by Weldon, Fay
‘I think that’s what Carl believed, Joanna. And then you went and had an affair with another man; not even someone more important, or younger, or richer than him, but some penniless librarian with straggly hair. What an insult! Of course he reacted. I know you think he over-reacted, but men are like that, especially men like Carl, who are used to having their own way.’
‘Whose side are you on, Angela?’
‘Yours, Joanna, you know I am. But Carl did have a point of view.’
‘Well, I don’t see it. I suppose you’re busy.’
‘I am a bit.’
‘Your children are about to visit you, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the grandchildren?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see, you have everything and I have nothing.’
‘Joanna,’ said Angela briskly, ‘you have a house worth two million pounds –’
‘It’s falling down, and Carl won’t pay a penny for repairs.’
‘You have a butler –’
‘He’s gay. Carl will only let me have gay servants. I’m surprised he doesn’t have them castrated as well, just to be on the safe side.’
‘And a gardener who shares your bed. Perhaps Carl is right. You are simply not to be trusted.’
‘How do you know about Oliver?’ asked Joanna, after a short silence.
‘It’s obvious.’
‘Don’t tell Carl,’ said Joanna, ‘or he’ll kill me.’
‘Or the young man, judging from past form,’ said Angela, quite bleakly, and quite seriously.
‘I’d thought of that,’ said Joanna.
‘And you let him take the risk?’
‘If I do,’ said Joanna, ‘so can he. It’s worth it. I don’t care any more. I don’t mind being dead. What have I got to live for? Next year’s crocuses?’
Angela said, ‘All I can say is, Joanna, keep your young man out of the garden for the time being. His parts might begin to glow in the dark, and you wouldn’t like that. Gerald seems to think we’re getting quite a lot of radioactivity over here.’
‘How lucky you are,’ was all Joanna said, ‘to have Gerald.’
14
Angela is a good friend. She is a Doctor of European History, but she pretends to be less than Gerald in all matters because thus she preserves the domestic and marital peace, and she reckons those are of all things the most important to preserve, above dignity, truth and honour, and who is to say she is not right? She is married and I am not, and I am sufficiently a child of my generation to believe a woman who has neither husband nor children is scarcely a woman at all.
I, who revealed the truth one day, and lost everything, including dignity and honour, should be the last to suggest that she is wrong. Isaac of course lost more in a similar revelation; that is to say his life. But he had often told me he’d die for me if he had to. Fate listened, that was all: happened to be passing by, as he spoke, with its ear-muffs off. Alas, by dying, Isaac did me no good. He stepped without looking into the path of a reversing car just outside the May Gallery. There were no witnesses, and it was known that Isaac had left the gallery early with a migraine, and a man who has a migraine does not look carefully where he is going, so who was to doubt the driver’s word – he being chauffeur to Carl May, and with a clean driving licence, and doing nothing more sinister at the time than backing into his own garage, albeit across the public pavement? And Isaac King had no family to dig away at the matter, to fling up dirt and dust until some nasty scandal was revealed, some bleached bone of unfleshed-out truth discovered.
Isaac was one of those rare and valuable people who are, or appear to be, totally innocent in their life’s work: who, by pursuing their own interests, do no apparent harm to anyone. An academic, an antiquarian, an Egyptologist, his imagination fired by Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra when he was a boy, his fervour fanned in various university departments; and then, discovering the civilization of Ancient Egypt to be a culture of the wholly benign, the unmalicious, thereafter lived by sifting the desert sands for scraps and shards yet undetected, nodding politicly at museum curators, with impossible care and patience deciphering the all but indecipherable, piecing together fragments, writing up, collating, publishing papers only a handful of people anywhere in the world would understand. He wanted to bring the past to life. A benign and beautiful past, like no other.
‘Is there any money in it, this Egyptology of yours?’ asked Carl, at the interview. He was looking for a curator first and a collection second. He had a gallery: he wanted to put something in it: he wanted to be known as a cultured man. An enviable opportunity for the right person. I was there at the interview. I was to be involved. I was to be cultured too. I rather fancied Meissen, but Egyptology turned up.
