No More Meadows (26 page)

It was no doubt a charitable idea, besides being a good advertisement for soap, but Christine sometimes found it quite embarrassing to listen to the tales of woe told by these ‘wonderful people'. Anyone who came to the microphone was automatically a wonderful person. Everyone was buddies and bursting with the milk of human kindness, but the plight of the wonderful people, telling their stories of crippling and ruin and sudden death for the sport of listeners, was reminiscent of the freak at a circus, exploiting his misfortunes for cash. Once a woman who had lost a husband in the last war and two sons in Korea broke down and had to be led away, and a man whose wife had died having their fifth baby sobbed right into the microphone and got the biggest applause of all.

It was all very embarrassing. Worse still when the unfortunates could not answer the question and had to trail back to Kokomo, Indiana, or Gallipolis, Ohio, with the fare wasted and the glittering prize unwon. If you could be very pathetic, however, a listener might call up the studio and offer to give you a piano or a half share in a garage or your fare to the sanatorium where your wife languished. That was very, very wonderful, and all the announcers got madly excited and handed out bars of soap all round. Christine often thought that if the benefactors had money to spare for plausible unknowns it might have been better to help their family or friends nearer home.

Better perhaps, but not so spectacular, for if charity began at home the listening millions would not hear about it, and be softened up for soap buying.

Whatever Christine felt about the programme, she always had to listen to it while she pushed her vacuum cleaner or watered her plants, much as one is impelled to stop and watch a street accident. When it was over she switched off the radio, made sure that she had her keys in her bag, for she had locked herself out more than once and had to take a taxi to Vinson's office, and went out to do her shopping.

It was a quarter of an hour's walk to the shops. Down a hill, under a railway bridge where there was often a puddle of
muddy water which cars splashed on to your stockings as they sped unheeding by, and up a winding hill on the other side, past house after little suburban house with awnings on the windows and cutely planted evergreens and sometimes a light by the gate made like a miniature street lamp.

One of the houses had a lamp held aloft by a plaster statue of a dwarf dressed as a jockey. He was fastened to the gatepost by a stout chain and padlock, although Christine did not think he was in any danger of being stolen.

Some of the houses had the owners' names painted on little white boards and stuck into the front lawn like Keep-off-the-Grass notices. It was always the people with the oddest names who had them planted there in bravado, as if to show that they were not ashamed of them.

The shopping centre, when she reached it, was all that she could wish for. There was a Woolworth's, and a hardware store that sold every kind of nail the world had ever made, a florist where she bought her plants, a drugstore with a soda fountain where she treated herself to banana splits, until Vinson told her she was getting fatter, and finally the supermarket, which she did not think she would ever cease to enjoy, however long she lived in America.

The supermarket has become one of the natural phenomena of American life. It would be a small and backward village indeed that did not have one. Children are brought up to it and never know the friendly tea and biscuit smell of a corner grocery. No one stops any more to think how wonderful it is, but to anyone fresh from post-war England the supermarket is a marvel, a cornucopia of the world's riches.

The first time Christine ventured into her local supermarket she thought she was in heaven. She took her little wire basket on wheels and pushed it round, gaping at the thousands of tins on the shelves, at the vegetables freshly washed and wrapped in cellophane, the deep-freeze locker where you could get whole meals all ready to be thawed out and eaten, and the butcher's glass-fronted refrigerator, which was a jewel case of pork chops, lamb chops, legs of veal, breasts of chicken and crimson rounds of the kind of steaks Christine had long since forgotten.

In England, when you see something unusual on the grocer's
shelves, you buy it even if you do not need it at the moment, because it may never appear again. It took Christine a little time to drop this habit. She kept seeing things that she had craved for years, and she bought so much that she could hardly carry it home, and then had no room for all the tins in her small kitchen.

