Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  ‘An artist needs freedom, not a family,’ said Pierre; he could so easily read her mind. She felt his warm breath on her check. ‘The artist’s duty is to all mankind; he must break free of the chains of convention. And women can be artists too, as you are, Lucy, remember that!’

  The first time Pierre had heard Lucy sing, in her sweet, clear, untrained voice, helping Bessie’s fumbling notes along, he had claimed her as an artist; the one he had been waiting for, the one who could truly bring his music to life. Poor Bessie was forgotten: she could hardly get to the piano: Lucy and Pierre were always there: as she worked to catch the notes between notes he found so significant he could make them include the whole universe. Edwin was on the last chapter of a novel: a time he found particularly tense. There was to be piano-playing only between two and four o’clock of an afternoon. He said so with some force. The house trembled. People wept.

  ‘He has you in prison,’ said Pierre of Edwin then. ‘For what is a home but a man’s prison for a woman, and what is a wife but an unpaid whore? She lies on her back for her keep, bears children and cooks dinner likewise.’ And when Lucy had recovered from her shock, the more she thought of it the more she perceived that what Pierre said was true. Lucy understood now that the sapphire necklace she wore round her neck was the symbol of her imprisonment: that her ruby ear-rings marked her as an instrument of lust, that the gold charms on her bracelet were for Edwin’s benefit, not her own; for is not a willing slave more useful than one who is unwilling?

  ‘You would not be my slave,’ said Pierre, ‘you would be my love.’

  Lucy’s eyes went to the suitcase, and she wondered whether she should check that they were still there, in the suitcase, tucked in tissue in a dancing shoe: the sapphire, the rubies and the gold. But of course they were. Why should they not be? And they were hers by right, every one, payment for years of servitude. In the new world women would have equal dignity with men. When the workers of the world rose up, they would lift up women with them.

  ‘All the same,’ said Lucy, ‘on this day of all days, allow me to feel like a mother, not an artist, and cry just a little.’

  ‘You should be ashamed to even consider such a betrayal,’ said Pierre. ‘Weeping is something which women of the haute bourgeoisie do the better to control men,’ and Lucy was glad to understand that he was joking, for Edwin had scolded her and chided her and made her feel foolish from the day he had met her, and never ever joked about anything.

  Pierre called down to the landlady to bring breakfast up to the room. He stood naked at the top of the stairs and dodged behind the door when the woman arrived with the tray: she seemed to Lucy too small and old to carry such a weight. The servants at home were stout and strong.

  ‘Don’t upset her too much,’ said Lucy when she had stopped laughing. ‘We owe her too much rent for that. I don’t know why you put off paying her.’

  But Pierre said they would wait for dark and then slip away unnoticed and pick up the Paris train before anyone realised, and he didn’t want any silly nonsense from Lucy: the landlady was an old witch who took advantage of travellers and overcharged, and deserved what she got.

  Lucy said nothing, but after she’d eaten the breakfast the landlady brought – hot coffee and fresh frothy milk, long crisp bread, and farm butter and apricot preserve – she said, ‘I’d really rather pay her, Pierre.’

  ‘What with?’ asked Pierre. ‘We have no francs left. The journey across France is costing more than I thought. An artist shouldn’t be bothered by such sordid things as money: I don’t want to talk about it any more. We’ll send her some from Paris if you insist when we’ve sold your jewellery, but she doesn’t deserve it. She is a lackey of the masters, that’s all she is.’

  Lucy felt her eyes mist with tears: she couldn’t tell the difference between the frothy milk and the thick white china jug. They merged together. At home the milk jugs were of fine porcelain, and had little flowers upon them. One of them came from Limoges. She wondered where Limoges was, and if she’d ever go there. She could see such an event was more likely now that she was Pierre’s lover, no longer Edwin’s wife; on the other hand, any such journey would be accomplished in less comfort. She did not understand money: it seemed necessary for all kinds of things she had thought just happened – such as being warm, or welcomed, or treated with politeness by porters, and gendarmes, shop keepers and landladies. But money did not buy love, or freedom, or truth, or hope, or any of the important things in life.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said Pierre. ‘You’re homesick, that’s all it is,’ and he leaned towards her and removed a crumb from her lip, and her heart melted; the act was so tender and true. Edwin would have mentioned the crumb, not removed it. Pierre put on his shirt and she was glad, though she knew she shouldn’t be.

  ‘I’m not homesick,’ Lucy said, ‘not one bit. You’ve no idea how dank and drear the woods around the house are at this time of year. How they drip and drizzle!’

  ‘Worse than Bessie on a bad day,’ murmured Pierre, nuzzling into her hair, and she thought why is he allowed to mention Bessie’s name, and I am not, but Lucy laughed too, to keep Pierre company, to be of one accord in mind, as they were in body. Bessie was a plain girl and had not been blessed with a musical ear so Pierre could not take her seriously, and that made it hard for Lucy, now Bessie was at a distance, to do so either. Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed. Edwin had married a child and tried to stop her choosing, but now thanks to Pierre she had grown up and made her own choice.

