The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  I was acutely embarrassed, and to stop her telling me any more about the defenceless Laura, and succumbing already to her forceful personality, I found myself telling her about my husband’s sudden death at the wheel of his car.

  She said how brave I was to go away by myself, and asked hadn’t I any children who would have taken me away with their families?

  Oh, no, Edna Beresford wasn’t my type at all, but I was, at that time, vulnerable and pathetically grateful for her presence, and from that moment I knew that the pattern of my holiday was set.

  She had a word with the head waiter of our hotel, and I was ensconced with the pair of them at a small table in the huge dining room of our concrete hotel. Later, and round the swimming pool on the flat roof, she personally arranged three lounging chairs, turning them as the sun moved, dedicating herself to the pursuit of a tan.

  Now it’s up to you, she seemed to be saying to the sun. I, in deference to my fair skin, positioned my fringed umbrella, and turned to Laura.

  ‘It’s very pleasant up here, isn’t it?’

  The only way to describe Laura’s hair is to say that it was hair-coloured, and was as strong and coarse as fuse wire. It was cut so short that when she bowed her head it stuck up in untidy tufts from a double crown. At first I thought she hadn’t heard me.

  ‘I’ve often thought,’ she said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle, ‘I’ve often thought that if hot sunshine could be guaranteed for two weeks in England, and there was a mile-long strip of concrete where towels could be laid, then a lot of these people, Mother included, would be just as happy. What we’re seeing now isn’t Portugal. We could be anywhere.’

  Then she bent her head over her paperback book, and I found myself dismissed.

  I left her alone, but before we went down to our rooms to shower and change for the evening meal, I tried again: ‘Would you like to explore the old town tomorrow? We could sit outside one of the small cafés and watch the people passing by. I went to buy postcards this morning, and I saw an old woman, dressed in black, parking her donkey outside a shop, just as a woman at home would park her Mini.

  ‘And there’s a beautiful old church just across the square. I think that the children were rehearsing their first Communion. They were chanting their responses to a priest with the crumpled face of an all-in wrestler.’

  Just for a moment, when I mentioned the children, her eyes sparkled with interest, and then the reserve took over, and she shook her head.

  ‘No, thank you. I’m all right here, really. Besides, Mother isn’t interested in sightseeing.’

  But you are, I almost said, then I checked myself. Who was I to interfere?

  From then on, I was determined to go my own way during the day, and wandering round the cobbled streets the next afternoon, I came across the Piccadilly Pub.

  SUNDAY LUNCHES here, it said. ROAST BEEF AND YORKSHIRE PUD, and in the entrance bloomed a huge and ugly plastic cactus plant.

  I couldn’t believe it. All cacti look artificial, I told myself. Hoping I was unobserved, I pinched a leaf to make sure, and it was plastic, and I was enchanted.

  I went inside, and there it was. The carpet, British as a bun-loaf, with its pattern of royal blue and rust, the tables with their heat-resistant tops, the bar complete with jolly landlord in shirtsleeves, and his wife, blonde hair piled high, resting her bare mottled arms on the counter and talking away with an accent as Yorkshire as apple pie and cheese.

  ‘You must see it,’ I told Edna over our evening meal.

  ‘All right then, we’ll give it a try,’ said Edna, speaking as usual for the two of them, then she held out a plump arm, already toasted to a dark chocolate. ‘Three more days of this, and I’ll be a lovely colour. Laura takes after my husband. He couldn’t tan, poor man, no matter how hard he tried.’

  Laura’s dress that evening was of an indeterminate length, one of the neutral shades she seemed to favour; as the hotel’s tiny pageboy in his brown uniform, busy with buttons, sprang to attention to open the door for us, I saw the way she stared at a girl coming in.

  The girl was tall, with long black hair, and her maxi-dress was the pale green of a sugared almond, with a high ruched neck and long, tight sleeves with leg-o’-mutton fullness at the top.

  ‘You’d look nice in a dress like that,’ I told Laura as we crossed the cobbled square, but she shook her head in quick denial.

