She did not faint again. August was beginning to cool into September, and with the gradual lifting of the sticky Washington heat Christine felt very well. She was well enough to receive with equanimity the news that Vinson’s mother had decided that she was able to face the trip to Washington, and was coming to stay with them for two weeks.
Christine took the news better than Vinson did. When he began to read his mother’s letter, he said: ‘Oh my God’, although he hastily amended it to: ‘Well, isn’t that fine? Mother’s coming east to see us.’
He seemed uneasy, but Christine was rather pleased. She was naturally curious to see her mother-in-law, and eager to make friends with her if possible. Vinson did not often speak about her, and when he did it was with no very great enthusiasm. Brought up in a family who loved and accepted each other in spite of irritations and disputes, Christine could not understand anyone not wanting to see his mother.
Vinson did not actually say that he did not want to see her. He was too conventionally well-mannered for that. Even to Christine he did not always say what was in his mind when it was something that had no right to be there. It was obviously with an effort, however, that he said at intervals: ‘It will be nice when Mother comes. I’m sure you and she will get on.’ Sometimes, when they were planning something for the near future, he said: ‘Oh, but of course that will be when Mother’s here’, and had to brighten his tone deliberately in the middle of the sentence which he had started with inadvertent gloom.
When Christine saw Mrs Gaegler senior she understood Vinson’s unease a little better. Mrs Gaegler had said that she would arrive on a Sunday morning, but instead she arrived early on the Saturday evening when Christine and Vinson were changing to go to a cocktail party at Admiral and Mrs Hamer’s. That was only the first of many inconvenient things she did. The next was that she brought with her a horrid little dog called Honeychile. It was a chihuahua, a tiny creature like a spider, with spindling legs, eyes like gooseberries, a rat tail, a skull too narrow to house a brain and a shrieking yap that rent the nerves. It was Mrs Gaegler’s pride and joy, the solace of her life since her husband and children had abandoned her to live alone in Kaloomis, Kansas.
That was the way she put it. ‘I’ve been abandoned by my family,’ she would say, with the false half-laugh of self-pity. She classed her children’s defection with her husband’s, although he had gone off with a girl from a drugstore, while all they had done was to go into the Army or the Navy or get married.
The obscene little dog ran into the house before her and nipped Christine on the ankle as soon as it saw her. Vinson raised a foot at it, and it nipped at him too and fell into a paroxysm of frustrated yapping because its futile teeth could not get through his trousers.
‘Poor little Honeychile!’ People with unpleasing dogs always come in just in time to catch you if you raise a hand or foot to them. ‘Vinson, I’m surprised at you!’ Mrs Gaegler cried, before she had even said hullo to her son. She bent down and picked up the dog, which went on yapping in her arms as a background to her talk. Looking back afterwards on her visit, it seemed to Christine that all her mother-in-law’s conversation had been to the accompaniment of Honeychile’s shrill yapping.
There was plenty of it - both the yapping and the conversation. Mrs Gaegler talked all the time as if it were a bodily necessity, like breathing. She could not sit silent in a room for longer than she would have been able to hold her breath without choking. Words rattled from her in a jarring Middle West twang from the moment she woke in the morning to the moment when she had taken her sleeping-tablets and retired for the night with the threat that she would not sleep; and the words were mostly about herself.
She was one of those very ordinary people who consider themselves unique. As a nonpareil, Mrs Gaegler was of vast interest to herself, if to no one else, and the ills and discomforts of her person were her religion. She began to complain the moment she arrived, standing in the hall in her spike heels and extraordinary little pagoda hat, with the dog barking, and Christine in her dressing-gown, and Vinson in his shirt-sleeves with his tie hanging round his open collar.
Mrs Gaegler was an undersized, short-legged woman, who would have been fat if she had not been held in and pushed up at all the salient points. She wore her clothes well and went in for conspicuous accessories like an outsize handbag in the shape of a fishing creel, and a necklace made of small glass balls in each of which was suspended an imitation goldfish. The gold bracelet flopping at her wrist spelled out the letters I L-O-V-E Y-O-U. If Vinson’s father had given it to her, it was hard to believe that she would still wear it after he had transferred his love to the girl from the drugstore. Perhaps she had bought it for herself.
In her youth she must often have been called ‘Babyface’, and she was trying to perpetuate the attribute into middle-age. Her round face was made up very pink and white, the bow of her lips was painted on outside the natural edge, her eyebrows repeated the round line of her china eyes, and her blue-grey hair was brushed back in a fluff of little curls. Christine had to admit that she did not really look sixty, although there were times when she was complaining when she could look a disgruntled eighty.
Almost before she had greeted Christine and flicked her round eye up and down to sum up her daughter-in-law, she began to tell them about the trip: how tired she was, and how terrible the hotels had been, and how a thousand miles was much too far to drive – as if it were Washington’s fault for being so far away from Kansas.
‘Matt drives too fast, you know,’ she grumbled. ‘He always has. I kept telling him and telling him to watch his speed, and finally he side-swiped a truck back there in Zanesville, Ohio, and put a scratch on the car, which just about makes me mad, because I’ve always been so careful about the paintwork on that automobile.’
Matt was her other son, Vinson’s younger brother, who was a captain in the Army. He was on leave now and had driven his mother to Washington, where he was going to stay with an old college friend while she visited Vinson and Christine.
He came in with his mother’s bags, smiling broadly. His face looked as if he were more at home with a grin on it than anything else. He was taller than Vinson and more burly, with a wider, larger-featured face. Although they were both dark, they did not look at all alike. They greeted each other with a handshake and a slap across the shoulders, but you would not have thought that they were brothers who had not met for over a year. Christine sensed a certain restraint between them; not quite an animosity, but a certain caution on Vinson’s part, as if he were in the habit of expecting his brother to get above himself, and a half-mocking watchfulness from Matthew, as if he had never quite made up his mind whether Vinson was a joke or not.
When Vinson introduced him to Christine, Matthew looked at her contemplatively for a moment with a spreading smile, then put down the suitcases, took a deliberate stride and a firm hold on her arms and kissed her, a little too near the mouth. Christine glanced at Vinson and saw that he did not like it.
Matthew grinned. ‘All right, all right, Mother,’ he said, for Mrs Gaegler was hopping about among her many bags like a schoolteacher trying to count a picnic party. ‘I brought everything in. Yes, your cosmetic bag’s there. You don’t have to fuss, toots.’
‘It appears we’ve come a day too early, Matt,’ she said, opening her eyes very wide, while Vinson and Christine murmured that it did not matter at all. ‘Vinson and this lovely girl – isn’t-she just a darling person? I knew she would be – are just off to a party, so of course there’s nothing for us but to put on our party dresses and go along with them.’
‘That would be wonderful, Mother,’ Vinson said awkwardly, ‘but I don’t know whether the Admiral –’
‘Don’t worry,’ his mother said. ‘I’m not afraid of admirals. I can get along with anyone,’ she told Christine, ‘because I’m so interested in people. I’ve studied psychology, you see, so I know what makes everyone tick.’ Christine smiled and tried to receive this information well. She was determined to like her motherin-law, and to be liked.
‘I thought you were so tired,’ Vinson said, and Christine saw that Matt was grinning at the sight of Vinson trying to persuade his mother out of something she meant to do. ‘Wouldn’t you rather lie down and rest a while? Christine can get your bed fixed in a moment, and we won’t be away too long. If it were anything else we’d cut the party, but since it’s the Admiral we can’t very well…’
‘Of course I’m tired,’ said his mother. ‘Motoring always makes me feel just terrible. You know that. But don’t imagine that I haven’t trained myself to be sociable when I feel limp as a rag. Every evening,’ she told Christine, ‘I suffer from Five o’Clock Fatigue. My doctor says it’s only my spirit that keeps me going through all the entertaining we have back home. But of course I’ll come with you, Vinson. I know you’ll want to have all your Washington friends meet your mother.’
‘Well –’ Vinson glanced helplessly at Christine. She had never seen him so at a loss. His mother seemed to subdue him and sap his confidence. ‘You’d better go call Mrs Hamer and ask if we may bring my mother and brother to her party.’
‘Not me, Vin,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m going right on to Bob’s. You can have your admirals, but count me out.’
‘Just say it’s my mother then. And be sure to ask her very nicely, won’t you, darling?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Christine was irritated by his nervousness. ‘I know how to talk to admirals’ wives. I ought to. I’ve had enough practice with the brutes.’
Matthew laughed and Honeychile barked at him. ‘Of course she does,’ said Mrs Gaegler, tapping the dog’s flimsy skull with her finger. ‘She’s a very lovely girl. I always know about people the minute I see them. Vinson, you mustn’t be so –’
‘Oh no,’ said Christine instantly on the defensive to stop Vinson’s mother trying to gang up with her against him. ‘I’m dreadful. I always say the wrong thing.’
As she went through to the living-room to telephone she heard Matthew say: ‘I say, though, Vin boy, I like your wife.’ Vinson murmured, and then she heard him say to his mother: ‘Let me take your bags up and show you your room. I’m sure you’ll want to freshen up.’ It was not like a son talking to his mother. It was like a host dealing courteously with an acquaintance. He was as unnaturally polite to her as he had been to his sister Edna. Politeness was all right – the Copes had never gone in for it enough – but this seemed to Christine to be an odd way to treat your relations.
