The Past and Other Lies

by Maggie Joel

  The back window was open and even though it was Sunday and Parson’s was shut on Sundays, a sudden waft of sawdust and raw meat seeped into the flat.

  What kind of a man brought his wife to live here?

  The kind of man who thought more of his comrades in the league than he did of his own wife, who cared more for some unknown miner’s family in Worksop than he did for his own family right here in Acton. Lord knew, she didn’t need a big house; a poky terrace would do; a two-up, two-down with a parcel of yard out the front and a WC out the back would do. It wasn’t much to ask, was it? And they could rent at first, couldn’t they? But oh, no! While other wives lived in comfort with gas cookers and washing machines, she was meant to be content with this mean little one-and-a-half-bedroom flat above Parson’s.

  Bertha, meanwhile, was queening it in a three-bedroom house with a garden and rosebushes in Oakton Way.

  In the other room the baby gulped, choked, and fell silent.

  Jemima held her breath and stood motionless, her heart thudding noisily.

  With a little cough the baby began to grizzle once more.

  The creamy-coloured peeling wallpaper that covered the walls began to turn a violent red colour and a pulse started throbbing in her forehead. She couldn’t remember getting up but now, somehow, she was standing in the hallway, the blood hurtling through her body so that her arms ached and her fingers clenched the air. But her body had nothing to do and nowhere to go except out into the yard to rescue the washing off the line.

  She would go outside. She would rescue the washing off the line.

  But it had been spitting all evening and the washing, she knew, would already be wet through. And anyway there was another pile of nappies to wash and Ronnie’s work clothes still not dry for tomorrow though she had washed them on Thursday. Perhaps it would be a good thing if there was a strike because then she wouldn’t have to wash his work clothes, but then she remembered the schools weren’t going on strike no matter what happened with the government so really there was no escape.

  No escape at all.

  She flung open the door to the flat and stepped, stumbled, down the cold concrete steps to the downstairs door, which was permanently ajar because the hinges were rusted. She tugged open the door and pushed the huge old black perambulator out of the way and stood in the yard, breathing deeply.

  Breathing deeply.

  The rain sprayed a fine mist onto her face and it felt cool and calming and she liked the way her hair grew damp and heavy and had that wet hair smell about it, and how her dress clung to her legs and the drops dribbled down her arms and along her fingers and hung in droplets at her fingertips before sliding off and splashing on the muddy yard beneath her feet.

  She smiled. She thought about laughing out loud but there was no one to hear, Parson’s being closed on a Sunday and the shop empty and silent for once. The smell of sawdust and raw meat still lingered. It had begun to seem like there would never be a time when she couldn’t smell sawdust and raw meat.

  She would go out for a walk. No matter about Baby, Baby never noticed if you were there or not, except when it was hungry or needed changing, and even then you never knew if it realised it had been fed or changed or not. What did it matter if you went out on your own and left Baby asleep while you did the shopping or went to the park or looked at the fashions in the shop windows? Baby had never come to any harm and it was ridiculous to be tied to the house like a slave when your husband was at work every day, or out at yet another pointless rally, and only took Baby out in the perambulator on a Sunday afternoon for all the world to see what a wonderful dad he was. Oh yes, a wonderful dad—didn’t they all say so? And she, stuck indoors like a slave.

  Like a prisoner.

  The rain eased a little and she looked up at the grey dusk and wondered when Ronnie would deign to come home. He had come home late nearly every night of the last week filled with all the news as though what Mr Baldwin said and what the government did or what the union demanded could have anything to do with them. With her. And now someone was on strike—the coalminers, no doubt; it was always the coalminers—and you’d think that would be an end to it, but no! Now they were saying it’s a general strike or revolution! And what did they think that would accomplish? she had asked. Did he think the Russians were better off now than before?

  So they had fought and Ronnie had gone out. Although there had been more to it than just the Russians.

