Nora

And there, in turmoil, reader, we will leave Marion’s ego, and get back to mine.

To tell or not to tell? This is the stuff of which the advice columns are made, and just because it is the advice column of a lowbrow women’s magazine is no reason to believe the problem does not exist. Why, we could even elevate the problem a little—transpose it to the masculine realm. Just suppose I’m Mark (Did you notice that, reader? Now I’m some young guy called Mark), and I’m married to Sue, and our best friends are Alan, married to Ellen, and our other friends are Helen and Peter, and Sue tells me Ellen is having an affair with Peter. So I say to Sue, Wife, I don’t want to know any of that, don’t tell me, it’s just rumor, and if we all look the other way it will simply fade away; Alan will be none the wiser, or Helen. But then I hear the scandal from another source, from mere acquaintances, and merer colleagues, and it appears that everyone knows except Alan, who is my good friend, and now all men pity him and in their hearts even deride him. And it’s obvious that sooner or later Alan must find out—for someone’s bound to tell Helen, and Helen will be on the phone to Alan, and Alan will feel the shock of his wife’s deception, and, worse, the way his friends have betrayed him by not telling him. What do I do? Tell Alan now? Betray Ellen, whom I like? Who is my wife’s best friend? In theory I am supposed to have a word with Ellen, or persuade Sue to do so—she has, anyway, and it’s made no difference—and ask her to desist for Alan’s sake. Of course, Ellen won’t do any such thing. She’ll be outraged. Her business; what’s it to do with me? But it has everything to do with me. Marriages are held in common. You can’t get away with such bad behavior and upset no one.

Illicit lovers always believe that they are invisible, but of course they are not, nor truly want to be. They are seen (like Mrs. Sonia Collier and her lover) together in parked cars, or holding hands in unlikely restaurants, or in corners of public gardens, or coming out of hotels in their own neighborhood, and word gets round, even in big cities, where everyone likes to think they are anonymous but actually, within the wider context, have created villages of their own. Look at the zip codes of the Christmas cards you send out—after a year or two in a certain district, the great majority will be going only so far as just around the corner.

Mostly we do nothing, for who wants to be the bearer of bad news, the wrecker of domestic peace, the stirrer up of unnecessary strife? We the friends stay silent, and the marriage splits, the couple part. We the friends then take sides, go with one or the other—not necessarily the innocent, because it’s the innocent who weep and are dreary; the guilty have a bright new life, a new energy to bring home. Even so, if you ask one, you can’t ask the other, for fear of embarrassment. And presently the group begins to feel bad, and blame gets apportioned, and there’s too much tension about who said what to whom, and before you know it, the group’s split apart. Individual friendships within the group seldom stand the strain. And Alan, the innocent victim for whom you suffered in silence, says to you, “Mark, you bastard, you knew and you didn’t tell me. What kind of friend are you?” And he’s right.

That’s enough of being Mark, who has no real way out of his predicament, and must suffer insult and contumely for no fault of his own. I’ll return to my own, female assessment of the situation.

Ellen slept with Peter one night and got a taste for it, and so that particular valuable, life-enhancing little nexus of friendship which surrounds the two of them gets unknotted, and the frayed strands lie around in disarray until some vigorous, undaunted couple spies the wreckage, and picks up the choicest pieces, and knits them into some other basic exercise in group social intercourse; and in the end, the Marks and Sues, Ellens and Peters, Alans—and who? Shall we give him someone exotic? Adeline!—Alans and Adelines are sitting round other people’s dinner tables, communing with a new set of familiar faces. But something’s lost. I don’t think, statistically speaking, Helen will find a new partner for some time: whom one man rejects, another rejects, too, especially if the slur is fresh—

“Are you insane?” asks Rosalie, incensed. I was on the phone to her again, quite carried away. “You’re back somewhere in the past. The world is not arranged in couples anymore. Giving dinner parties is not the center of life, nor is going off with other couples to share some chalet in the sun. People have friends; they get by one way or another. The loss of a husband is personal, not social. Life without Wallace is freer and wider than life with Wallace, no offense to him.”

“Anyway, he’ll be back,” I say, automatically. But it’s been eighteen months, without even knowing whether to grieve or not. And I suppose it has indeed been “terrible” for everyone, but Wallace was away a lot before hauling out for good, and there was a sense in which for months every year anyway Rosalie was married in name only, and now we just have a lengthy extension of those months. Besides, I don’t feel Wallace is dead. I am not sensible of it. When I think of people who have died I am conscious of a kind of space in the air their shape, a blanking out in existence, a hollow through which they vanished; I don’t feel that with Wallace, no matter what reason says. His thin, angular body, his Adam’s apple, his craggy face, the greenish pullovers he wore, always slightly too tight (did he buy them that way, or was it Rosalie’s habit to use too hot a wash?), still seem to me to have his rightful corporeal existence. And how, of all people, could Wallace cease? The way he would turn his eager, concentrated face if anyone said anything interesting, the bright abstraction of his gaze—he seemed so much less rooted in his physical being than did, say, Leslie Beck, as to be all air and fire, and, being so little rooted in the flesh, by rights should be immortal. The sensualists of the world deserve to die young—and, of course, often do, they being the smokers, the drinkers, the fornicators. The Wallace Hayters ought to outlast us. The older I get, the more I appreciate Wallace.

And what am I going to say to Rosalie about Mr. Collier? Because I begin to see something must be said. Simply, “Guess what I found out about my boss the other day?” Well, that would do. But it will sound as if I want to spoil something—chomp up happiness and spew it out; wreck her world with tales of murder and mayhem; bring the brides-in-the-bath syndrome lapping at her front door. Step out of line, sister, and the ghouls will get you! Stop being Penelope to Wallace’s Ulysses, and see what happens. Cease your weaving, leave the loom; see, the mirror cracks from side to side, and you lie jerking and dying from the current on the bathroom floor.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying Wallace will be back,” said Rosalie briskly. “There was a time when it helped, but that time is past. And why these long silences? What are you trying to tell me, Nora?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Good,” said Rosalie, “because I’ve just had Marion on the phone yet again, and I think she is falling in love with Leslie Beck.”

“That is insane,” I said.

“She’s jealous of her own staff.”

“Leslie Beck was good at that,” I said. “Always, if only by implication, holding the existence of other women over the head. If you don’t, such was the undercurrent message of the Life Force, others will. Others are after the magnificent dong; they’ll race you to it. There are more of you than there are of me, says Leslie Beck. What a privilege to have the light of my attention turn upon you. But Marion’s too sensible to fall for it.”

“Look,” said Rosalie, “we were all too sensible to fall for whatever it was, but we did. I want to know more about your affair with Leslie Beck; come round this evening and tell me about it.”

“It’s a secret,” I reply, quite shocked.

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Rosalie, “we all knew and we never told.”

“I thought you only half knew. How could you possibly really know?”

“You looked so pretty,” my friend said. “Kind of wild-eyed and excitable. And you overcooked everything, which wasn’t like you—sloppy pasta and watery vegetables. You were mooning about, for once, instead of trying to be like Susan, and doing everything perfectly and precisely.”

“But Ed never knew?” I was terrified.

“I don’t think so,” said Rosalie. “He just thought having a job was good for you.”

“I never said anything,” I defended myself.

“Perhaps Leslie did,” said Rosalie. “Didn’t you think of that?”

Outrage! I was eaten up with anger, and yet I was pleased. When you’re with a man like Leslie Beck, who, however he complains about his marriage, has yet a wife and chose her and sticks by her, and you acknowledge that and with it your status as concubine, there are unwritten rules. The powerful—the married man who does not care what his wife feels—should not betray the powerless: that is to say, me, the hopelessly in love who yet, for her children’s, and, indeed, her husband’s, sake, must keep the marriage going.

Can you imagine me, Nora, the neat, clean, competent, straight little thoughtful sun-sign Virgo, married to sinister, vulgar, businessman, con man, sting-in-the-tail, sun-sign Scorpio? It was out of the question. I didn’t want to be married to him. I just wanted to be forever on a wooden platform with Leslie Beck, poised halfway between heaven and hell, drawing down blessings into a half-built multistory office building.

I went round and told Rosalie all about it. I left Ed watching a documentary on chimpanzees.

