by Weldon, Fay
The day after Anita moved in, Leslie waylaid me on the steps as I was on my way to the Courtauld.
“Marion,” he said, “thank you for being such a help with Jocelyn. We’ve all been having quite a time with her lately. I expect it’s the menopause.”
“She’s rather young for that,” I said.
“What would I know? Hope and Serena will need continuity. I hope you can stay on.”
The court would need to be convinced, in any custody case, that Hope and Serena had continuity, that is to say, and I didn’t feel inclined to help him out. I said I’d stay for a couple of weeks, and by that time they’d be used to Anita. He said it was not certain that Anita was staying. I said Susan and Vinnie’s au pair was leaving, so I could move into their house; it was comfortable and convenient there. Leslie said it was time he had the basement treated for dry rot before it spread to the rest of the house, and had central heating and a proper kitchen and bathroom installed. Of course, then I’d have to pay proper rent, but he’d keep it as low as possible. I said I’d have to be on my way; I didn’t want to miss a lecture on “Cubism and Politics.” He asked if he could come down that evening; he wanted a shoulder to cry on.
And all through the rest of the day I thought about whether or not I wanted Leslie Beck to cry on my shoulder, and whether or not, if I did, I would be able to have a centrally heated, newly converted flat in Rothwell Gardens free. And I let him cry on my shoulder, and when we went in to look at the old boiler room, and I showed him the dry-rot spore which he had never wanted to believe in (a surveyor’s house is the last to get seen to, as the dentist’s child has the worst-cared-for teeth), and he showed me his mottled, purply thing stretching up toward the light of day, I began to laugh, thinking of the comparison, and of what Ida and Eric had done to me, that I should make such a comparison, or perhaps it was just exposure to too much “Art and the Symbol” at the Courtauld. Dusty and dirty as it was down there, I succumbed to Leslie, and became part of his fiefdom; he, for his part, felt able to come to terms with and eradicate the dry rot. A kitchen and a bathroom were more or less put in, though the plumbing for both was inadequate. There was no hot water, other than by kettle. The central heating never arrived. But I stayed on and helped with his children, and when Anita was away with her parents, I would join Leslie in the bedroom for the night. It was part of a bargain; it was part of the pattern of my life—part of my revenge upon it. It stopped me having to think about boyfriends or why I wasn’t married. It was automatic. It was without effort. I went to his and Anita’s wedding and helped look after Hope and Serena throughout the ceremony without turning a hair, merely being glad for their sakes that their lives were to be more settled. Any qualms I might have had about deceiving Anita disappeared completely on her wedding day. She had turned into Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did.
There was some quality in Leslie’s sexual energy, his very indomitability, the size and scope of the tool fate had given him, which failed to ignite the erotic imagination—or, at any rate, mine. I could take or leave this experience, and it paid the rent.
But one day Anita came down to my flat. She was crying. She was wearing a particularly dreary dress. It was navy blue and had a little white collar. She tried to look authoritative, like Jocelyn on a good day, but always failed. She had told Leslie she was pregnant. She had thought he would be pleased. Instead, he shuddered, said he was already a father, he did not want another child, there was too much expense involved, and asked her to consider an abortion. I suspected it was not expense that made him shudder—he was doing very well at the time financially—but rather the thought of his life being wound even more closely with Anita’s. The planning deal with which her father had been connected was long since accomplished, to everyone’s good profit; and just as dentists have trouble getting patients to remember to pay their bills once the pain has gone, so Anita, just by existing, had trouble reminding Leslie of her onetime importance in the scheme of his life. Now his need was gone, and she was a fixture to which no gratitude was owed.
