11

That night, too, Stan the Polish carpenter, came to Janice, Victor’s wife.

Janice had found him some weeks back through the Yellow Pages – the Post Office’s official directory of tradesmen and services. The wardrobe door in her bedroom kept swinging open and Janice concluded she needed a carpenter.

Victor had changed his style of dress along with his mode of life, and left most of his expensive suits behind in the big mahogany bedroom wardrobe.

‘Don’t give them to the jumble,’ he’d beseeched his wife, during one of the long wrangling telephone calls that followed their parting. ‘Try and sell them: or else don’t ever complain to me or anyone that I keep you short of money. You can’t just sit about and live off me for the rest of your life. You must make some effort. You owe it to yourself.’

Janice had suggested that since now Victor had a retail outlet, he might be better at selling his suits than she, but he had accused her of being possessive, obstructive, and insulting his new profession, so she had advertised the suits in the local newspaper and put For Sale cards in stationers’ windows, but no one had replied, so there in the wardrobe the suits stayed. And something – either the dry summer and subsidence of the soil beneath the house causing the whole structure of the house to tilt; or some alteration in the very nature of the suits themselves, which certainly seemed to get heavier with disuse and depression as the months of Victor’s absence rolled by – had thrown the wardrobe out of true so that the catch would not hold, and the door would swing open even when the room was perfectly quiet and still, and startle her: as if Victor himself was about to step out of the cupboard and fill the house again with his presence.

And what would he not have to say about the state of the carpet? The dust under the bed? Strawberry jam spilt on the velvet chairs and rubbed in, not sponged off? Five of the glass rummers broken? Well, presumably broken, since only seven remained of the dozen she’d bought him for their eighteenth wedding anniversary, out of housekeeping money saved over fifteen of those cheese-paring, housewifely, well managed years.

No.

Victor, stay in your cupboard.

I don’t want your vision of me any more.

I don’t want to have to resist your disapproval, struggling for my pride in the face of your contempt.

Stay where you are. Please.

I don’t want to have to intercede between Wendy and you: not any more. I am tired of explaining to Wendy that you don’t mean to hurt you just can’t help it. I am tired of explaining to you that it isn’t Wendy’s fault she is more interested in embroidery than boys, in the gaining of spiritual grace rather that the losing of her virginity. Wendy is yours as much as mine. You must take some responsibility. It is some hereditable factor working in her: it cannot be environmental.

Not with you around, Victor.

She fears him. She sees him, in her mind’s eye, her guilty eye, stepping finally out of the wardrobe, hears him speak, putting into words at last what his reproachful look has for so long mutely suggested.

‘Your child, not mine. My seed was far too much diluted. She didn’t inherit her nature. I’m afraid she caught it.’

For although Wendy was without a doubt Victor’s child, in as much as one of Victor’s sperm swam up to meet the egg deposited through Janice’s fallopian tubes, other men’s sperm had also swum around inside Janice, before Victor and she were married, and had, it was vaguely felt by both of them, left some disagreeable trace of themselves behind, polluting her procreative byways and highways, as it were, so that Wendy was not only Victor’s child, but Alan’s, Derek’s, Mike’s, Joe’s, John’s, Murray’s and so on, and others whose names she had forgotten or she never knew, and probably took after the sum of all her mother’s lovers, rather than her acknowledged father. Victor had always hoped to marry a virgin: expected to marry a virgin: as his father had done before him: someone as pure and helpful as his own mother: but alas he fell in love with Janice. Or rather, having slept with Janice once, after a dark and drunken students’ party, could not bear the notion of her sleeping with anyone else thereafter, and taking this for love, married her. Whereupon Janice, as if to reassure him, had silently and instinctively made herself as rigid, plain, clean, orderly and respectable as possible; bristling with defences designed to repel any possible sexual boarders, so that merely to look at her was to feel certain that here was a woman faithful to her husband.

Perforce, if nothing else.

Behold wild Janice, married!

What we have here ladies and gentlemen, is no woman, but a housewife. And what a housewife! Note her rigid, mousy curls, kept stiff by spray; her quick eyes which search for dust and burning toast, and not the appraisal, the enquiry, of the opposite sex; the sharp voice, growing sharper, louder, year by year: at home in a bus queue or ordering groceries or rebuking the garage, but hardly in the bed.

Does that suit you, Victor?

No.

But I thought that was what you wanted.

How am I to be desired by all, but still kept for your especial use? My highways and byways unpolluted even by the thoughts of others?

Tell me! Victor!

But Victor, I was only trying to be what you wanted. It isn’t fair.

Go to Elsa, then. I know her by heart, although I have never met her. Who is wanted by all, and desired by all: her inner footpaths well trodden down by the thoughts of men, and women too. Whose hair flows free, and spreads across pillows; whose eyelids rise and fall with automatic erotic intent; whose voice is useless in the grocer’s shop but useful in the bed Elsa, who is everyone’s, whether she knows it or not, in the imaginings if not in the flesh.

Go to Elsa then, while I, Janice, remember who I am. While there’s still time: before my hair is iron grey, like my heart, and there is no turning back.

