Mischief (27 page)

But I thought of that tender 1641 Van Dyck painting of the newly married pair, William Prince of Orange, aged fifteen, and Mary, Princess Royal of England, aged ten, and took comfort. The weight of the world is upon the young pair, and all the troubles of state and domesticity, and they are brave and beautiful in the face of it. And I sipped my Chardonnay, or Chablis, and watched the couple walk by, and wondered about their lives. They were on their way, perhaps, to visit a first grandchild and had never approved of the marriage in the first place: or to visit her parents, whom he had never liked. Something like that.

And then one moment she is walking beside him – well, a little behind him, as I say – and he says something and she suddenly falls on her knees before him: it is quite a movement: she seems to shoot out from behind him to arrive at floor level, twisting to face him. It is the same movement you see in the Pinter play,
Homecoming
, I think it is, the one in which the man proposes to the woman, shooting right across the stage on his knees to entreat her to be his.

A few years back, when Harold Pinter was playing the part himself at the Almeida theatre, he lamented that his knees were no longer up to it. He was sixty. It was at one of those pre-performance meet-the-author sessions. I proposed a solution, namely, that he could alter the part to suit his knees. Just write out the proposal. It was after all his play. Pinter was horrified. The lines were sacrosanct, they had entered into the canon, were no longer Pinter’s to change. They dwelt with other scared texts in some dissociated state of their own: stage directions which had to be served and suffered for, by the writer too. I really admired that.

Picture the scene that day at Schipol. Now the woman wails aloud like an animal, a human bereft, a cow that has lost its calf, hands clasped towards her husband in entreaty; her hair toppled around her face, her red lip-sticked mouth smeary and gaping wide, her back teeth dark with old fashioned fillings. Her heels stick out oddly at the end of lean shins, as if someone had broken her bones, but people’s legs do look like that sometimes when they kneel at the Communion rail. Her skirt is rucked up, too tight and short for this sudden, passionate, noisy activity. She is not like a virgin, beautiful in prayer; she is a fat middle aged woman with thin legs having a mad fit. She is praying to him, beseeching him,
have mercy, Lord, have mercy.

At the Oyster Bar glasses pause mid air; people all around pause in their transit and look to see what’s going on. The husband takes a pace or two back, embarrassed and bewildered, and stares at the wife. He is trying to look as if she is nothing to do with him. At least he does not disappear into the crowds. Perhaps she has his passport.

Something stranger still happens. Women staff come out of the shops, first hesitantly, then with more deliberation, towards the source of the noise. There are two young girls with bare midriffs, but most are brisk and elegant older women, in crisp white shirts and black skirts and sensible shoes. They cluster round the wife, they help her to her feet, they brush her down and soothe her, soothing, clucking, sympathising. She stops the wailing: she looks round their kindly, consoling faces. She feels better. She manages a tremulous smile.

An armed policeman approaches: he is dismissed by this Greek chorus of female nurturers with a look, a dismissive flick of a hand, a derisive finger, and he melts away. It occurs to me that the Nurturers, ever more difficult to sight than the Norns, who weave the entrails of Nordic heroes to decide their destiny, or those Mediterranean Furies, who drive us mad with guilt – have actually put in an appearance at Schiphol. Like the Lover at the Gate, unseen until the hour of need, who fills up the bed when the husband departs, these benign creatures turn up in an emergency, so long as it is dire enough. I have always suspected they existed, though unsung in fable, but I had never sighted them until now. And in an airport! I am privileged.

Then, as if this was her destined fate, and this was their purpose, the Nurturers propel her towards her waiting husband. She does not resist. She is tentative and apologetic in demeanour. The expression on his face does not change – ‘
I am a man much set about by troubles, bravely enduring.’
The nurturers turn back into shop assistants and disappear behind their counters. The couple walk on as if nothing had happened, towards Zone C, she still just a little behind him. She pushes her hair back into its proper shape, and wobbles on her heels. She may have hurt her knees.

Back at the oyster bar things return to normal. Eating and drinking continue. The crowds close behind them. Schiphol flows on. Lunchtime is approaching: Noise levels are increasing.

‘Why did she do that?’ my husband asks, bewildered. ‘Is she mad?’

