by Patrick Gale
Hiding amidst the commuters at the bar, Madeleine bit savagely on a pork pie and took a swig from her can of Newcastle Brown. What had possessed her to catch a train home? Even now she could hear her mother’s neighbours – one hesitated to call them friends:
‘And she was always such a quiet girl.’
They were right. She had always been quiet. Ugly and quiet. Some of course would now nod sagely and call it furtive.
After ballet and warts had bitten the dust, her mother had left her beautifully alone. Well, alone. Studious, in her angry fashion, Madeleine had wound her furtive way through Tatham’s, via a degree in Fine Arts and Italian at Bristol, to the Warburg Institute on whose margins for the past six years she had pursued a devotion to the minute dissection of this thing called beauty. Her doctoral thesis, written with the collaboration of a geneticist friend called Madge and published to discreet notices last year, had provided biological and historical evidence that an obsessive appetite for aesthetic pleasure was a genetic trait and invariably accompanied reduced sexual security.
Madeleine’s flatmate, Georgene, had cleverly smuggled her out of the flat through the basement and a back entrance. Georgene’s nimble handling of her Harley-Davidson in rush-hour traffic would have shaken off any intrepid reporters who had tried to follow in taxis. Georgene worked as a dispatch rider and was out all day and some nights. She had been left with strict instructions that if anyone, including Edmund, bothered her for Madeleine’s whereabouts, she was to say she had left to do some research in Freyburg.
Madeleine finished her beer, crushed the can, gaining less satisfaction from this than usual, then returned to her seat with another pork pie and a reserve packet of cigarettes. The gingery commuter was leaving as she sat down.
‘Only forty-five per cent pork in those things, you know,’ he chirruped.
She leered back with her mouth full. He had abandoned his newspaper. She snatched it, burrowed in her bag for a pen and set about finishing his crossword. He had only filled in two answers. She replaced his ‘paternitty’ with ‘fatherhood’.
‘Hi, Mum. I’ve met this man …’
‘How’d you like to be a glamorous granny, Mum?’
‘How many Barrowers read The Sun, Mum?’
‘Hi, Mum. Long time no see. I’ve just got myself knocked up by a Cardinal.’
To mull over various ways of breaking the news had almost become a game. She was not absolutely certain that she wanted to have the baby. In fact, she was fairly certain that she did not. It would be kinder to Mum, therefore, to keep quiet about the pregnancy and see just how big a splash the papers made of it tomorrow. The ‘Mother, he done me wrong’ sketch, though corny, was fairly plausible. In terms of gritty experience, Madeleine had embarked on what Georgene called her Beretta Caper as a novice; untried and mildly curious. Sadly she had also been the kind of virgin whose erudition annulled the purity generally accorded those of untouched state.
It was all Madge’s fault. Madge managed to lead a double life as a full-time geneticist and a part-time good Catholic girl. The part-time role was mainly for her mother’s benefit and involved a quantity of good Catholic socializing. The latter brought her up against the personal secretary to a prominent Cardinal. Even the geneticist side of Madge had fancied this man, one Thurston. She had therefore seen rather more of him than was permitted under good Catholic auspices. His ‘boss’, it transpired, had recently been left a large library of eighteenth-century erotic prints by his father, a good Catholic blessed, plainly, with a wicked sense of humour. The Cardinal was a broad-minded man, as Cardinals go, and understanding that the collection was unique and unpublished, was seeking a good Catholic art historian for professional advice. Never one to leave a friend’s talents to languish under a bushel, Madge had passed Dr Merluza’s credentials and telephone number on to Thurston who, grateful, passed it on to the Cardinal who, delighted, rang Madeleine up and invited her to a good Catholic tea.
Madeleine had never looked at erotica over tea with a cardinal before. It might have proved the substance of a very witty article for a feminist review, only Edmund Kilpatrick had been more handsome and less typically ecclesiastical than she had pictured him as being.
‘I never wear my soutane for tea,’ he assured her.
In the course of two centuries the Cardinal’s late father’s collection of erotica had lost none of its powers to excite. Add to these factors the deadly hour of the encounter and one could see the conclusion as thoroughly foregone.
