Four Bare Legs In a Bed

by Helen Simpson

  ‘Have I spoiled the loaf?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’ll be even better than usual.’ We continued our walk, his arm round my shoulder as friendly as could be.

  When I woke up it was almost evening, warm and still. I watched his crumpled face a foot away coming out of sleep, the lids flickering, light clearing the eyes and then a wreath of smiles.

  We used to be friends then.

  He upends me, he takes no notice of anything above the waist. How would he like it, that’s what I’d like to know. And after some farmyard activity, while I’m still inside my nightdress, very often, he cages me in his big arms and legs and disappears with a snore.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ My husband has started to make casual enquiries. ‘Did you have any interesting dreams?’ I found a rubbishy paperback calling itself a Dictionary of Oneirology in his briefcase the other night when I was looking for The Times. How fascinating to learn that in Islam dreams of shrews are always related to faithless wives; I wonder if that works the other way around. And dreams of being infected with vermin are often the equivalent for pregnancy, it says here. No flies on me. Soon he will be cross-questioning me about the possible appearance of daggers, snakes, nail-files and umbrellas in my night pictures.

  What does worry me is that I am finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between dreaming and awake. I often feel quite astonished when I turn out of a dream into the morning. I shout or laugh in dreams and wake my husband. I dream I am dreaming; or I dream I have woken up. I try to test whether a dream is a dream by cutting a plate of sardine sandwiches; I scoff the lot and am none the wiser. Recently I tried biting my hand in a dream to see if I was awake. Next morning there were toothmarks, so where does that leave me?

  I was very late back one night last week, and crept up the stairs hoping he would have fallen asleep. No such luck. He was propped up against the pillows, and closed Anna Karenina with a bang as I came into the room.

  ‘It took ages to find a taxi,’ I said. ‘They seem to dry up after eleven.’

  ‘Why didn’t you catch the train? The last one doesn’t go until eleven-thirty.’

  ‘I know, but Rhoda and I were having such an interesting discussion in the wine bar. The film was very thought-provoking.’

  ‘What was it again?’

  ‘Battleship Potemkin.’ Surely he wouldn’t have seen that. I certainly hadn’t.

  ‘Ah. What was it about?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the nature of war, particularly at sea.’

  ‘And you and Rhoda sat till past midnight discussing naval tactics over the Liebfraumilch.’

  ‘Along with related matters. Look, you can just stop being so suspicious. I’m sick of your bullying. I’m going to get changed.’ I stormed off to the bathroom with my nightdress.

  ‘Stay here,’ he called. No fear, I thought as I bolted the bathroom door. That way he would see that, at the particular request of Mr Pembleton, I had uncharacteristically left off my bra. I took a quick cold shower using Coal Tar soap, and went back into the bedroom with an innocent smile.

  ‘Where did you find a taxi,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, don’t start again.’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Waterloo Bridge.’

  ‘But you say you met Rhoda at the Barbican.’

  ‘Yes, I did, but the wine bar was a little way off, and then there are no taxis in the City late at night. So we carried on walking because we knew there are always taxis on Waterloo Bridge.’

  ‘It’s miles to Waterloo from the Barbican.’

  ‘I know, and that’s why I’m so tired and cross and longing for bed. And if that’s all the sympathy you can show, I wish I’d never married you.’ I burst into tears at last, and finally convinced him of my blamelessness, so much so that he apologised and kissed me goodnight.

  Then I woke up, and the crocodile tears were still trickling down my cheeks. I looked at the clock – five a.m. – and at the sleeping bulk beside me, remembering how we had spent the previous evening in front of the fire playing chess. You see how confusing it can be.

  He beat me at that game of chess as he usually (though not invariably) does. When I was putting the pieces away, thinking about them one by one, I said, ‘I like the knight best. I like his L-shaped hopping.’

  ‘You would,’ said my husband, bitterly. The funny thing was, I understood exactly how he felt.

