The Likes of Us (49 page)

But I know what I'd be feeling if I were in the dock with Huby tomorrow, aware that the penalty this time will not be six of the best but more like a year or two inside and a paralysing fine. And waiting – oh, the sweaty-palmed, stomach-fluttering waiting
–
for Huby to be offered and succumb to that fatal temptation to enlarge.

Good

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caroline rang again that morning, at a quarter to nine, after Fred had left the house but before peak rate started. Jean accepted the transfer-charge call.

‘Mum. Sorry about that, but I'm short of change.'

‘That's all right, love. You must never let that stop you.' Jean put a smile into her voice. ‘Mind you, your father did have a word or two to say about our conversation ten days ago. It was on the bill that came yesterday. Nearly four pounds' worth.'

‘Oh, dear! Did you tell him what we were talking about?'

‘No, I didn't. Time enough for that, if –' She stopped herself. ‘What news have you got?'

‘None, really.'

‘You mean there's no change?'

‘Hmm.'

‘How's Alan?'

‘Well... fretting a bit.'

‘I expect he is. But from what you told me...'

‘Oh yes. All the same, it's worrying.'

‘This thing is going to be a worry in years to come as well, unless someone can do something about it. Have you seen a doctor or do you want to wait till you come home?'

‘It could be too late then.'

‘Don't be silly. I didn't mean that. I'm sure it's nothing now.'

‘I've made an appointment here. I'm going tomorrow.'

Jean's younger daughter had irregular periods, a minor nuisance until she met a boy at university and began to sleep with him. Sleep with him! Ye Gods! What Jean's mother would have said to her! What Caroline's father would say if her education was put at risk. Not that it would come to that, but Jean did wish that Caroline was where they could talk face to face, taking as long as they needed, and not nearly two hundred miles away on the end of a telephone. Thank goodness, though, the child felt able to share her worry. She had always told all three of them – they both had, come to that – that if anything was wrong they should come to them first. Anything, she had said. Because even the nicest, best adjusted of children had to live in the same world as everyone else.

Stephen was still in bed. When she had finished her chat with Caroline, Jean took him up a cup of
tea. He had shown no desire to go to university and so had not screwed himself to that extra pitch of effort to qualify for entrance. Now Jean rather suspected he wished he had: the three extra years of study would have kept him off the labour market. He did not know what he wanted to do. In better times he could have taken any old job until he found his path. But the better times had slipped into economic recession and there were no jobs; all he had now was this morale-sapping life on the dole. Fred said he had a school full of younger Stephens. ‘What can I tell them?' he would say. ‘How can I spur them on when I know full well that most of them are destined for the scrapheap at eighteen? Some of these kids may never work. I can't see whoever's in power getting three and a half million back into jobs. We shall reap the whirlwind of all this in ten or fifteen years' time,' he would brood at his most pessimistic, ‘with an alienated generation that won't be integrated into a society that's shown such little regard for them.'

Stephen stirred under his duvet as she went into the room and spoke to him. She put the teacup on his bedside table and told him not to let it go cold. He had always been sluggish in the mornings. Jean had sympathised with all three of them in the amount of sleep they needed while they were growing. But this lying late in bed every day was not right for a young man of Stephen's age. Yet how could she blame him? What challenge did the days hold to get him up each morning? The world was wasting him.

‘If you want me to cook breakfast for you, you'd better not be long because I've got to go out.'

‘I'll see to it myself.'

‘There are eggs and bacon and sausages in the fridge.'

‘Naw. Mebbe I'll have them at lunchtime.'

As his head emerged, she noted again that he badly needed a shave. But she did not put that down to his present lethargy: an incipient beard seemed to be a mark of his age group.

‘What will you do today?'

‘Dunno.'

‘You could start by cleaning this place up. It's like a tip.'

‘Oh, Mum.'

