“Thank you very much. You say the sweetest things.”
“Oh, let’s go to sleep.”
“There’s steamed fish tomorrow.”
“Charming,” he said. “Life is so full of thrills.”
Alan, feeling that sleep was further away than ever, got out of bed and stood upon the scales. He balanced from one foot to another to try and make the reading as low as possible. Proving to his own satisfaction that he had lost two pounds, he said to Esther, “There is something, however, that I haven’t told you. If I have been behaving a little strangely, there is a reason for it.”
Esther opened her eyes, alarmed.
“My agent rang up last week,” he said. “He likes my novel. He thinks it’s going to make quite a splash. He’s sent it to the publishers with a very strong recommendation. A pity you haven’t read it. I would have liked to have discussed it with you.”
“Isn’t that marvelous,” said Esther faintly. “Isn’t that wonderful! Why didn’t you tell me earlier? We could have celebrated.”
9
“I DIDN’T LIKE ALAN writing that novel,” said Esther to Phyllis. “I didn’t like it one little bit. And I liked it even less when he said his agent was enthusiastic.”
“I would have been proud,” said Phyllis. “I’d think it was marvelous if Gerry could only do a thing like that. I wish I’d married a writer. Writers stay at home most of the time. I could learn how to type and be a great help to him in his work.”
“I had no urge whatsoever to help Alan,” said Esther. “Not in this respect. He’d come home from the office and have dinner and go into the bedroom and take out his typewriter and that would be that for the evening. I could sit staring into space for all he cared. And what would he have done if I’d gone off by myself and typed in the evenings? He wouldn’t have stood for it. That’s another of the rules of marriage. Husbands can snub wives, but wives aren’t allowed to indulge themselves in artistic endeavors: wives can only do so in secret, when husbands are out of the house. Wives are a miserable lot. I shall never be a wife again.”
“I think you should see a doctor. It’s not right to think like that. It’s perfectly natural for women to be wives, and to look after husbands who are not really fit to look after themselves, and it was very unfair of you to try and stop him writing. And most unwise. No wonder he looked elsewhere.”
“You have this extraordinary passion for simplifying things, Phyllis. I didn’t try and stop him writing. I encouraged him. He was doing it just to annoy, anyway, to prove to me what a creative person he was and to demonstrate how I had stifled his talents and his personality. I knew from the way he would gobble down his dinner, pretending not to notice what he was eating, and then stand in the doorway and say, with his papers clutched in his hand, ‘I am going away to write now. I do not want to be disturbed.’ He used such a challenging tone of voice that I quickly recognized the whole thing as an act of aggression. And he waited and waited for me to ask him what it was about, and I wouldn’t, so he had to go on writing and almost before he knew what had happened, he had finished. So he ought to have been grateful to me. Instead, he preferred to believe he had done it all in spite of me.”
“Didn’t you want to know what he was writing? I would have died of curiosity.”
“If he wanted it to be a secret, why should I bother?”
“Poor Alan! Trampling on his creativity like that.”
“Poor Alan, indeed. When did Alan ever do anything except exactly what he wanted when he wanted?”
“Well that’s men, isn’t it?”
“You do reduce everything to a kind of comic-strip level, don’t you? All this happened the night before Gerry called.”
Phyllis paused in the careful peeling of an apple.
“Gerry?”
“Yes. Didn’t he tell you?”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“It was quite a casual visit. Perhaps he thought it wasn’t important—oh, don’t look like that, Phyllis. You don’t own the poor man.”
“I don’t want to own him. I just want not to be hurt by him. I want it to be like it was when I was a child, when you thought the day you got married you lived happily ever after. Esther, I’m cold. You talk and talk and none of it matters, and then you say something and it’s real. Turn on the gas fire.”
Phyllis tossed the unbroken strip of peel from her apple into the air. It curled to make a “C” on the floor.
“C. I wonder who that is? I wonder who in the world that is. Do you think I will ever meet someone who will make me happy? I wouldn’t mind waiting until I was seventy. Just so long as some day I do.”
“Men don’t make women happy. Men make women unhappy.”
Esther crouched in front of the gas fire, making toast.
“Gerry used to make me happy. I was so very happy once,” said Phyllis.
“It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable. Better never to be happy at all.”
“Tell me about Gerry. What did he say? Why did he visit you? What happened? Did you let him make love to you?”
Esther turned to stare at Phyllis in an unsmiling way, and the toast burned.
Brenda now lay on the bed in her nightgown with her hands clasped behind her head and an expression of beatitude on her face that quite tormented Susan.
“Did you really let that man make love to you?” asked Susan. “Just like that? A foreigner? A pick-up in a pub?”
“Yes. Why not? Why are you so interested? What more do you want to know? I don’t like discussing clinical details. He was no different from an Englishman, really. There is no need to go on about his being a foreigner.”
“I don’t understand how you can take such a thing so lightly.”
“You think you are the only person who ever feels anything. Who knows, perhaps he and me will get married.”
Susan looked at the prostrate figure on the floor. His watch was solid gold; his clothes must have cost a fortune in Carnaby Street; he had the smooth and silky skin of the protein-fed.
