The Life and Loves of a She Devil (2 page)

Bobbo is doing very well in the world. He has become successful. Once he worked humbly as an official in the Revenue Department but then he resigned, threw caution to the winds, risked his pension and began to do private tax work. Now he earns a great deal of money. It suits him to keep me tucked away in Eden Grove. Bobbo has a pleasant apartment in the centre of the city, fifteen kilometres further still to the east, fifteen kilometres further from Mary Fisher, where he gives occasional parties for his clients, where he first met Mary Fisher face to face, where he stays overnight when business presses. So he says. I very seldom go to Bobbo’s apartment, or his office. I let it be known I am too busy. It would be embarrassing to Bobbo if his smart new clients saw me. We both know it. Bobbo’s graceless wife! All very well, I daresay, for an income-tax collector; hardly for a tax expert working in the private field, growing rich.

Mary Fisher, I hope that tonight you are eating tinned red salmon and the tin has blown and you get botulin poisoning. But such hope is in vain. Mary Fisher eats fresh salmon, and in any case her delicate palate could be trusted to detect poison, no matter how undetectable it might be in other, cruder mouths. How delicately, how swiftly she would spit the erring mouthful out and save herself!

Mary Fisher, I hope such a wind arises tonight that the plate-glass windows of the tower crack and the storm surges in, and you die drowning and weeping and in terror. I make puff pastry for the chicken vol-au-vents, and when I have finished circling out the dough with the brim of a wine glass, making wafer-rounds, I take the thin curved strips the cutter left behind and mould them into a shape much like the shape of Mary Fisher, and turn the oven high, high, and crisp the figure in it until such a stench fills the kitchen that even the extractor cannot remove it. Good.

I hope the tower burns and Mary Fisher with it, sending the smell of burning flesh out over the waves. I would go and fire the place myself, but I don’t drive. I can only get to the tower if Bobbo drives me there and he no longer does so. One hundred and eight kilometres. He says it is much too far.

Bobbo, parting Mary Fisher’s smooth little legs, shiny-calved, shiny-thighed, inserting his finger, as his habit is, where presently his concentrated self will follow.

I know he does the same to her as he does to me, because he told me so. Bobbo believes in honesty. Bobbo believes in love.

‘Be patient,’ he says, ‘I don’t intend to leave you. It’s just that I’m in love with her and at the moment must act accordingly.’ Love, he says! Love! Bobbo talks a lot about love. Mary Fisher writes about nothing but love. All you need is love. I assume I love Bobbo because I am married to him. Good women love their husbands. But love, compared to hate, is a pallid emotion. Fidgety and troublesome, and making for misery.

My children come in from the midsummer garden. A pigeon pair. The boy, slight like my mother, and like her given to complaints. The girl, big and lumpy, as I am, voicing a vindictiveness that masks the despair of too much feeling. The dog and the cat follow after. The guinea pig rustles and snuffles in its corner. I have just turned out its cage. The chocolate for the mousse bubbles and melts in the pan. This is the happiness, the completeness of domestic, suburban life. It is what we should be happy with: our destiny. Out of the gutter of wild desire on to the smooth lawns of married love.

Sez you, as I heard my mother’s mother say, on her deathbed, when promised eternal life by the attendant priest.

B
OBBO’S MOTHER BRENDA STOLE
around the outside of her son’s house at No. 19 Nightbird Drive. She had a playful disposition, which her son had not inherited. Brenda meant to surprise Ruth by pressing her nose against a windowpane. ‘Coo-ee, I’m here,’ she would mouth through the glass, ‘the monster, the mother-in-law!’ Thus she would apologise for her difficult role in the family and get the evening off, so she imagined, to a good start, any tension there might be dissolving into laughter.

Brenda’s little heels sank into the smooth lawn, spoiling both them and it. The grass was newly mown. Ruth liked mowing the lawn. She could push the mower with one powerful hand, and the job was swiftly and easily done, whilst her littler neighbours perspired and complained, coping, as they always had to, with grass left to grow too long in the belief, dashed weekly and re-born weekly, that mowing the grass was what husbands did.

