The Microcosm

by Maureen Duffy

  ‘To be understood like “Except ye become as little children,” I should think. It was becoming a patriarchy with God the father that did for us.’

  ‘But it still wouldn’t make any difference to you and me would it?’ Stag looked across at Matt. ‘We wouldn’t want to be women even if we could be rulers, generals. At least I wouldn’t because I just can’t think of myself in those terms. I know a lot of people can and are quite happy to do so but I don’t, can’t. I imagine you’re the same. The only thing I would be if I weren’t myself would be a man with a wife and family, a doctor. Not that I worry about it. One of my girlfriends said to me once, ‘The only difference between you and a man is that you wear a deodorant.’ And now men are taking to those so that lets me right in. What about a sweet? I’ll have some cheese I think and let’s get him to bring us some more wine.’

  ‘Try a zabaglione,’ Matt suggested, ‘I think you’d like it.’

  ‘I’ll have one too,’ Irene said.

  ‘Three zabaglione,’ Matt ordered.

  ‘Tre?’ the man said as if the others no longer existed and the two of them had a linguistic conspiracy all their own.

  ‘Si e formaggio per la Senora.’ It seemed ridiculous to call Stag ‘signora’. ‘E un altra bottgilia di vino.’

  The waiter bent forward, whisked away plates and unused cutlery, flicked his serviette over the cloth, smiled at Matt and hurried away to return at once with another bottle which he uncorked with a grand gesture, poured all round, and was gone.

  ‘Cheers again everybody,’ Stag said for the fourth time raising her glass though she and Matt were now drinking most of it between them. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘Just deciding that if you and I weren’t what we are we’d have to change sex altogether. What I look forward to is a time when we can all be what individually we are and nobody gives a damn. They don’t already of course in some groups. I find when people know you first and then you tell them they usually accept it.’

  ‘I don’t think I have any compulsive need to tell anyone.’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t call mine compulsive. It depends how close a relationship you want with someone. If it’s going to be anything above the level of nodding acquaintance, friendship with the usual communication, you’ve either got to get it straightened out or lie or evade, which is a form of lying. Choose either of the last two and there’s the end of the relationship. This is particularly true I find with a man. In fact it’s amazing how much sex or some aspect of it comes into our everyday conversation. All the fertility preoccupations of the days of primitive religion seem to have to be lived out in our own lives all the time now we don’t externalise them anymore.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Irene dipped her spoon into the smooth froth of zabaglione in its glass dish. ‘I noticed it particularly when I was working in offices. The whole of one’s conversation, day after day, was tinged with it whether it was just among the girls or the sex war that lit up every time one of the men came in. I wonder if we really are more conscious of it than our parents’ generation?’

  ‘Oh I think so. You were quite right,’ Rae said turning to Matt, ‘this is very nice. I think it’s all much more open now and there are dozens of reasons why when you think about it; wider education, development of psychology, mass media like television and newspapers, the fact that people have more leisure to think about things and aren’t simply concerned with where the next meal is coming from, oh and many more.’

  ‘It’s a phase we’re going through of course, overawareness like kids who are just finding out how babies get born. It’s funny how we seem to have to go right through the natural process of growth even in the dissemination of new ideas. I’m afraid we’ve got a painful amount of growing up to get through before it all becomes so much a part of common knowledge that no one takes much notice of it anymore and we can get on to the next stage whatever that’s going to be.’ Matt finished his wine.

  ‘Coffee and liqueurs all round?’ Stag asked. ‘I’ll have a brandy I think. What about everyone else?’

  ‘Brandy for me too. Rae?’

  ‘Just coffee.’

  ‘And for me.’

