“C’mon in! Join the Club!” Val had cried, ushering her visitor into her large, untidy front room, its sash window pushed up as far as it would go to let in the eddies of cool air which every now and then, on the North side of the house, created a small respite from the prolonged heat-wave of this summer.
“Join the Club!” With these three words Val had lifted her visitor effortlessly and at once over any number of potentially embarrassing hurdles, such as explaining about Arnold, and why she’d walked out on him and what, if anything, she planned to do next.
For Val had recognised it all at a glance, as soon as she saw Mildred and her suitcase in the doorway. Had she, Val, not been through exactly the same thing herself, barely a year ago? Well, not exactly the same, because in her case it was Malcolm who had walked out on her; but what difference did it make, which of the warring partners actually upped and left?
“Men!” Val had summed it up, flinging herself backward against the sofa cushions, her fuzz of blonde-ish hair making a sort of quivering halo round her outraged face. “Men! Men when they retire! Retirement, it’s like a bomb, it’s a killer! You might as well be on a terrorist hit-list as have a husband coming up to sixty-five!”
“Well, sixty-one, actually, in our case,” Mildred interposed, but Val, understandably, brushed this aside.
“Well – sixty – sixty-five – Whatever. It’s death to the marriage when it happens, that’s for sure. You might as well take out divorce papers in advance when you see the date coming. Husbands go mad, stark staring raving mad. All of them! It’s their real natures coming out at last. If they don’t do one crazy thing, they do another.
The crazy thing done by Malcolm, it transpired, had not been (as in Arnold’s case) to plunge headlong into a ludicrous new career. No, in his case he had plunged head-long into the arms of a woman whose extravagance, bad temper and history of nervous breakdowns would ensure him a life incomparably more nerve-racking, harassing and exhausting than that as Manager in an International Pharmacautical Company had ever been.
This, anyway, was the version expounded by Val when, that first evening, seated just inside the open French windows, the two friends whiled away the summer twilight, and indeed half the night, with a delicious exchange of grievances about their errant husbands.
It was wonderful! Never had Mildred felt so free, so untramelled in the very core of her being. She could speak her mind at last. Once a marriage is over (as hers had been for all of sixteen hours), loyalty is suddenly seen to be nothing more than an encumbrance, a burden, a barrier to clear thinking. Well, it had always been that, of course, but in a successful ongoing marriage clear thinking is commonly kept to a minimum anyway, or where might it not lead?
The delights of slowly, and in congenial company, tearing to shreds the character of an errant spouse, savouring to the full every detail of his deficiencies, have never been fully documented in sociological treatises; and in this particular case the joys of the process were greatly enhanced for each of the participants by the encouragement they got from the other. They egged each other on and, as the last traces of sunset faded above the straggly lilac bushes and the posts for the washing-line at the end of Val’s garden; as the stars broke dimly, a few at a time, through the pinkish haze of the London sky, a point came when Mildred felt she had actually dismembered Arnold, laid him out piecemeal on a slab, where he deserved to be. She felt cleaned, reborn. With Val’s help she’d quite dispelled that niggle of guilt she’d already begun to feel on the train up. Wasn’t it rather awful, that niggle had warned her, to have left her husband so totally in the lurch? And on a Saturday afternoon, too, at the height of the season, and with no guarantee at all that those two girls would even turn up to do the Teas, let along put their backs into it once there.
But, No, no, no! had cried Val. Guilty? What a fantastic notion! Arnold was the guilty one, he deserved everything he got. Look how he’d dragged her against her will on this crazy ego-trip of his, without the smallest consideration for her feelings, or even for her health. A typical chauvinist pig, Val declared. No consideration, no sensitivity: totally selfish, totally wrapped-up in his own selfish concerns. Far from feeling guilty about letting him down, Mildred should be feeling triumphant at having had the courage to do her own thing at last, to be her own person.
