by James Runcie
‘You’re not a country person, are you?’
I took off my jacket and lit a cigarette. ‘Then I suppose you’ll have to teach me.’
‘You don’t need that …’ he said, looking at the cigarette.
‘Just dance with me, Stan.’
He was a good mover. I only hoped he wasn’t thinking of his wife.
Eventually when I’d finished the cigarette we started necking and we sank to the floor, right by the rug and the fire like he had wanted. After a while he broke off and asked if I wouldn’t prefer to be more comfy in the bedroom.
Comfy.
That wasn’t how I would have described it, since the sheets were yellow nylon and the room wasn’t heated, but we made the best of it and I managed not to think of Martin or the wedding or where my life was heading. I looked up at the ceiling and listened to the rain until Stan came. Then he turned away and I think he began to cry, although he didn’t want to let me see that. Perhaps his wife wasn’t dead after all.
By then it was six or seven o’clock and I felt a bit sick. I went to the bathroom and had a shower to let the smell of sex and Cointreau run away from me. There was some Imperial Leather, which was a relief because the only other scent on offer was the great smell of Brut and I didn’t want that.
I came back to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and put my clothes on.
‘You going?’ Stan asked.
‘Best get back.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Maynell Avenue.’
‘Can I see you again?’
‘If you want,’ I said. ‘There’s not much to see and you’ve seen most of it.’
‘Was it all right?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘We should do this again some time,’ he said, leaning back in the bed. I noticed he had put his hat back on. It was the only thing he was wearing. ‘So long, partner.’
The next day Mum wanted to stay in and watch The Sea Shall Not Have Them with Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde but I went to Dave’s house so he could tell me about the wedding. We smoked some dope and listened to Deep Purple singing ‘Wring That Neck’.
I wondered if I’d ever have feelings again. I thought about Martin and all that middle-class crap he wanted, clawing his way up into respectability. He still hadn’t got his head round the idea that this was 1969. He didn’t understand that once you’d sorted out your attitude to money and how much you needed then everything else followed. Did any of us want to have friends round for fondue suppers at a Habitat dining table? Did I really want to sit in a Vauxhall next to a husband in a Burton’s suit who was always the wag at the Christmas party? I’d rather be poor. I’d rather be desperate.
Five
Claire
We began our married life in a terraced house in Brighton. We couldn’t afford a home directly on the seafront so we found a dilapidated building three streets back with a balcony and a bit of a view. In the evenings we would ignore all the work that needed doing, open the windows and sit out drinking white wine, watching people walking on the esplanade and the gulls circling overhead. I had always liked seagulls as a child but once they start nesting in your roof you develop a more hostile attitude and I started to hate the bastards.
I was specialising in music and teaching a Primary 4 class in a Church of England JMI. Although Martin and I were lucky to find work I think we were surprised by the responsibility and the lack of freedom that went with it. For the past few years we had been the carefree generation with a conscience but once we were employed it was as if we had opened a door and walked straight into middle age. ‘This isn’t us,’ I wanted to say, ‘we’re not ready for this, it’s all a mistake,’ but we had to accept that we weren’t students any more.
Our house had once been divided into bed-sits and so we spent much of our early marriage knocking down flimsy dividing walls, sanding, polishing and choosing soft furnishings. Consequently most of our car journeys were either to Habitat, the local DIY store or the municipal dump.
I think we became almost careless of time; our marriage a procession of work, cooking and gardening, of Morecambe and Wise on the telly, and friends coming round for buffet suppers, music and the odd joint. Brighton was lively in the seventies, ‘a good place to bring up kids’, everyone said so, and we were invited almost every weekend to parties where we were offered nut loaf and potato salad, and where the decade’s greatest invention, the clip-on plastic wine-glass holder, had become the quintessential lifestyle accessory.
After a few years, and as soon as they thought it polite, people began to ask when Martin and I were going to start a family but there were enough children for me to be going on with at the school. I told everyone there was plenty of time and, besides, we wanted to enjoy being the two of us for as long as we could. I wasn’t ready to turn into my mother, a housewife in Oxfordshire, preparing endless batches of soup for the freezer, making marmalade in spring and chutney in autumn, and praying each day ‘because it does make a difference, darling, it really does’.
I think my parents were disappointed that I had to earn money. Although they could hardly disapprove of my being a teacher they clung to the notion that it was in some way shameful for a wife to work. They always looked at Martin with a faint air of regret because they didn’t think he earned enough to support me. Whenever they asked him a question it always came over as slightly patronising.
‘Still straightening out rivers, Martin? Still shoring up cliffs?’
They never understood that I actually wanted to teach. I loved the joy on the children’s faces as they sang together, happiness for which I was, in part, responsible. It wasn’t like maths or spelling where they were continually assessed; they came to music lessons as equals. No one had kicked the confidence out of them by telling them they were no good, and even the ones who all the other teachers said were trouble could always bang away on a glockenspiel. We warmed up with rounds, ‘Frère Jacques’ and ‘Non Nobis Domine’, and then got out the recorders for ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ and some old folk songs. I had a little music trolley and gave triangles, Indian bells, tambourines and a bass xylophone to those who couldn’t play the recorder and we rehearsed songs for school assembly extolling the joys of youth and creation, from ‘Farmer, Farmer, Sow Your Seed’ to ‘Glad That I Live Am I’.
