by Marie Joseph
‘I could save up if I wanted to. Yes, it would look nicer on the sideboard,’ I said, then I told her about my unexpected visitor. I told her how thin he was, and how he had a way of saying things that made me laugh.
Mother moved a twig slightly. ‘Jonathan was lovely, but he had no sense of humour, and I still think it looks better on the mantelpiece. What did you say his name was?’
Used to following her vague way of talking, I told her that his name was Mr Chambers. ‘I saw it at the bank on the front of his cage.’
She gave me one of her all-knowing looks and said she thought an early night wouldn’t come amiss, so I went to bed and lay awake for ages planning an economy drive.
I didn’t go far as writing the results in a notebook, but at the end of the week I called in with six pounds to pay into my account.
Behind the counter there was a Miss Vernon with flyaway scarlet frames to her spectacles, and she was quite free, but I stood behind the customer at Mr Chambers’ grille.
He looked, I thought, even thinner than I remembered, but when he saw me, his smile left me in no doubt about his pleasure at seeing me.
As I handed in my paying-in slip, and as he counted the notes carefully, going through them twice to make sure that two weren’t sticking together, he raised his eyes and whispered that he hoped Jonathan was in good health.
‘It’s all finished,’ I whispered back, but Miss Vernon heard, and her eyebrows raised themselves over the tops of her scarlet frames.
‘I won’t keep you a minute, Miss Smith,’ said Mr Chambers in his normal voice. Then he walked away from the counter with his loping stride, and I’ll swear Miss Vernon winked at me.
He came back with a slip of paper which he handed to me folded discreetly down the middle. I read it and said yes, I’d be waiting at eight o’clock, and yes, I did like Chinese food.
We smiled at each other, and a man waiting behind me muttered something about it being no wonder the country was going down the drain.
Then I walked out into the street again, feeling richer and happier than I’d felt for a long, long time . . .
Let the Sunshine In
THE FIRST DAY of real summer sunshine did it; that and the paperback Kathy was reading in snatches – sometimes in bed, sometimes in the bath, and as often as not as a diversion from some television programme she found rather boring.
Summer had come all at once, touching their quiet street of Victorian houses with a sparkle of bright sunshine. Kathy could almost smell it, fresh and lemony, making her want to open every possible window, do her hair in a different style, and change her perennial faded jeans and sweater for something light and floaty, like a printed chiffon.
Then, at the thought of herself in printed flowered chiffon, she laughed aloud, so that the cat in his basket raised his head to stare at her, and baby Timothy, walking, but only just, threw back his head to laugh with her, lost his balance, and fell flat on his face.
Although it was only half-past nine, Kathy had done a thousand things. She had cooked breakfast for David her husband, for Ryan and Roland, her seven-year-old twins, for Timothy, who had thrown most of his on the floor, and for her two live-in students, who had gone off on an educational trip to Oxford for the day.
She had driven the twins to school, washed up, vacuumed, made the beds and loaded the washing machine. Then, suddenly, in the middle of laughing at the idea of herself in floaty chiffon, Kathy remembered the book she was reading in snatches.
It had described a wife tied to her home as some sort of pathetic creature seething with an inner turmoil, aching with nameless dissatisfaction, trapped on a revolving wheel of domesticity, her talents wasted, her potential ignored, merely a slave to man.
‘That’s me,’ Kathy thought. ‘Six males to fetch and carry for, and even a cat that’s a tom. Miserable, frustrated and intellectually starved, and I didn’t know it.’
And somehow, the unexpected promise of summer that morning caught her unawares, so that when Timothy staggered over and clung to her legs, she glanced down at him with something that was almost akin to distaste.
The book was right. She was frighteningly passive, far too content, and yet that sunny morning she had actually envied David going off to his office in town. Soon, if she ran true to the book’s prognosis, she would be dominating him because of her seething inner jealousy, and making her children’s lives a misery because of her tormented frustration.
Although Kathy was usually well able to analyse her own reasons for being a wife and mother, this sunny morning she identified with the housebound-slave image completely.
