Title: Three Times Table
Author: Sara Maitland
Publication: Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, 1990.
B Lorry driver
D those skinny men
H Jim
J Phoebe
K Rachel
L Lisa
M Sue
Y All characters in the house
X the women
Z the boys
His eagerness made her, suddenly, want to be intelligent again.
Under his dynamic tutelage she started reading - not the literature of
her childhood, but hard politics, sociology, philosophy, ideas, and
experimental fiction. To please him she learned
to talk about
what she read
and what she thought.
He was,
and she forced herself to remember this with gratitude,
one of the best talkers she had ever met; funny and fast.
Passionate, and unashamed. A man who could and would talk the hind legs back on to
an injured donkey, provided it had decent proletarian credentials. They
had all learned from him; she and Lisa still spoke, stylistically, as
he had taught them to. He had set his mark on them.
Where was he now?
Phoebe, lying on her bed in her mother's house in north London,
asked herself with a sudden rush of nostalgia.
In what corner of what foreign field did he still keep the faith,
further the revolution, wake up his current lover at three in the
morning to discuss the delicate interweavings of class and race.
She could not bear to think that he had taken all that pure wrathful
zeal into marketing or insurance broking.
Occasionally she half hoped to see him again,
she would find herself watching faces rising towards her on the
escalator of the Tube
and wonder
what she would feel if one of those faces were suddenly to be his.
Where had they all gone, those extraordinary skinny left-wing men, who
had bullied their girl-friends into the Women's Movement
and been surprised when the hand with which they had so kindly offered freedom
had been bitten so damn hard?
Nearly twenty years later Phoebe still found it hard to suppress a
little vindictive chuckle at the looks of growing shock on Jim's face
- Jim and Lisa's Jonathan and Sue's Alan -
when they discovered that their righteousness was not enough.
Their women, far from being grateful, turned on them,
snarling, in late night conversations
telling them
to shut up;
far from setting them free to work for the Revolution,
their women demanded
that they take emotional responsibility and also clean the loos.
And finally, only a year or so later, turned them out of house and home
- put them on the street, as women who failed to be properly grateful
to the fathers had been put for centuries.
But even as she chuckled,
Phoebe knew now
that this was not fair.
There had been a time, a brief time, a glorious dawn, when despite her
growing awareness of her own sexual failure, despite her anger and
frustration, despite her own laziness and lack of commitment, there had
been a time
when she had been happy and hopeful and joyous.
It had not, as it turned out, been Jim that had made the happiness
for her, but the house itself. However he, with his determined hands
and determined nose, had been her way in.
She did not know where he was now and she did not really care, but he
had probably been the most influential person in her life: her handsome
prince and Maggie's father. He had given her that household, a little
society, warming itself in its own glow of virtue, insulating itself
from the big bad world; but within its own limits it had been open and
supportive. She had, during that year, woken some mornings giddy with
courage and boldness, excited and certain. Motivated.
It had been, however briefly, a time when her body and her mind had
fitted together so tidily and wholely that, waking up one morning
and deciding
that it was time to go back to Oxford and visit her mother,
was neither traumatic nor casual, but straightforward.
She had discussed it with her family;
hugged Lisa and Sue, kissed Jim, left home, and taken the tube to Acton
where she stuck out her thumb on the edge of the A40 on a smiling
spring day and gone home.
Had that,
she wondered now,
been a mistake?
A kindly lorry driver on his way to North Wales,
chatting of his own daughter and his home,
had dropped her at the roundabout at the top of the Banbury Road at
about lunch-time. She had walked down through suburban Summertown,
taking her time
but without reluctance; watching the tidiness of the shoppers and the
smartness of the shops with something akin to smugness
- how little energy and vitality they had, compared to her own shopping
street, with its untidy market atmosphere permeating even the Safeways
and Boots which had tried to raise their modern, never-had-it-so-good
façades in challenge to the poverty and squalor, and had failed.
Two blocks away from the house of her childhood it suddenly occurred to
her
that her mother might have left that there might
be strangers in the hallway, a different set of curtains hanging at the
windows; her father's study might have been turned into a playroom for
a new generation of North Oxford children, so different from herself in
her prim Clark's T-bar sandals that she would not be able to recognise
her own infancy in theirs.
It would be too humiliating to have to contact her mother through her
publishers or her employers. How could one ring a bell on a house door
in respectable places like this
and say,
"Excuse me does my mother live here?"
That was the stuff of melodrama,
and now she was back in Oxford she knew
she was somewhere, somehow, still too middle-class, too much her
father's daughter, to want that.
This was leafy north Oxford, this was the pace of security. This was
the corner to which she had tottered, her mother holding her on white
leather reins, her legs encased in knitted leggings
whose scratchiness she could still remember.
This was the street along which she had run, a skinny and excited
ten-year-old,
to boast to her father
that she was the only girl who had made it to the next round of the
chess competition.
This was the pavement along which, awkward and
gawky, she had struggled to find a graceful, even a comfortable, way of
carrying her cello to and from her chamber music group.
She hesitated at the corner,
reluctant almost to discover that she was now, as of this moment,
completely lost in the world,
and for the first time she asked herself clearly
why she had decided to come here.
This was not home. Home was in Peckham, in the shabby house whose light
spilled each evening out onto the street. Family was Jim and the
others; family was her women's group and squabbling at two-thirty in
the morning about whether women could be said to constitute a separate
class because they had a separate relation to the mode of production,
while still making each other coffee and giving each other hugs. And
love was standing outside the local supermarket collecting signatures
for the campaign to keep Family Allowance as a separate benefit. She
had forsaken her people and her father's house, and had, like every
other well-brought-up girl, established her own household and she
should cleave only unto it, forsaking all others so long as she should
live. She did not know why she had come. Not certainly to reassure
her mother, but ...to boast of her new self! To show off?
