6

Love!

‘Love,’ says Gemma grandly, to Elsa, ‘is what the nubile young feel when their search for a mate reaches an appropriate conclusion: it is the tool nature uses to perfect her species. We do not, cannot, choose to love, out of admiration for the other’s spiritual qualities; we love where love seems right, gene calling to gene, as country cats call to each other across fields.

‘Therefore,’ says Gemma, ‘Elsa, I shan’t ask you why you love Victor, I shall simply accept that you do because you say you do. Perhaps your blue eyes need to match his troubled green ones to produce a serene and grey-eyed child?’

‘Oh,’ says Elsa, ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t think either of us wants babies: I mean, it wouldn’t be sensible.’

‘Ah,’ says Gemma, ‘so you mean to join the rest of us? Who, by reason of age, or self-discipline, or common-sense, or fear, or a simple malfunction of fallopian tube or testes, are destined to deny Nature its genetic self-expression?

‘In that case,’ says Gemma grandly, ‘love will be for you what it is for me, the emotion we feel for those who have the capacity to hurt us.

‘Is that what you want, Elsa?

‘Elsa, are you listening?’

‘Does Hamish hurt you?’ asks Elsa, horrified.

‘Yes. He hurts me because he is so often away, making money I enjoy spending. He hurts me because he is sorry for me, and because his inner disabilities are such that they match my more open, more dramatic ones. He hurts me by being tired and ill and unhappy, so that I cannot take credit for making him happy. He hurts me by disliking my friends almost as much as I dislike his. He hurts me by buying antiques himself instead of leaving it to me: I have few pleasures in this world. I love him: so I put up with the hurt he causes me: indeed, it is because he hurts me that I know he loves me, and to live with a husband one loves is good fortune, indeed.

‘And at least he is not unfaithful to me.’

Gemma smiles at Elsa: the smile of a good and loving wife, albeit in a wheelchair.

Elsa smiles at Gemma, wretchedly: the smile of the daughter who has stolen the love of the father, or means to do so.

Gemma smiles.

Elsa loves! How she loves. She is all love.

Elsa loves her mother, but does her mother love her back? Elsa doubts it. Sheila, drinking gin and tonics in the pub with her husband, Elsa’s stepfather: her hair newly streaked: laughing and carrying on, no doubt, as if she weren’t the mother of seven children and the eldest of those run off to live with a married man – well, share a Regency sofa with him in the back of an antique shop – and forbidden to darken her door again. ‘You go with that man if you like,’ said Sheila. ‘You’re a big girl now. Give up your job and your bedsitting room and honest folks’ good opinion if you must: ruin some poor woman’s life if that’s how it grabs you, but don’t come back here with your dirty washing for me to do. I don’t know what’s come over you, Elsa, I really don’t.’

Love.

It came over Sheila once, and there she was, carrying Elsa. But that was a long time ago. Not that she’s forgotten. Elsa’s father was a big blond man, a sailor home from the sea, and Sheila has never forgotten. A golden dandelion waved above her nose on the cliffside as Elsa was conceived. Blue sky, blue eyes: gold flower, gold hair. The first of seven, and the best, the very best. Sheila loves Elsa.

‘Out you go, Elsa, and don’t think you’ve got my blessing. You haven’t. And don’t come back here whining at Christmas time because he’s gone back to his wife.’

‘He won’t, mum.’

‘Don’t call me mum. So far as I’m concerned you’re a motherless child. Double gin and tonic please, and don’t forget the ice and lemon.’

Victor, dear. Victor, my love. Block my ears, shut my eyes; your tongue in my every opening, blacking out all memory, all sense. Victor, transport me to other lands, so that what she said can no longer be heard; Victor be my mother, my missing father, my everybody, all my love, for ever and ever. Amen.

Elsa loves Victor more than she fears Gemma.

But Elsa loves her mother. Elsa is a good girl. Elsa opens her mouth to blurt out Gemma’s husband’s proposition, via Victor, and her own acceptance of it.

But Victor stands beside her. Elsa shuts her mouth.

‘Hot!’ he says. ‘How do you keep the plants watered, Gemma? Illegal hose-pipe, after dark?’

‘We have our own well and irrigation system,’ says Gemma. ‘Naturally. Now I must leave you two love-birds together, and see about Wendy and Elsa’s cake. I will have to make it myself, of course. The trouble with Asiatic servants is that not for love nor money can they make a simple sponge.’

How easy it is for Gemma to make an exit, thinks Elsa, enviously. She presses a button and glides away. She, Elsa, using her feet, stumbles, blushes, is misunderstood or fails to understand; leaves, one way or another, with her own inadequacies fresh in everyone’s mind.

‘You made quite a hit with Hamish,’ says Victor to Elsa. ‘There was no need to be quite so enthusiastic.’

‘I won’t if you don’t want me to.’

