The Pumpkin Eater (10 page)

“Was it all right… last night?”

“Was what all right?” She was again the Ireen I knew at school: arrogant, off-hand, not bothering about herself.

“Well, I mean … did they find you?”

She laughed at me. “I'll leave you those mags,” she said. “You ought to read them sometime.”

“Thanks. I will.”

“And good luck with that vicar's son of yours. I suppose you'll be necking with him again now — when I've done gone, I mean.”

My father drove us to the station. Ireen kissed us both goodbye. “Thanks,” she said, “for the most gorgeous time.”

“Come again,” my father said. “We'd love to have you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I'll remember that.”

My father and I looked at each other blankly when the train had gone. “Well, old thing,” he said. “Back to work.” I followed him out of the station, and the strange thing was that I felt sad. It was almost as though Ireen had stolen the clergyman's son from me after all. I felt deserted, and puzzled, and sad.

My father loved me, I know, in his self-sufficient way. For years he regretted that I wasn't a boy, but after Ireen's visit his attitude seemed to change and during the following, the Christmas holidays, he really began to take some sort of tentative pride in me. My mother too stopped pushing and shoving me quite so much, and resigned herself to my straight hair. I began reading the women's magazines, starting with the ones that Ireen had left behind, and learned many useful facts such as that all men are children, all men are emotionally immature, all men dislike hairnets and criticism, all men are unfaithful, must be trusted, need hot breakfasts, want more than they should have and need more than they are given. As I never thought of the clergyman's son as a man, I didn't apply any of this to him. I would not believe, even when he changed so strangely, that he was childish or half-witted — and there, according to Ireen, I made my mistake.

We met as usual on the second day of the holidays. He was staring into the window of the bicycle shop, where all the torches and spanners were wreathed in tinsel. I was wearing an old overcoat of my mother's, since I had grown out of last winter's, and had belted it tightly with a short luggage strap. I had also dabbed my nose with my mother's natural powder and was wearing a suspender belt: but this he couldn't possibly have known. He had grown even taller and his wrists were blue with cold. When I said hullo he whirled round, knocking over two scooters. I propped them up again while he stammered, “Hullo … Gosh … Didn't see you … I was just…”

“Let's go to the Copper Kettle.”

“No. No. I can't. I have to … Which way are you going?”

“Oh, down the High Street. Are you going down the High Street?”

“No … Must dash home, do some work …” He peered at me through the flag of hair that continually fell over his eyes. He combed it through with his fingers and said, “Gosh. You've changed.”

“Have I?” I should have said no, I haven't, and told the truth.

“Yes. Well… Goodbye.”

I was sad, but not heart-broken. He had often behaved like this in the past. On my way home I called in at the factory to see my father. He greeted me warmly, and for the first time the clerks stood up when I came in. “I'm just going to do the tour,” he said — every week he went round seeing every man, woman and boy, this was his great argument for private enterprise — “Come along, they'd like to see you.”

So he conducted me round the factory — seeming to forget that I had known it all my life, every dry-smelling, dusty corner of it — and introduced me to the men, most of whom had let me work their looms since my arms were eight inches long, many of whom had saved me from being scalped in the rope-walk or stabbed to death by the great matting needles. I appreciated this, realizing that I had a new status. I bowed gravely to the Mongol boy who wound the rope round huge reels; his top-heavy head nodded like a mandarin and his arms made winding motions all the time he was awake. I sat on a stool in the office, with its water-colours of Kashmir and the Punjab, and examined my grandfather's quill pens, pretending it was the first time. “I suppose it's not impossible,” my father said, as we drove home for lunch, “for a woman to run a business …” Then he made a wry face and patted my knee, rejecting the idea.

I didn't see the clergyman's son again until Christmas Day. He and his mother — a silly, insipid woman I thought her — sat in the pew in front of us in church, and all though the service I loved, with a new element of pain, the tender back of his neck, the shoulder-blades in the school suit, the raw, clumsy hands clasped (was he praying?). As we filed out of the church he smiled at me, and in the porch he said. “Happy Christmas.”

