by Pamela Evans
Leaving him scowling after her, she hurried upstairs to get her jacket.
‘I won’t be long,’ she called on her way through the kitchen to the back door.
‘I’ve told you, Jane . . . you’re not going anywhere,’ he said, voice rising with temper.
‘Oh, don’t be so daft.’ She opened the back door and stepped out into the garden - only to feel his hand on her arm, pulling her back.
‘Back inside,’ he ordered.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Mick,’ she said, struggling to get free, hardly able to believe this was happening. ‘I have to go.’
He stared at her in a fury, dark eyes wild and strange, hand clamped to her arm in a bruising grip.
‘I’ve told you, you’re not going anywhere. And I meant it.’
‘You can’t dictate to me as though I’m some nineteenth-century scullery maid,’ she said, staring furiously into his eyes, her face screwed up with pain from the pressure of his hold on her. ‘I meant it when I said I am not going to give up my business just for the sake of your male pride. I don’t think it’s fair of you to ask it of me.’
‘And I don’t think you’re being at all fair to me . . .’
‘I’m doing my best for all of us,’ said Jane, wincing from his grip. ‘I warned you that things would be different if you moved in with us. If you can’t accept that, you’d better leave.’
‘Don’t you dare tell me to leave, woman. This is my . . .’
‘But it isn’t, is it, Mick?’ she said as his words died on his lips. ‘It isn’t your house. Now let me go and do my work, please.’
His hand slowly dropped from her arm and he immediately became the injured victim, looking deeply wounded with the deliberate intention of making her feel guilty.
‘Oh, do what you like,’ he said and went inside, slamming the door after him.
As she nipped next-door through the gap in the fence to see Davey, she saw Giles in his garden working on the flower beds.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked, coming over to her, dressed in an old pair of jeans and the navy blue sweater he used for gardening.
‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘I’ve just popped in to tell Davey that I have to go to the shop for an hour or so. But Mick’s in if he wants to come home before I get back.’
‘I think Kevin’s hoping he’ll be staying to lunch with us. I was going to send him in to check with you first.’
‘That’s fine by me, so long as you don’t mind,’ said Jane with a sense of relief because Davey resented his father’s being back and didn’t try to hide it. She felt easier in her mind if he wasn’t at home with Mick when she wasn’t there to keep the peace between them.
‘I’ll tell him then.’
‘Thanks, Giles.’
‘It’s a pleasure.’
‘See you,’ said Jane, and hurried up the path and out of his back gate to her car.
Alerted by the sound of raised voices in the adjacent garden, Giles had watched the incident between Jane and Mick through a crack in the fence. If Mick had got any rougher with Jane, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself intervening. But he’d kept out of it for her sake.
Mick Parker wouldn’t take kindly to interference and was the type to take his resentment out on his wife. Jane was making a supreme effort to convince the outside world that all was well within the Parker home which was why Giles had said nothing to her about witnessing the argument.
He’d had his doubts ever since first meeting Mick Parker, who’d seemed very full of his own importance. Now Giles had seen proof that things were going horribly wrong. Davey was a changed boy since his father had been back. He was much more subdued than he used to be and always reluctant to go home though, like his mother, he insisted that everything was fine with the family.
Making a sudden decision, Giles hurried indoors and made a telephone call to the estate agent’s office, instructing them to remove his cottage from the market for the time being. He didn’t trust Mick Parker. There was something abnormal about his behaviour that made Giles sense danger for Jane and the children.
As painful as it was living next-door to the woman he loved under the current circumstances, he couldn’t move away. He’d rather be close at hand in case she needed him.
Jane was trembling with reaction as she drove to the shop, mouth dry, stomach knotted. This past couple of months had been hellish. Thank God Mick chose to stay in Brighton during the week. At least that allowed her to attend to her business and recover from the appalling stress of having him around at the weekend.
It was an impossible situation which would only be resolved, so far as Mick was concerned, when she relinquished her home, her business, her identity, and reverted to being merely an appendage of his. He was determined to wear her down and it was an uphill struggle to stop it happening.
Was it wrong to want to be allowed to have her own interests and opinions? she asked herself. Was she being selfish in wanting to keep a business she had worked hard to build and which would eventually be passed on to her children? To ask her to revert back to the way she’d been before was like asking someone to forget how to walk. Surely no one had the right to demand that of another person?
To make matters worse, there was constant friction between Davey and his father, despite her pleas to her son to make more of an effort. She supposed it was a protective thing with Davey. He had always been closer to Jane than Pip was. She guessed also that he’d found life pleasanter when Giles had been like one of the family, admiring him as the boy did.
Determined to regain authority over his family by any means, Mick exacerbated the situation by picking on Davey at every opportunity. Consequently, if Jane wasn’t battling against his attempts to trample her into the ground, she was acting as peacemaker between father and son. It was exhausting as well as dispiriting.
The only person who seemed pleased about Mick’s return was Pip. She’d always been a Daddy’s girl and had slipped straight back into the role, assisted by the fact that Mick thoroughly spoiled her. This also caused trouble between Jane and Mick because she was opposed to such blatant favouritism.
