A Start in Life (4 page)

Even this was not so simple. With his daughter out all day, and his wife and housekeeper discussing which photographs did Helen most justice, which quotes from her album of press cuttings should be included, and from there sinking to a delightful and endless conversation about their childhoods (‘Of course, I was spoiled, and once you are you never get over it, do you?' ‘That was my trouble. I never cleaned the bath out until I was married. Didn't know you had to.'), George found himself doing the bulk of the dusting these days and most of the shopping as well. He was fatter and not so cheery. Sometimes he shaved only if he were going out. Helen, in her middle age, which she hated, had turned away from him slightly, as if blaming him for her advancing years. Why not? She blamed him for his own. Only Mrs Cutler, her eyes watchful, her thin frame thriving on their diet of made-up dishes and instant coffee, remained the same.

Helen was changed. She was as beautiful as she had ever been, for thin women retain their shape. But they lose what little flesh they had as time goes on. Helen was very thin. Her long narrow hands and feet, emerging
from the caftan, seemed to have assumed their ultimate skeletal shape. The bones of her shoulders were sharply outlined. Her wedding ring was loose and sometimes she took it off. Her red hair was now a secret between herself and her hairdresser, and on the days when she was due to have it done she found the atmosphere in the streets threatening. Eventually, Mrs Cutler, the Hoover abandoned in the middle of the floor, would take her, leaving George to finish whatever work she had or had not been doing. On their return, both women would pronounce themselves exhausted, and Helen would retire to bed, where she knew she looked her best. George, harassed, would join her for a drink. Helen's blue eyes, more prominent now in their pronounced sockets, would gaze out of the window with a wistful and ardent expression, her thoughts winging to past triumphs, past travels, past love affairs. George, looking at her in these unguarded moments, would be shocked to see how quickly she had aged.

Ruth took some of Anthea's advice, had her hair cut, won a scholarship from the British Council which entitled her to a year in France working on her thesis, and fell in love. Only the last fact mattered to her, although she would anxiously examine her hair to see if it made her look any better.
‘Je ne suis pas assez belle pour lui.
' Had she but known it, her looks were beside the point; she was attractive enough for a clever woman, but it was principally as a clever woman that she was attractive. She remained in ignorance of this, for she believed herself to be dim and unworldly and had frequently been warned by Anthea to be on her guard. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you're all there,' said Anthea, striking her own brow in disbelief.

She did this when Ruth confessed that she was in love with Richard Hirst, who had stopped her in the corridor to congratulate her on winning the scholarship and had insisted on taking her down to the refectory for lunch. Anthea's gesture was prompted by the fact that Richard was a prize beyond the expectations of most women and certainly beyond those of Ruth. He was one of those exceptionally beautiful men whose violent presence makes other men, however superior, look makeshift. Richard was famous on at least three counts. He had the unblemished blond good looks of his Scandinavian mother; he was a resolute Christian; and he had an ulcer. Women who had had no success with him assumed that
the ulcer was a result of the Christianity, or indeed the way he professed it, for Richard, a psychologist by training, was a student counsellor, and would devote three days a week to answering the telephone and persuading anxious undergraduates that it was all right to enjoy sex with every partner, or alternatively, that it didn't matter if you didn't. Then Richard would wing home to his parish and stay up for two whole nights answering the telephone to teenage dropouts, battered wives, recidivists, and alcoholics. There seemed to be no end to the amount of bad news he could absorb.

A man who did things! Her father, as far as she could see, did nothing but listen to her mother. But Richard had been known to race off on his bicycle to the scene of a domestic drama and there wrestle with the conscience of an abusive husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, or lover. (He had indeed let it be known that he did this.) His flat was permanently occupied by teenagers found huddled on benches at Waterloo Station, whom he took in until they either found work or escaped while he was at a lecture. The porter at the college was only too well acquainted with the distraught and usually drunk woman who appeared regularly to ask Richard to sort out an article which would redeem her whole life if published in
New Psychology.
He was rarely at home. He rarely slept. He never seemed to eat. His ulcer was the concern of every woman he had ever met in his adult life, and many were eager to tempt his palate with special bland dishes: no obligations entailed. Many were disappointed. His diet was a matter of speculation, as was his physique, which remained oddly splendid. His dark golden hair streamed and his dark blue eyes were clear and obdurate as he pedalled off to the next crisis.

