by Weldon, Fay
A wind got up; the meeting took to the workmen’s lifts and reconvened in the site office. A girl served coffee from a vending machine. I got mine last, I noticed. The man I took to be a senior planning official from the Ministry of Works and was down on my “in attendance” list as Mr. D. Alterwood, dropped his official manner and said to my boss, “Well, Leslie, and how’s Anita?”
And Leslie replied, “Anita? Living the life of Riley. A house to run, a man to love, a party to go to, a baby on the way, what else can a girl want? You’ll be a grandfather soon,” and I remembered that Anita’s maiden name was Alterwood, and now understood the marriage rather better than I had, and, moreover, thought I would keep it to myself. Poor Anita! In return for her husband’s favors I would forgo even the pleasure of going home and saying to Ed, Rosalie, Susan, et al., “Leslie married Anita to get on in the world. All that stuff about the love of his life is nonsense,” so that when thereafter Leslie poured the wine and Anita brought on her tureen, we, her guests, would silently contemplate the manner of her existence, and pity her the more. Married to Leslie Beck because her father, risen by fouler means than fair from the back street where he was born, was on some planning committee somewhere, could pull a string or two and make a local authority dance nicely to his vulgar tune! Once the route to riches was the merchant’s ship, or the camel on the silk route, or the cartful of slaves, or the iron foundry belching smoke into the air; for the last fifty years, as the cities of the world have redefined themselves, sent their steel spires and glass façades shooting up into the sky, instead of huddling low against weather and the god of battles, the secret has been “permission to build,” and women are married for it, and men die for it.
I did not think worse of Leslie Beck because he had married Anita for her dowry. I merely felt less guilty about what he and I were clearly going to do.
I had always marveled at his ruthlessness, the ease with which he had disposed of Jocelyn. And, seeing no way in which I could be useful to him, assumed in him a selfless passion for me.
I was quite insane: out of context, in my little yellow hard hat and reporter’s spiral notebook, my husband out of mind, my children thrust into some corner of it where their little piping voices could not be heard.
Leslie Beck the magnificent. How could any of us ever forget what Marion Loos had told us, in the days when she was skittish, when she lived in Jocelyn Beck’s basement with the cockroaches and the spore of the dry-rot fungus, and babysat for Hope and Serena, and went daily to the Courtauld the better to appreciate and assess the creative history of mankind, and went from house to house of a weekend, to Rosalie’s and Susan’s and mine, cleaning, washing up, walking children, earning the small sums which kept her fed and clothed, part friend, part companion, part servant, how she brought us a tale of Leslie Beck’s cock, or dong, or dick, or willy, or whatever awed, affectionate, familiar, or derisory word you choose to call it by: the thing which goes ahead, in any case, and stops men and women from being all spirit, all idea, all art appreciation, rooted and thwarted as they are in the entrancements and necessities of the flesh.
In other words, Marion opened the bathroom door one day and saw Leslie Beck erect and alone, his thing mottled and, to her mind, enormous, like the giant carved into the chalk hills of Cerne Abbas in Dorset. She closed the door quickly, but the sight was seared into her eyeballs and put her (she said) off sex forever. “If that thing inside you, in and out, in and out,” said Marion Loos, of the large eyes, slender legs, and fastidious nature, “is what it’s all about, I’d rather do without.” She was just too picky, we all said, at the time and often since, for her own good.
And as for Marion, even while she worked for us, she felt superior to us. We were all flesh and hot dinners, baby poppers, nest builders. Our men had dongs of conventional size, and lived within the rather wide norm of conventional existence; but still were not to Marion’s taste; and just as well. Our beds were filled with a familiar, smelly warmth; we swelled up and turned over and gave birth and sank down again, and leapt out of bed to nurture, nourish, and keep the dirt at bay, and fell in again gratefully—while Marion gazed at some medieval Virgin plus Child, and picked up a notion that a visitation by the Holy Ghost would be okay, and that you’d know it was Him because of the one dozen red roses He’d offer you first. I think she told us this to trouble us, and so it did.
