Encounters (41 page)

Biting his lip Sammy lay back and switched off the light. ‘Of course they did. I’m just being silly, I know it. But that’s the way I am.’

‘And Joy can have the pictures she wanted?’ She was almost wheedling.

‘Sometime, I suppose, yes.’

Sylvia gave a big sigh of satisfaction. ‘As long as it’s sometime, Sammy, there’s no hurry.’

She turned over and settled herself for sleep contentedly. She knew exactly how long it would take! And this time she would claim her commission. She had already worked out just how much it would cost to buy a smart portfolio for carrying Sammy’s paintings. Not for him of course. She was the salesperson in this family. She smiled in the darkness. Poor Sammy. She really must try and remember to buy a jar of instant coffee for him. First thing on Monday morning.

W
hen Katherine was seven she wanted to be a nun. She fingered her mother’s coral beads lovingly, as a rosary, and threaded to them the cross she bought with her pocket money and chose herself from the black flock tray in the window of the second-hand shop on the corner. It was of chased silver, wafer thin and very holy. At the bottom of the garden, deep in a most secret place among the sooty privets, she had made from an old orange box an altar and there she played at churches, her head draped in the mantilla of an old dressing-up shawl.

At boarding school there was a chapel; stark, serviceable and compulsory. She threw herself into the daily service with fervour, mouthing the hymns in a reverent whisper, half disapproving when her friends heartily shouted the well-worn verses and screwing up her eyes during the prayers in an effort of concentration.

Confirmation classes begged from a reluctant father – ‘You’re not serious are you, Kate? All that mumbo-jumbo!’ – were a bitter disappointment. Held in the cold chapel when other less dedicated people were at prep, the only sound save for the chaplain’s bored voice, was the agonizing embarrassment of her own stomach rumbling.

But the day of confirmation itself was a success. The pretty white dresses and veils, the beautiful illuminated postcard from matron, mother in her best hat; and the bishop. The bishop was quite beautiful and she almost fainted with excitement to feel his hands upon her head. She accepted the glow of happiness within her as a genuine inspiring experience and knew that at last the mystery she sought had come to her. Her first communion in the cold spring morning, light-headed from lack of breakfast, excited and half-afraid, maintained the wonder and the exhilaration.

But as the months passed so did her resolution. Getting up early on Sunday was all very well in the summer but on foggy winter mornings it was a different matter. By the time she left school she had stopped going to church in the holidays altogether.

At university she read philosophy and deliberately abandoned the one religion in the quest for the truths of many. The search left her interested, well-read and with a BA, but without faith. And she no longer felt the need for it. Her life was full of material things; of work and play; of friends and men; of parties and books and fun. There were no more long evenings leaning elbows on sill, gazing from her bedroom window at the infinities of heaven. She shared her bedroom at the flat with three and peace was a nonexistent commodity even in the depths of night. The agonizing soul-searching quest of the teenager had been replaced by the complacent confidence of a healthy young woman. If her soul still cried out for succour she firmly ignored the call. She rejected faith now as consciously and outspokenly as she rejected her parents’ standards and values as being bourgeois, old-hat and faintly ridiculous.

George was an atheist. And at first everything that George said and did had the ring of absolute truth in her ears. She gazed into his eyes and hung adoring on his every word.

‘It’s ourselves that count, Kate. We are what we are and life is what we make it. No rational person can believe our course is dictated by a bearded old man in the sky.’ He put his arm round her waist and squeezed her playfully.

‘You’re right, it’s up to us.’ Dazzled by his smile she followed him to parties and dances. She entertained for him and ended up darning his socks when she moved into his Notting Hill basement. Her parents threatened to wash their hands of her but both secretly came, each not telling the other and swearing her to complicity in their guilt, as they looked around the two dingy rooms with the stuffingless sofa, the clothes horses draped with towels and the uncompromisingly small double bed. Her mother brought her a bunch of chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies the colour of the smoky autumn sky and the scent of her tweed skirt was of bonfires and new-mown grass.

Kate cried when her mother had gone. Her free-thinking independence hinted suddenly of squalor.

