There is no point in remaining in Marion’s head. There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.
I called Ed at his office on his direct line. I spoke to his secretary. There was a muffled conversation behind a blocking hand. His publishers are old-fashioned; it seems they cannot afford hold buttons on individual lines. Finally Ed spoke.
“What do you want to say to me?”
“Where were you last night?”
“I go where I want to. If you’d like information, ask your lawyer to get it.”
“But, Ed, what happened? Nothing happened. Why are you being like this?” And so forth. You try not to, but this is how it comes out. Ending up with: “You’ve ruined Colin’s life. You’ve put doubts in his mind from which he’ll never recover. You’ve pushed him into Amanda’s arms.”
“It’s you who’ve done it all, Nora, not me. I just at last responded. I’ve had enough. Now go away.”
“I suppose,” I say, “now you’ve gone through all my money, you can do without me.”
A pause.
“Well, Nora, you would say that.”
I am ashamed of myself. I am panicking. Ed has never done anything like this before, said anything like this. He is hard. I understand that he does not mean to come home—for crimes committed against the marriage many years ago, plus my failure to turn up at the Golden Friar.
Mr. Collier comes toward my desk. “Nora,” he says, “I think we’re going to have to say no to personal telephone calls at the office.”
Ed has hung up, anyway. I replace the receiver. Mr. Collier stares at me, his murderous eyes kindly. If Rosalie enters Mr. Collier’s bed, will she be allowed out of it again? If Rosalie fails to enter Mr. Collier’s bed, will she be allowed to live or be killed for spite?
Without Ed, I perceive, I am unprotected. I am alone. I have five thousand pounds in a bank, and a dependent child who hates me, and a house with a mortgage that increases rather than decreases every month and is unsalable. It is as well I did not buy Anita Beck’s painting.
If I can have Colin and Ed tissue-typed, will that make a difference? No, it won’t. Ed believes what for some reason he wants to believe. Paranoia. Is he with Susan? I dial her number.
NORA: | Hello, Susan. |
SUSAN: | Why, Nora. |
NORA: | Was Ed with you last night? |
SUSAN: | Of course he wasn’t. |
She’s lying.
MR. COLLIER: | I did ask you not to make personal calls from this office, Nora. |
Do I have to put up with this man? Yes, I can see I do. If I am suddenly deprived of Ed’s income, I cannot afford to walk out of jobs, especially not ones which give me enough free time to sit and write, as I do now, what publishers’ readers will assume to be a novel, and may pay quite a large sum for. Richard and Benjamin are not yet wholly independent. Ed believes children past the age of twenty-three should be independent of their parents; he has not helped Richard and Benjamin. I have. Which would benefit them most? My public silence about myself, or financial help while they establish themselves in the world?
“Mr. Collier,” I say, “I am truly sorry. The fact of the matter is that I am upset. Do you think I could take the afternoon off?”
“I think that would be a very good idea,” he says. “And I’m sorry if I nagged. It’s just I’m expecting a call on that line from my lawyer. Rosalie and I are hoping to speed up the legal process and have Wallace officially declared dead. Naturally, I’m anxious. We do so want to get married as soon as possible.”
Brides in the bath! And Mr. Collier rubs his hands together, as I imagine once did Mr. Crippen, the famous mass murderer, whose wives never emerged from the bath to consummate the marriage; but I can’t properly concentrate on Rosalie’s troubles.
“I hope I can be a bridesmaid,” I say.
I make my way to Kew Gardens Square, parting crowds as a breaststroke swimmer might part muddy and dangerous waters. Ed’s car, missing from outside our house, is outside Susan’s. It is a strange feeling, when the black anger of paranoia, of jealousy in the head, is suddenly proved justified. The emotion is lessened, not heightened. The sensation is of relief.
Susan opens the door to me. She is wearing black silk pajamas, probably described in a catalogue as a “lounging set”; her hair falls over one eye; she looks absurd. She is too old for romantic dishabille. I cannot believe Ed is taken in. She is wearing her glasses and has Wilson’s Sociobiology, a very large volume, weighing down one hand. No doubt she saw me coming. No doubt she was prepared for it.
The energy of my entry drives her back into her own hall. She leans against the wall mirror, half amused, half alarmed. It is her amusement that gets to me.
“Why, Nora,” she says, “are you okay?”
“Where’s Ed?” I ask.
