The Way We Were

by Marie Joseph

  All he saw in her face now was surprise, nothing more, and when she stood back to let him in he saw that she wasn’t alone.

  A thin man with a haggard face and a straggly black beard straightened up from the record player and smiled a welcome.

  ‘Algie, this is Keith,’ Megan said, and he could smell warm cooking smells from the kitchen, and saw that Megan was flushed and embarrassed. He wished himself a thousand miles away.

  ‘I only dropped by for a minute,’ he said quickly. ‘No, honestly, I can’t stay. I’m catching a train from Euston, really.’

  He glanced at his watch and widened his eyes in false amazement. ‘I’ve been down in this area on business, and I remembered you used to live here, and I thought . . .’ He wondered if they were married, his Megan and this Algernon. The name fitted perfectly, he thought nastily, hating the gently smiling man with every fibre of his being.

  ‘But you must stay,’ she was saying, and Algie, obviously sensing tension between them, murmured something about the necessity of stirring something or other, and, disappearing into the kitchen, closed the door.

  ‘Keith,’ she said softly, saying things straight out the way she always had. ‘Why have you come?’

  And all at once, it was there in his heart: the pain of their parting, the loneliness of the past year, the pride that had stopped him writing to her, culminating in the uncharacteristically impulsive decision to catch a train down to London.

  He could have picked up the phone, but with his usual common sense deserting him, he had decided that wouldn’t do.

  It had been a gamble, a stupid gesture, and all the way down on the train he’d been telling himself that she was probably sweeping the stage in Newcastle, or walking on as a gormless maid in Wolverhampton, working as an understudy and waiting for her big break.

  He forgot every word of the careful speech he had rehearsed in the train. Now it was as if all that was left was anger.

  Disappointment and a terrible rage at finding her here with another – Algie, with his twitching, elongated dimples, and his thin suffering face stuck in the middle of that revolting black beard. Oh, he knew Algie’s type all right.

  All the women fancying him because he brought out the mother in them; the artistic type, he probably wrote twee little plays for amateur dramatic societies to perform at harvest suppers, or got to his feet and recited Dylan Thomas at parties.

  Probably wore a gold medallion tangled up in the black hairs on his narrow chest. Oh, yes, Megan was sure to have got mixed up with Algie’s sort now that she was on the stage.

  ‘And where are you working?’ he heard himself ask. ‘What is it at the moment? Desdemona, Portia, Ophelia or Cleopatra?’ He was being cruel and he knew it.

  But all she said again was: ‘Why did you come, Keith?’

  He glanced towards the kitchen door, suspicious of Algie.

  ‘I came,’ he said clearly, ‘I came because I haven’t stopped loving you; because I couldn’t stop thinking about you and because I had to see you again.’ His head dropped as he whispered: ‘And because I thought you might have felt the same.’

  Then there was nothing left to say except, ‘Say goodbye to Algernon for me,’ and so he said it, then turned towards the door.

  ‘Wait! Keith, wait!’ Her voice, the lovely, husky voice with the slight Welsh inflection in it, called him back.

  ‘It didn’t work out, wanting to act. You were right. There are hundreds of girls like me, most of them with experience and bookings behind them, all “resting” in coffee bars and behind shop counters all over London.’

  She ran her fingers through the mop of brown curls. ‘I gave up so soon I couldn’t have been all that keen. But you goaded me. At the moment I’m a secretary to a solicitor.’

  ‘And Algie?’

  ‘He lives across the corridor with his friend Wayne,’ she said, ‘and because my flatmates are away for the weekend, and because Wayne has gone to Solihull to see his mother, we are having a meal together. Do you see?’

  He nodded and said that he saw.

  ‘No, you don’t see, Keith. You only see what you want to see, just as you can’t see now that I’m standing here, aching for you to put your arms around me, because you’ve come back when I thought I would never see you again.’

  There were tears running down her cheeks, and when he held her close and kissed her face he could taste the saltiness of them on his lips and knew she cared.

