The Realms of Gold (19 page)

She was wondering whether to join a class on classical music, or a class on upholstery, or a class on bird watching. It was strange that Tockley offered these things, but it offered them with some persistence. She did not really want to join an evening class at all. She was feeling too low to profit from an evening class, but she felt that if she did not join, her husband would be angry with her, and she was so tired of his being angry with her that she would do quite a lot to avoid it. But maybe not upholstery. Cookery she could have faced, but he would have thought that was stupid. And so it would have been, but she had almost ceased to mind how stupid she appeared.

The main reason why she did not want to go to an evening class was that she did not want either her husband or her mother to gain the moral advantage of baby-sitting for her. If she were to let either of them make any inroads on her misery, they would destroy her. Her only hope lay in total resistance. They must not be allowed to pity her or help her. She had dedicated her life to resistance, but her resistance must be both total and secret. On the other hand, it was possible to deceive them both, as she had already discovered—she could allow one or the other of them to baby-sit, while she went off to a course on Sociology or the Russian Novel, as long as she didn't actually enjoy herself while she was out. Perhaps, after all, that would be the best line. It would give Mark less opportunity to complain that she was turning into a cabbage, or whatever it was that he was complaining she was doing. As long as she didn't find herself actually enjoying herself, or taking an interest, she would be safe enough. And there was, after all, little likelihood of that.

She took the brake off the pram, and jerked it forward. The baby's fingers jerked out of his mouth, and he let out a despairing wail, then crammed them back in again, glaring at her reproachfully, with incommunicable distress. She stared back, not knowing what to do. Her regret was immense, but what was there to do about it? She could not even smile at him in his angry captive state. ‘There, there,' she said, weakly. Her voice sounded very odd. Often she didn't speak to anyone all day except the baby and the people in the shops. I'll forget how to talk one of these days, she said to herself, as she set off home. She would give the baby a bit of biscuit when she got back, perhaps he would feel better with something to chew on. She didn't want him to be miserable. But what on earth could she do about his teeth?

On the way home, she wondered why she had ever got married. She spent a good deal of each day wondering about this question, and as yet had come up with very little in the way of an answer. The answers that did from time to time float towards her, before floating off again, were too trivial as well as too unpleasant to grasp. Could she possibly have done it because her younger sister had just done it before her, and she was jealous? Such things did happen, she knew. Was it because her mother had put a bit of pressure on her? Was it because she couldn't think of any other way of getting away from her mother? Was it because she couldn't think of anything else in the world to do? She would scan the back pages of women's magazines for hints about her own behaviour, but found little: there was some conspiracy afoot, to make people believe that marriage was necessary and desirable, and nobody seemed at all concerned to justify it, as though it needed no justification. Occasionally one of the more expensive and avant garde of the women's magazines would suggest that there were other ways of doing things, but she could tell at once that the other ways would not have suited her, and that the kind of women who did the other things did not live in Tockley.

She never wasted time on wondering whether or not she had married Mark because she loved him. That would at least have simplified the issue. One could feel sorry for people who married in love and then fell out of love. It must happen quite frequently. Janet had seen it happen to her own acquaintances. No, her own case had been very different. She had certainly not loved Mark when she had agreed to marry him. She had been quite interested in him at one point, she admitted that much to herself—otherwise she wouldn't have gone out with him, would she? But as for love—she had always known that she hadn't loved him. Why on earth had she agreed to marry him?

