The Pumpkin Eater (4 page)

“You mean … they're just going to go away. For ever. That's what you mean, isn't it? Why don't we get them adopted, or something? Why don't we
give
them away?”

My father sighed deeply and turned back to his desk. “You'd better work this out between you,” he said. “The offer stands, that's all I can say. Now … the next point. Where are you going to live?”

“It'll have to be in the country,” Jake said.

“You can't work from the country?”

“At the moment I can. Later I may have to get a room or something …”

“That's no good,” my father said. “A man needs regular meals, someone to look after things. There's no point in
making
difficulties for yourself, is there? You've got enough without that.”

“I don't quite see the alternative, sir.” The “sir” was astounding. Changed already from the man I had always known, my father suddenly seemed to grow vast, threatening, absolutely powerful.

“We've always lived in the country,” I said, but neither of them listened to me.

“A good friend of mine happens to be an estate agent,” my father said. “He has a link-up with a firm in London. It seems there's a lot of new planning going on and it's possible to buy a fairly short lease on one of these old houses for quite a reasonable sum. Here's one, for instance. Have a look at it. It'll pretty well clean me out, mind you, but I'd sooner you had it now, while you need it, than wait until I'm dead.”

“I don't know why you should — ”

“If I'd had a son,” my father said, “I'd have known how to bring him up. No problem. We failed with this girl here. There's no question of it, we failed. It's time she had a firm hand on her tiller, and I've got a strong notion that you're the chap to put it there.”

“I'm
here
!” I said. “Why can't you talk to
me
?”

My father leant over and patted Jake's shoulder. “Good luck,” he said. “Good luck, my boy, you need it.”

After the wedding, we had a party. The caterers brought small chicken sandwiches, trifle and champagne. Everyone was very happy. My mother cried, as usual, and my father clasped Jake's hand, speechless, as though he were about to take off into orbit. The children, who were being looked after for the day by my mother's Mrs. Norris, sent us Greetings telegrams. A fortnight later the three eldest went to boarding school.

We moved into the house my father had found for us, and the surviving children came up by train. They had a great deal of luggage, for I insisted that they brought everything: clothes and sticks, toys, pots, Malt, books, diaries, horseshoes, conkers, ribbon and string and a shedful of punctured bicycles. They invaded the local schools, where they were known collectively as the Armitages, so that for convenience and solidarity those who had post office savings books or sent up coupons for silver-plated teaspoons or entered competitions for winning ponies, changed their names; and those who were too small had theirs changed for them and grew up used to the idea that in any list, roll call or census they came very near the top.

Only the three at boarding school remained apart, cut adrift, growing old under their old names. They were my first children, and although they had always been gloomy and hard to please I felt desolate without them. I burned with anger, but dully. Anger against whom, against what? It was all for the best, that boy and those girls set on the right path, flannelled and stockinged for Jesus and the General Certificate of Education, stripped for ball games in the bitter cold. It was right for Jake that they should go. Slowly, little by little, almost imperceptibly, I let them drift until only our fingertips were touching, then reaching, then finding nothing. Our hands dropped and we turned away. The younger children always felt kindly towards them, the three melancholy Conservatives who grew to hate Jake with such inflexible devotion. In time, they included me in this hate. They were my first enemies. My mother sent them each ten shillings at the beginning of every term, fastened to the letters with small gold safety pins.

With Jake's child I went to hospital for the first time. Jake was thirty and beginning to worry about his hair. He was deprived, nervous, over-excited. He was working on his first full-length script, and he told me that one day he would build a tower of brick and glass overlooking the valley where we met.

“I don't know what's the matter with me,” Philpot said. “Sometimes I shake all over and sometimes I have a temperature of ninety-three. Sometimes I cry for hours on end.”

“Why don't you see a doctor?”

“They'd just say it was the worry. I mean, there's nothing you can do about worry, is there?”

