by Jane Rogers
He glared at the Cosiglow, ignoring her.
“And she’s not a child any more, she’s over eighteen. Lots of girls are married by eighteen. And he’s a sensible lad, with good prospects, he’ll do well enough when he’s finished studying at that university. He’s going to be an architect, Carolyn tells me. His Dad’s a doctor, you know, they live up on Quickedge, in ever such a nice house. Four bedrooms, Carolyn says they’ve got.”
To Jean at work, she said wonderingly, “I know they all do, these days, I know that. But she does seem young. It doesn’t seem more than a few months since I was knitting clothes for her dolls – and now –” She held up her needles, speared through the left front of a pearly-white matinee jacket.
Alan’s parents were perfectly civilized about the marriage, and Alan took considerable satisfaction in the fact that he knew they were rather shocked. Serve them right. Lucy insisted on not taking it seriously for days.
“It’s too absurd, getting married at your age, you’re far too young. Come on darling, be sensible. You’ll meet thousands of girls before you find the one you like.” She ruffled his hair. “You’re so romantic and silly – there’s nothing to an abortion these days. It’ll be awfully sad if you marry her and find you don’t like her later.”
Like you, Alan said to himself. You hypocrite.
Meg, who thought things ought to be done properly, invited Alan’s parents round for tea, just before Christmas. Lucy accepted, but Alan knew they wouldn’t go. She rang up on the morning with breathless excuses about having to practise a particularly beastly new piece for a concert tomorrow.
“Why don’t you go?” Alan asked her when she put the phone down.
She pulled a face, and ran her outstretched fingers through her long hair, pulling it out sideways from her head to that it fell back softly in the shape of a folding fan. “It’s very sweet of them, Alan, but I really think it would be a bit of a disaster.”
“Why?”
“Well darling – because I don’t think we’ve got very much in common.”
“Isn’t your children getting married something in common?” Alan said venomously.
“Why are you so angry, my love? Do you really want us to go? If you really want us to, we will. I don’t suppose it’ll be that bad!”
He was astonished that she had backed down. She phoned Meg again and told her she was so silly, she’d made a muddle with the dates of two concerts, and it would be perfectly all right for them to come tonight but only if Meg was absolutely sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble, it was so sweet of her . . . Alan was repelled by the ease with which she lied.
He had harboured for months the idea of telling her that he and Pam knew about Jeremy. But he knew that he never actually would. He dreaded her reaction: seeing her wriggle and flick her tail and swim away in a sea of lies – or seeing her pop like a burst balloon. Either would be terrible.
Carolyn came round to his house that evening, and told him about her mother’s preparations for tea. He realized he hadn’t warned them what sort of meal tea was. Lucy took afternoon tea at about four o’clock, and dinner at eight. Carolyn’s parents had tea at six p.m.
“Mum was awfully nervous about it. She thinks your parents are terribly posh.”
“Huh.” He had told her everything about his mother. Her reaction had been quietly puzzled. She had not condemned Lucy, as he half hoped, yet feared she would.
“She thought they’d better have something to drink so she got some sherry, then she was worried because she’s only got those little glasses – you know, little tumblers, and she says they’re only for whisky.”
Carolyn’s parents never drank in the house. Occasionally Arthur would go for a pint at the local, but that was it. Alan was pleased. Lucy would find nothing more disgusting than a tumbler of sweet sherry with her dinner. Tea.
“They don’t like me, do they?” Carolyn asked, as they sat picking at some smoked ham and coleslaw Alan had found in the fridge.
“Don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” He realized from Carolyn’s face that it did.
“Dad does. Lucy’s hardly met you, has she?”
“But they don’t want you to get married.”
He shrugged. “None of their business, is it?”
“I feel –” she hesitated, looking round – “I don’t know, frightened, when I look round this house. I mean, it’s all so – rich and everything.”
“It’s just junk,” he said angrily. “Antique junk.”
“No but it’s like – like a stately home or something. And all these beautiful flowers. . . .”
“I hate them. It’s like living in a chapel of rest.”
“Don’t you want to live in a house like this when you grow up?”
