Chain Reaction (8 page)

A
ND NOW JOY IS
insisting that Vernon take her out to look at some suitable properties. She can’t wait to leave Joyvern, for someone to come along and buy it so she can pick up her dusters and flee.

All this is too much for Joy and losing face is the worst of it, losing face in front of her friends and neighbours. She has always been needy of other people’s approval; she used to enjoy showing people around her new house, her decorated house, her extended house, her newly carpeted house, always something to show them. But not like this, oh no, not now she is leaving and forced to give it up.

Vernon and Joy were one of the first residents of this brand-new estate. They were given a bottle of champagne and a bouquet of flowers by the builders. Prideful people, they set the standard as it were, first to put up hanging baskets and their little red mail box beside the gate started a colourful trend. They moved in when the garden was little more than a shape scraped out of the muddy earth by a digger. Those were spindly saplings, now grown into sturdy standard cherries. The road that led to the cul-de-sac was hardly passable in those days, what with the builders’ mess and the asphalt wagons and the dangerous piled-up mountains of paving.

But during all their fifteen years on the estate, Joy suffered a perpetual worry that someone else would move into the cul-de-sac who was more affluent, more sophisticated than they, forever afraid of embarrassment in front of other people, or of one of her family committing some social gaffe. Vernon is the only one in the world to know how much she suffered. Spend spend spend seemed to
be
the only answer. Joy’s magazines tell her that this is an illness but Vernon would disagree with this.
Joy spent with a purpose.
She had to keep in front. The kitchen shines with its new yellow tiles, begonias in the window, bright blue plates, all matching, not cheap. Decorating the whole house every couple of years and then came the roof extension. She wanted to get the builders in but Vernon insisted on doing it himself. ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees, Joy, you really must try to remember that.’ The lists run on and on, ever changing—the small conservatory at the back, greenhouse, gazebo and pergola, the patio and the bathroom Jacuzzi. A sensible navy Ford for Vernon and a neat little Mini in a daffodil hue for Joy. Holidays in Greece, Corsica and Turkey, Benidorm is not for the Marshes. They held barbecues and At Homes on Christmas Eve, and Tupperware parties when they were in vogue and they were the first to join the new Neighbourhood Watch scheme. Suzie and Tom, five and eight when they moved here from Joy’s mother’s house, were well-kept, well-behaved children with green-shampoo-shiny hair and scrubbed and rosy English faces. They played in the garden, not out in the road like they tend to do nowadays. They never had sweets stuck round their faces. They did well at school, went riding, played tennis, joined the Scouts and the Guides and went on to further education and are now living with their partners. Tom is already married with a baby of his own.

Suzie swears she will soon be engaged and that
everyone
lives together nowadays. She’s got a good job as a Clinique beautician and as Joy says, you can’t get a more reputable brand than that.

Nothing to shame Joy there.

As a mother she has a great deal to be proud of.

Then, seven years ago and out of the blue, Vernon was made redundant.

He had wanted to search for another job, difficult though that might be, at least it would be safe, but Joy said no, this is your chance to use that money and those brains of yours to become self-employed—‘your own man’ were the actual words she used as if, up until then, Vernon had been somebody else’s. ‘Your own man at last!’

They were already in debt. Oh, not the dangerous, embarrassing kind—more like Access, Visa, Joy’s accounts at M&S, Laura Ashley, the loan for the second car, for example. Vernon knows now that that precious redundancy money should have been used to pay these off, but we would all be millionaires with hindsight, wouldn’t we?

He has let Joy down with the failure of Marsh Electronics Ltd, the tatty shop where he goes every day trying to get rid of the bits and pieces, hopelessly picking the mail off the mat without ever needing to read the demands that spiral monthly like weeds in a garden.

He has never been the kind of man to make a success on his own. He lacks the drive, the energy needed for that sort of lonesome enterprise. Now Joy would probably have done better, being more ambitious than he. She might have made a success of a dress shop—that’s if she hadn’t smuggled out all the stock.

She tries to make out she does not blame him, that she believes he did his best, but she doesn’t honestly mean that, not deep down. Deep down she thinks that Vernon, her man and protector, has let her down badly. Oh yes, he knows his wife well enough by now. He is a fat, flatulent failure and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.