Janice’s wrist positively aches, slamming the wardrobe door. Presently she feels the task is beyond her, and summons help. Janice sends for Stan, the Polish carpenter. He is a small man; he weighs nine stone two (he tells her so); he trembles; his eyes have the sorrowful appreciation of the immigrant; is he sorry for her or she for him? Before she knows it there she is on the bed, and him on top of her, hammering away with a quivering, nervous intensity. She is to make it all better for him. The grand home of his childhood, his family acres, lost to the State; his wife a common working woman, who cannot even understand his degradation; cannot comprehend that carpenters have poetry in their souls: Janice is to make up for it all. Not that he blames his wife. Her father was a prison officer, soulless, and beat all human aspiration out of her, leaving her merely English. Not her fault – but their mutual doom.

He has always been doomed. Angry, nervous, Polish and doomed.

Six times in one night: eight the next. This takes Janice back; like nothing or no one else: not even the plumber, nor the milkman. Is it mere physical exhaustion, or the rebirth of her sexuality, that leads her now drooping round the house, careless of its appearance, and her own? Slut that she’s becoming, only fit to lie back upon the bed, while Stan the Polish carpenter wreaks his nervous will upon her, expends his tormented energy, and fills her dazed mind with the overflow of his complaints against the world, his wife, the betrayal of his past, his hopes, and his country.

‘It seems to me,’ said Janice, lying there, ‘that you do all right. If I’m anything to go by.’

‘You English,’ he cried, moving up to her mouth to stop her complaints, ‘all you English are the same. You understand nothing.’

But Victor’s king-size bed, with the Slumberland mattress, is large enough for Janice to turn herself so that his mouth, too, is presently stopped.

It seems to Janice, even from her comparatively limited experience with other men since Victor left home, that the physical activity of sex has become a great deal more varied since she was a girl, and lay in the missionary position beneath a variety of men. In those days tongues could only be used in mouths, and penises must only come in contact with vaginas – lest the word perversion be bandied about; and the involvement of hands or instruments carried with it the overtones of a horrid, secret masturbatory activity. And boy-friends, as she remembered, since the general consensus was that love must accompany sex, were supposed to come one at a time. But now, surely, there was a great tumbling of humans all together, and a more diffuse eroticism, which being confined no longer to certain parts of the person in ritual conjunction with the certain other parts of certain other people, need hardly be so limited any more.

Come carpenter, carpet layer, car mechanic, accountant: come one and all. Since this sensation, this forgetfulness, is all we are after. What I think of you, now, man, not what you think of me. Who cares? You’ll be gone in the morning. Pray God.

And since my mouth, my comment, can be stilled not by your mouth, but right to the source of my objection with your erect penis: and I can stop your comment on me by using up your tongue between my legs; and I can obtain relief from self-observation by stopping thinking, if only momentarily – and with this particular carpenter the law of diminishing returns seems to operate – after my fourth orgasm and your third the brain seems to work again.

I am still myself, for all of you.

About the time that Alice comes battering at Victor’s door, Janice wriggles free from Stan and says, ‘The wardrobe door is open again. Won’t you for God’s sake fix it? It’s what you came for.’

Her voice has lost its harshness of quality. Her hair, unwashed and uncurled for some weeks, has regained a natural sheen. It clots greasily and heavily around her face. It pleases him and suits her. Her mouth has relaxed its grimness of line. She is abandoned to all decency. She is herself again: heavy, sprawling, and available, freely demanding of him and herself.

‘You English women are cruel,’ says Stan. ‘You wish to humiliate me. To remind me that I am only the carpenter. The useful little man around the corner, hein?’

But presently, singing and still naked, he takes his screw-driver and removes the lock, and lathes the length of the drawer, and by accident removes some beading, which he then has to hammer back.

Bang-bang.

Janice sits up in bed, marvelling. Never has she seen such cheerful bungling. It is as if all his potential skill with tools has concentrated in the living one.

Wendy. Where’s Wendy? How does Wendy fare while her mother relives her past, and so thoughtlessly and selfishly redefines her nature?

Wendy’s doing nicely, thank you. Wendy, the while, has been to the church choir social, and eaten half a dozen fattening scones and drunk six small glasses of sweet sherry. Here she has encountered a post-graduate student from Milwaukee doing research into fading religious attitudes in Western Europe. His hair is curly, he is half her size: his face is lively and impish, as is his mind. Her slow head tries to follow his quick movements as he goes about the room, making enquiries of one churchgoer and another. Wendy is patient, as is her nature. Finally he comes to her. He asks his initial questions: finds her replies promising, sits her in a corner: takes notes: enquires about her attitudes to God, to sherry, to her mother, to her father, her sexual experiences, if any, her parents’ attitude to sexual matters. Presently his hand stops writing: he asks the questions for himself, and not for his further degree. And Wendy, scarcely noticing the transition, continues to talk in a manner she never would have done had she not had so much sherry and believed herself to be furthering the cause of knowledge, science and truth; in so doing she offered herself to him as she was, and not, perhaps, as she would have liked to be, or her father might have wished she was.

The young man took her home, and it being a warm night, they bought fish and chips and sat together on a park bench to eat them: and he, knowing that her virginity was a bother to her and had driven her father from home, relieved her of it in the laurel bushes behind the bench; an episode disturbed only by a passing and indifferent policeman’s torch, and then by a sudden change in the weather, making them scuffle through the undergrowth for their clothing. Neither, afterwards, had any desire to part, or felt any desire to be off and finished with the episode, but walked together hand in hand, bodies rubbing together at every opportunity. She asked his name at the front gate, and asked him in to share her bed – an offer he gladly accepted.

