A Kind of Loving

by Stan Barstow

  But not as much as the way she talks. She talks the most horrible bilge most of the time and freezes up as though you’ve insulted her if you dare to try to put her right. She has one or two favourite subjects. The Royal Family’s one of them. She keeps a scrapbook of the Queen and Philip and the kids and she reads all these intimate stories about the way they live and takes them all for gospel. As if anybody really knows about them, and they wouldn’t be allowed to write it if they did. Another favourite of hers is the way she puts shopkeepers in their places. To hear her talk you’d think everybody in Cressley was out to do her down. But she doesn’t let them get away with it, Ma Rothwell doesn’t. Oh, no, she puts them in their place all right. A proper putter-in-place, she is. She never seems to see that if she was the big lady she thinks she is they’d all be falling over themselves to be nice to her and so she ought to reckon they do even if they don’t. Then there’s politics. You don’t need telling she’s Conservative. What else could she be but real true blue and never a good word for the Labour Party and the trade unions. If she had her way trade unions would be abolished. And as for the miners, well, they’re just holding the country up to ransom, so she says, and making trouble at every turn. She’s not forgotten the Old Man’s a miner, but it doesn’t stop her shooting her mouth off about something she knows absolutely nothing about. And I mustn’t forget the coloured people, the West Indians and Pakistanis and so on. She’d pack that lot off home, and sharp about it, because what with blackies on the buses and all you read about in the papers it’s getting as a respectable Englishwoman daren’t put her nose outside her own door. In fact, she can hardly open her mouth without showing everybody what a stupid, bigoted, ignorant old cow she is. And I’ve got to live with her.

  As for Ingrid, I don’t think she had a serious thought to call her own before she met me and I gave her something to think about, except what colour of coat she wanted for winter and whether she liked ‘Criss Cross Quiz’ better than ‘Double Your Money’, or ‘Take Your Pick’ better than both.

  It’s not having a life of my own any more that really gets me down, though. I don’t seem to be able to do anything I want to do. I try playing my records once – but only once. Before the first side’s finished both Ingrid and her ma are bored to death and I have to pack it in because they want television on. I always used to like television before I came to live at Rothwell’s but now I hate the sight of it because it’s on when I go in at tea-time and it doesn’t go off till it’s time to go to bed. I’ve got to watch it, though, because I can’t read with the light out and I don’t go out much without Ingrid because her ma doesn’t think it’s right.

  I’ve been there about six weeks when we have our first little set-to. Mr Van tells me one day that the Philharmonia Orchestra’s coming to Leeds and would I like to go over with him because it’s a real crack outfit and you don’t often get a chance of hearing them live.

  ‘Well I don’t know, Mr Van Huyten,’ I say. ‘I’d like to but I’m not my own boss now, y’know.’ I try to laugh. ‘Married man an’ all that.’

  ‘Bring your wife along, Victor,’ he says. ‘I’d be glad to have the company of you both.’

  I tell him I’ll see what she says and I ask her that night if she’d like to go, only I make the mistake of doing it while her mother’s there. Like I expected, she pulls a face. ‘I’d be bored to tears,’ she says.

  ‘Why don’t you give it a try? There’s always a first time.’

  ‘Ingrid knows what she likes and she doesn’t pretend to enjoy highbrow nonsense,’ Ma Rothwell says, minding her own business as usual.

  Well, I’m as wild as hell on a windy night at this and it’s all can do to stop myself telling her just what I think. ‘It’s a matter of opinion,’ I say, holding it back. ‘Makes a change from television quiz shows, though.’

  She tightens her mouth up because she knows this is one for her.

  ‘Anyway, I’d like to go if you won’t.’

  Now left to Ingrid this would be okay but the old cow has to put her two cents’ worth in again. ‘You have to sacrifice things when you’re married,’ she says. ‘Give and take.’

  Now just what this has to do with me going to a symphony concert I don’t know. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to climb the walls. It’s stupid beyond belief.

