So much for Marion on Friday night. It is with some relief that I leave her consciousness and return to my own, which flows more easily. Marion is hard work. I feel being Marion must be hard work. All that responsibility, and so little trust in anyone, and really nobody to turn to. I think I’d rather be me, peacefully pecking away at my word processor, day after day.
Be that as it may, reader, or putative reader, that Friday night, I, Nora, went round to Rosalie’s to follow up our abortive lunchtime conversation, so surprisingly interrupted by her departure with Mr. Collier for lunch. Why, I wondered, did I bother with face creams, low-fat diet, scalp massage, the exact length of my skirt, and so on, when all Rosalie seemed to have to do was slop around and exist? But then again, why, since I had never given Mr. Collier a second glance, and presumably Rosalie had, out of some secret corner of her eye, should I be put out about it?
And Ed (my husband, if you remember; the one who reads while he walks about the house) was never going to fall off a mountain, as had Rosalie’s. Ed would always come home to me, was reluctant, indeed, to set forth from the house without me. In the mornings he would kiss me goodbye, once, twice, fondly, no matter how fine it meant he had to cut the catching of his train. “The run down the hill,” he’d say, “will do me good. And the faster the run, the more good it will do me.” Once Ed had seemed set to be one of those grand London publishers who talk in lofty tones about the nature of culture, eat status-conscious lunches with notable writers, take their vacations in Italian villas with contessas, and are amusing about what Umberto Eco said to Melina Mercouri on the Concorde; but his life (and thereby mine) had, thank God, turned out other than my parents had hoped. Ed was now a senior editor at a publishing house, with a few shares in the company, and had survived unscathed a decade of takeover bids and mass firings. We lived modestly but cheerfully. Ed’s enthusiasm and knowledge of the literary end of the fiction market remained undiminished; his belief that everyone was as dedicated, honest, and well-intentioned as himself had been a little shaken by the decades, but not miserably so. My parents between them had left me a house, a car, and thirty thousand pounds. Otherwise I don’t know how we would have managed. Accord Realtors paid peanuts—as, when it came to it, did the House of Arbuss, the publishing conglomerate for which Ed, simply by sitting at the same desk and doing the work under his nose, now worked. Teenagers are expensive and take up a lot of room. Ed does his job and believes the world will all fit into place around him if he does; I do the worrying.
Occasionally I worried that in some mysterious way my existence defused him; had he married someone less practical, less whatever it is I am, with my short fair sensible hair, my precise features, my skirts at their proper length, someone more likely to take to drink or to shoplift, he might have allowed himself more temperament, be more inclined to write inflammatory articles in Publishers Weekly than steady and informative pieces defending the status quo in Book World, as he regularly did. He was respected in his profession.
When I said I was going round the corner to see Rosalie, instead of watching a documentary on the slums of Argentina, he looked a little wistful but said nothing to dissuade me. Please do not mistake me. Ed is not a boring man; or only so far as he is good, for there is an area where these qualities in a person do seem to coincide.
Rosalie was speaking to Marion on the phone when I arrived. I made myself coffee. Catharine was away at college and Alan out for the evening. Two TVs were on in different rooms, unwatched. I switched them off, including the documentary on the slums of Argentina, which I felt both glad and guilty to miss. Ed’s tastes are superior to mine. We live with a certain formality, well aware that the bad coin ousts the good, that if children read comics today, they won’t read the classics tomorrow; TV programs are carefully selected for their cultural and political correctness; and Ed is right—it’s just that sometimes I long for the energy and brashness of what is random and to the common taste. Lights at home are switched off so as not to waste electricity; meals are taken at the table, not on the knee watching TV; the cat is wormed regularly; the children take their turn washing up. Left to myself, I think I would live like Rosalie without Wallace: not bent on self-improvement, forever conscious that discipline and effort are required if everything isn’t simply going to fall to pieces, degenerate into chaos, and thence, losing energy, deliquesce altogether into basic sludge, but rather thinking, well, life is short; if eating chocolates while watching a horror video is your fancy, then face the fact and do it!
I even put sugar in both our coffees, not just Rosalie’s.
“Now Leslie Beck is back,” said Rosalie when finally she put the phone down, “he means to stay. That was Marion. Leslie Beck has beaten her down to a thirty-percent gallery commission, and possibly no commission at all. She must be in a state!” and she gave me Marion’s account of the second Beck encounter, which I, Nora, have already given to you. And then I asked Rosalie about lunch with Mr. Collier. What had they talked about? Had they mentioned me? Who paid? What would happen next?
Rosalie laughed and said, “I know what you’re thinking, Nora. You wonder how desperate I can be, to go out with a creep like Collier. Take off his glasses, take off his suit”—Had she? Surely not!—“he’s a man like any other. Your trouble is you’re too discriminating. You’re too picky. Like Marion, just luckier, because you and Ed got together early on, when the urge was strong, and you grew together. You don’t even know what you’re like on your own, or what kind of person you’d be, not married to Ed.”
“I’d manage fine on my own,” I said. “It was the same for you, and you’re okay.”
“It wasn’t the same,” she said. “Wallace and I were always more separate. We never understood each other, or tried to. I don’t think you could exist without Ed, and you know it, or else when you found Susan in bed with him you wouldn’t have got into such a panic.”
“Almost in bed,” I said, “and certainly not inside the bed, just rolling around on top of the spare bed among the coats, and only then because she’d put hash in the chocolate mousse. All the same, it was unforgivable of her.”
“I don’t think it was Susan who added it to the mousse,” said Rosalie. “It’s hardly likely. I think it was more probably Vinnie, still not recovered from the sixties. Perhaps she was as much a victim as Ed; perhaps it’s time you forgave Susan.”
But I wouldn’t talk about it. The incident of Susan and Ed, the last of the great events, the great obstacles, seven full years into our Richmond life, when great events, great obstacles, should have been behind us and all of us allowed to live in peace and fidelity, not divorcing or thinking of divorcing, not swept off our feet by emotions we couldn’t control, driven by motives we didn’t understand, had shattered my peace of mind; and though I knew Ed was indeed part of me, and me part of Ed, the whole of us, the oneness of us, was sullied. I said as much to Rosalie. I could not forgive. Not yet.
“You are so hypocritical,” said Rosalie. “One rule for you, another for Ed,” and I rather wished I hadn’t come round to see her, even though the slums of Argentina was the alternative. But she was right; of course she was right. I must have looked as if I had taken offense, though I hadn’t, because she started talking about her affair with Leslie Beck, way back when, as a kind of peace offering. And this is what she told me.
For the beginning of Rosalie’s affair with Leslie Beck, reader, I am grateful to be allowed to take you out-of-doors, to the Dorset coast, where the waves pound themselves to bits against cliffs, like a frantic woman pounding her fists against the chest of some unmoved lover—if you’ll excuse a rather strained metaphor, but it came to mind—and the sky arches high, windswept, and mindless above. A relief for me, and perhaps you, to be away from domestic interior plus TV set, real estate offices, art galleries, and those premises in general which mankind has devised for its safety and comfort, its diversion and the individual manifestation of status. I have, I grant you, given a description of a street or so, and of how Jocelyn stood outside Leslie’s offices and shouted her ire (while trying to get in, out of outside, as it were, as quickly as possible), but even these scenes have related back to house prices; I wasn’t content to let just you and them be. I like you to think, not just to see.
So how about, for light if painful relief, looking at these two, Rosalie and Leslie, walking along a deserted beach. Rather a short beach, as it happens, high headlands curving round on either side of it. They have walked around one of them to reach where they are, and are making for the next one. Their car has broken down; they are going for help. Leslie is at the time married to Jocelyn. Rosalie is married to Wallace. Wallace is on an expedition up Everest. He should have radioed back to base camp two days previously but failed to do so. This may well be because radio conditions are bad, but it could be because the party of three have all been killed; Wallace has an engraving of Whimper’s party falling off the Matterhorn over the mantelpiece in the Bramley Terrace house, and Rosalie does not forget it. Rosalie has been married for only a few months and is hurt because Wallace prefers the Himalayas to her. She finds it hard to forgive him for both making her so anxious about his safety and yet making her want him never to return, to vanish from her life as quickly as he entered it, talking of love and integrity—and how better and more simply than by death?