“Shouldn’t he be in his office?”
“Why is his car outside your door?”
“Is it? He must have decided to go by train. It’s easier from here than from Richmond. Terrible to be a daily commuter from Richmond. I don’t know how I stood it for so long.”
“Was he here last night?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Vinnie?”
“Still away. Why, do you want a replacement for Ed?”
She doesn’t like me at all.
I ask her how long it has been going on and she says nothing is going on and I am paranoid, and I accuse her of breaking up my marriage and she says my own unreasonable jealousy has done that, forced Ed out of his home. That and my constant infidelity. I am baffled. I am wronged, and Susan claims some kind of moral victory? How can this be?
“He has started divorce proceedings against you,” says Susan, and I remember Jocelyn and Leslie Beck and stay calm. Once you start throwing things, you have had it.
She takes me into the living room and starts sharing with me.
She shares with me how unhappy Ed has always been with me, how he has had nobody intelligent to talk to for years, how if it had not been for me and my noisy insistence on having children, he would now be head of his own publishing house and not merely a senior editor.
She shares with me how Ed has stayed with me for the sake of the children, and tried to keep things on an even keel, treated Colin as his own, though everyone knew he was Leslie Beck’s.
“That’s not true,” I say. “Colin is Ed’s son.”
Susan raises an eyebrow. She shares with me how, though Amanda is Leslie Beck’s, Vinnie has always known all about it, and how she offered to have a termination but Vinnie begged her not to. By implication, I should have done the same with Colin. What can I say? I fall silent. She shares on.
She shares with me how I am so noisy and Ed is so quiet. She shares this very softly. She is being very soft and still.
I understand that I am being manipulated, that Susan occupies the moral ground and will repel all interlopers, that she has dragged Ed up there with her, that in her mind, and therefore Ed’s mind from now on, I am dirt. She shares with me how difficult Ed has found my smoking, and the dangers of passive smoking for children.
I see that the photograph of Vinnie on the table has gone, and that there is one of Ed in its place.
She shares with me that if the Golden Friar incident had not happened, something else would shortly have come along, and that Ed had been waiting for it, his opportunity to leave me and join her. That I was now the worthless one, the despised, the moral leper.
And that, if you ask her, Anita Beck was having her revenge, that all misfortune emanated from the loft at 12 Rothwell Gardens, by way of Leslie Beck. And that I had better not say so, or I would be locked up and declared insane as well.
I rose to go.
“I’m glad I could share so much with you,” said Susan. “I think you’ll find this sorting-out is in all our interests. A year from now you’ll be really glad it happened.”
I called Marion from a phone booth.
“Oh, Nora,” she said, “I was feeling really mean the other day. Was I rude? I’m sorry if I was. Rosalie told me about Ed. She could kick herself for not being more tactful. I hope you’re not angry with her. She’s got involved with this man, and she’s scared stiff of him.”
And she told me Rosalie was going round to the Tudor manse to dine with Mr. Collier, á deux, and would not be able to keep out of his bed without being impolite, and she told me Leslie Beck was coming through the door and wanted to marry her, and she did not know what to say to him, she was so depressed. She had not been so depressed since she was eighteen. She thought all her life had been a flight from depression.
So I hung up, because I could see there was no one to talk to, no one to help me. I was on my own.
I bought a ticket to Earl’s Court. I left the station, found a general store, and bought some bananas, some bread, some firelighters, some milk, and some wax polish. I bought a ticket to Chalk Farm station. I changed trains at Piccadilly and left the bag of shopping for the homeless, keeping only the firelighters. I checked I had my cigarette lighter and that it was working.
I walked up the hill from Chalk Farm to Rothwell Gardens. I knocked on the door of No. 12 and, getting no reply, let myself in with the key I had on my key ring, which I kept in the same spirit as I kept the belt of the brown dress with orange flowers. I am an affectionate and romantic person, and I believe that if you join the body, you join the soul. I was surprised, but relieved, that in all these years the lock had not been changed. My plan depended upon it.
I went upstairs to the loft. I thought I heard a feeble meowing from the linen cupboard on the first floor and opened the door. A thin, thin cat crept out from a jumble of soiled sheets and blankets. I would see to the poor creature on the way down. It did not seem to have much life left in it.
