Aphrodite's Hat

by Salley Vickers

  Her mother had become content, but not with Laura.

  With Terence her mother had formed an alliance which included an undeclared agreement between them over Laura. ‘Our girl’s a bit of an idealist,’ she had used to say, winking at Terence when Laura had suggested that abortion might not be the only solution for foetal abnormality. ‘Wait till she has to bring up a handicapped child!’

  Perhaps it was the discernible threat behind this remark which had dissuaded Laura from having the amniocentesis before giving birth to Luke, her second child. Luke, tiny, wrinkled and with one perfect arm tucked under his armpit, had been born with the other tapering into a little cleft stub. Terence had taken one look at Luke and had spoken of ‘places’ where the baby might be ‘helped’. Laura had spent the night in terrified tears and at six the following morning had presented herself to the staff on the ward, washed and dressed with baby Luke in her arms.

  ‘No thank you,’ she had said when they suggested she wait for her husband. ‘I have ordered a taxi – it is quite all right.’

  Arriving home she found her mother was staying. The supper things had not been washed and a bottle of whisky was on the table. ‘Celebrating, darling!’ Terence had said. Later her mother found a moment to whisper, ‘He was upset, you see. Dearest girl, I hope you don’t mind, but a man needs a drink at times like this.’

  Laura gave up her regular job as a teacher to look after Luke. Nellie, her daughter, six years older and bright as paint, helped too, and, in time, Luke learned to be almost as able as other children. But still Laura would only work in the evenings when the children were in bed, which is how, as a teacher of adult education, she met Simon.

  Simon was the local organiser for adult education. ‘Have you ever given your body in a sacred cause?’ he asked after a few too many glasses of Chardonnay at the Christmas party. He had brown eyes which looked right into hers.

  ‘Never!’ she had replied, laughing in spite of herself and he had gravely explained that to sleep with a man on first meeting was considered by certain tribes a sign of possession by the gods. ‘What a winning excuse,’ she had said, still laughing and wishing that the years of maternity had left her wit in better order.

  The children’s annual visit to Terence’s parents coinciding with the Christmas party had left Laura unusually free and she had prescribed herself the overnight stay with Simon as a restorative, hardly expecting to hear from him again. ‘I’m allegedly phoning about your class on the Nineteenth-Century Novel,’ he had said on the phone the following evening, ‘but really it’s to say “hurry back”.’ Terence, whose infrequent meetings with his own mother made him more than usually impatient, yelled at that moment, ‘Can you get off the phone, I’m expecting someone?’ which enabled Laura to say to Simon, quite properly, ‘May I call you back later?’ and ‘Remind me of your number.’

  Later she did call him and the evening classes she ‘taught’ began gently to expand. ‘I hope they’re paying you decently for all this god-awful work?’ Terence had said, truculent that he had to spend yet another evening alone. ‘Never mind – it’ll help pay for the French trip.’

  ‘I’ll have to cut down on this,’ Laura had said that evening, lying beneath Simon. Later, coming into the bedroom with a cup of coffee for her before she drove home, Simon said, ‘Why not come and live with me?’ and then when she said nothing, ‘Marry me. I’ll be fine with Luke. Look, I love your children.’

  ‘But you haven’t met them.’ Laura had pointed out. Still, his offer was seductive. Far more than the call to her body, Simon’s readiness to take on a handicapped boy reached to something deep inside her.

  It was this exchange which, a month or so later, prompted her to send him ‘The Buried Life’. By this time, Simon had taken a university job and had moved to London. She found reasons to visit him there – a conference on George Eliot, a visit to the National Gallery – but their meetings had become harder to arrange and perhaps this too was behind Laura’s sending the poem.

  (ii)

  A Nameless Sadness

  ‘Loved the poem!’ Simon sounded breezy over the phone. A prickle across Laura’s skin warned her to drop the subject, but there is a demon inside us which urges towards our own harm.

  ‘I love it too. What did you like in it?’ She was about to add, ‘I couldn’t send it to anyone who didn’t understand.’