Leslie strides along. He is not very tall but he is stocky, strong, and energetic; Rosalie has to all but run to keep up with him, and this makes her feel childlike and curiously dependent. He is wearing jeans and a shirt open to the waist; he has tightly curled reddish hair on his chest and wears in it, against the wishes of his wife, a gold medallion given to him by that wife on the occasion of their wedding, a celebration which was a cause for the exchange of many valuable gifts. This medallion is an antiquity and of the highest value, or was, and depicts Europa riding into the sea on a bull’s back. Leslie took it to a jeweler, who made a hole in it, strung it on a chain, and sharpened up the embossing so you could see what was going on, which was when it lost its value. His hair reaches his collar and curls up like a child’s. Rosalie is wearing a sloppy dress with a long skirt made of purple crushed velvet, which is much too hot, and her shoes are too tight. She has never known what to wear when, but just likes purple.
Jocelyn called her that morning and said, “Leslie and I are taking Hope and Serena to the seaside; we hear Wallace is away. Why don’t you come, too?”
So Rosalie put on whatever was to hand, without thinking, or only enough to wonder why Jocelyn had asked her.
It became apparent presently. The au pair, Helga, had irresponsibly taken the Sunday off, seeing it as a holiday and not the day when she was obviously needed most, and Jocelyn was left without anyone to help with the children. Hope was still in diapers and sat damply on Rosalie’s lap all the way.
Picture the shore as they walk along. Behind them, Jocelyn sits with Serena and Hope in a car which won’t start. Rosalie is accompanying Leslie because Jocelyn wanted her to, since Serena and Hope, amazingly, have fallen asleep in the car, and Jocelyn doesn’t want Rosalie’s chatter to wake them. Rosalie is a little offended because Jocelyn isn’t in the least jealous of her, thinking herself so superior as to make worry unnecessary, or so Rosalie construes it.
The walk along the beach is without incident. Leslie talks about his bid to become a director of Agee & Rowlands. He is tired of working on a small scale; he wants to embark upon great schemes. It is dangerously ambitious to wish to move mountains, to reroute rivers, to build dams, in general to interfere with God’s plan for the human race; but it is impressive, and Rosalie is impressed. She walks with her head bowed so as to appear shorter; her shoes can hardly get any flatter. She feels docile. “Is the tide coming in or going out?” asks Rosalie, and the crumpled purple velvet glints in the sun. Her eyes are very blue. So are Leslie Beck’s. She has narrow sloping shoulders and, in those days, a soulful pre-Raphaelite look. Her hair is frizzy and halolike as she stands with her back to the sea and looks at Leslie Beck and the high cliffs behind him. And the sea creeps up and up, to the foot of a headland. They are taking their time.
“Out,” says Leslie.
“That’s strange,” says Rosalie, “because the last wave made my shoes wet and the one before didn’t.”
“Then take off your shoes,” says Leslie, and she kicks them off over her bare shoulder into the sea.
“Rosalie,” I said to her, “you’re not being totally accurate about this.”
“It’s accurate in essence,” she said. “The essence has sustained me all my life.”
Thus, while Jocelyn, out of sight on the other side of the headland, unsuspectedly soothed Hope and Serena. (They were bottle-fed; Jocelyn did not fancy breast-feeding, and who could blame her? Not I, for all it’s fashionable. Little goats tugging at the teat! Yuk!) Leslie and Rosalie romped and cavorted, counting the waves to see if every seventh was biggest, as alleged, chasing her shoes in and out of the sea. Leslie kicked off his as well, and took off his shirt, and the hair on his chest was tightly curled, gingery and plentiful, like the hair on Wallace’s red setter, which he had insisted on bringing into the marriage and now expected Rosalie to look after in his absence. And was Wallace ever coming back, or was he frozen and stiff in some crevasse, penis limp and swollen and blue for good?
“I’m so hot,” cried Rosalie, and, indeed, the sun was hot and strong overhead, and the sea, now driving round the headland, astonishingly fierce and swift.
“Then take off your dress,” he said. “It’s for winter wear, not summer. Even I, a man, can tell you that.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” she said.
“Don’t be coy,” he said. “I can’t abide a coy woman. And you’ll have more on underneath it, I bet, than most women do on top.”
“Now how did you know a thing like that?” she asked, and took off her dress, long thin arms stretched high, softly fringed with fine fair hairs, and stood in a white Terylene half-slip over staunch white panties, and a substantial bra from Marks & Spencer, not so white, having been washed along with one of Wallace’s blue mountaineering shirts long ago. A memento of Wallace. And they rounded the next headland, waist-deep.
And there they were on another little deserted beach, with the sea gulls calling and the sun in their eyes. Leslie Beck laughed, and Rosalie wasn’t sure she liked the laugh or the thought behind it.
“We can’t just leave Jocelyn stranded there in the car,” said Rosalie. “It isn’t fair.”
Leslie Beck raised an eyebrow.
“You needn’t have come with me,” he said.
“She didn’t want me to stay,” said Rosalie sadly. “She wanted me to go away.”
“I know the feeling well,” said Leslie Beck, with equal or even greater sadness.
And, sobered, they set off apace, the better to gratify Jocelyn, who would not gratify them.
They traversed this headland more easily than the last, debating the while whether it was that the tide was coming in, as Leslie had suggested, or the rocks they clambered over made the difference.
“You were trained as a structural engineer,” said Rosalie. “I expect you would know.”
“Did you really say that?” I asked.
“Something like that,” said Rosalie. “Leslie’s foot slipped into the sea and he had to take off his jeans.”
“If the sun was so hot,” I said, “they would have dried quickly enough if he’d left them on.”
“Oh, you’re so practical, Nora,” Rosalie complained.
Be that as it may, Leslie and Rosalie rounded the headland to find themselves on the next beach, a charming little cove with white, steep, smooth sands up which the foam surged and fell back rapidly.
“If we’re not careful,” suggested Rosalie, “we’ll be cut off by the tide.”
“Good Lord,” said Leslie Beck, “I think you may be right.” And they inspected the next set of rocks, but, alas, the sea had covered them and surged in and back in a most tumultuous and dangerous manner.
“I can’t swim,” said Rosalie.
“Nor can I,” said Leslie Beck.
“That is not true,” I said. “That simply is not true!”
“I learned to swim later,” said Rosalie. “I could see the importance of it.”
So what could they do but wait, inspecting the high-water mark to see whether they could expect to live, and finding that it ran some four and a half feet from the foot of the cliff—just about as wide, Leslie Beck said, as a double bed.
They sat at the foot of the cliff and waited for the tide to advance. Rosalie took off her M&S bra and lay on her face and sunbathed while Leslie Beck paced the ever-narrowing strip of land, now the width of a king-size bed. Then he said, “I might as well sunbathe, too,” and took off the rest of his clothes and lay down beside her, on his front for modesty’s sake, but not before she’d had a glimpse of what he referred to as his dong, his magnificent dong, enormous even at rest, in its nest of reddish hair. Now, she already knew about the size of it. One morning, pushing open the bathroom door, which he had neglected to lock, Marion had seen it, and she had passed the word along. There was no doubt the fact of it preyed on all minds, though we would have hated to admit it at the time.
“How vulgar,” I said, “how unspeakably vulgar he was, Leslie Beck the magnificent.”
“How magnificent he was,” said Rosalie, “Leslie Beck the vulgar.”
“Women are too kind to men,” I said. “Forever telling them that size makes no difference.”
Rosalie felt the first cold touch of foam along one flank and squealed and rolled over into Leslie Beck’s arms and felt a long hard touch along the other.
“But I might get pregnant,” said Rosalie.
“I’ll look after that,” said Leslie Beck, famous last words, “and besides, the tide is now well over the high-water mark, and if you ask me it’s a leap tide, and we might as well die happy.” And still she demurred; she even talked of Wallace.
“Protect my magnificent dong,” he begged, “from damage by sun and sea and salt. Shade it, shelter it, enclose it, take pity on it. You have no idea how this thing hurts if thwarted. It is women’s blessing, but my curse.”
So Rosalie did, and nearer and nearer they rolled to the foot of the cliff, hooked together, hot, damp, sandy, and shrieking, while the tide slipped under them and over them, warm, thin, and foamy beneath, cold and clear above; and death seemed not too terrible a thing, or only the stairway to heaven, up which they labored. Or so Rosalie claimed, though I can hardly believe a thing like that.
