Another Kind of Cinderella and Other Stories

by Angela Huth

  ‘You bitch,’ she screamed. ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch.’ She disowned me as a mother, she said. I wouldn’t see her again, not even at the funeral.

  It’s late at night now, but I’ve calmed down a bit. I try to put Meriel from my mind, concentrate only on Douglas. He was very tired this evening, weak. But cheerful as always, holding my hand. He doesn’t ask about Meriel any more. He hasn’t the strength to hear about disputes. He knows there’s only a short time left.

  Well, I’m not going to write my journal again after tonight. It’s been cathartic in some ways, but nothing can help any more. Besides, I want to spend every moment from now on at Douglas’s bedside. Often, sitting there, so quiet, I long to ask him one last time, where did we go wrong? But the time’s past. Such a question would be an unfair burden in his pitiful state. Besides, the closeness of death rarely enlightens. Like me, he can have no answers.

  The Wife Trap

  Seventeen years after their divorce, Peggy Jarrett received a Christmas card from her ex-husband George. She had recognised his writing on the envelope at once, and was puzzled. There had been no word of communication ever since their apathetic farewell in Court, a sleety morning all that time ago. What was he up to now?

  Nothing, it seemed. Peggy read the message several times.

  Why don’t you drop in for a cuppa if ever you’re passing this way? Yours ever, George.

  Whatever made him think she’d be his way? She had no reason to pass through Lincolnshire, some hundred miles north-east from where she lived. What a daft idea! Besides, in the unlikely event of her being in his direction, what would be the point of dropping in on a man with whom she had had seven years of nothing but boredom, irritation and disappointment? As a husband, George had been nowhere near up to scratch, in Peggy’s mind, and she hadn’t missed him once since their parting. Indeed, she’d scarcely given him a thought.

  Nonetheless, she searched the card for clues. She held it up to the opal wintry light that hung flatly across her small kitchen window, her lips puckered in critical contemplation. It was a traditional scene: coach and four in front of an olde inn, swirling snowstorm blurring the artist’s incompetent draftsmanship. Rubbing her finger over the picture, Peggy could feel the raised paper that had been employed to depict the snow – a porridgy feel that made her shudder. A very low-grade card, she was bound to admit. But then George had never had her instinct for nice things. That had been one of the many life-dividers between them. His obliviousness of quality stuff – curtains, pictures, shoes, ties, anything you could mention – was one of the things that had driven her to despair. What’s more, he had shown no inclination to learn. Things were just things, as he so often used to say, and as long as they functioned properly that was good enough for him. What do I care if a glass comes free from a garage or for twenty quid from bloody Harrods? he once asked. Funny how she remembered the question. He’d been standing in the kitchen clutching a tin of Quality Street to his stomach at the time. She could hear his sneery voice as if he were shouting at her this very moment. The Christmas card brought it all back to her, the remembrance of all the troubles she’d had with George; the fact that she had married beneath her, and regretted her mistake from day one of the honeymoon.

  For a moment, Peggy wondered whether to throw out the card. But then she decided to put it with the rest, in a shoebox on whose lid she had written Christmas 1995. Might as well. She had quite a hoard of boxes now, proof that she was in so many friends’ thoughts at the festive season. The presence of these cards was a peculiar comfort. Sometimes, even in the heat of July, she would take them out to recount them, and reread the messages of goodwill and cheer. Not that even Jen, her best friend and neighbour, knew anything of this secret ritual. Jen was a great one for Understanding Most Things, as she often reassured Peggy: but instinct told Peggy that there were some things that should not be confided even to a best friend, for fear of misinterpretation.

  When she had put the card in the box with the rest of her collection, Peggy almost forgot about it. Although, during the course of the next eight months, her mind did occasionally turn, curiously . . . Once, years ago, she had found a dormouse curled up under a floorboard in deep sleep. She had not disturbed it, but remembering its presence every so often caused a small wick of comfort to flutter in her stomach. George’s card acted in the same way.

