A Woman of Our Times

Three

When she set out for Sunderland Avenue, for her mother’s house, Harriet didn’t take her car. It was parked outside the flat and the keys were in her bag, but she didn’t even glance at its shiny curves as she passed. She walked to the end of the road, turned right and went on, away from the river and towards the tube station.

In the early days of her independence, before the onset of Leo and the flat and the car. Harriet had always gone home by tube to see Kath. Her mother and stepfather lived on the southern fringe of London, where the narrow streets of terraced houses gave way to the broader, suburban avenues and closes. It was an awkward, boring journey, involving two changes and then a bus ride from the tube station, but it seemed fitting to do it this way, today.

Harriet smiled faintly as she negotiated the local street market, skirting the stalls piled up with cauliflowers and Indian cotton shirts and cheap cassettes.

Going home to mother? she taunted herself, experimentally.

But it wasn’t that. She was close to Kath, and she felt the need to explain to her what had happened. She was going home to do that, as if to a friend.

Harriet came out at the other side of the market and saw the tube station ahead on the corner. The pavement outside the entrance was smeared with the pulp of rotten oranges, and littered with vegetable stalks and hamburger cartons. A handful of post-punks and market traders’ boys were lounging against some railings. They inspected her as she passed. Harriet had begun to think of herself as too old and too married to be a target for street-corner whistles, but now she reminded herself that she was not quite thirty, and that she was no longer quite married.

She caught the eye of one of the market boys. He stuck out his lower jaw and whistled through his teeth.

‘Ullo, darlin’! Can I come wiv yer?’

It wasn’t much of a tribute, but it heartened her. She smiled, more warmly than was necessary, and shook her head.

‘Aw right, I’ll wait for yer!’ he shouted after her.

Harriet went on through the shiny mouth of the ticket hall and the dense, fuggy tube smell closed around her. She pressed her money into the ticket machine and moved through the barrier in a sea of Saturday morning shoppers. The escalator swept her downwards, making her one of an unending ribbon of descending heads like intricate skittles. The train was crowded. Harriet squeezed in with a press of bodies, and reached up to a pendant knob. A newspaper was folded in her bag, but she could not twist around to reach it, let alone open it to read. Instead she studied the passengers around her.

A young black couple sat immediately beneath her elbow, with a small girl perched on her father’s lap. The child’s hair was twisted into springy pigtails and she wore a spotless white ruched dress. The child beamed up at Harriet and Harriet smiled back at her. The young parents nodded, conscious and proud.

The smile lingered on Harriet’s face as she looked beyond. Standing next to her were three teenage girls, going up west to spend their week’s wages on clothes. Beyond them was a fat man in overalls, two boys with headsets clamped over their ears were hunched next to him. There were old ladies, tourists in raincoats, foreign students, wax-faced middle-aged men, all wedged together, patiently perspiring.

Harriet didn’t mind being a part of this pungent mass, even felt affection for it. She thought of it as a slice of the city itself, pushed underground, with herself as a crumb of it.

When she changed trains the crowd thinned. She was travelling against the tide of Saturday shoppers and there were plenty of empty seats. Still Harriet didn’t unfold her newspaper. She stared through the window opposite at the unending runs of pipework, thinking.

At the end of the line she was almost the only passenger left on the train. She ran up the littered steps, through the various layers of station smells, and boarded a bus outside. Harriet climbed to the top deck. She had always ridden upstairs with Kath, when Lisa was a baby, enjoying the vistas and the glimpses into lives behind first-floor windows.

It was a short ride to Sunderland Avenue. Harriet had long ago decided that somewhere in the course of it came the dividing line between London, proper London, and its dimmer, politer suburbs. Shopping streets gave way to long rows of houses fanning away from the main road. There were steep hills, lending the impression that woods and green fields might be glimpsed, in the distance, from the top of the bus. Harriet knew quite well that there never was anything to be seen, even on the clearest day, but the spread of more streets, winding up and down the hills.

The bus stopped at the end of Sunderland Avenue, and there was a steep climb from there to her mother’s house. Harriet walked briskly under the avenue trees, past front gardens full of asters and dahlias and late roses. They were big, detached houses built in the Thirties, and their owner-occupiers took pride in them. It was a neighbourhood of conservatory extensions and new tile roofs and house names on slate plaques or slices of rustic log or spelt out in twisted metal.

The house belonging to Kath and her husband, facing Harriet on a bend at the hilltop, had the look of being even better-tended than the rest. The original windows had been replaced by bigger, steel-framed ones. There was a glassed-in room that Ken called a storm lobby enclosing the front door, a rockery beside the front path and new garden walls of yellowish reconstituted stone. A big pair of wrought-iron gates across the short driveway were painted baby-blue.

