Take It Easy

by Pat Rosier

  ‘Finding someone to look after your children while you go back to work.’ Her mother’s voice was completely neutral.

  ‘How did you …?’

  ‘It’s not been hard to work out. And Bob’s mother rang me a while back,’ now Isobel could hear disapproval, ‘ostensibly to ask if I knew of a good plumber — what good a plumber of any standard on this side of town would do her, I’ve no idea. And she just happened to mention that she had given you some advice about finding child care in the local paper.’ Her dislike of the other grandmother was palpable. Isobel didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I’m not very …’ she started miserably.

  ‘You’re a perfectly good mother!’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s … I don’t know ….’

  ‘Well, it’s your life.’ That was one of her mother’s favourite sayings. “And things are different now from when I brought you up.’ That was another one. Isobel was grateful. Then her mother went on to say she couldn’t take on full-time child care, not at her time of life, but if Isobel did go back to work, she wouldn’t mind being a back-up. ‘Children get sick,’ she said, ‘so do child-carers, I’d be able to help out’. She was bustling about the kitchen as she spoke. Isobel couldn’t see exactly what she was doing from her seat at the dining table on the other side of the servery.

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ was all she could manage in reply, swallowing down tears. ‘It’s hard to find anyone …’

  ‘If you keep at it you will. Don’t take just anyone now, not for my grandchildren.’ And she laughed, making a joke of her concern and Isobel joined in. Then she was being told about how her father had yet another plan for changing the kitchen cupboards and there wasn’t a chance, they worked fine as they were. ‘So he’s putting some shelves in that wasted space behind the spare room door …’ Isobel heard her mother’s voice, but not her words. She hadn’t even thought about the boys getting sick. They were never sick.

  ‘Have you thought about getting in someone, someone who could cook and clean too?’ A tray of biscuits was going into the oven.

  Isobel had, briefly, and dismissed it as too expensive and too difficult. You had to be rich for that. ‘Bob must be doing all right,’ her mother continued, stacking used utensils, ‘you should talk to him about it.’

