by Weldon, Fay
Jocelyn was too drunk and maudlin to hear the telephone ringing in Marion’s basement flat. Marion went down to answer it. It was Leslie.
“Is she still there, or has she gone to her mother?” he asked.
“Still here,” said Marion.
“Is she quiet?”
Marion, still smarting, told him Jocelyn was quiet now but had done some damage.
“What?”
“She kicked the Watteau to bits and slashed the Stubbs and poured olive oil over the kilims and the prayer rugs. Oil is the worst thing to get out of silk carpets. I think you should come home as soon as possible, Mr. Beck. It isn’t fair to leave me responsible for a woman in this condition. I’m too young, and I’ve got an essay to write.”
There was silence for a little. Then Leslie Beck said, “Okay, Marion, I’ll see to it,” and put down the receiver. Marion checked Hope and Serena, who were safely playing checkers in their bedroom with the television on, and went back to Jocelyn. Jocelyn had taken off all her clothes and finished the whiskey, and was trying to race wood lice across the table. They kept curling up in terror when Jocelyn banged her fist and made the surface they walked on tremble and shake.
The bell rang, and Marion, expecting Leslie Beck, went thankfully to open it. Two men and a woman stood there: one man was a doctor from the practice Vinnie worked for; the other described himself as a psychiatrist, and the young woman as the duty Social Welfare officer. Jocelyn came to the door with no clothes on, took one look at the visitors, darted past them, and would have run down the street had they not caught and gently restrained her. They drew her inside with expert hands, settled her on the sofa, and sat soothingly around her. Jocelyn remembered she had no clothes on and looked round for them, but Marion, mindful of Leslie, had already hung them in the wardrobe upstairs, so she gave up. Marion found her a blanket. Jocelyn said she didn’t like wool next to the skin, so Marion found her a silk bedspread.
“Well, now,” they said to Jocelyn when all that was arranged, “what seems to be the trouble? We hear you’ve been a naughty girl.”
“Me!” said Jocelyn, rising to her feet, “me! I’m not the one who’s a tart from the typing pool! I’m the wife!”
They tried to ease her down again; Jocelyn declined and jabbed the duty officer in the eye with her elbow in so doing.
“Sorry,” Jocelyn said, not meaning it. “This is my house, bought with my father’s money, and if I want to stand or sit that’s my business, and if you come here uninvited and I happen to have no clothes on that’s your bad luck—or good luck, depending on how it grabs you.”
“Yes,” they said, “but we gather there was a little trouble in the street today.”
“Who told you?”
“Your husband. He’s very concerned about you.”
Jocelyn screamed.
“Now, now,” they said, “try not to wake the children,” and the matter of the Watteau and the Stubbs came up, and the fact that their value was more than half a million pounds was mentioned.
“They’re no more Watteau and Stubbs,” said Jocelyn, “than I’m a copulating dog,” and she went woof, woof quite sharply at the lady duty officer.
The three asked Marion for confirmation that Mrs. Beck was acting out of character, to which Marion, after some hesitation, agreed. They asked Mrs. Beck if she would agree to admitting herself as a voluntary patient at Colney Hatch psychiatric hospital, and when she indignantly said she would do no such thing and asked them to leave her house, adding that if there was a Rembrandt in the house she’d take an ax to it if she felt so inclined, they nodded to one another and told her in that case she would be compulsorily admitted under section 136 of the Mental Health Act. The duty officer and the psychiatrist held Jocelyn’s arms while the doctor administered a sedative, and presently they led her away wrapped in a blanket.
Some twenty minutes after the ambulance left, Leslie Beck let himself into the house. He had Anita with him.
“Thank you for coping,” said Leslie to Marion. “I hope you’ll be able to see to the children until we can sort things out a little?”
“I can’t tomorrow,” said Marion. “I’ve got a lecture.”
“I’m sure if you explain the situation,” said Leslie Beck, “they’ll make allowances.”
Anita wandered through the house picking over Jocelyn’s satin cushions, shaking her head at the presence of wallpaper, the wall-to-wall carpets in the bedrooms, the fact that she cooked with electricity. Clearly there were changes on the way.
