by Weldon, Fay
She ordered her fish unfilleted. Delicately and discreetly she parted flesh from bone. Her nail varnish was pearly pink. He thought of Valerie waiting for him. He did not think of Stef at all. His children were safely in Norfolk, with his mother, so why should he?
Q: Really? What is the figure for men?
A: I don’t know. I’m sorry. In Darcy’s Utopia, however, though love will flourish, and pleasure abound, furtive alliances be formal and reformed, and sexual excitements be breathless and secret and glorious, marriage will be beset around with difficulties and obstacles and deep seriousness: only the very determined will marry. Livings together will happen in abundance, of course; but marriage will be another matter: marriage will imply intent to procreate. Of all matters in Darcy’s Utopia only procreation will be subject to rules and regulations. It will be a most serious matter. You cannot have women popping new people out of themselves just at random, when and where they want. In Darcy’s Utopia there are bound to be children, but their parents will be carefully selected, and being in short supply they will grow up in a world which loves and admires children and finds them interesting, and doesn’t herd them together in schools to get them out of the way, dunk them in front of obscene videos to keep them quiet, and slap them about and threaten them in the streets, which is what happens in this society of ours which you seem to find both perfectly ordinary, and, worse, inevitable. Well, I don’t. How many children do you have, Mr Vansitart?
Q: Three. A little boy of eight and four-year-old-twins, girls. Loved and wanted children all of them. I find what you say monstrous. I cannot believe you mean it. You’re joking.
Hugo looked up in alarm as a woman in a black belted mackintosh and beret pushed her way through the restaurant towards him. He got to his feet. ‘Stef!’ he pleaded, but she slapped his face, there and then, in front of everyone. ‘Your mother brought the twins back. I’m taking Peter with me on holiday. The twins are in the buggy outside,’ she said. ‘You’d better bring them inside before someone steals them.’ And she left. Eleanor Darcy said, ‘Don’t bother about me. I’ll find my own way home.’
Valerie meets her lover’s wife
Reception rang through and said there was a lady waiting to see me in the foyer. I was in the bath. In the better hotels there is always a telephone by the bath – the sense of importance of those who soak in the provided scented foam being thereby increased. ‘Look, I am the sort of person who is always in demand – always! Why, I can’t even take a bath without being pestered for my time and attention. I’ll come to your hotel again, and tell all my friends.’ And I said, ‘Ask her to come up,’ without thinking too much about it. It might have been my colleague Ann – who knew my whereabouts – or even my editor, come to congratulate me on the first pages of Lover at the Gate which I had faxed through from the hotel’s secretariat – or even Sophie, come to apologize, though I hardly imagined she had been promoted from child to lady in the few weeks of my absence.
And I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in one of the big white towels in which these places specialize, and, with an innocence born no doubt of the habit of the past, opened the door.
A small indeterminate woman in a lightly belted black raincoat slipped in past me: she had wispy fair hair and I could see at once from whence the twins had inherited what I can only describe as their nebulousness – a sense of the nebulae or star cluster that is better seen out of the corner of the eye. If you look too hard it disappears altogether into a kind of wistful, disappointed light in the night sky. Yet she managed to be a rather successful financial journalist. Perhaps all the figures permuting in her head had somehow sapped her reality.
‘Can I help?’ I asked, rather wishing I had more clothes on.
‘I am your lover’s wife,’ she said, and then I was glad I had so little on. I felt like flinging aside the towel. Hugo kept telling me my body was glorious and I had come to believe him. Lou never even looked, on Tuesday and Friday nights, any more than he looked at the instrument he played. He knew it too well. Just as he practised the violin every morning between nine thirty and ten thirty, so I always had the sense he practised his lovemaking on me, getting ready for the real thing, only this with me was not it: I was not it. With Hugo, I was quite definitely the performance: Stef, the more I looked at her, obviously a mere rehearsal. I was surprised when she said:
‘Eleanor Darcy I could understand. But you! What goes on here?’
‘I didn’t ask you here and I don’t want to see you and I have nothing to say to you,’ I said, showing her the door but, alas, she seemed to have no intention of going through it, so I capitulated rather too easily and offered her a drink from the mini bar. She said she’d have a sherry, a nebulous drink itself, so I poured her as dark and sweet a one as I could find in the little tight tiny rows of sinister bottles, and while she drank it I put on trousers and sweater.
‘Hugo likes really thin women,’ she said, ‘when he likes women at all. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that he’s a closet gay.’ I said I didn’t think her opinion was worth very much: if that was the opinion she had of her husband then naturally he preferred someone who admired, loved, trusted and desired him, and why didn’t she just go away?
‘I’ve been to see your husband,’ she said – I didn’t like that at all – ‘and he asked me to tell you that if you don’t return home by the end of the week he is going to join forces with Kirsty Bull: she’s coming to live in and look after your children.’