“When I grow up,” he said, smiling at her phrase, “I don’t want my life to be anything like theirs. They are a pair of hypocrites. I don’t like the games they play.”
She got up from the table, the food hardly touched on her plate. “But it is nice. There’s so many strange little things –” She was staring at the shelves of the dresser, where various antique plates (prized by Lucy for the colour of their glaze, or the intricacy of their design) vied for attention with two corn dollies, a brass frog, some Victorian bottles and two tall feathery maidenhair ferns. “We haven’t got anything like this at our house. These are beautiful, you know.” She touched one of the old plates, which was covered in a dense pattern of tiny blue flowers, a brilliant deep Victorian blue. “Really lovely.”
Alan made a farting sound through his lips. “Clutter and junk. Don’t you like this?” pointing to her untouched coleslaw.
“I don’t like the dressing much.”
“Shouldn’t you eat, for two and all that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know how to cook this sort of stuff either.”
“Stop it, Carolyn. I don’t care if we live on chips and fish fingers for the rest of our lives. Here, have a bit of cheese.”
They went out to the pub, and when Alan came back Trevor and Lucy were at home. He found them, most unusually, sitting either side of the fireplace having a drink together. Pam had been out at a friend’s all evening.
“Did you have a nice time?”
His mother giggled. “Have you been into their house? You must have been – isn’t it sweet? I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much furniture in one little room. You should have seen our tea: ham, salad, cheese, crackers, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, bread-and-butter, trifle – all at once, mind you – cream cake, sherry, cups of tea –” She counted them all off on her fingers, smiling innocently as she spoke. “It was perfectly wonderful.”
Alan asked his father, “Did you like them?”
“The mother seems a kindly soul. I don’t know about the father. He hardly said a word. Is he very shy?”
“He wants to kill me, Carolyn said.”
They stared at him in silence. At last Lucy said, “What on earth for?”
“Getting his daughter up the spout.”
There was another shocked silence. His father cleared his throat. “I – well, I hadn’t realized he felt like that. It was all – it was all very civilized and friendly. There wasn’t really any difficulty over it. I wonder if – I wish you’d told me that, Alan. Perhaps I could have had a bit of a chat to him.”
Alan shrugged. “Don’t think it would make any difference.”
His mother took a swig of her brandy. He could see she was recovering.
“The detail in that house really is splendid, isn’t it?” She turned to Trevor. “Did you notice what they had above the fireplace?”
“No – horses, something like that.”
“Yes,” she enthused, “exactly. That famous one from Woolworth’s – with the horses charging out of the sea. I’ve never seen it on a wall in a real house before. It was worth it just for that.”
“It’s on more walls in more houses than any other picture in the country,” Trevor said mildly. “That and Tina.”
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“And the carpets!” she cried, getting into her stride now. “They are so wonderful! Who on earth designs them? With patterns like – like giant sputniks, and about twenty colours in them.” She smiled at Alan. “They positively assault you, don’t they? I bet you could keep thieves out with a carpet like that.”
“You mean, they’d know there was nothing worth stealing?” said Alan.
His mother looked at him for a moment without an expression on her face, then she smiled and waved her glass at him. “All I can say is, I hope young Pam shows a bit more taste and discernment when she chooses her parents-in-law.”
She said it as if it was a joke, but Alan knew perfectly well that she meant it from the bottom of her heart. He went to the door.
“Alan?” she said. “Come on darling, can’t you see the funny side? We liked her parents, they were loves. I expect they’d have a giggle about our house, if they came round here.”
“Goodnight,” he said, and shut the door. He hated her.
Carolyn and Alan did not make love again until they were married. It was Alan’s idea. He made a sour kind of joke out of it, that they must wait until their wedding night. Carolyn agreed because she could see he meant it, although she didn’t understand why. On their wedding night he was drunk, and she was affectionate and clinging, and it was as hopeless as he had been predicting to himself. He felt, when he woke the next morning, that his life was at an end – a complete disaster.
Alan’s term began again on January 20th, and he returned to university with a guilty sense of relief. Carolyn, who still had her job at the ‘Craft Basket’, stayed at home.
