Wicked Women (13 page)

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Pierre, but he wouldn’t have liked them if he heard them so Lucy said, “I’m really glad I’m not at home, Pierre. This time of year. When the days are really short, and winter hasn’t quite caught up with them and the skies just seem to sulk. Why, they sulk even worse than Bertie on a bad day,” and she laughed again, betraying her other child, for the sake of love. “And the rooms of the house are so crowded and sad,” said Lucy, “and here everything is simple and graceful and plain. I promise you I don’t miss a thing. You make up for it all, Pierre.”

Lucy’s brother Joseph would have arrived on Christmas Eve, as was his custom, bearing gifts. They would be the wrong gifts: an impossible doll, an unworkable cannon, a scarf she hated, the kind of pen Edwin never used. Joseph’s talent for the wrong gifts was a marvel: it was a joke she and Edwin shared: a look between them every year, no more: that much they had at least: this equality of shared experience, which grew every year as the Christmas Tree grew, so slowly you could never see it, soil never quite right, too wet or too dry, so you feared for it; but every Christmas an inch or so higher. This year it would have to go on its side to get through the front door, and could only stand in the window arch—would Edwin and Joseph talk about Lucy, or would her name not be mentioned? An impossible subject, an inexplicable situation: a woman lost to duty, lost to honour, lost to motherhood: a woman altogether vanished away, erased from the mind, nameless. A subdued source of sorrow, of better-never-born-dom.

“No children to tug at my skirts,” said Lucy, “no brother at my sympathy, no husband at my conscience. A day like any other, dawning bright and fair on our new life together. Just you and I, and art, and beauty, and love, and music. All the things that passed poor stuffy old Edwin by!”

“I pity Edwin,” said Pierre. “He had no ear. A man who rations music to two hours a day has no ear and a man who locks a piano has no soul!”

The better to enforce his ruling, Edwin had kept the piano closed; unlocking it at two o’clock after lunch: emerging from his study at four o’clock to close it once again. In the mornings, thus freed from practice, Lucy and Pierre had walked in the woods, and talked about music, and presently love, and then more than talked, and Pierre had explained to Lucy how unhappy she was, and how her way of life stifled her, and how he could not be a great artist without her, and Bessie had seen them in the woods and Lucy had forged one of Edwin’s cheques and paid both their passages over; and left Edwin a note and was gone; taking her jewellery because Pierre said she must, and the way not to think about any of it was to be in bed with Pierre. They had scarcely left the cabin on the way over: they had been the talk of the ship and she hadn’t cared. To fly in the face of all things respectable intensified the pleasure she had with Pierre: what was forbidden was sweet: she hoped they would never reach Paris, where everyone felt as she and Pierre did, but of course that was silly of her: what was forbidden could not be kept up for long and in any case had to be sandwiched between the permitted in order to count—why had there been no one to stop her? If you were a child wasn’t that what happened? That someone stopped you? She’d relied on Edwin for that all her grown life, but since she couldn’t tell him about Pierre how could he have helped her? But she blamed him because he hadn’t, because he’d been so busy with his book he hadn’t even noticed the time she was spending with Pierre: it was Edwin’s fault she had left.

She wondered what she and Pierre would do all day. When they were out of bed there seemed not very much to do, except wait for other days to arrive, or messages to come which didn’t come from friends she had only heard of, never seen. If she was at home on this day she would be so busy—it would be all best clothes and mince pies and the gifts beneath the Christmas Tree, and a formal kiss from Edwin before the unwrapping ceremony began—

Pierre said, “We’ll smuggle the suitcase out after lunch when Madame takes her nap. She sleeps well: she doesn’t care how the rest of the world toils for her profit! Then in the evening you dress as me and I’ll dress as you, and that will be the best disguise in the world, and we’ll escape. We’ll be so clever!” Lucy thought it was probably better as an idea than it would be as an actuality—she could get into his coat but her jacket would never stretch over his shoulders—but didn’t say so. It was the kind of prank Bertie would think of. Pierre had explained to her how Edwin was a father/husband, but what did she have now instead—a son/lover? Was such a thing possible?

“I could offer her a gold charm from my bracelet,” said Lucy. “In fact I think I’ll do that.”

