by Vesna Main
–Does that make the other two uncomfortable?
–I don’t think so. Anyway, Tanya tells them to push off; one of the men says: I see, now that you have your posh friends, we aren’t good enough. The women ignore him. When Anna leaves the table to get more drinks and Sarah is in the toilet, Tanya notices Sarah’s bag casually left on the chair. She takes twenty pounds out of her purse. Serves her right, she thinks, stupid woman leaving her bag like that.
–Exactly. I’m with Tanya on that.
–Sarah won’t miss it, Tanya reasons, whereas it might save her from Dave’s blows when she gets home after a poor night.
–Well, she needs it more than they do. To each according to their need.
–Yes, but she’s stealing.
–From the rich.
–They aren’t rich.
–Compared to Tanya, they are.
–I suppose so. The two women again talk of the group, say that they have some new members from outside the university and that they’re really keen to do more campaigning; they mention fund-raising for the women’s refuge. What’s that, Tanya asks.
–A good question; she may need to know about it.
–They tell her – she has never heard of a place like that – and they part, giving their number to her; they would love to keep in touch. She doesn’t give them hers: no point, she lies, I’m about to move.
–I can imagine these busy bodies turning up at her house. She is wise not to give them her address.
–She fears what Dave might do if he saw them.
–I can see where this is going.
–Can you?
–He will beat her up and she will go to a refuge; the two women will help.
–Something like that. Gosh, am I making it too predictable?
–Not necessarily. But it’s what I said before: the gun on the table . . . The mention of the women’s refugee has to have a point.
* * *
–Good day?
–I think so.
–You’re not sure?
–I revisited a chapter. Tinkered with it.
–Which one?
–The difficult one. Most difficult.
–?
–When he tells her.
–I hope you toned down her reaction.
–I couldn’t do that.
–You’re the author. You can do anything.
–It’s a most horrible thing that he did and it wouldn’t make sense to underplay it.
–She overreacts.
–Male—
–Reader. What else can I be?
–Make the effort to understand how she feels.
–I do, but her reaction’s completely irrational.
–She’s in shock.
–She could step back and think.
–I don’t think so.
–Not straight away but after a few hours, the next day. But she doesn’t.
–It takes longer than that to recover from such a revelation. If one can ever recover.
–She’s impetuous.
–Me again. She got it from me.
–You said it.
–But seriously, you can’t imagine any woman thinking rationally in that situation.
–I can. There are women who would stay calm and assess what’s happened, think where to go next.
–Very few women would be able to do that. Certainly not Anna.
–That’s her problem.
–You just don’t understand how shocking it is.
–They’re both alive and healthy and, if she loves him, she should be able to think how to move on.
–Look, this is how it goes: she comes in, a bit earlier than usual, around five. She’s excited. She’s had some good news: a producer has contacted her with an idea to make a television programme called From Nana to Nursery Girls – you know, Nana by Manet. He’s her favourite painter—
–Surprise, surprise.
–And she thinks it’s wonderful to have him in the title together with the Gallery’s painting.
–Why does it have to be Manet?
–I’m not the only Manet fan.
–I wish you’d write something that has nothing to do with us. It’s bloody annoying.
–I’ve only taken a few minor details.
–That’s not what it feels like to me.
–Stop complaining. Wait until you see the whole thing. You won’t even notice the details. The main issue has nothing to do with us.
–Who knows?
–What do you mean?
–Nothing. Just a joke.
–What did you mean when you said that?
–Nothing.
–Why did you say it then?
–One doesn’t know what might happen to us, what’s in store.
–Such as, you being like—
–I’m not saying that.
–What are you saying then?
–Nothing. Let’s leave it for now.
* * *
–How are you?
–Fine.
–How was your day?
–Fine.
–Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t have gone on. As you say, I need to wait and see the whole text.
–Okay.
–I was thinking about the difficult chapter.
–Yes?
–You said you’ve tinkered with it.
–Yes.
–You mentioned some good news, some television programme—
–Yes, that’s why Anna is so chatty, excited, when she comes in. It takes her a while to register that something’s wrong.
–Too self-centred, as always.
–That’s unfair.
–She never notices when Richard has a problem.
–Look, I’m telling you about my novel. If you want to go on about us—
–Who was talking about us?
–You use every opportunity to criticize me.
–I was referring to Anna—
–And she’s like me.
–In some ways.
–You see. You think she’s like me and—
–Who made her so similar to you?
–I think she is wonderful and even if she’s not perfect, she doesn’t deserve what happens. No woman does.
–Okay.
–Okay.
–Look, I’m sorry.
–Fine.
–I’d like to hear what happens. Please?
