by Weldon, Fay
But since Marion took me so suddenly and surprisingly to task for my infidelity—if that’s an okay word—I feel less sure of myself. So I’ll be brief.
It began the day after Susan left with Leslie and Lady Angela for Bordeaux. It hardly seemed her most direct route home, though none of us liked to say so. Nor had she and Vinnie had any particular disagreement. Vinnie had given up his part-time work at the medical practice; How to Tone Up Your Heart had done very well at the bookstores, and a longer and more interesting book, The Nature of Dreams, had been well received by serious critics. Vinnie and Susan were finally out of debt.
“I don’t know which she disliked more,” said Vinnie sadly, as we picked out aubergines and yellow peppers from one of the glossier stalls in the Périgueux market, “my giving up on the healing arts, betraying everything we thought we stood for, or the people she admires taking me seriously. Better if I’d stuck to diets.”
How mean of Susan, I thought. Vinnie wore a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. He had grown a mustache. He was tanned, fleshy, and handsome, the way Gérard Depardieu is. We had left the others behind. Ed and I had had a minor disagreement that morning. Ed had said what a pity Susan had left. I’d said oh really, why? He’d said because now there was no one to talk to. I’d said did that mean he couldn’t talk to me? He’d said you know what I mean, and I’d said no, I did not. I was hurt and upset. In other words, I was prepared and ready to take offense, prepared and ready to go with Vinnie to the Périgueux market, just the two of us. Long, long ago I lost faith in the sincerity of my own righteous indignation. If you hear it from anyone—whether yourself, a spouse, a boss, a politician, a general—understand some evil is planned.
My eyes were still red-rimmed with tears. Vinnie bought me a Pernod in a bar. Then another. People stared. It was a hot, hot day. We went down to the river to see if it was cooler. It was not. I was still upset. Vinnie had a soft heart. He could not bear to see anyone in distress. He put his arms around me. He was a completely different shape from Ed. Ed’s belly was concave where it met, or failed to meet, my midriff. Vinnie’s was convex; it butted into me, firm and blue-striped, offering powerful consolation. There was no one around. The strong garlic-and-oil fingers tried to push up the narrow hem of my dress: a rather feeble Indian cotton, I remember, browny-pink stamped with large orange flowers, hideous in retrospect but having a kind of flimsy accessibility—no doubt why I was wearing it. I keep the sash belt at the back of my panties drawer, though the dress itself, along with all the other garments one once wore and loved, has long since been sucked up into the maw of time and vanished.
“It’s too hot out here,” he said, and drew me into the bushes.
What the romantic (and Ed tells me I am romantic) remembers of these events is the place, the ambience, the totality of someone else’s being and body, not sexual detail. Unless something is unpleasant, or truly remarkable (like the size of Leslie Beck’s dong), actual performance gets subsumed into the gestalt, fuzzy around the edges like the orange flowers on the browny-pink dress, part of the whole but not its total purpose. Whether Vinnie was good or bad in bed, or on the stony banks of the Dordogne, I cannot remember. Better to be Vinnie, I think, and have your total self remembered with affection and pleasure, than to be Leslie Beck and have your sexual prowess recalled, because that must, with age, fail, and as that diminishes, so must you. But I’m not a man, I wouldn’t know. It can only be speculation, since men are so nervous about sexual performance, they seldom talk, let alone write, about what really matters to them.
Mostly I remember the blue-and-white T-shirt stretched over a tight belly Susan nagged him about, and a lizard sitting on a hot stone, staring at me with unblinking eyes, as if the kind of stillness, the suspension of time which can fall like a protection around lovers, had stretched to include him, too. Or perhaps it was a her. Who’s to tell, with lizards?
I said it would not, could not, happen again. Should not have happened in the first place. It was beneath his dignity either to agree or to argue. I claimed we had meant, and planned, disloyalty to no one. He asked me not to be hypocritical. I shut up.