“You don’t know his name,” she said, “or his income.”
“It doesn’t matter. I feel I am in love. I have never been in love before. I want to feel like this forever. My kind of love is not yours. Mine makes me happy. You say that that is being a whore. I think it’s just being a normal, natural woman.”
“I think it’s being a normal, natural man, more like. I think you should have been born a boy.”
“My mother wanted me to be a boy. I am glad I am a woman, though, now. I feel wonderful.”
“You were feeling something quite different before. You were all anxious and worried.”
“When you came in looking so cross I felt I ought to apologize. The least I could do was not have enjoyed it. But now I am bored with pretending. I feel marvelous. I feel powerful. I think all I have to do is stretch out my little finger and men will fall down in front of me in droves. Do you ever feel like that?”
“Sometimes. Not often.”
“When I look back at the past I seem to have been so foolish. I worried about whether men would like me. But it doesn’t matter, does it? What matters is whether I like them. What a revelation! Isn’t life wonderful? I wonder what my mother would say. She’d have a fit.”
“She’s probably in bed with the butcher at this very minute. Suburban widows are a randy lot.”
Brenda sat up.
“You have no right to say a thing like that. My mother loved my father very much and hasn’t looked at a man since he died. She is a very good woman, and my father treated her very badly, which was what she wanted, I’m afraid. She had to struggle very hard to bring me up, which she loved doing, and granted she isn’t very intelligent, but she’s a good woman, and very brave in the face of adversity, everyone says so; and the butcher is about eighty, anyway. And I’ll tell you another thing. I’m tired of being patronized by you. I don’t think you know as much about love as you pretend. You may be kinky fo
r artists and married men, but that doesn’t mean you know everything about life.”
“Just because you’ve fallen into bed with a strange Asiatic and liked it doesn’t mean you do, either. It was very unwise of you. I don’t see him going down well in your family circle.”
“I won’t really many him. I will love him but never marry him, because East and West can never meet. He might be a Muslim, anyway, and his attitude to women not acceptable.”
“I hardly imagine he had marriage in mind when he followed you home from the pub. Or a union lasting more than a quarter of an hour at the very most.”
“You make everything sound so sordid. We’ll see when he wakes. I think your relationship with William is sordid, taking a man away from his pregnant wife. And you and Alan, that was sordid, too. Fancy fancying a man because he’d written a book! I feel too happy to be really angry with you, however. You only say nasty things because you’re jealous; because I have some capacity for happiness, and you have none. I feel liberated. I thought I would have to marry a bank clerk or a doctor or a lawyer and have children and be a housewife, but now I see I needn’t do any of these things. I shall never get married.”
“You will have to.”
“Why?”
“Children. You want children.”
“You don’t have to be married to have children.”
“You’ll grow old and ugly. Then you’ll need to be married.”
“You don’t mean to get married. Why should it be different for me?”
“Because you have a suburban soul.”
“I have not. Didn’t I just go to bed with him? Is that being suburban?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Brenda’s look of happiness died. “You can’t win, can you,” she said in a small voice. She turned her head onto the pillow and began to cry.
“Now what’s the matter?” asked Susan.
“I’m all upset inside. I don’t know what’s the matter. Is there enough hot water for a bath?”
“Yes.”
“It won’t make any difference, though. I’ll still feel sticky and horrible.”
“That’s just guilt.”
“Why should I feel guilty?” Brenda stopped crying to inquire.
“Because you’re not married, and you don’t love him, and you don’t want his children.”
“Do you have to want someone’s children not to feel guilty about making love to them?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t want Alan’s children.”
“Good God, no.”
“Then?”
“But then I didn’t like Alan in bed, either. I wasn’t really interested in bed, just in his creative soul.”
Brenda got out of bed and knelt beside it and prayed.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Praying.”
“To whom, for God’s sake?”
“I don’t know. Anyone.”
“What are you praying?”
“I’m just saying, ‘Dear God what shall we do to be saved?’”
“You are right to ask. I’ll go away and leave you to your devotions.”
“Please don’t. Don’t go away until he does. If I shut my eyes, will you wake him up and get rid of him so that when I open my eyes he’s gone?”
“Are you talking to me or to God?”
“You.”
Susan crossed to the sleeping man and kicked him. He grunted and stirred, but he did not wake up. He was too drunk.
10
ESTHER SCRAPED THE TOAST into the sink. She looked with distaste at the black crumbs, and ran the tap to wash them away.
“I don’t really eat,” she remarked. “I scavenge. I am trying to clear up the mess that surrounds me, like a cat cleaning up after having kittens.”
“You say horrible things,” said Phyllis, taking out her compact and staring at her face. “Human beings are more than animals. I think you say these things just to shock me. But I am not easily shockable.”
“Where is Gerry now, do you think? At this very moment?”
“I don’t know. Why won’t you answer my question?”
“It was an unworthy question.”