The noise of hammering came from the house. Janice’s window was brightly lit and the curtains not closed. A woman sat on the front step. She wore a headscarf, and spectacles, and seemed angry. She spoke with the flat sour accents of the underprivileged and defeated.

‘My husband’s in there with your mum,’ she said. ‘Mending her wardrobe, like as not. If it’s not that it’ll be her ceiling rose. Listen to him, hammering all hours of the day and night. Mind you, he’s not English.’

When Wendy, dazed by the suddenness of events, took out her front door key and opened the door, the little woman in the headscarf ran in ahead of her and Kim – for that was the young researcher’s name – and up the stairs and into Janice’s bedroom, and flew at her rival, scratching and biting, as she sat naked and correct in the bed. It took Stan, Wendy and Kim together some effort to drag her off, by which time Janice was mauled, bleeding and shaken.

Stan’s wife sat and cried in the kitchen while Janice made her a cup of tea. Stan had dressed and gone home, but not before his wife had spat at him.

‘I’m not blaming you,’ said Stan’s wife to Janice. ‘If it’s not you it’s someone else. I only wish women would stick together a bit. It’s not for me I mind – not any more – it’s for the children. He’s never at home. He’s either off giving his money away at political meetings or screwing the lady clients so his work never gets done. Then he quarrels with them or their husbands find out so he never gets paid. I don’t mind what he does with his cock; he’s got to do something with it that’s for sure, and it’s better than having it in me all hours of the day and night, God knows. It’s a kind of nervous twitch he’s got.’

Stan’s wife raised her head and looked about her, as if for the first time conscious of her surroundings. She looked at the unwashed dishes, the grime on the cup she drank from, the bottle lids and scraps of paper on the floor; the crumbs on the sideboard, the congealed fat on the table, the burnt debris on the cooker.

‘I’d be ashamed to live like this,’ said Stan’s wife. ‘A real pigsty. Well, he likes a good wallow.’

Stan’s wife left.

Janice, Wendy and Kim sat round the kitchen table for some time after her departure. Kim’s hand itched with desire to take notes, but he desisted.

‘You can’t go on like this, mum,’ said Wendy. ‘You’d better get dad back.’

‘Do you want that?’ enquired Janice. Her left eye was swelling, and her hands were trembling almost as much as had the carpenter’s penis, erect. Stan’s wife, she had noticed, trembled too. Her nose had been running, as if in her passion she had manufactured extra juices, and a drop had hung trembling unnoticed for some time, from her nostrils. The less Janice had to do with the carpenter, and his like, the better.

A pity. It had all seemed so simple. Summoning bed companions out of thin air, dismissing them again at will. All of them less than she, as she had been less than Victor.

‘I’m all right,’ said Wendy, with simple pride. ‘Now I’ve met Kim. I can take daddy or leave him, if you see what I mean. Kim’s coming to stay with us. He’s only got a kind of self-service hotel in South Kensington, and he doesn’t like it very much. It smells of cooked cabbage, he says. This place smells a bit too, but we’ll soon get it cleared up. Won’t we, mother.’

‘You clear it up if you want to,’ said her mother. ‘Nothing to do with me. But what will your father say, if he stays?’

‘Nothing I can’t make good use of in my thesis,’ observed Kim, in the constructive fashion that marked his passage through life.

‘It’s hardly up to father to say anything,’ said Wendy, her hand travelling down towards Kim’s crotch, as naturally and easily as if she stretched it out to stroke a kitten.

Let Victor cope, thinks Janice, taking a tranquilliser and going to bed and sleep. The wardrobe door does not fall open, although Stan had no time to fix the bolt. Her orifices are still sensitive and uneasy from his quivering searches of them; her eye is hurting; as is the deep scratch, red-edged, that runs from her thumb to her wrist; and her mind thuds from the insults offered to her by his wife. But her head no longer aches. On the contrary, it feels well healed and perfectly content. Even without the tranquilliser she would have slept well.

Elsa, too, sleeps soundly, after Hamish’s departure, but is presently awakened by a rattling of her door handle and the soft booming of Alice’s extraordinary voice in the corridor outside. Elsa sits up, and shivers. The room is cold. The weather has changed in the night; the window is shut but the wind has managed to find a crack and she feels it chilly on her cheek. Outside the night is draining from the sky, leaving it bleak and grey yet streaked with a kind of shine, as if the walls of heaven had been far too harshly scraped in the new wind’s scouring away of the night.

‘Let me in,’ begs Alice, ‘let me in. I must speak to you.’

‘I can’t,’ says Elsa. ‘I’m locked in. It’s some mistake.’

‘It’s no mistake,’ booms Alice through the door. ‘Victor’s with Gemma and they don’t want you to know.’

Alice goes round to the back of the house, out into the kitchen courtyard, and climbs up to Elsa’s window, using the library ladder to get her some part of the way; after that she relies on cornices, decorative alcoves, and concrete gargoyles for footholds. She is a heavy girl and in passing breaks the top rungs of the library ladder.

Elsa winces at the thought of Victor’s inevitable displeasure, and leans out to help Alice, and wonders whether perhaps it might not be preferable to topple down and end everything, than to endure the pain that had clutched her heart at the thought of Victor with Gemma.

