Four Bare Legs In a Bed

by Helen Simpson

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Helen Simpson

  Title Page

  Four Bare Legs in a Bed

  Good Friday, 1663

  Give Me Daughters Any Day

  The Bed

  What Are Neighbours For

  An Interesting Condition

  Labour

  Christmas Jezebels

  A Shining Example

  Zoë and the Pedagogues

  Send One Up For Me

  The Seafarer

  Below Rubies

  Escape Clauses

  Copyright

  About the Book

  * * *

  Brilliant, funny and tragic, Four Bare Legs in a Bed is an outstanding and invigorating collection of short stories. In Simpson’s uniquely imaginative and sensuous voice, we hear of the mixed blessings of independence and marriage, of sex and babies.

  About the Author

  * * *

  Helen Simpson is the author of Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, In-Flight Entertainment and A Bunch of Fives. In 1991 she was chosen as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1993 she was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists. She has also received the Hawthornden prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. She lives in London.

  ALSO BY HELEN SIMPSON

  Dear George

  Hey Yeah Right Get A Life

  Helen Simpson

  FOUR BARE LEGS

  IN A BED

  Four Bare Legs in a Bed

  WHEN YOU DRAW the curtains in the morning you stand in front of the window like a black dog. I am brought down to earth with a bump. It isn’t fair.

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  You ask, even though you know we were sitting side by side over a shepherd’s pie in front of World in Action. I sip my tea and blink at the little azure Chinaman fishing from his pagoda.

  ‘Well?’ you insist.

  I channel vertically under the sheet to hide my blushing neck, muttering demulcent nothings. Goats and monkeys.

  What can I say, after all? I can hardly admit that I had a most colourful and stimulating night, thank you, lying bear-hugged with your squash partner skin to skin, dissolving in an exchange of slow damp kisses.

  Don’t let on to the Old Man, but I think I can safely say I have slept with all the men and boys of my acquaintance, including the grey-beards and one-way homosexuals and those towards whom I had not thought I felt an iota of oestrus.

  Only two nights ago I was lying on a riverbank with the other girls, and beside me knelt a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, a childish little chap. A boatload of his schoolfriends in their uniforms drifted past. They wore straw hats, but the sun beat up from the river to make crescents of light flick like sticklebacks over their faces. As they floated by, their smarmy teacher unleashed on us a particularly obsequious grin. His teeth were snaggled and tarnished. Ooh, we all giggled, revolted, and my little boy showed himself in sympathy. I gave him a kiss and a hug; there was a beam of envy from the schoolmaster. I gave him more hugs and kisses, and a generous warmth spread through me, tantalising and lovely.

  ‘You’re only fourteen, aren’t you, darling,’ I teased, pressing his head to my bosom, pretending to be motherly. I woke describing circles, and I was laughing.

  When we were first married, all of six months ago, he used to bring home large men in suits who laughed loudly, drank beer from tins and said outlandish things in suddenly solemn voices: for example, ‘It’s time to put your cock on the block,’ and, ‘We are talking serious megabucks.’ After a couple of months he stopped inviting them. I missed the flick of their eyes, but by then of course we were talking serious monogamy.

  A couple of nights before the wedding we met for a drink on Eel Pie Island. We stood in the long grass staring upstream, watching the Thames flow by on either side, dividing just before it reached us and meeting again behind us. I looked back down half-a-dozen years and saw my secret self at thirteen or fourteen. I had never felt incomplete alone, nor had I ever trembled for security. Now I had a premonition that my privacy and self-possession, which harmed nobody and were my only important treasures, would be things of the past the day after tomorrow. My saying yes to a wedding appeared in this illuminated instant as self-betrayal. A tide of shame and terror crept over my skin, moving fast like spilt wine. I stammered some thin wedge of these thoughts to my future husband, thinking (with an early marital shudder at the predictability), he will say no man is an island.

  ‘No man is an island,’ he said.

