That is enough out of Marion’s eyes. I appointed myself her biographer, only temporarily, stirred on as I was by the return of Leslie Beck into our circle. I have the account of it only from Rosalie, mind you, to whom Marion related it over the phone, in some agitation: and the event has had to be filtered through first Marion’s, then Rosalie’s head, and the further distortion and exaggeration that I suppose must happen as I, Nora, commit it to paper. Though I don’t want to believe that.
Marion Loos, spinster, art dealer, and gallery owner, is more Rosalie’s friend than mine. She and I have of late rather lost touch, but then I don’t buy paintings. Rosalie occasionally does, though she is mad to do so. She ought to save every penny she can.
I use the word “spinster” of Marion advisedly: the nature, I suspect, predating the event, or rather lack of it. “I am a spinster,” Marion will exclaim, “and I am proud of it.” Don’t avoid the word, she suggests: better to concentrate on making the state desirable, and so render the word acceptable. Well, bully for her. She likes her life to be an uphill battle. I don’t.
“Marion was trying to be bold and bright about it,” said Rosalie, “but she was really upset. She even cried. I’ve never known Marion to cry, have you?”
“Not in public,” I said, though I had always thought perhaps Marion did weep in private, or when she was alone with her two Persian cats, Monet and Manet, who were as well groomed, nervy, wide-eyed, and brave as she. When the guests were gone, and the apartment quiet, and the wide bed so steadily empty, did the paintings on the walls—those tributes to her taste, her judgment, her flair, not to mention her income—the books on the shelves, the flicker of the television, the expectation of another working day tomorrow, combine sufficiently to block off loneliness? Did Marion Loos live with the sense of a life wasted, or of a life well spent?
“I know what you’re thinking, Nora,” said Rosalie. “You think any woman who doesn’t have a husband and children is to be pitied. You’re nuts.”
Rosalie has, or had, a husband who climbs mountains. Wallace Hayter went climbing one weekend in Switzerland, or said he did, and simply didn’t come home again. No body was found; he was seen getting off a train at Zermatt; he had booked into a Gasthaus; he just didn’t turn up there in the evening when expected. It was February and peak season, so they gave the room to someone else—an irrelevant detail, I expect, but it sticks in the mind. The courts have refused to declare Rosalie’s husband dead before another two years have passed. In the meantime, by some miracle—or her husband’s sensible contrivance—an insurance policy now keeps Rosalie and her two teenage children in modest comfort. Rosalie endures what to many would be an uneasy and distressing situation with an equanimity disturbing to myself, Marion, and Susan, her friends. Susan remains Rosalie’s friend, although she is no longer mine.
“If he’s dead,” Rosalie says, “he can’t suffer. If he isn’t dead, he’s with some woman, and happy.”
She’s let herself run to fat; she watches television and eats fish and chips with her children; she wears flowered shirts and elastic-waist skirts; she overflows her bra and is comfortable; she gossips with her friends.
One day, of course, as we the friends remind her, someone at the insurance company will query the necessity of continuing to pay out, and the source of her income will dry up; but Rosalie refuses to worry about the problem of outrageous future, let alone take arms against it. Marion, Susan, and myself saw her through the first tearful, agitated weeks after her husband went missing, fed her tranquilizers, then weaned her off them. Now Rosalie, even without diazepam, does nothing all day but sit around. This capacity of hers for idleness rather shocks us. If our houses are dusty in the corners, it’s because we’re busy, and other things are more important. Rosalie these days just doesn’t care. Her panty hose sag around her ankles. If they are large enough at the hips, they are too big in the legs. You wouldn’t look at her twice in the supermarket.
“Personally,” says Rosalie, “I think the real reason Marion is upset with Leslie Beck is that he flirted with her staff and not her.”
I didn’t want to think that. I preferred to believe that Marion Loos was upset by news of Anita’s death. The news had certainly disturbed me.
“Well,” I said, “you have time to think about these things. Lucky old you,” and I looked at my watch and went off down the hill to the office where I work part-time. I do general clerical work for a real estate agency by the name of Accord Realtors: “Accord” because that puts them toward the beginning of the yellow pages; “Realtors” because by thus describing themselves they acquire a transatlantic and go-getting air—or so they believe. Accord Realtors has its offices in the arcade of shops along from Richmond station, the busy terminus of the overland line which will take you swiftly, if not comfortably, into the very heart of London. Richmond is a pleasant place. The river Thames runs through it. It is far enough from the city to have its own character, near enough to borrow some of the city’s vitality. Look into any window at dusk, in the minutes after the lights go on, and before curtains and shutters are closed, and you will see stripped pine, blue-and-white china, bookcases, typewriters, paintings on the wall; and if you are envious, you are meant to be. Look at us, they announce, we belong to the gentle intelligentsia of England: people with taste who appreciate the pleasures of the mind, who are not plagued by too much money but one day, one day, if there is justice in the world, will have it. Richmond is a prosperous enough place. Its beggars are few, its homeless hostels many; girl children can go unaccompanied to school. The public library is well used; there is a shop that sells nothing but palms; conservationists are active. There are enclaves like this all over the world, where people like Rosalie and Wallace, Ed and myself, Susan and Vinnie, shattered by the world, retreat to rear their growing children.
My desk and computer are to the left of the door. If the receptionist is out, and she often is, at the doctor or the dentist, life at Accord Realtors is quiet—so quiet, reader, that I rather wonder if I will have my job for long. But quiet enough to let me get on with writing this unpublishable work for an hour or so every day. What I write is bound to be libelous, and Leslie Beck loves going to law; and who wants to hurt and upset their friends for the sake of a few dollars, anyway? That, at least, is the kind of thing we like to say in Richmond: we like to occupy the moral high ground, to our certain disadvantage. It is the reader, therefore, who for once is the invention, as the substance of this autobiographical work is not. But I must say that the very thought of this nonexistent reader drives me on, roots me to the page—both a hope and a fear that there might eventually be someone out there reading, coming with me through the journey of this narrative. But, reader, forget all that; really, all I want is your company. I get lonely, here at Accord Realtors. And a kind of sadness has fallen on the arcade, which no amount of bright lighting can cure. No one seems to want the flighty panties in the window of the lingerie shop, the Belgian chocolates in the patisserie; no one wants frivolity anymore; no one will spend. I am sure it has something to do with AIDS.
Sometimes I do still get chatted up by house-buying clients: not so often as I did, though I tell myself that’s because there are fewer clients. I have “good bones” and always was too skinny for comfort, and I have short fair hair. Ed says I could be any age between thirty and fifty, but perhaps he’s just being nice. Ed is thoughtful and kind; he works in publishing; he is thin, has bright eyes, wears glasses. He walks around the house with a book in his hand. I talk a great deal; he talks not very much. He likes to play jazz very loud. He has a gentle, disingenuous air. Sometimes he looks younger than his son Colin—they look very alike. But, then, Ed drinks very little alcohol, and Colin drinks quite a lot, and sometimes appears at breakfast quite raddled.
And this “Life Force” referred to by Leslie Beck, according to Rosalie, according to Marion Loos (who detected it in the tremble of Leslie Beck’s hands), and taken seriously by myself, Nora, does, I swear, exist—runs through all our lives with enough energy to forge real and fictional characters into beings of the same nature, unites the reader both actual and figmental. In its glare, the novel you read and the life you live are not distinguishable. Leslie Beck’s Life Force is the energy not so much of sexual desire as of sexual discontent: the urge to find someone better out in the world, and thereby something better in the self; the one energy working against the other, creating a fine and animating friction; or else racing along side by side, like the chariots in Ben-Hur, wheels colliding, touching, hellbent, sparking off happiness and unhappiness; creating in our excited heads wild notions of victory and defeat but, when it comes to it, mindless and about little else than accident and survival. For where are the chariots going but round and round the track, and how can the race ever end? Who is there to signal who’s winner, who’s loser? How difficult it is to reconcile the self of the night, the dweller, as it were, in the mucous membrane, that creature of engorged delight, with the organized and graceful self of the day? That first self is irrational, uncontrolled, universal, shameful; the second, the poor pitiful yet powerful thing, yearns for a moral shape to the universe. Marion Loos so frightened herself early on with her own first-self, Life Force behavior, she stunned herself into a half-life with cats. So I believe, though Rosalie doesn’t. Rosalie says Marion’s life is fuller than anyone’s, since she sees it as an end in itself, not just the tap through which other lives flow. Rosalie says that only the childless command their own souls, are capable of hell and heaven.
