Female Friends (26 page)

Christie is worth nearly a half-million, already.

Christie finds his children strange. The boy looks weedy and the little girl’s nose seems to run a lot. He watches their antics curiously. He buys them expensive presents. Grace loves them, after all, and his clients and friends seem interested in them. He expects, in time, he will be too.

But now Grace slaps Christie’s face at a party, and everything changes. He feels he cannot trust her. At this time more than ever, surely, he is entitled to her support. And what does he find? That Grace has not only joined his enemies, but heads them.

Christie sleeps apart from Grace, that night.

At breakfast she looks dreadful. Her eyes are puffy and her hair is unkempt and her skin blotched. He rather likes the sight of her. Does he have so much power over his wife? When Christie makes love to Grace she remains composed; she seldom loses control of herself. He had thought he liked her to be like that, but perhaps this is better, this malleable puffiness?

‘Please forgive me,’ Grace says. ‘I’d had too much to drink. I behaved dreadfully.’

‘Yes,’ says Christie, ‘you did.’ He is cruel. ‘It was not a pretty sight. I hate to see a woman drink, especially in public.’

‘Of course that building falling down was nothing to do with you, how could it be. Everyone knows it was a bomb.’

‘It’s bad enough for me having to put up with an official Commission of Inquiry, without my wife holding one of her own.’

‘Please don’t go to work angry with me. Please don’t.’ Grace is panicky. The day stretches bleakly in front of her, overshadowed by his anger.

‘I’m not angry,’ Christie says, cold as ice. ‘Let’s forget it.’

‘It’s just that when people don’t grieve for the dead, it’s surprising.’

‘How do you know what I feel?’

‘You’re my husband.’

‘And what kind of wife are you proving to be?’ he asks. ‘Disloyal and treacherous. A wife should love her husband through thick or thin.’

‘But I do, Christie, I do.’

‘Do you? I wonder. Of course I can’t trust you to do my books any more, you realize that.’

She cries again. The maid, coming with more coffee, is shocked. Christie waits patiently until the maid has gone.

‘I don’t believe in your tears,’ Christie says. ‘They are not honest. They are not tears of remorse, but of self-pity. You accuse me of not feeling sorry for the dead, but did you cry when your mother died? No. You were a heartless daughter as you are a heartless wife.’

Grace cries some more. He finds the sight of her increasing moral and physical disorganization more and more exciting, and beckons her back up to bed. She follows, meekly. Christie makes love to Grace without his usual sense of deference, of male lust bowing before the shrine of female condescension. In fact, the more she cries the more he slaps her. There is as much pleasure, he decides, in punishing her as in pleasing her. Possibly more.

And Grace, to be fair, takes to punishment as a duck takes to water.

All the same, Christie is disappointed in Grace. He had so hoped for something to worship, that would worship him in return. And all he has, after all, is someone and something quite ordinary.

The Inquiry into the hotel disaster neither exonerates Christie nor blames him. The plans, such as can be traced, are flawless, in design and execution. It seems that the members of the Inquiry simply do not like Christie—which is hardly fair but the kind of thing that happens—so do not expect themselves to clear his name. Christie deals with the situation by increasing the proportion of the day which he devotes to socializing. Not a glimmer of self-doubt must he show, he knows it. Thus he can convert the faint cloud of approbation which hovers over his head into a halo of fashionable success. To be noticed is the main thing, these days.

‘All publicity is good publicity,’ as he remarks to Patrick Bates, whom he engages to paint Grace’s portrait, in the sanctity of her own home. ‘I don’t care what you make her look like, just so long as she’s on canvas and you’ve signed your name. The medium is the message.’

Grace, reckless, is all too pleased to see Patrick again. She has quarrelled with Christie, again, that morning. Their rows are all one-sided, these days. He is icy, cold and rational. She is tearful, noisy, hysterical. He watches her, fascinated and unmoved, stoking the fires of her grief and rage.

Grace tells Patrick that she does not like coupling with a mass murderer. Not for nothing is he named Christie, she says.

Grace is showing off, as a wife will to a lover. She does not for one moment think that Christie was responsible for the disaster. Perhaps she imagined the phone-bills, the whisky and the bribes. She can’t check, in any case. He no longer brings his books home.

