Wicked Women (20 page)

She rejected him, of course, and he stayed home, grateful for my comfort. It was never a role I wanted—comforter—but better than none. I think I forgot it all sooner than Ed did. The tides of family swept us on. Now we are that rare thing: a well-suited couple who have survived well enough to rattle around in an empty house, to hold hands together like Darby and Joan as we go into the twilight of our years.

But this is specious twaddle. Even as I murmur these familiar words I realise the house is far from empty. Guy and Staria have left us two cabinet-makers working in the barn; Ira is in the attic with the old train set; a friend of Lettice’s is in the guest room recovering from what I suspect is an OD of acid.

“I don’t want to sell this house at all,” I say to Ed. A car is turning into the drive.

“Too late to turn back now,” he says. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Fair to whom?” I ask. He doesn’t reply.

“I thought you were set on moving house,” he said. “You told me you couldn’t cope anymore.”

“Only to keep you in face,” I said, “because you’re too proud to get a gardener in, and the nettles are taking over.”

The car’s a Mercedes. Whoever it is looks as if they have money.

A man driving, not a couple. Couples are the worst. You hear them picking holes in the best and most well-loved features with your home, despising your efforts.

“God, how can people live with a kitchen like that?”

“It’s too inconvenient, darling. We’d have to rip the whole place apart.”

“I suppose if the colours weren’t so dreadful, this bedroom would just about do.”

“What, only two bathrooms?”

Single people are not so critical or, if they are, don’t have the opportunity of displaying it. And at least you’re not dealing with the hidden agendas of other people’s relationships.

“I simply don’t know what to do,” admits Ed. “I look at it one way, and look at it another, and the advantage of staying balances the disadvantages of going. But now we’ve got this far just let’s carry on.”

It was like this with all three pregnancies. Because they’d got so far, we just carried on. Guy, Hetty, Lettice. I was fed up with it. “We’ll leave it to chance,” I said. “If this guy actually buys it, we sell. If he doesn’t, we take it off the market.”

“Okay,” said Ed.

Chance came up trumps. The potential buyer was an American, was Al, Guy’s original friend. Al apologised for his long absence, his lack of a thank-you note, which had been bothering him all his life. He embraced me; he called me Mom. I shuddered. He was doing well; he was gay; he lived in San Francisco; his business now brought him over to England frequently; he had come looking for properties in areas he knew; had found Grazecot for sale; was horrified. It was his happy childhood; it could not be sold. He needed to keep the place in his head, and with us in it, growing old gracefully.

Guy, Lettice and Hetty had never said anything so bold or so simple. They’d seemed happy enough to see their childhood obliterated, their parents shipped off into nowhere anyone would ever visit. Ungrateful bastard, bitches, thought I, with unusual fervour: or all three bitches, to give Guy his proper due for once.

Al, it seemed, had overcome the embarrassment of his early social gaffe sufficiently to call. It seemed churlish to reject so plain a message from Destiny.

“We changed our minds about selling,” said Ed, “as it happens,” and I went to the telephone to call the Estate Agent before minds could change again. The Agent was furious, and I didn’t care. We would rattle around in Grazecot till the end of our days, till we rattled around to death, till they carried us out feet-first. Let the kids deal with the problem of what to do with a changing world, since it was beyond us. That was what we’d had them for.

“O
H, SERENA,” THEY SAID.
“Serena! Serena was quite mad, you know. She would have made the finest surrealist painter of the twentieth century, only she ended up in a dustbin.”

And the little circle of ex-art students filled up their glasses and rolled a smidgen more dope and stared exhausted and melancholy into their mutual past. They wore sandals although it was cold outside.

“You mean,” said Philly, “her paintings ended up in a dustbin?”

“Oh no,” they said, whichever one of them it was, Harold or Perse or Don or Steve—Philly found them hard to tell apart, so information about Basil’s past seemed to come from some communal centre—“Serena ended up in the dustbin. She left Basil when she found him upstairs in the studio in bed with Ruthy Franklyn, and shacked up with some frame-maker she met in a hostel, who then committed suicide. She must have gone completely bonkers after that because she broke into Basil’s studio upstairs: burned all her own paintings in the stove—five years’ work gone in five hours—and had begun on Basil’s when luckily Ruthy came by and stopped her.

