by Mavis Cheek
‘Oh really?’ says Celia to the radio. ‘Another Renaissance man of culture.’ She is thinking of Henry VIII again.
‘... The madrigals, particularly daring in their harmonics, may well owe their arresting qualities to Gesualdo’s private sufferings.’
‘Like what?’ she asks.
Obligingly the announcer continues: ‘He murdered both his wife and her lover, his first cousin, and his own child, whom he decided was fruit of their union rather than his own flesh ... The works you have been listening to were all composed after this date.’
Terrific, thinks Celia. First Henry and now let’s hear it for Gesualdo.
‘There will be more works by this undervalued genius of the late Renaissance in our autumn schedule.’
She switches off.
Perhaps they will intersperse it with readings from Mein Kampf, she thinks. Time clearly exonerates and the thought rankles.
Indoors she drapes the frock over the banisters, puts down her case, looks at her watch which says five o’clock, and rushes with joyful expectancy into the kitchen and towards the washing machine. She is a little disappointed to see no additional offering which might explain poor Tom’s surreptitious visit – but still, what is in the washing machine will more than do. She takes the package up and kisses it. At last!
*
Up in the bedroom, seated in front of her dressing-table mirror (where else?) Celia regards the package. Apart from the wrapping paper being slightly damp it is unscathed. Her heart is thumping – the combined curiosity of what it contains and the projected telephone call after finding out makes her palpitate visibly – she can see the little pulse in her neck. Suddenly another emotion shoves its way in. Guilt. St Paul knew a thing or two about women. Of course Celia feels guilty. Men do not seek out other women unless they are driven to it. She can even hear her sister – whose aura seems to be somewhere in the room, over by the curtains Celia surmises – telling her so. Trust you, says Isabel, to be able to shift the blame ... And two wrongs don’t make a right ... Look at it from Alex’s point of view ... There had to be something wrong for him to start it.
Oh Hazel, thinks Celia, why aren’t you here to plead for me? But; of course, Hazel is in the enemy’s camp. Celia has been betrayed on both fronts.
Look here, she mutters to her sister, and she gets up, strides to her knicker and Tampax drawer and pulls out Dirty Harry. She wobbles the obscene piece of rubber at her phantom sister and she says, ‘Which would you prefer? This?’ She wobbles it again. ‘Or this?’ She holds up the romantic little package.
She feels she has won. Disapproving Isabel subsides. Celia’s conscience is clear. She puts Dirty Harry down on the dressing table and rips the paper from the package. Rip, rip, rip, she goes, for where has her erstwhile deftness got her?
And as she rip, rip, rips another thought occurs to her. One that is infinitely worse than guilt. What if all this keeping quiet is of no significance? What if Pastel Frock and Alex are in love? What if they should come to her – openly – to say – to say – well, whatever lovers do say to the deceived party... She shivers. Supposing Alex wants a divorce? She shivers again. She remembers how they looked locked into their embrace. Perhaps Good King Harry and his French executioner had a point – perhaps even Gesualdo had a point. Perhaps she should even now be pointing a gun at Pastel Frock’s gleaming head instead of sitting here so smugly thinking that a little revenge on the side will do. And then fortunately she hears her sister’s voice again and this time it says what she wants to hear. It says, ‘Oh, come off it, Celia. Don’t make such a drama out of everything ...’
And Celia’s fears subside.
Alex would never leave her for another woman.
If not for her sake then for the children – and if not for them then for his profession: he values that far too much.
God bless the Brandreth case, she hears herself say.
And Amen to that.
And God bless Tom, too. Let us not forget him.
If ever she needed the fillip of un cadeau d’amour it is now. Battered, defiled, aching from her wounds, she looks to this gift to restore her. Dirty Harry, his potency gone, sags on the dressing table. She waves the now denuded box at him, as garlic to a demon, and feels a happy surge of triumph. If she cannot be a rose for her husband, she will be one for Tom. Full-blown, velvet-petalled, thornless and infinitely desirable. For his long-serving loyalty he shall have her. (The fleeting thought that it is, actually, because of Alex’s disloyalty that he shall have her is quickly dismissed.) For his loyalty and for the flattery of his desire he has earned the reward.
