The Rules of Life (8 page)

Children? They had never discussed the matter. It would have been totally inappropriate for Gabriella to have had his, Timothy Tovey’s, offspring. He could not have acknowledged them. Nor, he thought, would he have continued to support Gabriella had she had children by another man. As it was, he believed he had dealt very fairly with her. But still sometimes, just sometimes, he would wake up in the night, and reach out for Gabriella, and find instead the staunch body of Janice.

‘And you feel like weeping,’ I finished his sentence for him, since he could not, ‘but quite what for you can’t make out.’

We were interrupted by the arrival of Janice Tovey, and I was not sorry. He seemed to be telling me a tale of waste and sorrow: of lives and happiness thrown away. But Janice, although I must say plain of feature, was a determined and positive woman, who seemed to have lived a good enough life, and when warned by her husband that Gabriella was roaming the city as a re-wind merely laughed and said: ‘She never bothered me when she was alive. Why should she now she’s a ghost?’ Poor Gabriella, I thought. The only one in the world to take herself seriously—but that, no doubt, is the fate of women who do not marry, and who do not have children, for whatever reason.

‘Love’, I said reflectively to Honor, when I got home, ‘is a woman’s whole existence. To men, it is a thing apart.’ Honor just laughed, and put a plate of high-fibre beans on unbuffered whole meal toast in front of me, and said I had changed, probably for the better, but I must now stop thinking about love and get on with the reform of the GNFR. Honor is, of course, quite right. Strange days, indeed. Oh, strange days.

Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel,
The Fat Woman’s Joke
, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series
Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil
, the film adaption of her 1983 novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1987 by Fay Weldon

978-1-4804-1259-0

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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