But when Alice, slipping, clutches at Elsa’s hair and makes her cry out and all but pulls her from the window, Elsa knows that she wishes to live and means to live, and pulls herself back inside and Alice too with an ease which surprises her.

Elsa closes the window and gets back into bed; her eyes feel stretched and wide with lack of sleep, and too much untoward emotion, come too suddenly. Alice huddles at the end of the bed, under blankets.

‘What am I going to do,’ mourns Alice. ‘How am I going to live? Even Gemma despises me.’

Elsa draws Alice in beside her. It is the nearest, for a long time, that she has lain next to a contemporary, more or less, in age: she is surprised to remember the difference between stretching naked next to a young person, and next to one who is old. It is the whole difference between the sensation of immortality and that of mortality. When she lay with Victor, lay with Hamish, death lay between them in the bed. They bridged him, but could not ignore him. Death waited, was made to wait, but clearly wouldn’t wait for ever. Is this the last time? Or this? Or this? Will I die before tomorrow night? A stroke, breast cancer, heart attack?

Elsa kisses young Alice, whose distress is merely that she will have to live for ever, as she is. Elsa covers Alice with her body; lets her hands comfort and penetrate Alice as if it were her own body she thus cajoled. Alice, made like any other woman in detail, though not in broad outline, cries out and calms, and smiles in the cold light. Thus Elsa did with her school-friends, on many an educational and recreational school journey to the Swiss Alps, the Italian Riviera, the Austrian Tyrol, until the exchange rate made such journeys difficult. Though Elsa worked weekends at the greengrocer’s to save the money to pay for them.

‘I’m not a lesbian,’ says Alice, ‘though Gemma thinks I am. I have trouble with my hormones, that’s all. Is that my fault? I am as normal as the next person – just unhappier.’

‘You seemed so sure of yourself this morning,’ murmurs Elsa, half asleep. ‘I was quite afraid.’

‘Come away with me,’ begs Alice. ‘Victor’s too old and anyway he’s married, and Gemma’s spoiled all that for you.’

‘I shouldn’t have gone with Hamish,’ Elsa reproaches herself, as if automatically. ‘Victor only went with Gemma to be revenged. And Gemma too. It’s all my fault.’

‘You’re so simple,’ says Alice. ‘It was all planned by Gemma. Everything always is. She means Victor to leave you and Hamish to impregnate you and her to keep the baby so she can torment it as it grows up. And she’ll get her way. She gets her way with everything except her own legs’.

No, thinks Elsa. Surely not. I can’t be pregnant. Can’t be.

‘If that were true,’ says Elsa, sinking backwards into sleep, ‘Gemma would be a very wicked person. And I don’t know anyone wicked. So it can’t be true.’

‘There was once a little spark of evil in her,’ says Alice, her voice now mixed up with Elsa’s dreams, ‘and the wind of the world has fanned it into a great fire. It’s consuming her and everyone.’

But Elsa is asleep. Alice lies beside her, sleepless and miserable. Presently the door is unlocked and Gemma enters, as Alice had indeed supposed she presently would.

Alice smiles sweetly up at Gemma.

Gemma smiles sweetly at Alice. Behind her comes Johnnie, with a breakfast trolley.

‘It’s stuffy in here,’ says Gemma. ‘Do open the window, Johnnie.’

Johnnie opens the window, and stands behind the trolley. There is a glint of expectation behind his glasses. So no doubt he stood, polite and expectant, in his native land, watching the tides of power sweep over the wretched and helpless of the earth; assisting it on its way, diverting it now and then to mulch the occasional head raised to block its path; listening; waiting; thriving on the cries of the tortured, the maimed, the burned. And now, hot coffee, thick cream, fresh rolls, crisp bacon. Breakfast! What are good times without the bad? The pleasures of the privileged are much enhanced by the cries of the unfortunate.

Johnnie stands easily behind the trolley, and watches, and smiles.

‘I expect you were cold in the night,’ says Gemma kindly. ‘I know I was. The weather’s changed. Which of you kept the other warm, I wonder?’

‘It was her,’ says Alice, thus displaying cowardice and conceding defeat all at once.

‘Get out of bed,’ says Gemma, and Alice does so, naked, hiding her body from Johnnie with her large lean hands. She makes twice of him, but what has that got to do with anything? Small men wield power: hold keys, apply electrodes, write execution lists, initiate policies. Before them the merely massive fall back, powerless.

Gemma’s chair whirs. She glides towards Alice, who backs towards the window.

‘Get out of here,’ says Gemma, ‘the way you came.’

Alice half falls, half climbs out of the window: and half climbs, half falls to the ground, where she lies collapsed and crying.

‘My eyes,’ she cries. ‘I’ve scratched my eyes. I can’t see. There was a bramble –’

‘That comes from seeing things you shouldn’t,’ calls down Gemma, and drops Alice’s jeans and T-shirt down after her, from between distasteful fingers.

‘You can open the gates for her,’ says Gemma to Johnnie. ‘We don’t want her here. Run along.’

Johnnie leaves. He does not run.

‘Well!’ says Gemma, alone with Elsa. ‘Well! Breakfast?’

She encourages Elsa to sit up in bed, and lends her a pink silk wrap to put round her shoulders. She touches each of Elsa’s nipples gently with her own cool finger.

