The Likes of Us (31 page)

Madge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If there was one thing all who knew Madge Collins were agreed upon it was that she was a lady: she had grace, charm, poise. Most people acknowledged her qualities with approval; in some, conscious of being lesser mortals, they aroused feelings of rancour. She was too perfect for this life, and pride went before a fall.

It had always been so with her. As a child she was a ‘little madam', wilful, used to getting her own way, but without the passions, tears and sulks others found inseparable from the attaining of their ends. At twenty-nine, the eldest of the three Greenaway girls, she was still single. Her youngest sister, Angela, had got herself pregnant while still at university and married with unfortunate haste at nineteen. You couldn't imagine Madge Greenaway in a situation like that; and it was less the moral aspect of it that one saw as sitting incongruously on her personality than the simple untidiness of it; the mess. At twenty-nine she seemed to be placidly biding her time (and leaving it a touch late, some thought). Though her name had never been closely connected with any man's, no-one doubted that she'd had her chances. She was handsome, intelligent, and she would have money from her father. Potential suitors came and went. One came and stayed long enough to transfer his attentions to the middle sister, Catherine, and marry her. Nor was there any feeling in this that Madge had lost a husband, that Catherine had stolen a man from her. She was hardly aware that her future brother-in-law had come to woo her before all the attractions he thought he'd found in her were more piquantly displayed to him in the person of Catherine. Madge, who hadn't wanted him anyway, gave them her blessing and went on living her own well-ordered life. ‘The man isn't born who's good enough for Madge Greenaway,' said an observant, concerned, and somewhat irritated friend at this time.

Edgar Collins changed this notion. It had been said that Madge did not meet enough eligible men because she had never gone out to work. Adam Greenaway became a widower while Madge was in her last year at school. She showed no interest in continuing her education and, at eighteen, she chose to stay at home and keep house for her father and younger sisters. Adam Greenaway was the managing director of a family motor sales and repair firm which he ran with a brother and a nephew, and there was plenty of money to pay for help for Madge. A woman came to the house every day and relieved her of all the menial tasks, leaving her free to supervise the shopping and household expenditure and to cook, all of which she enjoyed doing and showed an aptitude for. When her father, who for several years had been a Conservative member of the town council, came to serve his term as mayor, Madge became his mayoress and discharged her duties with such grace and ease she might have trained for the purpose all her life. On the occasions when she spoke in public she did so in a manner which, while not controversial, was lucid and piquant and avoided the shabby clich
é
s so many of her predecessors had relied upon. Madge Greenaway didn't flap easily; not even when the chairman at one of the functions she opened became himself so controversial as to describe her as the most charming mayoress the town had had for many a year to an audience containing two recent holders of the office. One of them who had already despised the other for owning all the faults Madge Greenaway was so free of now found that she detested Madge Greenaway more. The second woman was honestly pleased to see someone function so admirably in a role she herself had feared and fumbled in, to the extent of tripping on the stairs at the mayor's ball and sending sprawling the first citizen of a neighbouring town. It was at the mayor's ball held during her father's year of office that Madge met Edgar Collins.

He was introduced to her across an arbitrarily come -together circle in the bar, a shortish, stocky, sandy-haired man whom she smiled at and took no more notice of until a few moments later when, Tommy Marshall having launched into a risqu
é
story he'd been awaiting an audience for all evening, she felt a touch on her elbow and realised that Collins had edged his way round the outside of the group and was asking her to dance.

‘Or would you like another drink?'

‘Thank you. I think I'd prefer to dance.'

He had green eyes. His colouring wasn't of a type she had thought she cared for. She handed him her empty glass and he got rid of it before they walked together along the passage to the ballroom.

‘I hope you didn't mind, but I thought a rescue operation might be in order.'

‘He can be very funny at times.'

‘It didn't strike me as being one of those times.'

‘Perhaps you're right.'

‘The dignity of the office, and all that,' he said.

‘Even if the holder doesn't care…'

‘Ah, now, I didn't say that. I was thinking about the dignity of your sex as much as anything.'

‘Thank you.' She was amused.

‘And somehow I turn out to sound pompous and stuffy.'

‘No, I wouldn't say that.'

‘I'm neither, really. And as a matter of fact, it is a very funny story.'

‘Then why take me away?'

‘There's a time and place for everything. If you like, I'll tell it you myself, when we get to know each other better.'

She said, lying, ‘I'm sorry. I didn't catch your name.'

Collins was an architect who had a junior partnership with the ageing head of a firm in a nearby town. Some work for the Corporation had given him his connection with the Town Hall, hence his invitation to the mayor's ball where he met Madge.

He telephoned her three days later to say that he had to run out on Saturday afternoon to take a quick look at a site in Harrogate and would she like to go with him and then spend the evening in Leeds, where they could have an early dinner and go to see the touring production of a West End musical, for which he had tickets. It was the odd make-up of the invitation that stopped her from putting him off till another time. Why had he not suggested just dinner and the theatre? Why should she go all the way out to Harrogate with him?

But she went, and sat with cold feet and a mounting irritation as the warmth drained out of the stationary car and Collins and his client tramped about, pointing and talking interminably in the rapidly fading light. She tried not to show her impatience as Collins finally shook hands and came back to the car. He was himself in a mild temper.

‘Idiot,' he muttered as he slammed the door and pressed the starter.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Oh, I'd hoped to have a quick look at the site without seeing him; but he turned up and I was forced to listen to his cockeyed ideas.'

‘I thought the man who paid the piper called the tune.'

Collins grunted. ‘That, if I may say so, is a typical client's attitude. He's got a nice sloping site there, with a view. He wants his sitting-room to both overlook the view and catch the afternoon sunlight. Unfortunately, I can't give him that without rearranging the order of the sun's coming up and going down.'

