Four Bare Legs In a Bed

by Helen Simpson

  That row on Saturday was bad. There was screaming and shouting and hauling each other across furniture. I swung a punch and caught him in the eye. He gave me a fat lip, then he took my rent money and walked out. I spent Sunday trying to get rid of the blue marks with ice cubes, and played the Bessie Smith song about fifty times. ‘I’d rather be dead and buried in my grave; mean old grave!’ That always cheers me up.

  Yesterday morning, the usual deadbeat Monday, I thought old Grouse would make comments, but he was too excited about a new necklace which he’d bought cheaply from some dealer.

  ‘It might even be late seventeenth century,’ he muttered, ‘the settings are so extraordinarily fine.’

  He has a slack throat like a trout and a pair of plain-glass half-moons looped over his lugs in an attempt to appear more scholarly to the customers. He employs me as his shop assistant because I make a good showcase for jewels. I look imposing, even dignified, particularly in the black velvet dresses he makes me wear. Jewels look best of all against black velvet or white skin. The gentlemen can see this, and they trust me, they find me reassuring.

  ‘Try this on for me, will you, my dear?’ they say, and I dimple as I slip on the amethyst eardrops or the golden rope of enamelled ivy leaves.

  When I saw old Grouse’s new necklace yesterday morning, I understood why he was so happy. It was a web of rubies and pendant pearls as big as pear-drops. He made me try it on to see how it would look. We both stared in the mirror and sighed. You know the way, when you try something on and all your friends say, yes, go on, go on, buy it. You blush with pleasure and natural ownership.

  Well, it was like that, only better. The necklace gave my skin a nap like expensive writing paper.

  That’s one good thing about being fat, you usually have a good complexion. I’ve noticed on the way in on the bus how nice the skins are on the black women. I bet I’d get on well with those women if I could understand what they were on about. They sit there at eight in the morning, plumped down fair and square, acting like they’ve had three brandies before breakfast, laughing and shouting things down the bus to their friends, and I wish I could join in. Better than the sour old Peckhamites keeping themselves to themselves and clutching their shopping bags. Have you noticed how black skin has an extra margin of light, like the silver edge on plums?

  Of course, I couldn’t buy that necklace. Old Grouse was busy writing out the price tag in miniature calligraphy already: seven thousand pounds. I wished Colin could see me in it, then he would know what I was worth. I looked wonderful as I stared in the mirror, noble and wounded as a diva. His heart would soften.

  The idea grew in me all day. I served old fools with diamonds, and for the first time in my life felt resentful that they had money and I had not. I was the same as them, whatever they cared to think; only better, because younger.

  Then I decided I would have as much as anybody else for one night.

  Old Grouse left me to lock up as he had an appointment with his boyfriend, whom he always refers to as Sybil, as if that fooled me.

  ‘I may not be in until a little later tomorrow morning,’ he said; he and Sybil meet once every three or four weeks, and he is always late in the next morning.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, I packed my perfect necklace in green tissue paper and a proper green box with gold lettering. When it was time to lock up, I washed the coffee cups, set the burglar alarm, and put the green box in my handbag. I went home by bus as usual.

  Borrowing it just for a night hasn’t done anybody any harm, and it’s done me a lot of good.

  I came back and sat in the front room with the bag on my lap, and prayed. I concentrated very hard on the thought of him, and I wished and wished until it got dark.

  I wasn’t a bit surprised when he walked in.

  ‘I’ll be packing up, then,’ he said. ‘Have you got any food in?’ He flicked the light on and we blinked at each other.

  He had the black eye I’d given him, his eyelashes making a jetty fringe against the jewel-coloured bruises. I did him a plate of oven-ready chips and a couple of eggs. He asked me for a tenner as I knew he would.

  While he was eating, I went into the bedroom and changed into my satin dressing gown. I brushed my hair and fastened on the necklace. There was excitement beating in my ears. This was it. This must work.

  He barged in, then stood still and stared. His face took on an impersonal glaze of admiring lust that was meat and drink to me. That look will keep me going whatever happens in the future.