Joy—you might well imagine some frivolous blonde but she’s not like that, not at all. Five foot four and firmly built, she doesn’t go in for glamour but taste, the navy-and-white-spotted styles of sailing folk. Underplayed, but just as costly as if you were dressing in silks. Timberland coats and Timberland shoes. Bridge handbags, or Emmy. Beautifully tailored mock-riding jackets, hand-knitted, chunky sweaters that somehow cost hundreds, leather jerkins from Jaeger while Vernon shops for his suits from Marks and feels fine in them.

That rich, bronze tone in her dark brown hair does not come off a Superdrug shelf. She might wear her hair short in a sensible style but that cut and that loose perm cost an arm and a leg every time she goes to the salon.

‘Well, you want to be proud of me, Vernon,’ says Joy when she senses his disapproval. ‘You don’t want me to look like just any old thing.’ And she smuggles in her purchases and tells him she’s had them for years, it’s just that he is too lazy to notice.

He dreads going round to view houses. He imagines what sort of property they will find for £45,000, and that is taking a risk by the time the bills are paid off. He can imagine the look of pain on Joy’s bravest face as she turns and smiles and says,
This will do nicely, Vernon.’
She has put her name on several mailing lists and already picked out some which might suit, but the last place she wants to end up is some pebble-dashed, terraced, former council house at the wrong end of town.

And the other morning she told him with horror that she’d dreamed of a mobile home.

‘It won’t come to that, dear,’ Vernon said.

‘Promise me.’

‘I promise you.’

From the kitchen window she heard him discussing their affairs with Bob Pritchard next-door-but-one.

She called him in. She shouted that the phone was ringing.

Hands on hips she scolded, ‘Vernon, what in heaven’s name do you think you are doing?’

‘Just putting the world right there with old Bob.’

‘You were not putting the world right! I heard you! I heard you saying that things had reached crisis point. What’s that got to do with Bob? Angela has been longing to find out what’s going on round here, and now you’ve spilled the beans it’ll be everywhere tomorrow. Why do you never listen?
We are moving because the children have gone and we want somewhere smaller…’

‘Don’t be silly, Joy. Everyone knows—’

‘Excuse me, but no, they do not! Or they didn’t until you put your oar in. Sometimes you can be so insensitive, Vernon,’ and she fled upstairs in floods of tears.

She had told everyone they sold the Mini because she was finding driving so stressful.

Oh, why can’t she be honest? Life would be so much simpler. Honest with herself if no one else. There is no shame in what they are doing—thousands of others are in the same boat. There certainly would be shame if they went creeping deeper and deeper into debt until everything was beyond redemption, as some people do. But Vernon isn’t that sort of man. Vernon is a good man; he intends to pay everyone back and still end up with a place to live in.

‘This can’t possibly be it, Vernon.’

They draw up outside the house in the highly polished blue Ford. Vernon might be in a mess financially but he still cleans and polishes the car on a Sunday. A man of habits, sometimes just lately he thinks it is the habits that have been keeping him sane.

Vernon glances at the brochure again. The place is in the middle of nowhere, fields to front and back. He strains to read the name on the broken gate.
‘Hacienda.
It is, I’m afraid.’

Joy fidgets, peering out. ‘Well, at least it’s a house on its own, with a garden and a name.’

‘But look at it, love! It’s nothing but a heap of ruins. It can’t have been lived in for years. Come on, let’s go.’

‘Hang on, Vernon. Hang on. It could be made nice.’

Vernon senses trouble brewing. ‘It could be made nice, yes, if you had a spare fifty grand to spend.’ And he rests his case, firmly folding his arms on the subject.

She won’t have it. ‘But we might have one day, who knows?’ says Joy hopefully, suddenly drawing strength from the notion that she
could after all
have a detached house with a garden and a decent-sounding address. This when he has spent hours trying to convince her that they really have got to make a sensible choice.

