by Maeve Binchy
‘You’d forgive me?’ stumbled Harry.
‘It’s not a question of forgiving, there’s nothing to forgive, it’s the bargain we made when we got married. I give you a comfortable home, and you give me your presence and loyalty, and support me. There’s nothing unusual about it at all.’
And she had gone out into the kitchen to put some flowers in water, while their voices came from the sitting-room, and then they all left. Nobody came in to say goodbye or to tell her what had happened.
There had been no sound from the sitting-room, and she didn’t know whether Harry had left with them. The five minutes were like five hours, the clock ticked, and the water tank burbled, loudly menacingly. But she wouldn’t run in to see was he there, had he stayed, had she won.
She tore the stems of the flowers to little green rags as she waited. She knew this was some kind of test. It was too long, he must have gone. If she had lost, what would she do with the house. There was no point in scraping and saving to make it nice, just for a ten-year-old boy, and herself. If she had won, she would really keep her promise, she would make it a wonderful home for him, for them. Even if she had to steal, she thought, she wouldn’t back-track on her word.
Then the door of the kitchen opened, and Harry, red-eyed, came in.
‘I’m giving her £50,’ he said.
‘That seems very fair,’ said Margaret.
She never asked why, or whether he had loved the girl, or whether she was a marvellous lay, or how and when they had met. She kept her bargain, and the next time she had gone to Oxford Street, she started bringing home little treats for Harry and herself. Her reward was his guilty devoted smile, his belief that he had married a Wonderwoman and nearly lost her through his own stupidity. That made her feel very good.
There was only the jacket left now; everything else, including her coat, was in the left-luggage office. She had a scarf and a brooch in her handbag. That was how she had got the jacket four years ago, the nice lilac one, that Harry had said made her look so young. This time she wanted black velvet.
She took one from the rail, and with one movement removed the price tag, throwing it behind the radiator, and pinned her own brooch on the lapel. The jacket was on her in a flash, with her scarf knotted under its collar. In seconds she had taken a different jacket out to hold it up to the light.
‘It’s nice,’ she said to the sales girl.
‘Nice cheerful red,’ said the girl.
‘And they wear very well,’ said Margaret. ‘I’ve had this one for quite a while, I was wondering should I get it in another colour.’
‘It’s a good idea to buy a couple if they suit you,’ said the girl.
‘But,’ said Margaret, ‘I think it’s a bit extravagant of me really. I’ll just go and do the rest of the shopping and if I’ve anything left over I’ll come back later.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ said the girl politely.
And she walked out into the afternoon sunlight to collect all the shopping from the left-luggage, and go home to Harry.
OXFORD CIRCUS
My heart sank when Frankie got a job in the BBC. Up to now all the disasters in her life had been reasonably contained among her ever-dwindling circle of friends. But if she were in reach of a microphone she might easily broadcast them to the nation. They might even become national incidents. Because Frankie was rarely out of trouble. I think it was only because I was such a boss, that I was a friend of hers at all. I liked the self-importance of rescuing her. I liked her undying gratitude and useless promises to be more careful the next time.
Clive didn’t like Frankie, which was unusual because Clive liked almost everyone. He said she was brainless. Yet she had a far better degree than any of us. He said she liked getting into trouble, but he hadn’t seen the tears pouring down her face as she sat in the police-station wrongly accused of starting a fight in a restaurant and causing a breach of the peace. Frankie hadn’t started the fight, she had tried to stop somebody else’s. Clive said she was vain. That couldn’t be right either. Would somebody who was vain turn up at a dinner party in filthy painting clothes, because she had become so involved in doing up a neighbour’s child’s playroom that she had forgotten to look at her watch and just ran out to catch a taxi the way she was?
Frankie had recently disentangled herself from a particularly horrible man, who owned a restaurant and a bad temper, and who had beaten Frankie very badly on three separate occasions. The day she said she was leaving him, he had taken some of her best clothes and burned them in his incinerator.
She had taken nothing from the horrible man except a few bruises and a series of misunderstood memories. That was another fault of Frankie’s, she never learned from anything. If she were to fall down and pass out six nights in succession because she had drunk too much, she never considered for one moment that there was an element of cause and effect. She just regarded each falling-down as a terrible happening to be deeply regretted. There would be other restaurant-owners who would throw all her clothes into the incinerator. I just hoped there wouldn’t be many of them in the BBC.
‘I want a reduction in the licence fee,’ was all Clive said when I told him that Frankie was going to work at Broadcasting House. ‘The thought of that woman’s voice coming at me from the radio is enough to make me take sick-leave.’
Clive can be very silly once he has a bee in his bonnet about something, so I took no notice except to say that she would be doing research, not actually speaking on the air.
‘That’s a mercy,’ said Clive. ‘But the number of apologies for whatever she has researched for some unfortunates will be legion.’
For once we were having a quiet night at home, and I had cooked a dinner. Usually neither of us have much time, what with Clive giving evening classes and me taking them. For once we decided not to study but to stick photos into an album, and we had them all out on the floor when the doorbell rang. In London that’s unusual. We hadn’t invited anyone, and nobody selling bibles or double-glazing would ever climb the stairs to our flat, however great the commission in this world or the next.
