No More Meadows (35 page)

The longer she watched the new cleaner working on her home with a suction so powerful that it lifted the rugs off the floor and practically tore the loose covers off the chairs, the more she was convinced that she would never be satisfied with the secondhand one.

After all, as the salesman reminded her, what could you expect for ten dollars fifty? She knew that he was working on her. She knew that he was out at full stretch to make a sale, but she sat hopeless, watching almost dispassionately the mechanics of his salesmanship and the crumbling of her own weak resistance.

He showed her all the gadgets, including the one for spraying paint and blowing moth powder under the upholstery.

‘It certainly is a wonderful thing,' Christine said feebly when he had stopped the motor and the rugs had settled back on the floor and there was peace in the house again, ‘but I'm afraid I couldn't possibly afford it.'

‘With our easy terms? Lady, a pauper could afford it. If you can pay ten-fifty for this old wreck' – he spurned the secondhand cleaner with his crêpe-soled foot – ‘you can afford the down payment on this beautiful new one. I can take your same cheque for that if you like. Ten dollars fifty, that's all we're asking as a down payment, and after that you can make whatever monthly arrangements you like. Five dollars, seven dollars, ten dollars – as little or as much as you like. You can take three years to pay if you want.'

‘Well, but I'm afraid my husband –' Drowning under his salesmanship, Christine clutched at the straw of Vinson's name.

‘Look, lady, if he don't like the idea, why, he needn't ever know. He gives you an allowance for housekeeping? Right. Well, you could pay the ridiculously small instalments out of that and keep the whole business to yourself, hm?' That was what Mrs Meenehan had said. Since she sent for free demonstrations
of nearly everything she heard about on the commercials, she was no stranger to American sales methods.

‘Oh no, I couldn't do that,' said Christine. ‘I'd have to get his consent, though I'm afraid he won't agree.' But perhaps, after all, when she told Vinson about the wonderful cleaner, when she repeated to him what the salesman had said about it being an investment really, because it preserved the life of your house and furniture – perhaps she could get him in a good mood and persuade him.

‘I'll talk to him tonight,' she said, ‘and let you know.' But the college boy was out to make a sale today or die in the attempt.

‘Why not call him now, ma'am?' he suggested. ‘And let me tell him about the new model. If he's engineer minded, which I'm sure he is, being in the Navy, he'll appreciate what I have to tell him about the motor.'

‘Oh no.' Vinson did not like being called at the office. He did not know anything about engineering or the motors of vacuum cleaners, and she had a feeling that even the expert flattery of the salesman would not make him think that he did. She felt trapped. She wished that the young man would go away and leave her with the secondhand cleaner, although she now despised it.

‘I'll have to think about it,' she said, getting up as a sign for him to go. ‘I'll think about it and let you know.'

‘Now you're letting yourself down,' the young man said, his pleasant face falling in boyish disappointment. ‘You had made up your mind, you know you had, that this new machine was the only one for you. Surely you owe it to yourself, lady, to give your house the best. However,' he added sadly, picking up the paint sprayer and looking at it regretfully before he put it back in the box, ‘if that's the way you feel about it – O.K. As I told you, we don't go in for this high-pressure salesmanship. We leave that to the firms who can't sell their goods any other way. I sure am sorry, though.'

He looked genuinely crestfallen as he began to pack the new cleaner back into its box. Christine pictured him stowing it into his car again and driving slowly back to the shop, where other young men would be arriving jubilantly, having made sales of the new models, while he had wasted the whole afternoon on
her and only got rid of ten dollars and fifty cents' worth of rubbish.

She knew that she was lost. She realized now that she had been lost right from the moment when he had brought out the shining new cleaner and said: ‘Now, I'm not trying to make a sale.'

When he had gone away, all charm, and congratulating her on her good sense, she spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the whole house with the new vacuum cleaner. It really was a wonderful machine. Of course she had been wise to buy it instead of wasting her money on something inferior. Vinson must see it that way.