  When I catch him in some detail of his body, whirling his little finger round an ear rim or squeezing a pore on the wing of his nose, our eyes meet coldly and he looks away. These fugitive glimpses of hatred between us are frighteningly hearty.

  Yesterday, on my way to the shops, I was standing waiting to cross at the busy corner by Marchmont Drive, when a blue plumber’s van flew by. The driver’s window was open and, although he must have been doing fifty, I caught a long moment of his burnished shoulder and beautiful naked arm with the underarm tuft like the beard of a mussel. There was a blast of music – ‘Get Out of My Dream and Into My Car’ – as potent as a rogue whiff of jasmine, then it was all gone. I almost cried; I still had a lump in my throat by the time I reached the dry-cleaners. You’re not saying that means nothing.

  Recently I have noticed a disturbing change. Disapproving of my keeping any secrets from him, my husband has started appearing at precisely the wrong moment in places where he doesn’t belong. Last night I was lying in a tipped-back chair while the dentist puffed some sort of dizziness around me until I was only half-conscious. He approached and stroked me, removing his white coat, holding me, pressing me to him; and then my husband appeared in the doorway and said, ‘Excuse me, I’ll take over now.’

  I woke furious to his unconscious weight at my side. I felt like hitting him, but subsided, snarling. When I got back again I was by the sea and it was warm luminous evening. The light was so rare, the sky and sea of such a strange icy blue-green, that I knew I was further north than usual. I walked a few steps along sibilant shingle and quietly plosive bladderwrack, noticing that both a red sun and a yellow moon were in the sky, though the sun was very low. Now, running lightly down the dunes of marram grass appeared some sort of fisherman or sea-gypsy; I was only able to take in the black eyes with their oblique gleam.

  He was beside me and the sides of our faces touched; his felt like the skin of a starfish and mine like the lining of a shell. I was both aware of existing in my own body – the mild drumming of my pulses, the gentle maritime roar in my ears – and of being able to see myself and this other figure standing on the shore.

  He took a small mother-of-pearl box from his trouser pocket and gave it to me, watching intently as I nodded my thanks. Then his arm lifted at the elbow and he slid his finger under a strand of hair which had stuck to my forehead. I saw my face and neck flood with colour just as the disappearing sun set fire to a stripe of sea. He slid his hand suddenly through the deep armhole of my dress and his fingers curled to the shape of my breast. I lost all power and was beached onto his shoulder.

  Time makes a little leap. We are in a house built of driftwood and pine branches. The windows show oblongs of brine-blanched aquamarine; there are bubbles and knots in the glass. He is stoking the sea-coal fire. I stand waiting and hot salt tears brim up. He draws me gently into him again. I feel the extreme heat of his body; it radiates through his clothes like the sun. The middle of my own body bucks softly, gratefully. We stare at each other with reluctant half-smiles, and from our stiff breathing you might think we are about to fight.

  We lie down together on the bed by the wall. I close my eyes, curiously at rest now, floating. His violent hand plucks me from my suspension in the middle air and I hug him with equal violence. We rock together as though it seems our ribs must crack.

  But when at last it comes to it, clipped in the warm frame of his arms, thighs enfolded in his tangle, at this moment I happen to glance across his shoulder and so spoil everything. It has been going swimmingly but now there will b
e no conclusion. I sit up, spit words of refusal, glare across the room.

  He has done it again. This second invasion proves he has broken my cover. Now I will never more be private, even in the slumbering third part of my time. There at the window, his face like a censorious turnip, my husband is staring in.

  Good Friday, 1663

  We have a winding sheet in our mother’s womb, which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world, wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave.

  MY RUSTIC HUSBAND, preferring to be fifty years behind the times in church matters as in all else, has ordered Parson Snakepeace to preach only sermons from the old dead Divines, and to read them aloud without comment. This being Good Friday, he has chosen the horridest sermon he could find, all to do with death and earthworms.

  Lord, I’m sure I am grown quite melancholy at that old barbarous tale of the thorn crown and the sponge in vinegar. Ha, ha, ha!

