by Weldon, Fay
I said I was indeed sorry to have missed the service, but couldn’t afford to leave the gallery at such a critical time. I was glad Hope and Serena were doing well; I had only really known them for a few months when they were little, in my student days. As he could see, we were busy and would be working late into the night as it was.
“Late into the night!” he repeated. “How romantic. Can I be of any help to you ladies? Perhaps I could buy you all dinner afterward? It would cheer me up if I did. Life must go on.”
“There’s this amazing Japanese around the corner,” said Aphra, to my astonishment.
“I’m sure Ben wouldn’t mind looking after Holly an extra couple of hours,” said Barbara.
What could I say?
“Let me take one end of this,” said Leslie to Barbara, of a rather heavily framed MacIntyre. “Don’t worry, I’m used to paintings. I know how tender they are. We have a Stubbs at home—you see how hard it is for me to grasp that it’s no longer ‘we,’ but ‘I’—so, correction, I have a Stubbs at home. Anita really adored that horse.”
“You’re still living in Rothwell Gardens?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“And Hope and Serena come to stay, I expect, sometimes?”
“They’re busy young women,” said Leslie, “like you, Aphra, and don’t have all that time to spare for their old father. You wait till your little one grows up, Barbara. Take my advice, look after yourself; children can look after themselves. No woman should sacrifice herself for a child. Deny herself pleasures. Life’s short.”
He looked younger today. His blue eyes were lively; his muscles moved beneath the fabric of his fine cotton shirt. Barbara had belted her dress more tightly, I noticed. I refrained from pointing out that Hope and Serena would be more Barbara’s age than Aphra’s. I asked instead what had happened to the Watteau. He said briefly he’d sold the painting at the top of the market for thirty-two thousand pounds. It had been much restored, or it would have fetched more. I couldn’t resist asking if he’d given a percentage to Mr. Tallow at Rothwell Lane Antiques.
“It was way back in 1970 something,” I explained to Aphra and Barbara, “when I was a student at the Courtauld and living in Mr. Beck’s basement and helping him look after his two little girls by his first wife.”
“Is that one still alive?” asked Aphra, without, I thought, much sensitivity; but I told myself that so far as Aphra was concerned, the seventies were history, and no one grieves for people in history—when would one ever stop?—or refrains from mentioning their demise out of respect to the living who do not want to be reminded.
“So far as I know,” replied Leslie. He was wandering in and out of my office, reading my memos, looking over my correspondence, moving Anita’s painting into a more favorable position—taking it out into the gallery proper and placing it against a wall in a good light.
“Then,” I continued, “one day, when we were all out walking together—that was unusual, but I think it was an election day and Mr. Beck had had to come home early from his office before the polls closed—we passed the window of Rothwell Lane Antiques.” I did not care if Leslie overheard. He had invited himself to my gallery. He could not expect much courtesy.
In the window had been two particularly dark and dingy paintings—one a rather sentimental portrait of a girl in a whitish dress, the other a childish version of a horse.
“What do you think those are, Marion?” Leslie Beck asked. “All that time off work up at the Courtauld; you ought to know.” I was not, of course, taking time off work to go to the Courtauld; I was taking time off from my studies to see to the Becks’ plain and boring little girls, in exchange for a damp and dingy half-underground couple of unheated rooms for which they had no other use—but forget that. Leslie was, and I knew it (in Aphra’s language), “winding me up.”
“You could say these were a very bad Watteau and a rather less bad Stubbs,” I replied, “or you could say someone’s favorite uncle painted them and no one had the heart to burn them.”
So we all crowded into Rothwell Lane Antiques, with Jocelyn complaining that we couldn’t take the time, the polling station was about to close, it was more important to vote than to fill up the house with yet more junk, and Mr. Tallow took the two paintings out of the window for us to examine.
“They’ve only just come in,” he said. “I haven’t looked them up in Bénézit.”
The shop was filled with the musty smell of damp bindings and woodwormed furniture, but Mr. Tallow, for his stock in trade, also liked the excessive and the exotic: painted ships’ figureheads, stuffed birds in cages, and glass eyes vied for space with the more ordinary stripped pine.
