The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  It’s so funny. Before I came down to London, when I lived at home, I went around with Joe for a year and a half, but I never really knew him. It’s strange how you can talk to someone just one time, and feel you’ve known them all your life.

  I hope he hasn’t forgotten my number, but I know he wrote it down in a little notebook, because I teased him about it.

  ‘Adding mine to a long list?’ I said, and he grinned.

  ‘Not all that many,’ he said.

  That was another thing about him. He could be laughing one minute and serious the next. I could sketch his face now, if I was good at that sort of thing. It’s printed on my mind like one of those photographs that develop in an instant.

  If I go over to the cupboard and take down the coffee and make myself a cup, he’ll ring. Just as the kettle boils. I know it. I know it for certain.

  There, I knew I was right! But I’ll let it ring three, four times, then try to make my voice sound casual, or maybe even a little preoccupied, as if he were interrupting me in the middle of something vitally important.

  ‘Hello?’

  Oh why did Margo have to ring me tonight? Once she starts she goes on for ever.

  ‘That sounds fabulous.’

  What if he’s trying to ring me now, at this very minute, and getting the engaged signal? What if he tires of trying and goes out?

  If only she’d stop for breath, I’d tell her I was standing here in my coat on my way out. But it wouldn’t be any use. Once Margo starts she isn’t really listening to what I say. And why does she have to describe the exact shade she’s going to paint the walls of her new flat? I don’t care. I honestly don’t care.

  ‘Yes, we must meet. No, not this weekend . . .’

  When he rings, he may ask me to see him. This Saturday, and I’ll pretend to hesitate.

  ‘Yes, I’m still here. No, I’m not going home. One of the girls at the office is having a party.’

  Why am I lying? Why can’t I tell her I met this fabulous boy and I’m hoping he’ll take me out?

  But Margo would want all the details, and I can’t talk about him. Not yet.

  ‘Yes, we’ll do that. Bye, Margo.’

  If he’s been trying to get me, the phone will ring any time now. I don’t think I want a coffee after all.

  I never knew that falling in love was like this. I thought it would be a dreamy, tender feeling, but it isn’t. Falling in love is pain, a real pain, a tearing, hopeless feeling, an aching longing, a blotting-out of everything else. It’s a prayer to hear a voice, to see a face, and I thought I was too full of common sense ever to feel this way. What is love anyway? A combination of sexual attraction and a longing for mutual affection, a sort of mutual admiration society. And as for falling in love at first sight – well, I never believed in it. Until last night.

  I’ll read for a while, and I won’t glance round at the clock. It’s still only early, and he may not have a telephone in his flat. He may have to walk along the street to a telephone kiosk, and it could just be that he’s standing somewhere in the rain and the dark, waiting for someone to end a long conversation. I can actually see him standing there, the collar of his raincoat turned up, his dark hair plastered wet to his head, silently cursing the person talking endlessly in the kiosk.

  Why did I think this book was so absorbing? It’s stupid, I’ve read two pages, and I couldn’t repeat a single word or remember what happened.

  Oh, why do I have to jump halfway out of my skin just because the telephone rings, when I’ve been willing it to ring for hours? I know my voice will come out all wrong, not a bit noncommittal and surprised the way I want it to. My heart is beating so loudly it’s choking me.

  ‘Hello? No, it isn’t! You’ve got the wrong number.’

  I ought not to have slammed the receiver down like that. It may have been an old person trying to dial with fumbling fingers. It could have been someone like me, with every nerve alive and quivering, making a call that has taken every ounce of their courage. Silently I tell the unknown caller that I’m sorry.

  What was it he said exactly?

  ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow.’

  Not just some time. Tomorrow. If I knew where he lived, I’d try to find his name in the book. If I knew that he was on the phone, and if I knew his second name.

  It really is funny. I know the way he looks, and laughs, and the sound of his voice; I know that he likes sad poems and the Stones’ music; I know he prefers Indian food to Chinese, that he only needs five hours sleep a night, and I know that I love him. That is all.

