7

‘She should be thoroughly punished for making you so unhappy,’ said Bethany to Carl, when he ran through his life for her, the way new lovers do.

‘My mother is dead,’ he said, surprised.

‘I didn’t mean your mother,’ she said. ‘I meant your wife.’

‘Oh that old woman, that Joanna May,’ said Carl, ‘who cares about her?’

Bethany had heard that kind of thing before, for all she was so young. On the night she met Carl, she turned over in bed and said, ‘I’m twenty-four going on forty-two and you’re sixty-three going on thirty-six, so who’s counting?’ And Carl stopped counting there and then, though of course the world did not.

That first night he said to her, ‘You’re the second woman I’ve slept with in all my life,’ and she said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and he did not care if she believed or not: he just got out of bed to make some calls to Australia, and so she believed him.

‘I was totally faithful to Joanna all my married life,’ he said, when he had finished his calls and got back into bed. He had skinny white hairless shins but she did not care. ‘That was my folly.’

‘What happened?’ asked Bethany, though she knew pretty well; these things do not go unnoticed, even in circles of power, where policemen seldom enter in.

‘I found her with another man,’ said Carl, easily, though this was the first time for several years he had found words for the event. Well, who had there been to speak to? And in so saying, he bound Bethany to himself, or so she thought. She was safe with him now, she told herself: he would not, could not, surely, pass her on to some subordinate.

‘What did you do?’ asked Bethany audaciously, and audacity was rewarded, as it so often is.

‘I killed him,’ said Carl, even more easily. ‘That is to say, I had him killed. But it amounts to the same thing.’

Bethany wondered how the deed had been done, but did not like to ask. Screams in the soft suburban night had many a time disturbed her childish sleep; she had never liked to ask. Once she did and her mother slapped her. ‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ Mother said, and Bethany had believed her.

‘Why him not her?’ Bethany enquired further, now, of Carl. ‘Most men kill the woman and leave the man.’ Twenty-four going on forty-two, no doubt about it, reared in a whorehouse! The things she knew for all she never asked.

‘I left her alive,’ said Carl dreamily, ‘to suffer from the loss of me.’

‘Most women left alone for that reason,’ said Bethany, ‘just find someone else.’

‘Not when they’re old,’ said Carl. ‘Don’t you want me to tell you how I disposed of her lover?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she said, so he didn’t. Confidences are dangerous. Witnesses get killed. Those who know too much disappear. The world is not a safe place, even for the well intentioned; especially the well intentioned.

‘Why did Joanna betray me?’ asked Carl May, that first night, he who so seldom displayed ignorance or doubt, thus suddenly loquacious. ‘I don’t know much about women. What did my wife need that she didn’t have? I still can’t understand it. We’d been married nearly thirty years. She was never much interested in sex; what did she want with another man? She had more than enough to do – the house to look after and so forth; I was good to her: attentive when I had the time: generous – she could spend as much money as she liked on clothes, though she never would: ask Joanna to choose between Dior and Marks & Spencer and she’d choose Marks & Spencer. It was her background – middle of middle. Revenge of some kind? Insanity? She liked animals more than people: she said so: it hurt me. She had a little grey cat which died. That upset her. And then of course the dogs – it’s true I got rid of the dogs. But she never found out about that. It can’t have had anything to do with that. No, it was just in her female nature, buried deep, but there it was. The need to betray, to spoil, to turn what is good bad. The bitch goddess, at it again.’

‘How do you mean, Carl? Got rid of the dogs?’

He was not in the habit of explaining himself, and she knew it. But still she asked, and he replied, as she knew he would. As he trusted her body, so he began to trust her mind.

‘I was jealous,’ said Carl May to Bethany. ‘I didn’t like the way she stroked the dogs. I didn’t like the way they nuzzled her, as if they’d been there many a time before. Or how she’d talk to them instead of me. It upset me – a kind of spasm attacked my throat: such a lump in it I couldn’t swallow. Once, looking at her with them, I almost fainted. A lot of people depend upon me. I have to keep myself steady for their sake. I had the animals stolen: I was going to sell them; then I realized I’d have to have them poisoned. You know how dogs will find their way back home. But enough of all that.’

