Valerie Jones returns to ask further questions of Eleanor Darcy
Q: TELL ME ABOUT your educational background. Were there books in your house? Did your parents encourage you to read?
A: What you want me to tell you is how I, victim of a class-ridden society, managed to escape the long side streets of the outer suburbs and reach the shores of academia. Well, a few of us manage it. It helps to have a high IQ, though I suspect a talent for mimicry is more useful; being able to adopt at will the tones and attitudes of the educated middle classes. That I have.
Valerie sat on the sofa. Eleanor sat in a chair. Why, Valerie wondered, did Eleanor share the sofa with Hugo, but not with her?
First, of course, you have to know what you are: that there is another life, another set of attitudes, other responses out there in the world, which prevent most of us from aspiring to better things. We know what we like, like what we know, unless something quite powerfully intervenes to shake us out of it. The child from the fish and chip shop can only end up running Liberty’s if he has some idea of what Liberty’s is. How very snobbish of you, you will say; why should Liberty’s be seen as superior to a fish and chip shop?
Q: I wasn’t conscious of accusing you. Aren’t you being a little defensive?
A: I daresay. I was married to Bernard Parkin for fifteen years, a man who came from the lower middle class, but identified quite violently, for a number of years, with the workers. He would never set foot in Liberty’s, let alone Harrods—those haunts of the rich and the would-be rich represented for him the scornful laughter of the haves towards the have-nots. While some downright starve, and others scrimp and save to afford the large cod and chips, not the small, a few spend thousands on sunken baths and antique rugs. Poor Bernard. He was a good man.
Q: Was?
A: One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same?
Q: I don’t have an ex-spouse.
A: No? Well, I daresay you will, from what Mr Vansitart tells me.
To cover her discomposure, Valerie readjusted the microphone. She was flattered and excited that Hugo had talked of their relationship to Eleanor: offended that her privacy had been thus violated. The pleasurable feeling won.
You have pushed the microphone out of range. Shall I adjust it? We live in a world of surplus but can’t bring ourselves to believe that we do. We go on behaving and thinking as if there would never, never be enough. Gimme, gimme, gimme! Before someone else gets it. My sunken plastic bath better than your old cast-iron tub. If the poor have their faces ground into a mud made sharp and painful by slivers of diamond and chunks of ruby, whose fault is that? Those who shove their faces into it?—Bernard’s view. The consistency of the mud?—my view. Or that of the poor themselves, for daring to bend their heads and stare?
Q: You went first to the Faraday Junior School, I believe, an ordinary state school. What were your experiences there?
A: I understand what you are saying. Badly born, poorly educated as I am, how do I have the nerve to pass comment on the society I live in—let alone marry a professor of economics and co-author with him—the publisher’s term, not mine—a book on Darcian Monetarism?
She rose from the chair. She paced. Today she wore a tan silk shirt and tight dun-coloured trousers. She had the air of a female terrorist: someone who might take it into her head to shoot at any moment. Valerie thought, Good heavens, it was safer, after all, on the Mail on Sunday than on Aura, earthquakes notwithstanding. This may yet be the end of me.
Q: No. I was not saying any of that. I was asking how you enjoyed school.
Eleanor calmed, sat down again.
A: Yes, I believe you were. I had a bad time at the hands of male journalists during Julian’s trial and in the period leading up to it: some residual paranoia sticks. They look for a femme fatale, a Mata Hari of world finance, a seductress. If a woman is to be taken seriously she must either be past the menopause or very plain, preferably both.
Let us return to the Faraday Junior School. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, we five-year-olds trooped off to school: troubled and sophisticated we returned, the stuffing all knocked out of us. Schools are a strange contrivance; they do not occur in nature, yet somehow we suppose they do. Because a woman, by virtue of giving birth to a succession of children, is then landed with the task of bringing them up, is no cause to suppose children are best taught by the handful, the dozen, the score. Nature, as ever, provided a minimum, not a maximum, for our survival. Any mother knows that it takes more than one adult to cope properly with even a single child. The child has more energy and more passion than the adult. To make it sit still, sit up and oblige, because it is smaller than you and you can compel it, is unkind. To make it do so in company is bizarre.
In Darcy’s Utopia the first rule of education will be that in any school the teachers shall outnumber the pupils, and no pupil need attend who does not wish to do so. I suspect budding essayists and technicians will continue to turn up to be educated; those others, who find lessons a humiliation because they are daily exposed and defined as dullards, will not. Much will be gained by the individual and very little lost to society. Teachers, teaching only those who wish to learn, will regain their self-respect and that of their pupils. They will stay even-tempered from morning to night. In Darcy’s Utopia you will not see the eyes of the child dulling, the brow furrowing, as puberty arrives.