More personally distressing was the problem of bed. Jane had feigned more headaches recently than she cared to remember. But Mick wasn’t easily deterred. He’d always been very demanding in that department.
For all his domination, though, there were times when he seemed so sad and vulnerable. Then he would be overly apologetic to her - after an incident like the one they had just had, for instance. At such times he was so pathetic in his eagerness to please her, she pitied him and reminded herself that he had been through a bad time and it was her duty to try to make their marriage work.
Unfortunately, they had grown so far apart they no longer had any mutual interests on which to rebuild their relationship. This led Jane to feel suffocated by his presence at weekends and to long for Monday mornings when he departed for Brighton.
After Jane had left, Mick went back into the kitchen and slumped into a chair at the table, consumed with melancholy. What was the world coming to when a man couldn’t even get his breakfast cooked for him by his wife? This reconciliation with Jane had fallen far short of his expectations. It didn’t occur to him to attach any blame for that to himself. Once again he put the responsibility for this miserable state of affairs firmly at the door of the ‘women’s rights brigade’, for unsettling the nation’s women so they didn’t know their place any more.
Whoever heard of a wife going out on business and leaving her husband at home to cook for himself? It was outrageous! Business was strictly a male preserve with women working in menial positions, not running the show. He’d never had any of this sort of nonsense from Patsy, for all that she’d shown a determined side to her character about moving out. Patsy knew her place in the scheme of things. You never heard her wittering on about her own identity, and she certainly never expected him to cook his own breakfast. Thinking of Patsy gave him an unexpected pang. He missed her a lot.
But it was Jane who drove him crazy with the need to possess and control her; Jane with whom he wanted to share his life. But she’d changed so much, he didn’t know how to handle her. In the old days, he’d been at the centre of her world; they had liked the same things and been as one in their expectations of life.
These days she seemed to enjoy the most peculiar pastimes, such as walking without needing to get anywhere, and reading - in bed of all places. He’d put his foot down about that. Oh, yes! He’d told her the light was keeping him awake but his objection actually lay in the fact that her absorption in her book excluded him.
She indulged in other useless activities now too; things that were a sheer waste of time, like watching the sunset and observing the birds that came to her precious bird table. And she didn’t half go on about the plants and flowers in the garden! As if she didn’t have enough to do, she spent time out there working instead of employing a gardener to do it for her.
Then there was her odd taste in accommodation. She seemed to have lost all interest in moving upmarket and claimed actually to like living in this damned shed of a place. But he suspected she was determined to hang on to it for the same reason she wouldn’t get rid of her business: to prevent him from resuming his rightful place in the family as sole breadwinner and head of the house, something he wanted desperately.
Frustration reached exploding point inside him. He leaped up, growling, and kicked the wall, swearing loudly at the pain in his toes because he was only wearing bedroom slippers. Hopping about on one foot and beside himself with rage, he punched the door and felt even worse because it hurt his knuckles.
He simply must get back to his old footing with Jane. It was driving him mad, the way things were. He’d do whatever it took, he thought, with a surge of determination.
Then suddenly a sense of powerlessness beset him and he began to cry. Sitting down at the table with his head in his hands, he wept with self-pity. What had happened to the wonderful life he’d had before the warehouse fire? Where had it all gone? Why was everything so difficult now?
He felt a sudden longing for Patsy who would soothe away his tears and tell him he was wonderful. Jane used to do that. And she would do it again. He would make her - somehow!
‘It’s just like old times, isn’t it?’ asked Rita Parker a few weeks later when Jane and Mick and the children were at his parents’ place for Sunday tea.
‘Not half, Mum,’ Mick agreed.
‘Lovely to have him back, isn’t it, Wilf?’ she said to her husband.
‘Would have been better if he’d never gone away in the first place,’ snorted Wilf, causing an awkward silence.
‘Now, now. Don’t be like that, Wilf,’ said Rita with an unusual show of boldness. ‘We all know he went because he wasn’t well.’
‘We’ve only got his word for that,’ declared her husband.
‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’ asked Mick, glaring at his father.
‘Exactly what I say, son. We only have your word for it that you lost your memory,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a story to me.’
Sitting opposite Mick, Jane could see from the pain in his eyes that he was hurt as only his father could hurt him. She felt a stab of empathy. She knew he wouldn’t challenge his father as he would anyone else who made such a suggestion.
‘You believe what you like,’ said Mick in a subdued manner. ‘I’ve no way of proving anything.’
‘So long as I believe him, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?’ said Jane, addressing her remark directly to her father-in-law with an audacity she would never have dared show towards him at one time. ‘Since I was the one who was most affected.’
While Wilf threw a fierce glance in her direction, Mick looked at his wife in surprise. He greeted this further show of her newfound confidence with a certain ambivalence. On the one hand her support warmed him and gave him hope, but it also illustrated just how assertive she had become. He didn’t need a woman protecting him from his own father.
‘It’s all in the past anyway. He’s back now and that’s the important thing,’ said Rita in a swift attempt to defuse the rising tension. She looked at Jane. ‘I bet you feel as though it’s Christmas and your birthday all rolled into one, don’t you, having your husband back?’