‘You did the right thing,’ said Bethany, who felt quite safe, having no dogs to poison, no lover (so far) for Carl May to destroy.

Bethany knew well enough the value of the benefits she offered her new lover; how hard, once enjoyed, they were to do without: the sheer surprise, the sudden joyful restoration of self-esteem, as conferred by the sexual act when performed with the right (even though unlikely – especially the unlikely) person. Moreover, Bethany surprised even herself: she had never known the magic work so well before: not in the many sometimes profitable, sometimes distressing couplings of her adolescent days; not even when she moved away from home and the suburbs to the nightclubs of the fashionable world, not even then had she and whoever come even near it; no, not even with Hughie Scotland, Carl’s predecessor, not for all his fame as a media stud. Those others had not seemed to notice any lack of anything. Those others had given her money, cars, racing tips, sexual satisfaction, all kinds of things – but what Carl May gave Bethany, in return for his pleasure, was confidence. And what she felt he felt too. Oh yes, she was safe enough. He wouldn’t want to do without her. So Bethany believed. So Joanna had believed.

‘You be careful,’ said Patsy, Bethany’s mother, when Bethany reported back to her that she was moving on from Hughie Scotland to Carl, and rather liked the new arrangement. ‘Don’t go falling in love. Love’s all misery and muddle and never any profit.’

‘Don’t talk like that!’ said Bill, Bethany’s father, to his wife. ‘You and I are in love, always have been, and look at the profit we’ve made! Look at the child we made! Our Bethany, child of love. No wonder she’s sought after; and fate is on her side, it’s obvious. Carl May! That really is the big time.’

Patsy and Bill, ex-flower-folk, kept a house of moderate ill fame in an outer-London suburb, halfway down a very long quiet street. They went together to local pubs: he brought home lonely men, she brought home lonely women. They brought them together in the upstairs bedrooms of the large suburban house, charging an agency fee. Bill mowed lawns for the neighbours; Patsy would meet their children out of school if they were ever in a fix: they were an obliging pair, they took care to be, no one ever complained. Where did altruism stop, self-interest begin? Hard to tell. Whoever can, of other people or themselves?

Patsy and Bill met in the fifties, at the cinema. Gigi was showing: Audrey Hepburn of the wide brown eyes as the girl reared in the brothel who found true love, Maurice Chevalier as her protector. ‘Thank heaven for little girls,’ he sang, with all the faux-innocence of that sickly decade. There at the cinema, to that tune, Patsy and Bill fell in love, and reaffirmed that love at a rerun in the sixties, at a half-empty local cinema, while they were trawling for custom amongst the dispossessed and empty-lifers at a Tuesday matinée, and there, in the back row, Bethany was conceived in a fit of wholesome life-trust. How else should they rear her but as Gigi was reared? So the beauty advice came from women’s magazines, and the style was suburban not fin-de-siècle Parisian, but never mind, never mind! Bethany was created.

And Patsy and Bill, proud in their achievement, while valuing the joy of sex, all sex, and perhaps overvaluing Bethany their daughter, for a time all but priced her out of the market; many was the boring night she spent alone: lying empty, as a house may lie empty while its value increases. That was when she was fifteen. Noticing what was happening, they brought the price down.

All things are chance, thought Bethany, who bore no malice against her parents, no resentment for the manner of her upbringing, or thought she did not. I might have been born in Africa in time of drought, she thought, and had stick arms and legs, and a stomach which stuck out: I might have been born an Eskimo, and hardly seen my legs and arms at all, so cold would it be to undress: as it was I was born to Patsy and Bill, and if they had not been so foolish, so trusting, and so adored Audrey Hepburn, would I have been born at all? And now here I am with Carl, and happy and safe, so what’s the point of complaining? But he still hasn’t got his wife out of his system. Something must be done about that.