Into Ruth's dazed and grateful ear he spoke deprecatingly of his anorexic girls, his unmarried mothers, and his battered wives. She thought him exemplary and regretted having no good works to report back. The race
for virtue, which she had always read about, was on.

‘He's sick,' said Anthea, who had not taken the news of Ruth's attachment too well. ‘He can't have enough of other people's problems. He's insatiable. He doesn't recognize anybody's needs, only their demands. And he glories in it. It gives him the right to be more tired, more busy, more overworked than anyone he knows. Don't expect him to be any good in bed,' she added, seeing Ruth becoming more resolute by the minute.

Ruth had no expectations of this kind. But it did cross her mind that she might invite Richard for a meal. She contemplated the dining room at home. So sad. The velvet cloth and curtains dusty and bald in patches, a pervasive, not unpleasant smell, as if some wine had gone rancid in the bottom of a neglected bottle, the handle of a china soup tureen broken off and waiting on a small silver tray to be riveted. And anyway, was it not rather old-fashioned? The kitchen yielded little more to her increasingly worried inspection. Mrs Cutler, who only washed up once a day, was in favour of letting things soak in murky water. Tins of soup and packets of cereal made up the contents of the store cupboard; the refrigerator contained a plateful of sardines, some tomatoes, many pints of milk with the cream poured off, and a jar of chicken
en gelée.
The teapot had not been emptied. In the dull evening light of a cold spring, it did not look promising. Whatever life there was left in Oakwood Court was lived on the periphery; the main rooms no longer had any function.

So Ruth took more of Anthea's advice and found a flat for herself (and for Richard or at least his dinner) in Edith Grove, a dusty but not unpleasant thoroughfare near the World's End, reverberant with heavy traffic. She had the attic floor of a large house that shuddered with every passing lorry. And although she did not know it, thinking her new home flimsy and temporary in comparison
with what she had left behind, she had done very well, for her two rooms, despite their low ceilings, were light and might eventually be sunny, and the large overstuffed sofa and the small narrow bed, though shabby, were clean. The other tenants of the house were two elderly ladies, Miss Howe and Miss Mackendrick. Miss Howe, who made shirts for an expensive shop in Jermyn Street, was fierce and argumentative but worked so hard at her sewing machine that these qualities were not too much in evidence. Miss Mackendrick was as tiny and thin as a child; she was sweet and vague and did nothing except tend her many plants. Ruth would look up from the street and see her in the window, her cat held lovingly to her cheek. ‘Come on, Cissie,' Miss Howe would shout up the stairs. ‘We're going out. Kensington High Street. Do you good.' Miss Mackendrick would whimper a protest and sometimes even shed a tear. But Miss Howe always won, and when they got back, both ladies, tired and argumentative, but feeling braver than when they had left the house, went to bed very early.

It was a most respectable house. The landlord, an elderly young man who worked at the Home Office, would look in once a month, at Miss Howe's insistence, to mark their rent books. ‘He's liable for the Tribunal if he don't,' said Miss Howe inaccurately; she sometimes regretted that she had so little to complain about. The landlord, who owned two properties in Edith Grove, was abstracted but well-meaning, and regularly forced himself to drink a cup of tea in Miss Mackendrick's densely furnished and hermetically sealed rooms. Since he did without the larger income that he might have obtained by letting his house more profitably, he cut down on expenses. Ruth's water heater behaved erratically and her oven was a yawning cavern of rusting equipment. On wings of love, she cleaned and polished everything. Had she but known it, she was a desirable tenant. ‘If you'd like to leave me your keys one
weekend,' said the landlord, ‘my wife will come in and repaper your bedroom.'

It was not a bad life in Edith Grove. Throughout that vaporous and humid early summer Ruth watched the dusty trees from her bedroom window and read cookery books to find the perfect meal for Richard's ulcer. The fact that she did so little cooking these days, and indeed had never done much at all, did not bother her. If it were a question of reading, she could do it.

