by Marie Joseph
He emptied the contents of her string bag out on to the table, and started to detach the pieces of frozen filleted plaice from their wrappings. ‘Switch on the grill, there’s a good girl.’
She found to her surprise she was trembling. She was hungry too, having lunched off one chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. And tired. Not that he cared. All he cared about was his own comfort.
For all he knew, the little cat could be out there, in the dark and the pouring rain, lost, bewildered, wandering aimlessly across the busy street, to end up under the wheels of a car. She shuddered, and before he could stop her, opened the door.
Immediately, like a streak of black furry lightning, the cat shot into the room, and miaowing piteously, wound itself round her legs.
‘Just a minute, lovely,’ she told it, laying the pieces of fish under the grill. ‘You’ll have your supper, just as soon as it’s cooked.’
Beating his forehead with his fist – like some third-rate actor, she thought privately – he asked her whether she intended to give the cat his supper.
‘No, just mine,’ she said sweetly, ‘and I always knew that men who didn’t like animals or children had something suspect about them.’
‘Who said I didn’t like children?’ he asked dangerously.
‘Asking me have I taken my pill every morning isn’t exactly going to make me think that you’re over-eager to start a family, is it?’ she said, lowering her fillet of plaice down to the floor and smiling tenderly as the black and white cat fell on it in ecstasy, gulping it down.
Then she slapped his plate down on the table, poured herself a cup of tea and sat down opposite him, cheeks flushed with two spots of temper, blue eyes glittering with tears she was too angry to shed.
‘You know as well as I do that we can’t afford to start a family until we can move out of this dump,’ he said, through his first mouthful of fish. ‘And how can we possibly spend money on cat food? We’re supposed to be saving very seriously – and in case you’re interested, that cat is going to be sick.’
This time she didn’t argue as once again he opened the door and none too gently put the cat outside. ‘It’s because it was hungry,’ she said. ‘Being hungry is conducive to gulping food, you know.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word,’ he said, pushing his plate aside. ‘You always use it in the wrong context.’
‘Ho!’ she said. ‘So now you think I’m an illiterate moron. Good job it’s my evening for shorthand lessons. Perhaps I should change to the class for backward readers.’
‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,’ he said, ‘and now, if you don’t mind, I need the table for my books. I have an exam next week, in case you’d forgotten.’
She piled the dishes in the sink, swirled the cloth from the table and went to stare at herself moodily in the bedroom mirror instead of washing-up.
‘I’m off,’ she said ten minutes later, and he raised his head. For a moment she thought he was going to smile at her, but she looked away very quickly in case she was tempted to smile back. Then, bidding him a very distant goodbye, she opened the door, and seeing the bus was coming, had to run to catch it.
In her headlong dash, she couldn’t be sure whether the small flashes of white that caught her eye were the cat’s paws, or scraps of paper blown down into the basement area by the winter wind.
All through the shorthand lesson her stomach rumbled so much that she had to keep coughing to cover up, and when her turn came to read her notes out she had only managed to transcribe one word in three. Ten minutes before the end of the lesson she excused herself, pleading a headache, and for a second time that evening caught a bus just as it drew away from the kerb.
This time she got off on the other side of the road from their basement flat. Crossing over, she walked slowly along the rain-wet pavement, numb and cold, and so hungry she knew she would have to sink her pride and open a can of soup the moment she got inside.
Now she could admit to herself that he’d been right about the cat. It wouldn’t be fair to keep it when there was no one to let it in or out, even though she was sure something could be arranged with Mrs Davies in the flat above.
The truth was some people genuinely hated cats; they couldn’t help it.
It didn’t mean that they were cruel or anything – cats triggered off their allergies or asthma, or even brought them out in little blisters.
And he wasn’t cruel; he couldn’t be cruel if he tried. It was just that he was tired after working every day in that crummy office, and spending all his evenings slaving over textbooks trying to pass his accountancy exams.
Quarrelling was awful, it made her feel ill, and yet just lately they seemed to be having rows most of the time.
He was quite right about the money too, even money spent on cat food was money that could be added to their slowly growing balance in the building society.
Hurrying on, head bent against the driving rain, she didn’t see him at first; then she looked through the railings and there he was, crouching on the stone steps, holding out a saucer.
‘Come on Pretty-paws,’ he was saying, ‘don’t be afraid. You’ve got me all wrong, there’s no need to be afraid of me. Come inside.’
Then, as she stood quite still, he scooped something up in his arms, opened the door and went inside.
And when she let herself in, he was there, sitting at the table as she’d left him, the lamp shining on his dark head as he turned the pages of a book, and in front of the electric fire lay the little cat, curled up into a ball, its head tucked neatly between its paws.
He was most apologetic.
‘I opened the door to see if the rain had stopped,’ he said, looking her not quite straight in the eye, ‘and before I could do anything, the bloody thing was inside.’ He closed his book and rubbed his eyes. ‘I suppose we could come to some arrangement with Mrs Davies if you really want to keep it.’
