Yes indeed! They’re all here. Jack’s wife, Matthew and Jude from Central TV with her frizzy hair, her powerful personality, her muddy complexion and her straight nose. They all turned up today.
Jude and Matthew have the last two rooms in town, Jude in the Hôtel de Cheval Blanc and Matthew (naturally) in the Hôtel de France, where they take American Express Cards.
There is nowhere for Anne, so she is sleeping next door to Jack and me, in Frances’s room.
I write this by moonlight: sitting at the haunted window, writing pad on my knee. Jack lies asleep in the bed. He had a great deal to drink tonight, and besides, the day’s events have shaken him. Out like a light, lucky him.
What made me think I could just disappear? I am the point where the mad, the bad and the infamous meet. I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.
‘Come back to bed,’ says Jack.
‘No,’ say I.
This is what happened.
The minibus left the Hôtel de Ville at nine forty-five. The first gig was to be at ten thirty, au-dessous du Monument aux Morts. The Band had actually held a meeting, after breakfast, to decide what to wear, what to play, and various technical matters about breaks and keys. A week into the tour, and they were actually getting it together. As for me, I was practising inefficiency. It had occurred to me – forget the personal satisfactions my failings aroused in other people – that efficiency is neither wanted nor needed in the modern world. There is not enough to do and far too many people to do it. Better just for all of us to bumble along. I wore a white T-shirt – Frances had kindly washed it for me – and jeans. She had lent me a pair of her bikini briefs, too.
‘Fit enough to travel today?’ asked Jennifer.
‘I’m feeling much better,’ I said, politely.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Because we can’t have poor Frances stuck away on nursing duty, can we? After all, this is her annual holiday.’ Meaning, the likes of you can holiday any time, with other people’s husbands, forget about the likes of us. I was feeling pretty good, I must say (except for this pain which would suddenly dart in from the left to somewhere beneath the navel, hover for half a second, and then depart: enough to startle, not quite to hurt. I rather liked it.) And I was looking rather good. Too much sex may weaken you, but it gives you a pleasant swollen-mouthed glow as well. I looked better than Jennifer did. She had a bad mosquito bite just beneath her left eye. Perhaps that was the matter with her. I offered her some Boots’ Sting Relief, without which I never step abroad.
‘I expect one of the good things about getting older,’ says Jennifer, ‘is that the curse gets shorter.’
Some women just sit there, working out how old you are from things you let slip – old films you say you’ve seen: what age you were when you had a beehive hairdo – and Jennifer was one of them. But I blamed her husband Sandy – he was one of those men who talk about their wives as ‘old bags’ and talk about their sexual conquests in their presence. So I forgave her.
‘It certainly does,’ I said brightly. But I thought, for all I felt so good, I would call in and see a doctor when I got to Blasimon-les-Ponts. The French have this agreeable system which actually allows you to go to one and pay for a diagnosis and treatment, which they will actually discuss with you. In England doctors like to keep their conclusions to themselves, or written up in very secret notes. You are not even allowed to know your own blood pressure, as registered by them. A strange, barbaric country. (This can only be my father talking: sometimes, when my mouth is not moved by my polygenes into its disapproving moue, I feel it stretched into a kind of Dr Strangelove grimace – tee hee hee! the mouth goes in a kind of sadistic mirthlessness and I am then quick to reform my thoughts and feelings, making them, as far as I am able, more mine than my forebears. What more can a girl do?)
Besides, visiting the doctor would occupy the time between eleven thirty and twelve thirty, while we waited to go up to the school canteen for our free lunch. Salades de saison would be served to some 200 musicians and hangers on, along with pork chops and white beans which Frances hated and Jack loved and I put up with, and musicians from other nations, who had strong religious feelings and cultural preferences, would noisily refuse.
Jennifer and Sandy sat in the front of the bus. He drove. She offered advice, consolation and sips of Perrier water through straws, while he reproached her for various matters over which she had no control (the weather, her bosom) and those she had (‘look! there, there! a parking space!’ ‘It’s a double yellow line, you fool!’). There was room for a third up front, but the double bass sat between them. Well, it would, wouldn’t it. She had to lean across it, the instrument which spoiled her life, keeping him out all hours, splitting his loyalty, which she gladly did. I will say this for Sandy, that he exuded an air of great genial sexual confidence – he blinked and winked into the morning sun and preened himself in his wife’s esteem.
