And now, three weeks later, here she still was, hanging about in Val’s kitchen. Still with no plans, still with nothing to do. Timorously, and hoping it wouldn’t annoy Val when she came in, Mildred had been spending the afternoon wiping dust and traces of stickiness off the jars and bottles that lurked, rarely used, on the upper shelves of Val’s kitchen cupboard. With one half of her mind she was hoping that Val wouldn’t notice, because she might count it as “helping”; with the other half she was hoping that Val would, because otherwise what was the point of doing it at all?
There was no getting away from it, the two of them weren’t getting on quite as well as they had in the beginning. There was no open rift, no hurtful home-truths had been exchanged; it just wasn’t as much fun as it had been. At the beginning, all that talk about the awfulness of men had been balm to Mildred’s injured feelings, but latterly she had found herself getting irked by it. Not only their own failed marriages, but the failed marriages of most of their friends had been raked-over, at first enjoyably; but by now Mildred was beginning to feel that the subject had been just about talked into the ground. Surely the break-up of all these assorted marriages couldn’t always be entirely the fault of the husband, as Val’s discourse would seem to imply? For this to be the case, the wives would all have had to be perfect, and one doubted that there existed in the world enough perfect women to go round, let alone for each of these singularly undeserving men to have secured one? In particular, this portrait of Arnold as a monster of selfishness was no longer as soothing to Mildred’s ego as it had been, though it was hard to see why. Val’s tirades against him were, after all, only echoes of Mildred’s own complaints. Val was merely taking her side as a good friend should. But she did it with such gusto, somehow, and with such unremitting rancour.
“Dragging you off against your will”, “Treating you as a Thing”. “Ruining your life!”
Tearfully, furiously, Mildred had indeed made every one of these accusations at one time or another. But had it, actually, been quite like that? Sometimes, lying awake in Val’s spare bedroom, listening to the trains that ran quite near the end of Val’s garden, Mildred had found herself going over in her mind those weeks during which she and Arnold had battled over the project; he bullying, pleading, cajoling; she resisting with all her feeble strength until finally, from sheer weariness, she had given in.
Yes. On the face of it, this was a fair account of what had happened. He had won. She had lost. And yet … and yet … at odd moments, even while she’d been protesting most strongly and railing most bitterly against the folly, the sheer madness of the whole idea – at odd moments something had flashed across her consciousness like a flash of unfamiliar light; the kind of light that curves briefly across a ceiling when a car goes past in the small-hours; and she’d been aware of a small flicker of excitement such as she hadn’t known in years. Something was happening. Newness was brushing their lives. And though she had gone on protesting, had continued to feel terrified at the whole project, something deep in her heart was all the time changing, was shifting, while she wasn’t even looking, over to Arnold’s side.
*
Downstairs, the front door slammed. Val was back; and with a pang of dismay Mildred remembered that this was Thursday. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays Val went jogging after work, and her insistence that Mildred should accompany her never flagged, despite the mounting evidence that the attempt could only end in abject failure. Sometimes the failure was less abject than at others, but this didn’t help. It only served to confuse the issue, and to weaken Mildred’s resistance.
“But I’m fifty-three!” Mildred had howled when Val had first confronted her with this horrifying prospect. “Nobody of my age …!”
But of course she hadn’t got away with it. Age-ism was apparently only second to sexism as the ultimate sin; and anyway, was not Val herself nearly forty-nine?
“And you needn’t think that I’m going to give up in four years time, just because I’ll be fifty-three! On the contrary, the older you are the more important it is to keep fit” – and she’d added, for good measure, that age is all a matter of your mental attitude.
“Think you’ve got arthritis and you have got arthritis,” she airily explained. “Think you’ve got a bad back and you have got a bad back. Think you have a heart problem and you have got a heart problem. Think you have dropped arches and …”
By this time, Mildred thought that she had all of these things; but it availed her nothing. And so, from then on, too weak to resist, she had accompanied her friend to the local park on the prescribed evenings and, after stumbling sometimes a hundred yards, sometimes as much as two hundred, she would collapse onto a seat and await Val’s triumphant return, having done 3, 4, or sometimes it might be 5 or 6 circuits in whatever number of minutes was remarkable for that particular distance. Mildred was very vague about what was remarkable and what wasn’t, but all the same was ready to be impressed, as indeed behoves the one who can only do a hundred yards, or at most two hundred.