I opened the loft door and the blaze of color and energy leapt out at me and swept through me, and I felt weak. I took the box of firelighters from my bag, broke it in half, packet and all, for it seemed to me this had to be done very quickly, and lit both pieces. The box was stale, as so often happens, and the fumes weak, so it took a little time for the flames to catch. But when they were properly alight, and my hands were in danger, I tossed both pieces into the far corner of the studio, one toward the left and one toward the right, where the brushes still stuck in jars of turpentine, only half evaporated, and watched a little puff of flame and the fringe of some Victorian shawl begin to curl and flare, and, leaving the door open for the air to funnel up the stairs, took myself down them, scooping up the little cat on the way. She would have to take her chances with the kind people of Rothwell Gardens. A woman with a cat attracts more attention than one without one.
It took me a few minutes to catch her. The original scooping up took her by surprise and she was quiet, but then she found such strength as she could and wriggled free, tearing my hand with her claws. I had to coax her out from under the kitchen dresser, though there was no time, no time. Then I had to give her some water.
The front doorbell rang. I had failed. Someone had seen smoke, someone had come to warn and help. Well, it was fate. I had the cat safe and quiet in my arms—she was gingery, old and tough, though skinny. No kitten, she. I opened the front door.
There stood Leslie Beck, except it wasn’t. It was Leslie Beck as he’d once been: vigorous and bright-eyed; the hair not so curly, glossy rather than wiry; the eyes, though brown, not blue, wide and startled. Kitten’s eyes. Marion’s eyes. They looked strange in so young a man, as if life were a perpetual affront to his innocence and he couldn’t get used to it.
“Can I help you?” I asked. “I’m afraid I’m on my way out.”
“Does a Mr. Pecker live here?” he asked. It was a strange accent. Of course, South African.
“No,” I said firmly. I had to get away, get him away. “Sorry, wrong address.” I could hear a crackle from upstairs. I closed the front door behind me and joined him on the step.
He followed me down the street. I put the cat down outside No. 6. I remembered pleasant people living there. They had probably moved on long ago, but pleasant people sell to pleasant people, or try to.
“Are you just leaving that cat?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. He looked puzzled. “It lives there,” I said.
He followed me, talking. He said that Rothwell Gardens had been his last chance. He was flying back to Cape Town the next day. He was trying to trace his natural parents. All he knew was the name: Pecker, Becker, something like that. His adoptive father had died; his adoptive mother couldn’t remember much about any of it—she had a drinking problem. He’d looked them all up in the phone book, rang around; now he was trying Becks as a last resort. It had been a silly idea. They wouldn’t want to see him, anyway. But he felt at home here in this country.
“Come with me,” I said, “but give me a moment first.”
Docile, he followed.
At Chalk Farm station I phoned the fire department. Three phone boxes were out of order; the fourth worked. In Richmond, Accord Realtors is proud to assert, public services work to a high degree of efficiency. There is little vandalism. We may murder our wives in the bath, and their lovers, too, but the public telephones work.
I told them I had seen flames coming from No. 12 Rothwell Gardens. The sooner they came, the better. I wanted the loft to burn and the paintings; I had nothing against the rest of the house. Anita should not have been there, anyway. The house was Jocelyn’s by rights. Anita was not entitled to the vengeance she had been exacting.
I sat with the young man, Jamie Streiser, until I heard the fire sirens coming up the hill from King’s Cross. Then we bought tickets to Green Park.
“You’re a very strange lady,” he said, on the way.
“None stranger,” I agreed, “except probably your parents.”
He was a good-looking boy, and companionable; an excellent return on an investment, I thought. Half a million, and your capital back! I told him about it. I put Marion’s case well, Leslie’s less so. I felt a great deal hinged on his response. He thought for a time.
“I paint pictures,” he said. “That’s what drove my adoptive mother to drink.” I thought being called an adoptive mother by the child you rear might be the more likely cause, but children twist the world to suit themselves. “This woman runs an art gallery, right?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “That’s a relief,” he said. “I thought she might be some old hag. Is she married?”
I told him no. He said she probably thought she wasn’t entitled to happiness. He was sorry about that.
“Other children?”
“No.”