She looks down at the box.
Her hands sweat as they close around it.
Celia is very excited.
A child on Christmas morning could not be more excited than she. She kisses it and wonders what it holds. The box is black and shiny, laminated cardboard, and bears the embossed gilt word PERSONELLE. There is black tissue paper within which she unfolds carefully, her breathing coming faster and faster, driven on with longing, with the pleasure of what is to come and from the black tissue folds she takes out ... She takes out ...?
What?
What is this?
Is it a sculpture?
Is it some covetable piece of ancient Egyptian art?
It is coloured like ivory, a long, smooth-sided cylinder, rounding into a smooth peak at the top, perhaps nine inches long.
She stares at it, puzzled for a moment, before understanding dawns.
What she is holding is a fine companion for Dirty Harry.
She can almost see him quiver as he recognises its lewd proclivities.
What she is holding is a sex aid.
Willing herself to disbelieve this she cannot.
She recognises its alien form (for no man of her acquaintance was ever thus endowed).
What she recognises, God help her, is a vibrator. A VIBRATOR?
No, no. Her eyes, radiant and yearning for revenge, are playing tricks. She blinks. She looks again.
Yes, yes. She cannot look away. The truth is in her hands. That is what she sees. A vibrator. And it has a little card tied round its neck (no – not its neck – around its tip) and the card says:
Perhaps this will warm you up since I could not.
She blinks twice. She blinks thrice. It does not change. This is not her fertile imagination. This thing, this smooth, coned thing, this travesty is really in her hands. Bad enough it would have been had she opened it excitedly on Saturday morning, still as the honourable wife of Alex. Then it would have been no more than a passing disappointment, to be shrugged off, to be acknowledged as a good joke and understandable given the frustration she has doled out to Tom over the years. No more – then – than a fleeting blow to her pride that could, so easily, be laughed away. Now it serves to cause her the deepest disappointment she can ever remember, followed by the deepest unhappiness, as witnessed by the tears which begin flowing, down and down, plop, plop, all over her lap.
No wonder Tom tried to get it back. It was hardly the best way to plight his troth given the altered circumstances. She has learned enough during these past couple of days to be sensibly cynical and to understand that. First Alex and his rubber goods and now Tom and his plastic penis. What is it about her vagina, she wonders, that attracts these ideas? Whatever happened to flesh on flesh?
Whatever it is – Hell hath no fury, etc., etc. – and certainly not a woman scorned twice.
Tom and Celia never do confront each other about this incident. Celia assumes that Tom is mortified by her lack of interest in him which has turned him so quiet. And Tom, much more straightforwardly, thinks that two-faced Celia has just pocketed the loot.
The loot?
Ah yes.
It was the loot which turned Tom into Mrs Green’s robber.
For secreted amongst the black tissue paper of that wicked projectile was something else. Something costly, something alluring, something that Tom was damned if Celia deserve
d after all. What else could he have put there to win her heart? What else – of course – but a pair of pretty blue earrings.
Tom would have made Celia a good lover. He has the memory of an elephant where she is concerned. He once heard her tale of the iron and the forget-me-nots (though not, of course, all the personal details) and he saved it to make use of. Such a pity that the loving gesture (loving? Perhaps speculative might be more appropriate) should prove so useless now that his desire is cold as ash. Nevertheless two little sapphires remain to be found. Quite expensive little sapphires. Sapphires he could have recycled and given to the vicar’s wife. But he never got the chance. Neither, come to that, did Celia.
Sitting by her dressing table she begins to get worried at the amount of salt water that sploshes from her eyes. This must cease, she tells herself sternly, enough is enough. And by way of punctuating the flow she hurls the vibrator to the furthest depths of the room, the bay of the window, and the strength of the gesture acts like a full stop. The tears cease. She blows her nose, once, twice, thrice – and the crying is over. She is cleansed of the disappointment, cleansed of the anger, and quite, quite cleansed of Tom. When they meet again she will be icily polite, no more than that, for there is now no more to be.