Isaac smiled at Carl’s question. He had a kindly but melancholy air. His smile was somehow forgiving. I understood then for the first time that Carl needed to be forgiven: the understanding cracked wide my wifely love and admiration, and through the crack all kinds of emotions and sensations came rushing unannounced.
‘Twelve chairs of Egyptology in all the world?’ Isaac King enquired. ‘Six hundred devotees at most, turning up to the occasional conference, to compare notions and theories? Of course there’s no money in it.’
And Carl, I knew, was both impressed and horrified by such selfless dedication. And as for me, I thought this Isaac King was just wonderful. A good man. So kindly was this man, so generous, so trusting, that coming across the embalmed mummy of a newborn baby, and discovering no body inside, but only sawdust, he concluded not that the embalming priests had cheated the grieving parents but, being too enthusiastic with their fluids, had disintegrated the body by accident, and decided to go ahead with the funeral without telling the parents for fear of upsetting them.
Carl May would never have reached such a conclusion. Nor would my father. Nor indeed did I. But I loved Isaac for believing the best, and not the worst. We were in each other’s company from time to time, in that musty vaulted room, the May Gallery, and the pleasures of ideas exchanged became the pleasure of emotion shared, and eventually touch as well. We were as close as we could get.
Carl had me locked in my room so I couldn’t go to Isaac’s funeral. It would not perhaps have been proper: in giving evidence at the inquest it was I who told the world Isaac had complained of a migraine. He had complained of no such thing – merely that I would not leave Carl there and then, discovered in flagrante delicto as we were, and go off and live with him in his bedsitting room in Ealing, which smelled of gas fire and tooth powder, for all his goodness and generosity. But I was guilty and afraid. I had betrayed Carl and been discovered. Yet I still hoped for Carl’s forgiveness. Indeed, I expected it. I had made my demonstration of discontent: now I wanted things to be as before. But how could they be?
And so I moaned and groaned about the unfairness of it all to Angela, while trying not to acknowledge that, of the two of us, Isaac had had by far the worst deal. And she, to her credit, kept pointing it out, waiting for the day when I would have ears to hear. How good she is. This practising of so prudent a doctrine, of course, that of female subservience, does have some drawbacks. It renders Angela catty in her conversation: occasionally, one feels, out of sheer desperation, giddy in her behaviour and desperate in her undertakings. The unplucked whiskers on her chin, the straggly hair and wrinkled stockings, suggest some kind of revenge upon the world in general and on her husband in particular. But Gerald, dear Gerald, the amiable fool, seems not to notice, or care: they enfold each other happily enough at night, she tells me, her bulges against his paunch; her feet, untreated bunions and all, tangling with his softer, whiter, smoother ones. Gerald is a civil servant, he drives a car, his shoes are softest leather – his feet are in good shape. I saw his feet once, when the couple kindly asked me, the sorry divorcée, out to the local lido one weekend, to share with them the pleasures of an unexpectedly warm summer day: on littered grass crowded with suburban folk and children e
ating hot-dogs. Gerald and Angela are not smart at all: Carl couldn’t abide them: once I too looked down on them; now I am grateful for them.
(Now Angela knows I am not so alone, of course; that Oliver leaves his nettle-pulling and rose pruning to slip into my bed, I may not get asked to the lido again. Pity may give way to envy – or so I pride myself.)
Something is going to happen. I can feel it. It is so quiet and orderly here in the house, it is unnatural. It is the lull before the storm. Even Oliver feels it. He makes love silently, as if afraid of disturbing someone, something. I am in the habit of being quiet in any case: Carl required very little sexual response from me, and seldom got it. Well, that suited me. Sex between us was a kind of formal dance: a ritual performed in the presence of my beauty, his power: confirmation that the one could be owned by the other. There was little sweaty enjoyment here, little ecstasy of the flesh – but it had its compulsion; like any rewarding habit it had become necessary – as going to church on Sunday might be for a religious-minded person. Or so it had seemed to me. Perhaps I was wrong? Perhaps it was central to his very existence – in which case I had indeed provoked him. How could I, when it came to it, feel on Carl’s behalf, any more than I could think for him? I should have allowed him, even after thirty years or so of marriage, some independence of emotion.
