The Accidental Woman

by Jonathan Coe

  But see how many guns I am jumping, talking about Maria’s home when I have not even explained where or what it was. Maria lived, then, in a large terraced house, in a row of other large terraced houses, not far from the football ground. The house had three floors, and a total of eight rooms, only five of which she ever used. As for the others, she could have let them out to lodgers, if she had liked, if she wanted the company, say, or if she needed the money, but she neither wanted the company nor needed the money. Her job was well paid. She worked in a women’s refuge, a small cluster of houses on a quiet side of the city, whose exact location was kept a close secret. Here women who had been forced to leave their husbands because of cruelty, violence, or any of the other by-products of married life, could come and take cover for a while, with their children if necessary, and could then afford to feel relatively safe from the threat of pursuit and recapture. You should not assume from this, incidentally, that Maria had suddenly developed a social conscience. On the contrary, she found her work dispiriting and unrewarding. She had applied for the job because it was advertised, and she had accepted it because she was offered it, it was really as basic as that. She had been glad of it at first, partly because it gave her something to think about other than the past, and partly because she was tired of not having enough money to live on. When she first arrived in Chester, she had had no money at all, apart from a small sum which she had saved in London, which was just enough to cover the deposit on her new house.

  Here, then, she lived alone. She did not even want to keep a cat any more. All those old ways had been discarded, as having proved ineffective. She no longer listened to music, in the dead of night, with her eyes fixed on the red light of the cassette recorder. She preferred instead to go to sleep at once, sleep now being one of the very few aspects of existence for which she felt any degree of enthusiasm, except that occasionally she would find herself dreaming, and nothing browned Maria off so much as that. She would awake feeling intensely cheated. There are two kinds of dream, are there not, the good and the bad, a misleading classification if ever there was one. Maria did not know which she detested more. Dreams, as you know, are no sooner described than falsified, so it would be pointless to go into details, but the bad were those which brought her out in a sweat of fear and revulsion, and from which she awoke feeling even more drained than when she had gone to sleep, and the good were those which filled her with waves of hope and with a nameless quietude, and from which she would awake to the plunging realization that these delightful sensations had been, after all, no more than visionary. So it was much better not to dream at all, from her point of view. And there was this consolation, at least, that sleep came fairly easily to Maria at this period. I see no reason to add insomnia to her list of torments. She would often have to suffer only as few as five minutes of consciousness before dropping off altogether, and in the event of luck not being on her side on any particular night, she had devised a clever series of mental exercises which were as good as an anaesthetic. She would attempt to remember, in alphabetical order, the names of twenty-six different diseases of the body, all beginning with a different letter, and she had never yet to her knowledge had to go beyond gastro-enteritis. This game was open to endless variation, and for diseases she would sometimes substitute towns, vegetables, poets, breeds of dog, varieties of apple, colours, famous footballers, schools of philosophic and critical thought, musical instruments, surgical instruments, film directors (although Ν was a stumbling block in that one, she found), rivers, modes of transport, classical deities, fish, religious sects of the seventeenth century, or anything else she could think of. It would be a bad night indeed, then, on which she could not manage to keep thoughts of the past out of her head for the time it took to fall into an exhausted stupor. A very bad night. And yet it happened, more than once. Conversations, voices, would come hammering at her door, crying to be admitted. And how often, during those wakeful seconds, did she hear the words: a man rang. I can’t remember. Did he give his name, no. Did he leave a message, no.

  No.

  Which did Maria enjoy less, the weekdays, or the weekends? Difficult to answer. Weekends were lonelier, because at work she would talk to her colleagues, and to the inmates of the refuge, usually because she had to, and now and then because she felt like it, whereas at the weekend she would talk to nobody, unless to the young men who molested her in the cathedral grounds, or to the girls on the till in the supermarket where she did her week’s shopping. And she would talk to herself, too, just to keep her hand in. There seemed little point in losing the faculty of speech merely for want of practice, she never knew when it might come in useful again. As she stood in the queue at the supermarket, for example, soft cries might escape Maria’s lips, gentle words of protestation, such as ‘Sod this for a fucking bitch of a life’, or ‘Puke and shit, puke and shit, day in, day out’. As a result of making these remarks, Maria would get funny looks. And while on this subject I think it would be true to say that Maria was generally unpopular in her neighbourhood, and tended to be regarded with a suspicion which spilled over, for some people, into violent hatred. She never gave any offence, knowingly, but her neighbours mistrusted her because she lived alone, and was silent, and because the sight of her walking home from work on wet nights, huddled with cold, wearing a plastic headscarf to guard against the rain, somehow depressed them. But perhaps I can see their point, I feel depressed just writing about it.