And then there was no cold water above or foam beneath, for the tide had turned, and receded as swiftly as it had crept in. Rosalie’s shoe by some miracle—
“Rosalie, you are making this up!”
“No, no.”
—was left washed up on the shore, and Leslie Beck’s jeans, besides. His gold medallion, the wedding present from Jocelyn, which swung above her eyes, went chunk into his chest and bounced away, and chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk again—
“It wouldn’t be like that with Mr. Collier,” I said.
“How do you know?” she asked. “How could you know?”
And we both fell silent. We both knew well enough. Nothing’s fair. Those were the days of the extraordinary; these, of the ordinary.
And then, Rosalie said, Leslie Dong—a slip of the tongue, I’m sorry, Leslie Beck—just so happened to discover a path up the cliff both of them had overlooked, and when they had made their way to the village they found Jocelyn, Hope, and Serena waiting for them outside the post office. When Jocelyn had tried to start the car the engine had taken—
“I must have flooded the choke,” said Leslie Beck. “I’m not a mechanical man!”
At which Jocelyn looked surprised as well as hot and indignant, and said but she thought Leslie had a certificate in mechanical engineering, or was he making that up, too? She was impossible.
“And I suppose you found a table of tides in the glove compartment,” I said to Rosalie, and she looked surprised and said, “Yes, as it happens, I did! But he can’t have planned it, can he? I don’t seriously believe he said to Jocelyn that morning, what, no au pair? Let’s take poor Rosalie, she’ll help, and her husband’s away, she’ll be glad of something to do. And then managed to stall the car at one fifty-eight, and timed the tides, and only got them a little bit wrong; so it was rather more watery than he’d planned. Don’t be absurd, Nora. It was all perfectly spontaneous, and therefore forgivable.”
“And that,” I said, “was how Catharine was begotten.”
“Yes,” said Rosalie, at last. “You only have to look at her. Leslie’s child. Nice straight teeth in a nice wide jaw.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t call her Nereid, or something watery. ‘Catharine’ seems such an ordinary name, in the circumstances.”
And I wished that one of my children were Leslie Beck’s, not Ed’s at all, and tried to remember back if it could possibly be the case. It is so easy to disremember these things. What is inconvenient gets forgotten.
“Wallace liked ordinary names,” said Rosalie. “He said there was enough in life to overcome without adding your name to the obstacles.”
We contemplated this.
“Nora,” Rosalie added, “I was very young; I didn’t have children at the time. I didn’t understand how serious things can get. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done what I did to Jocelyn.”
“I don’t think,” she said, after a while. We discussed further the nature of the male organ and agreed that though length and breadth could certainly incite to lust, they hadn’t much to do with love in marriage. But our heart wasn’t in the discussion. I think we were both affected by the melancholy of nostalgia; we did not have the courage or energy, that Friday night, to come to a bolder conclusion.
Rosalie had sat in the back of the car on the way home with Serena on her lap. Jocelyn held Hope on her knee in the front passenger seat. In those days it was not unusual for children to be so carried, and, of course, seat belts were seldom worn. People were more prepared to trust to luck. Leslie Beck drove rather jerkily, Rosalie thought, and she derived comfort from that, feeling it implied that Leslie would rather have Rosalie sitting next to him than Jocelyn.
Serena, in the back of the car, stretched out her little hand to stroke her mother’s short and practical hair, and Rosalie was moved and felt ashamed of herself again, at least for a little—only until they were back in the Rothwells, and Leslie was turning into the Bramleys, and Jocelyn said, “Oh, no, Leslie, we’d better go straight home. The children are exhausted. It’s only a couple of minutes for Rosalie to walk back,” and Leslie put the car on course again for Rothwell Gardens.
“They’d love you to read them a good-night story,” said Leslie to Rosalie, as they disbursed the paraphernalia of a Sunday outing with the kids to the coast, but Rosalie said no, she ought to get back, and when she did, found a telegram from the Everest expedition to say Wallace was on his way home, with slight frostbite to his nose but nothing serious; she was to meet him at the airport that night. She had to set off at once.
“The dong with the luminous nose,” I said. She didn’t laugh. “Over the mountains and hills he goes.” Edward Lear, whom some call a poet and humorist, but whom I call frankly nuts, has a fine wild subtext, for those who know what they’re looking for.
“I didn’t love Leslie,” said Rosalie. “Not the kind of terrible, awful, besotted, glorious love you can feel for men who treat you badly. The size of the cock does not dictate the depth of the emotion it creates. The pebble, shale, and medallion bruises all over my body didn’t show through for a couple of days, so I was able to attribute them to Wallace.
“He was very pleased to see me; he had had some dreadful brush with death and said he was never going up a mountain again. He now valued life itself, which I represented; he had lost his appetite for death. We were very happy, until Mount Annapurna gave a little tug to his heartstrings one day, and he was off. As he said, it was how he earned his living; it was how he kept his little family fed. It wasn’t now because he wanted to go, but because he had to go.
“That certainly felt better. But I hated it when Wallace referred to us as ‘his little family.’ It didn’t ring true; it was as if we existed as snapshots in his pocket. It was sentimental.”
“If Catharine wasn’t his, that’s what you would feel.”
“But he didn’t know that. How could he?”
“Supposing Leslie had told Jocelyn, supposing he turned out to be the kind of man who always tells—and supposing Jocelyn told Wallace?”
“I’d have denied it. I’d have said it was a typical male fantasy on Leslie Beck’s part. I had it all worked out in my head. I remember going over the medallion bruises with a nail file, in order to fudge the imprint of the bull, but it hurt too much, so I had to stop. I used a lot of makeup base instead. I had to buy it especially. I wasn’t in the habit of buying cosmetics. I was desperate for Wallace not to know. I didn’t regret it for one moment; I just didn’t want Wallace to know.”
“And no guilt about Jocelyn? Not even when you went on eating her dinners, going round for coffee?”
“I just thought she was a fool. Going on a family outing with someone like me and letting yourself get separated from your husband.”
“It makes her sound rather nice,” I observed.
“But she wasn’t, was she?”
“No.” I had to agree.
“I was sorry for her. That’s why I kept going round for coffee. She seemed lonely.”
We both contemplated this statement. We both knew it didn’t ring true.
“You just went round to gloat,” I said, finally.
“Yes,” said Rosalie. “I’d stolen something from her from under her nose, and I loved it.”
“Horrid old you,” I said.
“Horrid old me,” she said. “Horrid all most of us.”
The phone rang. It was Ed, wondering how I was, suggesting I watch an interesting program on glaciers. Rosalie might like to see it, too. I thanked him for the suggestion. Home tugged, but I resisted it. Colin was not yet back, said Ed. Shouldn’t he be? Did I think he had a girlfriend? He seemed alarmed at the thought.
“May the Life Force be with him!” I said. “I hope so. See you later,” and I put down the phone, and then felt guilty. I had joined with Rosalie against Ed. It is what husbands fear will happen, and what does happen, and why they resist their wives’ friends, even the best of them.
“The trouble is,” said Rosalie, “these scenes, these events, sear themselves into the inner vision. I didn’t love Leslie Beck, but even so, I began to dream of him, and the dreams unsettled me, and whenever Wallace and I had a row, I soon realized, it would be after one of these dreams. So I had to accept what I never had before, that I was at least partly to blame for our rows, and by the end we were scarcely having rows at all. I suppose Leslie Beck should be given the credit for that.”
“You can’t say ‘by the end,’” I said, “because it may not have ended. Wallace may walk in through the door at any moment, frostbitten nose or worse; then what?”
Rosalie shrugged. She didn’t want to think about any of that.
“I want to hear more,” I said. “I need to know about you and Leslie Beck, and I don’t want to know, because it hurts.”
“There isn’t any more,” she said, “except Catharine. After the episode on the beach I didn’t hear from Leslie for another ten days or so. I was so busy with Wallace coming home and doctors and the media asking questions, I hadn’t the time to hurt and brood. That saved me. That space of empty time in which, while she waits for the telephone to ring, the assignation to be made, the woman gets to fall in love quite passed me by. It’s out of that terrible cycle of self-destruction and rebirth, I daresay, that Leslie’s Life Force is born. Thank God none of that happened. I escaped. Within a couple of days the memory was taking pride of place in my life narrative, as it were, and I didn’t particularly want it disturbed by reality, let alone a ten-inch cock, which was so real it had practically cracked me asunder. And when he did call, the following Saturday—
“‘Hi, Rosalie,’ he said, ‘this is Leslie.’
