Varying Degrees of Hopelessness
Page 12
But I wept partly from joy.
He would surely soon be here.
Perhaps he would just jump on a plane and come.
But then I worried about what would happen if he did come back to me.
The prospect of giving up the art of the unrequited passion was a daunting one.
I did not know if I could ever countenance any great amount of body contact either.
My person had always been inviolable.
The prospect of revealing to Robert all my physical defects was another daunting prospect.
The weird construction of my belly-button.
It was too embarrassing to contemplate.
Instead, I tried to concentrate on practicalities.
I reckoned my letter had a 70% chance of reaching Robert.
There was at least a 5% chance of its falling behind something at the Post Office and not getting to him for thirty years.
There was perhaps a 60-65% chance of its reaching him before he married that girl.
And then there was a 20% chance that he would want to come to ME.
Maybe 10%.
All in all, I estimated that there was about a 2% probability that he loved me, in the way that I loved him.
I wanted an equal relationship of that sort.
While I waited in limbo for my love, it was necessary to make interim plans.
Having completed her B.A. Honours degree in the History of Art, Pol was ready to move on.
Having been intensely miserable for some months, I had failed my finals.
So, without a degree, and without my love, it was now incumbent upon me to move out of Pol’s flat.
We were not on particularly amiable terms by this time, although she had taken a kind interest in my decision to write to Robert.
Pol was going to live in Norfolk by the sea.
No doubt her layers of fat would be handy there against the east winds.
My mother and Alan, my step-father, did not seem overly keen to have me move in with them.
Ever since their fateful trip to Malta, they had suffered a revitalization of their sex life.
Disgusting though it may seem.
My mother now considered herself a liberated and sensual woman.
Awakened.
One night in Malta she was lying on a bed, while Alan was … doing his business.
She was watching a fan on the ceiling turning round and round.
This in some way electrified her.
In some way that I really did not wish to hear about.
At any rate, they now did not welcome intruders.
There was no place for me there.
Our Heroine’s End
My hopes of making a fortune from that ‘Chardin’ relief painting had been dashed.
There was no sign of the thing in Dr Cragshaw’s office.
I could not consult him about it either, for he had apparently come into some money and moved to Tahiti.
But I was to have a stroke of luck of my own.
One should never give up hope.
You never know what’s round the corner.
Splutters, who had mysteriously passed away just after I had left him in a hotel room one day in a state (as usual) of some dishevelment, had given his country cottage to me in his will.
I was pleased.
More so perhaps than his wife.
I might have exciting excitements there, and learn about horse flesh.
All of Babs Cartwheel’s heroines know about horse flesh.
With my spirits raised to a considerable degree, I set off for Suffolk.
There, Constable landscapes continually unfolded beneath me.
Art was the guiding force in my life.
The best that can be said for nature is that it occasionally looks like a painting.
One day, longing for Robert, I wandered lonely as a Constable cloud into the middle of a field of poppies.
The colour was magnificent.
Especially when compared to my own.
I thought of their little lives, more daring and exciting than my own.
And I fell asleep.
It is hard to die usually, but for me it was easy.
I lay sleeping there in the poppy field.
A rash developed all over my body.
I sank into a coma.
No one came to rouse me.
No one came to rescue me, as I lay in a sea of undulating waves of grass, surging over me.
No one came to cure my coma by talking to me and playing my favourite Frank Sinatra records over and over night and day for months until at last a flickering eyelid or hand movement assured them that my coma was lifting, to their eternal joy.
I have always dreaded depending on the benevolence of others.
It would be terrible to grow old and increasingly allergic to bee-stings.
What if they forgot about your anti-bee-sting injection?
There you’d be, wheeled out in your bath-chair to enjoy the fresh air and bzzz – that would be the end of you.
My end was actually quite quick.
For, along with nuts and bees, I am extremely allergic to poppy seeds.
I had always avoided opium for this reason.
I died as I had lived.
I never gave up hope.
I never settled for second-best.
Even throughout my strange dalliance with Splutters, I had saved myself for Robert.
Our love was divine.
God spared me the knowledge, therefore, that Robert preferred Pol, the devil he knew.
‘Donuts Ex Machina’
Isabel exaggerates. She did not go into a coma. Feeling fine after her sleep in the poppy field, she took a bus to Sudbury to buy some groceries. There she met her father, who ran a donut shop. He instantly recognized her, and was so pleased to see her that he offered her a job as a walking donut, advertising his bakery. From this she derived her idea of Personal Space.
She also learned from him the bare facts of her birth, which clarified many things for her. She realized she was genetically predisposed to Rape Fantasies, and from then on she no longer mourned her body, or doubted its readiness and worthiness for the purposes of love. Her knobbly knees and crooked toes. Her unpredictable hair. They would all do in the end.
Personal Space
I became an artist of Personal Space.
Personal Space is the space that exists between different parts of the body.
For instance, there is a triangular space from one’s ear to one’s shoulder.
There is a much larger expanse of personal territory between the nose and the toes of a standing person.
An intrusion on these spaces by a stranger incurs hostility.
Hence one’s reluctance to travel in crowded trains.
Hence one’s aversion to crowds of all kinds.
And to being touched without due respect for one’s personal spaces.
I became a performance artist, performing demonstrations of my theory of Personal Space.
I was much in demand at the ICA.
Yet Another Ending (In Which Nobody Dies)
Robert returned from America a wiser man, with a tan, and married Isabel. They made a very imperfect couple and lived happily ever after in the country cottage, where Robert wrote books on the sublime and Isabel carried on with her performance art. He never admitted how silly he found her work; she never mentioned how romantic she found his. Her thinness troubled him. Her bones reminded him of death. She was physical evidence for him of the flimsiness and fallibility of the construction that makes a living, breathing, talking, walking companion. While he liked her arms when bent, the abdomen seemed to him a land of no return, a vast plain.
He hitched a dog to his sled and slid out across the Alaskan wilderness, his new-found land. He wondered if he was becoming too involved with people again. He had to draw back a bit. He pulled in the dog-sled and settled down for the night, leaving the great frozen interior bare as far as the eye could see.
They were like two people clinging in the snow. His polar vision chilled her.
He saw Pol whenever he could get away. He needed to be by the sea, near an end to humanity.
The Beginning of the End
And Angelica Lotus had her baby – 10½ lbs – her cushion to lie on and plump up for the rest of her life, her lonely life.
A Note on the Author
Lucy Ellmann’s first novel, Sweet Desserts, was winner of the 1988 Guardian Fiction Prize. She is also the author of Man or Mango?, Dot in the Universe and most recently Mimi.
By the Same Author
Sweet Desserts
Man or Mango?
Dot in the Universe
Mimi
Copyright © 1991 by Lucy Ellmann
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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eISBN 978-1-4088-4073-3
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