Wicked Women (27 page)

Bernard went down the steps in front of her; he was wearing a grey suit; he carried a portable phone. She remembered Victor long ago. Bernard seemed a stranger to her. There was a clattering behind her, and Angela pushed past. She was wearing a light shiny blue suit, and a lot of pearls, as if she were going to a wedding. “’Scuse me, Maria. I hope you’ve got Maurice ready. We’re going to be so late if you haven’t.”

“I didn’t know
she
was coming,” said Maurice, but he got into the car with Bernard and Angela, folding himself into the small space at the back, leaving Maria to stand on the doorstep. Perhaps it would be better if she didn’t go? All that way, to what end? To stand in a dingy room, listening to melancholy music, contemplating mortality and the death of hope, the death of love, the death of her body? What sort of “respect” was it that she thought she could pay? She had failed Bernard’s father in this life, she had failed to keep him alive, let alone healthy; she couldn’t even stay married to his son, a failure which had distressed the old man. She could just turn back now, into her half of the matrimonial home, take the day off work, get accustomed to the idea of Bernard, married to Angela, living on top of her. Accept her role as murderer, not mourner.

But her feet walked her, almost of their own accord, towards her car. Maria wore black court shoes, worn out of shape, as she felt she was herself. Denatured: altered perforce to fit the circumstances.

The Golders Green Crematorium is sombre and leafy, concrete-pathed and well-signposted: it serves large areas of the city. Its memorial rose garden is denatured. The ashes of the dead are dug into the soil, but somehow fail to produce abundance. Little red brick chapels are used for individual services, as little individual jars of breakfast jam serve these days instead of the whole jar. Hearses come and go, quietly: coffins are carried by experts, expertly. An almost agreeable hush descends upon the little clusters of friends and relatives: the air is hard to breathe, as if the place were indoors, not outdoors, or at any rate covered by some invisible bell-jar: you might as well be in an airport, or a hospital, so devitalised the place has become, by virtue of so many human passions stultified, brought up short by the advent of death. Too late now. For who ever lived totally as they wanted to: who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

Maria was late, but the chapel services were running even later. The deceased’s friends and relatives, an official said, were gathered in the appropriate waiting room. Maria pushed open the heavy gothic door; it groaned. Blank and hostile faces looked back at her. Angela was bright in her shiny blue. Maurice came out to be with his mother. Maria and Maurice leaned against the chapel wall. Maurice smoked a cigarette. Maria hoped Bernard would not come out and catch him.

“Angela’s pregnant,” Maurice said. “That’s the only reason he’s marrying her.”

Maria didn’t say, “Well, I was pregnant, too. That’s why he married me.” Or perhaps he made me pregnant in order to be obliged to marry me and then blame me. “Angela shouldn’t be here,” said Maurice. “It isn’t fair. She never even met my grandfather.”

“I expect she just likes to be with your father,” said Maria, “wherever he goes, and so she should. Try to like her, Maurice; it will be better if you do. We have to be civilised.”

A clutch of hearses approached, passed; following after them, on their black coat-tails, came a cream Rolls-Royce, which parked in a space clearly marked
OFFICIAL PARKING: HEARSES ONLY,
and Maria’s mother stepped out. She wore a pink turban and a yellow suit, and all around were the colours of brick chapel, concrete paving, a dull sky and bare branches, on which new buds still struggled to provide just a hint of the new season. It was such a late spring: no one could understand the weather these days. “Mother? All this way!”

“I didn’t want Maria to be defeated by a funeral,” said Maria’s mother to her grandson. “I was defeated by a wedding once. It doesn’t do to be defeated by rituals.”

“He brought her here,” said Maria, suddenly tearful. “He had no right to do that. He was my father-in-law, not hers. How dare they?”

“Pull yourself together; you’re not a child,” said Maria’s mother, out of some kind of dim maternal memory, “or I’ll wish I’d never come.” Maria was sobbing and gulping. Bernard and Angela emerged from the chapel. Bernard seemed disconcerted. Angela was pink and angry.

“I have every right to be here,” Angela said, stopping to face Bernard, taking in the presence of the first wife, his ex-mother-in-law, her soon-to-be stepchild. “I love you and you love me and I want every single part of you, and that means your past as well. If you loved your father, I loved him too, he’s my baby’s grandfather, and I’m entitled to come to his funeral, so I don’t know what you mean, Bernard, by my ‘cashing in.’ I don’t want to hear that kind of mean, miserable thing from you ever again. I’ve heard far too much of it from you lately. I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.” Then she turned on Maria. “What are you doing here, anyway? An ex is an ex, as you’ll find from now on. You depress the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. That godawful grey suit is a case in point and no one’s worn a scarf for years. Self-pitying bitch.”

The nasal voice stopped. It had come bursting in like some destructive gust of wind, thought Maria; everything settled, everything you clung to, was up in the air, whirling. They were all looking at her, waiting for a response. Maurice hovered half-way between Bernard and herself. Oh Eleanor, Eleanor, help me now. I married Bernard in the spring, but then the day was bright and clear. Eleanor smiled and drove my maternal mother out. Let me re-phrase that: together, Eleanor smiling, myself scowling, we held the whip that drove my mother out. Perhaps Eleanor was a false ally, after all. If she smiled it was because now she’d have my father to herself. Of course my stepmother lent me a dress. And afterwards she could afford to be generous. She’d won. Angela wants Bernard to herself, of course she does. She uses different methods, that’s all—sulks, not smiles. And Bernard just spreads his hands and thrives in the warmth of our squabbling.

