The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  I loved him, I told myself as he manoeuvred the car backwards and forwards into its parking position. I loved him, I reminded myself, as he ordered my favourite dishes, and raised his glass of wine.

  With Martin I would be safe; there would be no more need to worry about the future, no more climbing agents’ stairs, no more waiting anxiously for the telephone to ring, no more wondering if promises would be kept. I remembered the words of the little Cockney comedian in his dressing room as, his face damp with perspiration, and his eyes sunk deep into the hollows of his made-up face, he’d said, ‘I’ll get in touch about May. This television thing could be just the break you deserve, so don’t commit yourself before then.’

  If I married Martin, all the waiting, all the anxiety, would be over. As Martin’s wife I could put my dancing shoes away and concentrate on being cherished. I raised my own glass, and gazed ahead into a positive vista of security and comfort, and I felt so sad, I had to blink my eyes to prevent the unexpected tears from spilling over.

  Martin was one of the kindest people I had ever known. He was that rare being, a thoroughly good man. I leaned forward and impulsively covered his hand with my own.

  ‘I can’t marry you, Martin,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but it wouldn’t be fair. You need someone who loves you as you deserve to be loved, not a girl who postpones her wedding for a chance that she knows in her heart of hearts may never come. Forgive me . . .’

  He didn’t argue. I’d known that he wouldn’t.

  Back in the flat Martin stood there looking miserable and bewildered, and I slipped my ring off my finger and held it out to him.

  ‘If that’s the way you want it, Claire,’ he said, and I stared back at him, willing him to take me in his arms and plead with me to change my mind. If he’d done that, who knows what might have happened, but he gave the ring a pathetic little toss into the air, caught it sadly and placed it carefully in his pocket.

  ‘Then there’s nothing more to say, is there?’ he said, and dropped a chaste kiss on my forehead. He even remembered to close the door when he went out.

  I undressed and sat in my dressing gown creaming my face, then I brushed my hair hard a hundred times. What was wrong with me? I had sent away a man most girls would gladly have given their eye-teeth for, but why? In the mirror my eyes widened with surprise as I faced the truth. All because an unknown stranger, a big man with a thatch of unruly black hair, had made me laugh, and told me a truth I had been unwilling to face.

  I was almost asleep when the telephone rang.

  ‘It’s me again,’ the deep voice said. ‘I’ve just remembered that we didn’t complete the questionnaire. It seems a pity, because my views on double-strength paper towels are quite something. Also, I’m stuck with my story, and if I see you again you may just give me the inspiration to finish it.’

  ‘I’ve broken off my engagement,’ I said. ‘You were right, I didn’t love him, and it’s your fault.’

  There was silence which lengthened.

  ‘Can I come round?’ the dark brown voice said.

  ‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ I told him, and he laughed.

  ‘I’ve already proved how trustworthy I am. A quarter of an hour and I’ll be there.’

  ‘You can’t – ’ I began, but the telephone went dead.

  Martin would have been shocked to the very core of his being if he’d seen the speed with which I threw on my clothes, and the slapdash way in which I powdered my face.

  And he would have been stunned at the way in which I went straight into Simon’s arms when he held them out to me.

  ‘You can’t fall in love. Not just like that, willy-nilly,’ he would have said.

  But you can, and I had, just like that. And it was the easiest, most wonderful thing in the world.

  Back to Square One

  MARTIN WAS A rather ruddy-cheeked, square, less-than-average-height, tweed-jacket type of man. A man’s man, with a tactless way of saying what amounted to the wrong thing, and, according to his wife Dorothy, completely lacking in anything that could pass for sensitivity.

  And being a humble man, he would have agreed with her.

  In these modern days, when marriage is often referred to as being merely a sentimental custom, and when the Wednesday Play on television sets out to show less discerning mortals what life is really like, Martin was, he wryly supposed, something of a biological phenomenon.

