by Maeve Binchy
But Jen wouldn’t do this because it was not a civilised thing to do. It would be considered the act of a madwoman. In England that is. In the more hot-blooded Mediterranean countries it would be totally understood. But this was not a country of Latin lovers and passionate jealousy, this was a civilised place. So Jen fixed a slightly dim smile to her face as if she were talking to a very senile man and a very young baby instead of her husband and stepson.
‘Well, no point in us bothering about all that now is there? Your Mum is well able to sort out her own problems, Stevie. Would anyone like some drinking chocolate?’
Nobody felt like any, so Jen stood up deliberately and made some for herself. She knew if she had put three mugs on the tray they would all have had it, but why should she? Why should she play nanny to them both? While they stared into the changing pictures of the fire and worried about beautiful Tina and her troubled Christmas.
When Stevie had gone to bed, Jen talked about the supermarket. They wanted her to work Saturday, Sunday and the two days before Christmas. Should she do it? It was a lot of money; in the middle of January they would be sorry if she hadn’t done it. On the other hand, maybe it was just tiring herself out for the sake of a wage packet. Might they be happier if she were to stay at home a bit and relax? She wondered what Martin thought.
‘Whichever you like best,’ he said. His face still looked preoccupied to her. Suddenly it was all too much effort. Suddenly the mask of civilised behaviour fell right down to the ground.
‘Whichever I like?’ she said in disbelief. ‘Are you actually mad, Martin? Whichever I like? Do you think anyone in the whole world would like to get out of a nice warm bed and leave a gorgeous man like you still there, get dressed, flog over to the supermarket and deal with bad-tempered customers, watch that people don’t nick things at the till, see women wearing big rings spending forty, fifty, sixty pounds a time on food? If you think anyone would choose to do that you must be insane.’
He looked at her, dumbfounded. Jen had never spoken to him like this before. Her eyes were blazing and her face was contorted with anger.
‘But why did you . . . I mean, I thought you wanted to earn . . . you never said . . .’ he was stammering, unable to cope with the woman in the other chair who had turned into a stranger.
‘I wanted to have extra money to make this a nice home for you and Stevie and me, that’s what I wanted. And I never allowed myself to think about the sum of money that goes from your salary every month towards Tina’s mortgage. Not even on a Saturday afternoon when I look at her house, which is bigger and better than our house, do I question the fact that you pay towards its upkeep when we all know that sometimes Tina earns three times what you and I earn together. I know, I know her work is uncertain. Some weeks she might earn nothing. I know, but isn’t she lucky, my, my, my, what a bit of luck that we never suggested that she should get a regular job like the rest of the world has to do?’ Jen paused for breath and pulled away her hand which Martin was reaching for. ‘No, let me finish, perhaps I should have said it before, perhaps I am the guilty one for pretending it doesn’t matter, for putting on a brave little face, but that’s what I thought you needed. You’d had enough tempers and tantrums with the last one, I thought you needed a bit of peace and calm around you now.’
‘But I need you, you’re what I want,’ he said simply.
She went on, nodding her head in agreement. ‘Well, that’s what I tried to be, calm, and putting a good face on things, and I suppose that’s what I’ll go on doing. It was just when you asked me to suit myself or whatever you said—‘whichever I like’—as if there was any question. Of course I’d like to be at home here, getting up late, pottering around a bit, maybe doing the plants and sort of just enjoying ourselves, like people do. Like some people do.’
‘But I thought you found it a bit dull here, and that’s why you like to run off and be with people, meet them, and have a bit of money as independence, you know.’ His big honest face looked at her, bewildered. No wonder Tina had walked over this kind, uncomplicated man.
Jen opened the kitchen cupboard and showed him the store of luxury foods, the crackers, the table decorations. She gestured to the bright, shining ornaments and the electric lights on the Christmas tree. She wordlessly touched the new standard lamp that stood by his chair, the curtains on their smart, new rail, the brass box which held the logs for the fire.
