The Realms of Gold (22 page)

Mrs Ollerenshaw accepted a digestive biscuit, and commented that when the shop had still been going, they'd always done better with the other well-known brand of ginger cake. ‘I don't know why, really,' she said. ‘There's not much to choose between them, is there?' There followed a discussion on food prices, and whether small grocers were going well or losing out on the rises: the Ollerenshaws could take an Olympian view, for they had retired a year ago and sold the business, and were now living in a new bungalow in the small village, a village which had been almost swallowed up into the growing stretches of Tockley. Janet had thought she would be sorry to see the shop go, though it was obvious her parents couldn't live there forever—for one thing, her father couldn't manage the stairs any more, since his illness—but when the moment of departure came, she found herself surprisingly unmoved, for the truth was that the shop had changed beyond all recognition since the days when she had loved it, those early days of infancy and grace, those childish days when the apples trees had borne fruit, and the counter in the shop had been a scrubbed wooden slab, and bacon had been kept in a muslin cloth, and cheese in a cold cheese safe, when tea had been measured out of large oval enamelled tins, and biscuits kept in large boxes and sold by the ounce, when an indescribable smell of coffee and ham and beans and sugar had hung over all. It was all gone now. The changes she could remember clearly—the first large refrigerator, which had seemed such a miracle, followed a few years later by a deep freeze and a decision to stock the new frozen foods. She had peered awestruck into the icy depths, humming away, and admired the piles of peas and crinkle-cut chips lying in the arctic jewelled white and blue, but at the same time she had grieved for the old larder and its solid smell of damp, she had felt a kind of pity for the stone and marble slabs. In the end even the shop itself had been pulled down and rebuilt—not the whole building, but the shopping space itself. The small square window panes had been replaced by a huge plate glass frontage, goods had been displayed on a central shelf unit, and Frank Ollerenshaw had introduced wire baskets and called himself a Self-Service store, though he still sat there in person, weighing out cheese and bacon just as he had done in the old days, for there were still old customers who were not content to buy everything in plastic packets from New Zealand and Denmark, and who would ask for a quarter of red cheese and a quarter of yellow, expecting to be understood.

But he had had a slight stroke, and had sold the business and retired. Janet knew she must ask after him, but did not like to, for she knew her mother would complain. Nevertheless, as Mrs Ollerenshaw nibbled her biscuit—was she trying to imply by the movement of her lips that it had gone soft?—Janet asked, ‘And how's Dad keeping?'

‘Oh, he's not so bad,' said her mother. ‘He complains a lot, though. He's very down, really. And he won't stick to his diet, you know. I can't make him stick to his diet.'

Launched on the subject of diet, she talked for a quarter of an hour, about doctors and cholesterol and fat and flour and butter and margarine and cooking oil and cakes and chocolates, and the great lengths she had gone to in order to provide appetizing meals that Frank would eat, and how he was always sneaking off to the larder to help himself to forbidden things, and how tired she was of listening to his complaints, and how she wished Janet and Mark would come out and see him more often but she supposed Mark must be very busy. Janet listened dully: she knew that nothing on earth would persuade either her father or her mother to change their eating habits, and that talking about diet was substitute for following it. In reality, deceiving themselves profoundly, they would sit and eat mounds of bread, butter and jam, they would eat fried eggs and chips and bacon, they would eat buttered kippers, and roast lamb with roast potatoes on Sundays, and that was that. The fact that her father was overweight and ill would make no difference to their behaviour at all: like a smoker who believes he will never die, he would go on eating. She had seen them eat half a pound of chocolates in an evening, after a large meal, and yet they still said they never ate sweets, or only on special occasions.

When her mother had finished talking about food, they noticed that Hugh in the garden was getting restless, and Janet went to get him in, and then her mother looked at her watch and said that she must be going.

‘Give Dad my love,' said Janet, accompanying her to the front door. The baby, tactlessly, was too cross to be very agreeable to his grandmother, and struggled and wriggled when she tried to hold him. ‘He's teething,' said Janet, apologetically.

