A Family Affair (34 page)

‘Thank you,' Linda said.

She was in bed – the three-quarter-size bed that had been delivered from Bath because none of the local furniture shops could supply them with what they wanted in time, wearing her new filmy powder-blue nylon nightie. David, unknotting his tie, looked at her in the dressing-table mirror and felt his stomach tighten with love.

‘What d'you mean – thank you? What for?'

‘For today. For marrying a …' Her voice cracked. ‘A lost cause like me.'

He turned. ‘What are you talking about?'

She attempted to smile but it was wan, a pale imitation of the radiance of a few hours previously.

‘David, don't pretend. You don't have to pretend.'

‘I'm not pretending.'

‘You went through today just to make me happy. And I want you to know how grateful I am. How much I love you for it. I just wanted you to know.'

‘Linda, you're talking rot.' He crossed to the bed, sat down on the edge beside her and took her in his arms. ‘I married you because I wanted to – all right?'

‘Oh, David …' She nuzzled into his shoulder. Her hair felt like spun silk against his cheek. ‘David, I love you.'

‘And I love you.' His voice was hoarse with emotion, speaking the words he'd never expected to speak, let alone mean and feel with every ounce of his being.

He stood up, unbuttoning his shirt, unbuckling his belt, dropping his clothes on to the bright Readicut rug and turning back the covers to slip into bed beside her. She melted against him and as he felt the warm yielding curves moulding to his body he forgot momentarily that she was a sick – a dying – woman. She was quite simply just his Linda.

He slid his hand under the low frothy neckline of her new nightdress, cupping her breast, feeling the nipple rise and harden. With his other hand he rucked up the skirt, his fingers following the line of her thigh up to the jut of her hip bone, then slipping back to bury themselves in the soft tuft between her legs. He crooked his leg so that his knee lay across her thigh, his whole body reaching out toward her, his love a thick knot of desire that blotted out thought and reason.

‘Linda …'

He rolled towards her, at the same time taking her with him, his body probing now where his fingers had probed.

‘Linda …'

At first he was too intent on his overwhelming need to notice her withdrawal, the tension, the slackening, the inertia. He covered her mouth with his, parting her lips with his tongue and she tore them away, turning her head to one side, her breathing laboured and ragged. Then and only then was he aware of a shaft of alarm.

He raised himself on his elbows.

‘Linda – what's the matter?'

‘I'm sorry,' she murmured. There was a sob in her voice. ‘David, I'm sorry. I can't. I don't feel very well …'

His ardour was gone as swiftly as it had become aroused. He rolled off her, looking down at her anxiously, afraid he'd hurt her, afraid … afraid …

‘I'm sorry,' she said again. ‘I just can't. I really can't.' The tears were welling weakly in the corners of her eyes, trickling down her face. ‘I'm so tired. So terribly tired. I'm sorry … I'm sorry …'

‘Hush!' he said fiercely. ‘Stop saying you're sorry! I'm the one who should be saying sorry!'

‘It's our wedding night! But I honestly don't think I can …'

‘It doesn't matter,' he said. ‘Honestly, Linda, it doesn't matter at all.'

‘It does …'

‘No. You're my wife and we're together. That's the only thing that matters. I mean it, Linda.'

And it was true, he realised. Such a short time ago it had all been so different. Then it had been the physical thing that had mattered. Then he would have run a mile at the thought of marriage. That had all been turned on its head. Just being with Linda – keeping her with him – was all that mattered now.

‘There'll be other times,' he said softly, catching her tears with his fingers and wiping them away. ‘We'll have other times, you'll see.'

He lay down beside her, holding her tenderly, listening to her breathing, shallow and regular, as she fell asleep. Through the long hours of the night they stayed that way; when dawn broke they were still in one another's arms.

Helen drove carefully along Greenslade Terrace and parked outside Number 11. It had been raining – the cobbles were slick and the doors of the houses on either side were closed. Helen was glad. She didn't especially want to run into any of her new neighbours today. She was too anxious to simply get inside the house and have a really good look around.