Soon, however, she managed to get into her head that she could buy anything she wanted at a moment's notice and up to nine o'clock on Saturdays, and so she curbed her enthusiasm. She had to because she was spending too much. The prices were terrifying. When you got to the cash register at the end of the store where the incredibly quick man, who had his name pinned to his overall in a little celluloid card case, reckoned up the contents of your basket, the final sum which sprang up on the till was always more than you expected. Vinson gave her money every Monday, and she did not like having to ask him for more before the end of the week. He always gave it to her without saying anything, but she did not think he liked it.

She grew canny. She compared prices and saved a cent here and there like any Service wife. She learned not to ask for a ‘joint' of meat. She had tried that and the butcher thought she meant pig's knuckles. She learned what a chuck roast was, and ‘fryers' and ‘picnics', although she never did discover what standing ribs might be. She learned to call a tin a can and Vienna sausages Wienies, and she tried to make herself say tomatoes with an American A. She was learning the ropes.

The suburb where Christine and Vinson lived was in Maryland. It was a long journey from there to the centre of Washington. No buses ran past the apartments, so she had to walk fifteen minutes to the shopping centre and take a bus from there to the District line, where you had to change, because the state transport systems would not run into each other's territory. You got on to what Christine had quickly learned to call a streetcar, after she had asked a man painting white lines on the road where the trams stopped, and he had straightened up and stared at her as if she ought to be in St Elizabeth's asylum.

You had to put fifteen cents into the slot just inside the streetcar door. Christine was always careful to have a nickel and a dime ready, because, although most of the drivers were pleasant, some of them were crotchety and she was nervous of asking
them for change. She thought that if she had to be a tram driver and a conductor at the same time, she would be crotchety too and have the ulcers they were popularly supposed to possess.

It was a forty-minute ride to the centre of the town where the cinemas and the best shops were. You stopped and started and stopped and started and jerked, and the bell clanged like a locomotive in a switchyard, and the streetcar's radio played dance music and told you to buy a reconditioned sewing-machine for no money down and a long, long time to pay on the magic credit system. It also told you where you could borrow money on the easiest, friendliest terms in town. It exhorted you, it begged you to borrow money. It encouraged you to spend more than you earned and then pay off your debts by getting into debt to a loan company. It told you to forget that you had been brought up to think there was anything shameful in borrowing money. There was nothing wrong with it. All the best people did it. It was one of the most delightful business transactions you could make, and jolly Jim Jedwin was there at the Anacostia office to help you, and friendly Art Farmer would welcome you at the Friendship Heights branch. Just plain old country folks all of them, eager to give you the old-fashioned greeting of a simple, homey firm.

And so it went on. The music played. The usurer's front man rollicked on about loans, and the streetcar jerked and stopped and started and clanged, and finally Christine got off at Fifteenth Street and dived for the pavement among the phalanx of cars that she never believed would stop for her.

She sometimes spent an afternoon walking about looking at the dresses and hats and shoes in the shop windows, but she did not often risk going inside. Vinson was particular about her appearance. He was always saying: ‘You must get the right kind of dress' for this or that party, or: ‘You can't go to the Henderson's without a hat', but if she spent too much his face tightened up when he went through her cheque stubs at the end of the month.

He was a great one for saving, and Christine was glad, although she had never learned how to save herself. To her, money was money, to be enjoyed when you had it and wished for when you did not; but Vinson had been saving for a long
time, and soon perhaps they would be able to get out of the apartment and have a house with a garden - and children?

When they talked about having children, Vinson always stuck to his original opinion that they should wait a year or two ‘until we see how things are'. He was always thinking that there was going to be another war at any moment. It was depressing, Christine wanted to have a child soon. It would give more point to her life, and make her days less lonely.

‘I'm nearly thirty-five,' she said. ‘I oughtn't to wait too long. Soon I'll be too old. I'm dreadfully old now.'

‘Women are in their physical prime at thirty-five,' he said. He had read that in a magazine.

Sometimes, when she went down-town, she went to the cinema to while away the long afternoon. Once she went into a big book store with the idea of perhaps getting into conversation with the assistants and talking the language of her old life at Goldwyn's, but they were offhand and they did not seem to know anything about the books they sold, and so she did not try to talk to them.