  ‘I read it aloud to Trish.’

  Trish was Simon’s flat-mate, brought in to help pay the rent. A pale girl with black-rimmed eyes, she smiled a good deal but on the few occasions when Laura had stayed the night she had caught something baleful in Trish’s glance. Sometimes she had been apprehensive lest Trish get hold of Terence’s phone number.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We thought it was a bit long-winded, but then they were, weren’t they, those eighteenth-century bods.’

  ‘Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth century.’

  ‘Of course he is,’ said Simon. ‘Anyway, when are you coming next? My body misses yours.’

  Laura had never again alluded to ‘The Buried Life’. On her next visit to London she had seen the copy of the poem she had sent, which Simon and Trish had dealt with so comprehensively, lying in the dish which acted as the flat’s filing system, along with the gas and electricity bills and the tokens Simon was saving from the petrol station.

  That night Simon had asked again if she would come to live with him and she knew she did not want to. But it is hard, when you have established patterns, to change them. In a world of Terence, Simon was more than an escape: and he was ardent, in a way which disarmed her.

  It was not until she upped sticks and brought the children to London to be with Simon that she saw a flicker in that ardour.

  Simon was as good as his word – he behaved with overt kindness towards Luke, and Luke, unused to receiving the love of more than one parent, prospered. To Laura’s surprise it was Nellie who was the fly in the ointment of their new life. For, gradually she became aware, the bitter truth was that Nellie and Simon did not get on.

  Used to the customary daily friction between Terence and Luke, Laura was lulled at first into a false sense of the success of her enterprise when she saw the way Simon responded to her son. ‘Come on, tiger,’ he had said, when Luke had asked if he could ‘wee’ the first time they all went out together to the pictures. And he had taken Luke’s hand and led him to the Gents as if the boy were his own.

  Laura, in the darkness of the cinema, wept tears of gratitude. But Nellie, precocious, independent Nellie, had insisted on sitting on her lap. ‘Hey, what’s all this?’ Laura asked. ‘Nellephants don’t generally sit on laps – not that I’m complaining, mind,’ she added, feeling her daughter’s slight frame tense. ‘It’s well known it’s a privilege to have a Nellephant sit on one.’

  ‘She’s got an Oedipus complex,’ said Simon when two nights running they had woken to find Nellie in bed with them.

  Nellie, who had been taken by Laura to all kinds of theatrical events, said scornfully, ‘No, I haven’t – that’s when a man wants to sleep with his mother. I’m not a man.’

  ‘Perhaps you are!’ Simon had replied. ‘Perhaps you are going to grow a little penis and turn into a man.’

  Laura had been horrified at this and Nellie had gone first red and then white and had vanished from the room.

  ‘Simon, that was horrible.’

  ‘It was a joke?’

  ‘She’s ten, Simon, an age where it’s perfectly normal to get into your parents’ bed. You might even take it as a compliment.’

  But it wasn’t a compliment and Laura knew she was trying to put a false complexion on things.

  Luke settled down in a local school but Nellie, formerly top of her class, fell behind. She complained of stomach aches, took days off from school and became picky about her food, until Laura began to wonder if she should take her to the doctor.

  ‘Do you think she’s anorexic?’ asked Simon one evening. Nellie had retreated to her room a
gain and Simon was watching television with Luke on his knee. He sounded almost pleased with the idea.

  ‘Don’t!’ Laura was at her wits’ end. Her daughter’s strong young body had become thin and bowed, like the body of a little old woman, and her eyes had begun to gleam unnervingly in her narrowing face. She looks like a trapped vole or a hedgehog, Laura thought, compunction twisting her heart.

  (iii)

  Alas! is even love too weak

  To unlock the heart, and let it speak?

