by Stan Barstow
‘I don’t want to be married to both Ingrid and her mother.’
I couldn’t be sure but I think he nearly smiles at this.
‘You’re in a pretty poor position too, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘Nowhere to go, nothing to offer a wife.’
‘That’s right.’
‘A pretty poor wicket, in fact.’
‘Oh, it’s not all that bad from where I’m sitting,’ I tell him, getting a bit riled. ‘I’ve walked out and now I can stay out if I want to. There’s no baby to think about now, and nobody’s going to push me into anything.’
‘Who’s pushing?’ he says without rising.
‘All right, p’raps you’re not. But don’t make it seem like I’m hanging around waiting for Ingrid to say she’ll have me back. I did the walking out, remember.’
‘That’s right, you did. And anyway, you don’t know that Ingrid wants you any more, do you?’
‘She hadn’t shown much sign of it for a bit.’
‘Well then,’ he says, ‘perhaps it’ll be better all round if we call it a day. Forget it ever happened. Six months isn’t long. Ingrid could claim an allowance from you but I don’t think she needs that. She’ll want to apply for a divorce, of course. You wouldn’t object to that, would you?’
‘What grounds has she?’
‘Desertion, I suppose. If we were in America we could probably add mental cruelty as well.’
‘That’s a good ’un, that is.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? Divorces always have their funny side.’
‘I shall die laughing.’
‘Well that’s what it comes to, isn’t it, Vic? You won’t want to be tied to a wife you’re not living with, and I’m sure Ingrid will want to be free. She’s young and attractive. She’ll want to marry again. So will you, sometime, I suppose.
‘I’ve had a bellyful of being married.’
‘So now you’re going to chuck it and get out.’
‘I haven’t said that.’
‘I thought you had.’
‘I only said I could if I wanted to. I said I wasn’t waiting around for any favours and I wasn’t going to be pushed into doing anything I didn’t want to do. And you can tell Ingrid that from me, and her mother an’ all.’ I’ve got to the stage now where I don’t mind being rude.
‘I’m not carrying any messages, Vic. If you want to say anything to Ingrid you’ll have to tell her yourself.’
‘A fat chance I’d have with her mother on guard. She doesn’t like me, y’know.’
‘I know she doesn’t. But I like you, Vic. I still think you’re a decent lad and I don’t shy from the thought of you being my son-in-law.’
‘Thanks very much.’ I try to make it sound sarcastic but underneath I’m pleased. It’s getting to be quite a treat to know somebody likes me.
Mr Rothwell looks down at the menu as the waitress comes over again.
‘What will you have?’ he says. ‘College pudding or apple tart?’
‘I’ll give it a miss and just have coffee.’
He orders two coffees and the waitress shuffles off again. She’s an elderly bint with thick stockings and her little white hat-thing on crooked. It’s not a very classy joint, all dark paint and grubby wallpaper, but it’s pretty full, mostly of men, and I suppose it’s got a name among a certain type of feller, travellers and such, as a place where you can get a plain meal and a drink with it.
We’re sitting in a corner with a hat-rack between us and the next table, which is why we can talk without anybody hearing.
‘Suppose I said I’d the offer of a flat?’ I say to him. ‘What then?’
‘I’d say it makes the situation much more promising,’ he says. ‘If you asked Ingrid to live with you there and she refused then of course you’d be the injured party. Legally.’
‘And I could apply for a divorce?’
‘I should think so.’
‘D’you think she would come? She’d have to go out to work again to help pay the rent.’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’
‘How the hell can I?’ I say, getting riled again. ‘Her mother ’ud go hairless at the thought.’
‘I don’t want a bald wife,’ he says, ‘but we’ll have to risk it, won’t we?’
‘You mean…?’
‘I mean that what Ingrid’s mother thinks in this case is secondary to what Ingrid herself thinks. If you want to see her, then –’ He stops. ‘Do you want to see her?’
I wait a minute, then I say, ‘I think maybe I should.’
‘All right, then. Where?’
‘Not at your house.’
This time he does smile, a real smile and no mistake about it. ‘Now Ingrid’s mother would go hairless if I suggested that,’ he says.
9
I
It seems like ten miles we walk that night, talking and mulling over things together without having to keep our voices down because her mother’s in the next room. We have plenty to talk about and plenty to think about – the next forty years, in fact. It’s not something you make your mind up about all in a minute. The last time it was settled in a couple of jiffs in the park, but not this time. This time I’ve thought about it – I’m still thinking – and we’re talking. We’ve never talked so much before – we were never very strong on talking – and maybe we’ll never talk as much again. Perhaps if we had talked a bit more and messed about a bit less things would be different now. But they’re not, and that’s that. That’s the way it is and we’ve got to make the best of it.
After what seems like hours of walking all over the town we come to the park and sit down in our old shelter.
‘You know you’re gunna have to stand up to her, don’t you?’ l say.
She nods. ‘Yes.’
‘You’ll have to let her see you’ve made your mind up and you can’t be talked out of it.’
‘It won’t be easy,’ she says. ‘She’s dead set against you now.’
‘Well, your dad’s with us anyway.’
‘He’s a brick is me dad. I don’t know what would have happened without him.’
‘Aye, he’s a right nice chap, your dad. I right like him.’
‘Is it a big flat, Vic?’ she says. ‘Will it take a lot of furnishing?’
I can hear the excitement in her voice and I know that now there’s some definite aim she’ll find what she needs to stand up to her ma. I tell her for the umpteenth time that I haven’t been in the place so I don’t know.
‘When d’you think we can look round?’
‘Any time, I suppose. They’ll be expecting us to look at it before we decide anything.’
‘You want to take it, don’t you, Vic?’ she says.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?’ I say. ‘It’s steep but we’ll manage, I suppose.’
