by Mavis Cheek
On the answerphone there was a message from a Gerald she had met with Becky at that wine bar last week. Oh, why not? she thought, but with little conviction.
*
Janice climbed the stairs. She felt philosophical about their steepness and the fact that Sylvia Perth lived - lived? - right at the top. What pilgrim, what traveller after redemption ever had it easy? She puffed on.
She thought of Christine with her pen, cold within thick winter walls, writing into the night in the meagre light of too few candles.
Langland, storm-blasted on a pastureside, distilling poetry and morality from the harshness . . . Do well, Do better, Do best. 'Contrition is on his back asleep and dreaming,' Peace said. 'Then by Christ! I will become a pilgrim and walk to the ends of the earth to find an honest livelihood .. .'
An honest livelihood? Janice Gentle strove upwards though her heart was pumping and her inner thighs were raw with chafing. Would that were her journey's end. As it was - and at best - she would switch off Sylvia. And at worst? She shuddered. She could not think beyond the switching off of her agent's voice.
When the world seems to scorn and reject you, take the courage of Christine de Pisan's fifth spear, the one wielded by Lady Hope, who is loved by Patience and protected by the shield of Faith, she told herself.
Above her she heard footsteps, the slam of a door, the rattle and crash of breaking botdes as if scattered by flailing feet. A yoghurt pot, cracked side dripping, came bouncing down the stairs. She stopped. The footsteps descended, bringing with them an eddy of ire. Janice pressed herself into the wall as a young woman appeared, running and muttering like a well-dressed White Rabbit. 'Now I'm late. Now I'm late.' And then, 'Why me?' She stopped, wild-eyed, to ask, 'He's in Hong Kong — what am I doing here?'
Janice shook her head, trying to look like an interested party.
'Haven't J got a job to do? Would he come and clean my sink?' The young woman suddenly looked at her hands. Despite her immaculate dress, she was wearing a bright yellow pair of rubber gloves. She stared at them as if she were staring at blood. 'Look at these,' she said.
Janice obliged.
The young woman ripped one off with a loud and rubbery smacking sound, throwing it carelessly over her shoulder like a Russian on party night. 'I ask you. Would he come to my flat and do that for me? Would he? Would sodding Jeremy do that}1 With the stylishness of a mannequin she peeled the remaining glove off slowly and let it fall, plop, on to the floor. And with a click of her sparkling high heels, she turned the corner below, and vanished.
Janice thought of the beautiful Dermot Poll, and she wondered, sadly, if he had a sink. And if he did have a sink, she wondered if he cleaned it himself, and if he didn't clean it himself, did he have anyone who cleaned it for him? It could, were things different, have been her . ..
She picked up the yellow gloves. It was all so unsatisfactorily topsy-turvy. As if she had been living inside out and needed righting.
'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day,' said the White Queen. 'It must come sometimes to "jam to-day",' Alice objected. 'No, it can't. .. It's Jam every other day: today isn't any other day, you know.' 'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!' 'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'It always makes one a little giddy at first -'
So thought Janice, coming upon the mess and mayhem. She dropped the yellow gloves near by and tapped at a broken milk bottle with her heel. A note rolled over, saying 'Recommence delivery from today.'
She took several deep breaths, swapped her pilgrim's wimple for the braveness of a crusader's shield, and continued towards Sylvia Perth's front door.
Chapter Sixteen
G
RETCHEN O'Dowd watched and listened in wonder as Rohanne Bulbecker infiltrated the solicitor's office. She told such enormous lies that Gretchen half expected the floor to swallow them both up - but it stayed in place. 'Stinking fish,' said Rohanne finally to the man in the pinstriped suit. 'You lawyers have colluded in stinking fish, and I intend to expose it. Now, shall we talk?' The man, who had hitherto suggested that they make an appointment some time next week, blinked once, retained his expression of blank distaste and led them into his office. 'I can give you precisely five minutes,' he said. Rohanne proceeded to lay out on the desk before him a number of documents and to point to their relevant parts. The five minutes passed unremarked and led into ten and then an hour. The pinstriped man had coloured slightly but remained calm as clay. Rohanne called for tea, which came in little bone-china cups, and she was pleased to note that the solicitor's cup tinkled a little as he replaced it in its saucer.
