At the end of the 1970s, however, she was so focused on her work, daytime occupation which she now labelled ‘career’, implying that it should by right be confused with ‘life’, that she admitted little else into her thoughts. So when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and needed surgery, Janet hardly reacted, the matter of fact way in which she received the news suggesting to her mother that she had grown callous and uncaring, a state she resolved to rectify. The operation was a success and she recovered, but was weak for some time and then was subject to some months of precautionary outpatient chemotherapy, a programme that took a steady toll, but she did recover. Indeed when she died, having reached her mid-eighties in the nursing home that had been her home for six years, it was not the cancer that claimed her. And a good measure of the success of her treatment was down to David Smythe, who still lived with his parents, across the road. Always having referred to her mother as Mrs. Rowlands, for some reason consistently omitting the final syllable, a habit that continued to this day, David had taken time off work to drive her to her appointments. He had done her shopping, fixed taps and done odd jobs around the house, despite being perhaps the most impractical person that Janet had ever met. Her mother thought the world of him, always had, and saw much more of him then than she had of Janet since she left university and home in the same month.
He was thirty-five by then, already a successful accountant, fully chartered and with his own practice and a solid, satisfied client base. Memories of absence can be stronger than any other, she thought, as she recalled that she had never harboured any kind of feeling for him, never fancied him in any way. He, perhaps, might have been one of the few males for whom she had never even considered the use of words like ‘fancy’, even in the negative. He was there because he was there and had always been there, like one of the trees in the street, never quite the same on re-acquaintance, but rarely noticed. Her mother’s regular and fulsome praise for his contribution to her well-being never registered. It was like talking about the weather. You always did it, but never really cared what was said, its only function to fill a potential void of non-communication. Though Janet visited her suburban roots regularly every weekend, usually spending all of Sunday with her mother, starting with mass and then lunch followed by an afternoon in front of the television, and finally tea before catching the train home to south London, she saw little of David, her presence, she assumed, allowing him some space to do what he had foregone during the week. Not only was he still single, Janet could not remember ever having seen him with a girl, except herself, of course, when occasionally he was given the job of chaperoning her to the nearby shops to spend her pocket money.
But on one particular day, one Sunday when her mother was beginning the renewal of her active enjoyment of life as the effect of her treatment waned, she invited the Smythes for lunch, insisting that she and she alone would cook for five. For Mrs. Rowlandson, Janet had been a late and only child. Mrs. Smythe, on the other hand, had borne David at twenty-one, so his parents were actually younger than her mother, despite David’s ten years on herself. The Smythes belied the apparent conventionality and predictability of their son and continued to live the comparatively racy life the street had come to identify with them. Perhaps Janet had borne something of a crush for Mr Smythe, a tall, dignified gentleman with a deep voice and reassuring manner, the father, perhaps, that she had lacked from her early teens.
Her mother had cooked a full traditional Sunday lunch with roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, carrots, apple pie and custard, a combination of tastes Janet had memorised from familiarity, but which had figured progressively less frequently after daddy died. It was as if, after months of illness, she had consciously decided to reinvent her normal life, to revive it from a distracted drowsiness brought on by her inability to participate. Over lunch she thanked David for his help, clearly demonstrating more than mere gratitude for what he had done. After nobly acknowledging the after-dinner toast, David, who had spilt custard on his college tie and looked the complete idiot in his formal garb, actually wept. Janet remembered him rise from his place at table and offer an embrace to her mother, saying how happy he was that she was back to her old self. Her mother’s response was to giggle a little at his attention and attack the custard spot with her napkin as he leaned towards her, an act that released all tension and gave them all a good laugh. It also, for Janet, cast David as the son her mother had always wanted. Her own foetus might have been male.
