by Sue Townsend
Jack was pleased to hear all this; it meant that she was available and vulnerable. He thought he might stand a chance of making her happy and building up her pension plan again.
Jack asked if she had any children and was relieved when she said no.
“I like children too much to have one for myself,” she said. “I would have made a terrible mother. I’m fundamentally lazy, I’m horribly selfish and anyway, I hate pain. I’ve seen too many cowboy films and watched cowboys’ wives screaming the ranch house down giving birth to the cowboys’ sons.”
Jack said, “It was always a son, wasn’t it?”
Pamela said, “Yes. I was a double disappointment to my father. Not only was I a horribly ugly little girl, I also killed my mother.”
“Indirectly,” said Jack.
He had to stop himself from touching her, putting his arms around her and holding her tight. He almost settled for simply putting his hand on her shoulder but he didn’t want to alarm her.
They went into the house by the kitchen door; an old black Labrador padded up to Jack and dropped a rubber Santa Claus at his feet.
“That’s Bill,” Pamela said.
Jack stroked one of the dog’s velvety ears and said, “Hello, Bill.”
There was a recycling box on the floor of the small utility room; half a dozen Stolichnaya bottles were visible. Jack asked her if she lived alone.
She kicked at the box and said, “Yes, and I drink a bit because I’m lonely.”
Jack was almost relieved that she had a fault and wasn’t perfect; it gave him some hope that she might need his help. He wanted to take care of her. And anyway, he thought, he didn’t drink enough himself. He saw them together in Spain, perhaps, maybe even at a bullfight; she was Ava Gardner, he was Ernest Hemingway, they were drunk and brawling in public. He asked if he could have a glass of vodka. He felt quite capable of downing a tumblerful in one go.
She said, disappointingly, “There’s not a drop in the house. I keep forgetting to buy it when I’m in the village.”
“So she’s not an alcoholic,” thought Jack, and was relieved. She could be anything she wanted to be. He didn’t care.
“I’ve got wine,” she said. “But that doesn’t count as drink, does it? It’s more of a medicine since the bloody doctors said we could drink two glasses a day.”
Everyone sat at the big table in the middle of the kitchen; it was covered in books, newspapers and a pile of final demands. Ali fell asleep almost immediately.
Pamela said, “He’s fucking shagged out. I’m not allowing him to drive back to Leeds tonight.”
Jack wondered if her bad language would eventually get on his nerves after they were married. She didn’t look the type of woman who would take criticism lying down.
The Prime Minister said, “Why did Andrew leave you, Pam? Was there another woman?”
She said, “He probably got bored. I’m a very boring person, Ed. It’s the reason I don’t go to parties: I bore everybody to tears. I’ve got absolutely no conversation.”
Jack vowed never to go to another party, ever again. He wanted to stay at home and be bored by Pamela.
She said to the three men, “I never, ever cook. But there is food.” She waved vaguely towards a larder and a fridge. “I’m sure you’ll find something.”
She lit another St Moritz and said to Jack, “You’re a policeman, aren’t you? I had a burglary last week.”
Jack said, “What did they take?”
“The usual things,” she said. “Telly, video, bit of silver, all my jewellery.”
“Did you report it?” asked the Prime Minister.
“There was no point,” she said. “The burglar alarm wasn’t working, so the bloody insurance company won’t pay out.”
Jack wanted to tell her that he would be willing to withdraw all of his savings and replace the jewellery she had lost.
As if reading his mind she said, “I don’t miss any of it. I’ve got too many things as it is. Look at this house. I’ve got five bedrooms, two bathrooms, three reception rooms and a kitchen all stacked with things. I’m sick of it all. I shall never buy another thing as long as I live. What I long for is a white room, a little white bed, an ashtray and a few books.”
The Prime Minister said, “You’ve just described a prison cell. And if you carry on associating with your troublemaking friends, that’s where you’ll end up.”
