Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  NOT PLAYING THE GAME

  Jennifer Chapman

  © Jennifer Chapman 1986

  Jennifer Chapman has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1986 by Century Hutchinson Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Rosie and Caroline

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter One

  ‘You don’t think it will change, do you, I mean, when it’s the right thing to do as opposed to the wrong?’ Mickey asked David.

  They sat facing one another in the bath. A good deal of water had gone on the floor and Mickey’s blue garter on the lavatory seat had a limp damp look about it.

  ‘I don’t see why it should,’ David said, beginning to soap himself.

  Mickey remained inert at the tap end, watching David through the misty atmosphere of the rather cold bathroom. The weather had turned, but what could they expect for the end of September. A summer wedding would have been nice and had been suggested, but Mickey and her mother had temporarily forgotten the cricket season, and the look of dismay, almost affront on David’s face had hastily led them on to September. And here it was, W-Day, with Mickey not wanting to get out of the bath because the air was so much colder than the water and because she wanted to prolong the aftermath of their last time of ‘doing it’ without being expected to; and because David was so splendid to look at.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ she asked him.

  ‘Horribly,’ he said, levering himself up and out of the water.

  ‘Which bit are you most nervous about?’ she persisted.

  ‘Being late,’ he said, vigorously rubbing his back with the towel.

  Mickey leapt out of the bath and threw her arms around his neck. ‘I love you, I do love you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re making me wet,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you’re so romantic!’ she said, not loosening her hold, sensing him weakening.

  ‘No, Mickey,’ he began, attempting to sound resolute, but she had put her mouth against his and he was as much in love with her as she with him.

  It was an equal intoxication and had been for the six months they had lived together. Six months of the exquisite delight of being in love and being certain, even when they argued. Six months also, of being late.

  ‘I’ve got less than half an hour,’ Mickey gasped, peering now, short-sightedly, at the steamed up face of her watch on the bathroom window ledge.

  ‘It’s alright for you, the bride’s expected to be late,’ David said.

  In the bedroom, as yet the only room they’d tackled in the Victorian house, Mickey wriggled into her new white underwear, groaned at having to wear a bra, and ran downstairs thus. In the hallway she threw on a trench coat and stuck her feet into a pair of wellies. Remembering the blue garter, she tore upstairs again. David, half-dressed, met her on the landing.

  ‘Forgot the “borrowed blue”,’ she said, breathlessly, dodging past him to the bathroom.

  On her way back she paused. ‘You don’t suppose it’s bad luck to have the borrowed and the blue together?’

  ‘Those are my boots you’ve got on,’ David answered. ‘Perhaps they’ll count.’

  Mickey stared down at her feet. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Mickey, I don’t think it really matters,’ he said, leaning forward, kissing her face. ‘Now go! Please go!’

  ‘I thought they were mine,’ she said vacantly, ‘I really did.’

  The car seemed to have less than the required number of cylinders operating during the two-mile drive to her parents’ home. Elements of a bad dream were gathering force. She had to pass the church and spotted distant cousins arriving in straw hats. She pressed her foot harder on the accelerator, but a few yards further on had to stop at a zebra crossing and wait while David’s parents stepped out in front of her. Why was his mother wearing black? More wedding guests filed across, their heads bent against the rain. Not one of them recognized her, which was a relief but at the same time a little dislocating.

  At her parents’ house there was the predictable disharmony and everyone seemed cross with her although in a distracted sort of way. She felt rather like an afterthought, conscious of being in the way, which was ridiculous and possibly paranoid, but that was how she felt.

  Her father, in grey morning dress, wrenched at the trench coat and when she clung on to it muttered something along the lines of ‘Have it your own way, you always have’, which was totally unfair. She went upstairs to her old room and there on the bed was the wedding dress, made to measure two months earlier and doubtless now too big. It wasn’t that she’d meant to lose weight or been too lovesick to eat, it was just that the kitchen in their house left much to be desired and unlike David, she rarely had time for lunch.

  She stood, staring at the whiteness of the dress, wondering, once again, whether agreeing to hypocrisy was worse than upsetting one’s mother. She delved in her trench coat pocket, extracted a handful of cosmetics and deciding to get on with it, sat down at the dressing table. She was almost ready, face and dress on, her long thick brown hair more or less in place if still a little damp, when her mother burst into the room and in an explosion of matriarchal passion let out a huge sob and sank down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Oh Mother, please, I can’t bear it,’ Mickey pleaded. ‘After all, I haven’t lived at home for years!’

  ‘It’s not that,’ her mother said weepily. ‘Your father and brother won’t speak to one another and your sister thinks she’s pregnant and can’t get into her dress.’

  Mickey turned from her and hurried across the landing to Laura’s room. The house seemed vibrant with weeping and ill temper. Laura, her face wet and red, sat in a dejected attitude on the old nursing chair, the front-buttoning bodice of her lemon bridesmaid dress gaping open.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, flatly, when she saw Mickey. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘So are you, I gather,’ Mickey answered.

