by Marie Joseph
‘You’re a good old sport, Tina,’ he said suddenly, and I said that I knew I was but hadn’t we better be going back to our friends.
Reluctantly he nodded, and with a last backward glance at a particularly endearing little tern, he followed me over the shingle to the warden’s post.
Alec looked guilty, for no reason that I could fathom, as we clambered up the wooden steps and went inside the room with its long tables and glass cases of stuffed birds, labelled meticulously as to type and breeding habits.
Joanna had untied the green scarf and her long yellow hair fell forward over her exquisite features. Mentally I compared her well-groomed appearance with my own unglamorous image in the anorak, and my heart sank right down to my mud-splashed wellingtons and stayed there.
Alec ordered another round of coffee from the warden’s wife, and Paul drank his standing by one of the glass cases in rapt contemplation of a stuffed redshank, speckled brown with long red legs.
We caught the boat back with five minutes to spare, and this time Alec sat next to Joanna, with Paul on her other side, leaving me to be chatted up by the weather-creased boatman, who assured me that if we’d lingered five more minutes we would have been stranded on the Point for another seven hours.
The prospect of such a happening made Paul’s dark eyes glow, but Joanna closed her eyes in genuine horror.
‘The mind boggles,’ she said, and Alec added that his was boggling too.
‘I’m sorry that you’re not enjoying yourselves,’ Paul said, his thin face stiff with hurt. Just then we were caught in the slip-stream of a fishing boat making for the shore and Joanna squealed, but the arm she clutched belonged to Alec.
By now the soft Norfolk drizzle had changed to a hard downpour. To an intrepid bird-watcher, rain is merely an occupational hazard, and after lunch Paul suggested a brisk walk along the quayside. Joanna and Alec said there was an oldie film on television they simply must see.
We peeped in on them on our way out, and I felt less guilty when I saw that Joanna was sitting next to Alec, her left knee clasped in Alec’s palm.
So Paul and I walked off down the steep village street, and along the quay. We talked to an old salt and through Paul’s binoculars we saw a grey seal swimming with the foam-flecked tide.
‘It’s funny the way things never turn out the way one expects them to,’ he said.
‘Joanna is beautiful,’ I said.
Paul sighed. ‘I almost proposed to her last week. I decided to leave it until this weekend. You know, the wind in her hair, and the sun sinking low over the salt marshes. But she’s hating every minute of it, and somehow I’m seeing her through different eyes today.’
‘She’s a town bird,’ I said softly, but he didn’t laugh.
‘That bloke,’ he said, ‘the one with the wandering hands. Do you honestly think he’s your type?’
‘Not really,’ I said, as sadly as I could. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’
‘Hilarious,’ Paul said, then he looked at me with the questioning expression of someone who sees things clearly for the first time. Very slowly he traced the outline of my mouth with his finger, then pushed a strand of damp hair back underneath the hood of my anorak.
And if you ever saw the film Gigi, you’ll know what I mean when I say that he stared at me with amazement, as if he were realising that I’d been growing up right before his eyes.
A little lost tern flew past, keeping up its own peculiar rambling chatter. It hovered on the wing, but when Paul bent his head and kissed me, he didn’t even notice it.
And for me, held close in his arms, it was as though at that moment all the birds of Norfolk burst suddenly and rapturously into glorious song.
Two Can Play
FORTY PER CENT of each year, I reckoned one day, Rob and I spent apart. I also told myself that he couldn’t help it if his job as an export executive meant he had to be away from home two weeks out of every three, coming back from the capitals of the Eastern world with a suntan, a hangover, and a suitcase full of dirty shirts for me to wash.
‘Would you,’ I asked myself – out loud I confess, talking to myself becoming somewhat of a habit – ‘be happier married to a man who worked in the Ministry of Pensions, who caught the eight-fifteen to town each morning, returning on the five-forty?’
And most days the answer was yes. Yes please. Loud and clear.
They’re a friendly lot down where we live. Dinner parties, wine-and-cheese get-togethers, dancing on the patios, flirting with each other’s husbands, mildly in the main. But nothing, nothing at all for the wife left on her own.
