Trouble

by Fay Weldon

  ‘But why would anyone be interested in a book called Lucifette Fallen?’

  ‘Some researcher picked up an early review. “The archetype of the matrimonial row: God and Lucifette, sub-title Lilith in her new appearance”.’

  ‘Why haven’t I seen this review?’ asked Annette.

  ‘Because it came out in some nutty New Age journal,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘Winfrey must have got hold of a proof copy. Probably by way of Marion. Marion’s into the New Age: she goes to a self-discovery group: so do all sorts of TV people. Drives me nuts. I’m the only rational man left in the universe; everyone else has gone Carl Gustav. Personally, I’d rather put my faith in a rabbi, but even they are gazing into crystals these days and telling their fortunes by the stars.’

  ‘Lucifette Fallen is nothing to do with the stars,’ said Annette. ‘It’s all cosmos, darling,’ said Ernie. ‘All cosmos. At any rate I’m glad they think it is. There’s money in the New Age.’

  ‘Can you be more precise about the magazine?’ asked Annette.

  ‘I’ll put it in the post to you,’ said Ernie Gromback. Jungian Eclectics, Astrologian Psychonuts, I can’t remember. So I’ll ask the Oprah Winfrey people to get back to you as soon as possible. That’s decided?’

  ‘But Ernie,’ said Annette. ‘I don’t think Spicer would like me going on a chat show. We never look at things like that on TV.’

  ‘Does Spicer want you to earn any money out of this book or not?’

  ‘Well frankly, Ernie,’ said Annette, ‘possibly Spicer doesn’t. And possibly I don’t, because I can see trouble ahead, and family is more important to me than anything else, and I love Spicer, as you know.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because you’re pregnant,’ said Ernie Gromback, ‘that you’re slightly out of your mind.’

  ‘I am so not,’ said Annette. ‘I’ve waited so long to have this baby, and I mean it to be born into a happy, settled family. Now you know all that, Ernie.’

  ‘I suppose this baby of yours is Spicer’s? It isn’t mine?’

  ‘Ernie!’ protested Annette.

  ‘Well, Annette?’ asked Ernie Gromback. ‘It’s a reasonable question.’

  ‘Babies have a gestation period of nine months,’ said Annette. ‘The last and indeed the only time you and I had any association of a carnal nature was two years and one month ago.’

  ‘You make it sound rather bleak,’ said Ernie, ‘but at least you’ve been counting. So have I, if you want to know. And I wish Spicer would be better to you, but what can I say? Do this one small thing for me, Annette, since you won’t do anything else—appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show, in the full flower of lovely motherhood, tribute to Gromback’s knack for picking talent. Literary talent, that is.’

  ‘But what angle are they going to take?’ enquired Annette. ‘I’ll have no control over any of it. Supposing my mother sees the programme, and thinks Lucifette Fallen is all about her and my Dad. Which it is. Oh God, Ernie, couldn’t I just unwrite this novel? And it has such an embarrassing title.’

  ‘The title works, Annette,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘I rather doubted it would but since Astrojunk has picked it up you were spot on in your judgement. So you’re going to say yes to Oprah Winfrey?’

  ‘I’ll think about it, Ernie,’ said Annette. ‘I’m going to look dreadfully pregnant and I’ve had such a terrible day.’

  ‘Husbands are for telling about terrible days,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘Keep it for Spicer, since that’s the way you want it. When exactly are you having this baby?’

  ‘On Christmas Day,’ said Annette.

  ‘Ah, a little goat,’ said Ernie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A little Capricorn,’ he said. ‘Marion has me well-trained. I’m on the cusp between Scorpio and Sagittarius, did you know that? Wildly attractive but a sting in the tail! Marion’s a Gemini. We were born for each other; but Scorpios simply have to scuttle from out of their rocks from time to time to see what they’re missing. Marion knew that when she took me in. Perhaps in the spring, when your waist has returned, and you’re a world-famous author, I could scuttle past your door and you would look out from your Virgoan isolation—’

  ‘Ernie, I have to go,’ said Annette.

  ‘But never forget the sting in the tail,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘Oprah Winfrey?’

  ‘Oprah Winfrey, Ernie,’ said Annette sadly. ‘I can see I have no option.’

