Canvey Island (14 page)

‘Deirdre bought them for me.'

‘Deirdre?'

‘My wife.'

‘Nice.'

‘She died.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I didn't want you to think I was divorced.'

‘I didn't.'

‘I don't want you to think there's anything wrong with me.'

‘I don't.'

I could see the remains of breakfast in the kitchen sink. The plate and the cutlery, a frying pan with dried-up fat and half a sausage on the gas ring.

‘Would you like to come through? I've got a drinks cabinet. Perhaps I could light the fire in case it gets a bit chilly? We could sit on the sheepskin.'

‘That'd be nice,' I said, expecting him to move the coffee table out of the way. That was how he wanted it, I could see, on the rug by the fire. He put a match to the gas.

‘Would you like to see my collection?'

‘Of what?' I wondered if it might be pornography. Ideas he wanted to try out.

‘Boots, of course.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Samples. Everything I've made. A whole career. They're in the basement.'

‘Take your hat off,' I said.

‘No, I'm shy,' he said. ‘I'd like to show you the boots first. I don't have all my hair. I like to keep my hat on.'

‘OK,' I said. ‘Show me the boots.'

‘It's a bit dark on the stairs but there's no need to be frightened. I won't harm you.'

‘That's a pity,' I said, trying to be jokey and then regretting it. What if he had his mother down there like in
Psycho
?

‘You should look at the wellingtons first. That's how I started. It
was my idea to make them in pink and blue rather than green and black. Then I did white for the young ladies. Then protective and safety. I'm good with steel caps too. But I expect you don't want me going on about that. Rubber's best.'

‘No,' I said. ‘Tell me about the steel caps.'

He wasn't going to talk to me about floods or mothers or changing the world. He was going to talk to me about shoes. That was as long as he didn't murder me. Then we'd go back up, drink Cointreau and fool around for a bit. Not much harm in that, I suppose.

‘Shall we go upstairs and put on some music?' he asked.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I'd like that.'

‘We've got lots of country. Lynn Anderson's good. Do you know “Ride, Ride, Ride”?'

‘Have you got any Neil Diamond?' I said. He looked like the type of man who would.

‘I've been to his concerts. With Deirdre, of course.'

Stop talking about your wife
, I thought.

‘Let's have something else,' I said. ‘Johnny Cash. “A Boy Named Sue”, something like that.'

‘You're not a country person, are you?'

I took off my jacket and lit a cigarette. ‘Then I suppose you'll have to teach me.'

‘You don't need that …' he said, looking at the cigarette.

‘Just dance with me, Stan.'

He was a good mover. I only hoped he wasn't thinking of his wife.

Eventually when I'd finished the cigarette we started necking and we sank to the floor, right by the rug and the fire like he had wanted. After a while he broke off and asked if I wouldn't prefer to be more comfy in the bedroom.

Comfy.

That wasn't how I would have described it, since the sheets were yellow nylon and the room wasn't heated, but we made the best of it and I managed not to think of Martin or the wedding or where my life was heading. I looked up at the ceiling and listened to the rain until Stan came. Then he turned away and I think he began to cry, although he didn't want to let me see that. Perhaps his wife wasn't dead after all.

By then it was six or seven o'clock and I felt a bit sick. I went to the bathroom and had a shower to let the smell of sex and Cointreau run away from me. There was some Imperial Leather, which was a relief because the only other scent on offer was the great smell of Brut and I didn't want that.

I came back to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and put my clothes on.

‘You going?' Stan asked.

‘Best get back.'

‘Where do you live?'

‘Maynell Avenue.'

‘Can I see you again?'

‘If you want,' I said. ‘There's not much to see and you've seen most of it.'

‘Was it all right?'

‘Yes,' I lied.

‘We should do this again some time,' he said, leaning back in the bed. I noticed he had put his hat back on. It was the only thing he was wearing. ‘So long, partner.'

