by Weldon, Fay
She shared with me that when Leslie Beck presently saw a handprinted sign, “Les Ice Caves des Madones,” by the side of the road, they followed arrows down bumpy lanes to a makeshift village composed mostly of cafés and souvenir shops. Notices invited them to leave the brilliant day for black cold, to view the stalactites and stalagmites. Lady Angela refused to do any such thing; she preferred, she said, to stay above ground as long as possible. Caves made her think of death. “Don’t get into mischief,” she said, and Leslie laughed and said he would if he could, but he doubted if here was the place. Susan and Leslie descended by means of a rickety elevator and joined a party of tourists. They were rowed across an underground lake, where the water was black and terribly still and cold. Above them arched a vaulted sky of rock and, glowing all around, intricately wrought pinnacles of icy stone, pink and green and mauve. In the flickering lights provided by a vulgar management, Susan let Leslie Beck hold her hand.
“Cold enough for you?” he said. He wore a white cricketing sweater, the kind with vertical cables, round his shoulders; the sleeves were tied over his chest. Susan had declined his offer to borrow it. She wore only a summer dress. She shivered. “I told you so,” he said. She had to lean into him on the boat, just for warmth. He put his arms round her. (“Gorilla arms,” said Susan. “They always seemed too long for his body.”)
“See, to the right,” said the guide, “Mother Nature has fashioned a nun, and over there, look, Mother Mary. Look hard and you’ll see she is clasping Baby Jesus to her bosom. Indeed, God is everywhere.”
And the tourists gasped with amazement and gratification at these symbols especially sent by the Creator, and the boat tilted a little in the smooth black water as they craned to make out which exactly was the bit of the salty spire of rock that was Jesus, and all except Leslie and Susan were sure they could tell.
The boat beached. The party followed the guide through a tracery of paths, marveling at more stalactite madonnas—see, see the Holy Child’s little hand—and Indian chieftains with intricate headdresses, and stalagmite chandeliers and soup ladles suspended over their heads—
“The other way round,” I said.
“Don’t interrupt,” said Susan.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Go on sharing.” I did not want to hear this. The reason I had visited the Marion Loos Gallery was not to see Anita’s painting, or to buy it, but because it seemed possible Leslie Beck might show up while I was there. That fate might bring us together once again. Oh love, love; romance etched so deep into the female soul it defies all reason; abandon sense all ye who enter here, and all of us have entered. Romance in the head—nothing to do with lust in the loins. Look, at the time of the hot summer of Berkeley Square I didn’t love Leslie Beck at all; I was seduced by secrets, which are to true love as artificial sweetener is to sugar, calorie-free but in the long run carcinogenic, not the real thing, and only a peculiar aftertaste in the mouth to tell you so, to warn you. A cheat. Everything costs. Nothing is for nothing. Fewer calories, more cancer.
Susan shared with me that Leslie Beck said “Follow me,” and so she did. And they went down slippery paths through slimy rocks which management had not cleaned up, until the noise of the party was lost, and only a glimmer of light struck through from above. Leslie leaned Susan up against a rock and covered her body with his own to keep her warm, and she quite forgot how she despised him: and feeling not his fingers in her hair, but something which she could have sworn was bats, screamed, and ended up lying on the ground with her back in a greenish puddle.
“We’ll lose the others,” she said. “We’ll die down here. No one counted us. No one will miss us. Only Lady Angela, and that too late.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, “just finishing my life now. Would you?”
That touched her greatly. She was a sucker for sentiment, she said; she’d married Vinnie because he told her making love to her was like making love to the sea, something dark and infinite. He had said the same to me, but I didn’t tell her that. I felt ashamed of myself for taking from her something she relied on, grew up with, had her babies by.
“We’re hopelessly lost,” she said to Leslie, as she followed him farther into the jumbled mass of rocks, so cold to the touch, but trusting him, because women do trust men at such times. Then the path opened up and a blast of light and warmer air met them, and there coming toward them, returning to the entrance, was another party, another guide.
