A Kind of Loving (49 page)

'Suppose the landlord's got somebody else on his list?'

'It doesn't work quite like that. These flats are leased year by
year. It's up to the outgoing tenant who he surrenders his lease to, though the landlord can always refuse to renew it if he
disapproves. The Fowlers only renewed their lease a couple of
months ago.'

' But that means I'll have to find a lump sum and I just haven't
got it.'

'Don't worry about that. We'll raise the money somehow and
you can pay back week by week. Anyway, all that can be settled
later. The point is, do you want it? Will you give it a try?'

'I don't know. I just don't know, Chris.'

She comes down on her knees in front of me and takes my
hands in hers. 'Look, Vic, I know you're unhappy, and I want to help you. We both do.'

I turn my head away. 'I've had enough, Chris. It's just a big cheat. A lousy cheat.'

' I know what you wanted, Vic,' she says.' It's what most people
want, though they're not all conscious of it. They want the other
half of themselves, the other person who will make them whole.
I'm happy to say I've found that with David. There was no doubt
in my mind at the beginning and there's been none since.

'People talk glibly of being in love. Magazines and films are full of it. But there's a difference between that and loving. You
can be in love with someone you hardly know - all romance and
rapture and starry eyes. Oh, it's all true, Vic. It can happen just
the way they say it does. But you can't
love
a person till you know
him or her inside out, until you've lived with them and shared
experience: sadness, joy,
living -
you've got to share living before
you can find love. Being
in
love doesn't last, but you can find love to take its place.

'Do you know what I mean, Vic?'

'Yes, I know.'

'With some people that shared experience drives them apart,
but with others it welds them still more strongly together.
Through losing your baby you and Ingrid have shared tragedy
early. Don't let it drive you apart, Vic. Be strong. Let it give you
something, not take away.'

'We never had it in the beginning,' I say.

'Well try to find it now, Vic,' Chris says. "Think of Ingrid.
She loves you, or she did, I know. Losing the baby was much
more of an ordeal to her than it could be to you. She needs some
body, Vic - not her mother - but somebody strong, to look after
her and comfort her and make her see that life can be good again.
You could do that, Vic. You could do that for Ingrid.' She
squeezes my hands. 'Be strong, Vic. Don't give up. Make your
marriage work.

'I'm not offering you the easy way out, am I?' she says in a
minute.

I haven't time to think up an answer to this before David
comes back and Chris gets up off her knees.

'What did he say?'

'He's got nobody else in mind. He'll hold it for a week.'

I run my hand through my hair. 'Only a week. It's not long
enough, Chris.'

She looks at me.'I think it is, Vic. Quite long enough.'

'How are you fixed for money?' David asks me.

'I've about thirty quid. Not a lot, is it?'

'Well if that's all that's on your mind, don't worry. We can
let you have a bit and you can pay us back when you can.'

I look up and there's Chris looking from me to David with
that lovely little smile on her face that seems to say, 'There's my
man. I didn't have to ask him - he knew.'

'It... it's really very good of you, David.'

'Glad to be able to help. Families should stick together, I
always think.'

III

A couple of days later Mr Rothwell comes home. I suppose
Ingrid's mother's sent for him. He'll be thinking he's had nothing
but urgent messages to come home since he heard about me.
Anyway, how I know about it this time is because he rings me up at the shop.

'Vic? This is Ingrid's father. I want to talk to you.'

I'm sure I don't want to talk to him. I imagine the way Ma
Rothwell must have ranted on about me coming in drunk and spewing on the carpet and I think he'll probably want to take a
poke at me when he does see me.

'Well, what about?'

'Don't be so bloody ingenuous,' he says. 'What do you think
it's about?'

'Well, when, then? I'm working now.'

'Where do you have your lunch?'

'At a little cafe round the corner.'

'D'you know the Dolphin, that pub in Bread Street?'

I say Idol

'Meet me there at half past twelve ... Hello? Are you still there? I thought we'd been cut off. You will be there, won't
you?'

I say okay, I'll be there, and he rings off.

I've got butterflies in my stomach all the rest of the morning,
wondering what he's going to say, but when I get there at
dinner-time he seems quite reasonable, like he always is. We
order and he doesn't start till the soup's served.

'It's quite a mess, taken all round, isn't it?' he says.

'I suppose it is.'

'I've a good mind to send you a cleaning bill for the carpet.'