Kirsty Bull is a friend of mine whose husband left her six months back. I know Lou admires her. She plays double bass, and I reckon Lou is quite stirred by the sight of the hefty instrument so sturdily placed between, let’s face it, equally hefty legs. She tends to wear full denim skirts with lace borders and her hair falls over her face while she plays. Not a style I wish to emulate; I prefer a kind of brisk straight-lined tidiness; but of all the women in the world Kirsty Bull is the one I would prefer not to move in to babysit. It is one thing to move out – not to be able to move back in because one’s place has been usurped is quite another. I didn’t like that one bit.
‘And Hugo will come back to me because he always does,’ she said, ‘when the guilt gets too much. So I’ve just come out of the goodness of my heart to warn you to save yourself while you can: you’ll lose Hugo – where is he, by the way? Not here? No. I can tell you where he is. Chatting up Eleanor Darcy in a flash restaurant. She’s next. Not only will you lose Hugo you will lose your home, husband and children as well.’
She was trying to frighten me off, of course. I didn’t believe a word she was saying. The phone went. It was Hugo.
‘Your wife’s here,’ I said.
‘The bitch,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe a word she says. She said the twins were outside in their buggy and she was lying. By the time I got back inside Eleanor Darcy was gone.’
So I didn’t believe a word Stef said. She went, and I got on with the life of Ellen Parkin, about to emerge from her chrysalis, to spread her wings as Eleanor Darcy.
LOVER AT THE GATE [6]
Bernard’s encounters with Nerina
‘Ellen,’ said Bernard one morning at breakfast, ‘I have made a breakthrough. Nerina is going to stay on to take her degree.’
‘Nerina?’
‘I’ve told you about Nerina. Her family is from Pakistan. But her father’s a lawyer and her mother does part-time filing work in the college office.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘The mother?’
‘No. Nerina.’
‘Stunning.’
‘So she’s not covered up with bits of black in case she turns you on?’
‘Ellen, she wears bits of jeans and bits of T-shirts like the rest of the group. There is more than a touch of racism in your assumption.’
‘Yes, well you’re liberal-racist. Why don’t you say right out “this middle-class westernized Pakistani girl called Nerina”? You can’t bring yourself to do it. It’s the
little “but” gives you away. “But” her father is a lawyer.’
They were both trying to give up smoking.
Presently Ellen said:
‘What sort of stunning?’
‘A perfectly oval face: large almond eyes: rather like one of those plaster Madonnas made in India.’
‘Like the one you jumped on?’
‘No. That was Italian.’
‘You’re just saying that. You’ve no idea where it was made. I expect you’d just rather it was Mediterranean because it would feel less racist.’
‘Perhaps you’d better have a cigarette, Ellen.’
‘Yes, I will.’
They both did.
Ellen finally said:
‘Okay, what sort of breakthrough?’
Bernard told Ellen that Nerina had come to him in tears. Her brother had joined the fundamentalists, and was putting pressure on the family to withdraw her from college and marry his friend Sharif.
‘What’s Sharif like?’
‘Ellen, I have no idea. It is hardly the point.’
‘If I was one of your students and you lot were counting up your staff-student contact hours, working to rule and refusing to mark exam papers, I might well prefer to give up the course and marry my brother’s friend Sharif. If he was halfway good-looking.’
Bernard left for college early and said no more about Nerina. Christmas was coming and Ellen took a part-time job in the college office to meet the extra costs of the season, and there met Nerina’s mother, a pleasant woman wearing a serviceable sari and black lace-up shoes.
‘I believe you have a daughter in the college, Mrs Khalid,’ said Ellen. Both women were transferring confidential student records from file cards on to computer. Occasionally, on whim, they would allow a finger to slip and up-grade exam results. ‘I’m just about coming to the Ks.’
‘Her name’s Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘N. S. Khalid.’
Nerina’s card showed two years of B pluses and A minuses in communication studies and sociology, and then a term of Cs and Ds, and then back up to straight As.
Ellen turned the Cs and Ds into Bs. The girl might yet come out with a first.
‘She went through a bad patch,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘She fell in love with her brother’s friend and wanted to leave college but we made her stay on. I think she’s over it now.’
‘Nerina’s always on at me to wear western clothes,’ confided Mrs Khalid, ‘but I like to be comfortable. I feel happier wrapped, and able to eat as many buttered tea cakes as I like. And of course it keeps her brother Fariq quiet. He’s eighteen; he’s turned fundamental at the moment. But I expect it’s no worse than being a punk. He’s at us all the time, but boys of that age do so like to be morally superior, don’t they?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t have children, or mean to.’
‘You’re very young,’ said Mrs Khalid comfortingly. ‘You’ll change your mind.’
