You know what it’s like in the country. Too many roosters strutting round too many farmyards surrounded by adoring hens: too many bellowing bulls mounting too many grateful cows: too much soft-eyed female acquiescence and too much glittery male pride, too many females being chosen and males choosing to allow you to believe, as is possible in the city, that nature can be subdued and men and women made equal. The lesson from nature is too extreme to be ignored, and that, in my opinion, is why the villages hereabouts buzz with destructive scandal, and adultery, suicide, self-mutilation, incest, rape and murder are common occurrences, and cities are, by comparison, sane and peaceful places.
My name is Judith. I come from the city. I am thirty-four. My husband is ill with asthma, which is why we moved down here. We have two children, Colleen and Kieron. We live opposite Ranstrock Farm, in a nice little old sub-Georgian house, rather cheap because it’s near the main road. It’s a rather new road, carving through the Ranstrock acres. We tend to live in a cloud of pesticide but never mind: the meadows are wonderfully green and lush and fertile. My husband makes architectural models – you know, those miniatures of new hospitals, new schools, new urban centres and so on, which serve to get commissions for architects and go on display to soothe the local inhabitants when it’s obvious that change is neither wanted nor needed, but is going to happen.
(Round here I’m described as cynical and am not particularly welcome at the WI, because sometimes their cakes make me laugh. There is a certain Mrs Leaf, who uses at least a teaspoon of green colouring and at least a teaspoon of orange colouring in her icing, not a drop or two like other people, and when I start laughing, so does everyone else, which is half a relief, half terrifying, because once we start, when will we ever stop? Zen must come to Easter Dundon – our village – too, in the end. Nothing’s safe. We all know it, but they’d prefer to put it off for a bit, not welcome it, like me. So I get labelled cynical.)
My husband is what you would describe as a craftsman, and I am what you would describe as a craftsman’s wife.
Craftsmen’s wives are on the whole good-looking, stable and reasonable. We wear well. Our husbands, after all, are not indifferent to appearance and have an eye for quality, and a weakness for a bit of gloss. They are practical men: they know they will never be rich but will always be right, and choose accordingly. They are often overtly gentle men, with anger and envy running in strong torrents beneath. But they love and are loved and are usually faithful. Their wives develop strong and fairly idiosyncratic views of their own, a kind of inner fortress within the outer defences of the craftsman’s view of the world. Craftsmen tend to despise the world, because, being genuinely sensitive, they can’t quite cope with it.
Artists’ wives, if I may digress, have a far harder time. If your daughter must go to Art School, never let her do a Fine Art course. The young male artists are all waiting there to pounce, and pounce one will. Then watch her turn from some slim, bright, energetic girl into Saskia washing-up at Rembrandt’s sink, soft, plump-armed, doe-eyed, barefooted, serving the Artist who serves Art. Art is a convenient mistress for any man. He can drink, beat, steal, fornicate, commit any number of domestic cruelties and excesses in Her name. It’s expected. And when your artist has sucked his Saskia dry and turned the corners of her smiling mouth from up to down, he throws her out and, if he can, finds another plumper, less currently weepy one. The process can take years, and a handful of children.
Want to sleep? Your artist wants to wake. Want to work – no – his retrospective’s coming up. Want the baby? No – terminate! How can he paint if he can’t sleep? Don’t want a baby? Then you must have one – how can he live with the sterility you impose upon him? Want to eat? No, he wants to drink. And so must you, daughter, you must want what he wants, for you must serve Art too. But Art’s a faithless mistress; pity the Artist: he only uses you as he is used. Serve Her as he may, drink, batter, carouse, fornicate at Her bidding, she’ll turn her back in the end. Many, many are called, and few are chosen. Many have the symptoms of genius, but very few have the disease itself, and those that do probably look and behave like bank-clerks, and never even realised they were Artists.
(Bank-clerks as husbands are another story. I’ll tell it some time.)
Farmers’ wives – ah, farmers’ wives. Sandra Jephsen lives across the way in Ranstrock Farm. At the Carnival Party last year Geoffrey Jephsen, cock of his dungheap, swaggering young farmer, Sandra’s husband, owner of Ranstrock Farm and its three hundred acres, as was his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him, let his eye light on me, and now I love him.
