The Facts of Life (9 page)

‘No,’ she said, ‘That picture’s a lie. That’s not the man I married. The man I married is sitting downstairs. That dreamboat in the natty suit and shiny shoes was a man I dreamt up and carried in my head. I hope you know him well, your Edward.’

‘I do.’

‘I mean really well. Men change, girl. They grow up slower than women.’

‘You must have had some good times with him.’

‘Oh. Yes. Good times.’ Her mother leant against the headboard and snorted at her recollections. ‘I suppose he made me feel safe, which was nice. And he was taller than me then, before his accident. And he was a good dancer, when he’d had a few, which makes it all the sadder I suppose.’ She looked at her hands again, her hard, worker’s hands with their incongruously lacquered nails, and sighed to herself. ‘So,’ she said, ‘Have you set a date?’

‘Not yet,’ Sally told her, ‘But I don’t see much point in a long engagement.’

‘No. I bet you don’t.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Oh you know, Madam. You know.’

Sally surprised herself by blushing and had to pretend to blow her nose. Her mother went on regardless of the confusion she had caused. ‘Where will you live? You can’t live here.’

‘We might have to, Mum, to start with.’

Her mother began to protest but Sally cut her short.

‘We’d pay you rent. Proper rent.’

‘Well I don’t know. You might end up like that Perkins lot up the street and never move out.’

‘Don’t be silly. Anyway, we’ll probably find somewhere in Rexbridge.’

‘You’d better go and have a word with the parson tomorrow evening. Fix up the banns and everything.’

‘Oh I’m not sure we’ll get married in church.’

‘Because he’s Jewish? We brought you up C of E, my girl, and we’re paying. So you get married in church.’

‘But we never
go
to church!’ Sally protested.

‘So? We’re English and your father and I got married in church, and you can do the same. C of E.’ Her mother wrinkled her nose. ‘You don’t want one of those poky registry office jobs like some old tart with a divorce on her. You want a bit of charm, girl. A bit of dignity. There’ll be time enough for the other.’

‘Well I’m going to wear cream, I warn you.’

Her mother sat up sharply.

‘I thought you said you weren’t in the club?’

‘I’m not, but I can’t wear white at my age.’

‘At your age, at your age. You’re only twenty-seven.’

‘A moment ago you were carrying on as though I was forty.’

Her mother pointed a warning finger.

‘You wear cream and it’s over my dead body. I don’t want all the neighbours getting ideas. We’ll take you round to Ida’s sister. She can do you something simple with a little veil. You can always shorten the sleeves and get it dyed later. I’ll pay.’

‘Where’s all this money come from suddenly?’

‘It’s my money. I earned it. You don’t have a daughter and not put something by just in case. Daughters cost. It’s a fact of life. Now. Go to bed and get some sleep. I’m exhausted and you look as if you could do with some too. Have you told your dad?’

‘Yes. He was asleep by the stove with the radio on. I told him when I came in.’

‘What did he say?’

They looked at each other and started to chuckle at the thought.

‘You know what he’s like. He said “Oh,” and asked me what Edward did again, as if I hadn’t told him already a hundred times, and then he said, “Well you’d better tell your mother.” I know he wasn’t any wilder about me seeing Edward than you were, but I had expected a little more enthusiasm.’

‘Oh he’ll be pleased. In his way. When it sinks in.’ Her hair wrapped in chiffon, her mother had already climbed into bed and was tugging the covers up around her. She sometimes claimed that sleep was the one pleasure that never disappointed. Sleep and Gordon’s gin.

‘Put the top light off on your way out, there’s a love,’ she murmured sleepily.

Sally crossed the cramped room with its loudly ticking alarm clock and bedroom smells of night cream and talcum powder. As she reached for the light switch, her mother made soft, pettish little settling noises as she snuggled into her pillows and Sally knew that even now, after so many years of hard practicality and cruel disappointment, her mother threw aside her khaki slacks and work gloves in her dreams to become some headstrong character from the films she loved, with a palatially draped bedroom suite, dour but loving Scottish servants and an embarrassment of impatient suitors.