“And I thought, Christ, Wallace is sitting here at my elbow, how am I going to manage this? But all Leslie Beck had to say was this:
“‘Jocelyn and I wondered if you were both by any chance free for Sunday lunch tomorrow? I know it’s short notice, but we’re dying to hear Wallace’s exploits...,’ and I understood the course that this was going to take, and was relieved. It was to be as if it had never happened—or, at any rate, left just as a source of secret pleasure for when Leslie and I, flanked by our spouses, faced each other across the dining table. And our social relations with the Becks hotted up no end, though I think mostly, to be honest, because Wallace got his own monthly TV show, Mountains and Me, after that, and Jocelyn loved a celebrity. Once a fortnight! Such a terrible waste of Leslie Beck, don’t you think, to lie beside him in bed and thwart his natural and legitimate desires? It doesn’t bear thinking of. She deserved what she got.”
I said I had to get back to Ed; he would be going to bed soon. I wanted the consolation of his warm and friendly body beside mine. Alan had come in and was in the kitchen with the radio turned on very loud to the pop channel. He was a tall, gangly boy who took after his father and was Richmond’s junior pole-vaulting champion. Catharine had turned out to be the more rewarding of her two children, but that was just my opinion. I am not a sportive person; neither was Catharine, by nature, but she tried. She wanted her official father’s approval, poor girl.
Rosalie walked me to the gate.
“Jocelyn came to visit me in hospital when Catharine was born,” she told me, “and I was nervous when she bent over Catharine’s crib and turned back the coverlet to see her better. Wallace was there, too. ‘Just like Wallace,’ Jocelyn said. ‘The spitting image. Isn’t it amazing how babies look so like their fathers for the first few days?’ And after that it was just accepted that Catharine looked like Wallace; people kept telling me so, even my own mother, though I could never see it.”
“I certainly never said it,” I observed.
“Leslie even came to see me in hospital, too. I was so surprised! He just sat in a chair and looked at me and looked at the baby, and held up his hands and counted off nine fingers, one for each month. I said nothing. He smiled. Then he kissed me on the forehead and bent over the baby and kissed her. He was wearing the medallion outside his denim shirt and it went clunk against the crib, and I felt faint. You know how hot these maternity wards can be. ‘Well,’ Leslie Beck said to me, mother of his child, ‘what can you do in the face of the Life Force?’ Then he went away.”
“You’re making that bit up,” I said.
“Yes,” said Rosalie. “I just wish it had happened. You know what it’s like when you’ve just had a baby and are no longer center-stage. Some row over paternity would have landed me back in the middle; but fortunately, I resisted the temptation to confess. And now there is no reason to do so.”
“If Catharine ever wants a mortgage,” I said, “it would be useful for her to claim Leslie Beck for a father. Still alive, active and healthy at sixty, looks better on a form than lost down a mountain at fifty-two.”
“You’re insane,” said Rosalie. “And the sooner you stop working at Accord Realtors, the better.”
The author as God. If only it were so. I would like to be God. I rolled quietly out of bed after Ed was asleep and wrote the following by hand. I folded the paper and put it in my bag. I do not want Ed to know I am writing an autobiography. He would want to read it, naturally. And naturally, I would want him not to. Writer-as-wife turns out rather different stuff from writer-as-underemployed-clerical-assistant.
Dinner-partying groups of young marrieds and middle marrieds form and re-form in the suburbs: in and out of each other’s lives, each other’s front doors; a sign of vigor and contentment; demonstration that the parental home has been efficiently and finally left, the new and better unit formed than the parents had ever managed. Just see, Mother, Father! Look here! Witnesses to the life! People who take me as seriously as you ever did, close enough to worry with me about the cat being ill, yet distant enough to make a judgment about the job I should or shouldn’t take. While you, parents, only ever had your own ax to grind. You thought I’d just taken a husband; but see, here’s a whole new life unfolding, a whole gracious world....
The group serves as the anvil against which social skills are sharpened and political attitudes refined, sparks of discord occasionally flying off, quickly extinguished. Through the group you learn how to behave, how best to seat people at the table, what to expect from children, how to cope with obscene telephone calls, how not to make coq au vin, how not to serve chocolate mousse after boeuf en daube, how not to be caught rolling around with other people’s husbands on piles of party coats. A few singles are invited into the group, drift around; are welcome so long as they know their place, don’t upstage. Pace Marion.
The problem with the group is that it tends to intertwine erotically as well as socially. Something happens—a telephone call overheard on the extension, a look intercepted—tensions build, and suddenly the group’s no more. Who knew what and didn’t say; who didn’t know and said too much? Treachery is too deep, trust too shaken, to heal the break. If you’re a friend of this one, you can’t be a friend to that one—it’s too much.
The group that centered for a time, and never with a full commitment, on the Becks collapsed in on itself quite suddenly and neatly and without undue anguish when Anita replaced Jocelyn. When we moved out to Richmond, leaving Leslie and Anita behind, we managed to reconvene, but only for a time, until I discovered Susan with Ed, together on the bed among the coats. An isolated incident, Ed assured me, and I think I believed him, had to believe him; we had been together too long, were too kind to each other, to fall into nonbelief and all that might lead to. But that was the time we stopped giving dinner parties for one another: they were too expensive, or we were too tired, or the new dietary laws of the eighties stymied us. Fiber, low fat, and little alcohol failed to inspire us to entertaining. We felt the loss, but not enough to issue invitations.
That is enough from writer-as-wife—or, at any rate, all she could manage before sleep overtook her. It has been entered on a floppy disc under “Gutters,” where the autobiography is filed.
When I came home from Rosalie’s that night, Ed was already in bed. It occurred to me that I could wake him and confess what had happened once between Leslie Beck and me, and indeed between Vinnie and me, and be back center-stage. (Remember Vinnie? Susan’s doctor husband—the fleshy, energetic, exuberant doctor, so very different from Ed?) And after that I’d be free to talk about it with Rosalie and not be afraid she’d gossip; because who by now could possibly care, except Ed? Or, I supposed, perhaps, Leslie?
But even as I thought it, I knew I wouldn’t confess. I still wanted the world to go right, not wrong. You leap into the world, if you’re someone like me, with amazing ambition. You flail your red lanky infant limbs about and mean to put the whole thing right. You yell and protest your woes, you gurgle your contentment, concerned not so much with notions of hunger, thirst, pain, and pleasure as with justice withheld or gratified. It is the infant’s indignation that always impresses me: how we are born with the sense that everything should be supremely okay, how furious and puzzled we are to discover it isn’t. And how we give up too early.
“You were a crier,” my mother would tell me. “You were the eldest, you roared night and day, and nearly put me off children for life. But by the time you were six or seven you’d cheered up. You turned into a great little helper.”
Well, thank you, Mother. You rocked me and lulled me into acceptance. So, okay, I couldn’t have you to myself; so you littered my world with other little greedy sucking mouths—it was tear you to bits, or give in and be a good little girl. I gave in, and I passed my exams, cleaned my shoes, helped my little sisters and brothers to cross roads instead of hurling them into the traffic, got to college, terrified myself witless by setting myself up for a near-rape by a lorry driver, and fled into the arms of lovely Ed, who was suitable if poor, when I was twenty. Everyone came to the wedding and rejoiced, and said how lucky my mum and dad were that I’d given no one any trouble ever. “Or only in the first five years,” said Mum, and I think she felt I’d somehow failed to live up to that early willful, riotous, complaining promise of nothing but trouble ahead. You can get to be my age and still know nothing about yourself.
And Ed had his First in English when I was only halfway through a language degree course I was likely not to do well in, so it made sense for me to forget the degree and come south with him and do a secretarial course, which is always practical for a young married woman to do. And now I work part-time at Accord Realtors, or would if there were any work to do; the outside world has its realities.
What I am leading up to, as you may have guessed, is a really good justification for my affair with Leslie Beck. I do feel it needs justification. Rosalie hadn’t had children, hadn’t been married for long enough to identify sufficiently with either mothers or wives, to understand that these roles are held in common by all women, and that copulating with other women’s husbands in secret, no matter how the self-esteem rises, no matter how exciting secrets are, is also in some way to lower the self. Rosalie will be forgiven; she just didn’t know. Ignorance of the lore is every excuse.