  Incidentally, marriage gave his words the lie, since it made an island of every man except himself. Conjugal life correctly conjugated reads: libido libidas libidat libidamus libidatis libiDON’T. Goodbye to the pure uncomplicated glee which can spring up between strangers, leading them out of their clothes and towards each other in a spirit of, among other things, sunny friendship.

  The girls at school had a quasi-religious conviction that once you felt the right way about a man, that was it. He was the other half who would make you whole, he was the only possible father of your children. I meet Rhoda every once in a while for a slice of cauliflower quiche, and she still subscribes to all that.

  ‘Either it’s Animal Lust, which doesn’t last,’ says Rhoda, ‘or it’s the Real Thing, which means Marriage.’ Rhoda likes things cut and dried. Recently she became engaged to the only possible father of her children. She took him shopping for a ring, hauled him past the windows of Hatton Garden, and he expressed nothing but ridicule at the prices. Next time he went to tea with Rhoda’s parents, he was sitting on the edge of the sofa balancing a plate of flapjacks on his knee when his prospective mother-in-law produced a tray of unpriced rings and demanded that he choose one. She said her daughter Rhoda was not to be shamed by a naked finger. He chose, and of course it turned out to be the second most expensive, over a thousand. There is a moral in that somewhere.

  Sometimes I slide my ring off before we go to a party, but he makes me put it on again. That left-handed ring finger is the weakest of the ten, always the first to let you down during a vigorous scherzando; there are sets of arpeggios based exclusively round strengthening its feebleness. It is also the most sensitive, the one women use when following such instructions as, Pat this featherweight creme lightly into the fragile skin tissue which surrounds the eye area.

  Lily-livered, swathed in white from head to foot, I said, ‘I will.’ Willing and waking may come to the same thing, but sleep is another matter. I am only properly alone now when I’m asleep, such is the encroachment. Well, sleep is a third part of life so I suppose I mustn’t grumble.

  You don’t even have a right to your own bed when you’re married. There is no escaping the mildmint breath toothpasting its way across the pillows. I am lying cool and straight in my bed when he climbs in with a proprietorial air, and I catch myself thinking, ‘How dare you.’ I never achieve the old full secrecy now, I never properly escape him, not until I’ve lost consciousness altogether. And even then … The other night as I lay waiting for sleep – almost there – I felt his fingertips on my eyelids, and I knew he was testing whether the eyeballs were moving in order to tell whether I was dreaming or not.

  My husband is older than me; not so much older that he thanks his lucky stars for me, but sufficiently older to create the distance of a demi-generation gap between us. He is a Management Consultant and he thinks he’s got me taped. He probably has, except for my nocturnal life. He has a square leonine head with icy blue-green eyes. I don’t know what he thinks about – ‘If only he c
ould talk,’ as old people say of their pets.

  You could say we rushed into it, but then, why not repent at leisure. How dismal are those long-term liaisons where, the seven years and a day being up, no nerve is left to take the plunge. On our honeymoon near St Ives, there was one late wordless picnic down on the beach when I stared at his cleanly minted profile against the night sky and worshipped the silence. Out last week at some busy new restaurant, however, we sat dumbly over plates of chilli-spiced pomfret fish until in the end, to stop the water-drops leaping, I lowered my eyes, staring hard at his tee-shirt, on which was traced a detailed map of half a square mile of the Outer Hebrides, and savagely wished myself there.

  His worst failing so far is jealousy. The last time I rang him at the office, his secretary said earnestly, ‘I haven’t seen hare nor hound of him.’ But if he rings me and I don’t answer, there is likely to be an inquisition. Last week it got beyond a joke. I had taken the phone off the hook because Mr Pembleton had come round to give me my clarinet lesson and at nine pounds an hour I don’t like to take any chances on being interrupted. Anyway, towards the end of the lesson we were deep into a passage of Albinoni, quite transported by its bosky rills, and Mr Pembleton’s eyebrows were leaping in time to the rhythm as always, when in burst my bellowing pinstriped husband. It was very embarrassing. I was furious. Mr Pembleton was almost crying as he slunk off, not even given enough time to pack away his clarinet properly.