  We were happy again, like two strangers, and it was as instant as on the first Waltzer night. The next time round lasted more than I ever felt anything, with sleep like a deep snowdrift at the end.

  Now I can see the edge of the wardrobe at last. I don’t think I’ll be able to fall back to sleep. This is an awful time of day, all grey and patient and colourless; it makes me think of death. I used to get up early at home when I couldn’t sleep, and go to look at the back garden in my nightdress. It was horrible, the way everything was so cold and even the roses were grey. Depressing enough to make you cry, except you knew that the sun must come up sooner or later and colour would come back to all the corpse shapes.

  When I reached out just now, he wasn’t there.

  Maybe he’s in the bathroom. But there’s no noise. I would have heard him.

  I won’t think about this for a few minutes more.

  The sheet where he was lying is quite cold.

  I’ll count to a hundred before I put my hand up to check for the necklace.

  How fat my arms are in the half-light, lying at my sides like monsters. How dull and grey they look! The colour of ash.

  Escape Clauses

  I’VE JUST BEEN asking this policeman about it. Now he’s reading the paper, embarrassed at the situation. But at least he’ll still be breathing at five o’clock and able to go home to his tea.

  I asked him about what it would be like and how long it would take. I was stuttering a bit. Well, it could take up to quarter of an hour, he said, but not longer. Can’t you do anything to make it easier? I asked.

  Instead of taking this to mean I wanted lead weights in my pockets or some such device for a quick clean neck-break, he took it in a sense I had not even thought of. Narrow-eyed at the prurience of the subject, he muttered that I could ask the man to protect my kicking hind-quarters from the crowd’s view: for cash in hand he would tie a piece of rope around my thighs so that my skirt would be decently bound in too. At this I drew back disgusted, my eyes overflowed and my breathing started to make a great noise. Also, I have no money.

  I used to stay up late watching television, long after Mum had gone to bed. Once I saw a televised hanging. He adjusted the rope around the man’s neck, then pushed him off the platform. The man swung and struggled and swung. His legs raced round as though he were riding a bicycle. He burst the cord tying his hands and threw them up in the air once or twice, then started to fiddle with his collar. The hangman leant out and boxed his head whenever he came near. It went on and on, the superimposed digital seconds flickering away in the lower right hand corner of the screen just as they do for athletic events, until eight minutes had passed, then nine. He sent his assistant down to dangle from the man’s ankles. This extra weight did it at last. All the time, the TV commentator was talking very seriously about what a terrible man this was, even the shape of his skull showed it (here a phrenologist butted in with confirmation), and how public opinion had been overwhelming.

  What bothers me most about all this in one way is that I cannot think what I have done wrong. I’ve never wanted the limelight. Quite the opposite.

  ‘You must learn to get along with other children,’ said my mother.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why can’t I just ignore them?’

  All that time ago at Primary School, I remember standing in the cloakrooms with a little knot of them – Michael Brownlow, Sandra Hoskins, Graham Doyle and the Bigelow girl with blue plastic spectacles.
I was unself-conscious as you are at five. I wasn’t aware of thinking or doing anything in particular – I was simply being, which is fair enough and surely innocent enough too – when I noticed they were all staring at me solemnly, shaking their silly little heads in condemnation.

  ‘What is it?’ I bleated. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘You know,’ they said meaningly. ‘And we can’t talk to you or play with you if you do things like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ I wailed. But all they would say was, you know. I plucked at the sleeve of Graham Doyle, the kindest of the four; he drew away with a sorrowful expression.

  ‘But I don’t know what I’ve done!’ I cried.

  ‘Oh yes you do,’ they said, with certainty. Things looked black as I realised I was missing something that obviously should have been built in.

