by Weldon, Fay
“Of course he didn’t do it,” she said. “He just ran into a perfectly horrible woman, and married her, and now he’s met me, and together we’ll look after the Pekingese.”
“What about Bingo?”
Bingo was Wallace’s name for the red setter. Rosalie had tried to call him Hector, but over the years Bingo had won. I wondered if Wallace and Mr. Collier had anything in common and decided they were both open, as it were, to the drastic. Both made headlines.
“I might give Bingo away,” said Rosalie, and I thought, well, that’s the end of Wallace, and probably Bingo. She’d never liked him. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll take him with me if it ever comes to it, but it probably won’t,” and she kissed me again. “I don’t think Wallace fell,” she added. “I think he jumped. We had a fight just before he left. He was looking at Catharine, who had just had her hair cut short, so it curled all over her head, and Wallace said she reminded him of someone. Who could it be? I named an aunt or two, on both sides; but he went on shaking his head. So I said perhaps it was the face he saw when he looked in the mirror, and I reminded him of what Jocelyn Beck had once said—’the spitting image of her father’—and I think there was something about my voice, because Wallace said, ‘Oh, yes, the Becks, back in the Primrose Hill days. That’s who it is. Leslie Beck.’ And then he stopped talking. All that night and all the next morning he didn’t say a word to me. And then he went off to the Matterhorn, for this PR race to the top. The Matterhorn’s dead easy, any tourist can do it, but it always looks good on film. I think it was for a Diet Coke TV ad.”
“How low we all sink,” I said. “Once mountain climbing was all about purity and solitude and spiritual endeavor, now it’s about Coca-Cola.”
“Maybe it was Diet Pepsi,” said Rosalie. “We both preferred that. Not so sweet. But ‘Leslie Beck’ were the last words Wallace ever spoke to me.”
And Rosalie went off to Bluebeard’s castle to sun by Mr. Collier the mad electrocuter’s swimming pool and worry about her cellulite, and I went home, where I found Ed sitting reading a manuscript in the back garden. The lawn needed mowing but I didn’t mention it. I just couldn’t myself have sat and read with a clear conscience in grass as long as ours, and I was surprised he could.
“It was too good a day to stay in the office,” he said, “so I brought some manuscripts home.”
I said to him, because I couldn’t help it, “Did you see the photograph in the Guardian? That was a painting by Anita Beck. Remember the Becks, back in the Primrose Hill days?”
“I thought her name was Jocelyn,” he said, but at least he spoke, which was more than Wallace had to Rosalie.
“That was the wife before Anita.”
“I think we’re remarkable,” he said, “you and I, to have stayed married to each other so long, considering how things go in the world.”
And he smiled at me so sweetly I felt better, until I thought, perhaps smiles are like flowers and are offered to assuage guilt. Perhaps scowls and empty vases denote a happy home.
The next day was Sunday, and Ed went with Colin and Amanda for a walk in the park. He seemed tranquil, cheerful, and subdued, as usual. I tried not to stare at Colin; no need to reassure myself that he was indeed Ed’s child, of course he was, it was just that reason itself was becoming disturbed. There was no way Colin could be Leslie Beck’s. Unless sperm loitered and hung about—it was meant not to, but how could you be sure? To think too closely about the origins of these strapping children was distressing; by magic they appeared, by magic they endured. Surely we could leave it at that?
And Colin, as I watched the three of them leave the house, had so much the same build, the same shape, though on a larger scale, as his father, that I was quite returned to my senses. He held hands with Amanda, who had Leslie Beck’s bright blue eyes and her mother’s straight thick hair. She had her mother’s briskness and competence, but not, thank God, her mother’s insensitivity. I had decided that though I would be courteous to Susan when and if I saw her, I would not seek out her company if I could help it.
