Marion

I find it quite difficult to like people; I think I got into the habit of dislike when I was a child. “Oh, Marion! Marion was looking down her nose when she was born,” my mother would say.

Ida and Eric were both large, overflowing people, as was my younger brother, Peter. I was always tall for my age and had large feet, but I was thin. By the time Peter was twelve, the others were all two stone overweight apiece. I was born controlled, and was either born or soon became an organizer. I had to be. If I wanted to leave the house with my hair combed, I would first have to find the comb, somewhere among the dirty dishes and the cigarette stubs and the lottery tickets. All of them smoked, Petey from the age of eight. None of them read books. Both parents would tell friends I had been switched at birth. At first it hurt me; then I longed for it to be true, though I could see too great a resemblance, more’s the pity, between my father’s nose and my own to allow me to really believe it. My family felt that the day existed in order to be enjoyed; I felt that the day was a mere framework in which one could somehow “get on”—though where I was meant to be getting on to I did not understand, and there was no one around to tell me. Those born, like me, strangers to their family by virtue of their intelligence usually respond to language and have books to help them out, or their English teacher takes an interest, and so they more easily find their proper niche in the world, get to university and start a life appropriate to themselves. But I had a problem with the written language: I was, and still am, mildly dyslexic, though excellent with numbers, and some slight functional disorder left me unable to draw anything more complex than a cat sitting on a table. It was not until I was fourteen and plucked up enough courage to go into the local art gallery that I understood where my passion and my interest lay—that is to say, in other people’s paintings, in alternative visions of reality. But I didn’t know what to do with it, and, again, there was no one to tell me. Bad at English, bad at art, good at math. They steered me into the bank at an early age, and even that Eric and Ida thought was overly ambitious. And I liked no one at the bank, either: everyone was so plain and ugly; everything you looked at seemed contrived to root you brutally to the here and now; it was mean of spirit.

I hated my family. I hated boys, whose messy fumblings under skirts upset me, and whose only ambition, so far as I could see, was to get the better of me, reduce me to their own sorry state. Other girls got loved, it seemed to me; I was the kind boys just wanted to bring down a peg or two. I hated my job. I hated the Van Gogh fake worst of all. Not that it had been painted in the first place, which seemed a compliment to the artist, but that no one even noticed. What did that say about the curators of this exhibition?

When Ed, the photographer, and the picture editor turned up at the “Bank and the Painter” show (I knew it was a wrong association at the time but couldn’t have told you why), I felt my heart leap. I liked the look of these three men; I liked the way ideas seemed to be in control of their flesh. They were more animated than the people I was used to, who tended to the pudgy, who had the pallor of the unenlightened, the thick pale skin of those who are anxious to keep doubt out—an altogether stolid and complacent look.

To be translated, in the course of a week, from beans on toast with Ida and Eric in Norwich to avocado vinaigrette with Ed and Nora in Primrose Hill, although the price was washing the dishes and putting the children to bed, seemed some kind of miracle. The marvel had happened. What I had always hoped to be true was indeed true: that if you have a genuine liking and an enthusiasm, albeit untutored, for something, just for its own sake, why, then, this counts as a rare gift, and you can become a valued member of society just on account of it. Your difference will be noted and admired; the world will open its arms to you. I lived under the stairs, and I listened and I learned.

“Under the stairs” worried Nora and Ed, so they moved me to Leslie and Jocelyn Beck’s basement, where, everyone told me, there was “lots of room.” But there was not the same atmosphere. Leslie Beck did not read books; he had safe reproductions on the walls; Jocelyn collected horse brasses; Hope and Serena, for all their dullness, told lies. I did what I had to, to earn my rent: developed asthma and babysat in the evenings and on weekends for Ed and Nora, Rosalie and Wallace, Vinnie and Susan, and picked up what knowledge, what social graces, I could. I meant, after my first week at the Courtauld, to end up at least director of the Tate Gallery. So quickly life can change.

I don’t think I was particularly highly sexed. Perhaps it was just that Eric and Ida had been noisy and frequent lovers, and I was determined that what was good enough for them was not going to be good enough for me. Pushing open the bathroom door one day and seeing Leslie Beck’s erect organ, purply and mottled, unnerved me; I told the others about it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. But I was really pleased to discover I could tell a good story, be socially accepted, make other people laugh. Giving an account of Leslie Beck’s dong, as they loved to call it, liberated me just a little from feelings of inferiority. I became equal to them. I worked for them one by one, but I was from that moment part of the group.

