by Weldon, Fay
“It’s not quite my style, Leslie,” I said. “Not quite the gallery’s style.”
“Then that’s a pity,” he said. “I did think, since you were such a help to her in the past, and she was so fond of you, I’d give you the opportunity of first option.”
“You’re thinking of Jocelyn,” I said, “not Anita,” and it seemed to me he had to pause a little before remembering who Jocelyn was.
“Well,” he said, dismissing all that, “you’ll be interested to know Anita built up quite a collection of paintings over the last couple of years. You must come round and see them. She developed cancer of the liver. From diagnosis to death in three months. It was in her family. Her mother died of it. Dreadful. Anita painted mostly interiors, but a few landscapes. I was little by little widening her scope. Getting her out of the house.”
“Poor Anita,” I said.
“She had this amazing sensitivity,” Leslie Beck said. “This response, this special talent. But very little self-confidence, left to her own devices. I like to think I helped her. Of course, I won’t release all the paintings at once. I know the art market like the back of my hand. She’s buried next to her mother, in the family vault.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “All very close, as families ought to be.”
I was not portraying myself as either sensitive or responsive, but I need not have worried. I could be as inane as I liked and Leslie Beck wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t remembered Anita as coming from the kind of family that boasted its own burial vault, on the contrary, but I suppose money can buy anything these days, even its own family history. Though “vault” might just mean the same shelf in the mortuary.
“I’ll leave Anita’s painting with you, anyway,” he said, “to think about. Not one of her very best, but naturally I’m attached to it. Well, I am to all of them.” Then he turned his back on the painting, and on its glinty wrappings still scattered all over the floor, and prepared to leave. More exhaust fumes leaked in as he opened the door, though I realized he could hardly be blamed for that.
He stopped in the entrance and looked back at me. He wore a very good gray suit and a cheerful, youthful tie. His cheeks were pink. He looked to me like a carnivore and a drinking man. I am a vegetarian.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said, “without her. How I’m going to live.” He spoke loudly enough for both Aphra in the stockroom and Barbara in the back gallery—attending to some muddle about the price of a particularly small MacIntyre painting, which a prospective purchaser wanted measured, both with the frame and without, gross and net, as it were—to hear. “Dear little Marion,” he said then, in a meditative fashion, “I think of you a lot, you know.”
If he had not said it, I might have believed he was suffering from some kind of retrospective amnesia and could not be held accountable for what he said or did, or how he insulted his wife’s memory, and I would have forgiven him. Had he forgotten me altogether, it would have been, I suppose, understandable, though not pleasant. But that he should both remember and still see nothing amiss in trying to sell me poor Anita’s painting; and, more, that he had reconstructed the wretched woman’s life to provide himself with a happy marriage; and, yet more, that though in love with his own grief he was so shallowly in love that he could still attempt flirtations with my staff—these things were intolerable.
“And in the end, you did so well for yourself,” he said. “The Marion Loos Gallery! Who’d have thought it! And all from our little spot of enterprise, or do you have a backer? Some nice rich banker?”
“No backer,” I said, “no banker. All my own work. Please shut the door. You’re letting the traffic fumes in. I get asthma.”
“So you do,” he said and smiled, and it almost worked. “I remember. But we had to keep that quiet, didn’t we?” When he smiled he showed his teeth and looked young and mischievous and somehow in command again, as if his view of the world were the right one, the only civilized version around.
“Do you ever wonder?” he asked.
“I never wonder,” I said.
“Some things,” he said, “it’s best to keep quiet about. But I’m sure you’ll see your way to hanging Anita’s painting. Times have been easier, as I’m sure you know.”
His teeth were still regular, pointed and white. Once they’d put me in mind of some small, agreeable, nuzzling animal, or, as he became more imperative, something dangerous, some glossy fox, perhaps, rooting around and above me—a vision which would occasionally change, even in the middle of lovemaking, to one of the fox loose in the henhouse, tearing and slavering, blood and feathers everywhere, and then I’d lose my impetus, as it were, my capacity to be mindless, never my strong point, and have to pretend orgasm. He was easily convinced. And then he’d change sides and meld into the cock surviving the slaughter, straddling the dungheap, preening and crowing, “Clever me, clever me, how happy I am.” What an act of trust sex is: thus to open the henhouse door to the fox, let alone bed down nightly with the cock.
