The Fruit of the Tree (10 page)

I visited the hospital and, after a cursory examination, was dismissed with the usual statistics that two in five pregnancies or was it one in four spontaneously terminated. My visit to my G.P. was much more satisfying; first he reassured me about the bumpy ride from Brighton.

‘If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else,’ he told me, suggesting one or two other innocent pursuits that might have caused it just as easily.

And looking back, it is difficult to see why I felt quite so guilty, for if every woman could expect to miscarry as a result of the things I had done, there would be hordes of women taking fast car journeys and lifting heavy objects, instead of taking the proverbial hot bath and bottle of gin, or indeed instead of queuing up for abortions.

My main concern now, however, was the next pregnancy.

‘As soon as you know you are pregnant,’ he said. ‘Come and see me. We will help you through it from the beginning.’

After that I put it out of my mind, knowing I must now wait, and when Ruth and Roger arrived for a weekend, with Ruth well into the middle of her pregnancy, I do not believe I felt too many pangs of jealousy.

The other all important event in January was the sale of our old home and office, and despite the great relief both to us and the Bank Manager, this was something of an anti-climax to me, since I was hardly involved in it. As a result of the sale, Michael now spent quite a lot of time at home, although he was looking around for a small lock-up office.

With the house now in some semblance of order, I felt able to invite my parents to stay and we chose a sunny weekend in June, when the countryside would be at its most pleasant. My timing proved to be faulty, for only a few days before the Visit, the washing machine went wrong, and when they arrived, we were once again living on naked concrete floors.

I was accustomed to the washing machine being a little temperamental, and how much this was to do with having to wash Michael’s entire rugby kit, including his boots, in bygone days, I never really knew. Every now and then, it would literally blow its top and emit froth and water in a thin stream. All that was needed was a speedy twiddle of knobs and sanity would usually be restored, and mopping up operations could be commenced.

On this occasion, I was following my normal routine, or lack of it (for things hadn’t changed dramatically in three years of married life) when I became aware that the machine was still filling with water, when I should have expected it to have stopped. Rushing to do the necessary twiddle, I found indeed that there was a shallow puddle forming on the kitchen floor. Going into action with squeezy mop and bucket, I soon noticed that the volume of water on the floor was increasing despite my efforts. This was an unexpected development, so I turned the washing machine off completely.

I had been working for a full ten minutes on swabbing the decks, when I realised that the noise that kept on and on in my ears was the sound of the mains water running and running, and it came to me that for reasons best known to itself, the washing machine had continued to fill and spill throughout the entire floor washing session. I rushed to turn off the mains, and even as I did so, saw the dark stain of water spreading insidiously over half the hall carpet.

No time for independence or emancipation now. The important question was ‘Where’s Michael?’

A few phone calls to likely places unearthed a couple of the plumbers; they came over to see if they could help, but by that time, most of the water had been cleared up, leaving only a damp and soggy carpet, and…

One other thing, which I didn’t discover until I tried to boil a kettle for tea, for plumbers are great tea drinkers. A fault on the wiring under the concrete kitchen floor which operated all electricity in the kitchen, lounge and boiler room! No electricity—again!

But Michael was not defeated, though he found me quite hysterical on the subject, when he finally arrived home. A few electrical miracles were performed and then he was able to find the time to say to me, ‘How many times have you told our customers, “First, turn the water off at the mains.”?’

He never let me forget it!

That’s the trouble with being impractical in patches; it doesn’t matter how sensible you are in the matters of child-care, feeding the family, home economics or economies, there are certain occasions which are forever remembered in the annals of the family history whilst your normal exemplary behaviour is forgotten.

Take, for example, my driving. From the very beginning Robert regarded me as some kind of inferior being when it came to driving, and in that respect was trained as a young ‘male chauvinist’ from a very early age. Robert himself was a natural driver and would whizz round the house on his little tricycle, missing items of furniture and my toes by fractions of inches by virtue of his impeccable steering, and performing elaborate 3-point turns with a finesse unexpected in a normally rather clumsy two-year-old.

When I first started driving the Consul to the village for shopping, which was only at weekends, because Michael drove the car most weekdays, Michael and Robert would stand by the front door and watch me depart—or try to. For some reason, I was afraid to put my foot down as I turned round our circular drive. I always felt that I would be unable to follow the curve of the drive and shoot straight forward instead. So each little gentle tap on the accelerator would be followed by a stall and a restart of the engine. At each new start my sarcastic husband and his adoring sidekick would break into solemn applause and cries of ‘Good old Mummy—Well Done, Mummy!’

However, after several months of this I became quite accomplished at driving to and from the village. One day when the lane was dappled with spring sunshine, I drove back home feeling relaxed and happy. A bird hopped across my path and I allowed my eyes to follow it, feeling in tune with nature. A grating sound reminded me of the existence of a huge horse chestnut tree on the corner of our lane, whose enormous roots protruded about two feet on that corner. Considerably dampened, I took the injured beast home, and owned up to its scratched side.

‘It’s a good thing,’ growled Michael ‘that it wasn’t a new car!’

Actually, it didn’t last all that much longer. It wasn’t anything I did—just old age—but before long, we were buying a new old car.

This time it was an Austin A40, a much smaller car and much more manageable as far as I was concerned. Nevertheless, its seat adjustment was very stiff, and it was easier to prop myself forward with our old armchair cushions, which I’d also used in the Consul.

The first day I tried it out, I didn’t quite realise how far I was from the pedals, and thus how little control I had over them. Accustomed to my old Consul’s lethargic response to my foot, I put the A40 into first gear and one touch on the accelerator sent me shooting forward, until the left hand headlight made contact with the garage door. Luckily, the door handle was level with the light, and instead of breaking down the door, I merely broke the headlight.

