Mortimer Penelope: The Pumpkin Eater

“I think I would,” I said. “It is now.”

“Yes. It is now. But you don’t know what it is, do you?”

“What is it, then?”

“That I’m capable of fancying someone else. That I’m a perfectly normal man who can fancy someone else.”

“I’d forgotten about Philpot,” I said.

“Good. Then what the hell are we arguing about?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I suppose it’s just … nothing.”

I got up from the sofa and walked slowly towards the door. I knew that I wouldn’t leave him, that I was not going out of the room, but I had to move somewhere. He said, “You’re going to bed now, I suppose.”

“No. Just shutting the door. In case the children hear you shouting.”

“Give me a drink, then. I’m not going to shout any more.”

As I handed him the drink he caught me and pulled me on to his knee. For a few moments he held me tightly, an awkward, dead armful.

“I didn’t mean any of that,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Any of what?”

“About the children. I love the children, you know that.”

“You were telling the truth.”

“Was I?”

“I think so.”

“You do see how it was, don’t you?”

“You mean about Philpot?”

“Well, she was here. I know it wasn’t very noble of me, or anything like that. I just felt fed up. Bored to death with this script. You did rather hand her to me on a plate, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“No. Well, you wouldn’t, I suppose.”

He craned up to kiss me. Like a child, with puckered mouth and closed eyes, he waited. I looked at him carefully. I thought of my other husbands, decent, adult, unselfish men from whom I had escaped while escaping from my childhood — each one an insufficient parent, readily left alone. They seemed to watch me while Jake waited for his maternal kiss. Now it’s your turn to suffer, my girl. Now it’s up to you to do the forgiving and forgetting. Now it’s your turn to refuse freedom or give it out inch by inch.

“You didn’t tell me,” I said. “But I suppose you slept with her?”

He did not open his eyes, but shook his head violently.

“You didn’t?”

“No. Of course not. Now kiss me, forget it.”

“You promise me?”

“I promise. I promise.”

I bent warily and kissed him. He was filled with the urgency and excitement of a man released from danger.

“But do you still want to?” I asked, merciless.

“Not if I don’t see her again.” He smiled up at me. His eyes were still quite empty, and I realized now that they never changed, even in love. “You won’t let me see her again, will you?”

“No,” I said.

For an instant, before he reached again, he looked puzzled.

I took every string and jar and puff and rubber band and hair clip of Philpot’s, every velvet ribbon and safety pin, every packet and box, full or empty, every piece of her clothing down to the laddered stockings in the wastepaper basket and I tied them up in her genuine Victorian shawl with black braid round the edges and dumped them in the front garden. It was a fine, warm night. The roses were at their best in the moonlight, when you couldn’t see how blackened and blighted they were. I took her sewing machine and dressmaker’s dummy and portable wireless and a terrible lemon and green abstract that Jake had once offered to buy, and piled them neatly beside the dustbins. Then I sat on the front steps and probed the sensation of fear, which after all that running up and down stairs had dulled to a slight physical pain, as precisely located and bearable as mild toothache.

What, I asked myself, was I frightened of? Thirty-one years old, healthy and whole, married to a fourth husband (why four?) who loved me, with a bodyguard of children (why so many?) — what was I frightened of?

Not of Philpot, surely? Oh no, not in the slightest of Philpot. Of whom, then? Of what?

I soon began to feel cold. Unused to long, solitary bouts of thinking, I remarked to myself that I was cold and therefore got up and went indoors. It occurred to me that there was probably some etiquette for this situation which I didn’t know. Perhaps I ought to sleep somewhere else. There was nowhere else to sleep, except in Philpot’s bed. I didn’t consider it. I walked about the house for a while. The younger children were already shifting about, rolling their heads from side to side and muttering. The one in the cot had thrown all its bedclothes on the floor and was so wet that it appeared to be drowned, not sleeping. Dinah opened her eyes and said, “There’s the most awful smell in this room,” and shut her eyes and slept on.

At last I went into the bedroom, undressed and got in beside Jake. In his sleep he looked puzzled again. I thought of waking him up, but for the first time I could not touch him. This paralysis, this failure of my will to make my body move, revived all my fear, and I lay there sweating, shaken by great beats of my heart, ignorant as in a first labour but with no instinct, or memory to help me. It must have been then, I think, that Jake and life became confused in my mind, and inseparable. The sleeping man was no longer accessible, no longer lovable. He increased monstrously, became the sky, the earth, the enemy, the unknown. It was Jake I was frightened of; Jake who terrified me; Jake who in the end would survive. He rolled over, his mouth slightly open, and began to snore.

“ Most enviable New Year resolution comes from writer/producer Jake Armitage, whose latest who-done-it mirth-jerker , The Sphinx, starts shooting mid-January. Jake’s plans? To say ‘No’ at least once a week to movie moguls who are out-bidding each other to buy his services. ‘I’m a yes-man by nature,’ says Jake, ‘but there comes a point when you’ve got to sit back and live a little.’ Jake, now one of the highest paid scribblers in the business, started ten years ago on a re-write of a B-picture weepy for Lazlos Rothenstein, since when he has never looked back .

“ Beth Conway, John Hurst and Italian discovery Maria Dante are three of the stars of The Sphinx, the new comedy-thriller which Jake Armitage has scripted and will produce for Tower Productions. Doug Wainwright directs, and locations will be shot in North Africa .

“ I congratulated Mrs. Armitage on running her large household with such apparent ease. ‘It wasn’t so easy once,’ she said, laughing. ‘There was a time when we didn’t dare to answer the door in case it was someone coming to sue us!’ Those days are far away now, for since that first £100 script, taken on to keep the wolf from the door, the Armitages have never looked back …”

Everything is silent in the afternoon. Everything keeps still. The Jag is out of the garage, but the Floride is in. The grass will be mown when it starts to grow. The dishes are clean in the dishwasher and the rubbish eater has eaten the rubbish away. A Froebel-trained girl with a good complexion and a hard heart sits resting in her room. She writes to her friends and smokes one of her two daily Turkish cigarettes with a cup of weak tea. Soon she will let herself out of the front door and walk energetically from place to place, collecting the children from schools.

There: the latch clicked: she has gone. I could dust the room or tidy the magazines now the house is empty. But why? It’s somebody else’s job. Somebody else never does a job properly. The food is tasteless. There’s no incense of furniture polish about the rooms as there used to be. The toys are never sorted out and Jake has gone to lunch with two buttons missing from his shirt. It’s somebody else’s job. Why can’t somebody else do a job properly? Heaven knows we pay them enough.