Jane knew she mustn’t cause a scene by telling the truth, so concentrated on passing the bread and butter to Davey and said, ‘Naturally.’
‘Would you like a bit more ham, Davey?’ enquired Rita.
‘No, thank you, Gran.’
She gave him a close look, noticing how downcast he was.
‘You’re very quiet, son,’ she said. ‘That isn’t like you.’
‘Take no notice of him, Mum,’ said Mick, giving his son a disapproving look. ‘He’s always in a mood about something.’
Davey said nothing but, looking at him beside her, Jane saw a strawberry blush creep up his neck and over his ears.
‘He’s all right, aren’t you, Davey?’ she said, giving him a reassuring pat on the arm.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, but Jane knew he was feeling wretched.
This wasn’t helped by his sister’s contribution.
‘Davey’s always sulking lately,’ Pip informed her grandparents with childish thoughtlessness. ‘Dad keeps telling him off about it.’
‘Not like you, is he, Princess?’ said Mick, smiling indulgently at his daughter. ‘You’ve always got a smile on your face.’
Jane could have throttled him. Couldn’t he see how wrong it was to use favouritism for Pip as a weapon against Davey? Had he no sensitivity at all towards growing children? If anyone should know about the pain of parental victimisation, Mick should.
‘It’ll be his age, I expect,’ said Rita diplomatically. ‘They do start to get moody at this stage.’
‘I thought that was when they were teenagers?’ said Mick.
‘You were a miserable little bugger from birth,’ growled Wilf.
Sitting there in the cross-fire of all this animosity, Jane thought how out of place she felt now with her in-laws. She no longer seemed like a member of their family.
That evening when the children were in bed and Jane spoke to Mick about his unfair behaviour towards Davey, she felt even more isolated and as though she was fighting a lone battle.
‘The boy is rude and sulky and deserves every telling off I give him,’ Mick said. ‘And I expect you to take my side, not his.’
‘I’m trying not to take sides,’ she said. ‘But I am asking you to be a bit more patient with him. He obviously feels threatened in some way by your coming back. He needs to get to know you again . . . and learn to trust you.’
‘I’m his father and he’ll show me some respect,’ Mick announced. ‘He ought to be grateful I’ve not landed him one.’
‘Hitting him isn’t the answer.’
‘Okay, so I won’t wallop him. But whatever I do it would be wrong in your eyes,’ he protested. ‘There’s no pleasing you these days.’
‘Oh, Mick,’ she said sadly. ‘It just isn’t working out, is it?’
‘And who’s to blame for that?’ he said, looking at her accusingly.
‘You obviously think I am.’
‘You are,’ he stated categorically. ‘All you have to do is to give up this ridiculous business nonsense and be a proper wife to me again then everything will be just like it used to be.’
‘I am being a proper wife to you,’ she said. ‘I look after you when you’re here. Just because I do other things as well, doesn’t mean I’m failing in my duty as a wife.’
‘It feels like that to me.’
‘Do you really want me to be unhappy, Mick?’ she asked emotionally. ‘With no interests of my own outside the home and no challenges in my life?’
‘It’s my job to make you happy, and I would if only you’d let me.’
‘It doesn’t work like that . . .’
‘It used to.’
‘Well, it doesn’t now.’
<
br /> ‘Most women would kill for what I want to give you,’ he informed her. ‘A lovely house and a car and plenty of money to live on without having to go out and earn it. But, oh, no, that’s not good enough for you.’
‘It isn’t that it isn’t good enough, Mick,’ she said, weary from trying to make him see her point of view.
‘Sounds that way to me.’
‘It’s just that it isn’t the way I want to live. Those things aren’t important to me any more,’ she said. ‘Please try to understand.’
‘You’re beyond understanding,’ he mumbled crossly.
‘Try, Mick,’ she begged him. ‘Just try to see this thing from my side.’
He shrugged his shoulders for reply and she knew she was wasting her time.
In despair of ever being able to communicate with him, she left him slouched in the armchair in the living room, smoking, and went to bed feeling utterly dejected.
Jane’s father had never been a fan of his son-in-law and disapproved wholeheartedly of Jane’s having taken him back. He couldn’t forgive Mick for leaving her in financial trouble.
‘Lost his memory, my Aunt Fanny!’ Joe could be heard to say when Mick wasn’t around and Jane was defending him. ‘He buggered off and left you ’cause he was skint and not man enough to stay and face up to it. It’s as simple as that.’
Mick was equally as lacking in enthusiasm for his father-in-law so there was always a bad atmosphere when Joe came to the cottage. He wouldn’t have come at all if Jane hadn’t insisted on inviting him, which she did frequently because she was trying to make them all into a normal family again, which meant tolerating each other’s relatives.
One wet Sunday evening in June when Joe had been for tea and they were all watching a comedy show on TV called On the Buses, Trudy Hamilton called in to see Jane.
‘I’ve been spending the day with Giles,’ she explained. ‘I was hoping to catch you in the garden actually, but the rain put paid to that.’