ELEVEN
It was Saturday morning. As Pamela left the shop and made her slow way home, nose furtively buried in a nice tabloid headline and urging herself to savour the decadence, Miss Phoebe Glen passed her in the street without a glance, oblivious to all save her goal that morning: to win the fat man. He would come into the shop eventually, she knew, and when he did, she would be ready for him.
And she was. . .
‘There is more to life than budgerigars,’ she said jauntily, as he sidled in. She was very pink and her eyes glowed strangely. The fat man froze, no response coming readily to his lips.
Mrs Patel kept smiling while she sorted the Maltesers and the Bounty bars.
He first shook and then nodded his head, made a curiously muddled motion that was half-bow and half-curtsey, and thought, How strange. Because after buying that copy of The Budgerigar he had been quite taken.
‘But your landlady, Lavender, would not like them, would she?’ She came even closer. He flinched. But stood his ground. He had to. Short of climbing into the upright refrigerator, there was nowhere else for him to go.
‘Lavender?’ he said cautiously.
Mrs Patel dropped one of the packets and tutted.
Miss Phoebe continued, still quite playfully, ‘And you must get so lonely living on your own in that dreadful place in Pumping Lane. You deserve better. It must be hard for you to live with someone unintelligent.’
Coquetry, she thought, I’ll give him coquetry. She hoped she had not gone too far. Ani Patel, who was absolutely certain she had gone too far, just went on sorting chocolate bars. It did not do to look at all censorious if you had darkish skin.
The fat man, who only knew his landlady as the Widow MacNamally, and as a woman who kept herself to herself except on the odd occasion when she brought a friend home from The Five Bells, was impressed.
She came closer. He quite liked the sweetish smell that hung around her. She said, ‘I offer you the opportunity to come and lodge in a cultivated household. Conversation, higher things. The gifts that lift us above animals, as Hazlitt would have it.’
In her desperation Miss Phoebe would have turned a somersault, or done a conjuring trick, or abracadabraed up the Turin Shroud, in order to impress him.
He said, ‘I’m not very fond of haslet,’ pressed pigmeat not being his favourite.
Miss Phoebe immediately said, ‘Neither am I, oh neither am I. . .’ as the desperate supplicant will.
And the fat man found the way her pointy fingers danced through the whiteness fascinating. A bit grubby, but definitely fascinating. And she was doing something ever so strange with her eyes. He looked across at Ani Patel, who gave him a little look of encouragement. If this worked, she would be safe home with Ari on those Tuesdays.
He almost said yes, and then, like a drowning man, he saw Karaoke for Beginners. And grabbed it like a life-raft. Shielding himself with the publication, he slid across to Mrs Patel, who felt sorry for him.
‘It is last week’s,’ she said. ‘Have it for half-price.’
He was not there yet. But Miss Phoebe felt in her fingertips that she had him in her thrall.
‘A packet of strong mints,’ she said to Mrs Patel. ‘In case the social services call.’
Mrs Patel nodded and thought, yet again, how strange were this nation’s habits. What was wrong with offering them a cup of tea?
She would have asked Mrs Pryor to explain the matter, as she sometimes did, but Mrs Pryor had already been in. Very early for her. And she did not seem quite herself nowadays. Ani Patel’s heart bled for her. She could see that Mrs Pryor was affected by the loss of her son. She thought about Ari again and hoped, very much indeed, that Miss Phoebe was successful with her lodger.
Pamela was banned from going to her own shop this Saturday. Jenny, obviously worried about finding her slumped in an exhausted coma over the paint-finishes one Monday morning, warned her about spending too much time on the business. The fact was, there was little to come home for any more. She did not say this, of course. But presumably it was obvious.
‘There is no need for you to be there at nine o’clock,’ said Jenny one Friday night, when Pam had rung her absent-mindedly to ask her something. ‘Get in a cab and come over here and I’ll feed you.’
