That night after love Jack said, ‘So, Starlady Sandra.’ And I said well why not, somebody has to be. It is, I suppose, my habit to diminish myself: we’ll have no vainglory here. I am a guilty person: I have to punish myself. My mother is mad because I am sane: my brother is dead because my suppressed rage killed him: my father was shot because my birth was used as evidence against him. My anger is all powerful; could blot out the world. So it is never expressed. I am cool, rational, and for ever guilty. I punish myself by ignoring my worldly success. Even the adjective ‘worldly’ diminishes its noun, don’t you see – as if there were some other realer kind of success somewhere else, more worth having. So a therapist – a Jungian, I think – told me before I left her after four sessions, murmuring that I was far too busy to continue seeing someone who merely stated the obvious.
‘Why do you murmur?’ she asked, at the door. (I don’t write these difficult things to people: I don’t hide behind letter and stamp: I have it out face to face.) ‘Why don’t you shout, stamp and scream these things to me?’
‘Good heavens,’ I said mildly. ‘You’re far too nice for that!’ And so she was. But she had cold eyes, which reminded me of my father. I didn’t quite trust her. I felt I could have blown her away with a breath, for all she was nearly six foot and I a mere five foot five. She had bought a couch more fit for her than for me, and I felt its length reaching far beyond my feet, far beneath my head: as if I was on a rack and in danger of being stretched for ever.
‘The reason I felt I’d known you all my life,’ Jack complained, ‘is that I’d seen you on TV.’
‘You might have felt it anyway,’ I said. ‘How will we ever know?’
‘Men are more comfortable with women who are lesser than they,’ he said, ‘but personally, I can put up with a little discomfort.’
‘A degree in astronomy,’ I said, ‘is nothing. A master’s in mathematics paltry. I can’t make an audience feel a common cause, lift its spirits, get its blood singing, hormones pumping. You raise your trumpet to the stars and sing to them. I just catalogue and annotate. I am mere secretary to the heavens, if not, as I let you believe, research assistant to the vice chairman of the Royal Astrological Association.’ Or words to that effect, whenever I could, for want of breath, his mouth on mine.
‘Jack,’ I said, in other words. ‘You are greater than me. I look up to you and admire you.’
‘And look,’ I said, ‘it’s not a high-profile programme: not all that many people watch it, and those who do are mostly senior citizens, half asleep in their chairs, too tired to put out the cat and switch off the telly: trapped by their own inaction.’
Jack, Jack, I said, in other words: don’t worry about the spectacle of me, ogled by millions, by too many – for all I could do with high collars and genteel voice, it made me more the stuff of fantasy than ever. Take ’em off, rip ’em off! How can the woman who is everyone’s be for one alone? Of course I hadn’t wanted Jack to know: ever to say ‘So, Starlady Sandra.’ Fame in a man is for a woman a great aphrodisiac: fame in a woman appeals to the man who likes public fucking. Pity.
‘Look,’ I pleaded, in the name of love, which would now have to conquer many hazards, ‘it’s only half an hour or so once a month, and most of the time on screen it’s charts, diagrams and special effects, not even me. I’m just a passing presenter.’
He laughed and said not to worry, it didn’t matter one way or another how I earned my living; I was to stop overpresenting my case, I was protesting too much, but wasn’t it me who discovered the Planet Athena?
‘Only by mistake,’ I said. Well, almost by mistake. A couple of orbits askew needed some kind of explanation. I invented an explanation, focused the lenses, clicked the cameras, and lo, there it was! ‘The Press latched on to it,’ I said. ‘That’s all that happened.’
‘No one cares any more,’ I said. ‘Five years ago is for ever ago. I’m a whatever-happened-to person. Honestly, you have nothing to worry about.’
He appeared to sleep.
‘Look,’ I said, before he could wake, or appear to, and forestalling a discussion initiated by him on the alleged difference in our incomes, ‘I don’t get paid a great deal; not in terms of, say, what the makers of TV commercials make. Peanuts. A pittance. And what I make I spend on clothes. I did have a little house in London before I married Matthew but he wanted me to sell it, as a token of my love for him: he wanted me, as it were, to demonstrate a wholehearted approval of our togetherness. No bolt holes for either of us! So I did, and Matthew invested the money for me in high-risk investments and lost most of it in last year’s stockmarket crash. So I was more dependent on him than ever. Or so he thought. He didn’t know I didn’t mind being penniless. He would have minded very much, and didn’t understand that not everyone was like him: or rather, believed that everyone not like him was eccentric, or in some way untrustworthy. He had his own money invested in the money market, and did well enough, as many with friends in high places did at that time.
‘Jack,’ I said, or words to this effect, ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to be lying on a lumpy mattress with you, with nothing but a nylon bag of possessions to worry about: travelling light, travelling free.’
Jack asked into the dark, and I knew then he only appeared to sleep, to listen to my monologues the better, ‘Weren’t you angry about the money?’ and I replied no, I didn’t have the time, and he said ‘Yes, you were angry or you wouldn’t have run off with me. I am your revenge.’
