Goodness

A Bundle of Unpleasant Contradictions

After my father’s death we came back to England to live with my widowed grandfather and spinster aunt in an ill-conceived semi-detached in Park Royal, about mid way between the Middlesex Hospital and where they later built the A40. My grandfather, who had escaped his country labourer background with a naval career that pulled him up to the dizzy heights of home ownership, lace curtains, embossed wallpaper and the like, was of the opinion that he was doing us a great favour putting a roof over our heads, and having never been able to stomach my fervently evangelical father, adopted a told-you-so attitude that was to weigh heavily on my sister Peggy and myself throughout our childhood, and even more so, one imagines, on my mother who had no money to go elsewhere.

‘Those jungle boys,’ the old man would begin, though I don’t suppose he could have been much over fifty then, ‘haven’t got souls to save, have they?’ He smoked a pipe, as grandfathers will, or used to, and regularly occupied a heavy shapeless armchair in an ungenerous living room choked with green Wedgewood and Hummels. ‘Never saw the point of missionarying,’ he grunted.

I remember, from where I would be lying on the hearthrug, being fascinated by his facial skin, especially on the cheeks where the pores were so thick and large as to suggest the texture of some old neglected sponge. Certainly they had soaked up enough in their time. His hair was already white and prickly short, the kind old men scratch vigorously. ‘Shifty sods too.’ He sucked in through his nose. ‘Saw enough of that lot in my time to know to leave well alone, I did.’

Naturally he was speaking, even in those early days, over the urgent clamour of the television which he watched fixedly but didn’t appear to need to listen to. Unless it was encroaching deafness. He puffed one pipe while scraping the bowl of another. ‘If Arthur’d had any sense at all he’d have kept a gun in the house. Couple of loud bangs would have had that lot scarpering. That’s what I say.’

My mother only said. ‘Please, Dad. Please,’ and would get up and go into the kitchen. He might shout after her: ‘For God’s sake, Jenny, can’t you even take a joke? Or are you going to mourn after him your whole bloody life?’ She wouldn’t answer. She would never answer. This is my mother’s way. For my own part, I remember feeling desperately sorry for her, yet incapable of intervening, since I always suspected that Grandfather, incorrigibly unpleasant and offensive as he was, was right. What was the point of missionarying? What possible sense did it make? My father must have been mad to go out there talking to blacks with their bones in their noses, their drums, their funny clothes, when they wore them (we had photographs). It wasn’t that I was of an age to hold any progressive beliefs on the equal value of all cultures and religions. Quite the contrary. Just that somehow, from the cradle, I didn’t believe in the saving and transformation of souls. My intuition has always been that people are who they are and forever remain so, or at best will simply become more and more themselves, more and more that spirit that you can’t help but feel destined to be. Just as it is destiny to be black, destiny to be white. This is what self means, surely. Otherwise who are we?

Only Peggy objected. Only she stood up for Father. She said: ‘You shouldn’t say those kinds of things, Grandad.’ We sat, lay, stood in that smoky suburban sitting room in West London: floral carpet, a pattern of coronation crowns and sceptres on the wallpaper, the grey TV carelessly wrapping and rewrapping time into odd half hours of this and that. Peggy said: ‘Black people have souls just like us. Yes they do. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight.’

What would she have been, seven, nine? She wore her hair in a ponytail and stood chubbily round-bottomed by Grandfather’s chair. She said: ‘Daddy was a good man. He loved the Lord Jesus and he wanted to save people so they wouldn’t go to hell. And now he has gone to heaven to wait for us there.’

While she spoke of course, my Grandfather would keep mumbling and rumbling his prejudices, since this wasn’t really a conversation so much as two people at either end of life speaking their parts in each other’s presence. ‘Man would’ve done better if he’d thought of his own wife and kids before those bloody chimpanzees.’

I might catch the sound of my mother crying softly in the kitchen.

‘God is looking after us,’ Peggy insisted.

‘With the help of muggins here’s pension I suppose,’ Grandfather came back. Until eventually he turned from the television to look at her out of sunken brown eyes. Though there was still a glint there. He would have been wearing his pub-going dark waistcoat, shirt-sleeves rolled up; a bulky, heavy-breathing presence.

Staring him out, she said: ‘Don’t be such a miserable old grumbler, Grandad. It’s sinful to grumble and be miserable.’

The sight of her, rather than anything she said, would at last make him forget his racist grouching. He’d say, ‘Come here, Peggy love. Come and sit on Grandad’s knee.’

She pouted. She might well have had her hands on her hips. Probably she was already aware of striking poses. Certainly Grandfather recognised them when they were struck. He liked to grab her and cuddle her hard on his knee and say things like: ‘My jewel, my Peggy. I do like a little girlie with some sparkle about her.’

My mother cooked, Grandfather rowed with or cuddled Peggy, and around six thirty Aunt Mavis came back, flopped down in an armchair, kicked off her shoes, treating us to a whiff of feet which nobody commented on, and lit a cigarette. I even remember the brand, Park Drive. They were the first I tried myself, stealing from her handbag. With her and Grandad together and the windows forever closed against ‘the damp’, we thus sat out the 1960s in a thick Virginia smog.

Very quietly, to myself and Peggy, when she had us on our own walking to church perhaps, my mother would say: ‘Smoking is evil. Because it’s an abuse of the body the Lord gave you.’ It was the nearest she came to criticising Grandfather openly. She said: ‘Our bodies are precious, holy. Every human body, His temple, made in His image. That’s why you must never smoke. You must promise me you’ll never smoke.’ I suppose one might have objected that martyrdom was an even greater abuse of this image of God’s we were supposed to be taking care of. But as a boy this never occurred and later there would seem no point in being cruel, since, come eighteen odd, you have learnt to humour rather than rebel. You have already won your freedom. Or at least you’re of an age to think in such terms.

In line with her firm belief in the holiness of the human body, my mother wore no make-up, no earrings, no jewels at all apart from her wedding and engagement ring; she was a well-built, auburn, rather attractive woman, I suppose, with a pale quiet intense energy. Her sister, Aunt Mavis, on the other hand, made up heavily and did everything to hair and skin that the fashions of each season dictated. Barely two years younger than my mother, she nevertheless affected the manner and aspirations of the teenage factory girls she worked with. I remember her, well into her thirties she must have been, still talking to us with adolescent dreaminess of Mr Right and the very large family she intended to have, when quite probably she had never so much as been kissed. She was ugly. Her features were oddly flat, she had no chin, and there was something out of true about her eyes, so that only one ever appeared to be looking directly at you.

As I grew older I began to appreciate that Aunt Mavis was a figure of fun, even ridicule. She said things out of the blue, laughed when there seemed no reason to, or alternatively cried. At nine or ten perhaps I began to feel seriously embarrassed about her, especially if I brought friends home, embarrassed that she was part of our family at all. It seemed so extraordinary, this having to accept the imposition of people you weren’t comfortable with. Forever chattering and clapping her hands, forever retailing the small change of factory gossip, a curiously vacant expression hovered about Aunt Mavis’s flattened features, a disturbing lack of focus. She wasn’t a normal person. Apart from the television, she dedicated most of her spare time to the Harrow branch of the Elvis Presley Fan Club, of which she claimed to have been a founder member. And perhaps she was. It was inane enough. All I know is that as she chunnered on and on, always senseless, always excited, full of affected gestures and expressions which often she misunderstood, I simply wished and wished she would disappear.

Twenty years later, during the months of guerilla warfare that tore the heart out of our marriage, I remember Shirley telling me that I had been entirely conditioned by this family of mine, that I had just soaked up the pathetic piety of my mother, the coarseness of my grandfather, the amorality of my sister, and a fair dose of poor Aunt Mavis’s dumbness too. These are the kinds of things one says in arguments, I suppose, and my own feeling is that nothing could be further from the truth. What kind of combination would that be? Piety, coarseness, amorality?

‘They don’t mix,’ I told her.

‘Dead right,’ she said, ‘you’re a bundle of contradictions, George Crawley, and unpleasant ones at that.’

But those were the good old days, pre-Hilary. I can’t recall Shirley and I arguing in quite the same aimless, indulgent way afterwards.

Walking Wounded

My mother led a strange life. At home, in Gorst Road, she was little more than a slave. Even Aunt Mavis used to demand things of her, would say: ‘I’m the modern woman, aren’t I? Bringing home the bread, the least I can expect is to have my bed made for me.’ She blinked, gormless and vapid.

Mother bowed to it. She did everything, shopped, cooked, washed up, cleaned, mended, gardened, darned, scrubbed, laundered, ironed. She was always tired, her skin always rough with work. And it occurs to me that apart from the brief interlude of her marriage, of Africa, she had been doing more or less the same thing in the same house since her early teens when her own mother died. For all of which she received no pay and less thanks, not a person who didn’t take her for granted.

Yet the curious thing was that at our church, the local Methodists, Mother was a figure of considerable importance: a taker of meetings, reader of lessons, organiser of conferences and outings; a woman of quick decision, easy authority and loud, strong singing voice. We sang, ‘He who would valiant be,’ and she was booming and triumphant. For Father had been valiant. We sang, ‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest,’ and she had tears in her eyes, thinking of the saint my father had been, the rest he had deserved.

She was much loved, even revered. People came to her with their problems. They came with the most intimate problems, the most serious, even legal problems. For them she was both comfort and oracle. People came and wept with her, prayed with her, told everything. I always found, and to this day still do find, this fact extraordinary. I myself was unable to talk to my mother about anything: about religion, about my own wilderness of doubt, about my dead father, about Grandfather’s unpleasantness, about Aunt Mavis’s queerness, most of all about puberty (Peggy’s an explosion, physical and behavioural, my own slower, more furtive and guilty, later bold and deceitful). I was unable to talk to her about anything, and she in turn made no attempt to tackle anything intimate with me, nor with Peggy, who, through her friends at school, became my chief source of the vital information one inevitably grubs around for at that age.

I remember looking in Mother’s handbag. I was supposed to be getting change for collection. She wasn’t going to church for some reason. She had problems with her hips sometimes. Bouts of something or other. And ferreting for her purse amidst a mess of hankies, keys and scraps of paper, breathing the forever memorable, blown-nose and old-leather smell of her bag, I came across a tampon, a cylinder wrapped in ricepaper. I said: ‘What’s this, Mum?’ At once she was flustered. I latched on immediately. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Put it away.’ ‘But what is it, Mum?’

You would have thought, looking back, here was her opportunity to give young George his lesson, to guide him towards some mature understanding of the female body. But no, she says: ‘It’s a cigar.’ I couldn’t swear, but this may be the only straight lie my mother ever told me. ‘For Grandfather.’

I looked at the long tube in its flimsy paper cover. It looked the right shape for a cigar, the big ones they advertised with organ music on the box. I said: ‘But you don’t like Grandad to smoke.’ ‘For his birthday,’ she wriggled. ‘It’s next Friday you know.’ She found a painful smile. ‘We can waive a rule for his birthday, can’t we? Bless his dear heart.’

And I swallowed it. The extraordinary thing being that she then went out and actually bought a cigar for the old man’s birthday. Odd, no, to think of my mother being so cunning, so resourceful in her prudishness? For what? To save my innocence? In a world where the worst is anyway chalked on every wall. In a family where, that very evening, Peggy had already told me everything, mocking my innocence, even showing me quite graphically (using a ‘Q’ tip) how you fitted them in.

Yet almost everybody in the church brought their problems to this woman, their confessions. They came to her after service in the hall where we had coffee and she would go off with them to the vestry, leaving Peggy and I to kick our heels in the yard amongst stacks of coal and tiles from the roof they’d had to remove because they were dangerous. They came to her at home in Gorst Road, sometimes late in the evening and she took them to her room. ‘Here comes another of the walking wounded,’ Grandfather would announce when the bell ding-donged in the middle of the Man from Uncle, Harry Worth’s Half Hour. ‘Out with the bandages. Call the nurse. Or is it to be last rites?’ And when one Saturday afternoon a black came, he said with his extraordinary flair for insensitivity: ‘Don’t you think we should frisk him? Don’t want any trouble.’

But despite his prejudices and scorn Grandfather never actually prevented anybody from coming in. Even the most dishevelled of tramps (for Mother was famous for giving tea to vagrants in the kitchen — ‘Four sugars, ma’am’); even, as the sixties progressed, the occasional Indian (if Grandfather despised blacks, he truly loathed Indians). And this was another thing with my mother, that however much derision she attracted, and probably still attracts, she generally gets her way; and even if she doesn’t answer back, she has a quiet authority in her passivity, a power really, something terribly persuasive about her softly focusing brown eyes. Charisma. It was her ‘ministry’.

‘My ministry,’ I heard her explaining when she turned down Eddie Foulkes who owned the Hallmarks Plastics factory on Bowes Road and always put a tenner in the collection plate. I was on hands and knees on threadbare carpet in the dark light at the top of the stairs. They were by the porch below. She had prayed about it and the Lord had told her no.

Grandfather was furious when I told him and there was the most almighty row. She was putting her prayer rubbish before the welfare of her bloody family. Wasn’t it enough that her husband had been killed by a bunch of nignogs? Wasn’t it enough that she lived on the social, that we couldn’t afford decent clothes? Mother said Eddie had been divorced, she could never marry a man who had broken a solemn vow to someone else. Otherwise what did promises mean? Grandfather was livid. He spat. Peggy said everybody got divorced and she couldn’t, see the problem, especially seeing as they liked each other. Eddie was fab. Mother didn’t cry; Mother only cried when she was afraid for your soul. ‘Maybe if I stayed at home and did nothin’ all day I’d ‘ave more of a chance of getting married,’ Mavis said.

It was a nasty scene and partly my fault, since I had hoped the others would be able to change her mind and we could move into Eddie’s big house over in Ealing. Also I honestly believed it would be the best thing for my mother. Grandfather raved on and on. I seem to remember it was on this occasion that he hit her. When the whole thing got too painful I went out the back and kicked a ball against the wall. I decided that after I had escaped my family and was in control of my life, I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, as Grandfather was, but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable, as Mother did. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life.

Wasn’t that a fair stab at a moral code? For a fourteen-year-old. And one I honestly do believe I’ve stuck to.

Although only a month or so ago, when she found my scrapbook, Shirley said: ‘You are aware you’re not human, aren’t you? You are aware of that? Because I know what you’re thinking.’

‘Only too human,’ I replied, ‘to go by what’s in those papers.’

But Shirley had become one of the walking wounded herself by this time.

A Certain Grace

Aunt Mavis finally found her Mr Right. Bob Hare was about ten years her younger, unemployed, slim to the point of frail and a Mormon. When he spoke it was with the extreme and unfriendly caution of somebody who is not expecting a fair trial. Oh, God,’ Grandad announced after his first visit, ‘a turd on two legs. And I thought I’d seen it all.’

