Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  “Religion is the opiate of the people,” said Pierre from his pillow. “God is a drug fed by the masters to the poor and hungry, so they are content with poverty and hunger. Jesus was never born: heaven does not exist. Blind belief is a thorn in the side of mankind and we will pluck it out.”

  In one more week it would be 1900, the dawn of the twentieth century, and into that dawn would strike through the light of new hope and new liberty, and all the energy of free thought and free love, untrammelled by convention, and Lucy’s soul soared at the thought that Pierre and she were part of it: that he and she were one step ahead of that new dawn. They would be in Paris by New Year’s Eve to be amongst the anarchists; they would gather there together to drink to the future: the passionate brotherhood of the enlightened, and their sisters in that passion.

  What a different stroke of midnight it would be from the one she would have envisaged just a few months back: a single glass of wine raised solemnly at the first stroke, in the parlour, in the company of Edwin her husband and Joseph her brother, and then to bed. And each stroke sounding its annual dirge to lost hope and failing passion: its welcome to the triumph of boredom and the death of the soul.

  Pierre left the bed and stood beside her. He was naked. Lucy could not become accustomed to it. She had been married to Edwin for fourteen years and had never caught more than a flash of white limb in the bathroom, a movement of bare flesh above her in the bed. Now Pierre unpinned her hair so it flowed around her shoulders.

  “So never name that day again,” said Pierre, “or it will drag you back to the Lord of the Dark Domain,” and they both laughed. Lord of the Dark Domain was their name for Edwin. Lucy’s husband wrote novels for a living; once every five years or so, to the acclaim of serious critics, he would publish an extremely melancholy book, the text so closely printed that Lucy had no patience with it, but then she was not expected to. Edwin loved Lucy for her folly; she was his child bride, his pretty wife: now he would see how he had misjudged her! Now he would find out: now that another man understood her talent, her intelligence, her quality, her passion.

  “All the same,” said Lucy, “it comes as a shock! No mince pies, no gifts and ribbons and best dresses? Never more?”

  “Never more,” said Pierre, “or you will be dragged back into the Hell of Domesticity, which is the Death of Art.”

  Pierre was a composer of fine if difficult song cycles which so few people in the world could understand that when Pierre came to New York from Paris to perform, the concert hall was all but empty, the tour was cancelled and Pierre left penniless and stranded in a strange land. Edwin, as an act of kindness, had offered him work for the summer, teaching Bessie and Bertie the piano. Bessie was twelve and Bertie was ten. They would wake this Christmas morning to a house which lacked a mother. Lucy put that image from her too. Bessie had Edwin’s beetling brows; Bertie aped Edwin’s clipped, dry manner of speech. They were Edwin’s children more than Lucy’s. Pierre saw it. Edwin claimed it. The law acknowledged it: let the law have its way.

  “An artist needs freedom, not a family,” said Pierre; he could so easily read her mind. She felt his warm breath on her cheek. “The artist’s duty is to all mankind; he must break free of the chains of convention. And women can be artists too, as you are, Lucy, remember that!”

  The first time Pierre had heard Lucy sing, in her sweet, clear, untrained voice, helping Bessie’s fumbling notes along, he had claimed her as an artist, the one he had been waiting for, the one who could truly bring his music to life. Poor Bessie was forgotten: she could hardly get to the piano: Lucy and Pierre were always there, as she worked to catch the notes between notes he found so significant he could make them include the whole universe. Edwin was on the last chapter of a novel: a time he found particularly tense. There was to be piano-playing only between two and four o’clock of an afternoon. He said so with some force. The house trembled. People wept.

  “He has you in prison,” said Pierre of Edwin then. “For what is a home but a man’s prison for a woman, and what is a wife but an unpaid whore? She lies on her back for her keep, bears children and cooks dinner likewise.” And when Lucy had recovered from her shock, the more she thought of it the more she perceived that what Pierre said was true. Lucy understood now that the sapphire necklace she wore round her neck was the symbol of her imprisonment: that her ruby earrings marked her as an instrument of lust, that the gold charms on her bracelet were for Edwin’s benefit, not her own; for is not a willing slave more useful than one who is unwilling?

