by Weldon, Fay
And I went. Rosalie has one of those gas fires that look like a real log fire if you haven’t been round to the gas showrooms and seen them and know how much they are and how expensive to run. Since Wallace went, she has it on most of the time. She leaves lights on. Her fridge is so full of food the bits at the back grow stale and hard and jammed together unnoticed and have to be thrown out. She is wasteful. She has taken down from the wall Wallace’s many photographs of mountain crags and has put up painted mirrors instead, and moved out the sensible filing cabinets and put squashy chairs in their place, and changed the carpets from patterned red to totally impractical cream, as if with Wallace she had a surfeit of practicality and frugality, lived too long in a perpetual cold bath of English common sense, and now, finally, had turned the hot tap on. And I paced and talked and told.
“I suppose the truth was,” I said, “Leslie had nothing to lose. He liked to possess women, he liked to have a hold over them, he laid claim to you at the foot of a cliff; but he didn’t want to upset his marriage, or at least not until it suited him, so once he had you, that was that. And he gave as much pleasure as he got.”
“Yes,” said Rosalie.
“And he kept me going for months, not because he loved me but so I’d go on working for him all through the summer—August and September as well as July.”
“You underrate yourself,” said Rosalie.
“It was a wonderful summer,” I said. “I don’t care what his motives were. I just don’t delude myself he had no motives, and I want you to know that. I don’t want to claim any great love between us.”
“You never claim anything,” said Rosalie. “That’s your trouble. That’s why you’ve reached the age you have and you’re living down a suburban back street, watching telly with your husband, working part-time for a failing estate agent. But the market will pick up.”
“Who says? Mr. Collier?”
“Sandy. He’s got a lovely home, Nora, if you like that kind of thing, which I think I do. It’s detached, in half an acre, with a drive, Tudor beams, carriage lights and a porch, and inglenooks and a custom kitchen.”
“Tiled bathroom floor?” I asked.
She looked surprised.
“We didn’t get as far as the bathroom,” she said. “That’s upstairs. There’s a downstairs loo, so why would I? We’re only at drinks-before-the-show stage. He behaves very correctly.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“He’s civilized and pleasant. Apart from saying I bring unconventionally into his life, and he feels a terrific sense of liberation with me, I have as yet no indication whether he just wants companionship, or companionship leading to something deeper, as they say in the lonely-hearts ads. He’s a widower.”
“How did his wife die?”
“He’ll tell me in his own good time. You’re changing the subject, Nora. We were talking about the summer you screwed Leslie Beck and cheated on Ed and went on talking to Anita Beck over the dinner table, and getting a kick from it.”
“I’m ashamed of myself,” I said.
Well, I was and I wasn’t. In these circumstances you build up a set of defenses, which enable you to live with yourself. Ed not caring enough, the peculiar idea that if you’re discovered it will somehow improve your marriage—a notion encouraged by articles in women’s magazines headed “How the Affair Enriched Our Lives,” in which the deceived husbands or wives, discovering the existence of a rival, wonder what they’ve done wrong and set about remedying it forthwith. What, not romantic enough for you? Why, then, dearest, here’s a dozen red roses. Neglected you? My darling, let’s take a holiday! In this scenario Ed would realize he’d hurt me by not caring, not understanding that I was still attractive to other men. A likely tale!
And so on and so forth. Boring, boring. And Anita was wrong for Leslie. Poor Leslie! What a narrowing of life’s possibilities, an insult to the cosmic principle, to doom Leslie to only Anita. Boring, boring. What it was really about was trouble, destructiveness, self-pity; the vengeance I longed to take against my mother, creator of the hated siblings, by stealing my father from her; and in my mind, Leslie Beck, the vast-penised one, stood for my father, and Anita, the boring pregnant one, my mother. Of course. How does that version grab you? Meanwhile, the real world went on.
Anita was pregnant with Polly, who turned out as dreary as Hope and Serena. How horrible and dismissive I am to Leslie’s children—had you noticed?—except the illicit ones, whom I deign to appreciate. Catharine and Amanda. Why do you think that is, reader? It has to do with my mother’s children (other than me) by my father: my perfectly pleasant twin sisters, my amiable brother, whom I also despise for no reason at all. I went to a Kleinian therapist for a time, but she told me to leave Ed, or that’s what I heard her say, so I left. Her, that is, not Ed. But some of it seemed valid enough and stuck.