“So poor Basil changed the locks and Serena went and lived in the alley at the back of the house for a week or so, shouting and screaming, selling herself to passers-by, and then OD’d on heroin. She fell headfirst into a dustbin from whence she was carted off to the booby hatch, where she died. That was four years ago.”

“Poor Basil,” they chorused.

Philly envisaged Serena’s thin, white legs waving out of a big, black, plastic bin: a rag doll thrown away. “He’d married her to calm her down and help her paint, but it didn’t work,” said Harold, Perse, Don or Steve. “Serena was always completely mad, perhaps even because she was so talented. More talented even than Basil.”

“Completely mad,” agreed the Jean, Holly, Ryan and Olive who went with the men. Way, way over the top. OTT. Poor Basil. Better luck next time!”

They were all thirtyish: Basil was fortyish: Philly was twenty-one. In her family people only got married once. What did she know?

They were in Basil’s house, which had been left him by his grandmother. It had been designed in the thirties, and was made of functional and brutalist concrete: a long, low, expensive building with portholes where other people would have had windows. Philly had moved in a week ago. She was pregnant with Basil’s baby. The house was cold because the gas bill had not been paid. No one seemed to mind. Philly could see she’d be the one who’d have to attend to such matters.

Basil came down from the studio to join his friends, to join Philly. He had worn out his talent for the day. Now they could all party.

He had a gentle manner, a sweet smile, and a reputation as a major painter. His father had been a Royal Academician; his grandmother had slept with Augustus John. Dark green foliage surged up against the portholes, as if the house was under water. A sudden wind must have got up outside. The place was crowded in by trees. Philly would have risen to turn on the lights, but there was no electricity. Those bills had not been paid either.

So many things about the house, Philly could see, glamorous though it was, more exciting than anything she had ever known, which needed seeing to, organising, fixing, changing, cheering up. Then it could be a home. But not yet, not yet: better to offer no judgements. Philly knew the friends accepted her, or why would they talk about Serena? But perhaps to Basil she was just another item of changing human scenery. Wait and see. She sat quiet in the half-dark.

“Let’s not talk about Serena,” Basil said, “ever again. This is Philly’s home now. A new life starts for her and me. Let’s forget Serena.”

So everyone forgot Serena, including Philly.

That was in September. Philly set about making the house her own.

The kitchen door was stuck. It had not been opened for years. But since the back garden had at some time been sold off to keep creditors at bay, and the door led almost directly into the loading bays and alleys which backed a shopping complex, who would want to open it anyway? Better, Basil said, to use the front door, walk up the garden path and go round to the shops. Philly did. How did you unstick a door, anyway? It seemed better closed. The back of the complex was sunless by day, poorly lit by night. It always seemed deserted, but if ever you opened the windows at the back you could smell stale urine and hear a scuttling sound—rats or cockroaches, no doubt startled by the noise. So Philly kept the back windows closed: she let fresh air blow in from the front. Hardly windows, anyway: hinged portholes. And you had to force foliage back in order to get them open.

By November the trees on windy days were bare and the portholes easier to open, although branches scratched up against the glass, and there was never silence. Philly’s father came to visit her. Philly’s mother had died that same month only a year ago, and left her daughter eleven thousand pounds. Perhaps Philly had got pregnant to forget the grief, sorrow and shock, to lose herself in a new life: the thought hung between father and daughter. “I’d have those trees cut down,” said Philly’s father. “They make the house dark and damp. Personally, I’d rather live in a bungalow. Shall I come over and get rid of a few branches for you?”

But Basil liked trees. The worst offender, when it came to opening the studio window, was an elm which had escaped Dutch elm disease, and was apparently as rare as it was beautiful. Basil was shocked at the notion that there could be a leaf, a twig less of the tree than nature suggested. But what did Philly know? To Philly, according to Basil, one leaf was much like another. She was a barbarian: but hadn’t they always known that: Harold, Perse, Don and Steve, Jean, Holly, Ryan and Olive, too? Philly was the new blank canvas on which Basil could imprint his taste, his knowledge, his guidance.