Bob spent his days proselytising on doorsteps in Shepherd’s Bush and Holland Park. Although timid, he was obviously grimly determined, constantly summoning up all his courage to get a foot in the door and jabber out his lines: the Book of Mormon, the moral decay of our society, the only road to salvation, the importance of the family, what have you. Naturally the reaction he was most at home with was rebuff. He drew the dole and rent relief, which disgusted my grandfather, and was unhealthily pale and sickly-looking in a pinched, persecuted way. If he had any attraction at all it was that haunted and haunting, thin-boned, soft-eyed passion you often find in black-and-white photos of refugees and general strikers. Mother saw red, though she was careful to call him ‘Poor dear Bob’. Aunt Mavis was having none of it and after only a couple of months married him without telling any of us, so that late one Saturday afternoon, there she was, tubby in tight slacks, gathering her clobber together and setting off for a bedsit in Haringey.

Where very soon she miscarried. Not once but twice. This much I learnt from Peggy who had overheard a conversation between Mother and Grandfather. Mother, who blamed herself terribly for this injudicious marriage and visited regularly, asked me to come with her to cheer Mavis up, telling me only that she was depressed. I refused. My mother insisted. Why should I? I asked. Had Mavis ever come to see me? Perhaps I was just annoyed that at sixteen or seventeen, or whatever I now was, I still wasn’t to be let in on the serious and intimate information in the family, I was being treated like a child, my opinion wasn’t required. I told her I wouldn’t go unless Mavis asked me herself. Mother said this attitude was unchristian of me and selfish. I pointed out that no one else was being asked to go, not Peggy, not Grandfather. ‘We can go into town afterwards,’ she pleaded, ‘perhaps treat you to something you want to see.’ For it was and still is so important to Mother that an appearance of family solidarity be kept up.

We took two long London bus-rides through depressing streets, the new estates that were already slums. There was a terraced house, four flights of uncarpeted stairs, a dingy yellow door where a rag did for a doormat and a note said: ‘Bell don’t work. Knock.’

I blame my mother really for never finding out more about Mavis and what was wrong with her. I mean, it’s one thing being good and generous to all and sundry, but my own feeling is that we have certain strategic responsibilities to the members of our family that are far more important. Mavis was obviously not quite right in the head. One knew that if only from the way people instinctively treated her with condescension, not unkindly, but with indulgence rather, the way you treat animals, half-wits, tiny babies. Yet my mother never enquired into what might lie behind this. I have no memory of any doctor ever being invited to pronounce on her odd facial features or retarded mental development. She was just accepted from the start for what she was, dumb, childish, ugly. And while it’s all very well saying we’re all God’s creatures whatever’s the matter with us, I do believe that Mother failed in her duty here.

Bob was out to see the social security people. Mavis was in bed, eating sweets, smoking. Fishing for a piece of toffee stuck to her teeth, she talked about her miscarriages quite openly in my presence, despite initial frowns and signs of discouragement from my mother. Mother asked had the doctors said anything about why, and Mavis laughed and said, nothing that made any sense. She blew out smoke through one nostril and then the other. She and Bob were determined she said. They had mostly got married for the kids. He was mad about them.

I wanted to go because of the smell, the unpleasantness, and then the embarrassing inanity of my aunt’s twitter. She was showing some baby clothes she had bought now. She was sure it was going to be a boy. She giggled. When it finally decided to turn up. I remember her big pear-shaped body heaving from one side of the bed to another to pick things up off the floor; she let out grunts, her cigarette flecking the blankets with ash. I was desperate to go, I get quite frantic sometimes when I find myself in unpleasant situations, I simply can’t bear it, I feel I will die of unpleasantness; but Mother of course felt duty bound to wash the dishes, hoover the carpet, save the unsaveable. I offered to help, to speed things up, but was told to keep Mavis company, drink my tea.

I stood by the bed with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want any tea and I had spent my whole childhood in the same house as Mavis without ever talking to her. Was it likely we would find anything to say to each other now? I told her we were going into town afterwards to see the Queen’s stamp collection. I told her Peggy had got herself a dog but then never bothered to look after it, she was so busy playing the drums in a rock group all the time. Grandfather loathed the thing. I told her I was going to university in a year or two so as to be able to leave home. Mavis licked a thumb. I asked her if she liked being married, and she said it was all right and stopping work was the best thing that could ever have happened to her, not having to get up so early and have your hands ruined by those hot machines. ‘Which reminds me,’ she said. ‘Where’s me lipstick?’

Bob came back. He stood frail and knotty-haired in the doorway watching my mother down on her knees having a go at crud on the carpet. The room was quite big, maybe fifteen by fifteen, but it had everything, kitchenette, bed, table, chairs, sofa, so it was cluttered, with just the one orange-curtained window and a busy road behind to rattle it.

‘No need to do that,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’d have done that.’

When he got closer to us you couldn’t not be aware he’d been drinking. He looked belligerent, ready to snap.

‘We clean the place every day,’ he insisted. His eyes were pink.

Preparing to leave, Mother made a whole pantomine of signs with her eyes for him to come outside and have a word about Mavis. A rock would have understood, but Bob’s strained face merely filled with puzzlement. I was tugging at Mother’s coat cuff to be gone. Mavis was propped up in bed staring chinlessly. How old must she have been? Thirty-six? Thirty-eight? Mother made her signs again. Perhaps half understanding, Bob said: ‘We’re okay. We don’t need help from no one.’ He was tense.

‘Cheerie bye,’ Mother called past him to her sister. At the corner of the stairs we heard raised voices above us. Shouting. Mother hesitated one short second in mid step, then quickened her pace.

With what relief I let myself out into the street and took a breath of fresh air! I had hurried on ahead. For life, as I have so often insisted to Shirley of late, should have a certain grace, shouldn’t it? A certain grace. Please. Otherwise I do believe one might as well be dead.

A Classic Case

The first time I threw in my weight in an attempt to tip the scales toward sanity and common sense was on the occasion of Peggy’s first pregnancy. I would have been living in Leicester by then. Shirley and I had moved in together, having found ourselves quite a decent semi some miles from the university; it was pricey, but we shared with a couple of other students and Mr Harcourt, her father, unwittingly provided what I couldn’t always afford.

It would be difficult to exaggerate what a release this change of scene was, how wonderful at last, at last, not to have to worry that Mother would find out what one was up to, not to have to face her silent and suffering reproach, her insistent, if never spoken, ‘Be thou me! Be thou me!’ I didn’t go back home from one end of term to the other and certainly not for such minor events as Grandfather’s prostectomy or Aunt Mavis’s suicide attempt. Mother wrote asking me to come and I wrote back asking what possible help could I be, and explaining that the important thing for me surely was to get the best degree possible and so escape the poverty trap that in the future world of high technology and high unemployment people from my sort of unskilled lower middle-class background were in every danger of falling into.

Mother wrote to say she understood, though it would be nice if I could make it home just sometimes, and she kept me up to date on such events as the death of Peggy’s dog Jagger (fed chicken bones by Grandfather), the church meetings she spoke at, what she had cooked when so and so and so and so, who were missionaries in Borneo or clergymen from Nigeria, had come to lunch, her contacts with Peggy (scrubbing clean some slum my sister was squatting in, lending her ten pounds she would never see again), stories of a stray cat she had taken in, a tramp she had fed who had walked off with Grandfather’s favourite lighter, so and so who had been converted when so and so came to speak to the youth fellowship, conversations with the next door neighbours about the state of the sewage pipes under the garden, our sycamore that took light from their front room, the rotting fence they wanted to fix and Mother couldn’t afford to, etc. etc.

I didn’t go home. I was happy as I had never been before: work, play, parties, independence, self-indulgence, Shirley. Until mid way through the third year Mother sent a telegram: ‘Peggy in family way, please please come.’

It was a classic case of people not doing what was most sensible and convenient for everybody concerned, and thus a forerunner of events to come. Worth dwelling on. Mavis, I discovered on arrival home (Mother’s letters were clearly rather less informative than they liked to present themselves), had come back to live in Gorst Road after swallowing a half bottle of bleach. Her second attempt. Bringing only the minimum dole with her, she spent her days listening to old Elvis Presley records in her room and whining about Bob who had now left the Mormons and joined some Eastern fringe religion based in Indonesia and run by a charismatic figure known as the Bapi. This had disorientated Mavis. The Bapi had ordered Bob, as he did all his converts, to take a new name. So Bob was now Raschid. The root cause of their break-up had apparently been that Mavis, in a surprising show of independence, had infuriated Bob by refusing to call him Raschid or to contemplate changing her own name. She was Mavis and she liked to be called Mavis. I suppose the only positive thing about all this was that it was a good story to tell at dinner parties. Financially it was a disaster.

Peggy meanwhile had been squatting in Islington playing drums in a small folk group and helping in a War on Want shop on Camden High Street which had been raided for drugs on three occasions. Thrown out of the squat a few days before, she had temporarily returned home, more to make a visit than out of any real need for refuge, since Peggy could have found a bed at a moment’s notice almost anywhere in the city, so extensive was and is her network of friends, or rather of those people who immediately recognise in her one of their own subculture.

She came home and over tea quite by the way and without the slightest sense of momentousness, told Mother that she was pregnant. Later in the same conversation, throughout which Mother had with her customary infinite caution been trying to find out more, Peggy asked her for a large, indeed by our family standards huge, sum of money, without specifying why she needed it. At which Mother had quickly put an old-fashioned two and two together and telegrammed me.

I arrived in the afternoon towards three. In a clearly agitated state, so unlike the serene air of wisdom she would offer her walking wounded, Mother caught me at the door before I could ring the bell, so as to grab a private word: she had stalled Peggy over the issue of the money, she said, though in reality she could never afford such a sum. She had stalled her to prevent her from going elsewhere before I arrived. She wanted me to talk to her rather than doing it herself because she knew Peggy considered her something of a religious fuddy duddy whereas coming from me the advice would have much more authority. Peggy respected me. She was always saying how much common sense I had and how well I was doing. And of course I was young. Everybody set so much store by what generation you belonged to these days. I must tell her that it was wrong to have an abortion. Quite wrong. It was killing a child. It was murder. There was nothing more one could say about it and all the modern arguments in its favour were just unadulterated institutionalised selfishness. How could they be anything but? A child was alive and you killed it, and it was so shameful that something that called itself the women’s movement supported such carnage. Peggy must have the baby. She must. If she didn’t want it afterwards, Mother herself would keep it. Something somehow could always be arranged. There were so many people wanted babies and couldn’t have them.

I was a shade overwhelmed. Every day, or at least every month of her life in her role as self-appointed social worker Mother must have dealt with more or less similar situations; she’d had plenty of girls from the church come to her pregnant by the wrong man, or by the right man at the wrong time. Yet her sense of urgency now, her determination to persuade, was extraordinary. The wrinkled corners of her soft mouth trembled. Her hands were clasped together with unnatural force. Her living soul-self seemed to be concentrated in the fluttering, watering eyes looking at me so intensely. You could see how for her, for my mother, a simple suburban abortion was raised to the level of a vast metaphysical showdown between good and evil. There were angels and demons perched all over the furniture.

‘Please, George,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Fresh, or rather stale, from coach and tube, still struggling a little to reaccustom myself to the prayer-meeting rhetoric, I pointed out that Peggy could hardly want the money for an abortion, since abortions, like it or not, were now free on the health service. Mother stopped. She was breathing quickly: ‘Oh, of course. Of course. How stupid of me. How stupid!’ And she asked: ‘Is there any chance she doesn’t know?’

Peggy apparently was out the back soaking up the year’s first sunshine. I said I would go and talk to her, get to the bottom of it at once. ‘Please,’ Mother said again. ‘Okay,’ I said.

So far we had talked in undertones amidst the pungent shoe and old geranium smells of the porch, but now, crossing living room and kitchen to reach the back, I was struck as never before by the dinginess of my old home. The wallpaper was a glazed yellow brown, the carpet threadbare — a rug aslant, itself badly worn, rather obviously covering the hole by the passage door. Sofa and armchair with their washed out once elastic covers were more than ever tattered and shapeless.

I looked, and found it desperately poignant to think of my dear mother wasted in that unpromising environment. I felt a surge of moral energy. I was the success of the house. I was about to graduate. These people needed help and it was up to me to give it to them. Rather than staying away, I should be making regular visits to check the situation out, see what ought to be done.

I opened the back door. Outside was a twice folded handkerchief of lawn surrounded by rosebushes and other, for me nameless, flowers which my mother somehow found time to cultivate and water and worry about. They about half-hid the black creosoted fence that sagged behind. I stepped out, ducked under a line straining with damp washing, and found Peggy sprawled on a patch of dandelions in bra and pants, exposing her chunky pale body to sunshine that seemed barely warm. A scruffy little dog nobody had told me about was idly licking her ribs.

‘Peggy.’

She sat up and broadly smiled surprise. ‘You too!’ she said. ‘Quite a reunion. How nice.’ Falling forward as her body came up, her breasts were plump. She stroked the little dog. ‘Do you like Theo? He waylaid me on the Heath and refuses to go away.’

I pushed aside a damp green nylon sheet and squatted down. I paused. I said: ‘Mother tells me you’re pregnant.’

She was squinting still to adjust her eyes. ‘Oh you’ve grown a moustache.’ She burst out into one of her laughs. ‘Makes you look a bit AC/DC.’

In a low voice, I explained that Mother had telegrammed for me to come down to persuade her not to have an abortion, but that in fact I was entirely on her side. Entirely. So not to worry. Of course she should have an abortion. The feminists were perfectly right. It was her body to do what she wanted with. It was her decision. If she went and had a baby now what kind of career could she ever expect to have? Not to mention the poor child growing up in these slummy surroundings, with not even much prospect of work at the end of the day, and then the present international climate, the threat of nuclear war and so on. Was it a world to bring kids into? I’d support her one hundred per cent if Mother started putting on any pressure, in fact I felt just about ready for a showdown, let her know what I thought about her repressive religious ideas, though seeing as it was really none of her business the best thing would be simply not to say anything and then to present her with a fait accompli. If she. .

‘But I don’t want to have an abortion,’ Peggy blinked.

I was taken aback. She leaned over and ruffled my hair. She kissed my cheek, playing older sister. ‘Don’t worry your little head about it, Georgie, you’re so worked up, cool it, take it easy, I’ll sort it all out myself, it’s no problem.’

She smiled. Then she said: ‘So poor Mum thought I was planning an abortion?’ and she got up and ran into the house to tell Mother she had never had any intention of getting an abortion. Never. How on earth had she got that idea into her head? Oh, when she’d asked for money it was because she and some other friends were clubbing together to put up bail for one of the guys in the squat who’d been arrested. Completely trumped up drugs charges. The police should be ashamed of themselves. From the garden I could hear Mother weeping for joy, fierce hiccups of emotion, promising what funds she had.

