by Weldon, Fay
COLIN:
Isn’t that Rosalie over there?
ED:
Yes.
AMANDA:
Who’s she with?
COLIN:
It’s Mr. Collier. Mum works for him.
AMANDA:
Isn’t Rosalie the one whose husband disappeared and no one will say whether he’s dead or not? I think it’s okay for her to go out with a man. What’s she supposed to do?
COLIN:
Wait for him.
Ed has risen and gone over to speak to Rosalie. The children confer and quickly order Cokes, fish and chips, chicken and salad, and skate and black butter for when Ed returns.
AMANDA:
But didn’t your mother say that’s where she was going? That Rosalie was poorly?
COLIN:
That’s funny; so she did.
The Cokes arrive. Ed comes back. Ed sees the Cokes and smashes them across the restaurant, liquid and glass flying here and there. The buzz of conversation ceases.
ED:
Your bitch of a mother. She won’t make a fool of me anymore. Neither will you two. Fucking under my roof. What do you think I am?
COLIN:
Dad, let’s go.
ED:
You’re not even my son. Look at you! Bloody rings in your nose.
AMANDA:
Everyone wears them, Ed. Please calm down.
ED:
(Jeering) Ed, Ed. Look at you, listen to you. “Ed.” You’re not Vinnie’s daughter, either. You’re Leslie Beck’s. The same way this bloodsucker here is. It’s incest, and the way no one has the nerve to say so disgusts me. Where do you think your shit of a mother is? Oh, she’s steamy, she’s steamy....
Various young people, friends of Colin’s, help Ed out of the restaurant. Rosalie is on her feet, paying the waiter for the Cokes. Mr. Collier is picking odd fragments of glass out of his trouser leg. A lot of Coke and glass went their way.
On the way home Ed says he’s sorry if he’s upset everyone; he’s upset himself, says he’s had enough, none of it’s the kids’ fault, but he does not retract his statement about their fathering. He goes to his room. Amanda makes beans on toast. Colin is too distressed to eat. Ed leaves the house with a suitcase. Amanda and Colin decide that if the worst possible case is incest, they don’t care. They can live together so long as they don’t get married, and the sooner they’re out from under the parental roof, the better. I come home. Etcetera.
Our bedroom seems oddly empty. I go to sleep for three hours. I dream I am in the Marion Loos Gallery, searching in an empty purse, trying to borrow money from Rosalie. When I wake up, Ed hasn’t returned. I call various friends, who express surprise and concern but haven’t seen him. I try Susan repeatedly but get only the busy signal.
I say to Colin and Amanda what I think I ought to say: that they mustn’t let this incident drive them together. They’re far too young to commit themselves to anything permanent. This upsets them even more, so I shut up. Anyway, my heart isn’t in their lives; it’s in my own. I am ambivalent about Ed’s absence. Something that feels rather like Leslie Beck’s Life Force wells up as an exhilaration, some notion of freedom; on the other hand, the house seems to be a kind of desert, its contents whited out in a heat haze. The television is on and no one is watching it.
Rosalie comes round.
“Colin,” she says, “your father is your father. I have known your mother forever. No one has suggested anything different, ever. Your father has flipped. He will be back soon.”
Amanda stares in a mirror and says, “I don’t look like anyone I know. I never did. I’ve never belonged.”
Colin says to me, “Where were you, then? When you said you were with Rosalie, where were you? Are all women like you?”
Bloody Ed, I think. I’d like to kill him. That makes me feel better.
Rosalie says, Why didn’t you tell me? We only went to the Golden Friar because we thought no one would see us. Whoever goes to the Golden Friar?
And so on.
Colin says, If Ed never comes back, how am I going to get a bit of tissue from him to tissue-type?
Amanda says her mother is a hypocrite, too, and who is Leslie Beck, anyway? What do I know about Leslie Beck?
I do not say he is the man with the biggest dong in the world. It no longer seems funny or wistful, or whatever it was, and besides, it is no longer true.