  He walked me back here, so he could decide to come round instead of ringing. And my hair’s a mess, and I have a ladder in my last pair of tights. I know what I’ll do. I’ll wash my hair and tie it up in a towel. That will be tempting fate all right. If I make myself look a mess, then he’ll come. That’s life.

  It’s only half-past nine, early really. I’d smoke a cigarette if I had any, even though I gave it up six months ago. I could go down to the machine on the corner, it would only take five minutes, but in that five minutes, he could ring . . .

  I’m sure I wouldn’t have missed the sound of the telephone when the water was running as I washed my hair, but it’s ten o’clock, and now my hair is almost dry. Perhaps if I’d eaten something I wouldn’t feel so sick.

  Obviously, he isn’t going to ring, I know that now. I think I’ve known it all along, really. He had to have some exit line, and I suppose ‘I’ll ring tomorrow’ was better than ‘See you around some time.’

  I’ll get over it. In less than a week I shouldn’t wonder. I won’t be able to remember his face, or the way he laughed, or the way he talked. He’ll be just a boy I met at a dull party, and that will be that. I’ll never tell anyone my dreams again. They’ll stay where they should stay – locked in my heart.

  I can’t think why I thought I liked him so much. He wasn’t much to look at. Too tall, and too thin, and tomorrow evening I’ll go and see a film with one of the girls from work and if the telephone does ring, then I won’t be in to not answer it.

  But it won’t ring and if it does, it won’t be him.

  I suppose it’s funny, me lying in bed at eleven o’clock with my hair rolled up, and the book I can’t read.

  I really think that if my mother phoned me now and I heard her voice, I’d give in and admit to the loneliness I swore I’d never feel, and I would be tempted to say that I’d come home again.

  She’d love that.

  Yes, if I heard her voice, I’d cry, and I’m not the crying sort, even though for the past hour I’ve been crying away inside me, and I’ve discovered that is the kind of crying that hurts the most . . .

  From my bed I can see the little squares of light from the windows opposite. All of them bedsitters like mine. For the first time I lie and wonder at the loneliness and unhappiness those bright squares conceal. Poor lonely people. Poor sad old world.

  Who on earth is ringing at this time? A quarter to twelve? I wouldn’t answer it if I didn’t think it would disturb the girl with the baby in the room next door.

  ‘Hello? Yes, it’s me. Well of course it doesn’t matter it being so late. As you say, the night is still young – well nothing really, just reading the most absorbing book. You know the kind, the sort of book you can’t put down. No, as a matter of fact I don’t think I’m doing anything this Saturday . . .’

  The Psychologist

  THERE WASN’T ANYTHING wrong with Gina, my brother’s wife, that I could see. She was pretty and kind, and clever, too. She got her English degree at the same time as Dan, and hers was a First when Dan’s was only a Second. But Mother didn’t like her. That much was obvious.

  ‘Why does Mother act so queer when Gina’s around?’ I asked my father, and he said what a thing to say, but I believe in coming straight out with things. ‘Maybe she doesn’t think Gina’s good enough for him,’ I said, and my father lowered his Sunday paper a fraction of an inch and grunted.

  ‘If your
brother Dan had come home and announced that he’d just got himself engaged to Princess Anne, your mother wouldn’t have been satisfied,’ he said. ‘Women get some funny ideas, but she’ll come round, you’ll see.’

  Then he disappeared behind his paper again, and I knew that as far as he was concerned the subject was closed. My father, I’m afraid, is like all men – he only sees what he wants to see.

  Dan and Gina were coming over to tea, and I could hear my mother in the dining room, dashing about with big sighs instead of lying on her bed as she usually does after Sunday lunch.

  I knew she’d be getting out the lace tablecloth, handed down through I don’t know how many generations, and laying the table with her best china cups and saucers. So I went through and asked her if I could help, and that made her look at me strangely and ask if I hadn’t something more important to do like washing my hair, or repainting my toenails.

  ‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,’ I said, meaning to jolly her up, but she ignored me and got out the pearl-handled cake knives from their velvet-lined box. I knew that before Dan and Gina arrived she would dash upstairs and change into her best dress – the one that nearly made my father faint when she told him that it cost half the price it really did.

  ‘Sundays are supposed to be a day of rest,’ she told me, ‘but as far as I’m concerned it’s one long slog from morning to night. No sooner have I got the lunch dishes out of the way than it’s time to start on the tea when visitors are coming, and I’ve still got the sponge cake to make.’

  I picked up a paper serviette, pale blue to match the cups and saucers, and she all but slapped my hand away. She was in what Father would have called one of her ‘tizzes’.

  ‘Dan and Gina aren’t visitors,’ I said. ‘They’re family. I don’t see why you have to go to all this fuss. When Dan was at home we used to have sandwiches round the television for Sunday tea.’

  ‘Sandwiches round the television!’ she said, as if I’d suggested we eat off newspapers spread on the floor. ‘Whatever next?’

  Well, I’m a deep thinker, and one of the things I’m keen on at the moment is psychology. In fact, after A-levels I may go to university and make it my career. I knew that what Mother needed was a straight talk, a sort of confrontation with her problem, so I fixed her with a penetrating look.

  ‘You don’t think Gina is good enough for Dan,’ I said, ‘so you go to all this fuss every time he comes, to try to make him realise what he’s thrown away by not living at home for the rest of his life. It’s what they call subconscious motivation, you see.’

  ‘Is it now?’ my mother said. ‘Well right this moment my subconscious motivation tells me that if you don’t go upstairs and take off those awful tight pants, and comb your hair just enough to make it apparent that you’ve got a face behind it, they’ll be here.’

  She carried the silver teapot through into the kitchen to give it a quite unnecessary polish, and I followed, feeling sorry for her. Then I remembered that sympathy is an entirely wasted emotion. Practical help is what mixed-up people need. Practical help comes next on the list if they fail to reach an understanding of their conscious motivations, and nothing, I knew, would convince my poor mother that Gina was a wonderful girl who was making Dan a super wife.

  No, I had come to the conclusion that in Mother’s eyes, Gina was a ruthless woman who had taken one look at her only son and decided to catch him, come what may.

  I sat on the deal table swinging my legs. Maybe the way they’d got married hadn’t helped. Perhaps if Dan had produced Gina one weekend and introduced her to Mother as a friend, sort of worked up to the fiancée bit, instead of ringing from Oxford one night to say guess what, they had decided to get married on the last day of term – maybe Mother could have come to terms with herself.

  There was, of course, the sexual aspect, and sex, as any disciple of Freud knows, comes into everything. I decided to go upstairs to lie on my bed and think Mother’s problem out in peace.

  ‘He was away from home,’ I remembered Mother saying. ‘Young and inexperienced. A natural prey for a designing woman.’

  ‘No student is entirely inexperienced in the wiles of women nowadays,’ Father had said, and Mother had said that Dan was an innocent babe, and she would bet that Gina couldn’t even boil a kettle of water.

  Listening to them, as an impartial observer of course, I knew then that jealousy, as they say, had reared its ugly head.

  I sat up and took off my dark glasses to see things even more clearly. Mother was jealous of Gina, the other woman in her beloved son’s life, and that was why she behaved as she did whenever they came to see us, just to show Gina that anything she could do his mother could do better. If you see what I mean.

  Now, if just for once Mother would deliberately let her image slip a little – if Gina could see her revealed as the sweet, rather harassed mother she really is, then she’d stop behaving as though she had no personality at all and come out of the awful shyness that Mother’s perfection had wrapped her in.

  I was quite excited by the way my analysis had worked out, and I ran downstairs to put my point to Father, but he was asleep with the newspaper over his face.

  And in the kitchen, with one eye frantically on the wall clock, Mother was piping an intricate pattern in cream round a fruit flan, and moaning that she’d never get the sponge cake baked in time.

