No More Meadows (25 page)

‘Oh, quick, darling,' she leaned out of the window. ‘Hurry up. Someone else is after us.'

‘Silly,' he said, getting into the car. ‘That's not for us. That's only an ambulance or a fire truck.'

‘Only!' she said, as the noise grew to a hideous wail of sound and passed by them unseen on a parallel street. ‘It's the most awful noise I've ever heard. Worse than the sirens in the Blitz. Why do they have to do it?'

‘Gets the traffic out of the way. You hear it all the time.'

‘I've heard it on the films, when the cops are chasing gangsters, but I didn't know it happened in real life.' Things were always happening in America that made you feel you were in a film.

Before they got to the country hotel where they were to spend Vinson's few days' leave, he stopped at a filling station and had the confetti brushed out of the car, and went into the men's room to brush off his uniform.

‘Oh, why?' said Christine. ‘I like our confetti. I don't care if people at the hotel do know we're honeymooners. They're bound to, anyway. I'm sure we look like it.'

But Vinson did not want to look like it. While they were at the hotel he behaved most circumspectly to her in public. When they were alone together he was not circumspect. He was everything that she could wish for in a lover, and she came back from her honeymoon far more in love with him than before.

It was hard to say when Vinson ceased to be a lover and became a husband. The transition was so gradual that Christine did not notice it happening until one night, when she could not sleep, she kissed Vinson awake and turned him over to her, and he was annoyed that she had woken him.

It was the most hurtful thing that had ever happened to her in her life. When she had stopped crying enough to be able to talk, she said: ‘You wouldn't have been like that on our honeymoon.'

‘Look, honey,' he said, ‘I love you like crazy, but I'm a man with a job of work to do, and I need my sleep. Marriage isn't all honeymoon, you know.'

‘I suppose you're right,' she said into the pillow. ‘I was silly to think it could be.'

After that she did not make the first advances to him again. He still came to her often as a lover, especially at week-ends when he did not have to get up early, but it was not the same. Hers became the more passive and submissive role, depending on his love rather than hers for its stimulation, just as in ordinary things she was learning to be as dependent and compliant as he wanted her to be.

He was a demanding, sometimes a didactic husband. Having gone her own way all her life, Christine found at first a certain pleasure in playing the part of obedience. It was nice to belong to somebody, and a relief to have the burden of initiative taken from you. Vinson discussed things with her, but it was always he who made the decisions. When they both wanted different things she gave in and let him have his own way. She knew that she was encouraging him to be selfish, but he was selfish by nature, anyhow. She could not change that, and so the smoothest course was to allow it. He did not like it if she pitted her will against his, and so, to keep him happy, she crushed her family tendency to opinionated argument and tried to be the kind of wife he wanted.

She was a good wife. She took a lot of trouble with the apartment,
she tried not to be extravagant, and she was always there looking nice when Vinson came home at night.

It was fun to have her own little home to do as she liked in. Housework, with her bright modern kitchen and all her gadgets, was a very different matter from the hopeless drudgery of trying to keep ‘Roselawn' from degenerating into a shambles. At first she was very busy, but after a while, when she had done everything she could think of to soften the apartment out of the bachelor habits it had acquired when Vinson lived there alone, she found that marriage had not given her enough to do. There were days when she was bored, bored, bored, and longed for her busy working day at Goldwyn's and for the friends she had left behind in England.

Christine liked most of the women she met, and she had made friends with Art Lee's wife, but Nancy, like most of the naval wives, had children and was busy in the daytime, so Christine did not have anyone to go out with unless she was with Vinson.

She missed Timmy painfully. It was terrible not to be able to have a dog. She came home from a pet shop with a kitten one day, but Vinson said that cats were not allowed in the apartments either, and she had to take it back. She changed it for some goldfish, and they swam moodily round in a coiled glass tube fixed to the kitchen wall, poor company when she was lonely.

Her apartment was on the fourth floor of the building, which had stone stairs and a cold painted iron banister and a row of little letterboxes by the entrance, because postmen did not climb stairs in America. You had to go down and unlock your box with a key. Sometimes Christine lost the key for a few days at a time, and Vinson would be cross, although the letters that came for him were mostly bills. There were a terrible lot of bills. Things like rent and the telephone had to be paid every month, and the month's bill was almost as high as it would be for a quarter in England. Everything in Washington was fabulously expensive, especially when you made the mistake of translating it into terms of English money.

All the apartments had ultramarine painted doors with brass knockers and nippled rubber mats outside. As you climbed the stairs you could hear what was going on behind every door. A
baby crying, a saucepan lid falling, a radio commentator declaiming about a political scandal or an airplane disaster. The news never seemed to be about anything else. Christine's door was like all the others, except that when you pressed the bell dulcet chimes sounded on the other side of it. That worried Christine, but Vinson seemed quite happy about it.

Inside the door was a little square hall with the bedroom and bath on one side and the sitting-room on the other. The wall between the sitting-room and the kitchen did not go to the end of the room, and the space where the kitchen merged into the sitting-room was used for dining, which was handy in some ways but awkward in others, for guests sitting at the table could see what kind of chaos your kitchen was in.

The nicest thing about the apartment was the screened porch which led off the sitting-room. It had a tiled floor and cushioned window seats, and potted plants grew there with an ease which would have delighted Aunt Josephine.

The apartments were in great red-brick blocks set up the side of a hill, with a sandy playground in the middle, which screamed all day long with the children who were too young to go to school. At the side of the apartment buildings ran a new road where the residents fought for a place to park their cars at night, and opposite was an expanse of raw earth, where the ground had been cleared for new houses.

