The Accidental Woman

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘Did you ever wonder where I’d been?’

  ‘Of course I wondered. You know I did. Why?’

  ‘Well, if you were to lend me a little money – just fifty pounds, that’s all – then I might tell you what happened.’

  Maria wrote her brother a cheque, but as soon as he had folded it and put it away in a pocket, she knew that she had been tricked.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve cashed it,’ he said. ‘Honestly. I promise.’

  He left the kitchen just as Ronny was coming in. He had come to slip in a quick proposal of marriage before going home. Maria refused, more kindly than she had used to do, and when she showed him out, she kissed him goodbye.

  Bobby and William left together, since they lived in the same part of London. There was more kissing, both formal and tender. Dorothy was not in on this, having fallen into a drunken stupor on her bed, after making successive and fruitless passes at all three men, on the pretext of asking them into her bedroom to mend her alarm clock. Virtue was not one of her virtues.

  That left Maria and Sarah, alone in front of the fire, as so often before.

  ‘What a lovely evening,’ said Sarah.

  Maria had no grounds for disagreement.

  ‘What a beautiful day it’s been.’

  This, on the other hand, seemed slightly too rhapsodic. All she would concede was, ‘Yes, I quite enjoyed it.’

  ‘Today’ said Sarah slowly, ‘has been the happiest day of my life so far.’

  Maria looked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled at her friend’s astonishment. ‘Can you not guess why?’

  Maria said nothing.

  ‘While you were in the kitchen, with Robert, and while Dorothy was in her bedroom, with Ronny, I was in here, with William. He proposed to me.’ She stood up. ‘We’re going to be married.’

  8. A Great Day for Ronny

  Spring that year was rainy. Maria rarely had the inclination so much as to step outside, whether to go for walks or to visit friends or to see plays or films. Instead she would sit on her bed, staring blankly at the drizzle and waiting for the time to pass. Many, many weekends were spent like this. She could hear Dorothy, occupying herself in the other rooms, busy with guests, or records, or the television, or some other form of amusement. Very occasionally Maria would join her, and they would exchange broken sentences, but more often she would wait until Dorothy had gone out before venturing into another part of the flat, for it no longer made sense to pretend that they liked each other very much. To be fair to Dorothy Maria was not a very likeable person under these circumstances, and to be fair to Maria, Maria realized this full well, but found herself for weeks unable to break out of a state of cold languor, a mood of wearied acceptance of whatever garbage life elected to throw at her. In the office they stopped using the nickname Moody Mary, as betokening too much affection, and instead began to consider ways of getting rid of her.

  There was, in fact, another reason, besides Maria’s general disagreeableness, for the deterioration of her relations with her flatmate. This was that Dorothy, tired, I suppose, of going to bed with a succession of different men, and charmed, no doubt, by Maria’s physical attractions which, in case I didn’t mention it before, have, throughout this book, been considerable, although I won’t go into details, impressed, I repeat, desperately trying to pull the threads together, coming to the point at last, by these, she attempted to seduce her.

  The mouths of my male readers have perhaps begun to water at the imminent prospect of a titillating tableau. I’m sorry, for their sakes, to have to say that this will not be forthcoming. Dorothy’s approach was extremely direct (sophistication, subtlety etc., not being, etc., as explained in the previous chapter), and, so much the better for me, exclusively verbal. She introduced the subject one evening in early April, a bright, wet evening on which for some reason or other Maria chose not to retire to her bedroom immediately after dinner, but to sit quietly on the sofa, gazing with tired eyes in the general direction of her own feet. Dorothy was reading a magazine, but her heart obviously wasn’t in it, for she laid it down after flicking through its pages for a few minutes in an attitude of signalled carelessness.

  ‘Heigh ho,’ she said (and if you believe that then you will, I rejoice to think, believe anything), ‘time passes slowly sometimes, doesn’t it?’

  Maria nodded, faintly.

  ‘Do you miss Sarah, Maria?’

  ‘Yes, I do, sometimes.’

