This Year It Will Be Different
Jen felt a wave of unease, as she often did about Tina. She hoped there was no danger of Tina spoiling their first Christmas by arriving suddenly and being sweet. Tina being sweet was sickening. Martin seemed to forget how she had humiliated him so often and so publicly. How other men had been found sipping wine and eating dainty delicate sandwiches when Martin got home tired from work. In the days when Stevie was a toddler and well out of the way in his playpen and a wet nappy, Martin could barely remember the number of times when Tina had disappeared, overseas, sometimes for weeks on end, or how her working hours in the casino seemed to stretch to midmorning and Martin had been unable to go to work until she returned.
Tina had been able to think of Stevie alone in the house; Martin had not.
But nowadays, when Tina was so charming and undemanding, it seemed that he could no longer remember the bad old days. Tina was so unfairly good-looking: long legs, long fair hair, and whatever she wore looked marvelous. She looked girlish and in many ways too young and irresponsible to be Stevie’s mother. Jen, on the other hand, looked matronly, she told herself sadly, and as if she were the mother of many older children. Life was unfair, Jen was the same age as the leggy Tina, twenty-nine. Next year they would both be thirty, but one of them would never look it, not even when she turned forty in ten years time.
Jen pinned up the Christmas cards, attaching them to ribbons and trailing them across the wall.
“That’s nice,” Stevie said approvingly. “We never had that before.”
“What way did you put them then?”
“I don’t think we put them at all. Well, last year Dad and I were in a hotel, remember, before you came along, and before that I don’t think Mum had much time.”
He was neither wistful nor critical. He was just seeing things the way they were.
Jen seethed to herself. Mum had no time, indeed! Mum who had no real job, who just played about in that casino, had no time to put up Christmas decorations for her husband and little son. But plain old Jen had time, boring Jen who worked in a school from nine to four. Industrious Jen who dragged herself and Tina’s son on two buses so that the boy could see his mother with minimum fuss. And took the money out of her own purse to pay for the taxi in order to keep the peace. But nobody ever said Jen hadn’t got time to do anything. There was no mercy, no quarter given second time round.
Martin approved of the decorated house; he went round touching the sprays of holly and ivy over the pictures, the candle in the window, the tree that was waiting for them all to fill.
“This is lovely,” he said. “It’s like a house you see on telly not like a real house at all.”
It was meant as high praise. Jen felt a strange stinging in her eyes. It was a hell of a lot more real, she thought, when bloody Tina was here with her high-flying friends and her idiotic chat and no time to make a Christmas for anyone.
Well, at least this year, like last, Tina would be miles away on a cruise ship dealing the cards, calling the numbers, and looking divine for the passengers. That’s what she had done last year, just before the divorce was final. Jen had gone home to her mother, who had warned her all through the five days of Christmas that it wouldn’t be easy to marry a divorced man and raise his child. Martin said it had been a lonely Christmas in the hotel, though Stevie had enjoyed the organized games. They had both thought it was better not to spring too much on him at once, let him have a Christmas alone with his father to show him there was some stability in a changing world. He had only been seven, poor little fellow. Still he had adapted very well, all in all. He certainly didn’t think of her as a wicked stepmother, and he didn’t cry for his golden-haired mum. Jen just wished they wouldn’t think of her as so ordinary and of Tina as something special and outside normal rules.
She had lit a fire for them and they sat, all three of them, around it talking. For once nobody asked what was on the television, Martin didn’t say he had to go out to his worksheet, Stevie didn’t say he wanted to go to his room. Jen wondered why she had felt so uneasy about Tina and their Christmas. It was childish to have these forebodings. She laughed at the other school secretary who read her star signs carefully before taking any action each morning; people would laugh too at Jen with her premonitions and funny feelings that something was going to happen.
“Tina rang me at work today,” Martin said just then.
Martin hated being rung at work, he was on the counter in a busy bank, he hated being called away from his window. Only the greatest of emergencies would make Jen pick up the phone to call him. Surely it must have been the same with Tina, and this must have been an emergency.
“Her cruise has been canceled apparently so she’s not going abroad. Only told them at the last minute, and no money or anything. Very unfair of the company.” Martin shook his head at such sharp practice.
“So Mum will be at home at Christmas?” Stevie was pleased. “Will I go over to see her in the morning or what?”
Jen found that her eyes were tingling for the second time that evening. Damn her. Damn Tina forever. Why couldn’t she be ordinary? Why couldn’t she have found a man and lived with him and married him like ordinary people did? Why did it have to be this flapper life of cruises and casinos and clubs? And Lord, if it had to be that, why did it have to be this shipping company of all of them that had to fail? There had to be a reason. Now they would have to disrupt their nice Christmas Day, just so that Tina could see her son for a couple of hours. A son she couldn’t care about or why would she have given him away? It was so unfair. Martin was shaking his head doubtfully.
“That’s the problem,” he said, looking from one to the other. “You see, she had all her plans made to go abroad and she has nobody, nobody at all for Christmas. She doesn’t think she could stay in her house all alone. She doesn’t like the idea of being all alone for Christmas.”