*
Derek was holding the Little Blonde Secretary's legs up in the air after intercourse. Even he, not one to make judgements on such matters, found these gymnastics (of a purely obstetric nature) deflationary. Nowadays she was always getting him into bed with her and going at him in a variety of ways that he didn't know she knew and he didn't think she knew she knew, either, until recently.
They were trying to get pregnant.
'It's time to start a family,' she had said, and though she had taken out her cap recently she still didn't feel pregnant at all. Well might that magazine article say don't worry but she did. And she felt that a firm hand was needed. Derek was getting altogether too tired, what with the garden fence and visiting the pub. He needed to put his heart and soul into it.
'You need to put your heart and soul into it, Derek,' she said. 'And eat more salad.'
He could only nod when she said this, since his mouth was full of vitamin pills and she was waiting to see him down his glass of SuperMalt.
The magazine had been very helpful. It didn't hurt any man to take good care of himself, it said, but it always seemed to fall to women to do the organizing. Very true. Look at her dad. Look at Derek. Look at the Boss Masculine.
At work she had smiled up at this latter as he passed, discreetly hiding the magazine. The Boss Masculine stopped. He did not think he had seen a smile like that for weeks. And he was not looking forward to the conference in Birmingham, either. Women's smiles were nice. They reminded him that he was (despite her catheters and her scar tissue) still a man. How nice it would be just to have someone with whom to talk over the day's business while eating a civilized meal - a female voice, a female presence, a female smile . . .
He smiled back at the Little Blonde Secretary Bird. 'Would you be able to come to the conference with me? I could do with your help . . .'
She remembered the deferential tone of his voice fondly as she watched her husband at his health-giving ritual.
'So, Derek, I checked my calendar and the conference was in my' - she lowered her voice ~ 'safe period. Then I rang you. And you said yes . . .'
Derek, still swallowing, thought he would just like to have seen her if he'd tried to say no.
'And do you know what he said then?'
Derek shook his head.
'He said that if I'd been his wife he wouldn't have let me out of his sight for a moment.'
'Well you're not,’ said Derek. 'You're mine. And I will.'
If the Little Blonde Secretary Bird thought there was something wrong with this, she could not quite put her finger on it, and she satisfied the disquiet by remembering how the Boss Masculine had compared her blushes to a little pair of roses ... If only his wife looked after him better, he could be very presentable.
She took out her jar of stretch-mark cream and sniffed it. It smelled wholesome. Placing it next to Getting Pregnant, Staying Pregnant and The Pregnant Father, she fixed Derek with a look of firm intent. He looked back at her with as much fervour as he could muster, given the ferrous taste in his mouth. If he could just stop taking the iron he'd be grateful.
But Derek was prepared to look on the bright side. The prospect of starting a family had a positive spin-off. For, looking around the house one quiet weekend, he had realized that there was nothing left to do (the district surv
eyor still refused planning permission for the loft - alas, it would always be the wrong height) and his heart had grown heavy. The decorations were in superb condition, more or less brand new, and even he — who loved the feel of the paintbrush, the slither of the paste - could think of nothing else . . . But now, suddenly, he had a reprieve. If they were going to have a baby, then they would need a nursery . . . He had looked up 'Nursery' in his DIY manual, measured up what he might need, and set off for B&Q.
Such a lot of work, he had thought happily, pushing his trolley through the doors. Shelving, nappy-changing bench, small wardrobe, intercom. The music smoothed his way around the aisles and he fingered the pine and the melamine lovingly. He was away for quite a long time. When he returned to the house, he wondered if somebody had died while he was away. The front-room curtains were drawn against the sunshine (it was 2.26 p.m. on a Sunday), and, as he let himself into the hall, whistiing, his nose twitched at the pungent assault. Rich. Very rich. He nearly choked. Sort of musky and smoky at the same time.
