by Mavis Cheek
'Excuse me.'
A well-bred, firm-toned female voice. Janice looks up.
Tight lips, a strong, fine-boned face framed in a red-gold fringe, below which there are flower-blue eyes that say nothing. Remainder of hair held close in an uncompromising chignon. No lipstick, no rouge, refined bearing with the smell of lemons and honey about her. Graceless clothes; pleated skirt, plain white blouse, indeterminate brown coat and unadorned black pumps. Janice remarks to herself that the coat is not summerweight and yet its owner does not even glow. She also sees that the ankles are small, the wrists delicate, the curve of the neck graceful. This is not raw-boned gracelessness but imposed, surface only. Early forties perhaps, but not difficult to picture her younger. Janice blinks and half smiles, she nods, moves her bulk and the crackling plastic bag, and goes on chewing her chocolate bar. She continues to look sideways as she does so. Good, very good, she thinks.
'Thank you so much.' Superior politeness as if the one giving thanks is in fact saying, Be grateful to me. Cold. With fire lurking somewhere within.
Janice is intrigued.
An idea shapes in her head.
She chews faster, shifts her position to see better. Waits.
The idea grows in her as the woman arranges herself in the seat and adjusts her clothes to avoid encroaching on Janice's side. Janice spills everywhere, well into her companion's space, yet the woman manages to avoid any physical contact at all. There is something engaging about that isolation. She takes one more long, slow sideways look before daring to decide. But yes - yes, yes, yes - it is right. Easy to see her as she is now and as she was once. Fading red-gold beauty. Lines of experience, lines of regret, perhaps? And a hardness somewhere. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Janice wants to write a retrospective novel for which red-gold and her artificial, self-imposed dullness will be the very epitome of Phoenix rising. In fact, that might very well be the title of the book.
When the red-gold woman brings out a Church Times and begins reading it, Janice feels that her cup of invention is full. To create a romantic heroine from a vicar's wife — flaming hair, scorched hopes - is the beguilement that she seeks. Without such beguilement Janice Gentle could never complete a sentence let alone a whole book. Now she has what she needs.
Red Gold, who will be eternally happy.
Little Blonde, bird-like, bird-brain, who will be driven by boredom and disappointment towards a bitter, wretched end.
Square Jaw, whose even features resembled the Before in an Alka-Seltzer advertisement, will become a solid and desirable force — one who will be forgiven and loved.
The tale is set.
Janice can go home now, for her day's work is fairly done.
Genius, born out of such disparities.
Genius.
*
It is of course genius that Janice Gentle has. Her works have been likened to Jane Austen, they have been likened to Enid Blyton, they have been likened to Grimm. They have been discussed in sentences that breathed the names of both Richardson and Danielle Steele, they have been reviewed in The Times, they have sold by the yard in airport bookstalls. She is read by the wives of both Oxford dons and Oxford butchers, for she writes of that which touches the human condition most, that unfashionable, elusive item on which turns the world. She writes, at the core, about love. 'Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage . . .' Janice may be recluse, she may have little experience of the commodity, but it does not stop her understanding it. After all, she has never been sat upon by an elephant, but she knows that if she were it would hurt. Life may pass her by, but she is not hampered in letting her own small experience fly free. Indeed, very possibly, it is the life passing her by that helps.
She herself had been touched by love once and it made a profound, if inconclusive, impression. Until she found Dermot Poll again writing about the condition was preferable to seeking more of its reality. And so she did. Calliope, beautiful-voiced Muse to a thousand epic poems, had blessed her sister with the gift of words (every woman has something if it is only smooth elbows), and Janice, alone and heart-bruised and severely into the pleasures of eating, used her gift well.
Sylvia Perth was right. Ninety-three per cent of her readership were women, princesses to pauperettes, taking the romance with as large or as small a dose of salt as they chose. They were loyal, enthusiastic and read her avidly.