Mrs Khalid had a soft expression and lively eyes but a never-say-die-ishness that quite reminded Ellen of Rhoda. She wondered whether, if Mrs Khalid were in love with her son’s friend Sharif, would she do as Rhoda had done, try to marry off her daughter to Sharif just to keep him in the family? And thought no, probably not. Sometimes Ellen felt the need for some understanding older woman in whom to confide. Her mother Wendy hovered round the house in too petty and ethereal a form to be much use: the occasional glimmer of light where no light should be, an object in motion which by rights should be still. And Rhoda, dead and buried, stayed firmly silent, finished and underground. Perhaps the reward of the wronged was to have eternal life? Perhaps the punishment of the wrong-doers was just to be finished, kaput, over? Though to think in terms of rewards and punishments was childish. Story book notions. Nothing to do with real life.
‘I might not change my mind,’ said Ellen.
‘A woman without children might as well not be born,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘It was to have children that Allah put her on this earth. Can you think of any other reason?’
‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘Not really. Unless we lateral think and it wasn’t him put us here.’
‘I wouldn’t want my son to hear a thing like that,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘Especially not as you’re wife to a member of staff. It might be dangerous.’
‘Tell me more about Nerina,’ said Ellen to Bernard, over breakfast. They had both settled down to non-smoking. He put down a volume of Hume – he no longer read the daily papers, but was working through the world’s philosophers, from Plato onwards, and had now reached the Scottish humanists.
‘What about Nerina?’
‘Why did she go from As and Bs and then down to Cs and Ds and then to steady As.’
‘I’m not having a relationship with her,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you think.’
‘That is not what I thought,’ said Ellen, ‘but it must have crossed your mind or you wouldn’t have brought it up.’
‘It is not possible,’ he said, ‘to move amongst these nubile girls and have no reaction whatsoever.’
‘I absolutely understand,’ said Ellen. ‘Any more than it’s possible for me to work up at the college with all those strapping lads running round in jockey shorts and have no reaction whatsoever.’
‘All brawn and no brain,’ he said. ‘Of no possible interest to you. Even Nerina worries about the sudden jump to straight As. It’s happened since she joined the black magic course. She finds it disconcerting.’
‘Black magic? The poly now teaches black magic? It is that desperate for students?’ Under the new educational regulations any increase in students meant a concomitant increase in funding.
‘Of course we don’t teach black magic. Jed is running a course in the psychology of group reaction. Mass hypnosis, mass psychosis, as related to auto-suggestion. That kind of thing. It is the students who refer to it as the black magic course. Please, Ellen, I’m reading.’
‘And they stand around in pentacles trying to raise the Devil?’
‘I really don’t know what they do. Please, Ellen, I’m trying to ascertain the nature of reality.’
‘Bully for you. And all of a sudden she got straight As? Does she have a thing for Jed, or Jed for her? That would be a more likely explanation.’
Bernard put Hume down. He had been paying more attention than she thought. He had shaved off his beard again. She liked the tender line of his lip: she could see now what he was thinking. ‘Jed is a married man,’ said Bernard, ‘of considerable integrity. He does not have affairs with students and if he did it would certainly not affect their grading.’
Windscale the cat jumped off his lap and sat on Ellen’s. It had never properly mastered the art of sitting on humans. It faced outward, not inward, and kept its claws out to keep itself locked on. ‘Ellen,’ as Bernard sometimes observed, ‘puts up with more from cats than she does from humans.’
Bernard, Ellen observed, had become rather thin. He ate as much as usual, but gesticulated more. He waved his hands around a lot. She hoped that when he stopped smoking he would fill out a little and his knees would be less likely to bruise hers in bed, but no. He went to bed late and rose early, and the space in between was lively with frequent, prolonged and energetic sex.
‘Sometimes,’ she said to Brenda, ‘I wish he’d just stop.’
‘I always wish Peter wouldn’t begin,’ said Brenda.
Belinda said, ‘Ì told you so. Now he’s not a Catholic, now he’s not a Marxist, there’s no control at all. Why do you think he had those belief structures in the first place?’
Liese said, ‘Len and I are totally happy.’
The springs in Ken and Rhoda’s bed twanged apart and jutted sharply through the mattress. Ellen wondered if she should perhaps look for a replacement, but put it off. Money was tight, and the Christmas season approaching. She thought they might have a Christmas tree; for the first non-ideological season for many years.
Nerina called in at the office to see her mother. Mrs Khalid i
ntroduced her to Ellen. Nerina was beautiful, in a languid kind of way. Her palely dark skin glowed with the light of youth. She was serene. Perhaps too serene, Ellen thought: there was something static in her expression, as if the skin had been plumped out by a layer of silicone wax beneath, and made her doll-like. Her bottom lip pouted. She moved slowly and gracefully, conscious of a femaleness it would, Ellen could see, be quite natural to want to drape with fabric rather than exhibit. Her bosom was too large, too suddenly plump, to fit neatly inside its T-shirt. Her jeans were very tight, her feet tiny and her heels high.
