She did not have to think of duty, not any more. Duty. Stern daughter of the voice of God, William used to say. When he was sitting doing something pleasant and had to get up and do something useful. Stern daughter of the voice of God. She used to laugh, as though it was funny. Once she said, What does it mean, actually?
It’s Wordsworth, he said, distracted.
Yes, but what is it?
Oh, ‘Ode to Duty’, I think. A very long and almost impossible poem about duty. You know how Wordsworth can be sometimes. Prosing on. But I like the idea of its being not just the daughter but the stern daughter, and not of God but his voice.
But you don’t believe in God, she said.
Ah, but I believe in the words, he replied.
William’s duty: going from one pleasant thing to another. From one loving woman to another.
Ferdie, who was his father’s son and once she’d loved him for that and now didn’t any the less because of it, had said to Erin the other night, The unexamined life is not worth living, you know. Socrates said that, and I think it is still a good idea.
But since that woman had come there was altogether too much examining. Pointless examining, since it ran round and round and round. Coiling round her and William who was dead and couldn’t explain anything, and had he not been wouldn’t have anyway. Never apologise, never explain was a kind of mantra of his. Lynette would say, Oh, I’m so sorry, and mean it, but often it would be a frivolous thing she was sorry about, and William would say sternly, Never apologise, never explain. She’d asked him who said that, too, and he said he thought it was John Wayne in a movie, but it was just one of those things, everyone knew it. John Wayne, she said, astonished, and William said, Well, my dear, I am catholic in my tastes, and she had to think about that because she knew he wasn’t at all religious, but she suspected there was more to it than that. But then she often couldn’t follow his sayings. Not just the old-fashioned language, often the whole point escaped her. Not the not-apologising, of course; maybe being John Wayne it spoke her language. She wondered if he’d apologised to Helen, or explained. Neither would have worked, but she supposed at that scale of things he must have tried. Amazing how little thought she’d given to Helen, at the time. William had filled her mind, there wasn’t room for anything else. They’d gone to the south of France for their honeymoon. He’d asked, and that’s what she said she wanted. They’d gone to a stone house on the edge of an old village. The house had semi-cylindrical terracotta tiles, and William explained how this was a sign of the south; further north the roofs were covered in slate, or slices of stone, they crouched into the hillsides as though going back to the original earth they came from, he said. Trying to turn their backs to the bitter winds. Their house belonged to English people and was luxurious, with central heating and hot running water and a big downy bed. The other houses in the village were generally not like that but the locals didn’t seem to hold the luxury against them. They hadn’t had time to get sick of the English coming in and taking over then. William talked to them, and spent money in the small shops. People enjoyed telling him things.
The village was on a hill with a small ruined castle on top. Their house was on the edge of the village, so they looked over sloping rows of ancient olive trees. They sat on the terrace at the back (the front door opened on to the street) and drank pastis, which Lynette quite quickly learned to like, Tastes like liquorice, she said, and William talked about olive trees. Light lives in olive trees, he said. See how the blades of the leaves turn and shake silver. Shake: that’s a Gerard Manley Hopkins word, but I don’t know that he ever saw olives. That light—it’s the light that Socrates saw, and Demeter and Persephone. And now we are seeing it too. Persephone, who ate just a few seeds of pomegranate and so had to stay part of the year in the underworld with her kidnapper, Hades. And so we have winter. Summer and the crops grow, winter they lie dormant, when Persephone is off in hell with Hades.
Lynette sat and listened to him. It was the image of their marriage: William talking, Lynette listening.
They’re a long-term proposition, olives, he said. If you want to hurt your enemy, destroy his olives. It will take him many years to recover. A wheat crop is a year, but an olive is seven, and then you are barely starting.
Oh, he was a great imparter of information, was William. He loved telling people things. When she met Jack she guessed it was because William was pleased to have learned them, that he very easily might not have, that he had taken time and trouble to know things, not just getting his education at university but keeping it up, and he never lost his delight in his knowledge. Jack never had been interested in learning, had stayed the boy they’d both been once. Jack. No, don’t go there. She didn’t want Jack to be a disappointment.
