“An easy lay.” He spoke sullenly, and they were silent for a bit.
“I am glad you’re jealous,” she said presently.
“I’m not jealous. Why should I be jealous? Just get that fucking pipe out of my sight. You shouldn’t keep other people’s phallic symbols on the mantelpiece.”
She broke the pipe in half and put it on the fire, and they were happy, after a fashion, for a while.
“Is the bulb growing yet?” he asked. He had bought her an expensive lily as a present. They had planted it together in a pot with some potting compost. She watered it lovingly but it showed no sign of green. The dull earth remained flat and undisturbed.
“No.”
“I’m afraid you forget to water it.”
“I don’t forget. I water it faithfully, but nothing happens. I haven’t got green fingers.”
“Neither have I. Esther has, or used to have. After she ran away she had the back garden concreted over. She said it was tidier.”
“Ran away?”
“Never mind. You can’t hold against people the things they do when they’re mad. I wish she hadn’t done that to the garden. I like looking at flowers, even though they seem to wilt if I so much as touch them. Go on painting. I like to sit here while you paint. I wonder why Esther couldn’t bear me to paint? She would never leave me alone. She was forever offering me cups of coffee and biscuits and delicious new dishes. It was hardly surprising I got nothing done. When I was writing my book I locked it away, but I left the key where she could find it. I wonder if she looked. I would write more and more extreme things, things that I knew would annoy her more than anything, to try and provoke her into taking some notice, but I don’t know whether she ever looked. When it’s published she’ll have to take notice, won’t she? She’ll have to read it then. Other people will force her into it.”
“How could you bear to live all those years without love?”
“I never said I didn’t love Esther,” he said in some alarm. “I do. I always have. She’s part of my life. She’s Peter’s mother. The happiest time in my life was when Peter was a very little boy; we made our contacts with each other through him. A smile to each other above the tiny head—you know the sort of thing. But they were real smiles, you wouldn’t know about that. Parenthood is a whole dimension of life which is meaningless to you.”
“You reproach me with having no children. But yet you wouldn’t father a child on me. It’s not fair.”
“Why do women always want things to be fair, I wonder. Nothing’s fair. And I wasn’t reproaching you, either. You have to be brave, mind you, to be a childless, husbandless woman. Women are only considered to exist through merit of their relationships. I admire you for being so brave.”
“It’s very sad,” she said forlornly, “that I should like and admire you so much as a person, and that you should like and admire me, I sometimes think, only as a female body. I thought for a time you were a serious kind of man, who could appreciate all of me and not just a bit of me. I don’t want to be wrong about you. Don’t make me be. You have been tied down in this hideous marriage of yours for so long I don’t think you know what you’re doing any more, or thinking, or saying, or feeling. I want to save you. I want to rescue you.”
“I don’t want to discuss my marriage with you, Susan. Why do you insist? It will do you no good and only upset us both.”
“Because you’ve got to. You can’t go on like this, living with someone who doesn’t appreciate you. You need to be encouraged and loved and admired, and all your wife does is stultify every natural wholesome feeling you’ve got, until you’re so full of defenses, you’re just not capable of feeling properly any more.”
“I don’t know why you have such a high opinion of me. Esther, who knows me better, has a very different view. I am her tame, despicable ad-man.”
“But that’s what she’s tried to make you. She seeks to despise you.”
“And you don’t?”
“No.”
“I wish I could believe it. I say terrible things to you sometimes. Why do you put up with it? Other women wouldn’t.”
“You try to drive me away, I know, because then everything would be simple and easier for you. But it’s not what you really want.”
“I want food,” he said. “I want pie and chips and ketchup, the kind of food we had when I was a little boy. I can’t raise my sights above my stomach. I’m sorry. I know I should, but really I can’t take anything seriously but food.”
“Stop trying to get out of it. You’ve got to make some kind of decision. It’s important. It’s the turning point of your life. Your last chance.”
“Come here,” he said, “body.”
Laying her on the bed he turned her unclothed body this way and that, and pumped her limbs here and there, penetrating every likely orifice that offered itself to his view. He slapped and bit her, pulled her breasts and tore her hair. It afforded no pleasure at all, and she suffered a mounting sense of shock and outrage. This was not what she had meant when she embarked upon her career of cheerful sexual freedom. She cried, which interested him, but he did not desist. She was half on the bed, half on the floor, while Alan paused, searching his memory for details of vaguely remembered adolescent reading, when William let himself into the room. They covered themselves, separately, with blankets, and Susan flung herself weeping into William’s arms. He put her in a chair, unmoved, and stroked his neat beard.
“I left my pipe,” he said. “Where is it?”
“I threw it away,” she said. “I’m sorry. He made me. Oh, William, make him go away. He’s being so horrible to me.”
“Good,” he said. “You had no right to get rid of my pipe. One way and another, you are no better than an animal. I am sorry I disturbed you at your antics. Pray continue. I am just going.”
“Oh, don’t go away. Don’t leave me with him. Why did you go away when I asked you to? I didn’t really want you to. We were so happy together, weren’t we? Please don’t leave me. Not now.”