I didn’t “love” Vinnie as I loved Leslie Beck, though I’m sure that if love is a thing to be deserved, Vinnie deserved it more. I think what happened was that our intimate knowledge of each other, that inevitable component of the friendship of couples, had brimmed over its accepted edge, swollen by excitement, secrecy, fulfillment. But then, by some unlikely good fortune, and I can see it as good fortune, and by virtue of a kind of mutual embarrassment, the heady brew evaporated.
Susan returned unexpectedly. Anita, she said, was tedious; Lady Angela made passes; London would be hot and empty. She’d changed her mind. We, her friends, were the lesser of various evils. Opportunities to be alone with Vinnie were limited. When we could, we took them, Vinnie and I, over the years. But when I quarreled with Susan, allowed myself to be upset over the matter of Ed and she on the bed during a party, I also managed to make it happen that I could not see Vinnie again without invoking comment. Should I take credit for that? I don’t know. During the summer with Leslie, I felt faithless to Ed and did not like the feeling. Over the years with Vinnie, if you had asked me about “infidelity,” I would have denied its application to myself, and believed it. Ed and I had become one person, albeit with two independent bodies; Ed and Vinnie were friends; what I did with Vinnie included Ed; it was just that it seemed better not to tell him.
There was no serious “need to know.”
Vinnie’s relationship with Susan was trickier, and a source of grief and worry to him. I think if I had pushed it, he would have left Susan and come to me, but I didn’t want that. I wanted Ed and Vinnie; I wanted my cake and the icing, too; and since it hurt no one, why not?
I heard a noise. I looked up from the page. And there, facing me, clear as day at Accord Realtors, stood Susan. For a moment, I was confused. It was Susan of eighteen years ago, back from Bordeaux, back to chaperone her husband, back from her outing with Leslie Beck and Lady Angela, back to kill me. I must have felt guiltier than I thought I did. But no, it was now; it was the nineteen-nineties, not the seventies, and Susan was still brisk, beautiful, and superior. She had got thinner, not fatter; her eyes were still large and luminous. She looked what she was: intelligent, competent, busy. She looked like Glenn Close.
I pushed the manuscript into the drawer.
“Susan,” I said.
“This has gone on long enough,” said Susan. “One of us has to speak to the other.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, but I found myself smiling. I was so pleased to see her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and before I knew it I was embracing her. She felt like my mother, which made me feel like a forgiven child: trusted, trusting, and safe.
“What are you sorry about?”
“I can’t honestly remember,” she said, “but someone has to apologize, and I can’t wait around anymore for you to do it. Rosalie’s called me. Leslie Beck has turned up again: that’s more interesting than us not speaking.”
She wanted me to go halves with her, she said, buying poor Anita Beck’s painting. It didn’t seem right that it should go to a stranger, but she couldn’t possibly afford the ridiculous sum Marion was asking. After all she’d done for Marion, you would have thought she could have made some concessions. And Marion had let all kinds of things slip in the past, which Susan now reported to me.
Both Mr. Render and Mr. Collier were out of the office. I felt increasingly at liberty at Accord Realtors to write my novel (or my memoirs) and to speak to friends during office hours. Since Mr. Collier had been wooing my best friend, Rosalie, I had felt more and more like a colleague and less and less like an employee. I rather wondered whether it was not self-interest which prevented me from warning Rosalie against taking baths with Mr. Collier, but you can be too paranoid, even about your own nature.
“I know all that,” I said to Susan when she’d finished. “I’ve alwa
ys known.”
“But it’s totally shocking,” said Susan, whose job these days, I remembered, was fund-raising for a child adoption agency. She had discovered in herself, as many of us do, a liking for sitting down in her best dress at formal dinners, and having food put in front of her, and talking to people of importance and distinction. She had done her early shift working with the deprived and miserable, her middle shift trying to lever society toward taking responsibility for the deprived and miserable; now she just wanted some peace and a good dinner, and Anita Beck’s painting at a reduced price as a memento of more interesting times. But she was my friend again, or said so. I must take a positive, not a negative, view of her actions and attitude. Look, I was really pleased to see Susan, not to be alienated from her anymore, not to have to cross the supermarket aisle to avoid an encounter. Nevertheless, she had made Vinnie unhappy in a way she needn’t have, seeing her own bad temper as somehow sanctified, allowing it full rein, exercising it needlessly: “I’m cross. You must put up with it.” That, more than anything, in men or women, makes for unhappy homes.