‘It’s not what I want, it’s what you want. If you don’t want to, I certainly don’t want to put pressure upon you. It’s the last thing I want: you’d never let me forget it. On the other hand, if you want to make me happy, if you want to demonstrate to me that you’re sexually free, and truly liberated and that it’s not all talk, then you certainly will. I spent twenty years with Janice and she was faithful to me and I was faithful to her, and in the end it meant nothing. Except we both missed out. And if I regret anything for Janice it was that – the necessity she felt to be faithful to me. We put ourselves in prison. No one put us there.’

‘What do you mean, you were faithful to Janice? You were always having affairs with your secretaries. You told me so. You were absolutely frank.’

‘Faithless with my body, faithful in my mind. You’ve no idea how guilty I felt. How it spoilt everything.’

‘And I was just the current one when you left Janice,’ says Elsa, full of self-pity. ‘I know all that.’

Victor looks pained.

‘You under-rate yourself, and you under-rate me. I hate it when you talk like that, Elsa. You sound cheap and cynical.’

‘I’m only trying to face facts, Victor.’

And she is, she is. As if all facts were of necessity unpleasant, and all truths hard. He takes her hand: she is trembling.

‘I don’t want you to be unhappy, Elsa. I don’t want to be responsible for that. I made Janice unhappy. I don’t want to do it again.’

Lunch settles Elsa’s nerves, as a free meal served on an aircraft will do much to settle the stomach of any nervous traveller. It is a gift, something thrown in for free, and as in our experience good things and bad things come grouped together, by virtue of the free gift the plane seems the less likely to fall to the ground. The meal is served by the pool, on a glass trolley with gold wheels. It consists of jellied consommé spooned into Waterford tumblers, topped with tinned whipped cream and a spoonful of mock caviar; followed by cold tongue and salad served with bottled salad cream.

‘The culinary taste in this household,’ remarks Victor, ‘is as confused as is its tastes in antiques.’

‘Perhaps,’ remarks Elsa, ‘you will be able to help Gemma there as well.’

‘I hope you are not jealous,’ murmurs Victor. ‘It would hardly be reasonable if you were. Good heavens, a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair!’

Clearly Elsa is being ridiculous.

‘Victor,’ says Elsa presently, ‘what’s a prostate gland?’

‘Not something I wish to consider. Some men have trouble with it in later life. Malfunction interferes with the urinary processes, I believe, and can make one more or less impotent.’

Elsa has not had first-hand experience of a man who has trouble gaining an erection. Indeed, her sexual intimacy so far has been with Victor, whose trouble – if trouble it be – has been the opposite – of confining his manifest erections to convenient and appropriate places.

But Marina’s other friend has a boyfriend who is occasionally impotent, so Elsa is not altogether ignorant of the problem. Tales have got back to her of the embarrassment of lying beneath a man whose member becomes unexpectedly defenceless and childlike, and she and Marina have, helpfully, read and re-read articles in Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Mayfair, Playmate, Penthouse, Forum and magazines of even more explicit and colourful detail, which analyse the condition and suggest cures, some of which Marina thought her duty to pass on to her friend. They were not well received.

‘Why do you want to know?’ asks Victor, now.

‘Never mind,’ says Elsa.

‘It must be very hard for a man not to be able to express physically what he feels emotionally,’ says Victor. ‘At least I’ve never had that problem.’

While Victor and his girlfriend sit in a rich man’s house and eat caviar and jellied consommé, albeit not of the first rank, Victor’s wife Janice and his daughter Wendy sit in their lounge on the outskirts of London and eat fish and chips from newspaper. They finish a half bottle of tomato sauce between them, and use up the last of the sea-salt, left over from the days of Victor’s husbandry. They eat with their fingers; all the cutlery is dirty and stacked in the double sink with the expensive mixer taps. The radio is on in the dream kitchen although no one is listening to it; the hall light is on although it is broad daylight; the television is switched on, although it is the middle of the day and only rubbish showing.

Wendy, who is almost exactly Elsa’s age, but who averts her eyes from newsstands which sell sex magazines, is still in her nightie and dressing gown. She is a plain, plump, peaceful, lazy girl with an interest in embroidery and very little else.

‘Mum,’ says Wendy eventually, ‘it’s rather nice with Dad not here.’

‘Yes,’ says Janice, after a minute or so’s reflection, ‘I know.’

‘Once you’ve got over the shock.’

‘That’s right,’ says Janice, and she puts down her mug of coffee on a polished coffee table and does not even worry in case it leaves a mark, and what would Victor have to say then? And eats yet another chip without worrying about her figure and the appearance she will make at the firm’s Ladies’ Night.

‘When things happen these days they just happen, and no one has a nervous breakdown,’ says Wendy. ‘If I haven’t got a boyfriend that’s my bad luck not dad’s. I’ve got a patchwork quilt in the Sale of Work – I didn’t tell you – and I don’t have to dread it not selling. If it does it does, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t.’

Wendy hasn’t said so much for years.

‘Do we have to go and meet him tomorrow?’ Wendy entreats. ‘Supposing he decides to come home?’

Just suppose! For the last twenty years Janice has dutifully considered and talked out with Victor, every practical and emotional problem that has arisen in the home and in the marriage. Just suppose! What then? I feel this. Do you feel that? Of course you do!