“Anita’s memorial service is on Friday,” said Leslie Beck. “So many people loved her. St. Martin-in-the-Fields. At three o’clock. It would be a really nice gesture if you came. It will be dreadful for me, of course. I’ll probably break down. But the Life Force—well, I think I possess it in great measure. I feel it already,” he said, and spread his hands and looked at them, and I looked at them, too. His long thumbs arched away from his palm, bending and mobile even from the top joint. The memory of it made me all but gasp. He caught my eye. He smiled. And then finally he shut the door and went away.
Aphra had already begun to clear and fold the wrappings which had fallen from the painting. I was grateful for her. And, indeed, for Barbara, who, although she drifted and muddled, knew just what to say to the right client at the right time, and made the saying sound accidental—which I sometimes thought perhaps it was—and thereby genuine. She so disliked saying a disagreeable word about anything, was so eager to see the best in everything, she could scarcely avoid being enthusiastic about even the worst of our paintings—indeed, especially the worst—for fear words of distaste would somehow fly through the ether and upset the artist in his garret: Art, for Barbara, was sacred. Sometimes, all the same, I wanted to shake her. Just because it’s Art, I wished her to understand, doesn’t make it good. Just because it sells, doesn’t make it bad.
“What a creep,” said Aphra, of Leslie Beck. To this man, this creep, Anita had dedicated her life. When you’re with a man, no one tells you he’s a creep; they don’t like to; they think, well, that’s her choice, perhaps ours isn’t up to much, either; how will we ever be sure in this polite world? In other words, as we all know, one woman’s creep is another’s true love, and just as well. I didn’t want to believe Leslie Beck was a creep by any objective standard, for Jocelyn’s and Anita’s sakes, or Rosalie’s, or Susan’s, or Nora’s, or my own.
Barbara had stuck the painting on a chair: she studied it. Aphra joined in.
“It oughtn’t to work,” Barbara said, “but it does. What’s that comb doing? It seems to come out of another painting altogether. Rockwell detail in the middle, Monet magic all around.”
“Monet mush,” said Aphra, who liked to wind Barbara up. “Pity she’s dead. I really like the bit in the middle.”
“There aren’t any hairs in the comb, I suppose?” I asked. I wasn’t going to look too closely. There could have been four that I knew of—one of Anita’s, reddish and limp; one of mine, perhaps, long and dark; one of Rosalie’s, wiry and brown; one of Nora’s, short and fair. And more, how many more? Leslie Beck’s favorite bed was his wife’s. Bloody Anita, always the innocent.
“No,” said Barbara, and she sounded surprised. “No hairs, that I can see.”
My voice had risen. I could hear it; it does when I’m stressed. That’s what surprised Barbara. Creeps came in and out of the gallery all the time. They had a good deal to say and seldom parted with a penny. Nothing unusual.
“Put the pa
inting in the stockroom,” I said, “while I work out what to do,” because I supposed something had to be done, and Aphra picked up the canvas and ran, her black-and-white legs, I suddenly saw, a rather welcome return to living op art; and my desk was clear again, but nothing was the same, or could be: what was done could be forgotten, but not undone. Twenty-three years, and at last I felt guilty.
Nora
That is enough out of Marion’s eyes. I appointed myself her biographer, only temporarily, stirred on as I was by the return of Leslie Beck into our circle. I have the account of it only from Rosalie, mind you, to whom Marion related it over the phone, in some agitation: and the event has had to be filtered through first Marion’s, then Rosalie’s head, and the further distortion and exaggeration that I suppose must happen as I, Nora, commit it to paper. Though I don’t want to believe that.
Marion Loos, spinster, art dealer, and gallery owner, is more Rosalie’s friend than mine. She and I have of late rather lost touch, but then I don’t buy paintings. Rosalie occasionally does, though she is mad to do so. She ought to save every penny she can.
