by Patrick Gale
Never had the saying that one must suffer to be beautiful been so rigorously brought home to her. She succeeded in donning the wig and styling it much as before but it might have been made of cheese-wire it dug so fiercely into her. The headache, which had never entirely left her all day, paled by comparison with such immediate pain. Driving to the school, she felt herself multiply martyred. She was not yet so vain as to have become irrational. She wondered if she were sick. Women such as she had become, women with scarlet nails and borrowed splendour, were never ill. They had everything organized, and disease was not part of their plan. They vomited with tidy aggression in other women’s bathrooms then partied on, lips painted afresh. They scorned hospitals. Illness bored them and the surgeon’s knife filled them with selfish fears. They died violently, she sensed, in a kind of anger at a world that had cheated them. Women who made love in blonde wigs and took pains to deceive their children died crushed beneath the wheels of trains or skewered by the steering columns of their lovers’ cars. A trickle of warm moisture ran from under the wig across her temple. She glanced fearfully up at the mirror, half expecting to see blood, but it was merely sweat and she dabbed it away with a handkerchief.
She was one of the last of the parents to arrive but there was not a breath of complaint from the children and she remembered her show of strength that morning. She noticed its effect almost immediately; a change had come over the pecking order in the group. To her surprise she saw that it was her daughter who now held sway, telling people where to sit, holding power of ultimate disapproval or permission. And it was Morag, normally so haughty and spiteful who was now the po-faced wheedler and appeaser.
‘Mrs Spalding, I know it’s very short notice,’ she began, with such soft shyness that Wanda anticipated mockery, ‘but my parents are taking me to the cinema tonight and I wondered if you’d let Mark and Jennifer come too. We’ve all done our homework already. We did most of it in break and we finished it in the last lesson because Mr Dukes was off sick. Daddy would drop them off afterwards. So you wouldn’t have to do anything.’
Wanda acquiesced so easily they seemed quite startled. Jennifer began to plead automatically before realizing her wish was already granted. Wanda could think of nothing but the cruel way their voices played upon the pain in her head. The possibility of emptying the car that little bit sooner and facing an evening of relative tranquillity was an unlooked-for blessing. Her immediate impulse on swinging clear of Morag’s parents’ long drive was to snatch the wig off but she checked herself with the thought that she would only have to pull it on again for her husband’s benefit, possibly with even greater difficulty and pain than before.
When she reached home, she walked swiftly round drawing all the curtains and turning on a few lights to create a pleasant, welcoming atmosphere, then she kicked off her shoes and lay in the middle of the drawing room carpet, breathing gently. The scents of potpourri and cleaning products soothed her. The tang of carpet freshening powder was a reminder that she had not rested all day. She closed her eyes, concentrating on breathing slower and slower, counting to herself as she drew in the fragrant air. The pain in her head began to subside and, fancying she felt the wig loosen perceptibly about her skull, she slipped into a sensuous doze.
She had given no thought all day to what they were to eat for supper. Normally it was something she did after the children had been taken from her after breakfast. She would load the dishwasher then allow herself a cup of coffee and a couple of the biscuits she kept hidden inside the drum of the electric potato peeler and she would pore over recipe books and a shopping list. Given though she might be to the blandishments of kitchen gadgets, she had never been one of those modem mothers (slatternly mothers, she thought of them, lucky, happy slatterns) who contented themselves with a hoard of frozen meals and a microwave oven. Apart from Instant Whip, the nearest she had ever allowed herself to fast food was a pressure cooker, and that she only used for steaming puddings and root vegetables. When she woke to find her husband standing over her asking if she were all right and what was for supper because he couldn’t smell anything cooking, she stared up at him and felt panic in her very soul.
‘I…I fell asleep,’ she stammered, climbing to her feet and padding, shoeless, into the supperless space across the hall. ‘Morag’s parents have taken the children to the cinema. I had a headache when I got back and I lay down and I must have fallen asleep. Sorry.’ She looked about her. The lack of lights and steam, the lack of sizzle, formed a dreadful, silent accusation. She could not pretend that the automatic oven switch had failed to come on when there was palpably nothing in there waiting to be cooked. There was not even a piece of meat. She opened the fridge door then closed it again hurriedly as he came in behind her. There was nothing. No bacon. No chicken breasts. Not even some humbly reassuring mince.
