The Life and Loves of a She Devil (4 page)

‘Our parents,’ said Bobbo, ‘are sent to try us!’ He enjoyed Ruth’s dependence upon him: the way her dark, deep, bright eyes followed him about the room. He loved to sleep with her; she was a warm, dark, eternal sanctuary and if the light was on he could always shut his eyes.

‘Perhaps they’ll get married,’ said Brenda to Angus, ‘and both move out.’

Ruth used up rather more hot water than Brenda had anticipated, especially in the bath. In hotels hot water comes free, or appears to.

‘I hardly think so,’ said Angus. ‘A boy like Bobbo needs to marry wisely, with an eye to money and connections.’

‘I had neither,’ said Brenda, ‘and yet you married me!’ And they kissed, longing to be alone together, to be without the younger generation.

Bobbo went back to college, passed the last of his accountancy exams, came home and contracted hepatitis. Ruth found that she was pregnant.

‘They’ll have to get married,’ said Brenda. ‘I’m far too old to be nursing an invalid.’ Ruth was sleeping on the sofa while Bobbo was ill, and had broken its springs.

‘Marriage!’ said Bobbo, appalled.

‘She’s a peach amongst women,’ said Brenda. ‘I don’t know how your father will manage without her. She’s efficient and conscientious and
good.
’

‘But what will people
say
?’

Brenda pretended not to hear and put the house up for sale. She and Angus were moving back into an hotel, now Bobbo could stand on his own feet. Audrey Singer announced her engagement to another. Bobbo drank half a bottle of whisky, had a bad relapse, and married Ruth when she was five months pregnant. Hepatitis is a depressing and debilitating illness, and it seemed to Bobbo, at the time, that his mother was right and one wife was much like another. The great advantage of Ruth was that she was
there.

Ruth wore a white satin wedding gown to the Register Office and Bobbo realised perhaps he was wrong. There could be a considerable difference between one wife and another. He thought he saw people sniggering. As soon as the baby was born, she conceived the next.

After that Bobbo insisted that Ruth should wear a coil and looked around for more suitable recipients of his affection and sexual energy. As the effects of hepatitis faded, he found them easily enough. He did not like to be dishonest or hypocritical and would always tell Ruth what had happened and what would happen next, if he could manage it. He told her that she too was free to experiment sexually.

‘We’ll have an open marriage,’ he’d told her before they were married. She was four months into pregnancy and still being rather sick.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘That we must both live our lives to the full and always be honest with each other. Marriage must surround our lives, not circumvent them. We must see it as a starting point, not a finishing line.’

She’d nodded in agreement. Sometimes, to stop herself being sick, she would hold her mouth together with her fingers. She did it now, while he talked about personal freedom. He wished she wouldn’t.

‘True love isn’t possessive,’ he explained to her. ‘Not our kind of domestic, permanent love. Jealousy, as everyone knows, is a mean and ignoble emotion.’

She had agreed and run to the bathroom.

Presently, rather to his dismay, he found the pleasure of sexual experiment enhanced by the knowledge that he would eventually report it to his wife. He stood outside his own body as witness to erotic events. It made the excitement greater and the responsibility less, since he could share it with Ruth.

It was obvious to both of them that it was Ruth’s body which was at fault, for what she saw as difficulties and he did not. He had married it perforce and in error and would do his essential duties by it, but he would never be reconciled to its enormity, and Ruth knew it.

Only his parents seemed to expect him to be faithful and kind, as Angus was to Brenda and Brenda to Angus. They treated Bobbo and Ruth as proper husband and wife; not somehow accidentally espoused.

Ruth had wheeled the babies’ pram around the park and taken comfort from licks of their ice lollies and read romantic novels, amongst them those by Mary Fisher; and Bobbo had got on in the world.

Shortly after they had moved in to Eden Grove Bobbo had seen Mary Fisher across a crowded room at his own party and she had seen him and said —

‘Let me be your client.’

And he had said —

‘At once.’

— And the past paled for Bobbo, including even the agony and ecstasy of Audrey Singer, and the present became all powerful and the future full of wonderful and dangerous mystery.

This was how the affair began. Bobbo and Ruth gave Mary Fisher a lift home from the party. Mary Fisher had parked her Rolls-Royce impetuously, the sooner to enjoy herself, but unfortunately, for she had obstructed the flow of city traffic, and while she flickered and glittered at her host, the police arrived to tow the vehicle away.