She knew her parents did not miss her, but the news that she was leaving home had prompted them to an expression of intense dismay. Helen recovered much of her histrionic brilliance when contemplating this betrayal, tragically, from her bed. ‘But
why
do you want to go?' she repeated. There was no logical answer. ‘Only one reason, if you ask me,' said Mrs Cutler, grimly swiping at the dust on the bedside table.

‘But I'll come home at the weekends,' protested Ruth. ‘And I'm out all day anyway. It's not as if you see anything of me.'

‘But the
nights
, Ruth, the
nights
! Supposing Daddy or I were taken ill? You can't ask Maggie to bear the whole burden.'

‘Indeed you can't,' agreed Mrs Cutler.

George was more sympathetic. He went to Edith Grove, puffing up the stairs in his sharply waisted overcoat, which was now rather too tight for him. He sat on the clean shabby sofa and asked his daughter to make him a cup of coffee. Ruth served it with care. She takes after Mamma, George thought with surprise; it had never struck him before. Ruth introduced him to Miss Howe and Miss Mackendrick. George passed the test. Before he left, he telephoned Helen to say that he would soon be home. Ruth noticed a slight blankness invade his features as he received the usual list of things she wanted done. None of these was excessive but each took a long time to describe. ‘And Maggie needs a new library book,'
Ruth could hear her mother saying. ‘Nothing with an unhappy ending. And nothing set in the colonies. And preferably with nobody called Douglas in it.' Mrs Cutler's husband had been called Douglas.

‘Daddy, I don't like Mrs Cutler,' said Ruth.

George drained the last drops of coffee from his cup. ‘Never cared for her too much myself,' he replied. ‘But she keeps your mother happy.'

The next evening Ruth, at her window, saw his car draw up. She went downstairs to let him in and found him on the steps holding a carton filled with damask napkins, entrée dishes, serving plates, a ladle, and some knife rests.

‘Mamma would have liked you to have them,' he said.

‘Mrs Cutler,' asked Ruth, who refused to call her Maggie, ‘how do you make a chicken casserole?'

Mrs Cutler removed her cigarette from her mouth, tipping the ash into the saucer of the cup of tea she was drinking at the kitchen table.

‘For how many?'

‘Two.'

‘I get it. Well, you can buy some chicken pieces at Sainsbury's, put them in a Pyrex dish with a tin of Campbell's mushroom soup, and bung the whole thing in the oven for a couple of hours. Dead easy. I usually serve it with a bit of rice and some frozen beans. Then you could buy one of their apple pies and warm it up for pudding.'

For once Ruth had the feeling that Mrs Cutler was doing her best. Unfortunately, it was not good enough.

‘Anthea,' she asked on the following morning. ‘How do you make a chicken casserole?'

‘Are you still trying to get that nut to come to dinner?' Anthea carefully replenished her lipstick and smiled brilliantly at herself in her mirror. ‘Why chicken casserole? Why don't you just grill him a bit of sole? You can do it at the last minute. He's been known to turn up late, you know.'

But the weather had become hot and thundery and Ruth did not trust the refrigerator at Edith Grove to preserve anything for longer than half an hour. It would
have to be a chicken casserole because the oven, also slightly defective, could be relied upon to cook it very slowly. Ruth saw herself, in a long skirt and her Victorian blouse and cameo, casually taking the complete dish from the oven when Richard arrived. Besides, it would smell better.

So it would have to be the
Larousse gastronomique
in the public library.

She was appalled by the number of ingredients required and also by the fact that leeks, which figured largely in the recipe, were in short supply. She should have done all this two months ago. Eventually she located some in Harrods, poor shabby things propped up like invalids in their wooden boxes, and anxiously swathed in blue tissue paper. She bought ten, together with two melons (in case one was unsatisfactory); then, with an obscure feeling of giving in to bad advice, she bought an apple pie – rather superior, very expensive, with an overlay of lyrically golden varnish – in the bakery department. She took a taxi back to Edith Grove, put the cake in the refrigerator, the melons on the windowsill, the leeks on the table, cutting away the yellowing green parts which she took down to the dustbin as she went out with her shopping bag for the second time. On this trip she bought three pounds of new potatoes, some carrots, onions, cream, and a bottle of wine. When she got back up the stairs, she was just in time to seize her notes but not in time to catch the bus to her lecture. It would have to be another taxi.