Mr. Tallow wanted twenty pounds each for the paintings. Leslie Beck beat him down to six and seven pounds, and would have got the seven down to five had not Hope been keening and Jocelyn lamenting and Serena putting the glass eyes in her mouth.
“If they turn out to be anything,” said Mr. Tallow, “I expect you to see me right.”
Leslie laughed and said, “Of course,” and clinched the deal, and as we left he added, “Of course, Marion here says those paintings are a Watteau and a Stubbs! And she’s up at the Courtauld,” thus making Mr. Tallow blanch and Leslie laugh.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Jocelyn as we ran to the polling station. “They’re just rubbishy old paintings.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Leslie. “Marion has a good eye,” and he pinched my bottom and I squealed and Jocelyn took offense and we arrived at the polling station with half a minute to spare.
“Who did they vote for?” was all Aphra asked, but I didn’t know, and wouldn’t have told her if I did. That was Leslie’s and Jocelyn’s affair.
Leslie called me over, from the other side of the room, and I went, as if it were still all those years ago and myself the drudge again, despising myself for doing it.
“I see the exact place for Anita’s painting,” he said, and he indicated that prime patch of wall that catches the customer’s eye when he enters the Marion Loos Gallery for an opening: facing the door, just to the right.
“I hadn’t intended to hang it at all,” I said. “It’s not in keeping with the rest of the show.”
“Really, Marion,” said Leslie, “stop sulking. It’s the least you can do. You should have come to the memorial service. It hurts me that you didn’t.”
His face fell sad and silent; his hands trembled—not, I thought, for once, with the Life Force coursing through them, planning some new mischief, but as the effect of real and barely contained sorrow, the desperation of the bereaved, who know that life has to continue, or there’d be no point in lamenting the loss of it for the departed, but can hardly find the will to keep going. “Marion,” said Leslie Beck, “we are all getting older. Shouldn’t we just forgive and forget? Isn’t it time?”
The problem was rather, I thought, that we had all forgotten long ago and were only just now beginning to realize that there was a great deal to forgive: a whole great indigestible lump of it. All the same, he was persuasive.
“And it isn’t fair to take it out on Anita,” he said. “She doesn’t deserve it.”
His hand stretched out to touch mine, and I didn’t want that.
“Let me think about it,” I said, and found something else to do on the other side of the gallery.
Leslie Beck’s pinches and pats, in the days of my employment by him, had been quite frequent, but normally happened when Jocelyn was in the room, so I did not take much notice of them, and could, in any case, hardly afford to take offense. But I began to dream of him: alarmingly graphic dreams, in which I could feel the weight of his body, the texture of his skin—a kind of virgin’s dream of idealized sex. I think I was a desolate kind of person in those days. Perhaps I still am, or am seen to be by others. I was born strange to my parents, as if I inherited from my mother and father genes which lay undisclosed even to themselves. My mother’s mother painted, my father’s grandfather played violin i
n a church orchestra; but the creative urge had bypassed Ida and Eric, who saw only what was under their noses, and could not understand the artist’s desire both to interpret what was there and to set up alternatives.
“Do take your nose out of that book,” my mother would say, “and go for a healthy walk,” and my father would add, only half joking, “That girl will educate herself out of the marriage market if she’s not careful.” And I would bring home prints from the library, as well as books, and hang them on my bedroom wall, and my mother would say of Picasso, “I could do as well as that standing on my head,” and so on, but I don’t want to knock them or disparage them. They were kind, even loving, and if the joke during my childhood was, when I pushed away some massive piece of half-cold battered fish, with its limp pile of greasy potato sticks beside, and the red dollop of tomato ketchup (for color), “I reckon that child was switched at birth; she’s none of ours,” they spoke not so much out of malice as confusion. Other girls had boyfriends; I did not. I daresay I looked down my nose at them.