Matthew treated Mrs Gaegler less politely and was more successful with her. He treated her like an inconvenient child, and merely laughed at her when she was difficult. He did not look as if he took anything seriously.
When Vinson and his mother had gone upstairs, Mrs Gaegler complaining above Honeychile’s yapping that the stairs were too steep and someone would break their neck there some day, Matthew came into the living-room, where Christine was being obsequious to Mrs Hamer, with a sycophantic smile on her face, as if the Admiral’s wife could see her. Matthew winked, made a face at Mrs Hamer’s voice clacking through the telephone, and gave Christine a casual salute. ‘’Bye, Chris,’ he said. ‘Be seeing you.’
Christine changed her sycophantic smile to a friendly one for him. She was glad he had come. She liked him. Perhaps he would become a real brother to her, as Roger had never quite been.
With Matt’s inconsequential influence removed, Mrs Gaegler became more difficult. Vinson could not laugh at her as his brother did. He just stood and looked worried while she said that the bed would have to be moved because she would get neuralgia if she faced the light, and might she have another lamp and a cushion for Honeychile – ‘She likes green ones best. She’s allergic to red’ – and she hoped that dog next door was not going to bark all the time and upset poor Honey, who had not fully recovered from her last confinement.
She kept the door of her room open and talked on while Christine and Vinson finished their interrupted changing. Vinson did not answer. He tied his tie and brushed his hair deliberately, plodding about the room with an expressionless face.
Christine felt that she had to say something. When there was a pause while Mrs Gaegler was putting her head into a dress, Christine told her that the room was going to be the baby’s, and that Vinson had decorated it himself.
‘It’s very charming,’ Mrs Gaegler emerged through the neck of the dress. ‘If you want my opinion, the frieze is a little too high, and of course they never use pink for nursery walls now. It’s always yellow. It has a definite psychological effect, you know.’
‘Well, we like it,’ said Christine stoutly. ‘Vinson painted it himself.’
‘I know, dear. You told me. And as I’ve said – it’s very charming.’
They had to wait for her quite a long time, and Vinson fussed about being late at the Admiral’s. When his mother emerged in a tight black dress with her bosom pushed well up and her smoky hair fluffed out, the question then arose of what was to be done with Honeychile.
She could not be left in the house alone. Mrs Gaegler said that was cruel, and she was funny, but she could never be unkind to dumb animals or children. In Kaloomis, Kansas, Mrs Gaegler said, she always got a dog-sitter when she had to go anywhere without Honey. ‘Though, of course, most people are delighted to have her along. Perhaps one of your neighbours would have her?’ she asked Christine. ‘I’m sure they’d be glad to look after her. She’s everyone’s pet. Why, back in Kaloomis everyone knows her. She’s quite a public figure. When she had her puppies I had it put in the Births column of the Herald. Let’s take her round to one of your neighbours, shall we, and then get going. I need a drink. I’m a little weak right now. My adrenal glands don’t produce enough natural stimulant, you know. It’s always the same at this time in the evening.’
‘I don’t think we could do that,’ Christine said. ‘Betty is always so busy, and they’ve got a dog, and I don’t think Mrs Meenehan …’
‘They wouldn’t help you out?’ Mrs Gaegler raised the arcs of her eyebrows. ‘That doesn’t sound very neighbourly. Haven’t you gotten around to making friends with your neighbours then? Of course I must remember. You’re English.’
Christine looked at her and clenched her fists. If Vinson’s mother were going to start on that line … She turned and went downstairs, reminding herself that she was going to like her mother-in-law.
They took Honeychile with them. There was nothing else to do. They left her in the car, yapping frenziedly and scrabbling at the window, and when they came out from the party they found that she had chewed a hole in the leather of the back seat. Vinson was furious. He prized his car next to the Navy, his wife and his house. He sulked while he drove, but his mother did not notice. A couple of drinks had compensated for her defective adrenal secretions and she had had a good time. She had gone round saying to everybody: ‘I’m Commander Gaegler’s mother. I’m sure you know my son.’
Christine, drinking Coca-Cola and standing unobtrusively in a corner because she thought from Mrs Hamer’s glance that her condition must be too obvious, heard her mother-in-law beard Captain Fleischman, who was the chief of Vinson’s division, and tell him how lucky he was to have her son working for him.
Vinson finally came back and rescued Christine to take her home. She never saw much of him at parties. He always went off and talked shop with other naval officers, and left her to domestic banalities among the wives. All the husbands did that. At any naval party you would find all the men at one end of the room and all the women at the other, the sexes divided like oil and water.
Knowing him well, she saw that he had had several drinks, but he appeared to be perfectly sober. No one who was looking for a promotion would ever be anything else at an admiral’s party. They collected Mrs Gaegler, who had Captain Fleischman hypnotized like a chicken against the wall, and then they said good-bye to the Admiral, who grunted at them, and gave the appropriate effusive thanks to Mrs Hamer, who was standing by the table which held the inevitable cold turkey and ham, so that no one dared to come and eat it.
Christine and Vinson had planned to have supper at home, but there was not enough for three, so they went to a restaurant. Mrs Gaegler said she was not hungry, but she ate quite a large steak, although she complained that it was too rare and no one in the east knew how to broil a steak the way they did back home.
The stimulation of her drinks was wearing off, and evidently her adrenals were not yet functioning, for she began to feel poorly now, and while Christine and Vinson ate their dessert, at which she made a face, she was fidgeting to get back to her digestive mixture.
At home they urged her to go to bed, although she promised them she would not sleep. They shut the door on her and Honeychile at last, and went downstairs to have some coffee by themselves. Vinson looked tired. He seemed depressed. Christine made a little light conversation to him, as she sometimes had to do when she did not know what to say to please him, but she felt silly sitting there in her best cocktail dress that was now too tight, making conversation to her husband, so she gave it up.
‘What’s the matter, Vin?’ She moved closer to him on the sofa.
‘Nothing. I’m tired.’
‘More than that.’
‘Uh-huh.’ He shook his head. ‘Well,’ he began in a brighter tone, ‘how do you like my mother?’
‘Oh, she’s sweet, Vin. I’m sure we shall get on very well.’
‘Of course. She’s a grand person. It’s wonderful to have her here.’
He sounded as if he wanted to be convinced, but Christine could not find the words to back up his attempt.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, suddenly relaxing. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But – look. Every time, I think it will be better, and we shall be like a friendly family. I do try. One must love one’s mother, but - I don’t know. She’s not like other people’s mothers. She’s so difficult. She always has been. When we were children she –’ He shook his shoulders a little. ‘Oh, to hell with that. But a mother – you know. It’s kind of a let-down when you can’t feel about her as you should.’
‘You mustn’t say that, darling,’ Christine said, but she was glad that he was confiding in her. ‘After all, your mother isn’t very well. She seems to have so many things wrong with her.’
‘She’s the healthiest woman on God’s earth,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a damn thing wrong with her. But she’s always been like that. My father was a pill, but I sometimes think he … Oh, Christine,’ he put his arms around her, ‘thank God I’ve got you. I’ve never had anyone – close, you know. Don’t ever leave me.’
‘Of course not, darling.’ She sat and cuddled him for a while. If he wanted her to be a mother to him, all right, she would be maternal.
Presently she said: ‘I like your brother, Vin. I think he’s terribly nice.’
She thought that he would be pleased, but if he was he did not show it. He sat up and smoothed his short black hair. ‘Matt?’ he said. ‘He’s O.K. Cocky, though. He always was. Come on, let’s go to bed.’
They went to their room and heard through the flimsy wall the snuffling snores of Mrs Gaegler, who informed Christine next morning when she tottered down for breakfast two hours after Vinson had left that she had not slept a wink all night and knew she never would in a house that faced north and south.
Mrs Gaegler was full of ills and strange disorders, some of which Christine had never heard of before. She seemed to suffer from a different complaint on every day of her visit. You never knew what it would be. She told Christine all about it when she came down in the morning, and by evening she had fallen a victim to something else, with which she would greet Vinson when he came home.
Her voice went on and on all day. The only thing that could drown it was Christine’s noisy vacuum cleaner, which Mrs Gaegler said had an unhygienic dust-bag and should be banned by federal law. When the vacuum cleaner was roaring round sucking up the rugs you could not hear an airplane directly overhead, but Mrs Gaegler went on talking, her lips nimble and her hands idle. She never offered to help Christine with the housework. She was allergic to dust, dishwater, silver polish and hot irons.
She was allergic to anything she did not like, and when she felt liverish from drinking too much rye whisky her quite plebeian symptoms were ennobled with the name of allergy too.
She was adept at aggrandizing minor complaints into full-scale ills. If she was a little tired it was nervous exhaustion, or prostration, or the defective adrenals again. If she had a headache it was a migraine coming on, or even in her wilder flights the threat of a cerebral tumour. If her skin itched she was sure she was in for hives or shingles. Indigestion from over-eating was called gastritis; a cough from over-smoking was a touch of bronchitis. She complained for days that she had sprained her thumb writing letters, and when she was persuaded out into the garden one day to help weed the lawn the slight backache she acquired convinced her that she had slipped a disc in her spine, and she made Christine drive her to the doctor.
