Victoria Line, Central Line

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘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 Filippino girl with as much interest in the house as she had herself. Together they cleaned and polished all day. Together Vera and the little Filippino washed woodwork, and held the fitments of glass lights in soft dusters rubbing gently till they shone. The little girl from Manilla 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 offence 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 Manilla . . . 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 terrorising 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 mousey 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 fri
end 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 débutante? 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 thorough spring clean 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 to 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 hard-working 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.

  ‘You can give that to Mother,’ he had said.

  ‘Why? I don’t know her. She’d think it was silly,’ said Heather.

  ‘No, first time meeting her, she’d think it was nice,’ he insisted. ‘It’s what people do, honestly.’

  ‘You didn’t take a plant to my Mum,’ she said reasonably.

  Adam was furious. He hadn’t taken a plant to Heather’s mother because she lived forty minutes away on the tube, because they had gone there for tea one Saturday, because Heather had said that her mother hated airs and graces and he hadn’t wanted to be considered a young dandy. Now it was being used against him.

  He thought about the kind of weekend they could have had if they had stayed in London. The cinema tonight, perhaps, and a fish and chip supper. Saturday morning poking around antique shops and second-hand stalls. Drink a few pints with some of Heather’s friends at lunchtime . . . the afternoon would pass in a haze of doing up the room they lived in, sweeping the leaves away from the basement gutters; they might carry on with that picture framing; they might go and drink a bottle of wine with other friends until they went to the disco; and instead he had this torture ahead.

  The train stopped and his heart lurched; they couldn’t be there yet. Surely there was another half-hour.

  ‘Are we there?’ Heather yawned and rooted for her shoes. She hadn’t a hint of nervousness or anxiety. She reached for his carefully chosen potted plant.

  ‘Don’t forget your geranium,’ she said.

  They hadn’t arrived, but they had reached a situation which called for their having to change trains. That was how the guard put it.

  ‘Has this one broken down?’ Heather asked him.

  ‘It is a situation where you have to change trains, Madam,’ he said again.

  ‘I’d love it if he was in charge of any crisis,’ grumbled Heather getting out on to the platform. Her eyes lit on the Ladies Room. ‘I’ll take advantage of the change of train situation to have a relief of bladder situation,’ she said happily and scampered off to the lavatory.

  Adam stood glumly wondering why he thought everything that Heather said was funny and endearing at home in London and he thought it was coarse and offensive when he was starting to get into Mother’s orbit. He leaned against a telephone box waiting for Heather to come back from the Ladies and for the next train to come and rescue them. On the opposite platform stood lucky people going to London. They would be there in time to go to a theatre perhaps, they might be salesmen coming home from some conference in Brighton. None of them had forty-eight hours of anxiety lying ahead of them as he did. None of them had to worry about Mother asking Heather, ‘And what school were you at my dear?’ and Louise asking Heather, ‘You mean you actually sell things to the public? Heavens!’, Elsie asking Heather, ‘Would you like Earl Grey or English breakfast in the morning?’ He winced and felt a real pain at the thought of it. And there was no way he could muzzle Heather and ask her to remain completely silent, so she was bound to talk about times when they had both been pissed and to let slip that they had smoked pot, and lived in the same room, and that her father had died in an alcoholics’ home and her stepfather was bankrupt . . .

  Adam heaved a very deep sigh.

  Love was turning out to be full of problems that the poets and the movie makers never spoke of.

  Suddenly he thought he couldn’t stand it. Not now, not yet. He wasn’t ready to take the weekend now. Perhaps later when he and Heather were so sure of each other and
of their happiness that a weekend like this wouldn’t matter. Perhaps later when he didn’t seem like a small boy wet behind the ears to the Mummy and the Sister and the Old Retainer . . . perhaps then Adam’s Bohemian lifestyle and friends would be much more acceptable. Perhaps when he was more of a man.

  He knew he had to act in the next minute if he was going to stop the disastrous visit. A quick phone call . . . he was most most dreadfully sorry but he had just come down with this dreadful flu, and Heather had sent her regrets and would so look forward to meeting Mother and Louise and everyone another time. Yes, yes he could do it now quickly. And to Heather? Well imagine how funny life is! He had just phoned home to explain that they were going to be late and, fancy, Mother had come down with this dreadful flu and had been trying to contact him, could they possibly put off the visit? Then he and Heather had only to cross the platform, jump on a London bound train. In an hour or two they would get off at their tube station, and, hand in hand, clutching their weekend bags and the geranium, they would go home . . . there would be no hurts, no confrontations. Love would remain separate and self-contained. He could be a loving son every second weekend until he was mature and manly enough not to care.

  With one hand on his ear to cut out the noise of the trains he told the tale first to Elsie and, gritting his teeth trying to put out of his mind her tones of disappointment, he agreed to tell it all again to Mother.

  ‘We had everything so nice,’ Elsie said, ‘We even had a fire in Miss Heather’s bedroom. Your mother had the chimney swept during the week.’

  Mother was concerned about his imaginary flu, but he had the strangest feeling she didn’t entirely believe him. She gave the merest of hints that she thought something more exciting and glittering had turned up for Adam and Heather.