by Mavis Cheek
Celia grits her teeth.
‘By the way,’ she says, finding a suitable diversion. ‘Your dog’s crapped right in the middle of the lawn.’
But such a statement is small recompense.
‘Oh, she’s always doing that. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got a pooper-scooper. Dave’ll do it when he comes home.’
‘You’ve got a good marriage, Isabel.’
Celia looks at her.
Isabel looks back.
‘True,’ she says, with immense satisfaction.
Funnily enough, though, what with pooper-scoopers and shitty kidney meat, and despite everything, Celia would still rather be herself than her happily married sister.
How odd we are.
They go in to eat.
Alex decided long ago that if he never saw another marital aid it would be too soon for him.
It was partly the introduction of these items into the relationship with Miss Lyall that wrecked him for his holiday in Brittany. For the first few days in France he felt like an untrained novice who has been forced to wrestle a series of Turkish heavyweights. Miss Lyall proved to be the owner of quite an array of these accoutrements, being a modern sort of a girl, and the first time she produced her little attaché case containing them he felt a definite loss of sang-froid. Partly excited at the prospect, partly embarrassed, he had launched himself into this new dimension with notable results: sex takes longer, he found, and its delights become more leisurely (or more arduous, depending on your stamina) when organly flesh is protected from direct contact by latex. In her sexual liaisons Miss Lyall usually has to introduce them sooner or later ... it was not criticism of Alex, as she pointed out – absolutely no criticism at all.
Many of her attaché case items took the form of condoms with attachments – small bobbles, big bobbles, warty bits, size-doublers (Alex found this latter rather insulting) and the like. Alex, usually of middling range in the duration between the desire and the spasm, has found himself, once kitted out in one of these, able to last astonishingly well. They also have other advantages: they not only provide tantalisation and inflamement, but they also double as birth control. Miss Lyall has an unfortunate inability to take the Pill and although modern science has done wonders with the cap and the sponge it is nice for her, sometimes, to let the man take responsibility. Since she takes so much responsibility in her life, one way and another, this is not surprising. She certainly is a liberated woman. Alex had to hand it to her for that. And he quite often did.
It was after that rather difficult weekend at the Queen’s Brough that Miss Lyall first introduced Alex to the contents of her attaché case. And they certainly did imbue the proceedings with restorative zest. It was like having a teenager’s capacity matched with a mature man’s sexual thought pattern: while the body could go on and on and on, the brain kept saying things like, Good Lord old man – haven’t you had enough? The brain had had enough quite frequently – but that little layer of latex said that his thrusty bit had not. It was all very strange. Pleasantly unpleasant. There being little he could do, without loss of honour, he yielded himself up to it all as enthusiastically as his hard-pushed body would allow. He even contributed an item of his own. A few weeks into all this he remembered that he had an item at home somewhere which they could try. The recollection pleased him since, in particular, he wanted to show his avid partner that she was not the only one who knew what was what, inventively speaking. So he hunted about the bedroom for the one he had bought to use with Celia and which she, far less game than Miss Lyall, complained made her sore. He found it in a drawer amongst his wife’s underwear and sneaked it away with him on the next illicit nuit d’amour. Somewhere around the middle of July this was, and Miss Lyall was entranced. Such gestures of contributory thoughtfulness were not usual in her experience.
They, and Dirty Harry, were at it all night.
It was after that particular session, testing in the extreme, that Alex had another judge to see very early the following morning. And it was during that dawn drive, when he began hallucinating and seeing cows and sheep doing grotesque sex acts all over the inside lane of the motorway, that he began to think things were not quite so wonderful after all. He had hit a plateau of tiredness and it was affecting his brain. Why, one of the sheep appeared to be winking at him out of its curly eyelashes. A frightening experience. One that he ought to heed. When domesticated farm animals appear to be giving one the old come on across a hedge there is certainly room for reappraisal. Especially if the animal in question is a sheep – than which there can be no more stupidly grotesque creature alive in the English greensward. This is not to say that Alex might have been less worried by some other animal making suggestive faces at him, it is merely to say that – since it was a sheep – he was aware that the situation was very bad indeed ... but pride drove him on and it was, eventually, (much to Alex’s relief) Miss Lyall who finally ended the affair.