  I shall have to be more careful in future.

  Sometimes I have a dream that tears through me like a hurricane and leaves me shaking, the sort of dream that used to be explained away as the work of devils. There were sleepy female demons who gave out such heat that even in midwinter the soporific lettuce seeds sprouted when they walked by, the mere rustle of their skirts made frosty rosebushes blossom into full-blown crimson. Such a succuba would descend in a hot dream upon a sleeping man with an appetite so violent that by the time she had finished with him even the densest-bearded would wake quite exhausted and feeling as though his bones had been dislocated. My own hurricanes would no doubt have been described as the work of that cocky male devil the incubus, whose nocturnal interference was held responsible for the births of mutants and monsters.

  Occasionally, at the end of some mad sparkling quarrel, he clubs me down at last with that spiteful threat: ‘What you need is a baby. That would sort you out.’ Oh yes, that would be the end of this road and no mistake. They’re all on his side, of course: First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, etc.

  Do you think it possible that a dream confluence – put it more bluntly, fusion with a chimera – might result in a phantom pregnancy? Or does the waking self give up the ghost?

  My dreams have been with me from the edge of childhood, mostly the sort of dream in which every courtesy is maintained and every permission given; but I never knew before I married what it was to be a quarreller. Our rows are like the weather, there is no control over them and very little warning, sometimes none at all. We might be basking in the sunshine when a squall appears from nowhere and within seconds develops into a howling tornado. At the same time and with equal speed we hurtle back down the decades, transformed into giant infants stamping and frowning and spouting tears of rage.

  ‘Don’t talk to me then! See if I care!’ rings out with playground simplicity.

  I slap his arm and burst into tears of rage and disappointment. I follow him into the next room. ‘What about the time you left me stranded by the Albert Memorial,’ I yell.

  ‘You sound just like a scratched old record,’ he hisses. He follows me upstairs. Insults cramp my throat. I find the best one and aim it carefully like a dart. I watch the pupils disappear to pin-points in the great excited aquamarine irises of his eyes.

  ‘Go away! Go away!’ I shout, turning to the wall as he approaches and whamming my forehead against it.

  Every time this happens I am astonished at the pack of devils let loose.

  We fall into bed like two nasty children. He says things so hard that I feel little shooting spasms in sexual places, so then I feel they must be true. I am quiet. I think about them. Then I slap out at him and he thumps me, so I scratch and bite. He says my name after I’ve turned out the light but I don’t answer. We lie awake in that sort of long dead silence when all future life is Arabia Deserta.

  We still behave fairly normally in public, avoiding the little bitternesses which longer-established married couples automatically bat to and fro without self-consciousness. Recently we had to go to a dinner party given by one of my husband’s grateful clients. Towards the end of the meal, the client’s wife ran in from her kitchen bearing a Baked Alaska alight with blue rum-based flames. In case you don’t know about Baked Alaska, it is a nightmare of a pudding which only a fool would try to make, a large lump of ice cream covered with heavily whipped sugar-stiffened raw egg-whites sitting on a sponge cake. This structure is cauterised in a scorching oven for three minutes, during which time the ice cream is supposed to stay frozen while the meringue bakes to brown peaks. It is what you might call the Ur-recipe for disaster.

  The client and his wife were a fairly tense couple anyway, but the stealthy sniping with which they had seasoned the early part of the meal was now given culinary fulfilment.

  ‘Knife, darling.’ His voice rose to shrillness. ‘Sharp knife.’

  ‘I know, darling, but cut it faster than you did last time,’ she urged. ‘You remember what happened then.’

  ‘It’s melting, darling,’ he barked.

  ‘You’re not cutting it fast enough,’ she said. A slice shot across the waiting tea-plate, and ice cream slopped onto the tablecloth.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ Her brows were knitting furiously, and she was dancing a little jig at his side.