And Marion, until now, when she comes running to Rosalie crying, complaining that Leslie Beck has turned up in our lives again, and that Anita is dead, has said and thought precious little about any of these matters at all. It always annoys me how for some people day can succeed day and nothing happen; how can after can of cat food can be opened and devoured, trash bag after trash bag of cat litter be put weekly out the door while other people’s children get born and grow up; and how, while their life dribbles away, they continue to act and chatter and behave as if everything were normal, yet actually they are in a state of paralysis, and surely must know it. People can die in that paralysis, that’s the trouble, and only the tears in their eyes as they dumbly depart this life indicate their final awareness of it. Life has been wasted. The Life Force shot by just out of orbit, disappointing, like an expected meteor passing so far from the earth as to make no spectacle at all. If you don’t do something, nothing happens, I keep saying to Marion Loos, and she says, “Shut up, Nora, I don’t want anything to happen. I am perfectly all right as I am. You’re talking about yourself.”
At least one day Anita woke out of her slumber and started doing something, started painting, even though she left it so late she was interrupted by death itself.
Marion, Rosalie, Susan, and Nora, that’s me. Among us we have eight children, now all in their teens, early and late. I will name them but not write about them much if I can help it: all that need be said is that these children provide endless anxiety and occasional gratification, that life has been organized around their existence for years—even Marion’s, who acts as aunt, and says that’s more than enough for her—and that we fondly and wrongly believe our worry about them acts as a kind of talisman. If you lie awake all night in a frenzy of despair waiting for the return of the feckless girl, the drug-taking son, they come home safe. On the whole. Sometimes they don’t. If the despair is ambivalent—mixed with a half-conscious (at best) desire never to see them or think of them again—so much the worse. And if the sight of someone else’s baby continues to fill you with instant, immediate, and genuine pleasure—the triumph of hope, as they say, over experience—so much the better. Their names are (Rosalie’s) Catharine and Alan, (Susan’s) Barney, Amanda, and David, (mine) Richard, Benjamin, and Colin. Marion—nil. The name of Rosalie’s missing husband is Wallace; Catharine’s father is Leslie Beck, as is Amanda’s. Wallace never realized this about Catharine, nor has Vinnie ever wondered why Amanda has crinkly, orangy curls and needs to wear braces. Both Vinnie and Susan have wide jaws and strong, large, even teeth: the fact is that Amanda has Susan’s teeth in Leslie Beck’s foxy, nuzzling jaw; she has endless trouble with them, poor child, while the orthodontist struggles against an unkind genetic fate.
The things you know about your friends you must never, never disclose! In the States, people move a great deal, make new friends, learn the art of starting afresh: perhaps they’re wise. Here in Richmond, England, we tend to stay rooted to the spot, aghast.
So let me take you back from the chaste safety of Richmond, and the nothingness of Accord Realtors, to the dramas and excitements of 1974, to Leslie Beck’s tall town house, No. 12 Rothwell Gardens, London, NW1. It has just been painted white, after eight years of being coated in a rather startling sixties pink. The yellow drainpipes and guttering are now a sensible and prudent black. As does the rest of the nation, Leslie Beck is feeling cautious: a sobriety of vision reflects itself first in color schemes. IRA bombs have been going off in buses and trains; it is not safe to sit near the window in restaurants; worse, the price of oil is going up dramatically as the OPEC countries of the Gulf get together to form a cartel. Color may be brave, but ordinariness is safer. A rumor goes around that ration books are being printed; it is generally felt that the West is collapsing, somehow imploding, and that Marx was right. One up, in other words, to the Soviet Union. Little did we know.
It was a summer morning. It was coffee time. Rosalie maneuvered her stroller up the front steps of Leslie and Jocelyn Beck’s house. Catharine, aged fifteen months, Leslie Beck’s unacknowledged child, sat in a stroller rather too small for her. The elegant magnolia tree in the front garden was in bloom. It was a bright day. Rosalie expected everything within the house to be happy; the dramas and terrors of the outside world, back in 1974, having less effect on domestic life than they do now. In the nineties people will come to their front door weeping, and if you ask why, will reply, “I’ve been watching the news.” Then, not so. Perhaps there were just fewer cameras about.
Rothwell Gardens is a row of twelve rather grand, late-Victorian houses, fronted by a pleasantly leafy private road, which sweeps off Rothwell Lane and back into it again, taking in a narrow strip of land as it does so, to nurture the trees which provide the leaves which put up the price of the houses no end. (Remember, I write this in a realtor’s office; these details occupy my mind.) Rothwell Lane in the seventies provided excellent shopping facilities: a small grocer, a drugstore, a hardware store, a stationer, an antique shop, a shoe repairer, and so on. Now, of course, things have changed. The business tax has driven these useful and friendly shopkeepers out of business, and bathroom design and lingerie shops have taken their place. (Marion says they must be tax-loss enterprises—she sees no way they can make a decent living for anyone.) Now the dwellers of the Rothwells—the Lane, the Crescent, the Gardens—go up to the new Sainsbury’s in Camden Town like anyone else, fighting their way through a maze of traffic and fumes to get there, waylaid and made to feel guilty by the new beggars and street dwellers of Camden.
The houses of Rothwell Gardens inspired loyalty and love. The rest of us moved out of the area as the horrors of the inner city pressed in upon us: Susan and Vinnie went first, to Richmond; Rosalie and Wallace, Ed and myself followed. But Leslie Beck stayed where he was, clung to the property through good times and bad—married for it and pimped for it, suffering, no doubt, as it suffered, from storms, blocked gutters, woodworm, and despair. (If the house fails, by some sympathetic magic, the owner fails, too. These things are known but seldom spoken of at Accord Realtors.) Twelve Rothwell Gardens is now worth a million pounds—if Leslie can find a buyer, that is. How much he would profit by selling it is another matter. It may be mortgaged above its current value, for all I know. Building societies and banks, at the time of the real estate boom in the eighties, often advanced money in excess of the value of the house, leaving borrowers who assumed, wrongly, that those who lent money would be meaner and more prudent than those who borrowed it, in the end, both sorry and astonished.
The Becks, being the grandest of us, and living in the biggest and best house, were well able to patronize the rest of us. No doubt we resented it. Rosalie and myself lived in Bramley Terrace, around the corner, a pleasant row of tall narrow houses built in the 1820s to the same classic design, like facing like, and still, I was pleased to see when I went retracing our old stamping grounds the other day, intact. These houses are now worth some half a million pounds (if you can find a buyer)—smaller by a third than the Rothwell Gardens property, but worth more proportionately, being cheaper to maintain and, if you can stand running up and down the stairs, easier to live in. Back in the sixties, a couple such as Ed and myself, the one a publisher’s junior editor, the other on the editorial staff of the Consumers Watchdog, could comfortably afford to buy a house in Bramley Terrace, even when the other lost her job for attending too much to her children and too little to her work. Or so it was alleged.
I took Rosalie’s Catharine with me on this outing into the past. I thought she might like to see the place where she’d spent her first few years, the streets in which she played. In the seventies, little girls could still play in the streets. Catharine said none of it seemed familiar at all. Then she went down on her knees.
“Are you praying?” I asked in alarm, but she was only shortening herself, to see if the street was recognizable from a different angle. And, yes, indeed it was, or so she claimed.
“Can you remember being happy?” I asked. What we want, after all, is for our children to remember happy childhoods, though many of them seem to have grizzled throughout, and it was none of our doing, I’ll swear.
“Only if I don’t think about it too carefully,” she replied, and I wondered what in the world Rosalie and Wallace could have done to make it happier.
“I always felt like a cuckoo in the nest,” she said.
Well, what are any of us except statistics? According to research on tissue typing, one in seven of us does not belong to the father we think we do. Add to this mere ordinary variations of temperament, intelligence, and rather aesthetic perception, and it is hardly surprising that so many of us feel like cuckoos, not fitting in the nest in which we find ourselves.
Rosalie and Wallace lived around the corner at No. 7 Bramley Terrace. The houses on their side of the Terrace were without gardens, they having been stolen by the big houses of Rothwell Gardens in the 1890s. The lower branches of the Bramley apple trees, which had originally been part of a large orchard, and had given the Terrace its name, were now used for the swings of the Rothwell Gardens’ children. The kids of the rich can flourish anywhere: their parents have seen to that. Wallace climbed mountains and was away a lot. Rosalie looked after the kids and occasionally restored antique china. Bramleys are the large green sourish apples which fluff up when cooked and make excellent pies. Items of fact are easy to pluck out of the memory; affect—by which I mean feeling, response—is more of a problem.
Perhaps we were all cuckoos in nests to start with, which is why we ended up in our ancient apple orchard, like seeking out like, trying to puzzle out what was going on. The Bramleys, for all of us, was a new neighborhood, a step up toward where we felt our natural home to be. You could say, in relation to Leslie Beck, that once settled there, we set out compulsively to create as many new cuckoos as seemed feasible within the bounds of matrimony and accepted behavior. The life of the cuckoo, after all, is pretty good: uncomfortable in its nest to begin with, but rapidly and ruthlessly consuming all available nourishment until its maturity; and then it’s off. It was hatched both greedy and ungrateful.