Later, over tea and buns, which she insisted on baking and even icing as a sort of celebration, Mother asked: ‘Not the father, I hope?’

‘You what?’ Peggy was licking her finger to pick up crumbs from her plate. Mavis fed herself vacantly.

‘This fellow who’s been arrested. He’s not the father?’

‘Oh no,’ Peggy laughed.

I couldn’t help feeling as we munched away that I was the only one there actually concerned about the practical implications of this development. I said: ‘So maybe you wouldn’t mind telling Mum who the father is, since she’s probably going to have to look after the poor child.’

Peggy turned to me in surprise. ‘Oh my, aren’t we a sour puss!’

Mother said: ‘George’s only trying to help, dear. It was so nice of him to come down. Now do tell us about the chappie.’

‘His name’s Dave,’ Peggy said. ‘He’s an actor, a wonderful man. We’re going to get married as soon as we can. And we shall be looking after the child ourselves, thank you very much. Why ever shouldn’t we?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Mavis came out in an inexplicable huff.

‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that getting married was one of the few things you could do from one moment to the next if you really wanted to.’

‘If you must know, brother dear,’ Peggy said with condescending sweetness, ‘we’ve got to wait until his divorce comes through.’

Typically my mother said nothing. She passed round the buns again, merely remarking that they hadn’t risen as much as they might and she hadn’t been able to fill them with buttercream as she usually did because there was only marge in the house these days and without running out to the shops. . The fact that Peggy was plunging into the most precarious of situations (with an actor!), as a result of which Mother herself would suffer, certainly financially if in no other way, did not appear to worry her at all. She herself had refused to marry a perfectly decent and quite wealthy man ostensibly because he had divorced nearly a decade before, and now her daughter was having another man divorce to marry her and she didn’t say anything about it, when some serious comment might just have made her see sense. As a result of which, I was being forced into a position where I had to be unpleasant simply to express the only sensible opinion possible.

‘Seems to me,’ I began, ‘you’re hardly. .’ But Mother caught the sound of the rotary sprinkler in the next garden and rushed out to pull in the washing. She preferred this to inviting our new neighbour, a vanguard of gentrification, to adjust the thing. No sooner was she out than Peggy leaned across the table towards me, her breasts swinging heavily: ‘What’s got into you, George?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘For heaven’s sake! You seem to be doing your best to ruin a happy situation and start an argument. Relax. Please.’ She was wearing earrings the size of saucers, punk dark lipstick.

I said: ‘I’m sorry, Peggy, but I thought I was trying to prevent an unhappy situation from developing.’

And when Mother came back in I told her I was off. I’d take the coach back to Leicester that night. I had a lot of studying to do. At the door she thanked me, as if it had been me had worked the miracle. She embraced me and kissed me. In the background Grandfather was complaining to the TV about the influx of Kenyan Asians.

I wash my hands of you all, I thought.

Lucky Stars

What was it I liked so much about Shirley? Why did we become so rapidly and permanently attached? I can’t rightly remember. At seventeen, eighteen, one is so much immersed in life. One likes without noticing quite what or why, in a whirl of vanity and self-gratification.

We met at a retreat intended to promote church unity. There must be an irony there. The well-to-do Anglo Caths in Chiswick High Street were dallying with the Shepherd’s Bush Congregationalists and Park Royal Methodists, and the youth of the three churches were lured off to an Easter Week of Prayer in a boarding school outside High Wickham. Shirley and I were drawn together in the second round of the table-tennis tournament.

Thin as a rake, poignantly flat-chested, sinewy, imperious, athletic, dynamic, she bounced and swayed threateningly at the other end of the table, four or five bracelets rattling on each wrist, be-ringed fingers lifted to cover her laughter, long copper hair falling away from a cocked cheek. One of the Anglo Caths, I thought, even before she spoke. I had to sweat blood to beat her.

Perhaps it was the freedom and assurance she had which attracted me first, a strength of character and cheerfulness that meant you could never feel you were hurting her. And naturally I was impressed that someone from a higher class was interested in me. I liked the fact that her father was a lawyer, that the family was well-off, respectable, moneyed, and that my mother, with the way she always confuses respectability with morality, wholeheartedly approved of them. I was overwhelmed by all the contact of skin on skin, the way she shivered and melted when I kissed her ear, as I soon learnt to, the way she put a hand in my shirt as we walked across Gunnersbury Park. She liked to touch me. She wore a green silk scarf over her hair the way gipsies do, which somehow made me feel unspeakably tender, it gave her face such a bright, bird-like look, all eyes. But it was the sudden and complete intimacy that was most extraordinary. From the very first days together Shirley and I could talk about anything, everything. And amazingly we always agreed. She with me and I with her. It was uncanny. Had we not thrown religion and all its imponderables very promptly out of the window, we would have said we were made for each other.

So that on arrival back in Leicester that evening, I immediately turned to Shirley for support. Hadn’t I been right? Hadn’t I? One sounded mean saying certain things, but the fact was they had to be said. We talked it over. Shirley agreed wholeheartedly; it was a case, she decided, where the older generation, my mother, and the sixties aberration that had followed it, my sister, were both erring in sentimentality and romanticism, were refusing to look long and hard at future reality, future practicality.

Our room-mates Gregory and Jill were there, another solid sensible couple, and I was surprised, as we talked, how rapidly, on the basis of just a smattering of information, they came to the same conclusions I had. It was reassuring. Gregory said he found it extraordinary that people were even allowed to go on making the same old mistakes you read about in every novel, newspaper and social study, as if the centuries past had never been and the race had learnt absolutely nothing.

We cooked ourselves omelettes with green peppers and ate, unusually, in front of the TV, since BBC 2 was kindly interrupting the snooker to show somebody’s version of Carmen (both Jill and Shirley came from the right class to be opera buffs). We drank some decent wine Gregory had tracked down that Sainsbury’s had started importing from Friuli, and toasted to high-paying jobs and plenty of nights at the opera. ‘But no running off with gipsy girls,’ Jill frowned. ‘Nor army boys,’ Gregory replied.

We really were a happy foursome in that house. There were no overbearing characters, no martyrs, no one was even particularly idiosyncratic. We shared the housework and the bills. We studied quietly and helped each other. We all knew what we wanted and how to go about getting it. We were young, cheerful, optimistic.

In bed later that evening, Shirley said, ‘Poor Peggy. Really.’ And she said: ‘Praise be to God for Reckitt & Colman though. A pink one a day keeps the gynaecologist away. Or the shotgun at bay. And you still can make hay. And have a damn good lay. Oh yea!’ ‘Oh shut up,’ I laughed, trying as always to be serious. Though one of the best things about bed with Shirley was, not just the excitement, but the fact that this was when she was at her merriest. Sometimes we’d be reduced to such helpless laughter we’d have to give up and start all over again when we’d got over the giggles. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘if Peggy’s so anti hormone-juggling and all that, you could tell her to get a bedside book of jokes. Excellent contraceptive.’ ‘Just,’ I said, ‘that you’d always be worried she might miss the punchline.’ ‘She does seem,’ Shirley agreed, ‘a rather inattentive creature.’

Still, appreciating that sometimes I’m too quickly irascible and categorical, and because I really do love Mother and Peggy and wish them well, and since I felt I might yet influence the situation for the good somehow, I decided not to overreact and cut myself off from them. A few days after getting back to Leicester, I wrote Peggy the following letter:

Dear Peg,

Sorry if I seemed like a bit of a bull in a china shop when I came down Tuesday. The fact is I’m really seriously worried about you and Mum, I mean about how you will cope if things start going wrong. Perhaps the best thing I can do is just list my fears, which I think you’ll have to agree are not far fetched:

a) What if your actor man doesn’t marry you and won’t or can’t support the baby?

b) What if you don’t have enough money and have to go back to Gorst Road to bring him/her up amongst the mad and the senile?

c) What if Mother breaks down under the strain? Who will look after Grandfather and Mavis then?

Of course if either Mother or I or even yourself were well-off none of the above would be a problem, but even after I get out of university and hopefully get a job, it will be some years before I’ll be able to spread any of the proceeds about, since Shirley and I will have to save for a home of our own. We can’t rely entirely on her parents. My one thought is, and this is the last time I shall mention it, that it might be better to have an abortion now, get yourself safely married, save up a bit and then have the baby. That’s all.

Hope you are well otherwise. Shirley and I are both gearing up for finals and making job applications. Fingers crossed.

All best, GEORGE.

She wrote back from an address in Holloway beside which she had scribbled the words: ‘Temporary. Communicate via Mum.’

Georgie bruv — she wrote in blue wax crayon on a large sheet of graph paper — ‘ might just as well ask, 1. What if a brick were to fall from a great height on your big head leaving you totally mentally handicapped? 2. What if Shirley’s dad lost all his jolly lolly and you couldn’t go horseriding at the weekends? 3. What if you were paralysed from the waist down in a hit-and-run accident and Shirley not only refused to push your wheelchair but ran off with a well-hung Rastafarian. .? See what I mean?

George, when you love a man as I love Dave, I mean love deeply, then you want to have a baby with him and he with you. It’s something you both feel in your souls. It’s the ultimate human experience. And once it’s started, the baby I mean, you can’t say, no, no, we’ll have it in three years’ time, for the simple reason, brother mine, that ‘it’ would be a different baby, wouldn’t it, not the baby of our love now, but the baby of our love then. I shall have that baby too when the time comes, okay? No need to worry about Mum either as she has Big G on her side.

By the way, is it okay if I crash a night at your place on the way back from the Loughborough festival?

Lots of love and thanks, no really, for your concern.

PEG.

Fair enough, I thought, if she insisted on being romantic about it (’baby of our love now’, indeed, as if it wasn’t just any sperm meeting any egg). Time would tell how right I was.

In the event, however, this was not to be the case. For coming back from her roadying at the Loughborough Festival, Peggy crashed not at our place but about fifteen miles away shortly after leaving the M6. It happened around midnight on the pillion of a 500cc Honda behind a bloke called Marcus Robbins, a folk singer apparently. They hit a broken-down, unlit Mini-van stationary in an underpass. Marcus was killed instantly. Peggy suffered only mild concussion, but miscarried.

She was heartbroken. I sat by her hospital bed for hours upon hours while she did nothing but cry and squeeze my hands. Her chubby face was pale. Carelessly she let her big breasts show through her nightdress, the kind of thing you just can’t help noticing even when you don’t want to. She cried and I felt very close to her and gave up my last week of revision to be with her, shuttling back and forth on trains and buses. We talked about this and that, and for the first time we talked about our childhood at home — Mother, Grandfather, Mavis — as something definitely past and gone. We were adults. I remember her surprising me by saying she often thought of Mother as the Virgin Mary and Grandad as the Devil. I never think in these terms. People are who they are. Anyway, who did that make Mavis? Some possession case JC ought to hurry up and heal? And where was the man himself? Certainly not me.

At one point, laughing through her tears, Peggy said: ‘You want to bet Mum will find some way of saying it was her fault.’ I smiled. ‘Poor baby,’ she whispered. ‘Poor little baby.’ Her plump cheeks ran with tears. In a kind of daze she said, ‘You know there’ll never never be another baby the same. In all eternity. I was going to call her Elsa. Don’t you think it’s a nice name?’

Deep true lover Dave didn’t show up once the whole week they kept her in, but I didn’t mention this. Sensibility so often seems to entail not mentioning the most painfully pertinent. Peggy should have been counting her lucky stars.

I Do the Right Thing

Shirley and I on the other hand were truly in love. We were quite sure of it. We had been together four years now, formative years. We had grown into each other, made sacrifices for each other. For the last two years we had had our bank accounts in common, at my insistence, since I felt that as soon as you knew something was the right thing, the best course of action was to commit yourself at once. Some people fret and fritter their whole lives away, wondering whether to take this plunge or that. It inhibits them in every area, love, work, play. They sit for years caught uncomfortably on the prongs of their fences. But I was eager to get a move on.

I was ambitious. I wasn’t sure in what direction, but I was eager to prove myself. Half I would have liked to travel, see places, have adventures, half I wanted to get right down to it and make money now in the city I’d grown up in, buy a car, buy a house, then a better car, a better house, eventually go into business, politics, who knows. Over those last four years, since adolescence, the world had gradually been transformed from my prison to my oyster. I felt ready to dive in, rather than merely desperate to get out. And understandably I associated this change and the euphoria that went with it with Shirley.

In any event, it seemed important to get marriage out of the way. Shirley was fun to be with. She was attractive. She had hazel eyes and a straight nose with a tiny sprinkling of freckles (like a bouquet I told her) around the bridge. And we got on together. She was intelligent herself and she believed in me. She said I had a good mind, a good body, a good face, a good voice and rotten taste, but the latter, fortunately, she felt she could rectify. She smiled wrily. She had large, well-spaced, fine white teeth with just one small endearing chip on the left upper incisor — skiing accident, the Dolomites (whereas my own chip I owe to a scuffle in a playground on the Tubbs Road Estate). Her lips were wide, her manner, at least in social conversation, exquisitely sardonic and ‘collected’ I think must be the right word. She would never embarrass you. She was always cool, polished. And talented too. She could dance, play the piano, play tennis (all the upper middle-class accomplishments denied to Peggy and I). She could sing counterpoint alto to my solid harmony church tenor. We often, hamming it up, sang hymns and even anthems together about the house. Plus she was an eager lover and she swore blind she didn’t want kids. Who wouldn’t have married her?

Her parents lashed out on the clothes and rings. My mother, delighted, spent more than she need have done buying a Moulinex she would never have dreamt of getting for herself. The venue was Christ Church, Turnham Green. Peggy, Grandfather and Mavis were all there, Grandfather with his navy medals, Peggy in a whorish pink jumpsuit, but I shut my mind to any embarrassment, they couldn’t harm me now. I had escaped.

In a lemon dress, hair permed for the first time in lovely copper ringlets, opals in her ears, wide eyes truly glowing as it seemed to me only hers could, Shirley whispered at the chancel steps: ‘If only I had a pair of tits, I’d make quite a picture, n’est-ce-pas?’

For my own part, acknowledging stout Mr Harcourt’s complacent approving, just very slightly boss-eyed smile, bespeaking wealth, respectability, unassailable common sense, I knew I had done the right thing. I was set. Why shouldn’t we be happy?

We rented a flat in North Finchley and got down to business with the rat race. House prices were spiralling and we would have to spiral after them. Shirley quickly found a place teaching infants at a private school for girls, St Elizabeth’s, a temporary arrangement as what she was really suited for was something in publishing or advertising maybe. But we both felt that this was a moment to swallow pride and get some experience behind us. We didn’t want to live off her parents. Meanwhile I got a foothold on the bottom rung at InterAct Management Systems and proceeded to become an expert (perhaps I should say one of ‘the’ experts) in network planning. Within a couple of years I was turning out software they’d never dreamt of till I arrived.

