Selected Stories

‘You’d be a married man?’

‘Yes.’

‘I get the picture.’

Rebecca’s mother had demanded to know where the sinning had taken place. Gerard’s mother, questioned similarly, had revealed that the forbidden meetings had taken place in different locations – once or twice in her lover’s office, after hours; over lunch or five-thirty drinks. A hotel was mentioned, and finally a hired room. ‘How sordid!’ Rebecca’s mother cried, then weeping overcame her and Rebecca crept away. But, elsewhere, Gerard remained. He reported that extraordinary exchanges had followed, that great importance was attached to the room that had been specially acquired, great offence taken.

‘I’m tired of this ghastly hole.’ Rebecca was good at introducing a whine into her tone, a bad-tempered, spoilt-child sound that years ago she’d once or twice tried on in reality before being sharply told to cease immediately.

‘Oh, it’s not too bad, darling!’

‘It’s most unpleasant. It’s dirty for a start. Look at the sheets, I’ve never seen sheets as soiled as that. Then Mrs Edwina is dirty. You can see it on her neck. Filthy dirty that woman is.’

‘Oh, she’s not too bad.’

‘There’s a smell of meat in the hall. She never opens a window.’

‘Darling -’

‘I want to live in a house. I want us to be divorced and married again.’

‘I know. I know. But there’re the children. And there’s the awful guilt I feel.’

‘What I

feel is sick in my bowels. Every time I walk in that door I feel it. Every time I look at that filthy wallpaper I get vomit in my throat.’

‘We could paint the place out.’

‘Let’s go to the Bee’s Knees for a cocktail. Let’s never come back here.’

‘But, angel -’

‘Our love’s not like it used to be. It’s not like it was when we went dancing in the Ruby Ballroom. We haven’t been to the Nitelite for a year. Nor the Grand Splendide -’

‘You wanted a home-from-home.’

‘I don’t think you love me any more.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then tell Mrs Edwina what she can do with her horrid old room and let’s live in a house.’

‘But, dear, the children.’

‘Drown the brats in a bucket. Make a present of them to Mrs Edwina for all I care. Cement them into a wall.’

‘We’ll just get into bed for five minutes -’

‘I don’t want to get into bed today. Not the way those sheets are.’

‘OK. We’ll go and have a Babycham.’

‘I’d love a Babycham.’

When the house was empty except for themselves it was best. It often was empty in the early afternoon, after the woman who came to clean had gone, when Gerard’s mother was out, doing the voluntary work she had recently taken up. They wandered from room to room then, poking into everything. Among other items of interest they found letters, some written by Gerard’s mother to Rebecca’s father, some by him to her. They were in a dressing-table drawer, in a slim cardboard box, with a rubber band around them. Twice the love affair had broken up. Twice there were farewells, twice the admission that one could not live without the other. They could not help themselves. They had to meet again.

‘My, my,’ Rebecca enthused. ‘Hot stuff, this.’

After their weekend visits to the two who had been wronged Gerard and Rebecca exchanged reports on Sunday evenings. Gerard’s father cooked and used the washing-machine, vacuum-cleaned the house, ironed his own shirts, made his bed and weeded the flowerbeds. Rebecca’s mother was in a bedsitting-room, a sorry sight. She ate nuts and chocolate while watching the television, saying it wasn’t worth cooking for one, not that she minded in the least. She was keeping her end up, Rebecca’s mother insisted. ‘You can see,’ she confided, ‘why I didn’t think I should look after you, dear? It wasn’t because I didn’t want you. You’re all that’s left to me. You’re what I live for, darling.’

Rebecca saw perfectly. The bedsitting-room was uncomfortable.

In one corner the bedclothes of a divan, pulled roughly up in daytime, were lumpy beneath a stained pink bedspread. Possessions Rebecca remembered, though had not known were particularly her mother’s – ornaments and a tea set, two pictures of medieval people on horses, a table-lamp, chairs and floor rugs and, inappropriately, a gong – cluttered the limited space. Her mother’s lipstick was carelessly applied. The same clothes she’d worn in the past, smart then, seemed like cast-offs now. She refused to take a penny of alimony, insisting that part of keeping her end up was to stand on her own two feet. She’d found a job in a theatre café and talked a lot about the actors and actresses who bought cups of coffee or tea from her. All this theatrical talk was boring, Rebecca reported on Sunday evenings: her mother had never been boring before.