She did so much earlier than she had intended, it is true, but then, for some reason, she had gone off sex with Alex – maybe it was because he had started to look peaky, or maybe it was because he had begun to bypass foreplay and go straight for intercourse. Quite a few of her chaps did this eventually, but none quite so early on. Miss Lyall had no illusions about affairs like these, but she was quite fond of foreplay, indeed, curiously, during those hot middle weeks of August she had found herself enjoying it better than she had ever done before. By then, for some reason, intercourse seemed less and less important: she could only blame Alex’s loss of style for this. The more she wanted the prelude, the less he seemed inclined. (Alex’s logic in this matter was the quicker he got it over with, the quicker he could get off to sleep, which seemed fair enough to him ...) And so she told him, point-blank, just before he was to leave for France, and just before she was to leave for Corfu, that it had been fun but – well – all good things, as they say, all good things ...
Alex shook hands with her over a Campari and soda, resolved never to get entangled with another woman again and went off to France an exhausted wreck. As we are already aware.
Celia’s passivity and lack of demand throughout this whole episode has helped Alex to see what a good, modest, agreeable woman he has married. He is not going to risk losing all that again in a hurry. How good Celia was in France, despite the weather. She left him alone to sleep, amused herself and the children, and seemed quietly contented, whenever he surfaced, to perform the slightest of acts commensurate with his being her fleshly partner in life. A good wife, he came to see, the best kind of wife, he thought on the ferry home. Oh no, most certainly, he will never be unfaithful to her again.
And so restored was his affection for this paragon of his that when they returned to Bedford Park he even fashioned a placard out of some old crates, saying, ‘Polaris Out. Free Nelson Mandela. Celia rules OK’ and walked solemnly up and down their garden path with it – a joke which he enjoyed hugely, a joke which his neighbours enjoyed hugely, a joke which merely puzzled and slightly irritated Celia. She had by then completely forgotten their conversation in the conservatory on her birthday for she had other, more pressing, things on her mind. Still, it pleased Alex to have done something ridiculous like that – perhaps Celia was right, perhaps he had got a touch too staid. He looked across at his wife and saw that she was still a young woman – a surprisingly dewy-eyed one nowadays – beautiful to behold with her smile and that melancholy light in her eyes. She had the sort of unfocused quality of a virgin princess about her. He broke out into a sweat. Bloody hell (this is where the children first picked it up, of course), to think he might have lost her ...
Alex dropped Dirty Harry into the water off Kew Bridge on his way home one September night and, as it floated away, he felt immense relief. He could now settle down into middle-age and really concentrate on work. Which he did and work had been getting more and more interesting ever since. As his life returned to normal the Brandreth case became increasingly convoluted and challenging and Alex’s se
lf-esteem (so bruised by Miss Lyall, he realised retrospectively) returned. This was far more enlivening than illicit sex. The more convoluted it got, the more Alex thrilled to it. He was back on form and really going places again ...
So – on this particular October day (the same as the one in which we have left Celia) – another interesting aspect must have developed for Miss Lyall (now merely a business colleague like any other) has requested a meeting alone with him first thing in the morning. He has left his little family with regret for they looked particularly appearing as he said his goodbyes. The sight of Celia, sitting up in bed, flanked by Henry and Rebecca still in their pyjamas (they are having something mysteriously called an ‘occasional day’, an odd aberration peculiar to the state system of which he does not approve but cheers himself by saying that they will soon be in the private sector where such fecklessness will not occur), made him wish – just for a moment – that he did not have to leave them so early. Still, duty, the Brandreth case and Miss Lyall call and must win over mere familial sentiment. He set off in fine fettle. A man at one with the world. Respected member of the community, chairman of the Neighbourhood Watch, and one whose sense of humour is restored to the locale, following the witty incident with the placard.
Gaily, he had waved up at the judge in his bedroom window, bonhomie and community spirit exuding from him. He had lost touch with everyone during those few hectic months (and is therefore unaware of Tom’s little contretemps with the law) but he feels back on form now. Part of it all again. He will chair the next Watch meeting with alacrity, he vows, as he drives off in the direction of Miss Lyall’s office in Knightsbridge. The children wave to him from the bedroom window. How sweet and innocent they look. How he loves them. He turns the radio on to Radio Three. Someone called Gesualdo is ‘This Week’s Composer’. He bears with the strangled noises which he does not much care for. They sound like an animal in pain. They sound like madness.
