She didn’t know what to say to Spence. She put the paper aside.
“Not the right kind of support,” said Spence, and sighed, with compressed lips. “Nothing satisfies you, does it? Jake’s not going to school. We’ll collect Fergie from the Crafts, bring her back, then I’m taking him to see a movie. Is there anything I can get you?”
“No thanks.” She lay back listlessly, closing her eyes.
The hellhounds were under an injunction to approach nobody except Anna herself, and this morning they seemed to be respecting it. As long as she stayed indoors and never answered the phone, as long as she refused to give interviews, killed their email, they would have to give up in the end. Spence and Jake were in and out. Anna went through the house, tidying clothes into drawers and books onto shelves, setting cushions straight, tasting the horror and dread that filled the air. When her wanderings took her into Jake’s room, Fergie the anarchist hamster was wide awake. She watched Anna with concern through the bars of her cage.
On the last of their camping summers, they had found a good spot above the Gorge du Tarn, to hole up and avoid the mayhem of le quinze. They were chilling around the yurt, after a hot and exciting walk, scrambling limestone crags, and Jake had implored his daddy to give Charlie and the Chocolate Factory another try. Anna had spread a blanket in a secluded corner of the emplacement, to do some yoga: Spence lay on an airbed in the evening sun, the book propped on his smooth, tanned chest while Jake walked up and down, tried to play with his diabolo, exhibited terrible adult signs of nervous distress. Please, thought Anna, between pity and laughter, please, Spence, stretch a point, be kind. Finally Spence sat up, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry kid,” he said, holding out the book. “This still stinks pretty bad.”
Jake walked over.
“Will you let me explain to you why? You see, this guy’s take on poverty is just vile—”
“No!” yelled Jake. “No no no! Don’t EXPLAIN!” And he ran, hugging the paperback, jumped over the low wall at the back of their site, disappeared into the scrub oaks.
“I’d better go after him,” said Spence, sorrowful but unrepentant.
“You stay where you are, Rhadamanthus. You’ve done enough damage. For God’s sake Spence, it’s only a kiddie’s book. And he loves it.”
“Well, he shouldn’t.”
She found her little boy sitting on a ledge of warm stone, on the very edge of the gorge. Under his dangling feet a mass of treetops fell away. Far below the river snaked, a ribbon of sea-washed bottle glass, striated with tiny moving rods of bright color: those were kayaks. He turned his head away, a tear glistening on his cheek.
“Where’s the book?”
“It’s here. I was going to throw it away, but I didn’t.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. It’s not the poor paperback’s fault.”
She put her arm around his small, warm, naked shoulders. Almost at once he relaxed, and she rocked him, murmuring soothing words, don’t worry, dearest Jake-boy, don’t cry, I love you…“Maybe you ought to let him explain, so you’d understand. Jake, you can’t make a person like something. Especially not your daddy. What’s the use in forcing him to say what he doesn’t mean? That’s not what loving people do. You’re going to have to accept that he’s just not keen on Roald Dahl. Think of you and porridge.” He was so in love with his father, so touching in his heartbreak: down there the river runs, up here the lizards blink on the hot rock. I hug my baby, I love them both so much:
Throw this jewel memory away; it is fouled.
One winter Monday morning. Anna discovered to her horror an unheard of thing. She had forgotten to make her sandwiches! “I hate Mondays!” howled Anna, running around looking for the hairbrush for Jake’s hair. Every Sunday evening from time immemorial she had prepared five frugal lunches, packed in plastic bags and stowed in the freezer, five because though she was often at work on a Saturday (not to mention Sunday), there were days when her apparatchik duties turned up a free meal, and it averaged out. Spence, who in honor could never be asked to make these lunches, began to slice bread, the bread he baked himself, grinning very sweetly. “No!” she cried, “I’ve done that! I got that far, and then I couldn’t find the butter! It was in the freezer, remember, because Jake had unpacked it there—” She unearthed from the crock five pairs of slices, but Spence took them out of her hands.
“Hey hey hey,” she boasted. “Look at this, I’m getting my sandwiches made for me!”
