The Life and Loves of a She Devil (3 page)

Ruth left the room. He heard the click of the oven opening: he heard a little cry, a crash. She had burned her fingers. The vol-au-vents were on the floor—he knew it. And so small a distance to carry them—from the oven to the table!

Bobbo turned up the volume of the music and went in to find chicken and cream sauce and pastry on the lino-tiled floor and the dog and the cat already scavenging. He kicked the animals into the garden and pushed Ruth into a chair and told her not to upset the children, who were upset enough by her behaviour as it was, and scraped everything up methodically and as hygienically as possible, reconstituting if not individual pastry cases then at least a suggestion of a large, single, chicken-filled flan. It was in the interests of hygiene that Bobbo left a thin film of food upon the floor. He estimated its value at some $2.

He required the cat and the dog to come and lick up the film, but both were now sulking outside and would not come back in. Instead they sat upon the wall, next to his parents, and like them waited for the domestic climate to change.

‘Do stop crying,’ pleaded Bobbo in the kitchen. ‘Why do you make such a fuss about everything? It’s only my parents coming to dinner. They don’t expect all this effort. They’d be perfectly happy with a simple meal.’

‘No, they wouldn’t. But I’m not crying because of that.’

Then what?’

‘You know.’

Ah, Mary Fisher. He did indeed know. He tried reason.

‘You didn’t expect me, when I married you, never to love anyone again?’

‘That is exactly what I expected. It is what everyone expects.’

She had been cheated, and knew it.

‘But you’re not like everyone, Ruth.’

‘You mean I’m a freak.’

‘No,’ he said, cautiously and kindly. ‘I mean we are all individuals.’

‘But we’re married. That makes us one flesh.’

‘Our marriage was rather one of convenience, my dear. I think we both acknowledged that at the time.’

‘Convenient for you.’

He laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because you think in clichés and talk in clichés.’

‘I suppose Mary Fisher doesn’t?’

‘Of course she doesn’t. She is a creative artist.’

Andy and Nicola, the children, appeared in the kitchen door: he little and light, she large and looming. The wrong way round. He seemed more girlish than she. Bobbo blamed Ruth for having got the children wrong. He felt their mother had done it on purpose. His heart bled for them. Children open up exquisite nerves and twang them daily, painfully. He wished they had never been born, even while he loved them. They stood between him and Mary Fisher and he had strange dreams in which they came to sorry ends.

‘Can I have a doughnut?’ asked Nicola. Her response to domestic crisis was to ask for food. She was very overweight. The expected answer, ‘No’, in its uttering, would set up a counter-irritant and thus save her parents from more distress. They would be so busy chiding her they would forget to chide each other, or so she believed; wrongly.

‘I have a splinter,’ said Andy. ‘Look, I’m limping!’

He demonstrated, walking through the film of food, limping on into the living room, treading sauce into the carpet. It was autumn green, toning prettily and safely with avocado walls and sea-green ceiling. Bobbo reckoned the greasy footprints would add $30 to the cleaning bill. Come its annual overhaul, the carpet would now have to go for Special and not Regular cleaning.

Outside, Angus and Brenda decided that Ruth would by now have recovered her composure. They left their wall and came up the garden path and rang the forest chimes of the front door.
Pling-plong!

‘Please don’t embarrass me in front of my parents,’ begged Bobbo, and Ruth began to weep the harder: she uttered great gulping sobs and heaved her giant shoulders. Even her tears seemed bigger and more watery than other people’s. Mary Fisher, thought Bobbo, wept nice neat little tears, which had an altogether stronger surface tension than his wife’s and would surely be worth more on the open matrimonial market. If only there were such a thing, he would trade Ruth in at once.

‘Come in,’ he said to his parents at the front door. ‘Come in! How wonderful to see you both! Ruth has been peeling onions. She’s a little tearful, I’m afraid.’

Ruth ran up to her room. When Mary Fisher ran, her footsteps were light and bright. Ruth’s weight swayed from one massive leg to another and shook the house each time it fell. Houses in Eden Grove were designed not just for littler people, but for altogether lighter ones.

N
OW. IN MARY FISHER’S
novels, which sell by the hundred thousand in glittery pink and gold covers, little staunch heroines raise tearful eyes to handsome men, and by giving them up, gain them. Little women can look up to men. But women of six foot two have trouble doing so.

