Part 1 (1/2)

THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN.

JONATHAN COE.

1. Beforewards.

Take a birth. Any birth.

Arriving on the threshold of womanhood (for it is she, as chance would have it) Maria finds herself in Mrs Leadbetter's study. Mrs Leadbetter the headmistress. She beamed at Maria and waved her to an armchair. Outside it was dark.

'I won't keep you long,' she said. 'I wanted to say this only: that we are proud of you, Maria. The first of our girls in fifty-four years to have won a place at Oxford. What an opportunity stretches before you. How excited you must be.'

Maria smiled.

'One doesn't like to crow,' said Mrs Leadbetter, 'but the boys' school this year has secured only three places. Out of twelve entrants, this represents only twenty-five per cent. And yet out of our two entrants, you represent fifty per cent success. You must feel very proud.'

Mrs Leadbetter had a peculiar face, very brown and wrinkled. She was a stout woman. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s resembled nothing so much as two Dundee rock cakes (bonus size) of the sort sold in the bakery just around the corner, although strictly speaking this was a comparison which Mr Leadbetter alone was ent.i.tled to draw. Maria anyway took no notice of her, her mind running on the school motto, Per ardua ad astra, which she could read, upside down, on Mrs Leadbetter's headed notepaper.

'In less than a year's time, Maria, you will be going to Oxford,' the old woman continued. 'It is a city of dreams. I went there myself, of course. Yes, I can remember doing my Christmas shopping there once. Have you any idea, Maria, what an exciting time of your life approaches? Freed from school's closed world, you fling yourself pell-mell into the giddy whirl of life, in the company of life's gay young things on the doorstep of their dreams.'

Maria did not believe a word of this, of course. She was inexperienced, but not stupid, and in the last few years she had begun to notice things, and to withdraw, unimpressed, from the society of her school friends, her former playmates. Miserable Maria, they had started to call her. Moody Mary. Childish nicknames, that's all. s.h.i.+t-face. Snot-bag. Their invention was inexhaustible. Maria's reserve infuriated Mrs Leadbetter, as usual.

'You are a quiet girl, Maria. You have a silent and studious disposition, admirable in one so young. You channel your youthful high spirits into the peaceful streams of the intellect, the pa.s.sive contemplation of the great works of art and literature. You are placid, imperturbable.'

Maria was thinking furiously of a way to be rid of this maniac. She craved her lamp-lit bedroom.

'All I wanted to say, Maria, is that I and all the staff, all of us here at St Jude's, are behind you and rooting for you, and are pleased and proud with what you have done. We want your time at Oxford to be the glorious start of a life rich in achievement and fulfilment. You must begin even now to prepare yourself for it, psychologically and spiritually. Think daily on your success, Maria, and what it will mean for you. Look forward to it with joy and antic.i.p.ation. Be thrilled.'

A hard thing to ask, that, of Maria, whom little thrilled, not even the darkness through which she walked that evening on her way to the bus stop. It was a cold night, and school was empty, but for the cleaners to be seen at work in bright windows. The homeward traffic hummed, the chill breeze swept, Maria s.h.i.+vered.

Beneath the street lamp which marked her bus stop she could see that Ronny was waiting for her. She sensed also that it was going either to rain or to snow, soon, perhaps before she had finished her walk up the long hill. She was too tired to feign pleasure on being greeted by him.

'I thought I'd wait for you,' said Ronny. He added, when they were on the top deck of the bus together, driving past the closing shops, the dark offices and factories, 'Just think, a year from now, we will be in Oxford together.'

'Ronny,' said Maria, 'why did you apply to go to Oxford? You told me once that you never wanted to go there.'

'I applied because you will be there.'

'But supposing I hadn't got in, and you had? Where would have been the sense in that? You did a very dangerous thing, Ronny, because you tried to calculate how things would turn out in the future.'

'But I was right.'

'Supposing I were to die before then.'

Here you are to imagine a short silence.

'I love you, Maria.'

'And yet you know that I think you are very foolish. If you think you can control your life in this way, then why don't you find another girl, one who knows what you mean by those words.'

This advice stung Ronny to what we in the trade refer to as the quick. However, he ignored it as usual.

