Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (3 page)

It is this thin line of integrity, buried almost without trace, to which her readers subliminally respond. '"Love,"' says Janice, '"is Nature's second sun."' '"Love,"' says Janice, '"looks not w
ith the eyes but with the mind, ‘
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind . . ."' Both quotes from Elizabethans, which is annoying since Janice's heart is set in times before them. Indeed, Janice considers Elizabethan literary arts a mere dilution of the golden age that passed before. But they are apt quotes all the same. She has many more stored away, all of which she keeps buzzing in her head as she writes so that they flavour, always, the text.

Back, then, to Battersea.

After her first book was published, Sylvia Perth said gaily, 'Janice, my dear, you can now afford to live anywhere you choose. Right in the centre of town if you want to.' But Janice had chosen Battersea. Battersea suited her very well. The area she chose suited her very well. Sylvia Perth it did not suit. In vain did she try to persuade Janice at least to select the
best
part of Battersea. 'Why not near Albert Bridge - so close to Chelsea - or Prince of Wales Drive . ..? But not here, dear. Not in this bit. Why, it's practically
Nine Elms
. . .' But Janice did not mind that at all and the apartment block was right. Built in the 1950s in that strangely dull cube-like manner, it was unremarkable. Neither large nor small, neither smart nor dowdy. And with no architectural features at all. It just was.

Of course the area had changed in the years since she moved there. Young upwardly mobiles had discovered the river, provender shops had discovered the young upwardly mobiles, and it had all got rather fashionable. But not in Janice's bit. Here, due to bomb damage, the buildings were too new to knock down, too dull to become desirable and too off the beaten track to appeal to any but the drear of heart or those to whom surroundings are frivolities. Hence the shop on the corner still sold ordinary items like digestive biscuits and standard tea, having no market for
langue de chat
nor Lapsang, and hence its owner still wore an overall and liked to chat to his customers. Janice avoided the place whenever possible, preferring the supermarket, where the only exchange required was a grunt of apology as your trolley ran over a foot and where the act of shopping was so detached that there was no sense of shame at whatever you stuffed in your shopper.

The corner-shop man attempted to look unmoved by Janice's requirements, but he was a singular failure at it. If she said four packets of custard creams, his brows shot up and his eyeballs fairly rotated in his head, and all the while he would keep his voice even, saying, slow and deliberate,
'Four
packets of custard creams, six Mars bars, six fudge fingers, two pounds of butter, one pound of cheese,' in a never changing rhythm that made the whole seem like a litany of disapproval. Nothing she ever bought there tasted quite so good as things she bought elsewhere that were free of the stain of his glance. Neither did she very much like the way he glanced at her. His look held too much interest, too much human
bonhomie,
and Janice would prefer to efface herself from such involvements. She would like, so far as the world was concerned, to avoid existence until the time was right to emerge.

As dogs grow to look like their owners and owners their dogs, so Janice Gentle had grown towards nothingness rather well. All excepting her size, of course, and that was just one of those anomalies that occasionally spring up in life. If our presence in the world can be described with a colour, then Janice
Gentle
was beige. Her skin was pale, her hair nondescript, her eyes indeterminately light, and bloodless her lips. Her body, naked, was not unlike porridge or, more kindly, not unlike a Rubens without its rosy tints and the light of wickedness in the eye. She had never lain on sundrenched beaches taking the hue of honey or the glow of chestnuts from the sun, and though some poet or songster might call her flesh milk-white, it was, in fact, rather an unwholesome paleness, like the skin of one who has stayed in the darkness too long.

