Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

‘No, it can’t do any harm,’ Dinah agreed. It was not easy to deny Ed.

The car rolled down the driveway leaving the Parkeses with their arms around each other, waving, against the backdrop of their woodland castle. Dinah wondered if Milly was mutely watching from some window slit.

‘I rather like Ed,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s something about all that energy.’

Matt liked him because he reflected himself, Dinah thought. Matt was full of his own kind of energy, and he was capable of the same self-absorption.

‘Odd child, wasn’t she? Why do they let her behave like that? It’s almost as if they’re afraid of her, of what she might say or do.’

‘Camilla-and-custard,’ one of the boys murmured from the back of the car.

‘Or the wild witch of the woods.’

Dinah thought of the streetwise shell and the vulnerable core she had glimpsed within the carapace of clothes and cosmetics, and suppressed her impulse to jump to Milly’s defence.

‘What did you talk to her about on the walk?’ ‘Home,’ Dinah said.

Matt sighed. He would not pursue the conversation, and a space of silence admonished them both. Dinah stared ahead at the trees and the dipping road and then the gas stations and parking lots as they drove back into Franklin.

A little later, when the boys were back in school and her days were no longer superficially occupied with their needs and demands, Dinah crossed town in the Jeep on her way to an appointment with Ed’s employment consultant. Dinah had concluded that it could not do any harm to see her, as Ed had pointed out at the beginning, and the woman had sounded pleasant and businesslike on the telephone. Dinah’s résumé and some examples of her work were in the unfamiliar briefcase on the passenger seat beside her.

The town lay quiet under a pallid, sunless sky. The trees that lined Main Street brandished their fall colours, but less noticeably against the backdrop of dignified clapboard houses and the rosy brick-built façades across the green. The windows of some of the tackier shops were already displaying Hallowe’en masks and costumes. There was little traffic in the wide streets and she arrived too early for her appointment. She parked the Jeep and sat waiting, thinking.

There was an uncomfortable pressure weighing on her, and the sense of it made the colours of the day seem sickly and caused the clean resinous scent of the air to scrape in the back of her throat. Dinah felt that the gap between the capable laughing wife and mother she pretended to be and the real woman who crept within herself was growing wider and wider.

Only Matt sensed it, and she could barely talk to Matt at all.

She checked her watch again. Still a few minutes before time, but she needed to get out of the Jeep. She felt shut in, panicked by claustrophobia, fearful of the two women who slid uncontrollably apart beneath her skin.

She scrambled her belongings together and stepped out into the cool air. She dropped her purse and bent down to retrieve it, and as she straightened up again dizziness assaulted her.

Forcing herself to breathe evenly Dinah walked up the shallow steps to the door of the building. It was a new low-rise, with glass curtain-walls reflecting the whitish sky. Two men came out of the doors as she tried to go in and they glanced curiously at her as she edged past them.

The building was multi-occupied, there was a long list of tenants in the small lobby. Dinah searched for the consultant’s name, reading the list twice before she located it.

It was a corner office on the second floor. In the little anteroom there were two chairs and a table with neatly arranged business magazines.

‘Jenny shouldn’t be more than a minute or two,’ the consultant’s secretary smiled. Dinah opened her briefcase and stared at the typed résumé in her lap. Who was this woman? Was this who she had once been, defined and held in place by these qualifications and this much work done?

She realised that she was looking past the sheets of paper at her own knees. They made bony protuberances under the matt black stuff of her leggings. Solid enough. Yet she was afraid to touch them in case her fingers met emptiness. The fear of it ballooned in her chest like nausea.

Dinah’s head jerked up again and she focused on the view from the window. The buildings in the block opposite. A sugar maple, fire-tinted leaves. Back on Kendrick Dee Kerrigan would be laying out after-school bread and cookies in her kitchen. Nancy would be lifting her little girls out of the back of the station wagon, wondering as she did so if it was too early to have a glass of wine. Not knowing that Dinah was out she might well call over to see if she wanted to join her.

Normal things.

Were they normal, or did they seem strange to her only because of her distance from them?

Dinah straightened her legs. Her feet looked odd, disjointed.

Am I going mad?

‘Hi. I’m Jenny Abraham.’

The consultant had emerged from her office, was holding the door open for Dinah. They shook hands and Dinah obediently followed her. She sat down in the chair facing the desk, fanning out the paper evidence of herself before handing it over for scrutiny.

‘Thanks. That’s all very professional-looking. I’ll check through it in a moment, but we should talk a little first. It helps if I can get a kind of a feel for the person you are.’

Ms Abraham smiled encouragingly. They began to talk about the kind of work Dinah might do. Dinah knew that her body language was all wrong, but still she could not make herself unlock her knees and arms. She doubted that there was much in advertising outside New York or Boston, and even if there were there would surely be plenty of home-grown talent. Who would want a precarious Englishwoman? She wondered vaguely if she could teach. Almost everyone in Franklin seemed to be some kind of a teacher.

‘Good. That’s very interesting.’ Jenny Abraham managed to purse her lips and shake her head at the same time. She was writing busily in the spaces on a long form. The little stabs of her pen seemed sharp enough to puncture Dinah’s skin. There was a big coloured Peanuts poster on the wall behind the woman’s desk.

This was a bad mistake, Dinah was already thinking. Why had she let Ed Parkes bully her into it?

‘Let’s talk a little bit about the real you, Dinah.’

Ms Abraham leaned back in her swivel-chair and steepled her fingers.

‘Tell me, what are you proudest of, amongst all your achievements?’

Dinah started to talk too quickly, to fend the woman off. The words came out jumbled up. She said something about a campaign for a children’s charity she had once worked on and then contradicted herself, mentioning her boys, her family.

‘And most ashamed of?’

No .

I should have heard that before she said it. I should have guessed it was coming and forestalled her.

Who is she, to sit in her big chair with a smile and eyes like glass chips and ask me about shame? It was only a job I wanted. Some little occupation to divert my mind. Perhaps make me feel fixed here like Matt, even Jack and Merlin, instead of skidding over some huge inhospitable polished surface with no landmark, no harbour.

Only there is no diversion. How could I have imagined there would be? I have to get away from here first. Then I can think.

Dinah made an answering smile, just by stretching her stiff lips. She leaned forward and took her papers off the woman’s desk, squared them neatly by tapping the edges and slid them back into her briefcase.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve been wasting your time. I don’t really need a job. I’ve just realised.’

Somehow, she was standing up. Ms Abraham’s face showed a real expression, surprise. Dinah gathered her belongings awkwardly in her arms. Anger carried her out of the room and past the secretary in her cubicle, and back down in the elevator to the lobby. The Cherokee was where she had parked it, across the street.