When the bus reached the terminus, they performed a small ritual, as follows. Ronny asked Maria if he could walk her home, Maria refused, Maria descended from the bus, Ronny remained on it, and he then rode all the way back to school and beyond, for his home did not lie in the same direction as Maria's, no. Accompanying Maria on her bus home involved for him a detour of some twenty-three miles, and the loss on a good day of some seventy-four minutes which could have been usefully spent on homework or on indulgence in pop-eyed s.e.xual reverie. He would arrive home horrendously late, to a cold supper, to the wrath of his parents, to the scorn and taunts of his brothers and sisters. But he suffered all this gladly for Maria. So that's two clowns we have met already.

Alighting from her bus, Maria next had to walk up the long hill. Certain preparations were essential. She put down her bag, her bag full of books, and b.u.t.toned up her coat, every b.u.t.ton, for there was an attempt at snow after all. She turned up her collar, and pulled on her gloves. Now a decision had to be made. There was a cafe at the bus terminus where Maria could, if she desired, sit and drink a cup of coffee, or of hot chocolate, or could eat a sandwich, sitting in the corner. She had a favourite seat in the corner, and she could see that it was empty. But she decided against it, this evening, because she did not really have the money, and she did not really have the time, and above all she did not really want to, if the truth be told. So she picked up her bag and began to walk, this aged aged schoolgirl, past the cafe, and past the newspaper shop, past all the shops until there were no more shops, only bare woods on either side of the road, and the occasional house, and the road started to rise and the hill began.

It occurred to Maria, sometimes, as she walked up the hill on dark and frankly cold nights such as this, that there was every chance that one day she might be accosted, and perhaps mugged, and conceivably raped, and then left for dead, for the road was not used much by pedestrians. She did not see what she could very well do about this. She could only get home by climbing the hill, and she was not prepared to stay away from home, in spite of home's obvious drawbacks, for a night away from home, out in the dark without a roof over your head, where is the pleasure in that. Perhaps her parents might have come to the bus terminus, in their car, and have given her a lift home, but the offer had never been made, and it is by no means certain that had it ever been made Maria would ever have accepted it. The whole question is only important insofar as it should be stressed that among Maria's sensations, as she walked up the hill of an evening, was the fear that some day something like that might happen, and she was often afraid, at this time of her life, not very afraid but often very slightly fearful, of what might one day befall her. And it was often in the dark that these fears took shape, although generally speaking she preferred the dark to the light, any day of the week.

In those days Maria wrote poems, too. For instance, she composed a poem, or fragments of a poem, on her walk home that evening. It was a peculiar poem, well worth preserving, I wish I could give you the whole of it. Unfortunately it was destroyed, along with so many other mementoes of Maria's life at this period, in the fire which burnt down half of her parents' home in 1982. (Touching to reflect that of this event, which is not due for nearly twelve years yet, she has at present little inkling.) The poem concerned, among other things, the contact of half-formed snowflakes with unresisting cheek, the act of unthinking uphill progression, the texture of street lamp glow where it merges with winter sky, and the comfort to be derived from states of solitude. Maria felt happiest when she was alone, by and large, but the thought of being always alone terrified her, because she was only human, the source you might say of all her problems. Why Maria wrote these poems, what pleasure she took in wrestling with emotions, disguising them as thoughts and misrepresenting them in words, what satisfaction she derived from copying them out in a fair hand and reading them over to herself, I cannot say. Probably none.

Arriving home, Maria shouted h.e.l.lo to her mother, at work in the kitchen, for she was not averse to showing affection occasionally, and then went straight upstairs to her bedroom, where her brother was practising the violin. He stopped when she came in and they had a short, monosyllabic conversation. Sympathy, understanding, affection, trust, liking and love are all words completely inappropriate to describe the feelings felt by Maria for her brother, and vice versa. Soon he folded his music stand and left, much to Maria's satisfaction. Alone again and inside at last, things were looking up. She deliberated between her bed and her chair, opting finally for the latter as being the more conducive to thought, since she wanted to think. She turned her bedside light on, the other lights off, and, while up, she wondered whether to listen to some music, on her portable ca.s.sette player. She decided not, because it was hard to think while listening to music, in her experience, you only ended up wasting one or the other. No, there was no need for music, that evening.

