by Weldon, Fay
Occasionally I worried that in some mysterious way my existence defused him; had he married someone less practical, less whatever it is I am, with my short fair sensible hair, my precise features, my skirts at their proper length, someone more likely to take to drink or to shoplift, he might have allowed himself more temperament, be more inclined to write inflammatory articles in Publishers Weekly than steady and informative pieces defending the status quo in Book World, as he regularly did. He was respected in his profession.
When I said I was going round the corner to see Rosalie, instead of watching a documentary on the slums of Argentina, he looked a little wistful but said nothing to dissuade me. Please do not mistake me. Ed is not a boring man; or only so far as he is good, for there is an area where these qualities in a person do seem to coincide.
Rosalie was speaking to Marion on the phone when I arrived. I made myself coffee. Catharine was away at college and Alan out for the evening. Two TVs were on in different rooms, unwatched. I switched them off, including the documentary on the slums of Argentina, which I felt both glad and guilty to miss. Ed’s tastes are superior to mine. We live with a certain formality, well aware that the bad coin ousts the good, that if children read comics today, they won’t read the classics tomorrow; TV programs are carefully selected for their cultural and political correctness; and Ed is right—it’s just that sometimes I long for the energy and brashness of what is random and to the common taste. Lights at home are switched off so as not to waste electricity; meals are taken at the table, not on the knee watching TV; the cat is wormed regularly; the children take their turn washing up. Left to myself, I think I would live like Rosalie without Wallace: not bent on self-improvement, forever conscious that discipline and effort are required if everything isn’t simply going to fall to pieces, degenerate into chaos, and thence, losing energy, deliquesce altogether into basic sludge, but rather thinking, well, life is short; if eating chocolates while watching a horror video is your fancy, then face the fact and do it!
I even put sugar in both our coffees, not just Rosalie’s.
“Now Leslie Beck is back,” said Rosalie when finally she put the phone down, “he means to stay. That was Marion. Leslie Beck has beaten her down to a thirty-percent gallery commission, and possibly no commission at all. She must be in a state!” and she gave me Marion’s account of the second Beck encounter, which I, Nora, have already given to you. And then I asked Rosalie about lunch with Mr. Collier. What had they talked about? Had they mentioned me? Who paid? What would happen next?
Rosalie laughed and said, “I know what you’re thinking, Nora. You wonder how desperate I can be, to go out with a creep like Collier. Take off his glasses, take off his suit”—Had she? Surely not!—“he’s a man like any other. Your trouble is you’re too discriminating. You’re too picky. Like Marion, just luckier, because you and Ed got together early on, when the urge was strong, and you grew together. You don’t even know what you’re like on your own, or what kind of person you’d be, not married to Ed.”
“I’d manage fine on my own,” I said. “It was the same for you, and you’re okay.”
“It wasn’t the same,” she said. “Wallace and I were always more separate. We never understood each other, or tried to. I don’t think you could exist without Ed, and you know it, or else when you found Susan in bed with him you wouldn’t have got into such a panic.”
“Almost in bed,” I said, “and certainly not inside the bed, just rolling around on top of the spare bed among the coats, and only then because she’d put hash in the chocolate mousse. All the same, it was unforgivable of her.”
“I don’t think it was Susan who added it to the mousse,” said Rosalie. “It’s hardly likely. I think it was more probably Vinnie, still not recovered from the sixties. Perhaps she was as much a victim as Ed; perhaps it’s time you forgave Susan.”
But I wouldn’t talk about it. The incident of Susan and Ed, the last of the great events, the great obstacles, seven full years into our Richmond life, when great events, great obstacles, should have been behind us and all of us allowed to live in peace and fidelity, not divorcing or thinking of divorcing, not swept off our feet by emotions we couldn’t control, driven by motives we didn’t understand, had shattered my peace of mind; and though I knew Ed was indeed part of me, and me part of Ed, the whole of us, the oneness of us, was sullied. I said as much to Rosalie. I could not forgive. Not yet.