When Jocelyn and Leslie parted and Anita moved in, and I had to help Rosalie with poor flipped Jocelyn, I was linked into the group even more tightly. My benefactors, my friends. I trusted them—they would share their last crust with you for the privilege of helping you—with the exception of Leslie Beck. I understood him too well. I understood that his background was like mine; that he had fought his way out and up; that his talent was for making money and losing it, and it was a talent they marveled at but didn’t envy. I understood that Leslie Beck believed he would have to buy his friends, and they let themselves be bought, out of kindness to him. He envied them their social ease, the buzz of conversation that rose from their dinner tables; he wanted to be one of them, and the more he wanted to, the less he could be, because the point was that the only way to be one of them was not to want to be one of them. He had attached himself to them, and they went along with it; me, they had attached to themselves. It was a better position to be in. I was their good work, and I squirmed beneath it, while at the same time—I won’t say “loving” them; I will say “not disliking” them. For me, that’s quite a lot. Gratitude is a terrible emotion.

Leslie Beck recognized himself in me, of course he did. I failed to find him attractive, as did the others. I knew too much even then about that kind of man: redheaded curly-haired males with biceps, vigorous, somehow bursting out of too-tight, too-bright clothes. You meet them in betting shops and afternoon drinking clubs. My dad had a couple of friends like that; when they came round for a drink and a game of cards, my mum would always put on her lipstick. They like to notch you up, tell the lads about you. But what do the Noras, the Rosalies, the Susans know? They’re innocent. They think marriage is all about true love or lust; they don’t understand self-interest. Men like Leslie acquire women like Jocelyn if they possibly can—a cut above them socially—and learn what they can until they’ve learned enough. Or else they go for the plain ones with a good dowry, like Anita, who will work hard and be grateful and never cause trouble. But to satisfy the demands of self-interest is not to satisfy the soul; they swagger, but they’re never content; they’re restless; they need acceptance. And scheme to get it, because all they know is scheming. That I understood in him. We were rivals, and I was winning.

The day after Anita moved in, Leslie waylaid me on the steps as I was on my way to the Courtauld.

“Marion,” he said, “thank you for being such a help with Jocelyn. We’ve all been having quite a time with her lately. I expect it’s the menopause.”

“She’s rather young for that,” I said.

“What would I know? Hope and Serena will need continuity. I hope you can stay on.”

The court would need to be convinced, in any custody case, that Hope and Serena had continuity, that is to say, and I didn’t feel inclined to help him out. I said I’d stay for a couple of weeks, and by that time they’d be used to Anita. He said it was not certain that Anita was staying. I said Susan and Vinnie’s au pair was leaving, so I could move into their house; it was comfortable and convenient there. Leslie said it was time he had the basement treated for dry rot before it spread to the rest of the house, and had central heating and a proper kitchen and bathroom installed. Of course, then I’d have to pay proper rent, but he’d keep it as low as possible. I said I’d have to be on my way; I didn’t want to miss a lecture on “Cubism and Politics.” He asked if he could come down that evening; he wanted a shoulder to cry on.

And all through the rest of the day I thought about whether or not I wanted Leslie Beck to cry on my shoulder, and whether or not, if I did, I would be able to have a centrally heated, newly converted flat in Rothwell Gardens free. And I let him cry on my shoulder, and when we went in to look at the old boiler room, and I showed him the dry-rot spore which he had never wanted to believe in (a surveyor’s house is the last to get seen to, as the dentist’s child has the worst-cared-for teeth), and he showed me his mottled, purply thing stretching up toward the light of day, I began to laugh, thinking of the comparison, and of what Ida and Eric had done to me, that I should make such a comparison, or perhaps it was just exposure to too much “Art and the Symbol” at the Courtauld. Dusty and dirty as it was down there, I succumbed to Leslie, and became part of his fiefdom; he, for his part, felt able to come to terms with and eradicate the dry rot. A kitchen and a bathroom were more or less put in, though the plumbing for both was inadequate. There was no hot water, other than by kettle. The central heating never arrived. But I stayed on and helped with his children, and when Anita was away with her parents, I would join Leslie in the bedroom for the night. It was part of a bargain; it was part of the pattern of my life—part of my revenge upon it. It stopped me having to think about boyfriends or why I wasn’t married. It was automatic. It was without effort. I went to his and Anita’s wedding and helped look after Hope and Serena throughout the ceremony without turning a hair, merely being glad for their sakes that their lives were to be more settled. Any qualms I might have had about deceiving Anita disappeared completely on her wedding day. She had turned into Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did.