‘It’s lucky,’ said Michael with restraint when I confessed, ‘that we don’t spend our money on new cars.’

I’ve always been able to say that I’ve only had encounters with trees and so on, on our own private land or lane—with one exception, where I must admit I look back in sheer amazement at my own foolishness.

It was during the summer of that year, when Michael’s plumbers were taking their holidays. They all had their own vehicles, which were usually in a lot better condition than anything we possessed, and preferred to park their vans in our front drive, (which they still referred to as ‘the Yard’) rather than leave them at their homes.

Much as I disliked trying out new vehicles, it was tempting to avoid my usual walks, even though they were fewer these days, by making use of the vans.

I had to pluck up my courage to use Frank’s van for the first time, warning Robert that if he moved a muscle, I wouldn’t let him come with me again.

By the time Frank’s holiday was over, I had built up some confidence, and was less reluctant to drive Les’s van, which was the next one to be deposited outside the front door.

Michael was at home carrying out some mystery operations on the internal workings of our own car, when I took Les’s van out, this time, without Robert.

As I turned the bend on to the main lane, I was aware of a lack of response from the brakes at my gentle pressure. By the time I reached the T-junction on to the main road, I had to pull on the hand brake to stop the car.

I ought to have turned round—of course I ought, but the memory that flashed through my head was what had happened the last time I tried to carry out a three-point turn at that point. The other ridiculous thought that occurred to me was that I ought to improvise in some way. Michael was always improvising—I remembered him driving all the way from Sonia’s house without the use of the clutch, so I too would be undefeated by the car. Out on to the road I went.

There is a saying that the Lord takes care of fools and children, and in this case, His ministering angels were uniformed, and driving a police car. I saw them coming towards me on the opposite side of the road, as I crept along at 20 miles an hour, with plumbing equipment—odd bits of pipe and fittings—clanking around in the back of the van.

To this day I do not know what prompted that car to turn in its tracks and follow me, but I was not more than half a mile from home when the police car overtook me and waved me down at the side of the road. I put my feet down on everything that was available, the non-existent brakes, the clutch (which apparently was the wrong thing to do) and pulled on the hand brake, and then when there were no further actions I could take, I glided forward and finally came to a halt behind the police car, with a gentle thud, as my front bumper hit their back one.

They leapt out of their car, whilst I sat paralysed, and rushed to inspect the damage, one of them crossly scolding me, ‘We gave you ample time to stop.’

However, they calmed down a bit when they saw that their car was unscathed.

I explained to them about the brakes, but not quite everything—I’m afraid I had to give the impression I had only just discovered that they weren’t working.

‘We’ll have to take you home,’ they said. And even then I rather foolishly asked: ‘Couldn’t I just turn it round and drive it straight home?’

‘Oh no, madam,’ they replied. ‘We couldn’t possibly let you do that.’

And that is how I came to appear before Michael with a very tall policeman on each side of me; and how subsequently I received my first (and only) endorsement on my driving licence; and how—to his extreme annoyance—Michael, as the owner of the van, received a similar smudge, and an even bigger fine than me!

I didn’t confess the entire truth to him either, and so for some time afterwards he could be heard to say, ‘I just can’t understand how you could drive onto the main road without checking the brakes.’

10. A Crisis Passes

With increased mobility, I began to make friends locally. I developed a friendship with Carol, a girl who had once done some secretarial work for Michael and who had a son of Robert’s age. Her sister Jill also had a boy, some six months older. It was a great delight to me that I could at last arrange some form of social life for Robert at the same time as enjoying pleasant adult company myself.

With the advent of spring and summer, the great outdoors beckoned, and we tended to see more of our neighbours, Doug and Beryl. On one occasion, Beryl called to me through the hedge and offered me some bean seeds, preserved from last year’s crop, which apparently were an extremely good strain.

Like ‘Jack’, I was at a loss to know what to do with them. But I don’t like things weighing on my conscience, so I dug a small hole at the side of the garden and dropped them in. To be truthful, it was more of a burial than a planting.

When I told Michael, he made me dig them up and replant them, and even then it wasn’t right, and I had to dig and rake a patch of ground and put them all in again at regular intervals. Despite this lack of care, they flourished and Michael found two lengths of scrap iron and arranged a sort of metal arch for them to entwine themselves around.

The excitement of seeing these things actually green and growing brought out long buried yearnings to cultivate the soil, for I hadn’t lived in a house with a garden since I was eleven years old. Now I was filled with a desire to see grass in the garden, and Michael and I went out there with various implements and started hacking away at the weeds and levelling out the bumps.

Pessimistically, Michael (who had once suggested we concrete the entire area) decided we had better attempt to clear and seed one quarter of the garden initially and try some more another year. I thought it sounded a silly idea, but it seemed wise to dig first and argue after.

One Sunday, we could hardly bear to tear ourselves away from the task to go visiting friends, and I couldn’t have been more surprised at my own attachment to the place and to the job at hand.

One day, a dark stranger knocked at our door and offered his services as a gardener. Michael seized upon him like a long lost friend, and even though I was rather sad to lose my new interest, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the speed with which the garden took on a new look. Guiseppe, for such was his name, was superseded by another Guiseppe, and when once or twice a large job needed to be carried out, a whole team of brothers and cousins all apparently named Guiseppe appeared on the scene.

The soil was dug and rolled and raked and rolled again, and one day I sat on the smooth earth with Robert, peering through the hedge at Doug and Beryl’s fine lawn and putting green.