“You’ve never cared twopence for anyone in your entire life,” said William, “and I’ll tell you something else. You’re a lousy painter. Go back to your ad-man. You deserve each other. I hope you take better care of his property than you did of mine.” He nodded to Alan. “Good day.”
He left. Presently Alan laughed. Susan continued to weep.
“I’m sorry,” Alan said. “But really I feel much better. You have a marvelous body, did you know?”
“I don’t care about my body,” she said. “What about me?”
“It’s time you got married.”
She looked at him, instant hope mingling in her brain like instant coffee in boiling milk, but he shook his head at her and went back to his wife.
“Why do you bring me to life,” she cried out after him, “if only to kill me again?”
“It’s terrible to be used like a pound of butter,” said Susan to Brenda, “because that’s what he did. I won’t go into details, you’re too young, but he went all the way through the book of rules, bending me and him in every possible direction. What has love got to do with rules? Or position?”
“If you want to be loved,” said Brenda piously, “you have to love. If you had loved him enough, you wouldn’t have minded. You would have been glad to have afforded him some pleasure.”
“It wasn’t anything to do with pleasure or with sex. It was just all his miserable rage and hatred coming out; he was humiliating me on purpose.”
“Do you think he’s like that with his wife?”
“I am afraid not, with her no doubt he is more then reverent. That makes it worse. I was prepared to take him seriously, and he was determined to treat me like a whore. If he had managed to have a decent relationship with me he might have been saved. Now he will have to be a dandruff shampoo man for the rest of his life. It’s his loss, not mine. I learned about him in time. I shall never marry him. And it wasn’t only what he did, it was what he said. In the morning his wor
ds still all over me, like thorns.”
“You still haven’t told me what made you leave Alan,” Phyllis was saying to Esther at about the same time. Nausea held Esther like a rapist’s arms. She still ate, on the principle that she might as well give in and enjoy it, but food in her mouth seemed fluffy, and her very words tasted disagreeable. Phyllis stood at the stove stewing apples for her friend, having a vague notion that stewed apples had therapeutic powers. “I can understand that when you go on a diet you would disturb all kinds of things you didn’t know about, like shifting a heavy wardrobe and watching the little creatures scuffle away, and finding old beads and letters you’d forgotten about buried in the fluff. But wasn’t being married to Alan something to cling to? I would have thought it was the one positive thing you had, being a wife. How could you ever know you were right to do such a thing?”
“I left Alan once before. That time it was easy. It was a positive act. I wanted sex, and life, and experience. I wanted things. I was young. I could hurt and destroy and not worry. I had excuses. This time it was different. I did it because the state I was in seemed intolerable, not because I hoped for anything better. And yes, it is true that this time I have been conscious of a sense of sin, not against Alan, but against the whole structure of society. It is a sin against Parent Teachers Associations and the Stock Exchange and the Town Hall and the Mental Welfare Association and the Law Courts—”
“Do you feel sicker, Esther? Should I call the doctor?”
“Not that destructive young man of yours, no—it was a willful sin against all those human organizations that stand between us and chaos, marriage being one of them. My mother was very shocked when she rang home and found me gone. She followed me down here.”
Esther’s mother Sylvia Susan was small, neat, pretty and 65. She was flirtatious, and wore clothes so up-to-date that people, never having seen anything like them before, would stare after her in the street. Now she wore a gray denim smock with matching kerchief in her hair. Her legs were thin and knotted; Esther was able to look at her own with something approaching approval. She sat at the table biting her fingernails, which was something she only did when in her mother’s company.
“I wish you wouldn’t worry me so,” said Sylvia. “It is not fair of you. Am I not due for a little peace? Could I not be allowed, for once, the luxury of not worrying about you?”
“I am not worried about myself, so I see no reason for you to be worried.”
“Look at you! You’re in a terrible state. You’ve got soup all down your front. You always were a messy child. I don’t know who you got it from. It wasn’t me. I did all I could to train you, but you were very stubborn. You were too clever, that was the trouble. You could read when you were three, and type when you were four.”
“A pity it all came to nothing.”
“It made me uneasy at the time, and I was right. None of my side of the family had brains. You got them from your father. And your body became overgrown in its attempt to keep up with your brain. Your father would stimulate you, that was the trouble. He encouraged you to think, when what you needed was the exact opposite.”
“I don’t think you ever really gave the matter two thoughts, Mother, you were too busy.”
“I know you have this view of me as a frivolous party-going woman, goodness knows why. If I went to parties when you were a child it was simply to help your father. Giving parties was an expensive and tiring occupation. But his business depended on his social contacts.”
“You were good at those.”
“Now what do you mean? Esther, what is the matter with you? Come home with me. What you need is a rest, and some proper looking after, and then you will go back to Alan. You are in one of your states, and it’s no use taking any notice of the things you say or do. I shan’t let them hurt me. I know you too well. You are my daughter, when all is said and done.”
“What is the matter, Mother? What is all this talk of daughter? Have you decided you are lonely, after all these years? I prefer it down here, thank you very much. And I am not going back to Alan.”
