Well now, friends, let’s have a little light relief. Let me tell you the story of what happened to Esther and Alan in the twenty-fourth year of their marriage. It was an episode distressing enough for those involved, although no doubt diverting and instructive for their friends. And what are friends for, but to provide the raw material for debate and exhilaration? (You may remember Esther and Alan in the earlier years of their marriage; when both went on a diet and Esther left home, briefly, and you may be surprised to find that instead of the son they had then, they now have a daughter, by name Hermes. But that’s the prerogative of the writer – to change the rules as work proceeds. If you can’t accept it, close the book!)
Envisage now one of our new palace hospitals: a concrete tower without, nicely carpeted within, with grave young things in white coats and folders stepping in and out of slow lifts, and the occasional dressing-gowned patient coughing or limping or spluttering, having wandered out of the patients’ day rooms, and little alcoves here and there fitted with tea-bars, staffed by jolly volunteers, where the visitors can buy white sugared buns and a fix of caffeine. And where the feel of seedy anxiety mixes with the lingering stench of gangrene and floats in the purified air; and paint the walls with whatever gloss colour the designer decrees, they will still pale and roughen too soon with the notion of things running down, running out – of desperate saving measures, which will never quite work. Any cure can only be temporary, after all.
But that’s the public wards, and we are meant to be here for light relief. There’s a private wing too, and that’s where Alan is. What did he work all those years for, if not for a little privilege? Things aren’t so serious in the private wing. Money’s a fine cushion for a worried head.
Mind you, Alan had the cushion snatched away, rather suddenly. Bang, thump! It happens to the unlikeliest people, these days. Redundant!
What’s he doing here? He’s having a face-lift. That is to say, he had one, a week ago, not to mention a cut and a stitch or so in the epicanthic fold above the eye. That takes years off. And ageing executives who want jobs had better take as many years off as they can. But Alan’s not healing very well: the bruises don’t fade, the tissues don’t join. Why? Mr Khan the surgeon is worried.
Well, that’s what Mr Khan says. We can hardly suppose the condition of Alan’s epicanthic folds keep him awake at night. Other things do that. Pony the nurse for example; longing for Pony does on occasion keep him awake. Mr Khan is a cosmetic surgeon of enormous wealth and great skill. (People certainly get richer dealing with the discomforts of the privileged than they ever do dealing with the sufferings of the humble.) He is married to Mrs Professor Khan, a brain surgeon, of beauty, presence and renown, who terrifies him. Mrs Khan even has morality on her side, since she works for the National Health Service, in what her husband refers to as the Free Wards. He works there sometimes too, of course, for form’s sake and because he gets a little tax relief, repairing burn cases and torn flesh. But Mrs Professor Khan will never, ever, agree to work in the private wing. She will never be rich, not really rich, but she will always be virtuous and she sleeps very well at night. Pony is neither virtuous nor rich nor beautiful nor brilliant, but she is young, very young. If she doesn’t sleep well at night at the moment, it’s because she keeps having to get up to spend a penny, having been made pregnant by Mr Khan. At this very moment, as Mr Khan steps over the threshold from the public to the private wing, off lino and on to carpet, she is waiting to tell him the news.
Mr Khan is dusky and immeasurably charming: he comes from somewhere on the Indian sub-continent: he has dark, almond-shaped eyes, heavily fringed: he has sensuous fingers. He makes love in the spirit of the Kama Sutra: he hums love songs as he operates, as he shapes a little bone here, remoulds a little flesh there: remaking man, and woman too, in an image better than God himself managed. How can Pony resist him? She doesn’t. Pony is small and pixie-faced and has blonde fly-away hair flying away beneath the white frilly cap they wear in the private wards. She’s a nurse by the skin of her teeth: her father is an ex-Minister of Health. It gives her a boldness with specialists an ordinary nurse would never have.
Mr Khan sweeps down the corridor: he is king in his kingdom. Where he goes nurses look deferentially and patients look admiringly, and offer thanks. Many wear burnouses, even here in hospital; and women chadors, but their eyes glow in warm gratitude, above the black and virtuous folds.
‘Mr Khan! Mr Khan!’ Pony breathes, stepping out from behind a portable sterilising unit left untidily in the corridor by a porter who went on strike yesterday for increased pay, and will probably do the same tomorrow. All is not well in our hospitals, especially in the private wings. Not often do rich and poor come into quite so intimate contact: it is inflammatory!
Mr Khan stops briefly, and smiles kindly at her; so some early morning mercenary, fresh and spruce from his military bed, tuned and bright for killing, might pause to smile at some little Persian kitten. He moves on: she runs after him. Other nurses have good strong quiet sensible shoes: Pony manages to break the rules and wears little heels; for medical reasons: her insteps demand them. Even so, she has to gaze up into Mr Khan’s face. It is very agreeable, for both of them. Mrs Professor Khan is taller than her husband.
‘Well, Pony?’
‘Bobby,’ whispers Pony. ‘I’m pregnant.’ And her little face radiates enchantment, wonder and gratification.
‘Oh,’ says Mr Khan, stopped in his tracks. Then he resumes walking.
‘What are we going to do, Bobby?’ asks Pony, falling into step beside him.
‘We’ll have to talk about it,’ says Mr Khan, ‘but not now, not here.’
‘You’re always so busy!’ she mourns. ‘But then you’re so important. Just like Daddy!’
Ah, Daddy!
‘It’s true,’ says Mr Khan, ‘that many people depend upon me. In the meantime, I love you very much and your news makes me very happy.’
Pony beams.
‘Bobby,’ she says, ‘I have to tell you that your wife was waiting for you in her office just now but she went home. I told her you were busy, and so you are! I was right. She’s so busy too, isn’t she? She waited only twelve and three quarter minutes.’
‘I love my wife as well, Pony,’ Mr Khan reminds her, ‘but of course not in the same way as I love you. Over the next week or so we’ll work something out. Now, to business! How is Mr Lear?’
(Mr Lear is, of course, Alan. Once he was Alan Sussman, but that was when he had a son, before he had a daughter, and in the days that he was vaguely Jewish, and consumed by an inner angst: these days he is tormented by practicalities, such as losing a kingdom and an income and, of course, in the manner of fathers everywhere, tormented in various ways by his daughter. Grown children go too soon, or go too late, or to the wrong place or, worst of all, don’t go at all.)
‘I’m very worried about Mr Lear,’ says Pony, composing her face into a grave nurse-like mask. (Well, she’s not exactly losing sleep over Alan, any more than is Mr Khan. She regards him in the way nurses do regard patients – as essentially fictional characters.) ‘He does seem so depressed. I mean, clinically depressed.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Mr Khan, ‘anti-depressant depressed?’
‘He was once diagnosed as depressed by his GP,’ says Pony, ‘and was given them. I asked him how they’d worked and he said they gave him nightmares and I said that was only imagination, and he said quite so. I don’t somehow seem to get through to him, Bobby. Perhaps he has been badly hurt by women?’ And her little lips tremble with sympathy, and Mr Khan pauses again, to admire her sweetness, and to instruct, which he loves doing, and which his wife, over the years, gives him fewer and fewer opportunities so to do.
‘There is certainly some reason,’ says Mr Khan, ‘why the healing process is delayed: why the tissues refuse to knit: why such a simple operation as a face-lift, which should cause a mature man no trouble at all, has proved so traumatic in this particular case. My sweet Pony! To think that you are carrying my child! How fortunate women are: all a man can do is tinker with creation: a woman is creation itself!’ And he continues his stride down the corridor, with Pony trotting after him.
‘Bobby,’ says Pony firmly – not for nothing is she her father’s daughter – ‘actually, men create babies too. I see this one as being as much yours as mine. I just do the carrying around! I don’t even have to do that for us any more. We could take this baby out of me now, deep-freeze it for a little, and put it back in somebody else’s womb altogether, and both of us watch it come out, hand in hand.’ She is referring to advances in gynaecological technique recently accomplished only a few yards down the corridor from where they are standing.
‘Not quite, Pony, not quite yet,’ says Mr Khan. ‘Though no doubt in time such techniques will be perfected, and I take your point.’
It is at this moment, while Mr Khan and Pony are locked in their loving war, that a little party of three sweep by them. Esther goes first, lean and freckly and passionate, for all the world like Katharine Hepburn in Venice in Summer Madness, a woman, though fifty, clearly in her confident sexual prime. Behind her go a pair one could take for brother and sister; Freddo with Irish good looks, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped with bright blue eyes and thick black hair and a sharp thin nose – wearing his best navy suit for the occasion, and his working boots. Freddo is Esther’s lover. And Hermes is here too. Hermes, as you know, is Esther and Alan’s daughter. She is twenty-four, going on fourteen, pretty as a picture, bright as a button and cross as two sticks. Hermes feels badly done by.
Pony is out of sympathy with visitors. They mess up the rooms and upset the patients. She stands between the Lear entourage and her charge.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks. Mr Khan admires her courage. Only his wife has as much.
‘To see Mr Lear,’ said Mrs Esther Lear, ‘in Room 341. I know that is his room. It was on Reception’s computer.’