Of the seven per cent remaining, this was almost entirely made up of men who, so far from having romance on their minds, were accused by their womenfolk of not having it anywhere within their vocabulary of understanding - not even so much as tucked away in an armpit. They read Janice Gentle as one might read a textbook, looking for a solution and a set of rules. And they came away, usually, as baffled as they had been before, the enchantment of the genre being beyond the ken of fact-finding man.
From Sydney to Stockholm, Dubai to Dundee, Janice Gentle's books were very much in demand. She had made a lot of money and spent little. She had spent little because her personal requirements were scant and also because she did not know that she had made a lot. Had she known how much she had made it is unlikely she would have been taking a tube-train journey this morning at all, it is far more likely that she would have been lying on a settee with her feet up, eating and waiting, waiting and eating, until the Quest she could at last set going produced results, and her Crusade could begin.
But only Sylvia Perth, agent and friend, confidante and publisher's go-between, loyal fan and devoted accountant, knew exactly how much money Janice Gentle had made from her books, and for reasons of her own, for the present, she did not feel it necessary to enlighten her.
*
Back now towards home, mission accomplished.
The Little Blonde Secretary has left the carriage already. Square Jaw and Red Gold remain. As the train pulls into the station and Janice steps out, she gives one last backward look at her intended characters. Yes, yes, they are both perfectly right, especially the colour of that hair. If she is skilful she can make much of that as it turns from its chignon into flowing silver-streaked fire. But she will have to be careful. Distinguishing sentimentality from romance is a thin line and the descent into bathos is never far away.
Sylvia once brought her a whole pile of books which, she said, were trying to replicate Janice's style. Janice read one or two and winced - it was as if the writers had stripped a tree bare of its
fruit instead of taking selectively, or had demanded that each tree carry all the fruits of the universe just to be sure . . . Square Jaw may well release that chignon of blazing hair - very possibly Red Gold will be young and beautiful again. But whether that beauty is in the eyes of the world or whether it is only in the eyes of her lover - that is the question which counts. As a mother looks upon her new babe which to the world resembles a potato and which to the mother resembles a cherub, so, Janice instinctually knows, do lovers look upon lovers. How else could the plain and the ugly be loved? And that is a thought which is dear to her. She believes it utterly.
It is this thin line of integrity, buried almost without trace, to which her readers subliminally respond. '"Love,"' says Janice, '"is Nature's second sun."' '"Love,"' says Janice, '"looks not with the eyes but with the mind, ‘And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind . . ."' Both quotes from Elizabethans, which is annoying since Janice's heart is set in times before them. Indeed, Janice considers Elizabethan literary arts a mere dilution of the golden age that passed before. But they are apt quotes all the same. She has many more stored away, all of which she keeps buzzing in her head as she writes so that they flavour, always, the text.
Back, then, to Battersea.
After her first book was published, Sylvia Perth said gaily, 'Janice, my dear, you can now afford to live anywhere you choose. Right in the centre of town if you want to.' But Janice had chosen Battersea. Battersea suited her very well. The area she chose suited her very well. Sylvia Perth it did not suit. In vain did she try to persuade Janice at least to select the
best part of Battersea. 'Why not near Albert Bridge - so close to Chelsea - or Prince of Wales Drive . ..? But not here, dear. Not in this bit. Why, it's practically Nine Elms . . .' But Janice did not mind that at all and the apartment block was right. Built in the 1950s in that strangely dull cube-like manner, it was unremarkable. Neither large nor small, neither smart nor dowdy. And with no architectural features at all. It just was.
Of course the area had changed in the years since she moved there. Young upwardly mobiles had discovered the river, provender shops had discovered the young upwardly mobiles, and it had all got rather fashionable. But not in Janice's bit. Here, due to bomb damage, the buildings were too new to knock down, too dull to become desirable and too off the beaten track to appeal to any but the drear of heart or those to whom surroundings are frivolities. Hence the shop on the corner still sold ordinary items like digestive biscuits and standard tea, having no market for langue de chat nor Lapsang, and hence its owner still wore an overall and liked to chat to his customers. Janice avoided the place whenever possible, preferring the supermarket, where the only exchange required was a grunt of apology as your trolley ran over a foot and where the act of shopping was so detached that there was no sense of shame at whatever you stuffed in your shopper.
