London Transports

by Maeve Binchy

  Joseph wondered if he could come and call at her bed-sitter sometime. Vera agreed and asked him for afternoon tea the following Saturday. The sunlight caught the beautiful china, and the gentle highlights in Vera’s hair, and the shining wood of the one small table…and Joseph’s eyes filled with tears. He started to apologize for being forty-five, and to excuse himself for his arrogance in supposing that a beautiful young girl could possibly…She let him babble on for some minutes and then just as he was about to retract everything he had said from sheer embarrassment, she laid a finger on his lips and said:

  “Don’t say any more, Joseph. I should love to see your dream house in Finsbury Park, and we’ll make it the most wonderful palace in the world.”

  She had heard dialogue a little like that in some old movie, and it seemed right for the occasion. It was indeed. Utterly right. The months passed in a flurry of inspecting the house, giving in her notice at the hotel, accepting a small marriage settlement from Joseph, a complete refusal on her part to have anything to do with her family, a quiet wedding, an undemanding honeymoon in the sunshine of the South of France, and then Vera’s apprenticeship ended and her life began.

  The small scullery attached to the great kitchen in Finsbury Park became her headquarters. Here she sat and studied the plans, here she returned after great measuring trips around the rooms, here she studied fabrics, paint charts, samples of tiles, wood pieces. It was in this scullery that the catalogues began to mount up as she debated, and wondered, and frowned, and pouted, and looked at the first ones again. Joseph began to fret after a few weeks.

  “Is it proving too much for you, my little darling?” he asked anxiously. “You know we can have a designer, and a consultant if you like. Someone who will take the donkey work from you.”

  “Donkey work?” cried Vera in genuine amazement. “But this is the best bit. This is what we want, to decide it ourselves, to have it perfect. To have a perfect house which we get for ourselves!” Her eyes looked almost wild with enthusiasm, so Joseph decided not to point out that they slept on a bed in a bedroom and ate meals in the little scullery while a fourteen-room house awaited them. It was like a naked house waiting to be dressed.

  It got dressed. Amazingly slowly. It took months for the painting, months for the curtains, the furniture to build up. Two years went by and it still looked as if they had just moved in. Joseph was deeply disappointed.

  He worked hard all day as a company lawyer. He had thought that his life had taken a new and almost miraculous turn when the flowerlike Vera had agreed to marry him. True, his evenings were less lonely than when he lived in the hotel. But they were a lot less comfortable. In the hotel he had room to rest, to relax, room to work. In the hotel he had excellent food. At home, in the future palace, he had no room. He lived from a box in their bedroom, since Vera would allow no furniture anywhere until it had been finally agreed and settled and each item took months. The cooking was negligible since they had to wait for all the equipment to be installed. Vera didn’t seem interested in food, she didn’t seem to think he needed it either. She rushed to greet him on his return each day with a peck on the cheek and a sheaf of leaflets and swathes of fabric.

  “Oh there you are, my dear. Dearest, so you think this flower is too large. I’m not quite certain, I’m almost certain but not quite.”

  He began to try and guess what she wanted him to say, but knew that he had to give the pretence of ruminating over it, otherwise she would not be satisfied. Often, faint with tiredness and hunger after two hours of studying design, he wondered whether she might in fact be having some kind of nervous trouble that he hadn’t noticed before. Then he would banish the thought guiltily, and tell himself that he was a selfish swine to expect his young wife to have a glass of scotch ready, a meal cooking, and a lively interest in his day.

  Sometimes he called at the hotel and ate before he came home. Vera never seemed to mind. Yes, of course she had plenty to eat, she made herself cups of soup and sandwiches, she said vaguely.

  Joseph’s hope that they would have children was also doomed. It was a long time before he realized that Vera had been taking the contraceptive pill. All this time he had been hoping that she would tell him she had conceived.

  “But, darling, we can’t think of children in this beautiful house. I mean how could you have children with this wallpaper?” Her hands caressed the wallpaper almost sensuously.

