The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  Ten traumatic minutes later, she lifted the little girl on to a chair at the table, and struggled to push the baby’s fat hands through the sleeves of a plastic cover-all feeder which had surely been made three sizes to small.

  Never at her best in the mornings, she suppressed a shudder at the sight of the glutinous mess of milk and cereal which Emma was busily stirring round and round.

  Meanwhile, obviously preferring the dog biscuit, the baby blew bubbles through a mouthful of cereal, then spat it down the front of the feeder.

  ‘Sweetie?’ Emma asked with trusting confidence, her blue eyes filled with hopeful pleading.

  ‘When you’ve finished your cereal,’ said Beth, in a tone she believed to be both firm and tender.

  ‘Sweetie now,’ said Emma, the blue eyes filling with genuine tears.

  Giving up the struggle, Beth lowered the bubble-blowing baby into the walker, and told Emma that if she was a good girl she could help Grannie to dust.

  No sooner into position, the baby grasped the rail of the walker with two fat hands and manoeuvred it at surprising speed out of the kitchen and down the hall, her legs in their lacy tights moving like pistons.

  Beth checked the hall for lethal weapons, found none, and took the sweeper and her dusters into the white-and-pink drawing room. She was quite cheerfully dusting round the mantelpiece when a crash from the hall galvanised her into action. She arrived in time to see the telephone lying on the carpet, gloated over by a triumphant baby, and Emma giving the bottom stair, with its fitted dark green carpet, a lavish coating of talcum powder. She almost missed the sight of a leaf of her precious pot plant protruding from the right corner of her youngest grandchild’s masticating jaws . . .

  Praying that it wasn’t poisonous, Beth hooked it out, rescued the talcum powder from Emma’s busy fingers, and decided that the time had come for the baby’s morning rest.

  As she struggled to change her, recovering the sodden nappy from between the wildy threshing legs and inserting a clean one with what she thought was commendable skill, Emma watched her every move with wide-eyed interest.

  ‘Me not have nappies,’ she intoned with pride. ‘Me go to the lavatory.’

  With one of the baby’s legs well into a pair of plastic frilly panties, Beth gave her elder grandchild a suspicious glance.

  ‘Do you mean you want to go to the lavatory now?’

  Emma crossed her legs, and stared back with an inscrutable expression.

  ‘Oh, lord,’ Beth said, and leaving the baby, led Emma by the hand on to the landing.

  ‘Me do it by myself,’ said Emma, climbing with difficulty on to the seat, and by her dreamy expression showing Beth that all was accomplished. Then she tore off a strip of toilet paper, described a vague circle with it in the air, dropped it down the pan, and insisted on flushing it away all by herself.

  Accustomed to the roomy splendour of her drop-side cot, the baby screamed for twenty minutes after being lowered into the narrow confines of her grown-out of carrycot, and back downstairs Beth listened gloomily. Giving up all idea of cleaning the house, she made herself a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Swings now,’ Emma said, part-way into her anorak and buttoning the top button in the bottom buttonhole.

  ‘After lunch,’ Beth told her, again firmly and gently, remembering the casserole she had decided on in preference to the collections of tins in the shopping basket. Stubbing out the cigarette, she took the raw steak from the refrigerator and began to cut it up into little pieces.

  As she worked on the meat, she heard a sudden terrified shriek from somewhere upstairs.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, she passed the guest room, with the baby now moaning softly from behind its closed door, and hurried into her own bedroom.

  On top of Bill’s chest of drawers, her wig reposed on its stand, wound up on rollers for its next wearing at a dinner party the following evening. Emma was staring at in frightened horror.

  ‘Me not like that lady,’ she whimpered.

  Beth lifted it down. ‘It’s only hair. Feel how nice it is.’

  Emma’s round cheeks actually paled, and she backed away. Beth tried again. ‘See, Grannie will draw a face on the stand,’ she said reaching for her eyebrow pencil. ‘There we are. Two eyes, a nose, and a smiley mouth. Now, isn’t that funny?’

