The Heart of the Country Read online

  ‘I don’t want to be dependent on the State,’ said Natalie.

  ‘Who does?’ inquired Sonia, civilly. ‘But what choice do you have? There’s no fresh milk, only powdered. It’s cheaper. Ben can make it up.’

  The children didn’t go to school that day, and Natalie just slept and slept, in Sonia’s bed.

  Driven Mad

  Natalie stayed with me for three months. I gave her tutorials on the Welfare State: she did the things I was too depressed to do, such as picking up toys, sorting out clothes, and weeding the garden. Within the week, strangely, the house had the same polished orderly look that characterized Dunbarton. Very boring. Alice slept with my three, Ben had a blanketed-off section of the bathroom, and Natalie and I shared a bedroom. (Oh yes, separate beds. Are you mad? Ros across the road had a divan to spare. She’d found it in a skip. The things people throw out!)

  Natalie got thirty-seven pounds forty-three pence from the State, plus various renewal and heating allowances. I managed to extract fifty-five pounds forty-three for my lot. We pooled the money and even occasionally managed a bottle of wine. I don’t think she was happy, but I was. No word came from Harry Harris. The children no longer asked after him. Ben was silent but responsible (as responsible as any male can be: that is to say as long as it suits him but not a moment longer: consider his father!) and Alice clucked around my three making herself useful. I could see panic in her blue eyes, sometimes, when she thought no one was looking. Both children hated their school. They were laughed at on two counts: first for having posh accents, then for living on the Boxover Estate, where the new poor (us) and the problem families (her: she’d walked out of the hostel) were housed. Most children adopt the local accent pretty quickly, as cover, but these two seemed unable to do so. They were somehow unbending: stubborn, like their mother. They found it difficult to admit defeat.

  Natalie got herself put on the housing list, though I couldn’t see the reason for it. It seemed to me we were doing pretty well as we were. Only once did she flip. We and a group of others were queueing outside the telephone on the green, with our coins at the ready, and Ros came out of the booth in tears. Ros had a boyfriend at the time they reckoned was supporting her, though he wasn’t; he could only just support himself and his beard. So they’d stopped her benefit. The DHSS don’t mind if men visitors stay until two o’clock or even three, but four’s going a bit far, five smacks of early shift, and anything later means breakfast, and if it’s breakfast there’s hell to pay. They don’t begrudge us a spot of sex – it saves paying the psychiatrists’ bills later – it’s relationships they can’t stand. They reckon the ultimate obscenity is human affection. If a man stays, your benefit stops. We, the abandoned mothers of Britain, don’t deserve love. We had our chance, and we muffed it. I muffed my chance of being kept by Stephen by having this fancy about Alec, this stupid feeling that even as a non-earning citizen (stay-at-home-wife) and mother (forgive me, unpaid child minder for the State) I was entitled to love and be loved.

  So I would get confused and upset sometimes, and even with my help Natalie got a lot of things wrong. She should have gone to Welfare in the first place – they’d have presented her case to the DHSS and the Housing Department themselves and then both would have coughed up. And she should never have believed Mary Alice about Housing: clerks in one department have no idea what goes on in another, and sometimes not even their own. Regulations change every week. If you don’t hear what you want to hear you must go from clerk to clerk and department to department until you do. Of course Welfare’s in Street, DHSS in Glastonbury, and Housing in Shepton, and Appeals in Bridgwater – that’s a forty mile round trip from Eddon Gurney, and none of us has a car, have we? And there’s only one bus a day, if you’re lucky, so you have to hitch, and you can’t hitch with children. And that, if you ask me, is why one in five women on supplementary benefit ends up in mental homes. Driven mad by the State.

  ‘Driven mad’. It’s just a phrase these days but I think it’s a real enough concept. Women do get driven mad. Men drive women mad. Anxiety about how to keep a home going for the children drives women mad. Unrequited love drives women mad. Working out how to get from A to B when you have no money and there are no buses drives women mad. (Don’t ask me what drives men mad. Let them look after themselves. They run society, don’t they, not to mention the hospitals and the drug industry? They are the psychiatrists. How many women shrinks in here? Four? To twenty-eight men?) Okay, okay, feminism sends women mad. Funny joke. Point taken. I have to take it, don’t I, because I want to get out of here.