He opened the door of the fridge and looked inside. There was a bowl of red apples, two leeks, a bag of sprouting potatoes, a pot of cream, a packet of only slightly mouldy cheese and various little wrapped-up parcels in the dairy compartment.
She said, “You make me sound like an anarchist; it’s just that we’re against everything you stand for, Ed.”
The Prime Minister slammed the fridge door shut and went into the pantry. They could hear him walking around on the stone floor in his high heels. When he came out he said, “There is absolutely nothing to eat, and I’m hungry.”
Pamela said, “Don’t whine, Eddy. It reminds me of our God-awful childhood.”
The Prime Minister said, “I had an idyllic childhood.”
“You’re not talking to David Frost now,” she said. “It’s me, Pamela; I was there some of the time, remember.”
Jack said, “We could send out for pizza.”
Pamela said, “Domino’s don’t deliver so far out and there’s nothing in the village; it’s almost dead now since Ed closed the post office.”
The Prime Minister said, “I didn’t personally close it, Pam, those little rural post offices are no longer viable concerns.”
“It was viable to me,” she shouted. “I now have to drive into Stow-on-the-Wold to buy a fucking stamp.”
The Prime Minister said, “Pamela, please don’t swear.”
While Pamela and the Prime Minister snapped and growled over the bones of their political differences, Jack got up and began to gather together the ingredients for an evening meal. He cleared a surface, assembled some utensils and began to cook. Through close study of her books, he had been taught by Delia Smith to prepare a repertoire of seven fail-safe dishes. He wanted to dazzle and seduce Pamela with his skills. He wanted to demonstrate how good he was at baking a tart, putting up a tent, ironing a white linen shirt, driving through London traffic, doing the crossword in the Independent, and hitting the bull’s eye with a variety of guns—he could kill an assassin at a range of 500 metres with a high-velocity rifle.
He was astonished to find out that falling in love was like the songs and the books said it would be. Colours were brighter; life seemed full of amazing possibilities. He rarely sang and before today in the car had never done so in company, but now the words to ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ came into his head, then he found himself singing “Wearing the same shabby dress…” Nobody heard him. Ali was still snoring and the Prime Minister and his sister were still raging at each other about the successes and failures of global capitalism and who had received the most attention from their father.
When the leek and onion tart was ready Jack put it on the table in front of Pamela as if it were the Holy Grail. He was rewarded by her saying, “Fucking hell, that looks good.”
He set out the side dishes, sautéed potatoes and a bowl of minted petits pois.
Pamela opened a bottle of wine with well-practised ease. She said, “Does Ali drink?”
Jack woke him up and Ali said, “When in Rome, innit,” and had half a glass.
Jack was gratified when every last morsel had been eaten. At Pamela’s suggestion Ali phoned his wife to tell her that he wouldn’t be home that night. Salma didn’t believe him when he told her that he was staying in a house next to some boarding kennels in the country, so he took the phone outside into the cool April evening and let her listen to the sound of eleven dogs barking. She was not placated.—
“Ali,” she said. “Don’t do this to me; you’re with another woman. I know who she is—it’s that fat whore who works in the greengrocer
s.”
Ali came back into the kitchen and said to Jack, “Talk to my missis, Jack. Tell her I’m on a job.”
Jack took the phone and spoke to Salma. He told her that providing she gave her permission he would like to engage Ali for a further two days.
She said to Jack, “We have never been apart for more than one day; it will be hard for me. You must take care of my husband, make sure that he eats—sometimes he forgets.”
Jack said he would do that. Then he thanked her and handed the phone back to Ali.
Ali would have preferred to have slept in his car—the driver’s seat folded flat and he had a blanket in the boot—but Pamela wouldn’t hear of it. She took him upstairs and gave him a choice of four bedrooms. He chose the nursery. There was a bed in there that looked about the right size for him. He was only a small man.
