‘I’m sorry about that, Francine,’ Mr Harris had said, drawing close to her as she stood straining at the door with her coat. His skin was stodgy and pale, and his eyes quivered like tinned fruits in the jelly of his face. ‘It’s meant so much to me having you here.’
Afterwards Francine had hurried down to the station, the grim scenes of her unhappy lunch hours clinging to her as she passed. It had taken a long time for the elation at her freedom to come, and she had only really felt it when Lynne phoned to tell her about the job at Lancing & Louche and sounded quite friendly, as if nothing had happened. She had even said that they only sent their top people to Mr Lancing, although in her sensitive condition Francine had detected a note of warning in the compliment.
She turned on the kitchen lights and put her bag on the table. Janice had left dishes in the sink, minutely and elegantly smeared, and a carton of milk stood open on the sideboard. A note on the table said that she had gone out for the evening. Irritation provoked a tightening in Francine’s head, and she felt the slight tumult in her stomach which was the residue of being unable to distinguish her thoughts by discussing them with someone else. She never really assumed control over events until she had related them in some form: untold, their reality was too pressing, still sullied with the awkwardness of the moment. Once she had presented them to an audience, they came back to her purged and confirmed, interpreted, ordered scenes which could then be filed in memory. Given the unsociable nature of her day, she had hoped Janice would be on hand when she arrived home. She remembered that it was Friday night, and the thought of spending it alone worried her for a moment, until she conjured up the dispensation of her activities the night before. She was recovering, and would prove it with a long, scented bath, an arsenal of beauty treatments, and a relaxed posture later on the sofa with a magazine.
Thus intent, Francine visited the sitting-room en route to her indulgences and listened to the messages on the answering machine. Two were for Janice, one of them the imperious manager of the Hampstead boutique, the other a man with a rough voice saying something that Francine couldn’t hear very well. Her mother’s clearer, complaining tones followed, asking why she had to have that silly machine on the whole time and would madam like to phone her when she got in, although not if it was past ten o’clock. Then it was Ralph, saying that he’d enjoyed last night and he hoped she hadn’t felt too awful at work because he certainly had. His voice sounded incongruous and polite beside the others.
Francine immediately began the business of not returning Ralph’s call, going into the bathroom and turning on the taps. She looked in the mirror above the sink and was surprised to see that her face was haggard beneath an unfamiliar mat of lank hair. The idea that Ralph had wrought this change with the pummelling effect of his attention — wanting to talk to her before she’d even walked through the door! — was interesting, but the seeds of melodrama were blighted by the realization that his message had contained no suggestion that he wanted to see her again. In the more productive state of mild uncertainty, she removed her tired, twice-worn clothing and set about the lavish business of restoring herself while fingers of steam began to creep warmly over her skin.
In the bath, she reflected on the fact that her mother had lately seemed to be enjoying a new lease of life, which, while it didn’t succeed in blunting the voracity of her interest in Francine’s affairs, suggested the renewal of activity in her own. Francine didn’t think about her parents very often, having some time ago realized that the profitability of her association with them would never again reach the modest peaks of her childhood years — unless they died, of course, which was a horrible thought — but she did occasionally solicit her mother’s attention, and maintained a relationship with her over the telephone which was useful in times of shortfall, when other confidantes could not be located or were found wanting. Maxine Snaith’s appetite for information was considerable, and allowed Francine the rare luxury of being asked more questions about herself than she really wanted to answer.
Her parents had never visited her in London, and although they frequently mentioned the fact that there was always a bed for her in Kent, both parties seemed to consider the terms of Francine’s emigration so extreme as to lend her absence a certain finality. Since Frank, Francine’s father, had taken his retirement, a journey to London had been mentioned more frequently, but Francine had soon discovered that the foreign flavour of the idea made it easy to forestall. If the disincentives of bombs and bad weather failed, she could always say that she was very busy at that particular time, and Maxine would grow meek with awe and with the possibility of encountering things that she didn’t understand, making a trip later in the year sound much more acceptable.
Francine was Frank and Maxine’s only child, and they had united their names as well as their bodies to form her. The experiment had certainly been a success; almost too great a success, in fact, for their hazy understanding of their own union made its exotic and turbulent fruit the object of a slightly fearful contemplation. Frank and Maxine hadn’t really known one another for very long when they’d got married — Frank had proposed to Maxine over the telephone from Maidstone, and had been away on business in Leicester right up to the wedding — and Francine had arrived so rapidly that they had straight away been sent into inescapable orbit around her and never really got the chance to catch up with each other. The fact that Francine resembled neither of them gave their grouping a somewhat alien atmosphere, and although any two of them could conjure a certain intimacy on the common ground of the third’s absence, seated around the dinner table in the evenings things were often awkward.
Francine’s sex and her fast-developing loveliness eventually swung the tide of affiliation in her mother’s favour, and Frank became an increasingly extraneous presence in the house. The forces of femininity were, he soon realized, inward-looking and indifferent to his conquest, and he was not even required to do the slavish work of offsetting them. Francine’s vanity had been tended at the roots by her mother’s determination to witness and enshrine every new development, and Frank was relegated to the position of a patron observing with a slight, helpless horror the spectacle his generosity has permitted to be enacted.
Maxine’s devotion to Francine’s physical triumphs and the social victories which the future would undoubtedly bring permitted her time only to give herself attention of a somewhat indifferent and secondary nature. She was not an attractive woman, made from small bones which easily accrued quantities of bluish, intractable fat in their own defence. She found it hard to see herself clearly in the glare of Francine’s superiority, and she grew detached and confused in matters of her own upkeep. At the hairdresser’s she never really knew what she wanted, and would allow the woman to run free with her uncertain creative powers, manufacturing whimsical, ill-realized styles which didn’t seem to belong to her. She would occasionally look at herself in the mirror and would feel a mild perturbation, dutifully applying blocks of make-up to all the recognized places. The apparently meaningless reservoirs of flesh around her body she regarded rather more fearfully, and took to palliating them with the consumption of brightly coloured milkshakes instead of food. As this cruel practice became more frequent, it eventually replaced all the memories of varied and seductive forms of nourishment she had accrued during her life with the simpler image of a tall glass filled with brown, pink, or cream liquid — colours which she came to associate with the meals they represented, preferring the brown one, for example, for the evening meal — and as she shrank Maxine wondered if there would come a day when she wouldn’t be there at all.