by Weldon, Fay
Following my conversation with Mr. Render, I’d wondered whether I ought to call Rosalie and suggest at the very least that she take no baths with Mr. Collier. I decided against it. Their wooing was their business, not mine. I wish I could not so easily construct a perfectly adequate alternative scenario, in which Mr. Collier had electrocuted both wife and lover. The latter had been bathing together midafternoon, and Mr. Collier had rigged up the electric cable, shoved the raw end into the bathwater and so electrocuted them, dragged them out of the bath (getting a shock burn or two himself), then taken off his clothes and called the police. But if a jury hadn’t come to that conclusion, why should I?
I would give Mr. Collier the benefit of the doubt, unless it began to look as if he and Rosalie were indeed to be seriously involved, were overcoming obstacles such as how red setter would get on with Pekingese. Then I supposed it would be my duty as a friend to put the matter to her, though I didn’t look forward to it. One hates to be a wet blanket. My mind spins forward to jokes about wet electric blankets, but I suppose Rosalie would have to take it seriously.
So when I called Rosalie, I didn’t even mention Mr. Collier. In any case, Marion had been on the phone to Rosalie again, complaining about Leslie Beck’s interference with the group show, an episode which I herewith give you through Marion’s eyes.
Marion
“Marion,” said Aphra to me the morning after I slammed out of my own gallery, which is not the way anyone should treat his own property, leaving my staff to discuss love seats with Leslie Beck the egregious, Leslie Beck the creep. “Marion, I’m sorry.”
“In future,” I said, “call me Miss Loos,” but I knew she wouldn’t. She humored me, in the way the young these days humor those who are more settled in the world than they, who like to have furniture polished and a steady disposable income and their clothes taken to the cleaners. “What are you sorry about?” I asked, curiosity overcoming dignity.
The opening of the group show was to open its doors at five thirty. A couple of the artists had phoned to say they would be dropping in to see how their works were hung. Barbara was already rehanging these to advantage to save argument. Sometimes we stood firm, but today no one seemed to have the energy to do so. Let them have their own way. The painters who worried most were the ones who needed to worry; the others were sitting in the Italian sun or snoozing in their penthouse garrets—a couple of paintings in a group show wouldn’t affect their income or their reputation one way or another. A couple of leading newspapers were sending critics; this did not please me particularly. Why hadn’t they turned up at the MacIntyre? And, of course, thanks to the Life Force, Anita Beck’s painting had pride of place, and was the most expensive in the show by twenty percent, and made me extremely nervous. But I didn’t have the heart to move it. And it wasn’t any worse than Halliday’s comical goose or clumsier than Beldock’s boring fish-on-slab: let it be where Leslie thought it ought to be.
“We went to the Japanese with Leslie Beck,” said Aphra, “and he discovered he’d left his wallet at home. So I came back and took seventy quid from the petty cash. Barbara said it would be all right.”
Oh, did she?
“It must have been a good dinner,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Just bits of slimy pieces, as usual,” said Aphra, “but hardly any calories, and he was okay company.”
“I thought you said he was a creep.”
“Okay for a oldie,” she said. “And I didn’t know all that stuff about how you began in the world. I’d like to have my own gallery one day.”
“I bet you would,” I said. “So, when is he going to replace the seventy pounds? Or did he say I could take it out of the sale of the painting?”
Aphra laughed. “I was right the first time,” she said. “He is a creep. That’s exactly what he said.”
The wine for the opening turned up. I don’t try to save money on it. I see good wine as an investment. The more you spend on frills, the richer people think you are; the richer they think you are, the more likely they are to give you their money. When I lived in Leslie Beck’s basement on nothing but dribs, drabs, and handouts, cleaning up the mess of other people’s lives, I put up with second best and received second best. I was tired of it. It was like Eric and Ida switching forever to the game shows on TV, the unfunny comics, the Sunday hymn program, while the wisdom of ages flickered through on other channels. They felt at home with the shoddy. I never did.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m hard, without feeling. But I feel for Monet and Manet: I cried when Monet got ulcers over her eyes and had pads put on them by the vet and was blind for a whole ten days. It’s not that I’m incapable of emotional pain; it’s just that I prefer not to seek it out. I like to have money in the bank. I never, ever want to be in the state I was when I got pregnant by Leslie Beck.