His hair was plastered to his head, there was rain on his face, and when she went to lean against him, the shoulders of his jacket were so damp that she guessed he must have been crouching on the steps for a very long time holding out the saucer of milk.
But she said nothing, only held him closer and told him of her love, as the cat opened one yellow eye and slowly and rhythmically began to lick a white-tipped paw.
Love in the Red
LAST MONDAY IN my lunchtime I called in at the bank and whispered my request to the pale young man behind the grille. He went away, then came back with a slip of paper, which he handed to me folded neatly down the middle. He was smiling as if he found what he’d just written down extremely funny.
Advice of balance, it said, then it went on to tell me that the balance of my account was minus ninety-one pence.
At the end of the afternoon I decided I couldn’t afford the bus fare home, so I started on the long walk, and on the way I talked to myself, holding a kind of financial inquiry into my sorry state of affairs.
‘Why did you buy that red coat, Miss Smith, when you already have a camel-hair swing-back that’s still in fashion?’
‘Because everyone knows that the price of wool is rising higher and higher. It was a sort of investment, don’t you see?’
‘Well, how about the cardigan, the lacy skinny-rib, the one that does everything for you apart from keeping you warm? Was that purchase strictly necessary, Miss Smith?’
‘But surely you can see how exactly it matches my new swirly skirt? I’d have been a mad fool to pass that by, now wouldn’t I?’
It was no good. My conscience didn’t understand my motivations and neither would Jonathan. Only the night before he’d told me gently that if I didn’t mend my extravagant ways, he could see no future for us.
Jonathan is kind, and Jonathan is good, and he is overpoweringly obsessed with figures (the one, two, three kind) because he is training to be an accountant. It’s a sort of occupational hazard, the way he feels obliged to translate everything into debits and credits.
&nbs
p; He’s the sort of man who has a little box by his telephone and puts the appropriate money into it every time he makes a call. He starts saving up for his holiday the minute he gets back from the one before, if you know what I mean. He is practical and thrifty, which I fear I will never be, and he will make a wonderful husband. His children will put their birthday money straight into their little money boxes, and every time they’ve saved eighty pence Jonathan will make it up to a pound before transferring it to their Post Office saving accounts.
And the very throught of it all made me want to cry.
Although I’m twenty-three I still live with my mother, because we like each other, and since my father died I know she’s lonely, though she’d never admit it. When I get married Jonathan and I will go for tea every Sunday, and he’ll go through her accounts and make sure she’s not living beyond her means.
‘But I’ve lived beyond my means all my life, dear,’ she told him when he offered to go through her ‘papers’ after my father died suddenly. ‘But all right then, dear, if that’s what you’d like.’
Jonathan’s face when she produced her ‘papers’ from a biscuit tin on the top of the kitchen cabinet is a sight I shall never forget.
‘But where do you keep the receipts of all your bills?’ he asked, his heavy-framed spectacles slipping down his nose as he tried to decipher her method of book-keeping.
‘The paid ones are in the toast rack, and the unpaid ones are with my trading-stamp books in the kitchen-table drawer,’ she told him, thinking he’d be pleased at her efficiency.
And now, when we’d seen a flat at a rent we could just about afford, and Jonathan had said we must get down to talking seriously about money, I had to make this terrible discovery that I was minus ninety-one pence!
Longing for some sympathy, I told my mother.
‘Don’t say you haven’t been filling in your cheque stubs again,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to it once you get the hang of it, dear.’
‘I’ll have to get an extra job,’ I said wildly. ‘From seven till midnight in a coffee bar, or as a barmaid, or cleaning offices – or something like that. If only I could win the pools,’ I added, seeing myself showing my bank statement to Jonathan with six or seven noughts in black.
‘You’d have to start doing them first,’ my mother said mildly, and looked at her watch. ‘It’s time I wasn’t here. I thought Jonathan always came round while I was at my flower-arranging class.’
‘He’s swotting for his exams,’ I told her, following her into the hall. ‘I’m going to wash my hair.’
‘Swotting,’ she said, tucking a red scarf into the neck of her coat any-old-how, ‘that’s an old-fashioned word. I thought it went out with Angela Brazil.’
‘Who’s she?’ I asked, but my mother had already gone, twirling her fingers at me in an airy goodbye.
Feeling depressed, I went back into the living room and stared at the blank television screen. Time for another self-conducted financial inquiry, I decided.
‘Do you honestly think that Jonathan is old-fashioned?’
‘He has all the solid virtues, if that’s what you mean, Miss Smith.’
‘Would you say he carried his economy drives too far? He’s only twenty-four.’
‘In years, maybe, but in wisdom he has a head on his shoulders far beyond his age. You must show him your latest balance sheet without delay, Miss Smith. I think you’ll find that when he realises you intend to cut back your losses in the coming months, he’ll come to terms with you.’
‘But I don’t want him to come to terms with me. I want him to love me. As I am.’
The doorbell rang with a piercing suddenness that made me jump as if I’d been shot in the back.
‘I’ll take it back,’ I told the Jonathan I imagined standing on the other side of the door. ‘I haven’t worn it yet, and I’ll run past shops with my eyes closed from now on. I’ll darn my tights, and I’d swear I’d knit my own vests if I wore them . . .’ I opened the door and there was the pale young man from the bank.