Children do quite like to gather together, in fits and starts, to enjoy one another’s company, to find out how others live. It is natural enough for them to want to acquire knowledge from their elders. But it is unreasonable from this to extrapolate ‘the school’ as one of the cornerstones of society—for what are schools but institutions in which, in the name of knowledge, we ghettoize the young, and keep them from adult company, coop up the violent with the meek, those who like learning with those who don’t, and in general fit them for the modern world, which one quick glimpse of the television will show them to be a violent, murderous, greedy, vulgar and horrid place, in which people in a good mood throw custard pies at one another and in a bad mood chop each other to pieces?
Q: I take it you did not like school?
A: I liked it very much. I was sorry for those who didn’t, who by far outnumbered those of us who did. I daresay the Faraday Junior was no worse than any other school: indeed even a little better. No one was moved to burn the place down and the teachers were not encouraged to beat the children: though I had my knuckles painfully rapped on various occasions when I had apparently failed to decode some mysterious message or other. Teachers get irritated, of course they do, their elaborate and expensive training courses notwithstanding. Why? Because they are doing the most unnatural thing in the world, which everyone tells them is perfectly natural, in order that little children should all sit down quiet and good in one place and learn to take the world for granted, and not attempt to change it.
Q: But you tried to escape? You did want to change your situation?
A: When you ask that you betray your belief that one class is indeed superior to another: that to be born to the uneducated lower classes is a singular life-problem: though I’m sure if I asked you straight you would, in your gentle, blind, liberal way, deny it. The class distinctions we employ, you would maintain, are descriptive not pejorative. The person with, say, the pinched and nasal accents of the English Midlands is no worse than the one whose language has the rounded and lordly ring of London’s Knightsbridge, merely different. Tell that to employers, boyfriends, doctors, the dinner party hostess. Second-class citizen! goes up in neon lights when those who use the pronunciation of the streets and not of the written word open their mouths. Rightly they are discriminated against! Woe unto them, say I, who do not seek to improve themselves but cling with misplaced loyalty to the speech of their parents, as they do to the homes they were born into.
In Darcy’s Utopia it will be as normal to practise elocution as to brush your teeth. If more than lip service is to be paid to the notion that we are all equal, then it must be first acknowledged that we are born unequal, and that some of us have to work harder than others to make up for it. We must be prepared to make value judgements—allow Milton to be better than Michael Jackson in absolute terms, not just because that one’s your cup of tea and that one’s mine. The politeness of the cultured towards the uncultured, the hurt defiance of the latter to the former, compound one another. With misplaced kindness, the best of us refuse to discriminate against the worst. All things are equal, we say, and we lie, and know we lie.
Q: You seem very conscious of class discrimination. Were you much aware of it as a child?
A: Yes, but I can’t say I suffered from it. To have hurt feelings is not a particularly painful kind of hurt. Toothache is much worse. I was certainly made very aware, as a child, of the strange and complex attitudes people had towards my father, the entertainer. They depended upon him for their pleasure, they admired him because he had a skill they did not, they liked him because he was charming and energetic, but they did not treat him as their equal.
The best were patronizing; the worst could not help but insult him. The band would be required to eat, in the kitchen, cheaper food than that offered the guests: be offered beer if the guests had wine, wine if they had champagne. Should that have upset him? It always did. Jazz was popular in all circles during my childhood—the demand now is for more structured music or the cold beat of the synthesizer—but through the sixties the music of Black Africa in distress appealed to softened hearts. We went everywhere: from garden parties in the grounds of castles, wedding receptions in marquees, hunt balls in assembly rooms, university teas on graduation day, garden fêtes in the bishop’s palace, to the annual parties of car salesmen, the golden weddings of simple folk—once I even remember a gypsy funeral—ladies’ night at the masonic lodge, and the British Legion get-together. I went to them all and watched and listened and made my own judgements. To be the hired help is to be helpless in the face of taunts and insults. Just as the waitress gets blamed for the quality of the soup, so will the band get blamed for the non-vitality of the guests. If the guests won’t dance when the host expects them to, has depended on them to, that’s the band’s fault and they don’t get paid, or only after an argument. As the wine waiter trots back and forth to establish the status of the customer as connoisseur, so the band will be required to play the most tricky musical number—‘Maryland’ for example—to prove the musical expertise of one or other, of the revellers.