Christine's windows faced this clay desert on one side and the playground and the back of another apartment block on the other. There was nothing beautiful to look at, and nothing beautiful to listen to. The playground resounded with children's shrieks, and the occasional scream from a window flung up by an exasperated mother. The apartment walls were thin, and all day and most of the night babies cried and radios clamoured and men and women argued, or gave parties, or knocked on things with hammers.

It was not a very nice place to live. Christine longed for a house, but Vinson said they could not afford it yet, and this was quite a good address for a naval officer to live at. Why, there was even a captain living two floors below them. That made it all right.

The Navy had to be at work by eight o'clock, which seemed
to Christine unnecessary. Other wives told her that their husbands were seldom in the office on time, since they did not have to report in until eight-thirty, but Vinson was never late. He left the apartment punctually at seven-thirty, and it seemed a very long day until he came home. Other husbands left their offices at four-thirty, but Vinson often stayed late to finish some work, and she might not see him until after seven. Sometimes he brought work home, or read naval manuals for long hours after supper. He was very conscientious. One day he brought home a dictaphone and put it by his bed in case he had an idea in the night about his work. Christine was sometimes tempted to say rude things into it, but she refrained. She was a good wife, and she would help him to be made a captain, if that was what he wanted.

Christine got up when Vinson did and gave him his breakfast and kissed him good-bye by the front door. She determined that she would kiss him good-bye until the end of their days together. When you did not kiss your husband good-bye in the morning and hullo in the evening it was the end of a proper marriage. It happened to a lot of people, but how exactly did it come about? Did the kisses become cooler and more perfunctory until gradually they faded away to nothing? Or was there one terrible day when you had quarrelled and you did not kiss him good-bye, and the quarrel was still with you in the evening, and he just unlocked the door and flung down his cap and you did not get up to greet him, and that set the pattern for all the days to come, long after the quarrel was over?

Sometimes, after Vinson left in the morning, Christine went back to bed with the paper, which was about twenty times the size of the one she used to read in London. She could never find her way about the Washington newspapers, which were riddled with stories of political corruption, the names of victims of air disasters and road accidents, and society news about gay little parties given by women with German-Jewish names.

When she had had her bath and set her hair, which she could not pin up at night now that she was married, she cleaned up the kitchen and washed the supper dishes from the night before. Vinson would never let her do the dishes at night, although she always itched to get out to the kitchen after
supper. He wanted her to sit with him, although he usually worked or read the paper or listened to the radio and did not talk to her very much. It sometimes seemed as if they had exhausted nearly everything they had to say to each other at supper.

In England, before they were married, there had always been so much to talk about. Vinson had been interested in what she had to tell him about her day at the shop, and there was so much to discover about each other's past lives. But now that they had told nearly everything about themselves that they intended to tell, what was left? Sometimes there seemed to be a great vacuum between them, a no-man's-land across which they could not reach each other. Christine would look up from her book or her sewing to where Vinson sat dangling a house shoe from his toe, and realize in a moment of panic that she was married to him and that he was a stranger.

She wondered what other married couples talked about when they were alone. Gossip, probably, about people they both knew, but Vinson did not care for gossip. He had definite ideas about people. He either liked them and they could do no wrong, or he did not like them and he could not hear any good about them. That was that, and he was not interested in the fascinating details of their lives.

Marriage was supposed to bring you close, but sometimes, as you got to know a person better, it drove you farther apart. When you did not know someone very well, irritating habits and small disagreements were passed over in the excitement of discovering the things you did have in common. But when you were sealed within the walls of marriage for ever, small inadequacies, even tiny differences of mood, could grow out of proportion and push you both as far back into yourselves as if you had a real quarrel.

When Vinson came home feeling masculine and wanting to love her, everything was all right between them. At such times they were happy together, and in these first months of their marriage there were enough of these times to make up for the moments when Christine struggled against disappointment like a fly caught in a cobweb.

She was happy. Of course she was happy. She had wanted to
be married, and now she was. It would come out all right. Marriage was not as easy as it looked at first sight, and if there seemed to be anything wrong it must be her fault. She would be more loving and more tolerant and everything would be all right. Everything
was
all right. Think what some people's marriages were like! She and Vinson were lucky.

These things she told herself as she cleaned her apartment and listened to the morning quiz programmes on the radio.

There had been nothing like them on B.B.C., except perhaps Wilfred Pickles, but ‘Have a Go' was only a very mild version of these programmes where people from the studio audience were made to tell the microphone the most intimate things about themselves, before they tried to answer the general knowledge questions that could bring them fabulous sums of money, or a precision-built plastic rocking-chair or a television set with a tone ‘as mellow as an old Stradivarius violin'.

Whether they won or lost, of course they were given samples of whatever product was sponsoring the programme. When some colourful bearded character from the backwoods was hauled up to the microphone to tell his simple story to the amazed children of progress, Christine wondered how he felt about lugging home to his rustic retreat six giant-size boxes of Foamo, the new miracle sudsmaker that cuts dishwashing time in half, yet is mildest of all to your hands. The sponsors were usually paying his bill at a hotel in Chicago or Hollywood or wherever the programme came from, so he probably gave the Foamo to the chambermaid and went happily home to dip his tin plates in a cold mountain stream, with a hundred dollars in his pocket for knowing who was the manager of the Boston Red Sox baseball team in 1932.

There was one programme which shamelessly exploited people's misfortunes and tragedies to provide entertainment for the vast morning audience of housewives all over America. You were supposed to write in to the studio that your child was going blind, or your wife crippled from polio or your home burned to the ground with all your savings tied up in an old sock inside it. The worse you could make it sound the better, for whoever had had the most ghastly things happen to them was asked to come along to try and win money for an operation on their child, or a
wheelchair for their wife, or a down payment on a new home, so that these wonderful, wonderful people could make a new start in Little Rock, Arkansas.