He did not. She waited until he had had his supper, and then asked him innocently: ‘Don't you think the house looks nice and clean?'

‘It looks swell, honey. But then it always does. You keep it very nice. You're a good girl, but I don't want you to work too hard and tire yourself.'

Now was the time. She told him about the new cleaner and how much work it would save her. She told him the whole story, about the college boy who looked too good for his job, and about the secondhand cleaner and the difference between the two, and Vinson sat silent and let her talk, but the fingers of one hand were drumming on the arm of the chair and he was biting the nails of the other, and she knew he was getting annoyed.

He said that they could not afford it. She had known that he would say that, but she had not expected him to be less cross about the expense than about the fact that she had been a salesman's dupe.

‘I've told you time and again,' he said. ‘you should never buy things you hear advertised on the air. The reputable firms don't do business that way. If you wanted a new vacuum cleaner - I don't see why you did, because we had one –'

‘Now you're being like the man I heard in a shop. When his wife said: “I'm going to look at some coats”, he said: “Why do you want a coat? You've got a coat.”'

‘If you wanted a new vacuum cleaner,' Vinson repeated when
she had finished, ‘why in God's name didn't you go to a decent electrical store where you wouldn't be swindled?'

‘I haven't been swindled,' Christine protested. ‘You're prejudiced. Everybody buys things through commercials. Mrs Meenehan buys all her things that way. She –'

‘A very good reason for you not to do it,' he said. ‘Isn't there any difference between my wife and the wife of a broken-down old warrant officer who only struggled into a commission because of the war?'

‘Vin! Don't be such a snob. Just because you went to that smug Naval Academy –'

‘Now, honey, don't try and quarrel with me. You know it's bad for you.' Since she became pregnant this was his new line to stop any arguments.

‘Well, it's worse for me to slave away with that old vacuum cleaner you had for years before we were married. And the secondhand one I was going to buy wasn't much better. Honestly, Vin, if you'd
seen
the difference between that and the new one. There was no question of which to buy.'

He laughed, but without mirth. ‘To think of you being taken in by that old trick! By God, that salesman certainly had a field-day with you. Don't you know that they only advertise things like cheap secondhand cleaners to give them a chance to get into your home with a new one? And then you know what they do? They bring the old one with a piece of paper or something stuffed into the tube so that it has hardly any suction at all, so of course the new one seems miles better by comparison.'

‘Oh no, Vin. He was an awfully nice young man. I'm sure he wouldn't –'

‘Sure he was an awfully nice young man. That's why they sent him out to get you.'

Christine was crestfallen. He thought that she had been a fool. Perhaps she had. But she had her new vacuum cleaner. Nothing could take that away from her. Mercifully Vinson did not say that she must send it back. He contented himself with grumbling about the monthly payments and saying that, with the house to pay off and the baby coming, they were living beyond their means.

Presently he went down to the cellar to soothe his soul with
carpentry. While Christine was washing the supper dishes, Mrs Meenehan's head, swathed in a mauve hair net, for this was her shampoo night, appeared through the gloaming at the window to ask after the vacuum cleaner.

When Christine told her that she had bought a new one and showed her the treasure, Mrs Meenehan was lavish with approval and borrowed it there and then to try it out in her own house.

Christine went down to the basement, stepping carefully down the stairs with the new deliberate tread she had already acquired, although she was not yet much heavier. She had coffee for Vinson, and an idea.

‘If we're so hard up she began.

‘We soon will be at the rate you're going,' he said, without looking up from his calculations on the drawing-board.

‘If you're so hard up, why couldn't I get a job? Part time perhaps. It wouldn't be too tiring. I could easily do something for a bit until I – until I begin to show. I could at least earn enough to pay off the vacuum cleaner.'

‘Oh, damn the vacuum cleaner,' he said. ‘You're not taking a job.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because a commander's wife doesn't go out to work, that's why.'