  In August, Peggy’s sister Lil suggested Peggy go up for a week to see the new house she and Jack had bought in Alnwick. Peggy didn’t much fancy the idea, and knew from experience a week with Lil and Jack would be more like hard work than a holiday. She was driven to distraction by Jack’s non-stop boasting about how he was a man for a bargain if ever there was one. In their last tacky little house there was not a single item that had not been a bargain, it was too plain to see. Peggy held no hopes that the knockdown terraced house in Alnwick would be any different. She hated Lil’s scarcely disguised sympathy for her own single life – sympathy! That was the last thing she needed, considering her own superiority of judgement was of quite a different class to Lil’s; and then the children. They were the sort of children who made Peggy feel glad she had none of her own. Still, despite everything against the idea, Peggy decided she would go, just for a few days.

  The visit passed just as she imagined it would, and on the journey home Peggy was aware of an unaccountable weariness. The thought of home, and peace, was cheering, but not all that cheering. As she sat in a motorway café eating her lunch, she reflected on the year ahead of unchanging routine: part-time job at Oxfam, the bridge club, choir practice once a week and dear Jen’s interminable visits and enquiries. Nothing to complain about, but nothing to lift her spirits, either. For want of something better to do, she studied the map, thinking that a different way home might relieve the tedium of the next few hours. It was then, by chance, she noticed the small town where George lived, and remembered his card. She measured the distance from her present position with her thumb: some thirty miles, she reckoned. A short visit – cup of tea, exchange of awkward pleasantries – would be under an hour out of her way.

  Peggy took but a moment to make up her mind. However unexciting the reunion might be, at least she could make it into a good story for Jen, whose own life always seemed so much more exciting than Peggy’s.

  An hour and a half later she drew up at an undistinguished house in a suburban street: neat privet hedges and a newly painted wooden gate. She walked up the straight little path feeling nothing at all, and rang the bell. After no response to three rings, she took the liberty of finding her way round to the back of the house. She saw George at the end of a long, narrow garden. The familiarity of his stance – he had his back to her – caused a strange constriction in her chest. He stood there, same as ever, legs apart like a Colossus of suburbia, hosepipe in hands, playing its jet of pale water over a bed of brilliant flowers.

  George had worked all his life for a horticultural firm which sold packets of seeds by the million. It had always been his habit to avail himself of free packets, and to furnish the garden so that it looked like pages from the firm’s glossy mail order brochures. All too vulgar for Peggy’s taste, of course: always had been. Though she had seen the point of free flowers, and in this one matter had conceded to George’s determination never to pay for anything in the garden.

  She stood quite still, knowing she would have a moment or two to take in his unchanging shape before he turned and saw her. He wore slouching trousers of indeterminate beige, and a polo shirt of a particularly nasty rust that she, Peggy, would never have agreed to. His hair was perhaps a little thinner, and the neat side wings, that curved same as always 3ver his ears, were greying. Had she seen enough? Was this a mad idea? Should she turn and run?

  Even as these questions fizzed through her mind, Peggy saw that it was too late. George had spun round and was looking straight at her. He frowned for no more than a second – possibly the strong evening sun was in his eyes. Then he smiled and moved towards her, the water from
the hosepipe at his side making a sloppy track across the lawn. He stopped a yard from her – deeper runnels in his cheeks, grey eyebrows, teeth he still had not bothered to have straightened – still smiling.

  ‘Well, I’m blessed, Peg o’ my life, I was just about to suss out the hydrangeas,’ he said.

  The years shot away from Peggy. His news had always been about gardening. Now, after a such a long absence, all he could think to greet her with was his own immediate plan concerning the hydrangeas.

  ‘Were you passing?’ he asked after a pause.

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘I knew you would. One day’

  Cocky bastard. All the same, Peggy smiled nicely. ‘You’ve got quite a garden,’ she said.

  ‘Not a bad little patch. You should’ve seen it when I came here. Cup of tea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind.’

