Her Living Image

by Jane Rogers

  Carolyn never really understood Alan’s reaction to her being pregnant. Two days after the scene in the pub, he rang her up. His voice sounded forced and sulky, as if someone was telling him what to say.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you. Let’s get married.”

  There was a silence. She couldn’t think of any reply.

  “All right? Carolyn? We’ll get married at Christmas. I’ll come back again next weekend and we can plan it.”

  When she had put the phone down she went and sat in her bedroom. She was very relieved, so much so that she felt weak. It would be all right at the weekend. They would be able to talk and explain.

  But she was disappointed. Alan remained distant and slightly sullen. He insisted on discussing practical details, as if they were planning a sale of work or an expedition. At last she lost patience.

  “You don’t have to marry me.”

  “I know,” he said evenly.

  “Well why are you?”

  “Because I want to.”

  “Well why are you being so horrible about it?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. Why are you being so distant and unfriendly? Anyone would think someone was standing behind you with a gun.”

  “It is a shot-gun wedding,” he said and grinned, making it, briefly, all right.

  “No one is. We don’t have to.”

  “Look I’m OK. I’ve decided – unless you don’t want to?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t want you to do me a favour.”

  “Well I’m not. Now let it drop,”

  Carolyn knew that he was angry with her, for some reason which she couldn’t fathom, and that the more she pressed him for an explanation the more he clammed up over it. She knew that it was to do with her being pregnant, but that it wasn’t the simple fact of her pregnancy. She remembered vividly the sight of him crying in the car that night, and she still didn’t understand what that had been about. But he refused to let her get near the subject.

  “Forget it. I don’t want to discuss it.”

  She could see that he would lose his temper if she pressed him any further, and so she left it. But it made her miserable that they were not open with one another. Her position in relation to him had slipped. He was forcing her to be careful of what she said; setting up areas which were not to be talked about. It made her feel that he wanted her to be grateful to him for marrying her. But confusingly, he seemed sincere enough in wanting to (almost the more sincere, because of his grimness about it).

  His mood wasn’t consistent. Often they were just on the edge of being happy. She thought it would come right when they were married.

  Alan was very unhappy. He hadn’t imagined being married, or having children, for years. It was like discovering you have a disease; something permanent but liveable-with, like diabetes. It altered the shape of his life.

  He liked Carolyn well enough. Almost certainly, he was in love with her. And on the basis of that, he was prepared to marry her, and even wanted to. The fact that she was pregnant was forcing both their hands in a way which was nearly amusing. Everyone they knew was so amazed –“I never thought it would happen to you!” Grimly, he could have enjoyed the sudden notoriety and muted sympathy. He could have felt superior and thought them all fools for pitying him for getting what he wanted. Almost certainly, nearly, quite, he could.

  But for Carolyn. She had betrayed him. When she knew she was pregnant she did not tell him, she kept it secret. They had made love, and it had been so utterly different from his other experiences of sex that he thought something wonderful had happened. He thought it was to do with passion and love. And it turned out to be simply because she knew she was pregnant; a mechanical trick she was turning on him.

