Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (15 page)

 
          
Liffey slept.
The female nucleus of the
ovum and the male nucleus of the sperm, each containing the chromosomes that
were to endow her child with its hereditary characteristics, both moved towards
the centre of the ovum, where they fused to form a single nucleus. The nucleus
divided into two parts, each containing an equal portion of Liffey and Richard’s
chromosomes.
Liffey’s brown eyes, Richard’s square chin.
Her gran’s temper, his great-grandfather’s musical bent. And so on.

 
          
That
was Friday night. By Sunday night, as they listened to Vivaldi on Richard’s
cassette player and toasted their toes by the wood fire, the two cells had
divided to make four, eight, sixteen—by early Monday morning, when Richard left
for London, there were sixty-four, and could be termed a morula. The process
was to continue for another 263 days; and 266 days from the time of conception,
when the specialisation of different tissues was complete—some that could see,
others that could hear; some to breathe, others to digest, stretch, retract,
secrete; some to think, others to feel, and so on—a baby would be delivered,
weighing seven pounds or so. If Liffey’s nature and physique were such that she
would not abort the child, by accident or on purpose, or die from the many
hazards of pregnancy: if Richard’s were such that he could protect it until it
was grown; if the combination of genes that formed the child allowed it health
and wit enough to survive—a naked, feeble creature in a cold world, with only
mews and smiles to help it—and then fulfill its designed purpose and itself procreate
successfully—the human race would be one infinitesimal step forward.

 
          
Nature
works by waste. Those that survive are indeed strong but not necessarily happy.
Auntie Evolution, Mother Nature— bitches both!

 
          
Offices do for some
instead of
families, and for others, more prudent, as a useful supplement to them. Bosses
are as parents, subordinates as offspring, and colleagues as siblings. For
entertainment there is the continuing soap opera of lives that brush past each
other, seldom colliding, seldom hurting.

 
          
It
does not do, of course, to mistake office life for real life. For if a desk is
emptied one day by reason of death, or redundancy, or resignation, or transfer,
it is filled the next, and the waters close over the departed as if they had
never been. In offices no one is indispensable; in real life people are.

 
          
Mother
dies, and is gone for good. The personnel officer dies, to be reborn tomorrow.

 
          
It
does not do, either, to mistake office sex for real sex, least of all to carry
the fantasy into the outside world. Secretaries marry bosses, it is true, but
must remain secretary and boss for the rest of their lives, hardly man and
wife.
He parental, she childish.
And colleague may
marry colleague, but the quality of comradeship inherent in the match, of
fraternal common sense and friendliness, keeps them for ever like brother and
sister, hardly man and wife.

           
Miss Martin was in love with
Richard. Why should she not be? He was young, he was pleasant, he was
good-looking, he was forbidden; above all he was there. He had come to confide
in her. She was sorry for him too, regarding Liffey as a bad wife, who could
not even consult a railway timetable accurately, and who rang the office at
inconvenient times, distracting Richard when he most needed to concentrate,
intruding and interfering in a world that was none of her business.

 
          
Miss
Martin knew that hers was a hopeless love. She could place herself quite
accurately in the world. She was sensible but dull. She had a solid,
pear-shaped figure that no amount of dieting would make lissom. She preferred
to serve rather than be served. She
was deserving
, so
would never get what she deserved. She did not understand her fiance Jeffs
regard for her and rather despised him for it. If he loved her, who was not
worth loving, how could she love him? He seemed lively and handsome enough now
but would soon settle down and be as dull and plain as she was.

 
          
Miss
Martin, in fact, following the death of her father, was in a sulk that might
well last her whole life. She was consumed by spite against the Universe, which
had spited her and taken away the object of her love. She would find no joy in
it. The determination glazed her eyes, dulled her hair and skin.

 
          
In
the meantime Richard would do to be in love with. The passion, being forbidden
and unrequited, would serve as its own punishment. It made her heart beat
faster when he came into the room, and her hand tremble when she handed him his
coffee, and her typing perfect, and her loyalty fierce. It was a secret love.
It had to be. It would embarrass Richard to know about it. The love of the
socially and physically inferior is not welcome, especially if the object of
the love is male. Miss Martin, in other words, knew her place.

 
          
She
knew it, as it transpired, better than he did.

 
          
On
Monday, Richard arrived in the office and hung his coat upon the hook provided.
(Later Miss Martin would re-arrange it so that it hung in more graceful folds.)
She had waiting for him upon his desk a list of the day’s appointments. There
was mud upon his shoes, and she tactfully remarked upon it so he could attend
to it before encountering his boss.

           
“That’s country life,” said Richard.
“All mud and stress.
But Liffey loves it. Have you
ever lived in the country, Miss Martin?”'

 
          
“I’m
a suburban sort of person,” she replied.
“Neither one thing
nor the other.”

 
          
“I
need a nail file,” he remarked, and she provided it. She did not find these
attentions to his physical needs in any way humiliating. They set him free to
attend to matters that by common consent were important—the making of the
decisions that kept them all employed. She could have made the decisions as
well as he of course, but nobody would then have believed they were important,
let alone difficult.