“Now you are being ridiculous. Now listen, Esther. You remember the doctor you saw last time, who did you so much good—”
“I am not mad. I know you want to think I am, but I’m not. I had a nervous breakdown fifteen years ago, from which I am quite recovered. At least I suppose it was a nervous breakdown. That’s what people said. It seems, in retrospect, more like a fit of sanity, from which happy state you and your doctors wrenched me, forcibly. By the time you’d drugged me and shocked me, I was in no state to do anything but go back to Alan. Why should one necessarily be mad, just because one prefers not to live with one’s husband? I am not mad now.”
“No one is saying you are, darling, just overtired and overstrained. And I’m sorry. I know it’s hard for you to admit it, but you were definitely off your head then, the last time. You had no reason for leaving Alan. You couldn’t give one. He was earning good money, at last. Your marriage had got off to a shaky start; I can tell you now I cried nightly all that first year when he was living off you, sponging off you, but then all of a sudden he changed, and he was doing marvelously, and we could all see what a wonderful future you both had. It was Peter’s birth that did it, of course. It was all Alan needed, a sense of responsibility. I don’t know why you had to go to that art school. You should have gone to the University and done something with your brain, instead of hanging around with that extraordinary crowd. But by some miracle, which I will never understand, it all turned out all right in the end, until you suddenly take it into your head to walk out on your child and husband for no reason. If that’s not madness, what is?”
“I could see where it would all end, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.”
“Like what? And what has happened between you and Alan if it is more than just your neurosis? Is it another woman?”
“Yes and no.”
“I’m sorry, dear, but it’s yes or no. There are no half ways where these things are concerned.”
“I am afraid there are.”
“No doubt that’s very modern of you. But let us try to get at the truth. Is he being unfaithful to you?”
“Mother, will you let me and Alan run our own marriage, or ruin it, as the case may be? I’m a grown girl now.”
“One would hardly think it. Look at it, this room. Look at the state you’re living in! It’s disgusting.”
“You didn’t run your own life any too successfully.”
“Now what can you mean by that? I was a good wife and your father was a good husband. I am lonely now you are all I have in the world. He left me well provided for.”
“You never cared a fig for him. You went away on your holidays leaving him all alone with only me to look after him—”
“I was very delicate. I was never strong. What would you have me do? I’d have been no use to either of you if my health was broken.”
“And I used to dread you coming back and sneering at me, which is what you did, for being ugly and fat, and laugh at the way I tried to look after Father. But it was your fault that I was ugly and fat. And if I wasn’t good at looking after Father, I was only a child, wasn’t I? Or meant to be.”
“You should have aired the sheets. You were twelve. That’s quite big. You knew sheets ought to be aired. It was damp sheets that gave him rheumatic fever. The doctor said so.”
“It’s an old wives’ tale about damp sheets and rheumatic fever. You held that over me for years. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“And it was his weak heart after the rheumatic fever that killed him. I’ve never said it as plainly as that before, but it’s in my heart, and it ought to come out.”
“Don’t you worry, it’s been leaking out of your heart for the last fifteen years. I know what you think. But it’s your own guilt speaking. Who were you off with on your medically recommended holidays in the south of France? Who? What were you d
oing, and who with? That’s what killed Father, not my damp sheets, but your adulterous ones.”
“You are out of your mind, Esther, don’t let’s quarrel. We haven’t quarreled like this for years. If I’d had a son we wouldn’t ever have quarreled. Daughters are possessive about their fathers, that’s the trouble. I did what I could in the face of my own nature, which is the best any woman can do. But it’s all in the past now. I am getting old. You seem young to me still, a child, but in the eyes of the world I suppose that even you are no longer young. You won’t marry again, who would want you? You are too gross. You must stay married to
Alan. I beg of you. You have some money of your own, but it is folly, folly, to throw away your security, and your status, and the respect the world accords you as a married woman and a mother, and your husband’s income, and presently his pension, which will be generous. Three-quarters of his salary, I understand.”
“Women of your generation seem to regard men as meal tickets. It’s not very nice.”
“It’s a great deal less painful than regarding them in any other way. And it is practical. Youth goes so quickly. It is such a short span in one’s life. When it is over you recognize that comfort, status and money in the bank are really more important to a woman than anything else. And her family, of course. Esther, you are my family.”
“The thing about my mother,” said Esther to Phyllis, “is that she never thought anything was important except her bank balance in her entire life. This lover she had in the South of France, he gave her jewels and money. That was why she went to him, not for love. And my poor father died trying to keep up with her demands—her financial demands, not her sexual ones, she didn’t have those. I don’t understand how I came to be born, nor, I think, does she. He was such a gentle clever man. All he ever wanted to do was sit in his study reading old law reports, with me to dust and bring him coffee and cook his dinner, but she insisted. She insisted. She made him go out into the world and entertain clients and steer so near the edge of the law he lived in dread of falling over and ending up in prison. I think prison would have been a relief to him, in fact. He could have been the librarian and pottered.”
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