  He had met Dorothy during the war when they were both stationed ‘somewhere’ in England on the same aerodrome. He had met her, fallen in love, married her, and from that day forward had never wanted to sleep with any other woman.

  She was his life, his love, his sole delight, and with each passing year his love for her grew into a tender, deeply satisfying emotion.

  And from that love came Janet and Gillian, completely unidentical twins, and Tommy, who, like his father, according to his mother, must have been on the back row when tact was being given out.

  Then, because both Martin and Dorothy loved their children unselfishly – loved them enough to let them go – they found themselves alone when Martin was only forty-five, and Dorothy forty-three.

  ‘We’re back to square one,’ as Martin said, puffing away at his disgustingly filthy pipe, and staring through the smoke cloud at his wife as she sat across the room in her chair, the glow from the standard lamp touching her soft hair to gold.

  Martin had soon learned that her hair was tinted, not dyed, and only that evening, coming in from an exhausting day at the office, he’d said the wrong thing again: ‘You’ve been having your hair dyed again,’ he’d said, when what he really meant to say was how attractive she looked. He’d never learn.

  ‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ she said.

  Martin’s face went blank as he said: ‘Are what?’

  That was another of his faults – he very often forgot what he’d said the minute after he’d said it.

  ‘What you said we were,’ Dorothy said, and not for the first time he detected a note of wistful sadness in her voice.

  He couldn’t bear to see her even slightly unhappy, loving her as much as he did, but well aware of his shortcomings when it came to putting his innermost thoughts into words, he made a great show of relighting his pipe, though all the time it was roaring like a factory chimney inside.

  So, because his heart was large, and of the sentimental kind, he decided that she needed cheering up. Even with his lack of insight it was obvious that since Tommy had left to work and study in London, his wife had fretted. Was fretting, he corrected himself, seeing the droop of her shoulders.

  He spoke carefully, weighing each word with care: ‘Isn’t it nice living in a tidy house for a change?’ he began, blowing out what he was sure was a tactful cloud of smoke.

  Dorothy didn’t reply, so he enlarged on his chosen theme: ‘The toothpaste is always where it could be expected to be, and the bottle of shampoo lasts for more than a week, and best of all, we can go to bed at night and bolt the front door, knowing that we don’t have to lie awake waiting for the sound of Tommy’s motor bike. At least, wherever he is, or whatever he’s doing, we don’t know about it, so we can’t worry, can we, darling?’

  Because of the cloud of smoke he couldn’t see the expression in his wife’s blue eyes, which was perhaps as well.

  ‘I think you’re actually glad that they’ve left home, and that we’re alone,’ she said, and without the slightest hesitation, deaf to her icy tone, Martin agreed

  ‘It’s rather nice being a middle-aged Darby and Joan,’ he said.

  There was a silence which grew and lengthened, and so he tried again: ‘Remember all that cooking you used to do? All the washing and the ironing? Now you can sit with your feet up all day. How does it feel to be a lady of leisure?’

  The smoke cleared a little, and from across the big family-sized room, Dorothy stared at him.

  For one uncomfortable, bewildered moment, he felt as though she had penetrated his very soul.

  ‘I�
��ll make the coffee,’ she said, ‘congratulating myself the while that there are only two cups and saucers to put on the tray instead of five, as there used to be when we were a family, not just a middle-aged Darby and Joan.’

  He could tell by her back, and the deliberate way she closed the door, extra gently, that once again he’d said the wrong thing. His pipe had gone out, but somehow he hadn’t the heart to light it, so he sat there with its comforting warmth in the hollow of his hand. He didn’t understand, that was what Dorothy had always told him; he didn’t even try to understand.

  Supposing, just supposing, when she came back with the coffee, he were to take it from her, and set it down on the low table, then kneel down on the rug by the side of her chair and tell her what was in his heart?

  He tapped out his pipe on a big glass ashtray, issues too complex for him to resolve creasing his usually smooth forehead into tramlines of anxiety.

