Nora

Okay, out of Marion’s head, back to my own. I, Nora, should be better equipped after this practice to explain Marion to Susan, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. Just because I understand what it is to be Marion doesn’t mean others can or want to.

“What shocks you about it?” I ask Susan, but I know that answer perfectly well. It shocks Susan that a woman should take her life into her own hands without permission from social workers. Since Susan is the one who normally interferes in other people’s lives and is not herself interfered with, interference seems fine by her.

“You know perfectly well,” says Susan. “Babies can’t go to anyone just on whim. You’re trying to annoy me, Nora. Next you’ll tell me you think it’s okay to sell your kidneys to the highest bidder.”

I open my mouth and close it again. “No one else’s business if I choose to,” I want to say. “If I’d rather have a custom kitchen than a kidney, why shouldn’t I?” But I don’t want to argue with her. I just think she is quite the wrong wife for Vinnie.

We are in her house in Kew Gardens Square, one of the more desirable locations in the area served by Accord Realtors, and readily salable, should Vinnie and Susan ever wish to put it on the market. In this it is quite unlike 12 Rothwell Gardens in Primrose Hill, though the houses themselves are very similar. In these, the hard times of the property market, location is all-important. In the central-city area, grandiose property above two million pounds can still be sold, as the Middle East empties after the Gulf War, houses with electronic security devices already in situ being in special demand. Anything in an apartment building with a security desk at the entrance and proper surveillance of all callers, and inside the apartment a room (usually a w.c.) already converted to a communications center—steel-walled against bomb and gun attack, with alarm system and radio equipment already installed, into which the dweller can retire at the first sign of trouble—can be sold at once, at the asking price. But good solid family houses in the inner-city area, and the next price bracket down, are now two a penny. Nobody wants them. Nobody can sell them. Only in the suburbs, where citizens still assume they can breathe the air and live without fear of terrorist or personal attack, are such houses in demand.

Susan’s front garden was well pruned and tended. Her brass knocker was shiny. Her door key was on a proper ring, easily accessible, in a tidy bag. She and Vinnie had fought over the years, object for object, his tendency toward creative mess versus her determination to be orderly. I could see that some compromise had been reached, but that the terms of the armistice veered in her favor. The old splintery pine had been replaced by good, well-restored pieces, glossy with beeswax polish. My taste, of course, and Vinnie’s, ran to dog hairs and old favorites and take-us-as-we-are and let’s-eat-in-the-kitchen. Not so Susan.

We went into the drawing room. Flowers had been formally arranged. Bookshelves lined one wall. They sagged. This would have been Vinnie’s victory—a battle won, if not a war. Vinnie disliked being dependent on carpenters, plumbers, painters, electricians. He thought every man of honor should be his own tradesman-craftsman. Susan would cry out for professionals: “Please, please, not another botched job!” Vinnie would say: “Oh, that! I can do that.” And it might take him years, but eventually he’d get round to it, do-it-yourself book in hand. Why pay pounds when you can do it yourself for pennies? Susan would grit her teeth; her mouth had set into the look of someone who gritted her teeth. It was no longer soft and full, vulnerable; it was firm and thin. But he’d won about the books: they were old and shabby, and very few of them had been published post-1950, which meant they were difficult to keep clean. A duster, swept along the shelf, would catch the bindings, the old jackets, and tear them. It was what we at Accord Realtors call “a most gracious room”—that is to say, there was space for a grand piano, on which were some family photographs and Vinnie’s award for Best Food Writer of the Year—something which looked like a copper leg of lamb perched on a brass plinth. He’d spent a couple of years as a food columnist, Susan said, on a Sunday paper. I knew that. I’d read it every week. Vinnie was away. I was disappointed to hear it. Of course. He was in the States, researching the relationship between dairy products and catarrh.

“Poor Vinnie,” said Susan, “they keep his nose to the grindstone. I think he’d much rather be writing books on the nature of reality, but that kind of book doesn’t sell.”

And I held my tongue and didn’t remind her of Vinnie’s book on the nature of dreams, which had sold but had not suited her view of her husband as a person of the flesh, which left her as a creature of the spirit. In order that she be ethereal, he must be solid. Or so Vinnie had often complained, breaking off more French bread, spooning out more apricot confiture, while Susan sipped her black coffee. That was the summer they weren’t getting on too well, the summer she’d left with Leslie Dong the magnificent.

“Nora,” said Susan, “there’s something I need to share with you.”

I know this “sharing.” It means someone is determined you’re going to end up thinking just as she does. She wants you on her side. And she doesn’t mind hurting you. I didn’t say “I see. And not just the cost of Anita Beck’s painting.” If my Colin and her Amanda were sharing my kitchen in the nude, she and I might well end up joint grandparents. Vinnie and Susan, Ed and Nora, Rosalie and—who? Wallace, down from his mountain? Mr. Collier the mad electrician? All brought together again, with Anita Beck’s painting of Leslie Beck’s bedroom on the wall, to keep the past in tune with the present. I did not think Marion would be washing dishes for us; some things change.

“Share away, Susan,” I said, and felt almost fond of her again. I had been jealous because her house was twice the size of my house, and because she ran a charity and I worked part-time at Accord Realtors, and because Vinnie still had energy and initiative and Ed liked to sit at home and watch TV. And because she had Leslie Beck’s daughter and I, at best, could only have Leslie Beck’s grandchild. But there was more that we shared than that drove us apart: a whole past. I forgave her.

And she shared. She shared.

She told me some things I already knew and some I did not.

