The Heart of the Country (2 page)

‘Good heavens, my husband must have overlooked it,’ Natalie said. ‘I’ll make sure it’s seen to, Pauline.’ By this time Natalie was really put out. Harry, she felt, ought to stand between her and these embarrassments.

But it wasn’t until Natalie realized that Harry hadn’t even left the usual five pound note to pay Flora the cleaner that she decided to call him at his office.

Pow! Wham! Oh, the wages of sin.

Only five pounds for four hours’ work! It wasn’t much. But Harry argued that Flora was only eighteen, was an indifferent cleaner – albeit the best that could be found – and that if she was paid more the market would be spoiled for other employers.

How much do you pay your cleaner? If you have one? Or how much are you paid, if you go out cleaning yourself? I tell you, it’s not enough. It can never be enough. For his unkindness, for his blindness, Harry Harris deserves to be unhappy with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, though I don’t suppose he will be. Natalie, consenting to the paying of Flora the sum of one pound twenty-five pence an hour, was an accessory after the fact, an accomplice, but deserved even worse inasmuch as Flora is, politically and in the feminist sense, her sister, her little helpless sister, living as Flora did in a caravan on the site of the council garbage tip, there where the crows wheel and fly. Flora lived with Bernard, who was unemployed. (Unemployment amongst the rural under 25’s is reckoned, currently, at around 60 per cent.) Flora’s heels were downtrodden: it was bad for her young legs; they bowed outward from the knee. Her diet was bad, too, and her clothes were too thin in cold weather. Amazing, really, how beautiful she managed to be, beneath a halo of black, yellow and green greasy-spiked hair, solid with hair gel and spray: like an angel ascending, not even falling. Even Harry had noticed how lovely she was – but not enough not to cheat her: one pound twenty-five pence the hour for washing the flecks of hair from the basin after Harry had shaved; for picking up the Harris children’s toys; for wiping the grease from where it accumulated behind the mixer taps of the kitchen sink – you know, that rather sexy dip at the start of the stem?

The wages of sin! Harry sinned; Natalie paid. So did Flora.

Now the section of countryside between the Mendip Mast and Glastonbury Tor is extremely pretty – though, as I say, troubled by the mystic forces I speak of. There are winding country lanes and sudden hills, and sheep graze and cottages nestle and villages drowse, even though round every other bend there’s a concrete bunker, a tin barn, a quarry and an intensive pig breeding unit. The fact is, the, heart of the country’s rotten: I really believe
it is. No wonder Harry sinned. How can a people be better than its rulers? If the rulers put profit and practicality first, how can the people be expected to do better? Take Harry: now the way out of Harry’s financial difficulties was flight. The most practical person to fly with was not his wife, but Miss Eddon Gurney, who was single, childless and unafraid. Of course he went. It was profitable and practical to do so. Wouldn’t you, in his shoes? No? Look at it this way. Harry and Natalie slept together, ate together, had children together; but that was the limit of their intimacy. They exchanged information, not feelings or ideas.

‘I’ve booked the car in for a service, darling,’ she’d say, over breakfast.

‘Thank you, darling,’ he’d say, and off he’d go to work. Anyone can talk like that. Why Natalie rather than another? Why stay?

They were helpful and polite to each other, and never quarrelled. Why bother? They might even have believed they were happy together, had Harry not discovered himself really quite interested in what Marion Hopfoot, voted carnival queen in 1978, had to say, which was that she was in love with him, and Natalie not discovered herself in Arthur’s arms, rolling off the Victorian chaise longue on to the rather nice rag rug before the little coal fire in the register grate, intertwined and even more wonderfully energetic on the floor than the sofa. Ah, conversation. Oh, love. Ah, sex. Oh, again, consequences!

The consequence was:

‘I’d better come round,’ Hilary, Harry’s receptionist, said, and so she did. She had a pale face and a domed forehead and too large pop eyes, and a practical manner. Many a man would follow her to the ends of the earth, had she chosen to go. She knew exactly what to do, and when and how, and would never have dreamed of going. A wonderful gift! She had beautiful breasts too – white energetic domes, cherry-tipped, and these gave her confidence in the world – but Hilary hardly enters the story, she or her chest. She is merely the bearer of bad news, standing in Natalie’s dream kitchen – oak-veneered cupboards, brass fittings, wall oven and ceramic hob, and a black-and-white tiled floor recently rather badly washed by Flora. Hilary’s waist was tightly belted, the better to show off her figure, and her frog eyes were moist with pity and indignation mixed.

