Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  ‘You’re not going to disappoint me, are you?’ Josephine said next.

  Mickey looked unsure as to what was meant by this.

  ‘You’re not going to become like all the other smug little wives. No, of course you’re not,’ she continued without pausing. ‘You’re a successful solicitor, a female person with a brain and a life of her own.’ Josephine had this clever little way of being insulting and disarmingly flattering in the next breath. ‘David, I’m afraid, is just one of the boys and always will be. I hope he appreciates how lucky he is to have you.’

  Mickey could feel her smile becoming sticky at the edges, Josephine’s rhetorical remarks were wedge-shaped and difficult to field.

  ‘How are things at the big house?’ she said, in an effort to change the subject.

  ‘Not bad, not good. The same. How can one get excited about selling lavender bags?’

  ‘How’s the earl?’

  ‘Peter? Oh, dotty as ever, rushing about like a blue-arsed fly; endlessly going on about death duties. He’s making noises about getting on to Dan Lovell.’

  Josephine chuntered on at some length about the unfairness of it all, but Mickey was thinking about David and inwardly still smarting over Josephine’s dismissive observation of him as ‘just one of the boys’. It rankled, uncomfortably, inexplicably, just as it had when Emily had talked about ‘the boys’ spilling their tea.

  Josephine was at her most vitriolic that evening and Mickey hoped she would be gone before David returned. In the event that particular worry was needless: she did not go until midnight, but David was still not home.

  Josephine was exhausting company but Mickey couldn’t go to bed after she’d left. She checked the phone, concerned but almost hoping that it might be out of order. The dialling tone sounded strong and clear. She thought to ring the club but held back, wanting David to make the call to her. She made more coffee and sat down in the depressing living room, alert and jumpy for the call that didn’t come.

  By half-past one, her over-tired brain had graphically built up the most horrendous car smash with David lying bleeding, perhaps dead, in the overturned car wedged in a ditch somewhere between the club and home. Now she dreaded the possibility that the phone might ring or the doorbell sound and police officers with ashen faces be standing outside steeling themselves to impart the dreadful news.

  At a quarter past two she could bear it no longer. Her palm coldly sweaty, she lifted the receiver and dialled the club number. It rang and rang and there was no reply. She redialled and this time somebody answered but she’d made a mistake and the drowsy voice at the other end was not pleased.

  She felt foolish and angry, with herself but more so with David. She started to think unwisely, about what Josephine had said earlier, the reason for her coming round at all: people were talking about David, people were saying things about him and Josephine; but why should they think or say anything if they didn’t suspect or know he was like that? It didn’t have to be Josephine. David was now off the road in a different way, the car parked at the top of the heath, windows steamed up, the seats reclined.

  How do I play it, she thought, when he does come home? The jealous rage appealed to her, and it was how she felt except that she didn’t really believe David was with another woman. The jealousy was directed towards a rival more difficult to fight. Mickey knew where David was and the phone not being answered at the club was only because it hadn’t been heard by those in the bar. She was even certain that David’s not calling her was no deliberate omission – he wasn’t like that, he never meant to be cruel.

  She switched out the lights downstairs. The melodramatic notion of being in the living room, in the dark, for him to find her, crossed her mind, but she could not be certain he’d go in there and to have to call him would ruin the effect. She went to bed and fell asleep with a sense of something lost, yet she wasn’t quite certain whether it was entirely bound up with David.

  *

  Throughout the winter months nothing changed yet maybe Mickey was still, unreasoningly, expecting that it would. She thought she was happy and she thought she loved David, so what else could she do but go to the club with him, make teas, listen to monolithic sporting anecdotes, and increasingly be the one to drive home. Sometimes it varied: there were weekends when he played away and stayed away, on occasions not returning until Sunday evening.

  In the early spring Laura’s baby was born. It was a boy. Lawrence rang Mickey with the news, sounding incredibly excited and pleased. The event had matured him.

  ‘What do you think we should call it, I mean him?’ he asked, quite breathless with delight. ‘I want something like Keith or Mark, you know, a name that won’t give him any bother. Laura wants Lucien. I mean, Lucien! He’ll be called “Lucy” wone ’e!’

  ‘Rather a lot of “Ls”,’ Mickey said. ‘How are they both?’

  ‘Great. I was there you know. I wouldn’t let them kick me out. Laura was great, really triffic. And the baby, well he’s really something else!’

  ‘I am pleased, Lawrence, and congratulations.’

  Mickey was alone. It was a Wednesday night and David was training. She thought about Laura and Lawrence, unmarried, not even living together, but somehow more together than she and David were turning out to be. The thought had come to her unbidden and with it a wave of sadness that seemed then as if it had been held back for some time.

  The next day she went to see Laura in the hospital. Molly was already there, sitting by the bed, looking grandmotherly. Mickey peered into the canvas cot at the end of the bed and saw the top of a tiny head covered in sticky black hair.

  ‘Isn’t he gorgeous, and just like Laura was as a baby,’ Molly crooned.

  ‘He’s lovely,’ Mickey said, looking to her sister. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Laura said. She looked pale and exhausted but still defiant.

