by Weldon, Fay
But I, Nora, knew what I was doing. And all I can offer in my defense is to say, look, I am capable of more than being good Ed’s good wife; in other words, I bore myself; I feel I creep around at less than my potential, and it’s painful, and I don’t want to die like that.
When I was alone with Leslie Beck one day in his office, he suddenly looked at me and said, “Tell me all about it, Nora,” and I was taken aback and flustered.
“All about what?” I asked.
“Why you’re unhappy,” he said, and that was the end of the dinner-party relationship, the general helping-out-at-the-office. Leslie and I were into something different.
Now what, you may ask, was I doing in Leslie Beck’s office, back of Fitzroy Square? Sitting at the desk where once the new Mrs. Beck had sat, where the vibes of bad, mad Jocelyn (or poor, sane Jocelyn, depending on your point of view) still somehow hung so strongly in the air that Chloe (the stunning black girl in reception, who was clearly so much a sex object in the eyes of the almost entirely male clientele of Agee, Beck & Rowlands as to outweigh any possible equal opportunities credibility) would still, a year later, jump nervously at sudden noises in the street, sudden buzzes from the doorbell, or the initial crackle as the entry phone was activated. Chloe was six foot three and made me feel both small and pallid to the point of invisibility; but, then, as wife and mother, I had been feeling my invisibility lately.
It was Ed’s idea that I work for Agee, Beck & Rowlands. I think I was offended that he was so sure of my common sense and reliability that he would suggest such a thing. That he did not believe Leslie Beck the businessman could be any kind of rival, present any kind of threat, no matter what the size of his dong or dick, was, I told myself, the ordinary reaction of the academic man—the kind who has achieved a First and then grandly renounced academia—who has a sense of intellectual self-worth so great that for all his self-depreciating ways, it can never really be dented. No wife of mine, he says to himself—and, by implication, to her—will put up with a man less intelligent than me, will find philistinism attractive, could possibly be seduced by the merely physical. We live in a world where the intellect counts. My wife can share an office with Leslie Beck the magnificent, and her imagination will not race out of control.
Yet what are all those incestuous dinner-partying group cavortings about except the pleasures of imagination? Leslie and Jocelyn Beck, Ed and me, Susan and Vinnie, Rosalie and Wallace, and Marion thrown in for good measure, promoted to guest from babysitter, all round the one dinner table, picking over the moules marinière, okay, but an exercise as well in see-what-I’ve-got, wouldn’t-you-like-it-too? Wallace’s steady mountain hands, the curve of Susan’s neck, Ed’s kind and mischievous glance, Rosalie’s rounded breasts—what would they be like in bed? How did it ever occur, the half of this couple can only wonder, that I ended up in this pairing, when it could so easily have been that? And wouldn’t perhaps that one over there be preferable to this? And, looking up, meet and keep an eye a fraction of a second longer than required? The wonder is that couples stay friends, that discretion gets the better of desire. And, of course, it is not only about sex; it is about the whole business of spousing as well. That one standing barefoot at the kitchen sink, that one at the desk answering letters from the bank—what would it be like?
As I say, after Leslie divorced Jocelyn and installed Anita in her place to look after Hope and Serena, dinner invitations from Rothwell Gardens seldom came our way, and were less and less frequently reciprocated. The real problem was not with Leslie’s behavior, I am sorry to say, but that Anita was so hopelessly dull. She’d wear the kind of shapeless brown dress that only the flamboyant can get away with, and she was not flamboyant, with a string of long beads that looked like her grandmother’s, no matter how fashionable they were; and she picked over her food as if there were something wrong with it and only spoke when spoken to, or, in an attempt to be interesting, say things like, as we gratefully received our poulet rôti à l’estragon, “I read in the papers that eighty percent of all chickens die of cancer,” or, as we talked about South Africa and sanctions, “I don’t think if people haven’t been to a place they’ve got any right to pass an opinion on it.” And Leslie, who now speaks of her death as a tragedy, scarcely so much as addressed a word to her if he could help it, and we all noticed and did nothing, worse than nothing. We shouldn’t have mocked her; we should have drawn her out, helped her, reformed and refined her spirit, taught her the error of her ways, counseled her about the necessity of at least providing hot plates if you’re serving lukewarm food; but we never took the time or trouble. At ten forty-five precisely Anita would look at her watch and say something to Leslie in her nasal voice about babysitters and he’d pretend not to hear, and she’d get agitated in a pink and sullen and upset way, and by eleven thirty he’d finally give up and they’d go, and those left behind would exhale with relief and mirth, and then feel guilty about it.
