Stories (42 page)

And now Stella was forced to remember, to think about having minded, minding, coming to terms, and the ways in which she now did not mind.

“I don’t think about it,” she said.

“Well, I don’t think I’d mind,” said Dorothy.

“Thanks for letting me know,” said Jack, short despite himself. Then he made himself laugh.

“And you, do you have affairs while Philip’s away?”

“Sometimes. Not really.”

“Do you know, Jack was unfaithful to me this week,” remarked Dorothy, smiling at the baby.

“That’s enough,” said Jack, really angry.

“No it isn’t enough, it isn’t. Because what’s awful is, I don’t care.”

“Well why should you care, in the circumstances?” Jack turned to Stella. “There’s a silly bitch Lady Edith lives across
that field. She got all excited, real live artists living down her lane. Well Dorothy was lucky, she had an excuse in the baby, but I had to go to her silly party. Booze flowing in rivers, and the most incredible people—you know. If you read about them in a novel, you’d never believe … but I can’t remember much after about twelve.”

“Do you know what happened?” said Dorothy. “I was feeding the baby, it was terribly early. Jack sat straight up in bed and said: ‘Jesus, Dorothy, I’ve just remembered, I screwed that silly bitch Lady Edith on her brocade sofa.’”

Stella laughed. Jack let out a snort of laughter. Dorothy laughed, an unscrupulous chuckle of appreciation. Then she said seriously: “But that’s the point, Stella—the thing is, I don’t care a tuppenny damn.”

“But why should you?” asked Stella.

“But it’s the first time he ever has, and surely I should have minded?”

“Don’t you be too sure of that,” said Jack, energetically puffing his pipe. “Don’t be too sure.” But it was only for form’s sake, and Dorothy knew it, and said: “Surely I should have cared, Stell?”

“No. You’d have cared if you and Jack weren’t so marvellous together. Just as I’d care if Philip and I weren’t….” Tears came running down her face. She let them. These were her good friends; and besides, instinct told her tears weren’t a bad thing, with Dorothy in this mood. She said, sniffing: “When Philip gets home, we always have a flaming bloody row in the first day or two, about something unimportant, but what it’s really about, and we know it, is that I’m jealous of any affair he’s had and vice versa. Then we go to bed and make up.” She wept, bitterly, thinking of this happiness, postponed for a month, to be succeeded by the delightful battle of their day-today living.

“Oh Stella,” said Jack. “Stell …” He got up, fished out a handkerchief, dabbed her eyes for her. “There, love, he’ll be back soon.”

“Yes, I know. It’s just that you two are so good together and whenever I’m with you I miss Philip.”

“Well, I suppose we’re good together?” said Dorothy, sounding surprised. Jack, bending over Stella with his back to his
wife, made a warning grimace, then stood up and turned, commanding the situation. “It’s nearly six. You’d better feed Paul. Stella’s going to cook supper.”

“Is she? How nice,” said Dorothy. “There’s everything in the kitchen, Stella. How lovely to be looked after.”

“I’ll show you our mansion,” said Jack.

Upstairs were two small white rooms. One was the bedroom, with their things and the baby’s in it. The other was an overflow room, jammed with stuff. Jack picked up a large leather folder off the spare bed and said: “Look at these, Stell.” He stood at the window, back to her, his thumb at work in his pipe bowl, looking into the garden. Stella sat on the bed, opened the folder and at once exclaimed: “When did she do these?”

“The last three months she was pregnant. Never seen anything like it, she just turned them out one after the other.”

There were a couple of hundred pencil drawings, all of two bodies in every kind of balance, tension, relationship. The two bodies were Jack’s and Dorothy’s, mostly unclothed, but not all. The drawings startled, not only because they marked a real jump forward in Dorothy’s achievement, but because of their bold sensuousness. They were a kind of chant, or exaltation about the marriage. The instinctive closeness, the harmony of Jack and Dorothy, visible in every movement they made towards or away from each other, visible even when they were not together, was celebrated here with a frank, calm triumph.

“Some of them are pretty strong,” said Jack, the northern workingclass boy reviving in him for a moment’s puritanism.

But Stella laughed, because the prudishness masked pride: some of the drawings were indecent.

In the last few of the series the woman’s body was swollen in pregnancy. They showed her trust in her husband, whose body, commanding hers, stood or lay in positions of strength and confidence. In the very last Dorothy stood turned away from her husband, her two hands supporting her big belly, and Jack’s hands were protective on her shoulders.