  Baby had stopped. Jemima cocked an ear in the rain and listened. There was traffic in High Street, she could hear the splash of tyres as a bus passed by and in the distance the bells of All Saints calling people to Evensong. They would get a good turnout tonight, despite the rain, because people were eager to hear the latest about whether there really was to be a strike or not in the morning.

  The strike. It was all people talked about. It was all they had talked about at tea that afternoon at Mum and Dad’s.

  Dad had been reading from the Gazette when they’d arrived—late, thanks to Baby regurgitating its milk all over Ronnie’s shirt front and he not having another shirt to change into (and now everyone thinking it was Ronnie who fed Baby because it was his shirt ruined and no one thinking that most of her own dresses had been ruined weeks ago and no one noticing because where did she ever go that she got a chance to wear a nice dress?).

  So Bertha and Matthew had already been there and settled on the settee this last half-hour or more with their cups of tea and their bread and butter and jam and all nice and cosy and she and Ronnie arriving late and getting a look from Dad that said, You might at least make an effort to arrive on time for tea that your mother’s made and your own sister and her new husband already here and settled, but he’d said nothing, only shook Ronnie’s hand and said ‘Evening, love’ to her and tickled Baby under the chin and Baby had chuckled and gurgled as though butter wouldn’t melt.

  ‘They say it’ll be anarchy and revolution,’ announced Dad, sitting down, and Jemima had groaned because it was obvious they weren’t discussing the Cup Final or the Residents’ Allotments Association.

  ‘I’ll have a cuppa, Mum,’ she said, sitting on her old chair by the window and passing Baby to Ronnie. Bertha wanted to hold Baby, you could tell even without looking, but Bertha would wait to be asked. She was sitting, all prim and wifely, beside her new husband.

  Her new husband: Mr Matthew Lake who worked behind the counter at the post office and who was forty if he was a day! His and Bertha’s wedding at the registry office in the town hall had been a small affair compared to her own. Perhaps the bride was ashamed of marrying a man so much older than herself? At any rate, the ceremony had been very brief with no organ music or hymns, and if Jemima hadn’t got the confetti herself it would have been as flat as cake you’d made yourself. They’d had a wedding breakfast at the Duke of York Tavern and Aunt Nora and the girls—Janie so big you wondered how she dared show her face—and Mr Lake’s mother and aunt, who looked old enough to be at their own funerals. A very sober affair it had been, with speeches so stiff and formal you’d have thought someone had died, and perhaps someone had because what kind of a young girl, even someone like Bertha, would get herself saddled to a man who was forty and worked at the post office?

  Afterwards the newlyweds had gone to Scarborough for the week and good luck to them in late November with the sky as grey as the sea and who knew what sort of lodgings. She shuddered, remembering the Sea View Bed and Breakfast in Torquay where she and Ronnie had stayed for six grim nights last March.

  And here they were, Mr and Mrs Matthew Lake, married these five months gone and playing the Happily Married Couple, if you please!

  ‘Another slice of bread, Matthew dear?’ asked Bertha, offering the plate.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Matthew, carefully selecting a slice and placing it on his plate.

  ‘Jam?’

  ‘Thank you kindly.’

  Sickening. Who were they trying to fool? What kind of a marriage could it b
e, him so old, her grateful to finally be someone’s wife? And as for the bedroom! Well, the mind reeled to imagine it:

  Another go, my dear?

  Thank you, my dear.

  Pyjamas?

  Thank you kindly.

  Ugh! It was disgusting. It was unimaginable. Did he think about it, she wondered, during the day when he was stamping the mail and tearing off a sheet of stamps for you behind the counter? Did he think about tearing off a sheet of stamps when he was in bed with Bertha?

  ‘Jem, a slice of walnut cake?’