But I, Nora, knew what I was doing. And all I can offer in my defense is to say, look, I am capable of more than being good Ed’s good wife; in other words, I bore myself; I feel I creep around at less than my potential, and it’s painful, and I don’t want to die like that.
When I was alone with Leslie Beck one day in his office, he suddenly looked at me and said, “Tell me all about it, Nora,” and I was taken aback and flustered.
“All about what?” I asked.
“Why you’re unhappy,” he said, and that was the end of the dinner-party relationship, the general helping-out-at-the-office. Leslie and I were into something different.
Now what, you may ask, was I doing in Leslie Beck’s office, back of Fitzroy Square? Sitting at the desk where once the new Mrs. Beck had sat, where the vibes of bad, mad Jocelyn (or poor, sane Jocelyn, depending on your point of view) still somehow hung so strongly in the air that Chloe (the stunning black girl in reception, who was clearly so much a sex object in the eyes of the almost entirely male clientele of Agee, Beck & Rowlands as to outweigh any possible equal opportunities credibility) would still, a year later, jump nervously at sudden noises in the street, sudden buzzes from the doorbell, or the initial crackle as the entry phone was activated. Chloe was six foot three and made me feel both small and pallid to the point of invisibility; but, then, as wife and mother, I had been feeling my invisibility lately.
It was Ed’s idea that I work for Agee, Beck & Rowlands. I think I was offended that he was so sure of my common sense and reliability that he would suggest such a thing. That he did not believe Leslie Beck the businessman could be any kind of rival, present any kind of threat, no matter what the size of his dong or dick, was, I told myself, the ordinary reaction of the academic man—the kind who has achieved a First and then grandly renounced academia—who has a sense of intellectual self-worth so great that for all his self-depreciating ways, it can never really be dented. No wife of mine, he says to himself—and, by implication, to her—will put up with a man less intelligent than me, will find philistinism attractive, could possibly be seduced by the merely physical. We live in a world where the intellect counts. My wife can share an office with Leslie Beck the magnificent, and her imagination will not race out of control.
Yet what are all those incestuous dinner-partying group cavortings about except the pleasures of imagination? Leslie and Jocelyn Beck, Ed and me, Susan and Vinnie, Rosalie and Wallace, and Marion thrown in for good measure, promoted to guest from babysitter, all round the one dinner table, picking over the moules marinière, okay, but an exercise as well in see-what-I’ve-got, wouldn’t-you-like-it-too? Wallace’s steady mountain hands, the curve of Susan’s neck, Ed’s kind and mischievous glance, Rosalie’s rounded breasts—what would they be like in bed? How did it ever occur, the half of this couple can only wonder, that I ended up in this pairing, when it could so easily have been that? And wouldn’t perhaps that one over there be preferable to this? And, looking up, meet and keep an eye a fraction of a second longer than required? The wonder is that couples stay friends, that discretion gets the better of desire. And, of course, it is not only about sex; it is about the whole business of spousing as well. That one standing barefoot at the kitchen sink, that one at the desk answering letters from the bank—what would it be like?
As I say, after Leslie divorced Jocelyn and installed Anita in her place to look after Hope and Serena, dinner invitations from Rothwell Gardens seldom came our way, and were less and less frequently reciprocated. The real problem was not with Leslie’s behavior, I am sorry to say, but that Anita was so hopelessly dull. She’d wear the kind of shapeless brown dress that only the flamboyant can get away with, and she was not flamboyant, with a string of long beads that looked like her grandmother’s, no matter how fashionable they were; and she picked over her food as if there were something wrong with it and only spoke when spoken to, or, in an attempt to be interesting, say things like, as we gratefully received our poulet rôti à l’estragon, “I read in the papers that eighty percent of all chickens die of cancer,” or, as we talked about South Africa and sanctions, “I don’t think if people haven’t been to a place they’ve got any right to pass an opinion on it.” And Leslie, who now speaks of her death as a tragedy, scarcely so much as addressed a word to her if he could help it, and we all noticed and did nothing, worse than nothing. We shouldn’t have mocked her; we should have drawn her out, helped her, reformed and refined her spirit, taught her the error of her ways, counseled her about the necessity of at least providing hot plates if you’re serving lukewarm food; but we never took the time or trouble. At ten forty-five precisely Anita would look at her watch and say something to Leslie in her nasal voice about babysitters and he’d pretend not to hear, and she’d get agitated in a pink and sullen and upset way, and by eleven thirty he’d finally give up and they’d go, and those left behind would exhale with relief and mirth, and then feel guilty about it.
When I think of Anita, I think of the wringing of work-worn hands. I think of Leslie saying to me, as I lay in his and Anita’s bed, “And on top of everything else, she’s paranoid. She goes through my diaries to check up on me. She’s convinced I’m cheating on her, though I give her not the slightest cause to suspect me,” and I even remember thinking how sad for Leslie, to be married to so dull, boring, and paranoid a woman, and why ever had he done it? And why had I married Ed, when if I’d waited around a bit I might have married a man more quixotic, more sexually active, more individual, and, let’s face it, less self-satisfied. Someone who would leave me so exhausted, so worn out after sex, it was all I could do to get to the shower to dress, to be out of the house before Anita returned. In Anita and Leslie’s shower, the soap, in the form of a Mickey Mouse, hung from a rope. I’d never seen anything like it. In our circles white soap lay plainly in a white dish, unperfumed and unscented, in accordance with Vinnie’s belief that the functional was beautiful, the beautiful functional. Though these days, I noticed, Rosalie preferred her soap bright pink and smelling of roses.
The children it was who called me home at that time, not Ed. Little helpless voices calling in my head. Mother, Mother, we want you. We are not fully grown; we need you to feed us, notice us, comfort us, stand between us and the outside world, until the day we want to leave, when we’ll make such a dash for the door, knocking you aside! Mother, Mother, leave your lover’s bed, come back to lay the table. We need you here in the mornings, rolling out of the parental bed as the alarm goes, warm and satisfied, but not so satisfied you’ll burn the toast. Mother, we didn’t ask to be born. You brought us into existence, now see it through!
Reader, I can’t face it. I keep putting the actual facts of the matter off. The run-up to how it happened that Leslie and I came to be alone in a room, on a summer’s afternoon, when his secretary was on holiday, and girls from the temping agency too inefficient or too expensive or both for Leslie’s taste, and he was saying, “Tell me about it, Nora.” I suppose I want myself to be there by some kind of magic, propelled by destiny, not knowing in advance, perfectly well, what was going to happen.
But the truth is, it wasn’t like that. It was at one of our few dinners at the Becks’ (new-style), when Anita was jumping up and down trying to organize the lamb and apricots, which was hopelessly undercooked, pink to the point of raw (Jocelyn overcooked, Anita undercooked), and I had already caught Leslie’s eye and held it just a second too long. And thus it went:
LESLIE: | The letters pile up, the phone goes unanswered. We’re busier than ever, but I might as well close up shop now the holiday season’s started. It’s a nightmare. |
ED: | Why don’t you ask Nora to come and temp for you? She’s looking for a job through July. |
ANITA: | Leslie, do you think the lamb’s done? |
ED: | In fact, she’s got to have a job through July, if we’re to put the car on the train to Bordeaux and not have to drive it down through France. |
ANITA: | Why don’t you hire a car when you’re there? |
LESLIE: | I warn you, Nora; Agee, Beck & Rowlands overworks and underpays. They’re famous for it. And I’m a monster, as everyone knows. But if you’re game, Nora, so am I. |
ED: | What do you say, Nora? The children can manage without you for a few weeks. |
ANITA: | Why don’t you ask me to do it, Leslie? I’m the obvious person. |
LESLIE: | You’re too busy with the house, dear. |
ANITA: | And Nora isn’t? |
LESLIE: | I think the lamb should go back in the oven, Anita. |
ANITA: | Oh, dear. |
LESLIE: | Now don’t spill all that pink juice down your nice brown dress. Go carefully. |
But she did spill it, and dissolved in tears on the grounds that the gravy had burned her, which was highly unlikely, in the circumstances. I think it was because she was just miserable. She was pregnant.
