by Weldon, Fay
“I must have flooded the choke,” said Leslie Beck. “I’m not a mechanical man!”
At which Jocelyn looked surprised as well as hot and indignant, and said but she thought Leslie had a certificate in mechanical engineering, or was he making that up, too? She was impossible.
“And I suppose you found a table of tides in the glove compartment,” I said to Rosalie, and she looked surprised and said, “Yes, as it happens, I did! But he can’t have planned it, can he? I don’t seriously believe he said to Jocelyn that morning, what, no au pair? Let’s take poor Rosalie, she’ll help, and her husband’s away, she’ll be glad of something to do. And then managed to stall the car at one fifty-eight, and timed the tides, and only got them a little bit wrong; so it was rather more watery than he’d planned. Don’t be absurd, Nora. It was all perfectly spontaneous, and therefore forgivable.”
“And that,” I said, “was how Catharine was begotten.”
“Yes,” said Rosalie, at last. “You only have to look at her. Leslie’s child. Nice straight teeth in a nice wide jaw.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t call her Nereid, or something watery. ‘Catharine’ seems such an ordinary name, in the circumstances.”
And I wished that one of my children were Leslie Beck’s, not Ed’s at all, and tried to remember back if it could possibly be the case. It is so easy to disremember these things. What is inconvenient gets forgotten.
“Wallace liked ordinary names,” said Rosalie. “He said there was enough in life to overcome without adding your name to the obstacles.”
We contemplated this.
“Nora,” Rosalie added, “I was very young; I didn’t have children at the time. I didn’t understand how serious things can get. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done what I did to Jocelyn.”
“I don’t think,” she said, after a while. We discussed further the nature of the male organ and agreed that though length and breadth could certainly incite to lust, they hadn’t much to do with love in marriage. But our heart wasn’t in the discussion. I think we were both affected by the melancholy of nostalgia; we did not have the courage or energy, that Friday night, to come to a bolder conclusion.
Rosalie had sat in the back of the car on the way home with Serena on her lap. Jocelyn held Hope on her knee in the front passenger seat. In those days it was not unusual for children to be so carried, and, of course, seat belts were seldom worn. People were more prepared to trust to luck. Leslie Beck drove rather jerkily, Rosalie thought, and she derived comfort from that, feeling it implied that Leslie would rather have Rosalie sitting next to him than Jocelyn.
Serena, in the back of the car, stretched out her little hand to stroke her mother’s short and practical hair, and Rosalie was moved and felt ashamed of herself again, at least for a little—only until they were back in the Rothwells, and Leslie was turning into the Bramleys, and Jocelyn said, “Oh, no, Leslie, we’d better go straight home. The children are exhausted. It’s only a couple of minutes for Rosalie to walk back,” and Leslie put the car on course again for Rothwell Gardens.
“They’d love you to read them a good-night story,” said Leslie to Rosalie, as they disbursed the paraphernalia of a Sunday outing with the kids to the coast, but Rosalie said no, she ought to get back, and when she did, found a telegram from the Everest expedition to say Wallace was on his way home, with slight frostbite to his nose but nothing serious; she was to meet him at the airport that night. She had to set off at once.
“The dong with the luminous nose,” I said. She didn’t laugh. “Over the mountains and hills he goes.” Edward Lear, whom some call a poet and humorist, but whom I call frankly nuts, has a fine wild subtext, for those who know what they’re looking for.
“I didn’t love Leslie,” said Rosalie. “Not the kind of terrible, awful, besotted, glorious love you can feel for men who treat you badly. The size of the cock does not dictate the depth of the emotion it creates. The pebble, shale, and medallion bruises all over my body didn’t show through for a couple of days, so I was able to attribute them to Wallace.
“He was very pleased to see me; he had had some dreadful brush with death and said he was never going up a mountain again. He now valued life itself, which I represented; he had lost his appetite for death. We were very happy, until Mount Annapurna gave a little tug to his heartstrings one day, and he was off. As he said, it was how he earned his living; it was how he kept his little family fed. It wasn’t now because he wanted to go, but because he had to go.