In the foreground were the olive groves. In the distance the Mont St-Victoire. When they drove around, William sought out Cézanne paintings and got pleasure from looking at their mountain and remembering his. When we get a bob or two we’ll buy a Cézanne of the Mont St-Victoire, William said, but of course they never did get that kind of money.
Lynette thought of all the lovemaking they did on that trip. Lovemaking, having sex, coition. A little coition before breakfast, William would say. A morning glory. Up and down the house, not just in bed. All through the day. Once on the terrace, after dinner, in a black velvet night, Lynette leaning on the stone wall and looking over the rows of invisible olives to where she knew the mountain to be, saying, We can’t, someone will see us, and William, No, my Linnet, it’s dark and they are all in bed, look, no lights, and she, Yes, they’re in their bedrooms with the lights off watching us through the gap in the shutters; and all the time William sliding under her skirt, slipping down her knickers, doing it hardly moving, and her making no sound but a gasp at the end. Of course, that’s what a honeymoon is; William murmuring lune de miel at the shopkeepers and the solid peasanty women smiling in complicity. Lunes de miel, funny to see it so literal, said William; honeymoons don’t last. Ours will, said Lynette, we will never give this up.
They came home, and bought their house, renovated it, extended it, Erin was born, and no more sex up and down the house at all hours. Satisfactorily often and happily in bed, so she thought, but now she wondered, looking back, if that had been enough for William. She’d thought it to be growing up, growing into a relationship, but maybe ought to have read more warning into her position as the third Mrs Cecil. Not that she even now was supposing he had plans to make Barbara the fourth. But then the thought came: she hadn’t been thinking of marrying him when she began fucking him on the boardroom kitchen floor. Maybe he was getting round to marrying Barbara. She’d thought he was happy, that they both were, that life was good, fruitful and flourishing (as she wrote on Christmas cards her wishes for friends’ new years), that there was even a kind of perfection in the pattern of her days.
In those advice-to-the-lovelorn columns it always said that a spouse straying was the fault of both parties in the couple. Had it been Helen’s, as well as William’s? Had it been Lynette’s fault that William had sought out Barbara (or been sought out by her)? If she’d maintained that sex up and down the house would he not have done it? It seemed a kind of frenzied mad thing for a wife to be doing to keep her husband amused, but maybe that was what William needed. The thought that he might have been on his way to marrying Barbara suddenly made her think, lucky he died, spared us all that mess. A wicked thought, but satisfying.
In that honeymoon village was a small hardware and kitchen shop. It sold Laguiole knives, and two-handled rocking choppers, saucepans, gratin dishes, brown earthenware pots and white Pillivuyt porcelain. The shelves seemed sparse and dusty and the old lady who kept it spent most of her time in the kitchen at the back, but it was surprising what could be found there. Lynette bought some curious things to take home for her catering business. That was when she had the idea of opening her Batterie de Cuisine, as a good thing to do when she got tired of the catering. Which she did quite soon,
when she realised what her working hours could do to her evenings with William. But then she had Erin and everything went on hold for a while. William said his wife didn’t need to work, and she was happy with that, until Erin went to kindergarten. Then Janice was keen, so the two of them started the shop. Angus and Janice broke up, so Janice had more time. But it was mainly Lynette’s, her planning over the years when Erin was a baby; Janice went along. Maybe Janice would buy her out, run the shop for herself. Lynette couldn’t see it. But then, she said to herself, how good am I at understanding people? But Janice did depend on her, worked best when she did what Lynette planned. Perhaps Janice could get another partner.
Am I really going to get rid of the shop? she asked herself. Who knows. But I am not having a funeral. The firmness of that thought comforted her, and she turned over and slept the deep sleep that had eluded her all the nights since William died.