And as for the vibrator itself, it is forgotten. It rolls quietly to rest in a hidden nook where the floor meets the curtains and remains there undisturbed.
Later Celia takes the vibrator box out to the dustbin and shoves it under all the fishbones and the lemon peel and the general detritus of her birthday dinner party. So far as she is concerned she has dispensed with the whole episode. She will not think of it again. She must redraw the battle plans and is more determined than ever to find her Sweet Vengeance elsewhere. That is all she thinks about as she fixes the dustbin lid firmly in place and goes back into her respectable no-frills house that looks just like all the rest.
It would be nice to think that a silver lining could be found here as well. It would be nice to think that a Bedford Park dustman found the expensive contents of the box and took them home to his wife, but this is not so. Together the two little sapphires were cast underground, along with the rubbish of the age, and may well be found a hundred-thousand years hence by some avid post-bomb excavator who, scratching his two ear-less heads, will wonder what the relevance of such items could possibly ever have been.
PART THREE
1
It would probably never have happened if Alex had not rung Celia at seven o’clock that night to say that he was not, after all, coming home. His reason was perfectly genuine. Old Judge Watson, doyen of the Circuit, had Things To Say on the subject of the Brandreth case. Strictly off the record but strictly relevant to Alex and his team’s approach. The judge lived near Winchester. He suggested that Alex should come to his home for a private dinner to hear about these Things. Alex could stay for the night and continue on to London in the morning. That would not put Alex out too much. Now would it?
Alex – his eyes pricking from the tiredness of unaccustomed debauchery, his balls aching from constant activity, and the muscles in his arms strained and sore from holding some of the more bizarre positions the knowledgeable Miss Lyall encouraged – had but one desire: to get home to his own domain, to his own bed, to his own undemanding, agreeable wife. But judges are not bred to be gainsayed. Warmly, down the telephone, Alex thanked this influential septuagenarian and said that he would, of course, be delighted to come to Winchester. He then, scarcely able to restrain his tired crossness, telephoned his wife.
In the furious disappointment of the aftermath Celia has been contemplating other ways of getting even with Alex. She has conjured visions of herself down at Greenham, living in a tent of plastic bags and deriding the men who guard that vile place so heartily that they have no recourse but to arrest her. This is a seductive vision until she realises that it would shame her to use the radical commitment of those base-women for her own domestic ends. One should come to disarmament with a pure heart or not at all. Reluctantly (for Alex would be outraged, which would be nice) she rejects the idea and toys with another.
The sublime to the ridiculous.
What about appearing on television in one of those game shows? One of those particular game shows where the participants have to leap about and scream with joy and kiss the presenter a dozen times. Alex would go mad. She could alert the whole of Bedford Park to watch (she has a quick vision of Alex down on his knees pleading with her Not To Go To The Television Centre but she casts him aside like a worn glove). Wonderful thought! Oh the sheer joy ...
But she abandons this too. She is not sure that it wouldn’t upset her even more than her errant husband – and it would probably take too long to organise. Besides, she might have a latent liking for such things. There is something of the show-woman buried within her after all.
She toys with a few other ideas which – since she enacts them in her mind – do much to reduce her hunger for Vengeance and life begins to calm down a little, to regain a degree of sanity, so that, by the time Alex rings her, it is in the balance, really, whether she will do anything at all. But the conversation reverses all that.
‘Celia?’
‘Alex?’
Alex allows some of his irritation to surface. He has been a lover all weekend which has been a great strain. This is, after all, his wife. He feels snappish and it shows.
‘Celia – where have you been? I’ve been trying to ring you all afternoon. As a matter of fact I’ve tried to ring you damn near most of the weekend ... I telephoned especially on Saturday evening because of your birthday – And You Were Out.’ It is the bluster of a man who is being only marginally honest.