Pedro sat behind Sandy: his eyes closed. He was asleep or meditating. His reddish beard glittered in the sun. His body was littered with talismans of one kind or another. He was barely talking to either Jack or me: Jack, on account of being brought in the night before on the wrong chord, or some such matter I did not fully understand: but Jack, according to Pedro, had done it once too often. Jack for his part merely said Pedro was impossible, and didn’t understand jazz. He should stick to folk, where he was so much at home. (The Jumpers despised folk almost as much as Dixie.) These quarrels would flare up amongst the Band, rage for a time, and then subside over a glass of beer on a good break. Jennifer and Frances were used to it. I was not. Pedro was not speaking to me because I had refused to sign his copy of Athena, planet of the Aquarian Age, bringer of peace published by the Astrological Society. (‘But why won’t you?’ Jack asked. ‘Because it’s an outrage to common sense,’ I had replied, and Jack said, ‘For God’s sake sign, or he’ll break another string tonight. The man’s a menace. He’s bringing the whole band down.’ But I wouldn’t.) Now, as I say, Pedro’s soft, kind eyes, with their cold deeper level of hate and resentment (I had seen the same in Godfrey’s) were closed. Sandy speeded up to go over the railway crossing for the sake of the extra bump; he likes to do that.
‘Hold tight, everyone!’ cried out Jennifer, and everyone held tight and the instruments twanged and wine bottles clattered and Frances shrieked, and a strong smell of body odour came from Stevie the trombone player, and Jack and I held hands.
I went to the doctor’s surgery, just up the road from the Credit Lyonnais, and sat only briefly in a small white room amongst posters of poisonous snakes and mushrooms, before being allowed into his consulting room. The French seem a healthy lot – or else begrudge paying doctors money. Doctor Tarval was, or so I thought at first, a not very bright young man in his middle twenties, with an owl face, cropped hair and perfect French manners. Language was a slight problem, since he spoke no English, but the vocabulary of pain can be mimed. He seemed to understand: required me to go behind a curtain and pee into a container, and come back at four o’clock. I asked why, but he was almost as unforthcoming as an English doctor, and said there would be time enough to discuss it then. Jennifer and Frances had come with me. Sandy had locked the keys inside the van, somehow circumventing all Renault’s ingenuity to prevent just such a thing happening (the Band blamed Pedro, clearly today’s whipping boy, for leaning on a lock at just the wrong time) and fortunately after the shirts and instruments had been taken out – but not the Band’s cassettes, which it was Jennifer’s job to display – for which Sandy roundly and publicly blamed Jennifer. Jennifer had for once had enough: her eyes glinted not with tears but with rage, and she shouted (to the amazement of the passers-by – the French are a controlled lot), ‘You mad disgusting insane bully, sell your own fucking cassettes. They stink, anyway. Call yourself a bass player? You couldn’t strum a mandolin.’ Well, she wasn’t going to live that down for quite a while, was she, especially since even I know that a mandolin is a very difficult instrument to play.
So I took her off to a café and bought her a brandy, and Frances came too, and Jennifer cried and shrieked for a little, and I said Sandy must be feeling a fool for having so stupidly locked the keys in – she hadn’t thought of that. Her loyalty was so ingrained, she believed he must have somehow done it on purpose – and she would do better to laugh than cry. And presently she felt better, and told us a little about her past – an only child brought up by an elderly father, without the gift for friendship, envying other children their large families, their busy lives: Sandy’s secretary originally, then deposing his wife, moving on, taking over their three children, having two of her own; but they were now almost grown and the loneliness was closing in again. People know so much about themselves, I thought, yet remain so powerless to control their lives. It explained Jennifer’s ‘come on, everybody’ syndrome; the need to be necessary, the short cut to being loved. I thought then that it would make a good short story.
‘I’m sorry for his first wife,’ I said. ‘With you coming flashing along like a dreadnought.’
‘You can talk!’ said Jennifer, and Frances shrieked, ‘Hark at her!’ and pointed at me, and downed a brandy, fifteen going on forty, and we all laughed some more. It was a good half hour. We were all, I suppose, under what might be called tension. But I thought perhaps I was undergoing some kind of sea change, due to the sun’s heat, and the music, and Jack, and all this writing down of the past; and that perhaps there was such a thing as ‘discovering yourself’ and that indeed you might end up being nicer than you thought, at least on the top layer. Then I went to the doctor.