‘He is not supposed to have visitors,’ says Pony. Hermes and Freddo prepare to turn back, but Esther will have none of it.
‘I am his wife, my dear,’ says Esther. ‘And husband and wife are one flesh.’
Pony has that superstitious fear of the word ‘wife’ common, thank God, to the mistresses of adulterers, and it is she who stands aside. The Lear party pass on.
‘It isn’t right,’ complains Pony to Mr Khan, who is standing in rapt fascination, staring after Esther Lear. ‘I know he wants his face-lift kept secret from his wife. He told his family he was on a redeployment course for redundant executives in the North of Scotland. He wanted his new face to be a surprise for them. He told me so. He confides in me, you know. And he doesn’t like his wife one little bit. They live apart.’
Mr Khan shakes his head reproachfully. ‘Mr Lear should not have told lies. There is nothing to be ashamed of in cosmetic surgery. It is natural for employers, in these dismal times, to want their employees to look young and handsome and fresh, and to inspire confidence in others. A man often looks older than he feels: in such cases to have a face-lift is not conceit, merely sensible.’
Pony has heard him say such things many times.
‘So that’s the wife!’ he says. ‘Mrs Lear! She seems a higher type than the husband.’
Pony hasn’t heard him say this before, and she doesn’t much like it. She feels rather tired, and thinks perhaps she’ll go home to her parents’ house in the country, for the weekend, and weed their flowerbeds.
Esther, at the door of No. 341, turns on her followers and forbids them entry.
‘Hermes, Freddo,’ she says, ‘you stay out of here.’
‘You’ll only have a row with him,’ says Freddo in his succulent young voice, with the slight over and under tones of Irish (Southern) mist and charm.
‘We are far more likely to have a row if there are witnesses,’ says Esther, briefly. ‘You should know that by now.’
‘I’m coming in with you, my darling,’ persists Freddo. ‘The bastard will only upset you.’
There is no stemming the flow of his goodwill, his desire to look after and protect, his Lancelot complex, as Esther describes it. So Esther diverts the flow. How skilled she is, after years of family life, in inter-personal relationships!
‘Freddo dear, I need you to stay here and look after Hermes. She should never have come in the first place.’ Hermes darts her mother a wounded and recalcitrant look. ‘This is between her father and me.’
‘Now you are accusing me of tagging along,’ says Hermes, tears rising.
‘See, Freddo,’ says her mother, ‘she’s in no state to be left alone.’ So Freddo stays, with his quasi stepdaughter. They sit beneath a palm in an upholstered alcove especially designed for surplus visitors, thus caught short by family passions. Hermes sits sulking, putting as much space as she can manage between herself and Freddo. Freddo stares at himself in a little gilt mirror and observes some slight slackness beneath his own chin, and experimentally lifts it. He now has a Chinese look.
‘I spy Chinee with a lace lilt,’ he says.
Hermes looks down her small, straight, perfect nose, and pretends not to belong to him.
Alan sits up in his hospital bed, his bandaged face turned listlessly towards the wall. Beside him books stay unread and orange juice undrunk. Esther sits herself beside her husband, her nearly ex-husband – the final decree will be in only a couple of weeks – and takes his hand in hers, and feels it grow tense.
‘I didn’t mean it to go so far,’ she says, being these days someone who likes always to put the general before the particular. Women in domestic situations tend to do the opposite. ‘I didn’t mean it to come to this.’
‘It hurts to talk.’ He won’t meet her eye.
‘It always did, darling,’ she observes, and leans over to adjust his head bandages. He shrinks, and wants her to know that he does. He doesn’t trust her. She has come here for some sinister motive.
‘The bandages have slipped! Let me help you. What do the nurses do round here, except stand about and chat up the doctors? You can hardly see at all.’
‘I don’t want to see.’
‘But, darling, it’s Spring outside. Look out the window. Daffodils.’
Alan says that he doesn’t like daffodils. They are too common and too yellow and Esther says no doubt he has seen too many Springs turn into too many Winters, which sounds rather more like the Esther he knew, or of late has come to know.
‘At least,’ he concedes, ‘you didn’t bring your lover. I suppose we must be grateful for that.’
Esther is glad he has raised the subject. She loves talking about Freddo to Alan.
‘He’s waiting outside,’ she says. ‘He wanted to come in to protect me from you, but I said since you were a sick man, I’d probably be safe, for once.’
‘I don’t want to hear about your lover.’
‘You brought the subject up,’ says Esther, ‘and I think you should hear, because you might make a new relationship yourself one day and you won’t want it to collapse like all your others. Freddo is always kind and considerate. He never finds fault with either my body or my mind. He accepts me: he admires me. He makes me happy. You must remember what it’s like going round with the young and amorous and uncritical. You did enough of it, when safely married to me. But young girls do seem to prefer married men, don’t they. They can put in practice without risking involvement. But there is something very sad and unwanted and defeated about a heterosexual man unmarried in his middle years. Don’t you think?’
‘Esther,’ says Alan, ‘I didn’t ask you to come here. I didn’t want you to come. Would you kindly go?’
It is somewhere in Esther’s nature to accept rebuke.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, in a small voice, quite like the old days, when she had apologised for everything, including the weather, and had weighed five stone more. ‘I’ll behave.’ And she looks at him with true sympathy, but not for long, just long enough to ask:
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes,’ says Alan.
‘It’s not supposed to,’ she says. ‘You’re probably imagining it. When I heard you were in hospital, and what for, I rang up the BMC and made enquiries. They were very helpful. They said you might experience discomfort, but they didn’t mention pain.’
‘It hurts,’ he says. ‘There is pain.’
‘They also told me,’ she remarks, ‘what it was likely to cost.’
‘Did they?’ He’s vague, too vague.
‘They assured me you’d look ten years younger. I said what a pity it was there were some parts the surgeon’s knife couldn’t improve.’
‘Potency,’ says Alan, declining to take offence, ‘is a matter of self-esteem.’
‘Poor Alan,’ says Esther.
‘It has all been a great humiliation,’ he says.
‘I know what those feel like,’ she says. ‘You taught me.’ He lets that go. She tries again. ‘Your daughter Hermes is outside, keeping Freddo quiet. She’ll come so far to show her sympathy, but not quite all the way.’
‘Perhaps she’ll run off with Freddo,’ says Alan, hopefully. ‘How much of my redundancy money have you paid him?’
‘It isn’t your redundancy money, it’s mine. The Court awarded it to me, taking note of your despicable behaviour during the last years of our marriage. Only a couple of thousand, to start him up in business. He has a nice little shop now: it keeps him busy and happy all day. So when you sell the house over my head, as you so often say you will, and kill yourself, as you so often say you will, there’ll be someone able to look after me.’
‘When did you ever need looking after?’
‘Oh, once, once,’ she says, sadly. ‘I am what you’ve made me. Alan, I didn’t come here to quarrel with you, I only came to ask how you got the money for this really very expensive and perfectly unnecessary cosmetic surgery, when Hermes’ Cordon Bleu classes have to be paid for and the roof is leaking and your solicitor’s fees must be enormous, because you keep insisting on going to court over trivial issues, which I always win, and there is no one in the world to care whether you look young or old. How did you pay?’
He is silent for a little and then he says, ‘I took out a second mortgage on our house.’
It is her turn to be silent. And presently she says, with ominous calm, ‘I don’t believe you. You’re trying to upset me. How can you take out a mortgage without my signature?’
‘Mostly in these offices,’ he says, ‘they’re on the husband’s side. They’ll stretch a point or so.’
She believes him. Believing him, she shrieks and flies at him, belabouring his bandaged head with quite powerful fists. He is already poised for escape having, after all, been married to her for many years and being able to predict her reactions – but gets his foot trapped beneath too-tightly tucked hospital blankets and can’t slide out of the bed as easily as he has imagined. He shrieks for help and she shrieks abuse. Hermes and Freddo come running in. Hermes will not intervene physically but cries out to anyone who will listen, ‘They’re always doing this! I’m so ashamed! No wonder I’m so neurotic!’ And Freddo tries gently to restrain his lady love, crying, ‘Oh my darling gentle lady!’ but she elbows him savagely aside. It is left to Pony to restrain Esther with a cunning neck-lock from the martial arts in which she is trained, and by the time Mr Khan has arrived, in response to his bleeper’s urgent alarm tweet, some kind of order has been restored. Esther is brilliant-eyed but quiet in the corner of the room, with Freddo stroking her hair and regarding Alan with a curled lip, and Hermes is weeping quietly, and Pony is adjusting Alan’s bandages.
‘It’s all right, Mr Khan,’ says Pony, ‘I don’t think any of your wonderful work has been spoiled.’ And she mutters, ‘Visitors!’ under her breath, but quite loud enough for Esther to hear.
‘Mrs Lear,’ says Mr Khan, in his mellifluous voice, ‘will you come with me to my office? I think we should talk. It is true that in normal times physical violence can release tension in a helpful way, but these are not normal times for your husband. He needs your love and support. The cheek scars are safe enough, but I have raised the epicanthic folds, and they are particularly vulnerable.’