“That certainly felt better. But I hated it when Wallace referred to us as ‘his little family.’ It didn’t ring true; it was as if we existed as snapshots in his pocket. It was sentimental.”
“If Catharine wasn’t his, that’s what you would feel.”
“But he didn’t know that. How could he?”
“Supposing Leslie had told Jocelyn, supposing he turned out to be the kind of man who always tells—and supposing Jocelyn told Wallace?”
“I’d have denied it. I’d have said it was a typical male fantasy on Leslie Beck’s part. I had it all worked out in my head. I remember going over the medallion bruises with a nail file, in order to fudge the imprint of the bull, but it hurt too much, so I had to stop. I used a lot of makeup base instead. I had to buy it especially. I wasn’t in the habit of buying cosmetics. I was desperate for Wallace not to know. I didn’t regret it for one moment; I just didn’t want Wallace to know.”
“And no guilt about Jocelyn? Not even when you went on eating her dinners, going round for coffee?”
“I just thought she was a fool. Going on a family outing with someone like me and letting yourself get separated from your husband.”
“It makes her sound rather nice,” I observed.
“But she wasn’t, was she?”
“No.” I had to agree.
“I was sorry for her. That’s why I kept going round for coffee. She seemed lonely.”
We both contemplated this statement. We both knew it didn’t ring true.
“You just went round to gloat,” I said, finally.
“Yes,” said Rosalie. “I’d stolen something from her from under her nose, and I loved it.”
“Horrid old you,” I said.
“Horrid old me,” she said. “Horrid all most of us.”
The phone rang. It was Ed, wondering how I was, suggesting I watch an interesting program on glaciers. Rosalie might like to see it, too. I thanked him for the suggestion. Home tugged, but I resisted it. Colin was not yet back, said Ed. Shouldn’t he be? Did I think he had a girlfriend? He seemed alarmed at the thought.
“May the Life Force be with him!” I said. “I hope so. See you later,” and I put down the phone, and then felt guilty. I had joined with Rosalie against Ed. It is what husbands fear will happen, and what does happen, and why they resist their wives’ friends, even the best of them.
“The trouble is,” said Rosalie, “these scenes, these events, sear themselves into the inner vision. I didn’t love Leslie Beck, but even so, I began to dream of him, and the dreams unsettled me, and whenever Wallace and I had a row, I soon realized, it would be after one of these dreams. So I had to accept what I never had before, that I was at least partly to blame for our rows, and by the end we were scarcely having rows at all. I suppose Leslie Beck should be given the credit for that.”
“You can’t say ‘by the end,’” I said, “because it may not have ended. Wallace may walk in through the door at any moment, frostbitten nose or worse; then what?”
Rosalie shrugged. She didn’t want to think about any of that.
“I want to hear more,” I said. “I need to know about you and Leslie Beck, and I don’t want to know, because it hurts.”
“There isn’t any more,” she said, “except Catharine. After the episode on the beach I didn’t hear from Leslie for another ten days or so. I was so busy with Wallace coming home and doctors and the media asking questions, I hadn’t the time to hurt and brood. That saved me. That space
of empty time in which, while she waits for the telephone to ring, the assignation to be made, the woman gets to fall in love quite passed me by. It’s out of that terrible cycle of self-destruction and rebirth, I daresay, that Leslie’s Life Force is born. Thank God none of that happened. I escaped. Within a couple of days the memory was taking pride of place in my life narrative, as it were, and I didn’t particularly want it disturbed by reality, let alone a ten-inch cock, which was so real it had practically cracked me asunder. And when he did call, the following Saturday—
“‘Hi, Rosalie,’ he said, ‘this is Leslie.’
