Flying Under Bridges (16 page)

Eve
couldn’t stop smiling at Inge and then Inge asked Eve what she did and she had
to say, ‘Housewife,’ and it sounded so awful. She said so. ‘It’s awful, isn’t
it?’

‘And
then what?’ Inge replied.

‘What
do you mean?’

‘What
will you do next?’ Inge leant across the table towards Eve. ‘I’m going to learn
to fly. One of those little planes you can take up on your own. Kate and I want
to go to California. I shall learn to fly and… you know the Golden Gate
Bridge?’

Eve
nodded. She knew what it looked like. She’d never been but she’d seen pictures.
‘You want to fly over that? How wonderful.’

‘Over
it!’ exclaimed Inge, so that the other table stopped their conversation about
the problems inherent with flat roofs and listened. ‘Anybody can fly over it.
I want to go underneath.’ Inge left Eve with that thought and swooped back to
the past. ‘Do you know, at school Matron used to come in and wake us in the morning
and we had to get out of bed instantly the door opened? I heard she died a few
years ago and I couldn’t have been more delighted. Isn’t that dreadful? Kate’s
a Quaker and…’

Eve
wasn’t really listening. Eve was thinking about her life, about her house. I
could be a cabbage in that house, she said to herself. Eve, you could do
something with your life. You don’t have to just sit here like a pudding. Eve’s
Pudding. It was like a light had gone on in her derelict building. It changed
everything. In fact the whole avocado business would never have happened if
Inge hadn’t turned up.

Chapter
Ten

14
January

Holloway
Prison for Women

London

My dear Inge,

Being
No One

seeing
in the distance a fig tree in leaf, Jesus went to see if he could find anything
on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the
season for figs. And he said? to it,

‘May no
one ever eat fruit from you again.’

(MARK
11.13)

I don’t understand that
story. It wasn’t the season for figs. The tree could hardly be blamed, yet it
got cursed to never make anything good again. What’s it about? It just seems
like temper but that can’t be it. If anyone came along to my tree there’d be no
fruit. That’s what I am. I’m the cursed fig tree.

You
know that I don’t blame you for anything that happened, don’t you? Something
in your last letter didn’t feel right. I mean, it’s important that you know
none of this was your fault. You’re my friend. You’re the person I trust to
look after my daughter now that things are so bad. I don’t blame you but
everything changed after you came. That day, after we met, you went home with
your laundry and I should have done the same, but I felt so shaky I didn’t know
what to do with myself. I saw myself sitting, spending my life sitting. I have
spent my adulthood waiting for others to do what they had to do. Sitting at
the table waiting for Adam to come home for his dinner, sitting in the school
playground waiting for the bell to ring and sitting waiting for my children. Waiting.
Sitting. I didn’t mind so much for Shirley. She was going to be a dancer. Did
you know that? Jazz, ballet, tap, we did it all, well, she did. I watched. I
loved it. All the girls running around, needing help to put their hair in buns,
sewing costumes. The big shows at the end of the year. Waiting in the wings. Watching
my angel floating out in front of everyone.

‘Your
daughter’s got real talent,’ people would say. ‘You must be so proud.’

And I
was. I waited and I was. I used to dream about seeing her in the West End or
some film, you know, like Leslie Caron without the accent. I hadn’t done
anything but she was going to. She was going to.

After
we chatted, you and I, I couldn’t sit for another minute. I knew I’d had too
much coffee so I went along to the library. I don’t know what I was looking
for. A book to change things somehow.

I was
dithering in the careers section when I met Theresa Baker. We’d never really
had a conversation even though she lives only a few doors up. Anyway, she was
looking up something in tile grouting and we rather bumped into each other.
Theresa’s really quite the riskiest thing in our close. She’s not married to
her partner. That’s not the risky bit. No. She had a ‘placenta party’ after her
last home-birth. Apparently in the old days women used to fry up the whole
thing and eat it. Packed with protein. The whole street was invited. It was
twins so I expect there was plenty to go round but we didn’t go. I didn’t go
because, well, I was busy and Adam didn’t go because I didn’t tell him about
it.

Anyway,
she said, ‘Hello, Eve, getting the latest Joanna Trollope?’

‘No.
No,’ I said, even though it was always a possibility. ‘No. I need a book on
starting your own business.’ The librarian heard me and immediately went
looking. Theresa frowned at me but my mouth kept moving on its own. ‘I’m
starting my own business. Doing organising for people. You know, people who
are too busy to work and run their homes efficiently. A wardrobe and cupboard
organiser. I’m very good at kitchen cupboards.’

‘Gosh.’
Theresa chuckled. ‘What an extraordinary idea. Actually I could do with that.
Let me know what you charge.’

Charge?
Charge? Money? ‘Yes, yes I will.’

‘By the
way,’ she said, ‘you going to your sister’s classes?’

‘Classes?’
I said, trying not to sound as if I didn’t know what Theresa was talking about.

‘Women’s
Studies, at your mum’s house.’

Fact —25 per cent of
all housewives are clinically depressed.

I’ll
get to the women’s classes in a minute because they’re important, but first I
have to say that I don’t believe that statistic about housewives for a moment.
That means seventy-five per cent feel fine. I read in the paper today that a
new study has shown that women who are depressed ought to spring clean the
house. Everyone in prison is madly looking for my depression. In here we are
all either mad or bad and at the moment I haven’t been categorised, which makes
things uncomfortable for the authorities. It would be good to blame my
behaviour on the menopause except for two things: apparently no scientific association
has ever been clinically demonstrated between depression and women’s hormone
levels. And (I think this one is the clincher) I hadn’t had the menopause yet.