As Madge had often warned her, teatime in England was the great erotic hour. This was a fact foolishly ignored by many and exploited by only a churlish few. According to Madge’s theory, five to four found the intellect in the twenty-four-hourly doldrums when it could only be raised by a cupful of tannin followed two hours later by a shot of something stronger. The bodily resources were also low. One’s blood sugar level had sunk and the working beast had to muster all her remaining strength to stagger on until five-thirty. Five to four was the time of day when, if one stopped for a foolish second to analyze the lie of one’s thoughts, there could be nothing dearer to the human frame than to curl up somewhere warm, preferably not alone. When the French began to mock our habit of le five o’clock they little appreciated that the institution of teatime from the nursery onwards was a national fortification against lust. Sharp, overbrewed tea brought one back to one’s senses. Weaker mortals, more prone to the satyr’s influence, backed up the tannic defence with biscuits and cake. Cake, in anything but ungenerous proportions, was death to lust. A swiftly eaten slab of teashop gâteau was guaranteed to floor the most predatory bacchante.
Surrounded, in the Cardinal’s well-appointed sitting room, by inviting cushions and rugs, as well as his stimulating inheritance, Madeleine and Edmund foolishly left their macaroons untouched until it was all too late. Then a fanciful illustration to Boccaccio inspired them to put the cakes to a less fattening, rather ticklish use. And it was only four thirty-five.
At around six-thirty she was having great fun discovering the sluice system in his antiquated bathroom and Edmund, dressed again, was sitting on the stairs outside with a whisky beside him. His head in his hands, he was getting ready to admit that this must never happen again. Four days later he was in the same pose, in another part of the house, the same thoughts churning in his mind. And three days after that and two days after that. Edmund was a clever man but a weak one and Madeleine, while both clever and no doubt capable of immense feats of will, was having far too good a time preparing his erotica for publication – not in his name, of course – to think of anything but how to be a Scarlet Woman.
‘You’re savage,’ he told her, taking a mouthful of her hair and pulling.
‘Ouch!’ She laughed, and moved her face back towards his own. He murmured something and hid his face in her breasts.
‘What was that?’ she asked, leaning away slightly. ‘I hate it when I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
‘I said I can hardly bear it.’
‘Bear what?’
‘You. Your beauty.’
‘Oh come on. You’ll have to try harder than than. Go on. Convince me.’
‘Your eyes,’ he said, deadly serious. ‘And your strong round arms and …’
‘Yes?’
‘You have quite extraordinary teeth.’
Exchanges like this were frequent. Their frequency weakened her cynical barricades and afforded Madeleine a glimpse of herself as something other than a waistless lump. Fleeing now to Barrowcester, she was unsure whether this should earn Edmund her graditude or deathless malediction.
Georgene steered her in the direction of a family planning clinic to get her fixed up, unbeknownst to Edmund, with the Pill. Madeleine thought this was great fun too, and immensely clever, but soon became bored and forgetful of her daily dose. Recently she had forgotten to take it for three days and a week before that, she had accidentally knocked the foil packet down the back of a chest of drawers and got bo
red of trying to tease it out with a coathanger. On both occasions she had, in all innocence, tried to make up for her lapse by wolfing three or four pills at once. The consequence would not be visible for months, but it had made its presence felt. She had alerted Edmund and it seemed unlikely that they would ever meet again. It was only in their final interview, over the telephone, when she laughed at his explanation of the rhythm method, that he had realized that Madge had passed her off as a good Catholic under false pretences. Conducted entirely in his flat during daylight hours, their affair had been archly indulgent on her part, archly tortured on his, and wholly lacking in any emotional engagement from either party. Confronting the rude come uppance of this hasty liaison of loin and cerebellum, it had not crossed her mind to be hurt that he had not mentioned marriage, even to explain its impossibility.
