by Weldon, Fay
Let me say I don’t usually look at men in a predatory and salacious manner, but tonight the prospect of being a Judge’s Wife had got to me and I was fighting back. I wanted to annoy Matthew. Now you may think this trivial and stupid of me but what’s a girl to do? A woman, that is to say, rising forty-two and never had a baby, nor wished to, and not wanting one, and her life being somehow unsatisfied: the past so neatly and tightly packed away, forgotten: depression and elation both denied, scored out with a thick black line. Compromising, as women so often do, with their own happiness, because they must. But there was no ‘must’ for me – I had chosen to drift with the current into this peculiar role; acting woman, not really being one, unentitled as I always felt I was, by virtue of my birth, to an ordinary existence. Unclassed, de-natured, disallowed. Say I was desperate, if you like, latched on to Mad Jack the trumpeter – jazz musicians are unclassed, unentitled by choice – as if he were a tree trunk and I falling over a cliff. Oh, a tree trunk! How apt! But I think it was nothing to do with that; I think even were I married to someone I actually loved, liked and admired, I would still have gone off with Mad Jack that night. Say rather that like called to like. It takes one to know one.
It was Greenwich where the mean, mean time comes from and the stars are particularly poignant, having offered themselves there first for human study. ‘PMT and GMT’ I’d sing round the Greenwich house, if I broke a saucer, or burned a sauce, to Matthew’s irritation. I’d explain the joke but he did not see it was a joke. Forget Matthew. Oh, forget him! And the green sward shimmered beneath my silver sandals and my dress was far too tight. It clung to me and constricted me, as if the fabric itself had taken on the role of lover. Jack looked me straight in the eye, tapped in the beat, raised his trumpet to that hardly innocent angle and sang to me, about me, for me, of me, by, with and from me, and right, I may say, into me, and what could I do? Except dance, for him. Such things do not come to many of us. Many of us do not come to such things, if you’ll forgive the indecency. At the end of the set Jack smiled, and I saw Matthew drifting – not quite drifting but sidling in a both nervous and aggressive way, like a fire-ship into an enemy harbour – through the dancing astronomers and their groupies – takes a lot to get an astronomer to dance – I think the Brady Quintet’s Water Music had sapped their will quite profoundly – to take me away, or at least dance with me, so my exhibition of arm-stretching, hand-waving, hip-rolling solitary dancing pleasure would not come to any more public attention than absolutely necessary – Starlady Sandra seldom behaved like this, though she got by, I might say, on a kind of hint that she certainly could if she wanted, and that one day if you watched carefully enough you might catch her out – and Mrs Sandra Sorenson – you know, the High Court wife – certainly must not be caught. So I didn’t smile back at Jack, nothing so ordinary, I gave him one of those grave intent looks which agrees everything then and there – the same kind, but with a different and more interesting purpose, of course, as when car drivers meet at crossroads, and by telepathic communication, passing through those unsmiling glances, decide who’s to go first, and how, and act upon it, unerringly. And Jack nodded towards the bushes and I went after him and Matthew stood gaping behind us.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ was the first thing Jack ever said to me.
‘Yes,’ I replied. My dress was unbuttoned and round my ankles and I stepped out of it.
‘You haven’t been drinking?’ was the second.
‘Not so it counts,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t want to take advantage,’ was the third, as he kissed my breasts and nipped the nipples between his teeth. And that’s as far as I’ll go because here I lie in the shade, trying to come to terms with my past, and I do not want to drift off altogether into an erotic stupor. My task here must be to speak the truth, hide nothing from myself, and peel away the successive onion-skin layers of the past, no matter how it makes me cry. Sex is the great forgetting, the great drug, the great consolation, the great mopper-up of tears: the mover to action, the enhancer of courage, the gauge to the self. It shows full or empty, something or nothing, and steps in between. I shift about on the hard ground. The grass is not soft enough. I want a bed, and Jack in it.
Enough. I am not a person to waste time. This holiday, this run-away, this beginning of a new life, whatever it turns out to be, must afford me the time for self-discovery. Every day a better day: a step further on the road to understanding. If Sandra Starlady lies on her back in the sun, eyes closed, don’t think nothing is going on.
