Part 11 (1/2)

She said, ”I have nowhere else to go. I know that your father wouldn't mind. And after all these years I regard the cottage as my home.”

I understood what she meant; it tore at my heart; but even then I genuinely didn't want to know the details. And of course in time she got over that crisis and was as serene and stylish and well mannered as ever.

Some time pa.s.sed. And then again I began to understand that there was something new in Jo's life. Not a man, but a woman. Someone new on the council estate, or someone just discovered. These two women, Jo and the other woman, had been boasting to each other about the richness of their lives, boasting in the way women boast. The other woman's name was Marian. She was artistic; she made curtains and painted earthenware plates; she infected Jo with a wish to do similar things. On weekends I began to hear about the expensiveness of kilns. Six or eight hundred pounds. I had the idea that I was being asked in the name of art and Jo's general social endeavour to spend some money on an electric home kiln. A business expense, which would apparently be recovered in no time. As it was, Jo was getting almost no return on her craft and art. By the time she had paid for the plain earthenware plates on which she did her painting, of flowers or a dog or a tiny kitten in a tea cup, and then the baking of her painted plates by a kiln-owner on the council estate, the renting of a stall at a craft fair, the travel to the fair, by the time she had done all that, she was showing no profit at all. I imagined her sitting forlorn beside her craft goods at the fair, as an ancestor in long skirts and clogs might have sat in a simpler time beside her eggs in a village market, ready at the end of the weary day to exchange everything for a handful of magic seeds.

Sometimes in London a go-ahead young art dealer whom you have just got to know might invite you to dinner. And it seems at first that everything in his austerely laid out house or flat is exceptionally tasteful and well chosen, the enviable discoveries of an unusual eye. When at last you feel you must remark on the long and lovely old oak table on which you are dining, you hear that it is for sale, with everything else you have seen. You realise then that you have been invited not just to dinner but to an exhibition, the way a developer might ask you to a show house, for a little more than the pleasure of your company.

So now it was with Jo. She began on Sat.u.r.day mornings to undo big, heavy bundles of her work, painted plates, enamel-and-wire work, very streaky landscapes and portraits in wax, charcoal drawings of animals, watercolours of rivers and willows. Everything that could be framed was framed, with very big mounts; that was why the bundles were so heavy.

These Sat.u.r.day exhibitions put me on the spot. I actually was interested. It was moving to me to see these stirrings of the spirit where I had expected nothing. But to express interest was to encourage the display of another big bundle on the following Sat.u.r.day. To say then to Jo that there was real talent there and that it might be a good idea for her to take drawing lessons or watercolour lessons drew no response from her. It was not what she wanted to hear.

Somehow the idea had been given to her that talent was natural and couldn't be forced or trained. When I said that one piece showed a big development she said, ”I guess it was all there.” She was speaking of the bubbling up of her talent, and she was not boasting. She might have been talking of something outside herself. I felt that these semi-political ideas about the naturalness of artistic talent-and its cla.s.slessness: there was more than a hint of that-had been given her by someone. I thought it might be her new friend Marian.

It took me a little time to understand that Jo had been presenting her work to me not for my criticism. She wanted me to buy her work; she wanted me to tell my London friends about her. I was a craft fair all on my own. And so was my father. The work Jo brought on Sat.u.r.day mornings was not hers alone. There were many pieces by Marian, and she was generous about them. No jealousy there. I began to feel that these two women, one encouraging the other, had become awed by themselves. They were ordinary people; but their talent made them remarkable, above the common run of women. They liked every artistic thing they did. Each piece was to them a little miracle. I became nervous of these women. In some such way many working-cla.s.s criminals, or people criminally inclined, present themselves to the middle cla.s.ses. I became very much on my guard.

Sometimes they liked to leave work in the cottage. This was more for my father than for me. However fierce he was with outsiders, he was gentle with Jo. He liked to give the impression that he was in her hands. He actually never was. This little bit of acting pleased him: a little power play, still, letting the two women, suppliants in this matter of artwork, think he was feebler than he was. The idea of Jo and her friend Marian was that after a week or so the beauty of a piece would be overwhelming, and my father would buy. You can't blame them; this is what some London dealers do.

