The Rules of Life (7 page)

‘He begged me to say no more and actually offered to kill his wife if that would suit me. But I said no, I had no wish to be a murderer’s wife. Nor did I have any desire to go to Bolivia, or New Zealand, or any of the other places he suggested. We would stay where we were, and he would go back to work as Mr Cunningham’s assistant. Aldred protested that he could never, ever, stand such humiliation as that, but, as I pointed out, he had no choice. Who else would employ him on such favourable terms? Cosmetic surgeons, unlike medical researchers, are interchangeable. I, for my part, vowed never to see Mr Cunningham in private again—nor did I, or only once or twice, when he claimed his hand trembled as he operated from sheer deprivation of me. It does not do to make these emotional breaks too quickly. Another rule: men like to feel that they are doing the giving up. If you are seen to give them up they take offence and can turn quite nasty.

‘So now we made it up, dear Aldred and I, and sealed our new beginning with many kisses, and our house grew to feel warm and safe again. I took a degree in Fine Arts at the Courtauld Institute, and Aldred learned, eventually, to work happily with Mr Cunningham, though I think it was a little hard for him. Men are such seekers after status! See two cockerels, fighting over who shall rule the roost, stand crowing in the dung heap, and fluff the feathers of the silly hens! Well might blood flow, for the one who loses hardly lifts his head again to groan, let alone crow, and eats last, on leftovers, and grows thin and wretched, despised even by the lamest, scraggiest hen.

Aldred is here on the other side: my beloved Aldred is with me. He took my hand as we swept along the corridor between life and death. He took it as a brother would a little sister’s: we were warm and safe together. We mistook our roles in life, or they were mistaken for us. How full of error the world is! We should have been family, brother and sister: the sex between us was born simply of youth, energy and proximity. All that we had was great affection, the one for the other—and of course my capacity to cause him pain. Mr Cunningham is over here too. He left cosmetic surgery some time in the early eighties and became a specialist in in-vitro conception and artificial insemination, a venture which ended badly. His clients believed they were being fertilised by the sperm of ‘virile young medical students’, but in fact of course the sperm was all his, and it was reckoned at the court case that there are some five hundred of his children in Central London alone. Well, why not? And though his clients were disconcerted—indeed, some were appalled—to know that their children had been fathered not by some vaguely imagined Adonis but by this wizened, trembling, shortsighted septuagenarian, they should not have worried. Once indeed and in truth Clive Cunningham had been Adonis enough, and sperm does not acknowledge age. It is forever in its prime.

‘Clive Cunningham took my other hand as we swept along the corridor of the dying and I saw a smile pass between him and Aldred in the glow of events that joined us all, in which there was no pain, only connection. I say
smile
, I say
saw,
because these are the only words I have to describe what is beyond words—such feeble, incomplete instruments they are! Let me go, whoever you are! Why do you make me speak, use words where no words belong, only connection? Truly I was mistaken: I have no rules to give you: there is such a tangle in the sewing box! Where does one thread begin, another end? How can I know? Please let me rest in peace!’

My poor Gabriella’s voice faded out. She seemed to suffer. I wanted not to hear, but how could I refuse experience? I threw switches and turned dials, almost to overload. I would not let her go.

‘Here, see, a strand,’ she went on, after a while, as if fingers and mind had been busy un-plaiting. A strong one, a central one, around which the tangle forms. Yes—see!—that must be Timothy Tovey. It is plaited and woven and multicoloured; it is shot through with silver and gold. How wonderful it is! But look! Someone has washed him badly, made the water too hot. The colours have run. It need never have happened. Any person can be washed, if proper care and attention is paid, even those which say “Dry Clean Only”—which is mostly only a manufacturer’s convenience—oh, my poor head! What is a word, and what is a label, and what is a principle, and who can we trust? …’

Here, for all my efforts, the tape ends, abruptly; and, fortunately, with it the sensuous spell cast over me by that elderly woman, Gabriella Sumpter, dead these three months. Lucky for Honor: how does a woman deal with a husband in love with a re-wind? I have no doubt he moons and picks at his food and longs for death, the sooner to join his beloved, to be part of the joyous throng in the Great Script Conference—for that, I have no doubt, is where Gabriella Sumpter found herself.