  ‘Poor Maria,’ said Dorothy, with a pitying smile, and sounding more like Charlotte every minute. ‘I feel for you. Life is so empty for you now. I wish there were more sparkle in your life.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Maria, contemplating retreat.

  ‘You don’t have a lover, do you, Maria?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even someone whom you would like to love? Not even a glint in your eye?’

  Maria apparently did not consider this question worth answering.

  ‘I have a glint in my eye, though.’

  Maria looked up, and found that this was indeed true. She began to feel slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t have a boy friend, Maria. You’re very beautiful.’ The preliminaries were over, and Dorothy came straight to the point. ‘Maria, let’s go to bed now, and make love.’

  Maria raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course I’m serious. Let’s explore each other’s bodies, there’s nothing on the television.’

  ‘Thank you, I’d rather not.’

  Appalled as she was by the proposition, Maria did not yet move. She was interested to hear the explanation for this new development in Dorothy’s behaviour.

  ‘But why not?’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Because I’m not attracted to you. You’re a woman.’

  ‘Oh Maria, how can you be so narrow-minded! Where’s your sense of adventure? I’m asking you to travel with me, to reaches of physical pleasure where no man can take us. I’m asking you to demonstrate the independence of our sex. We might achieve an ecstasy we’ve never felt before, and at the very worst we’ll have made a valid political statement. Where’s your self-respect? I want to lead you down a sexual avenue which it’s every woman’s duty to explore. Why won’t you come with me?’

  Maria had been about to say, ‘Because it’s a cul-de-sac’, but changed it to, ‘Because of the No Entry signs’, which I think you will agree is wittier and is, in fact, the only recorded instance of her ever having made a humorous remark. It annoyed Dorothy no end. She took the magazine and threw it across the room in a gesture of disgust.

  ‘It’s no wonder you’re lonely, Maria. It’s no wonder everybody hates you.’

  With that she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. Maria sat pondering her last words.

  One consequence of this incident was that Maria took a resolution which had long been brewing. She decided that it was time to find a third person to share the flat. She and Dorothy had agreed, when Sarah had first moved out to live with her husband, that they should only attempt to find a new tenant if it should become financially imperative. That time, Maria felt, was fast approaching, but she now also felt a need simply for further companionship. Why I say ‘simply’ I don’t know, because such needs, common to all but a happy few, are far from simple, and the possible ways of satisfying them are even less so. But Maria seems to have assumed, with flaccid and, it must be said, entirely uncharacteristic optimism, that it would be feasible to find a replacement with whom friendly or at least pleasant relations might be enjoyed. She had perhaps in mind a woman of about her own age (Maria is now twenty-nine). However, Dorothy had other ideas.

  ‘Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to find someone,’ she conceded, when Maria suggested it to her over breakfast the next morning. ‘But I don’t think we should advertise. We don’t want to take anybody who might happen to come in off
the streets. Did you have anyone in mind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None of your friends? But I forgot, you have so few friends. Well, you’ll just have to let me think about it, and we’ll see what can be done.’

  That evening Dorothy returned from work in a mood of excitement.

  ‘I’ve found just the person, Maria,’ she said.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘His name’s Albert. You wouldn’t mind that he’s a man, would you?’

  ‘Not if he’s nice. How did you meet him?’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘Is he a new colleague?’

  ‘No, he’s a patient.’

  Dorothy, I should inform you, worked at a hospice for recovering alcoholics.

  ‘A patient? What makes you think he’d be suitable?’

  ‘Maria, he told me his whole story today. It’s pitiful. The tears were streaming from my eyes, you never heard anything so tragic. He’s absolutely homeless and hasn’t got a friend in the world. He only ever to took to drink because he had nobody to love him or care for him. You’ve never seen such a poor lonely old man.’

  ‘Old? How old?’

  ‘He’s seventy-four.’

  ‘Dorothy, this isn’t a hospital. It’s not a geriatric unit. It’s a flat. It’s a home.’

  ‘Maria, don’t be so heartless. A home is exactly, what he needs.’