Rosalie came out of Scotland as a girl; her father was a baker; she rode down to England on the back of her boyfriend’s bike, the works of Tennyson in her satchel; she ditched him, went to secretarial college, moderated her Glaswegian accent, got in bed with an antique dealer, learned furniture, ditched him, took up with a bookseller, learned the language and attitudes of the artistic middle classes, met Wallace outside a TV studio, and married him. (Her bookseller had just revealed a wife.) Wallace was tall and good-looking, difficult and remote. Nor was the marriage nearly as bad as it could have been. Rosalie admired him; she, too, was carried away, for a time, by the mystique of the mountain. She could, she once told me, enjoy sex with anyone. This could only be her good fortune.
I think Wallace treated sex with Rosalie as he treated mountains: something to be attacked with energy, but not too often; surmounted, finished, a flag planted to automatic applause, and then a nice long rest. He looked as craggy as one of his peaks, with bony knees and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was alert and practical and considerate enough once problems were explained, but you could wear yourself out explaining. Silence and suffering might sometimes seem a preferable option, and I suppose along with those go, if only as alliteration, a propensity to secrets. Rosalie looked robust enough; she had a lot of dark hair which half hid her very pale face and grew so vigorously you thought she’d have had energy enough to look after herself, whatever happened, and so it proved. She would keep what you could see of her rather heavily hooded eyes downcast. Her mouth was almost lax. In the beginning she looked good in trousers, having a long, straight back and narrow hips, but she never seemed to know it, or, at any rate, to care enough to retain these assets after Wallace fell off his mountain. When Rosalie opened the door to you, you knew she would not judge you, or take offense. If you were her friend, you were part of her life, and that was that. She was generous; Wallace was not. Rosalie liked the fridge full. Wallace liked it empty. Rosalie poured wine to the rim of glasses while Wallace winced.
Since Wallace dictated the amount of housekeeping money available, Rosalie was unable to keep up with the Becks when it came to giving dinner parties, nor do I think she wanted to. The Becks liked to serve champagne, and begin the meal with smoked salmon, followed by something like boeuf Wellington—badly enough cooked by Jocelyn, Leslie’s first wife. There would often also be a trifle, Leslie’s favorite dessert, rich in cream and brandy. Leslie was both rich and lavish, and liked to be seen so. Susan and myself fought back with Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Cookery, putting our trust in good cooking and hard work rather than lavish ingredients: Rosalie would serve beef stew and dumplings and be done with it, and Wallace would say, “You see, you don’t need to be rich to eat well,” and would be the only one not to notice that Jocelyn was moving her feet under Rosalie’s kitchen table to shift away the children’s toys, and had the air of someone going slumming and not liking it. Leslie just ate with gusto and enjoyed himself.
Jocelyn served dinner on a shiny mahogany table set with the family silver and place mats with “Hunting at Redhen” upon them. Redhen was her uncle’s estate. Leslie always drew attention to the mats. He had married above himself, and wanted everyone to know it. He had trained as a surveyor: competence and confidence had enabled him to rise to the top of the old established firm of chartered surveyors, once Agee and Rowlands, now Agee, Beck & Rowlands, and how he managed to sneak in there between Agee and Rowlands and become managing director was perhaps because Chas Rowlands was eighty and an Old Etonian who didn’t understand the necessity for work, and Leslie Beck was young, vital, and offered clients glasses of champagne instead of cups of tea, and had friends in the Ministry of Works who, like himself, had passed through grammar school and gone on to Cambridge.
Jocelyn’s father was a country doctor whose cousin was an earl; Jocelyn rode to hounds, and if she knew nothing else, knew how to behave, and how other people should. Leslie was vague about his own background—his father a civil servant in Lancaster? What did that mean? Train driver? Tax inspector? Whatever it was, Jocelyn, albeit not startlingly pretty, and without fortune, by virtue of her birth and breeding enabled Leslie Beck not just to live at No. 12 Rothwell Gardens, but to entertain, and feel at home among bankers, stockbrokers, and junior ministers of the Crown, the kind of people who could do a man in business a good turn or two. Leslie and Jocelyn Beck had two little girls, Hope and Serena, who were wide and stocky, as was Leslie, and who had inherited their mother’s rather large nose and close-together eyes, but not his red, crinkly, and vigorous hair. It was, perhaps, not the most fortunate combination of parental looks, but Rosalie and Nora, Jocelyn’s friends, supposed that when puberty overtook the girls, they would blossom. Something would have to happen.
At the time Leslie changed Jocelyn for Anita, Susan and Vinnie were living in Bramley Crescent, a street very similar to Bramley Terrace, only curved, following probably the original path of the river which marked the orchard boundaries and now ran underground, to well up in the basements of the big houses of Bramley Square, and give such a damp problem as to reduce their market value by at least a third—a state of affairs which went on for decades, until the housing boom of the eighties made such details as possible subsidence immaterial. Crescent prices were always twenty percent above Terrace prices; Crescent houses had managed to hang on to their back gardens and dated from ten years earlier, so they kept many original Georgian features, in the form of delicately railed balconies, ceiling roses, and marble fireplaces—rather too pretentious for the size of the house at the time of building, in fact, rather nouveau, I would have thought, but looking pretty good a hundred and fifty years on, and much sought after. The paper value of Vinnie and Susan’s former house in the Crescent is some three-quarters of a million pounds; of Ed’s and mine in the Terrace, under a half million. I don’t know why this should make us feel inferior, but it does. Only Leslie Beck, of all of us, still lives round there. Anita died there.
This kind of property detail didn’t occur to me until I started work at Accord Realtors. Please bear with me. I am reminded of the weaver bird, who spends his life building elaborate nests, picking up pieces of glass and silver foil, displaying them before his home. Look at me, look at me, what have I not achieved! How it sparkles! Come live with me and be my love—oh, glorious me!
Susan worked as a speech therapist for the local education authority, those being the days when such specialists were publicly funded; so she had not just the value of her house but the constant reassurance of her virtue to keep her warm, not to mention Vinnie, who had recently qualified as a doctor and was large, plump, fleshy, noisy, emotional, sensual, and animated. At that time they were seen as a foil for each other: Susan cool, critical, earnest, neat, humorless. But those were the days when Vinnie won every time, when society itself was on the side of the hedonist, the bon vivant, and Susan loved him and would take his views and his tastes, and not struggle for her own identity.
Vinnie worked part-time in the Bramley surgery and wrote Help Yourself to Health books, which sold well—well enough for Vinnie and Susan, when they felt the time had come to leave the central city for the suburbs, to buy a big house in the best part of Kew, still near enough to Richmond for us to meet up in the supermarket, when fate so decrees, but way, way beyond anything Ed and I could afford, let alone Rosalie, out of the proceeds from Wallace’s insurance policy.
I do not think I should work at Accord Realtors for much longer; it makes me envious and materialistic. Better to do a stint at the housing charity and have shock treatment for the condition.
At the time Anita supplanted Jocelyn, Marion lived in the basement flat of Leslie Beck’s house and had student status. She paid a reduced rent in return for helping with Jocelyn’s children, and supplemented her income by babysitting and doing odd jobs for the others in our circle. Marion’s father was a small-town builder, normally unemployed, her mother an idle housewife, and Marion—the cuckoo in their messy nest—a tall, slender, fastidious, wide-eyed girl. She had started her working life boringly in a bank, and been put, almost accidentally, in charge of a touring show of contemporary artists sponsored by that bank. Here she met my husband, Ed, and as a result, after taking a course in fine art at the Courtauld, had ended up owning a West End gallery, and richer than any of us. Potted histories.
The sad fact was that all of us, though we tried hard to be egalitarian, and to tell ourselves that money didn’t matter, took on the comparative status of the accommodation in which we lived. The Becks couldn’t help but patronize; we in the middle jockeyed for precedence, and Marion was the poor relation. She sat at table with us, but spent more of her time helping clear dishes for whichever hostess it was in proportion to the relative status of whichever host, thus having it in her power to define that status. And we deferred to her judgment: she was the witness to the life.
Such was the group which Leslie and Jocelyn would gather round their dinner table from time to time. We were the second division, it is true. We would get to hear, via Marion, how the Becks had had the almost great and nearly famous—leading architects, writers, politicians—to other dinners; for these more formal events, we, apparently, were not fit guests. We consoled ourselves that we were couples he liked, not the ones he had to invite if his plans for the development of London’s docklands and inner cities and so forth, in which Agee, Beck & Rowlands increasingly involved themselves, were to materialize.