  ‘Not really, no,’ said Mr Gromback of Gromback, Little & Peach: Gromback since 1982, Little since 1921, and Peach since 1810, and doing nicely, even in this year of recession.

  ‘Annette,’ said Spicer, ‘I’m trying to read.’

  ‘But you haven’t had your supper, Spicer,’ said Annette. ‘Straight in the door, hardly a word to anyone, and into your study. Aren’t you hungry?’ The evening sun shone in the window and made all things gold.

  ‘I had some fruit,’ said Spicer. ‘That’s all I need.’

  ‘Don’t get too thin,’ said Annette. ‘Your shoulders are so broad and nice as they are. What are you reading?’

  ‘Not a book I think you’d understand,’ said Spicer.

  ‘Cutting Free from Hurtful Ties, by Chalice Wellspring,’ Annette read over Spicer’s shoulder. ‘Am I one of the ties that hurt? Does that include wives?’

  ‘Annette,’ said Spicer, ‘the book is a study of the internalised negative figures that can sabotage everything that a man attempts to do. The inner enemies. If you wish to take on the role of enemy in my life there is no way I can prevent you. But I will then have to do my best to escape you. You certainly represent something phenomenal in my life—last night in my dreams I was Jonah inside the whale; the seas were tumultuous, terrifying.’

  ‘I was the whale?’ asked Annette.

  ‘Annette, please just go away and leave me in peace, for God’s sake! If you see yourself as the whale, that’s your problem. Most women would have realised they were the sea. Get on with your own life. It’s busy enough, to all accounts.’

  ‘No. I won’t go away,’ said Annette. ‘I’m your wife. I want to know. I have a right to know. Okay, so I’m this inner enemy, just suppose. What does the book tell you to do about it?’

  ‘Invoke the High C,’ said Spicer. ‘Now you won’t understand that, you’ll just laugh, as the ignorant and antagonistic do. The Inner Enemy all too often takes the form of the seducer, the doubter, the one who mocks. Not surprising you’re prepared to hold your husband and family up to ridicule by appearing on a TV show in an advanced state of pregnancy.’

  ‘I’m not laughing, Spicer,’ said Annette, ‘or mocking. If you are cutting the ties that link you to me, if you are detaching yourself from me, then this is very painful for me indeed. Don’t you understand that? That it hurts?’

  ‘How you centre everything upon yourself,’ said Spicer. ‘You are hopelessly egocentric. A man can be tied to many things, from drink to drugs to rubber fetishes to money, let alone wives. Good Lord, Annette, can’t a man even read a book someone’s recommended without your coming over all paranoid?’

  ‘Who recommended this book?’ asked Annette. ‘Dr Rhea Marks?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Spicer. ‘She did. As it happens.’

  ‘I went to see Dr Rhea Marks’s husband today,’ said Annette, before she could stop herself, ‘and he indecently assaulted me. Perhaps he does that to all his patients. Perhaps Dr Rhea’s decided to get rid of pathetic old Herman Marks and Spicer Horrocks would do very nicely thank you. Wine merchant in prime of life, energetic in bed, merely persuade him to cut the ties that hurt, and voilà!’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better ring your mother,’ said Spicer.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re insane,’ said Spicer. ‘Your mother may know better than me how to deal with you when you’re in this frame of mind. I frankly have no idea what to do for the best.’

  ‘You could close the book and talk to me,’ said Annette.

  ‘Very well,’ said Spicer. ‘I can see I have
no choice. But it doesn’t endear you to me. Now, can we take these things one at a time? First, Dr Herman Marks indecently assaulted you? Really? In what way?’

  ‘I don’t even want to say—You are so out of sympathy with me,’ said Annette.

  ‘You can’t make these accusations and then just leave them in the air,’ said Spicer. ‘People get into real trouble doing that. You need to be more careful, Annette.’

  ‘Don’t bully me like this.’

  ‘What form did this assault take?’ Spicer asked.

  ‘He made me undress,’ said Annette.

  ‘Made you? Really? How does someone make someone else undress?’ asked Spicer. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘On pretext of a medical examination,’ said Annette.

  ‘Annette, he is a doctor, and you are pregnant,’ observed her husband.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Annette. ‘Let’s just say I had to run out of his room half-naked and then out of the house, past his wife.’