  ‘Well, I think it sounds a horrible idea. I’m sorry I even suggested finding someone. I warn you, I shall be furious if you try to bring that man in here.’

  The words came with difficulty to her lips, for fury was in fact an emotion of which she was no longer capable, and to compound the problem she was a poor actress. Nevertheless, she believed that she had made her position clear, and that Dorothy would respect it. In this she was mistaken. For, arriving home rather late from work the next day, she was immediately struck, upon opening the front door, by a peculiar smell. It was hard to define exactly but years later, searching for words in which to describe it, Maria said that it was almost as if a small herd of cattle had arrived, reeking of whiskey, and used the sitting room as a latrine. A grizzled old man, dressed awkwardly in new, ill-fitting clothes, was sitting on the sofa drinking from a mug of tea. He stood up when she entered, introduced himself as Albert, told Maria that she must be Maria, and said how much he liked his new room. Maria went to find Dorothy and they had a short, inconclusive argument. Maria then lay on her bed for the rest of the evening. She felt a slow chill steal over her.

  A week passed. During this time her initially vague but insistent unease began to assume a more definite shape. She was soon able to classify her objections to the presence of Albert under the following four headings: smell, drink, flatulence, and other. As for the first three, it was quite likely, she realized, that they existed in some relationship of complex interdependence which she was not equipped to understand. Dorothy had of course assured her that he had forsworn alcohol for the remainder of his natural life, but this assurance seemed to be at odds with various circumstances, such as the fact that on the second morning of his residence, Maria, in attempting to leave her bedroom at seven thirty, had found herself unable to open the door, the obstruction, it transpired, being Albert’s prostrate body, which had fallen there several hours earlier on its way to the bathroom, intending no doubt to relieve itself of the rum with which it had been privately regaling itself all evening. This incident, which Dorothy laughingly brushed off as a ‘relapse’, turned out to be the first in a series.

  Furthermore, Albert did not take easily to everyday domestic life. His attempts to use the vacuum cleaner resulted more often in the breakage of fragile objects, such as small items of china, or chairs, than in any noticeable improvement in the appearance of the carpet. When trying to use the shower he flooded the bathroom. He could not cook. He disliked Maria, or so his terms of reference would seem to imply, for he was heard to describe her as a ‘miserable slag’. He very rarely spoke to her directly at all, although this may have been for want of opportunity, since her excursions from her bedroom became increasingly infrequent. On the other hand he appeared to like Dorothy, whom he affectionately called ‘Dotty’, and he would willingly execute small commissions for her, little tasks which she imposed on him as a manifestation of her trust. For instance, she would give him sixty pounds, and ask him to go to the supermarket and do the week’s shopping for the three of them, barely uttering a word of reproach when he returned after half an hour with a loaf of bread, a pork pie, and seven bottles of gin. These were the sorts of minor failings, marginal errors of judgment owing as much to inexperience as to anything else, which Maria classified as ‘other’.

  By the end of the first week, she knew that she was going to have to find somewhere else to live. It crossed her mind more than once, as it has conceivably the reader’s, that this was precisely the outcome that Dorothy, mortified by the failure of her recent advances, had intended to provoke, and that no sooner would Maria have packed her bags and gone than Albert himself would be quietly booted out and left to resume his former life. But she realized that to charge Dorothy with this intention would only be to invite further wide-eyed accusations of cruelty and cynicism. So she found herself in a tricky situation, and not for the first time. Weighed down by unhappiness, and bored with always having to keep it to herself, she thought that it might alleviate the problem a little to talk about it with someone, a friend, say, supposing one could be found. Idly she flicked through her address book. There were three entries, under Β for Bobby, R for Ronny, and S for Sarah. She remembered that it would be no use trying her brother, because he had gone back to visit her parents for the weekend. What about Ronny? She smiled, none too cheerfully, as she recalled another time, nearly eight years ago, when she had surprised herself by choosing to visit him at a moment of crisis. A fat lot of good that had done her. But he had changed since then, and so had Maria, and although he was still as silly as ever about wanting to marry her, she no longer felt uncomfortable with him, in fact quite the reverse, for there was something about the very familiarity, amounting even to predictability, of his behaviour, which inspired in her a real and otherwise unavailable sense of comfort. She decided there and then, with a thrill of pleasure, to phone him. They had not seen each other since the night of the dinner party. How surprised he would be to hear from her!