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with it. There’s no harm in me goin’ to a concert, is there?’

  She shrugs. (She can shrug in a more maddening way than anybody I ever met.) ‘If you want to carry on just as you did before you were married it’s got nothing to do with me. Though I’m sure Ingrid will have something to say about it.’ And she bows out now she’s done the damage.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ I tell her, and I don’t. You can’t say anything when she talks like that because there’s no sense to argue at.

  ‘You don’t mind if I go, do you?’ I say to Ingrid.

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘A fortnight on Saturday.’

  ‘I don’t know. We might want to go somewhere else.’

  For a second I hate her enough to slap her silly face. To think only three months ago I’d just to snap my fingers and she’d come running. Now I’m married to her and it’s as if her mother puts her in a trance where she hasn’t a mind of her own.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to forget about that,’ I say, ‘because I’m going.’

  This puts me in the dog-house and with Ma Rothwell around I’ve no chance of sorting it out till we go up to bed.

  ‘I didn’t like the way you snapped at me tonight,’ lngrid says, pulling her jumper over her head and shaking her hair free again.

  ‘I didn’t like the way everybody was telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I don’t know what the hell’s coming over you these days, Ingrid. You’re just an echo of your old lady.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t call her that, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Well you know who I’m talking about.’

  ‘You should show a bit of respect for her, Vic. After all, we are living in her house.’

  ‘Don’t I know it?’

  She finishes undressing and gets into bed. ‘Are you going to this concert?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘You’re going to make an issue of it?’

  ‘Me?’ I stand there in my shirt and underpants, pointing my finger at my chest. ‘I’m making an issue of it? You let your mother drive me into a corner, don’t do a thing to help me out, and then say I’m making an issue of it. Just because you’d rather stop at home yourself and watch some bloody silly television programme.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake keep your voice down. She can hear every word.’

  ‘I don’t care what she can hear,’ I say, my voice getting louder still.

  There’s a tap on the door and Ma Rothwell says from outside, ‘Are you all right, Ingrid?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  I put the light out and get into bed. ‘What the hell does she mean? Did she think I was hiding you or summat?’

  She snuggles down under the clothes without bothering to answer me. Now she’ll go to sleep and we’ve settled nothing. We’ll wake up in the morning and it’ll all start again. It’s all boiling away inside me and there’s no way of getting rid of it.

  One day the phone rings in the shop and there’s Jimmy on the other end of the line.

  ‘Guess who walked into the office the other day,’ he says. ‘Old Conroy.’

  ‘I thought he’d moved away altogether.’

  ‘His family live in Bradford. He’s not working at the moment because he’s emigrating, off to Australia. He’s fixing a get-together before he goes…’

  We talk a bit (it’s quiet in the shop) and Jimmy tells me they’re all going out to the Lord Nelson, that’s a pub on the way to Bradford, for a booze-up and would I like to go. It’ll be a kitty do with everybody chucking ten bob in at the beginning of the evening and drinking till it’s gone. I tell him
I don’t know how I’m fixed for that night, but I’ll let him know.

  I know now I shan’t be going but I mention it to Ingrid just to let her know the sort of sacrifices I’ll make for the sake of peace and quiet.

  ‘I always thought you didn’t like Conroy,’ she says.

  ‘I got to like him well enough before he left. And anyway, it’s a chance to see some of the lads again.’

  ‘It’ll be a drinking do, won’t it?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Have you told him you’ll go?’

  ‘No, I put him off. You know very well your mother ’ud go hairless if I as much as offered to go out on me own to a do like that.’

  She looks at me sort of soft and gutless like. ‘Oh, Vic I don’t want you to think you can’t do anything on your own any more.’

  ‘You want to tell your mother that sometime,’ I say. ‘If I set me mind on going, I’ll go, and neither you nor your ma will stop me. But I’m all for a quiet life, and as I’ve got to live here I’ll give it a miss.’

  We’re up in the bedroom as usual, the only place we can have a private talk – if we keep our voices down.