  ‘It’s been in too long,’ he said as the second slice collapsed.

  ‘Three minutes and not a second more, on my mother’s grave,’ she said with hatred. ‘It’s you. You’re so slow.’

  The table had fallen silent, no chit-chat being possible at the borders of such a scene. I looked on with what I thought of as a sort of Olympian compassion at first, until, like a tuning fork, I shuddered, catching certain unmistakably married reverberations.

  This morning when I wolf-whistled him as he emerged shaggy and glistening from the shower, he clapped his hands over himself and said, ‘That’s not exactly very feminine, is it.’ He has beautiful hands, fine as earth, rough and warm like brown sand. Sometimes he lets me wash his back and shoulders, which is when I get the marvelling feeling most strongly. I have never told him about this.

  I first felt helpless admiration when I watched him come off the court after a game of tennis, pulling off his shirt as roughly as a child would, his sweat drops white and pearly in the sun. His face was brighter than silver, sunburnt to coppery patches on the cheekbones, his florid shoulders weathered almost to the colour of claret. Let me love you, I said silently as we went to bed that night for the first time, let me stroke your shadows with my fingers and inhale your skin’s smell of honey and air; let me love you before you heave ho my hearty.

  At night, in pyjamas (which did not appear until after the wedding), he curled to me like a striped mollusc, with the long curving back of a prawn. My little crocodile, I said maliciously as he draped his length against me in bed. When he whispered in my ears (which he still does sometimes) then he caused trembling while my fingers and toes turned to sparklers. It made him groan like a wood-pigeon before falling asleep, though usually I was chortling away for some time afterwards.

  Then, my mind was a sunny prairie of contentment; my body was quick, god-like, with a central line of stars. There was the scarcely-dare-believe-it hope that marriage might even mean years of this ahead, safeguarding a life of such subterranean holiday in perpetuity. Yes, yes, there is more to marriage that that, I know that now; but surely there is nothing as good.

  About six months ago, a week or two after the marrying event, we were w
alking along the edges of some stubbled corn-fields when we came to a solitary house in a field of its own. We looked through the windows – some of which were broken – and there was no furniture inside, so we didn’t feel like intruders when we lifted the latch of the garden gate. Concealed by its hedge from the gaze of idle ramblers was a menagerie of topiary, wild-looking peacocks, boars sprouting long leafy green bristles, one or two blurred heraldic hounds. It was hot, late in the afternoon, and we lay down on a bed of box clippings at the end of the garden. I could see horse-chestnut trees nodding beyond the hedge. The densely knit noise of bees came from a nearby tangle of blackberries. I slipped out of my clothes, we lay together on his shirt, we concentrated suddenly for a while on a time of intense and escalating delight. Afterwards I was wicked with pleasure, and we shared the bread roll and apples saved from our pub lunch. I remember noticing the red and green striations on the apples’ skins and the miraculous honey-combed structure of the bread. Then we fell asleep.

  I dreamed an urgent heated dream of the sort which sometimes follows hard on the heels of satisfaction.

  I was walking down the High Street in Bakewell with a modest strong young man. He was quite tall; as he talked to me, he turned his head slightly and tipped his glance down to shoulder level. He was telling me how he made all his own bread, how easy it was, just two or three loaves a week, or four when he felt unusually hungry.

  ‘How on earth do you find the time,’ I said. ‘All that kneading and proving.’

  ‘Oh, you can fit that in round other things in the odd few minutes here and there,’ he assured me.

  He showed me his current mass of dough, throwing it lightly from hand to hand like a goal-keeper. Then he wore it as a vast damp pliable boxing glove, deftly pulling at it and pummelling it with his other hand.

  ‘You try,’ he said. I found the glove-trick manipulation too difficult, so instead I kneaded away enthusiastically. It grew and grew, elastic and cirrus-streaked, until I felt worried.