“You were a saint, Mills, to have put up with it as long as you did. No one should be as saintly as that. It’s wrong. It’s anti-life. You could have had a breakdown, you could have ruined your health, slaving all day at this job of his. Much he’d have cared!”
This last couldn’t be quite true, and in her heart Mildred knew it. But so delicious was Val’s unshakeable partisanship that it seemed a shame to spoil it by any blurring of Arnold’s villainy.
For half of that first night and for much of the next day (which was a Sunday), the conversation had continued on these lines. It seemed for a while that they would never come to the end of anecdotes about ill-usage by their respective husbands, nor ever tire of the delicious sense of shared outrage engendered by each others’ grievances.
But all things come to an end. On Monday morning Val went back to work, leaving Mildred with what can only be called an emotional hangover from an excess of letting her hair down, of being what Val called “her own person” for a whole weekend. Mildred wasn’t used to being her own person, she found it both tiring and disquieting; and the more so because in Val’s house, it seemed, there wasn’t anything to do.
“I hate being helped,” Val had declared that first Monday morning, deftly preparing a casserole for supper before setting off for work at the Housing Department, “I really hate it, so please don’t try to tidy up or anything. Just – well – enjoy yourself. Do your own thing.”
What was her own thing? Mildred hadn’t had much practice at it, one way and another, and she saw this now, through Val’s eyes, as a grave deficiency. The first thing she must do, of course, was to find somewhere else to live. She couldn’t go on trespassing on Val’s hospitality for ever. And a job, too, of course, though as yet she wasn’t particularly short of money. Money from the joint account, that is. Arnold’s money. It was too humiliating.
A job. Yes. That Monday morning she’d got as far as going out and buying the local paper (“Nice to see you back, Mrs Walters,” the newsagent had greeted her, and kindly though it was meant, it sounded to Mildred’s ears like some kind of an accusation, though she couldn’t quite work out why.) Back at Val’s she spread the paper out on the kitchen table.
There were lots of jobs. Pages and pages of them, but even before she had finished reading to the end of the first column Mildred knew already that she couldn’t do any of them. Couldn’t type. Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t operate a switchboard. Couldn’t (as had been made disastrously clear) cope with the stresses of the catering trade.
“I’m so incompetent!” she’d wailed to Val that evening, when, the casserole having been consumed and the dishes whisked into the washing-up machine (by Val, of course – “I know exactly how I want it done”) the two settled themselves in garden chairs to enjoy the cool of the evening. “I wish I’d trained for something. But what with getting married, you see, and then …”
Val’s response was immediate and predictable.
“What’s getting married got to do with it?” she demanded. “A woman’s entitled to take whatever job she likes, whether her husband likes it or not. If Arnold didn’t approve, you should have told him he could do the other thing! Oh, I know it’s it’s difficult, of course I do, because Malcolm was just the same. They all are, you know. Once a man gets married he starts to assume that he’s bought you, body and soul. He thinks he has a right to every minute of your time, every ounce of your energy, it’s all there just for him, to be expended on pandering to his whims, furthering his interests. You have to fight it, Mills, you really do. You should have insisted on having your own career, right from the beginning. You shouldn’t have listened to his objections.”
; Had Arnold made objections to her having a career? She couldn’t really remember the subject having come up, certainly not in this clear-cut way. And anyway …
“I did have a job, you know,” she protested. “For quite a while. I was a part-time filing clerk at Wishart Brothers. The trouble is, no one wants filing clerks any more, it’s all computers and things. But I don’t think Arnold minded. Not at the time.”
“Well, he wouldn’t would he? It didn’t threaten him, did it, not filing. Men never mind their wives doing something low-status and boring, just to bring in a little money. It’s if she gets a proper job, something that stretches her, that uses her talents, that’s when …”
Actually, the filing job had used talents of a sort, though not ones that Val was likely to recognise. Mildred’s talent for not getting bored easily had come in very useful. But, alas, it was no longer the marketable asset it had once been. In an awful lot of jobs nowadays boringness had been replaced by complication, and this didn’t suit Mildred at all.