Then came Mary Thomas with whom she had been at school. Sweet angelic Mary, whose gym tunic had never been creased and stained was exactly the same, if a little plumper. She was not, as Kate had secretly expected, impressed and envious of
la vie bohème
.

‘Oh Kate, how awful.’ Mary looked round with blatant and sincere horror. ‘That dreadful man. How does he expect you to live like this? Oh Kate, can’t you leave him? Why do you stay?’ She turned over the dusty books on the mantelpiece with fastidious fingers and touched by accident a mouldy piece of cheese which Kate had put down a few nights before and unaccountably lost.

‘I love it like this,’ Kate countered indignantly. ‘This is the life I’ve chosen. I meet interesting people; I read interesting books. We save our money to go to the theatre and concerts. George is not interested in material possessions and I agree with him.’

‘I suppose he’d think I was a bourgeois old hen then.’ Mary smiled gently, but the expression in her eyes made Kate think again. Mary was laughing at him. She saw his ideas as ridiculous and silly. ‘It must be just like being a student still,’ she went on, and Kate was confirmed in her opinion. Mary was quietly confident in her own way of life and in her eyes she and George were irresponsible children. The idea shocked Kate very much.

‘What a boring cow she must be!’ George shouted with laughter when Kate told him of the visit. ‘I’ll bet coming to see us is the most exciting thing she’s done since she left school.’

‘She’s had a baby, George.’ Kate did not mean to sound reproachful. It was wonder she felt for the experience her best friend had had which she could not share.

‘Well, there’s no great virtue in that. She’s just adding to the population problem.’ Unimpressed George threw himself down in the chair and put his feet on the table. He had brought the
New Statesman
home and was at once immersed in it.

‘But George, she’s happy. Really happy, and …’ Kate groped for a word, rejected it as trite and cosy and then unable to find another, reluctantly produced it. ‘She’s fulfilled.’

There was another snort of derision from behind the paper, but no further comment.

Kate retreated to the kitchenette and began to open tins. Mary would undoubtedly by now be preparing a nourishing and wholesome meal for her family, made with real food; her saucepans probably matched and her kitchen would have come entire and co-ordinated from the pages of a glossy magazine.

Kate looked up at the greasy grey wall behind the cooker. Once she had begun to wash this corner and her efforts had ended sharply and distinctively in an uncompromising black line. The shiny road safety poster disguised nothing. She had given up not even half-way through the job and it showed.

Depressed she poured the contents of her saucepan into two bowls and carried them to the table where George’s feet still rested, side by side, showing a hole in the shiny sole of one shoe.

‘Has anyone ever told you that you behave like a peasant?’ she said with unexpected venom. He peered over his paper and slowly removed first one and then the other foot from the table.

‘Yes, you, honey, with boring repetitiveness. But you’ve never told me how you’re so sure the nobs don’t stick their plates of meat on the Chippendale.’ He picked up his spoon and started eating ravenously. ‘Or did
mummy
tell you?’

She hated the way he emphasized the word, debasing it to sound cheap and silly by a mere flicker of inflection. His occasional bitter sarcasm, always aroused if he thought she was getting at him through his background, usually reduced her to tears. His tone was too acrid not to be genuine.

Turning unhappily from her own food she rummaged under the cushion for a packet of cigarettes. She had given up giving up. ‘I’d like to go out for a meal, George. Somewhere nice, just for once. Could we?’ She blew a cloud of smoke in the air and pushed her hair back from her eyes. It was unwashed and stringy. Mary’s had been immaculately styled. She checked her thoughts abruptly. It was almost as though she were jealous, which was unthinkable. She renounced her parents’ way of life absolutely and that, after all, was the style Mary followed. It might work for Mary, but not for her. ‘Please, George.’

He looked up suddenly, hearing the note of desperation in her voice. ‘Katie, love. Of course we can, if it means that much to you. Candles, wine, dancing – the lot if it will make you happy.’ He scraped his bowl and eyed hers speculatively. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

‘You have it.’ She ground out the cigarette and threw herself down on the sofa. ‘I’ll have some coffee in a minute.’