The Prime Minister was drunk. He was so drunk that he kept repeating to Jack and Pamela that he wasn’t drunk. He also told them repeatedly that he loved them both very, very much. Then he cried and said he wanted his mum. “I don’t remember her, Pam,” he said. “I used to have a picture in my mind of her face and her hair but then I realised that it wasn’t Mum at all, it was Jean Simmons the actress. I’d got the two of them mixed up somehow. Mum was fat, wasn’t she? I remember her going off in the car to the hospital, she was more like Hattie Jacques.”
Pamela said, “Mum wasn’t fat, Ed. She was pregnant with me.”
Jack said, “Isn’t there a photograph?”
Pamela said, “There were a few. Mum didn’t like being photographed; in every one I’ve seen she’d turned her head away and her face was just a blur. Andrew took the photo albums.”
“Why?” shouted the Prime Minister. “Mum was my mother, not his.”
“Mum shared the album with his favourite Labrador bitch, Patsy,” said Pamela.
“What was she like?” pressed the Prime Minister.
Pamela said, “I don’t know. Ask somebody who knew her. Uncle Ernest lives in a care home near Cheltenham.”
The Prime Minister said, “I want to see him now.”
“Tomorrow,” said Jack.
The Prime Minister pulled off his blonde wig. His own hair lay fiat and distorted on his scalp. Pamela and Jack supported him up the stairs and led him into a handsomely furnished bedroom. The Prime Minister insisted on undressing himself. Pamela said, “Do you want to borrow pyjamas or a nightie?”
Jack said, “There’s a nightie in his bag, I’ll see to him.”
When Jack rejoined Pamela at the kitchen table he saw that she had opened a third bottle. She wanted to talk about her brother.
“I hate it when people have a go at Ed,” she said. “I know I disagree with practically everything he stands for, and I hate the way he kowtows to the Yanks, but he’s my big brother and I suppose I love him.”
At ten o’clock she put her jacket on and said, “It’s time to put the dogs to bed.”
Jack went out with her. It was years since he’d been in such complete darkness; he looked up, expecting to see stars, and there they were—the sky was full of them. As he and Pamela walked towards the kennels he said to her, “We don’t see the stars in the city.”
She threw her head back to look up. “They’re a small compensation for living in the God-awful countryside,” she said.
“You’re not happy here,” he said.
“No, I’m a city girl. Andrew kidnapped me and brought me here. I’m not even a real dog person, either,” she said.
She went from room to room switching off the dogs televisions and wishing them goodnight. Eleven pairs of eyes watched as she turned and said, “See you all in the morning,” before closing the door.
Under cover of darkness Jack took her arm and walked her along the path towards the house, though it was he who didn’t know the way.
Jack asked if he could make some coffee.
“Andrew may have left some beans,” she said. Then she added, as if finally realising that three months had passed since he’d gone, “They’re probably a little stale.”
Jack knew that after they’d finished their coffee he should have gone to bed. Pamela had been yawning throughout their conversation and had mentioned several times that she had to be up early in the morning to see to the dogs. But Jack couldn’t tear himself away. It was Pamela who got up from the table first, saying, “I’m dead on my feet.”
He apologised for keeping her up. She said, “Jack, do you know that Chinese proverb, ‘After three days, fish and visitors stink’?”
He said, “I do.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s been my bitter personal experience that after only one day fish and visitors stink.”
Jack said, “Don’t worry, we’ll leave before lunch tomorrow.”
“You’ll be bored with me by then anyway,” she said. This would have been a good opportunity for him to make some kind of declaration of his interest in her, but he said nothing and she went upstairs to her bed. He remained seated at the kitchen table for a long time, trying to get used to the idea that he was now living in a new universe.
∨ Number Ten ∧
EIGHTEEN
Ali was woken by his mobile phone. He opened his eyes and saw that he was lying under a Lion King duvet. The caller was Sedek, his eight-year-old son, who asked him for the name of the longest river in the British Isles. Ali said it might be the Thames, but he wasn’t sure.