It was Frankie.
‘I’m not going to stay a minute, I’ll leave the door open so that I won’t even be tempted,’ she said, blocking the door open with her handbag and creating such a draught that all the photos blew out of their little piles.
‘Close the bloody door,’ said Clive and I knew the evening was ruined.
‘I just wanted to borrow one sweater, and one skirt. Until lunchtime tomorrow only. To go to work in, the job starts tomorrow you see, and because Bernard burned all my things I’ve got nothing to wear except this dress, which I don’t think would be suitable for the Beeb.’
It was a lovely dress, cut to the navel, with rhinestones all around the bit of bosom it had. It would be unusual in the BBC but might just hasten on the disaster that was bound to befall Frankie. I said cheerfully that I would go and see what I could find.
Frankie sat on the floor, falling out of her rhinestones and oohing and aahing at the pictures.
‘My God, didn’t we all look foul at your wedding?’ she shouted, and even through the bedroom door I could feel Clive bristling.
Then.
‘Clive, that’s not you. I don’t believe it. With all the curls and the little toy horse sitting on a stool. It’s beautiful.’ She positively gurgled over the picture. I had begged him once with tears in my eyes not to throw it out, and had won only by such a small margin that I had always kept it hidden in the bottom of the drawer. I took it out to gurgle a bit myself over, privately.
I rushed out of the bedroom carrying my only good skirt and a new blouse which I had not yet worn.
‘Would these do?’ I said hurriedly.
Frankie was so far into the photos now that nothing would have got her out of them.
‘Look at that picture of you and me and Gerry!’ she exclaimed happily. ‘Do you remember that night you went out with him and I had to pretend to your mother that you
stayed with me? It was awful, I kept getting so confused about what I was meant to have been doing, or what we were meant to have been doing, that I’m sure I gave the game away.’
Oh she had, she had, then and now, but that was Frankie, so innocent, and hopeless. Always.
‘I believe you have joined the BBC,’ said Clive in a heavy overdone effort to save me embarrassment. It was as if he had flashed a notice saying let us change this unsavoury subject of my wife’s past. I hated him for it.
Even Frankie must have sensed some tension, because she sort of gathered up her limbs, and breathed a few dizzy remarks about hoping she’d cope with her first day as a new girl, and snatched my clothes and ran.
Clive had put away the photos. The one of him with curls he had torn into eight pieces, and thrown into the basket. He said he had remembered he had a lot of study to catch up on. I went to bed in a sulk, couldn’t sleep, so got up and did the ironing. Clive said I was behaving like a martyr, that I was only ironing to make him feel guilty. No, I said, harassed working wives love ironing, it keeps them sane, they use it as therapy in mental hospitals, everyone knows that. He said I was becoming as childish as my friend Frankie, and even more immature. I said his shirts were now a size too small for him, or a half size anyway, why else would all the top buttons be loose?
Oh it was a lovely evening.
Frankie rang me at work, nobody except Frankie ever rings me at work. The Principal hates it, and he’s right, you can hear the whole form screaming while you’re out of the classroom. I’ve told Frankie this again and again, but she never remembers. She wanted to meet me at six o’clock to give me back my clothes.
‘I don’t need them at once,’ I said, furious to have brought the Principal’s wrath down on me again for nothing.
‘But I want you to have a little drink, just two little drinks in the BBC Club,’ she said beseechingly.
There was no time to chat. I could hear a noise like a tank division coming from my classroom. Anyway I’d always wanted to go into the BBC Club, that’s what did it.
‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘Where is it?’
‘Get off at Oxford Circus, and walk in a straight line,’ she said. ‘I’ll have your clothes in a nice plastic bag ready for you.’
I hoped that she’d remember to get some replacements for herself. I could only too easily see her sitting there in her bra and pants drinking a pink gin.
The real reason I gave in so easily was that I wanted to avoid meeting Clive. We had parted in a mutual sulk that morning and I didn’t look forward to apologising or waiting for him to. It would do him good not to see me waiting there anyway. We usually had a beer and a sandwich from the fridge at about six, before he went out to teach a lot of foolish self-advancing housewives all about economics, and before I went to learn Italian. I was doing a degree in Italian so that I could teach it in a school where the children were older, and more appreciative, and didn’t scream like deprived railway engines.
Two little drinks at six o’clock, and the chance of seeing some personalities . . . it was a great idea.
The BBC Club was huge, and had two separate entrances, each with a porter’s desk where you had to show an identity card before being let in.
‘Perhaps your friend has signed you in,’ said a porter kindly, examining the visitors’ book. My friend hadn’t. There was no passport to personalities for me at all. I felt very sad.
I waited on a chair, feeling foolish, for about half an hour until Frankie arrived, breathless. She was desperately sorry but she’d been to the shops, it was late closing, and she’d got herself something to wear instead of my skirt and blouse.