She was always wanting to go to the doctor. The opportunity of plaguing a new one was too good to miss. Christine had to drive her there every other day to have injections – no one knew what for – but she had brought with her a selection of ampoules which she insisted on having pumped into herself at regular intervals. Christine hoped that the doctor threw away the ampoules and pumped in sterile water instead, as she had often done with hypochondriacs in the hospital.
One whole shelf in the bathroom had to be cleared for Mrs Gaegler’s drugs and medicaments. She took little nips at them all day long, and sometimes at night Christine would hear her patter into the bathroom in her gold kid mules to refresh herself with a dose of this or that. Her craving for penicillin was abnormal. If she pricked herself with a pin she wanted it, and once when she got a rose thorn in her finger she wanted to have an anti-tetanus shot as well.
The luckless Honeychile was also subjected to frequent dosings. She had vitamin pills every morning, cod-liver oil at midday and gland extract at night to compensate for the hormones Mrs Gaegler said she had lost when she had her puppies. Sometimes she spat the pills out, a half-dissolved mess on the carpet, and Mrs Gaegler would fear for her life and want to take her to the vet. The preparation of the dog’s food was the only labour she would undertake in the kitchen. Christine had halfheartedly offered to do it, but her mother-in-law insisted on mashing up the tinned chicken and strained baby foods herself, as if she thought – perhaps with reason – that anyone else might poison Honeychile.
Matthew merely laughed at his mother’s hypochondria. Vinson was resigned to it, and Christine soon learned not to take it seriously. She would sympathize politely, and would run up to the bathroom for a medicine bottle or drive Mrs Gaegler to the doctor when she wanted, but she was no longer disturbed by the announcements of a gastric ulcer or a perilous blood pressure.
However, if no one in her family would worry about her ills, Mrs Gaegler was compensated by the interest which Mrs Meenehan took in them. On the morning after Mrs Gaegler’s arrival she had appeared at the kitchen window ostensibly to borrow a ‘drain of salad oil’, but really in the hope of meeting the visitor, whose arrival she had watched round the corner of a curtain the day before. Mrs Gaegler was at the sink mixing herself a double bicarbonate of soda, and Mrs Meenehan, who loved other people’s insides as much as she loved gadgets, weighed cheerfully into a discussion of Mrs Gaegler’s morning symptoms. They took to each other at once. Mrs Meenehan had a floating kidney, which in itself was a passport to friendship.
After this she was always coming round with some patent medicine or unguent, or a newspaper article about cancer, and she and Vinson’s mother would stand talking on the porch for hours, with the nodding heads, sucked-in mouths and popping eyes peculiar to clinically minded women. Sometimes Mrs Gaegler would go across the garden to the Meenehans’ house and come back flushed with the discovery of a new kind of aspirin she had heard advertised on the television, and want to be driven to the drugstore immediately. Christine always had to take Vinson to work now so that she could have the car, for Mrs Gaegler could not walk anywhere, even to the shopping centre at the end of the road. She had spastic insteps and threatened cartilage in her knee joint.
Christine was pleased that her mother-in-law had made friends with Mrs Meenehan. It took her off her hands and gave her some free moments to get on with her work undisturbed by conversation and the short figure following her about saying: ‘Why do you do it that way?’, but Vinson was not pleased. He liked having the Meenehans next door no better than he had liked having Mr and Mrs Pitman R. Preedy opposite, and for the same reason. He was more snobbish than any Englishman. If people were ‘not quite our kind’ he did not want to mix with them, and he did not think his mother should either.
When she was not talking about her own ailments Mrs Gaegler liked to discuss other people’s. She was always boring Vinson and Christine with long stories about people they did not know, who all seemed to have cancer or T.B. or poliomyelitis. It did not make for stimulating conversation. After supper Vinson would usually escape to his carpentry in the basement – he was making a play-pen now – and Christine would be left to hear about that perfectly darling Sally Thorne, who’s just riddled with bone cancer, the most shocking thing.
When she had temporarily exhausted her own and other people’s insides Mrs Gaegler would turn her attention to Christine’s. Never had an expectant mother been given so much advice and criticism as Christine had in those two weeks. It maddened her. Although she was always willing to discuss the baby with Vinson or Lianne or Nancy Lee or even the pessimistic Betty Kessler next door, she found herself reluctant to discuss it with her mother-in-law. Mrs Gaegler’s approach was somehow offensive. She was almost ghoulishly curious, and she was full of all the unappetizing old wives’ expressions like Quickening and Waters Breaking. She said that Christine was wearing the wrong clothes, doing the wrong exercises, eating the wrong food. Christine was following her doctor’s advice and her own instincts, but her mother-in-law, having produced three children – ‘and nearly died with each of them, for all the thanks they give me now’ – considered herself a sounder authority than any doctor, and certainly than any green wife with her first baby – and an English wife at that.
Although she never openly insulted Christine’s homeland, she was always taking little digs at it; and in spite of the evidence of the overpopulated British Isles, she was of the opinion that having a baby in unenlightened England was the most hazardous thing in the world.
She was talking about the baby one evening when she and Christine drove to the Arlington Annexe to fetch Vinson. She always said: ‘My first grandchild. Don’t let’s talk about it; it makes me feel so old’, and then proceeded to discuss every aspect of the baby, before and after birth.
She was objecting now to the names that Vinson and Christine had chosen. No Gaegler had ever been called Stephen or Pamela. It would not do. Christine drove in silence. She would not give her mother-in-law the satisfaction of knowing that if the child was a boy she was going to let Vinson saddle him with the unfortunate middle name of Norbert, which was a Gaegler family name.
Mrs Gaegler never noticed if you did not answer. If she asked you a question she was usually saying something else before you could speak.
‘Careful, dear,’ she said, shrinking delicately back from the windscreen. ‘You were too near that green car. I shall come east for the christening, of course. I know you’ll want me to, even though I shall balk at the font when I hear the child’s name spoken. What kind of church shall you have the christening in?’
‘A Catholic one, of course.’ Christine was surprised that she should ask.
‘Oh, my dear, I do hope you’re not getting infected with this popish bug of Vinson’s. He got it from his father, and it’s stuck to him even after Harry Gaegler managed to throw it off to suit his own convenience.’ She always spoke of her miscreant husband by his full name, as though he had been a mere acquaintance.
‘I’m not thinking of being converted, if that’s what you mean,’ Christine said as she drove through the gates of the Annexe and slowed down for the coloured policeman to recognize her and wave her on with a smile. ‘But Vin’s a Catholic and it’s a law of his Church that his children should be too, and of course he wants it.’ She looked behind her to back the car into Vinson’s numbered parking space opposite the end doors of the building.
‘But you’re surely not going to sit down under that! Watch it, dear. You’re very near that other car. I think it’s terrible the way the Romans grab hold of the children before they’re old enough to know better, though they have to, I suppose, to save the Church from dying out. I had to have Edna and Vinson baptized Catholics, but when it came to Matt I dug my toes in, and he was baptized a good Methodist. Harry Gaegler didn’t mind by that time, because he was already interested in That Girl and beginning to see the disadvantages of his religion.’
‘I don’t see that it has any disadvantages,’ Christine said. ‘I often wish I’d been born a Catholic instead of someone who’s supposed to be a Protestant, but never learned to do anything about it.’
‘You are thinking of being converted!’ Mrs Gaegler accused her. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of a level-headed girl like you.’ She was always saying how sensible and level-headed Christine was, as opposed to herself, who was so sensitive and emotional. ‘I despise the Catholic Church. I never would have married Harry Gaegler if I hadn’t been an innocent young thing and so mad in love with the guy that I thought it didn’t matter. I tell you, it’s been a great disappointment to me to see my son grow up in the toils of Rome. It brings on one of my migraines whenever I think of it. I feel I have one coming on right now, if you want to know. Edie was more enlightened, thank goodness. She took my advice and gave it up long before she met Milt, and now she goes to the Episcopal Church with him like a sensible woman. But Vinson’s so stubborn and prejudiced.’
‘He’s not,’ protested Christine. She hated her mother-in-law to criticize Vinson in any way. It seemed unfair. She had no right to, when she had done so little for him. ‘Not about religion, anyway. He just does what he thinks is right and leaves other people to do what they like. He’s never tried to persuade me to be converted. Sometimes lately I’ve thought I might, because it would be more convenient with taking the child to church and everything, but Vinson says if one’s only doing it for convenience it wouldn’t be right. They probably wouldn’t have me, anyway. The Catholic Church isn’t always out to grab people, like you say. You have to work your way in.’
‘My, my,’ said Mrs Gaegler, raising her eyebrows and patting her fluffy hair, ‘you are very much under Vinson’s influence, aren’t you? More than I thought. I declare, it’s quite a change to see a nice old-fashioned submissive wife. Perhaps that’s why Vinson chose to marry an English girl. They’re not so enlightened as American women in that way.’
