When I Was Otherwise

by Stephen Benatar

  “And with all that flesh you carry…aren’t you frightened for your heart?”

  “Only when I’m with you.”

  She smiled.

  “No but seriously,” she said, “the forties are a notoriously dangerous age. I mean—for men. Only the other day I heard of someone who was…well, he was also just forty-four, funnily enough. Enjoyed a good game of tennis in the morning—but he was quite used to playing it, of course—must have been in better shape than you are. In the afternoon he suddenly keeled over. Dead. No warning whatsoever. Bonk! That was a Sunday, too.”

  “I’m sorry to hear of it,” said Andrew.

  “But the point is, dear: have you decided yet on the things that are really important to you? That’s what I’m anxious to find out.”

  “Yes. Margaret Thatcher. The winner of the Grand National. The state of the stock market.” He said this with not the glimmer of a smile.

  Daisy laughed; and for the time being looked upon him far more kindly. “Yes. You are your father’s son.” As clearly as his brother was—though in a different way. In actual appearance Andrew looked more like his uncle than he did his father.

  “You think so?”

  “I hear that you’re his favourite, too. His and his new wife’s.” (Of thirty-two years’ standing.)

  “Just as Malcolm is his mother’s.”

  “Well, yes, there may be something in that, also.”

  There was a pause. This moment of better feeling between them was precariously balanced.

  Andrew spoke about the weather.

  “It looks as though things might be brightening up,” he concluded, conscientiously. “And not before time!”

  Daisy nodded her agreement. “What’s more, a break by the sea wouldn’t do you any harm either, I daresay. And as for Myra—well, I should have thought she was positively crying out for one; what with all that poor health which she enjoys.”

  “She does not enjoy it.”

  “Exactly. Which is the very thing I’m saying to you. A holiday would set her up.”

  “I think that’s Uncle Dan back, isn’t it?”

  Yet Daisy hadn’t heard Dan; nor, indeed, her nephew.

  “But…don’t you have any discipline at all, then, over those two boys of yours? In my day they wouldn’t have been allowed just to go off like that—no, certainly not—not when it was a question of visiting their grandmother. I’ll bet they get to see her mother a little more often! Any takers I wonder? And did you know she’s made you all a lemon meringue pie? Not that I’m advising you, Andrew, to eat more than the merest mouthful. But all the same I think it’s very sad. I wonder if you’d like to give me another of those cigarettes, dear? They’re rather small ones, aren’t they?”

  Andrew only said, as he offered her the packet, “Myra’s mother died, Aunt Daisy. In 1970 or thereabouts.”

  Although his tone was reasonably expressionless something in his eyes indicated that he thought this to be a fair point.

  Daisy commiserated—genuinely. She wanted to hear the details. She was sorry that Marsha had never told her. She would have sent some flowers.

  But then her flow of sympathy reverted into its former channel.

  “Anyhow, dear. We don’t want to split hairs, do we? The principle remains the same.”

  Dan, who had been briefly sidetracked into the downstairs cloakroom, entered the lounge at last. The bottle he carried was still wrapped in its tissue paper.

  “Sorry to have been so long: there was quite a queue! Anyway, Andrew, I see you’ve been in good hands during my absence. Never a dull moment while Daisy’s around. What have the two of you been nattering about?”

  “Oh,” said Daisy, with a careless laugh. “Nothing very much. We’ve just been setting the world to rights—haven’t we, dear? But, yes, I think you could say I’ve been managing to keep him tolerably well entertained; perhaps I have my uses. I told him he was like his father. Wouldn’t you say so? Has many of the same mannerisms, seems to me.”

  Marsha came in.

  “Dinner’s on the table, everyone.”

  “Ah, Marsha. Just in time to join us for a sherry,” said Dan. “I was going to bring you yours in the kitchen.”

  “No, no. Everything will get cold. You’ve got to come at once.”