“Why don’t you just hit him?” I asked. I felt incensed. I felt he had gone too far. I had finished at the Courtauld and was running a small contemporary-art gallery in Hampstead—not very good paintings and not very much money—while the owners, Jane and George Harris, were away; I rather naively imagined they would be so pleased with my performance when they came back that they would ask me to stay. The contrary was true. I was young; I had imagined people sold bad art at the lower end of the market because they couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad. Only little by little, as the world worked upon me, did I realize that many people like “bad” art. I try not to make crude value judgments, these days. My taste is like a sharp blade blunted by disappointment; I saw and saw away at “good” and “bad,” hemming and hawing like any other gallery owner, trying to keep prices down and commissions up. As it was, when Jane and George Harris returned, they found all the “good” paintings, as I saw them, on the walls, and all the “bad” paintings stacked in the basement, and nothing sold. In retrospect, I have some sympathy with them: supposing I came back and found Aphra’s choices all over my walls, and my income up but my reputation down (where it counts, at the Tate, the Metropolitan, and so forth). I would most certainly ask her to leave. But at the time it hurt. It was just before this happened, when my future seemed secure, that I thought I could afford a moral gesture, and moved out of Rothwell Gardens. Anita, of course, saw my leaving as an unkind act, for she had hoped that I’d be able to help with the baby, and here I was, helpful Marion, deserting her. I think she did hit Leslie. At any rate, little Polly was eventually born.
Leslie kept an eye on me after I left his house. He would turn up from time to time at whatever dreary place I happened to be living in, whichever back-street gallery I toiled in—partly to gloat, partly to offer sympathy, partly to use my shoulder to cry on. His mother in the north had died; his father seemed scarcely to notice, just nodded her out of the house in her coffin, the same way he’d nodded her out shopping, and got on with the garden. Leslie wept over that. Jocelyn tried to turn Hope and Serena against him. That annoyed but did not distress him. Anita refused to smile and scintillate. That shamed him. Business was bad. That really agitated him. He’d borrowed too much; used the security of Rothwell Gardens for some additional loan; lived in anxiety lest someone foreclose on the property. Anita’s father would lend him money, but only if he put half the house in his wife’s name. This he refused to do.
“Men earn the money,” he’d say. “What do women want of them—everything? Women see marriage as a meal ticket for life. Anita broke up my marriage to Jocelyn. At least Jocelyn’s family did their best for her, dowrywise. Anita should think of that.”
We’d make love—Leslie’s workout, I’d call it, if I wanted to upset him, and I often did. I felt he was right—that my life had run up against a dead end—and I could feel my benefactors thinking the same thing, and hated it.
“You should have stayed with me,” said Leslie. “Stuck it out. I’d have left Anita for you in the end.” That wasn’t true. He hadn’t liked me leaving Rothwell Gardens without his permission, that was all it was.
“What, and throw my life away?” I’d say. He was a lonely man. I wanted someone like Ed, or Vinnie, someone companionable, if I wanted anyone. And they didn’t come my way. Nothing seemed to come my way. Not even Eric and Ida could be proud of me. Who could be proud of a female shop assistant, with no money, no home, no husband, no children? Dregs, and I had worked my way so proudly into dregs. Better that I’d ironed aspiration out of my soul and stayed home.
What I wanted to do was impossible, because it would cost half a million pounds to do it, and how did someone like me find that kind of money? I wanted to run my own gallery—not to work in some sad art shop in the suburbs, selling prints and cards, but to own and run a proper gallery in the West End, where I’d have enough status and power to be part of the mysterious and ongoing world of the p
ainter, at its leading edge, where the splashing of paint upon canvas—or these days, board—becomes part of the culture of nations. I wanted to play the role of the connoisseur, to be both patron and muse to the world I loved. I wanted to be somewhere where at least a few people would know what I meant if I said “good.” I had seen the premises, just behind the Museum of Mankind, and they were empty, and waiting. I had the skill, the training, the business sense, the contacts, the discrimination—everything that was required except the capital. And I remembered how I had jeered at Ida, when once she’d told me she’d have studied music at the guildhall but her parents couldn’t afford it; she’d had to go out to work instead. A likely tale, I’d thought; an easy way out; an easy justification for lack of commitment. Now I could see just how real and hard a factor money was—or, rather, the lack of it. How it stood between people and what they could become.