‘I work my guts out all day,’ he was saying, as to some invisible jury, ‘and it’s been a bugger of a day too, and I come back to find you fast asleep, looking like nothing on earth, and the table not even laid.’ She darted a hand to her head and was relieved to find the wig still in place. ‘What’s got into you?’ he asked.
She decided to brazen it out. ‘I forgot,’ she said.
‘You what?!’
‘I forgot. I’ve never done it before and I won’t do it again. But I forgot. I spent the whole day cleaning and scrubbing and I completely forgot about supper. And I’ve had a terrible headache. Why don’t I fix us both a nice drink? Better still, why don’t we live a little and go out. The children are safe with the Hewitsons until 9.40. If we went now I’m sure we could get a table. I’ve had a bugger of a day too.’ From somewhere deep within her she found a reserve of flirtatious gaiety. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You mix us both a nice gin and put your feet up while I go and put on something pretty then we can pretend we’re young and free again and you can take me out for dinner. Somewhere cosy. Somewhere French with candles!’
There was a pause, perhaps for only a second, in which she was intensely aware that the fridge had developed a louder buzz than usual, which she knew was the sign that it was reaching its point of built-in obsolescence, then he began to shout at her. He called her filthy things — filthier things than he ever did when they were having sexual intercourse. He implied she was a failure as a wife, a mother, a woman even, and then he slapped her. He had offered her many insults in his way and in his time but he had never, until this evening, touched her in violence. She fell back against the sink. Then, all at once, the shock of his big bony hand against her jaw seemed the ultimate denigration and she took a knife from the wooden block beside the bread bin and pushed it into his stomach. It was a big knife, her biggest, and the block was a particularly cunning one with a discreet mechanism which sharpened each blade as it released it for use.
She had often heard of the similarities between pork and human flesh, in particular their skin structure and the thickness of their fatty deposits. After the initial resistance, which might as well have been caused by the starched cotton of his shirt as by any strength of skin and muscle, the knife slid in with appalling ease and swiftness. The sensation was not unlike slicing into a rolled pork loin. Her husband gasped and staggered backwards, then forwards, then slumped to the floor. Never having taken a first aid exam, he did not know better than to pull the knife out. She had punctured his liver. By the time he was writhing and coughing on the linoleum, his suit was turning purple with his gore. She tried to staunch the flow with tea towels, but he was beyond her help. He seemed to spit in her face as he died but perhaps he was only coughing.
She called for an ambulance and the police, telling them her husband had been stabbed but not by whom, then she looked up the relevant cinema in the local newspaper and telephoned to leave an urgent message for the Hewitsons that an emergency had arisen and they were to hang on to Mark and Jennifer until contacted by the authorities. Turning back, she saw the big red thing on the kitchen floor and was suddenly sick, just as she had imagined wo
men with blonde wigs should be. She vomited nothing but acrid juices, having eaten nothing all day, but it ruined the parts of her clothes the blood had not already stained, and she determined to change into something cleaner before the emergency services arrived. Both hospital and police station were a good fifteen minutes’ drive away. Skidding slightly, because her feet were wet, she hurried across the kitchen and up the stairs to the bathroom. She tugged her blouse over her head and stepped out of her skirt. She began to wash her bloodied hands in the sink then realized that there was so much of the stuff on her that a shower would do the job better.
Having been descaled only that afternoon, the jet was extra strong and she welcomed its buffeting. It was only as she raised her hands to her face that she remembered she was still wearing the wig. Blinking the water from her eyes, heedless now of how badly she treated the thing, she took a handful of curls and tugged. She recoiled with a gasp. Crying out as though the water were scalding her, she flung back the shower curtain and struggled to see herself in the looking glass. The mirrored surface had steamed up and her flailing hand could not reach it so she tugged once more at the curls and felt once more the unmistakable agony of her own outraged scalp refusing to yield.