‘He may well have driven her mad,’ I say, ‘but she will not have got there on her own.’ And as we make our way to the Rijksmuseum I tell him how I imagine the day has gone for the blonde woman, and how she has been driven to distraction, to the point of falling upon her knees in a public place and wailing, imploring him to stop, just stop, her state of desperation so extreme that she managed to summon the Nurturers. What I tell him is, of course, only one of a dozen possible scenarios.

‘Marcelle,’ he said to her this morning –we will call her Marcelle, she looked like a Marcelle, and we will call him Joseph, perhaps in the spirit of mild irony: Joseph, after all, stood steadily stood by Mary in the hour of her need: he did not take a step back and try to disown her when she embarrassed him so. ‘Marcelle, did you remember to call Sylvia about Alec last night?’ Marcelle is busy packing, in a suitcase not quite big enough for all her needs. They are up early. They have a flight to catch.

Marcelle and Joseph will live in a detached house with its own thick carpets and good reproduction furniture and a designer kitchen. He will have one married daughter by an earlier marriage and they will have two teenage children between them, and a neat garden, in which anything unruly will have been cut down to size. She will use bark chippings, that ugly stuff, to keep the weeds down.
Joseph: Ugly, what do you mean, ugly? Well, you should know. But I am not made of money: we cannot afford a gardener more than once a week, for God’s sake. Just get him to use bark.’
Once long ago, Marcelle dreamed of romance and roses round a cottage door: and once indeed Joseph picked a single cherry in an orchard and brought it to her. That was when she was first pregnant with Alec and Joseph was emotional about it. She kept the pip for ages, and even tried to make it sprout by putting it in water. Then she would have a whole little tree covered with cherries, but nothing happened except that the pip just lay there and the water grew cloudy and sour and she had to throw it out. All that was left was a ring round the glass which no amount of scouring would remove. Still, even that was a consolation. A memento of something good.

She would really like another suitcase especially for her cosmetics, but Joseph doesn’t like heaving cases about. Who does? Jars are heavy and bulky: creams for the eyes and the neck and the lips and the bust, each one magically different, are probably interchangeable, but she is nervous of being without a single one of them. She can’t make up her mind. She packs and re-packs: she slips jars into her shoes to save space, but the weight is unavoidable.
Joseph
: ‘
Couldn’t you do without the gunk for just a couple of days and nights?
It’s not as if they seem to make any difference. You’re over forty, nearly fifty.
S
urely the days when face creams would help have passed? Take them to the Charity Shop and be rid of them.’
As if charity shops took half empty jars of cream, however expensive. What do men know?

‘I called but there was no answer,’ says Marcelle. She lies.

‘Did you leave a message on Sylvia’s answer phone?’ asks Joseph. He has already packed. It takes him five minutes. He is decisive.
Joseph: ‘One of us has to be.
’ Now he is brushing his teeth. She cooked him his breakfast but had none herself. He likes a good breakfast; she is never hungry first thing in the morning. Joseph has good teeth: Marcelle spends a lot of time at the dentist.
Joseph: ‘My mother made sure I had milk everyday. You really shouldn’t let Alec and Carla drink those disgusting sweet drinks all the time
.
It’s not as if you were passing on any particularly good dental genes – at least from your side
.’ But how do you stop teenagers from eating and drinking exactly what they want? It wasn’t as if Joseph was around all that much at meal times to train them to do anything at all, let alone sit down when they ate and drank.

‘I couldn’t,’ says Marcelle. ‘It wasn’t switched on.’

‘That’s strange,’ says Joseph. ‘Sylvia is usually so efficient.’ Sylvia gets called ‘Sylvia’ a lot, even when ‘she’ would be more normal. Marcelle notices these little things. According to Joseph, Sylvia is elegant, Sylvia is intelligent, Sylvia has perfect teeth, what a good dress sense Sylvia has. And so slim! Such a pretty figure. Sylvia is like a sister to Joseph, and tells everyone so, though of course they are no blood relation. Sylvia has twin girls of fifteen: very smart and well behaved and no trouble at all.
Joseph: ‘Sylvia knows how to bring up children.’
The only thing wrong with Sylvia is her husband Earle. Joseph thinks Earle is something of a slob, not worthy of Sylvia. Earle and Sylvia are Joseph and Marcelle’s best friends, and their children like to spend time together. But over the last five years Earle has crept up the promotion ladder and Joseph has stuck on a certain rung while others clamber up over him.

