by Weldon, Fay
We ought to move back to the city, where there’s less pollen to fuel Roy’s asthma, and I can get a job, and the children can catch buses. But I can’t live without seeing Geoffrey. Not now. I would itch so much with desire I’d scratch myself to death and end up like my mother. Gone. When we part he says ‘see you round,’ but he never says how or where or when. He doesn’t like me to be secure. I just know that somehow we see each other at least twice a week: I’m out looking for mushrooms or blackberries, or he just happens to be driving his Range Rover through Polydock when I’m shopping; and once I knocked on his door when I knew she was out and he was in, because I can see everything from my window, and he had me on the bed, his and her bed, her side, and then said, ‘don’t ever do that again’, so I didn’t. It’s don’t-ring-me-I’ll-ring-you land we’re living in. But he rings me. He does.
What do I do now, how do I get him, how do I make him leave her and take me? He can have me with or without the children. Roy can have those. My life can’t go on with Roy for ever, humdrum and without passion. I shall never love anyone now but Geoffrey: the sheer power of my loving must make him love me: my hate for her will make her ill and make her old and die, and then he’ll need someone to look after the children, and I’ll be there. Roy doesn’t need me: he’s married to his architectural models.
Geoffrey took me to the tea-rooms at Pennyham today, for all the world to see.
‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ he said, on the hay in the big barn, withdrawing himself from me, leaving me all a-shudder as usual with unfulfilled desire, but all the better to remember him by and all the more eager next time. ‘This is thirsty work,’ he said, and we went to the Golden Goose and had tea and scones; and there was a dark-haired girl serving who went quite pale and shaky at the sight of him and me. You know how it is, you know: someone else’s husband flirting with you, the wife’s sitting opposite trying not to notice, you wait for the quick flicker of anxious eyes before deciding that’s it, that’s enough, and moving on. This was more than a quick flick and an anxious look; it was a white, open-mouthed stare, and I had no intention of moving on, not for Sandra, not for her, not for anyone.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s Ellen,’ he said, ‘that’s last year’s model. Don’t worry.’
I didn’t worry. I took his hand to my mouth and held it there, for all the world to see. She fled to the kitchen. She was only a waitress; not worth a half of me. I didn’t care who saw, and neither did he. All the world!
He ate his scone with big delicate fingers, big delicate fingers with which he paddled in me, and Sandra passed by outside and because we were sitting at the table by the window she saw us, and she came in and just stood by the table, in her headscarf, windcheater and clumsy leather boots. She reminded me of my mother. I have a photograph of her, standing just like that, on an autumn day, taken unawares. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said to her. ‘I can’t be in here seeing Ellen, can I, because here I am having tea with Judith from across the way! You two really ought to get together some time over the school run. A hundred miles a week!’
She looked at me and I looked at her, and I smiled and she wept and ran from the room, and all the customers, the neighbours and the distant relatives, for that’s what it’s like in the country, turned and stared.
‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘One thing in all the world I can’t bear and that’s a jealous woman.’
I’m winning, I thought, I’m winning. She will die from grief and his displeasure, and I shall be queen in her place, as is only right and fitting.
It was time to collect the children from school, and when he’d quietly finished his tea he allowed me to go. My thighs were agreeably bruised and sore. He didn’t make love to her, not any more. He’d said so.
‘Marriage is for the procreation of children,’ he’d said. ‘And that’s been seen to, after all. What you marry and what you fancy, they’re two different things.’ He had a low, deep, soft voice. It caressed when it wanted to, bullied when it chose. What it said was what I believed.
I let her collect her children first from the school gate, and drive away. Then my Colleen and Kieron got in the back of my car. I don’t let them in the front. It’s safer in the back. I’m a nervous driver. My mother was killed in a car-crash, after all. She’d had a row with my father in the morning, and died in the afternoon. The whole house would shake with their rows. I was on her side, but hated her for not being happy all the same, and then I hated her for being dead, for making everything impossible: for example, that I could never make her happy. I promised the children ice-cream. I was alive and exultant; the sun was sinking. The autumn landscape was sodden and green and wonderful, multi-shadowed. There are lots of little hills round here, and sudden valleys and sudden views. Even when mad with love the beauty of it all impinges upon me.
I drove along the ridge-road, the A561, not crowding Sandra at all. I could afford to be kind. He had claimed me in public, and disclaimed her. The A561 was the main road between two small towns – not quite wide enough for the traffic it had to carry, always part closed for roadworks as they took out a curve here, or widened there, trying by half measures to make what was dangerous safe, and only half succeeding.
