Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  ‘Come all this way,’ said Peter, who was a Professor of Classical History, ‘and you can’t even see the footprints properly, just two undistinguished puddles.’ Ah, but I loved him. I shivered for his disappointment. He was supervising my thesis on varying concepts of morality and duty in the early Greek states as evidenced in their poetry and drama. I was dependent upon him for my academic future. Peter said I had a good mind but not a first-class mind, and somehow I didn’t take it as an insult. I had a feeling first-class minds weren’t all that good in bed.

  Sarajevo is in Bosnia, in the centre of Yugoslavia, that grouping of unlikely states, that distillation of languages into the phonetic reasonableness of Serbo-Croat. We’d sheltered from the rain in an ancient mosque in Serbian Belgrade: done the same in a monastery in Croatia: now we spent a wet couple of days in Sarajevo beneath other people’s umbrellas. We planned to go on to Montenegro, on the coast, where the fish and the artists come from, to swim and lie in the sun, and recover from the exhaustion caused by the sexual and moral torments of the last year. It couldn’t possibly go on raining for ever. Could it? Satellite pictures showed black cloud swishing gently all over Europe, over the Balkans, into Asia – practically all the way from Moscow to London, in fact. It wasn’t that Peter and I were being singled out. No. It was raining on his wife, too, back in Cambridge.

  Peter was trying to make the decision, as he had been for the past year, between his wife and myself as his permanent life partner. To this end we had gone away, off the beaten track, for a holiday: if not with his wife’s blessing, at least with her knowledge. Were we really, truly suited? We had to be sure, you see, that this was more than just any old professor-student romance: that it was the Real Thing, because the longer the indecision went on the longer Mrs Piper, Peter said, would be left dangling in uncertainty and distress. He and she had been married for twenty-four years; they’d stopped loving each other a long time ago, naturally – but there would be a fearful personal and practical upheaval entailed if he decided to leave permanently and shack up, as he put it, with me. Which I wanted him to do, because I loved him. And so far I was winning hands down. It didn’t seem much of a contest at all, in fact. I’d been cool and thin and informed on the seat next to him in a Zagreb theatre (Mrs Piper was sweaty and only liked TV), was now eager and anxious for social and political instruction in Sarajevo (Mrs Piper spat in the face of knowledge, Peter had once told me), and planned to be lissom and topless – I hadn’t quite decided: it might be counterproductive to underline the age differential – while I splashed and shrieked like a bathing belle in the shallows of the craggy Croatian coast (Mrs Piper was a swimming coach: I imagined she smelt permanently of chlorine).

  So far as I could see it was no contest at all between his wife and myself. How could he possibly choose her while I was on offer? But Peter liked to luxuriate in guilt and indecision. And I loved him with an inordinate affection, and indulged him in this luxury.

  Princip’s footprints are a metre apart, placed like the feet of a modern cop on a training shoot-out – the left in front at a slight outward angle, the right behind, facing forward. There seemed great energy focused here. Both hands on the gun, run, stop, plant the feet, aim, fire! I could see the footprints well enough, in spite of Peter’s complaint. They were clear enough to me, albeit puddled.

  We went to a restaurant for lunch, since it was too wet to do what we loved to do: that is, buy bread, cheese, sausage, wine and go off somewhere in our hired car, into the woods or the hills, and picnic and make love. It was a private restaurant – Yugoslavia went over to a mixed capitalist–communist economy years back, so you get either the best or the worst of both systems, depending on your mood – that is to say, we knew we would pay more but be given a choice. We chose the wild boar.

  ‘Probably ordinary pork soaked in red cabbage water to darken it,’ said Peter. He was not in a good mood. Cucumber salad was served first.

  ‘Everything in this country comes with cucumber salad,’ complained Peter. I noticed I had become used to his complaining. I supposed that when you had been married a while you simply wouldn’t hear it. He was forty-six and I was twenty-five.

  ‘They grow a lot of cucumber,’ I said.