Coming to a sudden decision, she lifted the telephone and dialled the number of her friend across the street.
‘Moira?’ she asked, hardening her heart against the sound of her friend’s baby screaming in the background. ‘This is Kathy. I wonder, could you have Timothy for the day? Only until I collect the two boys from school this afternoon?’ She glanced over her shoulder at the disturbing sunshine. ‘Something’s come up and I have to go out. Would you mind?’
‘It’s about time you asked me to help you out,’ Moira said, after only the briefest of pauses. ‘I’d decided I couldn’t ask you to baby-sit any more until you’d stopped being so independent. Bring him across right away.’
So stopping merely to stuff a plastic bag with nappies and plastic pants, his favourite wooden helicopter, and the old chiffon scarf he would, hopefully, suck when he went nodding off to sleep after lunch, Kathy walked him across the street to her best friend’s house.
At the sight of Moira’s nice round smile of welcome he screamed in horror, but Kathy prised open his clinging fingers one by one and handed him over.
Then before Moira could ask any questions, and before Timothy’s screams, heart-rending by now, weakened her resolve, she hurried back across the street and into her own house, thankfully closing the door behind her.
To strike a real blow for women’s rights, Kathy knew she should have started a painting, or written a short story, or at least fulfilled herself in some way, but instead she went out into the small back garden, took a deck chair from the shed and just sat in it for the next two hours, reading bits of the book from time to time.
The sun was pleasantly warm on her face, and for a little while she slept. When she woke up, she made no attempt to go in, just sat there, allowing her thoughts to wander.
The real root of her trouble, she decided, was that she had married young. Maybe if she had gone on to university after A-levels, instead of opting for commercial college and a job as a run-of-the-mill secretary, she would have been a director of a firm by now. She could have been sitting at her own desk, making snappy but brilliant decisions, answering two telephones at once and dictating letters to some silly girl who had no thought in her mind but getting married and having babies.
Being a full-time wife and mother had become, as the book had prophesied, more of a religious cult than a mode of living.
David took her for granted; the boys took her for granted; and the current pair of students, two great strapping lads in their late teens sometimes called her Mummy, just to tease. And she was twenty-nine!
Of one thing she was absolutely certain. David would never question his identity, even with the disturbing influence of the weather to confuse him. Six years her senior, David knew exactly who he was and why.
He was a lovely man; slow to anger, quick to love, not exactly handsome but not homely either. A long, long way from the concept of the Victorian father who ruled his home with a rod of iron. Kathy smiled as she thought about her almost ideal husband.
Then she frowned a little.
She had to be honest. Although David had never actually said that he thought a woman’s place was in the home, Kathy knew in her heart of hearts that was where he really preferred her to be.
‘Perhaps I ought to show him I’m a person in my own right and not just his wife,’ she thought lazily. So she closed her eyes and imagined herself
being kissed with lingering passion by a tall, dark man with a drooping black moustache. David was short, fair andclean-shaven. Then Kathy remembered she wasn’t particularly keen on tall men with drooping black moustaches.
At one o’clock she went inside and with the worrying paperback propped up against the fruit bowl, she ate a cottage-cheese salad for her figure, then a big slice of lemon meringue pie for her delight.
This time, as she read, she learnt that all she had got from her life was a man, and all the slavery that went with the getting of him. She discovered that her mind was one big question: Who am I? She was struggling with the frustration of knowing that she could have been a top physicist, a lady jockey or even a bank manager by now.
She knew she should have been taking a solidified pack of braising steak out of the freezer and setting it to thaw before mixing it with herbs and onions. But, somehow, braising steak didn’t go with sunshine, so she went back into the garden until it was time to fetch the boys from school, and when she picked up Timothy she could see that Moira was lying bravely when she vowed that Timothy had been no trouble at all and it had been a pleasure looking after him for her.
‘I hope you sorted out what came up?’ Moira said.
