. He said actually these dreams had destroyed his marriage.
His bed was really good, not like normal beds. He had Indian hangings on it and the sheets smelled like he’d been waving josticks over them. I really liked that bed. The nights I spent in it were the best of my life. I used to come all the time. I mean, he knew what to do. He’d been married. He wasn’t like Billy Tansley or Badger Reid, those babies. And he came masses. After the first times, he didn’t bother getting out when he came. He said to come inside me was the realisation of ten years of dreaming.
I don’t know why I go on about him, I mean how wonderful he was and everything. I don’t know why I’m telling you all these private sexual things. I mean, I should have forgotten him, that’s what everyone says. I shouldn’t keep letting myself remember. But it’s not exactly remembering. I mean, all those things I had with Alan are just there, they’re still in me if you know what I mean? I still wake up and think, it can’t have happened, what did happen. I still sometimes think I’m in that bed and then we’ll have this day in front of us, the k
ind of day when Alan works at his pottery and I’m just there adoring him, like I was his wife or something . . .
It was a long way to school from Green End. I used to bike it on Alan’s bike when I felt like it. But I’d gone right off work and off the other girls. I mean, they used to say crap like ‘Billy Tansley told us you got a sugar-daddy, Marigold.’ And you should have seen the rubbish they were going with! Those schoolboys couldn’t make anyone feel like a woman. They couldn’t make a woman feel like a woman! They were wankers. Didn’t know a thing about passion. So I felt superior. Who wouldn’t? Only thing I got better at at school was Eng Lit. Alan knew masses about Shakespeare. He knew what everything meant. He explained As You Like It to me from beginning to end. No, I got bloody cheesed off with school, though. Bossy teachers. Girls boasting about their spotty blokes. I was ready to give it up, except Alan kept saying just what Eddie had said – got to stick it out at school till you get the exams. And I think they were right. I regret it now that I had to pack it in.
My Mum turned up one day. She looked a bit better, but she wasn’t. She’s on the booze now an’ that’s it. I thought, go on, Ma, do the mother bit. Tell your daughter she’s filth. Tell her she’s sweet sixteen and chucking her life away on a man of thirty-eight. I was wrong, though. She’d just come for a look. Alan made her a cup of tea and I could tell she was watching her grammar. He impressed her alright. She’d never met anyone like him. I think maybe she even fancied him, ’cos she started on about herself, telling him what a beauty she’d been before she got fat. But she disgusted him. He’d seen her that night in the pub. He thought she was awful, the pits. He pushed her out after we’d had the tea and she looked really hurt like as if she wanted to be invited to stay.
I never thought I’d wind up back with her. You bloody learn though, don’t you? You think you’ve got something made. I did. I mean, I had in a way. If I’d been older and known more about everything and if I’d layed off a bit and not been the kind of slave I was to Alan, then he might have, well, you know, fallen in love with me. I don’t say he would. I mean, when I think about it, I realise I’m not clever enough for a man like that, and they want more than sex after a while, they want you to know things and recognise famous paintings and understand Shakespeare and decide how you’re going to vote and things like that. He liked my drawings, though. He said I could be a good artist if I got a better understanding of why I drew things the way I do. I never thought that aspect was important in drawing, but perhaps it is. If I went to art school, they’d help me with this, wouldn’t they? I dunno. Don’t suppose I’ll ever get there, anyway. You’ve got to have A-level for art school, haven’t you? It’s not just a question of the money.
I thought of telling Lady Falkender about the baby. I think I need to talk to someone in a letter or something because quite often I feel clobbered by all that and I start to go down like I am now and not wash or eat or take care of myself. I don’t cry. I just think about it and then I get this drained feeling, like being numb and losing touch with gravity or something. I hardly told anyone at the time. I mean, I told Alan because I told him I don’t mind having it if it’s yours and mine, in fact I’d love to have a little baby and care for it. But he didn’t want it. He didn’t even want to hear about it and he gave me this long lecture about his wife who spent nine years trying to have a baby and how she came almost to full term twice and then had miscarriages and how she suffered. It was like he hated me for wanting the baby his wife had wanted. He’d gone off me a bit after my Mum came, but now he went off me really. I’d hang around him, hoping we could make love and he’d be like he’d been at the beginning, all hot an’ that. I’d put my uniform on and go and kiss him on the mouth and push myself against him. Sometimes we’d fuck, but he didn’t kiss me or hold me afterwards. He’d fuck with his eyes shut, like he’d get turned off if he looked at me.
He arranged everything. He got me an appointment with some Pregnancy Advice Group. He said, don’t worry, Marigold, I’ll see you through the actual abortion. But it was finished by then. He despised me. He thought I was stupid to have got pregnant. He said it was the fault of my upbringing. He said the working classes were still miles behind, specially the women, just stupid and ignorant.