The gate is not attached to the post. They walk up the weedy garden path and push open the shabby front door, avoiding the nettles that grow amongst the feelers of ivy. ‘It could be a charming little cottage. I can see exactly how it could be in my mind’s eye,’ calls Joy, cheering. ‘And look, what a cosy little sitting room this must have been. We could sit in front of the fire in the winter and—’

‘Joy!
The ceiling is caving in with the damp. None of the doors fit. The chimney is running with water.’ Vernon wanders round the room in a gathering state of gloom, and out into the small kitchen beyond. There’s an old stone sink, flagstone floors, rotting shelves hanging off the bulging walls. He sniffs. There is something dead and decaying behind the alcove. He wishes he could share his wife’s optimism but he can’t. She is resorting to fantasy because she cannot bear the truth.

‘We could put a Rayburn in here and cook on it and heat the water. And what a wonderful, overgrown garden, Vernon. A secret garden! We could even keep chickens. We could grow all our own food, eat our own eggs and sell the surplus, and we could have open fires instead of that costly central heating. This house is even small enough to light with oil lamps, they’re in all the shops again now.’ She is suddenly gleeful after months of depression. ‘Oh, Vernon, think. Just think of the money we’d save!’

He will normally say anything to avoid confrontation. ‘Joy! Stop it!’

‘But Vernon…’

‘It’s just no good.’

‘But Vernon, listen to me.’ Her restless hands are washing each other over the cracked and dirty sink. Seeing this makes him want to cry, Joy is so unhappy.

But he makes himself answer her patiently. ‘I don’t need to listen to you. My own common sense tells me that this sort of property is right out of the question. We couldn’t begin to live like this…’

‘Oh, we could, we could! Don’t you see? I could go out to work and you could stay at home all day on the dole and grow things and do the place up…’

‘Joy, just listen to me for a change. You can’t even pull the giblets out of a blessed chicken and there’s nowhere for a washing machine. Think about that for a moment. And the plaster is falling off the walls—look.’

She is pleading with him and he just can’t bear it, walking through this house like walking through her own day dreams. He loves his wife dearly, he loves her little ways, he wants to give her what she wants, he has always enjoyed providing for her up until now. She is scuffing round the garden among the thorns and brambles. She gushes on, ‘And there’s a well somewhere under all this. We could have our own water and generate our own electricity. I read all about it, Vernon, in
Take a Break.
There was this down-and-out family—’

‘Joy! We are not down-and-out!’

She is losing patience with him now. ‘Well, it feels as if we are, thanks to you,’ she cries bitterly.

‘Stop it!’

‘When we married I never imagined—’

‘I know, Joy.’

Rage and fear are making her cruel. ‘If my mother could see me now! When I think what that woman sacrificed—’

‘Stop it, Joy, please!’

‘And now you won’t even try to make things up to me. You never had much imagination, Vern. You were never one to see the possibilities, you always have to be led.’

But Vernon is on his way back to the car, head bowed and sighing. He has to convince her that he simply cannot undertake another dangerous venture and risk certain failure. These hopes of hers are just a glimpse of old pain, they were energised like this before he started the business. He does not want their happiness to depend on him, ever again. Vernon is exhausted. He knows she will sulk in the car for the rest of the afternoon and automatically dislike anything else they look at.

Her attitude just isn’t fair! All right, she has suffered, showing people round the house, making excuses to the neighbours, facing a move she never wanted to make. But so has he. Begging for money from this bank and that, made to wait in carpeted foyers, treated like a scrounger, trying to make things right with angry customers. One way and another his humiliation has been complete.

Joy slams the car door behind her. ‘If you’re going to take this negative attitude towards everything we see then there’s not much point in me coming with you, is there, Vernon?’ she snaps. ‘You might as well just drop me off at home and be done with it.’

Joy merely shrugs her shoulders when they are shown round the sensible Swallowbridge flat. She is car sick, she says, from having to read the map.

‘It is lovely and clean,’ Vernon says to the eager woman who shows them round, a professional person no doubt, carefully made up and in her forties; maybe Joy will be humoured by that but she will despise the net curtains. He finds his wife’s silence embarrassing because there’s not much to say about such a small property and normally Joy would fill in the gaps. But now she merely picks at invisible threads on her sleeve. She might as well have stayed in the car.