FAY WELDON

WATCHING ME, WATCHING YOU

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Christmas Tree

Breakages

Alopecia

Man with No Eyes

Holy Stones

Threnody

Angel, All Innocence

Spirit of the House

Watching Me, Watching You

Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child

Weekend

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

Christmas Tree

The last thing Brian did before he came South was to plant out the Christmas Tree for his Mum and Dad. The tree had grown and flourished for years in the sooty square of Bradford backyard where all other growing things failed, except cabbages. Its needles were dark-green, thick and resilient upon the twig, and its branches grew in conventional Christmas Tree shape. Every year one or other of the Smith family would dig it out on Christmas Eve and replant it on Twelfth Night, and every year the tree repaid them by growing thicker, higher and glossier. Soot clearly suited it. So the tree had existed since 1948, when Brian was ten. Now he was twenty-five. It had given him, Brian worked out on that traumatic day, fifteen years’ worth of pleasurable feelings.

‘Never drops a needle on my carpet,’ said his mother with pride, every year. ‘Not like the ones you buy down the market.’

‘They’re dead before they get to you,’ she would explain, every year. ‘They boil the roots, you know. They don’t want them growing, do they? No profit in that.’

Brian was spending a last Christmas with his Mum and Dad before leaving Bradford for good. There seemed no point in staying. His wife Audrey would not have him back, even though his daughter Helen was born that Boxing Day.

‘I told you no and I meant no,’ said Audrey. ‘I told you if you went with that woman you needn’t think you were coming back, and what I say I mean.’

Meaning what was said was a Northern habit, and in retrospect, admirable enough. At the time, however, it had seemed merely drastic. Audrey had shut him, Brian, the hero of his life, out of the cosy warmth of home; left him out in the cold exciting glitter of the unknown world, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. His Mum was allowed to visit the new baby, but not his Dad. Audrey made strange distinctions. ‘Pity it’s not a boy,’ said his Mum, cautiously. ‘It’s a funny-looking little thing. But Helen’s a pretty name and time can work wonders.’

The affair with Carlotta had ended. Brian had written a play for the local theatre — his first. It had transferred to London. Carlotta played the lead. Brian had gone down for rehearsals. Audrey had protested. ‘You’ll sleep with her if you go,’ she said. ‘I know you. Too big for your boots.’

That was another Northern crime, being too big for your boots. Almost as bad as having a swelled head, putting on airs or having eyes bigger than your stomach. Brian slept with Carlotta, and the affair lasted for the run of the play. Four months.

‘That’s the way it goes,’ said Alec, his agent, later to be his friend. ‘When actresses say for life they mean ‘til the end of the run. That’s show biz.’

So Brian, who had believed he was a serious writer, and not in show biz, returned bruised and contrite to Bradford, was thrown out by Audrey, stayed with his parents over Christmas, planted out the Christmas Tree, digging the pit wide and deep, spreading the roots to maximise nourishment and minimise stress — ‘That’s the key to that tree’s success,’ said his Dad, this year as every other, ‘taking care of the roots. Careful!’ — and left, for London, all soft-centred harshness and painful integrity, to slam into the soft cultural underbelly of the South. And so he did.

In the year after he left Audrey Brian wrote two stage plays, one musical, four television plays for the BBC and three letters to Audrey. The applause was deafening and prolonged for everything except the letters, which were met by silence, and the silence hurt him more than the applause cheered him.

Writers tend to undervalue those who praise them, or complain that praise is patronising: whilst at the same time feeling aggrieved if they are not praised. They never win the battle with themselves, which is why, perhaps, they go on writing.

The theme of Brian’s work was adoration, almost reverence, of and for the working classes, and his message a howl of hatred for the middle classes, and his solution violence.

‘Wonderful!’ said Alec. ‘The more you insult them the more they’ll love you.’ And in those cosy pre-OPEC days it seemed uncomfortably true. Though that of course was not why Brian chose such themes. The theme — which was something Alec could not or would not understand — chose him. Looking around his middle-class, cheering audience, Brian suffered.

There were, of course, compensations. His words upon the page were simple and direct and attractive; and as he was upon the page, so was he in bed. The girls trailed in and out of his flat and wept when it was all, all over, and for the rest of their lives searched his work for their appearance in it, and frequently found themselves, portrayed not unsympathetically.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ said Alec, politely. Alec wore bifocals. He was happily married to a good cook, and a prey to romantic love for inaccessible young girls. He, at least, maintained that he was happily married. His wife had another story.

After the fourth letter, Brian forgot Audrey. He asked his parents down to London for first nights, or the taping of his Plays for Today, and they were pleased enough to stay in the grand hotels he booked them into, and his friends seemed genuinely to like them — ‘What a lucky man you are, Brian, to come from a family like that. Real people!’ — and if his parents went back, shaking their heads over him and his rackety life, as if he were a neighbour’s child and not their own, Brian was not there to see it. They would bring him photographs of Helen, and even a father’s kind eye was obliged to observe that she was a plain and puddingy child, and that made her the easier to ignore.

He worried about himself, all the same. Had he lost his roots, forsaken his origins, worse, joined the middle classes? He had an image of himself as the Christmas Tree back home, dug up and not put back, left in its pot, unwatered, living on borrowed time, on the goodness of the past.

‘Do stop going on,’ said Victoria of the green pubic hair and feather boa. ‘I never knew anyone so guilty as you. Can’t you just stop worrying?’

He couldn’t. Victoria left.

‘But you’ve got it all made,’ said Harriet the theatrical twin, or was it Belinda, they played the silliest games, ‘rich and famous, and the revolution just around the corner, and you won’t even be the first to go, like us; but the last. You good little leftie, you.’

They went, pretty soon, to be cooks on someone’s charter yacht, somewhere in the sun. ‘Perhaps I’m having my cake and eating it too,’ he fretted to Lady Ann Scottwell, who had piano legs but wore the shortest of mini skirts, when a less secure girl would have worn trousers, and they somehow managed to make a plus out of a minus, erotically speaking. ‘You might be a little naive about the revolution,’ she murmured into his chest hair, cautiously. ‘Daddy says it definitely isn’t coming.’

That was 1968 and Daddy, it transpired, knew best.

Things went wrong. ‘Violence, dear boy,’ said Alec, who was going through a camp stage, ‘is definitely unfashionable. There’s too much of it about in real life. If things go on as they are, your entire audience will be legless and armless.’

Brian, who nowadays said in public that Alec, in the great school report of life, got good marks for contracts, but bad marks for integrity, tried to take no notice. But he felt confused, as the world changed about him, and goodies became baddies — from Castro to the IRA to Israel and even cigarette smoking became unfashionable. He drank to clear the confusion.

The BBC actually rejected a script and a stage play at the Aldwych was taken off after two weeks. ‘How about a film?’ asked Alec. ‘Hollywood calls.’

‘Never,’ said Brian.

‘A television series? Good money. Good practice.’ Brian put the phone down.

He knocked down a television producer in an Indian restaurant, appeared in Court, and was given a conditional discharge, but the Evening Standard picked up the story and ran a piece about Brian’s recent succession of creative disasters, and referred to his ‘emotional stalinism’.

‘We’ll sue,’ said Brian to Alec.

‘We won’t,’ said Alec to Brian. ‘We’ll work out what it means and see if it fits.’ Alec was back on the straight and narrow path to glory.

Instead, Brian married Rea, a fragile blonde actress with a passionate nature, who stopped him drinking by sleeping with him only when he was sober. They went back to Bradford in search of Brian’s roots, but found flyovers and bypasses where the red brick back-to-backs of his childhood had been. His parents now lived on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise block. Rea did not like the place at all. Shopping baskets were filled with white sliced bread and Mr Kipling cakes, and mothers slapped their children in the streets, and youths smoked and swore on corners. ‘I think you’d better forget your roots,’ said Rea. She did not want anything to do with Helen, who was still not pretty, in spite of her name.

Brian and Rea set up a fashionable home and gave fashionable dinners for writers with international reputations and New York publishers and notable film directors of a non-commercial kind, mostly from Europe, and filled the house with fashionable stripped pine and Victorian biscuit tins — ‘Oh the colours! Those faded reds and crimsons!’ — and Brian, to give himself time to think, wrote a comedy about the upper classes and the encroaching Arabs, which did very well in the West End. ‘Christ, you have sold out,’ wrote Audrey, out of the blue. ‘Making people laugh is a perfectly serious ambition,’ he wrote back. He needed money. Rea was very expensive. He hadn’t realised. She would import Batik silk just to make curtains — the yellows and browns. Ironwork had to be genuine Coalbrookdale: steak had to be fillet: clothes had to be Bonnie Cashin.

‘How about doing the rewrites on a film? Rome, not Hollywood. Money’s fantastic,’ said Alec. ‘All right,’ said Brian.

