Mortimer Penelope: The Pumpkin Eater

“Because that’s not the point,” my father snapped. “I’m not going to have you crushing this boy with responsibility from the word go. As it is he’s taking on far more than he can chew, and he’s got to work like a nigger to do it. I don’t know anything about this … cinema business, and I haven’t got much faith in it, to tell you the truth. But I’m not going to have you trailing home with half a dozen more children in five years’ time and another messed-up marriage on your hands. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the size of it. It’s high time you saw a little sense, my girl.”

He had never before spoken to me like this. “Jake — ” I said, “Jake —?”

“Your father’s quite right,” Jake said. “It’d make things a lot easier.”

They sat there unmoved, looking at me.

“Anyway … what about the holidays? They’d have holidays.”

“They can come here,” my father said. “Your mother loves having them, as you know.”

“You mean … they’re just going to go away. For ever. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Why don’t we get them adopted, or something? Why don’t we give them away?”

My father sighed deeply and turned back to his desk. “You’d better work this out between you,” he said. “The offer stands, that’s all I can say. Now … the next point. Where are you going to live?”

“It’ll have to be in the country,” Jake said.

“You can’t work from the country?”

“At the moment I can. Later I may have to get a room or something …”

“That’s no good,” my father said. “A man needs regular meals, someone to look after things. There’s no point in making difficulties for yourself, is there? You’ve got enough without that.”

“I don’t quite see the alternative, sir.” The “sir” was astounding. Changed already from the man I had always known, my father suddenly seemed to grow vast, threatening, absolutely powerful.

“We’ve always lived in the country,” I said, but neither of them listened to me.

“A good friend of mine happens to be an estate agent,” my father said. “He has a link-up with a firm in London. It seems there’s a lot of new planning going on and it’s possible to buy a fairly short lease on one of these old houses for quite a reasonable sum. Here’s one, for instance. Have a look at it. It’ll pretty well clean me out, mind you, but I’d sooner you had it now, while you need it, than wait until I’m dead.”

“I don’t know why you should — ”

“If I’d had a son,” my father said, “I’d have known how to bring him up. No problem. We failed with this girl here. There’s no question of it, we failed. It’s time she had a firm hand on her tiller, and I’ve got a strong notion that you’re the chap to put it there.”

“I’m here !” I said. “Why can’t you talk to me ?”

My father leant over and patted Jake’s shoulder. “Good luck,” he said. “Good luck, my boy, you need it.”

After the wedding, we had a party. The caterers brought small chicken sandwiches, trifle and champagne. Everyone was very happy. My mother cried, as usual, and my father clasped Jake’s hand, speechless, as though he were about to take off into orbit. The children, who were being looked after for the day by my mother’s Mrs. Norris, sent us Greetings telegrams. A fortnight later the three eldest went to boarding school.

We moved into the house my father had found for us, and the surviving children came up by train. They had a great deal of luggage, for I insisted that they brought everything: clothes and sticks, toys, pots, Malt, books, diaries, horseshoes, conkers, ribbon and string and a shedful of punctured bicycles. They invaded the local schools, where they were known collectively as the Armitages, so that for convenience and solidarity those who had post office savings books or sent up coupons for silver-plated teaspoons or entered competitions for winning ponies, changed their names; and those who were too small had theirs changed for them and grew up used to the idea that in any list, roll call or census they came very near the top.

Only the three at boarding school remained apart, cut adrift, growing old under their old names. They were my first children, and although they had always been gloomy and hard to please I felt desolate without them. I burned with anger, but dully. Anger against whom, against what? It was all for the best, that boy and those girls set on the right path, flannelled and stockinged for Jesus and the General Certificate of Education, stripped for ball games in the bitter cold. It was right for Jake that they should go. Slowly, little by little, almost imperceptibly, I let them drift until only our fingertips were touching, then reaching, then finding nothing. Our hands dropped and we turned away. The younger children always felt kindly towards them, the three melancholy Conservatives who grew to hate Jake with such inflexible devotion. In time, they included me in this hate. They were my first enemies. My mother sent them each ten shillings at the beginning of every term, fastened to the letters with small gold safety pins.

With Jake’s child I went to hospital for the first time. Jake was thirty and beginning to worry about his hair. He was deprived, nervous, over-excited. He was working on his first full-length script, and he told me that one day he would build a tower of brick and glass overlooking the valley where we met.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Philpot said. “Sometimes I shake all over and sometimes I have a temperature of ninety-three. Sometimes I cry for hours on end.”

“Why don’t you see a doctor?”

“They’d just say it was the worry. I mean, there’s nothing you can do about worry, is there?”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know …” I was cleaning out the kitchen cupboards, a sign of unease. The girl — she was in fact a woman of twenty-four whose surname was Philpot — had said she was sure there was something she could do. I had set her to cleaning saucepan lids with steel wool. She did it slowly, sitting on the edge of the sink and stroking the dented lids round and round as though they were faces.

I took the new Coronation mugs off the shelf, a clutch in each hand, and put them on the floor. Then I asked Philpot to move so that I could get some more hot water. She heaved herself up on to the fridge and spread her skirt over it.

“Goodness,” she said, “what a lot of mugs. Poppy was given one too. Aren’t they rather divine …”

“I think they’re hideous,” I said. “But we’ve got dozens of spoons.”

“Yes,” she said, “Poppy got a spoon too.” She looked out of the window to the garden, where some of the younger children and Poppy were sitting each in an individual cardboard box doing, as far as I could see, absolutely nothing. She sighed gustily. “I wonder if there’ll ever be another Coronation. I mean, while we’re alive.”

“Oh, sure to be.” I felt she needed reassuring. “Why? Did you like this one?”

“I did indeed. Such wonderful parties. Poppy went to stay with my aunt.” I scraped bits of butter off six saucers on to a plate, and moved her off the fridge. She settled like a great duck on the cooker. “And I had a simply wonderful time, although I slept all through the actual thing on TV. Shall I hand you the mugs, or something?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“Well, of course, it all ended in disaster. It always does with me. People’s wives get so ratty somehow. And I mean, I like them, that’s the funny thing. I like them really better than their husbands. Sometimes I wonder if I’m quite normal. I mean, I have been told I’m frigid, but I don’t see how you can tell. I mean, honestly — how can you tell?”