With parents happily planted in easy chairs with port and brandy, their flushing cheeks apparently the cause of the room’s misted windows, Janet had washed up while David dried. They had a common interest in music and, whereas Janet had not been to a concert in years, David told her that he went regularly, at least a couple of times a week and was a subscription holder in some of London’s most prestigious venues. By the time Janet had begun to wipe down the cooker, privately marvelling at how neatly and cleanly her mother could operate in the kitchen, he was placing the last of the dishes in the cupboard, into correct places he knew better than she did. As cutlery crashed item by item into the plastic drawer insert, he raised the possibility of their seeing something together in the coming weeks. He refused to give her details, almost insisting that she should come, because he knew she would enjoy it. She agreed for some reason and gave him her phone number. He rang to confirm the next day, just after the six o’clock start of the cheap rate, saying that he had two tickets for the following week. They should meet in the Lamb and Flag, just off Garrick Street near Long Acre at six. She told him with an affectionate laugh, affection for the place and not for him, that she knew it well because it was just around the corner from her bank. His newly confident tone closed the conversation by asking her to dress up a bit, as he put it. When she replaced the receiver, Janet’s only thought was a question to herself, asking why she had never bothered to move her account to another branch.
They met and had a pint and a sandwich in the pub over a chat about her mother and her career. She asked nothing of him and he offered it. They found they shared a liking for the uncluttered, uncomplicated and uncommercialised style of the place, and the beer, of course, was always excellent. It was not, as she had expected, to Covent Garden that he took her, but to the other way, to the Coliseum, where English National Opera were to present Janáček’s Katya Kabanova. He was a composer she had heard of, but whose music was unknown to her. David, of course, was an aficionado, and explained the plot, with its story of unhappy marriage, guilt at succumbing to an affair and eventual self-destruction, with such sympathy and passion that it was like meeting a new person, someone she had never known. He infected her with his enthusiasm, real excitement at the prospect of seeing this production and drew her into his world so she could share it. After the first act, they went to the bar for the interval scrum. But she refused the offer of a drink with a shake of her head. She said not a single word during the twenty minutes as he sipped his beer with an occasional comment about its poor quality. Janet’s mind was full of the stinging pain associated with Pete’s rejection of her, reignited by Tichon’s selfish treatment of his wife on the stage.
She needed the diversion of work to cope. She also needed a diversion from work, so an interest in something outside actually made her more effective and her regular visits to the opera with David proved the perfect foil to the otherwise all-engrossing career. When he eventually asked her to marry him, they had never shared a bed, made love, or even kissed more intently than friends. Theirs had been a traditional courtship of the kind lived only in the pages of Victorian guides for young people, a kind that had probably never been lived even by the intended readership. And neither of them regarded themselves as particularly young any more.
She surprised herself by accepting without hesitation, as if the response had been pre-programmed in her subconscious, an immediate reaction to a stimulus, like scratching an itch. He said, “Will you marry me,” and she said, “
Yes” and that was that. She felt as if she had switched off a gushing flow within her that was always meant to be stifled, a fountain of youth that had to be drained with the purpose of achieving the conventional respectability for which she always assumed she was destined. And now that appeared in the ample shape of David Smythe. They had a simple ceremony in the parish church they had both attended as children, but in different decades, and honeymooned in the Seychelles at a time when it cost an arm, a leg and considerable other limbs to visit that place. He had suggested the Kenyan coast at first, but had rejected it when he immediately and correctly surmised that she wanted to refuse but could not express her reason. She sold her flat, whilst he liquidated some of his investment property. They pooled the considerable sums and added another huge mortgage, this time based on two substantial incomes, and bought, at the start of the 1980s, the elegant, tall mid-terrace in Canonbury they still owned, and where they raised their two children, the first of which was probably already on its way by the time they were married. Once released from the cage in which David had caringly confined it, his passion proved almost insatiable. Though a Roman Catholic like her, he was also a pragmatist and he insisted they use birth control like everyone else to ensure they created only what they planned. Even in love, he remained the accountant. That is how he lived his successful life, calm, measured, controlled, except, of course, when within embracing range of his wife, a region in which he displayed an abandon of gluttony she became ever happier to feed.