  “You would not be my slave,” said Pierre, “you would be my love.”

  Lucy’s eyes went to the suitcase, and she wondered whether she should check that they were still there, in the suitcase, tucked in tissue in a dancing shoe: the sapphire, the rubies and the gold. But of course they were. Why should they not be? And they were hers by right, every one, payment for years of servitude. In the new world women would have equal dignity with men. When the workers of the world rose up, they would lift up women with them.

  “All the same,” said Lucy, “on this day of all days, allow me to feel like a mother, not an artist, and cry just a little.”

  “You should be ashamed to even consider such a betrayal,” said Pierre. “Weeping is something which women of the haute bourgeoisie do, the better to control men,” and Lucy was glad to understand that he was joking, for Edwin had scolded her and chided her and made her feel foolish from the day he had met her, and never ever joked about anything.

  Pierre called down to the landlady to bring breakfast up to the room. He stood naked at the top of the stairs and dodged behind the door when the woman arrived with the tray: she seemed to Lucy too small and old to carry such a weight. The servants at home were stout and strong.

  “Don’t upset her too much,” said Lucy when she had stopped laughing. “We owe her too much rent for that. I don’t know why you put off paying her.”

  But Pierre said they would wait for dark and then slip away unnoticed and pick up the Paris train before anyone realised, and he didn’t want any silly nonsense from Lucy: the landlady was an old witch who took advantage of travellers and overcharged, and deserved what she got.

  Lucy said nothing, but after she’d eaten the breakfast the landlady brought—hot coffee and fresh frothy milk, long crisp bread, and farm butter and apricot preserve—she said, “I’d really rather pay her, Pierre.”

  “What with?” asked Pierre. “We have no francs left. The journey across France is costing more than I thought. An artist shouldn’t be bothered by such sordid things as money: I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We’ll send her some from Paris if you insist when we’ve sold your jewellery, but she doesn’t deserve it. She is a lackey of the masters, that’s all she is.”

  Lucy felt her eyes mist with tears: she couldn’t tell the difference between the frothy milk and the thick white china jug. They merged together. At home the milk jugs were of fine porcelain, and had little flowers upon them. One of them came from Limoges. She wondered where Limoges was, and if she’d ever go there. She could see such an event was more likely now that she was Pierre’s lover, no longer Edwin’s wife; on the other hand, any such journey would be accomplished in less comfort. She did not understand money: it seemed necessary for all kinds of things she had thought just happened—such as being warm, or welcomed, or treated with politeness by porters, and gendarmes, shopkeepers and landladies. But money did not buy love, or freedom, or truth, or hope, or any of the important things in life. “Don’t cry,” said Pierre. “You’re homesick, that’s all it is,” and he leaned towards her and removed a crumb from her lip, and her heart melted; the act was so tender and true. Edwin would have mentioned the crumb, not removed it. Pierre put on his shirt and she was glad, though she knew she shouldn’t be. “I’m not homesick,” Lucy said, “not one bit. You’ve no idea how dank and drear the woods around the house are at this time of year. How they drip and drizzle!”

  “Worse than Bessie on a ba
d day,” murmured Pierre, nuzzling into her hair, and she thought why is he allowed to mention Bessie’s name and I am not, but Lucy laughed too, to keep Pierre company, to be of one accord in mind, as they were in body. Bessie was a plain girl and had not been blessed with a musical ear, so Pierre could not take her seriously, and that made it hard for Lucy, now Bessie was at a distance, to do so either. Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed. Edwin had married a child and tried to stop her choosing, but now thanks to Pierre she had grown up and made her own choice.

