slightly over-made-up blonde, the smile she gave him just a little bit too suggestive as she told him, ‘Lucky Cathy,’ and added, ‘Look, why don’t you come in and have a drink? And I dare say we could find you something to eat,’ she added as they both heard his empty stomach growl protestingly.
‘Thanks but I’d better not. Sally’s got supper on,’ he lied.
‘Oh … I thought she was working tonight.’ The blonde was pouting slightly now, the pale blue eyes narrowing.
He’d never been a man who enjoyed the dangers of flirting, but her obvious availability and sexuality were making him sharply aware of the contrast between her attitude towards him and Sally’s.
His body hungered for the comfort of sexual contact with Sally, but these days she just didn’t want to know. Sometimes he felt the only reason she stayed with him was out of habit and because he provided a home for her and the children plus a steady income to support them all. It certainly wasn’t because she wanted to be with him.
The children were more important to her than he was. Much more important.
Cathy chattered excitedly all the way home.
‘Lindsay Roberts went to Disneyland for her summer holiday,’ she told him. ‘She was telling everyone about it. When can we go, Dad? Everyone else in my class has been.’
‘Stop exaggerating, Cathy,’ he told her sharply. Too sharply, he realised when she suddenly fell silent and he saw the sullen pout of her mouth and the tears shining in her eyes.
‘Why are you so mean?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Mum wants us to go.’
‘I’m not being mean, Cathy … I …’
He stopped. How did you tell a fifteen-year-old that the way things were right now you were lucky to be able to pay the mortgage, never mind pay for expensive American holidays?
‘You’re mean,’ Cathy told him. ‘And you forgot that you promised to take Paul fishing.
‘I wish I lived in a big house like Lindsay’s with a garden all the way round it.’
Joel’s mouth tightened. It wasn’t Cathy’s fault, he told himself. Kids were more materialistic these days; the whole world was more materialistic.
‘Aunt Daphne’s having an extension built on to her house, with a new bathroom. I heard her telling Mum.’
Paul was in the kitchen when they got back. Tiredly, Joel apologised to him and started to explain, but Paul wasn’t listening.
‘It’s OK … I didn’t want to go fishing anyway,’ he told him curtly.
Joel had never found it easy to get on with his son. He had always felt that Sally over-indulged him, much more so than he had ever been indulged as a boy. He could scarcely even remember his mother spending much time with him. She had not been the maternal type, despite giving birth to five children. Sally, on the other hand, had cosseted and protected Paul to the point where Joel had sometimes felt when he was a baby that he wasn’t even allowed to touch him.
‘You’re too hard on him. He’s a child, that’s all,’ Sally would protest whenever he attempted to discipline him.
‘Mum said to tell you that there’s cottage pie in the fridge for supper,’ Cathy informed him. ‘But I don’t want any.’
‘Neither do I,’ Paul announced.
Joel paused in the act of opening the fridge door and then closed it again. The phone rang and he went to answer it. It was the foreman in charge of one of the other production lines at the factory.
‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.
Joel sighed under his breath.
‘I can’t,’ he told him flatly. ‘Sally’s at work and I’ve got to stay in with the kids.’
‘When I grow up I’m never going to get married,’ Cathy announced when he had replaced the receiver. ‘And I’m going to have lots and lots of money and go to America as often as I like.’
‘Cathy …’ Joel began, and then stopped. What was the point? How could he explain to her?
Later, when both children had gone to bed, he prowled restlessly round the living-room, too on edge to sit down and watch the television. No one knew yet exactly what was going to happen with the factory, but, whatever it was, he already had a gut feeling that it wasn’t going to be good.
As a boy he had felt the effects of his father’s careless attitude towards a settled existence and regular, reliable work; his mother hadn’t seemed to care that some weeks there wasn’t any food in the house.
‘Make sure you ask for seconds at dinnertime,’ Beth, one of his older sisters, had instructed him when he first started school.
He had promised himself even before he and Sally married that his kids would never know the indignity of that kind of poverty; that they would never suffer the effects of that kind of parental irresponsibility.
Three years ago, when Sally had tentatively suggested trying for another baby, he had shaken his head and tried to explain to her how he felt.
Six months later, he had had a vasectomy. Was he imagining it, or was it after that that she had started to lose interest in him sexually, as though she no longer wanted him now that he could not provide her with a child … now that he could no longer fulfil his biological role in her life?
And if he lost his job and he could no longer fulfil his role as breadwinner either, would she reject him even more?
He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, absent-mindedly leaving the empty unrinsed milk bottle on the worktop.
One of the other men had said to him this afternoon, ‘What the hell are we going to do if this place does close down? There’s nowhere else for us to go. Not in this town.’
‘No,’ he had agreed. ‘Nor anywhere else locally either. The engineering industry’s been hit badly by the recession.’
What he really wanted was to have Sally here at home listening to him while he told her how worried he was, he admitted as he switched on the television and then switched it off again.
She never seemed to have time to listen to him any more, and then she complained that he never talked to her.
Increasingly recently at Kilcoyne’s he had worked hard in his role as foreman to mediate between the men and the management, and as overtime had stopped and the men had felt the effects in their wage packets he had had them coming to him complaining that they were finding it difficult to manage.
He was in exactly the same boat, but because he was their foreman he had felt unable to point this out to them and tell them that he had his own problems.
He had never really wanted Sally to go out to work, and she wouldn’t have had to either if he hadn’t been fool enough to take out that extra loan to buy a new car, and then she had wanted a new kitchen—like her sister.
None of them had known then just how high interest rates were going to rise, and, even though now the payments were easier, they were still heavily in debt to the bank. At the time it had seemed worth taking the risk, he had told himself it had been worth it, and that night when Sally had walked in just as he was finishing the kitchen … It had been a long time since they had made love like that, since he had felt her body clench with excitement and need when he touched her. He had felt really good that night. Happy … secure … a king in command of his own small personal world. And then six weeks later the company had gone on to short time, and Sally had announced that, since he was making such a fuss about the cost of the kitchen, she’d pay off the loan herself.
It had been too late then to take back the angry words he had uttered in the panic of realising just what the drop in his weekly wage was going to be.
And besides, Sally had been proved