All my love. Still!!!!
SHIRLEY.
It was nine o’clock. I phoned at once. She arrived forty minutes later. From the tone of that letter and then her broken voice on the phone, I had imagined her bedraggled: jeans, a sweater, tennis shoes, tear-streaked cheeks, little-girlish. I had imagined we would cry together and both plead mea culpa, then laugh and think how crazy we’d been. That was what I expected, and at least partly very much wanted. Instead she was carefully made-up, her lips were glistening and she was wearing a new twenties-style cylinder dress that frocked out just above slim knees, her feet pointing carefully in sharp white high heels, likewise new. There was something glassy and brittle and untouchable about it all, but stylish too; it suited her shape, her thin face and round wide eyes. She embraced me.
‘Shirley!’ I sighed. I get these waves of emotion sometimes. I just want to be very sentimental and have everything settled and happy.
But the embrace was brief. She sat down and crossed her legs, leaned forward, enunciating very correctly, as if at an interview or addressing a mixed race audience. She said: ‘I’ll stay, or rather you’ll stay as long as you give up the idea of other women. Otherwise you’ll have to go.’
Looking back, and considering my mood on seeing her walk into the flat at once so vulnerable and stylish, I’m sure this is a concession she could easily have wrung out of me, had she only had the sense to approach the matter differently, that is seductively, kindly, with comprehension. But the idea of going straight back into conflict and being simply bulldozered into concession was simply not on. It was thus with a wisdom that surprised me, worthy of my mother I thought, that I said: ‘Shirley, honestly, there are so many things wrong with our relationship, the only hope we’ve got is to live together happily for a while. Then maybe we can make concessions. I mean, it’s a long process. You have to work for it.’
‘Oh, so for now we just kiss and make up,’ she said. ‘Is that it?’
‘But isn’t that what you said in your letter?’
‘As long as you promise,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to be treated like a doormat.’
I stood up. Somehow I felt as if I was acting, very aware of my position in the room, of what I was doing with my body, my hands. It all seemed very unreal. Not an unpleasant feeling, but a shade disturbing. I gave the wall a soft punch. I said look, look, if what she was really trying to tell me was that she wanted children and a happy traditional family, then simply to play it extremely slowly, extremely sweetly, and I might give in, probably would in fact, yes, most men did in the end, didn’t they, but for the moment I was afraid that a baby would simply bind us together all the more, precisely when there were very clear signs that perhaps we weren’t really suited to each other. Wait just a few months, I said. Hang on.
Would Shirley notice if the sun rose in the west? One wonders. Certainly on this occasion she didn’t appear to appreciate what a massive change of position and principle I had just offered, what a major climb down this was.
She lit a cigarette. ‘Unless you promise not to go to this other woman again, then you’re going to have to get out of this flat and go and live on your own.’
‘Shirley,’ I said, ‘we’re both tired, we’re overwrought. Now let’s just go to bed and sleep on it. I’ve got to go to work in the morning. You’re on holiday. I’m not.’ (School had just broken up.)
She said the last thing she wanted to do right at the moment was be in the same bed with me.
‘Suit yourself.’
But in the middle of the night she must have slipped in under the covers because I woke up with a start to find her clinging to me. She was naked, which was unusual for her (she usually wears a rather unexciting blue cotton nightdress). Not crying, not saying anything, she twined herself round me. So that when I had fully woken up we made love, violently, with her on top, which again was unusual. And while this was going on I remember thinking with some euphoria, ‘We’re really living now, really living, a modern life, with passion, with intrigue!’
17 Ollerton Road
Exactly five days before our scheduled departure for Turkey, Shirley received a letter ‘advising’ her that due to cuts in government grants, etc. etc., her school was being obliged to reduce its staff by two and they thus regretted to inform her that she would be without a job as from the end of the summer break. For myself I couldn’t help feeling that this was rather a blessing in disguise. My first big stroke of luck. Now she would be forced to go for something more stimulating where there were real career opportunities to be had, especially since she wasn’t in a position to apply to most state schools, never having got her teacher training certificate. She could move into something like the media or marketing or business administration or product management. Which should force her to brighten up and most probably get over the baby business.
But Shirley took it all very badly. On first showing me the letter when I arrived home from work, she was frantic and it was clear that she had been crying for much of the day. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. Trying without success to comfort her, I said laughingly that for the tough intellectual cookie she had always been, she was crying rather a lot lately, wasn’t she? She went and locked herself in the bathroom. Not for the first time I experienced that acute, that lacerating awareness of having in all probability married the wrong woman.
The curious thing being that whenever I have this sensation I immediately do my utmost to repress it, I simply won’t accept it, even now, and I get into a veritable frenzy of activity in an attempt to put things right and ‘save the situation’. So now I looked around and started preparing a spaghetti alla carbonara, one of the few decent things I know how to cook, found a bottle of wine at the back of the larder, white, and stuck it in the ice-box, put a tablecloth on the table (took me a while to find where she kept them), sawed through a couple of frozen rolls and stuck them under the grill, etc. I made a feast.
When she finally emerged, I like to think lured by the smell of sizzling bacon, Shirley was thankful but still apparently inconsolable. It was the only thing that had been going well in her life, she said, her relationship with the children at school. The only thing that hadn’t turned sour. And just to lose it like this. . Everything, everything was going to pieces.
I tried to be cheerful, bustling with kitchen implements I wasn’t quite used to. ‘Think of it as a challenge,’ I said. ‘Get yourself a good job.’ But she said that was another thing, she couldn’t get herself a good job now, could she, because if she did she’d never have a child. You couldn’t take a job and then go and get pregnant in the first few months, it wasn’t serious. And she just didn’t want to leave it for a couple of years more.
I sympathised, though privately I’m thinking, Come on, buck up girl! I mean, if something like this happened to me, I know I’d bounce right back, go for it, don’t let them get you down. Where was her joie de vivre, for heaven’s sake? She was only twenty-eight. And the following day, overtaken by a sudden summer horniness urgent as thirst, and seeing as I hadn’t actually promised anything to anyone just as yet, I left the office early (thinking, after all, we’d be on holiday next week) and went over to Willesden to see Rosemary.