As Time Goes By

by Hilary Bailey

  Susie McLintock was standing at a stall selling badges and posters for the Greenham Common women. Polly gave her a pound and said ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’ve only been here for ten minutes,’ Susie said. ‘I’m out shopping really only the woman who runs it had been standing here since eight and she wanted to go off for a pee and a cup of coffee.’

  Polly shook the collection tin, which was only half full.

  ‘People aren’t that interested,’ said Susie. ‘Women wrestling in mud has more appeal than women demonstrating in mud, somehow.’

  ‘You should have a raffle,’ Polly remarked.

  Another woman in an anorak and moonboots came up and said, ‘I’m back – do you want to get away?’

  Susie picked up her shopping basket, full of vegetables and fruit, and said to Polly, ‘Do you want to come to the pub?’ As they walked along Susie’s son saw them as he skated up the road and came after them. ‘Shoes?’ he said. Susie turned round and gave him some notes from her purse. ‘Make sure they’re waterproof, this time,’ she called after the skating figure. ‘I hope he does,’ she said. They stood outside the pub in their coats, drinking lager. A woman came up and talked to Susie about the protest about the hospital closure, the leafleting about the presence in the neighbourhood of a rapist. ‘The police are beginning to do something now,’ she said.

  ‘There was a helicopter beaming lights into our garden for half an hour last night,’ Polly said. ‘It frightened me. It frightened our cat. They could have seen us picking our noses.’

  ‘Makes you think,’ said the other woman. Susie pulled a file from the bottom of her shopping basket and said, ‘If you’re including public health in that course you’re teaching do you want these comparative figures about the developing countries? Take the whole file and copy what you want.’

  ‘I’ll let you have it back by Tuesday,’ said the woman. ‘I’d better go. I think Fred’s finally coming round to look at the lights.’

  ‘I saw him in the Warwick half an hour ago,’ Susie reported. ‘I hope he turns up.’

  ‘So do I,’ the other said with feeling. ‘It’s been three weeks now.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Susie said, when the woman had gone.

  ‘She could be lucky,’ Polly told her.

  ‘So – how’s it all going?’ asked Susie.

  Polly shrugged. ‘As well as can be expected. It’s all my own fault. I’m the author of my own downfall and so on and so forth.’

  Susie looked slightly puzzled, seemed about to ask her something and then paused. She said, ‘What’s that terrible woman next to you doing to Julie Thompson?’

  ‘Anna Lombard? What’s happening?’ asked Polly.

  ‘Well, apparently she’s trying to get her out. She appeared yesterday evening, just as Julie was putting the tea on the table, said had Julie thought about the offer of cash they’d made a year or so before and started talking vaguely about the condition of the place being unsuitable for children. Said she’d seen a big crack in the building. Then she went as white as a sheet, Julie said, and muttered something about thinking it over and suddenly went away. Julie’s very worried about it because of course she knows if they can get the place declared unfit she’ll have to go. Also the woman seemed a bit mad, she says. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘I think it’s a one-off by Anna Lombard,’ said Polly. ‘Of course they want the flat, it’d add £50,000 to the price of the house. But I don’t think they’re the sort to go in for serious harassment. And there’s nothing much wrong with the building. If there were they’d have scaffolding round it in one minute. They never stop nagging me about my roof. It’s an obsession with them. How’s Greg?’

  ‘He says he wants to move in with us.’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Polly advised.

  ‘I wasn’t planning to,’ said Susie, giving her a neutral look. ‘How are Pam and Sue and Margaret? Nice picture of Val in the local paper posed against the graffiti, holding Rufus, next to the caretaker holding a dead rat in each hand.’

  ‘She never told me she was in the local paper,’ Polly said. ‘I must order a glossy copy and send it to Rufus’s grandmother, Lady Kops of Kensington, W.8.’

  Susie put down her glass, picked up her shopping and said, ‘I must go. The washing’s still in the laundrette.’