  ‘We’ll get married,’ he said. ‘Next week.’

  They were kissing when the kitchen door opened wide to reveal Algie with an apron round his middle and a fish slice in his hand.

  ‘May I be a bridesmaid then, darlings?’ he beamed.

  Tomorrow I am Seventeen

  HE IS LAUGHING, my father, when I think about him. Not as he was the last time I saw him, his eyes shadowed with pain and his mouth clamped tight on the words even he could not find to say.

  I remember him best riding down the hill on his bicycle, his old college scarf wound round his throat, and his big ears burning scarlet with the cold.

  I have heard people say that I am like him, and I’m glad. I want to be like him, even including the big ears, and I wish my hair was straight instead of curly so that I would resemble him even more. I want to talk like him, and I want my mother to look at me and be reminded of him.

  During that time, that awful time, when their marriage was dying, he would come into the house and glance warily at her, almost as if he was afraid of her. He would bite his lip arid look away from her, then he would wink at me and tweak Joanna’s pony-tail, and swing Sally high up into the air.

  ‘With your hair like that, you are like a lady Viking with her horns pointing the wrong way,’ he said once, and my little sister laughed, not knowing why.

  He was full of words, my father, and he had a special way of telling us such wonderful stories.

  ‘It’s only pretend,’ I would say, and he would nod and wrinkle his nose at me. His nose had a blob on the end, and I would wonder how my mother felt when she looked at her three daughters and saw that blob faithfully reproduced on each one of us.

  How do my two younger sisters remember their father, now that he has finally gone from us for ever?

  Joanna was eight and Sally was six when it was all happening. That is two years ago, but I can still see them now. Their faces stiff with despair as our mother and our father shouted at each other in the next room.

  They were saying hurtful and soul-searching things, resulting in my father going away that night. But first, before he went, he came to us to say goodbye.

  ‘I want you to understand, to try to understand,’ he said. ‘Sometimes mothers and fathers stop loving each other, and when that happens, it is better that they say goodbye.’

  Better for them, but surely not for us, I wanted to say. But he was explaining that he would come and take us out every Sunday afternoon, and anyway I could not say it because of the way he was looking at me, with such sadness in his eyes it gave me pain.

  ‘Why has my father stopped coming to the gate to pick us up on Sunday afternoon?’ I asked my mother, after she married Martin.

  She sighed at me. ‘Oh, love, you know he is going to live in Australia with Tricia, and you know she is expecting a baby.’

  ‘I was his baby first,’ I said, and my mother shook her head.

  ‘We talked it over, your father and me, and we feel that under the circumstances, as he is leaving the country quite soon, it is better for everyone concerned that he keeps away. He’ll write to you often – you know he will. It really is better this way, darling.’

  ‘Better perhaps, for Joanna and Sally, but certainly not for me,’ I said, and my mother turned her face away, her shoulders hunched with a sadness and a terrible disappointment in me.

  Martin is kind. He is a jolly man, a maintenance engineer with a big laugh. He loves my mother and he tries to love me. But I know I make it very hard for him.

  Sometimes,
when my sisters climb on the gate and swing backwards and forwards, waiting for Martin’s car to come down the hill, I remember my father on his ancient bicycle, and all I want to do is cry . . .

  ‘Daddy’s coming!’ they shout, and when Martin gets out of his car, Joanna takes his briefcase from him and Sally holds his hand, and on my mother’s face grows a smile of welcome it never grew for my father.

  Sometimes I want to shout and scream at them, as if I were seven and not almost seventeen and in my last year at school.

  I am seventeen tomorrow, and soon I will be eighteen and at university, and then I will be twenty, and then thirty and forty and fifty, and then, oh then, will I remember him still?

  Now my dreams of my father are untarnished by time, but I know that dreams can fade. What will happen to my dreams as the years go by? Will I forget the way he smiled and the way he looked at me that last day, when he told me about Australia and we both pretended that it was only a plane trip away?