 
          
Messengers
came, telephones rang and files were circulated. Currently obsessing Richard’s
department was the maximising of the salt content of a particular brand of
chicken soup and the growing conviction that some kinds of salt acted saltier
than others, a fact verifiable by common experience but not scientific
experiment. Pleasing the public palate is not easy.

 
          
“Of
course Liffey would have everyone keeping their own chickens and boiling them
down for soup,” said Richard. “She’s not a great one for packets.”

 
          
“I
wouldn’t have the heart,” said Miss Martin. “Poor chicken!”

 
          
Before
lunch Richard took out an unlabelled bottle of white wine.

 
          
“All
this talk of salt has made me thirsty,” he said. “Will you have some, Miss
Martin? It’s home-made. A neighbour of ours made it.
Mayflower.
It’s supposed to be unlucky for women to drink it, and Liffey won’t, but you’re
not superstitious, are you?”

 
          
“No,”
said Miss Martin, drinking too. Richard noticed the stolid fleshiness of her
behind as she bent to a filing cabinet, and found himself rather admiring it.
Liffey’s buttocks proclaimed themselves to the world, moving in open invitation,
cheek by cheek, beneath tight jeans. Miss Martin had something to hide.
But what?
He took another glass.

 
          
“I
love you,” said Miss Martin two glasses later. The love induced by the
mistletoe, parsley, and mystery ingredients in the wine was of an elemental,
imperative kind and over-rode inhibitions induced by low self-esteem.

 
          
Richard
flinched, as if physically assaulted, but quickly recovered. Miss Martin was an
excellent secretary, he liked her, and for some reason pitied her, as he pitied
certain kinds of dogs who look at humans with yearning eyes, as if able to
conceive of humanness but know they can never aspire to it and are doomed to
creep on four legs for ever.

 
          
“That’s
just the wine talking,” said Richard more truly than he knew. “You’d better not
have any more.” But he poured her another glass even as he spoke.

 
          
“I
don’t see why I shouldn’t love you,” complained Miss Martin. “No skin off your
nose.”

 
          
“Well,”
said Richard, “since
it’s
sex that makes the world go
round—”

 
          
Miss
Martin felt argumentative. She often did, but was accustomed to keeping her
arguments to herself. “I’m not talking about sex,” she said, “I’m talking about
love.”

 
          
“You’re
only not talking about sex,” said Richard, “because I suspect you know nothing
about it.”

 
          
“I’m
a virgin,” she said.

 
          
Miss
Martin rang up the colleague with whom Richard was supposed to be lunching and
said he had been delayed by a crisis, and they went off to lunch together,
oblivious of those who saw them. He strode on long cheerful legs, and she
trotted alongside on her little dumpy ones. It wasn’t right. He was a kestrel,
she was a sparrow doomed to pick at leavings. In Nature everyone knows his or
her place.

 
          
Mabs
would have been pleased at the unrightness brought about by her mother’s
potion, and would certainly have thought it served Miss Martin right. Mayflower
wine is unlucky for women to drink, and she had been warned.

 
          
“I
think,”
said
Richard blindly, “I would be doing you a
kindness in saving you from suburbia and a life of proper propriety.”

 
          
And
in a room at the Strand Palace Hotel after lunch, for her sake rather than his,
or so it appeared to him, he did not so much as save her from these things as
make them intolerable to her for ever.

           
By
five o’clock
both were back in the office: Miss Martin
was pale and stunned and at her typewriter, and he was trying to catch up with
his work. Neither could quite believe that it had happened, and Richard
certainly wished that it had not.

 
          
Miss
Martin told no one. There was no one to tell. “I was drunk,” she told herself.
“You know what home-made wine is.”

 
          
Richard quite wanted
to tell Bella
about the astonishing episode of himself and Miss Martin, but prudence forbade
it. She would have laughed at him, from her lordly position, sitting astride
him on the study sofa, exacting response from him, payment, this pleasure for
that, as if she were the queen and he the subject. Boadicea.
Knives
on the wheels of her lust, cutting into self-esteem.

 
          
“I
took her virginity,” he could have said. “It seemed my right, even my duty. She
certainly expected me to.”

 
          
“ ‘Took
her virginity,’ ” Bella would have sneered. “A poor
Victorian dirty old man, that’s all you are at heart.”

 
          
But
he knew there was power in it. That he would never be forgotten: that his life
lasted as long as hers. He would keep that to himself.

 
          
“Don’t
you worry about all this?” he asked Bella. He had to ask her something. She
demanded rational conversation until the very last minute of their love-making,
and question and answer seemed the least troublesome means of providing it.

 
          
“Why
should I worry?”

 
          
“In
case Ray finds out. He might come home early.”

 
          
“Ray
never comes home early.” She was bitter, but he could see her logic. Bella was
doing what she was because Ray came home late: it was the grudge she bore
against him. It circled and circled in her mind—words rather than meaning. Ray
Comes Home Late. Ray could not, therefore, come home early or she would not be
doing this. He could see that the logic might well apply to Bella, making her
husband inaudible and invisible if he returned early from his visit to the
nubile Karen and her homework problems—perhaps taken ill, or overcome with
emotion—but would hardly save him, Richard, from Ray’s anger and upset.