At around the same time that Celia is roused from her bed to answer the door to a well-pleased Mrs Green, he gets to Knightsbridge.
And just at the very moment that Mrs Green is feeling cheered in Bedford Park by her lugubrious watching of Celia and the children at their late breakfast, he finds a parking space. As he arrives at Miss Lyall’s building Celia is dishing out orders regarding the clearing up of leaves in the garden and while he waits to enter his erstwhile lover’s office his wife, in her kitchen, is remembering that funny incident with Mrs Green and the condoms. When he finally enters the office and Miss Lyall suggests that he might like to sit down, Celia receives the telephone call from Hazel. And if she is upset by her news, it is as nothing to the upset Alex feels from his.
At the instant that his relaxed and enquiring buttocks meet the dove-grey hide of Miss Lyall’s office chair, Celia is shouting at Rebecca. At the moment when Miss Lyall offers him a very large whisky (despite the early hour) Celia is telephoning Isabel. And as the reason for the whisky becomes more and more dreadfully clear to Alex, Celia is preparing to set off to Isabel’s for the day. And Mrs Green, as we know, is up a step-ladder taking down the curtains, watching the car go, preparing for her soul-soothing rummage, her voyage of discovery.
Such simple domestic detail, one way and another.
Such a mundanity of events.
So where, you may ask, is that beetle?
It is coming. Assuredly, it is coming. Its ghostly little spectre is even now creeping out from the woodwork. A tiny, insignificant shadow that brings a whirlwind in its wake.
The meal is over. Rebecca and Henry have disgraced themselves in Celia’s eyes by eating almost everything and asking for seconds. The ‘almost’ which they left was the pastry. At least her nephews ate theirs. Weaned on Isabel’s cookery they go for quantity over quality every time. Their aunt makes a mental note to get them something really nice and complicatedly electronic for Christmas so that they can have endless pleasure taking it apart.
Isabel looks at the discarded pastry on her nephew’s and niece’s plates and shoots Celia a look of utter triumph.
‘You may be writing a book,’ she says, ‘but you can’t make pastry, can you?’
Celia says, ‘Fuck the pastry,’ and feels much better.
Isabel gives a little shriek to try to cover the words and says loudly, ‘Boys – take Henry and Rebecca out to the kitchen and get the chocolate ice cream. You can eat it in front of the telly.’
Off they all rush, kitchenwards.
‘Did you hear our mother say fuck,’ says Henry with pride.
The elder of his two cousins shrugs. ‘Now, where the fuck is the ice cream,’ he says nonchalantly.
Henry is firmly back in the shade.
‘Oh fuck,’ says Rebecca. ‘I don’t like chocolate ice cream.’
‘Oh yes you do,’ says Henry. ‘You only said that so you could say It.’
‘I’ll show you some of our dad’s magazines,’ says the younger of the two cousins, doling out lumps of melting brownness into dishes. ‘He keeps them in the shed. They’re all about fuck.’
‘Going to eat it in the garden, Mum,’ he calls. ‘OK?’
‘Fucking well better be,’ says his brother, low-voiced but wondrously assured.
Henry and Rebecca gaze at him admiringly.
‘Yes,’ calls Isabel cheerily. ‘But make sure Brillo doesn’t lick out the bowls. She may have worms.’
An investigation of the turd on the lawn shows this, indeed, to be the case.
Henry says it looks like their ice cream, which puts him in the running again.
Hearing the childish laughter from the garden Isabel sighs happily.
‘They get on so well,’ she says knowingly. ‘And you are obviously overwrought at the moment. Why not leave them here for the weekend? My boys will be a good influence on your two. You could finish your book or something ...’
So Celia agrees. Isabel has spare toothbrushes, spare pyjamas, even spare knickers for Rebecca.
‘Why on earth,’ says Celia irritably, ‘have you got girls’ knickers when you’ve only got boys?’
‘Because we do fostering sometimes.’
Celia passes a weary and defeated hand over her forehead. How good this sister of hers is, and what a strong, honest relationship she has with the well-adjusted Dave. Celia feels quite mortified by it.
