Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  Angel had her mother’s large, sad eyes. The reproach in them was in-built. Better Dora’s heart had stopped (she’d thought it would: six months pregnant, she found Terry in the housemaid’s bed. She, Dora, mistress of servants! What bliss!) and the embryo Angel never emerged to the light of day.

  The noise above Angel stops. Ghosts! What nonsense! A fallen lath grating and rattling in the wind. What else? Angel regains her courage, slips her hand out from beneath Edward’s thigh preparatory to leaving the bed for the bathroom. She will turn on all the lights and run. Edward wakes; sits up.

  ‘What’s that? What in God’s name’s that?’

  ‘I can’t hear anything,’ says Angel, all innocence. Nor can she, not now. Edward’s displeasure to contend with now; worse than the universe rattling its chains.

  ‘Footsteps, in the attic. Are you deaf? Why didn’t you wake me?’

  ‘I thought I imagined it.’

  But she can hear them, once again, as if with his ears. The same pattern across the floor and back. Footsteps or heartbeats. Quicker and quicker now, hastening with the terror and tension of escape.

  Edward, unimaginably brave, puts on his slippers, grabs a broken banister (five of these on the landing – one day soon, some day, he’ll get round to mending them – he doesn’t want some builder, paid by Angel, bungling the job) and goes on up to the attic. Angel follows behind. He will not let her cower in bed. Her bladder aches. She says nothing about that. How can she? Not yet. Not quite yet. Soon. ‘Edward, I’m pregnant.’ She can’t believe it’s true, herself. She feels a child, not a woman.

  ‘Is there someone there?’

  Edward’s voice echoes through the three dark attic rooms. Silence. He gropes for and switches on the light. Empty, derelict rooms: plaster falling, laths hanging, wallpaper peeling. Floorboards broken. A few cans of paint, a pile of wallpaper rolls, old newspapers. Nothing else.

  ‘It could have been mice,’ says Edward, doubtfully.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’ asks Angel, terrified. The sound echoes in her ears: footsteps clattering over a pounding heart. But Edward can’t, not any more.

  ‘Don’t start playing games,’ he murmurs, turning back to warmth and bed. Angel scuttles down before him, into the bathroom; the noise in her head fades. A few drops of urine tinkle into the bowl.

  Edward lies awake in bed: Angel can feel his wakefulness, his increasing hostility towards her, before she is so much as back in the bedroom.

  ‘Your bladder’s very weak. Angel,’ he complains. ‘Something else you inherited from your mother?’

  Something else, along with what? Suicidal tendencies, alcoholism, a drooping bosom, a capacity for being betrayed, deserted and forgotten?

  Not forgotten by me, Mother. I don’t forget. I love you. Even when my body cries out beneath the embraces of this man, this lover, this husband, and my mouth forms words of love, promises of eternity, still I don’t forget. I love you, Mother.

  ‘I don’t know about my mother’s bladder,’ murmurs Angel rashly.

  ‘Now you’re going to keep me awake all night,’ says Edward. ‘I can feel it coming. You know I’ve nearly finished a picture.’

  ‘I’m not going to say a word,’ she says, and then, fulfilling his prophecy, sees fit to add, ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Silence. Stillness. Sleep?

  No, a slap across nostrils, eyes, mouth. Edward has never hit Angel before. It is not a hard slap: it contains the elements of a caress.

  ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ says Edward, softly.

  ‘But I am pregnant.’

  Silence. He believes her. Her voice made doubt impossible.

  ‘How far?’ Edward seldom asks for information. It is an act which infers ignorance, and Edward likes to know more than anyone else in the entire world.

  ‘Three and a half months.’

  He repeats the words, incredulous.

  ‘Too far gone to do anything,’ says Angel, knowing now why she did not tell Edward earlier, and the knowledge making her voice cold and hard. Too far gone for the abortion he will most certainly want her to have. So much for the fruits of love. Love? What’s love? Sex, ah, that’s another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.

  But Angel will turn sex into love – yes, she will – seizing it by the neck, throttling it till it gives up and takes the weaker path. Love! Edward is right to be frightened, right to hate her.