  By the time he was eleven, Luke was able to play the trumpet, football and the lead in Richard III, which last he did with alacrity, leaping and grinning with an energetic malevolence which belied the sweetness of his nature. Laura, now forty, sat with Simon in the school hall and felt that perhaps she had been right to leave Terence all those years ago. Terence, too, it must be said was apparently happier. He had married a former friend of Laura’s who had demonstrated her friendship by working up a steady antagonism towards her husband’s former wife. Laura and Simon had shaken down together; it was true that the ardour which had so forcefully won her had abated, and over the years Simon had tended to arrive home later and later from work. Laura did not enquire too deeply into the possible reasons for this. It was enough for her that they were friends, of a kind, and rubbed along. And it must be owned that Simon had remained very attached to Luke. But Luke was not her only child.

  Nellie, or Nell, as she was now known, bore no relation to the small eager girl who had once helped rear and care for Luke. At twelve she had started to smoke, covertly at first, later she was more brazen about it. Her room, once clinical in its neatness, became first untidy, then chaotic and finally, Laura in despair had to own, disgusting.

  ‘Darling, how can you?’ she had asked in genuine bewilderment when she had found a used tampon on her daughter’s floor. And Nell had just smiled her barren little smile and shrugged and gone off with ‘friends’ who looked to Laura like the inmates of a detention centre.

  By unspoken agreement, Laura and Simon ceased to discuss Nell. Laura, who by now held a university post, acquired the habit of racing home before Simon to tidy Nell’s bedroom. Nell had placed an embargo on anyone entering her bedroom, but Laura could not bring herself to ignore the astonishing mess in which her once fastidious daughter now chose to live. Cigarette ends, used tissues, as well as other items more personal, lay littered about the room. In fact, it was through her surreptitious cleaning of Nell’s room that Laura learned her daughter was no longer a virgin. She flushed the used condom down the lavatory, went downstairs and made herself a cup of coffee and smoked one of the cigarettes she had found lying in the middle of the floor.

  She had not smoked for seventeen years. She found she was missing Terence.

  It took a while for Laura to cotton on to the fact that Nell was taking drugs. She asked advice of a friend who had trained as a counsellor, who suggested she leave her purse lying around. ‘It’s a sure-fire test,’ Judy had said. ‘Don’t leave too much in it. But if she’s been honest in the past …’

  ‘Of course she has!’ Laura could hardly bear that she was having this conversation about her daughter. She recalled Nell at five, slipping her pocket-money into her mother’s purse – not the other way round. Later, when asked why she had done this, Nellie had replied, ‘To buy you nice things, ‘course.’

  ‘OK, but they change.’ Judy sounded complacent. ‘So if she’s not taken money before and now she does, you’ll know it’s drugs.’

  Laura, feeling like a traitor, left her purse with a twenty-pound note in it on the sideboard, on an occasion she knew Nell would be alone in the house. She spent the evening at dinner with friends, almost sweating with anxiety, and became ebullient when she found on her return that the purse had been left untouched.

  ‘Hey, what’s got into you?’ Simon asked that night. ‘Wild woman.’

  But the short period of elation passed. It became impossible to ignore the fact that Nell, when not angry and snarling, or, somehow worse, dissociated and vague, was rendering herself comatose. It was some comfort, Laura supposed, that, at any rate, Nell showed no disposition to rob anyone in the household for her habit. A remnant of her former being, stiff and honest, still hung painfully about her and Laura sometimes thought she glimpsed a wistfulness in her daughter’s eyes. But when she tried to hug her, Nell’s body still seized up.

  And there was no one to talk to about it. Unable to commune with Simon, Laura held back from confiding elsewhere. It was as if, were she to speak her terror, her whole life might spin out of control. She took to praying, furtively at odd moments, and to lighting candles. She threw silver coins into wishing wells, gave money to gypsies selling ‘white heather’ and sent sums of money, larger than she could afford, to charitable organisations – as if by virtue of the anonymity of the gift her daughter might be granted grace.

  But Nell just grew less and less like the child Laura remembered. Maybe I was wrong about her? she thought. Maybe all along she was like this? But she knew she wasn’t wrong. Over the years she had become shaky – her confidence in her own judgement diminished. But she clung fast to the conviction that she knew her own child.