They were hurtling over the viaduct. She had left it too late to hurl herself to an easy death. She pulled her case down from the rack, finished her second can of beer and relit a protective cigarette. If things were really bad she could always come down here on foot to put an end to it all. This being Barrowcester, someone would be certain to waylay her however, trying to dissuade her with arguments of eternal love, temporal duty, or at least an invitation to sherry. Madeleine hated Barrowcester. The emotion smote her in the spleen as they pulled into the station and a porter opened her door for her with a smile. She loathed the place. Why was she here? It was too pretty and the people were unnaturally caring and nice and it was all too damned un-her. She handed in her ticket and dawdled out on to Station Approach to begin the long climb up the High Street, along Tower Place, past Boniface Crafts and through the Close to Tracer Lane and home. Home, whose vowel moaned with animal discontent. She kept her head down, ignoring the blandishments of window boxes and kind, open faces. She was not ready to meet anyone and tomorrow, after reading their cleaning ladies’ papers, they would be all too ready to avoid her. Oh why had she come and why oh why was she in a red dress?
Red in Barrowcester adorned only post boxes, telephone kiosks and the fire engine. The Barrowcester female wore calm browns and greens, tasteful blues and various exclusive shades of cobweb or limestone. Summer brought a brief crisis of pastels and florals but they were few who made brief erroneous ventures into geranium or tiger lily; it was all forget-me-not and jasmine with the occasional blown rose – always prickly old-fashioned, never some easy-care hybrid tea. Within two months of their arrival here from her childhood in florid Bayswater, Madeleine had seen her mother licked into semi-respectable shape. The old glamorous clothes with their poison greens and blood reds had been passed on to that Hades of fashion, the Tatham theatre wardrobe, and been replaced twin-set by twin-set with a uniform that sat awkwardly on a woman with a bosom and a past. Even her mother’s past had evaporated. She had never been exactly open about it with her daughter, but now, from what she could glean from conversations on her rare trips home, Madeleine found that most Barrowers had pieced out the outlines of some outrage involving a vast house on the outskirts of Barcelona and a terrorist bomb. She chose not to interfere; Mum had her reasons, not the least of which was that she had to live here.
When the impulse to run home had first entered her mind as she watched a poster curl in the kettle steam and heard Georgene’s whooping reports of the swelling crowd of journalists below their windows, Madeleine had pursued a fantasy of being the whore returned from Babylon, striding the cobbled streets, behind her a trail of corrupted youth and lingering pagan odour, before her a confusion of children snatched into safety and door bolts drawn in haste. The reality was a sad affair. As she slid cowering over the junction of the High Street and Tower Place, past her mother’s shop and one of the city’s few pubs, she sensed that the Barrowers held and would retain the upper hand. She had done the running. They would receive her, smug on their sheltered hill, and get on very nicely thank you without her when she ran away again, as she undoubtedly would in a few days. Earthly Paradise was strictly for pure and undemanding hearts. Madeleine invariably reached breaking point and fled with an inward scream in less than a week. She lit a last cigarette tucking the empty packet into a passing window box, and wondered whether the crisis baying at her heels might keep her there longer than usual.
She passed under an arch into the Close. The Cathedral’s twin towers glowed in the last of the evening sun. Before her and slightly to the right she could just make out the spikey roof of the chapel quadrangle at Tatham’s. Her pock-marked teens reached out at her from each lengthening shadow and she felt every lumpen pound the returning prodigal. Dining with swine had been a rare treat while it lasted.
15
As he soaked in the shoe box of a bathroom with four crackers spread with peanut butter and sliced banana lined up on the soap rack before him, Evan studied his distant toes and wondered about Mrs Merluza’s daughter. Placing the mother’s age at fiftyish and assuming her, from her glamour to be the kind of woman who has her babies early and by mistake, if at all, he would gauge her daughter to be around thirty. Evan munched a cracker, brushing the crumbs off his chest. Since the bomb tragedy that deprived her of her father had occurred in the girl’s infancy, she would have been reared wholly under the mother’s influence and was probably a creature of no ambition and affected dress, the lamb within turning to premature mutton.
When, spruce a couple of hours later, he climbed the stairs, following voices to the sitting room, he found that he was gravely mistaken. As he knocked at the door a woman’s voice, deeper than Mrs Merluza’s, muttered something angry in Spanish (possibly Catalan, as he didn’t catch it) and he entered. The air was heavy with stifled scene. His landlady was cowering in an armchair and a waistless woman in a red dress was staring away from him into the night beyond.
