A Dry Spell

by Clare Chambers

  She had immediately cancelled her hair appointment and rushed out to the shops in search of a pair, and then driven the forty-odd miles through the Sussex countryside to the school. It was lunchtime when she arrived and the boys were out on the field, hundreds of them, identical in grey and white. One of them, about Guy’s age, was loitering near the gate, kicking gravel. Daphne gave an imperious wave and he trotted over obediently. ‘Would you give these to Bromelow,’ she said, thrusting the green cardboard box into his hands. If she drove like the wind they might be able to fit her in at the salon after all, she was thinking, when the boy said, ‘Hello, mother.’

  Over the years Guy had often retold this story, against his mother, and he was thinking of it now, sitting in his office looking out across a different school field to where a rounders match was in progress. Every so often he could hear the ‘thock’ of a good hit and a crescendo of cheering as the batsman approached fourth post, but inside the school, all was quiet. He preferred it like this, when the children and most of the staff had gone home and he could get on with some work.

  At the perimeter of the field the council’s giant mower, like a combine harvester, was cutting the grass, spilling its rainbow dust behind it. Through the window came the scent of fresh sap. Guy closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He would have to make an announcement in assembly tomorrow: it is forbidden to throw grass. When he was a schoolboy grass fights were among the chief pleasures of the summer term – virtually an accredited sport. But now there were angry letters from parents if a child came home with so much as a green smear on his uniform. It was a similar story in winter: no throwing snowballs, no sliding on the black ice. Guy was ambivalent about the wisdom of this cosseting. Instinct told him that the elimination of all risk was a vain enterprise where children were concerned, and he rather resented the restrictions to their freedom. On the subject of Children in the abstract he was entirely rational; with regard to his own daughters he was as neurotic as the next parent.

  Letters from parents. He had a pile in front of him now to be answered. He moved the ones that were written on lined paper to the top – in his experience the senders of these were more likely to come up to the school to make their point in person if they didn’t achieve immediate satisfaction.

  Dear Mr Bromelow

  I was concerned to learn that my son (Mark 3R) has been asked to produce a project on the subject of DINOSAURS. I am surprised and dismayed that a Church school sees fit to promote a theory which contradicts the teaching of the Bible, and I would prefer it if Mark could be excused from these lessons. Perhaps in the interests of balance he might be allowed to submit a project on GENESIS instead.

  Yours sincerely

  Eric Sharpearrow

  Guy switched on his computer. The school secretary, Mary, typed all his general Dear Parents letters, along with memos, agendas and minutes of meetings, but he didn’t like to burden her with the one-offs. Besides he could never quite achieve the necessary fine balance between propitiation and irony when talking into his dictaphone. He began to jab away: he had never learned to type properly, but he could keep up a blistering pace with his two index fingers.

  Dear Mr Sharpearrow

  Thank you for your letter of March 1st. I am sorry that Mark’s class project for this term has been a cause of concern. I’m afraid I can see no conflict between the subject matter and the teaching of the Church of England. If on consideration, you would still like Mark to be excluded on religious grounds from the lessons in which dinosaurs are mentioned, that is of course your right. However we do not have sufficient staff to supervise individual absentees: he would have to sit outside my office and work independently. After consultation with the class teacher we have agreed that as the dinosaur theme is being taught within a natural-historical rather than a religious context it would not be appropriate for Mark to offer GENESIS as an alternative topic, and we suggest instead REPTILES.

  Yours sincerely

  G.J. Bromelow

  He smiled to himself, He and Jane would laugh about it later.

  He saved the document under the name ERIC4: this was not the first piece of correspondence Guy had had with Mr Sharpearrow in the two terms since he had become head teacher. The man always complained as a matter of course whenever the PTA held a raffle or any fund-raising event which involved some element of gambling, and he had been incandescent when one of the pupils had taken the part of God in a school production of the story of Noah’s Ark.

