Marion flew in from Johannesburg to see her two daughters Elspeth and Erin. Marion was sixty-four but you’d never have known it. Her arms were bare, lean and tanned and braceleted with thick bands of gold. She wore silk dresses from Hong Kong and her blue eyes were large and bright with added oestrogen, and she had a brand-new husband who owned a gold mine. She said she just had to get out of South Africa for a time: Mandela was free and all hell about to break out: this always happened when there was a weak government.
Marion looked at the way her daughters lived and was shocked. Neither was married. They lived together in a country cottage: Elspeth bred sheepdogs and Erin worked in the local school library. Neither looked after her appearance. Elspeth was thirty-eight and had hairy legs and her clothes smelled of damp dog, and Erin was thirty-five and at least two stone overweight. In the evenings they ate beans on toast and watched television.
‘You girls ought to be married,’ said Marion, aghast.
‘There’s no one around here to want to marry us,’ said Elspeth and Erin, ‘and, if there were, we might not want to marry them.’ Marion had run off from their father Ted when Elspeth was eight and Erin was five, leaving Ted to bring them up. ‘What do women need with men or men with women?’ he’d asked, all through their childhood.
‘They never had a mother’s care at the age they needed it most,’ said Marion, weeping on the phone to Cas, her new husband. ‘I let those girls down. It’s all my fault.’
‘It’s never too late to make amends,’ said Cas, who had a cheerful and optimistic disposition.
He comforted his wife as best he could. But Marion was still upset. She called Ted and said how dare he let her daughters get into such a state. Ted said the girls were perfectly happy and Marion was to leave them alone. What she’d begun would just have to take its course.
Marion put off her return flight and said to her girls, ‘Life is better with a man. You don’t have to earn your own living and there’s always sex when you want it and someone to talk to when the day is done.’
They said, ‘We like our independence and we talk to each other when the day is done, though we see what you mean about sex. But all the best men are married, and if they’re not there’s something wrong with them. They’re either maniacs or impotent or gay. Or all three.’
‘Oh, pshaw!’ said Marion, ‘there’s always someone perfectly decent about,’ and in spite of their protests she put them in touch with a dating agency and filled in the forms on their behalf and then had to fly back to Johannesburg, where Cas had been having trouble with the servants. If people are free to work where they will, how do you get them to work for you at all? Marion blamed Mr de Klerk, for letting Mandela out.
‘Our mother is a fascist and a reactionary,’ said Elspeth, washing and re-washing her best navy jersey to get the dog smell out.
‘She seems very lively,’ said Erin, picking her way through a mixed green salad without dressing. She was on a diet.
‘The wicked often are,’ said Elspeth. Elspeth was the one who’d suffered most when their mother left their father, being the elder.
The phone rang and it was the man from Datawhile. A Mr Leonard Shaving had been in touch. He would be pleased to meet both Erin and Elspeth. He would take them both out to lunch at the Crown and Cheese on Sunday. Mr Shaving’s height was six foot two, his weight thirteen stone two, his complexion ruddy, his income large, his property various, his visage attractive, and he had a degree in philology.
‘That’s the plus,’ said Elspeth. ‘What’s the minus?’ People had been trying for years to sell her dogs she didn’t want.
The man from Datawhile was hesitant. Then he said, ‘He has a birthmark on his forehead and has been married three times already.’
Elspeth and Erin thought a little. But they were no longer content with just each other and a life of no change and little excitement: such was the effect of their mother’s sudden eruption out of the land of peaches, gold and injustice.
Elspeth said, ‘Most men just hit and run: at least this one stays round to marry.’
Erin said, ‘I like the sound of a man who doesn’t give up.’
Elspeth said, ‘In any case, I rather fancy a short-term marriage,’ and Erin said, ‘Better a divorcee than left on the shelf.’
Both said, ‘Mr Gorbachev has a birthmark on his forehead and it’s perfectly charming: the whole world agrees.’
Three marriages, they decided, were nothing. Their mother was on her fifth. And what harm could there possibly be in Sunday lunch at the Crown and Cheese?
