Part 2 (1/2)

So much for the aftermath of Aunt Mavis's funeral. One could hardly ignore the fact that some crucial balance had tipped. Something was wrong. Over the weeks and months that followed s.h.i.+rley became moody, difficult, aggressive, while I was simply doing everything in my power to tip that balance back, to get back to the halcyon days before that conversation. With this in mind I brought home flowers and bottles of good wine in abundance, I cut out evening working as far as was possible for someone with my responsibilities and aspirations; I cut out the karate cla.s.s I'd started going to for my back and which I was thoroughly enjoying and proving surprisingly good at. Instead I bought tickets for the opera and for orchestral concerts and ballets which I knew s.h.i.+rley liked and which I myself didn't mind.

What else? I found a stable in Totteridge where we could ride Sunday mornings for an outrageous price and rub shoulders with other young professionals like ourselves. I encouraged dinner parties, trips and acquaintances, even when I wasn't really particularly keen, even when, for example, I had my mind on the huge new programmes we were troubleshooting for Brown Boveri. I tried to get her to take an interest in some large item we could feasibly buy, a new car for example, and I brought home brochures of Cavaliers, Orions, Giuliettas and the like. That usually cheers people up. But most of all I began to suggest that if she didn't find St Elizabeth's sufficiently challenging and surely she had already stayed far longer than we ever intended she should look elsewhere for a job, try for something in publis.h.i.+ng again, or broadcasting. That had always been the plan after all. The problem as I saw it was that she wasn't fulfilled in her work. She was bored. I even suggested she might think about coming into InterAct in some capacity. I was in a position to swing that now. But s.h.i.+rley said on the contrary that she had no intention whatsoever of changing her job. What did publishers do in the end, sat in offices like everybody else, thinking of the price of paper. No, she owed to St Elizabeth's the discovery that she had a vocation for small children. She loved her children. Really, she loved their eagerness, their innocence. In fact she loved teaching in general. It was fun. She had never expected she would, but there you were. She would be dead without her job. It was the only good thing in her life.

'So,' I said, mustering what enthusiasm I could, 'why not get into a whole load of extra-curricular activities? The plays and concerts they're always asking you to do. That could be exciting. Bury yourself in it, if you like it so much.'

'You are a love,' she said. 'Such a delight.'

One Tries and Tries to be Sensitive Another thing I had to put up with these days were the frequent visits from s.h.i.+rley's mother.

Mrs Harcourt was a busy, bossy, bustling woman, exhibiting all the character traits of the wife who gives up career for family and is then left stranded when the fledgelings fly the nest (an object lesson for s.h.i.+rley if only she'd had eyes to see it). She spent an inordinate amount of time on her personal appearance (hair-do's, sauna, ma.s.sage), and had taken up photography as a hobby to fill in the becalmed oceans of time between one social function and the next. She always had her camera bag when she came to visit and at some point or other would always pull out a Nikon and take her gla.s.ses off to squint through its expensive auto-focusing lens at some unlikely subject, in fact the more unlikely the better, to show what an eye she had, how she saw 'the unusual in the usual', as she put it.

She squinted through the lens, maybe at a mess of saucepans inside one of our cluttered cupboards, maybe at soap suds being sucked into the drain, at a coffee mug balanced on the arm of the sofa, but as far as I remember she never clicked the shutter in our house and certainly never showed us any of the results if she did. Perhaps not even she could find anything sufficiently unusual, we are such regular people. She had put on two small shows at the local library in Chiswick, one depicting, from de rigueur unlikely angles, various stages of slaughter in a poultry abattoir off the Goldhawk Road, a comment on man's barbarity to the chicken apparently, the other featuring pieces of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the mudbanks opposite the family's Strand-on-the-Green house, clammy with slime and generally unrecognisable. The glaring gratuitousness of these enterprises was one of the few things s.h.i.+rley and I were still capable of laughing about together.

Otherwise, Mrs Harcourt was a signed-up, card-carrying member of the newly formed SDP, as perhaps only an already wealthy unemployed person could afford to be. Her small head came surprisingly forward from her body and when she spoke, her crisp elocution set a fierce mole above one corner of her mouth in undulating motion. Perhaps this accounted for the immediate impression of pus.h.i.+ness she communicated.

She would come over in her Metro Deluxe, maybe three, four times a week, shortly after s.h.i.+rley got back from school. When I arrived home a couple of hours later I wasn't invited to join in whatever discussion was under way. Often they sat together in the kitchen or even the bedroom to make it clear they wanted to be on their own. Once I heard crying. More often there were loud peals of haw-hawing women's laughter, Mrs Harcourt gasping for breath, probably holding her sides the way older women will, shrieks of 'Oh dear, oh dear', s.h.i.+rley no doubt tossing her hair back, glistening pink mouth wide open, the gesture that had most enchanted me when first I met her.

'So what do you find to talk about?' I might ask later.

'Oh, this and that.'

'Come on, she's here every other evening. There must be something.'

'About Dad, about Charles. She's worried that he never seems to have any girlfriends. You know.'

'I'd be worried for the girl if he did.'

'Then he was arrested last week in some anti-Cruise march.'

'He likes to be arrested, it reinforces his council flat credentials. ' And off the cuff I asked: 'What's the score with your dad these days anyway? We haven't seen him for donkeys.'

s.h.i.+rley said: 'What a lemon this cooker is. For G.o.d's sake! You can never be sure what the temperature is. It doesn't matter how you set it. Either the stuff comes out like charcoal or everything's raw in the middle.'