‘I love you,’ was the next thing I said to Jack. Now I know better than to say that mid-sex to any man (other than a fiancé or husband, for whom it is more or less required listening, at least from time to time). It quite puts a strange man off his stroke; the prospect of commitment; the dread of female pain to come. None the less, meaning it, I said it.
‘You can’t say that,’ he said, taken aback.
‘Why not?’
‘You hardly know me.’
‘Well enough.’
‘You’re a person of instant decision, then.’
‘Yes.’
I saw him smile, or did I feel him smile? The moon was behind a cloud shaped like a weasel; nevertheless the light of the Plough over Greenwich is not negligible – I might have seen it.
I daresay it is absurd to seek so patiently and earnestly after truth, when self-delusion is so much more comfortable. Truth in any case is no constant thing; it changes from day to day. Even the two and two we used to trust to make four can no longer be relied upon to do so. By assuming two and two make four we can get to the moon and pay the Band; for all practical purposes two and two still make four; but the fact is that they merely approximate four. The fact of adding destabilises the wretched numbers. Try to make two approach four by ever-increasing fractions and you’ll never, ever get there. The components of the universe are too infinitesimal, too occupied increasing their infinitesimality, to devote any energy to joining themselves up. We great clumping clumsy creatures, looming through the macro world, grasping at the moon, know little or nothing of that other micro state.
What the hell, Jack smiled. I’ll swear he smiled in the light from the emerging moon. He was pleased. He was not frightened off; he knew how rare the feeling was, and that I spoke the truth. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘we’d better stick together. What’s your name?’
‘Sandra Harris,’ I said. Well, it could be anyone’s name. He made no comment beyond ‘Hi, Sandra.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ I said. I knew his name. He introduced himself when he introduced the Band. ‘Mad Jack the trumpet-player,’ he called himself. What a treat, after my mother, after Robin, to have the word so blithely used. Not the black, black devil’s side of us, but the pearly animation of the spirit, heard in that mad music.
‘You’re here with your husband, I suppose,’ he said next.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s here with me. I’m a research assistant.’ Well, it was true, in its way. I answered to the Astronomer Royal. Lies must always be as close to the truth as possible.
‘I’ll have to go back for the next set,’ he said. ‘Stay where you are,’ and I lay on my back in the twigs and the leaves, under his jacket, and stared at the Plough, and listened to ‘Hindustan’ and ‘If You Knew Susie’ and to Jack playing for me, and thought about nothing, not even where Matthew was.
After the last set I joined Jack in the old Ford Transit van in which he lived, and stayed with him all night.
‘What are your circumstances?’ he asked. ‘Are you free to stay with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband doesn’t mind?’
‘We go our separate ways.’
‘No children?’
‘No.’
‘Thank God.’
The van was fitted out like a makeshift caravan. The bed was a foam mattress on the floor: there were shelves for a book or so – he read economics and Small is Beautiful and John Fowles’ The Maggot. H
is clothes were few but neatly folded. His dishes likewise, neatly stacked. A plastic water container hung from a hook: he was a tidy man. The van smelt of sex, garlic and toothpaste – a good mix, I thought. We parked and struggled on the floor all night, and slept just a little, intertwined.
We had breakfast in a bacon-and-egg café behind King’s Cross. One place seemed much like another. I used the loo and washed my face in the wash basin. I wore a shirt of Jack’s over my white dress. It came down to an inch or two beyond the hem. I thought it looked rather good. My mouth was swollen and my chin scratched and that was fine by me. My arms and neck were marked with tooth bites.
‘You can’t go home looking like that,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
He told me a little about Anne: he’d left her a year ago, at her request. He went back once a month or so to fix the washers and see she was all right. They didn’t sleep together. His daughter Frances was doing her ‘O’ levels. They were apart, but free, and stayed friends.
‘There must be more to it than that,’ I said.
‘She gave me an ultimatum,’ he said. ‘My music or her.’
‘So it was the music.’