“It’s very interesting,” he tempted me, and usually it is the most pleasurable part of the day, and I’m not knocking it, to sit quietly with a husband by the fire, together on a sofa, just watching television. It is a wonderful thing to have (I will not say a husband, pace Rosalie) someone who wishes to share an experience with you, a sofa, and television, and peace to watch it in. But it isn’t enough. More! More! We are greedy for more. What we have is of no importance. What we don’t have consumes our attention.

“Poor Rosalie,” I said. “She’s feeling low. Of course, she could come round here—”

“I’d have to find my shoes,” said Ed, though he’s fond enough of Rosalie, “and do up my belt, and there’s not enough wine for all of us. You go.”

And I went. Rosalie has one of those gas fires that look like a real log fire if you haven’t been round to the gas showrooms and seen them and know how much they are and how expensive to run. Since Wallace went, she has it on most of the time. She leaves lights on. Her fridge is so full of food the bits at the back grow stale and hard and jammed together unnoticed and have to be thrown out. She is wasteful. She has taken down from the wall Wallace’s many photographs of mountain crags and has put up painted mirrors instead, and moved out the sensible filing cabinets and put squashy chairs in their place, and changed the carpets from patterned red to totally impractical cream, as if with Wallace she had a surfeit of practicality and frugality, lived too long in a perpetual cold bath of English common sense, and now, finally, had turned the hot tap on. And I paced and talked and told.

“I suppose the truth was,” I said, “Leslie had nothing to lose. He liked to possess women, he liked to have a hold over them, he laid claim to you at the foot of a cliff; but he didn’t want to upset his marriage, or at least not until it suited him, so once he had you, that was that. And he gave as much pleasure as he got.”

“Yes,” said Rosalie.

“And he kept me going for months, not because he loved me but so I’d go on working for him all through the summer—August and September as well as July.”

“You underrate yourself,” said Rosalie.

“It was a wonderful summer,” I said. “I don’t care what his motives were. I just don’t delude myself he had no motives, and I want you to know that. I don’t want to claim any great love between us.”

“You never claim anything,” said Rosalie. “That’s your trouble. That’s why you’ve reached the age you have and you’re living down a suburban back street, watching telly with your husband, working part-time for a failing estate agent. But the market will pick up.”

“Who says? Mr. Collier?”

“Sandy. He’s got a lovely home, Nora, if you like that kind of thing, which I think I do. It’s detached, in half an acre, with a drive, Tudor beams, carriage lights and a porch, and inglenooks and a custom kitchen.”

“Tiled bathroom floor?” I asked.

She looked surprised.

“We didn’t get as far as the bathroom,” she said. “That’s upstairs. There’s a downstairs loo, so why would I? We’re only at drinks-before-the-show stage. He behaves very correctly.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“He’s civilized and pleasant. Apart from saying I bring unconventionally into his life, and he feels a terrific sense of liberation with me, I have as yet no indication whether he just wants companionship, or companionship leading to something deeper, as they say in the lonely-hearts ads. He’s a widower.”

“How did his wife die?”

“He’ll tell me in his own good time. You’re changing the subject, Nora. We were talking about the summer you screwed Leslie Beck and cheated on Ed and went on talking to Anita Beck over the dinner table, and getting a kick from it.”

“I’m ashamed of myself,” I said.

Well, I was and I wasn’t. In these circumstances you build up a set of defenses, which enable you to live with yourself. Ed not caring enough, the peculiar idea that if you’re discovered it will somehow improve your marriage—a notion encouraged by articles in women’s magazines headed “How the Affair Enriched Our Lives,” in which the deceived husbands or wives, discovering the existence of a rival, wonder what they’ve done wrong and set about remedying it forthwith. What, not romantic enough for you? Why, then, dearest, here’s a dozen red roses. Neglected you? My darling, let’s take a holiday! In this scenario Ed would realize he’d hurt me by not caring, not understanding that I was still attractive to other men. A likely tale!

And so on and so forth. Boring, boring. And Anita was wrong for Leslie. Poor Leslie! What a narrowing of life’s possibilities, an insult to the cosmic principle, to doom Leslie to only Anita. Boring, boring. What it was really about was trouble, destructiveness, self-pity; the vengeance I longed to take against my mother, creator of the hated siblings, by stealing my father from her; and in my mind, Leslie Beck, the vast-penised one, stood for my father, and Anita, the boring pregnant one, my mother. Of course. How does that version grab you? Meanwhile, the real world went on.

Anita was pregnant with Polly, who turned out as dreary as Hope and Serena. How horrible and dismissive I am to Leslie’s children—had you noticed?—except the illicit ones, whom I deign to appreciate. Catharine and Amanda. Why do you think that is, reader? It has to do with my mother’s children (other than me) by my father: my perfectly pleasant twin sisters, my amiable brother, whom I also despise for no reason at all. I went to a Kleinian therapist for a time, but she told me to leave Ed, or that’s what I heard her say, so I left. Her, that is, not Ed. But some of it seemed valid enough and stuck.

Female reader, I warn you, do not take into your home as your friend the kind of woman who hates her mother and loves her father: she’ll be after your husband in a trice. Male reader, reverse the sexes in the above. I’m a mild case of mother-hate. When it came to it, I accepted the role of Leslie’s concubine; I didn’t fight and struggle to oust the original wife, or try to get pregnant. I wasn’t the kind who calls up on the phone and listens to the voice, his or hers, and hangs up.

And don’t you believe those wrong-number calls when you pick up the phone and it goes dead. They’re not wrong numbers. It’s the passions and envies of the outside world, battering ghosts at the domestic door, shocking the phone into life—bringg, bring-g-g, bring-g-g—trying to get in, and what’s the betting you’ve brought it on yourself?

“Insane,” says Rosalie. “Insane!”

Leslie Beck cornered me on stairs and under them, after office hours and before them, in muddy rivulets at the bottom of deep, deep excavations, in on-site Portakabins tottering halfway up hillsides, in my home while Ed was taking Richard to have his wisdom teeth out, in the marital bedroom while Anita was in hospital with a threatened miscarriage. And I allowed myself to be cornered—in fact, put myself in the way of his cornerings. I cannot see a hard hat or pass a building site to this day without a lurch of the heart, although my feelings for Leslie Beck were, when it came to it, so little to do with the heart. It is merely in recollection that I have so promoted them.

True to Leslie Beck’s original confining of our relationship, we discussed neither our past nor our future, nor what I might feel toward him or he toward me. It had the effect of focusing the present quite miraculously, so that every coupling became a new and sudden beginning. I daresay he knew what he was doing.

“Did Anita lose the baby?” asks Rosalie.

“Who cares?” I say.

“I expect she cared,” says Rosalie, snottily.

“What about you, then?” I ask. “Poor Jocelyn. What a family outing you gave her to treasure up in memory. A fine beach trip you gave her, oh yes.”

“She never knew.”

“What makes you think Leslie didn’t tell her?”

That silences her. I continue.

Once I said to Leslie, Leslie I said, wouldn’t it be nice to do this somewhere ordinary and proper, somewhere comfortable, both physically and emotionally, somewhere we’re not going to fall off a ledge, smother in mud, or be disturbed by our spouses? Somewhere which doesn’t have danger and uncertainty as a built-in punishment factor? Somewhere tranquil?

And all he said was, “If you don’t like it, say so. We don’t have to do this at all,” so I shut up.

“What did you talk about?” Rosalie asks.

“Nothing in particular,” I say. “The same kind of silly conversation you had with him on the beach. For example, does the moon always rise in the same place; when the clocks go back do you gain an hour or lose an hour of life; is the tide coming in or going out? Ed talked about ideas, concepts. Ed would pause in the middle of lovemaking to consider Socrates on the conflict between love and duty; Leslie applied himself with silent concentration to the task of sex. Leslie and I exchanged information about the material world and occasionally reflected on its ironies, but that was all. Speech did not play a large part in his life.”

“Had it occurred to you,” says Rosalie, “that screwing you was his revenge on Ed the intellectual? That Leslie Beck felt inadequate when we talked about political details he couldn’t follow, books he hadn’t read, plays he’d never heard of? So what, he’d say; so I don’t run my own telly program like Wallace, so I don’t publish books like Ed, or write them like Vinnie, so I’m a philistine. But I can have your wives at will and make money. Sneer at me if you dare.”

“I don’t want to think it was because of anything,” I say. “I think it was for itself; just for his body and my body, between us acting out the urge to make the perfect baby—my competence, his energy—except I was on the pill, so it didn’t happen, so nature got bored and suggested to both of us to ‘try again.’ Leslie split first—that is to say, so offended me that I never wanted to speak to him again.”