And I tell you this; I am jealous! I am jealous of every little, pretty woman who ever lived and looked up since the world began. I am, in fact, quite eaten up by jealousy, and a fine, lively, hungry emotion it is. But
why
should I care? you ask. Can’t I just live in myself and forget that part of my life and be content? Don’t I have a home, and a husband to pay the bills, and children to look after? Isn’t that enough? ‘No!’ is the answer. I want, I crave, I die to be part of that other erotic world, of choice and desire and lust. It isn’t love I want; it is nothing so simple. What I want is to take everything and return nothing. What I want is power over the hearts and pockets of men. It is all the power we can have, down here in Eden Grove, in paradise, and even that is denied me.

I stand in my bedroom, our bedroom, Bobbo’s and my bedroom, and compose my face the sooner to return to my matrimonial duties, to wifedom and motherhood, and my in-laws.

To this end I recite the Litany of the Good Wife. It goes like this:

I must pretend to be happy when I am not; for everyone’s sake.

I must make no adverse comment on the manner of my existence; for everyone’s sake.

I must be grateful for the roof over my head and the food on my table, and spend my days showing it, by cleaning and cooking and jumping up and down from my chair; for everyone’s sake.

I must make my husband’s parents like me, and my parents like him; for everyone’s sake.

I must consent to the principle that those who earn most outside the home deserve most inside the home; for everyone’s sake.

I must build up my husband’s sexual confidence, I must not express any sexual interest in other men, in private or in public; I must ignore his way of diminishing me, by publicly praising women younger, prettier and more successful than me, and sleeping with them in private, if he can; for everyone’s sake.

I must render him moral support in all his undertakings, however immoral they may be, for the marriage’s sake. I must pretend in all matters to be less than him.

I must love him through wealth and poverty, through good times and bad, and not swerve in my loyalty to him, for everyone’s sake.

But the Litany doesn’t work. It doesn’t soothe: it incenses. I swerve: my loyalty swerves! I look inside myself: I find hate, yes: hate for Mary Fisher, hot, strong and sweet: but not a scrap of love, not the faintest, wriggling tendril. I have fallen out of love with Bobbo! I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.

‘B
UT WHY WAS SHE
crying?’ asked Brenda of Bobbo, as Ruth lumbered upstairs and the house shook. ‘Is it the time of the month?’

‘I expect so,’ said Bobbo.

‘Such a nuisance for a woman,’ said Brenda, and Angus coughed a little, embarrassed at the turn the conversation was taking.

Presently Ruth came down, smiling, and served the soup.

Twelve years now since Bobbo first met Ruth. She was one of the girls working in Angus’s typing pool. Angus was in the stationery business, working up to his second million, which the introduction of Value Added Tax was later to whittle away to nothing. Angus and Brenda were for once living in a house, not an hotel, which Bobbo appreciated, although he himself was away at his Further Studies. Accountancy exams go on for many years, keeping the son (it is usually a son) unusually dependent upon the father.

Ruth was a helpful, willing girl, able to concentrate and not for ever staring at her reflection in mirrors. If anything, Ruth avoided mirrors. She lived away from home, although still in her teens. Her bedroom had been needed to accommodate her step-father’s model train set. She and the train could not safely share a room, because of her clumsiness and the delicacy and sensitivity of the equipment. One of them had to go, and Ruth was the easier to move. It can take months to adjust train tracks properly and permanently: a young woman can settle anywhere.

So Ruth had taken up residence in a hostel mostly inhabited by shop girls; a particularly light and fine breed of young woman. The belts that cinched their tiny waists would scarcely encompass one of Ruth’s thighs.

The leaving of the childhood home had been unemotional: it was obvious to everyone, including Ruth, that she had outgrown the place. She did not like to make a fuss. Her school had been a convent, run by nuns of the more superstitious, less intellectual kind; it concentrated on teaching the female and household graces, and examinations, apart from those in shorthand-typing, were not taken. The training encouraged stoicism, not selfish emotions, nor attention-seeking tears.

Ruth’s half-sisters Miranda and Jocelyn did well enough at St Martha’s, especially in Greek dancing, which they demonstrated very sweetly at end-of-term concerts. Ruth was useful, too, on such occasions, shifting props. ‘You see,’ the nuns said, ‘everyone has a value. There is a place for everyone in God’s wonderful creation.’

