London Transports

by Maeve Binchy

  Pat had an appointment with the hairdresser on the afternoon of the Terrible Day.

  “Going somewhere nice?” asked the hairdresser in her bright, routine way.

  “Err…yes,” said Pat.

  “Oh, to a function is it?” asked the hairdresser.

  “Um. No, no. Not a function. Private house. Old friends, and new friends. A party. An ordinary party,” Pat screamed defensively.

  The hairdresser shrugged.

  “Very nice, I’m sure,” she said huffily.

  The baby-sitter arrived on time. Pat had hoped that she might ring and say she couldn’t come. That would mean the end of this ludicrous outing across London to copulate with strangers. The only tingles of excitement she felt were the ones which ran through her brain asking her if she were certifiably insane.

  Debbie and Danny barely looked up from the television.

  “Good night, Mum. Good night, Dad. Come in and see us when you get back.”

  Pat’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Stuart love…” she began.

  “Good night, you lot,” Stuart said firmly.

  She had assumed that they would take the car and was startled when Stuart said that it was much simpler than driving to take the tube.

  “Only one change,” he said. And to Pat the words seemed sinister and fraught with meaning. She wondered if he was saying that they would only swap with one couple when they got there. She felt nausea rise in her throat. Suppose it was like a dance in the tennis club years ago, when nobody asked you to dance and you ended up grateful for some awful person who eventually did suggest a shuffle around the floor. Could this happen tonight? Suppose some appalling, foul couple rejected by everyone else nodded encouragingly at them? Would they have to say yes? Did the house rules say that there was no opting out?

  “Yes, but wouldn’t it be nice to have the car coming home?” she asked.

  “Mightn’t feel like driving on the way back,” said Stuart succinctly.

  Worn out with pleasure? Exhausted? Asleep on some strange other wife’s bosom? Going home with someone else? Staying with the awful woman in Seven Sisters? What could he mean, he mightn’t feel like driving? The whole nightmare was now quite frightening. Why had she ever agreed to this wicked and silly thing? Why had Stuart ever suggested it?

  The tube came immediately, as trains always do when you are going to the dentist or a wife-swapping party. The stations flashed by. Stuart read the back of someone else’s evening paper. Pat examined her face three times in her compact mirror.

  “You look fine,” Stuart said to her when she got the compact out a fourth time.

  “I suppose you’re right. Anyway, it’s not my face they’ll be looking at,” she said resignedly.

  “What? Oh. Oh yes,” said Stuart, smiling supportively, and going back to reading the late football results.

  “Do you think we’ll take off our clothes immediately?” Pat asked wretchedly as they walked out of the station and towards the house.

  “I don’t know, I expect it depends on whether they have central heating,” Stuart said matter-of-factly.

  Pat looked at him as if he were a total stranger.

  “Did she give you any indication of how many people were going to be there?” Pat asked shrilly after another minute of walking. “I mean, they’re not very big houses. They can hardly have dozens.”

  “No, she said just a few friends,” said Stuart. “A few friends, she didn’t say how many.”

  “But we’re not friends, we’re sort of intruding on them in a way, aren’t we?” she begged. There were tears in her eyes. They were only one corner away from the house now. Right-turn that and they were in the road and there was no going back.

  Stuart looked at her, moved by the tears he could hear in her voice.

  “It’ll be lovely, Pat dear. You’ll love it. You’re always a bit nervous at times like this.”

  She looked at him, her eyes flashing.

  “What do you mean at times like this? What ‘times like this’ have there been before? When have we done anything remotely like this. It’s the only time like this…” To her horror, she burst into tears.

  Stuart looked very distressed. He tried to touch her, to put his arm around her, but Pat pushed him away.

  “No, stop saying it’s all right, and that I’ll love it. I’ll hate it. I’m not going. That’s final.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say this before? Why did you wait until we’re nearly there?” Stuart asked, his innocent, round face looking both foolish and puzzled at the same time. “I can’t understand why you didn’t say to me that you thought it wasn’t on, then we’d never have set it all up. I thought you wanted to come too.”

  Pat gave a snort into her tissues.

  “You said it sounded an adventurous thing…” he said.

  Pat coughed loudly.

  “You said we’d try it once and if we didn’t like it we’d have got it out of our system,” he went on.

  Pat blew her nose.

  “Why, love? Why have you changed your mind now? Just tell me. We’ll do whatever you want to. We won’t go if you really hate the idea. Just tell me.”

  Pat looked at him through her red eyes. His face was indeed very round and innocent. She wondered that she had never noticed that before. He was simply another disappointed young bank clerk. Another man in a dead-end job, with an average wife, a few drinks on a Saturday, two nice but time-consuming and money-swallowing children, a car that needed a lot of money spent on it, or else needed to be replaced. They had a loan of a trailer each year, but he would never feel the sands of the West Indies or the Seychelles between his toes.

  She began to speak and then stopped. She must be very careful now. It was as if he had been a negative, and now somebody had shown her the developed print. She could see all the frustrations, the hours of commuting, the thickening of his waist. Those things were far from the James Bond or Wild West books he read for a half hour before he went to sleep each night.

