The Heart of the Country (8 page)

What Sally could have told Natalie, as she had told many another embarrassed parent in the past, was that all kinds of charities existed which would have been prepared, properly approached, to pay Ben and Alice’s fees – the rich look after their own – and that representation to the board of governors might well have resulted in the waiving of the money owing. But she did not tell her; Natalie was too neat and too pretty and her husband had run off, and Sally could not help wishing, from time to time, that Val’s back would improve sufficiently for him to be able to do what he kept threatening to do; look up the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally and run off – with her. What Sally felt for Natalie, amazingly, was envy. But that’s what being married to a depressive can do for a woman. How do I, Sonia, know all this? My husband Stephen, thank God, couldn’t claim to be a depressive; he was an anal retentive paranoic, which is bad enough. And personally I border on the manic (out and out it pours, doesn’t it, never stopping), but I reckon about two thirds of the women in the estate, all of us on the dole, were married to depressives at one time or another, or had our illegitimate children by them. And though we all started out as healthy, cheerful, female children, the male disease of depression is catching. Quite simply, the men pass it on to their womenfolk and, to use a dirty word, it’s as fatal as AIDS. We drudge down to the post office to cash our drafts: we can’t even get it together to have them paid direct into a bank.

My shrink – sorry, psychiatrist – says this is nonsense: women are depressives too, sit in hospital corridors, speechless and motionless, staring into space, just like men; unmarried ones too – but I reckon they caught it from their fathers.

Be that as it may, Sally failed to give Natalie proper sisterly help at a time when she needed it. Okay?

In the meantime, Jax was restless at the end of his lead. He was hungry.

Natalie took the telephone number of the recommended school from Sally, and then its address. A phone call would cost ten pence and, if she was left waiting at the end of the line, possibly more. She would do better to call round in person. That would be free. Or would it? Perhaps the free schools, like the museums, would now charge her admission? A fee to see the headmaster?

Neatly dressed, clear-eyed little children with self-satisfied faces ran about the corridors as she left. That’s what £1,250 a term can do for the young, here in the heart of the country.

Angus, driving past the school in the Audi Quattro, saw Natalie and Jax pass out through the school gates and pulled up beside them, with an enviable squealing of brakes, the kind that betokens a person of instant decision at the wheel. Natalie got in beside Angus. Jax, as if sensing the urgency of the situation, jumped into the back seat without demur. And on they all went towards Glastonbury.

‘You again!’ he said. ‘Surprise, surprise!’ He’d been up and down the road four times, waiting for her.

‘I hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Natalie. ‘I hope he doesn’t leave hairs on your nice new seats.’

‘My wife will hoover them up,’ said Angus. He was lying. ‘And I don’t mind anything so long as it’s to do with you.’

He was getting fonder and fonder of Natalie by the minute. Female distress and incompetence, mixed with a soupçon of resistance, can do that to a man. Natalie wasn’t looking her best that morning. She had forgotten her make-up, the walk to school had flattened her hair and she had holes in her tights. It reassured him: she looked altogether approachable.

‘The truth of the matter is,’ she said, ‘I think my husband’s left home.’ She had to say it to someone. And so, at last, it
became true.

She wouldn’t go with Angus for a coffee. She said she had too much to do. He went all the way back to Waley and Rightly, estate agents, of which he was a director. Their offices nestled at the foot of Gurney Castle.

Cough, Cough, Wheeze, Gasp

Natalie went to the bank, to ask for a loan.

The bank manager, by name Jasper Jones, was a strikingly good-looking man in his early thirties, who would presently be moved to an urban branch and no doubt end up at Head Office. In the meantime he jogged along country lanes with as much confidence as if they had been dry streets, dodging cow pats and slurry pools, knowing his life would not include them for ever. On a better day Natalie would have attempted to charm him, raising her dark-lashed blue eyes to his, and so forth, but not today.

