by Jane Corry
‘Are you all right, love? What happened?’
It’s Betty. They’re all here now in my bedroom.
‘I didn’t stop in time because of the ice and the dark.’ It’s at least partly true.
‘But you can still drive it?’ This is Melissa. ‘We’ve got to get to that party and none of my friends’ parents can take us.’
Why are teenagers so selfish at times and so loving at others?
Her eyes narrow. ‘Where were you, anyway?’
I take in this beautiful, tall, raven-haired young woman and marvel once more, as I often do a) that she is my daughter and b) that she can treat me like I am the adolescent. I would never have dared do that to my parents. I sometimes wonder whether I should have been tougher with her. But Melissa has such a strong character. Betty says it’s important to keep ‘lines of communication open with teenagers’ and I think she’s right. Even though it looks as though I’m giving in at times.
‘I told you I had a work party to go to,’ I remind her.
‘And I told you, young lady,’ adds Betty, ‘that your mother couldn’t get back so she stayed the night because of the snow.’
‘But it’s all gone now,’ says Melissa, staring at me. This is ridiculous. I feel as if I am on a witness stand. Then again, her best friend’s dad has just gone off with another man and half her class’s parents are divorced.
‘It was heavy last night where the party was,’ I say. ‘But then it cleared in the morning. By the way, did Dad tell you when he was going to be back?’
‘No.’ Betty is giving me an odd look. ‘Are you all right, dear?’
I try to sound like a woman might if she hadn’t just unexpectedly bumped into the man who had once broken her heart and changed her life for ever. ‘Just a bit upset about the car.’
‘Well, don’t worry about it. I can drive Melissa and her friends to that party.’
Really? Betty had only learned to drive after Jock had died. She’d ‘never got round to it’ before, but actually took to it like a duck to water.
‘That would be great.’
I am suddenly flooded with love for my amazing family. How lucky I am, I think, cuddling my two girls (Melissa has instantly stopped being cross now the party situation had been sorted). ‘Tell you what,’ I say. ‘How about we go bowling after Daisy and I finish shoe shopping?’
Melissa wrinkles her nose. ‘Boring.’
‘You always used to love it,’ points out Betty.
‘Well, I’m older now. And I’ve got coursework to do otherwise Mum will nag me.’
I’ve got work to do too, I remind myself. Saturday is my day for catching up with admin that I haven’t got round to during the week. But the children have to come first. So off we head for Brent Cross.
The shoe-shopping expedition does indeed turn out to be everything I’d feared. ‘I hate this style,’ protests Daisy, pushing away a sensible pair of lace-ups.
I groan. ‘It’s the only pair that fits! We’ve already been to seven shops. Just have them. Please.’
The young assistant, whose complexion looks as though it was applied with a builder’s pasting brush, throws me a disapproving look. When you have teenagers, I want to tell her, you’ll end up pleading too.
Stuart sends me a text:
Conference going well. How are you?
Nightmare.
I reply.
Shoe shopping with Daisy.
Lucky you!
he fires back.
It’s all right for him. He’s well out of it with his erudite lectures about crowns and molars and root canals.
When we get back, Melissa is stomping up and down. ‘Where are my black leather trousers? The ones I lent you?’
‘Sorry. In my room.’ I run up and bring them down.
‘You’ve torn the hem on the left leg.’
‘Have I?’
‘How did that happen?’
I honestly don’t know but I feel my colour rising. ‘No idea.’
‘It’s OK,’ says Betty. ‘I’ll sew it up. And don’t speak to your mother like that, love. She’s not a slave, you know.’
Melissa rolls her eyes. ‘If she was, I’d sack her.’
‘Now that’s not very polite …’
I ought to agree but I don’t feel strong enough for a teenage argument. Not after the shock of last night. So I’m afraid I leave them to it, heading up to the sanctity of my office, where I sink down on the squashy yellow chesterfield that’s positioned close to the door to hide a patch of worn carpet. If it wasn’t for ‘my space’, I might go mad. On the far side is my desk, piled high with papers. It’s not a big room but there’s just enough space, even though the drawers are stuffed with things that I really ought to clear out. But there are just never sufficient hours in the day, and besides, there are some sentimental bits and bobs I can’t bring myself to get rid of.