The corner-shop man attempted to look unmoved by Janice's requirements, but he was a singular failure at it. If she said four packets of custard creams, his brows shot up and his eyeballs fairly rotated in his head, and all the while he would keep his voice even, saying, slow and deliberate, 'Four packets of custard creams, six Mars bars, six fudge fingers, two pounds of butter, one pound of cheese,' in a never changing rhythm that made the whole seem like a litany of disapproval. Nothing she ever bought there tasted quite so good as things she bought elsewhere that were free of the stain of his glance. Neither did she very much like the way he glanced at her. His look held too much interest, too much human bonhomie, and Janice would prefer to efface herself from such involvements. She would like, so far as the world was concerned, to avoid existence until the time was right to emerge.
As dogs grow to look like their owners and owners their dogs, so Janice Gentle had grown towards nothingness rather well. All excepting her size, of course, and that was just one of those anomalies that occasionally spring up in life. If our presence in the world can be described with a colour, then Janice Gentle was beige. Her skin was pale, her hair nondescript, her eyes indeterminately light, and bloodless her lips. Her body, naked, was not unlike porridge or, more kindly, not unlike a Rubens without its rosy tints and the light of wickedness in the eye. She had never lain on sundrenched beaches taking the hue of honey or the glow of chestnuts from the sun, and though some poet or songster might call her flesh milk-white, it was, in fact, rather an unwholesome paleness, like the skin of one who has stayed in the darkness too long.
No man had lusted for her so far as she knew, no woman had sighed to have her curves. No child had rested on her ample lap nor settled its head within her shelving bosom. Janice's sensual delights were all taken by mouth, and that was the way she liked it. She wore a loose, long cardigan that draped her form as unbecomingly as a dust sheet on a thirties suite, she wore regulation spectacles of unremarkable design, and her hair was held back in a plain rubber band and washed once a week on Thursdays. She weighed fifteen stone, stood five feet two in her bare, spreading feet, was an absolute virgin and looked the same in her twenties as her thirties, her thirties as her forties, in which latter category, just, she now resided. Since coming to Battersea Janice Gentle had kept her life neutral. Other women looked upon her as a sad creature compared with their stylishness; and those feminine-hearted ants scuttling beneath her minuscule fifth-floor balcony would look away sorrowingly and in disgust should they chance to raise their heads and catch sight of her mottled cellulite taking the air.
Men did not pity her, for men did not notice her. So far as men were concerned, Janice was invisible - so plain as to be erotically unuseful, her intellect not strident nor colourful enough to be considered a threat. Apart from the corner shop they left her alone and unremarked, for which she was content, and she hoped it would ever more be so. Until her Quest and Crusade, of course; when they were completed, things would have to be different. Meanwhile she had her books and her beige, beige world. And that was all she sought.
, It had, however, not always been
like that...
Chapter Three
M
RS Gentle, deceased, had nothing to thank men for. In her opinion she had done her woman's duty by life and she had not received her due. Mr Gentle had absconded when Janice was a little thing in plaits and had broken his wife's nose into the bargain. Mrs Gentle wore this broken nose as the martyrs of old wore their whip marks, for until its receipt she had been a proud and orderly woman prepared to accept and forgive much for the cause of neighbourly propriety. She had received it standing in the street in her nightclothes, clutching four-year-old Janice's hand while the four-year-old clutched her teddy. Mrs Gentle had been patiently waiting for the episode within her home to pass and thought the midnight street was the safest place to wait while Mr Gentle rampaged. So long as they kept quiet no one would know. Janice, whose dressing-gown and pyjamas did not keep the cold away, began to sob and wish to be held where the warmth would feel nice. Mrs Gentle, who had kept her step whitened and her privet tidy and whose nets had never let her down, felt this was the very last straw. 'Eat this and shut up,' she said, handing the child a sweet that happened to be in her raincoat pocket. It was a Clarnico toffee and its sugary smoothness did the trick. Somehow Janice felt warm again.
