by Weldon, Fay
Oh no?
“I’ll tell you what I heard,” said Jocelyn. “If Leslie says, ‘Shut the door, Anita, I want to fuck you sitting on my knee,’ and the other one says, ‘But Leslie, you wanted this letter to Austin’s typed in order to catch the mail,’ and Leslie replies, ‘Okay, then we’ll do both at the same time,’ I reckon there is no mistaking what is going on.”
And Rosalie thought a little and said, “Jocelyn, these may have been voices heard in your head. Fantasies,” but remembering the way Leslie Beck had once crept up on her from behind while she was making sandwiches in her own kitchen, remembering the feel of sand and surf on the skin, Rosalie supposed the voices to be real enough.
Rosalie stopped feeling jealous quite suddenly and felt instead that she was on Leslie Beck and Anita’s side and wished them every good luck in the world: Jocelyn was the kind of woman on whom a man could never creep up. He would have to wash well first and ask permission, which would be grudgingly given. No doubt many of the women at the Becks’ first-division dinner parties, the ones who wore real diamond brooches, carefully placed, not hasty ethnic ornamentation slung around necks and arms, were of that particular nature. We second-division types don’t bargain with our bodies; it isn’t done. We tend to offer ourselves freely, perhaps too freely, for a little excitement and the preservation of our marriages, for our children’s—and, indeed, our husbands’—sake. I suspect Rosalie, Susan, and myself all married men with a little less sexual energy than ourselves—that is to say, truly nice men. We were always on the wooing side of the male-female divide, not that of those consenting, and then only just, to be wooed. The former seldom get given furs and diamonds; the latter do. But, then, we don’t want them. We would rather have the soul of a man than his money.
Marion watched it all from her flat down below and never got married at all. It was dark and damp down there in the early seventies, before the builders were brought in to turn the premises into something rather more like a rentable garden flat than a mere basement for storage and servants. It was from those earlier days that Marion dates her asthma.
But back to the day of dread. Jocelyn rose from the table, threw off her wrap, and stalked naked from the room. Rosalie admired the pink and solid perfection of her body, her bold high breasts, the muscular buttocks, the general sense of unavailability. But Jocelyn wasn’t waiting for admiration; she just wanted to get dressed as quickly as possible. Rosalie picked up the wrap and folded it. Leslie Beck never liked to see women’s clothes thus discarded. He liked them properly hanging in the cupboard. He would fold his own clothes even while his penis grew to its full ten inches, one-seventh of his height.
Jocelyn came back smartly dressed in a white blouse and a navy skirt.
“Where are you going?” asked Rosalie. “Don’t do anything silly. Remember you’ve been munching tranquilizers.” She had taken the opportunity of giving Catharine some milk from the Beck fridge and a biscuit from the Beck tin; she felt the little girl was entitled to it. But Jocelyn was on the phone. She called the man at Rothwell Hardware and asked him to come over at once to change the locks. Then she called her mother.
“Mummy,” said Jocelyn, “I’m so upset. Leslie is leaving me. He’s going to live with his secretary. Daddy must cut off his allowance at once, and I think he should ask for the car back.”
Hope, or was it Serena, out in the garden, began to scream. She’d fallen off the swing, or, rather, the branch that had supported it had snapped. Apple is a soft wood and not suitable for swings, but try telling that to the cuckoo dwellers of Rothwell Gardens, rejoicing in their stolen orchard, home at last. Rosalie ran outside at once to help. Hope lay winded and stunned on the ground; Serena heaved with an asthma attack. They were hopeless children, thought Rosalie. They would reflect little glory on Leslie Beck, who loved glory. Jocelyn stayed on the phone for some time; now she was talking to her lawyer. She wished for a divorce from Leslie on the grounds of mental cruelty, and a court injunction to keep him out of the house in the meanwhile. “Jocelyn,” begged Rosalie, returning with Hope in her arms, “please don’t be hasty. At least talk to Leslie.” But Jocelyn would not listen.
Whereupon Marion, thank God, came home from her lecture and volunteered to take Hope to the emergency room for an X-ray in case she had a concussion, and took Serena along as well because she was turning blue about the lips. It was, as Marion later said, that kind of day. Either nothing happens for ages and ages, or everything happens at once.