Bobbo’s mother peered into the kitchen window where the mushroom soup simmered, waiting for its dash of cream and splash of sherry, and nodded her approval. She liked things to be properly done—so long as someone else did it. She looked through the open French windows into the dining room, where the table was laid for four and the candles were in their sticks, the silver dishes polished and the sideboard dusted, and sighed her admiration. Ruth was good at polishing. One rub of the powerful fingers and stains disappeared. Brenda was obliged to use an electric toothbrush to keep her own silver nice—a lengthy and irritating business—and she envied Ruth perhaps this one thing: her way with silver.

Bobbo’s mother Brenda did not envy Ruth’s being married to Bobbo. Brenda did not love Bobbo and never had. She quite liked Bobbo, and quite liked her husband; but even there, feelings were elusive.

The smell of night-scented stock filled the air.

‘How nicely she does everything,’ said Bobbo’s mother to her husband, Angus. ‘How lucky Bobbo is!’ Angus stood on the path, waiting for his wife’s playfulness to abate, and for her to stop looking in windows. Brenda wore beige silk and gold bracelets and liked to feel timeless. Angus wore a brownish check suit and a yellow ochre shirt and a blue spotted tie. No matter how rich or poor they happened to be, Brenda always looked a little too elegant, and Angus just a little absurd. Brenda had a little tip-tilted nose and too-wide eyes, and Angus a great fleshy nose and narrow eyes.

Bobbo wore grey suits and white shirts and pale ties and was careful always to look serious and neutral, biding his time, concealing his power. His nose was straight and strong and his eyes just right.

Brenda looked into the family room and saw the two children watching television. The remains of an early supper stood on the table. They were washed, combed and ready for bed: they seemed happy, although graceless. But then with Ruth for a mother what could you expect?

‘She’s such a good mother,’ whispered Brenda to Angus, beckoning him closer to admire. ‘You have to respect her.’

Brenda shook her heels free of clinging earth and went round to the laundry room where Bobbo was at that moment removing an ironed, folded shirt from a neat pile. He wore only vest and pants, but hadn’t Brenda bathed him when he’d been a little boy? Can a mother be frightened of her son’s nakedness?

Brenda did not notice the neat little bite marks on her son’s upper arm: or perhaps she did, and assumed they were insect bites. They certainly could not have been made by Ruth’s teeth, which were broad, heavy and irregular.

‘She’s such a good wife,’ said Bobbo’s mother, moved almost to tears. ‘Look at that ironing!’ Bobbo’s mother never ironed if she could help it. In the good times indeed, she and Angus liked to live in hotels, simply because there’d be a valet service. ‘And what a good husband Bobbo has turned out to be!’ If she thought her son was narcissistic, staring so long in the mirror, she kept her thoughts to herself.

But Bobbo looked in the mirror at his clear, elegant eyes, his intelligent brow and his slightly bruised mouth, and hardly saw himself at all: he saw the man whom Mary Fisher loved.

Bobbo, as he dressed, was working out in his head a monetary scale for love-making. He felt happier when he could put a fiscal value to things. He was not mean: he was happy enough to spend money. He merely felt that life and money were the same thing. His father had implied it often enough.

‘Time is money,’ Angus would say, hurrying his son off to school, out of the house. ‘Life is time, and time is money.’ Sometimes Bobbo would have to walk, because there was no money for the bus. Sometimes he’d go by chauffeur and Rolls-Royce. Angus had made two millions and lost three during the course of Bobbo’s childhood. A life full of ups and downs for a growing boy! ‘In the time you take to do that,’ he’d say to the toddler, Bobbo, trying to lace his tiny shoes with untrained fingers, ‘I could make a thousand pounds.’

A monetary scale for love-making, Bobbo thought, would have to set the sum of earning-capacity-wasted plus energy- consumed against the balance of pleasure-gained plus renewed-creativity. A cabinet minister’s coitus, however feeble, could work out at some $200, a housewife’s entr’acte, however energetic, a mere $25. An act of love with Mary Fisher, a high earner and energetic with it, would be worth $500. An act of love with his wife would be graded at $75, but of course occurred more often so unfortunately would yield a diminishing return. The more often sex with a particular person happened, Bobbo believed, the less it was worth.

Bobbo’s mother extracted her heels once more from the well-tended earth of the new lawn, beckoned her husband, and with him made her way to the front of the house. She looked into the living room and there, behold, was Ruth’s mountainous back, bent over the record player, arranging a pleasant selection of pre-dinner and post-dinner music.

Ruth straightened up, knocking her head against the oak beam over the fireplace. The house had been designed for altogether smaller occupants.