‘This is hardly spending money just for me to fritter away. I got these things for our house. I don’t hoard my salary for me anymore than you do with yours. I spend it making a nice home for us all, and I’m sorry Martin, I do not want to have Tina here to wreck our first Christmas, I really don’t, and that’s why I’m so upset. I just want you and me and Stevie and a bit of time. Time to talk. Is that so awful?’
‘Tina? Come here for Christmas? There was never any question of that!’
‘Oh yes, there was. I saw it in your eyes, you wanted brave Jen, nice calm Jen to say, let’s be civilised, let’s ask Stevie’s mother to share our groaning board. Well I won’t and that’s that.’
‘But you can’t think I want Tina here, can you? After all the Christmases she ruined on me and Stevie, after all the heartbreak and the lies and the deceit. Why would I want her here again? I am divorced from her remember, I’m married to you. It’s you I love.’
‘Yes, but what about Tina’s Christmas?’
‘Oh, she’ll find somewhere, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not worried. It was you who sounded worried when you were talking earlier with Stevie, you definitely looked upset about her.’
‘I was and I am a bit, you see, I didn’t finish while Stevie was there.’
‘What is it?’ Jen was anxious.
‘Oh, just Tina upsetting people. As well as the Christmas fiasco, she has plans to go abroad in the New Year. More or less a permanent job, she says. We had a talk about the house, her house. She won’t need anymore help towards it, she’s going to let it apparently, and she said she’s sending us something to recompense me.’
‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’
‘Yes, well, so will I, but the main thing is no more monthly cheque to her.’
‘Are you upset because she’s going?’
‘Only for Stevie. I think that he will miss her, but then tonight when I came home to this lovely place, I think he’ll only miss her for a little while, he’s got such a good home here. You’ve made it a real home for both of us.’
But she wouldn’t give in completely, she had come out in the open and she wasn’t going to put on her gentle-Jen mask again immediately.
‘So what was the upset about if you’re not going to miss Tina, and you think Stevie’ll get over it? Why were you so depressed?’
‘I was thinking that I must be a very dull sort of husband. Tina ran away from me, you ran off to work at weekends, I thought it was because I was dull.’ He looked so sad, she knelt in front of him.
‘I thought I was dull too, I wanted to be tigerish like Tina, but I never thought you were dull for a moment, not for one second. I swear it.’
He kissed her in the firelight. ‘Men are very silly really,’ he said. ‘We never think of saying the obvious. You are beautiful and fascinating, and I’ve always been afraid since the first time we met that you might be too bright for me, and think I was a dreary sort of bank clerk encumbered with a son. I couldn’t believe it when you wanted to take us both on. I never think of Tina except in relief that she gave me Stevie, and that it turned out as it did. It never crossed my mind to compare you. Never.’
‘I know.’ She soothed him now, he seemed so worried. But he was struggling to find words. He was determined to pay her the compliment that was in his head and his heart but he had never been able to say.
‘Years ago,’ Martin said, ‘they used to have mainly black-and-white films and when one was in colour they used to say ‘‘In Glorious Technicolour . . .’’, that’s what you’re like, Glorious Technicolour to me.
’
He stroked Jen’s mouse-brown hair, and her pale cheek, he put his arms round her and hugged her to him in her grey cardigan and her grey and lilac skirt. He kissed her lips which had only a little lipstick left and closed her eyelids which had no make-up and kissed her on each of them.
‘Glorious Technicolour,’ he said again.
Pulling Together
PENNY WROTE AN AIR LETTER TO HER FRIEND MAGGIE IN Australia every week. Every week she wrote about life in the staffroom, how Miss Hall had become like a caricature of a schoolmarm, how the children were now all delinquents instead of just a steady thirty per cent of them. She wrote about the parents, some of them filled with mad hopes and beliefs that their daughters were going to conquer the world. It was a hard thing to live in a land that seemed to have been ruled forever by a woman monarch and a woman prime minister, Penny wrote, it gave girls notions that they could get anywhere. That was nearly as bad as the old notions, the notions that they could get nowhere.