It was Carnival time: the time when floats from all over the West Country – which have taken their creators a year to devise, make and render mobile – gather in Bridgwater to begin their magical mystery tour of the West, and this road was one of the main routes along which these fantastical rolling monsters travelled. They would sometimes take up almost the entire width of the road, to the great handicap of the traffic and the great delight of Kieron and Colleen. As I rounded the sharp corner into the outskirts of Shillingford I found the road blocked. Before my eyes a petrol tanker was skewing and slipping one way across the road, a carnival float, an orange and green balsa wood and foam monster, fifty feet high, mounted on a long trailer, surrounded by pink polystyrene dwarves, and towed by a tractor, was skewing the other. The monster toppled on top of the tanker. The tractor tipped on its nose in someone’s front garden; the tanker’s cab tipped into the stone wall on the other side. The back of the tanker mounted the back of the trailer. The single car between me and this major traffic event jammed on its brakes. So did I. The car in front was Sandra’s. I went into the back, but only slightly. Even so, my car being old and hers new, her crumple zone crumpled dramatically. My children squealed – I could see hers bobbing about in the back, presumably squealing too. I saw her eyes, pale and anxious with something other than wifely martyrdom, in the mirror. I saw men running away from the accident: the trailer driver somehow out of his cab, on to the wall, away. Fire! I thought, and I knew she thought it too. I restarted the engine, backed as fast as I could, which was very, very fast, and she followed. The children, catching fear, were suddenly dead silent. I gave her room to turn, then turned myself; a neat, rapid, three-point turn which any driving instructor would have admired, though in a place to turn him pale, on a blind corner.
But, listen, I looked after her and her children too. I was the opposite of murderous, when it came to it. We were both round the corner when the tanker went up and the green and orange balsa and foam giant too, in a black stench of flame and fire, which – as I found out later – by some great good fortune killed no one. Fathers were not yet home from work: mothers were on the school run, or walking. Shillingford has the misfortune to be a fraction under three miles from both Pennyham and Pollydock, which means the local authority won’t pay for a school bus. (I’m sorry about these names, but if you live round here you have to put up with the truly unbelievable. If people who live in towns tend to believe the country has been invented for their benefit, it is hardly surprising.) Three houses were burned to the ground that day and new rules were laid down for carnival floats and the movement of same that very week.
We took the long, difficult way round to Polydock, and home, over the levels. We didn’t have to speak. She just smiled briefly, as
I let her pass and go first. She knew the way home: I didn’t. I followed behind, but meekly, not harassing. My hands were trembling on the wheel. Fear shakes you back into sanity.
I can’t tell you how beautiful the evening was, or the little wet leafy roads, between the tall, tall hedges. If a hedge is high and the road runs low between them, you know the road is old, has been there for ever, or at any rate since people started wanting to get from one place to another, and this was always the best and shortest way to do it. Even Kieron, seldom moved by natural glory, said, ‘doesn’t it all look nice,’ and Colleen said, ‘don’t say anything. We’ll have a crash,’ and the last rays of sunlight glittered and caught in the gold leaves of the beech trees as they formed an arch above us, and Sandra’s car went on ahead, showing the way.
As the sky darkened, the light from the blaze over in the east was pierced by orange and green streaks. It reminded me of Mrs Leaf’s funny cakes, the ones I shouldn’t laugh at, and of my father’s paintings, going up in smoke – he’d used a lot of green and orange, and painted very, very thickly, which meant very expensively, and my mother had complained about that, which I’d thought was unfair of her. A man had to paint what a man had to paint. If I’d gone harder into the back of Sandra’s car, who would have been killed, her or me? Probably both of us. In my mind it had always been her, and I’d always been safe.
I knew it was all nonsense. Of course Geoffrey slept with her. (Why shouldn’t he: she was there, and he wasn’t so very fussy as to who he entered, or where, or how.) He had no intention of leaving her, was just acting rooster in the farmyard, and it was my fault for letting him; not his fault for doing it, or her fault for being hurt by it, if fault lay anywhere, which I doubted. I’d be last year’s model too, soon enough, when my own marriage was sufficiently mangled to make him feel properly effective, properly seigneur of the lands round about. We were living in what had been the bailiff’s home. No doubt his father had had it off with the bailiff’s wife, and his father’s father with her mother, and then they’d all stood round and watched the bull mounting the cows, and felt truly part of nature.
A pink flare leapt in the sky. One of the dwarves, I supposed. Even this far away, with the car windows closed, you could smell burning. Sandra switched on her headlights, and I switched on mine.
So I loved him, and that was partly animal, the good part, and partly full of hate, the bad part; and all mixed up with him preferring Sandra to me, and my mother’s death and my father’s paintings and the bonfire I had made, and shouldn’t have, and I had hardly been sane since then.
All I could do now, by going on, was hurt her more. It was true that if it wasn’t me it would be someone else. There were a dozen women thereabouts, bored and on the school run, who’d wrap their thighs round his, as excitedly, as desperately, as marvellously, as me. We all think we’re something special, I daresay; men certainly do! It had just better not be me that did it. Let it be someone single, more purely victim. I loved him to hurt her, and it was demeaning to all of us.
She skidded on leaves and went into the ditch. I stopped. We all got out, and surveyed the damage. She said nothing. ‘I think it’s a bit too hot for me to handle round here,’ I said. ‘We’ll be selling the house very soon.’
