“Perhaps Mrs Mole’s Sybil’s got nothing else to do.”
“You might like to know she’s got two kids and a husband.” There was a pause. “You’ve become awfully hard, luv.”
“Don’t be silly, Mum.” With an effort, I made my voice softer. Mum set great store by the regular family gatherings now that only Declan was left at home. “What’s the bad news?” I enquired.
“Eh? Oh, I nearly forgot. Your auntie Flo’s dead. The poor old soul was knocked down by a car or something.
But the thing is, luv,” her voice throbbed with indignation, “she was already six feet under by the time some woman rang to let your gran know.”
“Why should Gran care? She had nothing to do with Flo.” Auntie Flo had, in fact, been a great-aunt, and the black sheep of the family, I had no idea why. Gran never mentioned her name. It was only when Auntie Sally had died ten years ago that I first set eyes on Flo, at the funeral. She was the youngest of the three Clancy sisters, then in her sixties, had never married, and seemed to me an exceptionally mild old woman.
“Blood’s thicker than water,” my mother said meaninglessly.
“What did Auntie Flo do that was so awful?” I asked curiously.
“I think there was a row, but I’ve no idea what it was about. Your gran would never talk about it.”
I was about to ring off, when Mum said, “Have you been to Mass?”
To save an argument, I told her I was going to the eleven o’clock. I had no intention of going to Mass.
I replaced the receiver and looked at James. There was a strange, intense expression in his light blue eyes, and I realised he’d been watching me like that throughout the entire conversation with my mother. “You’re very beautiful,” he said.
“You’re not so bad yourself.” I tried to sound jokey.
Something about his expression disturbed me.
“You know, marriage isn’t such a bad thing.”
Alarm bells sounded in my head. Was this a roundabout way of proposing? “That’s not what you’ve said before.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“Well, I haven’t.” He came towards me, but I avoided him by going on to the balcony. “I’ve tried it before, remember?”
James was standing just inside the window. “You didn’t keep his name. Were things really so awful?”
“I didn’t want his name once we were no longer a couple. And it wasn’t awful with Gary, just deadly dull.”
“It wouldn’t be dull with me.”
So it was a proposal. I stuffed my hands in my dressing-gown pockets to hide my agitation and sat down. Why did he have to spoil things? We’d made it plain to each other from the start that there was to be no commitment.
I liked him—no, more than that, I was very fond of him.
He was good to be with, extraordinarily handsome in a rugged open-air way. We got on famously, always had loads to talk about, and were great together in bed. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him or with anybody else. I’d struggled hard to get where I was and wanted to get further, without having a husband questioning my every decision, interfering.
I remembered Gary’s astonishment when I said I wanted to take an A level. We’d been married two years. “What on earth d’you want that for?” I recalled his round pleasant face, his round moist eyes. We’d first gone out together at school and had married at eighteen. I’d realised, far too late, that he’d been my escape route from home.
Why did I want an A level? Perhaps to prove to myself that I wasn’t as stupid as my teachers had claimed, for self-respect, to gain the enjoyment from books that I’d only briefly experienced before my father had put a brutal stop to it.
“I’d like to get a better job,” is what I said to Gary. I was bored rigid working at Peterssen’s packing chocolates. “I’d like to learn to type as well, use a computer.”
Gary had laughed. “What good will all that stuff be when we have kids?”
We were living in Kirkby with his widowed mother, not far from my parents. Although we’d put our name down for a council house, one would not be forthcoming until we had a family -not just one child but two or three. I visualised the future, trailing to the shops with a baby, more kids hanging on to the pram, getting a part-time job in another factory because Gary’s wages as a storeman would never be enough to live on. It was why we’d never even considered buying a place of our own.
Two years later we were divorced. A bewildered Gary wanted to know what he’d done wrong. “Nothing,” I told him. I regretted hurting him, but he was devoid of ambition, content to spend the rest of his life in a deadend job wondering where the next penny would come from.
My father was disgusted, my mother horrified: a Catholic, getting divorced! Even so, Mum did her utmost to persuade me to come back home. My younger sister, Trudy, had found her own escape route via Colin Daley and had also married at eighteen, though Colin had been a better bet than Gary. After ten years they were still happily together.
Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me back to Kirkby and my family. Instead, I rented a bedsit. I had my English A level by then, and until I bought my flat, nothing in life had given me more pleasure than the certificate to say I’d achieved a grade C. Armed with a dictionary, I’d made myself read the books I’d been set, struggled for hours to understand them in the bedroom at my motherin-law’s, while downstairs Gary watched football and game-shows on television. It seemed no time before the words started to make sense, as if I’d always known them, as if they’d been stored in my head waiting to be used. I shall never forget the day I finished reading Pride and Prejudice. I’d understood it. I’d enjoyed it. It was like discovering you could sing or play the piano.
Once settled in the bedsit, I took courses in typing and computing at night school, left Peterssen’s, and began to wonder if it had all been worth it as I drifted from one deadend office job to another—until three years ago, when I became a receptionist/typist with Stock Masterton, an estate agent’s in the city centre. Of course, I had to tell George Masterton I’d worked in a factory until I was twenty-four, but he had been impressed. “Ah, a self-made woman. I like that.”
George and I hit it off immediately. I was promoted to “property negotiator”. Me! Now George was contemplating opening a branch in Woolton, a relatively middle-class area of Liverpool, and I was determined to be appointed manager, which was why I was writing the report. I’d driven round Woolton, taking in the number of superior properties, the roads of substantial semidetacheds, the terraced period cottages that could be hyped and sold for a bomb. I’d noted how often the buses ran to town, listed the schools, the supermarkets . . . The report would help George make up his mind and show him how keen I was to have the job.
It was through Stock Masterton that I’d found my flat.
The builders had gone bankrupt and the units were being sold for a song, which was unfair on the people already there who’d paid thousands more but the bank wanted its money and wasn’t prepared to wait.
“I’ve not done bad for someone not quite thirty,” I murmured to myself. “I’ve got my own place, a job with prospects and a car. I earn twice as much as Gary.”
No, I’d not done badly at all.
Yet I wasn’t happy.
I leaned on the iron rail and rested my chin on my arms. Somewhere deep within I felt a deadness, and I wondered if I would ever be happy. There were times when I felt like a skater going across the thinnest of ice. It was bound to crack some time, and I would disappear for ever into the freezing, murky water beneath. I shook myself. It was too lovely a morning for such morbid thoughts.
I’d forgotten about James. He appeared on the balcony tucking a black shirt into his jeans. Even in casual clothes, he always looked crisp, neat, tidy. I turned away when he fastened the buckle of his wide leather belt.
He frowned. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“You shuddered. Have you gone off me all of a sudden?”
“Don’t be silly!” I laughed.
James sat in the other chair. I swung up my bare feet so they rested between his legs and wriggled my toes.
“Cor!” he gasped.
“Don’t look like that. People will realise what I’m doing.”
“Would you like to do it inside where no one can see?”
“In a minute. I want to take a shower.”
He smacked his lips. “I’ll take it with you.”
“You’ve just got dressed!”
“I can get undressed pretty damn quick.” He looked at me quizzically. “Does this mean I’m forgiven?”
“For what?” I was being deliberately vague.
“For proposing. I’d forgotten you modern women take an offer of marriage as an insult.” He took my feet in his hands. I was conscious of how large and warm and comforting they felt. “As an alternative, how about if I moved in with you?”
I tried to pull away my feet, but he held them firmly.
“The flat’s only small,” I muttered. “There’s only one bedroom.”
“I wasn’t contemplating occupying the other if there were two.”
No! I valued my privacy as much as my independence.
I didn’t want someone suggesting it was time I went to bed or asking why I was late home—and did I really want the living room painted such a dark pink? I wished I could start the day again and stop him proposing. I had been quite enjoying things as they were.
James put my feet down carefully on the balcony floor.
“Between us we could get somewhere bigger.”
“You’ve changed the rules,” I said.
He sighed. “I know, but it’s not the rules that have changed, it’s me. I think I’m in love with you, Millie Cameron. In fact, I know I am.” He tried to catch my eyes. “I take it the feeling isn’t reciprocated?”
