‘It wouldn’t be the greatest of losses,’ she said coolly. ‘One grows out of swearing.’
Could she really be serious? When we had our lives so splendidly worked out already. ‘We’d have to cut out the quickies any time we felt like it.’ Had she thought about that?
‘That’s true, but I’ve always preferred the unabridged bedtime version myself.’
I stopped eating and looked at her, her long fine face, big, prominent eyes, the curve of character in her jaw, my good-looking if rather sinewy wife. ‘Come on, come on, Shirley! She’d always be reproaching us for not having children, you know what she’s like. Go forth and multiply, the Christian family, and so on.’
‘She’s never said a word about it to me,’ Shirley said, ‘in fact I’ve always thought her admirably sensitive on that point. My own mother’s much worse.’
‘But you can see the reproach in her eyes, for God’s sake. She doesn’t need to say anything. That’s the whole point about my mother; she is a reproach in herself.’
Shirley smiled. ‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, that the hang-up might be yours rather than hers, I mean, you imagine her reproaching you for things you feel guilty of anyway. You’ve substituted her for your conscience, it helps you to ignore it. You think, it’s her fault I’m feeling guilty, it’s just my stupid mum.’
‘Three cheers for psychoanalysis,’ I said brightly, filling my mouth with some fierce sauce or other. ‘Want to know what I dreamt last night?’
But Shirley said: ‘Anyway, I’d really rather like to have a kid now actually. Why not? In fact that’s partly what I was meaning to talk about. We could find a bigger place, have a baby and your mum could look after it while we were at work.’
Errors of Judgement
On reflection, one of the many errors of judgement I made with Shirley was mistaking class for intelligence, class and perhaps academic ability. They had seemed such rock-solid guarantees of personality at the time. I should have reflected: a) that any society, in its struggle to maintain the status quo, has a natural tendency to associate the manners of its ruling class with an above-average mental capacity, and; b) that girls often tend to be great and successful swots during their school years, get eight As at ‘O’ Level, or whatever the new equivalent is, but that this is no indication of true intelligence, which, on the contrary, only emerges through long-term behaviour patterns and real-life choices. I should also perhaps have reflected on the lightness, even flightness with which Shirley adopts and then drops and then perhaps readopts all sorts of opinions and points of view. One week she is pro-Israeli, the next pro-Arab, depending on who has committed the most recent atrocity; one week she will stop taking sugar because it’s bad for her skin and the next she’ll start taking it again because she needs to put on weight, she needs more energy. In short, Shirley is a person who neither has nor holds any truly deep-seated opinions, is capable of following no one particular policy. So that I should have seen that her sensible line on children (that they were too risky a business and that people who wanted good careers couldn’t afford the time a baby required and deserved — opinions that more or less reflected my own) might turn out to be short-lived. Yes, I should have seen it and been ready for it. Except that we were only eighteen when we met and I was in love with her.
‘You do appreciate,’ I broached it carefully back home in bed, ‘that this is a complete reversal of what you were saying only a few weeks ago. You remember? When Greg and Jilly were over and you were talking about that Ian McEwan thing you’d read. About not having children while there’s this nuclear threat. A complete reversal.’
‘So what?’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m growing up.’
‘But we went over this before and you promised. No kids.’
‘But that was years ago.’
‘Right. Of course it was. Those are precisely the kind of things you have to decide long range.’ And remembering something Mother once said, I told her: ‘If a person can’t keep a promise then what on earth’s the point of making one? The whole point about promises is that they bind you across time. Or no?’
Without a word she got up, pulled on her dressing gown and went into the living room to watch TV. I stayed put in bed listening to snippets of some film, sinister music, raised voices. I went over everything that had been said. I reflected that as usual I was right. The problem was that my exasperation, which was partly fear, made me too harsh. I came over as inhuman. Presentation problem.
I got up, found my own dressing gown and padded after her. Shirley was sitting on the sofa staring glumly at the television, a glass of Grand Marnier in her hands. She always likes to have snob drinks about the house. So do I for that matter. I was struck then, in that moment watching her before she noticed me, by the hollow angularity of her intent face in gloomy TV light, the slumped position of her body. She looked singularly unattractive. But I’m always careful·not to be swayed by such momentary perceptions. I knew Shirley was a good-looking woman and I was determined that our marriage would work out.
I went and sat next to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She didn’t so much as turn to look at me.
‘Come on, Shirl, I’m sorry, I was too harsh. I must sound like a real chauvinist arsehole sometimes. Forget it.’
When she still didn’t turn, I got up and went back to bed.
A few minutes later she came back into the bedroom herself. She snapped on the light. Blinding me.
‘Let’s go out,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘We can go down to the Torrington. There’s dancing till two Tuesdays.’
‘But I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.’
‘Likewise.’ And she said: ‘Listen, Crawley, if we don’t have kids it’s so we can make the most of our freedom, right? Whereas all you do is work. Work, work, work. There must be something else in life.’
Out on the High Road she walked with an exaggerated girlish flounce. Suddenly she turned and grabbed me and kissed me hard, forcing our lips together, fingers twined behind my head. We were under an umbrella. ‘You know you’re turning into an old office fart, George,’ she said brightly. ‘Our life is one great suburban bore.’ I kissed her back, trying to return her passion. ‘Come on, put your hand on my arse,’ she said, so I did. ‘Squeeze,’ she said, so I did. And at the Torrington we danced excitedly, with an excitement I hadn’t felt for some time, rubbing thighs, necking, clinging tight, then went home and tackled the titbit, making quite a feast of it. Come the morning, the office, the green screen, and I was shattered.
So much for the aftermath of Aunt Mavis’s funeral. One could hardly ignore the fact that some crucial balance had tipped. Something was wrong. Over the weeks and months that followed Shirley became moody, difficult, aggressive, while I was simply doing everything in my power to tip that balance back, to get back to the halcyon days before that conversation. With this in mind I brought home flowers and bottles of good wine in abundance, I cut out evening working as far as was possible for someone with my responsibilities and aspirations; I cut out the karate class I’d started going to for my back and which I was thoroughly enjoying and proving surprisingly good at. Instead I bought tickets for the opera and for orchestral concerts and ballets which I knew Shirley liked and which I myself didn’t mind.
What else? I found a stable in Totteridge where we could ride Sunday mornings for an outrageous price and rub shoulders with other young professionals like ourselves. I encouraged dinner parties, trips and acquaintances, even when I wasn’t really particularly keen, even when, for example, I had my mind on the huge new programmes we were troubleshooting for Brown Boveri. I tried to get her to take an interest in some large item we could feasibly buy, a new car for example, and I brought home brochures of Cavaliers, Orions, Giuliettas and the like. That usually cheers people up. But most of all I began to suggest that if she didn’t find St Elizabeth’s sufficiently challenging — and surely she had already stayed far longer than we ever intended — she should look elsewhere for a job, try for something in publishing again, or broadcasting. That had always been the plan after all. The problem as I saw it was that she wasn’t fulfilled in her work. She was bored. I even suggested she might think about coming into InterAct in some capacity. I was in a position to swing that now. But Shirley said on the contrary that she had no intention whatsoever of changing her job. What did publishers do in the end, sat in offices like everybody else, thinking of the price of paper. No, she owed to St Elizabeth’s the discovery that she had a vocation for small children. She loved her children. Really, she loved their eagerness, their innocence. In fact she loved teaching in general. It was fun. She had never expected she would, but there you were. She would be dead without her job. It was the only good thing in her life.