Only talk, and you will see.

That I am all in all to thee.

‘Is that unfair of me?’ asks Wendy, in whom there is clearly something of Victor. ‘I suppose you must miss him. For sex and all that,’ she adds kindly.

Since Victor left, Janice has been to bed with the insurance man who came to investigate a claim for a damp bedroom ceiling, and the furniture removal man who came to take away Victor’s quadrophonic sound system, with its extension speakers in the bedroom; and others as well whom she can barely remember. She has discovered the irresistibility of sexual opportunity. It has nothing to do with her attractiveness, or lack of it. If she, a married woman with a missing husband, stands helplessly next to the matrimonial bed, the likelihood is that any man who happens to be in the room with her will bear her down upon it, as if moved by a kind of cosmic sense of responsibility towards her, rather than by any base or disagreeable opportunism. She is comforted by the knowledge.

In the meantime Victor’s sense of guilt towards her that her bills and the mortgage are promptly paid, and the housekeeping money is almost double what it was when he was home; nor is she any longer obliged to show him the household accounts weekly, and account for missing pennies. She no longer has to shop and cook for his evening meal; she no longer has to entertain friends she does not like, or wash up after them.

Wendy is companionable and easy. Weeds over-run the garden; dust collects in the house; the milkman has to beg her for the bottles back; she sleeps well, able to stretch over into Victor’s side of the bed; she looks younger and prettier than she ever did. Her thoughts, her habits, her child, her bed, her home; they are all her own.

‘We’ll see what we feel like tomorrow,’ says Janice. ‘If you don’t want the rest of your fish, can I have it?’

Gemma summons Elsa to her bedroom, which is in the eastern turret. It is reached by means of an ornamental lift. Gold doors open as Elsa approaches to reveal an octagonal room. Sunlight filters mistily through the greenish opaque glass of its long windows. A tropical aquarium runs like a broad frieze around the room: flashes of scarlet fin can be seen in and out the bubbles and the stirring water weed. The carpet on the floor is sandy grey; the ceiling is of rippled, muted blue; palms and ferns wave gently in the flow of some concealed air-conditioning system. A fountain fills the room with the gentle sound of splashing water.

‘It’s like being under the sea,’ says Elsa.

‘I’m so glad you said that,’ says Gemma. She is wearing white, edged with bubbles of brown, like the very summit of a breaking wave. ‘Because that’s what the designer promised me, and then I thought I could do it better than him and took over. I think rooms should assert the personality and complement it, and not just be a boring background to one’s life. Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes,’ says Elsa.

‘At any rate I was told that by the only man I ever loved. (Not counting Hamish, of course.) You’ll have a taste for antiques all your life, did you know that? You’ll never be able to go back to the patterned carpets and factory chairs and Woolworth’s paintings of your childhood. First love has that effect. You’re very lucky, Elsa. You might have fallen for a car maniac, or a yachtsman, or a dedicated golfer, and learnt something positively detrimental to your future survival. In later years you won’t regret having met Victor.’

‘I don’t regret it now.’

‘Sit down,’ says Gemma, fondly, patting the frondy pouffe at the foot of her chair, ‘and I’ll go on with my story, my warning to wantons.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘Why not? I don’t mean to insult you. The only sensible thing a pretty girl with no education can do is live off men and get what she can out of it. Where would I be if I didn’t have Hamish? Life for a rich woman in a wheelchair is not so bad: life for a poor one is fairly disagreeable, I imagine. I am only trying to help you to avoid the major pitfalls: the ones I didn’t. Consider Miss Hilary, for example, the unfortunate lady in the employment agency who found me my job. I heard later that she killed herself. Miss Hilary worked hard all her life, and no doubt had a fiancé killed in the war – and after that carnage, remember, there simply weren’t enough men to go round, and none left over for second chances, not if you had a big nose and a big loud laugh and big feet. Not like these days, when there’s a surplus of men and a girl can pick and choose: well, look at you, Elsa! Miss Hilary certainly wasn’t wanton, and much good it did her. She kicked and struggled all her life to keep her head above water, but she’d fallen in a particularly cold patch, and the air when finally she got her head up – a good job, running a department – was so damp and misty as to be almost no better than the water; barely breathable. I imagine she just gave up and went under. At least I found a sunny spot. And I daresay she thought she was wicked, sending off girls of good appearance to model naked at Fox and First, for art’s sake. Though no doubt they’d have got there, one way or another, without her aid. Would you model jewellery naked, for Victor, as I did for Mr Fox?’

‘If he wanted me to.’

‘You’d do anything he wanted?’

‘Yes.’

And so, it seems, she would. The coming night looms large in Elsa’s mind. She feels already the press of Hamish’s poor weak body struggling against her own. She looks forward to it and dreads it as one might a hospital operation: welcoming the appointment time for no other reason than it is appointed, and the attention, the ministering, the drama: fearing death under the anaesthetic, and pain on waking, if waking there be.