  She hoped Edwin would keep Christmas without her. She hoped he would remember, when he brought in the Christmas Tree, the little fir which had grown in its pot on the step since the first year of the marriage, that it had to be watered well. She hoped he knew the boxes in the attic where the decorations were. Lucy added a new one every year—would he remember that? Would he realise you had to balance the golden horses with their silver riders? And part of her hoped he’d get it all wrong. Part of her hoped that now she was not there, he would have no heart for any of it, he would be so sorry she had gone. She would find a letter from him in Paris, forgiving her, asking her to go home. Of course she would not go.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” said Pierre, but he wouldn’t have liked them if he heard them so Lucy said, “I’m really glad I’m not at home, Pierre. This time of year. When the days are really short, and winter hasn’t quite caught up with them and the skies just seem to sulk. Why, they sulk even worse than Bertie on a bad day,” and she laughed again, betraying her other child, for the sake of love. “And the rooms of the house are so crowded and sad,” said Lucy, “and here everything is simple and graceful and plain. I promise you I don’t miss a thing. You make up for it all, Pierre.”

  Lucy’s brother Joseph would have arrived on Christmas Eve, as was his custom, bearing gifts. They would be the wrong gifts: an impossible doll, an unworkable cannon, a scarf she hated, the kind of pen Edwin never used. Joseph’s talent for the wrong gifts was a marvel: it was a joke she and Edwin shared: a look between them every year, no more: that much they had at least: this equality of shared experience, which grew every year as the Christmas Tree grew, so slowly you could never see it, soil never quite right, too wet or too dry, so you feared for it; but every Christmas an inch or so higher. This year it would have to go on its side to get through the front door, and could only stand in the window arch—would Edwin and Joseph talk about Lucy, or would her name not be mentioned? An impossible subject, an inexplicable situation: a woman lost to duty, lost to honour, lost to motherhood: a woman altogether vanished away, erased from the mind, nameless. A subdued source of sorrow, of better-never-born-dom.

  “No children to tug at my skirts,” said Lucy, “no brother at my sympathy, no husband at my conscience. A day like any other, dawning bright and fair on our new life together. Just you and I, and art, and beauty, and love, and music. All the things that passed poor stuffy old Edwin by!”

  “I pity Edwin,” said Pierre. “He had no ear. A man who rations music to two hours a day has no ear and a man who locks a piano has no soul!”

  The better to enforce his ruling, Edwin had kept the piano closed; unlocking it at two o’clock after lunch: emerging from his study at four o’clock to close it once again. In the mornings, thus freed from practice, Lucy and Pierre had walked in the woods, and talked about music, and presently love, and then more than talked, and Pierre had explained to Lucy how unhappy she was, and how her way of life stifled her, and how he could not be a great artist without her, and Bessie had seen them in the woods and Lucy had forged one of Edwin’s cheques and paid both their passages over; and left Edwin a note and was gone; taking her jewellery because Pierre said she must, and the way not to think about any of it was to be in bed with Pierre. They had scarcely left the cabin on the way over: they had been the talk of the ship and she hadn’t cared. To fly in the face of all things respectable intensified the pleasure she had with Pierre: what was forbidden was sweet: she hoped they would never reach Paris, where everyone felt as she and Pierre did, but of course that was silly of her: what was forbidden could not be kept up for long and in any case had to be sandwiched between the permitted in order to count—why had there been no one to stop her? If you were a child wasn’t that what happened? That someone stopped you? She’d relied on Edwin for that all her grown life, but since she couldn’t tell him about Pierre how could he have helped her? But she blamed him because he hadn’t, because he’d been so busy with his book he hadn’t even noticed the time she was spending with Pierre: it was Edwin’s fault she had left.