  This church is as cold as the grave. You would not know the air was so gentle outside, all the daffodils kissing the air and the apple trees like brides.

  Here, by my pew, lies my husband’s mother, Myrtilla Fanshawe, 26 years old, d. 1634, boxed up in fine Carrara:

  God’s goodness made her wise and well-beseeming

  Her wifely virtues won her much esteeming,

  Earth would not yield more pleasing earthly bliss

  Blest w’two babes, though Death brought her to this.

  That shallow space over there, beneath the window showing St Catherine, is reserved for my tomb. I insist on a chaste design. None of your beastly seraphim, mind; I never could endure your marble flittermice.

  Myrtilla died in childbed, bearing that blockhead my husband. He sits beside me now pretending to listen to the sermon, his mouth catching flies, a pure clown, mere elementary earth, without the least spark of soul in him. That he should have claimed me for his wife! He would be more fitly mated with some silly, simple, peaking, sneaking country girl, one that goes with her toes in, and can’t say boo to a goose.

  I cannot endure him near me, with his sweating, snoring, scratching, snap-finger ways. He’ll sit and yawn, and stretch like a greyhound by the fireside, till he does some nasty thing or other and so gives me an excuse to leave the room. When he has blown his nose into his handkerchief, he looks into it as if there were a diamond dropped out of his head.

  There in the womb we are fitted for works of darkness, all the while deprived of light: and there in the womb we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood, and may be damned, though we be never born.

  To confine a woman just at her rambling age! take away her liberty at the very time she should use it! O barbarous aunt! O unnatural father!

  My aunt Champflower is a very violent lady. She will fall into a fit or fly at you for the least piddling insignificant thing. In her day she was a beauty, but now she washes her face and hands in lead varnish to hide the dismal hollows of eight and thirty years.

  Lord, what a difference there is between me and her. How I should despise such a thing if I were a man. What a nose she has! what a chin! what a neck! She desired my ruin with all her little heart. She danced for pure joy at my wedding.

  My father never would have heard Scandal’s buzz had she only kept it from him. He would have let me look where I pleased for a husband. I have a tidy fortune. But, no, I must be thrown away in haste to this clodpoll squire.

  My aunt calls me to her room and talks of Honour and Reputation with a long face like the beast of the Nile.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ says I, ‘but what has such talk to do with me?’

  ‘What indeed!’ cries she in a passion.

  She pauses. She trifles with a lace some time before she speaks next, making play with a certain letter, reading it to herself with a careless dropping lip and an erected brow, humming it hastily over.

  I recognise the hand. It is from my Celadon.

  ‘Well, niece, this galloping abroad and allowing young fellows to fool with you has given your reputation no very good complexion.’

  ‘Madam, I seek only to follow your example. Besides, I have heard it said often and often when I was with you in London, that a lady’s reputation ought to be a sort of brunette; then it has an attraction in it, like amber. A white reputation is as disagreeable to men, I am sure I have heard you say twenty times or more, as white eyebrows or white eyelashes.’

  ‘Pooh pooh,’ says she with a sort of snarling smile. ‘You can talk in that airy impertinent way until Domesday but it will not save you. I have other letters. Your fop delights in nothing but rapes and riots, as all the world well knows. I have heard certain tales. I have ocular proof.’

  ‘Madam,’ says I, though I start to feel a little uneasy now, ‘there are some persons who make it their business to tell stories, and say this and that of one and t’other, and everything in the world; and,’ says I…

  ‘And your father shall know all,’ she finishes.

  Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and the rest die in age, and age also dies, and determines all. O, huzza, Parson Snakepeace; cheerful matter for an April morning! Our youth is hungry and thirsty, after those sins, which our infancy knew not; and our age is sorry and angry, that it cannot pursue those sins which our youth did.