Brian could not understand why, to his eye, the house looked more and more like an old junk shop, the more Rea spent. And why she spoiled fillet steak with garlic and laughed him out of liking chips. He fell rather suddenly and startlingly out of love with Rea. She bought Christmas Trees without even the pretence of roots — merest branches posing as proper trees — and failed to deal properly with the needles, which of course would fall in profusion, so that he would find them all the year round, in piles of dust in corners and stuck, slant-wise and painful, into the fabric of his clothes. ‘They’ve been dry-cleaned, Brian. Surely my duty to your clothes stops there?’

He felt out of sympathy with her, and rightly critical. She lived on the surface of her life: she lacked complexity. She either laughed at his moods and sensitivities, or, worse, failed to notice them. If he got drunk and hit her — which on one or two lamentable occasions happened, when he was busy rewriting the rewrites, and Rome would ring and the demand would be for this line in and this line out, taking the very last scrap of integrity from the script, and every drop of remaining dignity from himself — if he then lashed out at Rea, he had the impression that it was merely, for her, a scene in a play in which she thought she should never have accepted a part in the first place. He suffered. She would not even wear his black eye boldly, as his mother had worn his father’s, but used make-up to disguise it. Everything, with Rea, was disguise, because there was no real self. She acted. She acted the part of wife, hostess, lover, connoisseur of impossible objects. She even acted being pregnant, but when it came to the point, had abortions, and then made him feel responsible by saying it was his lack of enthusiasm for the baby which induced her to have them. ‘I didn’t want to see you acting mother,’ he said. ‘That’s true enough. At least I know what a real mother is. You don’t. It’s not your fault. You’ve had no mother.’ Rea’s mother had died when she was born. It was a source of some sorrow to her.

Rea had no mother, no roots, no soul. Brian felt it acutely. Times were bad between them.

Brian delivered scripts late, or sloppily written, or not at all. First drafts failed to get to second draft stage. There were arguments about broken contracts. Brian was half-pleased, half-humiliated. There seemed nothing to write about. Nothing, in a changing world, that a writer could put his finger on and cry, stop, that’s it: and hold back the world for a minute or two, to allow it to look at itself.

‘Tax man’s at the door,’ said Alec. And so he was, hammering away. ‘Television series?’

‘Not yet,’ said Brian. ‘Not quite yet.’

Brian found Rea in bed, in his and her bed, with a second-rate cameraman. ‘That’s it,’ said Brian. ‘Out!’ ‘Not on your nelly,’ said Rea. ‘You go, I’ll stay.’

Rea countered, by solicitor’s letter, his accusations of adultery with accusations of mental cruelty, which he could not understand, and physical cruelty, which he could. He let her have everything. ‘You never were quite real to me,’ he said to her, when he called to collect his clothes, in the bold New Year of 1976. ‘You lived in a play.’

‘You wrote it,’ she said, sourly, and slammed the front door after him, and the shock made the brown Christmas Tree, stuck carelessly outside for the dustmen to collect, lose the last of its needles.

He felt the world was ending, in a sour dream. He was nearly forty, and had nothing.

‘Except friends, fans, freedom, a reputation, and a queue of TV producers outside your door,’ said Alec. Brian let one or two of them in. With Rea out of the way he could work properly again. He sent a large sum of money to his parents. They sent it back.

‘We have everything we need,’ they wrote. ‘Our pensions are more than sufficient. You save it for a rainy day. You need it more than we do.’

He was hurt, feeling the reproach, and redirected the money to Audrey. She kept it, but sent no thanks.

Brian felt old. The world was full of young men in jeans, and more than a few of them were competent writers, quicker, cheaper, more sober, and harder-working than he, snatching the work from under his nose; and the best and brightest girls behaved as girls never had since the beginning of time, expecting him to make coffee and saying ‘Don’t ring me, I’ll ring you’: and the theatre had lost its shape, and its giants, and the proscenium arch had gone, and everyone ran round pretending the writer was no one special, just someone with a job to do: and a stage play had become just a television play, with a live audience.

Unsatisfactory times. The young women still came. They preferred him, if anything, to their contemporaries. They had a surface politeness. They would ask him what the matter was, on those mornings when he turned his face to the wall, and couldn’t get up, and his phone would ring, and he couldn’t bring himself to answer it. ‘I’ve lost my roots,’ he’d say. They could not of course believe him, and took his mournfulness as a slur upon their sexuality, and an insult to their femininity. But what he said was at last true. He could no longer send down feelers into his past, into the black, crumbling, moving soil of his childhood.

‘Re-pot yourself,’ snapped Alec, who had other stars in his stable now — young men who liked, nostalgically, to dress like Colin Wilson. Alec had never stopped. ‘Find new soil.’

‘I tried with Rea,’ said Brian.

‘Now’s the time to write something really big,’ said Alec. ‘Some spectacular statement, to hit the contemporary button on the head.’

‘It’s been hit so often it’s lost its spring,’ said Brian.

But he thought perhaps Alec was right. And he felt he was resting, not idling. He knew, as he had always known, that the big work was there somewhere, waiting to emerge: the great work, that was to be to Brian Smith and the contemporary world, as Paradise Lost had been to Milton and his world. The master work, the summing up, knotting up, tying up and gift presentation of the human experience that everyone was hoping for, waiting for.

In two acts, of course, with a small cast and a single set to minimise expense, and one good interval to maximise bar and ice-cream sales.

‘Don’t be like that,’ said Alec. ‘Playwrighting is the art of the practical.’

‘One thing you have taught me, Alec,’ said Brian, ‘is that a writer is gigolo to the Muse, not lover.’ Perhaps he should change agents? But death seemed easier.

Brian spent the Christmas of 1978 in Alec’s new home, in Belgravia. One of Alec’s inaccessible young girls had proved accessible, and now Alec lived with her, while Alec’s wife lived with the girl’s former boyfriend. ‘Playing fathers and mothers,’ murmured Brian into his Christmas pudding. ‘Easier than husband and wife.’

But Alec’s girl made a good brandy butter and her father actually worked for the Forestry Commission and the Christmas Tree in the corner had real roots, and was dark green and bouncy, and she planned to keep it in a tub out on the balcony all year, and Brian felt a real surge of affection for both of them, and a conviction that the Western World was not tottering about on its last legs, as everyone kept saying but just, as he was, having a little rest before undergoing a transfiguration into youth, health, vigour and purpose.

Almost as if this welling up of optimism attracted real reason for it, Brian fell in love in the spring of 1979.

He could not recall ever having felt such an emotion before. What he had thought was love, he now realised had been a mixture of lust and anxiety lest the object of his lust should get away, together with a soupçon of practical worry about who was to iron his shirts and wash his socks, seasoned with a pinch of pleasure at having found someone who would listen, with attention and sympathy, to the continuing soap opera of his life. In the heat and glory of his new-found love, and in the renaissance that went with it, in the new awareness of the spiritual content of what goes on, or should go on, between man and woman, he wrote to Rea, and apologised.

Rea wrote a friendly letter back, saying she was pregnant and happy and a lot of their trouble had been his, Brian’s, womb-envy. Having babies, she said, was the real creativity: compared to this the writing of plays and the making of films must seem thin indeed. But the best a man could do.

He read the letter out to Linda, the object of his love. She nodded and smiled. She had long fair hair, and a pink and white complexion and tiny teeth and a little mouth, and a plump bosom and a plump figure all over. Little white hands; tiny feet. She was twenty-two. She was a country girl. Her voice, when she spoke, which she did only when entirely necessary, was faint and frail and female and had a gentle, seductive Devon burr. She was working, when he met her, as a waitress in an hotel in Weston-super-Mare, where Brian and a film crew were filming a chase sequence: a man on water skis being pursued by a beautiful CIA girl in a black wet suit.

Brian had expected, more or less, to bed the wet-suit girl sometime during their stay at the hotel: but when he saw Linda, standing against the window of the breakfast room, the morning sun shining behind her hair, silhouetting her sweet, pensive face, he lost all interest in that petty ordinary ambition. Linda brought him his orange juice, and her eyes were downcast, and he thought this is what women ought to be, and why I have had such trouble with the others: this is how my mother must have looked when she was young. Linda raised her eyes, and there was a look in them which he remembered from the Statue of the Madonna in the classroom where he’d gone for a time, when he was seven, to the Catholic school: it was of understanding, forgiveness and invitation all at once. Blue eyes beneath an alabaster brow, and the ridiculous waitress’s cap narrowing the forehead, as had the Virgin Mary’s wimple. He loved her.

‘Christ!’ said Alec. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

Brian hardly thought Alec was one to talk. ‘Listen,’ said Alec, ‘my Lisa may have been a college girl but at least she was doing English Lit and got a perfectly respectable 2-2. This girl is a waitress!’