“Under close supervision from the gaffer.” He divided slices of organic salami into five modest portions. “How much mustard? One dyne, ten dyne, how many nanograms?” and then someone let rip a fart.
“Cor!” said Anna. “What a woofter. That was you, Spence.”
“The one who smelt it dealt it,” said Spence.
“Ha! The one who said the rhyme, done the crime…”
Jake had found the hairbrush and stood in the kitchen doorway giggling, gently smoothing his own curls, ready to dart away if attacked. His parents, if they could catch him, were far too thorough.
Sweetness, sweetness, in every living moment—
Throw it away.
All the farting, nose-picking, bottom-scratching, snuffling intimacies of the nest, robbed of foundation, collapsing like the iridescent surface of a bubble when it bursts.
In the cold snap, before last Christmas, Spence and Anna lie in front of a coal fire in the piano room, bicycle stable, occasional winter parlor, sifting charity appeals. Anna meant to spread their contributions, but it always ended up being Christmas and Easter. Spence liked being coaxed. He liked having her take charge of this part of life, the mothering he missed in her professional daze. “Well gee whizz, marmee, I’m just waiting for the day when you send me and Jake out into the snow, to give our Christmas dinner to the poor…” And here, another jewel. A snowfall at dusk, Anna and four-year-old Jake are trotting along by the park gates, in the magic glimmering. They have been to see the dentist, and they both got a clean test. They are proudly wearing stickers to this effect on their coats, to take home and show to Daddy. Jake is telling his mummy about a new Shere Khan character Spence has invented, called Billy Blue.
“Billy Blue isn’t a grown up, mummy. He’s a little boy like me and you.”
Throw it away, it’s fouled.
Anna had hoped that she wouldn’t have to know the Crafts, but it had not worked out that way. Insidiously, helplessly, she’d had to endure it while the two families and the children became “friends.” Birthday parties, barbecues on the beach, lunches at country pubs, treats for the kids: McDonalds, the ice-rink, the flumes, the laser-gaming. Anna didn’t like it. This wasn’t the way they’d reared Jake, this endless, greedy, placatory circus. How can you expect them to make sense of the world if you believe one thing and behave completely the opposite. And it didn’t even work: Meret and Charles’s kids were horrors… She knew she had no choice, and anyway, she didn’t want to admit Charles Craft was a problem. She couldn’t possibly tell Spence that old story now.
Secretly, irrationally what she’d hated most was being able to keep up with the Charles Crafts because of Spence’s earnings. At least this aspect was a private humiliation: Spence was convinced that his Anna was indifferent to material reward, and the people they met at the Crafts expected Anna to have a “wife” job, something minor, a second-income thing.
One Saturday last summer it had been Anna’s turn to cook for one of the gatherings that she didn’t like. She’d been late home, the guests had been in situ, Spence hadn’t done a thing about the food, which was a tiny bit bloody-minded of him, but fair. Anyway, she was happy to have an excuse not to join the party. My mother used to do this, she remembered, when annoying Senoz friends and relations turned up… When a woman disappears into her kitchen it’s not a submission, it’s a statement: a retreat in good order. She was peeling roasted peppers and aubergines for pisto castellano, a finicky job, and feeling irritated because Charles, along with a
children’s writer called Neal Hight, had elected to take roost in the kitchen, watching her while she worked. They were talking about Sheltered Housing in the Algarve. Neal’s old Mum was installed. Charles was very interested in getting Meret’s parents sorted out, but he had to convince Meret. She must see that her work was suffering, and it was so important to her—
“It’s your wife’s drawings that make those books,” said Neal, “Spence is a lovely guy, don’t get me wrong. But he has no idea how to write for children—”
Meret and Spence suddenly appeared and passed between the gossiping pair, crossed the kitchen and went out through the open door into the June garden. Neal mugged embarrassment at Charles, but Anna’s eyes followed that visitation, the lucky Spence who didn’t have to cook, out into the tiny paradise where three tiers of flowers beside the path were in bloom together: carnation, lily, lily, rose. A frog croaked, among the yellow flags by the pond where Jake’s famous DRAGONFLY had lingered. Meret and Spence stood by the pool. Anna felt a prickling in her shoulders. She looked round and found that Charles was staring at her, a strange glare she couldn’t read, except thank God it didn’t look like sexual interest.
