by Weldon, Fay
I do not think I should work at Accord Realtors for much longer; it makes me envious and materialistic. Better to do a stint at the housing charity and have shock treatment for the condition.
At the time Anita supplanted Jocelyn, Marion lived in the basement flat of Leslie Beck’s house and had student status. She paid a reduced rent in return for helping with Jocelyn’s children, and supplemented her income by babysitting and doing odd jobs for the others in our circle. Marion’s father was a small-town builder, normally unemployed, her mother an idle housewife, and Marion—the cuckoo in their messy nest—a tall, slender, fastidious, wide-eyed girl. She had started her working life boringly in a bank, and been put, almost accidentally, in charge of a touring show of contemporary artists sponsored by that bank. Here she met my husband, Ed, and as a result, after taking a course in fine art at the Courtauld, had ended up owning a West End gallery, and richer than any of us. Potted histories.
The sad fact was that all of us, though we tried hard to be egalitarian, and to tell ourselves that money didn’t matter, took on the comparative status of the accommodation in which we lived. The Becks couldn’t help but patronize; we in the middle jockeyed for precedence, and Marion was the poor relation. She sat at table with us, but spent more of her time helping clear dishes for whichever hostess it was in proportion to the relative status of whichever host, thus having it in her power to define that status. And we deferred to her judgment: she was the witness to the life.
Such was the group which Leslie and Jocelyn would gather round their dinner table from time to time. We were the second division, it is true. We would get to hear, via Marion, how the Becks had had the almost great and nearly famous—leading architects, writers, politicians—to other dinners; for these more formal events, we, apparently, were not fit guests. We consoled ourselves that we were couples he liked, not the ones he had to invite if his plans for the development of London’s docklands and inner cities and so forth, in which Agee, Beck & Rowlands increasingly involved themselves, were to materialize.
But on with our story, reader, back to the convulsive day when Leslie Beck changed wives. As Rosalie knocked on the door she heard the sound of shrieking. Could it be Hope and Serena, usually so stolid, for some reason not at school? She wondered whether just to slip away, but she looked forward to the occasional morning cup of coffee with Jocelyn, who was always friendly and cheerful, if reserved, and Rosalie, especially if Wallace was away on an expedition, could often feel isolated, trapped at home and powerless with little Catharine. And besides, she did like to compare Catharine, a lively and handsome child, with her secret half-sisters, always to Catharine’s—and thereby her own—advantage. Portraits of Leslie, Jocelyn, Hope, and Serena were hung side by side in the hallway, painted by a lady artist of some note, who, Rosalie and Nora agreed, seemed to like Leslie but loathe Jocelyn, Hope, and Serena. Their pallid faces, dumplinglike, rose on tiny necks from overbroad shoulders. Leslie at least seemed carved in solid rock, and was without a neck at all, which rather suited him. And art is art: Leslie Beck was known to understand it, and Jocelyn not. So the grisly cartoons—as Susan’s husband, Vinnie, described them—hung on the wall and were much admired, and rose in value year by year, and ensured that no member of Beck’s legitimate family could ever feel too well of themselves, or believe that if all else failed they could rely on their looks to get by.
Rosalie and Wallace would no more have had their portraits painted and hung on the wall than they would have robbed a bank: it was not their style; they did not live in the spirit of self-regard. Nor did Ed and I, at that time, have the sense of dynasty, let alone the time available, required for such an enterprise—forget the money.
Reader, I realize there are a great many people on the literary palette I have chosen; somehow I have to draw their portraits clearly in your head. It has the makings of a problem, I can see. Other people’s lives are as full of detail as one’s own, and in real time our own detail takes some sixteen waking hours to get through, and another eight sleeping—and heaven knows what adventures the mind has in sleep—so the problem of the setting up of characters on the page is daunting. I wonder, sitting here at Accord Realtors, how the convention has arisen by which you, the reader, who know Leslie Beck’s exact height—one of our circle, one night, no doubt with many a muffled giggle of excitement, measured both Leslie’s height and the length of his penis, respectively five feet ten and ten inches when erect (and now you know something else), one-seventh, exactly, of his height—are content not to know similar measurements for everyone else. Perhaps it is that the reader assumes a norm unless informed otherwise? If Rosalie has crossed eyes, you assume I will tell you. If Marion is four feet five, ditto. (Actually, she’s five feet eleven, on the margin of exceptionality; now you know that, too.) I’m five feet three, which is pretty pathetic.
