The Pumpkin Eater (14 page)

“Anything's possible,” I said.

“But not that. Oh George, George …” She turned her face into the pillow. She was seventy, and hopeless, and I didn't know how to comfort her. I went to the window and drew back the curtain. It was too dark to see the church spire.

“Ma…”

“I'm glad he wanted to be cremated. I
am
glad about that. It would be dreadful to think …”

“Ma, listen.”

“To think of him buried …”

I sat on the edge of her bed and held her shoulder.

“I want to tell you something.”

Automatically, obedient to years of training, she perked round, sniffing back the last rush of tears. “Yes, dear?”

I swallowed, looked confused, not meeting her eye.

“No!” she said. “
No!
”

I nodded.

She sat bolt upright, almost knocking me off the bed. She scrubbed her face furiously, repeating again and again.

“You're not! You
can't
! My dear child, you
can't
!”

“Well,” I mumbled, picking at the fluff in the blanket, “there it is …”

“But it's insane! What can Jake be thinking of? What — ?”

“He doesn't know yet. You're the first person I've told.”

“But how
can
you start all that over again? How
can
you? My poor child, are you
never
going to get any rest? …” I didn't have to listen any more. I knew it all by heart. Slyly, under cover of the barrage, I tipped two sleeping pills out of the bottle and reached for the glass of water. “You'll be the death of me,” she said, using the word as though it had no meaning. “You will, you'll be the death of me. Have you
no
consideration for other people? In my mother's day there was no proper prevention but how can you
contemplate
…” In these moments of crisis, which she loved, my mother had great fluency. “This! This on top of everything else! I'm glad your father didn't live to see it. Yes. I am. I'm glad your father …”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I shouldn't have told you. Here, you'd better take these pills.”

She took them without noticing she was doing so. I pushed her gently back on to the pillow and straightened the bedclothes. She nagged me heartily all the time, her face pink with outrage. I turned out the bedside light.

“When will it be?” she asked.

“Oh, not for ages. Not till October.”

“October!” she groaned, her eyes closing. “How
will
you manage?”

“We'll talk about it in the morning.”

“Careless girl. How could you be so… careless…”

She slept abruptly. I went downstairs and, sitting at my father's desk, wrote to Jake. I told him that my father was dead and that to take her mind off it I had told my mother that I was pregnant. I said it had taken her mind off it wonderfully, so far; and that it also happened to be true. I said that I hoped he didn't mind too much, and that I was very happy about it myself. I asked him to see that the char was paid, and to give my love to the children, and told him that I would telephone his secretary about the cremation, it would please my mother very much if he could manage to come. I gave him my love, drew three children's kisses at the bottom and left it, with threepence, on the kitchen table for the postman to collect in the morning.

Jake drove down for the cremation, and he brought Dinah. I didn't know what to expect, although I knew that he wasn't going to burst into my mother's house and congratulate me. He walked straight past me and saluted my mother on both cheeks. Then, holding her elbow, he led her into the study.

“I don't know what's eating him,” Dinah said. “He didn't speak the whole bloody way.”

“Don't talk like that in front of Gran. Please.”

“Sorry. He drove like a bloody maniac, too.”

“Oh, Dinah …”

“He did. Is everyone very miserable?”

I hurried into the study. It was all right. My mother was going through the catalogue of my father's affections: “… I was just saying the other night, how fond he was of you, Jake. He was very proud of you, too, you know. Only last week, I can't believe it now, but only last week he said, ‘Mame, we must go and see that film of Jake's at the Odeon.' Of course he hadn't been out for three months, but that seemed such a sign of hope. And now …”

“Is there a drink?” Jake asked, not looking at me.

“Oh dear,” my mother said. “There they are.” She began to cry again.

“We can't … get to the front door,” the undertaker murmured. “Could the gentleman please move his car?”

“Could you move your car?” I asked Jake.

I thought he was going to refuse, but he moved it.

“Could you see they get him down all right?” I asked. “I'm going to take her into the garden. She doesn't want to see him go away.”