Despite the fact it’s the weekend, my inbox has already acquired several new messages. There’s a furious email from a casting director because one of my extras didn’t turn up for an ad shoot yesterday. It’s not the first time. I won’t be using that person again. If someone lets you down in this industry, it reflects badly on you. Mud sticks.
Then the phone rings. It’s Sally, the assistant I took on last year. She’s a sixty-something divorcee who wanted ‘something to do’, and although I really needed someone with more experience in the acting world, I took her on because I felt sorry for her. Since then, she’s proved to be worth more than her weight in gold. Sally’s great with people and is really organized. Like me, she works from home so we can keep our costs down.
‘We have a problem,’ she says. ‘Karen has got herself a tattoo.’
Karen is one of our new extras. She was due to be in an historical drama today. Filming often carries on over weekends. ‘As far as I know,’ she says, ‘they didn’t have tattoos in the time of Henry VIII. Says she didn’t realize it would be an issue.’
I groan. ‘We’ll need to find someone else.’
‘Don’t worry,’ says Sally. ‘I’m onto it.’
‘Thanks.’
No sooner do we finish talking than there’s a musical ripple from my phone, indicating a text. I glance at it. Then freeze.
Lovely to see you last night.
How about a coffee some time?
M
Yes, is my first thought. Yes, I want to see you again too. A coffee to talk about the what-might-have-beens. No more than that, of course, because it wouldn’t be right.
But if I did see Matthew, I’d need to tell Stuart. I’d have to say that there’d been someone before him who broke my heart. Or would I? I could fudge it, tell him part of the truth. But then I’d be lying. I’d be no better than my mother had been. And what about the children? What would I say to them? ‘Hey, I’m just off to have a coffee with a former lover?’ Or, ‘I’m meeting up with a friend who did things to my body that your father has never been able to?’
Big lies begin with small ones.
It was good to see you too
I message back, adding:
Thanks for the offer of coffee but I’m pretty busy at the moment.
My finger hovers over the Send arrow. I hesitate.
‘Mum? Where are you?’ yells Melissa from downstairs. ‘I can’t find my black ankle boots.’
And I press it.
I’ve done the right thing. I know it.
So why, I ask myself as I go down to sort out the boots and wonder what I can rustle up for everyone’s dinner (given that I haven’t been food shopping), do I feel so flat?
6
Betty
‘I’m so sorry you’re leaving us,’ the department manager had said when I’d reluctantly handed in my notice. ‘We were going to offer you a promotion as a hat buyer. There’d be another rise in salary, of course. And obviously we’d want you to continue modelling for us.’
But Jock wouldn’t be moved, even though the pay at the factory was lower. ‘You’ll
be with other women of your own sort,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll like it there.’ He squeezed my bottom. ‘I’ve got big plans for us, Betty. We’re going to get ahead in life, you and I. One day, we’ll be able to buy our ain place and not have to rent. Just do what I say and we’ll be all right.’
I was beginning to learn a lot about my fiancé that I hadn’t appreciated at the beginning. As long as I agreed with him on decisions, it was OK. He would be in a good mood like he was now. There was no more ‘cold feet’ talk about the wedding. Instead, he kept asking me who had replied so far to the invitations. ‘Has the big gaffer accepted?’ he asked, meaning his boss’s boss.
‘Yes,’ I replied checking my list.
Jock punched the air. ‘Good. That means he likes me. There’s talk of another opening in management two positions above me now old Brown is retiring.’