I, if you remember, am Nora, married to Ed, the publisher, and the one writing this book of an afternoon up at Accord Realtors.
Marion Loos is the one who describes herself as a spinster, runs the art gallery, and sold her baby to get it going. (I was going to break that to you later. It was, of course, Leslie’s baby; I don’t want you throwing the book aside, crying “This is ridiculous.” Not my fault that what is true can also be ridiculous. Blame God, who invented Leslie of the active penis, not me. Me, I’m just filling in an idle afternoon as the recording angel, waiting for the property market to rise.)
Marion also has two indistinguishable cats, Monet and Manet.
Rosalie is the one who’s gone to fat and seed, and whose husband, Wallace, fell off the mountain, or perhaps did not; her elder child, Catharine, was fathered by Leslie Beck and the two events may, of course, be connected. One day Rosalie may well tell me and I will tell you. I am pretty sure my son Colin is not Leslie Beck’s; I am pretty sure Ed is Colin’s father. If I am going very carefully through the past, it may be in the attempt to reassure myself on these two separate counts. But memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.
Jocelyn Beck was Leslie Beck’s first wife; Anita Beck was his second wife. I speak about Jocelyn in the past tense not because, like Anita, she is dead but because (a) she has moved out of our lives, and (b) by custom and practice, first wives are perceived to have existed in the past. Though to be fair, if Jocelyn married again, from her point of view Leslie Beck would also be considered unentitled to the luxury of the present tense.
Susan, married to Vinnie, was our friend until a couple of years ago, when she did something so terrible, she, too, gets to be put into the past tense, but she still lives near us all in Richmond, and I have an idea we will soon be forgiving her, or she us. It takes an illness, or a death, or just the passage of time, at least among women, for the power of shared experience to overcome the transitory nature of affront. I know it is not proper to say, “Oh, women are like this” and “Men are like that,” because the more we emphasize gender differences, the more they are used against women, and to men’s benefit; but nevertheless, I think it is safe to say, cautiously, that men cling to their hatreds, their taking of offense, more than do women. That may well be because men are more likely to come rushing at each other, with their axes raised, than are women, who might like to but would have to drop the babies so to do. Just as when estrogen levels sink in a woman, it is safe for society to give her hormone-replacement therapy, which keeps a female female, soft, sweet, and smiling, but antisocial to give the aging man testosterone injections, for if you do he runs round raping women and hitting other men on the head. What a bummer!
While we contemplate this problem, and come to terms with it, the temporary solution is, of course, for women just to hand the babies over to the men. Susan tried this with Vinnie for a time; she went out to save the world and he looked after Amanda. But perhaps she chose the wrong baby: it looked so like Leslie.
Susan now just nods politely and says hello should she run into one of us at the supermarket or the station, and we�
��ll even say a word or so about the weather and political events, but she is no longer trusted with feelings or enthusiasms or woes, the very stuff of friendship. All the same we miss her, and I expect she misses us. One of us will go rushing at her with arms outstretched, and the business of reconciliation, which takes nations decades, will be done in a trice. Just I’m not going to be the one to do it. But more of that later. We were recapping.
The children are Catharine and Alan (Rosalie’s), Richard, Benjamin, and Colin (mine; I’m Nora), and Barney, Amanda, and David (Susan’s lot; they get mentioned because the animosity of the adults has not been allowed to infect the children). Marion’s baby wasn’t around long enough to be named. I feel peculiar even mentioning it; we swooshed the episode out of our minds so fast, and yet I suppose this particular child was the key to the Leslie Beck Story.
Leslie Beck, whose penis was exactly one seventh of his height. I know; it was I who measured both.
True confessions!