  “Oh. Right you are, madam.” Dan put down the bottle, still in its tissue paper. “Well, never mind. It won’t come to any great harm, I suppose.”

  Daisy stared from one to the other of them—and then at the bottle—with incredulous disgust. “Well, who can be surprised he wanted to divorce her?” she enquired of the world in general, in an undertone.

  “What was that, Daisy?”

  “Only my little joke, dear. And I daresay you were much better off for it, in any case. I think that new dress is most becoming. At least, I don’t believe I’ve seen it before, have I?”

  “Not more than a dozen times.”

  Marsha went ahead, into the dining room.

  Daisy adjusted her hearing aid. She said to Andrew, as he held the door open for her: “Oh, my word…that was a close shave! Did you see that quite old-fashioned look she flashed me? Pure cutthroat! But thank God—if there’s one quality I do possess—that quality is tact. I may get into things; but I always get out of them. Hallelujah! Anyway she probably didn’t hear me if the truth be told. These days she’s nearly as deaf as I am. Dan, as well. Poor old things. You just have to make allowances for them both; whatever you do, dear, try not to forget that. You’ll find it makes things easier. I do.”

  It was one of the longest exit lines that even she had ever delivered—especially while a gentleman was holding the door open for her.

  “Come on, old girl,” said Dan. “Beep, beep! Beep, beep! You’re causing an obstruction.”

  23

  But Marsha had heard.

  And was she better off for it—as the old witch had then had the temerity to tell her?

  Was she? She waited until she went to bed that night really to think about it.

  Well, at first it hadn’t been so bad, certainly. Sometimes, she remembered now, she had actually sung at the beginning of a bright new day—for who could say what might be just around the corner?—and danced gaily through the empty flat, manoeuvring an excited Malcolm as her partner.

  Nor had she forgotten the sense of accomplishment she’d found in making a home out of something other than wedding presents and parental generosity. The sense of freedom. Before, when not accompanied by her own mother or by Andrew’s, she had usually been directed round the stores by a fiancé who, even then, had seemed a little penny-pinching and rather too concerned with the views of others. “I’ve heard that these days Mrs Quinn wouldn’t give a thank-you for anything made out of walnut,” he had said decisively, when Marsha had admired a very stylish wardrobe. Now, however, Malcolm and she scoured the secondhand shops (by this time Andrew had chosen to go off to boarding school) and generally celebrated the discovery of any small bargain by having their tea in a café, which really they couldn’t afford. And Malcolm often saved up his pocket money, too, to surprise her with something which he considered pretty, either for the mantelpiece in the lounge or for the one in her own bedroom. On the whole this was a very good time.

  But even then the loneliness had been apparent, especially after Malcolm had been tucked up in bed on those frequent long evenings when there was only the wireless or her library book for company. Nobody with whom to talk over the endless frustrations or the little excitements of the day which no child on earth, however sympathetic, could always be expected to find interesting. Nobody with whom it was any longer possible to try to laugh over the trivial, unmemorable things that in fact made up the fabric of a life. Even her own mother’s interest in what were, after all, her only two grandchildren appeared at times a trifle superficial, not at all what a husband’s would have been. Or should have been.

  It might have seemed less lonely, of course, if only she had enjoyed her job at the fl
ower shop.

  She did have boyfriends. Naturally. In those immediately postwar years she was still quite young. And one of them, a man called Peter Makins, had even promised to marry her as soon as his wife could be persuaded to divorce him. Yet she eventually realized that a woman in her thirties, even in her early thirties, with two growing children and hardly any money, was not a likely candidate for remarriage. The day she finally faced up to this was the day that middle age first took on a shape in earnest and when the distance to it didn’t seem so far.

  And though the boyfriends still came (and went) they weren’t any more the fancied pathway to a secure, companionable future but only a means of staving off awareness that no such future now existed. Theatres and dinners, drinks and cuddles, these were still enjoyable, of course, but with every year that passed she thought she grew a little more frenzied about the amount of significance she attempted to see in them, the amount of pleasure she attempted to derive from them.