  The son, Mark, was a nice lad, despite his genes, Guy thought, though horribly oppressed by his father. He never joined in any of the school’s extra-curricular activities, was forbidden to go to tea with other children in case somehow polluted, and was not allowed within range of a radio or television. Mind you, Guy was with the father all the way on the last point. Harriet and Sophie watched far too many cartoons, and even Jane, whom Guy had once liked to think of as cerebral, spent most of her evenings slumped dully in front of the TV. He hoped she was in a good mood when he got home, which he tended to do later and later these days. She didn’t greet him on the doorstep with a litany of complaints, exactly, but he could tell from her expression if it had been a good or a bad day. If she made eye-contact that was usually a positive sign; if not it meant she was hassled, distracted and on the point of withdrawing into that distant realm within herself where he could not follow. Sometimes her eyes were red and puffy and that was a bad sign – evidence of a confrontation with Harriet in which the child had emerged the clear victor. And everything was his fault, though Jane never said so.

  She hadn’t wanted to move. He had applied for his current job as head of a suburban primary school in west London purely for interview experience, but had to his surprise been offered the post along with modest relocation expenses. Jane had cried for two days and he had almost turned it down, but she was a fatalist as well as a martyr. ‘It’s meant to be,’ she said. And so they had sold their small semi-detached house on the south coast, where they had been happy, and where Jane had grown up, and had friends, and a good job with the health service, and where the children had been born, and moved to an equally small but much costlier Victorian semi in Twickenham, five minutes from the school. They were no better off financially, Guy worked much harder and longer and Jane, who was in any case slow to recommend herself to strangers, knew nobody.

  Guy glanced down at the photograph of her on his desk, taken in happier times. She was holding Sophie and wearing a soppy, infatuated mother’s smile. She didn’t often look like that now. A few years of frowning at the children had scored two deep lines between her eyebrows – her laughter lines were faint by comparison. But she was still beautiful, with her red mermaid hair and sea-green eyes, when she remembered to smile. And she had a laugh that could wake the dead – a real lunatic’s cackle. It had been what first attracted him to her – even though his own imbecility was its object. Sometimes they surprised themselves by making each other laugh just like they used to, and then it was pure bliss: better than sex. Of which there was, in any case, a dwindling supply. Jane had been acting very strangely lately, decamping to the spare room in the night because she was too hot or too cold or couldn’t sleep, and showing no interest whatever in her appearance, slouching around the house in jeans and trainers, when he had offered unlimited funds to buy new clothes. She could be so pretty when she bothered. Then the other night he had come home late from a governors’ meeting and found her in the bath with her swimsuit on.

  ‘What are you wearing that for?’ he had asked.

  She had looked momentarily embarrassed, but then collected herself. ‘I always used to want to have a bath in my swimming costume when I was little – just to see what it felt like. But Mum would never let me,’ she said, daring him to criticize.

  ‘Oh.’ He wasn’t going to fall into the trap of siding with a killjoy. ‘What does it feel like?’

  ‘Nice.’

  He bent over to kiss her and she slid fractionally further under the water
, so that he had to stretch forward, straining his back, which was already aching from two hours in one of those excruciating plastic bucket seats. His tie flopped out from his waistband and dipped into the water.

  ‘How has your day been?’ he asked, wringing it out.

  ‘Not bad. Harriet nicked a copy of The Downing Street Years from the arcade.’

  Guy pulled a face. ‘We’ll have to do something about that child.’

  ‘Her kleptomania?’

  ‘Her taste. How did she manage it, anyway?’

  ‘I was looking for something to give your mother for her birthday; we’d been into every bookshop in town and when we got back to the car I noticed Harriet was carrying this great hardback under one arm. I didn’t know which shop she’d taken it from so I couldn’t very well return it. I gave her a lecture about stealing of which she understood about one word in ten. Oh and Sophie got Honours in her ballet exam.’

  ‘Did you talk to anyone today?’

  She shook her head, pulling the plug out with a plop. ‘No one over the age of five. Not what you’d call a proper conversation.’