She wrote about the time passing so quickly that it was quite impossible to believe she was facing her fifth Christmas at this school. If anyone had told her that when she started . . . if anyone had said that at twenty-seven Penny would have had one job, and one job only, in a girls’ school, in a city miles from her home . . . in a small shabby flat, that she had never done up because she had never intended to stay in it. She wrote to Maggie about cold, autumn evenings where she stood, hands deep in her pocket, cheering on the hockey team because it showed a bit of school spirit and pleased the games mistress, how she helped at the school play because it was solidarity and how, even now, without a note in her head she would help for the fifth time to organise the Carol Concert.
She didn’t need to tell Maggie why she did all these things. Maggie knew. And Maggie was a good friend, she never mentioned it. Not once, not even in the middle of her own air letters about teaching in the Bush; about having killed a kangaroo and thinking everyone would be furious but in fact they had congratulated her; about how the school seemed to empty at sheep-shearing time; about Pete, the fellow she had a de facto with. De facto meant a real, proper, live-in relationship; it counted if you wanted to become an Australian citizen.
Maggie never enquired why Penny didn’t leave if it was all so wearying. Maggie knew about Jack. And she knew enough about Jack not to ask any questions about him.
In the first days of the romance Penny had written flowingly about him, about the way Jack had come into her life, suddenly and surely. Knowing that he loved her, knowing that he needed her. Jack had been so sure of everything, Penny felt foolish in her doubts. Doubts about his being married for one thing, about his not leaving home, about his wanting to keep it all quiet.
Jack loved everything about Penny that was funny, he said. Funny, lively and free. She was so different to the predictable women who all came up with the same self-centred line over and over . . . Penny felt that this line had something to do with wondering when, if ever, the man would be free. So that was a road which she had never gone down in the early days. She had sworn to him that she too wanted to be free, she couldn’t bear the idea of being tied down; she couldn’t change her horses in midstream now, she couldn’t suddenly, when she passed her quarter-of-the-century mark tell this man that she wanted a little security. She had picked up Germaine Greer’s book, The Female Eunuch, and read again the chapter which said that there is no such thing as security. She willed herself to believe it, and refused to read any articles suggesting that Germaine Greer herself might have had a change of heart.
Because of Jack’s position and the fact that he and his wife had to go out to a lot of functions, even though it was all meaningless of course, and the smiles they had for the cameras were phoney and empty . . . Penny could tell nobody about their relationship, about how he came to the little flat whatever evenings he could steal and how she had to be there most of the time just in case, and not complain on the many evenings that he had not been able to steal time. She had hinted a little of that to Maggie in the start, but Maggie, secure in her de facto, had been too kind to pursue it. Maggie had simply said that if you loved someone, you did, and that was it. You took the package. You couldn’t break the kit and reassemble it, much as she would like to reassemble Pete without his insatiable thirst for ice-cold beer! It had been heartening, and Penny hugged the notion to herself when things were bleak which was more and more of the time.
There had been three years of Christmas Days of loving Jack, and now a fourth was upcoming. They had been the saddest days of her life. Sitting, watching gleeful television shows, telephoning her mother and stepfather miles and miles away, assuring them she was happy and thanking them for all the gifts. Fingering whatever scent bottle Jack had given her, and waiting all the time until he could steal the minutes. Last year he had only come for a quarter of an hour. He had pretended he needed to pick something up from his office he said. The children had insisted on coming, he had left them in the park to play. He couldn’t stay.
She had cried for two hours after he had gone. She had put on her dark raincoat and walked past his house later in the afternoon. It was full of lights and Christmas trees and cards on the wall, and mistletoe on the light. Who was that for? The children were too young. But don’t ask him. Never let him know that she had seen it.