  In the late nineteen-forties her mother suggested she should go to a marriage bureau. Over the years she went to several. The nervousness, the disappointment, the frustration…the boredom. Occasionally, however, you met someone who gave you just enough hope to carry on, although more often you vowed to yourself that never again…no, never again. It was pitiful, some of the types you were obliged to eat dinner with: she remembered the man with the appalling stammer and the constant rivulet of saliva dribbling out of one corner of his mouth.

  And yet you did go on, for the mere fact, often, that you felt so desperate and were afraid to stop.

  Surprisingly, though, the early nineteen-fifties introduced a comradeship and a contentment which were to last for more than a decade and which were to provide not merely the most fulfilling period of her later life but even of her earlier one as well—yet it was only towards its end she properly understood how happy she had been. Another divorcée had moved into the flat above, and an equally nice woman, whose husband was nearly always away, into the one immediately below; there were just four flats to the building, one on every floor. Her own home became the common meeting ground. Virtually every evening either Beryl or Joan or both of them would come in for a gossip and a cup of tea and stay at least an hour, more usually for two or three. Joan worked in a film studio—she was assistant to the art director—and Beryl in a handmade-chocolate shop. And it was so lovely to hear of their day-to-day experiences and to be able to tell them yours. The laughs they had. It was almost like being at school again, only there Marsha had never had two such very close friendships, only a continuous procession of giggles and pranks and dares, which had undoubtedly given rise to lots of merriment but hadn’t proved either lasting or meaningful. She discovered for practically the first time in her life the deep satisfaction there was in having women friends—as opposed to men friends—who really knew, and cared, what you were talking about, who didn’t make demands and with whom you could simply be yourself. Malcolm, as he grew older, was often there as well, and sometimes, even, the pleasant elderly couple in the downstairs flat might drop in for a short while, they and the wife’s dotty sister, but essentially it was a trio, and it was lovely being part of a trio.

  Eventually Marsha worked in the same chocolate shop as Beryl but this was when that halcyon period was drawing to its close. Their rents were to have been put up alarmingly; the whole of Paddington Street was beginning to acquire a gloss. They all had to look for cheaper accommodation and in the process they were scattered.

  So to all intents and purposes she lost her friends, and she lost Malcolm. She went to Golders Green. Moved there on the same day Kennedy was shot. Malcolm went to Dulwich. It had seemed the moment for a break: “I can’t remain with you for ever.” He was nearly twenty-four. Marsha had always wanted him to marry and to provide her with grandchildren—Andrew’s, she had once confessed to Joan, would never give her half the pleasure—but she hadn’t thought about the time when he’d be old enough to do so; hadn’t allowed herself to think about it. Now, as he kept on saying, a smaller flat was cheaper than a larger one and obviously she wouldn’t want to make another move in just a year or two.

  She wouldn’t have minded. Honestly. It would have been worth it. And the further move would even have supplied her with an object. Something to counterbalance the tedium of a future which she foresaw as being empty and aimless.

  Yet she hadn’t told him that; she hadn’t wanted to become possessive. But since in reality she had always been possessive this decision to let him go was as brave as it was painful. It hurt her more than the separation from her husband. It hurt her more than the separation from her friends.

  At first she saw Beryl and Joan reasonably often. Then the gaps between their meetings grew longer. By the time, three years later, that she gave up her flat in Golders Green and went to live with her mother, now a charmingly eccentric despot of eighty-nine, they were no longer meeting at all. She hardly even spoke to either of them more than twice a year—although they still remembered one another’s birthdays and sent nice cards at Christmas, with several lines of news on the side that faced the greeting.

  But what was so incredible—that even when they did speak it could nowadays be a little hard to think of things to say!

  Joan had married again. Beryl’s husband had given up his life in repertory and on tour. Times had changed.

  Times were always changing.

