by Mavis Cheek
On she primly drove.
No, the country with its promise of peace beckoned and was best. No need to worry about where the sexual energy was leaking out once she had established herself in the pastoral. She would be too busy with her half an acre and a cow, or whatever it was. She'd buy a book. She'd hire a man. She nearly swerved into the outside lane... No, no, she would not hire a man. She would do it all herself. And she was bloody well going to enjoy it. Of London, truly, Mrs Fytton, aged forty and a half, had had quite enough.
She would grow old there gracefully. Learn to live without benefit, or oppression, or cosmetics or hairdressers. Unless there was a way to do it in the self-sufficiency method. Berries or crushed newts or something. Women have always known how to get what they want in the looks department. In Newgate did not Moll Flanders keep her teeth pearly by rubbing them on her hem every day with a little soot?
Her spirits rose as the car sped further and further away from the horrible place, London. London, which contained more lunatics of the male rampant variety to the square mile than anywhere else on earth. This was a fact. Rosa, living in Buenos Aires, might say that she'd got them all down there, but she was wrong. Clancy might say that, according to the local mavourneens, they were all over in Dublin, thank you very much. But she also was wrong. Even Elizabeth, an escapee from west Londinium like herself, but for quite different reasons, now up on some Outer Hebridean isle, could sometimes be a bit short about the male aspects of the community, but since this largely comprised her husband and a few goats, and since her views on the subject directly corollated to the state of their marriage, this was somewhat suspect.
Puzzled, they reminded themselves that it was still largely the women who brought up the next generation. 'So why’ they wondered, 'is the next generation of husbands and lovers not appearing to get any easier?'
Angela, pondering her own experiences back on the market, shrugged and said, 'How can you redirect the next generation when you are still defending the barricades against the first?'
'It is not a battleground,' said Rosa gently.
‘I know,' replied Angela, just as gently. 'And Stalingrad was just a little dust-up between mates
The Lunatic Swains were definitely, definitely, clutched up in her small bit of west London. Solipsistic this might be, but Angela was sure of it. If the nastiness of the neighbourhood pygmy witch-women was silver-medal standard, the lunacy of the male rampant was gold cup for the championship ... This was the bit that the counsellor left out when exhorting her to get on with her life. What she should have added was: and preferably in a nunnery.
'Perhaps you are setting your standards too high?' said Elizabeth, who was obviously back on her husband at the time.
'Ah, yes’ said Angela, 'you are probably right. I will instantly become a visitor at the Scrubs. Sure to find someone that way...'
'Angela!'
'Elizabeth!'
'Angela, that's not what I meant.' 'Oh, very well then. Hollo way.'
Mrs Fytton's Swains. How Ian curled his lip as each one went down like a nine-pin. 'I cannot bear to see you getting so hurt,' he said. Trundling back to his bint.
Bear to see? Bear to see? She watched him go, too stricken to object.
Strange, she thought, how the vocabulary changes emphasis according to situation. Ian's 'cannot bear' was on a direct par with son Andrew's statement, during his summer holidays, that he was 'desperate to get a job'. 'Desperate' was used interestingly here. 'Desperate to get a job' comprised lying in bed until about 11.30 and then stumbling about for a bit before embarking on a fruitless amble around the immediate locale with several of his mates, calling in to shops on the off-chance and no doubt frightening the proprietors rigid with their gangling six-foot clumsiness, their menacing inar-ticulacy and their shuffling gait of the young homeless. 'Give us ten pounds, Mum. There are no jobs to be had anywhere.' 'Anywhere' in this situation was also an interesting variation on received meaning. Anywhere, apparently, could also mean 'this small bit of London in which we live'.
Just to be fair, and not to imply that the sorority was hanging back in the matter of the changing shape of the English language, daughter Claire's linguistics were also interesting. To pick one at random, 'it's doing my head in' could be said of anything from the introduction to the household of cheaper shampoos to the imposition of a five-minute rule for the telephone - both of which were quite likely, in daughter Claire's head-done-in state, to contrive the failure of all three of her A-levels and a permanent place under a blanket outside Woolworths.
Now she knew that it was an inherited trait. Husband Ian's 'cannot bear' was in the same class. Meaningless. Though she wanted to believe it, how she wanted to. But subtext. What he actually meant by 'cannot bear' was that it made his life difficult having an upset dumped wife. Apart from making him feel guilty, which detracted from the quality of life within the bosom of the new bint, Ian's heart was not entirely free of her. He was not entirely averse to jealousy when she was happy with another man. She had seen that. She knew him well enough to read him. She did not need to lean across the table and say that the new man in her life had the genital equivalent of a Polaris Tomahawk stationed in his underpants, she had merely to lean back and let her eyes go secretive and misty. Something old and primal, she supposed. He would come and call and sniff it out, like a confused dog.
