The kitchen was worse. It contained a sink, a gas cooker circa 1950, and a refrigerator that looked huge because its walls were nearly a foot thick, though its usable interior quite a small space. Originally it must have been a very good one, for it had lasted more than sixty years. There was no washing machine. Zillah stripped off the children’s clothes and put jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, and Jordan’s anorak to soak in cold water in the sink. She switched on the fan heater and put a match to the fire she had laid earlier. It was strange how Jims never seemed to notice the state of the place or the inadequacy of the fittings or, come to that, the cold. At any rate, he never mentioned them. Did this augur well for a life companion or not? Of course, he was a pal of Sir Ronald. If she married him she and Jims would no doubt occasionally have Sir Ronald to dine. Perhaps in the members’ dining room…
As she began making scrambled eggs for the children’s tea, Zillah decided that if she did marry Jims, no way was she going to do the cooking in the future. Or any housework as long as she lived. Who was it said, “I’ll never be hungry again?” Oh, yes, Scarlett O’Hara. If only she had a video in this bloody bloody place and the film of Gone With the Wind, she’d play it tonight after the kids were in bed. If she married Jims she’d be able to watch videos every night. What an ambition! But she’d also be able to have unlimited babysitters and go to the cinema and the theater and nightclubs, shop all day long, have facials and her hair done at Nicky Clarke, and stay at health farms and be a lady who lunched at Harvey Nichols.
Was she going to marry him, then? Had she made up her mind?
The children would be able to play video games and have computers instead of watching whatever rubbish was currently on television: Baywatch or something of that ilk. Not great in black-and-white. She’d better bathe them. Jordan had mud on his feet and in his hair. But Jims was gay. Besides, there was another pressing reason, not just for not marrying him but for not marrying anyone.
The letter had come in October of the previous year. For about five minutes, if that, she’d believed what it said and that it came from the people it said it did. Maybe that was because she’d wanted to believe it. But had she wanted to? Not entirely. Anyway, that hardly mattered, for she’d soon seen it was an obvious nonsense. Jerry hadn’t been on a Great Western train going from Gloucester to London. He’d left her and the kids and Willow Cottage ten minutes before that train collided with the other one and driven himself off somewhere or other in his battered Ford Anglia, which was twenty years old if it was a day.
The letter purported to come from the Great Western. In fact, since she was his wife and still was on the day of the train crash, she’d have been the first to hear of his death and not ten days afterward. Not in a phony letter that cried out to be disbelieved, but from the police. They’d very likely have wanted her (or someone she named) to go and identify the remains. There’d have been a funeral. So after the first five minutes she hadn’t believed the letter. But she’d wondered who’d written it and what Jerry was up to. Certain things seemed clear. He’d arranged for the letter to be sent to her and this must mean that he wanted her not necessarily to think he was dead, but to act as if he were dead. What he was really saying was: “This is to show you I’m off, I won’t be troubling you again. Just act as if I was dead. Shack up with someone, get married if you like. I won’t interfere or put a spoke in your wheel.” Was he saying that? She couldn’t think what he’d meant if he hadn’t meant that.
Of course, he was always a joker. And his jokes weren’t even clever or particularly funny. Zillah, Zillah, the rick-stick Stillah, round tail, bobtail, well done, Zillah. Pinch, punch, first of the month, no returns. If he happened to be sleeping with her on the night of the last of the month-it didn’t happen that often-he’d always awakened her with those words and the corresponding gestures. “No returns” meant the rules of the game stopped her pinching and punching him back. There was another one about going into the garden and meeting a great she-bear who said, “What, no soap?” She couldn’t remember the rest of it. Once, long ago, she must have found him funny. And his country singing and his minteating.
They’d not really lived together since Jordan was born and not much before that, and she’d never been such a fool as to think she was the only one. But she had thought she was the preferred one. “All other girls apart, first always in my heart,” as he’d once told her and she, being young, had taken it seriously. It was probably a line from Hank Williams or Boxcar Willie. Disillusionment set in when he was always somewhere else and about as bad a provider as could be. What was the good of setting the Child Support Agency on his track when he never earned anything?
Because they thought he and she were divorced, everyone believed that when Jerry came visiting it was to see his kids and that Jordan bunked in with Eugenie and he slept in Jordan’s room or downstairs on the couch. The truth was, however, and there was never any question about it, that he shared Zillah’s bed. Sex with Jerry was really the only thing about him she still liked as much as she ever had and there had been plenty of it that last weekend he’d spent at Willow Cottage. For a moment, running the children’s bath, she wondered about that remark of Jims’s. Something about he didn’t mind what she did about sex but he drew the line at “that ex-husband of yours.” She’d been too struck with surprise at his proposal to think much about it at the time, but did that mean he wasn’t among those who believed Jerry had been visiting just as the children’s father? Probably. It didn’t matter. Jims, as she very well knew, was no fool.
It showed her something else as well. That Jims took it for granted she and Jerry were divorced. Did her parents? They no longer lived on Jims’s father’s estate but had retired to a bungalow in Bournemouth. Relations between her and them were strained and had been since she moved in with Jerry, got pregnant, and dropped out of the art foundation course she was doing at a north London polytechnic. Strained but, since the original rift was mended, not broken off. It was her parents who’d persuaded Sir Ronald to let her have this house. Still, when she spoke to her mother on the phone, she had the impression they considered her a divorced woman who had only got what she asked for.
The children had to share a bath. It cost too much to keep the immersion heater on for long. Eugenie stared searchingly at her brother until he said, “Stop looking at me. Your eyes are making holes in my tummy.”
“Mummy,” said Eugenie, “did you know his willy is called a penis? Some people call it that. Did you know?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Titus told me when Jordan got his out to do a wee. Are they all called a penis or is it just his?”