There was Johnson, an electronics man retired young from the airforce having lost an arm; pompous, mannered, always a fresh handkerchief in his pocket and so on, but very sharp. He’d had the idea. Then there was a dithery, worried type, Will Peacock, a great adjuster of trouser belts and twister of ties. He was putting up the money he’d inherited, and at the time I arrived still losing it. To look at him, death pale, stooped and fiftyish at thirty-five, you’d have thought he’d been bleeding for weeks on end. He needed a transfusion. But these were the halcyon days of software design and really you couldn’t go wrong (to my credit actually that I sensed this at once).

I remember the interview as one of the turning points of my life, one of those rare moments of real self discovery. These two dull three-piece men began to explain that they’d just won their first large contract, a network planning system for oil rig construction in the North Sea. The idea (it seems very old hat now) was that the constructors should feed into the computer all the information relative to task sequences and durations, specifications and quantities of material and labour required, estimated idle time, possibility or otherwise of simultaneous operation, etc. etc. and InterAct’s custom-written network program would then schedule all their work for them, time their orders, give advance warning of when they would need to draw on specialised labour, programme their payments, spot liquidity problems way ahead, and so on. Any unforeseen hitch or delay (flash welders not available for three days, interest rates up half a per cent) and the project manager need only tap in the details on a portable keyboard to have complete rescheduling and costing of absolutely everything.

It caught my imagination, I suppose because of the wonderful vision of life it implied (I still love network planning). All the complexities of people working together, people with different skills and temperaments, from different races and social classes, all the complications of fashioning and fitting together a vast range of heterogeneous and often obstinate materials, the hazards of shifting massive structures tens of miles across lashing seas and anchoring them to the sludge or rock of the sea bed — all this was to be controlled by one man tapping rapidly on a portable keyboard. And any snag, obstacle, inconvenience, rather than being allowed to send the whole house of cards tumbling to the ground, would simply be absorbed, analysed, and then the entire structure very finely altered, re-tuned, counterbalanced, and set on its way again, all embarrassments and dilemmas foreseen and neutralised, all interpersonal relations and moral issues rendered superfluous, nothing left to chance. It seemed a worthy cause to me and obviously profitable.

I told them I was their man. I really was. I’d study night and day to get into it. I’d be an expert on network planning before the year was out (and it was already September). They could pay me the absolute minimum salary for the first six months and then we could negotiate something reasonable on the basis of my performance, but I really wanted this job. I gave full reign to my enthusiasm, and you’ve got to remember these were still the bad old days pre-Thatcher when enthusiasm, at least for work, was taboo. But instinctively, and the feeling was overwhelming, I knew I was doing the right thing. It’s something I’ve noticed so often since then, that when I’m outside the exhausting claustrophobia of family and intimate relationships, my personality flowers, I get so damn confident. I knew I didn’t have quite the qualifications they wanted, I knew less than zero about network planning, so rather than bluffing it I simply offered to come in at a low price and work my bum off. I was dealing with a couple of canny older guys who needed a bargain and, as I suspected, would know one when they saw it. ‘Look, don’t even bother interviewing anybody else,’ I said with a sniff of humour so as not to sound unpleasant. ‘Take me. Please. I can guarantee it won’t be a mistake.’

In the end they picked up my soul for just £3500 a year. But I was sure I was the winner.

Perfectly Normal Behaviour

In those days InterAct had its offices on the North Circ, just past the Pantiles Pub, on the right heading south. So coming out of the interview victorious and immensely pleased with myself, I took a bus down to Park Royal to tell Mum. She was praying with a young girl who had leukaemia. I got this info from Mavis who was watching the kind of television they will put on in the no-man’s-land between breakfast and lunch. A diagram was showing how nuclear waste is sealed in canisters, a matter of burning concern for Mavis, who, one felt, could only have improved with a little radiation.

I waited for Mum, mooching about the poky old sitting room, savouring a feeling of detachment and maturity, examining here and there the pathetic objects that had inhabited my childhood, the Wedgewood, the quaintsy Hummels.

Finally Mother came downstairs with her dying girl. She was a stunningly pretty little thing, in her mid teens I imagine, a perfect, frail, pressed lily of a face, though with a silk scarf tight about her head; to hide hair loss I quickly supposed. I smiled sympathetically, but having embraced my mother the girl hurried out without sparing a glance for the rest of us. It’s something I’ve noticed frequently about the walking wounded. They don’t really want to be seen by the rest of us at the Crawley household. They’re embarrassed they’ve had to go looking for unorthodox help like this. All the stronger Mother’s pull must be to get them past the ogre of Grandfather at the door.

Hardly noticing me, Mother flopped onto the sofa and rubbed her fingers in her eyes. She seemed exhausted. I announced that after a brilliant interview I’d got a really promising job. She took her fingers from her eyes, focused on me and beamed. ‘Oh how wonderful, George. You must tell me all about it.’

‘Let’s go out to lunch,’ I said, ‘Just us two. Celebrate.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, Dad and Mavis. .’

‘Oh come on, you can leave Grandad and Mavis for once.’

She stood up smiling, smoothed down her dress, little girlish, looked around her, saw the other two imprisoned in their perennial sloth, television, newspaper, never a useful item in their hands, never an interesting comment to make, doing nothing but sapping away at her marvellous energy. She looked at them. They didn’t offer. They didn’t say, ‘Go ahead, Jenny dear.’ She hesitated, then said: ‘Oh well, perhaps I could fix them a couple of pork pies and a little egg salad. I think there are some salady things in the fridge. Hang on.’

I went into the kitchen and watched her working rapidly with plates, tomatoes, lettuce, boiled eggs. I noticed that there was something very different between the way she did these things and the way Shirley did them. Difficult to pin it down though. Unless it was simply that Mother lacked Shirley’s style, the way she has of turning a plate into a picture. Mother tended to fumble. There were cuts on her fingers. A tomato came out not in slices but rough fruity chunks. She wiped her hands on a torn dishtowel (showing Beefeaters) and we set out.

Perhaps this lunch was the happiest moment I ever had with my mother. We ate in a Greek place on Acton High Street near the railway bridge. Not ideal but what do you want in Acton in the late seventies. She was pleased as a child to be treated, perhaps more pleased, since children always think everything is due to them. She said: ‘I’m so very glad you’ve got what you wanted, George. It’s so important not to be frustrated and cooped up in life.’ ‘Kind of business that’s going to go like a bomb,’ I said, ‘with the way labour costs are shaping up right at the moment. People just have to be efficient.’ She said: ‘Oh, this is lovely,’ and she beamed.

Coming back from paying, though, I caught her frowning. ‘Don’t worry, it wasn’t that expensive,’ I laughed. ‘I’ve got the money,’ for it would have been like her to have spoilt things fretting about how much cash I had. But she said she was thinking of that pretty young girl with leukaemia who was almost certainly going to die.

Then leaving the restaurant an odd thing happened. I opened the door for her and she stepped out directly and really rather carelessly into the path of an older, patently working-class man dashing for the bus with three or four Co-op carrier bags swinging wildly from his hands; one of the bags slammed into her leg and, half turning, the man stumbled and almost fell. ‘Fuckin’ idiot!’ he screamed, scrambling on for the bus. ‘Fuckin’ idiot your-fuckin’-self,’ I roared after him. ‘Why don’t you watch where you’re fuckin’-well going?’

No sooner were these words out than I realised what a huge milestone this was. I had never sworn in front of my mother before.

Collecting herself, she said: ‘There wasn’t any need for that, George.’ And after a few moments walking, she said quietly: ‘I hope you don’t use that language often. It’s so horrible.’ But the time had come; I said firmly: ‘Mum, you live in a different world, okay? A different world, another planet. The planet Goodness. And maybe that’s fine for you. But I live here and now. Okay? Everybody says that stuff, you know, everybody, it’s even tame.’ She said: ‘Perhaps they do, I just hoped you wouldn’t.’ As of old, she had her grating, meek-shall-inherit-the-earth tone. But I had absolutely no intention of excusing myself as I might have done five years ago. The terms of our relationship had changed. I offered the treats. Very soon I would be offering the financial protection too. And she couldn’t expect to criticise me about my language or any other perfectly normal behaviour.

Contemporary Civilisation

Those good years. I see myself bolting down my muesli, buttering my toast, showing variously-coloured season tickets to variously-coloured conductors, the 260, the 12, learning to leave the carcinogenic dregs at the bottom of tuppenny coffees at the office, staring and staring at the green Hew-Pack screen, exploring strings, sprites, double trip codes (my own invention), glancing up at the frenzied chase of polished metal on the North Circ, brushing lunchtime sandwich crumbs from the keyboard, studying on the bus on the way home (never a headache then), catching the nine o’clock news and the business programmes, studying and calculating away on my little IBM till midnight and gone, while Shirley maybe did the dishes, prepared lessons, read her art books, phoned friends, picked up the comedies she liked on the box. The neighbours across the hall invited us over for drinks sometimes, but we discouraged it; they were a sweet couple, Mark and Sylvia, both cheerful and very attractive physically, but hopelessly dumb. There was no future in it. You see that more or less immediately with some people. They felt they’d arrived in their two-bedroom Finchley flat, while we were only beginning our way up. No point in doing much more than waving to each other.

More willingly we went to parties, dances, when we got to hear of them. We still loved each other’s company, still shone in groups and enjoyed making a show of our happy relationship. Shirley would come and sit on my lap. We would get involved in friendly little tussles. You could sense people watching, envying. We had that off to a T. Or occasionally she cooked the most beautiful meals from French recipes to surprise dinner guests: Jill and Gregory, now resident in Hornsey, both in commercial insurance; Peggy, pregnant again (I didn’t even bother offering advice this time, you learn to recognise someone’s destiny after a while); and just every now and then Shirley’s younger brother Charles, one of your pink champagne lefties (Cambridge third in Philosophy) of uncertain sexual orientation and extraordinary belligerence; despite Daddy’s huge salary he had somehow wangled himself a council flat off the Goldhawk Road, which he referred to as ‘my pad’ and rarely slept in.

So we had these little treats, the odd evening in company. But mainly our life was just the glorious, as yet unsoured routine: the busy days, bus and office, the Mars bars, lager, Rothmans and Evening Standards, the steeply rising curve of my career, weekend purchases of consumer goods, Shirley’s teaching, parents’ evenings and school plays, on and on, day in day out, but brightly peppered with our always successful lovemaking, the pleasure at gloomy weekends of leafing through brochures to choose Mediterranean holidays we could now easily afford. Surely this was the good life, a triumph really of contemporary civilisation, busy young urban people, working hard, living well, faithful to each other, honest. It seemed that nothing was lacking. In my defence I think I can say that had it been allowed to go on this way, I would have been the last person to want to change anything.

Shortly after they took me up to eight grand, Mavis had a third shot at killing herself, and finally got it right: whole bottle of Disprin in the early hours and then the head in the oven for good measure. I felt a little sorry for my mother who would inevitably see this as another defeat and find cause to blame herself, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling relieved that at least this weight had been taken off her shoulders.

Inevitably I was called in to deal with the practical side, the funeral arrangements. The difficulty here was to persuade Mother to go for a reasonably priced coffin and skip the rose tree bit at the crem which would have eaten up three months of her pension and would anyway have had to be shared with two other ‘cinderellas’, as Shirley rather quaintly put it. Likewise, when the back door was rotting away, when the fridge was faulty (occasionally defrosting itself all over the lino), when the bathroom window could never be properly shut because the wood had swollen, what on earth was the point of a wreath of pinks for mad Mavis? I did my best.

The surprise at the cremation, though, was that Grandfather cried. He said nothing, but tears streamed from his pulpy old eyes. Sitting next to him I put an arm round his thick back to comfort him and found him trembling with emotion. Foreseeing his own funeral was the only way I could explain it, for it is indeed awesome when the coffin suddenly slides away through black curtains and you know you will see that face (however unloved) never again; doubly awesome I suppose when you expect to be providing the object lesson yourself in the not too distant future.

It rained for the event. Peggy came late, in the last stages of gestation, accompanied by a tall blonde boy who may or may not have been the father. On trying to engage him in conversation he turned out to be Czech and spoke only the most broken English. Bob/Raschid had been informed but didn’t turn up, so that apart from the family there were only two rather mysterious spinster types in plastic macs who we eventually discovered were the other founder members of the Harrow branch of the Elvis Presley Fan Club. We let them take away the deceased’s record collection, rather generously I thought, since you never know how much that kind of stuff might be worth these days. Mavis had had no life insurance so there was no windfall to give the event any cheer, and after desultory conversation over coffee and digestives at Gorst Road everybody took their umbrellas and themselves off home.

In the Scirocco (disc brakes all round, electric windows), Shirley rather unexpectedly said: ‘I do feel sorry for your mother though.’ And over Tandoori chicken later, because we really had to get out of the house to brighten up, she said: ‘I wouldn’t mind you know if she got your Grandfather into a home now and came to live with us. She’s okay.’

‘No room,’ I explained promptly.

‘We won’t be where we are forever.’

I shook my head: ‘He’ll never go into a home. And so long as he’s in Gorst Road she’ll stay with him. Then you’re always saying how impossibly pious she is. Think, you’d have to stop swearing about the house, you’d. .’

‘It wouldn’t be the greatest of losses,’ she said coolly. ‘One grows out of swearing.’

Could she really be serious? When we had our lives so splendidly worked out already. ‘We’d have to cut out the quickies any time we felt like it.’ Had she thought about that?

‘That’s true, but I’ve always preferred the unabridged bedtime version myself.’

I stopped eating and looked at her, her long fine face, big, prominent eyes, the curve of character in her jaw, my good-looking if rather sinewy wife. ‘Come on, come on, Shirley! She’d always be reproaching us for not having children, you know what she’s like. Go forth and multiply, the Christian family, and so on.’

‘She’s never said a word about it to me,’ Shirley said, ‘in fact I’ve always thought her admirably sensitive on that point. My own mother’s much worse.’

‘But you can see the reproach in her eyes, for God’s sake. She doesn’t need to say anything. That’s the whole point about my mother; she is a reproach in herself.’

Shirley smiled. ‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, that the hang-up might be yours rather than hers, I mean, you imagine her reproaching you for things you feel guilty of anyway. You’ve substituted her for your conscience, it helps you to ignore it. You think, it’s her fault I’m feeling guilty, it’s just my stupid mum.’

‘Three cheers for psychoanalysis,’ I said brightly, filling my mouth with some fierce sauce or other. ‘Want to know what I dreamt last night?’

But Shirley said: ‘Anyway, I’d really rather like to have a kid now actually. Why not? In fact that’s partly what I was meaning to talk about. We could find a bigger place, have a baby and your mum could look after it while we were at work.’