But on with our story, reader, back to the convulsive day when Leslie Beck changed wives. As Rosalie knocked on the door she heard the sound of shrieking. Could it be Hope and Serena, usually so stolid, for some reason not at school? She wondered whether just to slip away, but she looked forward to the occasional morning cup of coffee with Jocelyn, who was always friendly and cheerful, if reserved, and Rosalie, especially if Wallace was away on an expedition, could often feel isolated, trapped at home and powerless with little Catharine. And besides, she did like to compare Catharine, a lively and handsome child, with her secret half-sisters, always to Catharine’s—and thereby her own—advantage. Portraits of Leslie, Jocelyn, Hope, and Serena were hung side by side in the hallway, painted by a lady artist of some note, who, Rosalie and Nora agreed, seemed to like Leslie but loathe Jocelyn, Hope, and Serena. Their pallid faces, dumplinglike, rose on tiny necks from overbroad shoulders. Leslie at least seemed carved in solid rock, and was without a neck at all, which rather suited him. And art is art: Leslie Beck was known to understand it, and Jocelyn not. So the grisly cartoons—as Susan’s husband, Vinnie, described them—hung on the wall and were much admired, and rose in value year by year, and ensured that no member of Beck’s legitimate family could ever feel too well of themselves, or believe that if all else failed they could rely on their looks to get by.
Rosalie and Wallace would no more have had their portraits painted and hung on the wall than they would have robbed a bank: it was not their style; they did not live in the spirit of self-regard. Nor did Ed and I, at that time, have the sense of dynasty, let alone the time available, required for such an enterprise—forget the money.
Reader, I realize there are a great many people on the literary palette I have chosen; somehow I have to draw their portraits clearly in your head. It has the makings of a problem, I can see. Other people’s lives are as full of detail as one’s own, and in real time our own detail takes some sixteen waking hours to get through, and another eight sleeping—and heaven knows what adventures the mind has in sleep—so the problem of the setting up of characters on the page is daunting. I wonder, sitting here at Accord Realtors, how the convention has arisen by which you, the reader, who know Leslie Beck’s exact height—one of our circle, one night, no doubt with many a muffled giggle of excitement, measured both Leslie’s height and the length of his penis, respectively five feet ten and ten inches when erect (and now you know something else), one-seventh, exactly, of his height—are content not to know similar measurements for everyone else. Perhaps it is that the reader assumes a norm unless informed otherwise? If Rosalie has crossed eyes, you assume I will tell you. If Marion is four feet five, ditto. (Actually, she’s five feet eleven, on the margin of exceptionality; now you know that, too.) I’m five feet three, which is pretty pathetic.
I, if you remember, am Nora, married to Ed, the publisher, and the one writing this book of an afternoon up at Accord Realtors.
Marion Loos is the one who describes herself as a spinster, runs the art gallery, and sold her baby to get it going. (I was going to break that to you later. It was, of course, Leslie’s baby; I don’t want you throwing the book aside, crying “This is ridiculous.” Not my fault that what is true can also be ridiculous. Blame God, who invented Leslie of the active penis, not me. Me, I’m just filling in an idle afternoon as the recording angel, waiting for the property market to rise.)
Marion also has two indistinguishable cats, Monet and Manet.
Rosalie is the one who’s gone to fat and seed, and whose husband, Wallace, fell off the mountain, or perhaps did not; her elder child, Catharine, was fathered by Leslie Beck and the two events may, of course, be connected. One day Rosalie may well tell me and I will tell you. I am pretty sure my son Colin is not Leslie Beck’s; I am pretty sure Ed is Colin’s father. If I am going very carefully through the past, it may be in the attempt to reassure myself on these two separate counts. But memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.
Jocelyn Beck was Leslie Beck’s first wife; Anita Beck was his second wife. I speak about Jocelyn in the past tense not because, like Anita, she is dead but because (a) she has moved out of our lives, and (b) by custom and practice, first wives are perceived to have existed in the past. Though to be fair, if Jocelyn married again, from her point of view Leslie Beck would also be considered unentitled to the luxury of the present tense.
Susan, married to Vinnie, was our friend until a couple of years ago, when she did something so terrible, she, too, gets to be put into the past tense, but she still lives near us all in Richmond, and I have an idea we will soon be forgiving her, or she us. It takes an illness, or a death, or just the passage of time, at least among women, for the power of shared experience to overcome the transitory nature of affront. I know it is not proper to say, “Oh, women are like this” and “Men are like that,” because the more we emphasize gender differences, the more they are used against women, and to men’s benefit; but nevertheless, I think it is safe to say, cautiously, that men cling to their hatreds, their taking of offense, more than do women. That may well be because men are more likely to come rushing at each other, with their axes raised, than are women, who might like to but would have to drop the babies so to do. Just as when estrogen levels sink in a woman, it is safe for society to give her hormone-replacement therapy, which keeps a female female, soft, sweet, and smiling, but antisocial to give the aging man testosterone injections, for if you do he runs round raping women and hitting other men on the head. What a bummer!
While we contemplate this problem, and come to terms with it, the temporary solution is, of course, for women just to hand the babies over to the men. Susan tried this with Vinnie for a time; she went out to save the world and he looked after Amanda. But perhaps she chose the wrong baby: it looked so like Leslie.
Susan now just nods politely and says hello should she run into one of us at the supermarket or the station, and we’ll even say a word or so about the weather and political events, but she is no longer trusted with feelings or enthusiasms or woes, the very stuff of friendship. All the same we miss her, and I expect she misses us. One of us will go rushing at her with arms outstretched, and the business of reconciliation, which takes nations decades, will be done in a trice. Just I’m not going to be the one to do it. But more of that later. We were recapping.
The children are Catharine and Alan (Rosalie’s), Richard, Benjamin, and Colin (mine; I’m Nora), and Barney, Amanda, and David (Susan’s lot; they get mentioned because the animosity of the adults has not been allowed to infect the children). Marion’s baby wasn’t around long enough to be named. I feel peculiar even mentioning it; we swooshed the episode out of our minds so fast, and yet I suppose this particular child was the key to the Leslie Beck Story.
Leslie Beck, whose penis was exactly one seventh of his height. I know; it was I who measured both.
True confessions!
I’ve never told anyone about that, either, until now. If only the recession would end, and the property market look up again, I wouldn’t have time to contemplate my life in this way; there’d be no time to so much as consider the state of my navel, out of which, like scarves from some magician’s very deep and personal hat, I seem able to draw events and memories, like bloody entrails....
My fear is this: Supposing I were to draw out too many, or they started spilling out of their own accord, uncontrolled; how could I continue to digest? I might just die from loss of undisclosed material. We bury memories out of consideration for our mental health.
Myself and Leslie Beck, dancing naked around a room! And where was my husband, Ed, at the time? Safely at home, believing I had gone to see my mother in the hospital. She was in a coma, and so couldn’t report back whether or not I’d sat by her bedside as a good daughter should. And what house were we in, Leslie and I, dancing and measuring? Why, No. 12 Rothwell Gardens. And what room were we in? Anita’s bedroom? Of course!
When Leslie Beck came to Marion’s gallery with a painting by poor dead Anita of that very same bedroom, and Marion went round to Rosalie’s and wept, and Rosalie handed the event on to me, and I wrote it down, doing my best to stand in Marion’s perfect (I won’t say polished; they would be too new to need polishing) shoes, and speak out of her persona—Marion’s “I”—as reported to Rosalie, who is closer to her than I am, as interpreted by me, Nora, in a piece of writing I polished and polished, and am proud of, I suggested that the source of Marion’s disturbance was guilt. But I don’t think Marion ever feels guilt, nor is Rosalie much given to it. I am the one whom it disturbs.
So here we are, back at the beginning, in the 1970s. Leslie Beck is still married to Jocelyn (just), and Rosalie has maneuvered her stroller up the steps of 12 Rothwell Gardens, the better to sustain her secret, wobble it like a loose tooth with the tongue, to find out if it’s still hurting, and found Jocelyn in crisis. Or such is Rosalie’s account of it.
Jocelyn Beck, so says Rosalie, flung open the door. She was wearing a silk dressing gown with nothing underneath; it fell open, and Rosalie could see the pink-nippled breasts—larger than she’d imagined—and a glimpse of black pubic hair. Jocelyn’s normally well-ordered hair was wild, her eyes pink and smeary. She sobbed; she was hysterical; she pulled Rosalie to her and clasped her, which relieved Rosalie, who had thought that perhaps Jocelyn had somehow discovered that Leslie was Catharine’s father. Little Catharine, startled, began to cry. Hope and Serena stood at the back of the hall, silent and distressed. “I phoned Leslie’s office,” wept Jocelyn, “and someone left the receiver off the hook. I overheard what was going on. Leslie is having an affair with someone he works with.”
“How could you tell,” asked Rosalie, “from just something overheard?”
“It’s too terrible for me to say it,” said Jocelyn, mouth puckering again. “How did I end up being married to such an awful person?”
“It may all be a mistake,” ventured Rosalie. “Has he said anything?”