And why did she want to share Anita’s painting with me? To save money? I thought not. She had plenty. I had seen Vinnie’s Midriff Diet for Men on display in bookshops everywhere for the past year. More likely it was an attempt to resurrect her past and see her minor fling with Leslie Beck, the man with the biggest dong in the world, on a par with my summer of love. Although she, like Rosalie, had gotten a baby out of hers, and I hadn’t, theirs had been of no other consequence. Mine had.
I supposed Marion would say that made my sin against Anita Beck worse, but who was Marion to put on moral airs? She must be wondering herself, or she would not have felt obliged to tell Susan how she acquired the Marion Loos Gallery—something I had known for years, and also managed to keep secret for years. I will try to take the sting from it by recording it, as I have done Leslie Beck’s reappearance in Marion’s life, but not yet my own. Now I will look out of Marion’s unfairly large, wide eyes. It becomes quite a relief not to look out of my own. It is pleasant to feel, as Marion feels, somehow better than other people: that she has the prerogative of proper feeling, proper behavior—a full yet discreet sensibility. Oh, yes, it is quite pleasant to be Marion, after all. To have no children, no hostages to fortune, when it comes to it, is quite a relief. I enjoy it here, in Marion’s mind.
Marion
I find it quite difficult to like people; I think I got into the habit of dislike when I was a child. “Oh, Marion! Marion was looking down her nose when she was born,” my mother would say.
Ida and Eric were both large, overflowing people, as was my younger brother, Peter. I was always tall for my age and had large feet, but I was thin. By the time Peter was twelve, the others were all two stone overweight apiece. I was born controlled, and was either born or soon became an organizer. I had to be. If I wanted to leave the house with my hair combed, I would first have to find the comb, somewhere among the dirty dishes and the cigarette stubs and the lottery tickets. All of them smoked, Petey from the age of eight. None of them read books. Both parents would tell friends I had been switched at birth. At first it hurt me; then I longed for it to be true, though I could see too great a resemblance, more’s the pity, between my father’s nose and my own to allow me to really believe it. My family felt that the day existed in order to be enjoyed; I felt that the day was a mere framework in which one could somehow “get on”—though where I was meant to be getting on to I did not understand, and there was no one around to tell me. Those born, like me, strangers to their family by virtue of their intelligence usually respond to language and have books to help them out, or their English teacher takes an interest, and so they more easily find their proper niche in the world, get to university and start a life appropriate to themselves. But I had a problem with the written language: I was, and still am, mildly dyslexic, though excellent with numbers, and some slight functional disorder left me unable to draw anything more complex than a cat sitting on a table. It was not until I was fourteen and plucked up enough courage to go into the local art gallery that I understood where my passion and my interest lay—that is to say, in other people’s paintings, in alternative visions of reality. But I didn’t know what to do with it, and, again, there was no one to tell me. Bad at English, bad at art, good at math. They steered me into the bank at an early age, and even that Eric and Ida thought was overly ambitious. And I liked no one at the bank, either: everyone was so plain and ugly; everything you looked at seemed contrived to root you brutally to the here and now; it was mean of spirit.
I hated my family. I hated boys, whose messy fumblings under skirts upset me, and whose only ambition, so far as I could see, was to get the better of me, reduce me to their own sorry state. Other girls got loved, it seemed to me; I was the kind boys just wanted to bring down a peg or two. I hated my job. I hated the Van Gogh fake worst of all. Not that it had been painted in the first place, which seemed a compliment to the artist, but that no one even noticed. What did that say about the curators of this exhibition?