When I think of Anita, I think of the wringing of work-worn hands. I think of Leslie saying to me, as I lay in his and Anita’s bed, “And on top of everything else, she’s paranoid. She goes through my diaries to check up on me. She’s convinced I’m cheating on her, though I give her not the slightest cause to suspect me,” and I even remember thinking how sad for Leslie, to be married to so dull, boring, and paranoid a woman, and why ever had he done it? And why had I married Ed, when if I’d waited around a bit I might have married a man more quixotic, more sexually active, more individual, and, let’s face it, less self-satisfied. Someone who would leave me so exhausted, so worn out after sex, it was all I could do to get to the shower to dress, to be out of the house before Anita returned. In Anita and Leslie’s shower, the soap, in the form of a Mickey Mouse, hung from a rope. I’d never seen anything like it. In our circles white soap lay plainly in a white dish, unperfumed and unscented, in accordance with Vinnie’s belief that the functional was beautiful, the beautiful functional. Though these days, I noticed, Rosalie preferred her soap bright pink and smelling of roses.
The children it was who called me home at that time, not Ed. Little helpless voices calling in my head. Mother, Mother, we want you. We are not fully grown; we need you to feed us, notice us, comfort us, stand between us and the outside world, until the day we want to leave, when we’ll make such a dash for the door, knocking you aside! Mother, Mother, leave your lover’s bed, come back to lay the table. We need you here in the mornings, rolling out of the parental bed as the alarm goes, warm and satisfied, but not so satisfied you’ll burn the toast. Mother, we didn’t ask to be born. You brought us into existence, now see it through!
Reader, I can’t face it. I keep putting the actual facts of the matter off. The run-up to how it happened that Leslie and I came to be alone in a room, on a summer’s afternoon, when his secretary was on holiday, and girls from the temping agency too inefficient or too expensive or both for Leslie’s taste, and he was saying, “Tell me about it, Nora.” I suppose I want myself to be there by some kind of magic, propelled by destiny, not knowing in advance, perfectly well, what was going to happen.
But the truth is, it wasn’t like that. It was at one of our few dinners at the Becks’ (new-style), when Anita was jumping up and down trying to organize the lamb and apricots, which was hopelessly undercooked, pink to the point of raw (Jocelyn overcooked, Anita undercooked), and I had already caught Leslie’s eye and held it just a second too long. And thus it went:
LESLIE:
The letters pile up, the phone goes unanswered. We’re busier than ever, but I might as well close up shop now the holiday season’s started. It’s a nightmare.
ED:
Why don’t you ask Nora to come and temp for you? She’s looking for a job through July.
ANITA:
Leslie, do you think the lamb’s done?
ED:
In fact, she’s got to have a job through July, if we’re to put the car on the train to Bordeaux and not have to drive it down through France.
ANIT
A:
Why don’t you hire a car when you’re there?
LESLIE:
I warn you, Nora; Agee, Beck & Rowlands overworks and underpays. They’re famous for it. And I’m a monster, as everyone knows. But if you’re game, Nora, so am I.
ED:
What do you say, Nora? The children can manage without you for a few weeks.
ANITA:
Why don’t you ask me to do it, Leslie? I’m the obvious person.
LESLIE:
You’re too busy with the house, dear.
ANITA:
And Nora isn’t?
LESLIE:
I think the lamb should go back in the oven, Anita.
ANITA:
Oh, dear.
LESLIE:
Now don’t spill all that pink juice down your nice brown dress. Go carefully.
But she did spill it, and dissolved in tears on the grounds that the gravy had burned her, which was highly unlikely, in the circumstances. I think it was because she was just miserable. She was pregnant.