If I, the child groupie, was noticed—and I tried to make myself invisible—I would be treated in kindly enough fashion, but as something of a curiosity. Also, I used to think, as an embarrassment, as if the presence of children put a damp blanket on everything; made flirtation self-conscious, drunkenness difficult, dancing almost disgraceful. If the English do not like children, it is because they think they ought to behave properly, responsibly and quietly in their presence and can never riot or have a good time when they’re around. Children are real party-poopers. Ask Brenda. I learned a good deal about the role of food and drink as a socio-economic indicator. In the palace, the castle, the country house, the wine would be good but the food tasteless, and the band given beer and sandwiches on the assumption that this would be their preference. The middle classes would serve sour cheap wine but exotic foods and the band would eat whatever the guests ate, but not for long: the hosts having paid for the band to play, not to eat. The lower classes—if we talk about upper and middle how can we not talk about lower?—served tea, beer, gin and stodgy food, cut as often as not into hamfisted wedges, fit to fill the belly not the hand, and, understanding that the band was working for a living, treated it with respect and decorum. Everyone got happily drunk together and a good time was had by all; so long as the band kept the beat, what they played was immaterial. I was given, in all circles, a great deal of orange squash, then as now considered the drink most fit for children, though only loosely connected to the orange. I can tell you that the further down the social scale we went the brighter and sweeter and richer the orange squash, and the more I loved it.
In the palace, in the castle, at the hunt ball and the country house men brayed like donkeys and women shrieked and swooped like owls: the middle classes made me fidgety with their concern—was I not out too late? Was my father being nice to me? Not too nice? Wouldn’t I fall asleep in class tomorrow? Wouldn’t I like to curl up on the sofa?—and mostly I enjoyed the sweaty heaving pleasures of the British Legion do, where the guests galumphed and the men got drunk and waved bottles around—and one thing I noticed through all the ranks of society, no matter what the background, or the income, or the form the party took, was that as the evening wore on women would begin to look pained and patient and longed to get home, but didn’t like to say so for fear of being accused of ruining the evening’s fun. Men do so dislike women who stand between them and drink.
In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no drinking before six in the evening and no one will mind, because life will be okay without it. It will be the custom rather than the law. We will have as few laws as possible. Persuasion will replace compulsion. To be drunk will be recognized as a symptom not of manliness but of extreme unhappiness, and since only on rare occasion do we want to broadcast the fact of our unhappiness to the world, the lager lout, the whisky soak, the sherry drunk will become a rarer and rarer phenomenon, until finally withering away.
Q: Were you brought up in any particular religious or political persuasion?
A: My father was converted to Communism when I was eight. I would stand on street corners with him while he sold copies of the Morning Star. He would instruct me in the history of the world while the people of the world walked by, ignoring the salvation we offered them, and the icy wind blew around our ankles. In the evenings we would have readings from Das Kapital. Yes, we did what we could to save the world, my father and I.
Q: You were very fond of your father?
A: I adored him. There was no denying he was forgetful. He forgot to hand in such little money as he collected from sales of the Morning Star; they prosecuted and he was put on probation for two years. That upset him very much. He felt keenly the ingratitude of the Party and lost his faith. During those difficult years, when he drank rather more than he should, he would sometimes even forget on the way home from gigs I was his daughter and not just an ordinary groupie.
Q: You mean you were a victim of child abuse?
A: How simply you put it. Never quite. Often nearly. But who isn’t, at least in their own minds? That is all for today. It is tiring to think about the past. How are you getting on with Lover at the Gate?
Q: I am not sure that it’s an appropriate title. Why are you so keen on it?
A: Because of the way life changes when the lover at last appears. Haven’t you found it to be so? In most people’s lives the lover stands there, at the gate, faithful, waiting, unnoticed. All we need do is ask him in. Not all of us have the courage, of course.
Q: But you had, Mrs Darcy?
A: Oh yes, and still have. So have you, Mrs Jones. One little push and the whole world’s one, no woman’s better than the next! Here’s Brenda with more coffee. Or is Jones your maiden name? Many women choose to work under their maiden names.
Q: Jones is my married name, as it happens.
A: I can see that might in the end cause some complications.
Valerie Jones made her excuses and left—she had had more than enough coffee. She felt sleepy rather than tired, as a result, she told herself, of having had so little sleep of late. She felt rather superior to Eleanor Darcy on this account and left Brenda’s house in good humour.