  ‘I hate you,’ he says, and means it. ‘You mean to destroy me.’

  ‘I’ll make sure it doesn’t disturb your nights,’ says Angel, Angel of the bristly fair bush, ‘if that’s what you’re worrying about. And you won’t have to support it. I do that, anyway. Or my father does.’

  Well, how dare she! Angel, not nearly as nice as she thought. Soft-eyed, vicious Angel.

  Slap, comes the hand again, harder. Angel screams, he shouts; she collapses, crawls about the floor – he spurns her, she begs forgiveness; he spits his hatred, fear, and she her misery. If the noise above continues, certainly no one hears it, there is so much going on below. The rustlings of the night erupting into madness. Angel is suddenly quiet, whimpering, lying on the floor; she squirms. At first Edward thinks she is acting, but her white lips and taloned fingers convince him that something is wrong with her body and not just her mind. He gets her back on the bed and rings the doctor. Within an hour Angel finds herself in a hospital with a suspected ectopic pregnancy. They delay the operation and the pain subsides; just one of those things, they shrug. Edward has to interrupt his painting the next afternoon to collect her from the hospital.

  ‘What was it? Hysteria?’ he enquires.

  ‘I dare say!’

  ‘Well, you had a bad beginning, what with your mother and all,’ he concedes, kissing her nose, nibbling her earlobe. It is forgiveness; but Angel’s eyes remain unusually cold. She stays in bed, after Edward has left it and gone back to his studio, although the floors remain unswept and the dishes unwashed.

  Angel does not say what is in her mind, what she knows to be true. That he is disappointed to see both her and the baby back, safe and sound. He had hoped the baby would die, or failing that, the mother would die and the baby with her. He is pretending forgiveness, while he works out what to do next.

  In the evening the doctor comes to see Angel. He is a slight man with a sad face: his eyes, she thinks, are kind behind his pebble glasses. His voice is slow and gentle. I expect his wife is happy, thinks Angel, and actually envies her. Some middle-aged, dowdy, provincial doctor’s wife, envied by Angel! Rich, sweet, young and pretty Angel. The efficient secretary, lovable barmaid, and now the famous artist’s wife! Once, for two rash weeks, even an art school model.

  The doctor examines her, then discreetly pulls down her nightie to cover her breasts and moves the sheet up to cover her crotch. If he were my father, thinks Angel, he would not hang my naked portrait on his wall for the entertainment of his friends. Angel had not known until this moment that she minded.

  ‘Everything’s doing nicely inside there,’ says the doctor. ‘Sorry to rush you off like that, but we can’t take chances.’

  Ah, to be looked after. Love. That’s love. The doctor shows no inclination to go.

  ‘Perhaps I should have a word with your husband,’ he suggests. He stands at the window gazing over daffodils and green fields. ‘Or is he very busy?’

  ‘He’s painting,’ says Angel. ‘Better not disturb him now. He’s had so many interruptions lately, poor man.’

  ‘I read about him in the Sunday supplement,’ says the doctor.

  ‘Well, don’t tell him so. He thought it vulgarised his work.’

  ‘Did you think that?’

  Me? Does what I think have anything to do with anything?

  ‘I thought it was quite perceptive, actually,’ says Angel, and feels a surge of good humour. She sits up in bed.

  ‘Lie down,’ he says. ‘Take things easy. This is a large house. Do you have any help? Can’t afford it?’

&nb
sp; ‘It’s not that. It’s just why should I expect some other woman to do my dirty work?’

  ‘Because she might like doing it and you’re pregnant, and if you can afford it, why not?’

  ‘Because Edward doesn’t like strangers in the house. And what else have I got to do with my life? I might as well clean as anything else.’

  ‘It’s isolated out here,’ he goes on. ‘Do you drive?’

  ‘Edward needs peace to paint,’ says Angel. ‘I do drive but Edward has a thing about women drivers.’

  ‘You don’t miss your friends?’

