Look, one thought leads to another. After lunch I parted gracefully from Jennifer and went to lie in the shade of an oak tree on the grassy slopes that led down to the moat at the foot of the castle. On the far side of the moat a thousand senior French citizens milled around the big marquee where the afternoon concerts were held. They had come in by bus from the villages around. For four hours they would sit in a confined and unventilated space, on uncomfortable chairs, watching endless heel-and-toeing, swirling skirts, gracious bowing and ferocious thigh-slapping (Turkish) and listening to gypsy fiddling, Creole mourning, and thirty-piece orchestras playing melancholy, energetic but always folksy pieces. This they would do with an intensity and appreciation which made me, a mere lady astronomer, feel ashamed. The women wore dark cheap cotton dresses on their bolster bodies; their arms were fat and flabby, or thin and fleshy. The men had little sharp elderly eyes, tough burned skins and wore greasy Sunday suits. To such an end must all peasants come: nothing left in life but to be bussed in to Folk Festivals to witness the artificial celebration of a daft and dreary life.
I catch myself thinking like my father; the Nazi beast. That is what happens when the work machine gets turned off: you find out who you are, how nasty you can be. In the sudden silence of non-attempt, non-effort, you hear the furies flapping round your ears. If there are no papers to write, no graphs to decipher, no lectures to give, no dinner guests to entertain, you see ghosts. You drive dogs shrieking in terror from the mere sniff of you. You are yourself. To what end had I come, forget my elderly peasant brethren. I leapt upon Mad Jack the Knight Errant’s horse as he galloped by and he landed me in the fire, not the frying pan. The truth of the matter is, no amount of fucking can stop you thinking and the time had come to think.
I felt obliged to give some thought to the matter of my father. My father, the supplier of the genes that gave me the Aryan cast of my countenance, the precise lines of jaw, cheekbones, nose – the rather thin mouth, the small perfect teeth, the long legs – all so different from my gypsy-girl mother Tamara, plump, dark and somehow diffuse, and she herself, in her turn, so inappropriate a child for her mother, my grandmother Susan, who had the kind of English horse-face seen at its best in an English vicarage garden, pruning hands protected by thick cotton gloves. Susan ran off with a gypsy: she was, I like to think, the original for the girl in the D. H. Lawrence story, The Virgin and the Gypsy. I am one of a race of misfits, that’s for certain: the result of a surfeit of miscegenation, and would have come to nothing had it not been for some chance mutation in the genes, which gave me the kind of brain which is useful in worldly affairs – one that can do sums, pass exams, consider the heavens, discover a new planet, and has a gift for teaching, for making the improbable facts of the universe seem probable to a television audience. This I do by throwing myself around a studio, pretending to be the sun, or a black hole, or a red dwarf, or whatever, demonstrating the Doppler Shift by putting a brass band on a railway carriage and zooming it past the mike – in imitation of what Christian Doppler himself did, long ago – and so forth. I am good at it. Look, I’m really something, me. And also I am nothing. I am the debris of the world, product of a series of unconsidered and unnatural matings, between the proud, the mad and the murderous. Once things start going wrong in a family they certainly go wrong. (The brass band I chose for the Doppler Effect show were a staid and boring lot, by name the River Kwai Beat. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have employed the Citronella Jumpers. They’d have got, for once, Musician Union rates – a rare event in any musician’s life. (Then I would have really impressed them.) Though, now I come to think of it, it was the sousaphone player of the River Kwai Beat who gave me the card of the Citronella Jumpers, which I in turn gave to the Centenary Organisers, which was how I encountered Jack, meaning of my life. Love at first sight!)
I wonder if my father, donator of the genes, ever fell in love? Or did I get my capacity to do so from my mother’s side of the family? This business of genes really intrigues me. I devoted two whole programmes to evolution – I find myself a stern Darwinian when going into the possibility of, for example, there being life on Athena, that miserable, chilly little planet. (Unlikely: improbable to the factor of a trillion or so, in fact.) And my ratings, never vast, dropped 5 per cent while I told the audience so. This was news no one wanted to know. What, no life out there! And we’re all waiting for the starship to arrive and explain all! Someone has to.