  The revelation had devastated him, eroding his confidence and his desire for her. It hit at the root of his male pride, but also at the basis of his love for her. What had attracted Alan to Carolyn initially, and reinforced his interest as he got to know her, was her painful honesty. At school he had always found it easy to get women. He was tall and reasonably good-looking, with a slightly sad, very reserved look which could melt into a charming smile, so intimate that it unbalanced almost any girl he cared to direct it at. He was bright and articulate, the son of a successful doctor and a concert cellist. His home was a four-bedroomed house standing in its own large garden on the outskirts of the town. He had the usual run of furtive sexual fumblings and persuaded three of his girlfriends (whom he then held in contempt) to go all the way. Carolyn, who had been in his English class for years, had always been quite insignificant. With the thinning of numbers to an A-level class of fifteen, she was brought to his attention. She had become rather wispishly beautiful, thin with light hair and quick nervous movements. He decided she was as clear and pure as water, against the other girls’ coarseness. She also started speaking in class, which she had never done before. Everyone was amazed when she first did, interrupting the teacher with a series of incoherent stammers which seemed to insist on being articulated, against her will. She would blush furiously, her pale complexion flooding red so that he actually imagined her blood flowing in a hot tide to the surface of her flesh; a thought he found exciting. The things she said were always in disagreement, with the teacher or another member of the class, and cost her so much, in terms of physical anguish, that they carried great conviction. Some people laughed at her, but after a while they began to take her seriously. She had an odd, idiosyncratic way of looking at things – he felt she had some standards which he wasn’t familiar with, against which she matched the things they said. Often she had to work so hard to overcome her paralysing shyness that what she had to say burst out in a shout, or in a tone of great fierceness. After a term, she was grudgingly admitted by the flyers in the group to be worth reckoning with – though very odd.

  Alan’s charming smile fell on stony ground with her. She was uncompromisingly hostile to him, which piqued and fascinated him. She was unreceptive to any of the signals he sent out. She moved away when he sat near her, went into town to change her library books instead of going home when he invented a string of excuses that would enable him to walk in her direction. She displayed no interest in any of the social events he said he was going to and wondered if he might see her at. She was prickly and sharp with him, and only too obviously relieved to make her escape. He sought her out more pointedly, and was rewarded by, “Why are you following me about?”

  The charming smile. He still couldn’t quite believe it didn’t work with her. “Because I like you.” He watched her blush, and imagined he could actually feel a little glow of heat on his own skin, radiating off her warmth.

  “I – I – I thought you were laughing at me,” she said.

  “Why? Why should I laugh at you?”

  “You all do, in English, I know you do.”

  “No we don’t.” Suddenly he was embarrassed too, and at a loss. They stared at each other for a moment.

  “Will you go out with me?” he asked, blushing himself.

  “I – I – I – all right.”

  Alan had his own reasons for liking her desperate honesty; reasons that went beyond his contempt for the other girlfriends of his youth. Trevor and Lucy Blake were slightly unusual parents, although it was years before Alan and his sister Pamela realized this. They thought it normal for Daddy to get them up and dress and breakfast them, before he went down to morning surgery, and for Lucy once she was up to spend ages talking excitedly and gesticulating on the telephone, before consigning them (with a kiss on the head) to Nissy while she disappeared to the study to practise, and the house was filled with the cello’s dismal squeaks and groans, which always recovered eventually, into more or less of a tune. They thought it was normal for Lucy (they had never called her Mummy) to fly from room to room looking for her watch, keys, diary, gloves, scarf, and blow a kiss to them from the garden path as the taxi-driver carried her cello out to the car, while Nissy held them up to the window to wave. They thought i
t normal for tea to come out of the fridge or the oven in a tinfoil box with a peel-back lid, although they did remember for weeks afterwards Lucy’s occasional cordon-bleu phases, when the house had been filled with heart-warming smells, and different kinds of food had appeared out of saucepans on top of the oven, and other dishes inside it. She had a repertoire of all-time favourites, culled from these various phases, which the whole family loved, and knew that no one could make better: coq au vin, boeuf Stroganoff, lasagne with home-made pasta, duck with orange, tandoori chicken.

  Alan loved his mother hopelessly. He loved the way she looked, with her glossy chestnut hair which reached below her waist when she let it loose, and her tinkle of necklaces and trails of silk scarves, and her neat slender legs in their high-heeled shoes, reminding him of gazelles’ legs – or gazelles reminded him of her, he supposed, since he must have seen her first. He loved the way she smelt, the atmosphere with which she surrounded you, the way she gestured, the ear-rings that sparkled in the light when she turned her head quickly. He loved the music that she made on her cello, and the way she sat curved around it, seeming to listen to its inner voice as she played.