And to her astonishment Pierre hit her, or she thought that was what had happened, since there was a sudden kind of stinging blackness around her head, but how could she know; no one had ever hit her before. For a second or so she couldn’t see, and was perhaps suffering from amnesia, for she couldn’t quite remember where she was; but yes, it wasn’t home, it was indeed an inn somewhere in the South of France, and she was leaning against a whitewashed wall, while a strange man rather younger than herself apologised for something rather trivial, and she could hear a kind of
knock, knock, knock,
which she thought was Edwin chopping down the Christmas Tree, the one that had started little and grown deep and strong. Edwin divided it root from branch, because it spoke of a celebration Lucy could no longer name, and anyway it spoke a lie. But of course the sound was only the
knock, knock, knock
of the landlady at the door, demanding money she and Pierre didn’t have, speaking in a language Lucy didn’t understand, but who knew them better than they knew themselves. She could see that to look after yourself you would have to know yourself, but who was there in that land, in that time, to hear such a thing if it were said?

W
HEN GOSLING WAS TWO,
his body was smooth, plump and bronzed. He ran in and out of the waves at the water’s edge and was happy. “He’s a real water baby,” his mother would say fondly. But she carried his little brother in her arms, and her eyes were even softer and kinder for the baby than they were for the little boy, and Gosling noticed.

She called the older one Gosling in pure affection, and the younger one Duckling, which was even more affectionate. Gosling once pushed Duckling under the bath water, but fortunately help came in time: for Duckling, that is, not Gosling.

“Did your mother hope you’d grow up to be a swan?” asked Gosling’s wife, interested.

“I don’t know what she thought,” was all he said. He would volunteer information about his past, but did not like his wife to be too inquisitive. His past was a private planet, full of unscalable heights and hopeless depths where he alone was brave enough to wander. “Anyway,” Gosling added, “it’s ugly ducklings, not goslings, who grow up to be swans. My little brother was the one she had hopes for.”

“Well, I think you grew up to be a swan,” she said. They had been married for a year when she said that. She was proud of him: his fine dark eyes, his smooth skin, his sexual confidence; the gregarious fits which interrupted his more sombre moods. She felt she was very ordinary, compared to him. Her name was Eileen, but he called her Leda, and this gratified her very much.

Eileen met Gosling in a London park at the edge of a swimming pool. He was a Sunday father; he took his little daughter Nadine swimming while, he complained, his ex-wife entertained her lover. Nadine did not share her father’s enthusiasm for the water; no, but she endured it with patience and polite smiles. She was a good girl. Eileen, that Sunday afternoon, splashed about in the water happily enough, though she did complain of its coldness. But then her parents kept a hotel in Bermuda: Eileen had spent her youth in warm water, chasing sailboats. English water was hard and bitter with chlorine: why did so many people want to go in it? The pool was crowded.

Gosling and Eileen collided underwater: he had to help her to the surface. His hand, firm upon her arm, seemed to transmit some kind of magnetic current: at any rate his touch acted like an electric shock. She squealed aloud and snatched her arm away in alarm; nearly sank. They touched again, tentatively. Again she let out a little yelp. That made him laugh. “We are seriously attracted to each other,” he said as they surfaced, and she had to agree. She was eighteen: he was thirty.

When she pulled herself out of the pool, she felt awkward and unattractive; she regretted her freckled, friendly face, her strong, muscular body: men liked her, but that was all. She worried at once about her epileptic brother: she would have to confess to it. Then who would want her? Her brother’s existence spoiled everything. Her eyes were pink and smarting. She wished she were not a swimmer: she would like to be Diana the Huntress, chaste and fair, icy and cool like the moon, not goose-pimpled.

“I like swimming,” Gosling said.

“I love it,” she said, and forgot about Diana and thought his brown eyes grew troubled for a minute, and then he dived back into the water and swam lazily and confidently up and down the pool, knowing quite well she was waiting for him.

“You could be a champion if you tried,” said Eileen, as they drank hot chocolate from the drink-dispenser. Her mother had told her the way to win a man was to flatter him, and Eileen wanted to win Gosling as never before had she wanted to win a man.