‘Breast milk can be deep-frozen now,’ says Gemma. ‘Isn’t that useful!’

‘I see you did the typing,’ says Gemma, pouring coffee. ‘And so beautiful! You must have a deeply feminine nature. To type well is to desire to please.’

‘I hope Alice was merely trying to keep warm in your bed and nothing else,’ remarks Gemma, buttering toast. ‘I am afraid she has some kind of genetic deficiency, and is sexually ambivalent. Her mother is a confirmed lesbian. There is a lot of it about. It is nature’s answer to the population problem. I can’t bear anything unnatural myself. Can you?’

Alice’s motorbike can be heard to spit, and sob, and roar. The great wood-veneered gates open by Johnnie’s remote command. ‘I am disappointed in Alice as a person and as a physiotherapist,’ says Gemma, slicing the top of an egg. ‘She was very clumsy. And how could I have gone to Great-Aunt May’s funeral? I have trouble enough getting to places I want to get to. The reason there was no one at her funeral was because she was so boring no one wanted to go. And she had no business sending me off to be a mother’s help, as if I were a skivvy.’

Gemma’s eyes are bright with remembered rage.

‘My mother would never have allowed it,’ says Gemma. ‘And if Great-Aunt May had looked after my mother properly, had the roof mended so it didn’t leak, my mother need never have died. I hate Great-Aunt May. I’m glad she’s dead. She deserved to die.’

Gemma plucks the pendant at her neck.

‘I’ll leave you some more typing after breakfast,’ says Gemma, recovering her equanimity a little, although there are tears of passion in her eyes. ‘I would like you to stay in your room this morning, and rest.’

‘Alice had a father,’ says Gemma, bitterly. ‘All those Hemsley girls had a father. I didn’t. I was a bastard, a skivvy, and everyone knew it. There’s no excuse for Alice. She had every advantage.’

‘It doesn’t matter how long ago your childhood was,’ says Gemma, by way of explanation. ‘It is never finished. Never.’

‘And now,’ says Gemma, calmer, ‘while you drink your coffee I’ll get on with my story.’

Mr Fox’s party, May 12th, 1966.

Gemma had borrowed Marion’s mother’s white satin dancing shoes, circa 1930, and Marion’s gran’s white silk shawl, circa 1915, and worn it over a semi-topless black lace dress bought from the now re-opened boutique at the foot of Fox and First’s offices with money borrowed from Marion’s dad, and had been to the hairdresser in her lunch-hour to have her hair made bouffant and springy to the touch with lacquer.

‘Ugh!’ said Mr First, touching it with a thin, dry finger. ‘The more money you girls spend on your looks, the worse fools you make of yourselves.’

Gemma cringed, as anyone might well do from the murderer – even if one thus defined only in someone else’s dream.

‘What do I do to deserve it?’ rasped Mr First, disappearing into his office. ‘No one likes me.’

Mr Fox’s party.

Gemma was humiliated. Her breasts, by comparison with the minor swellings exhibited by the other women in the room, seemed to her own eyes to be gross, and Mr Fox’s earlier admiration of them surely ironic rather than sincere. She was obliged to swathe them with her shawl and look rather like Great-Aunt May on a particularly cold day.

Mr Fox set her to making champagne cocktails, spoke to her as if she were the maid, and otherwise ignored her.

Oh, Mr Fox!

As for Gemma’s hair, all the other women had silky hair, close-cropped.

Gemma served champagne cocktails.

The party sank down upon silky cushions, pot smoking, acid popping; beautiful people rolled on to and over other beautiful people, limbs pallidly interlocked, without energy or particular interest.

Not Gemma. Provincial, uneasy Gemma.

As for the men, if that’s what they were, with their pretty, depraved faces, they took no notice of Gemma.

Gemma, who are you, after all? No one titled, or rich, or black, or amazing. You are a typist, and loving Mr Fox will not change that.

Not this evening, anyway. Love’s a trivial commodity here.

More champagne cocktails. A sugar lump doused in brandy at the bottom of each thick eighteenth-century rummer, filled to the brim with champagne and adorned with a sprig of mint. Delivered into trembling, fastidious, manicured hands.

An oddly old young man, whose hair was dyed elderly grey, and pupils turned red by means of contact lenses, pulled Gemma’s shawl aside, peeked inside, laughed, closed the shawl again and offered her a drag on his reefer.

‘Go on,’ murmured Gemma’s mother in her ear, ‘go on. Join in! Or do you mean to let me down? Be a typist all your life? I left you everything I could – looks, ambition, a body to be used as a weapon in the world. I didn’t make it; but you can, Gemma. Go on, accept!’

‘Gemma!’ whispered Great-Aunt May, shocked. ‘Don’t you dare! Everything I’ve taught you! Virtue, obedience, self-control, submission to God’s will!’

Gemma fingered her pearl necklace, which had looked appropriate in Marion’s mum’s mirror, but now looked merely pathetic. Gemma hesitated.

The young man raised what would have been his eyebrows had he not shaved them off and pencilled others in.

Mr Fox left the party with two heiresses and a society photographer.

Gemma moaned.

The young man, bored, moved on.

Gemma went home by underground.

Round, on points, to Great-Aunt May. Mother scrabbles at the window, dead nails scouring the glass.