  He hated the way people were always ringing her up, and she was always saying, “How lovely!” and “I’ll be there by two, I promise, darling.” He hated the way she was always, always, on her way out and late. He hated the way she said to him, “Tell me tomorrow darling, I must fly now,” and the way that when she’d waved Bye-bye and got into the taxi, she immediately opened her bag and took out her mirror and comb, and didn’t look at you again, even if the taxi didn’t move for ages, because the man was changing the meter or talking into his radio.

  He longed to please her. At school he laboured to make himself better than all the others. “You clever boy!” she would cry, throwing her arms around him, and sending him into a transport of joy. “Let’s have a look at your book then.” Quickly she would flick through his exercise books, glancing from page to page as they flew by. “Oh, this is very good, Alan. What a brainbox you are!” A kiss on the head and she was off, leaving him the more deprived for his brief spell in the full sunny glow of her attention. She always had so many places to go and so many people who wanted to see her that he felt cruelly his own stolid boringness, and was not surprised that she did not spend more time with him.

  She wanted them to be musicians like her, and both he and Pam were learning instruments, he the violin and Pam the clarinet. But he wasn’t very good, and even to please her (which was his only motive for practising) he could not make himself into a musician. Pam was better at it. She seemed to get along quite well.

  In the evenings his mother was out, and Dad would read them stories and put them to bed. Sometimes, amid great excitement, his mother was in, with guests who drank wine and laughed loudly and spoiled him and Pam. He was ashamed of the way his father sat in his armchair staring at them without joining in the conversation, or even rudely reading as they talked. Everyone always wanted to talk to Lucy and listen to what she had to say, everyone was always looking at her.

  As he grew older his own life began to have more centre to it and he gave up yearning so hungrily after his mother’s attention. He began to find his own satisfactions in doing well at school, in his friends, in his drawings. Sometimes Lucy would seize on one and cry, “But darling, this is marvellous! I’ve bred an artist! This must go up on the wall!” and stick his latest painting up with Sellotape alongside the daubs by the mentally handicapped group she had played for at Christmas, and the postcards from her friends all over the world.

  Despite the fact that she seemed rarely to be in it, the house reflected her taste. It had a breathless untidiness, with an underlying stratum of solid good things: expensive carpets and curtains in dark plain colours, antique furniture ranging from valuable to junk, but having in common a charm or whimsicality that had made each piece claim her attention originally. She and Trevor went to auctions together. It was the only pleasure they seemed to share. And there were always flowers. Lucy would laugh and wave her hand when people said, “How lovely they are.” “Flowers are my weakness!” she said. “I must have flowers, I can’t bear it without them. Flowers are my vice.” Trevor bought her a huge bunch every Friday, the florist made it up specially for him, and she often bought them herself as well, when something caught her eye: carnations, roses, freesias, lilies, pockets of scented air in the corners of rooms – and flashes of colour, violet iris, scarlet tulip, golden mimosa shining on the dark polished furniture. Most of her guests brought flowers when they came, knowing how she liked them, and how she loved to arrange them in tall glass vases on the kitchen table while people gathered around her, chatting in a tight excited crowd.

  As Alan grew older he noticed that when his mother promised “Tomorrow”, she always forgot. And he caught himself thinking, as she spoke sometimes, “She doesn’t mean that.” When he reached sixteen he was ready to condemn her as superficial and a hypocrite. He judged her the more harshly, and was the more hurt by his judgement, because he still worshipped her. He would have given anything for her unadulterated attention and approval.

  It was Pam, much more worldly-wise than he, who told him about the affair.

  “I feel sorry for Dad,” she said casually one day, as they sat in the kitchen after school, helping themselves to a packet of chocolate digestives.

  “Why?” he said crossly, already knowing she was going to say something stupid.

  “The way Lucy carries on.”

  “What d’you mean, carries on?”

  “You know.” She was scraping the chocolate off the biscuit with her top teeth, and pretending to be absorbed in it.

  “Stop being so thick!” he shouted angrily.

  “I’m not thick, you are.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “That she’s got a boyfriend.”