He pronounces his v’s as w’s; Pony loves it. Wulnerable! She sighs her admiration. Mr Khan preens.
‘He should not, for instance,’ Mr Khan goes on, ‘laugh too much.’
‘My father,’ remarks Hermes, ‘was never a great laugher. He should be safe enough.’
Mr Khan sends Hermes and Freddo down to the canteen to wait for their mother, and desires them to choose herbal tea rather than coffee. Coffee, he says, can break the fine capillary nerves in the cheek, and righting them can be quite a business. ‘Some things,’ he tells the silenced, desperate assembly, ‘our patients can’t help. Such as the passage of time, or the inequities of a natal fate. Things like coffee, alcohol, over-eating, over-indulging in sex – people wrinkle up the face quite drastically – they can help, but usually won’t. You do not,’ says Mr Khan sadly, ‘meet the finest and best of mankind in this particular wing of the hospital.’
Freddo and Hermes, much reduced, go for herbal tea, resolved to abjure coffee, Esther accompanies Mr Khan to his office, and Pony sits on the end of Alan’s bed, to calm him and soothe him in the interests of the proper knitting of tissue. The process was known to Sister Tutor as ‘chattering on’ and she was a great believer in it, and Pony was an adept pupil.
‘Friends,’ says Pony, curling her little slim legs, ‘are all very well at visiting time, but if it’s nearest and dearest out of proper hours, then there’s nearly always trouble. I think hospitals should be kept for the patients, don’t you? Sister Tutor always told us that hospitals are sanctuaries: and that the mind must heal before the body can, and what most patients come in for is peace and quiet. A broken leg, she’d say, is a plea for help: and what the nurse must do is find the source of the inner pain. Go easy on the pain-killers, she’d say: most patients need pain to assuage their guilt. When in their own estimation they’ve suffered enough, the pain just goes. Pain-killers merely confuse the patient and drag the healing process out. Sharp and short, she’d say, or easy and long, and in these days of cutbacks and queues for hospital beds, easy and long is plainly immoral. Sister Tutor is a wonderful woman. So wise!’
Alan isn’t listening: he is tenderly moving his jaw, beneath its bandages, and is alarmed by the degree of movement the bones now seem to have.
‘Do you think something’s given?’ he asks.
‘No, no,’ says Pony, soothingly. ‘You just began to use your jaw properly. Shouting “you bitch, you bitch” the way you did, you really exercised your mouth. Sister Tutor was a great believer in catharsis. Now you’ve got what you really wanted to say out, you’ll find speaking much easier! Isn’t that wonderful? Good! I think we’re really on the way to recovery!’
And she slips off the bed and does a little dance about it. Alan can scarcely believe his improvement merits so extreme a response.
‘Everything’s going so perfectly,’ says Pony. ‘And now I’m pregnant too!’
‘Good heavens,’ says Alan, gloomily.
‘Why, don’t you like children?’ She’s anxious.
‘Not much,’ he says. ‘No one seems able to cook them properly.’
She looks at him blankly, not taking the joke, and he is ashamed of having made it: she is very bright and pretty and rescued him from his wife’s fists. He responds properly, as she deserves.
‘That’s wonderful!’ he corrects himself. ‘I didn’t know you were married.’
‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ she says. ‘But I soon will be! It’s Mr Khan, you know.’
‘I might have known it. Only yesterday he showed me photographs of his wife and children.’
‘He feels he ought to, that’s all. She looks all right in photographs, but she’s terribly boring. She’s a brain surgeon. He can’t possibly love her, except in a conventional sense.’
‘Is there another sense?’
‘Oh yes!’ breathes Pony. ‘But how could someone of your generation understand?’ And she speaks of the passion which melts her bones, and the feeling of the heavens uniting, and the sense of destiny, of the ultimate fortune, the great adventure! Herself and Mr Khan! He from so far away, spirited into this very hospital: and she having done her training here, almost by accident: and thus they’d met. Fate has led them together. How else to explain it?
‘Ah yes,’ says Alan, turning his face back to the wall. ‘All that.’
In the meantime, Esther is talking to Mr Khan, in his large cool office. A photograph of Mrs Professor Khan and the two children, all on horses, stands on his tidy desk. ‘It is no use living in the past, my dear,’ he says.
‘Don’t you “my dear” me,’ says Esther. ‘And there is a great deal of use in living in the past. Anger keeps me going! To think how I lived! All those wasted years!’
‘Do you want to tell me, my dear?’ He gazes into her bright blue eyes with his own soft brown ones. He admires her. She reminds him of his wife – an intelligent and forceful woman, unbowed down by that necessity of being good which so afflicts English women: the sense that things must be put up with, whatever they are, and no complaints allowed.
‘Tell me why the mention of a second mortgage should make you so very, very violent!’
‘There was a time,’ says Esther, ‘and I lived through it, before the trouble started, when women were proud to be wives, and admired men, and ran homes, and loved to do it well, and the name housewife had dignity and substance and mothering was all the rage, and I mothered Hermes. And then Hermes was nineteen, and I wanted her to leave home, and didn’t at the same time, because then what would my purpose in the world be? I had reached the time of my come-uppance as wife and mother, and I realised it, and Alan couldn’t, and Hermes wouldn’t.
‘Picture the scene! Myself in my love home in the suburbs, with the roses in the front and the lawn at the back, big enough for a game of croquet and summer Sunday drinks, and serviced by myself: the wife, no matter what her talents or her aspirations were, existed in those days to service the family. And the family, without a doubt, was better off for it. Well, there’s a dilemma!
‘And then one summer evening came and I was waiting for Alan to come home. I was cooking the dinner. I am a very bad cook, but that was neither here nor there. To cook was my function. Alan liked formal meals, of the kind he took out at business men’s restaurants at lunchtime. And he was always slightly aggrieved at the food I set before him, as if feeling the lack of a menu, a choice of dishes. I was in a muddle: the mixer had spattered unhomogenised mayonnaise all over the kitchen: a bolognaise sauce was catching in the pressure cooker – you could tell by the smell of the steam – and Hermes was writing an essay on the kitchen table, and I said, which I shouldn’t have:
“Can’t you keep your books to just one area of the kitchen table, Hermes?” And I suggested she work in her room, where she had such a nice reading lamp, a Christmas present from her father. She reminded me that it had been I who had actually bought the lamp and put his name upon it, as usual, and I explained, as usual, that Christmas was the busiest time of her father’s year, she mustn’t be upset by his apparent neglect. “It’s the time,” I said, “that the main Presentations and Conferences take place.”
“It’s the time the office parties take place,” Hermes corrected me, and went on to say that office parties were annual orgies and I went on to say she knew nothing about it, and she said she might not but Val did – Val often worked in offices – and I said, “Who is this Val? You keep talking about him,” and Hermes said, “It’s not a him, it’s a her,” and while I digested this and got ready for trouble ahead, and took out the flour to thicken the gravy, Hermes sidestepped and started in on me.
“You don’t make it less greasy by adding flour,” she said, “you just add carbohydrate to cholesterol.”
“Your father loves gravy,” I said.
“You’re trying to murder my father,” my daughter said.
“Why should I?” I asked. “Since he supports us and looks after us, and we are the meaning of his life?”
“You are a slave,” said Hermes.
“I am a housewife,” I said.
“Val says you are a slave,” said Hermes, “and what you do is unpaid shit-work, and what you cook is murder. You want him to have a heart-attack and claim on the insurance,” and I replied that all this was only a stage Hermes was going through, and she said, “What? Being a lesbian, a stage?” and since it was the first I’d heard of it, perhaps I didn’t react properly, merely asked her not to mention it to her father before he’d even begun his soup – you know how children will wait on the doorstep for the tired and weary worker, in order to spring bad news upon him – and explained to her how bad the times were, what with oil prices shooting up again and the recession and the rate of exchange – I can never remember whether a low pound is good or bad, can you? And so forth. And Hermes said:
“Mother, I don’t believe you are a stupid woman. You went to college to get a degree. I think it is marriage that has made you stupid. You have lived your life through your husband. You have dedicated yourself to him, and given the scraps to me, and there is nothing left of you, nothing, except a parrot wittering phrases, and when I go, when I do go, you won’t have him, because when I go, Father goes. I feel it. And Val says so.”
“Hermes,” I said, “surely it’s time you left home.”
“Oh yes, that’s right,” she cried out in her bitterness. “Turn me out in the last year of my finals! It’s because I’m a lesbian! Val says lesbians must expect opposition, driven from pillar to post.”
“Oh, do move your books, Hermes,” I said, “and not a word to your father about being a lesbian until Mrs Thatcher has sorted out the economy a little.”
‘Of course I only said that to annoy her, and I shouldn’t, but life can get very boring.
‘Hermes screamed and threw a book, which caught the pressure cooker and spilt the stew and knocked the gravy all over the floor just as Alan came into the room, back from work.
