No More Meadows (34 page)

Daddy seemed to do most of the work of her house, so she had plenty of time to spare, and was always creeping over the grass at the back of the houses and appearing alarmingly at Christine's kitchen window with a shout of: ‘Hi there, Catherine!'

She had got Christine's name wrong the first time she heard it, and even when she heard other people calling her Christine she stuck to Catherine, as if she knew better. Christine wanted Vinson to put up a fence round their garden, so that Mrs Meenehan could not make her cat-footed invasions, but it appeared that you were not allowed to put up fences or hedges on that property. The front gardens must remain just one long continuous slope of community lawn, broken only at mathematical intervals by the neat gravel garage entrances.

The row of houses were alike inside as well as outside, as Christine found when she visited her neighbours, although the
plain girl's house was shabbier and more untidy than hers, and the Meenehans' house was an uneasy jungle of travel trophies exemplifying the less-pleasing tastes of countries all over the globe. The front door opened straight into the living-room, which had a pale polished floor and a small fireplace with a white-painted mantel. Since it was summer the fireplace of the plain girl and Mrs Meenehan, and probably every house in the road, had one large, regular-shaped log sitting neatly across the andirons. Christine wanted to have flowers or a plant in her fireplace, but Vinson wanted a log, and so they had a log too.

The living-room narrowed to a small dining space at the far end, and beyond that was the kitchen, which was fitted up like the advertisements in magazines, and was Christine's delight. Upstairs was the tiled bathroom, the front bedroom which Vinson called grandly the Master Bedroom, and a smaller room at the back which he was redecorating for the baby.

Often Christine went into this room with its smell of pink paint and its nursery frieze round the wall and imagined the cot there with the baby in it, and looked down at her barely plumper figure and tried to realize that this was where the body in the cot was now. She had heard people say that when you were pregnant you had a great consciousness of motherhood, but she found that it did not come naturally. You had to make yourself feel like that deliberately, to remind yourself all the time that the life was already created, because it was so hard to believe. Although she felt a deep glow of happiness whenever she thought about the baby, she felt so unchanged that she sometimes forgot about it for hours on end when Vinson was not there to remind her.

He was almost more conscious of the baby than she was. Although he did not like her to mention it in front of other people, he was always wanting to talk about it when they were alone. He was genuinely as pleased as she was, and he took a deep and almost morbid interest in all the symptoms of her condition. She sometimes thought that it was a pity she did not have more interesting things to tell him. She had stopped being sick; and apart from tiring more easily and finding herself suddenly breathless if she talked too much, she felt quite normal. He still treated her with the utmost care. He made her lie
down when she did not want to, he rushed out with a hat when she was in the garden, and he always called out: ‘Watch it there!' when he saw her feet coming down the steep cellar steps to him.

Because he was so nervous about her he made love to her less often; and when he did, it was almost apologetically, as if he thought that by making her pregnant he had forfeited his right to anything else.

Christine supposed that after the baby was born he would settle down and become a normal husband again.

Christine's pregnancy, combined with her pride in the new house, developed in her a more intense domestic energy. She was for ever cleaning, or tidying cupboards and drawers or moving furniture about. She was like a bird making a nest. Although it would be nearly six months before her baby was born, she was already driven by a restless urgency to get everything in order.

Lianne came to see her one day, and found her standing on a chair washing the kitchen walls, which were perfectly clean. While they drank coffee together Christine took out the table drawer and began to polish the silver while they talked.

‘What's the matter with you?' Lianne asked. ‘You never used to be so crazily domestic'

‘I can't help it. I just feel like that. I feel there's no time to get everything done. It's because of the baby. Didn't you feel like that with yours?'

‘Hell, no,' Lianne said. ‘I was worse than I am now. I couldn't be bothered to do a thing except lie around with candy bars and the comic sections. When the apartment got so you could hardly get in the front door, Dick used to have to clean up.'