“I can have her all to myself,” he said. “I might change my ticket home. It means losing a couple of hundred quid, but it’s not every day you find your mother. What a coincidence, you on the doorstep like that. A minute either way—”
I asked him to forget about the step. I could see I might end up in prison. It didn’t seem too bad a place to be. I had joined the ranks of the hysterically wicked: the destroyers of art. Cassandra Austen, who tore up so many of her sister Jane’s letters. Ruskin’s maid, who burned his manuscript, nine years into the writing. Burton’s wife, who threw her husband’s erotic diary in the fire. Nora, who burned Anita Beck’s studio and everything in it. Only no one now would hear about Anita Beck; she would not take her place in the annals of art history, and I did not mind one bit. No, I was on the side of the destroyers. Art is a cause of much suffering to innocent bystanders, so they fight back from time to time. Good for them.
Jamie Streiser walked into the Marion Loos Gallery.
“Where is my mother?” he asked. He had a flair for the dramatic.
Marion came out of the stockroom, followed by Leslie Beck. She was flushed. He looked pleased with himself. Barbara and Aphra, embarrassed, tried to look at nothing in particular. Aphra straightened the Anita Beck painting. It fell to the ground, stayed upright, juddering, then toppled back against the wall.
Marion took no notice. Marion and Jamie looked at each other. Marion sighed. Leslie rushed to the painting, fearing damage.
“Leslie,” Marion said, “I’m sorry. It was a sweet offer, but I really can’t marry you. I don’t think it would work. My life is so full as it is, I really can’t fit anything more into it. You know how it is with businesswomen. Busy, busy, busy! I would drive you mad.”
There seemed to me a kind of applause in the air. I looked at everyone’s hands, but they were quite still. I took out a cigarette.
“Nora,” said Marion, “please don’t smoke. It’s so bad for the canvases.”
I put my cigarette away.
Leslie said bitterly to Marion, “I suppose this is another of your young men. You’ll be sorry. Don’t think this offer will come again. You’re an old hag and getting older by the day. Men last, women don’t,” and went back home to Rothwell Gardens.
Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens. It’s so uncomfortable being Nora, I shall give Rosalie a go.
Rosalie is dressing for her date with Mr. Collier. She has been on a diet since first she met him, when it seemed that the nothing happening, and the nothing happening, after Wallace disappeared into the mountains, might turn into something happening.
There are two dresses in her wardrobe which might by now just about do, and between which she must choose. One is black with sequins; one is white with lace around the bodice. You can dress up a little white dress or dress it down, just as you can, mythically, a little black frock. Rosalie is indecisive. But the little black dress has sequins, and are not sequins perhaps metal, and does not metal carry electricity?
ROSALIE: | (Calling) Catharine, Catharine? |
CATHARINE: | What is it, Mum? I’m looking for my hockey shoes. If I could only get onto the college team, Dad would be proud of me. |
Catharine believes that if only she can be good at sports, by some sympathetic magic her father will reappear in her life.
ROSALIE: | Is it metal that carries electricity, or nonmetal? |
CATHARINE: | Why, Mum? |
ROSALIE: | Never mind. |
Rosalie takes down the black dress, the quicker to die. She wants to get it over with. Death has been hovering, in the form of Mr. Collier’s phone calls, in the form of her dreams: last night she was visited by a skeleton, with Wallace’s moist living eyes clear in their sockets, dangling Mr. Collier’s trousered legs and black shoes. If Mr. Collier is a murderer, she might as well die. If he is not, then life might be worth living. Tonight she knows she will find out. Something has to happen; nothing has happened for too long.
She takes down the white dress. It is the one she often wore when she went with Wallace to mountaineering club dinners. A sacrifice then; a sacrifice now. Brides in the bath. Murder, murder, all the way.
She combs her hair. She tugs. A tangle comes right away. Her hair is not rooted so firmly in her head as once it was. She seems to remember combing her hair halfway up a cliff with Leslie Beck, when they were on their way back to Jocelyn. He had handed her a comb. Why? She did her best, but the wind undid her efforts. Perhaps later he slipped that particular comb into the silver casing of the relevant part of Jocelyn’s brush, comb, and mirror set. Perhaps later still suggested that Anita paint it. A linking object, as some objects are even without this kind of human intervention, joining past to present. A stupid thing like a comb. All women have them, use them with shared emotion, staring in mirrors.
A phone rings.
CATHARINE: | Will you take it, Mum? |
ROSALIE: | Okay. |
She puts on the white dress, since it’s nearest, but it’s tight. By the time she gets to the phone it has stopped ringing. Rosalie bustles off to the Tudor manse in her little car, in a too-tight white dress.