Mr Gentle, spotting his wife and child from the upstairs bedroom where he was breaking the last of Mrs Gentle's china fancies, and seeing that this pleasurable activity was coming to an end, ran down the stairs, out into the street, and brought his fist into an equally satisfying collision with the cartilage of his wife's nose. The child howled afresh, her mouth now empty, and blood dripped on to her teddy bear. Mrs Gentle, caught off guard and momentarily released from her dignity, yelled for pity, yelled for vengeance and yelled for succour. Neither of the first two was available and the third came late, for the Gentle household lived in one of those polite streets where if you saw someone fall down you looked away, allowing time for them to get up again lest they be embarrassed by your noticing. Mr Gentle ran off into the night, and when succour did eventually come, it provided a sugar lump for the sobbing Janice, as well as strong, sweet tea for her mother. The sugar lump had the same pleasing effect on little Janice as the Clarnico toffee had done and she was soon very soundly asleep.
There were several incidents in that house in the years that followed, though Mr Gentle did not officially return. But no matter what he occasioned on his brief revisitings, Mrs Gentle never again ran out into the street. On the whole the humiliation of sharing her plight with her neighbours was worse than bearing it alone, and she kept herself to herself after that.
On Janice's seventh birthday Mr Gentle made his last appearance. He left the house with pieces of birthday cake embedded in his hair and cuts to his face from the broken window through which he had thrown it. His departure was rapidly followed by an hysterical line of seven-year-olds who had witnessed whatever it was that had happened. Janice stood on a chair at the front-room window watching them go. Then she helped her mother pick up the broken china and apply Elastoplasts, and took her teddy to bed, along with a large chunk of the iced cake, from which she picked clean the garden detritus before chewing her way slowly through it. They did not entertain again after that. Although the years rolled by with no more visits by Mr Gentle, the safest way forward seemed to be to stay self-contained and to live orderly, quiet lives. And they remained in that house, in that street, since that was what you did.
When Janice Gentle began growing hair and curves and found herself crying a great deal for no reason in particular, Mrs Gentle told her to watch out. 'You keep away from men, my girl,' she said, sha
king her moppet to give emphasis, and she pointed at her splayed nose. 'Look at what I got. Never trust any of them and if you do, well .. .' - she shook her head this time instead of the mop — 'just make sure you get your fist in first.'
So Janice, being an obedient sort of a girl, obeyed and steered clear of the opposite sex. She became academic, a bit of a blue stocking, tipped by her teachers for great heights, Cambridge, should she choose, for the world in which she immersed herself was the world of six, seven, eight hundred years ago. The change from a land to a money economy, the demise of the feudal system, the growth of town and city, increasing secularization, the birth of a middle class . . . She read all she could of the medieval romances. She loved the prose and the poetry and the clear ideas expressed of right and wrong. Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, Piers the Ploughman's search for the ultimate truth in Langland's everyday setting, Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Christine de Pisan who wrote with such beguiling simplicity and yet was mistress of the art of the court as well as mistress of her own life by virtue of her pen. L'amour courtois, from its roots in Provence to its spread throughout Europe, fascinated and delighted Janice both for the lyricism it inspired and for its ideals: love should be a thing freely sought and freely given; marriage is no excuse for not loving. Chivalric love, the highest achievement. This was the core of it. And out of this was spawned a great literature and art, a philosophy with rules and theories in which no woman was demeaned nor lover spurned if he obeyed them. Only through love, said the poetry of the troubadours, can man become virtuous or noble, and indeed - as Janice delighted to discover - even the very principles of Provencal grammar and metre were based upon the noble laws of love.