She was obviously dying to know where Kathy had been all day long, but Kathy didn’t want to tell her.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she told her vaguely. And when Timothy had been bathed and put to bed, grizzling a little to punish her for having left him for the day, Kathy fed the rest of the men on boiled ham, salad and potatoes, telling them firmly that the weather was much too warm for their usual hot meal. They ate in disgruntled silence, but heartily nonetheless.
Then, when the twins had gone grumbling to bed, fighting a rear-guard action on every stair, and the students had gone to their room to study, Kathy and David were at last alone together in the undusted sitting room, with Timothy’s wooden helicopter on top of the television, crumbs on the carpet, a shoe on the window-ledge, dead flowers in the vase, and yesterday’s papers on the sofa.
Kathy glanced around her with distaste, then, remembering the book, despised herself for caring. She watched David relaxing in his chair and tried very hard to feel that he was exploiting her. She failed dismally.
‘This room is a mess,’ she said in a loud voice, deliberately taunting him, willing him to say that it was and what had she been doing all day? But he was busy getting his beloved pipe going, and as he disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and the evening paper, she knew that he hadn’t noticed a thing.
‘It looks OK to me,’ he said.
Kathy half-closed her eyes and tried to see him as a selfish man who had thwarted her dreams, stopped her from being fulfilled and turned her into his cringing slave. She failed again.
‘David?’ she said again, a thought puzzling her. ‘If I hadn’t married you, or if I had married you and been determined to carry on with my career, do you realise that I could have been out for a boozy lunch today with a client, negotiating a contract worth, say, twenty thousand pounds?’
‘That’s true,’ David said, trying to humour her.
Kathy frowned. ‘But if I didn’t look after the children and the house and the cooking, then someone else would have to, wouldn’t they?’
‘I expect so,’ David said, a trifle warily.
‘So they’d be a slave to domesticity, wouldn’t they?’
‘Nothing more sure,’ said David, carefully watching her through his smoke screen, after letting his newspaper fall. What was coming next? he wondered.
Kathy pondered on that for a while. ‘I hated that journey on the tube,’ she said, going over to sit on the rug by his chair, leaning against his legs. ‘I wasn’t very good at shorthand and my typing was worse. I have to be honest with myself, David. I was very glad to leave the office when the twins began to show so obviously.’
‘You mean when you couldn’t bend down to put your shoes on?’ David reminded her, but she wasn’t listening to him.
‘And caring for the boys and the students, planning meals and being with Timothy is what I’m best at, isn’t it?’ She turned her face up towards him. ‘Doing what I do well without getting angry all the time doesn’t make me into some kind of freak, does it? I’m quite normal, aren’t I?’
‘You look reasonably normal to me,’ he replied, softly.
Kathy sighed. ‘I wish you’d said I was the most beautiful, the sexiest woman you’d ever set your eyes on,’ she said, so he said it, word for word, then he ruffled her hair.
‘Tell me what’s wrong, love!’
Kathy shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ She twisted round and stared up into his face. ‘I parked Timothy with the girl across the street all day, then I came back and sat out in the back garden in the sunshine, doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ She frowned. ‘I suppose I was rebelling, but now that the sun’s gone in none of it seems to matter very much any more. It all sounds a bit silly now.’ She began to wonder how she could have been so influenced by a book.
David stretched out a hand, knocked his pipe in the big glass ashtray, and then pulled her up into his arms.
‘It was the sunshine,’ he reassured her. ‘It did exactly the same to me. I should have had my cheese sandwich at my desk as usual, but suddenly I felt as if the office walls were closing in on me, so I went out and drank a beer sitting on a wall outside a pub. There was a very attractive girl with long blonde hair, and the last thing I did before I went back to the office was to wink at her – like this.’
He closed one eyelid in a slow wink that was much more explicit than a leer. ‘Suppose she had followed you?’ Kathy said, outraged, and he laughed out loud.
‘I’d have run like hell! You know I would!’