“You mean you have that great big flat down there practically rent-free?” she asked Marion.
“It may be big,” said Marion, “but it’s damp and there’s no proper heating.”
“All the same,” said Anita, “you’ve got a bargain there. Leslie’s very generous. But someone’s got to look after the children, I suppose. I mean to go on working. So you might as well stay.”
Leslie reported the destruction of his suits to his insurers over the emergency line, and Anita and he spent the night in the marital bedroom among piles of shredded fabric and teeth-torn socks, and Marion went downstairs and slept like a log, she was so exhausted. She moved out very soon afterward, and our special entree into the ins and outs of the Beck household was gone. As I say, the Becks were never exactly friends: they were from the Rothwells, not the humbler Bramleys. We did not feel for their distress, though I think we should have.
So that was how Anita replaced Jocelyn in Leslie Beck’s life, and how Jocelyn lost house, marriage, and children. Women, when the breakup of a marriage appears imminent, should never on any account leave the matrimonial home, as any lawyer will affirm. It leads to all kinds of trouble. Possession, they will add, is nine-tenths of the law, and so it is.
And if you try arguing your case from the nuthouse, which you can be forcibly prevented from leaving, and your family has provided you with the old family lawyers, and Leslie Beck has access to the most expensive ones in town, as Agee, Beck & Rowlands naturally did, why then you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Judges don’t like the idea of women standing in the street in a respectable part of town shouting abuse at their husbands while those husbands try to get on with their work, especially if respected firms thereby lose clients and business. The more so if you, the shouting woman, claim you were perfectly sane at the time, merely provoked—you having to say that in order eventually to get custody of your children—because not only, they fear, might you make a habit of it, but other women might begin to do the same. It might all end up in rank upon rank of wives of the judiciary making noisy scenes outside the Law Courts. If Jocelyn was sane it looked bad, and if she was insane, worse.
“Framed!” shrieked Jocelyn at the court. “Stitched up!” And they led her back to Colney Hatch, and thereafter a friend of the accused represented her in court and made a pretty bad and drunken job of it, too. But that was Leslie Beck’s luck, not his devising.
It does no one any good, in the public or the legal eye, to have carved up the cultural heritage of Europe, and it was difficult, by the time the paintings were produced in court, to affirm that they were not Watteau, not Stubbs, merely Leslie Beck’s affectation, his desperate need to be one up on Rothwell Lane Antiques—more of that later—and the family lawyers couldn’t see that it would affect the case one way or another whether the paintings were worthless (actually six pounds the one, seven pounds the other, at Rothwell Lane Antiques, as Marion could have affirmed; but no one asked her) or worth half a million between them.
So it went. Leslie divorced his wife and retained possession of the marital home and, for a time, custody of the children. It took Jocelyn some nine months to persuade Colney Hatch that she was no longer insane (she had given up the argument that she’d never been insane in the first place, merely drunk, provoked, and having a low tolerance for Valium; what was her account of herself as sane worth, in the face of a declaration that she was not, on the part of the doctor, the psychiatrist, and the duty of
ficer?). That finally managed, it was another year before she could persuade the court that she was now fit to look after her own children, if she lived with her parents and remained in their care. Leslie undertook not to contest the new custody arrangements if Jocelyn made no claim against 12 Rothwell Gardens. Accordingly, she transferred the property to him by deed of gift, in token of her natural trust and affection for him.