“I do think you’re sensible, love, doing it like this,” said her mother. “It’s far better. He can get on with his studying, without getting distracted, and you can be earning your little bit and putting it away towards a house. And your Dad and I can keep an eye on you and make sure you’re not overdoing it, for the sake of the little one.”
Carolyn nodded. She had not been given any choice in the matter. Alan had obviously expected to return to university alone, once the fuss was over. And there certainly wasn’t any point in her moving out of her Mum’s to live alone at a time like this.
It was as if she wasn’t married; just as it had been before, going to bed in her pink and white room, setting off for the ‘Craft Basket’ at half-past eight in the morning, just as she used to set off for school, home by five-thirty, tea, telly, and some needlework to keep herself occupied. She was making a patchwork quilt for the baby’s cot. Meg had already knitted a whole drawerful of matinée jackets and bootees, in white, pink and blue. (“I’ll put whichever colour it doesn’t need in the shop window, love. They’ll all get used, don’t you worry.”)
Alan came back most weekends, and they went out for long drives in his father’s car. At Easter Carolyn went to stay with him at university for a week. He was borrowing a house that two of his student friends rented. They had both gone home to their parents’. It was a dingy, poorly furnished little terrace, reminding Carolyn of the old house on Railway Street. But it was the first time they had ever lived privately together. This week was a revelation to both of them. They could do what they liked – go to bed, get up, eat, bath, go back to bed – there were no rules. No one to notice or be offended. It was a week lifted out of real life. Carolyn’s pregnancy added to the strangeness. There was a neat solid bulge where her flat belly had been. The baby was kicking, at night Alan lay with his hand on her side and felt the repeated thrusting movements. He found it almost repulsive to think of it in there, kicking at the walls; but it roused him sexually as well. It made her strange. Sex was in the air all the time. Each was constantly aware of the other’s movements, the other’s body. Even if they were reading or washing up, there seemed to be rays of heat running in the air between them. Pregnancy made Carolyn aware of her body in a way she had never been before; her small breasts had become heavy and almost painfully sensitive, and when Alan stroked her, or breathed close with his hot breath on her nipples, she felt giddy and weak.
“Will it be like this when we live together, do you think?” Carolyn found it suddenly possible to talk about the future, which she had not dared to do before. It was the middle of a dim afternoon. Outside the rain pattered lightly on the window, and in the room there was a great sense of tranquillity. They were lying on the bed after making love, every trace of lust scoured out of them, their bodies clean and abandoned.
“I don’t know,” Alan said slowly. “I hope so.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked. She felt that everything between them was clear now, so that speech was like dropping pebbles into clear water and watching them sink to their resting place. The friction of their bodies had rubbed away all the untidy mess of misunderstanding, and they could speak directly.
“I could rent a place like this next year. In September.”
“September,” she repeated, and listened to the rain.
“You’ll have to stay at home till the baby’s born, won’t you?”
“Yes. We could move before September, though. We could move in the summer.”
“Yes. We’ll do that.”
They lay quietly, fingers just touching, Carolyn watching the lightshade sway in a slight draught, Alan watching the gentle rise and fall of her ribcage as she breathed .
Chapter 9
Carolyn began to notice the household around her. She came downstairs for all her meals. She was still very quiet and unapproachable, jumping and stammering if a remark was addressed to her, but self-contained. Disciplined. Able to sit, composedly, eating and listening while they talked. She was still an awkward presence because she was never relaxed; there was an unnatural quality of alertness in her posture, in the intent way she stared at you as you spoke, in her sudden jerky movements. They soon gave up trying to draw her into conversation. The first advances she herself made were to Sylvia, Sue’s four-year-old daughter. Sylvia was pestering her mother for a story one morning after breakfast. Clare had gone to work, and Bryony was deep in the newspaper. Carolyn was picking up on the movements of the three women, which had seemed so mysteriously random at first. She knew that Sue worked as a nurse four nights a week, going on duty some time after the children had gone to bed in the evening, and returning at seven in the morning. On these mornings her freckled face was blanched, and she sat motionless at the breakfast table, staring sightlessly into a cup of cold, wrinkle-skinned coffee, while her long red hair gradually slithered out of the nest of twists she had knotted it into, and hairgrips pinged out over the floor and the table around her. After she had gone upstairs Carolyn collected them and put them in a jar on the mantelpiece. She was surprised by the extent of Sue’s gratitude, when she came looking for them the following evening.