‘I couldn’t be her pet poodle,’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘Now, I’ve found you,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to lose you. Come live with me and be my love, in a van parked over a sewer.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘You can leave work just like that?’ he asked, surprised.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean much to me.’ And it didn’t.
We went back into the van. It had curtains over the windows, hippie-style. We made love. I use the words advisedly. Such things happen. Buses pinged and taxi meters clicked outside: a police car siren made us both start. The heads of passers-by were at window level. If they looked down or in what did we care? We re-made the universe: they were just the raw stuff of our dreams.
‘You do take something?’ he said, ‘I mean, precautions.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ He hadn’t heard of AIDS, or if he had he meant to take no notice. Nor was I going to remind him. It would be a death worth living for. Fuck Jack and die? I thought. Too right, I thought. Any day.
‘I’d better go home and collect a few things,’ I said. ‘You park here and I’ll take the tube.’
‘I’ll drive you,’ he said. ‘I’d better know a few things. Besides, there might be trouble.’
On the way I asked: ‘Do you usually live in the van?’
‘Or with friends,’ he said. ‘My things are still at Anne’s. Such as they are. I travel light.’
So much was clear. He’d been to Manchester University, from a South London grammar school. Read Economics, smoked too much dope, half-dropped out, played trumpet, got his degree. Taught for a time; married Anne, bought a house, raised a family, got thrown out. What did anyone do with their lives? What else was there to do but get through it, enjoying yourself on the way?
Well now, I’d always had the feeling people ought to do more with their lives. Become SS officers and do scientific experiments, train as psychiatrists and treat Robin for his illness, grow roses and lament the past like my grandmother Susan, establish stable carpeted households and be ambitious, like Matthew: discover planets and get high-powered media jobs – pass exams and keep on passing them – I had equated not so doing with madness, which was my mother’s occupation. Throwing all control, all sense of future, to the winds, and hearing voices. Listening to Jack, I perceived all of a sudden there might well perhaps be another way. I won’t say the awareness came like a flash of lightning, but I certainly blinked once or twice as the van took the road to Greenwich. It was a diesel van and rather old; it had a rocking motion, most unlike that of Matthew’s Mercedes.
Which was in the drive when we got there. So he hadn’t gone to work, as I had rather hoped, indeed assumed. I needed my passport, my cheque book, a credit card or so: some jeans I had worn properly into, and a favourite sweater. That was all. I was throwing off the past.
‘Well!’ said Jack, looking at the house, which had a circular gravelled drive leading up to it, two false pillars flanking a boring dark blue door, and a few tedious pots of hydrangeas placed here and there, to suggest the place was somehow in a natural setting, which of course it was not – Mock Georgian, 1920-ish. But the rates alone could have kept many of Matthew’s clients in comfort and tranquillity, and unobliged to commit their frauds and murders.
‘So this is home,’ said Jack. ‘Well, well,’ he repeated.
‘Not very well at all,’ I said, and went inside.
Matthew was reading The Times in the morning room, or pretending to. He was wearing last night’s clothes. He hadn’t been to bed, either. His face was red in all the wrong places, his square English chin wobbled as if all the flesh that surrounded it was suddenly spare, and no longer needed as a framework for the conviction of his opinions. I was ashamed to have spent so much time in his bed, even in the missionary position.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
‘Who else?’ I said.
‘Surprised to see me, I expect,’ he said. ‘Sneaking home from your night on the tiles. And don’t tell me any of your lies about being with friends. I can see through lies. It’s my profession. You can’t deceive me the way you do everyone else. I know you through and through.’
‘I did have a night on the tiles,’ I said. ‘I don’t deny it.’