“Lots of people are alone for Christmas,” Jen said suddenly before she had time to think.
“Yes, well sure they are. But this is Stevie’s mum. And you know Tina, she likes to have a thousand people round her, but they all think she’s going away.”
Jen stood up pretending to fix the curtains which didn’t need to be touched at all. They didn’t seem to notice her.
“So what will Mum do then if she doesn’t want to be alone? Will she go away somewhere else?” Stevie wanted to know.
“I think she will, she said she was ringing round a bit,” Martin said. Of course she was ringing round a bit, but who better to ring first than the kind ex-husband. Just to make him miserable and guilty, just to make him offer her Christmas Day with her son, with a nice meal cooked for her. Yes, obviously Tina would ring Martin first, the old reliable, always there. No matter if she ran away, she knew he’d take her back. Until he met Jen and found that life could be lived on a normal level.
It had taken Jen to open Martin’s eyes to Tina and her way of going on. But, Jen thought grimly, she mightn’t have opened them enough. It was hovering in the air between them. The invitation. It had to come from Jen, but she was not going to issue it. No, she was most definitely not. She would pretend that she hadn’t understood the tension.
“Then I won’t be able to see her on Christmas Day?” Stevie said.
Jen was bright. “If she had been on the cruise you wouldn’t have seen her anyway, remember?” she said. “And you’ve given her your Christmas present and hers to you is under the tree.”
“But if she has nowhere to go …?” Stevie said.
“Oh Stevie, your mum has a thousand places to go, you heard your father say just a second ago she has a thousand friends around her.”
“I said, she likes a thousand friends—it’s a different thing.”
Jen knew what she would like to do at that minute. She would like to have put her coat on and walked out in the rain and wind. She would like to have hailed the first taxi she saw and gone to Tina’s house. Then she would have taken Tina by the neck and shaken her until there was only a flicker of li
fe left in her body. Briskly she would get back into the taxi and come home to inquire if anyone would like drinking chocolate as a treat.
But Jen wouldn’t do this because it was not a civilized thing to do. It would be considered the act of a madwoman. In England, that is. In the more hot-blooded Mediterranean countries it would be totally understood. But this was not a country of Latin lovers and passionate jealousy, this was a civilized place. So Jen fixed a slightly dim smile to her face, as if she were talking to a very senile man and a very young baby instead of her husband and stepson.
“Well, no point in us bothering about all that now, is there? Your mum is well able to sort out her own problems, Stevie. Would anyone like some drinking chocolate?”
Nobody felt like any, so Jen stood up deliberately and made some for herself. She knew if she had put three mugs on the tray they would all have had it, but why should she? Why should she play nanny to them both? While they stared into the changing pictures of the fire and worried about beautiful Tina and her troubled Christmas.
When Stevie had gone to bed, Jen talked about the supermarket. They wanted her to work Saturday, Sunday, and the two days before Christmas. Should she do it? It was a lot of money, in the middle of January they would be sorry if she hadn’t done it. On the other hand, maybe it was just tiring herself out for the sake of a wage packet. Might they be happier if she were to stay at home a bit and relax? She wondered what Martin thought.
“Whichever you like best,” he said. His face still looked preoccupied to her. Suddenly it was all too much effort. Suddenly the mask of civilized behavior fell right down to the ground.
“Whichever I like?” she said in disbelief. “Are you actually mad, Martin? Whichever I like? Do you think anyone in the whole world would like to get out of a nice warm bed and leave a gorgeous man like you still in the bed, get dressed, flog over there and deal with bad-tempered customers, watch that people don’t nick things at the till, see women with big rings on spending forty, fifty, sixty pounds a time on food? If you think anyone would choose to do that, you must be insane.” He looked at her, dumbfounded. Jen had never spoken to him like this before. Her eyes were blazing and her face was contorted with anger.
“But why did you … I mean, I thought you wanted to earn … you never said …” He was stammering, unable to cope with the woman in the other chair who had turned into a stranger.
“I wanted to have extra money to make this a nice home for you and Stevie and me, that’s what I wanted. And I never allowed myself to think about the sum of money that goes from your salary every month towards Tina’s mortgage. Not even on a Saturday afternoon when I look at her house, which is bigger and better than our house, do I question the fact that you pay towards its upkeep when we all know that sometimes Tina earns three times what you and I earn together. I know, I know her work is uncertain. Some weeks she might earn nothing. I know, but isn’t she lucky, my, my, my, what a bit of luck that we never suggested that she should get a regular job like the rest of the world has to do?” Jen paused for breath and pulled away her hand which Martin was reaching for. “No, let me finish, perhaps I should have said it before, perhaps I am the guilty one for pretending it doesn’t matter, for putting on a brave little face, but that’s what I thought you needed. You’d had enough tempers and tantrums with the last one, I thought you needed a bit of peace and calm around you now.”
“But I need you, you’re what I want,” he said simply.
She went on, nodding her head in agreement. “Well, that’s what I tried to be, calm, and putting a good face on things, and I suppose that’s what I’ll go on doing. It was just when you asked me to suit myself or whatever you said—whichever I like’—as if there was any question. Of course I’d like to be at home here, getting up late, pottering around a bit, maybe doing the plants and sort of just enjoying ourselves, like people do. Like some people do.”