“And you’ve got the wrong shoes, too,” Val would say, and no doubt this was true. Equipping herself with the right shoes was just one more thing that Mildred was no good at … Like typing, book-keeping, raising a daughter, organising a Tea Room and running more than two hundred yards.
On this particular evening she hadn’t done too badly. She had got as far as the third seat along the avenue before flopping down and watching Val’s disappearing thighs dappled by the evening sunlight through the trees.
It was a lovely evening. The August heat wave was not quite over and in the leafy coolness of this secluded walk Mildred leaned against the wooden back of her seat (“In Loving Memory of Eleanor Fishe,” it said), and drew in deep breaths of the soft evening air. She found herself hoping that Val would manage her full 6 circuits this time – perhaps even 7 – at something less than record speed, so that this pleasant interlude might go on and on.
There was plenty to amuse an idle spectator. Dog-walkers, leads swinging loose from their hands, bleating instructions to their cavorting charges who lollopped, zig-zagging, drunk with freedom, from tree to tree. Toddlers, too, in push-chairs; their young mothers deep in gossip. Older children scuffing their shoes in the gravel, bored, dawdling behind their elders. And then the joggers, of course. Every now and then Mildred thought that one of them was Val returning and felt an obscure relief when it was not.
She was startled by a man’s voice, close behind her.
“May I sit here?” it politely enquired; and before she had collected her wits enough to say “Yes, of course,”, – which naturally she would have said, why ever not? – the stranger was already settling himself alongside her. Middle-aged he was, slightly balding, and dressed in so dark and neat a suit that she concluded he must be on his way home from work. No one would come out on a lovely summer evening dressed like that if they just meant to enjoy a stroll.
“Lovely evening,” remarked her companion; and Mildred cautiously agreed. Not that she was minded to argue the point; her caution was due to her uncertainty about how to hold her own, how to think of the right sort of pleasantries to contribute to the sort of conversation that this was clearly going to be. Conversation with strangers had never been her forte; it was one more of the things she was no good at.
Afterwards, she could have kicked herself for not remembering more clearly how the conversation developed; how it was that within a few minutes he had got her describing, in quite lively detail, her abortive sojourn at Emmerton Hall; the problems of the Tea Room, the loveliness of the grounds, the growing numbers of tourists, the difficulties of getting staff. She was on the point of confiding to him her reasons for walking out on it all when, with a thunder of heavy steps and a surge of displaced air, Val was upon them: large, flushed and panting, and radiating – Mildred could already tell – an all-embracing and non-specific disapproval of the companion Mildred seemed to have acquired in her absence.
*
“Letting yourself get picked up!” she scolded, after they reached home, though with a bit of a tooth-displaying smile on her face to indicate that this wasn’t meant to escalate into any sort of a quarrel. “Whatever did you think could come of it? A man like that?”
Like what? And what had she thought would come of it? She hadn’t thought at all, that was the truth. Had just responded as best she could to a situation she found herself landed with. She tried, not very effectively, to explain to Val this unsatisfactory state of mind.
“Mills, just listen to yourself! That’s the story of your life, isn’t it, ‘just responding to what you find yourself landed with!’ You must learn to take charge of your life. Learn to assert yourself. Decide what you want and make it happen! Like when that go-getting smoothie asked if he could sit by you, you should have asked yourself, Do I want him? And if not, you should have told him to go away. Don’t be such a victim!”
When criticised, Mildred always found it difficult to assemble her thoughts clearly and, above all, quickly enough. Certainly not quickly enough on this occasion to halt the next bit of good that Val had in mind to do her.
An Assertiveness Course. With the autumn term coming on, there’d be plenty of them starting up. Expensive, yes, but never had money been better spent. Why, Val herself had been on one of these Courses. Without it, she’d never have been able to make the break with Malcolm.
“No tears! No mess! No recriminations. Just Wham, and he was gone. A clean cut. A surgical operation.”
With sterilized instruments, presumably? And a general anaesthetic? Was that really the way life should be shaped?
“I’ll think about it,” she said, with reference to the Assertiveness Course and knowing that she wouldn’t. Or, rather, that she already had thought about it during the few seconds while Val had been speaking and had decided against it. It would be just one more thing that she would turn out not to be any good at.