Читать книгу A Hard Time to Be a Father - Fay Weldon - Страница 8

All kinds of things puzzled Maureen Timson when she was eighteen, and nothing puzzled her more than her friend Audrey Thomas. If Audrey was a friend: Maureen couldn’t even be quite sure of that. Maureen and Audrey were both at college, doing languages. They shared a room, being next to one another in the alphabet; a kind of fated closeness. Maureen had all the advantages, Audrey (in Maureen’s eyes) very few. Yet Audrey led and Maureen followed, and Maureen could not understand it, and chafed, and was riled. Maureen liked to get to the bottom of things: to work away at them like a knotted shoelace, yet here there was something bottomless, un-unknottable. The tangle stayed. It was not fair.

She, Maureen, was pretty: she only had to look in the shared bedroom mirror to know. (Maureen’s mother had discouraged mirrors, being the kind who said it was your character that counted, not your looks, but mirrors are everywhere. Puddles or shop windows will do, or the interested eyes of others, when they reflect back a flattering image.)

Audrey was not at all pretty. She had a face like – as Maureen’s Great-Aunt Edith would say – the back of a bus. (Maureen’s mother had eight aunts and Edith was the one she most disliked – but then Maureen’s mother disliked almost everyone, scorning the weak, the frivolous, the idle, the soft, which meant almost all the human race, excepting only sometimes Family.)

Maureen was an only child, Maureen’s mother having scorned her father right out of the house, shortly after Maureen’s birth. (Maureen had a vision of him, stumbling with thick boots and beery breath, up the damp path between the sad rhododendron leaves and away for ever, her own infant crying echoing from the right-hand upstairs window.)

Maureen had a tidy little waist, and Audrey had rolls of flesh above and below hers: that is the kind of thing you get to know if you share a room. Maureen had never shared a room before. It puzzled her that for all her bodily imperfections Audrey could wander around it naked and easy. Not only did it puzzle her, she didn’t like it.

Maureen was clever: from the age of thirteen she’d never let a past participle not agree with a verb, not once. Audrey could hardly tell a grave from an aigu. Heaven knew how Audrey had wangled her way into college. Maureen read Machiavelli and Audrey read women’s magazines. But still there was something Audrey had, that Maureen didn’t. Audrey led, Maureen followed, half grateful, half resentful. Maureen was solitary, Audrey was not. Maureen hated to be solitary.

‘You make friends so easily,’ said Maureen to Audrey, making it sound like a reproach, some in-built lack of discrimination. ‘How do you do it?’

And that seemed to puzzle Audrey, who was so seldom puzzled.

‘You just talk to people,’ she said.

‘Anybody?’ asked Maureen, with distaste.

‘Well, yes,’ said Audrey. ‘Anyone who comes along. Why not?’ Sometimes it was more than talk, it was into bed with just anyone, and then into someone else’s, so the first anyone would go off in a huff, and Audrey would weep. But as Maureen would say to her, what did Audrey think would happen? Maureen kept her virginity to the last possible moment, and then surrendered it to the Secretary of the Debating Society, a steady and reliable boy with a car. Maureen was sensible, Audrey was not.

Audrey was popular with boys but Maureen could take her pick of them, so that wasn’t a problem. But Maureen felt when she looked in the mirror of their eyes she saw something different from what Audrey saw. Now why should Maureen think that? She tried to talk about it to Audrey. ‘Well, what do you see?’ asked Audrey.

‘Lust and self-interest,’ said Maureen, before she had time to think. They were sitting together in a Chinese restaurant after a film. Audrey was eating crispy banana in batter, which Maureen of course had declined.

‘Oh,’ said Audrey. ‘I see them liking me.’

Maureen felt such a spasm of rage she swallowed too great a mouthful of too-hot calorie-free China tea and burned her throat, and it was dry for days. But she didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She forgot it.

What she didn’t forget was Audrey standing on top of a sandhill one day in spring, in a one-piece swimsuit, hair flying in the wind, turning back to the group that followed her, that would follow her anywhere, calling out, ‘Come on, everyone!’ and everyone followed. Friends. Company. Party times, good times, crowded times, peopled times; the whole human race whizzing round the benign fulcrum that was Audrey. ‘Come on, everyone!’ and everyone came, and so did Maureen, against her will yet by her will. She thought of the quiet, damp regularity of her childhood home, the single cat shut out at night, breakfast for two, mother and daughter, laid before they went to bed: some blight had entered her soul too deeply. Up the sandhill she ran with the others, and Audrey was in the sea first. ‘Come on in, everyone! The water’s lovely!’ But of course it wasn’t, Audrey was joking; it was icy, everyone screamed and Audrey splashed. How dare she! Maureen was furious. But everyone had a good time, and so did she. Orchestrating Audrey, that’s what she was: weaving everyone into patterns of pleasure! How was it done?

Eventually their paths parted. Audrey with her two-two went off to muddle through some Social Science course; Maureen, with her two-one, went off to Brussels to work for the EEC, always her ambition. There had seemed something so clear and wholesome and ordered, not to mention well-paid, about the notion of a job in such a city, with a little car of her own, a little flat to be private in. And so it had turned out. Maureen had to chuck the Secretary of the Debating Society, because he went to work for Marks & Spencer in Newcastle, but these things often happen to student relationships. All the same Maureen was quite put out when she found Jim had married within the year, a colleague ten years older than himself. That summer she went home to her mother in Paignton for her annual holiday, but it was miserable and boring; she resolved never to do it again. Twelve years in Brussels, and creeping up in the Agricultural Division, and lonely, and getting herself involved with a married man (but they were all married: what was she to do?) which kept her lonelier because of all the waiting about for the telephone to ring and the secrecy and the unkept promises and the no social life. It took her for ever to break it off (what had happened to her?) but finally she did.