“But I thought you found it a bit dull here, and that’s why you like to run off and be with people, meet them, and have a bit of money as independence, you know.” His big honest face looked at her bewildered. No wonder Tina had walked over this kind, uncomplicated man.
Jen opened the kitchen cupboard and showed him the store of luxury foods, the crackers, the table decorations. She gestured to the bright, shining ornaments and the electric lights on the Christmas tree. She wordlessly touched the new standard lamp that stood up by his chair, the curtains on their smart new rail, the brass box that held the logs for the fire. “This is hardly spending money just for me to fritter away. I got these things for our house. I don’t hoard my salary for me any more than you do with yours. I spend it making a nice home for us all, and I’m sorry, Martin, I do not want to have Tina here to wreck our first Christmas, I really don’t, and that’s why I’m so upset. I just want you and me and Stevie and a bit of time. Time to talk. Is that so awful?”
“Tina? Come here for Christmas? There was never any question of that!”
“Oh yes, there was. I saw it in your eyes, you wanted brave Jen, nice calm Jen to say Let’s be civilized, let’s ask Stevie’s mother to share our groaning board. Well, I won’t and that’s that.”
“But you can’t think I want Tina here, can you? After all the Christmases she ruined on me and on Stevie, after all the heartbreak and the lies and the deceit. Why would I want her here again? I am divorced from her remember, I’m married to you. It’s you I love.”
“Yes, but what about Tina’s Christmas?”
“Oh, she’ll find somewhere, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. It was you who sounded worried when you were talking earlier. With Stevie, you definitely looked upset about her.”
“I was and I am a bit, you see I didn’t finish while Stevie was there.”
“What was it?” Jen was anxious.
“Oh, just Tina upsetting people. As well as the Christmas fiasco, she has plans to go abroad in the New Year. More or less permanent job, she says. We had a talk about the house, her house. She won’t need any more help towards it, she’s going to let it apparently, and she said she’s sending us something to recompense me.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Yes, well, so will I but the main thing is no more monthly check to her.”
“Are you upset because she’s going?”
“Only for Stevie. I was thinking that he will miss her, but then tonight when I came home to this lovely place I think he’ll only miss her for a little while, he’s got such a good home here. You’ve made it for both of us a real home.”
But she wouldn’t give in completely, she had come out in the open and she wasn’t going to put on her gentle Jen mask again immediately.
“So what was the upset about if you’re not going to miss Tina, and you think Stevie’ll get over it. Why were you so depressed?”
“I was thinking that I might be a very dull sort of husband. Tina ran away from me, you ran off to work at weekends, I thought it was because I was dull.” He looked so sad, she knelt down in front of him.
“I thought I was dull too, I wanted to be tigerish like Tina, but I never thought you were dull for a moment, not for one second. I swear it.”
He kissed her in the firelight.
“Men are very silly really,” he said. “We never think of saying the obvious. You are beautiful and fascinating and I’ve always been afraid since the first time we met that you might be too bright for me, and think I was a dreary sort of bank clerk encumbered with a son. I couldn’t believe it when you wanted to take us both on. I never think of Tina except in relief that she gave me Stevie and that it turned out as it did. It never crossed my mind to compare you. Never.”
“I know.” She soothed him now, he seemed so worried. But he was struggling to find words. He was determined to pay her the compliment that was in his head and his heart but he had never been able to say.
“Years ago,” Martin said, “they used to have mainly black-and-white films and when one was in color
they used to say ‘In Glorious Technicolor …’ That’s what you’re like, Glorious Technicolor to me.”
He stroked Jen’s mouse-brown hair, and her pale cheek, he put his arms around her and hugged her to him in her gray cardigan and her gray and lilac skirt. He kissed her lips that had only a little lipstick left, and closed her eyelids that had no makeup, and kissed her on each of them.
“Glorious Technicolor,” he said again.
PULLING TOGETHER
Penny wrote an air letter to her friend Maggie in Australia every week. Every week she wrote about life in the staff room, how Miss Hall had become like a caricature of a schoolmarm, how the children were now all delinquents instead of just a steady thirty percent of them. She wrote about the parents, some of them filled with mad hopes and belief that their daughters were going to conquer the world. It was a hard thing to live in a land that seemed to have been ruled forever by a woman monarch and a woman prime minister, Penny wrote, it gave girls notions that they could get anywhere. That was nearly as bad as the old notions, the notions that they could get nowhere.
She wrote about the time passing so quickly that it was quite impossible to believe she was facing her fifth Christmas in this school. If anyone had told her that when she started. If anyone had said that at twenty-seven Penny would have had one job, and one job only, in a girls’ school in a city miles from her home. In a small, shabby flat that she had never done up because she had never intended to stay in it. She wrote to Maggie about cold autumn evenings where she stood, hands deep in her pocket, cheering on the hockey team because it showed a bit of school spirit and pleased the games mistress, how she helped at the school play because it was solidarity and how, even now, without a note in her head she would help for the fifth time to organize the carol concert.