‘I would like to give you a loan, Mrs Harris,’ he said, ‘but there is no way I can, I’m afraid. If you came to me with any kind of security, or these days even without it but with some workable scheme for making money out of nothing, then of course I would look favourably upon a request to borrow. But just money out of the blue, for groceries? No. Social security does that kind of thing. I suggest you get down there before the office closes for lunch. Your house is not a security, as you may have thought, but a liability. There’s an Inland Revenue bill outstanding: did you not know that? Of some forty thousand pounds – the tax people move fast. They can sell the house over your head, and at a lot less than market value, if they so choose.’

‘They can’t do that. I live there,’ said Natalie. Now actually she was right, and she could have had a stop put on a compulsory sale through the courts, but who was there to tell her that? Not the bank manager. Harry had fraudulently built up an overdraft of eighteen thousand pounds, against a non-materializing million-pound order, and how else but by the rapid sale of the house was the bank manager to get his money back, after the Inland Revenue had taken their cut, and get to Head Office in the end. I am not saying this went through the front of Jasper Jones’ mind, but it sure as hell passed somewhere through the back, enabling him to reply, firmly:

‘They can and they do. They can sell everything except personal belongings, and I can assure you there’s not much they see as personal, except a toothbrush or so. There is nothing wrong with accepting social security, Mrs Harris. A quarter of the country now depends on it, one way or the other. Just 30 per cent of the population works: the other 70 per cent live off their earnings.’

‘But once you’re on it,’ asked Natalie, ever simple, ‘how do you get off?’

‘Ah!’ said Jasper Jones. ‘That’s the problem. And by the way we don’t encourage dogs in the bank. He seems very restless. Is he safe?’

‘He’s hungry,’ said Natalie.

Natalie went to the DHSS offices and there saw one of their senior clerks, a single lady in her forties, who had gone straight from school into the social services and risen through the ranks by virtue of her competence and administrative abilities. Natalie could have described her by her rather heavy tweed suit and the long green scarf she wore knotted around her neck for warmth and shelter, but not by her face, which was unexceptional to the point of anonymity. She was professionally kind and considerate but felt, herself, that the sooner her clients (as she was now taught to call them) learned to stand on their own two feet, the better. Her name was Mary Alice Dodson, and I (Sonia) have crossed her path several times, one way or another. I hate her for her self-righteousness. Natalie didn’t understand that she was hateful, and thought her perfectly pleasant. But then she saw herself as a supplicant, and not someone with rights. What a battle I was to have, raising Natalie’s client-consciousness!

Mary Alice Dodson, having taken down a great deal of information about Natalie, said, in the kind of tone that can be construed as reproachful:

‘So what it comes to is that you have no family you can turn to. Your children are without the normal aunts, uncles and grandparents. You’re very much alone.’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no blame in it,’ said Mary Alice, enigmatically, ‘unless you’re prepared to take it.’

I don’t want to be unfair to Mary Alice. All women are our sisters. She went potholing in the Cheddar Gorge as a hobby. She is underpaid and overworked like anyone else and is a virgin at forty-three. Some women are (a few) and there’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It’s just that Mary Alice does seem to feel it’s a woman’s
fault
if she finds herself in the kind of emotional and/or practical quandaries which afflict women who insist on consorting with men, and bearing their children, in an area of high unemployment. If they’d only keep their bodies to themselves, Mary Alice thinks, how much more cheerful and decent a place the world would be. Mary Alice’s hair is very coarse, straight and thick.

‘Now your husband has left, you are not anticipating an alternative live-in relationship?’

‘No. Are these questions necessary?’ Natalie shouldn’t have asked that.

‘I have to ask these personal questions,’ Mary Alice explained patiently to Natalie, ‘only in order to establish some kind of background. If you register it as an abuse of privacy try to understand our position. There are more and more people out there trying to take unfair advantage of a system which is breaking down already.’

‘I wouldn’t ask for money if I didn’t need it.’

‘Nor would we offer it to you if you didn’t,’ said Mary Alice, sharply. She belongs underground in a cold, dark hole, and she knows it: she must, or else why does she go potholing?

‘Of course’, went on Mary Alice, ‘there can be no question of the State subsidizing you yet. Your husband may turn up within the next week or so. I pass Dunbarton on my way to work in the morning. One of the more pleasant new bungalows around here. It must be worth quite a lot. Mortgaged?’