  ‘After you’re married,’ says Angel, ‘you seem to lose contact. It’s the same for everyone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Um,’ says the doctor. And then, ‘I haven’t been in this house for fifteen years. It’s in a better state now than it was then. The house was divided into flats, in those days. I used to visit a nice young woman who had the attic floor. Just above this. Four children, and the roof leaked; a husband who spent his time drinking cider in the local pub and only came home to beat her.’

  ‘Why did she stay?’

  ‘How can such women leave? How do they afford it? Where do they go? What happens to the children?’ His voice is sad.

  ‘I suppose it’s money that makes the difference. With money, a woman’s free,’ says Angel, trying to believe it.

  ‘Of course,’ says the doctor. ‘But she loved her husband. She couldn’t bring herself to see him for what he was. Well, it’s hard. For a certain kind of woman, at any rate.’

  Hard, indeed, if he has your soul in his safe-keeping, to be left behind at the bar, in the pub, or in some other woman’s bed, or in a seat in the train on his literary travels. Careless!

  ‘But it’s not like that for you, is it?’ says the doctor calmly. ‘You have money of your own, after all.’

  Now how does he know that? Of course, the Sunday supplement article.

  ‘No one will read it,’ wept Angel, when Edward looked up, stony-faced from his first perusal of the fashionable columns. ‘No one will notice. It’s tucked away at the very bottom.’

  So it was. ‘Edward’s angelic wife Angel, daughter of best-selling crime writer Terry Toms, has smoothed the path upwards, not just with the soft smiles our cameraman has recorded, but by enabling the emergent genius to forswear the cramped and inconvenient, if traditional, artist’s garret for a sixteenth-century farmhouse in greenest Gloucestershire. It is interesting, moreover, to ponder whether a poor man would have been able to develop the white-on-white techniques which have made Hoist’s work so noticeable: or whether the sheer price of paint these days would not have deterred him.’

  ‘Edward, I didn’t say a word to that reporter, not a word,’ she said, when the ice showed signs of cracking, days later.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, turning slow, unfriendly eyes upon her.

  ‘The article. I know it’s upset you. But it wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Why should a vulgar article in a vulgar newspaper upset me?’

  And the ice formed over again, thicker than ever. But he went to London for two days, presumably to arrange his next show, and on his return casually mentioned that he’d seen Ray while he was there.

  Angel had cleaned, baked, and sewed curtains in his absence, hoping to soften his heart towards her on his return: and lay awake all the night he was away, the fear of his infidelity so agonising as to make her contemplate suicide, if only to put an end to it. She could not ask for reassurance. He would throw the fears so neatly back at her. ‘Why do you think I should want to sleep with anyone else? Why are you so guilty? Because that’s what you’d do if you were away from me?’

  Ask for bread and be given stones. Learn self-sufficiency: never show need. Little, tough Angel of the soft smiles, hearing some other woman’s footsteps in the night, crying for another’s grief. Well, who wants a soul, tossed here and there by teasing hands, over-bruised and over-handled. Do without it!

  Edward came home from London in a worse mood than he’d left, shook his head in wondering stupefaction at his wife’s baking – ‘I thought you said we were cutting down on carbohydrates’ – and shut himself into his studio for twelve hours, emerging just once to say – ‘Only a mad woman would hang curtains in an artist’s studio, or else a silly rich girl playing at artist’s wife, and in public at that’ – and thrusting the new curtains back into her arms, vanished inside again.

  Angel felt that her mind was slowing up, and puzzled over the last remark for some time before realising that Edward was still harking back to the Sunday supplement article.

  ‘I’ll give away the money if you like,’ she pleaded through the keyhole. ‘If you’d rather. And if you want not to be married to me I don’t mind.’ That was before she was pregnant.

  Silence.

  Then Edward emerged laughing, telling her not to be so ridiculous, bearing her off to bed, and the good times were restored. Angel sang about the house, forgot her pill, and got pregnant.

  ‘You have money of your own, after all,’ says the doctor.

  ‘You’re perfectly free to come and go.’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ says Angel. ‘The baby has to have a father.’

  ‘And your husband’s happy about the baby?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ says Angel. ‘Isn’t it a wonderful day!’