“You are so hypocritical,” said Rosalie. “One rule for you, another for Ed,” and I rather wished I hadn’t come round to see her, even though the slums of Argentina was the alternative. But she was right; of course she was right. I must have looked as if I had taken offense, though I hadn’t, because she started talking about her affair with Leslie Beck, way back when, as a kind of peace offering. And this is what she told me.
For the beginning of Rosalie’s affair with Leslie Beck, reader, I am grateful to be allowed to take you out-of-doors, to the Dorset coast, where the waves pound themselves to bits against cliffs, like a frantic woman pounding her fists against the chest of some unmoved lover—if you’ll excuse a rather strained metaphor, but it came to mind—and the sky arches high, windswept, and mindless above. A relief for me, and perhaps you, to be away from domestic interior plus TV set, real estate offices, art galleries, and those premises in general which mankind has devised for its safety and comfort, its diversion and the individual manifestation of status. I have, I grant you, given a description of a street or so, and of how Jocelyn stood outside Leslie’s offices and shouted her ire (while trying to get in, out of outside, as it were, as quickly as possible), but even these scenes have related back to house prices; I wasn’t content to let just you and them be. I like you to think, not just to see.
So how about, for light if painful relief, looking at these two, Rosalie and Leslie, walking along a deserted beach. Rather a short beach, as it happens, high headlands curving round on either side of it. They have walked around one of them to reach where they are, and are making for the next one. Their car has broken down; they are going for help. Leslie is at the time married to Jocelyn. Rosalie is married to Wallace. Wallace is on an expedition up Everest. He should have radioed back to base camp two days previously but failed to do so. This may well be because radio conditions are bad, but it could be because the party of three have all been killed; Wallace has an engraving of Whimper’s party falling off the Matterhorn over the mantelpiece in the Bramley Terrace house, and Rosalie does not forget it. Rosalie has been married for only a few months and is hurt because Wallace prefers the Himalayas to her. She finds it hard to forgive him for both making her so anxious about his safety and yet making her want him never to return, to vanish from her life as quickly as he entered it, talking of love and integrity—and how better and more simply than by death?
Leslie strides along. He is not very tall but he is stocky, strong, and energetic; Rosalie has to all but run to keep up with him, and this makes her feel childlike and curiously dependent. He is wearing jeans and a shirt open to the waist; he has tightly curled reddish hair on his chest and wears in it, against the wishes of his wife, a gold medallion given to him by that wife on the occasion of their wedding, a celebration which was a cause for the exchange of many valuable gifts. This medallion is an antiquity and of the highest value, or was, and depicts Europa riding into the sea on a bull’s back. Leslie took it to a jeweler, who made a hole in it, strung it on a chain, and sharpened up the embossing so you could see what was going on, which was when it lost its value. His hair reaches his collar and curls up like a child’s. Rosalie is wearing a sloppy dress with a long skirt made of purple crushed velvet, which is much too hot, and her shoes are too tight. She has never known what to wear when, but just likes purple.
Jocelyn called her that morning and said, “Leslie and I are taking Hope and Serena to the seaside; we hear Wallace is away. Why don’t you come, too?”
So Rosalie put on whatever was to hand, without thinking, or only en
ough to wonder why Jocelyn had asked her.
It became apparent presently. The au pair, Helga, had irresponsibly taken the Sunday off, seeing it as a holiday and not the day when she was obviously needed most, and Jocelyn was left without anyone to help with the children. Hope was still in diapers and sat damply on Rosalie’s lap all the way.
Picture the shore as they walk along. Behind them, Jocelyn sits with Serena and Hope in a car which won’t start. Rosalie is accompanying Leslie because Jocelyn wanted her to, since Serena and Hope, amazingly, have fallen asleep in the car, and Jocelyn doesn’t want Rosalie’s chatter to wake them. Rosalie is a little offended because Jocelyn isn’t in the least jealous of her, thinking herself so superior as to make worry unnecessary, or so Rosalie construes it.