Errors of Judgement

On reflection, one of the many errors of judgement I made with Shirley was mistaking class for intelligence, class and perhaps academic ability. They had seemed such rock-solid guarantees of personality at the time. I should have reflected: a) that any society, in its struggle to maintain the status quo, has a natural tendency to associate the manners of its ruling class with an above-average mental capacity, and; b) that girls often tend to be great and successful swots during their school years, get eight As at ‘O’ Level, or whatever the new equivalent is, but that this is no indication of true intelligence, which, on the contrary, only emerges through long-term behaviour patterns and real-life choices. I should also perhaps have reflected on the lightness, even flightness with which Shirley adopts and then drops and then perhaps readopts all sorts of opinions and points of view. One week she is pro-Israeli, the next pro-Arab, depending on who has committed the most recent atrocity; one week she will stop taking sugar because it’s bad for her skin and the next she’ll start taking it again because she needs to put on weight, she needs more energy. In short, Shirley is a person who neither has nor holds any truly deep-seated opinions, is capable of following no one particular policy. So that I should have seen that her sensible line on children (that they were too risky a business and that people who wanted good careers couldn’t afford the time a baby required and deserved — opinions that more or less reflected my own) might turn out to be short-lived. Yes, I should have seen it and been ready for it. Except that we were only eighteen when we met and I was in love with her.

‘You do appreciate,’ I broached it carefully back home in bed, ‘that this is a complete reversal of what you were saying only a few weeks ago. You remember? When Greg and Jilly were over and you were talking about that Ian McEwan thing you’d read. About not having children while there’s this nuclear threat. A complete reversal.’

‘So what?’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m growing up.’

‘But we went over this before and you promised. No kids.’

‘But that was years ago.’

‘Right. Of course it was. Those are precisely the kind of things you have to decide long range.’ And remembering something Mother once said, I told her: ‘If a person can’t keep a promise then what on earth’s the point of making one? The whole point about promises is that they bind you across time. Or no?’

Without a word she got up, pulled on her dressing gown and went into the living room to watch TV. I stayed put in bed listening to snippets of some film, sinister music, raised voices. I went over everything that had been said. I reflected that as usual I was right. The problem was that my exasperation, which was partly fear, made me too harsh. I came over as inhuman. Presentation problem.

I got up, found my own dressing gown and padded after her. Shirley was sitting on the sofa staring glumly at the television, a glass of Grand Marnier in her hands. She always likes to have snob drinks about the house. So do I for that matter. I was struck then, in that moment watching her before she noticed me, by the hollow angularity of her intent face in gloomy TV light, the slumped position of her body. She looked singularly unattractive. But I’m always careful·not to be swayed by such momentary perceptions. I knew Shirley was a good-looking woman and I was determined that our marriage would work out.

I went and sat next to her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

She didn’t so much as turn to look at me.

‘Come on, Shirl, I’m sorry, I was too harsh. I must sound like a real chauvinist arsehole sometimes. Forget it.’

When she still didn’t turn, I got up and went back to bed.

A few minutes later she came back into the bedroom herself. She snapped on the light. Blinding me.

‘Let’s go out,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘We can go down to the Torrington. There’s dancing till two Tuesdays.’

‘But I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.’

‘Likewise.’ And she said: ‘Listen, Crawley, if we don’t have kids it’s so we can make the most of our freedom, right? Whereas all you do is work. Work, work, work. There must be something else in life.’

Out on the High Road she walked with an exaggerated girlish flounce. Suddenly she turned and grabbed me and kissed me hard, forcing our lips together, fingers twined behind my head. We were under an umbrella. ‘You know you’re turning into an old office fart, George,’ she said brightly. ‘Our life is one great suburban bore.’ I kissed her back, trying to return her passion. ‘Come on, put your hand on my arse,’ she said, so I did. ‘Squeeze,’ she said, so I did. And at the Torrington we danced excitedly, with an excitement I hadn’t felt for some time, rubbing thighs, necking, clinging tight, then went home and tackled the titbit, making quite a feast of it. Come the morning, the office, the green screen, and I was shattered.

So much for the aftermath of Aunt Mavis’s funeral. One could hardly ignore the fact that some crucial balance had tipped. Something was wrong. Over the weeks and months that followed Shirley became moody, difficult, aggressive, while I was simply doing everything in my power to tip that balance back, to get back to the halcyon days before that conversation. With this in mind I brought home flowers and bottles of good wine in abundance, I cut out evening working as far as was possible for someone with my responsibilities and aspirations; I cut out the karate class I’d started going to for my back and which I was thoroughly enjoying and proving surprisingly good at. Instead I bought tickets for the opera and for orchestral concerts and ballets which I knew Shirley liked and which I myself didn’t mind.

What else? I found a stable in Totteridge where we could ride Sunday mornings for an outrageous price and rub shoulders with other young professionals like ourselves. I encouraged dinner parties, trips and acquaintances, even when I wasn’t really particularly keen, even when, for example, I had my mind on the huge new programmes we were troubleshooting for Brown Boveri. I tried to get her to take an interest in some large item we could feasibly buy, a new car for example, and I brought home brochures of Cavaliers, Orions, Giuliettas and the like. That usually cheers people up. But most of all I began to suggest that if she didn’t find St Elizabeth’s sufficiently challenging — and surely she had already stayed far longer than we ever intended — she should look elsewhere for a job, try for something in publishing again, or broadcasting. That had always been the plan after all. The problem as I saw it was that she wasn’t fulfilled in her work. She was bored. I even suggested she might think about coming into InterAct in some capacity. I was in a position to swing that now. But Shirley said on the contrary that she had no intention whatsoever of changing her job. What did publishers do in the end, sat in offices like everybody else, thinking of the price of paper. No, she owed to St Elizabeth’s the discovery that she had a vocation for small children. She loved her children. Really, she loved their eagerness, their innocence. In fact she loved teaching in general. It was fun. She had never expected she would, but there you were. She would be dead without her job. It was the only good thing in her life.

‘So,’ I said, mustering what enthusiasm I could, ‘why not get into a whole load of extra-curricular activities? The plays and concerts they’re always asking you to do. That could be exciting. Bury yourself in it, if you like it so much.’

‘You are a love,’ she said. ‘Such a delight.’

One Tries and Tries to be Sensitive

Another thing I had to put up with these days were the frequent visits from Shirley’s mother.

Mrs Harcourt was a busy, bossy, bustling woman, exhibiting all the character traits of the wife who gives up career for family and is then left stranded when the fledgelings fly the nest (an object lesson for Shirley if only she’d had eyes to see it). She spent an inordinate amount of time on her personal appearance (hair-do’s, sauna, massage), and had taken up photography as a hobby to fill in the becalmed oceans of time between one social function and the next. She always had her camera bag when she came to visit and at some point or other would always pull out a Nikon and take her glasses off to squint through its expensive auto-focusing lens at some unlikely subject, in fact the more unlikely the better, to show what an eye she had, how she saw ‘the unusual in the usual’, as she put it.

She squinted through the lens, maybe at a mess of saucepans inside one of our cluttered cupboards, maybe at soap suds being sucked into the drain, at a coffee mug balanced on the arm of the sofa, but as far as I remember she never clicked the shutter in our house and certainly never showed us any of the results if she did. Perhaps not even she could find anything sufficiently unusual, we are such regular people. She had put on two small shows at the local library in Chiswick, one depicting, from de rigueur unlikely angles, various stages of slaughter in a poultry abattoir off the Goldhawk Road, a comment on man’s barbarity to the chicken apparently, the other featuring pieces of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the mudbanks opposite the family’s Strand-on-the-Green house, clammy with slime and generally unrecognisable. The glaring gratuitousness of these enterprises was one of the few things Shirley and I were still capable of laughing about together.

Otherwise, Mrs Harcourt was a signed-up, card-carrying member of the newly formed SDP, as perhaps only an already wealthy unemployed person could afford to be. Her small head came surprisingly forward from her body and when she spoke, her crisp elocution set a fierce mole above one corner of her mouth in undulating motion. Perhaps this accounted for the immediate impression of pushiness she communicated.

She would come over in her Metro Deluxe, maybe three, four times a week, shortly after Shirley got back from school. When I arrived home a couple of hours later I wasn’t invited to join in whatever discussion was under way. Often they sat together in the kitchen or even the bedroom to make it clear they wanted to be on their own. Once I heard crying. More often there were loud peals of haw-hawing women’s laughter, Mrs Harcourt gasping for breath, probably holding her sides the way older women will, shrieks of ‘Oh dear, oh dear’, Shirley no doubt tossing her hair back, glistening pink mouth wide open, the gesture that had most enchanted me when first I met her.

‘So what do you find to talk about?’ I might ask later.

‘Oh, this and that.’

‘Come on, she’s here every other evening. There must be something.’

‘About Dad, about Charles. She’s worried that he never seems to have any girlfriends. You know.’

‘I’d be worried for the girl if he did.’

‘Then he was arrested last week in some anti-Cruise march.’

‘He likes to be arrested, it reinforces his council flat credentials. ‘ And off the cuff I asked: ‘What’s the score with your dad these days anyway? We haven’t seen him for donkeys.’

Shirley said: ‘What a lemon this cooker is. For God’s sake! You can never be sure what the temperature is. It doesn’t matter how you set it. Either the stuff comes out like charcoal or everything’s raw in the middle.’

‘And me?’ I asked with what I hoped was a wry smile.

‘What?’

‘Don’t you talk about little old George?’

‘Aren’t we insecure?’ she laughed. She said: ‘Of course we talk about you sometimes. It’d be odd if we didn’t. Wouldn’t it?’

‘Would it?’

‘‘I think so.’

‘Okay. And what do you say?’

‘Oh, that you don’t deserve me.’ She stabbed a fork into some casserole meat and smiled sweetly.

‘Tell me more.’

‘Mmm, let me see, that your background’s made you a repressed hypocrite.’

‘Ah, of course, that. Examples?’

‘Though naturally we always agree that deep down you’re a kind, honest man and you’ll probably turn out good in the end.’

‘Naturally.’

But I think I can tell a knife when it’s out. And turning.

I suggested that we try to get away more often if she felt so down. An occasional weekend in Paris; we could afford it now. We were averagely well-off young people, even if we might have done better to save. Or I could even take a week off at Easter. Maybe we could go to Spain, Italy. Or a few days riding somewhere. She said she didn’t want to go away for a weekend, let alone for Easter. She didn’t even want to go away in the summer. We were planning to drive down to Turkey that year, seeing as everybody else seemed to be going to Greece. Now she didn’t want to go. I could go on my own. I said, no, I could not go on my own. What was the point? ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘In your head you live entirely on your own all the time.’

One tries and tries to be sensitive. I said that if she felt really depressed and unhappy maybe, just maybe, she should see somebody, er, get help, I don’t know, a psychoanalyst or something. She said: ‘Do me a favour, sweetheart, please.’ And she said: ‘This flat is impossible, really impossible, you know that? Not a single window that gets the sun, the carpets are the worst dust traps imaginable, the drains stink, the cupboard doors don’t close, the hot water’s never hot enough, the pipes groan, the oven’s useless, the paint is nearly grey, and you can never do anything about it because the landlady doesn’t want to pay for it. I mean, what are we doing here?’

I felt she was rather exaggerating. Still, at least this was something I could deal with. I suggested that if it was the flat that was depressing her, though she could never say I didn’t help with the cleaning and so on, then why didn’t we buy our own place now instead of waiting.

‘With whose money?’ She was aggressive. I said she knew perfectly well with whose money. A bit of our own and a great deal of her father’s. Surely it was tacitly understood that when we were ready, he’d help us to buy. She said buying our flat wouldn’t solve anything. The flat was awful, but it wasn’t that that was getting her down. I said I didn’t know what else to suggest, it seemed to be me making all the suggestions and then her promptly telling me I was stupid every time I opened my mouth. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t be happy.

‘Don’t suggest anything,’ she said. ‘And above all, stop buying me flowers as if I were dying or something.’

Carrying the Gloomy Can

My mother came over. I think for my birthday. Mother is a great celebrator of birthdays, even when everybody else has forgotten them. She even remembers Hilary’s. It’s a ritual for her, a slavery almost, like the moral code she blindly follows, the tithe of her income in the collection plate, the sense of duty toward Grandfather, the not marrying a man because he’d got divorced a decade before.

She remembered my birthday and brought the traditional, home-baked, lemon-iced birthday cake, arriving at the door after two long bus rides all bright and chirrupy, because of course Mother is never more cheerful than when she knows she’s fulfilling some family duty. I thanked her and kissed her. I was even glad she’d come as I felt it might take some of the tension out of the air. But hardly have we sat down to eat our cake than Shirley is asking: ‘Saved any souls lately, Mrs Crawley?’

It was deliberately hurtful. She had the innocent smile on her face she always combines with her worst sarcasm. My Mother very simply said: ‘It’s not me saves souls, lovey, it’s God,’ and she began to tell us all about Peggy’s darling little boy Frederick. He was so big and blond, he had all his milk teeth already, he was such a gorgeous cuddly little boy. Her big clumsy hands massacred the cake with the flat’s blunt breadknife. ‘For you, George?’

Shirley asked: ‘‘I imagine Peg’s planning another one now?’

Naturally, given the still dubious paternity of the first, this had Mother knitting her brow. But she managed a forgiving laugh: ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know, Peggy never tells me anything.’

‘Vetting possible fathers, perhaps,’ Shirley suggested. ‘She’s into Buddhism these days, isn’t she? Perhaps we’ll have a Chinese in the family.’

When we were on our own a moment in the kitchen I asked her what the hell she thought she was up to. Why couldn’t we just have a pleasant meal together?

‘I hate,’ she said, ‘the way you’re such a goody goody when your mother comes, the way she thinks the sun shines out of your backside. If she knew what you were really like.’

‘And what am I like?’ I asked.

‘You hardly need me to tell you that,’ she said.

‘You were the one, sweetheart,’ I told her, ‘said you wouldn’t mind her coming to live here with us.’

‘Precisely because,’ she replied, ‘she might finally be forced to see the light. We might clear the air.’

‘I swear in front of her,’ I said, ‘I don’t try to hide anything.’

At which, and I’m afraid this is very effective, she simply burst out laughing and walked back into the living room.

Driving Mother home to Acton, I said: ‘Sorry if Shirl was a bit abrasive, Mum.’

‘Was she, love? I didn’t notice.’

‘I don’t know, she seems a bit, er, frustrated these days. I don’t know what it is.’

‘We all go through our bad patches, poor dear,’ Mother said complacently. Then waiting for the lights at the A40, she hazarded: ‘I know it’s none of my business, but perhaps it’s time to start a family. She did tell me she’d like a baby a while back.’