  Jemima quashed the image and stared at the plate her mother was holding out. She took a piece of cake absent-mindedly. Did people think about that with her and Ronnie? Did they wonder what went on in the bedroom? Funny, she hadn’t thought about it before the marriage, so satisfied had she been to be Mrs Ronnie Booth, and then suddenly she was heavy with the baby and she had walked about the park and up and down the lane proudly with her still-unmarried elder sister on her arm and never a thought for what folk might think. Except, of course, what a pretty mother she would make. Now she wondered. Now she took a sideways look at Ronnie and wondered. He was thin, he always had been, and his clothes had a tendency to be too large, and his bones, if he showed them to her when the light was still on, were sharp and tending to jut out of his skin. He wasn’t a tall man, and not manly perhaps, like Jamie Cannon was manly, but you never felt out of your depth with him like you might with Jamie. You always knew what he was thinking and how you could get him to think what you were thinking, and it was like that in bed when the lights were out and it was so cold you had to keep your nightdress on and hope the old bed didn’t creak too much in case old stingy Parson was still in the shop downstairs.

  Ronnie had been so funny on their wedding night, treating her as though she might break—as though it were her first time! She hadn’t said anything—some things you didn’t tell your husband—and after that every night, regular as clockwork, not as frantic perhaps as old Gilfroy, but regular and no more fiddling about in stock cupboards and fumbling to do yourself up quick-sharp in case anyone came by. But since Baby, nothing, almost as though he was too scared of hurting her, and here she was with her figure back and men looking at her and not thinking for a moment that the baby could be hers. And Ronnie off at his stupid meetings every night and not back till late and thinking her already asleep.

  ‘Folk have got to eat,’ proclaimed Dad solemnly, wrenching her thoughts back to the present.

  ‘We are eating, Dad,’ she pointed out through a mouthful of walnut cake.

  ‘And we’re the lucky ones!’ declared Ronnie, and the way he pounced on her, it was as though he’d been waiting for her to say just those very words all afternoon. All week.

  Jemima pinched the piece of walnut cake between her thumb and first finger until it crumbled and collapsed onto her plate in little bits.

  ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘we could go for five minutes without discussing the dreary old, boring old miners? It’s so dull!’

  Beside her she felt Ronnie stiffen, but he said nothing. Sitting opposite, Bertha picked up her teacup and took a quick sip, her eyes fixed on a point on the carpet between them.

  In his armchair, Dad frowned. ‘It’s what I just said, folk have got to eat, whether they be rich folk or poor folk, and folk that don’t have food in their bellies will be restless until they do. Stands to reason. Don’t take no fancy parliament fella in Westminster, nor no red-faced union leader on a soapbox, to tell us that. We can see it with our own eyes. Question is, what’s to be done about it and how are they going to go about doing it? That’s the only thing far as I can make out.’ And he cast a challenging glance at his audience, or more precisely at his two sons-in-law, as they, at least, could be trusted to have some grasp of the nation’s current precarious political situation.

  Jemima snorted.

  Next to Bertha, Matthew licked his lips and faced his father-in-law thoughtfully as though he doubted the validity of what Dad had said and his authority to say it. Just as though he was aware that he was almost of Dad’s generation and was waiting, none too patiently, in the wings to assume the role of Head of the Family.

  ‘That’s true, of course,’ he conceded carefully, and you knew from the way he said it that he was merely being polite and that Dad’s opinions really counted for very little, ‘but there will always be rich and poor folk. That’s human nature. You see it in every society from Calcutta to the New Guinea tribesman...’

  Oh Lord, what did he know of New Guinea tribesmen? thought Jemima, silently rolling her eyes. He weighed parcels in a post office, for heaven’s sake!

  ‘...but the fact remains we live in a civilised society where a chap and his family can get on in life if they so desire, and we have a very good system of parliament that is the envy of every other civilised nation and which allows us to resolve disputes and find solutions without recourse to violence.’

  Ronnie fairly jumped up from the settee in his agitation and Jemima braced herself.

  ‘Violence?’ he replied furiously. ‘If you were...were...were starving and your family was starving because your wages had steadily been decreasing for the last ten years and your hours have been cut and you see your boss living in a big house with servants and driving a big car and when you complain you’re thrown out of your job and left to live on the...the charity of others not much better off than yourself, what would you do then? I bet you would have recourse to violence then. I know I would!’

