Nobody had ever taught Crawford Kingsland the art of changing the subject, or if they had, he hadn’t been listening. He talked on, blissfully unaware of Helen’s hunted glances over first one shoulder then the other, as she searched vainly for a means of escape. He continued talking at her, pounding her with information about his job in a factory that made fans and air filters for both the home and hotel bathroom markets. She had stopped replying some minutes before, and was now backed into a corner, turning her glass of too warm too sweet wine in her fingers, and twitching.
But there was no escape. Helen and Crawford Kingsland were alone in the kitchen. The chunky handle of the Rangemaster oven door dug into Helen’s back as she pressed against it, trying to put more millimetres of distance between her and Crawford Kingsland. From the buzz of talk and laughter she could hear through the open kitchen door, it seemed that the party had moved into the larger living room, where the French doors opened out onto a terrace and then a sloped garden.
She was 57 years old and had come to accept that this was what happened to her. She was polite, shy, plain (“homely”, her mother used to say) and quietly spoken, and all of this made her a sitting duck for people like Crawford Kingsland to trap in the kitchen at parties and talk at about air filters.
She was targeted everywhere else too: At the insurance office where she had worked since leaving school, the younger women talked to her about the men they dated, their gym habits, holidays, nights out at bars and afternoons at salons from which they emerged with impossibly glossy finger nails and long sooty feathery lashes like Bambi. Helen would listen politely, answering when she was asked a question, which was not often. She experienced a weird fascination in listening to them. They thought she was old, she supposed, old and dull, and a world apart from them with their long hair and tiny dresses. And they were right – their world was not hers. She was not quite sure what her world was, but she knew that within it she needed to be smiley and approachable at all times. In fact people did approach her all the time, in order to talk to her about themselves.
Like Crawford Kingsland, and his wretched air filters. Helen made another feeble attempt to break away from the conversation, but Crawford didn’t notice. To Helen’s dismay, he had now moved on to telling her how much he loved talking to her, and what a wonderful listener she was. How she understood him as no woman had done before, not ever. She stared at him, the oven door handle digging painfully into her back, frozen like a rabbit before a snake. She wanted to run, and keep running until she was out in some wild countryside somewhere, with miles and miles and miles between her and Crawford Kingsland.
Impossible of course, since she hadn’t done more than run for a bus for thirty years.
Crawford Kingsland was now suggesting that, since they got on so well, Helen might do worse than think about some sort of a future with him? Helen noticed that his mouth formed a little pointy peak, almost a triangle, when he spoke. It was like the beak of some horrible aquatic animal, possibly, she thought, a squid. And his face, hot under the kitchen strip-lights, was glistening with a thin sheen of sweat and flushed an unpleasant purplish colour, not usually seen on human skin. Perhaps, although she wished him no ill-will, he would explode in a moment with a stroke, and she could go and phone for an ambulance and escape that way.
But Crawford Kingsland’s blood pressure appeared to be up to the challenge, and he was now squeezing the tops of her arms, rhythmically, like someone inexpertly kneading bread dough. Helen’s heart began to leap about inside the cage of her ribs like a bird frantic for escape. Oh God, make him stop talking. Make him go away. Must I stand here and meekly agree to marry Crawford Kingsland because I’m too polite to object?
“There you are! I’ve been looking all over the house for you!”
The hands stopped their rhythmic kneading and the squid mouth was suddenly still.
Released, Helen looked over to where the voice had come from. Standing in the kitchen doorway was a thin young woman, only just old enough not to be a girl, whose short hair was sticking up in messy red-dyed tufts all over her head. Strangely, it suited her. She was wearing very large, black framed glasses that magnified her eyes, and a faded T-shirt printed with the name of a punk group that marginally predated Helen’s own youth. Her face was small like a child’s, but there was nothing childlike about her voice. She spoke clearly, with no hint of apology.
“I’m afraid I need to drag you away,” she said.
She slipped a hand under Helen’s elbow, and flashed a bold lipsticked smile towards Crawford Kingsland, who had dropped his hands to his sides and was helplessly looking on, squid beak mouth slightly open and foolish.
Helen hurried out of the kitchen before he could recover the power of speech. She followed the red-haired woman through the living room, out through the French doors and into the garden. It was a warm evening, scented with cigarettes and different perfumes and wine from the party, and, more strongly, with summer flowers bleeding their scents into the night air. There was a soft silver moon in the sky above the hedges, round and shiny as a penny.
Helen breathed a long, shaky sigh of relief. “Thank you. But do we … have we met before?”
“No, but I could see you needed to escape. Trapped with a terrible old bore at a party, we’ve all been there. I’m Angela, by the way.”
When Angela smiled, Helen saw that she had a gap between her two front teeth, and it somehow made her want to trust her.
“Thank you. I’m Helen,” she said. And then, in an unplanned burst of uncontrollable truth, she added how it wasn’t only at parties, and not only this one time, but her whole life, every single day of it. “I can’t stop saying ‘yes’ to people, even when I mean ‘no’, or standing there politely, when I want to be anywhere else.”
From behind the thick glasses Angela’s eyes burned into hers. “That’s just crazy, Helen. Someone should do something to change that before it’s too late. Who could do that, do you think?”
“Me,” Helen said, “but how?”
Angela grinned. The moonlight caught her teeth and made them gleam. “ You only do and say what you want to do and say. It’s a bit uncomfortable at first, but you soon get used to it.”
Helen confessed that Crawford Kingsland had been talking about a future with her. “And I knew I’d have to say yes! I didn’t have any other options! I’d have to marry him, or if not him, someone just as bad.”
Angela laughed, and the sound of it was the most wonderful thing Helen had ever heard. “Of course you’ve got options: Take up tennis, train as a nurse. Breed giant rabbits, write a novel. Move to the seaside. Go on Tinder, get a lover. Lots of options, Helen. You choose.”
The idea of not marrying Crawford Kingsland, or anyone like him, danced before Helen’s eyes. She lifted her face to the moon. “Thank you, Angela.”
“You’re welcome. Shall we go back in and get a drink?”
Helen took a deep breath. “No. It’s an awful party. I’m going home,” she said.
Ann Hayton is a retired health visitor using her delightful freedom to walk dogs, swim in the sea, and write. Her first novel, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WHALE ROAD, was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Award in 2022, and the New Angle Prize in 2023. She is currently working on her second novel.
Illustration via Unsplash.