“Come with me, Nora,” said Leslie Beck to me that very day. “I have a few more notes to make,” and we ascended once more by the workman’s lift to the fourth floor, one-seventh of the way up a skeletal building.
Mr. Collier has just been over to my desk. He said, “What are you writing, Nora?” and I replied, “A fictionalized biographical sketch, Mr. Collier,” rather hoping he would suggest this was no way to spend the time he paid me to spend, but all he said was, “Well, be kind to yourself,” which I thought was an interesting thing to say, and went away. He is, apparently, taking Rosalie out to dinner. I hope he does not see marriage to Rosalie as some kind of meal ticket when his business fails, as it must surely do; if so, he will be disappointed. Rosalie’s future is insecure; it is she who needs the meal ticket. And, besides, Wallace might turn up at the wedding.
I know that it is leaping ahead to envisage marriage between them: one pub lunch and one dinner invitation don’t add up to a wedding, but it is the kind of thing that happens. Rosalie was not meant to live happily and fatly alone; she was born to sudden events, and as you are born, so you continue. I am proposing no faith in astrology here, merely observing that certain natures do seem to be predisposed to certain patterns of life. The way it goes when you’re a child, that way it continues. If you’re the kind of person who is rescued in the nick of time, you can expect it at fifty as well as at twelve. We play the cards of life a certain way, albeit unconsciously; we can acquire skill in handling them, of course we can, but mostly it just comes naturally, and the most important factor is the hand we are originally dealt: it is our fate pattern, like it or not.
So it seems safe for me to say that Rosalie is not the kind of person who lives alone. Sudden rescue comes, but often with a sting in its tail. Rosalie’s mother, widowed, finds and marries the perfect stepfather, but he dies of a heart attack on moving day. Wallace comes home from Everest but has frostbite. Jocelyn turns up to say Catharine looks like Wallace, but Leslie never acknowledges his child. Wallace doesn’t return; the insurance pays up—but there’s a time limit somewhere to spoil it. I think Rosalie can expect to marry Mr. Collier, and quite precipitately, but I also think there will be a sting in the tail. We’ll see. I hope this time it’s just a little one. A life of strange events, separated by long stretches of peaceful boredom, that’s how I see Rosalie’s life.
Leslie Beck was the kind of person, you could also safely say, who tended to land on his feet.
Why is it that neither Rosalie nor myself, on hearing that Leslie Beck is a widower, has displayed any apparent desire to reestablish a relationship with him, find out how his dong is doing? Perhaps he’s now too old to be interesting. Perhaps the only point to him was that he was married to someone else—that the one-seventh of him that we found so important was forbidden.
Okay, there I was with Leslie on the wooden lookout platform on the fourth floor of what is now Broadcaster House. The rest of the party had gone. Ropes and pulleys all around us; a crane moving high above; buckets of wet, slopping concrete being hauled up and down on either side of us; tattooed men with bare muscled chests passing in and out of our field of vision, walking deftly on girders overheard, swarming like monkeys on scaffolding, vanishing again. The wind was strong and noisy; the day, hot and dusty; the wooden floor of the platform, splintery. It seemed both the brightest and the most unprivate place. I said as much to Leslie.
“Unlike the grave,” he said. “The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.”
Well, even electrical engineers occasionally get to hear a little poetry. He spoke it awk
wardly. I was touched.
“My favorite place,” he said. “You’ll remember it fondly.”
“I suffer from vertigo,” I said. “I can’t bear to look down. I get dizzy.”
“Then don’t look down,” he said, taking off my clothes, piece by piece, until I stood naked except for my hard hat, conscious of space around, below, above, the sound of hammering, metal on metal, and the rise and fall of sirens below, and the sting of wind and dust against my skin.