“You knew the way,” said Susan. “A shortcut, that was all.”
“How could I?” he said. “We were lucky, that’s all.”
Leslie Beck the lucky.
But when they got down to the villa outside Bordeaux, and Lady Angela mentioned to Anita that they’d stopped off at the caves, Anita, who was suffering from an allergic reaction to the sun, and whose eyes were tiny in a shiny red swollen face, said, “Oh, Leslie and I always stop off there,” and Susan thought she must be blushing, but how could one tell? There were baked beans, brought over from England, along with marmalade and tea bags, with hefty pork chops for supper, and Leslie Beck acted toward her as if she were Lady Angela: not an attempt at flirtation, not a flicker of the eye, a move of the hand; so she got a lift to Bordeaux airport.
Susan shared with me that only then did she realize that they had made love “unprotected,” as she put it, and it was the most fertile time of her cycle, so she went back quickly to the Dordogne to join Vinnie, to fudge any possible issue. Which indeed there was, in the shape of Amanda, she of the crinkly red hair.
I did not share with Susan how disappointed I had been at her unexpected return: what was the point of my stirring up yet more old wounds, old memories? What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Anita had stirred up more than enough already, left us reproach as a legacy. Anita Beck’s revenge, thus to present us with the truth of our lives: we the faithless, who both claim and demand fidelity.
Susan shared with me her worry that Colin might be Leslie Beck’s son, making any liaison between Amanda and Colin incestuous. I told her she had no need to worry. Her own guilt made her anxious; that much I shared with her.
“But Colin is so obviously Ed’s child,” I said. “You only have to look.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, dubiously. “Well, Ed’s always wondered.”
That shook me. I felt cold. I did not let her see.
Susan then shared with me that when Vinnie told her I had seduced him on the banks of the Dordogne, she, being indignant, had told Ed what Leslie had told her, that Leslie and I had been having it off all one summer.
Kiss and tell, kiss and tell. In a secret liaison, each party believes there is a balance of power, an equity of terror, a mutual deterrent; and how often each is mistaken! Pow! Boom! And there you have it, a wasteland of rubble that used to be people’s lives, over which ragged children swarm.
I stopped sharing any more with Susan. It seemed a very one-sided business to me.
I did not bring the matter up with Ed. He had never seen fit, after all, to bring it up with me. I felt diminished and insulted. Either he had gone through powerful emotions and I had simply not noticed, or he was so good that jealousy was not in his nature, in which case it might be possible to reconstrue “good” as “apathetic.” Either way, I did not like it. I could see that the kind of cozy, tranquil love I thought we enjoyed together might not be that at all; it could be just habit—Ed’s need for someone to live with, to shop and cook and be pleasant, to put aside money for the future, to watch TV with; someone who would try to prevent the children from smoking in the house; someone lying there beside him, night after night, to satisfy such rare sexual urges as he had.
Or perhaps he was doing me a kindness: staying with me, keeping the home together for the sake of the family. Forgiving me but no longer liking me or trusting me—living a half-life with me because of Leslie Beck. Nodding in front of the television, night after night, rather than speak to me; animated with friends, dreary with me. How many men a
re like this with their wives? Because finally, word has got back.
Anita Beck, this is a fine revenge.
I write this on Monday. On Saturday, Rosalie said, “Nora, you’re nuts. Nothing’s altered since yesterday, and yesterday you were perfectly happy, so what are you going on about?”
Rosalie was to spend the afternoon at Mr. Collier’s. He had refilled the swimming pool in her honor. She was not sure she wanted that. She would have to appear in a swimsuit and was nervous that her cellulite might put him off.
“My marriage is built on lies,” I said, dismally.
“Think yourself lucky to have one,” said Rosalie, briskly. “At least they’re your lies, not his.”