Mr. Collier comes to meet her, beaming pleasure, as she hurtles down the drive. The division between lawn and drive is lined with white stones; there are carriage lamps on either side of a brass-knockered door. He’s been picking roses. He opens the car door. He is not very tall; his face is round and benign; he does not have much hair. He is as unlike Wallace as anyone can be: Wallace is tall, hairy, and cavernous. Mr. Collier can rig up a cable from the electricity meter; Wallace is hopeless at that kind of thing. Wallace takes his own life because his wife was once unfaithful; Mr. Collier takes his wife’s life for the same reason. Rosalie thinks Mr. Collier deserves respect; she is prepared to sleep with him. She looks forward to it.
MR. COLLIER: | I say! That’s a dress and a half. I thought we might stay in. There’s dinner in the oven; the maid prepared it. It’s her night out. A real luxury, a live-in maid. If the property market doesn’t start looking up, she might have to go. |
He chatters on. Wallace used to be silent. He would brood, his mind on distant mountain peaks. Mr. Collier—he likes her to call him Sandy, but in her head he’s still really Nora’s Mr. Collier—shows her the rest of the house: shiny modern furniture from Harrods, Chinese carpets, hideous vases, cocktail cabinets. The Pekingese snaps at their heels.
MR. COLLIER: | Not the nicest dog in the world, Rosalie, but my wife’s dog. It’s a comfort to me. You know about all that. A Svengali turned up in her life. I know they said in court it was the other way round, but women always get the blame. You’re something of a feminist; you know all about that. She didn’t deserve to die. Women make mistakes; she was unlucky. |
He begins to look less and less like a murderer; Nora, more and more of an alarmist. But he pours great dollops of gin into her glass and not much tonic, and Rosalie sees he puts great dollops of tonic into his own but not much gin. At the top of the stairs he pauses, faces her; she faces him. He comes closer; he kisses her; no arms around her; his tongue goes into her mouth. Well, that’s all right.
MR. COLLIER: | Oh, Rosalie! I’ve been so patient. I haven’t wanted to lose you. I’ve been through a lot, you know. So have you. |
ROSALIE: | I suppose you didn’t hear back from the lawyers? |
She wants Wallace declared dead. She wants Wallace declared not dead. What she doesn’t want is to dream of Wallace’s skeleton, bleached and rattling in a mountain wind, picked over by birds, with Wallace’s still-living eyes staring at her, reproachful. Mr. Collier’s trousered legs offer reprieve, unless he, too, is death dressed up. It’s hopeless.
MR. COLLIER: | Not yet. I’m a very respectable man, Rosalie. I take this seriously, please believe me. I don’t want us just to have sordid sex. I want a proper relationship with you. Marriage. |
Sordid sex. Can she live with a man who speaks of sordid sex? Yes, she thinks she can, in the Tudor manse. They could ask people to dinner. She could live as Jocelyn Beck once lived, long ago: in propriety. Anyway, he hasn’t said he thinks sex is sordid; just upheld that casual sexual relationships are sordid. All kinds of perfectly decent people believe that, including Wallace, as do most men that she can see, if far fewer women. She positively wants him now to undo her zipper, free her from the constraints of the dress. She is wearing her high-heeled shoes. They are too tight. If he would show her the bedroom she could take them off casually, fall back on the bed and say, “Oh, Mr. Collier—no, oh, Sandy—of course we’ll be married. You and only you, forever more,” and open her arms. It is his fate to kill, hers to be killed.
Does she hear a crackling in her ears, as Anita Beck’s studio burns, as the flames approach, sweep through the length of the room, embracing the past, destroying it, sucking up the sea, the cliffs, the stretch of sand, sparking and arcing, spitting and steaming? Something, at any rate, deafens her to reason.
Mr. Collier shows her the bathroom before he shows her the bedroom. It is a big room. The floor is tiled; there are scorch marks on the tiles. The bath is pink, the taps are gold. The toilet has a pink furry cover.
MR. COLLIER: | Here’s where it happened. Here’s where he tried to kill me; here’s where she tried to save me. She didn’t mean me to die. I couldn’t make the court understand that. |
Mr. Collier for some reason puts in the stopper and turns on the taps. The Pekingese curls up on the pink furry mat that surrounds the toilet and looks soulful. Mr. Collier advances on Rosalie and undoes her zipper.