It might be that I took the job because I was inquisitive, in order to find out why Leslie married Anita. But if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything; I was just trying it out for size. “Nora,” said Leslie Beck finally, and after two whole disappointing weeks of formal secretarial work, in which Leslie was often away at site meetings, and I was setting up appointments with clients, and paying his bills when they came in for the third time, and sending out invoices and the occasional letter to the local authorities and planning committees, and typing up transcripts of the tapes on which he recorded all his telephone calls. “Tell me all about it, Nora.”
“All about what?”
“Why you’re unhappy.”
“I’ m not.”
“Yes you are. I can tell by your eyes.”
And then there was a phone call from Mr. Agee, and off he went, leaving me to contemplate my unhappiness and my discontent.
I went to the washroom and stared into the mirror, to see if it was possible to read emotions in the eyes. If we smiled and smiled, as I did, could people ever tell? Chloe came in and asked me what I was doing. I said I was searching my face for signs of unhappiness. She laughed and said, “That old line. Leslie tried it on me.” How was I to know it was a line? I realized I was a woman of little experience. That disconcerted me even more. Who wants to end up a woman of little experience?
The next day, Leslie Beck said to me, “So, have you thought about it, Nora? Why you’re unhappy?” And I replied once again, “I’m not.” And again he went away, and left a kind of vacuum behind him, man-shaped.
On the third day, Leslie Beck said, “Nora, your problem is with the Life Force. It batters away at you and you won’t let it flow. You’re a good little girl, you’re inhibited, and you’re married to Ed.”
“I love Ed,” I said.
“Sure you do,” he said, “and I love Anita.” A comparison which shocked me. “And how are you getting on with the letter to Westminster Planners?”
It was in my typewriter. He looked over my shoulder; I could feel his breath on my bare shoulder.
“You’ve reworded it,” he said.
“It was ungrammatical,” I said.
He bit my shoulder. Now, I can work at Accord Realtors with Mr. Collier and Mr. Render, without their maleness intruding upon me. They can instruct me and reproach me, dictate my comings and goings, reward me and fire me, stick-and-carrot me, and I can manage not to feel like a concubine. When I worked for Leslie Beck, I came to understand why when women first started working in offices they were seen as little better than whores. The basic situation is intolerable. Man powerful, woman powerless. What can you do, in the end, but enjoy it? Marriage (if you’re lucky) takes place between equals. Sex happens between men who earn more and women who earn less. I should have walked out of the office when Leslie bit my shoulder, but I had corrected his grammar and felt bad about it, and it seemed to me I deserved the sudden sharp pain.
“It’s a terrible life for a woman,” said Leslie Beck, “when the best thing she can do for a man is correct his grammar. I’ll tell you what, Nora, we’re not going to discuss a thing; what you feel, what I feel. None of that boring old stuff. We’ll just do what we do, and find out what happens when it comes along.”
“Shall I go with you to tomorrow’s site meeting?” I asked. “You’ll need someone to take proper notes. I do what I can with the backs of your envelopes, but it’s not good enough.”
“Well done,” said Leslie Beck. “Let the Life Force in through a pinhole, and the next thing you know it’s sweeping everything along with it, like water through a crumbling dam in one of those old films. I hope you have a head for heights.”
That night, I dreamed of Leslie Beck. Nothing to do with crumbling dams. Each to her, his, own image. We were in a hot-air balloon, and up, up, up we were swept, into the navy-blue ether, where clouds formed into waves and beat upon us. I was so restless that Ed woke up, he who slept the sound and dreamless sleep of the innocent, and we made love, and he even got out of bed to turn on the light, so stirred was he by some new liveliness in me, that is to say, in the hovering, jeering presence of Leslie Beck, into whose arms he had pushed me. Sometimes I wonder about men, and their alleged desire to keep women to themselves. The urge to hand them round seems pretty strong.
But really, I had no cause to complain about Ed, and to want Leslie as well was greedy—as greedy as the infant wailing me had ever been. By coincidence, I got a letter from Alison the next morning; I have twin sisters, Alison and Aileen, younger than me by less than a year. Both are in Sydney. They spend a lot of time with their families sailing round the harbor, drinking white wine in the hot sun under grapevines. Philistines. I despise them and envy them, love them and hate them. Alison was coming home for the summer. She proposed staying with me. I put off thinking about it; I did not even speak to Ed about it. He kissed me three times before he left for work. Why?