  As I say, it was Natalie’s turn to flip when we were waiting in the queue for the telephone one Monday morning. I’d been explaining to her how I meant to get through to Tania Rostavitz, the only welfare officer at Gurney who has a clue. That is, by saying I was her sister Anna. I just happen to know, from reading the holiday postcards in her office, that Tania has a sister Anna. Claim a personal relationship – otherwise the switchboard just leaves you hanging on the end of the line, until your money runs out and the pips go and you give up. Saves them all kinds of trouble, doesn’t it!

  Anyway, Ros came out of the box in tears – you should see Ros: she’s so romantic looking: really beautiful with misty black hair and big eyes; she looks like a Hardy heroine, and here she was, stuck with the kids in a council house, arguing with the State as to whether or not this fat, awful little creep with the beard was a full-time or a part-time lover – oh yes, we get reduced by our circumstances! A lovely brimming saucepan of hope and emotion simmered down and down until it’s a sort of greasy sludge – if you’ll forgive a metaphor from the kitchen. And Natalie suddenly for no apparent reason shrieked and started banging on the telephone box and shouting ‘I can’t live like this. I won’t!’ and ran back and sat in the garden all afternoon. Just sat. She wouldn’t go inside the house. She said it frightened her.

  The only upshot was, of course, she and I had to join the telephone queue again the next day and by then Tania had gone on holiday (they’re always on holiday or on courses or being transferred to head office) and there were even more delays. But she had to get through somehow. For some reason of their own the DHSS had given a special clothing allowance to Ben but not to Alice. Something to do with him sleeping on the bathroom floor and her having a proper bed. But by then anyway Alice was sleeping on the sofa. And when we wrote them letters all we ever got was one of those forms with reasons for disallowance on them, and the section ticked ‘child over requisite age’ which was crazy, since Ben was older than Alice anyway. Once their computer starts doing that kind of thing, you have to get through in person. It’s full time work being on social security. They really make you earn your living.

  But look, it was cosy. I reckon we could have gone on like that forever. But fate started intervening, working itself up towards the fire on the float. Just little straws in the wind. Natalie actually getting a job and then the odd matter of the old leather bucket. It quite frightens me how things keep turning up, and taking a hand in events. You get the feeling that not just people, but material objects, are part of the general conspiracy to toss you up in the air and land you where you least expect.

  Cough, Cough, Cough Again

  ‘Same old floor, same old mop, different owner,’ said Flora to Jane. (Remember her? Arthur’s long-suffering wife? Too thin for her own good?) Now Jane and Arthur were living in Dunbarton, Flora still came up to clean. Why not? A job’s a job and it’s stupid to feel loyalty to one employer just because they’re hard done to by the next. When did an employer ever feel loyalty to an employee? That’s what Bernard wants to know. His father worked for thirty-five years in the sales office of a firm which made linoleum. The office was just under the factory chimney. Strange particles fell from the sky, and drifted through the windows, along with the flecks and grime. In the thirty-sixth year Bernard’s father got cancer of the lungs. He was fired (before he had time to make a connection between inhaling fumes and his illness
) on the grounds that he’d been pilfering. It was true. He had. He’d been pilfering for twenty-four years. Everybody did it. Just a square yard or two of reject stuff, otherwise thrown away. It just all of a sudden became a firing offence, the day after he reported sick. Funny, that. Cough, cough, cough he went and did the new staff-relations man come and visit him in hospital? Like hell he did. A friend or two from work came. A new man sat at his desk now, they said. The waters had just closed over Bernard’s father’s head. It was as if he had never been. And no pension either, because of the pilfering. And as everyone knows, lung cancer can happen to anyone, even non-smokers.

  ‘I must have been mad,’ said Bernard’s dad, ‘cough, cough, cough!’ He’d never smoked in his life, or drunk, or run after women. ‘Thirty-five years of my life, believing if I did my best by them they’d look after me. You take a lesson from me, lad. Don’t you believe them when they say a steady chap sticks to one job, doesn’t chop and change. That’s employers’ talk.’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Cough, cough, cough,’ went his father.

  And now here Bernard was, while Flora cleaned Jane’s floor, heaving sacks of enigmatic powders off lorries and on to shelves, wheeling half-corroded drums of liquid from shed to shed, and the only safety measure he could see was a tanker of water and a hose.

  ‘Just dilute,’ Angus had said. ‘That’s all you ever have to do – dilute.’ And the previous day one of the drivers had remarked:

  ‘If you get any of the dust on you, wash it off.’