  ‘What about the other mums in the playground?’ asked Guy. Sophie was in the reception class at his own school; twice a day Jane had the opportunity to join the throng of gossiping women if she so chose.

  ‘They all know each other already. They give me a wide berth, anyway, because of you.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. I was just saying.’

  The sun was setting as Guy switched off his computer, the last of the letters answered and filed. Perhaps he would stop off on the way home and pick up some flowers for Jane and a bottle of wine and they could have a proper chat for once when the girls were in bed. Then he remembered: there was a chance of seeing that comet tonight if the skies were clear. There was no point in spending a fortune on a telescope if you didn’t take the trouble to observe that sort of phenomenon. The wine and the chat would have to wait. He locked his office and let himself out through the main reception area. Passing the caretaker’s house in the corner of the now empty staff car park he could see the flickering light of the television through the net curtains, and hear the closing music for the early evening news. He would be back in time to read the girls a bedtime story. His heart swelled with love as he pictured their pink, freshly washed faces and shining eyes. He always felt much more indulgent towards them when they were elsewhere. It soon wore off once he got home.

  On his way back he ducked into the church adjoining the playing field, where they held the school’s carol concerts and harvest festival celebrations. It had become a habit, beginning and ending each day with a prayer. If time was short he might just put his head round the door and call ‘Goodnight God’. Twenty years ago, thought Guy, as he pushed open the wooden door and breathed the familiar scent of musty hassocks and wax polish, if you’d told me I’d end up a pillar of the church I’d have laughed in your face. His parents were not religious in the least, though they respected the church in much the same way as they regarded, say, Morris Dancers, as a symbol of a more genteel and picturesque England. He had been confirmed at school with the rest of his year en masse. Like prep and cross-country it was compulsory, so the question of faith hadn’t arisen. He had had his first semi-mystical experience in the desert when he was twenty-one, and then when Sophie was born, five and a bit years ago, he had felt himself once more in the presence of the miraculous and suddenly discovered a great yearning to believe in God. It was fatherhood which made him look beyond himself to a higher, better Father, who would protect his fragile treasure from all the horrors of the world.

  He and Jane had gone along to their local church for Sophie’s baptism and had received such a welcome from the congregation – for whom funerals were more common – that they had been easily persuaded to return week after week. He had a subconscious suspicion, never properly exhumed or articulated, that his appointment to this headship had been won on the strength of his – relatively recent – status as a churchgoer. Applicants must be regular communicant members of the Church of England, the advertisement had said. That was a tough requirement nowadays; the field would not have been particularly large.

  He picked up a copy of the 1662 service book that someone had left in a pew. He preferred this version to the modern one. The more obscure and antiquated the language the better he liked it. The 1980 version was cold by comparison. He turned the tissue-thin pages to the Order for Holy Communion. Here was his favourite bit: in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection. He loved that: it was so deliciously non-committal. He unhooked a hassock and knelt down, sending up a puff of dust. His prayers tended to follow the same pattern; brief thanks for the blessings of the day just past, and rather lengthier petitioning for the future health, happiness and safety of his family. Lately though, his devotions had become rather more mechanical than spiritual. When he came to the end of his list of intercessions he would stay on his knees with his eyes closed and ask into the silence, ‘Is there anybody there?’ For some months now he had not heard any reply.

  4

  It was in. The letter was in. Jane nearly fainted with embarrassment when she opened the magazine in the newsagent’s and saw it there. She had been in to check every week since she’d written, determined not to buy a single issue until she needed to. She had deliberately chosen a down-market weekly for her own protection in the knowledge that no one she knew would ever read it and put two and two together. But now, carrying the thing to the counter, its lurid headlines shrieking of human wretchedness in all its variety, she felt that everyone in the shop must know that she was J.B. of Middx. who had Gone Off It.

  She was so distracted that she quite forgot Harriet, who had been sitting at her feet trying to pull the free gifts off the front of the children’s comics, and she was out of the door before a wail of alarm brought her up short.