There was some quality in Leslie’s sexual energy, his very indomitability, the size and scope of the tool fate had given him, which failed to ignite the erotic imagination—or, at any rate, mine. I could take or leave this experience, and it paid the rent.

But one day Anita came down to my flat. She was crying. She was wearing a particularly dreary dress. It was navy blue and had a little white collar. She tried to look authoritative, like Jocelyn on a good day, but always failed. She had told Leslie she was pregnant. She had thought he would be pleased. Instead, he shuddered, said he was already a father, he did not want another child, there was too much expense involved, and asked her to consider an abortion. I suspected it was not expense that made him shudder—he was doing very well at the time financially—but rather the thought of his life being wound even more closely with Anita’s. The planning deal with which her father had been connected was long since accomplished, to everyone’s good profit; and just as dentists have trouble getting patients to remember to pay their bills once the pain has gone, so Anita, just by existing, had trouble reminding Leslie of her onetime importance in the scheme of his life. Now his need was gone, and she was a fixture to which no gratitude was owed.

“Why don’t you just hit him?” I asked. I felt incensed. I felt he had gone too far. I had finished at the Courtauld and was running a small contemporary-art gallery in Hampstead—not very good paintings and not very much money—while the owners, Jane and George Harris, were away; I rather naively imagined they would be so pleased with my performance when they came back that they would ask me to stay. The contrary was true. I was young; I had imagined people sold bad art at the lower end of the market because they couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad. Only little by little, as the world worked upon me, did I realize that many people like “bad” art. I try not to make crude value judgments, these days. My taste is like a sharp blade blunted by disappointment; I saw and saw away at “good” and “bad,” hemming and hawing like any other gallery owner, trying to keep prices down and commissions up. As it was, when Jane and George Harris returned, they found all the “good” paintings, as I saw them, on the walls, and all the “bad” paintings stacked in the basement, and nothing sold. In retrospect, I have some sympathy with them: supposing I came back and found Aphra’s choices all over my walls, and my income up but my reputation down (where it counts, at the Tate, the Metropolitan, and so forth). I would most certainly ask her to leave. But at the time it hurt. It was just before this happened, when my future seemed secure, that I thought I could afford a moral gesture, and moved out of Rothwell Gardens. Anita, of course, saw my leaving as an unkind act, for she had hoped that I’d be able to help with the baby, and here I was, helpful Marion, deserting her. I think she did hit Leslie. At any rate, little Polly was eventually born.

Leslie kept an eye on me after I left his house. He would turn up from time to time at whatever dreary place I happened to be living in, whichever back-street gallery I toiled in—partly to gloat, partly to offer sympathy, partly to use my shoulder to cry on. His mother in the north had died; his father seemed scarcely to notice, just nodded her out of the house in her coffin, the same way he’d nodded her out shopping, and got on with the garden. Leslie wept over that. Jocelyn tried to turn Hope and Serena against him. That annoyed but did not distress him. Anita refused to smile and scintillate. That shamed him. Business was bad. That really agitated him. He’d borrowed too much; used the security of Rothwell Gardens for some additional loan; lived in anxiety lest someone foreclose on the property. Anita’s father would lend him money, but only if he put half the house in his wife’s name. This he refused to do.

“Men earn the money,” he’d say. “What do women want of them—everything? Women see marriage as a meal ticket for life. Anita broke up my marriage to Jocelyn. At least Jocelyn’s family did their best for her, dowrywise. Anita should think of that.”

We’d make love—Leslie’s workout, I’d call it, if I wanted to upset him, and I often did. I felt he was right—that my life had run up against a dead end—and I could feel my benefactors thinking the same thing, and hated it.

“You should have stayed with me,” said Leslie. “Stuck it out. I’d have left Anita for you in the end.” That wasn’t true. He hadn’t liked me leaving Rothwell Gardens without his permission, that was all it was.