I’d met Rob at the airport, me in the jeans I seemed to live in, and him coming through Customs wearing his pale grey tropical suit, with that irritating suntan, his hair badly in need of a trim, and his eyes glazed with exhaustion, wanting nothing more than to fall asleep in his chair, watching television with his eyes closed, dopey, unresponsive, reserving his charm, I suppose, for the board room and the high-powered business confrontation in Calcutta or wherever.
I’d wash the caseful of dirty shirts, pander to his indigestion, recount little anecdotes about the children, which I suspected bored him rigid, and a week later drive him back to the airport, when the whole business would start over once again.
Then, on his last time home, I found the visiting card in his wallet. OK, I was snooping, and it served me right. But just holding the card in my hand gave me a clear picture of the girl who had given it to him.
Lizzie Nascari, it said, and anyone who calls herself Lizzie and gets away with it is bound to be beautiful, I told myself. Tall, with legs starting at her waist, dark-haired almost surely – Rob told me once he had never fancied a blonde woman – brown as a berry, but of course, and intelligent and articulate. I saw her very clearly. So what did I do?
I could have asked him about it, but I didn’t. I even thought of turning the card over and writing my own name and telephone number on the back, imagining his face when he saw it. Would it be amusement, or plain down-to-earth guilt? But if I’d done that, he would have known I’d been snooping, and that kind of behaviour doesn’t fit into what I knew we both consider to be the civilised pattern of our marriage.
So I said nothing; just drove him off once again to the airport, kissed him goodbye, and drove the familiar route back home, stopping off at the supermarket to pick up a huge carton of groceries, staggering out with it to where I’d parked my car, rather neatly I thought, in between a shabby Rolls and a sparkling Mini.
There was a man standing on the pavement, wearing jeans, a vermilion open-necked shirt, and an irate expression.
‘This your car?’ he said, as I balanced the carton on one hip, trying to open the boot with one hand, and dropped an economy-sized tin of baked beans into the gutter in the process.
‘Hope so,’ I said, laughing. ‘Sorry I’ve hemmed you in, but with a bit of toing and froing I should get out, then you can.’
‘Take more than a bit of toing and froing,’ he was saying, none too gallantly, when the bottom of the carton gave way, depositing the remainder of the groceries in the road.
‘Blast,’ I said, retrieving a double pack of pink toilet paper from his toes, and scrabbling the rest of the things together as best I could. ‘Seems this isn’t going to be my day.’
He helped me to pick up the rest of the things, handing them to me as I threw them into a gaping boot, and I wished there’d been more exotic things amongst my shopping.
‘How many children do you have?’ he asked me, grinning, and I told him just two.
‘But they have huge appetites, and I hate shopping, so now I can hibernate for the rest of the week.’
‘Surely not,’ he said, and I knew that he was chatting me up, but it isn’t every Monday morning that a girl meets a man who is a cross between Rhett Butler and that bloke who’s supposed to turn up after you’ve had a certain kind of bath. I found myself telling him that I’d just seen my husband off to Calcutta, and that the kids were
at nursery school.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘How about a cup of coffee in that grotto across the road? Perhaps by the time we’ve drunk it, the car behind you and the car in front of me will have gone, and we can drive away with dignity.
‘To make it above board, my name is Stephen Marsh, and I’ve come to live, of late, in one of the single flats by the bridge. I’ve taken two days to settle in, and don’t for the life of me know where the percolator is. Could be in a box marked “sundries” which I haven’t got round to opening yet.’
As I hesitated, knowing full well that he could have extricated himself without the slightest difficulty, he went on: ‘You can tell me which of the two launderettes is the better one, and if there’s a decent golf club around.’
And so I went, and he told me he was recently divorced, and because he had the sort of face one talks to, all interesting hollows and little-boy-lost shadows under his eyes, I told him how bored I was, how fed up with being a 40 per cent wife. I honestly did. Giving him the perfect excuse for telephoning me and suggesting that we meet again.