“Happy Christmas.”

“What did you get?”

“Oh … lots of things. A gramophone. What did you get?”

“I got a gramophone too.” It was a delightful coincidence. We were really pleased. I longed so much to kiss him that I felt weak, almost tearful in spite of my pleasure.

“We might go to the flicks next week,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Yes, that would be lovely.”

“I'll come round on Wednesday.”

“
Yes
… But oh no, I can't! I can't on Wednesday! I've got to go to this awful old Rotary thing with my father — ”

“It doesn't matter.” He had already turned away.

“But it does matter! You see, Mummy hates going, so he said this year he'd take me, and I don't
want
to go either! Can't we go on Tuesday?”

“No, I can't go on Tuesday,” he said. “It doesn't matter.” And he was off across the churchyard in his navy blue overcoat and new Christmas scarf. Six months before, I would have run after him. Now I stood still among the church-goers, my gloved hands clenched in my pockets, calling out inside myself don't go, don't go, please, I love you so much …

“You'll ruin the
hang
of that coat,” my mother said, “if you put your hands in the pockets like that. You must learn that good clothes have to be
worn
well, otherwise you'll always look a little rapscallion.”

So on Wednesday my father took me to the Rotary dinner, where I was given a gilded powder compact engraved with my mother's initials. It was intensely boring, but they all made a great fuss of me and I began to think that perhaps it was better to be bored and admired than interested and miserable. I tried flapping my eyelashes and was amazed when old men I had known all my life went pink, and giggled, and even offered me cigarettes. “She behaved beautifully,” my father told my mother, who was waiting up with Ovaltine. “A perfect lady. It's something, you know, to have a daughter you can be proud of.”

“Handsome is as handsome does,” my mother said. “You shouldn't say such things in front of the child, George. She'll get swollen headed.”

I did, a little. The next week my mother took me to London for the day and bought me an evening dress at Debenhams, yellow net with a yellow taffeta underskirt and a clutch of hard yellow rosebuds on the bodice. I was stupid enough to long for the clergyman's son to see me in it, though if he had, he would have run a mile. On Saturday night my father took me to the Masonic Ball.

This, the peak of the town's New Year celebrations, was held in the largest hotel, one of remarkable dinginess and squalor. That night, with streamers and balloons, changing spotlights, and a band dressed in satin Cossack shirts, it was transformed. I danced with my father, who did a surprisingly elegant slow foxtrot, and with the bank manager and the manager of Boots and a reporter who was not a Mason but had to write about the Ball for the local paper. I was sipping fruit cup, a little out of breath, when Mr. Simpkin asked me for the pleasure.

He was a small, square man, Mr. Simpkin, with too much face for the size of his features: his little sparking eyes and snub nose and small, fat mouth sat very close together in a great expanse of cheek. As though to fill up his face he wore a thin, spiky moustache, gingerish. His hair, thinning, was fixed across the top of his head in separate strands. He held me quite differently from the others, clasping my hand close and gently pressing his hard, round stomach against me. He was a beautiful dancer, and his patent leather feet seemed to draw mine after them like magnets.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“Oh yes. Yes, I am.”

“I'm an old friend of your father's, y'know. I saw you at the Rotary do last week. I suppose they all tell you you look like Hedy Lamarr?”

“No. No, no one does.” Curious, I flapped my eyelashes a little. “Why? Do I?”

“You do indeed.” He held me a little closer. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen,” I lied.

“Still at school, I suppose?” He murmured these questions, hardly opening his mouth.

“Yes. But I'm leaving soon. I've had enough of school.” This was true, but I had never even thought it before. The music stopped and we clapped, but he did not lead me away.

“Let's have the next,” he said, twinkling. “Your father knows you're quite safe with me.”

It seemed that Mr. Simpkin was the manager of a nearby paper works.