MR. COLLIER: | Let’s have a bath together. I love to take baths. I take them at all times of the day and night. We’ll drink gin together; we’ll see what happens next. |
ROSALIE: | Here? Where it happened? |
MR. COLLIER: | Yes. It must be exorcised. She’d want that. She wanted me to be happy. She didn’t mean for any of it to happen. He was after my property. He wanted the house. It was the time prices were peaking, but he wasn’t to know that. None of us did. |
The bath is full. It is a very large bath, semicircular. He pours in bath salts. They are scented. Steam rises from pinkish water. Is it cyanide? Mr. Collier takes off the white dress.
MR. COLLIER: | White, my wife’s favorite color. A wardrobe full of white dresses. Virgin white. You are so like her. Beautiful! The court case, everything: like a dream. I was so distressed. Smell the scent in the steam. Don’t you love that? |
She bends, she inhales. Why doesn’t he?
He isn’t taking off his clothes. Why not? But it is absurd to imagine a man will murder not one woman but two in the same bath. One he can talk himself out of, but two? Of course not. Either way, Rosalie does not want to turn back. She is dizzy. Something will happen now.
She hears the sound of sirens. Is it the police? But it’s only the front doorbell, ringing and ringing and ringing, getting the better of the crackling and buzzing in her ears. She thinks perhaps there is some kind of drug in the pink powder, the pink water. He is offering her something to drink; he is adding it to her glass of gin, which she still has in her hand.
MR. COLLIER: | Oh, damn. I’d better go and see who it is. Get them to go away. This is a night for just the two of us. |
Mr. Collier pushes open the bathroom door. She follows him to the top of the stairs. She has no clothes on. It doesn’t seem to matter. He opens the front door; she hears Wallace’s voice. In her head she sees his skeleton, his bony hand upon the bell. The door opens farther; Wallace is pushing it as Mr. Collier tries to close it. The hand seems as much flesh as bone. She walks down the stairs toward it. Wallace stands there.
WALLACE: | For God’s sake, Rosalie, what are you playing at? If it’s not one thing, it’s another. |
Wallace is back from the grave, and Rosalie, too.
I, Nora, take credit for that. I’m pleased with myself; I have the courage to be me again. I was at home waiting for something more to happen. You can become addicted to event very quickly. I was waiting for the police to arrest me, for Ed to come home. The phone rang. It was Wallace.
WALLACE: | Nora? |
NORA: | Is that you, Wallace? Where have you been? |
WALLACE: | Is that all you have to say? |
NORA: | Yes. |
WALLACE: | Can I speak to Ed? |
NORA: | He’s not here. Try him at Susan’s. |
WALLACE: | Have you been drinking? |
NORA: | Yes. |
WALLACE: | Where’s Rosalie? I finally get home after all that, and there’s no one in. |
Wallace has been suffering from amnesia. He found himself penniless and without documents on the China coast; he’d worked his passage from Essen on a tanker flying the Liberian flag. It had taken him forever to get back. Well, that was his story, and he was sticking to it. He might get his job back at the BBC on the strength of it. My own view was that he had met up with some lady from a mountaineering club more his style and type than Rosalie and gone off with her. Changed his mind and decided to come home.
I told him where Rosalie was. I told him despair and grief had driven her into the arms of the Richmond electrocuter; I had tried to stop her, but she was stubborn. He should get round to the Tudor manse and put in his bid before she was permanently gazumped by Mr. Collier.
I sat at the window and waited. Colin and Amanda were out. I was alone in the house. It was tranquil, as a barren landscape is tranquil. I wondered how long Ed had been seeing Susan, how long he had been saying one thing and thinking another, as I had since the summer with Leslie Beck, and whether or not it mattered. The panic, anger, fear, and black jealousy engendered by helplessness, by nonaction, had burned away, shriveled up, when I set fire to Anita Beck’s studio. I was left scoured, clean, and trusting in the fate which had held me up over a cat and so given Marion back her son, and punished Leslie in those areas in which retribution were required, and not others, and which had produced Wallace in the nick of time to save Rosalie, and which now brought Colin, not with Amanda, up the path. He looked so like Ed, I thought at first he was. Ed, coming home, forgiving and forgiven.
Colin said, “I hope you don’t mind. I’m not seeing Amanda anymore. It’s over. She keeps telling me what to think.”
I said, “I don’t mind.”
Colin said, “That’s the only reason.”
I said, “Of course.”