–She’s happy. Her enthusiasm, her passion, it all pours out and then in the middle of a sentence she notices his subdued face, his hunched body, his inability to share what she’s talking about. She panics something has happened to the girls. He reassures her they’re okay. She asks whether he’s ill. He isn’t. She says that whatever it is, they will get through it together. She loves him and he shouldn’t worry, she will help him.
–If she could guess what it is, she wouldn’t be saying it.
–How could she possibly guess? It would never have crossed her mind.
–And then he tells her.
–Yes, he says that they are getting rid of him at work.
–I’m trying to picture it. Where are they?
–In the lounge. He’s sitting on the sofa, she’s standing in the middle of the room, facing him, but as soon as she notices the state he’s in, she sits down next to him, takes his hand in hers.
–You make it sound like a play.
–That’s how I see it. I need to visualise the scene to be able to write the dialogue.
–Right. And then?
–When she hears that they want to sack him, she is incredulous. She almost laughs. She relaxes visibly. You can’t be serious, she says. You have the best RAE record. She mentions the Suf
fragette centre he founded and now directs, which has gained an international reputation as the best collection of the material on the Movement. Why would they want to get rid of you? He says: because I visited a prostitute.
–You mean, he says one prostitute, just the one?
–Yes, I think he would try to play it down.
–I see. That’s changed.
–Yes.
–Anna would know that seeing a prostitute isn’t a sackable offence.
–Perhaps but, as you can imagine, it doesn’t cross her mind at the time. Let me read you what I wrote: we get Anna as the first-person narrator.
–Of course, as always in her sections.
–Here it goes: We were in the kitchen. It was 6.55 on Sunday 13 November when I heard those words, those five words that came to constitute his revelation and when my body lost all sensation of weight and corporality and had anyone stuck a needle into my arm, or my leg, or indeed anywhere into my body, limbs or face, I would not have felt anything. The words that my husband spoke, that sentence, that sentence that contained no more than five words, anaesthetised me. At the same time, my mind was emptied of everything that it had ever known or been aware of. Once the words were spoken, my conscious awareness of myself and of anything around me was obliterated to the point where the world around me was taken out of existence. I was standing in the kitchen without knowing that I was I; I was in the kitchen without knowing where I was. When my awareness of myself started coming back, and I began to have some notion, some notion of who I was, it was my surroundings and the man in front of me who seemed unknown, unreal even. It felt as if someone had placed white gauze between me and the space around, and this new world, this unknown world, a world in which I felt lost, this world appeared through a haze, like a dream. We were standing in a room that I had never seen and I had to screw up my eyes to try to find out where I was. The place looked like a kitchen, somebody’s kitchen, somebody whom I didn’t know and had never visited. I couldn’t determine which colour and what material those worktops were made of; I tried to step nearer to see better, to touch the objects around me but my legs wouldn’t move. I tried to stretch my arms but they seemed locked in place. I could hear humming and I remember thinking that it sounded like a fridge but my ears wouldn’t let me determine where the noise was coming from. With my body paralysed and my mind in a state of amnesia, I should have felt calm but I didn’t. Something somewhere inside me was trying to get out. I wanted to move but I couldn’t. I wanted to speak but I couldn’t. And who could I have spoken to, anyway? A few metres in front of me stood a man who looked exactly like my husband and yet I knew, I was sure, he was not my husband. He was nothing like my husband. But why did he have the face shaped in the same way as that of my husband’s and why was his body built in exactly the same way as the body of my husband, and why did his voice sound exactly the same as that of my husband? And when this man spoke, all I could think was how dare he speak to me and speak to me in the tone that suggested familiarity, how dare he call me by my first name? How dare he? His words had nothing to do with me and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But where was my husband? This man looking at me and saying things that had nothing to do with me, things that I didn’t want to hear, things that didn’t make sense, who the hell was he, this usurper, this thief, this intruder? Had he murdered my husband and assumed his identity? I disliked that man and I wanted to make him go away. I wanted him to leave me alone but he stepped towards me and said my name. He was sorry. Sorry? What for? I didn’t know him; I didn’t want him to use my name. There was nothing to be sorry about. We were strangers who had never done anything together. Then came another sorry. And many more sorries. His sorries had nothing to do with me. And he called me by my name. And again. How dare he? I had to stop him. I wanted to scream, wanted to tell him to go away, I wanted to push him over. The bastard. More bloody sorry. And my name. My name. Stop it. Stop it. I wanted to shout but couldn’t. The fool, the idiot – for what else could he be? – was sorry, sorry, sorry. He was sorry and then he said my name. My name. Again. I wanted to stop my ears. I wanted to cover them with both hands.
–Wow. No more screaming?
–No, that’s the main change.
–Right. More powerful than her screaming.