When Ed, the photographer, and the picture editor turned up at the “Bank and the Painter” show (I knew it was a wrong association at the time but couldn’t have told you why), I felt my heart leap. I liked the look of these three men; I liked the way ideas seemed to be in control of their flesh. They were more animated than the people I was used to, who tended to the pudgy, who had the pallor of the unenlightened, the thick pale skin of those who are anxious to keep doubt out—an altogether stolid and complacent look.
To be translated, in the course of a week, from beans on toast with Ida and Eric in Norwich to avocado vinaigrette with Ed and Nora in Primrose Hill, although the price was washing the dishes and putting the children to bed, seemed some kind of miracle. The marvel had happened. What I had always hoped to be true was indeed true: that if you have a genuine liking and an enthusiasm, albeit untutored, for something, just for its own sake, why, then, this counts as a rare gift, and you can become a valued member of society just on account of it. Your difference will be noted and admired; the world will open its arms to you. I lived under the stairs, and I listened and I learned.
“Under the stairs” worried Nora and Ed, so they moved me to Leslie and Jocelyn Beck’s basement, where, everyone told me, there was “lots of room.” But there was not the same atmosphere. Leslie Beck did not read books; he had safe reproductions on the walls; Jocelyn collected horse brasses; Hope and Serena, for all their dullness, told lies. I did what I had to, to earn my rent: developed asthma and babysat in the evenings and on weekends for Ed and Nora, Rosalie and Wallace, Vinnie and Susan, and picked up what knowledge, what social graces, I could. I meant, after my first week at the Courtauld, to end up at least director of the Tate Gallery. So quickly life can change.
I don’t think I was particularly highly sexed. Perhaps it was just that Eric and Ida had been noisy and frequent lovers, and I was determined that what was good enough for them was not going to be good enough for me. Pushing open the bathroom door one day and seeing Leslie Beck’s erect organ, purply and mottled, unnerved me; I told the others about it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. But I was really pleased to discover I could tell a good story, be socially accepted, make other people laugh. Giving an account of Leslie Beck’s dong, as they loved to call it, liberated me just a little from feelings of inferiority. I became equal to them. I worked for them one by one, but I was from that moment part of the group.
When Jocelyn and Leslie parted and Anita moved in, and I had to help Rosalie with poor flipped Jocelyn, I was linked into the group even more tightly. My benefactors, my friends. I trusted them—they would share their last crust with you for the privilege of helping you—with the exception of Leslie Beck. I understood him too well. I understood that his background was like mine; that he had fought his way out and up; that his talent was for making money and losing it, and it was a talent they marveled at but didn’t envy. I understood that Leslie Beck believed he would
have to buy his friends, and they let themselves be bought, out of kindness to him. He envied them their social ease, the buzz of conversation that rose from their dinner tables; he wanted to be one of them, and the more he wanted to, the less he could be, because the point was that the only way to be one of them was not to want to be one of them. He had attached himself to them, and they went along with it; me, they had attached to themselves. It was a better position to be in. I was their good work, and I squirmed beneath it, while at the same time—I won’t say “loving” them; I will say “not disliking” them. For me, that’s quite a lot. Gratitude is a terrible emotion.
Leslie Beck recognized himself in me, of course he did. I failed to find him attractive, as did the others. I knew too much even then about that kind of man: redheaded curly-haired males with biceps, vigorous, somehow bursting out of too-tight, too-bright clothes. You meet them in betting shops and afternoon drinking clubs. My dad had a couple of friends like that; when they came round for a drink and a game of cards, my mum would always put on her lipstick. They like to notch you up, tell the lads about you. But what do the Noras, the Rosalies, the Susans know? They’re innocent. They think marriage is all about true love or lust; they don’t understand self-interest. Men like Leslie acquire women like Jocelyn if they possibly can—a cut above them socially—and learn what they can until they’ve learned enough. Or else they go for the plain ones with a good dowry, like Anita, who will work hard and be grateful and never cause trouble. But to satisfy the demands of self-interest is not to satisfy the soul; they swagger, but they’re never content; they’re restless; they need acceptance. And scheme to get it, because all they know is scheming. That I understood in him. We were rivals, and I was winning.