Christine said nothing. She was not going to be rude to her mother-in-law. She would not give her that weapon – that English girls were rude, and she was suddenly too tired to talk to her any more.
‘I hope Vin comes out punctually,’ she said, to change the subject. ‘He promised he would, because I’ve got a lot to do.’ Milt and Edna were in Washington and were coming to dinner. Matthew was coming too. It would be a family reunion, and Christine was determined to have everything perfect in case anyone felt like thinking that English girls did not make as good wives as Americans.
Vinson did not come out punctually. At four-thirty the doors opened and the stream of white, coloured, uniformed, crippled, old, young, thin, and fat people began to pour out and head for the cars and buses like lava. She had seen this many-headed sight often since she came to Washington, but it never failed to fascinate her. If Vinson came out late, which he usually did, she was quite happy to sit and watch the throng of released workers, recognising a face here and there among the officers, speculating about the civilian employees, and what their homes were like and what they were off to do now in such a hurry.
Mrs Gaegler, for all her psychology and her professed interest in people, did not want to watch the crowd which poured out of the Annexe for a solid ten minutes. She bent her head and began to fiddle with the dial of the radio. She did not want to watch any crowd that had negroes in it. She was allergic to coloured people. She was proud of that. It was her Southern blood, she said. She was almost pure Middle West, but she made great play with a far-away ancestor who had come from Louisiana, and her eyes misted over if she saw a Confederate flag.
The last stragglers had come out before Vinson appeared. He was talking with another naval officer, who wore a ridiculous plastic cover over his uniform cap, because it looked like rain. On the steps Vinson waved at Christine and then stood and talked for a few more minutes, the two of them with brief-cases under their arms and their heads poked forward seriously, as if the entire defence programme of the United States was on their shoulders.
‘Sorry, honey,’ he said, as Christine moved over and he got into the driving seat – he would never let her drive him. ‘Hope you haven’t been waiting.’
‘We have. You know you said you’d come out early, because of the dinner.’
‘I know, but I had to stop back and talk with John Flett about that Japanese business. That’s important.’
‘So is my dinner,’ Christine said, and he laughed and patted her knee to show that he did not think she meant it crossly.
‘We waited a full quarter of an hour,’ his mother told him, ‘and the leather odour of this car brings on my nausea. Honey-chile didn’t like waiting. She barked at everyone who came out, didn’t you, my pet?’
‘I’ll bet she did.’
‘But your wife and I have been having a very interesting talk.’ She had taken to calling Christine Your Wife, almost as if she were disclaiming her as a daughter-in-law and reminding Vinson that the responsibility for bringing her into the family was all his. Christine retaliated by calling her Your Mother. Mrs Gaegler had said that she must call her Lucette, but Christine could not bring herself to do that. She could not call her Mrs Gaegler, and she was not going to call her Mother, so she spoke of her to Vinson as Your Mother, and did not address her directly by any name.
‘Well, that’s fine,’ Vinson said. ‘What were you two girls gossiping about?’ He tried to preserve the illusion that his mother and his wife were the best of friends.
‘She was telling me that you intend to bring my grandchild up a Papist,’ Mrs Gaegler said.
‘I told you to keep off the subject of religion,’ Vinson murmured to Christine.
‘Oh, you did?’ said Mrs Gaegler, who always heard things she was not meant to. ‘So your wife is to be told what she can and can’t talk about now, is she? My goodness, if Harry Gaegler had spoken to me like that I’d have given him something to remember. I would never have stood for half the nonsense your wife puts up with from you.’
No one said: ‘Perhaps that’s why he left you.’ Vinson swore at a perfectly harmless old man in a panama hat who was trying to cross the road, and Christine turned up the radio with a blare of ‘Shrimp boats are a-coming’.
The family reunion went off no better than might have been expected with a family who did not particularly want to be reunited. The evening started unpropitiously by Honeychile refusing to take her gland extract. Every time she was given the pill she stuck out her long tongue and deposited it on the carpet. Mrs Gaegler was in a ferment. She wrapped the pill in meat, and Honeychile ate the meat and spat out the pill. She crushed it with sugar, and Honeychile took the spoonful into her mouth, goggled her eyes and threw the whole lot back on Mrs Gaegler’s shoe.
‘Open her mouth and put the pill on the back of her tongue and then close your hand round her nose so that she has to swallow it,’ Vinson said.
‘Oh no, Vinson, that’s cruel. You must remember Honeychile isn’t like other dogs. She’s sensitive. She gets it from me. Why, if I were to force the pill down her she’d never take one again.’
‘She doesn’t seem to be taking it now,’ said Vinson, with the mild sarcasm which was all the impertinence he would allow himself to give his mother.
‘She will, she will. It just takes a little psychology. I can always win her round.’
She was still trying to make the rat-tailed dog take its hormones when Edna arrived. She was so busy fussing on the carpet with Honeychile that she hardly looked up to greet the daughter she had not seen for months.
When at last she could be persuaded to stand upright Edna kissed the air near her cheek and said: ‘How are you, Mother?’ This was rash, because her mother proceeded to tell her just how she was that evening, which was half dead from nervous exhaustion, with a nauseated feeling to her stomach.
‘Where’s Milt?’ she asked suspiciously, as if she thought Edna’s husband might have left her.
‘Outside fooling with the car. He think’s he’s got a slow puncture. He never notices these things when we’re near a garage. Will you help him he if wants to change the wheel, Vinson?’
‘I’d be glad to. But this suit has just come back from the cleaner –’
‘Oh, never mind,’ said Edna briskly. ‘I expect Matt will help him when he comes.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so fond of that gaberdine, Vinson,’ Mrs Gaegler said, travelling her eye up and down him as if he were something that somebody was trying to sell her. ‘The colour’s all wrong. Don’t you think so, Edie?’
‘But it’s an expensive suit,’ Vinson said. ‘It cost me a hundred bucks.’ To the Americans in the room that absolved the gaberdine from further criticism.
Milt came in presently, kissed Christine in his squashy way and told her she was the most wonderful girl he had ever seen, and asked his mother-in-law: ‘How are you?’ before anyone could stop him. Mrs Gaegler told him how she was, with embellishments on the story she had told Edna and the addition of a pain in her foot from the worry about Honeychile – ‘reactionary nerves’. Milt incensed her by saying she looked wonderful, perfectly wonderful. He would have made a good compère on an audience-participation radio programme. Wonderful was his favourite adjective.
Washington was having two days of Indian summer. It was as hot as it had ever been in July, and although there was a storm approaching, it was sucking air into a stifling vacuum before it could bring relief. Everyone felt limp, and Christine saw that she was not alone in having to smother yawns. There seemed to be nothing to breathe in the little living-room where Mrs Gaegler told about the feeling in her stomach and the electric fan whirled the stale air uselessly round and round. When the heat came down Mrs Gaegler had insisted on closing all the windows in the house, to keep the hot air from coming in, although Christine thought that you could argue a better case for opening the windows to let the hot air out. However, her mother-in-law fussed so much if the windows were opened, and slipped so many discs in her spine reaching to shut them again, that Christine was forced to let her have her way and seal the house up like a biscuit tin.
Vinson made the drinks for everyone except Christine, and then there was a jaunty hammering on the door and Matthew came in and broke up the spiritless boredom of the room with his cheerful presence and exuberant greeting of Edna and Milt. He was the only Gaegler who seemed perfectly at ease with his family. Edna and her mother were fairly polite to each other on the surface, but behind their quick, critical eyes they seemed to be sparring in unspoken combat, like two women in love with the same man. Vinson had been quiet ever since his mother came, and he was even more constrained in the presence of his whole family, as if he could not be himself in front of them.
When Christine went to the kitchen to give the finishing touches to the dinner, Edna followed her out, her slight stoop pulling her dress up on one hip. She was wearing the same brown dress – a little uneven now at the hem – which she had worn for Christine’s wedding, and a little hat shaped like a canoe on her untidy coffee-coloured hair.
‘How’ve you been, honey?’ she asked, putting down her drink and picking up a cloth to wipe some saucepans on the draining-board. Edna was one of the few women Christine knew who would come into a kitchen and do what was wanted without asking.
‘How do you get on with Mother?’ she asked, polishing a saucepan more brightly than Christine ever could.
‘Oh – very well, really.’
Edna laughed, screwing up her monkey face. ‘You’ll get used to her. You have to know how to treat her. Vinson never did know. He lets it get him down when she fusses all the time about her health. Me and Matt, we just pay no attention.’
‘One day,’ Christine said, ‘she’ll have something really wrong with her and no one will believe it.’
‘She’ll never have anything wrong with her,’ Edna said, ‘unless it’s penicillin poisoning.’
‘Why do you always talk about me behind my back?’ Mrs Gaegler came round the kitchen door, her round eyes aggrieved. If you were asleep or trying to telephone she could shake the whole house with the noise of her high heels, but at inconvenient moments she could creep up on you like an Indian.
Christine felt guilty, but Edna said blandly: ‘I was saying how much I like that gown, Mother. It’s very becoming to you.’