But she cannot be unfaithful to Christie, she finds, not properly, however much she wants to, however much Patrick lies on top of her, trying to part her legs with his knee, telling her that art requires her cooperation, and asking her what difference does it make, since his sexual claim to Grace was prior to Christie’s.

Really? The incident is long since obliterated from Grace’s mind; it is only future events which will bring it to more precise recollection. Grace, these days, really believes she came to Christie a virgin bride, and that her secret passages belong to her husband alone.

It is not her mind, Grace finds, which rejects this adulterous lover; on the contrary, her mind welcomes him—she would be delighted to pay Christie out for his ill-treatment of her. Her body, however, seems to take a more serious and a less trivial attitude. Her legs remain crossed to protect that warm and pulsating mucous membrane from the strangeness of the intruder. It seems to expect familiarity and to reject what is unknown.

Ah, thinks Grace, and ah again, in Patrick’s arms. This Christie of hers, who breakfasts with her in the mornings, quite normally, like any ordinary man, and makes telephone calls from the missionary position—not quite so normally, perhaps, but merely (he says) because he’s a busy man and when he thinks of things he likes to see to them immediately—this daily and nightly Christie of hers, this father of her children, to outward appearances so honourable and efficient, to all inward appearances (she has this minute convinced herself, Patrick’s warm breath in her mouth, her ears, her nose) is a villain, a devil, a monster, a criminally negligent constructor of unsafe buildings and she is entitled to be unfaithful to him. At whatever sacrifice to herself.

Patrick’s mouth moves downward from her lips, while his hand moves upwards from her knees. Her legs capitulate, relax.

Patrick likes to paint women nude, or if they insist, wrapped in white bathtowels. Christie insists on the towel, and Grace has chosen the smallest she can find, such is her mood that morning.

Women who go to linen cupboards and find them neatly piled with clean, warm, sheets and towels, put there by other women, are given to such moods, says Marjorie. They have the time. Seduction is not for working women, or mothers, or earnest housewives—it is for the idle and absurd.

‘This doesn’t count,’ says Patrick, ‘it really doesn’t. This isn’t sex, it’s pleasure.’

And so it is, and Grace moans and tosses with gratification, taken by surprise as she is by the unexpected nature of this event. Unexpected! By her, perhaps. But by Christie? For it is Christie who has led her to Patrick, almost by the hand.

Marjorie once told Grace of the urge ambitious husbands feel to render up their wives into the arms of the men they most respect and admire, as if in hopes that high achievement was an infection which could be venereally transmitted.

‘Eskimos, perhaps,’ said Grace, shocked. ‘They lend their wives to passing guests. But not the kind of men we know. Really, Marjorie!’

Perhaps she was wrong? Perhaps Christie, her golden fiancé, her suitable husband, is more of an Eskimo than she thought? Grace, lying entranced by her own pleasure, and her own wickedness, gains the strength to view her once golden fiancé, her once suitable husband, with impartial eyes. She must now believe the evidence of her unwifely ears, and unwifely eyes, and accept that her husband is a sadist, a mass murderer, and in matters of sex, an Eskimo.

For yes, he delivered her over to Patrick. He did. Believing first virginity and then fidelity in his wife to be as much part of his life and as necessary to his existence as the head on his neck, yet without a doubt Christie unclothed her, wrapped her in the scantiest of towels and pushed her towards Patrick, a man he greatly admires.

Indeed, Patrick Bates is much admired by everyone who’s anyone. He is an artist, and he makes money out of artistry. Big money. His name is internationally recognized. He is accepted in palaces and hovels alike. He goes freely into houses where Christie, for all his money and connections, can barely scrape an invitation. And if he gets drunk inside them, and breaks up the furniture and the best vases, then Patrick is excused. (That he is seen as a kind of court fool, in these high places, escapes Christie the Colonial.) Women of all kind and conditions fall down at Patrick’s feet. To be painted by Patrick Bates is to have slept with Patrick Bates, everyone who’s anyone knows that. And what illustrious company to keep, albeit by proxy. What brothers and sisters in experience it makes of everyone who’s anyone.