Ken owned a small engineering company, with a sub-division specialising in domestic central heating. ‘My house is as much an advert for my business as my offices, I always say,’ Ken was fond of remarking.

‘You do always say,’ Harriet would agree, earning a sharp look from Kath and a titter from Lisa. But Ken would only ever nod with satisfaction, as if she had simply agreed with him. He was a kind man and fond of his stepdaughter.

Before Harriet even reached the glass door of the porch, Kath appeared amongst her begonias that sheltered there from any storms that might sweep across south London.

‘Harriet! You never said that you’d be coming.’

‘I took a chance that you’d be in.’ Equally, she had taken a chance that her half-sister would be out and that Ken would be working.

‘Well, if only you’d rung. Lisa’s at Karen’s, and Ken’s on a job.’

‘Never mind.’ Harriet kissed her mother, then took her arm. ‘We can have an hour to ourselves.’ Thinking of what she would have to say in the hour she added, too brightly, ‘The garden’s looking lovely.’

Kath peered over her shoulder. ‘But where’s your car, love?’

‘I left it at … home. Came on the tube.’

Kath looked horrified. ‘It’s not broken down already, is it?’ Harriet knew that her mother was proud of her in her smart hatchback, proud of the shop and of Leo whose name appeared alongside photographs in glossy magazines.

‘I just wanted to come the old way.’

‘Well, what a nuisance for you,’ Kath commiserated, as if conceiving such an odd notion could only be an inconvenience.

They went into the house together, passed through to the kitchen at the back. It was a big room looking through sliding doors on to a terrace and the garden beyond. There were quarry tiles and expanses of pine units with white laminate work-tops, rows of flowered cereal and biscuit jars, a radio playing morning music. Kath spooned coffee powder into floral mugs, flicked the switch of the kettle, and embarked on a piece of news about Lisa’s latest boyfriend. Harriet stood by the patio doors, half-turned to the garden, looking up the slope of the lawn to the spreading tree of heaven at the end. She listened carefully to the story, putting in the right responses, but Kath broke off midway.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’

Sometimes she surprised Harriet with her shrewdness. Harriet supposed that she didn’t give her mother’s insight sufficient reckoning.

‘Jenny lost her baby. He lived for two days, he died last night.’

She was ashamed of her means of prevarication, putting Jenny’s tragedy to Kath at one remove, instead of admitting to her own.

Kath’s face reflected her feelings. She knew Jenny only slightly, but her concern was genuine.

‘The poor thing. Poor little thing.’

Harriet told her what had happened. They drank their coffee, leaning soberly against the pine cupboards.

‘Perhaps it was for the best,’ Kath said at length. ‘Better than him being handicapped for ever. They can start again, when they’ve put this behind them.’

‘Maybe,’ Harriet said sadly.

Kath faced her. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

Harriet thought briefly that it would be much easier to talk to someone else, anyone at all, rather than her mother in her dream kitchen.

‘Harriet?’ Kath was anxious now.

There was no point in choosing mollifying words. Turning her back on the tree of heaven Harriet said, ‘Leo and I are going to separate.’

As soon as it was said she wished that she had wrapped it up a little. Kath went red, banged down her coffee mug, didn’t even notice the little pool of spilled liquid that collected on the white worktop.

‘No you don’t, my girl. You’re a married woman. You don’t come back here and say you’re giving up after your first quarrel. You have to work at marriages, don’t you know that? You’ll work it out between you, whatever it is. You’ll be all the stronger together after it’s all blown over.’

Harriet saw that Kath was already smoothing over the damage, making it orderly again in her mind, as if her daughter’s life was her own kitchen.

‘Don’t talk like an agony aunt,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ve been married for four years and had a thousand quarrels. I’m not leaving him because of the quarrels. The truth is that we don’t make each other happy. It’s time we admitted to the truth. It’s quite clear-cut, really.’

She hadn’t expected that Kath would be so upset. Her mother cried easily, but she looked too shocked even for tears to come.

‘How can you say that? You make a perfect couple. You always did, at the wedding, ever since.’

The wedding, Harriet thought. I should never have let myself be put through all that. It had been a big white one, of course, mostly paid for by kind-hearted Ken. Harriet herself in a tight-waisted long dress with a sweeping train and a veil; her half-sister, then fifteen, trying to hide her puppy fat inside folds of corn-gold satin, two other small bridesmaids in cream silk. A hired grey Rolls with white ribbons, and a lavish reception following the carefully ecumenical service. Leo’s parents had decided to make the best of the inevitable. Harriet could have spoken their reasoning for them; Leo’s girlfriend was presentable and was no fool. She had her own little business and was making a go of it. His family had turned out to the wedding in force and had sent absurdly generous presents.

