by Weldon, Fay
Grace rings the bell. The dogs stop barking, begin again. No-one comes.
Oliver, standing on the roof of the car, can see into the high windows, brilliant with light.
He can see pictures on the walls and the backs of chairs and people moving inside. It seems warm, cosy and prosperous in there, and so it is. If the curtains are left undrawn it is from sheer indifference to the outside world.
Oliver, Chloe and Grace ring and ring the door-bell and bang upon the knocker. Still there is no response. Oliver goes to the corner phone-box and telephones the number Grace, her fingers trembling, writes down for him. When the phone rings, someone lifts the receiver off the hook. That’s all.
The top window opens and closes again. Christie’s hand, Grace swears. Something flutters down, and falls at Grace’s feet, as she clutches the railings and screams and shakes her fist. No-one from all those other houses comes to see or intervene or help. They remain closed, and silent, and shut, as always, to the implorings and imprecations and dying desperations of those outside. All’s well within.
Grace has tears pouring down her cheeks. She seems scarcely human.
‘Petra, Petra,’ she shrieks. ‘You bastard,’ she cries. ‘You bastard. Christie, you murderer. I’ll kill you.’
‘If she behaves like this,’ says Oliver wretchedly, ‘perhaps Christie’s right, perhaps she’s not fit—’ but he knows himself, how else can Grace behave?
What fluttered down is a narrow strip of yellow ribbon. Petra’s hair ribbon. Christie’s token of mirth and victory.
Oliver thinks Grace will have a heart attack. She has collapsed on the ground. She is screaming.
‘Get an ambulance, for God’s sake,’ Oliver says to Chloe. ‘That bastard Christie, it’s too much. We’ll all be locked up—’
Chloe phones. Grace picks herself up, crawls towards the house, scrabbling at the cream stucco until the walls and her hands are pink with plaster and blood mixed.
When the ambulance comes she seems surprised to see it.
‘I don’t need that,’ she says. ‘Why should I need that? I’m perfectly all right.’
The ambulance goes away. Grace stays the night with Chloe and Oliver. In the morning Grace seems composed, even cheerful.
‘The children are much better off with Christie,’ Grace says. ‘I can have a much better time without them, can’t I. That little flat is dreadful.’
And so it is, and so she can, and so she does. It’s as if part of her brain has been burnt out.
Later, when Grace becomes pregnant by Patrick, it is Chloe who persuades her not to have an abortion. She believes vaguely that the burnt out parts will be reactivated, but of course they aren’t – what’s dead is dead, and childbirth may be a miracle for the child but it is not for the mother. And this is why Chloe now feels Stanhope to be her responsibility; her fault.
And indirectly, why Chloe feels responsible for Kevin and Kestrel, whose mother might still be alive, if it had not been for Stanhope’s birth.
51
Mind you, Christie was right to be angry with Grace.
Grace slapped his face at a party, and humiliated him in public, and that was the start of their troubles. Petra was two, at the time, so such mad behaviour could not even be attributed to post-natal mania.
It was not because Christie was flirting with an elderly titled lady in a corner – that kind of thing seldom worried her – that Grace slapped Christie’s face. It was because, having had a little too much to drink, she had decided all of a sudden that he had no business to be at the party at all.
‘You murderer,’ she cried, ‘you mass murderer,’ and Christie had to hustle her off home in a taxi. He couldn’t even use his own car because the chauffeur had been instructed to circle the block until midnight, and was nowhere in sight.
A week previously one of Christie’s hotels had fallen down, the day before its official opening, killing fifty-nine people, and injuring twelve. Amongst the dead were:
Two LCC Building Inspectors, called by the Manager to inspect the cracks which had appeared that day in the foyer ceiling.
The Manager himself.
Assorted interior decorators, florists, publicity men, developers, architects.
A conscientious pop singer supervising the setting up of amplifiers.
And the destruction was so total, and even the rubble so pulverized, that no amount of sifting the evidence proved anything much to anyone. And the architects’ plans and Christie’s specifications had to be dug up from all kinds of remote files, and that of course took time. The Inquiry was postponed.