  Mr Pringle is my solicitor. He is a cold fish with unflattering steel-rimmed glasses. He has been very patient with me, explaining the difference between judicious and judicial, and attempting to pluck out my stings of emotion and moral warmth by demonstrating that he is but a neutral instrument working within a larger neutral instrument. The law is as finely balanced, he says (with a keen nose for cliché), as a Swiss watch; make one illogical exception, and you throw the whole mechanism out. This is little comfort to me now, for obvious reasons. I think Mr Pringle sees that, which must be why he continued to visit me after my case was lost. He has helped me while away the time with little legal conundrums, for I cannot help going over the lengthy and complicated trial in my mind several times an hour, trying to see the sense in it.

  ‘I have two sorts of hand-writing, Mr Pringle, one with each hand. I taught myself how in a bid to while away the time during a dull honeymoon in the Balearics. From this, counsel for the prosecution Rory Deerhurst deduced that I am practised in all forms of deceit.’

  ‘In fact the Prosecution did not proceed with that particular charge, Mrs Vernish,’ said Mr Pringle. ‘No proof of forgery was ever produced. Your personal correspondence was openly conducted by your left hand and your business letters by your right. Confusion arose only when you signed yourself in different names.’

  ‘Since when was fantasy a crime?’

  Mr Pringle sighed.

  ‘Confusion arose because, in law, a forgery is perpetrated when the hand of Jacob purports to be the hand of Esau.’

  ‘I have never taken biblical names.’

  ‘In any event, the charge of forgery was dropped. I must confess, your calligraphic versatility struck me as, ah, more dexterous than sinister.’

  I tittered through a veil of angry tears.

  ‘“Of all the torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well douned, if you hold her head betwixt your legs; and beleeve me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feele in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness & of the said doune, and of the temperate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut.” The defendant has admitted of her own free will that her favourite book is Pantagruel. You have just heard read an entirely typical passage from this book. Members of the jury, I would like you to consider for yourselves the probable moral fibre of a person who can find something to snigger at in such unnatural filth.’

  ‘Objection, my Lord. Defecation is a perfectly natural human function,’

  ‘Objection overruled. You may proceed, Mr Deerhurst.’

  ‘Thank you, my Lord. Members of the jury, I would like you to judge whether or not it is likely that a person who habitually reads such lewd and disgusting stuff for their private gratification might not become a depraved and corrupted being. The question of bestiality does not impinge here, although cruelty to animals is obviously condoned in the most appalling way.’

  They found it significant that I called my cat Felony. I argued that I had chosen her name for its euphonious qualities. She used to sink her incisors into the heel of my hand and pause a fraction of a millimetre from breaking the skin, staring at me until her eyes were reduced to sadistic yellow semibreves. She murdered without a qualm. She toyed with her victims, smiling broadly at their squeaks and death throes.

  ‘Why isn’t she a criminal?’ I asked. ‘Here I am, so criminal that I must be hanged by the neck until I am dead, and yet I have never shown such cruelty.’

  ‘The difference is,’ said Mr Pringle, ‘that we must assume your cat commits her crimes without mischievous discretion.’

  *

  They raked through my diaries for examples of antisocial behaviour. No luck! As counsel for the defence Howard Vaillant argued, although these journals were full of the utmost violence and rage, they were the very opposite of a menace to society. Just as venom is drawn from an adder and transformed into an antidote to snakebites, skirled Mr Vaillant, so the dark side of human nature grows positively helpful to the common weal when siphoned off into paper and ink. I unleashed an anodyne simper on the jury, who were scribbling away in spiral-backed notebooks. My recorded ambition to do away with the entire Ironside family was in this manner rendered stingless, and I was once more acquitted, although the jury decided informally that my character had muddy depths.

  During the last few weeks I have managed to beg several newspapers from warders and visitors, and among these I found the following two accounts of my trial.

  Shameless drunkard Flo Varnish crept out while normal people slept… and did her gardening in the nude. Busty Flo, 53, has a disfiguring port-wine stain shaped like Africa all up the right side of her body. ‘She’s really ugly,’ stormed blonde neighbour Sue Jenkins, 37. ‘Something should be done about it. We’ve even seen her kissing women goodnight on the doorstep.’ And Flo’s husband, 42, a fitter, admitted yesterday that they had divorced because they could not live together any longer. Distraught toy-boy Patrick Bacharach, 28, said, ‘She’s peculiar. Her cat means more to her than I do.’ Florrie, who has no children, last night denied that her father was an Arab.