She told me how angry she had been with Vinnie and all of us the day she left for Bordeaux with Leslie Beck and Lady Angela. Not because of anything in particular we had done but because of what we were, because we were self-indulgent and self-satisfied and could talk only of food and babies. She was not like us; she had things to do, and here she was trapped with a husband and two small children she had acquired almost by accident. She was being sucked down by hot sun and wine, and the crackle of cicadas was making her deaf, and her brain was ceasing to work, and she kept tripping over half-naked children.

“We were on holiday,” I said. “We were just being, not doing.”

“Nora,” Susan said, “you and Rosalie, whenever was either of you doing, not being, unless in bed with Leslie Beck?”

She shared with me. Leslie Beck had told her and Lady Angela, as they took the B-roads down to Cahors, across the river Lot, to the high plain where the hot south begins and the air smells of overripe peaches, that any woman was his for the asking. Lady Angela had laughed and told Leslie Beck he was a braggart and a liar and a vulgarian, and he said every woman could be had, all it needed was a little planning: the only thing women ever needed was the opportunity and a man who wanted them. And he was a man who liked women. And the women he had had never forgotten him.

“Why’s that?” asked Lady Angela, and Susan, who was irritated and annoyed by Leslie Beck, said from the back, “Because of the size of his thing, Lady Angela, that’s what he means.”

“How do you know?” asked Leslie Beck, surprised. “You’re not one of my women. Not yet.”

“Because Marion saw it by mistake,” said Susan, “and she told me, and I told Rosalie, and Rosalie told Nora.”

“And now you’ve told Lady Angela,” said Leslie Beck, well satisfied, and then had to remind her to drive on the right, because she’d veered directly into the path of an oncoming truck. Lady Angela said it made no difference to her, she was gay, but she’d heard that the length of the male member was not important to heterosexual women. What did Susan say? Susan said she was in no position to make comparisons.

Susan shared with me that she wished then very much that she was back with Vinnie and the rest of us, talking about food and babies. She hated talking about sex. But the conversation was burnt into her memory.

She shared with me that when Leslie Beck presently saw a handprinted sign, “Les Ice Caves des Madones,” by the side of the road, they followed arrows down bumpy lanes to a makeshift village composed mostly of cafés and souvenir shops. Notices invited them to leave the brilliant day for black cold, to view the stalactites and stalagmites. Lady Angela refused to do any such thing; she preferred, she said, to stay above ground as long as possible. Caves made her think of death. “Don’t get into mischief,” she said, and Leslie laughed and said he would if he could, but he doubted if here was the place. Susan and Leslie descended by means of a rickety elevator and joined a party of tourists. They were rowed across an underground lake, where the water was black and terribly still and cold. Above them arched a vaulted sky of rock and, glowing all around, intricately wrought pinnacles of icy stone, pink and green and mauve. In the flickering lights provided by a vulgar management, Susan let Leslie Beck hold her hand.

“Cold enough for you?” he said. He wore a white cricketing sweater, the kind with vertical cables, round his shoulders; the sleeves were tied over his chest. Susan had declined his offer to borrow it. She wore only a summer dress. She shivered. “I told you so,” he said. She had to lean into him on the boat, just for warmth. He put his arms round her. (“Gorilla arms,” said Susan. “They always seemed too long for his body.”)

“See, to the right,” said the guide, “Mother Nature has fashioned a nun, and over there, look, Mother Mary. Look hard and you’ll see she is clasping Baby Jesus to her bosom. Indeed, God is everywhere.”

And the tourists gasped with amazement and gratification at these symbols especially sent by the Creator, and the boat tilted a little in the smooth black water as they craned to make out which exactly was the bit of the salty spire of rock that was Jesus, and all except Leslie and Susan were sure they could tell.

The boat beached. The party followed the guide through a tracery of paths, marveling at more stalactite madonnas—see, see the Holy Child’s little hand—and Indian chieftains with intricate headdresses, and stalagmite chandeliers and soup ladles suspended over their heads—

“The other way round,” I said.

“Don’t interrupt,” said Susan.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Go on sharing.” I did not want to hear this. The reason I had visited the Marion Loos Gallery was not to see Anita’s painting, or to buy it, but because it seemed possible Leslie Beck might show up while I was there. That fate might bring us together once again. Oh love, love; romance etched so deep into the female soul it defies all reason; abandon sense all ye who enter here, and all of us have entered. Romance in the head—nothing to do with lust in the loins. Look, at the time of the hot summer of Berkeley Square I didn’t love Leslie Beck at all; I was seduced by secrets, which are to true love as artificial sweetener is to sugar, calorie-free but in the long run carcinogenic, not the real thing, and only a peculiar aftertaste in the mouth to tell you so, to warn you. A cheat. Everything costs. Nothing is for nothing. Fewer calories, more cancer.

Susan shared with me that Leslie Beck said “Follow me,” and so she did. And they went down slippery paths through slimy rocks which management had not cleaned up, until the noise of the party was lost, and only a glimmer of light struck through from above. Leslie leaned Susan up against a rock and covered her body with his own to keep her warm, and she quite forgot how she despised him: and feeling not his fingers in her hair, but something which she could have sworn was bats, screamed, and ended up lying on the ground with her back in a greenish puddle.

“We’ll lose the others,” she said. “We’ll die down here. No one counted us. No one will miss us. Only Lady Angela, and that too late.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, “just finishing my life now. Would you?”