  ‘Don’t go without me, Mummy. Someone might take me,’ said Harriet in a voice full of reproach, turning Jane’s own warning, issued a hundred times a day, neatly against her.

  ‘I wasn’t going without you,’ Jane lied. ‘Don’t be silly. Keep up.’ And the two of them walked along holding hands for a full minute before Harriet grew bored and peeled off, looking for distractions in shop windows.

  Once at home Jane sat Harriet in front of a video of some innocuous cartoons which she had, with amazing prescience, taped the day before, and left her engrossed, inches from the screen, while she retreated to the kitchen to read the agony column.

  She made herself a cup of coffee and eased a chocolate biscuit silently from its packet. The sound of rustling would have brought Harriet straight out to investigate. Jane flicked through the magazine to the Problem Page, her face puckering with disdain at the combination of lurid revelation and celebrity tittle-tattle that constituted its principal subject matter. ABDUCTED BY ALIENS! MY GRAN STOLE MY FIANCÉ! I BORED MY RAPIST TO SLEEP! The stories seemed to fall into two categories: How I Overcame Disaster, and How Disaster Overcame Me, and there tended to be an element of sexual adventure or misadventure involved. The thought that she, Jane, who was so fastidious about her privacy, should find herself in print alongside this collection of vulgar blabbermouths and self-publicists made her feel thoroughly soiled.

  By the time she reached her own letter she had decided that, comparatively speaking, she was problem-free. Her husband did not beat her; she had not caught AIDS from a one-night stand, nor was she pregnant with her brother-in-law’s baby. The Agony Aunt clearly did not agree, however, as she had accorded Jane’s letter top billing, boxed, in bold type. There was even an accompanying photo of a woman in a silky nightie standing at the end of a bed with one finger up to her cheek and a worried expression on her face. Behind her, half under the covers, was a man looking disappointed.

  The letter, which had originally been long and elegantly phrased, was now edited to conform to the publication’s rather abrupt style, and read as follows:

  Dear Mandy
>
  Since I had kids I’ve gone right off sex. I love my husband and still find him attractive but I don’t enjoy the physical side of things any more. I have tried fantasizing about other men but that doesn’t work. It’s him I love. I just find sex a chore. I’d rather do the dishes. I’m only 31. Is there something wrong with me?

  Yours desperately,

  J.B.

  Dear J.B.

  Yes! But nothing that can’t be put right! As a young mum at home with kids it’s all too easy to stop thinking of yourself as a sexual being. You love your husband – don’t let the spark go out of your marriage. Try to think of ways to bring some romance back into your lives. Surprise your husband with a candlelit supper – or even a candlelit bath! Perhaps a friend or relative could babysit for you while you go away for a night. It’s amazing what a change of scene can do. Try to spend as much time and effort on your sex life as you do on the children. Let the housework slide. Watch a romantic movie instead. You owe it to yourselves not to let a small problem grow into a big one. Act now. Good luck!

  At the bottom of the page was a list of telephone numbers that anxious readers could call to hear recorded messages offering information and advice on a variety of topics: Rape; HIV; AIDS; Impotence; Herpes; Premature Ejaculation; Abortion. Really, thought Jane, given the great range and diversity of afflictions for which sex was responsible, she might have expected her own stance to be held up and applauded as a model of rational behaviour. But not a bit of it. The professional consensus appeared to be that she was a freak in need of a cure. She rolled the magazine into a tight wad and hurled it like a javelin at the swing bin. It glanced off the lid and came to rest by the back door. A candlelit bath. She quite liked that idea, but only if she could have the bath to herself, of course. She would save it for when Guy was away on one of his conferences.

  From the sitting room came the sound of gunshots and violent swearing. Jane hurried in to find that the cartoons had given way, without Harriet appearing to mind, or even notice, to the end of the Quentin Tarantino film which Guy had been intending to save. Jane threw herself at the Off switch, precipitating a shriek of protest from Harriet, which soon turned to furious sobbing. Look at that, thought Jane. She actually does drum her little heels on the ground, just like a child in a comic strip.