This document, thus worded, was drawn up by the family lawyers. Their offices were in the Berkeley Square area and presently became part of a big new development, in the course of which a whole and perfect row of early-Victorian London town houses were pulled down and a glass-faced office building erected in their place. Agee, Beck & Rowlands played a major part in this development. I only mention this in passing. The value of 12 Rothwell Gardens—especially at that time, when it had a good fewer zeroes on the end of it than it does now—was, of course, minuscule by comparison to the sums of money spent on the Berkeley Square development, and I am not suggesting anyone was bribing anyone. Of course not; it’s just that people like to do one another favors. Down here at Accord Realtors it’s very often only drinks in the Black Lion or a good lunch at the Bear, and I’ve known waiting lists for desired but scarce new cars suddenly to disappear, and for surgical operations likewise, and minor committees to let through rather tricky decisions on the nod after these little social events, and that’s only what I know about and not what I don’t. Me, I’m just an assistant clerical hand round here. Anyway, what’s life without favors? And Rosalie doesn’t forget being called “that boring woman” (as reported by Marion), any more than Marion liked it being suggested that she wasn’t giving value for money in return for her low rent, and I never liked the way Ed and I were relegated to second dining division, and I suppose the fact is none of us could forgive her for living in the big house with the fabulous Leslie and then allowing him to go to waste, and Jocelyn, frankly, was just never really likable.
So here I am, reader, many years later, sitting in Accord Realtors, writing, marveling at the past, when in comes Rosalie herself. She’s wearing a kind of maroon velveteen track suit, which I daresay is comfortable, and the thick hair has been grabbed up and wound in a bunch on top of her head and secured with a pleated purple elastic hairband, probably Catharine’s, and she seems at ease and happy. She’s carrying a Marks & Spencer shopping bag overfull of frozen meals. It’s a branch where they pack for you. They must be cutting down on bags, or someone just couldn’t be bothered. That’s what happens when you wear maroon velveteen track suits out shopping. She has the appearance of neither a vendor nor a purchaser of property, but someone come in to waste time and put possible clients off, and I look round nervously, but neither Mr. Collier nor Mr. Render seems bothered. The property market is so bad that normal misfortune can seem good by comparison.
“Hi,” she says, and she smiles and sits on the edge of the desk, and her broad rump squashes right up to my little pot of spring flowers so I have to move it over, and her face lights up and in spite of everything she’s pretty.
“I’ve been thinking about Leslie Beck and Jocelyn,” I say, “and all that business.”
“She was always half nuts,” said Rosalie. “In fact, if a court says you can only have your children if you live with your mother, you might even be three-quarters nuts.”
“That doesn’t excuse the way Leslie Beck behaved,” I say. “At the time it was just something that happened step by step, as you obviously didn’t notice, and because no one else seemed to see it as appalling we didn’t register it as such, but when you think about it, it was. And he’s still about; and God hasn’t even punished him.”
“He’s got older,” volunteered Rosalie.
“We all get punished that way,” I say.
Mr. Collier is looking over at Rosalie. Rosalie says she doesn’t think Leslie Beck behaved worse than another man would in a similar situation. If men can’t have sex with wives, and the wives are bad cooks, men seldom understand why they should be expected to hand over to them any proportion at all of their worldly goods.
“I don’t remember Jocelyn as such a really bad cook,” I say, but Rosalie remembers clearly a certain beef Wellington which Jocelyn once presented: dense, tough, gray meat inside and a thick pastry case outside so solid Rosalie lost a crown.
“If she cooked for Leslie’s important clients like that, and we must suppose she did, it wouldn’t have done Leslie Beck much good. No,” says Rosalie, “women must keep to their side of the domestic bargain. If men pay, women must deliver: sex, home comforts, and kids. Look at the number of men,” says Rosalie, “who default on maintenance or argue through the courts till the cows come home that they shouldn’t have to pay it, who falsify accounts, bribe witnesses, refuse to buy absent kids socks and shoes, but can manage expensive toys and holidays. They’re not nasty men, they’re just fighting in the cause of what they see as natural justice. It is unnatural, they think, if the wife isn’t in the bed or at the sink, and the kids aren’t under their nose, to be expected to pay for them. Why?”
Mr. Collier looks as if he might come over any minute. He is a gray kind of man with a double chin and owl glasses.
“Rosalie,” I say, “you only defend Leslie Beck because he’s Catharine’s father—”
“Don’t say that—”
“And you have somehow to justify your adulterous relationship with him.”
“It’s not a question of justifying. Jocelyn wouldn’t sleep with him, therefore it wasn’t a marriage—”
“Then how come she had those children?”
