A Kind of Loving (50 page)

'That's right, you did. And anyway, you don't know that Ingrid
wants you any more, do you?'

'She hadn't shown much sign of it for a bit.'

'Well then,' he says, 'perhaps it'll be better all round if we call
it a day. Forget it ever happened. Six months isn't long. Ingrid could claim an allowance from you but I don't think she needs
that. She'll want to apply for a divorce, of course. You wouldn't
object to that, would you?'

'What grounds has she?'

'Desertion, I suppose. If we were in America we could probably
add mental cruelty as well.'

' That's a good 'un, that is.'

'Yes, isn't it? Divorces always have their funny side.'

' I shall die laughing.'

'Well that's what it comes to, isn't it, Vic? You won't want to be tied to a wife you're not living with, and I'm sure Ingrid will
want to be free. She's young and attractive. She'll want to marry
again. So will you, sometime, I suppose.'

'I've had a bellyful of being married.'

'So now you're going to chuck it and get out.'

'I haven't said that.'

'I thought you had.'

'I only said I could if I wanted to. I said I wasn't waiting around for any favours and I wasn't going to be pushed into
doing anything I didn't want to do. And you can tell Ingrid
that from me, and her mother an' all.' I've got to the stage now
where I don't mind being rude.

'I'm not carrying any messages, Vic. If you want to say anything to Ingrid you'll have to tell her yourself.'

'A fat chance I'd have with her mother on guard. She doesn't
like me, y'know.'

'I know she doesn't. But
I
like you, Vic. I still think you're a decent lad and I don't shy from the thought of you being my
son-in-law.'

'Thanks very much.' I try to make it sound sarcastic but underneath I'm pleased. It's getting to be quite a treat to know
somebody likes me.

Mr Rothwell looks down at the menu as the waitress comes over again.

' What will you have?' he says.' College pudding or apple tart?'

'I'll give it a miss and just have coffee.'

He orders two coffees and the waitress shuffles off again.' She's
an elderly bint with thick stockings and her little white hat-thing on crooked. It's not a very classy joint, all dark paint and grubby
wallpaper, but it's pretty full, mostly of men, and I suppose it's
got a name among a certain type of feller, travellers and such,
as a place where you can get a plain meal and a drink with it.
We're sitting in a corner with a hat-rack between us and the
next table, which is why we can talk without anybody hearing.

'Suppose I said I'd the offer of a flat?' I say to him. 'What
then?'

'I'd say it makes the situation much more promising,' he
says. 'If you asked Ingrid to live with you there and she refused
then of course you'd be the injured party. Legally.'

'And I could apply for a divorce?'

'I should think so.'

'D'you think she would come? She'd have to go out to work again to help pay the rent.'

' Why don't you ask her?'

' How the hell can I?' I say, getting riled again.' Her mother 'ud
go hairless at the thought.'
^;

'I don't want a bald wife,' he says, 'but we'll have to risk it,
won't we?'

'You mean...?'

^f
I mean that what Ingrid's mother thinks in this case is second
ary to what Ingrid herself thinks. If you want to see her, then -'
He stops.
'Do
you want to see her?'

I wait a minute, then I say, 'I think maybe I should.'

'All right, then. Where?'

'Not at your house.'

This time he does smile, a real smile and no mistake about it. 'Now Ingrid's mother
would go
hairless if I suggested that,' he
says.

CHAPTER 9

I

it
seems like ten miles we walk that night, talking and mulling over things together without having to keep our voices down
because her mother's in the next room. We have plenty to talk
about and plenty to think about - the next forty years, in fact.
It's not something you make your mind up about all in a minute.
The last time it was settled in a couple of jiffs in the park, but not
this time. This time I've thought about it - I'm still thinking -
and we're talking. We've never talked so much before - we were
never very strong on talking - and maybe we'll never talk as much again. Perhaps if we had talked a bit more and messed about a bit
less things would be different now. But they're not, and that's
that. That's the way it is and we've got to make the best of it.

After what seems like hours of walking all over the town we
come to the park and sit down in our old shelter.

'You know you're gunna have to stand up to her, don't you?' I
say.

She nods. 'Yes.'

'You'll have to let her see you've made your mind up and you can't be talked out of it.'

'It won't be easy,' she says. 'She's dead set against you now.'

'Well, your dad's with us anyway.'

'He's a brick is me dad. I don't know what would have
happened without him.'

'Aye, he's a right nice chap, your dad. I right like him.'

' Is it a big flat, Vic ?' she says.' Will it take a lot of furnishing ?'