It was a Thursday evening at the end of August. We were at 12 Rothwell Gardens. Anita was out of hospital, the baby saved; she had gone to her parents’ house to be looked after properly. She’d been home for one day between hospital and family. During that day she’d washed our dirty glasses and emptied the ashtrays—I smoked in those days; so did Leslie, but not Anita—and changed our sheets. Not knowing that they were “ours.” They could just as well have been “theirs.” Did she know of my existence? I don’t think so. I hope not.

“Perhaps she went to her mother so as not to be upset?” says Rosalie. “Perhaps being upset was what made her almost miscarry. Perhaps she had to make a judgment: Do I go home from hospital and suffer the misery of knowing Leslie’s with Nora? Do I go home and endure the lesser suffering of just letting him get on with it, knowing the baby’s life depends on my not allowing myself to be upset?”

“I hope not,” I say. “I hope not,” and begin to cry.

“That’s better,” says Rosalie.

“Hypocrite,” I say.

Anita had dressed the marital bed with her best white cotton sheets with frills, the kind you have to iron, the kind no sensible person has. The pillows were the square French kind. The bed itself was brass, high off the ground, the metal smoothly and gracefully worked. There were tall windows with kind of beige velvet curtains, and a rather elegant yellow button-backed chair, and that kind of smudgy dun-colored wallpaper that was fashionable at the time, and a very pretty dressing table with one of those awful Victorian silver-backed brush, comb, and mirror sets that had probably been her great-grandmother’s most valuable possession—they used to serve as popular silver wedding presents, once upon a time. The room would make a good painting—yes, I can see that: textures, fabrics, and colors all alive and united. Anita’s bedroom was surprising. She was so plain and unexotic in herself, I wondered if she had copied it from a painting seen in some gallery on a school trip, or reproduced in a magazine. I had no idea at the time, of course, that she could paint herself, or had any interest in it. Leslie mentioned once to me that she’d been to art school before being sent off to secretarial college; her father could not abide fancy ways. Of the coming baby all Leslie had to say was this: “What’s the betting it’s another girl. My wives are incapable of begetting boys.” In those days everyone thought the mother dictated the sex of the baby; I thought so myself, and despised Anita for not having the gumption to give Leslie Beck the boy he deserved, since that was the gender he wanted. Personally, as the mother of boys, I always longed for a girl.

“His wives had daughters; his mistresses had boys,” says Rosalie.

“What do we make of that?”

Married to Leslie Beck. Of course I wanted it. But on, on.

On Anita’s white bed, careless of its fine fabric, pounded this rampaging smelly naked monster with curly red hair, this muscled goat of a husband, straddling a little mewling creature who turned out to be me, thin thighs thrust apart by Leslie Beck’s great, engorged, and forever unsatisfied self. “I can’t get no satisfaction”—remember the Stones’ song? Always, always satisfied in the flesh; never, never in the spirit. Poor Leslie. He’d altered the angle of the dressing-table mirror so it reflected the bed. But a man can have the biggest organ in the world, and thrust and thrust, and forever survey and search the soft and convoluted foldings of female flesh, in and out, in and out, and still not find what he’s looking for. Any more than I was satisfied, than a thousand orgasms would have satisfied me: each could stop the clock for a moment, suspend time, unite me to the universe, block out the mind, expand the spirit, exhaust the will. But strength and sanity return. I have stopped; the clock has not: two hours nearer death, and mortality is as real as ever. Time to leave, to go home to Ed, to shower, to fall into that legal, dutiful, comforting bed, made fresher and more interesting by what had gone before. We had a percale duvet set in our house—easy-care, in appropriate pastels—and oblong pillows of the unexotic kind.

When I got to the office the next day, wearing my nice new earrings and a garter belt that gripped me round my waist and kept me aware of my body, kept me on my exotic toes, as it were, Leslie was already there, hovering at my desk.

“Nora,” he said, “this is your last week, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” I said, taken aback.

“Chloe’s home from vacation this weekend,” said Leslie Beck, “so the firm’s back to normal. But we’ve all been so grateful for your helping out. I think Mr. Agee wants to give you some kind of bonus. It will certainly have my recommendation.”

I could have gone three ways. I could have screamed and wept and had a broken heart. I could have cut up his clothes, as Jocelyn did. I could have gone to my mother, in essence, as Anita once or twice went to hers—that is to say, gone home and suffered in silence, self-esteem shattered. But I chose the third option—or, rather, it chose me. I simply fell out of love with Leslie Beck there and then.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I’ll bother to work my notice out. I’ll go now.”

“You can’t leave us in the lurch like this,” he said.

“I can,” I said, and I did. I went straight home, burned my garter belt and all my defiled panties in the anthracite stove, and said to Ed when he came home, “Ed, I’m not working for Leslie anymore. He keeps chasing me round the office desk. It isn’t right; his wife’s pregnant. He is not a nice man, and I am never asking him to dinner again, and if he asks us, I’m sorry, we can’t, we’re busy.”

“I wish you’d decided this earlier,” said Ed. “We could have managed a holiday,” and I knew I was home and safe.

There was no punishment. No baby, no social disease, no discovery, no divorce, no ostracizing, no shame, no self-hatred; only one glorious nervy summer and one holiday deferred. We went in September.

When I got home from Rosalie’s, after telling her the full tale of Leslie Beck and myself, it was one in the morning and the kitchen light was still on. I was instantly anxious. Ed had found out. I had spoken to Rosalie, and he had somehow overheard. My thoughts had traveled down Dalrymple Street, across Gossamer Road, back up Hogtie Lane and home, been absorbed by some kind of spousely osmosis, and Ed was waiting up to kill me.

I went straight to the bedroom. Ed was safely in bed and asleep. The episode was in the past. Ed looks very good when he is asleep: calm and peaceful Richmond living; the gentle, regular exercise of the mind; the conviction that books are the real life and world events some kind of hysterical flurry on the other side of a TV screen; an affection for his children which allows him to overlook their various excesses and trust in me, enables him to sleep with the tranquillity of the cherished child.

I supposed that one of the children had left the kitchen light on. I put my hand round the door and switched the light off and a little voice cried “Ooh,” so I switched it on again. A girl with no clothes on stood there: a strong, very white-bodied girl with a red crotch, curly red hair, and wearing braces, which glinted as she turned her startled head toward me. She was eating a big slice of bread, carved from the loaf still on the table. If you go out for the evening, no one ever bothers to clear anything away. It was Amanda, Susan’s daughter. Colin came up behind me, wearing a towel to preserve his decency from his mother’s gaze.

“I hope you don’t mind,” says Colin. “Amanda had to stay. She missed the last bus back to Kew.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m glad to see you again, Amanda.”

And so I was. Amanda, Leslie’s by-blow. Children tend to stay in the villages their parents carve for themselves out of the hard city rock, marry and procreate within them. Leslie, ruthless lord of the manor, self-appointed, against whose rule the village men forever strained and spoke, begat out of wedlock the beautiful Amanda, and Colin, handsome village lad, had the temerity to woo her.

“I hope I haven’t taken the breakfast bread,” said Amanda. She seemed unabashed by her nakedness. “I just get so hungry in the night.”

“I bet you do,” I said.

Leslie Beck would get up in the night to eat sliced white bread. He preferred the crust. In the morning, only the weak central crumb would be left. Susan, who had had the privilege of spending whole nights in his company, had once told me so.

Last time I’d seen Amanda, she’d been twelve, large-featured and plain. Now she was eighteen, I supposed, handsome rather than pretty, and without self-doubt, as the metal diamonds on her teeth proclaimed. Not many girls are prepared to go on wearing them, at her age, no matter what the orthodontist suggests. Leslie’s Life Force had entered in; it made her body glow, her skin translucent. Lucky Colin, I thought, and left them together and went to bed. I was so tired.

