Presently that too was added (‘No one could say that our Trev isn’t obliging,’ as Mrs Gilman was wont to remark). The new housing estate was on the outskirts of the town, it now took Trevor over an hour to travel to and fro. But the return journey was sweetened by the meat extract 143advertisements in the evening paper. These represented a young husband returning to a young wife, and though they changed slightly every month or so, their gist was always the same, the young husband commenting, playfully and appreciatively, on the delicious smell that the meat extract had given to a soup, a stew, or a plate of rissoles. During the years of living at home these advertisements had made rather wistful reading—not that he wished for better soups, stews or rissoles than those of his mother’s cooking, but he would have liked to be praising Rachel for them. Now he could enter a home of his own, exactly like the young husband in the advertisement; and Rachel, turning off the Third Programme, would jump up and become the advertisement’s young wife, and after supper and washing up would sit on the glacial arm of his easy-chair, looking forward to the day when they could have a television set, and being interested in the assorted womanly bits read aloud from the evening paper.

‘What about this, Ray? “Special offer. Brighten your table with plastic salad-servers. Choice of art shades in pink, blue, or old gold.”’

Rejoicing in a home of his own, he also rejoiced in his now domesticated Rachel, the wife he had looked forward to, cooking almost as well as Mum, thirty years younger than Mum, and getting ready to be a Mum herself—for Rachel had honourably observed her bargain, and was again with child. He expressed his joy and approval by bringing home little presents, presents of a kind that would please a domesticated young wife: plastic fruit-dishes, 144rayon tablecloths, chromium-plated toothbrush-holders, and—an acknowledgment of Rachel’s more extended culture—an Old English brass toasting-fork. His elation pursued her into the kitchen, endowing it with every kind of patent labour-saving device for peeling potatoes, slicing beans, whisking eggs, saving soap, removing pips from grapefruit and unstopping sinks. All these were shiny, fragile and clattering; there was even a kettle that whistled when it boiled. Rachel reflected that she could not have a home of her own that was not also a home of Trevor’s. And, after all, she did not have to use these kitchen comforts; she had only to keep them dusted and displayed, and to refer to them.

She was now appreciably pregnant. Being sick was part of the daily routine, and when she was lucky took place immediately after waving off Trevor to his bank. Trevor longed for the baby, irrespective of its sex. Rachel hoped it would be a boy. Pink salad-servers, armchairs like glazed brawn, and Mrs Gilman as a grandmother would not matter so much to a boy. She hoped so devoutly that it would be a boy that she did not often allow herself to consider that it might be a girl. To live, during some hours of the day, like a young wife in a meat extract advertisement (she had recognized the source of those sprightly compliments) was perfectly tolerable, since Trevor was not only so good and so sterling, as became a Gilman, but also was lovable, and the man she had elected to love. For her daughter to grow up like the young girls in the advertisement of How to Glamourize your Hair at Home was a different matter. 145One day, considering this more attentively, she broke into a cold sweat. She wrote to Celia Hanson, asking her, if the child were a girl, to be its godmother.