‘No, no,’ I said, childlike, ‘it isn’t like that.’
‘I don’t mind being your revenge,’ he consoled me. ‘If I have to put up with your being the centre of attention I will: and if I have to put up with your earning more than me, how about buying me a new trumpet case in Bordeaux, so I don’t have to mind so much?’
‘I will, I will,’ I promised. Love, honour, obey and support, as long as we both shall live. Been to India, lately: seen the men silting, while the women building workers heave and shovel: been to Africa, where the men smoke ganja and the women hoe the brick-hard soil: been out to dinner and counted the number of times your hostess gets up? No wonder the men feel bad about it.
This is no complaint, only a comment. The women like doing it, so where’s the harm? Any man, cries the woman – unless she’s pretty, educated, a good earner and under thirty, when she reckons she can pick and choose – is better than none. Half a man, if she’s a Muslim and has to share him with another – better than indignity and No Sex. My friend Jude made a TV series about it. Women Who Serve. She sees Sandra’s Sky as a rather boring sideline: a kind of tarted-up late night science programme of minority interest. The ratings we get seem to astonish her.
‘It’s the high-necked blouse,’ I say. ‘It attracts the porno audience.’ That’s the kind of thing Jude’s able to understand. That mankind is also interested in its origin and its destination and sees in the heavens, quite rightly, the pattern that will solve the problems of its existence, quite escapes my media friends. The gorilla idly masturbates behind bars in London Zoo, and the audience gawps, but it’s the gorilla eyes that really get to them: that sad black wisdom.
Alison said to me when I told her Matthew had proposed marriage –
‘Well, well! Aren’t you lucky. Not many men will marry a star.’
‘Firstly,’ I replied haughtily, ‘I am not sure that marriage is the end all women must automatically desire: secondly, what do you mean by lucky; it is no more than I deserve: and thirdly, far from Matthew loving me in spite of my fame, it was my fame that led him to seek me out.’ That was at the very height of my starladydom: I had recently discovered Athena, and named the blasted rock in a public ceremony, and was wanted on game shows, chat shows, as token woman in shows discussing anything from the decline of socialism to the nature of the arts/science divide. I was blonde, as well as bright. Former boyfriends crawled out of the woodwork then: old one-night stands; faces I had forgotten (and parts as well, thank God) to remind me of a past I had assumed I had put behind me for ever. Only Matthew, carrying assurance and the world’s approval on his stocky shoulders, came to me out of the present, offering me a life worthy of my sudden new status. Little me.
‘You’re wrong,’ I told Alison. ‘Somebody wants me.’
‘You are your sample of one,’ she said, disappointed. Whoever likes to hold a faulty theory, so easily disproved. I preened; she fidgeted her unbelief.
I like to have these conversations with other women about the nature of our sexual selves. They deal in generalisations, they come to no conclusions, but they pass the time agreeably: the problem for a childless, unmarried woman lay in providing sufficient fuel for the conversational fire. I was glad to have this new episode with Jack, this new experience, to pile onto the general conflagration. Presently no doubt I would also have a divorce to discuss and compare. Pity my poor grandmama! Her family life was such a pattern of shameful secrets – illegitimacy, insanity, cancer, divorce, bankruptcy; all unthinkable, unsayable, weaving in and out: each by itself the cause of doom, gloom and anxiety, family secrets and nightmare, of pacing up and down behind closed doors – let alone piled on top of one another as they were for her. And no telephone helplines at her fingertips, just think of it! Else she might not have wished me and Robin unborn so often, and Robin might not thus have rendered himself. He knew he brought shame on others, and that’s what in the end he couldn’t bear. Oh, the shame of it, Robin! The disgrace. Well, well. And all my fault, for sopping up such sanity as there was in my mother’s nurturing blood, leaving nothing but madness for him. But the devil’s work, not mine, surely, thus to reduce my glory, my despair, to this kind of grim, bleak banality. If Robin had kept going until, say, a year ago, and had then jumped beneath his train, all of us involved would have reacted less grievously. The train driver could have looked at the statistics and learned that he had a one in four chance of such a thing happening to him in his working life, and gone to British Rail Medical for counselling: my grandmother and myself would have joined a Mind support group and learned how-to-cope, comparing ourselves to others in the same situation. Robin’s torn and bloody corpse and his tormented mind would be thoroughly devalued, but we would have been saved. But it was a full twenty years ago he killed himself, and the world was still young in the ways of emotional self-preservation. There is of course no support group for children of such fathers as I had, nor will there ever be. We are too few, our fate...
Only the State of Israel, boring the world with talk of the holocaust (that old thing! Forty odd years ago. Forget it!) nags on, and has become, of course, a dab hand at a passing massacre itself. But that, they say, is not the same. That was unpremeditated. Dead’s dead, say I, and may the living never again envy the dead. The nations of the world limp on, denatured, as are their citizens, unable as ever to face their own past. Well, I can say no better for myself, can I?