  As Polly left she saw Susie’s son skate past her, carrying a plastic bag, signalling success. Why hadn’t Susie asked after Clancy, she thought, then forgot about it. The day wore on, the pale sunshine failed to disguise the weariness of the crowds pushing by the stalls. Now the summer tourists had gone, with their money and their holiday mood, the natives looked more obviously tired and fed up. Standing there during the last hour of business, more on principle than in the hope of selling anything, she began to review again the string of events and decisions which had somehow stranded her on these shores, middle-aged and struggling to keep her feet against the incoming tide, selling old items to weary people about to be engulfed themselves. She said to Kate Mulvaney, who came past with a large frozen turkey, like stone in a plastic bag, ‘If there’s anything left after the sale of the house, once the bank loan’s paid off and Alexander’s done his worst, I’m going to get a bloody shop and become a proper dealer. I know all about it now – the family’ll have to squash in over the shop, as many of them as the place will take, and the others’ll have to shift for themselves. What else can I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Katie. ‘But I can’t see how Alexander can get anything.’

  ‘It went in our joint names when I bought it years ago, God knows why,’ said Polly. ‘I think I felt guilty about what I was doing to him. I told him if all failed he’d always have a home. He told me to get stuffed at the time, in the ’sixties style, but of course it’s the ’eighties now. He’s coming round in a top hat twirling his moustache. The problem is that he’ll have a good solicitor, even a barrister, and I doubt if I can even produce the right paperwork to prove I need legal aid.’

  Kate looked drawn. ‘You all right?’ asked Polly.

  Kate said doubtfully, ‘Yes – yes. I think so.’ Then she went off to get something to go with the turkey.

  If he gets me, he gets me, Polly thought of Alexander. Overhead the motorway drummed traffic along to Oxford. She thought she saw Clancy talking to a man by the café, mimicking the nervy energy of his youth, now somehow out of synch with the movements of the inner man. She turned to answer an enquiry from a passer-by thinking Clancy ought to be leading a less uncertain life, we all should be. When she looked back, he was gone. ‘Polly!’ said Kate. Beside her was a bearded man. Suddenly her blue eyes were very blue in her brown face. ‘It’s Dermot,’ she announced. ‘Dermot – this is Polly.’ They shook hands. ‘Dermot’s just back from Africa – he’s staying with us. Come round for a drink tonight.’

  Polly nodded, wondering who the man was. With any luck, unlike Kate’s former husband he would be able to contend with a woman whose preoccupation had been with the unfeminine subject of virtue – not domestic virtue, but general virtue. Still, how could he have been expected to cope with a wife who was insouciant about the toys on the floor, was never petty, jealous or greedy, and saw them both as moral beings in a moral universe? She made life impossible. After him had come the opportunistic Joe Coverdale, who had fallen in love with her, but out again fairly quickly. Probably, like her husband, he could not take Kate’s fatally unattractive combination of Irish housekeeping and belief in her own soul, a terrible sign of spiritual pride in a woman, and about as seductive to the average man as a glass eye or a wooden leg. But here she was, Kate, after all that, having somehow managed to qualify as a doctor, doing good all over the place, a credit to herself and all the labouring women in the world. Irish life being what it was, Polly reflected, Dermot was probably some kind of ninth cousin to Kate and might tolerate her improbable belief in her own spiritual autonomy. In Polly’s world, where husbands and fathers, as in a science fiction novel,
tended to dematerialise after a few years, re-materialising some years later in Tudor houses in the home counties or with heiresses in the USA, and where women consequently had to reorganise and lead independent but knife-edge lives between the labour market and the fracture clinic, the sight of Kate was a tonic.