As soon as they had gone, I went to the phone booth on the corner and called Leslie Beck. It took me some minutes to pluck up the courage to do it. I remembered the number by heart. It was like being a schoolgirl again. I felt once again what I had quite forgotten: the sensation of standing at the crossroads of a thousand different paths, adventure round every corner. I understood what was stripped away by the passage of time: the sense of alternative; and the understanding was not pleasant. I am old, I thought, but not so old as Leslie Beck, who can’t manage it anymore, and what could I possibly want from him other than that? But there was something I needed, some acknowledgment I had to have, some picture of myself when young, thrown back from his eyes. Nothing of me reflected from Ed’s eyes any longer, nothing.
And I went to the phone booth; I did not use my own phone. It was the habit of the past reasserting itself—the excitement of secrecy. I had nothing to hide yet was afraid of being overheard; perhaps, in some mysterious way, I might be recorded on the answering machine. Technology may be man’s friend, but it is the enemy of the secret woman.
Leslie Beck answered the phone. His voice had not changed.
“Why, Leslie,” I said, as rehearsed, “it’s Nora. Ed and I were so sorry to hear about Anita. It must be very upsetting for you.”
There was silence at the other end. I prattled on. “Marion told me Anita was painting toward the end. I wondered whether there was any more of her work available, or perhaps you only sell through Marion? I saw the picture in the Guardian—of course, that’s not why...” I was flustered. This was not going right.
Then he said, “You rehearsed that, Nora.”
“Oh, God, Leslie,” I said, in my normal voice. The other had sounded strained and squeaky.
“Why didn’t you come to the fucking funeral?”
“I didn’t like to,” I said. It was pathetic. I felt guilty.
“What none of you women seem to realize,” said Leslie Beck, “was that Anita understood me. Why don’t you come round?”
I didn’t want to. I had only wanted to hear his voice. It was like taking old family snapshots out of a box: I would remember myself as a different person, a stranger.
“I’m supposed to be cooking Sunday lunch,” I said, stupidly. I could have been nineteen.
Leslie Beck said I must use my ingenuity. I had always been good at ingenuity. Anita had admired it. So I went home and left a note on the kitchen table to say I’d gone round to Rosalie’s, she wasn’t well; why didn’t they all eat out at the Golden Friar, they did a special Sunday lunch; I’d try to meet them there—and took the train to Leslie Beck.
Twelve Rothwell Gardens was dilapidated and shabby. The property had a For Sale sign on a board in front of it. So, I noticed, had four others in the street. The kind of people who had recently upgraded their properties and life styles and bought in the Gardens were those now most hit by the recession: senior management, leading architects and lawyers. All business was bad, except for debt collection, which thrived.
Leslie Beck opened the door. He wore his dressing gown. His feet were bare. He apologized. He said he thought he had flu; he was not the man he had been. His face had shriveled in upon itself. The hair was now sandy, not red; it no longer flourished, as once it had. The full mouth had narrowed.
“You’re looking good, Nora,” he said. “It’s a bad day for me. Some days the depression’s bad; sometimes it lifts. It’s lonely without Anita. I’ve let things get into a mess.”
He had. The floors had not been swept for a time, nor the carpets vacuumed. Things lay where they had been put, in a most disconcerting way. Furniture, for some reason shifted to the middle of the room, just stayed where it was. The dresser stood six inches from the wall; the sofa faced the door—as if Leslie had suddenly lost his zest for life in midpursuit of a mouse. Socks lay discarded, orange peel likewise; old newspapers, receipts, and torn envelopes with scrawled tele
phone numbers upon them lay on the table, and empty plastic shopping bags lay on the floor where they had fallen, some still full of cat food. All the potted plants were dead.
“Doesn’t Polly come and help?” I asked.
“Polly and I have quarreled,” he said. “She’s a pig. All my daughters are pigs.”
Not Amanda, I was going to say. Not Catharine. But I didn’t. There’d been quite enough sharing of late. Nor did I ask him what the quarrel was about.
“And, of course,” he said, “Anita lost interest in the house toward the end. She just shut herself in the studio and worked away. At the end, she really came into her own.”
“What we need,” I said, looking round the disgusting kitchen, “is Marion back in here to do the cleaning-up.”
“I thought perhaps you’d do it,” he said, and laid a scrawny finger on my sleeve.
“You thought wrong,” I said.