The punt slid under a bridge. Sally dropped her head back on the cushions, steadying her blue straw hat with one hand. She gazed up at the clammy stones then, as they emerged, at a clutch of day-trippers who were staring at them. A red-haired woman took a photograph then turned immediately away, as though the seizing of the picture had rendered the actual beauty of the scene insignificant. Edward was punting proficiently, with a steady rhythm and minimal splashing. He was in cricket whites and had taken off his jacket to reveal a white shirt that – fetchingly, Sally thought – looked two sizes too large. He had rolled up his sleeves to keep them dry and now she could see the tendons flex in his forearms as he pushed and pulled on the glistening pole.

Impatient with holding the thing in place, she slipped off her hat and dropped it in her lap. She ran her fingers through her hot hair then, shutting her eyes against the sun, let a hand trail in the water. The Rex smelt faintly rotten, unless it was the odour of exposed mud at the base of its banks. There had been no rain for weeks and the river flowed slowly, deep on its bed. As they drifted past a college where the lawns were being mown, the sweet scent of cut grass washed over her and made her open her eyes.

Thomas sat before her, in front of Edward. Despite the heat, he had persisted in wearing both jacket and tie and his face was pink and shiny in the shadow of his panama. The picnic he had brought with him was packed in a basket between their feet. When they had first set out, he had kept up a stream of pronouncements and mordant witticisms. It was as though his position – wobbling in a damp punt, in a holiday setting far from his usual academic context – threatened to render him anonymous, so he strove to impose his superiority on the weed, the ducks and the idling passers-by. Then they passed a punt full of young men who mimicked his manner and roared with impudent laughter. With a faint pout, he fell silent, merely casting over his shoulder a look that could have bored holes in their boat timbers.

Pitying him, Sally drew him out afresh, asking how Rexbridge had changed since his undergraduate days. She assumed, correctly, that he had spent the best part of his life in largely unchanged circumstances, attached to the same, distinguished college. He had served as an air raid patrolman during the war, which had entailed his finally learning to ride a bicycle. He snorted dismissively when she suggested that the Home Guard might have been more amusing, then went on to question her closely about her work and responsibilities. Edward played no part in the conversation. When she addressed him, he would smile and give a short reply before returning to his labour. His assumption of the punt-pole appeared to make him at once a party and an outsider to their society, like a cabby or a gondolier.

Thomas had yet to congratulate them on their engagement. On first acquaintance, she would have mistaken this for a calculated discourtesy, but now that she had known him several weeks she suspected that Edward had simply not yet told him. This suspicion was confirmed when they were sliding through the ragged edge of town. Thomas said that he was planning to take a trip to Tuscany in the late autumn and hoped that Edward would come with him. Edward said nothing but blushed hotly when Sally threw him an angry glance.

He steered them in to the bank where some poplars marked the edge of a field. A family was picnicking noisily a hundred yards away on the opposite side of the river. One of the children was climbing a tree that hung out over the water. Sally looked at his baggy shorts and muddy feet and was startled by a sudden access of broody warmth. She had often pictured herself as married, complete with shadowy husband and roses around the door, but motherhood had never formed a part of the fantasy. There were no love songs about childbirth or motherhood, none, certainly, to which one could dance.

Even allowing for rationing, Thomas’s picnic showed that eye for luxury at which selfish bachelors excel. There was none of the starchy mass which recent austerity had made a wifely virtue, just formal islands of flavour, enticing and rare. Sitting cross-legged on one corner of the rug, he delighted in revealing the network of more or less corrupt contacts through whom he had come by the ingredients – a rector’s wife, to whose daughters he taught Latin, a butcher’s boy he had once surprised in an act of public indecency.