I wonder if my father was tall or short? I had only ever seen his face in an old newspaper cutting, and, back in the last century, Mendel had explained to anyone interested that genes don’t blend. It’s not my father’s tallness and my mother’s shortness that makes me of middle height. (My head at Jack’s chin: what a pleasure it is to look up to a man – I had to lower my eyes to meet Matthew’s.) No. We inherit attributes from a male and female parent, but we don’t end up hermaphrodite, do we? So I can’t work back from me to discover my father’s appearance or temperament. What we have are particles of inheritance: maleness being made up of a million million inheritable particles, femaleness likewise. Depending on where the preponderance lies, we turn out to be one or the other. Majority decision, as it were. We inherit, randomly, all kinds of things unnecessary to our survival, simply not contra-indicative of it. We can survive (as a species) pretty well with our remnant appendix: it’s merely an irrelevance, as are the stripes on a zebra. (The schizophrenic gene will presently, no doubt, breed itself out, particle of inheritance by particle. Presently. It’s just tough in the meantime.) As human beings we have a vast surplus of intelligence over what is required for our survival as a species – it may even be contra-indicative to that survival. Down’s Syndrome people, with their extra chromosome, seem more appropriately equipped than the rest of us; they have just enough sense to feed and provide for themselves, an active desire to reproduce, and are far less given to suicidal/martial behaviour than we others, who are in actual danger of wiping ourselves out, something no other species, as far as we know, has so far done. I didn’t put that bit in the programme – Central would have censored it. Talk of Down’s Syndrome in anything other than tones of hushed sympathy they simply won’t have – talk of nuclear death-wish smacks of CND, and ill manners. As for me, Starlady Sandra, I mean to help the evolutionary process along by failing to reproduce. I guess I may have more than a hundred half brothers and sisters walking about today, living evidence of man’s surplus intelligence, my father’s spirit of scientific enquiry, and they won’t necessarily feel the way I do. Bang, bang, you’re dead! Gotcha! That’ll teach you to do nature’s work for it – weeding out the unfit with your own peculiar Darwinian mix of randomness and purpose, which got you labelled back in 1949 at the Nuremberg Trials, even in the days before punchy headlines, the Mad Sadist of Bleritz. You should have tried cosmology, like me, professionally, not taken up genetics as a hobby. Daddy! But then the discipline was hardly invented, back in the twenties, the thirties, when you got given your particular world view.
Now I admit that when I realised my mother’s mad tales about my father were in fact true, not mad at all but quite, quite true, which happened when I was fifteen (Frances’s age), it was quite a shock. I resolved never to have children, never to get married. In the first I have succeeded by way of three abortions (I am remarkably fertile, or so I have been told – my body managing to foil contraceptive devices in the most remarkable way): in the second I failed, more’s the pity. I read Pure Maths at Oxford, worked on a space programme for a time (mathematicians end up everywhere); became a cosmologist, and then developed an interest in simple astronomy, of the sky-gazing kind. Our research team was based at the Greenwich Observatory. I saw this period as a sabbatical, in fact, and it was my good luck, rather than the result of any particular endeavour, which made me the first to postulate, then verify, the existence of Athena. In the meantime, of course, I had had affairs, even fallen in love with, various men: most wanted children: those who did not I did not like. Sad. To prefer a Porsche and a peaceful annual holiday abroad to the creation of children may seem sensible, but it is not likeable. My more complex reasons for remaining childless seemed to me both reasonable and noble, but I seldom wished to discuss these complexities, let alone my family history and shame, with those men I loved, fancied, or felt would do me some good in the world – that is to say, professors, employers, and so on. So they thought me hard and unkind, tough as old boots, which of course I was not. It is not easy to go against blind instinct: it is not easy to do away with babies who have managed to get so far, so very far, towards a viable existence, and now must be blotted out, refused their chance, because I, like my father in his way, have decided to use my surplus intelligence and interfere in evolution’s plan. Still, I had my work to get on with.