The wages of sin!

‘The staff haven’t been paid for two weeks,’ said Miss Hilary Frog. ‘Mr Harris said it was just a cash-flow problem but most of us in computers know where that kind of thing leads. It’s a high risk business, isn’t it? If you haven’t got the capital, that is – and Mr Harris hadn’t. My boyfriend’s father is a friend of the bank manager and he told us Harrix was seriously underfunded. Then, when he didn’t turn up today, and Marion neither –’

‘Marion?’ Natalie had never heard her name before. Truly. It’s most often a bolt from the blue which strikes down a good wife and mother, especially when she’s economically dependent. Don’t let me frighten you – unless it’s into getting a training and a job. You know what the statistics for these things are? You know how many marriages end in divorce? One in three. And a recent survey shows that a woman’s standard of living falls on average by 42 per cent after divorce, and a man’s actually
rises
… Enough!

‘Marion?’

‘Marion Hopfoot,’ said Hilary. ‘She’s his secretary. He’s been seeing a lot of her. That is to say, not just in office hours, which would be natural, but after hours as well. Well, you must have known. Oh. No? Oh dear! But Marion told us it was all okay, you knew all about it and didn’t mind. And one of the fellers told me you and that antique dealer up by the Castle – but that’s none of my business. Well, every marriage is different, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ said Natalie.

‘But this morning, when Mr Harris didn’t turn up, and Marion didn’t either, we got to wondering and one of the technicians called her home and Marion’s mother answered. She said Marion had left a note saying she was running off to Spain with Harry Harris. And it must be true because she’d taken her passport. So everyone reckoned that was that. They called the police because of the unpaid wages.’

‘Police?’ said Natalie.

‘And then
you
rang, Mrs Harris. So I reckon that’s that. Sixteen people out of a job, if you don’t count Marion Hopfoot.’

Natalie sat on the kitchen table, swinging her left leg idly and thinking of Hilary’s frog eyes and that Hilary’s bosom was over the top but unable to take in all that much of what Hilary actually said. She felt like a cobra which has swallowed a donkey and finds it too large to digest and too awkward to spit out. She couldn’t somehow make sense of anything.

‘There’s hardly any petrol in the car,’ she observed.

‘So?’ inquired Hilary. Hilary was having to do without two weeks’ wages and none at all in lieu of notice, and felt that Natalie was not the only one with troubles. ‘And I’ve got no money and Harry doesn’t believe in credit cards – not for me, anyhow – though he’s got a gold American Express. There’s enough petrol for this afternoon, I expect, but how am I going to get the children to school tomorrow morning?’

How indeed? Of such boring problems are tragedies made. Natalie, the perfect mother, the tidy dresser, she who turned up at school every morning with her tights unladdered and her face properly made up and a pretty little scarf round her neck, bringing out the colour of her somewhat blank blue eyes – I tell you, little Mrs Tippy-toes was sleepwalking, poor thing, and had been for 15 years or so, ever since she married Harry Harris. Only now she suddenly perceived she might not be able to get to the school gates
at all.
And this, it suddenly came to her, might well be the wages of sin. The first thing a woman who suffers misfortune feels is
guilty. My fault,
she is convinced. Something I did wrong. She may well be right.

And Natalie had a great deal to be guilty about, when you come to think of it. Consider her sins that very day.

The sin of lust: as envisaged with Arthur. She was looking forward to it. It’s as bad to contemplate it as to do it.

The sin of envy: envying Flora’s looks, and making her dust an already dusted sideboard. Mahogany – veneered, but sealed with polyurethane and very, very shiny.

The sin of pride: despising Hilary because she had a too-large bosom (by Natalie’s standards) and frog eyes.

The sin of sloth: not bothering to know what was going on in Harry’s life, heart and bank account; asking Pauline to deliver her groceries, instead of collecting them herself. Pauline was older than Natalie and had a harder life,

The sin of gluttony: buying smoked salmon for dinner. Scottish, not Canadian. Twice the price, and pity the poor fish! Followed up by chicken. Horrid white stringy stuff, from a mangy bird which lived and died to a box.

The sin of avarice: underpaying Flora on Harry’s instructions. The less she paid Flora, the more pairs of shoes Natalie could buy. Natalie loved shoes: they were her extravagance. She owned eighteen pairs, and fifteen of these had high heels, so when the hard times came she had only three for getting about in, and two of those were sandals.