‘And these,’ he crowed, producing a small, napkin-lined tin of
petits fours
as the coffee heated on a little oil burner, ‘come from Didier.’

‘From whom?’

‘The college’s new sous-chef. He’s from Alsace, poor boy, and very young to be away from home and no-one in common room bothers to speak to him at all when he’s carving, much less in French.’

Thomas’s explanation tailed off as he sank his teeth into one of Didier’s small confections and assumed an expression worthy of St Teresa. Edward caught Sally’s eye and grinned but she looked back at him flatly and said, ‘Edward, why don’t you rinse these plates and glasses in the river, then it won’t make such a mess of the basket when I put them back?’

Edward dutifully took a handful of picnic things down to the water’s edge. Sally leaned back on the rug, resting on one elbow, and watched. Thomas watching him go. For the first time it occurred to her that he might be nervous left alone in her company. It would pay, she decided, to be direct.

‘Thomas?’

‘Mmh?’ Thomas had closed his eyes again and was pretending to sun himself.

‘Edward hasn’t told you our news, has he?’

‘Er. No?’ There was a slight quaver to his voice, which he promptly mastered. ‘But I think I can guess.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Congratulations,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

She glanced towards the river. Edward had walked along the bank and was crouching down to talk to the little boy and his older sisters, who had rowed across from the family party.

‘You don’t approve of me, do you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, as a wife for Edward. You’d rather he fell in love with some don’s daughter. Someone with a plummier accent.’

‘My dear woman, you couldn’t be more wrong! I can think of nothing worse for him.’ He looked full at her. Shaded by his hat brim, his eyes searched her face. ‘You’re strong. You’ll protect him.’

‘What on earth from?’

‘Well.’ He shrugged, and poured three cups of coffee. ‘Cream?’ he asked.

‘No, thank you. I take mine black.’

‘There you are.’

‘What from, Thomas?’ she persisted.

‘Himself, largely. He’s spoken of his family, I take it?’

‘He said they were dead.’

‘Yes.’ He stirred two spoonfuls of thick brown crystals into his cup, raised it and sipped. ‘Terrible to be so alone and so … so unsure. He –’ Thomas broke off.

‘Yes?’

‘If I have any disapproval,’ he said at last, ‘It’s with the marital institution, not with his choice of mate.’

‘Oh.’ Sally thought a moment, taking this in.

‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, doctor, I really must have a smoke.’

Before she could exclaim that she was inured to pipe smoke, he was up and striding away from her, busy with his tobacco pouch, parting a way through the cows that had drifted over to graze nearby.

Sally drained her coffee, relishing it to the bitter dregs. She looked in one direction and then the other at the two men – they could not have been further removed from her earlier life. As she formed the thought, it struck her with the force of a revelation, that her life had altered irreversibly. Her wedding day and its attendant rituals were, in a sense, a sentimental irrelevancy. The wedding was for the world, for her mother. Sally felt it was now, not then, that a part of her life was over and a new one begun.

She lay back, head on her hands, and watched a white cloud unravel on an eggshell sky. She felt full – with good food, of course, but also with possibility. She felt tired as well. The week had been no more exhausting than usual – a daily round of chest-tapping, medication, fretful children and adults respectful of authority, frightened of pain. Whereas previously she would have returned from work, eaten her tea then collapsed on the sofa with a library book or the radio, however, she had now the added labour – however bewitching – of a love life. She had become an athlete of sleep, adept now at snatching intense restorative catnaps in a vacant hospital consulting room.

Lulled by the sun, doped with wine, she let her eyelids close and drifted off into a heavy doze during which she could hear the afternoon progressing around her but was too somnolent to sit up and re-enter it. She heard Edward return and sip his tepid coffee. She heard him tentatively say, ‘Hello? Sally?’ but she failed to respond. He snorted – either from disappointment or affection – and packed away the picnic things.

‘Sally?’ he asked again more persistently. ‘Where’s Thomas?’