The Pumpkin Eater (7 page)

Jake and I set off somewhere, through a great fair. I kept on saying how much it must have cost. We found that we had to go the wrong way, through a chain of caverns, each cavern contained Mickey Mouse or Popeye or the Sleeping Beauty. But we were going the wrong way. We walked along the truck lines and at last climbed up a conveyor belt: the belt carried wooden painted mermaids, which were going down, but it was not too difficult. When we came out, the party, the people, had all gone: nothing was left but icy water lapping against the walls, darkness and cold. A man in uniform, a fireman, was poking about in the water. Jake had disappeared. I looked and searched, but couldn't see him. Then I heard him calling and saw a hand coming up out of the water. I ran and put my hand down into the water, feeling the rim and neck of some big jar or hole into which he had fallen. I felt his head and hand inside. He was holding a blade of grass and I pulled at it, trying to pull him out, but it broke. I shouted for the fireman, but he shouted back, “I've got six more down here!” I tried to hold Jake, to pull him out, but my hand kept slipping and at last he stopped moving, and I knew he was dead.

“I don't think, at the moment, we need to think in terms of treatment of any sort. Your immediate need, I feel, is for someone to talk to. Say twice a week. Shall we see how we get on?” He was wearing a different suit today, sombre tweed and a heather-mixture tie.

“All right,” I said. “So long as I can think of something to talk about.”

“Oh, I don't think that will be too difficult.” He slyly uncapped his pen. “How's the weeping?”

I didn't want to disappoint him. “Better, I think.”

“We'll give you some tablets to pep you up a little. Children all well?”

“Dinah's got 'flu or something.”

“Dinah. Let me see, Dinah is the …” Again he raked, worried, down the list. “She's sixteen,” I said.

“Ah, yes.” He was almost cosy today. “You must have difficulty finding names for them all.”

“That's what everybody says. It's stupid. There are hundreds of names. My grandmother had fifteen children and each one of them had at least three names. That makes forty-five names if you work it out, but she didn't find it difficult.”

“Your father's mother?”

“No, my mother's mother. Of course a lot of them died.”

“You could hardly hope to keep fifteen children in those days.”

“But you could now.”

“Yes …” he said slowly; then, darting up at me, “How's Jake?”

“He's gone to North Africa.”

“Indeed? On location, I suppose.”

If he was trying to be a father to me, he was dreadfully succeeding.

“Yes,” I said. “On location.”

“Now why didn't you go too?”

“Well, they're living in tents … you know … he didn't think I would … Anyway, I can't leave the children.”

“But you have plenty of staff?”

“Yes, but … Anyway, I can't leave them.”

“I see.”

He sat back and looked at me gravely. Then, with a short sigh, he glanced down at my file. “You have had no illnesses? Miscarriages, difficult confinements?”

“No.”

“You have never … terminated a pregnancy?”

“Of course not. Why should I?”

“But you weren't exactly … well off before you married Jake? One would have thought that the financial burden …”

“Look,” I said, “it was easy. We always lived in the country, and most of the time it was the war. We ate cornflakes and eggs and carrots, things like that, because I didn't know how to cook anything else, so we were vegetarians. I don't mean we were vegetarians because we didn't believe in eating meat, I just didn't know how to
cook
meat. Well, we didn't need any clothes. My mother used to knit things for the children, but the boys and the girls all wore the same clothes because it was easy, and so did I. My second husband, that's Dinah's father, bought dozens of sheets and white cups when we were married, so we were still using those when I married Jake.
What
financial burden?”

“Well, the school fees alone …”

“There weren't any school fees. They went to the village school. We got free milk and free orange juice — that gummy stuff, we used to drink it with gin when some friend or someone brought some gin — and we never went out, except sometimes to the pictures. That cost ninepence. After the beginning we never had to buy cots or prams or nappies, anything like that. It's complete nonsense about this financial burden. It costs a good deal less to keep a child for two years, three years, than it does to have an abortion. Why? — Do you think I should have had abortions?”