Now Harriet imagined Averil Gold shaking her well-groomed silvery head and murmuring, ‘These mixed marriages often come to grief.’ Before adding, adoringly, ‘But Leo always was a naughty, headstrong boy.’

She looked across the expanse of pine and tile at her mother. ‘We’re not even a couple. We never were, probably. It’s a difficult notion, for people as selfish as we are.’

‘You’re not selfish,’ Kath insisted. ‘And Leo’s a good husband. He looks after you.’

Harriet’s forbearance deserted her. ‘He’s a filthy bloody husband,’ she snapped. ‘Do you know what I found him doing? Can you guess? No, don’t try to guess. I found him in his studio, screwing a model.’

‘Are you sure?’

Jane had asked the same question. The realisation made Harriet laugh, a gasp of real laughter that made her eyes water.

‘Sure? What else might they have been up to?’

‘How can you laugh about it?’

Yet Kath seemed more shocked by her daughter’s flippancy than by the news itself. It occurred to Harriet that even her mother might have guessed at what she had taken so long to discover for herself. Anger strengthened her determination.

‘I’m not going back to the flat. It can be sold, we’ll each take fifty per cent. I’ll use my share to buy a smaller place.’

‘You’re very cool about it.’

‘Am I? I want to know my own mind, that’s all.’

Kath was recovering herself. She mopped up the spilt coffee, took her mug over to the sink and dried the bottom of it.

‘You always did. Always, from a tiny thing.’

Kath remembered how Harriet had been, long ago, when there were only the two of them. Single-minded and possessed of her own unshakeable certainties. She shook her head now, sighing. Kath wanted to see her daughter happy and believed she deserved it. But for all her other capabilities, Harriet was always restless rather than contented.

‘I think you should give him another chance. Probably he’ll never do it again.’

‘No,’ Harriet said, leaving no margin for contradiction. ‘He will do it again, because he’s done it before.’

She laughed once more. ‘Do you know, I think it might have been different if he hadn’t tried to cover himself up with his shirt?’ The absurdity of it made her want to laugh harder. ‘As if he had something mysterious down there, that I shouldn’t see.’

Then she caught sight of her mother’s face, and the laughter subsided. She went to Kath and put her arms around her. ‘I’m sorry if you’re disappointed. I’m sorry for Leo and me, too.’

‘Is that all?’ Kath demanded.

Harriet thought. It seemed so little, after so much.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It appears to be.’

She dropped her arm from her mother’s shoulder, walked back to the garden doors and looked out at the big tree again. Its leaves were beginning to show autumnal colours. The tree of heaven drops its leaves every winter, Harriet told herself bracingly. It would be a sentimental mistake to regard it as an emblem.

‘May I stay here for a day or two? Until I can rent a place? I can go to Jane’s, if it’s a nuisance.’

Her childhood bedroom was across the landing from Lisa’s, kept nowadays for visitors.

‘How could it be a nuisance? Of course you can stay. What shall we tell Ken and Lisa?’

‘The truth, of course.’

As Harriet had guessed, Kath’s anticipation of their shock and outrage was much greater than the reality.

‘He’s a stupid bugger,’ Ken pronounced. ‘You do whatever’ll make you happy, love. Or I can go round there and thump him for you, if you want.’

‘Well no, thanks,’ Harriet murmured.

Lisa came back only just in time to change for a date with her latest love. Harriet sat on the corner of the bed and watched her half-sister diving between the wardrobe and the dressing table.

There were too many years separating the two of them, and too many differences, for them ever to achieve friendship. As children they had fought bitterly, too different even to enjoy the satisfaction of being in the same competition. It was to Kath’s, and especially to Ken’s, credit that the girls had always been treated even-handedly. But still, even in adulthood, the two of them didn’t fully trust one another. They existed in a state of uneasy truce, always aware that hostilities might break out again.

Kath’s younger daughter had her mother’s fair, curling hair and the same full, soft lower lip. Harriet’s features were thinner and stronger. Lisa was easy-going to the point of laziness, except when there was the faintest threat that she might not get her own way. She was like her mother, too, in that she would go to any length to avoid scenes, preferring that everything should be pleasant and comfortable. Harriet preferred clarity and justice.

‘I think Kath believes I’ll go back to him,’ Harriet said.

‘And will you?’ Even before she had finished speaking, Lisa’s attention returned to her mirror. She was busily painting her mouth with a fine brush. Harriet remembered that ten years ago she had been absorbed in similar preparations herself and Lisa had been a plump, complaining nine-year-old. She had no desire to go back to those days, with or without the help of hindsight.