  She followed him to the back door. He stopped to turn off the outside tap on the way, and kicked viciously at the green plastic snake of the hose. Once, he had kicked the cat, Pinky, so hard that he had caused a rupture. Peggy remembered Pinky as she looked about George’s kitchen: a beautiful marmalade, lovely temperament, everyone said. There wouldn’t be any animals here, of course. George loathed animals. Pinky was one of the many things that had come between them.

  The kitchen was a room that personified George’s view of his surroundings: functional. The walls were a nasty green. There were plastic blinds at the window, a torn shade on the overhead light, a Formica table patterned with ribbons and roses of crude yellow and blue. The smell of stale smoke reminded Peggy of another division of opinion between them, as did the full ashtrays. She had eventually trained George not to smoke in the kitchen, but obviously that rule had lapsed with his freedom.

  Peggy drew her angora cardigan tightly round her, and sat on an uncomfortable stool at the table. George, whistling under his breath, switched on the kettle and dumped two mugs on the table. One of them, a souvenir of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, she recognised as theirs. The other was new and ugly. But then in the sharing of things, Peggy remembered, George had been quite generous, allowing Peggy her pick and saying he would not need much stuff just for himself.

  Eventually George sat at the other side of the table. A tin pot of tea and a bottle of milk stood between them. Peggy felt some old habit rumbling up through her veins: without asking, she poured the tea. George’s first.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘What brings you to this part of the world?’

  ‘I’ve been staying with Jack and Lil. They’ve got a new place up in Alnwick.’

  ‘Ah, Lil.’ George had never shown much affection for his sister-in-law, though once, at a Christmas party, Peggy had found him giving her more than just a polite kiss under the mistletoe.

  ‘You’ve got a nice place up here, I must say. Very quiet,’ she said. Might as well be friendly.

  ‘Quiet! Don’t you believe it.’ George banged his fist on the table, making the tin pot shudder. ‘It’s wicked. Breakins, burglaries, rape, mugging, the lot. Terrible. I organised a local neighbourhood watch, as a matter of fact. I’m what they call the chairman. I’d say things have improved a bit since we put the notices up, but not much. You can’t be too careful. Had to spend a fortune on security, I can tell you.’

  Peggy followed his glance towards expensive locks on the windows and huge bolts on the door. He’d always had a thing about security, she remembered. But the precautions he had taken here seemed to her a little out of proportion to the value of the contents of the house. No burglar in his right mind would want anything from this kitchen, surely.

  ‘You lock yourself in all right, do you?’ George asked.

  ‘Oh, I take good care.’

  ‘Sometimes I’ve thought, you know – funny thing, but there it is – I’ve thought, come along, George, send a card to Peg o’ my life and tell her to be sure to check her locks. It’s a violent world today. But of course I never did. You know me, not much of a writer. So then I sent the Christmas card and lo and behold here you are, so I can warn you in the flesh.’

  He smiled. But there was a look in his eye that was new to Peggy. A sort of flinty, manic glare. Possibly it was her imagination. The sun had tinged everything with a glowering orange, making Peggy unsure of her original impression. Perhaps George had changed, in some way she could not put her finger on, which aroused both unease and something vaguely exciting.

  They chattered on about the hydrangeas, and George’s plans for a new greenhouse, and his addiction to snooker on the television. Two pots of tea were drunk, and then they turned to cans of shandy. These lived on the ledge above the sink and were warm from a long day in the sun: funny old George, still not much good at looking after himself. Never did remember to put drinks in the fridge.

  Some time after eight (amazed, she was, how the time had flown) Peggy remembered the three-hour journey ahead, and said she had better be on her way. The three cans of shandy had made the roses on the table tremble as if through a heat haze. Still, she stood up quite firmly and announced her intention to leave.

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to go, surely’ said George. ‘You can’t drive till all the shandies have settled. It would be irresponsible to let you go. Sit yourself down and I’ll get us a sandwich.’