Walking past Mason's, seeing the new displays of crockery and household goods in the windows, she had a twinge of shame, as she remembered how hard she had worked on making herself take an interest in wedding presents. What a crazy binge of objects a wedding produces. Insane. Tea sets, coffee sets, pyrex dishes with different designs, fish knives, ironing boards, toasters, electric kettles, what kind of refrigerator, what colour bedroom curtains. They had been quite distracting, the objects, they had taken her mind off Mark for days on end. (Frances Wingate, her oh so much cleverer cousin, had been a little taken up with the whole thing herself too, though she would never in a million years have admitted it. She had been particularly taken, when young, twenty-one and foolish, by a writing desk that her mother-in-law to be (now her ex-mother-in-law) had given her. She hadn't minded the Gallé vase, either. There is some tribal insanity that comes over women, as they approach marriage: society offers pyrex dishes and silver tea spoons as bribes, as bargains, as anaesthesia against self-sacrifice. Stuck about with silver forks and new carving knives, as in a form of acupuncture, the woman lays herself upon the altar, upon the couch, half-numb. Even sensible women, like Frances Wingate: sensible women, who later struggle, as their senses return, and throw their Gallé vases and fish knives violently around their dwellings, as a protest.)

Mason's window was like an altar, a shrine to matrimony. So thought Janet Bird, as she walked past it, and thought of all the poor fools who would make their offerings, their purchases, who would receive coffee percolators and ice buckets and hotplates and pressure cookers, and then live forever disconsolate amidst their useless indestructible relics. Janet's cupboards (and she was a tidy woman, who had been married only four years) were already filled with irreparable toasters and handleless non-stick frying pans.

Why did one let it all happen? She would have liked some kind of an explanation. But there was very little in the way of an explanation, in the streets of Tockley. Aided by a psychoanalyst, or even by a reading of Freud in his new Pelican edition, she might have been able to construct some kind of an answer. But there were no psychoanalysts in Tockley. There was not even a bookshop that stocked Pelicans. And she wouldn't have understood Freud, had she got hold of it. She was on her own, in a solitude that was so bleak that it was a thing on its own, almost a possession, almost company. She and the baby were in it together: at first she'd been afraid that he would have been on his own too, somewhere out there, but they shared the same envelope of darkness. It was a relief, to find that they constituted a unit, instead of two separate solitudes. She was not a natural mother: mothering did not come easily to her, for she was over-anxious, over-fastidious, she sterilized bottles too carefully, she read the Baby Book too often, she had no instinct for easy margins or leeways. The sight of the baby crawling on a less-than-spotless floor, or raising an unsterilized object to his mouth, would fill her with panic. But despite her apprehensions, she cared for him: he was her small powerless ally, and it was not him that she resented, from him there was no need to close herself away. He was an innocent victim of larger forces. And at the moment, the poor mite was miserable. His teeth hurt him, and she could do nothing to help. He would wail all evening, while she tried to entertain Mark's colleagues, and felt inadequate, in all directions. She foresaw it all.

Perhaps she would buy some jelly for the baby's gums. It did no good, but it did no harm either. Even the book said it did no harm. She paused, in front of the chemist's, and then pushed on, to a larger, more anonymous self-service store further down the road, which had a chemist's department. She didn't like small shops, where one recognized the staff, and was recognized by them. She preferred larger places, like this one, with its long counters and cash desks and cut prices, with its rapid turnover of assistants. Queueing at the cash desk, she watched peaky, undernourished little girls, in high platform shoes and ludicrously short skirts pushing trolleys around, re-stocking shelves: girls of sixteen, with tough, scrappy, vacant faces and pink and blue plastic shoes. And boys of sixteen, in overalls, with long drooping hair, and thin lips. She ached, with either sympathy or envy for them: she was not sure which.

(Frances Wingate, watching these same girls and boys three months earlier, had reflected on the extraordinary style of the provinces: so avant garde in some respects, so out of date in others. The short skirts had long vanished from the London scene, but the platform shoes had reached heights of exaggeration in colour and form, that none but the boldest would yet have dared to wear.)