She would, she said, send her manservant Garcia in the morning to retrieve the foolish thing. In the meantime, she said, could Bobbo and Ruth give her a lift back, since they were on her way home?

‘Of course!’ cried Bobbo. ‘Of course.’

Ruth thought that Mary Fisher somehow meant
she
was on
their
way home, but when Bobbo stopped on the corner of Eden Avenue and Nightbird Drive to drop Ruth off, realised her mistake.

‘At least take her to the door,’ protested Mary Fisher, in an act of condescension which Ruth was never to forgive, but Bobbo said, laughing —

‘I don’t think Ruth is a natural rape victim, somehow. Are you, darling!’ and Ruth said, loyally, ‘I’ll be perfectly all right, Miss Fisher. It’s just that we live in a dead end and reversing’s so difficult in the dark! And we’ve left the children without a baby-sitter: I really must get back as soon as possible.’

But they weren’t listening, so she got out of the back — Mary Fisher was in the front, next to Bobbo — and before the door shut heard Mary Fisher say — ‘You’ll never forgive me. I live ever such a way away. Almost to the coast. Actually, on the coast itself,’ and Bobbo said — ‘Do you think I didn’t know that?’ and the door closed and there Ruth was, standing in the dark, while the car zoomed away, and the powerful red rear lights shot off into blackness. Bobbo never drove like that with her: thrum, thrum! And she never caused Bobbo any inconvenience: never asked for a lift here, or an errand there: he always made such a fuss if she did. How did Mary Fisher dare? And why did her presumption charm him, and not offend him? A lift to the
coast
while Ruth would walk in the rain, rather than delay Bobbo fifteen seconds.

She went home and thought about it, lying awake all night, and of course Bobbo did not come home, and in the morning Ruth shouted at the children, and then told herself it wasn’t fair to take her distress out on them, and got herself under control, and ate four toasted muffins with apricot jam when the house was quiet and she was alone.

Bobbo came home very tired and missed dinner and went straight to bed and fell asleep and didn’t wake until seven the next morning when he said, ‘Now I know what love is,’ and got up and dressed, staring at himself in the mirror as if he saw something new there. He was away the next night, and after that two or three nights every week.

Sometimes he’d say he was working late and staying over in town; but sometimes, if he was very tired or very elated, would confide that he’d been with Mary Fisher, and he’d talk about the dinner guests — famous people, rich people, whom even Ruth had heard of — and what there’d been to eat, and the witty, charming, naughty things Mary Fisher had said, and the dress she’d worn, and what it was like afterwards, when at last he could take it off —

‘Ruth,’ he’d say, ‘you’re my friend; you must wish me well, in this. Life is so short. Don’t begrudge me this experience, this love. I won’t leave you; you mustn’t worry, you don’t deserve to be left; you are the mother of my children: be patient, it will pass. If it hurts you, I’m sorry. But let me share it with you, at least —’

Ruth smiled, and listened, and waited, and it didn’t pass. She wondered, in the quiet days, about the nature of women who cared so little for wives.

‘One day,’ she said, ‘you must take me to dinner at the High Tower. Don’t they find it strange that your wife is never there?’

‘They’re not your sort of people,’ Bobbo said. ‘Writers and artists and things like that. And no one who’s anyone gets married, these days.’

But he must have passed the remark on to Mary Fisher, for presently Ruth was asked to the High Tower. There were only two other guests: the local solicitor and his wife and both elderly. Mary Fisher said the others had cancelled at the last moment but Ruth did not believe her.

Bobbo had done his best to stop Mary Fisher issuing an invitation to Ruth, but had failed.

‘If she’s part of your life, darling,’ said Mary Fisher, ‘I want her to be part of mine. I want to meet her properly, not just as someone you discarded on a street corner in the middle of the night. None of my heroines would stand for that! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We’ll make it one of the duty dinners, not the fun ones.’

Sometimes Bobbo asked Mary Fisher why she loved him. Mary Fisher said it was because he was lover and father and what was forbidden and what was allowed all rolled into one, and anyway love was mysterious, and Cupid was wilful and why did he want to know, couldn’t he just
accept
?

Bobbo did. Ruth came to dinner. She’d tripped and blushed and the hairs on her upper lip and chin caught the light at dinner: she had spilled wine on the tablecloth and said the wrong things to the wrong people, surprising and upsetting things.