His eyes were twinkling, and their faces were so close that Kathy could see the tiny thread marks on his cheeks, and the laughter wrinkles fanning out like spokes from the corners of his eyes. His face was so dear and loved that she couldn’t understand why she’d been making so much fuss.
‘I do love you,’ she told him, ‘and for good measure I’d like you to know that you haven’t condemned me to a spiritual death. I know exactly who I am.’
‘And who might that be?’ David whispered softly.
Kathy sat up straight and stared through the window. The sky had clouded over, and if the sunshine had called, then its visit had been a short-lived one.
‘I am your wife, and the mother of your sons, and I quite like my life the way it is, and I don’t have a secret yearning to be a lady jockey or anything, so there we are.’
‘So there we are,’ said David, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, ‘and pity the poor horse if you had decided to be a lady jockey, because my left leg has gone to sleep.’
Later, as they got into bed, David smiled. ‘Not reading tonight?’ he teased.
‘No,’ Kathy said slowly. ‘I’m going to surrender myself to your masculine domineering selfish passion, and isn’t that a lovely thought?’
Jane
WHEN SHE WAS born, Martin’s daughter had a red and wrinkled face, a head that grew to a point and was quite definitely flat on one side, blue-veined old lady’s hands, a purple pressure mark on her nose, and a decided squint. Martin thought she was beautiful.
They called her Jane.
As the years went by, it became clear that between Jane and her father there was a special affinity, a love so absolute that it was almost tangible. Every evening Martin would walk quickly up the road from the station, click open the gate, and Jane would hurl herself down the garden path into his arms.
‘She waits behind the door for him like a little dog,’ her mother laughingly told her friends, and she cried when the doctor said that there must be no more babies.
Martin held her close in his arms and kissed her tears away. ‘We have Jane,’ he said. ‘What more can we want? We’re complete.’
To be quite truthful, Jane wasn’t a pretty child. At least, not to people less discerning than Martin. They saw
a little girl, small for her age, with straight brown hair framing a too-thin elfin face. They admitted that her eyes were lovely, the deep blue that borders on purple, but definitely not shown off to advantage by the round, horn-rimmed spectacles that continually slipped down the bridge of her nose and had to be pushed back by a small, sunburnt hand. Jane was a nut-brown child, a washed-out-jeans-and-faded-T-shirt child; not a pink-and-white, frilled and ribbons-tied-in-hair little girl at all.
And Jane was often sick. Not seriously ill, just periodic bouts of sickness that left her drained and empty, her tiny face a pale blur against the pillows and her short upper lip beaded with perspiration. ‘Acidosis,’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘She’ll grow out of it,’ said her mother.
But Martin would sit by her bed and close his eyes on a private and anxious little prayer. ‘Don’t let it be anything serious,’ he’d pray, and with his big hand, for Martin was a big man, an undemonstrative, inarticulate man, he would push back the tumbled hair from the damp forehead and murmur broken words of love.
Those were the years, the sun-filled years, when they discovered how similar were their tastes . . . Fresh air, bicycle rides, walks in the rain, romping in the garden with the dog; games of Chinese chequers, hot buttered crumpets round the fire, Perry Mason on television, the advertising jingles sung together until Jane’s mother would clap her hands over her ears in laughing protest.
Then, later, pop records bought by the dozen and played nonstop. The first pair of nylons, the first shoes with heels, the first bra, definitely not essential but ardently desired. The brown silky hair which grew so long that she could disappear into it when the occasion demanded . . . and occasion seemed to demand it more and more as Jane approached her seventeenth birthday.
It was around this time that Martin began to have the strange feeling that he had two daughters.
One was the sixth-former who came in from school with the despised felt hat crammed down into her satchel, her face shiny and innocent of make-up. The other was the young lady, the very elegant young lady, who, after a lengthy session in the bathroom, would come downstairs and stare at him with eyes ringed around with thick black pencil. She would swear on oath that she could see quite well without her spectacles, thank you, when all the time it was perfectly obvious that her vision was (as they say in the best fog warnings) restricted to a couple of yards.