Female reader, I warn you, do not take into your home as your friend the kind of woman who hates her mother and loves her father: she’ll be after your husband in a trice. Male reader, reverse the sexes in the above. I’m a mild case of mother-hate. When it came to it, I accepted the role of Leslie’s concubine; I didn’t fight and struggle to oust the original wife, or try to get pregnant. I wasn’t the kind who calls up on the phone and listens to the voice, his or hers, and hangs up.
And don’t you believe those wrong-number calls when you pick up the phone and it goes dead. They’re not wrong numbers. It’s the passions and envies of the outside world, battering ghosts at the domestic door, shocking the phone into life—bringg, bring-g-g, bring-g-g—trying to get in, and what’s the betting you’ve brought it on yourself?
“Insane,” says Rosalie. “Insane!”
Leslie Beck cornered me on stairs and under them, after office hours and before them, in muddy rivulets at the bottom of deep, deep excavations, in on-site Portakabins tottering halfway up hillsides, in my home while Ed was taking Richard to have his wisdom teeth out, in the marital bedroom while Anita was in hospital with a threatened miscarriage. And I allowed myself to be cornered—in fact, put myself in the way of his cornerings. I cannot see a hard hat or pass a building site to this day without a lurch of the heart, although my feelings for Leslie Beck were, when it came to it, so little to do with the heart. It is merely in recollection that I have so promoted them.
True to Leslie Beck’s original confining of our relationship, we discussed neither our past nor our future, nor what I might feel toward him or he toward me. It had the effect of focusing the present quite miraculously, so that every coupling became a new and sudden beginning. I daresay he knew what he was doing.
“Did Anita lose the baby?” asks Rosalie.
“Who cares?” I say.
“I expect she cared,” says Rosalie, snottily.
“What about you, then?” I ask. “Poor Jocelyn. What a family outing you gave her to treasure up in memory. A fine beach trip you gave her, oh yes.”
“She never knew.”
“What makes you think Leslie didn’t tell her?”
That silences her. I continue.
Once I said to Leslie, Leslie I said, wouldn’t it be nice to do this somewhere ordinary and proper, somewhere comfortable, both physically and emotionally, somewhere we’re not going to fall off a ledge, smother in mud, or be disturbed by our spouses? Somewhere which doesn’t have danger and uncertainty as a built-in punishment factor? Somewhere tranquil?
And all he said was, “If you don’t like it, say so. We don’t have to do this at all,” so I shut up.
“What did you talk about?” Rosalie asks.
“Nothing in particular,” I say. “The same kind of silly conversation you had with him on the beach. For example, does the moon always rise in the same place; when the clocks go back do you gain an hour or lose an hour of life; is the tide coming in or going out? Ed talked about ideas, concepts. Ed would pause in the middle of lovemaking to consider Socrates on the conflict between love and duty; Leslie applied himself with silent concentratio
n to the task of sex. Leslie and I exchanged information about the material world and occasionally reflected on its ironies, but that was all. Speech did not play a large part in his life.”
“Had it occurred to you,” says Rosalie, “that screwing you was his revenge on Ed the intellectual? That Leslie Beck felt inadequate when we talked about political details he couldn’t follow, books he hadn’t read, plays he’d never heard of? So what, he’d say; so I don’t run my own telly program like Wallace, so I don’t publish books like Ed, or write them like Vinnie, so I’m a philistine. But I can have your wives at will and make money. Sneer at me if you dare.”
“I don’t want to think it was because of anything,” I say. “I think it was for itself; just for his body and my body, between us acting out the urge to make the perfect baby—my competence, his energy—except I was on the pill, so it didn’t happen, so nature got bored and suggested to both of us to ‘try again.’ Leslie split first—that is to say, so offended me that I never wanted to speak to him again.”
It was a Thursday evening at the end of August. We were at 12 Rothwell Gardens. Anita was out of hospital, the baby saved; she had gone to her parents’ house to be looked after properly. She’d been home for one day between hospital and family. During that day she’d washed our dirty glasses and emptied the ashtrays—I smoked in those days; so did Leslie, but not Anita—and changed our sheets. Not knowing that they were “ours.” They could just as well have been “theirs.” Did she know of my existence? I don’t think so. I hope not.