‘I don’t know.’

And do you know, Natalie didn’t. ‘My husband looks, looked after things like that,’ she added, since Mary Alice looked so surprised, not even knowing it was a classic line, not even uttering a deprecatory little laugh at her own folly. Yes, really and truly, here she was at thirty-four and her husband had looked after all that. Or hadn’t. Natalie had always thought the house moves had been from choice, not necessity. She had simply not understood her husband’s nature. (And if you don’t think this is likely consider all those women who live with bigamists, rapists, child molesters and such and never even guess.)

‘Then you’d better find out before making any application to us. Of course, if you genuinely can’t cope we will do the coping for you.’

‘I just want to know my entitlements.’

‘The Children’s Officer will be up to see how the children are, that goes without saying.’

‘The children? The children are fine.’

‘I’m sure you think they are, but you must have had a shock, and may not be the person best fitted to tell. And, of course, as I say, your husband may be back.’

‘I’m not sure I want him back,’ said Natalie.

‘If he can provide for you, the State won’t have to. There might not be quite as much picking and choosing as you suppose.’

Down, down the hole, Mary Alice: into the black depths and may you get wedged, stuck tight, with your head in a cleft about to flood at any moment, and someone pulling at your legs and you just not budging. Down, into the icy torrent of your clients’ despair.

‘If I lose my home, will I be re-housed?’ asked Natalie next. ‘Will I get a council house?’

‘It’s not as easy as that. Too many women round here seem to think they only have to ask and it will be given. They even come in from outside the area, thinking they fancy a free view of the Tor and expecting us to play nanny. Are the children healthy?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘That’s bad,’ said Mary Alice. ‘Or you might be able to notch up a housing point or two. Of course, we do have bed-and-breakfast accommodation for people who’re evicted for no fault of their own, but there usually is fault. And there’s an emergency hostel – but that’s hardly for your class of person. You’d have to ask at Housing. But they’re shut on Thursdays. They’re in Shepton Mallet.’

‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ said Natalie.

‘You’d be surprised what things come to,’ said Mary Alice. ‘And, by
the way, dogs are not allowed in these offices.’

Natalie went next to a solicitor, Alec Southey, and I’m not saying much about him, I’m sorry, because he was the one I, Sonia, went to about a parking ticket, whom I had an affair with, who wouldn’t leave his wife, but on account of whom Stephen left me. He failed to tell Natalie about how she could have a stop put on the sale of the house: perhaps he just forgot but perhaps he was a friend of a) the Inland Revenue, b) the bank manager, c) Arthur, d) Angus; any of them or all of them would do. Alec was currently having an affair with the wife of a man away in Saudi Arabia a lot of the time, so not likely to
burst in.
I think Stephen bursting in on Alec and me made quite an impression – though, as it happens (I believe it often happens) it wasn’t Alec Stephen hit and hated, it was me. Amazing how men stick together, even in these circumstances. Alec’s tall, thin and dark. So are a lot of men. I keep thinking it’s him I see across the street, and my heart stops, but it isn’t him, after all. Can this be love? Anyway, now I’m inside this place there are no streets to see him across any more, only wards, and I don’t seem to see him so often. Can this be sanity? Alec said to Natalie that dogs gave him asthma, and this at least I know to be true. Cough, cough, wheeze and gasp. Good!

Natalie then went off to see the police inspector, Jack Took, because Alec Southey said the police might well help her trace Harry, and she was shown into his office.

‘I expect it’s all a mistake,’ said Natalie. ‘I expect he’ll turn up any minute. I expect he’s lost his memory through stress. These things do happen.’

Jack Took, a kindly, twinkly fellow of the old school, said he expected that Harry Harris was at that very moment living it up on the Costa del Criminal with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, using his credit cards to advantage, and possibly other people’s as well. Had Natalie no idea of the kind of person she was married to?

‘Apparently not,’ said Natalie.

The police inspector talked about possible criminal proceedings against Harry; conduct which led to the closure of a factory and the throwing out of work of at least sixteen people, still with wages owing, was not just misrepresentation but downright fraud.