When I came out I saw Matthew’s car outside the Hôtel de France. Shiny Mercedes are rare in this part of the country. They tend to keep to motorways and major cities, where they don’t get dusty and scratched. It took up too much of the road: other vehicles queued to get past. There was no doubt it was my husband’s car. I leaned against a wall.
‘What’s the matter?’
I looked round, I can only suppose wildly, for I am a contained kind of person, usually, and found myself staring straight into Jude from Central’s eyes. I fainted.
I have never fainted before. Very occasionally I have wept, but never fainted. It is not pleasant, and pleasant. Not pleasant because of the black whirling nauseous tunnel which swirls through your head and sucks you in and takes you over; pleasant because of the sheer sensuousness of it all, as body takes over from mind, simply takes it upon itself to wipe it out. I wonder if animals spend a lot of their time in this agreeable, sexy state? I hope so, for their sakes.
I need time to collate everything that’s happened inside my head and out of it, although for the most part I’d just been sitting and writing while I waited for my lover to turn up and the erotic stupor to take over. Like being on drugs. But things had been going on, more than even I quite understood. The past was catching up with me – well, that was okay; I’d just stood still and let it – but here it was in practical reality, in the stolid shape of Matthew and the lean and hungry one of Jude – and I hadn’t reckoned on that. No wonder I fainted. I was playing for time. Still am.
Where was I? Back in the café, feeling fine, my wits collected, my eyes wary, Jude saying Central had sent her down to make sure I was okay.
‘Going to come up with next month’s programme, you mean,’ I say.
‘To make sure you’re okay,’ she repeats, patiently. ‘You can have a year’s sabbatical, they say. They understand what pressure you’ve been under.’
‘What does that mean? I haven’t been under any pressure at all.’
That stops her. I just fell in love, lust, with Jack and ran off. I wasn’t under pressure; I was bored.
‘That’s not what Alison and Bobby told me. They would have come themselves if only they’d had the time. Anyway, it’s a face-saving thing, isn’t it,’ she says vaguely. ‘If Central are going to give you a year’s sabbatical they have to justify it to the accountants. So it doesn’t look so much like a bribe, more like a medical matter.’
‘You mean they want to get rid of me for a year?’
‘Oh God, Sandra,’ she complains, ‘you’re difficult.’
‘I’m not difficult,’ I say. ‘I just like to know what’s going on.’
And so on. There’d been a small piece in the Mail about my going off with a jazz band to the South of France. Central’s spies had followed it up. I wonder who’d put the piece in?
‘Anyway,’ said Jude, ‘either way, they want to know what’s happening. Production dates are looming and there’s been nothing from you.’
‘I just can’t be bothered,’ say I. ‘Have another drink.’
The sounds of Dr Jazz echoed up the street from the War Memorial.
‘You look very odd,’ she says. ‘Exhausted and not very clean. Are you living rough? Do you want to come home with me? We can fly back together from Bordeaux, at five o’clock.’
‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘I have nowhere to go, once I’m back. My husband threw me out.’
She looks surprised.
‘That’s not what he says. He says you had some kind of breakdown. You know he didn’t get his Judgeship, or whatever it’s called?’ She sounds severe.
‘Actually I didn’t know that,’ say I. ‘Still, try, try, try again! He’ll do it one day.’
‘You know he’s here in Blasimon-les-Ponts,’ she says.
What’s she playing at?
I rise.
‘I’d better go and help the Band get back into the van,’ I say. ‘They’re kind of locked out. It’s the sort of thing that happens. See you around, I expect. Don’t you just love this kind of Festival? There’s two whole hours of Bulgarian State Folkdance at two this afternoon. That’s in the stadium. They do a splendid knee-slapping turn. The thighs are a real turn-on.’
Even as I spoke, I wondered who and what I was betraying, for I heard myself fall back into the old media side-speak; the making of jokes where none should be. Jack was right: I had become infected with the dreadful virus of urban worldliness, and there was no health in me. Some vital sensibility had been deadened by long exposure to studio lights. I could not maintain my interest in Bulgarian wedding dances for more than an hour at a time. They entranced Jack. They wearied me. We were not altogether at one. It had to be faced. I was at home with Jude. I did not trust her, but I was at home with her. We talked, as they say (‘they’ being those I most despised), the same language. I could laugh with the Band, and listen to the Band, and spend my nights with the leader of the Band, and involve and concern myself with the women of the Band, but who could I speak to in the Band who would have the slightest notion what I was going on about? While Jude would get at least 80 per cent of what I had to say, and put a researcher on to the other 20 per cent, checking on the detail. Why, one day a team of us might even come to some conclusion about the Nature of Experience, given a little help from the Religious Affairs department.
