Mortimer Penelope: The Pumpkin Eater

“Indeed? On location, I suppose.”

If he was trying to be a father to me, he was dreadfully succeeding.

“Yes,” I said. “On location.”

“Now why didn’t you go too?”

“Well, they’re living in tents … you know … he didn’t think I would … Anyway, I can’t leave the children.”

“But you have plenty of staff?”

“Yes, but … Anyway, I can’t leave them.”

“I see.”

He sat back and looked at me gravely. Then, with a short sigh, he glanced down at my file. “You have had no illnesses? Miscarriages, difficult confinements?”

“No.”

“You have never … terminated a pregnancy?”

“Of course not. Why should I?”

“But you weren’t exactly … well off before you married Jake? One would have thought that the financial burden …”

“Look,” I said, “it was easy. We always lived in the country, and most of the time it was the war. We ate cornflakes and eggs and carrots, things like that, because I didn’t know how to cook anything else, so we were vegetarians. I don’t mean we were vegetarians because we didn’t believe in eating meat, I just didn’t know how to cook meat. Well, we didn’t need any clothes. My mother used to knit things for the children, but the boys and the girls all wore the same clothes because it was easy, and so did I. My second husband, that’s Dinah’s father, bought dozens of sheets and white cups when we were married, so we were still using those when I married Jake. What financial burden?”

“Well, the school fees alone …”

“There weren’t any school fees. They went to the village school. We got free milk and free orange juice — that gummy stuff, we used to drink it with gin when some friend or someone brought some gin — and we never went out, except sometimes to the pictures. That cost ninepence. After the beginning we never had to buy cots or prams or nappies, anything like that. It’s complete nonsense about this financial burden. It costs a good deal less to keep a child for two years, three years, than it does to have an abortion. Why? — Do you think I should have had abortions?”

He blinked several times, picked up his pen and put it down again. “Of course not,” he muttered valiantly. “Of course not.”

“Anyway we had a bit of help from my mother.”

“Ah. I see.”

“She hardly ever wrote to me without pinning a ten shilling note to the letter. She used to fiddle the house-keeping money, my father never knew. She always pinned it on with a safety pin, a little gold one, because she didn’t think paper clips were safe, and an ordinary pin might have pricked the postman’s finger …” He smiled politely. “I should think she used to send me a pound a month. It paid for cigarettes, you know, and sometimes toys. The children never ate sweets, I don’t know why.”

“It sounds very … idyllic,” he said.

“No, it wasn’t idyllic. But it was all right.”

“You were happy. Or rather, you think now that you were happy.”

“Yes. I mean, I know I was.”

“But you had two divorces, and for a short time you were … a widow.”

“Yes. But I wasn’t unhappy. It’s as though … as though between the time I was a child and the time I married Jake nothing happened. As though everything stopped. I didn’t seem to grow any older, I didn’t seem to change at all. Then suddenly I was married to Jake and it all started again where it had left off when I was seventeen. But I was twenty-seven then. Do you understand what I mean?”

He wrote rapidly for a full minute. When he had finished he pondered, fingers steepled under his nose. “Tell me about your first husband.”

“Oh lord,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

“Can’t remember? But you were married to him for … nearly five years.”

“He was a reporter on our local paper. But the war broke out just after we were married and …”

“He was in the Forces?”

“No, he was a conscientious objector. They put him on the land.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. I had the children and he … well, he worked on the land.”

“You liked him, you said?”

“Oh, yes. He was sweet. He drank too much, that was the only thing.”

He waited, but I didn’t offer him any more information. I couldn’t think of any more. At last he was driven to ask, “And how did it end?”

“It didn’t really end. I met the Major — he was Dinah’s father — at a sort of … concert in the village hall. He was a very sober, military sort of school-master, rather intelligent. He read New Writing , and Horizon and so on. He was a great one for making lists. He was very interested in the children, liked teaching them to read and count beans, you know, things like that. My husband, the first one, was pretty hopeless with children. So we fell in love. I think it was quite a relief, really, divorcing me — for my husband, I mean. He cried a good deal at one point, but it was only the drink.”

There was a long pause.

“And then?” he asked coldly.

“Then? Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents. I had Dinah there. Of course he was dead by then.”

“And did that upset you?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it did. Naturally. It must have done.”

He slumped in his chair. He seemed tired out. I said, “Look, need we go on with this? I find it tremendously boring, and it’s not what I’m thinking about at all. I just don’t think about those husbands except …”

“Except when?”

“I never think about them.”

“We’re almost at the end.” The smile had grown even weaker. “I’m sorry if it’s a painful for you, but it helps to know the facts. Who was the next one?”

“Giles. He was a professional violinist. I suppose he still is. He came with some quintet to play chamber music in the Town Hall, something to do with C.E.M.A. or E.N.S.A. or one of those things. Anyway, the Major had left me £200 in his will and Giles seemed to think he could manage the children. I don’t think I ever loved anyone in the way I loved Giles — except maybe a boy once, when I was very young.”

“Then …”

“Why? I don’t know.”

“Was it something to do with the children?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Did you insist on having children — which he didn’t want?”

“No! He loved children!”

“Why did it go wrong, then? What happened?”

“Nothing happened! I’ve told you, that was the thing about that time — nothing happened!”

“And yet after four years you were ready to leave … Giles and marry Jake. Something must have happened.”

“I just had to go on, that’s all! When I stopped wanting …”

“Wanting?”

“To go to bed with him. Then there was nothing. No future. Nothing to look …”

“But why did you stop wanting to go to bed with him? Because he didn’t want any more children, and sex without children was unthinkable to you, a kind of obscenity? As it is with Jake, now? Isn’t that true?”

“No! It’s not true!”

“Don’t you think sex without children is a bit messy, Mrs. Armitage? Come now. You’re an intelligent woman. Be honest. Don’t you think that the people you most fear are disgusting to you, and hateful, because they are doing something for its own sake, for the mere pleasure of it? Something which you must sanctify, as it were, by incessant reproduction? Could it be that in spite of what might be called a very full life, it’s sex you really hate? Sex itself you are frightened of? What do you think?”

“You really should have been an Inquisitor,” I said. “Do I burn now, or later?”