No More Meadows (29 page)

‘It will be bad enough when you're a captain. I don't seem able to behave like a commander's wife, but it will be worse trying to be a captain's wife. I hope I don't get like that woman downstairs.'

‘Now, honey,' Vinson said. ‘Captain and Mrs Decker are very fine people, and she's been very friendly towards you.'

‘I don't like her. She's got a face like a crab and she's always telling me stories about people I've never heard of, and what good families they come from, and the other day she drove me to the shops when it was raining, and because I wanted to go to Woolworth's – only for just a moment – she wouldn't wait for me and I had to walk back.'

‘I'd still be happier to see you making friends with her instead of some of the wives you run around here with.'

‘What's wrong with them? I love old Mrs Minter. She knows
how to make tea the English way. And Nora Beckley is a dear although I know she looks a bit odd. But you needn't have been so offhand to her that time she was here when you came home. Her husband's got cancer.'

‘Well, don't look at me as if it was my fault. I'm certainly sorry for her, but I do want you to make the right kind of friends, darling.'

‘What's wrong with Lianne then? She's the nicest person I've met since I came to America. Life around the flats – sorry, apartments – has been much more fun for me since I've known her. I suppose you don't like me being so friendly with her because her husband's only a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve.'

Vinson did not answer. If an accusation was true he did not deny it or try to defend himself. He just ignored it, so that you never knew whether you had scored a point off him or not.

Christine had met Lianne Morgan one day when she was in the basement laundry putting her washing into the machine. A very tall slim girl with a wide mouth and a lot of flopping brown hair had come down with a basket full of dirty clothes and an even dirtier small boy in a cowboy hat covering her from behind with a couple of pistols.

‘Hi,' said the girl to Christine at once. ‘I've seen you before. You're the English girl who's married to the good-looking Commander, aren't you?'

‘Yes,' said Christine. ‘How did you know?'

‘Oh, I know most things that go on around these tenements. We've been here since way back. You'd be surprised at some of the things I could tell you. Dick – that's my husband – says I'm too nosy, but I can't help it. We live in the block across the playground from you, but our laundry's full of yacketyyacketing women this morning, so I came over here. Let me dump these things – and come up and have some coffee, won't you? Quiet, child,' she said to the little boy, who was killing washing machines – bang, bang – right and left. ‘He's home from school because he said he was sick, but I found out afterwards that he'd held the thermometer under the hot faucet. Pretty cute at his age, don't you think? I've got a little girl who's older, but she isn't half as smart.'

Christine knelt down to the little boy, who had a round bright
face under the dirt, and reminded her of her nephew Clement. ‘What's your name?' she asked. The boy looked at his mother.

‘He's called Perrin, poor little brute, because it's one of Dick's family names and his father insisted on it. I call him Peter, but Dick has to call him Perrin, in case we'll forget when the old man comes.'

‘Well, he doesn't call me that too much,' said the little boy, mitigating the case against his father. ‘Mostly he calls me that evil child.'

Christine went up to Lianne's apartment, and found it the same shape inside as her own, but looking quite different because of the state it was in. Christine's apartment was very tidy. She had plenty of time to keep it so, although it went against her nature. She had been brought up by Aunt Josephine on the theory that there was no sense in putting things away only to have to get them out again. Her father had been allowed to keep his study in a mess of books and papers, and the drawing-room at ‘Roselawn' had always been littered with mending, newspapers and dog pills ready to hand. If you brought down glue to mend something, or nail varnish to do your nails in front of the fire, the bottles might stand around for days, and people would look at them as they passed and say: ‘I must put that away some time.'

But Vinson did not like that kind of thing. If yesterday's newspaper was still lying about when he came home, he would take it out to the kitchen before he sat down. He was a very tidy man. He always put his clothes away and his shoes neatly in line, so Christine had to do the same. If she left underclothes lying about he was quite capable of putting them away himself, and she did not like him to do that, in case he saw that there was still a pin on her knickers where a button should have been.