Not one of my hotels, said Christie, to the Press and everyone. The architects’ hotel, the owner’s hotel, the public’s hotel. Not my hotel, and besides, everyone knows it was a strategically placed bomb which brought the building down. And off Christie went, busier than ever; to the office, and to clients’ meetings; and to parties and dinners, without, it seemed, a spark of grief or anxiety or remorse.
Christie’s telephone bills trebled that week, however, and Christie drew several thousands of pounds from the bank in cash, and sent off many cases of whisky to all kinds of addresses. Grace knew, for she helped him at home with various accounts which he did not, he said, trust his office to do properly. She would transfer certain figures from one ledger to another under Christie’s direction. Grace enjoyed doing it – she had an eye for the shape of figures on the page, and she wrote the numbers with all the delicacy of a Chinese calligrapher.
Now, at this latest party, as she watches Christie chatting up a blue-haired lady in a corner – wife of an LCC Alderman – she sees him as if with someone else’s eyes. The dead Manager’s wife, perhaps, or even a florist’s widow. She slaps him. Slaps Christie, murderer.
On the way home from the party, in the taxi, she can feel Christie trembling. She is surprised; her own anger has been shortlived, springing out of nowhere, it seems, and vanishing as quickly. She is herself again. The spirit which possessed her, so momentarily but so effectively, has passed on.
‘I’m sorry,’ Grace says. ‘I don’t know what came over me. It was as if I was someone else. Of course it wasn’t your fault that hotel fell down. And you only knew one or two of them, anyway, and only in a business sense.’
But he isn’t satisfied. He is savage.
‘Hold your tongue in public, you bitch,’ he says. ‘Or do you want me in prison? Is that it? It’s costing me enough as it is; do I have to bribe you too? What do you want, diamonds, mink?’
She shrivels up. And things have been going so well, too. She is such an ornament in his life, she knows it, so loving, so happy, so pleased to be married, with her long slim legs and her wide cool eyes, running the house like clockwork, flattering the right guests, discouraging the wrong ones; loving the children, always there to admire her husband’s resourcefulness and guile, his shrewdness and his wealth; to listen to his plans and sit out his indignations; never nagging when he’s too busy to get home, confident that home is where he’d rather be than anywhere (and so it is – oh, marvel!). Never critical, never complaining, yet with a whole host of trivial likes and dislikes with which she regales and enchants him. Kippers she finds repugnant but she adores Velasquez. Wet leaves depress her, kittens cheer her up. A man without a tie is unmanly, braces are ridiculous, belts erotic. And so on.
And to think that he, Christie, owns all this rampant femininity, that he can take his pleasure in it as and when he chooses – even in the afternoons, if he wants; if only he could spare the time from work.
Christie is worth nearly a half-million, already.
Christie finds his children strange. The boy looks weedy and the little girl’s nose seems to run a lot. He watches their antics curiously. He buys them expensive presents. Grace loves them, after all, and his clients and friends seem interested in them. He expects, in time, he will be too.
But now Grace slaps Christie’s face at a party, and everything changes. He feels he cannot trust her. At this t
ime more than ever, surely, he is entitled to her support. And what does he find? That Grace has not only joined his enemies, but heads them.
Christie sleeps apart from Grace, that night.
At breakfast she looks dreadful. Her eyes are puffy and her hair is unkempt and her skin blotched. He rather likes the sight of her. Does he have so much power over his wife? When Christie makes love to Grace she remains composed; she seldom loses control of herself. He had thought he liked her to be like that, but perhaps this is better, this malleable puffiness?
‘Please forgive me,’ Grace says. ‘I’d had too much to drink. I behaved dreadfully.’
‘Yes,’ says Christie, ‘you did.’ He is cruel. ‘It was not a pretty sight. I hate to see a woman drink, especially in public.’
‘Of course that building falling down was nothing to do with you, how could it be. Everyone knows it was a bomb.’
‘It’s bad enough for me having to put up with an official Commission of Inquiry, without my wife holding one of her own.’