She was putting strips of wax on her legs: pressing lengths of fine, sticky paper onto the skin, ripping it off, its surface now darkened by removed, unwanted hair. It was both fascinating and disgusting.
“I’m going to be late,” she said. “Marion was on the phone for hours. I wish Leslie Beck would fade back into the wallpaper. Everyone’s been upset since he turned up. Now Marion’s thinking of firing Barbara. Can you imagine? Where is Ed this morning?”
“He had to go to the office,” I said.
“Um,” she said, and I thought, well, Vinnie’s away, and Susan’s in Kew Gardens Square, and for all I know Ed’s not at the office, he’s with her. But this could only be my paranoia. Sometimes I felt paranoia was the only strong emotion that now possessed me, rendered me irrational. All that was left of love was the fear of abandonment, the child kicking and screaming, lost to all reality in its tantrum.
Neither Mr. Collier nor Mr. Render is in the office today. I can shuffle papers as much as I want, do some more work on the scene at the Marion Loos Gallery, as reported by Marion to Rosalie, and by Rosalie to me. No doubt errors have crept in, but there’s the fun of it. Truth is too rigid a master not to take pleasure in cheating him. It is, in any case, a relief to forget my own predicament, at least for a while.
So let’s envisage it. Marion stands staring at the Anita Beck painting. She has the Guardian review page in her hand: “Group Show at the Marion Loos,” by Melanie Deutsch. It is not the lead review, but you couldn’t expect that for such a show. And at least it runs to a respectable length, which is good, though it does refer to a “little, good-hearted show.” There is even a photograph. It is of the Anita Beck painting, which to Marion’s surprise looks remarkably good in black and white. No doubt that is why it was chosen. Much of the column is devoted to Melanie Deutsch’s particular theory, the apex notion—namely, that it takes a whole lot of indifferent paintings to produce one good one. By inference, the Anita Beck is the one at the apex of the pyramid. Marion has no patience with this kind of thing, but when she looks around the gallery and sees eight red dots for every ten paintings, she is not too disturbed. And at least no one has said, as they perfectly well could have, that Marion Loos has lost her nerve, is playing safe—that as recession bites, standards fall.
She has had four offers for the painting and refused them all: two from regular clients, one from Nora, and one from Susan. She is not usually given to such quixotic behavior—on the contrary. She supposes she wishes to spite Leslie Beck, or perhaps she merely wanted to own the painting herself. She could have put it in a darkish corner at home and no one would have taken much notice of it. Now that there has been a photograph in the Guardian, all this will change. She has to rethink.
Enter Leslie Beck, waving the newspaper.
LESLIE:
You should have marked it up at least two thousand more. I told you so.
MARION:
You didn’t happen to sleep with Melanie Deutsch?
LESLIE:
Marion, all that is over. I am an old man. You must come round to the house; I’ve at least two hundred canvases there.
MARION:
She must have worked hard before she died.
LESLIE:
She did. I encouraged her. I was her muse. I’m lost without her. To grow old alone... don’t you feel alone, Marion? The dark edging in? The Life Force fading?
MARION:
I have the gallery, I have my friends, I have my work. No.
LESLIE:
And your cats; I hear you have cats. It worries me. That’s a bad spinstery sign, Marion.
MARION:
How do you know I have cats?
LESLIE:
Someone told me. Yes, your delightful assistant. Your Barbara. The one with the difficult husband. She tells me she was at college with Melanie Deutsch. Where is Barbara?
MARION:
I don’t know. She’s late in.
Enter Aphra.
APHRA:
Hi, creep. How ya doing?
LESLIE:
Hi, minilight of my life.
APHRA:
Who’s the major? Don’t tell me. Barbara. Your generation never gives up. It’s all the red meat you eat. Disgusting. Do you know what the legacy of your lot is to us? AIDS. I read it in someone else’s paper, on the train.