“Of course he hasn’t,” snapped Jocelyn, bad temper beginning to replace distress. “I know who it is now, at least, and he can’t talk himself out of it. She’s a boring, ugly, and common woman. Her name’s Anita Alterwood. I never paid her any more attention than I did the daily help. She whines when she answers the phone.”
“I don’t suppose it’s anything very serious,” said Rosalie. “You know what Leslie is,” and she quieted Catharine, persuaded Jocelyn to get dressed and wash her face, and ruthlessly sent Hope and Serena out into the garden to play. Rosalie always enjoyed taking charge in a crisis. She gave Jocelyn two of the tranquilizers her doctor had given her because when Wallace was away she couldn’t sleep properly for worry, and if she did, she only had nightmares of him lying dead and broken at the foot of a crevasse.
Days similar to this one, in which Jocelyn discovered Anita’s place in her husband’s life, are lived through by wives all over the world. That they happen is not so unusual. Remarkable and awful days, all the same, and memorable, when the very foundation of existence shifts and alters, and all the love, the nurturing care, and the self-sacrifice which marriage to a man entails is revealed in a flash as folly, thereby making the self a fool. Within a second the future shifts into uncertain gear, and the prospect of domestic redundancy looms, and self-esteem takes a swift dive down into the bottomless pit—perhaps that very same deep magician’s hat I spoke of earlier—and it’s all she can do to steady it, prevent it being lost forever. And the fact that it happens every day to so many doesn’t make it any better when it happens to you. Insecurity dogs the life of the dependent woman, yapping at her heels. And most women, wages being what they are, remain dependent, no matter how hard they work. Takes two wages, these days, to keep up one home.
I daresay it happens to men, too; of course it does, on discovering the infidelity of a wife, the coming home to a note on the mantelpiece and an empty bed. But the shock for men seems more sustainable; the abandoned woman has far lower a status in society than the abandoned male. “You’re so old-fashioned, Nora,” I hear Rosalie complain, even as I say it. “Because you think something, you assume the thought is universal. It isn’t. Who do you think is thought better of by the world, Marion or Leslie Beck? Marion, of course.” I’m not sure Rosalie’s right. If Leslie Beck wants to remarry, he’ll be able to. But Marion will have a problem finding someone to take her on, even if she goes about it the right way, which she won’t. “Oh, Nora” (Rosalie again), “please get it out of your head that it’s sad to be single.”
Back to the day that is seared into Rosalie’s memory: the day she helped Jocelyn come to terms with the truth about Leslie Beck. She ran down to the basement in the hope of finding Marion, but Marion was out at a lecture on cubism, or whatever. So Rosalie ran up again to find Jocelyn beating the scrubbed pine kitchen table with her rather large and competent fists; she was washed but not dressed. Hope and Serena were outside swinging on the swings that hung from the apple trees which by rights belonged to Bramley Terrace.
“I could understand,” said Jocelyn, “if he had an affair with someone better than me, but why does he have to choose my inferior? What does that make me in the eyes of the world?”
“The world doesn’t have to see it,” said Rosalie, rather put out to find Jocelyn now more concerned with her public image than with personal grief. In those days we were all, being younger, a good deal more censorious than we are now. We thought there were certain ways in which people ought to behave, in order to conform to the norm of the good and the nice, the orthodoxy of the civilized classes. You must not be materialistic; you must not be elitist; you must stifle anger; you must pursue consensus, not force confrontation; and so forth. Only when the lights were out, or faces turned the other way, did we behave with a depravity we felt to be singular to us, though of course it was not; only when really pushed did we scream and shout, report the au pair to the immigration authorities, sleep with our friends’ husbands, cheat the butcher, smack our children, run out into the street in our nighties, hope our husbands would swim out to sea and never come back. We hated and despised ourselves, and others, when we did it. These days we are less likely to condemn others, because we can no longer avoid the notion that others are no different from “us.” Condemn your sister, condemn yourself. Condemn your brother, live lonely forever! A hard lesson, but we learned it. Presently I will forgive Susan. I can feel it coming on.
And it is true enough that Rosalie would have felt better if news had come of Leslie Beck’s infatuation, not with his typist, but with, say, a film star. To be rejected in favor of someone of higher status makes it easier to maintain one’s self-esteem as fate buffets it about. When a man takes a girl twenty years his wife’s junior as sexual partner, it is certainly painful, but the passage of years is not the wife’s fault. If he prefers a working girl, a mere subordinate, and she is the same age as his wife, and plainer than his wife, and her merits observable only to her husband and not the world, what can that make of his wife? Except she must have done something terrible. Cast out, rejected, sent home to her parents, no good in any society in the world.
Rosalie was upset, too. She conceded to Jocelyn the rights of the wife—prior use, and so forth—but felt, as you would, reader (should you be female, which I can’t take for granted), that if Leslie Beck was going venturing outside his marriage, it ought to be back into her, Rosalie’s, arms. She was willing enough.
Rosalie remembered saying to Jocelyn on that Day of Dread, “Jocelyn, perhaps you’ve misinterpreted some casual conversation? Perhaps it was a crossed line? Whole lives can’t change because someone leaves a phone off the hook.”
Oh no?
“I’ll tell you what I heard,” said Jocelyn. “If Leslie says, ‘Shut the door, Anita, I want to fuck you sitting on my knee,’ and the other one says, ‘But Leslie, you wanted this letter to Austin’s typed in order to catch the mail,’ and Leslie replies, ‘Okay, then we’ll do both at the same time,’ I reckon there is no mistaking what is going on.”
And Rosalie thought a little and said, “Jocelyn, these may have been voices heard in your head. Fantasies,” but remembering the way Leslie Beck had once crept up on her from behind while she was making sandwiches in her own kitchen, remembering the feel of sand and surf on the skin, Rosalie supposed the voices to be real enough.
Rosalie stopped feeling jealous quite suddenly and felt instead that she was on Leslie Beck and Anita’s side and wished them every good luck in the world: Jocelyn was the kind of woman on whom a man could never creep up. He would have to wash well first and ask permission, which would be grudgingly given. No doubt many of the women at the Becks’ first-division dinner parties, the ones who wore real diamond brooches, carefully placed, not hasty ethnic ornamentation slung around necks and arms, were of that particular nature. We second-division types don’t bargain with our bodies; it isn’t done. We tend to offer ourselves freely, perhaps too freely, for a little excitement and the preservation of our marriages, for our children’s—and, indeed, our husbands’—sake. I suspect Rosalie, Susan, and myself all married men with a little less sexual energy than ourselves—that is to say, truly nice men. We were always on the wooing side of the male-female divide, not that of those consenting, and then only just, to be wooed. The former seldom get given furs and diamonds; the latter do. But, then, we don’t want them. We would rather have the soul of a man than his money.
Marion watched it all from her flat down below and never got married at all. It was dark and damp down there in the early seventies, before the builders were brought in to turn the premises into something rather more like a rentable garden flat than a mere basement for storage and servants. It was from those earlier days that Marion dates her asthma.
But back to the day of dread. Jocelyn rose from the table, threw off her wrap, and stalked naked from the room. Rosalie admired the pink and solid perfection of her body, her bold high breasts, the muscular buttocks, the general sense of unavailability. But Jocelyn wasn’t waiting for admiration; she just wanted to get dressed as quickly as possible. Rosalie picked up the wrap and folded it. Leslie Beck never liked to see women’s clothes thus discarded. He liked them properly hanging in the cupboard. He would fold his own clothes even while his penis grew to its full ten inches, one-seventh of his height.
Jocelyn came back smartly dressed in a white blouse and a navy skirt.
“Where are you going?” asked Rosalie. “Don’t do anything silly. Remember you’ve been munching tranquilizers.” She had taken the opportunity of giving Catharine some milk from the Beck fridge and a biscuit from the Beck tin; she felt the little girl was entitled to it. But Jocelyn was on the phone. She called the man at Rothwell Hardware and asked him to come over at once to change the locks. Then she called her mother.
“Mummy,” said Jocelyn, “I’m so upset. Leslie is leaving me. He’s going to live with his secretary. Daddy must cut off his allowance at once, and I think he should ask for the car back.”
Hope, or was it Serena, out in the garden, began to scream. She’d fallen off the swing, or, rather, the branch that had supported it had snapped. Apple is a soft wood and not suitable for swings, but try telling that to the cuckoo dwellers of Rothwell Gardens, rejoicing in their stolen orchard, home at last. Rosalie ran outside at once to help. Hope lay winded and stunned on the ground; Serena heaved with an asthma attack. They were hopeless children, thought Rosalie. They would reflect little glory on Leslie Beck, who loved glory. Jocelyn stayed on the phone for some time; now she was talking to her lawyer. She wished for a divorce from Leslie on the grounds of mental cruelty, and a court injunction to keep him out of the house in the meanwhile. “Jocelyn,” begged Rosalie, returning with Hope in her arms, “please don’t be hasty. At least talk to Leslie.” But Jocelyn would not listen.
