More Than You Know (44 page)

But she was beginning to find her single lifestyle unsatisfactory; she didn’t dream of a home and babies, but wanted someone to share things with, not just her leisure time and her bed, but the contents of her head, her thoughts, her plans, her ambitions for herself, someone who understood her and what she was about. The only man who had ever fitted that bill was Matt Shaw; and if ever a man was locked into a marriage, however stormy, it was he.

But she discovered on their very first date that Barry Floyd filled this brief extraordinarily well.

And marriage, as far as she could see, was a straight and fast road downhill to a place where, even if you continued with your career, and earned as much or even more than your husband, he still remained in some mystical way the head of the household, and had to be waited on, fussed over, and asked permission if you wanted to be away or even work late.

She had been shocked by Eliza’s giving up work; she was fairly sure it had been at Matt’s insistence. She wasn’t sure which was her strongest emotion: distaste at Matt’s behaviour or disappointment in Eliza’s; either way, that assuredly wasn’t what she wanted.

That was the spring that
Time
magazine bestowed upon London the ultimate accolade of the title “the Swinging City,” when it became the most desirable place on earth, a modern-day Camelot, home of every kind of pleasure. That was the year that photographs of London—often also featuring the new model sensation Twiggy, with her childlike face, her boyish haircut, her spindly body—appeared in every newspaper in the world. That was when everyone fought to get in on the act, when the prime minister, Harold Wilson, was photographed with the Beatles, and the Queen’s sister (who had, after all, married into the Camelot fantasy herself) rocked to the Rolling Stones; when Michelangelo Antonioni chose London as the location for
Blow-Up
, his iconic tale of fashionable and degenerate society; when even Paris fashion turned tricksy and trendy, when Courrèges showed girlish rather than womanly models in short white boots and plastic dresses, and Paco Rabanne draped models’ forms with dizzily wonderful plastic mirrored jewellery; and that was the time when Eliza thought she was going mad, watching from her self-imposed exile, as every fashion editor in the world battled to find new designers, models, and photographers and to give them the freehold of their pages in ever wilder and more imaginative ways.

She would sit in the flat or in the park, Emmie in her pram, leafing through magazines in an agony of impotence, thinking how differently, how much more creatively, how much better, for Christ’s sake, she would have shown this dress, those colors, that designer. Occasionally she would go and meet Annunciata or Maddy or one of the other fashion editors for lunch, and come back feeling depressed, disenfranchised, cheated of her rightful place in this dazzling over-the-rainbow world.

“And I’m lonely,” she wailed to Maddy, one of the very few people to whom she would admit any flaw in her new life. “Matt’s never home before nine, and then he’s too tired to talk and, more important, listen.”

“Don’t you have friends with babies?” asked Maddy.

“Well, yes and no. Lots of acquaintances, girls I used to know, of course, and they ask me to tea and to meet them in the park, although lots of them have got nannies. It drives me crazy, Maddy; there they are,
allowed nannies by their husbands, so they can leave their babies and go shopping and do dinner parties, and I’m not allowed one by mine to do something really important. God, it’s so unfair. So, actually, I prefer to spend my time alone with Emmie. Although I have got one friend,” she added, “much more interesting. I met her at the clinic.”

“The clinic?”

“Yes. I go there to have Emmie weighed and have her vaccinations and so on. It’s the highlight of my week, I tell you.”

“Oh, Eliza—”

“No, I’m serious. Anyway this girl is called Heather and …”

“Heather! That’s a pretty name.”

“Do you think so? Thanks.”

“Yes. And little Coral, how is she getting on?”

Coral was exactly the same age as Emmie; Eliza and Heather had eyed each other up for several afternoons at the clinic and, with the small class-crossing miracle that only babies can wreak, had each recognized something in the other that they liked, and had smiled at each other and said hallo occasionally, but this was the first time they had exchanged more than a few words.

“Oh … bit slow. She hasn’t gained much this week. She’s been poorly, had a bad cold, and they can’t eat, can they, when they’re all bunged up.”

“No. Emmie had a cold last month, that spell when it was really windy, you know, and I was so fed up with being indoors, I took her out anyway, and she got worse; in fact, she had a temperature. I felt so guilty—”

“Oh, I know; the guilt’s awful, isn’t it? I put Coral in the bath without testing it properly and it was—”

“Not scalding?” said Eliza in horror.

“No, no, almost cold. Poor little thing, I felt so ashamed, but I’d boiled it in the kettle because we’ve got no hot water, you see, and it wasn’t enough.”

“You’ve got no hot water?”

This was so unimaginable to Eliza she forgot to be tactful.

