Maureen was an only child, Maureen’s mother having scorned her father right out of the house, shortly after Maureen’s birth. (Maureen had a vision of him, stumbling with thick boots and beery breath, up the damp path between the sad rhododendron leaves and away for ever, her own infant crying echoing from the right-hand upstairs window.)
Maureen had a tidy little waist, and Audrey had rolls of flesh above and below hers: that is the kind of thing you get to know if you share a room. Maureen had never shared a room before. It puzzled her that for all her bodily imperfections Audrey could wander around it naked and easy. Not only did it puzzle her, she didn’t like it.
Maureen was clever: from the age of thirteen she’d never let a past participle not agree with a verb, not once. Audrey could hardly tell a grave from an aigu. Heaven knew how Audrey had wangled her way into college. Maureen read Machiavelli and Audrey read women’s magazines. But still there was something Audrey had, that Maureen didn’t. Audrey led, Maureen followed, half grateful, half resentful. Maureen was solitary, Audrey was not. Maureen hated to be solitary.
‘You make friends so easily,’ said Maureen to Audrey, making it sound like a reproach, some in-built lack of discrimination. ‘How do you do it?’
And that seemed to puzzle Audrey, who was so seldom puzzled.
‘You just talk to people,’ she said.
‘Anybody?’ asked Maureen, with distaste.
‘Well, yes,’ said Audrey. ‘Anyone who comes along. Why not?’ Sometimes it was more than talk, it was into bed with just anyone, and then into someone else’s, so the first anyone would go off in a huff, and Audrey would weep. But as Maureen would say to her, what did Audrey think would happen? Maureen kept her virginity to the last possible moment, and then surrendered it to the Secretary of the Debating Society, a steady and reliable boy with a car. Maureen was sensible, Audrey was not.
Audrey was popular with boys but Maureen could take her pick of them, so that wasn’t a problem. But Maureen felt when she looked in the mirror of their eyes she saw something different from what Audrey saw. Now why should Maureen think that? She tried to talk about it to Audrey. ‘Well, what do you see?’ asked Audrey.
‘Lust and self-interest,’ said Maureen, before she had time to think. They were sitting together in a Chinese restaurant after a film. Audrey was eating crispy banana in batter, which Maureen of course had declined.
‘Oh,’ said Audrey. ‘I see them liking me.’
Maureen felt such a spasm of rage she swallowed too great a mouthful of too-hot calorie-free China tea and burned her throat, and it was dry for days. But she didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She forgot it.
What she didn’t forget was Audrey standing on top of a sandhill one day in spring, in a one-piece swimsuit, hair flying in the wind, turning back to the group that followed her, that would follow her anywhere, calling out, ‘Come on, everyone!’ and everyone followed. Friends. Company. Party times, good times, crowded times, peopled times; the whole human race whizzing round the benign fulcrum that was Audrey. ‘Come on, everyone!’ and everyone came, and so did Maureen, against her will yet by her will. She thought of the quiet, damp regularity of her childhood home, the single cat shut out at night, breakfast for two, mother and daughter, laid before they went to bed: some blight had entered her soul too deeply. Up the sandhill she ran with the others, and Audrey was in the sea first. ‘Come on in, everyone! The water’s lovely!’ But of course it wasn’t, Audrey was joking; it was icy, everyone screamed and Audrey splashed. How dare she! Maureen was furious. But everyone had a good time, and so did she. Orchestrating Audrey, that’s what she was: weaving everyone into patterns of pleasure! How was it done?
Eventually their paths parted. Audrey with her two-two went off to muddle through some Social Science course; Maureen, with her two-one, went off to Brussels to work for the EEC, always her ambition. There had seemed something so clear and wholesome and ordered, not to mention well-paid, about the notion of a job in such a city, with a little car of her own, a little flat to be private in. And so it had turned out. Maureen had to chuck the Secretary of the Debating Society, because he went to work for Marks & Spencer in Newcastle, but these things often happen to student relationships. All the same Maureen was quite put out when she found Jim had married within the year, a colleague ten years older than himself. That summer she went home to her mother in Paignton for her annual holiday, but it was miserable and boring; she resolved never to do it again. Twelve years in Brussels, and creeping up in the Agricultural Division, and lonely, and getting herself involved with a married man (but they were all married: what was she to do?) which kept her lonelier because of all the waiting about for the telephone to ring and the secrecy and the unkept promises and the no social life. It took her for ever to break it off (what had happened to her?) but finally she did.
The very next day she got a letter from Audrey. Could they meet? Just like Audrey, Maureen thought, why should anyone want to keep in touch with anyone just because they’d been to the same college, been close together in the alphabet. But she wrote back. Audrey invited Maureen to stay for Christmas. Yes, Audrey was married (well, she would be, wouldn’t she: with three children). They lived in the country, with lots of animals. Just like Audrey, thought Maureen, come-on-everyoneing into something no doubt damp, muddy, messy, noisy, with cat crap in corners. But Maureen went; she had come to dislike Christmas after seven seasons with a married man.
Audrey’s house was a mess. Of course it was. Maureen put on rubber gloves and helped clear up; helped get the over-decorated Christmas tree steady on its pins, the stockings done, endeared herself to the children by handing out Mars bars in a sugar-free household, and keeping Audrey’s husband Alan entertained while Audrey muddled through the children’s bedtimes and prepared four kinds of stuffing for two small turkeys because that was more fun than one stuffing and an apple in a single large turkey.
‘But it’s more work, Audrey.’
‘I know it is, Maureen, but we’ve all got used to two turkeys. Family life is all ritual.’
Maureen doubted that ritual was enough. Alan was a political journalist with left leanings; he had to reinspect his own political stance at least three times a year. It didn’t seem to Maureen that Audrey was taking much notice of what was going on in her husband’s head: she favoured a kind of ongoing warm emotional demonstration by way of keeping him happy.
‘Darling, what’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ she would cry, flinging her arms round him and embracing him as he stared at the electricity bill (two turkeys cost a third more to cook than one, as Maureen pointed out) until he unwillingly smiled. Maureen understood the unwillingness very well. In fact she thought she understood Alan very well. She looked round the ingredients of the household: the children, the warmth, the animals, the mud tramped in and out, the friends coming and going – they came for miles – and thought, with a little reorganisation this would do me very well. She thought she would have it for herself.
She had to wait four years. In that time she became a frequent visitor to the household. Long weekends, Christmas, holidays, part of the family. Then Audrey had, as Maureen knew she would, her ritual affair with a married man. Maureen knew the anatomy of that very well. ‘I feel so bad about it,’ mourned Audrey, chopping Christmas nuts for the stuffing of one of the turkeys. ‘I love Alan, but I just can’t stop myself.’
‘I expect you just want attention and flattery and to feel loved,’ said Maureen, carefully. She’d read enough women’s magazines in her time, oh yes, many a one since her college days. ‘The things Alan isn’t good at. Such a pity he isn’t more demonstrative. Then you wouldn’t have to look for love outside your marriage.’
Audrey’s tears fell into the couscous and lemon peel, and made the stuffing a fraction soggier than it should