‘You all right, Miss Whatsaname?' asked Miss Howe, emerging from her basement. ‘I keep hearing the door go.'

‘Yes, I'm fine, Miss Howe. Just a bit late this morning.'

‘All right for some,' said Miss Howe to her cat, but loud enough for Ruth to hear.

The lecture was important; Ruth heard about one
word in three. ‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, in
La Cousine Bette
we have the plain woman's revenge, but Balzac has given this particular plain woman manipulative powers that most plain women cannot use. Here we have the clearest example of Balzac's own desire to manipulate his characters.' She heard that bit and nodded her head in agreement, then stopped abruptly as she realized that she had forgotten to buy another bottle of wine for the sauce. Why did simple meals cost so much, not only in terms of money but in sheer attention? One part of her would have been happier with
La Cousine Bette
, but she dismissed this as faint-heartedness. Balzac would always be there. Richard, she knew, would not.

‘I shan't see you until Wednesday,' she told Anthea. ‘I'm not coming in tomorrow.'

‘He's not coming for the whole day, is he? You'd do better to leave everything until the last moment. What are you going to wear?'

‘That blouse of my grandmother's and my tapestry skirt.'

‘Not bad. Too elaborate, of course. You'll look as if you're dressing up for him.'

‘Well, I am,' said Ruth humbly.

‘For God's sake,' cried Anthea in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to let everything show?'

At least, Ruth consoled herself, I have no manipulative powers. These, she knew, constituted the quality that distinguished the villains from the virtuous. Yet why, she thought, did Balzac take such a delight in Bette's terrible stratagems? She decided to postpone thinking about this until she had more time.

Richard was due at eight o'clock on Tuesday evening. Ruth woke at her habitual early hour of six and wondered how she was going to fill the day. With anticipation, naturally. That is how most women in love fill their day. Frequently the event anticipated turns out to be quite dull compared with the mood that preceded it. The
onus for redeeming the situation rests on the other person who is, of course, in no position to know of the preceding mood. Thus both fail and both are disappointed.

In the morning, which was bright but charged with steamy cloud, she went for a walk in the cemetery to calm her mind. For a little while it worked. There was no one there but the gardener and an old man with a young child: they took small steps, their heads down, all the time in the world to spare. A rank, growth of a loose purple flowering weed flowed over the graves, binding them together in a common fate. It seemed hard on the newly dead not to be able to join the others beneath the flourishing undergrowth. Vaguely deterred by the absence of a religious edifice, which would somehow give the whole excursion a weight which it presently lacked, Ruth turned homewards at half past ten and made herself a cup of coffee. The rest of the morning could be taken up with deciding where to buy the chicken. And perhaps a bunch of flowers.

She got out her notes on Racine and contemplated the plight of the stricken (but ageing) Phèdre. ‘
Oui, prince, je languis, je brûle pour Thésée.
' Professor Wyatt would read out that verse with a telling pause before the last two words, thus revealing Phèdre's substitution of her husband's name for that of the young man, Hippolyte, for whom she burns and languishes. Hippolyte, whose mind is occupied by ‘la jeune Aricie', a suitable virgin of good family, is devoured by a sea monster as he rushes along the shore in his chariot. Richard on his bicycle, thought Ruth, although she always envisaged the episode as one of those monumental and frightening beach scenes by Picasso, showing mammoth figures with inflated arms bowling slowly along a strip of sand: a sense of nightmare behind the comedy. She did not really care for Hippolyte, she decided, although Phèdre was enough to put anyone off. The combination of outraged and
thwarted sensuality and priggish inviolability (Hippolyte is a ward of the goddess Diana) seemed to her avoidable, given a little goodwill on both sides. ‘As you grow older, you will come to see this as a paradigm of middle-aged love,' said Professor Wyatt. ‘All you have to decide at the moment is whether the vengeance wrought is brought about by the old gods of antiquity or the new and punitive God of the Jansenists.' This was what she now tried to do.