“Not running, no.” Heather gave Eliza a slightly cool look. “None of the flats in our house have. We’ve got the toilet on our floor, though, so we’re lucky. Girl in the basement, she has to come up three flights every night. She’s pregnant; how she’ll manage when she’s got the baby, I don’t know.”

“Poor girl.” Eliza struggled to sound concerned rather than horrified, but horrified was how she felt half the time talking to Heather, who lived in two rooms and a kitchenette and a shared bathroom in one of a row of old houses just off Clapham Common. Heather, whose husband, Alan, worked in an engineering factory, who had lost two babies before she had Coral and considered herself most wonderfully fortunate; Heather, who had less money for everything, food, rent, and the electric and gas meters each week, than Eliza spent on food and petrol for her car.

Heather wasn’t seeing much of swinging London, that was for sure.

She was small and pale, with long, straight light brown hair and enormous grey eyes, and Eliza found her much better company than her old friends; they chatted a couple of times over a cup of tea served from the antique urn in the clinic, and then one day had walked up the road together towards where Eliza had parked her car and Heather caught her bus.

“Blimey,” Heather had said, eyeing the white Ford Cortina that Eliza loathed and that Matt had insisted on, “that yours?”

“Um … yes. Yes, it is. Now, why don’t I give you a lift; then you won’t have to wait for the bus. We can put both the carry-cots on the backseat, look, and both sets of wheels in the boot. Come on; hop in.”

She always took Emmie to the clinic in a carry-cot because it could be lifted from its wheels and put in the car; the large Silver Cross pram that her mother had bought her didn’t actually get many outings. She felt pretty sure that Heather’s shabby pale blue carry-cot was probably all she had to cart Coral about in. And lifting it off the wheels to get it onto the bus … well, it was hard to imagine how she managed. It was hard to imagine how she managed at all.

She was shocked by the house Heather lived in; she helped her with the carry-cot wheels up the stairs to the second floor: the dark, dingy stairs covered with linoleum, the light green paint peeling off the walls,
and the time-switch light going off repeatedly. It was cold, in spite of the sunshine outside, and the stairs smelt bad, a nasty mixture of cabbage and urine.

When they reached Heather’s door she looked at Eliza slightly apologetically and said, “I can’t ask you in, sorry; it’s all a bit of a mess.”

“That’s fine,” said Eliza. “I haven’t got time anyway. Bye, Heather, see you next week.”

As she walked back down the stairs, two teenage boys passed her; one of them was carrying a transistor radio, playing some pop music very loudly. She heard them laughing and shouting something as she shut the front door. If they were allowed to make that sort of noise, how could the neighbours complain about little Coral crying?

“It’s exactly that, because she’s a baby,” said Matt when she told him about it. “Lot of these landlords don’t allow children, any more than they allowed coloreds; she’s lucky to have a place at all.”

“Lucky! Matt Shaw, how can you possibly think someone living like that, sharing a lavatory, no running hot water, is lucky?”

“Because she is,” he said. “People like her, they have to take what they can get. At least the toilet’s on her floor.”

“Matt Shaw, you are such a foul, bloody hypocrite. Going on and on about your working-class credentials, and you sit there calmly telling me Heather’s lucky to have a toilet on her floor. How would you feel if that was us, with Emmie living there?”

“We wouldn’t be there for more than five minutes,” said Matt.

“Oh, is that right? And how would we get out of it?”

“Listen, Eliza, when my mum and dad got married they didn’t have a toilet at all, and for years I had my bath down at the municipal baths twice a week. I survived, and my dad worked his arse off to get that house sorted.”

“I don’t see how that makes Heather lucky.”

“She’s got a roof over her head, that’s why. It’s a starting point, OK. Mind you, she could lose it anytime now. Lot of big terraces in Clapham are being knocked down. Getting the tenants out is a nightmare. I feel for the landlords; I really do. All right, all right, only joking.”

“You are disgusting, you know that? And I just hope for your sake you don’t have any of those houses with signs up saying, ‘No children.’ God, you’re a nasty lot, you developers.”

“And what would you do if I did?”

“I’d leave you,” said Eliza.

It was, of course, completely ridiculous to be so completely—well, nearly—defeated by someone else. To be forced to do what that someone else wanted, often in the full knowledge that it was wrong; to hear herself giving in to entirely unreasonable demands; to find herself lacking in all the qualities—like common sense, willpower, and even humour—that she had thought she possessed in abundance; to become, quite simply, the sort of person she disapproved of and even despised. But confronted by this tyrant, this self-opinionated, hyperconfident creature whose wishes were forced upon her by a confusing mixture of icy determination and noisy aggression, she was lost. Defeated. She had no idea what to do.