  “But not ever?” gasped Joseph, shocked.

  “Perhaps sometime,” Vera said, distantly aware she might have gone a little too far.

  Vera was twenty-eight, they had been five years married when he dared to say to her that the house was perfect. He had admired every single item, rearranged every piece of furniture with her, and now he hoped that the endless business was over. To his increasing alarm he noted that she didn’t seem too anxious to spoil the kitchen by cooking, and she didn’t want to fade the colors in the sitting room by letting the light in. There was no comfortable fug in the study she had designed for him, because she begged him not to have the heating too high lest it blister the paint. His cigar smoking was done outside his own home.

  That was the unhappiest year of Joseph’s life because he now realized that the completion of the house did not signal the start of a normal life together. Her attractive face was still bent over magazines and fabric charts. They had never entertained anyone. He had taken his mother, an elderly woman, there once…for a drink before Sunday lunch. Vera said she couldn’t possibly cook a huge Sunday roast if they were to show the kitchen at its best.

  “But why do we have to show it at its best?” he begged.

  “Why spend all this time and money unless we want things at their best?” she answered.

  He hoped that if he got her some regular help she might become more relaxed about it. Together they interviewed seventeen applicants, the wages he offered were high. Eventually she settled on a Filipino girl with as much interest in the house as she had herself. Together they cleaned and polished all day. Together Vera and the little Filipino washed wood-work, and held the fitments of glass lights in soft dusters, rubbing gently till they shone. The little girl from Manila saved every penny she earned, and drank packet soups with Vera all day to keep up her strength. At night she went to her own room and watched a portable television. Vera had bought her this in order to keep her at home. She told Joseph that if Anna went out at night she would lose her energy for polishing.

  Joseph suggested a cook as well, but Vera asked why did they want someone to mess the place up. She would however like a daily woman to do the heavy work so that Anna and she could be free to do the finer chores.

  The cleaning woman came five days a week. She thought Vera was daft and told her so. Vera didn’t even listen. She certainly didn’t feel insulted.

  “If you don’t like the job and the money, I’ll get someone else,” she said reasonably, without any offense in her voice.

  The cleaning woman was called Mrs. Murray, and she lived in a block of flats not at all unlike the ones where Vera had grown up. Sometimes Mrs. Murray, feeling a bit sorry for this poor madwoman she worked for, would tell tales of Life in the Buildings. Vera’s face contorted with near spasms. She almost ran from the room if Mrs. Murray began to evoke the life and sounds.

  “Please, Mrs. Murray, I beg you, go on with your work. I don’t want to delay you. Another time.”

  Behind her back Anna and Mrs. Murray pointed to their own foreheads and shook their heads.

  “I think she must have had nothing when she was young,” said Mrs. Murray one day in a burst of confidence to Anna.

  “I always think she very wealthy lady,” said Anna.

  “Wouldn’t you feel sorry for her old man?” Mrs. Murray went on. “He’d be better off down with us, coming in to a bit of a laugh and a good meat pie, and a block of ice cream with a glass of port after it, and his slippers. I think that’s what he’d prefer, to tell you the God’s honest truth.”

  Anna gave
it some thought.

  “Yes, and when I think of my family back in Manila…where there is little money…and little food and little furniture…but when the father comes in…all stops and there is smiling and welcoming and he is an important man.”

  Mrs. Murray nodded sagely.

  Outside the door, where she had paused not to eavesdrop but to polish the corner of a picture frame which had escaped them all, Vera stood and listened. Her body was flooded with a great pity for them. Two poor women, not much older than herself. One from a drunken Irish family, living now in slum conditions in a London council flat, one a poor Asiatic whose family and country were so wretched they had to export her to clean floors and send them back her wages.

  And these two women pitied her. Vera gave a high-pitched little laugh at the wonderful way that nature allows people to bear their burdens so easily by considering themselves better off than others. Happily she moved from the door and knelt down to examine the ball and claw feet of the table, which were known for their ability to trap dust.

