by Josa Young
‘Melissa? What are you doing here?’ It was her mother, shaking her shoulder. ‘You weren’t meant to be coming home until after Christmas.’
She awoke, numb with cold, to see her parents standing over her, looking worried. She unwound herself and stood up, stumbling slightly, and saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stand it. I’ve resigned.’
Her parents didn’t look as pleased and welcoming as she’d hoped.
‘Well,’ said her mother. ‘We’d better get you into the warm. How long have you been here?’
‘I took the three o’clock. What’s the time now?’
‘It’s seven o’clock. Why didn’t you call and let us know you were coming?’
‘It was a bit spur of the moment.’
They had the front door open, and her father, looking grim, picked up her luggage and ushered her inside.
‘Don’t go to your room, it isn’t ready for you. I’ve been giving it a good turnout with Mrs Lewis, so it’s all upside down. You’d better go along to the spare room. There should be enough hot water for you to have a bath to warm yourself up.’
Melissa knew what she had been expecting – the kind of unconditional loving welcome that she had always had before. That her parents would instantly make everything all right again. Not this, being treated like an unexpected and not very welcome guest. Her mother bobbed forward with a kiss on the cheek, but Daddy didn’t hug her as he usually did. She could see that they were not pleased with her and this was the very first time in her life she had ever experienced anything like it.
She moved towards the stairs looking back to see her unsmiling father carrying her suitcase and her mother gathering the scattered bags.
‘You get warmed up and we can talk later,’ she said. Melissa turned away and went along the upstairs passage to the spare room.
Thirteen
Melissa
April 1967
Dreaming the afternoon away, Melissa slouched on a chair behind the counter, her face resting on her cupped hands. There were few customers mid-afternoon, mid-week, to her relief. Anyone conceivably interested in Lord Groove’s array of purple tie-dyed T-shirts, love beads, granny glasses, loon pants and fringed waistcoats was either stuck behind another counter, a typewriter or a desk. It had been a struggle for her, to begin with, to attract the customers’ attention and sell them things. They all seemed so sophisticated and knowing, and she quite invisible and shy. She quailed at the thought of suggesting items that might suit them.
She was alone with her dreams and the slow passing of under-occupied time. Her boss, whom she delighted in her mind in calling ‘your lordship’, although his real name was Alan Smalls, expected her to spend the hours ripping open the outer seam of second-hand jeans he bought in bulk, and inserting colourful corduroy triangles to convert them into bell bottoms. The sewing machine was silent, a fly buzzed against the shop window and her eyelids drooped.
She wished she had something concrete to think about, some future in view. At least she was sitting down and the smell of joss sticks was better than bedpans.
Returning to live at home had not turned out as expected at all. There was no drifting back into the irresponsibility of her childhood. After the first chill, her parents had been kinder but a new brisk note had crept into their conversations. They asked her all the time what she was planning to do. Did she want to go to secretarial college or even retake her A Levels and go to university? They didn’t mention nursing again and accepted that her foot had made it difficult for her. She was considering it but she wasn’t drawn to any one subject. The idea of being a teacher or a secretary in some dull office afterwards filled her with horror.
She was also expected to take a full part in the family’s domestic arrangements and not just the fun bits like cooking. Her mother had breezily told her that she wouldn’t expect rent – this hadn’t occurred to Melissa – but would require a good deal of cleaning and tidying in exchange for room and keep.
She found herself scrubbing the kitchen floor as an unpaid skivvy for her parents. Relations became strained quite quickly. She also had a queer suspicion she was in the way. She was amazed at the amount they went out, even for whole weekends, leaving her alone at home. They never invited her to join them.
The present seemed formless and uninteresting. All work, high tea, evenings in with the television or books or Scrabble, and hoovering, dusting, mopping and folding. Her brothers were still away at school. Even when they did come home they ignored her just as they always had. It was mutual though so didn’t cause any further dismay.
She had always taken it for granted that her parents loved each other, but now she noticed how united they were, that her mother was essential to the smooth running of her husband’s practice, as his office manager and receptionist.
Having shied away from it to begin with – her terror of the lake blocking her dreams – she found herself straying in her mind back to lovely sleeping Castle Hey. When she remembered how she had treated Munty she blushed with remorse. It was unlikely she would ever see the house or him again. Then she relived his kisses. She couldn’t forget that with Munty she had been the cool envied girl, driving up the King’s Road in a sports car.
She’d been horrid to him, blaming him, frightened and embarrassed by her accident, and guilty about lying to her parents. The gloom had come upon her with terrifying speed and she wasn’t able to shake it off. She realised now she had taken it all out on that gentle man who had treated her with such kindness and admiration. She regretted it bitterly and Munty began more and more to occupy the echoing wastes in her mind.
She liked to lull herself to sleep by picturing herself in something gorgeous from Quorum, floating through magical candle-lit rooms at Castle Hey, Munty adoring at her side, directing teams of people to perform various unspecified tasks.