And they had over twenty wonderful years of marriage, raising two children, Marie, obliquely named after Janet’s school and Douglas after David’s father, thereby perpetuating a tradition of the initials DS in the male line. They lived in a wonderful house, had the privilege of accomplished and respected careers plus a considerable income which allowed them to amass very early a large retirement cushion. If that were not enough, the continued success and achievement of both of their children, as far as Janet described it, and certainly of one of them from David’s perspective, was a constant and ever gratifying joy. Janet simply could not see that a career in the media, with its unknowns, its risks, its potential for unpredictability, was anything to be ashamed of. These, of course, were the very characteristics that completely undermined it in David’s accountant’s eyes. The waning of Janet and David’s shared star had begun before Douglas came out with his confession, but its cooling had certainly accelerated when Janet offered support while David’s instinct was to reject. It had taken four years for the process to register a truly tangible chill, during which time the demands of Janet’s headship only grew, while David’s involvement with the practice gently waned according to his own plan. He was, after all, sixty years old by then and ready to start running down the flag, as he put it, despite the fact that, as Janet reflected, he left the pole pretty much erect. Her menopause had begun in her late forties and she had to fight herself to remain calm and level headed at times, an encounter she always won within the school compound but sometimes lost by the time she got home. She sought and received surgery, just minor pickings, as it turned out, and it had been delivered easily and quickly, needing only a couple of days off work
But then she lost interest in sex. And, though David by then seemed to be accelerating towards the slippers and fireside of his retirement, no longer putting in any of the extra hours he used to give to ensure he delivered ahead of schedule, as he had done throughout his working life, he still displayed a thoroughly active interest in her, an interest that could not cope with what was interpreted as rejection. Douglas was at college, doing what his father labelled a ‘fake’ degree, a comment that provoked anger and tears in a nineteen year old who was still accurately labelled a ‘boy’ by his parents, because Janet wanted to hold onto that status while David, perhaps, without admitting it, recognised an aspect of himself. A few weeks later, as if to counter his father’s perceived ridicule with a blow he knew would hit its target, Douglas announced to the assembled family that he was gay, and adopted every mannerism, accessory and trait, always thankfully under-stated, that might advertise the fact. David was furious and didn’t speak to him for a whole term, threatening to cut off the allowance that sustained his attendance at college. Janet had managed to persuade David to relent, but not without feeling that David blamed her for Douglas’s ‘condition’, accusing her of having been over-fussy and encouraging the effeminate side of her son’s character. For her, work again became the solace, devoting as much of her time to it as she could, while David pursued his own interests, his music above all, more often than not now enjoyed from radio or compact discs from his expensive hi-fi via headphones. These usually went on straight after dinner. They still loved one another, but the complications and pressures of their lives, professions and perceived aging in competition, left no space for expression.
She was still walking briskly, having turned right into Canonbury Road and picked up more pace on the downhill. She meandered to the other side of the usually busy road during another period of traffic light sequencing tranquillity and, fifty metres before she reached her own street, the bus that she might have preferred, one which went all the way, sped past to stop at the place where she would have alighted. She was glad that she had walked, the mental space the exertion created having prompted refreshing introspection, an activity for which she rarely found time any more. The journey had taken just over half an hour, but she had relived most of her life above these countable steps.
But as she strolled more slowly and apparently without purpose down the street towards her house, she realised that she had found no space to reoccupy those two Kenyan years. They were years where the exigencies, no water, no rain, no electricity, no telephones, a shortage of real friends nearby except Father Michael, a gas powered fridge that was hotter inside than out, all of these were easy to communicate and consistently elicited suitable admiration from people who could not conceive of life without their dishwasher. But the true magic of the experience defied description. In those two years she had felt closer to life and certainly closer to death than before or since. It was life intensified, concentrated, magnified, even more so in its elusive memory. The tragedy of her last few months, culminating in her discovery of John Mwangangi’s smashed head on the day she left was still a chasm in her conscience, a sore that would not heal, a hole that would not fill that she had learned to walk around. She could avoid falling into its still devastating sadness, but it would be with her forever, like that child she had killed.