Mr Shaving was as handsome, rich, charming, tall and intelligent as his description, and his birthmark no more disfiguring than Mr Gorbachev’s, but the attraction was between Erin and him, not Elspeth and him, and it was Erin, the librarian, he asked to marry him. Elspeth hid her disappointment from her sister and the very week of the engagement won Best Dog at Crufts for a sheepdog, Fluffy Danube, and was asked out to celebrate by the owner of Runner-Up Best Dog, the terrier Ratty IV, whose old blue jersey was even smellier than hers had been before its thorough washing. The smell of wet dog is comforting.
Marion and Cas flew over for the wedding. Ted wouldn’t attend as he didn’t want to set eyes on Marion and besides, went nowhere where he was expected to wear a shirt. He had checked up on Mr Shaving and discovered that his three previous wives had hanged themselves. Elspeth and Erin were offended and said that was (a) hearsay, (b) scandal; (c) obviously neurotic women would make a beeline for a man as pleasant and kind as Mr Shaving and (d) they were glad Ted wasn’t coming to the wedding. Marion pointed out that in Ted’s eyes no good could ever come out of anything so speedy and sexy as a Dating Agency: he was an old-fashioned, jealous old fart and leaving him was the best thing she’d ever done.
The wedding day came and Erin was down to a size 12 and the sun shone and everyone rejoiced, and forgot about Ted, and the owner of Ratty IV came along with Elspeth, and there were obviously more wedding bells in the air: but Elspeth did not cancel her subscription to Datawhile: you could never tell. Mr Shaving whisked Erin back to his large country house, where maids did all the work. He did not want his wife to spoil her nails checking out books in the library so Erin gave up her job and spent her time polishing her nails instead, and thinking about Mr Shaving, as he liked her to do. And life was indeed, as her mother had told her, better with a man. She didn’t have to spend her time working, and there was usually sex when she wanted it, though not always. In the evenings he was often melancholy so she would keep her thoughts to herself.
‘But it’s so wonderful when he smiles,’ said Erin to Elspeth; ‘It’s well worth the times when he doesn’t.’ But Elspeth thought Erin seemed a little, somehow, abstracted, as if more things were Erin’s fault than Erin had ever realized.
‘He’s the kind of man who buttons up his feelings,’ Erin wrote to her mother. ‘If only sometimes he’d cry and let them go! But you know what men are! They never talk about their emotions.’
‘Darling,’ Marion wrote back, ‘Men hardly ever have feelings: that’s why they so seldom let them go. It’s not that they want to cry and don’t: it’s that they just don’t want to cry. Sounds to me as if he’s turning out to be like Ted – a real depressive!’ She and Cas thought they might be getting a divorce. He wanted her to give a party and ask the de Klerks as guests of honour. Marion said she had no intention of honouring the betrayers of white South Africa.
‘Take no notice of Marion,’ said Elspeth to Erin. ‘She’s old-fashioned and bitter, and has quarrelled with Cas. Get your husband to talk about himself. Find out why his other marriages failed. Communication, that’s what’s needed in a marriage. Laugh together, love together, cry together.’ She and Ratty IV’s owner were going to Preparing-for-Marriage classes, organized by the Church, though they hadn’t yet quite decided to marry.
But Mr Shaving wouldn’t talk about himself, or his previous wives. He said life was here and now; and they were married and that was that. He didn’t say he loved her, because, Erin said to Elspeth, that wasn’t his style. Erin told Mr Shaving that she loved him at least once a day, and she thought it pleased him, though it embarrassed him.
One day Mr Shaving had to go away on business, or so he said, but Erin called the man at Datawhile and discovered that Mr Shaving had kept his file at the Agency open and that he’d made four contacts since their wedding. How Erin wept and wailed. She called Marion who said briskly she shouldn’t make such a fuss; this was what marriage was like: had she ever said any different? Erin called Elspeth, who said contacts didn’t necessarily mean sex: perhaps he took a philological view of marriage. Erin said he never spoke to her about philology, she didn’t know what it was, how could she find out now she wasn’t allowed in the library; she was on her own in the world, she always had been; how she suffered! Nobody understood! She called her father but Ted replied, ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’ It was a bad day for everyone. Some days are like that.