But after the ‘discovery’ of Athena, that miserable lump of rock, in its distant, unlikely orbit – and quite when an asteroid stops and a planet begins is merely a matter of scale, but the Royal Astronomical Society was short of funds (whoever isn’t?) and could do with a bit of publicity, and nothing like a new planet for making a splash and putting up the membership, and I sometimes think Athena was perhaps actually put in my way, one dark night, rather than I seeking it out, but never mind – I have a low self-image, according to a therapist I once visited; which is why these feelings of omnipotence and paranoia keep warring in my rather inadequate bosom (see?), and find it hard to credit myself with any real achievement – anyway, there I was on television rather a lot, and I look better on screen than off it (thank you, Daddy, for your Aryan cheekbones, your thin straight nose, your rather square shoulders, narrow waist: you looked smashing in your SS uniform, especially designed for the likes of you) and I kept getting phone calls and letters from this Matthew Sorenson who really admired me for my mind, my independence, the way I dealt with success. In other words, fame turned him on. He was, he said, a barrister. Now that did impress me, and I agreed to meet him for dinner, and before I knew it he was a frequent visitor to my rather pleasant two-room flat in Bayswater, pacing up and down, talking, talking, about every subject under the sun. Now I rather liked that. Most people I knew could talk about one or two matters – few ranged widely over the spectrum of human interest. He had a rather pink face – he drank quite a lot – and a self-important jaw. I did not fancy him in bed at all, which did not stop me getting into one with him from time to time. It wasn’t that the talk wasn’t interesting, it was just sometimes I longed for silence, and the heave, heave, grunt, grunt of mindless sexual congress was the nearest I could get to it. There was no escaping him, I don’t know how it happened. He was always there; when I opened the front door; when I finished at the studio; on the phone at the observatory; picking me up for lunch. He bought me jewels. Jewels! He introduced me to his friends, who were impressed by me, this woman of achievement. How they all talked, and laughed, and shrewdly, wittily commented as if the world was there for their observing, and all the suffering in it meat for their witticisms. I remember after one particularly scintillating evening, after Matthew had brought me home in the Mercedes (a rather perky little vehicle) and I had kissed him goodbye on the step, and he had groaned his passion, ‘But why won’t you let me in? You did last Saturday’ (he had such a memory for names and places and times which I somehow did not believe in at all), I waited for him to go and then took a ride on the underground just to be with ordinary, incoherent, tired, stumbling human beings again. Why then, you ask, did I marry him? Because he narrowed down the paths of my exits, until they were all blocked except the one signposted ‘wedding’ and that was the only one I could find, as I ran blind and dizzy here and there, with the Press on the phone and the cameras at the door, and journalists wanting to know who I thought this year’s worst-dressed man was, and what was my favourite scent/cause/dessert and what was my star sign, and literary luncheon-organisers wanting me as their speaker. I had a feeling that only lawyers and barristers could keep any of it in calm proportion, mocking at it as they did. ‘Sandra, darling, you can’t take it seriously. You’re a nine-day wonder!’ So I just plain and simply married Matthew and moved into his house in Dulwich, the one his last wife had vacated a year or so before, leaving her very tasteful, boring, everlasting pure wool sea green carpets behind her, not to mention a Magimix in which was still wedged a piece of fungoid carrot. The home felt like the Marie Celeste.
‘Did she leave in a hurry?’ I asked Matthew.
‘Not soon enough for me,’ was all he said, bleakly, and I wondered how she had offended. Well, it should have been a warning.
‘What did she do?’ I asked.
‘What wives do,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’ That should have been more than a warning. ‘But you won’t be like that, will you? You’ll keep an outside interest. Your little programme.’
Now that we were married my programme had become not a major contribution to the world, or to celestial affairs, but a ‘little programme’. Well, what did I expect? Why should it be different for me than for the generality of women? I made my contribution to dinner-party conversation, ideas for the coming next month’s programme would be postulated over the melon and parma ham and consolidated over raspberry mousse and discarded over rather inferior goat’s cheese: I made a pretty enough picture at the end of the dinner table and presently there were fewer solicitors and more judges on my left and right. That, it seemed, was the object of the exercise, of the marriage. Matthew wished to be promoted to the Bench. It was, I supposed, not too bad a bargain. Matthew paid for my bed and board and I was able to save my not inconsiderable earnings. Central paid for at least some of my clothes, and the Tax Inspector kindly agreed that what I spent on the rest was tax deductible, and Matthew all but encouraged me to buy the kind of little black dresses he felt suitable for an accomplished dinner-party hostess. Rather boring design magazines came to photograph the inside of our house: the Mail did one of its pieces on ‘Who’s to Sunday Dinner’ and Matthew clocked up four judges and wives over very traditional roast beef.
‘Well done, Sandra,’ he said, on that occasion. ‘I’m very proud of you. Now if only we can persuade the Press to drop the Starlady Sandy absurdity –’
‘They would drop it,’ I said, ‘and very quickly, if you were not so anxious to have them around.’
‘Good God,’ he said, huffing and puffing – I was sure that he would be a Judge very soon – he had the looks and the mannerisms and the habit of getting things wrong and falling asleep quite suddenly in the middle of a sentence – really, he had no need to worry – ‘I don’t encourage them! Seedy lot! Media rubbish. Gutter press: your kind, not mine.’ I don’t think, personally, he could tell the difference between Interior and Woman’s Realm.