When I said nothing, watching for green — I had the usual hassler trying to edge past me on the inside, something I never allow — she said: ‘I always feel there’s a time in everybody’s lives when it’s just the next logical step to take, the only way to grow.’

I laughed, putting my foot down hard. I love driving. I said, ‘You forget, Mum. I specialise in logical steps, it’s my job, and I can assure you it wouldn’t be. Shirley’s is just a straightforward case of boredom. That’s the problem. Have a baby and she’d be even more bored. She’d always be trying to dump it on babysitters and relatives.’

Mother said brightly: ‘Well you know you can count on me, love. I have ever so much fun looking after Frederick.’

With a sense that events were in danger of getting beyond my control, I rang up Shirley’s father the following week and began a very, but very careful spiel I’d prepared in every detail: about Shirley being depressed because of the miserable flat we’d been in too long, about the landlady never wanting to decorate or replace anything, about the rental market being so hopeless these days with the ludicrously pro-tenant rules the Labour government had introduced and Margaret hadn’t as yet got round to repealing, about the price of property being so high it was unimaginable for two young people to buy a decent place on their own — and I asked him was there any chance, now I’d put a bit of money together myself, because I was saving about thirty per cent of my income — was there any chance that he could maybe chip in, rather massively actually, and. .

He said: ‘Not till I’m sure just how the settlement’s going to go with Mary, I’m afraid.’

It was lunchtime and when I’d got the phone down I looked at the world map on the wall where tiny flags showed all the countries where my software was being used. From Panama to Portugal, it said on the brochure, Austria to Australia. Why is it, I wondered, that I am always to be excluded from the intimate affairs of the lives of people close to me? Why? Why do they keep me out? I was hurt, angry.

‘But why should you need to be told?’ Shirley retorted.

‘Because we’re married for Christ’s sake! Because we’re supposed to be sharing our lives. You complain I don’t understand you and then you don’t tell me what I need to know to have a chance. Obviously it’s been upsetting you. It explains everything. And I’ve been faffing about in the dark for months.’

She said perhaps I was right. Yes, probably I was right. But she just hadn’t felt like telling me. She hadn’t the heart to talk about it. It was so awful. Her parents had been such a fixed point in her life, she’d never even realised really.

She was on the brink of tears, and for once I was allowed to console her.

But over the next months, though it seemed impossible, and above all unnecessary, the tension heightened. Shirley would be sullen and moody on my arrival home and almost anything I said would cause a flare up. I might innocently ask what was for dinner and abruptly be told I could bloody well get my dinner myself. I might, despite office weariness, traffic weariness, a briefcase full of work, offer to go to the Indian shop, pick up some goodies, and immediately have to hear that since I was no good at doing the shopping and always brought home the wrong things there was no point in my going, was there?

Of course, from what one gathers from magazine articles, TV documentaries, radio plays while washing the car, etc., it did occur to me that Shirl might be suffering from some sort of physical/mental illness, or even stress, and that perhaps I should be feeling sorry for her, rather than the opposite. This I honestly tried to do. But then I also thought that if she was prone to suffering from, say, clinical depression (though she never had so suffered in the seven previous years I’d known her), then I personally didn’t want to be the one who carried the gloomy can for the rest of my life, did I? It was a serious problem.

I stroked the wispy hair at the fine nape of her neck as she sat on the floor, back to the sofa, watching TV. She shook my hand off.

Or at least scenes like this occurred. Why couldn’t we be cheerful?

I said: ‘Fancy a pint down the Torrington? Bound to meet somebody.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Bit of a tipple, pinch your nipple.’

Nothing. No response.

I phoned her brother Charles, met him in a pub in Kentish Town and over a couple of jars asked him what he thought. Had Shirley ever suffered from depression as a child? He smoked heavily from my pack of Rothmans, playing a fifty-p piece across pale knuckles. He said Shirley had always been the parents’ favourite, they had always given her everything — ponies, dance classes, skiing holidays — while he had largely been ignored and then generally made fun of when he tried to point out the social injustice their lifestyle implied. He had given the Filipino maid a wad of notes from Father’s wallet once, though, intimidated and conditioned as the girl was, she had handed them straight back to Mother, after which his father had given him a thorough beating. That was the kind of family it had been. The difference being that while he rebelled, Shirley had lapped it up, and what she was reaping now was precisely the fruit of her mindless and selfish upbringing, the ennui of the directionless bourgeoisie. She needed a cause, a sense of purpose. He himself was on a local committee which tried to ensure that eligible people got rehoused. He had been instrumental in saving a number of squats which had been under threat from eviction. He was never depressed at all. With all the suffering there was in the world, he said, it was so damn obvious what one should do with one’s life that he couldn’t understand people lounging around moping.

It didn’t seem worthwhile arguing with someone whose views were so far beyond the pale, so I drank up, paid and got out. Though that evening, just for the record, as it were, I did suggest to Shirley that she might get involved in one of those groups that provides free crêches for working-class mothers.

‘Please,’ she said, chopping lemon, ‘are you out of your mind? Or do you want to turn me into your mother or something?’

So finally I put it to her. Could it really all be simply because she wanted a child?

Could all what be?

Her being so depressed and unfriendly (not to mention obtuse).

‘Oh that. Just a phase,’ she said, breezing about with saucepans. She kissed me on the side of the neck as I tucked into chops.

‘So it’s not that you want a baby?’ I often do wish, with Shirley, that I had my dictaphone in my pocket.

She shook her head rather exaggeratedly, refusing to take me seriously. I was patient.

‘No, because I mean if it is that, I mean, if you really want children,’ I took a deep breath, ‘then seeing as I don’t, I don’t know why, but I really don’t, I feel complete and happy without them, then I think the best thing to do would be for us to split up so that you’ll be in plenty of time to find another man and we can stop making life a misery for each other. Which seems a crime frankly. I mean,’ I hurried on, talking at her back now as she sloshed water in the pans — Shirley always seems to be doing something with pans — ‘I personally don’t want us to split up, at all, I really don’t, I just want us to be happy together. I’ve said it a thousand times. However, if you. .’

The saucepans are the new, slow cooking, heavy metal kind, and cost a good month’s salary. Though I’ll give her they’re stylish. I never objected to such purchases. On the contrary, I encouraged anything that would make her happy. I was always so relieved when there was something she actually wanted.

But now at last she turned. She stood with her backside hitched up against the draining board, her fingers gripped to its edge. She was wearing glossy blue running shorts. She looked at me and looked at me and at last after all these months she burst into tears. She wept and suddenly crouched down over pitted red-and-black chequered lino. She said of course she didn’t want us to split up. How could I even imagine such a thing? And she was sorry if she was being unpleasant and bloody-minded. She didn’t even know why she was like this herself. But she felt so upset about so many things. Honestly. And she burst into tears again.

Tears, I must say, have a quite overwhelming, even disabling effect on me. I have never been able to resist them. I had been unable to resist my mother’s as a child and I was unable to resist Shirley’s now. Hence at this point I gave up any attempt to follow the argument through to some sensible conclusion and hurried from the table to go and comfort her. We cuddled, she cried, I whispered softly, we kissed, looked into each other’s red eyes, confessed, forgave, kissed again and eventually, arriving somehow in the bedroom, made love, with me foolishly, if not unnaturally, hoping the tide had turned.

There followed a very happy two weeks of perfect reconciliation, relaxation, fun. So, yes, it was still possible. Everything was hunky-dory. Turkey was on. We bought our ferry tickets, got the car serviced. We were going to have a great time. Life was great. And then it began all over again: arguments, sulking, general bitchiness. Turkey off. Not only Turkey, but any other holidays I might be planning too. Okay? When I reminded her of all she’d said that evening, all she’d conceded, she either refused to acknowledge that such a scene had ever taken place, or she’d try some bright sardonic line like: ‘All under duress, Your Honour, under duress. My lawyer wasn’t present. I retract everything.’ Or she’d throw back her head, laughing, and say, ‘Oh George, I do love the way you always, always believe you’re right. You’re a phenomenon.’

I spoke to no one about this. Every morning I went into work, joked with Tony, my assistant programmer, flirted mildly with the secretaries, Joyce and Sandra, reported to Johnson and Will Peacock, wined and dined clients, made rude jokey propositions down the phone to switchboard. No doubt you can picture it, the average stale-tobacco, fluorescent-lit office life, with all the little formalities and pleasantries and gallantries, the way you live and brush up against people and talk behind each others’ backs and generally get on famously.

I spoke to no one. Probably it was the same for Shirley. Jolly and lively at work, glum and offhand at home. As if we were only our real selves of old when we arrived in the safe environment of the office, the school. If other people came, Mark and Sylvia, determined to be neighbourly (had we noticed the lock didn’t engage on the front door, and what about the state of the lawn?), forcing their way in with a few cans of Whitbread’s or a tin of chewy flapjacks, we put on a great front. Shirley was almost too dazzling, I drank heavily, but as soon as they were gone, we slumped. The television. A newspaper. Separate bedtimes.

And it was on one of these evenings, as I remember it, that my heart hardened. I use that Biblical expression because at last after a childhood of Bible studies I understood what it meant: a deliberate, quite conscious shutting oneself off from the tenderer emotions. My heart hardened. I’d had enough.

This is What I Should Have Gone For

Grandfather had become entirely incontinent. I had my suspicions frankly that the old NHS had rather cocked up the prostectomy, maybe whipped out something they shouldn’t have, bit of sphincter or something, but as Shirley said, you’d never get to the bottom of it. Nor was Grandfather likely to generate much sympathy in tabloid newspapers or even a court of law were one to try for some compensation. Instinctively people would see he deserved it. So I spent a little time every morning checking out the geriatric home situation. I gave exactly fifteen minutes, ten thirty to ten forty-five, to phoning up all the various bodies concerned. I felt in this way I’d be informed and prepared when the crunch came and wouldn’t have to lose a whole week finding out the score right at some critical moment when I had a new project on my hands or something.

The problem, my enquiries revealed, was that the old man wasn’t suffering from senile dementia. Had he been suffering from senile dementia and hence truly in danger of doing damage to himself, accidentally putting the electric kettle on the gas, or setting his jacket on fire when lighting his pipe, then they would have taken him in (though with something like that on the cards one couldn’t help feeling it might have been worth hanging on to him for a while). Otherwise, they encouraged home care, and given that the social worker had reported my mother as being ‘valiant and willing, if a little overprotective’, they were of the opinion he should remain in Gorst Road.

Well, with property prices rising sharply again, I felt on reflection that this solution suited me for the moment too. Hang on a few years, then get a whole bundle of money for the house, enough not just to pay for Grandfather’s home but to leave something to spare for setting up Mother in a small place of her own as well. That way we wouldn’t be forced to take her in ourselves.

Until two things happened in the same week. Grandfather fell down the stairs and bust his hip, and Mother, who now had to wash him and change him like a baby at all hours of the day and night, came down with some sort of virus that completely floored her. She phoned me feebly at 7 a.m., having waited of course until the third day of this illness before ‘bothering me’.

I drove over in excruciating traffic to the banana republic of Hackney, aiming to winkle out the ever phoneless Peggy and take her over to Park Royal to help out. In the event, however, the gipsy painted third-floor door of her bedsit was answered, not by my sister, but by a rather stout Indian woman, the kind with a beachball of brown belly showing through gaudy drapes and a neat red bullet-hole in her forehead. She was holding the lardy and wriggling young Frederick, while her own (presumably) two small girls peeped duskily from behind her sari — beyond which, a backdrop of carelessness and charity-shop makeshift. I noticed a saucepan on the carpet, for example, a newspaper torn to shreds.

Peggy had a job, the woman said. Where, doing what, how could I get there? She didn’t know. Which again is typical of Peggy. She gets a babysitter and then doesn’t bother to explain how she can be contacted. What was the woman supposed to do if the child fell ill, if there was an emergency? But Peggy always imagines all will go well. This was what she had taken over from our childhood religion I suppose: faith. Well may it serve her. Still it was good to think there was another income in the family.

I drove over to Gorst Road, another hour simply tossed into the maw of the capital’s time-gobbling traffic system, and had to wait a further five minutes for Mother to drag herself down to the front door, since I’d forgotten my own keys. She was quite ashen and complaining, very unusually for her, of crippling stomach pains. Had she seen a doctor? No she hadn’t and didn’t want to. It was just a bug. But she must go and see her doctor. For heaven’s sake! She wouldn’t. But. . She wouldn’t. She hated doctors. God would take her in his own good time. My mother actually said that. I hugged her all the same and half carried her in her nightie to the sofa; then went up to see Grandfather; the stink on the landing, however, told me more than I needed to know and I went back downstairs.

Mother had now stretched out on the couch. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘And the social services, for Grandfather, have you been in touch?’ Apparently a social worker would come in the next couple of days. ‘So we should take him to hospital. Immediately. Where they can look after him.’ But he didn’t want to go to hospital, she said. He refused. He’d shout and scream if you tried. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. She closed her eyes and sighed, holding her stomach. I thought: ‘Incredibly, these two people are my responsibility. This is my family. And I’m supposed to be meeting my contact from Tektronics for an early lunch.’ I asked: ‘Isn’t there anybody from the church could help?’ She shook her head. There was, but they were on holiday.

For a moment I stood helpless in the dark cave of my childhood sitting room, trapped again: the photographs, the Wedgewood, the dusty naïveté of the Hummels, the sullen rhododendrons outside the window, and, blending it all together, an all-pervading sense, which was also a smell, of brown. Somehow the place stank of brown. There I stood. Until the obvious occurred. There is nothing you can’t pay your way out of. And even though it was going to be expensive, I moved to the phone.

That evening I finished work as early as I could and drove to Gorst Road for about seven to check that all was well and we were getting our money’s worth. The nurse was tall and pleasantly bulky, her hair done up in a bun on a long thick neck, one of those women who carry weight well, moving about with a crisp rustle of uniform and tights faintly chafing together between strong legs. In her early thirties, I guessed, efficient, assured, getting through. ‘Will do, Mr Crawley,’ she said in response to some request or other, and I told her to call me George.

Upstairs I found Mother asleep in her green nylon sheets (Shirley would wince just at the thought) and the passageway beyond now smelling almost sweetly. I looked in on Grandfather to find him sitting up with the Express. Every piece of clothing, towel, dressing-gown, string vest, was neatly, femininely folded. Even the old man’s still black, rather fierce hair was combed flat, his cheeks shaved. He looked surprisingly virile, as if he might spring up into action at any moment. I smiled. ‘Had to get a nurse in,’ I said. ‘Bit expensivo, but there you go.’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘Good day at the office?’

I thought of the nurse talcing his loose old balls and bum. I thought, if only one could afford the service on a regular basis, family life could be made quite pleasant. In our own case, as long as it wasn’t for more than two or three nights, it would be worth every penny. And on the way downstairs, noting how the threadbare patches were bigger now, the bannister rail looser, it occurred to me that I might have sex with this nurse. Why not? I could tell Shirley I had to stay the night with Mother and I could perhaps get a leg over in mine and Peggy’s old room. That should exorcise a few ghosts.