  Walking home in light rain, leaving the boys in the pushchair for speed, worrying about them getting wet and cold and then sick for the first time, Isobel was thinking how her plan to go back to work by the end of this year – October, when the boys were two — was getting something of a life of its own. Not altogether a bad thing she supposed, it committed her, beyond her own inertia or lack of courage, to facing up to talking to Bob and making him take notice.

  ~~~

  Chapter 16

  During a changeover between programmes, Isobel asked Bob to turn the television off so she could talk to him. He hesitated, did what she asked and went back to his seat on one of the arm-chairs that matched the sofa where she had sat in case he would sit beside her. Looking at a spot on the carpet by his feet, flicking her eyes up to his face now and then, she told him about her trips to the library to read the Circular, checking out possible child-carers, even what his mother had said. It would be better to say what she had been doing, she’d decided, rather than going into the reasons; he’d be more likely to interrupt and argue if she tried to explain herself.

  ‘But you’re my wife …’ It sounded like an accusation.

  ‘I know, that’s the probl ….’ That wasn’t what she meant to say. ‘I mean,’ she continued quickly, ‘I’m no good at being a wife who stays at home,’ and stopped again when she heard the whining edge to her voice.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Look at my mother. And yours.’ And after a pause, ‘Would you like to have another….’

  ‘No! You’re not getting it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to get. You’re my wife, you’ve got two lovely boys, I earn enough — you’re damned lucky!’

  ‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it.’ Her stomach was churning with more emotions than she thought she could have all at once. Finally, Bob looked directly at her.

  ‘Look,’ he said, with strained reasonableness, ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate just now. This will have to wait until after Decimal Currency day.’

  ‘But that’s four months away!’

  ‘Three and a half. And that’s my last word on this until it’s over.’ And he got up and turned the television back on.

  Isobel did not run out of the room and slam the door, as she wanted to. She made herself sit for a few moments then walked out quietly and made a cup of tea without banging anything, taking one in and putting it on the floor beside Bob’s chair, noticing his nod of acknowledgement and going back to the kitchen, sitting at the table with her hands around the hot mug, even though it was a warm evening. Think, she was saying to herself, don’t cry, don’t scream, think. Forcing herself to breathe slowly, she sat and sipped the hot tea. The only decision she could come to was to not give up. Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up. That had to be enough for now so she rinsed her cup, dried it and put it away and went back to the living room. Bob had moved to the sofa and had his shoes off and his feet up, so she sat in the armchair. He glanced at her, saying ‘Okay?’ She nodded and muttered ‘Uh huh.’ They watched Mission Impossible in silence when Bob had given her a plot summary of the episode so far. Anyone looking in the window, Isobel thought, would quite likely think they were watching in companionable silence. Perhaps they were.

  Everything changed and everything stayed the same. Isobel remembered that from sixth form French and wished she could remember it in French. She hadn’t known what to make of it then. Without saying anything Bob added twenty pounds to the housekeeping money he gave her each week. It went into her savings account. When, a few weeks later, he asked her what she would like for mother’s day, she didn’t point out that she wasn‘t his mother, she said, ‘Driving lessons,’ startling herself as much as him. He’d done his usual shrug, and on the first Sunday in May gave her a card from Learn To Drive with John and Jay and said he would pay for ten lessons and he supposed her mother would look after the boys while she had them.

  Her mother approved. ‘Your father left it too late,’ she pronounced, ‘you’ll need to do better than him,’ and said Thursday mornings would be a good time for her to look after the boys.

  Bob’s nights away increased to three or four a week and now often included Friday night and most of Saturday. Apologies for the amount of time he was away became less frequent and when he was home he hardly ever suggested having sex, and it was all more a relief than anything else to Isobel. He’d ring and let her know his movements and after she’d been out twice, probably walking she thought, and he’d had to ring several times to let her know he wouldn’t be home he installed an answer-phone. So, it seemed to her, they had less and less occasions to talk directly to each other. When they did they both maintained a casual politeness that Isobel found easy enough. In fact, she was out more herself, even though it was getting dark earlier and winter’s colder dampness had set in. A consequence of looking after Sarah now and then was that Sally took them all to the supermarket in her car and when she learnt about Isobel’s driving lessons she’d suggested taking the children around to their grandmother’s so she could take Isobel out on her own to practice which she said she enjoyed and Isobel certainly did. Bob never asked how the lessons were going once he had established that she’d started, and Isobel never mentioned them either.

  It seemed to Isobel that she and Sally were almost becoming friends, even though Sally mostly talked about finding a Clarice Cliff piece or a Beatrice Potter bunny mug or a small item of furniture, an art deco lampshade … Isobel began to recognize some of the names, but never held on to the detail. Either Sally didn’t notice or she didn’t mind. She talked about Daniel occasionally, about how ‘when he was good he was very very good,’ — with a laugh — but when he was in one of his low sp
ells there was no cheering him up. Isobel wondered about talking with her brother about dull moods, but somehow there was never an opportunity. When she told Sally about wanting to go back to work and how difficult it was to think of ways to manage childcare and how she’d visited a few women who looked after other people’s children for money and it had been very depressing, Sally encouraged her to keep trying. ‘Playing with china and antiques suits me fine,’ she said, ‘but if you want a proper job, go for it.’ And she said she’d be able to help out a bit in school holidays, she tended to work her buying and selling around them already, as, unlike Sarah, Nathan was not the kind of child she could readily leave with someone else. ‘A very active boy,’ was how her mother-in-law described him.

  The weeks chugged by, with the driving lessons, and Sally, and her parents and the libraries — she went to the main branch every couple of weeks to check what jobs there were, though she never went as far as applying for one — and all the washing and drying and feeding and cleaning up, and having things orderly when Bob came home.

  There was a lot to be anxious about. When Bob had started being away overnight she’d lain in bed and planned two escape routes for herself and the boys, one from a fire, the other from an intruder, and every subsequent night she was alone with them she reviewed the plans. Sometimes she planned an escape route for them all during the day too. The complicated business of child-care when she started work was a constant niggling worry, especially in relation to sickness, and school holidays, and that was after she’d found someone. Her mother’s offer, and Sally’s, helped a little, but in the end the responsibility was hers. And as for accounting for the two and a half years she’d had out of the workforce when she started applying for positions; she never had any intention of telling the real story. Sometimes not being a good wife to Bob worried her, too. He deserved a good wife she thought, and she would never be one.