  On the whole he was very glad he wasn’t driving, he decided when the waiter had bowed them out into the night air. He was happy to sit back while Irene took them safely home. The lift shot them straight up to the studio, the bar was opened and music began to spill into the room from a gleaming radiogram. He found his way to the bathroom, slapped his face hard and doused it with cold water to bring back some feeling and then stood for a moment staring at himself completely alienated in the mirror above the washbasin. You fool, he whispered to his image, you bloody drunk fool. Who are you? What are you doing here? Letting yourself be taken up and patronised like some little snotty-nosed, ragged-arsed foundling from the workhouse and only because you’ve no confidence in yourself any longer, because you’ve identified so much with the shades, with the dead that you’re only half-alive yourself. Is this what Steve’s priestly father would mean by suffering? Is this why Steve won’t accept it? The audacity of you to think you could suffer like that, be submerged and still keep your own identity. Don’t you understand, there’s nothing you can do this way because you’re no longer even making real choices, there’s only the negative choice to go on and that’s become mere habit. You listen to your mouth talking and no longer believe it though you know the words are true. But they don’t mean anything, are just thrown off from the top layer of your mind because underneath there’s an emptiness, nothing, a vacant tomb. The dead have possessed you, dead hopes like children in limbo, every vital feeling a ghost of itself; the face of a zombie looking back at you from the glass. He pulled down his bottom lids one after the other and the sockets showed yellow and bloodless. Then he shrugged and grinned at the mask in front of him and turned towards the door.

  As he came through into the studio he saw that Rae and Stag were dancing, pirouetting and swooping as if on a ballroom floor and went to stand before Irene. ‘Would you like to dance?’

  He knew only one way to dance as they danced at the House of Shades, held close, the fingers of one hand slipped through the tie of Irene’s dress behind so that he could let her ride slackly in time to the music or draw her to him their loins moving together. In his present mood any other kind of dance seemed decadent, gutless unless it was done for display as animals and birds do, and the smooth conversation of foxtrot and quickstep irritated him with its urbanities and posturing. ‘To coin an old phrase, what’s a pretty girl doing in a set-up like this?’

  Irene looked up at him and unaccountably her eyes were pricking with tears that made her even more attractive. He watched her hold them back and then he said. ‘What’s for you here? You’re not happy are you?’ He felt drawn to her by their common age-group and by their dependence although his was only temporary. Tomorrow he could drive away if he wanted to. ‘Stuck down here in the country what life do you see? Who do you know that you can really talk to?’

  ‘No one. You’re quite right of course. We don’t see anyone and everything has to be kept quiet because of the business. Kay’s hotels are all in healthy, bracing, narrow-minded places. If the air and food are good and they get good service they’re content to lie there or amble through the countryside or along the front.’

  ‘Prolonging a cocoon life, wrapped in silk and imagining that one distant day they’ll spread their wings and fly away to heaven to be butterfly angels for eternity.’ He had made her laugh and she was even more tempting when she laughed through the tears. He imagined her throat under his lips and shifted his grip on her belt.

  ‘The music’s stopped. Perhaps we ought to.’ He let her go. Finding his way to the bar he poured himself another drink and turned to survey the room. He felt anger against Rae rising in his gorge. Why was he here? They didn’t enjoy the same things, the same people; she would never dance properly with him in public feeling that it left her naked to other people’s eyes he supposed. He knew
he was very drunk but he felt that it was her fault. The weekend away was being a terrible failure. But then isn’t it always when I try to run away from something. This time I’m not going to run. Suppose I got Irene to leave Stag, to come to me, what would it mean? Only another running away that would deceive me for a while til the first flush was over and then I would wake to desolation with nothing solved and another heap of ruins around me. I have to find another answer, there has to be some way out of all this.

  Aware that someone was speaking to him, he focussed his eyes, trying to keep them off the angle of wall and ceiling that wouldn’t stay in place but tried to catch him out by wandering up and down.

  ‘You know I’ve been thinking,’ Stag was saying, ‘perhaps what I need is someone like you to travel about and keep the managers on their toes, particularly if I buy this place in Scotland. It’d be too far for me to get up there very often. You have a car and can drive. You could decide which one you wanted to live in, live as well as I do, everything found, petrol off the hotel account, all your salary to yourself.’