An important craft fair was coming up. I heard about it weeks beforehand from Jo. It was to be on a Sunday, and on the morning of that Sunday a Volvo station wagon came in to the cottage drive. A woman I didn't know was driving. I took this to be Marian. Jo was sitting beside her. They had come to take away some of the art work they had left for my father to get used to. Jo came out first and, very much the woman who knew her way around, let herself into the cottage. She came out shortly afterwards with my father who, overdoing the dodderiness, leading Jo on (but only in this matter of art work), was helping ineffectually to bring various awkwardly shaped pieces (big frames, big mounts) out to the porch.

My room was at the other end of the cottage, near the entrance gateway, at the beginning of the small semi-circular drive. So when Marian came out, to greet my father, I saw her from the back. Her black, too loose, elastic pants, part of a black outfit, had slipped far down. And that energetic getting out of the Volvo, using the steering wheel to lever herself out, had pulled it askew and even lower.

She said to my father, ”I've been admiring your lovely house. I've heard so much about it from Jo.”

I had worked out a character for her, but, as had been happening more and more in my work in recent years, I had got it wrong. Such directness, such social grace wasn't at all what I was expecting. Nor was the big Volvo, handled with a matching grace as, sitting high, she eased it into the tight, awkward curve of our drive. For years afterwards I could recall that moment. She was tall, a further surprise, not plebeian or council-estate in figure, and exercised and slender. The glimpse of her lower body, the black coa.r.s.e material contrasting with the lovely skin, fixed the moment in my mind. With a quick right hand she straightened the back of her pants, pulling it out and down a little more before pulling it up and straight. I doubt whether she knew what she had done. But the moment was ever with me. When, later, we were together it could bring about immediate desire for her, or it could put life into a lagging performance.

I watched them put their pieces in the station wagon and drive away. I was too nervous to call out to Jo. And so it happened that for a week I was obsessed by a woman whose face I hadn't even seen. Ideas of comedy or crime fell away.

On Sat.u.r.day I asked Jo how the fair had gone. She said it hadn't gone at all. She and Marian had sat all day at their stall (the rent was twenty-five pounds) and nothing had happened. Towards the end of the afternoon some men had appeared to be interested, but they were only trying to pick them up.

I said, ”I saw Marian last Sunday morning when she came here.”

I had tried to speak as neutrally as possible. But the look on Jo's face told me that I had given myself away. Women are sharp about s.e.xual attraction, even when they themselves are not involved. All their senses are trained to detect the beginnings of interest and inclination, a man's loss of neutrality. Women may say that for them there is an important self beyond s.e.xuality. We allow ourselves to see what they mean, but then we come across women's autobiographies that are boastful chronicles of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g; and often in the biography of a dead woman writer, say, very sensitive and serious in her time, the life presented for our admiration (now that the books have faded) is princ.i.p.ally the life of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g.

Jo's bright eyes became shaded with roguishness and complicity. She herself was displaying a new character, as if to match what she had seen in me.

I asked, ”What does Marian do?”

”She is a swimmer. She works at the baths.” The munic.i.p.al baths in our market town.

That explained the exercised body. I had never been to the munic.i.p.al baths and I imagined myself in a biggish pool, with barefooted Marian in her swimsuit doing her round of the pool, walking a foot or two above the level of my head. (Though I knew it wouldn't be like that: she would more probably be in a synthetic sh.e.l.l suit of some sort, sitting in a chair beside the sun-bleached and water-stained plywood tea counter, having bad coffee or tea, and reading a magazine.) Jo, as if reading my thoughts, said, ”She's lovely, isn't she?” Generous as always about her friend, but still with the new complicit look, as though she was ready for any adventure with me that might include her friend.