She tried another tack.
“And anyway, we had Flora in the end, and so whatever I’d done I’d have had to give it up then.”
Val was fairly bristling. She sat bolt upright in her chair, which creaked alarmingly under her feelings of outrage.
“Why would you have had to give it up? Why shouldn’t Arnold have given up his job instead? She was his baby too, wasn’t she?”
Indeed she was. Mildred’s modest energies could never have extended to finding herself an extra-marital relationship, not in a hundred years. The marital one was as much as she could cope with. But still, that wasn’t what Val had in mind. It was the Women’s Lib thing she was talking about; how fathers ought to share equally in the chores of child-care.
Mildred pondered.
“I don’t think actually that men make very good fathers,” she mused: and then, realising what she had said, went on hastily:
“Arnold was very good with her, really, when she was small,” she recalled, trying to be fair. “He used to read to her and things. It was when she was growing older, a teenager and so on … that he began to … Well, so did I, you know. We both did.”
From that point on, the problems of bringing up daughters began to dominate the conversation. Rudeness, untidiness, problem boy-friends, pocket-money … and Val had won – if that was the right word – inasmuch as her Rosemary now had a steady partner and a place at a College of Business Studies, whereas Flora was still causing Mildred untold anguish. All Arnold’s fault, of course, Val assured her. If only he’d spent more time with the girl, cared about her more … In the fading gold of twilight, Val’s hands looked very white and rather beautiful as she gesticulated wildly over the matter of paternal inadequacies. Not all of her accusations were quite fair. Arnold did care about Flora, worried desperately about her, though not perhaps in quite the way that Mildred worried. His worries were more general, more wide-ranging – about the girl’s whole way of life, really, and what sort of future she could be heading for. Mildred’s anxieties tended to be more specific, as the anxieties of mothers often are. The contact lenses, for example. Was Flora taking them out each night and sterilising them properly in the right kind of solution? Was she washing her hands thoroughly before inserting them? How could she be taking these sorts of precautions in that unhygienic hovel, with sleeping-bags all over the floor and the water running brown out of the only tap that worked? And if she wasn’t, might she not contract some horrible eye disease? Mildred wished, passionately, that Arnold had never bought her the things, but all the same, you couldn’t actually blame him for it. He’d just wanted his daughter to look beautiful, to be able to discard her unbecoming glasses, to have the best of everything, despite her surliness and ingratitude.
Val, such a tower of strength in discussing broken marriages and the manifold failings of the male sex, hadn’t proved quite so supportive about Flora, though she’d tried to be.
“Well, at least she’s not pregnant,” Val had remarked at one point, in an attempt at consolation, but, as it happened, this was entirely the wrong thing to say.
Because Mildred would have loved Flora to be pregnant. An illegitimate baby would be such a healthy sort of a problem, such a normal – even a fashionable – one. One that Mildred could do something about. Money. Baby-sitting. Something. And, who knows, in this situation Flora might begin to feel – might even show – a spark of gratitude for what her mother was doing for her. And wouldn’t that be wonderful!
CHAPTER FIVE
And now, three weeks later, here she still was, hanging about in Val’s kitchen. Still with no plans, still with nothing to do. Timorously, and hoping it wouldn’t annoy Val when she came in, Mildred had been spending the afternoon wiping dust and traces of stickiness off the jars and bottles that lurked, rarely used, on the upper shelves of Val’s kitchen cupboard. With one half of her mind she was hoping that Val wouldn’t notice, because she might count it as “helping”; with the other half she was hoping that Val would, because otherwise what was the point of doing it at all?