She designed her wedding dress over and over again in her mind – should it be a white mini, lace headscarf and go-go boots or something more traditional? Whatever she was wearing, it was always Munty’s fair head and slender back encased in the same black tailcoat that she had seen him wearing at P&Q, waiting for her at the top of the aisle. Turning to smile at her. When she woke up from her fantasies to the dreary day-to-day of housework and Lord Groove, she sometimes fell into a gloom and, much to his lordship’s irritation, had to take days off sick. She was lucky to keep her job.
In the absence of Munty, no other man she knew invited her out on dates, and it was difficult to meet anyone interesting in Dorking. She regretted bucketing out of her Season where at least there were men to meet. What on earth had possessed her to waste such an opportunity? There was no going back now. She was stuck.
Half dozing when the bell in the shop doorway tinkled, she snapped awake and looked up to see someone tall standing against the light. Her well-primed heart leapt with recognition.
‘Munty!’ she cried out, louder than she meant, so delighted that her ridiculous dreams had conjured him up at last. It was clear to her from his worried expression that he was expecting to be rebuffed.
‘Melissa, hello. I was just passing.’
‘Passing? You were just passing Dorking?’
‘Well, yes. Driving down to Castle Hey.’
Then she laughed, thrilled that he had come to find her.
‘I called at your father’s surgery and the nurse told me where you were.’
‘Ah!’
Melissa lifted the hinged section of the counter and stepped through. She was wearing a long-sleeved short shift in bright peacock blue, with strings of beads and flat sandals on her feet. Lord Groove insisted she look the part. She looked up at him smiling, raising her arms, and the anxious expression left him as he bent to kiss her as if he couldn’t help himself.
He came back the following Saturday to take her to Castle Hey. As she stepped once again across the threshold of her dream house Melissa let go of last year’s fear. Her parents knew where she was and approved. She decided to remember only the f
un, the kisses, the promise that Munty and his house would be her busy exciting future.
Work had started in earnest, windows were flung open, sunlight streaming in while workmen scrubbed the scarred walls and slapped on whitewash. Munty told her that he’d been spending every weekend here himself for months working alongside the men.
‘I wanted to show you something much better than when you came before,’ he said. ‘At least half the problem must have been what a mess it was. I didn’t blame you for wanting to run away.’
Melissa knew that that hadn’t been it. She’d been excited by the possibilities of the house as soon as she had seen it, about being with Munty and making it a special place where people would want to stay. About behaving like a grown-up. It had been the lake that had ruined the weekend. Nothing else. She looked at Munty with new eyes so grateful that he’d tried again.
‘Oh no, not at all,’ she replied gazing around at the transformation.
That evening they sat again in the little room where they had had their first picnic, drinking P&Q’s house champagne.
‘We could see each other a bit, don’t you think?’ he said.
‘I’d like that very much.’
She hugged to herself the secret sense that she had needed rescuing from the dragon of boredom. She glanced sideways at her prince on the shabby old sofa. Fair and pale he looked just right to her. She leant over and kissed him.
Fourteen
Melissa
October 1968
Melissa had poached the small purple plums she had found in the old orchard. She was pressing them through a sieve when the first dull twinge invaded her. She stopped and looked out of the window as the sensation swelled inside her before dying away. Bit like the curse. The huge old kitchen, warm with heat from the Aga, had become her preferred sanctuary as the year rolled away from the sun’s warmth. There she cooked and stored, day after day, against an unimaginable future: jam, whole meals for the freezer, chutney and pickles.
Munty always knew where to find her when he came home from London, rushing in to sit at the table, drink tea and talk to her. He was always so pleased to see what she was making. His mother had never made jam or cakes for him, she’d been too busy working.
Pearl and Reg had sold the family business. Having read the trade papers like runes to see the future, they had cannily decided that the new supermarket in the High Street was a severe threat to the traditional grocer. The average age of their customers rose sharply. The younger ones deserted them for snatching TV dinners from huge freezers and ready-bagged sugar from open shelves and chucking them into those trolleys imported from America. They had no desire to allow their customers to help themselves as if they were in some of kind of uncouth cash and carry. It seemed so perfunctory and unhelpful. Retirement to the warmth of Malta beckoned as Reg had service family there so off they went for a new life.
Munty kept in touch by letter but there was still an awkwardness between mother and son. His mother had been fine with Bert but Munty was another matter, growing away from her, particularly after her new marriage and the deaths of his grandparents. Add Melissa and the house and it was just all too difficult. The invitation to visit was always there of course but they could barely afford to mend the Castle Hey roof let alone fly to Malta.
The unexpected pregnancy following so quickly after their quiet wedding had delayed their plans for the house. Munty told Melissa that she must rest, they could have exciting business ideas after the baby was born. To begin with she was disappointed and frustrated. She’d hoped to get going, like her mother did with her father, with all the loving and helping she had dreamt about. Even those ideas began to shimmer like mirages.