‘I'll bring you some spirits of salts next time I come,' said her mother, poised on the threshold. ‘For that stain in the sink. I've been meaning to, but I keep forgetting, I'm so busy these days.'

‘I don't believe in having that stuff in the house,' said Janet, feeling rather powerful as soon as she had got her mother over the step and out onto the path. ‘It's terribly poisonous. What if the baby got hold of it?'

‘You could surely find somewhere where he
wouldn't
get hold of it,' said her mother, almost sharply, and then nodded and marched off. Janet turned back into her house, and shut the frosted-glass-paned front door with its stainless steel knob, and thought that after all her own house was her own house, and while she was alone in it there was something to be said for
that
. She felt almost cheerful as she went back to tidy up the kitchen.

 

Mrs Ollerenshaw, standing at the bus stop, thought about her daughter. There was something wrong there, but if Janet couldn't tell her, what could she do? Janet was unhappy. Was she tired, with the baby? Small babies were tiring, and Hugh was a bad sleeper, she could tell. She'd offer to have him for the night more often, but Janet didn't seem to like it, and she didn't want to interfere. Was there something wrong between her and Mark? She'd never much cared for Mark, a snobby little fellow he was, too full of himself, always putting people's backs up with his superior jokes—she'd tried to say something to Janet about him, but she hadn't been able to, Janet was so prickly and difficult, but anybody could see how unhappy she was during the engagement, and how peaked she looked when she got back from the honeymoon. And now it was too late. Never interfere between husband and wife. But she couldn't stop herself calling round, to see how Janet was. She was worried about her. She wished she could speak to her, but somehow whenever she got there, the words wouldn't come right, and she'd find herself talking about cholesterol and recipes and spirits of salts. Janet was quite right not to want spirits of salts in the house. It was nasty evil corrosive dangerous stuff, fizzing away like the devil given half a chance, and smelling strong enough to knock you over. She didn't know why she'd ever suggested it. She couldn't help herself, that was the solemn truth.

She shivered, a fat woman in a big coat, as she waited for the bus. There was a cold wind blowing, and it was, now, growing dark. Marriage, what a business it was. Why didn't one drag one's daughters back from the altar, instead of pushing them up the aisle? She wouldn't like to live with Mark Bird, she could tell that, and have to keep everything just so. She'd be glad to get back to Frank and have a bit of tea and toast. And yet Frank hadn't been up to much in many ways. They were a funny family, the Ollerenshaws, a temperamental lot, for all that they looked so quiet. It was a cold bed that Janet lay on. What could one ever do for one's daughter? Nothing, nothing. Everything she tried to do came out wrong. Perhaps it did some good, just to be around. But perhaps it didn't do any good at all. It's hard, that's what it is, thought Mrs Ollerenshaw, as she waited for the East Midlands County bus in the gathering gloom, helpless and concerned.

 

Janet, safely back in her own house, shut the door on the falling leaves, put the baby on the polished wood living room floor, and went into the kitchen to clear up. The meal was all organized, except for the things that had to be done at the last minute. She washed the tea cups, stared at the stain in the sink, and was just about to go out of the back door to empty the tea pot down the grate when she noticed her neighbour in the next door garden getting in some washing off the line, and decided not to: the last thing she wanted to do was to have to have a word with her neighbour, and the low hedge between the two back gardens made an interchange impossible to avoid. Her neighbour was a constant threat to her, and she would avoid encounters if she possibly could. It was not that there was anything overtly threatening about her—on the contrary, it was her very meekness that constituted the menace. She was an awful warning, poor Jean Cooper, of what Janet herself so nearly was—timid, nervous, gauche, sad, unfinished. She lived in the downstairs flat of the house next door, with her silent husband, and she was going mad, Janet thought, from boredom, so mad that she would even overcome her shyness to talk endlessly, nervously, over the garden hedge. Once she started, one could not get away. She had been already there, four years earlier, when Janet moved in, and Janet had at first thought she was much younger than herself, for her face had that curious washed blank unlined unregistering look which from a distance looks like youth, and she had worn her hair in childish styles, tied back with a ribbon or even, occasionally, in bunches: and she had worn childish clothes, school-type skirts and jerseys and blouses. But after a while Janet had noticed she was at least her own age, if not a couple of years older, and that she continued to look young because nothing ever happened to her.