Shortly after Ruth moved into the hostel, her mother left home. Perhaps she too felt driven into a corner by the ever-growing train set, or was disappointed by the lack of sexual enthusiasm so often displayed by those who get caught up in this rewarding hobby, or perhaps it was—as Ruth imagined—that the sudden absence of the daughter set the mother free. At any rate Ruth’s mother ran off with a mining engineer to Western Australia, on the other side of the world, taking Miranda and Jocelyn with her, and Ruth’s step-father presently made do with a woman of fewer expectations, who saw no particular reason why Ruth should visit. Ruth, after all, was not a blood relative, not remotely family.

These facts, coming to Brenda’s notice by way of Angus, made her feel sorry for the girl.

‘She needs a helping hand!’ said Brenda. Ruth was always the one at the switchboard when Brenda rang through early, late, or in the lunch hour, courteous, calm and efficient. The other girls would be out shopping for little scarves and earrings and eyeshadow and so forth and all on Angus’s time (no wonder he was so often bankrupt); but never Ruth. ‘I was once an ugly duckling,’ Brenda said to Angus, then. ‘I know what it feels like.’

‘She’s not an ugly duckling,’ said Angus. ‘Ugly ducklings turn into swans.’

‘I think,’ said Brenda, ‘the girl needs a proper home at this, the turning point in her life. She could stay with us. I could help her make the most of herself and she could do a little cooking and cleaning in the evenings, after work, in return. And I really have to have someone for the ironing. She would pay rent, too, of course. She is a very proud girl. Probably about a third of her wages.’

‘There isn’t room,’ said Angus. The house they lived in was very small, which was how they both felt comfortable. But Brenda pointed out that while Bobbo was at college his room was empty during term-time.

‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘An empty room just
feels
wrong.’

‘You’ve lived in so many hotels,’ he said, ‘you’re beginning to think like an hotel manager. But I know what you mean.’

Brenda and Angus both felt, but did not quite like to say, that Bobbo’s childhood and dependency had been going on for a long time: for too long, in fact. His room should by now be free, surely, for them to use as they wished. Parenthood could not go on for ever. And if they wished to fill the room up Ruth would do the filling very well indeed. ‘Bobbo can always sleep on the sofa,’ said Brenda. ‘It’s very comfortable.’

Bobbo was surprised and annoyed, coming home for Christmas, to be offered a sofa for a bed, and to find his old schoolbooks moved out of his cupboard to make way for Ruth’s flat, trodden-down shoes.

‘Look upon Ruth as a sister,’ said Brenda. ‘The sister you never had!’

But Bobbo had that preoccupation, common to the only child, a fascination with sibling incest, and took his mother’s words as justification for the fulfilling of his fantasies and crept into what after all was his own bed, by dead of night. Ruth was warm and soft and broad and the sofa was cold and hard and narrow. He liked her. She never laughed at him, or despised his sexual performance, as did Audrey Singer, the girl whom Bobbo currently loved. Bobbo felt that his seduction of Ruth, this vast, obliging mountain, served Audrey right.

It was sexual suicide of the most dramatic kind.

‘See what you have done!’ he said, in his heart, to Audrey.

‘See what you have driven me to! Ruth!’

‘See,’ he said to his mother, in his heart, killing off any number of birds with one stone, ‘see what happens when you turn me out of my own room, my own bed. I’ll simply climb back into it, no matter who’s there.’

Ruth was happy enough with the arrangement. She hugged the knowledge of her secret love to her heart, and felt healed, and a great deal more like everyone else, just taller, which didn’t after all notice when she was lying down. When her step-father’s new wife rang at Christmas to see how she was getting on she was able to reply, with truth, that she was getting on perfectly well, thus enabling the guilty couple to forget her properly. Ruth’s mother presently wrote to say this would be the last letter ever, since her new husband wished her to put her past behind her, and they both now belonged to a wonderful new religion which required total obedience from the wife to the husband. In such acquiescence, wrote Ruth’s mother, lay peace. She gave her blessing (and the Master’s too, for she had been allowed to consult him personally about Ruth: the Master was the Oneness’s representative on this earth as the wife was the husband’s representative) and was thankful that Ruth was now fully grown and able to look after herself. She was more worried about Miranda and Jocelyn, who were still so young, but the Master had told her everything would be all right. This letter was a last, final, loving goodbye.