‘That's odd,' Christine said. ‘I feel I have to work all the time. I feel like a French housewife. I get terrible urges sometimes to take all the bedding out and air it on the lawn.'

‘For heaven's sake!' cried Lianne, startled. ‘Do you do it?'

‘I have to. I'd worry all day if I didn't. I worry all the time about little things that don't matter at all. I burst trying not to let myself worry to Vin, because it's so boring for him to have
me talking all the time about the floor polish and vacuum cleaners. I'm terribly worried just now about my vacuum cleaner. It's old and doesn't seem to suck properly, but we really can't afford a new one. I don't know what to do.'

Lianne laughed at her serious face. ‘You sure are in a bad way,' she said. ‘If you're going to get like this every time you're pregnant, I hope your family is limited to one. Snap out of it, girl. You're getting like these dreary naval wives who get you in a corner at parties and try to tell you their recipe for corn bread. I haven't come here to shake my head over your domestic problems. I've come here to keep you up to date on the dirt at the apartments. The Deckers have got a new car, and Maxwell is having a hate against them because they won't let him clean it any more since he got water in the glove compartment. He misses you. He told me you were the first real lady he's seen round those parts. And that red-haired girl – the one who was always hanging black lace scanties on the line, remember? -well, wait till I tell you what happened about her …'

Mrs Meenehan, however, the wife of the retired lieutenant-commander next door, was more than willing to worry with Christine about her vacuum cleaner. That sort of thing was right up her street. Although she let ‘Daddy' do most of the work in her own house, she could not let anyone else alone to run their houses as they liked. She was always telling Christine what brand of soap-flakes she must buy and how she could not possibly get along without this or that cooking gadget. If Christine did not buy the thing she recommended, Mrs Meenehan was quite capable of buying it for her herself and appearing at the kitchen window with the article and a demand for the seventy-five cents she had paid for it.

One morning when Christine was upstairs making the bed she heard Mrs Meenehan yoo-hooing frantically in the back garden. When Christine put her head out of the window, she shouted: ‘Come down right away, Catherine! There's something on the TV you must see.'

She never called it television. It was always TV, or even, in her worst moments, video.

Christine knew that Mrs Meenehan would not go away unless she went down, and she could not have her shouting on the
back lawn all morning, so she went downstairs with her hair in pins and allowed herself to be hurried across into the Meenehans' living-room, which was arranged somewhat like a cinema, with the mammoth television set as the focal point, and all the chairs placed so that you could not help looking at the screen wherever you sat.

The Meenehans, having nothing much in common except their memories of the days when Daddy had command of the
Walrus,
lived for television. They had another set in the basement room, which they called ‘the rumpus room', and which was fixed up with a bar and a pin-table and a juke-box and notices which said ‘Gents' and ‘Ladies' in foreign languages, and other trophies of the Meenehans' naval travels. They had originally fixed up the basement for their son, but even a rumpus room with funny notices and mugs full of wax beer that looked real until you turned them upside down could not keep him at home. He had gone away from them to marry a girl they did not like, but they kept up the whimsy of the rumpus room under the illusion that they needed it for parties with the crowds of friends they did not have.

The thing that had so excited Mrs Meenehan this morning was a commercial which was advertising secondhand vacuum cleaners. It was still going on when Christine got there, for television commercials were inordinately long and took up almost more time than the actual programmes. The vacuum cleaners were called ‘rebuilt', not secondhand, and were selling for merely ten dollars, if only you would call POtomac 8 – 7534 RIGHT NOW.

‘Right now, ladies!' shouted the ebullient young man on the screen. ‘Don't delay to take advantage of this positively unique offer, which obsoletes any other in the history of rebuilt vacuum cleaners. These machines are going fast! We're getting calls at the studio every minute. Don't miss your chance to get a free demonstration of one of these wonderful, magic, never-before-equalled vacuum cleaners in your home today! Call right now! POtomac 8 – 7534!'

He hammered it at you like machine-gun fire. You could hardly resist. Mrs Meenehan was completely sold on the idea, as she was sold on nearly everything the radio and television
commercials hurled at her, as her gadget-cluttered kitchen testified.