  He’d remind her that when he had finally come home to her after the war, the twins were already one year old, so that in effect they had never known a life together without children. Then he’d tell her that in the last few weeks, since they were alone for the first time in their marriage, it had seemed to him that she had grown younger and more beautiful, as though a miracle had taken place.

  When he looked at her nowadays he saw again the girl he’d married all those years ago.

  Then she’d laugh, and he’d say something about her being a little fatter but that it didn’t matter.

  He chewed worriedly on the stem of his pipe . . . No, perhaps he wouldn’t say anything about her being fatter, Dorothy was inclined to be touchy about that.

  And yet to him, she was still eminently desirable. That’s what he’d say. He was improving all the time.

  He jumped when Dorothy spoke at his elbow. He hadn’t heard her come in with the tray. It was as though he’d been miles away.

  ‘I’ll take that, darling,’ he said, and just as he’d planned he put the tray down on the coffee table, and went over to kneel on the rug by her side.

  But the telephone rang, and she ran, actually ran, into the hall. ‘Perhaps it’s one of the girls,’ she said, and he could hear her voice out there, and the way it always came alive with a kind of singing joy, whenever one of them rang.

  So he sugared the coffee, two lumps for himself because he didn’t care all that much about his figure, and one lump for Dorothy, because she did. He hoped she wouldn’t be long or it would go cold, and worse than that, he’d forget what he had decided to say.

  Dorothy wasn’t long, because it was Janet, the elder twin. Telephoning from Yorkshire, where she lived, was an expensive business.

  He remembered every word he’d decided to say, but when she came back, Dorothy looked different somehow. Even the way she walked across the room, took her cup from the tray, and settled herself down in her chair.

  She seemed older, although the tired droop to her shoulders had gone. Now she was smiling and obviously excited.

  ‘Guess what,’ she said. ‘Janet is going to have a baby. I’m going to be a grandmother. And you’ll be a grandfather,’ she added softly, almost as an afterthought.

  Then she came over and knelt by his chair, and her blue eyes were opaque with tenderness as she gazed backwards into a vista of nappies and bottles and potty-training.

  ‘It’s just as you said, darling. We’re back where we started, back to square one. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  And of course it was wonderful, and natural, and life was sweet, and not a bit like the Wednesday Play on television.

  Martin stretched out his hand and clumsily touched her cheek, and incredibly the girl he’d seen just a few minutes ago had disappeared. He could see the fine wrinkles round his wife’s eyes, and the incipient double chin, and a bit of hair at the side that they’d missed with the dye. Sorry – he apologised to himself – the tint.

  The girl had gone for ever, he knew that now, and in her place was a little plump woman – a grandmother.

  ‘Imagine us grandparents. It’ll be like starting all over again,’ she said softly, and he agreed.

  Because it was true, perfectly true. So why, then, did Martin, a man’s man, completely lacking in sensitivity, feel a lump in his throat as he stroked his wife’s hair, and what surely to goodness could not be tears pricking away at the back of his eyes?

  The Road to the Isles

  WHEN STEVE AND I got engaged after knowing each other for only a month, I knew exactly what my mother would say, and sure enough she did.

  ‘The fiercer the flame the sooner it dies,’ she said, and she was right.

  In August, with our holiday booked – we were going with Steve’s friend Andy and his fiancée to Cornwall – Steve suddenly told me he had met Another, and that he felt it was better for me to suffer now rather than later, when I might wake up and find myself married to the wrong person.

  But you aren’t the wrong person, I would have cried if my pride had let me. You’re the rightest person lever met. You are all I want, with your sad dark eyes, and your little-boy-lost appeal. I want to marry you and look after you; cherish you always, till death do us part.

  Instead I wrenched off my ring, held it out to him, and stared unbelievingly as he gave it a mournful little toss and stowed it away in his pocket. I had the ignoble feeling that before the week was out he would be forcing my ring on to the third finger of Another’s left hand.

  I had managed during the weekends to acquire a nice tan, and now there was a pale circle on my finger reminding me of my irretrievable loss. I stared at it sadly.