“They are marvellous,” said Stella.

“They are, aren’t they.”

Stella looked, laughing, and with love, towards Jack; for she saw that his showing her the drawings was not only pride in his wife’s talent, but that he was using this way of telling Stella not
to take Dorothy’s mood too seriously. And to cheer himself up. She said, impulsively: “Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

“What? Oh yes, I see what you mean, yes, I think it’s all right.”

“Do you know what?” said Stella, lowering her voice. “I think Dorothy’s guilty because she feels unfaithful to you.” “What?”

“No, I mean, with the baby, and that’s what it’s all about.”

He turned to face her, troubled, then slowly smiling. There was the same rich unscrupulous quality of appreciation in that smile as there had been in Dorothy’s laugh over her husband and Lady Edith. “You think so?” They laughed together, irrepressibly and loudly.

“What’s the joke?” shouted Dorothy.

“I’m laughing because your drawings are so good,” shouted Stella.

“Yes, they are, aren’t they?” But Dorothy’s voice changed to flat incredulity: “The trouble is, I can’t imagine how I ever did them, I can’t imagine ever being able to do it again.”

“Downstairs,” said Jack to Stella, and they went down to find Dorothy nursing the baby. He nursed with his whole being, all of him in movement. He was wrestling with the breast, thumping Dorothy’s plump pretty breast with his fists. Jack stood looking down at the two of them, grinning. Dorothy reminded Stella of a cat, half-closing her yellow eyes to stare over her kittens at work on her side, while she stretched out a paw where claws sheathed and unsheathed themselves, making a small rip-rip-rip on the carpet she lay on.

“You’re a savage creature,” said Stella, laughing.

Dorothy raised her small vivid face and smiled. “Yes, I am,” she said, and looked at the two of them calm, and from a distance, over the head of her energetic baby.

Stella cooked supper in a stone kitchen, with a heater brought by Jack to make it tolerable. She used the good food she had brought with her, taking trouble. It took some time, then the three ate slowly over a big wooden table. The baby was not asleep. He grumbled for some minutes on a cushion on the floor, then his father held him briefly, before passing him over, as he had done earlier, in response to his mother’s need to have him close.

“I’m supposed to let him cry,” remarked Dorothy. “But why should he? If he were an Arab or an African baby he’d be plastered to my back.”

“And very nice too,” said Jack. “I think they come out too soon into the light of day; they should just stay inside for about eighteen months, much better all around.”

“Have a heart,” said Dorothy and Stella together, and they all laughed; but Dorothy added, quite serious: “Yes, I’ve been thinking so too.”

This good nature lasted through the long meal. The light went cool and thin outside; and inside they let the summer dusk deepen, without lamps.

“I’ve got to go quite soon,” said Stella, with regret.

“Oh, no, you’ve got to stay!” said Dorothy, strident. It was sudden, the return of the woman who made Jack and Dorothy tense themselves to take strain.

“We all thought Philip was coming. The children will be back tomorrow night, they’ve been on holiday.”

“Then stay till tomorrow, I want you,” said Dorothy, petulant.

“But I can’t,” said Stella.

“I never thought I’d want another woman around, cooking in my kitchen, looking after me, but I do,” said Dorothy, apparently about to cry.

“Well, love, you’ll have to put up with me,” said Jack.

“Would you mind, Stell?”

“Mind what?” asked Stella, cautious.

“Do you find Jack attractive?”

“Very.”

“Well I know you do. Jack, do you find Stella attractive?”

“Try me,” said Jack, grinning; but at the same time signalling warnings to Stella.

“Well, then!” said Dorothy.

“A ménage à trois?” asked Stella, laughing. “And how about my Philip? Where does he fit in?”

“Well, if it comes to that, I wouldn’t mind Philip myself,” said Dorothy, knitting her sharp black brows and frowning.

“I don’t blame you,” said Stella, thinking of her handsome husband.

“Just for a month, till he comes back,” said Dorothy. “I tell you what, we’ll abandon this silly cottage, we must have been mad to stick ourselves away in England in the first place. The
three of us’ll just pack up and go off to Spain or Italy with the baby.”

“And what else?” enquired Jack, good-natured at all costs, using his pipe as a safety valve.