‘I mean… what I mean is, you want to take it because it’ll mean we can be together?’
I think for a minute how to answer her. ‘I reckon we haven’t had a fair try,’ I say then. ‘We’re married and we ought to see how it works out with just the two of us. P’raps we’ll be chucking pots at one another inside a couple o’ months, but at least we shan’t be able to blame anybody else if we are.’
‘I don’t think we will.’ She moves closer and puts her head on my shoulder. I slide my arm round her just like in the old days. ‘We’ve had a rotten six months, haven’t we?’ she says.
‘I’ll say.’
‘If anybody had told me last year at this time all that was going to happen I’d never have believed them.’
‘Yeh.’ I’m thinking I’m going to kiss her in a minute. You couldn’t believe how different she is when her mother’s not around.
‘Vic,’ she says in a minute; ‘all that time, you know, when I didn’t want you to make love to me. Well it wasn’t that I didn’t want you to really; only it never seemed right somehow, while we were living at home.’
‘I think I know what you mean.’ I remember how I never got used to going u
p to bed at night in a natural kind of way, and how the bedsprings creaked and how I didn’t like leaving anything in the drawers for fear Ma Rothwell went into them during the day. Though what the heck there was to be ashamed about I don’t know; but she just made you feel that way.
So now I do kiss her because it’s the one thing I’ve been bothered about. If that wasn’t right it just couldn’t have worked out at all.
‘It’ll be different when we’re on our own,’ she says. ‘We’ll be all right then.’
‘Yeh, we can do what we like then…’ I smile. It’s funny how things come into your mind. ‘I’ve never seen you in the bath except once on our honeymoon.’
‘Do you want to see me in the bath?’
‘Yes. There’s something nice about you when you’re all shiny and slippy with soap.’
She laughs. ‘You’re a funny thing.’
‘Yeh, funny. But not queer.’
‘No, not queer.’
‘This is funny as well,’ she says; ‘us sitting here talking. It’s about the first time we’ve sat here and just talked.’
‘Except the night you knew you were having a baby.’
‘Yes, then. That’s when you said you’d marry me.’
Well I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of that all over again so I tighten my arm round her and say, ‘We can do something else, if you like?’
‘Such as?’
I slip my hand into her coat. ‘What d’you think?’
‘It’s a bit cold, though, isn’t it?’
‘We never used to bother about that before.’
‘It seems a bit funny an old married couple like us having to… to do it in the park. Suppose somebody comes?’
‘Nobody ever did before, did they? An’ anyway, like you say, we’re married.’
‘I haven’t got my lines with me.’
‘You’ve got your ring on.’
‘You’re the last person they’d think I was married to.’
Right at the last minute she says, ‘Have you got something, Vic.’
I have to laugh. ‘As it happens, I have.’
And then she’s got both arms round me and she’s holding me tighter than tight and saying over and over again, ‘Oh, I do love you, Vic, I do love you, I love you.’
So that’s all right, then.
II
Walking back to Chris’s I turn it all over in my mind. She still loves me. After all that’s happened – the way I mucked her about, the accident and losing the baby, the way her mother’s tried to turn her against me, and the way I’ve behaved – after all that she still loves me and she’s ready to try and make a go of it. Whether I love her or not’s another thing altogether, but that’s not what matters now. What matters is I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m tired of feeling like a louse and now I’m going to do the best I can. And who knows, one day it might happen like Chris said: we might find a kind of loving to carry us through. I hope so because it’s for a long, long time.
Because now I reckon I’ve got a lot of things weighed up. All this has taught me, about life and everything, I mean. And the way I see it is this – the secret of it all is there is no secret, and no God and no heaven and no hell. And if you say well what is life about I’ll say it’s about life, and that’s all. And it’s enough, because there’s plenty of good things in life as well as bad. And I reckon there’s no such thing as sin and punishment, either. There’s what you do and what comes of it. There’s right things and there’s wrong things and if you do wrong things, wrong things happen to you – and that’s the punishment. But there’s no easy way out because if you do only right things you don’t always come off best because there’s chance. After everything else there’s chance and you can do the best you can and you can’t allow for that. If you say, well why does one bloke have all bad luck and another one have all good luck when he might be a wrong ’un, well I’ll say isn’t that chance? And anyway, he might not be as lucky as you think because you can’t see inside him and a bloke can have six cars and holidays in the south of France every year and it’s still what’s inside him what counts.
What it boils down to is you’ve got to do your best and hope for the same. Do what you think’s right and you’ll be doing like millions of poor sods all over the world are doing. And when it hits you, if it does, chance, call it what you like, you’ll wonder like all the rest of them because you’ve always done your best and you don’t deserve a rotten deal. But that’s your story.
And now I’m going to do my best and see how it works out.
So endeth the lesson.
It’s a chilly night and I shiver a bit as I walk. It’ll be Christmas again in a fortnight.
About the Author
With the publication of A Kind of Loving in 1960, Stan Barstow’s name joined those of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Keith Waterhouse and David Storey in a remarkable spontaneous explosion of literary talent from the English industrial north and midlands.
The success of the book and the adaption into a feature film in 1962 allowed Stan Barstow to leave his job in engineering and devote himself to a writing career which would produce ten further novels, three volumes of short stories, many hours of television and radio drama and several ventures into the theatre. An autobiography – In My Own Good Time – appeared in 2001.
Since 2000, Barstow has made his home in South Wales with the distinguished radio dramatist Diana Griffiths.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and an Honorary Master of Arts of the Open University.
Copyright
First published in 2010
by Parthian
The Old Surgery
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The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Stan Barstow, 1960
Cover design by Marc Jennings
Cover photo by I C Rapoport, from Aberfan: The Days After
Typeset by Lucy Llewellyn
The right of Stan Barstow to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 9781906998776
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