‘I am not a chimpanzee,’ she said crossly. But the truth was, she did feel a bit like an animal in a cage.
Both her mother’s silly suggestion about Peter and her visit to Cambridgeshire were very unsettling. In her isolation the past kept tiptoeing in and tickling her. Forgotten things in drawers, a postcard down behind the piano – all these things were imbued with new meaning.
When she rang Margie to apologize for being so short with her and to ask her more about Tom – she did not in the least want to know, but she felt as a true sister she was obliged to ask – she ended up telling her all about her trip to the Levels. Safe within her blossoming new affair, Margie could afford to be high-handed. ‘To this day I do not know why you gave up Douglas,’ she said. ‘He was absolutely gorgeous, and right for you. Gave you loads of fun. Kept you young.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Pam, ‘so young I was like a demented teenager. He also damn nearly wrecked my career and my relationship with Danny.’
‘Well – that’s all in the past now,’ said Margie, as easily as one might dismiss Passchendaele as a scrap. ‘Why don’t you ring him up? He might be free.’
Pamela paused, stunned. And then she said slowly, as if talking to a vegetable. ‘Have you gone barking mad?’
‘And have you,’ Margie asked, ‘forgotten how nice it is?’
Pamela did not ask what. She did not have to. If Margery was a vegetable, she was an extremely well stuffed one. No – she knew, by the creeping tone of smugness. But she let her go on.
‘You could just say you’d rung for a chat. Be brave. You’re nearly fifty. You can do anything. What have you got to lose?’
Pamela thought about her mother. She could be forgiven because of age. Margie could not. She swallowed, made her voice bright, and changed the subject. ‘Tell me about Tom,’ she said.
It worked, of course. Margie launched in. And he sounded wonderful. But then, they always did. A superior thought that made absolutely no difference to her state of mind. Which was low.
This morning she was again feeling crabby on account of ringing up her son. This time he and The Girlfriend were still in bed – at half-past eleven. She had been up for hours. She had been cleaning for hours. Cleaning! She had no one to lie with. She suspected the two of them spent their whole time in Liverpool bonking. How could she have been protective of him? He was streets ahead of her. Those magazines proved it. But then, she comforted herself, if she had not been so protective of him, had not put him first, he would probably not be so happily indifferent to her, and so happily involved and bonking The Girlfriend now. Disturbing but true. Her sacrifice, she knew, without a tinge of pride, had made him whole. Oddly enough, this thought did nothing to alleviate the crabbiness. Nothing at all. So, she had produced a well-balanced member of the human race? Oh, good, she thought, going at the plughole savagely. Well, that’s all right, then. That really makes the sexual frustration, the loneliness, and the sudden metamorphosis into flounder-woman much more acceptable.
Such thoughts were not helped by the sight of her primly active rubber glove. Crash, bang, she went, throwing cutlery for one back into a drawer.
And now the past was really coming back to haunt her with a vengeance, because – as if Peter and Douglas were not enough – she suddenly thought of Dean. Sweet Dean. Oh, the ignominy. Oh, the panic. . .
In the shine of the sink she saw poor Dean’s face as it looked out from under the bed, naked and holding an African violet (why on earth had she shoved that under there with him?), and she saw her own face, beetroot red, as red as her Happy Jacket, glaring at him through the crack in the door, telling him to Stay, as if he were a little dog. And then going cheerfully down the stairs, two at a time, saying after the initial strangled cry of surprised greeting, ‘Oh, Danny – would you just run and get us some milk from the corner shop?’ And he, just having arrived back, Finals completed, and a little travel-weary, looking back at her as if she were completely daft. Since when did Danny run his mother’s errands anyway? And certainly not on the day he returned from university . . . ‘I’ll take it black, Ma,’ was all he said. ‘That’s cool.’
So poor Dean stayed up there, under the bed, while down below Danny and she bantered, had tea, made toast and it was half an hour before she could escape back upstairs to help him dress and slip out.