  And now is there anything more, I wonder, that you can possibly want to know about Maria’s years in Chester. Did she ever leave the city, for a holiday, or for a seaside outing? No, never. Did she not communicate with her family, all this time? Very occasionally, by letter, or by telephone. Did she never have any visitors to stay, in the spare bedroom, none of those old friends who thronged her fancy in moods of fond remembrance? Unnecessary sarcasm. No, of course not. Then surely I have told you all that you need to be told. Yet looking back, it seems to be rather a short chapter. Well, there is next to no direct speech, so you are still getting value for money, of sorts. Let’s be honest, I begin to weary of Maria, and her story, just as Maria begins to weary of Maria, and her story. What little fun there ever was in her, and in it, seems to have quite gone away, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that she desires nothing more than to have it brought to an end, rapid and painless. Let us move on, for I have only one more episode to relate of Maria’s life, and then we shall be done, and we can say goodbye.

  But there, you start chatting with the reader and before you know where you are you find that you have forgotten all about narrative. Did I not say, at the beginning of the chapter, that it was a Tuesday, and that there was something particularly interesting about Maria’s thoughts, as she walked home from work? Something had happened that day, you see. Something which had stirred up, in Maria, emotions which had lain dormant, unfelt, unattended to, for many years. A new woman had come to the refuge, with her child. The boy was nine years old, they were fleeing from a husband who had attacked and beaten them in a drunken rage, and Maria had recognized them at once as Angela, her old nanny, and her son, Edward.

  10. Afterhand

  It is one week later. Some impulse, it would seem, for she still has such things, has brought Maria to an unaccustomed place, viz. Chester railway station. It is Saturday morning. The weather? My, what sticklers for detail you are. Distinctly cloudy, with the possibility of light showers. She looks around her, at the scenes of coming, and going, and waiting, mainly the latter. The platform is not busy. She stands close to the railway line and looks both to the right and to the left, not knowing where the train will be coming from. Maria is southbound this morning. She is going home. Don’t ask me what has brought this on, but having made up her mind she is rather looking forward to it, to seeing her family again, after all these years. Perhaps it will all turn out to be a miserable disappointment, but no, I don’t think so, this time. She has a good excuse for going back, in that she has been invited, and a small
celebration is scheduled to take place in honour of her father, who will be sixty years old tomorrow. What could be nicer, how could one conceive a more fitting way of their honouring the occasion, than for the four of them to sit around the dinner table for Sunday lunch amidst the ruins of their old dining room? Only joking, the house has been substantially rebuilt by now. But it will be pleasant, she thinks, just this once, to try not to forget the past, but to recreate it, and thereby, perhaps, to come to terms with it. Worth a try, at any rate.

  Do you mind if we revert to the past tense? I find the other so exhausting.

  Something about the quiet bustle of the station, even though it was not busy, seemed to please her. She found herself watching the activities of the porters with something approaching interest, and the feeling with which she regarded the other passengers almost amounted to curiosity. She wondered, idly enough to be sure, but how else can you do it, who they were, and where they were going, and why they were going there, whether any of them had upon their hands a journey as important as Maria’s journey was for her, a final return after long absence. None of these other travellers, I might add, paid the slightest attention to Maria, whose heart was reaching out to them so warmly. They would have found her curiosity impertinent, and her attempts at sympathy uncalled for. For we all have our daily business to get on with, even on Saturdays, and there are times, and there are places, the railway station being one of them, at which we prefer the recognition of our interdependence to be kept to a minimum. A few words to the person who sells you your ticket, a nod to the person who punches it on your way to the platform, and that will do nicely, thank you. Not that Maria had any design, Heaven forbid, to enter into conversation with any of the strangers in whose company she was obliged to travel that morning. Nevertheless she had a strange sense, an absolutely unaccountable and unpardonable sense, that she was being ignored. This sense persisted until her train arrived, and she had found herself a comfortable and secluded seat on it.

  Just as the train was pulling out of the station, a young woman clambered aboard. She made her way breathlessly through Maria’s compartment, with no apparent intention of taking a seat in it, but as she was walking past Maria herself, the train gave a lurch and the woman fell into her lap. They laughed and apologized, and the consequence was that the woman decided to sit opposite Maria after all. Maria took the opportunity to allay a small anxiety.

  ‘Is this train direct?’ she asked. ‘Or do we have to change?’

  ‘You change,’ the woman said. ‘You change at Crewe.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ve never done this journey before.’

  ‘I do it all the time,’ said the woman. ‘Do you not live in Chester?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I just don’t travel by train very often.’

  ‘Well, of course, you have a point. Cars are so much easier. And cheaper, too, if there’s more than one of you, if you want to take the family anywhere, or something.’

  ‘I don’t have a family. I’m not married,’ said Maria.

  She must have sounded ashamed, for the woman appeared to be trying to reassure her when she said, ‘Never mind, neither am I.’

  ‘Do you live alone?’ Maria asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ve tried other ways, but, well, in the end, I thought I’d rather be by myself. At least it means there’s only one person around to get on my nerves. My name’s Mary, by the way.’

  ‘Oh. I’m Maria.’

  ‘Almost the same.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘I thought,’ Maria began, ‘I was beginning to think I must be the only woman in the world who lived alone.’

  ‘Oh, no, you’d be surprised. There are quite a lot of us, hiding away in the woodwork. People who’ve realized that you can get a lot more done if you don’t have to spend half your time darning someone else’s clothes and doing the ironing.’