She fished in her bag for the keys – still on a little wire ring with a brown card label attached – and selected one. Then, with the key in the lock, she paused, savouring the moment.

Her first house. The first home of her own. It had been long enough coming! Thirty-two years was an inordinately long time to wait! But then, if she'd chosen a career which necessitated such a lengthy training, and chosen to get herself involved with a married man instead of finding a husband, she had no-one but herself to blame.

And it had been worth the wait. Not just any old house for her first home, but the one Grandpa had brought Gran to all those years ago; the house where her own father had been born and brought up. What an incredible chance that it had come on the market again now, just when she was able to step in and buy it!

Helen turned for a moment, looking out over the valley, gleaming wetly from the rain. From the wagon works down by the railway sidings the hooter sounded suddenly as it had every working day at midday for as long as she could remember. It evoked a twist of nostalgia in the pit of her stomach.

Helen turned back, rotated the key in the lock, and paused again. Then, with a smile, she went into the house.

In the summer of 1957 Jenny left school; in the autumn, with five O levels under her belt, she started a secretarial course at the Technical College in Bath. Each morning she caught the 8.12 bus from the centre of Hillsbridge, sitting in the little back seat on the top deck with her smart new hound's-tooth check vanity box on the seat beside her and practised page after page of shorthand symbols in her notebook using the special pen that would make both thick and thin strokes according to how much pressure you exerted on it.

She needed all the practice she could get, Jenny reckoned. Shorthand didn't come as easily to her as typewriting, which she loved, or even, surprisingly, bookkeeping. The symbols and squiggles were all very well, very clever, but each time she thought she was beginning to master it, there was a new variation to learn and though she could write it quite well, reading it back was another matter. But master it she must. Jenny had set her heart on getting a job as a newspaper reporter, and the Head of Department at the college, a sharp little lady with a quavery voice, had said no editor would even consider taking her on with a speed of less than 120 words per minute.

She could do it, Jenny promised herself. If she could manage O levels in Latin and Maths and French, then she could learn to write shorthand at 120 wpm. Even if it meant practising until her wrist ached. And having persuaded Carrie to let her leave school and get on with doing the course that would help her achieve her ambition, she had to make a success of it!

Persuading Carrie hadn't been easy. Everyone had done their best to talk her into staying on and taking her A levels – her teachers; the headmaster (he'd sent a letter to Carrie and Joe saying that to leave now would be a terrible waste of her potential); even Carrie herself, though Jenny knew that the financial position at home was no better than it had ever been and another two years in school would only have added to the pressures.

‘The secretarial course is only for a year, Mum,' she'd said. ‘I'm eligible for it because I've been to Grammar School. Then I shall be earning and I'll be able to help you out.'

‘I don't want you to miss out on the opportunity to do well for yourself,' Carrie had said. ‘I don't want you feeling all your life that you could have gone to college if only we were a bit better off.'

‘I don't want to go to college,' Jenny had argued. ‘What's the point? I'd never get to university – you've got to be really clever for that – much cleverer than I am – and college is really only for people who want to teach. I don't.'

‘What's wrong with teaching?' Carrie had demanded. She rather fancied her daughter becoming a teacher. There was a lot of status attached to that.

‘I don't want to do it! I want to be a newspaper reporter.'

Carrie had snorted in disgust. To her, a newspaper reporter was someone like Walter Evans, who wrote for the
Mercury
, the local paper. He had an office in the centre of Hillsbridge that was hardly worthy of the name, he wore an old tweed suit with patched elbows, drove a dreadful old banger of a motor car and seemed to spend most of his time standing on the doorstep of his office smoking roll-up cigarettes and gossiping to passers-by in the hope of picking up a titbit of information that would lead to a story. Not in the same league at all as teaching, by Carrie's reckoning.

‘Everybody would look up to you if you were a teacher,' she said stubbornly.