Living in Brighton we didn’t have to travel far for our holidays and Martin worked all through the hot summer of 1976, examining the cracked and dried-out coastline, assessing the increased risk of landslip as the cliffs crumbled away. The reservoirs were depleted and the rivers low. Martin warned of a future of hot summers and flash floods. There was a hosepipe ban, you couldn’t wash your car, and the water board threatened to shut off the supply to household taps from two in the afternoon until seven the next morning. Even the fountains in Trafalgar Square were turned off.
In the garden I tried to mulch the roses with old dishwater and wet newspaper, but the thirstier plants all began to wither away in the arid soil. Only the lavender survived. I had always wanted to make a garden as my mother had done but there wasn’t the space or the money in Brighton. Of course I didn’t have the ability or the patience either, but at least I had the excuse that now we didn’t even have the water.
Then sometimes, when I was in the garden or out in the town, I would stop and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. I couldn’t understand how I had ended up dead-heading roses or carrying a shopping basket and why everyone kept asking me about my ‘hubby’ and what I was going to cook for him. At our wedding I’d been given a hostess trolley and a fondue set and I think everyone assumed that Martin would have the primary career and I’d be a dutiful wife who would simply dwindle into domesticity. But I just couldn’t do that.
I joined a women’s group where we shared experiences and talked about how the personal was as political as anything else in life. We sat round each other’s kitchen tables swapping Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, discussing patriarchal atti
tudes and whether or not sex with men was inherently oppressive. Was marriage a form of domination disguised by love? Had male power and female submission been eroticised? Should there be wages for housework?
Soon I could bandy about phrases like ‘the price of beauty’ and Martin became increasingly anxious, especially when I started talking about a woman’s right to refuse sex and control her own fertility. I think he thought it was a phase I was going through and he could tease me out of it by saying that he didn’t mind what I did provided I didn’t start wearing dungarees. I told him that I planned to start dressing for health and comfort rather than looks and if he didn’t watch out I would make him read all the articles in Spare Rib about the politics of appearance and the nature of women’s pleasure.
‘I thought I was quite good at women’s pleasure, my darling.’
‘All men think that, Martin. They never think there’s any room for improvement.’
‘Then you’ll just have to show me.’
‘And you’ll have to earn the right to be shown.’
Everything in my life seemed to involve presentation, some means of putting on a feminine mask to face the world, whether as teacher, wife, daughter or friend. I loathed being called ‘Mrs Turner’ at school and I hated being subject to what my friends called ‘the male gaze’.
‘Sometimes I’m not sure I know who you are any more …’ said Martin.
‘But wouldn’t it be boring if we stayed the same all the time?’
‘Yes, but I don’t want you turning into a completely different person. I could have married anyone if that was going to happen.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be helping me fulfil my potential, Martin? Isn’t that the point of marriage?’
I’d given him a tea towel on Valentine’s Day, the one saying how you start marriage by sinking into his arms and end up with your arms in his sink.
‘I know. But it’s hard. I wasn’t brought up to think like this.’
‘I hope you weren’t expecting a wife.’
‘Well, I did think that was the general idea.’
‘Then I’m sorry to disappoint you.’
Martin liked me being feisty just as long as it wasn’t with him.
‘It’s all right, Linda, I …’
‘What?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Did you just call me Linda?’
‘I didn’t mean to. It just came out. Perhaps it was the word “wife”.’
‘I can’t believe you did that. And now you’re smirking. It’s not funny, you know.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, don’t smile about it.’
‘I’m nervous. You make me nervous.’
‘Perhaps you should have married her after all,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t have given you so much trouble.’
‘It has occurred to me.’
‘Oh, it has, has it?’
‘But then, of course, my life wouldn’t be so delightfully combative, would it?’
‘Don’t push it, Martin …’
One day I found him looking through an old sketchbook Linda had given him. He thought I hadn’t noticed and he put it away quickly enough, but I knew what he was up to. It’s so irritating the way men romanticise former girlfriends. You can see the phrase ‘If only …’ hovering over their heads even if the whole thing was a disaster. In fact, very often the more dreadful it was at the time, the more they miss them.
Then there was the small matter of children. We didn’t speak about it much at first because we enjoyed our freedom and I think we were both scared by how much a baby might change us. I felt that I wasn’t ready and Martin was frightened by the idea. It was part of his general anxiety, the old fear of tragedy returning. How could I guarantee that our child would be healthy, that I wouldn’t die, or that nothing would go wrong?
We spent Christmas 1978 with my parents. Jonno was there with his little boy and Amanda was six months pregnant so much of the focus was on them. My mother kept giving me patient, loving looks but I could tell that hers was the smile of disappointment.
‘We don’t like to pry, dear, but is everything all right?’
‘It’s fine, Mummy, fine.’