‘Anyway,’ he said, a little feebly, ‘it’s touch and go. Sandra’s bad enough, without Starlady in front of it!’ One of the unclassed, that was me. Once we were married, he made me very aware of it. I was without a proper family. Susan’s father, my great-grandfather, had been a bishop, but that was a long way back and didn’t count any more. The women round the dinner table (I will not call them friends) had names from the English counties – Melissas and Amandas and Fionas – but Sandra? Where did that come from? (Clare, of all the guests, was the one I became fond of. She too had married her solicitor more or less by accident, and her general air of delinquency kept me going through many a scintillating, awful evening.)
‘All I’m trying to say,’ said Matthew, ‘is play it cool.’
And he put the phrase in quotes and laughed with self-satisfaction. How clever he was! The language of the streets.
‘Just for the moment.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No scandal,’ he said. ‘No more topless bathing. No more transparent blouses. Nothing for the press to get hold of.’
‘I am not in the habit of making public demonstrations of myself,’ I said. Nor was I. I rather enjoyed the general modesty of my clothes; and my general air of sobriety and responsibility on screen. I knew I was joking, but few others did – only those who (rarely; I was busy, and tired from cooking) got to raise my skirt and see the red suspenders underneath, in an age when women wore tights and suspenders were definitely not for holding up stockings. With Matthew I put on an old flannel nightie – well, it seemed hardly worth the effort to wear anything else. Grunt, grunt, groan, groan, and the same old position.
‘What’s good enough for missionaries is good enough for me.’
Had it not been for the sense of time passing – which so afflicts women of spirit and aspiration – I would really quite have enjoyed myself with Matthew. It was not hell. One has to live somewhere.
It was a day or so after his plea that I did not attract attention to myself – what can it be other than a generalised guilt which makes men so convinced that their wives are always on the brink of bringing about their downfall – think of Adam, eating the apple and blaming Eve – when he himself had behaved so badly to his previous wives, Lilith (who argued) and Talith (who was unutterably silly) that he was beyond taking any moral responsibility for himself – that we attended the ‘do’ at the Astronomical Society in the Observatory Grounds. Some centenary or other: another PR ploy.
It was a beautiful spring evening. Food was served on tables outside the Marquee: the Thames flowed grandly by, and these days even sports a live fish or so, not just those grimly floating belly upwards. The great and famous were there. You know what these occasions are like. (If you don’t, you haven’t missed much, except, I daresay, the opportunity to dress up.) A girl very seldom meets the man of her dreams on such occasions. The men are far too closely escorted. Fights almost never break out: the food is unexceptional, colleagues meet colleagues and compare notes, contacts are made and information passed on about vacancies arising in the astronomical world. There are always a few cameras, and sound and lighting men from local, not national, TV, some rather bored and yawning newshounds and the mere stringers of gossip columnists, seldom the real thing. Though of course of late there’s also often been me, Starlady Sandra, always good for a pic or two and what’s in the stars for her, not that anyone out there is interested, it’s just if not her, who? Whom? With a few mild and kind exceptions, astronomers are on the whole plain and boring people, of interest only to each other – at least until Athena and myself hit the headlines, which did I admit stir everyone up a little. Anyway, there I was, wearing a thin white silk dress with a perfectly respectable button-up-to-the-neck front, but slightly on the tight side – all these dinners, what did Matthew expect? – and my breasts, if small, and hardly worth so much as enclosing in a bra, so I never do, are certainly boldly nippled.
‘Sandra, are you sure –?’
‘Sure of what? What’s the matter with it?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’ Breasts embarrassed him. Nipples embarrassed him more. I was always rather surprised that he so stuck by the missionary position, which put him in such intimate contact with the fleshy things. I don’t think I disliked Matthew at the time as much as I may now seem to; it’s just that he did some fairly unforgivable things, the following day.
So there was me, and there was the Band, filling in between the Brady Quintet, who agreeably played extracts from the Water Music and (of course) ‘Jupiter’ from Hoist’s The Planets and a little Mozart, and a Scottish pipe ensemble who played sentimental Scottish ditties. Then the Citronella Jumpers came on loud and strong. I never drink at these functions – I like to go home clear-headed and be able, being hangover free, to have the whole thing well and truly in the past by the next morning. But this time I thought, fuck it, and I did. I drank. I drank glass after glass of champagne and I studied the Band.
Well, Karl was more classically handsome and Pedro more soulful and Sandy leered lecherously at the crowd in general and me in particular, but Mad Jack the trumpeter was the one for me.
