Alice Hartley‘s Happiness

by Gregory, Philippa

  By never wavering in his concentration on the tune and the necessary arithmetic, working from ten green bottles hanging on the wall, down to nine, eight, seven, six, and so on, and by bumping and thrusting in remorseless time (bear in mind that Michael started the song adagio, built up through allegro, and then concluded allegretto spirito! and falsetto too, actually), Mrs Hartley reached total satisfaction with a scream of ‘OH! YES! YES! YES!’ just as Michael trilled, ‘And there’ll be four green bottles hanging on the wall! … Oh God!’

  Aunty Sarah, who was pretending to dust the banister for all of this performance with a reminiscent smile on her face, nodded her old head wisely.

  Michael and Alice lay still for a while enjoying the dreamy peace of post-coital content. It says much for their sexual compatibility that they had never got further than four green bottles. And it says much for Michael’s concern for Alice’s sexual happiness that he had chosen ‘Ten green bottles’ in the first place. The consequences of, say, ‘Three blind mice’ would not have been nearly so happy.

  ‘Oh!’ Alice sighed at last. She sat up and threw the heavy waves of her black hair away from her face and over her shoulders. ‘I must get up,’ she said. ‘There’s a few people coming today and I have to prepare.’

  Michael felt for the bed behind him and crawled up to it like Sherpa Tenzing making the peak of Everest without oxygen.

  ‘Phew!’ he said. He rested, panting for a few moments until he had caught his breath. ‘Who’s coming?’ he asked.

  ‘Aerobo-garden Workshop at midday, Mothers and Babies at two, Women’s Rights at four, and in the evening I thought we might have a collective meeting to get in tune with ourselves and each other again,’ Alice said.

  ‘Again?’ Michael asked. He could not remember a collective meeting on attunement.

  Alice smiled. ‘Like last time,’ she said. ‘Herbal tobacco and lots of sex.’

  ‘Oh, that attunement meeting!’ Michael said. ‘Do you need me here during the day? I should really go in to the university to meet my Sunday reading group at midday.’

  ‘You run along,’ Alice said kindly. ‘Take the car if you want.’

  Michael, who had just been getting up, collapsed back on the pillows, quite pale. ‘Your husband would be bound to see it,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to upset him unnecessarily … I wouldn’t really … He might …’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘OK. I’ll run you in now, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll get a lift back with the Mothers and Babies,’ Michael said.

  Alice nodded and pulled on a dress over her rumpled head. It was deep royal blue, with a hem trimmed with gold sequins and embroidered with golden stars and silver moons. It was one of her favourite dresses, as yet almost unworn. She had worn it for Professor Hartley as soon as she had bought it and he had said that she reminded him of a character from a Brontë novel. When Alice had preened and asked – ‘which character?’ – he had said the first Mrs Rochester, the mad one in the attic.

  That was Professor Hartley’s idea of the perfect joke. It demonstrated his knowledge (and that in a discipline other than his speciality), it squashed Alice’s pretensions, and wounded her vanity. Thus it aided his control of Alice and established his superiority. In short, Professor Hartley was a bully and a clever dick.

  Alice had taken off the dress and never worn it again. It had hung in her wardrobe for five years, waiting for a party where it might be excusable. Now, she realized, she could wear it every day if she wished. And no one, ever again, would wipe the smile off her face by telling her she looked ridiculous when she had thought she looked beautiful.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ Michael said tenderly.

  Alice turned to him a face which was quite radiant.

  They kissed like young lovers.

  The aerobo-gardening class mowed and rolled the lawn to Dire Straits and started weeding the herbaceous borders with Madonna. Alice sat in the shade under the trees listening to the music and watching them with pleasure. She hardly turned her head when she heard the crunch of a heavy tread on the gravel and then a shadow fell on her.

  ‘Oh! Doctor Simmonds!’ she said. ‘How nice to see you!’

  Doctor Simmonds cast a jaundiced eye around the bright garden at the twenty skinny girls in sweat-stained leotards prancing long-legged behind the lawn-mower, or bending and hoeing in the flower beds, their bony bums bouncing to the beat.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked rudely. ‘Bob-a-job?’