‘Well,’ said Bethany, ‘it seems to me your wife lived an empty life and was a shallow woman and you’re well rid of her. But perhaps her life was boring. Perhaps she was just bored. Some women will do anything not to be bored.’

‘She could have gone to classes,’ said Carl. ‘She had no reason to be bored. She had me. Boredom is no excuse for infidelity.’

‘She should have had babies,’ said Bethany, ‘with all that time to spare. Why didn’t she?’ Not that she wanted or anticipated children herself, belonging to a younger generation, one which did not define women as people who had babies.

‘She did,’ said Carl, cunningly, ‘but she never knew it.’

‘That’s impossible,’ said Bethany. ‘How can you have a baby and not know it?’

‘In the same way,’ said Carl, ‘as you can have an hysterical pregnancy and be convinced you’re growing a baby when you’re not. That’s what Joanna did to me when she was thirty. She got morning sickness: her belly swelled up. She looked terrible. I took her to this doctor friend of mine, Dr Holly; a very clever man. He just looked her over and sent her out of the room and said to me, “Your wife and Mary Queen of Scots! There’s no baby there, only air and wind.” “What’s the cure?” I asked. “Love and kisses,” he said, “or failing that, a mock abortion, a ceremony of death.” Almost nothing he didn’t know about women. So that’s what we did. Told her she was to have a termination, anaesthetized her, and whee-e-ee, like a balloon going down, went Joanna’s belly. When she woke up she was cured. My lovely wife, slim and fresh and all for me again!’

‘But that’s not having babies and not knowing it,’ said Bethany, ‘that’s not having a non-baby.’

‘Oh so clever she’ll cut herself,’ said Carl May, his old finger running sharply down the skin between Bethany’s breasts, where she should have buttoned her blouse, lifting the white nylon rosebud in the centre of her bra and snapping it back so she jumped. ‘Wait! Joanna knew well enough I didn’t want children: I told her the day before our wedding: she accepted that when she married me. I took that phantom pregnancy of hers badly, an imagined one seemed to me worse than the real thing; let her conscious mind be loyal and loving, in her unconscious, in the depths of her being, Joanna May betrayed me, went against me.’

‘You were to be all in all to each other! Just you, just her! I think that’s sweet – my mother and father were like that, in the beginning. Then they had me, and felt differently.’

‘How could Joanna and I have had children? Do you understand just what sort of inheritance I have? What do you think it’s been like for me, knowing what kind of parents I had, what sort of bestial blood flows in my veins?’

‘Your parents were mentally ill, Carl, that’s all. They must have been.’

‘That’s all? Insanity? All?’

How white he suddenly was. She ran her finger over his lips. They were dry and trembling. He calmed. She had not known he could be upset. She felt privileged, and powerful. Carl May, Chairman of Britnuc, power in the land, TV personality, calmed by Bethany’s young finger.

‘I had myself sterilized when I was eighteen,’ he said. ‘A vasectomy. I would be the end of the line: that particular experiment of nature’s. I chopped down the family tree.’

‘Joanna didn’t mind?’

‘Joanna didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Why should she? What difference did it make? She understood my mind when we were married; we would have no children. There’d be just the two of us.’

‘Tea for two,’ said Bethany dreamily. ‘Just me and you. Two for tea and baby makes three.’

‘Baby makes five,’ said Carl sharply, and nipped her finger suddenly with teeth made sharp and fine by the passage of sixty-three years. ‘While she was opened up we took away a nice ripe egg; whisked it down to the lab: shook it up and irritated it in amniotic fluid till the nucleus split, and split again, and then there were four. Holly thought we could have got it to eight, but I said no. Growth begins so quickly: there wasn’t time. A truly vigorous egg, that one. We kept the embryos in culture for four whole weeks, had four nice healthy waiting wombs at hand and on tap, for implantation. All four took like a dream: there they grew until they popped into the world, alive and kicking and well. Four nice assorted ladies, desperate for babies, got four very pretty little girls: little Joanna clones. Not cloning in the modern sense, but parthenogenesis plus implantation, and a good time had by all. We kept it quiet. So quiet one of the mothers didn’t even know we’d done it. What passive creatures women are: they just lie there, trusting, and let the medical profession do what it wants.’