“What do you imagine Gerry is doing at this very minute? Let a vision come into your mind. I know what you see. You see him in bed with a woman. You don’t know what she looks like, all you know is she isn’t you. Perhaps she looks like me? Vaguely? He’s just a vague shape too, isn’t he? Your husband. You don’t really believe he exists separately from you. At least I just eat food. You’d eat him, if you could. To incorporate him. That’s a terrible way to be.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t think Gerry is with another woman. And what horrible nonsense is all that other about eating him? What do you think I am? A cannibal?”
“You are shocked, aren’t you. The truth is always shocking.”
“You’re mad. What happened when Gerry came to see you?”
“What happened? What happened? Sexually? That’s the only kind of happening you recognize. No wonder you fear growing old so much. But behaving and feeling as if you were fifteen won’t stop your backbone shriveling and your teeth falling out.”
“What happened? I begin to think you have something to hide.”
“Begin? You’ve been in a state of agitation ever since I said Gerry came to see me. Nothing happened, in the sense you mean.”
“I’m sorry to be silly. It’s just he always fancied you. I don’t know why. He’d go mad if I put on a pound, yet he liked you.”
“He came to let me know, on the excuse of passing by, that he had seen Alan lunching with Susan in Soho, and to tell me, under guise of denigrating her, just how young, beautiful, slim and intelligent she was.”
“But why would he do a thing like that?”
“Why do you think?”
“He’s horrible! He’s always fancied you. He thought you’d pay Alan out in his own coin.”
“You might be wrong. Perhaps it was all quite innocent. Perhaps he was just passing by. Perhaps he did think I knew about Susan having lunch with Alan. Perhaps he hoped for nothing at all. Perhaps it is all just in our minds, and not in his. We must be careful not to mistrust all men, just because they are our enemies.”
“You are so confusing. I know Gerry was after you, but I don’t think men are my enemies. I like men.”
“So do I. But I don’t think women should have anything more to do with men than they can possibly help. They should not try and ape them, either. I wish you would not wear trousers, Phyllis.”
“I like wearing trousers.”
“Women should aspire to be as different as possible from them. You should wear a skirt as a matter of principle. There must be apartheid between the sexes. Men and women should unite for the purpose of rearing children. Any woman who struggles to be accepted in a man’s world makes herself ridiculous. It is a world of folly, fantasy and self-indulgence, and it is not worth aspiring to. We must create our own world. I will lend you a skirt, Phyllis.”
Phyllis shuddered in spite of herself.
“We were talking about your husband,” said Esther, “on whose account you make yourself so wretched. I am not sorry for you on this account, since you married him with the full intention of being wretched. I will tell you the truth. Your husband came round and made a pass at me, although I am all of fourteen stone and five years older than him. Now why did he do a thing like that?”
“What did you do? Esther!” Poor Phyllis was trembling.
“I?” said Esther. “What would a woman like me do when a man like that makes a pass at her? ‘I like,’ he said to me, ‘a woman I can get my teeth into.’ To which I replied, ‘I am not normally a mass of toothmarks.’ That was quite witty, don’t you think?”
“You’re mad,” said Phyllis. She was standing up, pulling at her wedding ring, with her eyes so bright it was clear she was going to cry. “You shouldn’t talk to me about my husband like that. For pity’s sake, stop teasi
ng me and tell me what happened. You are so clever and I am very stupid, but it’s not my fault. Please tell me!”
“I have already told you. Nothing happened that was of any account.”
“But what do you mean ‘was of any account’? For all I know you’d go to bed with the Prime Minister and still say it was ‘of no account.’”
“Well, you know Gerry. It’s all talk with him, isn’t it? It’s a favorite female myth that the men who talk most do least. Like if people talk about suicide, they won’t. They do, of course, but it would be worrying to believe it.”
Phyllis started to cry. Mascara ran down her cheeks.
“Don’t get hysterical,” said Esther. “You wanted to hear this story. It’s not my fault if it turns out to be something you don’t want to hear.”
“Just tell me, Esther. I won’t hold it against you.”
“Gerry and I did not make love,” said Esther, allowing Phyllis to see that her fingers were crossed. “That night,” she added for good measure. “Try and calm down, Phyllis. Why should you worry, either way? What possible difference can it make to us, here and now, what happened to me a month or so ago? What matters is that your husband tried to upset me and succeeded.”
“All you can think of is yourself.”
“That is a charge that can fairly be leveled at every one of us. I wish you didn’t have such trivial problems, Phyllis. You must learn to look outside them. Gerry’s infidelity is merely a convenient hook on which to hang your anxieties. You would be better off as a peasant woman tilling the soil and trying to keep her family from starvation. Give any woman time to think, and she’s miserable at once. It is time you took up good works, Phyllis.”
“But you left Alan because he was unfaithful.”
“That is a gross simplification.”
“Well, you didn’t leave him just because he made you go on a diet.”
“He didn’t make me go on a diet. We decided to do it. He quite willfully set about depriving me. I quite willfully set about depriving him. We conspired together to break our marriage, in fact. I was less whole-hearted about it than him. I would have retracted if I could. I made peace offerings. I tried to cook his omelettes in butter. He chose to see it as an act of aggression. He was determined not to be married to me any more.”
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