Her name was Rosemary. I went out and bought stuff for her to prepare herself some dinner (thanks to Shirley I am actually quite an astute shopper) and we ate together over fantasy Formica in the kitchen and talked. It was really most pleasant, Rosemary’s company, a quite unexpected treat. I felt so easy, so relaxed, I amazed myself. Especially since I had been wondering recently whether I didn’t need tranquillisers. She explained, when I marvelled at all the little extras she’d done, that nursing wasn’t her vocation at all, she had wanted to be a pianist. She had trained and trained and very nearly made it, but not quite. Then not having quite got married either, she had decided she must have a safe source of income. She had taken up nursing, but signed on with an agency, rather than staying with the NHS, ‘to be flexible’, she said. Now she quite liked the job in a curious sort of way. My grandfather, for example, had been terribly sweet, had told her all kinds of interesting stories.

I didn’t object. I listened, and listening, supping whatever cans I’d found in the local subcontinent emporium, I remember being delighted by the straightforwardness of all this, another life unfolding so sensibly, so poignantly; and as so often when I meet a new woman, regardless of looks, I realised that this was the woman I should have married: cheerful, practical, generous, talented, not overly bitter about her disappointments, getting on. She had large white sensible teeth, long pale fleshy hands that seemed to have a quick active almost animal life of their own. There was something nervously vibrant about them as they lay still on the tablecloth, like starfish almost, damp, soft, alive. No nail varnish. No frills. This is what I should have gone for.

After eating, she asked permission, lit up a cigarette and then, for no reason I could see, simply smiled directly at me. Her lips, which weren’t well defined, had a rather sad wise twist, blowing out smoke. Her cheeks were full. And I recalled something I’d been thinking lately, on a bus somewhere, watching somebody kiss somebody: that all young women, however apparently plain or even ugly at first glance, all have their little attractions, their charms, their lures, not one without some way of catching your eye: a ready smile of complicity, a way of cocking the head so that hair falls to one side (why does this attract me so much?), a way of lightly touching your wrist perhaps, or of taking a knuckle in the mouth to laugh. One way or another, and consciously really I often think, they compensate for what they may not have, that archetypal body. So with Rosemary, her frank friendliness, utterly without flirtation, her acceptance of you, without any of the barriers of male-female social manoeuvring (viz Joyce, the more unnattainable the gigglier and flirtier she became), all this seemed to draw attention to the large fleshy presence of her body as something straightforward, animal, loveable, that might well embrace you, without difficulty, without anxiety, if only it could be unlocked from that angular uniform.

Her breasts were inescapably large, even extravagant.

And I was just getting definite ideas into my head, toying with breathtaking strategies, thinking it would be wise to drink a bit more for courage, when Peggy arrived, complete with baby Frederick and, after rushing up to see Mother, announced (she had cropped her hair since last I saw her) that she would be staying the night in her own room. So that in the event I was left with the rather less voluptuous, though not entirely unsatisfactory curves of the North Circular.

Wild Summer Rain

I don’t know what took hold of me that night. I went to bed, as usual, an hour or so after Shirley, having read, perfectly calmly, through a couple of hardware reviews I like to keep up with. I undressed and slipped under the quilt. It was July, but raining hard outside. In just two weeks we were supposed to be going to Turkey, except that all was up in the air with Shirley’s saying she didn’t want to come. Would I go on my own? Hardly. But the place on the ferry was booked. Why couldn’t Shirley be more reasonable?

Almost at once I realised I wasn’t going to sleep. I lay still. I assumed my customary sleeping position. No chance. I was in a state of such extreme physical and mental alertness. My skin seemed to sing and crawl with contradictions. There was just so much blood in me, unused, unfulfilled. I clenched my fists, my toes. I ground my teeth. For a while I surrendered to the most vivid erotic images, my tongue pressed against the blue cotton swell of a girl’s plump panties, for example, that sort of stuff. Then trying to force my mind elsewhere, I wondered about my mother’s life, its astonishing sexless serenity. How could people be so different from each other? What had happened to the straightforward sensible life I had planned?

Zombie-like, as if controlled from elsewhere, I sat up in the stale dark half light. I stood and went to the window, immensely tense, aware of sweat on my hands. Pushing back the curtain revealed the inevitable parallel lines of stationary cars, gleaming dully in rain and lamplight down to the dripping park. ‘My whole life,’ I thought, recalling Charles, while at the same time reflecting how unlike me this was, ‘has been nothing but a pathetic trundling along on the metalled rails of my early social and sexual conditioning.’ Confused, excited, I pulled some clothes on, found my shoes.

For more than an hour then, without an umbrella, wearing nothing more than Terylene trousers and a cotton shirt, I walked the respectable brick streets of Finchley. I sucked in the fresh damp air. I felt at once bursting, bursting with strenuous life, and at the same time paralysed, trapped, marching at a zombie-ish pace. But trapped by what? Was anything or anyone preventing me from doing as I chose?

I walked. The wild summer rain fell in dark gusts and clattered against sensible silent houses, the black gloss of blind suburban windows. And so I began to plan very definitely how I would invite Rosemary on holiday to Turkey in place of Shirley. Why should she say no? I would pay for everything. She had taken up agency nursing to be flexible, she said. She wasn’t married, she said.

I planned my approach in immense and teeth-gritting detail. I would have nerves of steel. I would say this, say that, smile that smile which Shirley had told me was sexy. And I fantasised what would follow, hot nights in Turkish hotels, Karma Sutra positions followed by good cheerful meals in spicy restaurants. Other people found relief in affairs, didn’t they? I had even heard a somewhat embarrassing and wimpy confession from Gregory recently.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I sat in the living room reading through papers from work, and the following morning, bewilderingly early, a good half an hour before she was due to be substituted, I was pushing into Gorst Road from a breezy damp morning to put it to Rosemary. Turn of the key, customary tug and push, and the door was open.

‘Hello, love,’ Mother’s voice sang, ‘I’m back on my feet.’ Embracing me, she said, ‘It’s something of a miracle really. I felt so ill yesterday.’

Indeed she still looked frail as rice paper. Though she gave a little clap of her hands and beamed. Which is a way she has. Rather as if we were at Sunday school, singing choruses.

‘And the nurse?’

‘I sent her home, poor dear, she was so tired. I think I can cope myself now. To be honest she was being rather bossy with poor Dad. I’m just making tea for Peggy if you want a cup.’

Peggy was still in bed, despite the fact that her infant could be heard yelling in the kitchen.

I suppose it must be indicative of the state I had got myself into, or rather that Shirley, that life had got me into, that only two hours later, as soon, that is, as I had a moment alone in the office, I was actually on the phone to this girl I had merely eaten a frugal meal with, watching her slow white hands as she fed herself.

‘I got your number from the agency. I said you’d left your purse.’ ‘Oh did I? How silly of me. I’ll. .’ ‘No, no you didn’t.’ ‘What?’ ‘You didn’t leave it. I got your number because I want to see you again. I enjoyed meeting you so much.’

After a short pause, she said: ‘You do realise you just woke me up. I’ve been on my feet all night.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I was ready to hang up the moment she said no. I truly did like her but I couldn’t see myself hanging on the phone and begging. My wife was a misery was the point. I wanted some fun.

She said: ‘Okay, how about next Friday?’

I put the phone down and stared around me: the desk, the Venetian blinds, the attractive HewPack hardware. Done it! Done it!

If you really want to do it, George. If you really want to be that person.

I stared, pushing the knuckles of both hands together, biting the inside of a cheek, concentrating. And realised I hadn’t really thought this through yet. I hadn’t decided. My heart wasn’t that hard. The truth being, I suppose, that for some people — Peggy springs to mind — new departures of this kind are just water off a duck’s back; experience doesn’t touch them deeply whatever they do, and so any course of action is more or less as good as the next. While for others of us, for me, it is a bath of acid. Did I really want to become an adulterer? There was a fear of changing, of losing myself somehow, a fear my mother had always exploited. I would far rather be good and stay put, if only one could have fun and pleasure with it.

Why couldn’t Shirley be pleasant?

By six o’clock that evening I had spent so much time blind in front of my screen agonising and wrangling with myself — Rosemary yes, Rosemary no (and how was I to explain my Friday evening outing?) — that I came to the conclusion that I must, must force the decision at once, tonight, or go mad and quite possibly lose my job into the bargain.

When I arrived home, Shirley had just come out of a long session with her mother who was now quite blatantly using her daughter as a recipient for all the bitter things she had to say about her father. Not something likely to improve our own marriage. The moment Mrs Harcourt was out the door I told Shirley I wanted to have a serious talk with her. She said, with her usual blithe irony, to fire away. Coming straight to the point, since otherwise I felt I mightn’t manage, I said our marriage was going through a very bad patch, we both knew that, and I was frustrated. Well, we had always said we would be honest with each other, and so now I was telling her I was going to be unfaithful to her.

‘You what!’

The fact that she was so incredulous galvanised me. Hadn’t she seen it coming? Determinedly I began to explain. I had never had another girl apart from her, had I? We had been going out since we were seventeen, for God’s sake. And I had never had much fun in life with going straight from school to university to job, because so desperately in need of money. I felt I had missed out on something. Everybody had more than one lover these days. Most happy marriages were the result of both partners having already sown their wild oats as it were. Now I was going to be unfaithful. I had a girlfriend.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked, almost gasped. It was as though she’d been living in a different world.

‘I’ve always believed in discussing everything,’ I said. ‘It’s you who always refuses to talk openly. I wanted you to see how dire things had got. I wanted you to understand.’

She shook her head fiercely from side to side, sat down, stood up, turned round, fidgeting her hands. She even laughed. And she began to tell me how weird I was, how I had simply sucked up my mother’s mad piety, my Grandfather’s coarseness, my sister’s naivety, my aunt’s dumbness too. I should listen to myself. Boy, oh boy, should I listen. I was a bundle of contradictions. I was crazy. How could I announce I was going to go and have it off with somebody else and then try and defend myself. She got angry. When I wouldn’t reply, she suddenly quietened down and said flatly:

‘So it’s the end.’

We were in the living room and I remember we both kept moving rather awkwardly about, not wanting to face each other. When she turned her back to look out of the window I saw her shoulders were trembling and this filled me with tenderness.

I said what did she expect me to do, the way she’d been treating me these past months? Really, what did she expect?

Shirley was silent.

‘I don’t love her,’ I said. ‘I just feel I have to have some fun. I’m living in a tomb here.’

She burst into tears. But this time my teeth were already gritted. I stood firm. She said if only I’d leave her and our bloody ‘relationship’ alone for five minutes, perhaps everything would buck up.

She stopped speaking and cried, still facing the big, rather clumsily double-glazed window where dusk was drawing the last colour from brown brick houses opposite. (Houses, houses and more houses. Everywhere people living together. How do they do it?) Then in a surprisingly sweet voice she said: ‘Anyway, if you think I’ve changed since we met, what about you?’

‘What about me? I haven’t changed at all.’

‘You were so fresh,’ she said. ‘You were so young. So urgent.’

‘No one wants our marriage to work more than me,’ I said.

‘So don’t go and sleep with this other woman. You said you didn’t love her. I could understand if you’d fallen in love with someone, but otherwise, what’s the point?’ Then trying to change the tone of the conversation, she said: ‘If it’s fun you want, we can go and play crazy golf, for heaven’s sake.’ Because we had done this recently and really enjoyed ourselves, an empty Saturday afternoon in Friern Park.

‘I’ve decided,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have told you. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to have this sorted out.’

Very quickly then, looking round her and picking up a few things, she went to the door and ran down the stairs. Her heels could be heard scratching like struck matches on the cement. From the window I watched her opening the garage door, her skirt lifting up the back of her slender calves as she stood on tip-toe a moment. She disappeared inside, then after a couple of false starts reversed out in her usual jerky way, clipping the kerb as she backed round. At the end of the close, indicating left, she turned right and was gone.

A Massive Change of Position and Principle

For the first time in some years, as the car accelerated away, I cried myself. Perhaps she was right. It was the end. Though I very much hoped not. Later I prepared myself a couple of scrambled eggs, reflecting that I’d have to set the alarm earlier than usual in case I had to go to work by bus. Shirley had presumably gone to her mother’s new and unnecessarily sumptuous flat in Ealing (the money that would have bought us our own place) and might well spend the night there, leaving me earless. I phoned a few times, but only got the engaged signal. Now I was getting used to it a little, I didn’t feel so unhappy with the new situation. At least there were signs of life, an explosion of drama after what had seemed a life sentence of static friction.

And the following evening, after bowling (yes, bowling!), then dinner, then Rosemary’s place, the advantages of my strategy became all too apparent. I had nothing to gain from not pursuing my goal to the limit now. So there was no hesitation. At my bright and chattering best — I felt seventeen again, but with the advantage of years of experience — around midnight I got Ros (as she asked me to call her) onto a rather Bohemian mattress on the floor (surrounded by mugs, wine-glasses and discarded clothes) and despite my delirious excitement at this new and so different body performed not at all badly I thought.

I returned on Sunday evening to find a note which read as follows:

George, please, this is a nightmare. George, we can’t let our marriage end this way. We can’t. I know it is partly my own fault, but I can’t help it if I’ve been feeling depressed. I didn’t tell you, but I have been to the doctor about it and to a psychoanalyst, you got me so worried that I might be mentally ill in some way, but both of them told me there was nothing wrong with me. There’s a point at which unhappiness is just unhappiness in the end, frustration just frustration. George, I know that when we were younger, at university, with Jill and Greg, when career and work and all the foreign trips we were going to make seemed so important, I said I didn’t want children. I said I was worried about nuclear war and so on and concerned about what sort of society our generation’s kids would grow up in. Silly things to say really. Now I just know that I want children, my own children. I know that that is the way for fulfilment for me; honestly, I’m just not interested in a career of any kind. I appreciate that you can’t possibly understand this physically, I mean the way I feel it in myself. How could you, being a man? But can’t you accept it as a lover and husband and friend? Okay, I take your point that I promised. But it was an ignorant promise, it was like promising not to eat before you know what hunger means. Can’t you see? You’ve become so hard, George. Why not soften up, please? Come on, be my bright handsome, hard-done-by, will-make-good little Methodist again, then let’s forget the whole thing and head off on that holiday together.

All my love. Still!!!!

SHIRLEY.