A delivery boy carried in a couple of cases of Australian Chardonnay. I asked him to carry them downstairs to the basement, where it’s so cold you don’t have to use the fridge, and he didn’t look too pleased, but that’s what he’s paid for. While he was downstairs, his van was ticketed.
“I hope you’re pleased,” he said.
I said I wasn’t pleased at all; with any luck, at least a couple of chauffeurs would be dropping rich clients off in front of the gallery that evening, and I didn’t want some boring ticketed van cramping their style. Chauffeurs have as much right to display their skills as anyone.
“I take your point,” he said, though I was sure he did not.
He was an attractive lad—dark, fleshy, and quite witty—but I had no time for any of that today. I handed the whole problem over to Barbara.
And then Leslie Beck stood in the door.
“I’m very busy, Leslie,” I said. He handed me a wedge of ten-pound notes. They were crisp and pleasant to feel, and still slightly warm from the cash machine.
“Seven of them,” he said. “You’d better count them, you’re so full of doubt.”
What did he mean? I was full of doubt? I remembered that was Leslie’s stock-in-trade. He would make a remark about your essential nature, and in the moment when your mind stood still, wondering what he meant, feeling grateful that somebody cared, somebody noticed, in he would come for the kill. The transition from the grateful to the physical is easily made.
If I had bothered to make the delivery boy grateful (rung up his boss, said it wasn’t his fault he was ticketed, offered to pay), then pleaded some sad female necessity of my own (a sink to unblock, a lonely evening), he would have been over at my place in a trice, if only to get back at the difficult, beautiful bitch and then dump her, and talk about it; but who wants such adventures? Sometimes I do; not often. It’s just good to know you can have them if you want.
Leslie Beck was staring at me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You could if you wanted, but you don’t. You were always like that. The things you’ve missed in life.”
I had the strong impression he was here to make trouble, to stir things up, and I was almost afraid.
“You should have come out to dinner with us,” he said.
“I was tired.”
“Barbara didn’t get home till three,” he said. “And she seems okay. She came back to Rothwell Gardens to look at Anita’s paintings. Has she talked to you about them?”
“She hasn’t had time,” I said. “Leslie, I have to get on,” and I walked off into the stockroom before he could read any more of my thoughts, which were, as he well knew, in the language of the cheap novels Ida used to read very occasionally, in turmoil.
Nora
And there, in turmoil, reader, we will leave Marion’s ego, and get back to mine.
To tell or not to tell? This is the stuff of which the advice columns are made, and just because it is the advice column of a lowbrow women’s magazine is no reason to believe the problem does not exist. Why, we could even elevate the problem a little—transpose it to the masculine realm. Just suppose I�
��m Mark (Did you notice that, reader? Now I’m some young guy called Mark), and I’m married to Sue, and our best friends are Alan, married to Ellen, and our other friends are Helen and Peter, and Sue tells me Ellen is having an affair with Peter. So I say to Sue, Wife, I don’t want to know any of that, don’t tell me, it’s just rumor, and if we all look the other way it will simply fade away; Alan will be none the wiser, or Helen. But then I hear the scandal from another source, from mere acquaintances, and merer colleagues, and it appears that everyone knows except Alan, who is my good friend, and now all men pity him and in their hearts even deride him. And it’s obvious that sooner or later Alan must find out—for someone’s bound to tell Helen, and Helen will be on the phone to Alan, and Alan will feel the shock of his wife’s deception, and, worse, the way his friends have betrayed him by not telling him. What do I do? Tell Alan now? Betray Ellen, whom I like? Who is my wife’s best friend? In theory I am supposed to have a word with Ellen, or persuade Sue to do so—she has, anyway, and it’s made no difference—and ask her to desist for Alan’s sake. Of course, Ellen won’t do any such thing. She’ll be outraged. Her business; what’s it to do with me? But it has everything to do with me. Marriages are held in common. You can’t get away with such bad behavior and upset no one.