Another time, another place. We’re in the mid-seventies and in the Dordogne, France. The Roses, Vinnie and Susan, have rented a farmhouse here: a low stone building enclosing a wide courtyard, stone-walled, wooden-beamed, simple, rustic, comfortable, as it grew naturally out of a benign landscape. The kitchen is dark and cool; since it’s high summer, meals are taken, for the most part, out-of-doors, on a long trestle table beneath a canopy of grapevines. For breakfast there’s fresh bread, slabs of local butter, plum confiture, and coffee; for lunch, more bread, local cheese, fruit, and wine; the evening meal, unless Vinnie chooses to cook, is eaten in any one of a number of local restaurants, where the cuisine is French provincial—the kind of food the world will not see again. Marie comes up from the village to clean; she is young, fresh, smart, and vaguely disapproving of the visitors. Jean-Paul comes up twice a week to do the outside work: hoe the vegetables, sluice down the courtyard, take away the trash. It is one of the most expensive villages (properties?) on the agency’s list. The plumbing works.

The farmhouse is on a hill and has a view—the high cliff of a river gorge to the south, its face riddled with prehistoric caves; to the west, more hills, more vineyards; and farther up the hill, the yellowy stone walls of a medieval town. Stories of dinosaurs absorb the children, and the heat of the day dampens arguments and protests; in the evening, there’s a safe river pool for them to swim in. In the mornings, someone will go to the Périgueux market: plums, peaches, aubergines, stuffed tomatoes, pâtés, cheeses, poultry (dead and alive) in a profusion that seems natural to the peasant and is a source of wonder and pleasure to the city folk.

The farmhouse sleeps twelve. This year Vinnie and Susan have asked Ed and me, Wallace and Rosalie, Marion Loos, and Antony Sparvinski—Vinnie’s publisher, whose wife has just left him. Everyone thinks vaguely that Sparvinski, who is thirtyish, unworldly, and foreign, might do for Marion. We are beginning to worry about Marion. We feel she is our responsibility. We snatched her out of her natural place in the world, promising her a better one, and now we suspect she is unhappy. A few lines that look remarkably like resentment are beginning to form around her brow as she peels the cucumber for Vinnie’s salad. Vinnie acknowledges that cucumber should be eaten together with the skin, which contains an enzyme that helps digest this otherwise most indigestible of vegetables, but the tender flavor and melting texture of a finely sliced and well-blanched peeled cucumber, Vinnie says, is worth minor digestive distress. We go along with it. Vinnie is our taste-and-culture leader. If he says something’s worth minor distress—for example, peeling and chopping horseradish roots dug fresh from the garden—for the sake of its natural flavor, that’s it: he fires us with enthusiasm, he chivvies us; he points out to us that a cracked and crazed blue-and-white Minton plate, two hundred years old, is a better thing to eat off than a factory-made new Wedgwood, and we agree. Because Vinnie loves the past, being nervous of the present, all our houses are full of old things, antiques; almost nothing is new. Even our towels are bought in junk shops, Vinnie pointing out that the old fabrics pick up moisture better than the new, and he’s right. It’s because of Vinnie that we all have white soap in plain white china soap dishes in our bathrooms, and baths that stand on legs and are impossible to clean beneath. Vinnie believes that the functional is beautiful, so long as it’s more than fifty years old. None of us would dare use “ease of cleaning” as a reason for buying or not buying anything; only gradually have plastics crept into our houses. There was a time when Susan decanted dishwashing liquid into an earthenware jug. Now that it has become usual for men to share housework, even Vinnie can work a washing machine and will use a dishwasher.

Our lot: see us as the brake-lining classes. That is to say, with our ridiculous impracticalities, our love of the old, our suspicion of the new, we wedged ourselves between the unthinkable (that our history would be buried under rubble) and the unstoppable (that profits must be made) and slowed down the headlong rush of the developers to dispose of our past entirely. While we were on our knees polishing some ancient flaking slate floor, carefully refitting and matching worm-riddled window frames, sneering at our neighbors who couldn’t tell old oak from new pine, they, the true revolutionaries, wanted to start over, to seal the cockroaches under concrete, to bury TB along with damp and ignorance, to put the past to the bonfire, as the past put its witches, alive. We were both right. We, in the snobbery of our taste, paved the way, alas (we would see it as alas, of course we would, purists to the bone), for the theme parks and heritage industry which now plague us, with their bonny milkmaids and olde worlde cookies; but if our towns are still discernibly different one from the other, if we have a green field left, it’s because we sniffed and looked down our cultured noses at what was new and convenient. The effort wore us pretty thin. The world leapt out of control. We’re reduced now to using ecologically sound dishwashing liquid, in nonbiodegradable plastic bottles. Vinnie was our hero.

Leslie was our natural enemy. It being against our principles to have enemies, we fraternized; we did what we could to convert him. Some of us even slept with him, to defuse him.

Marion, with her instinctive response to paintings, was our friend. It was our duty and our pleasure to offer her what assistance we could. What we valued, what we tried to rescue, as well as the old, was intelligence and response. We would open our houses and our hearts to it. I don’t think it made us better people. The “deserving poor”—those who would acknowledge the standards of their benefactors, who washed their faces and minded their manners—do well enough from century to century. It is the undeserving poor, who are never likely to reflect credit upon us, or do anything other than despise us, who need us: the undeserving of spirit we should turn our attention to. Marion’s brother Peter, for example, who hadn’t an idea in his head beyond X-rated videos.

So picture Marion, elegant even in her much-washed orange shift of a cotton dress, long-legged, large-eyed, wearing rubber gloves to peel cucumbers.

“Marion,” says Vinnie, “you can’t possibly peel cucumbers in rubber gloves. Where’s your finesse? Besides, cucumber juice is good for the skin.”

Marion sighs and takes off the gloves and risks her nails. She is always obliging, always polite, part friend, part protégée, part help. We trust our men to her without thought: betrayal is not in her nature, nor—and perhaps it is the same thing—is abandonment to the moment. In spite of her looks, there is a chasteness in her that seems to deter. She is unlikely to grip the male imagination. I would never be totally easy if Rosalie was alone for too long with Ed, and certainly not Susan; but Marion could spend a morning shopping in Périgueux with Ed, and I wouldn’t prickle, or feel left out, or think that existing secrets were being revealed or fresh ones plotted: I would just know she’d bring back the best and freshest vegetables, the rarest and most perfect cheeses.

This particular morning, Vinnie was preparing a five-course lunch. He had all of us helping. Ed was trimming meat with his fastidious fingers; Wallace was sharpening knives—swish, swish; I was skinning tomatoes; Marion was slicing cucumber; Antony was shelling fresh green walnuts. Susan was excused; she was upstairs writing an article for New Society entitled “Charity: System Bolstering or the Answer to Need.” The more noisily hedonistic Vinnie became, the more Susan retreated into a remote and chilly aestheticism. The door was open; sunlight shone through, and the smell of basil and ripe grapes and hot hills drifted in. We were happy, except for the slight crease of discontent on Marion’s brow. Then the room darkened, and who stood in the doorway but Leslie Beck. It was the first time I had seen him since I’d walked out of Agee, Beck & Rowlands, leaving him, or so he claimed, in the lurch, and myself lucky not to be in the family way. He was wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a red cravat, and looked like the wealthy bounder he was.

“I just happened to be passing,” he said, “in the Rolls. I wondered if you intellectual folk would put up with me, a mere businessman. I’m going on down to Cahors. I thought I might take you all out to lunch.”

We were surprised. We stared. No one said anything. He picked us off one at a time.

“Hello, Rosalie,” he said. “Hello, Nora—long time no see. Hello, Wallace—I was having lunch with Jocelyn; I go over to see her and the girls quite a bit. She said to remember her to you, how much she likes the new program. Hello, Ed—I saw you were in the quotes-of-the-week in my Sunday paper. What was it? Something pithy and witty.” Then he said to Antony Sparvinski, who was small, round, earnest, and nervous, “Hi, Antony. You know, Antony’s publishing a book of mine. Of course, it’s been ghostwritten; I’m told I don’t have the literary touch. It’s in the ‘How To’ series. How to read a surveyor’s report. Back in the domestic market, for my sins, but that’s where the profit is, isn’t that so, Antony?”

Antony agreed. So he was the traitor.

“I never thought you’d make it, Leslie,” he said. “I never thought you’d find your way down here.”

“I did,” said Leslie, “and I brought the manuscript with me, just to give you some holiday reading.”

“Thank you very much,” said Antony. He looked guilty and helpless. I couldn’t think why we’d thought he would do for Marion.

Then Leslie said to Vinnie, “How’s the cock of the walk? It all smells good. What a pity Anita can’t cook. What a waste of France! Where’s Susan?”

“Upstairs, working,” said Vinnie, and once one of us had spoken, what could we do but acknowledge Leslie, and even feel privileged he had deigned to call.