Outside the church, Janet paused, and stared at the notice board, waiting idly for the church bells to strike. It was almost mid-day. There had been moments, when things had been bad, when she had thought of turning to the church for help. She could have joined a mothers' group, now that she had a baby. She could speak to the vicar. The vicar must be used to problems such as hers. But what could he do about them? Nothing. He could not change Mark's nature, or her own nature, or Tockley or their life in it, and without some change on that kind of scale she didn't see much hope. It was better, really, not to give in: to keep one's self to one's self. A vicar would wheedle one's misery away, minimize it, stroke it and soothe it, and leave her nothing in its stead, leave her ashamed and betrayed. Vicars and doctors were all the same, they told one it was natural to suffer from headaches and misery at puberty, to dread marriage, to feel ill and get cystitis when newly married, to dread pregnancy and feel ill and cry a lot when pregnant, to cry a lot with post-natal depression. It was all so natural.

She was tired of hearing that kind of thing. It hadn't done her much good. It had brought her here, to this full stop.

She read the church notice boards, as she had read the Evening Class notice boards. One leaflet invited her to a jumble sale, another to an evening with slides about a Mission in India. A larger, more garish poster, with black print on a yellow ground, declared, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help.' There were of course no hills round here, and therefore no help: though she remembered being told in a modern Bible Class at school that the lines didn't mean that help came from the hills at all, they should have punctuated differently, thus: ‘I will lift mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help?' As though it were the enemies that were to descend from the hills, and the Lord to save one from them. Either way, there was no Lord, and there were no hills. It was all of an even flatness. She would quite have liked to see the warriors descending from the mountains, rattling their sabres, aiming for her heart.

The church bells tolled. She looked up at the tall spire. It was an exceptionally beautiful church, or so she had been informed since she was a small child, by local schoolteachers and local papers. Once she had climbed to the top of it. From the top of the spire one could see many flat miles, and the flat wide river, and the town's outskirts, and the chemical factory where her husband was to work. (She hadn't met him then.) And she had clung to the old worn stone, alarmed by her vertigo, alarmed by the almost overpowering impulse to jump off and crash into the churchyard below. That again was something that puzzled her. A lot of people suffered from vertigo, she knew, it was considered quite natural, and the top of the tower was often crowded with giggling, gasping, squeaking schoolchildren, or with parents blenching with fear as their children tried to stand on tiptoe to see over the parapet. But why, why was it natural? And if it was natural, why did people continue to build and climb towers? Why didn't they stay safely on the ground? They did not climb merely for the view.

The church had been no help. She was too young for the Women's Institute. The baby clinic was, she supposed, intended to be some kind of support, and it had been reassuring to discover that Hugh was gaining, not losing weight. But that was about it. Against her one-time friends she had hardened her heart, for fear lest they should discover her secret, and anyway the nicest of them had left the district. As who would not?

The church bells fell silent. She would walk through the church yard home, she decided. There were yellow leaves on the graves, and the berries of the holly were already red. She found herself thinking, despite herself, of the mushroom soup and the chicken that she was going to cook for the evening. She was not a confident cook, as she was not a confident mother, and always deeply dreaded that she would do something wrong. Every meal that she prepared seemed to contain in it the charred or bleeding ghosts of her first disasters: they could never be properly concealed or exorcized. However unexceptionable the meal, she felt that her guests could discern in it her past mistakes. It was in vain that she told herself that it didn't matter, that she didn't even like the guests, that she didn't care whether they liked their dinner or not, that anyway Cynthia's roast lamb hadn't been much to boast about, New Zealand it must have been and not properly unfrozen at that—it was in vain to repeat these arguments to herself, for she knew that she cared deeply though she despised herself for caring. Sliced peaches and sliced mushrooms floated in her head: she must be careful with the sauce, the last sauce she had made had been a little lumpy, and Mark had made an elaborate pantomime of dissecting one of the lumps.

(For Frances Wingate, tolled the Christian bells of the church. Happily neglectful, confident mother, no agonizer she over bits of bread salvaged from the carpet, over mud and diseases: haphazard, confident, efficient cook. To them that have, it shall be given. There was no need for Frances Wingate to bury her talents. Stony ground, stony ground, tolled the bells, for Janet Bird.)