Valerie and Lou manage a conversation
ELEANOR DARCY TOLD ME I was welcome to call her if necessary; if I needed any further factual details for my Lover at the Gate. She didn’t go so far as to give me her telephone number, but I prudently copied it from the instrument at a point during the interview when she was distracted: when one of Brenda’s children had somehow slipped into the room to find a drum stacked halfway down a pile of similar toys. My own children, Sophie and Ben, managed their early childhood well enough without the help of noisy, let alone musical, toys. My husband Lou was musical—a professional musician, in fact—and, I suppose understandably, couldn’t endure the sound of good instruments badly played, or bad instruments played at all. I notice I refer to him in the past tense. One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same? But Lou is still legally my husband: Sophie and Ben are certainly my children, not my ex-children. The title outruns even death. I suppose if a court denied me access to them, I might speak of them as ex-children. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen now. It used to, of course. Adulterous mothers would be prevented from ever seeing their children again, lest they spread the contamination of sin. Then I suppose they did turn into ex-children.
Lou is a kind, understanding and reasonable man: friend as well as spouse. All that has happened is that I met Hugo at a party and came to understand that, as well as having friend and spouse, a woman needs the excitement of a lover from time to time: a re-basing, as it were, in the physical: the reincarnation of the carnal self in a body which gets, over the years, far too controlled by spirit and mind. The customary sex of the marriage bed does so little to stop the mind working, and the mind must stop working if the flesh is to have its due gratification; the acknowledgement of its glory.
I called Lou. It seemed to me I owed him some explanation. Besides, he might be worrying about me. It was 10.23 according to the Holiday Inn’s radio alarm clock, which flashed on and off on the bedside panel, redly. I wished it would just steadily and quietly glow. My nerves were a little on edge. Shortage of sleep was beginning to tell. Lou would be in the middle of practice. He was—is—a man of regular habits: up at seven thirty, breakfast at eight, mail at eight thirty, and so on. Even his phone calls were planned and made on the half-hour. I should have postponed the call for seven minutes. It might have gone better.
‘Lou,’ I said, when I heard his quiet, familiar voice on the phone.
‘I think I’m possessed by the Devil.’ It wasn’t what I meant to say, but that’s the way it came out.
‘General belief is,’ he said, ‘that you’ve gone mad. My advice to you is to see a psychiatrist. I’m in the middle of practice, as you surely know. Have you anything important to say?’
‘How are the children?’
‘As well as children are when their mother fails to come home from a party because she’s shacked up with some gorilla in a cheap hotel. The children have rather a low opinion of you, I imagine.’
Lou is a slight, controlled man with a sensitive face: Hugo large, grizzly and loose-limbed.
‘Lou, you haven’t told them?’
‘We agreed to be honest with the children, I seem to recall.’
I could have taken him to task about how he was defining ‘agree’ and ‘honest’, but just somehow didn’t.
‘The Holiday Inn is far from being a cheap hotel,’ was all I could think of to say. ‘On the contrary, it’s rather expensive. They’ve taken a print of Hugo’s Amex, but I don’t somehow think he’s on good personal terms with them, and you know how tight everyone is on expenses, these days.’
‘You just stay in the media world you know and love,’ he said. ‘It’s all you’re fit for. Leave me and the children in our little patch of civilization. Roll round in the gutter as much as you like, but don’t call me to tell me all about it. We’re doing just fine without you.’ And he put down the phone. No, it was not a good phone call. It brought back to me the reality of the life I had so abruptly left behind: I had somehow assumed it would fade out of existence when I wanted, fade back in when convenient, unchanged. That was what years of impeccable behaviour earned you. A holiday. Apparently not! The clock flashed 10.27, 10.27, 10.27. I wondered if Lou would take up his bow and play until ten thirty, or whether he would extend his practice time for four minutes. He would probably do the latter, and hurry through the change of clothes which would prepare him for the half-hour’s weight-training which he did between ten forty-five and eleven fifteen every Tuesday and Friday. Today was Tuesday. I had not seen Hugo for three hours. Already my body was beginning to feel restless: demanding reunification with the object of its yearning. I could feel Hugo’s body similarly missing mine. What confidence, what pleasure this physical certainty of need and equal need begat. I felt my breath come short, my eyes seemed to roll in my head: I wore no clothes. I stalked the room naked. I, Valerie Jones, ex-wife of Lou; poor Valerie, uptight Valerie, Valerie of mind triumphant; ex-mother of Sophie and Ben: the phone rang: it was Hugo, of course it was.
‘Darling.’
‘Darling. Christ I miss you. I can get there at one. Only for half an hour.’
‘Make it thirty-three minutes.’
‘Why thirty-three?’
‘Any time without a nought on the end.’
‘You are all mystery. Stef was never a mystery.’
Stef was his wife. He’d used the past tense.
The phone call eased the torment of desire a little. I found that if I settled down to the tape and the life of Apricot Smith, I became quite comfortable.