Illicit lovers always believe that they are invisible, but of course they are not, nor truly want to be. They are seen (like Mrs. Sonia Collier and her lover) together in parked cars, or holding hands in unlikely restaurants, or in corners of public gardens, or coming out of hotels in their own neighborhood, and word gets round, even in big cities, where everyone likes to think they are anonymous but actually, within the wider context, have created villages of their own. Look at the zip codes of the Christmas cards you send out—after a year or two in a certain district, the great majority will be going only so far as just around the corner.
Mostly we do nothing, for who wants to be the bearer of bad news, the wrecker of domestic peace, the stirrer up of unnecessary strife? We the friends stay silent, and the marriage splits, the couple part. We the friends then take sides, go with one or the other—not necessarily the innocent, because it’s the innocent who weep and are dreary; the guilty have a bright new life, a new energy to bring home. Even so, if you ask one, you can’t ask the other, for fear of embarrassment. And presently the group begins to feel bad, and blame gets apportioned, and there’s too much tension about who said what to whom, and before you know it, the group’s split apart. Individual friendships within the group seldom stand the strain. And Alan, the innocent victim for whom you suffered in silence, says to you, “Mark, you bastard, you knew and you didn’t tell me. What kind of friend are you?” And he’s right.
That’s enough of being Mark, who has no real way out of his predicament, and must suffer insult and contumely for no fault of his own. I’ll return to my own, female assessment of the situation.
Ellen slept with Peter one night and got a taste for it, and so that particular valuable, life-enhancing little nexus of friendship which surrounds the two of them gets unknotted, and the frayed strands lie around in disarray until some vigorous, undaunted couple spies the wreckage, and picks up the choicest pieces, and knits them into some other basic exercise in group social intercourse; and in the end, the Marks and Sues, Ellens and Peters, Alans—and who? Shall we give him someone exotic? Adeline!—Alans and Adelines are sitting round other people’s dinner tables, communing with a new set of familiar faces. But something’s lost. I don’t think, statistically speaking, Helen will find a new partner for some time: whom one man rejects, another rejects, too, especially if the slur is fresh—
“Are you insane?” asks Rosalie, incensed. I was on the phone to her again, quite carried away. “You’re back somewhere in the past. The world is not arranged in couples anymore. Giving dinner parties is not the center of life, nor is going off with other couples to share some chalet in the sun. People have friends; they get by one way or another. The loss of a husband is personal, not social. Life without Wallace is freer and wider than life with Wallace, no offense to him.”
“Anyway, he’ll be back,” I say, automatically. But it’s been eighteen months, without even knowing whether to grieve or not. And I suppose it has indeed been “terrible” for everyone, but Wallace was away a lot before hauling out for good, and there was a sense in which for months every year anyway Rosalie was married in name only, and now we just have a lengthy extension of those months. Besides, I don’t feel Wallace is dead. I am not sensible of it. When I think of people who have died I am conscious of a kind of space in the air their shape, a blanking out in existence, a hollow through which they vanished; I don’t feel that with Wallace, no matter what reason says. His thin, angular body, his Adam’s apple, his craggy face, the greenish pullovers he wore, always slightly too tight (did he buy them that way, or was it Rosalie’s habit to use too hot a wash?), still seem to me to have his rightful corporeal existence. And how, of all people, could Wallace cease? The way he would turn his eager, concentrated face if anyone said anything interesting, the bright abstraction of his gaze—he seemed so much less rooted in his physical being than did, say, Leslie Beck, as to be all air and fire, and, being so little rooted in the flesh, by rights should be immortal. The sensualists of the world deserve to die young—and, of course, often do, they being the smokers, the drinkers, the fornicators. The Wallace Hayters ought to outlast us. The older I get, the more I appreciate Wallace.