Gemma went home to shiver all night, under the duvet, the latest notion fresh from the Continent, feather quilt replacing blankets, in a pale blue cotton seersucker cover; as found in the houses of those in tune with modern living. Those who could afford to be really closely in tune with modem living also, no doubt, enjoyed central heating. Marion’s mum and dad did not.

Marion’s mum and dad had waited up for Gemma to return, the sooner to hear her tales of high life.

Gemma could not even cry in peace.

Marion, not having been asked to the party, had gone to bed early with a sleeping pill and slept soundly.

‘Such a wet blanket, that girl!’ observed Marion’s mum. ‘Not surprising she never gets asked out.’

‘She’ll marry an undertaker and disgrace us all,’ said Marion’s dad, comfortingly.

When at last Gemma was in her chilly bed, under the duvet, clutching the feathers around her, crying softly from pain and humiliation, Marion stirred in her sleep and wept a little herself, as if keeping Gemma company.

Mr Fox then absented himself from the office for some ten days. Nothing more was said of the trip to Tangiers. Gemma’s bosom remained, as if it were, expectant, thwarted and searching for someone to finger it. She could have sworn that in the interim it grew another couple of inches, and tilted upwards, waiting. It began to seem to Gemma that her breasts had a life of their own, offering themselves insensately to the world, regardless of her wishes for them. She bound them savagely flat with the elastic bandages Marion’s gran had used for her knees, and wore Marion’s mum’s sister’s white satin wedding dress (circa 1928) to the office.

Mr First, murderer, sister-slayer, raised his eyebrows and sneered as he passed through the office. Business was slack, and except for cleaning out the parrot cages, there was little to do.

On Saturday Gemma collected her week’s wages from a distraught Miss Hilary.

‘It’s all very well for you young girls,’ said Miss Hilary, taking a hundred per cent commission on Gemma’s week’s work. ‘You have your life before you. Mine’s all but gone.’

On Sunday Marion’s family took her to Kew Gardens. The first Jumbo jet passed overhead on its way to Heathrow and everybody ooo-ed and ah-d. The azaleas were over.

On Sunday evening Gemma wrote a letter to Great-Aunt May in her nursing home, telling her how she had left the north and was making a life for herself in London.

She never posted it. Years later Marion’s mum found it pushed down the back of the sofa of the three-piece suite, when she was replacing the upholstered furniture with cushions filled with polystyrene chips: something of a fire hazard but no one knew that at the time.

Failing to get a reply, Gemma was of course hurt, and angry.

Gemma dropped the pearl pendant in the wastepaper basket, but Marion’s mum retrieved it. Marion’s mum tried to put it in the top left-hand drawer of Marion’s chest of drawers, which Marion kept for treasures of various kinds, but could not open it.

‘Funny,’ said Marion’s mum. ‘Stuck! I must get Marion’s dad to see to that one day. Smelly, too. What’s she put in it now, the naughty girl?’

One fine day Mr Fox appeared at Gemma’s elbow, and bending sideways with dextrous charm, bit the back of her pretty white neck.

‘I’ve lost seven pounds,’ said Mr Fox, ‘and had a twenty-two and a quarter per cent increase in physical agility. See!’ And he bent and nipped her again.

Nip-nip!

Mr Fox is back! Gemma’s bosom swelled and heaved and burst its bandages.

‘Ooh,’ cried Gemma, suddenly lop-sided.

‘Extraordinary,’ murmured Mr Fox, and went to inspect the parrots.

Gemma blushed, with shame and despair. But Mr Fox’s mind was still on himself.

‘Do you think it’s an improvement?’ Mr Fox asked earnestly. ‘I don’t merely look haggard?’

‘No, no,’ cried Gemma.

Mr Fox cared what Gemma thought.

Mr Fox cared what everyone thought, but how was Gemma to know that?

Mr Fox disguised need with a cloak of contempt, like many another before and since, but Gemma did not see it.

‘I dined on lettuce leaves and water for ten days. The lettuce leaves were limp and the water came out of a tap. And how was horrid Mr First in my absence?’

‘Horrid.’ How smart Gemma is becoming! How she thinks now before she speaks!

‘Gemma, how I’ve missed you! Mr First is in or out?’

‘Out.’

‘Good. Come upstairs.’

And Gemma followed Mr Fox upstairs. So, the world can turn upside down in a moment: thus, boredom turn to joy unconfined.

In a dark comer of Mr Fox’s penthouse, beneath a profusion of fern, a tangle of creepers, worked an elderly cleaning woman, with dustpan and brush, feather duster, secateurs, watering can, fertiliser sprinkler, and perspex cleaner, genteelly cursing as humming birds swept beneath her nose, or through the wisps of her white hair.

Mr Fox behaved as if Mrs Olsen wasn’t there. So did Gemma, learning fast.

Well, the old woman got paid.

What more did she want?

Recognition? Understanding? Sympathy?

She would have to pay them, for those.

‘You’re getting fat,’ said Mr Fox to Gemma.

‘Two pounds,’ confessed Gemma. ‘It’s Marion’s parents. They’re feeding me up.’

‘What for? The killing?’

Was there a glint in his eyes? The glint of Red-Riding Hood’s wolf or Serena’s Bluebeard; wicked eyes peering out of a Disney forest-scape?

Gemma laughed, uneasily. Mr Fox did not laugh.

‘I hope Marion’s keeping her stories to herself?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you?’