Presently I remembered that it was when I had been about to call Eleanor Darcy and confirm the year of her marriage to Bernard Parkin, when I had found myself calling Lou instead, on impulse. I called the number. Brenda answered. Eleanor Darcy was out. No, she could not confirm the year of Eleanor Darcy’s marriage to Bernard.
‘But you were Mrs Darcy’s school friend.’
‘I can’t remember; I’m sorry.’
‘When will Mrs Darcy be back?’
‘I don’t know: I’m sorry.’
‘I wonder whether you could help me a little, Brenda. I’m writing a pen picture of Eleanor Darcy’s father Ken.’
‘I’m not able to help you in that area. I’m sorry.’
So much for leading questions. I wondered where Eleanor Darcy went. I had somehow supposed her to sit in that room forever, real only when Hugo or I were with her. I could see that writing Lover at the Gate had implications more profound than I had supposed. The boundaries between the real world and its imaginary reconstruction became stretched thin, almost invisible. Already I had ceased to be sure which side I was on. Even Lou’s piranha snapping now began to seem like something read rather than experienced.
I put my conversations with Lou and Brenda from my mind, at least for the time being, and had switched on the WP and was enjoying the little moans and buzzes of its warming up, when there was a mighty banging on the door and there stood Hugo. ‘Why weren’t you in the corridor with the door open, waiting?’ he asked.
I scarcely had time to close it before he was upon me. For some reason I thought of President Kennedy, bounding down the corridors of power, forever chasing the flick of a skirt, the back of a knee, the glorious in pursuit of the grateful. It was a couple of hours before I could get back to Eleanor Darcy.
LOVER AT THE GATE [3]
Apricot Smith marries Bernard Parkin
APRICOT WAS IN THE sixth form doing her A levels. Rhoda had a nasty pain in her stomach but refused to see a doctor. A faith healer, Ernie Rowse, moved in to No. 93 Mafeking Street, two doors down from Ken, Rhoda and Apricot. On Sundays men, women and children would collect in Mr Rowse’s back garden, dressed in white robes, singing strange hymns and raising their hands to heaven. They were collecting, they claimed, divine energies for Mr Rowse to dispense during the coming week. They would shake their empty hands over a barrel lined with tinfoil, from which he could at a later date draw out benison. They saw gold and silver dust drift downward from their hands, they told Rhoda. Rhoda was forty-eight, blonde, buxom and so cheerful Ken said she ought to be a barmaid. Rhoda could not see the heavenly dust, but liked the idea of it. Mr Rowse’s followers said when she was whole she would see it. During the week supplicants, bent, bowed, ill or in pain, fell in line down the path between the narrow rosebeds and out into the street, in search of a miracle cure. Every ten minutes, when Mr Rowse was working, the line would shuffle forward one place. When Mr Rowse took a rest, the line stayed as it was, sometimes for hours. Occasionally, in the evenings, Mr Rowse would catch up with himself and the line would clear altogether. But it wasn’t uncommon for clients to stand waiting all night.
‘Just like Harrods’ sale,’ said Rhoda.
‘Not in the least like Harrods’ sale,’ said Ken. ‘These people are destroyed by the system, not those who lick its arse.’
‘Neither of you have ever been to Harrods’ sale,’ said Apricot.
‘Oh-ah,’ groaned Rhoda this Thursday morning in November, holding her stomach. It was a warm day for the season, though damp. The roses had given up their annual struggle to keep things cheerful and now hemmed in Mr Rowse’s path with thorns.
‘You’d better go to the doctor,’ said Apricot.
‘And sit in his waiting room and catch God knows what? I’d rather die.’
‘Then why don’t you go to Mr Rowse?’ said Apricot. ‘The line’s only as far as the gate.’
‘Ken wouldn’t like it,’ said Rhoda.
Mr Rowse’s patients, forever winding down the path, oppressed Ken with the sense of his own age and mortality.
‘Ken won’t know,’ said Apricot. So Rhoda went.
Rhoda came home without a pain, besotted by Mr Rowse.
‘When he touches you his hands strike fire into you,’ she said. ‘I’m still tingling from head to toe.’
‘Did he say what caused the pain?’ asked Apricot, who, perforce, spoke and behaved pretty much like Rhoda’s mother, rather than her granddaughter.
‘He said I’d done something bad to deserve it,’ said Rhoda. ‘And he’s quite right, I have.’
‘What was it?’ asked Apricot, interested. Burned Ken’s sheet music by mistake or on purpose, argued with him, failed to stay up till he got home, and/or have his supper waiting in the oven? Those were the normal and acceptable patterns of Rhoda’s crimes. Apricot’s were to spend too much time on homework, not to have a boyfriend, not play an instrument, talk too much and be too big for her boots.