‘They’ll have a lovely time,’ Isabel continues, as she scrapes the gristle and rejected pastry off the plates. ‘Lots of fresh air in the garden and they’ll probably make a den in Dave’s shed. They often do. Dave doesn’t know they’ve discovered the key. Ha ha ... let them get on with it, I say …’
She begins to carry the dishes out to the kitchen, stopping and turning in the doorway. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘and by the way, we don’t use swearwords in this house. I know you’re tense but it really isn’t good for the children. They don’t like that sort of thing.’
Celia apologises and helps her sister by drying up the dishes she has washed.
The children have to be called several times before they emerge from the shed at the end of the garden. In her heart Celia hopes they will want to come home with her, but they do not.
‘Bye Mum,’ they say happily, putting their ice-cream bowls down in the kitchen. Each bowl is shining clean, well-licked by the dog. Later, after Celia has gone, Isabel will absent-mindedly put them away unwashed in the cupboard and they will all have a slight tummy upset after Saturday lunch tomorrow. Which is not unknown in this household. Dave will blame his grumpiness, which lasts well into the week, on this, though its fount is somewhat more esoteric. One of his favourite centre-spreads seems to have spilled something unmentionable over herself right where it matters so that he can no longer see the fulsome pinkness of what she reveals. The shed roof must leak. He spends the whole of the following weekend reviewing its water-tightness while Isabel, pleased with her husband’s handyman thoroughness, cooks a liver casserole and thinks she will pass on the recipe to Celia sometime. Perhaps she needs the iron.
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br /> So, at two-thirty, Celia wends her way homewards, relieved of her children and expecting to find nobody in and a house newly be-curtained and ready for the winter darkness. She looks forward to a few hours on her own. Somewhere along the day she has picked up a need to think about a few things. She almost begins to believe she is writing a book, so deeply involved has she suddenly become with the peregrinations of its heroine. Isabel’s words have made a salutary impression. Sod her. But Celia is resolved. Her heroine has said her last goodbye to her hero in the hotel. Her heroine can settle down now. Her heroine is prepared for – nay, welcomes – the opportunity to slot back into normality. Whatever the future holds it cannot be worse than what has gone before. She sought her Vengeance and she gained it, just as she planned, and the chapter, the book, is closed. Of that much she is sure as she drives thoughtfully along her road.
If Alex hallucinated on copulating livestock while driving in the past, those visions were as nothing to the pictures he sees before him as he drives home now. He has gone straight from Miss Lyall’s office to the nearest pub. True, he has paused momentarily to telephone his secretary and say that he will not, after all, be in today but that was more the action of a man conditioned to do such things, rather than the action of a man fully in control of himself. For Alex, an hour or so later and negotiating the Fulham Road, is feeling each hundred yards that takes him homewards like a station of the cross. Gesualdo is still playing away on Radio Three. To Alex the music is soothing now, very controlled, and completely and utterly sane. Whereas he is by no stretch of the imagination any of those things.
He is heedless of cutting up other vehicles. He is heedless of bus drivers’ yearning hand signals that turn into ‘V’ signs as he overtakes and slides swiftly on. Alex is driving back to Bedford Park and his little family like a man in a dream, like a man in a very bad dream. He is also, quite out of character, three-parts drunk. Which may, in some wise, account for the hallucinations. But not entirely. For they are the visions of a man drowning in his past, of a man who would, if he could, go down for that third time and never resurface. What he sees mocks him. What he sees is infinitely worse, infinitely more terrible than a raunchy sheep giving him the eye. What he sees, he is sure, holds the key to his undoing. Alex mourns for himself as he drives on and he gives himself up to the floating sights that hurt his eyes and make his stomach contract. How could he have become this man? And what are these sights that unfold before him? What surrounds him so palpably that – were he to dare – he knows he could reach out and touch? They are his undoing, certainly. For they are visions of rubber goods which come, menacing, inexorable, across his windscreen, over the dashboard, and slip through the locks and tensions of his seat belt. He relives the torture of holding Miss Lyall’s ankles up against a wall until his arms, let alone his latex-with-bobbles-shod penis, come near to breaking. He sees himself drinking wine from her orifice and crying exultantly that he is coming, he is coming ...