‘Everyone would look up to me if my name was on the byline of the
Daily Telegraph
,' Jenny said. ‘And anyway, I don't care whether they do or not. As long as I'm doing what I want to. And looking after a lot of screaming kids isn't what I want.'

In the end, to Jenny's surprise, Joe had taken her side. He usually sat on the sidelines when such arguments were taking place, but when he did intervene, he could be unexpectedly forceful.

‘I think you should let the girl do what she wants to, m'dear,' he said, and it was his tone more than his words which made Carrie take a step back. ‘She's old enough to know her own mind and there's no point forcing her.'

‘But I wanted to see her …' Carrie began.

‘It's not what
you
want, though, is it?' Joe said reasonably. ‘It's our Jenny's life and you can't live it for her.'

And so Carrie had conceded defeat, still not knowing whether to be relieved or disappointed – it was true that an extra wage packet coming into the house a year or so earlier than would otherwise have been the case would be very useful. Jenny had left school, bidding, in the end, a tearful goodbye to her friends. Most of them, including Rowena, were staying on.

Now, however, a few short months later, she felt as far removed from them as if they were inhabiting different worlds, which, of course, was not far from the truth. While they were still confined to school uniform, Jenny could wear what she liked, even a little make-up, which Carrie had at long last ceased to object to. Whilst they were living under the same regime of morning assemblies and dinner eaten in the school hall – albeit with a few privileges that came from being that elite Sixth Form – Jenny went straight to the desk that folded back to reveal her typewriter and ate sandwiches in the lunch hour in the coffee-bar style ‘student's common room' before wandering around Bath window-shopping. It was an exciting time, opening a window on what life as an adult would be like, giving her for the first time a glimpse of real freedom. But to begin with it was also a little lonely. Jenny was the only one from the Hillsbridge area. All the others in her group had been to school in Bath – either the High School or the Convent or the City of Bath Girls'School – and she thought they considered her something of a bumpkin. And if not that, well, an outsider.

The first friend she made was called Susan – Susan Beauchamp – and she was a bit of an outsider too, being several years older and having gone from school to do a course at the Lucie Clayton School of Modelling. This might have made her impossibly glamorous, and in some ways Susan was, but she was also somehow embarrassing with her rather affected ways and her boomy ‘posh' voice, and Jenny felt as reluctant to be paired off with her, as she had been, all those years ago, to be paired with bandy wombly Diane Whitcombe and fat Penny Presley. At least on her own she stood a chance of being accepted into one group or another. With Susan tagging along, she stood none.

It wasn't only with the other girls that her style was being cramped by having Susan in tow. Jenny had noticed that the coffee bar/student common room was often overflowing at lunchtime with interesting-looking boys. Most of them were on day release from the jobs they were apprenticed to and were therefore several years older than she was, which only made them more attractive – along with their hairstyles (including the DA which had been banned as totally unsuitable at school), their casual clothes (denim jeans and enormous fisherman rib sweaters) and their motorbikes (gleaming BSAs and Nortons and Triumphs drawn up in lines in the college car park).

There were engineers on Mondays and Wednesdays, electrical engineers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and something known as Technical Trainees on Fridays. Amongst them, Jenny had spotted some Hillsbridge boys she knew vaguely – and would like to know better!

Shaking Susan off wasn't easy, but sometimes when she had no sandwiches she went into town for soup and a roll and Jenny took full advantage of her absence to go to the common room alone.

Such a short time ago, she realised, she would never have had the nerve! She wasn't sure she had now! But she hid her nervousness behind a façade of self-confidence and pit-patted in on her kitten heels, found a stool and tried to look pert and alluring at the same time.

It worked.

‘Don't I know you?' one of the Hillsbridge boys – a Wednesday engineer – asked her, and soon they got talking and the others joined in. Jenny found herself the only girl in the circle – and found she was enjoying it too! Some of the older girls, the ones who wore short skirts and spiky stilettos, glowered at her, annoyed that she had muscled into what they regarded as their preserve, but the reaction amongst her own course mates, when they got to hear of it, was very different. They were impressed.