'Hallo,' he called, putting down the plastic bag of fixings that had been on offer and might come in useful. 'Hallo?'
'In here,' called a strange voice from the front room. A throaty voice, deep, slow, female - something akin to the exotic scent pervading the house.
He pushed open the door and entered their living-room to find her lying on the sofa. The fire was lit (gas-coal, he thought in passing, state of the art), the curtains drawn, candles alight, a botde of wine and two glasses on the middle-sized occasional table. And she - he blinked - she was lying back, absolutely stark naked, swathed in whirls of smoke. For a moment he thought she had taken up pipe-smoking or something, so prevalent were the bluey wreaths, but — and much relieved — he saw that there were a couple of joss-sticks burning in a vase on the mantelpiece.
He gulped and he felt a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He gave a nervous smile, suddenly aware of his teeth, which would not retract, and he wondered if she had gone mad, got drunk or - or what?
'Hi,' he said, trying to sound casual. 'Sorry I was so long. Quite a queue. Found the butterfly bolts and the -'
And then he could not go on. She was smiling at him in a way he had never seen, not even in their six months of courting and during all the fumbling and panting in the back of the Escort and what not; she was smiling like something out of one of those magazines. She was smiling like those fantasies of his that surfaced now and then, and she was even - he blinked - wearing high heels. Not a stitch on, lying across the settee sporting (no other word for it) white stilettos.
And this is my wife, he said to himself.
And further, he thought, this is my wife with whom I have not been doing much of this sort of thing recently, and certainly not like this ever... In the pub last night, when Ken and the others had talked about garden fencing and keeping it up, someone had cracked a joke about keeping it up in other areas. He, snorting lasciviously with the rest of them, found himself wondering when the last time he had kept it up in that way had been: weeks, he thought. And now this. ..
'Why don't you come and sit down and take off your clothes, too?' she said sweetly. 'And I'll pour us a nice glass of wine. We can, well . . .' - she patted the settee next to her - 'we can' - she fluttered her eyelashes coyly - 'you know' - flutter, flutter - 'all afternoon.'
He dismissed the sinking feeling this suggestion occasioned, put aside the tantalization of the B&Q items that throbbed in the hall, and began unbuttoning his shirt in much the same way he would have done if she had told him she wanted it off for washing purposes. She put out her little hand and pulled him on to the settee. He sat very heavily, pushed off his shoes, kept his head down, and went on unbuttoning. She handed him a glass, delicately pushed his hands away from his shirt, and continued the unbuttoning herself. He sipped the wine and stared. This was his wife, he had to remind himself, this was his wife behaving like a . . . well ... He drank deeply, trying to keep a smile on his face to match her smile, and his eyes met with hers, which never wavered. Perhaps it was his wedding anniversary? No, it couldn't be that, because, despite never quite remembering the date, he did always remember that they married in the autumn; he had been worried about the leaves in the gutter of the new house, so he was sure of that.
The promise she exuded was outrageous. She began running her fingertips up and down his bare breastbone. She reached for the buckle of his belt and pulled it undone. Some sixth sense of modesty prevailed and he dispensed with his trousers and undergarments himself.
'Socks, Derek,' she said, in a tone which was comfortingly familiar. But all too soon it was replaced with that same, throaty timbre.
He finished his glass and she took it from him, winding her body around his, warm, scented, yielding. Everything a man could possibly want. Except that this was his wife and he was not a man - he was Derek. She had never behaved like this before. Why was she doing it now? What was expected of him? The erection that had begun to creep up on him despite himself went down again abruptly. He put a cushion there so that she could not see, but she was having none of it. . .
'Naughty, naughty,' she said, pulling the cushion away. She stared. 'Oh dear1 she said childishly. 'Naughty, naughty, naughty . . .' And with amazing expertise, hitherto only experienced in his dreams, she bent her head down between his legs.
He was just going into stage three of ecstasy, that stage prior to explosion, when, as suddenly as it had arrived there, she took her mouth away and lay back.