“Well,” I said, “I don't know …” I was cleaning out the kitchen cupboards, a sign of unease. The girl — she was in fact a woman of twenty-four whose surname was Philpot — had said she was sure there was something she could do. I had set her to cleaning saucepan lids with steel wool. She did it slowly, sitting on the edge of the sink and stroking the dented lids round and round as though they were faces.

I took the new Coronation mugs off the shelf, a clutch in each hand, and put them on the floor. Then I asked Philpot to move so that I could get some more hot water. She heaved herself up on to the fridge and spread her skirt over it.

“Goodness,” she said, “what a lot of mugs. Poppy was given one too. Aren't they rather divine …”

“I think they're hideous,” I said. “But we've got dozens of spoons.”

“Yes,” she said, “Poppy got a spoon too.” She looked out of the window to the garden, where some of the younger children and Poppy were sitting each in an individual cardboard box doing, as far as I could see, absolutely nothing. She sighed gustily. “I wonder if there'll ever be another Coronation. I mean, while we're alive.”

“Oh, sure to be.” I felt she needed reassuring. “Why? Did you like this one?”

“I did indeed. Such wonderful parties. Poppy went to stay with my aunt.” I scraped bits of butter off six saucers on to a plate, and moved her off the fridge. She settled like a great duck on the cooker. “And I had a simply wonderful time, although I slept all through the actual thing on TV. Shall I hand you the mugs, or something?”

“No,” I said. “It's all right.”

“Well, of course, it all ended in disaster. It always does with me. People's wives get so ratty somehow. And I mean, I
like
them, that's the funny thing. I like them really better than their husbands. Sometimes I wonder if I'm quite normal. I mean, I
have
been told I'm frigid, but I don't see how you can tell. I mean, honestly — how can you tell?”

“I shouldn't think you are,” I said. “Could I get to the oven?”

“I'm in your way, I know I am. I'm sure there's something I could do. I feel useless, and you working away like a black.”

“Anyway, you don't look frigid,” I said, peering with some despair into the greasy cavern of the oven. “And you can't say fairer than that.”

“It does me so much good to talk to you,” she said distantly. “It's marvellous to talk to someone who
knows
. I really can't think how you manage, I mean with so little help and all those children. Of course Jake's a perfectly gorgeous father, I can see that. Poppy's mad about him. Well, of course, having no father she's mad about any man, poor little sweet, but she's especially mad about Jake. I do wish I had half your luck, although of course I know it's not luck really, you're so intelligent and attractive and capable and everything, you deserve every bit of it.” There was a long pause. Being partly inside the oven I could only imagine the wistful blue eye and the pinkish strand of hair that she nervously pulled down over it. “But oh crumbs,” she said, “I do envy you.”

I don't remember how we came to meet Philpot, but at that time we knew many minor characters in the film world, and she must have been attached to one of them. I liked her because she was lonely and eccentric and kept making little rushes at life which were, as she swore she had always known, doomed to failure. Perhaps, in a way, I envied her too. She was like girls at school who had brothers, but no love.

Every day, that summer, she turned up and mooned about our house, pushing her little awkward child into the garden and staying indoors herself, drinking in great draughts of what she called family life. She was tremendously anxious not to disturb Jake, but would tiptoe past his study door leaving such a smell of gardenia behind her that in a few moments he would come out, sniffing, and join us in the kitchen or the sitting room cluttered with patterns and pins, for we took to dressmaking at that time. There he would sprawl on the sofa and hold me with one arm while Philpot asked him about his work. She knew every detail of the film he was writing. Every day she would ask after the characters as though some mishap beyond Jake's control might have befallen them in the night. She wore striped blouses and large skirts and usually clenched her collar with some sort of cameo brooch — she had a weakness for cameos, china hands and boots, paper weights, stuffed birds and velvet photograph frames. Occasionally she would go away for a couple of days with someone who happened to be driving to Exmoor or Cardiff or Leeds. Then we would take over Poppy, though without joy, since none of us liked her very much. She made the boys feel foolish by prodding them, and bored the girls with inaccurate descriptions of love.