Oliver has dirt under his nails, both finger and toe: his broad working hands assist me in altogether new pleasures: I daresay I should be too old for these responses but I find I am not. Does he love me? I don’t know. Why should he? I think he likes the thought of screwing the rich older woman who employs him: kicking off his muddy boots at the door and walking barefoot (he seldom wears socks, finding them constricting) along thick carpets on his way to my room. I don’t think he laughs at me or reports on me to his friends.
I am fairly sure Oliver likes me. Carl never liked me. But then I didn’t like him. I loved him. I admired him and was awed by him: Lord of the dark domains, as he was, and myself the Ice Queen, having dominion over many secret things.
A woman may go out to work, earn her independence, spurn suitors, decline marriage, and be in every way her own mistress. But she will never wake in the morning with this particular gratification – she will never open her eyes to tranquillity and luxury, as I so often did, with the agreeable thought, ‘Good Lord! Little me! All this, and just because I look the way I do, am the person I was born.’ Enough for this woman just to be; not like the other to be forever proving, convincing, striving, placating, buying the comforts and respect of the world. Let someone else, for this fortunate, idle woman, do all that: let he who loves her, maintain her.
Of course it may all come to an abrupt end: the husband’s, the lover’s, favour may suddenly and dramatically be withdrawn. All the same, the flavour of that confidence remains: it is not forgotten… See how I crook my finger and young Oliver comes to my bed. The Ice Queen may be deposed, but she still knows who she is, and so does her subject. She who rules with the divine right of the old-fashioned female, she-who-must-be-obeyed, whose bag must be fetched, lawn mowed, glass kept filled. Someone has to do it.
I like Oliver. I like him for his implausibility, his trust in the future. He means to be a rock singer. He is getting it together. He has been doing this since he left college ten years ago. He lives by odd jobs; he can dry-stone-wall, dig ditches, lop trees, wire houses, clear blocked drains; he can paper and plaster, tell a comfrey from a borage leaf – the kind of things snow queens are not so hot at. Oliver looks like a young Elvis Presley and like him might presently run to fat. When things don’t turn out right – the drummer loses his drums (how can anyone lose drums; they are so plentiful and bulky: still it’s done) so the one gig of the year can’t be set up – his girlfriend sends the engagement ring (such a little diamond!) back. She lives in Scotland: he only sees her at Christmas and Easter: of course she sends it back! Oliver simply smokes a joint or two, and ceases to worry. I join him. We pass the magic weed from hand to hand, enjoying – as no doubt they will presently say in the ads – a special languid intimacy. I find simple things move me. When Oliver rolls a joint for us both, unwraps a boiled sweet for me, my heart turns over. Such kindness! I am unused to it. Carl would mix me a gin and tonic before our dinner guests arrived and hand it to me, smiling with his lips, but barking in his heart, a high-pitched non-stop frantic bark: the gesture did not really register as love, or kindness. Poor Carl. Poor me.
I try to forgive Carl: try not to burden my friends with these sudden spasms of anger, misery and resentment. It is my experience that a quiet mind is gained only by forgiveness: when you cease to see the other as enemy, as merely yourself in another guise, see the ‘you’ as perceived by the other, forget the notion of ‘I’ – I shiver, I suffer, I bleed; I hate, my head will burst with my resentments; you whom I hate for not acknowledging this I – then peace descends. Our lives are our own again.
Until the next storm bursts.