No man had lusted for her so far as she knew, no woman had sighed to have her curves. No child had rested on her ample lap nor settled its head within her shelving bosom. Janice's sensual delights were all taken by mouth, and that was the way she liked it. She wore a loose, long cardigan that draped her form as unbecomingly as a dust sheet on a thirties suite, she wore regulation spectacles of unremarkable design, and her hair was held back in a plain rubber band and washed once a week on Thursdays. She weighed fifteen stone, stood five feet two in her bare, spreading feet, was an absolute virgin and looked the same in her twenties as her thirties, her thirties as her forties, in which latter category, just, she now resided. Since coming to Battersea Janice Gentle had kept her life neutral. Other women looked upon her as a sad creature compared with their stylishness; and those feminine-hearted ants scuttling beneath her minuscule fifth-floor balcony would look away sorrowingly and in disgust should they chance to raise their heads and catch sight of her mottled cellulite taking the air.

Men did not pity her, for men did not notice her. So far as men were concerned, Janice was invisible - so plain as to be erotically unuseful, her intellect not strident nor colourful enough to be considered a threat. Apart from the corner shop they left her alone and unremarked, for which she was content, and she hoped it would ever more be so. Until her Quest and Crusade, of course; when they were completed, things would have to be different. Meanwhile she had her books and her beige, beige world. And that was all she sought.

, It had, however, not always been

like that
...

Chapter Three

M

rs
Gentle, deceased, had nothing to thank men for. In her opinion she had done her woman's duty by life and she had not received her due. Mr Gentle had absconded when Janice was a little thing in plaits and had broken his wife's nose into the bargain. Mrs
Gentle
wore this broken nose as the martyrs of old wore their whip marks, for until its receipt she had been a proud and orderly woman prepared to accept and forgive much for the cause of neighbourly propriety. She had received it standing in the street in her nightclothes, clutching four-year-old Janice's hand while the four-year-old clutched her teddy. Mrs
Gentle had been patientl
y waiting for the episode within her home to pass and thought the midnight street was the safest place to wait while Mr Gentle rampaged. So long as they kept quiet no one would know. Janice, whose dressing-gown and pyjamas did not keep the cold away, began to sob and wish to be held where the warmth would feel nice. Mrs Gentle, who had kept her step whitened and her privet tidy and whose nets had never let her down, felt this was the very last straw. 'Eat this and shut up,' she said, handing the child a sweet that happened to be in her raincoat pocket. It was a Clarnico toffee and its sugary smoothness did the trick. Somehow Janice felt warm again.

Mr
Gentle
, spotting his wife and child from the upstairs bedroom where he was breaking the last of Mrs
Gentle
's china fancies, and seeing that this pleasurable activity was coming to an end, ran down the stairs, out into the street, and brought his fist into an equally satisfying collision with the cartilage of his wife's nose. The child howled afresh, her mouth now empty, and blood dripped on to her teddy bear. Mrs
Gentle
, caught off guard and momentarily released from her dignity, yelled for pity, yelled for vengeance and yelled for succour. Neither of the first two was available and the third came late, for the Gentle household lived in one of those polite streets where if you saw someone fall down you looked away, allowing time for them to get up again lest they be embarrassed by your noticing. Mr Gentle ran off into the night, and when succour did eventually come, it provided a sugar lump for the sobbing Janice, as well as strong, sweet tea for her mother. The sugar lump had the same pleasing effect on little Janice as the Clarnico toffee had done and she was soon very soundly asleep.

There were several incidents in that house in the years that followed, though Mr Gentle did not officially return. But no matter what he occasioned on his brief revisitings, Mrs Gentle never again ran out into the street. On the whole the humiliation of sharing her plight with her neighbours was worse than bearing it alone, and she kept herself to herself after that.

On Janice's seventh birthday Mr Gentle made his last appearance. He left the house with pieces of birthday cake embedded in his hair and cuts to his face from the broken window through which he had thrown it. His departure was rapidly followed by an hysterical line of seven-year-olds who had witnessed whatever it was that had happened. Janice stood on a chair at the front-room window watching them go. Then she helped her mother pick up the broken china and apply Elastoplasts, and took her teddy to bed, along with a large chunk of the iced cake, from which she picked clean the garden detritus before chewing her way slowly through it. They did not entertain again after that. Although the years rolled by with no more visits by Mr Gentle, the safest way forward seemed to be to stay self-contained and to live orderly, quiet lives. And they remained in that house, in that street, since that was what you did.