Truth doesn’t go away. It stays, patiently waiting to be understood.
Of course everyone had known. The situation was so obvious! Anna’s teammates on campus had probably talked about the affair whenever she left the room. Publishing folk had talked about it, in those after-work gatherings for cheap wine. Rosey McCarthy herself had issued a serious warning (and Anna had been embarrassed and disdainful, feeling that she was above women-talk, bitchy gossip).
She stood in the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror above the basin.
Here I am, within another of those sanctuaries. I have become a woman. I can be a matriarch like Rosey, who though she loves Wol truly, never forgets to treat him with contempt. Throws him out when he fails to satisfy, allows him back on sufferance. It is what they expect, it is the way relations between the sexes have to be. You have to keep the whip hand, or else they will turn on you. He’ll want a divorce, because Meret will want another white dress, another hired Rolls. I will have one of those complicated families: ex-husband, husband’s new girlfriend, son, girlfriend’s children, all around the same table. I will buy one of those huge gas-guzzling people-carrier tanks to carry them all around. Correction, I’ll make Spence buy it. I will take his money and sit with my elbows on the kitchen table and gossip about what a shit my ex-husband is, men are all the same. Could she endure such a life? Of course. A woman can endure anything.
She could see the huge black jagged malign complacent shape of female power, the greedy rancor of it, reflected in the mirror, breaking through her skin. I was afraid of Transferred Y, and I pretended other reasons, but this is why. I didn’t want to think of what it meant for real people because that means me, that means Spence… all the dirt about sexual relations, that I didn’t ever want to handle.
A shadow moved in the depths of the mirror. A floorboard creaked.
“Spence?”
Spence and Jake were out. She was so certain that she had glimpsed someone behind her that she went through the house from top to bottom. She looked in closets and behind every door, convinced that one of the hellhounds must have broken in. There was no intruder, only the dread and fear that had greeted her last night. Maybe the house has always been haunted, she thought. How would I know? My life has been lived elsewhere; that’s why I’m in trouble.
Another day began. Spence took Jake to school, then retired to his room. The Shere Khan industry must go on, the breadwinner must win bread. Before they left for Manchester, Anna had invented some post-employment therapy for herself: she would sort a career’s accumulation of papers, in the loft. She went up there to think.
You get fired, then you realize your husband is having an affair. It often happens to people that way; it’s not really a coincidence. Before you lost your job, there was a period of stress and anxiety, a situation that naturally affected your marriage, and you didn’t have time to pay attention. Everything here is normal, perfectly normal. She sat on one of the old tin trunks that had traveled the world with them and stared into the gloom.
Why is it so hard for me to understand ordinary things?
Anna used to get goosebumps when she ran across descriptions of Asperger’s Syndrome, the mild form of autism, the super-male trainspotter personality—especially reports from victims about how it felt, because they sounded so like herself. But I’m not a man. I’m meticulous, obsessed, a little bit strange, but ain’t I a woman?
You can’t be a woman. If you were, you would understand.
Maybe she’d known that Spence and Meret were having an affair. From the way he was behaving, she guessed Spence thought she knew. The day she’d had that awful interview with Nirmal and walked out of his office, fired, she’d gone round to the Rectory. Meret and Spence had been off somewhere together. And then Spence had…he’d been so cold, so unsympathetic, about her terrible disaster. He’d been cold and unsympathetic ever since, and now she could see why. To Spence, what had happened that fatal day had been…my wife came home unexpectedly and caught me out. Maybe Anna had known all along and cynically ignored the affair, because without Meret there’d be no Shere Khan, and she’d have had to to go back to being a prudent breadwinner. It’s as if I made a deal, in my sleep, traded my career for my marriage. I bet that’s how Spence sees it… This is the part of the Faustian bargain they don’t tell you about. Oh, and by the way, while you are wrestling with God, your personal life will be a disaster, your home will be crawling with miserable secrets, carpets heaving with the dirt swept under them. But the Faustian bargain is supposed to be for men, anyway. Someone was walking around downstairs. It wasn’t Spence. She would have heard him leaving his room, which was right below her. How strange if she had been living in a haunted house all these years and never known it…
Piles of shit in the corners.