Hamish, lie close. Do your best, or your worst, or your nothing. Give me something of your past, and your power, and your wife. Do you lie here at night, Hamish, in this very room, in the grey gauzy bed pushed back against the wall as if it were of no importance? Alongside Gemma, with her lost, dangling legs? Do you part them by force or by habit, or have you lost heart altogether? Perhaps you never come here at all. Perhaps you are her polite and daily husband, and not the instinctive nightly one at all?

Hamish, Gemma is yours; and you are Gemma’s, by virtue, night or day, of the grief you can cause her, which she herself defined as love.

But Hamish, I mean to have you. Victor says so. And I will afterwards have power over Hamish, and Victor, and Gemma, and myself.

I will be free.

And afterwards, perhaps Hamish will see me right, give me some money. I could buy some new jeans, some moisturiser, without having to ask Victor and having him discuss at length the brand of jeans desired or the morality of face cream. No, I would send any spare money at once to Sheila. The new school term is coming and the young ones will want new shoes and Sheila struggling to pay for them. Sheila will not hear of the handing down of used shoes from older children to younger. Such a practice is bad for the feet.

Oh, mother, what is happening to me?

Gemma smiles at Elsa in a kindly fashion. Elsa cannot meet her eye.

‘Well, I was much the same at your age: I would do anything for love. And it was a good job I had at Fox and First, by any standard. Does Victor pay you well?’

‘I don’t exactly get wages. If I need anything he gives me money. He’s very generous.’

‘Does he stamp your insurance card.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘Of course not. Why should you? Victor is your insurance against an unkind future. So he was to Janice. At any rate you have somewhere to live, not too hot, not too cold, not too damp, not too dry, otherwise I daresay the antiques would rust or warp or split. I was lucky too, in that respect. I failed to find a room of my own and went to lodge with Marion’s family. I shared her bedroom. She wanted me to. She was accustomed to sharing with her gran, but when that old lady became incontinent and had to leave, she found herself lonely, in a room all to herself. She suffered from night fears, poor girl. Understandably, as it turned out.’

1966.

Swinging London! Yellow Rolls-Royces, carrying pop stars from recording to recording; Minis with darkened windows to hide the unknown excitements within; housewives carrying psychedelic shopping bags; the smell of marihuana rising in cinemas, public transport, and over polite dinner tables. The first brave schoolboy began to grow his hair long and was expelled for his pains. The barricades were not yet up but the tumbrils rumbled in the distance. Oh, the fun of revolution before the bombs began to burst! Gemma, of course, heard no distant rumblings. She heard only the pounding of her own heart; the steady timeless pulse of love.

Gemma loved Mr Fox.

What’s more, she believed what he said.

When Mr Fox said to Gemma that first morning, in relation to the warm coffee, that living was an art, not an experience, she believed him. It was also a selective process, Mr Fox said, and the more stringent the selection, he said, the finer the end result would be. It was important to take a firm stand against the second best; against warm coffee, against pink angora jumpers, and so on, and all things either spiritually, physically or emotionally lesser than they should be. He, Mr Fox, was a creative artist, responsible for wresting beauty out of the chaos of experience. Beauty was born out of beauty, therefore Mr Fox tried to look only on what was beautiful.

‘What do you do with the ugly things?’ enquired Gemma.

‘Burn them, break them, destroy them.’

‘What about ugly people? You can’t destroy them.’

People, Mr Fox admitted, could be a problem. In the meanwhile he required fresh coffee to be brought up to his penthouse and would Gemma kindly oblige?

Gemma would.

Mr Fox went upstairs. Not just as any mortal would, not two at a time, but three. Gemma marvelled. Such godlike energy! Gemma set about making Mr Fox’s coffee. Gemma failed to close the lid of the coffee grinder properly so that when she switched it on, fragmented coffee beans flew into the air and about the office, as if a volcano had spewed its grit into the heavens. The noise brought Marion running from Mr First’s office. She seemed distressed.

‘It’s the last straw! Now I have to sweep it up, I suppose. Who else is going to? I’d hand in my notice,’ said Marion, not for the first and not for the last time, ‘if only it wasn’t for my holiday pay. As for Mr First, he’s perfectly horrible. He just said he hoped he hadn’t made you cry. That means he’s glad he did.’

‘He did not make me cry so there.’

‘He liked you,’ said Marion. ‘But then everyone likes you. Even me.’

And she got down on her hands and knees with the green and yellow dustpan and brush and swept and cried at the same time.

She was distraught, and reminded Gemma of little Alice, crying her heart out in the shrubbery, unmoved by offers of homemade sweets. ‘Gemma don’t ever leave us. Gemma don’t go. You’re the only friend we’ve got.’

But Gemma went.

‘You will stay,’ begged Marion now. ‘You won’t let Mr First drive you away? You won’t just not turn up tomorrow? I couldn’t stand another new face.’

‘Of course I’ll stay. I like it here. At least it’s not boring, is it.’