  Emma’s heartbroken sobs were indicative of the fact that she didn’t find it even remotely funny, and Beth comforted her to a background of desolate wails from the room next door.

  Twenty harassed minutes later, she found herself walking down the avenue, a decidedly smug baby strapped into her pushchair, and an equally satisfied Emma trotting alongside.

  And spreading her weight midway on the seesaw at the park while an ecstatic Emma rose up and down chanting ‘Seesaw Margdaw’, Beth congratulated herself on having got the casserole in the oven before things got too hectic.

  It was as she accompanied an insistent little girl up the steep ladder of the slide that doubts began to assail her. ‘One switches the oven on automatically,’ she comforted herself, only to find on their return to the house that all clichés don’t inevitably ring true.

  Saying a word she hoped Emma would never repeat, she lined up a row of ready-to-eat baby foods in their little tins on the kitchen dresser, and got to work.

  Afterwards, drunk with fresh air, and full of the entire contents of two of the tins, the baby slept, and Emma composed herself reluctantly on the sofa in the drawing room and condescended to be read to.

  Her own eyelids drooping, Beth read solidly through the unbelievable life-history of a precocious mini-skirted mouse, then started on her own version of the Three Bears.

  But apparently she had got it all wrong. Her version differed in details she would have thought too trivial to mention from the version Emma was used to, and the round blue eyes reproached her sadly from the sofa cushions. The Three Bears Beth remembered from her own childhood had never, it seemed, behaved in quite that way and at last Beth turned back to the traumatic life story of one Amanda Mouse.

  And apart from an overturned cup of orange juice on the deep cream pile of the carpet, a sticky sweet lodged right in the middle of the pale sofa back, and the leather frame of a family photograph chewed to a pulp by the baby, the afternoon passed without event.

  True the teatime meal of soft-boiled eggs seemed to spatter itself over rather a large area of the kitchen, but at half-past five exactly, dead on schedule, Beth climbed the stairs with an egg-trimmed baby underneath one arm and a tired-out little girl by the hand, feeling that she was coming to the end of a long, long journey.

  Lavishly she sprinkled the bath-water with a handful of her precious fern-scented bath salts.

  ‘See,’ she told Emma. ‘Green water. Isn’t that nice?’

  The baby, her fat stomach protruding, her formless features one beam of delight, seemed to think so too, and allowed herself to be lowered gently into the sea-green depths. Feeling pleasantly maternal, and ignoring an ominous twinge somewhere in the small of her back, Beth undressed Emma.

  ‘Me not like green water. Me like white water,’ Emma said, and knowing by now when she was beaten, Beth sighed, removed a wet wriggling baby from the tub, and, one-handed, refilled it with water of a more acceptable colour.

  Apart from ending up as wet as if she’d taken a dip in the sea fully clothed, and squeezing the baby into the wrong pyjamas, a mistake indignantly pointed out by a nakedly prancing Emma, Beth felt she had really done quite well, and when Dina arrived she handed over the children in their dressing gowns swearing to high heaven that they had been no trouble, no trouble at all.

  Which was true of course; they were delightful babies, and Bill wouldn’t mind cold meat and salad for supper, and she wasn’t really tired. Just faintly exhausted, that was all.

  So why was it, then, that changing quickly into dry clothes just as Bill’s key grated in the lock, she saw staring back at her from the mirror an old, old lady, old at f
ifty, with wispy hair, a shiny face, worn to an indisputable shadow?

  The Long Hot Summer

  MY STORY BEGINS last summer – the summer we drove Mum to distraction.

  My father was in America on a business trip, Roger, my twin brother, was waiting to go up to university, and I’d just left school. I was going to start my secretarial training in the autumn, and had all the summer to spend as I wished.

  Jan, my best friend, was deciding what to do with her life, and staying with us in the process – her parents were in the middle of getting a divorce. And Jamus – well, Jamus was just around all the time. He was on holiday, too, from art school, and was searching for what he called ‘some reasonable motivation for living’.