“I don’t want to be a champion,” he said. “I just enjoy the water.”

“Oh, so do I!” And so she did: she loved the buoyancy of her body in this murderous liquid, which healed and soothed when it didn’t kill. Water was both adversary and friend: it parted in front of her, closed behind her. How powerful she was when she cleaved the water. Eileen cleaved unto Gosling the day they met, and after that they never wanted to part. Not really. She didn’t tell him all the things that swimming meant to her, partly because she didn’t know she was unusual and thought most people felt the same, and partly because she did not want to love what he only liked. While Eileen had an intense relationship with water, Gosling just swam. He’d swum, he said, in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel; even in the Dead Sea.

“But the Dead Sea isn’t really water,” Gosling said. “It’s just a chemical soup.” The Dead Sea had brought tears to his eyes. He hadn’t liked that. He was an engineer and travelled the world, bringing back to Eileen, who became Leda on their wedding day, all kinds of strange presents.

Leda stayed home and looked after her stepdaughter Nadine, and presently her own baby Europa, and joined a swimming club and won a race or two.

Leda told Gosling about her victories when he returned from abroad and he raised an eyebrow. “Swimming is something to enjoy,” he said, “it shouldn’t be something competitive,” and she was obliged to agree. He told her about the ocean rollers of Florida and the surfing there, so they thought about these natural wonders instead of victories at the local swimming club.

The family went for an excursion to the seaside: Gosling and Leda and Nadine and Europa; they pottered about rock-pools and avoided the patches of oil on the sand, and Leda tried not to wonder how far was the coast of France and just how fast she could swim there.

Gosling swam and dived and ducked and lashed about. He was, oh yes he was, the real water baby his mother had defined; he was the gosling who was never quite the duckling who never quite became a swan. He was passed over for promotion. Perhaps he had spent too much time on foreign beaches, and not enough in foreign offices. But he was the man who liked swimming: he thought the world well lost for that. His mother had died of cancer, painfully, when he was a young man, at the time when it seemed important for him to renounce and defy her: at the wrong time.

He felt his mother had given him contrary instructions. She had named him Gosling, in the hope of his becoming a swan: she had called him water baby, and water babies surely did not grow up.

When he was on foreign trips he was unfaithful to Leda. He stayed in hotels where there were swimming pools, and always some girl, who did not swim but splashed about, who would admire Gosling’s prowess, his lazy confidence in the water, his wet, rippling muscles which gave promise of excitement to come. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Gosling would say to Leda. “I like them, I don’t love them.” Gosling did not believe in lying. “We must be honest with each other,” he’d say.

Leda started training in earnest. Her times startled the trainer at the local swimming club.

“You’re four seconds off the Olympic crawl record,” he said. “Four seconds is a long time,” said Leda.

But she talked about it to Gosling when he returned from New Zealand, where the beaches are long, white and clean, and the girls likewise.

“Crawl is not a swimmer’s stroke,” he said. “It’s the competitor’s stroke. An antagonistic, angry sort of swimming. Nothing to do with water, just with doing down your fellow human beings. At best see crawl as the getting-somewhere stroke, not the being-someone stroke.”

Leda thereafter swam breast-stroke instead of crawl, to her trainer’s annoyance, but soon excelled in that as well. She swam for the County team and won a cup or two. And then rather a lot of cups. They began to line the walls.

“Of course back-stroke is the one that requires real swimming talent,” said Gosling. It was his own best stroke, and Leda’s weakest. They swam a jokey sort of race, one day, back-stroke, and he won, and after that they were happy for a time. But she knew she had not really tried to win, just been polite: won time and his favour, just for a little.

Gosling was good company, liked good food, good drink and bad women; he could tell a good story. For some reason, friends who liked sport faded away, or perhaps they were gently mocked out of the house. Presently there was no one to ask exactly what the silver cups on the sideboard were, or to care, or admire. The task of polishing them became oppressive; there was so much else to do. Gosling referred to them in any case as “Leda’s ego-trip” and she began to be embarrassed for them, and of them. The cups went into the spare room cupboard in the end; the surfboard came out of it, and they went on family weekends to Cornwall, where they all surfed.