by Penny Jordan
It had been all right, expecting her to run the house and take care of all the kids’ needs when she was at home, but now that she was working…
‘So stop working,’ he had told her last week when she had come home to find the house in a mess and him sitting in front of the television.
‘You know I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘We need the money.’
‘I’m ready, Mum…’
She forced herself to smile at Cathy as she came into the kitchen.
‘OK, love, I’ll take you now. Don’t forget, your dad’s picking you up.’
‘Huh… if he remembers. Mum, can we go to Florida next year? Nearly everyone in the class has been except for me.’
‘Florida’s very expensive, Cathy…’
Sally hadn’t told Joel, but she had already decided that she was going to try and put something aside from her wages into a special holiday account. She’d love to take the kids to Disneyland. Another few years or so and they would be too old to really enjoy it. It would be worth making a few sacrifices, and if she and Joel both put the same amount away each month …
‘Don’t forget,’ she reminded Cathy as she dropped her off outside her friend’s home, ‘you’re not to leave until your dad comes to pick you up.’
‘All right, all right. I’m not a baby, you know,’ Cathy told her as she rolled her eyes and tossed her hair.
Physically, Cathy took after Joel’s mother, being small, blonde and far too pretty. She had none of Sally’s thick dark hair and, thankfully, seldom revealed any of the tension that often clouded Sally’s deep’brown eyes.
Temperamentally Cathy was far stronger than Joel’s mother and, if neither of their children had shown any signs of the superior intelligence Daphne claimed for her son, Edward, they were both doing well enough at school for Sally to feel secretly very proud of them.
It was nice to have the house to herself, she acknowledged when she got back; not that she was likely to have any time to appreciate her solitude. Unlike Joel, she could not sit down in front of the television set oblivious to the chaos around her.
Upstairs the bathroom floor was covered in wet towels and someone had left the shower gel open on the shower floor, so that its contents was oozing wastefully away.
‘You should make the children contribute more to the household work,’ Daphne had remonstrated with her when she had called round unexpectedly one day and found her sister up to her eyes in domestic chores.
‘The way you do with Edward?’ Sally had commented wryly.
‘Edward is a very special child. With his level of intelligence he needs a constant input of intellectual stimuli to prevent him getting bored. Besides, he’s naturally a very tidy boy. Your two need the discipline of taking responsibility for certain domestic chores. But then, of course, I suppose it is difficult for you. If Joel were a different kind of man … Clifford is marvellous in the house. He wouldn’t dream of sitting down and expecting me to do everything… but then of course it’s all down to background, isn’t it?’ she had added. ‘And with Joel’s family background…’
Daphne hadn’t meant to be unkind. It was just that, as the older sister, she had always seemed to think it her role to have the freedom to comment on and criticise Sally’s family and way of life.
‘She’s a snob,’ Joel had once commented blatantly, and a part of Sally agreed with him, but naturally, since Daphne was her sister, she had felt duty-bound to defend her. She looked at her watch.
She had another half hour before she needed to leave for work.
She finished cleaning the bathroom, emptied the washing machine and refilled it. Both Cathy’s and Paul’s bedrooms were fearsomely untidy, but she hardened her heart. They both knew that they were supposed to tidy their own rooms.
Where was Joel? Irritably she scribbled him a note, reminding him that he had to pick Cathy up and that he had forgotten his promise to Paul.
It must be nice to be a man, and not have to worry about domestic routine and arrangements, safe in the knowledge that there was someone else there to cope. Well, she reflected, she didn’t have that luxury, and if she didn’t leave in five minutes flat Sister was going to be reminding her that every minute she was late meant that either someone else had to cover for her or the ward went unstaffed… Sister was a stickler for punctuality, and who could blame her? If only she could impose the same awareness of responsibility on Joel that Sister imposed on her ward nurses.
As she finally locked the back door behind her, she breathed a small sigh of relief.
* * *
Wearily Joel opened the back door. The kitchen smelled cold and empty, unlike the kitchen of his childhood where his brothers and sisters had always played. But his mother hadn’t always been there, too caught up in doing other things, just like…
He dismissed the thought irritably. No one could ever accuse Sally of not being a good mother—far from it. She doted on Paul and Cathy. Spoiled them, made it obvious that their needs came first in her life—well before his.
He frowned as he caught sight of the note on the kitchen table.
Pick up Cathy. All he wanted to do was to sit down and unwind, to think about what was happening at work.
They had all known that Andrew’s suicide had to be bad news for the company. It had been obvious for months that things weren’t going well. No one seemed to know exactly what was going to happen, but everyone was afraid that it would mean more job losses, more redundancies.
The other men had turned to him, as foreman, for reassurance and explanations, but he hadn’t been able to give them, and on top of his own feelings of anxiety and uncertainty he had felt as though he was somehow failing them, letting them down in not being able to supply the answers to their questions.
He had tried to see the works manager, but the pale, thin girl who was his secretary had simply shaken her head. The last thing he needed was to come home to an empty house and a terse note from Sally complaining because he had forgotten he had promised to take Paul fishing. Didn’t she realise how serious the situation was?
He had tried to ring to explain that he was going to be late, but the phone had been engaged.