  He wondered for a split moment whether he’d heard right, decided he wasn’t that drunk and said thickly, ‘Thanks but I have a job. Shall we dance?’ He turned to Irene. As he began to move he heard Stag say, ‘Come in here a minute Rae, I’ve got something I think you’d be interested in.’

  When he turned again in the course of the dance he saw that they had disappeared and drawing Irene to him he let himself bury his face in her throat, breathing in her perfume and moving his lips against her skin. ‘Sing to me. I like women to sing to me while we’re dancing.’ She allowed herself to relax and then he felt her body grow taut, attempt to draw away but he held her there guessing that the others had come in to the room, and only let her go when the music stopped. His grasp of the evening receded. He moved and spoke like an automaton, answering like an intelligent parrot. Only when they were back in their own room, a little feeling returned and it was anger that rose again, rose and choked him until he was down on his knees before the shell-pink pan throwing up his pain and misery until his whole body was torn and empty. Then he heard himself crying out bitter words against her, words to wound and claw while she stood there silent. At the end she said quietly, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’ He fell into bed and asleep to waken again and again with his miserable body demanding water for its shrivelling flesh or that he should drag himself back into the shell-pink bathroom and sit there with his head held in his sweating hands. Towards morning he slipped into a heavy sleep that was like a coma and which left him with a foul mouth and a slight fuzziness of vision but more than anything else a sense of shame. He wondered what he should say to her and looked at her still sleeping beside him. He let his mind play over the evening finding great gaps in his memory that he filled with terrifying actions and guilty words. Why should she love him? What was there to love? He put out a hand and touched her and she laughed quietly in her sleep and moved closer. What would she remember when she woke and what would she say to him?

  ‘Was I too bad last night?’ He had fallen asleep again and wakened to find her getting out of bed, swinging her feet quickly to the floor as she always did and slipping them out of sight in the soft grey moccasins. She went into the bathroom and he sat up, reached for his clothes and began to pull on his socks. By the time she came back he was half-dressed and ready to face the answer.

  ‘You were obviously very unhappy.’

  ‘Yes, but did I say terrible things to you?’

  ‘I didn’t really listen because you didn’t really mean them and I was a bit hazy myself, so I let you carry on and then sleep it off. Poor Matt.’

  ‘You know I can’t remember much. Did I do anything awful? I mean did everyone else know how plastered I was?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Everyone was pretty far gone. You made a pass at Irene, kissed her or something.’

  ‘My God, did I really? Oh hell that’s torn it.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone took it seriously. Anyway it was all Stag’s fault. She always overdoes everything and she hasn’t much idea about people’s feelings because she’s too busy being the Lady Bountiful. She just doesn’t think and it seems to me the more money she has the worse she gets, more divorced from reality, insulated in a sort of golden dream blanket. There’s no need for it all. Why can’t she just be herself. With all this drink and easy money she won’t have a thought in her head soon.’

  ‘I thought you liked it rather.’

  ‘You are silly. Why do you think I left her?’

  ‘I don’t like to think.’

  ‘She lost my respect.’

  ‘Yes, but you like nice things, and food and all that. I don’t give you any of those. That’s why she makes me so on edge I suppose because she makes me feel inadequate, that I don’t have enough to offer you.’

  ‘And now you see. I could have had all that if I’d wanted but it isn’t any use without other things. You have the other things.

  ‘What was she like, you know, in bed?’

  ‘I don’t really remember. Now don’t say it. I don’t.’

  ‘That’s not much help to me in curing my insecurities.’

  ‘You mean “who’s the prettier fellow and wears the braver dagger”? You are funny you know, just like little boys.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m here aren’t I, with you. Now are you happy?’

  ‘Better. You honestly don’t remember?’

  ‘I told you, no.’

  ‘Then it couldn’t have been so good. Do you think you’d remember me?’