‘She really got under your skin today, didn’t she?’ He got up at last and ruffled her hair gently. ‘Are you having regrets about living here?’

‘No, of course not.’ She reached for his hand and pulled him down on the sofa with her. ‘It’s just that I miss some things …’ She broke off helplessly, looking round at the torn wallpaper, the shabby furniture, the threadbare rugs. It was as though for the first time she had seen them through her own eyes. Before she had always seen them through his. When her parents came she had been consciously on the defensive, but Mary’s open criticism had caught her unawares, unguarded.

‘It’s not very nice, George, is it? Be honest.’ She gazed at him intently. But he just shrugged.

‘To
be
honest, Kate, I never notice. It suits me fine. It’s cheap and it’s warm and it’s convenient. What more do I want?’

What more indeed?

On her way back from work the next day Kate hesitated in front of the greengrocer by the station. On the pavement lay ranks of potted bulbs, houseplants and buckets of golden daffodils. She eyed them longingly, trying to ignore the exorbitant price tags pinned to them. A florid young man came out of the shop wiping his hands on his overall.

‘Can I help you, love?’

He stood in front of the flowers as if to prevent her even looking at them unless she meant to buy. Wordlessly she shook her head and turned away.

Three days later George had to go away to attend a conference. It was the first time she had had to sleep alone in the flat and she found herself lying gazing up at the ceiling in the dark, listening for all the strange city noises which now suddenly seemed hostile around her. The flat itself was hostile. It was George’s, but for the first time since she moved in it was not a vehicle for George’s dominating personality and without him there, without his belongings scattered to the four corners it was dead and dull. Of her own personality and her dreams it reflected nothing at all.

She sat up in bed suddenly and turned on the bedside light. What were her dreams? Where was her personality? Wrinkling her forehead to think better, she gazed at the paisley design of the old eiderdown. A sharp quill was sticking through the material near her hand and absent-mindedly she pulled at it, watched as the delicate white feather drew through the tiny hole and opened like a flower in her hand. It was soft and pure and rather poignant.

At school she had dreamed of being a grown up. When she had stopped wanting to be a nun she had wanted to be a nurse, then in turn a riding instructor, a vet, a secretary with beautifully manicured nails, an artist and a concert pianist. But when the careers mistress, realistic, short of time and possibly of insight, intent on actualities had probed into the subject she had had to admit, even then, a lack of any real purpose.

It was taken for granted she would go to university – her grades had always been good – but her choice of subject, philosophy, had been a surprise to everyone. Kate could explain neither the origin nor the depth of her interest, but her examination results proved that this was indeed her subject. Graduation had brought the return of reality. Decisions could no longer be deferred. Or could they? Her contemporaries hoped for a career in TV or publishing or journalism and she had half-heartedly drifted with them. But of course she had failed her interviews; the keen young men saw at once through her veneer and spotted her lethargy and indecision. So she reverted to a quick course in shorthand typing and then as she had been at last about to face up to some half-hearted self analysis she had met George. Unbelievably he too had been doing a typing course, although his was part of a master plan for his career. They had compared their speeds and later mockingly their legs and agreed that hers were the more likely to turn a boss’s head.

But her job at last was very ordinary, undemanding and boring. While her social life was an exciting and exhausting round of parties she had not minded this. Work was somewhere she could surreptitiously relax. She had usually completed her day’s quota of letters by lunchtime. She was never stretched. Lately she had begun to question the point of it all. She adored the theatre and concerts. She was fascinated by some of George’s friends, although more and more she was finding them pretentious and opinionated. But she had to admit to herself at last that, when she had time to think about it, like now, she found her home life boring and squalid.

She had, however, no complaints about sex, and that in itself was beginning to bother her. Was she hanging on to this life merely because George was good in bed? She hugged her knees and gazed thoughtfully at the washed-out amoebic shapes on the quilt. Where was it all leading? Was she going on like this for years, dragging at George’s heels? And another thing: she missed the solitude of being an individual, even while amongst a crowd. George was too possessive to allow her that freedom. He didn’t do it intentionally. It was just his way, but it was stifling her, that and the boredom at work.