“Stay to lunch, Leslie,” said Vinnie. “And welcome. Is Anita with you?”

“Anita’s in Cahors with little Polly,” said Leslie, at which we all sighed gently with relief. “Not so little now. I’m on my way down. Well, well, Marion, still at it? They working you as hard as ever? I’d have thought you’d have got your own gallery by now.”

And Marion, instead of turning white with rage around the nostrils, as she was very well able to do, just said, “I need a sponsor first. Perhaps one day I’ll find him,” and went on peeling and slicing cucumbers.

Leslie said, “Now what am I to do with my hungry chauffeur, since you won’t accept my invitation?”

He knew quite well that if he made us confront our egalitarian principles in public, we’d have no option but to live up to them.

“Ask him in,” said Vinnie. “There’s food and drink for everyone.”

“Her,” said Leslie, and we all sighed.

Reader, if you can at this tense moment bear to leave these hot, dreamy, wine-soaked, garlic- and olive-oil-drenched salad days for a little, I’ll take you back to the wet, cold Norfolk afternoon when Ed first met Marion and brought her home to Bramley Terrace.

Ed had commissioned a coffee-table book entitled The Artist and Money. Now he, the picture editor, and a photographer traveled to Norfolk to visit a touring exhibition called “The Bank and the Painter,” sponsored by a High Street bank, to catch up with and photograph a minor Rembrandt etching, The Moneylender, and possibly a couple of Van Gogh café scenes as well, painted in exchange for a dinner and a glass of wine or so.

The exhibition was not a success. There were few people to get in the way while the photographer, having done with the Rembrandt, was setting up for one of the Van Goghs. The tall, pretty girl who had handed out the warm white wine and limp sandwiches nudged Ed and said, “Don’t make a fool of yourself. That one’s a fake. A forgery.”

In those days, Marion had a Norfolk accent you could cut with a knife, which stood to reason: the exhibition was touring the provinces, and the bank was going through one of the nonelitist phases banks go through when the credit centrifuge, in low-interest gear, spins money out in the direction of the common herd, before changing gear and sucking it back in again where it belongs, with the rich and powerful. The purpose of the exhibition was, as well as touting for customers, to demonstrate that famous artists were people, too, and had human problems, and in so doing, by using the cult of the personality, to make art accessible to ordinary folk. Or such was their quite laudable purpose. They had asked for girl Friday volunteers among their branches, and Marion had stepped forward; and because she was pretty, and clearly of the people, she had got the job. She was paid no overtime for this special project and was currently working a sixty-eight-hour week. It was the kind of detail Marion would instantly work out.

“What do you mean, fake? How do you know?” asked Ed, taken aback.

“Well, look at it,” said Marion. “Anyone with half an eye could tell it’s a forgery.”

Ed looked and couldn’t. But, then, paintings weren’t his specialty.

“It’s too polished around the edges,” she said. “It’s too careful for a man who wanted his dinner. Look at the way the light comes out of the lamp. Like Morse code—dot-dot-dash, dot-dot-dash. Too regular. No, it’s a fake. The one on the left’s okay. That’s the Van Gogh. Same subject, different painter; a hundred years or so in between.”

And she passed on with her plate of sandwiches.

The photographer said, “I’ll take the one on the left, to be on the safe side,” and repositioned his camera.

Ed followed Marion into the side room, where the wine was kept, and asked her if she had any special knowledge of the subject, and she said no, how could a bank teller know anything except the denominations of bank notes and how to refuse credit to the unworthy so they didn’t ask twice? At which point the exhibition director, a serious man with a cavernous face, came in and suggested that Marion get on with her work and not waste time talking to guests. And thus Ed reported the conversation:

MARION:	This guest is talking to me. I’m not talking to him. And I’ve worked forty-eight hours so far this week, and it’s only Thursday, so I reckon I’m entitled to a conversation or two.
DIRECTOR:	You seem to have an attitude problem, Marion. It’s a great privilege for you to be asked to work here for us, among these beautiful and world-famous works of art.
MARION:	They’re mostly fakes, Buster. You’ve been had. Why do you think the insurance is so low? There’s a whole lot of people laughing at you up their cultural sleeves.
DIRECTOR:	Are you drunk?
MARION:	No. I’m just shit-tired. You were too cheap to pay what the national galleries wanted: you rented from private houses and got a load of rubbish. The etchings are second-rate; the plates must have been hacked to pieces. Those poor bloody painters—they have to put up with you when they’re alive, and you’re still buggering them when they’re dead.
DIRECTOR:	I hardly think a girl like you is qualified to pass an opinion on art. Now will you get back in there and do what you’re paid for, and all you’re fit for, and serve the wine.
MARION:	I’m ashamed to. It’s warm. Even a girl like me knows white wine should be cold. And it’s sweet. They’ll all have headaches in the morning. Worse than after my mother’s tonic wine.
DIRECTOR:	Perhaps it would be a good idea if you left now and didn’t come back.
MARION:	You mean I’m fired?
DIRECTOR:	Yes. (Exit Marion) I’m sorry about this. Head office insisted I recruit from the philistine ranks. I told them it wouldn’t work, and I was right.

Ed, the photographer, and the picture editor passed Marion in their taxi on the way to the station. They stopped the taxi.

Marion said she had no money until payday and nowhere to live. No, she refused to go to her parents’ house. She would not give in. No, she did not think the bank would take her on again; if they offered, she did not think she’d accept. Banking stifled her; there were no proper promotion prospects for women, anyway. Being “good with figures” got women as far as bookkeeping, seldom accountancy. Doing what she was told to do by people stupider than she upset her. No, she would rather go on the streets.

The taxi meter clicked up. The publishing collective would miss its train if they delayed further. Marion consented to get in the taxi and go to London with them, and Ed brought her home to Bramley Terrace. We had no spare room, so we found her space in Leslie Beck’s basement, and she helped out with Hope and Serena in the evenings and with my Richard and Benjamin, and Rosalie’s Catharine, and Susan’s Barney, and did her course at the Courtauld, melding the households into a yet tighter unit, as she went from one to another, sopping up the standards of what are now called, in an attempt to diminish them, the chattering classes, but which I would rather call the classes with conscience—of whom, I fear on a bad day, as with French-provincial cookery, the world will not see the like again.

We belonged to a level of society somewhere between the street protesters and the bourgeoisie establishment. We were the shock absorbers of the nation, the swing voters: if our patience grew thin, we’d change the way we voted. It was our only power—that and the sense that sheer strength of communal good intent, shared indignation, would somehow magically influence the course of events. We went to the theater, read novels, talked politics, waxed indignant, followed the news, listened to the radio, were active men and women in the PTA, brought our children up to be nonracist, nonsexist—when that concept presently dawned upon us all—and to empathize with others. (“Colin, but why did little George beat you up in the playground? No, don’t hit him back. Talk to him. Understand him, and forgive. Become his friend.”) We had given up on our generation, finally understood our own powerlessness, our littleness of vision, as the more desperate and drastic energies of the world swept in and engulfed us, like the ocean swamping some secluded rock pool. We put our faith in the future our children would create, if only we created them properly. It was, I think, and still is, a noble vision. And I continue to believe Amanda and Colin in my kitchen, Amanda naked and cheerful, metal teeth gleaming and unabashed, Colin in his courteous towel, will do better than we.

Ed brought Marion home; we believed there was some sort of better life she could attain. We treated her like a car whose engine hadn’t fired properly: we thought if we really tried, and pushed and pushed her to the brow of the hill, and let her run down, the engine would splutter to life, and she’d carry on under her own energies. And the trouble was, now she’d run down the hill and was in a dip none of her choosing, but ours, and the engine hadn’t quite fired. Marion stood at the sink peeling cucumbers in rubber gloves until told not to by Vinnie; she was nearly thirty; she hadn’t married; she had no children; she lived in a bed-sitting room and worked in this art gallery or the other as an assistant, until the day she’d tell management what she thought of them and either walked out or was fired. And the gallery world is small, and her reputation preceded her. “Marion? Marion Loos? No, I don’t think so.” Though she was never brisk and brutal with us. We were her safety and her hope.

She trusted us, and it made our responsibility the greater.

Leslie’s chauffeur strode up the path, “crushing ants with every step,” as Rosalie later complained. She was forty-five-ish; she wore what looked like combat fatigues. She was over six feet tall. She did not seem the kind to linger over Vinnie’s five-course lunch, to properly savor the peasant harshness of the local wine. We sighed in our hearts; our meal was ruined, the serenity of the day gone.