He was holding out my umbrella, a tartan collapsible one in its matching case, and he was smiling.
‘You left this on the counter. I ran after you, but by the time I’d got out of my cage you’d gone. You in training for the Olympics or something?’
‘I was running away from the truth,’ I told him, the words saying themselves. ‘Do you have many clients shooting themselves on bank premises during the space of a year, Mr Chambers?’
He looked grave, but his eyes were still teasing. ‘That bad was it, then?’
‘You know it was.’
He put both hands together in a mock pious gesture. ‘We never discuss out clients’ financial status, I’m afraid.’
‘But you were laughing. I saw you!’
He shook his head. ‘Smiling. At you, not at your balance. You looked so worried. I was trying to cheer you up. Money isn’t worth getting upset over. Not if you have enough to buy food with and pay your rent.’
He shuffled his feet and, to my surprise, I saw the beginnings of a blush creep over his face. Rather a nice face too, topped by untidy thick hair.
‘Look,’ he was saying, ‘would you care to come out for a drink or something? I’m not a Samaritan or anything, but I’m a good listener, and although my shoulders aren’t all that broad, there’s room for you to cry on one if you feel like it. You looked scared out of your wits when you opened the door. Did you think I was the rent man?’
‘I thought you were Jonathan.’
‘Unfortunately, no,’ he said.
I don’t know how it happened, but there he was ten minutes later, sitting opposite me, his long grasshopper legs stretched out across the rug, a mug of coffee in his hand, listening gravely as I told him what a terrible wife I was going to make Jonathan.
‘He says his mother had a bottom drawer well stocked with three of everything before she married his father,’ I said.
‘Why three?’
‘Well, you know. One in use, one in the wash, and one in case.’
‘In case of what?’ His expression was perfectly serious, but his eyes were brimming with laughter. I knew I was being very disloyal, so I leapt to Jonathan’s defence.
‘My fiancé has a practical turn of mind. He believes that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds take care of themselves. Or is it the other way round?’
‘Practical, but you don’t love him,’ said the pale and thin young man from the bank.
So there I was five minutes later, showing him out in a silence positively dripping with dignity.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Bank personnel should never make personal remarks about the love lives of their clients. It was unforgivable of me. When we meet again it will be as if through a grille darkly, and I promise not to laugh.’
And with that he walked away with his long loping stride, and I found myself worrying just for a moment if a person could be as thin as he was and still stay healthy. Then I closed the door, picked up the telephone and dialled Jonathan’s number.
‘Come round and talk to me. Forget the swotting for this evening,’ I begged desperately. ‘I want to tell you something. Please.’
It wasn’t very romantic having to plead like that, but it seemed important I proved to myself that I wasn’t afraid of showing him the slip of paper with Advice of balance printed across it.
I wanted to see his reaction. I wanted to explain to him that I’d be the kind of wife who never had enough money left at the end of the week; a wife who knew that two and two made four, but couldn’t for the life of her fathom why, and who couldn’t, in any circumstances, be expected to add her life away.
Jonathan is kind, and Jonathan is good, but he would never smile at an overdraft, not even one for ninety-one pence.
And when he came, and I turned my face away from his kiss, he looked down at the slip of paper and flinched as if I’d dealt him a blow.
‘We’ll have to start you on a system,’ he said slowly,
as if talking to a backward child. ‘I’ll give you a little notebook and you must write down every single item of expenditure, not forgetting a thing. We’ll go over it together at the end of the week and see where you’re going wrong. If you take care of the pennies, I think you’ll find that the pounds will take care of themselves.’
‘Your father used to say that,’ I said, and it was more a sad certainty than a statement of fact.
And that was the moment when I would have taken off my engagement ring and handed it to him. But I didn’t have an engagement ring, Jonathan having decided that we couldn’t possibly afford even a teeny-weeny solitaire.
‘I can’t marry you,’ I told him. ‘I know I’ll never meet anyone as good as you, Jonathan, and I mean that sincerely, but you can’t turn me into an adding machine. People don’t change just because they get married, Jonathan. Can’t you see?’
He argued a little, but his heart wasn’t in it; he is an intensely practical man, and he knew I was right, but we held each other close before he went away . . .
Mother said: ‘You’ve been crying.’ She had come in from her flower-arranging class, glowing because her teacher had praised her arrangement of three bare twigs and two daffodils.
‘I can’t understand myself,’ I said. ‘I’m not all that stupid about money. I know I’ll have to save up and budget if I want a home of my own, but it seemed important to prove to Jonathan that I wasn’t even willing to try.’
‘Because you stopped loving him a long time ago,’ said Mother. Then she placed her artistic offering on the mantelpiece, and admired it with her head on one side. ‘Freud could have told you why you bought that red coat, dear.’
‘He could?’
Mother nodded. ‘You bought it because your subconscious dictated that if you could convince Jonathan that you’re an incurable spendthrift, he would go away and never come back. Do you think it would look better on the sideboard?’