I can’t
say I had depression as such but they give disturbed animals in the zoo Prozac.
Germaine says — this suggests misery in response to unbearable circumstances
rather than something constitutional. The trouble is my circumstances were not
unbearable, just predictable. I hadn’t done anything with my life and by the
time I realised, it felt like it was too late. I’ve been crying and the shrink
says that’s okay. It’s what we women do — seek relief in tears. Men do it with
masturbation he told me, which was more information than I needed.

I cried
when Diana died, Princess Diana, and I didn’t know her but I knew that feeling.
That sitting on your own feeling she must have had and she was beautiful. The
whole town got together and erected a plaque at Anderson’s Garage. She once
stopped for fruit gums on her way to a polo match. I don’t think she actually
bought them herself but that wasn’t the point. The mayor unveiled the plaque
and Mr Anderson played memorial music over the tannoy system, which is usually
used to warn people that they are inadvertently about to fill up with diesel.

I am
allowed to be sad. Sad is fine. It’s the crazy bit that they’re all on the
look-out for. It was crazy what I did, killing someone, but I wouldn’t do it
again. Then I keep thinking about what will happen if they do let me go. Will I
just go back and sit in my kitchen? Look out of the window and pluck hairs from
my chin? The psychiatrist has shown me that I need to change my world. Martha
showed me that, come to think of it, but I don’t know how. All I knew was that
I could change Shirley’s world. That I could change things for my daughter so
that she didn’t end up just sitting. I don’t know what will happen to her now
but I know she isn’t married to that man. To that man who would have made her
sit and wait all her life. That’s what I need her to understand.

‘Do you
think you were a good mother?’ they keep asking, and I don’t know. I thought
so. I mean, it was what I did, but Adam blamed me for Tom. He so wanted a son
to follow him into business. To build on his insurance empire. To see that nothing
ever happened to anybody for which they did not receive some financial reward.
When Tom went his own way, Adam said it was my fault for encouraging him. They
blame the mother for everything. Not the father. I read that some people in
Finland had done a study and they found that being unwanted by your mother was
the crucial factor in the subsequent development of schizophrenia. It’s such a
responsibility. Right from the beginning they tell you that a glass of wine can
cause neurological problems in the foetus. That you need to provide the ‘optimum
uterine environment’ or your kid will be clueless, but not to worry too much
about it because stress is bad for the baby.

I want
to explain about Tom because I think it will help everyone understand how I
felt about Patrick. You see, human beings can feel things so deeply. I know
that but it wasn’t part of my life. I felt I had been skating on thin ice all
my emotional life. Never getting under the surface and I didn’t want that for
my kids. I wanted passion for them. I wanted something extraordinary because
what I had was only ordinary. I’m not blaming Adam. It’s just how things were.
You had passion, Inge. You must know what I mean.

Womb
with a View

To the
woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you
shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he
shall rule over you.’

(GENESIS
4.16)

Miss March, the lawyer, is
much more confident than the psychiatrist. He favours a pencil but she writes
everything down in pen.

Fact
—
the Bic pen was invented by a French baron called Bich. He
dreamt up the smooth-flowing ball-point in 1953 and probably never had to write
a cheque again. There are now three thousand million of them sold each year.
The Japanese invented the felt tip and the self-propelling pencil. The fountain
pen may have been around in 1748 when Catherine the Great wrote in her diary
about using an ‘endless quill’, but then she also died making love to a horse
so she may not be a reliable historical witness.

Miss
March thinks I am nearly ready to testify but she is very worried about what I
should wear. It is very important that I look demure. She has the facts at her
manicured fingertips. Imagine that — a lawyer and time to do her nails.
Basically it’s the non-killer look that she’s going for. Certainly I mustn’t
wear anything that might suggest any strength about me and she doesn’t want me
to mention the classes Martha held.

That’s
what I was talking about, wasn’t it? Sorry. Anyway, I didn’t mean to go to the
classes. It happened by accident. Mother was still in the hospital and needed
some fresh night things, so I popped over one evening to her house, our old
house, to get them. It’s just an ordinary semi. I’d grown up there but that
night I didn’t know the place. Jesus on his bits of velvet had disappeared and
in his place were a lot of candles and posters for flower remedies and tea tree
oil, that sort of thing. From the minute Mother moved out Martha hadn’t wasted
any time. She had swept down from her London club and changed everything. Even
the basics. Out was draylon and in were natural fibres and untreated wood. I
think you could have boiled most of the furniture and got quite a hearty meal.

There
were about six women in the sitting room when I arrived. They were drinking red
wine and wearing a lot of flowing things. I didn’t seem to know any of them
except Theresa Baker from the library, who was clutching a box of Sainsbury’s
red. Theresa handed me a glass of wine while a woman in swirls of multi-coloured
batik held forth.

‘Oh, it’s
the most awful business. They need the pregnant mares so they routinely
slaughter foals, re-impregnate the mares as soon as possible and start all over
again.’ A tiny ferret of a woman in one corner looked quite faint.

‘Hello,’
I said brightly. ‘Sorry to interrupt, just come to get—’

‘You’re
just in time,’ declared Martha. ‘You all know my sister Eve. She’s perfect.
Ordinary as the day is long. We need your opinion, as an ordinary woman.’

‘What
on?’

‘Urine
farms,’ said Theresa Baker, pouring more wine. ‘For hormone replacement
therapy. You know, HRT.’