A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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that must be protected. As she looked at familiar things her clear sight seemed to give different, surprising perspectives.
Kath was wearing summer sandals on high cork heels, her toenails were painted with a dark, jammy red varnish.
Looking at her mother’s feet Harriet said musingly, ‘You used to have a pair of sandals like that when I was small.’
She remembered a blue skirt, too, and a small sandpit, perhaps in a playground. Kath in her blue skirt bent down to her with a cigarette curling blue smoke between her fingers.
‘Cork wedgies, that’s right. What a memory you’ve got,’ Kath said. ‘You can’t have been more than four or five.’
‘I can remember all kinds of things,’ Harriet answered. There was something else about today that reminded her of long ago. Perhaps it was the light, oblique and golden, the standard illumination of memory.
Kath looked at her with curiosity. ‘Can you? What things?’
‘Places where we lived, before Ken came. The one up a lot of stairs, where you could look down on the railway lines.’
‘That was a horrible place. I wish you’d forget it, I certainly have.’ Kath’s voice was sharp. They rarely talked about the time before Ken, before the advent of comfort and respectability.
‘It was all right, wasn’t it? I remember playing on the stairs. There was a fat woman who used to take me into her room and let me touch some china animals. Where were you?’
‘Working. Sybil used to mind you while I was out.’
‘Those days can’t have been easy for you.’ Harriet often wondered how she had managed, Kath who liked things nice and who hated rows or scenes, or even passion, any demonstration of naked feeling. Yet she had supported herself and an illegitimate daughter, in a series of menial jobs, until Ken Trott had come along to rescue them both. Except that Harriet hadn’t wanted to be rescued.
‘I had you, love. I wanted to look after you. I wasn’t going to let anything come between us, whatever else I had to do.’
Except Ken and Lisa, Harriet thought, and then almost laughed aloud at the tired old resentment that still came creeping up to assault her. Harriet was eight years old when Ken took Kath and her daughter into the first house and embarked on the processes of refurbishment, bathroom after bathroom and kitchen after kitchen, that had reached their high point here in Sunderland Avenue. Lisa was born when Harriet was ten. Adult Harriet knew that she had hated them both, stepfather and half-sister, until late into her teens. Young Harriet did not know what the feeling was, only that it cut her off. She dealt with it, and with other emotions that did not seem to fit in with being a Trott, by suppressing them. She played up the aspects of herself that were approved of, or at the least tolerated, and so she became Harriet the clever one, the determined one, the self-reliant one. Harriet with the wild temper, if you provoked her. Lisa was the pretty one, the one who was the image of her mother, the good little girl. The very memory made Harriet want to grind her teeth. She knew that she must have been a difficult child.
‘Poor you,’ she commiserated with her mother.
Kath was shocked. ‘I don’t know why you should say that. I’ve been very lucky. I could have ended up anywhere, considering the way I began.’
Harriet knew that the euphemism meant considering I was pregnant at eighteen, not married. She understood her mother’s fear of it, even now. It was serious, getting into trouble in the English provinces in 1952. Kath hardly ever talked about it.
Suddenly, in the sunny garden, Harriet’s consciousness of her dream suffered a dizzying change of focus. From feeling light and free, she felt sickeningly cut adrift. Her marriage was over. She was grown up, twenty-nine years old, without dependants, without a centre to her life. Kath had her centre, here with Ken, and Harriet felt ashamed of her adolescent, submerged resentment of it. For herself she had a job, perhaps a dozen real friends. It seemed little to show for thirty years of existence. Thinking of her mother’s much more frightening isolation at eighteen, Harriet was possessed by a longing to link herself with that vanished girl.
‘Tell me about it. You never have, not really.’
‘It’s all too long ago, love. Ken’s your Dad, isn’t he?’
‘Please.’ Harriet hadn’t speculated for years about the existence, somewhere, of a real father. Even in her most intensely separate years she had barely imagined him, and she was not asking about him now. It was Kath she wanted to hear about. She was afraid for herself and drifting. Kath’s story would expose the roots that went back before Ken’s time. The roots were buried deep; she could hold on by them.
‘Tell me,’ she begged. ‘Tell me about what you were like then.’
Kath was touched by her eagerness. She sat for a few seconds looking down the garden to the open patio doors that led into the quiet house, seeing beyond them. Then, surprising Harriet, she tapped her hands on the metal arms of her chair and began to laugh.
‘I was a bright spark in those days. I thought everything I wanted was just there for the taking.’
‘How strange,’ Harriet said softly. ‘I thought that too, last night. I had a peculiar dream about it, except that I wasn’t asleep.’ She wondered if their visions of everything were the same, linking them across thirty years. Kath was busy with her own memories, not listening.
‘I was very pretty, and I knew it.’ She turned to Harriet and pushed out her soft lower lip in a flirtatious pout that her daughter had never seen before. They both laughed.
‘I had plenty of boyfriends. There’d be the cinema on Friday nights, dancing on Saturdays. One or two of them even had cars. On Sundays we’d go for a drive, right out into the country, to a pub.’
‘What were they like, the boyfriends?’
‘I can’t remember. Brylcreemed hair, they all had. Jackets and ties.’
One of them, Harriet thought, had been her father. Which of them didn’t have any significance at all. She tried to imagine him, with his Brylcreemed hair, undoing the knot of his tie before unbuttoning Kath’s cotton shirtwaister. The picture would only come to her in black and white, like a still from a Fifties movie. She wondered if she had been conceived after the cinema, the dance or the country pub. There seemed no point in asking, ‘What was he like?’
‘I do remember someone from those days. Very vividly. I still think of him, sometimes.’
Harriet lifted her head. ‘Who is he?’
‘Oh, he was much older than me. He was the neighbour of your grandparents. We lived on one corner of the street and he lived on the opposite corner. Only his house was different, it was turned sideways so it looked in a different direction, and you couldn’t see into it from where we were, across the road. He kept to himself, and we hardly ever saw him. It was funny, the way we got to be friends.’
‘What happened?’
But Kath was simply absorbed in the recollection. She went on, when she was ready, without needing Harriet’s prompting.
‘I used to ride an old bike. I was doing a typing job for a shoe company and I’d cycle to work when the weather was good to save the bus fare. The day I properly met Mr Archer I think I must have been talking to a boy around the corner, where your gran couldn’t see me. After I said goodbye to him I got on the bike and swung round the corner on it, on the pavement. I ran straight into a lamp-post. Blinded by love, I suppose.’
Kath produced the pout again and Harriet laughed once more, although she was impatient for the story to continue.
‘I fell off, with the bike on top of me and the bike playing a tune because the wheel was buckled and some spokes had come loose. Mr Archer was coming up the road the other way, and he helped me up. I was half in tears, with the shock and with feeling a fool, and seeing my bike all bent.’
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