  Peggy let herself sink back on to the stool, whose seat had made grooves in her thighs. Suddenly exhilarated by a feeling that time did not matter, she made no protest. With incredulous eyes (in the old days George had never lifted a finger in the kitchen) she watched him open a tin of salmon, spread vegetarian margarine on sliced bread and cut up two homegrown tomatoes.

  ‘Not exactly a feast,’ said George, ‘but there’s plenty of raspberry ripple for afters, and I can probably lay my hands on a bit of cheddar.’

  By now Peggy was hungry as well as tired. She ate gratefully, and found herself accepting a glass of homemade elderberry wine. They talked more about the greenhouse, and about who had been promoted in the seed firm in the intervening years (George mentioned a lot of names new to Peggy) and no mention of her own life was made. After they had eaten, they went to the front room – forlornly brown – and sat side by side on the old G-plan sofa that Peggy, at the time of their parting, had said she would not miss at all. They watched the news, and the snooker, and by the time they turned it off a thin summery darkness had gathered outside the windows.

  ‘Time to be turning in,’ said George, as he had said every night of their marriage. ‘Have to get up early. Why don’t you stay the night, Peg o’ my life? It’s a bit late to start back now. I’ve got a perfectly good spare room: never been slept in, as a matter of fact.’

  Peggy stifled a yawn. He was quite right, of course: it was no time of night to be setting off cross-country. She sat for a while in easy silence, not thinking about the answer she knew she would give, but wondering why the funny little irritating things about George didn’t seem to annoy her as much as they used to. She stood up, stretching in a way she would never consider in front of a stranger: George had never been one to complain of her habit of stretching before bed.

  ‘I’ll stay, thanks very much,’ she said, arms above her head. ‘But no hanky-panky, mind.’

  In the dim light she could tell from his amazed expression that no such thought had crossed George’s mind.

  ‘Would I ever?’ he asked. ‘You can trust me. But it’s nice seeing you again. Just the same as ever – well, in a way. Let’s go and settle you in, sheets and whatnot.’

  An hour later, her case unpacked, Peggy sat up in bed wondering at the curious turn of events. Her critical eye took in the ugly maple furniture, the hideous curtains, the central light – she missed a lamp by her bed – and she felt some pity for George. To have stumbled along in such discomfort and ugliness for so long . . . but then he had never been a great observer. Probably none of this affected him in the way it would affect her.

  There was a knock on the door. Peggy’s hand went to her chest. One of the two nightdresses
she had packed to take to Alnwick had a low-cut front. She had chosen to wear this one tonight, for no particular reason.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’ll leave a light on, on the landing.’ Pause. ‘If I don’t see you in the morning, good luck. Drop by again.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Well, blow me down, if he didn’t come knocking on my door, Jen. The cheek of it! I told him where to get off. But the fact of the matter is, George is still attracted to me. It was as plain as anything.

  Peggy slid down in the bed. Before she could dwell on what could have been, what might have been, she fell asleep, hand still protecting her unassaulted breast.

  She woke next morning soon after nine – a most unusual time for her, who was usually up and hoovering at seven-thirty. Hurrying out of bed, Peggy put her lateness down to the thickness of the curtains. No chink of sun slid into the strange room. She pulled them back, annoyed with herself, and looked at a landscape of 1930s suburban villas all staring blankly over their privet hedges. Then she dressed, folded her sheets – one blue, one pink – and packed her case.

  Downstairs, there was no sign of George, and no note. He had plainly left in a hurry. Remains of his breakfast were on the kitchen table. The empty eggshell sat in a cup she had bought on the first anniversary of their marriage. They had been staying in Paignton at the time, and Peggy had been much drawn to this china donkey whose basket on his back served as an eggcup. It was painted with merry yellows and greens, imported from Spain. George, for all his immunity to pretty things, had been taken with it, too, from the start. Nowadays, of course, her taste more refined by the myriad glossy magazines she studied every month, Peggy could see herself rejecting such a donkey with some scorn. But she was touched that George should have kept it, and was still using it. Sentimental old thing, he had always been, in some ways.