  She hoped Edwin would keep Christmas without her. She hoped he would remember, when he brought in the Christmas Tree, the little fir which had grown in its pot on the step since the first year of the marriage, that it had to be watered well. She hoped he knew the boxes in the attic where the decorations were. Lucy added a new one every year – would he remember that? Would he realise you had to balance the golden horses with their silver riders? And part of her hoped he’d get it all wrong. Part of her hoped that now she was not there, he would have no heart for any of it, he would be so sorry she had gone. She would find a letter from him in Paris, forgiving her, asking her to go home. Of course she would not go.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ said Pierre, but he wouldn’t have liked them if he heard them so Lucy said, ‘I’m really glad I’m not at home, Pierre. This time of year. When the days are really short, and winter hasn’t quite caught up with them and the skies just seem to sulk. Why, they sulk even worse than Bertie on a bad day,’ and she laughed again, betraying her other child, for the sake of love. ‘And the rooms of the house are so crowded and sad,’ said Lucy, ‘and here everything is simple and graceful and plain. I promise you I don’t miss a thing. You make up for it all, Pierre.’

  Lucy’s brother Joseph would have arrived on Christmas Eve, as was his custom, bearing gifts. They would be the wrong gifts: an impossible doll, an unworkable cannon; a scarf she hated, the kind of pen Edwin never used. Joseph’s talent for the wrong gifts was a marvel: it was a joke she and Edwin shared: a look between them every year, no more: that much they had at least: this equality of shared experience, which grew every year as the Christmas Tree grew, so slowly you could never see it, soil never quite right, too wet or too dry, so you feared for it; but every Christmas an inch or so higher. This year it would have to go on its side to get through the front door, and could only stand in the window arch – would Edwin and Joseph talk about Lucy, or would her name not be mentioned? An impossible subject, an inexplicable situation: a woman lost to duty, lost to honour, lost to motherhood:
a woman altogether vanished away, erased from the mind, nameless. A subdued source of sorrow, of better-never-born-dom.

  ‘No children to tug at my skirts,’ said Lucy, ‘no brother at my sympathy, no husband at my conscience. A day like any other, dawning bright and fair on our new life together. Just you and I, and art, and beauty, and love, and music. All the things that passed poor stuffy old Edwin by!’

  ‘I pity Edwin,’ said Pierre. ‘He had no ear. A man who rations music to two hours a day has no ear and a man who locks a piano has no soul!’

  * * *

  The better to enforce his ruling, Edwin had kept the piano closed; unlocking it at two o’clock after lunch: emerging from his study at four o’clock to close it once again. In the mornings, thus freed from practice, Lucy and Pierre had walked in the woods, and talked about music, and presently love, and then more than talked, and Pierre had explained to Lucy how unhappy she was, and how her way of life stifled her, and how he could not be a great artist without her, and Bessie had seen them in the woods and Lucy had forged one of Edwin’s cheques and paid both their passages over; and left Edwin a note and was gone, taking her jewellery because Pierre said she must, and the way not to think about any of it was to be in bed with Pierre. They had scarcely left the cabin on the way over: they had been the talk of the ship and she hadn’t cared. To fly in the face of all things respectable intensified the pleasure she had with Pierre: what was forbidden was sweet: she hoped they would never reach Paris, where everyone felt as she and Pierre did, but of course that was silly of her: what was forbidden could not be kept up for long and in any case had to be sandwiched between the permitted in order to count – why had there been no one to stop her? If you were a child wasn’t that what happened? That someone stopped you? She’d relied on Edwin for that all her grown life, but since she couldn’t tell him about Pierre how could he have helped her? But she blamed him because he hadn’t, because he’d been so busy with his book he hadn’t even noticed the time she was spending with Pierre: it was Edwin’s fault she had left.

  She wondered what she and Pierre would do all day. When they were out of bed there seemed not very much to do, except wait for other days to arrive, or messages to come which didn’t come from friends she had only heard of, never seen. If she was at home on this day she would be so busy – it would be all best clothes and mince pies and the gifts beneath the Christmas Tree, and a formal kiss from Edwin before the unwrapping ceremony began –

  Pierre said, ‘We’ll smuggle the suitcase out after lunch, when Madame takes her nap. She sleeps well: she doesn’t care how the rest of the world toils for her profit! Then in the evening you dress as me and I’ll dress as you, and that will be the best disguise in the world, and we’ll escape. We’ll be so clever!’

  Lucy thought it was probably better as an idea than it would be as an actuality – she could get into his coat but her jacket would never stretch over his shoulders – but didn’t say so. It was the kind of prank Bertie would think of. Pierre had explained to her how Edwin was a father/husband – but what did she have now instead – a son/lover? Was such a thing possible?

  ‘I could offer her a gold charm from my bracelet,’ said Lucy. ‘In fact I think I’ll do that.’