“What, and throw my life away?” I’d say. He was a lonely man. I wanted someone like Ed, or Vinnie, someone companionable, if I wanted anyone. And they didn’t come my way. Nothing seemed to come my way. Not even Eric and Ida could be proud of me. Who could be proud of a female shop assistant, with no money, no home, no husband, no children? Dregs, and I had worked my way so proudly into dregs. Better that I’d ironed aspiration out of my soul and stayed home.

What I wanted to do was impossible, because it would cost half a million pounds to do it, and how did someone like me find that kind of money? I wanted to run my own gallery—not to work in some sad art shop in the suburbs, selling prints and cards, but to own and run a proper gallery in the West End, where I’d have enough status and power to be part of the mysterious and ongoing world of the painter, at its leading edge, where the splashing of paint upon canvas—or these days, board—becomes part of the culture of nations. I wanted to play the role of the connoisseur, to be both patron and muse to the world I loved. I wanted to be somewhere where at least a few people would know what I meant if I said “good.” I had seen the premises, just behind the Museum of Mankind, and they were empty, and waiting. I had the skill, the training, the business sense, the contacts, the discrimination—everything that was required except the capital. And I remembered how I had jeered at Ida, when once she’d told me she’d have studied music at the guildhall but her parents couldn’t afford it; she’d had to go out to work instead. A likely tale, I’d thought; an easy way out; an easy justification for lack of commitment. Now I could see just how real and hard a factor money was—or, rather, the lack of it. How it stood between people and what they could become.

Now I know some women manage to marry a million pounds and much more besides, and I daresay I am as beautiful as they are, feature by feature, but I am not that kind of woman. Anyone who wants a good time would do well to avoid me. I say what I feel, and feel what I say, and both things can be difficult to live with, and neither is the way to marry a millionaire.

I was sitting staring into the half-dark one evening, bemoaning my fate, when Leslie came to my door. I was surprised; I’d had a visit from him only a couple of weeks before; he usually came round every other month or so. He came to me with a proposition. His visit, he said, was for business, not pleasure.

A wealthy South African man, a Mr. Clifford Streiser, had just flown in with his wife. Mr. Streiser headed a consortium which was buying a thirty-acre derelict docklands site with a view to its development. Mrs. Brenda Streiser had come with him, to visit a fertility clinic in Harley Street. Leslie, if he played his cards right, could handle, as agent, the Streiser development, and all his troubles would be at an end. Playing his cards right included wining, dining, and doing the odd favor.

“I am not a call girl, Leslie,” I said, “not yet. And no businessman would see me as a favor. I am not the type.”

Leslie looked quite shocked.

“I’m not talking hundreds here, Marion,” he said. “I’m talking hundreds of thousands, maybe a million. And don’t you need half of that million to start your gallery?”

“Whatever it is,” I said, “I see you mean to take a fifty-percent commission.”

“You’ll learn,” he said. “Once you have your gallery, you won’t sound so superior.”

I said I was baffled as to how we were to extract a million pounds from the unfortunate Mr. Streiser, or what particular part I could possibly play.

“If I could forge an old master, I’d do it,” I said to him. “If I could bribe someone else to forge it, better still. But what would I bribe him with? My body? I’d be willing, but it would take ten years to earn it at current rates.” I wouldn’t make a good whore; I wasn’t either good enough or bad enough: my heart not golden enough to be the cheerful kind, yet my soul stubbornly nonbiodegradable, being too occupied with mind to achieve a proper semblance of the debased and wretched fallen woman. Hopeless! Who’d want me?

He looked embarrassed and finally told me. We took the Streisers out to dinner at Claridge’s. I rented a dress. It was creamy white and dead simple. I did my hair as the pregnant wife in the van Eyck painting had done hers. I made myself look quiet, intelligent, attractive, sane—the qualities people look for in babies. Leslie wore his best gray suit and a tie curiously toned down in color. He looked, for once, honest as well as competent. We made a good pair.

Cliff Streiser was a tall, broad-shouldered, pleasant, ordinary, and rather fleshy man who’d discovered the knack of making money without hurting anyone. All you did was buy up large tracts of derelict ground in overlooked places toward which the city crept, and which had always been despised, and then turn them into glittering shopping malls and office blocks, turn the shame of a district into the pride of the city, and you were honored for it. He looked a little confused, a little out of his depth; his bright eyes darted to and fro. Princess Margaret dined in a corner. “Wait till I tell my mother,” he said. I liked that. I thought he was kind. His father was dead, and he mourned him. That seemed to me important, too. Wealth couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. His first wife had gone off with a polo player. Well, that happens, if you suddenly grow rich and it goes to your wife’s head. Polo players!