She had tried so hard, she had made such sacrifices. Ah, Lily Rose. Little Jake, your deep eyes gazing at me over the curve of my breast, those nights when you were first born: but I did the right thing, I gave him to Spence, can’t ask for equality and then refuse to give up your own privileges. She had been so sure that she and Spence could win the game together, with their new rules. But here she was in the filthy pit. The shit was where she lived, not tucked away in some children’s literature conference hotel (as she had hoped): it was inside her life, her personal space. Anna’s parents had brought her up to bolt the toilet door, had discouraged dirty talk about farts and poo. Anna and Spence had taught Jake differently. They were poor and aspirational too, but these things are relative. For them the killing squalor of real poverty was generations in the past; they didn’t have the same ingrained fears. Nothing wrong with shit. The stuff is harmless, attractive even. From time to time bothered by constipation, a little struggling and heaving, sore anus after passing a knobbly great stool at last, but she was not afraid. In her childish fantasies, shitting had been her model for sex, not because sex was dirty but because Anna was ignorant, didn’t know which bit of her anatomy down there was giving her pleasure. At Easter in third year, she and Ramone had spent a weekend with Martin Judge, another arts student, someone Ramone hated. She couldn’t remember why, one of Ramone’s strange freakish fits… He’d rented a cottage in the Lincolnshire Wolds. They had a picnic by a strong-flowing ditch of a river, in a field margin on a warm April afternoon. They ate sandwiches made of hardboiled egg and sliced onion that had been steeped in vinegar. Anna went apart, behind a bush, made a scrape in the ground and laid such a big fine turd, plump and brown and pointed at both ends like a rugby ball. Nice shit, good shit. Goodbye shit, I’m leaving now. If you can’t walk away from it, that’s not so good. Shit is anything in your life that you don’t want and can’t use, but there it is anyway. Her mouth was full of shit, she had finally found something Anna Anaconda could not swallow, she was choking.
; At the end of the day Spence fetched Jake. “We have a stalker,” he reported, in the stern, superior tone he’d been using ever since the day she lost her job. “Maroon jeep, parked outside number thirty-nine. The guy got out of the car and followed us half way to the school this morning; the jeep’s still there now. But he didn’t try anything, and the rest of them have gone. D’you think he’s your police bodyguard?”
“I doubt if I have a police bodyguard.”
He shrugged and turned away.
Anna went to hide in the kitchen, because her eyes were full of tears. She heard Jake say, “Why are you being mean to mummy?”
“I’m not being mean, kid. Mommy is very sad because she lost her job.”
“I think you’re making her sadder. Please don’t get in an argument. I hate it when you two get in an argument. If we’re in trouble, we should be sticking together.”
Spence came into the kitchen and gave Anna a fake hug, which she returned in the same spirit. She thought: soon we’ll start taking him to the ice-rink and stuffing him with sweets. He’ll behave badly and I’ll whimper Oh, Jake, don’t be horrid! and let him get away with murder. The unhappiness of Meret’s marriage, written over her children’s lives as plain as print, now to be scribbled all over Anna’s child. Spence cooked. They ate, Anna in disgrace. After the meal, she kissed Jake goodnight and went back to the loft.
It was late when she came down again. Spence was in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the rug, putting together a joint. Smoldering resin perfumed the air. The mellow light of their standard lamps fell over the beautiful wide spaces of this first floor room, with the balcony (skinny little balcony) from which you could glimpse the sea, where Anna grew pelargoniums and tomatoes and the little strawberry tree that was doing so well. They’d bought this house, when they came back to England and everything about the country had seemed drab, poky, and mean, because it had a balcony with a glimpse of the sea… But the folded futon couch was gone, it had been retired to Spence’s study. A new sofa, big and soft and expensive, stood against the back wall. Anna and Spence always bought top of the range, when they emerged from Holy Poverty to make a consumer purchase: a compromise, as Spence would joke, between his taste and hers.
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