  ‘Your turn next,’ Molly was saying. She was putting on a show, overdoing the pleasure. Mickey knew things would be difficult at home. Her father had adopted a pose of total indifference.

  She and her mother left the hospital together and outside Mickey asked how it was at home.

  ‘Difficult,’ Molly said, looking away. ‘Your father’s so stubborn. I think he’s doing it now simply because he’s too proud to change his tack. He just pretends nothing’s happened, that the baby doesn’t exist. That dear little baby,’ she trailed off, her voice developing a tremble.

  ‘Would you like me to say something? Do you think it would do any good?’ Mickey said.

  ‘You can try dear, but . . .’ Molly was now searching through her handbag, evidently for a handkerchief.

  ‘I’ll come round this evening,’ Mickey said, wanting to touch her mother but afraid she might break down completely if she did. For a moment she hated her father, venom rising in her chest, resentment at the way he could blight others’ lives by omission: her mother’s, Laura’s, Gordon’s, and even her own, but worst of all, a day-old baby’s.

  She went back to the office and drafted several aggressive letters to people who had infringed their neighbours’ boundaries, failed to pay their debts or in some other way made life difficult and unpleasant for someone else.

  She was unable to contact David to tell him she would be late and at six left the office and went straight to her parents’ house.

  Her father came to the door and she knew at once that something was wrong. He just looked at her, without saying anything. She followed him into the drawing room where he sat down heavily and put his head in his hands.

  ‘Where’s Mother?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘At the hospital,’ he said.

  Mickey felt alarm gathering force within her.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded. ‘Is Laura alright?’

  ‘Not Laura. The child. They’re operating at the moment.’

  ‘But I saw them this afternoon. The baby was fine.’

  ‘Well he’s not now,’ her father said sharply, standing up. He turned
away from her and went towards the drinks table, wiping his hands down his sides, as if they might be wet.

  ‘I’d better go,’ Mickey said. ‘Do you want me to ring you from the hospital, to let you know what’s happening?’ She said this coldly, in the same tone she would use to a criminal who was guilty but insisted on pleading innocent.

  ‘No,’ he said, in a strange, quiet voice. ‘No, stay here, will you.’

  He had three large scotches after that and then confessed, in a way Mickey found unbearably affecting, that he’d behaved badly over the last six months,

  ‘Couldn’t help it. Didn’t mean it,’ he said, too set in his gruffness to make it sound in any way penitent.

  Mickey looked at him and felt a sudden and overwhelming sense of pity. Her father was so inhibited emotionally as to have stymied the affection he might have enjoyed from his family, and yet she could see how he was suffering now, and suffering alone because he’d confused compassion with weakness. But it was too late to rearrange her own feelings towards him, the brief flash of pity soon gave way to the old resentment. How dare he sit there, demanding her attention, even her understanding, when Laura’s baby was being cut open? And yet she couldn’t leave. She sat it out and listened to him start on about Gordon and the factory, the usual bitter words. If he had been anyone else but her father she might have interrupted and questioned why he was so angry with life. He ended, on his fifth scotch, speculating over the day Laura’s son would be old enough to take over the factory and the fight against Gordon, perpetuating division rather than dynasty.

  Mickey despised him and loved him as she always had; the blood tie invincible just as it must be in him to be suffering so acutely over the precarious hold on life of his grandson.

  The telephone rang after what seemed like many hours but was only two. The baby had come through the operation and was breathing well – there had been a blockage. Molly sounded tearful and joyous and wanted to speak to the Walrus, who lumbered to the phone and made a series of unintelligible grunting noises in response to the flow of emotion from the other end.

  Mickey put on her coat and indicated she was leaving. Her father was still listening to her mother, his expression a frown of relief. Her parents were and probably always had been, closer than she’d ever supposed.

  She drove back to her own house, which was empty and noteless.

  ‘Why aren’t you here, David!’ screamed in her head.

  She went into the kitchen. The bread, butter and cheese were out, signs that he’d been in earlier. She started to make herself a sandwich but hadn’t the appetite to eat it. She was overcome by a sense of loneliness, so much harder to accept than before because for a time she had believed it could never happen again. The delusion of love had led her to expect too much.

  She thought of Laura and Lawrence, Molly and the Walrus, her family whom she had assumed wanting in their relationships when compared with her own. Now she envied them. In her mind’s eye she saw Lawrence sitting by Laura’s hospital bed, calling the baby ‘Lucy’; and in times to come, when again indifference would seem the greater element between her mother and father, she would remember her father’s urgent clumsy progress to the telephone and the look of relief to know that tacitly he was forgiven.

  Laura and Lawrence, Molly and the Walrus, the bonds between them as couples were flawed but they were essentially together.

  By the time David came home she was in bed, not asleep, but lying in darkness. During the waiting she had thought of many ways to begin but all sounded to emotive, too rehearsed. They ranged from the pathetic to the coarse and angry; from the ‘Where were you when I needed you?’ to the ‘David, you’re a shit!’ In the event, when he crept into bed, smelling a little of the evening’s exertion, she could say nothing, her lips sealed tight over a resentment that had run out of steam and that she didn’t really understand.

