The Banker's Niece 23: The first letter

Spring 1978

Monday
My dear Jane

It is difficult to say that it was lovely to see you at the weekend. I think it was almost the saddest time of my life.

    I wonder if you quite realise what you are doing. At the moment you are living in a somewhat unreal atmosphere at university. Everybody is equal and simply accepted for what they are there. When you get away things are not quite the same.

    If you marry Rick you are cutting yourself off from all the things you have been brought up to accept and expect. Firstly on the purely practical side:

  no trips abroad

  no extras of nice clothes etc.

  no private medicine

  above all, none of the advantages for your children that you have had.

    Secondly and far more important you will be committed to such a narrow limited world and circle of friends, with really not much hope of improvement. It may not matter to you now, but I think you will get very bored. It does still matter what your background is and the mere fact that you worry about this yourself proves it. You can ignore the background and upbringing if someone has great brains, or charm, or talent, but they must have some compensation.

    I rang up my friend Patricia after you left. I wanted to hear her reaction and see if I was being prejudiced, snobbish etc. She was terribly distressed to hear about you. I think she feels as upset and worried as we do. She said she could not bear to think of you wasting your very good brain – not to mention ability and looks. I think she feels for you as for a daughter and being a little further away she can think less emotionally. I would not call her cynical, but she put even more emphasis than I do on the importance of background, how you have been brought up and what you expect from life. It is this that gives you confidence and the ability to mix with anybody.

    Anyway, don’t do anything in a hurry. If you are not dying to have babies what is the hurry? Get your degree and get away from your narrow world of Exeter. You have so many talents. Don’t bury them all and turn into a bored and boring housewife too soon.

    Enough of preaching. You know what I think and I shan’t mention it again. My next letters will be the usual mundane gossip.

    Love Mummy

‘What - a - load - of - bollocks,’ said Rick, throwing down the letter.

    They were in Jane’s room, sitting on the mattress. The letter had arrived that morning shortly after she stood in the street and waved goodbye to Rick. He was heading to work in the Mini, she was staying at the house to try and make a start on revision for her finals in six weeks’ time. Instead of revising however, she’d spent the day in tears, longing for Rick to return. Now here he was, but if anything she felt worse. How could she discuss with him something that was about him? But if not Rick, who else could she talk to?

    ‘It’s all very well for you to say that,’ cried Jane, her face in her hands. ‘But I can’t bear the thought of making my mother so unhappy.’

    ‘What about her making you unhappy?’ said Rick.

    Jane couldn’t answer that. If she was unhappy it was obviously her fault, wasn't it? That was what everyone always said.

    ‘But what if she’s right?’ she said.

    ‘Right about what?’ said Rick.

    ‘About not having books and holidays and things.’

    ‘Well what do you think?’ demanded Rick.

    ‘I don’t know,’ she cried. ‘It doesn’t seem important now but what if I’m being naïve or spoilt?’

    ‘Well what if you are?’ said Rick. ‘It’s your life.’

    Was it? She felt as if she belonged to a network of parents, uncles, aunts and cousins, all wanting something from her, something that she never seemed able to give them.

    ‘And what about what she says about you?’ she carried on. ‘I can’t understand how she can have one view and I can have another completely different. How does that happen? How can we both be right? What is the truth?’

    Rick pulled her hands away from her face and made her look at him. ‘You’, he said, ‘are right for you.’

    'But what do I know? What experience do I have? I’m only twenty-two. I’m twenty-five years younger than her.’

    ‘Exactly,’ said Rick. ‘You’re different from her. Of course you’re going to see things differently.’

    ‘But how do I know what I’ll feel in the future?’

    ‘What do you feel now?’ he demanded.

    ‘I don’t know,’ she cried, flinging herself face forward on to the mattress.

They thought they’d got away with it, even though both she and Rick had hated every minute of the visit to Jane’s parents and left as soon as they could after breakfast on Sunday, as no one had said anything untoward. No one, in fact, had said anything much at all.