I use the word “spinster” of Marion advisedly: the nature, I suspect, predating the event, or rather lack of it. “I am a spinster,” Marion will exclaim, “and I am proud of it.” Don’t avoid the word, she suggests: better to concentrate on making the state desirable, and so render the word acceptable. Well, bully for her. She likes her life to be an uphill battle. I don’t.
“Marion was trying to be bold and bright about it,” said Rosalie, “but she was really upset. She even cried. I’ve never known Marion to cry, have you?”
“Not in public,” I said, though I had always thought perhaps Marion did weep in private, or when she was alone with her two Persian cats, Monet and Manet, who were as well groomed, nervy, wide-eyed, and brave as she. When the guests were gone, and the apartment quiet, and the wide bed so steadily empty, did the paintings on the walls—those tributes to her taste, her judgment, her flair, not to mention her income—the books on the shelves, the flicker of the television, the expectation of another working day tomorrow, combine sufficiently to block off loneliness? Did Marion Loos live with the sense of a life wasted, or of a life well spent?
“I know what you’re thinking, Nora,” said Rosalie. “You think any woman who doesn’t have a husband and children is to be pitied. You’re nuts.”
Rosalie has, or had, a husband who climbs mountains. Wallace Hayter went climbing one weekend in Switzerland, or said he did, and simply didn’t come home again. No body was found; he was seen getting off a train at Zermatt; he had booked into a Gasthaus; he just didn’t turn up there in the evening when expected. It was February and peak season, so they gave the room to someone else—an irrelevant detail, I expect, but it sticks in the mind. The courts have refused to declare Rosalie’s husband dead before another two years have passed. In the meantime, by some miracle—or her husband’s sensible contrivance—an insurance policy now keeps Rosalie and her two teenage children in modest comfort. Rosalie endures what to many would be an uneasy and distressing situation with an equanimity disturbing to myself, Marion, and Susan, her friends. Susan remains Rosalie’s friend, although she is no longer mine.
“If he’s dead,” Rosalie says, “he can’t suffer. If he isn’t dead, he’s with some woman, and happy.”
She’s let herself run to fat; she watches television and eats fish and chips with her children; she wears flowered shirts and elastic-waist skirts; she overflows her bra and is comfortable; she gossips with her friends.
One day, of course, as we the friends remind her, someone at the insurance company will query the necessity of continuing to pay out, and the source of her income will dry up; but Rosalie refuses to worry about the problem of outrageous future, let alone take arms against it. Marion, Susan, and myself saw her through the first tearful, agitated weeks after her husband went missing, fed her tranquilizers, then weaned her off them. Now Rosalie, even without diazepam, does nothing all day but sit around. This capacity of hers for idleness rather shocks us. If our houses are dusty in the corners, it’s because we’re busy, and other things are more important. Rosalie these days just doesn’t care. Her panty hose sag around her ankles. If they are large enough at the hips, they are too big in the legs. You wouldn’t look at her twice in the supermarket.
“Personally,” says Rosalie, “I think the real reason Marion is upset with Leslie Beck is that he flirted with her staff and not her.”
I didn’t want to think that. I preferred to believe that Marion Loos was upset by news of Anita’s death. The news had certainly disturbed me.
“Well,” I said, “you have time to think about these things. Lucky old you,” and I looked at my watch and went off down the hill to the office where I work part-time. I do general clerical work for a real estate agency by the name of Accord Realtors: “Accord” because that puts them toward the beginning of the yellow pages; “Realtors” because by thus describing themselves they acquire a transatlantic and go-getting air—or so they believe. Accord Realtors has its offices in the arcade of shops along from Richmond station, the busy terminus of the overland line which will take you swiftly, if not comfortably, into the very heart of London. Richmond is a pleasant place. The river Thames runs through it. It is far enough from the city to have its own character, near enough to borrow some of the city’s vitality. Look into any window at dusk, in the minutes after the lights go on, and before curtains and shutters are closed, and you will see stripped pine, blue-and-white china, bookcases, typewriters, paintings on the wall; and if you are envious, you are meant to be. Look at us, they announce, we belong to the gentle intelligentsia of England: people with taste who appreciate the pleasures of the mind, who are not plagued by too much money but one day, one day, if there is justice in the world, will have it. Richmond is a prosperous enough place. Its beggars are few, its homeless hostels many; girl children can go unaccompanied to school. The public library is well used; there is a shop that sells nothing but palms; conservationists are active. There are enclaves like this all over the world, where people like Rosalie and Wallace, Ed and myself, Susan and Vinnie, shattered by the world, retreat to rear their growing children.