  During his cross-examination of Mrs Vernish, counsel for the prosecution Rory Deerhurst demanded: ‘Where would we be in time of war if everyone were like you?’ Mrs Vernish replied that she did not know. Mrs Vernish, who is no relation to Cadogan Vernish who last year received a ten-year sentence for his part in the Vernish-Barnes ‘knicker-sniffing’ scandal, requested a glass of water and appeared visibly moved. She was wearing a dark green dress patterned with white daisies. Mrs Vernish faces seventeen separate charges, the most serious of which is Petit Treason and carries the death penalty. The trial continues.

  Waking on this plastic foam-filled mattress, I unpeel myself, damp as a rasher of bacon, and sit up in the dark. There is no window in my cell, but I know it is morning by the clarity in my mind and the lack of soreness behind my eyeballs. Back at home, I’m always awake before six. This whole summer has been wasted by the law. I cannot think of anything which has given me more pleasure in life than waking cool and early in the friendly blue shadow of cotton sheets, feeling life return to its efficient stations all over my body. Then going naked downstairs and out through the unlocked back door into the garden. My toes play arpeggios in the wet grass. Sometimes I sit down in the dew to bask in the silver-fountain glitter of five in the morning. The treetops are lit up like glass, and the air is rank-scented, cold and bonfiery. Against the back wall grow tobacco plants, chives, pendulous tails of Love-Lies-Bleeding, Mile-a-Minute, jowly snapdragons, and the taut caviar beading of blackberries. I go round shaking the roses over my neck; their close-packed weatherbeaten petals store a peck of dew. I stand against the white-washed side wall for a moment trying to straighten my spine against it, and shudder as its still-nocturnal chill lowers the temperature of my torso. Is it irresponsible to court such floods of profitless pleasure? More people should try it, I used to think (before all this happened).

  If the Jenkinses and the Ironsides wanted to set their alarms early and climb to their t
opmost bedrooms to catch a sight of me over the trees, that was their business. I looked up once and caught a row of eyes which goggled at me like fish and then disappeared. Fancy spoiling their children’s sleep too. By the time the policeman called, I was always long up and dressed. I would give him coffee and rock cakes while he tried to explain that a public place is one where the public go, no matter whether they have a right to or not. That includes their eyes. Even though my little garden has a high wall and shady apple trees, the neighbours can still see me from their attic windows. So the charge of indecent exposure was added to my list, and Mr Pringle advised me to plead guilty.

  Mrs Ironside was never a small woman, and when she stood in my doorway that Monday she looked like a well-built tiger. Arms akimbo, snarling and filling my kitchen with foul language, she blotted out the April sunshine and I resented her hotly. Throughout the wrangle, a cigarette hung damply from her lower lip, and I felt furious because I had just washed my hair for the first time in three weeks. It wasn’t by any means the first time that she’d stood there bellowing her wild accusations of witchcraft, larceny, adultery and God knows what. Most people would have gone a lot further than I did under the circumstances.

  She left me with a few choice bruises too, I can tell you, being roughly double my weight. But I’m quicker. Whether or not it merely aggravated a dormant kidney condition just waiting for a knock to set it ticking will never be known. Certainly the doctor failed to gain the jury’s confidence with his ‘On the one hands’ and his ‘Medical men are in general agreements’. Mr Pringle says it was a trumped-up charge, worse because so serious; it counts as murder, you see, if somebody dies within a year and a day of your hurting them. And of course she had to go and die at the end of March the following year. Heaps of people die in February and March; it’s the time of year for it. Even if it was her kidneys, Mr Pringle said, it would be impossible to prove malice aforethought and in fact I was acting in self-defence even if I did strike the first blow. She should never have said I did that to my baby, rest its soul.