It might be that I took the job because I was inquisitive, in order to find out why Leslie married Anita. But if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything; I was just trying it out for size. “Nora,” said Leslie Beck finally, and after two whole disappointing weeks of formal secretarial work, in which Leslie was often away at site meetings, and I was setting up appointments with clients, and paying his bills when they came in for the third time, and sending out invoices and the occasional letter to the local authorities and planning committees, and typing up transcripts of the tapes on which he recorded all his telephone calls. “Tell me all about it, Nora.”
“All about what?”
“Why you’re unhappy.”
“I’ m not.”
“Yes you are. I can tell by your eyes.”
And then there was a phone call from Mr. Agee, and off he went, leaving me to contemplate my unhappiness and my discontent.
I went to the washroom and stared into the mirror, to see if it was possible to read emotions in the eyes. If we smiled and smiled, as I did, could people ever tell? Chloe came in and asked me what I was doing. I said I was searching my face for signs of unhappiness. She laughed and said, “That old line. Leslie tried it on me.” How was I to know it was a line? I realized I was a woman of little experience. That disconcerted me even more. Who wants to end up a woman of little experience?
The next day, Leslie Beck said to me, “So, have you thought about it, Nora? Why you’re unhappy?” And I replied once again, “I’m not.” And again he went away, and left a kind of vacuum behind him, man-shaped.
On the third day, Leslie Beck said, “Nora, your problem is with the Life Force. It batters away at you and you won’t let it flow. You’re a good little girl, you’re inhibited, and you’re married to Ed.”
“I love Ed,” I said.
“Sure you do,” he said, “and I love Anita.” A comparison which shocked me. “And how are you getting on with the letter to Westminster Planners?”
It was in my typewriter. He looked over my shoulder; I could feel his breath on my bare shoulder.
“You’ve reworded it,” he said.
“It was ungrammatical,” I said.
He bit my shoulder. Now, I can work at Accord Realtors with Mr. Collier and Mr. Render, without their maleness intruding upon me. They can instruct me and reproach me, dictate my comings and goings, reward me and fire me, stick-and-carrot me, and I can manage not to feel like a concubine. When I worked for Leslie Beck, I came to understand why when women first started working in offices they were seen as little better than whores. The basic situation is intolerable. Man powerful, woman powerless. What can you do, in the end, but enjoy it? Marriage (if you’re lucky) takes place between equals. Sex happens between men who earn more and women who earn less. I should have walked out of the office when Leslie bit my shoulder, but I had corrected his grammar and felt bad about it, and it seemed to me I deserved the sudden sharp pain.
“It’s a terrible life for a woman,” said Leslie Beck, “when the best thing she can do for a man is correct his grammar. I’ll tell you what, Nora, we’re not going to discuss a thing; what you feel, what I feel. None of that boring old stuff. We’ll just do what we do, and find out what happens when it comes along.”
“Shall I go with you to tomorrow’s site meeting?” I asked. “You’ll need someone to take proper notes. I do what I can with the backs of your envelopes, but it’s not good enough.”
“Well done,” said Leslie Beck. “Let the Life Force in through a pinhole, and the next thing you know it’s sweeping everything along with it, like water through a crumbling dam in one of those old films. I hope you have a head for heights.”
That night, I dreamed of Leslie Beck. Nothing to do with crumbling dams. Each to her, his, own image. We were in a hot-air balloon, and up, up, up we were swept, into the navy-blue ether, where clouds formed into waves and beat upon us. I was so restless that Ed woke up, he who slept the sound and dreamless sleep of the innocent, and we made love, and he even got out of bed to turn on the light, so stirred was he by some new liveliness in me, that is to say, in the hovering, jeering presence of Leslie Beck, into whose arms he had pushed me. Sometimes I wonder about men, and their alleged desire to keep women to themselves. The urge to hand them round seems pretty strong.
But really, I had no cause to complain about Ed, and to want Leslie as well was greedy—as greedy as the infant wailing me had ever been. By coincidence, I got a letter from Alison the next morning; I have twin sisters, Alison and Aileen, younger than me by less than a year. Both are in Sydney. They spend a lot of time with their families sailing round the harbor, drinking white wine in the hot sun under grapevines. Philistines. I despise them and envy them, love them and hate them. Alison was coming home for the summer. She proposed staying with me. I put off thinking about it; I did not even speak to Ed about it. He kissed me three times before he left for work. Why?
That morning I wore jeans and flat shoes to go into work at Agee, Beck & Rowlands. Colin, who had just passed his driving test, drove me to the station, which both terrified and pacified me—but I resolved, did I not, to speak as little of the children as possible?—and at eleven I went by taxi with Leslie to the site conference, where I stood around in a hard hat taking notes. Over the last few months, the old buildings which had once housed Jocelyn Beck’s solicitors had been reduced to rubble, and behind improvised fences composed of assembled front doors of elegant proportion, many still with brass door fittings attached, dealers were groaning as they picked over shattered chandeliers and ceiling moldings, ebony floors, cracked Italian firebacks, and Dutch tiles, which in those days demolition engineers loved to destroy, not understanding that therein their greater future lay.
Of the two glass-and-steel slabs that were to replace the solid, low-slung elegance of early-Victorian London, one had already risen, to some twenty-eight skeletal stories; building work on both was behind schedule. Leslie had been called in as a troubleshooter, oil-fire fighter of the development world. Entire floors had been rented in advance to conglomerates who needed a good London address and needed it fast. Their lean, hungry, and manicured representatives were present at the meeting; they, too, brought with them young women whose function it was to record decisions on tape and in notebooks. With our bosses, we presently rose, in a kind of miner’s cage especially devised for just such use, to a wooden platform on the fourth floor, and felt for some reason privileged so to do. From here we could get a better view of the entire site. To the east, St. Paul’s tower glittered; over in the near west, the flag on Buckingham Palace fluttered to announce that the queen was actually at home today; by some trick of sound travel at this level, you could hear the lions in Regent’s Park zoo to the north. Fully blocking off the south was Leslie Beck, in his element up here: Tarzan to my Jane.
I could not see that this cluster of intent and powerful men was unduly wicked, although Ed, Vinnie, and Susan, and, to a lesser extent, Rosalie and Wallace, were united in the belief that everything to do with the removal of the old and its replacement by the new was of itself bad. The general supposition had been that if I worked at Agee, Beck & Rowlands, I would be associating with people both worldly and wicked, but that a few weeks of it wouldn’t do me any harm. Perhaps I had already been there too long, and my standards had already fallen, for those I encountered seemed civil, polite, and friendly; and this particular group, albeit in hard hats on top of a half-built building, seemed mainly concerned with car-parking facilities, traffic flow, population density, and glare factor. Leslie carried sets of figures in his head and stood as some kind of infallible human computer of the south, the one to whom they turned.
“Leslie, would you say...?”
“Leslie, in your experience...?”
“Mr. Beck, what are your views on...?”
Whereupon Leslie, with a kind of adroit and confidence-creating lightheartedness, would oblige with an instant and definite opinion. I felt proud of him. Wind whistled through the open girders beneath us. Whatever we were doing seemed to me good, as construction always does to those who engage in it. That it might be the wrong building in the wrong place, that what stood there before might have been okay—never mind. Putting up a building is as satisfactory to the human spirit as cooking a dinner. Cavemen hollow out the cave and scratch a drawing upon its walls; wild men of the trees build houses in their branches; swamp men put their dwellings on stilts; Eskimos carve ice into blocks and live inside them: building is as natural to men as cooking is to women. (Having uttered this swingeing piece of discriminatory gender disinformation, could I bring to your attention the fact that if you look around you in primitive parts of the world, you will see it’s women carrying bricks, chopping trees, and erecting makeshift dwellings in the street, while the men just sit and stare, zonked out by drink, drugs, or depression; but I daresay this is due to the breakdown of rural society and the oppressive nature of capitalism rather than any basic flaw in man, as opposed to woman, so forget it.) Let me just say that one-seventh of the way up that building, I had the strong impression that these gray-suited men were decent guys doing a man’s job, and the semi-naked, tattooed men who swung on the girders likewise, and it was right and proper for me to be there as a tender woman taking notes.
A wind got up; the meeting took to the workmen’s lifts and reconvened in the site office. A girl served coffee from a vending machine. I got mine last, I noticed. The man I took to be a senior planning official from the Ministry of Works and was down on my “in attendance” list as Mr. D. Alterwood, dropped his official manner and said to my boss, “Well, Leslie, and how’s Anita?”