In storybooks, teachers discover girls like me and ease them out of the cultural desert, but I suppose I was just unlucky. I never encountered teachers who weren’t bored, cranky, and in a cultural desert themselves. It was only when I came across Vinnie and Susan, Rosalie and Wallace, and Nora and Ed, and they allowed me into their lively, chattering, responsive circle, and I went into homes where there were books on the shelves and wine to drink, and a kind of cultural hedonism pervaded everything—even, I imagined, the bedroom—and laughter and tears came and went unashamed, that I began to take my first breaths of real life. Susan got me the place at the Courtauld, and Ed and Nora the use of Leslie Beck’s basement, and now here I was, in my midtwenties, dreaming of Leslie Beck and wondering how to lose my virginity (though I had a feeling that celibacy and a proper and meticulous response to art history—indeed, to anything—went hand in hand). At that time, mind you, I was making a special study of illuminated manuscripts, and the essay I was trying to write the day Jocelyn was sectioned under the Mental Health Act was on the connection between the monastic life style and the pursuit of excellence. These things can render you impatient with the untidy mess people make of their lives.
It had certainly shocked me to come home from the Courtauld one day and discover Jocelyn hysterical and about to be replaced by Leslie’s secretary Anita, Rosalie flapping, little Hope lying in the garden semiconcussed, and Serena gasping for life itself. This was the bad side of cultural hedonism: days such as this one just did not happen back home in Ida and Eric’s domain.
And I was upset and a little jealous, I daresay, to discover the existence of Anita. I had thought that if Leslie Beck’s eye was to stray anywhere, it would surely be toward me.
Later, of course, when he had lost interest in Anita, she having served her purpose, it finally did; and that is an episode I am not quite strong enough to reassess, but I suppose I had better try, since the reappearance of Leslie Beck in my gallery has made some evaluation of the past inevitable, as if fate intended it, gave us these sets of experiences in the first place the better that we may, later on in life, make some retrospective sense of them. At the time we’re glad just to survive them, meeting each wave of chaos as it comes; forget dissecting them.
I hope Leslie does not attempt to pinch or pat Aphra. She’s of the new school. She’ll bite his fingers off.
“Marion,” says Aphra, “Leslie’s right. It looks really good just inside the door. We always get red dots there.”
(Leslie! So soon the creep has ceased to be a creep, has gained personal and familiar identity in Aphra’s eyes. How did he do it? By taking off his jacket and hauling weights about, I supposed, while fresh from a memorial service; and the offer of a real dinner after, of course. Never forget the free dinner.)
“First thing you see when you come in the door.”
“See how the light catches the curtains,” said Barbara, not apparently to be outdone in treachery. “Your wife was a very accomplished painter, Mr. Beck. And now I’ve begun to adjust to the hard edges of the comb, I can just about reconcile it with the rest....”
Lucky old you, I thought.
“As to price,” said Leslie Beck, “what do you think, Marion? Six and a half thou?”
“You’re out of your mind,” I said. “A total unknown? In a show where everything’s between three and five, with the odd bargain drawing in the six hundreds?”
And Aphra said, “Well, it’s going to have pride of place, the first thing you see, perhaps we could risk it....”
And Barbara said, “It has a kind of real quality—you can tell, everything else begins to fade into insignificance. It really is the pièce de résistance!”
I wished Aphra would get back to her dingy squat and Barbara back to her baby and the kitchen sink, where she belonged—why did I employ such imbeciles? Leslie Beck smiled at me, and just as a scent can bring with it total recall, so the smile brought with it what I believe is called the feeling tone of those early virginal dreams, more powerful than the memory of anything that came later. I sat down.
“Tired, Marion?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a hard week.”
“Harder for me,” he said, and I knew it was true.
“I take sixty percent commission,” I said, still fidgeting.
“You sometimes do thirty percent for friends,” said Barbara.
“I didn’t really know Anita,” I said.
“But you know Leslie,” said Barbara.
“As well as a woman can know a man,” said Leslie, coy and corny both, sitting down beside me on the little upholstered gilded bench with the curving-away arms I’d picked up at Christie’s—a bin end, as it were, from the contents of some middle-of-the-road Renaissance Italian palace. I felt quite ill. “Good lord,” he said, “I think we’re sitting on a love seat. It belongs in a brothel.”
Aphra and Barbara looked at it with interest.
“How does it work?” Aphra asked. “I suppose if the woman hitched her legs over the arm and the man was behind...”