‘You remember your sister Wendy,’ said Rhoda, ‘the one who died of drink so young? Actually she was your mother. I should never have married your father. I told myself it didn’t matter because they weren’t husband and wife but Mr Rowse said the ceremony made no difference. Sin’s eaten a hole in the lining of my gut. Now I’ve got that off my chest I feel much better. Make me some cheese on toast, there’s a dear. It will give me a pain but it’s worth it.’
Apricot made Rhoda some cheese on toast, overcooked it and shrivelled the cheese.
‘Poor me,’ said Rhoda, ‘poor me,’ and she poured herself another cup of sweet strong tea, which burned all the way down. She wasn’t looking well. Her eyes were huge, her hair grey and her skin papery, but her heart remained childlike. The longer she lived with Ken the more like Wendy she became.
‘Poor you,’ said Apricot, agreeably. There was little point in taking offence, and no time to do so in any case. She had to pass her exams.
Rhoda’s pain and Mr Rowse battled it out for well over a year. Rhoda took to table-tapping and séances and reported seeing the ghost of Wendy hovering over her bed at night. Ken was always asleep when Wendy appeared.
‘I’m surprised she bothers,’ said Ken. ‘I’m surprised she isn’t too busy delivering milk bottles in the sky.’
‘She’s like she was the day she had Apricot,’ said Rhoda. ‘Her hair all frizzed out like a black halo and ever so sweet. One thing you could say for my daughter, she never let herself go. Even when she’d had a drink or so too many she still had her stocking seams straight.’ Since Wendy had taken to hovering over the bed, Rhoda had reclaimed her as a daughter and now spoke freely of the past.
‘She should have consulted me about Apricot’s name,’ said Ken. ‘She had no business not doing that.’ Some things out-rankle death.
‘Are you sure you shouldn’t see a doctor?’ asked Apricot, as Rhoda’s cough grew nastier. She smoked sixty cigarettes a day. The white paint on the window frames was encrusted with black. ‘What can a doctor do for her?’ said Ken. ‘When your number’s up your number’s up.’
Money was tight. Ken found it hard to adapt to the new age. Music was now for the young, not the middle aged: folk had taken over from jazz as the language of the radical and the sentimental. Ken’s band dissolved and reformed under a succession of names. The Dixie Syncopaters, Jazzorola, Folkwise, Folkways, the Red Resolution, and back to Dixie Railroad; too many musicians chased too few gigs: that’s the way it was. Rhoda had to give up work, and no sickness benefit was available since Ken had never let her succumb to the system and pay national insurance. Not that she’d ever wanted to, as she told Apricot.
‘Better to live in the present, dear,’ she said, ‘while you can. That’s your father’s motto and he’s right, as usual.’
Apricot sometimes wished she lived in as ordinary a household as did her neighbours; though the more she considered the neighbours the less ordinary they seemed. Mr Rowse the healer at 93 Mafeking Street, a Miss Potter and sixteen cats at No. 95, themselves at No. 97, a Mr Hill in a ménage à trios at No. 90—perhaps all the normal people lived down another street? She had good friends at school: Brenda, Belinda and Liese. Brenda and Belinda, like herself, were scholarship girls, in a school where the others paid. Their names went up on a list on the school board as being entitled to free lunches. Liese’s father owned a chain of garages: he’d been a prisoner of war, had married an English girl. Liese was a vague, sweet girl who had all the pocket money she needed and kept Apricot, Brenda and Belinda in clothes and shoes. Belinda, short and fat, knew most of Keats by heart, and large chunks of Shelley. Brenda, tall and languid, was captain of the netball team. Apricot came top of everything. But they were still the scholarship girls, objects of envy because they were not ordinary, objects of pity because they were poor, their accomplishments scarcely the point.
‘You are all outsiders,’ said Liese’s father. ‘That’s why you stick together.’
‘Liese isn’t an outsider,’ said all but Liese. ‘She doesn’t have free dinners.’
‘She’s half-German,’ he said. ‘That’s more than enough.’
‘How do you win?’ asked Apricot.
‘Men never do,’ he said. ‘Once an outsider, always an outsider. But girls can marry in.’
His wife was Jewish, he had converted to Judaism. There’d be soft tomato sandwiches for tea, and chicken soup and dumplings for supper. The lights were soft, the carpets thick, hot water flowed from taps; everyone liked to be comfortable.