‘Look,’ I said to Jude, using the language I deplored, but knew she would understand, ‘I’m sorry, but I need some space. I’m trying to make some kind of choice here; you understand?’ She’d lately produced a Drama Series called Life Choice: she ought to understand. Women wondering whether to change jobs, leave husbands, have babies, tell lovers they had AIDS, that kind of thing. A real bore, straight off the pages of New Society – unless the choice happens to be yours, when of course it can only be of considerable interest.
‘Okay,’ Jude said, ‘you can have till tomorrow.’ (In radio they move slowly: they’re all on thirty-seven-year contracts and it feels like it. In telly it’s here today and gone tomorrow, so stamp on a foot, make a mark, stab a back, while you can. I love it!) ‘But at least go and talk to Matthew. He’s come all this way to see you.’
‘You talk to him,’ I said. ‘What’s more, you marry him.’
‘He has asked me to,’ she said.
I remember the moment when I discovered Athena – poor Athena! I had been so angry with her! All she did was whirl about in her own rather unexpected orbit; a simple thing, a lump of stone, incapable of reproduction, helpless in the grip of her own qualities, which kept her suspended there between heaven and hell, and not so different, when I come to think of it, from myself. And what a shock it was, understanding how all the figures worked out, wondering why it hadn’t been obvious before: the same kind of shock, come to think of it, as fainting. Not an altogether pleasant shock, because one’s been such a fool not to have realised it all before; but pleasant because it all works out so well, fits together so admirably. Oh, what a flash of light. Matthew and Jude.
‘Wait a moment,’ I said. ‘But you love that other fellow, that director.’ (See Appendix III!)
‘It’s never done me any good,’ she said. ‘And I’m very fond of Matthew; not in the neurotic way I love Andreas.’
All this talk of love! It is absurd.
‘But I don’t want to hurt you in any way,’ she added. Well she wouldn’t, would she?
‘Matthew needs building up,’ said Jude. ‘You really sapped his confidence.’
‘Poor Matthew,’ said I.
And there I will leave that scene. I went up in the bushes behind the castle and there Jack the mad trumpeter and I embraced, and the sun shone, and the butterflies crossed bluely past my hazy eyes, and green grasses tickled my arms, and oh, oh, oh again, but I don’t know, I was scarcely concentrating. Of course one doesn’t have to: in fact it often seems the less one does the better it goes, only afterwards you can hardly remember, and I like the memory to be there, the seventh sense still feeling its input, only barely tamped down, waiting to go again; while at Greenwich I turn and open the dome to the skies, or at Central I wait for the studio lights to shine, or the computer at Imperial College to come on line, or the graphite rods to rise (I’m talking about the old Magnox, I know; now all but obsolete) and the pile to start up, and the mind, which the body feeds – I swear to you, for all this love and lust, the body is just something that feeds the mind, through the seven senses – to get going –
Look, what am I doing on this hillside with this itinerant musician, while everything collapses around me? Jude means to move into my horrible house, and it instantly seems not so horrible, merely mine. She means to have my dreadful husband – and likewise the ‘dreadful’ fades and the ‘my’ looms.
‘Is something the matter?’ asks Jack.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Frances said you went to the doctor.’
‘I have a little hay fever,’ I say, not the sort to claim pity for female problems. The pain seemed to have gone. Fainting had quite shaken it out of me. Afterwards Jack went off to lead the Band in a parade round the streets and I went to the Hôtel de France to face Matthew. Jude wasn’t there. My husband was very formal and correct, in open-necked shirt, blue trousers, white socks and black city shoes.
‘Did Jude pack for you?’ I asked, ever curious.
‘Jude’s been very busy,’ he said, ‘but yes.’
‘She certainly has,’ I said. ‘I’ve only been gone three weeks.’
‘You haven’t been idle,’ he said. ‘You look like the slut you are.’ There was no suggestion of reconciliation, then.
‘How long has it been going on between you and Jude?’ One has to ask.