He weighted my clothes down with a stray scaffolding pole. “In case the wind tries to steal them,” he said. I was reassured. He meant me to survive. He had red curly hair thick on his chest; his shoulders and arms were muscled and glossy. He stood in his natural state in his natural place: he was meant to poise between heaven and earth; he had elevated me and I was honored. The dimension of his prick was neither here nor there—as tall as a tree, as thick as a pole; who cares. I only ever told you its measurements to confine him in my mind, define him, and so lessen him, because I am a practical person and don’t like to suffer from loss any more than anyone else; and I need to stand up to the Life Force and confine it in inches, give it a practical, conceivable measurement. Leslie Beck’s laughable Life Force. If I laugh, it’s only to get through my days with Ed.
He leaned me against the scaffold barrier that untrustworthily ringed the platform.
“Supposing it gives?” I asked.
“It won’t,” he said. “Men trust their lives to these every day.”
And it didn’t give, and I wouldn’t have cared if it did. Little Nora, married to Ed. Happily, too. Who’d have wanted to be married to Leslie, falling from heights and not caring? But I think Leslie Beck was a very different man to his wives. Jocelyn refused to respond to him—though this may have been mere insanity. And Anita, once married, seemed to find little pleasure in him, or in anything. Or perhaps he married them because they took no pleasure in him: sex and marriage, in some men’s heads, simply don’t go together.
I will have to make friends again with Susan; we will have to make some common sense of the past. It seems important.
I got splinters in my back, my knees. He wore no medallion; perhaps Anita had made him take it off. A sea gull landed on the barrier and flew away, shrieking with what sounded like mirth, as the master species took its pleasure.
“Suppose someone comes,” I remember me saying, and I remember him laughing. “All the better,” he said. “Better luck for a building, this, than anything else. Luckier than dead cats in the foundations, or bishops’ blessings—better than anything.”
I asked him how buildings could have luck. He said they were as prone to it as any human being. Some were lucky, some weren’t. Yes, he thought on the whole he was lucky, but hard work went into it. If you didn’t look after yourself, who else would. He asked me kindly to stop talking now.
I didn’t think through to the future at all; nor, I think, did he. The Life Force is not about futures; it is all here and now. Leslie Beck could plan a building, plan a marriage, plan a site for a seduction, and achieve his plan simply because he didn’t worry about the consequences. He looked ahead, but never too far ahead. Got as far as his blue heaven, never to the blackness of outer space beyond. He’d forget that if he married Anita he’d get planning permission, okay, but would have to put up with her cooking forever; he’d get into my panties now and forget he’d have to face me in the office, at the dinner table, rely on my discretion, put himself in my power. Leslie Beck schemed, but Leslie Beck was rash.
“Get into my panties,” I said, but I was trying to diminish him. It wasn’t like that. It was something more. I’ll swear it was.
When at last he helped me to my feet, he went on his knees and embraced me, his head lying against my crotch. I don’t forget that. I thought then that Leslie Beck the magnificent, Leslie Beck the wicked, Leslie Beck the life liar understood the nature of the universe, and what is important in it, more than any other man I’d ever known. And do not think my knowledge of men is confined to Ed and Leslie Beck. It is not.
Leslie Beck felt it was his duty to get on in the world. His aspiration was to be ruthless: he would cheat and stamp upon and ruin others to do it. He was a fool, he had no taste, he would swim around out of his depth and be laughed at; but his one great attribute he used, and used it well. God will forgive him.
Mr. Render came toward me with our standard specification sheet relating to redecoration clauses in leasing contracts. Three coats of paint was becoming two coats of paint. By such thin, grudging margins did the balance swing in favor of the emptor rather than the vendor. So many wanted to sell; so few wanted to buy. No one wanted to develop anything. Everyone wanted just to go back home and hide. Pull down an old building—a great howl of protest arose. Put up a new one—it stood empty. Leslie Beck must be having a hard time of it. Poor Leslie Beck. Less magnificent than before, no doubt; obliged to sell off his dead wife’s paintings, scrape together a few thousand somehow. I’d heard of property developers lately who’d gone bankrupt—had to sell the family home, the Porsche, the lawn mower for a knockdown price; distribute wife and children among relatives and take jobs as waiters or bus drivers. (I didn’t hear tell that they now lived off the state, mind you. An energetic man remains energetic, even in myth.) Others who were made ordinarily and more painfully redundant, as small firms, hitherto considered safe, went out of business, who had no Porsche to sell, no rich relatives to pick up the pieces, seemed to get less attention than those who suddenly moved from riches to rags; but that’s the way of the world. Even in adversity, those who had most continue to get most, if only in terms of attention.
