by Fay Weldon
‘If I just give you a telephone number, will you stop?’
‘Yes, Annette.’
‘It’s on the B 3210, and the telephone number is 0886 435281. Okay? Have you got a pen?’
‘Steve just handed me one.’
‘Steve’s not listening in on the extension, Gilda?’
‘No, he’s not, Annette.’
‘I believe you, because you’re my friend, even though you did sleep with Spicer. So Steve had better not be on the extension, had he, or you’ll be in trouble. It’s better when I talk to you than when I just think about you.’
‘Don’t brood, Annette. I’ve said and said I’m sorry. And Steve knows.’
‘As I say, it comes in waves. I can feel one coming on now. It’s a pit in the stomach.’
‘Tell me more about the ditch. Please.’
‘I’m using Henry and Buttercup’s phone. They can’t afford luxuries, and I haven’t any money. Perhaps you’d better call me back?’
But when Gilda called the number Annette had given her, all she got was a continuous bleep.
‘Spicer, are you in there?’ Steve called through the letter box of the Horrocks’ house in Bella Crescent, since no one had answered his knocking and his ringing. ‘I know you are, because you just opened the door to Marion. She got out of the taxi ahead of me, and pretended not to see me. We need Annette’s number, nothing more. Give it to us and we’ll go away and leave you in peace.’
‘What makes you think I have Annette’s number?’ asked Spicer cheerfully, opening his study window, sitting on the sill. He wore an Indian cotton dressing gown, striped red and yellow.
‘Annette says she gave it to you.’
‘Annette is a liar,’ said Spicer. ‘Hadn’t you heard about her secret affair with Ernie Gromback? It’s been going on for years. What did Annette care about what she was doing to poor Marion? Annette’s ruthless. I suited Annette while I was well and could oblige her, physically and financially, but now I’m ill and bankrupt and have to sell the house, she’s just buggered off. Marion comes round to nurse me. That’s all there is to her and me. We’re not exactly a number. Christ, someone has to be nice to me after all I’ve been through.’
‘You look quite well to me, Spicer.’
‘That’s the high blood-pressure—it produces a flush. I’m told I could have a stroke at any moment.’
‘Don’t you worry at all about Annette, Spicer?’
‘Worry about Annette? As well worry about a piranha fish. She dropped that baby without turning a hair. Dropped it dead, of course, as suited her purposes.’
‘Gilda speaks to Annette on the phone. She says Annette doesn’t sound too good,’ said Steve.
‘Don’t be taken in by Annette,’ said Spicer. ‘She had the nerve to call me the other day, pretending to be in tears, begging me to have her back. I didn’t believe a word of it. Gilda had put her up to something, I could tell.’
‘Spicer, I don’t think you’re in your right mind.’
‘Never been more in it, old chap,’ said Spicer from his windowsill.
‘They’re two of a kind, Annette and Gilda, a monstrous conspiracy of women. Take my advice, Steve—get rid of Gilda the first opportunity you’ve got. She’s foisted that baby on you. I could tell you things about Gilda which would surprise you, a nice fella like you.’
‘I expect you could, Spicer. On a more realistic level, have you actually sold this house?’
‘Are you spying for Annette? What’s going on here? I’m not a material person. I’m not interested in money. I’m not selling this house. I am giving it away by deed of gift, before the official Receivers get their filthy hands on it.’
‘So who are you giving it to, Spicer? Not Annette, I take it?’
‘Are you joking? Give it to the woman who drove my poor wife out of her own house, rendered my son Jason a virtual orphan and then took sexual and emotional advantage of him? Why should I give her my house? No, I’m making it over to a couple of people I trust. Not many of those around.’
‘Then he slammed the window shut,’ said Steve to Gilda, ‘and as he moved away his dressing gown fell open and I’ll swear he had an enormous erection.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Gilda, ‘or my milk will dry up. Was Marion in the room with him?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Steve. ‘My feeling is he just gets off on abusing Annette.’
‘I suppose that could be a tribute to his love for her,’ said Gilda, cautiously, ‘which will emerge again when this mental illness, or whatever it is, has passed over the pair of them. Because he must be mad, mustn’t he?’
