by Tim Parks
‘You do appreciate,’ I broached it carefully back home in bed, ‘that this is a complete reversal of what you were saying only a few weeks ago. You remember? When Greg and Jilly were over and you were talking about that Ian McEwan thing you’d read. About not having children while there’s this nuclear threat. A complete reversal.’
‘So what?’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m growing up.’
‘But we went over this before and you promised. No kids.’
‘But that was years ago.’
‘Right. Of course it was. Those are precisely the kind of things you have to decide long range.’ And remembering something Mother once said, I told her: ‘If a person can’t keep a promise then what on earth’s the point of making one? The whole point about promises is that they bind you across time. Or no?’
Without a word she got up, pulled on her dressing gown and went into the living room to watch TV. I stayed put in bed listening to snippets of some film, sinister music, raised voices. I went over everything that had been said. I reflected that as usual I was right. The problem was that my exasperation, which was partly fear, made me too harsh. I came over as inhuman. Presentation problem.
I got up, found my own dressing gown and padded after her. Shirley was sitting on the sofa staring glumly at the television, a glass of Grand Marnier in her hands. She always likes to have snob drinks about the house. So do I for that matter. I was struck then, in that moment watching her before she noticed me, by the hollow angularity of her intent face in gloomy TV light, the slumped position of her body. She looked singularly unattractive. But I’m always careful·not to be swayed by such momentary perceptions. I knew Shirley was a good-looking woman and I was determined that our marriage would work out.
I went and sat next to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She didn’t so much as turn to look at me.
‘Come on, Shirl, I’m sorry, I was too harsh. I must sound like a real chauvinist arsehole sometimes. Forget it.’
When she still didn’t turn, I got up and went back to bed.
A few minutes later she came back into the bedroom herself. She snapped on the light. Blinding me.
‘Let’s go out,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘We can go down to the Torrington. There’s dancing till two Tuesdays.’
‘But I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.’
‘Likewise.’ And she said: ‘Listen, Crawley, if we don’t have kids it’s so we can make the most of our freedom, right? Whereas all you do is work. Work, work, work. There must be something else in life.’
Out on the High Road she walked with an exaggerated girlish flounce. Suddenly she turned and grabbed me and kissed me hard, forcing our lips together, fingers twined behind my head. We were under an umbrella. ‘You know you’re turning into an old office fart, George,’ she said brightly. ‘Our life is one great suburban bore.’ I kissed her back, trying to return her passion. ‘Come on, put your hand on my arse,’ she said, so I did. ‘Squeeze,’ she said, so I did. And at the Torrington we danced excitedly, with an excitement I hadn’t felt for some time, rubbing thighs, necking, clinging tight, then went home and tackled the titbit, making quite a feast of it. Come the morning, the office, the green screen, and I was shattered.
So much for the aftermath of Aunt Mavis’s funeral. One could hardly ignore the fact that some crucial balance had tipped. Something was wrong. Over the weeks and months that followed Shirley became moody, difficult, aggressive, while I was simply doing everything in my power to tip that balance back, to get back to the halcyon days before that conversation. With this in mind I brought home flowers and bottles of good wine in abundance, I cut out evening working as far as was possible for someone with my responsibilities and aspirations; I cut out the karate class I’d started going to for my back and which I was thoroughly enjoying and proving surprisingly good at. Instead I bought tickets for the opera and for orchestral concerts and ballets which I knew Shirley liked and which I myself didn’t mind.
What else? I found a stable in Totteridge where we could ride Sunday mornings for an outrageous price and rub shoulders with other young professionals like ourselves. I encouraged dinner parties, trips and acquaintances, even when I wasn’t really particularly keen, even when, for example, I had my mind on the huge new programmes we were troubleshooting for Brown Boveri. I tried to get her to take an interest in some large item we could feasibly buy, a new car for example, and I brought home brochures of Cavaliers, Orions, Giuliettas and the like. That usually cheers people up. But most of all I began to suggest that if she didn’t find St Elizabeth’s sufficiently challenging – and surely she had already stayed far longer than we ever intended – she should look elsewhere for a job, try for something in publishing again, or broadcasting. That had always been the plan after all. The problem as I saw it was that she wasn’t fulfilled in her work. She was bored. I even suggested she might think about coming into InterAct in some capacity. I was in a position to swing that now. But Shirley said on the contrary that she had no intention whatsoever of changing her job. What did publishers do in the end, sat in offices like everybody else, thinking of the price of paper. No, she owed to St Elizabeth’s the discovery that she had a vocation for small children. She loved her children. Really, she loved their eagerness, their innocence. In fact she loved teaching in general. It was fun. She had never expected she would, but there you were. She would be dead without her job. It was the only good thing in her life.
‘So,’ I said, mustering what enthusiasm I could, ‘why not get into a whole load of extra-curricular activities? The plays and concerts they’re always asking you to do. That could be exciting. Bury yourself in it, if you like it so much.’
‘You are a love,’ she said. ‘Such a delight.’