‘Nothing’s been “going on”. After your leaving in the manner you did, I had no option but to look round for someone else.’ His jaw is beginning to tauten, his lip to tremble; his nose is inflamed and his cheeks getting pinker by the minute. I understand now why he has come so far to speak to me. He wants not to speak, but to hit. We’re in the bar of the Hôtel de France, however, not in our bedroom. He may have to restrain himself.
‘You bitch,’ he begins. ‘You witch. Do you understand what you did to me? First you humiliate me in public, then you lose me the only thing I’ve ever wanted. You cold, cold bitch. Do you understand? Is there no way of getting through to you?’
‘I hear what you say.’ It is bound to madden him. It does. I don’t like myself.
‘I could kill you,’ he says. I feel very depressed. I can see he is justified in his desire. I married him to suit myself. Well, he did the same to me but the strong (me) should look after the weak (him) and not let self interest win. I am sorry to see Jude falling into the same trap.
‘How long was there between my predecessor going,’ I asked, ‘and my arriving?’ I had never thought to ask. That calmed him. It was clearly a matter of pride.
‘Seven weeks and two days,’ he said. ‘She was another one!’ Another one like me, by inference. Greedy, self-interested, loving him for his big house and his nose for a good bottle of wine, not him, the boy his mother had loved. Or perhaps she hadn’t loved him. Some people are just born unlovable.
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I said, with some sincerity. To my horror he began to cry. Seven weeks and two days. He’d be breaking his own record with Jude, I expected. At least I’d left more for Jude to clear up than a mouldy carrot in the Magimix.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘it’s embarrassing.’ So it was. The bar was filling up with African dancers; wild, lean men with feather headdresses and painted bodies. They made Matthew look very strange. I offered to go out and buy him a pair of canvas shoes from one of the market stalls, and that started him off again.
‘You never even liked me,’ he said. I shan’t go on with this account. Neither of us came out of the episode well. He’d come because of the new divorce laws – which he himself, of course, had helped construct. He wanted a divorce as quickly as possible, and he wanted me to sign an affidavit as to my generally impossible behaviour, which I duly signed. He said he’d thought he’d better catch me while he could, before I disappeared – as he put it, smiling, his temper much improved now he had my signature, my mark, as if that somehow contained and controlled me, and now he could work magic spells on me in my absence – into the wild blue yonder. And I suppose he was right.
Jude came in on the dot of three, no doubt as planned. She’d had lunch at the Café des Routiers. I’d had none. My jeans were beginning to feel very loose upon me, and no longer agreeably tight. She’d had snails, faux-filet, a nice goat’s cheese and café noir. I asked her. She seemed surprised, but Matthew explained my love of such detail.
‘You might be able to get into my dresses,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to go to all these functions and give dinner parties. It’s part of the job. No such thing as a free lunch.’
‘We’re going to live very quietly,’ said Matthew, ‘and raise a family.’
Well! His jaw and her nose: her liveliness, his determination. ‘I hope it’s a boy,’ I said, and left. What had seemed very trivial, being the sexual relationships of the childless, now attracted to itself, in my eyes, a certain gravity. If people, even the most unlikely, come together to raise children, there seems a certain inevitability about it all. And it is interesting how often it is the most unlikely, the least apparently suited, who want to have children, as if nature for ever scoops up those who stray too far from her net, and flings them back in there, willy-nilly. There! You of six foot four and you of four foot eight! Deviate from the norm, would you? Oh no. You Jewish Princess and you lumberjack – thought you’d keep it going your way? Not on your nelly – it’s twins for you! Even the participants in these evolutionary dramas seem to feel surprised. They certainly look it in wedding photographs. No wonder the guests get drunk.
Matthew took me to the door. He handed the signed affidavit to Jude before he left the bar, surreptitiously, but I noticed all the same. He thought I’d snatch the paper back. He couldn’t believe his luck. No doubt I’d signed away home, maintenance, everything. I didn’t care. Jack would be pleased with me. Can’t go one way, have to go the other.
‘See you back at Central then?’ asked Jude.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
‘Don’t think too long,’ she said.
‘Why – do you want my job as well?’ I asked. But you can go on like that for ever. I said goodbye as nicely as I could, disappointed in her. I’d thought she was a romantic figure, and here she was, consenting to the missionary position for the sake of a gravelled drive and a nice letter box and my bath salts. I went down the road, drawn by the sound of the Band, squeezing back against shop fronts, as trails of enormous lorries did their after-lunch (fuck you) dash for wherever, feeling as affronted as Elizabeth Bennet when she turned down boring Mr Collins only to have her best friend Charlotte take him.