  Alan stared at the noticeboard on the opposite wall, pretending to read something but seeing nothing but a blur of the leaflets, notes, scraps of ribbon and withered buttonholes which Lucy had pegged up there. “Who?” he said finally.

  “Jeremy. The double-bass.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “It’s obvious, as soon as you start to think about it. But anyway, I saw them.”

  “When?”

  “You’re not cross-questioning an enemy spy, you know,” she flared, and turned her attention back to her revolting biscuit.

  “Go on. Tell me. When?”

  “‘Please.’ You are the rudest person I ever met.”

  “Please. Tell me.”

  “Last night. I woke up and it was late – after two. I was starving so I thought I’d come down to the kitchen. When I got downstairs I could see the drawing-room light was on so I thought they must still be up, I’ll go and see if they want a snack. Anyway, it was dead quiet and I felt a bit funny as I opened the door –” She stopped.

  “And?”

  “And there they were.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “On the sofa. Lucy and Jeremy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “What d’you think?”

  “TELL me.” He was so angry with the stupid little brat he wanted to smash her face in.

  “All right, if you must know every disgusting detail. She was lying on the sofa and he was – I don’t know – doing something to her. I couldn’t see properly.”

  “With no clothes on?”

  “I don’t know. I shut the door quick, before they saw me.”

  He imagined opening the drawing-room door. The sofa faced the fire, at a slant. You would just see one end of a person lying on it. “How d’you know it was Jeremy?”

  “His jacket was on the floor. And his double-bass was in the hall,” she said smugly.

  Alan stared at Pam, fighting back the tears which welled in his eyes. How could she? How could she?

  “Hadn’t you guessed?” said Pam in her chirpy
voice. “I’ve known for ages there was something going on. I mean, she’s always out, and she’s not at that many concerts. She’s probably been at it for years.”

  “Shut up!” Blindly, Alan ran to his room, where he beat and punched his bed and cried aloud in a rage like a child.

  Pam was right, of course. He realized afterwards that he had known for years, that there were a hundred fine details that he had chosen to ignore about her behaviour, her phone conversations, the times of her comings and goings. Dad must know. Unless he was wilfully blind too. But if he knew – why did he let it go on? They were obscene, disgusting. He started going out with Carolyn soon after Pam made her announcement. Carolyn, he knew, would never behave like his mother.

  Meg was shocked when Carolyn told her about the baby. She couldn’t believe that Carolyn had done that. It just wasn’t like Carolyn. But she was diverted from her own reaction by Arthur.

  “That bloody lad. I’ll kill him. I will, I’ll kill him. Who does he think he is? I’ll bloody kill him.”

  It was only the second time Meg had seen Arthur really angry. The first was some eight years ago when he’d been accused of shoddy workmanship on a car which had been involved in a crash two days after he’d MOTed it. He had had a fight with the insurance inspector and ended up in court charged with Assault. He was such a quiet, retiring man. “He’s never had a cross word for me or Carolyn – never,” Meg told Jean ruefully. When he was angry like this he went berserk, she knew. She argued and pleaded with him, and warned Carolyn to keep Alan away from the house.

  “He’s a nice lad, Arthur, honest he is, a really decent lad. I wouldn’t wish for anyone better for our Carolyn, myself. And it’s not as if – Imean, he wants to marry her. There’s no sense in it now, come on. What’s done is done. No use crying over spilt milk.”

  Arthur could have been deaf, for all the effect this had.

  “You can’t blame it all on him, anyway. It takes two you know. You can’t blame him and not her. You’re behind the times, Arthur, you’re old-fashioned. They all do it now, look at the papers – look at the telly. It’s not like it was when we were young.” In the silence in which Arthur received this, Meg reconsidered. “Well, it wasn’t so different when we were young, for that matter. Look at our Bertha, she was three months gone with Harry when she married Jim. And you know as well as I do Jim wasn’t the father. It happens all the time. It’s not as if they’ve done anything very unusual now, is it?”