‘Oh, do you think so?’ Her mother twirled around delightedly. She was a sucker for the glibbest compliment. ‘But that’s more than I can say for your hat, Edie. You’re not of an age to wear that kind of frivolous thing any more.’
That came well from her, whose hats were all about twenty years too young for her, but Edna did not mind. She took off the canoe and threw it up on to the top of the refrigerator.
‘I hate any hat,’ she said, ‘but Milt doesn’t care for me to go out without one. I guess I’ll take my shoes off too if Christine doesn’t mind. My feet are always happier when they can feel the floor.’ She kicked her shoes into a corner and ambled across the kitchen for her drink, very short and flat-footed in her stockinged feet.
‘You’ll have to watch yourself, Edie,’ her mother told her. ‘You’ve gotten a bit cranky in your forties.’
‘I always have been,’ Edna said. ‘It’s inherited.’
‘Harry Gaegler,’ said her mother, who did not see how this could mean her, ‘never took his shoes off until he went to bed, whatever else he may have done.’
‘What are you looking for? Can I help you?’ Christine asked, for Mrs Gaegler was questing distractedly about the kitchen.
‘Yes, dear. I want some fresh newspaper to put down for Honeychile.’
‘I can’t see why you don’t train her to use the garden,’ Christine said, encouraged by Edna’s presence to voice an irritation that had been with her ever since her mother-in-law started spreading newspapers on prominent bits of the floor.
Edna winked at her. ‘Honeychile isn’t like other dogs. Didn’t you know that?’
‘I’m glad you understand that,’ her mother said, not seeing the wink, because she was bending down to the cupboard under the sink. ‘Some people’ – she straightened up and glanced at Christine – ‘just don’t seem to see that a dog has to be treated with psychology like everyone else. Oh me.’ She pressed the palm of her little pink hand to her forehead. ‘Bending down that way has sent my blood pressure way up. Thank you, dear.’ She took the newspaper from Christine and went out.
Christine and Edna began to dish up the food. Matthew put his curly head round the door. ‘Can I wash my hands?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been helping Milt change a wheel, and I don’t want to muss up your bathroom, Chris. Your house always looks so clean. If I thought Carol could be like you I’d marry her tomorrow, if she’d marry me.’ Carol was his girl friend, who played small parts on television and gave him a lot of trouble.
‘I wish Milt were like you, Matt,’ Edna said. ‘When he’s been doing a dirty job around the car he leaves the bathroom floor covered with dirty towels and a scum on the basin an inch thick. I get tired of telling him.’
‘Milt’s henpecked,’ Matthew said, drying his hands on a paper towel and throwing it neatly across the room into the waste bin.
‘I guess he is,’ said Edna equably.
‘Do you think they’re ready for dinner?’ Christine asked Matthew.
‘I imagine so. Milt and Vin are discussing economic trends over a Scotch and water and Mother’s crawling about the floor with bits of newspaper, but otherwise they’re ready. Anything I can do?’
‘You can carve the meat if you like.’
Matthew carved very well. He was useful in a kitchen – more useful than Vinson, who used too much finesse and took a long time to get anything done. Matthew had come out to see Christine once or twice while he had been in Washington, and she found him nice to have about, even when she was busy. He was easy and friendly and he made himself at home.
‘What goes on?’ Vinson came into the kitchen, looking a little put out. ‘What’s everyone doing in here? This is no sort of a party. I wish you’d learn to organize a little better, Christine. You shouldn’t have to spend so long in the kitchen when you have guests.’
‘It isn’t guests. It’s family,’ Christine said through a cloud of steam as she drained the peas.
‘When I entertain them in my house my family are my guests,’ said Vinson pompously.
‘Relax, brother,’ said Edna, going out with a pile of plates.
‘Where are her shoes?’ Vinson asked. ‘Listen, Christine, I’m always telling you, when you’re a hostess you must arrange things so that you’re not in the kitchen so much. It only needs a little method.’
‘Do it the Navy way,’ Matthew said, without looking up from his carving.
‘What are you doing with that roast? I told you I’d carve for you, Christine. I wouldn’t let Matt –’
‘He’s doing it very nicely,’ Christine said soothingly. ‘You were busy drinking with Milt – being a host, you see.’
‘Bring the food in and let’s eat,’ Vinson said. He did not like her to tease him in front of Matthew.
Christine had taken a lot of trouble with the dinner. Vinson was proud of her, and everyone complimented her, except Mrs Gaegler, who would hardly eat anything. She sat bolt upright turning things distastefully over with a fork, as if she thought there might be grubs underneath.
When Milt, who, as usual, was loud in praise of everything, asked her: ‘Aren’t you glad Vin married such a lovely girl who can cook so wonderfully?’ Mrs Gaegler would only say: ‘I’m surprised that an Englishwoman can cook meat at all, when they get no practice at it over there.’
‘You’re eating nothing, Mother,’ said Vinson, hastily, afraid that she was going to start on England. ‘Try some of this potato salad. You know you like it.’
‘I’ve told you, Vinson,’ she said snappishly, ‘I feel painfully sick in my stomach tonight. How can you expect me to eat?’
‘It’s the heat,’ Milt said easily, helping himself from a dish. ‘No one can eat in this weather.’
‘Except you,’ Edna said. ‘You always break your diet when we come out. You have just no willpower.’
‘Don’t pick on me, Edie,’ Milt said, and Mrs Gaegler backed him up, choosing to side with him against her daughter, in the same way as she often tried to side with Christine against her son.
‘You can’t object to me eating salad,’ Milt said. ‘And this is just the most wonderful salad I ever tasted. Christine, you are just the cleverest girl –’
‘The salad would be all right if you didn’t pick all the eggs out of it for yourself, like the glutton you are.’
‘I notice you’re eating potatoes, Edie,’ her mother said, ‘which is much worse.’
‘Oh no. Eggs have far more calories than potatoes.’ Edna had read many magazine articles on dieting and was as calorieconscious as any American. She visualized them as tangible lumps of fattening stuff, marching straight to the waistline.
‘Ah, but,’ said Mrs Gaegler, who knew all about calories too, ‘eggs consume their own calories. Potatoes don’t.’
After this statement, which was too baffling to be contested, she leaned forward and delicately picked a piece of meat off the dish to give to Honeychile, who had been yapping round the table, high-stepping like a show hackney, ever since the meal started.
‘You shouldn’t feed dogs at the table,’ Matthew said.
‘This isn’t dogs. It’s Honeychile. There, I was afraid she wouldn’t eat that beef,’ Mrs Gaegler said as Honeychile spat the meat out on to the carpet. ‘She’s so very particular about what she eats. When she was expecting her babies she wouldn’t take anything but salmon, and towards the end her nerves were so upset she wouldn’t touch anything at all. It’s a wonder she came through it. She had two veterinaries at her accouchement – Dr Stiegler and an assistant. My goodness, I’ll never forget that night. It just drained me. I don’t think I could go through that again, though I sold those puppies for fifty dollars apiece. Honeychile is too sensitive to be a mother. When she was nursing, you know, I had to stuff paper in the doorbell, because every time it rang her milk went away.’
Vinson was looking uncomfortable. He did not like this kind of talk at the dinner table. He gave Christine his almost inaudible whistle, to indicate that she should fetch the dessert and make a diversion. They were at opposite ends of the table and she was laughing surreptitiously with Matthew about Honeychile’s confinement, but she looked up at once and said: ‘Yes, Vin?’ although no one else had heard the whistle.
‘Now isn’t that something?’ Mrs Gaegler drew everyone’s attention to Christine. ‘He’s trained his wife to answer when he calls her under his breath. Looks as if he’s got her just where he wants her, doesn’t it, folks?’ She laughed affectedly, pretending that she had meant it as a joke.
‘Well, I think that’s wonderful,’ Milt said. ‘Simply wonderful. That’s just the most beautiful thing –’
‘Harry Gaegler used to shout for me at the top of his voice,’ Mrs Gaegler said, ‘and, my goodness, that man had a voice like a hog caller. But I would never answer. I wouldn’t let any man think I was at his beck and call. Do it again, Vinson. I want to see it again.’
Vinson was never averse to showing off Christine’s tricks as if she were a trained dog, but she got up quickly and went out with Edna to the kitchen. As she went she heard Mrs Gaegler say: ‘You could never teach an American girl that, but English girls don’t seem to have the same strength of character.’
‘You’re mad, aren’t you?’ Edna said, putting down a pile of plates.
‘Wouldn’t you be?’ Christine threw the silver into the sink with an infuriated clatter.
‘Oh, sure. I’d be hopping mad. I’ve never seen Mother so trying.’
‘Nor me. I wonder if there is really something wrong with her.’
‘No. She always starts complaining about her stomach as soon as she sees food.’
‘I know, but that doesn’t usually stop her eating it.’
‘She’s all right. The day when she doesn’t complain of anything – that will be the day we know she’s really ill.’
Mrs Gaegler would not eat any of the dessert, which was blueberry pie. ‘I couldn’t hold it. My stomach feels like it’s turned upside down,’ she said, as if she were afraid the pie would fall out of it.
‘You’re missing the most wonderful blueberry pie,’ Milt said. ‘Best I ever tasted.’