I’ve never told anyone about that, either, until now. If only the recession would end, and the property market look up again, I wouldn’t have time to contemplate my life in this way; there’d be no time to so much as consider the state of my navel, out of which, like scarves from some magician’s very deep and personal hat, I seem able to draw events and memories, like bloody entrails....
My fear is this: Supposing I were to draw out too many, or they started spilling out of their own accord, uncontrolled; how could I continue to digest? I might just die from loss of undisclosed material. We bury memories out of consideration for our mental health.
Myself and Leslie Beck, dancing naked around a room! And where was my husband, Ed, at the time? Safely at home, believing I had gone to see my mother in the hospital. She was in a coma, and so couldn’t report back whether or not I’d sat by her bedside as a good daughter should. And what house were we in, Leslie and I, dancing and measuring? Why, No. 12 Rothwell Gardens. And what room were we in? Anita’s bedroom? Of course!
When Leslie Beck came to Marion’s gallery with a painting by poor dead Anita of that very same bedroom, and Marion went round to Rosalie’s and wept, and Rosalie handed the event on to me, and I wrote it down, doing my best to stand in Marion’s perfect (I won’t say polished; they would be too new to need polishing) shoes, and speak out of her persona—Marion’s “I”—as reported to Rosalie, who is closer to her than I am, as interpreted by me, Nora, in a piece of writing I polished and polished, and am proud of, I suggested that the source of Marion’s disturbance was guilt. But I don’t think Marion ever feels guilt, nor is Rosalie much given to it. I am the one whom it disturbs.
So here we are, back at the beginning, in the 1970s. Leslie Beck is still married to Jocelyn (just), and Rosalie has maneuvered her stroller up the steps of 12 Rothwell Gardens, the better to sustain her secret, wobble it like a loose tooth with the tongue, to find out if it’s still hurting, and found Jocelyn in crisis. Or such is Rosalie’s account of it.
Jocelyn Beck, so says Rosalie, flung open the door. She was wearing a silk dressing gown with nothing underneath; it fell open, and Rosalie could see the pink-nippled breasts—larger than she’d imagined—and a glimpse of black pubic hair. Jocelyn’s normally well-ordered hair was wild, her eyes pink and smeary. She sobbed; she was hysterical; she pulled Rosalie to her and clasped her, which relieved Rosalie, who had thought that perhaps Jocelyn had somehow discovered that Leslie was Catharine’s father. Little Catharine, startled, began to cry. Hope and Serena stood at the back of the hall, silent and distressed. “I phoned Leslie’s office,” wept Jocelyn, “and someone left the receiver off the hook. I overheard what was going on. Leslie is having an affair with someone he works with.”
“How could you tell,” asked Rosalie, “from just something overheard?”
“It’s too terrible for me to say it,” said Jocelyn, mouth puckering again. “How did I end up being married to such an awful person?”
“It may all be a mistake,” ventured Rosalie. “Has he said anything?”
“Of course he hasn’t,” snapped Jocelyn, bad temper beginning to replace distress. “I know who it is now, at least, and he can’t talk himself out of it. She’s a boring, ugly, and common woman. Her name’s Anita Alterwood. I never paid her any more attention than I did the daily help. She whines when she answers the phone.”
“I don’t suppose it’s anything very serious,” said Rosalie. “You know what Leslie is,” and she quieted Catharine, persuaded Jocelyn to get dressed and wash her face, and ruthlessly sent Hope and Serena out into the garden to play. Rosalie always enjoyed taking charge in a crisis. She gave Jocelyn two of the tranquilizers her doctor had given her because when Wallace was away she couldn’t sleep properly for worry, and if she did, she only had nightmares of him lying dead and broken at the foot of a crevasse.
