by Jane Asher
It had all seemed so easy at first. His marriage had been more than satisfactory at the beginning: Eleanor had proved herself to be an efficient and intelligent wife – an asset to the company as much as to his home life – but it hadn’t taken long to discover that physically her needs were very different from his. He had assumed it was just exciting sex that he missed, like so many men of his generation seemed to, and the occasional fling with a secretary or girl picked up in a bar kept him quite satisfied in that department for many years, but after the first few sessions with Barbara he had been surprised to find himself missing her relaxed, spontaneous warmth and affection as much as the unexpected proficiency of her technique.
The invitations to well-cooked, homely suppers were irresistible. Countless evenings spent alone in his flat, or out with colleagues in pubs or restaurants where he had been expected to make small talk about sport or politics, had left him vulnerable to the charms of cosy, undemanding domesticity, and Barbara provided it willingly. The feeling of being so obviously adored was new and very seductive, and Barbara was so quick to sense his needs that she made the evenings spent with her little havens of comfort and relaxation that soon became indispensable. Sometimes they would spend evenings in her small flat in Paddington, but the thought of Eleanor telephoning and finding him out made John nervous, and more and more frequently he would invite Barbara to cook and sleep in his flat.
In spite of her careful tidying and clearing in the mornings, he knew Barbara’s presence would not go undetected for ever, and when she was made redundant from her office job and forced to leave her flat, the decision to rent her one two floors below John’s had been natural and sensible. He couldn’t see that either woman was hurt by the arrangement, and often congratulated himself on keeping his marriage so problem free by having his other needs catered for during the week.
He had astonished himself by suggesting to her that she had a child. He had worried that she was getting bored; that the long days and weekends spent on her own might leave her vulnerable to predatory males roaming about London looking for comfort just as he had been, and it suddenly seemed such a simple idea to provide her with the perfect, time-consuming distraction that he knew she secretly longed for.
She had never clearly expressed a desire for a baby, but had given herself away many times by the way she would talk of pregnancy and childbirth, and by becoming just a little too emotionally involved in television programmes where children were featured. He knew she never mentioned the possibility, not because she didn’t want them herself, but because she thought he didn’t, and that her every effort was to make his London life run smoothly and comfortingly in the way he liked it.
But it wasn’t purely for her sake that he had suggested it. If he thought back, John admitted to himself that the idea of a son – kept well out of his way by Barbara except for the times he might feel like brief forays into fatherhood – was rather pleasing. The ability to return at weekends to the child-free zone in Surrey would make the perfect balance.
But of course it hadn’t worked out as he had imagined it at all. The child had been a girl, and in spite of Barbara’s tireless efforts to keep her from irritating John, she had disrupted the easy harmony of his London life far more than he had imagined. The noisy messiness of babyhood had led into the impossible demands of childhood and then the sulkiness of teens. And since leaving the local college the girl couldn’t even find a job. He did his best to remain aloof from her moods and tantrums, but a certain involvement was becoming increasingly unavoidable.
Now he knew there was something wrong, something upsetting Barbara, and he reluctantly put down the paper and looked at her over his glasses. ‘Where’s Susan?’ he asked, crossing his legs.
‘Out. With her friends.’
‘Uh. She’s out a lot lately, isn’t she? No problem is there? Not having a problem again, is she?’
‘No. No, of course not, John. She’s fine. She’s grown up now, you know. You don’t need to worry about her.’
‘So you keep saying. But I’ve never liked that crowd she mixes with, you know that.’ He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and looked back down at his newspaper. Barbara watched him, a mixture of love and terror in her heart. She couldn’t understand why she was finding this all so difficult. It wasn’t as if she had never lied before; for years she had lied to the child about her father; about his mysterious weekends with ‘Aunt Eleanor’. Not to mention the biggest lie of all: the way they had let Susan think that they were married, that she was legitimate, that this was John’s family; his only family. But all that had happened by default over a long time and so gradually that there had never appeared to be a conscious decision to lie. It had felt true, too. The real truth had felt like the unreal part. Eleanor had become a shadowy, aunt-like figure in Barbara’s consciousness many years ago, and John had been her own husband as surely as Susan had been their legitimate, one and only beloved daughter.
But this was different. She wasn’t used to lying to John, and she was finding it an unpleasant and frightening experience. She had always enjoyed the moment he came home from work; his tiredness making him rub his eyes and kick off his shoes like a little boy. There was nothing she liked better than to slip his jacket off his shoulders, put her arms around his neck and kiss his sweet, rumpled face as he grunted and protested, then sit him down in his armchair and let him complain to her about his day, while she rubbed his feet or rested her head on his knee. She had never felt even the slightest twinge of jealousy when she had thought of Eleanor, who had become merely an apocryphal figure, entering the house only via John’s descriptions of meetings with her during the day, or phone calls he had received, or simply complaints about her that he had felt like voicing.