The very next day she got a letter from Audrey. Could they meet? Just like Audrey, Maureen thought, why should anyone want to keep in touch with anyone just because they’d been to the same college, been close together in the alphabet. But she wrote back. Audrey invited Maureen to stay for Christmas. Yes, Audrey was married (well, she would be, wouldn’t she: with three children). They lived in the country, with lots of animals. Just like Audrey, thought Maureen, come-on-everyoneing into something no doubt damp, muddy, messy, noisy, with cat crap in corners. But Maureen went; she had come to dislike Christmas after seven seasons with a married man.

Audrey’s house was a mess. Of course it was. Maureen put on rubber gloves and helped clear up; helped get the over-decorated Christmas tree steady on its pins, the stockings done, endeared herself to the children by handing out Mars bars in a sugar-free household, and keeping Audrey’s husband Alan entertained while Audrey muddled through the children’s bedtimes and prepared four kinds of stuffing for two small turkeys because that was more fun than one stuffing and an apple in a single large turkey.

‘But it’s more work, Audrey.’

‘I know it is, Maureen, but we’ve all got used to two turkeys. Family life is all ritual.’

Maureen doubted that ritual was enough. Alan was a political journalist with left leanings; he had to reinspect his own political stance at least three times a year. It didn’t seem to Maureen that Audrey was taking much notice of what was going on in her husband’s head: she favoured a kind of ongoing warm emotional demonstration by way of keeping him happy.

‘Darling, what’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ she would cry, flinging her arms round him and embracing him as he stared at the electricity bill (two turkeys cost a third more to cook than one, as Maureen pointed out) until he unwillingly smiled. Maureen understood the unwillingness very well. In fact she thought she understood Alan very well. She looked round the ingredients of the household: the children, the warmth, the animals, the mud tramped in and out, the friends coming and going – they came for miles – and thought, with a little reorganisation this would do me very well. She thought she would have it for herself.

She had to wait four years. In that time she became a frequent visitor to the household. Long weekends, Christmas, holidays, part of the family. Then Audrey had, as Maureen knew she would, her ritual affair with a married man. Maureen knew the anatomy of that very well. ‘I feel so bad about it,’ mourned Audrey, chopping Christmas nuts for the stuffing of one of the turkeys. ‘I love Alan, but I just can’t stop myself.’

‘I expect you just want attention and flattery and to feel loved,’ said Maureen, carefully. She’d read enough women’s magazines in her time, oh yes, many a one since her college days. ‘The things Alan isn’t good at. Such a pity he isn’t more demonstrative. Then you wouldn’t have to look for love outside your marriage.’

Audrey’s tears fell into the couscous and lemon peel, and made the stuffing a fraction soggier than it should have been.

‘If only I could tell Alan, if only I could talk to him about it, I’d feel so much better in my mind.’

‘Perhaps you should,’ said Maureen, not believing her luck. ‘You have such a strong marriage. If Alan knew the lengths you’d been driven to he’d be horrified. He’d really work at saving the marriage, to make sure this kind of thing never happened again.’

‘You mean, confess?’ asked Audrey, her swift hands pausing, some glimmer of common sense illuminating the dark recesses of her lovesick mind, but only for a moment, not long enough. Her lover was as married as she was, glooming over his Christmas Eve whisky in some other household, missing her as she was him, lost to her for the season.

‘It’s hardly confessing,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s just being honest. How can a marriage as close as yours and Alan’s work if you’re not honest with one another? I think you owe it to your marriage, and to Alan, to tell him all.’ Then Maureen went out for a walk with the children, in the woods, where the leaves were wet with mist, and tried out ‘Come on, everyone!’ as she produced Mars bars from her bag. How they rushed. It worked.

Audrey told Alan about the affair, as the two of them filled Christmas stockings. She told him all about her secret love, about trystings in the backs of cars and offices, and behind hedges – it had been going on since the summer – and how she really loved Alan. If only he was a bit kinder and nicer to her it need never have happened, but he’d let things get stale and how much she valued her marriage.

‘Don’t talk like the back of a women’s magazine,’ was all Alan said, before hitting his wife from one side of the room to another, and by Boxing Day Audrey had packed her bags and gone. She’d had to go, screaming and hysterical, leaving the children, the matrimonial home and all, but it didn’t help her a bit in the divorce. Technically, she’d deserted. And her lover decided to stay loyal to his wife, as married lovers will. They want excitement, not legality. Just as well there was Maureen there to help the family through the rituals of that dreadful Christmas Day – Maureen knew the domestic ropes so well, as Alan’s mother had observed. And by the next Christmas Maureen was not just installed in the house but pregnant as well, with her first child, and calling out ‘Come on, everyone!’ at meal times, along with the best, though she didn’t often cook herself, having help in the house, and a very good job (considering the local wage structure) running the local branch of the Farmer’s Union.

‘Don’t say that!’ Alan would beg. ‘Don’t say “Come on, everyone!”’

‘Why not?’

‘It irritates me. I don’t know why.’

‘Then you’re just being irrational,’ said Maureen firmly, and went on doing it. For a time her ‘Come on, everyone!’ was rather less peopled than Audrey’s had been – but the family friends soon drifted back and everything was just fine, and the damp and droopy rhododendron leaves which rustled in her past, in her dreams, stood up fine and straight and glossy in some glorious imagined sun.