I thought of the exercised and relaxed body stretched out in her bed, clean body in clean sheets, smelling of chlorine and water and cleanliness, and I was deeply stirred.

Jo said, ”She's made a couple of mistakes. Like the rest of us.”

Jo's language was like that, with strange old-fas.h.i.+oned echoes: the mistakes were no doubt children by unsuitable men.

She said, ”She's been living with someone for ages.”

She began to tell me what this man did, but I stopped her. I didn't want to know any more. I didn't want to get a picture of him. It would have been unbearable.

MY PURSUIT OF Marian (Roger said) was the most humiliating thing I had ever exposed myself to. And at the end, to add to my humiliation, I discovered that council-estate women of Marian's age thought of s.e.x in the most matter-of-fact way, in the crudest way, you might say, or the simplest, the most natural, almost as something they had to go shopping for, and in the same spirit of sport with which they went shopping for cut-price groceries (on certain evenings, when the supermarkets marked down certain perishable items). Marian (Roger said) was the most humiliating thing I had ever exposed myself to. And at the end, to add to my humiliation, I discovered that council-estate women of Marian's age thought of s.e.x in the most matter-of-fact way, in the crudest way, you might say, or the simplest, the most natural, almost as something they had to go shopping for, and in the same spirit of sport with which they went shopping for cut-price groceries (on certain evenings, when the supermarkets marked down certain perishable items).

Marian told me later (when my pursuit was done, and our weekend relations.h.i.+p was more or less established) that groups of young women in her area would make a party on Thursday or Friday or Sat.u.r.day and go out to the pubs and clubs, trawling for s.e.x with men they fancied on sight. Fancied: that was the word: ”I fancy him.” No woman wanted not to have a man she fancied. These occasions could turn very rough. The fancied men were also matter-of-fact about women and s.e.x, and a woman could be easily knocked about. If a woman objected too loudly or with too many obscenities she could be given a ”beer shampoo”: she could have a bottle of beer emptied over her head. It was all part of the s.e.x game, part of the weekend clubbing. Almost every woman who did this kind of clubbing had at one time had her beer shampoo. At the end there was s.e.x for everyone, however fat, however plain.

Marian was telling me one day about someone on her street, a young woman, who lived on crisps and very sweet chocolate bars and pizzas and burgers, and was immensely fat. This woman had three children, also very fat, by three different fathers. I thought this was a critical story from Marian, the swimmer, about bad diet and fatness. But I was wrong. Most of the women in Marian's area were fat. Fatness by itself wasn't a story. This was a story about the fat woman's s.e.xual appet.i.te and s.e.xual success. The moral tone I thought I detected wasn't there. Marian was speaking in her gossipy way only of the presumption and absurdity of the fat woman. She said, ”It's like a Chinese laundry in that house, with men. In and out fast.”

That was Marian's language style. Sharp. It went with everything else about her. To me it all made a whole.

Even if I had all or some of this knowledge about Marian's background I don't think it would have helped me in my courts.h.i.+p, to use that inappropriate word. I couldn't have adopted the att.i.tude of the fancied men of the pubs. I wouldn't have known how to knock a woman about in a pub or give her a beer shampoo. I could only be myself, and depend on such arts of seduction as I possessed. These arts hardly existed. Perdita and a few other women like Perdita had, as the saying was, thrown themselves at me. They didn't do so for flagrant s.e.xual purposes. They did it only for marriage. s.e.x hardly entered into it. I was okay, as a partner or husband, and that was all. So I never had to seek women out or win them. They were simply there, and I discovered now that, in the winning of Marian, I had no talents of seduction at all.

Men are never more foolish or absurd than when they ”make a pa.s.s.” Women especially mock them, though these same women would be mortified if no pa.s.s were made at them. I felt this absurdity keenly, and I wouldn't have been able to pull it off, if Jo hadn't helped me. She prepared the ground for me, so to speak, so that when Marian and I finally met Marian knew that I was interested in her. We met in the lounge of the old coaching inn in the town. The idea, which was Jo's, was that she and Marian should be having coffee or tea on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and I, coming into the town from the cottage, should happen upon them. It was simplicity itself, as Jo said, but it was easier for the women than for me. I was more than embarra.s.sed. I could hardly bear to look at Marian.

