We sit in my garden eating Parma ham with melon and figs.
‘So you’ve been to see poor old Molly. Does she look really ancient now?’
‘Well, she’s over eighty. She’s going a bit deaf and blind and can’t be bothered keeping herself or the flat clean any more and her clothes all seem to be falling apart. You know.’
‘Indeed I do. Bet you wouldn’t be interested in me if I looked like that.’
‘Don’t be silly. Let’s go to bed.’
At three we wake up, kiss, make love and start talking again. I bring in a tray with a pot of camomile tea and brown bread and honey. We talk about everything except Leo and Muriel, as if guilt is a bill that hasn’t arrived yet.
‘I was thinking about what you were saying earlier, about Molly. Women have changed since her day, although I don’t think men have. Now we’re supposed to work and be wives and mistresses and mothers and intellectual equals and great cooks – a combination of the Michelin and Who’s Who and the lineaments of gratified desire.’
‘And do you succeed?’
‘Me? Oh, I don’t work. I’m useless.’
‘But you are pretty good at gratifying desire. Yesterday I almost fell asleep after lunch. You’re so lucky. You don’t have to get up in the morning.’
‘Do you despise me for not working?’
‘Women like you never do. You use your sex appeal and youth to con some poor sap into supporting you for the rest of you life. Wasn’t it Shaw who said marriage was licensed prostitution? Of course, it was different in the past when women couldn’t get a proper education and most of the professions were closed to them. But now any woman with brains can earn her living.’
‘Perhaps next time I’ll be a tycoon.’
‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’
‘Reinvention? Oh yes.’
Next week David is to join Muriel and their two children in Bournemouth. For both of us this month has been a holiday, from ourselves and from Leo and Muriel.
Our last night together. We can’t sleep. We keep turning to each other, touching, as if the other’s face and body is a poem in Braille we have to memorize. ‘I’ll be back in two weeks.’
‘This has become so much our room. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to share it with Leo again.’
‘I dare say you’ll manage. You’ll phone me at work?’
‘Of course.’
‘You won’t leave it for another fifteen years? You have a very strange sense of time.’
‘Yes, I suppose I do, but some things are timeless. I’ll always feel close to you now, David. You know, it is quite possible to love two people, but not in the same way. Part of me will always be here in this room, this bed, with part of you. We’ll always have to stay in each other’s lives now.’
‘Always is a big word.’
Well, David’s doubts have turned out to be more accurate than my blind optimism. You are back and to my surprise – and self-disgust – I’m pleased to see you. We’ve settled easily into an affectionate routine. Neither of us has asked the other any questions about last summer, not even when you found David’s razor in our bathroom.
I feel lethargic. I haven’t the energy to phone David. Already, last summer seems a long time ago. My body feels strange: my heart, belly, tear ducts and breasts seem bigger, like overripe fruit waiting to burst. At night I lie awake beside you, listening to my internal seething and churning, which at four in the morning merge with the rhythm of trains and the shouts of drunks. At first I thought I was becoming a hypochondriac, but now I’ve missed two periods and notice a thickening, as if a layer of clay has been slapped on around my waist and thighs. I’m almost sure now, yet still I say nothing, do nothing. My body’s been invulnerable for years, I can’t believe it would disobey me now. I’ve been pregnant before, of course, but so long ago that I’ve forgotten how it feels, although I vividly remember the misery of my two abortions.
My slinkier dresses bulge now, and I have to turn up at parties in long, flowing clothes.
‘Are you putting on weight?’ you ask as we’re dressing to go out.
‘Too much good food.’ Alone in the bathroom I stare at my naked body in the mirror. I’m rounder, softer, with heavy breasts and dark, sore nipples. My body’s been sending me all these signals, and I’ve just ignored them. It’s the one thing I never expected to happen and if – if – I’ve no idea if the father’s David or you. You’ve always said it’s impossible; it would be a back-to-front immaculate conception, a diabolical miracle. Not so long ago I’d have been burnt at the stake. If it’s yours I’ll have to have an abortion. But David’s child – George’s great-grandchild – yes, I could enjoy that. Or it might all be the product of my disastrous imagination. Women do have imaginary pregnancies. But not at eighty-six, surely?