Rosalie puts me to bed and gives me pills. I hear her saying, “Just to add to it, Nora, I think I’m afraid of Mr. Collier. I don’t want to go out with him anymore, but I have to. I don’t like to annoy him. He has a funny look in his eye. You know the way spaniels look at you sometimes, and it could be devotion or they could be about to bite? That kind of look. Or perhaps I just imagined it.”
She hasn’t been to bed with him yet; she’s trying to put it off. I go to sleep.
I wake with a start, hearing a strange noise. But it is not really strange. It is Colin and Amanda, demonstrating how little they care about the censure of the world. They will probably now have a baby, just to press home their point.
Sleeping pills sometimes have a strange effect: they paralyze the body, root it to the bed, while agitating the mind. I imagine if you had a stroke and could only move your eyes to indicate yes or no, that’s what you would feel like all the time. I would rather be dead, but how could you achieve it?
I am cold all down my left side: it is the absence of Ed making itself felt. I take refuge in Marion’s head. Open my wide eyes to look at an alternative world.
Marion
Barbara brought her baby to the gallery again today. It seems that either I have to pay her more, so that she can afford child care, or she will have to bring Holly with her to work every day, or else I will have to fire her so she can claim unemployment benefits. If she leaves of her own volition she will be defined as willfully unemployed and will not be able to claim anything. Since her husband is earning just over the minimum (£162.25 after taxes), the little family cannot expect family credit. She can’t deprive the child of its father; besides, she loves him. They have had very little sleep since the baby was born, which is why, she hopes, Ben is behaving this way. Since he believes it costs only twenty pounds a week to feed a family, a sum his mother once mentioned, this is the amount he has been giving Barbara from his wages, and which she has been supplementing with the money she earns from me. It seems her husband has now torn up the chore-share contract they drew up and pinned to the kitchen wall when they married. He says it is an insult to his manhood, which she has insulted enough.
“All this,” I say, “from having sex with Leslie Beck. Was it worth it?”
“I did not have sex with Leslie Beck,” she says, “though not from lack of trying. I was sorry for Leslie. He just made me feel so sorry for him. He took me up into Anita Beck’s studio. It’s the length of the house turned into one room. It is so beautiful and peculiar up there, you have no idea, and he cried because Anita was dead, and I cried, too, and I just somehow wanted to keep the world going.”
“And he couldn’t get it up,” says Aphra. She had her knuckle in the baby’s mouth again. “You ought to give this baby a pacifier.”
“Ben and I don’t believe in pacifiers,” says Barbara. She stares at me with desperate, furious eyes. She is quite changed from her usual gentle self. “What am I going to do? I had no idea life was like this. I had no idea it was so unfair.”
I don’t know what to say.
“When you look back upon these years,” is all I can think of, “they will seem the best time of your life.” I say it. “That’s what people tell me,” I add, “young marrieds with baby. The happiest of all.” But my voice falters.
Some idiot comes into the gallery. I have to go, though normally it is Barbara’s job to face the inquiring passerby, whose only apparent purpose in entering the gallery in the first place is to be able to say, when you give them a price or two, “What? That much? For such garbage?” and walk out laugh
ing. This happens now. For the first time that I can remember, I wish I didn’t have to run a gallery. I wish I could just shut the door and go home. Who are the Tate, the Metropolitan, anyway? These idols of mine, the ones whose attention flatters me? For every hundred paintings on any of their walls, only some three percent are done by women. What does that make them? What is it all about? What does the putting of colors on little squares of canvas in certain shapes add up to? It’s all some nonsense of my own, some mad way of getting back at Ida and Eric. The worship of mud pies. “Look, look! See what I’ve done. Aren’t I clever!”
The baby wails. Aphra has handed him back to Barbara. It occurs to me that she is a very inexpert mother. I have a glimmering of sympathy for Ben.