But unfortunately her experiences with the new swains were so unerringly awful that to pretend was useless. No one could say that, after Ian, she had not tried. But if Dorothy Parker was right about 'Scratch a lover and find a foe' she should come on down to west London. Never mind scratch. In west London it was 'put the slightest, softest finger pad of pressure on the skin of a lover and you will find yourself availed of the entire Napoleonic retreat, Gallipoli, and assorted extracts from the Somme and Dunkirk . . . with artillery. Something to do with loss of empire and the lack of big-game hunting probably. No other outlets but the snare of the signal of a wiggling piece of skirt (gloriously into battle) and the fury of being captivated by it (retreat with guns).
As a married woman she was so protected from it all. It made her shiver every time she thought now about the
Houses of Parliament and the male majority who ruled within thinking about sex every six minutes. Could that be true? If it was, then the only compulsion she could liken it to as an experience was the number of times you thought about peeing when in the last stages of pregnancy. And then you had the excuse of the baby's head or bottom or tender little foot on your bladder. Male politicians had no such excuse with regard to their wobbly bits, unless they had called into Cindy the Whip for a quick trussing en route for the House. Which, she was not surprised to read in Cindy the Whip's autobiography, was not unknown. But rare.
Which meant, God help the planet, that most of the assembled parliamentary representatives did it spontaneously. One minute the Chancellor of the Exchequer was holding up his Treasury case and spouting about family allowances, and the next he was in the mental grip of a lurid coupling that might or might not include goldfish. That, she thought, must be the point at which he reaches for a glass of water. She imagined sex peppering every single debate in Parliament, like perforations in a colander: whale hunting with harpoons - congress in wet suits; pregnant prisoners wearing shackles - Vaseline, leather and whips; the European Union butter mountain - Last Tango in Paris and what Marlon did with half a pound of unsalted...
Recalling that particular piece of filmic legend, her heart contracted with grief. It was after borrowing the video of Last Tango, on the pretence of its being a cinematic milestone (her) and the perfectly honest desire to see a woman buggered (him), that Ian turned to her, or - to be fair - peered round her heaving buttocks, and suggested it would be nice to have another baby.
What?
The children were teenagers. Freedom was in sight. She was thirty-six and crisp on the matter. 'You want one, you go and have one,' she said.
He looked surprised (apart from
a little daft), peeking between her legs like an anxious gynaecologist. Well, he was surprised, unsurprisingly surprised, because until that moment she had denied him nothing. She knew how to get and keep a man and it was not by saying no to things.
He scowled.
I have spoiled him, she thought, as she watched little willy die. Another baby? My plans, my hopes, my dreams, she thought, amid a lathering of Lurpak.
'Come on, baby,' he wheedled. He could wheedle her like nobody else. But this time - for the first time - she denied him.
'Ian, I have had my tubes tied.'
'But you could always have them undone.'
That her delightful, high-flying businessman husband should suddenly discover an interest in gynaecology astonished her.
'No,' she said. And she continued to deny him. Now the pain of the mistake of it cut her in two.
She clutched the wheel and slowed a little. That was the thing about long car journeys - there was nowhere to hide your brain.
Last Tango in Paris, it was.
Oh, go butter those scones, woman.
Despite her sterling efforts, he remained flaccid for a week.
If a mind-reading alien wandered in and rummaged around in their respective brains, what terrifying, terrifying madness would be revealed...
The Swains. The Swains. Mrs Fytton's Swains.
Lunatic, Lunatic. Lunatic all.
Time to let the swains bubble up to the surface, be considered, and be dealt with for once and for all. Nothing like a motorway for dealing with the grimmer side of the cranial filing system. The Swains, then. And let that be a lesson to her. Shadows of the past, be they gone.
3
April
His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
mae west
She was now but half an hour from her destination. Just time to bring them out, one by one, those Male Lunatics Rampant, shake them and put them back in the drawer marked Unnecessary. She slowed the car and took her mind to those first painful days when she was free and when, mindful of the counsellor's advice, she was on red alert and prey to the first Volpone who came along with wandering hands and a soulful light in his eyes.
Sheep are renowned for looking sympathetic, especially if one announces the name of a well-known fox to them, and she was just passing fields and fields of the woolly creatures. All looking very sympathetic indeed. Volpone, she repeated, opening the window and calling out to a field of chomping ewes. 'VOLPONE!' Sometimes lunacy is catching.
Victor.
And a lesson that one should never take up with a bloke with a vanquisher's name. What with his innocent smile (hiding foxy teeth) and the soulful light and the wandering hands, and her being a trusting sort of a person who, as a happily married woman, had read her Fay Weldons as if they were fairy tales, she was not prepared for the killer instinct of the average small-female-game-hunting male. Not his honey tongue, not his seductive and quivering external equipment -not his lunacy. And certainly not her vulnerability to it.
