The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  It felt odd to be drawing up outside the familiar house in which he lived no longer; odd, too, to be inserting the same old key into the same old lock, just as if nothing had happened.

  Inside, the house was in darkness. Automatically, his hand reached for the switch just inside the front door, and for a moment he stood blinking in the sudden light, waiting uneasily for his wife to pop out from somewhere. He could feel his body already braced against the encounter, whatever form it might take. Tears? Reproaches? A handful of bills?

  “Beatrice!” he called up the dark stairs, after a few moments. “Where are you, Beet?”

  This was another thing Helen didn’t like, his addressing his estranged wife as “Beet”, but what the hell, a man can’t always be watching his step about everything, and anyway Helen wasn’t here at the moment, was she?

  “Beet!” he called again, louder, going to the foot of the stairs, “Beet, I’m here! I’ve come for my …” His voice trailed away among the echoes, and he knew now, for certain, that the house was empty. All the same, some kind of uneasy nagging of the spirit drove him to open first this door and then that, switching on the lights and noting, in each room, the blank, unlived-in look of a house in which a woman is suddenly alone, in a place much too big for her. He even peered down the cellar stairs, and tried the outside lavatory—though how she could have been there, with the back door securely bolted on the inside, top and bottom, he could not begin to imagine.

  Where the hell had she got to? The sense of outrage that was growing within him took him quite by surprise, and he stood for a moment in the chilly, white-lit kitchen trying to analyse the feeling. Why in the world should he care whether she was here or not? He’d only come to collect his things and go. In fact, it was better this way, the last thing he needed was another tearful scene. Or any more telephone messages from the solicitor, or to hear anything whatsoever about money. He was sick of hearing about money, of thinking about money, of getting letters about money … and above all he was sick of Beatrice moaning about money, her mouth pinched with grievance, her pale eyes red-rimmed under their sandy lashes, and her fists clenching and unclenching themselves as she sought desperately for some new way of hurting him. This was quite a problem for her now that he’d left home. The old ploys, such as burning his dinner black or refusing to go to bed with him were quite obsolete now that he had Helen.

  All the same, and thankful though he was to avoid another of these scenes, Martin still felt obscurely affronted by the fact that Beatrice wasn’t here to—well, not to greet him, that was ridiculous—but, well, to do, or be, something. To acknowledge his presence, even if only by refusing to speak to him. Something. It was his right, somehow.

  *

  Whistling to keep himself company, Martin set off up the stairs and entered the spare room, which for many months preceding his final departure had served him as bedroom as well as study. By his own request, most of his personal belongings had by now been stacked in this room ready for removal to Helen’s; and now, standing at the door and contemplating his massed goods and chattels, he found himself once again gripped by an inexplicable sense of outrage.

  Inexplicable, because he himself had ordained that this was where they were to be; had, indeed, transported several of the objects with his own hands from various parts of the house. Why, then, was the sight of them all here, all together, so infuriating?

  Collecting them together in one place had been a good idea. It had been his idea. How could he have guessed that his most treasured possessions—his books, his filing cabinet, his hi-fi equipment, even his brand-new dinner-jacket—would look, in the mass, like the remnants of a church jumble sale?

  Cardboard boxes bursting through their lids with bits and pieces: piles of shoes, piles of sweaters, of pyjamas, of underwear—could he really ever have been the owner of all these garments which Beatrice (at his behest) had sullenly unearthed from all the drawers and cupboards in the house?

  And his expensive, ultra-modern reading-lamp, too. He’d only bought it recently, and now here it was slumped drunkenly against some packing-cases, for all the world like a derelict on the Embankment. And his pictures likewise, his framed photographs of school and University cricket teams; there they all were, bundled together, with string round them. Even his new divan had been dismantled, the base upended against the wall, and the sprung mattress lashed around with rope into a great sullen roly-poly blocking out half the window.

  It was awful. It was monstrous. Martin stood there almost in a state of shock, as if he had come home and found the place vandalised. And the fact that it had all come about in accordance with his own instructions alleviated the horror of it not one whit.