‘Please don’t go to work angry with me. Please don’t.’ Grace is panicky. The day stretches bleakly in front of her, overshadowed by his anger.
‘I’m not angry,’ Christie says, cold as ice. ‘Let’s forget it.’
‘It’s just that when people don’t grieve for the dead, it’s surprising.’
‘How do you know what I feel?’
‘You’re my husband.’
‘And what kind of wife are you proving to be?’ he asks. ‘Disloyal and treacherous. A wife should love her husband through thick or thin.’
‘But I do, Christie, I do.’
‘Do you? I wonder. Of course I can’t trust you to do my books any more, you realize that.’
She cries again. The maid, coming with more coffee, is shocked. Christie waits patiently until the maid has gone.
‘I don’t believe in your tears,’ Christie says. ‘They are not honest. They are not tears of remorse, but of self-pity. You accuse me of not feeling sorry for the dead, but did you cry when your mother died? No. You were a heartless daughter as you are a heartless wife.’
Grace cries some more. He finds the sight of her increasing moral and physical disorganization more and more exciting, and beckons her back up to bed. She follows, meekly. Christie makes love to Grace without his usual sense of deference, of male lust bowing before the shrine of female condescension. In fact, the more she cries the more he slaps her. There is as much pleasure, he decides, in punishing her as in pleasing her. Possibly more.
And Grace, to be fair, takes to punishment as a duck takes to water.
All the same, Christie is disappointed in Grace. He had so hoped for something to worship, that would worship him in return. And all he has, after all, is someone and something quite ordinary.
The Inquiry into the hotel disaster neither exonerates Christie nor blames him. The plans, such as can be traced, are flawless, in design and execution. It seems that the members of the Inquiry simply do not like Christie – which is hardly fair but the kind of thing that happens – so do not expect themselves to clear his name. Christie deals with the situation by increasing the proportion of the day which he devotes to socializing. Not a glimmer of self-doubt must he show, he knows it. Thus he can convert the faint cloud of approbation which hovers over his head into a halo of fashionable success. To be noticed is the main thing, these days.
‘All publicity is good publicity,’ as he remarks to Patrick Bates, whom he engages to paint Grace’s portrait, in the sanctity of her own home. ‘I don’t care what you make her look like, just so long as she’s on canvas and you’ve signed your name. The medium is the message.’
Grace, reckless, is all too pleased to see Patrick again. She has quarrelled with Christie, again, that morning. Their rows are all one-sided, these days. He is icy, cold and rational. She is tearful, noisy, hysterical. He watches her, fascinated and unmoved, stoking the fires of her grief and rage.
Grace tells Patrick that she does not like coupling with a mass murderer. Not for nothing is he named Christie, she says.
Grace is showing off, as a wife will to a lover. She does not for one moment think that Christie was responsible for the disaster. Perhaps she imagined the phone-bills, the whisky and the bribes. She can’t check, in any case, He no longer brings his books home.
But she cannot be unfaithful to Christie, she finds, not properly, however much she wants to, however much Patrick lies on top of her, trying to part her legs with his knee, telling her that art requires her cooperation, and asking her what difference does it make, since his sexual claim to Grace was prior to Christie’s.
Really? The incident is long since obliterated from Grace’s mind; it is only future events which will bring it to more precise recollection. Grace, these days, really believes she came to Christie a virgin bride, and that her secret passages belong to her husband alone.
It is not her mind, Grace finds, which rejects this adulterous lover; on the contrary, her mind welcomes him – she would be delighted to pay Christie out for his ill-treatment of her. Her body, however, seems to take a more serious and a less trivial attitude. Her legs remain crossed to protect that warm and pulsating mucous membrane from the strangeness of the intruder. It seems to expect familiarity and to reject what is unknown.