‘Is it all right?’ Christine asked Edna. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever made it.’
‘Don’t they have blueberries in England?’ Matt asked. ‘I should have thought they could.’
‘Of course they could,’ his mother said, ‘but they would never get anyone to pick them. The British just don’t want to work. That’s why they’ll never be anything but a second-class nation.’
Christine felt her face reddening. ‘We’re not a –’ she began, and was near to tears, but Matthew Came to her rescue.
‘Look, Mother,’ he said, ‘when we can stand up to what the British took in World War II we might have the right to judge what makes a second-class nation. I was in London the night the City was on fire. I’ve seen Plymouth. We should judge the British on that, not on whether they want to pick blueberries.’
‘What’s eating you, Matt?’ Vinson said acidly. ‘I thought all you Kansas University boys were isolationists.’
When everyone got up to go to the other end of the room for coffee Christine took his arm and drew him aside. ‘Vin! You were horrid to Matt. He was only trying to be nice to me by sticking up for England.’
‘It wasn’t his place. If anyone’s going to stand up for my wife, it’s me.’
‘Well, why didn’t you?’
‘He didn’t give me a chance. He jumped right in with his slick talk. Just like he’s been trying to jump in ahead of me ever since we were children. That smarty pants. It’s a damn good thing I saw you first, or he’d have jumped in there too.’
‘Don’t be silly. He wouldn’t have been interested in me. He’s got a girl.’
‘He’s always got a girl. A different one every month. You watch out.’
‘Oh, Vin, don’t talk such nonsense. He’s your brother.’’
'I’d still kill him if he ever tried to make a pass at you.’ He gripped her arm and stared at her. Looking into his flecked eyes, strange and bitter with unreasonable jealousy, Christine could believe that he meant it.
‘When you two love-birds have finished your tête-à-tête there,’ Milton called out, ‘come on over, Vin, and pour us a drink.’
Vinson went over to them and Christine finished clearing the table. The kitchen was suffocatingly hot. Mrs Gaegler said that no one should use an oven in this weather, and perhaps she was right.
Christine opened the back door and stepped out on to the grass. It was almost as hot outside. The storm could not be very far away. There was that breathless, suspended pause on the earth and air, when every leaf hangs motionless, waiting for the rain. Thick clouds covered the stars and moon, and away to the left, above the roofs of the town, the black sky was slit by a streak of yellow light. In the night’s silence Christine could hear very clearly the sugary throb from one of the Meenehans’ television sets and a tap dripping in the kitchen behind her.
The music stopped and the burst of studio audience applause which followed it almost drowned the first rumble of thunder. Here it came again, like barrels rolling down a distant cobbled street. Christine waited, her face to the sky, longing to feel the first drops of rain. She did not want to go indoors to the crosscurrents of the family party. She wanted to stay out here where the night was quiet and smelled of meadows, and the grass and trees were beginning to stir in the first hint of breeze. For a moment, as the breeze blew suddenly into a wind and flung a gust of raindrops against her lifted face, she thought she was in England, and all the summer storms of her childhood came back to her in a wave of homesickness.
She stood tiptoe on the grass as the rain fell drop by enormous drop, ceased suddenly as the wind held its breath in a pause while the thunder rolled, and then came all at once hissing down in a torrent on the earth, on the houses, on the trees and bushes, and sent Christine running indoors.
‘It’s coming! The storm’s coming!’ she called. As she ran into the living-room a deafening clap of thunder exploded over the house, and Mrs Gaegler screamed and fell off the sofa on to the floor.
Everyone looked at each other for a moment, and then began to laugh because they had been frightened.
‘Come on, Mother.’ Vinson stooped to help her up. ‘They didn’t get you that time.’
‘I’ve been struck! I was struck by a thunderbolt!’ she wailed. ‘No you weren’t.’ Vinson settled her rigid body back on the sofa. ‘You just got a fright, and so – whoops!’ The lightning stabbed, the thunder clashed and Mrs Gaegler screamed and fell against the back of the sofa with her eyes closed.
‘I’m in shock,’ she announced, opening her eyes very wide and staring round at them. ‘I’m in a state of shock. My head … Vinson, give me another shot of whisky. The thunderbolt must have knocked my glass over.’
‘Do you think she should?’ Vinson looked at Christine, who was on her knees with Matthew, picking up the pieces of the glass which Mrs Gaegler had broken.
‘Of course,’ his mother snapped. ‘Why ask her? She’s always talking about when she was a nurse, but she’s never done any good for me. I must have a stimulant. I feel that I’m failing. My heart… my nerves….’ The storm was a heaven-sent opportunity for her to go through most of the symptoms in her repertoire. Christine had never seen her put on such a good act. When Vinson handed her the glass of rye and water she took a greedy gulp and almost immediately gasped and clutched at her stomach. ‘A stabbing pain – right through me! And you needn’t all look at each other,’ she said, as the family exchanged glances. ‘You’ll never know the pain I was in there for a moment. I think I’ll go and get myself a sedative.’
‘I’ll get it for you,’ Christine said.
‘I wouldn’t dream of bothering you,’ Mrs Gaegler said coldly. She got up with the face of a martyr and went upstairs to sulk because no one believed in her pain.
The family talked desultorily, while the thunder rumbled into the distance and the sheets of rain lifted to a spatter and gradually ceased. Christine opened the window and the cool air came in like a draught of water.
Milt and Edna, who had a long drive home, were getting ready to leave when Mrs Gaegler came down the stairs. ‘I’ve just vomited,’ she informed them. ‘In the basin,’ she added, as if that made it more interesting. They tried to respond suitably to the news, although they only half believed it. She had made herself sick before now by pushing a spoon down her throat.
Edna found her shoes, retrieved the canoe-shaped hat from the top of the refrigerator and followed Milt out to the car over the cool wet grass.
‘Let’s drive Matt home,’ Christine said, as she and Vinson turned back to the house. Vinson always insisted on guiding people down the driveway from the garage in case they cut up his bank.
‘Didn’t he come in Mother’s car?’
‘No, it’s being mended. He ran into a bus the other day, but don’t tell your mother. He came over in a cab tonight.’
‘Let him take one back then.’
‘He could, but I’d like to go for a drive. The air’s so wonderful now.’
‘We’d have to take Mother. She won’t like being left alone.’
Mrs Gaegler, however, said she felt much too ill to go out. She would crawl into bed – not that she would sleep – and pull the sheets over her head. That was all she was able for. ‘But you go ahead and have your fun. Don’t worry about me. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment. You go. Leave me. Why shouldn’t you? Why should you worry about me?’
Having successfully made them feel bad about leaving her, she made her exit, hauling herself hand over hand up the banisters, pausing on every third step to gasp a little. She looked smaller than usual, and her girlish ankles weakly climbing were suddenly pathetic.
‘We shouldn’t have left her, Vin,’ Christine said as they went out.
‘She’s all right. I think she’s a little tight as a matter of fact. That’s all that’s wrong with her.’
Matthew wanted to drive, but Vinson would not let him. They all sat on the front seat with Christine in the middle, and Matthew sang ‘Allentown Jail’. He had a pleasant, mournful voice. Christine felt cosy driving along with the three of them close and friendly together. Once or twice Vinson glanced across to see how near to her Matthew was sitting.
When they got to the house where Matthew was staying, his friend Bob came out and insisted that they should come in for a drink. Christine had Coca-Cola and Vinson had several drinks and became more happy and relaxed than Christine had seen him since his mother arrived. Bob played the piano and Matthew sang, and Bob’s wife, who was half Hawaiian, took off her shoes and danced a hula.
They stayed for quite a while. Every time Christine said they ought to go Bob said he would not hear of it. Christine was quite happy to stay because Vinson was enjoying himself. It was easy, friendly company, and although she was tired she could sit back and dream to the music and nobody bothered her.
Some time after midnight she asked Vinson: ‘Don’t you think we should ring up your mother and tell her we’ll be home soon, in case she’s worrying?’
‘No, it’s all right.’ Vinson waved a careless hand from the piano, where he was singing now, not quite sober. ‘She’s O.K., I told you; it was the whisky. She’s probably in a dead sleep by now.’
‘But just in case she isn’t.’ Christine was troubled by the instinct that makes a nurse go back and look at a patient just once more. When she rang her home number, there was no answer. Her mother-in-law must be asleep. No need to worry then. Her instinct had been wrong.
Nevertheless, when they did get home much later, she quietly opened the door of the room that was to be her baby’s, and looked in at her mother-in-law.
Mrs Gaegler was not there. The bed was tumbled, but empty. Honeychile jumped yapping off the bed, skittered between Christine’s legs and fled downstairs.
‘Vin, come quickly!’
‘What’s wrong?’ His voice was vague with drowsiness and whisky.
‘Your mother – she’s not here.’ Christine ran downstairs and met him coming slowly up. They searched the house. There was no Mrs Gaegler, and her dog went leaping everywhere in a frenzy, scattering the rugs, its ridiculous front legs beating the air.
When the telephone rang Christine got to it first. It was Dr Bladen, the doctor who had stuck a hypodermic needle so many times into Mrs Gaegler.