I wondered how much to tell Jack of all this and decided it would be very little. One of the benefits of being with someone so unacquainted with one’s way of life and thought is that there can really be no point in the exchange of confidences and the asking for advice. I have always been very bad at the latter. Jack, not being interested in my marriage, could hardly be interested in my divorce. And I could scarcely expect him to be sympathetic with the internal tumult, the nervousness, that tends to ensue when the one you think you’re leaving turns out to be leaving you.
It was to my surprise that I discovered a plump, agitated figure weeping upon Frances’s shoulder, as she sat on a stone bench beneath the trees of Blasimon-les-Ponts’ central square, where the cars neatly parked in the shade, at that agreeable and tidy angle so admired by the French, but which leaves a useless triangle at either end of the row. The English, with their blunt four-square approach, at least find room for one more car. However, I daresay I digress. The weeping woman was of course Anne. The Band played on; ‘Hindustan’, followed by Jack singing in a hoarse croak ‘The girls go crazy about the way I walk –’ (walk, of course, being a euphemism for you-know-what) – rather bravely, I thought, in the circumstances. I sat down beside Anne. She moved abruptly away so that my flesh did not touch hers. I understood the feeling. I had not wanted to touch Jude after hearing her intention of marrying Matthew. He’d assured me nothing had been ‘going on’, but then he’d said to me all kinds of things that had not proved true – most importantly, that he’d do everything in his power to make me happy. Now I do not believe it is any man’s obligation to make any woman happy, and I would not hold him to that – she should learn to make herself happy – but he should have refrained from making me actually unhappy.
Anne. I asked how she’d got there. She said by train. She glared at me. She had blue swollen eyes, and bits of her, not all, had been in the sun. The left side of her nose was particularly pink.
‘Facing the engine,’ I said. And Frances, said, interested, how do you know that, and I said well, she’d have been travelling south-west and getting the sun from the east, and Anne slapped Frances for general treachery, and Jack sang louder and louder and the crowd caught on and clapped and cheered and stamped. Anne didn’t slap me. I would have, in her place. ‘How did you know where Jack was?’ I asked.
‘He sent me a postcard,’ she said. And I didn’t believe her at first, but she took it out of her well-worn, very English, crocodile bag with its stiff metal clasp (people are extraordinary, really) and showed me a postcard of Blasimon-les-Ponts. She allowed me only a glimpse of the other side but I registered Jack’s writing, a letter-post stamp, and a brief message. I am not slow. Anne put her trophy back in her horrid bag.
‘I’m staying,’ she said to me, defiantly.
‘You can’t come all this way and not stay,’ I said, reasonably. I saw no reason now to be kind. ‘Would you like me to ask at the Hôtel de France if there’s a vacant room. I’m afraid the town is very crowded. I expect Frances has told you. The Band and us lot are billeted up at an Hôtel de Ville – that’s a town hall, you know, not a proper hotel, with no proper facilities – simply miles and miles away.’
‘You lot!’ she said, ‘you lot! You cold shameless woman. I think you’re insane. What are you doing with my husband!’
‘Fucking him,’ I’m afraid I said, and somehow that defeated her. She looked horrified, and wept some more, and turned her head from side to side, hopelessly, as if there was nowhere now she could crawl to and hide, so as not to show her shame and defeat. Well, I recognised that feeling too, though I hadn’t had it for a long time. Not since I’d been a student and went to call on my boyfriend one night, to surprise and please him, and found him in bed with a friend of mine. Such friends women have! Think of Jude, and her so keen on God!
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but there it is. He’s a musician, and you can’t tie them down.’
‘You tell me!’ She was getting angry again. ‘You tell me that! Do you think I don’t know that? My Francie, my Colin?’ Had Jack even mentioned Colin? He hadn’t! I looked at Frances. ‘Colin’s my little brother,’ remarked Frances. ‘He’s five. He’s over-active. Little pain he is too –’
Anne was mouthing; the words had trouble coming out of her mouth, as if she’d had a stroke. The words were willed, but somehow just not there properly.