The Morgans' apartment, however, was in chaos. ‘Forgive it,' Lianne said, waving a hand round the living-room as they came in. ‘It isn't always like this.' Christine suspected that it usually was. A child's night-clothes were thrown half on and half off the sofa, books had been pulled out of the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and one male shoe stood on the table. In the porch was a battered model railway track, which ran in and out under the chairs, some broken toys, children's books thrown
down open with the pages crumpled, a litter of scrawled drawing-paper and some dirty glasses and ashtrays. Two wooden handles hung from coiled wires on the wall.

‘That's Dick's muscle builder,' said Lianne pulling on them with a backward swing of her long body. ‘He has to do something now that he's back in the Navy in command of a large steel desk. But he will do it out here with no clothes on. He swears he can't be seen through the screens, but of course he can. I've been outside to look. The Captain's wife who lives below you has bought herself a pair of fieldglasses.

‘We had a party last night,' she said, to explain the state of the kitchen. Christine liked it. It was the first untidy kitchen she had seen in America.

‘Some people over here wouldn't dream of letting you into their homes unless they'd spent all day cleaning them up,' she said.

‘I know it,' said Lianne.' Maybe I should be like that. I don't know. Are you that way?'

‘Not by nature,' Christine said. ‘But I try, because my husband thinks that I -'She stopped, realizing that what she was going to say might sound critical of Vinson. Lianne gave her a quick look and then turned to the cupboard to see if she could find two clean cups.

After that visit Christine often went over to Lianne's apartment, or Lianne came to hers after the children had gone to school. Sometimes they went out together in the afternoon, and once, when they had been to an affecting film, they had both cried so much that when they came out they had to go and have a drink. Lianne had told the children to go to a neighbour's apartment when they came back from school, so they did not hurry home. They had three cocktails and giggled all the way back on the streetcar, and when Christine got home she found Vinson there before her for the first time since their marriage.

He was not pleased. He did not come to the door to greet her. He sat in his chair swinging one foot, and waited for her to come to him.

She kissed him and was ready to apologize, but he pulled back his head and said in his matron voice: ‘Where have you been?'

‘Out with Lianne. We went to a movie. It was –'

‘You could at least have left a note for me.'

‘I would have, but I didn't know I'd be so late, or that you'd get back so early.'

‘Why shouldn't I, when I wanted to hurry back and see my wife?'

‘Please don't make me feel bad about it, darling. You know I've never not been there when you come home. I thought you'd understand, just this once. Give me a kiss and tell me you love me.'

He stiffened. ‘You've been drinking, Christine.'

‘Well, we had to have a drink, because the movie upset us so much. What's wrong with that? You talk as if I was a nun or something.'

‘You go off drinking down-town with your trashy friends while I sit here and worry about whether anything's happened to you.'

‘You make it sound so terrible. I'm sure you weren't worried. You just say that because you're cross that I was late. I'm sure Dick isn't cross with Lianne, although he's bound to have been home before she was. He doesn't work so late as you, being only a lieutenant.'

‘That boy will never get anywhere,' Vinson muttered. ‘He's irresponsible.'

Christine had by now got so far out of her role as humble and obedient wife that she could not get back into it.

‘Well, I like Lianne and Dick,' she said, incensed now and unable to stop herself provoking him, ‘even if you don't. You have your friends – and I don't like all of them. I can't bear that fat Willie who drops peanuts down the cracks of my sofa – so why shouldn't I have mine? You're jealous, that's what it is. You're jealous of my being friendly with Lianne because I can talk to her intimately. Why shouldn't I have someone to talk to? I gave up friends like Margaret and Rhona in England to come out here to you, and I don't see why I –'

‘Christine,' he said, looking at her out of his odd, tortoiseshell cat eyes, ‘are you trying to quarrel with me? You're wasting your breath if so, because you know I won't quarrel with you.'