I can hear the excitement in her voice and I know that now
there's some definite aim she'll find what she needs to stand up
to her ma. I tell her for the umpteenth time that I haven't been in the place so I don't know.

'When d'you think we can look round?'

'Any time, I suppose. They'll be expecting us to look at it before we decide anything.'

'You want to take it, don't you, Vic?' she says.

'Beggars can't be choosers, can they?' I say. 'It's steep but
we'll manage, I suppose.'

'I mean ... what I mean is, you want to take it because it'll
mean we can be together?'

I think for a minute how to answer her. 'I reckon we haven't
had a fair try,' I say then. 'We're married and we ought to see
how it works out with just the two of us. P'raps we'll be chucking
pots at one another inside a couple o' months, but at least we shan't be able to blame anybody else if we are.'

'I don't think we will.' She moves closer and puts her head
on my shoulder. I slide my arm round her just like in the old days.
' We've had a rotten six months, haven't we ?' she says.

'I'll say.'

'If anybody had told me last year at this time all that was going
to happen I'd never have believed them.'

'Yeh.' I'm thinking I'm going to kiss her in a minute. You couldn't believe how different she is when her mother's not
around.

'Vic,' she says in a minute; 'all that time, you know, when I didn't want you to make love to me. Well it wasn't that I didn't want you to really; only it never seemed right somehow, while
we were living at home.'

'I think I know what you mean.' I remember how I never got
used to going up to bed at night in a natural kind of way, and
how the bedsprings creaked and how I didn't like leaving any
thing in the drawers for fear Ma Rothwell went into them during
the day. Though what the heck there was to be ashamed about I don't know; but she just made you feel that way.

So now I do kiss her because it's the one thing I've been
bothered about. If that wasn't right it just couldn't have worked out at all.

'It'll be different when we're on our own,' she says. 'We'll
be all right then.'

'Yeh, we can do what we like then...' I smile. It's funny how
things come into your mind. 'I've never seen you in the bath
except once on our honeymoon,'

'Do you want to see me
in the bath?'

'Yes. There's something nice about you when you're all shiny and slippy with soap.'

She laughs.'You're a funny thing.'

' Yeh, funny. But not queer.'

'No, not queer.'

'This is funny as well,' she says; 'us sitting here talking. It's
about the first time we've sat here and just talked.'

'Except the night you knew you were having a baby.'

'Yes, then. That's when you said you'd marry me.'

Well I don't want to go into the pros and com of that all
over again sol tighten my arm round her and say, 'We can do
something else, if you like?'

'Such as?'

I slip my hand into her coat. 'What d'you think?'

' It's a bit cold, though, isn't it ?'

'We never used to bother about that before.'

'It seems a bit funny an old married couple like us having to
... to do it in the park. Suppose somebody comes?'

'Nobody ever did before, did they? An' anyway, like you say,
we're married.'

'I haven't got my lines with me.'

'You've got your ring on.'

'You're the last person they'd think I was married to.'

Right at the last minute she says, 'Have you got something,
Vic.'

I have to laugh. 'As it happens, I have.'

And then she's got both arms round me and she's holding me tighter than tight and saying over and over again, 'Oh, I do love
you, Vic, I do love you, I love you...'

So that's all right, then.

II

Walking back to Chris's I turn it all over hi my mind. She still
loves me. After a!! that's happened - the way I mucked her about,
the accident and losing the baby, the way her mother's tried to
turn her against me, and the way I've behaved - after all that
she still loves me and she's ready to try and make a go of it.
Whether I love her or not's another thing altogether, but that's not what matters now. What matters is I know I'm doing the
right thing. I'm tired of feeling like a louse and now I'm going to
do the best I can. And who knows, one day it might happen like Chris said: we might find a kind of loving to carry us through. I hope so because it's for a long, long time.

Because now I reckon I've got a lot of things weighed up. All
this has taught me, about life and everything, I mean. And the
way I see it is this - the secret of it all is there is no secret, and no
God and no heaven and no hell. And if you say well what is
life about I'll say it's about life, and that's all. And it's enough,
because there's plenty of good things in life as well as bad. And
I reckon there's no such thing as sin and punishment, either.
There's what you do and what comes of it. There's right things
and there's wrong things and if you do wrong things, wrong things
happen to you - and that's the punishment. But there's no easy
way out because if you do only right things you don't always
come off best because there's chance. After everything else there's
chance and you can do the best you can and you can't allow for
that. If you say, well why does one bloke have all bad luck and
another one have all good luck when he might be a wrong 'un, well I'll say isn't that chance? And anyway, he might not be as
lucky as you think because you can't see inside him and a bloke
can have sk cars and holidays in the south of France every year and it's still what's inside him what counts.