And I went home all of a glow. Radiant. Telling myself firmly how low I’d sunk, that a casual encounter with a perfect stranger had made my day. I stacked away the groceries, fed the washing into the automatic, and went upstairs to make the bed, removing Rob’s pyjamas and pillow, the way I always did the day he went away. Even when he wasn’t there I still kept my things to my side of the bed, which somehow usually seemed to symbolise my loneliness, but not that day, because I was singing underneath my breath.
At half-past twelve I picked up the kids from nursery school, Josh three, and Tina four, and they were carrying the fruits of their morning’s endeavours, two paper baskets. Tina’s was perfect. She has ‘busy’ fingers, just like my mother, but Josh’s basket looked ready to disintegrate at a touch, and he had that furtive, hangdog expression about him which he always has when he’s done something wrong.
Tina would tell me soon. They were hardly settled in the back of the car when she said that he’d poured his orange juice on the floor instead of drinking it, and had wet his pants.
‘Not berry much!’ he shouted, close to tears, and I wondered, not for the first time, how their chromosomes could have been so misguided as to give me a tough, practically minded, self-sufficient little girl, and a sensitive, clinging, obstinate little boy.
It rained in the afternoon, and the woman across the road asked me to have her two children to play while she took her baby to the clinic for a checkup. By teatime they had turned the house into a slum, and Josh shamed me by sitting atop his toy chest, arms folded, eyes narrowed into slits, preventing the other children from going anywhere near his ‘things’.
My head ached, and when I had time to look at myself in the mirror, in the blessed peace of the early evening, I wasn’t too surprised to see a shiny-nosed, limp-haired, slightly demented woman staring back at me, looking at least ten years older than her thirty-one years.
Not worth changing, even into a housecoat, I reasoned, and not worth making myself more than a snack. Bang once again went all my resolutions about keeping up my morale, giving myself the psychological tonic of putting on make-up and sitting down to a properly cooked meal.
Rob, I reminded myself, would be eating in an air-conditioned hotel – smoked salmon and caviare, more than likely – and there’d be the scented night outside, and that visiting card nestling in his pocket. Or would he have dialled Lizzie’s number already?
Stephen Marsh rang me at the end of the following week. He was clever, that one. Just giving me long enough to wonder if he was going to get in touch with me, but not long enough to forget him. His voice had a gentle quality that sent little shivers of anticipation up and down my spine – yes, honestly – and I didn’t resist all that hard when he asked me to have a meal out with him.
No difficulty getting a baby-sitter. We have one of those neighbourly points systems in our area, and I rang the girl who was chief organiser at the time and she arranged it for me.
The girl turned out to be Minta, a real earth-mother type, and when she saw Stephen park his car at the kerb, she actually had the nerve to look shocked. Minta, with her husband who rings her up every day to tell her exactly what time he’s leaving the office, not that I suspect it deviates more than five minute either way in any case. I could see her eyes taking in my long dark blue dress, and the string of beads which skimmed my cleavage.
Why was I wearing that dress? That particular one? Why not my country cotton print, or the grey skirt with my Edwardian blouse? I’d asked myself that already, and the answer was I was wearing that particular dress because it made me look sexy. Because I wanted to look that way.
Because I was tired of wearing jeans, and because I was tired of sitting alone night after night, having sex thrown at me from the television, and being expected to get a vicarious thrill out of it. I wasn’t being naïve about that little white square card in Rob’s top pocket any more. If he was determined not to miss out on things, then I, his wife, was going to see just what I was missing. Jealous? Not me. Never.
Stephen Marsh was the ideal person to fly my first kite with, for want of a better expression. It was ridiculous that Rob should be the only man in my life. I’d married him seven years ago, just before the permissive society got really going . . . Seven years ago. The seven-year itch.
I giggled, and Stephen Marsh leaned forward to fill my glass.