  A surge of understanding went out from her. He just needed some excitement, something out of the ordinary, some proof that he wasn’t a mouse, that he was going to do something daring in his life before he grew old and retired and walked with a stick and crumpled and died.

  Quite calmly she looked at him and said:

  “I’m jealous. That’s it. That’s the truth.”

  “You’re what?” he said.

  “I don’t want them to have you, to see you. I don’t want those girls to…you know, make free with you. I’d be very jealous. I love you. I don’t want them loving you.”

  “But, Pat,” he said desperately. “We’ve been through all this; it’s got nothing to do with love. It’s got to do with swapping. It’s got to do with excitement, and frontiers…and not doing the same things always…till the end of our days.”

  She had been right. She resolved that she would do everything her feeble imagination and some sex manuals could dream up if only they got home unscathed from Seven Sisters.

  “You’re too great,” she said hesitantly. They didn’t use flowery endearments, they never paid each other extravagant compliments. It was hard to begin on a street in the middle of the evening in North London on the way to a wife-swapping orgy. But people have to begin somewhere.

  “You’re too…important. Too precious, and exciting. I love it when we…er…screw. I don’t want other women to share it. It’s my…er, pleasure.”

  “Do you love it?” he asked innocently.

  “Oh I do.” She closed her eyes, a sigh of genuine pleasure that she might in fact be going to win escaped her, and it sounded like genuine desire.

  “I didn’t think you minded all that much one way or another,” he said.

  “If you knew how I do,” she said. And then firmly: “But I wouldn’t feel at all the same if you let all these women crawl over you…”

  She paused. It was a calculated risk. In fact she had given little thought to Stuart’s part in the
whole sorry business, she had been obsessed with her own role. But she thought that to say this would have been to confirm Stuart in thinking that he had married parochial, puritan riffraff and that his excitement would be between the covers of books for the rest of his days.

  “I often…er…get panicky in case some of the women who come into the bank might…er, proposition you,” she said.

  Stuart looked at her.

  “There’s no need to worry like that. That’s kind of paranoid that jealousy,” he said soothingly. “I’ve always been faithful to you. Even this business tonight is with you.”

  “I don’t want to share you with them,” she said. “I’m not going to. They’ve got lousy old husbands, awful fellows. I’ve got you. Why should I be so generous?”

  He paused. He looked up the road, he looked down the road. Her eyes never left his face. Down the road won.

  “Suppose we got a couple of kebabs…”

  “And a bottle of wine.”

  As they turned to go back to the station, a middle-aged couple stopped in a car to ask them where the Road was.

  Pat asked them what number they wanted.

  As she had suspected, it was number 17.

  “Have fun,” she said as she gave them directions, and she and Stuart dissolved in laughter.

  “They were a bit old,” said Stuart. “Do you think it would have been very sordid and sort of pathetic?”

  Pat wasn’t going to let him think that.

  “No. There were probably fabulous birds there. Anyway, older ones are more passionate. She’d probably have had you pinned to the hearth rug the moment we got in the door.”

  Under a streetlamp, she thought his face looked a bit foolish. As if he had seen how tatty and grubby it might all have been. He was very gentle. In a great wave of affection she realized that indeed she would not have liked sharing him with anyone, and that an evening in bed with a bottle of wine, and a nice spicy donar kebab and all that black and red underwear might be the most exciting kind of thing that she had experienced for some time as well.

  Women are so much more sensible about sex, she thought cheerfully as Stuart bought the tickets home. She had forgotten the weeks of anxiety, the endless examinations in the mirror, the ceaseless fears lest anyone should discover. Heady with relief, she even allowed herself the indulgence of imagining what that elderly woman in the car might look like naked, and she smiled at Stuart, who looked like a tiger now that his wife was too rabidly jealous to allow him to indulge in the wife-swapping party to which they had been invited. Horizons had been broadened without anyone having to do anything.

  Finsbury Park

  * * *

  Vera hated to see television plays about poverty. She even disliked seeing working-class women, babies in their arms, hair in rollers, explaining some social problem to a concerned television reporter. It reminded her too much of her youth. In those shuffling, whiney women she could see her mother, cigarette always hanging from the corner of her mouth, cardigan held together with a safety pin, the door of the flat never closed since people were always coming in and out, the place smelling of clothes drying…clothes that had not been properly washed so it was really dirty clothes drying.

  Vera hated to hear women laugh loudly, they reminded her of her mother and her elder sister, cackling away when things were at their worst, cheering each other up with bottles of ginger wine and announcing that they would be dead long enough. Vera never liked to think of anything that reminded her about life as it was lived before she was fifteen.

  On her fifteenth birthday she was taken to the hospital with rheumatic fever, and during the long weeks there she got to know Miss Andrews, the gentle schoolteacher in the next bed who changed her life.

  “Ask them to bring you lavender water not sweets.”

  “Ask your school friends for hand cream not comics.”

  “I’ll choose some nice books for you from the library.”