DRESSING UP IN VOICES
for Jonathan Dove
THE ONLY TIME I ever lost control — I mean truly lost control,’ he said, ‘was with someone else’s wife.’
‘Go on,’ she said and pushed aside the carcass of the small bird she had just eaten.
‘Well he was some kind of financial genius. I met them through Flavia.’
She wrinkled her brow to show that she knew no Flavia.
‘You know,’ he went on. ‘Flavia. The broker who used to lead Edward around like a spaniel.’
‘Oh yes,’ she lied, keen for him to press on.
‘Anyway, the genius, who incidentally was ugly as sin, had to go away to Washington for some secret advisory mission and she turned up on my doorstep and we sort of fell into bed.’
‘Goodness,’ she said.
‘Quite. I mean, she was dead sexy and all that but…Actually, now that I think about it she wasn’t sexy at all. But that was just it, you see.’
‘What was?’
‘Why I lost control. It was all forbidden. She said she loved him, or at least that she had immense respect for him. There was something else too, because she forbade me to let on to anyone else what was going on.’
‘So she turned up on your doorstep more than once?’ she asked, for whom his doorstep was as yet no more than a dot lovingly marked on an A—Z page.
‘God yes. Every day for a month.’
‘No more?’
‘A month was quite enough. Anyway, he came back. She seemed to be scared of him, terrified that he might find out. She wouldn’t talk about it, but now and then there was a close shave — someone meeting her on her way to my place, that sort of thing — and I’d see the panic in her eyes. Smell it on her almost.’
‘Goodness.’
‘Of course, it was only the trappings I fell for; the secrecy, the air of the illicit and probably the knowledge that, all being well, I’d never have to take up any responsibility for her. Anyway, I lost control. Utterly. She would ring up at about six to ask if I was free and I would say yes, ridiculously excited, then ring whoever I was meant to be seeing and cancel. Even really good friends.’
‘Didn’t anyone suspect?’
‘Well of course they did, but I blinded them with half-truths. There was a married woman, I said, but no one any of them had ever met. I think, when a month went by and no one had been introduced, they just assumed that I was ashamed of her.’
‘Or that she was ashamed of you.’
‘What?’ He looked up from the napkin he had been shredding and saw that she was mocking him. He snorted. Their waiter took away his spotless plate and her bird carcass. Gus asked him to bring them both a pudding. He asked for it in fast Italian.
‘What did you ask for?’ she demanded, cross because she had wanted zabaglione.
‘Oh, it’s their speciality. It’s a kind of ice-cream grenade, encased in white chocolate and dribbled with Benedictine.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sorry. Did you want something else?’
‘No.’
‘No, come on. Did you? ‘Cause I can grab someone and change the order.’
‘Well…’ She looked across the candle into his pale green eyes. He wore the apologetic expression she had seen last night. He had been doing something delectable back and forth across her abdomen with his short, blond hair and small, pointed tongue. She had run a hand across the back of his neck, as much to feel the stubble there as to make some dumb show of gratitude, but he had stopped and looked up at her with that apologetic look on his face; a painfully proper child caught out at an impropriety. ‘No. Go on,’ she had told him then. Now she merely smiled and confessed to a hankering after a warm froth of egg and Marsala. He had the waiter at his side with one brief turn of the head.
‘You do have zabaglione, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Certo, ma è freddo,’ the waiter told him. ‘Per i barbari americani.’
‘Oh no,’ she burst out. ‘Please don’t bother. The ice-cream thing would be fine.’ Cold zabaglione was like offering a virgin a bed with dirty sheets. She had wanted the world’s most erotic food and they were trying to fob her off with a pornographic approximation. She loathed Benedictine, but now would suffer it meekly.
‘But I’m sure they could heat it up for you,’ he urged her, visibly embarrassed. ‘They could use a bain-marie.’
‘No, Gus, honestly,’ she insisted and turned to send the waiter away. ‘What he ordered will do beautifully,’ she assured him. The waiter left them with a tinge of a sneer. Gus’s ring hand lay on the table. ‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered and reached out to touch his fingers with her own. He let his hand lie dead beneath hers then withdrew it to effect a needless adjustment to his hair.