Poor, sweet Dean. She remembered, suddenly, that it was his birthday last month. She counted on her fingers. Twenty-eight. Did that sound better than twenty-six? Who could say? She was still and always would be twenty years older than him. Old enough to be his mother. Their Catullian games might have eased her heart, but such liaisons had always been thus, she thought mournfully. Such liaisons had always been ill-received and just as shameful.
Poor Jocasta. Finding Oedipus. Horror, of course, would certainly have made her mute. But also disappointment, perhaps? After all, there was nothing like youth. Poor Jocasta – to give that up and gain a son? From where she was sitting this morning, it didn’t seem a very fair bargain.
Crash, bang, crash.
She now realized that she was making quite a lot of noise on purpose. Good job Piggins was sleeping in the Whiskery Beyond or he might have got kicked. She considered the possibility of getting a dog until Ani Patel, sighing a little, said that dogs were such a tie and meant you could not go off on your own for tramps. Realizing eventually that her newsagent did not mean smelly old men in broken boots, but was remembering how she used to go off walking in the past, Pamela agreed she had a point.
Hardly one that mattered, she thought despondently. For here she was, free to do anything. Stay out all night if she wanted to. Even stay out all night with an old tramp if she felt so inclined. And she was cleaning.
Crash, crash, bang.
Enough!
She ripped off her rubber gloves and threw them down on the draining board like gauntlets. She had cleared every single surface in the kitchen and tidied everything away. Not one of her usual pursuits. The cobbler’s children go unshod. Her home might be colourful, but it was no design set. She straightened her back. And it was still only half-past twelve. On the wall was a plate that Jenny had brought her back from a trip somewhere. It said, ‘A clean and tidy home means a dull woman.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ she thought miserably, looking out through the gleaming kitchen window. It probably does.
Of course she could have gone to lunch with the boring Baldwins – a banker and his charitable wife, for whom Danny had removed the B, substituted a W, and sung, ‘There was a wanker and his wife,’ to the tune of ‘Barbara Allen’. She even missed that schoolboy stuff around the house now. It used to irritate, now she missed it – like a whole lot of things. She could just stay in and continue with her study plans. She looked at the clock. There was still time to ring the Baldwins and say she was coming after all. Though her hand hesitated on the telephone, in the end she decided not. Maybe she would just go out. She pondered. But where?
Well, she certainly was not going back to Cambridgeshire. And she was certainly not going to attempt to play gooseberry with Margie in Berkshire. So she decided to have lunch out on her own. Why not? Get a paper. Choose somewhere appealing. It was yet another perfect Indian summer’s day. She put on her soft pink jumper, tidied her hair, applied some make-up and struggled into an alarmingly tight pair of jeans (shrunk in the wash, of course) and got into the car.
Now, she said to herself, pretending the question was real, where shall we go today? But she already knew. She set off for north of Regent’s Park. Be nice to have a little stroll around there again – not having been for well over a year. . . Might look at the Heath. She hummed under her breath. A sure sign she was up to something and kidding herself. Which, of course, she was.
‘Well, I won’t go in,’ she said defiantly, as she turned off the Marylebone Road. ‘I won’t even let him know I’ve been.’ And, she thought, even more defiantly, after the Levels and memories of Douglas, it seemed oddly appropriate to be doing this. And the car was a new one so it wouldn’t be recognized.
She found herself in the familiar territory of Dean’s road. She doubted he still lived in the same flat with the same lads – he would probably be living with a girl by now, like Danny. He could even be married. But she kept her head down low over the wheel as she crawled by. This time there was no sense of sadness to overwhelm her. Only memory and desire. That old geranium. She had forgotten how carefree the time with Dean was. She had managed, for the first time in her life, to do what all those therapies suggest: she really did live those few months of theirs one day at a time. Funny how you sometimes only see the value of things once they are over.