‘For a nasty piece of work read mad,’ said Steve. ‘For mad read a nasty piece of work. Who knows?’
‘Life’s easier to bear,’ observed Gilda, ‘if you can write off a sector of the populace as mad: that is, not pertaining to the race of the proper people, the nice kind ones. Then you don’t have to think any more about any possible resemblance between you and them. You’re sane, they’re mad. Finis.’
They fell silent.
‘Perhaps Spicer’s right about Annette,’ observed Steve in due course. ‘Perhaps Spicer is to be pitied more than Annette.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Gilda. The baby cried in the next room.
Steve went to fetch him, and Gilda unbuttoned her blouse, and they sat close together while she fed him, as if by so doing they could keep the world out.
‘Hi, Gilda.’
‘Annette, you gave me a wrong number. I tried to ring back but it was unobtainable.’
‘What number did you try?’
‘0886 435281.’
‘You must have written it down wrong. I told you 0846. Have you got that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can test it if you like, when I ring off.’
‘I don’t trust you. I’d rather you gave me your address so Steve and I can come and fetch you.’
‘I don’t think I can quite cope with that yet. Anyway where would I go? I don’t have a home any more. Spicer’s hijacked it.’
‘You can stay with us. Or you could just walk back in, and say hi, Spicer, I’m back home. If anyone’s going to leave, you are. Or, Hi Spicer, why don’t we set up home together again?’
‘It just doesn’t feel as if I could do that, Gilda. If you’re rejected by a man, your instinct is to stay in the gutter: you’re disallowed the home. Besides, Marion’s there. And I have no legal rights.’
‘I think perhaps you ought to get back in there, Annette. Spicer seems to be giving the house away.’
‘Don’t tell me. To the therapists, just to hurt me more.’
‘I suppose so, Annette. To a couple of people he trusts, he says. At the very least, you need to get your stuff out of it.’
‘But there’s almost nothing in the house that’s mine, apart from some clothes. I’ve lost a couple of stone so I reckon they’d look really weird on me now. Spicer bought the car and the stereo and stuff like that: my earnings paid for holidays and food and loo paper and it was always me who filled up the tank. So I’ve nothing to show at all for those ten years, not even by way of possessions. I don’t like talking about it, Gilda. It makes my neck start hurting again.’
‘What’s the matter with your neck?’ asked Gilda.
‘I cut it on a bit of metal when I fell into the ditch.’
‘This ditch. How did you get into it?’
‘It’s a kind of black pit, not just a simple ditch, Gilda. It takes forever to get out of it. The sides are slippery. There’s mud and blood everywhere. I always knew there was bound to be a gap; but in my head I’d sanitised it into The Gap, you know, the chain store, all the clothes neat, clean, folded and properly catalogued, and the same wherever you are in the world, not in the least like the gap really is.’
‘What are you talking about, Annette?’
‘Do you think Spicer’s seeing Marion, Gilda?’
‘Yes, I think he is.’
‘Sleeping in
my bed, casting her disgusting Tarot cards on my dining table, cooking at my stove, using up my soap, her hand on Spicer’s cock; she’s so stupid, Gilda, why does he prefer her to me?’
‘Perhaps that’s why, Annette. Because she’s stupid. Or to get back at Ernie Gromback. I have no idea. Forget it, forget him, or else just walk back in.’
‘He’s forgotten me. He’s blocked me out. And the Marks team—the Grouchos and the Harpos, the Lenins or the Stalins, now the therapists, what’s the difference?—will own the house and set up surgery, and all the freaks and nutters in the world will walk up my steps and ring my bell and take off their clothes and cavort in my rooms, and Herman’s hands will palpate two thousand breasts and Rhea’s soft voice will destroy a thousand marriages, and the negative archetypes will swoop and whistle and scream down the Crescent, and bow the trees down because I’m not there to ward them off. You know Spicer and I conceived Gillian in the back garden? We made love to the scent of night jasmine under the racing moon, before we had any idea how damaging the transits of the moon could be, when he loved me as much as I loved him.’
‘Stop it, Annette. You’re upsetting yourself.’