“Why does Philpot have to stay with us?” they asked.

“She's been turned out of her flat.”

“But why does she have to stay with us? We've got enough people.”

“She's looking for another one.”

“I've never seen her looking. She just stays in bed all the time if you ask me.”

“In
my
bed, too. Why can't she bring her own bed? I'm not going to sleep in that awful cot again.”

“It's a perfectly good cot.”

“It's not, and I'm not going to sleep in it.”

“Look, there's a squirrel.”

“I'm not going to sleep in that cot.”

“Where's Poppy?”

“Poppy's staying with her aunt.”

“Then why can't Philpot stay with her aunt?”

“Because Philpot's aunt lives in Gloucestershire and Philpot can't look for a flat, I mean couldn't look for a flat if she was in Gloucestershire.”

“She could come in a helicopter.”

“I'm not going to sleep in that cot.”

“I'm glad Poppy's in Australia.”

“Must you wade in the puddles? You don't have to wade in them.”

“Well, I wish she'd go home, that's all.”

“She can't. She hasn't got a home.”

“She smells of fish.”

“No, she doesn't. She smells like roses rather.”

“She smells like roses and fish, but fish most.”

“I'm not going to sleep in that awful cot.”

“She had a spot on her chin yesterday, but this morning she'd squeezed it. Don't tell Dad, he'd say change the conversation.”

“He had to grab her yesterday, when she fainted. It must have been awful for him, the smell.”

“Fainted?”

“She fainted when you were out for your walk.”

“Do you faint like this? Is this how you faint?”

“Oh, for heavens sake, get up! You're smothered in mud, it'll take me hours to brush it off, hours!”

“I was only asking.”

“I'm not going to sleep in that …”

We were spread out over quarter of a mile of Heath; converging, in a brown, sodden afternoon, on Dinah playing netball. Why should anxiety touch me? I looked across to one of London's unexpected hills, topped with a broken steeple. Fly away home, your house is on fire. The older children, in shrunken blue duffel coats, ran pell-mell down the slope and leapt on my back. Jake's children stamped and fell down in the wet leaves.

“I can see them,” I said, and we stumbled down into a desolate slum patch of ground scattered with a few corrugated iron sheds. Various children in short sleeved cotton jumpers and long skirts and gumboots were festooned about a great bare tree, while others made vague motions with a football in the wet grass that someone had tried to mark out with chalk. “Where's Dinah?”

We found her shivering in the corner of the field, holding her stomach and saying she had a terrible pain. She looked at us with envy; even, it seemed to me, with affection. The mistress, a young, quite pleasant looking woman sensibly dressed in a leather coat, called “Dinah!” with the rising inflection, tinged with strain, that women use towards children at the end of a hard day. Dinah shuffled off, and the mistress pushed them all into a ragged circle and attempted to show them something. The damp, darkening afternoon was quiet except for their incessant coughing. They began to lollop about, throwing the ball with feeble gestures, from hip-level. “Keep moving!” the mistress exhorted them. “I'm going to stir you up like a pudding!” She ran amongst them, darting heavily to and fro while the children fell in the mud and held their stomachs and gazed into the foggy distance.

“Can we go now?”

“I'm cold, I'm freezing.”

“I'm not going to sleep in that cot.”

“Then run about. Run about and get warm.”

“Why should I? I'm tired.”

“Why do we have to come and see Dinah play football?”

“I'm
tired
…”

A girl in baggy tartan trousers, a windcheater and a fur hat came slowly over the brow of the hill. For a moment I thought she was Philpot. She dragged a pram after her and stopped, kicking the wheels viciously because they were stuck up with mud. Then, after looking down on us for a few moments, she went back the way she had come. As she was submerged, first pram and finally hat, I was irrationally convinced that she had come to give me some message from the outside world; but that like a rescue craft she had looked, seen nothing, and gone home.