“And I thought, Christ, Wallace is sitting here at my elbow, how am I going to manage this? But all Leslie Beck had to say was this:
“‘Jocelyn and I wondered if you were both by any chance free for Sunday lunch tomorrow? I know it’s short notice, but we’re dying to hear Wallace’s exploits...,’ and I understood the course that this was going to take, and was relieved. It was to be as if it had never happened—or, at any rate, left just as a source of secret pleasure for when Leslie and I, flanked by our spouses, faced each other across the dining table. And our social relations with the Becks hotted up no end, though I think mostly, to be honest, because Wallace got his own monthly TV show, Mountains and Me, after that, and Jocelyn loved a celebrity. Once a fortnight! Such a terrible waste of Leslie Beck, don’t you think, to lie beside him in bed and thwart his natural and legitimate desires? It doesn’t bear thinking of. She deserved what she got.”
I said I had to get back to Ed; he would be going to bed soon. I wanted the consolation of his warm and friendly body beside mine. Alan had come in and was in the kitchen with the radio turned on very loud to the pop channel. He was a tall, gangly boy who took after his father and was Richmond’s junior pole-vaulting champion. Catharine had turned out to be the more rewarding of her two children, but that was just my opinion. I am not a sportive person; neither was Catharine, by nature, but she tried. She wanted her official father’s approval, poor girl.
Rosalie walked me to the gate.
“Jocelyn came to visit me in hospital when Catharine was born,” she told me, “and I was nervous when she bent over Catharine’s crib and turned back the coverlet to see her better. Wallace was there, too. ‘Just like Wallace,’ Jocelyn said. ‘The spitting image. Isn’t it amazing how babies look so like their fathers for the first few days?’ And after that it was just accepted that Catharine looked like Wallace; people kept telling me so, even my own mother, though I could never see it.”
“I certainly never said it,” I observed.
“Leslie even came to see me in hospital, too. I was so surprised! He just sat in a chair and looked at me and looked at the baby, and held up his hands and counted off nine fingers, one for each month. I said nothing. He smiled. Then he kissed me on the forehead and bent over the baby and kissed her. He was wearing the medallion outside his denim shirt and it went clunk against the crib, and I felt faint. You know how hot these maternity wards can be. ‘Well,’ Leslie Beck said to me, mother of his child, ‘what can you do in the face of the Life Force?’ Then he went away.”
“You’re making that bit up,” I said.
“Yes,” said Rosalie. “I just wish it had happened. You know what it’s like when you’ve just had a baby and are no longer center-stage. Some row over paternity would have landed me back in the middle; but fortunately, I resisted the temptation to confess. And now there is no reason to do so.”
“If Catharine ever wants a mortgage,” I said, “it would be useful for her to claim Leslie Beck for a father. Still alive, active and healthy at sixty, looks better on a form than lost down a mountain at fifty-two.”
“You’re insane,” said Rosalie. “And the sooner you stop working at Accord Realtors, the better.”
The author as God. If only it were so. I would like to be God. I rolled quietly out of bed after Ed was asleep and wrote the following by hand. I folded the paper and put it in my bag. I do not want Ed to know I am writing an autobiography. He would want to read it, naturally. And naturally, I would want him not to. Writer-as-wife turns out rather different stuff from writer-as-underemployed-clerical-assistant.
Dinner-partying groups of young marrieds and middle marrieds form and re-form in the suburbs: in and out of each other’s lives, each other’s front doors; a sign of vigor and contentment; demonstration that the parental home has been efficiently and finally left, the new and better unit formed than the parents had ever managed. Just see, Mother, Father! Look here! Witnesses to the life! People who take me as seriously as you ever did, close enough to worry with me about the cat being ill, yet distant enough to make a judgment about the job I should or shouldn’t take. While you, parents, only ever had your own ax to grind. You thought I’d just taken a husband; but see, here’s a whole new life unfolding, a whole gracious world....
The group serves as the anvil against which social skills are sharpened and political attitudes refined, sparks of discord occasionally flying off, quickly extinguished. Through the group you learn how to behave, how best to seat people at the table, what to expect from children, how to cope with obscene telephone calls, how not to make coq au vin, how not to serve chocolate mousse after boeuf en daube, how not to be caught rolling around with other people’s husbands on piles of party coats. A few singles are invited into the group, drift around; are welcome so long as they know their place, don’t upstage. Pace Marion.