Alex blinks at the truth.
Alex quite often must blink at the truth.
Alex’s profession calls for quite a lot of truth-blinking. (We should, after all, have no jurisprudence were our lawyers unable to do this and before we pour scorn we should, perhaps, pause to consider what other system we might usefully replace it with. Ducking stools and hot brands perhaps ...?)
His blink is rather a long one, for his ‘most of the weekend’ was one quick attempt on Saturday night while Miss Lyall was in his shower. Embroiled as he was it came as a considerable relief to receive no reply though he now makes a passing-fair imitation of umbrage that Celia should have been out. But since then, during this afternoon, now that the weekend’s orgy of love and business is over, he has made up for it. He has attempted several times to telephone her to let her know about the interfering old coot in Winchester; and there are few things more designed to increase irritability than an unanswered telephone, especially if various parts of your body are aching from over-strenuous coupling: Alex, on getting through to his wife at last, is extremely sharp.
Celia, despite being fully aware of her husband’s perfidy, is nevertheless astonished to hear how easily the lies trip off his tongue. She had assumed that now her consciousness was raised she would isolate the duplicity, and she cannot isolate it at all. This is very wounding, for a wife may at least comfort herself that she knows her husband ... Celia feels, as she hears Alex’s lies drip so smoothly (or rather, drip so irascibly), that she does not ... She could swear he is telling her the truth. Which, of course, he is; the judge’s invitation exists; Alex’s resentment that the invitation exists, exists; in this particular part of the conversation his conscience is absolutely clear. To Celia it just goes down the plughole of deceit like all the rest. It revitalises her thoughts of revenge.
So – Alex is not coming home? Celia grips the telephone tightly and urges control upon her vocal system which is in danger of running amok.
With Celia feeling emotionally fragile, and with Alex feeling corporeally fragile, the conversation, redolent of connubial misunderstanding, continues thus:
‘Not coming home?’ says Celia very faintly.
‘That’s right,’ says Alex irritably. ‘Not home tonight. Home tomorrow. Well – where were you when I rang?’
&n
bsp; ‘Not coming home?’ she says. She is only half concentrating now for if she is not careful she is going to say something very loud, very rude, and indicating that she knows more than he knows she knows.
Alex becomes more waspish. If Celia can keep repeating herself so can he.
‘You were out,’ he repeats, with the venom of one whose balls ache. ‘Where?’
‘Judge Pastel?’ she says – still faint but quite distinguishable to Alex.
‘Judge Watson,’ he says, crisp in his real truth.
‘Attractive, is he?’ says Celia, unable to stop herself.
‘What?’ says Alex.
‘A bit of a goer?’
‘Celia? What on earth are you talking about? Judge Watson is seventy.’
‘What colour is his hair, Alex?’
Alex looks at the phone in disbelief.
‘Blonde, perhaps?’ goes on Celia.
‘Judge Watson is completely bald,’ he finds himself saying, and he wonders why.
‘Really?’ says Celia gaily. ‘With a welcoming pudenda?’
He has misheard, he must have, she must really have said agenda. Perhaps his ears have been affected along with everything else. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he says coldly.
‘Don’t beg,’ she says sharply. ‘Sell matches.’
There is a pause.
‘Celia,’ says Alex. ‘Have I upset you?’
It occurs to him that since at this precise moment there is nothing in the world he would like more than to be in his own home with his own children and his own wife he is not displaying it very well. But he cannot help it. Miss Lyall does not lack clarity. He is quite sure that if he telephoned her right now she would be very direct. Unlike Celia she is a very direct woman. Which makes the whole thing very flattering and very exciting. She knows what she wants and – as his brain and body tells him – she certainly gets it. Celia is reticent by comparison. In keeping with being a wife this undoubtedly is – but at the same time, at the same time, it is much more fun not to have to be constantly in control. Nevertheless he needs rest, he needs the unspoken harmonies of his quiet marriage bed. He needs his little amenable Celia right now and he decides to cajole her with the truth of this.