Let me say I don’t usually look at men in a predatory and salacious manner, but tonight the prospect of being a Judge’s Wife had got to me and I was fighting back. I wanted to annoy Matthew. Now you may think this trivial and stupid of me but what’s a girl to do? A woman, that is to say, rising forty-two and never had a baby, nor wished to, and not wanting one, and her life being somehow unsatisfied: the past so neatly and tightly packed away, forgotten: depression and elation both denied, scored out with a thick black line. Compromising, as women so often do, with their own happiness, because they must. But there was no ‘must’ for me – I had chosen to drift with the current into this peculiar role; acting woman, not really being one, unentitled as I always felt I was, by virtue of my birth, to an ordinary existence. Unclassed, de-natured, disallowed. Say I was desperate, if you like, latched on to Mad Jack the trumpeter – jazz musicians are unclassed, unentitled by choice – as if he were a tree trunk and I falling over a cliff. Oh, a tree trunk! How apt! But I think it was nothing to do with that; I think even were I married to someone I actually loved, liked and admired, I would still have gone off with Mad Jack that night. Say rather that like called to like. It takes one to know one.
It was Greenwich where the mean, mean time comes from and the stars are particularly poignant, having offered themselves there first for human study. ‘PMT and GMT’ I’d sing round the Greenwich house, if I broke a saucer, or burned a sauce, to Matthew’s irritation. I’d explain the joke but he did not see it was a joke. Forget Matthew. Oh, forget him! And the green sward shimmered beneath my silver sandals and my dress was far too tight. It clung to me and constricted me, as if the fabric itself had taken on the role of lover. Jack looked me straight in the eye, tapped in the beat, raised his trumpet to that hardly innocent angle and sang to me, about me, for me, of me, by, with and from me, and right, I may say, into me, and what could I do? Except dance, for him. Such things do not come to many of us. Many of us do not come to such things, if you’ll forgive the indecency. At the end of the set Jack smiled, and I saw Matthew drifting – not quite drifting but sidling in a both nervous and aggressive way, like a fire-ship into an enemy harbour – through the dancing astronomers and their groupies – takes a lot to get an astronomer to dance – I think the Brady Quintet’s Water Music had sapped their will quite profoundly – to take me away, or at least dance with me, so my exhibition of arm-stretching, hand-waving, hip-rolling solitary dancing pleasure would not come to any more public attention than absolutely necessary – Starlady Sandra seldom behaved like this, though she got by, I might say, on a kind of hint that she certainly could if she wanted, and that one day if you watched carefully enough you might catch her out – and Mrs Sandra Sorenson – you know, the High Court wife – certainly must not be caught. So I didn’t smile back at Jack, nothing so ordinary, I gave him one of those grave intent looks which agrees everything then and there – the same kind, but with a different and more interesting purpose, of course, as when car drivers meet at crossroads, and by telepathic communication, passing through those unsmiling glances, decide who’s to go first, and how, and act upon it, unerringly. And Jack nodded towards the bushes and I went after him and Matthew stood gaping behind us.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ was the first thing Jack ever said to me.
‘Yes,’ I replied. My dress was unbuttoned and round my ankles and I stepped out of it.
‘You haven’t been drinking?’ was the second.
‘Not so it counts,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t want to take advantage,’ was the third, as he kissed my breasts and nipped the nipples between his teeth. And that’s as far as I’ll go because here I lie in the shade, trying to come to terms with my past, and I do not want to drift off altogether into an erotic stupor. My task here must be to speak the truth, hide nothing from myself, and peel away the successive onion-skin layers of the past, no matter how it makes me cry. Sex is the great forgetting, the great drug, the great consolation, the great mopper-up of tears: the mover to action, the enhancer of courage, the gauge to the self. It shows full or empty, something or nothing, and steps in between. I shift about on the hard ground. The grass is not soft enough. I want a bed, and Jack in it.
Enough. I am not a person to waste time. This holiday, this run-away, this beginning of a new life, whatever it turns out to be, must afford me the time for self-discovery. Every day a better day: a step further on the road to understanding. If Sandra Starlady lies on her back in the sun, eyes closed, don’t think nothing is going on.
‘I love you,’ was the next thing I said to Jack. Now I know better than to say that mid-sex to any man (other than a fiancé or husband, for whom it is more or less required listening, at least from time to time). It quite puts a strange man off his stroke; the prospect of commitment; the dread of female pain to come. None the less, meaning it, I said it.
‘You can’t say that,’ he said, taken aback.
‘Why not?’
‘You hardly know me.’
‘Well enough.’
‘You’re a person of instant decision, then.’
‘Yes.’
I saw him smile, or did I feel him smile? The moon was behind a cloud shaped like a weasel; nevertheless the light of the Plough over Greenwich is not negligible – I might have seen it.