“Perhaps she went to her mother so as not to be upset?” says Rosalie. “Perhaps being upset was what made her almost miscarry. Perhaps she had to make a judgment: Do I go home from hospital and suffer the misery of knowing Leslie’s with Nora? Do I go home and endure the lesser suffering of just letting him get on with it, knowing the baby’s life depends on my not allowing myself to be upset?”
“I hope not,” I say. “I hope not,” and begin to cry.
“That’s better,” says Rosalie.
“Hypocrite,” I say.
Anita had dressed the marital bed with her best white cotton sheets with frills, the kind you have to iron, the kind no sensible person has. The pillows were the square French kind. The bed itself was brass, high off the ground, the metal smoothly and gracefully worked. There were tall windows with kind of beige velvet curtains, and a rather elegant yellow button-backed chair, and that kind of smudgy dun-colored wallpaper that was fashionable at the time, and a very pretty dressing table with one of those awful Victorian silver-backed brush, comb, and mirror sets that had probably been her great-grandmother’s most valuable possession—they used to serve as popular silver wedding presents, once upon a time. The room would make a good painting—yes, I can see that: textures, fabrics, and colors all alive and united. Anita’s bedroom was surprising. She was so plain and unexotic in herself, I wondered if she had copied it from a painting seen in some gallery on a school trip, or reproduced in a magazine. I had no idea at the time, of course, that she could paint herself, or had any interest in it. Leslie mentioned once to me that she’d been to art school before being sent off to secretarial college; her father could not abide fancy ways. Of the coming baby all Leslie had to say was this: “What’s the betting it’s another girl. My wives are incapable of begetting boys.” In those days everyone thought the mother dictated the sex of the baby; I thought so myself, and despised Anita for not having the gumption to give Leslie Beck the boy he deserved, since that was the gender he wanted. Personally, as the mother of boys, I always longed for a girl.
“His wives had daughters; his mistresses had boys,” says Rosalie.
“What do we make of that?”
Married to Leslie Beck. Of course I wanted it. But on, on.
On Anita’s white bed, careless of its fine fabric, pounded this rampaging smelly naked monster with curly red hair, this muscled goat of a husband, straddling a little mewling creature who turned out to be me, thin thighs thrust apart by Leslie Beck’s great, engorged, and forever unsatisfied self. “I can’t get no satisfaction”—remember the Stones’ song? Always, always satisfied in the flesh; never, never in the spirit. Poor Leslie. He’d altered the angle of the dressing-table mirror so it reflected the bed. But a man can have the biggest organ in the world, and thrust and thrust, and forever survey and search the soft and convoluted foldings of female flesh, in and out, in and out, and still not find what he’s looking for. Any more than I was satisfied, than a thousand orgasms would have satisfied me: each could stop the clock for a moment, suspend time, unite me to the universe, block out the mind, expand the spirit, exhaust the will. But strength and sanity return. I have stopped; the clock has not: two hours nearer death, and mortality is as real as ever. Time to leave, to go home to Ed, to shower, to fall into that legal, dutiful, comforting bed, made fresher and more interesting by what had gone before. We had a percale duvet set in our house—easy-care, in appropriate pastels—and oblong pillows of the unexotic kind.
When I got to the office the next day, wearing my nice new earrings and a garter belt that gripped me round my waist and kept me aware of my body, kept me on my exotic toes, as it were, Leslie was already there, hovering at my desk.
“Nora,” he said, “this is your last week, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” I said, taken aback.
“Chloe’s home from vacation this weekend,” said Leslie Beck, “so the firm’s back to normal. But we’ve all been so grateful for your helping out. I think Mr. Agee wants to give you some kind of bonus. It will certainly have my recommendation.”
I could have gone three ways. I could have screamed and wept and had a broken heart. I could have cut up his clothes, as Jocelyn did. I could have gone to my mother, in essence, as Anita once or twice went to hers—that is to say, gone home and suffered in silence, self-esteem shattered. But I chose the third option—or, rather, it chose me. I simply fell out of love with Leslie Beck there and then.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I’ll bother to work my notice out. I’ll go now.”
“You can’t leave us in the lurch like this,” he said.