But I could understand more than enough of what she said. A tale of martyrdom and misery, of masochism and monstrous male manners. (Ms were the consonant she had most trouble with, oddly enough.) Jack off with his trumpet, no proper family life: practising all day and the neighbours complaining; him not there at the children’s births because he was off at a gig; his drinking, his wretched leaving capacity, the friends who could pull him away, the nights out with other women – ‘But of course,’ I said. ‘Of course. Didn’t you know all this when you married him?’
It didn’t stop her. On she mouthed and mumbled. A dreadful absentee father: she left them with him for a week – they lived on chips and he brought his girlfriend home.
‘But why have children, if it’s all so terrible? Why carry it on?’ On she went. On Jack played.
‘Oh don’t, don’t,’ begged Frances. People stopped listening to the Band and started listening to Anne instead. That wouldn’t do. Jack wrapped up the gig. His lip was going, that was all; or he’d have carried on, I had no doubt of that.
Jack stood over her and sighed. She seemed old and he seemed young.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘It will only upset you.’
‘I came last year in the middle,’ she said, perfectly clearly when she spoke to him, her victim, ‘and you sent her away.’ Her? My predecessor?
‘This time it’s different, Anne.’
‘I’ve heard you say that a hundred times.’
‘Hardly a hundred.’ How amused he seemed. But how else was he to deal with her? Such a dreary old woman! One longs for a decent rival.
Frances said personally she was going off to the café, but I didn’t move. So she lingered, looking depressed.
‘You knew when you asked me I couldn’t leave Colin,’ moaned Anne. ‘He’s right in the middle of his allergy tests.’
‘He doesn’t have to have allergy tests. All he needs is for you to cheer up and he’d be fine. You shouldn’t have come. It was very naughty.’
‘But you sent me a postcard.’
‘I sent you a postcard asking you to start the car every few days, or the battery runs down. I didn’t say come.’
‘But it’s what you meant.’
How dare she look at him like that, speak to him like that, as if she were in his head! How dare she have his car in her garage, as she presumably did. And what car? He hadn’t spoken to me about any car.
‘Frances and I will go down to the café,’ I said, ‘and leave you two together. Let me know what you work out.’
It was time for me to go to the doctor. I thought he might well have something of importance to impart, it being that kind of day.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘puis-je vous offrir mes félicitations. Vous êtes enceinte.’ Or words to that effect.
‘Pardon?’
‘Seulement deux ou trois semaines, mais vous êtes certainement enceinte.’
Pregnant. Ah yes. They have the most sensitive tests for extra oestrogen these days. But the pain? An ectopic pregnancy, perhaps? I had to draw a diagram before he understood what I meant. Then he shook his head vigorously.
‘Mais non.’ Just one of those things: one of the Fallopian tubes a little swollen. It sometimes happens. A week or two and all would be well.
Oh yes, I thought, it certainly would.
‘Everything okay?’ asked Frances, as I came out.
‘Fine, fine.’
‘Mum shouldn’t have come down. It’s embarrassing for everyone. But she’s like that. Dad’s always had women. I’m used to it, why can’t she be? She could just wait quietly at home and look after Colin and wait for him to come back.’
‘But, Frances, this time he isn’t going to come back. This time it’s for keeps.’
‘Oh what a mess,’ she carolled, with a sudden burst of good cheer. ‘What a mess! What a mess!’ She was like her father, like the whole Band.
‘Do you play an instrument?’ I asked, suspiciously.
‘I play the accordion,’ she said, ‘and I sing quite a bit. Not with this band, though. I’m folk.’
Well, there it was. I was feeling very tired. Rather a lot had happened. I left her in the café being chatted up by the waiter and found Sandy and the bus, just as a mechanic finally levered the back door open; I piled coats in the long back seat and lay down and fell asleep. Enough was enough.
I woke up to find the van was on the way home to the Hôtel de Ville. Anne was sitting next to Frances. Jack was sitting by himself. In the front, Sandy and Jennifer sat stiffly, not talking. Presumably Sandy had not yet forgiven his wife for her outburst of ingratitude. Pedro was asleep. Stevie sat upright and disapproving, staring out into the bouncy night. I looked at my watch. It was ten thirty. Jack came and sat next to me.
‘I didn’t want to wake you up,’ he said. ‘You know I love you. I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world.’
‘Um,’ I said, and went back to sleep. Starlady Sandra, Jack’s fancy woman, impregnated yet again! Oestrogen makes you sleepy, even so early on in a pregnancy.