  ‘Laura isn’t interested in clothes,’ said Edna, and for the first time since my husband died, I felt an upsurge of genuine emotion – anger – but I said nothing.

  The Piccadilly Pub was crowded with holiday-makers, mostly from our hotel, and it might have been any pub, anywhere in England. The women sat with their husbands, low-cut dresses showing off the angry Vs of sunburn on their necks, and Mabel, the landlord’s wife, moved amongst the tables, replenishing their glasses of beer and genteel gin and tonics.

  But for Edna’s kindness to me, I would have been an outsider, a woman alone, and I was glad I had held my tongue but I felt saddened to see the way Laura chose the corner seat, positioning herself so that she was almost hidden by a wooden trellis.

  Mabel blossomed over to our table, took our orders, and asked if we’d like to see yesterday’s Daily Express. Edna took it from her and turned immediately to the weather charts. It seemed they were having a heatwave in England, and she bemoaned the fact that we’d come all that way to find the sun when it was there all the time, if only we’d stayed put.

  I glanced at Laura, and we exchanged an amused glance. A middle-aged man with a fiery scalp leaned across and asked if he could glance at the sports pages of the paper. With a gracious smile Edna passed it over, and his wife asked if she lived in Solihull.

  ‘No, I live in Manchester, but my sister lives in Solihull and we’re supposed to be very much alike,’ Edna told her, and before we knew it, we were included in their party.

  It turned out that Edna’s sister actually belonged to the same association – the Inner Wheel, I think it was – and there were exclamations about the smallness of the world.

  Edna and the woman who knew her sister went on talking nonstop, the men were lost in the sports columns of the paper, Laura was wrapped in her own dream, and I sat there quietly, feeling that special kind of loneliness that only comes when one is part of a crowd, and accepting with resignation that I would feel that way for a long time to come, perhaps until I died.

  Suddenly, on impulse, I leaned across the table and whispered to Laura, ‘Shall we go?’ And to my surprise she nodded. I told Edna, and she nodded too.

  ‘Mother is happy now,’ Laura said as we went outside into the darkened street. ‘She feels better now she’s made English friends. She isn’t really keen on foreign parts when the sun goes down, you know.’

  It was said in her soft voice, entirely without malice, and I felt a glow of affection for the strange, lonely girl, and would have linked my arm in hers if I’d been the demonstrative type.

  We walked along slowly past the closely shuttered houses, and when we turned the corner and I saw the hotel, its concrete façade floodlit into a kind of garish splendour, I felt a sudden revulsion at the thought of entering its marble-floored foyer.

  I pointed across the harbour. ‘Those lights over there. Shall we go round and see what they are?’

  She sensed my mood immediately. ‘Probably another bar. Just keep your fingers crossed that this time the cactus won’t be a plastic one.’

  We needn’t have worried. This bar was small and homely, with a tiled floor dotted with round marble tables, and even at that time of night there was only one unoccupied. We ordered coffee and an aniseed-tasting liqueur.

  Laura was looking around her, and I knew that, like me, she was hugging herself with delight. Just then, at that very moment, Manuel came in.

  He walked like a cat, soft and sure-footed, and I guessed him to be around twenty-three years old. He wore sun-bleached jeans and a checked shirt open at the neck to show a crucifix, and
after glancing around him and exchanging a few words with the man behind the bar, he threaded his way over to our table, walking in that peculiar way, as if his feet scarcely touched the ground.

  ‘I may sit here, madame?’ he asked, addressing me. I smiled and said but of course, and saw the way Laura’s head ducked down, and the way an unbecoming blush stained her cheek, and I grieved for her.

  But because I wanted her to have some little adventure to remember, I spoke to the boy and complimented him on his English.

  He thanked me gravely.

  ‘My father, before he died, was porter at Lisbon airport in the summers, and he teach me,’ he said, and I asked him if he lived in the town.

  He waved a hand in the direction of the closely cluttered houses.

  ‘I live with my mother. I have much brothers and many sisters.’ He held up his hand and counted for us on his fingers. ‘Maria, Jose, Filomena, Jose Antonio, Amalia and I am Manuel.’

