The Marriage Bed by Constance Beresford-Howe Page A

no way impeded our mutual pleasure, only prolonged it deliciously. But was it ignorance, or simply innocence, that made us unable to separate emotion from those acute bodily pleasures? Most of my friends and his had no trouble keeping the two apart – Billie had always been able to – but we didn’t know how. Freaks that we were, we lay in each other’s arms afterwards and mingled tears. For us it really had been nothing less than an act of love; a final and permanent commitment.
    Or so it seemed at the time. In retrospect, though, I had to admit it was inexcusable to be less with it than my own mother. Because what could be more ridiculous, after all that, than to find yourself three years later all alone, perpetually doing laundry, shedding tears into children’s socks, and making up this rotten, vacated double bed? Irritably I plucked Mao out from under the sheet, where he was catching an imaginary rat. And while we were asking silly questions, why did I need to see my mother so badly now, all of a sudden, when all our lives till recently I’d considered Billie the child and myself the adult? Oh well, what was the point of brooding over such things now. In a few hours she would be here, and that gave me something to look forward to.
    “Come on, you lot,” I said to the assembled kids and animals. “Let’s start getting ready for the Happy Hour.” Putting it this way made the snowsuit routine easier to face, likewise its grim sequel – shopping for gin at the Liquor Board outlet half a mile away. Thismeant wrestling the pram out of the front porch, always a test of muscle and character. However, the thought of a ride in their beloved pram spurred the kids into active co-operation, and, getting into the spirit of the thing, Mao shot up the curtains like a flying cat and made us all laugh.
    A few torn scraps of bright blue sky fluttered like flags overhead. The high-sprung pram lurched over the icy pavement in a slow progress that had a sedative effect on me as well as on the children. As we bumbled along I planned the day with some kind of confidence that I could control at least minor events. A macaroni-cheese casserole could be prepared in advance for supper, so I needn’t be in and out of the kitchen while Billie’s visit lasted. The TV could be pushed into the dining-room to occupy the kids there. Violet would have to be shut into a bedroom – Billie was afraid of dogs, even craven, dim-witted dogs like ours. And I’d buy mushrooms and make some of those nice little hot canapés she liked to nibble with her drinks. And somehow or other, at some point, I would have to scrounge time to brush my hair and change out of this grotty old smock, or she would say in her tinkly voice, “Sweetie, you mustn’t get
drab.
” Yes, this visit, like yesterday’s with Edwina, would have its strains; but at least I wouldn’t be bored. Billie might be trivial, but, after all, so is most good entertainment.
    The children lolled happily one at each end of the pram, gazing out with a sort of vacant approval at the skeleton trees, the shop fronts, the passing cars hissing over salted roads. They even sat contentedly outside while I rushed into the library to change my pile of books. One of my happiest recent discoveries was that Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, most of them good. In minutes I emerged with about five pounds of fiction, enough to see methrough quite a few white nights to come. Hugh and Martha were still in a benign mood. Instead of being bored, which I well remembered as the chronic childhood disease, they seemed to be diverted by everything. Martha beamed broadly and called “Hi!” to a passing postman with bow legs, and Hugh raised a wondering face to the remote silver toy of a transatlantic plane and murmured “Bird.”
    “Plane,” I corrected him. One of the sharpest disillusions of my young life was discovering how unlike a bird a jumbo jet is. I thought before I tried it that air travel would