He blinked several times, picked up his pen and put it down again. “Of course not,” he muttered valiantly. “Of course not.”

“Anyway we had a bit of help from my mother.”

“Ah. I see.”

“She hardly ever wrote to me without pinning a ten shilling note to the letter. She used to fiddle the house-keeping money, my father never knew. She always pinned it on with a safety pin, a little gold one, because she didn't think paper clips were safe, and an ordinary pin might have pricked the postman's finger …” He smiled politely. “I should think she used to send me a pound a month. It paid for cigarettes, you know, and sometimes toys. The children never ate sweets, I don't know why.”

“It sounds very … idyllic,” he said.

“No, it wasn't idyllic. But it was all right.”

“You were happy. Or rather, you think now that you were happy.”

“Yes. I mean, I know I was.”

“But you had two divorces, and for a short time you were … a widow.”

“Yes. But I wasn't unhappy. It's as though … as though between the time I was a child and the time I married Jake nothing happened. As though everything stopped. I didn't seem to grow any older, I didn't seem to change at all. Then suddenly I was married to Jake and it all started again where it had left off when I was seventeen. But I was twenty-seven then. Do you understand what I mean?”

He wrote rapidly for a full minute. When he had finished he pondered, fingers steepled under his nose. “Tell me about your first husband.”

“Oh lord,” I said. “I can't remember.”

“Can't remember? But you were married to him for … nearly five years.”

“He was a reporter on our local paper. But the war broke out just after we were married and …”

“He was in the Forces?”

“No, he was a conscientious objector. They put him on the land.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. I had the children and he … well, he worked on the land.”

“You liked him, you said?”

“Oh, yes. He was sweet. He drank too much, that was the only thing.”

He waited, but I didn't offer him any more information. I couldn't think of any more. At last he was driven to ask, “And how did it end?”

“It didn't really end. I met the Major — he was Dinah's father — at a sort of … concert in the village hall. He was a very sober, military sort of school-master, rather intelligent. He read
New Writing
, and
Horizon
and so on. He was a great one for making lists. He was very interested in the children, liked teaching them to read and count beans, you know, things like that. My husband, the first one, was pretty hopeless with children. So we fell in love. I think it was quite a relief, really, divorcing me — for my husband, I mean. He cried a good deal at one point, but it was only the drink.”

There was a long pause.

“And then?” he asked coldly.

“Then? Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents. I had Dinah there. Of course he was dead by then.”

“And did that upset you?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it did. Naturally. It must have done.”

He slumped in his chair. He seemed tired out. I said, “Look, need we go on with this? I find it tremendously boring, and it's not what I'm thinking about at all. I just don't think about those husbands except …”

“Except when?”

“I never think about them.”

“We're almost at the end.” The smile had grown even weaker. “I'm sorry if it's a painful for you, but it helps to know the facts. Who was the next one?”

“Giles. He was a professional violinist. I suppose he still is. He came with some quintet to play chamber music in the Town Hall, something to do with C.E.M.A. or E.N.S.A. or one of those things. Anyway, the Major had left me £200 in his will and Giles seemed to think he could manage the children. I don't think I ever loved anyone in the way I loved Giles — except maybe a boy once, when I was very young.”

“Then …”

“Why? I don't know.”

“Was it something to do with the children?”

“I don't know. I can't remember.”

“Did you insist on having children — which he didn't want?”

“No! He loved children!”

“Why did it go wrong, then? What happened?”

“Nothing happened! I've told you, that was the thing about that time — nothing happened!”

“And yet after four years you were ready to leave … Giles and marry Jake. Something must have happened.”

“I just had to go on, that's all! When I stopped wanting …”

“Wanting?”