Sandra Jephsen has thin fair hair and a timid eye, fleshy legs and a gentle manner. A proper farmyard female, just right for Geoffrey, who glitters and glistens with male sweat and energy, and has muscles which move beneath the skin as if they had their own separate existence: as if it were they which made love, not he. I know that, I know all that; I don’t care.
What does he see in her, when he could have me? I have long slim legs and sharp brown eyes and look and feel a bit like Shirley MacLaine.
He didn’t want to marry her, he didn’t choose her. He married her because she was a Fenton and the Fenton Farm’s two hundred acres verge on to Ranstrock Farm, and that’s the way things are done round here: a Jephsen and a Fenton sacrificed, so that two half-acre fields can become one one-acre field and the ploughing made easier. The old order continues alongside the new. They have two pale little children, more Fenton than Jephsen. I’m surprised she managed to impose her genes upon them at all, she has so little will, so little energy. She knows about me: I know she does. We take our cars out at the same time each morning – on the school run. Our children go to the same school, five miles down the road. She looks at me with her sad, pale eyes and looks the other way and I know she knows, and I don’t care.
I let her go first, I drive behind her, rather too close. I like her to know I’m there. I know it’s cruel, but I don’t care about that either. I see her eyes in the mirror, looking back at me if she has to stop and I pull up just behind her. My father was an artist, my mother killed herself (at any rate she died when I was twelve; that’s how I interpret it. Suicide or second-hand murder). When he died last year there were two hundred canvases in the attic. He’d sold three when he was twenty-six, and nothing since. Nothing. Perhaps I inherit his cruelty? I burnt them all. I and my sister, we presided over the death of his life. It was a wonderful bonfire. Crackle crackle! My husband Roy was shocked. He doesn’t like to see anything die that lives. He doesn’t like to see Art, Craft’s big sister, insulted. I think he changed his view of me a little, then. But how can I tell what’s happening between him and me? It’s all one-way now, in any case. I love Geoffrey. I’ve forgotten Roy. I would drive whey-faced Sandra off the road, if I dared, which I so nearly do. Except for the children, in the cars; for this is the school run.
Five miles to school there and back in the morning, and the same again in the afternoon. That’s a hundred miles in a school week.
‘It’s crazy,’ says Roy. ‘Why don’t you and Sandra Jephsen get together and organise something?’
‘I like doing it,’ I say. She sometimes manages to elude me on the way home, but there I am in the morning, always, falling in just behind her. Well, the children do have to be at school on time. She’s not a bad driver.
They closed our village school at the beginning of the year: it was either put the children on the school bus to Polydock Junior, which has a low reputation, or do the hundred weekly miles to Pennyham and back. How was I to know Sandra would choose Pennyham, too? I’m surprised she cares. I’m surprised she can tell a good school from a bad school. I can. I’m a real PTA type. Geoffrey says so.
Geoffrey said so, nuzzling my ear in the back of his Range Rover, my skirt rucked up and tearing, caught on the door handle, with the dogs snuffling and uneasy outside. It’s quick, sudden, farmyard and violent with Geoffrey, not slow and gentle and peaceful and reverential as it is with Roy. Roy talks to me while he makes love, admires my body, looks after my feelings, goes on patiently till I’m satisfied: Geoffrey doesn’t care about me, only about him. He loves me, in so far as he loves me, and while it lasts, for the sexual pleasure I give him. That’s all. Geoffrey says things like, ‘what a little slut you are,’ or, ‘if I were your husband I’d throw you out,’ or, if I say I have to go, because of the children, ‘what a real little Miss PTA you are!’ And then his teeth will nip my ear so I cry out and I don’t go until he’s finished, and the children wait at the school gate and I don’t care. I love him. Sandra Jephsen collects hers on time, poor thing.
Why does he want her, standing in his kitchen, mashing the potatoes for his supper with her pale suffering eyes? He could have me.
I wonder if Roy knows. I don’t care about that, either. He’d never have the courage to leave me. He loves me, he does what I say. He’s weak. He’s not strong. Geoffrey is strong, and so am I. Roy should have Sandra; I’m sure they’d suit each other.
