Free Possession by Celia Fremlin Page B

Peggy. “But at least there’d be something to show for it. And it would be optional, too. You could look at her ugly, sulky face, with the tears dripping down it, and decide just how much it was worth to you to get rid of it….”
    I gathered that Peggy and Pat had been having one of their scenes this morning. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I kept quiet. “A marvellous system!” Peggy repeated savagely, gathering up the empty cake bowl and pitching her cooking utensils into the sink with a murderous clash of metal. “Dowries may have been expensive , yes; but so is everything that really makes life morecomfortable. And nowadays you don’t even have the option. There’s no one, now, who you could pay to take your daughter away at eighteen.”
    “Well, there’s the universities,” I said cautiously. Cautiously, because university is a sore point in Peggy’s household. Peggy herself doesn’t mind so much, but Harold, the brilliant scientist, had always assumed first that his children would be clever—which they are—and second that they would use this cleverness for excelling at academic work, which they do not. They don’t exactly refuse to stay at school and to apply for university places; but they make it quite clear that it is all being done as a favour, just to humour the adults. Naturally this attitude infuriates their father whenever he lets himself be aware of it; and his fury, shrill and inadequate as a grasshopper, infuriates Peggy; and then they have a family row on their hands. What makes it even more annoying, from Peggy’s point of view, is that she doesn’t care whether the children go to university or not. She cares about Harold’s caring, and about his irritating way of showing that he cares, and about the children’s even more irritating ways of showing that they don’t; but beyond this she just wishes that they’d all shut up.
    Nevertheless, she only smiled at my reference to the explosive subject.
    “The universities? What a hope! They only take them for half of the year! And then, after three years, they give them back to you! Look at Liz!”
    We looked at Liz, metaphorically speaking; and for a minute we basked in the familiar, consoling knowledge that our troubles with our children were at least less than hers. Liz has been a great support to us in this way, over the past few years; in times of stress we turn to her like those zoologists ’ baby monkeys, who run to their experimental wire mother for an empty sort of substitute comfort.
    It wasn’t always thus: and in a way I suppose it serves Liz right, this uncongenial rôle that she now fulfils in our lives. Once upon a time, you see, it was she who was thesuccessful one, the smug and patronising victor in the Cat-Race . Hers were the little boys who talked fluently before they were two; who didn’t wet the bed; who mixed happily with the other toddlers at the local play-group, instead of standing about the way Janice used to, sucking her thumb and looking like a case-history of maternal deprivation. They were never smacked, or told to speak nicely, dear, and yet they were quite well-behaved, and could all read before they were five. And during the ensuing years, while the rest of us wrestled variously with school-phobias, stammers, National Health spectacles, and addiction to comics, Liz’s boys sailed onwards and upwards, with straight limbs, enquiring minds, and a positive liking for salads and bodybuilding protein.
    “I got them into good eating habits right from the beginning, you see,” Liz used to say blandly—just as if the rest of us had deliberately inculcated the obsessional demand for chips and ice-lollies against which we feebly struggled.
    And so it went on. Liz’s boys passed their O-levels brilliantly, excelling particularly in maths and science subjects. As Liz never tired of pointing out to us—at school concerts, and on speech days, and in the Saturday morning queue at the butcher’s—maths