‘I am not upsetting myself. It is being done to me. Head over heels down into the pit again, slipped through the gap, the waves breaking over me again. I’m going to have to go now, Gilda. Do be careful of the gap. You know how the guards call out on certain stations of the London Underground, “Mind the gap! Mind the gap!” What can this possibly be, this “gap”, foreigners wonder, looking round for some little scuttling thing you’re supposed to look after? When what’s meant is “notice the space between the straight line of the carriage and the curve of the platform and don’t slip down it”. The true gap is the space between the world as it ought to be, and the world as it is; between what you think love and marriage and babies is going to be and what it turns out to be, and its proper name is Disappointment. Anyone can fall into it, Gilda. It’s horrible down here. Bloody and pulsating; mean, spiteful and full of hate; grabbing and sucking down and grasping. Disappointment is the mother of all nasty emotions. You want the world to be perfect and it isn’t. It drives you to terrible deeds. You can’t see properly down here because your eyes are misty. You think it’s tears have done it and feel sorry for yourself, but it isn’t; your vision is cloudy because you’re growing a cataract of rage, a kind of second eyelid. The white skin across the eye cats reveal to you when they’re sick. You never knew it was there: you just stroked its shiny fur and trusted and hoped for the best, but all the time the cat’s worms were travelling to its brain, and by the time you notice it’s too late to help. It’s having fits.’
‘Can’t we come and fetch you, Annette?’
‘No. Once you’re in the black pit you’ve got to get out of it yourself. There’s a route somewhere. I’ll find it somehow. You’ve got to blink away the rage so you can see clearly: the trouble is the rage is the only way you know how to survive. And you keep stumbling over wreckage. I keep thinking I’ve found the way out, and I even get my hands on the edge to pull myself out but there’s Spicer’s great black boots, tramping and stamping and kicking me down into the pit again. He circles it for ever. I’m falling, Gilda, even as I speak. He’s such a shit, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not worth loving. No special relationship, ever. Just him laughing at me behind my back, mocking me, wondering how to get rid of me. If I learn to despise him, will I stop loving him? Is that the way?’
‘I don’t know, Annette.’
‘The pompous shit, the sleazeball—I’ll call him names. I’ll practise and see if that works. I’m going now, Gilda. Goodbye. Buttercup’s just come in.’
‘Gilda?’
‘Hello, Ernie.’
‘I can’t stand this not knowing,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘Someone has to find Annette. My PR people are going crazy. Now she’s not available, all the media big guns want her for their shows. I can’t hold up publication for ever. Besides which, I’m worried about her. What a bastard Spicer is. The only good thing to be said about him is he’s taken Marion off my hands just in time for her Macrobiotic Vegan phase. All she’ll eat then is grapes and brown rice. I want all the clues you have, Gilda.’
‘208 miles north-ish of Watford, twelve sheep, a moor, rosemary, a dial telephone, a shepherd with a breathing problem owing to ingesting Ministry chemicals, a bedroom with a shrine to a photograph in it, a front room which sounds peculiarly horrible, and an elderly pair called Henry and Buttercup. That’s it.’
‘I’ll get my people on to it.’
‘Oh, Ernie, you sound so rich, effective and powerful.’
‘Are you mocking me, Gilda?’
‘No, I’m not, Ernie.’
‘Why would Annette be so certain of the exact mileage, when she’s so vague about everything else?’
‘I kind of don’t want to ask her that, Ernie.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I’m afraid of the answer.’
‘Can you accept a reverse charge call, please, from a call box?’
‘Where’s the call box?’
‘Yorkshire.’
‘Okay, okay. Put her through.’
‘Gilda?’
‘Hi, Annette. How are things?’
‘Better. I was telling you about this ditch.’