But she was restless. And even rather unhappy. The break in her routine, occasioned by her extreme dedication to the idea of the god-like Richard was, she knew, wrong, not sensible, doomed, in fact. But it was appropriate that she should spend the day alone for the very strength of her feelings had already removed her from normal contact, and certainly from normal conversation. But how very sad it was to be alone with these feelings, when, in ideal circumstances, she might be motivated to share them.

On an impulse she telephoned her mother. Helen was having one of her better days. ‘Just a minute, darling, while I drink this coffee that Maggie's just brought me.' Ruth waited while she drank the coffee, hearing it, seeing it, knowing that her mother would expect a respectful pause while this bit of business was given its full importance. Helen always had an audience, if only in her mind's eye. ‘Now, my darling, why aren't you at a lecture or something?'

‘I'm having this friend to dinner tonight. I thought there'd be a lot to do.'

‘Well, if you've got time, darling heart, there's plenty to do here. Daddy's gone to Mount Street and Maggie's got a shopping list as long as your arm.'

‘I thought Daddy had sold the shop.'

‘He has, but that silly woman can't manage on her own, it seems. She pays him some sort of retainer to advise her.'

(This was quite untrue. Calling in one day out of sheer boredom, George had found Mrs Jacobs in the back room of the shop, sitting down to a simple meal of rye bread and liver sausage, with a dill pickle on the side, and a glass of lemon tea. ‘
Mahlzeit
,' he said automatically. He had not used the word for years. Her face brightened. ‘I've brought far too much,' she confessed. ‘I don't eat a lot these days. Won't you join me?' So he did and took to dropping in at the shop quite regularly after that. ‘Call me Sally,' said Mrs Jacobs. ‘I was named Sarah, of course. After my mother.' They became Sally and George quite easily. Miss Moss handed in her resignation.)

While George, waited upon once again, sipped his lemon tea in Mount Street, Ruth and her mother and Mrs Cutler sat down to tinned tomato soup, cheese on toast, and instant coffee at Oakwood Court. The aromatic plates were slipped casually into a brimming washing-up bowl by Mrs Cutler and left there to soak. The two women lit cigarettes with an air of exhaustion. Ruth felt a sudden surge of affection for them, Helen in her caftan and bracelets, Mrs Cutler in her dress uniform of elephant-coloured trousers, nylon blouse, and remedial footwear. They managed to be so busy doing the little they had to do. They carried their packets of cigarettes around with them like talismans; they called for cups of coffee; Helen refurbished her make-up with severe and practised strokes; even when they took a rest in the afternoon they made it sound like an assignment to be fitted into a busy day. And then there would be tea – they both groaned for it – and then George would be home, more cheerful than of late, bearing something expensive to eat, and then they would all spruce themselves up for drinks at six. At eight o'clock they would start groaning again, exhausted by their day; Maggie would make a few sandwiches and take them in on a tray; they would swallow a last drink, take their sleeping pills and retire to bed.
Mrs Cutler would change into her slippers and dressing gown and watch television until it closed down for the night.

Ruth, in her neatness, admired the agreeable air of lavishness and laissez-faire that reigned at Oakwood Court. It was as if they had all come down in the world and were determined to let everyone know it. They must spend as much on drink as on food, thought Ruth, but they seem to flourish on it. My mother always seems clean and scented, although slightly dusty, somehow. She doesn't go out enough, of course. But really, when you come to think of it, they aren't having too bad a time. There was no need to worry about them. And they seemed to keep themselves amused.

‘How's the writing?' she asked.

Helen, clenching and unclenching her jaw muscles to keep them firm, could not reply.

‘I think I might try a short story,' she said eventually. ‘The television people would have it. I have this knack for dramatic situations, and I might even write in a part for myself. I've been away too long.'

‘Mother,' said Ruth suddenly and urgently. ‘There's this man coming to dinner tonight and I'm terrified.'

Helen's blue eyes turned clouded and vague. She was silent and seemed remote, vaguely offended. But all she said was, ‘I won't tell your father. He is so frantically anxious in case you do something unsuitable. He'd have kept you at home, if at all possible. No, say nothing. Terrified?' She gave a very small smile. ‘There's no need to be. No need at all.'