Barbara had always wondered at the desire of women like Eleanor to go to work, to need more in their lives than the care of a house and family. The stories John brought home of Eleanor’s meetings with his designers or architects amazed her, and she was genuinely puzzled by the amount of energy it seemed to her such a woman must possess. Any qualms about her situation that she had had in the first few months of her relationship with John were quickly put to rest once she gave any real thought to the third party in the triangle. Any woman, she reasoned, who could happily let her husband stay up in town all week and not miss him, who demanded more in her life than being his wife and the mistress of a beautiful home, was a human being so far removed from anything she could begin to sympathise with that she felt no guilt at all at fulfilling the role she saw the other as voluntarily relinquishing. How could she love him, she reasoned, like I do?
Ever since their first meeting in the wine merchant’s round the corner from the flat she had known she would love him completely and for ever. The charm with which he had teased her about the bottle of Blue Nun she had been buying for her sister’s birthday tea had caught her breath, and the extraordinary invitation to pop round to his flat to taste what he called real wine had been irresistible. It might have been only sex he had been after, but she was so used to that being the only route open to her to secure a brief hour or so of superficially warm human contact that she had felt no guilt or shyness at giving him quickly what he wanted. The lessons learnt through years of sex with a startling number of previous bed partners had paid off, and she was able to make that first evening physically exciting and unusual enough to guarantee a return visit. What she hadn’t expected was the childlike surrender with which he soon began to depend on the nurturing devotion which she expressed in supplying not only his sexual but also his everyday bodily and emotional needs, from home-cooked meals to perfectly ironed shirts and from patient listening to unquestioning, uncritical love.
I have everything I could possibly want, she often thought. This wonderful man who needs me and desires me, and his daughter, born out of love. Let E. (as she always thought of her) have her job and her staff and her committees and her good works. I’ll do what she should be doing and look after the man who p
rovides her with everything she has.
Barbara had come to feel almost noble about it, as if, by her silence and her devotion and her acceptance of the lack of any real legal or social standing she was unselfishly keeping the other two afloat. Her own time was so happily, and fully, spent in caring for John and Susan and in shopping, cooking and cleaning that she found it impossible to imagine wanting anything more.
The feeling of unease in dealing with John was new and horrible. Her love for him was unequivocal and uncritical, and it was the sense of it being just so wrong that such a trusting, clever man should be misled that worried her far more than any anger he might feel towards her on its discovery. She was used to his anger; seeing his bad temper as a challenge more than a threat; a chance to soothe him and coax him back into good spirits.
Susan had been going to E.’s two or three times a week for several weeks now, and she hated not being able to talk to John about it. The girl was changing; there was no doubt about it. There was an arrogance in her manner that hadn’t been there before, and a dismissive attitude to her mother that made Barbara feel almost tearful. Susan had always had a corner that Barbara had been unable to penetrate; the resigned-looking girl who had gone out in the evenings with her friends when John’s moods had made her feel in the way had always been difficult to know, but up till now Barbara had convinced herself that this was something common to all young girls, and that the solitariness and secrecy were perfectly normal. This new lack of communication was different. And she was terrified that at any moment John would notice some of the clothes that the woman had been buying her, or smell the new scent she’d persuaded her to wear. The short hair had been easy enough – Susan was always experimenting with her looks, and John had even said he liked it.
‘Are you ready for your tea, John? I’ve made a beef stew.’
John stretched his arms in front of him, letting the newspaper drop onto his lap, and yawned and pulled off his glasses as he looked up at her. ‘I certainly am. I’m starving and exhausted.’ He cocked his head on one side and smiled. ‘Come here, you silly thing. What are you looking so worried about? Dumplings not risen? I’ll soon sort that out.’
As she pushed the newspaper onto the floor and moved to sit on his lap, letting her heavy breasts rest against his chest the way he liked it, Barbara thought herself the luckiest woman in the world.
When Susan finally came home she went straight to her room and shut the door behind her, letting Barbara’s cry of welcome echo unanswered along the hallway. She walked over to the long mirror hanging on the wall next to her wardrobe and studied herself, a little taken aback by the image that confronted her – as she always was these days – but not displeased. She was getting used to the shorter hair, and enjoyed the way it swung gently around the bottom edge of her jaw in a thick, glossy curve as she moved her head, but the change of makeup still took her a little by surprise. She had become so used to the thick, black eyeliner and heavy foundation that the subtle, smudgy brown around her eyes and the pale porcelain-like texture of her skin still looked startlingly minimal and undefined when she caught sight of herself. The first thing she had done after the session with the makeup artist that Eleanor had set up for her was to rush home and reapply her old look, but on catching sight of herself reflected in a shop window later that day she had been surprised by the garishness of the image and had resolved at that moment to give the new, subtle makeup a chance. After a few days of following the chart that she had been given and experimenting with the products that Eleanor had insisted on buying her she had to admit that she was beginning to like it. She also liked the admiring glances she was getting, and was amazed to discover what power she could exert by a small swing of the hips or shake of the bouncy hair.