Honor would have done her best to keep me in this world, and fed me on dumplings and lemon meringue pie, packet-made. I don’t think she has ever washed a garment by hand, let alone ironed one. She does not even possess an iron: she pushes a week’s multicoloured laundry into the washing machine and switches it to ‘whites, heavy’ and gets on with her life. That is why my underclothing is always harsh and pinkish-purplish. But neither would Honor have deceived me with the likes of Clive Cunningham.

I counted my blessings, shook the spell of Gabriella Sumpter from me, and prepared a solid and constructive report on the Sumpter Tapes for the coming GNFR Synod. I argued that they contained no evidence that the GSWITS was attempting to contact his humble creation, or giving us the reassurance we need that we have, indeed, through our contacts with the re-winds, put our fingers on the meaning of the universe.

The rules of laundry are not the rules of life! I included some fairly strong criticism of the current clique of pinner priests. The report may well be something of a sensation. But I was not finished with Gabriella Sumpter. That night she came to me in a dream: a high-bosomed sixteen-year-old girl in a white dress, singed around the hem, her hair dishevelled, her lovely eyes wild. She begged me to take a message to Janice Tovey, to say there was nothing to grieve about, since everything was part of everything else. How familiar, how sweet her voice was. But I decided I would do nothing; Janice Tovey would hardly welcome such a message. Re-winds are everywhere these days, and the messages they send are not necessarily more sensible in death than in life.

On the following night Gabriella came again, and this time Honor saw her too: the presence in our bedroom was so bright it was as if someone had switched on the light. Honor, usually such a sound sleeper, woke with a start and, seeing a stranger in the room, groped for the teeth she kept in a glass beside the bed. I have no doubt she wanted to look her best, for Gabriella, at some thirty years, was the most ravishing creature I have ever seen, dressed in the cream-coloured muslin nightdress she had spoken of, gathered under perfect breasts with a lilac ribbon, dark hair flowing round the sweetest face.

‘Tell Timothy Tovey to hurry,’ she said. ‘Tell him he is the thread that binds us together.’ At that she faded out—but not, I thought, without a slight frown at the grey pinkly-purple state of our bed-linen; though that last may be my imagination.

‘Who on earth was that?’ Poor Honor was terrified. I explained a little of the story, and she suggested, wisely, that perhaps I should do what I had been asked and get in touch with the Toveys, in case Gabriella next chose to appear in her winding sheet—no matter how beautifully made by Miss Martock—fresh from her grave and deliquesced about the eyes. A horrible thought!

So that is what I did. The Toveys lived in a magnificent house on Hyde Park. It is one of the sadder features of the GNFR that it tends to maintain, indeed even increase, such inequities as already exist between the haves and the have-nots. Although dramatic individual stories of rags to riches, riches to rags, are a common enough feature in Western societies nurtured under the GNFR, on the whole there is little social mobility. The poor just gently get poorer; the rich, not so gently, get richer: our religion seems to breed social passivity. To consent is not to strive. The
idea
is so important in the formation of civilisations, is it not? Notions of socialism and a fair society faded along with Christianity: the eighties finally saw them off. The GSWITS, I fear, is a great admirer of Dickens.

Be that as it may, it was obvious to me that money was the least of the Toveys’ worries. Depression, however, may well have been. I saw a Rolls Royce parked in the drive, and a Bentley in the garage, but both in a dull old-fashioned black, not the brilliant spots and swirls so popular these days. The interior of the Toveys’ house, though flawlessly decorated, was bleak and reproachful in its grandeur: the very flowers in the vases seemed to sigh and wilt in the unkind light of central chandeliers which sent unflattering shadows through the too-high rooms. The many leather couches were so plumply upholstered as to make it more likely that they would throw one off than welcome one in. It was a household run by a woman on a perpetual diet of the senses. It would be uncharitable of me to suggest a likeness between Honor and Janice Tovey—suffice it to say that I understood at once why Timothy Tovey should have sought solace in Gabriella’s arms.

Mrs Tovey being out at a fund-raising, I could not pass on Gabriella’s message to her in person—somewhat, I must say, to my relief. I was shown instead into the library, where I found Timothy Tovey, a courteous white-haired man who still had about him the remnants of the vigorous good looks of his youth. I had, I think, expected to see him bowed down by grief at the loss of Gabriella, but he seemed cheerful enough, even lively. He was obviously a man with a great appetite for life. He talked to me freely; he was a member of the GNFR and although I am not of the high priesthood I am sufficiently advanced in the lay hierarchy to hear confession, or, as we like to call it, life-story.

