Sylvie had passed her honeymoon in Deauville, Pamela spent hers on a walking holiday in Switzerland, but Ursula began her own marriage with a rather wet week in Worthing.
She married one man (‘a pleasant enough chap’) and woke up with another, one as tightly wound as Sylvie’s little carriage clock.
He changed almost immediately, as if the honeymoon itself was a transition, an anticipated rite of passage for him from solicitous suitor to disenchanted spouse. Ursula blamed the weather, which was wretched. The landlady of the boarding house where they were staying expected them to vacate the premises between breakfast and dinner at six and so they spent long days sheltering in cafés or in the art gallery and museum or fighting the wind on the pier. Evenings were spent playing partner whist with other (less dispirited) guests before retiring to their chilly bedroom. Derek was a poor card player, in more ways than one, and they lost nearly every hand. He seemed almost to wilfully misread her attempts to indicate her hand to him.
‘Why did you lead trumps?’ she asked him later – genuinely curious – as they decorously removed their clothes in the bedroom. ‘You think that nonsense is important?’ he said with a look of such deep contempt that she thought it might be best to avoid games of any kind with Derek in the future.
On the first night, blood, or the lack of it, passed unnoticed, Ursula was relieved to find. ‘I think you should know that I am not in-experienced,’ Derek said rather pompously as they climbed into bed together for the first time. ‘I believe it is the duty of a husband to know something of the world. How else can he protect the purity of his wife?’ It sounded like a specious argument to Ursula but she was hardly in a position to argue.
Derek rose early each morning and did a relentless series of press-ups – as if he were in an army barracks rather than on honeymoon. ‘Mens sana in corpora sana,’ he said. Best not to correct him, she thought. He was proud of his Latin, as well as his smattering of ancient Greek. His mother had scrimped and saved to make sure he had a good education, ‘nothing had been handed on a plate, unlike some’. Ursula had been rather good at Latin, Greek too, but she thought it best not to crow. That was another Ursula, of course. A different Ursula, unmarked by Belgravia.
Derek’s method of having conjugal relations was very similar to his method of exercise, even down to the same expression of pain and effort on his face. Ursula could have been part of the mattress for all he seemed to care. But what did she have to measure it against? Howie? She wished now that she had questioned Hilda about what went on in her ‘pleasure palace’ in Ealing. She thought of Izzie’s exuberant flirting and the warm affection between Pamela and Harold. It all seemed to indicate diversion if not downright happiness. ‘What’s life worth if you can’t have some fun?’ Izzie used to say. Ursula sensed there was going to be a shortage of fun in Wealdstone.
As humdrum as her job had been, it was as nothing compared to the drudge work of keeping house, day in, day out. Everything had to be continually washed, scrubbed, dusted, polished and swept, not to mention the ironing, the folding, the hanging, the straightening. The adjustments. Derek was a man of right angles and straight lines. Towels, tea-towels, curtains, rugs all needed constant alignment and realignment. (As did Ursula, apparently.) But this was her job, this was the arrangement and realignment of marriage itself, wasn’t it? Although Ursula couldn’t get over the feeling that she was on some kind of permanent probation.
It was easier to succumb to Derek’s unquestioning belief in domestic order rather than to fight it. (‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’) Crockery had to be scoured clean of stains, cutlery had to be polished and straightened in drawers – knives adjusted like soldiers on parade, spoons spooning each other neatly. A housewife has to be the most observant worshipper at the altar of the Lares and Penates, he said. It should be ‘hearth’, not ‘altar’, she thought, the amount of time she spent sweeping out grates and rattling clinker out of the boiler.
Derek was particular about tidiness. He couldn’t think, he said, if things were out of place or askew. ‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ he said. He was, Ursula was learning, rather fond of aphorisms. He certainly couldn’t work on ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’ in the kind of muddle that Ursula seemed to create simply by entering a room. They needed the income from this textbook – his first – which William Collins was to publish and to this end he commandeered the poky dining room (table, sideboard and all) at the back of the house as his ‘study’ and Ursula was banished from Derek’s company most evenings so that he could write. Two should live as cheaply as one, he said, and yet here they were, barely able to pay their bills because of her lack of domestic economy, so she could at least give him some peace to try to earn an extra crust. And no, thank you, he didn’t want her help in typing up his manuscript.
Ursula’s old household routines now seemed appallingly slovenly, even to her own eyes. In Bayswater her bed often went unmade and her pots unwashed. Bread and butter made a good breakfast and there was nothing wrong, as far as she could see, with a boiled egg for tea. Married life was more exacting. Breakfasts had to be cooked and on the table at just the right time in the morning. Derek couldn’t be late for school and regarded his breakfast, a litany of porridge, eggs and toast, as a solemn (and solitary) communion. The eggs were cooked in rotation throughout the week, scrambled, fried, boiled, poached, and on Fridays the excitement of a kipper. At weekends Derek liked bacon, sausage and black pudding with his eggs. The eggs came not from a shop but a smallholding three miles away, to which Ursula had to trek on foot every week because Derek had sold their bikes when they moved to Wealdstone ‘to save money’.
Tea was a different kind of nightmare as she had to think of new things to cook all the time. Life was an endless round of chops and steaks and pies and stews and roasts, not to mention the pudding that was expected every day and in great variety. I’m a slave to recipe books! she wrote with faux-cheerfulness to Sylvie, although cheerful was far from how she felt every day, poring over their demanding pages. She gained a new respect for Mrs Glover. Of course, Mrs Glover benefited from a large kitchen, a substantial budget and a full batterie de cuisine, whereas the Wealdstone kitchen was fitted out in a rather paltry fashion and Ursula’s housekeeping allowance never seemed to stretch throughout the week so that she was continually chastised for overspending.
She had never bothered much about money in Bayswater, if she fell short she ate less and walked instead of taking the Tube. If she really needed topping up there had always been Hugh or Izzie to fall back on, but she could hardly go running to them for money now that she had a husband. Derek would have been mortified at this slur on his manhood.
After several months under the constraint of unending chores Ursula thought she might go mad if she couldn’t find some kind of pastime to alleviate the long days. There was a tennis club that she passed en route to the shops every day. All she could see of it was the tall netting that rose behind a wooden fence and a green door in a white pebble-dash wall facing the street, but she could hear the familiar inviting summer sound of thock and twang and one day she found herself knocking on the green door and asking if she could join.
‘I’ve joined the local tennis club,’ she said to Derek when he came home that evening.
‘You didn’t ask me,’ Derek said.
‘I didn’t think you played tennis.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I meant you didn’t ask me if you could join.’
‘I didn’t know I had to ask.’ Something passed over his face, the same cloud she had briefly seen on their wedding day when Sylvie had corrected his Shakespeare. This time it took longer to pass and seemed to change him in some indefinable way, as though part of him had shrivelled inside.