My desk and computer are to the left of the door. If the receptionist is out, and she often is, at the doctor or the dentist, life at Accord Realtors is quiet—so quiet, reader, that I rather wonder if I will have my job for long. But quiet enough to let me get on with writing this unpublishable work for an hour or so every day. What I write is bound to be libelous, and Leslie Beck loves going to law; and who wants to hurt and upset their friends for the sake of a few dollars, anyway? That, at least, is the kind of thing we like to say in Richmond: we like to occupy the moral high ground, to our certain disadvantage. It is the reader, therefore, who for once is the invention, as the substance of this autobiographical work is not. But I must say that the very thought of this nonexistent reader drives me on, roots me to the page—both a hope and a fear that there might eventually be someone out there reading, coming with me through the journey of this narrative. But, reader, forget all that; really, all I want is your company. I get lonely, here at Accord Realtors. And a kind of sadness has fallen on the arcade, which no amount of bright lighting can cure. No one seems to want the flighty panties in the window of the lingerie shop, the Belgian chocolates in the patisserie; no one wants frivolity anymore; no one will spend. I am sure it has something to do with AIDS.
Sometimes I do still get chatted up by house-buying clients: not so often as I did, though I tell myself that’s because there are fewer clients. I have “good bones” and always was too skinny for comfort, and I have short fair hair. Ed says I could be any age between thirty and fifty, but perhaps he’s just being nice. Ed is thoughtful and kind; he works in publishing; he is thin, has bright eyes, wears glasses. He walks around the house with a book in his hand. I talk a great deal; he talks not very much. He likes to play jazz very loud. He has a gentle, disingenuous air.
Sometimes he looks younger than his son Colin—they look very alike. But, then, Ed drinks very little alcohol, and Colin drinks quite a lot, and sometimes appears at breakfast quite raddled.
And this “Life Force” referred to by Leslie Beck, according to Rosalie, according to Marion Loos (who detected it in the tremble of Leslie Beck’s hands), and taken seriously by myself, Nora, does, I swear, exist—runs through all our lives with enough energy to forge real and fictional characters into beings of the same nature, unites the reader both actual and figmental. In its glare, the novel you read and the life you live are not distinguishable. Leslie Beck’s Life Force is the energy not so much of sexual desire as of sexual discontent: the urge to find someone better out in the world, and thereby something better in the self; the one energy working against the other, creating a fine and animating friction; or else racing along side by side, like the chariots in Ben-Hur, wheels colliding, touching, hellbent, sparking off happiness and unhappiness; creating in our excited heads wild notions of victory and defeat but, when it comes to it, mindless and about little else than accident and survival. For where are the chariots going but round and round the track, and how can the race ever end? Who is there to signal who’s winner, who’s loser? How difficult it is to reconcile the self of the night, the dweller, as it were, in the mucous membrane, that creature of engorged delight, with the organized and graceful self of the day? That first self is irrational, uncontrolled, universal, shameful; the second, the poor pitiful yet powerful thing, yearns for a moral shape to the universe. Marion Loos so frightened herself early on with her own first-self, Life Force behavior, she stunned herself into a half-life with cats. So I believe, though Rosalie doesn’t. Rosalie says Marion’s life is fuller than anyone’s, since she sees it as an end in itself, not just the tap through which other lives flow. Rosalie says that only the childless command their own souls, are capable of hell and heaven.
