Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [29]
They had been ridiculously happy. It was the early sixties, but they lived a pretty old-fashioned life. What she remembered most about it was how simple life had been. Nicholas had been paid in cash – she hadn’t had a penny of her own. She had three old tea caddies on the window-sill in the kitchen for the housekeeping, the bills and her dream fund, which doubled as the emergency fund. She would put money in there, when there was spare, and daydream about a new three-piece suite or a holiday in Scotland. And that was it. Every morning now the postman poured a mountain of paper through their letter-box – insurance, pension, investments. Nicholas paid the bills and filed them in lever-arch files. She didn’t need to look at them so long as he was around to do it. She had seen a greetings card in a shop recently: it had said that if you prayed for rain you should be prepared to deal with some mud. That had made her smile. They’d got the prosperity they’d dreamt about, and the security, so the complications were the mud. She had bought the card and put it on the windowsill in the kitchen, where she used to keep the three tea caddies – five houses and forty years ago. He’d been a good husband. A really good husband. And she loved him so. Still.
They’d had a lot of fun when they were poor. The girls refused to believe it now, when she told them there had been weeks when Nicholas hadn’t had enough money to go to the pub – because you had to have enough for two pints, so you could buy one for someone else. The girls were of the cashpoint, credit-card world – how could they understand? If you didn’t have it, you couldn’t spend it. Alien concept. They’d had a car, which was more than most people, and sometimes enough to drive to the coast at the weekend. Spread a blanket on the sand and eat sandwiches.
When she talked about it Susannah called her Ma Larkin. And she was right, in a way: life was better then.
If she had to name one perfect year, it would be 1972. She’d been in her early thirties. The girls had all been born. Nicholas was doing well in his job – he’d passed most of the bank exams he’d spent years revising for late at night in the front room. He was going places in the bank, he told her, and his joy at that infected them all. She had her beautiful, beautiful girls. Three children under five, and no tumble-dryer. What would Bridget make of that? Bridget, whose buggy was practically a car, who did all her food shopping with a credit card on the Internet, and had it delivered by men who carried it right into the kitchen, and probably, soon, would be unpacking and cooking it too. A few years ago Nicholas had taken her to the Caribbean. She had never thought she would be so lucky. They had stayed on Antigua in a beachfront room. She had never been anywhere so staggeringly beautiful, and sat for hours each morning, not reading the book in her lap, just gazing out at the amazing colours of the sea and the water and the sky.
On the last day they’d taken a car tour of the island. Their driver was called Christmas, and on the way back they went to his home to meet his children. It wasn’t so much a house as a shack, and Anna had watched in astonishment as nine immaculate children in white dresses, white ribbons in their cornrows,