Whereupon Marion, thank God, came home from her lecture and volunteered to take Hope to the emergency room for an X-ray in case she had a concussion, and took Serena along as well because she was turning blue about the lips. It was, as Marion later said, that kind of day. Either nothing happens for ages and ages, or everything happens at once.
Marion took the children to the hospital in Jocelyn’s car. “Shouldn’t you go to the hospital, too?” asked Rosalie of Jocelyn. “You are their mother.”
“Hope’s perfectly all right,” said Jocelyn. “I was falling off horses onto my head all through my childhood, and there’s nothing wrong with me. What’s a swing? And as for Serena, she’s just demanding attention. She can’t bear Hope getting it all. If Marion’s so fussy, let her do it. I expect she only wants an excuse to borrow the car.”
She went up into the bedroom and Rosalie followed, since Jocelyn had with her the garden shears. Jocelyn took Leslie’s beautiful, if rather stodgy, suits from the filled wardrobe and flung them into a pile on the bed; then, picking out the trousers, she started cutting them up, slicing first from crotch to waist. Catharine had fallen asleep in her stroller and remained in the kitchen. Rosalie again begged Jocelyn to consider that she had been taking tranquilizers, which can have the side effect of turning the taker violent, and pleaded with her just to stop and sit down, or Rosalie would feel it was all her own fault. She pointed out that perhaps if Jocelyn simply did nothing, waited for Leslie to return and then talked quietly to him, perhaps suggested family therapy, the matter might resolve itself and the marriage end up stronger than ever. Wasn’t it a pity—the house, the children, the friends, everything, so much at stake...? But still Jocelyn slashed and ripped.
“The man’s sex-mad,” she said. “He’s an animal. He’s disgusting. My father paid for the suits. They’re mine to do with as I please.”
Leslie had told Susan, and Susan had told Rosalie, and Rosalie had told me, that Jocelyn thought sex once every six weeks was generous. Jocelyn’s father, it seemed, had told her when she was little that once every two months was the norm, and Jocelyn had this frequency of “intercourse,” as she called it, imprinted somewhere in her psyche. Her father was a doctor, so how could she doubt him? And we all knew about Leslie’s predicament, though we never talked about it among ourselves, thinking it was restricted information, as indeed it was. But we thought less of Jocelyn for what we saw as meanness.
One of the most noticeable ways in which 12 Rothwell Gardens differed from the rest of our houses, apart from the size and the number of rooms and the width of the stairs, was that it was without bookshelves. It seemed that Leslie and Jocelyn seldom read anything except the newspapers, and Jocelyn subscribed to Vogue, though to what end was not apparent. The rest of us read novels and so had some idea of what went on in other people’s heads; even Wallace would carry a thriller in his backpack, to read in his tent in a snowstorm. Jocelyn would sometimes read historical biography, but very few biographers carry details as to frequency of intercourse in their subjects’ lives, so once the idea of every two months had been put into Jocelyn’s head, how was she to replace it by any other? Jocelyn exemplified the sad life of the rich, which we liked to believe in. It stopped us from feeling jealous, and not feeling jealous made us think better of ourselves.
“Why not go down to Leslie’s office,” suggested Rosalie, “and have it out with him? You might feel better.”
“Bloody Marion’s got the car,” said Jocelyn, snipping and tearing, “to take the bloody children to the hospital.”
“I’ll call a taxi,” said Rosalie, and did. When it came, Jocelyn, having finished her task of cutting up trousers, but still tearing socks to pieces with her teeth for good measure, got in without protest.
Agee, Beck & Rowlands had its offices in one of those rather pleasant squarish houses in a staid road behind Fitzroy Square, where well-established firms of architects, surveyors, and structural engineers have their offices.
Picture the scene. (In the days when we still dined out, Rosalie often dined out on it.) Rosalie pays off the taxi. The front door of Agee, Beck & Rowlands is closed. There is an intercom attached to the side of the door, a button you press and a panel into which you speak, and are heard if you are lucky. The ground-floor window is open; this fine spring day offers the first sun and warmth of the season. Standing in the window, looking out and stretching even as Jocelyn and Rosalie watch, is Leslie Beck. He looks handsome, satisfied, and well entertained, as no doubt he is: stocky, cheerful, vigorous. Can that be Anita at the electric typewriter behind him? A rather plain and dowdy girl, with a large nose, a dull complexion, and her hair in an elaborate and old-fashioned beehive? Is it the same letter she is engaged in—the one to Austin’s? Perhaps she has been obliged to retype it, inasmuch as she failed to get it perfect the first time round? This is before the days of the word processor, remember; there was a lot of retyping to be done, a great deal of giving up and starting afresh. Or perhaps that was just Rosalie’s fancy, and the Austin letter was already in its envelope and six more done since. Though if Anita’s typing was anything like her cooking proved to be, that was unlikely.
Be that as it may, Leslie saw Jocelyn and Rosalie, and first he blanched, according to Rosalie, and then he smiled.
“Darling,” he cried from the window, “how wonderful to see you. And Rosalie. And Catharine, your new baby! The more little girls in the world, the better. Just push the door and come on in.”
Catharine was fifteen months old, but Rosalie could see that this was no time to remind him.
“Bastard!” Jocelyn was shrieking, for all the street to hear. “Fornicating pig! Adulterous swine! I’m going to chop it off and feed it to my father’s dogs. It’s unnatural, it’s fiendish, it’s monstrous.”
Somehow she had managed to bring the garden shears with her; now she brandished them. Leslie Beck, with surprisingly quick reflexes, slammed down the window and vanished from view. Passers-by turned. A startled face, that of Mr. Roger Agee—Rosalie had once been privileged enough to dine with him at the Becks’—looked out of the top window. Anita Alterwood, for it was indeed she, rose from her typewriter and for a moment took Leslie’s place at the window. She half smiled; she seemed both displeased and yet gratified.
“Jocelyn,” pleaded Rosalie, “you’re playing into her hands. Can’t you see?”
“Bitch!” yelled Jocelyn. “Whore, slut. What do you use for hair spray? Leslie Beck’s semen? Cupfuls of it?”
“Jocelyn,” begged Rosalie. “Please don’t. Not like this. Not a public scene. He won’t put up with it.”
“Good,” said Jocelyn savagely, giving Rosalie an ungrateful shove, so that Catharine began to cry. Small children hate it when those allegedly in charge raise their voices and prove themselves not fit for the task.
“Just come home,” begged Rosalie, and Jocelyn hesitated for a second, and then tried to push the front door open, hearing the sound of locks on the other side of the grating, but was too late by half a second. The door was now securely bolted. Jocelyn kicked it savagely. Then she crouched down and yelled more insults through the entry-phone panel.
“You’re all curs and bitches! You’re animals; you’re all in heat night and day.”
The ground-floor window opened. It was Mr. Roger Agee.
“Jocelyn,” he said, “I don’t know what’s happened, but you’re clearly upset. Please just be quiet and I’ll come out and we’ll talk about it. Probably better if you don’t see Leslie just at this very moment.”
“Why? Is he having it off with her in the broom closet? You’re in on it, too. If you don’t fire that woman immediately, I’m reporting you to the director of public prosecution. You and your Berkeley Square development. My lawyer says it stinks! The lot of you stink! I’ve read the files, and you’re all rottener than rotten fish, so don’t you tell me what to do, Mr. Roger stinking Agee.”
Passersby were gathering now, and in some number. A couple of gray-suited men, who might well have been senior officials from the Ministry of Works, emerged from a taxi and approached Agee, Beck & Rowlands, and would have come up the steps, but Jocelyn turned on them, too, brandishing the shears.
“My husband is Leslie Beck,” she said, “of Agee, Beck & Rowlands, and he’s fucking his secretary and I’m his wife, and if you do business with him you’re as corrupt and evil as he is. The whole lot of you stink around the crotch!”
Roger Agee apologized to them from his window and said they were being besieged by a madwoman, he was sorry, the police were on their way. They hailed a taxi and departed.
“I’m not mad,” shrieked Jocelyn, “the world has gone mad. The whole lot of you are in collusion with that evil bitch.”
And Rosalie told me that in her opinion Jocelyn was quite right, everyone was indeed in collusion, if not particularly with Anita, at least with the principle of doing away with everything familiar and whoring after the new and the fresh. Older women are meant to grin and bear it, not rant and protest; rejected wives are no fun. People pay them lip service, but they’d rather, really, they just went away. Besides which, word had got round that Jocelyn would only let Leslie into her bed once every two months, and what sort of wife was that? No one was on her side.