  And indeed today the daffodils nod brightly under a clear sky. So far, since first they budded and bloomed, they have been obliged to droop beneath the weight of rain and mist. A disappointing spring. Angel had hoped to see the countryside leap into energy and colour, but life returned only slowly, it seemed, struggling to surmount the damage of the past: cold winds and hard frosts, unseasonably late. ‘Or at any rate,’ adds Angel, softly, unheard, as the doctor goes, ‘he will be happy about the baby.’

  Angel hears no more noises in the night for a week or so. There had been misery in the attic rooms, and the misery had ceased. Good times can wipe out bad. Surely!

  Edward sleeps soundly and serenely: she creeps from bed to bathroom without waking him. He is kind to her and even talkative, on any subject, that is, except that of her pregnancy. If it were not for the doctor and her stay in the hospital, she might almost think she was imagining the whole thing. Edward complains that Angel is getting fat, as if he could imagine no other cause for it but greed. She wants to talk to someone about hospitals, confinements, layettes, names – but to whom?

  She tells her father on the telephone – ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘What does Edward say?’ asks Terry, cautiously.

  ‘Nothing much,’ admits Angel.

  ‘I don’t suppose he does.’

  ‘There’s no reason not to have a baby,’ ventures Angel.

  ‘I expect he rather likes to be the centre of attention.’ It is the nearest Terry has ever got to a criticism of Edward.

  Angel laughs. She is beyond believing that Edward could ever be jealous of her, ever be dependent upon her.

  ‘Nice to hear you happy, at any rate,’ says her father wistfully. His twenty-year-old girlfriend has become engaged to a salesman of agricultural machinery, and although she has offered to continue the relationship the other side of marriage, Terry feels debased and used, and was obliged to break off the liaison. He has come to regard his daughter’s marriage to Edward in a romantic light. The young bohemians!

  ‘My daughter was an art school model before she married Edward Holst... you’ve heard of him? It’s a real Rembrandt and Saskia affair.’ He even thinks lovingly of Dora: if only she’d understood, waited for youth to wear itself out. Now he’s feeling old and perfectly capable of being faithful to an ex shoe-shop assistant. If only she weren’t dead and gone!

  An art school model. Those two weeks! Why had she done it? What devil wound up her works and set poor Angel walking in the wrong direction? It was in her nature, surely, as it was in her mother’s to follow the paths to righteousness, fully clothed.

  Nightly, Edward studied her naked body,
kissing her here, kissing her there, parting her legs. Well, marriage! But now I’m pregnant, now I’m pregnant. Oh, be careful. That hard lump where my soft belly used to be. Be careful! Silence, Angel. Don’t speak of it. It will be the worse for you and your baby if you do.

  Angel knows it.

  Now Angel hears the sound of lovemaking up in the empty attic, as she might hear it in hotels in foreign lands. The couplings of strangers in an unknown tongue – only the cries and breathings universal, recognisable anywhere.

  The sounds chill her: they do not excite her. She thinks of the mother of four who lived in this house with her drunken, violent husband. Was that what kept you by his side? The chains of fleshly desire? Was it the thought of the night that got you through the perils of the day?

  What indignity, if it were so.

  Oh, I imagine it. I, Angel, half-mad in my unacknowledged pregnancy, my mind feverish, and the doctor’s anecdotes feeding the fever – I imagine it! I must!

  Edward wakes.

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘I don’t hear anything.’

  ‘You’re deaf.’

  ‘What sort of noise?’

  But Edward sleeps again. The noise fades, dimly. Angel hears the sound of children’s voices. Let it be a girl, dear Lord, let it be a girl.

  ‘Why do you want a girl?’ asks the doctor, on Angel’s fourth monthly visit to the clinic.

  ‘I’d love to dress a girl,’ says Angel vaguely, but what she means is, if it’s a girl, Edward will not be so – what is the word? – hardly jealous, difficult perhaps. Dreadful. Yes, dreadful.

  Bright-eyed Edward: he walks with Angel now – long walks up and over stiles, jumping streams, leaping stones. Young Edward. She has begun to feel rather old, herself.

  ‘I am a bit tired,’ she says, as they set off one night for their moonlit walk.