  Laura was up in Nell’s room, which had become something of a fetish for her, one chilly summer evening. Simon was giving one of his ‘late’ seminars and Luke had gone over to a friend to spend the night. Laura, unable to resist the allure of the chaos of her daughter’s room, was on her knees piling together some scattered papers when her gaze became transfixed by some words on the page before her.

  Dear Daddy, she read. Please, please trust me. I am fine. Mum, of course, as you say, is mad. She’s quite barking and I have to ignore anything she tells me or I will go mad too.

  There was more but Laura did not want to read it. She walked out of her daughter’s room and down the stairs and into the garden.

  It was a large garden, for London, and Laura had taken pride in the way she had planted it. A tree, a shrub, a scented plant, a herb for every birthday, every anniversary – every important family occasion. She went and lay face down now under the white lilac tree she had planted for the third anniversary of her meeting with Simon.

  ‘Nellie, Nellie.’ She found she was crying and scratching the ground. Earth was in her mouth and the damp grass was soaking her clothes. ‘Nellie, Nellie, Nellie – my little Nellephant – What have I done to you? Oh, Nellie!’ For it was she, she – she couldn’t any longer avoid the frightful knowledge – she who had done this to her own child.

  She had left Terence so that Luke might have a chance – and in doing so had destroyed her daughter. No. That was a lie. She had left Terence for her own selfish interests – because, frankly, she could no longer bear – had loathed, in fact, his way of pulling down all that seemed good to her. But she had had children by Terence. By the inescapable law of nature she was not entitled to leave. And for what had she left, after all? Rolling over on to her back she thought about Simon.

  She had known all there was to know about her and Simon from the beginning: the poem she had sent had told her. Simon had no clue what ‘The Buried Life’ might mean. And she had gone on, knowing he had no clue, forcing her child into a picture of a life which suited herself for the time being. And in return for this her child had turned on her – and who could blame her? ‘Oh, Nellie, Nellie,’ she cried, and from the cold grass and white London skies no answer came to give her comfort.

  (iv)

  And long we try in vain to speak and act

  Our hidden self, and what we say and do

  Is eloquent, is well – but ‘tis not true!

  Some vestige of strength, some particle of the years of early care, must have remained in Nell, for she got herself into university. Simon was delighted; he even offered to help her transport her things. Laura could not banish the notion that his enthusiasm was fuelled by his desire to see Nell out of their house. ‘D’you think she’s ready for it?’ Laura asked him, as they prepared for bed the
night before Nell’s departure.

  ‘Sure. She’ll have a whale of a time. Do her good. Get her away from her mama’s beady eye. You’ll see – it’ll be cool!’

  But Laura, who tried not to object to the over-youthful turns of speech that Simon increasingly tended to use, remained uneasy. Nell had displayed uncharacteristic signs of nerves about her impending experience.

  ‘C’m on! That’s normal,’ Simon had said. ‘Give the girl a break!’ And the following morning, when Nell was looking green over her breakfast coffee: ‘What about a nip of whisky for the university girl? Get you into the student mood.’

  With Nell gone, the household, it was true, grew calmer. The effort which had gone into Luke’s care had brought compensations. He was popular, and there were few weekends Laura and Simon did not now have to themselves. Laura felt guilty to find that life without Nell was pleasanter. And of course, much of the relief came from the effect her daughter’s departure had on Simon.

  ‘It’s great to be alone together again,’ he said one night in the bath. And as she climbed out of her clothes to join him, ‘This is like old times.’

  So when Simon asked Laura to marry him she was not much surprised, only at the form she found her answer taking.

  ‘I always said we should marry,’ said Simon. ‘D’you remember? Thirteen years and I’ve never wanted another woman.’

  Perhaps by an association of ideas (she was thinking of his ‘late’ seminars) Laura found herself asking, ‘Whatever happened to Trish?’ The flat-mate with the baleful eye had caused some trouble when asked to make way for Laura’s children. But the departed Trish had continued to send Simon a Christmas card each year, until one year they had stopped.