‘If you need any advice, dear, you just have to ask. Or if you’d like your father to talk to Martin …’
‘No,’ I said, ‘please don’t do that.’
My father pretended he was unconcerned about the emptiness of my womb. Instead he asked me to play a piece of Bach on the violin. It was the only present he wanted, he said, just to listen to my music.
We went to church on Christmas Day, Martin and I all too aware of our unexercised faith but grateful for the ritual of lessons, carols and the half-forgotten certainties that had defined my childhood. Dad read from the Gospel of St John and stood in the pulpit dressed in a simple white surplice, telling of the Christ child as a light in the darkness, a fragile hope against all the unpredictability of the world.
It was a love, he said, that was as strong as death.
He talked of the power and the freshness of new birth, the child as source of peace and joy, and of comfort from fear, and I thought, suddenly, and for the first time, that he was preaching only to me.
Martin
Every time I went back to Canvey Dad and Vi were as embarrassed to ask as Claire’s parents. I could sense them starting to steer the subject round and then giving up and talking about football or the weather so it was a relief when we could finally tell them that Claire was pregnant.
‘Well, we were wondering,’ said Vi.
‘Thought there might be something wrong with you.’
‘Thanks, Dad …’
I watched the children coming out of my old school in Long Road and recognised some of my former friends waiting outside the gates, already parents. They looked tired and bored and were older than I had ever imagined they could be. Ade’s wife Kate was talking to Patsy Warner. I remembered how she used to let boys look at her knickers for a shilling a show. Linda told me that she was the first of her friends to lose her virginity. Then there was Henry Williams who used to invite the girls to watch him streak every night, and Alison Watkins, and Rosie Atkinson who everyone said had the best breasts in the school even though none of us had ever seen them.
Some of the old teachers were in a Portakabin: Mr Lister, Miss Dovedale, Mr Wheatley, Mr Keating, their names a roll-call of memory. I remembered Mr Dodd going through French irregular verbs until his mouth started to dribble, and Mr Longstaff who had left one afternoon and never come back. Why was that? we wondered. A nervous breakdown? Infidelity? Indiscretion?
When I was a child they had been tall and authoritative but now they seemed either eccentric or desperate. If we ever returned to Canvey they would teach our child and Claire would be one of their colleagues.
I wanted to be seventeen again, with Linda and the future all before us. I didn’t want to be middle-aged.
I tried to remember what it had been like in the past, when I had loved without imagining a future. Any consummated desire, any happiness, had always contained the possibility of its absence. This was how I had lived my life, holding back and protecting myself, still conscious of the loss of my mother, knowing how swiftly love could be taken away.
But now, with a child, love would have to be unconditional. I would have to provide the certainty and trust: a life without doubt.
Claire
It was 1979, the winter of discontent: freezing fogs and the roads not gritted; oilfields blockaded by fishermen and a national rail strike inevitable. There were drifts of snow fifteen feet deep, the snowman outside the school had an ‘Official Picket’ sign stuck round his neck, and the temperature was twenty-nine degrees below zero. Martin’s dad telephoned and told us that four men from Benfleet had gone missing at sea. Freak tides had breached the defences at Jaywick and a thousand people had been evacuated. A man had been found dead and covered in snow in a car park at Stanford-le-Hope.
There was rubbish everywhere.
Water workers, ambulance drivers and dustmen were on industrial action, and Martin had stayed on to help keep a pumping station open. We didn’t tell too many friends about that but he couldn’t afford to strike. He was management not production line and there wasn’t much of a choice with a baby on the way.
The first sign had been the surprise of my waters breaking before I felt any contractions. I awoke just before dawn to a feeling of wetness and the faint smell of protein, and I guessed what my doctor called ‘the unstoppable adventure’ had begun. The spontaneous rupture of membranes was like a wave unfurling over my baby’s head.
I woke Martin and told him to make a cup of tea and phone the hospital. I wanted him to be calm, and we had tried to anticipate every eventuality, but in the end we panicked like everyone else. When the contractions eventually came they were only four minutes apart and we had to make a mad dash.
We reached the hospital at nine in the morning and Lucy arrived at three minutes past five. Martin joked that it was the only nine-to-five job I’d ever done but I was too exhausted to find it funny. Instead I think we both cried.
There weren’t the words. I had started going into labour in a dream and woke to find my world utterly altered: Lucy’s crumpled face smoothing from old age to a baby, the grey-blue blood-streaked flesh slowly gathering colour like dawn. It was the reverse of dying; the eyes slowly opening, the head lifting to the air rather than sinking in the last gasp of death.
I could not believe the beauty of her presence; the nuzzling smell of her, the softness of her skin, the fragility of delicate fingernails and miniature curled toes. I could not understand how I could feel so much love and so much fear at the same time. If I lost this child I would have to live with an exploded heart.
But I found motherhood harder than I had ever imagined. It hurt as the baby took the colostrum, and when the milk eventually came in my breasts felt engorged, the areolae were swollen and hard. Lucy found it difficult to latch on, so much so that I couldn’t accept the fact that the bluish watery foremilk could ever be any good for her.