It was only a holiday job, in actual fact. Linda’s parents, he had discovered, owned a garage in East Devon and Linda lived at home, helping out.

‘I’m glad she’s a waitress,’ said Brian. ‘I’m finally back where I belong. Amongst real people, who do real things, and live simple, honest hard-working lives.’

‘Christ!’ was all Alec would say.

During that long hot summer Brian wrote a four-part love story for television so full of sensual delights that even enemies and critics were touched, and Alec was silent, and Audrey wrote, out of the blue. ‘My God,’ said Audrey, ‘life was never like that for you and me. Wish it had been. My fault, perhaps. Helen’s training as a nurse. Shouldn’t you be using your television time to protest about low pay instead of all this full-frontal stuff?’

Still, it was better than nothing.

Linda came to live with him in London. She wouldn’t and didn’t sleep with him, though nobody believed it. She was virtuous. Her family didn’t believe it either and cast her off. She spent her time writing letters home on thin blue lined paper with purple violets round the edge. She had unformed, careful writing and her spelling was bad. He found that charming. He still had trouble spelling, himself.

Forgiveness was a long time coming.

‘I’ve let them down,’ she whispered. ‘They trusted me.’

‘Perhaps we ought to be married,’ said Brian, though he’d sworn publicly never to do anything like that again. She considered.

‘I suppose that would be nice,’ said Linda. ‘They’d forgive me, then. Oh, I do so want you to meet them! I miss my mother and my brothers so much.’

They agreed to marry at Christmas. It couldn’t be any earlier because Brian had to go to Los Angeles for three months, to work on a film. A thriller.

He half-wondered whether to take Linda, but she said firmly that she didn’t want to come. ‘I’ll stay home and arrange the wedding,’ she said. ‘Honestly, I’d rather. I don’t really fit in with your smart friends.’

‘That’s what’s so wonderful about you,’ he said. He could see that in Los Angeles, where girls were thin and leggy and bronzed, she might not appear to advantage. She liked to keep out of the sun, because it made her nose peel.

He had thought the wedding would be a Register Office affair, but Linda had set her heart on being married in a white dress with bell sleeves in the village church, and he agreed. ‘It will cost you to do it properly,’ she said, timorously. She had never asked for money before. He gave her a cheque. ‘I haven’t got a bank account,’ she said. ‘If you’re going home,’ he said, ‘your parents can cash it for you.’

‘They don’t have banks,’ she said, and he was surprised. What kind of people were they? ‘It’s only a little garage,’ she apologised.

He was pleased. He thought the peasant soil might be some kind of equivalent to the proletarian earth that afforded his early nourishment. He flew off to LA over the Pole, first class, and did not even try to date the young woman who sat next to him, who wore sneakers and had a little silver snuff box full of vitamin pills and said she was in hospitals. ‘Administration?’ he asked.

‘I own them,’ she said, and what with East turning West beneath them, and the sun rising where it had only just set, and rather too much champagne, he felt the world was upside-down and longed for Linda’s stolid charm, and her little feet in high strap heels, rather than those serviceable if sexy sneakers. Stolid? He was rather shocked by that particular choice of word. It was not how one usually described the Virgin Mary. Stolid.

In love with the Virgin Mary. But he was. He became almost nauseous when confronted with the ravishing Mary Magdalenas of Malibu Beach: human animals doing their copulatory dance under the Studio Ring Master’s whip: the fantasies of an exhausted film industry, taken such definite flesh. He had no trouble resisting them.

It was not, he saw now, that he had ever been promiscuous. Just that no woman until now had ever succeeded in properly captivating him. ‘Christ!’ said Alec on the telephone, across half the world. But he’d put his commission up to fifteen per cent and since the spring, and the advent of Linda, Brian had been doing well enough and fulfilling his early promise, as money maker if not saviour of society.

Brian came home on December 14. The wedding was on December 15. Linda was already in Devon. The wedding was all organised, she told him when he rang from Heathrow. All that was required was Brian’s appearance, wearing a suit, and with the ring, early the next morning. She’d even arranged the cars, which should have been the groom’s task. The wedding reception was to be in the Women’s Institute Hall, and they were to spend the night with Linda’s parents, the Joneses, in the caravan in the garden. If it was raining, or snowing, they could squeeze into her bedroom.

Women’s Institute? Caravan? In December? After Studio City, Malibu and Sunset Boulevard, it sounded strange. But Brian Smith marrying Linda Jones sounded profoundly, agreeably right.

He was relieved, too, if only by virtue of shortage of time, of the burden of providing friends and family to witness the wedding. He wanted a new life. He did not want the past clouding any issues. In East Devon, down in the South West, he would be born again.

Honest rural folk.

Linda’s father met him at the station. The train was late. Mr Jones paced up and down in an ill-fitting navy suit, and boots with buckled uppers. No more ill-fitting, Brian told himself, than my father’s at prize day at the grammar school. The pale grey suits of the executives of Studio City, their smooth after-shaved jowls, their figures jogged into shape, made an unfair comparison. Linda’s father was narrow like a ferret, sharp-eyed like a fox, untidy as an unpruned hedge in autumn, and had thick red hands with bleak oil beneath the nails. One eye wandered, when he spoke.

‘Best hurry,’ said Mr Jones, ‘Linda’s waiting,’ and they climbed into an old C-registration Mini, with the back seats taken out and piled with plastic fertiliser sacks and ropes, guarded by a snappy, noisy, ugly little dog. Barking prevented them from talking.

The garage had a single petrol pump, and was marked No Petrol, and was outside the last house in an undistinguished row of pre-war houses set back from the main road. Brian was rushed upstairs to change, the dog snapping at his heels, into a tiny room with four different flowered papers on the wall, and two beds and three wardrobes and six trays of sausage rolls on boards placed across the beds. He caught a glimpse of Linda as he fled from the dog; she was in brilliant Terylene white. He thought she blew him a kiss.

What am I doing, he thought, trying to find a place between the plastic beads and greeting cards and Mr Men stickers and the Christmas holly and bells which decked the mirror, so he could fix his tie. He was bronzed by the Californian sun; his face was narrow and handsome and clever. What am I doing? What desperation has landed me here? No, this is jet-lag speaking. I love Linda. Write it in plastic Christmas foam on what remains of the mirror. I love Linda. What has Linda’s family to do with her, any more than mine to do with me? Roots. Aye, there’s the rub. Red Devon soil hardened by winter. What good was that to him? He was used to soot. He was ready. A Rolls-Royce stood outside. Well, he was paying.

Into the first car he stepped, and Linda’s father came with him. Best man. Linda’s father had trodden in the mess left by the dog in the hall. Linda’s father’s shoe smelt. ‘Overexcited,’ said Linda’s mother. She was stout and dressed in green satin but otherwise might have been anyone. Linda’s cross-eyed brother kicked the dog out of the house. Linda’s wall-eyed brother hoovered up the mess, which was largely liquid.

‘Don’t do that!’ cried Linda’s mother. Linda smiled serenely beneath her white white veil. She was a virgin.

‘My wedding day is the happiest day of my life,’ she said, though whether to Brian as he passed, or as a statement of policy to God above, or simply to quell the riot he did not know. Mr Jones nipped upstairs to clean his shoe.

The village church was big and handsome and very cold. A hundred people or so were gathered on the Bride’s side of the church. The acoustics were bad, and there were many small children in the congregation. Brian stood dazed, facing the cross and banks of paper flowers. The Vicar was elderly and dressed in a white gown. Brian heard sound and movement and presently Linda stood beside him, and he felt better, and to the sound of children crying and protesting he and she were married, in God’s sight.

Outside the church, later, there were many photographs taken. He thought he had never seen so many ugly and misshapen people gathered together in one place. He could not be sure whether this was so, and a phenomenon peculiar to this part of Devon, or whether it was just the sudden contrast to the people of Southern California.

Various people young and old, men and women, came up to congratulate him, and in the course of brief conversations let it be known that Linda was not a virgin, had had at least two relationships with married men, one abortion, one miscarriage and had married him for his money. Linda did not seem to be popular. He thought perhaps he was dreaming.

At the reception at the W I Hall, where sherry was served, and also the sausage rolls he had seen on the bed, the Vicar remarked on the cross- and wall-eyes of the Jones boys, and accounted for it by village in-breeding. It’s a genetic weakness, he said. Genetics, he added, bitterly, was a three-syllable word, and words so long were not often heard in these parts.

Jet lag became more pressing. He had to sleep. He remembered making a speech. Linda put on her going-away clothes and the Rolls took them back to the garage. The dog lay vomiting on the path.