Jo left. Marian stayed to have a lukewarm drink in the dark, low, almost empty bar. I presented my case. In fact, the legal a.n.a.logy helped me to do so. Everything about her enchanted me, her narrowness above the waist, her voice, her accent, her language, her aloofness. Whenever I felt my courage failing I thought of her black, coa.r.s.e elasticated pants slipping low when she got out of the Volvo station wagon. I thought it was important not to let things drag on for another week. I would lose momentum, perhaps lose courage altogether, and she might change her mind. She agreed to stay for dinner; in fact, she seemed to think that that had been already agreed. Jo had done her work well. Better than I had done mine. I had made no arrangements. For a minute or so I thought I might take her to the cottage, but I knew that would have been calamitous: my father, though decayed, had a strange canniness still. So dinner was only dinner. There was no working towards anything else afterwards. So you could say that Marian and I had a kind of courts.h.i.+p. We had the house wine; she loved that. We arranged to meet for lunch the next day. I felt I could shower Jo with treasure for all she had done for me.

I booked a room at the inn for the next day. I had an anxious night, and a desperate morning. I have searched myself to see whether I had ever spent such an anxious time, so full of yearning, so full of self-distrust, and I don't think I have. I felt that everything depended on seducing this woman, taking her to bed. In other crises one has more or less an idea of what one is worth and what work one has done and where things might be going. But in this business of seduction I had no experience. It was the completest gamble. Everything depended on the other person. Later, when I got to know more about the ways of Marian and her friends, this anxiety of mine appeared extraordinarily foolish and pathetic. But, as I have said before, even if I had known about those ways it would not have helped.

The long night ended. The lunch came. We went afterwards to the booked room with the strange dark and musty furniture. How terrible now to embrace a stranger, just like that. Marian seemed very slightly to repel me, and I was relieved. We undressed. I undressed as though I was at the doctor's, being examined for a rash. Jacket on a chair; then trousers, underpants and s.h.i.+rt, all very neatly.

Marian's armpits were dark with silky hair.

I said, ”So you don't shave.”

”Somebody asked me not to some time ago. Some people think it's disgusting. They make strange faces when they see it.”

”I love it.”

She allowed me to stroke it, to feel its silkiness. It overexcited me, and worked with the other pictures I had of her. I came a little before I should. She was cool. For a long time she remained on her left side, hip high, waist sunken, her right flank smooth and exercised and firm. Her left arm partly covered her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her right arm was crooked above her head, revealing her underarm hair. On two or three fingers of the hand that covered her b.r.e.a.s.t.s she had rings: gifts, I thought, from previous wors.h.i.+ppers, but I closed my mind to them now.

She said, in her cool way, looking down at me, ”Aren't you going to b.u.g.g.e.r me?”

I didn't know what to say.

She said, ”I thought that was where you were going.”

I still didn't know what to say.

She said, ”Did you go to Oxford or Cambridge?” And with a gesture of irritation reached across the bed for her bag. Easily, as though she knew where it was, she took out a tube of lip salve.

I hesitated. She pa.s.sed the lip salve to me, saying, ”I am not doing this for you. You do it.”

I hadn't thought it possible for a naked, exposed woman to be so imperious.

She commanded. I obeyed. How well I did I didn't know. She didn't tell me.

When we were dressed again, she more or less fully, I only partly, there was a ring at the door. I remembered, too late, that in my agitation I had not put on the ”occupied” light.

She seemed to grow insane. She said, ”You, go to the bathroom.” She called out to the person outside to wait, and then she began pelting all my clothes into the bathroom, jacket, shoes, pelting everything she could see, as though she wished no sign of me to remain in the bedroom.

It was only a chambermaid, Spanish or Portuguese or Colombian, doing some kind of checking.