  “Beatrice!” he nearly screamed again, because somebody must bloody do something: but of course it was useless. Bloody Beatrice wasn’t bloody here.

  *

  Past seven o’clock. Helen would have been expecting him for quite a while now, and he was anxious, if possible, not to have to mention to her this visit home—to 16, Hadley Gardens, that is. Not that she would be anything other than sweet and understanding about it, but all the same …

  The shirts must be somewhere. Beatrice wouldn’t have washed them herself, of course, she’d have sent them to the laundry, and so what he must look for was a slithery blue plastic parcel with Sunfresh Laundry printed on it, and a bill for God-knew-how-much pinned on. Irritably, he began picking around among the clutter, shoving piles of clothing this way and that.

  *

  A door slammed downstairs. The front door it was, propelling a blast of cold air right through the house, and reverberating like a shot from a cannon. For a moment, Martin crouched immobile, like a criminal caught red-handed. Then, cautiously, he straightened up and tiptoed to the door. If it was Beatrice—and of course it was Beatrice, who else could it be?—then it was better that he should give her a shock by creeping downstairs than that she should give him one by creeping up. This would establish the correct order of precedence in the ensuing quarrel.

  Well, of course there would be a quarrel. There always was. Trust Beatrice to think up something.

  And now there came another sound. A laugh this time, a woman’s laugh, loud and slightly mocking; and then, echoing it, Beatrice’s pleased, tentative little giggle which meant that someone had just said something outrageous which she, Beatrice, would have loved to say if she’d dared.

  Martin knew well enough who the someone must be; but for confirmation he crept across the landing and leaned over the banister.

  The light was still on in the hall, just as he’d left it, and from his vantage point he could see the two hairdos from which flimsy headscarves, glistening with rain, had just been removed: Beatrice’s threadbare perm, and the dark, shining up-piled edifice that belonged to Marjorie Pocock, Beatrice’s evil genius from over the road. Not content with making life hell for her own husband, Marjorie was for ever in and out here, inciting Beatrice to make life hell for hers…. Martin watched the two heads move apart as coats were hung up, then swing close again as the pair made their way, still giggling, out into the kitchen. Through the open door, he could hear taps being turned on, a kettle being filled, the clink of crockery … the silent white-lit kitchen was coming alive now, for them….

  Footsteps. Little thuds and clatterings. More giggling. The scrape of a chair … the door of the fridge opening and then shutting … a low murmur of voices … and then a little shriek of merriment from Beatrice.

  How dare she! For him, she had nothing but complaints and tears and ugly, whining recriminations; and now here she was screaming with merry laughter in the company of this interfering, mischief-making bitch!

  Bitch! Both of them, bitches!

  And what’s more, he could guess who it was they were bitching about. Him.

  CHAPTER III

  “MARTIN, DARLING, LISTEN. This Ledbetter girl—the bit where she denies ever having been depressed. I’m just wondering—if you’d maybe probed a bit more at
that point …? I mean, we do know, don’t we, that she did have treatment for depression, it’s in her record….”

  Helen, from her seat at the typewriter, had swivelled round to face him, pushing her soft blonde hair back from her forehead in a familiar self-deprecating gesture: a gesture that seemed to say that the criticism she was voicing was merely a blonde, fluffy sort of criticism, unworthy of an important man’s attention. When in fact it was nothing of the sort, but right on the ball.

  “I don’t know—perhaps I’m just being stupid?” she continued, knowing that she was not. “Perhaps I missed some of the preliminary data …?”

  She hadn’t missed a thing, naturally. Martin, slumped at the breakfast table, still in his dressing-gown, still eating, felt at a hideous disadvantage. It was barely ten past eight, and here she was, fully dressed, lipstick in place, and all agog to finish the typing of this interview before she left for work. Her eagerness to be a help to him at this hour in the morning was terrifying, it absolutely made his stomach churn, but of course he couldn’t say so because it was so marvellous of her to be doing it at all, fitting it in somehow before going off to her rather gruelling teaching job, at which she had to arrive on the dot of nine.