Mrs. Streiser the infertile, his new wife, was blond and pretty, brighter than he was and younger by some fifteen years. She had been that day to the “Pride of the Pharaohs” exhibition at the British Museum, and had stood in line to see the newly discovered Leonardo drawing on display there. That was really something. They had three black live-in servants in their large house in Cape Town. She showed me photographs of them, as if they were part of the family, and was even shopping for presents to take back to the cook’s little girl. Yes, she let the cook have her little daughter live with them. Anything else, said Mrs. Streiser softly, would be unkind.

One way and another, considering how society restrains and restricts its members, and the difficulty of resisting its pressures, I thought the Streisers could be described as a good couple, could almost slip through the eye of a needle and go to heaven.

I presented myself to them as Leslie’s girlfriend, which was true enough. In fact, throughout the meal I spoke not a single lie, except once, when I said I was pregnant. And that I would have to have a termination, because I couldn’t upset my parents. Well, South Africa is still a fairly old-fashioned society, and it seems parents there can get very upset when their unmarried daughters get pregnant. Now, what a pleasant and stable society for anyone, provided he or she is not black, in which to be a parent, if not necessarily a child.

“My dear,” said Brenda Streiser, “you can’t have an abortion. You have to have the baby. You will always regret it if you don’t.”

“But I can’t do it to my parents,” I said. “They don’t even know about Leslie here. They’re so old-fashioned. They’re so proud of me. It will break their hearts.”

“A baby’s life is sacred,” said Brenda. “And not yours to take away.”

“Brenda’s right,” said Cliff. “She’s always right about these things. Brenda’s a marvel. I’ve got the brains, she’s got the heart.”

“I can’t have babies,” said Brenda. “So I know what I’m talking about.”

“Poor Brenda,” said Cliff. “She’s had a terrible time. All that messing about with her insides, and all my fault.”

“In the end,” said Brenda, “it’s his sperm count. Nothing to do with me. Not his fault, poor darling. Well, only in a way.”

“Mumps,” said Cliff, “when I was a grown lad. I told you, didn’t I, Leslie? How I suffered! But what a man’s suffering to a woman’s?”

“You did indeed tell me,” said Leslie. “What a tragedy!”

After prawn cocktails, we went on to Chateaubriand. I made little mews of appreciation, though I hate red meat. A good appetite’s a good sign. I was trying hard not to dislike, not to be disliked. So much counted on me. I was looking very good. Not a hint of the asthma that sometimes plagues me. Other diners were staring at me, even more than at Princess Margaret. If I could dress like this all the time, eat in places like this, I thought, I would feel at ease and at home in the world. Perhaps my error had been to aim not high enough. I had been so gratified and stunned by my goatish leap from bank clerkery to life around the Bramleys that I had stayed upon that particular ledge too long. It was time to leap once again, and I could, I could. If, on one particular day, the dreary pattern of a lifetime changes, and just in the nick of time, the next change will also be sudden, and in the nick of time.

“Why don’t you come back home to Cape Town and stay with us?” said Brenda. “Have the baby adopted, go back home; no one need ever know.”

“I could never part with a baby once I’d had it,” I said. “And besides, they depend on me at work. I can’t just walk out, let them down.” This baby was going to inherit good moral traits, as well as a handsome and healthy physique and a sweet and pliable nature.

“I’d like to adopt,” said Brenda, “but Cliff had this silly prison sentence, before he even met me. They won’t let us adopt. He hit a policeman who was beating up a black. He was only twenty-one.”

“You could always try surrogate motherhood,” said Leslie to Cliff, “but I don’t suppose Brenda would fancy that.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Brenda. “I think all that’s unnatural. I don’t want any other man’s stuff in me. And I don’t want Cliff putting any of his in someone else, and what would be the point, there’s no sperm in it anyway.”

“Hush,” said Cliff, for the waiter was hovering.

“Eat up, darling,” said Brenda. “I’m dying for the profiteroles.”