‘Now we can,’ said Linda, ‘quick! Before anyone comes home,’ and she pulled him upstairs to the room with the many wallpapers and he removed her clothes except her veil and made love to her. That was what marriage was all about. He thought she probably wasn’t a virgin, but just pretending. He wondered where his silver cuff links were and couldn’t see them. Then he fell asleep. When he woke she was unpacking wedding presents, and singing happily. ‘This is the happiest day of my life! Oh, how I love you!’ said Linda, and gave him a kiss. ‘Look, a toaster, and a lovely casserole with yellow flowers. That’s from Auntie Ann.’

She had not noticed any lack of sexual enthusiasm in him. Was that innocence, or insensitivity, or cunning? His cuff links were decidedly gone. ‘You must have left them in London,’ said Linda. ‘They’ll turn up.’

They had been a present from Rea. For some reason he valued them. But Linda dismissed the matter. Now they were married she seemed much more definite. Her eyelids no longer drooped, in modesty and decorum. She looked him straight in the eye, and lied.

‘The bill from the caterers hasn’t been paid. Could you possibly give me a cheque? Three hundred pounds.’

‘I thought you made the food yourselves.’

‘No. It was all bought in. Every scrap.’ She did not seem to mind that the lie was easily detected, nor the amount improbable. She gave him a little kiss on the nose. ‘Husband! Go on, say wife.’

‘Wife!’

‘Will you come out with us on the Christmas Trees? It would please Dad.’

And so they did. Dad and the two boys and Brian, after dark on his wedding night, with light snow falling, took shovels and borrowed a neighbour’s van and travelled ten miles inland, on to Forestry Commission land, where the pylons were slung from hill to hill, carrying electricity from the Nuclear Power Station to the good folk of Exeter, and there, beneath the wires, hair crackling and tooth fillings zinging, they pirated Christmas Trees. Good healthy well-shaped trees, three foot high, with a broad spread of vigorous roots. Brian dug, and laughed, and dug some more. It was theft, it was dangerous, there were dog patrols to stop such acts, but he felt, at last, that he was doing something sensible and useful. The Jones family were pleased by the muscle and enthusiasm of their new relative. Father Jones, despite the snow, took off his coat, and carefully laid it down beside where Brian rested, and on impulse Brian felt in the inside pocket, and yes, there were his silver cuff links. He left them where they were, and said nothing. What was there to say?

He didn’t suppose the dog was trained to cause uproar: no one was clever enough for that: just that when the dog caused uproar, the cover seemed too good to miss. He thought Mrs Jones might well feed it on cascara, just to be on the safe side.

The hilarity of exhaustion and despair turned sour when they arrived back at the house with some fifty Christmas Trees and unloaded them in the backyard. Mrs Jones had an old tin bath ready outside the back door, filled with boiling water. The brother with the wall-eyes bound the living green of the trees with twine. Mrs Jones dumped the roots in the boiling water, and the cross-eyed brother reloaded them on to the van. Linda stood by and watched the murder. ‘What are you doing? Why?’ he shouted at them, but the wind was strong, and snow flicked off the ground, and the water bubbled, and the stereo in the house was on loud to cover their nefarious deed. Cliff Richard. He thought he could hear the trees screaming as they died. ‘Just boiling them,’ said Linda, surprised.

‘But why, why?’

‘It’s just what we do.’

‘It can’t make any difference to you,’ he cried. ‘No profit lost to you if they grow.’

‘People always boil the roots,’ she said, looking at him as if he was daft. ‘It’s the done thing.’

He could see she took him for a fool, and despised him for it, and had tricked him and trapped him, for all he was bright and old, and she was thick and young.

He stumbled inside and up to the bedroom and fell asleep and slept, with the smell of boiling tree in his nostrils, and flakes of sausage-roll pastry in the sheets, and woke, with Linda next to him. Her skin was clammy. She wore a cerise nylon nightie, trimmed with fawn nylon lace. He went downstairs to the coin telephone in the hall and rang Alec. ‘I think I’ve found the right place for me,’ he said, and indeed he had. He had bound himself by accident to a monstrous family in a monstrous place and had discovered by accident what he felt to be the truth, long evident, long evaded. It was that human nature was irredeemable. ‘I think I’ll stay down here for a while with my wife,’ he said. My wife! All aspirations and ambition had been burned away: old wounds cauterised with so sudden and horrific a knife as to leave him properly cleansed, and purified. ‘Next to nature,’ said Brian with a dreadful animation rising in him: the writer’s animation; ‘with cows and cider and power lines and kind and honest country folk. I think I could really write down here!’

‘Christ!’ said Alec. He seemed to have fewer and fewer words to rub together, as his stable of writers found more and more.

Breakages

‘We blossom and flourish As leaves on a tree, And wither and perish But nought changeth thee —’

sang David’s congregation in its laggardly, quavery voice. Some trick of acoustics made much of what happened in the church audible in the vicarage kitchen, where tonight, as so often, Deidre sat and darned socks and waited for Evensong to end.

The vicarage, added as a late Victorian afterthought, leaned up against the solidity of the Norman church. The house was large, ramshackle, dark and draughty, and prey to wet rot, dry rot, woodworm and beetle. Here David and Deidre lived. He was a vicar of the established Church; she was his wife. He attended to the spiritual welfare of his parishioners: she presided over the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute and ran the Amateur Dramatic Society. They had been married for twenty-one years. They had no children, which was a source of acute disappointment to them and to Deidre’s mother, and of understandable disappointment to the parish. It is always pleasant, in a small, stable and increasingly elderly community, to watch other people’s children grow up, and sad to be deprived of that pleasure. ‘Oh no, please,’ said Deidre, now, to the Coronation Mug on the dresser. It was a rare piece, produced in anticipation of an event which had never occurred: the Coronation of the Duke of Windsor. The mug was, so far, uncracked and unchipped, and worth some three hundred pounds, but had just moved to the very edge of its shelf, not smoothly and purposively, but with an uneven rocking motion which made Deidre hope that entreaty might yet calm it, and save it from itself. And indeed, after she spoke, the mug was quiet, and lapsed into the ordinary stillness she had once always associated with inanimate objects.

‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise — In light inaccessible —’

Deidre joined in the hymn, singing gently and soothingly, and trying to feel happy, for the happier she felt the fewer the breakages there would be and perhaps one day they would stop altogether, and David would never, ever find out that one by one, the ornaments and possessions he most loved and valued were leaping off shelves and shattering, to be secretly mended by Deidre with such skills as she remembered from the early days, before marriage had interrupted her training in china restoration, and her possible future in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Long ago and far away. Now Deidre darned. David’s feet were sensitive to anything other than pure, fine wool. Not for him the tough nylon mixtures that other men wore. Deidre darned.

The Coronation Mug rocked violently. ‘Stop it,’ said Deidre, warningly. Sometimes to appear stern was more effective than to entreat. The mug stayed where it was. But just a fraction further and it would have fallen.

Deidre unpicked the last few stitches. She was in danger of cobbling the darn, and there is nothing more uncomfortable to sensitive skin than a cobbled darn.

‘You do it on purpose,’ David would complain, not without reason. Deidre’s faults were the ones he found most difficult to bear. She was careless, lost socks, left lids unscrewed, taps running, doors open, saucepans burning: she bought fresh bread when yesterday’s at half price would do. It was her nature, she maintained, and grieved bitterly when her husband implied that it was wilful and that she was doing it to annoy. She loved him, or said so. And he loved her, or said so.

The Coronation Mug leapt off its shelf, arced through the air and fell and broke in two pieces at Deidre’s feet. She put the pieces at the very back of the drawer beneath the sink. There was no time for mending now. Tomorrow morning would have to do, when David was out parish-visiting, in houses freshly dusted and brightened for his arrival. Fortunately, David seldom inspected Deidre’s drawer. It smelt, when opened, of dry rot, and reminded him forcibly of the large sums of money which ought to be spent on the repair of the house, and which he did not have.

‘We could always sell something,’ Deidre would sometimes venture, but not often, for the suggestion upset him. David’s mother had died when he was four; his father had gone bankrupt when he was eight; relatives had reared him and sent him off to boarding school where he had been sexually and emotionally abused. Possessions were his security.

She understood him, forgave him, loved him and tried not to argue.

She darned his socks. It was, today, a larger pile than usual. Socks kept disappearing, not by the pair, but singly. David had lately discovered a pillowslip stuffed full of them pushed to the back of the wardrobe. It was his wife’s deceit which worried him most, or so he said. Hiding socks! That and the sheer careless waste of it all. Losing socks! So Deidre tried tying the socks together for the wash, and thus, in pairs, the night before, spun and dried, they had lain in the laundry basket. In the morning she had found them in one ugly, monstrous knot, and each sock oddly long, as if stretched by a hand too angry to know what it was doing. Rinsing had restored them, fortunately, to a proper shape, but she was obliged to darn where the stretching had worn the fabric thin.