‘What will you do?'

‘We'll talk about it and promote a bit more bad feeling on both sides, then settle for the inevitable compromise.'

He glanced at her as he took the car round a big island on to the Leeds road. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't intend to keep you hanging about for so long.'

She looked out at the coloured lights in the trees. ‘I was wondering why you'd brought me out here with you.

‘I knew I shouldn't have time to go all the way back to pick you up.'

‘Couldn't we have met in Leeds?'

‘That would have meant you making your own way there.'

‘I'm quite capable of doing that.'

‘Yes, you'd either come in by bus, or in your own car. The first method is inconvenient and the second would have meant an incomplete evening: parting in Leeds instead of my driving you home.' He flicked on his headlights as they left the street-lamps on the edge of the town. ‘Now I've spoiled the beginning of it by leaving you bored and cold.'

The warmth from the heater began to move round her calves and feet as they drove down the hill. Headlights swung and lifted in the sudden intense darkness as ascending cars overtook a slow-moving bus.

She said, ‘All right. I'll forgive you.'

He was a logical man, who organised his life. She must overlook the small occasions when circumstances upset his plans. She leaned forward as far as the safety belt he'd insisted she wear would permit and gently rubbed her legs below her knees. He glanced at what she was doing and asked, ‘Feeling warmer now?'

‘Yes.' Now, she found, she was pleasantly expectant about the evening ahead.

He parked in a street off Briggate and led her round the corner to a pub in a narrow yard which was reached through an alley between two shops.

‘Is this where we're going to eat?'

It wasn't what she had expected. She looked at the late-Victorian interior as they stepped inside: a low ceiling, black wood, brass rails, grey mirrors – some carrying chipped and faded advertisements for products forgotten since the First World War – and caught a glimpse past the heads of the standing drinkers of joints of roast beef and ham on a marble-topped counter. She thought, ‘Oh, no, not a cold sandwich in this crush!' before feeling Collins' hand on her arm as he made way for her to follow him through to the restaurant area beyond the bar.

He gave the waitress his name and she pulled out a table so that they could sit side by side with their backs to the wall.

‘Are you hungry?'

‘Famished.'

‘The steak and kidney pie's good. So's the fillet steak, for that matter. And to start with I can recommend either the pate or the whitebait. They're both delicious.'

They ordered, and Madge sat forward to lean on her elbows and scrutinise her surroundings from this new vantage point.

‘This is a quaint place.'

‘You've never been before?'

‘I didn't even know it existed.'

‘It can't have changed much since the turn of the century. A real old music-hall pub. Can't you imagine it full of gents with mutton-chop whiskers and ladies of doubtful reputation with low necklines, too much make-up, and big hats?'

Their drinks came. Collins lifted his glass and turned his head to look into her face. ‘Cheers!'

Madge echoed him. She had speculated earlier about where he would take her if he wanted to impress her on this first evening out. The Metropole? The French restaurant at the Queen's? But she saw now that he was not the man to establish false precedents. He might indeed take her to such places sometimes, but she would know now that it was a special occasion. Impress her? She was just a little irked to realise that he had succeeded in doing that simply by not at all trying to do so.

Had her father lost his wealth Madge Greenaway would have missed what it bought, but – providing there were no attendant disgrace – she would have coped with her changed circumstances. For Madge's life was conditioned not by considerations like happiness and fulfilment, but by a sense of the fitting, and it was a sense she would have applied in whatever drawer of the social cupboard she had found herself. Not that she thought much about this. It was in instinct for the way she wished to appear to other people; and it had more to do with respect – hers for herself as she felt it reflected in the eyes of others – than with anything as obvious as popularity and being liked.

When it became clear, as it soon did, that Edgar Collins was more than casually interested in her, she began to think about the matter of marriage to him.

She wasn't in love with Collins but she was fond of him. As the junior partner in a small firm of architects he wasn't the most obviously desirable match; but he was young enough and ambitious enough to better himself, and Madge was not averse to pushing him where it might seem needed. She was nearly thirty. Opportunities for marriage were bound to become fewer. Spinsterhood, however proud, had no place in her scheme of things. She
ought
to be married.

She made up her mind; not so much that she would say yes when he asked her to marry him, but that she would lead him into a position where he would ask. For she sensed that behind the smiles, the jokes, the cool banter, Collins was a little in awe of her. Perhaps it was the enormous respect many men had for the woman with whom they were newly in love; or maybe it was simply the strength of her personality which kept him at a distance. She thought that she was, anyway, the stronger of the two; that she would lead the way here as she would, no doubt, on so many occasions in the future.

She began to charge their meetings with small intimacies: borrowing a handkerchief which she returned washed and ironed; giving him cigarettes from her own lips while he was driving; letting him turn when others were there to find her watching him; and gazing at his mouth while they were alone and he was talking, in a manner that suggested a preoccupation less with what he was saying than with him himself. She wanted him to try to make love to her, to put himself into a situation over which she had full control. She didn't doubt her ability to control it. But something held him back. He took her hand in a cinema and kissed her briefly when they parted, but that was all. Collins would come to the moment in his own time, she was sure, and patience was a quality which, in maturity, she had never lacked. But there was satisfaction in controlling the pace and pattern of events, and pleasure in the thought that she might engineer the time and place herself.

But not foolishly. She went to see her doctor. He was an elderly man who had known Madge all her life.

‘I know I can't expect you to approve,' she said. ‘And the best precaution of all is to say no.' She was appealing in her apparent frankness. ‘But you see, I can't guarantee to do that.'