One Tries and Tries to be Sensitive
Another thing I had to put up with these days were the frequent visits from Shirley’s mother.
Mrs Harcourt was a busy, bossy, bustling woman, exhibiting all the character traits of the wife who gives up career for family and is then left stranded when the fledgelings fly the nest (an object lesson for Shirley if only she’d had eyes to see it). She spent an inordinate amount of time on her personal appearance (hair-do’s, sauna, massage), and had taken up photography as a hobby to fill in the becalmed oceans of time between one social function and the next. She always had her camera bag when she came to visit and at some point or other would always pull out a Nikon and take her glasses off to squint through its expensive auto-focusing lens at some unlikely subject, in fact the more unlikely the better, to show what an eye she had, how she saw ‘the unusual in the usual’, as she put it.
She squinted through the lens, maybe at a mess of saucepans inside one of our cluttered cupboards, maybe at soap suds being sucked into the drain, at a coffee mug balanced on the arm of the sofa, but as far as I remember she never clicked the shutter in our house and certainly never showed us any of the results if she did. Perhaps not even she could find anything sufficiently unusual, we are such regular people. She had put on two small shows at the local library in Chiswick, one depicting, from de rigueur unlikely angles, various stages of slaughter in a poultry abattoir off the Goldhawk Road, a comment on man’s barbarity to the chicken apparently, the other featuring pieces of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the mudbanks opposite the family’s Strand-on-the-Green house, clammy with slime and generally unrecognisable. The glaring gratuitousness of these enterprises was one of the few things Shirley and I were still capable of laughing about together.
Otherwise, Mrs Harcourt was a signed-up, card-carrying member of the newly formed SDP, as perhaps only an already wealthy unemployed person could afford to be. Her small head came surprisingly forward from her body and when she spoke, her crisp elocution set a fierce mole above one corner of her mouth in undulating motion. Perhaps this accounted for the immediate impression of pushiness she communicated.
She would come over in her Metro Deluxe, m
aybe three, four times a week, shortly after Shirley got back from school. When I arrived home a couple of hours later I wasn’t invited to join in whatever discussion was under way. Often they sat together in the kitchen or even the bedroom to make it clear they wanted to be on their own. Once I heard crying. More often there were loud peals of haw-hawing women’s laughter, Mrs Harcourt gasping for breath, probably holding her sides the way older women will, shrieks of ‘Oh dear, oh dear’, Shirley no doubt tossing her hair back, glistening pink mouth wide open, the gesture that had most enchanted me when first I met her.
‘So what do you find to talk about?’ I might ask later.
‘Oh, this and that.’
‘Come on, she’s here every other evening. There must be something.’
‘About Dad, about Charles. She’s worried that he never seems to have any girlfriends. You know.’
‘I’d be worried for the girl if he did.’
‘Then he was arrested last week in some anti-Cruise march.’
‘He likes to be arrested, it reinforces his council flat credentials. ‘ And off the cuff I asked: ‘What’s the score with your dad these days anyway? We haven’t seen him for donkeys.’
Shirley said: ‘What a lemon this cooker is. For God’s sake! You can never be sure what the temperature is. It doesn’t matter how you set it. Either the stuff comes out like charcoal or everything’s raw in the middle.’
‘And me?’ I asked with what I hoped was a wry smile.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you talk about little old George?’
‘Aren’t we insecure?’ she laughed. She said: ‘Of course we talk about you sometimes. It’d be odd if we didn’t. Wouldn’t it?’
‘Would it?’
‘‘I think so.’
‘Okay. And what do you say?’
‘Oh, that you don’t deserve me.’ She stabbed a fork into some casserole meat and smiled sweetly.
‘Tell me more.’
‘Mmm, let me see, that your background’s made you a repressed hypocrite.’
‘Ah, of course, that. Examples?’
‘Though naturally we always agree that deep down you’re a kind, honest man and you’ll probably turn out good in the end.’
‘Naturally.’
But I think I can tell a knife when it’s out. And turning.
I suggested that we try to get away more often if she felt so down. An occasional weekend in Paris; we could afford it now. We were averagely well-off young people, even if we might have done better to save. Or I could even take a week off at Easter. Maybe we could go to Spain, Italy. Or a few days riding somewhere. She said she didn’t want to go away for a weekend, let alone for Easter. She didn’t even want to go away in the summer. We were planning to drive down to Turkey that year, seeing as everybody else seemed to be going to Greece. Now she didn’t want to go. I could go on my own. I said, no, I could not go on my own. What was the point? ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘In your head you live entirely on your own all the time.’
One tries and tries to be sensitive. I said that if she felt really depressed and unhappy maybe, just maybe, she should see somebody, er, get help, I don’t know, a psychoanalyst or something. She said: ‘Do me a favour, sweetheart, please.’ And she said: ‘This flat is impossible, really impossible, you know that? Not a single window that gets the sun, the carpets are the worst dust traps imaginable, the drains stink, the cupboard doors don’t close, the hot water’s never hot enough, the pipes groan, the oven’s useless, the paint is nearly grey, and you can never do anything about it because the landlady doesn’t want to pay for it. I mean, what are we doing here?’