‘You have beautiful eyes, and the wine is sparkling in them,’ he said. Yes, he was that corny, but at least there was no pretence about it. No Brief Encounter this, no sleazy railway-station buffet on a drizzly afternoon. He was missing his wife, in spite of what he tried to tell me, and I was missing Rob. We found each other physically attractive, and that was all there was to it.
It was all there, the candle-light, the rich food, eyes clinging, knees touching underneath the table, hands clasping across the table. As we drove back I told him about Minta, and he said he’d drive around awhile until she’d gone, then come back. He told me to switch off the porch light to give him the signal, and I knew he’d done it all before, but I didn’t care. In my wine-bemused state it seemed to make it all the more exciting.
Excitement, that was the word. Not guilt, or any of the self-questioning doubts I’d been sure would spoil such an occasion, just happy, uninhibited joy at what I was contemplating, that’s all.
Then why, when it came down to the nitty-gritty, as they say where I come from, couldn’t I go through with it? Was it that smooth side of the bed reproaching me? Yes, we’d got that far, and why did I, suddenly, frighteningly sober, tell him it was no use?
‘There’s a rude word for women like me, and you can say it if you like,’ I said. But he didn’t. Instead he came and sat beside me, cupping my face gently between his hands, and telling me that he understood.
‘It’s my fault for rushing things,’ he said in his quiet voice, and I told him quickly that I never wanted to see him again. Just the thought made me want to curl up and die of shame.
‘OK, love, if we meet in the supermarket, I’ll hide behind the nearest tin of ham,’ he said, and when he’d gone I wished I’d been the kind of woman who could have had a good cry.
The next day remorse set in, in spite of the fact that I told myself I had nothing to torment myself with. I resolved that when Rob came home, things were going to be different.
It wasn’t natural for us to be leading such totally contrasting lives, his high-powered, and mine that of a small-town frump. Tired he might be when he arrived back home, but I’d tell him that for my sake, for both our sakes, we must make more effort to bridge the gap.
If a stranger like Stephen Marsh could excite me and make me feel like a teenager again over a bottle of wine and Chateaubriand for two, then so could my husband, the man I loved, the father of my children. Still burning with the sense it all made, I bought him a slim gold lighter I couldn’t afford.
So once again, there I
was letting Minta in at the front door, but this time driving out to pick up Rob at the airport. ‘We’re not going straight home,’ I’d tell him. ‘We’re going out to eat. You can sleep all day tomorrow, if you like. And I’m going to tell you just how much I’ve missed you.’
He’d never know, thanks be to heaven he’d never know, that I was wiping out the memory of what had happened while he’d been away.
I expected opposition. I know that all Rob ever wants when he comes home is a tin of soup, a hunk of bread and some cheese, eaten in front of the television.
So imagine my astonishment when we got into the car and he forestalled me. When he said he wanted to take me out for a meal, and asked, couldn’t I phone the baby-sitter and ask her to stay?
When we were in the restaurant he opened his briefcase, and handed over a tissue-wrapped parcel containing five, yes five, silver bracelets, which he said were an un-anniversary present.
The lighter stayed in my hand-bag, and the words I was going to say remained unsaid. Rob was saying them all for me, anyway. He told me how he’d missed me, and how much he loved me. It was uncanny, and all too revealing. I just sat there, listening, and he was too kind, too loving, tanned, tired and vulnerable. And knowing what my own motivations had been, I could only guess at his.
I found myself glancing at his lightweight jacket, imagining the wallet snug in its pocket.
‘You’re looking really pretty tonight. I’ve neglected you far too much,’ Rob was telling me, and I smiled at him. It can be done. Smiling when you’re crying inside, and when your mind is shouting: ‘Lizzie Nascari. I hate you. Have you any idea just how much I hate you?’
Funny Girl
MELISSA WAS A big girl, a plumpish girl, with corn-coloured hair which looked as if it had been home-cut with a pair of rather blunt kitchen scissors, as indeed it had. She came originally from Yorkshire, and had a dry sense of humour with a touch of vulgarity in it, a decided asset with four children under the age of ten and a home in Surrey which was as rambling as a Victorian vicarage.