His wife’s back with him now. I biked out to see him just the one time when the thing was over, the termination I mean. I suppose I thought, if I can’t have his baby, perhaps I can still have him. I don’t know what made me think this. You’re naive at sixteen, I guess. You hope for things you’ll never get, I mean probably never get in your whole lifetime. But I thought, I’ve done what he wanted, got rid of the baby, so he owes me something. But there was this woman there. Someone about his age or a bit younger. She was ever so slim and she walked like she’d once been a dancer. I hadn’t a clue who she was. She just came out and stared at me and said, ‘I’m Alan’s wife. What do you want?’ I could have told her, couldn’t I? I mean I could have just given it to her, the nights I’d been there and the baby and those dreams of schoolgirls he’d confessed. I could have let her have it all. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. It was like when Eddie left our home. You couldn’t have made him change his mind.
And I know I’ve got to get on now. Look at me. I look terrible, don’t I? My Mum says there’s a job going at the turkey place where she works an’ I ought to try to get it. I hate turkeys and meat of any kind. It’s probably gone by now, anyway, the job. And I get depressed about not getting my O-levels. I mean, there was a time when I could have got Maths even, and I can imagine Eddie being ever so pleased and taking us out for a celebration at the Wimpey. I don’t feel rancour, though. I mean, like I said, it’s Eddie’s life, isn’t it, and Alan’s life and you’ve got to make the best of what’s left. Otherwise you just go down. And I don’t want to go down, but I wish Lady Falkender would write to me. I mean, I’ve got hopes of that ’cos I think she’s the kind of person who might understand. I could be wrong though. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.
Autumn in Florida
‘Special security passes,’ said the travel agent to George, ‘are needed for anyone staying at Palmetto Village. I shall require a passport-sized photograph of both you and your wife. These will be forwarded to Palmetto, together with your reservation documents, photostats of the first five pages of your passports – to include, of course, your US visa – and a signed statement by a professional person – doctor, solicitor or JP, say, – vouching both for the likeness of the photographs and for your suitability as a Palmetto resident.’
It was July in Ipswich and stifling in the travel agent’s stuffy premises. George loosened his tie and prepared to comment that this seemed like a lot of unnecessary fuss and paraphernalia and red tape and smacked, furthermore, of the CIA, but sighed instead and nodded and thought, the central purpose of this holiday is recovery – recovery from mediocrity, recovery from my everyday self – so I must make absolutely certain that all the arrangements go smoothly and that nothing upsets me. ‘Fine,’ he snapped.
While the travel agent’s fingers began a repetitive waltz with his Compu-108, George picked up the Palmetto brochure. He’d owned an identical one since January and knew the pictures in it by heart: palm-fringed pale and empty beach, palm-fringed yachts jostling for space at a clean and sparkling marina, palm-fringed 18-hole golf course, ‘exclusive to Palmetto residents’, palm-fringed riverside nightclub hung with orange mandarin lamps, palm-fringed Palmetto Village itself, clusters of pale pink Mexican-style apartments, white umbrellas on rooves and balconies, oleander and hibiscus and Cana lilies framing the buildings not only with bright pink and orange, but also, in George’s mind, with certainty. This was no mock-up, no deception: this was the tropical land limb where presidents sipped at brief idleness. While the driving October rains brought down the oak leaves and flooded the Suffolk ditches, here would George be, renewing himself.
*
George’s wife, Beryl, had said at Christmas, it’s been a bad year. What you
mean, offered George, is you haven’t got used to Jennifer being married and not here any more. No, said Beryl, I haven’t, but it’s not only that.
George understood. He sat in his office at the Wakelin All Saints branch of the Mercantile and General Bank, sipped the weak coffee he had taught his secretary to make and decided, Beryl knows I’ve been passed over. There’s no fooling Beryl. She’s heard me murmur about the managership and even though I haven’t told her they’ll bring a younger man in, she knows they will, a younger man from Head Office probably, cutting his razor-sharp teeth on the Wakelin All Saints branch.
The Wakelin All Saints branch of the Mercantile and General Bank occupied a low, Tudor building that had once been two workers’ cottages. Rescued from years of decay in the sixties by a hairdresser called Maurice, they had given brief but unlikely houseroom to backwash basins, driers, mirror tables, infra-red lamps and black imitation leather chairs. But Wakelin All Saints was, as Maurice was forced eventually to point out, ‘a far cry from Upper Brook Street’. His dream of combining his hairdressing skill with his yearning for silence and home-grown mange-tout peas collapsed in 1971 and Mercantile and General snapped up his premises. Maurice moved to Billericay, George was installed at Wakelin All Saints as assistant manager. Maurice was thirty-five and a sadder man; George was then forty-nine and optimistic.