‘No. It’s not. And what’s more, if you’re looking for somewhere to stay, you can come to my place. We’ve got a spare bed. My mum and dad would get on with someone like you. I’m a bit of a disappointment to them, to tell you the truth. I’m getting nightmares, you see. I can hardly bear to close my eyes. It’s only since Mr First’s sister and the accident. But I’m all upset, and that’s the fact of it.’

‘Accident? You said she jumped.’

‘Well, she wasn’t dead when she landed and then she was run over by a car, so it was an accident, really. A traffic accident.’

‘No it wasn’t. It was suicide. Why did she do it?’ Gemma persisted.

‘She was making a nuisance of herself.’

‘What sort of nuisance?’

‘I don’t like to talk about it.’

‘Tell me.’ Naughty Hannah, this time. Refusing to tell Mrs Hemsley where she’d hidden the tin opener. Hannah couldn’t abide baked beans, which was a pity, since they were her staple diet.

‘Miss First fancied Mr Fox,’ Marion went positively red in the face, just like Hannah blurting the truth. ‘And Mr First didn’t like it. I don’t want to talk about it, Gemma. You know what these new buildings are like – the walls are awfully thin. If you offer to pay my mum four pounds a week, she’ll be ever so grateful; and my dad can drive us both in in the mornings. Did Mr Fox really ask for you to take up his coffee? Up to the penthouse?’

‘Yes.’

Time enough. Marion would presently disclose all. Hannah always confessed to the whereabouts of the tin opener, when hungry enough.

‘Then I suppose you’ll have to. But Gemma, dear, do be careful.’

Gemma, up the circular staircase, round and round and round, in the service of her beloved, noticed only that she had a broken fingernail. Gemma must be very careful, Gemma thought, to hide such a blemish. Such a falling away from perfection!

Mr Fox’s penthouse was an octagonal structure perched on the main roof of the building. Quick-growing ivy vine extended fronds and stickers over its eight windows. Within, he had contrived a yellowy jungle gloom: palms grew about the room; stuffed jungle animals glared from under and over metal furniture, upholstered for the most part in leopard skin. A flock of humming birds darted to and fro amongst the underbrush. Mr Fox was nowhere to be seen but his voice came from the floor.

‘Is that my coffee? I’ve been waiting. What took you so long?’

Mr Fox was in his bath. It was a steamy jungle pool, sunk into the floor, from which the smell of musk arose. The water was murky. Water lilies floated on the surface, through which his white, sinewy shoulders broke. His eyes were little, and sharp, and gleaming.

‘I don’t lie in the bath to get clean,’ remarked Mr Fox, ‘but to get ideas. I clean myself first under a shower. Put the tray by the water’s edge, my dear. And try not to blink or look surprised. It’s rude to notice nudity: not rude at all to be nude.’

‘Yes, Mr Fox.’

‘Do you like my bath?’

‘Isn’t it rather difficult to clean?’

Mr Fox sounded quite peeved. ‘Now how would I know a thing like that?’

‘Are the water-lilies plastic?’

‘Plastic, to me, is the worst of the four-letter words.’

Gemma, trying to spell plastic in her head, put down the tray without remembering to hide her broken nail.

‘One of your nails is broken,’ remarked Mr Fox. ‘I hope we are not going to find you slovenly. Every movement, every activity, every object must be given its due – then such accidents don’t happen. But you walk well, Gemma, and move gracefully. I like that.’

‘Thank you, Mr Fox.’

‘Any time,’ observed Mr Fox, and sank deeper into his bath so that the water lilies swung gently over the surface of the water, beneath which a rather slight, pale, naked but clearly male body stirred. Gemma was accustomed to the bodies of females, but had had little contact so far with males, apart from a teacher or so, the doctor, the dentist, and poor dead Mr Hemsley, whose spirit lingered so in the house he left behind.

Little Alice, pulling on trousers instead of a skirt, saying that’s what daddy wants. I saw it in a dream.

Little Alice, with a daddy never seen in the flesh, but known in the spirit.

The unusual sight of Mr Fox, white, gentle, bare beneath the water, moved Gemma to compassion. His body seemed vulnerable, vulnerable as a girl’s might be. Perhaps there was not so much difference, after all, between him and her, between the male and the female? Perhaps he felt, and hoped, and suffered too, just as any woman might?

Gemma smiled at Mr Fox.

Mr Fox smiled at Gemma.

The world stood still.

Mr Fox leapt from his bath, lithe, lily-white and dressed for some reason in red and black striped swimming-trunks. Mr Fox embraced Gemma, so that her twin-set and skirt glistened with moisture.

‘Your ear lobes are delicious,’ he said, nibbling them. ‘I look forward to a future in which they model many a pretty sugar ear-piece. But that’s enough for now. Just go away downstairs and type or whatever it is you do. And tomorrow, when I see you again, do try and wear something different, something more appropriate to the spirit of the age. There’s a boutique next door – at least I think they’ve re-opened; they had to close for repainting after a rather nasty accident in the street outside. Try them, at any rate.’

