Free The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer

silent. Possibly this was because he was stupid, but since he never returned from India after his last journey back in 1936, I don’t know. When I was a small child he seemed to me wise. If he is still alive — and there has been no sign of him for twenty-six years — he must be about seventy. In my first term at school I used to carry a photograph of him in my blazer pocket. It was taken against the Indian sun, and screwing up his eyes he looked reasonably boyish. I told the more credulous girls that he was my young man. As I was very fat and plain at the time, even they didn’t believe me.
    When I grew thinner I fell in love. For two years I loved the son of the local clergyman and he, sporadically, loved me. Although I was only thirteen at the beginning of this romance — he kissed me abruptly on a bus coming back from the cinema in Luton — my parents seemed to approve. I realized later that if they had seen us in bed together they would have thought we were playing sardines. We did not, of course, go to bed together. It didn’t occur to us. But we struggled together in the backs of cars, in attics and summer houses and my father’s rope yard at night, and in the organ loft. In the term time we wrote to each other, and for the first days of the holidays never sought each other out but waited, with desperate anxiety, to meet by chance in Smith’s or Woolworths or outside the bicycle shop, where we would often stand stroking the gleaming handlebars of speedy bicycles.
    My friends at school, during this period, were Betty Maclaren, Irene (pronounced Ireen) Douthwaite, Angela Williams and Mary White. Their fathers, like mine, were business men. Their fathers drove twelve-horsepower Standard or Vauxhall cars and wore navy blue suits, trilby hats and mackintoshes. Their mothers all had new permanent waves, made up their faces with vanishing cream and “natural” face powder, wore fur coats all the year round. Their brothers went to Oundle or Repton and were gods.
    When these friends went to stay with each other in the holidays they invented interesting situations between themselves and their friends’ brothers. Sometimes a brother would write, “Give my regards to the fair Angela,” or “my humblest respects to Miss I. Douthwaite, I hope she is in good health.” Then giggling attacked us like a plague, all day we were wracked with it, spluttering into our handkerchiefs, doubled up over our prayers, not daring to catch each other’s eyes for fear of a new bout beginning. I had no brothers, and therefore took it for granted that none of my friends would want to come and stay with me. There had to be a sexual incentive for everything: that was why we went to church and were fairly attentive in scripture, biology and English literature. None of us, at that time, could concentrate on mathematics or geography and we plodded on with Latin only in the faint hope that we might one day be able to understand Ovid. We had not yet encountered medical text-books, which would have provided a sharper spur.
    My friends knew, of course, about the clergyman’s son. I told them that he was nineteen, since we were only interested in older men, but otherwise I was fairly truthful. “You wouldn’t like him,” I said airily, keeping my great love for him to myself. “He doesn’t care a bit about films or dance music or anything like that.”
    â€œOh, I like clever boys best,” Ireen said, sucking up to me.
    â€œI
dote
on clever boys,” Mary White said. She had an aunt in London who was going to present her at Court. This same aunt had already taken her to a play by Noel Coward and a Cochran revue. Mary White regarded herself as a civilizing influence and kept telling us that her parents were going to be divorced. She was not to be trusted.
    â€œWell, you wouldn’t like
him
,” I said.
    â€œWhy do
you
, then?”
    â€œI don’t,