Mr Shaving came home and seemed astonished at Erin’s grief. ‘I married you because you were calm, plump and in control,’ he said. ‘Now you are hysterical, thin and full of demands. What has happened to you?’
‘Marriage to you’, she replied, ‘has happened to me, as it happened to your other wives. Where are they now?’ And she stamped her foot.
‘Dead and gone,’ he said, ‘since you force my hand. And all died for love of themselves, not me. Samantha took her life because I spent a night with Sally Anne; so I married Sally Anne, what else could I do; but within the year Sally Anne had recourse to the rope because of her guilt about Samantha, and Sally Anne returned to haunt my next wife Jennifer, with whom I was when Sally Anne died, so she lost her wits and swung, and none of them cared for me enough to contain their own lechery, guilt and folly. They only cared about themselves, and each other.’
‘And what are your feelings about your poor dead wives?’ asked Erin.
‘I have none,’ he said. ‘They did what they did. We must all take responsibility for our own lives and, as with our lives, our deaths.’
‘Try and feel,’ said Erin, who had been attending a therapy group for the wives of depressives, to Mr Shaving, and she led him to the barn where his wives had one by one swung and dangled from the same stout hook. It was a haunted, gloomy place and oppressed her spirits terribly, and his as well, though he would not admit it.
‘I feel nothing,’ he said. ‘I only behaved as a man behaves when he follows his nose and gets on with his work.’
‘Follows his nose nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s something else he follows!’
‘Why should a man not?’ asked Mr Shaving, ‘since it’s in his nature so to do? Why can’t you be happy with me as I am with you; I fill your pocket and I fill your bed: we even watch telly together. My unconscious is my own, not yours.’
‘I married all of you,’ she said, ‘including that. Including your soul.’
‘Oh no, you did not,’ he said, and stalked off, as she later heard from Datawhile, to an evening out with an heiress in a seaside town, and he never came back. Divorce papers came with the post. Erin wept and wailed.
‘If only I hadn’t said this,’ she wrote to Marion, ‘if only I hadn’t done that, he’d still be with me now. If only I’d left his soul alone!’
‘His mother hurt him when he came out,’ wrote Marion. ‘You could tell by the mark on his forehead. It wouldn’t matter what you said or what you did, he was born to make women unhappy. Not all men are like that, of course.’ She was happy with Cas again. She’d given the party, and the de Klerks had come and charmed her. Elspeth wrote to Cas and wrote to Ted: ‘I’m terribly worried about Erin. She sits in the barn all day feeling sisterly to the three poor dead Mrs Shavings. Supposing she comes out in sympathy, and leaps from the rafters herself?’
Cas and Marion caught a plane straight over from Johannesburg and Ted took his bicycle out of the shed and rode the hundred miles south and they all arrived at the same time, just as Erin was in the barn putting the noose around her neck.
‘More men in the sea than ever came out of it,’ said Marion, removing the rope. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Anything, that is, but suicide.’
‘You were just fine until you married,’ said Ted. ‘I blame your mother.’ But at least he and Marion shook hands and shared a bar of chocolate, and Cas was jovial.
‘I’ll get you a divorce lawyer, Erin,’ said Cas. ‘You’ll do well out of this!’ and Erin quite brightened. It’s hard to give up lobster and champagne if you’ve wasted years on tuna and goats’ milk, and you know it: and a relief to realize that income need not stop when marriage does, if that marriage has been to a monster.
Elspeth called Datawhile and got Erin’s file reopened at no extra cost. Within a year Erin had remarried; now she was wife to a wealthy left-wing County Councillor with a social conscience; he was a reconstructed man, in the feminist sense. In fact he talked about his responses and his feelings so much, and about how he could best make amends for the sins of his gender, that she sometimes fell asleep before he got round to sex. But, as Marion said, it was probably better this way than the other.
‘The greatest thing you’ll ever know,’ said Marion, ‘the hardest thing you’ll ever learn, is how to love and be loved in return. Look at me! Five marriages and I made it! I’m so happy I could almost change my politics!’