'But you could always have them undone.'
That her delightful, high-flying businessman husband should suddenly discover an interest in gynaecology astonished her.
'No,' she said. And she continued to deny him. Now the pain of the mistake of it cut her in two.
She clutched the wheel and slowed a little. That was the thing about long car journeys - there was nowhere to hide your brain.
Last Tango in Paris,
it was.
Oh, go butter those scones, woman.
Despite her sterling efforts, he remained flaccid for a week.
If a mind-reading alien wandered in and rummaged around in their respective brains, what terrifying, terrifying madness would be revealed
...
The Swains. The Swains. Mrs Fytton's Swains.
Lunatic, Lunatic. Lunatic all.
Time to let the swains bubble up to the surface, be considered, and be dealt with for once and for all. Nothing like a motorway for dealing with the grimmer side of the cranial filing system. The Swains, then. And let that be a lesson to her. Shadows of the past, be they gone.
3
April
His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
mae west
She was now but half an hour from her destination. Just time to bring them out, one by one, those Male Lunatics Rampant, shake them and put them back in the drawer marked Unnecessary. She slowed the car and took her mind to those first painful days when she was free and when, mindful of the counsellor's advice, she was on red alert and prey to the first Volpone who came along with wandering hands and a soulful light in his eyes.
Sheep are renowned for looking sympathetic, especially if one announces the name of a well-known fox to them, and she was just passing fields and fields of the woolly creatures. All looking very sympathetic indeed. Volpone, she repeated, opening the window and calling out to a field of chomping ewes. 'VOLPONE!' Sometimes lunacy is catching.
Victor.
And a lesson that one should never take up with a bloke with a vanquisher's name. What with his innocent smile (hiding foxy teeth) and the soulful light and the wandering hands, and her being a trusting sort of a person who, as a happily married woman, had read her Fay Weldons as if they were fairy tales, she was not prepared for the killer instinct of the average small-female-game-hunting male. Not his honey tongue, not his seductive and quivering external equipment -not his lunacy. And certainly not her vulnerability to it.
She looked into Victor's eyes and read there kind understanding and pleasing desire. It was one in the morning on the pavement outside the Chelsea Arts Club. She was too drunk to even see a taxi, let alone hail one. He took her hand, which she so willingly proffered, and led her down the garden path. She fell through her front door; he picked her up and looked at her all night with tender light of love in between bouts of electrifying orgy. She went on reading the same ocular tenderness until all her little feathers were quite smoothed, not a ruffle in sight. Until she could say the name Ian without weeping or kicking the furniture. Until she could believe, yes, believe it was that easy.
At which point the ocular message from Victor became cloudy. She read panic, suddenly, when she suggested normal things like going on holiday together ('Ah, well, urn, oh, I'm not very good with holidays as such') or meeting her children ('Ah, well, um, oh, I'm not very good with children as such') or actually getting out of the house in which he still lived with his divorced wife and two dogs ('Ah, well, um, oh, I'm not very good at living on my own as such
...')
He did not feel ready to commit.
'Commit?' she said. 'Commit? You managed to commit yourself to having your dinners cooked for you while you watched the mud-wrestling or the pogo-stick championships or whatever it was. You managed to
...'
And then she shrugged and backed off. 'Ah, well, um, oh, I'm not very good at dealing with inadequates as such.' With which she marched out. And then marched back again. And then marched out again, until she was worn out with it all and suggested he could find a most useful route away from her by travelling very fast, and in circuitous mode, up his own bum.
She telephoned Ian one night after this, pushed beyond endurance with the loneliness, and he came over. For about an hour he sat with her in the kitchen, sipping whisky, talking about the children, even laughing. All very ordinary, all very gentle, the anger dispelled in the comforting of her need. She loved him all over again. She hoped he would stay, and almost believed that he would suddenly realize what a mistake he had made in leaving her. Then he said, quite easily, that he had to go. Casual. It had become casual between them. He even squeezed her arm and gave her a hug. She smiled and nodded at him and let him out of their house, and watched him scurry over to his car and drive away. It was, she felt, like watching your own shadow depart from you. Shortly after this he asked for a divorce. Pragmatism said to her there was little point in refusing.
And then - quite suddenly - Ian remarried. So swiftly after the divorce that it was as if a bereaved had married the mortician. He took his bride-to-be (little, blonde, helpless Miss Fang the Dentist from 's-Gravenhage), and Andrew and Claire, out to Sydney for the wedding. Clever. Very clever. The children were thrilled. New dad, new wife, new presents.'
Thrilled.
His wife, now ex-wife, Angela, lay in bed sipping port and lemon (she had - she'd convinced herself - a sore throat) and rang everyone she could think of. Some of her old political fire surfaced, but it was hazy. She told them all that it was just a pose of a wedding and organized so they could dance on the bones of Aborigines.
'That's my girl', said Clancy, if a little vaguely. And she changed the subject.
Rosa congratulated her on getting such a generous settlement. Why? She had earned the money too. She remained in a huff for three weeks until she realized that the only person it hurt was herself.
She told her parents about the divorce, defiantly, but her parents, now retired, were very disappointed. Their golden girl had lost the golden boy and the golden life. After all they did for her too. She must have brought it on herself with all those dungarees and what not. Thanks, she muttered as she left. After that she scarcely went to see them. And they never came up to see her. Old people became very selfish. How she longed to be old.