–She doesn’t explode as he expects her to. She implodes.
–I prefer that.
–I’m still not sure that I can communicate the enormity of the shock. I’ll have to revisit it. Her growing irritation with him brings her back and once she comes back, she’s angry.
–I can imagine her fury.
–She wants to know where Richard found the woman. He says he can’t remember—
–He should stick with that.
–It wouldn’t work. She insists and so he tells her about his e-mail account under a false name; she wants the password. He pleads with her not to look. She won’t give in. Eventually, he tells her it’s catandmouse13 – the year when the Cat and Mouse Bill, a notorious bill—
–Allowing the authorities to re-arrest a woman after she had been released from prison during a hunger strike . . .
–Well done.
–What do you expect, being married to a historian?
–Neat that, isn’t it?
–What?
–Him using his specialist knowledge for his password and the irony of what the bill stood for and what the word means here: access to prostitutes.
–Most readers would miss it.
–Not all. You wouldn’t.
–Come to think of it, quite funny that password.
–I don’t think Anna finds it funny.
–That’s her problem; she never sees the funny side of things.
–Don’t be facetious.
–Perhaps in years to come, she’ll look back and laugh at the absurdity of the password.
–I doubt it.
–You don’t think time will heal—
–I don’t know. But at the moment, it’s hardly funny. She opens the account and finds hundreds of contacts.
–So he will have to admit there wasn’t only one prostitute.
–Exactly.
–Your tinkering with the chapter: did you get rid of her demand?
–No. I think that’s a very important part of Anna’s psychology at that point.
–I thought you didn’t go for character psychology.
–To some extent. In fact, I don’t usually, but this novel demands it. It’s very difficult to play linguistic and stylistic games with an issue such as prostitution, particularly if you are a woman.
–You’re keeping that?
–Oh, yes. But I’ve altered it and added something else.
–What?
–Well, she looks up several of the women, stares at their images on websites, comments on their vulgarity, their cheapness. She sees their fees and services. She says she could do the same and better and she forces him to write her a cheque for a blow job. She demands £200 because she has a PhD. She says, you know, letters after the name make a difference. I don’t think your whores had PhDs.
–Hell hath no fury—
–Reluctantly, he complies, writes her a cheque. They sit on the bed and she handles his penis but he can’t get an erection—
–Hardly surprising under the circumstances.
–Your male empathy has no bounds. He wants to touch her breasts but she says that’s extra. He asks her to put him in her mouth. I’m not putting this piece of flesh, this piece that’s been in so many whores, I’m not putting it in my mouth without a condom, she says. He feels humiliated and he cries. They give up. And it’s then she says she’s no good, she needs to learn from a professional. He protests that she’s great; she has nothing to learn from anyone. She insists that he arranges to meet his latest prostitute, and this time in a luxury hotel, and that he has sex
with the woman while she watches. He’s horrified but she says either he does that or he can move out.
–It’s the same as before. I don’t like that. She’s mad. He shouldn’t give in.
–He has no choice. Now Anna imagines the scene with the prostitute and Richard; in her mind it plays out as a scene in an Orson Welles film and she’s sitting in an armchair, in a very large hotel room, smartly dressed, stilettos, an elegant cigarette in her hand, as she observes the action on the bed.
–What’s the point of that?
–She’s out of her mind.
–That’s obvious.
–What I mean is that she’s out of herself. Literally. She sees herself as someone else. That’s her way of coping, playing a role.
* * *
–Good day.
–Not brilliant. Don’t want to talk about it.
–Okay.
–And yours?
–The same as always.
–You always say that.
–It’s always true.
–?
–Something I wanted to say about Anna.
–Yes?
–In that crucial chapter, I think she’s cruel. Cruel and insensitive. She can’t hate him so much after she’s loved him all those years.
–That bothers her too. No, that’s not the right word. That worries her, frustrates her, drives her mad. But she can’t help it. The way she sees it, he destroyed the identity of her husband, or who she believed he was. And he did the same to her. She’s not who she thought she was.
–She’s had a new experience.
–That’s insulting.
–I grant you, a terrible experience, but still a new experience. She should learn from it, become a better person, more self-aware. More compassionate. Less judgmental. The opportunities are limitless.
–Maybe she will with time but for now, the shock’s too big, too unsettling. Her politics, her feminism, her sisterly solidarity have been wiped out and she hates those women. Nor does she miss the irony that when she stares at the pictures of the women, she’s judging them purely as objects, just like the punters do. And there’s another irony: Richard was obsessed with the women. He couldn’t organise a trip outside London, book the hotel, without checking out the local women and contacting them, often booking them as well. Now she’s obsessed; she can’t tear herself away from the computer. She can’t stop contacting them. She hates him for doing this to her.