  In the morning she was up and dressed before he awoke, but he stirred before she left.

  ‘Shall I cook something for this evening?’ she asked him. ‘Will you be home?’

  He groaned against the light of day and swung himself into a sitting position on the side of the bed, his hands shielding his face.

  ‘Tonight? No. I’m playing squash.’

  ‘I thought that was what you were doing last night,’ she said.

  ‘I was. It was a league game last night.’

  She could not quite see the significance of this.

  ‘I thought you might have come up to the club,’ he said.

  ‘They had to operate on Laura’s baby last night,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh yes, is he alright?’ He said this in such a way as to make Mickey feel a little faint.

  ‘You knew about it?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Your mother rang here,’ he said. ‘I told her you’d still be at the office.’

  She picked up her handbag and turned away from him.

  ‘Mickey,’ he called after her. ‘I tried to ring you there myself but there was no reply.’

  She was halfway down the stairs. David came out to the landing,

  ‘Mickey, you didn’t say what happened,’ he shouted after her as the front door slammed.

  *

  It was two nights later that they faced one another, in the kitchen, a room too small for indefinite distance, especially when each was so acutely aware of the other’s awareness.

  ‘How long are we going to carry on like this?’ David began after several monosyllabic communications of a mundane nature, heavy with the undercurrent of umbrage.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Mickey, I’m sorry if you think I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘I can’t say that you have,’ she said.

  ‘Well why are you being like this?’

  The tone of her voice opened up then, from flat and unfriendly, to baffled pleading: ‘Why do you have to spend so much time on sport? Why is it so important to you?’

  ‘It’s not like that. I enjoy it, that’s all.’

  ‘How can you say that? You’re obsessed by it. Your whole life revolves around matches and training. It’s sport first and everything else a poor second, including me.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ he said, but he wasn’t looking at her now. ‘Anyway, you knew what I was like when you married me. What do you want me to do, give it all up?’

  This seemed grossly unfair, a deliberate extreme to shift the guilt on to her.

  ‘Of course not. You wouldn’t anyway – you couldn’t let the team down.’ She was shouting now, sarcasm rolling off her tongue like a torrent of acid. ‘There’s not a grown-up among you. Intellectually you’re all suffering from stunted growth. You’re dependent upon sport, hooked like junkies.’

  ‘Thank you very much!’

  She was seizing her breath in quick short gasps. If only he could stop her now, with an embrace, a show of love negating her words, releasing her from the onward momentum of a fury that was created out of desire. But his ‘thank you very much’ was said with an edge of cold detachment previously unknown to her. She had, perhaps, struck too close to his particular and secret insecurity.

  She felt she had gone too far, provoking him to dislike her, maybe even to reconsider loving her.

  ‘I’m going out,’ he said.

  She waited in the kitchen while he went about the house. She heard his movement and activity – perhaps he was leaving her. She called out in panic: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Where do you think?’

  The door closed and the house was suddenly a cavern of stillness.

  ‘You knew what I was like when you married me’ stuck in her mind. Sold as seen, no guarantees, nothing’s perfect, make the best of what there is.

  ‘But it’s not what I expected!’ she said out loud.

  She began moving round the kitchen, unthinkingly putting things away in places she would never find them. Was she being unreasonable? Could it have made any difference to Laura or the baby or herself if
David had cancelled his squash match? Was that what it was really all about?

  Chapter Five

  The summer came, or rather, the cricket season, and Mickey no longer went to the matches or even the club. She and David shared a house during the week, little more than that. She cooked for him, washed and ironed the endless ‘whites’, sewed up seams that had split as runs were made, impossible catches caught. She did all this and bided her time for she knew not what.

  They were civil to one another, neither prepared to start the final conversation, neither really believing they could have failed. Each felt there was something still there and more than just a dogged will to carry on, but stubbornly they refused to seek it out and in the process became strangers. What had gone was the light-hearted intimacy, suffocated by resentment that grew, almost subconsciously, because pride kept it pushed down and hidden as the weeks went by.

  More than anything, Mickey missed being able to behave badly: David had been the only person in her entire life with whom she had been able to do that, confidently and securely. The tenor of her relationship with him had changed so that now it would be completely inappropriate to display an irrational frame of mind. She could no longer be certain of his tolerance, although at one time she’d been so sure of him as to know he actually enjoyed the tolerating, that it was part of the delicious intensity.

  They lived now as she supposed did many married couples, with a different sort of tolerance, an unspoken agreement to fit around each other’s lives in the least upsetting arrangement while they waited to see what might or might not happen.

  David seemed hardly to notice the alteration but then that in itself was part of it. More to the point, it was symptomatic of the change that Mickey should think of David not noticing the difference.

  She was getting used to being lonely again, and if she felt cheated she was not prepared to allow resentment to overwhelm her. She was really being very level-headed about it all, retaining what was left, apparently accepting the levelling out of passion to one, sometimes two nights of sex a week that, surprisingly, still worked. Unjustly, maybe, she reasoned this was why David did not leave, and it suited her to believe this was his remaining hold over her, as to think deeper might sharpen the memory of what had been and was seemingly lost.