‘Ah, Professor,’ chimed up Mrs Merluza, able to rise now that she was not alone, ‘this is my dear daughter, Madeleine.’
The woman turned.
‘Hello,’ she said, not offering to shake hands. ‘You’ll make a change from all those creepy organists. Mum never invites them to supper.’
‘I’m honoured,’ Evan muttered.
‘Indeed you are. Sit down. What would you like to drink?’
‘Scotch?’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Mrs Merluza and fairly ran to rattle ice cubes at a table behind where he was sitting. Madeleine drew the curtains and flopped into an armchair. She was twenty-six or seven. Not conventionally pretty, but then, Evan reflected, neither was he. A big girl, she should not by rights have been wearing scarlet. Were one to drape her statuesqueness in black instead, or darkest purple, she would make an electric Norma or Ariadne. The red, however, showed spirit, as did she in the course of the evening. Her conversation was keen, not to say erudite – he discovered that she specialized in the history of erotica and concepts of visual sensuality – but Evan gained the impression that she was performing. He might have been her supervisor or an attentive brick wall. What fascinated him as they drank together then went down to eat was that she exerted some hold over her parent. It was as if she had a secret that her mother was terrified she might blurt out and her every utterance was followed by appeasement on the older woman’s part.
‘Delicious, Mrs Merluza. Really delicious,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Yes, Mum. It’s great.’
‘Why thank you, darling. Thank you. It’s only veal and a little …’
‘But Evan,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘I can call you that, can’t I? Good – Evan, don’t you find his style apallingly dated? Honours aside, he writes like Castaneda, or even Dylan if you put on the right voice.’
Her English was effortless, even slapdash, compared to her mother’s. The only trace of Spanish was a marked softening of her Ss on the rare occasions when she spoke fast. She managed to combine the stolid, contained simmering of an Electra with a corrosive vein of Wickedest Girl in Class. Her hair. Evan wanted to reach out and rub its coarse thickness on his cheek. A luxuriant, coff
in-dark mass, it matched her bovine eyes and made her mother’s black look navy blue. She had the heavy eyebrows and bangle-jangling, furred forearms of a Costa Brava waitress and the sharpness of Dorothy Parker with a stubbed toe.
‘Can I offer you a brandy, Professor?’
‘No thanks, Mrs M. I must stay up and work.’
‘More coffee then?’ Madeleine suggested.
‘Please.’
Mrs Merluza made to move but her daughter rose and waved her back.
‘Stay put,’ she told her. ‘I’ll get it.’
Evan watched her mother play with a cheese rind.
‘They grow up so fast,’ she simpered with a sigh and he smiled back to help her relax.
It could not be easy having such a daughter turn up to frighten one. Madeleine was the kind of girl medieval parents would have handed over to the strong arm of the church at the first decent opportunity. It was only when he felt a tumultuous relief on tearing himself away on the pretext of ‘important reading’ that he realized that even his customary state of amiable self-possession had been upset. He was in awe of someone.
He made another attempt at reading Sukie Lark Rosen’s New Mythology – an attempt so feeble, even he was not fooled – then sat at the table in his bedroom and took out his diary. He had never kept a daily journal, as he suspected these soon became a litany of self-accusation, drab encounter and supper menu. Instead he kept a book for the recording of states, crises and anecdotes. Its chief purpose was as a safety valve to lower the frequency of shamefully revelatory letters to friends of questionable fidelity.
‘Madeleine Merluza is fat and late twenties and I am thin and middle forties,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t like big girls. I have never liked big girls. I was wild about Miriam when first I met her and she was queen of the titless rakes. Maybe that was what was wrong with our marriage, and not babies or Thomas Aquinas? Can one go for forty years of one’s life under the misapprehension that one likes titless rakes before making the discovery that their polar opposite is one’s true lodestone? Come to think of it, Ma says that Huby Stokes, who Miriam is dating, is built like a lorry driver.’