Yes, Oh Mum. Afraid now of nagging, Jean mostly let things slide, thereby abetting him in his apathy. During the last depression, in the thirties, proud men had polished their worn shoes, snipped threads from fraying cuffs and collars and gone out each morning to haunt labour exchanges and factory gates, then shop-window gaze or linger in the reading-rooms of public libraries until it was time to go home and pretend for another day that they were still employed. Until what savings they had ran out and they had to face their families and own up.

Jean's mother had told her things like that. The bad times for her had had bad luck thrown in for good measure. Widowed when Jean and her brother were still young, she had turned her hand to any mortal thing that was legal and decent to bring them up and put them through grammar school. Jean's standards of fortitude had been set by her mother's example. You held on, never let go, worked till you could hardly stand, asked for nothing that was not your due and fought tooth and nail for everything that was. ‘You know all about poverty,' Jean could hear her saying, ‘but I'll see you're never familiar with squalor'. But that extra two years at grammar school – four earning years between her and Jack – had been the limit of what could be managed. No college or university for them. Jack might have become a civil servant, instead of settling for local government; she herself would surely have become a teacher; probably out of the house again and doing something interesting once the children had stopped needing constant care and attention. But that had become her role, the purpose of her life: to look after Fred and the kids, make a good home for them, see that they had everything she could provide.

Had she done it well? She could only measure that against the failure she saw every day: surly, disaffected children; husbands and wives with hardly a good word for each other; others leading their own, separate lives, drifted apart, some of them split up. She had been lucky: the two who were away kept in touch, came home; all three confided. There had been that terrible time, quite early on, when Fred had become infatuated with that unmarried teacher from the school in Calderford. ‘I can have a friendship, can't I?' he had pleaded, when even she had seen what couldn't be hidden any longer. And for months she had sweated through nights when he didn't touch her and others when he clung wordlessly to her, making love in a silent frenzy, as if to drive the demon of infidelity out of himself.

And they were still together. It was never spoken of, never brought up, thrown out. Yes, she had done it well and she had been lucky. All the same, there were times when... But never mind.

Stephen had not come down by the time she had drunk another cup of tea herself and washed up her and Fred's breakfast pots. She put on her coat, took her shopping bags and called from the foot of the stairs: ‘I'm taking my key in case you want to go out. Make sure you lock the door and I'll see you for lunch.' She waited. ‘Do you hear?'

She backed the car carefully into the street. She had the use of it during the day now that Fred, with a doleful recognition of his thickening waist, had taken to cycling the two miles to school. This was one of those mornings when she was glad not to have to wait for a bus: blustery, whipping the poplars of the garden opposite, with rain in the wind. Straightening the vehicle, she fastened her seatbelt, managed that stiff initial push into bottom gear and drove off to her first call.

 

‘Was that your car making all that noise?' Millie Tyler asked, handing Jean her cup of coffee.

‘I'm afraid the exhaust's gone. I heard it rasping a bit the other day but I quite forgot to ask Fred or Stephen to look underneath. It's nearly four years old. Stephen gets on to Fred regularly about part-exchanging it while he can still get a decent price. But Fred's having one of his periodic economy drives.'

‘Oh?'

‘I don't mean he's penny-pinching. But I know he'd like us to see Venice this year and he does feel the burden of Caroline's fees and having to subsidise Stephen. I mean, he's got to let the lad keep most of his dole if he's to have any life at all.'

‘Oh, yes, you've got to give them their chance.'

‘Well, Caroline, anyway. All Stephen can hope for at present is that things will pick up before all the stuffing's knocked out of him.'

Mollie's two daughters were living away, married to men with good prospects. Mollie herself, widowed twelve months ago, was only just recovering from having a breast removed.

‘But how are you feeling?' Jean asked.

‘Oh, pretty fair. I think they're just about ready to give me a clean bill of health.'

‘Oh, that is good news, Mollie.'

‘Yes, it could all have been a lot worse.'

‘Is that a new dress?'

‘Yes. I thought I'd treat myself.' Standing, Mollie drew herself up in the closely-fitting tweed frock. ‘You couldn't tell, could you?'

‘You'd have no idea. You look as good as ever.'