  I remember we all wore jeans, and we never put on a pair of shoes, not even walking down to the village. And we didn’t get nails in our feet, or bits of broken glass, nor any of the things my mother gloomily predicted we would.

  We positively thrived on the scandalous looks thrown at us by the sedate housewives in the High Street, with their trolley baskets on wheels and their conventional hairstyles.

  About noon each day, until he moved in with us, Jamus would come round and we’d say: ‘What shall it be first? The Brahms Number Four, or a session with Jimmy the Cat?’

  Then one of us would decide, and pile the records on the turntable; someone would make coffee, Mother mostly I think; and we’d lounge about and talk.

  After a while, Mum would come into the room and glare at us.

  ‘There are perfectly good chairs to sit on,’ she’d say, stepping neatly over our stretched-out bodies. ‘Why don’t you do something constructive? There’s a good tennis club not five minutes away, and there’s always the garden to tend. Think what a surprise it would be for Daddy if he came home and found the flowerbeds free from weeds.’

  ‘Hardly a surprise, more like a traumatic experience,’ said Jamus out of the side of his mouth. I knew Mother had heard by the way her lips tightened, and she turned and stalked out of the room, banging the door behind her.

  ‘Who’s for tennis?’ Jamus asked mockingly, and we nearly died laughing as he stood up on his unshamedly filthy tiptoes and did an imaginary serve towards the French windows.

  Eating regular, well-balanced meals was another of the things we didn’t believe in, but every few hours we’d invade the kitchen and boil spaghetti, or raid the fruit bowl. The rest of the time we existed on mugs of coffee and chewing gum.

  Sleep was another thing we could do without – at the correct time for it, anyway. We’d stay up playing records until two or three in the morning.

  ‘Doesn’t Jamus have a home?’ Mum asked one day. ‘He’s a nice boy,’ she went on determinedly, ‘and behind all that hair I’m sure there lurks a very nice face.’

  I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince me, or herself.

  She turned on the kitchen tap, began to rinse a lettuce and said: ‘You’re all missing so much. All this talk, talk, talk. Where does it get you? Answer me that, Ginny.’

  ‘Nowhere,’ I said quite truthfully, ‘but at least we care enough to talk.’

  ‘But that’s just it. You don’t care! You don’t care about anything . . .’

  She actually sniffed, and I stared at her in horror, because Mum isn’t the crying type.

  ‘I’ve tried to understand you, but I just can’t . . .’ she moaned.

  ‘You can’t understand because you’re too old,’ I explained, as gently as I could. ‘At your age you can’t expect to feel the same way about things as we do . . .’

  I remember she looked at me with an unfathomable expression in her blue eyes.

  My mother has beautiful eyes. I suddenly thought how pretty she must have been when she was young, and I told her so.

  ‘Well, thank you, dear,’ she said slowly, ‘and would you really say that at thirty-eight I’m really ancient?’

  ‘Mum’s got something on her mind,’ I told Jamus that evening. He was lying on his stomach making a sketch of me.

  ‘It’s no wonder your mother’s got something on her mind,’ said Jamus, cheekily, ‘with a daughter like you to worry about all day!’

  ‘I’ve got the feeling she isn’t enjoying this summer very much,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps she’s missing my father, but we haven’t left her alone in the house very much, have we? We’ve been around nearly all the time.’

  Jamus threw down his pencil, and stared at me.

  ‘Bourgeois, but sweet all the same,’ he mused.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Your parents missing each other,’ he said, with a smile.

  Before I could comment, Roger and Jan joined us, and I decided it was best to drop the subject.

  A little later, Roger said that he had this urge to go down to the beach, and sleep beneath the stars.

  So we did just that, leaving my poor unsuspecting mother a note telling her what we’d done, and not to worry.

  It was fun, glorious fun, dancing on the beach close to the waves, seeing Jan, her long hair flying in the breeze and arms outstretched, running along the vast expanse of sand, shouting defiance to the wind as it took her words and tossed them away.

  How Jan and I ached with laughter as we watched Roger and Jamus dance a minuet in the shadows.