He hadn’t eaten anything all day and his stomach felt empty, but the last thing he wanted was food. He looked at the note again and then checked his watch. He might as well go straight round for Cathy.
* * *
Jane’s mother gave him an amused look as she opened the door.
‘I’ve come to collect Cathy,’ he told her.
She was a plump, slightly over-made-up blonde, the smile she gave him just a little bit too suggestive as she told him, ‘Lucky Cathy,’ and added, ‘Look, why don’t you come in and have a drink? And I dare say we could find you something to eat,’ she added as they both heard his empty stomach growl protestingly.
‘Thanks but I’d better not. Sally’s got supper on,’ he lied.
‘Oh… I thought she was working tonight.’ The blonde was pouting slightly now, the pale blue eyes narrowing.
He’d never been a man who enjoyed the dangers of flirting, but her obvious availability and sexuality were making him sharply aware of the contrast between her attitude towards him and Sally’s.
His body hungered for the comfort of sexual contact with Sally, but these days she just didn’t want to know. Sometimes he felt the only reason she stayed with him was out of habit and because he provided a home for her and the children plus a steady income to support them all. It certainly wasn’t because she wanted to be with him.
The children were more important to her than he was. Much more important.
Cathy chattered excitedly all the way home.
‘Lindsay Roberts went to Disneyland for her summer holiday,’ she told him. ‘She was telling everyone about it. When can we go, Dad? Everyone else in my class has been.’
‘Stop exaggerating, Cathy,’ he told her sharply. Too sharply, he realised when she suddenly fell silent and he saw the sullen pout of her mouth an
d the tears shining in her eyes.
‘Why are you so mean?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Mum wants us to go.’
‘I’m not being mean, Cathy… I…’
He stopped. How did you tell a fifteen-year-old that the way things were right now you were lucky to be able to pay the mortgage, never mind pay for expensive American holidays?
‘You’re mean,’ Cathy told him. ‘And you forgot that you promised to take Paul fishing.
‘I wish I lived in a big house like Lindsay’s with a garden all the way round it.’
Joel’s mouth tightened. It wasn’t Cathy’s fault, he told himself. Kids were more materialistic these days; the whole world was more materialistic.
‘Aunt Daphne’s having an extension built on to her house, with a new bathroom. I heard her telling Mum.’
Paul was in the kitchen when they got back. Tiredly, Joel apologised to him and started to explain, but Paul wasn’t listening.
‘It’s OK… I didn’t want to go fishing anyway,’ he told him curtly.
Joel had never found it easy to get on with his son. He had always felt that Sally over-indulged him, much more so than he had ever been indulged as a boy. He could scarcely even remember his mother spending much time with him. She had not been the maternal type, despite giving birth to five children. Sally, on the other hand, had cosseted and protected Paul to the point where Joel had sometimes felt when he was a baby that he wasn’t even allowed to touch him.
‘You’re too hard on him. He’s a child, that’s all,’ Sally would protest whenever he attempted to discipline him.
‘Mum said to tell you that there’s cottage pie in the fridge for supper,’ Cathy informed him. ‘But I don’t want any.’
‘Neither do I,’ Paul announced.
Joel paused in the act of opening the fridge door and then closed it again. The phone rang and he went to answer it. It was the foreman in charge of one of the other production lines at the factory.
‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.
Joel sighed under his breath.
‘I can’t,’ he told him flatly. ‘Sally’s at work and I’ve got to stay in with the kids.’
‘When I grow up I’m never going to get married,’ Cathy announced when he had replaced the receiver. ‘And I’m going to have lots and lots of money and go to America as often as I like.’
‘Cathy…’ Joel began, and then stopped. What was the point? How could he explain to her?
Later, when both children had gone to bed, he prowled restlessly round the living-room, too on edge to sit down and watch the television. No one knew yet exactly what was going to happen with the factory, but, whatever it was, he already had a gut feeling that it wasn’t going to be good.
As a boy he had felt the effects of his father’s careless attitude towards a settled existence and regular, reliable work; his mother hadn’t seemed to care that some weeks there wasn’t any food in the house.
‘Make sure you ask for seconds at dinnertime,’ Beth, one of his older sisters, had instructed him when he first started school.
He had promised himself even before he and Sally married that his kids would never know the indignity of that kind of poverty; that they would never suffer the effects of that kind of parental irresponsibility.
Three years ago, when Sally had tentatively suggested trying for another baby, he had shaken his head and tried to explain to her how he felt.
Six months later, he had had a vasectomy. Was he imagining it, or was it after that that she had started to lose interest in him sexually, as though she no longer wanted him now that he could not provide her with a child… now that he could no longer fulfil his biological role in her life?
And if he lost his job and he could no longer fulfil his role as breadwinner either, would she reject him even more?
He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, absent-mindedly leaving the empty unrinsed milk bottle on the worktop.
One of the other men had said to him this afternoon, ‘What the hell are we going to do if this place does close down? There’s nowhere else for us to go. Not in this town.’
‘No,’ he had agreed. ‘Nor anywhere else locally either. The engineering industry’s been hit badly by the recession.’