Rosalie took Jocelyn home, because Catharine’s wailing began to drown out even Jocelyn’s shrieks, and the windows of Agee, Beck & Rowlands were now silent, and the police were on their way. Blinds were pulled; shutters were closed all the way down the street. The place reminded Rosalie of the Chinese embassy in Portland Place, which has looked like that for twenty years: its windows boarded up, blank, and silent, albeit in multi-occupation. Faceless and brooding: does it plan attack or expect it, who can ever tell? I suppose to plan one is inevitably to expect the other. Susan maintains that insomnia is a symptom of repressed anger: you are back in your cave, adrenaline flowing, both planning the tiger’s death and expecting it to pounce. Susan can’t even let you lie awake at night without construing it as your fault, not your misfortune.
Once they were home, Rosalie left Jocelyn in Marion’s charge. Serena had had an injection and was breathing freely. Hope had had her X-ray and nothing amiss had been found, though she was still crying, having been traumatized, Marion explained, by the X-ray machine—in those days a great hefty piece of equipment which swung on angled arms over the patient, like some slow metal monster planning how best to devour its victim.
“I told you not to bother, Marion,” said Jocelyn, and then loudly to Rosalie, “Why is it that people you employ to help only ever make matters worse?”
“I should go to bed,” said Rosalie, leaving Jocelyn with another couple of Valium.
“I don’t think she should take those,” said Marion. “They seem to make her very aggressive,” but it was too late—Jocelyn had taken them, swilling them down with whiskey, and more whiskey.
“Now I suppose I’ll be left to put the children to bed,” said Marion. “I was hoping to do my essay.”
Rosalie and little Catharine went home to make Wallace’s tea. He would be back soon from the TV studios. Jocelyn wept and raved at the kitchen table in Rothwell Gardens. Then she went into Leslie Beck’s bookless study and emptied the filing cabinet and got a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen and sloshed it over everything. She pulled down a painting he said was a Watteau and kicked it; she got a Swiss army knife from somewhere—Marion having locked the kitchen door so Jocelyn couldn’t get at the knives—and slashed what Leslie Beck said was an undiscovered Stubbs, but which Marion said was only some old horse by some rightly undiscovered amateur; then Jocelyn sat on her chintz sofa in her pretty room, which had the most expensive curtains in all Rothwell Gardens, and wept.
It was Marion, by the way, who usually reported on everything that went on in No. 12 Rothwell Gardens, from the price of the curtains to the absence of books, who confirmed what Leslie had said to Susan, who told Rosalie, who told everyone, about what Jocelyn’s father the doctor had led her to expect of married life. Marion would babysit for us as well: news from one house carried fast to the next.
“You can give your life to someone,” Marion said to Jocelyn that evening, “and all that someone is, is someone who gets a typist from the pool to sit on his knee with bits of him inside her to type a letter. Perhaps none of it is very important.”
Jocelyn said to Marion, “What do you know about anything? You’re just some trumped-up bank clerk living rent-free, eyeing my husband, neglecting my children, and traumatizing them at whim.”
Marion was affronted and did not help Jocelyn later that evening, when perhaps she should have done.
By eight o’clock in the evening Jocelyn was beginning, in the manner of wives, to miss her husband’s return. Dogs do it, too; it is not only wives. If the master fails to return at the expected time, no matter if all he can be expected to do when he arrives is kick and shout, they begin to get restless and wonder what they’ve done wrong; habit and guilt make them fawn and lick in the instant between his return and his getting the boot in. “I might have imagined it,” Jocelyn was saying to Marion by half past eight. “Or perhaps I got a crossed line, as that boring woman Rosalie said. What have I done? Will he ever forgive me? Why did Rosalie make me go round to his office? It’s her fault. Poor Leslie; I hope he doesn’t go into his study. I’ll clean up tomorrow. I’m too exhausted now. I’ll wait up till he comes home, and then I’ll kiss the hem of his garment and anything else he likes. If he wants me to be an animal, I’ll be an animal. Who cares? I give up!” and she called and called Leslie’s office, but of course all she got was the busy signal. No doubt, wisely, everyone in the office had taken everything off the hook.
Jocelyn was too drunk and maudlin to hear the telephone ringing in Marion’s basement flat. Marion went down to answer it. It was Leslie.
“Is she still there, or has she gone to her mother?” he asked.
“Still here,” said Marion.
“Is she quiet?”
Marion, still smarting, told him Jocelyn was quiet now but had done some damage.
“What?”
“She kicked the Watteau to bits and slashed the Stubbs and poured olive oil over the kilims and the prayer rugs. Oil is the worst thing to get out of silk carpets. I think you should come home as soon as possible, Mr. Beck. It isn’t fair to leave me responsible for a woman in this condition. I’m too young, and I’ve got an essay to write.”
There was silence for a little. Then Leslie Beck said, “Okay, Marion, I’ll see to it,” and put down the receiver. Marion checked Hope and Serena, who were safely playing checkers in their bedroom with the television on, and went back to Jocelyn. Jocelyn had taken off all her clothes and finished the whiskey, and was trying to race wood lice across the table. They kept curling up in terror when Jocelyn banged her fist and made the surface they walked on tremble and shake.
The bell rang, and Marion, expecting Leslie Beck, went thankfully to open it. Two men and a woman stood there: one man was a doctor from the practice Vinnie worked for; the other described himself as a psychiatrist, and the young woman as the duty Social Welfare officer. Jocelyn came to the door with no clothes on, took one look at the visitors, darted past them, and would have run down the street had they not caught and gently restrained her. They drew her inside with expert hands, settled her on the sofa, and sat soothingly around her. Jocelyn remembered she had no clothes on and looked round for them, but Marion, mindful of Leslie, had already hung them in the wardrobe upstairs, so she gave up. Marion found her a blanket. Jocelyn said she didn’t like wool next to the skin, so Marion found her a silk bedspread.
“Well, now,” they said to Jocelyn when all that was arranged, “what seems to be the trouble? We hear you’ve been a naughty girl.”
“Me!” said Jocelyn, rising to her feet, “me! I’m not the one who’s a tart from the typing pool! I’m the wife!”
They tried to ease her down again; Jocelyn declined and jabbed the duty officer in the eye with her elbow in so doing.
“Sorry,” Jocelyn said, not meaning it. “This is my house, bought with my father’s money, and if I want to stand or sit that’s my business, and if you come here uninvited and I happen to have no clothes on that’s your bad luck—or good luck, depending on how it grabs you.”
“Yes,” they said, “but we gather there was a little trouble in the street today.”
“Who told you?”
“Your husband. He’s very concerned about you.”
Jocelyn screamed.
“Now, now,” they said, “try not to wake the children,” and the matter of the Watteau and the Stubbs came up, and the fact that their value was more than half a million pounds was mentioned.
“They’re no more Watteau and Stubbs,” said Jocelyn, “than I’m a copulating dog,” and she went woof, woof quite sharply at the lady duty officer.
The three asked Marion for confirmation that Mrs. Beck was acting out of character, to which Marion, after some hesitation, agreed. They asked Mrs. Beck if she would agree to admitting herself as a voluntary patient at Colney Hatch psychiatric hospital, and when she indignantly said she would do no such thing and asked them to leave her house, adding that if there was a Rembrandt in the house she’d take an ax to it if she felt so inclined, they nodded to one another and told her in that case she would be compulsorily admitted under section 136 of the Mental Health Act. The duty officer and the psychiatrist held Jocelyn’s arms while the doctor administered a sedative, and presently they led her away wrapped in a blanket.
Some twenty minutes after the ambulance left, Leslie Beck let himself into the house. He had Anita with him.
“Thank you for coping,” said Leslie to Marion. “I hope you’ll be able to see to the children until we can sort things out a little?”
“I can’t tomorrow,” said Marion. “I’ve got a lecture.”
“I’m sure if you explain the situation,” said Leslie Beck, “they’ll make allowances.”
Anita wandered through the house picking over Jocelyn’s satin cushions, shaking her head at the presence of wallpaper, the wall-to-wall carpets in the bedrooms, the fact that she cooked with electricity. Clearly there were changes on the way.
“You mean you have that great big flat down there practically rent-free?” she asked Marion.
“It may be big,” said Marion, “but it’s damp and there’s no proper heating.”
“All the same,” said Anita, “you’ve got a bargain there. Leslie’s very generous. But someone’s got to look after the children, I suppose. I mean to go on working. So you might as well stay.”
Leslie reported the destruction of his suits to his insurers over the emergency line, and Anita and he spent the night in the marital bedroom among piles of shredded fabric and teeth-torn socks, and Marion went downstairs and slept like a log, she was so exhausted. She moved out very soon afterward, and our special entree into the ins and outs of the Beck household was gone. As I say, the Becks were never exactly friends: they were from the Rothwells, not the humbler Bramleys. We did not feel for their distress, though I think we should have.
So that was how Anita replaced Jocelyn in Leslie Beck’s life, and how Jocelyn lost house, marriage, and children. Women, when the breakup of a marriage appears imminent, should never on any account leave the matrimonial home, as any lawyer will affirm. It leads to all kinds of trouble. Possession, they will add, is nine-tenths of the law, and so it is.
