No More Meadows (28 page)

She did not see Vinson at first. There were so many naval officers dressed like him, and so many with his slight build and springy walk. She had already waved to two strange men, and was wondering whether to wave to another who looked like Vinson from a distance, when his head suddenly came in at the car window, with his white teeth shining and his flecked brown eyes eager to see her.

Driving home with him seemed so easy that she wondered how she had ever missed the way that morning. She soon learned her way to the Annexe and back, but she always had to keep her mind on the road. If she let it wander while she was driving she was apt to find herself carried away on a curving branch road that might lead her back to Washington, or out to Alexandria, or descending again on the Pentagon to drive round and round that hopeless merry-go-round designed by someone far cleverer than the driver of any car.

When she did not have the car she waited in the apartment for Vinson to come home. She always changed her dress and did her face, tidied away her ironing-board or her sewing, because, although it pleased him to see her busy at domestic tasks, he liked her to be unemployed when he came home, and ready to open the front door as soon as she heard his whistle on the stair. He had a special whistle for her, two rising notes, such as one might use to call a dog. He trained her to answer this promptly, and he got her so attuned to it that even when he whistled very softly she could hear it, as a dog will answer to a high-frequency whistle that the human ear cannot detect.

Sometimes, when they were sitting with people, he would whistle very softly from across the room and Christine would raise her head and look at him, although the person to whom
she was talking had not heard. Vinson liked to show off this trick in public. It made him feel like Svengali.

Christine had to be ready in the evenings in case he came home punctually, but more often he stayed on to finish some work when the other people in his office had gone, and Christine waited, and worried whether the supper would spoil, and wondered whether, if she had a drink and cleaned her teeth afterwards, he would notice. He did not like her to drink alone. He liked her to wait until he came home and made his special brand of martini, which took a lot of trouble and pouring back and forth from different jugs, but tasted no different to her from any other.

She always looked forward to seeing him. Her days were often long and lonely, and she saved up small items of news for him during the day and planned how she would tell them to him. But sometimes, after he had kissed her and pressed her hard against the brass buttons of his tunic, when she started to tell him something she had been saving up, he made the wrong kind of answer, or interrupted her, and it fell flat. That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself – theirs as well as yours – and then, of course, they don't know their part.

Often Christine looked forward eagerly to chattering round Vinson in the kitchen while he went through his methodical motions of mixing martinis, and often she was disappointed because he did not think the same things funny, or was not as interested as he should have been in what the man at the drugstore had said.

Sometimes when he told her a piece of news from his day, she heard herself making the wrong comment on it, and was immediately sorry, because he, too, might have been planning while he was driving home how he would tell it to her, and now she had disappointed him, and she knew how it felt.

In the afternoons, while she waited for it to be time for Vinson to come home, she listened to the radio programmes that she had learned to call soap operas. These were a series of domestic dramas, each lasting a quarter of an hour, during which time a set of characters with easily distinguishable voices went through a chain of emotional crises. They were supposed to represent
ordinary families - ‘people just like people you all know' – but if any ordinary family had experienced so many ups and downs as these radio characters suffered from day to day they would all be in a psychiatric ward before long. The B.B.C. programme ‘Mrs Dale's Diary' was a direct descendant of these soap operas, but while Mrs Dale and her tedious suburban family led a fairly eventful life they never experienced anything like the intrigue, murder and illicit passion in which their American counterparts indulged.

Some of the soap operas had been going on for years, but the characters in them never seemed to get any older or wiser. They were suspended in time, like the eternal Bob Cherry and Billy Bunter in the English boys' weeklies, who had been in the Remove at Greyfriars as long as Christine could remember. They had a faithful listening audience, who had followed their fortunes from the beginning and perhaps knew more about the radio characters than they did about their own husbands. At the same time, however, the script writer had to cater for the listener who might be hearing the programme for the first time and would not know who was who. A character, therefore, would have to refer, even with intimates, to ‘my wife Ethel', or ‘the landlady, Mrs Gooch', or ‘Paula Revere, the leading lady in my current Broadway show', which struck a stilted note in an otherwise free-and-easy dialogue.

Since more and more soap operas had hit the air to sell detergents and deodorants and headache pills, it was the fashion in America to condemn them for the nonsense they were, but Christine suspected that more people listened to them than would admit it. She herself, being new on their onslaught, was fascinated, and followed the fortunes of the various sets of characters with deep interest. Sometimes she tried to tell Vinson about them, but he did not want to hear, and if the programme was going on when he came home he would switch it off, so that Christine would have to wait until the next day to know whether Joanne had finally agreed to marry Anthony (with the H pronounced) or whether Leslie (pronounced Lesslie) had freed himself from the ropes in time to go after the burglar who had stolen the secret formula for the wonder drug.

There was a programme about a poor young widow with two
children, who played out ‘the eternal conflict between a mother's duty and a woman's heart'. The children were never heard from – perhaps because child actors would be in school at the time the programme was relayed – and the young widow sometimes went off for days at a time to follow some twist of the plot, without thought of her Mother's Duty, but such details did not matter in the larger drama of the soap operas. The children had probably played an important part at the beginning of the series – heaven knows how long ago – and after the script writer got tired of them no one thought of changing the announcement record about the Mother's Duty and the Woman's Heart. The public would not have wanted it changed, anyway. It was the kind of public that likes to know where it is.

There was a sinister cripple in this programme, who talked in a snarl and never threw a decent word to anybody. All the characters had to be like that – all bad, or all good, or always funny. They never said anything out of character, in case listeners should think someone else was talking.