She thought, believe it or not, about Mrs Leadbetter's words. These were what occupied her young mind. They made no sense to her, not surprisingly, but more disturbing than that, Maria could think of no reason for Mrs Leadbetter's having spoken them which made sense to her either. She had a feeling, she had had a feeling in the study that afternoon, that something was expected of her, that now that she had done what had been expected of her, namely, pa.s.sed her exam, something else was going to be expected of her. It was not simply that she was expected to be pleased with herself for having pa.s.sed her exam, she was already pleased with herself for having pa.s.sed the exam, she would not have taken the exam if she had not thought that to pa.s.s it would give her pleasure. Rather, her unease had something to do with the peculiar way in which it seemed to be required that she should manifest her pleasure. Maria had never been good at manifesting pleasure, although she was quite capable of feeling it, in her own way. As for excitement, that was quite beyond her, and had been since the age of about seven. So Mrs Leadbetter was really asking the impossible of her. This gave no particular cause for alarm, Maria had never felt any need to do what Mrs Leadbetter asked of her. However, she suspected that it meant that her parents would also ask the impossible of her, and this was more serious, partly because the bearability of domestic life depended to a large extent on the maintenance of good relations with her father and mother, and partly because she still bore towards them the vestiges of a sense of duty, the origins of which she had always chosen, sensibly, not to a.n.a.lyse.

But perhaps we could undertake this a.n.a.lysis for her.

Her grat.i.tude towards her parents centred mainly, unbelievable though this may seem, around some memories for which they were indirectly responsible. Yes, Maria had happy memories of her childhood, who hasn't. We all have our memories, we h.o.a.rd them up and shape them to our requirements. We do things simply so that one day, it may be the next, we shall have the pleasure of remembering them, I can't think of any other reason. Yet it is curious, isn't it, there can be few things more useless, for practical purposes, than happy memories, except perhaps hopes, but then I don't want to start getting difficult at this stage. There'll be plenty of time for that later. These memories, anyway, were of events which used to take place on Sunday afternoons, little family excursions, walks and drives, to places of scenic or historic interest. They would climb into the car, the four of them, mother and father and Maria and little Bobby, and they would go to the woods, or to the common, or to the hills, or to a village, or to a museum, or to a garden, or to pick blackberries if it was the blackberry season, or to sit and watch the fishermen if it was the fis.h.i.+ng season. Maria regarded these outings as evidence of parental affection, which was reasonable enough, for if her parents had been doing it merely to get the children out of the house, then they would not have come with them, but would have sent them out alone, or with an aunt or an uncle, and if they had merely wanted to get out of the house themselves, then they would have left the children behind, under the care perhaps of their grandparents. This affection seemed all the stranger, too, when she considered that as children she and Bobby had been, to put it mildly, insufferable, and much p.r.o.ne to fighting, and shouting, and biting, and screaming, and peeing, and puking. There was one Sunday afternoon which she remembered with particular fondness. She remembered it even now, this evening, in her bedroom chair. They had gone to the park, they called it the park, it was a ragged construct of meadow, trees, gorse, hawthorn, stretching over a hill or two five miles from home, with a fine view, for those who like that sort of thing, of the countryside, in one direction, and of Birmingham, in the other, and not far from the motorway, that was its real attraction, so that it was never quiet up there, you could always hear the roar of the traffic as well as the singing of birds, the mooing of cows, and all the other country noises which are so nice, if that sort of stuff appeals to you. The park. It was here one Sunday afternoon that Maria and her family were separated, by chance, for ten minutes at the most, but to Maria it seemed longer, much longer. She can only have been seven or eight. How she cried, and ran, and wandered, tearing her socks on the brambles and falling, in the end, so hard that she could not get up, and how they had called, Maria! Maria!, further and nearer, further and nearer. It was the crying finally drew them to her. Meanwhile a man had found her, he had come across her in the gra.s.s. h.e.l.lo, little girl, he had said, why are you crying, or words to that effect, he had asked some b.l.o.o.d.y stupid question anyway, she remembered that much. In retrospect he had probably been going to molest her, this thought had not occurred to Maria at the time. But at that moment Bobby found her, he had heard the sobs, and then her mother was stooping to cradle her and brus.h.i.+ng away the tears with the arm of her rough tweed overcoat, and Maria, although she did not stop crying for a good while yet, had never known joy like it, before or since.

Maria sustained her affection for her parents on the basis of memories such as this.

The point being, that they did not yet know of her success in the examination. Maria herself had only found out, from Mrs Eccles, that very afternoon. The news could not fail to give them pleasure, but by the same token, her own response to it could not fail to give them pain. Maria wondered why this should be so. She herself was glad to be going to Oxford next year, it seemed to her as good a thing to do next year as any. On the other hand there was no reason to suppose that she would enjoy being at Oxford, any more than she enjoyed being at school, and Maria was opposed to the idea of being pleased or excited without reason. So how to break the news to her mother and father, in a manner which would not upset or annoy them?