Going home was a nightmare if you timed it wrong and tried to get on a streetcar when all the workers were pouring out of the shops and offices. You had to wait on a narrow wooden platform in the middle of the street with cars swishing close to your legs and sometimes the rain coming down on your head. Car after car was full, and when the driver did consent to cram in a few more bodies there was no queuing system, and it was every man for himself if you wanted to get home at all. Christine always had to stand up all the way to the District line. The only man who ever got up and gave her a seat was a coloured man. When she told Vinson this he would not believe it. He did not like negroes. He said they were the ruin of Washington and someone ought to stop the evil that Roosevelt had wrought in letting them encroach all over the town like termites.

Christine did not agree with him. She liked to see so many coloured people about. It made her feel that she was in an exotic country. She was fascinated by their high voices and by the loose, bent-kneed walk of the men, the garish clothes of the women and the way they sat about on broken chairs outside their rickety homes in the evening sun, with the hair of the sticklegged
little girls pulled into tight plaits that sprung from odd places all over their heads.

She had a friend called Maxwell, who did odd jobs around the apartments. He was very black indeed and he wore a bellying cinnamon-coloured cap and had one thumb missing and a silver plate in his head from the war. She asked him to clean the outside of her windows, and Vinson came home too early and found Maxwell having coffee and cake in the kitchen and telling Christine the sins of his first wife.

Vinson was cross. ‘You must learn that you can't encourage them,' he said. ‘Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. I know these Shines. The next thing will be he'll be asking you for money. You'll see.'

‘Oh no,' Christine said. ‘Not Maxwell. He's terribly honest. He even told me when I gave him too much for the time he'd worked.'

‘Softening you up,' Vinson said, ‘for future benefits.'

‘Oh no, darling. You mustn't be unfair. You're absolutely wrong,' Christine said, but it was not two weeks before Maxwell rang the door chimes to say that if he did not have three dollars to pay off arrears of rent he would be turned out of his house.

Christine gave him the three dollars. She did not tell Vinson, partly because it would be unfair to Maxwell, and partly because she did not want to admit she was wrong. After that Maxwell occasionally touched her for half a dollar to take his wife to the movies, but he carried her shopping for her when she met him in the street, and he unstuck windows that would not open, and told her about his method for picking up girls when he was in the Navy – ‘You is on the street with a long black cigar, and you gits her eye in yo' eye and you keep it there' – and he was altogether quite a pleasure to her.

The ordeal of getting to town and back in the streetcar determined Christine to learn to drive Vinson's car and get her permit as soon as possible.

He was loath to teach her. ‘It's dangerous,' he said. ‘It's nothing like your London traffic. I'm so afraid you'll get into trouble and get yourself hurt, darling.'

Christine liked him to be concerned about her, but it did not
deflect her. ‘I drove all right in England. You let me drive the Buick, and you said I was the only woman you'd ever not been scared to drive with. But of course that was when you were courting me.'

‘Could be,' he said, ‘though you didn't drive so badly, for a woman. But you'll find it so hard to learn to drive on the right.'

‘You learned to drive on the left in England pretty quick. I can do it if you can. Take me out tonight and let me try and I'll bet you I could go and take my test tomorrow.'

‘Oh no, honey!' He did not want to think she was too efficient. ‘Besides, .there are all sorts of highway regulations you'll have to learn. You can't treat the Washington cops like you treated your London bobbies.'

‘I'll learn. I will be careful. Oh, please do take me out tonight. We could find a side-road, if there are such things in this part of the world.'

He said that she should have a learner's permit. He said that there was hardly any petrol in the car. He said that he had meant to work. Finally, when he saw how much she wanted it, he agreed to take her. Although he was selfish, his honest desire was to make her happy, although his ideas of what should make her happy were not always the same as hers. When he bought her presents, for instance, he consulted his own taste rather than hers. He bought her great purple orchids, and she did not tell him that she liked the little butterfly ones better. He thought she ought to like heavy and ornate jewellery, and he never discovered that she preferred small and delicate things.