  He laughed and we laughed with him because it was impossible not to; there was a childlike simplicity about him. Made bold by the liqueur, I offered to buy Manuel a drink, but with a natural dignity he refused, and went on sipping the strong black coffee the waiter had placed before him.

  I suppose Edna would have described my behaviour as chatting up the natives, but I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself, and it was only when we got up to go and he stood to wish us a courteous goodnight, that I realised Laura hadn’t said a single word.

  Back at the hotel, in the lift, she stood apart, a bemused look on her face, and I knew that in her quiet way she had enjoyed herself. I knew also that she would say nothing to her mother about Manuel, but when, the next morning, she refused to accompany her up to the roof for another sunbathing session, I knew a small moment of triumph. Laura was not, after all, as mother-dominated as I had thought.

  Down on the beach, the fishermen were sorting out their catch emptying the fish on to the sand, sardines, tiny squid, and species I could give no name to. There were men sitting around mending their nets, holding the mesh between their toes, using a tool like a shuttle, working cleverly and quickly. Amongst them was Manuel.

  His thin face broke into a wide grin when he saw us, and when Laura, obviously fascinated by what he was doing, forgot herself so far as to squat down by him on the sand, I moved away.

  As God is my judge I meant no harm to come to her. Already I had grown fond of her, and afterwards I told myself that it was because I could not bear to see her missing out in life. But when she joined me at the water’s edge and told me she was meeting Manuel that evening, I was both appalled and glad at one and the same time.

  Edna made no bones about the way she felt about it. ‘I’ve told her she’s a fool, but she won’t listen. I’m worried.’

  I was convincing myself, even as I tried to convince her. ‘He’s harmless, I’m sure, and Laura’s no child. Twenty-five is almost middle-aged these days. Hasn’t she ever had a boyfriend then?’

  Edna’s eyes, outlined with turquoise eye shadow, widened at me.

  ‘She’s never been interested in boys, and they’ve never been interested in her, and besides, from the little she’s told me, I gather he’s a common fisherman, when he’s working, and he’s foreign.’

  ‘We are the foreigners,’ I said.

  Edna sniffed. ‘It isn’t like her to defy me.’

  So, feeling partly responsible, and uncomfortably guilty, I stayed with her for the rest of the day, sharing her worry, lying prone by her side round the swimming pool, a silent Laura, seemingly engrossed in her paperback, between us.

  That same evening there was a dance downstairs in the hotel basement, and Edna and I were invited to make up a party with the two couples from Solihull. The floor was stamp-sized, coloured lights wavered over the dancers, and I discovered that to go where the music was soft and the lights low, was a pain in my heart, because my husband wasn’t there.

  And Laura was out with Manuel – out there in the warm, scented darkness. I reminded myself that she was intelligent, and must know the value of holiday friendships, and I thought of how she’d looked, going out to meet him, and just for a brief moment my heart rejoiced for her.

  Laura shared a room with her mother. I was preparing for bed when there was a knock on my door and Edna came in, ostensibly to borrow a pot of cream.

  ‘She’s come in,’ she said, seated at my dressing table, creaming away, ‘and he’s been making love to her. It’s written there on her face. I told her she’s a fool, and you know what she said?’

  I didn’t want to know what Laura had said. I was appalled at her mother’s lack of sensitivity, but there was no stopping her.

  ‘“Don’t humiliate me, Mother.” That’s what she said.’

  Long after she’d gone, glistening with cream, I lay awake, seeing Laura’s gentle, homely face stiff with hurt as her mother trampled heavy-footed on her dreams.

  That night I wept into my pillow, and the tears were not for me.

  As the days passed, I could only conclude that Manuel was neglecting his fishing trips. They spent every waking hour together, and I saw the way that Laura blossomed, and worried silently.

  She told us nothing, but once I saw them, leaning over the harbour wall together. They looked an incongruous pair, Laura broad-bottomed, wearing a pair of bright blue slacks that did nothing at all for her figure, and Manuel in his sun-bleached shirt, inclining his head towards her, listening as she talked to him.