  ‘I’ll tell you straight, though,’ I say. ‘I didn’t bargain for this bloody lot when I offered to marry you.’

  ‘There’s no need to swear,’ she says.

  ‘Swear?’

  ‘Yes, swear. You do it so much these days you don’t even notice it; and you never used to.’

  ‘Circumstances were different. This is enough to make a parson swear.’

  This is the way we always are now. The only chance we get to talk, except when we go out, which isn’t often now that Ingrid’s showing obvious (she’s very self-conscious about it; and so am I, for that matter), is late at night and first thing in the morning. Well you know how you are first thing and at night it’s as though we’ve time for nothing else but the grouses we’ve been saving up because we couldn’t get rid of them earlier. So it seems like we do nothing but niggle and nag.

  ‘You go if you want to,’ she says.

  ‘And get the big freeze treatment for it? No, thanks. I haven’t forgotten the concert.’

  ‘Well you went to that, didn’t you?’

  ‘And paid for it. Anybody’d have thought I’d spent the evening in a knocking-shop somewhere instead of a respectable symphony concert.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you.’

  ‘Aye, it’s up to me. You never back me up, do you? You let your mother say just what she likes and you never think of siding with me, do you?’

  ‘I don’t see why I should fall out with my mother. I never used to and I won’t start now.’

  I chuck my keys and money with a clatter on to the dressing-table. ‘Not even to save my face, eh?’

  ‘She’s my mother, Vic.’

  ‘And I’m your husband; or have you forgotten now you’ve got the certificate to prove you have one? I know anybody ’ud take me for the lodger, but you can bet your boots I remember signing my name.’

  ‘P’raps you’re sorry you married me,’ she says, and she should know better, she really should, with me in the mood I’m in.

  ‘There’s no bloody p’raps about it,’ I tell her.

  Well that sends her to bed in tears and leaves me walking up and down the bedroom itching to throw things about and break them from sheer frustration.

  Oh, it’s a great life, and we’ve only another thirty or forty years of it to come.

  7

  I

  I get back from the shop about half past six one night at the back end of August, in the middle of a heat wave, and find the house all locked up. I haven’t got a key and I can’t get in till Ingrid and her ma come back from shopping or wherever they’ve decided to go without bothering to tell me.

  I haven’t been feeling so hot this afternoon. I’ve had a blinding headache since just after dinner and I’m dead-tired. I’m standing outside the back door with my hands in my pockets and wondering how long they’ll be when Mrs Oliphant our next-door neighbour comes out to shake the tablecloth. She spots me as she turns round to go back into the house and stops and gives me what I fancy’s a queer look.

  ‘Looks as if I’m locked out,’ I say, feeling a bit of a Charlie about it. ‘I don’t suppose you know where they’ve gone?’

  Well now she looks at me proper odd and no mistake about it as she comes up to the fence with the tablecloth over her arm. Red and white check, it is.

  ‘But they’re up at the hospital,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you –’

  ‘Hospital? It isn’t Ingrid’s day for antenatal. That’s on Tuesday…’ All at once it’s as though somebody’s kicked the bottom out of my belly and all my tripes are tumbling out. ‘What’s wrong?’ I say. ‘What you lookin’ at me like that for?’

  ‘But surely,’ she says, still gawping at me. ‘It’s Ingrid. They’ve taken her to hospital. She’s had an accident.’

  The sun seems to be burning right through my skull and Mrs Oliphant’s face goes all swimmy and out of focus in front of me. I take hold of the fence and feel myself sway a bit.

  ‘As far as I can understand it, she fell downstairs and brought on a miscarriage. They rushed her into hospital early this afternoon. It couldn’t have been much after two. You mean to say you didn’t know?’

  I shake my head, partly to say no and partly to try and clear it. My knees have taken their hook somewhere, leaving the rest of my legs to fend for themselves. I know if I don’t sit down somewhere in a minute I might fall down.