That touched her greatly. She was a sucker for sentiment, she said; she’d married Vinnie because he told her making love to her was like making love to the sea, something dark and infinite. He had said the same to me, but I didn’t tell her that. I felt ashamed of myself for taking from her something she relied on, grew up with, had her babies by.

“We’re hopelessly lost,” she said to Leslie, as she followed him farther into the jumbled mass of rocks, so cold to the touch, but trusting him, because women do trust men at such times. Then the path opened up and a blast of light and warmer air met them, and there coming toward them, returning to the entrance, was another party, another guide.

“You knew the way,” said Susan. “A shortcut, that was all.”

“How could I?” he said. “We were lucky, that’s all.”

Leslie Beck the lucky.

But when they got down to the villa outside Bordeaux, and Lady Angela mentioned to Anita that they’d stopped off at the caves, Anita, who was suffering from an allergic reaction to the sun, and whose eyes were tiny in a shiny red swollen face, said, “Oh, Leslie and I always stop off there,” and Susan thought she must be blushing, but how could one tell? There were baked beans, brought over from England, along with marmalade and tea bags, with hefty pork chops for supper, and Leslie Beck acted toward her as if she were Lady Angela: not an attempt at flirtation, not a flicker of the eye, a move of the hand; so she got a lift to Bordeaux airport.

Susan shared with me that only then did she realize that they had made love “unprotected,” as she put it, and it was the most fertile time of her cycle, so she went back quickly to the Dordogne to join Vinnie, to fudge any possible issue. Which indeed there was, in the shape of Amanda, she of the crinkly red hair.

I did not share with Susan how disappointed I had been at her unexpected return: what was the point of my stirring up yet more old wounds, old memories? What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Anita had stirred up more than enough already, left us reproach as a legacy. Anita Beck’s revenge, thus to present us with the truth of our lives: we the faithless, who both claim and demand fidelity.

Susan shared with me her worry that Colin might be Leslie Beck’s son, making any liaison between Amanda and Colin incestuous. I told her she had no need to worry. Her own guilt made her anxious; that much I shared with her.

“But Colin is so obviously Ed’s child,” I said. “You only have to look.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, dubiously. “Well, Ed’s always wondered.”

That shook me. I felt cold. I did not let her see.

Susan then shared with me that when Vinnie told her I had seduced him on the banks of the Dordogne, she, being indignant, had told Ed what Leslie had told her, that Leslie and I had been having it off all one summer.

Kiss and tell, kiss and tell. In a secret liaison, each party believes there is a balance of power, an equity of terror, a mutual deterrent; and how often each is mistaken! Pow! Boom! And there you have it, a wasteland of rubble that used to be people’s lives, over which ragged children swarm.

I stopped sharing any more with Susan. It seemed a very one-sided business to me.

I did not bring the matter up with Ed. He had never seen fit, after all, to bring it up with me. I felt diminished and insulted. Either he had gone through powerful emotions and I had simply not noticed, or he was so good that jealousy was not in his nature, in which case it might be possible to reconstrue “good” as “apathetic.” Either way, I did not like it. I could see that the kind of cozy, tranquil love I thought we enjoyed together might not be that at all; it could be just habit—Ed’s need for someone to live with, to shop and cook and be pleasant, to put aside money for the future, to watch TV with; someone who would try to prevent the children from smoking in the house; someone lying there beside him, night after night, to satisfy such rare sexual urges as he had.

Or perhaps he was doing me a kindness: staying with me, keeping the home together for the sake of the family. Forgiving me but no longer liking me or trusting me—living a half-life with me because of Leslie Beck. Nodding in front of the television, night after night, rather than speak to me; animated with friends, dreary with me. How many men are like this with their wives? Because finally, word has got back.

Anita Beck, this is a fine revenge.

I write this on Monday. On Saturday, Rosalie said, “Nora, you’re nuts. Nothing’s altered since yesterday, and yesterday you were perfectly happy, so what are you going on about?”

Rosalie was to spend the afternoon at Mr. Collier’s. He had refilled the swimming pool in her honor. She was not sure she wanted that. She would have to appear in a swimsuit and was nervous that her cellulite might put him off.

“My marriage is built on lies,” I said, dismally.

“Think yourself lucky to have one,” said Rosalie, briskly. “At least they’re your lies, not his.”

She was putting strips of wax on her legs: pressing lengths of fine, sticky paper onto the skin, ripping it off, its surface now darkened by removed, unwanted hair. It was both fascinating and disgusting.

“I’m going to be late,” she said. “Marion was on the phone for hours. I wish Leslie Beck would fade back into the wallpaper. Everyone’s been upset since he turned up. Now Marion’s thinking of firing Barbara. Can you imagine? Where is Ed this morning?”

“He had to go to the office,” I said.

“Um,” she said, and I thought, well, Vinnie’s away, and Susan’s in Kew Gardens Square, and for all I know Ed’s not at the office, he’s with her. But this could only be my paranoia. Sometimes I felt paranoia was the only strong emotion that now possessed me, rendered me irrational. All that was left of love was the fear of abandonment, the child kicking and screaming, lost to all reality in its tantrum.

Neither Mr. Collier nor Mr. Render is in the office today. I can shuffle papers as much as I want, do some more work on the scene at the Marion Loos Gallery, as reported by Marion to Rosalie, and by Rosalie to me. No doubt errors have crept in, but there’s the fun of it. Truth is too rigid a master not to take pleasure in cheating him. It is, in any case, a relief to forget my own predicament, at least for a while.