  ‘Oh dear God,’ said Spicer. ‘Poor Rhea. This madwoman running out of her husband’s consulting room, shrieking rape. Is this what pregnancy does to women? First obsessive jealousy, then accusations, now fantasies of sexual molestation?’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ sobbed Annette. ‘You always side with my enemies.’

  ‘Enemies? A middle-aged middle-class housewife with enemies?’ enquired Spicer. ‘Only if she’s a paranoiac. Now shall we get back to your earlier statement? That Dr Rhea Marks has decided to get rid of her husband and selected me as a substitute? You do see that this can only be the product of a distressed mind?’

  ‘I know it sounds stupid, Spicer, and I’m sorry,’ said Annette, ‘but why else is she trying to break up our relationship? How can you believe all the nonsense she speaks? She’s the one who’s destructive, not me. She feeds into your vanity, she flatters you. Something’s going on I don’t understand. Perhaps she procures patients for her husband.’

  ‘You have to stop making these allegations, Annette, or you’ll end up in prison,’ said Spicer. ‘And the more you insult Dr Rhea Marks, who is extremely helpful, supportive and positive, the more difficult things will get between you and me. So please, for God’s sake, stop. Let me make you a cup of tea. You distress yourself so.’

  ‘But things between us aren’t difficult, Spicer,’ said Annette, as she sipped her tea and dabbed her eyes. ‘Or they weren’t before you started going to see Dr Rhea Marks.’

  ‘Not for you, perhaps,’ said Spicer. ‘What about me? Could you really believe the rows, the scenes, make me happy? I was becoming ill, Annette,’ said Spicer. ‘The stress of being married to you was showing. My blood-pressure was up. I could have had a stroke, a heart-attack, any minute: thank God I got to Dr Rhea in time. I’ll always be indebted to Marion for getting me to her.’

  ‘If you’re really ill, and not just a hypochondriac, go to a proper doctor,’ said Annette. ‘Get your blood-pressure lowered by pills. Or get someone else to measure it, who isn’t taking your money.’

  ‘Is that your only response? No concern, no love; just to suggest doctor’s pills which always do more damage than they do good. You should hear Dr Rhea on the subject. She’s turned her back on the orthodox medical establishment. She’s seen too much of it. Now don’t start crying again. I spoke to Rhea today,’ said Spicer. ‘She feels she needs to see you, in the hope of bringing you to some understanding of just how drastic my situation is. Just how ill I am: how careful you have to be.’

  ‘I’m too stunned to cry any more,’ said Annette. ‘Why should I see someone who obviously has such a low opinion of me? Who reads my star-chart and says it’s shit? I suppose yours is the cat’s whiskers.’

  ‘It certainly isn’t afflicted in the way yours is. My planets cluster in air signs. Yours are mostly earth, and in the bottom half of your chart. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. It just means I am intuitive and imaginative, while you are practical. We balance each other, more or less.’

  ‘But I drag you down?’ cried Annette sadly. ‘The top-heavy end of the see-saw.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Spicer. ‘But I do think we should go together to see Dr Marks. She’ll have a thing or two to say to you. I’ll keep you out of Dr Herman’s way, if only for his sake.’

  ‘Very well, Spicer,’ said Annette. ‘Make the appointment.’

  ‘Gilda,’ said Annette. It was 2.10 on a Friday afternoon.

  ‘Hi, Annette,’ said Gilda. ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Because I’m in Dr Herman’s room using his phone. It’s okay. He’s gone to Austria, or somewhere, for a conference. Spicer’s upstairs with Dr Rhea. On the way he said I was very brave to see her, considering what she knew about me.’

  ‘That wasn’t very nice of him, Annette,’ said Gilda.

  ‘He’s in a funny mood,’ said Annette. ‘Dr Rhea opened the door sort of excited to see me, I don’t know why. You just get a feeling. She was on some kind of power trip. Then she wiped the smile off her face and said I was to wait while she saw Spicer for twenty minutes, then she’d see me for twenty minutes, then both of us together, and she showed me in here to wait. There’s a chart on the wall of how to search the breast for lumps.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask her why she wanted to see you?’ enquired Gilda.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Annette. ‘I was quite bold. I said to her the minute we were in the door, what are we in, some kind of marriage therapy?’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Gilda.