‘Yes, I look all there,' Mollie said wryly, ‘even if I know I'm not.'

Jean had always admired Mollie's figure and envied her ability to keep it trim yet shapely without the fussy regimen that so many women had to adopt. In her late forties, she was a woman with looks enough to choose her way into a good second marriage, if ever she wanted one. But what now? Jean wondered. At what stage did you tell a man that what he saw and liked was not all it seemed? And what were the chances of being doubly lucky and picking a man you really wanted who would also swallow his disappointment and accept it as part of the bargain?

‘I've got a bit of shopping to do. I wondered if there was anything you wanted.'

‘I'm all right, Jean. I can manage all that.'

‘Well, you look fit enough just now, but you didn't sound it on the phone the other day.'

‘Oh, that was just this bug that's going around. You're sick and on the run for twenty-four hours and then it leaves you. Have you managed to keep clear of it?'

‘Well, so far, yes. There's been a bit of it among the staff at Fred's school.'

‘He's all right, is he, Fred?'

‘Yes, he's fine.'

‘And how's Caroline? Still enjoying herself.'

‘Oh, yes. She's settled to it nicely.'

‘When are we going to talk about that coffee morning?'

‘There's the flag day before then.'

‘Yes, well, we ought to give people plenty of time, so's they've no excuses. Otherwise it'll be the same old story: leave it to Jean; she'll see that it's all right.'

‘They usually rally round, when it comes to it.'

‘Some do, some don't.'

‘Don't make me out to be a martyr, Mollie.'

‘That's your word, not mine. Whenever have I heard you moan?'

‘What have I got to moan about?'

‘There's not one of us who hasn't got something, at some time or other.' She looked up as Jean sighed. ‘That came from deep down. Was it for something special?'

‘I was just thinking that you shame me, Mollie. With all that's happened to you, what right have I to grumble?'

‘If you've got something to grumble about, grumble.'

‘That's just the point. I haven't.'

All the same...

 

The woman came back into the greengrocer's as Jean was transferring her purchases from the counter to her shopping bag.

‘I'm just wondering if you've given me the right change...'

Jean only half heard as she lingered, thinking there was something else she needed. The customer went again. ‘Sorry, my mistake.'

The woman behind the counter took coins from the still open till and handed them to Jean. ‘There's your change, dear. Thirty-seven pence.'

Jean was outside before it clicked in her mind. Opening her purse, she checked the coins in there, then took those the woman had given her from her pocket. She went back in and to the head of the queue.

‘Excuse me.'

‘Yes, love.' The woman glanced up from her rapid serving.

‘My change.'

‘It must be catching today,' the woman said. ‘I did give it to you, you know, love. What was it, now? Thirty-seven pence.'

‘Yes, but you've given it to me twice. I know by the coins in my purse. I hadn't that much loose change when I came in.' She handed the money back.

‘Well, thank you.' The woman smiled. ‘I must have been dreaming.'

‘Both of us, come to that,' Jean said.

‘Aye, well, I don't know about you, love,' the woman said, ‘but it's not dinnertime yet, and I could lose a small fortune by half-past five.' She put her head back, her fleshy throat above the neck of a shocking-pink jumper pumping uninhibited laughter out of her broad chest.

 

Mrs Rawdon stopped Jean as she reached the pavement on the other side of the street. Preoccupied, Jean would have walked past her.

‘Mrs Nesbit.' She was a small deferential body in a worn tweed coat.

‘I'm sorry. I hadn't seen you.'

‘Oh, you've more to think about than me.'

Jean looked into the pale crumpled face and wondered, as she had before, how anyone without an ailment could nowadays age so much before her time.

‘How is your husband, Mrs Rawdon?'

‘That's why I stopped you.' The woman shook her head. ‘I'm afraid…'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘We cremated him the day before yesterday.'

‘Had he been in hospital?'

‘Oh, yes. They had to take him back in the end. I'm glad I've seen you, though. I thought you ought to know, you having been so kind to us.'