But how Gemma was to afford new clothes, Mr Fox did not say. Nor did Mr Fox offer to advance her any of next week’s wages. Marion, however, offered to lend Gemma any of Marion’s gran’s clothes she might care to have, and Gemma was able to array herself in some very pretty shawls and lacy dresses and granny-boots, left over from the days of Gran’s youth at the turn of the century.

Marion’s home in Finchley was abundantly cosy, and Marion’s mother and father as kind as could be. The colours here, in this semi-detached suburban house, with the narrow back garden where the marrows grew and the washing hung, were as vivid as in the Fox and First office and perhaps less unexpected.

Here, in the room where the family sat and ate their supper in front of the television, the carpet was of a red Indian design; the wallpaper willow patterned, the curtains of flowered chintz, and the three-piece suite of tartan wool. Shelves, display cabinets and mantelpiece were crowded with mementos from holidays abroad: dolls of different nationalities were tacked around the walls, their arms raised, by virtue of the nails that held each beneath its armpits, in row upon row of forlorn entreaty.

On the first evening of her stay, Marion’s mother Audrey, forewarned by a telephone call from Marion, came home especially early from the betting shop where she worked, and made Gemma a special celebratory mixed grill. Liver, bacon, kidney, sausage, egg, chips and tomato; followed by tinned peaches and a rather strange custard and a strong cup of tea. After supper, leaving the three-leafed oak-veneered table, and the place mats with scenes from the Italian lakes, Marion’s father, Arthur, a compositor by trade, settled his solid, friendly bulk into one of the armchairs, took out his pipe and puffed a slow reflective puff or so. Audrey settled into the other chair with her knitting, and Marion and Gemma sat side by side on the sofa. Marion, who seemed surprisingly restless for someone who had eaten so much, leafed through holiday brochures. Gemma longed for bed, and tried to keep awake, and failed, and dozed.

Presently Arthur spoke.

‘That was a good supper, Marion’s mother. As good as any I remember. That was zabaglione with the peaches, Gemma. Real Italian zabaglione, made with brandy, not even wine. Made you sleepy did it? Well, no harm done, Marion’s friend. You know you’re safe with us, that’s why you sleep. Shall he who is amongst enemies sleep? Shall we have a drop of slivovitz to round the evening off? What do you say to that, Marion’s friend?’

‘Drop of what?’ asked Gemma, startled.

‘Slivovitz. Yugoslavian plum liqueur. We were in Yugoslavia back in ’61. Still some of the good old slivo in the cocktail cabinet. Gets a bit encrusted but that makes it stronger. Are you warm enough, girl? You’re a pale lass, not like our Marion.’

‘Boiled beetroot, I suppose you mean!’ interposed Marion. ‘I’d be a shade less red if I didn’t have to roast year in year out in the southern sun.’

Arthur ignored his daughter.

‘Are you warm enough, Marion’s friend? Shall I turn the flicker-fire higher?’

‘You’re boasting, Marion’s dad,’ said Marion’s mum, proudly enough. ‘It’s not manners. What will Gemma think?’

‘She’ll think we’re like anyone else, which we are, but we’re not ashamed of it. Proud of what we have, and not afraid to show it. Remember those Yugoslav roads, Marion’s mum?’

‘Call those roads, Marion’s dad?’

The talk rose and fell between them; rising on one side and the flicker-fire, falling on the other. A baffled Marion, in the middle, supported the net. Back and forth.

‘More like ditches,’ said Audrey. ‘Bump, bump, bump. And what with the goat’s meat churning away inside and the yoghurt too, I was heaving half the time. No, I didn’t fancy Yugoslavia.’

‘It’s Capri for us this year,’ said Arthur to Gemma. ‘Valerie, that’s Marion’s mum’s sister’s eldest, our niece, as you might say, was meant to be coming too, but she went and got herself married to this fellow.’

‘And now they can’t go away at all because of the mortgage,’ lamented Marion’s mum. ‘Makes you think twice about marriage, doesn’t it. And then the kids come along and you know what they’re like, in foreign hotels. Especially if there’s bidets. Well, you just can’t do it. We never had more than just the one, for that very reason. Well, we didn’t know, when we had her. Feeling all right Marion? You’re looking queasy.’

‘I suppose so,’ Marion was sulking.

‘Poor Marion,’ said Audrey. ‘She’s been that depressed lately. Never mind, a nice holiday will bring back the roses.’

‘It doesn’t bring back the roses,’ cried Marion, with unexpected defiance. ‘It just makes me peel. Why do we always have to go south? I want to go to Scandinavia. And it’s not the holiday doing me good, so much as working for it in that office does me bad. Especially overtime. On top of that great empty building with the birds banging against the glass, and those bloody parrots staring at you with their nasty eyes.’

‘You shouldn’t speak like that of God’s creatures,’ said Arthur, shaking his head at his wayward daughter.

How, wondered Gemma, could the world hold both the Ramsbottle family and Mr Fox as well? If one was real, how could the other be too? Each so defiant, so certain as to its own way of life. The notion came to Gemma that she was at the parting of the ways. She was being required to choose.