At this point a cat wandered into her bedroom (it was all go in this household, as you can see). This creature, a small brown and white tabby called Sefton, was only two years old but had a bearing and a philosophy of life which belied his age. Maria genuinely loved him, with a love founded, as it should be, on a profound respect. Sefton seemed to her to have got life sorted out, from top to bottom. The goals of his existence were few, and all admirable: to feed himself, to keep himself clean, and above all to sleep. Maria sometimes believed that she too might be happy, if only she were allowed to confine herself to these three spheres of endeavour. Also, she admired Sefton's att.i.tude towards physical affection. He was for it, from all comers. Perfect strangers had only to stop, to stoop down and to offer him the simplest caress between the ears, and then for a few minutes they would be all over each other, stroking and fondling and rubbing like two young lovers out on the golf course in the throes of p.u.b.escent rapture. This was to Maria a source of great envy. Not that she would have liked to be stroked and fondled and rubbed by perfect strangers, of course not. Exactly. What she envied was the fact that Sefton could indulge in this delightful intimacy safe in the knowledge that the pleasure taken in it by himself and his partner was entirely innocent, unless by some misfortune it turned out to be someone of b.e.s.t.i.a.l tendencies, and that had never happened to him yet. Not so with Maria. She had, let's not be shy about this, had physical contact with men, or rather boys, before now, although only two, admittedly, on anything like a sustained basis. For she was not averse, at this stage, to the odd kiss, or the odd cuddle, or the occasional o.r.g.a.s.m. But more and more she began to see the s.e.xual cravings of the human race, including her own, as the symptom of a far greater craving, a terrible loneliness, an urge for self-forgetfulness which, so the story went, could only be attained in that peculiar private act which tends to take place upstairs, between consenting adults, and with the curtains drawn. She would not have minded touching Ronny, for instance, huddling together on the back seat of the bus, entering preciously for a moment into a shared world, were it not that she suspected his hands would shortly start moving towards her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or diving between her thighs, making with killer instinct for those parts of her which boys always seemed to find so inexplicably interesting. Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux. But these problems did not exist, you see, for Sefton, and not only in his dealings with men and women, but also in his dealings with other cats, for he had been thoughtfully neutered, at an early age.

Maria envied Sefton on three counts. The third was this, that n.o.body ever expected him to take the slightest interest or satisfaction in human affairs. Thus he was at liberty to parade a breathtaking and perfectly legitimate indifference. Just watching him did Maria a power of good, in this respect. He patently didn't give a toss about the family's welfare, except when it affected his own. He was totally self-absorbed, and yet totally unselfish, a condition which Maria knew, already to her great sadness, to be quite unavailable to her. It made him nevertheless her favourite confidant. She could tell him, for example, of her success, without embarra.s.sment, simply because there would be no danger of his displaying the least excitement. Many were the secrets which Maria had told Sefton, because she knew that they would mean nothing to him, and many were the little items of news which she had tried out on him, in order to gain strength from the astonis.h.i.+ng nonchalance with which he would hear and ignore them. Every family should keep a cat, for this very reason.

She sat with Sefton on her lap, talking to him of this and that, while he slept, her day at school, her hopes and fears, her quiet desires, until her father returned from work and she was called down to dinner. The family ate dinner in the kitchen. Maria's mother had heated up four pies, which she served with mashed potato and tomato ketchup. Her father consumed his food noisily, trailing his tie in the gravy, while her brother sat withdrawn, too shy and unhappy even to speak. He took small and regular mouthfuls. Maria waited until the meal was half eaten before telling them.

'Mother, I have some news,' she said.

They laid down their forks in unison.

'I pa.s.sed the exam. I will be going to Oxford next year.'

Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I'm b.u.g.g.e.red if I can describe one.

Her father congratulated her, and praised her cleverness.

Her mother said that it was wonderful news, and told her that she must be very excited.

Her brother remained silent, but grinned.

'You will never look back now, darling,' her mother continued. 'This is the very opportunity that your father and I never had. Once you have had an education like that, nothing in life will ever be denied to you.'

'You must work hard, and enjoy yourself,' said her father. 'Work hard, and enjoy yourself, and you can't go wrong.'