Occasionally, I felt a little quiver of doubt inside me. Was I doing the right thing in marrying a man who didn’t listen to what I had to say and was only interested in his own voice? But it would be even worse if I broke it off than if he had done so. Girls got themselves a bad name that way round here. Besides, I wanted a husband and a home of my own; and children. It was what we all aspired to, unless you were what Mum called a bluestocking, like the teacher who lived next door to us and had never ‘found herself a man’.
It rained cats and dogs on our wedding day. Some might have taken that as an omen. But not me. I’d managed to quash those doubts and now all I wanted was to walk down the aisle. ‘You look beautiful,’ said Dad when I came down the stairs of our council house wearing the white silk A-line dress I had made myself with little beads round the sweetheart neckline.
Beautiful? He’d never once called me that before.
Mum’s eyes were brimming with tears. I’d never seen her so emotional. ‘My little girl. You’re about to be a woman now.’
Then she took me into the kitchen. ‘I probably should have said this to you earlier but, well, on your wedding night, you need to be prepared for …’
She stopped.
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I said, trying to save her from the embarrassment. ‘I know about that sort of thing.’
Her face turned dark. ‘You haven’t done it?’
‘No,’ I reassured her hastily. ‘Of course not. But I’ve read Cosmo. One of the girls in Lingerie gave it to me as a leaving present. There was a big piece on …’
I faltered, unable to say the ‘sex’ word to my own mother.
Her face cleared. ‘You daft brush. Don’t believe what you read in magazines. Marriage belongs to the real world.’ She gave me a brief hug. Then she stood and looked at me as if for the last time. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
I didn’t pay much attention to her words at the time. All I wanted to do was step into the big shiny blue second-hand Rover that belonged to one of Dad’s mates and get to the church. Jock had told me not to be late, ‘even if it is fashionable’, because he didn’t want people thinking I’d changed my mind.
‘You’re marrying a good man,’ said my dad gruffly to me in the back. ‘That Jock of yours is going far.’
‘He’s got a mouth on him at work, sure enough,’ said Dad’s pal from the driving seat.
But from the way he spoke, it didn’t sound like a compliment.
As I walked down the aisle, I could feel all eyes on me. Those funny thuds in your chest are just butterflies, I told myself. It was normal to have doubts. Cosmo said so. All I had to do was remember that I was getting married to a decent, strong man who wanted to look after me. And there he was now! My handsome fiancé waiting for me at the altar in his hired Moss Bros suit. He’d had his hair cut and slicked back. And he smelled reassuringly of Brut, just as he always did.
‘Hello, princess,’ he said to me as I took my place next to him. Then he put his arm around me. I wasn’t sure that was allowed from the way the priest frowned. Jock said his vows loudly and clearly. No one listening to him would ever have suspected that he’d had doubts not so very long ago.
Even so, the service didn’t go according to plan. No one objected, thank goodness (there was no reason why they should, although my heart was still in my mouth at this bit), but the organist got the hymns wrong, playing the one about saving us from troubled times instead of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Nor was there a choir, because they’d all been struck down with flu.
‘I’m going to get a refund,’ said Jock tightly when we posed for the photographs. ‘It’s not on. No one tries to pull one on me like that. I paid good money.’
And as he spoke, I could feel his fingers dig a little deeper into my arm.
The speeches at the reception seemed to go down well. Dad talked about me in a way that I almost didn’t recognize myself, calling me his ‘precious only daughter’. Jock’s best man made lots of smutty jokes that made everyone laugh, including the big gaffer, although his wife looked a bit shocked. When my new husband and I had the first dance to ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, by Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell, he placed his cheek next to mine. It’s going to be all right, I told myself. He loves me. And I love him.
Then we drove to the caravan in Devon that Jock’s boss had lent us for the honeymoon. All the way there, I was a bundle of nerves – not because of the night ahead but because of the way my new husband was driving. He’d been taught by a friend because he couldn’t afford formal lessons and had been cock-a-hoop when he’d passed last month.
‘Please,’ I begged when he overtook yet another car, which hooted him in disapproval. ‘Don’t go so fast.’