  Reluctantly, Martin gulped down the dregs of his coffee and raised his bleary eyes. He just couldn’t think at this hour of the day, the evenings were his time for thinking. Intelligent questions while he was still spreading marmalade on his last piece of toast simply made him feel ill. Why couldn’t she be rushing round the flat looking for handbags and things, like other women?

  “I don’t mean,” Helen continued, pushing her hair back yet again, and beginning to talk faster and faster, as if gathering speed for the running jump she was going to have to take over his morning lethargy. “I don’t mean that there’s necessarily any discrepancy. After all, a girl like that—a slightly unbalanced girl—might easily find herself denying, even in her own mind, that …”

  Martin’s early morning brain buzzed like a telephone that hasn’t even been dialled yet. He could grasp just enough of what she was saying to feel sure that she was right, but beyond this his mind was a blank.

  He decided to allow himself a little flare-up of petulance. Why not? After all, they’d been living together for over a month now, surely it didn’t have to go on being so bloody idyllic? Not all the time?

  “Just type what’s there,” he admonished her, repressively. “There’s no need at this stage to start looking for discrepancies. Certainly not for the typist to start looking for them.”

  He was sorry the moment he’d said it; the quick dip and swing of her hair as she bent once more to her work told him he’d hurt her. He hadn’t meant to, really he hadn’t; but she shouldn’t go on at him so.

  To compensate for his momentary unkindness it was now necessary to go across and lean over her shoulder, to praise her—indeed over-praise her—for the excellence of her work, and to tell her how beautiful she’d been looking, sitting here at the typewriter so sweet and serious, and all for him.

  She melted at once, of course, and he kissed her, smudging her lipstick so that it had to be done all over again. He knew how she gloried in this sort of thing: there can’t be many history mistresses who have to re-do their lipstick twice before going in to their first lesson of the morning.

  *

  Twenty minutes later she was gone, and at the sound of the outer door closing behind her, such a wave of relief washed over him as stopped him in his tracks, absolutely appalled.

  It was the awful familiarity of the feeling that frightened him most. This was precisely and exactly the way he’d always felt about doors slamming behind his wife. Any door, anywhere, ever. In her case, of course, it had been right and proper to feel like this; reassuring, in a way, a sign that the marriage was collapsing in just the way a marriage should collapse. Almost with nostalgia, he recalled those slamming doors of his former life, ushering in, as they did, stretches of wonderful peace and silence while Beatrice sobbed in the bedroom, sulked in the kitchen, or even merely refused to speak to him, passing him on the stairs with averted, swollen eyes. Whatever the form of her withdrawal, it was always an improvement on what had gone before, and brought with it a sense of release and freedom. No doubt the relief on these occasions was only the proverbial relief experienced by those who cease to bang their heads against brick walls, but all the same it was a welcome respite, and very understandable. What was not so understandable was how this very same relief could be experienced by one who no longer has a brick wall to bang his head against; who is, on the contrary, living a life as near to paradisal as mortal man can hope for. How could it be that the emotions engendered by a sour and hostile estranged wife could be thus transposed, in their entirety, on to the image of an adored and adoring mistress? How could such a thing be possible?

  It couldn’t, obviously. There must be some other explanation; and. to Martin, with all his psychological training and know-how, the explanation was as obvious as it was reassuring.

  What was happening, quite simply, was that his nervous system had, over the years with Beatrice, become conditioned to react like this to the sound of a slamming door, so that now, like any Pavlov dog, he was incapable of reacting in any other way.

  Yes, that was it. A simple stimulus-response phenomenon, nothing to do with Helen herself or how much he loved her.

  All was explained. His boundless and unqualified love for Helen was still intact. With a clear conscience, he could now permit himself to relax into this wonderful sense of solitude, of lightness, of restored well-being, knowing that it was spurious, a mere hangover from the unhappy past. He could make himself a fresh cup of coffee, too, exactly the way he liked it, instead of in that blasted percolator. Strong and black, and with lots of sugar, it would perhaps stir his torpid faculties just sufficiently to enable him to go to his desk and settle down to a morning’s work on that God-awful thesis.