“Or if she were on her elbows, crouched...” said Barbara.
It was beyond endurance. I asked them to finish hanging the show without me, since I seemed superfluous, wished them well with their Japanese dinner, called a taxi, which fortunately arrived promptly, and went home.
“Thirty percent, then?” inquired Leslie, as I left.
“Take the lot,” I said. “Who cares?”
I fed Monet and Manet, soothed myself by stroking them into ecstasy, and listened to a little Vivaldi, which always helps. Then I called Rosalie and talked at her for half an hour.
“Why am I so upset?” I asked her.
“Because you’re guilty,” Rosalie replied.
“About Anita?” I asked. “So I slept with Leslie Beck. So did a lot of others. What’s so special?”
“Guilty about Anita and Leslie Beck, too,” she said. “You did him a dreadful injury and he doesn’t even know it, and you can’t face it.”
What injury? I’d spent a lifetime asking Rosalie to explain me to myself; now I began to think I’d rather listen to my own, less facile interpretation. I was Leslie’s victim, not he mine. It’s always the man’s fault, everyone knows.
I went to bed and dreamed about Leslie Beck: not the dreams of innocence, as once they were, but those of experience, of the piercing and halving and pinning of the body through its center, where the legs meet the trunk. At first everything was rusty and creaky, like some oil drill that has been unused so long it seizes up, but little by little the plunging and plucking became easier and quicker and faster, as if the machinery were at last fulfilling its proper purpose.
I woke up midstroke with the conviction that Leslie Beck was at that moment having it off with either Aphra or Barbara, or both, and resolved to fire the pair of them forthwith. They’d taken more than enough advantage of me as it was. And this was the end: an absolute liberty.
I
took two sleeping pills, fell asleep, and woke up quite sane.
So much for the quiet lives of those who live alone, with only cats for company, in flight from Leslie Beck.
Nora
So much for Marion on Friday night. It is with some relief that I leave her consciousness and return to my own, which flows more easily. Marion is hard work. I feel being Marion must be hard work. All that responsibility, and so little trust in anyone, and really nobody to turn to. I think I’d rather be me, peacefully pecking away at my word processor, day after day.
Be that as it may, reader, or putative reader, that Friday night, I, Nora, went round to Rosalie’s to follow up our abortive lunchtime conversation, so surprisingly interrupted by her departure with Mr. Collier for lunch. Why, I wondered, did I bother with face creams, low-fat diet, scalp massage, the exact length of my skirt, and so on, when all Rosalie seemed to have to do was slop around and exist? But then again, why, since I had never given Mr. Collier a second glance, and presumably Rosalie had, out of some secret corner of her eye, should I be put out about it?
And Ed (my husband, if you remember; the one who reads while he walks about the house) was never going to fall off a mountain, as had Rosalie’s. Ed would always come home to me, was reluctant, indeed, to set forth from the house without me. In the mornings he would kiss me goodbye, once, twice, fondly, no matter how fine it meant he had to cut the catching of his train. “The run down the hill,” he’d say, “will do me good. And the faster the run, the more good it will do me.” Once Ed had seemed set to be one of those grand London publishers who talk in lofty tones about the nature of culture, eat status-conscious lunches with notable writers, take their vacations in Italian villas with contessas, and are amusing about what Umberto Eco said to Melina Mercouri on the Concorde; but his life (and thereby mine) had, thank God, turned out other than my parents had hoped. Ed was now a senior editor at a publishing house, with a few shares in the company, and had survived unscathed a decade of takeover bids and mass firings. We lived modestly but cheerfully. Ed’s enthusiasm and knowledge of the literary end of the fiction market remained undiminished; his belief that everyone was as dedicated, honest, and well-intentioned as himself had been a little shaken by the decades, but not miserably so. My parents between them had left me a house, a car, and thirty thousand pounds. Otherwise I don’t know how we would have managed. Accord Realtors paid peanuts—as, when it came to it, did the House of Arbuss, the publishing conglomerate for which Ed, simply by sitting at the same desk and doing the work under his nose, now worked. Teenagers are expensive and take up a lot of room. Ed does his job and believes the world will all fit into place around him if he does; I do the worrying.