  ‘You like living alone, then?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I have my freedom. That’s everything, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Maria, but she could not stop herself from asking, a few seconds later, ‘Freedom to do what, though?’

  Mary shrugged, confused by the question.

  ‘To do whatever you like, of course,’ she said. ‘Why, is that not how you find it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Maria, ‘I sometimes feel that in the last few years I’ve achieved less than ever. But then I’m not sure I ever did achieve anything. I’m not sure I know what it means. I brought someone into the world once, a little boy, but that’s about it.’ She smiled, a quick, rueful smile, and repeated, ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘You mustn’t be so negative,’ Mary said, earnestly. ‘Just look around you. Look how beautiful the world is.’ The train was entering Crewe at the time, so she had not chosen her moment well. ‘Think of all the wonderful opportunities that might be just around the corner. Think of all the love and happiness in the world.’

  Maria had a brief go at this, and then said, ‘Could you be a little more specific?’

  ‘What makes me happy, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  ‘Well, that’s easy. I suppose the thing that makes me most happy in all the world is being with my boyfriend.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes. He’s got a job in Stoke, you see, and I work in Chester, so every weekend I go over and stay with him. It gives me something to look forward to all through the week. Of course, it’s not as if we can’t talk to each other in between, on the telephone. I should say that either he phones me or I phone him at least every other night. But we think it’s important to have separate jobs, and to be independent.’

  ‘Independent, yes, I see what you mean.’

  ‘It’s what we women have been fighting for, after all, isn’t it? And now I’m able to have my cake and eat it, you see, because I can get up to all sorts of things in Chester and he doesn’t have to know about them. I mean, I wouldn’t like you to think I’m promiscuous or anything, but it’s not as if we’re married, and I do love Keith, he’s terribly sweet and everything, but after all you’re only young once and I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a bit of fun, while the sun shines, so to speak. That’s the real advantage of living alone, don’t you find?’

  Maria nodded, without, it must be said, much conviction.

  ‘Take last night, for instance. Normally I go to Stoke on Friday night but yesterday there was this party so I decided to stay for it. I phoned Keith to tell him, of course, and he didn’t mind a bit. We just have that kind of relationship. We’re a very modern couple. Anyway, I’ll tell you what happened at the party. Well, there I was, dancing away to the music, you know, the way you do, and suddenly this man came up and grabbed me by the shoulder. He was a bit rough with me but terribly goodlooking and so we got talking, and before long he was saying the rudest things to me, you can’t imagine. Do you know what he called me?’

  Maria did not know what he had called her.

  ‘He called me “a proper bit of tit, fit for nothing but to be fucked till I dropped”. Well, naturally I couldn’t help being flattered in spite of myself –’

  But at this point Mary’s anecdote was interrupted by a cry of ‘All change!’, and they realized that the train had stopped.

  ‘Well, here we are. The parting of the ways,’ she said. ‘It’s been so interesting talking to you. I’m afraid you’ll just have to imagine what happened next. It was amazing, simply amazing. Have a good weekend, won’t you. Where did you say you were going?’

  This conversation provided much food for thought on the remainder of Maria’s journey. The thought which it fed was not exactly new, but she was aware that today it impressed itself upon her with a greater energy than usual. Her old unthinking torpor gave way, as the train headed south, to a flux of questions whose importance she had always sensed but which she had never dared actually to put to herself before. And even as she considered them, she was made to recognize, both her reason and her intuition pointed out
to her, in the kindest possible way, that they could never be answered, never, never be answered now, and so even these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable. These were Maria’s impressions, as the train at last drew into the station, and deposited her in the city of her birth.

  It was by now lunch time, and she was feeling hungry. But the station buffet, new décor notwithstanding, looked as unattractive as ever, and besides, she had had a happier thought. She would have something to eat at the old café at the bottom of the hill. So she walked into the city centre, and waited for a bus.

  The bus took her past her old school, St Jude’s, which she realized she had not seen since the day she left it, fifteen years ago. She had a vague recollection of the day she had sat in Mrs Leadbetter’s office, receiving the headmistress’s congratulations, but it was not at all vivid, dark winter evenings being hard to visualize on summer Saturday afternoons. One detail, however, bobbed up in her mind quite distinctly, and she sighed. Per ardua, maybe.

  Her plans for lunch were thwarted, because when she reached the terminus she found that the café no longer existed, if it ever had. The petrol station which used to stand adjacent to it had been extended, in order to provide car-wash facilities, and presumably the café had been demolished to make this possible. Maria was not in the least upset, you understand, she was not one to stand in the way of progress, but she could have handled a sandwich, less for old times’ sake than for the more pressing reason that she hadn’t eaten since eight o’clock in the morning. The thought of the long walk uphill on an empty stomach did not appeal to her. She could have phoned home for a lift, it is true, but she didn’t. Nothing seemed to have changed much, a few trees felled here, a new house there. Indeed, Maria did not notice the most significant change of all, which is that it took her ten minutes longer to walk up the hill than it had used to. Finally her parents’ house came into view, doing its best to look as it had always done, and Maria walked up the old drive, hesitated, and rang the doorbell.