“You must come along sometime,” he said. “I'll show you around. There's a lot to interest a bright girl like you. How about it, one afternoon? Then we could have a spot of … tea, and I'll deliver you back safe and sound.”

“It'd be simply lovely.”

“That's a date, then. Keep it to ourselves, shall we? You'd better give me a ring.”

It was almost an assignation. He must have felt my delight because he cooled off a little, and after that dance took me to meet his wife. She was sitting with the other wives on a sofa in a kind of crypt just off the ballroom. Mr. Simpkin introduced me as “George's little girl — you remember?” and she talked to me kindly. All I saw of her was a mottled turkey neck hung with pearls and rough, working hands which she had tried to cover with talcum powder.

After this, the holidays settled down, more boring, more empty than they had ever been before. I waited for the clergyman's son to call, but he didn't come. I loved him more, if anything, but my love now grew anxious, sharp, even resentful. I even told myself that I hated him, which was an elaboration of love that I couldn't understand and which filled me with misery. Twice I met him in the town, but the first time he stumbled into the fishmonger's and the second time he ran as though all the hounds of hell were after him across the churchyard. Still I couldn't believe that he didn't want to see me. I defied the women's magazines and rang him up, but his mother answered and said that he was working and she was very, very reluctant to disturb him since everything depended on his passing the Higher Certificate since without the Higher Certificate he would be unable to go to Oxford, which would be a great deprivation since his father was quite set on him going to St. John's which was his father's old college and had quite a remarkably pretty garden, I must go and see it if ever I went to Oxford, but in the meanwhile … So I wrote him smudged letters, and tore them up. My mother said I had had too much excitement, and for some reason became angry with me. The days at home were stiff and hostile and I spent hours in my hot bedroom, wishing I could die.

Two days before the end of the holidays my mother went to a meeting of the Townswomen's Guild, leaving me alone in the house. I walked from room to room looking for something to do. My body ached. I wanted to run, leap, stretch, exhaust myself, but somehow I was too tired. I made faces at myself in the hall mirror. Suddenly, without any warning, the afternoon became intolerable. It was something I couldn't live through, an impossibility. Wondering at myself, but with a curious sense of obedience, I telephoned Mr. Simpkin at the paper works.

“I must see you,” I said. “Immediately.”

“Well, well. My goodness. And how are you, my dear?”

“I want to see you straightaway.”

“Is something … the matter?”

“Shall I come to the works?”

“No, no. No, don't do that.” There was a short pause. “You're at home, I take it?”

“Yes, but they're all out.”

“Well… I don't think I should come to the house.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll meet you at the end of the drive. We can go up Sam's lane.”

Sam's lane was the nearest childhood walk. I don't think I imagined Mr. Simpkin and me trudging down it for the good of our health. I don't think I imagined anything. Sam's lane was the obvious place to go, since it was out of the town, which was ugly, and not right in the country, which was too far. I went upstairs and put on a jersey dress, cut on the bias, which I thought suited me, and my school mackintosh. Something told me that this would be more appropriate than my new, well-hanging overcoat. Then, giving Mr. Simpkin exactly time to tell his staff that he was going out for a while, to put on his coat and hat and drive from the paper works, I walked down to the gate.

Not, as my mother thought afterwards, to my doom — Mr. Simpkin merely kissed me, his moustache grazing my gums like a toothbrush, and fumbled a little with the unyielding navy gaberdine. Obviously he thought that this was what I wanted, and looking back on it I could not blame him if he had raped me. But rape, thank God, is not for the Mr. Simpkinses of this world. They are level-headed men, sane men, men who know what's what. A little flirtation with a willing partner, even if it's a schoolgirl who telephones you at three in the afternoon, is just as far as a reasonable man like Mr. Simpkin cares to go on his home ground. On a business trip, of course, it's different — well, a man's got to have a bit of sport, a good story to take back to the boys, what the wife doesn't see the wife doesn't grieve over and there's nothing nasty about it, you understand, nothing what you might call
sexual.
Much of this, in that ten minutes up Sam's lane, I began to understand.