And if you try arguing your case from the nuthouse, which you can be forcibly prevented from leaving, and your family has provided you with the old family lawyers, and Leslie Beck has access to the most expensive ones in town, as Agee, Beck & Rowlands naturally did, why then you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Judges don’t like the idea of women standing in the street in a respectable part of town shouting abuse at their husbands while those husbands try to get on with their work, especially if respected firms thereby lose clients and business. The more so if you, the shouting woman, claim you were perfectly sane at the time, merely provoked—you having to say that in order eventually to get custody of your children—because not only, they fear, might you make a habit of it, but other women might begin to do the same. It might all end up in rank upon rank of wives of the judiciary making noisy scenes outside the Law Courts. If Jocelyn was sane it looked bad, and if she was insane, worse.
“Framed!” shrieked Jocelyn at the court. “Stitched up!” And they led her back to Colney Hatch, and thereafter a friend of the accused represented her in court and made a pretty bad and drunken job of it, too. But that was Leslie Beck’s luck, not his devising.
It does no one any good, in the public or the legal eye, to have carved up the cultural heritage of Europe, and it was difficult, by the time the paintings were produced in court, to affirm that they were not Watteau, not Stubbs, merely Leslie Beck’s affectation, his desperate need to be one up on Rothwell Lane Antiques—more of that later—and the family lawyers couldn’t see that it would affect the case one way or another whether the paintings were worthless (actually six pounds the one, seven pounds the other, at Rothwell Lane Antiques, as Marion could have affirmed; but no one asked her) or worth half a million between them.
So it went. Leslie divorced his wife and retained possession of the marital home and, for a time, custody of the children. It took Jocelyn some nine months to persuade Colney Hatch that she was no longer insane (she had given up the argument that she’d never been insane in the first place, merely drunk, provoked, and having a low tolerance for Valium; what was her account of herself as sane worth, in the face of a declaration that she was not, on the part of the doctor, the psychiatrist, and the duty officer?). That finally managed, it was another year before she could persuade the court that she was now fit to look after her own children, if she lived with her parents and remained in their care. Leslie undertook not to contest the new custody arrangements if Jocelyn made no claim against 12 Rothwell Gardens. Accordingly, she transferred the property to him by deed of gift, in token of her natural trust and affection for him.
This document, thus worded, was drawn up by the family lawyers. Their offices were in the Berkeley Square area and presently became part of a big new development, in the course of which a whole and perfect row of early-Victorian London town houses were pulled down and a glass-faced office building erected in their place. Agee, Beck & Rowlands played a major part in this development. I only mention this in passing. The value of 12 Rothwell Gardens—especially at that time, when it had a good fewer zeroes on the end of it than it does now—was, of course, minuscule by comparison to the sums of money spent on the Berkeley Square development, and I am not suggesting anyone was bribing anyone. Of course not; it’s just that people like to do one another favors. Down here at Accord Realtors it’s very often only drinks in the Black Lion or a good lunch at the Bear, and I’ve known waiting lists for desired but scarce new cars suddenly to disappear, and for surgical operations likewise, and minor committees to let through rather tricky decisions on the nod after these little social events, and that’s only what I know about and not what I don’t. Me, I’m just an assistant clerical hand round here. Anyway, what’s life without favors? And Rosalie doesn’t forget being called “that boring woman” (as reported by Marion), any more than Marion liked it being suggested that she wasn’t giving value for money in return for her low rent, and I never liked the way Ed and I were relegated to second dining division, and I suppose the fact is none of us could forgive her for living in the big house with the fabulous Leslie and then allowing him to go to waste, and Jocelyn, frankly, was just never really likable.
So here I am, reader, many years later, sitting in Accord Realtors, writing, marveling at the past, when in comes Rosalie herself. She’s wearing a kind of maroon velveteen track suit, which I daresay is comfortable, and the thick hair has been grabbed up and wound in a bunch on top of her head and secured with a pleated purple elastic hairband, probably Catharine’s, and she seems at ease and happy. She’s carrying a Marks & Spencer shopping bag overfull of frozen meals. It’s a branch where they pack for you. They must be cutting down on bags, or someone just couldn’t be bothered. That’s what happens when you wear maroon velveteen track suits out shopping. She has the appearance of neither a vendor nor a purchaser of property, but someone come in to waste time and put possible clients off, and I look round nervously, but neither Mr. Collier nor Mr. Render seems bothered. The property market is so bad that normal misfortune can seem good by comparison.
“Hi,” she says, and she smiles and sits on the edge of the desk, and her broad rump squashes right up to my little pot of spring flowers so I have to move it over, and her face lights up and in spite of everything she’s pretty.
“I’ve been thinking about Leslie Beck and Jocelyn,” I say, “and all that business.”
“She was always half nuts,” said Rosalie. “In fact, if a court says you can only have your children if you live with your mother, you might even be three-quarters nuts.”
“That doesn’t excuse the way Leslie Beck behaved,” I say. “At the time it was just something that happened step by step, as you obviously didn’t notice, and because no one else seemed to see it as appalling we didn’t register it as such, but when you think about it, it was. And he’s still about; and God hasn’t even punished him.”
“He’s got older,” volunteered Rosalie.
“We all get punished that way,” I say.
Mr. Collier is looking over at Rosalie. Rosalie says she doesn’t think Leslie Beck behaved worse than another man would in a similar situation. If men can’t have sex with wives, and the wives are bad cooks, men seldom understand why they should be expected to hand over to them any proportion at all of their worldly goods.
“I don’t remember Jocelyn as such a really bad cook,” I say, but Rosalie remembers clearly a certain beef Wellington which Jocelyn once presented: dense, tough, gray meat inside and a thick pastry case outside so solid Rosalie lost a crown.
“If she cooked for Leslie’s important clients like that, and we must suppose she did, it wouldn’t have done Leslie Beck much good. No,” says Rosalie, “women must keep to their side of the domestic bargain. If men pay, women must deliver: sex, home comforts, and kids. Look at the number of men,” says Rosalie, “who default on maintenance or argue through the courts till the cows come home that they shouldn’t have to pay it, who falsify accounts, bribe witnesses, refuse to buy absent kids socks and shoes, but can manage expensive toys and holidays. They’re not nasty men, they’re just fighting in the cause of what they see as natural justice. It is unnatural, they think, if the wife isn’t in the bed or at the sink, and the kids aren’t under their nose, to be expected to pay for them. Why?”
Mr. Collier looks as if he might come over any minute. He is a gray kind of man with a double chin and owl glasses.
“Rosalie,” I say, “you only defend Leslie Beck because he’s Catharine’s father—”
“Don’t say that—”
“And you have somehow to justify your adulterous relationship with him.”
“It’s not a question of justifying. Jocelyn wouldn’t sleep with him, therefore it wasn’t a marriage—”
“Then how come she had those children?”
Our voices were rising. Mr. Collier came over with some property descriptions for me to type. “Sun-drenched patio” had been changed to “agreeable walled yard” in response to rising consumer protest concerning misleading information from the realtor profession. They were cleaning up their own act before the government was tempted to interfere in matters it knew nothing about.
“Isn’t it Mrs. Hayter?” Mr. Collier asked. “Wallace Hayter’s wife?” Rosalie said yes. Mr. Collier said what a tragedy, what a mystery; her plight had always preyed on his mind. (I was surprised that Mr. Collier had the kind of mind on which things preyed, but then was ashamed of being so easily dismissive of another human being. I find that as I grow older, I have to train myself not to cast other people out of my sphere of inclusion, as it were; it is appropriate to young women, and, to a rather lesser extent, young men, engaged in the full ferocity of their mating behavior, to deride and dismiss those they do not see as appropriate sexual partners, but it ill becomes them when they get older. There!)
Rosalie said it preyed somewhat on hers, too, and Mr. Collier stammered and apologized, and said, since it was lunchtime, why didn’t they both go round to the pub. Rosalie said before they left why didn’t I come round that evening; Marion had been on the phone to her for hours. I said very well. She dimpled, yes, she did, at Mr. Collier, and at least straightened the elastic waistband before she left.
I got back to “Life Force.” Mr. Render dozed.
Now I will allow Marion to take up the story again—that is to say, my version of the events of the following Friday as seen through Marion’s eyes, or as I suppose her to have seen them, having only Rosalie’s word to go by. In order to transfer the “I” from myself back to Marion, I have had, as it were, to subtract Rosalie’s addition to the tales in order to get back to what we so wistfully call “the truth.” We writers have a hard task, thus mixing biography and autobiography. I suppose I could just call Marion on the phone and say “What happened, what happened?” and tape the answer and transcribe it, but where would be the fun in that? And would she tell the truth anyway? I’m sure she’d try, but would she manage? I can see I am gracefully and gently edging over into fiction, in thus letting Marion speak, but never mind.