‘Don’t you think,’ she’d said to the solicitor, ‘that the more police there are the more crime there is?’

‘You mean,’ he’d said, kindly, ‘the more police, the less crime. Surely.’

‘No, not surely at all,’ said Ruth, excitedly, spinach quiche slobbering down her chin, and Bobbo had to silence her with a kick under the table.

Sometimes Bobbo thought that Ruth was mad. It wasn’t just that she didn’t look like other people: she couldn’t be relied upon to act like them either.

Bobbo feared that since Mary had properly met Ruth she had cooled a little towards him. It did no one any good to be associated with the unhappy and unfortunate. Love, success, energy, health, happiness went round in a closed circle, self-perpetuating and self-energising, but precariously balanced. Alter one spoke of the wheel and the whole machine could falter and stop. Good fortune so easily turns to bad! And now he loved Mary Fisher and he loved Mary Fisher and he loved Mary Fisher and his parents had come to dinner and his wife had wept and made a scene, and thrown the dinner about and he did not like her at all. Ruth stood between him and happiness: full square! And in all the history of marriage had there ever been such full-squaredness?

Bobbo had said to Mary Fisher, ‘Mary, don’t you feel guilty about having an affair with a married man?’

And Mary had said, ‘Is that what we’re having, an affair?’ and his heart had pounded in terror, until she’d added, ‘I thought it was more than that. It
feels
like more than that! It feels like for ever,’ so that joy had silenced him, and she’d gone on to say, ‘Guilty? No. Love is outside our control. We fell in love: it is no one’s fault. Not yours. Not mine. And I suppose because Ruth expects nothing, she will never have anything. We can’t spoil our lives because she was born with so little joy. You acted out of kindness when you married her, and I love you for it, but now, my love, be kind to me. Live with me. Here, now, for ever!’

‘And the children?’

‘They are Ruth’s crown, and her jewels. They are her comfort. She is so lucky. I have no children. I have no one except you.’

She said what he wanted to hear. It was entrancing. And now he sat at a suburban table, with his mother, his father, and his past and thought of Mary Fisher, and how she needed him, and longed for a future, and Ruth came in at last with the soup tureen.

Ruth’s brave smile faltered over the soup. Her parents-in-law stared up at her in calm and pleasant anticipation. And Ruth gazed at the three dog hairs in that greyish foam which is good mushroom soup, thickened by cream and put through the blender.

The dog’s name was Harness. Bobbo had bought him for Andy on Andy’s eighth birthday. Ruth looked after him. Harness did not like Ruth. He saw her as a giantess, an affront to the natural order of things. He accepted the food she gave him, but he slept where she told him not to, slunk under cupboards and snapped at searching hands, chewed the upholstery and set up a din if left anywhere he did not want to be. He shed hairs, stole food, ate butter by the pound (when he could find it) and vomited it up directly. Bobbo, on those Sundays he was at home, loved to go walking with Harness in the park, and Andy would go too, and father and son would feel happy and ordinary and comfortable. Ruth would stay behind, removing dog and cat hairs from fabric of one kind or another with a special vacuum brush, battery powered. She did not like Harness.

‘Don’t let the soup get cold, Ruth,’ said Bobbo, as if this was her usual habit

‘Hairs!’ was all Ruth said.

‘It’s a nice clean dog,’ said Brenda. ‘We don’t mind, do we, Angus?’

‘Of course not,’ said Angus, who did. As a child Bobbo had always wanted a dog, and Angus had always prevented him from having one.

‘Can’t you even keep the dog out of the soup?’ asked Bobbo. It was the wrong thing to say, and he knew it as soon as it was said. He did try not to say ‘can’t you even’ to Ruth, but it did slip out whenever he was feeling at odds with her, which of late had been more and more.

Tears appeared in Ruth’s eyes. She picked up the soup tureen. ‘I’ll sieve it,’ she said.

‘What a good idea!’ said Brenda. ‘Then no harm’s done.’

‘Bring the soup back at once,’ cried Bobbo. ‘Don’t be so silly, Ruth. It isn’t a disaster. It’s three dog hairs. Just pick them out.’

‘But they might be the guinea pig’s,’ said Ruth. ‘He was running along the dresser shelf.’ She liked the guinea pig least of all the children’s pets. Its shoulders were too hunched and its eyes too deep. It reminded her of herself.