I walk in Holland Park, staring at the baby-dominated world that suddenly opens up. It’s November. Plants are dying, but children are growing. In prams and pushchairs imperious little monsters rule. One of those, oh God, one of those. Above each sunny, rapacious little face I see the eclipsed features of a mother or nanny. How exhausted they look, anaemic, their life’s blood draining into their charges as surely as if an intravenous tube linked the two. One of the women is hugely pregnant. I smile at her bump and then into her tired eyes, meeting her answering smile.
All my life I’ve ignored this submerged freemasonry of women and small children. I’ve often wondered why women carry on having babies at all, now that they don’t have to. I start to project these changes in my body outwards into a new autonomous being.
Can’t tell you because you’d want me to get rid of it. You’d hate the competition and the mess. Can’t tell David either; he’s already got two kids and it wouldn’t be fair to spring this on him. Last summer was a no-strings affair: no promises, no demands and certainly no babies. I hope it’s his. It can’t be yours, but perhaps I should pretend it is. One of you obviously had something to do with it.
I want it. Him. Her. I want to love in a different way, with the total absorption of these women in the park. Seven months before this baby’s born and already I’m lying for it, turning my life upside down.
The Contract
The Christmas party at the Fizz was even more excessive than usual: enough food and drink to support a refugee camp for six months; strippers leaping out of cakes; Salome performed with the head of Karl Marx on a plate. Nothing too baroque, however, as there were MPs and journalists present and one-lifers don’t like it when parties get out of hand. Two years ago I conjured up Queen Victoria to give the after-dinner speech, but she only gaped at us all and disintegrated all over the table. The dead have no stamina. Sensational profits this year – my bonus is enough to buy that estate in Sussex and have another flutter on the interplanetary-retirement scheme. Cecil Rhodes, who has reinvented himself as an ecology consultant, reckons this planet will be finished by the middle of the next century, and one does have to plan ahead.
Jenny wouldn’t come to the party. She’s very temperamental at the moment; just lies around all day and seems to be putting on weight. She goes out on mysterious errands. I suspect she’s still having an affair with that tedious grandson of George’s. Not that I care, of course, although how she could … Jealousy is out of the question. I must have slept with twenty women as I flitted from continent to continent last summer; can’t even remember their names. I was shocked by her rejection of my proposal. Still, married or not, here we are together again, under the same roof. I just wish she wouldn’t be so damned faithful to her old lovers. Love? As tired a word as Christmas itself.
‘I hate this time of year,’ I complain as we sit down to supper. I absent-mindedly open another bottle of champagne, although I’m still hungover from last night, and pour a glass for Jenny.
‘No thanks. I told you, I’m trying not to drink.’
‘Whatever for? Yes, Christmas always makes me feel like a has-been.’
‘But I thought you said you
preferred this century to any other? I think this is a great time to be alive. Providing you’re young, bright, rich and beautiful, of course. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.’
‘You don’t understand, Jenny. You’re so young – comparatively, I mean. Why, in the old days I wasn’t just a businessman, I was the most famous man in this world or out of this world. Nobody was ever quite sure who God was or what he looked like but everybody knew me. They talked about me all the time. Of course, the whole thing was a misunderstanding because I was only one of many. One agent couldn’t possibly have handled all that work. According to a fifteenth-century bishop there were 133,306,668 fallen angels, although I don’t see how he could possibly have known, and I never met them all.’
‘So what happened to the others?’
‘That’s a very good question. A few are involved with the Fizz, but I lost touch with all the others centuries ago. Some of them have probably fallen on hard times. We’re a vulnerable minority. Milton claimed they shrank to the size of fairies so as to make more room in Hell – too kitsch for my taste. I’ve always had a certain flair for falling on my feet, but some of the others were hopelessly unworldly. No skills at all, except playing the harp and singing. Perhaps we should try and trace them …’
‘Angels Anonymous?’