Now I know some women manage to marry a million pounds and much more besides, and I daresay I am as beautiful as they are, feature by feature, but I am not that kind of woman. Anyone who wants a good time would do well to avoid me. I say what I feel, and feel what I say, and both things can be difficult to live with, and neither is the way to marry a millionaire.
I was sitting staring into the half-dark one evening, bemoaning my fate, when Leslie came to my door. I was surprised; I’d had a visit from him only a couple of weeks before; he usually came round every other month or so. He came to me with a proposition. His visit, he said, was for business, not pleasure.
A wealthy South African man, a Mr. Clifford Streiser, had just flown in with his wife. Mr. Streiser headed a consortium which was buying a thirty-acre derelict docklands site with a view to its development. Mrs. Brenda Streiser had come with him, to visit a fertility clinic in Harley Street. Leslie, if he played his cards right, could handle, as agent, the Streiser development, and all his troubles would be at an end. Playing his cards right included wining, dining, and doing the odd favor.
“I am not a call girl, Leslie,” I said, “not yet. And no businessman would see me as a favor. I am not the type.”
Leslie looked quite shocked.
“I’m not talking hundreds here, Marion,” he said. “I’m talking hundreds of thousands, maybe a million. And don’t you need half of that million to start your gallery?”
“Whatever it is,” I said, “I see you mean to take a fifty-percent commission.”
“You’ll learn,” he said. “Once you have your gallery, you won’t sound so superior.”
I said I was baffled as to how we were to extract a million pounds from the unfortunate Mr. Streiser, or what particular part I could possibly play.
“If I could forge an old master, I’d do it,” I said to him. “If I could bribe someone else to forge it, better still. But what would I bribe him with? My body? I’d be willing, but it would take ten years to earn it at current rates.” I wouldn’t make a good whore; I wasn’t either good enough or bad enough: my heart not golden enough to be the cheerful kind, yet my soul stubbornly nonbiodegradable, being too occupied with mind to achieve a proper semblance of the debased and wretched fallen woman. Hopeless! Who’d want me?
He looked embarrassed and finally told me. We took the Streisers out to dinner at Claridge’s. I rented a dress. It was creamy white and dead simple. I did my hair as the pregnant wife in the van Eyck painting had done hers. I made myself look quiet, intelligent, attractive, sane—the qualities people look for in babies. Leslie wore his best gray suit and a tie curiously toned down in color. He looked, for once, honest as well as competent. We made a good pair.
Cliff Streiser was a tall, broad-shouldered, pleasant, ordinary, and rather fleshy man who’d discovered the knack of making money without hurting anyone. All you did was buy up large tracts of derelict ground in overlooked places toward which the city crept, and which had always been despised, and then turn them into glittering shopping malls and office blocks, turn the shame of a district into the pride of the city, and you were honored for it. He looked a little confused, a little out of his depth; his bright eyes darted to and fro. Princess Margaret dined in a corner. “Wait till I tell my mother,” he said. I liked that. I thought he was kind. His father was dead, and he mourned him. That seemed to me important, too. Wealth couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. His first wife had gone off with a polo player. Well, that happens, if you suddenly grow rich and it goes to your wife’s head. Polo players!
Mrs. Streiser the infertile, his new wife, was blond and pretty, brighter than he was and younger by some fifteen years. She had been that day to the “Pride of the Pharaohs” exhibition at the British Museum, and had stood in line to see the newly discovered Leonardo drawing on display there. That was really something. They had three black live-in servants in their large house in Cape Town. She showed me photographs of them, as if they were part of the family, and was even shopping for presents to take back to the cook’s little girl. Yes, she let the cook have her little daughter live with them. Anything else, said Mrs. Streiser softly, would be unkind.