Roy’s asthma is worse down here in the country, not better. I used to feel for his wheezing and gasping – now I despise it. I’m never ill. He’s half Geoffrey’s size; he is really quite a small man, now I look at him. Is it really a man’s job, to sit day after day gluing tiny scraps of wood together? And not even to his own design, but to someone else’s? He says that really he’s a cabinet-maker, but he can’t keep a family on that, so he has to do this. Compromise! I say I’d go out to work happily enough, even gratefully, but how would the children get to school? Roy doesn’t drive. He has one of those peculiar disabilities which mean if you see a large object coming – like a truck – you drive into it, not away from it. A disability driving instructors fear, for there is no curing it. Or so Roy says. I wonder. I wonder about all kinds of things, since my father died, since I started this affair with Geoffrey. No, I didn’t start it. Geoffrey did. We live in the country, after all, and the cock looks round the hens, and thinks, I’ll have that one this morning, that pretty little feathered thing; and so he does.
We ought to move back to the city, where there’s less pollen to fuel Roy’s asthma, and I can get a job, and the children can catch buses. But I can’t live without seeing Geoffrey. Not now. I would itch so much with desire I’d scratch myself to death and end up like my mother. Gone. When we part he says ‘see you round,’ but he never says how or where or when. He doesn’t like me to be secure. I just know that somehow we see each other at least twice a week: I’m out looking for mushrooms or blackberries, or he just happens to be driving his Range Rover through Polydock when I’m shopping; and once I knocked on his door when I knew she was out and he was in, because I can see everything from my window, and he had me on the bed, his and her bed, her side, and then said, ‘don’t ever do that again’, so I didn’t. It’s don’t-ring-me-I’ll-ring-you land we’re living in. But he rings me. He does.
What do I do now, how do I get him, how do I make him leave her and take me? He can have me with or without the children. Roy can have those. My life can’t go on with Roy for ever, humdrum and without passion. I shall never love anyone now but Geoffrey: the sheer power of my loving must make him love me: my hate for her will make her ill and make her old and die, and then he’ll need someone to look after the children, and I’ll be there. Roy doesn’t need me: he’s married to his architectural models.
Geoffrey took me to the tea-rooms at Pennyham today, for all the world to see.
‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ he said, on the hay in the big barn, withdrawing himself from me, leaving me all a-shudder as usual with unfulfilled desire, but all the better to remember him by and all the more eager next time. ‘This is thirsty work,’ he said, and we went to the Golden Goose and had tea and scones; and there was a dark-haired girl serving who went quite pale and shaky at the sight of him and me. You know how it is, you know: someone else’s husband flirting with you, the wife’s sitting opposite trying not to notice, you wait for the quick flicker of anxious eyes before deciding that’s it, that’s enough, and moving on. This was more than a quick flick and an anxious look; it was a white, open-mouthed stare, and I had no intention of moving on, not for Sandra, not for her, not for anyone.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s Ellen,’ he said, ‘that’s last year’s model. Don’t worry.’
I didn’t worry. I took his hand to my mouth and held it there, for all the world to see. She fled to the kitchen. She was only a waitress; not worth a half of me. I didn’t care who saw, and neither did he. All the world!
He ate his scone with big delicate fingers, big delicate fingers with which he paddled in me, and Sandra passed by outside and because we were sitting at the table by the window she saw us, and she came in and just stood by the table, in her headscarf, windcheater and clumsy leather boots. She reminded me of my mother. I have a photograph of her, standing just like that, on an autumn day, taken unawares. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said to her. ‘I can’t be in here seeing Ellen, can I, because here I am having tea with Judith from across the way! You two really ought to get together some time over the school run. A hundred miles a week!’
She looked at me and I looked at her, and I smiled and she wept and ran from the room, and all the customers, the neighbours and the distant relatives, for that’s what it’s like in the country, turned and stared.
‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘One thing in all the world I can’t bear and that’s a jealous woman.’
I’m winning, I thought, I’m winning. She will die from grief and his displeasure, and I shall be queen in her place, as is only right and fitting.
It was time to collect the children from school, and when he’d quietly finished his tea he allowed me to go. My thighs were agreeably bruised and sore. He didn’t make love to her, not any more. He’d said so.