Leslie Beck introduced her as Lady Angela Pettifer. The Rolls was hers: she was driving down through Cahors to Bordeaux; she was giving Leslie a lift. We had wronged her. Leslie Beck tried to bring in champagne; she dismissed it and him. “You can’t drink champagne with pork and beans,” she said. One of us! She was interested in the story of Marion’s life; she had it out of her almost before the fresh, crusty bread was broken, certainly before the tomato-and-basil salad was finished.

“You need to run your own gallery,” she said. “You need a backer.”

We all turned hopeful faces toward her. A title, a Rolls...

“Not me,” she said. “I’m always broke. But I have friends.”

We were nicer to her than ever.

“I’m not Leslie’s mistress,” she said, out of nowhere, “in case you think so.” And I was glad, and so was Rosalie. Wives one can endure; other concubines can lead to a state of agitation.

Reader, can I remind you of a few things? At this stage, Leslie has had carnal relations with myself and Rosalie; his daughter Catharine, aged eight or so, drinks Orangina with the other children down the far end of the trestle table, politely ignoring these new visitors as they politely ignore the great proportion of the adult world which does not directly impinge upon them. So long as their parents look happy, children are well able to forget them. Did Leslie’s eyes drift over toward Catharine, searching through the children to locate his own? Rosalie said she thought so. I doubted it.

Susan was not in a good mood. Of all of us, Susan was the one who was best able to show her displeasure. Wallace would darkly brood, but there seemed nothing personal about it; Vinnie could suddenly lose his temper and be violent, and then be full of remorse; Ed would go white and icy, then pull himself together; Rosalie and I were placators; Marion could look offended and often did; but Susan’s displeasure could make a warm sun seem cold. This year she had cut her straight brown hair short and sharp: she was trying to make the transition from young motherhood back into the outside world, and finding it difficult.

This summer she was impatient with our ways; she found Vinnie’s preoccupation with food and the relics of the past irritating. She talked to Rosalie and me as if we were idiots; we were always on the verge of believing it, as it was, as if it were our husbands who functioned in the world and we just trotted along behind, clucking and tutting, more like our mothers than we had ever believed possible. It was Ed whom Susan really liked: they would lose themselves in talk of Herodotus and sociology, while Rosalie and I muttered who? what? and Wallace dreamed of mountains and Vinnie poured more wine. It’s Ed and Susan who ought to be married, I would think. And that didn’t make me right for Vinnie, either. I was too finicky, too precise. Right for no one, not even Leslie Beck—or only for a summer.

During that lunchtime I remember Susan saying:

TO VINNIE:	Let Leslie open his champagne. It can’t be worse than this awful peasant plonk you keep getting. Do people lose their palate as they grow older, like their hearing?
TO MARION:	So, how do you like Antony, Marion? We asked him down especially for you. Now don’t disappoint us.
TO ANTONY:	How do you like Marion, Antony? She’s got British citizenship....
TO ME:	I’m asking Ed to the opening of the new gallery at the Museum of Mankind. I hope you don’t mind.
TO LESLIE:	So, how many good buildings have you torn down this year?

Culminating with:

TO LADY ANGELA PETTIFER:

Is there room in your Rolls for me? I can’t hang around here any longer. If I can get back to Bordeaux, I can fly back to London and do some research. Then Vinnie can keep the car and look after the children. Do them all good....

And that is exactly what she did. Susan packed her bag and left with Leslie and Lady Angela, leaving Vinnie openmouthed and humiliated, and the thought of Vinnie humiliated shook all of us, not just me.

Rosalie came into Accord Realtors; she was lunching with Mr. Collier. She had bought a new coat. Lately she had been buying from thrift shops, but this one had a crisp and cheerful air. It looked suspiciously like one I’d seen recently in a store window, its tag saying five hundred twenty-three pounds. I’d wondered who there’d be around these days with enough money to buy it, except I supposed there was always a woman ready to spend her last penny on clothes. It just hadn’t occurred to me it would be Rosalie.

“What’s the matter?” asked Rosalie. “You’re brooding.”

Mr. Collier was in his office, waiting for a fax to come through.

“I was thinking about the past,” I said, “and the way it catches up with the present. Susan’s Amanda and my Colin are dancing about naked in my kitchen.”

“Then it’s just as well,” said Rosalie, “your Colin isn’t Leslie Beck’s son. If he’s not.”

“Of course he’s not,” I said.

“Some people,” said Rosalie, “say that once a woman’s been with a man, she never breeds true again. Her children take their features from all her lovers.”

“That is just not scientifically possible,” I said, and refrained from adding, “And some people say you’re going out with a murderer.”

“When Susan went off with Leslie Beck to Bordeaux, that time,” I said, “they had an affair, didn’t they?”

“An affair, an affair,” Rosalie jeered. She was in an uppity mood. “How romantic you are. I expect they spent a night or two together. If you and I did, why wouldn’t she?”

Nor did I point out that Rosalie had spent only a couple of intimate and ridiculous hours with Leslie Beck and had a baby by him only by accident, and he and I had loved each other for a whole summer.

Instead I said, “I love your coat,” and Rosalie said, “I know what you’re wondering, Nora, poor Nora—are you going to get in touch with Leslie Beck again? And can you bear it if he isn’t interested? If you’re too old and he’s forgotten?”

“You’re talking about yourself,” I said.

And Rosalie said, “I know. But I’m protected by Mr. Collier, and you only have Ed. I got this coat fifty pounds off because it had been in the window, on display.”

“Good for you,” I said.

“Anyway,” said Rosalie, “I think Marion should have first option on Leslie Beck the widower. I think we owe her that.”

“Why?”

“Because if it hadn’t been for us, she might be married to some nice bank manager and living happily in the suburbs with four kids and some pretty pictures on the wall.”

“Now you’re talking like me,” I said, “as if marriage were an end in itself. You’re slipping. Marion would have got where she is without our help.”

“She wouldn’t,” said Rosalie.

“She’s not the marrying kind,” I said.

“She would have been,” said Rosalie. “She’d have had to have been.”

Mr. Collier put his head out the door and said, “Half a mo, Rossie.”

“Rossie?” I said. “That sounds very kind of domestic. Supposing Wallace comes home?”

“You just don’t want me to be happy, Nora,” said Rosalie. “You never have,” and I felt again the ground shifting beneath my feet, just as I’d felt when Susan suddenly up and went off with Leslie Beck, leaving me disturbed, angry, and jealous.

Mr. Collier and Rosalie went off arm in arm. I wondered why she had felt obliged to be disagreeable to me. Perhaps it was instinctive: the need to warn others off your territory, when first it’s won. Or perhaps women friends are just for when there’s no new male upon the horizon? I didn’t want it to be true, but at least it meant I didn’t have to take it personally. All the same, I wanted to cry. I told Mr. Render I wasn’t well, left the office, and took the train to Green Park station.

I walked down Bond Street, past the expensive stores, which had never been part of my life, and now, I supposed, never would be, up Maddox Street, past the furtive fly-by-night carpet and fabric shops, and round the corner to where the streets opened out and became wider and less busy, where the commerce of fashion gave way to the commerce of investment art. I went past Browse D’Arby, past a window containing an old master or so, another with a discreet ship-at-sea-in-storm on an easel, a display of astrolabes, to make a change from the gold frames, and on to the Marion Loos Gallery and the nervier, chancier realm of contemporary art.

I went through the swing doors, and there facing me was Anita and Leslie Beck’s bedroom. The tawny curtains, the dun scratchy wallpaper, the orangey chair, the best white linen, the silver-backed comb on the bur-oak dressing table; and somehow the shadow of Leslie Beck was there upon the bed, humping away, defacing and yet enlivening, as if one film were superimposed upon another, and the stronger image showing through. But of course that was only in my mind, and I hoped not ever in Anita’s. I thought it was probably not a very good painting, anyway, but what did I know?

Marion wasn’t there. She was out at the Tate.

“There’s been a nibble for the MacIntyre,” said Barbara helpfully. “Of course, it would be now they’re all packed up and on their way back to Scotland.”

It was a world I didn’t understand and said as much. I said I wanted to buy the Anita Beck painting.

Barbara said she wasn’t sure it was for sale. Aphra said she was pretty sure it wasn’t. I said, since it didn’t say anywhere it wasn’t for sale, why wouldn’t it be? If I was prepared to spend my life savings on a painting in the middle of a recession, why shouldn’t I?