It was always like this: always difficult, always upsetting. David’s things were attacked, as if the monstrous hand were on her side, yet it was she, Deidre, who had to repair the damage, follow its source as it moved about the house, mending what it broke, wiping tomato purée from the ceiling, toothpaste from the lavatory bowl, replanting David’s seedlings, rescrewing lids, closing doors, refolding linen, turning off taps. She scarcely dared leave the house for fear of what might happen in her absence, and this David interpreted as lack of interest in his parish. Disloyalty, to God and husband.

And so it was, in a way. Yet they loved each other. Man and wife.

Deidre’s finger was bleeding. She must have cut it on the sharp edge of the broken Coronation Mug. She opened the table drawer and took out the first piece of cloth which came to hand, and wrapped her finger. The cold tap started to run of its own accord, but she ignored it. Blood spread out over the cloth but presently, fortunately, stopped.

Could you die from loss of blood, from a small finger cut?

The invisible hand swept the dresser shelf, knocking all sorts of treasures sideways but breaking nothing. It had never touched the dresser before, as if awed, as Deidre was, by the ever increasing value of its contents — rare blue and white pieces, frog mugs, barbers’ bowls, lustre cups, a debatably Ming bowl, which a valuer said might well fetch five thousand pounds.

Enough to paint the vicarage, inside, and install central heating, and replaster walls and buy a new vacuum cleaner.

The dresser rattled and shook: she could have sworn it slid towards her.

David did not give Deidre a housekeeping allowance. She asked for money when she needed it, but David seldom recognised that it was in fact needed. He could not see the necessity of things like washing-up liquid, sugar, toilet rolls, new scourers. Sometimes she stole money from his pocket: once she took a coin out of the offertory on Sunday morning instead of putting a coin in it.

Why did she stoop to it? She loved him.

A bad wife, a barren wife, and a poor sort of person.

David came home. The house fell quiet, as always, at his approach. Taps stopped running and china rattling. David kissed her on her forehead.

‘Deidre,’ said David, ‘what have you wrapped around your finger?’

Deidre, curious herself, unwrapped the binding and found that she had used a fine lace and cotton handkerchief, put in the drawer for mending, which once had belonged to David’s grandmother. It was now sodden and bright, bright red.

‘I cut my finger,’ said Deidre, inadequately and indeed foolishly, for what if he demanded to know what had caused the wound? But David was too busy rinsing and squeezing the handkerchief under the tap to enquire. Deidre put her finger in her mouth and put up with the salt, exciting taste of her own blood.

‘It’s hopelessly stained,’ he mourned. ‘Couldn’t you just for once have used something you wouldn’t spoil? A tissue?’

David did not allow the purchase of tissues. There had been none in his youth: why should they be needed now, in his middle age?

‘I’m sorry,’ said Deidre, and thought, as she spoke, ‘I am always saying sorry, and always providing cause for my own remorse.’

He took the handkerchief upstairs to the bathroom, in search of soap and a nailbrush. ‘What kind of wife are you, Deidre?’ he asked as he went, desperate.

What kind, indeed? Married in a register office in the days before David had taken to Holy Orders and a Heavenly Father more reliable than his earthly one. Deidre had suggested that they remarry in church, as could be and had been done by others, but David did not want to. Hardly a wife at all.

A barren wife. A fig tree, struck by God’s ill temper. David’s God. In the beginning they had shared a God, who was bleak, plain, sensible and kind. But now, increasingly, David had his own jealous and punitive God, whom he wooed with ritual and richness, incense and images, dragging a surprised congregation with him. He changed his vestments three times during services, rang little bells to announce the presence of the Lord, swept up and down aisles, and in general seemed not averse to being mistaken for God.

The water pipes shrieked and groaned as David turned on the tap in the bathroom, but that was due to bad plumbing rather than unnatural causes. She surely could not be held responsible for that, as well.

When the phenomena — as she thought of them — first started, or rather leapt from the scale of ordinary domestic carelessness to something less explicable and more sinister, she went to the doctor.

‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘do mumps in adolescence make men infertile?’

‘It depends,’ he said, proving nothing. ‘If the gonads are affected it well might. Why?’

No reason had been found for Deidre’s infertility. It lay, presumably, like so much else, in her mind. She had had her tubes blown, painfully and unforgettably, to facilitate conception, but it had made no difference. For fifteen years twenty-three days of hope had been followed by five days of disappointment, and on her shoulders rested the weight of David’s sorrow, as she, his wife, deprived him of his earthly immortality, his children.

‘Of course,’ he said sadly, ‘you are an only child. Only children are often infertile. The sins of the fathers —’ David regarded fecundity as a blessing; the sign of a woman in tune with God’s universe. He had married Deidre, he vaguely let it be known, on the rebound from a young woman who had gone on to have seven children. Seven!

David’s fertility remained unquestioned and unexamined. A sperm count would surely have proved nothing. His sperm was plentiful and he had no sexual problems that he was aware of. To ejaculate into a test-tube to prove a point smacked uncomfortably of onanism.

The matter of the mumps came up during the time of Deidre’s menopause, a month or so after her, presumably, last period. David had been in the school sanatorium with mumps: she had heard him saying so to a distraught mother, adding, ‘Oh mumps! Nothing in a boy under fourteen. Be thankful he has them now, not later.’

So he was aware that mumps were dangerous, and could render a man infertile. And Deidre knew well enough that David had lived in the world of school sanatoria after the age of fourteen, not before. Why had he never mentioned mumps? And while she wondered, and pondered, and hesitated to ask, toothpaste began to ooze from tubes, and rose trees were uprooted in the garden, and his seedlings trampled by unseen boots, and his clothes in the wardrobe tumbled in a pile to the ground, and Deidre stole money to buy mending glue, and finally went to the doctor.

‘Most men,’ said the doctor, ‘confuse impotence with infertility and believe that mumps cause the former, not the latter.’

Back to square one. Perhaps he didn’t know.

‘Why have you really come?’ asked the doctor, recently back from a course in patient—doctor relations. Deidre offered him an account of her domestic phenomena, as she had not meant to do. He prescribed Valium and asked her to come back in a week. She did.

‘Any better? Does the Valium help?’

‘At least when I see things falling, I don’t mind so much.’

‘But you still see them falling?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does your husband see them too?’

‘He’s never there when they do.’

Now what was any thinking doctor to make of that?

‘We could try hormone replacement therapy,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Deidre. ‘I am what I am.’

‘Then what do you want me to do?’

‘If I could only feel angry with my husband,’ said Deidre, ‘instead of forever understanding and forgiving him, I might get it to stop. As it is, I am releasing too much kinetic energy.’

There were patients waiting. They had migraines, eczema and boils. He gave her more Valium, which she did not take.

Deidre, or some expression of Deidre, went home and churned up the lawn and tore the gate off its hinges. The other Deidre raked and smoothed, resuscitated and blamed a perfectly innocent child for the gate. A child. It would have taken a forty-stone giant to twist the hinges so, but no one stopped, fortunately, to think about that. The child went to bed without supper for swinging on the vicar’s gate.

The wound on Deidre’s finger gaped open in an unpleasant way. She thought she could see the white bone within the bloodless flesh.

Deidre went upstairs to the bathroom, where David washed his wife’s blood from his grandmother’s hankie. ‘David,’ said Deidre, ‘perhaps I should have a stitch in my finger?’

David had the toothmug in his hand. His jaw was open, his eyes wide with shock. He had somehow smeared toothpaste on his black lapel. ‘The toothmug has recently been broken, and very badly mended. No one told me. Did you do it?’

The toothmug dated from the late eighteenth century and was worn, cracked and chipped, but David loved it. It had been one of the first things to go, and Deidre had not mended it with her usual care, thinking, mistakenly, that one more crack amongst so many would scarcely be noticed.

‘I am horrified,’ said David.

‘Sorry,’ said Deidre.

‘You always break my things, never your own.’

‘I thought that when you got married,’ said Deidre, with the carelessness of desperation, for surely now David would start an inspection of his belongings and all would be discovered, ‘things stopped being yours and mine, and became ours.’ ‘Married! You and I have never been married, not in the sight of God, and I thank Him for it.’

There. He had said what had been unsaid for years, but there was no relief in it, for either of them. There came a crash of breaking china from downstairs. David ran down to the kitchen, where the noise came from, but could see no sign of damage.

He moved into the living room. Deidre followed, dutifully.

‘You’ve shattered my life,’ said David. ‘We have nothing in common. You have been a burden since the beginning. I wanted a happy, warm, loving house. I wanted children.’

‘I suppose,’ said Deidre, ‘you’ll be saying next that my not having children is God’s punishment?’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘Nothing to do with your mumps?’