I daresay it is absurd to seek so patiently and earnestly after truth, when self-delusion is so much more comfortable. Truth in any case is no constant thing; it changes from day to day. Even the two and two we used to trust to make four can no longer be relied upon to do so. By assuming two and two make four we can get to the moon and pay the Band; for all practical purposes two and two still make four; but the fact is that they merely approximate four. The fact of adding destabilises the wretched numbers. Try to make two approach four by ever-increasing fractions and you’ll never, ever get there. The components of the universe are too infinitesimal, too occupied increasing their infinitesimality, to devote any energy to joining themselves up. We great clumping clumsy creatures, looming through the macro world, grasping at the moon, know little or nothing of that other micro state.
What the hell, Jack smiled. I’ll swear he smiled in the light from the emerging moon. He was pleased. He was not frightened off; he knew how rare the feeling was, and that I spoke the truth. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘we’d better stick together. What’s your name?’
‘Sandra Harris,’ I said. Well, it could be anyone’s name. He made no comment beyond ‘Hi, Sandra.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ I said. I knew his name. He introduced himself when he introduced the Band. ‘Mad Jack the trumpet-player,’ he called himself. What a treat, after my mother, after Robin, to have the word so blithely used. Not the black, black devil’s side of us, but the pearly animation of the spirit, heard in that mad music.
‘You’re here with your husband, I suppose,’ he said next.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s here with me. I’m a research assistant.’ Well, it was true, in its way. I answered to the Astronomer Royal. Lies must always be as close to the truth as possible.
‘I’ll have to go back for the next set,’ he said. ‘Stay where you are,’ and I lay on my back in the twigs and the leaves, under his jacket, and stared at the Plough, and listened to ‘Hindustan’ and ‘If You Knew Susie’ and to Jack playing for me, and thought about nothing, not even where Matthew was.
After the last set I joined Jack in the old Ford Transit van in which he lived, and stayed with him all night.
‘What are your circumstances?’ he asked. ‘Are you free to stay with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband doesn’t mind?’
‘We go our separate ways.’
‘No children?’
‘No.’
‘Thank God.’
The van was fitted out like a makeshift caravan. The bed was a foam mattress on the floor: there were shelves for a book or so – he read economics and Small is Beautiful and John Fowles’ The Maggot. His clothes were few but neatly folded. His dishes likewise, neatly stacked. A plastic water container hung from a hook: he was a tidy man. The van smelt of sex, garlic and toothpaste – a good mix, I thought. We parked and struggled on the floor all night, and slept just a little, intertwined.
We had breakfast in a bacon-and-egg café behind King’s Cross. One place seemed much like another. I used the loo and washed my face in the wash basin. I wore a shirt of Jack’s over my white dress. It came down to an inch or two beyond the hem. I thought it looked rather good. My mouth was swollen and my chin scratched and that was fine by me. My arms and neck were marked with tooth bites.
‘You can’t go home looking like that,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
He told me a little about Anne: he’d left her a year ago, at her request. He went back once a month or so to fix the washers and see she was all right. They didn’t sleep together. His daughter Frances was doing her ‘O’ levels. They were apart, but free, and stayed friends.
‘There must be more to it than that,’ I said.
‘She gave me an ultimatum,’ he said. ‘My music or her.’
‘So it was the music.’
‘I couldn’t be her pet poodle,’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘Now, I’ve found you,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to lose you. Come live with me and be my love, in a van parked over a sewer.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘You can leave work just like that?’ he asked, surprised.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean much to me.’ And it didn’t.
We went back into the van. It had curtains over the windows, hippie-style. We made love. I use the words advisedly. Such things happen. Buses pinged and taxi meters clicked outside: a police car siren made us both start. The heads of passers-by were at window level. If they looked down or in what did we care? We re-made the universe: they were just the raw stuff of our dreams.
‘You do take something?’ he said, ‘I mean, precautions.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ He hadn’t heard of AIDS, or if he had he meant to take no notice. Nor was I going to remind him. It would be a death worth living for. Fuck Jack and die? I thought. Too right, I thought. Any day.
‘I’d better go home and collect a few things,’ I said. ‘You park here and I’ll take the tube.’
‘I’ll drive you,’ he said. ‘I’d better know a few things. Besides, there might be trouble.’
On the way I asked: ‘Do you usually live in the van?’
‘Or with friends,’ he said. ‘My things are still at Anne’s. Such as they are. I travel light.’
So much was clear. He’d been to Manchester University, from a South London grammar school. Read Economics, smoked too much dope, half-dropped out, played trumpet, got his degree. Taught for a time; married Anne, bought a house, raised a family, got thrown out. What did anyone do with their lives? What else was there to do but get through it, enjoying yourself on the way?