‘How about you?’ he asked.
‘What about me?’
‘When did you last lose control?’
‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘It’s sad, but I don’t believe I ever have.’
‘So your books aren’t autobiographical? All that rage? All those thwarted lusts?’
‘Lord no,’ she sighed, peeling a runnel of softened wax off the candle. ‘I mean, of course I have to write about feelings I can sympathize with, but I couldn’t begin to live such a violent life. The very idea!’ and they both laughed. The very idea of such a sane animal running fabulously amok! How too absurd! How…How endearing! She felt herself grow dim before the massed jury of her heroines and continued, ‘Besides, I don’t think you can put real happenings into fiction. Not without toning them down.’
‘Too wild?’
‘Sort of. There are too many jagged, messy bits. Heaven knows, there’s nothing more dead than a tidy story, but there needs to be some kind of perspective.’
‘Oh look. Perfetto,’ he pronounced as their white chocolate grenades of ice cream arrived before them. He attacked his at once with that same decorous greed she had noticed in bed. She sank a spoon into hers and watched the chocolate armour crumble into the alcoholic ooze below. She carved out a spoonful then let it lie.
‘I’m not altogether sure that I’ve ever been in love,’ she said. He failed to interrupt so she continued. ‘It’s not that I’m heartless, or even incapable. I’ve thought I was in love several times.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he said, eyeing her pudding as his own all but disappeared.
‘I suppose you could call my attitude romantic insofar as I believe in the possibility of meeting someone with whom one could pass the rest of one’s life and for whom one would be prepared to die.’ She realized of a sudden that the man at the adjoining table was listening with keen interest so she paused to take a mouthful of her grenade and give him time to resume his conversation with the youth before him. The ice cream hurt her throat. Benedictine was as re
miniscent of dry-cleaning fluid as the last time she had tasted it. Mutely she offered her plate to Gus.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. She nodded. He accepted it and began to eat again.
‘And each time I meet someone and they say they love me, I’m flattered, and usually for them to have got that far they have to be fairly attractive, so I’m excited as well. And, I don’t know. The whole business is so very beguiling. Other people’s bedrooms and breakfast. Going through a day with that mixture of smugness and light-headed exhaustion…’
‘Bliss.’
Was he, she wondered, talking about love or the pudding?
‘So I throw myself into it, fingers crossed and hoping that this time it’ll be the real thing. But of course that’s stupid because, as I realize each time I bring something to an end, if it were the real thing I shouldn’t have had to cross my fingers, or hope, or crank up my indulgence. If it were the real thing, I’d have lost control. Of course writers and films exaggerate no end but there’s no smoke without a fire and I just know that, if I don’t feel physically sick at separation and giddy every time I hear someone’s voice or find one of their odd socks at the bottom of the bed, then I’m faking. Every time, after I’ve started faking and got myself thoroughly involved, there comes a sickening moment when some demonstration of theirs shows me that they’ve lost control and I’m still sitting there with fingers crossed and my spare hand firmly on the joystick.’
The man with the youth tittered. Gus quashed him silent with a sharp look. It was one of the unimportant things that made her sick at their every separation and giddy when she heard his voice. That and the wholly irrational whatever that caused her to invite him repeatedly to her bed while the furies of rationality keened a despairing no.
She had found him at an unmemorable dinner party three years ago with his pretty and seemingly vacuous girlfriend, Loulou. Gut-stabbed by lust, she had set out perversely to woo the girl rather than charm the man. Loulou proved far from vacuous, was calculating indeed, and she had been made swiftly a party to her ceaseless round of infidelities. They would ask her to supper and she would dutifully play the role of professional wit and novelist, gabbling away about nothing when she needed to take Gus by the lapels and scream about the betrayals that passed unseen beneath his patrician nose. More recently there had been a falling off in their meetings because the strain had been becoming too much for her. Also she had been busy convincing herself that she loved another man, who was yet too ghastly to trundle out for friendly inspection. Then, three weeks ago, a postcard had arrived.