‘The black pit of the soul. I’m having a real problem with my milk, thanks to you.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten all that old stuff. I’m back in the real world. It was just a perfectly ordinary ditch and I was just very lucky Henry and Buttercup happened to pass by in their old Ford Prefect. Or I might have been there all night and died from loss of blood and/or hypothermia. That’s what the doctor said. Though I don’t know. I was half out of the ditch when their lights caught me, something shapeless and struggling in the mud. Brave of them to stop. One of their headlights goes off at an angle, like someone with a cast in their eye, otherwise I wouldn’t have been seen. They picked me up, washed me down, stitched me up, and here I am, cold-turkeying on Spicer, tied to the mast to stop me going back to burn the house down, cut out the crotch of his trousers, scratch the side of his car with a coin, get the Markses three months in prison under Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act—using a fortune-telling device, namely a horoscope, to discompose one of Her Majesty’s subjects, and that’s what you can get, three months—tar and feather Marion, all the things I knew would help me out of the pit, only Henry and Buttercup tell me it’s another false exit, all I’ll see silhouetted when I look up to the sun will be Spicer’s boots, Spicer’s smiling face. They’re right.’
‘You’re still not really better. You said you’d lost two stone. That’s a worry. You must be almost not there.’
‘I can’t think why. We live on chops, potatoes, and lardy cake.’
‘How horrible.’
‘It helps break the pattern.’
‘You’re not on drugs, Annette?’
‘I’m addicted to Spicer, that’s why Henry and Buttercup tied me to the mast. I am hooked on my own punishment.’
‘Punishment for what, Annette?’
‘For being a victim. Blame the sinned-against for the sin, blame the victim for the crime. See how Spicer blames me! Dear Spicer, please forgive me for the hurt you have done me. Dear Spicer, forgive me for the death of the baby you killed. Spicer, cruel master, let me lick your boots, let me fawn upon you; take me back; if I can’t have your kindness, let me have your cruelty.’
‘Annette, that is disgusting.’
‘I know. I am entropied, degraded. Did my father really believe I aborted the baby? Went off with a lover? Or was that just what my mother said he believed?’
‘Your mother said it.’
‘Then we can discountenance it. She has never forgiven him for his affairs. Neither have I. If he wanted anyone but her, why didn’t he have me? Did you speak to the children?’
‘No.’
‘Please do. Tell th
em to hang on in there. Say I’ll be in touch very shortly.’
‘Okay. You are getting better, Annette. I can hear it in your voice. How’s the pit?’
‘The shit and the mud seem to be drying up. It would make good fertiliser. But I still can’t find the path out. Any number of false starts, but you keep slipping back and you know Spicer’s roaming up there anyway. Shall I tell you how I got to be in here?’
‘Yes please, Annette.’
‘Well. I got out of hospital and went home and found the photograph of the Doctors Marks and Spicer naked and doing God knows what to each other, in the name of therapy no doubt, and got thrown out. I had the evidence of my own eyes but it still wasn’t good enough. I started walking north. I don’t know why, except the further north you get in this hemisphere the colder it gets, so it seemed a fitting direction. All kinds of people stopped to offer lifts, so I accepted them. Why not? None of them were going far, that was the problem. A woman gave me her jumper, a man gave me sandwiches. Two young people tried to take me to a doctor. I suppose I looked very strange. I shivered a lot. I got as far as the big service station at Watford, where I took the initiative and started hitching. I probably should have just let what happened, happen. A lorry driver picked me up. He was young and goodlooking and had tattoos on his arm. They were brown and bare and muscly. It was kind of domestic in the cab. A rug on the seat; some artificial flowers in a silver vase he’d won in a raffle; a photograph of his mother’s cat stuck in the rearview mirror. He said he’d take me as far as I wanted if I’d have sex with him once every fifty miles, that was his fee for lady hitchhikers. I said yes, okay.’
‘Annette!’
‘Well, why not? He was very warm and soft to the touch. I can’t explain it. Spicer was always so contained and somehow chilly, even in performance. Straight trade seemed better to me. We got fifty miles and stopped in a layby, and another fifty, and another and another, and then he wanted to again after only another five miles, and I said that wasn’t in the deal and began to get angry. Why had he been so precise if he was going to do this? It was dark by then. He left the main road and went off into the countryside, bump, bump along tiny roads, in a temper, and I got frightened, which was stupid because what could he do which he hadn’t done already—but I was passionate in defence of the deal. It is the only way I can describe it. It seemed a matter of life and death to me that he should stick to the bargain and to him that the sex should be more than the bargain.’