When she woke it was dim outside, not still but again. She had slept solidly through the lifting of the fog and the brief cold shining of the sun. Now it was twilight. The house seemed not so much quiet as muted. She went downstairs: nobody in the kitchen. She looked in her study; there was Aurora, asleep under the rug. She found Ferdie in William’s study, sitting at the laptop. He looked furtive, she thought, closed the lid when he saw her. Something made her go over and lift it back up again. She saw creatures with enormous penises pointing to the sky. They had hairy haunches with cloven hooves and neat little horns on their curly-bearded heads. The screen flipped over into pictures of women impaled on these giant penises, frolicking in the air.
I can’t get rid of them, said Ferdie. I think they’re gone, then they come back. Each time it seems worse than the last.
But where do they come from? Lynette was staring at scenes of orgies.
I don’t know. They just came. Maybe I touched something, I can’t tell.
William, said Lynette.
I don’t know, I don’t understand.
Things like that don’t just turn up. They have to be got in the first place.
I do know that pornography sites draw you in, deeper and deeper, you can’t get out.
Only when you’ve made the first move. They don’t reach out and get you. Oh, it’s all shit, all shit. That’s all it is.
No, said Ferdie, only bits are shit. Remember the bits that aren’t. William loved you. You have to hang on to that. I knew it. You knew it. He knew it.
Yes, but look at this. The screen kept jumping into yet more orgiastic scenes, which had nothing to do with satyrs and nymphs, though it might have been huge fat rolling Bacchanalian women doing things with bananas. Ferdie found himself thinking helplessly and madly that surely bananas were anachronistic in these scenes.
He didn’t need this, Lynette said, and suddenly with a violent hand swept the little laptop off the desk. It flew through the air and landed on the head of one of those bronze replica statues of Hermes that people used to buy in Pompeii and stand on their hearths.
It didn’t explode, or fizz into sparks, or anything like that, but it did crack apart and the screen went grey. Lynette stood looking at it, her hand over her mouth, her eyes like a guilty child’s. On the head of Hermes. How did I do it? My aim is never so accurate.
When she turned to Ferdie she smiled. Guiltily at first. He smiled too. Then in a moment they were both laughing, leaning over, clutching themselves, gasping. They’d stop, look at one another, start again. Gales, paroxysms, weeping furies of laughter. Till they were too weak to do anything but flop back in chairs.
Well, said Lynette. Drastic situations need drastic actions. Am I still channelling William? Anyway, that’s got rid of them.
And the laptop?
Well? I’ve got one, Erin’s got one. We don’t need it.
I suppose it’s a clean break, said Ferdie. I didn’t mean you to see that. I was looking to see if there was anything that mattered.
We’ll never know. And it will never matter. Except we’ll know that your father and my husband used to look at pretty nasty pornography.
Maybe. It’s sad if he did. But maybe it wasn’t anything to do with him. We did wonder, said Ferdie, if maybe William knew I was doing my thesis on Pan and was looking him up. He did like to know about things, you know that. And by accident got into this.
You’re a sweet boy, Ferdie.
Lynette scrabbled together the pieces of computer and put them in the wastepaper basket, a kind of tall square box of tooled Florentine leather. I quite hate this room, she said. She squeezed her lips in a tight line. I’m going to turn it into a study for Erin. Get rid of all this gentleman’s den crap. Erin, she said. Is she back from school?
She didn’t go. She’s in bed, asleep. I think.
Lynette felt sick. She’d forgotten about Erin. All that examining, of honeymoons and new babies and fruitful lives, of marriages with not enough sex for greedy husbands, and she hadn’t once thought of Erin today.
She’s okay. I reckon she needed to sleep.
And what about Aurora?
She said something about a dead baby.
What? Lynette thought, a day in bed and the world goes mad. Though parts of it have been mad for a long time. Me sleeping didn’t have anything to do with William and pornography. Clay feet, she thought. Clay dick, more like. I can’t begin to understand it, she thought, but women never can, it’s a cliché that women can’t understand men’s capacity for betrayal.