  I shall never more see the playhouse, nor go to Ponchinello nor Paradise, nor take a ramble to the Park nor Mulberry Garden. I could as soon persuade my husband to share a sillybub in New Spring Garden or to drink a pint of wine with friends at the Prince in the Sun as I could fly.

  My aunt Champflower took me with her to London last year for a spring holiday. We lodged near by St James’s, and I never was so happy in all my life.

  I dote upon assemblies, adore masquerades, my heart bounds at a ball; I love a play to distraction, cards enchant me, and dice put me out of my little wits.

  On our third evening, then, we saunter to the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall for the sake of the Chinese lanterns and to taste a dish of oysters.

  There we happen to meet again with a certain merry sharking fellow about the town, who has pursued us diligently from chocolate house to milliner to the Hay-market since our arrival. He has with him a friend; and this friend is Celadon.

  ‘I came up, sir, as we country-gentlewomen use, at an Easter Term,’ explains my aunt demurely, ‘to the destruction of tarts and cheesecakes, to see a new play, buy a new gown, take a turn in the Park, and so down again to sleep with my forefathers.’

  ‘We see you have brought your sister with you in kindness,’ says Celadon, giving me a mighty wink.

  The two fine gallants pay her gross and lavish compliments, ogling and glancing and watching any occasion to do forty officious things. They have all the appearance of gentlemen about them. I notice that Celadon’s eyes look sideways on me like an Egyptian drawing. He wears a fine long periwig tied up in a bag.

  My aunt curtseys at last. Down goes her diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own attractions; then launches into a flood of fine language, still playing her chest forward in fifty falls and risings, like a swan upon waving water.

  Hang me if she has not conceived a violent passion for the fellow.

  … when my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction, if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to Princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.

  I look down now at my arms and see the fine eggshell skin with a pretty sparkle from the sun, and the violet-coloured veins at my wrist. I cannot think I am dust and worms’ meat.

  The carnation dew, the pouting ripeness of my honeycomb mouth, he said; and that my face was a swarm of cupids.

  I do love Love, I would have all the Love in the world. What should I mind else, while I have any share of youth and beauty? When I went to Court all eyes were upon me, all tongues were whisperin
g that’s my Lord Spatchcock’s fine daughter; all pressed towards me and bowed, only to get half a glance from me. When I went to the playhouse, some stood gazing on me, with their arms across their heads languishing as oppressed by beauty. The brisker fellows combed their wigs and prepared their eyes to tilt with mine. Ah, flattery was my daily bread.

  Celadon is so agreeable a man, so eloquent, so unaffected, so particular, so easy, so free. All his finery is from the best in Paris, his shoes from Piccar and his gloves from Orangerie. He wears his clothes with so becoming a negligence that I can barely wish him out of them.

  He had the greatest skill in arranging assignations that ever I saw; and all the while he flattered my aunt with a thousand honeyed words and promises, until I was ready to burst with laughing.

  My hair was dressed in flaunting little ringlets and crimped serpentaux puffs. I wore my new under-petticoats of white dimity, embroidered like a turkey-work chair with red, green, blue and yellow, with a pin-up coat of Scotch plaid adorned with bugle lace and my gown of printed calico.

  I carried my claret-coloured velvet coat with gold fringes to protect me from the dangers of the night air. Even in spring, jaunting abroad at four in the morning strikes a chill into the bones.

  Parson Snakepeace has conceived the pretty notion of keeping a skull upon his desk.

  I can never persuade myself that religion consists in scurvy out-of-fashion clothes and sour countenances, and when one walks abroad, not to turn one’s head to the right or left, but hold it straight forward like an old blind mare.

  O that I were your lover for a month or two, he murmured in my ear like a bumble bee.

  – What then?

  – I would make that pretty heart’s blood of yours ache in a fortnight.

  That God, this Lord, the Lord of life could die, is a strange contemplation; that the Red Sea could be dry, that the sun could stand still, that an oven could be seven times heat and not burn, that lions could be hungry and not bite, is strange, miraculously strange, but super-miraculous that God could die.