  She went on packing her unsold goods into her battered white van and, as if to confirm her view that men have magical powers, one minute they’re watching Match of the Day in their socks, the next they’re running advertising agencies in New York, saw Clancy seeming to hurry towards her, then disappear into a cluster of stalls. Or perhaps he ran up a tree and was clinging to a branch and gibbering at her, she vaguely thought, then slammed the doors of the van shut and went home for a cup of tea and a sit down, before her nerves got any worse.

  As she went into the kitchen she found the table blocked by tall girls in black, all clustered like a flock protecting a wounded bird round a plump girl with frizzed pale brown hair, who was crying.

  Unnoticed, Polly made her tea, hearing only her daughter Sue say, ‘What a bitch. She acts like the princess in a fairy story but she’s more like the wicked stepmother.’

  Upstairs Polly, with her sore feet on the sofa, was jotting down a few lines on a pad – ‘As I suspected, you’re a rank sentimentalist,’ said Claude Rains, who was obviously the only sensible person in Casablanca – when Pam put her head round the door and said, ‘Mum, can Harriet stay for the rest of the weekend?’

  Polly said, ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Harriet Lombard,’ explained Pam. ‘You know – she’s the daughter of Thingy Lombard next door, always hurrying down the path with his briefcase – looks like Jim Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister – he’s married to this beautiful woman with the gold hair, like Princess Diana, the one who’s always ringing about the roof. You know. Anyway, our science master’s brother lives with her mum, in Bromley. But it’s only a semi and there’s three of them, Harriet’s brother and sister, then her mum, then this social worker who’s our science master’s brother – so finally she had a row with her mother and came dashing up here to ask if she could move in with her dad and Princess Di, because she’s at the Slade and there’s no room for her to do her paintings or anything and they’ve got this big house, the Lombards – so, I’m coming up the street with Fiona and we find her leaning against a tree outside their house, sobbing her eyes out. Fiona recognises her because they used to go to the same primary school years ago, before she moved – Fiona – so we asked her in and said what’s the matter –’

  ‘Well, look,’ said Polly. ‘As long as it’s only –’

  ‘I told you, just the weekend –’

  ‘All right, I’ve been on my feet all day –’

  ‘Well, thanks Mum,’ said Pam.

  Polly yawned and looked back at the pad. With any luck, she could leave for Katie’s before Clancy came back from wherever he had gone. If he decided to come with her, he could fatally damage the evening. He’d probably be drunk when he arrived: if not, he’d be drunk after fifteen minutes at Kate’s. He’d then roll joints in front of the children and offer them drags, droning on about the utter harmlessness and life-enhancing qualities of grass, a statement which, with any luck, would be received with scepticism by young people observing his wrecked face and distressed frame of mind.

  Further remarks about drug abuse being the hallmark of the cool, laid back, unselfseeking and loving would no doubt be treated with similar scepticism, coming from the lips of a man plainly gripped by malice and hatred as some are gripped by arthritis. Still, how she’d loved him, she thought. Now she wondered what had come over her. If it wasn’t for him, Polly thought, having arrived in her bedroom, to stare self-pityingly at her own face in the glass, picking up the huge crack in the wall behind her, background and comment on the state of her life and appearance – if it wasn’t for him I’d be Lady Kops, living in Mayfair with children at Oxford and Cambridge, greeting the Chairman of the Board in the immaculate hall, under my Hockney, on top of my Carrara marble tiles, ‘How nice to see you Sir Rodney, such a pity about the mine incident in Bolivia, which killed ninety, and the consequent hiccup in production.’ Contemplating the alternative worlds a woman can imagine when working out what would have happened if she’d said ‘I love you’ to one man or another, Polly changed her tights and hopped out through the garden to Kate’s, thankful that she’d evaded Clancy.

  It was peaceful now, for the builders who were taking every other increasing-by-twenty-five-per-cent-per-annum residence to pieces, had gone for the weekend. The sky shone with the lurid glow of the reflected neon, but she could still see the stars up there, through the haze. There was grass under her feet, she spotted her cat stalking her, concealing itself under bushes, leaping out and skittering off to find more cover.