David was silent, taken aback. Out of the corner of her eye Deidre saw the Ming vase move. ‘You’re a sadistic person,’ said David eventually. ‘Even the pains and humiliations of long ago aren’t safe from you. You revive them.’

‘You knew all the time,’ said Deidre. ‘You were infertile, not me. You made me take the blame. And it’s too late for me now.’

The Ming vase rocked to the edge of the shelf: Deidre moved to push it back, but not quickly enough. It fell and broke.

David cried out in pain and rage. ‘You did it on purpose,’ he wept. ‘You hate me.’

Deidre went upstairs and packed her clothes. She would stay with her mother while she planned some kind of new life for herself. She would be happier anywhere in the world but here, sharing a house with a ghost.

David moved through the house, weeping, but for his treasures, not for his wife. He took a wicker basket and in it laid tenderly — as if they were the bodies of children — the many broken and mended vases and bowls and dishes which he found. Sometimes the joins were skilful and barely detectable to his moving forefinger: sometimes careless. But everything was spoilt. What had been perfect was now second-rate and without value. The finds in the junk shops, the gifts from old ladies, the few small knick-knacks which had come to him from his dead mother — his whole past destroyed by his wife’s single-minded malice and cunning.

He carried the basket to the kitchen, and sat with his head in his hands.

Deidre left without saying another word. Out of the door, through the broken garden gate, into the night, through the churchyard, for the powers of the dead disturbed her less than the powers of the living, and to the bus station.

David sat. The smell of rot from the sink drawer was powerful enough, presently, to make him lift his head.

The cold tap started to run. A faulty washer, he concluded. He moved to turn it off, but the valve was already closed. ‘Deidre!’ he called, ‘what have you done with the kitchen tap?’ He did not know why he spoke, for Deidre had gone.

The whole top of the dresser fell forward to the ground. Porcelain shattered and earthenware powdered. He could hear the little pings of the Eucharist bell in the church next door, announcing the presence of God.

He thought perhaps there was an earthquake, but the central light hung still and quiet. Upstairs heavy feet bumped to and fro, dragging, wrenching and banging. Outside the window the black trees rocked so fiercely that he thought he would be safer in than out. The gas taps of the cooker were on and he could smell gas, mixed with fumes from the coal fire where Deidre’s darning had been piled up and was now smouldering. He closed his eyes.

He was not frightened. He knew that he saw and heard these things, but that they had no substance in the real world. They were a distortion of the facts, as water becomes wine in the Communion service, and bread becomes the flesh of the Saviour.

When next he opened his eyes the dresser was restored, the socks still lay in the mending basket, the air was quiet.

Sensory delusions, that was all, brought about by shock. But unpleasant, all the same. Deidre’s fault. David went upstairs to sleep but could not open the bedroom door. He thought perhaps Deidre had locked it behind her, out of spite. He was tired. He slept in the spare room, peacefully, without the irritant of Deidre’s warmth beside him.

In the morning, however, he missed her, and as if in reply to his unspoken request she reappeared, in the kitchen, in time to make his breakfast tea. ‘I spent the night in the hospital,’ she said. ‘I went to casualty to have a stitch put in my finger, and I fainted, and they kept me in.’

Her arm was in a sling.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You should have told me it was a bad cut and I’d have been more sympathetic. Where did you put the bedroom key?’

‘I haven’t got it,’ she said, and the teapot fell off the table and there were tea and tea leaves everywhere, and, one-armed, she bungled the business of wiping it up. He helped.

‘You shouldn’t put breakables and spillables on the edge of tables,’ he reproached her. ‘Then it wouldn’t happen.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I’m sorry about what I may have said last night. Mumps are a sore point. I thought I would die from the itching, and my friends just laughed.’

Itching? Mumps?

‘Mumps is the one where you come out in red spots and they tie your hands to stop you scratching?’

‘No. That’s chickenpox,’ she said.

‘Whatever it was, if you’re over fourteen you get it very badly indeed and it is humiliating to have your hands tied.’ ‘I can imagine.’

He wrung out the dishcloth. The tap, she noticed, was not dripping. ‘I’m sorry about your things,’ she said. ‘I should have told you.’

‘Am I such a frightening person?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re only things,’ he said, to her astonishment. The house seemed to take a shift back into its ordinary perspective. She thought, that though childless, she could still live an interesting and useful life. Her friends with grown-up children, gone away, complained that it was as if their young had never been. The experience of childrearing was that, just that, no more, no less. An experience without much significance, presently over; as lately she had experienced the behaviour of the material world.

David insisted that Deidre must surely have the bedroom key, and was annoyed when she failed to produce it. ‘Why would I lock you out of the bedroom?’ she asked.

‘Why would you do anything!’ he remarked dourly. His gratitude for her return was fading: his usual irritation with her was reasserting itself. She was grateful for familiar ways, and as usual animated by them.

He went up the ladder to the bedroom window, and was outraged. ‘I’ve never seen a room in such a mess,’ he reported, from the top of the ladder, a figure in clerical black perched there like some white-ruffled crow. ‘How you did all that, even in a bad temper, I can’t imagine!’

The heavy wardrobe was on its side, wedged against the door: the bed was upside down: the chairs and light bulb broken, and the bedclothes, tumbled and knotted, had the same stretched and strained appearance as David’s socks; and the carpet had been wrenched up, tossing furniture as it lifted, and wrung out like a dishcloth.

When the wardrobe had been moved back into place, the door was indeed found to be locked, with the key on the inside of the door, but both preferred not to notice that.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Deidre, ‘I was upset about our having no children. That, and my time of life.’

‘All our times of life,’ he said. ‘And as to your having no children, if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s God’s.’

Together they eased the carpet out of the window and down onto the lawn, and patiently and peaceably unwrung it. But the marks of the wringing stayed, straying for ever across the bedroom floor, to remind them of the dangers of, for him, petulance, and for her, the tendency to blame others for her own shortcomings.

Presently the Ming vase was mended, not by Deidre but by experts. He sold it and they installed central heating and had a wall knocked out there, a window put in here, and the washer on the kitchen tap mended, and the dry rot removed so that the sink drawer smelled like any other, and the broken floorboard beneath the dresser replaced. The acoustics in the kitchen changed, so that Deidre could no longer hear David’s services as she sat by the fire, so she attended church rather more often; and David, she soon noticed, dressed up as God rather less, and diverted his congregation’s attention away from himself and more towards the altar.

Alopecia

It’s 1972.

‘Fiddlesticks,’ says Maureen. Everyone else says ‘crap’ or ‘balls', but Maureen’s current gear, being Victorian sprigged muslin, demands an appropriate vocabulary. ‘Fiddlesticks. If Erica says her bald patches are anything to do with Derek, she’s lying. It’s alopecia.’

‘I wonder which would be worse,’ murmurs Ruthie in her soft voice, ‘to have a husband who tears your hair out in the night, or to have alopecia.’

Ruthie wears a black fringed satin dress exactly half a century old, through which, alas, Ruthie’s ribs show even more prominently than her breasts. Ruthie’s little girl Poppy (at four too old for playgroup, too young for school), wears a long, white (well, yellowish) cotton shift which contrasts nicely with her mother’s dusty black.

‘At least the husband might improve, with effort,’ says Alison, ‘unlike alopecia. You wake up one morning with a single bald patch and a month or so later there you are, completely bald. Nothing anyone can do about it.’ Alison, plump mother of three, sensibly wears a flowered Laura Ashley dress which hides her bulges.

‘It might be quite interesting,’ remarks Maureen. ‘The egghead approach. One would have to forgo the past, of course, and go all space age, which would hardly be in keeping with the mood of the times.’

‘You are the mood of the times, Maureen,’ murmurs Ruthie, as expected. Ruthie’s simple adulation of Maureen is both gratifying and embarrassing, everyone agrees.

Everyone agrees, on the other hand, that Erica Bisham of the bald patches is a stupid, if ladylike, bitch.

Maureen, Ruthie and Alison are working in Maureen’s premises off the Kings Road. Here Maureen, as befits the glamour of her station, the initiator of Mauromania, meets the media, expresses opinions, answers the phone, dictates to secretaries (male), selects and matches fabrics, approves designs and makes, in general, multitudinous decisions — although not, perhaps, as multitudinous as the ones she was accustomed to make in the middle and late sixties, when the world was young and rich and wild. Maureen is forty but you’d never think it. She wears a large hat by day (and, one imagines, night) which shades her anxious face and guards her still pretty complexion. Maureen leads a rich life. Maureen once had her pubic hair dyed green to match her fingernails — or so her husband Kim announced to a waiting (well, such were the days) world: she divorced him not long after, having lost his baby at five months. The head of the foetus, rumour had it, emerged green, and her National Health Service GP refused to treat her any more, and she had to go private after all — she with her Marxist convictions.