It had been so very lonely that this year she had decided to go away. To somewhere where there was sunshine and, preferably, no Christmas. Morocco, she had thought of, or Tunisia. Somewhere Moslem and warm. But Jack had been appalled. Hurt and even a little shocked.
‘You must think very little of me, and how I have to go through this facade if you just run away,’ he had said. ‘We could all do that . . . run away from things. I thought you loved me and that you would be here. Have I ever failed to come and see you at Christmas? Answer me that.’
Penny realised it had indeed been selfish of her. But now that it was the season of fuss and school hysteria, now the shops had been playing Christmas songs for weeks already and her eyes felt tired from looking at so many pictures of domestic bliss, Penny wished that she had been firmer. She wished that she had told Jack in level tones, without any catch in her voice, that going away for eight days did not mean an end to the love that had consumed her for almost four years and would continue to be the centre of her being forever. She should have been strong enough, and found the words that didn’t make it look like a gesture, a hurt little reaction . . . something from the I-can-stand-on-my-own-feet brigade. But now it was too late. He was going to take her to supper on Christmas Eve, in a new place, very simple, no one he knew or his wife knew would go there. It sounded like a café from what he said, Penny thought glumly. She could imagine herself having sausage and beans and a nice cup of milky tea.
Still it was better than . . . she stopped and racked her brains to think what it was better than. She looked over at Miss Hall, fifty-five possibly, same old jumper and skirt for years and years, same old shabby briefcase, sitting tucked away in a corner reading her newspapers, face grey, hair grey, outlook grey. Yes it was much better than being Miss Hall with her big house which must have been worth a fortune in the square and her lack of interest in anything except being left alone with her precious papers. Penny often wondered what, if anything, she ever read in them, she seemed to have no interest in current affairs, in politicians or in gossip columns. She had not been seen doing crosswords.
There was a knock on the staffroom door, it was Lassie Clark. Lassie was one of the pupils that Penny liked least, a big, sulky-looking girl with hair deliberately arranged so that it covered most of her face. She had a way of shrugging her disapproval and boredom without even seeming to move her shoulders. Without bothering to move the curtain of hair that hid her eyes and mouth, Lassie muttered that she had been told to report there at three-thirty.
‘What was it for this time?’ Penny asked. Lassie was one of the familiar faces reporting because of essays not done, excuses not given in by parents . . . home
work unfinished.
‘Don’t know,’ Lassie said. ‘Something about an old school pageant, I think. Or else it was something else.’
Penny longed to give her a good, hard smack. She must remember to tell Maggie in her next letter that teaching in an all-girls’ school, working in an all-female staffroom was definitely not natural. It made you mad, sooner rather than later. And in Penny’s case, now. She controlled her urge to attack the girl.
‘How old are you, Lassie?’ she enquired, her voice over-pleasant.
Lassie looked out from the mane of hair suspiciously as if this was a trick question.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Come on now, it’s not one of the hard ones.’
‘I’m fifteen,’ Lassie admitted without any pleasure.
‘Good, well by that age I’m sure you know what you were asked to report here about, was it the bloody pageant or was it some other goddamned thing. Say which it was and don’t have us here all night.’
Lassie looked up in genuine alarm. The teacher seemed to have lost control.
‘It was the bloody pageant,’ she said, with spirit, knowing she could hardly be corrected about the word since the teacher had used it first.
‘Well what did you do? Not go to rehearsal?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What a fool you are! What a stupid, foolish girl who can’t see further than her own foolish face. Why didn’t you go to the rehearsal and get shut of it? Now you have to stay in and spend a half an hour in the classroom writing for no reason, and they’ll be looking out for you tomorrow, and they’ll probably insist you dress up as a shepherd or an angel or something. Why the hell couldn’t you have just gone along with it and stood there like the rest of us have to, year after bloody year just because it’s easier.’