  ‘You’d better come in and sit down,’ Mrs O. says, and opens the little connecting gate to let me through. ‘It must have been a shock for you, but naturally I thought you’d know… Come along in and sit down for a minute. There’s a cup of tea left. You’ll feel better in a few minutes.’

  Mr Oliphant looks up from his evening paper as we go in.

  ‘Here’s young Mr Brown, Henry,’ Mrs O. says. ‘I’ve just found him outside the house. He couldn’t get in and he didn’t know anything about Ingrid till I told him… You just sit down there and I’ll pour the tea. You’ll feel better after it.’

  ‘He didn’t know?’ Mr Oliphant says. ‘But I thought you said it happened just after dinner?’

  Mrs O. must give him a signal from behind me because he lets it drop.

  ‘I haven’t been feeling well all afternoon,’ I mutter, and he looks at me.

  ‘And you’ll be feeling worse now, eh?’ he says. He gets up and comes over to me, a big chap, in his shirt-sleeves, and puts his big hand on the back of my neck and shoves my head down between my knees and holds it there for a minute. ‘Now lean back and relax,’ he says, letting go.

  ‘There’ll be a cup of tea for you in a minute and you’ll feel better then.’

  When Mrs Oliphant brings the cup and saucer I hold them tight for fear of dropping them and ask her if she’s got a couple of aspirins to spare and she goes into the kitchen and comes back with the bottle. I swallow the aspirins and sip the tea. It’s a bit weak and not very hot. The two young Oliphant kids come rampaging in from the garden and Mr O. turns them straight round and packs them off out again.

  ‘I suppose Ingrid’s mother would be too shaken up herself to let you know,’ Mrs Oliphant says. ‘You are on the telephone, I suppose?’

  Yes, we’re on the phone. And it’s a good four hours since it happened. There’s been plenty of time to let me know. I know it and so do Mr and Mrs Oliphant.

  ‘Would you like to ring up from here?’ Mr O. says. ‘You can use our phone by all means.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘In a minute. I’ll ring in a minute.’

  Will she die? I’m wondering. What if she’s dead already? What if I’m a widower just this minute and I don’t know it? Free again…

  I finish the tea and then Mr Oliphant shows me where the phone is on a little shelf in the hall. ‘D’you know the number?’ I shake my head and he flips through the directory. Then he lifts the receiver and says a number and waits.
In a minute he says, ‘Cressley Infirmary? Just a minute, please.’ He holds the receiver out to me. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘Hello… I’m inquiring about a Mrs Brown. She was brought in this afternoon. She had an accident, a miscarriage, early this afternoon… What? This is Mr Brown, My name’s Victor Brown, hers is Ingrid… Yes, all right.’

  I look round but Mr Oliphant’s gone. I stand there with the receiver to my ear and wait. There’s a kid’s pedal-car and a tricycle behind the front door and a rubber ball at the bottom of the stairs. I like the way the hall’s decorated, with a light fawn paper on the walls and a dark blue with like little stars on the ceiling. I believe Mr O. does it all himself. I don’t exactly know what he does for a living but they seem comfortable. They’re nice people. Nice and steady and quiet and happy…

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve no news at the moment, Mr Brown. Mrs Brown is still in the labour ward.’

  ‘When will you know?’

  ‘You could ring in about an hour. Or you could come up and wait. We’d tell you then as soon as there’s anything to report.’

  ‘All right, I’ll come up. Thank you.’

  Probably wondering why I’m not there already, I think as I go back into the dining-room and tell Mr and Mrs Oliphant.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be all right,’ Mrs O. says. ‘I had a miscarriage once and I didn’t even go away. I’ve had both my children since then, so you can see it didn’t do me any harm. And Ingrid wasn’t very far gone, was she?’

  I wonder if she knows Ingrid was three months on the way when we got married and I say, ‘No, not far,’ and leave it at that.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Mrs Oliphant says. ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘Are you going up there now?’ Mr O. says, and I nod.

  ‘Yes, I thought I would.’