And the special sin of splashing the poor.

You may not know about this one: it’s a modern sin. It’s what happens, say, on the School Run. If you’re driving the children to school on a rainy day and you pass too close to the mothers and children who don’t have cars, who have to walk, and you drench them with the mud of your passing. We are here in this world to be scavengers: to pick up the dregs and dust of creation and save what’s possible and render it back to the Almighty, not to hang about carelessly, adding to the mud, the trouble and confusion. We are meant to be salvagers, not wreckers.

Natalie had sinned badly that morning, taking her children to school (private, of course), driving too close to Sonia, an unsupported mother, who, with Edwina (4), Bess (5) and Teresa (6) filed along the busy road in the rain, as close in to the prickly hedge as they could, for fear of sudden death on their way to a school (not private, of course) which all three children hated, but which the law obliged them to attend. Natalie simply didn’t see them: she didn’t even notice they were there.

Alice, Natalie’s little girl, noticed. Alice said, ‘It’s raining. Why don’t we give them a lift?’

Ben said: ‘You’re so stupid, Alice. We don’t give lifts to people like that.’

But Natalie just said, peering through a misty windscreen, which neither wipers nor demister at full blast would clear: ‘Do be quiet, children,’ without actually hearing a word they were saying. In her defence it was a nasty morning for driving, but that is not the kind of excuse the Prime Mover likes to hear. He, after all, sends the rain. He worked in his mysterious way, and Sonia helped. She looked after the retreating five-door Volvo Estate. (Of course it was a Volvo. What else?) Jax the Alsatian, the Harris’ dog, looked back at Sonia and grinned. Even the dogs of the rich live better than do the new poor. The dogs ride; the poor walk, or go by bus. There are very few buses anymore in the countryside. The rich don’t take them. That means buses don’t, on the whole, make profits. So they have to be subsidized. But who’s going to subsidize them? The rich, who don’t need them or use them? Ho, ho!

‘God rot her,’ said Sonia aloud. ‘Rich bitch!’ Sonia had been born a nice round pleasant thing. Her life and times had turned her sour, so now she could deliver a curse or two, effectively. God heard. God sent his punishment on Natalie. Or was it the Devil? He forgave her other sins, but got her for this one. Natalie committed the sin of carelessly splashing Sonia. Sonia cursed her. Misfortune fell on Natalie. Cause and effect? Surely not. Let’s just say coincidence, and remind ourselves that the trouble at Harrix and in the Harris household long predated this particular event. Except of course God may send his punishments retrospectively. We may all of us be being punished
now
for sins we are about to commit. Time may not be as linear as we suppose.

‘What have I done?’ asked Natalie, pretty white sinful hand, used to exploring Arthur’s chest hairs, to her mouth. She addressed the universe as much as Hilary.

Well, as I say, the wages of sin! There’s no telling. The day Natalie Harris splashed Sonia with mud was the day Harry Harris left for work in the morning and did not return home, ever. Some sins are obviously worse than others.

The Pleasures of Adultery

Pleasure I said, pleasure I meant. Adulterate means to spoil, to pollute. It also contains the sense of dilution by poison. It’s dropping a spot of cochineal into the white icing sugar and water mix and watching the colour spread – great streaks of vile red circling out with the first stir from that single central drop, gradually easing and diluting as you work into bland universal pink. So what (to change the metaphor, while keeping it domestic) if it’s like a blind tumbling right off its roller when you tug, bringing down with it in a cloud of dust every concept of honour, dignity, integrity, fidelity or trust you ever had! So what if you can’t raise the blind, and have to stay in the dark for ever! It’s worth it. That’s what I think.

Rot you, I said to Natalie. Rich bitch! Rot you. I, Sonia, cursed her. And her world fell down, clatter, clatter, clatter. Good!

There, I have blown my cover. The ‘I’ who speaks to you is Sonia. In my quest for sanity and self-improvement I do my docile best, as instructed by my psychiatrist, to objectivize myself and see myself as others see me – that is to say in the third person – when and as I enter into Natalie’s story. In Chapter One I reckon I just about succeeded. But ‘The Pleasures of Adultery’ have clearly been too much for me: in my excitement I have revealed all. Well, let’s get on. The tale is about Natalie, not me. A writer’s exercise in ego reduction! I do apologize for the ‘good!’ at the end of the previous paragraph. One should wish no one harm. But it’s what I felt, so there it stays, unedited.