So let’s envisage it. Marion stands staring at the Anita Beck painting. She has the Guardian review page in her hand: “Group Show at the Marion Loos,” by Melanie Deutsch. It is not the lead review, but you couldn’t expect that for such a show. And at least it runs to a respectable length, which is good, though it does refer to a “little, good-hearted show.” There is even a photograph. It is of the Anita Beck painting, which to Marion’s surprise looks remarkably good in black and white. No doubt that is why it was chosen. Much of the column is devoted to Melanie Deutsch’s particular theory, the apex notion—namely, that it takes a whole lot of indifferent paintings to produce one good one. By inference, the Anita Beck is the one at the apex of the pyramid. Marion has no patience with this kind of thing, but when she looks around the gallery and sees eight red dots for every ten paintings, she is not too disturbed. And at least no one has said, as they perfectly well could have, that Marion Loos has lost her nerve, is playing safe—that as recession bites, standards fall.

She has had four offers for the painting and refused them all: two from regular clients, one from Nora, and one from Susan. She is not usually given to such quixotic behavior—on the contrary. She supposes she wishes to spite Leslie Beck, or perhaps she merely wanted to own the painting herself. She could have put it in a darkish corner at home and no one would have taken much notice of it. Now that there has been a photograph in the Guardian, all this will change. She has to rethink.

Enter Leslie Beck, waving the newspaper.

LESLIE:	You should have marked it up at least two thousand more. I told you so.
MARION:	You didn’t happen to sleep with Melanie Deutsch?
LESLIE:	Marion, all that is over. I am an old man. You must come round to the house; I’ve at least two hundred canvases there.
MARION:	She must have worked hard before she died.
LESLIE:	She did. I encouraged her. I was her muse. I’m lost without her. To grow old alone... don’t you feel alone, Marion? The dark edging in? The Life Force fading?
MARION:	I have the gallery, I have my friends, I have my work. No.
LESLIE:	And your cats; I hear you have cats. It worries me. That’s a bad spinstery sign, Marion.
MARION:	How do you know I have cats?
LESLIE:	Someone told me. Yes, your delightful assistant. Your Barbara. The one with the difficult husband. She tells me she was at college with Melanie Deutsch. Where is Barbara?
MARION:	I don’t know. She’s late in.

Enter Aphra.

APHRA:	Hi, creep. How ya doing?
LESLIE:	Hi, minilight of my life.
APHRA:	Who’s the major? Don’t tell me. Barbara. Your generation never gives up. It’s all the red meat you eat. Disgusting. Do you know what the legacy of your lot is to us? AIDS. I read it in someone else’s paper, on the train.

The phone rings. Marion answers it. It’s the Tate. They want to know all about Anita Beck: what is the corpus of work; can they view it; who are the executors; is the legal position uneasy? Instead of handing them straight over to Leslie Beck, she says she will call back. She hates Leslie Beck. She asks him if Anita Beck left a will, and Leslie says no, and Marion says in that case he can’t dispose of the paintings until after probate, and that can take years.

LESLIE:	Whose side are you on, Marion?
MARION:	Anita’s.

And now she feels better. Leslie leaves, pursued by angst. Enter Barbara, with baby in arms.

BARBARA:	I’m sorry, Marion. I didn’t know what to do. Ben refuses to look after Holly anymore. I thought he was a proper caring father. But now his office has come off flexitime, and he says his job is more important than my job; mine is just pin money, and anyway, a baby needs its mother. The truth is, it’s been all trouble and complaints ever since the baby was born. We’ve both been so tired, and there’s no money for proper child care, and I’d no idea it was going to be like this.
APHRA:	Why didn’t you ask me? I could have told you.
MARION:	Just go away, Aphra. I don’t want to hear your marital woes, Barbara. This is your workplace, not a therapist’s office. And you should have rung about bringing the baby.
BARBARA:	The phone’s been busy all morning. We need another line.
MARION:	Don’t tell me how to run my business.
BARBARA:	And I thought you’d be in a good mood, what with the Anita Beck in the Guardian. I thought you’d be really happy.
MARION:	You are not a little girl, Barbara. And this is not a game.
BARBARA:	You’re just jealous because Leslie Beck showed me Anita’s paintings. And because I can pull strings at the Guardian, and you can’t anymore. He said you used to be his au pair. Is that true?

The baby starts to cry.

MARION:

I think perhaps you’d better take the baby home, Barbara, right now. People come to galleries to be away from babies. I think your husband’s right; a mother’s place is at home with her child. You are probably too highly qualified for this job.

Barbara starts to cry as well.

BARBARA:

But I love working here. I want to work here. It’s just how can I do everything? Finish this shift, go home, and the housework starts, and no one ever tells you you’re beautiful, or cares what it’s like for you. All they do is worry about the baby. And I take one night off, just one, and look what happens. Ben gets hysterical, and you get moody. Why don’t you just run off with Leslie Beck, Marion? He’s your last chance. Poor man, he’s so sad. His wife died. I only stayed to comfort him, and he couldn’t, anyway. He said he was like King David, and could I just warm him all night, but I had to go because of Ben. I thought we were all friends.

Aphra has the baby; she has her knuckle in the baby’s mouth.

APHRA:	I think I’d rather like one of these....
MARION:	You’re both fired.

But neither of them takes any notice of her, and both go into her office to make themselves some herbal tea, to reduce their stress levels. Marion would like to cry, but the phone keeps ringing, and she has to do three people’s work, and she can’t.