She had been married for two years before Janet met her, in a union even more inexplicable than her own with Mark. Indeed, the element of parody and exaggeration was what most upset her about the Coopers. Not that Derek Cooper resembled Mark: on the contrary. He was silent, unaggressive, unambitious: he seemed quite content to sit in his downstairs flat in Aragon Court and read books about sailing and the Boer War and smoke his pipe. If Jean looked young for her age, he looked old. They were both, now, in their late twenties. It was hard to imagine why they had married, or how they had even managed to say enough to each other to get themselves engaged, and Janet found herself wondering curiously from time to time whether the whole thing had been a complete misunderstanding, arising from some improperly heard remark.

Janet had pieced together a little of it, from remarks that Jean had dropped over the garden fence. Jean had at first tried to take a superior line, the experienced wife speaking to the raw bride: she had whispered shyly yet insistently that it was better to hang one's washing line at this end rather than that end of the garden, because of the trees, and that she wouldn't advise Janet to order eggs from the milkman, they were cheaper and fresher at the shop down the road. Janet, feeling sorry for this evidently timid person, had allowed herself to be advised, but she had done her best to keep Jean out of the house, because she did not want her to see that she had no idea how to boil potatoes, and that when she tried to make cheese sauce it always went lumpy. After some time, she began to realize that Jean was incompetent as well as shy: she might make wise remarks about where to hang the washing, but she was always leaving it out too late (as on this very evening) or hanging it up when it was about to start raining. And when, after a year's acquaintance, she had confided that she didn't dare to give Derek a lamb chop for supper, he always said there was nothing on a Iamb chop, Janet felt that the balance had swung, and that no matter how badly she herself coped with daily affairs, she was never going to be as bad as Jean Cooper. Oddly enough, this knowledge did not cheer her: but for the grace of God, she might say to herself daily, but the smell of burning reached her nostrils nevertheless, and she knew that there was no true escape, that she was herself, at some point, if not now, equally condemned to those same flames.

Jean Cooper said over the garden hedge, a pair of shears in her hands, one fine morning while Janet was expecting Hugh, that she would have liked to have a baby, but that it didn't seem to happen. Janet, embarrassed, extremely doubtful about her own feelings about her own rather late pregnancy—(she had after all been married for well over two years before it happened, and then it had happened by accident)—had not known what to say, and had not wanted to hear any more, but she had not been able to avoid it. ‘I've always wanted a baby,' said Jean, ‘but the truth is Derek isn't very masterful.' Like the confession about the lamb chop, this remark turned Janet's blood to ice, and made the hair stand up with fear on her head: for what could the woman mean? She could not endure sexual revelations over the hedge, but it did seem as though the Coopers were in need of a Marriage Guidance Counsellor at the least, if not of a doctor. Again, her own sexual experiences had been far from happy, for Mark, though masterful enough out of bed, had been much in need of assistance in it; they had between them worked out some kind of compromise, and Mark was by now quite pleased with himself, though she suspected it was at her own expense. But if they had been one degree less able, they would have been like the Coopers.

For these reasons Janet Bird looked out of her kitchen window at the dusky shadow of Jean Cooper, in her white Arran sweater and grey flannel skirt, as she took in her tea towels, and felt moved by an enormous fear and pity. Pity so intense was not endurable, that white shadow flitting greyly in the autumn evening, longing for a word—‘Was that your mother I saw?', ‘How's little Hugh today?'—was like a soul in torment, and she herself, Janet Bird, could do nothing, she had no saving words, she was herself if not in torment at least in limbo, and if Jean were to speak to her she would sink into the lower depths. Like a sad white bird, like the stranded sea gulls that sometimes swooped and mewed, far from the sea, in the elms, Jean Cooper fluttered and swooped in her suburban garden, watched by Janet Bird, who was waiting for a private moment to empty her tea pot.