The walk along the beach is without incident. Leslie talks about his bid to become a director of Agee & Rowlands. He is tired of working on a small scale; he wants to embark upon great schemes. It is dangerously ambitious to wish to move mountains, to reroute rivers, to build dams, in general to interfere with God’s plan for the human race; but it is impressive, and Rosalie is impressed. She walks with her head bowed so as to appear shorter; her shoes can hardly get any flatter. She feels docile. “Is the tide coming in or going out?” asks Rosalie, and the crumpled purple velvet glints in the sun. Her eyes are very blue. So are Leslie Beck’s. She has narrow sloping shoulders and, in those days, a soulful pre-Raphaelite look. Her hair is frizzy and halolike as she stands with her back to the sea and looks at Leslie Beck and the high cliffs behind him. And the sea creeps up and up, to the foot of a headland. They are taking their time.
“Out,” says Leslie.
“That’s strange,” says Rosalie, “because the last wave made my shoes wet and the one before didn’t.”
“Then take off your shoes,” says Leslie, and she kicks them off over her bare shoulder into the sea.
“Rosalie,” I said to her, “you’re not being totally accurate about this.”
“It’s accurate in essence,” she said. “The essence has sustained me all my life.”
Thus, while Jocelyn, out of sight on the other side of the headland, unsuspectedly soothed Hope and Serena. (They were bottle-fed; Jocelyn did not fancy breast-feeding, and who could blame her? Not I, for all it’s fashionable. Little goats tugging at the teat! Yuk!) Leslie and Rosalie romped and cavorted, counting the waves to see if every seventh was biggest, as alleged, chasing her shoes in and out of the sea. Leslie kicked off his as well, and took off his shirt, and the hair on his chest was tightly curled, gingery and plentiful, like the hair on Wallace’s red setter, which he had insisted on bringing into the marriage and now expected Rosalie to look after in his absence. And was Wallace ever coming back, or was he frozen and stiff in some crevasse, penis limp and swollen and blue for good?
“I’m so hot,” cried Rosalie, and, indeed, the sun was hot and strong overhead, and the sea, now driving round the headland, astonishingly fierce and swift.
“Then take off your dress,” he said. “It’s for winter wear, not summer. Even I, a man, can tell you that.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” she said.
“Don’t be coy,” he said. “I can’t abide a coy woman. And you’ll have more on underneath it, I bet, than most women do on top.”
“Now how did you know a thing like that?” she asked, and took off her dress, long thin arms stretched high, softly fringed with fine fair hairs, and stood in a white Terylene half-slip over staunch white panties, and a substantial bra from Marks & Spencer, not so white, having been washed along with one of Wallace’s blue mountaineering shirts long ago. A memento of Wallace. And they rounded the next headland, waist-deep.
And there they were on another little deserted beach, with the sea gulls calling and the sun in their eyes. Leslie Beck laughed, and Rosalie wasn’t sure she liked the laugh or the thought behind it.
“We can’t just leave Jocelyn stranded there in the car,” said Rosalie. “It isn’t fair.”
Leslie Beck raised an eyebrow.
“You needn’t have come with me,” he said.
“She didn’t want me to stay,” said Rosalie sadly. “She wanted me to go away.”
“I know the feeling well,” said Leslie Beck, with equal or even greater sadness.
And, sobered, they set off apace, the better to gratify Jocelyn, who would not gratify them.
They traversed this headland more easily than the last, debating the while whether it was that the tide was coming in, as Leslie had suggested, or the rocks they clambered over made the difference.
“You were trained as a structural engineer,” said Rosalie. “I expect you would know.”
“Did you really say that?” I asked.
“Something like that,” said Rosalie. “Leslie’s foot slipped into the sea and he had to take off his jeans.”