 
          
He
said as much.

           
“Ray wouldn’t be angry or upset,”
said Bella. “Why should he? He likes me to enjoy myself. And what else can he
expect, the way he never comes home until late. And you’re a friend after all.”

 
          
“You
don’t think this is an abuse of friendship?”

           
“It might be a
test
of friendship. Whenever I go away, my friend Isabel sleeps
with Ray. She and I are still the best of friends.”

 
          
“I
expect you compare notes,” said Richard gloomily.

           
“Of course,” said Bella.

           
“I don’t want you to talk about me,”
said Richard.

           
She sighed and raised her eyes to
heaven, revealing an amazing amount of white.

 
          
“I
don’t think Ray treats you very well,” said Richard.

 
          
“In what way?”
Bella was interested.

 
          
“The
way he talks about other, younger women in front of you.
And
complains about your tits.”

 
          
“That’s
just his insecurity.”

 
          
“He
calls you ‘the old bag.’ ”

 
          
“He
projects his fear of ageing on to me,” said Bella, “that’s all.”

 
          
“Well,”
said Richard, “I do feel bad about doing this, in spite of what you say.”

 
          
“Of
course you do. It’s the only way you can get it up.”

 
          
He
found her crudeness horrific and fascinating and was unable to continue
talking.

 
          
On
evenings when Richard did not accompany Ray and Bella on some gastronomic jaunt
or was keeping Bella company on

           
Ray’s late nights out, he ate simply
enough, with the family. The staple food of the household was fish fingers,
baked potatoes, and frozen peas. Food, except on special occasions, was
regarded as fuel. Tony and Tina, the children, watched television and read
books while they ate.

 
          
“Today’s
children have no palate,” mourned Bella.

 
          
The
Nash household was for the most part quiet, as if saving its strength for
uproar, or recuperating its strength from the last outburst. Helga, the
au-pair, washed and cleaned and fried fish fingers and ironed, the children did
their homework, Ray wrote in the attic, Bella and Richard silently worked or
studiously made their secret love.

 
          
Sometimes
it reminded Richard of his parents’ home: the semblance of ordinariness, of
kindness and consideration and warmth, as passions gathered and dams of rage
prepared to burst.

 
          
Married
to Liffey, in the little sweetness of their love, he had forgotten all that. He
had learned as a child to smile and please and be out of the way when storms
broke. Liffey had learned the same lesson.

 
          
Richard
would do things with Bella which he believed debased the pair of them.

 
          
“No
such thing as a perversion,” Bella would say, “so long as both enjoy it.”

 
          
But
Richard knew that she was wrong, that in dragging the spirituality of love down
into the mist of excitement through disgust, he did them both a wrong. He would
never do such things to Liffey. She was his wife. But he had to do them with
someone or be half alive.

 
          
All
Bella’s doing, thought Richard.
Bella’s fault.

 
          
Or
he could have lived with Liffey for ever in the calm ordinariness of the
missionary position, as had his mother and father before him, and known no
better.

 
          
Miss
Martin had trembled and moaned so much he’d simply got it all over as soon as
possible.

 
          
Richard
could see that Miss Martin too might come to enjoy it. Perhaps it was his duty
to ensure that she did, to bring her to the enjoyment of sex before casting her
back into the stream of life from which he had so tenderly fished her? The more

           
Richard contemplated the notion the
more attractive and the more virtuous such a course appeared.

           
There were, Richard thought, three
kinds of women and three kinds of associated sex. Liffey’s kind, which went
with marriage, which was respectful and everyday, and allowed both partners to
discuss such things as mortgages and shopping on waking. Bella’s kind, which
went with extra-marital sex and self-disgust and was anal and oral and
infantile and addictive, and so out of character that
nobody
said anything on waking if only because the daily self and the nightly self
were so divorced. Miss Martin’s kind, which involved seduction, the pleasure of
inflicting and receiving emotional
pain
: in which the
sexual act was the culmination not to physical foreplay—for orgasm was in no
way its object—but of long, long hours, days, weeks of emotional manipulation.

 
          
It
would not be possible,
nor
indeed desirable, Richard
thought, to find these three different women in one body; he could never
satisfy his needs monogamously. Could any man?

 
          
On
Wednesday morning Richard said to Miss Martin, whose hand shook more than ever
when she handed him his coffee,
whom
he had had to
reprove more than once for carelessness in typing, and who was now wearing her
hair curled behind her ears, “I like your hair like that.”

 
          
It
was the first personal remark he had made to her since their return from the
Strand Palace Hotel.

 
          
Miss
Martin blushed. Later he asked her out to lunch. He knew she would not refuse,
that she would make no trouble for him and make no demands. She was born to be
a picker-up of other people’s crumbs. Well, he would scatter a few. She needed
the nourishment, and the more wealth that flowed from him the more there would
be to flow. Richard knew that in sexual matters the more you give out, the more
there is to give.