  ‘Only a bit,’ Laura snivelled, ‘but my bust is enormous.’

  ‘Do you really think you’re pregnant?’ Mickey asked, going over to her sister and tugging at the two sides of the dress to try and make them meet.

  ‘I’m not a hundred per cent.’

  ‘Who’s the father? Lawrence?’

  ‘Of course!’ Laura snapped and then added, ‘Actually I’m not a hundred per cent on that either,’ and gave way to a fresh bout of sobbing.

  Laura was eighteen, a good deal younger than Mickey and her brother, Gordon; the ‘surprise package’ as their father often explained, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

  ‘How late are you?’ Mickey said, still grappling with the dress.

  ‘Three months,’ Laura answered in a small voice.

  ‘Oh really!’ Mickey exclaimed with exasperation, and then with a rush of emotion and pity hugged her sister to her and said it would be all right and she shouldn’t worr
y too much.

  ‘We ought to swap dress – mine’s too big,’ she said, rocking Laura back and forth in her arms.

  ‘Oh please, don’t do that, it makes me feel sick,’ Laura said, easing away.

  In the next five minutes they exchanged dresses. Mickey felt more comfortable, physically and morally, in the lemon frock, and Laura, who was now as putty in her hands following the relief of confession, stood meekly in front of the long dressing mirror while Mickey tied a blue chiffon scarf around the thickening waist in order to ‘debridefy’ the white.

  Their mother came into the room and capitulated to practicality with surprising equanimity.

  ‘I am going to miss you, darling,’ she said in a heartfelt way, leaving a lipstick print on Mickey’s cheek.

  From downstairs came her father’s bellow: ‘The car’s here.’

  Laura and her mother were bundled into the limousine. Gordon had already driven off in his Mercedes. Mickey and her father stood in awkward silence, waiting in the hallway for the car to come back for them. Father had no conversation for women, even his own.

  ‘My own son! Bloody man!’ he muttered, after about a minute of slightly agitated movement from one foot to the other. He had a bit of a walrus face, accentuated by a grey moustache. His eyes were generally furious. Mickey had long felt he would have been better suited to some sort of military career rather than being the owner of a toy factory, although he did have a great interest in toys, particularly clockwork. He often lamented their demise in favour of batteries. He still had a train set somewhere in the house and when Mickey and Gordon were children had growled at them if they went anywhere near it. Gordon had received the greater number of smacks for trespass and perhaps it was that time of inherent resentment of their father and his toys that had led to Gordon starting his own rival factory.

  ‘Hologram jigsaws,’ father snorted. ‘My idea. Industrial espionage. That’s what it is!’ He always spoke in words rather than sentences, increasing the impression of bad temper exhibited in his face.

  The car returned for them and proceeded at funereal pace to the church. Father had failed to notice anything amiss in the dresses for the day, but then he had always been both colour- and style-blind to women’s apparel – a defect that had proved beneficial when Mickey was a teenager.

  When they reached the church it was no more than twenty minutes past the appointed time and in the moment before they got out of the car father, very unexpectedly, patted Mickey’s knee and pursed his lips together in a way that suggested emotion.

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll catch on,’ he murmured, turning from her to step out into the rain. ‘Rubik Cubes didn’t last long.’

  The wedding ceremony was a blur to Mickey, one of her contact lenses having gone adrift.

  ‘Don’t cry, my darling,’ David whispered, squeezing her hand.

  ‘I’m not,’ Mickey told him.

  ‘Shush,’ the vicar hissed.

  In a moment or two Mickey heard herself promising to obey David; she’d forgotten to have that bit taken out but didn’t care, not then. The mass of brightly adorned people in the body of the church seemed to recede and for a few short minutes it was just her and David, her and David forever.

  Don’t get carried away, she warned herself. This is Mickey standing at the altar, in lemon, not white and with her knickers wet from making love.

  But it was all done, the ‘worst over’. They were man and wife. ‘No worse than going to the dentist,’ David had said.

  They signed away their lives to one another hardly containing their glee, and joined, never to be put asunder, they strode down the aisle between a sea of well-wishing faces like Moses’ parted waves.

  In the light of day, reality was presented to Mickey in the form of a cricket bats’ ‘guard of honour’ she and David had to pass beneath as they came out of the church. Obliquely, and in the way such thoughts will intrude even on the best of occasions, Mickey wondered on which page of the local newspaper her wedding would appear and pictured it somewhere between the hockey results and the football.

  Photography ensued, mercifully cut short by the weather, and then the crocodile of cars slid off to the hotel where the reception was to be held.

  Mickey and David, too pleased with one another to speak, sank back in the leather seat of the limousine. They felt unreal, too happy to be true, momentarily isolated in the undiluted intensity of one another’s company.

  The reception was being held in a rather ugly building termed a ‘function suite’ and attached to the town’s largest hotel which boasted eleven bedrooms. They’d needed somewhere spacious because there were so many teams of people to invite – cricket, rugger, hockey, squash. David, who was captain of most of them, said it would be difficult not to invite the lot: he never knew when he might have to drop someone from a team and they’d take it less hard, knowing it was nothing personal. Besides, he’d sold insurance to the majority of club members, life policies and pensions, that sort of thing, all big commission stuff. Not that David was that type, the insurance man always on the make. He didn’t have to sell at all – people asked him; they trusted him because he was good at games and a sound team man.