Mr Fox, or Marion and Marion’s family.

Mr Fox and danger. Marion’s family and safety.

Mr Fox, I love you.

Mr Fox, save me from a fate worse than death: save me from the boy next door; because this is what next door is like. Save me from all the things my great-aunt wanted for me, and poor Mrs Hemsley achieved, and the dentist’s wife as well.

Audrey’s voice had become somewhat stringent.

‘I don’t like to hear you talking like that, Marion. It smacks of ingratitude. It’s a good job and lovely people you meet up there, so no more of your stories, if you please, Marion.’

‘What stories?’ enquired Gemma.

But Marion leapt to her feet.

‘Shut up all of you,’ cried Marion, spilling her glass of slivovitz on both the Indian design and the tartan cover, as if determined to make the most of every spilled drop.

‘Shut up! I want some peace! There’s no peace at work and there’s no peace at home.’

They were all three on their feet now. Gemma rose too, out of politeness.

‘Behaving like this in front of your friend,’ said Audrey. ‘What’s she going to think of us?’

‘It’s you who’ll shut up, my girl, speaking like that!’ added Arthur. ‘And you won’t have a holiday at all if you go round saying the things you do.’

‘Put me in a home, will you?’ Marion shouted. ‘Like the cat and my poor old gran?’

‘You were the one who wanted gran to go, our Marion, and don’t you forget it. It was you who complained about the state of Slumberland, and don’t you forget that either, and left it to me to scrub it up.’

‘Aye aye,’ said Arthur, steadying the nerves of the group, as clearly he was accustomed to doing. ‘Tempers all round! No use grieving over spilt milk. Mr First’s poor sister: poor old Tom cat: poor old gran. Life is not without its tragedies. But you’ve got a good job there, Marion: good pay and good workmates you can bring home, and a chance to meet the stars.’

‘You could do that in other places.’ Marion remained stubborn.

‘You can’t pick and choose,’ said Arthur. ‘You didn’t do too well in your O-levels, remember that.’

‘Only because you took me on holiday the fortnight before I sat my maths, and my stomach was churning from the channel crossing –’

Gemma sat and stared at the flicker-fire, and was consumed by longing. She longed for the touch of Mr Fox’s hand: for the feel of his lips on hers. In her mind his white and tender body stirred, beneath the floating water lilies.

Oh, Mr Fox, Mr Fox, think of me as I think of you.

I love you.

See, I send my longing out to you, across unknown distances, across uncharted wastes of feeling. I can feel my spirit reach you, encircle you, gain strength from you, and return to me enriched.

Mr Fox, you are thinking of me –

Mr Fox, I love you.

Mr Fox, I want you.

I know what that is, now.

Love.

‘I know what,’ says Arthur, ‘let’s put aside the slivovitz; it always did make for an acid tongue, and let’s all have a drop of Italian vino, and hey presto, we’re on the Isle of Capri already, with our troubles behind us, soaking up the sun and the wine and the friendly faces, and listening to our Marion telling us tales of who came into Fox and First, and what’s going on in the world – our own personal gossip column, that’s our Marion...’

A morning in May, in 1966.

In Gemma’s office the fountain splashed and the birds sang. Outside, the sun shone, and the Minis darted, and flower-children begged alms and distributed nature’s largesse, with confidence. The world was clearly going their way. The enemy was in retreat, forced back by peace, and love, and a little help from hallucinogens. In New York a millionaire’s son scattered his inheritance in banknotes from the top of the Empire State Building; and he wasn’t even mad.

What price honest toil now?

Upstairs in the penthouse Mr Fox slept in his jungle bed. Down one flight of iron stairs Marion typed and Gemma filed to make his rest comfortable and his waking prosperous. Gemma was properly clothed in a black lace dress and a cream shawl, scarlet embroidered. She was happy, and beautiful, and excited. She had slept soundly in the room she shared with Marion. Air-Wick had, for the most part, hygienised the smell from the Slumberland mattress. It had been well scrubbed, in any case, by Marion’s mother with old-fashioned Lifebuoy soap. Breakfast had been Continental-style.

‘We go Dutch on Tuesdays,’ as Marion’s dad explained, jovial even with shaving cream all over his chin. Coffee, boiled egg, cheese and cake were placed in front of Gemma by Marion’s mother with the best will in the world. Not once during the meal did Gemma have to get to her feet. Gemma, who for years had breakfast standing up, the better to get Hermione, Hannah, Hortense, Helen and little Alice off to school!

Business, it seemed, was booming. Gemma had to stop filing when a film-actress with a known name, wide eyes, a limp look, a slender body and tufts of hair missing from the top of her head came in to inspect a navel stone dangling in one of the showcases. She asked Gemma to model the stone, but fortunately, since Marion’s gran’s dress did not easily open, let alone come off, the actress changed her mind, and wandered out to see if she could buy a meat pie. She fancied a meat pie, she said.

She wore a shaggy fur coat with the buttons missing and nothing on beneath it.