  With us she was her usual uncommunicative self and on that last day, sitting with us in the bus on the way to the airport, the fawn midi-cardigan across her knees, there was a frightening stillness about her.

  Edna and I exchanged addresses, promising to write, and in the flurry of passing through Customs, I lost sight of them.

  My elder son and his wife were there to meet me, and I knew I was home again, and glad to be where I belonged.

  We didn’t write, Edna and I. Holiday friendships are inconclusive anyway, and in spite of the fact that we had spent those two weeks in close proximity, we had nothing really in common.

  I picked up the threads of my life. I went to evening classes, learning Portuguese and pottery. I baby-sat with my grandchildren, and if during the long nights my arms still reached out across the big double bed, there was no one to know.

  Then, around Christmastime, the letter came.

  Edna’s writing was like herself, big, bold and self-assertive. Laura was living in London, and she was married. To Manuel!

  They were living in one room in Earl’s Court, and she, Edna, would be very glad if I would call and see them. She was sure the whole thing was a terrible mistake. Manuel was working as a waiter in the evenings, and Laura was teaching at some ‘slum’ school, and she was just waiting for the day when her daughter turned up in Manchester again, ready to admit that she had made a mess of her life.

  I was intrigued, so intrigued that I decided to go and see them. I knew that area of London, with its wilderness of bedsits and its faceless anonymity, and the thought of Laura, shy, gentle, sweet Laura, living there, filled me with dismay.

  So the next day, squashed between Christmas shoppers, I caught the tube to Earl’s Court and walked along a street of tall Victorian houses until, at last, I found the address.

  The room was on the fourth floor, four flights of uncarpeted stairs, cooking smells seeping from beneath every door I passed.

  I found the number, the door opened immediately to my timid knock, and Manuel stood there.

  For a moment I thought he hadn’t recognised me, then his thin face lit up with pleasure.

  ‘Madame! How nice it is to see you. Laura will be home soon. Come in. It is beginning to rain, yes? Come in and sit down.’

  The room was quite dreadful. There was a bed in the corner, and an ancient cooker against one wall. A gas fire spluttered and glowed, and the heat was oppressive. Manuel walked soft-footed over to the cooker, lifted a lid from a pan, and stirred diligently.

&
nbsp; ‘Always I cook the meal,’ he told me. ‘Before I go out to my work.’ He twirled an imaginary tray above his head. ‘I am waiter. You see?’

  I saw all right. I saw him in some overcrowded restaurant, walking cat-like between the tables, balancing his tray, and I saw the way his deep tan had faded, leaving his young face not so much pale as transparent.

  And I remembered him on the beach, with the hot sun shining down on his bare head, the fishing net gripped between his toes as he worked.

  I watched him as he brought plates and forks and laid them neatly on a card table over by the window, and when I refused to eat he seemed genuinely disappointed.

  ‘Always the rain,’ he was saying as the door opened and Laura came in, the shoulders of her coat black with rain, a string bag dangling from her wrist.

  Because the chair I sat in was positioned behind the door, she didn’t see me immediately and, dropping the parcels anywhere, went straight into Manuel’s arms.

  I saw the way he held her face still for his kiss, and I saw the way his lips formed the words ‘Amo-te’, and I didn’t need my knowledge of Portuguese to know that he was telling her he loved her.

  Quite unselfconsciously he turned to me.

  ‘We have so little times together, always I tell her that when she comes in from work,’ he said, and I stood up and held out my hand to Laura.

  ‘Laura,’ I said, ‘how pretty you look. I’m so very happy for you both.’

  And I meant it, every word.

  For gone was the defeated look, and passive indifference. Laura was transformed. Her hair still grew in that unbecoming way, and her round face was devoid of make-up, but when I saw the way Manuel was looking at her, I understood everything perfectly.

  I myself am five feet nothing, my feet stand at a quarter to three, my figure has always resembled a bolster tied in the middle, and my eyes peer short-sightedly from behind thick spectacles.

  Yet that was the way my husband had always looked at me. And at last I understood.

  The Solid Citizen