It looked the same – big front window – first floor – curtains at half-mast – decaying skeletons of long dead begonias in a terracotta pot on the sill. Ah, but how many twenty-somethings lived like that in this road, in these conversions? She was just about to pick up speed and move on when the door beneath the withered begonias opened and out tumbled Dean and his flat-mates – all three, the same ones, and each with their kit bags – so they even went Saturday training as they had always done. Time might have been standing still and waiting.
She stared. It was an extraordinary moment, taking her completely by surprise, because the whole of her seemed to turn inside out while her brain exploded and her ears rang to deafness. It was simply that she had forgotten how wonderful he looked – and, worse, she had had no idea – how could she know? – what fifteen or sixteen months would do to him. Something had matured, changed, deepened. She almost called him, but a girl appeared behind them all. Dark-haired, slender, moving delicate as a flower down the steps, catching them up. Dean reached out and put his hand round her waist, she clutched him for a moment as she stumbled – smiled, righted herself, stayed within his hold.
Pamela’s mouth went dry. The exploded brain began to pound, her eyes went watery and she felt sick. But it had to be. What she had come for, she did not quite know, but what she had seen, had to be. It was right. She needed to see precisely this. The understanding made her feel better. The pounding receded. The sickness died away. Her mouth moistened. She was right to let him go. That was where his future lay. Not with her. As she said to Rick, in defence of herself, if it had been Danny and some old bag she would have gone crazy.
The four of them were close now but on the other side of the road – paying her and the other parked cars no attention. Dean still had his arm round the girl, she still giggled, and suddenly the other lad – Julian, was it? She seemed to remember that was the name – Julian danced over to Dean, grabbed the girl from him, and said, laughingly, ‘Hands off, you bastard. . .’
She watched Dean’s arm fall back to his side, saw that he relinquished her easily, that he did not care for her in that way. She felt stupid with gladness.
They advanced. She slid further down in the seat. She tried very hard not to look at him as he strode and jumped and cavorted along the pavement opposite, right past her car. If she saw a sadness about his eyes, she refused to acknowledge it. She smiled out of the car at him, not thinking, and then shrank back down again. Just for a moment she wondered if their eyes had met and decided it was illusion. And she drove off quickly in the opposite direction, just in case she did something to make it reality.
She did not go to Regent’s Park but drove home listening to Tosca. It was painful really. Within the confines of her little car, where no one else could possibly know or share the thought, she indulged in comforting self-pity and thought, as she listened, that sometimes you had to acknowledge you were a walking tragedy yourself.
Half-way along the path she stopped to pluck a few dead heads of roses and thought, yet again, how shamefully she had neglected the garden.
Plenty of time for that sort of thing now. It was a chilling thought. She suddenly saw herself pottering about in a shapeless old skirt and no longer colouring her hair. That was what having the role model of her mother sitting in the Burlington did. It tempted you to think that giving up was a good option. Go back to Peter, put your feet up, settle right down and let someone else take the strain. Tempting. Very tempting.
Especially in the matter of being able to afford a gardener, she thought idly. She inspected the desiccated tendrils of the Nellie Moser and had no idea what to do about them. She stared up at the wistaria, which looked very seedy, and she ran an inexpert toe along the edge of the campanula. Have to ask her mother. Soon, soon, she would turn into her anyway. Remembering that comfortable smugness settled in the blue armchair, she was bound to admit that the prospect could be worse. But not by very much.
She frowned at the bright blue front door. Did she have a creeping feeling that she would like to repaint it in something pale? She plucked at the sleeve of her very pink sweater. Was she not considering that the next one she bought might be taupe? Save me, save me, she implored herself, and began to sing very loudly, to the tune of ‘Vissi d’arte’: ‘I am not my mother, I never was my mother, I never will be my mother, I swear, I swear, I swear –’ and at each enunciation of swear she gave it all she had got. Which was a surprising amount.
Something would happen. She was a great believer in doors opening when others closed.