One way and another, considering how society restrains and restricts its members, and the difficulty of resisting its pressures, I thought the Streisers could be described as a good couple, could almost slip through the eye of a needle and go to heaven.
I presented myself to them as Leslie’s girlfriend, which was true enough. In fact, throughout the meal I spoke not a single lie, except once, when I said I was pregnant. And that I would have to have a termination, because I couldn’t upset my parents. Well, South Africa is still a fairly old-fashioned society, and it seems parents there can get very upset when their unmarried daughters get pregnant. Now, what a pleasant and stable society for anyone, provided he or she is not black, in which to be a parent, if not necessarily a child.
“My dear,” said Brenda Streiser, “you can’t have an abortion. You have to have the baby. You will always regret it if you don’t.”
“But I can’t do it to my parents,” I said. “They don’t even know about Leslie here. They’re so old-fashioned. They’re so proud of me. It will break their hearts.”
“A baby’s life is sacred,” said Brenda. “And not yours to take away.”
“Brenda’s right,” said Cliff. “She’s always right about these things. Brenda’s a marvel. I’ve got the brains, she’s got the heart.”
“I can’t have babies,” said Brenda. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
“Poor Brenda,” said Cliff. “She’s had a terrible time. All that messing about with her insides, and all my fault.”
“In the end,” said Brenda, “it’s his sperm count. Nothing to do with me. Not his fault, poor darling. Well, only in a way.”
“Mumps,” said Cliff, “when I was a grown lad. I told you, didn’t I, Leslie? How I suffered! But what a man’s suffering to a woman’s?”
“You did indeed tell me,” said Leslie. “What a tragedy!”
After prawn cocktails, we went on to Chateaubriand. I made little mews of appreciation, though I hate red meat. A good appetite’s a good sign. I was trying hard not to dislike, not to be disliked. So much counted on me. I was looking very good. Not a hint of the asthma that sometimes plagues me. Other diners were staring at me, even more than at Princess Margaret. If I could dress like this all the time, eat in places like this, I thought, I would feel at ease and at home in the world. Perhaps my error had been to aim not high enough. I had been so gratified and stunned by my goatish leap from bank clerkery to life around the Bramleys that I had stayed upon that particular ledge too long. It was time to leap once again, and I could, I could. If, on one particular day, the dreary pattern of a lifetime changes, and just in the nick of time, the next change will also be sudden, and in the nick of time.
“Why don’t you come back home to Cape Town and stay with us?” said Brenda. “Have the baby adopted, go back home; no one need ever know.”
“I could never part with a baby once I’d had it,” I said. “And besides, they depend on
me at work. I can’t just walk out, let them down.” This baby was going to inherit good moral traits, as well as a handsome and healthy physique and a sweet and pliable nature.
“I’d like to adopt,” said Brenda, “but Cliff had this silly prison sentence, before he even met me. They won’t let us adopt. He hit a policeman who was beating up a black. He was only twenty-one.”
“You could always try surrogate motherhood,” said Leslie to Cliff, “but I don’t suppose Brenda would fancy that.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” said Brenda. “I think all that’s unnatural. I don’t want any other man’s stuff in me. And I don’t want Cliff putting any of his in someone else, and what would be the point, there’s no sperm in it anyway.”
“Hush,” said Cliff, for the waiter was hovering.
“Eat up, darling,” said Brenda. “I’m dying for the profiteroles.”
I wept a little into my steak as I tried to eat up. Clifford ordered a bottle of claret that cost ninety-nine pounds. They knocked it back. I drank mineral water.
“Oh, dear,” said Brenda, and she cried a little, too, because she loved her husband and wanted a baby and didn’t see how to reconcile the two.
“The real problem is,” said Leslie, “I’m already married. My wife has a weak heart. A man like me can’t be expected to live celibate all his life. But I can’t abandon her. It’s not her fault. She’s ill. If she found out about Marion, if there was a baby, it would kill her. What a mess we’re all in!”
