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Authors: Celia Fremlin
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happened when he’d warned her he would be late. “Surprise, darling, surprise! I managed to get away before the end….” and then the ecstatic hugging in the hallway, half of her soul clasped in his embrace, and the other half ranging the kitchen, antennae out for something burning, something boiling over, something Beatrice-like and awful…. It had never happened so far … it mustn’t ever happen.
With a quick, expert glance round her kitchen, Helen assured herself that her pots and pans, like a class of well-disciplined children, were all doing exactly what they should be doing at this precise point in the timetable, and then she dashed into the bedroom to effect a lightning change. Until she tore it off, she had not noticed how damp her pleated school skirt had become during the journey home. It would need pressing before she wore it again. Oh hell! Oh never mind, never mind, her hair was the really urgent problem, just look at it, bashed lank and stringy by the February sleet, no time now to set it with rollers, she’d just have to push it into shape as best she could with fingers and comb….
*
It was a photo-finish, just about: with Martin’s key in the door exactly as Helen raced past the winning-post—emerged, that is, from the bedroom, smiling, relaxed and with every hair in place to welcome him.
CHAPTER VII
I T HAD BEEN a lovely dinner, one of Helen’s best. The washing up had been done—Martin always helped with this, no one could call him a chauvinist pig, he could see that it was only fair when she worked all day—and now here he was, his domestic duties honourably fulfilled, and with a long, peaceful evening ahead in which to get on with his work. Evenings had always been his best time for working. He remembered vividly from his student days that surge of energy that would come over him at nightfall, as it comes to a cat, or a panther; and how the words would pour forth almost faster than he could get them down, far into the night. “Best first-year essay I’ve ever read, Martin.” “A remarkable piece of work, Mr Lockwood. I’d like to show it to the Professor….”
That sort of thing. It seemed like yesterday. He waited, now, for it all to happen again. The circumstances were ideal; a good dinner inside him and a long, peaceful stretch of time ahead, safe from interruption.
Helen saw to this. For her, Martin’s work sessions were sacrosanct , and evening after evening she would fend off neighbours, phone calls, relatives, canvassers, like a blonde and beautiful guard-dog, creating for him an atmosphere of peace and privacy such as he had longed for in vain ever since leaving university. Now at last, after all these frustrating years, he had a chance of really achieving something.
*
Martin stirred in his chair, restlessly: then bent to open the bottom drawer of the desk and extracted from it the file containing the provisional synopsis for his thesis. His supervisor, Dr Frost, a pale,painstaking academic, humiliatingly much younger than himself, hadn’t been too pleased with the synopsis at first reading, and Martin had had to go to great lengths to impress on him the provisional nature of the document, and had endeavoured to mask its intrinsic dullness and lack of originality by dropping vague hints of some startling new angle shortly to be adumbrated, and to be expounded in detail in the revised version.
So far, so good; but for several weeks now Dr Frost had been politely indicating that it was high time that this startling new angle should be taking some kind of definite shape; that something, at least, should by now have been set down on paper indicating the direction of these new and original thoughts that were to be the raison d’être of the thesis.
“There’s a lot of supplementary data that hasn’t been fully analysed yet,” Martin would temporise; or, “I’ve got to get a further control sample before I can make any positive assertions,” but his supervisor was
With a quick, expert glance round her kitchen, Helen assured herself that her pots and pans, like a class of well-disciplined children, were all doing exactly what they should be doing at this precise point in the timetable, and then she dashed into the bedroom to effect a lightning change. Until she tore it off, she had not noticed how damp her pleated school skirt had become during the journey home. It would need pressing before she wore it again. Oh hell! Oh never mind, never mind, her hair was the really urgent problem, just look at it, bashed lank and stringy by the February sleet, no time now to set it with rollers, she’d just have to push it into shape as best she could with fingers and comb….
*
It was a photo-finish, just about: with Martin’s key in the door exactly as Helen raced past the winning-post—emerged, that is, from the bedroom, smiling, relaxed and with every hair in place to welcome him.
CHAPTER VII
I T HAD BEEN a lovely dinner, one of Helen’s best. The washing up had been done—Martin always helped with this, no one could call him a chauvinist pig, he could see that it was only fair when she worked all day—and now here he was, his domestic duties honourably fulfilled, and with a long, peaceful evening ahead in which to get on with his work. Evenings had always been his best time for working. He remembered vividly from his student days that surge of energy that would come over him at nightfall, as it comes to a cat, or a panther; and how the words would pour forth almost faster than he could get them down, far into the night. “Best first-year essay I’ve ever read, Martin.” “A remarkable piece of work, Mr Lockwood. I’d like to show it to the Professor….”
That sort of thing. It seemed like yesterday. He waited, now, for it all to happen again. The circumstances were ideal; a good dinner inside him and a long, peaceful stretch of time ahead, safe from interruption.
Helen saw to this. For her, Martin’s work sessions were sacrosanct , and evening after evening she would fend off neighbours, phone calls, relatives, canvassers, like a blonde and beautiful guard-dog, creating for him an atmosphere of peace and privacy such as he had longed for in vain ever since leaving university. Now at last, after all these frustrating years, he had a chance of really achieving something.
*
Martin stirred in his chair, restlessly: then bent to open the bottom drawer of the desk and extracted from it the file containing the provisional synopsis for his thesis. His supervisor, Dr Frost, a pale,painstaking academic, humiliatingly much younger than himself, hadn’t been too pleased with the synopsis at first reading, and Martin had had to go to great lengths to impress on him the provisional nature of the document, and had endeavoured to mask its intrinsic dullness and lack of originality by dropping vague hints of some startling new angle shortly to be adumbrated, and to be expounded in detail in the revised version.
So far, so good; but for several weeks now Dr Frost had been politely indicating that it was high time that this startling new angle should be taking some kind of definite shape; that something, at least, should by now have been set down on paper indicating the direction of these new and original thoughts that were to be the raison d’être of the thesis.
“There’s a lot of supplementary data that hasn’t been fully analysed yet,” Martin would temporise; or, “I’ve got to get a further control sample before I can make any positive assertions,” but his supervisor was
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