Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

“Temporarily,” said Malina briskly.

“If I get a post,” Jims said, dropping his voice, “it will of course be rather different.”

All this was making Zillah nervous. “My children won’t go away.”

“No, darling, and we don’t want them to.”

“It might be wise,” said Malina, “not to give any interviews to the print media for a year. Could we have your first husband tragically killed in a car crash?” Reluctantly she was forced to relinquish this favorite scenario. “Well, no, maybe not. But by then,” she added coyly, “another wee one may be on the way.”

Zillah thought the chances of another wee one slender in the extreme. She had no experience of interviews or journalists but was already frightened of them. Still, she had long ago cultivated the art of banishing unpleasant thoughts from her mind. It was the only form of defense she knew. So, every time a picture of Jims as shadow minister of state at the Home Office or under-secretary for health came into her head and she had a vision of a reporter appearing on her doorstep, she thrust it away. And whenever a voice whispered in her mind’s ear, “Tell me something about your previous marriage, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith,” she plugged it up. After all, she knew Jerry wouldn’t reappear. What surer way could there be of making plain your intention to disappear than by announcing your death?

Jims bought her an engagement ring, three large emeralds mounted on a square cushion of diamonds. He’d already given her a Visa card in the name of Z. H. Leach and now gave her an American Express platinum card for Mrs. J. I. Melcombe-Smith and told her to buy any clothes she liked. Wearing her new Caroline Charles green suit with the bead-encrusted bodice, she dined with Jims in the Churchill Room at the Palace of Westminster and was introduced to the leader of the Conservative party in the Commons. Seven years ago Zillah would have described herself as a Communist, and she didn’t know if she really was a Conservative.

“You are now, darling,” said Jims.

After dinner he took her into Westminster Hall and down into the Chapel of St. Mary Undercroft. Even Zillah, who took very little notice of such things, had to admit that Sir Charles Barry’s stonework was impressive and the lavish fittings magnificent. Obediently, she looked at the bosses showing St. Catherine martyred on her wheel and St. John the Evangelist boiling in oil, though she was squeamish about such things and St. Lawrence being grilled made her feel a bit sick. She’d take care not to look up during the marriage ceremony. Against all this rich and brilliant color, she decided, an ivory wedding dress would be most effective. Because she’d fixed on the single- woman option, she was determined to push aside the memory of her marriage and was almost reconciled to a church ceremony.

It was a pity the children couldn’t be there. She rather fancied Eugenie as bridesmaid and Jordan as page. They’d have looked so chic in black velvet with white lace collars. Apart from these frivolous considerations, she was seriously concerned about her children. Their existence was one of those not exactly unpleasant, more disturbing facts she couldn’t banish, though she tried. That is, she tried not to think about them except as the two people she was closest to in the world, possibly the only people she loved, for her affection for Jims hardly came into that category. But the circumstances were too awkward to allow her to forget the troublesome aspects. For one thing, they constantly asked when they were going to see Jerry again. Jordan had a disconcerting habit of declaiming loudly out in the street or, worse, when Jims brought an MP friend to call, “Oh, I do want to see my daddy!”

Eugenie, though less emotional, always spoke more to the point. “My father hasn’t been to see us for months,” or, quoting the babysitter Zillah now employed almost daily, “Mrs. Peacock says my father is an absentee dad.”

The last address Zillah had for him was in Harvist Road, NW10. Sometimes she got out the piece of paper on which he’d written it down and just stared at it, thinking. There was no phone number. At last she phoned Directory Enquiries. Without a name they couldn’t or wouldn’t help her. One afternoon, leaving Mrs. Peacock with the children, she went up to Harvist Road on a Bakerloo Line train to Queen’s Park. The place reminded her of her student days when she and Jerry had shared a room in a house near the station. They’d been very happy for a while. Then she got pregnant and they married, but things were never the same.

“Needles and pins, needles and pins,” said Jerry, quoting his old granny, “when a man marries his trouble begins.” They were on their two-day honeymoon in Brighton. Then he said, “I quite like being married. I may do it a few times more.”