Marion took the children to the hospital in Jocelyn’s car. “Shouldn’t you go to the hospital, too?” asked Rosalie of Jocelyn. “You are their mother.”
“Hope’s perfectly all right,” said Jocelyn. “I was falling off horses onto my head all through my childhood, and there’s nothing wrong with me. What’s a swing? And as for Serena, she’s just demanding attention. She can’t bear Hope getting it all. If Marion’s so fussy, let her do it. I expect she only wants an excuse to borrow the car.”
She went up into the bedroom and Rosalie followed, since Jocelyn had with her the garden shears. Jocelyn took Leslie’s beautiful, if rather stodgy, suits from the filled wardrobe and flung them into a pile on the bed; then, picking out the trousers, she started cutting them up, slicing first from crotch to waist. Catharine had fallen asleep in her stroller and remained in the kitchen. Rosalie again begged Jocelyn to consider that she had been taking tranquilizers, which can have the side effect of turning the taker violent, and pleaded with her just to stop and sit down, or Rosalie would feel it was all her own fault. She pointed out that perhaps if Jocelyn simply did nothing, waited for Leslie to return and then talked quietly to him, perhaps suggested family therapy, the matter might resolve itself and the marriage end up stronger than ever. Wasn’t it a pity—the house, the children, the friends, everything, so much at stake...? But still Jocelyn slashed and ripped.
“The man’s sex-mad,” she said. “He’s an animal. He’s disgusting. My father paid for the suits. They’re mine to do with as I please.”
Leslie had told Susan, and Susan had told Rosalie, and Rosalie had told me, that Jocelyn thought sex once every six weeks was generous. Jocelyn’s father, it seemed, had told her when she was little that once every two months was the norm, and Jocelyn had this frequency of “intercourse,” as she called it, imprinted somewhere in her psyche. Her father was a doctor, so how could she doubt him? And we all knew about Leslie’s predicament, though we never talked about it among ourselves, thinking it was restricted information, as indeed it was. But we thought less of Jocelyn for what we saw as meanness.
One of the most noticeable ways in which 12 Rothwell Gardens differed from the rest of our houses, apart from the size and the number of rooms and the width of the stairs, was that it was without bookshelves. It seemed that Leslie and Jocelyn seldom read anything except the newspapers, and Jocelyn subscribed to Vogue, though to what end was not apparent. The rest of us read novels and so had some idea of what went on in other people’s heads; even Wallace would carry a thriller in his backpack, to read in his tent in a snowstorm. Jocelyn would sometimes read historical biography, but very few biographers carry details as to frequency of intercourse in their subjects’ lives, so once the idea of every two months had been put into Jocelyn’s head, how was she to replace it by any other? Jocelyn exemplified the sad life of the rich, which we liked to believe in. It stopped us from feeling jealous, and not feeling jealous made us think better of ourselves.
“Why not go down to Leslie’s office,” suggested Rosalie, “and have it out with him? You might feel better.”
“Bloody Marion’s got the car,” said Jocelyn, snipping and tearing, “to take the bloody children to the hospital.”
“I’ll call a taxi,” said Rosalie, and did. When it came, Jocelyn, having finished her task of cutting up trousers, but still tearing socks to pieces with her teeth for good measure, got in without protest.
Agee, Beck & Rowlands had its offices in one of those rather pleasant
squarish houses in a staid road behind Fitzroy Square, where well-established firms of architects, surveyors, and structural engineers have their offices.
Picture the scene. (In the days when we still dined out, Rosalie often dined out on it.) Rosalie pays off the taxi. The front door of Agee, Beck & Rowlands is closed. There is an intercom attached to the side of the door, a button you press and a panel into which you speak, and are heard if you are lucky. The ground-floor window is open; this fine spring day offers the first sun and warmth of the season. Standing in the window, looking out and stretching even as Jocelyn and Rosalie watch, is Leslie Beck. He looks handsome, satisfied, and well entertained, as no doubt he is: stocky, cheerful, vigorous. Can that be Anita at the electric typewriter behind him? A rather plain and dowdy girl, with a large nose, a dull complexion, and her hair in an elaborate and old-fashioned beehive? Is it the same letter she is engaged in—the one to Austin’s? Perhaps she has been obliged to retype it, inasmuch as she failed to get it perfect the first time round? This is before the days of the word processor, remember; there was a lot of retyping to be done, a great deal of giving up and starting afresh. Or perhaps that was just Rosalie’s fancy, and the Austin letter was already in its envelope and six more done since. Though if Anita’s typing was anything like her cooking proved to be, that was unlikely.