And Leslie replied, “Anita? Living the life of Riley. A house to run, a man to love, a party to go to, a baby on the way, what else can a girl want? You’ll be a grandfather soon,” and I remembered that Anita’s maiden name was Alterwood, and now understood the marriage rather better than I had, and, moreover, thought I would keep it to myself. Poor Anita! In return for her husband’s favors I would forgo even the pleasure of going home and saying to Ed, Rosalie, Susan, et al., “Leslie married Anita to get on in the world. All that stuff about the love of his life is nonsense,” so that when thereafter Leslie poured the wine and Anita brought on her tureen, we, her guests, would silently contemplate the manner of her existence, and pity her the more. Married to Leslie Beck because her father, risen by fouler means than fair from the back street where he was born, was on some planning committee somewhere, could pull a string or two and make a local authority dance nicely to his vulgar tune! Once the route to riches was the merchant’s ship, or the camel on the silk route, or the cartful of slaves, or the iron foundry belching smoke into the air; for the last fifty years, as the cities of the world have redefined themselves, sent their steel spires and glass façades shooting up into the sky, instead of huddling low against weather and the god of battles, the secret has been “permission to build,” and women are married for it, and men die for it.
I did not think worse of Leslie Beck because he had married Anita for her dowry. I merely felt less guilty about what he and I were clearly going to do.
I had always marveled at his ruthlessness, the ease with which he had disposed of Jocelyn. And, seeing no way in which I could be useful to him, assumed in him a selfless passion for me.
I was quite insane: out of context, in my little yellow hard hat and reporter’s spiral notebook, my husband out of mind, my children thrust into some corner of it where their little piping voices could not be heard.
Leslie Beck the magnificent. How could any of us ever forget what Marion Loos had told us, in the days when she was skittish, when she lived in Jocelyn Beck’s basement with the cockroaches and the spore of the dry-rot fungus, and babysat for Hope and Serena, and went daily to the Courtauld the better to appreciate and assess the creative history of mankind, and went from house to house of a weekend, to Rosalie’s and Susan’s and mine, cleaning, washing up, walking children, earning the small sums which kept her fed and clothed, part friend, part companion, part servant, how she brought us a tale of Leslie Beck’s cock, or dong, or dick, or willy, or whatever awed, affectionate, familiar, or derisory word you choose to call it by: the thing which goes ahead, in any case, and stops men and women from being all spirit, all idea, all art appreciation, rooted and thwarted as they are in the entrancements and necessities of the flesh.
In other words, Marion opened the bathroom door one day and saw Leslie Beck erect and alone, his thing mottled and, to her mind, enormous, like the giant carved into the chalk hills of Cerne Abbas in Dorset. She closed the door quickly, but the sight was seared into her eyeballs and put her (she said) off sex forever. “If that thing inside you, in and out, in and out,” said Marion Loos, of the large eyes, slender legs, and fastidious nature, “is what it’s all about, I’d rather do without.” She was just too picky, we all said, at the time and often since, for her own good.
And as for Marion, even while she worked for us, she felt superior to us. We were all flesh and hot dinners, baby poppers, nest builders. Our men had dongs of conventional size, and lived within the rather wide norm of conventional existence; but still were not to Marion’s taste; and just as well. Our beds were filled with a familiar, smelly warmth; we swelled up and turned over and gave birth and sank down again, and leapt out of bed to nurture, nourish, and keep the dirt at bay, and fell in again gratefully—while Marion gazed at some medieval Virgin plus Child, and picked up a notion that a visitation by the Holy Ghost would be okay, and that you’d know it was Him because of the one dozen red roses He’d offer you first. I think she told us this to trouble us, and so it did.
“Come with me, Nora,” said Leslie Beck to me that very day. “I have a few more notes to make,” and we ascended once more by the workman’s lift to the fourth floor, one-seventh of the way up a skeletal building.
Mr. Collier has just been over to my desk. He said, “What are you writing, Nora?” and I replied, “A fictionalized biographical sketch, Mr. Collier,” rather hoping he would suggest this was no way to spend the time he paid me to spend, but all he said was, “Well, be kind to yourself,” which I thought was an interesting thing to say, and went away. He is, apparently, taking Rosalie out to dinner. I hope he does not see marriage to Rosalie as some kind of meal ticket when his business fails, as it must surely do; if so, he will be disappointed. Rosalie’s future is insecure; it is she who needs the meal ticket. And, besides, Wallace might turn up at the wedding.
I know that it is leaping ahead to envisage marriage between them: one pub lunch and one dinner invitation don’t add up to a wedding, but it is the kind of thing that happens. Rosalie was not meant to live happily and fatly alone; she was born to sudden events, and as you are born, so you continue. I am proposing no faith in astrology here, merely observing that certain natures do seem to be predisposed to certain patterns of life. The way it goes when you’re a child, that way it continues. If you’re the kind of person who is rescued in the nick of time, you can expect it at fifty as well as at twelve. We play the cards of life a certain way, albeit unconsciously; we can acquire skill in handling them, of course we can, but mostly it just comes naturally, and the most important factor is the hand we are originally dealt: it is our fate pattern, like it or not.
So it seems safe for me to say that Rosalie is not the kind of person who lives alone. Sudden rescue comes, but often with a sting in its tail. Rosalie’s mother, widowed, finds and marries the perfect stepfather, but he dies of a heart attack on moving day. Wallace comes home from Everest but has frostbite. Jocelyn turns up to say Catharine looks like Wallace, but Leslie never acknowledges his child. Wallace doesn’t return; the insurance pays up—but there’s a time limit somewhere to spoil it. I think Rosalie can expect to marry Mr. Collier, and quite precipitately, but I also think there will be a sting in the tail. We’ll see. I hope this time it’s just a little one. A life of strange events, separated by long stretches of peaceful boredom, that’s how I see Rosalie’s life.
Leslie Beck was the kind of person, you could also safely say, who tended to land on his feet.
Why is it that neither Rosalie nor myself, on hearing that Leslie Beck is a widower, has displayed any apparent desire to reestablish a relationship with him, find out how his dong is doing? Perhaps he’s now too old to be interesting. Perhaps the only point to him was that he was married to someone else—that the one-seventh of him that we found so important was forbidden.
Okay, there I was with Leslie on the wooden lookout platform on the fourth floor of what is now Broadcaster House. The rest of the party had gone. Ropes and pulleys all around us; a crane moving high above; buckets of wet, slopping concrete being hauled up and down on either side of us; tattooed men with bare muscled chests passing in and out of our field of vision, walking deftly on girders overheard, swarming like monkeys on scaffolding, vanishing again. The wind was strong and noisy; the day, hot and dusty; the wooden floor of the platform, splintery. It seemed both the brightest and the most unprivate place. I said as much to Leslie.
“Unlike the grave,” he said. “The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.”
Well, even electrical engineers occasionally get to hear a little poetry. He spoke it awkwardly. I was touched.
“My favorite place,” he said. “You’ll remember it fondly.”
“I suffer from vertigo,” I said. “I can’t bear to look down. I get dizzy.”
“Then don’t look down,” he said, taking off my clothes, piece by piece, until I stood naked except for my hard hat, conscious of space around, below, above, the sound of hammering, metal on metal, and the rise and fall of sirens below, and the sting of wind and dust against my skin.
He weighted my clothes down with a stray scaffolding pole. “In case the wind tries to steal them,” he said. I was reassured. He meant me to survive. He had red curly hair thick on his chest; his shoulders and arms were muscled and glossy. He stood in his natural state in his natural place: he was meant to poise between heaven and earth; he had elevated me and I was honored. The dimension of his prick was neither here nor there—as tall as a tree, as thick as a pole; who cares. I only ever told you its measurements to confine him in my mind, define him, and so lessen him, because I am a practical person and don’t like to suffer from loss any more than anyone else; and I need to stand up to the Life Force and confine it in inches, give it a practical, conceivable measurement. Leslie Beck’s laughable Life Force. If I laugh, it’s only to get through my days with Ed.
He leaned me against the scaffold barrier that untrustworthily ringed the platform.
“Supposing it gives?” I asked.
“It won’t,” he said. “Men trust their lives to these every day.”