  When we were exhausted we lay in a row on the beach and discussed life and death. We said all that was in our hearts and minds down on the beach in the warm, sea-scented darkness . . .

  We couldn’t believe, we all agreed, that next week Roger would be sleeping in a student-type room, Jan would be joining her mother in a flat in London, and I’d be learning how to touch-type.

  Jamus had decided against going back to art school, and with his meagre savings was going to Italy for a few months to see what life was like over there.

  It seemed like the end of everything, but we promised to meet again at Christmas, and swore that everything would be the same, and that we’d never change.

  In the darkness, Jamus’s face looked noble, and when he kissed me his lips tasted of salt.

  I think I knew then that nothing stays the same, and I was right . . .

  Jane was sharing my room, and it was the night after our excursion to the beach when she told me she might be pregnant.

  I lay there, feeling my heart drop like a stone. A cliché, I’d always thought, but that’s exactly what happened. One minute my heart was beating away as usual, then, after she’d told me, in her matter-of-fact, see-if-I-care kind of voice, I felt my heart do a downward swoop. I sat up in bed, and stared at her. I asked her to repeat what she’d just said. And she did . . .

  ‘I think I may be pregnant,’ she said, and only someone who knew Jan as well as I did could have detected the faint wobble in her voice.

  ‘Roger?’ I whispered, hoarsely, and she nodded.

  I lay down again and closed my eyes. I knew I should have been thinking about Jan, but I was thinking about my parents, and how they’d flaunted their pride in my clever twin brother. How they’d boasted to their friends about his formidable collection of A-levels, and the way he’d got the university of his choice, with no trouble at all.

  I could imagine their faces when they heard the news. I could even picture the way my mother would brush her hair away from her forehead, the way she always did when she was worried about us, and I knew then that, up to now, she’d had nothing really to be anxious about at all.

  Up till now . . .

  ‘You should have done something about it,’ I began, my words tumbling over each other because of the sudden anger I felt. ‘You should have been more careful.’

  Jan’s voice drifted across from the other bed. ‘Oh, precautions, you mean. We just didn’t think, Ginny.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I was amazed at the way my brother seemed to have acted. Didn’t he have any sense of responsibility?

  I thought I knew him with a closeness that only twins can understand. I knew his seriousness, his dedication to h
is studies, and his inborn theories about what was right and wrong.

  He’d had little time for girlfriends until I’d brought Jan home with me for a weekend, and even then I hadn’t noticed any instant attraction between them. They held hands a lot, and they kissed at times, but I’d never thought . . .

  ‘Oh God, what are you going to do?’ I asked, my voice shaking with tension.

  ‘Have it, of course,’ said Jan. ‘And not tell Roger.’ She sounded fierce and determined. ‘And if you tell him, Ginny, I’ll – I’ll kill you!’

  I heard my mother come upstairs and go into the bathroom. I heard the bath-water running, and the funny noise it makes in the pipes in my room. I heard her humming to herself, and I knew she was happy because my father would be home in a few days. I felt a surge of anger against Jan.

  ‘If I tell him, he’ll insist that we get married,’ she was whispering. ‘You know what Roger is like, and he won’t go up to university. He’ll get a job, and we’ll live together here with your parents or in some crummy room. Oh, he’ll pretend it doesn’t matter, but it will matter. One day he’ll look at me and I’ll know he’s thinking that but for me he’d have had a wonderful career. Can’t you see? I can’t tell him.’

  ‘You could have an abortion,’ I suggested, eagerly. ‘It’s supposed to be easy nowadays, and our mothers need never find out.’

  ‘My mother couldn’t care less,’ Jan said bleakly.

  I stared across at her, at the dim shape of her face, and her long dark hair spread out on the pillow. I wanted to get out of bed and creep over to her. I longed to put my arms round her and tell her not to worry, but I knew how she’d have reacted to my gesture.

  Independent and reckless – that was Jan. That was how she’d been at school. Scraping through exams when she could have come top every time if she’d been bothered, treating all the teachers with disdain, always in some sort of trouble, and laughing all the time . . .