I said to Mr. Render that I would attend to it. I remarked on how, at least these days, Accord Realtors didn’t have to stay open late, to cope with the flood of business after other offices had closed, or open early to cater to the commuters, and were eager either to profit by a hysterically rising property market or to get into the market quick. Those were the days when no sooner did we erect a For Sale sign outside a property than we had to send someone out to slap a Sold sign on it. But in those days I got no writing done. I do now.
“At least,” I said, “nowadays you and Mr. Collier can get to see something of your families.”
I wished to check out whether Mr. Collier was married. He had told Rosalie he was not, but you never knew. I did it clumsily.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr. Render. “Your charming friend is quite safe. Mr. Collier’s wife died two years ago. Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”
“No,” I replied, rather startled. What manner of wife gets her name into the papers simply by dying?
“It’s why we still have trouble getting staff,” said Mr. Render, “or the kind of staff we need. At any rate, he is free to marry again, and I am sure he is anxious to. He and Sonia had no children, but he has a Pekingese who is lonely and needs a proper home.”
I searched his face for irony and found none, and was, as so often nowadays, ashamed of myself, this time for assuming that Mr. Render—walking swiftly and desperately on soft carpets between filing cabinet, computer monitor, desk, and telephone, dealing politely both with desperate vendor and teasing, flirting, possible prospective purchaser—was a gray man with a gray spirit. He was not.
“My friend has a red setter her husband left behind,” I said. “I am not sure the two breeds will get on,” and it was his turn to search my face for irony and find none.
I sent out a circular offering bargain deals in newly built houses, at a fixed mortgage rate, complete with custom-built kitchens—twenty-percent discount if purchased within three months. I knew there would be no takers.
Sonia Collier, I thought. Sonia Collier? And I remembered Ed saying once at breakfast, “Why is it that in that particular stratum of society, racehorse owners and real estate agents, and smart restaurateurs, people who live off froth and other people’s gullibility, the sippers of gin and tonic by swimming pools, are always conspiring to do o
ne another in?” And I looked over his shoulder at the headline in the newspaper, and it said, in twenty-point bold, “Husband in Bath Case Goes Free,” and beneath it, in fourteen-point, “Sonia Collier reaped what she sowed, says coroner,” and he read the passage aloud to me.
Of course. That Sonia Collier. The very Sonia Collier who had conspired with her lawyer lover to murder her husband. The lover, naked, had crept up upon the husband in the bath and plunged into the water a live power cable rigged up to the electric mains. But the bath was of old-fashioned cast iron, not molded in plastic, and hadn’t been grounded as it should have been; a massive electric surge found its way through the wet tiled floor and back up through the lover’s bare wet feet and burned out his already racing heart. He fell jerking and shuddering to the ground; Sonia Collier, screaming, trying to embrace him, caught the end of the power cable, still vibrantly alive, and met her death as well. Mr. Collier received nasty burns but quickly recovered. Or such, at least, was Mr. Collier’s story. Three naked people, two male, one female, one of each dead, and a live electric cable in a bathroom in the middle of the afternoon could have many explanations, not necessarily the one Mr. Collier gave. The coroner’s jury deliberated for some hours but eventually seemed to accept his version and passed a verdict of accidental death. Sonia Collier was an adulterous wife, and a childless one; her motive for murder was her desire to lay possessive hands on her husband’s beautiful mock-Tudor house; her lover was under her thumb. No one liked her—only, it seemed, her husband. Ed had quoted him over breakfast: “Poor Sonia. I blame the property boom. I was too busy to pay her the attention she deserved.” As a statement, it made Ed laugh, but I thought it was rather a nice thing to say, in the circumstances.