Be that as it may, Leslie saw Jocelyn and Rosalie, and first he blanched, according to Rosalie, and then he smiled.
“Darling,” he cried from the window, “how wonderful to see you. And Rosalie. And Catharine, your new baby! The more little girls in the world, the better. Just push the door and come on in.”
Catharine was fifteen months old, but Rosalie could see that this was no time to remind him.
“Bastard!” Jocelyn was shrieking, for all the street to hear. “Fornicating pig! Adulterous swine! I’m going to chop it off and feed it to my father’s dogs. It’s unnatural, it’s fiendish, it’s monstrous.”
Somehow she had managed to bring the garden shears with her; now she brandished them. Leslie Beck, with surprisingly quick reflexes, slammed down the window and vanished from view. Passers-by turned. A startled face, that of Mr. Roger Agee—Rosalie had once been privileged enough to dine with him at the Becks’—looked out of the top window. Anita Alterwood, for it was indeed she, rose from her typewriter and for a moment took Leslie’s place at the window. She half smiled; she seemed both displeased and yet gratified.
“Jocelyn,” pleaded Rosalie, “you’re playing into her hands. Can’t you see?”
“Bitch!” yelled Jocelyn. “Whore, slut. What do you use for hair spray? Leslie Beck’s semen? Cupfuls of it?”
“Jocelyn,” begged Rosalie. “Please don’t. Not like this. Not a public scene. He won’t put up with it.”
“Good,” said Jocelyn savagely, giving Rosalie an ungrateful shove, so that Catharine began to cry. Small children hate it when those allegedly in charge raise their voices and prove themselves not fit for the task.
“Just come home,” begged Rosalie, and Jocelyn hesitated for a second, and then tried to push the front door open, hearing the sound of locks on the other side of the grating, but was too late by half a second. The door was now securely bolted. Jocelyn kicked it savagely. Then she crouched down and yelled more insults through the entry-phone panel.
“You’re all curs and bitches! You’re animals; you’re all in heat night and day.”
The ground-floor window opened. It was Mr. Roger Agee.
“Jocelyn,” he said, “I don’t know what’s happened, but you’re clearly upset. Please just be quiet and I’ll come out and we’ll talk about it. Probably better if you don’t see Leslie just at this very moment.”
“Why? Is he having it off with her in the broom closet? You’re in on it, too. If you don’t fire that woman immediately, I’m reporting you to the director of public prosecution. You and your Berkeley Square development. My lawyer says it stinks! The lot of you stink! I’ve read the files, and you’re all rottener than rotten fish, so don’t you tell me what to do, Mr. Roger stinking Agee.”
Passersby were gathering now, and in some number. A couple of gray-suited men, who might well have been senior officials from the Ministry of Works, emerged from a taxi and approached Agee, Beck & Rowlands, and would have come up the steps, but Jocelyn turned on them, too, brandishing the shears.
“My husband is Leslie Beck,” she said, “of Agee, Beck & Rowlands, and he’s fucking his secretary and I’m his wife, and if you do business with him you’re as corrupt and evil as he is. The whole lot of you stink around the crotch!”
Roger Agee apologized to them from his window and said they were being besieged by a madwoman, he was sorry, the police were on their way. They hailed a taxi and departed.
“I’m not mad,” shrieked Jocelyn, “the world has gone mad. The whole lot of you are in collusion with that evil bitch.”
And Rosalie told me that in her opinion Jocelyn was quite right, everyone was indeed in collusion, if not particularly with Anita, at least with the principle of doing away with everything familiar and whoring after the new and the fresh. Older women are meant to grin and bear it, not rant and protest; rejected wives are no fun. People pay them lip service, but they’d rather, really, they just went away. Besides which, word had got round that Jocelyn would only let Leslie into her bed once every two months, and what sort of wife was that? No one was on her side.
