The Widow

Chapter 16

Thursday, 10 June 2010

The Widow

I USED TO LOVE Sunday lunch. Always roast chicken and all the trimmings. It used to feel like a family thing, and when we were newlyweds we had our mums and dads over to share it with us. Sitting round the table in the kitchen, they’d half-listen to the end of Desert Island Discs and read the Sunday papers as I put the potatoes in the oven to roast and poured us cups of tea.

It was lovely being part of this grown-up world where we could invite our parents for lunch. Some people say they felt it when they started their first job or moved into their first home, but those Sundays were when I felt like a real adult.

We loved our house. We’d painted the sitting room magnolia – Glen said it was ‘classy’ – and we bought a green three-piece suite on credit. We must’ve paid hundreds of pounds for it in the end, but it looked just right so Glen had to have it. It took longer to save up for a new kitchen, but we managed in the end and picked one with white doors. We walked round the showroom for ages, holding hands like the other couples. I liked the pine cupboards but Glen wanted something ‘clean’. So we went for white. Looked a bit like an operating theatre when we first put it together, to be honest, but we bought red handles, and snazzy jars and things to liven it up. I loved my kitchen – ‘my department’ as Glen called it. He never did any cooking – ‘I’d only make a mess,’ he’d say and we’d laugh about it. So I did the cooking.

Glen would lay the table around them, play fighting with my dad to move his elbows and teasing his mum about reading the horoscopes. ‘Any tall, dark strangers this week, Mum?’

His dad, George, didn’t say much, but he came. Football was the only interest they shared, really. Only they couldn’t even agree on that. Glen liked to watch football on the telly. His dad went to the match. Glen didn’t like all those bodies squashed together, all that sweat and swearing. ‘I’m more of a purist, Jean. I like the sport, not the social life.’ His dad said he was a ‘poofter’.

George didn’t understand Glen at all and we thought he probably felt threatened by his education. Glen did well at school – always near the top of the class – and he worked hard because he was determined not to end up a cabbie, like his dad. Funny that he did end up in the same profession. I said it as a joke once, but Glen told me there was a world of difference between being a cabbie and being a driver.

I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Maybe one of the pretty girls who didn’t have to try. I didn’t try, anyway, and Glen always said I was pretty, so it sort of came true. I did make an effort for him, but not too much make-up. He didn’t like it – ‘Too tarty, Jeanie.’

On our Sunday get-togethers, Mary used to bring an apple crumble and my mum brought a bunch of flowers. She wasn’t a cook. She preferred tinned veg to real ones. Funny really, but dad said it was what she’d been brought up with and he’d got used to it.

When I did domestic science at school, I used to bring home the dishes we cooked. They weren’t bad, but if we’d done something ‘foreign’ like lasagne or chilli con carne, Mum pushed it round her plate a bit.

So roast chicken suited everyone and I always did tinned peas for her.

There was lots of laughing, I remember that. About nothing, really. Funny things that had happened at the salon or the bank, gossip about the neighbours and EastEnders. The kitchen would get all steamy when I was draining the carrots and cabbage and Glen would draw with his finger on the windows. Sometimes he drew hearts and Mary would smile at me. She was desperate for grandchildren and would whisper to me when we did the washing up, asking if there was any news. At first I said, ‘Plenty of time for babies, Mary. We’ve only just got married.’ Later, I pretended not to hear as I stacked the dishwasher and she stopped asking. I think she guessed it was Glen’s problem. I was closer to her than my mum at the time and she knew I’d tell her if it was me. I never told her the reason, but I suppose she guessed, and Glen blamed me for telling her. ‘No one’s business but ours, Jeanie.’

The Sunday lunches started to tail off because Glen and his dad couldn’t bear to be in the same room.

His dad found out about our fertility problem and made a joke of it the Christmas after we were told by the specialist.

‘Look at this,’ he said, picking up a satsuma out of the fruit bowl. ‘It’s like you, Glen. Seedless.’

George was a nasty man, but even he knew he’d gone too far. No one said anything. The silence was awful. No one knew what to say, so we all looked at the telly and passed the Quality Street. Pretended it hadn’t happened. Glen was white as a sheet. He just sat there and I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. Seedless.

In the car home, he said he’d never forgive his dad. And he didn’t. We didn’t refer to it again.

I wanted a baby so badly, but he wouldn’t talk about ‘our problem’, as I had to call it, or about adoption. He disappeared inside himself and I kept myself to myself. Two strangers in the house for a while.

At the Sunday lunches Glen stopped drawing in the steam, he opened the back door to let it out. And everyone began leaving earlier and earlier and then we all started making excuses. ‘We’re so busy this weekend, Mary. Do you mind if we leave it until next Sunday?’ Then ‘next month’, and gradually family lunches were just on birthdays and at Christmas.

If we’d had kids, they’d have been grandmas and granddads. It would’ve been different, but the pressure to perform for our parents became too much. There were no distractions. Just us. And the scrutiny of our lives was too intense for Glen. ‘They want to interfere in everything,’ he said after one lunch when Mary and my mum had decided where would be best for me to buy a new cooker. ‘They only want to help, love,’ I’d said lightly, but I could see the dark clouds gathering over him. He’d be quiet and busy with his own thoughts for the rest of the day.

He hadn’t always been like that. But he started to take offence at everything. Tiny things – something the paper-shop man said about Arsenal losing, or a kid on the bus cheeking him – would upset him for days. I’d try to laugh him out of it, but I got worn down by the effort so I stopped and let him work it out for himself.

I began to wonder if he was looking for reasons to be upset. The people he’d always liked working with at the bank began to annoy him and he’d come home moaning about them. I knew he was working himself up to something – a row, probably – and I tried to talk him out of his moods. There was a time I might’ve been able to – when we were younger – but things were changing.

One of my ladies at the salon said all marriages ‘settle down after the “truly, madly, deeply” bit.’ But was this settling down? Was this it?

I suppose it was then that he started going upstairs to his computer more. Closing himself off from me. Choosing his nonsense over me.