Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [86]
Donald’s mum was a tartar, but his dad was lovely. When Donald and I started going out together I would go by the shop after work and wait for Donald. He was often out doing deliveries and things, so I’d sit and talk to his dad for ages, waiting. He was a lovely man. He’d been in the navy, during the war. He had these blue tattoos, all up his arms. He’d married Donald’s mum before he was called up, in 1939, and came home to a bride he didn’t know all that well, and a small son he didn’t know at all. God, what that war must have done to families. I think he married in haste. I know he repented at leisure. She was scary with an upholstery hammer in her hand, that woman. I think I was as much in love with his dad as I was with Donald, in a way. He was so different from my own dad.
Marriage to Donald represented escape. In my day, you didn’t just go off and get those things for yourself, like you can. You needed a man. It meant a home of my own. Freedom. It meant his dad was my dad. Besides, it was what everyone was doing. You couldn’t have sex until you got married, apart from anything else, and it was pretty much all any of us ever thought about—the normal ones at least. We were married within eighteen months of meeting. Too fast. We didn’t know each other well.
Which is not to say we weren’t happy. I don’t want you to think that. We had a lot of fun. It was all a big adventure—having our own place. I learned to cook. I can’t tell you the laughs we had over my experiments in the kitchen. Not that this is news to you lot. Never improved much, did I? We used to have to retire to the pub for a Cornish pasty quite often. We spent a vast amount of time in bed, learning how all of that worked. That was fun, too. I have to really cast my mind back, because the truth is that when we split up, I didn’t love your father anymore. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t love him then. I remember walking up the aisle to stand beside him on my wedding day, and thinking I would burst with joy. He was a handsome bugger. My mum said handsome brute. And there was something brutish about him. You know who he reminded me of—Marlon Brando in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Without the brooding violence, of course.
He didn’t really know what to make of you two. He was better when you were older. But babies, babies left him cold. He was too big, too awkward for you when you were small. He couldn’t change nappies or do up the buttons on your clothes, not that many men did, in those days. But you frightened him a bit. And he was a bit jealous, to be truthful. Some men are, I think. They get usurped, knocked down the pecking order. He loved you, I know that. He just wasn’t all that interested in you. I never once saw him get down on the floor and play with you. He hadn’t the patience for your games. The three of you learned to ignore each other, mostly.
I fought badly with his mother. She helped out a lot, when you were very little. But there was a price, and I decided early on that I wasn’t willing to pay it. She wanted to interfere, to tell me where I was going wrong. All our worst arguments were about that. He used to side with her. I thought he was a spineless git when it came to her, and I used to tell him so. He would wince and shout back and disappear off to his mother’s house and not come home for his tea, and when he did come home, I’d sometimes throw it at him, cold and congealed on the plate. I’d never do a thing like that now. Apart from anything else, it was me who had to clean mince and potatoes off the walls. But I was young, and I got so cross. In the early days we made up easily. Had fun making up, in fact. We both had a temper, and we knew it.
But gradually, the fights got more frequent, and they