It was nine o’clock. I phoned at once. She arrived forty minutes later. From the tone of that letter and then her broken voice on the phone, I had imagined her bedraggled: jeans, a sweater, tennis shoes, tear-streaked cheeks, little-girlish. I had imagined we would cry together and both plead mea culpa, then laugh and think how crazy we’d been. That was what I expected, and at least partly very much wanted. Instead she was carefully made-up, her lips were glistening and she was wearing a new twenties-style cylinder dress that frocked out just above slim knees, her feet pointing carefully in sharp white high heels, likewise new. There was something glassy and brittle and untouchable about it all, but stylish too; it suited her shape, her thin face and round wide eyes. She embraced me.

‘Shirley!’ I sighed. I get these waves of emotion sometimes. I just want to be very sentimental and have everything settled and happy.

But the embrace was brief. She sat down and crossed her legs, leaned forward, enunciating very correctly, as if at an interview or addressing a mixed race audience. She said: ‘I’ll stay, or rather you’ll stay as long as you give up the idea of other women. Otherwise you’ll have to go.’

Looking back, and considering my mood on seeing her walk into the flat at once so vulnerable and stylish, I’m sure this is a concession she could easily have wrung out of me, had she only had the sense to approach the matter differently, that is seductively, kindly, with comprehension. But the idea of going straight back into conflict and being simply bulldozered into concession was simply not on. It was thus with a wisdom that surprised me, worthy of my mother I thought, that I said: ‘Shirley, honestly, there are so many things wrong with our relationship, the only hope we’ve got is to live together happily for a while. Then maybe we can make concessions. I mean, it’s a long process. You have to work for it.’

‘Oh, so for now we just kiss and make up,’ she said. ‘Is that it?’

‘But isn’t that what you said in your letter?’

‘As long as you promise,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to be treated like a doormat.’

I stood up. Somehow I felt as if I was acting, very aware of my position in the room, of what I was doing with my body, my hands. It all seemed very unreal. Not an unpleasant feeling, but a shade disturbing. I gave the wall a soft punch. I said look, look, if what she was really trying to tell me was that she wanted children and a happy traditional family, then simply to play it extremely slowly, extremely sweetly, and I might give in, probably would in fact, yes, most men did in the end, didn’t they, but for the moment I was afraid that a baby would simply bind us together all the more, precisely when there were very clear signs that perhaps we weren’t really suited to each other. Wait just a few months, I said. Hang on.

Would Shirley notice if the sun rose in the west? One wonders. Certainly on this occasion she didn’t appear to appreciate what a massive change of position and principle I had just offered, what a major climb down this was.

She lit a cigarette. ‘Unless you promise not to go to this other woman again, then you’re going to have to get out of this flat and go and live on your own.’

‘Shirley,’ I said, ‘we’re both tired, we’re overwrought. Now let’s just go to bed and sleep on it. I’ve got to go to work in the morning. You’re on holiday. I’m not.’ (School had just broken up.)

She said the last thing she wanted to do right at the moment was be in the same bed with me.

‘Suit yourself.’

But in the middle of the night she must have slipped in under the covers because I woke up with a start to find her clinging to me. She was naked, which was unusual for her (she usually wears a rather unexciting blue cotton nightdress). Not crying, not saying anything, she twined herself round me. So that when I had fully woken up we made love, violently, with her on top, which again was unusual. And while this was going on I remember thinking with some euphoria, ‘We’re really living now, really living, a modern life, with passion, with intrigue!’

17 Ollerton Road

Exactly five days before our scheduled departure for Turkey, Shirley received a letter ‘advising’ her that due to cuts in government grants, etc. etc., her school was being obliged to reduce its staff by two and they thus regretted to inform her that she would be without a job as from the end of the summer break. For myself I couldn’t help feeling that this was rather a blessing in disguise. My first big stroke of luck. Now she would be forced to go for something more stimulating where there were real career opportunities to be had, especially since she wasn’t in a position to apply to most state schools, never having got her teacher training certificate. She could move into something like the media or marketing or business administration or product management. Which should force her to brighten up and most probably get over the baby business.

But Shirley took it all very badly. On first showing me the letter when I arrived home from work, she was frantic and it was clear that she had been crying for much of the day. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. Trying without success to comfort her, I said laughingly that for the tough intellectual cookie she had always been, she was crying rather a lot lately, wasn’t she? She went and locked herself in the bathroom. Not for the first time I experienced that acute, that lacerating awareness of having in all probability married the wrong woman.

The curious thing being that whenever I have this sensation I immediately do my utmost to repress it, I simply won’t accept it, even now, and I get into a veritable frenzy of activity in an attempt to put things right and ‘save the situation’. So now I looked around and started preparing a spaghetti alla carbonara, one of the few decent things I know how to cook, found a bottle of wine at the back of the larder, white, and stuck it in the ice-box, put a tablecloth on the table (took me a while to find where she kept them), sawed through a couple of frozen rolls and stuck them under the grill, etc. I made a feast.

When she finally emerged, I like to think lured by the smell of sizzling bacon, Shirley was thankful but still apparently inconsolable. It was the only thing that had been going well in her life, she said, her relationship with the children at school. The only thing that hadn’t turned sour. And just to lose it like this. . Everything, everything was going to pieces.

I tried to be cheerful, bustling with kitchen implements I wasn’t quite used to. ‘Think of it as a challenge,’ I said. ‘Get yourself a good job.’ But she said that was another thing, she couldn’t get herself a good job now, could she, because if she did she’d never have a child. You couldn’t take a job and then go and get pregnant in the first few months, it wasn’t serious. And she just didn’t want to leave it for a couple of years more.

I sympathised, though privately I’m thinking, Come on, buck up girl! I mean, if something like this happened to me, I know I’d bounce right back, go for it, don’t let them get you down. Where was her joie de vivre, for heaven’s sake? She was only twenty-eight. And the following day, overtaken by a sudden summer horniness urgent as thirst, and seeing as I hadn’t actually promised anything to anyone just as yet, I left the office early (thinking, after all, we’d be on holiday next week) and went over to Willesden to see Rosemary.

Who had her period. Mistresses, one feels, shouldn’t have periods. We kissed and sat and talked. She was saying (again!) how amusing my grandfather had been with all his navy stories and little jokes and she kept asking, rather pointedly I thought, about my family and job. When I tried to get away after an hour or so, she protested, she wanted me to stay the night all the same, period or no period, so that I finally had to explain what experience now tells me I should either have got out in the open at the very beginning or just forever and forever denied: that I was married (but that my wife and I didn’t get on and were thinking of divorcing, etc. etc.). Rosemary told me to put on my jacket, pick up my flowers and my bag and get the hell out at once. Just get out. Which, after only a second or so’s lightning quick thinking, I decided to do.

I drove home and gave the flowers, fortunately still in their wrapping paper, to Shirley, which did have some cheering effect. But it was a day of incredible blunders. For, embracing me to thank me for the flowers, she sniffed the perfume an earlier embrace with Rosemary had left. (Women are so sharp with perfumes, whereas to be honest I can barely tell one from the other, they all smell of sex to me.)

I confessed at once. As I said, I was determined to be honest if nothing else. This time she didn’t cry but was extremely cool and collected.

‘So out you go.’

She went into the bedroom and started piling my stuff into suitcases. I refused to take any notice and sat down in front of some programme on geriatric care, which again had me wondering whether it wasn’t time to dislodge Grandfather and sell Gorst Road.

‘Out,’ Shirley reappeared. ‘Your bags are in the hall.’

‘Where to?’ I said.

‘Wherever you like.’

‘Shirley,’ I said. ‘Come on, we’ve been through all this. Please be reasonable. Anyway, if I go, how are you going to pay the rent, now you haven’t even got a job? Then we’re supposed to be on the ferry Saturday morning at ten.’

‘Out.’

She sat down, leggily cross-legged on the floor and started to stare at me, while I continued to watch the television. She stared and stared, having me feel the full pressure of a gaze I refused to return. Then she had just opened her mouth to speak when the doorbell rang and it was Mark and Sylvia with their usual bottles of beer. And for once they were warmly welcomed, by both of us, as if by prior agreement. Oh hello, old mate, great to see you! Great!’

For a couple of hours we sparkled, we talked about the old woman downstairs who had taken to moving her furniture about in the middle of the night, the guy in the next block who put a blanket over his Maxi even in summer, about the three hundred Sri Lankans moving in at number five; Shirley rustled up some very attractive cheese and salad snacks on hot rolls; it was all perfectly charming, and even after they left nothing particularly unpleasant was said. Just that the following evening I had barely clattered through the door, before Shirley was barring the passageway announcing she’d found a room for me, in Southgate.

‘Out,’ she said. She put two freshly cut Yale keys on the top of the sideboard. ‘17 Ollerton Road. You can find it in the A-Z. The first month’s rent’s paid. Now go.’

I didn’t think. Without a word, grim-faced, grabbing destiny by the scruff of the neck, and mainly just to show her I didn’t give a damn, I picked up the suitcases, picked up the keys, which had the address and various other bureaucratic jottings attached to them on a luggage tag, and bumped downstairs. At least I got the car this time.

The room was what you might expect, one of London’s endless makeshifts, a grand old Victorian house, now eight separate bedsits. My predecessor, I saw from the bells on the door, had been called Ms Deborah Samberuts. Well. I climbed to the third floor and found a single divan, chest of drawers, wash-basin, wardrobe, etc., all perfectly clean and irretrievably shabby. The pull-down blinds were broken. The walls were grey. A Picasso poster had been mended with Sellotape some long brown time ago and there was the dense smell of aerosol air freshener engaged in unequal combat with years of tobacco smoke stale in a tufty carpet. I looked round, smoked a cigarette myself to sort out the pong, then left my suitcases and went out to find a pub and eat something.

I think perhaps for three or four hours then I really believed that this was it, that we had separated, that I was going to live in this squalid room for a month or two before finding something more suitable and generally starting a new happier, healthier, or at least less stressful life, preferably as near as possible to the office, Greenford perhaps or Perivale. Rent a flat, fill it with appliances, pick up a really good car on the never never, I quite liked the look of the new Audi 80.

I closed the door and set out. The evening air had a cool but summery smell walking down to the main road; I interpreted it as a smell of freedom. The pub was full of young people who, from the volume of their conversation, the haze of smoke and maze of glasses around them, obviously shared my belief that life was for friends and fun. At one point there was a flurry of back-slapping and shouts. I sat on my own and watched animated faces, the shifting and posture of bodies, attractive and otherwise, and I must say I took a sort of quiet, determined pleasure, watching these people drink and talk.

However, towards midnight, alone in Ms Samberuts’s room, when it came to unpacking what Shirley had put in those suitcases, finding toothpaste and pyjamas, a half-full bottle of Milk of Magnesia, my athlete’s foot powder, I don’t know why but I was simply overwhelmed by a great flood of emotion. I bit the pillow and wept. Physically I felt thoroughly sick, with a strain about my throat, tight chest, aching muscles. I beat my fists against the mattress and roared.

One wonders now about these explosive, these absolutely debilitating emotions: a fully-grown man lying in a shabby suburban room moaning. One wonders if somehow they mightn’t have been controlled, tranquillised, fended off. For looking back, here was an escape route I would have done well to have taken. For Shirley’s sake too. For everybody’s. The irony being that I often wonder if these tumultuous feelings of regret, of sentiment, gusting through me like storm winds the way they do, aren’t perhaps after all the best part of George Crawley, the nearest he comes to love. And equally frequently I will catch myself wondering if Hilary isn’t my destiny somehow, if my present dilemma, which arose out of that crisis, isn’t precisely the decision I was born to make.

I don’t know. The superstitious mentality dies hard of course. In any event, I wept on the bed in this rented room, tried to sleep, couldn’t, then did, and promptly had one of the truly atrocious nightmares I would later have to learn to get used to.

Mutilation is my forte with nightmares. It begins as a suffocating sense of horror, concentrated about clenched jaw and tight Adam’s apple. Then all at once I’ll be aware that, for example, my hand is missing. There is just the wrist dripping blood, perhaps the bone protruding, ragged flesh. Following which we plunge into hectic, gorily visual oneiric narrative as I feverishly wrap the stump in a blanket, in toilet paper, and start searching for the lost hand, wondering if it can’t perhaps be saved, re-attached, my mind actually flicking at tremendous speed through all the sensational stuff one reads in papers about surgeons working all night to put some child’s arm back on — always a child’s. And in my dream, strangely, I am both a child and an adult, as if I had lost this hand years ago, yet the wound is still bloody and fresh.

I search. Gorst Road. Always Gorst Road. Sometimes it’s my hand I’m after, sometimes my foot or leg, sometimes my dick, or even my head. Like some horrible ghost, I hunt through room after room, turning over settee cushions, opening drawers, the way in waking life I frequently look for keys I’ve mislaid, pens, papers, tickets. But the missing part is never found, just as the accident that caused it is never explained. And perhaps as I search I don’t really want to find it, thinking how gory it will be when I do, remembering a book I read once where somebody digs his murdered child’s head from a shallow grave, the eyes full of mud. Or on other occasions the search will turn up not the missing part of me at all, but Grandfather, gross and bloated in his armchair, or Aunt Mavis of all people, on her back, nightdress pulled up over a thick white belly, face hideously giggling in death.

Such is my average nightmare, the kind of neurosis-generated angst fantasy that merely confirms one’s contemporaryness, I suppose — busy man, under pressure — the kind of thing you can even learn to look on with a certain affection after the nth recurrence.

But the night Shirley threw me out was the first time. And the interpretation seemed obvious. I was mutilated by this break-up. Indeed in my sleep I started calling out for her, needing to show her the disaster, the bloody stump, and so finally, shouting my wife’s name, I woke myself up. I was in a sweat, shocked and full of adrenalin. Immediately, in just pyjamas, relieved as I moved that I hadn’t stopped to agonise over this one, I ran down two flights of gritty, lino-covered stairs to a pay phone on the first landing. Then back to my room for a coin, then back to the phone.

I wept as I spoke. She wept on hearing me weeping. We told each other we couldn’t bear the thought of separation. We had invested so much in our marriage, our identities were so wrapped up in it, in each other, we just couldn’t bear for it to end. Who were we if not our marriage? In half an hour I was home and enjoying precisely the sentimental reconciliation I had hoped for and been denied just days before.

So that only a few weeks later, shortly after our return from Turkey, it would be the rings in her urine in the middle of the night, followed by the serious talk with Mr Harcourt, the mortgage, the payrise, the house in Hendon with permission for an extension, nausea, pregnancy books, pre-natal classes and a host of purchases to be made. .

Such was the power of love. And now it actually came to it, I didn’t mind. I thought, you can handle this, George. You can be happy with this. This is the way life goes. It’s manageable. For Shirley was in such delightful mood now. She was so bright and pleasant, so much my old Shirley. And I thought, you should have caved in on this one ages back, George. This isn’t going to do you any harm. When we lay in bed one night going through the Penguin book of names, I said: ‘If it’s a girl let’s call her Hilary.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it means cheerful, apparently. Like us.’