“Shall I read it, Sylvia?”
The little girl leaned back against her mother’s knee, staring at Carolyn.
“Let me read it. I don’t know that story. Can I have a look – please?”
Dragging her feet reluctantly, as if she was being pushed from behind, Sylvia took her book to Carolyn, standing well back and handing it to her at arm’s length. Carolyn opened the book on her knee and studied it.
“This looks interesting. What’s it about? The Snow Queen? Who’s she?”
Sylvia put her thumb in her mouth.
“Where does she live, Sylvia?”
“In the North Pole.”
“Does she? What does she look like?”
Sylvia suddenly moved forwards and grabbed the book. “In a picture –” she riffled the pages “– there!”
“She doesn’t look very nice, does she? Shall we find out what she does?”
Sylvia nodded, and leaned her weight against the side of Carolyn’s chair. As Carolyn started to read a look of absorption came over the child’s face, and her thumb slotted into her mouth. She gazed at the pages as Carolyn read, as if she could see the events unfolding there.
Soon Carolyn was the favourite story re
ader, both with Sylvia and her older brother Robin. They liked her because she didn’t put the book down in the middle to go and do something else, and because she read stories properly, as if she wanted to know what happened too.
Carolyn was cautious about the times when she came downstairs. She knew Sue’s movements. She felt all right coming down when Sue and the children were there, or when the kitchen was empty, although the suddenly-abandoned look of the room always gave her a shock. There was always the odd dirty plate or mug on the table, and a tub of margarine (open) and milk (in its bottle) lying around, not put away in the fridge. She tried to avoid Bryony, which was difficult because she could not work out her routine. If their paths crossed Bryony usually ignored her, but with contempt, as if she was behaving stupidly. Carolyn found everything about Bryony so alien that she could not begin to guess what she was doing that Bryony didn’t like.
Bryony was squat with a cropped bristly head, reminding Carolyn of a wrestler on television. She wore enormous shapeless skirts which looked as if they were made from old curtains or bedspreads, and baggy sweatshirts which she had dyed herself in dingy shades of rust, snot-green and pale mouldy purple. She described colours which appeared to Carolyn to be faded, dirty, or both, as “subtle”, and Carolyn realized that her clothes were not these shades by dismal accident, but by the most painstaking design. She had tie-dyed various instantly recognizable T-shirts and scarves for Sue, Clare and the children too, and was obviously pleased by the blotchy and imperfect (in Carolyn’s view) results.
She wore the strangest shoes Carolyn had ever seen. They had thick flat soles, to each side of which was stitched a straight flap of leather. The flaps stood up on either side of her ankle, and were laced together where they met in a stiff ridge over her foot. Through the gap at the end her thick grey sock protruded. Carolyn commented on them, and for once incurred Bryony’s pleased attention, as she explained how a friend had made them for her to an ancient design, and that unlike any shoes you could buy, they were made to last a lifetime, were completely healthy and natural, and did not threaten to deform the foot or posture in any way. Bryony also had an enormous bag which she took with her everywhere, a great soft shapeless thing which looked as if (Carolyn’s guess was later verified) it had been home-made out of wash-leathers. There were odd jagged seams all over the place, and the pale soft chamois leather had effectively polished dirt off every surface it came into contact with, so that it was now as grimy as the leathers Carolyn’s Dad used at the garage. There were things embroidered in red wool on the top flap of the bag; in time Carolyn recognized them as feminist symbols. She thought that by far the most apt symbol of women’s liberation was the beautifully simple clenched red fist-in-a-bag, which Clare and Sue also wore in their lapels. When she later read (at Clare’s instigation) the Pankhursts’ story, with the exhortation to suffragettes to be “an iron fist in a velvet glove”, she immediately linked that image with the symbol of “fist-in-a-bag”.