“If the sun was so hot,” I said, “they would have dried quickly enough if he’d left them on.”
“Oh, you’re so practical, Nora,” Rosalie complained.
Be that as it may, Leslie and Rosalie rounded the headland to find themselves on the next beach, a charming little cove with white, steep, smooth sands up which the foam surged and fell back rapidly.
“If we’re not careful,” suggested Rosalie, “we’ll be cut off by the tide.”
“Good Lord,” said Leslie Beck, “I think you may be right.” And they inspected the next set of rocks, but, alas, the sea had covered them and surged in and back in a most tumultuous and dangerous manner.
“I can’t swim,” said Rosalie.
“Nor can I,” said Leslie Beck.
“That is not true,” I said. “That simply is not true!”
“I learned to swim later,” said Rosalie. “I could see the importance of it.”
So what could they do but wait, inspecting the high-water mark to see whether they could expect to live, and finding that it ran some four and a half feet from the foot of the cliff—just about as wide, Leslie Beck said, as a double bed.
They sat at the foot of the cliff and waited for the tide to advance. Rosalie took off her M&S bra and lay on her face and sunbathed while Leslie Beck paced the ever-narrowing strip of land, now the width of a king-size bed. Then he said, “I might as well sunbathe, too,” and took off the rest of his clothes and lay down beside her, on his front for modesty’s sake, but not before she’d had a glimpse of what he referred to as his dong, his magnificent dong, enormous even at rest, in its nest of reddish hair. Now, she already knew about the size of it. One morning, pushing open the bathroom door, which he had neglected to lock, Marion had seen it, and she had passed the word along. There was no doubt the fact of it preyed on all minds, though we would have hated to admit it at the time.
“How vulgar,” I said, “how unspeakably vulgar he was, Leslie Beck the magnificent.”
“How magnificent he was,” said Rosalie, “Leslie Beck the vulgar.”
“Women are too kind to men,” I said. “Forever telling them that size makes no difference.”
Rosalie felt the first cold touch of foam along one flank and squealed and rolled over into Leslie Beck’s arms and felt a long hard touch along the other.
“But I might get pregnant,” said Rosalie.
“I’ll look after that,” said Leslie Beck, famous last words, “and besides, the tide is now well over the high-water mark, and if you ask me it’s a leap tide, and we might as well die happy.” And still she demurred; she even talked of Wallace.
“Protect my magnificent dong,” he begged, “from damage by sun and sea and salt. Shade it, shelter it, enclose it, take pity on it. You have no idea how this thing hurts if thwarted. It is women’s blessing, but my curse.”
So Rosalie did, and nearer and nearer they rolled to the foot of the cliff, hooked together, hot, damp, sandy, and shrieking, while the tide slipped under them and over them, warm, thin, and foamy beneath, cold and clear above; and death seemed not too terrible a thing, or only the stairway to heaven,
up which they labored. Or so Rosalie claimed, though I can hardly believe a thing like that.
And then there was no cold water above or foam beneath, for the tide had turned, and receded as swiftly as it had crept in. Rosalie’s shoe by some miracle—
“Rosalie, you are making this up!”
“No, no.”
—was left washed up on the shore, and Leslie Beck’s jeans, besides. His gold medallion, the wedding present from Jocelyn, which swung above her eyes, went chunk into his chest and bounced away, and chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk again—
“It wouldn’t be like that with Mr. Collier,” I said.
“How do you know?” she asked. “How could you know?”
And we both fell silent. We both knew well enough. Nothing’s fair. Those were the days of the extraordinary; these, of the ordinary.
And then, Rosalie said, Leslie Dong—a slip of the tongue, I’m sorry, Leslie Beck—just so happened to discover a path up the cliff both of them had overlooked, and when they had made their way to the village they found Jocelyn, Hope, and Serena waiting for them outside the post office. When Jocelyn had tried to start the car the engine had taken—