  She wondered what she and Pierre would do all day. When they were out of bed there seemed not very much to do, except wait for other days to arrive, or messages to come which didn’t come from friends she had only heard of, never seen. If she was at home on this day she would be so busy—it would be all best clothes and mince pies and the gifts beneath the Christmas Tree, and a formal kiss from Edwin before the unwrapping ceremony began—

  Pierre said, “We’ll smuggle the suitcase out after lunch when Madame takes her nap. She sleeps well: she doesn’t care how the rest of the world toils for her profit! Then in the evening you dress as me and I’ll dress as you, and that will be the best disguise in the world, and we’ll escape. We’ll be so clever!” Lucy thought it was probably better as an idea than it would be as an actuality—she could get into his coat but her jacket would never stretch over his shoulders—but didn’t say so. It was the kind of prank Bertie would think of. Pierre had explained to her how Edwin was a father/husband, but what did she have now instead—a son/lover? Was such a thing possible?

  “I could offer her a gold charm from my bracelet,” said Lucy. “In fact I think I’ll do that.”

  And to her astonishment Pierre hit her, or she thought that was what had happened, since there was a sudden kind of stinging blackness around her head, but how could she know; no one had ever hit her before. For a second or so she couldn’t see, and was perhaps suffering from amnesia, for she couldn’t quite remember where she was; but yes, it wasn’t home, it was indeed an inn somewhere in the South of France, and she was leaning against a whitewashed wall, while a strange man rather younger than herself apologised for something rather trivial, and she could hear a kind of knock, knock, knock, which she thought was Edwin chopping down the Christmas Tree, the one that had started little and grown deep and strong. Edwin divided it root from branch, because it spoke of a celebration Lucy could no longer name, and anyway it spoke a lie. But of course the sound was only the knock, knock, knock of the landlady at the door, demanding money she and Pierre didn’t have, speaking in a language Lucy didn’t understand, but who knew them better than they knew themselves. She could see that to look after yourself you would have to know yourself, but who was there in that land, in that time, to hear such a thing if it were said?

  LEDA AND THE SWAN

  WHEN GOSLING WAS TWO, his body was smooth, plump and bronzed. He ran in and out of the waves at the water’s edge and was happy. “He’s a real water baby,” his mother would say fondly. But she carried his little brother in her arms, and her eyes were even softer and kinder for the baby than they were for the little boy, and Gosling noticed.

  She called the older one Gosling in pure affection, and the younger one Duckling, which was even more affectionate. Gosling once pushed Duckling under the bath water, but fortunately help came in time: for Duckling, that is, not Gosling.

  “Did your mother hope you’d grow up to be a swan?” asked Gosling’s wife, interested.

  �
��I don’t know what she thought,” was all he said. He would volunteer information about his past, but did not like his wife to be too inquisitive. His past was a private planet, full of unscalable heights and hopeless depths where he alone was brave enough to wander. “Anyway,” Gosling added, “it’s ugly ducklings, not goslings, who grow up to be swans. My little brother was the one she had hopes for.”

  “Well, I think you grew up to be a swan,” she said. They had been married for a year when she said that. She was proud of him: his fine dark eyes, his smooth skin, his sexual confidence; the gregarious fits which interrupted his more sombre moods. She felt she was very ordinary, compared to him. Her name was Eileen, but he called her Leda, and this gratified her very much.

  Eileen met Gosling in a London park at the edge of a swimming pool. He was a Sunday father; he took his little daughter Nadine swimming while, he complained, his ex-wife entertained her lover. Nadine did not share her father’s enthusiasm for the water; no, but she endured it with patience and polite smiles. She was a good girl. Eileen, that Sunday afternoon, splashed about in the water happily enough, though she did complain of its coldness. But then her parents kept a hotel in Bermuda: Eileen had spent her youth in warm water, chasing sailboats. English water was hard and bitter with chlorine: why did so many people want to go in it? The pool was crowded.

  Gosling and Eileen collided underwater: he had to help her to the surface. His hand, firm upon her arm, seemed to transmit some kind of magnetic current: at any rate his touch acted like an electric shock. She squealed aloud and snatched her arm away in alarm; nearly sank. They touched again, tentatively. Again she let out a little yelp. That made him laugh. “We are seriously attracted to each other,” he said as they surfaced, and she had to agree. She was eighteen: he was thirty.