So much for Marion. Back to Rosalie, finishing her leg wax on Saturday morning, talking to me, myself wondering if Ed is where he says he is, at the office. Rosalie’s legs are now smoother than they were, but not so young as they were, and she has a lot more weight to lose. I wondered, if Ed were to leave me, would I find someone else, could I keep someone else, would I want to?

“Rosalie,” I said, “there is something you ought to know about Mr. Collier.”

“He said people would get round to warning me sooner or later,” said Rosalie. “He’s a mass murderer. I know. He told me.”

“It’s not a joke.”

“Anyway,” said Rosalie, “she deserved it. Fancy doing that to a man, cuckolding him in his own house, in her own bath. Baths are even worse than beds. At least Leslie Beck only did me out-of-doors, not in his wife’s bed.”

She was angry with me. I knew she would be. She stared at herself in the mirror.

“Leslie Beck or a mass murderer,” she said. “What’s the difference?” Then she relented, and smiled at me, and pecked me on the cheek. I could smell a thousand lotions, a thousand scents—all the aromas of the past.

“Of course he didn’t do it,” she said. “He just ran into a perfectly horrible woman, and married her, and now he’s met me, and together we’ll look after the Pekingese.”

“What about Bingo?”

Bingo was Wallace’s name for the red setter. Rosalie had tried to call him Hector, but over the years Bingo had won. I wondered if Wallace and Mr. Collier had anything in common and decided they were both open, as it were, to the drastic. Both made headlines.

“I might give Bingo away,” said Rosalie, and I thought, well, that’s the end of Wallace, and probably Bingo. She’d never liked him. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll take him with me if it ever comes to it, but it probably won’t,” and she kissed me again. “I don’t think Wallace fell,” she added. “I think he jumped. We had a fight just before he left. He was looking at Catharine, who had just had her hair cut short, so it curled all over her head, and Wallace said she reminded him of someone. Who could it be? I named an aunt or two, on both sides; but he went on shaking his head. So I said perhaps it was the face he saw when he looked in the mirror, and I reminded him of what Jocelyn Beck had once said—’the spitting image of her father’—and I think there was something about my voice, because Wallace said, ‘Oh, yes, the Becks, back in the Primrose Hill days. That’s who it is. Leslie Beck.’ And then he stopped talking. All that night and all the next morning he didn’t say a word to me. And then he went off to the Matterhorn, for this PR race to the top. The Matterhorn’s dead easy, any tourist can do it, but it always looks good on film. I think it was for a Diet Coke TV ad.”

“How low we all sink,” I said. “Once mountain climbing was all about purity and solitude and spiritual endeavor, now it’s about Coca-Cola.”

“Maybe it was Diet Pepsi,” said Rosalie. “We both preferred that. Not so sweet. But ‘Leslie Beck’ were the last words Wallace ever spoke to me.”

And Rosalie went off to Bluebeard’s castle to sun by Mr. Collier the mad electrocuter’s swimming pool and worry about her cellulite, and I went home, where I found Ed sitting reading a manuscript in the back garden. The lawn needed mowing but I didn’t mention it. I just couldn’t myself have sat and read with a clear conscience in grass as long as ours, and I was surprised he could.

“It was too good a day to stay in the office,” he said, “so I brought some manuscripts home.”

I said to him, because I couldn’t help it, “Did you see the photograph in the Guardian? That was a painting by Anita Beck. Remember the Becks, back in the Primrose Hill days?”

“I thought her name was Jocelyn,” he said, but at least he spoke, which was more than Wallace had to Rosalie.

“That was the wife before Anita.”

“I think we’re remarkable,” he said, “you and I, to have stayed married to each other so long, considering how things go in the world.”

And he smiled at me so sweetly I felt better, until I thought, perhaps smiles are like flowers and are offered to assuage guilt. Perhaps scowls and empty vases denote a happy home.

The next day was Sunday, and Ed went with Colin and Amanda for a walk in the park. He seemed tranquil, cheerful, and subdued, as usual. I tried not to stare at Colin; no need to reassure myself that he was indeed Ed’s child, of course he was, it was just that reason itself was becoming disturbed. There was no way Colin could be Leslie Beck’s. Unless sperm loitered and hung about—it was meant not to, but how could you be sure? To think too closely about the origins of these strapping children was distressing; by magic they appeared, by magic they endured. Surely we could leave it at that?

And Colin, as I watched the three of them leave the house, had so much the same build, the same shape, though on a larger scale, as his father, that I was quite returned to my senses. He held hands with Amanda, who had Leslie Beck’s bright blue eyes and her mother’s straight thick hair. She had her mother’s briskness and competence, but not, thank God, her mother’s insensitivity. I had decided that though I would be courteous to Susan when and if I saw her, I would not seek out her company if I could help it.

As soon as they had gone, I went to the phone booth on the corner and called Leslie Beck. It took me some minutes to pluck up the courage to do it. I remembered the number by heart. It was like being a schoolgirl again. I felt once again what I had quite forgotten: the sensation of standing at the crossroads of a thousand different paths, adventure round every corner. I understood what was stripped away by the passage of time: the sense of alternative; and the understanding was not pleasant. I am old, I thought, but not so old as Leslie Beck, who can’t manage it anymore, and what could I possibly want from him other than that? But there was something I needed, some acknowledgment I had to have, some picture of myself when young, thrown back from his eyes. Nothing of me reflected from Ed’s eyes any longer, nothing.

And I went to the phone booth; I did not use my own phone. It was the habit of the past reasserting itself—the excitement of secrecy. I had nothing to hide yet was afraid of being overheard; perhaps, in some mysterious way, I might be recorded on the answering machine. Technology may be man’s friend, but it is the enemy of the secret woman.