“Do run along, Hermes,” I said, and she did, and Alan raised his eyebrows at the mess and I said I was sorry things were so behind today, Hermes was being difficult, we could no longer blame it on adolescence but perhaps she was feeling the pressure of exams and Alan said where’s the whisky and before I remembered I said in the fridge and got a lecture about whisky being served at room temperature, so I offered him gin and then said sorry again, because we’d run out of mixers, and he said what did I do all day, darling, and I said what I really wanted to do was to get out of this: start a new life: take out a second mortgage and get myself qualified, and he went into his set piece about my being a) too old to start anew and b) too loveably muddle-headed to cope outside the home.
“Darling,” he said, “if you’d ever been out to work you wouldn’t be talking like this. It is one long humiliation and curtailment of human rights.”
“Darling,” he went on, “you’d have to pay a housekeeper to do your work; they get paid more these days than office workers. We’d be running at a loss.”
“Darling,” I remember him saying, “had you thought about tax? I’d have to pay more if you went out to work. I would really resent that.”
“Darling,” he then said, “you’re a traditional woman and that’s the way I like it, even if you do put the whisky in the fridge.”
‘And I gave up and told him, unwisely, about Hermes and the fact that Val was female, whom we had assumed to be male.
“Well,” said Alan, “these things can be nipped in the bud. One can take steps.”
“But sometimes,” I said, knowing Alan, “by taking steps to make matters better, one makes them worse.”
“Darling,” he said, “trust me to know what I’m doing,” and I felt a sudden twinge of backache.
‘I remember I used to get quite bad backache, in those days. I took it to the doctor, on occasion, who would always say, what did I expect, at my time of life, so I’d take it home again, with a prescription for Valium. I was going to be a doctor once,’ says Esther to Mr Khan, ‘but my father said it was a waste of the nation’s resources, not to mention his, since I’d only get married and have children. He was quite right, as it turned out. That’s what I did. Have you noticed, Mr Khan, how many women there always are in doctors’ surgeries, and how few men?’
‘That may be,’ says Mr Khan smugly, ‘why it’s women who outlive men.’
While Esther tells Mr Khan such sections of her life story as she feels to be relevant to her grievances, Freddo and Hermes drink herbal tea in the canteen. Hermes is cold and sulky but Freddo barely notices.
‘I’d rather drink horse-piss,’ says Freddo, sipping a fine yarrow concoction.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Hermes.
‘Some people do,’ he assures her. ‘It cures rheumatism.’ And he tells her she is old-fashioned, and she says she isn’t interested in his opinion of her, and he says she’d better be, because he’ll be her stepdaddy soon enough, at which Hermes begins to weep gently into her camomile tea.
‘Why can’t my parents’ generation keep itself to itself?’ she moans. ‘Why does it have to come banging back into ours? Face-lifts for him, young lovers for her! At least my grandmother had the decency to grow old from a comparatively early age.’
‘Och, my darling,’ he says, and slips a consoling arm around her waist, ‘sure in mythology it happens all the time. First the mother, then the daughter!’
But she’s too lost in her own woes to feel the pressure of his hand or catch the tenor of his thoughts, and begins to repeat over and over:
‘It’s all my fault.’
‘It was all Hermes’ fault,’ Alan is saying to Pony, at that very moment, and he tells her how he had first gone calling on Val, to nip in the bud any possible undesirable relationship his daughter might make. He felt in those days that he was not a sufficiently attentive father and that the least he could do was take definitive action from time to time. Esther, at Alan’s command, has searched for and found Val’s address amongst Hermes’ papers. And so Alan had gone off to visit after work, grey-suited and brief-cased, and bolstered by a sense of being altogether on the right side of society. A gaggle of young persons on roller-skates nearly knocked him down: Val lived in a racy and expensive part of town. Her front door was chequered in silver and green. He found that strange and sinister. When Val opened the door to him he was taken aback. He had expected some tough-jawed young woman in denims, but found instead a shimmery young woman dressed in green silk with almond eyes set widely apart, and short, shiny fair hair: she was what he thought women should be and dismissed at once any notion that the friendship between her and Hermes was suspect. How could it be? He was irritated with Esther for having suggested it in the first place. How now was he to explain his presence? “Well?” Her voice was husky: it turned his heart over.
“I’m Hermes’ father.” It was all he could think of to say.
“How rare,” she said, “for a man to define himself in relation to a woman. And how welcome! Do come in.”
And she stepped to one side and he stepped past her, and caught a delicate whiff of her perfume, or soap, or shampoo, or something ridiculous, as he went by. Esther always used medicated soaps and shampoo.
‘And then? And then?’ asks Pony, for Alan’s voice falters and is still.
‘What do you think?’ asks Alan, his nostrils dilating a little, caught in the sadness and wonder of amazing times, gone by.
‘Of course, I know you’re very attractive, but someone like that, your daughter’s age – why would she want to?’ asks Pony.
‘You have not seen me at my best,’ says Alan stiffly, speaking out from beneath his bandages, ‘or you wouldn’t ask. Why you and Mr Khan, come to that?’
Mr Khan reclines on a sofa in his office. He is telling Esther about Pony.
‘I love the little thing,’ says Mr Khan. ‘I tell you this because I want you to know that I too am tempted, I too am human. I too am fed up with marriage. I am in no position to judge others. Of course, I love my wife as well as Pony.’
‘Of course—’
‘And I shan’t leave her. How can I? She has never deserved it.’
But Esther isn’t listening.
‘I blame Hermes,’ she says. ‘I really do. If she hadn’t been so silly, or if I hadn’t mentioned her coming out to Alan – girls these days come out into lesbianism as they used to come out into High Society – none of it would ever have happened.’
‘It should never have happened,’ says Alan, regaining his composure, ‘but it did.’ And he tells Pony in rather more detail how it had all come about. How Val had lain back on embroidered cushions, while Alan paced and apologised. Shimmering and glimmering up at him: pale limbs against luscious fabrics.
“Of course it all sounds absurd now I’m here,” he’d said. “How could you possibly be a bad influence on Hermes? If she were to grow up even remotely like you—”
“We’re the same age, Alan.”
“Yes, but you’re so original.”
She’d seemed surprised.
“Perhaps you’re accustomed to the company of very unoriginal people?”
“You find me suburban?” He’d considered himself, and sipped his whisky sour. “I daresay you’re right. The modern equivalent of the Yeoman of England. Sutton Man! I’m a senior executive in a big company, as it happens. International. Of course the UK operation is a fairly minor division of the whole, but more funds are being diverted here from the States and I have a reasonable prospect of going on the Board.”
“You don’t have to give me your qualifications,” she’d remarked. He was confused. Why was she lying back amongst cushions; what did she mean by it? Twenty years ago it would have been an open invitation for him to throw himself upon her, but who was to say what the signals were, these days? Perhaps she displayed the length of leg, the curve of the breast, the better to cry rape? Or perhaps it was just how she always welcomed guests: reclining on a low sofa, laughing and languorous. And how now was he to construe her last remark?
“I think you are the most beautiful, extraordinary girl I’ve ever seen in my life,” he’d said, giving up.
And she’d considered this, and stopped laughing, and become intense.
“Am I supposed to be flattered, or honoured, or both?”
“I was merely telling you what I thought,” said Alan, and then feeling that perhaps in her circles ‘thought’ was not an okay word, amended it to ‘felt’.
“No,” said Val, “you weren’t. You were expecting me to be grateful for your good opinion of me: which is really only a prelude to saying you want to go to bed with me, now, and go home to your wife after a couple of hours and hope to God I’ll forget the whole business. And if I telephone you at your office your secretary will say you’re out, but you’ll ring back after your meeting, which you won’t: and you can rely on me not to ring you at home because on the whole girls like me – or the kind of girl you think I am – are frightened of wives, and feel guilty about sleeping with married men, which is, after all, like sleeping with father to annoy mother.”
How could she read his mind? He’d wanted to leave. And even as he prepared to go, she’d stretched, cat-like, and said, “But certainly, if it’s what you want, I’ll go to bed with you. I just think you ought to be more honest.” That frightened him.
“I think I’d better go.”
She did not make the expected move to detain him. She suggested he give her regards to his wife, whom she had heard so much about from Hermes.
“You are more like a piranha-fish than a woman,” he’d complained. How could the mind be so sharp and wounding while the body so warm and yielding? “Thank God I am happily married!”
“Then you just go home to it,” she’d said, as if to a naughty child. He’d shuffled and shivered. He’d said he’d ring her in the morning, when she was feeling better, and started again for the door, and changed his mind, and said:
“It’s such a relief, you’ve no idea, finding a woman who can look after herself.”
She’d looked up at him with darkening, receptive eyes, no longer laughing, or mocking, or hurting, and he’d said, surprising himself, for during his ins and outs with various secretaries and colleagues’ wives over the years, he’d never said it, keeping at least some loyalty to Esther, “I love you.” He amended it to, “I think I could love you,” at once, but nevertheless it was said.
Alan falls silent again. Pony stares at him in alarm. There are tears in his eyes.
‘You mustn’t let your mind dwell on unpleasant things,’ she says.
His hand goes to his neck, remembering Val’s small white fingers, and how they unknotted his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. Her green silk whatever it was, was no hindrance to passion. There seemed, with Val, so little difference between dressed and undressed. Esther was always somehow embattled behind her clothes.