‘Yes. Not a word to anyone.’

‘Wonderful to be home again! Health farms are such tedious places.’

And Mr Fox flung down on a leopard skin sofa, and patted the cushion beside him. How lean and predatory he appeared: his body half sunk into feather cushions. He wore very tight denim trousers, open white shirt, and a moonstone pendant.

Gemma sat, cautiously, beside him. Mr Fox sat up, and pushed Gemma so that she sprawled, not as elegantly as she would have wished, back on the cushions. Then he bent over her on one elbow, as Valentino inclined over his white, pure love.

Did Mr Fox mean it? The romantic intensity of his gaze, the bright eyes searching her face, her throat, her body? Or was he joking?

Mrs Olsen coughed in an alarmed fashion, but Mr Fox took no notice of that.

Mr Fox’s weight was considerable, in spite of the recent loss of seven pounds, but his kiss was light, barely touching Gemma’s lips. His lips moved over hers, from right to left, from left to right, and then were gone. Mr Fox’s hand, however, was firm against her breast.

‘A funny dress,’ he said. ‘All lumpy. Or is it you? Say it isn’t you.’

Gemma opened her mouth to explain: but now it seemed that her lips, like her breasts, were scarcely hers to control. They waited now for kisses: they had little time for words. If they spoke at all, now, it would be to utter protestations of love. Gemma kept her mouth tight shut.

‘I do believe you love me, Gemma,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Which is only right and fitting, after all. Marion loves Mr First or she would have left long ago; and if you love me you won’t ask for a rise, will you, because that would make me really angry. But do tell me, what are you wearing beneath your dress, and why?’

Mr Fox stood Gemma up, removed her dress, unwound Marion’s gran’s bandages and dropped them into the waste-paper basket. Mrs Olsen clattered her displeasure under the umbrella fern. Mr Fox took the dress, took the scissors, and unsnipped a dart beneath the arms. Then, raising her arms above her head as if she were a doll, he replaced the dress.

‘That’s better,’ said Mr Fox. ‘It is usually easier to fit the garment to the body than the body to the garment. And never, never, let me see you again with your hair as you wore it to my party; next time I won’t come back.’

Mr Fox, are you serious?

‘Yes,’ says mother in Gemma’s ear, ‘deadly serious. Listen, learn, advance yourself. This is the way to live.’

‘Gemma,’ warns Great-Aunt May, ‘the man’s an idiot. Your father was an idiot too, but your mother wouldn’t believe me. Gawping and gazing over the footlights.’

‘Are you coming to Tangiers with me?’ enquired Mr Fox.

‘Yes,’ said Gemma’s mouth, who was clearly on Gemma’s mother’s side.

‘Are you a virgin?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gemma’s mouth.

‘The mixture is almost too strong to tolerate,’ complained Mr Fox. ‘Love, Tangiers, and virginity.’

Mrs Olsen coughed less discreetly. Her gnarled hand was outstretched. Rough, red and old. That’s what you want for me, Great-Aunt May. That’s how you want my hands. I know you. You don’t want me good, you want me miserable. My hands aren’t for dishcloths and hot water. They’re for the caressing of the male cheek, more, the male member. Look at my hands. Fold them in yours, Mr Fox. See the cool, slender, nimble fingers, the rosy palms? Put your thumb there in the hollow of my palm, Mr Fox, let me close my fingers around it. See! Not such a virgin but that I wasn’t born to it. Such tricks!

Is that what you did, mother? Back in the old cinema in Maryport, Northumberland. Please say you did – that I wasn’t conceived altogether without finesse? Not altogether!

‘If I could bother you for my money, sir. It’s three weeks now.’

‘Mr First pays you, I think,’ Mr Fox was vague and cold, his hands gone from Gemma’s. But now her hands were his, with her heart, and her mind, and her lips.

‘Mr First isn’t in, until after lunch.’

‘Can’t you wait, Mrs Olsen? Surely!’

‘No. My husband is crippled: he can’t get out. He’s waiting for his dinner.’

‘How much do we owe you?’

‘Sixteen pounds plus fares.’

‘Sixteen pounds! It’s incredible. And fares? Where do you travel from?’

‘Whitechapel.’

‘Isn’t that walking distance?’

‘Not for me, sir.’

‘Really? At the health farm I walked eight miles a day and thought nothing of it.’

‘Could I have my money, sir?’

‘I’ll make a note of it. And Mrs Olsen, I don’t like being disturbed: will you remember that? And the spider plants have been allowed to become too moist: they’re not flowering as they should be.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. There’s rather a lot to remember – it’s not as if I were a paid gardener.’

‘Any careful and reasonable person could manage. That will be all.’

Mrs Olsen left, rebuked, and without her wages.

‘Treat them tough,’ said Mr Fox happily, his money saved, ‘they love it.’

‘And now,’ said Mr Fox, ‘now that we have had our interlude, Gemma, and I am reconciled to London, and the office, which is not without its pleasures, though scarcely real life, you will perhaps earn your wages by doing some modelling for me. You may undress behind the bourbon rose bramble, savouring its sweetness the while. Take all your clothes off, if you please: scraps of fabric merely distract the eye and distort the sense of proportion.’