  Ronnie’s voice had risen during this little speech and he had got to his feet in his excitement. As he finished on this defiant note that seemed to be aimed straight at Matthew there was a silence. Ronnie sat back down and upset his plate, which was resting on the arm of the settee, so that the walnut cake fell onto the carpet butter-side down and crumbs scattered over his lap and over the chintz fabric of the settee.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mum amiably, and it was hard to know if she was lamenting Ronnie’s overheated little speech or the demise of the walnut cake and her carpet. She got up and went over to pick up the debris at Ronnie’s feet. ‘You’d think,’ she added, slowly straightening up and surveying them all pointedly, ‘that with two sides on which to fall, a slice of cake would occasionally fall on the unbuttered side, but no, never happens. Every time it’s butter-side down,’ and, having imparted this nugget of wisdom, she placed the errant slice on the trolley and gave the plate back to Ronnie. ‘Flapjack?’

  ‘Thank you,’ mumbled Ronnie shamefacedly.

  ‘Anyway, I really don’t see how a stupid strike in a coalmine should have the slightest effect on us,’ Jemima pointed out, because someone had to say it.

  Opposite her, Bertha gave one of those pursed-lips tutting noises that, as elder sister married to a postal worker, seemed to be her duty now. ‘That,’ she declared, ‘is because you don’t keep abreast of the State of the Nation.’

  ‘The State of the Nation!’ Jemima scoffed. ‘What do you know about the State of the Nation? What do any of us know except what we hear in the queue at the greengrocer’s?’

  ‘We read the newspapers, we see the newsreels...’

  ‘You young ladies don’t know anything about it,’ Dad interrupted, ‘and can’t be expected to neither. It’s not a lady’s duty to know these things.’ He turned to Ronnie, who swallowed and suddenly looked quite young. ‘As for starving miners turning to violence, I won’t hear of such things in my house, if you please. This is a law-abiding Christian household and we don’t hold with that kind of communistic talk.’

  Ronnie opened his mouth to protest but Dad held up a hand and continued. ‘I’m sure we all agree those poor men and their families are doing it tough and that Mr Baldwin and his government have not done all that they might to assist them, but that’s no excuse for the kind of behaviour they go in for in Foreign Parts.’

  Ronnie, duly reprimanded, studied the floral pattern on the edge of his plate and turned pink from his chin to the tips of his ears.
Jemima felt a rush of fury—fancy being so outspoken and then so cowardly as to allow Dad to tell him off in front of everyone! Why didn’t he say something in his own defence? At least look Dad square in the eyes? But no, he sulked like a schoolboy and she, his wife, was humiliated.

  ‘Yes, Mum, thank you, I will,’ said Matthew to his mother-in-law as she offered him a flapjack. He sat back with a relaxed attitude and Jemima thought, You wouldn’t put up with Dad telling you off, would you? You’d stand up for yourself. She observed her brother-in-law carefully and she observed Bertha reaching up and brushing a crumb from her husband’s shirt front then sitting up so primly and proudly and surveying the room as if to say, Look at my husband, Mr Matthew Lake of the GPO, who thinks before he speaks and knows how to defend himself and who won’t be told off by anyone.

  ‘Aren’t you giving Baby any tea?’ asked Bertha sweetly.

  Jemima smiled back at her even more sweetly. ‘If you knew anything at all about babies, you would know that when Baby is asleep the one thing you don’t do is wake Baby up.’

  Bertha flushed.

  ‘Any rate, I doubt it’ll come to a general strike,’ declared Dad with a finality that was intended to prevent further discussion. Unfortunately Ronnie, who had remained infuriatingly silent when he ought to have spoken up, was at once on the edge of his seat again.

  ‘I believe there will be, sir. And if not tomorrow then in the next few days—it has to happen. The government’s pushed the unions into a corner so they’ve nowhere else to go and the unions are solid enough that—’