  If he had seen the look in his new wife’s eyes at that moment, he would have known that Australia is a lot, lot further than a plane trip away . . .

  But when I am married and have children of my own, how will I describe the grandfather they will never know? Will there be some photographs to cherish, or did my mother burn them all? I knew what she was doing down there in the garden that last sad summer, standing by the bonfire with a rake in her hand, burning what was left of him. Papers from his study, even some of his clothes, furiously jabbing at the fire as if he was there and she was trying to destroy him for finding someone else.

  And yet not long after that, Martin started calling regularly, and some of the bitterness must have gone, because she would smile at my father and invite him in when he came to take us out.

  She even congratulated him when he told her that Tricia was going to have a baby, and I found myself wondering what it would look like, the little half-brother or half-sister I would never see?

  ‘Daddy!’ Sally was five and she had lost Teddypan, her little furry bear. It was quite unthinkable and impossible that she could go to bed without him.

  She is too young to remember how her father went out into the garden, shining a torch on the compost heap as he searched the sodden leaves. How he sifted carefully through the contents of the dustbin, then found Teddypan sitting in a corner of the wheelbarrow in the potting shed.

  In my memory he comes into the house, lifting Sally on to the draining-board so that she can see the gentle way he sponges Teddypan down.

  ‘You founded him, Daddy! You founded him for me!’

  ‘Of course,’ my father says. Of course he had found Teddypan. Of course he would always be there when we needed him.

  And now Joanna. Going off with her friend Julie to take a ballet exam, nervous and excited at the same time. And Mother finding her ballet shoes on the hall table after she had gone. I remember our faces as we stared at them, united in a moment of despair.

  My father was still shaky from a bad bout of flu, but he rode his bicycle as if he were on the last lap of the Grand Prix Cycle Race, a shoe tucked well down in each pocket of his raincoat.

  ‘What did she say?’ we wanted to know when he came back, his nose with the blob on the end glowing red. ‘Were you in time?’

  He smiled, ‘Oh, sure I was in time, and she wasn’t surprised, not in the least. She said she knew I would turn up with them.’

  Do I only remember the good things about him?

  ‘Was he cruel to you?’ I asked my mother one day in my bewilderment, and she shook her head and said that compatibility was a word I would understand the full meaning of one day; that she did not want to spoil my memory of my father, but that perhaps he had had his head a little in the clouds. He was impractical and too much of a dreamer.

  ‘If bills were piled a foot high on the mat, he would still give his last penny to anyone knocking at the door with a collecting-box,’ she said, then she sighed. ‘Always remember him, love, but don’t put him on a pedestal. Pedestals have a way of crumbling.’

  I am almost seventeen. I have my father’s nose and my father’s ears, which I hide out of sight beneath my long curly hair. I am old enough to know that I am being childish, but I say it just the same.

  ‘It would be better if my father had died, then we could have remembered him with love. Now, I feel rejected, and I am so very lonely in my remembering.’

  My mother’s patience gave out.

  ‘Lonely in your remembering! Now you sound just like him. Words . . . words . . . words . . . Whenever did words get anyone anywhere?’

  I told her I could mention quite a few to whom words had brought lasting fame. Her usually pale cheeks flushed pink with anger.

  ‘Your father will never write that book he was always going to write. He will never have that slim volume of poems printed.’ Her eyes darkened with despair. ‘You are making a habit of remembering him. Why must you be the odd one out? We’re a family again. We’re happy, far happier than we were when your father and I were trying to live together and failing miserably. And how can you hurt Martin so? He has never tried to take the place of your father. He loves you. He can’t tell you so in words that sing, but he’s sincere and he’s given me a security I’ve never known before.’

  ‘What is security?’ I asked.

  ‘It is everything to a woman like me, and to the woman you will be one day,’ my mother said.