And what am I going to say to Rosalie about Mr. Collier? Because I begin to see something must be said. Simply, “Guess what I found out about my boss the other day?” Well, that would do. But it will sound as if I want to spoil something—chomp up happiness and spew it out; wreck her world with tales of murder and mayhem; bring the brides-in-the-bath syndrome lapping at her front door. Step out of line, sister, and the ghouls will get you! Stop being Penelope to Wallace’s Ulysses, and see what happens. Cease your weaving, leave the loom; see, the mirror cracks from side to side, and you lie jerking and dying from the current on the bathroom floor.
“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying Wallace will be back,” said Rosalie briskly. “There was a time when it helped, but that time is past. And why these long silences? What are you trying to tell me, Nora?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Good,” said Rosalie, “because I’ve just had Marion on the phone yet again, and I think she is falling in love with Leslie Beck.”
“That is insane,” I said.
“She’s jealous of her own staff.”
“Leslie Beck was good at that,” I said. “Always, if only by implication, holding the existence of other women over the head. If you don’t, such was the undercurrent message of the Life Force, others will. Others are after the magnificent dong; they’ll race you to it. There are more of you than there are of me, says Leslie Beck. What a privilege to have the light of my attention turn upon you. But Marion’s too sensible to fall for it.”
“Look,” said Rosalie, “we were all too sensible to fall for whatever it was, but we did. I want to know more about your affair with Leslie Beck; come round this evening and tell me about it.”
“It’s a secret,” I reply, quite shocked.
“Don’t make me laugh,” said Rosalie, “we all knew and we never told.”
“I thought you only half knew. How could you possibly really know?”
“You looked so pretty,” my friend said. “Kind of wild-eyed and excitable. And you overcooked everything, which wasn’t like you—sloppy pasta and watery vegetables. You were mooning about, for once, instead of trying to be like Susan, and doing everything perfectly and precisely.”
“But Ed never knew?” I was terrified.
“I don’t think so,” said Rosalie. “He just thought having a job was good for you.”
“I never said anything,” I defended myself.
“Perhaps Leslie did,” said Rosalie. “Didn’t you think of that?”
Outrage! I was eaten up with ang
er, and yet I was pleased. When you’re with a man like Leslie Beck, who, however he complains about his marriage, has yet a wife and chose her and sticks by her, and you acknowledge that and with it your status as concubine, there are unwritten rules. The powerful—the married man who does not care what his wife feels—should not betray the powerless: that is to say, me, the hopelessly in love who yet, for her children’s, and, indeed, her husband’s, sake, must keep the marriage going.
Can you imagine me, Nora, the neat, clean, competent, straight little thoughtful sun-sign Virgo, married to sinister, vulgar, businessman, con man, sting-in-the-tail, sun-sign Scorpio? It was out of the question. I didn’t want to be married to him. I just wanted to be forever on a wooden platform with Leslie Beck, poised halfway between heaven and hell, drawing down blessings into a half-built multistory office building.
I went round and told Rosalie all about it. I left Ed watching a documentary on chimpanzees.
“It’s very interesting,” he tempted me, and usually it is the most pleasurable part of the day, and I’m not knocking it, to sit quietly with a husband by the fire, together on a sofa, just watching television. It is a wonderful thing to have (I will not say a husband, pace Rosalie) someone who wishes to share an experience with you, a sofa, and television, and peace to watch it in. But it isn’t enough. More! More! We are greedy for more. What we have is of no importance. What we don’t have consumes our attention.
“Poor Rosalie,” I said. “She’s feeling low. Of course, she could come round here—”
“I’d have to find my shoes,” said Ed, though he’s fond enough of Rosalie, “and do up my belt, and there’s not enough wine for all of us. You go.”