The machinations involved to prove that the widow's boy friend was not married to the cripple's sister had been going on now for several months, and looked like going on for ever, with a fresh twist of tragedy or hope whenever the plot slackened. Of course you knew it would come out right in the end, because the widow was a Good character, who said things like: ‘Whatever terrible things have happened to us, I think we shall all be better people for it.' She was also apt to tell her friends that she was looking for stars in the crown of heaven. It was very affecting.

To point up the drama in these programmes an organ was used for the incidental music. This was cheaper than having an orchestra, as its suspenseful chords could be used to make any speech momentous.

A character would say:' We have come to a crossroads in our lives -'
Boom!
from the organ. ‘There is something I have to tell you' – careening arpeggios – ‘I've met someone else.'
Boom, boom, boom!
with all the stops pulled out.

A love scene could be accompanied by a tremulant rendering of ‘Beautiful Dreamer', the
vox humana
could help Mom when she made another of her sacrifices to keep the home together,
and the carillon dinged out at any mention of religion, for God was cast quite frequently for a minor role in the soap operas.

Each programme was sponsored by some product, and began and ended with a commercial announcement. The words of the commercial were on a record and were always the same, so that you got to know them so well that you did not hear them any more, which is one of the reasons why people are able to bear with sponsored radio. Some of the advertisements were set to music. Christine heard them so often that they printed themselves on her brain. When she was doing housework she sometimes found herself singing: ‘Veeto – says No, no – to Underarm O!' or, to the tune of
Ach, du lieber Augustine:
‘Mrs Filbert's margerine,
margerine m
argerine. Mrs Filbert's
mar
gerine – buy some today!', or ‘Brush your teeth with Colgate's – Colgate's dental cream. It cleans your breath – what a toothpaste! – while it cleans your teeth!'

Such was Christine's life during these first months in Washington. When she stopped to think about herself she was surprised to find how quickly she had settled down. She had thought that life in America would be very strange for a long time. Although she was still frequently surprised by things she saw or heard, the new routine of her life was becoming so familiar that the old rhythm of her days in England was already like a far-off song, only half remembered.

She was less bored and lonely when she began to make friends with her neighbours in the apartments. The woman who lived opposite was a large and amiable hausfrau with short stiff blonde hair and a husband who could not sit down without grunting. They were called Mr and Mrs Pitman R. Preedy and they seemed to spend most of their time eating. Christine met the wife staggering up the stairs with brown-paper bags full of food, and often when the husband came home from work, he too carried a paper bag with a salami or a bottle of cream sticking out of the top.

Mrs Preedy was for ever making cakes, and sometimes she baked an extra one for Christine. In the course of a conversation across the hall from front door to front door, which was how they usually talked, for Mrs Preedy always said she had no time
to step into Christine's apartment, and she never asked Christine into hers, Christine had told her that she never made cakes. Mrs Preedy did not know that this was because Vinson did not like them. She thought it was because Christine did not know how to make them, and so about once a week Christine would answer the door bell to find a large iced cake sitting on her doormat, and Mrs Preedy retreating to the shelter of her own front door, stretching her orange-tinted lips in delight at her good-neighbourliness.

She was very sorry for Christine, because she had come from England. She thought that everyone in England was starving. The thought of the meat ration moved her almost to tears – and the toilet paper! A friend of hers had been to England, and the stories she had told her about that! She treated Christine as if she were an African native, newly come from some benighted jungle village. Once when she met Christine in the supermarket, buying quite ordinary things like milk and eggs and butter, Mrs Preedy had said: ‘I think it's wonderful how you know what to buy. Do they have
milk
in England?'

Christine never knew what to do with Mrs Preedy's cakes. Sometimes she ate a piece for her lunch, but Vinson, who had liked her figure in England, had begun to notice that she was too plump in comparison with American girls, and she was trying hard to reduce although she did not think it would suit her. She usually gave the cakes to Maxwell, and once, when she and Mrs Preedy went out together to go shopping, Maxwell was sitting on the grass at the side of the apartments with the plate at his side and a large piece of cake half-way to his dusty pink mouth.

Christine did not know whether Mrs Preedy had seen, but the cakes continued to arrive outside her front door, although less frequently, as if Mrs Preedy might be having a struggle to make her good-neighbourliness overlook the incident.

Vinson did not like Mrs Preedy, although she called him Commodore and always asked politely after the Navy when they met on the stairs. He said that the Preedys were not the type of people you expected to find living opposite you, and the apartments must be going down in tone. One Saturday morning when he was at home he had heard Christine and Mrs Preedy
calling loudly to each other across the hall about Mr Preedy's gastroenteritis, and he had called Christine inside and asked her if she was trying to disgrace him.

When he said things like that to her he used a voice that reminded Christine of her headmistress at school and her matron in the hospital, and it made her laugh. Then Vinson was a little sad, and told her that it was only because he loved her and was proud of her that he wanted her so much to measure up to the right standards.

‘What standards?' Christine asked, still laughing at his pursed-up mouth and serious, unblinking stare. ‘The standards of a commander's wife, I suppose you'll say.'

‘If you like.'

‘Well, don't you ever be made an admiral, Vin. I'd never live up to it.'

‘I sincerely hope that I shall some day. It's the crown of every professional naval officer's career. And you'll make a fine admiral's wife. I know it.'

‘Oh yes,' said Christine, making a rude face. ‘I'll wear pompous hats and be a wet blanket at junior officers' parties and stand in a corner looking down my nose at all the bootlicking women whose husbands want promotion.'

‘Now, honey,' said Vinson uneasily, for he did not like her to talk that way about the sacred Mrs Hamer.