‘Ah, your English compulsion to turn everything into a joke.’
‘Look, can’t we just eat our supper without all these pathetic reminiscences?’
‘Don’t be so blasé. Only a few centuries ago – yesterday in metaphysical time – I, or we, got the credit for thunderstorms, gales and blizzards and wet dreams and diseases and madness and crimes and professional failures. I know you think I’m conceited, but can you blame me? John Knox called me the “Prince and God of this world”; James I called me “God’s hangman”. They really admired me then; they were always trying to get in touch with me. The intellectuals were the worst. Like that old German pedant, Faust, who started out dry as dust and then turned out to have an insatiable appetite for sex, power and money. He cheated me in the end –’
‘Leo, why are you boasting like this?’
‘I just want you to know who I really am. Why, in the Great Catechism I get mentioned sixty-seven times whereas His name only appears sixty-three times.’
‘Do you mean to say you counted?’ Jenny comes over to my side of the table and hugs me. ‘Is this your way of saying you’re feeling old and unloved?’
‘Why do women always have to reduce everything to the personal?’
‘Why don’t men ever have the courage to talk about their feelings?’
‘I’m not some snivelling one-lifer, you know, whining about my inadequacies.’
‘Well, you can’t have it both ways.’ She returns to her chair and peels a peach, frowning at me.
‘Why not? I always have. I’ve always had it every conceivable way. The truth is, I was better off in a more religious age. Everyone was. Medieval man – I know you’ll say what about women, but they didn’t count then – saw himself as God’s beloved child. His earth was safe at the centre of the universe, and the sun moved around it. He knew where he belonged and what he should do, both during his lifetime and afterwards. Nowadays there’s chaos, everyone’s discontented with their place in the world, there’s no faith and Christmas is just a commercial jamboree.’
‘What an original thought,’ Jenny says sourly. ‘You sound like an old colonel. Look, it’s Christmas Eve, and I want to enjoy it. Tomorrow will be fun. We’ll be with Toby and Katrina and their kids. Christmas without children doesn’t make any sense.’ She pauses, searches my face for some signal that isn’t there and continues with forced jollity, ‘Let’s give each other our presents tonight, like they do in Italy.’
She gives me some gold cufflinks. Apart from the flowers, which showed some imagination, Jenny’s presents are predictable, the sort of thing a bourgeois wife might give her successful husband. Perhaps that’s how she sees us. Odd. I give her a small sixteenth-century Spanish painting I picked up at Sotheby’s last week. I don’t think she likes it, but she pretends she does.
‘See! There I am, firmly in my place, toasting heretics like crumpets in a cosy blaze. Actually, I didn’t have horns or a tail by then. I’ve been a good-looking chap for at least a thousand years now, but people always remember your mistakes.’
‘Well, you look fabulous now,’ she says in her new soothing, condescending voice that jars on me so much. ‘We should get Dominic to take some photos of us – now that you have a reflection.’
‘Another strange sign of the times. What’s going on? Who am I? Religion’s become a wishy-washy insurance policy, and I’m just a symptom of schizophrenia.’
‘Oh, do stop feeling so sorry for yourself.’
‘I don’t think you realize how humiliating this time of year is for me, Jenny. I never even get a mention on a Christmas card. They drool over that wretched little baby and fuss over their horrible children. I hate babies.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I do. My bad temper lasts for days. I’m irritated by Katrina’s spoilt, greedy children and Jenny’s raptures over them. I guzzle and booze and end up with a headache and indigestion. Our friends, who seemed so delightful a few months ago, get on my nerves now. They’re all so complacent, so unaware, and throw their money around so ostentatiously. The courts of medieval monarchs were quite tasteful compared with the waste and vulgarity at Toby and Katrina’s parties. Another few years here and I’ll be an ascetic socialist. And Jenny – she isn’t in the room with me any more.