15
Those who fear a storm breaking have it in their hearts to whip one up. So Joanna did, forthwith. She too had seen the press photograph of her own front door (or so she regarded it) closing upon the high heel of young Bethany, but shut her conscious mind to its significance, putting aside the yellow press with conventional murmurings of ‘rubbish’ and taking up The Times, who contented themselves with a ten-year-old library shot of her ex-husband at the opening of the May Gallery, the bearded face of Isaac in the background, just discernible. These things combined – the conscious, the barely conscious, the unconscious – to send winds both hot and cold, feverish and chill, through her mind to brew up a veritable hurricane. Well might she fear the lull before the storm.
Joanna paced her marble floor and then went out to find Oliver pruning and digging out rhododendron bushes.
‘I mean to sell this house,’ she said. ‘I hate it.’ The King’s House stood on the edge of the Thames, near Maidenhead. The river divided around it, to form an island.
‘It’s a very special house,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know. Some king kept it for his mistresses. Now it does for discarded wives.’
‘George the Third,’ he said, ‘had it renovated for Priscilla Evans. Part of the kitchens dates back to the sixteenth century.’
‘Oh, you would know,’ she said.
‘Yes I would,’ he said, ‘because I am interested in what goes on around me, not just what happens in my head.’
‘Does that make you better than me?’
‘No. Just different.’
Clip, clip went the secateurs, firmly and sharply. He took care not to bruise the wood he cut. She found his concern for the bush insulting.
‘I think it’s a very vulgar house,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t understand that. You think because it is old that justifies everything.’
It was true that the house was an uneasy mixture of the cosy and the elegant: much balconied, pink-washed outside, a nook-and-cranny effect inside, suggestive of weighty lovers chirruping at one another, peeking round corners. Successive purchasers had added marble floors and gold taps, and green watered-silk ruffled curtains of such expense Joanna had been reluctant to take them down, though only ever truly at home with crimson velvet curtains, round shiny mahogany tables and sideboards, patterned carpets and Chinese vases.
Oliver put down the secateurs and carefully brushed each small wound with bitumen paint.
‘All that trouble for a bush,’ she said. ‘I mean to put this house on the market, I’m not joking.’
‘I don’t think you’d be wise,’ he said. ‘It would be a lot of trouble for nothing. If you’re not happy here where would you be happy?’
‘Somewhere far far away,’ she said, ‘and don’t tell me wherever I go I’d have to take myself with me or I’ll scream.’
He laughed, and took up the spade and began to drive it into the stony ground beneath the largest of the bushes. His arms were bare; the muscles moved beneath brown skin.
&
nbsp; ‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘I was talking to the bush,’ he said. ‘I’m digging it up. I’m apologizing.’
She fretted and tapped her foot.
‘Why are you digging it up anyway?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s old and keeping out the light from the others,’ he said, ‘and because purple rhododendrons very easily become a pest.’
‘Well anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m going down to the estate agents now.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is a perfectly good house with a fine garden which had been allowed to go to rack and ruin and I’m just about getting it into shape again. I like it here very much.’
‘Well, I’m bored and lonely here,’ she said, ‘and since I pay, what I say counts.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘You’re just in a bad mood,’ he said.
‘Of course I am,’ she said, scornfully. ‘And I’ll do what I want, when I want, with my own house, my own garden.’
‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘the garden can’t be yours. Gardens are like children, they belong to whoever takes care of them.’
‘Then stay round here and weed it for some other employer,’ she said. ‘Because it won’t be me.’
‘You need me, Joanna,’ he said, and put down his spade. ‘You have a very jealous nature. You’re even jealous of rhododendrons. Why don’t you help me dig them up? You’d feel much better.’
She looked at her long idle nails, her well-kept hands: she looked at his grimy and hardworking ones, no longer gardening, and felt better…
‘It isn’t in my nature,’ she said, ‘and besides, the air is full of radiation. Angela says it isn’t wise to be out.’
‘Perhaps I’d better come in then,’ he said, ‘or perhaps you’d better come under the bushes.’
And he would have pulled her under them there and then, and she would not have objected, or minded sharp stones against her back, her front, or twigs in her hair, or dirtying her purple dress, only the postman chose to come up the path at that moment, with a packet from the Maverick Enquiry Agency, which she could not ignore.
