The New Neighbours (21 page)

They had well and truly celebrated Madge's ninetieth birthday, with excellent food and drink, and more to the point Madge had thoroughly enjoyed herself, talking to everyone, and cutting the beautiful chocolate cake that Sheila had made. Everyone had congratulated Madge and chatted with her until she had finally admitted she was a little tired and allowed Andrew to take her back into the house and people had begun to drift away.

They'd also had a chance to meet the students in number seven. Jill hadn't met all of them, but she had spoken to Madeleine, whose house it was, and the pretty little West Indian girl and the older of the two young men, Ben, with the ponytail and the penetrating dark eyes.

“I told one of the students,” she said to Anthony casually when they were finally indoors, “Ben, I think his name was, that we could probably give him some gardening work. He's putting himself through university and needs some extra casual work.”

Anthony was already reaching for his briefcase. “Fine,” he said absently, extracting a file and opening it.

Jill felt a stab of hot anger at his disinterest, it was almost as if he had heard her speak, but had no idea what she'd said.

Stock answer number one, she thought angrily, suitable for ninety per cent of the comments I make! She was tempted to say, “I've decided to have an affair with him.” Would that get stock answer number one, “Fine,” or stock answer number two, “Oh, really?” or would Anthony actually hear her if she said anything so outrageous? However, she simply said, “Anthony, you're not listening to me.”

He glanced up at the sharpness of her tone and said, “Yes I am, darling. You want Ben to help you with the garden. Fine. You fix it upwith him.” He gave her a quick smile and his eyes returned to the paper in his hand.

Frustrated, Jill left him to it and went into the kitchen, but a shepherd's pie was already made for supper, cauliflower washed and cut ready in a saucepan, and there was nothing for her to do there.

She went upstairs and looking out of the children's bedroom window, she saw Isabelle and the children still playing in the Circle garden. For a moment Jill leaned her hands on the windowsill and laid her forehead against the cool glass of the window. She felt so useless—no one needed her. For a moment she allowed this idea to nestle in her mind, then she gave herself a mental shake.

“Don't be so damn stupid, Jill!” she said aloud. “Anthony needs you, the children certainly need you and self-pity is going to get you nowhere.” She turned away from the window and went into her own bedroom. On the dressing table stood a photograph of her and Anthony together on a hilltop that summer in Ireland. Anthony had an arm round her shoulder and she was laughing up into his face. Jill picked up the photo and looked at it, recalling the day that it had been taken.

Nancy had been as good as her word and moved into Dartmouth Circle for two weeks in June. Jill and Anthony had taken the car across to Ireland on the Swansea-Cork ferry and meandered their way around Cork and Kerry, bed and breakfasting wherever they ended up each night.

At first Jill missed the children dreadfully and found herself looking round for them, but this quickly slipped into an uneasy feeling that she'd mislaid something, then after a few days she gave herself up to the freedom of having no one to think of but Anthony and herself. They could drive or stop, sight see or swim, walk or sunbathe, entirely as the mood took them and as they did all these things, they gradually rediscovered each other. To begin with they were very careful to ask, “What would you like to do today?” but after a week they had regained their ability to decide things together without more than a suggestion, a word or a look.

The day of the photograph they had been in West Cork. The weather had been perfect, she remembered, and they had set off from the B and B where they were staying, in their walking boots with a picnic in the rucksack. There was an iron-age fort on the top of a hill above the village, from which the views of the coastline were said to be stupendous. They had left the coast road and scrambled up a track through gorse, heather and the occasional bog and finally reached the top.

The fort was a complete circle of stones, piled like dry-stone walling, shoulder high and four feet wide. A small gap in this allowed them to wander inside, where they found a souterrain, an escape passage down through the hill. The entrance to it was blocked with a grating, but they peered down through the bars to the darkness below.