  Alice privately thought that his diagnosis of death in an old lady who was merely drunkenly asleep could be easily explained if he seriously thought that the new Boy Scouts’ uniform was a cut-away leotard with a boob-tube top.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, to avoid further explanations.

  ‘Tell them they can come and do me next,’ he said. He raised his voice to a stentorian shout: ‘You can come and do me next!’ he bellowed.

  Stephanie jumped at the noise and then ran light-footed across the grass to Mrs Hartley. She had stripped down to a pair of footless tights which clung unreliably to her skinny hips. Her small apricot-shaped breasts bobbed sweetly under a cropped t-shirt top which occasionally slid off one shoulder to show an enticingly rosy nipple.

  ‘You the Scout Captain?’ Doctor Simmonds asked in some surprise.

  Stephanie jogged from one thin foot to another in silence and looked to Mrs Hartley for guidance.

  ‘Bit young to be Brown Owl, aren’t you?’ Doctor Simmonds demanded as the nipple hove into view and challenged his belief that Stephanie was a boy.

  Stephanie did a few absent-minded scissor jumps. The t-shirt jumped too, revealing a tanned ribby midriff and the underside of her small pointy breasts.

  ‘I said you can come and do me next,’ Doctor Simmonds said. ‘You look as if you could use some more work. I’ve got a hay meadow which needs cutting. A traditional hay meadow, I’ve got. I do it the old way – the real way – with a scythe. I love to be out in the open air with my scythe. You can all come behind me and stack.’

  ‘Stack?’ Alice asked, as if the verb were some obscene suggestion.

  Doctor Simmonds glanced at her. ‘Stack!’ he said louder. ‘It would do you the world of good, Madam, to get out into a hayfield, like my hayfield, and find out what real work is like.’

  ‘Mrs Hartley,’ Stephanie asked, hopping on one foot and then the other. ‘Is this horrible man bothering you? Do you want me to disable him?’

  Doctor Simmonds leaned forward as if he could not believe his ears. ‘What? What? What did you say?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s all right, Stephanie,’ Alice said sweetly. ‘This is Doctor Simmonds, I can certainly handle him.’

  Stephanie nodded and trotted away across the grass. Doctor Simmonds was purple with rage. The thought of being disabled by Stephanie was only marginally more insulting than being handled by Alice.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said. ‘There are a few things I’d like to get straight. We’ll go inside and sit down.’

  He turned on his heel and marched firmly into the house. Alice, making wide aura-strengthening gestures with her hands, followed him, her blue embroidered gown hushing softly over the newmown grass.

  Doctor Simmonds was sitting at the kitchen table in the big carver chair. There was no sign of Aunty Sarah.

  ‘I’ve heard some funny stories about this place,’ he began truculently. ‘And I expect an explanation.’

  Alice hovered around to the other end of the table, still making aura-strengthening gestures. She hummed softly in her throat in praise of the Great Earth Mother whose service is simplicity and who, in happier, earlier and more straightforward times, would have ordered Doctor Simmonds’s immediate ritual castration, disembowelment, and burning alive at the Midsummer Solstice.

  ‘An explanation, d’you hear me?’ said Doctor Simmonds more loudly. ‘An explanation from you!’

  Alice nodded and shimmered down into a seat. ‘And what exactly is it that you don’t understand?
’ she asked. ‘Have you, perhaps, been asking yourself why your life seems so empty? Why you no longer desire your wife? Why you are bored, both with your work and with your hobbies? Are you worried about your excessive drinking and smoking, and the fact that you have no friends? Are you distressed that you are fat and ageing, balding, and unattractive, and that your breath smells and your clothes are ugly?’ She smiled at him like a sibylline prophetess. ‘Which of all these worries of yours – all of them, in their way, life-threatening – is uppermost in your mind?’

  Doctor Simmonds burbled inarticulately – ‘Why – how dare you?’ he exploded. Spittle flew across the table in a shower of snow-white dots. ‘How dare you, Mrs – Whatever-your-name-is?’

  Alice smiled. ‘You may call me Alice,’ she said, as one conferring a boon on the humblest of suitors.

  ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted by you – you cheeky …’ Doctor Simmonds cast around in his mind for the most insulting noun he could conjure. ‘You cheeky … woman!’ he said with loathing. ‘I came here to find why you are pretending that old Miss Coulter is still alive! I came here to find out what sort of rum game you are playing, my lady! I came here to find what you’re doing with a lad still wet behind the ears! And the district Scout Commissioner, who happens to be an old friend of mine, will be very interested in what you are doing with these Boy Scouts! Very interested indeed!’

  ‘Then tell him,’ Alice said encouragingly. She arose from her seat and went and opened the back door. Doctor Simmonds instinctively rose and followed her. Alice’s flowery perfume, mixed with the scent of warm female sexuality, wafted over him and her gown brushed at his ankles.

  ‘Tell him,’ she said invitingly. ‘And tell your wife that you made a mistake with Miss Coulter and that she is quite well, that she is better than she has ever been. And tell your wife, and the vicar’s wife, that we are exploring consciousness here, that we are growing into unity with each other and with the whole universe.

  ‘Tell them that the world is full of things which none of us understand, and that the key to deep joy is to watch and listen and learn. Not to pry and condemn.’

  Doctor Simmonds gaped inarticulately.

  ‘Tell them that it is possible to experience sexual pleasure so profoundly, and so deeply, that the sexual act is itself a way to consciousness. Have you ever made love which was so beautiful that you felt the presence of god all around you?’ she asked. ‘Have the two of you ever made love and wept for joy?’

  Doctor Simmonds was grey with shock, but from his complacent fat-man’s face a hungry little boy looked out. Alice saw the hunger in him, and knew how right she had been when she had teased him. He was bored, and lonely, and sick to his very soul.

  ‘Oh, Doctor Simmonds,’ she said with sudden pity. ‘Come upstairs and get out of those ugly clothes and I will massage you all over with passion fruit and ginseng!’

  For a moment he hovered, for a split second he swayed towards her; then he pushed himself back on his pompous heels and stormed out of the door.

  ‘Soliciting, prostitution, and keeping a bawdy house!’ he snarled. ‘I have you now, Mrs Whoever-your-name-is! I have you now! You haven’t heard the last of this by a long way. And the District Commissioner of Scouts will hear about this, and the parochial church council.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Alice said sadly. She watched him stomp off down the drive, muttering and threatening to himself as he went. She could hear him, like an ominous rumble of thunder on a sunny day, long after he had gone from her sight around the sweep of the drive.

  She shut the back door and went and sat at the table and rested her head on her hands.

  ‘Has he gone?’ Aunty Sarah asked, emerging from the larder with an open bottle of elderflower champagne in her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘What are you doing in there?’

  ‘Hiding,’ Aunty Sarah said precisely. ‘And drinking.’

  ‘Why?’ Alice asked.

  ‘I got bored waiting,’ Aunty Sarah explained.

  ‘Not the drinking, the hiding. Why are you hiding?’

  Aunty Sarah leaned forward and breathed a warm boozy flower-scented breath into Alice’s face. She tapped the side of her nose with one bony finger. ‘He’s going to be trouble, that one,’ she said. ‘Pity you couldn’t get him upstairs and we could have taken photographs of him and threatened to put them on the church notice board unless he minded his own beeswax.’

  Alice’s eyes widened. ‘That would be blackmail, Aunty Sarah!’

  ‘They do it all the time on the radiovision,’ Aunty Sarah said, unrepentantly. ‘And I can tell you, that Constable Parkinson in the village is a nice enough little man, but Starsky and Butch he is not.’

  ‘Too late now, anyway,’ Alice said regretfully. ‘And you are right, he is going to cause trouble if he can. What a pity he can’t be made to see the opportunities of the world which is all around him. The mysteries!’

  ‘Blind as a bat,’ Aunty Sarah confirmed. ‘He had a miracle healing before him – me – and he doesn’t know it.’

  ‘He could have a spacecraft land in his hayfield and he wouldn’t see it,’ Alice said mournfully. ‘He is determined to see the worst and to cause disturbance and grief.’

  ‘Not with me, he isn’t,’ Aunty Sarah said briskly. ‘I’m not going back to bed to please anybody. I’m not going to be dead and buried either.’