Leslie Beck answered the phone. His voice had not changed.

“Why, Leslie,” I said, as rehearsed, “it’s Nora. Ed and I were so sorry to hear about Anita. It must be very upsetting for you.”

There was silence at the other end. I prattled on. “Marion told me Anita was painting toward the end. I wondered whether there was any more of her work available, or perhaps you only sell through Marion? I saw the picture in the Guardian—of course, that’s not why...” I was flustered. This was not going right.

Then he said, “You rehearsed that, Nora.”

“Oh, God, Leslie,” I said, in my normal voice. The other had sounded strained and squeaky.

“Why didn’t you come to the fucking funeral?”

“I didn’t like to,” I said. It was pathetic. I felt guilty.

“What none of you women seem to realize,” said Leslie Beck, “was that Anita understood me. Why don’t you come round?”

I didn’t want to. I had only wanted to hear his voice. It was like taking old family snapshots out of a box: I would remember myself as a different person, a stranger.

“I’m supposed to be cooking Sunday lunch,” I said, stupidly. I could have been nineteen.

Leslie Beck said I must use my ingenuity. I had always been good at ingenuity. Anita had admired it. So I went home and left a note on the kitchen table to say I’d gone round to Rosalie’s, she wasn’t well; why didn’t they all eat out at the Golden Friar, they did a special Sunday lunch; I’d try to meet them there—and took the train to Leslie Beck.

Twelve Rothwell Gardens was dilapidated and shabby. The property had a For Sale sign on a board in front of it. So, I noticed, had four others in the street. The kind of people who had recently upgraded their properties and life styles and bought in the Gardens were those now most hit by the recession: senior management, leading architects and lawyers. All business was bad, except for debt collection, which thrived.

Leslie Beck opened the door. He wore his dressing gown. His feet were bare. He apologized. He said he thought he had flu; he was not the man he had been. His face had shriveled in upon itself. The hair was now sandy, not red; it no longer flourished, as once it had. The full mouth had narrowed.

“You’re looking good, Nora,” he said. “It’s a bad day for me. Some days the depression’s bad; sometimes it lifts. It’s lonely without Anita. I’ve let things get into a mess.”

He had. The floors had not been swept for a time, nor the carpets vacuumed. Things lay where they had been put, in a most disconcerting way. Furniture, for some reason shifted to the middle of the room, just stayed where it was. The dresser stood six inches from the wall; the sofa faced the door—as if Leslie had suddenly lost his zest for life in midpursuit of a mouse. Socks lay discarded, orange peel likewise; old newspapers, receipts, and torn envelopes with scrawled telephone numbers upon them lay on the table, and empty plastic shopping bags lay on the floor where they had fallen, some still full of cat food. All the potted plants were dead.

“Doesn’t Polly come and help?” I asked.

“Polly and I have quarreled,” he said. “She’s a pig. All my daughters are pigs.”

Not Amanda, I was going to say. Not Catharine. But I didn’t. There’d been quite enough sharing of late. Nor did I ask him what the quarrel was about.

“And, of course,” he said, “Anita lost interest in the house toward the end. She just shut herself in the studio and worked away. At the end, she really came into her own.”

“What we need,” I said, looking round the disgusting kitchen, “is Marion back in here to do the cleaning-up.”

“I thought perhaps you’d do it,” he said, and laid a scrawny finger on my sleeve.

“You thought wrong,” I said.

“You don’t have any money to spare?” asked poor old Leslie Beck. “Until the fees from the paintings come dribbling through, I’m going to be in trouble, along with the rest of the world.”

I said I did not. I said I had five thousand pounds in a bank, all that remained of my father’s legacy. The rest had been filtered into the expenses of our daily living. Ed and I, it occurred to me now, could not afford to be divorced. He had provided the necessities; I had provided the comfort.

“Then why don’t you buy a painting now?” he asked, “and save a gallery commission?”

It did not seem quite fair to Marion, but Marion was as rich as Croesus, everyone knew, and Marion had sold Leslie Beck’s baby and perhaps didn’t deserve too much.

And he took me up the dusty stairs and had to hold the banister as he went. I thought perhaps he was overdoing the old-man act and was making a play for sympathy and it would end in bed if he could, but I hoped not. I had no desire for him left, and it was sad. It emptied out something inside me, a secret dwelling place, as if someone had stuck a Vacancies sign in the window of a small hotel, and it smacked of failure, weakening hope, and shrinking income.

We went up narrow winding stairs, where cat’s turds, dried and twisted, lay in the dust, to the loft. I wondered what had happened to the cat; Leslie had never liked them. Leslie opened the door, and color came pouring out as if it were sound, struck through us as if it were radiation. I understood why Leslie Beck seemed so diminished; if you stood in the force field too long, it would simply carry you off. The smell of fresh oil paint and turpentine still hung in the air. The loft had been opened out: three rooms had been made into one and large square skylights had been set in the roof, through which the midday sun shone.

I hoped Ed’s walk in the Richmond park had been okay; it can get hot and dusty even there, and the fumes from car exhausts can hover. He must be home by now. They would be getting ready for the Golden Friar, complaining of my absence. They might even ring Rosalie, but there would be no reply. She was lunching with Mr. Collier, who one day I must try to call Sandy, as she did.