‘What, my Gabriella!’ he exclaimed. ‘Taped by the priests! Come back as a re-wind! Well, it doesn’t surprise me. That woman’s egocentricity would survive a hundred deaths. Waiting for me in the hereafter? Janice isn’t going to like that! Waiting for Janice, too, you say? Oh, my Lord!’ And he laughed, heartily.

I was, I must say, a little taken aback. He apologised. ‘I loved Gabriella,’ he said, ‘very much indeed at one time of my life. But is there to be no end to love? I held her hand when she died simply because she had sent for me, quite out of the blue. I had not seen her or spoken to her for twenty years: though GSWITS knows she had cost me enough in that time. And, seeing her as she was, old and ill, on her deathbed, it was hard to remember just why she had inspired such passion in me. She could be a very trying woman, you know. She once refused to see me for two years, on the grounds that she had discovered I slept with my own wife in a double bed!’

‘Three,’ I said. I tried not to sound too reproachful. Timothy Tovey had his part to play. As do we all.

‘As long as that? I can hardly remember. But I do recall she wanted to run off with some Greek waiter: she spent two years trying to persuade him to marry her, but she failed and came back to me. That was what all that was about. Did she tell you the truth? I doubt it. I first encountered her via her dental X-rays. We shared the same dentist, way back, when I was young. The poor man was obviously hopelessly in love with her—quite deranged. “
See
,” I remember him saying, waving the X-ray plates of a total stranger in front of me, as I reclined helpless in his chair, “
a perfect arch! A crime if anything, happens to those teeth
.” I could not help but notice the name. Gabriella Sumpter! It entranced me, together with the concept of a perfect arch. And I suppose it is in a man’s nature to love and want what another man loves and wants, albeit a dentist. So I sought out the young woman, and found the most beautiful creature imaginable, living with, though not married to, a prosperous, fashionable and very boring young doctor. I resolved at once to make her my mistress.’

And so the sorry story continued. Timothy Tovey had no intention of damaging his prospects in the diplomatic service by marrying Gabriella, though he confessed to promising her he would, the more easily to seduce the poor woman. They succeeded in keeping their relationship hidden from the doctor for some years, until Miss Martock, then resident as housekeeper in Orme Square, eventually became party to it—and she it was who, under a terrible burden of guilt, informed Aldred Ray about what was going on under the pear tree at home, and in a little service flat in Mayfair away from home. Gabriella forgave Miss Martock for her indiscretion—she relied heavily by then upon her housekeeper’s dressmaking skills. But Aldred could not forgive Gabriella; alas, he hanged himself in the bathroom, there where little pink-lacquered birds flew across gilded tiles. After which scandal, of course, it was all the more difficult for Timothy Tovey to regularise his relationship with Gabriella, although he did admit that at this stage he very much wanted to. He introduced Gabriella to his mother, and to his surprise Lady Julia quite liked the girl, in spite of her past, and would almost, he thought, have consented to the match, and encouraged him to face and overcome any consequent difficulties in his career, had it not been for Gabriella’s extraordinary behaviour, one morning, over the spoiling in the wash of a cheap muslin nightgown. She had fussed and carried on as if it had been some expensive silk extravaganza, quite spoiling Lady Julia’s breakfast. It was apparent that the girl had no idea at all how to manage the servants. She had been badly brought up. A diplomat’s wife has to know how to deal with staff. It is the key to her husband’s success.

And so, thoughts of marriage were abandoned and Gabriella was set up by Lady Julia in the little house in St John’s Wood, where it seemed she could do no harm. Here, Timothy Tovey explained, he was a frequent visitor, until shortage of money obliged him to marry Janice—a less distant relative of royalty—who was able to both line his pocket and further his career.

‘I loved Janice,’ Timothy Tovey said to me, ‘as a man loves a wife, and I appreciated Gabriella as a man appreciates a mistress. The wife stokes the fire; the mistress warms her hands at the blaze.’ The passion between himself and Gabriella had gradually faded. Some ten years into the marriage, when Janice had put him on a diet, came a time when the flame rekindled, and Timothy Tovey visited Gabriella more frequently than the once-a-fortnight which had been his custom. But that too soon passed. The bedclothes, he complained, were always uncomfortably scratchy. Finally the visits stopped altogether.