I bit my lip and shook my head. James turned away and I contemplated his perfect profile: straight nose, broad mouth, pale, stubby lashes. His hair lay in a flattering corn-coloured quiff on his broad, tanned forehead. He didn’t look as if it was the end of the world that I’d turned him down. According to his mother, who never failed to mention it, there’d been an army of girls before me. How many had he fallen in love with? On reflection, I didn’t know him all that well. True, -we talked a lot, but never about anything serious; the conversation rarely strayed from films, plays, mutual acquaintances and clothes. Oh, and football. I sensed he was shallow and also rather weak, always anxious still to do his father’s bidding, even though he, too, was twenty-nine. I felt irritated again that he’d spoiled things: I didn’t want to give him up. Nor did I want to hurt him, but I couldn’t be expected to fall in love with him just because he had decided he was in love with me.
“Perhaps we can talk about it some other time?” I ventured. In a year, two years, ten.
He closed his eyes briefly and gave a sigh of relief. “I was worried you might dump me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it!” I jumped to my feet and ran inside. James followed. Outside the bathroom, I removed my dressing-gown and posed tauntingly before opening the door and going in. I stepped into the shower and turned on the water. It felt freezing . . . but it had warmed up nicely by the time James drew the curtain back and joined me.
“Hello, luv. You look pale.”
“Hi, Mum.” I made a kissing noise two inches from my mother’s plump, sagging cheek. Whenever I turned up in Kirkby, she claimed I looked pale or tired or on the verge of coming down with something.
“Say hello to your dad. He’s in the garden with his tomaters.”
My father -I couldn’t even think of him as Dad -had always been a keen if unimaginative gardener. Dutifully, I opened the kitchen door and called, “Hello.”
The greenhouse was just beyond the neat lawn, the door open. “Hello there, luv.” My father was inside, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. His dark, sombre expression brightened at the sound of my voice. He threw away the cigarette, wiped his hands on the hips of his trousers and came inside. “How’s the estate-agency business?”
“Okay.” I managed to keep the loathing out of my voice. He told everyone I was a property negotiator.
Nowadays he claimed to be proud of his girls. “Where’s Declan?”
“Gone to the pub.” Mum couldn’t have looked more harassed if she had been preparing a meal for royalty. She took a casserole out of the oven, then put it back. “What have I done with the spuds? Oh, I know, they’re in the top oven. Declan’s promised to be back by one.”
“Will the grub be ready on time, luv?”
“Yes, Norman. Oh, yes.” Mum jumped at her husband’s apparently mild question, though it was years since he’d beaten her. “It’ll be ready the minute our Trudy and Declan come.”
“Good. I’ll have another ciggie while I’m waiting.” He disappeared into the lounge.
“Why don’t you have a talk with your dad and I’ll get on with this?” Mum said, as she stirred something in a pan.
As if I would! She’d always tried to pretend we were a perfectly normal family. “I’d sooner stay and talk to you.”
She flushed with pleasure. “What have you been up to lately?”
I shrugged. “Nothing much. Went to a club last night, the theatre on Wednesday. I’m going out to dinner tonight.”
“With that James chap?”
“Yes,” I said shortly. I regretted telling them about James. It was when Declan had jokingly remarked he was thinking of trading in his bike for a Ferrari that I’d told him about Atherton Cars where several could be had. The following Sunday, my father had driven over to Southport to take a look and I was terrified that one day he’d introduce himself to James.
Mum was poised anxiously over the ancient cooker, which had been there when we moved into the council house in 1969. I was three and Trudy just a baby; Declan and Alison had yet to arrive. These days, Mum wasn’t just stout but shapelessly stout. Her shabby skirt, with no waist to fix on, was down at the front and up at the rear, revealing the backs of her surprisingly well-shaped but heavily veined legs. I always thought it would have been better if they had grown fat with the rest of her. As it was, she looked like some sort of strange insect: a huge, round body stuck on pins. Her worried, good-natured face was colourless, her skin the texture of putty. The once beautiful hair, the same ash-blonde as her children’s, she cut herself with no regard for fashion. She wore no makeup, hadn’t for years, as if she was going out of her way to make herself unattractive, or perhaps she just didn’t care any more. She was fifty-five but looked ten years older.