Marion said it was just as well she had gone, since it was well known that she was broke, and they would have had to have woken Mr Fox. Nevertheless, it had been an encounter with the great, and Gemma’s heart beat faster.

‘Famous people have a kind of aura,’ Marion assured Gemma. ‘Mick Jagger was in once. He had a blazing white light around his head. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Gemma nodded politely. Marion, who yesterday seemed so solid and sensible, was showing signs, Gemma thought, of eccentricity, or of what Mrs Hemsley referred to as ‘the neurotics’. Marion had woken screaming and gabbling in the night: Gemma had registered the noise through her own dreams, but had been too tired to arouse herself properly. In the morning Marion claimed to have slept better for Gemma’s presence, so Gemma did not like to mention the disturbance.

Now Marion typed and made mild statements, and Gemma filed. Happy Gemma, on the brink, the very brink of life.

The sun shone: the fountains splashed: birds sang. Life was hers, and youth, and every possible, wonderful future.

A shadow fell across her desk.

A skinny hand, claw-like, rested on her shoulder.

‘Did I make you jump?’ Mr First’s voice.

‘No.’

‘Liar,’ said Mr First. ‘Now don’t look so cross. And don’t mind when I say unpleasant things to you. If you know what you’re like, if you have your own vision of yourself fixed firmly in your mind, it can hardly matter what I say. Can it?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Gemma. ‘Because you pay the wages.’

Mr First, she noticed, held a paperknife in his hand. The edge was so fine, so sharp, as to be almost transparent.

‘Sharp!’ said Mr First, approvingly. ‘Brilliant as well as beautiful. Cutting through the cackle with a mind sharp as a razor. Do you mind me stroking your hair?’

‘Yes,’ said Gemma, ‘I do.’ Although the paperknife was oddly near her throat.

‘Is there something so terrible about my hand?’

‘No.’ But there is, there is. It is old, and mine is young. And it is not Mr Fox’s hand. That surely is enough to be getting on with.

‘You have such soft hair, Gemma. Will you have lunch with me?’

Au secours! Au secours! Gemma needs help. Lost mother, vanished father, where are you now? Mr Fox, how can you sleep? And where is Marion, come to that?

Slipped from the room, deceiver that she is, at the first sign of Mr First. False friend! Like the doctor’s wife, the dentist’s wife, Mrs Hemsley, Great-Aunt May, all false, false; her own mother, dead and gone – the ultimate – original, worst betrayer of all. Mother, how dare you die!

Silence. The parrots are quiet. There is a lull in the office.

Not a footstep on the stair; not the rattle of a tea cup. Silence. No one. Nothing.

Nothing between life and Mr Fox, and death and lunch with Mr First, but a knife and her throat, sharp-edged; and not so jokey as the twisted smile on Mr First’s face pretended. Again, it seemed to Gemma that she was at the parting of the ways. Courage, and death. Cowardice, and life.

Gemma chose death.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I won’t have lunch with you, Mr First.’

Silence. The knife blade trembled at her throat.

Mr First sighed and put the knife down.

A joke, after all.

Of course. Employers always joke with typists.

‘Not even on pain of death,’ lamented Mr First, ‘will a pretty typist have so much as a meal with me! What a worthless, elderly fellow I must be! Would you like me to cut my own throat with the paperknife? Would that entertain you?’

‘No.’

‘At least we would find out whether the knife is as sharp as it looks. It is very valuable, very delicate. Designed by Mr Fox for the excitement of us all, and clearly fashioned for the slitting of throats rather than the opening of envelopes. Are you willing to try? Would you do it for me? It would prove its worth, and what is human life, as my partner Leon Fox would say, compared to art? Life is short, but art is long.’

Leon! His name was Leon. Thus, his mother christened him. Well, perhaps she did. In any case Mr Fox has a past, has a Christian name, has a lily pond beneath which his tender body stirs.

Mr Fox!

Love Gemma, Mr Fox.

Gemma loves you.

‘No,’ said Gemma. ‘Art isn’t very long, not these days. It’s a flicker on the telly screen, or a splash of paint on canvas.’

‘I shan’t cut my throat,’ said Mr First. ‘I shall stay alive if only in order to hear your words of wisdom. Would you have gone to lunch with Mr Fox, had he asked you?’

‘Yes.’

Mr First licked his lips.

‘If I might give you a word of advice –’

‘Please stop touching me –’

‘I touch you as one human being touches another, from concern and friendship: not I assure you, as an employer touching up the typist. I tried that – well, one does have to – and it didn’t work. I touch you, Gemma, as a father might touch a daughter. I have no children of my own. I suppose you want children?’

His voice is harsh and grating, the opposite of fatherly. The voice of the forever disgruntled child, taken on male powers.

‘Of course.’

‘Of course. It is the natural answer. May I give you a warning. The natural world is a dangerous place. You are staying with Marion, I hear. I can’t stop you doing so, but remember that Marion is a disturbed girl and has been having psychiatric treatment – the firm has been obliged to pay for it. Well, girls prepared to stay are hard to find: we do our best to help them.’

And Mr First returned to his office.