  ‘You’re you. That’s different. I love you.’

  ‘But you thought you loved her?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I must have done but it wasn’t like this quite. I can’t explain.’

  Matt gave a mock sigh. He was up against the impenetrable barrier of the feminine mind again but this time he didn’t care so much, it didn’t drive him to exasperation.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘I’ll be better when I’ve had a good solid breakfast. My stomach’s flapping on my backbone and I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of a parrot’s cage. Tea that’s the thing, several cups. What do we do about breakfast here?’

  ‘Ring I should think.’

  ‘You do it. Those bells put the fear of God into me. I feel as if I’m pressing the burglar alarum and there’ll be organised pandemonium. I’ll have everything that’s going but most of all tea, buckets of strong tea.’

  ‘What shall we do today?’ Rae asked when the maid had gone. ‘I gather we’re on our own, till this evening anyway.’

  ‘What would you like to do? You know this place better than I do, what is there to do? I feel like fresh air, apart from that I’m easy.’

  ‘Shall we go up into the forest then? We can have lunch somewhere and perhaps call in on Feathers and Billie if you haven’t had enough of my past life by then.’

  ‘I think I can take a little more provided no one wants me to drink champagne by the quart. I’ve had that. Too deceptive for a beer drinker.’

  ‘Billie’s a beer drinker, at least she used to be and I can’t imagine her changing much. Feathers is like me, probably a couple of martinis will do for her.’

  ‘Right. Do you know the way or should I look it up?’

  ‘I think I do but you’d better make sure and anyway we want to wander a bit first, don’t we?’

  ‘I always feel this is very old country,’ he said as they drove out. ‘You get the impression of its years pressing down on you or is it pressing up from the earth into humps of barrows and earthworks everywhere.’

  ‘Like those in the field over there?’ She pointed across at the collection of grassy hillocks and ridges rising unnaturally out of the level. ‘They could be just odd formations I suppose?’

  ‘Oh they could be. I wonder if anyone has tried to find out. It’s difficult when they’re on somebody’s farmland. Those horses’d be upset if you came along with a spade and wante
d to dig up their paddock. How far before we get to the forest proper?’

  ‘Just keep going along this road for another mile or so and we’ll find ourselves in it.’

  ‘The greed of kings, clearing all these hundreds of acres of their inhabitants just so his majesty can go chasing after other animals whenever he’s the fancy.’

  ‘Still it’s turned out quite well in the long run because it’s left us all this open space. And it’s a beautiful morning, one of the best we’ve had this year. You see, we’re into the forest now without noticing. Slow up a bit. There’s a clearing along here on the left where we can run off the road. This is it.’

  Matt bumped the car over the uneven turf and pulled up. ‘This do? It’s more like a heath than forest, proper forest with trees like Epping.’

  ‘There are trees, great stretches of them but there are these heathy bits in between. See, over there, trees. We can take the rug; the sun’s quite warm. There’ll be more people out this afternoon but we’re the first. We can have it all to ourselves.’

  He took the coloured rug from the back seat, locked the car and followed her across the coarse hair mattress of rough grass and heather. A skylark, a speck against a blue so bright it hurt his eyes as he tried to catch it, dropped down the scale shedding its clear notes over their heads until he lost it behind a clump of hazels. They passed out of the light, under tall trees whose boles were deep in young bracken, the tips of the fronds still curled into tight green snails. It seemed dark under the roofing branches as if he had followed her down into another world away from the sunlight.

  She stopped and waited for him to catch up. ‘We’ll find somewhere off the track where we can lie in the sun.’

  ‘Isn’t it fantastic how the year’s been getting on without us. You just don’t notice when you only see streets and houses every day. You come out into the country and suddenly it’s summer and you’ve hardly even noticed winter’s over.’ His voice sounded strange as if he should be whispering in the shadowed aisles of the forest. A patch of sun falling between the boughs onto a bank of fronds a few feet from the path made them glow a vibrating green.