Jill shuddered. “I'd hate to have to go down there,” she said. Anthony laughed and hugged her. “Bet you'd go fast enough if theenemy was clambering over the walls behind you,” he said, still holding her in his arms. He kissed her nose and then hand in hand they wandered outside again. The view was even more stunning than promised, the sea shimmering blue, the coastline edging it in smooth sweeps of green and jutting rocky headlands. On the top of one in the distance, a lighthouse gleamed white in the sunshine; inland were fields and farms and beyond them the misty grey of distant hills.

“You really couldn't be taken by surprise here, could you?” remarked Jill. “You have the most amazing view on every side.” Coming round to the seaward side again, they sat down on the grass looking out at the sea, the sun warm on their faces, the countryside below them ablaze with golden gorse.

“This is just beautiful,” Jill breathed, lying back on the grass and closing her eyes. The warmth soaked into her body and she wriggled her fingers in the cool grass beside her.

Suddenly she felt Anthony unlacing her boots and her eyes flew open as he pulled off first one then the other and then her heavy walking socks. She saw he had already discarded his own and now he lay beside her and kissed her gently.

“Can't make love in walking boots,” he murmured as he slid his hand inside her cotton shirt.

“Anthony,” she protested feebly as she felt her body respond to hisfingers on her breast, “we can't make love here.”

“Why not?” he whispered as he undid her shirt buttons and let his lips take over from his fingers, which had moved to the waistband of her shorts. “Seems the perfect place to me.”

“Someone might come,” Jill said weakly even as she reached for him.

“Let them,” he said huskily as he eased her free of the last of her clothes, “and they'll see how much, how very much, I love my wife.”

All resistance gone, they both surrendered to a perfect giving and taking of love, passionate, tender and satisfying, and when at last they lay side by side once more, relaxed on the grass in the shelter of the age-old fort, Jill felt she had never been as happy in her whole life. She raised herself up on one elbow to drink in the view, to remember exactly how it had been.

Suddenly, some way below, where the path dipped through a clump of bushes, she saw a movement and realised people were coming up the hill.

“Someone's coming, Anthony,” she giggled and poking him with a finger said, “Get dressed! Come on, quick, before they get here.”

Anthony opened one eye and glanced down the hill. A man and a womanwere negotiating the boggy patch before the last climb up to the fort.

“Suppose you're right,” he said reluctantly, and gathered up his scattered clothes.

By the time the newcomers reached the fort, Jill and Anthony weresitting decorously side by side, admiring the view, fully-clothed except for their boots and socks. The other couple said good morning and disappeared inside the stone circle. When they came out again, the woman approached them carrying a camera.

“Would you mind?” she asked, indicating the camera. “Would you take a photo of us together up here?”

“Of course,” Anthony got to his feet and the couple posed beside the entrance to the fort.

Jill rummaged in the rucksack and produced their own camera. “Perhaps you could take one of us,” she said smiling, “with the view behind us.” The photo was taken and the other couple wandered off down the far side of the hill.

“If it comes out well,” Jill said, “I shall have it enlarged and framed, and then every time I look at it I shall remember today.” She put her hands on his shoulders and reaching up, kissed him gently. “I do love you, Anthony.”

The holiday continued its blissful way; the weather stayed perfect, long sunny days with the light lingering until eleven or later. Their happiness in each other's company was completely re-established, and though Jill longed to discuss her need to be more than “just a housewife” she was reluctant to spoil their new-found happiness and she said nothing, putting the conversation off, leaving it for a better moment; but in Ireland that moment never came. Their two weeks away together, away from home, away from the office, the telephone, the fax machine, had brought them closer than they had ever been. There seemed to be a new understanding between them, and Jill decided to wait until they were home again before bringing up the subject of a job.

She sighed now, as she replaced the silver-framed photo on the dressing table. It had been a mistake, she'd been wrong to wait, for the moment they'd got back, Anthony was sucked into the morass of work that had accumulated in his absence. The closeness they had known dissipated in the routine of family life and normal living. There were times, but for the photo, that Jill would have thought that the day at the hill fort had been a dream. She remembered his words, “they'll see how much, how very much, I love my wife”.