“I can,” I said, and I did. I went straight home, burned my garter belt and all my defiled panties in the anthracite stove, and said to Ed when he came home, “Ed, I’m not working for Leslie anymore. He keeps chasing me round the office desk. It isn’t right; his wife’s pregnant. He is not a nice man, and I am never asking him to dinner again, and if he asks us, I’m sorry, we can’t, we’re busy.”
“I wish you’d decided this earlier,” said Ed. “We could have managed a holiday,” and I knew I was home and safe.
There was no punishment. No baby, no social disease, no discovery, no divorce, no ostracizing, no shame, no self-hatred; only one glorious nervy summer and one holiday deferred. We went in September.
When I got home from Rosalie’s, after telling her the full tale of Leslie Beck and myself, it was one in the morning and the kitchen light was still on. I was instantly anxious. Ed had found out. I had spoken to Rosalie, and he had somehow overheard. My thoughts had traveled down Dalrymple Street, across Gossamer Road, back up Hogtie Lane and home, been absorbed by some kind of spousely osmosis, and Ed was waiting up to kill me.
I went straight to the bedroom. Ed was safely in bed and asleep. The episode was in the past. Ed looks very good when he is asleep: calm and peaceful Richmond living; the gentle, regular exercise of the mind; the conviction that books are the real life and world events some kind of hysterical flurry on the other side of a TV screen; an affection for his children which allows him to overlook their various excesses and trust in me, enables him to sleep with the tranquillity of the cherished child.
I supposed that one of the children had left the kitchen light on. I put my hand round the door and switched the light off and a little voice cried “Ooh,” so I switched it on again. A girl with no clothes on stood there: a strong, very white-bodied girl with a red crotch, curly red hair, and wearing
braces, which glinted as she turned her startled head toward me. She was eating a big slice of bread, carved from the loaf still on the table. If you go out for the evening, no one ever bothers to clear anything away. It was Amanda, Susan’s daughter. Colin came up behind me, wearing a towel to preserve his decency from his mother’s gaze.
“I hope you don’t mind,” says Colin. “Amanda had to stay. She missed the last bus back to Kew.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m glad to see you again, Amanda.”
And so I was. Amanda, Leslie’s by-blow. Children tend to stay in the villages their parents carve for themselves out of the hard city rock, marry and procreate within them. Leslie, ruthless lord of the manor, self-appointed, against whose rule the village men forever strained and spoke, begat out of wedlock the beautiful Amanda, and Colin, handsome village lad, had the temerity to woo her.
“I hope I haven’t taken the breakfast bread,” said Amanda. She seemed unabashed by her nakedness. “I just get so hungry in the night.”
“I bet you do,” I said.
Leslie Beck would get up in the night to eat sliced white bread. He preferred the crust. In the morning, only the weak central crumb would be left. Susan, who had had the privilege of spending whole nights in his company, had once told me so.
Last time I’d seen Amanda, she’d been twelve, large-featured and plain. Now she was eighteen, I supposed, handsome rather than pretty, and without self-doubt, as the metal diamonds on her teeth proclaimed. Not many girls are prepared to go on wearing them, at her age, no matter what the orthodontist suggests. Leslie’s Life Force had entered in; it made her body glow, her skin translucent. Lucky Colin, I thought, and left them together and went to bed. I was so tired.
Another time, another place. We’re in the mid-seventies and in the Dordogne, France. The Roses, Vinnie and Susan, have rented a farmhouse here: a low stone building enclosing a wide courtyard, stone-walled, wooden-beamed, simple, rustic, comfortable, as it grew naturally out of a benign landscape. The kitchen is dark and cool; since it’s high summer, meals are taken, for the most part, out-of-doors, on a long trestle table beneath a canopy of grapevines. For breakfast there’s fresh bread, slabs of local butter, plum confiture, and coffee; for lunch, more bread, local cheese, fruit, and wine; the evening meal, unless Vinnie chooses to cook, is eaten in any one of a number of local restaurants, where the cuisine is French provincial—the kind of food the world will not see again. Marie comes up from the village to clean; she is young, fresh, smart, and vaguely disapproving of the visitors. Jean-Paul comes up twice a week to do the outside work: hoe the vegetables, sluice down the courtyard, take away the trash. It is one of the most expensive villages (properties?) on the agency’s list. The plumbing works.