  This was another somewhat disturbing thing that was happening to him—or, rather, wasn’t happening. His thesis, which was to have been the turning-point in his career, simply wasn’t progressing at all, or hardly. Already, the deadline was barely nine months away, and he’d scarcely completed even the introductory section; while his ideas for the succeeding chapters were still just as unformed—to be honest, just as derivative—as they’d been when he’d first prepared his synopsis. He had hoped—had, indeed, confidently assumed—that once he really got down to it his head would start humming with new and revolutionary ideas, just as it had done in his student days: that some novel and startling hypothesis would spring effortlessly into his mind, complete with inspired notions as to where and how to look for corroborative evidence. And once this had happened, he would then be able to forge ahead, recklessly outstripping that boring old synopsis, breaking new ground, confounding his critics, and blazoning his name in gold across the whole history of his subject.

  But it wasn’t happening. He’d been at it, on and off, for more than a year now, and not one single new or exciting idea had come to him. Every thought that entered his head had already been thought of by a dozen others; every avenue of research seemed to be blocked solid by hundreds of people who’d got there before him.

  Inspiration was dead. His brain hummed not with new and exciting ideas but with an ever-deepening boredom and sense of defeat.

  What had happened to him? What was going wrong?

  The answer, at first, had seemed easy. It was the pressure of his routine work at the Polytechnic that was holding him back. Twelve hours’ lecturing a week had been pushed on to him that year, despite his protests; and what with the preparation for these, and the seminars, and the tutorials, he seemed to have no time left for his own work at all. Also, as part and parcel of all this, there was the relentless persecution by his students, for ever handing in their assignments and expecting him to read them, or else not handing them in and expecting him to listen to their hard-luck stories of how this, that, and the other had prevented th
em finishing on time, and how none of it was their fault.

  As if he cared. The fewer assignments the better, as far as he was concerned, and whether the omissions were due to laziness, stupidity, or their grandmother being dead, he couldn’t care less, why bother him about it?

  The whole thing was so pointless, anyway. There wasn’t a thing he could teach them that they couldn’t just as well look up in some book. What was the library for? It had cost half a million pounds, or something, to put up, and was supposed to be the pride and glory of the place: but would the students use it? They would not, not so long as they had the option of pestering him instead without moving out of their chairs. That’s what he was paid for, being pestered by them, and the little beasts knew it. A Pestership, that’s how it should have been listed, this job of his….

  Anyway, with all this stacked against him, and the best hours of his day devoured by administrative trivia, it had seemed plausible enough, at the time, to attribute his creative block to pressure of routine work.

  *

  But then, a few months ago, all these long-standing obstacles had been suddenly and almost miraculously removed by the granting of his long-awaited Sabbatical—a whole year, on full pay, during which no teaching duties at all were to be required of him. Instead he was expected to concentrate full-time on what he had always longed to concentrate on—his writing and his research.

  Hooray! A lucky break for Martin Lockwood at last!

  But Martin’s rejoicings were short-lived. No sooner had the distractions and obstacles imposed by his job been wholly removed, than a whole new lot of obstacles and distractions came swarming in, as if on cue, to take their place: it was as if there were a sort of Parkinson’s Law of interruptions, from which no man can escape. What happened to Martin was that it was at just this juncture that his affair with Helen began building up to crisis point, and his marriage, long moribund, began to collapse completely. From then on, he didn’t seem to have a minute to himself. Courting Helen, quarrelling with Beatrice: it was all incredibly time-consuming; and then, on top of all this, the actual mechanics of breaking up the marriage and moving in with Helen seemed to fall entirely on him. Neither of the ladies in the case would stir a finger to help him, Helen out of diffidence, Beatrice out of spite, but the net effect was the same in either case: namely, that it was left to him to cope single-handed with bloody everything, from making room for his belongings in Helen’s flat to finding a solicitor for Beatrice, who was soggily doing absolutely nothing on her own behalf: just crying down the telephone, for which he was still paying, to all her awful friends.