She needed lost Victor so badly during that
annus dreadfulus
in her life that she used to wander along his road in case he might pop out and see her and say, 'Hi - let's get married as well.' All she saw was a dog turd or two, and she was driven mad enough to stare at them on the pavement near his house and wonder if she could possibly identify them as coming from Tipper and Tansy
...
If not, maybe he would still come out at midnight with them slavering on their leashes for the coyly named canine bowel activity 'Walkies
...'
The sheep and the hawthorns had now given way to fields of free-range pigs, or whatever you called them - organic porkers? She must get her terminology right if she was going to be part of the agricultural scene. She looked down at her map. Not far now. She would be quick in the dispatch of her chilling memoir.
Angela, all legal links with Ian severed, gritted her teeth, behaved with dignity and found a new job doing much the same as she had done as partner to her husband - but now she did it for their friends Joe and Gracie, who also installed systems. Dignity went out of the window when Ian actually wrote her a stiff letter saying he felt it was a bit much for her to go and work for a rival outfit. She immediately wrote back to Ian, saying,
'Au contraire,
my duck, but
you
are the rival now
...'
Then Joe and Gracie gave a party. And she met Leaky. 'Call me Leaky,' he said, with that devastating crooked smile. She'd often wondered since if she would have felt different had he said, 'Call me Norman,' but he did not. 'Leaky
’
he said, grinning down at her like Gary Cooper on stilts. And her heart went Blip! Lust flared, thank God, pain was pushed to the outer darkness, and she knew she was saved.
He looked like a Leaky, she decided (putting the notion of drips firmly out of her mind). He was long and rangy and hands-in-pockets and dangerous lopsided looks. He dealt in fine old vintage cars. She just said, 'Mmm, mmm -1 love old cars
...'
And tried desperately to name one. 'Lamborghini!' she almost shouted eventually.
He nodded as if it were a great truth. 'Did you know
’
he said, 'that there are spare parts for cars like Lamborghinis still available in places like Honduras and Poona?'
'Fascinating,' she said, over and over and over again.
Then she talked about lying in bed reading Austen or Tolstoy or Hardy by night.
And he said, 'Fascinating,' as if it was. She managed to imply that she was lying in bed reading
alone.
Ian's new wife was pregnant; Claire and Andrew were disgustingly delighted - 'a sister, a brother
...'
'Half-sister,
‘’
half
-brother,' she reminded them curtly. But 'ooh ooh, aah aah' they went. Vile renegades. To be shunned. Not that they noticed. So Leaky arrived just in time.
Call me Pandora, she thought. Hope. But she forgot that Pandora was burdened with all the ills of the world for her trouble.
Then one evening when she had gone to the theatre with Grade to see Carol Churchill's
Top Girls,
Leaky turned up in the foyer. 'Hi, darling
’
he said. 'Decided to come along too
...'
He barely spoke to Gracie. And the discussion afterwards was hampered by neither of them wishing to offend Leaky. Who said the play was interesting, but unresolved. At which Gracie raised an eyebrow and Angela felt uncomfortable. It was many things, but it was not unresolved. It said very firmly, and in a very resolved way, that it was hard being a woman in a man's world and that you had to make sacrifices in order to succeed on masculine terms. That, in her book, was pretty resolved.
She said, 'Marlene gets to the top after abandoning her daughter, her class, her femininity
...'
'Don't give me all that silly nonsense, Mrs Fytton
’
he said, smiling at her tenderly and patting her cheek.
Gracie blinked. Is there anything worse than reading Ditch This Person in your friends' eyes and not having the courage to do so?
'Goodbye, Leaky,' she wrote. And she booked a holiday to coincide with when the baby was due. There was some satisfaction in seeing Claire and Andrew's innate selfishness at work, for despite the thrill of 'Ooh, a sister' and 'Ooh, a brother' they wanted a holiday too. Despite Ian asking them to be around for the event, they declined and came to Crete instead.
It may have been then, in that moment of revelation regarding her children's naked selfishness, that she began to form the tiniest little embryo of an idea
...
Whose fruition she was bringing about in this mistress plan of moving to the country. The one which would bring Ian back to her like a fly to sweet glue. Women, take control of your lives! There were many other ways to skin a cat, she thought, with a haziness matched only by her historical commentary on the bones of Aborigines. At least, if it failed, there would be no one who knew her to see.
Now she was driving along
small, hedge-lined roads. Pass
ing wistaria-clad cottages and ruddy-bricked farmhouses, proper, safe, untouched by London madness. She went slowly, enjoying the peace. And she smiled. That moment of rebellion - that moment when Andrew and Claire stuck out their teenaged lips and said, 'No,' to their father - was sweet, sweet, sweet
..
. She remembered sipping her Olympic Airways gin and tonic and praying that the baby came on time. They had only a fortnight.
She gave Ian the wrong hotel telephone number so that he could not contact them as the proud father. Her children discovered the windsurfing and the nightclubs of Crete and never looked back. Well, certainly not at her lying on the beach. But there, in the warm blue waters, paddling around the lacy edge of the Med, she met Otto. Unpartnered Otto, who was there with his family of two grown-up children and assorted grandchildren. And who had a ground-floor bedroom in their villa. An accessible ground-floor bedroom.
So that was all right. A few stolen trysts, a few nice relaxed mezes washed down with the local paint-stripper. Quite a lot of paint-stripper. And bingo - the beginnings of a light-hearted relationship. Neither Andrew nor Claire noticed if she slept in the villa on account of the fact that they were never back to sleep in it themselves. She felt happy again.