As Ruth’s mother-in-law prepared to flatten her nose against the windowpane and be playful, Ruth turned. Even through the distorting glass it was clear that she had been crying. Her face was puffy and her eyes swollen. ‘The suburban blues!’ murmured Brenda to Angus. ‘It affects even the happiest!’ As they watched Ruth clawed wild hands to heaven, somewhere above the sea-green ceiling, as if entreating the descent of some dreadful god, some necessary destiny.

‘I think she’s a little more upset than usual,’ said Bobbo’s mother, unwillingly. ‘I hope Bobbo is being good to her,’ and she and Bobbo’s father went to sit on the low bench outside the house and stare into the deepening evening that fell over Nightbird Drive, and talk in a desultory way about their own and other people’s lives.

‘We’ll give her time to calm down,’ said Bobbo’s mother. ‘Dinner parties, even when they’re only family, can be quite a strain!’

Bobbo’s mother had a calm word and a quiet and pleasant thought for every occasion. No one could understand whence Bobbo’s questing, striving, complaining nature came. Bobbo’s father shared his wife’s capacity for positive thinking: sixty-six and two-thirds of the time such thinking was justified. Things often turn out for the best, if you expect they will: then all you have to do is leave well alone. But Bobbo, unlike his parents, did not like leaving things to chance. Bobbo’s ambition was a one hundred per cent success rate in life.

Bobbo finished dressing. He took his laundered, folded clothes for granted. When he stayed with Mary Fisher the manservant, Garcia, saw to these things; that Bobbo took for granted too.

‘What is Mary Fisher having for supper?’ wondered Bobbo, as his wife had earlier, and longed to be one of the delicate morsels his mistress put into her mouth. Ah, to be absorbed, incorporated! A slice of smoked salmon, a segment of orange, a drop of champagne!

These were the delicacies that Mary Fisher loved to eat, working out the fantasies of others. Fastidious, impossible Mary Fisher! ‘A little smoked salmon,’ she’d say, ‘really costs no more than a large quantity of tinned tuna. And it tastes so much nicer.’

It was half a lie and half the truth; it was like so much that Mary Fisher said, and wrote.

Bobbo went into the living room and discovered his large wife clawing at empty air.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘Because I bumped my head,’ she said, and he accepted the lie because his parents would be there any minute, and he had, besides, very little interest any more in what his wife said or did, or why she cried. He forgot Ruth, and wondered, as these days he often did, what exactly was the nature of the relationship between Mary Fisher and Garcia, her manservant. Garcia sliced the smoked salmon, uncorked the champagne and polished the wide glass panes of the lower floors inside and out. Other household tasks, more menial, he delegated to the maids. Garcia was paid $300 per week, which was twice what live-in menservants were customarily paid by other of Bobbo’s clients. Garcia carried little pots of coffee in to his mistress and put them on the great glass table on its pale steel pier, upon which Mary Fisher wrote her novels, on thin, thin paper with clear, red ink. Her writing was spidery and tiny. Garcia was tall and fleshy and dark and young, and his fingers were long and sometimes Bobbo wondered where they strayed. Garcia was twenty-five and just the look on him sent Bobbo’s mind at once to sexual speculation.

‘But Bobbo,’ Mary Fisher would say, ‘surely you aren’t jealous! Garcia’s young enough to be my son.’

‘Oedipus was pretty young too,’ was Bobbo’s reply, making Mary Fisher laugh. How pretty her laugh was and how easily it came. Bobbo wanted no one to hear it but himself. Yet how could he possibly be with her all the time? Certainly there was no other way of keeping her to himself and ensuring her fidelity but by being there. Yet Bobbo had money to earn, work to do, children to father, and a wife, clumsy and weeping and boring though she might be, to husband. He had undertaken marriage: he would see it through. And since he suffered, so would Ruth.

His wife seemed to him to be immeasurably large, and to have grown larger since he told her of his love for Mary Fisher. He asked her if she was putting on weight, and she said no, and stood on the scales to prove it. Fourteen stone, three pounds. A pound or so less, even, than usual! It could only be in his mind, then, that she loomed larger.

Bobbo put on a record. He thought it might drown the sound of his wife’s crying. He chose Vivaldi to soothe himself and her. The
Four Seasons.
He wished she would not weep. What did she expect of him? He had never claimed to love her. Or had he? He could hardly remember.