‘You English,’ he said, ‘hate to be comfortable. You think it will stop you getting to heaven. You would rather stand in the rain any day than in a bus shelter.’
‘Bloody foreigners,’ said Ken, though he mellowed when he heard Liese’s family was Jewish. Blacks, musicians and Jews, all victims of an oppressive society, were of the same family of misfortunates as himself. There were eleven taps in Liese’s house—Apricot had counted—including the garden tap. Taps, she reckoned, were the real symbol of wealth and success. At 97 Mafeking Street there were four; and think yourself lucky. Many of the houses had no bathrooms. Ken kept his sheet music in the one he had constructed in the small back bedroom, so fear of splashing kept it on the whole unused. There was carpet in the living room, lino elsewhere; gas fires downstairs and no heating in the bedrooms. The beds were damp and the floor cold when you put your bare feet out in the morning.
‘What do we want money for?’ asked Rhoda. Now she smoked eighty cigarettes a day. ‘You, your dad and me!’
‘So I can turn on the gas,’ said Apricot.
Gas flowed to cooker and fires when coins were put in the meter, not otherwise.
‘Put on your coat,’ said Rhoda, ‘if you feel the cold,’ but Apricot never would. She went round to Liese’s instead, where there was central heating. Brenda and Belinda went too. Belinda sucked sweets and read Tennyson aloud. Brenda talked about boys and Liese’s mother provided food.
‘That girl’s an opportunist,’ said Ken.
‘I don’t know what that means,’ whispered Rhoda, ‘but I’m sure you’re right.’ She lost her voice quite often. Mr Rowse said he was helpless in the face of the extravagance of her sin.
It was unusual for anything in particular to happen in Mafeking Street. The residents now took for granted the shuffling queue outside Mr Rowse’s surgery, or temple. Someone would get a new car, or a new cat: a tree would be lopped: the milkman’s horse bolt. A baby would get born and an upstairs window be lit at night: an old man would die and the hearse arrive, and a gap be felt for a while, but the very pressure of ordinariness, or whatever it was, soon healed it up. Ken would annoy the same neighbours by slamming the same van door twice a week in the same early hour. Now Rhoda had stopped work she would go down to the newsagent on the corner for her cigarettes at the same time every morning, each day a little lighter on her feet. She was now scarcely seven stone.
‘At least I don’t have to watch my weight now,’ she’d say. ‘Not like you, Ken.’
In the afternoons she would go and see Mr Rowse. She was allowed in by the back door. She didn’t have to queue. ‘I’m a priority case,’ Rhoda said. ‘He’s wrestling with my sin.’
‘He doesn’t want the others to catch sight of you,’ said Ken. ‘They’d all be off home!’
Rhoda looked at herself in the mirror and said, ‘I don’t see much wrong with me. Nice big eyes at last!’
When Apricot was three weeks away from the examinations which were, in theory, to get herself, Belinda and Brenda out of school, away from home and into a preferable social and intellectual environment—Liese was happy enough to fail hers, and be allowed to stay cosily at home and be married off to someone suitable—there was an unusual uproar in Mafeking Street. A group of students, chanting and carrying placards, milled round in the road outside Mr Rowse’s house, accosting his patients, pleading with them to go home, abjure the Devil and seek proper medical attention. Their placards announced them as ‘Catholic Youth Against Witchcraft’.
Rhoda went out to give them a piece of her mind.
‘Mr Rowse is a saint,’ Rhoda told them.
‘He’s an agent of the Devil,’ they assured her. Apricot followed Rhoda out to see what was happening. The young man whom she was to marry approached her. He was tall, he stooped, he wore a pale blue anorak and sturdy brown shoes. His eyes were bright and intelligent. He had a little beard, neatly and tidily cut. He was sincere. He explained to Rhoda and Apricot at some length the difference between religion and superstition. He said his name was Bernard Parkin, and that he was studying theology. His group were worried about the rise of superstition worldwide, and took positive action when circumstances warranted. He himself was destined for the priesthood. Rhoda nudged Apricot.
‘There’s a challenge,’ she said. ‘Nice young man like that wasted.’
‘Oh shut up, Rhoda,’ said Apricot, embarrassed, but she could see what Rhoda meant.
The police were called and required the protesters to go home, in the name of religious freedom. This caused further argument and noise. Police reinforcements arrived. Bernard took refuge in Rhoda’s house. Fortunately Ken was out.
‘Is it superstition to believe in ghosts?’ Apricot asked. Rhoda tactfully left them alone. She could be heard hawking and coughing in the upstairs bedroom.
‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ he said.
‘What about Jesus appearing to the apostles?’