“You don’t have any money to spare?” asked poor old Leslie Beck. “Until the fees from the paintings come dribbling through, I’m going to be in trouble, along with the rest of the world.”
I said I did not. I said I had five thousand pounds in a bank, all that remained of my father’s legacy. The rest had been filtered into the expenses of our daily living. Ed and I, it occurred to me now, could not afford to be divorced. He had provided the necessities; I had provided the comfort.
“Then why don’t you buy a painting now?” he asked, “and save a gallery commission?”
It did not seem quite fair to Marion, but Marion was as rich as Croesus, everyone knew, and Marion had sold Leslie Beck’s baby and perhaps didn’t deserve too much.
And he took me up the dusty stairs and had to hold the banister as he went. I thought perhaps he was overdoing the old-man act and was making a play for sympathy and it would end in bed if he could, but I hoped not. I had no desire for him left, and it was sad. It emptied out something inside me, a secret dwelling place, as if someone had stuck a Vacancies sign in the window of a small hotel, and it smacked of failure, weakening hope, and shrinking income.
We went up narrow winding stairs, where cat’s turds, dried and twisted, lay in the dust, to the loft. I wondered what had happened to the cat; Leslie had never liked them. Leslie opened the door, and color came pouring out as if it were sound, struck through us as if it were radiation. I understood why Leslie Beck seemed so diminished; if you stood in the force field too long, it would simply carry you off. The smell of fresh oil paint and turpentine still hung in the air. The loft had been opened out: three rooms had been made into one and large square skylights had been set in the roof, through which the midday sun shone.
I hoped Ed’s walk in the Richmond park had been okay; it can get hot and dusty even there, and the fumes from car exhausts can hover. He must be home by now. They would be getting ready for the Golden Friar, complaining of my absence. They might even ring Rosalie, but there would be no reply. She was lunching with Mr. Collier, who one day I must try to call Sandy, as she did.
The sun struck the canvases stacked against the walls and threw back the reflected light which had so startled me when Leslie Beck opened the door. Here were rugs and books and photographs, dried flowers and painted screens, powdered paint in jars, the paraphernalia of the artist’s studio: the overflowing effect which Vinnie tried for, and failed to achieve. But how could he possibly have achieved it, living with Susan? When we were young, I thought, our failings did not announce themselves. They were clothed in flesh, blanketed by fertility, lost in laughter, drunkenness, oil and garlic, peaches and tomatoes, laughter and conversation: all the things we denied Anita Beck because we despised her, and she had saved up what she could and given them back to us.
Anita used strong colors. The painting Leslie Beck had carried to Marion Loos was, of all her work, the most gentle and tentative. I was not sure I liked them, but what did I know? And what did like have to do with it, anyway? Marion never let one say “like” of a painting. It’s not subjective, she’d say, it’s nothing to do with you. It is something objective, something you have to acknowledge; you either have an aesthetic sensibility or you don’t. And if we tried to press her on the aesthetic sensibility, all she’d say was that it correlated with the individual’s capacity for moral action. So we gave up, suspecting she was trying to tell us she was better than the rest of us, even Susan.
There was a painting of a half-finished building, with a platform four stories up and a little cage, and the suggestion of small people lost in paint. Anita liked to use paint thickly: color was encrusted over color. There was a bedroom in what looked like one of the wretched small hotels you find round King’s Cross station. There was a seascape of a tide creeping round a headland to beat itself against cliffs, just the small narrow strip of brilliant sand remaining. There was an amazing cave with stalactites and stalagmites contorted into terrifying shapes, piled one on top of the other, entangling, like a Hieronymus Bosch. And bedrooms aplenty, mostly quite modest, some almost ordinary, but all pleasant, as if she weren’t quite sure about them but had decided to be kind. And there was one of a basement room with a strange mushroom growth inside it. I didn’t think that one worked so well.
“I was her muse,” said Leslie Beck. “None of you would believe me, but I was. She liked me to get out; she needed me, she used me. It was her Life Force, not mine. I was nothing. Just a kind of brush she used. She stayed here; I left the house. She sent me out.”