Immediately he screeched into a lay-by. His eyes were black with rage and his breath stank of beer. The government had not long ago introduced a limit to drinking and driving – Dad had been moaning about it – so I only hoped my new husband wasn’t over the limit. ‘Don’t criticize my driving,’ he snapped. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about anyway. It’s not like you’ve passed your test.’
‘I’d like to one day,’ I said, trying to calm him down.
‘We’ve got more important things to pay for first.’
‘Sorry, Jock,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it. It’s just that I get travel sick sometimes.’
‘Really?’ His voice was calmer now. ‘I didn’t know that.’ He patted my arm. ‘Just you sit back and close your eyes. We’ll be there before you know it. The caravan has got its own little kitchen. You’ll be able to make us some tea before we settle down for the night.’ Then he gave me a wink. ‘We’ve waited long enough for this.’
I don’t want to talk too much about the first time, but let’s just say, it wasn’t the way Cosmo had described with its ‘show him how to please you’ suggestions.
Forgive me for being so blunt, Poppy, but I wince even now, all these years later, as I remember how he shoved himself into me, heedless of my cries of pain.
After what seemed like hours, it was all over and Jock rolled off me onto his side. I was praying that in the darkness he wouldn’t see the tears streaming down my face.
‘Where’s the blood?’ he said suddenly.
‘It’s all right. You didn’t hurt me that much.’
‘The blood,’ he said again, heaving himself onto his elbows. ‘There should be blood if you’re a virgin.’
‘Of course I am,’ I protested.
He turned the light on to look at the sheets. ‘Then where is it? A woman is meant to bleed when she has sex for the first time.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, shaking.
Jock was squatting, still naked, facing me now. ‘Have you had sex with anyone else?’
‘You know I haven’t.’
‘Do I? What about those old men leering at you when you modelled your hats.’
‘Don’t be daft –’ I began.
‘And don’t you call me daft.’ His voice rose in the darkness. ‘Have you been making a fool out of me with all your prissiness about not having sex before marriage? Turn the light on. I want
to see properly.’
I stumbled across the cold, uneven, rocking caravan floor and did as I was told. ‘Aye, there it is,’ said Jock. His voice was kinder now. ‘See?’
There was indeed a smear of blood on the sheet.
‘That proves it, then.’ Jock was looking very pleased with himself. ‘Congratulations, Mrs Page. You’re officially mine now.’
Just as in the car, he’d changed from being angry to loving in seconds. ‘You’d better go and wash,’ he told me. ‘You’ll have to find the toilets outside.’
As I scrubbed myself clean, going over my legs again and again, I noticed a cut on my arm from where Jock had held me down with his hands and nails. It was still bleeding. Maybe that’s where the blood had come from.
I’d need to find a plaster for that. But something told me it would be wise not to tell my new husband.
I couldn’t wait to leave. Devon was beautiful enough, but I just wanted to move into our new home and make it ours. Maybe Jock would go back to his old self then. It never occurred to me, you see, that his up-and-down temper was his old self.
Our one-bedroom flat was on the fifth floor in a block that had been built soon after the war. No one told us, when we looked around, that the lift was frequently out of order. There was no central heating and we made do with electric bar fires, which I almost hugged in the freezing evenings. The damp, which came through the peeling brown wallpaper in big patches, made me cough and the landlord ignored our requests to have it looked at. The boiler didn’t work properly and the water was always lukewarm.
We were only minutes away from the factory and you could smell it from our tiny balcony where I hung the washing because we didn’t have a garden. If you’re in love, I told myself, it doesn’t matter where you live. The problem was that I didn’t know if I was in love any more.
My doubts had started during the honeymoon but they increased afterwards when I went straight to work on the factory assembly line. The girls were standoffish, and the job (fixing light bulbs into their metal bases without breaking them) was boring and repetitive. How I missed my lovely customers from the department store and those fashionable hats! I couldn’t help feeling resentful towards my new husband – and I also blamed myself for going along with his wishes.