'Do it to me now, Derek,' she said, eyeing him like a blonde pussy-cat, and there was a distinct edge of command about it. He felt more comfortable with that, much more at home. Though, suddenly desperate, he decided to be a bit careful, just to make quite sure of what she meant. ..
'What.. . um . . . exactly . .. urn . . . did you have in mind?'
'Go on, Derek,' she said, a trifle impatiently, and then, as if remembering, she flung her arms in total abandon above her head and pouted.
There was no mistaking what was required. He decided not to think any more, merely to act. He jumped on top of her. He tried to forget that this . . . um . . . whore — ooh, aah, eeh — beneath him was actually his lawful, wedded wife — the woman he had been in Sainsbury's with yesterday morning and who had told him it was about time he knew where the margarine spreads were kept . . . He managed to forget the polyunsaturateds and her with her tartan shopper and replace them with this erotic creature instead. He held on to that, sustained it - and the joy of spasm was his.
He lay back and looked at her. He expected - what? He was unsure. They had never done it like this before and usually in bed it was straightforward. You just fell asleep. But on a Sunday afternoon, in the front room with the curtains drawn - well, much as he would like to have a little doze, it seemed wrong. Anyway, he had loads of things to be getting on with before beginning on the spare room - buckets to clean, brushes to assess, perhaps another shelf in the cellar, screws to sort. Screws ...? He looked at his wife and wondered how long he should lie there before he could decently get up. He rather hoped she would give him the all-clear in a minute.
'Get off, please, Derek,' she said, and was wriggling out from beneath him.
He complied and sat up. He was about to apologize for squashing her when the words tucked themselves back behind his teeth. If what had just happened was bizarre, it was as nothing to what was going on now. Nervously he reached for the cushion she had tossed aside earlier, and he held it to his nakedness. What on earth was she doing? Having a fit, by the look of it. She had suddenly rolled away from him, lifted her legs in the air and begun bicycling and scissoring like a US Marine in training. He clutched the cushion even tighter and wondered if he ought to restrain her in some way.
'Hold my ankles,' she puffed.
Tentatively he reached out with one hand and circled one of her legs.
'Both hands, Derek,' she said, already out of breath. 'Put that cushion down.'
Reluctantly he did so and clasped
both her ankles.
'Pull me up tightly so my legs point at the ceiling,' she said.
He did so. He swallowed. He needed an answer and he was afraid to ask.
'If you do this,' she said, cycling some more and going disturbingly red in the face, 'the ... er . . . stuff . . . goes all the way down.' She paused, thinking. 'Or do I mean up?'
Derek remained mute. It really did seem the safest choice.
'You go and make a cup of tea,' she said, 'I've got to stay like this for a bit longer.' She was grimacing and had turned a dangerous shade of pink.
He put out his hand to touch her breast, suddenly realizing he had not got to them in all the goings-on.
She batted his hand away lightly but firmly. 'Don't,' she said. 'Or you'll knock me over.'
He felt on safer ground after that. On the way out to the kitchen he started whistling, and, retrieving his plastic bag from the hall, began unpacking the interesting contents while the kettle boiled. Whatever was going on, some things were secure. No doubt she'd explain it all to him in due course; in the meantime, he wondered, where were those gingernuts.
Nowadays he had grown used to the ankle-holding. What he hadn't quite got used to was the scene-setting she went in for. All sorts of different variations and what she called 'games, Derek' -which were certainly nothing like those outdoor activities of his schooldays. He was beginning to feel a teeny bit, well, used, like he was a unit of production, but on the other hand it kept her happy. When she undertook something, she undertook to do it perfectly - 'one hundred per cent, Derek' - and he was quite sure that this would extend to their having children. He could follow her confidently along that path. He had to follow her confidently along that path, because if he didn't, she could make life unbearable. At least she had gone mercifully quiet about the Vent-Axia, because he had decided it was something worth taking a stand over. When an extractor fan went in as perfectly as that one, you didn't go taking it out in a hurry . . .