Ah, thinks Grace, and ah again, in Patrick’s arms. This Christie of hers, who breakfasts with her in the mornings, quite normally, like any ordinary man, and makes telephone calls from the missionary position – not quite so normally, perhaps, but merely (he says) because he’s a busy man and when he thinks of things he likes to see to them immediately – this daily and nightly Christie of hers, this father of her children, to outward appearances so honourable and efficient, to all inward appearances (she has this minute convinced herself, Patrick’s warm breath in her mouth, her ears, her nose) is a villain, a devil, a monster, a criminally negligent constructor of unsafe buildings and she is entitled to be unfaithful to him. At whatever sacrifice to herself.
Patrick’s mouth moves downward from her lips, while his hand moves upwards from her knees. Her legs capitulate, relax.
Patrick likes to paint women nude, or if they insist, wrapped in white bathtowels. Christie insists on the towel, and Grace has chosen the smallest she can find, such is her mood that morning.
Women who go to linen cupboards and find them neatly piled with clean, warm, sheets and towels, put there by other women, are given to such moods, says Marjorie. They have the time. Seduction is not for working women, or mothers, or earnest housewives – it is for the idle and absurd.
‘This doesn’t count,’ says Patrick, ‘it really doesn’t. This isn’t sex, it’s pleasure.’
And so it is, and Grace moans and tosses with gratification, taken by surprise as she is by the unexpected nature of this event. Unexpected! By her, perhaps. But by Christie? For it is Christie who has led her to Patrick, almost by the hand.
Marjorie once told Grace of the urge ambitious husbands feel to render up their wives into the arms of the men they most respect and admire, as if in hopes that high achievement was an infection which could be venereally transmitted.
‘Eskimos, perhaps,’ said Grace, shocked. ‘They lend their wives to passing guests. But not the kind of men we know. Really, Marjorie!’
Perhaps she was wrong? Perhaps Christie, her golden fiancé, her suitable husband, is more of an Eskimo than she thought? Grace, lying entranced by her own pleasure, and her own wickedness, gains the strength to view her once golden fiancé, her once suitable husband, with impartial eyes. She must now believe the evidence of her unwifely ears, and unwifely eyes, and accept that her husband is a sadist, a mass murderer, and in matters of sex, an Eskimo.
For yes, he delivered her over to Patrick. He did. Believing first virginity and then fidelity in his wife to be as much part of his life and as necessary to his existence as the head on his neck, yet without a doubt Christie unclothed her, wrapped her in the scantiest of towels and pushed
her towards Patrick, a man he greatly admires.
Indeed, Patrick Bates is much admired by everyone who’s anyone. He is an artist, and he makes money out of artistry. Big money. His name is internationally recognized. He is accepted in palaces and hovels alike. He goes freely into houses where Christie, for all his money and connections, can barely scrape an invitation. And if he gets drunk inside them, and breaks up the furniture and the best vases, then Patrick is excused. (That he is seen as a kind of court fool, in these high places, escapes Christie the Colonial.) Women of all kind and conditions fall down at Patrick’s feet. To be painted by Patrick Bates is to have slept with Patrick Bates, everyone who’s anyone knows that. And what illustrious company to keep, albeit by proxy. What brothers and sisters in experience it makes of everyone who’s anyone.
‘Patrick and his fashionable cock,’ as Chloe says sadly to Marjorie, who has been to see Midge, bearing clothes for the children and a kettle for the cooker, so Midge doesn’t always have to boil the water in a saucepan – and brings back tales to Chloe of desolation and poverty, much inlaid with protestations of undying and sacrificial love, like glossy marquetry on some shoddy old pine box.
Meanwhile Patrick says this doesn’t count, and Grace allows herself to agree with him. This delicate intrusion, this deferential nibbling pleasure, his head between her legs in the most transatlantic of fashions, not eye to eye boldly, but servicing and being serviced, sight unseen, can surely be no more infidelity than masturbation is. No, it doesn’t count.
Christie, returning unexpectedly, thinks on the contrary that it does count.
It is Patrick’s belief – and experience has so far confirmed the belief – that if only he can appear suave enough, experienced enough, and rich enough, then husbands tend to be not just forgiving but appreciative of the interest taken in their wives. He does his best, for he is fond of Grace, and when he says he loves her (for it is his custom, these days, to comfort women with the notion that he does) he almost means it.