She stood still for a few seconds and listened. She could just pick up the muffled sound of the ten o’clock news, and knew that the two of them would be safely shut in the sitting room for at least the next twenty minutes, so she crossed to the bed and perched on the edge of it while she dialled Eleanor’s number.
‘Hello? Eleanor? I just wanted to thank you. Again. I love this new suit – it’s beautiful. And lunch was – delicious.’ She was picking her words carefully, consciously avoiding those that Eleanor had asked her not to use, and pleased that she’d just in time remembered not to call the food ‘nice’. She still found it extraordinary, and not a little silly, that her aunt minded so much about particular words and ways of doing things, but felt that to go along with her wishes was the least she could do to repay the older woman’s generosity. What did surprise her was how irritating she was beginning to find it when her mother used the very words and phrases that Eleanor was teaching her to avoid. She had never thought much about how her parents spoke or behaved, taking it all pretty much for granted, but her new awareness was forcing her to notice the difference between the two of them, and it made her feel strangely uneasy. Her father – when he spoke to her, which wasn’t often – talked like Eleanor, and her mother talked like – well, like – what was that word that Eleanor kept using, which made Susan laugh? Common. Her mother talked in a way that was common.
‘It was a very enjoyable day, Susan,’ Eleanor’s distinctly uncommon voice answered down the phone. ‘And I appreciate your politeness, but I’m the one who should be thanking you for indulging me. It gives me great pleasure to buy you things and make the most of your prettiness and charm. But you know that, I’m sure. Now what did you really think of the scallops? You can be completely honest, you know – I won’t be offended.’
‘No, I know – and I really did like them. Honestly. And the desser—pudding. It was great. It’s fun, isn’t it? This going out together and you telling me things. And I’m going to teach you a bit about music, Eleanor. You’re absolutely hopeless about modern music, you know. There has been a bit since the sixties. What does “house” mean to you?’
‘I have heard of it, Susan. I’m not as completely out of touch as you like to think. House music. Yes – it’s disco music, isn’t it? What they play to dance to. What I would call disco music, isn’t it? So there.’
Eleanor heard Susan laugh down the phone, and smiled to herself. It was something quite new to her, this feeling of comradeship with someone so much younger than she was, and she had recently begun to acknowledge just how fond she was becoming of this stepdaughter she had never known she had. She had foreseen that the mission to reeducate the girl, with its intended devastating payoff, would bring her satisfaction; what she hadn’t realised was that it would bring her so much emotional pleasure at the same time. She was becoming more proprietorial as each day went by, and found herself resenting it each time the girl had to return to what she saw as the bad influence of her mother.
The retraining of Susan was taking up a large proportion of her time: between her visits she spent hours planning the next shopping trip or museum visit, carefully mixing pleasure with culture so as not to frighten off her prodigy with too much obvious education. She found this time spent in preparation surprisingly soothing, using it as a barrier to fend off the thoughts about John that still permanently hovered threateningly at the edges of her mind. It was helping physically, too. Whenever the familiar pangs of jealousy began to invade her body she turned her mind quickly to ideas for the next outing, and found the burning misery that invaded her very bones would ebb slowly as she pictured Susan in a new outfit or gazing at a painting in the Tate. She was impatient between meetings for the chance to carry on with her project, using the excuse of waiting for the completion of Susan’s reprogramming to deflect the ever present, screaming question: when. When to tell him. When to confront him. And harder than anything else: what to hope for thereafter.
‘Now, that’s from reading a newspaper every day; another thing I’m determined to get you to do. You’d be surprised just how much you can keep abreast of things by reading one paper thoroughly every day.’
‘Oh I can’t, Eleanor. I can’t bear newspapers.’
�
�Of course you can. You just need me to show you how interesting they really are – and I don’t mean the gossip in the tabloids either—’
‘I know you don’t. I’m not quite that stupid,’ Susan interrupted.
‘You certainly aren’t, Susan. Don’t you dare say for one moment that I think you’re stupid. You’re an extremely clever, talented and attractive girl. Why else do you think I’m so fond of you? Why else do you suppose I enjoy being with you so much and giving you things?’
There was a little pause before Susan answered.
‘Do you really mean that?’ she asked quietly.
‘Of course I do. You’re a delight.’ There was another short silence, then Eleanor took a deep breath and spoke hesitatingly, almost nervously. ‘I have something rather extraordinary to ask you, Susan. You mustn’t take offence and I hope you’ll shout at me, if that’s what you feel like doing, but at least listen for a moment. I want you to—’
Suddenly there was a gentle little knock on Susan’s door, and at the same time it opened and Barbara’s head peeped round it, a flushed pink on her cheeks and a nervous anxiety in her small eyes. ‘Oh sorry, dear, I didn’t know you were on the phone. Your dad wants to see you. He says he hardly ever sees you. Will you come and sit with us, dear? Who are you talking to?’