  ‘Once, when you had a row,’ I went on, totally without mercy, ‘I heard my father begging you not to tread on his dreams. I thought that was the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘He didn’t make that up, you know,’ she said gently. ‘It’s a line in a poem.’ She slumped down on a chair and buried her head in her hands. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that I might have had dreams too?’

  And the bitterness was there, and the expression on her face was the same as on the night I saw her burning his things out in the garden.

  It was a look I had never seen since Martin came, and at once I was afraid and unhappy and mixed-up. I wanted to put my arm round her and tell her I was sorry, but how could I apologise for remembering my father with love?

  We were there, looking at each other, not saying anything, when Martin came in, followed closely by Joanna and Sally. And when my mother failed to return his smile or lift her face for his kiss, I knew I had won.

  Couldn’t she see that I cannot bear it that my father will never ride down the hill again?

  Standing there I knew all at once what a lot of him there was in me. There was the ability I have inherited to hurt with words, to wound with silences, to dramatise the ordinary, but I hoped that there was the tenderness, too.

  But my father was yesterday, and Martin is today, and I knew what I had to do.

  ‘Mummy’s waiting for a kiss,’ I said. ‘Come on, Martin, and then what about me?’

  The gratitude on my mother’s face filled me with shame . . .

  My father is a lovely man. There is magic in the words he speaks . . . I correct myself . . .

  My father was a lovely man, and there was magic in the words he spoke.

  Only the tense is different. That is all.

  The Secret Garden

  YOU ARE TWENTY-SEVEN, Sophie MacFarland reminded herself as the ribbon of the motorway sped past to the humming of wet tyres, a muted sound mingling with the swishing to and fro of her windscreen wipers.

  Ivor is ten years older, and has a broken marriage behind him. He wants children desperately, and so do you, and there is no reason to feel like this when the wedding is only weeks away. You love him, so where is the problem?

  It was growing dark even earlier than was normal for the time of year, and for the past few miles the rain had been falling steadily. She had promised Ivor that she would not drive from Edinburgh to London in one day, and he had given her the address of a hotel with explicit instructions on how to get there. He had marked her map, and in addition, with his usual concern for detail, he had penci
lled the road numbers down on a separate sheet of paper.

  Sophie put out a hand to check that the paper was on the seat beside her, then continued with her solitary conversation.

  You’re scared because you know that Ivor’s first marriage broke up as a direct result of his jet-flying way of life. Megan could not stand the loneliness, and you are wondering if you are going to feel the same.

  She checked that she was approaching the correct junction, and moved with care into the slow lane, her thoughts flicking backwards and forwards in her mind in rhythm with the overworked windscreen wipers.

  Ivor Jones, overseas sales representative of his London-based light-engineering firm. Three-quarters of the demanding way up the managerial ladder. Absolutely typical of his kind, with his briefcase, his dark suits, his white shirts, sober ties and broad gold watch-strap, all of which he wore like an invisible skin.

  Ivor Jones, exhausted by jet lag most of the time, his blue eyes weary from snatched moments of sleep on countless planes, his nights spent in faraway hotels, after meetings going on sometimes until the early morning.

  Clever, conscientious, intelligent Ivor, with a comfortable flat on the fringes of Knightsbridge, and a salary that made the filling in of his income-tax forms a painful affair; a lonely man, not quite able to take success in his stride.

  Sometimes during their courtship – it had been too spasmodic to be termed a relationship – Sophie had felt she would like to hold him in her arms, to rock him as if he were a child and not a grown man with a workable knowledge of five languages, and a folder full of statistics he already had at his fingertips.

  She drew into a lay-by, switched on the light, and studied the slip of paper.

  ‘If you were a helpless female I would suggest somewhere more accessible for you to stay the night,’ Ivor had said. ‘But you’re not. It’s no wonder that your boss up there in bonny Scotland is furious with me for depriving him of the best secretary he has ever had. He told me so when I telephoned him last week. “She’s a canny wee lass, Ivor Jones. And now you say you’re going to marry her and settle down there in London? Ye’re no friend of mine from now on, and that’s a fact”.’