Georgia Kennedy got out of bed and, as she had fantasized doing many times but had never had the courage to actually do since she had been Mrs Hugh Kennedy, Manager’s Wife, took off her Ceylonese pyjamas and walked naked down to the kitchen to make herself tea and toast, stopping to look at her face in the landing mirror.
A mane of reddish-gold hair that grew in masses of tendrils, straight high forehead, a firm chin and jaw-line which, she foresaw, would probably be plumply hidden in twenty years’ time, and wide intelligent greenish eyes which would probably be surrounded by a mass of little lines in twenty years’ time. Their embryos were already there. Leaning towards her reflection she raised her brows, pressed the star creases with her middle fingers.
What sort of a face is that Georgia Kennedy? Not beautiful, not lovely. Pretty. Good-looking. Handsome? You’re a striking-looking young woman, Mrs Kennedy, and you look sweeter and kinder than you are. You’ve got the sort of face that used to make youths believe that Georgia Honeycombe was an easy lay. And now that you are Mrs Kennedy, it’s a face that makes all of the Good Sports at the Club dances press their thighs closer to yours than they would dare to with the other men’s wives.
What is it that gives men that impression of me? She searches her full lips, pink cheeks and golden hair and receives the answer that hers is the face of a young woman which makes men think of milkmaids in summer meadows. A country girl with a pretty face, and the Good Sports knew all about country girls and hay-cocks – easy lay, cock.
But they had all been wrong, she had not been anybody’s easy lay: when she had given herself to Hugh it was in well-deserved virginal white.
Given? Well, that’s as good a description of it as any. He certainly hadn’t taken her. Not Hugh. Hugh as a bridegroom was knocking the door of forty: if there had been wild oats, he had sown them years before. Wild oats no more rampant than those sown in the company of the entire touring team, and which were more concerned with policemen’s helmets and thefts of public toilet signs than with women.
And ‘well-earned’ virginal white? Yes, because it had not been the nature of the pubescent Georgia Honeycombe to be chaste. She had strong lusts and vivid dreams in which she sometimes cried out. But she had parents who saw to it that she grew up to be a nice girl, a good girl; added to which she had been taught in a hassock and cassock school, in which God and his vicar kept an eye out for sins of girlish flesh.
Hugh got Georgia intact, and the honeymoon was almost over before he could bring himself to change that state. She preferred not to remember the honeymoon.
Hugh was better at firing off rifles.
They were not suited, but divorce in 1937 was not an option many couples considered, so they rubbed along and things got slightly better. Georgia was no longer intact, but she was disillusioned and unsatisfied. Married love was not what she had expected it to be. But, like divorce, in 1937 a more liberated sex-life was not an option open to a woman who had been to a hassock and cassock school. Not much of an option to many women who lived under the scrutiny of the community in a place like Markham then.
At the bottom of the stairs she halted at her unclear reflection in the glazed kitchen door to contemplate briefly the rest of Georgia Kennedy. Top heavy, well-defined waist, wide pelvis, rounded behind, long, solid legs – she would have made a good ‘Gibson’ Girl. Viewing herself objectively she knew that, had she been a mare, someone would no doubt have given her an approving slap on her flanks and said that she’d have no trouble when it came to producing. But Georgia did not want to produce. She smoothed the slight convex of her belly. She quite liked her own body but had never felt any desire to use it for the growing of tiny Hughs.
The letterbox, which had a flap like a man-trap, almost got Charlie Partridge’s fingers this time. His attention was caught by a pink image behind the patterned glass which was intended to protect postmen from such unexpected visions.
A good bloody thing she an’t my Missis.
Which, at least as far as Georgia Kennedy was concerned, wasn’t true. It might have been quite a good thing for her to have had a husband more like Charlie Partridge and less like Captain Kennedy. But there, she had been only barely eighteen when Hugh had proposed, and girls of eighteen can’t be expected to know that a dashing Territorial Army officer and captain of Markham Cricket Club isn’t necessarily going to make a dashing husband. Certainly Hugh Kennedy had not.