She went back upstairs. Erin was sleeping beautifully, lightly, on her side, her lips slightly parted. Lynette couldn’t bring herself to wake her. Ferdie’s right, she thought. Wise boy. She went back down. Aurora was creeping groggily into the kitchen. She yawned. I thought I heard a joke. Insane laughing. What’s the time? she asked, looking at the station clock on the wall. That late. I need a drink, now I’m not pregnant any more.
Lynette got one of the bottles of sauvignon blanc out of the fridge, and two of the tall-stemmed glasses.
Aurora said, Got any vodka? A good slug. A double or even a triple.
Lynette made a long drink with lime and soda and a lot of ice. What’s all this about? she said.
Aurora took a luxurious gulp. The baby’s dead, she said.
I didn’t even know . . .
Nobody did. Not me either. I was hoping I might be. I was putting off doing the test. The longer the safer, I thought.
So how . . .?
Blood. A bloody great smear of blood.
I see. Yes.
The thing is, it was the last egg. The last of my eggs and Cezary’s sperm. They tried to do a few but only a couple took and then only one was viable. They can tell, you know. Now I’ll have to start all over again from scratch. She drank more vodka. She sighed. Maybe it’s all too hard.
Ferdie came into the room carrying the Florentine wastepaper basket. Aurora’s eyes goggled when she saw its contents.
The pornographic laptop is no more, intoned Ferdie.
Aurora began to laugh, and that made her hiccup, and then she sobbed. I hate men who need pornography, she said.
Do you hate William? asked Ferdie.
Yes! In that way I do. How could he do that to us?
I suppose we should all live our lives as though we were going to die in a minute, said Ferdie. Keep them in perfect order. No secrets. Or else all safely hidden forever.
Lynette shuddered. Nobody could be that perfect.
JANICE GOES OUT FOR LUNCH
Janice had got into the habit of having lunch with Angus every few months. She’d gone from wanting to kill him to being quite happy to talk to him. This was the idea of the amicable divorce, and though she hadn’t given up saying evil things about his behaviour she wanted to stay on civil terms. There were the children, for one thing. And then she liked to keep an eye on how matters were going with him. She enjoyed wondering if the new wife were causing trouble. Once she wanted to kill her too; now she looked on with only faintly malicious amusement.
And then there was the gossip, whic
h Angus was good at. On this occasion she was finding out the story of Barbara. She knew that Lynette didn’t know anything about Barbara. In their brief encounter she’d perceived her as a demon who had stolen William away. She didn’t think of her as anything but a vast dark cloudy shape which had destroyed her happiness. And now was stopping her grieving for her husband as a loved wife should. That was what she said to Janice, telling her in all its vividness about William’s betrayal with this Barbara person.
Janice began by making barbed remarks about women getting their hooks into other people’s husbands.
What? said Angus. I knew she was a client of his.
She was having an affair with him, you mean.
Well, he didn’t tell me about that. I knew why she was seeing him.
He told her about the little girl being killed on a school excursion, the possibility of suing, the breakdown of the marriage, and the firm, William, handling the divorce.
Oh, said Janice. The account of the child’s death upset her. Oh, she said, and paid that attention that mothers do to the deaths of other women’s children, the horror, the fear, the recognition that there can be no worse thing, and then the demeaning gratitude that it hasn’t happened to them.
Oh, she said again, and was silent. Well, I suppose she didn’t much care what she did after that.
Nothing to lose, you reckon.
You can’t condone it, but you can understand it. What? Oh, just an ordinary old affair. Sleeping with him on a regular basis. But very contained, it seems. No suggestion of breaking up a marriage. Of course that’s what they all say at the beginning. And Lynette’s very upset. She takes it as a sure sign that he didn’t love her.
But that’s silly . . .
Yes, but she’s in a state anyway. Perhaps she’ll see things more clearly when she feels better. The woman says they weren’t supposed to be in love but that now she realises that she did love him.
Goodbye Sweetheart Page 18