And it didn’t give, and I wouldn’t have cared if it did. Little Nora, married to Ed. Happily, too. Who’d have wanted to be married to Leslie, falling from heights and not caring? But I think Leslie Beck was a very different man to his wives. Jocelyn refused to respond to him—though this may have been mere insanity. And Anita, once married, seemed to find little pleasure in him, or in anything. Or perhaps he married them because they took no pleasure in him: sex and marriage, in some men’s heads, simply don’t go together.
I will have to make friends again with Susan; we will have to make some common sense of the past. It seems important.
I got splinters in my back, my knees. He wore no medallion; perhaps Anita had made him take it off. A sea gull landed on the barrier and flew away, shrieking with what sounded like mirth, as the master species took its pleasure.
“Suppose someone comes,” I remember me saying, and I remember him laughing. “All the better,” he said. “Better luck for a building, this, than anything else. Luckier than dead cats in the foundations, or bishops’ blessings—better than anything.”
I asked him how buildings could have luck. He said they were as prone to it as any human being. Some were lucky, some weren’t. Yes, he thought on the whole he was lucky, but hard work went into it. If you didn’t look after yourself, who else would. He asked me kindly to stop talking now.
I didn’t think through to the future at all; nor, I think, did he. The Life Force is not about futures; it is all here and now. Leslie Beck could plan a building, plan a marriage, plan a site for a seduction, and achieve his plan simply because he didn’t worry about the consequences. He looked ahead, but never too far ahead. Got as far as his blue heaven, never to the blackness of outer space beyond. He’d forget that if he married Anita he’d get planning permission, okay, but would have to put up with her cooking forever; he’d get into my panties now and forget he’d have to face me in the office, at the dinner table, rely on my discretion, put himself in my power. Leslie Beck schemed, but Leslie Beck was rash.
“Get into my panties,” I said, but I was trying to diminish him. It wasn’t like that. It was something more. I’ll swear it was.
When at last he helped me to my feet, he went on his knees and embraced me, his head lying against my crotch. I don’t forget that. I thought then that Leslie Beck the magnificent, Leslie Beck the wicked, Leslie Beck the life liar understood the nature of the universe, and what is important in it, more than any other man I’d ever known. And do not think my knowledge of men is confined to Ed and Leslie Beck. It is not.
Leslie Beck felt it was his duty to get on in the world. His aspiration was to be ruthless: he would cheat and stamp upon and ruin others to do it. He was a fool, he had no taste, he would swim around out of his depth and be laughed at; but his one great attribute he used, and used it well. God will forgive him.
Mr. Render came toward me with our standard specification sheet relating to redecoration clauses in leasing contracts. Three coats of paint was becoming two coats of paint. By such thin, grudging margins did the balance swing in favor of the emptor rather than the vendor. So many wanted to sell; so few wanted to buy. No one wanted to develop anything. Everyone wanted just to go back home and hide. Pull down an old building—a great howl of protest arose. Put up a new one—it stood empty. Leslie Beck must be having a hard time of it. Poor Leslie Beck. Less magnificent than before, no doubt; obliged to sell off his dead wife’s paintings, scrape together a few thousand somehow. I’d heard of property developers lately who’d gone bankrupt—had to sell the family home, the Porsche, the lawn mower for a knockdown price; distribute wife and children among relatives and take jobs as waiters or bus drivers. (I didn’t hear tell that they now lived off the state, mind you. An energetic man remains energetic, even in myth.) Others who were made ordinarily and more painfully redundant, as small firms, hitherto considered safe, went out of business, who had no Porsche to sell, no rich relatives to pick up the pieces, seemed to get less attention than those who suddenly moved from riches to rags; but that’s the way of the world. Even in adversity, those who had most continue to get most, if only in terms of attention.
I said to Mr. Render that I would attend to it. I remarked on how, at least these days, Accord Realtors didn’t have to stay open late, to cope with the flood of business after other offices had closed, or open early to cater to the commuters, and were eager either to profit by a hysterically rising property market or to get into the market quick. Those were the days when no sooner did we erect a For Sale sign outside a property than we had to send someone out to slap a Sold sign on it. But in those days I got no writing done. I do now.
“At least,” I said, “nowadays you and Mr. Collier can get to see something of your families.”
I wished to check out whether Mr. Collier was married. He had told Rosalie he was not, but you never knew. I did it clumsily.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr. Render. “Your charming friend is quite safe. Mr. Collier’s wife died two years ago. Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”
“No,” I replied, rather startled. What manner of wife gets her name into the papers simply by dying?
“It’s why we still have trouble getting staff,” said Mr. Render, “or the kind of staff we need. At any rate, he is free to marry again, and I am sure he is anxious to. He and Sonia had no children, but he has a Pekingese who is lonely and needs a proper home.”
I searched his face for irony and found none, and was, as so often nowadays, ashamed of myself, this time for assuming that Mr. Render—walking swiftly and desperately on soft carpets between filing cabinet, computer monitor, desk, and telephone, dealing politely both with desperate vendor and teasing, flirting, possible prospective purchaser—was a gray man with a gray spirit. He was not.
“My friend has a red setter her husband left behind,” I said. “I am not sure the two breeds will get on,” and it was his turn to search my face for irony and find none.
I sent out a circular offering bargain deals in newly built houses, at a fixed mortgage rate, complete with custom-built kitchens—twenty-percent discount if purchased within three months. I knew there would be no takers.
Sonia Collier, I thought. Sonia Collier? And I remembered Ed saying once at breakfast, “Why is it that in that particular stratum of society, racehorse owners and real estate agents, and smart restaurateurs, people who live off froth and other people’s gullibility, the sippers of gin and tonic by swimming pools, are always conspiring to do one another in?” And I looked over his shoulder at the headline in the newspaper, and it said, in twenty-point bold, “Husband in Bath Case Goes Free,” and beneath it, in fourteen-point, “Sonia Collier reaped what she sowed, says coroner,” and he read the passage aloud to me.
Of course. That Sonia Collier. The very Sonia Collier who had conspired with her lawyer lover to murder her husband. The lover, naked, had crept up upon the husband in the bath and plunged into the water a live power cable rigged up to the electric mains. But the bath was of old-fashioned cast iron, not molded in plastic, and hadn’t been grounded as it should have been; a massive electric surge found its way through the wet tiled floor and back up through the lover’s bare wet feet and burned out his already racing heart. He fell jerking and shuddering to the ground; Sonia Collier, screaming, trying to embrace him, caught the end of the power cable, still vibrantly alive, and met her death as well. Mr. Collier received nasty burns but quickly recovered. Or such, at least, was Mr. Collier’s story. Three naked people, two male, one female, one of each dead, and a live electric cable in a bathroom in the middle of the afternoon could have many explanations, not necessarily the one Mr. Collier gave. The coroner’s jury deliberated for some hours but eventually seemed to accept his version and passed a verdict of accidental death. Sonia Collier was an adulterous wife, and a childless one; her motive for murder was her desire to lay possessive hands on her husband’s beautiful mock-Tudor house; her lover was under her thumb. No one liked her—only, it seemed, her husband. Ed had quoted him over breakfast: “Poor Sonia. I blame the property boom. I was too busy to pay her the attention she deserved.” As a statement, it made Ed laugh, but I thought it was rather a nice thing to say, in the circumstances.
Following my conversation with Mr. Render, I’d wondered whether I ought to call Rosalie and suggest at the very least that she take no baths with Mr. Collier. I decided against it. Their wooing was their business, not mine. I wish I could not so easily construct a perfectly adequate alternative scenario, in which Mr. Collier had electrocuted both wife and lover. The latter had been bathing together midafternoon, and Mr. Collier had rigged up the electric cable, shoved the raw end into the bathwater and so electrocuted them, dragged them out of the bath (getting a shock burn or two himself), then taken off his clothes and called the police. But if a jury hadn’t come to that conclusion, why should I?
I would give Mr. Collier the benefit of the doubt, unless it began to look as if he and Rosalie were indeed to be seriously involved, were overcoming obstacles such as how red setter would get on with Pekingese. Then I supposed it would be my duty as a friend to put the matter to her, though I didn’t look forward to it. One hates to be a wet blanket. My mind spins forward to jokes about wet electric blankets, but I suppose Rosalie would have to take it seriously.
So when I called Rosalie, I didn’t even mention Mr. Collier. In any case, Marion had been on the phone to Rosalie again, complaining about Leslie Beck’s interference with the group show, an episode which I herewith give you through Marion’s eyes.