That morning I wore jeans and flat shoes to go into work at Agee, Beck & Rowlands. Colin, who had just passed his driving test, drove me to the station, which both terrified and pacified me—but I resolved, did I not, to speak as little of the children as possible?—and at eleven I went by taxi with Leslie to the site conference, where I stood around in a hard hat taking notes. Over the last few months, the old buildings which had once housed Jocelyn Beck’s solicitors had been reduced to rubble, and behind improvised fences composed of assembled front doors of elegant proportion, many still with brass door fittings attached, dealers were groaning as they picked over shattered chandeliers and ceiling moldings, ebony floors, cracked Italian firebacks, and Dutch tiles, which in those days demolition engineers loved to destroy, not understanding that therein their greater future lay.
Of the two glass-and-steel slabs that were to replace the solid, low-slung elegance of early-Victorian London, one had already risen, to some twenty-eight skeletal stories; building work on both was behind schedule. Leslie had been called in as a troubleshooter, oil-fire fighter of the development world. Entire floors had been rented in advance to conglomerates who needed a good London address and needed it fast. Their lean, hungry, and manicured representatives were present at the meeting; they, too, brought with them young women whose function it was to record decisions on tape and in notebooks. With our bosses, we presently rose, in a kind of miner’s cage especially devised for just such use, to a wooden platform on the fourth floor, and felt for some reason privileged so to do. From here we could get a better view of the entire site. To the east, St. Paul’s tower glittered; over in the near west, the flag on Buckingham Palace fluttered to announce that the queen was actually at home today; by some trick of sound travel at this level, you could hear the lions in Regent’s Park zoo to the north. Fully blocking off the south was Leslie Beck, in his element up here: Tarzan to my Jane.
I could not see that this cluster of intent and powerful men was unduly wicked, although Ed, Vinnie, and Susan, and, t
o a lesser extent, Rosalie and Wallace, were united in the belief that everything to do with the removal of the old and its replacement by the new was of itself bad. The general supposition had been that if I worked at Agee, Beck & Rowlands, I would be associating with people both worldly and wicked, but that a few weeks of it wouldn’t do me any harm. Perhaps I had already been there too long, and my standards had already fallen, for those I encountered seemed civil, polite, and friendly; and this particular group, albeit in hard hats on top of a half-built building, seemed mainly concerned with car-parking facilities, traffic flow, population density, and glare factor. Leslie carried sets of figures in his head and stood as some kind of infallible human computer of the south, the one to whom they turned.
“Leslie, would you say...?”
“Leslie, in your experience...?”
“Mr. Beck, what are your views on...?”
Whereupon Leslie, with a kind of adroit and confidence-creating lightheartedness, would oblige with an instant and definite opinion. I felt proud of him. Wind whistled through the open girders beneath us. Whatever we were doing seemed to me good, as construction always does to those who engage in it. That it might be the wrong building in the wrong place, that what stood there before might have been okay—never mind. Putting up a building is as satisfactory to the human spirit as cooking a dinner. Cavemen hollow out the cave and scratch a drawing upon its walls; wild men of the trees build houses in their branches; swamp men put their dwellings on stilts; Eskimos carve ice into blocks and live inside them: building is as natural to men as cooking is to women. (Having uttered this swingeing piece of discriminatory gender disinformation, could I bring to your attention the fact that if you look around you in primitive parts of the world, you will see it’s women carrying bricks, chopping trees, and erecting makeshift dwellings in the street, while the men just sit and stare, zonked out by drink, drugs, or depression; but I daresay this is due to the breakdown of rural society and the oppressive nature of capitalism rather than any basic flaw in man, as opposed to woman, so forget it.) Let me just say that one-seventh of the way up that building, I had the strong impression that these gray-suited men were decent guys doing a man’s job, and the semi-naked, tattooed men who swung on the girders likewise, and it was right and proper for me to be there as a tender woman taking notes.