  ‘I’ll help,’ I offered generously, and her eager acceptance made me realise just how deep-rooted her neurosis was.

  She told me to weigh out the butter and sugar, and place them in the bowl she’d put to warm, and I was very conscientious about this, weighing the sugar to the last grain, and measuring the butter to the last thou of an ounce. Mother had finished the flan and whirled round, brandishing the wooden mixing spoon.

  ‘Whilst I’m creaming, you can weigh out the flour,’ she said. ‘Self-raising, on the top shelf to the left of the canister of dried fruit.’

  ‘There are two bags of flour,’ I was just going to say, when suddenly the idea occurred to me. I would rather die a lingering death than aspire to be a good cook, but I do know the difference between self-raising flour and plain, and here was my chance to give Mother the practical help she needed with her problem.

  Carefully, with my back towards her, I weighed out four ounces of plain flour, and put the bag back before she had time to notice what I’d done. I must admit, though, that I was almost overcome with the most awful sense of guilt when I saw her spreading the mixture evenly in two sandwich tins, and place them with touching confidence in the oven.

  Mother’s sponges are a byword in our family, and I’ve seen Gina’s expression when the silver cake knife is drawn slowly through the risen glory of the weekly masterpiece.

  ‘I can’t get mine like that, even with a cake mix,’ Gina had once innocently said, and Mother’s face couldn’t have been more shocked if poor old Gina had uttered a four-letter word.

  ‘Another piece, Dan?’ she’d said, and my brother had eagerly accepted, like the traitor all men are, and fallen on the slice of cake as if he hadn’t tasted anything like it all week.

  With one eye still on the clock, Mother rushed upstairs to change, but I knew that the in-built pinger in her brain would send her rushing down again at exactly the right time to open the oven door.

  I stood there, biting my newly grown nails, and communing silently with old Freud and his sexual jealousy theory. You’d just better be right, I was telling him when two things happened at once.

  The doorbell rang, and Mother came into the kitchen all scented and glamorous to take out her beautiful cake.

  ‘Gorgeous smell,’ Dan said, coming as usual straight through into the kitchen, and Gina followed him looking as usual completely overawed and holding a foil-wrapped parcel carefully in front of her.

  ‘Excuse me a moment,’ Mother said gaily, opening the oven door.

  I held my breath as, with an expression of horror and unbelievable dismay on her face, she remove
d the two tins, containing what looked like two flattened loaves of unleavened bread.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ she said, holding them out at arm’s length, with her hands encased in her oven gloves, and tactless Dan burst out laughing.

  ‘The last time Gina and I did that with some scones, we pretended they were biscuits,’ he said, and moving like a sleepwalker, Mother put the tins down on the table.

  Then swiftly Gina went to Mother and shyly placed the foil-wrapped parcel on the table.

  ‘You must have used plain flour by mistake, Mother,’ she said, and it was the first time she’d ever said Mother, quite naturally, like that. ‘It’s so easily done, and please don’t worry, I tried out your recipe and so Dad won’t have to miss his Sunday cake after all.’

  And before Mother’s dazed expression she unwrapped the foil, and there was a sponge cake, layered, and filled with raspberry jam, and although compared to Mother’s usual masterpiece it was like comparing a two-storey building to the Post Office Tower, Dan’s eyes said that as far as he was concerned his wife was Mrs Beeton and Fanny Craddock rolled into one.

  For a long moment we all stood like statues, staring at the cakes, then Mother looked straight at me, and I waited for her to say what she must surely say – that I was the one who had made the mistake and weighed out the wrong type of flour.

  I closed my eyes and called old Freud a rude name underneath my breath, but nothing happened, and I opened them again to see Mother actually place her arm round Gina’s shoulders.

  And only I, because, of course, I understand about such things, knew just what it cost her to say what she did.

  ‘Thank you, Gina,’ she said. ‘It was a stupid thing to do, but as you say, dear, it’s easily done, and your cake looks simply wonderful. I doubt if Dad will be able to tell the difference.’