  ‘If they can grow cucumbers,’ Peter then asked, ‘why can’t they grow mange-tout?’ It seemed a why-can’t-they-eat-cake sort of argument to me, but not knowing enough about horticulture not to be outflanked if I debated the point, I moved the subject on to safer ground.

  ‘I suppose Princip’s action couldn’t really have started World War One,’ I remarked. ‘Otherwise, what a thing to have on your conscience! One little shot and the deaths of thirty million on your shoulders.’

  ‘Forty,’ he corrected me. Though how they reckon these things and get them right I can’t imagine. ‘Of course Princip didn’t start the war. That’s just a simple tale to keep the children quiet. It takes more than an assassination to start a war. What happened was that the build-up of political and economic tensions in the Balkans was such that it had to find some release.’

  ‘So it was merely the shot that lit the spark that fired the timber that started the war, et cetera?’

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘World War One would have had to have started sooner or later.’

  ‘A bit later or a bit sooner’, I said, ‘might have made the difference of a million or so: if it was you on the battlefield in the mud and the rain you’d notice: exactly when they fired the starting-pistol: exactly when they blew the final whistle. Is that what they do when a war ends: blow a whistle? So that everyone just comes in from the trenches?’

  But he wasn’t listening. He was parting the flesh of the soft collapsed orangey-red pepper which sat in the middle of his cucumber salad; he was carefully extracting the pips. He didn’t like eating pepper pips. His Nan had once told him they could never be digested, would stick to the wall of his stomach and do terrible damage. I loved him for his vulnerability, the bit of him that was forever little boy: I loved him for his dexterity and patience with his knife and fork. I’d finished my salad yonks ago, pips and all. I was hungry. I wanted my wild boar.

  Peter might have been forty-six but he was six foot two and well-muscled and grizzled with it, in a dark-eyed, intelligent, broad-jawed kind of way. I adored him. I loved to be seen with him. ‘Muscular-academic, not weedy-academic,’ as my younger sister Clare once said. ‘Muscular-academic is just a generally superior human being: everything works well from the brain to the toes. Weedy-academic is when there isn’t enough vital energy in the person, and the brain drains all the strength from the other parts.’ Well, Clare should know. Clare is only twenty-three, but of the superior human kind herself, vividly pretty, bright and competent – somewhere behind a heavy curtain of vibrant, as they say, red hair, which she only parts for effect. She had her first degree at twenty. Now she’s married to a Harvard Professor of Economics seconded to the United Nations. She can even cook. I gave up competing when she was fourteen and I was sixteen. Though she too is capable of self-deception. I would say her husband was definitely of the weedy-academic rather than the muscular-academic type. And they have to live in Brussels.

  The Archduke’s chauffeur had lost his way, and was parked on the corner trying to recover his nerve when Princip came running out of a café, planted his feet, aimed and fired. Princip was seventeen – too young to hang. But they sent him to prison for life and, since he had TB to begin with, he only lasted three years. He died in 1917, in a Swiss prison. Or perhaps it was more than TB: perhaps they gave him a hard time, not learning till later, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, that he was a hero. Poor Princip, too young to die – like so many other millions. Dying for love of a country.

  ‘I love you,’ I said to Peter, my living man, progenitor already of three children by his chlorinated, swimming-coach wife.

  ‘How much do you love me?’

  ‘Inordinately! I love you with inordinate affection.’

  It was
a joke between us. Ind Aff!

  ‘Inordinate affection is a sin,’ he’d told me. ‘According to the Wesleyans. John Wesley himself worried about it to such a degree that he ended up abbreviating it in his diaries. Ind Aff. He maintained that what he felt for young Sophy, the eighteen-year-old in his congregation, was not Ind Aff, which bears the spirit away from God towards the flesh: no, what he felt was a pure and spiritual, if passionate, concern for Sophy’s soul.’