“Yes, I’ve decided I approve of polygamy,” announced Dorothy. She had opened her dress and the baby was nursing again, quietly this time, relaxed against her. She stroked his head, softly, softly, while her voice rose and insisted at the other two people: ? never understood it before, but I do now. I’ll be the senior wife, and you two can look after me.”

“Any other plans?” enquired Jack, angry now. “You just drop in from time to time to watch Stella and me have a go, is that it? Or are you going to tell us when we can go off and do it, give us your gracious permission?”

“Oh I don’t care what you do, that’s the point,” said Dorothy, sighing, sounding forlorn, however.

Jack and Stella, careful not to look at each other, sat waiting.

“I read something in the newspaper yesterday, it struck me,” said Dorothy, conversational. “A man and two women living together—here, in England. They are both his wives, they consider themselves his wives. The senior wife has a baby, and the younger wife sleeps with him—well, that’s what it looked like, reading between the lines.”

“You’d better stop reading between lines,” said Jack. “It’s not doing you any good.”

“No, I’d like it,” insisted Dorothy. ? think our marriages are silly. Africans and people like that, they know better, they’ve got some sense.”

I can just see you if I did make love to Stella,” said Jack.

“Yes!” said Stella, with a short laugh, which, against her will, was resentful.

“But I wouldn’t mind,” said Dorothy, and burst into tears.

“Now, Dorothy, that’s enough,” said Jack. He got up, took the baby, whose sucking was mechanical now, and said: “Now listen, you’re going right upstairs and you’re going to sleep. This little stinker’s full as a tick, he’ll be asleep for hours, that’s my bet.”

“I don’t feel sleepy,” said Dorothy, sobbing.

“I’ll give you a sleeping pill, then.”

Then started a search for sleeping pills. None to be found. “That’s just like us,” wailed Dorothy, “we don’t even have a
sleeping pill in the place…. Stella, I wish you’d stay, I really do. Why can’t you?”

“Stella’s going in just a minute, I’m taking her to the station,” said Jack. He poured some Scotch into a glass, handed it to his wife and said: “Now drink that, love, and let’s have an end of it. I’m getting fed-up.” He sounded fed-up.

Dorothy obediently drank the Scotch, got unsteadily from her chair and went slowly upstairs. “Don’t let him cry,” she demanded, as she disappeared.

“Oh you silly bitch!” he shouted after her. “When have I let him cry? Here, you hold on a minute,” he said to Stella, handing her the baby. He ran upstairs.

Stella held the baby. This was almost for the first time, since she sensed how much another woman’s holding her child made Dorothy’s fierce new possessiveness uneasy. She looked down at the small, sleepy, red face and said softly: “Well, you’re causing a lot of trouble, aren’t you?”

Jack shouted from upstairs: “Come up a minute, Stell.” She went up, with the baby. Dorothy was tucked up in bed, drowsy from the Scotch, the bedside light turned away from her. She looked at the baby, but Jack took it from Stella.

“Jack says I’m a silly bitch,” said Dorothy, apologetic, to Stella.

“Well, never mind, you’ll feel different soon.”

“I suppose so, if you say so. All right, I am going to sleep,” said Dorothy, in a stubborn, sad little voice. She turned over, away from them. In the last flare of her hysteria she said: “Why don’t you two walk to the station together? It’s a lovely night.”

“We’re going to,” said Jack, “don’t worry.”

She let out a weak giggle, but did not turn. Jack carefully deposited the now sleeping baby in the bed, about a foot from Dorothy. Who suddenly wriggled over until her small, defiant white back was in contact with the blanketed bundle that was her son.

Jack raised his eyebrows at Stella: but Stella was looking at mother and baby, the nerves of her memory filling her with sweet warmth. What right had this woman, who was in possession of such delight, to torment her husband, to torment her friend, as she had been doing—what right had she to rely on their decency as she did?

Surprised by these thoughts, she walked away downstairs,
and stood at the door into the garden, her eyes shut, holding herself rigid against tears.

She felt a warmth on her bare arm—Jack’s hand. She opened her eyes to see him bending towards her, concerned.

“It’d serve Dorothy right if I did drag you off into the bushes….”

“Wouldn’t have to drag me,” he said; and while the words had the measure of facetiousness the situation demanded, she felt his seriousness envelop them both in danger.

The warmth of his hand slid across her back, and she turned towards him under its pressure. They stood together, cheeks touching, scents of skin and hair mixing with the smells of warmed grass and leaves.