‘That’s two for tea and four babies make six, Carl, not five.’

Carl bit Bethany again. ‘Wrong!’ This time she yelped, and quite reminded him of his younger days. ‘There wasn’t anyone to tea. There ain’t a father in the whole wide world,’ crooned Carl May, ‘that gave help to my poor old dutch. All on her lonesome ownsome. Her DNA and hers alone. She was thirty. She was growing little hairlines round her eyes: so I gave time itself a kick in the teeth. It seemed a pity to let it all go to waste, when you could save it so easily.’

‘Like an old Magnox power station,’ said Bethany; he looked at her sharply.

‘Don’t be so cutesy,’ he said, not even bothering to bite, so she desisted.

‘Well,’ said Bethany, ‘all I know is if it was me I’d have told her. I’d never have managed to keep it to myself. I can’t keep the smallest secret, let alone cloning someone and not telling them!’

‘It’s sensible to keep things in reserve,’ said Carl May. ‘Information may not be wisdom, let no one tell you it is: but knowledge – ah, when it’s secret knowledge is power.’ And Carl May looked at Bethany hard, until she wondered which of her secrets he knew and wasn’t saying.

‘No,’ said Carl May, ‘she’ll never get it out of me. Let her go to her grave not knowing. She chose loneliness: let her be forever lonely.’

‘But now I know,’ Bethany said, ‘what about me?’ and wished at once she hadn’t opened her mouth.

‘You’ll keep it to yourself,’ Carl May said, and she thought, yes, I will: on the whole I better had. I can see I better had.

‘One day you might tell her,’ she said. ‘You never know what’s going to happen next. One day you might, to punish her. To take away her singularity.’

‘A long word for such a little girl,’ he said, and pinched her with sharp-filed fingernails – she’d given him a manicure: he enjoyed that: he on the chair, she crouched on the floor, red hair falling – better, she could see, in future, to file his nails less sharp or use words that were less long, or both.

‘What can happen next,’ asked Carl May, ‘that I don’t know about: what can surprise a man like me? I win. I always win. I need to win, as other people need sex, or food, and that’s all there is to it.’

Bethany shivered, and hoped Carl May hadn’t noticed, but of course he had. So she looked and spoke as bright as could be. ‘I wouldn’t like to have a lot of little me’s walking about,’ she observed. ‘One of me is quite enough,’ and the jabbing nail turned into a stroking hand, a pressing mouth, and she felt safe: yes, she felt safe enough. One of her, she told herself, was more than enough for him. Besides, she wasn’t perfect, not like Joanna: on the contrary, she was flawed; she knew it: people had told her so often enough. Now she was glad, not sorry, Carl May had noticed. If the penalty of perfection was reproduction she could do without it. Her bone structure was not good: she was pretty rather than beautiful – she had her mother’s chin: it would droop and double by the time she was thirty: she was all artifice: she inspired lust not love: she was cunning not wise: bright not clever: could memorize well but not categorize easily: was a good guest but an over-effusive hostess: affectionate but not constant – being able, at will, to switch that affection in the direction which most suited her, and often tempted to do so. These things Bethany knew about herself. She was in fact too vulnerable to the passage of time. She was the kind who went off early. Never mind, when she lost her capacity to charm she would start a business: an employment agency: a chain of them perhaps: Carl May would help her, pension her off: she would be powerful through money, that safe and snazzy stand-in for sexual pleasure. She liked to be safe. She didn’t like to be bored. It was difficult to keep a balance between the two.

‘What a pity you can’t have babies,’ she said, quite forgetting to whom she was speaking. ‘I’d like to have your babies. Then I’d always have something of you to love!’ Men liked to hear that kind of junk, but Carl merely shook his head impatiently, as if some gnat had bitten him, so she shut up and let him get on with it.