What he really wanted was to have Sally here at home listening to him while he told her how worried he was, he admitted as he switched on the television and then switched it off again.
She never seemed to have time to listen to him any more, and then she complained that he never talked to her.
Increasingly recently at Kilcoyne’s he had worked hard in his role as foreman to mediate between the men and the management, and as overtime had stopped and the men had felt the effects in their wage packets he had had them coming to him complaining that they were finding it difficult to manage.
He was in exactly the same boat, but because he was their foreman he had felt unable to point this out to them and tell them that he had his own problems.
He had never really wanted Sally to go out to work, and she wouldn’t have had to either if he hadn’t been fool enough to take out that extra loan to buy a new car, and then she had wanted a new kitchen—like her sister.
None of them had known then just how high interest rates were going to rise, and, even though now the payments were easier, they were still heavily in debt to the bank. At the time it had seemed worth taking the risk, he had told himself it had been worth it, and that night when Sally had walked in just as he was finishing the kitchen… It had been a long time since they had made love like that, since he had felt her body clench with excitement and need when he touched her. He had felt really good that night. Happy… secure… a king in command of his own small personal world. And then six weeks later the company had gone on to short time, and Sally had announced that, since he was making such a fuss about the cost of the kitchen, she’d pay off the loan herself.
It had been too late then to take back the angry words he had uttered in the panic of realising just what the drop in his weekly wage was going to be.
And besides, Sally had been proved right. They couldn’t have managed without the money she was bringing in.
Knowing that hurt him more than he wanted to admit. He had tried to tell Sally that, to explain, but she just didn’t seem to want to listen.
She had changed since she’d started working, even though she herself refused to admit it, grown away from him, made him feel he was no longer important to her.
‘You’re lucky,’ one of the men had said to him today. ‘At least your wife’s in work.’
Lucky. If only they knew.
* * *
Sally hummed to herself as she walked down the ward. She always enjoyed her work on Men’s Surgical. She paused by Kenneth Drummond’s bedside, responding to his warm smile. The forty-five-year-old university lecturer had been very badly injured in a serious road accident several months earlier, and she had got to know him quite well during his lengthy stay in hospital.
She had been on night duty during his first critical weeks under special care and a deep rapport invariably developed between such patients and the staff who nursed them. At times she had felt as though she had almost been willing him to live, reluctant to go off duty in case without her there he might give up and let go of his precarious hold on life.
It was a feeling no one outside the nursing profession could really be expected to understand. Joel certainly hadn’t done so.
‘You’ll have heard my news, I expect,’ Kenneth commented as she smiled back at him.
‘Yes, Wednesday, isn’t it? You’ll be glad to get away from here, I expect.’
‘Not really.’ His smile disappeared. ‘To be honest with you, I’m feeling rather apprehensive about it. Not because of any lack of faith in your surgeon’s hard work,’ he told her. ‘He’s assured me that he’s put enough pins and bolts in me to hold up the Eiffel Tower. No, it’s not that.’
‘Still, you are bound to feel a bit anxious,’ Sally com
forted him. ‘It’s only natural.’
‘Mmm. But it’s not so much that. To be honest with you, it’s the loneliness I’m dreading.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘I don’t suppose I should admit to that, should I? Very unmacho of me. We men are supposed to be tough guys who don’t admit to any kind of emotional vulnerability… until we’re somewhere like this. I don’t know how you nurses manage to put up with us. You can’t be left with a very high opinion of the male sex after you’ve heard us crying into our pillows.’
‘It isn’t always easy,’ Sally admitted. ‘It hurts seeing that someone’s in pain and that you know you can’t always do anything about it. Mind you, it’s nothing to what you hear down on the labour ward,’ she told him, trying to lighten his mood. ‘Of course it’s the men who get the worst of it down there. Woe betide any male nurse who tries to tell a woman in the middle of her contractions just to remember how to breathe and everything will be all right…’
‘Yes. I’ve always thought that, when it comes to bearing pain, women are far braver than men and far more stoical.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Sally told him with a grin. ‘I cursed Joel, my husband, to hell and back when I was having Cathy. I swore afterwards that nothing would ever make me go through anything like that again.’ She smiled reminiscently.
‘You’ve got two children, haven’t you?’ Kenneth asked her.
‘Yes. I would have liked another, but…’
She stopped, frowning. It wasn’t like her to confide so easily in anyone, especially a patient.
‘Have you any children?’ she asked him directly.
Although he had talked to her a lot during the months he had been in hospital, he had never mentioned any family.
‘Yes and no. My wife and I are divorced. She remarried and lives in Australia now.’ His expression changed. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t either a good husband or a good father. We married very young, straight out of university. Rebecca was pregnant at the time and she blamed me, quite rightly, I suppose, for the fact that her career was over before it had even started. A termination wasn’t an option in those days and neither really was single motherhood. James, our second son, was born following an ill-timed attempt at marital reconciliation. We separated before he was born. They—my sons—are adults now, and anyway they look on their stepfather as their father, and quite rightly, so it’s ridiculous of me to lie here feeling sorry for myself because I’m going home to an empty house when, in truth, it is empty through my own choice.’