There was no getting away from it, the two of them weren’t getting on quite as well as they had in the beginning. There was no open rift, no hurtful home-truths had been exchanged; it just wasn’t as much fun as it had been. At the beginning, all that talk about the awfulness of men had been balm to Mildred’s injured feelings, but latterly she had found herself getting irked by it. Not only their own failed marriages, but the failed marriages of most of their friends had been raked-over, at first enjoyably; but by now Mildred was beginning to feel that the subject had been just about talked into the ground. Surely the break-up of all these assorted marriages couldn’t always be entirely the fault of the husband, as Val’s discourse would seem to imply? For this to be the case, the wives would all have had to be perfect, and one doubted that there existed in the world enough perfect women to go round, let alone for each of these singularly undeserving men to have secured one? In particular, this portrait of Arnold as a monster of selfishness was no longer as soothing to Mildred’s ego as it had been, though it was hard to see why. Val’s tirades against him were, after all, only echoes of Mildred’s own complaints. Val was merely taking her side as a good friend should. But she did it with such gusto, somehow, and with such unremitting rancour.
“Dragging you off against your will”, “Treating you as a Thing”. “Ruining your life!”
Tearfully, furiously, Mildred had indeed made every one of these accusations at one time or another. But had it, actually, been quite like that? Sometimes, lying awake in Val’s spare bedroom, listening to the trains that ran quite near the end of Val’s garden, Mildred had found herself going over in her mind those weeks during which she and Arnold had battled over the project; he bullying, pleading, cajoling; she resisting with all her feeble strength until finally, from sheer weariness, she had given in.
Yes. On the face of it, this was a fair account of what had happened. He had won. She had lost. And yet … and yet … at odd moments, even while she’d been protesting most strongly and railing most bitterly against the folly, the sheer madness of the whole idea – at odd moments something had flashed across her consciousness like a flash of unfamiliar light; the kind of light that curves briefly across a ceiling when a car goes past in the small-hours; and she’d been aware of a small flicker of excitement such as she hadn’t known in years. Something was happening. Newness was brushing their lives. And though she had gone on protesting, had continued to feel terrified at the whole project, something deep in her heart was all the time changing, was shifting, while she wasn’t even looking, over to Arnold’s side.
*
Downstairs, the front door slammed. Val was back; and with a pang of dismay Mildred remembered that this was Thursday. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays Val went jogging after work, and her insistence that Mildred should accompany her never flagged, despite the mounting evidence that the attempt could only end in abject failure. Sometimes the failure was less abject
than at others, but this didn’t help. It only served to confuse the issue, and to weaken Mildred’s resistance.
“But I’m fifty-three!” Mildred had howled when Val had first confronted her with this horrifying prospect. “Nobody of my age …!”
But of course she hadn’t got away with it. Age-ism was apparently only second to sexism as the ultimate sin; and anyway, was not Val herself nearly forty-nine?
“And you needn’t think that I’m going to give up in four years time, just because I’ll be fifty-three! On the contrary, the older you are the more important it is to keep fit” – and she’d added, for good measure, that age is all a matter of your mental attitude.
“Think you’ve got arthritis and you have got arthritis,” she airily explained. “Think you’ve got a bad back and you have got a bad back. Think you have a heart problem and you have got a heart problem. Think you have dropped arches and …”
By this time, Mildred thought that she had all of these things; but it availed her nothing. And so, from then on, too weak to resist, she had accompanied her friend to the local park on the prescribed evenings and, after stumbling sometimes a hundred yards, sometimes as much as two hundred, she would collapse onto a seat and await Val’s triumphant return, having done 3, 4, or sometimes it might be 5 or 6 circuits in whatever number of minutes was remarkable for that particular distance. Mildred was very vague about what was remarkable and what wasn’t, but all the same was ready to be impressed, as indeed behoves the one who can only do a hundred yards, or at most two hundred.
“And you’ve got the wrong shoes, too,” Val would say, and no doubt this was true. Equipping herself with the right shoes was just one more thing that Mildred was no good at … Like typing, book-keeping, raising a daughter, organising a Tea Room and running more than two hundred yards.
On this particular evening she hadn’t done too badly. She had got as far as the third seat along the avenue before flopping down and watching Val’s disappearing thighs dappled by the evening sunlight through the trees.
The Echoing Stones Page 4