Barbara said, “Oh, dear,” and asked if I was all right. I said I was, and why shouldn’t I be? She took me into the small back room and made me some chamomile tea, and suggested we wait until Marion came back. I have always thought chamomile to be rather nasty slimy stuff, but I drank it, and presently my heart stopped beating so fast. The phone on the desk rang.

“Aphra,” called Barbara, “it might be Ben. Can you take it?”

“No, I can’t,” called Aphra from the far side of the gallery, causing a possible customer, a woman in a turban, to look up, startled. We didn’t behave like that at Accord Realtors. “I’m not going to interfere between husband and wife. All that happens is that everyone hates you.”

So Barbara took the call perforce, and it was indeed her husband, and he was obviously not happy. She had to hold the phone some way from her ear. “Yes,” she said, and “yes, but,” “but I can’t possibly,” “but we agreed,” “you’re not being reasonable,” “I was only looking at paintings,” and, growing bolder and angrier, “What difference does it make if you’re asleep and I come home at one o’clock, or two o’clock, or three,” and then she wept a little.

“Shall I leave the room?” I asked, but she nodded at me to stay, and then put the receiver down hard and fast.

“He’s impossible,” she said, “impossible.” And then to Aphra, “I’m going to have to go home. Ben says he’s not going to be my babysitter. He just doesn’t seem to understand. This is his baby, too. Why does he act as if it were just mine?”

“Because you stayed out late with Leslie Beck the creep,” said Aphra, “when you were meant to be on parole. So your warder is angry. Why ever did you do it?”

“I was drunk,” said Barbara, surprisingly. “All that sake.”

“I didn’t mean staying out late,” said Aphra. “I meant getting married and having a baby.”

Barbara apologized to me, and to Marion in advance, and hurried home.

“Marriage is a prison,” said Aphra. “The husband is the warder, and the children are chains round the ankles. I’m going to be like Marion; I’m going to stay out of the way of the Life Force, as defined by Leslie Beck.”

“You’d lose a lot,” I said. But I was quite cured of my own surfeit of jealousy; Leslie Beck was simply not a fit subject for it, and I even began to wonder whether I couldn’t do very well without putting Anita Beck’s painting on my wall. Why, at this stage of my life, did I begin to want souvenirs, mementos? It was absurd.

“Have you ever met this Leslie Beck?” asked Aphra.

“I have,” I said.

“And that’s why you want the painting?” She had clear, direct eyes.

“Yes.”

“What is it about this Leslie Beck?” asked Aphra.

“The size of his dong,” I said, getting annoyed with the way her generation patronized mine, and I was gratified when she looked quite shocked.

“Barbara didn’t say anything about that,” said Aphra, and left me alone. It was like a tennis match, played with someone much better than you. You managed to bat back one terrifying shot, only to receive another.

Marion came back from the Tate.

“Why, Nora,” she said, loftily. “How lovely to see you!”

She was looking elegant. She wore a kind of taupe silk suit and a little spotted scarf. Her nails were long and red. If anyone told her now not to wear rubber gloves to peel cucumbers, he’d receive short shrift. I was wearing my comfortable shoes. I thought, “I could publish the story of your life, if I wanted,” but not even that power gave me consolation.

“Aphra tells me you want to buy the Anita Beck,” she said. She was distant and formal. Rosalie was more her friend than I. She had something against me. What was it? What I had and she had not? Husband, home, kids, domesticity? The sense that I patronized her, as Aphra patronized me? I wished I hadn’t come. I wished I’d plodded back to Ed.

“I’m not sure about buying,” I said. “Rosalie told me it was here.”

“I don’t want you to have it,” said Marion Loos. “When I think what Anita went through because of you, I’d rather you didn’t.”

It was one of the more unfortunate days of my life. I should have stayed at work. I should not have told Mr. Render lies. I was being punished. I rose to go. Marion put out an elegant hand to restrain me.

“And where would you put it? On a wall that’s shared by you and Ed? Think about it, Nora. You were shameless, the lot of you. No rigor, no self-discipline, in and out of each other’s beds.”

I opened my mouth to protest and shut it again.

“And what is more,” said Marion, “you were all so self-satisfied. You thought you were doing me a good turn, you thought you were being so generous, deigning to educate me.”

What is more, what is more!

“What is more,” said Marion, “you thought a damp basement was good enough for me, so I have asthma to this very day. I had to use my inhaler in the Tate today. It was embarrassing. Something they spray in the air.

“You know what you lot did,” said Marion. “You used me as a servant, wiping your babies’ bottoms, picking up your dirty panties. You didn’t see it like that, oh no. I stood it for years,” said Marion Loos, “and it was all appalling. But what did I know? You took advantage of me.”

“I think I’d better go,” I said. I was cold to my heart. I hate rows, voices raised, people telling home truths. It was what she was born to, no doubt. What we’d never saved her from. The fishwife lay beneath a thin, thin veneer of poise and self-control. I thought I disliked her. I thought of Ed bringing her home. If she hadn’t been so pretty, would he have done it? Of course not. A plain and spotty girl talking about forged Van Goghs could be left to her own fate; a pretty one, not so.

“I don’t mean to make you angry,” said Marion.

“You have a bit,” I said. “Anyway, you’ve saved me throwing away thousands of pounds. Your Barbara asked me to say she was sorry, she had to go home; her husband’s angry because she spent the night with Leslie Beck.”

It was Marion Loos’s turn to have the color drain from her cheeks. She sat down abruptly. She didn’t bother to smooth her short skirt or keep her legs together. She seemed ungainly and young.

“Oh, Christ,” said Marion Loos.

“We’re all upset,” I said. “He’s stirred everything up. But Barbara didn’t mention the size of his dong to Aphra, so I expect it’s shriveled rather with age. I believe they do.”

Marion began to laugh. She stretched out her arms toward me. “I’m sorry,” she said, “really sorry. Of course you can buy the painting. No one else is going to. I can’t afford to turn away trade, just for the sake of principle. I’m not like Vinnie and the rest of you. I have to live in the real world. And as for Anita, I’m just being hypocritical.”

Cautiously, I let myself be embraced, and felt my resentment drain away. I am not very good at the new habit of touching and embracing; I was brought up without it. I associate it too clearly with sex. Little Miss Virgo, Vinnie would say. Little Miss Butter Wouldn’t Melt.

Marion outstripped her teachers in so many ways; I was proud of her. I didn’t say so. I thought she might hit me.

I’ve had enough of all these true confessions. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going into detail about my affair with Vinnie, which has nothing to do with Leslie Beck’s Life Force. Vinnie beckons gently, and women follow sometimes. Leslie Beck brandishes his giant phallus, and women lie wounded all around. Besides which, since Rosalie jeered at my use of the word “affair,” I feel quite nervous of it. I suppose it has got a kind of old-fashioned ring. What am I supposed to say? The furtive intimate relations I enjoyed for a while with Vinnie? I suppose Rosalie would like me to say “fucking,” but I won’t. She can do what she likes with Mr. Power-Cable Collier plus Pekingese; but as for me, I don’t fuck, I have affairs. I have a husband, a home, children, and many obligations, and I have affairs the better to sustain them. Husbands may have affairs for all kinds of reasons—what do I know? Wives have them not just to assuage the desires of the flesh, but to quell the raging spirit.

But since Marion took me so suddenly and surprisingly to task for my infidelity—if that’s an okay word—I feel less sure of myself. So I’ll be brief.

It began the day after Susan left with Leslie and Lady Angela for Bordeaux. It hardly seemed her most direct route home, though none of us liked to say so. Nor had she and Vinnie had any particular disagreement. Vinnie had given up his part-time work at the medical practice; How to Tone Up Your Heart had done very well at the bookstores, and a longer and more interesting book, The Nature of Dreams, had been well received by serious critics. Vinnie and Susan were finally out of debt.

“I don’t know which she disliked more,” said Vinnie sadly, as we picked out aubergines and yellow peppers from one of the glossier stalls in the Périgueux market, “my giving up on the healing arts, betraying everything we thought we stood for, or the people she admires taking me seriously. Better if I’d stuck to diets.”