She smacked his face for that but he only laughed. Now she was looking for him to find out if he was willing to stay dead. His name wasn’t on a bell at the street number he’d given her. When she banged the lion head knocker an elderly woman came to the door and said, “I’m not interested in double glazing,” before she’d even spoken.

“And I’m not selling it. I’m looking for Jerry Leach. He used to live here.”

“He called himself Johnny, not Jerry, and he doesn’t live here now. Hasn’t since last year. Months and months. The answer to your next question is no, I don’t know where he’s gone.”

The door was shut in her face. She walked across the road and sat down on a seat in Queen’s Park, gazing at the green expanse. A black girl and a white girl, walking past, looked curiously at her short-skirted linen suit and high heels, put their heads together and giggled. Zillah ignored them. It was evident that Jerry didn’t want his whereabouts known. She must make up her mind he’d gone forever. What would he think when he saw her and Jims’s photograph in the paper? Perhaps he didn’t read them. But he’d be bound to find out sooner or later if this thing Jims called a reshuffle took place before the wedding. Because by then Jims might be a minister and on account of his youth and good looks and her youth and good looks, a target for the media. Jerry was a rotten provider and generally hopeless with money, and unfaithful and callous, but not wholly bad. He was the last man to try and rubbish her chances. If he saw she’d made a good marriage and done well for herself, he’d most likely laugh and say, “Good luck, girl, I won’t stand in your way.” Besides, he’d be relieved she wouldn’t nag him any longer for child support. Not that he’d ever given her any, there being no blood in a stone.

That silly joke of his kept running through her head. She hadn’t thought of it for years until Eugenie came out with it the other day. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drownded. Who was saved? Perhaps he actually was dead. But no. She reminded herself that whatever she pretended or told Jims, Jerry was her legally wedded husband. She’d have been the first to be officially informed. He was her husband and she was his wife. Uneasily, she remembered that for some reason, now forgotten, Jerry had required and got the old form of marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer. There had been a bit about whom God had joined together let no man put asunder, and keeping only unto him as long as they both lived. Moreover, she was going to have to go through all that again at St. Mary Undercroft, where she didn’t exactly know but could guess that they’d have the same old service. And the vicar (or whatever-the canon?) would say those awful words about answering as they would at the dreadful day of judgment that no just cause or impediment stood in the way of their getting married. Zillah didn’t really believe in the dreadful day of judgment but the sound of it struck superstitious terror into her just the same. Jerry, wherever he was, was six feet and 182 pounds of just cause and impediment. Why did she always have to marry men who wanted their weddings to be in church?

After a while she got up and wandered back to the tube station. The trouble with thrusting unpleasant thoughts from your mind is that the thrusting can never be absolute and each time they come back it seems to be with redoubled threat. There were her parents to worry about too. She hadn’t yet told them Jerry was dead. Nor had she informed them that the official version of their relationship was that they’d never been married at all. Ostensibly, they’d be giving the wedding reception. Jims, of course, would be paying. She wondered how she was going to stop her mother telling the leader of the Opposition, not to mention Lord Strathclyde, how she used to take little Zillah with her when she went making beds and washing dishes up at the big house and the five-year-old was sometimes allowed to play with seven-year-old James.

The train came. The carriage she got into was full of yardies from Harlesden drinking lager out of cans, reminding her of the world she’d soon be leaving behind forever. At Kilburn Park she moved carriages and went on to Oxford Circus. The best remedy she knew for nerves and depression was shopping, a taste she’d never till now been able to indulge. It was amazing how quickly she’d taken to it and how much she enjoyed it. Already, after only a few weeks, she knew the names of all the designers, was beginning to get a good idea of what their clothes looked like and how one differed from another. If only academic subjects were so easily learned she might have got herself some qualifications by this time. Married to Jims, she wouldn’t need them.

Emerging from Browns some hour and a half later, laden with bags, she felt enormously happy and carefree, wondering why she’d been down in the dumps earlier. She took a taxi back to Battersea. The children were having