We got out of the van in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Anne was still crying, but silently. I bounced around, organising her bed for the night: blankets, a spare bolster; one of the horrid hard French kind.
‘You’d better share Frances’s room!’ I said brightly. The Band was silent, disliking Anne for her misery, me for my cheerfulness, my capacity to organise. No one blamed Jack. It was just the women again, making trouble for men.
‘Night, everyone,’ I said, firmly and loudly, and got into my half of Jack’s bed, and presently heard Anne get into hers next door, and then Frances, and a few murmuring words between them. The Band was having their goodnight drink in the kitchen, winding down after a day’s playing. You know what performers are. It was two o’clock before Jack came to bed.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘I thought you’d be asleep,’ he whispered. ‘Anne’s going back on the train tomorrow.’
‘Thanks for telling me!’
‘Don’t be sarky!’ He’d drunk too much. What was too much? I no longer knew.
‘No. I meant thanks for telling me.’
‘You’re too tough to worry,’ he said. That shook me. ‘What I like about you,’ he said, ‘is your toughness. I’ve never met anyone like you. I’d be safe with you.’
Well, I could see it. He would. Never feel sorry for anyone in his life again, never feel obligated. ‘You won’t ever leave me, will you?’ he says. ‘I need you.’
He falls asleep. Well, I don’t know. What does it matter? The whole human race is doomed. How can a species survive if a disease turns up which is sexually transmitted and invariably fatal in mothers and babies? The species will struggle along an aeon or two, but that’s it. Fight it back with the tools of civilisation, drugs and vaccines, but the first major earthquake, ice age, war and that’s it. Some such disease carried off the dinosaurs, if you ask me. Humans, cats, monkeys, all now get AIDS: heaven knows what else; they haven’t started testing. I don’t give any of them long. Not that it makes much difference: presently too the earth must fall into the sun: and it’s all words, all word games, all these notions of immensity, because our own individual deaths come first.
That dreadful woman lies awake and snivelly in the room next door, and her boring daughter who plays the accordion likewise. And here I lie, whatever it is in there splitting and twisting and copying and growing; my father’s blue eyes, or my mother’s brown: Jack’s sinewy neck, my pretty straight toes. We will never know. What’s the point: the species will never be perfected, were perfection in mind, which of course it isn’t, just endless workable forms. Of course Jack’s and my set of variables would work; would breathe, eat, sleep, fuck; but what would it mean? Why bother? And what of this child Colin, with his hyperactivity and his asthma? Does his fool of a mother know about additives? Colorants? Tartrazine? Probably not. Why has she left him behind; why isn’t she at home looking after him? A mother’s first duty is to her child, not her husband. I feel my grandmother’s pursing of the lips. I don’t even bother to rearrange my face in denial of my ancestry. Look, who wants a child? I am the only child I properly know. I got my father shot, I drove my mother mad. My brother Robin killed his father with grief, nearly did the same for me, his half-sister. There’s children for you. I think of my grandmother in her garden. Susan. The quick sudden smile. A kind of glitter of life, glimpsed behind hedges, between roses. No wonder the gypsy vaulted the lych gate, for all her pious ways.
Does Bloody Anne weep because I’m here with her husband, who no longer loves her, or because if he’d gone to a different gig, the night the moon shone over Greenwich Observatory, she’d be in his bed instead of me? Is it me she hates, or the permutations of fate? What can I do about it?
I know very well what I can do about it. I am the fulcrum where the past and future balance, in which I am like anyone else. But I am also the point where the mad, the bad and the infamous meet: the possessed and obsessed. I had better get it right – this infinitesimal spark of moral decision which is apparently required of me. Let us pray! Great Father, Cruel God, simulator of the Universe, in whose image I am made, etc? No, better not: no help there, God the Bastard! What the hell, Daddy-oh! I shall have this baby, even though it looks at me with your cold blue eyes. And Bloody Anne can have her Jack back, Jack the mad trumpeter, though it breaks my heart. Frances can learn her accordion in peace. Central can have me back, and I will go on patiently instructing the millions. Matthew and Jude can copulate in peace and tranquillity, pursuing both the future and their own ambition. I shan’t mock it. No. I shall listen one more time to the Citronella Jumpers and then go home – I can stay with my friend Clare while I sort things out – to nurture this baby and allow it its passage into daylight, since it’s so determined to get there. He, she or it. The ‘it’ is what I worry about, of course. Who doesn’t, these days?