She looked into Victor's eyes and read there kind understanding and pleasing desire. It was one in the morning on the pavement outside the Chelsea Arts Club. She was too drunk to even see a taxi, let alone hail one. He took her hand, which she so willingly proffered, and led her down the garden path. She fell through her front door; he picked her up and looked at her all night with tender light of love in between bouts of electrifying orgy. She went on reading the same ocular tenderness until all her little feathers were quite smoothed, not a ruffle in sight. Until she could say the name Ian without weeping or kicking the furniture. Until she could believe, yes, believe it was that easy.
At which point the ocular message from Victor became cloudy. She read panic, suddenly, when she suggested normal things like going on holiday together ('Ah, well, urn, oh, I'm not very good with holidays as such') or meeting her children ('Ah, well, um, oh, I'm not very good with children as such') or actually getting out of the house in which he still lived with his divorced wife and two dogs ('Ah, well, um, oh, I'm not very good at living on my own as such...')
He did not feel ready to commit.
'Commit?' she said. 'Commit? You managed to commit yourself to having your dinners cooked for you while you watched the mud-wrestling or the pogo-stick championships or whatever it was. You managed to ...' And then she shrugged and backed off. 'Ah, well, um, oh, I'm not very good at dealing with inadequates as such.' With which she marched out. And then marched back again. And then marched out again, until she was worn out with it all and suggested he could find a most useful route away from her by travelling very fast, and in circuitous mode, up his own bum.
She telephoned Ian one night after this, pushed beyond endurance with the loneliness, and he came over. For about an hour he sat with her in the kitchen, sipping whisky, talking about the children, even laughing. All very ordinary, all very gentle, the anger dispelled in the comforting of her need. She loved him all over again. She hoped he would stay, and almost believed that he would suddenly realize what a mistake he had made in leaving her. Then he said, quite easily, that he had to go. Casual. It had become casual between them. He even squeezed her arm and gave her a hug. She smiled and nodded at him and let him out of their house, and watched him scurry over to his car and drive away. It was, she felt, like watching your own shadow depart from you. Shortly after this he asked for a divorce. Pragmatism said to her there was little point in refusing.
And then - quite suddenly - Ian remarried. So swiftly after the divorce that it was as if a bereaved had married the mortician. He took his bride-to-be (little, blonde, helpless Miss Fang the Dentist from 's-Gravenhage), and Andrew and Claire, out to Sydney for the wedding. Clever. Very clever. The children were thrilled. New dad, new wife, new presents.'
Thrilled.
His wife, now ex-wife, Angela, lay in bed sipping port and lemon (she had - she'd convinced herself - a sore throat) and rang everyone she could think of. Some of her old political fire surfaced, but it was hazy. She told them all that it was just a pose of a wedding and organized so they could dance on the bones of Aborigines.
'That's my girl', said Clancy, if a little vaguely. And she changed the subject.
Rosa congratulated her on getting such a generous settlement. Why? She had earned the money too. She remained in a huff for three weeks until she realized that the only person it hurt was herself.
She told her parents about the divorce, defiantly, but her parents, now retired, were very disappointed. Their golden girl had lost the golden boy and the golden life. After all they did for her too. She must have brought it on herself with all those dungarees and what not. Thanks, she muttered as she left. After that she scarcely went to see them. And they never came up to see her. Old people became very selfish. How she longed to be old.
She needed lost Victor so badly during that annus dreadfulus in her life that she used to wander along his road in case he might pop out and see her and say, 'Hi - let's get married as well.' All she saw was a dog turd or two, and she was driven mad enough to stare at them on the pavement near his house and wonder if she could possibly identify them as coming from Tipper and Tansy ... If not, maybe he would still come out at midnight with them slavering on their leashes for the coyly named canine bowel activity 'Walkies...'
The sheep and the hawthorns had now given way to fields of free-range pigs, or whatever you called them - organic porkers? She must get her terminology right if she was going to be part of the agricultural scene. She looked down at her map. Not far now. She would be quick in the dispatch of her chilling memoir.
Angela, all legal links with Ian severed, gritted her teeth, behaved with dignity and found a new job doing much the same as she had done as partner to her husband - but now she did it for their friends Joe and Gracie, who also installed systems. Dignity went out of the window when Ian actually wrote her a stiff letter saying he felt it was a bit much for her to go and work for a rival outfit. She immediately wrote back to Ian, sa
ying, 'Au contraire, my duck, but you are the rival now...'
Then Joe and Gracie gave a party. And she met Leaky. 'Call me Leaky,' he said, with that devastating crooked smile. She'd often wondered since if she would have felt different had he said, 'Call me Norman,' but he did not. 'Leaky’ he said, grinning down at her like Gary Cooper on stilts. And her heart went Blip! Lust flared, thank God, pain was pushed to the outer darkness, and she knew she was saved.