  Highbury & Islington

  * * *

  “I hope you’ll like them all,” he said for the fourth time.

  “Oh, I’m sure I will,” said Heather without looking up.

  “I think you’ll get on with them,” he said, anxiously biting his lip.

  Heather raised her eyes from the magazine.

  “I said I’m sure I will, funny face. Even if I don’t it’s not the end of the world. They don’t have to live with me, I don’t have to live with them.” Cheerfully she leaned over and kissed him on the nose. Then she took off her shoes, settled her feet in his lap, and applied herself seriously to her magazine. A very colourful-looking one with a lot of Sin and Passion and Frenzy in capital letters on the cover.

  Adam hoped that she might have finished the magazine and, better still, have thrown it away before they got home. He could see his mother’s amazement—Frenzy and Sin magazines weren’t forbidden at home, it was just that nobody would contemplate buying them. He could imagine his sister’s sarcastic comments. Louise was always a little sardonic about strangers but he felt unhappily that Heather might give plenty of ammunition.

  “A trifle bookish I see, your Heather?” Louise would shout as she retrieved the offending magazine. And, oh God, would Heather relax so thoroughly that she would actually sit in her stockinged feet as she was doing now?

  Adam looked out of the train window and fixed his face in what he hoped was a calm, pleasant expression while he tried to work out some of the more glaring problems which faced him at the weekend. He had explained to Heather that there could be no question of sharing a bed under his mother’s roof. She had accepted it good-naturedly.

  “No point in terrorizing the poor old darling, is there? I’ll wait until they’ve all had their Ovaltine, then I’ll slip along to wherever you are.”

  He had even managed to tell her that this would not do either. He painted a picture of a home with three women, Mother, Louise, and old Elsie; this was the first time any guest had been invited to stay; there would be enormous excitement. There would be amazing scrutiny. Heather had sounded disbelieving but shrugged.

  “Well, two nights’ denial won’t kill us.”

  Adam had read a lot about love before he had met Heather. He knew only too well that love was often unreturned—as in the case of his loving Jane Fonda for a while. She had simply been unaware of his existence. And nearer home there had been a severe case of unreturned love when he had yearned for that stuck-up girl in the dramatic society. Of course he, too, had been loved, by that mousy friend of Louise’s, the quiet little girl with the irritating cough and nervous laugh. She had loved Adam for a bit and was always pretending that she had been given two theatre tickets and asking him would he like to come to plays with her. He hadn’t loved her even a little bit.

  Heather was his first experience of Real Love, and Adam frowned as he looked into people’s houses from the train window. Real love often ran into problems, well, from Romeo and Juliet onwards. There were cases of families refusing to countenance young lovers. He didn’t think this would happen at home. Mother and Louise wouldn’t summon old Elsie from the kitchen and face him with an ultimatum. It would be very different and much harder to take…they would laugh at Heather, and ridicule his taste. In little ways they would call attention to her shortcomings; they would assume that she was a tasteless little dalliance on his part. They couldn’t know that he loved her and wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

  He moved her feet slightly, she looked up and smiled at him over her torrid magazine.

  “Dreaming?” she asked him affectionately.

  “A bit,” he said, and felt a wave of disloyalty flooding him. Love wasn’t meant to be like this, it had nothing to do with trying to get two sets of people to make allowances, to change, to bend in order to accommodate each other. Love was meant to be straightforward. If things got in the way of love, then the Lover had to remove them, honestly and with integrity and dignity. The Lover wasn’t meant to sit gnawing his fingers about the confrontation of those that he loved.

  He had known Heather for a year and he had loved her for eight months, but this was the first time he had ever raised enough courage to take her home for a weekend. It hadn’t been easy.

  “But of course you can have a friend to stay, darling,” Mother had said. “Who is he? Anyone we know?” Mother had an idea that she might know anyone of substance in London. Among the twelve million people Adam could meet, she felt sure that the one chosen to be a friend might be someone she knew.