I wept a little into my steak as I tried to eat up. Clifford ordered a bottle of claret that cost ninety-nine pounds. They knocked it back. I drank mineral water.

“Oh, dear,” said Brenda, and she cried a little, too, because she loved her husband and wanted a baby and didn’t see how to reconcile the two.

“The real problem is,” said Leslie, “I’m already married. My wife has a weak heart. A man like me can’t be expected to live celibate all his life. But I can’t abandon her. It’s not her fault. She’s ill. If she found out about Marion, if there was a baby, it would kill her. What a mess we’re all in!”

We contemplated the mess, and the more we contemplated it, the worse it seemed. At last Clifford solved it.

Clifford said, “Supposing you had your baby in secret, Marion, and you handed it over to us, and we compensated you for its loss. Then you wouldn’t have to have an abortion, Leslie wouldn’t have to confess to his wife, Brenda would have her baby, which would be as pretty as its mother and as able as its father, and I’d have given my wife the best present in the world.”

Leslie didn’t say “How much?” outright, though I thought he might have. We bargained through the profiteroles. I think Brenda thought we ought just to give her the baby, out of love and friendship, but Clifford thought a financial transaction, and a large one, would be preferable. We were breaking the laws of both nations. He didn’t want me changing my mind at the last moment. “What’s money,” Leslie agreed, “compared to peace of mind?” And he suggested that if Brenda went on holiday for a few months before the baby was born, she could return to Cape Town with it in her arms, and no one would know it wasn’t hers. Brenda looked happier than ever.

There is a world shortage of white newborn babies of good healthy stock on offer for adoption. The Marion whom Clifford and Brenda saw was not poor. She had other options. The deal was made at nine hundred fifty thousand pounds. Clifford couldn’t quite bring himself to get to the million. I wept a little into my black café filtre to think of the baby from whom I would be parting, and said I must think about it; it was all so sudden.

I spent every night for a week at a cheap hotel with Leslie. He told Anita he was in Scotland. Leslie said he was doing this for Anita’s sake, not his own; he had somehow to maintain the marital home. I became pregnant at once, and just as well. The week was the most fertile of my cycle. I wondered whether it was a happy coincidence, and thought probably not. Nothing that had to do with Leslie was coincidence. This had been well planned in advance, probably from the moment Clifford had let slip his wife was attending a fertility clinic. I found a paperback entitled Fertility and Contraception: The Facts in the back of Leslie’s car. He had traded in the Porsche for a Citroën. I could tell things were not good for him.

At the end of the week he said, “We’ll only be about three weeks out on your dates. It’ll be just a little overdue.”

I said, “That’s all right. My brother and I were both a couple of weeks premature. It runs in the family.”

I asked why he didn’t make me pregnant before our meeting with the Streisers; he said to make sure I didn’t get any ideas. I didn’t pursue it.

He seemed to me a kind of devil man, pounding away at me with his chief asset in life, as if his future depended on it, which it probably did. The hotel was a hellhole. The bed was one of those old-fashioned narrow ones with a wire mesh for a base, not springs; it sagged in the middle. It was no holiday—though I was using up one of my precious holiday weeks.

I asked Leslie why he was so certain I was pregnant. He said there was an eighty-five-percent chance of it, and that was good enough for him. I asked him why he had had to book us into a back-street hotel in King’s Cross used by whores at worst and strays from the station at best, and not Claridge’s, and he said as he’d be deducting all expenses from my percentage of the Streisers’ payment, he’d assumed I’d want the bill kept as low as possible.

I wondered whether the baby would inherit Leslie’s temperament. If so, I was not sure I would be able to love it, especially if it was a boy. I asked myself if I would want to rear it, and the answer was no. I would produce the baby Brenda wanted, and she would make the best of it. Vinnie’s baby, or Ed’s, or Wallace’s I could have loved, but not Leslie’s. Was it to my credit or otherwise that I never had sexual relations with these three, though I daresay I could have had I tried? I was in and out of their bedrooms often enough. And it seems to be natural for men to want to bed their servants, their domestic or office maids, though not to have babies by them.

I think I was flattered that Leslie meant to have a baby through me, whatever his motives were.