When Janice
Gentle
began growing hair and curves and found herself crying a great deal for no reason in particular, Mrs Gentle told her to watch out. 'You keep away from men, my girl,' she said, shaking her moppet to give emphasis, and she pointed at her splayed nose. 'Look at what I got. Never trust any of them and if you do, well
..
.' - she shook her head this time instead of the mop — 'just make sure you get your fist in first.'

So Janice, being an obedient sort of a girl, obeyed and steered clear of the opposite sex. She became academic, a bit of a blue stocking, tipped by her teachers for great heights, Cambridge, should she choose, for the world in which she immersed herself was the world of six, seven, eight hundred years ago. The change from a land to a money economy, the demise of the feudal system, the growth of town and city, increasing secularization, the birth of a middle class . . . She read all she could of the medieval romances. She loved the prose and the poetry and the clear ideas expressed of right and wrong. Guillaume de Lorris's
Roman de la Rose,
Piers the Ploughman's search for the ultimate truth in Langland's everyday setting, Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Christine de Pisan who wrote with such beguiling simplicity and yet was mistress of the art of the court as well as mistress of her own life by virtue of her pen.
L'amour courtois,
from its roots in Provence to its spread throughout Europe, fascinated and delighted Janice both for the lyricism it inspired and for its ideals: love should be a thing freely sought and freely given; marriage is no excuse for not loving. Chivalric love, the highest achievement. This was the core of it. And out of this was spawned a great literature and art, a philosophy with rules and theories in which no woman was demeaned nor lover spurned if he obeyed them. Only through love, said the poetry of the troubadours, can man become virtuous or noble, and indeed - as Janice delighted to discover - even the very principles of Provencal grammar and metre were based upon the noble laws of love.

Courtly Love, the perfect ideal, the golden age of chivalry with its civilizing effect upon manners, became for Janice Gentle the golden age of history.
Vous ou Mort
was, she felt, the correct, and only, undertaking for love.

She refuted Castiglione for his latter-day belief that in
The Courtier
he had encapsulated it all. 'Castiglione was a hundred and fifty years too late,' she wrote in an essay, 'and his own weaknesses barred him from understanding the purity of what had gone before him. He, like the Elizabethans, took Courtly Love and bastardized it, killing the parent Provencal and burying it under a mawkish effluvium of sentiment, conceit, artifice and plagiarism. As the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was inspired by Giotto and went on to make bad, naive paintings despite the greatness of their inspiration, so did Castiglione become inspired by
l’
amour courtois
and go on to write an intolerable pastiche. In the next pages I intend to illustrate this with evidence drawn from early source material — from the courts of Blois, Flanders, Brittany, Burgundy, England, and from the writings that abounded among the troubadours and the trouveres of France, the minnesingers of Germany and the
dolce stil
novo
of Italy . . .'

It was this essay which won her the scholarship to Cambridge. With little encouragement from her mother and even less from herself, Janice declined to go. One thing to sit in a very small sixth-form class of girls and discuss Petrarch; quite another to be away from home, in a strange city, with new faces belonging to both sexes, and not fear giving public voice to her views on the
Judgements
of Marie de Champagne. Janice Gentle abandoned the idea. In any case, she told herself, her mother was getting old and frail and ailing, and Janice was required to stay with her. Mother and daughter colluded and Janice stayed, very firmly, at home: Janice to continue her studies by post and to attend the occasional lecture on her favourite subject, Mrs Gentle to sew and settle herself into the role of fragile parent. Janice stepped up her intake of food and rounded out considerably, finding, as in the past, that it was cheering to munch away the hours. They had a small income from Mrs Gentle's deceased maiden sister, and the house was theirs. With caution and low expenditure they existed very well, caution and low expenditure being the major legacy left to them in their experience of Mr
Gentle
, disappeared.