But she had such a wonderful life, with two marvellous children, now both, thankfully, at ease with their parents, two gorgeous grandchildren at an age when she could also enjoy their infancy, a wholly comfortable life in a picture-book house with a husband she still loved and they were at least, unlike the parents of most of her pupils, still together. But at the end of this summer term, the end of another school year, there was a dawning realisation that she needed some new challenge, some new motivation to reclaim her life from the encroaching humdrum of merely doing it all again next time round.
It was only just three o’clock when she turned the latch and opened the wide panelled black door of the Smythe family home, a door which she carefully and silently shut behind her, even rotating the latch so that it made no sound whatsoever. Used, as a teacher, to the noise of slamming doors for several hours a day, she took every opportunity to demonstrate, even to herself, that it was possible to close a door quietly and gently, a practice that became a habit long ago and a habit she never broke. She walked along the hall as far as the top of the stairs that led down to the basement kitchen and, without descending, paused to listen for evidence of Rosita at work down there. But everything was silent. To be sure, she leaned into the stairwell, just where the triangular top steps did their ninety-degree turn, and said her name, softly. There was no response. She must be upstairs. And so she made her way back along the hall and turned right to take the stairs up to her study. They had renovated the old house with s
uch a sense of quality that the stairs did not even creak beneath the handmade carpets she still preferred to the modern echo of polished wood floors. By the time she was half way up, some eight counted steps, she knew what to expect. She had suspected as much for some time, so it was no shock, as it had not been even the first time. The shock was to arrive later, like the day she found John Mwangangi, nothing at the time and then the dawning of life changing memory weeks, even months later. When she reached the top, turning back towards the front of the house near the three steps of the half landing, she stopped, not turning left to the study as she had planned but staring straight ahead where the bedroom door stood ajar leaving a six inch gap through which she could see her husband’s ample and rippling buttocks ramming back and forth into Rosita’s behind. She was standing, supporting herself with both hands on the waist-high horizontal bar across the base of the bedstead. She was naked, her small breasts being tugged by David’s podgy hands as he worked her from the back. He’s up her fucking arse, she thought, as she turned, still unnoticed, to retrace her path back to the street, closing the latch silently from the outside with her key.
She turned right and walked briskly, as if with purpose, to the end of the road and there, as if abruptly beached by the wave that had driven her, she stopped dead. It wasn’t in her to cry, though she wanted to. She couldn’t be angry, though she should have been. She wasn’t even surprised. Why should she be? It had happened before. But in this place where she had lived for a quarter of a century, she felt newly estranged and alienated. She fumbled in her bag for her mobile. She would ring him to say that the course had finished early and she was on her way home. She dialled the number, but paused on the last digit and then cancelled the call. She set off back towards the house, though this time she would slam the door and see what happened, but she stopped after a few hurried paces, unsure of what she might do next, whatever reaction she might provoke. So she turned again and walked slowly to the end of the road where the open door of the Marquess seemed to invite her inside. She rarely went there, limiting her visits to an occasional Sunday lunchtime in summer when she and David could sit outside and watch their small world go by in this giant city. But the bar-staff knew her at least by sight and greeted her as if she were a regular. She ordered a gin and tonic and sat down, only to spring back to her feet immediately to buy a pack of cigarettes from the vending machine. She checked with the staff that it was still acceptable to smoke and then realised she had no lighter, so another visit to the bar was needed, each petty interruption to her dismay pushing thoughts of the here and now to the fore. She had not smoked since she had left Kenya, thirty years less one month before. But this afternoon she smoked three, one after the other in a chain and finished a gin and tonic alongside each one. Her mind felt strangely empty, as if her experience had been anaesthetised. Her head was beginning to swim as the narcotic mixture made its mark and for some reason best known to someone who was not Janet Smythe, née Rowlandson, she started to laugh a gentle sustained laugh. There was no hint of a tear, not a trace of sadness. Irony, yes, that quality writers should not try to write because readers always miss it, as she had taught her English Literature A level students throughout the years when she was a ‘mere’ classroom teacher, a term she had disastrously used to her staff soon after taking over the headship, an error that had taken a year to undo.
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