Well now, I’d always had the feeling people ought to do more with their lives. Become SS officers and do scientific experiments, train as psychiatrists and treat Robin for his illness, grow roses and lament the past like my grandmother Susan, establish stable carpeted households and be ambitious, like Matthew: discover planets and get high-powered media jobs – pass exams and keep on passing them – I had equated not so doing with madness, which was my mother’s occupation. Throwing all control, all sense of future, to the winds, and hearing voices. Listening to Jack, I perceived all of a sudden there might well perhaps be another way. I won’t say the awareness came like a flash of lightning, but I certainly blinked once or twice as the van took the road to Greenwich. It was a diesel van and rather old; it had a rocking motion, most unlike that of Matthew’s Mercedes.
Which was in the drive when we got there. So he hadn’t gone to work, as I had rather hoped, indeed assumed. I needed my passport, my cheque book, a credit card or so: some jeans I had worn properly into, and a favourite sweater. That was all. I was throwing off the past.
‘Well!’ said Jack, looking at the house, which had a circular gravelled drive leading up to it, two false pillars flanking a boring dark blue door, and a few tedious pots of hydrangeas placed here and there, to suggest the place was somehow in a natural setting, which of course it was not – Mock Georgian, 1920-ish. But the rates alone could have kept many of Matthew’s clients in comfort and tranquillity, and unobliged to commit their frauds and murders.
‘So this is home,’ said Jack. ‘Well, well,’ he repeated.
‘Not very well at all,’ I said, and went inside.
Matthew was reading The Times in the morning room, or pretending to. He was wearing last night’s clothes. He hadn’t been to bed, either. His face was red in all the wrong places, his square English chin wobbled as if all the flesh that surrounded it was suddenly spare, and no longer needed as a framework for the conviction of his opinions. I was ashamed to have spent so much time in his bed, even in the missionary position.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
‘Who else?’ I said.
‘Surprised to see me, I expect,’ he said. ‘Sneaking home from your night on the tiles. And don’t tell me any of your lies about being with friends. I can see through lies. It’s my profession. You can’t deceive me the way you do everyone else. I know you through and through.’
‘I did have a night on the tiles,’ I said. ‘I don’t deny it.’
I think if he’d been nicer, that is to say more upset and less self-righteous, I might even then have sought his forgiveness and stayed. The force that seeks to preserve the status quo is to women the same as gravity is to the apple in relation to the earth. That is to say, very great indeed. It was the ‘I know you through and through’ which got to me. He didn’t, but, knowing so little about anything, he really and truly thought he did. Of course, his forgiveness might not have been forthcoming. I had tended to forget that – again, women do. They forget the man’s desire to shake a marriage to breaking point may be almost as strong as theirs. If you ask me, in real life it isn’t Eve who tempts Adam with the apple: it’s the husband who puts a lover in a wife’s way, and then says ‘There! See! I can’t possibly ever forgive you. It’s the end, and all your fault!’ Beware the husband who’s blind to the lover – he knows: of course he knows: he’s plotting his own freedom. And when you, discovered, say to him (with truth) ‘But I was only showing you how much I need tenderness, love and affection, how desperate I am, please can we talk about this and save our marriage’ he says ‘What marriage? You have destroyed the marriage.’ And so, by God, you have!
I’m not saying Matthew put Jack in my way: not at all: he hardly had time and how was he to know – as a husband often knows just how much more suitable a spouse his best friend would be for his wife, before pushing them into each other’s company: just that it fitted in fairly well with his plans for disposing of me. My ratings were falling again. I’d listened to his bright friends rather too often: forgotten the dreary plodding through fact and idea that produces a programme of any real value – I have great faith in readers, viewers – the consumers of culture. You can con them a little, some of the time: but not much, not all the time: very soon they switch off. They hate ‘repeats’ with justice. They’re being despised. And back home who wants their Sole Bonne Femme served by a failing TV star, Starlady Sandra, has-been, and in the papers as such? Oh, it’s a hard life at the top.
And here I was, jumping for the cliff, mouth rounded in a cavernous O, like the mad Munch woman, clutching at stars: standing in Jack’s shirt, searching for words to pacify my husband.
‘I’ve just come back to collect some things,’ I said. ‘Then I’m off.’
He put down his paper. He was reading the city supplement. He got richer by the minute and thought he deserved to.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘good riddance. The sooner the better. And clear the wardrobe of your tarty clothes, will you. The little black numbers that shop-girls wear. All you ever were was a trumped-up shop-girl.’