  Reading was better than television for blotting out her anxieties, so she increasingly went to bed early when she was on her own, often as early as eight o’clock and read, sometimes until very late. She made herself watch the television news nearly every night, it seemed disgraceful not to, and that added to her worries. Sending soldiers to Vietnam, Prime Minister Muldoon’s think big projects, sometimes her father talked about those. Then there was rising unemployment, how would that affect her getting a job, a good public service job that paid enough for her to pay for childcare? None of it weakened her resolve, though, other women did it and so would she.

  Then Isobel came across Martha Quest. It was the title of the book, Martha Quest, not the name of the author, Doris Lessing, that caught her attention. A woman called Quest, she liked that, she could think of herself as on a quest. When she started reading she was taken with how seriously Martha took herself and her own inner state. Isobel had gotten desultory about her reading notebook so took a while to find it. She wrote, in her notebook, ‘But soon she ceased to think, she merely waited, in a condition of locked and irritable unhappiness,’ and looked at it for a long time. She herself hadn’t ceased to think, she was kind of waiting and she was, if she allowed herself to be aware of it, both irritated and unhappy. But not irritable, she controlled herself better than that. Bob irritated her and she tried not to let it show. She didn’t often think about being unhappy, she didn’t often think about how she was feeling at all. That was what was so fascinating about Martha, her preoccupation with how she felt about things.

  Once Isobel started thinking about how she felt she couldn’t stop. Long after she finished the book, annoyed with Martha for getting married when it was so clearly the wrong thing to do, slightly amused at herself for taking a character in a book so seriously, she was unsettled by it. She saw a sequel to Martha Quest in the library, A Proper Marriage, and while she was curious, she didn’t want to read it, there was something about Martha that got under her skin in a way that was too disturbing. And noticing her feelings tended to make her cry. She envied Martha living in Africa, in a country that had real troubles, troubles that somehow made everything more important, but didn’t take out A Proper Marriage. The title put her off and she couldn’t bear it if Martha became the happily married woman she, Isobel, was supposed to be.

  Isobel wondered about taking the bus into the city with the boys in their pushchair and joining a march against sending troops to Vietnam, and then the day for it came and it was cold and drizzly and she didn’t. When she told Bob she had nearly gone he told her not to be silly and she felt a strong flash of anger and had to turn away so he didn’t notice. Having an argument, a row, shouting at each other, that would be intolerable. She’d already had to tell him about a conversation with Mrs-at-the-front who had come around to say that her own daughter and family were coming back from Switzerland in September and would be needing the flat. Bob had said that when everything was settled down after DC day, would be time enough to attend to that. So Isobel didn’t let herself think about it either, something like that could take up all the space in her mind and stop her thinking about getting back to work.

  About the first week of June Isobel realised that Joyce hadn’t been around for a while. When she thought back, it was probably a couple of months. Perhaps she’d come back in the spring, Isobel thought, when the weather was warmer again, and they could go to the park. Or perhaps it was too hard to keep visiting the boys knowing she couldn’t have her own children. ‘There are two ends to a phone,’ her mother would have said, but Isobel knew she wouldn’t ring Joyce at work and she didn’t have her number at home. Then she pictured Joyce, presumably living on her own, going to work every day, doing what she pleased at the weekends — and thought that she must have gotten visiting her and Andrew and Neil out of her system and no doubt had more exciting things to do on her weekends.

  Six mid-month days of almost constant rain had her in a despair of wet nappies and small clothes. Bob seemed to think it was her fault nothing could be dried outside. Drying with the electric heater was, she was sure, expensive, but he paid the bills and she had to do something. She’d put the clothes airers, festooned like trees from someone’s nightmares, in the living room with the heater on full and close the door, wishing it still had the old-fashioned high handles that the boys wouldn’t be able to reach and get to the heater in a moment of inattention on her part. They knew about ‘hot!’ but were increasingly curious about anything that wasn’t a toy. She jammed folded newspaper into the door when she closed it, so even she had to lean her weight against it and push as hard as she could to get it open. After a couple of days, to her relief, both boys lost interest in that particular closed door; their favourite game had become closing the door from the kitchen to the hall between them and knocking and calling until one of them opened it and they laughed at each other and closed it again and started all over.

  Andrew got what her mother called a chesty cold and Neil followed a day later. Bob was home on the worst night, when neither of them slept for more than an hour at a time; he suggested she go back to sleeping in their room until they all recovered. ‘After all, there’s no point in both of us getting worn out and I’ve got two days on the road starting tomorrow,’ he’d said. After three miserable days and canceling a driving lesson Isobel rang the doctor’s. ‘Bring them in,’ said the nurse, adding ‘wrap them up warm,’ when Isobel demurred, thinking about the wet cold walk. She wasn’t feeling too good herself, either. In the event her mother organized her father into taking them, and she got some decongestant medicine which turned out to be more use to herself than it was to the boys, who were recovered when she was still oozing nasal mucus and coughing violently. Bob was away four nights that week, though he did ring every day to see how they all were and it was less than three weeks to DC day.

  June turned to July and they were all well again. ‘Don’t think it’s good management’, her mother warned her, ‘it’s good luck, believe me. I’ve never seen one child as easy to manage as these two, as you’ll likely find out when you have the next one.�
��

  Isobel didn’t bother to reply.

  As The Day got closer, Bob could barely contain his excitement. ‘Three thousand bank machines to convert,’ he told her with glee. ‘Not that we’re doing them all, of course,’ he added, ‘but we’ve got the north pretty sewn up.' He offered to make up the change calculator that came in the Weekly News for her, but she said she thought she could manage to work out the change from the shopping herself. The news was full of pennies and cents and speculations that shopkeepers would use the changeover as an excuse to put prices up by a cent here and there. Isobel’s mother thought it a lot of fuss about nothing too, except when Bob was around; then she would ask him how it was going and joke with him about the wrath of shoppers if ‘your lot’ got anything wrong, all the while making it clear she recognized the importance of what he was doing. Bob planned to buy each of the boys a full commemorative boxed set of the new coins. ‘That’s a good idea,’ Isobel managed.

  The week before July the tenth Isobel hardly saw Bob, and was relieved, she doubted her ability to not scream if he said ‘DC Day’ one more time and she stopped listening to the news on the radio or watching it on television. Go smoothly and be over she wished, often.

  The day before The Day Isobel got a phone call.

  ‘Lois Schulman,’ said the voice at the other end, ‘I work with Bob, we met at new year.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Isobel, ‘I’m afraid Bob’s not here – he’s working away …,’ she was embarrassed that she couldn’t remember where he had said he would be, ‘I’m not expecting him until Wednesday.’

  ‘I know he’s away.' The voice was less brisk. ‘Look, this is none of my business, really, but I think you should know ….’

  Isobel nearly laughed. For once in her life someone actually wanted her to know something.

  ‘Yes?’