He was crying. I hated to see it. I thought perhaps I would put my arms around him, but I didn’t.
“But, of course,” he said, “women don’t get the recognition they deserve. I might as well set fire to it all. What’s the use?”
I asked him which one he liked the best, and he searched for what he wanted and drew out the one with the unfinished building and the wooden platform four stories out of twenty-eight high. And I was inordinately pleased. I had found what I had come for: a sense of preeminence, of being something special, not the least of all of us; not the one whom Ed put up with or Vinnie could do without, whom Susan despised and Rosalie jeered at, but the one whose energies Anita Beck could best translate onto canvas. I cried, too, and crying no longer suited me, I could not do it gracefully.
“That one’s twelve thousand pounds,” said Leslie Beck when he had recovered.
“I can’t possibly,” I said.
“I can’t afford to let it go more cheaply.”
“It’s out of the question.”
“Perhaps you could share it with Susan,” said Leslie.
“I’d rather not,” I said.
“Have one of the cheaper ones,” he said. “One of the bedrooms.”
“I wouldn’t feel satisfied with it,” I said, and he had the grace to laugh. We shut the door between us and that peculiar source of power and went down through the dingy, messy rooms and corridors, which set the studio off, as a particularly dreary frame, Marion assures me, will sometimes set off a particularly lively painting.
I went home. When I opened the door, Colin stood facing me. He seemed angry and upset.
“The Golden Friar can’t have been that bad,” I said.
“It isn’t a joke, Nora,” said Amanda. “It’s terrible.”
“Bitch,” the usually polite and affectionate Colin said to me, and went to his room and slammed the door.
“What happened?” I asked, alarmed. “Where’s Ed?”
I was tired, I was upset, I wasn’t sure what more I could face. Life goes on quietly, year after year; everyone smiles, then suddenly everything erupts. I had a headache.
“I think Ed’s gone,” said Amanda, and I went into some other kind of gear, abruptly. I expect I still had a headache but did not notice.
“Colin and me are brother and sister,” said Amanda. “Ed says so. Well, half-brother and -sister. So we can’t be in the same bedroom, not under his roof, Ed says. He’s flipped.”
“But that isn’t true,” I said. I went up to Colin’s bedroom and kicked th
e door until he opened it.
“This is crazy,” I said. “You are who you’re meant to be. You’re Ed’s son.”
“Don’t be like this, Colin,” said Amanda. “Don’t upset people.”
She wouldn’t leave it to me to sort out. She wouldn’t just go away. She pointed out that since Ed was totally wrong about her not being Vinnie’s daughter, he was probably wrong about Colin not being his son. The problem was that Ed had gone insane. I could see her mother in her.
“Colin,” I said, “have blood tests, tissue typing, whatever you like. I won’t be offended. But you are Ed’s son.”
“Then why did Dad say I wasn’t?” asked Colin. “And who is this Leslie Beck, anyway?”
I saw the world tilt: it gently moved to the left, then gently moved to the right. Amanda studied me, stopped me. I thought the whole clock would thereby stop, but it didn’t.
“And you’re drunk,” said Colin. He was the youngest. Richard and Benjamin were at college. Colin had always been the easiest, the most cooperative. My impulse was to slap him, but the discipline of decades restrained me; he was, besides, the tallest of my sons. I began to cry. In fact, I remember shrieking and wailing.
“Sorry, Mum,” said Colin, but still he stared at me as if he hated me, and Amanda looked as if she were settling in for a good long sharing. I sat down on a chair in the kitchen.
And bit by bit I pieced the incident together.
Scene: The Golden Friar, a cheerful and vulgar eating place in the same arcade as Accord Realtors, which the kids like and where they serve skate in black butter, which Ed loves.
COLIN:
I’ll have the haddock and chips and peas.
AMANDA:
I’ll have the grilled chicken and a salad with no dressing.
ED:
We’ll wait for your mother.
They look at him with surprise. Ed usually goes along with the flow of other people’s desires. They wait. Not even Cokes are suggested. Fifteen minutes go by. No mother.