The pregnancy had changed her. She was finding it more and more difficult to remember what had been so lovely about the idea of marriage and Munty. She was so tired sometimes she just wanted to cry and the dreaded glooms came over her more frequently and refused to shift. It was this ridiculous bump swelling her apron like a sail before the wind. When her waist had returned she would be better. She just had to grit her teeth and stick it out.
As the pregnancy had advanced she was plagued once again by a fear of failure and foreboding. Failing as a deb, a nurse and now failing as a wife. Would she fail as a mother too?
She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant within months of the wedding but after a bit of fumbling around with French letters it had seemed less embarrassing to do it without. That was when everything stopped being pleasant and started being frightening. Strangeness crept up on her with the developing pregnancy. She woke often in the night and stared into the dark worrying and worrying about the huge house that loomed and boiled up all around her.
It was so big and shabby and there seemed to be no end to the money it would suck up before anyone would want to pay to be there. She put the sieve down and straightened herself, leaning a hand against the base of her spine in an ancient, unconscious gesture.
Real married life would begin, she told herself, and she would surely be a proper, grown-up Lady Munty once the baby was born. Not the sad creature dragging itself about when no one was looking. She heard her own voice aggressive inside her head.
‘Pull yourself together,’ it said. ‘You’re a lucky girl. Stop being so hopeless and useless and feeble.’
She would cry. Then she would make sure she had washed her face and powdered it thoroughly and plastered on some kind of smile-shaped expression for Munty when he came home.
She could picture herself as a tiny ant-like creature scuttling about preparing meals and vegetables for the huge chest freezer she had been given as a wedding present by Pearl. It sat half empty, demanding offerings like some malevolent icy god. It should be such fun to have so much space and her own home but when she was alone the space closed in on her. In her dreams she was trying to shore up this toppling pile with something small and useless like a teaspoon or a flower. Maybe the dreams would leave her when she was free of the baby. Maybe she would be able to love Munty again.
She was upset that she didn’t want him to touch her at the moment, but she was so fragile like tissue paper that would tear in his hands. Her skin crawled at the memory of his fingers on her body. She was rapidly forgetting why she had liked it before.
One night a few weeks into the pregnancy he had pushed up her nightie and put his hand on her belly, wandering a little lower and delving gently between her soft folds. Previously a delicious sensation would begin to creep over her like a warm breeze and her thighs would fall apart as she sighed and smiled in the dark. This time she sat up, slapping at his hand and sobbing as if in pain.
‘What’s the matter?’
She could see how much she had upset him. They were both virgins when they married and he was quite shy and reserved about sex. She knew Munty had bought a book and read it carefully in order not to let her down. Why was she frigid all of a sudden?
‘I don’t know. I just don’t want you to do that.’ She twisted her legs together and put her hands over her face. ‘I don’t think we should. Not while I’m pregnant.’
He dropped back on to the pillows beside her.
Soon afterwards she’d moved out of the master bedroom and into a smaller room down the passage with a dressing room off to one side. She felt frantic with guilt, leaving him marooned alone in the great Gothick bed where they had spent their first chaste night more than two years ago. It was so high you had to run up to it and jump and she used this as an excuse. She could quite easily have asked him to bring the library steps upstairs.
She was less panicky in the new room. She didn’t have to be close to Munty at night, and feel his disappointment like a cold draft as their warmth crumbled to ashes. Sarah came over to stay, and helped her make curtains for the windows and dressing table of her new room. Her mother didn’t say anything, but she could tell that she disapproved of her leaving the marriage bed. So she had twittered on about making it nice for guests after she had recovered from the baby. She was ashamed in fr
ont of her mother just as she had been when she had left nursing.
She scooped the thick damson puree into the jam pan and wearily stirred in the sugar she had warmed in the Aga, stopping each time the waves of sensation poured through her body. Half an hour later, she potted up the damson cheese, added waxed discs and secured the cellophane lids with elastic bands before licking and sticking on the labels she had written earlier. The warm jars gleamed like garnets on the shelves.
It was time to give in to the pains, to accept what was coming and allow her pregnancy to end. Beyond that, there was a landscape hard to imagine. There must be a baby in the picture somewhere, but it eluded her. The wriggling mound that had disturbed her sleep for the last few months seemed to have no human form. When she lay awake in the dark, heart pounding, she was frightened by the separate life that dwelt inside her like a parasite – a cuckoo or a worm.
She left the kitchen and walked up the brick passage relieved that her mother had chosen and paid for a midwife and maternity nurse to look after her at home. She’d dreaded the idea of going to a hospital.
‘Miss Smith?’ she called. ‘I think it may have started.’ As she stood there, she felt a warm, wet gush between her legs and something splashed on to the stone flags of the hall. She looked down terrified and ashamed at her loss of control to see water gleaming on the floor.
‘Miss Smith? Something’s happened.’ She was frozen to the spot. The liquid dripped uncomfortably down the insides of her legs, making her shiver as it cooled in the draught. Maybe the baby would just fall out. She began to cry as the waves of sensation built to crests that she had not experienced before.