  ‘What sort of dust is it?’ Bernard asked. ‘Has it a name?’

  ‘Search me, old lad,’ the driver said, in the tones of the upper classes. Quite the little yuppie he appeared, but then nowadays men out of universities do drive lorries. They have to. It isn’t that the class system is breaking down; no: it’s just that those on top, feeling uncomfortable, lean down the ladder and grab what traditionally belongs to those on the lower rungs. Such as jobs.

  ‘All they saw fit to tell me,’ said the new-style lorry driver, ‘was if you get any of it on you, wash it off lickety-split. I am passing the information on to you, as is only my duty. We working men must look after each other, now they’ve cut the Factory Inspectorate by 50 per cent and those that are left are kept occupied plugging the leaks in Sellafield pipes. How do you tell a Factory Inspector? His thumbs glow in the dark. Heigh-ho!’

  ‘Twat,’ muttered Bernard, ungratefully, as the other drove off.

  Now Flora, for her inexpert but frequent washings of the Dunbarton kitchen floor, was these days using a string mop and an old leather bucket. Leather, thought Jane, in this day and age!

  ‘I thought I’d thrown that old bucket out,’ said Jane.

  ‘I brought it back in,’ said Flora. ‘I like it.’

  ‘Then you’re the only one who does. It was in a job lot of bits and pieces at the auction. Whoever bought it actually went to the trouble of leaving it behind. That’s really saying something!’

  ‘It looks like an antique to me,’ said Flora. ‘Perhaps your husband would be interested.’

  ‘No,’ said Jane, sharply. She did not care for conversations with the help. She did not particularly like the house now she was here. Arthur’s furniture looked peculiar in a modern bungalow, even she could see that. Heels marked the parquet floors. She had believed that living above the shop had fuelled her paranoia: she could see that living at a distance from it was even worse. She was fifty. She had done nothing with her life, except agitate about Arthur and sweep a few floors. They’d had one daughter, Carla, now at college, whose existence seemed merely to spur Arthur on to take an interest in younger women. Carla had been her father’s child from the moment she first opened her hooded infant eyes, treating her mother with a kind of idle contempt. Terrible, thought Jane, not to like your own daughter, but there it was. She didn’t think Carla noticed.

  ‘If he isn’t interested,’ said Flora, ‘my boyfriend will be. He’s an antique dealer, too.’

  The bracketing of Bernard, king of the rubbish tip, with Arthur, king of Dunbarton, was not music to Jane’s ears. No.

  Natalie’s little grey cat sat looking up at Jane Wandle with wide eyes, reminding her of every young woman who had ever stared thus at Arthur. How the creature got in was a mystery. Jane had sealed up the cat flap, closed the ever-open window of the laundry, but there the cat somehow managed to be, staring up with a look of dependence and hostility mixed. Jane opened the back door and smacked the creature out.

  Flora protested. ‘You shouldn’t do that! This is her home. She’s got to have somewhere to live.’

  ‘Natalie Harris should have thought of that,’ said Jane. ‘If she cared for it she should have taken it with her. Cats are expensive. Why should I take it on?’

  Jane thought these days that Arthur probably had indeed had an affair with Natalie Harris. She was his type; little girl impassive, clear-skinned, like one of the dolls she, Jane, collected. For all she knew Arthur was still seeing her.

  ‘Just because you don’t like Natalie Harris,’ said Flora, ‘is no reason to take it out on the cat.’

  ‘Why should I not like Natalie Harris?’ asked Jane, a rhetorical question to which Flora replied with a smirk which unfortunately Jane saw.

  She was right, then. And moreover, if Flora knew, everyone knew. What could she do? Nothing. Where could she go? Nowhere. All she could do was follow the advice given to economically dependent female spouses since the beginning of time – wait for her husband to cease his wanderings, and be as loving and loveable as possible in the meantime. Jane handed Flora a scrubbing brush.

  ‘I pay you one pound twenty-five pence an hour, Flora,’ she said. ‘Please earn it. Use this, if you don’t mind, not the mop.’ Flora dropped the scrubbing brush in the bucket so that dirty water splashed Jane’s nice pale blue floral skirt. ‘Some things just aren’t worth the money,’ Flora said. ‘Personally I prefer cats to people! Wash your own floors.’ And she walked out. But she took the bucket.