That hurt. What would my father have said? Child of his officer loins, a trumped-up shop-girl?
‘Take the smell of you out of my sight,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand your smell. You’re dirty.’
I swear I bath as much as anyone, but of course one never knows. Armpits? Where? I had no mother to tell me these things. And my grandmother couldn’t tell a rose from a cess-pit, or so, walking through her garden, one could only assume. My friends would hold their noses.
‘You smell of sex,’ he said, disgusted. That reassured me.
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Disgusting,’ he said. ‘Who with? How many? Would you care? How much, is really the point. I know your sort. I meet them in the Dock all the time. You withhold sex to lure a man into marriage, to get your meal ticket for life; then you sit back and watch him squirm. But you can’t keep away from the streets for long, your sort. Because at heart you’re a trollop, a whore, a prostitute. Your pleasure is to sell yourself. And that’s your downfall, because in the end, with any luck, some poor devil you’ve driven to distraction chokes you to death with your own tights.’ Stockings. I wore stockings. Nevertheless, it hurt. The nearer things are to the truth, the more they hurt.
‘And I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’d give a man a year’s probation for murdering the likes of you. That dress last night. Those – what do you like to call them? Titties?’
Now I’m sure I’ve never called my breasts ‘titties’. Why should I?
‘Well,’ I said, ‘anyway, you’ll be hearing from my solicitor.’
‘I look forward to it,’ he said, and I went upstairs to pack a bag, conscious of Jack waiting outside, my heart beating fast with a mixture of fear, exhilaration and amazement at my own daring. I opened the wardrobe and saw there was precious little there for my future life; but I do not like waste. I extended my requirements to include a cashmere sweater and a rather good black silk skirt with an agreeable swirl around the hem: and face creams; no, really, at forty-two I could hardly ignore their necessity. I am a great believer in creams and unguents for the skin, the more expensive the better. (One has to believe in something and astrology was barred to me.) I began to roll choice jars and bottles carefully in tissue. I found a Raynes shoe bag into which they could be safely packed – taking out for the purpose a particularly pretty pair of high heeled coffee coloured shoes. I’d give Clare a call and she could sneak in and take what she wanted when Matthew was out.
But of course I should have known matters would not proceed so peacefully, nor I think did I want them to, or I would merely have grabbed such things as I needed and run, and not bothered with tissue and packing. There was a bang bang up the stairs and Matthew threw open the door and roared, and threw jars and bottles into the mirrors, and then tried to murder me by stuffing a pillow into my mouth – a year’s probation from a friendly judge, I suppose, probably one who’d been to dinner, had he succeeded – and I struggled out and away – he was weeping, and he could hardly see what he was doing, I suppose that’s how I managed it – and though I could hardly suppose the circumstances had been quite so drastic, I understood the feeling of Marie Celeste which had struck me when I first came to the house – of a place left in a very great hurry indeed. The lump of mouldy carrot in the Magimix. I’d gathered Sylvia (his first wife’s name) was houseproud, so supposed an uncleaned utensil the equivalent of my rumpled clothes, everywhere, as he’d tossed them out of the wardrobe, and ripped and ripped.
Well, what did I need with any of it? Or him? I had my cheque book and cheque card in my pocket, and some fifty thousand saved pounds in the bank. But his voice still rang in my ears. ‘Hard, vulgar little tart! No background and no taste. If you knew how people laughed at you behind your back; how I tried to protect you from yourself. Picked you out of the gutter to make something of you! But you can’t resist it, can you. You must go whoring!’
Well, how little we know ourselves! Starlady Sandra, she of Athena fame, picked out of the gutter that was Central TV. But I mustn’t go on. Matthew really got under my skin. Five years of my life dissolving thus into insult.
‘Well,’ said Jack, when I returned to the van, ‘you don’t seem to have come away with much.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It turned out not to be worth the effort.’
‘I expect he was upset,’ he said. ‘I would have been. Under his nose, and everyone watching as we went off.’ I didn’t ask whose side he was on, because I know there is a sense in which men are always on each other’s side, no matter what.
He looked through his diary and said, ‘In a couple of months I’m going to France with the Band; a Festival Folklorique. I’d stay here with you but I can’t let the Band down. So perhaps you’d better come with me.’
And that’s why I now lay here, on a grassy bank in a sunny clime, and heard Jack say ‘Oh there you are; I was looking for you,’ and it was music to my ears, and life and event started up again. I stood up, dizzy, and swayed, and he caught me, his long thin arms around me, as the past caught up with the present.