Days similar to this one, in which Jocelyn discovered Anita’s place in her husband’s life, are lived through by wives all over the world. That they happen is not so unusual. Remarkable and awful days, all the same, and memorable, when the very foundation of existence shifts and alters, and all the love, the nurturing care, and the self-sacrifice which marriage to a man entails is revealed in a flash as folly, thereby making the self a fool. Within a second the future shifts into uncertain gear, and the prospect of domestic redundancy looms, and self-esteem takes a swift dive down into the bottomless pit—perhaps that very same deep magician’s hat I spoke of earlier—and it’s all she can do to steady it, prevent it being lost forever. And the fact that it happens every day to so many doesn’t make it any better when it happens to you. Insecurity dogs the life of the dependent woman, yapping at her heels. And most women, wages being what they are, remain dependent, no matter how hard they work. Takes two wages, these days, to keep up one home.
I daresay it happens to men, too; of course it does, on discovering the infidelity of a wife, the coming home to a note on the mantelpiece and an empty bed. But the shock for men seems more sustainable; the abandoned woman has far lower a status in society than the abandoned male. “You’re so old-fashioned, Nora,” I hear Rosalie complain, even as I say it. “Because you think something, you assume the thought is universal. It isn’t. Who do you think is thought better of by the world, Marion or Leslie Beck? Marion, of course.” I’m not sure Rosalie’s right. If Leslie Beck wants to remarry, he’ll be able to. But Marion will have a problem finding someone to take her on, even if she goes about it the right way, which she won’t. “Oh, Nora” (Rosalie again), “please get it out of your head that it’s sad to be single.”
Back to the day that is seared into Rosalie’s memory: the day she helped Jocelyn come to terms with the truth about Leslie Beck. She ran down to the basement in the hope of finding Marion, but Marion was out at a lecture on cubism, or whatever. So Rosalie ran up again to find Jocelyn beating the scrubbed pine kitchen table with her rather large and competent fists; she was washed but not dressed. Hope and Serena were outside swinging on the swings that hung from the apple trees which by rights belonged to Bramley Terrace.
“I could understand,” said Jocelyn, “if he had an affair with someone better than me, but why does he have to choose my inferior? What does that make me in the eyes of the world?”
“The world doesn’t have to see it,” said Rosalie, rather put out to find Jocelyn now more concerned with her public image than with personal grief. In those days we were all, being younger, a good deal more censorious than we are now. We thought there were certain ways in which people ought to behave, in order to conform to the norm of the good and the nice, the orthodoxy of the civilized classes. You must not be materialistic; you must not be elitist; you must stifle anger; you must pursue consensus, not force confrontation; and so forth. Only when the lights were out, or faces turned the other way, did we behave with a depravity we felt to be singular to us, though of course it was not; only when really pushed did we scream and shout, report the au pair to the immigration authorities, sleep with our frien
ds’ husbands, cheat the butcher, smack our children, run out into the street in our nighties, hope our husbands would swim out to sea and never come back. We hated and despised ourselves, and others, when we did it. These days we are less likely to condemn others, because we can no longer avoid the notion that others are no different from “us.” Condemn your sister, condemn yourself. Condemn your brother, live lonely forever! A hard lesson, but we learned it. Presently I will forgive Susan. I can feel it coming on.
And it is true enough that Rosalie would have felt better if news had come of Leslie Beck’s infatuation, not with his typist, but with, say, a film star. To be rejected in favor of someone of higher status makes it easier to maintain one’s self-esteem as fate buffets it about. When a man takes a girl twenty years his wife’s junior as sexual partner, it is certainly painful, but the passage of years is not the wife’s fault. If he prefers a working girl, a mere subordinate, and she is the same age as his wife, and plainer than his wife, and her merits observable only to her husband and not the world, what can that make of his wife? Except she must have done something terrible. Cast out, rejected, sent home to her parents, no good in any society in the world.
Rosalie was upset, too. She conceded to Jocelyn the rights of the wife—prior use, and so forth—but felt, as you would, reader (should you be female, which I can’t take for granted), that if Leslie Beck was going venturing outside his marriage, it ought to be back into her, Rosalie’s, arms. She was willing enough.
Rosalie remembered saying to Jocelyn on that Day of Dread, “Jocelyn, perhaps you’ve misinterpreted some casual conversation? Perhaps it was a crossed line? Whole lives can’t change because someone leaves a phone off the hook.”