  ‘Of course I’m not having an affair with Natalie Harris,’ said Arthur, in bed that night. ‘She’s not my type. I like skinny women. How you do worry yourself! I think she’s having a fling with Angus, actually.’

  ‘What about Jean?’

  ‘Jean won’t worry. She’s too sensible.’ The bed they lay in had belonged to the Harrises. It was king-size, and had gone for a song at the auction. The original Wandle matrimonial bed had fetched five hundred and forty-five pounds a couple of weeks before they’d moved into Dunbarton. How a convenient fate played into Arthur’s hands!

  A buyer had come into the shop, looking for just such a rare brass bed, and Arthur had taken him upstairs and shown it to him: a splendid piece of brasswork, early nineteenth-century.

  ‘Just as a matter of interest,’ said Arthur. ‘Of course it isn’t stock! Very much not for sale!’

  But he’d capitulated on being offered five hundred for it, five hundred and forty-five if the buyer could take it there and then in the van. He could, said Arthur, and when Jane came home from hearing reading, the mattress and bedding were on the floor and her and Arthur’s marriage bed of 26 years’ standing was gone. She’d cried, and Arthur had been abashed and apologetic, and had had a word with Angus, and was only too happy to buy her the Harris bed when the opportunity arose, which he thought she’d really like, it being modern. (Jane kept saying she hated old things, which in an antique dealer’s wife can only really be interpreted as hostility. Can this marriage be saved?)

  Now he wondered on which side Natalie had lain, and which side Harry, and why it was married couples stuck to one side or the other, and what was to be made of it.

  ‘I wish you were happier,’ he said to Jane. ‘I wish I knew what to do to cheer you up.’

  ‘I don’t like the house,’ she said. ‘I know I wanted it but now I’m here I want to be back in the flat. It’s too far from anywhere. I can’t get proper help in the house
and I’m lonely.’

  ‘If that’s what you really want,’ he said, rather too quickly, ‘we’ll put the place up for sale right away. I reckon we can get a hundred and twenty thousand. That’s sixty thousand clear profit. It’s a family house – we can wriggle round capital gains tax on medical grounds, I should think. Your nerves, perhaps – ’

  ‘But what will people think? Poor Natalie Harris – ’

  He was quite taken aback, surprised at the speed of her mind.

  ‘Poor Natalie Harris? Don’t spare a pang for Natalie Harris! When the heat dies down Harry Harris will turn up in the north somewhere, with a new name, and she and the kids will be off to join him. It’s a set-up job, don’t you see? The factory closes, the staff aren’t paid, he’s got a chunk put away no one can touch. Oh, she’s in on it, all right. What did you think she was, a poor wronged woman alone in the world?’

  He could not add that since Natalie cheated on her husband she deserved no pity, but he said it in his heart. He wished he had a wife he could confide in fully. He wondered what it would be like to be lying now next to Natalie, and wished he was. Then he fell asleep.

  No ‘For Sale’ board went up. It would have caused talk and speculation. Arthur just had a word with Angus at Waley and Rightly, and Angus said he’d do what he could. Arthur offered a 25 per cent commission, which seemed reasonable inasmuch as it was Angus who had arranged for the house to be sold to Arthur, at, roughly, half its market value. Though a new selling price of one hundred and twenty thousand was pushing it, said Angus. The second bathroom was like a box. But then when did Arthur never not push a profit to its limit?

  Traumas

  Natalie went up to the Abbey grounds to see Peter the groundsman. He swept; she walked along beside him. She had collected her DHSS draft and had managed to give Sonia the slip somewhere in Glastonbury. Ben and Alice now walked home from school by themselves; Ben put up with the embarrassment of being seen with his sister with the merest shrug, as if this was the least of his troubles. Sometimes Natalie could hear him through the bathroom wall crying in his sleep, but by day he was brisk, competent and distant, and seemed to make no distinction between Sonia and his mother, which might have been an elaborate act of revenge or might not, how could Natalie tell? Certainly he blamed Natalie for so carelessly losing his father. As for Alice, it was hard to tell what went on in her head. She sucked her thumb, and played with Teresa as if she were the same age and not four years older, and pulled Edwina’s hair when she thought no one was looking. The clear-eyed, protected look had gone. Alice no longer prattled, but whined. Perhaps she was just growing older; perhaps she was deeply traumatized? Who would ever know, who could ever tell?