I felt she was rather exaggerating. Still, at least this was something I could deal with. I suggested that if it was the flat that was depressing her, though she could never say I didn’t help with the cleaning and so on, then why didn’t we buy our own place now instead of waiting.
‘With whose money?’ She was aggressive. I said she knew perfectly well with whose money. A bit of our own and a great deal of her father’s. Surely it was tacitly understood that when we were ready, he’d help us to buy. She said buying our flat wouldn’t solve anything. The flat was awful, but it wasn’t that that was getting her down. I said I didn’t know what else to suggest, it seemed to be me making all the suggestions and then her promptly telling me I was stupid every time I opened my mouth. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t be happy.
‘Don’t suggest anything,’ she said. ‘And above all, stop buying me flowers as if I were dying or something.’
Carrying the Gloomy Can
My mother came over. I think for my birthday. Mother is a great celebrator of birthdays, even when everybody else has forgotten them. She even remembers Hilary’s. It’s a ritual for her, a slavery almost, like the moral code she blindly follows, the tithe of her income in the collection plate, the sense of duty toward Grandfather, the not marrying a man because he’d got divorced a decade before.
She remembered my birthday and brought the traditional, home-baked, lemon-iced birthday cake, arriving at the door after two long bus rides all bright and chirrupy, because of course Mother is never more cheerful than when she knows she’s fulfilling some family duty. I thanked her and kissed her. I was even glad she’d come as I felt it might take some of the tension out of the air. But hardly have we sat down to eat our cake than Shirley is asking: ‘Saved any souls lately, Mrs Crawley?’
It was deliberately hurtful. She had the innocent smile on her face she always combines with her worst sarcasm. My Mother very simply said: ‘It’s not me saves souls, lovey, it’s God,’ and she began to tell us all about Peggy’s darling little boy Frederick. He was so big and blond, he had all his milk teeth already, he was such a gorgeous cuddly little boy. Her big clumsy hands massacred the cake with the flat’s blunt breadknife. ‘For you, George?’
Shirley asked: ‘‘I imagine Peg’s planning another one now?’
Naturally, given the still dubious paternity of the first, this had Mother knitting her brow. But she managed a forgiving laugh: ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know, Peggy never tells me anything.’
‘Vetting possible fathers, perhaps,’ Shirley suggested. ‘She’s into Buddhism these days, isn’t she? Perhaps we’ll have a Chinese in the family.’
When we were on our own a moment in the kitchen I asked her what the hell she thought she was up to. Why couldn’t we just have a pleasant meal together?
‘I hate,’ she said, ‘the way you’re such a goody goody when your mother comes, the way she thinks the sun shines out of your backside. If she knew what you were really like.’
‘And what am I like?’ I asked.
‘You hardly need me to tell you that,’ she said.
‘You were the one, sweetheart,’ I told her, ‘said you wouldn’t mind her coming to live here with us.’
‘Precisely because,’ she replied, ‘she might finally be forced to see the light. We might clear the air.’
‘I swear in front of her,’ I said, ‘I don’t try to hide anything.’
At which, and I’m afraid this is very effective, she simply burst out laughing and walked back into the living room.
Driving Mother home to Acton, I said: ‘Sorry if Shirl was a bit abrasive, Mum.’
‘Was she, love? I didn’t notice.’
‘I don’t know, she seems a bit, er, frustrated these days. I don’t know what it is.’
‘We all go through our bad patches, poor dear,’ Mother said complacently. Then waiting for the lights at the A40, she hazarded: ‘I know it’s none of my business, but perhaps it’s time to start a family. She did tell me she’d like a baby a while back.’
When I said nothing, watching for green – I had the usual hassler trying to edge past me on the inside, something I never allow – she said: ‘I always feel there’s a time in everybody’s lives when it’s just the next logical step to take, the only way to grow.’
I laughed, putting my foot down hard. I love driving. I s
aid, ‘You forget, Mum. I specialise in logical steps, it’s my job, and I can assure you it wouldn’t be. Shirley’s is just a straightforward case of boredom. That’s the problem. Have a baby and she’d be even more bored. She’d always be trying to dump it on babysitters and relatives.’
Mother said brightly: ‘Well you know you can count on me, love. I have ever so much fun looking after Frederick.’
With a sense that events were in danger of getting beyond my control, I rang up Shirley’s father the following week and began a very, but very careful spiel I’d prepared in every detail: about Shirley being depressed because of the miserable flat we’d been in too long, about the landlady never wanting to decorate or replace anything, about the rental market being so hopeless these days with the ludicrously pro-tenant rules the Labour government had introduced and Margaret hadn’t as yet got round to repealing, about the price of property being so high it was unimaginable for two young people to buy a decent place on their own – and I asked him was there any chance, now I’d put a bit of money together myself, because I was saving about thirty per cent of my income – was there any chance that he could maybe chip in, rather massively actually, and . . .