The next day Mum wanted to stay in and watch
The Sea Shall Not Have Them
with Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde but I went to Dave's house so he could tell me about the wedding. We smoked some dope and listened to Deep Purple singing ‘Wring That Neck'.

I wondered if I'd ever have feelings again. I thought about Martin and all that middle-class crap he wanted, clawing his way up into respectability. He still hadn't got his head round the idea that this was 1969. He didn't understand that once you'd sorted out your attitude to money and how much you needed then everything else followed. Did any of us want to have friends round for fondue suppers at a Habitat dining table? Did I really want to sit in a Vauxhall next to a husband in a Burton's suit who was always the wag at the Christmas party? I'd rather be poor. I'd rather be desperate.

We began our married life in a terraced house in Brighton. We couldn't afford a home directly on the seafront so we found a dilapidated building three streets back with a balcony and a bit of a view. In the evenings we would ignore all the work that needed doing, open the windows and sit out drinking white wine, watching people walking on the esplanade and the gulls circling overhead. I had always liked seagulls as a child but once they start nesting in your roof you develop a more hostile attitude and I started to hate the bastards.

I was specialising in music and teaching a Primary 4 class in a Church of England JMI. Although Martin and I were lucky to find work I think we were surprised by the responsibility and the lack of freedom that went with it. For the past few years we had been the carefree generation with a conscience but once we were employed it was as if we had opened a door and walked straight into middle age. ‘This isn't us,' I wanted to say, ‘we're not ready for this, it's all a mistake,' but we had to accept that we weren't students any more.

Our house had once been divided into bed-sits and so we spent much of our early marriage knocking down flimsy dividing walls, sanding, polishing and choosing soft furnishings. Consequently most of our car journeys were either to Habitat, the local DIY store or the municipal dump.

I think we became almost careless of time; our marriage a procession of work, cooking and gardening, of
Morecambe and Wise
on the telly, and friends coming round for buffet suppers, music and the odd joint. Brighton was lively in the seventies, ‘a good
place to bring up kids', everyone said so, and we were invited almost every weekend to parties where we were offered nut loaf and potato salad, and where the decade's greatest invention, the clip-on plastic wine-glass holder, had become the quintessential lifestyle accessory.

After a few years, and as soon as they thought it polite, people began to ask when Martin and I were going to start a family but there were enough children for me to be going on with at the school. I told everyone there was plenty of time and, besides, we wanted to enjoy being the two of us for as long as we could. I wasn't ready to turn into my mother, a housewife in Oxfordshire, preparing endless batches of soup for the freezer, making marmalade in spring and chutney in autumn, and praying each day ‘because it does make a difference, darling, it really does'.

I think my parents were disappointed that I had to earn money. Although they could hardly disapprove of my being a teacher they clung to the notion that it was in some way shameful for a wife to work. They always looked at Martin with a faint air of regret because they didn't think he earned enough to support me. Whenever they asked him a question it always came over as slightly patronising.

‘Still straightening out rivers, Martin? Still shoring up cliffs?'

They never understood that I actually wanted to teach. I loved the joy on the children's faces as they sang together, happiness for which I was, in part, responsible. It wasn't like maths or spelling where they were continually assessed; they came to music lessons as equals. No one had kicked the confidence out of them by telling them they were no good, and even the ones who all the other teachers said were trouble could always bang away on a glockenspiel. We warmed up with rounds, ‘Frère Jacques' and ‘Non Nobis Domine', and then got out the recorders for ‘Au Clair de la Lune' and some old folk songs. I had a little music trolley and gave triangles, Indian bells, tambourines and a bass xylophone to those who couldn't play the recorder and we rehearsed songs for school assembly extolling the joys of youth and creation, from ‘Farmer, Farmer, Sow Your Seed' to ‘Glad That I Live Am I'.