  Alice smiled. ‘No, why should you!’ she exclaimed. ‘And I’m not going back to the Professor!’

  Sarah poured two measures of the elderflower champagne into the breakfast teacups and they clinked them together in a mutual toast of defiance, and drank them to the dregs.

  Aunty Sarah gleamed like a sadistic old lizard. ‘I’ll fix him,’ she said. ‘It’s about time something happened to him.’

  ‘Like what?’ Alice said, immediately diverted.

  ‘A spacecraft land in his hayfield,’ Aunty Sarah said musingly. ‘He’s always been daft about that hayfield of his. Thinks he’s the squire of the manor with it. He needs something to shake him up.’

  When Michael returned from the university with the Mothers and Babies it was in an unfamiliar car. Suzanne and Mary had brought a new recruit to the Growth Centre – Louise Biddings, hugely pregnant, was driving, wedged behind the steering-wheel of her pale blue Morris Minor. Suzanne sat in the front, Mary, Michael and the two babies were in the rear seat.

  ‘Welcome,’ Alice said warmly. She kissed them all in turn, breathing deeply when she turned her face into Michael’s neck and all that warming testosterone wafted around her.

  ‘This is Louise,’ Suzanne said. ‘She’s married to a postgraduate research student in the politics department. She was due on Tuesday.’

  Louise stood silent in her Jesus sandals, her eyes downcast, her dingy navy maternity smock billowing over her hugely pregnant belly.

  ‘Hello,’ Alice said pleasantly. ‘Hello, Louise, come in and sit down.’

  Louise waddled over the threshold and slumped on to the kitchen bench. Her hair was in lank rats’ tails, she smelled warmly of old sweat and stale chip fat.

  ‘I can’t afford anything,’ she said blankly. ‘And he said I wasn’t to come.’

  ‘He?’ Alice asked. She gestured to Michael to put the kettle on. Suzanne and Mary put their babies at either end of the pram and gave them a tea strainer and an ebony antique scarab to suck – redolent and tasty!

  ‘Jon-Jo,’ Louise said shortly. ‘My husband. He said that feminism and women’s movements are false-consciousness splinter groups which threaten the hegemony of the revolution.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alice said.

  ‘And I don’t have any money since I gave up work in the chip shop.’

  Alice nodded. She had not taken her eyes from Louise’s sludge-coloured pudding face.

  ‘When did you stop work?’ she asked.

  ‘On Tuesday,’ Louise said. ‘I got the sack, actually.’

  Alice raised her eyebrows.


  ‘My pains started,’ Louise said. ‘So I lay down behind the fryer. It’s against Health and Safety Regs to block the fire exits. I was a Hazard,’ she said with simple pride.

  ‘Why doesn’t your husband give you money?’ Alice asked.

  ‘He says property is theft,’ Louise started. ‘And he doesn’t want me to be an enslaved dependant. I have to be free to negotiate my own level in the capitalist labour market – until the revolution, that is,’ she said. She spoke of the coming revolution with resignation rather than with fervour.

  Alice nodded. ‘And what does he live on?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s got a grant, and a scholarship, and money from his Dad,’ Louise said without rancour. ‘That’s internal contradiction. He’s taking money from the state and from the capitalists, and he uses it to overthrow the state and the capitalists. If he gave it to me it wouldn’t be a revolutionary step. I don’t do anything which is internal contradiction.’

  ‘I see,’ Alice said, who thought she saw all the most important things. ‘And what about this baby?’

  ‘We were an accident,’ Louise said dully. ‘And then he married me because my Dad’s a miner.’

  ‘He wanted to join the labouring classes by marrying you?’ Alice asked.

  Louise frowned, trying to remember. ‘I think he said that,’ she said. ‘But the main reason was that my Dad said he’d break his bloody jaw.’

  ‘And what does your doctor say about your pregnancy?’ Alice asked.

  Louise shrugged. ‘He says “Next”,’ she said.

  Alice nodded. ‘Well then,’ she said brightly. ‘I understand that you cannot pay, Louise, but we can afford to let you have some treatment on credit, against the time when you can pay, how would that be?’

  ‘All right,’ Louise said. There was a glimmer of a smile on her tired face. ‘That would be all right.’