‘Marriage is for the procreation of children,’ he’d said. ‘And that’s been seen to, after all. What you marry and what you fancy, they’re two different things.’ He had a low, deep, soft voice. It caressed when it wanted to, bullied when it chose. What it said was what I believed.
I let her collect her children first from the school gate, and drive away. Then my Colleen and Kieron got in the back of my car. I don’t let them in the front. It’s safer in the back. I’m a nervous driver. My mother was killed in a car-crash, after all. She’d had a row with my father in the morning, and died in the afternoon. The whole house would shake with their rows. I was on her side, but hated her for not being happy all the same, and then I hated her for being dead, for making everything impossible: for example, that I could never make her happy. I promised the children ice-cream. I was alive and exultant; the sun was sinking. The autumn landscape was sodden and green and wonderful, multi-shadowed. There are lots of little hills round here, and sudden valleys and sudden views. Even when mad with love the beauty of it all impinges upon me.
I drove along the ridge-road, the A561, not crowding Sandra at all. I could afford to be kind. He had claimed me in public, and disclaimed her. The A561 was the main road between two small towns – not quite wide enough for the traffic it had to carry, always part closed for roadworks as they took out a curve here, or widened there, trying by half measures to make what was dangerous safe, and only half succeeding.
It was Carnival time: the time when floats from all over the West Country – which have taken their creators a year to devise, make and render mobile – gather in Bridgwater to begin their magical mystery tour of the West, and this road was one of the main routes along which these fantastical rolling monsters travelled. They would sometimes take up almost the entire width of the road, to the great handicap of the traffic and the great delight of Kieron and Colleen. As I rounded the sharp corner into the outskirts of Shillingford I found the road blocked. Before my eyes a petrol tanker was skewing and slipping one way across the road, a carnival float, an orange and green balsa wood and foam monster, fifty feet high, mounted on a long trailer, surrounded by pink polystyrene dwarves, and towed by a tractor, was skewing the other. The monster toppled on top of the tanker. The tractor tipped on its nose in someone’s front garden; the tanker’s cab tipped into the stone wall on the other side. The back of the tanker mounted the back of the trailer. The single car between me and this major traffic event jammed on its brakes. So did I. The car in front was Sandra’s. I went into the back, but only slightly. Even so, my car being old and hers new, her crumple zone crumpled dramatically. My children squealed – I could see hers bobbing about in the back, presumably squealing too. I saw her eyes, pale and anxious with something other than wifely martyrdom, in the mirror. I saw men running away from the accident: the trailer driver somehow out of his cab, on to the wall, away. Fire! I thought, and I knew she thought it too. I restarted the engine, backed as fast as I could, which was very, very fast, and she followed. The children, catching fear, were suddenly dead silent. I gave her room to turn, then turned myself; a neat, rapid, three-point turn which any driving instructor would have admired, though in a place to turn him pale, on a blind corner.
But, listen, I looked after her and her children too. I was the opposite of murderous, when it came to it. We were both round the corner when the tanker went up and the green and orange balsa and foam giant too, in a black stench of flame and fire, which – as I found out later – by some great good fortune killed no one. Fathers were not yet home from work: mothers were on the school run, or walking. Shillingford has the misfortune to be a fraction under three miles from both Pennyham and Pollydock, which means the local authority won’t pay for a school bus. (I’m sorry about these names, but if you live round here you have to put up with the truly unbelievable. If people who live in towns tend to believe the country has been invented for their benefit, it is hardly surprising.) Three houses were burned to the ground that day and new rules were laid down for carnival floats and the movement of same that very week.
We took the long, difficult way round to Polydock, and home, over the levels. We didn’t have to speak. She just smiled briefly, as I let her pass and go first. She knew the way home: I didn’t. I followed behind, but meekly, not harassing. My hands were trembling on the wheel. Fear shakes you back into sanity.
I can’t tell you how beautiful the evening was, or the little wet leafy roads, between the tall, tall hedges. If a hedge is high and the road runs low between them, you know the road is old, has been there for ever, or at any rate since people started wanting to get from one place to another, and this was always the best and shortest way to do it. Even Kieron, seldom moved by natural glory, said, ‘doesn’t it all look nice,’ and Colleen said, ‘don’t say anything. We’ll have a crash,’ and the last rays of sunlight glittered and caught in the gold leaves of the beech trees as they formed an arch above us, and Sandra’s car went on ahead, showing the way.
