‘So,’ I said, mustering what enthusiasm I could, ‘why not get into a whole load of extra-curricular activities? The plays and concerts they’re always asking you to do. That could be exciting. Bury yourself in it, if you like it so much.’
‘You are a love,’ she said. ‘Such a delight.’
One Tries and Tries to be Sensitive
Another thing I had to put up with these days were the frequent visits from Shirley’s mother.
Mrs Harcourt was a busy, bossy, bustling woman, exhibiting all the character traits of the wife who gives up career for family and is then left stranded when the fledgelings fly the nest (an object lesson for Shirley if only she’d had eyes to see it). She spent an inordinate amount of time on her personal appearance (hair-do’s, sauna, massage), and had taken up photography as a hobby to fill in the becalmed oceans of time between one social function and the next. She always had her camera bag when she came to visit and at some point or other would always pull out a Nikon and take her glasses off to squint through its expensive auto-focusing lens at some unlikely subject, in fact the more unlikely the better, to show what an eye she had, how she saw ‘the unusual in the usual’, as she put it.
She squinted through the lens, maybe at a mess of saucepans inside one of our cluttered cupboards, maybe at soap suds being sucked into the drain, at a coffee mug balanced on the arm of the sofa, but as far as I remember she never clicked the shutter in our house and certainly never showed us any of the results if she did. Perhaps not even she could find anything sufficiently unusual, we are such regular people. She had put on two small shows at the local library in Chiswick, one depicting, from de rigueur unlikely angles, various stages of slaughter in a poultry abattoir off the Goldhawk Road, a comment on man’s barbarity to the chicken apparently, the other featuring pieces of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the mudbanks opposite the family’s Strand-on-the-Green house, clammy with slime and generally unrecognisable. The glaring gratuitousness of these enterprises was one of the few things Shirley and I were still capable of laughing about together.
Otherwise, Mrs Harcourt was a signed-up, card-carrying member of the newly formed SDP, as perhaps only an already wealthy unemployed person could afford to be. Her small head came surprisingly forward from her body and when she spoke, her crisp elocution set a fierce mole above one corner of her mouth in undulating motion. Perhaps this accounted for the immediate impression of pushiness she communicated.
She would come over in her Metro Deluxe, maybe three, four times a week, shortly after Shirley got back from school. When I arrived home a couple of hours later I wasn’t invited to join in whatever discussion was under way. Often they sat together in the kitchen or even the bedroom to make it clear they wanted to be on their own. Once I heard crying. More often there were loud peals of haw-hawing women’s laughter, Mrs Harcourt gasping for breath, probably holding her sides the way older women will, shrieks of ‘Oh dear, oh dear’, Shirley no doubt tossing her hair back, glistening pink mouth wide open, the gesture that had most enchanted me when first I met her.
‘So what do you find to talk about?’ I might ask later.
‘Oh, this and that.’
‘Come on, she’s here every other evening. There must be something.’
‘About Dad, about Charles. She’s worried that he never seems to have any girlfriends. You know.’
‘I’d be worried for the girl if he did.’
‘Then he was arrested last week in some anti-Cruise march.’
‘He likes to be arrested, it reinforces his council flat credentials. ‘ And off the cuff I asked: ‘What’s the score with your dad these days anyway? We haven’t seen him for donkeys.’
Shirley said: ‘What a lemon this cooker is. For God’s sake! You can never be sure what the temperature is. It doesn’t matter how you set it. Either the stuff comes out like charcoal or everything’s raw in the middle.’
‘And me?’ I asked with what I hoped was a wry smile.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you talk about little old George?’
‘Aren’t we insecure?’ she laughed. She said: ‘Of course we talk about you sometimes. It’d be odd if we didn’t. Wouldn’t it?’
‘Would it?’
‘‘I think so.’
‘Okay. And what do you say?’
‘Oh, that you don’t deserve me.’ She stabbed a fork into some casserole meat and smiled sweetly.
‘Tell me more.’
‘Mmm, let me see, that your background’s made you a repressed hypocrite.’
‘Ah, of course, that. Examples?’
‘Though naturally we always agree that deep down you’re a kind, honest man and you’ll probably turn out good in the end.’
‘Naturally.’
But I think I can tell a knife when it’s out. And turning.
I suggested that we try to get away more often if she felt so down. An occasional weekend in Paris; we could afford it now. We were averagely well-off young people, even if we might have done better to save. Or I could even take a week off at Easter. Maybe we could go to Spain, Italy. Or a few days riding somewhere. She said she didn’t want to go away for a weekend, let alone for Easter. She didn’t even want to go away in the summer. We were planning to drive down to Turkey that year, seeing as everybody else seemed to be going to Greece. Now she didn’t want to go. I could go on my own. I said, no, I could not go on my own. What was the point? ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘In your head you live entirely on your own all the time.’
One tries and tries to be sensitive. I said that if she felt really depressed and unhappy maybe, just maybe, she should see somebody, er, get help, I don’t know, a psychoanalyst or something. She said: ‘Do me a favour, sweetheart, please.’ And she said: ‘This flat is impossible, really impossible, you know that? Not a single window that gets the sun, the carpets are the worst dust traps imaginable, the drains stink, the cupboard doors don’t close, the hot water’s never hot enough, the pipes groan, the oven’s useless, the paint is nearly grey, and you can never do anything about it because the landlady doesn’t want to pay for it. I mean, what are we doing here?’
I felt she was rather exaggerating. Still, at least this was something I could deal with. I suggested that if it was the flat that was depressing her, though she could never say I didn’t help with the cleaning and so on, then why didn’t we buy our own place now instead of waiting.