  Peter said now, as we waited for our wild boar, and he picked over his pepper, ‘Your Ind Aff is my wife’s sorrow, that’s the trouble.’ He wanted, I knew, one of the long half wrangles, half soul-sharings that we could keep going for hours, and led to piercing pains in the heart which could only be made better in bed. But our bedroom at the Hotel Europa was small and dark and looked out into the well of the building – a punishment room if ever there was one. (Reception staff did sometimes take against us.) When Peter had tried to change it in his quasi-Serbo-Croat, they’d shrugged their Bosnian shoulders and pretended not to understand, so we’d decided to put up with it. I did not fancy pushing hard single beds together – it seemed easier not to have the pain in the heart in the first place.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘this holiday is supposed to be just the two of us, not Mrs Piper as well. Shall we talk about something else?’

  Do not think that the Archduke’s chauffeur was merely careless, an inefficient chauffeur, when he took the wrong turning. He was, I imagine, in a state of shock, fright and confusion. There had been two previous attempts on the Archduke’s life since the cavalcade had entered town. The first was a bomb which got the car in front and killed its driver. The second was a shot, fired by none other than young Princip, which had missed. Princip had vanished into the crowd and gone to sit down in a corner café, where he ordered coffee to calm his nerves. I expect his hand trembled at the best of times – he did have TB. (Not the best choice of assassin, but no doubt those who arrange these things have to make do with what they can get.) The Archduke’s chauffeur panicked, took the wrong road, realized what he’d done, and stopped to await rescue and instructions just, as it happened, outside the café where Princip sat drinking his coffee.

  ‘What shall we talk about?’ asked Peter, in even less of a good mood.

  ‘The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?’ I suggested. ‘How does an Empire collapse? Is there no money to pay the military or the police, so everyone goes home? Or what?’ He liked to be asked questions.

  ‘The Hungro-Austrian Empire,’ said Peter to me, ‘didn’t so much collapse as fail to exist any more. War destroys social organizations. The same thing happened after World War Two. There being no organizing bodies left between Moscow and London – and for London read Washington, then as now – it was left to these two to put in their own puppet governments. Yalta, 1944. It’s taken the best part of forty-five years for nations of Western and Eastern Europe to remember who they are.’

  ‘Austro-Hungarian,’ I said, ‘not Hungro-Austrian.’

  ‘I didn’t say Hungro-Austrian,’ he said.

  ‘You did,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t,’ he said. ‘What the hell are they doing about our wild boar? Are they out in the hills shooting it?’

  My sister Clare had been surprisingly understanding about Peter. When I worried about him being older, she pooh-poohed it; when I worried about him being married, she said, ‘Just go for it, sister. If you can unhinge a marriage, it’s ripe for unhinging; it would happen sooner or later; it might as well be you. See a catch, go ahead and catch! Go for it!’

  Princip saw the Archduke’s car parked outside, and went for it. Second chances are rare in life: they must be responded to. Except perhaps his second chance was missing in the first place? He could have taken his cue from fate, and just sat and finished his coffee, and gone home to his mother. But what’s a man to do when he loves his country? Fate delivered the Archduke into his hands: how could he resist it? A parked car, a uniformed and medalled chest, the persecutor of his country – how could Princip, believing God to be on his side, not see this as His intervention, push his coffee aside and leap to his feet?

  Two waiters stood idly by and watched us waiting for our wild boar. One was young and handsome in a mountainous Bosnian way – flashing eyes, hooked nose, luxuriant black hair, sensuous mouth. He was about my age. He smiled. His teeth were even and white. I smiled back and, instead of the pain in the heart I’d become accustomed to as an erotic sensation, now felt, quite violently, an associated yet different pang which got my lower stomach. The true, the real pain of Ind Aff!

  ‘Fancy him?’ asked Peter.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just thought if I smiled the wild boar might come quicker.’

  The other waiter was older and gentler: his eyes were soft and kind. I thought he looked at me reproachfully. I could see why. In a world which for once, after centuries of savagery, was finally full of young men, unslaughtered, what was I doing with this man with thinning hair?

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ Professor Piper asked me. He liked to be in my head.

  ‘How much I love you,’ I said automatically, and was finally aware how much I lied. ‘And about the Archduke’s assassination,’ I went on, to cover the kind of tremble in my head as I came to my senses, ‘and let’s not forget his wife, she died too – how can you say World War One would have happened anyway? If Princip hadn’t shot the Archduke something else, some undisclosed, unsuspected variable, might have come along and defused the whole political/military situation, and neither World War One nor Two would ever have happened. We’ll just never know, will we?’