Our voices were rising. Mr. Collier came over with some property descriptions for me to type. “Sun-drenched patio” had been changed to “agreeable walled yard” in response to rising consumer protest concerning misleading information from the realtor profession. They were cleaning up their own act before the government was tempted to interfere in matters it knew nothing about.
“Isn’t it Mrs. Hayter?” Mr. Collier asked. “Wallace Hayter’s wife?” Rosalie said yes. Mr. Collier said what a tragedy, what a mystery; her plight had always preyed on his mind. (I was surprised that Mr. Collier had the kind of mind on which things preyed, but then was ashamed of being so easily dismissive of another human being. I find that as I grow older, I have to train myself not to cast other people out of my sphere of inclusion, as it were; it is appropriate to young women, and, to a rather lesser extent, young men, engaged in the full ferocity of their mating behavior, to deride and dismiss those they do not see as appropriate sexual partners, but it ill becomes them when they get older. There!)
Rosalie said it preyed somewhat on hers, too, and Mr. Collier stammered and apologized, and said, since it was lunchtime, why didn’t they both go round to the pub. Rosalie said before they left why didn’t I come round that evening; Marion had been on the phone to her for hours. I said very well. She dimpled, yes, she did, at Mr. Collier, and at least straightened the elastic waistband before she left.
I got back to “Life Force.” Mr. Render dozed.
Now I will allow Marion to take up the story again—that is to say, my version of the events of the following Friday as seen through Marion’s eyes, or as I suppose her to have seen them, having only Rosalie’s word to go by. In order to transfer the “I” from myself back to Marion, I have had, as it were, to subtract Rosalie’s addition to the tales in order to get back to what we so wistfully call “the truth.” We writers have a hard task, thus mixing biography and autobiography. I suppose I could just call Marion on the phone and say “What happened, what happened?” and tape the answer and transcribe it, but where would be the fun in that? And would she tell the truth anyway? I’m sure she’d try, but would she manage? I can see I am gracefully and gently edging over into fiction, in thus letting Marion speak, but never mind.
Marion
Leslie Beck came into the gallery around five o’clock on Friday night. Saturday is the best day for off-the-street sales, and Barbara, Aphra, and mys
elf were busy taking down the MacIntyre and arranging the spring group show, which was to have a flower-and-fish theme. Not necessarily in the same painting, of course. Such a show was Aphra’s idea, not mine; but recession makes cowards of us all. Next to pigs, fish sell best, and flowers are always safe. But a group show is not as good a long-term investment as is a one-man show: you may achieve more red dots at the opening, but the real money is in the large, slow-to-move, idiosyncratic canvas by the artist with a known name, which can end up in a Tokyo boardroom or as some palace folly in Sydney, making money every step of the way. Pigs, fish, and flowers end up swiftly—and there is no money in swift—above mantelpieces in the smaller reception rooms, up the stairs, or even in the kitchen of ordinary domestic houses, and this is neither Bond Street style nor appropriate marketing strategy for an ambitious gallery such as the Marion Loos. But the show would hang for three weeks only, would ease the cash-flow problem, and if we were sufficiently lighthearted about it, jokey even, I reckoned we could get away with it and not lose reputation. And it pleased Aphra. MacIntyre had acquired only seven red dots out of twenty possible, but there had been an interesting long-term nibble or two, even one from the Metropolitan in New York. Which you’d never get for fish, flowers, or pigs.
Aphra and Barbara looked up, interested, as Leslie Beck came in. That capacity had not worn itself out, then: to activate at least some response in women, if not one of actual liking. Leslie still comes across as male: men these days, especially young men, tend to register themselves on women as merely more human beings. I had thought this was something to do with my generation, but Barbara and Aphra’s response to Leslie made me change my mind: it is men who have altered, softened, who see themselves as people first and of a certain gender second. It is an improvement, I daresay, but it does nothing to cheer me up.
“You didn’t come to the memorial service,” said Leslie Beck, reproachfully. “You were missed. Serena and Hope were there. They’ve grown up into fine young women. They were so very fond of their stepmother. Serena’s about to make me a grandfather. Hope’s a social worker, too dedicated to her work to take the plunge into matrimony.”