“You think you’re so one-up on everything, Aphra,” Barbara is saying, “but if your boyfriend buys Leslie Beck’s basement flat, and you move in without getting married, you’re crazy. He’ll pay the mortgage and buy the car and the CD player, and you’ll do the groceries and the vacations and day-to-day expenses, because that seems fair, and when he throws you out after ten years he’ll own everything, and you’ll be thirty-three and have only the clothes on your back.”
“He loves me,” says Aphra feebly. I think for a moment she means Leslie Beck, but of course she means her boyfriend. “If anyone is forced out, it will be him.”
“It’s happening to all my friends,” says Barbara. “They either have babies and problems, or no babies and nothing.”
“Then your friends are stupid,” says Aphra. But she’s beginning to look troubled.
“It’s very damp and dark down there,” I say. “He never really got rid of the dry rot.”
And I refuse to say anything more. This is my staff; I am the boss; we are not a gaggle of agitated girls. They are betraying me, hurting me, but don’t know it. The baby is put in the office between cushions on a chair. I send Barbara out to buy some kind of nest for him—whatever they use, these days. The money comes from petty cash. It will be cheaper in the end for me to increase her salary, though she gives me to understand that child-care wages are higher than her own. She thinks this is monstrous; Aphra says it’s only reasonable, since working in a gallery is much more interesting than looking after a baby. Barbara leaves, weeping, to shop.
The baby stares at me. I suppose him to be about four months old. When he is not crying he has an unblinking stare. It is hard to believe he is the source of so much trouble. I wonder about my own child. I never gave him a name. I suppose he is all right and has not fallen victim to statistics, the sudden leap in the death rate that stands for male teenagers. I wonder what his political attitudes are? I almost never think about him. I suffered no aftershock when he went off with Brenda Streiser, who clearly, from her marveling gaze, had amply bonded with him. Research on identical twins shows that unless children are subjected to excessive trauma, they grow up to be what they will be, regardless of who rears them. Nature flings the genes together, in its endless experiment, this mother with that father, this father with that mother. The Leslie Beck–Marion Loos experiment is achieved, then carries on into other generations in search, presumably, of perfection. That’s all it is: we’re just bit-part players in the Life Force drama.
The baby cries. “Run round to the corner shop and get a pacifier,” I say to Aphra. “Don’t let’s traumatize the child.” Rosalie’s little children, I remember, all had pacifiers. So did Nora’s. Vinnie wouldn’t have them in the house. Aphra goes.
“Barbara won’t like it,” she says. I shrug. Aphra pauses at the door.
“I do think you’re wonderful, Marion,” she says, by the by. “I really do.”
I wished Monet and Manet hadn’t woken with sticky eyes this morning. I wished my apartment hadn’t seemed so dusty and forlorn. I wished the paintings on the wall hadn’t seemed like squares of canvas with peculiar colors on them. I wished the weekend hadn’t seemed so lonely and myself so friendless. I wished it were not my forty-fifth birthday, or that I had told someone. Who was there to care? I wished that the future were not bound to consist of less, not more—life shrinking to confine itself into old age, a hopeless struggle against loneliness and infirmity, with only a bank balance to keep me warm and a nature too proud and prickly to let me take to drink and be open to the warm and sloppy pleasures of pub and club society, where women like myself, only easier and warmer, abound.
I wished Leslie Beck had never come through my door with Anita’s painting stretching his arms, the basketball player who inclines over the heads of his fellow players and just drops the ball in the hoop. Though they say there is more to it than that; there is skill and scheming, too.
I called Rosalie for a chat. Tuesday mornings are almost always quiet. Many people nowadays stretch the weekend through to Tuesday afternoon.
I told her I was feeling low. She told me so was she, but she didn’t want to go into it. She told me Ed had left Nora. I said I didn’t believe it. And then I had to go, because in the gallery door stood Leslie Beck, smiling at me. I supposed I had become accustomed to his age, for he no longer registered as old. I felt a kind of hurt relief, as if I had been weeping for years and at last, exhausted and purified, I had stopped. I was grateful to see him.