I think if he’d been nicer, that is to say more upset and less self-righteous, I might even then have sought his forgiveness and stayed. The force that seeks to preserve the status quo is to women the same as gravity is to the apple in relation to the earth. That is to say, very great indeed. It was the ‘I know you through and through’ which got to me. He didn’t, but, knowing so little about anything, he really and truly thought he did. Of course, his forgiveness might not have been forthcoming. I had tended to forget that – again, women do. They forget the man’s desire to shake a marriage to breaking point may be almost as strong as theirs. If you ask me, in real life it isn’t Eve who tempts Adam with the apple: it’s the husband who puts a lover in a wife’s way, and then says ‘There! See! I can’t possibly ever forgive you. It’s the end, and all your fault!’ Beware the husband who’s blind to the lover – he knows: of course he knows: he’s plotting his own freedom. And when you, discovered, say to him (with truth) ‘But I was only showing you how much I need tenderness, love and affection, how desperate I am, please can we talk about this and save our marriage’ he says ‘What marriage? You have destroyed the marriage.’ And so, by God, you have!
I’m not saying Matthew put Jack in my way: not at all: he hardly had time and how was he to know – as a husband often knows just how much more suitable a spouse his best friend would be for his wife, before pushing them into each other’s company: just that it fitted in fairly well with his plans for disposing of me. My ratings were falling again. I’d listened to his bright friends rather too often: forgotten the dreary plodding through fact and idea that produces a programme of any real value – I have great faith in readers, viewers – the consumers of culture. You can con them a little, some of the time: but not much, not all the time: very soon they switch off. They hate ‘repeats’ with justice. They’re being despised. And back home who wants their Sole Bonne Femme served by a failing TV star, Starlady Sandra, has-been, and in the papers as such? Oh, it’s a hard life at the top.
And here I was, jumping for the cliff, mouth rounded in a cavernous O, like the mad Munch woman, clutching at stars: standing in Jack’s shirt, searching for words to pacify my husband.
‘I’ve just come back to collect some things,’ I said. ‘Then I’m off.’
He put down his paper. He was reading the city supplement. He got richer by the minute and thought he deserved to.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘good riddance. The sooner the better. And clear the wardrobe of your
tarty clothes, will you. The little black numbers that shop-girls wear. All you ever were was a trumped-up shop-girl.’
That hurt. What would my father have said? Child of his officer loins, a trumped-up shop-girl?
‘Take the smell of you out of my sight,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand your smell. You’re dirty.’
I swear I bath as much as anyone, but of course one never knows. Armpits? Where? I had no mother to tell me these things. And my grandmother couldn’t tell a rose from a cess-pit, or so, walking through her garden, one could only assume. My friends would hold their noses.
‘You smell of sex,’ he said, disgusted. That reassured me.
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Disgusting,’ he said. ‘Who with? How many? Would you care? How much, is really the point. I know your sort. I meet them in the Dock all the time. You withhold sex to lure a man into marriage, to get your meal ticket for life; then you sit back and watch him squirm. But you can’t keep away from the streets for long, your sort. Because at heart you’re a trollop, a whore, a prostitute. Your pleasure is to sell yourself. And that’s your downfall, because in the end, with any luck, some poor devil you’ve driven to distraction chokes you to death with your own tights.’ Stockings. I wore stockings. Nevertheless, it hurt. The nearer things are to the truth, the more they hurt.
‘And I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’d give a man a year’s probation for murdering the likes of you. That dress last night. Those – what do you like to call them? Titties?’
Now I’m sure I’ve never called my breasts ‘titties’. Why should I?
‘Well,’ I said, ‘anyway, you’ll be hearing from my solicitor.’
‘I look forward to it,’ he said, and I went upstairs to pack a bag, conscious of Jack waiting outside, my heart beating fast with a mixture of fear, exhilaration and amazement at my own daring. I opened the wardrobe and saw there was precious little there for my future life; but I do not like waste. I extended my requirements to include a cashmere sweater and a rather good black silk skirt with an agreeable swirl around the hem: and face creams; no, really, at forty-two I could hardly ignore their necessity. I am a great believer in creams and unguents for the skin, the more expensive the better. (One has to believe in something and astrology was barred to me.) I began to roll choice jars and bottles carefully in tissue. I found a Raynes shoe bag into which they could be safely packed – taking out for the purpose a particularly pretty pair of high heeled coffee coloured shoes. I’d give Clare a call and she could sneak in and take what she wanted when Matthew was out.