How mean of Susan, I thought. Vinnie wore a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. He had grown a mustache. He was tanned, fleshy, and handsome, the way Gérard Depardieu is. We had left the others behind. Ed and I had had a minor disagreement that morning. Ed had said what a pity Susan had left. I’d said oh really, why? He’d said because now there was no one to talk to. I’d said did that mean he couldn’t talk to me? He’d said you know what I mean, and I’d said no, I did not. I was hurt and upset. In other words, I was prepared and ready to take offense, prepared and ready to go with Vinnie to the Périgueux market, just the two of us. Long, long ago I lost faith in the sincerity of my own righteous indignation. If you hear it from anyone—whether yourself, a spouse, a boss, a politician, a general—understand some evil is planned.

My eyes were still red-rimmed with tears. Vinnie bought me a Pernod in a bar. Then another. People stared. It was a hot, hot day. We went down to the river to see if it was cooler. It was not. I was still upset. Vinnie had a soft heart. He could not bear to see anyone in distress. He put his arms around me. He was a completely different shape from Ed. Ed’s belly was concave where it met, or failed to meet, my midriff. Vinnie’s was convex; it butted into me, firm and blue-striped, offering powerful consolation. There was no one around. The strong garlic-and-oil fingers tried to push up the narrow hem of my dress: a rather feeble Indian cotton, I remember, browny-pink stamped with large orange flowers, hideous in retrospect but having a kind of flimsy accessibility—no doubt why I was wearing it. I keep the sash belt at the back of my panties drawer, though the dress itself, along with all the other garments one once wore and loved, has long since been sucked up into the maw of time and vanished.

“It’s too hot out here,” he said, and drew me into the bushes.

What the romantic (and Ed tells me I am romantic) remembers of these events is the place, the ambience, the totality of someone else’s being and body, not sexual detail. Unless something is unpleasant, or truly remarkable (like the size of Leslie Beck’s dong), actual performance gets subsumed into the gestalt, fuzzy around the edges like the orange flowers on the browny-pink dress, part of the whole but not its total purpose. Whether Vinnie was good or bad in bed, or on the stony banks of the Dordogne, I cannot remember. Better to be Vinnie, I think, and have your total self remembered with affection and pleasure, than to be Leslie Beck and have your sexual prowess recalled, because that must, with age, fail, and as that diminishes, so must you. But I’m not a man, I wouldn’t know. It can only be speculation, since men are so nervous about sexual performance, they seldom talk, let alone write, about what really matters to them.

Mostly I remember the blue-and-white T-shirt stretched over a tight belly Susan nagged him about, and a lizard sitting on a hot stone, staring at me with unblinking eyes, as if the kind of stillness, the suspension of time which can fall like a protection around lovers, had stretched to include him, too. Or perhaps it was a her. Who’s to tell, with lizards?

I said it would not, could not, happen again. Should not have happened in the first place. It was beneath his dignity either to agree or to argue. I claimed we had meant, and planned, disloyalty to no one. He asked me not to be hypocritical. I shut up.

I didn’t “love” Vinnie as I loved Leslie Beck, though I’m sure that if love is a thing to be deserved, Vinnie deserved it more. I think what happened was that our intimate knowledge of each other, that inevitable component of the friendship of couples, had brimmed over its accepted edge, swollen by excitement, secrecy, fulfillment. But then, by some unlikely good fortune, and I can see it as good fortune, and by virtue of a kind of mutual embarrassment, the heady brew evaporated.

Susan returned unexpectedly. Anita, she said, was tedious; Lady Angela made passes; London would be hot and empty. She’d changed her mind. We, her friends, were the lesser of various evils. Opportunities to be alone with Vinnie were limited. When we could, we took them, Vinnie and I, over the years. But when I quarreled with Susan, allowed myself to be upset over the matter of Ed and she on the bed during a party, I also managed to make it happen that I could not see Vinnie again without invoking comment. Should I take credit for that? I don’t know. During the summer with Leslie, I felt faithless to Ed and did not like the feeling. Over the years with Vinnie, if you had asked me about “infidelity,” I would have denied its application to myself, and believed it. Ed and I had become one person, albeit with two independent bodies; Ed and Vinnie were friends; what I did with Vinnie included Ed; it was just that it seemed better not to tell him.

There was no serious “need to know.”

Vinnie’s relationship with Susan was trickier, and a source of grief and worry to him. I think if I had pushed it, he would have left Susan and come to me, but I didn’t want that. I wanted Ed and Vinnie; I wanted my cake and the icing, too; and since it hurt no one, why not?

I heard a noise. I looked up from the page. And there, facing me, clear as day at Accord Realtors, stood Susan. For a moment, I was confused. It was Susan of eighteen years ago, back from Bordeaux, back to chaperone her husband, back from her outing with Leslie Beck and Lady Angela, back to kill me. I must have felt guiltier than I thought I did. But no, it was now; it was the nineteen-nineties, not the seventies, and Susan was still brisk, beautiful, and superior. She had got thinner, not fatter; her eyes were still large and luminous. She looked what she was: intelligent, competent, busy. She looked like Glenn Close.

I pushed the manuscript into the drawer.

“Susan,” I said.

“This has gone on long enough,” said Susan. “One of us has to speak to the other.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, but I found myself smiling. I was so pleased to see her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and before I knew it I was embracing her. She felt like my mother, which made me feel like a forgiven child: trusted, trusting, and safe.

“What are you sorry about?”

“I can’t honestly remember,” she said, “but someone has to apologize, and I can’t wait around anymore for you to do it. Rosalie’s called me. Leslie Beck has turned up again: that’s more interesting than us not speaking.”

She wanted me to go halves with her, she said, buying poor Anita Beck’s painting. It didn’t seem right that it should go to a stranger, but she couldn’t possibly afford the ridiculous sum Marion was asking. After all she’d done for Marion, you would have thought she could have made some concessions. And Marion had let all kinds of things slip in the past, which Susan now reported to me.

Both Mr. Render and Mr. Collier were out of the office. I felt increasingly at liberty at Accord Realtors to write my novel (or my memoirs) and to speak to friends during office hours. Since Mr. Collier had been wooing my best friend, Rosalie, I had felt more and more like a colleague and less and less like an employee. I rather wondered whether it was not self-interest which prevented me from warning Rosalie against taking baths with Mr. Collier, but you can be too paranoid, even about your own nature.

“I know all that,” I said to Susan when she’d finished. “I’ve always known.”

“But it’s totally shocking,” said Susan, whose job these days, I remembered, was fund-raising for a child adoption agency. She had discovered in herself, as many of us do, a liking for sitting down in her best dress at formal dinners, and having food put in front of her, and talking to people of importance and distinction. She had done her early shift working with the deprived and miserable, her middle shift trying to lever society toward taking responsibility for the deprived and miserable; now she just wanted some peace and a good dinner, and Anita Beck’s painting at a reduced price as a memento of more interesting times. But she was my friend again, or said so. I must take a positive, not a negative, view of her actions and attitude. Look, I was really pleased to see Susan, not to be alienated from her anymore, not to have to cross the supermarket aisle to avoid an encounter. Nevertheless, she had made Vinnie unhappy in a way she needn’t have, seeing her own bad temper as somehow sanctified, allowing it full rein, exercising it needlessly: “I’m cross. You must put up with it.” That, more than anything, in men or women, makes for unhappy homes.

And why did she want to share Anita’s painting with me? To save money? I thought not. She had plenty. I had seen Vinnie’s Midriff Diet for Men on display in bookshops everywhere for the past year. More likely it was an attempt to resurrect her past and see her minor fling with Leslie Beck, the man with the biggest dong in the world, on a par with my summer of love. Although she, like Rosalie, had gotten a baby out of hers, and I hadn’t, theirs had been of no other consequence. Mine had.

I supposed Marion would say that made my sin against Anita Beck worse, but who was Marion to put on moral airs? She must be wondering herself, or she would not have felt obliged to tell Susan how she acquired the Marion Loos Gallery—something I had known for years, and also managed to keep secret for years. I will try to take the sting from it by recording it, as I have done Leslie Beck’s reappearance in Marion’s life, but not yet my own. Now I will look out of Marion’s unfairly large, wide eyes. It becomes quite a relief not to look out of my own. It is pleasant to feel, as Marion feels, somehow better than other people: that she has the prerogative of proper feeling, proper behavior—a full yet discreet sensibility. Oh, yes, it is quite pleasant to be Marion, after all. To have no children, no hostages to fortune, when it comes to it, is quite a relief. I enjoy it here, in Marion’s mind.