A Little Learning. Anne Bennett

felt faint and clutched for the back of a chair.

      She remembered it so well: David’s kisses driving her wild, and knowing she wanted him to make love to her more than she’d wanted anything in her life before. She’d pulled away with difficulty, and tugging her blouse around her had turned the key in the kitchen door before leading the way upstairs to the bedroom. If she’d picked up Janet’s meaning correctly, the girl had arrived before she’d thought to lock up.

      ‘You saw …?’

      ‘I saw all right,’ Janet said, and her voice trembled as she remembered it all again. ‘I was so excited, so pleased, and I knew you would be too. I didn’t bother ringing the doorbell, but went straight down the entry to the back door. You were in the living room and had no clothes on your top. You were letting him … he was … you were just moaning, you weren’t doing anything to stop him!’

      ‘Don’t,’ Claire said, ‘please don’t say any more.’

      Janet had a lump in her throat which she swallowed with difficulty. ‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Are you embarrassed? I was disgusted.’ She saw that Miss Wentworth was crying, and she felt tears welling in her own eyes, but she was too nauseated by the whole thing to let them fall.

      ‘I know it must have been a terrible shock,’ Claire said eventually, her voice muffled with tears, ‘and I wouldn’t have had you see it for the world, but David and I love each other. We are going to be married.’

      ‘Married!’ exclaimed Janet. She couldn’t believe she’d heard right. ‘You’ll be giving up everything you’ve worked for, for a man.’

      ‘No, Janet, it doesn’t have to be that way.’

      ‘It does where I live,’ Janet spat out, suddenly angry. ‘Only Auntie Breda and Uncle Peter are different, and everyone says Uncle Peter’s henpecked and Auntie Breda wears the trousers.’

      ‘More marriages will be like your auntie’s in the future, Janet,’ Claire said. ‘Husbands and wives will both work and share the household jobs.’

      ‘They’ll share having babies too, I suppose,’ Janet said scornfully. ‘I mean, what if you had a baby?’

      ‘I won’t,’ Claire said confidently.

      ‘How can you be so sure?’ Janet said.

      ‘Look, Janet,’ Claire said, embarrassed afresh. ‘This is a conversation you should be having with your mother, not me.’

      ‘I didn’t see her doing anything.’

      ‘Well, I’m not going to tell you,’ Claire said, ‘except to say there’s things you can use, clinics you can go to. At the moment I don’t want a baby, but I may change my mind one day, when I’m married and we decide we want to start a family.’

      Janet remembered Aunt Breda’s angry words to Peter the day of the doctor’s visit to her father: ‘I’m getting her down that clinic, to get her sorted out, as soon as that kid’s born.’

      That was what Auntie Breda meant, she thought with sudden clarity, and wondered if her mother had chosen to have baby Sally like Claire seemed to suggest women were able to. Somehow she doubted Sally had been planned at all.

      ‘So,’ Claire said, ‘where do we go from here?’

      ‘Nowhere,’ Janet said flatly. ‘I want nothing to do with you. I’ll make my own way from now on.’

      ‘Janet, listen to me …’

      ‘No, I have listened. You made me feel I could do it, make a life of my own, and I can and will. If you’ve decided that’s not for you, that’s fine, but I don’t want you to teach me any more. You let me down. It made me sick.’

      ‘When you’re older you’ll probably understand a little more.’

      Janet shrugged. Claire remembered the shrug of the previous day and said, ‘I’m sorry about your hand. I shouldn’t have reacted as I did.’