Sunday 1st October

And the girls ended up huddled in a corner of the Mikado, Cat Stevens on the Juke Box, singing ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’, and trying to make two cups of coffee last and last.  Heaven knows how they ever made the place pay with customers like them.  They didn’t really talk about the situation, except Jane repeating every so often, ‘God Harriet, what a mess.’  And her saying, ‘Oh well I expect they will all have fun with their little arrangement.  Doesn’t it make you sick, you know, adults, sex – the whole thing?  I hope to God I don’t end up like them, don’t you?’

But they never really talked about how they both felt about it.  They had somehow lost the ability to tell each other things; things that mattered, so even now, even here in the eye of the storm, they were almost making small talk.  Even when Harriet had let Jane in on her big secret, Jane couldn’t find the words to tell her about her hurting myself.  It suddenly seemed so small besides what Harriet was telling her, would she have thought Jane was just being melodramatic; her way of saying, ’Me too, I am miserable too Harriet.’  So she had kept quiet and bitten her tongue and let Harriet be the star.  As usual.

And even now, she had no clever words at her disposal, no sarcastic barbs to hurl at her mother; she had just sat there and taken it all in without really hearing anything her mother had maybe been trying to say.  She never realised until later how much it must have hurt her to have to agree to stay with their father, and to put, even in words, the idea of Ted behind her.  He had been part of her life since before she had even married their Dad, so it must have really broken her heart to have to agree not to see him again; because maybe in a funny sort of a way she had really been married to Ted, but just living with us.  Maybe that was why the girls had felt she was never really there; her body was, but her heart and mind were elsewhere.  But then Harriet and Jane always had each other, so somehow they didn’t need her so much, and maybe she had felt that, felt that as a sort of rejection, and that somehow allowed her to justify keeping on seeing Ted.  But Jane didn’t think any of this back then, on that fateful day,

All she felt was numb, too shocked probably to think rationally at all.  Maybe it’s only on reflection, as we play again and again in our minds the things we can still remember that we begin to have real feelings about things at all.  Maybe we never really come to terms with how we feel about them at the time, and then each time we drag them back into the forefront of our minds we come up with a different way of seeing things, an ever-changing perspective, a constantly evolving opinion.  Or maybe it was just Jane who couldn’t let anything go, who constantly broke open the scabs, real and imaginary. to let the blood run free.  It would be nearly forty years later when she would hear Michelle Shocked sing, ‘Holding on to the past is my only mistake – let it go, let it go, let it go.’  And she would realise she was just the same, forever clinging on to the past, which would end up holding her back from making a real success of anything.

*  * *

‘I’ve got to sort things out.’ The thought kept hammering in Phil’s brain, ‘I can’t keep going on like this’.  There had to be another way, another way out of this mess, out of this hole he was in.  ‘That’s funny’ he thought, ‘one of the only novels I ever read was Mr. Polly – H.G. Wells – we had to read it for some exam at school, and I didn’t think it was much good then.  That’s how that book begins; Mr. Polly’s life is in a hole. Only I’m not Mr. Polly at all, am I?  No I am Phil Wilkinson, and this is nineteen sixty-eight and real life for God’s sake, not some Edwardian novel.’

But Phil felt must do something; he couldn’t face another twenty years of this, trudging in to work every day and pretending to be someone he most certainly was not.  Always waiting for the next letter, the next telephone call to sort out another ‘little irregularity’, to cover up another one of his mistakes.  And for what?  To end up like his dear old Dad, dying quietly of cancer in a hospital ward somewhere – and not complaining.

He never complained; that’s what Phil found so pathetic, he just accepted it all.  You work hard all your life, and then your life is taken away from you, and you are supposed to just lie there and take it. ‘Well, fuck it, I am complaining.  It’s so unfair – I have been dealt a really shitty hand this time.  As if I didn’t have enough problems already, and now I find my wife, the love of my life who I trusted implicitly, the one person I thought I could actually rely on has been living a secret life, has been unfaithful to me, and for years too.  I just find it so hard to accept.  What was June thinking of, and if she had wanted an affair she could have found someone a bit further away from home, someone I didn’t know for Christ’s sake.  If she had wanted a divorce I might have even been able to accept that, but not this.  No, I can’t take this.  It really cannot be happening to me.  It is all so unfair.  I have to sort things out; I can’t go on like this.’ he reasoned, almost speaking out loud

*  * *

Well the morning wore on, and Jane and Harriet both knew but didn’t say that Harriet would have to go soon.  Jane walked her to the train station, dreading being left on her own again, scared of having to go back into that house again, to act as if nothing had happened, to make small talk, and maybe worst of all dreading that one day it would all seem normal and that she would forget, even for a day, what her mother had done.

As the train pulled in, she just couldn’t stop herself, she had to ask her, ‘When do you think we’ll see you again Harriet?’

‘Who can say, little sister, who can say?  But don’t worry I won’t leave you.  I will always come back for you.  I promise.’  And she put her hand out and stroked Jane’s hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear, just as she had done when they were little children.  Jane reached up and held it there, her cool knuckles against her cheek.  For just a few seconds she was back – a child again, safe in the hands of Harriet, her big sister.  The train pulled in and Harriet boarded it and taking her seat she smiled out of the window as Jane walked along the platform breaking into a little trot, then slowing to a standstill as the train eased away and she was still waving as the guards van disappeared from sight completely.

And that was enough for her – that vague throw-away line of hers was enough to bring hope flooding back into her world.  Things might be desperate, it would be incredibly hard to get through the next few days, Jane was dreading having to see her Dad’s face, to see the hurt there, but it would pass one day, she knew that now.  Harriet still cared for her, that was enough to keep her going, that was all she needed, that little speck of hope to cling onto.