‘It’s not unpleasant,’ he says. ‘It’s the difference between then and now that’s painful, that’s all.’
Now Mr Khan holds Esther’s hand in his and tells her his troubles.
‘My wife works,’ he says. ‘She is a brilliant brain surgeon. She saves a dozen lives a week. Some of course come out as vegetables, but death’s the alternative, and her vegetation rate, as we call it, is lower than anyone’s. She has right on her side: all I have is money, but rightness weighs heavier in the scales of life. Our home runs like clockwork. We have a housekeeper and a timetable pinned on the wall: we take turns fetching and delivering the children: dancing lessons, fencing, music: we fit everything in. Clockwork! Why then do I love Pony, who is nothing, not even a very good nurse? I will tell you. Because she worships me, she adores me, she doesn’t understand me. But how can I leave my wife? It would destroy her.’
Esther looks down with some satisfaction at her lean, made-over, well-loved self, and says,
‘It might be the making of her.’
But he’ll have none of that.
‘She is made already,’ he says. ‘That’s what I can’t stand. Our love-life is fantastic, fantastic. Pony lacks imagination, not to mention stamina. But it’s Pony I want. I need her inefficiency. Look at me! My life is running out!’
‘All our lives are running out,’ says Esther sadly, ‘but Alan used to be preoccupied with how much faster my life was running out than his. He thought it justified his horrid little affairs.’
‘Affairs are not necessarily horrid,’ protests Mr Khan. ‘Sometimes they are beautiful, beautiful! I see Pony’s little dancing legs beneath her crisp white nurse’s skirt, and my heart turns over! I, Mr Khan, at whose frown the whole department of cosmetic surgery trembles! That this little creature, this little nurse, should wrap me around her little fingers – is not there wonder, and hope and amazement in this?’
‘I became hopelessly entangled in her web,’ says Alan to Pony. ‘She was Eve and she held out the apple of knowledge to me, and I ate of it, and was cast out for ever.’
They lay together, Alan and Val, in her satin bed. It was afternoon, the best time for stolen trysts. All passion spent, Alan lay on his elbow and gazed down at her perfect face, the sweep of her long lashes, the curl of hair beneath the ear. Her skin was dewy.
“You have everything before you,” he said to her, “it gives you a special quality. Youth, future, intelligence, hope: all shine through you!”
Her large eyes shot open.
“Alan,” she observed, “you are a terrible lover.”
He was taken aback. He thought he had done well enough. Was this what the new woman said to men, at such times?
“I beg your pardon?”
“You have no idea at all,” she said, “how to go about it.”
“No one else has ever complained.” He was haughty.
“I daresay not,” she said. “But then perhaps you only encounter people with no standards.”
Alan rose and dressed himself, vowing never to return.
“It seems the least you can do for your wife,” said Val, “when you do find time for her, is to afford her some small sexual satisfaction. I am more and more on your wife’s side. I am really thinking of giving up men altogether. At least women know what to do, and when, and how.”
“Good God,” said Alan, looking for his tie, “sex between men and women is an expression of love. It is purely instinctive. One does, after all, what comes naturally.”
“No,” said Val, “one does not. Sex is an acquired skill. Some have a natural talent for it, of course, the way some people are born able to draw beautifully, but application and training is still required. And you’ve simply never bothered.”
Alan had taken quite considerable offence.
“I’m going now, Val,” he said, “and I’m not coming back. You’ve gone too far. A man turns to a woman for comfort, reassurance, and a sense of completeness.”
“Surely,” said Val, “a man would turn to his mother for that. A lover offers something different.”
“I don’t like the way you use the word lover. Men are lovers, women are loved.”
Val sat up, bare breasts poised above the oyster silk.
She seemed surprised.
“I am your lover. You are mine. We are equal.”
At that he turned back to her, and sank back upon the bed: his resolution had failed. He could not do without her. She seemed neither gratified, nor disappointed, whether he stayed or whether he went. It occurred to him that she had no expectations and, having none, found the world immeasurably interesting. He thought he wanted to be like her, to divest himself of the boring habits of established thought: the little spats of righteousness and self-justification from which he suffered. He wanted to be born again, body and soul.
“Aren’t you going?” she asked.
“No. I find it too interesting. I want to change. I want to join your new world.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, if you’re going to stay, if we’re to continue this relationship, you’re going to have to learn to do better.”
“But you’ll teach me?”
“I haven’t time,” she said. She was taking exams in Design at the RCA. She rose and drank some spring water from a bottle and dug her sharp teeth into a red apple, naked as she was.
“I think you’d better buy a manual.”
And he lay on her bed, Sutton Man in a good grey suit and pale blue tie, and wondered what had hit him.
‘Hermes tried to tell me about Alan and Val,’ Esther is saying to Mr Khan, ‘but I didn’t want to listen. I was frightened. I knew everything was changing. I remember one evening in particular, Hermes was going berserk because I was darning socks and I was trying to explain to her how important it is that a man’s feet should be comfortable, and how I knew it was old-fashioned, but I liked doing it – it’s really quite a skill – and how it seemed wrong to me, simply to throw things away and start again, and how if she loved a man she’d know what I meant.
‘And Hermes said, “And where is my father now? This man you love?” and I said he was working late at the office, which I knew was a cliché, but like all clichés was no doubt true, and even if he did stop by at the pub now and then – and he did sometimes come home smelling of whisky – I could hardly grudge the poor man a drink. “I think he rather smells of musk,” my daughter said.
“Musk?”
“Val wears musk,” said Hermes. “It’s disgusting.”
“I thought Val could do nothing wrong!” I said.
“Val can do a lot wrong,” said Hermes darkly.
“Dear me!” I answered brightly. “And you used to be so fond of her. What happened? Did she steal one of your boyfriends? Well, I’m afraid girls do! It’s a mistake ever to put too much trust in a girlfriend!”
Hermes shrieked that she couldn’t live in this madhouse a moment longer, and I said then don’t, darling, don’t, and she became pale and grave and begged me not to turn her out before her Results – Results had been looming large in our lives lately – and I said she could always go and stay with Val, couldn’t she, all of the time and not just some of the time. Hermes still stayed over with Val a couple of nights a week.
“Val keeps turning me out of her bedroom because she’s entertaining her middle-aged executive lover.”
“Oh dear,” I said, “I do think girls should stick to their own age-group. There’s always trouble if you mix the generations.”
And she said, wonderfully darkly, “Quite so! He’s old enough to be her father, not to mention mine,” and I nodded and went on darning socks – I only really ever darn socks to aggravate Hermes – and she said, “Mother, I am trying to tell you something,” and I looked her in the eye and said, “That’s very thoughtful of you, darling, but your father has been particularly loving of late and I don’t think there is anything in the world I want to know. Now be quiet.”’
Alan lies in bed and recovers from the sudden uprush of remembered desire; it is Pony’s turn to offer confidences, as Sister Tutor always said she should.
‘All I have to offer him is love,’ says Pony, dewy-eyed, ‘and the baby, of course. Isn’t it strange, how I keep forgetting about the baby! The first time I set eyes on Mrs Professor Khan was when I’d just started working in the department. We were having a case conference, Bobby and I, and she walked in and sent me to fetch coffee, as if I were the maid. I thought then, I’ll get my own back on you, and when Bobby made the first pass, I didn’t slap him down or anything, and before I knew where we were, we were in bed and in love. So it’s all her fault. She brought it on herself, and now she can be a divorced brain surgeon and as for me, I shall be married to a specialist. I am, after all, daughter of an ex-Minister of Health!’
But Alan isn’t listening.
‘I blame Hermes,’ he repeats. ‘If only she’d kept her silly, malicious little mouth shut, Esther would never have known, and the whole thing would have blown over.’
And downstairs in the canteen, Hermes pours her heart out to Freddo, since he’s there.
‘Of course, my father never liked me,’ complains Hermes. ‘He wanted me to be a son, if anything. It was always him and her together, Alan and Esther, keeping me out. They were lovers, really, in spite of Val and all the ones that went before, and that’s what Val didn’t like, that’s why she had to get between them. Being with my father was her way of getting close to my mother. She never had a family of her own: she envied mine, I think, more fool her! I’ve always felt orphaned. The children of lovers are orphans, they say. Isn’t that sad!’
Freddo remarks that Alan and Esther didn’t look too like lovers to him, the pair of them screeching and carrying on, and Hermes observes that that’s the only model of love she has, and why she never means to get married, and he strokes her cheek in an understanding way, and she actually feels comparatively understood.
‘But of course,’ says Esther to Mr Khan, ‘not being jealous didn’t last for long: not for more than an hour or two. I had my rights as a wife, although Alan had been explaining to me for long enough how minimal these were. And so, as Hermes had gone weeping and complaining to bed, I too went tapping at Val’s green and silver chequered door and saw for the first time the exotic creature who was Hermes’ best friend.
“I’m Alan’s wife,” I said, and she raises her eyes to heaven and said, “Why do women always define themselves in relation to men?” But she let me through and I went into this vulgar brothel-like room, all crimson wallpaper and cushions, and there was Alan sitting on a low sofa, looking completely out of place with his pink tie askew but thank God clothed, and I went into the kind of shock one does go into when the evidence of one’s eyes and the conclusions of one’s reason simply don’t co-ordinate.