    Jane stopped singing along to the cassettes when Surrey turned into Kent, but it wasn’t until they turned into her parents’ drive and went past the woods and the fields and the tennis court that Rick stopped.

    When the drive fanned out into a circle in front of the house, they parked behind the central rosebed and scrunched across the gravel hand in hand. The three-storey Georgian façade with its wide stone steps and portico loomed ahead, blocking out the sun. A bird screeched in the shrubbery. Jane’s head was full of white noise.

    Rick disappeared into the bedroom he’d been allocated and Jane sat in the drawing-room nursing a glass of chilled white wine and making polite conversation with her parents. How was the journey? How was Exeter? When were her finals?

    She had written to them saying that she’d met someone and he’d asked her to marry him, but no one mentioned the letter.

     At 7.30 Jane’s mother sent her up to retrieve Rick.

    ‘I don’t know where he’s got to,’ she said snappily.

    Jane hadn’t bothered to explain to Rick that pre-dinner drinks were an essential part of the ritual. At the end of their visit to Rick’s parents, Peggy had found a copy of a 1950s’ book on etiquette and told Rick he ought to read it. Back in Exeter, Rick had spent the evening lying on their mattress reading bits out to Jane and roaring with laughter.

    ‘What sort of a world do these people live in?’ he exclaimed.

     

Supper was always at 7.30. Any later and her father would have a third glass of whisky and then he wouldn’t want any food and then he’d fall asleep in his armchair, sometimes till morning.

    They ate in the dining-room, the four of them ranged around the 12-seater mahogany table. The starter was avocado and Jane saw Rick watch her as she picked up her teaspoon and dug in. She wondered if he’d eaten avocado before.

    ‘Where do you come from?’ asked Jane’s mother of Rick.

    ‘Devon,’ said Rick.

    ‘Oh how lovely,’ said Jane’s mother. ‘Do you know …?’

    She rattled off a list of names, none of which Jane had heard before. She didn’t think her mother was actually making the names up. They were probably people she’d met once at some party, or friends of friends.

    ‘No,’ said Rick.

    Of course he didn't. Why would he want to?

    Her father emerged from his smokescreen. (He smoked about sixty cigarettes a day.) ‘What job do you do?’

    ‘I repair things,’ said Rick.

    Jane winced. Why did he have to make his job sound so dull? Why couldn’t he explain that he was a genius with inanimate objects? That there was no object he couldn’t deal with? That he healed them by instinct? That as well as repairing things he built prototypes and helped postgraduates with their research?

    ‘Any prospects?’ asked her father.

    ‘Nope,’ said Rick.

    Jane hastened to explain. Someone had to. ‘He’d need a degree to get any further.’

    ‘And he hasn’t got one,’ said Jane’s mother.

    ‘No,’ said Jane.

    What could she say? His brain didn’t work that way. He wasn’t interested in the subjects you studied at university. He didn’t take exams seriously. In any case he was dyslexic so all his letters came out the wrong way round, and his handwriting was atrocious as he’d been off sick when they learned joined-up writing at school so any piece of work he handed in was automatically marked down.

    But, even if she had been able to explain all that, would it make any difference? Her parents were like the academics at the university who thought they were superior because they worked with their heads rather than their hands. To her parents, people who repaired things were tradesmen and Jane had heard her mother talking to them.

    Jane’s mother spent the rest of the meal talking about Ollie. How well he was doing at Cambridge. What a good doctor he would make. How nice his girlfriend Lucy was. What a lovely time they’d had when Ollie and Lucy visited.

    As she always did when she was at home, Jane helped her mother clear the table and wash up. Neither of them spoke.

    As soon as she could she went into the hall where she found Rick pacing like a caged lion. He’d been left alone in the drawing-room with her father.

    ‘He wanted me to ask for your hand in marriage,’ he exploded. ‘I know he did.’

    ‘What did you do?’ asked Jane.

    ‘I walked out,’ said Rick.

    That night, Jane crept into Rick’s room and they clung together without speaking.

Click here for the next instalment