And then the moment had passed, and tall and tanned and fit in the
sunshine she had walked down the green street with the gardens either
side of her,
and had known by an instinctive glance
that her mother still lived there, that nothing had changed.
She rang the doorbell, listened to the silence within
and felt a moment of panic. Then she laughed at herself, with an edge
of self-mocking irony.
All her self-righteousness had failed to inform her that her mother, a
hardy professional, was certainly still at work in the city that she
had left behind her. They had probably passed each other on the road.
She went back to the corner and across to the nearby pub, where she sat
sipping beer, munching a cheese sandwich, and waiting.
She had waited all afternoon - later sitting in the garden and
reading. When the sun moved round she too had moved to the doorstep,
her sleeves rolled up
and concentrating half on the book and half on the remembered scene
until her mother had arrived, walking up the street where they had both
walked so many times before.
That had been the moment of her undoing. Her mother had got older,
fatter and sadder.
Phoebe felt an enormous, and unwelcome, surge of pity, of compassion
and caring; and with it guilt. In one swoop the feeling swallowed her
up and she had never got rid of it since. She saw in Rachel's face
three years of loss and loneliness; she saw too the simpler anger that
Rachel would never dare to express.
And to cover up the dreadfulness of the moment, the pain of the knowledge
that Rachel had become old, alone, and friendless,
she had giggled
and said something about having lost her key.
She felt the deep need in Rachel's hug,
and responded to it,
but it was Rachel's need not her own.
She was furious. Her fury made her aggressive
and she attacked. She was mean and horrible to her mother, snide,
self-righteous and unkind.
Only in her anger could she drown out the dark shadow that pity and
guilt had cast over her. She hated herself for it
and went on and on,
convinced that her only defence was to make Rachel throw her out again,
and Rachel refused to be provoked.
Finally Rachel responded
and Phoebe had forgotten in her wanderings just how bloody clever
Rachel was. How well she could keep control and use words and
manipulate their meanings and score points. It was this ruthless
clarity and brightness that she had run away from.
She,
Phoebe told herself,
did not play those stupid games any more, she was direct and
straightforward.
But her mouth motored on
and what came out was simply, and childishly, rude.
Phoebe felt foolish.
Rachel seemed able to absorb everything that Phoebe tried. She was calm
and sweet
and later insisted on taking Phoebe out to dinner at some fancy little
pseudo-Bohemian bistro.
Then to her final and total humiliation Phoebe found
that she was actually having a good time;
she was enjoying her mother and her mother's easy authority and charm.
Her mother,
she thought with a most annoying pride,
who was one of the few genuinely creative women scientists around and
in whose success, were it anyone except her mother's, she would be
rejoicing.
She went to bed in her own room, still full of pictures and possessions
that had belonged to a previous and vanished Phoebe. She curled up in
the position she had slept in as a child;
and realised with a sinking heart
that it was not only the most comfortable way of being in bed, but it
was also one that you could not adopt in company.
She thought
that she never wanted to sleep with Jim again, that the bonds of love were
snares and that she must at all costs leave as early as possible the
next morning and never come back.
She had a clear and frightening premonition
that she would not be able to manage it.
Perhaps if she had not got pregnant ...perhaps they could have pulled
it off. Perhaps not.
Now she no longer knew. She found it hard to remember with any
precision exactly what had happened next.
She remembered a little of the acrimony, of the mounting bitterness
within the house, of their winter of discontent, which was so much part
of and not part of the winter outside, and the miners' strike.
But the light no longer poured out of their house and onto the street;
the power cuts, although they supported them passionately, cut off
their power somewhere. Jim and Jonathan especially were never there,
and the arguments about washing up versus serving the revolution
lost their gaiety and became mean-mouthed. Alan and Sue moved out, went
north to do something else.
Phoebe had not seen Alan since, though Sue had moved back again
briefly later that winter, saddened and distressed by Alan's
disaffection. She had been part of a long stream of women who had come
and gone swiftly, lives collapsing in one area as they gained power and
certainty in another.
Suddenly there were too many women realising that
their happiness had to be taken at the expense of their men's
- men who had promised so much
and could not now deliver the goods; just like her father five years before.
Lisa and Phoebe shared the painful knowledge that they had been conning
themselves as well as their men.
How had a Conservative Government happened? Where were the golden days
which Paris and Chicago and Grosvenor Square had promised them?
In the meantime, the miners represented hope for all of them,
but within the giddy cycle of excitements they were all edgy with new
fears and old illusions.
After Sue and Alan left,
Lisa and Phoebe had invited their neighbour Jo and her lover Sophie to
come and share the house with them.
Jim and Jonathan had been away, picketing and pamphleteering in
Reading, had simply been not available, and Jo's squat had been
suddenly repossessed and it did not occur to any of the women that the
boys would mind. Sophie moreover actually had a job, had an income,
which was beginning to be something of a pressing issue, inflation and
the changing climate began to bite into their indifferent superiority
to the outside world and they had given no thought as to how to fight
that.
Then the boys, as it turned out, minded bitterly having Jo and Sophie.
Since, on principle, they could not say
that lesbianism made them nervous and that the complex new demands made
on them scared them,
they found more underhand and aggressive ways of expressing their
resentments.
The women outnumbered them and plotted together. Having the other two
women in the house taught Lisa something new about herself; she and
Jonathan stopped sleeping together, which left them all short of space.
Phoebe felt betrayed by Lisa's desertion.
She and Jim talked together secretly about leaving the house and going
off to somewhere "more committed",
but Phoebe could not bring herself to give up the only home she knew
of, could not bring herself to choose absolutely Jim's commitments over
the women's commitments.