Alan was as casual and relaxed as could be.
“Esther,” he said, “how did you know I was here? Val’s been doing some typing for me.”
“I used to type for you,” I said, “until recently.”
“Yes,” said Alan, “but you made so many mistakes it really wasted more time than it saved. Which is why I’m using Val, and didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you to be hurt.”
“I see,” I said, and then, playing for psychic time, “I only came to see if Hermes was here, actually. Her results are through.”
“What are they?”
“A lower second,” I told him. “Still – better than a third.”
“Christ,” said Alan, “that’s dreadful. You should have made her study, Esther. But no, you had to just let her run wild from a child. She simply never got the hang of academic work.” Need I mention that Alan only ever got as far as business college, and flunked that?
“Now,” he said, “I suppose I’m going to have to see her through some expensive secretarial college. She might have made some kind of effort. But no, you’ve brought her up to regard me as money-bags, Esther, which is hardly surprising, since that’s how you see me.”
Now through this quite irrational but familiar tirade, Val had been gliding up and down on her jewelled bare feet – I think it was some kind of eastern sandal she was wearing – staring first at me, and then at my husband, who was clearly her paramour. He may have got his tie back on but his feet were bare – and the skin crumbly and papery and veiny too. I don’t know why she, who could have had anyone, chose Alan, though Hermes did tell me later that she was neurotically obsessed with married men: she just couldn’t resist splitting marriages, and that once it was done, she lost interest, but I think it was simpler than that. I think she just welcomed experience, and anyone who knocked upon her door, she would let in, and in, and in – it was admirable in its way.
“If I ever have children,” Val observed, “I’ll do it on my own.”
And I said to her, “You’ve been sleeping with my husband.”
“Not sleeping,” said Val. “There’s not been too much sleeping. There are simpler words, but your husband doesn’t use them. Men are such romantics!”
I thought she should offer some apology, or show some shame, and said so, but Val said no, why should there be, so far as she could see the less time I had to spend with such a person as Alan the better. Was he always so rude and insulting? It occurred to me, with a shock, that that’s what Alan was. Not right, and honest, as I had assumed, merely rude and insulting.
“Why do you put up with it?” my rival now asked. “No, don’t answer that. It would go on for pages! In brief, what choice does a wife have? Only now you’ve caught him in flagrante delicto—”
“Val!” Alan was alarmed. “All you’ve been doing is my typing. I must apologise for my wife’s insane insinuations. This is all most embarrassing. Nothing has happened here tonight!”
“Well, actually I agree with you,” said Val. “A lot of plungings and shakings and terriers catching rats, but when it comes down to it, nothing. My soul is quite untouched. He’s a terrible lover, Esther. May I call you Esther?”
“You may call me Mrs Lear,” I replied, I hope with dignity, and admitted that I didn’t know what sort of lover he was since I’d married him so young, and was a virgin at the time, and had no standard of comparison at all. And Val cried out, “One man in a whole lifetime! How perfectly dreadful!” and Alan hustled me out of her house, unable, I later concluded, to stand two women talking together and himself no longer the central part of the action.’
Down in the canteen Freddo suffers a spasm of rage with Alan, Esther’s tormentor, and allows himself to hope that something will go wrong with the face-lift. How could any man treat a good woman so, Freddo expostulates, and Hermes asks him about his wife, left at home in Ireland, and he says ‘That’s different. I was just her meal-ticket. Ireland, anyway! All they want over there is a man to give them a baby, and a wedding so the priest doesn’t send them to hell for it, and then they’re through with men for ever. Sure, and isn’t all that the way God intended?’
‘Then why don’t you go back where you came from?’ asks Hermes, triumphantly.
‘Or why don’t you come back over there with me?’ he asks, not noticing the intended insult.
‘Of course,’ Esther says now to Mr Khan, ‘the first thing Alan saw when we got home, after I had interrupted his evening with Val, was the socks I had been darning for Hermes’ benefit. He picked them up and looked from them to me, and back again, and it is true the socks were cream and had been darned with rather yellowy wool, and I said something like, “Look, I’ve been darning your socks.” And he said, “But Esther, I can’t possibly wear these! They’re bodged, cobbled, lumpy and uncomfortable. You haven’t even matched the colours properly!”
‘I sat and considered the day I’d had, and the day he’d had. Eventually, I said, “I suppose Val darns beautifully.” I hadn’t mentioned Val since he’d dragged me out of her flat, and he hadn’t brought the subject up, and he replied, “Of course Val doesn’t darn beautifully. She wouldn’t dream of doing anything so menial. She is independent and proud.”
“But I heard her say you were a bad lover; she insults you,” I observed.
“We understand each other,” Alan said. “We deal in truths, not lies. Those were not insults, those were compliments. But how could you understand? You’re thirty years out of date! Val embroiders, actually. She does all her own cushions. She is remarkably talented. There’s almost nothing Val can’t turn her hand to. She befriended poor Hermes out of kindness: I can’t think what they have in common. Poor little Hermes! What a mess she is.”
“I suppose,” I said, as brightly as I could manage, “Val’s better in bed than I am, too.”
“She certainly turns me on, Esther,” he said. “To use a modern expression.”
“So what do you mean to do about it all?” I asked.
“Do?” he enquired. “Why, nothing! What should I do?”
“You’re not going to give her up? You know, how husbands are supposed to when the wife finds out?”
‘But he wasn’t. Why should he? That was an old-fashioned notion. He wouldn’t desert me. He wouldn’t sleep with me either. He’d spend weekends with Val and weekdays with me.
“I am only truly alive in Val’s company,” he said. “I am sorry if it hurts you, but we must speak the truth. Val has taught me that.”
“Yes,” I observed. “For someone so young she has taught you a lot.” At which he said she was an old soul. He took it I didn’t want a divorce. He said most women of my age thought half a husband was better than none, and I said I supposed that was true, and he said now that was settled we could be friends, even if we couldn’t be lovers, and asked me to fetch him a scotch. He didn’t mind if it was cold; in fact Val had taught him to appreciate iced scotch, and I said – oh, Mr Khan, do you know what I said? – I said “get it yourself.” And that was the first step to freedom. “Get it yourself.” One small step for a woman, Mr Khan. But a great step forward for women.’
Well, well! Press on: look forward, not back! You must hear these people out. What do we have friends for, but to lend an ear to their preoccupations and complaints? In time they will do it for us, when the white nights come, when the detail of what he said or what she did or what I felt keep sleep away, and a dreadful sense of injustice consumes our hearts with fire – not fair, not fair, what did I ever do to deserve this! – and the panicky feeling that something must be done, something, but what? weakens the bones. Then we will need our friends, as they once needed us. So hear friends out: answer the phone when they ring and do it in person – don’t leave it to the machine. They may seem mad to love such a one, or such another, but of such stuff are we all made. It isn’t really madness, you see; rather it is the concentrated sanity of hope.
So, now, what’s Hermes saying in the canteen over a third cup of yarrow tea? (Yarrow loosens the tongue and soothes the nerves. Freddo’s now on borage, that pretty blue flower which the Greeks used, to assuage the grief of those bereaved. And remember that Freddo’s lady love is closeted with Mr Khan, a suave and foreign charmer, and Freddo doesn’t care for that, although increasingly impressed by Hermes, who – now her silly sulks have gone – can be seen to be pretty, and merry, and charming, with very silky, very white, very young skin. While her mother’s, to be honest, is not what it was.)
‘It was all so dreadful,’ Hermes is saying, ‘but I couldn’t make Val see that it was. Even my tears didn’t move her. She maintained that she was sleeping with my father for my mother’s sake, in particular, and women’s in general, and with me because it was every woman’s right to be homosexual, and so far as she was concerned, nothing need change.’
Freddo looks at her, appalled.
‘You didn’t actually—’
‘Yes, we did, actually. Why not?’
He can’t answer. He breathes heavily.
‘Val said that people have to be confronted with the consequences of their actions,’ observes Hermes. ‘She said my father was at fault for trying to cheat my mother, and my mother was at fault in always seeking the easy way out, and that those who live by wife and children deserve to die by them, and I was at fault in still living under their roof, and so knowing past my time what was going on. She didn’t seem to think she was at fault at all. And I said yes, she was, it was her fault I’d only got a lower second! She couldn’t answer that.’
‘You mean you and her actually—’
‘Oh shut up, Freddo. And she said why didn’t I just come to bed and forget about it: she said we had three lives, waking, sleeping and sex, and each is a refuge and rest from the other two. And I said I wouldn’t. I thought she was disgusting, and she said have it my own way, and at that moment there was a ring on the bell, and she asked me to answer it, but I wouldn’t, because I knew it would only be one of her lovers, and it was. It was my father. Do stop looking at me like that, Freddo, I’m sure you had homosexual relations with other boys when you were in your Catholic seminary.’
‘Only ever against my will,’ says Freddo.