‘I’ve been trying to get you for some time,’ he said. ‘I’ve been ringing your home every half-hour since we took Mrs Gaegler senior away.’
‘Took her away? What’s happened? What’s happened to her?’ Christine pushed at Vinson, who was trying to get hold of the telephone.
‘She called me about eleven o’clock – said she was alone and very sick, and asked me to come right over. When I got there I called the ambulance at once. Mrs Gaegler is in Saint Mary’s Hospital. She had an emergency appendicectomy at twelve-thirty…. Oh yes, her condition is satisfactory. The appendix was a nasty-looking thing, though. I wish I could have got hold of you before, but Mrs Gaegler said she didn’t know where you were.’
‘But she did know, Vin!’ Christine said when she had rung off and told him what the doctor had said. ‘She knew Bob’s telephone number. She’s often rung Matt up there.’
‘Perhaps she was too ill to remember,’ Vinson suggested. They agreed on this, but as they looked at each other they saw that neither of them believed it.
Mrs Gaegler had won. She had triumphed over them. She had something really wrong with her at last. They had not believed her, and so she had ensured that they should feel as bad as possible by letting them stay out drinking and smoking while she was under the surgeon’s knife.
Mrs Gaegler lay like a martyr in the hospital, suffering no complications, but behaving as if she were the sickest person in the place and driving the nurses frantic. Whenever Christine and Vinson went to see her a doctor or a nurse would stop them in the corridor and ask them when they were going to take Mrs Gaegler home. Mrs Gaegler, however, did not want to go home. She was enjoying herself, and Christine and Vinson were in no hurry to have her back. She would have to spend a week or two recuperating with them before she could return to Kansas, and they clung to their breathing space of peace as long as possible.
Vinson was going to give Christine an evening out. They were going to the theatre and then out to dinner. To Christine this innocent diversion seemed very exciting. Washington, the capital of one of the largest countries in the world, has fewer theatres than the capital cities of the smallest countries in the world. Vinson said that this was because Roosevelt had ordained that negroes could sit down with white people for an evening’s entertainment, and so the white people stayed away and the theatres closed down or became cinemas. Christine only half believed this, because Vinson was prejudiced against both Roosevelt and the coloured race.
Whatever its cause, the dearth of theatres was a sad blot on an otherwise cultured city, and if the touring company of a second-rate Broadway show came to Washington the drama-starved inhabitants rushed as hungrily to see it as if it were a smash hit with an all-star cast.
Christine had booked the tickets weeks ahead and had been looking forward eagerly to her evening out. As she kissed Vinson good-bye on the morning of the day, she made him promise to come home in plenty of time to change and get to the theatre on time. He was not home at six o’clock. He was not home at seven o’clock. At seven-fifteen she had come to the distressing conclusion that he had forgotten. She was just going to ring him up when the telephone rang as she walked to it.
It was Vinson. He was terribly sorry, but an admiral had just flown in from the west coast and had called a conference for eight o’clock. He would not be able to take her to the theatre. Could he take her out to dinner, anyway? No, the conference might go on for hours. He was terribly sorry, but that was how it was.
Yes, that was how it was. The Navy! There were times when she hated it. The Navy came first. She was just a wife, and who was a wife disappointed of her evening out compared with an admiral who had just flown in from the west coast?
Honeychile, who had developed quite a healthy appetite since Christine had taken her off vitamin pills and cod-liver oil and hormones, came whining round her ankles for food. Christine went into the kitchen, fed the dog and was drearily contemplating whether she would boil or poach an egg for her supper when the telephone rang again. It was Matthew. Bob and his wife had gone out and Matthew was alone and bored. Could he come over?
Christine told him what had happened to her evening. ‘Why don’t you and I go to the theatre instead, Matt?’ she said, her spirits reviving. ‘If you go straight there and I take a taxi from here we could just make it in time.’
It was a musical show, not outstanding, but Christine enjoyed it more than she remembered ever enjoying a play in the days when she used to go to the theatre nearly every week in London.
‘Now let’s you and me go find ourselves the most expensive dinner in town,’ Matthew said as they came out. ‘If you feel all right that is.’ He treated her very cautiously. He was afraid of pregnant women, ever since he had once taken the wife of an absent friend out to dinner and she had been assailed by premature labour pains in the restaurant.
‘Of course. I feel fine. But I wonder if I ought – suppose Vin got back before we did? He hates me not to be there.’
‘He said the conference would last for hours, didn’t he? Well, if I know the Navy, you can add a few hours on to that when they get talking. He won’t be back. Come on, Chris, this is your night out. Enjoy yourself.’
Christine did enjoy herself. It was fun going out with Matthew. He took her to a French restaurant where she had never been with Vinson, and he knew the right food to order. He liked her as much as she liked him, and they had a lot to talk about. Christine told him about her life in England before she was married, and Matthew told her about his girl friend Carol, who was trying to make him jealous with a television producer. They both agreed that Matthew should give her up, but Matthew said she was the most wonderful thing since penicillin and he did not think he could.
After dinner he took Christine home in a taxi and sang her all the songs from the show they had seen. Christine wished that Vinson could play the piano or sing. He could not keep two notes of a tune together, and the only music he liked on the radio was the hillbilly songs. He hummed sometimes when he was carpentering or painting, but it was a tuneless hum. He never sang or whistled about the house.
Matthew’s crooning tenor inspired a mood of pleasing sentimental melancholy. Christine wished that the evening were not over. Matthew was the nicest brother-in-law she could have wished for. He was just what she would have chosen for a brother.
He left her at her home with a light kiss on the cheek, very different from the moist embraces Milt gave. As Christine walked up the path she saw a chink of light between the livingroom cortains. Had she left the light on, or was Vinson home? Oh well, he would not mind. He would be glad that his brother had given her a good time. She told herself this to stifle the little qualm of fear as she put her key into the lock. Ridiculous to have qualms of fear about your husband, and to feel guilty because you had gone out when he could not take you. But when she saw his face as he came into the hall to meet her her little qualm grew to full-size apprehension.
It was the worst quarrel they had ever had. They had bickered before, but they had never lost control to the point when they blazed out the most hurting things they could think of. Always before, when anger had sprung up between them, Vinson had said: ‘I won’t quarrel with you’, and made himself annoyingly unassailable. But now he wanted to quarrel. He was out to have a full-scale row, and he made her come into the living-room and sit down opposite him so that he could tell her all the things he had been brooding over while he waited for her to come home.
He was jealous of Matthew. That was the crux of it. Christine was horrified and slightly repelled that he could be jealous of his own brother, who was so obviously not the kind of person to try and step out of line with a sister-in-law.
‘Do you think I’d have gone out with him if he was like that?’ Christine asked. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know. You can’t trust any woman. I learned that a long time ago. What you’ve told me of your past history doesn’t incline me to think you’re any different from the rest. What about that Canadian – and the man you picked up at that nightclub?’
‘Oh, Vin, that was nothing. I’d never have told you, but you made me promise to tell you everything.’
‘I’m wondering how many more things there are that you haven’t told me.’
‘You talk as if I were a prostitute. It’s a fine way to talk to your wife. Look here, Vin, nobody gets to the age of thirty-four without having something. You’re such a prude.’
‘A prude!’
‘Yes, a prude. Where do you think I’ve been with your brother? To one of those hotels where you can get a room for a couple of hours?’
‘Christine, please.’ Vinson shifted on his chair. ‘Don’t talk like that. You know I’m not suggesting–’
‘You’re suggesting something, whatever it is. Look at me -the shape I am. As if anyone could be jealous about a woman who looks like this. I think it’s vile of you when Matt’s so nice. Yes, he is. I like him, like him, like him, do you hear? He’s a lot nicer than you in many ways.’
‘A pity you didn’t marry him, instead of me.’
‘I didn’t see him first.’
This was terrible, hateful. They were saying things they did not mean, but they could not stop. They had to go on finding worse things to say as they sat there, hating each other.
Christine got up, hot and trembling. She could not stand any more. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘I feel sick.’
‘I’m not surprised, the way you’ve worked yourself up. Even if you don’t care about me, you might at least give some thought to our baby.’
‘Don’t start on that tack.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s the most important thing in my life, and it should be in yours, but the way you behave makes me think that you’re hardly fit to be the mother of my child.’
‘Oh, Vin!’ A choking sound broke from Christine. She did not know herself whether she was crying or laughing. ‘You sound like a character in an old-fashioned melodrama. You’re the most ridiculous–’
‘If you’re going to laugh at me,’ he said icily, ‘you’d better go to bed.’
Christine went out. When she was in the hall she found she was not laughing, but crying.
Upstairs, Honeychile jumped guiltily off the bed when she heard her step. Christine knelt down and tried to get from the dog the comfort that Timmy had always given her when she was distressed. Timmy used to stand like a rock, eyes soft with concern while Christine clutched and twisted the hair on his neck and told him all the injustices that no one else understood; but when she put out her hand to Honeychile the spidery dog wriggled away yapping. It fled under the dressing-table and cowered there with its legs apart, trembling as if its life was threatened. It was a useless animal.