'And me?' I asked with what I hoped was a wry smile.

'What?'

'Don't you talk about little old George?'

'Aren't we insecure?' she laughed. She said: 'Of course we talk about you sometimes. It'd be odd if we didn't. Wouldn't it?'

'Would it?'

''I think so.'

'Okay. And what do you say?'

'Oh, that you don't deserve me.' She stabbed a fork into some ca.s.serole meat and smiled sweetly.

'Tell me more.'

'Mmm, let me see, that your background's made you a repressed hypocrite.'

'Ah, of course, that. Examples?'

'Though naturally we always agree that deep down you're a kind, honest man and you'll probably turn out good in the end.'

'Naturally.'

But I think I can tell a knife when it's out. And turning.

I suggested that we try to get away more often if she felt so down. An occasional weekend in Paris; we could afford it now. We were averagely well-off young people, even if we might have done better to save. Or I could even take a week off at Easter. Maybe we could go to Spain, Italy. Or a few days riding somewhere. She said she didn't want to go away for a weekend, let alone for Easter. She didn't even want to go away in the summer. We were planning to drive down to Turkey that year, seeing as everybody else seemed to be going to Greece. Now she didn't want to go. I could go on my own. I said, no, I could not go on my own. What was the point? 'Why not?' she said. 'In your head you live entirely on your own all the time.'

One tries and tries to be sensitive. I said that if she felt really depressed and unhappy maybe, just maybe, she should see somebody, er, get help, I don't know, a psychoa.n.a.lyst or something. She said: 'Do me a favour, sweetheart, please.' And she said: 'This flat is impossible, really impossible, you know that? Not a single window that gets the sun, the carpets are the worst dust traps imaginable, the drains stink, the cupboard doors don't close, the hot water's never hot enough, the pipes groan, the oven's useless, the paint is nearly grey, and you can never do anything about it because the landlady doesn't want to pay for it. I mean, what are we doing here?'

I felt she was rather exaggerating. Still, at least this was something I could deal with. I suggested that if it was the flat that was depressing her, though she could never say I didn't help with the cleaning and so on, then why didn't we buy our own place now instead of waiting.

'With whose money?' She was aggressive. I said she knew perfectly well with whose money. A bit of our own and a great deal of her father's. Surely it was tacitly understood that when we were ready, he'd help us to buy. She said buying our flat wouldn't solve anything. The flat was awful, but it wasn't that that was getting her down. I said I didn't know what else to suggest, it seemed to be me making all the suggestions and then her promptly telling me I was stupid every time I opened my mouth. I couldn't understand why we couldn't be happy.

'Don't suggest anything,' she said. 'And above all, stop buying me flowers as if I were dying or something.'

Carrying the Gloomy Can My mother came over. I think for my birthday. Mother is a great celebrator of birthdays, even when everybody else has forgotten them. She even remembers Hilary's. It's a ritual for her, a slavery almost, like the moral code she blindly follows, the t.i.the of her income in the collection plate, the sense of duty toward Grandfather, the not marrying a man because he'd got divorced a decade before.

She remembered my birthday and brought the traditional, home-baked, lemon-iced birthday cake, arriving at the door after two long bus rides all bright and chirrupy, because of course Mother is never more cheerful than when she knows she's fulfilling some family duty. I thanked her and kissed her. I was even glad she'd come as I felt it might take some of the tension out of the air. But hardly have we sat down to eat our cake than s.h.i.+rley is asking: 'Saved any souls lately, Mrs Crawley?'

It was deliberately hurtful. She had the innocent smile on her face she always combines with her worst sarcasm. My Mother very simply said: 'It's not me saves souls, lovey, it's G.o.d,' and she began to tell us all about Peggy's darling little boy Frederick. He was so big and blond, he had all his milk teeth already, he was such a gorgeous cuddly little boy. Her big clumsy hands ma.s.sacred the cake with the flat's blunt breadknife. 'For you, George?'

s.h.i.+rley asked: ''I imagine Peg's planning another one now?'

Naturally, given the still dubious paternity of the first, this had Mother knitting her brow. But she managed a forgiving laugh: 'Oh, I wouldn't know, Peggy never tells me anything.'

'Vetting possible fathers, perhaps,' s.h.i.+rley suggested. 'She's into Buddhism these days, isn't she? Perhaps we'll have a Chinese in the family.'

When we were on our own a moment in the kitchen I asked her what the h.e.l.l she thought she was up to. Why couldn't we just have a pleasant meal together?

'I hate,' she said, 'the way you're such a goody goody when your mother comes, the way she thinks the sun s.h.i.+nes out of your backside. If she knew what you were really like.'

'And what am I like?' I asked.

'You hardly need me to tell you that,' she said.

'You were the one, sweetheart,' I told her, 'said you wouldn't mind her coming to live here with us.'

'Precisely because,' she replied, 'she might finally be forced to see the light. We might clear the air.'

'I swear in front of her,' I said, 'I don't try to hide anything.'

At which, and I'm afraid this is very effective, she simply burst out laughing and walked back into the living room.

Driving Mother home to Acton, I said: 'Sorry if s.h.i.+rl was a bit abrasive, Mum.'