‘And Daddy burst in and said, “darling” in a disgusting, throaty voice, and Val said, “I thought you’d gone home.” She didn’t sound welcoming in the least, but Daddy took no notice. He’s wonderfully thick-skinned. He told her he was moving in with her. He couldn’t live without her. She was his education, his life, his future, his everything. “Oh dear,” said Val. She was trying to stop him coming into the bedroom, where I was, but he didn’t notice. He had a suitcase with him; he wanted to unpack. He told her he was expecting promotion, and then he’d leave home and the two of them would live together in a split-level bungalow, just built, he’d found on the outskirts of town. He knew the builder: he’d get it at a good price. It wasn’t too far from where the family lived so he could keep an eye on them. And I said, “Oh, thank you, Daddy,” and watched him jump a mile. I liked that. But he pulled himself together very quickly and said how about me running home to look after my mother? It’s time I did something to earn my keep, he said, and I said I had as much right to be in Val’s pad as he did. That shook him but he went on about Mum needing me, on account of how she was in the dark, really in the dark, because they’d had a row, him and Mum, and Mum had tried to murder him, throwing an electric heater at him while he was in the shower, but all she’d managed to do was fuse all the electricity in the house, so he’d packed a suitcase in the dark and come straight round to Val’s – he’d made up his mind. He’d chosen Val and a new life. How could anyone be expected to live with a murderous, violent woman like my mother? People had to take the consequences of their actions, he said – he’d got that from Val – so I got dressed and went home to look after poor Mum.’
‘Dressed?’ asked Freddo.
‘Put on my coat,’ she amends. She is beginning to want Freddo’s good opinion. Yarrow makes its drinkers soft and nice. ‘And as I left I heard them arguing. Val was saying but she liked to live alone, and Alan was saying but she’d said she loved him, and Val said but that was in the heat of the moment, and he said all our moments are heated, my darling, wait till you see the new house: picture windows and a magic eye garage. He and Val could jet-set all over the world: he’d go to the conferences by day while she lay by the pool, and in the evenings they’d see the town – and all Val did was look at my father as if he was mad, which I really think he was. Poor Daddy! Then Val asked Daddy what he meant to do about Mum, and he said she would be entitled to half the marital home, and she’d always wanted to work and be independent: now was her chance.
‘And that was when Val, to her credit, told him to go away. “I think,” she said, “that in my scheme of things, in my plan for Utopia, I underrated people’s capacity for just sheer simple appalling depravity.”
‘And Daddy went to a hotel for the night, and I went home, but couldn’t get into the house because the front door was locked.’
‘I was inside by then,’ says Freddo, ‘with your sweet lady mother, and sure and all we didn’t want any intruders. Nobody bursting in, you understand.’
‘It was my home, too,’ says Hermes, reproachfully.
‘And sure wasn’t it a special occasion! To find true love in the space of a few minutes! Sent out by the Head Office to right a power failure at No. 19! I knocked at the door, and called out, so as not to alarm those within, “This is the Electricity Board, Sir Lancelot himself, come to bring light into the lives of the helpless!” and who should come to the door but your dear lady mother, all swollen up with tears. A damsel in distress! It’s often like that when the power fails. Someone’s thrown something. We found a torch, we found a ladder, we found the fuse, and she told me I meant Sir Galahad, and not Sir Lancelot; Sir Lancelot merely ran off with King Arthur’s wife, and I shone a torch down from the top of the ladder on to her upturned face, and she smiled up at me through her tears, and sure my heart went out to her, and I knew I must dedicate my life to this poor woman’s happiness and up we went to the big soft bed.’
‘My father’s bed!’
‘Sure, and hadn’t he failed in his duty to it?’
Alan sighs, and Pony adjusts his bandages.
‘It won’t be long now,’ she says. ‘Your bandages will come off: you’ll be back in the world again.’
‘The world!’ he complains. ‘The world conspires against me. Step out of line and wham! bam! it gets you. No sooner did I have to face the fact that Val had been playing with my affections, than I was summoned to the Director’s office and there, instead of receiving the promotion I expected, was handed a redundancy notice. Certain branches of the business were being closed down: they no longer needed me. The recession, my dear, is like age: it closes in gently – one can’t believe it! That it should apply to oneself – impossible! There was quite a substantial redundancy payment but that was not the point. Being suddenly pointless, useless, was the point: waking up in the morning and having nothing but the mood one woke up in! I didn’t tell Esther what had happened. I let her think my aura of quiet despair was because I had given up Val on her account. And therefore that she, Esther, was to blame. But she didn’t take it as she usually did – trying to assuage the guilt I laid upon her with nervous coughings of apology, and little placatory offerings – a new shirt here, a pair of socks there, acquired by virtue of economies she had made in the housekeeping. No, not at all! I kept looking up and finding her smiling to herself, and when I moved back into her bed it was as if she’d scarcely noticed my absence. It didn’t occur to me she had a lover. I pretended to go off to work every day, but really went to the public library instead, and in the company of a dozen or so others similarly engaged, studied and responded to the advertisement columns of the newspapers. As the recession bit harder, the vacancies grew fewer, and still I had not found a job. Grief over the loss of Val – and that went deep – and the sense that I had made a fool of myself, and in front of my own daughter too – had aged me. My hair was noticeably grey. I went to many interviews – but no one offered me a job. I was depressed, miserable, and angry, and I drank too much, and it showed.
‘One day I decided to tell Esther all, and face her mirth and wrath – she, whom to the employed man had seemed an object to disregard and all but despise, to the unemployed seemed formidable. And I went home mid-morning.’
‘That’s never wise!’ says Pony.
‘To be sure,’ says Freddo to Hermes, ‘your mother is a frightening woman when she’s roused. I was happily in the dear soul’s bed one morning, as was my wont—’
‘How you have the nerve,’ exclaims Hermes, ‘to criticize me—’
‘My darling,’ says Freddo, ‘what I do is natural, what you do isn’t, and sure and isn’t there AIDS to prove it? God’s punishment on the sinful!’
She opens her mouth to protest, but he’ll have none of it, ‘– as was my wont,’ he repeats, ‘when there’s the sound of a key in the lock, and she jumps out of bed mother naked and goes to the top of the stairs.
“Esther, Esther,” hubby says, “where are you?”
“In bed,” she says. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“Didn’t you get up at all this morning?” he asks, looking at her naked shame.
“Sure and I did,” she says, “but I got back into bed,” and I hear her calling me, “Freddo!” and hubby says, “Who’s that?” and I go and stand beside her in my birthday suit, and she says,
“His name is Freddo, and he is the man I love. I am only half alive in your company, I am all alive in his. I’m sure you don’t mind. If you do, I’ll move in with him during the week and spend the weekends with you.”
And doesn’t the poor devil look as if he’s going to burst into tears, and I tell her to stop it, and it comes to me that she only wants me to get back at him, and I say so, but she says no, she wants me and to get back at him.
‘And then she asks poor hubby to go and fetch her some whisky, and, speaking personally, she says, she doesn’t like it on the rocks, and then he does begin to cry, and I go and get dressed, and when I get back she’s standing on the top stair, and he’s on his knees, blubbering and trying to kiss her feet.’
‘Don’t, don’t!’ cries Hermes, appalled.
‘Sure and it shows he’s a man of proper feeling. Many’s the time I’ve kissed your sainted mother’s toes. Hubby straightens up, seeing me, and says, “I won’t have that man in the house,” but all she does is laugh and says, “what I say, goes” and tells him she’s landed a job writing cookery captions in a magazine and can live as she chooses now.’
‘And perfectly dreadful it was,’ says Hermes. ‘To have a mother working! She never cooked food and she never washed clothes and if Dad said where are the cornflakes she’d say in the corner shop, and if I said where’s my white blouse, she’d say under the bed, where you left it, and if he said “let’s start all over again, my dear” she’d say, “I haven’t time to talk now. I have a meeting at nine. Make sure you take the cat to the vet and hire a carpet-cleaner for the stairs, and cook something for supper that won’t spoil, because I’m working late at the office tonight. I’m working and you’re not.”’
‘That’s just like her real sweet darling self,’ says Freddo. ‘A woman of spirit!’
‘She drove my father out,’ says Hermes, ‘whether she meant to or not. One day she found she’d set one too many empty plates before him; he walked out and hired a bedsitting room and started divorce proceedings, and she defended them. And what the solicitors didn’t take of the redundancy money, you did. My mother is a monster. My father made her so. No wonder I’m a mess. But I’ll never leave home. I’ll get everything I can from the pair of them, for ever and ever and ever!’
‘You’re your mother’s daughter and I love you for it,’ says Freddo and leans across the table and kisses her on the lips. ‘It was you I was after, all the time. And sure, now I’ve a little business set up of my own, couldn’t we get together? Only where will we live?’
Alan falls asleep in his bed. Pony creeps out of the room. Mr Khan says to Esther, ‘You are a very, very attractive woman, my dear,’ and his slender, talented hand creeps towards her ageing but more than sensuous knee, and Esther rises quickly and says she must just look in to see how her husband is, glad for once to claim him as such, and at this moment Mrs Professor Khan steps over the divide where the lino turns to carpet and the free wards stop and the paying wards begin, in search of her husband. And of course she encounters Pony, who is about the same business.