“To go to bed with him. Then there was nothing. No future. Nothing to look …”

“But why did you stop wanting to go to bed with him? Because he didn't want any more children, and sex without children was unthinkable to you, a kind of obscenity? As it is with Jake, now? Isn't that true?”

“No! It's not true!”

“Don't you think sex without children is a bit messy, Mrs. Armitage? Come now. You're an intelligent woman. Be honest. Don't you think that the people you most fear are disgusting to you, and hateful, because they are doing something for its own sake, for the mere pleasure of it? Something which you must sanctify, as it were, by incessant reproduction? Could it be that in spite of what might be called a very full life, it's sex you really hate? Sex itself you are frightened of? What do you think?”

“You really should have been an Inquisitor,” I said. “Do I burn now, or later?”

He laughed heartily. “I'm glad to see your sense of humour flourishing.” Everything about his face, except the jovial mouth, was as cold as mine. “Now, I was going to give you a prescription, wasn't I?” The pen flourished again. “One twice a day … There you are. I think they'll deal with those little weeps of yours. But keep them away from the children.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.”

“And don't be down-hearted. Great progress is being made. Great, great progress.”

Although he has no use for Freud (“all that cock”), Jake would unhesitatingly say that I longed all my life for a husband like my father: practical, positive, a man with a work bench, reliable. But then, my father was not like this. His reliability was invented by Jake. My father was a complete provincial. His ideas sprang directly from his own actions, and his actions were necessary to the way he lived. Nothing from the outside ever touched him. He had to engage a woman — my mother — to cook for him, but beyond this he was as near self-supporting as it is possible for a twentieth century Englishman to be. Among his few failures was an attempt to grow his own tobacco.

My grandfather died when my father was twenty, leaving him the family business, a small tent and rope factory in Bedfordshire. The factory made many things besides rope and tents: string, matting, canvas, anything that could be made out of hemp. This hemp was grown on a plantation in India, managed in my childhood by one of my father's cousins, a tall, remote man whom we called Uncle Ted. If I had an ideal, Uncle Ted approached it far more than my father. He was lean and burnt out, with colourless eyes like diamonds and enormous feet. I always liked men with big feet, but never married one. Jake's are small, arched, short-toed, inclined to be dainty. When I first met him I thought he was queer, because of the size of his feet and the crumpled little suede shoes he wore on them.

Uncle Ted, my first love, was almost completely silent. Possibly this was because he was stupid, but since he never returned from India after his last journey back in 1936, I don't know. When I was a small child he seemed to me wise. If he is still alive — and there has been no sign of him for twenty-six years — he must be about seventy. In my first term at school I used to carry a photograph of him in my blazer pocket. It was taken against the Indian sun, and screwing up his eyes he looked reasonably boyish. I told the more credulous girls that he was my young man. As I was very fat and plain at the time, even they didn't believe me.

When I grew thinner I fell in love. For two years I loved the son of the local clergyman and he, sporadically, loved me. Although I was only thirteen at the beginning of this romance — he kissed me abruptly on a bus coming back from the cinema in Luton — my parents seemed to approve. I realized later that if they had seen us in bed together they would have thought we were playing sardines. We did not, of course, go to bed together. It didn't occur to us. But we struggled together in the backs of cars, in attics and summer houses and my father's rope yard at night, and in the organ loft. In the term time we wrote to each other, and for the first days of the holidays never sought each other out but waited, with desperate anxiety, to meet by chance in Smith's or Woolworths or outside the bicycle shop, where we would often stand stroking the gleaming handlebars of speedy bicycles.

My friends at school, during this period, were Betty Maclaren, Irene (pronounced Ireen) Douthwaite, Angela Williams and Mary White. Their fathers, like mine, were business men. Their fathers drove twelve-horsepower Standard or Vauxhall cars and wore navy blue suits, trilby hats and mackintoshes. Their mothers all had new permanent waves, made up their faces with vanishing cream and “natural” face powder, wore fur coats all the year round. Their brothers went to Oundle or Repton and were gods.