That was 1968. If the State’s going to tumble, let it tumble. The sooner the better. Drop out, everyone! Mauromania magnifique! And off goes Maureen’s husband Kim with Maureen’s au pair — a broad-hipped, big-bosomed girl, good breeding material, with an ordinary coarse and curly brush, if somewhat reddish.

Still, it had been a good marriage as marriages go. And as marriages go, it went. Or so Maureen remarked to the press, on her way home (six beds, six baths, four recep., American kitchen, patio, South Ken) from the divorce courts. Maureen cried a little in the taxi, when she’d left her public well behind, partly from shock and grief, mostly from confusion that beloved Kim, Kim, who so despised the nuclear family, who had so often said that he and she ought to get divorced in order to have a true and unfettered relationship, that Maureen’s Kim should have speeded up Maureen’s divorce in order to marry Maureen’s au pair girl before the baby arrived. Kim and Maureen had been married for fifteen years. Kim had been Kevin from Liverpool before seeing the light or at any rate the guru. Maureen had always been just Maureen from Hoxton, East London: remained so through the birth, rise and triumph of Mauromania. It was her charm. Local girl makes good.

Maureen has experience of life: she knows by now, having also been married to a psychiatrist who ran off with all her money and the marital home, that it is wise to watch what people do, not listen to what they say. Well, it’s something to have learned. Ruthie and Alison, her (nominal) partners from the beginning, each her junior by some ten years, listen to Maureen with respect and diffidence.

‘Mind you,’ says Maureen now, matching up purple feathers with emerald satin to great effect, ‘if I were Derek I’d certainly beat Erica to death. Fancy having to listen to that whining voice night after night. The only trouble is he’s become too much of a gentleman. He’ll never have the courage to do it. Turned his back on his origins, and all that. It doesn’t do.’

Maureen has known Derek since the old days in Hoxton. They were evacuees together: shared the same bomb shelter on their return from Starvation Hall in Felixstowe — a boys’ public school considered unsafe for the gentry’s children but all right for the East Enders.

‘It’s all Erica’s fantasy,’ says Ruthie, knowledgeably. ‘A kind of dreadful sexual fantasy. She wants him to beat her up so she trots round London saying he does. Poor Derek. It comes from marrying into the English upper classes, old style. She must be nearly fifty. She has that kind of battered-looking face.’

Her voice trails away. There is a slight pause in the conversation.

‘Um,’ says Alison.

‘That’s drink,’ says Maureen, decisively. ‘Poor bloody Derek. What a ball-breaker to have married.’ Derek was Maureen’s childhood sweetheart. What a romantic, platonic idyll! She nearly married him once, twice, three times. Once in the very early days, before Kim, before anyone, when Derek was selling books from a barrow in Hoxton market. Once again, after Kim and before the professor, by which time Derek was taking expensive photographs of the trendy and successful — only then Erica turned up in Derek’s bed, long-legged, disdainful, beautiful, with a model’s precise and organised face, and the fluty tones of the girl who’d bought her school uniform at Harrods, and that was the end of that. Not that Derek had ever exactly proposed to Maureen; not that they’d ever even been to bed together: they just knew each other and each other’s bed partners so well that each knew what the other was thinking, feeling, hoping. Both from Hoxton, East London: Derek, Maureen; and a host of others, too. What was there, you might ask, about that particular acre of the East End which over a period of a few years gave birth to such a crop of remarkable children, such a flare-up of human creativity in terms of writing, painting, designing, entertaining? Changing the world? One might almost think God had chosen it for an experiment in intensive talent-breeding. Mauromania, God-sent.

And then there was another time in the late sixties, when there was a short break between Derek and Erica — Erica had a hysterectomy against Derek’s wishes; but during those two weeks of opportunity Maureen, her business flourishing, her designs world famous, Mauromania a label for even trendy young queens (royal, that is) to boast, rich beyond counting — during those two special weeks of all weeks Maureen fell head over heels classically in love with Pedro: no, not a fisherman, but as good as — Italian, young, open-shirted, sloe-eyed, a designer. And Pedro, it later transpired, was using Maureen as a means to laying all the models, both male and female (Maureen had gone into menswear). Maureen was the last to know, and by the time she did Derek was in Erica’s arms (or whatever) again. A sorry episode. Maureen spent six months at a health farm, on a diet of grapes and brown rice. At the end of that time Mauromania Man had collapsed, her business manager had jumped out of a tenth-floor window, and an employee’s irate mother was bringing a criminal suit against Maureen personally for running a brothel. It was all quite irrational. If the employee, a runaway girl of, it turned out, only thirteen, but looking twenty, and an excellent seamstress, had contracted gonorrhoea whilst in her employ, was that Maureen’s fault? The judge, sensibly, decided it wasn’t, and that the entire collapse of British respectability could not fairly be laid at Maureen’s door. Legal costs came to more than £12,000: the country house and stables had to be sold at a knock-down price. That was disaster year.

And who was there during that time to hold Maureen’s hand? No one. Everyone, it seemed, had troubles enough of their own. And all the time, Maureen’s poor heart bled for Pedro, of the ridiculous name and the sloe eyes, long departed, laughing, streptococci surging in his wake. And of all the old friends and allies only Ruthie and Alison lingered on, two familiar faces in a sea of changing ones, getting younger every day, and hungrier year by year not for fun, fashion, and excitement, but for money, promotion, security, and acknowledgment.

The staff even went on strike once, walking up and down outside the workshop with placards announcing hours and wages, backed by Maoists, women’s liberationists and trade unionists, all vying for their trumpery allegiance, puffing up a tiny news story into a colossal media joke, not even bothering to get Maureen’s side of the story — absenteeism, drug addiction, shoddy workmanship, falling markets, constricting profits.

But Ruthie gave birth to Poppy, unexpectedly, in the black and gold ladies’ rest room (customers only — just as well it wasn’t in the staff toilets where the plaster was flaking and the old wall-cisterns came down on your head if you pulled the chain) and that cheered everyone up. Business perked up, staff calmed down as unemployment rose. Poppy, born of Mauromania, was everyone’s favourite, everyone’s mascot. Her father, only seventeen, was doing two years inside, framed by the police for dealing in pot. He did not have too bad a time — he got three A-levels and university entrance inside, which he would not have got outside, but it meant poor little Poppy had to do without a father’s care and Ruthie had to cope on her own. Ruthie of the ribs.

Alison, meanwhile, somewhat apologetically, had married Hugo, a rather straight and respectable actor who believed in women’s rights; they had three children and lived in a cosy house with a garden in Muswell Hill: Alison even belonged to the PTA! Hugo was frequently without work, but Hugo and Alison managed, between them, to keep going and even happy. Now Hugo thinks Alison should ask for a rise, but Alison doesn’t like to. That’s the trouble about working for a friend and being only a nominal partner.

‘Don’t let’s talk about Erica Bisham any more,’ says Maureen. ‘It’s too draggy a subject.’ So they don’t.

But one midnight a couple of weeks later, when Maureen, Ruthie and Alison are working late to meet an order — as is their frequent custom these days (and one most unnerving to Hugo, Alison’s husband) — there comes a tap on the door. It’s Erica, of course. Who else would tap, in such an ingratiating fashion? Others cry ‘Hi!’ or ‘Peace!’ and enter.

Erica, smiling nervously and crookedly; her yellow hair eccentric in the extreme; bushy in places, sparse in others. Couldn’t she wear a wig? She is wearing a Marks & Spencer nightie which not even Ruthie would think of wearing, in the house or out of it. It is bloodstained down the back. (Menstruation is not yet so fashionable as to be thus demonstrable, though it can be talked about at length.) A strong smell of what? alcohol, or is it nail varnish? hangs about her. Drinking again. (Alison’s husband, Hugo, in a long period of unemployment, once veered on to the edge of alcoholism but fortunately veered off again, and the smell of nail varnish, acetone, gave a warning sign of an agitated, overworked liver, unable to cope with acetaldehyde, the highly toxic product of alcohol metabolism.)

‘Could I sit down?’ says Erica. ‘He’s locked me out. Am I speaking oddly? I think I’ve lost a tooth. I’m hurting under my ribs and I feel sick.’

They stare at her — this drunk, dishevelled, trouble-making woman.

‘He,’ says Maureen finally. ‘Who’s he?’

‘Derek.’

‘You’re going to get into trouble, Erica,’ says Ruthie, though more kindly than Maureen, ‘if you go round saying dreadful things about poor Derek.’

‘I wouldn’t have come here if there was anywhere else,’ says Erica.

‘You must have friends,’ observes Maureen, as if to say, Don’t count us amongst them if you have.

‘No.’ Erica sounds desolate. ‘He has his friends at work. I don’t seem to have any.’