I told Leslie I would have the pregnancy terminated if he did not agree to hand over seventy percent of the Streiser money, immediately, as it came in. One-third on agreement, one-third on delivery, one-third three months after the birth. I argued that since I was going through the actual process, the physical and emotional discomfort of birth, seventy-thirty to me was a reasonable division. He argued that since any baby was half the father’s, and the idea and the contacts were his, fifty-fifty was more than kind to me. We settled at fifty-five–forty-five in my favor, and Leslie said the sooner I had my own gallery the better. The money was going directly into Leslie’s bank account, laundered into some crevice of the dock development deal.

I called Cliff and Brenda and said that after much thought I agreed to the deal, and listened to Brenda’s sigh of happiness, and marveled that something which would make me so unhappy could make another woman so happy. But I expect, like most women, she thought she could grow the baby into her own image, regardless of its genes. It is in this hope, I imagine, that some women have baby after baby: as the infant gets to its feet and begins to argue, displays its own temperament and character, they quickly have another, hoping this time it will work. It never does, of course, but on they go. Rosalie, Nora, Susan—ever hopeful. At least Anita gave in and stopped after one.

As soon as the first installment arrived, I went straight around to the real estate agents and put down a deposit on the premises that were to be the Marion Loos Gallery. I spent the next few months preparing to buy and borrow stock. People were helpful—surprisingly so. I was more liked than I deserved to be. I was moved by the way contacts and colleagues put themselves out in my behalf. For the last three months of the pregnancy I went to Italy and there toured churches and monasteries; the baby kept me good company. I conversed with him; I instructed him; he was completely my friend. He could not answer back, but I knew and he knew that I was doing the right thing. A baby brought up in a pleasant home with kind parents and three servants anywhere in the world has a better chance of happiness than one brought up in some squalid inner-city room, which was the best a single mother on an ordinary female wage could provide. What is natural, careless maternal love, we both agreed, fetus and myself, compared with the love of nonnatural parents who care profoundly, even unto a million pounds’ worth of love?

For the last six weeks, Brenda came out to Venice to join me. She was very little and precise and eager. Churches bored her, but she liked sitting in St. Mark’s Square drinking the most expensive coffee in the world. I didn’t dislike her one bit. She made me drink chocolate; coffee would be bad for the baby. I hoped for her sake the baby would not take after Ida, or resemble its Uncle Peter. We gave birth in a nursing home outside Venice; I used her name.

If I myself couldn’t manage to have been switched at birth, I would at least make Ida and Eric’s version of my existence true for their grandchild. Switch the mothers, not the child. The baby was a boy, his hair a reddish fuzz. I supposed, from the books I had read, that this would fall out in about three months, and a stronger growth come in, and I was glad it would be left to Brenda to find this interesting, and important.

Brenda gave me an extra fifty thousand dollars after the birth, to make the sum up to a million.

“Don’t let Cliff know,” she said. “You know how men are. So proud! This is from my pocket, because that’s what I feel like—a million dollars!” The original transaction had been in pounds sterling, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her so and spoil her story, even for approximately twenty-five thousand pounds at an exchange rate of approximately two-to-one. I am not all bad, merely unmaternal.

I waved her and the baby goodbye from the Venice Hilton, had a good night’s sleep, which is difficult when you have a newborn baby—I was sorry for Brenda—and then moved into a cheaper and more romantic hotel, which I thought was my style. For a week I comforted myself with the Renaissance, a period which always helps the close observer put human experience into a historical perspective. Then I went home to London—via Milan, where I bought the kind of clothes I thought women who ran West End galleries would wear—and completed the deal on the gallery.

Oddly enough, Leslie seemed to be far more upset about my lack of baby than I was. He had assumed he would have another girl: had believed he could only beget girls. On hearing I had sold his son, he quite took offense.

“You should never have done it,” he said.

“It was your idea in the first place,” I protested.

“You should never have gone through with it. I didn’t think you would. It was just a way of getting you into bed for a whole week.”

And I don’t think I believed him. In the end, what does motive matter? I don’t suppose God has the time or inclination to divine it before Judgment Day sounds and the dead are raised up in the full clamor of their righteous indignation and vigorous disclaimers. It’s what we do that counts, not why. I opened the Marion Loos Gallery. Leslie got himself onto his financial feet again, and someone else brought up the baby. I didn’t see Leslie after that for a long time. We had worn each other out, in some way I didn’t quite understand, until there he was, standing in my doorway, with Anita’s painting under his arm, and dust motes in the air, disturbing the tranquillity of the day.