And while Gemma took off her clothes, Mr Fox put on a white nylon coat and a French onion-seller’s black beret, and presently sculpted around Gemma’s white upper arms a mould for an arm-bracelet with jewel settings incorporated. Mr Fox worked intently and happily: had only he been able to fill twenty-four hours of the day thus working, fulfilling his intended destiny, how admirable a person might he not have been!

When he was satisfied with his achievement, he put down his tools, and sighed, and the far-off look left his eye, and the glint returned, and he blinked at Gemma’s body, as if remembering it.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘Tangiers.’

Then Mr Fox crossed to a coconut tree and unhooked from it a double coconut, which Gemma had believed to be simply growing there, and from a hinged drawer carved in its rather repulsive hairy shell drew out a single antique ring. A red stone gleamed in a silver snake’s-mouth setting.

A ruby! At least Gemma assumed that it was a ruby, and not red glass. Mrs Hemsley owned a massive gilt necklace whose whole purpose was to house a ruby chip. Gemma had been sent to Maryport on several occasions to pawn it, secretly, at the pawn shop there.

Mrs Hemsley! Mrs Hemsley had not written to Gemma since she left home; nor did any of the girls; not even Alice, who had sworn eternal devotion. That she had not let them know her address, and that their letters to the YWCA went unanswered, much to their distress, quite escaped foolish Gemma. Gemma was angry with Mrs Hemsley and bitter too. Too bitter at not being written to, to write.

‘Hold out your left hand,’ said Mr Fox. Gemma stretched out her hand.

‘With this ring, etc.’ said Mr Fox, joking, and pushed the ring on to her third finger. The ring was too small, or her finger too large.

Gemma cried out in pain, as it went over her knuckle.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mr Fox, surprised.

‘My finger’s gone numb,’ said Gemma. ‘It feels cold.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Mr Fox, ‘see how beautiful your hand looks, with the ring upon it. You have perfect hands: or as perfect as nature can achieve. The artist, of course, outdoes nature. It is his function. The ring now on your finger belonged once to Katharine, Tsarina of all the Russians. Or so they say, and thus I paid. A very wicked lady. Wickedness comes expensive. Goodness is a far cheaper and more boring phenomenon, especially in retrospect.’ Mr Fox stretched out Gemma’s arm, gently inclining her hand, so that it dropped slightly beneath the weight of the ring. Both surveyed the effect.

‘Remarkable!’ said Mr Fox. ‘How the old masters knew their work. However defenceless and naked the body, the ring still symbolises power. And in this case, of course, a certain amount of passion, and cruelty. You are wearing Queen Katharine’s ring, Gemma. Katharine of all the Russias!’

‘But surely that’s very valuable?’

Gemma spoke with her own mouth, spontaneously. Mr Fox scowled, or as much as he ever scowled, for fear of deepening the lines on his brow.

‘That is besides the point,’ said Mr Fox, tartly. ‘Now kindly look at yourself in the mirror.’

In the centre of the room stood a giant tree trunk, from which green nylon foliage curled upwards. Mr Fox twisted a knot in the wood and a door swung open. Mr Fox’s wardrobe. On the back of the door was fixed a rather cheap full-length mirror. Into this Gemma stared. Mr Fox stood behind her, and stared too.

‘You should shave the pubic area,’ said Mr Fox, ‘dark hair catches the eye and spoils the effect. Mary Quant has hers cut heart shaped and dyed green; all very well if that’s where you want the centre of attention, but otherwise disconcerting.’

Gemma lifted her heavy hand towards the mirror.

‘This hand will never do washing up again,’ thought Gemma, with the dreadful clarity of prophetic vision. ‘It will never again be fit for simple things, or easy pleasures.’ She sighed.

‘You might well sigh. Every time you look at your body from now on, Gemma,’ said Mr Fox, ‘you will see a slight falling away from perfection. Over twenty is over the hill for a woman. But now you are all glory, and I adore you. I worship the human form.’

He caught up the ringed hand and pressed it to his lips: but lightly, jokingly.

‘You may keep the ring,’ said Mr Fox.

‘Me? Queen Katharine’s ring?’

‘For the moment.’

‘Oh thank you, thank you.’

But how difficult it was to please Mr Fox.

‘You are not a little girl to say please and thank you,’ said Mr Fox severely. ‘I am not giving you a treat, I am doing you an honour.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Never mind. Be careful with the ring, Gemma.’

‘Of course.’

‘Don’t wash up in it.’

‘Wash up? Never!’

‘Don’t slap an admirer with it, however importunate the lout might be. It might loosen the stone.’

‘Of course I won’t.’

‘And Gemma, don’t let Mr First see.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Mr First lays neurotic claim to various valuables about the building. But beautiful things belong to those who value them, not those who paid for them. Don’t you agree?’

‘Oh yes, yes! I’ll put it in my bag at once.’

‘You may wear it home, Gemma. It marks you as mine. But go home now before Mr First returns, and take Marion with you. I shan’t deduct the time from either of your wages: I am a generous man. But I want to be alone; to feel solitary; to let the muse flow. And Gemma, once you have the ring home, keep it in a safe place. Until I ask for its return.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Gemma, impetuous, leant forward and kissed Mr Fox on his cool, dry lips. Mr Fox smiled, cool and dry.

Mr Fox, Gemma loves you.

Well, of course, that was what Mr Fox intended.

‘Gemma,’ said Mr Fox, ‘remember to dress before you go.’