On New Year’s Eve, unable to face another party, I go to bed at seven and let her go out alone. I wake up at three to see Jenny undressing by the light of her bedside lamp and watch as she takes off her long, loose crimson dress. When we’re making love I’m too absorbed to look at her body carefully, but now I see how its contours have expanded and softened. Her breasts are heavy and purposeful; they no longer spring unemphatically above the flat plain of her belly. It’s flat no longer. Flesh curves richly from the top of her black bush, and her sharp hipbones are muffled and rounded. Sensing my eyes on her, she grabs a long, white night-dress to cover herself. She always used to sleep naked.
‘Good party? Who was there?’
‘The usual suspects.’
‘You’ve put on weight.’
‘Thanks, Leo, that’s a great start to the new year.’
‘Sorry. Happy 1984, Jenny.’
I used to think I knew everything about her, even when we were apart. Suddenly her mind and body have become opaque. The thought that she might be having a serious love affair gives me an enormous hard-on. I press myself against her, and she turns away from me in her sleep. The most obvious explanation for her plumpness is … No, that’s out of the question.
Since I’m more subtle than any private detective I follow her around for a few weeks. My ability to disappear comes in handy; she doesn’t realize I’m stalking her. I’ve never really thought about who Jenny is without me. In her room she reads and listens to music. She goes to see Molly and Katrina and meets other girlfriends for lunch. No sign of a lover unless she’s become bisexual, which I doubt. On Wednesday I follow her to St Stephen’s Hospital, and lurk while she goes inside. I’m too late to see which department she goes to, but she comes out smiling. When I casually ask about her health at supper she says she’s fine. Could she be nobly covering up some tragic diagnosis? It’s very unlikely anything would go seriously wrong with her. Even if it did she couldn’t die and would probably be entitled to sue in the Metaphysical Courts.
I follow her to the tube station, sitting invisibly beside her on the train. We get off at Sloane Square, and I follow her into Peter Jones. I rematerialize in China and Glass – to the alarm of an old lady whose Pekinese yaps and pees in distress – and follow Jenny on the escalator up to the third floor. I watch from behind a stack of plastic ducks while she wanders around, touching tiny jumpers, hats and dresses, crisp b
roderie anglaise pillows, painted wooden furniture and teddy bears. I rarely lose my temper, but when I do the manifestations are always physical. This time the plastic ducks melt into a yellow puddle, and I find myself glaring straight at Jenny while shop assistants rush up to stare at the liquefied ducks. With her usual chutzpah Jenny calmly walks up to me and kisses me lightly on the cheek.
But I refuse to be disarmed. ‘You can’t be. It’s impossible.’
‘It is real, I had a scan ten days ago, and there it was, wriggling around on a screen. A little Leo. Now you know we might as well do some shopping.’
I grip her arm tightly, quivering with rage. ‘Don’t come the sub-urban housewife with me. Little Leo, my arse. It’s nothing to do with me. Have you been screwing somebody else?’
‘Why shouldn’t I? You do. You always have.’
‘Even if you have it shouldn’t be possible. I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t see what’s so amazing. We’ve been sleeping together for the last seventy years.’
‘I told you, it can’t be mine.’
‘You keep saying you want to be ordinary, human. Well, maybe you are.’
‘It’s not that creepy grandson of George’s?’
‘I don’t know. Let go of me.’ She shakes herself free. ‘I’m going to buy some clothes. Now fuck off, Leo, we’ll talk about this later. I’m having this baby, with or without you, and you’d just better get used to the idea.’
A rail of tiny cardigans scorches as I pass it, and I become aware of the hostile audience of customers and assistants. They’re all women. Only women come here, women and their horrible screaming brats. In my anxiety to escape I carelessly disappear in the middle of the department and see gaping mouths and pointing fingers as I propel myself through the window, over the traffic and rooftops to my laboratory.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 18