The phone rings. Marion answers it. It’s the Tate. They want to know all about Anita Beck: what is the corpus of work; can they view it; who are the executors; is the legal position uneasy? Instead of handing them straight over to Leslie Beck, she says she will call back. She hates Leslie Beck. She asks him if Anita Beck left a will, and Leslie says no, and Marion says in that case he can’t dispose of the paintings until after probate, and that can take years.
LESLIE:
Whose side are you on, Marion?
MARION:
Anita’s.
And now she feels better. Leslie leaves, pursued by angst. Enter Barbara, with baby in arms.
BARBARA:
I’m sorry, Marion. I didn’t know what to do. Ben refuses to look after Holly anymore. I thought he was a proper caring father. But now his office has come off flexitime, and he says his job is more important than my job; mine is just pin money, and anyway, a baby needs its mother. The truth is, it’s been all trouble and complaints ever since the baby was born. We’ve both been so tired, and there’s no money for proper child care, and I’d no idea it was going to be like this.
APHRA:
Why didn’t you ask me? I could have told you.
MARION:
Just go away, Aphra. I don’t want to hear your marital woes, Barbara. This is your workplace, not a therapist’s office. And you should have rung about bringing the baby.
BARBARA:
The phone’s been busy all morning. We need another line.
MARION:
Don’t tell me how to run my business.
BARBARA:
And I thought you’d be in a good mood, what with the Anita Beck in the Guardian. I thought you’d be really happy.
MARION:
You are not a little girl, Barbara. And this is not a game.
BARBARA:
You’re just jealous because Leslie Beck showed me Anita’s paintings. And because I can pull strings at the Guardian, and you can’t anymore. He said you used to be his au pair. Is that true?
The baby starts to cry.
MARION:
I think perhaps you’d better take the baby home, Barbara, right now. People come to galleries to be away from babies. I think your husband’s right; a mother’s place is at home with her child. You are probably too highly qualified for this job.
Barbara starts to cry as well.
BARBARA:
But I love working here. I want to work here. It’s just how can I do everything? Finish this shift, go home, and the housework starts, and no one ever tells you you’re beautiful, or cares what it’s like for you. All they do is worry about the baby. And I take one night off, just one, and look what happens. Ben gets hysterical, and you get moody. Why don’t you just run off with Leslie Beck, Marion? He’s your last chance. Poor man, he’s so sad. His wife died. I only stayed to comfort him, and he couldn’t, anyway. He said he was like King David, and could I just warm him all night, but I had to g
o because of Ben. I thought we were all friends.
Aphra has the baby; she has her knuckle in the baby’s mouth.
APHRA:
I think I’d rather like one of these....
MARION:
You’re both fired.
But neither of them takes any notice of her, and both go into her office to make themselves some herbal tea, to reduce their stress levels. Marion would like to cry, but the phone keeps ringing, and she has to do three people’s work, and she can’t.
So much for Marion. Back to Rosalie, finishing her leg wax on Saturday morning, talking to me, myself wondering if Ed is where he says he is, at the office. Rosalie’s legs are now smoother than they were, but not so young as they were, and she has a lot more weight to lose. I wondered, if Ed were to leave me, would I find someone else, could I keep someone else, would I want to?
“Rosalie,” I said, “there is something you ought to know about Mr. Collier.”
“He said people would get round to warning me sooner or later,” said Rosalie. “He’s a mass murderer. I know. He told me.”
“It’s not a joke.”
“Anyway,” said Rosalie, “she deserved it. Fancy doing that to a man, cuckolding him in his own house, in her own bath. Baths are even worse than beds. At least Leslie Beck only did me out-of-doors, not in his wife’s bed.”
She was angry with me. I knew she would be. She stared at herself in the mirror.
“Leslie Beck or a mass murderer,” she said. “What’s the difference?” Then she relented, and smiled at me, and pecked me on the cheek. I could smell a thousand lotions, a thousand scents—all the aromas of the past.