‘Patrick and his fashionable cock,’ as Chloe says sadly to Marjorie, who has been to see Midge, bearing clothes for the children and a kettle for the cooker, so Midge doesn’t always have to boil the water in a saucepan—and brings back tales to Chloe of desolation and poverty, much inlaid with protestations of undying and sacrificial love, like glossy marquetry on some shoddy old pine box.

Meanwhile Patrick says this doesn’t count, and Grace allows herself to agree with him. This delicate intrusion, this deferential nibbling pleasure, his head between her legs in the most transatlantic of fashions, not eye to eye boldly, but servicing and being serviced, sight unseen, can surely be no more infidelity than masturbation is. No, it doesn’t count.

Christie, returning unexpectedly, thinks on the contrary that it does count.

It is Patrick’s belief—and experience has so far confirmed the belief—that if only he can appear suave enough, experienced enough, and rich enough, then husbands tend to be not just forgiving but appreciative of the interest taken in their wives. He does his best, for he is fond of Grace, and when he says he loves her (for it is his custom, these days, to comfort women with the notion that he does) he almost means it.

Then the conversation goes: Christie advancing, Patrick retreating, Grace, still all of a tingle, covering her nakedness with cushions, and clearly panicking.

Patrick
Why Christie! How good to see you! But how unexpected! Grace and I were renewing an old acquaintance.

Christie
An old acquaintance?

Now Christie, remember, believes that Grace came to him a virgin (and so, in a way, does Grace herself). Why else the white wedding dress from an expensive couturier, the marquee, the champagne, and so on? Patrick’s opening gambit stops him in his tracks.

Grace
It’s not true, Christie. Only this once today. I swear it. And we were only fooling about. You shouldn’t be so unpleasant to me at breakfast. It’s all your fault.

Christie knows she is lying. Grace, married to Christie, often lies, about how much she has spent on clothes, or what book she is reading: trivial lies, born of the fear of censure.

Christie
Liar.

Grace
I never lie to you, Christie, never.

Christie
Don’t think you’ll get a penny out of me, you won’t.

Worse and worse, what does he mean? Divorce? Later on in Grace’s life, when it becomes clear to her that the worst can and does happen, and that no amount of lies or false evidence prevents it, she quite gives up disguising actuality and develops a taste for the truth, in all its most telling, trenchant and destructive forms. But now, caught in flagrante delicto, she is at her most absurd.

Grace
Christie. I love you. I’d die without you. Patrick means nothing to me. I was angry because you let him paint me and you know what he’s like, and I never wanted it—

Christie (Ignoring her)
As for you, Patrick, get out of my house before I kill you.

Patrick
I’ve nowhere near finished the painting. I need another three sittings at least—

Christie advances on the easel to destroy the barely daubed canvas, but prudence and a proper sense of value stop him.

Christie
You can do it from photographs.

 
Grace
Oh Christie, you’ve forgiven me—

But he hasn’t. It is one thing to give your wife to the man of your choice, quite another to find she has done the choosing herself.

Patrick (Departing)
For a man who conducts his business affairs from on top of his wife, you take a very humourless view of sex, Christie.

He shouldn’t have said it, of course. If he’d kept quiet Grace might have been able to make her peace with Christie. But then Grace should never have whispered to Patrick the details of Christie’s sexual habits. It was disloyal of her: she knew it at the time, and perhaps she deserved to lose her husband; and then again, perhaps she wanted to, and it was a healthy instinct which led her thus to disloyalty and ruin. That sadist Christie, that mass murderer; that monster of sex and status intertwined, rendered erect by notions alone—notions of beauty possessed, of virtue sullied, of business and sex rolled into one, and not a laugh, not a glimmer of a smile as Grace lay there waiting, penetrated, and Christie got on the telephone not his office and his all-night staff, but wrong number after wrong number owing to a fault at the exchange. And not one person in all the world, not a friend, not a lawyer, not even Patrick, who only laughed, no-one to allow that she, Grace, was married to a monster. Later, they’d take her side, and sympathize, and encourage, as Christie the father revealed himself as villain. But Christie the husband, never. She should be grateful, they thought.