As the sky darkened, the light from the blaze over in the east was pierced by orange and green streaks. It reminded me of Mrs Leaf’s funny cakes, the ones I shouldn’t laugh at, and of my father’s paintings, going up in smoke – he’d used a lot of green and orange, and painted very, very thickly, which meant very expensively, and my mother had complained about that, which I’d thought was unfair of her. A man had to paint what a man had to paint. If I’d gone harder into the back of Sandra’s car, who would have been killed, her or me? Probably both of us. In my mind it had always been her, and I’d always been safe.
I knew it was all nonsense. Of course Geoffrey slept with her. (Why shouldn’t he: she was there, and he wasn’t so very fussy as to who he entered, or where, or how.) He had no intention of leaving her, was just acting rooster in the farmyard, and it was my fault for letting him; not his fault for doing it, or her fault for being hurt by it, if fault lay anywhere, which I doubted. I’d be last year’s model too, soon enough, when my own marriage was sufficiently mangled to make him feel properly effective, properly seigneur of the lands round about. We were living in what had been the bailiff’s home. No doubt his father had had it off with the bailiff’s wife, and his father’s father with her mother, and then they’d all stood round and watched the bull mounting the cows, and felt truly part of nature.
A pink flare leapt in the sky. One of the dwarves, I supposed. Even this far away, with the car windows closed, you could smell burning. Sandra switched on her headlights, and I switched on mine.
So I loved him, and that was partly animal, the good part, and partly full of hate, the bad part; and all mixed up with him preferring Sandra to me, and my mother’s death and my father’s paintings and the bonfire I had made, and shouldn’t have, and I had hardly been sane since then.
All I could do now, by going on, was hurt her more. It was true that if it wasn’t me it would be someone else. There were a dozen women thereabouts, bored and on the school run, who’d wrap their thighs round his, as excitedly, as desperately, as marvellously, as me. We all think we’re something special, I daresay; men certainly do! It had just better not be me that did it. Let it be someone single, more purely victim. I loved him to hurt her, and it was demeaning to all of us.
She skidded on leaves and went into the ditch. I stopped. We all got out, and surveyed the damage. She said nothing. ‘I think it’s a bit too hot for me to handle round here,’ I said. ‘We’ll be selling the house very soon.’
‘Going back to the city?’ She had a slightly nasal voice, and I had a flash of the old arrogant contempt, but another explosion, violet this time, brought me back to my senses. She was just ordinary. So was I. So was he. So were my parents – he and she, no different from many of our friends, only writ large on the canvas of a child’s mind, by reason of her early death, and never properly reduced by time and experience and understanding to ordinary size.
‘I should think so,’ I said. ‘All this driving about, just to get the children to school. It’s different for you; you belong here.’
‘Don’t sell the house without telling Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘I think he wants it back. It used to belong to the farm.’
It occurred to me, briefly, that if he’d been trying to get me out, this was the right way to go about it, but I don’t really credit him with quite so much duplicity. Of course it might have been unconscious on his part. He came from noble baron stock, after all.
We didn’t mention Geoffrey, apart from in the role of possible house-buyer. We didn’t have to. She recognised an abdication when she heard one, and accepted it graciously. She had always been the rightful queen.
We pushed and levered her car back on to the road. She drove off, I followed. She went into her big house, I into my own lesser one. Roy looked up from a model of a new Canadian university he’d been working on for some months. He had trouble placing so many fir trees.
‘So there you all are,’ he said. ‘I was worried. Some sort of accident on the road. There was a newsflash on local radio.’
‘Here we all are,’ I said. ‘Safe, sound, and back to normal.’ I made tea.
‘I’ve been a bit mad since my father died,’ I said to him in bed that night.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Hell-bent on destruction.’
‘I think we’d better move back to the city,’ I said. ‘As soon as possible.’
‘Anything you say,’ he said, and an unkind person might have thought he was unduly passive, but I knew that he only waited for me to say what was in his mind, when I eventually came round to it, thus saving time, argument and energy.