  I had my passport and my traveller’s cheques with me. (Peter felt it was less confusing if we each paid our own way.) I stood up, and took my raincoat from the peg.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, startled.

  ‘Home,’ I said. I kissed the top of his head, where it was balding. It smelt gently of chlorine, which may have come from thinking about his wife so much, but might merely have been because he’d taken a shower that morning. (‘The water all over Yugoslavia, though safe to drink, is unusually highly chlorinated’: guide book.) As I left to catch a taxi to the airport the younger of the two waiters emerged from the kitchen with two piled plates of roasted wild boar, potatoes duchesse, and stewed peppers. (‘Yugoslavian diet is unusually rich in proteins and fats’: guide book.) I could tell from the glisten of oil that the food was no longer hot, and I was not tempted to stay, hungry though I was. Thus fate – or was it Bosnian wilfulness? – confirmed the wisdom of my intent.

  And that was how I fell out of love with my professor, in Sarajevo, a city to which I am grateful to this day, though I never got to see much of it, because of the rain.

  It was a silly sad thing to do, in the first place, to confuse mere passing academic ambition with love: to try and outdo my sister Clare. (Professor Piper was spiteful, as it happened, and did his best to have my thesis refused, but I went to appeal, which he never thought I’d dare to do, and won. I had a first-class mind after all.) A silly sad episode, which I regret. As silly and sad as Princip, poor young man, with his feverish mind, his bright tubercular cheeks, and his inordinate affection for his country, pushing aside his cup of coffee, leaping to his feet, taking his gun in both hands, planting his feet, aiming and firing – one, two, three shots and starting World War I. The first one missed, the second got the wife (never forget the wife), and the third got the Archduke and a whole generation, and their children, and their children’s children, and on and on for ever. If he’d just hung on a bit, there in Sarajevo that August day, he might have come to his senses. People do, sometimes quite quickly.

  1988

  Baked Alaska

  You know what it’s like, Miss Jacobs, when you’re having an affair? Forgetting appointments, neglecting children, running off to the hairdresser, having your eyelashes dyed; stopping and staring in mirrors instead of passing by with averted eyes – as if all of a sudden the fact tha
t you’re alive and have a body matters – and you’re back with the sense of Mystical Connection. I’m an addict to extra-marital love: an addictive personality: one whiff of a cigarette and I’m off again: a drop of sherry in the Bombe Surprise and I’m out of my skull by dawn.

  I can feel your eyebrows shooting up, Miss Jacobs, even though I can’t see them. I have to lie here on this couch, which is a little too hard and rather short. What do your men clients do? Dangle their legs? Or perhaps you only get to see dwarves? I haven’t been to see you for eight weeks. I’d quite forgotten how dreadful it is – talking into space like this.

  What you always forget is that just because you’re connected, the object of your love is not necessarily, let alone permanently, so. As if you’d made a telephone call and the other person has spoken for a little and then wandered off, and not hung up, so that not only can’t you speak to them, but you can’t use the phone either, for anyone else –

  I know I told you I was going to Alaska, on business. That my employers had sent me on a trip to learn about Alaskan business methods. It was a lie. You mean it sounded true? So unlikely as to be true? Wonderful! Affairs are all lies: one gets really good at them.

  I daresay even you have lovers, Miss Jacobs. There’s someone for everyone: somewhere out there are men who will admire the stony bleakness of your regard, the ferocious tugging back of your hair, the toughness of your blemished skin, your unsmiling mouth. I envy you. You couldn’t even begin to pretend: you are all truth and permanence as I am all frivolity and change. I know only the silly side of the coin: what it is to be loved for blonde curls and sulky looks, and that peculiar gift for idiotic discrimination I foster, which certain men find so entrancing. ‘Oh no, I can’t possibly go there, or eat this, or see that!’ With a flick of red fingernail, despising this, adoring that – men love the carry-on, for a while at least: then they get bored.