Living in Brighton we didn't have to travel far for our holidays and Martin worked all through the hot summer of 1976, examining
the cracked and dried-out coastline, assessing the increased risk of landslip as the cliffs crumbled away. The reservoirs were depleted and the rivers low. Martin warned of a future of hot summers and flash floods. There was a hosepipe ban, you couldn't wash your car, and the water board threatened to shut off the supply to household taps from two in the afternoon until seven the next morning. Even the fountains in Trafalgar Square were turned off.

In the garden I tried to mulch the roses with old dishwater and wet newspaper, but the thirstier plants all began to wither away in the arid soil. Only the lavender survived. I had always wanted to make a garden as my mother had done but there wasn't the space or the money in Brighton. Of course I didn't have the ability or the patience either, but at least I had the excuse that now we didn't even have the water.

Then sometimes, when I was in the garden or out in the town, I would stop and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. I couldn't understand how I had ended up dead-heading roses or carrying a shopping basket and why everyone kept asking me about my ‘hubby' and what I was going to cook for him. At our wedding I'd been given a hostess trolley and a fondue set and I think everyone assumed that Martin would have the primary career and I'd be a dutiful wife who would simply dwindle into domesticity. But I just couldn't do that.

I joined a women's group where we shared experiences and talked about how the personal was as political as anything else in life. We sat round each other's kitchen tables swapping Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, discussing patriarchal attitudes and whether or not sex with men was inherently oppressive. Was marriage a form of domination disguised by love? Had male power and female submission been eroticised? Should there be wages for housework?

Soon I could bandy about phrases like ‘the price of beauty' and Martin became increasingly anxious, especially when I started talking about a woman's right to refuse sex and control her own fertility. I think he thought it was a phase I was going through and he could tease me out of it by saying that he didn't mind what I did provided I didn't start wearing dungarees. I told him that I
planned to start dressing for health and comfort rather than looks and if he didn't watch out I would make him read all the articles in
Spare Rib
about the politics of appearance and the nature of women's pleasure.

‘I thought I was quite good at women's pleasure, my darling.'

‘All men think that, Martin. They never think there's any room for improvement.'

‘Then you'll just have to show me.'

‘And you'll have to earn the right to be shown.'

Everything in my life seemed to involve presentation, some means of putting on a feminine mask to face the world, whether as teacher, wife, daughter or friend. I loathed being called ‘Mrs Turner' at school and I hated being subject to what my friends called ‘the male gaze'.

‘Sometimes I'm not sure I know who you are any more …' said Martin.

‘But wouldn't it be boring if we stayed the same all the time?'

‘Yes, but I don't want you turning into a completely different person. I could have married anyone if that was going to happen.'

‘Aren't you supposed to be helping me fulfil my potential, Martin? Isn't that the point of marriage?'

I'd given him a tea towel on Valentine's Day, the one saying how you start marriage by sinking into his arms and end up with your arms in his sink.

‘I know. But it's hard. I wasn't brought up to think like this.'

‘I hope you weren't expecting a
wife
.'

‘Well, I did think that was the general idea.'

‘Then I'm sorry to disappoint you.'

Martin liked me being feisty just as long as it wasn't with him.

‘It's all right, Linda, I …'

‘What?'

‘Sorry.'

‘Did you just call me Linda?'

‘I didn't mean to. It just came out. Perhaps it was the word “wife”.'

‘I can't believe you did that. And now you're smirking. It's not funny, you know.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Well, don't smile about it.'

‘I'm nervous. You make me nervous.'

‘Perhaps you should have married her after all,' I said. ‘She wouldn't have given you so much trouble.'

‘It has occurred to me.'

‘Oh, it has, has it?'

‘But then, of course, my life wouldn't be so delightfully combative, would it?'

‘Don't push it, Martin …'

One day I found him looking through an old sketchbook Linda had given him. He thought I hadn't noticed and he put it away quickly enough, but I knew what he was up to. It's so irritating the way men romanticise former girlfriends. You can see the phrase ‘If only …' hovering over their heads even if the whole thing was a disaster. In fact, very often the more dreadful it was at the time, the more they miss them.