‘Just what you want!' she told Christine, excited with the lust of buying, particularly at someone else's expense. ‘Call that number right now, Catherine honey. You can use my phone.'

Christine hung back. ‘I think I ought to ask Vinson first –'

‘Oh, shucks. What can you lose? It's only ten dollars fifty. Why, you could pay that out of your housekeeping money and he'd never know it.'

‘It does sound a bargain, but I think I'd rather ask him first –'

‘You heard what the man said? If you don't call right now you might lose your chance.' Mrs Meenehan took every word that came out of either of her television sets as Gospel truth, although after years of hearing advertising men tell her to call Right Now she should have realized that this was only a device to prevent you thinking better of it.

While Christine still hesitated she took off the Hawaiian doll which covered the telephone, and dialled the number. Before Christine could protest she heard Mrs Meenehan arranging for her to have a rebuilt vacuum cleaner demonstrated that very afternoon.

Well, it was a free demonstration, ‘without obligation to buy', the man had said. And although she knew that she would never have the courage to refuse to buy the vacuum cleaner after someone had taken the trouble to bring it out to her house and demonstrate it, it was only ten dollars fifty, and it surely must be better than the old one she had. Had she not seen it on the television screen cutting a swathe like mown grass through a pile of carefully arranged dust on the studio carpet? She was already catching some of Mrs Meenehan's television hypnosis.

The salesman who brought Christine's vacuum cleaner was quite young, a boy just out of college, with a crew cut, a friendly smile and a pleasant, educated voice. Christine felt sorry for him because his four years of youth and glory at college had led only to this, which was precisely why the vacuum cleaner company enployed as salesmen only young men who looked as if they were just out of college. A boy could earn good money in commissions while he was still fresh-faced, but as soon as he began to look too old to make housewives
feel sorry for him, then he would probably find himself out of a job.

The rebuilt vacuum cleaner looked rather battered and did not seem to suck any better than the old one which had been worrying Christine, but the salesman was so young and eager that she had not the heart to send him back to the shop with the sale unmade. The cleaner was no worse than the one she had already, and it was only ten dollars fifty after all, so she wrote out the cheque and hoped that Vinson would understand.

The young man had not used any persuasion on her. It had not been necessary; but when she proved herself a serious customer by writing the cheque he suddenly braced himself and began to go to work on her in earnest.

‘Just a moment, lady,' he said. ‘I'll be right back.' He ran out of the door with his athletic stride and returned in a few moments with a large cardboard box which he set in the middle of the floor.

‘What's this?' asked Christine, as she saw a shining new vacuum cleaner being lifted from the box. ‘I don't want to see another cleaner. I've just bought one.'

‘Sure you have, lady,' said the young man soothingly, ‘but quite frankly, between you and me' – his manner was flatteringly confidential – ‘that thing you've bought isn't going to last you too long.' He had praised the rebuilt vacuum cleaner while he was demonstrating it, but now that it was sold his manner towards it had changed.

‘You're going to realize some day,' he said, still frankly confiding, ‘that you're wasting your money buying cheap rebuilt machines when you could get a new one that will last you for years and never give you any trouble. Now, I'm not trying to make a sale. Believe me.' He gazed at her candidly out of his thick-lashed blue eyes. ‘I just want to show you our latest model, so that when the time comes for you to realize that you owe it to yourself to buy a new machine you'll have some idea of what to choose.'

‘Yes, but -' said Christine. ‘I don't think –' But he had already unpacked the new vacuum cleaner, fitted it up with its brush, plugged it in and started away on her carpet with a noise like a jet engine.

‘I'm not trying to make a sale,' he kept on saying. ‘I just want you to see, for your own interest, the difference between this new model and that old thing you've just written out a cheque for.' Now that she had actually bought the secondhand cleaner he began to damn it unmercifully, shaking Christine's confidence in it, as he intended.