When she was in her nightgown Christine forced herself to go to the top of the stairs and call down: ‘Vin! Have you had any supper?’
He did not answer.
‘Have you had any supper, I said.’ Irritation mounted in her voice.
‘No,’ he answered sulkily.
‘Shall I come down and get you something?’
‘No.’
All right, if he wanted to sulk, let him. Christine got into bed and turned away from the door. When he came heavily upstairs she pretended to be asleep. When he got into bed perhaps, after all, she would turn over and put out a hand to him and he would take her in his arms and kiss her, and she would weep and everything would be all right. It was not too late to retrieve it.
He did not get into bed. He turned out the light and Christine waited, ready to turn over as soon as she felt his weight on the bed; but he went out of the room, and in a moment she heard the door of the other bedroom slam shut.
When the alarm clock woke her the next morning Christine felt as if she had not slept at all. Her head ached and every limb was weary. She combed her hair and powdered her face and went into the room that was to be the nursery. Vinson was lying very neatly in the bed, his face buried in the pillow and his short black hair sticking up like a porcupine. Christine turned his face over and kissed him. He woke frowning, and sat up. He did not kiss her.
‘Is it time to get up?’ he asked in a completely wide-awake voice.
‘Yes. Oh, Vin – look, darling–’ She had planned how she was going to say: ‘I’m sorry’, but he swung his legs over the side of the bed and, without looking at her, felt for his slippers and slouched off to the bathroom.
He ate his breakfast in the kitchen, just like other mornings. Sulking did not impair his appetite. Christine did not know what to talk about, so she did not talk at all, except to ask him if he wanted more coffee.
He held out his cup. ‘I don’t want you to use the car today,’ he said. ‘The fluid in the brakes is low and they’re not holding properly. I nearly hit a lamp standard coming home last night, in case that’s of any interest to you. John Tanner’s picking me up this morning and he’ll bring me home. I’ll take the car to the garage tonight.’
When he had finished his breakfast he got up without a word, went into the hall, put on his uniform coat and cap and picked up his brief-case. Christine followed him, feeling like a child sent to Coventry. When he opened the front door she put her hand on his arm.
‘Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t think you’d want to.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Of course.’ He put his head forward. It was the bleakest kiss. It would have been better to have had no kiss at all.
Vinson stood on the lawn with his toes turned out, to be ready as soon as John Tanner drove up. He never kept anyone waiting. Christine stood just behind him in the doorway. She wondered if he knew she was there.
From the lawn next door Mrs Meenehan called: ‘Hi there, Commander! What do you know?’
Vinson did not answer. Mrs Meenehan went into her house. As soon as Vinson had gone she would be round at the kitchen window to ask what was wrong with the Commander. John Tanner arrived and blew his horn. Christine watched Vinson walk down the path. She always waved him good-bye when he drove off in the mornings. If he turned round before he got into the car she would wave today, but she did not think he was going to turn round. She hesitated, then went inside the house and shut the door. Immediately, she wished she had not. Suppose he looked round and she was not there? As she turned back to the door again she heard the car drive off. It was too late. She would have to wait until tonight. She would make it up with him tonight.
‘Had a tiff?’ Mrs Meenehan appeared at the window as Christine went into the kitchen.
‘No,’ Christine said coldly, putting dishes into the sink.
‘Oh yes you have.’ Mrs Meenehan waggled a finger at her. ‘You can’t fool me. The Commander looked like thunder. Don’t worry, honey. It’s because of your condition. I was just the same with young Gary. Daddy and I fought like cat and dog. It’s physical. You’ll see. Everything will be all-a-hunky when the baby comes.’
Perhaps she was right Everything would be all right when the baby came. All the little differences, the misgivings, the moments of boredom, the slight disappointments that her marriage had brought – all these would be swept away when their child was born. There would be no time for them.
All morning Christine felt particularly, keenly happy about the baby. Her self-engrossed happiness drove out the sadness of the quarrel. It was no longer a tragedy. It could be put right in a moment this evening. Christine would find the right thing to say, and they would be back where they were before – two people who were going to have a baby which would hold them together in a bond that no petty differences of character could weaken.
Christine got out the vacuum cleaner. It always did one good to clean the house when one wanted to clean out one’s mind. While she was bending to sweep under the sofa she suddenly straightened up and put a hand to her side. Yes! The baby had moved. It kicked.
She turned off the motor to stop Honeychile barking. If anything was making a noise the dog always had to augment it. The baby kicked again. She felt it very clearly. This was the moment for which she had waited so long, this proof that the mystery within her was alive and eager for the worlds.
Cnristine felt exalted. She wanted to tell someone. Who? Certainly not Mrs Meenehan, and Betty Kessler would only shake her head and say that now her troubles were really starting. Christine almost rang up Vinson, but the vision of him answering the telephone in a room full of stenographers and electrical typewriters checked her. Besides, he was probably still sulking. He did not know yet that the quarrel was over, that it did not matter, that nothing mattered because her baby was stirring into a new phase of life.
How wonderful it would be to tell him this evening! It would dispel everything else. He would come home frowning perhaps, determined not to make an advance before she did, and she would run to the front door as soon as she heard the car, and tell him about the baby. His face would light up, and it would be as if they had never said those terrible things last night.
When Matthew rang up she almost told him, but remembered his fear of pregnant women, and refrained. It only mattered to her and Vinson, anyway. The news was not for anyone else.
Matthew wanted to know if she had the car at home. He wanted to borrow it for the afternoon.
‘Matt, I’m sorry, but you can’t. The brakes are bad. Vin said it mustn’t be driven.’
‘To hell with that, Chris. I’ll be O.K. I can always throw it into low gear, or use the emergency brake.’
‘No, Matt. Vinson said not.’
‘Vin’s been saying not all his life. Listen, I have to have it. Carol’s in town. She’s here to do a show on one of the local stations, and I’m going to take her to lunch and then to the studio for rehearsal.’
‘Well, but couldn’t you -?’ No, of course he couldn’t take a taxi. No American could take his girl out without a car.
Christine knew that even if the car had been all right Vinson would not have let Matthew borrow it, but Matthew persisted. He was excited. He was urgent and persuasive. It was his big chance. Carol was here. He had to be with Carol. His leave was up tomorrow and he was flying west this evening. Heaven knew when he would see her again. She might get married or anything.
‘Chris,’ he said, ‘you’re my pal. I didn’t think you’d let me down.’
‘I wouldn’t, but Vin–’
‘He’ll never know. I’ll bring the car back before he’s due home. Honest. You will? Ah – that’s a girl; that’s a girl, Chris. I knew you’d come through.’
After Matthew had fetched the car Christine worried all afternoon. She worried that he would have an accident, although he assured her that he had driven a car without brakes all the time he was at college, and she worried that Vinson would come home before Matthew and the car, and all her news about the baby and her plans to make up the quarrel would be as nothing compared to his wrath.
When she came back from the supermarket she took out a canvas chair and sat on the only bit of lawn that was not sloping to watch for the car. Which car? Hers or John Tanner’s? It was four-thirty. Vinson might be home at five o’clock if he came out punctually to suit John Tanner. Every car that came along the road brought her to her feet. Here came one much too fast, with another car following it. That couldn’t be John Tanner, who was a solid family man, and cautious.
Matthew whipped the car round the corner into the driveway and pulled it to a slithering stop with the emergency brake outside the closed garage doors. He jumped out as Christine came over the lawn towards him with the slow tread that now was hers.
‘Got to run, Chris,’ he shouted. ‘Bob followed me down. He’s driving me to the airport and I’m late as hell.’
‘All right. I’ll drive the car in.’
‘Thanks a million for everything. I had a swell time. Everything was swell. Carol – she – well, I’ll write you about it. You’re a honey, Chris. Best sister-in-law I ever had.’ He kissed her and bounded down the slope and over the side of Bob’s open convertible, which jumped ahead like a racehorse at a starting gate.
Christine felt quite breathless. She had to pause for a moment to recover. Then she opened the garage doors and got into the car to drive it inside before Vinson came home and saw it.
There was no ignition key. Matthew must have slipped it into his pocket from habit when he jumped out. She could not start the car. She could not drive it into the garage, and Vinson might be home at any moment.
It did not matter about the key. Vinson had his own, and she could say she had lost hers until she got Matthew to send it back. But the car! She would have to push it into the garage. It was standing on the level where the driveway flattened out. She could do it.
Putting her hands on the fat shiny trunk of the car, she pushed. Nothing happened. She went round and took off the brake and then tried again. Still the big heavy car would not move. No time to go for Mr Meenehan. He would be watching the television in the rumpus room in his slippers. It would take ages to get him organized. She pushed again. If only it was a sensible little English car instead of this gross American monster…
Straining with all her might, she struggled, panting. As the car at last rolled slowly into the garage she stood upright, swayed dizzily with a spinning head, and knew that she was either going to faint or be sick.
She never could remember afterwards how she got into the house and on to the sofa, where Vinson found her with the pains beginning when he came home whistling and calling for her to show the quarrel was forgotten. She thought she must have crawled there, because when the nurses washed her in the hospital she heard them exclaiming gently about the grazes on her knees and hands.