‘I wish you would.' She felt her face flushing. ‘I wish you would quarrel sometimes, instead of being so smug.'

Even this did not rouse him. He shook his head and smiled. ‘I'm not going to spoil my marriage that way.'

‘Well, you'd better look out,' Christine said, almost shouting, ‘or you'll find you are spoiling it!'

She ran away because she was crying. She ran into the bedroom and lay on the bed and cried and felt sorry for herself. When she had got her breath back and was lying there pouting and trying to squeeze out another tear she realized that she was having to make an effort to go on feeling sorry for herself. She was in the wrong. She had come home late. She had tried to quarrel. She violently wished unsaid those things that she had worked herself up to say because she thought it would do Vinson good to hear them.

If he would come in now – and perhaps he would, for surely he would not like to think of his wife crying in here alone – she would throw her arms round his neck and kiss him and tell him how sorry she was. He would forgive her, and she would be just a silly and emotional woman, and make him feel strong and sensible.

She sat up and reached over to the dressing-table to powder her face, so that she should not be looking unattractively tearblotched when he came in. Then she lay back on the bed and waited for him, with one knee slightly raised, because her legs looked better that way.

He did not come into the bedroom. She waited for quite a long time. What would happen if she lay there until bedtime and he came in and undressed and let the sun go down on his wrath? That would make tomorrow as terrible as this evening. The only thing to do was to get up and go meekly into the kitchen to prepare his supper, just like ordinary evenings, to show him that it was all over and she was a good wife again.

It took quite a lot of doing, but she managed it. There was nothing else to do.

Late one afternoon, a few weeks later, Lianne rushed over to Christine and said that she had to go out to a cocktail party with Dick, and her baby-sitter had not shown up, and could Christine possibly go and look after the children for an hour or two.

Christine looked at the clock. ‘I'd love to,' she said, ‘but I don't see how I can. Vin will be home soon, and you know he hates it if I'm not here.' She had told Lianne what had happened after they had been to the cinema. Lianne had been interested, but incredulous. Her life had never encompassed a man like Vinson. Dick was casual and accommodating, and she had always done what she liked with her former boy friends.

‘Please, honey,' Lianne said, pulling up her strapless brassière. She was wearing the low-cut black cocktail dress in which she never felt comfortable. ‘Be a pal and help me out. Everyone else who'd do it is busy. You're my last chance.'

‘You know I would if I could. I'd love to put Peter and Betsy to bed. I could finish that story I started reading to them the other day. But – it seems sort of mean to Vinson.'

‘Oh, phooey,' said Lianne, hitching at her girdle. ‘You're much too good a wife. You spoil that man like nobody's business. You're always falling in with what he wants to do. Let him fall in with you for a change. Do him good. I tell you, honey, you don't know how to bring up a husband. Take a tip from an old married woman. You're laying up trouble for yourself.'

That was an American wife talking. Vinson said that was why he had not married one. Christine was an English wife. Vinson said that was why he had married her.

But Lianne was her friend. She would do anything for Christine, except understand her attitude towards her husband. Christine could not let her down, and perhaps, after all, Vinson would be proud of her for being kind and helpful. She would get him to come over to Lianne's apartment, and when he saw how good she was with the children perhaps it might encourage him about having their own baby.

Lianne took off her gay little hat, put it on again the other way round, gave Christine her front-door key and rushed off, leaving her gloves and bag on Christine's bed. Christine left a note for Vinson explaining and telling him to come over to the Morgans' apartment and went across to Peter and Betsy, whom she found sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator, eating cake.

She had a wonderful time with them. They were volatile
children, but affectionate, and apt to counter any serious order with: ‘I
like
you!' and a football tackle round the knees. Christine gave them their bath and cooked eggs for them, because they said they always had fried eggs, although she knew they didn't. Then she chased them into bed and read to them, and all the time she was thinking how domesticated and maternal she would look when Vinson came in.