The sun struck the canvases stacked against the walls and threw back the reflected light which had so startled me when Leslie Beck opened the door. Here were rugs and books and photographs, dried flowers and painted screens, powdered paint in jars, the paraphernalia of the artist’s studio: the overflowing effect which Vinnie tried for, and failed to achieve. But how could he possibly have achieved it, living with Susan? When we were young, I thought, our failings did not announce themselves. They were clothed in flesh, blanketed by fertility, lost in laughter, drunkenness, oil and garlic, peaches and tomatoes, laughter and conversation: all the things we denied Anita Beck because we despised her, and she had saved up what she could and given them back to us.

Anita used strong colors. The painting Leslie Beck had carried to Marion Loos was, of all her work, the most gentle and tentative. I was not sure I liked them, but what did I know? And what did like have to do with it, anyway? Marion never let one say “like” of a painting. It’s not subjective, she’d say, it’s nothing to do with you. It is something objective, something you have to acknowledge; you either have an aesthetic sensibility or you don’t. And if we tried to press her on the aesthetic sensibility, all she’d say was that it correlated with the individual’s capacity for moral action. So we gave up, suspecting she was trying to tell us she was better than the rest of us, even Susan.

There was a painting of a half-finished building, with a platform four stories up and a little cage, and the suggestion of small people lost in paint. Anita liked to use paint thickly: color was encrusted over color. There was a bedroom in what looked like one of the wretched small hotels you find round King’s Cross station. There was a seascape of a tide creeping round a headland to beat itself against cliffs, just the small narrow strip of brilliant sand remaining. There was an amazing cave with stalactites and stalagmites contorted into terrifying shapes, piled one on top of the other, entangling, like a Hieronymus Bosch. And bedrooms aplenty, mostly quite modest, some almost ordinary, but all pleasant, as if she weren’t quite sure about them but had decided to be kind. And there was one of a basement room with a strange mushroom growth inside it. I didn’t think that one worked so well.

“I was her muse,” said Leslie Beck. “None of you would believe me, but I was. She liked me to get out; she needed me, she used me. It was her Life Force, not mine. I was nothing. Just a kind of brush she used. She stayed here; I left the house. She sent me out.”

He was crying. I hated to see it. I thought perhaps I would put my arms around him, but I didn’t.

“But, of course,” he said, “women don’t get the recognition they deserve. I might as well set fire to it all. What’s the use?”

I asked him which one he liked the best, and he searched for what he wanted and drew out the one with the unfinished building and the wooden platform four stories out of twenty-eight high. And I was inordinately pleased. I had found what I had come for: a sense of preeminence, of being something special, not the least of all of us; not the one whom Ed put up with or Vinnie could do without, whom Susan despised and Rosalie jeered at, but the one whose energies Anita Beck could best translate onto canvas. I cried, too, and crying no longer suited me, I could not do it gracefully.

“That one’s twelve thousand pounds,” said Leslie Beck when he had recovered.

“I can’t possibly,” I said.

“I can’t afford to let it go more cheaply.”

“It’s out of the question.”

“Perhaps you could share it with Susan,” said Leslie.

“I’d rather not,” I said.

“Have one of the cheaper ones,” he said. “One of the bedrooms.”

“I wouldn’t feel satisfied with it,” I said, and he had the grace to laugh. We shut the door between us and that peculiar source of power and went down through the dingy, messy rooms and corridors, which set the studio off, as a particularly dreary frame, Marion assures me, will sometimes set off a particularly lively painting.

I went home. When I opened the door, Colin stood facing me. He seemed angry and upset.

“The Golden Friar can’t have been that bad,” I said.

“It isn’t a joke, Nora,” said Amanda. “It’s terrible.”

“Bitch,” the usually polite and affectionate Colin said to me, and went to his room and slammed the door.

“What happened?” I asked, alarmed. “Where’s Ed?”

I was tired, I was upset, I wasn’t sure what more I could face. Life goes on quietly, year after year; everyone smiles, then suddenly everything erupts. I had a headache.

“I think Ed’s gone,” said Amanda, and I went into some other kind of gear, abruptly. I expect I still had a headache but did not notice.

“Colin and me are brother and sister,” said Amanda. “Ed says so. Well, half-brother and -sister. So we can’t be in the same bedroom, not under his roof, Ed says. He’s flipped.”

“But that isn’t true,” I said. I went up to Colin’s bedroom and kicked the door until he opened it.

“This is crazy,” I said. “You are who you’re meant to be. You’re Ed’s son.”

“Don’t be like this, Colin,” said Amanda. “Don’t upset people.”

She wouldn’t leave it to me to sort out. She wouldn’t just go away. She pointed out that since Ed was totally wrong about her not being Vinnie’s daughter, he was probably wrong about Colin not being his son. The problem was that Ed had gone insane. I could see her mother in her.

“Colin,” I said, “have blood tests, tissue typing, whatever you like. I won’t be offended. But you are Ed’s son.”

“Then why did Dad say I wasn’t?” asked Colin. “And who is this Leslie Beck, anyway?”

I saw the world tilt: it gently moved to the left, then gently moved to the right. Amanda studied me, stopped me. I thought the whole clock would thereby stop, but it didn’t.

“And you’re drunk,” said Colin. He was the youngest. Richard and Benjamin were at college. Colin had always been the easiest, the most cooperative. My impulse was to slap him, but the discipline of decades restrained me; he was, besides, the tallest of my sons. I began to cry. In fact, I remember shrieking and wailing.

“Sorry, Mum,” said Colin, but still he stared at me as if he hated me, and Amanda looked as if she were settling in for a good long sharing. I sat down on a chair in the kitchen.