  Kate was stirring a pot on the stove in the kitchen when Polly banged on the window, calling, ‘Don’t worry. It’s only me.’

  ‘Sit down and have a drink, Polly,’ said Kate, who was wearing a woolly dress with an apron over it. ‘The others are all upstairs but it’s not going well.’

  ‘Dermot, I suppose?’ Polly said politely.

  ‘Mm,’ Kate said. ‘I’m in a predicament, really.’

  ‘I’m assuming he’s an old childhood friend and distant relative and several of your uncles were in Sinn Fein together,’ said Polly.

  ‘Ireland’s a small place,’ Kate pointed out.

  ‘I imagine that the heavy hand of the Irish church is also involved,’ said Polly.

  Kate handed Polly a glass of red wine and sat down at the kitchen table with her hand in her pale brown bird’s-nest hair. ‘That’s accurate,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a pheasant you’re cooking?’ Polly asked.

  ‘It’s supposed to be a celebration. The children aren’t behaving particularly well to Dermot. It’s a bribe.’ She paused. ‘I’m no good at it. It’s Patrick and Ajax, really. Siobhan doesn’t care. She’s got herself a temporary job at the Royal Court until she can get a job – forty applications she’s sent in and only four replies, three of them flat turn-downs and one interview that didn’t work. Anyway, she’s working all hours and doesn’t worry about a thing. Well, Dermot’s married, you see, and a devout man. And I’m still married and a devout woman.’

  ‘Your husband’s divorced, remarried and had a two-year-old,’ Polly said bluntly, ‘but you’re still married to him. That’s Catholic logic is it? How’s Kevin, by the way?’

  ‘Long Kesh,’ Kate said of her brother. ‘You’re right about me being Irish. But at least he’s safe. They can’t kill him or maim him there.’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ Polly said without confidence. ‘Anyway,’ she said, also without confidence, ‘you don’t have to get married, do you? I mean, things can go on much as they are.’

  ‘We’re committing what’s known as mortal sin,’ Kate said. ‘And if we can’t sincerely declare we’ll give up, we can’t receive absolution and can’t go to mass.’

  ‘What about if you get married in a registry office,’ said Polly, ‘and some liberal priest gives you a blessing – that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘We don’t have handy compromises like that in the Catholic church,’ Kate told her.

  Polly knew this anyway. ‘Well –’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, Dermot doesn’t want to hurt his wife. They’ve been married for fifteen years – he’s been away most of the time, but it’s a small town and a divorce would upset her position. There’s Irish respectability to be considered. Still, I’m lucky – I’ve got a lot–’

  ‘And a terrible conscience,’ Polly added.

  ‘What about you?’ Kate said.

  Polly shrugged. ‘Same old story,’ she told Kate. ‘Too many children, too little common sense, a lack of steady effort, sense of responsibility; a general belief that the sun will always shine on Polly Kops. Now I’ve dragged us all into a pit. Sell up, fresh start, that’s all I can do.’

  In Kate’s sitting
-room an uncongenial party had got together. Kate’s sister, in a grey dress and grey stockings, was talking to Patrick, Kate’s son, on a sofa by the window, while Patrick cast odd sharp looks at Dermot O’Brien, who was playing chess with a wooden-faced Ajax. As they came in Ajax took a piece of Dermot’s from the board, with a vengeful air. Dermot looked up and said, ‘He’s well ahead.’

  ‘You’re trying to lose,’ Ajax told him.

  ‘You must be joking,’ said Dermot, turning back and moving a piece, whereupon Ajax said, ‘Now tell me you’re not playing to lose.’

  ‘That’s perfectly all ri— Oh Christ,’ said Dermot, looking more closely at the board. Then he bent closer, looked harder and said, ‘Yes, that’s it, then.’

  Ajax turned his eyes up to the ceiling and sighed. ‘I told you I couldn’t play,’ Dermot said.