by Maeve Binchy
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 riff-raff 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 street lamp, 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 realised 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 school teacher 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. Mi
ss 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 enquiries 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 goodbye.
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 recognising 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 only had a tiny bed-sitter.
Joseph wondered if he could come and call at her bed-sitter some time. 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 apologise 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 flower-like 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, do 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 realised 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 colours 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 realised 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.