He didn't answer. Dinah and I walked my mother over the lawn, through the shrubbery to the vegetable patch. My mother, in her hat, was still weeping. “He loved his vegetables,” she said. “We never bought a single vegetable until this winter, when he couldn't manage it any more. Remember the strawberries, Dinah? You loved his strawberries,”

“Yes,” Dinah said. “They were super.”

“He thought you were growing just like your mother — he meant when she was your age, of course … Do you think they've … finished now, dear?”

“No,” I said. “Let's walk round once more.”

My mother blew her nose, then again clung to Dinah. We bent our heads against the wind and started round the sprouts again. “She was a wild, harum-scarum little girl, though,” my mother said. “What was the name of that friend you had to stay that summer? Eileen, was it? George liked her, I remember. What was her name?”

“Ireen,” I said uneasily. “You could let this off for allotments, couldn't you?”

“Ireen. That's right. She wrote to your father, such a sweet letter. She said she wished her father was like
him.
George was so modest, he was quite angry with me for reading it. It only seems like yesterday, and now … He didn't even say goodbye …”

“Run and see if they're ready,” I told Dinah.

“Okay.” She ran like a woman, not a girl, with her knees together and her feet wide apart. Perhaps it was cruel, but I wanted her to cry, to be sorry. Had she loved him? Did she love anybody? Did she even love me? What would she say when I told her that I was pregnant again? Would she think it… disgusting?

“Don't say anything to Dinah. About the baby, I mean. You won't, will you?”

“Of course not, dear. But Jake knows, I hope?”

“Yes; Jake knows.”

“It seems so dreadful that he'll have a grandchild … after he's gone. He loved the children, you know. Oh, he used to get angry, he used to say you had far too many. But he always loved them, you know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “Come on, now. They're ready.”

We drove to Luton at ten miles an hour, my father in his disposable coffin leading the way. There was no ashtray in the Daimler, and each time Jake finished a cigarette he wound the window down and threw the stub out. My mother had at last stopped talking. I had never seen Jake so pale, haggard. He sat with his back to the undertakers, his coat collar turned up, smoking with short, savage puffs. Dinah kept coughing. I daren't say anything. My mother took my hand and held it tightly. At the crematorium there were a few relatives, all the office staff from the factory and three or four of the men; there were representatives from the Rotary Club, the Borough Council, and the British Legion. Dinah turned down Jake's collar and he gave her a weak smile. In the chapel I stood between Dinah and my mother, but I was only conscious of Jake. “Fight the good fight,” my father's good friends sang, “with all thy might, Christ is thy strength and Christ thy right…” Jake stood with his hands in his pockets. I felt that his hands and his teeth were clenched; that he was sweating. It could have looked like grief, but I knew that it was anger. “Faint not nor fear,” the Rotarians sang, “his arms are near, He changeth not and thou art dear …” My eyes burned with tears, but not for my father. My mother squeezed my hand. She was glad to see me crying at last.

The doors opened, the coffin and the wreaths moved slowly away into the efficient, unseen furnace. Dinah's eyes were wide, her lips parted, she was shocked. We knelt, and the clergyman began some droning prayer. “Oh, why can't he be
quiet
!” my mother whispered savagely. I wished Jake could have heard this. I felt him looking at me and turned quickly. He stared at me. I smiled. He turned away, covering his eyes with his hand. I had been apprehensive, now I was frightened. I prayed, but not for my burning father. Let it be all right. Make it all right. Stop him looking at me like that.

Immediately we got home, he left, taking with him the bewildered and profanely protesting Dinah. My mother said, “He seems so upset. I wish I could think it was because of George. But I suspect it's something
quite
different.”

To explain what happened between Jake and myself is impossible, I know that. We didn't love each other as most people love: and yet the moment I have said that I think of the men and women I have seen clasped together with eyes full of loathing, men and women who murder each other with all the weapons of devotion. There's nothing new under the sun and even I have read — well, in parts —
The Origins of Love and Hate.
This is something you can't find in your magazines, Ireen, though by now, if you're still alive, you may have learnt it.