  “A girl. How dramatic!” screamed Louise, pretending to be a Victorian Lady overcome with shock. Adam could have wrung her neck with pleasure. “Is she a debutante? Do tell, do tell.”

  Adam had explained that Heather had a bed-sitting room in the same house in Islington. He did not go into the fact that for the past few months they actually shared the same bed-sitting room so as to save rent. To the eager faces of Mother and Louise, and of Elsie, who had come in from the kitchen at the noise of all the excitement, he announced that she really was just a friend, and that he would love to invite her for a weekend. He begged them not to ask people around for sherry on Sunday morning. He implored Elsie not to give the place a through spring cleaning before young Mr. Adam’s young lady came; he said that honestly Louise shouldn’t save her supper party for the tennis club people until Heather arrived. Short of going on bended knees, he couldn’t have done more to ask for a quiet, normal weekend. It had, of course, been useless.

  It was only natural that they should be so interested in his doings, Adam thought, forgiving them, loving them for caring so much. Since Father died he was the only man in their life; Louise was too bookish, too brisk for men. Well, she was nineteen and had never shown any real interest in men. She worked in the local library, she never mentioned boyfriends. She couldn’t have any secretly, could she? After all she lived at home. Every second weekend Adam arrived home to the Sussex town and told them tales about his life in London. The work in the bank, his prospects. His squash games, his walks on the heath. The little pub theatres he went to, his French classes preparing for big banking opportunities in the EEC.

  He mentioned lots of friends by name, but never Heather. He said nothing about the discos they went to on the Saturdays he stayed in London. He thought Mother might find discos a bit, well, lower class, and Louise would ask in her penetrating voice, “But why, Adam, why do people go to rooms with loud music and funny lights which eventually ruin their eyesight—I mean, do they enjoy it, Adam?” He told Elsie that he was learning a little bit more about cooking, but he didn’t explain that it was Heather who taught him, Heather who said, “I made the supper last night, you’ll bloody do it tonight, mate, or I’ll find myself a bloke who believes in equality.”

  His worlds were so different that he had put off for as long as he could the date when they had to be brought together. Adam who sat down with a linen table
napkin to tasteless, overcooked, plain food served from cracked china plates behind heavy net curtains…and Adam who sat on the bed with a great wooden bowl of highly spiced chilli, a bottle of red wine on the floor, his arm around Heather as they laughed and watched television. In the summer evenings the window of their basement flat was often open for all to see…. He could hardly believe they were the same person.

  Heather had invited him to her home several times. Her stepfather had asked Adam for a loan of a pound on each occasion and Heather had cheerfully shouted at him not be so daft. On one occasion Adam had secretly slipped the man a pound, hoping to buy his affection, but in fact it only worsened relations between them, as Heather had said it would. Heather’s mother was a hardworking Scot. She looked Adam up and down and said she hoped that he was a man who could hold down a day’s work. Adam explained nervously that although he was still a lowly bank official he was indeed a regular worker and had great ambitions. Heather’s mother said she approved of that because she herself had been unlucky in that she had married two wasters and two scroungers and two men who would drink the Thames Estuary dry if they got a chance. “There were only two altogether, Mam,” Heather had said laughing. “She always makes it sound as if there were six!”

  Adam couldn’t understand the casual bond that held the mother to her daughter. It wasn’t love, it had nothing to do with duty. There was no need involved, it didn’t seem to matter whether Heather went home for months or not. There were no recriminations, no interrogations. There didn’t even seem to be a great deal of interest. Heather’s mother could hardly remember the name of the department store where Heather worked. Adam marvelled at that; Mother and Louise and Elsie knew the name of every under-manager and a great many of the customers in his bank.

  Heather had always seemed amused about his tales of home. But then, Adam wondered with mounting horror as the train was taking them ever nearer, had he told accurate tales? Had he let her know just how very formal Mother could be? Heather hadn’t thought of taking a gift for the weekend, so Adam had bought a potted plant.