  “We’ll tell the social worker you’d like a hairdo to cheer you up…”

  The Vera who came out of hospital was slimmer and attractive-looking. And she had changed inside too. Miss Andrews had taught her a very important lesson—even awful things and unhappy times can have their uses, they can be a kind of apprenticeship. Vera must stay at school, she must pass some kind of exams even if school was hell and home was worse than hell.

  She had closed her eyes to the dirt and depression around her. She had dreamed of the day she would live in a clean house with no frying pans encrusted with the remains of a thousand meals. She dreamed of having a room to herself where no noise and no shouting could be heard, where no younger sister with nits in her hair would bounce on her bed saying:

  “It’s half my room, you can’t throw me out.”

  “Don’t leave too soon,” Miss Andrews had begged. “Don’t go until you are sure you can support yourself. It would be too depressing to have to return there. That would break your spirit.”

  Vera found it difficult to remember the two years she stayed on in her mother’s flat. She knew that her father must have come home from time to time…the period seemed to be punctuated with screaming and violence. She must have learned something at the school because she had managed to escape with some “O” levels. And during those two years she must have formed the habit of visiting Miss Andrews once a week, some hundred calls must have been made to the quiet apartment with its piano, its dried flowers, its cabinets of china, and its purring Persian cat.

  As an apprenticeship it must have worked, but it was blotted out. By the time Vera had finished, she could type, she could take shorthand, she could spell. Miss Andrews had taught her to smile and to speak nicely. Not in actual lessons, but by example. Vera’s voice was less shrill, her vowels less extreme, her reactions less speedy—so much so that her mother was totally unprepared for her flight from the tenement. It was done without fuss, without argument, and without heed to the pleas.

  “You’ll come back often to see us, you’ll come home every weekend,” begged her mother.

  “Of course,” said Vera, and never did.

  She sent her mother an envelope with a card and a pound in it three times a year, Christmas, birthday, and Mother’s Day. No details of how she was or where she was. No plans about coming back for a visit. No inquiries about the rest of the family. They had no way of telling her when Margaret died. And no way of appealing to her when Colin was lifted by the police. And when the pound had reduced to a fifth of its value she still sent it. Crisp and green, attached by a paper clip to a noncommittal card of good wishes. Once her mother tore it up and threw it into the fire. But Vera was never to know that.

  Miss Andrews had been too genteel, too ladylike to reveal to Vera what she later discovered to be a major truth in life—that money was the solution to almost every problem. If Miss Andrews had known this she hadn’t thought of passing it on, and after Vera had cut her ties with the family she also stopped seeing Miss Andrews. To the teacher she sent more thoughtful cards, and sometimes a lace handkerchief or a little sachet for her drawer. She never said what she was doing or where she was, and soon, or at some time anyway, the lonely teacher put Vera out of her mind. There was a finality about her three-line notes…they said good-bye.

  Throughout her first five years of freedom, which also meant five jobs and five different bed-sitters, Vera still regarded herself as in apprenticeship. There was no time for dalliances like every other girl she worked with seemed to have. There was no money to waste on silly things—the cinema, yes, sometimes, if it was the kind of film that might teach her something, about style, clothes, manners. Mainly British films, American style was too foreign, it might be outrageous, it might not even be style. Lunch hours spent in fashion stores, or in bookshops, reading but not buying the magazines; money, after the rent was paid, spent on evening classes in everything from beginner’s French to grooming.

  Suddenly she was twenty-three, and nicely spoken and well informed and living in an attractive
bed-sitter. She had collected some pretty ornaments, not unlike those that Miss Andrews had in her glass-fronted cabinet. She knew extremely important things about not mixing styles in her decor. She had learned as if by rote some rules of elegant living and if she had ever given herself the opportunity to entertain anyone, she was absolutely confident about how the table should be set and what wines to serve with each course.

  She had never relaxed about her background, and was amazed that other girls, the kind she met at work, would talk so freely about the uncouth habits of their parents…and joke about the vulgarity of their backgrounds. Vera would never be drawn. Once or twice when people did press she said that it hurt her to talk about the past. And people assumed that there had been some tragedy or some unpleasantness and left it at that.

  Because of her interest in china she got a job running the gift shop of a smart hotel and it was here that she met Joseph. Twenty years her senior, with his big anxious eyes and his worried face, he was the ideal catch, one of the giggling receptionists had told her. A lonely widower, no children, pots of money, so broken up after his wife’s death that he had sold the house and moved into a hotel. He had been living in this hotel for three years. He was apparently looking for a wife, since hotel life had its drawbacks. Sometimes he called at her little shop to buy gifts for clients, always she advised him with charm and taste. He was very attracted to her. Soon he managed to find the courage to ask her out. Vera’s own hesitation was genuine. In her effort to become her own version of a lady, she had given very little time to recognizing that she was a woman. She knew little of men, and was very shy on their first few outings. This pleased Joseph more than anything else she could have done…. In a matter of weeks he was telling her of his dream house, but his fears of being lonely in it if he bought it for himself alone. She agreed with him enthusiastically, she thought that a big place was bad if you were alone. That’s why she had only a tiny bed-sitter.