  Oh, how she wished that she too could have remarried: somebody chatty and understanding but strong and protective. Andrew had very soon found somebody else—a married woman he had met during the war who had been running a NAAFI at the time, was a couple of years older than he was and apparently had a forceful enough character to brook no nonsense either from canteen staff or from difficult husbands. For a long time now he had been rather well off. This didn’t reflect itself in the maintenance he paid but she supposed it was something he still paid maintenance at all. She felt bitter about two things: firstly, that it was always so easy for a man, relatively unencumbered and earning well, to find himself another mate; and secondly, that it was now Janet, not she, who was reaping the benefit of all those early years of struggle. She didn’t know if Andrew was still a stick-in-the-mud. Most probably he was, although there couldn’t now be any need for it, financially. Yet she herself had certainly become one—at first through force of circumstance but finally through inclination—and she resented this greatly.

  She had become somewhat shy. Quite nervous of the world. People said she had grown hard. She realized they could possibly be right.

  But she had so much hated being alone. When her mother died Marsha had gone to share the home of another woman; she’d seen the advert on a board. And, after that, of another. In neither case had it been a good idea: the bickering in both those flats had been interminable. If she had grown hard it was in watching out for her own rights. But at least it had been better than being alone (she had told herself afterwards, when she was alone). She had ended up back in Golders Green.

  Which was where she’d been living when she had received Dan’s invitation: to come to join him in Hendon.

  And now she bickered with Daisy in place of those other women. She even bickered with Dan. There were times when she felt like strangling the pair of them. So was she any better off? She might just as well have tried to hold on to Andrew—she thought he’d probably grown easier with age, at the same time that she herself had certainly grown more assertive—even though the biggest mistake of her life was in ever having married him in the first place, in not having realized that with patience she could surely have done so much better. Malcolm was her one consolation and yet she didn’t even see a lot of him any longer. It was ironic, too, that it should have been the one time she had actually held out against her mother, who on other occasions had made choices for her which she ought to have held out against.

  Including the one not to let her study at RADA.

  For if only as a young woman or a child she could have trained there, or
at one of the other theatrical schools, then who knew how different her life might have been? How full of colour, satisfaction and abiding love, how full of stimulation and of point? Who knew? It was true, as Daisy had once said and she herself had never since forgotten, that she’d been dealt a wonderfully good hand at birth and if only she’d also been given the skill with which to play it…? She thought in that case she could possibly have been amongst the very luckiest of mortals. (She had been foolishly impressed as well by Daisy’s allusion to the Sleeping Beauty.) But as it was…?

  She remembered that a younger cousin, not nearly her equal in looks nor with nearly so sweet a singing voice, had become quite well-known as an actress and a film star. She had lived for many years in Hollywood where, allegedly, she had attended many a glamorous and star-studded party. Whereas Marsha herself…well, what had she ever done? What famous person had she ever been introduced to, at any party at all, whether in Lausanne or Throgmorton Street or at John and Evelyn’s house in Pinner?

  Oh God. She turned onto her other side and peered at the luminous hands of her bedside travelling clock. One-thirty-five.

  So all right, she told herself, and with sudden fierce determination, forget RADA; forget Hollywood. If she had stayed with Andrew—or, rather, if Andrew had stayed with her—she would never have met Joan. She would never have met Beryl.

  It was necessary to be reminded.

  24

  “It’s amazing,” said Joan. “The days when you’re working and don’t appear to have a single spare minute, you can reorganize your own life and everybody else’s without turning a hair; the days when you’re free, it becomes a major expedition to go out and buy a birthday card. I bought a birthday card this evening. It was just before the shops closed. I swear, I’d been working up to it all day. I’d better not tell you what I had intended doing with my time.”

  “Oh, go on, though, do tell us!” cried Marsha.

  “I’d intended to give the flat its weekly clean, get up-to-date with the ironing, and turn out the kitchen drawers. And that was just to start with.”