“But don’t you need as much light as possible to paint?” asked Philly.

“This house is perfectly light and cheerful,” Basil said, and discouraged her father from visiting thereafter, on the grounds that he made Philly gloomy.

Philly was six months pregnant and didn’t like to argue with Basil, since she only got upset and never won. The fact was that it was a dark, cold house, no matter how much was spent on gas and electricity, how much wine was drunk by the friends. Basil encouraged her to put in new radiators: she’d turn them up full but the concrete walls seemed to swallow warmth and give none back. She put in wall lights to supplement the stark central bulbs; she washed the concrete walls with white: she brought halogen uplighters, but even by night, light seemed not to be doing its proper job of banishing gloom. A stubborn month. Well, November is never the brightest of months: just grey, grey.

Basil didn’t like spending money on the house: she used her own, and was happy to. He was pleased with what she did.

“It’s your home,” he’d say. “Have it the way you want it.” That encouraged her. She did what she could. She called in a carpenter to plane down the back door, and he freed it, but damp must have swelled the wood again, because within a week it was stuck once more. She had an electrician in to fix the oven; which had always either burned or cut out at the worst possible time, but its thermostat stayed unreliable. It was only five years old. Basil balked at the cost of a new one. Philly couldn’t make the floors “come up,” to use her mother’s phrase. Over and over she’d washed wide stretches of dark green floor tiles, and polished them too, but some of the tiles must have been unusually porous: the result was always patchy. Unsightly lines of what seemed like white salt kept rising up to spoil the finish. The whole floor should by rights have gleamed and shone; perhaps it was something about the pattern of light from the porthole windows which managed to give it a ridged effect. Philly would scrub and polish on her hands and knees. It was comfortable so to do. When she was upright, pressure on her sciatic nerve gave her a continual pain. It was not an easy pregnancy.

When Philly was seven months pregnant, in December, Basil suggested they get married. Twelfth Night, he said, would be the right kind of day: a special day: one you wouldn’t forget when it came to anniversaries.

January, and Philly was Basil’s second wife. Harold and Perse, Don and Steve came to the party after the wedding, in the house, along with Jean, Holly, Ryan and Olive. One of them observed, “Serena’s birthday was Twelfth Night,” and Philly said, “Who’s Serena?” a moment before she remembered. A rather strange thing happened. A box of indoor fireworks somehow caught fire inside its wrapping: blackish ash erupted from the box, swelled and burst the plastic: a series of tiny explosions then sent the ash flying and whirling through the air, so all the surfaces in the room were soon covered with a soft film of grey. It was not unpretty; and the event had not even been dangerous, just extraordinary, watching the box jump up and down as if of its own volition, puffing out ash. But when someone else said, “Philly, you forgot to take down the Christmas decorations: that’s unlucky,” she worried at once. She feared for her baby. Dear God, let me be lucky, prayed Philly. Babies got born with all kinds of things wrong with them. She vacuumed carefully every day, into every corner, and felt better. Cleaning was a kind of talisman. Amazing how Christmas tree needles hung around and got everywhere, no matter how sure you were you’d finally got rid of the last of them. But you could clean and clean in this house and it just never looked as if you’d done a thing. She couldn’t understand it.

Basil laughed when she complained.

“It looks just fine to me,” he said. “But thank God you have proper domestic ambition. You are the right wife for me, Philly.”

Philly’s father hadn’t been invited to the wedding. He’d written to ask if Philly would hand back the eleven thousand pounds from her mother for his safekeeping. He’d invest it for her, to her advantage. Basil had understandably taken offence. Philly felt her loyalties were to her husband, not her father, and Harold, Perse, Don and Steve, Jean, Holly, Ryan and Mattie agreed. “The thing to do with Basil,” all agreed, “is not make waves. He can be ruthless if you do. Poor Olive!”

Olive had been taken on at the same gallery as Basil. She had had a one-person show and, instead of being a failure, was now a success. She was no longer in the group of friends. Steve had taken on Mattie instead: it was that, or be out of the circle too. Mattie was a pleasant, daft girl, good at the Benefit Game, and no one spoke much about Olive any more, and within weeks she, too, was forgotten.