Rosalie took Jocelyn home, because Catharine’s wailing began to drown out even Jocelyn’s shrieks, and the windows of Agee, Beck & Rowlands were now silent, and the police were on their way. Blinds were pulled; shutters were closed all the way down the street. The place reminded Rosalie of the Chinese embassy in Portland Place, which has looked like that for twenty years: its windows boarded up, blank, and silent, albeit in multi-occupation. Faceless and brooding: does it plan attack or expect it, who can ever tell? I suppose to plan one is inevitably to expect the other. Susan maintains that insomnia is a symptom of repressed anger: you are back in your cave, adrenaline flowing, both planning the tiger’s death and expecting it to pounce. Susan can’t even let you lie awake at night without construing it as your fault, not your misfortune.
Once they were home, Rosalie left Jocelyn in Marion’s charge. Serena had had an injection and was breathing freely. Hope had had her X-ray and nothing amiss had been found, though she was still crying, having been traumatized, Marion explained, by the X-ray machine—in those days a great hefty piece of equipment which swung on angled arms over the patient, like some slow metal monster planning how best to devour its victim.
“I told you not to bother, Marion,” said Jocelyn, and then loudly to Rosalie, “Why is it that people you employ to help only ever make matters worse?”
“I should go to bed,” said Rosalie, leaving Jocelyn with another couple of Valium.
“I don’t think she should take those,” said Marion. “They seem to make her very aggressive,” but it was too late—Jocelyn had taken them, swilling them down with whiskey, and more whiskey.
“Now I suppose I’ll be left to put the children to bed,” said Marion. “I was hoping to do my essay.”
Rosalie and little Catharine went home to make Wallace’s tea. He would be back soon from the TV studios. Jocelyn wept and raved at the kitchen table in Rothwell Gardens. Then she went into Leslie Beck’s bookless study and emptied the filing cabinet and got a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen and sloshed it over everything. She pulled down a painting he said was a Watteau and kicked it; she got a Swiss army knife from somewhere—Marion having locked the kitchen door so Jocelyn couldn’t get at the knives—and slashed what Leslie Beck said was an undiscovered Stubbs, but which Marion said was only some old horse by some rightly undiscovered amateur; then Jocelyn sat on her chintz sofa in her pretty room, which had the most expensive curtains in all Rothwell Gardens, and wept.
It was Marion, by the way, who usually reported on everything that went on in No. 12 Rothwell Gardens, from t
he price of the curtains to the absence of books, who confirmed what Leslie had said to Susan, who told Rosalie, who told everyone, about what Jocelyn’s father the doctor had led her to expect of married life. Marion would babysit for us as well: news from one house carried fast to the next.
“You can give your life to someone,” Marion said to Jocelyn that evening, “and all that someone is, is someone who gets a typist from the pool to sit on his knee with bits of him inside her to type a letter. Perhaps none of it is very important.”
Jocelyn said to Marion, “What do you know about anything? You’re just some trumped-up bank clerk living rent-free, eyeing my husband, neglecting my children, and traumatizing them at whim.”
Marion was affronted and did not help Jocelyn later that evening, when perhaps she should have done.
By eight o’clock in the evening Jocelyn was beginning, in the manner of wives, to miss her husband’s return. Dogs do it, too; it is not only wives. If the master fails to return at the expected time, no matter if all he can be expected to do when he arrives is kick and shout, they begin to get restless and wonder what they’ve done wrong; habit and guilt make them fawn and lick in the instant between his return and his getting the boot in. “I might have imagined it,” Jocelyn was saying to Marion by half past eight. “Or perhaps I got a crossed line, as that boring woman Rosalie said. What have I done? Will he ever forgive me? Why did Rosalie make me go round to his office? It’s her fault. Poor Leslie; I hope he doesn’t go into his study. I’ll clean up tomorrow. I’m too exhausted now. I’ll wait up till he comes home, and then I’ll kiss the hem of his garment and anything else he likes. If he wants me to be an animal, I’ll be an animal. Who cares? I give up!” and she called and called Leslie’s office, but of course all she got was the busy signal. No doubt, wisely, everyone in the office had taken everything off the hook.