  ‘What will you do about your holiday?’ asked my mother, after she had repeated the bit about the fiercer the flame.

  I gazed down the long vista of empty years that I knew stretched ahead. ‘Stay at home. What does it matter?’ I asked her. What did anything matter? I asked myself.

  She exchanged a look with my father, and I knew they’d discussed the whole thing in detail. ‘You could come to Scotland with us,’ she suggested. ‘We don’t like to think of you mooning round the house on your own for a whole fortnight. You need a holiday.’

  ‘Everyone needs a holiday,’ said my father, dead on cue.

  ‘I can’t think of anything that appeals to me less than touring, bed-and-breakfast style,’ I said ungratefully. ‘No, I’ll stay at home and maybe decorate my room, and take care of the dog. It will save you his kennel fees,’ I added, and made my escape before my mother could start her persuasive tactics again.

  Usually my parents went abroad, to Italy or the Costa Brava, coming back with a suntan and peeling noses, and souvenirs to add to the white shelves in the sitting room. But this year my father, fired with national enthusiasm and disheartened by devaluation, had renounced his love of foreign travel.

  I had always wanted to see Scotland myself, but to go away with my parents was unthinkable. Quite out of the question.

  My father cherishes our five-year-old car with the care usually lavished on a delicate only child, and rather than subject it to the rigours of the motorways, he had booked it a passage on British Rail’s motorail to Perth.

  Mother and I watched as he personally supervised it being driven on to the rail truck, and when we arrived in Perth in a damp and dismal dawn, he was first off the train to check that it had arrived safely.

  There was a grey sky almost touching the tops of grey stone buildings, and over the station car park seagulls were wheeling with mournful cries. I sat huddled in the back of the car and thought about Steve in Cornwall with Another.

  I was sure that there the sun would be shining, the air filled with a tropical warmth. I shivered and huddled lower into my coat.

  ‘Well, this is it!’ said my father, sliding behind the driving wheel and starting in on a chorus of ‘The Road to the Isles’.

  In less than an hour we were driving along a well-kept country road, with hedges growing greenly on either side, and a view of blue hills in the distance. Every ten minutes or so we
would pass another car, and my father would extol the joys of motoring in Scotland, comparing it with his daily traffic crawl into London.

  ‘It’s raining,’ I said, determined not to see the bright side.

  ‘Scotch mist,’ said my father, and went on to ‘Ye Banks and Braes’. . .

  Around eleven o’clock, my mother said that her very soul was crying out for a cup of coffee, so we stopped at a small grey inn and sat round a table in a parlour with paintings of Highland cattle peering at us from the walls. At first I thought the room was empty, then, in the farthest corner, I saw a khaki-coloured anorak huddled over a steaming cup of coffee.

  My father, who would have struck up an acquaintance with Greta Garbo in five seconds fiat, said, ‘The top of the morning to you’ – or the Scottish equivalent to that.

  The anorak turned round, and a brown face sprouting the stubbly beginnings of a fair beard presented itself to us.

  Within minutes the young man had joined us at our table, and my father had built up a complete case history on him. His name was Malcolm, and he had started out from London and got as far as the border when his car had broken down. Rather than miss his holiday, he had left his heavy camping equipment in the boot, packed a toothbrush and a couple of shirts into his haversack, and taken to the road. He was a teacher at a big comprehensive school in the East End of London, and his mother, a widow, lived by herself in Wales and kept hens in her back garden.

  ‘What a shame,’ said my mother referring to the car. ‘And have you been lucky so far with lifts?’

  I knew what was coming, and I was right. As my father swung the car out on to the road again, there was Malcolm and his haversack sitting beside me on the back seat. I studied him dispassionately.

  Close to, he was quite attractive, though not nearly so handsome as Steve of course. He had thick fair hair, and his eyes were a blue so dark as to be almost navy. He laughed a lot at everything my parents said, and I began to wonder about him.