I feel myself going red.' I'm sorry about that. It was an accident.
I was pretty sozzled but I didn't mean to do that.'

'It seems the beer loosened your tongue a bit, too,' he says.

I say nothing.

'Perhaps you had some cause to fly off the handle; I don't
know. I've only heard one side of it.' He lifts his spoon and sucks
in some tomato soup.' Like to tell me your story?'

I shuffle about a bit on the chair. 'I don't see how I can, really.'

'You mean without offending me? Well try.'

'Well it's just that I don't think Ingrid's mother liked me from
the start and she's never given us a chance. We've never seemed to be married at all, really. I never felt I could say what I thought without getting her back up. I don't know if you know it, but she
influences Ingrid quite a lot.'

He nods. 'I know. Perhaps that's partly due to me being away
so much.'

'Well it got so Ingrid listened to her mother first all the time.
I felt like a lodger, only worse, because a lodger can come and
go as he likes and she was always rubbing it in that I had obliga
tions and responsibilities, but I never had a chance to take res
ponsibility because I was just nobody about the place ... Then
when the accident happened and she never let me know I was
so wild I nearly walked out there and then.'

'What do you mean, she never let you know?'

I tell him about coming home to find the house locked, and how Mrs Oliphant told me what had happened. I get a definite impression he didn't know about this, but he doesn't let on.

'She even tried to blame me for that,' I tell him. I'm not
enjoying this. It's not easy to run down a bloke's wife to his face,
even if he has invited you to do it. 'You might ha' thought I'd
stood at the top of the stairs and pushed her ...'

I'm hoping he'll say something about this and give away how much he knows, but he doesn't.

'Anyway,' he says, 'you decided to stay.'

'Yes ... And then things just got worse. Ingrid didn't seem to have any life in her any more. She just moped about the place
like she was going off into a decline and nothing I said could sn£p
her out of it. She said I'd no consideration.'

'It was a big shock to her, you know.'

'I know it must have been, but she can't act as if it happened
last week for the rest of her life. I just got the feeling her mother
was encouraging her not to get better.'

'So you'd say, then, by and large, that Ingrid's mother was
at the bottom of all the trouble?' he says, watching me.

'Well... yes, I would.' It is embarrassing, you know, calling
a bloke's wife to his face, especially if he happens to be a decent
sort of cove. And there's another thing - I have to lay all the
blame on Ma Rothwell because I can't tell him what the real
trouble is: that I never loved Ingrid in the first place and all this
on top of that was a bit too much for anybody to take.

The waitress comes over and serves the main course. I look
at it, mashed potatoes, cabbage, and mutton. I don't feel much
like it.

'Like a glass of beer?' Mr Rothwell says.

'No, thanks. I shall feel sleepy all afternoon if I have any.'

He orders a pale ale for himself. 'Not much of a drinker, are
you?'

'No, I'm not. I get drunk pretty easily, really.'

'Oh, don't feel ashamed about it,' he says. 'It's a point in
your favour, actually.' He picks his knife and fork up. It doesn't
seem as if this is putting
him
off his grub anyway. 'What are your
plans now, then?' he says. 'Are you living at home again?'

'No, I'm at my sister's.'

'Not very well in with your father and mother, is that it?'

'Something like that.'

'You seem to be quite an outcast.'

'I'm getting used to it. I've felt like one long enough.'

'You know,' he says, waving his knife about, 'I get the impression that you feel badly done to and have for some time.
Almost as though marriage itself was something that had been
imposed on you.'

I begin to feel uncomfortable because he's getting too warm for
my liking.

'Do you wish you'd never got married?' he says.

'Yes, I do.'

'Why did you get married?' he says, his eye on me. 'Because you loved Ingrid or because of the baby?'

I don't answer this one.

'All right, then; do you want to stay married to Ingrid?'

'I don't want to be married to both Ingrid and her mother.'

I couldn't be sure but I think he nearly smiles at this.

'You're in a pretty poor position too, aren't you?' he says. 'Nowhere to go, nothing to offer a wife.'

"That's right.'

'A pretty poor wicket, in fact.'

'Oh, it's not all that bad from where I'm sitting^ I tell him, getting a bit riled. 'I've walked out and now I can stay out if I
want to. There's no baby to think about now, and nobody's
going to push me into anything.'

'Who's pushing?' he says without rising.

'All right, p'raps you're not. But don't make it seem like I'm hanging around waiting for Ingrid to say she'll have me back. I did the walking out, remember.'