‘That was a miracle,’ said Bernard. ‘But I’m glad to have this discussion with you. Perhaps God has sent me to help you.’
He ate all the biscuits on the plate. He said he didn’t mean to worry her but her mother did look as if she needed to see a doctor. Faith healers gained their power—if power they had—from the Devil, not God: they worked more mischief than anyone knew. Apricot explained that her mother was a ghost and Rhoda her grandmother. Bernard settled down to re-educate her. She liked his mind: she liked the quality of his convictions, although, as she explained to Brenda, Belinda and Liese, she could not agree with those convictions.
Bernard told Apricot that to believe in ghosts was to insult God: the souls of the dead went to heaven, purgatory or hell, depending, but did not hang around afflicting the living. Bernard and Apricot, at his suggestion, sat up all one night together when Ken was away to prove that the apparition of Wendy appeared in Rhoda’s head, and nowhere else. Apricot sat closer and closer to Bernard on the stairs, and he edged further away, distancing himself from temptation.
‘Sex before marriage is a sin,’ he’d already told her, ‘and if I read the Gospels right, sex after as well, unless for the procreation of children.’ He failed to quote chapter and verse when Apricot asked him to, and then said it was a personal matter, in any case: if he was going into the priesthood he’d rather do it celibate.
‘Look, look, my mother’s ghost!’ cried Apricot, pointing, though there was nothing there, or hardly anything, just a warning shimmer in the air outside Rhoda’s bedroom. Bernard looked up and Apricot made a dive to undo his zip. He shook her off and made his way, groping through a dark lit only by the red light of the fish-tank heater, to the front door and out into the street and away.
‘I didn’t think you were that kind of girl,’ he said, ‘and I shan’t see you again. But do please get Rhoda to a doctor.’
Apricot persuaded Rhoda to go to the hospital.
‘What I don’t understand is this,’ said Apricot to Brenda, Belinda and Liese, ‘why was Bernard Parkin sitting next to me on the stairs in the dark if he didn’t want sex!’
They searched for an answer but couldn’t find one. They were full of complaints. They compared notes. What was it men wanted? They asked around. Liese’s father replied, ‘True love.’ They thought this was very continental of him. Ken, when they put the question, replied, ‘A quiet life,’ but they didn’t believe that either.
Exams were approaching; and, with them, trouble on all fronts. Mr Rowse refused to see Rhoda any more because she’d been seen talking to Young Catholics Against Witchcraft. Ken chatted Belinda up so she said she wouldn’t come round any more, or so Brenda reported. Apricot had a row with Belinda. Brenda sided with Belinda, Liese with Apricot. Rhoda vomited blood over the breakfast table. The hospital said she had cancer of the stomach, the throat, the liver, the bladder and everything. Ken, upset, tried to drive his van through the line of Mr Rowse’s patients: he broke the ankle of an elderly man too feeble to jump out of the way. The police were called: arrest narrowly averted. Mr Rowse’s Sunday Angels, or someone, put a dog turd through Ken’s letter box. The council tried to take Mr Rowse to court for fraud and deception, and asked Rhoda to be the star witness for the prosecution but she refused, and had a startling remission, as Mr Rowse had promised her she would if she were only loyal. Mr Rowse left the area and set up elsewhere. He had millions in the bank, rumour went, and had never in all his life paid any tax at all. He went without even paying the cleaner.
Apricot waited until her exams were over and then went down to the Catholic church and hung about until she met Bernard coming out of confession.
‘What were you confessing?’ she asked, bold as brass, walking up to him in her everyday short skirt and torn black stockings, as if the terrible incident on the stairs had not happened at all.
‘Sins of the flesh,’ he said, ‘committed in the head with you.’ That quite compensated for the insult he had offered her on the stairs.
‘Please marry me,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun any more at home. If I don’t get out I might go under.’
He understood her predicament, of seemed to, and, much to Brenda, Belinda and Liese’s disgust, married Apricot in a registrar’s office, in a civil ceremony. She was seventeen. This would do, he told her, until such time as she became converted to Catholicism and they could marry properly. Or not, as the case might be. They set up house in No. 93, which was now to let. She would have to go out to work, it appeared, to see him through college. But at least it was no longer theological college. He could not marry and be a priest. He would be a social worker instead. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Ken, who had given his consent without argument. He had started a new career as a singer. ‘Let’s hope she won’t have to do a milk round.’
When Rhoda died, a month or so later, Ken married his ex-saxophonist’s widow, who understood the rigours and demands of the musician’s life, and who had a teenage daughter. It was the kind of household he understood. Nevertheless, he felt abandoned and betrayed by the women in his life.