Symbolically she was just putting the key in her lock and giving it all she had got once more, when her small, pretty, punk-blonde, thirty-acting-as-twenty neighbour popped her elfin head over the front fence and blinked her baby-blues.
‘Are you singing, Mrs Pryor?’ she said brightly.
Pam longed to say the usual thing about riding a bicycle. But she held off. ‘Call me Pam,’ said Pam automatically.
‘And what was that you were singing?’ she said, in the kind way helpers up at Lupin Lodge spoke to their inmates. ‘I’ve never heard you singing to yourself before.’
The implication was wild lunacy. Pam smiled.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘How are you getting on now you’re on your own?’ Her eyes screwed up with sympathy.
Pamela longed to say something four-lettered and Anglo-Saxon. Any shred of respect she might have built up over the last few years would now be as shrivelled as the Nellie Moser. Wearing skirts that actually covered her fanny line had begun the rot – singing bowdlerized Tosca must just about have completed it. She clenched her teeth, turned, smiled, and waited. There would be more. Oh, verily, there would. . .
She, this neighbour, Peaches Carter – once, long ago, in far-off Leighton Buzzard christened June and now, in a surge of post-Baywatch syndrome and removal to West London, rechristened in fruiterer’s mode by her beefy, media husband Bud, whom Pam was certain was originally introduced as Bob – wore a puzzled look. It became her. As a matter of fact, thought Pamela crossly, grimacing from piles would probably become her. She kept the smile on her face and gritted her teeth. ‘Marvellously,’ she said, ‘Thank you – er – er. . .’
It was always so hard to speak that name. And for some reason, because it was always so hard, but unavoidable, she found herself wanting to go mad and say Strawberry or Mango instead. Indeed, finding herself with a little drop taken at one of their interminable barbecues this summer Pamela had called out across the smoking entrails, ‘Lovely ribs, Apricot, lovely. . .’ After which there was nothing to do but smile at the shocked and youthful gathering and hope they would put it down to senility. Since the Apricot incident, Pamela was pretty sure that Bud and Peaches and their friends now put everything down to senility. They had a tendency to speak to her in bright, loud voices and mouth at each other that she was In Design. Of course, they could have been mouthing at each other that she was In Decline. It mattered not. Danny had liked them. He and Bud would stand for hours looking at Bud’s GTI without, apparently, saying a word.
Pamela was squinting into the sun anyway, which probably completed the illusion of mental instability.
‘Not like you to go singing,’ added Peaches carefully. She could just as well have said, ‘Not like you to go naked in Sainsbury’s.’
Pam said, ‘Sorry.’ Which was fair enough, given the voice she possessed.
Peaches took the apology as her right. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘But now you’re back I can ask you. . .’ She gave Pamela one of her melting looks. Whenever Peaches saw Pamela, she metamorphosed into one of those greeting cards that says ‘In Loving Sympathy’.
Pamela kept her teeth clenched. If it is yet another invitation, she thought, I will not go – I will not. She prepared for the worst. They eyeballed each other and Pamela continued to try to love Peaches as she loved herself, which was a fairly successful enterprise at this juncture, since her self-esteem was somewhere in the primal sludge. Being thought wanting is bad enough, being caught doing something that apparently confirms it is quite another.
Peaches smiled with a horrible knowingness. ‘Doing anything tonight?’ she said, in a tone that encouraged Pam’s first considered response to be, ‘Yes, rogering Arsenal,’ which she quickly changed to a gay and careless ‘No.’
Peaches smiled again and tapped her nose. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because I’ve got someone coming over who wants to meet you.’
I will not go, I will not go. . .
Peaches dropped her voice in pleasurable conspiracy. ‘A man.’
Pamela accepted immediately. Pamela even brightened. Peter, Douglas, Dean all floated away in the afternoon sun. And her mother, Margie – even Rick. Doors, she thought, always doors to open.
‘I’d be delighted,’ she added. And went in.