The fact is, Marcelle does not want to call Sylvia. It was late; she was tired, now thank God it is too early. Seven years ago Joseph spent a night with Sylvia in an hotel, at a sales conference. He had come home in the morning – smelling of Sylvia’s scent (
Joseph: ‘Why do you never wear scent any more, Marcelle?’ Marcelle: ‘Because I am too busy. Because I never remember to put any on. It made the babies sneeze and I got out of the habit’)
and had confessed and apologised and she and Sylvia had talked it out, and they had agreed to forget the incident, which had been, well, yes, both unfortunate and unexpected.
Joseph: ‘I am so sorry, Marcelle. It should not have happened. But she is such a honey, such a sweet dear, you know how much you like her, and she is having such a hard time with Earle
.
I can only conclude somebody put something in the drink or it would never have happened
.
It meant nothing: just a silly physical thing. And she is your friend. I feel much better now I’ve told you.’
Yes, but in an hotel? A night? Full sex? Behind the filing cabinets would have been more understandable
. Sylvia: ‘I am so, so sorry, Marcelle, I would never do anything to hurt you. I will always be open with you. It was a silly drunken thing – someone must have put something in the office drink. Completely out of character and it will never happen again. We both have our marriages and our children to think about, so shall we both just say “closure” and forgive and forget?’
So Marcelle had. Or tried to.

Sylvia was a psychotherapist who worked in the Human Resources Department of the haulage business where Joseph worked as an accountant. Earle was now director of acquisitions at the same firm and earned far more than Joseph, and had an office to himself and a good carpet. He was away from home quite a lot, visiting subsidiary companies abroad. Sylvia was brave about his absences but sometimes she would turn up at Marcelle’s door at the weekend with red eyes and talk about nothing in particular and Marcelle felt for her. And Marcelle could see that bedding Sylvia had been a triumph for Joseph: a feather in his cap, so great an event it was now what sustained him in life. ‘
I was the one who bedded Sylvia, Earle’s wife, at the office party seven years ago.’

But Marcelle still did not want to call Sylvia ‘about Alec.’ Alec had been found taking drugs in school and was in danger of expulsion. Joseph reckoned that Sylvia could help with advice and wisdom, she, after all, being so good with young people. The twins would never take drugs, or be anorexic, like Carla. They were calm and orderly and dull.

‘I’ll call her when we get back from Copenhagen,’ Marcelle says to Joseph, looking up from the parade of the jars: different makes, different shapes: some gold topped, some white, some silvery, all enticing. They are going to visit the new baby, and will only be staying two days. She is glad it is not longer. Her stepdaughter has always been a bundle of resentments, at the best of times. Now she will be sleepless, and ordering Marcelle about as if she were the maid.
Joseph: ‘What can you expect? You stole me from her. Now you have to put up with it.’
It will not be an easy trip. Joseph does not like the new husband.

‘That’s all very well,’ says Joseph, ‘but you promised me you’d call her and now you haven’t. I really don’t understand you.’

‘I expect it will have blown over by the time we get back,’ says Marcelle with unusual firmness. ‘Schools always over-react. And I really I don’t see why Sylvia needs to know every detail of our business.’

‘She’s a good friend to you,’ says Joseph. ‘Better than you’ll ever know.’ What does he mean by that? Has something else happened between Joseph and Sylvia? Has he tried to restart the flirtation and she refused, for Marcelle’s sake? Or is that just what Joseph wants Marcelle to think, because he’s annoyed? She gives up on the throat cream and then thinks of Sylvia’s smooth and perfect neck, and re-packs it. Perhaps she can do without the eye cream? Sylvia is seven years younger than Marcelle. Sylvia has beautiful clear bright eyes, widely spaced and good cheek bones. Flesh seems somehow to have shrouded Marcelle’s. She feels suddenly hungry and goes to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. Joseph follows her into the kitchen.

‘Sylvia says the way to keep slim is never to eat carbohydrates before breakfast,’ he observes. ‘And I don’t think this matter of Alec is simply going to melt away, however much you hope it will. You have such a problem with reality! I don’t like to say this of Alec but he does have a family history of criminality. And remember the time when he was eight and you found money missing from your purse? I don’t think you dealt with that properly: Sylvia said the whole thing should have been talked through, not just swept under the carpet. Now this drugs business. Where has the boy been getting the money?’