“No Barbara, no Aphra?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “I only flirt with them to tease you.”
It occurred to me that he meant it.
“I think we ought to get married,” said Leslie Beck. “The old Life Force demands it. Our chance, yours and mine, to kick back at fate.”
“You mean,” I said, “with my money and my gallery you could get a new start in life, now the bottom’s dropped out of the development business.”
“I’m lucky to have a home to live in,” he said. “Don’t joke. I’m not.”
“Neither am I.”
“You’re lonely, I’m broke. The only thing is, cats give me asthma. Since Anita’s cat ran off, I’ve been feeling better. Don’t I look better?”
“Yes.”
“Leslie Beck the magnificent, still?”
“Yes.”
He was close to me. His hands were old but elegant. He was touching my sleeve, the way he used to, promising, offering, any number of delightful things.
“Your ambition, after all,” he said. “Not to be the servant anymore; to be the mistress.”
Aphra and Barbara came back at the same time and broke the spell.
“Take a few days to think about it,” he said. “But don’t leave it for too long. I’ll be snapped up. Widower with large house, central heating; but it’s you I want. Always have.”
“Creep!” said Barbara and Aphra, united in dismissing him once his hand upon my arm had been seen. Barbara didn’t protest when Aphra stuck the pacifier in the baby’s mouth.
“You be careful, Marion,” said Aphra. “It’s a setup. He’s after your money. He’s asking my boyfriend twice what he should for that flat. It’s not even got proper central heating.”
“Central heating?” said Barbara. “Aren’t you fussy all of a sudden. In your squat there’s no heating at all.”
“We can burn furniture and beams in an open grate,” said Aphra.
“There’s no open fireplace in Leslie Beck’s apartment,” said Barbara, smugly. How did she know?
I left them to it. I called Rosalie again.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “It’s difficult on your own. And you can end up in trouble, such trouble! But Leslie Beck? Of all people?”
Leslie Beck, of all people.
Nora
There is no point in remaining in Marion’s head. There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.
I called Ed at his office on his direct line. I spoke to his secretary. There was a muffled conversation behind a blocking hand. His publishers are old-fashioned; it seems they cannot afford hold buttons on individual lines. Finally Ed spoke.
&n
bsp; “What do you want to say to me?”
“Where were you last night?”
“I go where I want to. If you’d like information, ask your lawyer to get it.”
“But, Ed, what happened? Nothing happened. Why are you being like this?” And so forth. You try not to, but this is how it comes out. Ending up with: “You’ve ruined Colin’s life. You’ve put doubts in his mind from which he’ll never recover. You’ve pushed him into Amanda’s arms.”
“It’s you who’ve done it all, Nora, not me. I just at last responded. I’ve had enough. Now go away.”
“I suppose,” I say, “now you’ve gone through all my money, you can do without me.”
A pause.
“Well, Nora, you would say that.”
I am ashamed of myself. I am panicking. Ed has never done anything like this before, said anything like this. He is hard. I understand that he does not mean to come home—for crimes committed against the marriage many years ago, plus my failure to turn up at the Golden Friar.
Mr. Collier comes toward my desk. “Nora,” he says, “I think we’re going to have to say no to personal telephone calls at the office.”
Ed has hung up, anyway. I replace the receiver. Mr. Collier stares at me, his murderous eyes kindly. If Rosalie enters Mr. Collier’s bed, will she be allowed out of it again? If Rosalie fails to enter Mr. Collier’s bed, will she be allowed to live or be killed for spite?
Without Ed, I perceive, I am unprotected. I am alone. I have five thousand pounds in a bank, and a dependent child who hates me, and a house with a mortgage that increases rather than decreases every month and is unsalable. It is as well I did not buy Anita Beck’s painting.
If I can have Colin and Ed tissue-typed, will that make a difference? No, it won’t. Ed believes what for some reason he wants to believe. Paranoia. Is he with Susan? I dial her number.
NORA:
Hello, Susan.