The problem with the group is that it tends to intertwine erotically as well as socially. Something happens—a telephone call overheard on the extension, a look intercepted—tensions build, and suddenly the group’s no more. Who knew what and didn’t say; who didn’t know and said too much? Treachery is too deep, trust too shaken, to heal the break. If you’re a friend of this one, you can’t be a friend to that one—it’s too much.
The group that centered for a time, and never with a full commitment, on the Becks collapsed in on itself quite suddenly and neatly and without undue anguish when Anita replaced Jocelyn. When we moved out to Richmond, leaving Leslie and Anita behind, we managed to reconvene, but only for a time, until I discovered Susan with Ed, together on the bed among the coats. An isolated incident, Ed assured me, and I think I believed him, had to believe him; we had been together too long, were too kind to each other, to fall into nonbelief and all that might lead to. But that was the time we stopped giving dinner parties for one another: they were too expensive, or we were too tired, or the new dietary laws of the eighties stymied us. Fiber, low fat, and little alcohol failed to inspire us to entertaining. We felt the loss, but not enough to issue invitations.
That is enough from writer-as-wife—or, at any rate, all she could manage before sleep overtook her. It has been entered on a floppy disc under “Gutters,” where the autobiography is filed.
When I came home from Rosalie’s that night, Ed was already in bed. It occurred to me that I could wake him and confess what had happened once between Leslie Beck and me, and indeed between Vinnie and me, and be back center-stage. (Remember Vinnie? Susan’s doctor husband—the fleshy, energetic, exuberant doctor, so very different from Ed?) And after that I’d be free to talk about it with Rosalie and not be afraid she’d gossip; because who by now could possibly care, except Ed? Or, I supposed, perhaps, Leslie?
But even as I thought it, I knew I wouldn’t confess. I still wanted the world to go right, not wrong. You leap into the world, if you’re someone like me, with amazing ambition. You flail your red lanky infant limbs about and mean to put the whole thing right. You yell and protest your woes, you gurgle your contentment, concerned not so much with notions of hunger, thirst, pain, and pleasure as with justice withheld or gratified. It is the infant’s indignation that always impresses me: how we are born with the sense that everything should be supremely okay, how furious and puzzled we are to discover it isn’t. And how we give up too early.
“You were a crier,” my mother would tell me. “You were the eldest, you roared
night and day, and nearly put me off children for life. But by the time you were six or seven you’d cheered up. You turned into a great little helper.”
Well, thank you, Mother. You rocked me and lulled me into acceptance. So, okay, I couldn’t have you to myself; so you littered my world with other little greedy sucking mouths—it was tear you to bits, or give in and be a good little girl. I gave in, and I passed my exams, cleaned my shoes, helped my little sisters and brothers to cross roads instead of hurling them into the traffic, got to college, terrified myself witless by setting myself up for a near-rape by a lorry driver, and fled into the arms of lovely Ed, who was suitable if poor, when I was twenty. Everyone came to the wedding and rejoiced, and said how lucky my mum and dad were that I’d given no one any trouble ever. “Or only in the first five years,” said Mum, and I think she felt I’d somehow failed to live up to that early willful, riotous, complaining promise of nothing but trouble ahead. You can get to be my age and still know nothing about yourself.
And Ed had his First in English when I was only halfway through a language degree course I was likely not to do well in, so it made sense for me to forget the degree and come south with him and do a secretarial course, which is always practical for a young married woman to do. And now I work part-time at Accord Realtors, or would if there were any work to do; the outside world has its realities.
What I am leading up to, as you may have guessed, is a really good justification for my affair with Leslie Beck. I do feel it needs justification. Rosalie hadn’t had children, hadn’t been married for long enough to identify sufficiently with either mothers or wives, to understand that these roles are held in common by all women, and that copulating with other women’s husbands in secret, no matter how the self-esteem rises, no matter how exciting secrets are, is also in some way to lower the self. Rosalie will be forgiven; she just didn’t know. Ignorance of the lore is every excuse.