  ‘She just said oh we don’t like to call it that, and led Spicer upstairs. She’s wearing a kind of pleated navy blue dress with a white collar. It’s perfectly horrible; the kind of thing a nun would wear on her afternoon off. And an old yellowy cardigan.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘Tights and my old Calvin Klein mustardy top. I’m trying to look serious. Spiritual, even.’

  ‘What’s Dr Herman’s room like? Apart from the breasts. Does it give you the shivers?’

  ‘There’s a big wing chair, a greasy patch either side where his head touches it. The ceiling’s yellow from cigarette smoke. There are locked bookcases.’

  ‘It would give you the creeps,’ said Gilda, ‘in the circumstances.’

  ‘I think perhaps I did imagine what I thought happened,’ said Annette.

  ‘But you said he had an erection and it pressed into your back,’ said Gilda.

  ‘It could have been a pipe in his pocket or a slide rule or something,’ said Annette. ‘He was behind me. It might have been some kind of crystal device these nutters use to heal you, I don’t know.’

  ‘I think the simplest explanation is best,’ said Gilda.

  ‘But it felt long,’ said Annette. ‘Too long. Mind you, it did occur to me that’s the kind of length it would have seemed if I was a child and he was a grown man.’

  ‘You mean your father?’ asked Gilda.

  ‘I simply cannot believe any such thing about my father,’ said Annette, ‘but perhaps an uncle. Who’s to say?’

  ‘So either way,’ said Gilda, ‘Dr Herman’s let off the hook. Either you imagined it, or if you didn’t it’s a legitimate therapy and you’ll end up sexually liberated.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annette.

  ‘You never struck me as sexually unliberated,’ said Gilda. ‘In fact I remember things from our student days when you were decidedly liberated.’

  ‘Just shut up about those,’ said Annette.

  ‘And you were trembling and crying in that telephone box,’ said Gilda.

  ‘I think they call that abreaction,’ said Annette.

  ‘They’re brainwashing you,’ said Gilda.

  ‘I just want to live happily ever after with Spicer,’ said Annette, ‘and if I have to turn my head inside out it’s worth it. I’ve got to go now. Spicer’s coming downstairs. Gilda, I’m petrified. I don’t know why. I just get intimidated by doctors.’

  ‘Well now,’ said Dr Marks cheerily, ‘what do you wa
nt to tell me about your relationship with your husband?’

  ‘I thought you were going to tell me about it,’ said Annette. ‘That’s why you wanted to see me.’

  ‘It would help me if you told me how you saw it first,’ said Dr Rhea.

  ‘He seems upset at the moment,’ said Annette. ‘I don’t know why, and he blames me for everything that goes wrong, and he’s giving me a really hard time. But I’m sure we can work through it. Marriages go through bad patches and come out the other side, don’t they? We’ve been happy before and we will be again. I’m pregnant and not at my best. I expect I imagine things that don’t happen: Spicer says I do. Everything will just click back into place as soon as the baby’s born. Spicer and I need each other, always have. Until we met both our lives were messy. After we met we got things together. I stopped raving, Spicer stopped drinking. It was love at first sight. We met at a party and went home together and never left each other’s side thereafter. Though we both had to get unmarried to third parties to do it. We still call each other on the phone every day. Well, Spicer calls me. He doesn’t much like me calling him because he can be busy: it interrupts the flow of money-making thought, he says. And the children are in private schools; so the money has to flow. We try and give them stability. Spicer and I hate being apart. He has to go away in the summers to France, to see the vineyards: then we both feel desperate, lonely. We’re just intertwined. We’re so lucky to love each other. Lots of couples aren’t like that. By ourselves Spicer and I are nothing: together we add up to something. Well, a lot. Friends rely on us; our families; Spicer’s aunts: we’re central to so many people, you’ve no idea. Things have just got to work out.’ Annette fell silent.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Rhea Marks, and she got up and stared out of the window. ‘You must realise, Mrs Horrocks,’ said Dr Rhea presently, ‘that Spicer would get on perfectly well without you. After all, he has his own friends, his own work, his own interests, his own income.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Annette, and she giggled.