  It took some considerable time for the guests to file past the welcoming family group. Mickey heard her mother say to the cousins in the straw hats, ‘Don’t ask me about the dress’ in a mortified tone, and the cousins, their curiosity aroused (then if not before), began to search for some significance in the lemon dress. She saw people wince as the ‘Walrus’ shook hands with them, his fury over Gordon and hologram jigsaws doubtless being vented on the unsuspecting knuckles of those who had brought towels and toasters and well-meant wishes.

  Josephine from the sporting club, appeared in front of her. She too was wearing black. She paused a moment, smiled, then turned to David and kissed him on the lips.

  ‘Ah well,’ she breathed, stepping back a little, ‘you win some, you lose some.’

  Dan Lovell was next. At all such events there are the few people who it matters are there and Dan was one; not because he was an MP, not even because he was the most senior in the firm of solicitors where Mickey was the most junior: it was simply that she liked him a great deal.

  ‘Mickey you look lovely,’ he said, kissing her, his eyes showing open admiration. Dan was the only person, other than David, to whom Mickey could talk. He was a wonderful listener, a kind and clever man, the sort of person, Mickey felt, all Members of Parliament should be, though he was probably not ruthless enough to sustain a political career.

  Dan, of course, was alone, as always. Traces of sadness still showed in his face, seen, perhaps, only by those who knew him well. Mickey, so full of happiness today, longed for his with a sudden fervour that produced a small pain in her chest.

  The same sensation recurred some three hours later after the meal had been served, the cake cut and the Walrus risen to his feet and delivered a completely uncharacteristic speech in which he didn’t mention toys and actually said he was proud of his daughter, something he had never admitted before and which he would not have occasion to repeat, he concluded gruffly, in an effective attempt at disguising what could only be fatherly feeling. It had taken Mickey twenty-six years to come to terms with the fact that as far as her father was concerned, daughters were by the way. That she’d been wrong was quite a shock, although she couldn’t avoid the unpleasant thought that Gordon, hologram jigsaws, and revenge, might have contributed a little to her father’s extravagant praise of herself.

  David, who was greeted with table-banging and prolonged clapping and cheers, made a perfect, unexceptional speech while Mickey wound the lower part of her leg around his. This continued after he sat down and Mickey didn’t hear very much of the best man’s speech, a litany of jokes researched from What Rugby Jokes Did Next.

  When it was over she slipped out to the cloakroom and found Laura trying not to look upset.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done it to you,’ she said, her voice t
rembly.

  An unfounded, illogical wave of panic welled up in Mickey, as if Laura might be about to confess that David was the father of her child.

  ‘Done what?’ she asked.

  ‘Taken your wedding dress,’ Laura blubbered, bursting into tears.

  Mickey, feeling ridiculously relieved, hugged her sister and insisted she believe that it didn’t matter. Quite regularly, she had similar jealous imaginings about David, little stabs of self-inflicted torture she knew to be nonsense but which somehow she couldn’t resist. On more than one occasion she had asked David if he was quite sure he hadn’t been to bed with Josephine; and he’d answered that he didn’t think he would have forgotten if he had, which made Mickey accuse him of wanting to – if he hadn’t already. They’d had a bit of a row over it the last time: David had said she was being silly and because she knew it she became more unreasonable.

  ‘For God’s sake, you’re supposed to be an intelligent, grown-up woman,’ David had shouted at her.

  ‘Intelligence has got nothing to do with it,’ she yelled back, but they couldn’t keep their hands off one another for long and neither was disposed towards violence. Making up after a jealous row was just about the most potent thing Mickey could imagine. It was almost worth the foregoing misery.

  Her thoughts more in David’s arms than with her sister, she waited while Laura inspected herself, front, side and back in the cloakroom mirror.

  ‘Do you think it shows very much?’ she said, first slouching then pulling her shoulders back.

  Their mother came in. ‘I’ve spoken to Lawrence,’ she said, ‘I’ve told him it will have to be a registry office “do”, we can’t afford another church wedding so soon.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy! How could you!’ Laura wailed. ‘I don’t want to get married, ever. I don’t want to be a sacrificial offering.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Mickey muttered. She could see an argument developing that would go nowhere, Laura and their mother being equally matched in strength of will. The difference was that Mother always looked so ferocious while Laura, who was very much like Mickey physically, used ‘waif and stray’ pathos as her primary weapon. But the confrontation was cut short by three of the ‘Aga Brigade’ as Mickey always thought of them – her mother’s coffee morning friends – they of the ‘I could no more fly round the moon than do without my Aga’ as Mickey had once heard one of them proclaim. They erupted into the cloakroom, hats at variance with lines of vision, their voices turned up a few decibels by dry sherry, chablis and something approaching champagne.