  And to her astonishment Pierre hit her, or she thought that was what had happened, since there was a sudden kind of stinging blackness around her head, but how could she know, no one had ever hit her before. For a second or so she couldn’t see, and was perhaps suffering from amnesia, for she couldn’t quite remember where she was; but yes, it wasn’t home, it was indeed an inn somewhere in the South of France, and she was leaning against a whitewashed wall, while a strange man rather younger than herself apologised for something rather trivial, and she could hear a kind of knock, knock, knock, which she thought was Edwin chopping down the Christmas Tree, the one that had started little and grown deep and strong. Edwin divided it root from branch, because it spoke of a celebration Lucy could no longer name, and anyway it spoke a lie. But of course the sound was only the knock, knock, knock of the landlady at the door, demanding money she and Pierre didn’t have, speaking in a language Lucy didn’t understand, but who knew them better than they knew themselves. She could see that to look after yourself you would have to know yourself, but who was there in that land, in that time, to hear such a thing if it were said?

  1991

  Lily Bart’s Hat Shop

  It is said that Gustave Flaubert wove his novel Madame Bovary around a press cutting he read in a local newspaper- the sorry tale of a provincial doctor’s wife who, unable to face the consequences of debt and adultery, took poison and committed suicide. It is my belief that gloom, and a passion to punish the frivolous Madame Bovary for the vulgarity of her sins, clouded the great writer’s judgment. He was reading about attempted suicide, not suicide. The story has come down to me through members of my own family, that though in shame and desperation Emma did indeed cram arsenic into her pretty mouth, Justin the apprentice had wisely taken the precaution of liberally mixing the stuff with sugar and she survived. Black bile poured out of her mouth, true: her limbs for a time were mottled brown, the desecration of her marriage vows took visible and outward form – but there God and Flaubert’s punishment ended – Emma lived. And if man’s punishment came hot upon the Almighty’s – poor pretty Emma went to prison for two years for her sin – to attempt suicide was at the time both a mortal and a criminal offence - there came an end to that too, and fortunately before she had altogether lost her looks.

  My grandfather taught Emma’s great grandchild the violin at the New York conservatoire, which is how I happen to know the truth of the matter. Perhaps the story has become garbled through the generations, for certainly the timescale is a little strange: but the fictional universe has its own rules as it brushes up against our own. I am happy enough to accept the family version.

  Flaubert, having dismissed Emma to the grave, in an elaborate coffin which her husband Charles could ill afford, chose to visit unmitigated disaster on the whole Bovary family. The debts Emma had incurred in life had to be met by Charles in what remained of his, and he was left in penury. His eventual discovery of Emma’s love letters to Leon and Rodolphe upset him dreadfully – the maid Felicite having already badly damaged his faith in human nature by stealing all Emma’s clothes and running off with them - and the poor man died of grief. Emma’s little girl Berthe, orphaned, went to live with her grandmother, and on the old woman’s death ended up working in a cotton mill, and that was the end of the Bovarys.

  The version handed down by my family is far more benign. After poor Emma went to prison in Rouen, Charles visited her weekly for a time – but dressed in drab as she was, her hair pulled back and greasy, her skin still blotchy from the effects of arsenic – his adoration for her quickly waned, and his visits became infrequent and then ceased. The servant Felicite, far from stealing Emma’s clothes, simply wore them around the house to keep Charles happy, and was very soon replacing Emma in her master’s bed. There is some reason to believe that Felicite’s affair with Charles had been going on secretly for some years, and under Emma’s nose. Charles had more or less pushed Leon and Rodolphe into Emma’s arms and this is a sure sign of a guilty man. But perhaps it was no bad thing. Felicite made a gift of her considerable savings to Charles and financial disaster was replaced by prosperity. Under the girl’s solicitous care little Berthe bloomed and was happy. Nor was the village unduly censorious.

  Although Charles found Emma plain and unappealing, the Prison Governor at Rouen did not. Much moved by Emma’s plight, he allowed her many special privileges. She ate and slept in his quarters and having a gift for sewing and a love of fabric was kept more than busy embroidering his fine uniforms. Word of Charles’s involvement with Felicite having come to Emma, she did not hesitate to accept the Governor’s offer when her prison term was up, of a boat fare to New York. He was after all a married man.

  In New York Emma quickly found work in Lily Bart�
��s Hat Shop. Lily Bart, you may remember from the Edith Wharton novel The House of Mirth – most eloquently filmed in Hollywood, starring the delectable Scully from The X-Files – was the unfortunate young woman whose single act of sexual indiscretion in High Society led to her downfall. Cast out from decent company and reduced to penury, Lily, according to Wharton, was obliged to take work in a millinery shop but soon died from sheer despond.

  My family assure me that Wharton’s desire for a pointed tragedy must have got the better of her – the truth, and Wharton knew it well enough, was that Lily, though she could not sew for peanuts, was good at figures and soon took over the business: far from fading away she flourished, as did the hat shop. All the rich dowagers of New York flocked to its doors to buy, as did all the tragic heroines of literature, to work.

  Customers would find themselves welcomed by none other than the lovely Anna Karenina from Moscow, who had escaped her author in the nick of time, saved herself from the iron wheels of the suicide train and bought a passage to the new world. Norah Krogstad from Norway, allowed by the forward thinking playwright Ibsen to flee from home rather than destroy herself, found the miracle came true in New York. Earning as much as man she could be at one with man. Effie Brieff from Prussia, spared the fate of social obloquy, made an excellent seamstress and quickly regained her health and youthful high spirits.