‘Going back to the city?’ She had a slightly nasal voice, and I had a flash of the old arrogant contempt, but another explosion, violet this time, brought me back to my senses. She was just ordinary. So was I. So was he. So were my parents – he and she, no different from many of our friends, only writ large on the canvas of a child’s mind, by reason of her early death, and never properly reduced by time and experience and understanding to ordinary size.
‘I should think so,’ I said. ‘All this driving about, just to get the children to school. It’s different for you; you belong here.’
‘Don’t sell the house without telling Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘I think he wants it back. It used to belong to the farm.’
It occurred to me, briefly, that if he’d been trying to get me out, this was the right way to go about it, but I don’t really credit him with quite so much duplicity. Of course it might have been unconscious on his part. He came from noble baron stock, after all.
We didn’t mention Geoffrey, apart from in the role of possible house-buyer. We didn’t have to. She recognised an abdication when she heard one, and accepted it graciously. She had always been the rightful queen.
We pushed and levered her car back on to the road. She drove off, I followed. She went into her big house, I into my own lesser one. Roy looked up from a model of a new Canadian university he’d been working on for some months. He had trouble placing so many fir trees.
‘So there you all are,’ he said. ‘I was worried. Some sort of accident on the road. There was a newsflash on local radio.’
‘Here we all are,’ I said. ‘Safe, sound, and back to normal.’ I made tea.
‘I’ve been a bit mad since my father died,’ I said to him in bed that night.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Hell-bent on destruction.’
‘I think we’d better move back to the city,’ I said. ‘As soon as possible.’
‘Anything you say,’ he said, and an unkind person might have thought he was unduly passive, but I knew that he only waited for me to say what was in his mind, when I eventually came round to it, thus saving time, argument and energy.
Who?
Howard had trouble remembering names. Faces were easy enough, especially if in a familiar setting, but putting a name to that face was often quite beyond him.
It seemed a minor enough fault in an otherwise pleasant and agreeable man – a good father and a good husband, doing well in his chosen sphere of business. A secretary and a card index helped him with the names of his customers, and if the names of his neighbours on their executive estate sometimes eluded him it was perhaps hardly surprising.
‘We’re all so alike, that’s what it is,’ said his wife, Alice, a little sadly. She felt herself to be unexceptional, and sometimes wished it were not so. ‘Try to cook something new for dinner – like liver and avocado – and you find the whole estate’s done the same thing, on the same day!’
Howard was thirty-eight, broad-shouldered, fair, not particularly tall, not exceptionally good-looking, but presentable enough. He was Area Sales Manager (North-West) for a firm which made agricultural machinery. Alice was four years younger, plump, short, with carroty red hair and a freckled, everyday kind of face, and legs she preferred to hide. They had three children – Samantha, Thomasina and Sylvester – shortened, of necessity, to Sam, Tom and Silv. Howard sometimes couldn’t remember their names, either. He offered, as an excuse, the notion that the sex change which went with each abbreviation was enough to confuse anyone.
‘Perhaps you should put their names on your card index,’ said Alice, a little tartly. ‘Or perhaps you should try and spend more time with them, and a little less in the office, or at the pub.’
Well, everyone complains. Little hurts and reticences pass between couples and get swallowed up in the great flood of togetherness. Alice and Howard were happy enough, and so were their children until, one day, when they had been twelve years married, Howard went to the doctor to complain of recurrent headaches, met the doctor’s wife Elaine, and fell in love.
Elaine was bending over the T–Z section of the filing cabinet when Howard came up to the desk. He coughed; she turned, straightened, and as she came up looked him full in the eye. Neither smiled – their regard was intensely serious – and in those few moments the lives of both changed. It was as if, they told each other later, they recognised each other. That is to say, they knew in advance what was to come: how they were to move into the light, leaving others in the shadows.
When she had filled in the appointment he required he said, ‘Can I see you after work? It’s our wedding anniversary, so it can’t be for long, but never mind.’
She replied, ‘Of course. I’ll tell my husband I’ve gone to see a fri
end.’
He knew she would accept; she knew he would ask. Neither felt obliged to tell lies to each other, only to the rest of the world. And what a delightful conspiracy that turned out to be – the mixture of agony and excitement, shame and thrill. Alice believed lies, and Elaine’s husband Brian accepted excuses. Two lovers, pitted against the world, fighting for light, the escape from the dark. Love at first sight – full, powerful, sexual, forbidden love!
‘We were destined,’ said Elaine.
‘Two halves of one whole,’ said Howard, ‘that somehow got split.’
They slept together the day after they first met.
‘Will you come to bed with me?’ Howard asked, quite straightforwardly.
‘Of course,’ she had replied.
They went to an hotel for the night. He said he was away on business: she said she was visiting a friend.
‘This isn’t lust,’ he said, halfway through the night. ‘It’s love.’
‘I know,’ she said. She was taller than he was, with large dark eyes and a soft, tremulous mouth.