She had indeed. It was an outfit of skin-tight black velvet pants and a sort of a big red handkerchief tied under her bosom. It looked great, but it didn’t look like the kind of thing she could wear the next day at work. I had grave doubts whether it was even the kind of thing she should wear in this club.
We were about to sweep in when the porter asked for her card.
‘But I work in the BBC,’ said Frankie proudly.
‘I’m afraid you have to be a member of the club though,’ he said kindly.
Frankie was like a toddler whose ice-cream had been snatched away. I thought she was going to cry.
‘We can go to a pub,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to go to a pub, I want to go in here, it’s where all the BBC people go,’ said Frankie in a five-year-old voice.
At that moment a couple of men were waiting for the porter to finish so that they could go in, and they were amused by Frankie’s predicament. They asked her what programme she worked on, and good-naturedly signed us both in, looking at Frankie’s outfit appreciatively.
We were in. It was a big room, hot and smoke-filled, and crowded with people. I couldn’t see anyone I had ever seen on television, and I wasn’t near enough to people to hear any famous voices from radio either. I was a bit disappointed.
Frankie had wriggled up to the bar and got us drinks. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to lean even, so we stood in the middle of a crowded room, like people at a party where we knew no one. I didn’t like it at all.
‘I have a purpose in coming here,’ hissed Frankie, looking left and right in case anyone was listening.
‘Oh my God,’ I said.
‘No, listen, you’re always getting frightened over nothing. I think you don’t go out enough, you and Clive. I mean poring over old baby pictures every night, it’s not natural.’
‘We won’t be doing that again for a while,’ I said darkly.
Frankie didn’t notice any nuance in my tone. She was far more interested in her purpose.
‘I’m here for a special reason,’ she said again. Anyone who knew Frankie even slightly could see that trouble lay ahead. I who had known her since school felt weighed down with doom.
‘You see there’s this guy, my boss on the programme. He’s absolutely great, very dynamic, people just do anything he says, and he was saying today that he thought I was getting on very well for someone who had just come in. I really did, you know. I used my initiative and brought many more files than they asked for, and we found a whole new line to go on . . .’
‘Go on about the guy,’ I said resignedly.
‘Well, he said that what I needed was someone to sort of talk me into the programme, let me know the feel of the place, what they were at, where they were going, and what they wanted to do. And he said that I should try to live and breathe the programme constantly, thinking up new ideas, new ways of dealing with them, that’s what makes a programme great he says. Martin says.’
‘So?’ I said.
‘So I thought I should start doing it straight away,’ beamed Frankie.
‘Are we going to look for people from the programme and start living it and breathing it?’ I asked in disbelief.
‘No . . . not exactly. You see the one to tell me is this boss man, Martin. He really IS the programme. I thought I’d meet him here and get to know him, off-duty.’
‘But if you’re going to meet him, why am I here?’ I said, hurt.
The two little drinks didn’t seem such a good idea now I thought Frankie was going to dash off and leave me at any moment with over half an hour to kill before going to my Italian class.
But that wasn’t it, there was more.
‘No, he’s much too important for me just to turn up here and strike up a chat with him about the programme. That would be very forward. It’s more complicated than that.’
I sighed.
‘Some of the others were telling me that he has this utter dragon of a wife, a real Tartar woman, who won’t let him out of her sight. She works in the Beeb, too, but in another department and she won’t let him have any fun. She comes in here every night and stares across the room at him with awful eyes; then at seven o’clock she marches him home for dinner like a school boy.’
I automatically looked at the clock as if to count the minutes before this ritual took place.
/> ‘You’ve only got half an hour,’ I said jokingly.
Frankie was utterly serious.
‘I know, that’s why I have to find her. I must strike up a friendship with her as soon as possible, so that she’ll realise she has nothing to worry about, that I’m not after her husband. If she and I became friends then it would all be fine.’
I looked at Frankie, in her flame-coloured top and her tight, tight pants, her hair falling over her face like someone who had just got out of bed and was waiting, slightly tousled, for the next lover. I didn’t think her mission was going to be possible. But there’s no use explaining some things to Frankie so I offered to get another drink, and plunged into a sea of bodies around the bar.
When I came back Frankie was gone, or I thought she was, but she had only gone out to make a phone-call.
‘I have to identify her first,’ she said. At that moment someone was paged over the loudspeaker.
‘That’s her,’ giggled Frankie.
‘Where?’ I scanned the room.
‘We’ll see. I went out to a public phone-box and rang her asking to speak to her. We’ll just have to see who goes out.’
Like schoolchildren, we watched the door. Eventually a small blonde disappeared through it.
‘That couldn’t be his wife, not monsterish enough,’ said Frankie firmly.
‘Did they tell you he hasn’t slept with her for years, but he can’t leave her because of the children or her health?’ I asked sourly. I was feeling very annoyed with this childishness, and hated being part of it. I also wondered whether Clive was worried about me. Maybe I should have rung him.
The small blonde came back, shrugging her shoulders at her friends. ‘Nobody there apparently,’ she said. ‘The phone was dead.’
‘It is her,’ said Frankie in amazement.