Of course they encounter each other. You will know from your own experience, that when caught up in one of these wildly interacting groups – and most of us are from time to time; particles of dust flung into the air and jiggled about in some overwhelming magnetic sexual field, when tears flow and hysteria mounts – that there is just no getting away, until it has worked itself out. Flee to the Sahara and who will you see on the first camel but your lover’s husband’s secret boyfriend! Surprise, surprise! The Force is with you. The Force is strong. The Force is all the fun and horror in the world: it is an overflow of energy from the making of babies.
So that is why I say that naturally Pony encounters Mrs Professor Khan.
‘Good morning, Mrs Khan,’ she says demurely, hating and despising this woman who shares her lover’s bed, by right. Of course we, unlike Pony, admire her. She is what all women should be. Competent, assured, working nobly in the community, realising her potential, fulfilling her aspirations, organising her children, seeing her husband as decoration – she is so superior to him she can scarcely admire him. And he admires her, but he does not love her. How can he? He loves Pony. He loves what he can look after. Dear God, what is to become of us all?
‘Professor Khan,’ the older woman corrects her.
‘I’m afraid Mr Khan is rather busy,’ says Pony, boldly, laying down rights of ownership. Mrs Professor Khan pauses, examining her with curiosity, as a very large cat will a very small bird.
‘So am I, my dear,’ says Mrs Professor Khan, kindly. ‘Very busy.’
‘He’s with the wife of one of the face-lift patients,’ Pony says. ‘She’s rather upset. You know how important Mr Khan thinks the family gestalt is, when it comes to healing.’
‘I am sure he will comfort her,’ says Mr Khan’s wife, ‘as one human being will another. He is very good at that. Sometimes I feel he takes it to extremes. But then, he has all the time in the world.’
And she smiles sweetly, and Pony realises her loved one is under attack.
‘There is,’ Pony blurts out, ‘such a thing as love!’ and her eyes brim with sudden tears.
‘Only for weak minds, little girl,’ purrs Mrs Professor Khan. ‘Do you fancy yourself in love with him? I suspect you do. Try not to get hurt. My husband falls in love twice a year, once at Christmas and once at Easter. You must be last Christmas’s event, and Easter’s coming up – and you not over it yet. Oh dear! But at least you don’t have a brain tumour! We must try and keep things in proportion.’
And she sweeps on and Pony wails her distress and indignation, just as Esther passes by.
‘Oh dear,’ says Esther, recognising the nurse who earlier restrained her with a neck-hold from the martial arts, ‘what can be the matter?’
‘What am I going to do?’ the younger woman sobs. ‘I’m pregnant!’
‘But that’s wonderful!’ says Esther. ‘The one justification for love. It produces babies. You should be very proud and happy.’
‘But she’ll never let him marry me.’
‘Oh, marriage!’ says Esther. ‘That’s different. That is difficult. Never mind. Social welfare will always keep you, and give you a one-bedroom flat, and I’m sure the father will do what he can to help you – though then of course your benefit will be cut, so you might be better off saying you don’t know who the father is – and you will have the baby for ever, living evidence of the power of passion. What more do you want?’
‘But I got pregnant on purpose,’ says Pony, ‘so he’d marry me.’
Esther stares at her, quite stopped in her tracks. ‘Well,’ says Esther, ‘nothing changes,’ and she goes on in to wake her husband from his fitful, barely achieved slumber.
Mrs Professor Khan faces her husband. He is smaller than she.
‘I have been wanting to speak to you for two days,’ she says.
‘You were asleep when I came in last night, and gone before I woke up,’ he says. ‘Such is the fate of many busy and accomplished couples, of course.’
‘I think you should know,’ his wife says, ‘that I have been asked to join a peripatetic life-support team, centred in Moscow, to attend various Heads of State in the East. It is a two-year appointment. I mean to take it.’
‘But what about me?’ he asks.
‘There is already a cosmetic surgeon on the team. I’m sorry.’
‘What about the children?’
‘They have their father,’ she responds calmly. ‘And they already regard you as the primary parent.’
Indignation boils over. He jumps to his feet, blood suffusing his smooth, sensuous, olive skin, to the great danger of his capillary nerves.
‘You mean to leave me behind,’ he cries, ‘as nanny!’
Down in the canteen the waitress coughs. Freddo and Hermes are so closely entwined as to be a threat to common decency. They suit each other. Both are of an age, both are strongly sexed, and both highly opportunistic. Thank God they have found each other. They ignore the waitress’s cough. Now the manager will have to be sent for.
‘I won’t have you seeing this Val,’ he says, ‘that’s all.’
‘She’s locked up house and gone to the Harvard Business School,’ says Hermes.
‘Leaving her pad empty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we can squat!’ he cries, in triumph.
‘All I ever wanted from my parents,’ observes Hermes, acquiescing to his plan, ‘is that they should be happy. It’s all any of us want. Not good, not rich, not perfect – just happy. And they failed me.’
Thus, accepting her fate, she attains her maturity, albeit in Freddo’s company.
But of course what to the children appears to be abject misery, appears to the parents to be merely richly textured life – the intricate and fascinating games that couples play in the struggle for fairness and permanence within the home.
See now how Esther holds Alan’s hand, pulling him and her from the brink of separation – and the Final Decree only days away!
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, now. Listen to her!
‘So am I,’ he says. Good God!
‘You know I got pregnant on purpose,’ she says, ‘so you’d marry me. It wasn’t an accident.’
‘I had no idea,’ he says. ‘Poor little Hermes!’
‘I haven’t much pity for Hermes,’ says Esther. ‘We gave her life, that should be enough for her. We put up with her for years.’
‘Then if only she’d go,’ says Alan, ‘we could actually start our married life.’
‘Are you proposing,’ she says, ‘that we should get back together?’
‘I am,’ he says. ‘Now that I look ten years younger I’ll get a job soon enough. Employment’s all in the mind, you know.’
‘Tell that,’ she says, ‘to the three and a half million!’ But she kisses him through the bandages.
‘You must get these ridiculous wrappings removed,’ says Esther, ‘and come home at once to me.’
Mrs Professor Khan is taking a little time to placate her husband.
‘We can’t put our personal happiness before the affairs of the world, Bobby. Our leaders must be sound in wind and limb and brain, if the people of the globe are to sleep soundly in bed at night.’
‘You’ll be unfaithful to me,’ he laments.
‘Not for the sake of pleasure,’ she assures him, ‘or from any particular inclination. Only to steady my hand.’
He suffers, or appears to.
‘You know how it is,’ she says, ‘before a big operation. For the likes of us sex can only be therapeutic. Don’t pretend otherwise, to me. We are neither of us stupid people.’
‘I can’t bear it,’ he says, defeated.
‘What?’ she enquires. ‘My being unfaithful, or my not being stupid?’
He does not reply, and since she does not like time to be wasted, for lives truly hang upon her minutes, she leaves.
Pony is lurking outside the door. Mr Khan calls her in.
‘And what are we going to do about Freddo?’ asks Alan of Esther. ‘You can’t just ditch him.’
‘I can,’ she says.
‘Women are heartless.’
‘He was only ever entertainment at best, revenge at worst.’
‘You mean,’ says Alan, ‘you think he’s cooling off and you want to get in first.’
‘Probably,’ she admits.
And at that moment Hermes and Freddo come in, having been ejected from the canteen, hand in hand, and flushed with the discovery of the real, the true, the inevitable, the inimitable LOVE. And their elders and betters look at them, and quell such envy, jealousy, rage and resentment as rise in both their breasts, because the sun is no longer in mid-heaven, but beginning to sink, and they have each other, and tranquillity, and the golden glow of the evening, or else they have nothing.
‘Hi,’ says Esther, calmly, ‘you two.’
And after Freddo and Hermes have left, the sooner to consummate their passion, Pony bounces in, all smiles.
‘Mr Khan’s coming to take off your bandages,’ she says. ‘Your tests are through and all is well. And what’s more he’s going to give all this up and retire early and divorce his wife, and marry me, and look after his children himself; and all for love of me. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!’
‘Happy endings,’ says Alan.
‘Happy beginnings,’ says Pony, ‘and just as well. I almost thought I’d have to have a termination, but since I run the “Nurses Against Abortion” here in the hospital, wasn’t I half in a fix!’
And presently Mr Khan enters, with extra trolleys and nurses, and ceremoniously unmasks Alan, and returns him his face. He is a little irritable with Pony, who keeps dropping the scissors and losing the swabs, but she seems to like his irritation.
‘What an inefficient little thing you are!’ Mr Khan says, and she simpers and giggles and the other nurses envy her. Betrothed to a specialist!
‘Behold,’ says Mr Khan, as Alan’s face emerges, ‘the new man! Match for the new woman!’
Alan examines himself in the mirror. He sees with a new clarity. He sees the truth.
‘I look older,’ he says, ‘if anything.’
But that, of course, is the great penalty. The more we know, the older we get. The body quite withers away, in the harsh light of wisdom.
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