He said, “It doesn’t matter whose child you are. You’re still yourself.”
I said, “That’s right.”
He said, “I’ll speak to you when you’re feeling better.”
I said, “I feel just fine,” but he went away to find some Diet Pepsi. He said Rosalie’s Catharine had got onto the college hockey team, and I said that’s nice.
I waited to see what would happen next. Perhaps now I would be able to give up smoking. The thought prompted me to open a new pack. There had to be some source of pleasure in life, even though it kills you. Self-destruction is the natural state; anything else is an effort.
The gate clicked. I looked up. Vinnie was coming down the path. I hadn’t thought of that. His face was not set and grim; he had not come to talk about Susan and Ed, to be gritty and rancorous. He was smiling. He was coming to talk about us.
Mr. Collier has not been into the office for a week. Mr. Render has been out most of the time. The telephone has scarcely rung. I have written and written and written. I think everyone concerned is in a state either to endure the truth or to deserve it, though I am sure no one ever welcomes it.
Marion calls. She tells me Anita Beck’s studio caught fire; they think sun through the skylight, focusing on glass, was enough to do it. Everything has been so dry and hot. Fortunately, Leslie is insured. With the money he can do up the house and buy himself an electronic wheelchair for his old age, Marion says. Aphra has decided against living with her boyfriend. Marion has had to raise Barbara’s salary. She can’t stand babies, never could. Jamie is staying with her. He thinks he will go to art college in London. What was I doing on Leslie Beck’s doorstep? Trying to buy behind her back? Do her out of a commission? What does it matter—the paintings are burned. The Tate’s lost all interest, thus saving the nation from further shame.
She does talk. But we have to be patient with long-term friends. They’re illustrations—object lessons fate puts in our way, ever hopeful we’ll come to a conclusion or two.
“We’re all saved from shame,” I observe. “I have to go now, Marion. I’m not supposed to be on the phone too long.”
I can tell she’s offended. I wonder whether to call Vinnie. He is at my house, writing the book Susan would never let him write, on the nature of reality. This is not the fate Susan planned for Vinnie. She wanted him miserable, in perpetual darkness, once she turned the light of her eye away from him. Too bad.
It is so much easier writing fiction than autobiography. I gave up the latter for good the day Ed went. Real life is simply not like this, is it. If Ed goes, Vinnie does not turn up. In the real world Amanda stays around to haunt and disturb. The Tate does not call up about Anita Beck’s rather bad, sad painting. Her magic studio does not exist, or if it does, I do not get to see it. But doesn’t life in fiction proceed with éclat! In the real world, Marion grows old alone. Once she’s given Jamie away, he’s gone for good. No one ever knows the truth about Mr. Collier, or what became of Wallace. The children launch themselves into the patternless chaos of their own lives: Catharine does not get on the college hockey team, though this, at least, saves her from muscly calves and tough shins.
Never mind. Leslie Beck is true. Leslie Beck the magnificent; Leslie Beck and his Life Force, moving through our lives, leaping, unstoppable, like electricity, from this one to that one, burning us up, wearing us out, making us old, passing on, its only purpose its own survival. Leslie Beck, enemy of death, bringer of life: the best thing that ever happened to us.
Well, there you have it. Did we do right, did we do wrong? Forget Leslie Beck. Were we good women or bad? I suppose we’ll never know, unless there’s a Day of Judgment, and we’ll find out then. There certainly seems to be a human craving for such a day; but, alas, the needs of humanity at large, like the needs of the individual, are seldom satisfied. We’re all too hungry for our own good. I think Marion was right to sell the baby; she’d have made a dreadful mother—though, oddly, of all of us, she was the one most open to moral scruple. A good person. The others of us did all right by our children, more or less, and I suppose must draw whatever moral credibility we can from that. Nor do I think Leslie Dong the magnificent is necessarily a bad man: the cards he deals at least consist of pleasure and children, not like, say, those of General Schwarzkopf, who hands out cards of glory and death. Many seem not to take offense at that, either.
It’s in the shuffling of the cards, I daresay, that the whole point and purpose lies, and in the capacity for reminiscence, picking over the past, fictional or otherwise. Since God won’t give us a Day of Judgment, or chooses to delay it interminably, we have to write our own.
This is now going in a drawer. Mr. Collier tells me Accord Realtors is finally going to close its doors. After the boom, the bust; and serve us right.
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