One of the greatest differences between Jake and my other husbands is that they were all peaceful men capable of great physical exertion, but Jake is a violent man who wears a sluggard body for disguise. Sleepy, amiable, anxious to please, lazy, tolerant, possibly in some ways a little stupid: this is the personality he wears as a man in the world. His indestructible energy, aggression, cruelty and ambition are well protected.

Perhaps he should never have let me seen them. At the point where I learned what I was fighting, loving, I knew that I was bound, in the end, to lose. I dispensed with the formalities of tenderness, pity, the ceremonial flattery that should go before disciplined massacre. I fought, I suppose, like a woman, uttering distracting cries, making false moves, hitting below the belt. I was incapable of giving up, and unable to escape. But I was no match for Jake. He went on loving me even after I was beaten, propped up with my wound wide open, emptied of memory or hope.

My mother began to be irritated by me: I put things in the wrong place, forgot the fireguard, was extravagant with the Quix. She was also melodramatic about my pregnancy, suggesting that I should drink more gin. It seemed to me that she had recovered sufficiently to be left. I had not heard from Jake since the cremation and although every midnight I went to the telephone determined to call him, I could never make myself do so. It was not that I was frightened of his anger: I would have welcomed it. I was frightened that he would not be there.

I telephoned Dinah and said I was coming back. She said thank goodness, it was all chaos. What kind of chaos, I asked eagerly. She didn't know. Everything was fine. She had become a Deist. Yes, since the cremation. They were all well, but hurry back, it's absolute chaos.

It was snowing in London. The house was empty when I arrived. I walked round it looking for signs of life. There were very few. The dolls, bears and horses lay in orderly rows, the diaries and Biros were neat on bedside tables, the gramophones shut up, books back in the bookshelves, even if they were upside down. In Dinah's room howling guitarists, a copy of
Honey
, Tindal and Voltaire. In the boys' room, Gagarin and Glenn, a half-built Meccano windmill. In the nurse's room, the electric fire left on and a dirty teacup with one cigarette stub in the saucer. In Jake's study, nothing: the typewriter covered, ashtrays clean, wastepaper basket empty. It was like walking into a stranger's house, or into a house left desolate by some plague. Who are these people? Who are these children of varying sizes and sexes? Do they feel, do they think, do they look forward to anything, do they remember? Are they happy? They had built snowmen out in the garden. They were an army, self-contained. I was suddenly frightened of them; afraid that when they came back they would find me here, trespassing, and judge me coldly. Across the gardens I could see a great bonfire built by the demolition men. Its flames leapt up, fed by mantelpieces and doors. It crunched them and spat them out, ravenous.

I went up to the attic. Snow had piled on to the skylight and I couldn't see without the light on. I hauled out a cot and a rubber bath. The rubber had perished and stuck together. There was a high chair and a pair of scales piled up at the far end of the attic, but I couldn't reach them without moving a dozen suitcases. I heard, far down in the house, the front door slam. I threw the cot and the bath back into the attic and shut the door. What would they think if they found me grubbing about up here? They would think that I had gone crazy.

When Jake and I were first married — after the three eldest children had been taken away — we lived together in the evenings. Like actors, our lives began when the curtain went down. We ate and quarrelled and made love, cooked and drank and talked through the night, while the audience slept. Then, beginning with Dinah, the children began staying up later. They needed help with homework. They needed food. They needed conversation. They needed more and more of our lives. In a useless attempt to keep something for ourselves, we gave them bed-sitting rooms, television sets, new electric fires; but at eight o'clock, then nine o'clock, then ten o'clock they would be sitting in a patient row on the sofa preparing to talk to us or play games with us or perhaps just watch us, their eyes restless as maggots, expecting us to bring them up. My guilt and Jake's exasperation loaded the atmosphere until, to me, it became unbearable. But the children breathed it in placidly. There were now more great bored ones staying up in the evening than there were small, manageable ones asleep with their teeth cleaned. The nurse went off duty, as she called it, at half past seven, seldom failing to remark that she had had a twelve hour day. We went out, in order to be alone, to the great dirty pub on the corner, to the cinema, anywhere where we might be anonymous and behave, if necessary, unsuitably to our age and situation. That night, after I came home, there was no question of going out. We waited, with bad grace and burning impatience, for them to go to bed.