‘I wonder why,’ says Maureen under her breath; and then, ‘I’ll get you a taxi home, Erica. You’re in no state to be out.’

‘I’m not drunk, if that’s what you think.’

‘Who ever is,’ sighs Ruthie, sewing relentlessly on. Four more blouses by one o’clock. Then, thank God, bed.

Little Poppy has passed out on a pile of orange ostrich feathers. She looks fantastic.

‘If Derek does beat you up,’ says Alison, who has seen her father beat her mother on many a Saturday night, ‘why don’t you go to the police?’

‘I did once, and they told me to go home and behave myself.’ ‘Or leave him?’ Alison’s mother left Alison’s father. ‘Where would I go? How would I live? The children? I’m not well.’ Erica sways. Alison puts a chair beneath her. Erica sits, legs planted wide apart, head down. A few drops of blood fall on the floor. From Erica’s mouth, or elsewhere? Maureen doesn’t see, doesn’t care. Maureen’s on the phone, calling radio cabs who do not reply.

‘I try not to provoke him, but I never know what’s going to set him off,’ mumbles Erica. ‘Tonight it was Tampax. He said only whores wore Tampax. He tore it out and kicked me. Look.’

Erica pulls up her nightie (Erica’s wearing no knickers) and exposes her private parts in a most shameful, shameless fashion. The inner thighs are blue and mottled, but then, dear God, she’s nearly fifty.

What does one look like, thigh-wise, nearing fifty? Maureen’s the nearest to knowing, and she’s not saying. As for Ruthie, she hopes she’ll never get there. Fifty!

‘The woman’s mad,’ mutters Maureen. ‘Perhaps I’d better call the loony wagon, not a taxi?’

‘Thank God Poppy’s asleep.’ Poor Ruthie seems in a state of shock.

‘You can come home with me, Erica,’ says Alison. ‘God knows what Hugo will say. He hates matrimonial upsets. He says if you get in between, they both start hitting you.’

Erica gurgles, a kind of mirthless laugh. From behind her, mysteriously, a child steps out. She is eight, stocky, plain and pale, dressed in boring Ladybird pyjamas.

‘Mummy?’

Erica’s head whips up; the blood on Erica’s lip is wiped away by the back of Erica’s hand. Erica straightens her back. Erica smiles. Erica’s voice is completely normal, ladylike.

‘Hallo, darling. How did you get here?’

‘I followed you. Daddy was too angry.’

‘He’ll be better soon, Libby,’ says Erica brightly. ‘He always is.’

‘We’re not going home? Please don’t let’s go home. I don’t want to see Daddy.’

‘Bitch,’ mutters Maureen, ‘she’s even turned his own child against him. Poor bloody Derek. There’s nothing at all the matter with her. Look at her now.’

For Erica is on her feet, smoothing Libby’s hair, murmuring, laughing.

‘Poor bloody Erica,’ observes Alison. It is the first time she has ever defied Maureen, let alone challenged her wisdom. And rising with as much dignity as her plump frame and flounced cotton will allow, Alison takes Erica and Libby home and installs them for the night in the spare room of the cosy house in Muswell Hill.

Hugo isn’t any too pleased. ‘Your smart sick friends,’ he says. And, ‘I’d beat a woman like that to death myself, any day.’ And, ‘Dragging that poor child into it: it’s appalling.’ He’s nice to Libby, though, and rings up Derek to say she’s safe and sound, and looks after her while Alison takes Erica round to the doctor. The doctor sends Erica round to the hospital, and the hospital admits her for tests and treatment.

‘Why bother?’ enquires Hugo. ‘Everyone knows she’s mad.’

In the evening, Derek comes all the way to Muswell Hill in his Ferrari to pick up Libby. He’s an attractive man: intelligent and perspicacious, fatherly and gentle. Just right, it occurs to Alison, for Maureen.

‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ he says. ‘I love my wife dearly but she has her problems. There’s a dark side to her nature — you’ve no idea. A deep inner violence — which of course manifests itself in this kind of behaviour. She’s deeply psychophrenic. I’m so afraid for the child.’

‘The hospital did admit her,’ murmurs Alison. ‘And not to the psychiatric ward, but the surgical.’

‘That will be her hysterectomy scar again,’ says Derek. ‘Any slight tussle — she goes quite wild, and I have to restrain her for her own safety — and it opens up. It’s symptomatic of her inner sickness, I’m afraid. She even says herself it opens to let the build-up of wickedness out. What I can’t forgive is the way she drags poor little Libby into things. She’s turning the child against me. God knows what I’m going to do. Well, at least I can bury myself in work. I hear you’re an actor, Hugo.’

Hugo offers Derek a drink, and Derek offers (well, more or less) Hugo a part in a new rock musical going on in the West End. Alison goes to visit Erica in hospital.

‘Erica has some liver damage, but it’s not irreversible: she’ll be feeling nauseous for a couple of months, that’s all. She’s lost a back tooth and she’s had a couple of stitches put in her vagina,’ says Alison to Maureen and Ruthie next day. The blouse order never got completed — re-orders now look dubious. But if staff haven’t the loyalty to work unpaid overtime any more, what else can be expected? The partners (nominal) can’t do everything.

‘Who said so?’ enquires Maureen, sceptically. ‘The hospital or Erica?’

‘Well,’ Alison is obliged to admit, ‘Erica.’

‘You are an innocent, Alison.’ Maureen sounds quite cross. ‘Erica can’t open her poor sick mouth without uttering a lie. It’s her hysterectomy scar opened up again, that’s all. No wonder. She’s a nymphomaniac: she doesn’t leave Derek alone month in, month out. She has the soul of a whore. Poor man. He’s so upset by it all. Who wouldn’t be?’

Derek takes Maureen out to lunch. In the evening, Alison goes to visit Erica in hospital, but Erica has gone. Sister says, oh yes, her husband came to fetch her. They hadn’t wanted to let her go so soon but Mr Bisham seemed such a sensible, loving man, they thought he could look after his wife perfectly well, and it’s always nicer at home, isn’t it? Was it the Derek Bisham? Yes she’d thought so. Poor Mrs Bisham — what a dreadful world we live in, when a respectable married woman can’t even walk the streets without being brutally attacked, sexually assaulted by strangers.

It’s 1974.

Winter. A chill wind blowing, a colder one still to come. A three-day week imposed by an insane government. Strikes, power cuts, blackouts. Maureen, Ruthie and Alison work by candlelight. All three wear fun-furs — old stock, unsaleable. Poppy is staying with Ruthie’s mother, as she usually is these days. Poppy has been developing a squint, and the doctor says she has to wear glasses with one blanked-out lens for at least eighteen months. Ruthie, honestly, can’t bear to see her daughter thus. Ruthie’s mother, of a prosaic nature, a lady who buys her clothes at C & A Outsize, doesn’t seem to mind.

‘If oil prices go up,’ says Maureen gloomily, ‘what’s going to happen to the price of synthetics? What’s going to happen to Mauromania, come to that?’

‘Go up-market,’ says Alison, ‘the rich are always with us.’

Maureen says nothing. Maureen is bad tempered, these days. She is having some kind of painful trouble with her teeth, which she seems less well able to cope with than she can the trouble with staff (overpaid), raw materials (unavailable), delivery dates (impossible), distribution (unchancy), costs (soaring), profits (falling), re-investment (non-existent). And the snow has ruined the penthouse roof and it has to be replaced, at the cost of many thousands. Men friends come and go: they seem to get younger and less feeling. Sometimes Maureen feels they treat her as a joke. They ask her about the sixties as if it were a different age: of Mauromania as if it were something as dead as the dodo — but it’s still surely a label which counts for something, brings in foreign currency, ought really to bring her some recognition. The Beatles got the MBE; why not Maureen of Mauromania? Throwaway clothes for throwaway people?

‘Ruthie,’ says Maureen. ‘You’re getting careless. You’ve put the pocket on upside-down, and it’s going for copying. That’s going to hold up the whole batch. Oh, what the hell. Let it go through.’

‘Do you ever hear anything of Erica Bisham?’ Ruthie asks Alison, more to annoy Maureen than because she wants to know. ‘Is she still wandering round in the middle of the night?’

‘Hugo does a lot of work for Derek, these days,’ says Alison carefully. ‘But he never mentions Erica.’

‘Poor Derek. What a fate. A wife with alopecia! I expect she’s bald as a coot by now. As good a revenge as any, I dare say.’

‘It was nothing to do with alopecia,’ says Alison. ‘Derek just tore out chunks of her hair, nightly.’ Alison’s own marriage isn’t going so well. Hugo’s got the lead in one of Derek’s long runs in the West End. Show business consumes his thoughts and ambitions. The ingenue lead is in love with Hugo and says so, on TV quiz games and in the Sunday supplements. She’s underage. Alison feels old, bored and boring.

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