  But there was no answer. So Maria phoned Sarah, and they arranged to meet for dinner that evening. Sarah nominated a restaurant in Hampstead.

  She looked slightly more plump and pale than when Maria had last seen her, on the day of her wedding. As usual, they kissed before sitting down together, but it was only Maria who did so with any fervour.

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ said Sarah, unnecessarily.

  Maria smiled.

  ‘It was nice to hear from you. It was a very nice surprise.’

  ‘I just wanted to see you, that’s all.’ Maria paused, then asked:

  ‘How do I look, Sarah?’

  ‘You look very nice. And very well,’ said Sarah, staring fixedly at her fillet of sole while waiting for the tartare sauce to come.

  ‘No, how do I really look. You weren’t looking at me.’

  Thus prompted, Sarah examined Maria with some attention.

  ‘Actually you don’t look too well. I’d noticed already, but I didn’t think it would be polite to say so.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be polite. I want you to be my friend.’

  ‘Why, Maria? Is anything the matter?’

  ‘I’m unhappy. I think I’m going to move out of the flat. Only I don’t know where to go, or what to do.’

  A tear fell from the corner of Maria’s eye. Fortunately the waiter, who arrived at that moment with the tartare sauce, had his handkerchief with him and was able to wipe her cheek.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Maria, feeling very stupid.

  ‘We must remember to give him an extra tip,’ said Sarah, when he had gone, and added earnestly: ‘Maria, you must tel
l me everything. You must tell me all about what’s gone wrong. You have my undivided attention. Can I have your lemon if you’re not going to use it?’

  First of all Maria told her about Dorothy’s attempted seduction. Sarah was shocked and a little embarrassed. She blushed.

  ‘That does surprise me,’ she said. ‘Still, one always finds problems with shared accommodation. Don’t misunderstand me, Maria, I enjoyed living with you and Dorothy very much. But it doesn’t really bear comparison with having your own home, and sharing it with the man you love. Living with friends, by which I mean girl friends, of course, is all very well while you’re still young and you haven’t found your place in the word, but it can never really be as nice as married life. I don’t want to give you a lecture, Maria, just because I happen to have the benefit of more experience than you, but you can have no notion of how lovely it is to share everything with the man you love, a bed, your food, your money, your home, all your thoughts and experiences, your whole life, in fact.’ A thought now struck her, and she laid down her knife and fork. ‘But I was forgetting, you’ve been married already’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maria. How thoughtless I’m being. Of course, it doesn’t always work out as well as it has for me. How is little Edward?’

  ‘I never see him. I thought you knew that.’

  There was a long and frosty silence. Finally Maria, determined to retrieve something constructive from her friend’s sentimental outburst, but feeling, at the same time, less and less sympathetic and interested, asked coldly:

  ‘So you think that marriage is probably the answer to all my problems, and everybody’s else’s.’

  ‘It’s not quite as simple as that, of course, Maria,’ Sarah answered, with a sweet smile. ‘“Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures”, as somebody once said. I don’t want to generalize, because that would mean nothing to you. I can only speak out of my own experience, and over the last few months I’ve known such happiness…’ She paused and reflected. ‘It’s not enough, you see, Maria, just to be friendly with someone. You’ll never get deep into life like that. There must be intimacy, close, personal and physical intimacy. To share a meal with someone, for instance. I mean, here we are, sharing a meal together, at least, we would be – ‘she looked around angrily in the direction of the kitchens ‘– if they’d hurry up and bring us the next course. Honestly, I’m ravenous. Anyway, here we are, sharing a meal, but there’s no real intimacy in it, do you see what I mean? It’s not like sitting down to a meal with your husband, a meal which you’ve cooked yourself, and watching him eat it, watching him watch you eat, talking all the time with your eyes. Do you see what I mean?’