‘You're always telling me what a commander's wife does and doesn't do. Why should a commander's wife be different from other women? Lots of wives have jobs.'

‘Not mine. Do you think I want people to think I can't support my own wife?'

‘Vin, that's archaic. Why, lots of naval wives go out to work. Even commanders' wives. What about Mrs Hollis? She's in the Treasury. And Molly Gregg works part time at that school. You know she does, and her husband's senior to you.'

He could not dispute this, so he tried another line. ‘What could you do, anyway? I don't see how you could get a job.'

‘Didn't I hold down a perfectly good job at Goldwyn's for four years? The estimable Miss Cope. Why shouldn't I be the estimable Mrs Gaegler in some bookshop in Washington? And I'm a trained nurse. You forget that sometimes when you treat
me as if I didn't know how to look after myself. I could be a nurses' aid. I'd love to go back into hospital for a bit.'

He thought of another objection, triumphantly, for it was a valid one. ‘You couldn't get a job with the temporary visa you have. The Immigration Department wouldn't allow it.'

‘What would I need then?'

‘You'd need a permanent immigration visa, the one I've already applied for as a first step to taking out your citizenship papers, and it will take ages for that to come through, and by that time you'll be too near having the baby, so that stops all this nonsense about a job.'

Christine did not argue the point further. The idea of the job was going out of her head, because the discussion about the visa had reminded her of something else.

Weeks ago, Vinson had asked to see her visa, to check when it expired. During the move from the apartment to the house she had mislaid her passport with the visa inside it. She could not horrify Vinson by telling him this. He was always deadly careful about things like passports and permits. He stood in awe of the inclemency of government authority, and would begin to imagine that his wife would be deported or put into prison because she had lost her passport. So Christine had told him that she would check the visa herself, and had then forgotten all about it.

After Vinson had left for work the next day she turned the house upside down to find her passport, and finally ran it to earth at the bottom of a hatbox full of sweaters put away for the summer.

The visa had expired. It had expired more than a month ago, and here she was living in sin, so to speak, an alien without a permit.

She was getting ready to hurry off to the Immigration Office when Betty Kessler came round from next door to ask if Christine would keep an eye on her children while she went to the doctor. Betty was expecting another little bandy-legged Kessler. She and Christine sometimes exchanged symptoms, but Betty was not pleased and excited about her baby, as Christine was. She was a languid, long-faced girl who took life as it came and was never roused to visible emotion about anything, and she
accepted this third baby as just another of the tiring things that life with the insurance salesman had brought her.

By the time she had come back and relieved Christine of the two little boys, whose vocabulary did not encompass much more than ‘don't wanna', and by the time Christine had walked to the end of the road and taken the long bus ride and then the streetcar, and another bus, the Immigration Office was closed for the day.

It was a branch office out in the northern suburb of Bethesda; a drab and uninviting building on the cluttered main street. It looked the kind of place that would be shut when you most wanted it to be open. It looked the kind of place where all the employees would go off to lunch at the same time, and shut the office to foil anyone who could get there in their lunch hour.

She took a bus back to the District Line, where people were crowding on to the streetcars. Christine had to wait a long time before she could push on to one. She had to stand all the way. Since she came to Washington she had only once been offered a seat, and she had never seen a man stand up for any woman, however old or burdened with parcels. If American women thought they were as good as men – all right, let them stand. Christine wondered whether anyone would give her a seat when she became noticeably pregnant. Probably not, and when that time came she would not feel like risking the jammed and jerky streetcars to find out.

She stood limply, tired and discouraged among the odours of hot and work-stale humanity in the crowded car. She was jerked forwards and backwards and from side to side as the car started and stopped and rocked round corners like an unseaworthy boat. She wished she was back in England where she would not be an alien, but where bus conductors were kind, and she would have a grey expectant-mother's ration book and be allowed to go to the heads of food queues.