Saturday 14th October

‘What the hell is to become of me now?’ thought June.  I thought I might have still had some connection, some spark of sympathy from Jane at least.  But she just follows Harriet like some lost lamb.  And now as I look around me at this big house, that I have somehow never really felt was my own, I can’t help but be afraid of the future.  I used to think I couldn’t go on without Ted, that as long as I had him, even infrequently I could face the future.  Well, that’s all over now of course.  I knew that the moment Harriet caught us.  It was like waking up from a long sleep, and having to face the real world again.  And what sort of a world will I settle for now?  Will I ever be able to smile happily again?  Will I ever be able to love Phil again?  Oh, I always have loved him in a way, but it was never enough for me.  Will I be able to settle down and ever be contented, or will I always feel this bad?  Worst of all, will I one day forget?  Forget Ted?  Forget those moments of bliss, that tender rapture, that oneness with the world I felt in his arms?  Will I one day not think about him?  Will I just become another old woman, leafing through her photo albums, waiting for an occasional phone-call from one of my children, taking a cup of tea into Phil asleep in front of the tv and wandering up to bed alone?”

*  * *

On the train again, “I am always on fucking trains, but never going anywhere.” Thought Harriet.  As she passed the familiar buildings as the train built up a little speed, the railway footbridge where Jane and she used to watch the few remaining steam trains chuffing underneath, drenching them in hot sticky smoke, past the streets and houses huddled so close to the railway line, as if they were too scared to breathe, the very streets she tramped around yesterday after she discovered her wretched mother doing it, past the old iron foundry where they make the lawnmowers now, past the paint factory and the fertilizer plant with the big blue and orange drums of chemicals stacked up in rows, past the nursery greenhouses all mildewed and yellow glass, and then the fields with the cows chewing the cud and staring up at her, their tails swishing at flies on their rumps, past the little copses where Jane and she used to take their picnic basket when they were kids, past the little farms and outhouses, the very barns where her mother must have been doing it with Uncle Ted, the tiny lives lived out here with such narrow horizons, such dark and dismal skies, such limited imaginations, such tiny ambitions, to live and die here in these little houses, to be born and die in the same place, never having lived their lives to the full, never having done anything, never achieving their potential, never realizing they had potential to achieve even.  No, not for Harriet, this life, getting married to your childhood boyfriend, the boy from the same village, the same school, who knew your parents, who was probably even related to you a couple of generations back, to get yourself stupidly pregnant, to have to get married, though everyone would pretend the baby was just a little early as they titter behind their hankies over the garden fence, to bring up your snotty-nosed kids in these stupid houses, wiping the shit off their arses until you had the next one, and the next one, and you became fat with flabby arms and legs like tree-trunks and stopped enjoying sex because it was always the same and worse still – the same man, until you were there crying at your daughter’s wedding as she too married a local boy and was probably already up the duff herself and you watch as she has your grandchildren and they grow up in the same little houses and mean streets and none of them will ever do anything with their lives at all.  No, Harriet was different.  She was better than that.  She would be someone. She wasn’t like them, these ordinary people, she was different.  She just had to get through the next few weeks, buckle down and get some work done, enough anyway to convince her tutors not to kick her out, just bide her time until she had made her plans, till she got her hands on her savings book, till she could escape this cloying crap and start to live, till she could get to London and start again, with no-one knowing anything about her mother and her shenanigans, no-one knowing about her stupid foray into taking drugs and all that crap.  No, she would get herself clean, she would concentrate on her future.  She could be anything she wanted, not limited by these narrow fields, no pretty little hedges and fences around her life, no-one holding her back anymore.  Just wait, a few weeks that was all she needed.  A few more pointless train journeys to go, and it would all be alright.