He heard voices outside and got up and looked out of the window. Jack and Pamela were clipping leads on to the dogs’ collars. Ali opened the window and asked about the river. Jack and Pamela answered simultaneously: “The Severn.”
Ali gave his son the answer to his homework question, then asked to speak to each of his children in turn. He told them that he had slept the night in a wonderful bedroom that had been prepared for a child. “It was fit for the child of a king,” he said. “Everything that a kid could want was there, apart from a television and video.”
Pamela divided the dogs between her and Jack, taking six herself. They walked away from the house down the gravel drive; she was smoking her first cigarette of the day. The noise of barking was terrible; the dogs were ill disciplined and refused to walk in a straight line. When they reached the end of the drive the sun came out and Pamela pushed her dark glasses down from the top of her head to cover her eyes. She was wearing a different-coloured sock in her hair this morning, Jack noted.
“Are we walking far?” Jack shouted over the row.
“To the village and back,” she said. “I need some fags.”
There was very little traffic and they walked in the middle of the narrow lane. Every now and again they had to stop to disentangle the leads. Jack admired the wild flowers in the hedgerows. The sun was shining.
Pamela said, “This is my land. I had to plant those wild flowers. I had to send away to a specialist nursery; the bastard farmers round here had killed everything off with their bloody chemicals.”
“So you don’t hate the countryside?” said Jack.
“I hate what they’ve done to it,” she said passionately.
A brand-new olive-green Land Cruiser, driven by a man wearing mutton-chop whiskers and a tweed cap, passed at speed, forcing them almost into the ditch. It was some time before the dogs were calm enough to proceed with their journey.
“That’s the farmer who owns the land next to mine,” Pamela said. “He was on television last year crying about his bloody sheep. About how they were like members of his family, about how much it hurt him to see his livestock destroyed. Well, the half-a-million-quid compensation he swindled out of Ed soon put the smile back on his face. The same flock of sheep were moved from farm to different farm so often they must have thought they were on a fucking Cook’s tour.”
They approached the village of Swale-on-the-Wold; it was evident from the glances that the villagers directed at Pamela that she was not popular. She came to a stop outside the old post office. Two men were fitting a double-glazed PVC unit
into the gap left by the old sash window.
They walked on and Jack wondered if he could live with somebody who existed at such a high level of indignation and anger. He held on to the eleven dogs while she went into the small Spar shop. When she came Out she was carrying a box of Vesta Chow Mein. Jack said, “You’ll have to come to London, Pamela, and I’ll take you to Gerrard Street and buy you a proper Chinese meal.”
To his surprise she said, “When?”
He said, “As soon as Ed is back at Number Ten.”
She said, “Jack, it’s fairly obvious to me that Ed is a burned-out case.”
As they passed the old post office on their way back they saw that a workman was fixing a wrought-iron sign over the front door: ‘Ye Olde Poste Office’.
♦
Ali had worked out how to boil a kettle on the stove and had made tea. He was telling the Prime Minister why he would never vote Labour again. “First they wasted all that money on the Armouries Exhibition—I mean, who wants to spend thirty quid on taking his kids to see a few old guns and swords, innit? And then there’s the stupid one way system an all them bus lanes, and why did they have to close the swimming baths down before my eldest lad got his bronze medallion?”
The Prime Minister sat with his head in his hands and raged inwardly. Why was the British electorate unable to differentiate between the responsibilities of national and local government?
Pamela came in and said, “Congratulations, Ed, you were a good, classic drunk last night, ten out of ten.”
The Prime Minister blinked rapidly and mumbled an apology.
Jack went upstairs to collect their bags; he passed the open door of the nursery. On his way back he went inside and looked around. The furniture and the toys were new but obviously unused. Jack opened the top drawer of a chest and found it to be full of pale, small articles of clothing. He closed the drawer gently and shut the door behind him as he went out.
Pamela was busy when they left; a woman with a Caribbean tan was being reunited with her small dog. Jack kissed Pamela on both cheeks and smelled her perfume and said he would be in touch about that meal.