“But not enough to let me be myself,” Jill muttered resentfully.

She had finally seized the moment one evening, when, sitting on the floor, leaning her back against his legs, she said, “Anthony, I really do want to go back to teaching… part-time of course.” She felt him stiffen, and turning round she laid her arms on his knees and looked earnestly up into his face.

“I can't spend all day in the house, Anthony, it's driving me mad. I must get out, do something.”

“It's too soon,” Anthony said firmly. “The children need you.”

“And the children have me!” Jill cried in frustration. “I'm here when they need me. Isabelle's here for them too. I need to do something out of the house. I need to contribute something to life.”

“Your contribution is being a wife and mother,” protested Anthony.

“What greater contribution could you be making?”

“I know that,” said Jill fighting to sound calm and reasonable, “but it isn't enough. I don't feel fulfilled as a person. Other women have jobs and families, other wives cope with both.”

“Yes, but you don't have to. I don't want a wife who's a part-time worker and a part-time mother. I want a full-time wife for me and a full-time mother for my children.”

“But what about what I want?” demanded Jill. “They're our children, not just yours, and I think I'd be a better mother to them if I felt fulfilled myself.”

“Perhaps we should try for another baby,” suggested Anthony.

Jill felt a flash of anger. “I don't want another baby, Anthony,” she said between clenched teeth, “I want a job.”

“Well, it's too soon,” Anthony repeated stonily. “We agreed, not untilboth the children were at school.” He put his arms round her shoulders and touched his forehead to hers. “I thought we'd sorted this out in Ireland.”

Jill drew back and stared at him in amazement. “In Ireland?” she repeated. “We never mentioned it in Ireland.”

“I didn't think we had to, not make an issue of it. I just thought you understood how I felt, how I want our family to be. We were so close there, I thought…”Anthony's voice trailed off.

“You thought if you told me you loved me, I'd do everything your way. Be a good little wife and do as I'm told.” Jill pulled away from him, got to her feet and turned away. She was near to tears, but she was determined not to let them fall, not to cry. When she cried her voice didn't work properly and she felt the urgent need to finish this conversation, now that at last it was being held at all.

“Jill, don't be absurd,” Anthony was exasperated. “Don't put stupid words in my mouth. I loved being with you in Ireland, having you to myself, being just the two of us like when we were first married, but here at home it's not like that. Here we have two lovely children, we're a family and the children need you. You're their mother and you should be there for them.”

“You're their father,” Jill snapped back, “they need you too, but you go out to work, full-time.”

“That's different.”

“Yes,” replied Jill bitterly, “it always is!” And she had walked out of the room, knowing bleakly that this question was never going to be resolved.

She was right, it wasn't resolved; it wasn't even mentioned again. Jillspent the rest of the summer trying to be what Anthony wanted her to be, but all the time the resentment bubbled. Gone was the special closeness they'd experienced in Ireland, gone the usual comfortable ease they knew at home, and in its place was the coolness of acquaintances.

Without the knowledge of the other, each of them consulted Nancy, but she was far too wise either to give advice or take sides, all she said was, “Give it time and remember how important your children are to both of you.”

So, they had coasted along, each waiting for the impossible, a change of heart in the other. Occasionally they made love, but their lovemaking seemed routine, lacking the fire and delight of their time in Ireland. Perhaps Anthony was too tired, he certainly was working extremely hard these days, or perhaps Jill herself was disinterested, for she seldom initiated their lovemaking any more. She hadn't really given the matter much consideration. It probably happened to all couples after a while and was perfectly natural. Then, today at the party, she had come face to face with Ben. She had been pouring drinks at the makeshift bar and he had come over for a beer.

“Hallo,” he said, “I'm Ben.”

“Hi Ben,” she replied. “Want a beer?”