And bit by bit I pieced the incident together.

Scene: The Golden Friar, a cheerful and vulgar eating place in the same arcade as Accord Realtors, which the kids like and where they serve skate in black butter, which Ed loves.

COLIN:	I’ll have the haddock and chips and peas.
AMANDA:	I’ll have the grilled chicken and a salad with no dressing.
ED:	We’ll wait for your mother.

They look at him with surprise. Ed usually goes along with the flow of other people’s desires. They wait. Not even Cokes are suggested. Fifteen minutes go by. No mother.

COLIN:	Isn’t that Rosalie over there?
ED:	Yes.
AMANDA:	Who’s she with?
COLIN:	It’s Mr. Collier. Mum works for him.
AMANDA:	Isn’t Rosalie the one whose husband disappeared and no one will say whether he’s dead or not? I think it’s okay for her to go out with a man. What’s she supposed to do?
COLIN:	Wait for him.

Ed has risen and gone over to speak to Rosalie. The children confer and quickly order Cokes, fish and chips, chicken and salad, and skate and black butter for when Ed returns.

AMANDA:	But didn’t your mother say that’s where she was going? That Rosalie was poorly?
COLIN:	That’s funny; so she did.

The Cokes arrive. Ed comes back. Ed sees the Cokes and smashes them across the restaurant, liquid and glass flying here and there. The buzz of conversation ceases.

ED:	Your bitch of a mother. She won’t make a fool of me anymore. Neither will you two. Fucking under my roof. What do you think I am?
COLIN:	Dad, let’s go.
ED:	You’re not even my son. Look at you! Bloody rings in your nose.
AMANDA:	Everyone wears them, Ed. Please calm down.
ED:	(Jeering) Ed, Ed. Look at you, listen to you. “Ed.” You’re not Vinnie’s daughter, either. You’re Leslie Beck’s. The same way this bloodsucker here is. It’s incest, and the way no one has the nerve to say so disgusts me. Where do you think your shit of a mother is? Oh, she’s steamy, she’s steamy....

Various young people, friends of Colin’s, help Ed out of the restaurant. Rosalie is on her feet, paying the waiter for the Cokes. Mr. Collier is picking odd fragments of glass out of his trouser leg. A lot of Coke and glass went their way.

On the way home Ed says he’s sorry if he’s upset everyone; he’s upset himself, says he’s had enough, none of it’s the kids’ fault, but he does not retract his statement about their fathering. He goes to his room. Amanda makes beans on toast. Colin is too distressed to eat. Ed leaves the house with a suitcase. Amanda and Colin decide that if the worst possible case is incest, they don’t care. They can live together so long as they don’t get married, and the sooner they’re out from under the parental roof, the better. I come home. Etcetera.

Our bedroom seems oddly empty. I go to sleep for three hours. I dream I am in the Marion Loos Gallery, searching in an empty purse, trying to borrow money from Rosalie. When I wake up, Ed hasn’t returned. I call various friends, who express surprise and concern but haven’t seen him. I try Susan repeatedly but get only the busy signal.

I say to Colin and Amanda what I think I ought to say: that they mustn’t let this incident drive them together. They’re far too young to commit themselves to anything permanent. This upsets them even more, so I shut up. Anyway, my heart isn’t in their lives; it’s in my own. I am ambivalent about Ed’s absence. Something that feels rather like Leslie Beck’s Life Force wells up as an exhilaration, some notion of freedom; on the other hand, the house seems to be a kind of desert, its contents whited out in a heat haze. The television is on and no one is watching it.

Rosalie comes round.

“Colin,” she says, “your father is your father. I have known your mother forever. No one has suggested anything different, ever. Your father has flipped. He will be back soon.”

Amanda stares in a mirror and says, “I don’t look like anyone I know. I never did. I’ve never belonged.”

Colin says to me, “Where were you, then? When you said you were with Rosalie, where were you? Are all women like you?”

Bloody Ed, I think. I’d like to kill him. That makes me feel better.

Rosalie says, Why didn’t you tell me? We only went to the Golden Friar because we thought no one would see us. Whoever goes to the Golden Friar?

And so on.

Colin says, If Ed never comes back, how am I going to get a bit of tissue from him to tissue-type?

Amanda says her mother is a hypocrite, too, and who is Leslie Beck, anyway? What do I know about Leslie Beck?

I do not say he is the man with the biggest dong in the world. It no longer seems funny or wistful, or whatever it was, and besides, it is no longer true.

Rosalie puts me to bed and gives me pills. I hear her saying, “Just to add to it, Nora, I think I’m afraid of Mr. Collier. I don’t want to go out with him anymore, but I have to. I don’t like to annoy him. He has a funny look in his eye. You know the way spaniels look at you sometimes, and it could be devotion or they could be about to bite? That kind of look. Or perhaps I just imagined it.”

She hasn’t been to bed with him yet; she’s trying to put it off. I go to sleep.

I wake with a start, hearing a strange noise. But it is not really strange. It is Colin and Amanda, demonstrating how little they care about the censure of the world. They will probably now have a baby, just to press home their point.

Sleeping pills sometimes have a strange effect: they paralyze the body, root it to the bed, while agitating the mind. I imagine if you had a stroke and could only move your eyes to indicate yes or no, that’s what you would feel like all the time. I would rather be dead, but how could you achieve it?

I am cold all down my left side: it is the absence of Ed making itself felt. I take refuge in Marion’s head. Open my wide eyes to look at an alternative world.