Even as I hesitate, I see Maurice drifting over to Bernard’s side. Mother love? What’s that? What’s required? I want Maurice to grow up to be the best of his father, not the worst. We aren’t meant to be on sides: we are meant to try to be civilised. All my life spent understanding and forgiving—but these are matters of life and death; desperate things. Red on black, black on red: understood but not forgiven. Has my mother come here today to explain that to me? She can’t forgive me, she won’t forgive, she must not forgive me because what I did was unforgivable; nor can she understand it. But she can still instruct me. She won’t look me in the eye, she never will, but she came today to set an example, to help me.

“My
father-in-law,” said Maria to Angela, “mine. And it’s you who have no business here. You can have Bernard’s future, you’re welcome to it, but you can’t have Bernard’s past. That’s mine. You will not unravel my life from this moment back. Why don’t you just go back to the house? Go on back, let me mourn in the peace I deserve. I came first and you came second; all you are entitled to is the dregs—”

“Bernard!” wailed Angela, but Bernard just spread his fingers helplessly, and licked his lips.

“It’s her or me,” cried Angela. “I’m warning you, Bernard.”

“I do as I like,” said Bernard. “What you do is up to you.”

“This is our business, not yours,” said Maria’s mother to Angela, as once she should have said it to Eleanor. “You go, we stay.” And she looked Angela’s suit up and down as if to say this is a funeral, not a wedding; can’t you tell the difference? I’m old enough to do as I like but you’re not. Whoever can have brought you up?

Angela looked at Maria’s mother’s attire and curled her lip. “Mutton dressed up as lamb,” she actually said.

“Excuse me,” said a group of black-suited, sleek-haired men, passing through, bearing a coffin on accustomed shoulders. The little cluster of mourners had to part and re-form. Maria wondered if the body inside the coffin were male or female, young or old; how they’d lived, how they’d died. Whether they were persecutor, self-interested and invalidating; or victim, understanding and forgiving, this was the outcome. Since there was no justice in death, you’d better find it in life, however disagreeable it made you in the eyes of others, in your own eyes too.

“Just go away,” Maria said to Angela, with a snap of anger so sharp and severe it all but cracked and slivered the sheltering bell-jar; or at any rate a breath of cold, fresh, lively air suddenly whipped around their legs: a memento of winter in the presence of spring. Everyone looked startled.

“Go away,” repeated Maria, “and take Bernard with you.”

Bernard said, “I can’t do that. I’m the chief mourner. He’s my father. I have to stay. But you don’t have to, Angela. Really it’s best that you don’t. Wait in the car.”

And Angela walked meekly off to wait. Maurice moved over to stand by his mother’s side.

“That’s better,” said Maria’s mother. “At last!”

“What’s more, I’m not living beneath a baby,” said Maria to Bernard, “let alone you, Angela and a baby. What do you think I am?”

“That’s okay,” said Bernard. “Now my father’s dead I can afford to move out. You can have the whole house.”

They stood together in the chapel, and afterwards went their separate ways. Bernard to Angela and a new baby, Maria and Maurice back home, Maria’s mother back to her cards. Red on black, black on red; red on black, life on death.

“K
NOCK-KNOCK,” SAID THE
child into the silence. He was eight. The three adults looked up from their breakfast yoghurt, startled. Harry seldom spoke unless spoken to first. He’d seemed happy enough during the meal. The waiter had fetched him a toy from the hotel kitchens, a miniature Power Ranger out of a cereal packet, and he’d been playing with that, taking no apparent notice of a desultory conversation between Jessica, his mother, and Rosemary and Bill, his grandparents. “Who’s there?” asked his mother, obligingly. “Me,” said Harry, with such finality that the game stopped there. He was a quiet, usually self-effacing child; blond, bronzed and handsome.

Perhaps he’d been more aware of the. content of their talk than they’d realised. It had of course been coded for his benefit, couched in abstract terms. The importance of fidelity, the necessity of trust, different cultural expectations either side of the Atlantic, and so on: its real subject being the matter in doubt—should Jessica go home to her faithless husband in Hollywood, or stay with her loving parents in the Cotswolds. To forgive or not to forgive, that was the question.

They’d tried to keep the story from the child, hidden newspapers and magazines. It wasn’t a big scandal, just a little one; not on the Hugh Grant scale: nothing like that, not enough to make TV, just enough to make them all uncomfortable, leave home and take temporary refuge in this staid and stately country hotel, with its willowed drive, its swan-stocked lake, its Laura Ashley interior, where reporters couldn’t find them to ask questions. If you answered the questions it was bad; if you didn’t answer them it was worse. The solution was simply not to be there at all.

The story, the embryo scandal, goes thus. Young big-shot Hollywood producer Aaron Scheffer sets off on holiday with English wife of ten years, Jessica, and eight-year-old son, Harry, to spend the summer with her parents. At the airport he gets a phone call. His film’s been brought forward, its budget tripled; rising star Maggie Ives has agreed to play the lead. Aaron shouldn’t leave town. He stays; wife and child go. Well, these things happen. Two weeks in and there’s a story plus pics in an international showbiz magazine: Aaron Scheffer intimately entwined behind a palm tree on a restaurant balcony. Who with? Maggie Ives. They’re an item. Other newspapers pick up the story.

No air-conditioning in the grandparental home in England: how could it ever work? Why try? The place is impossible to seal. Too many chimneys: too many people in the habit of flinging up windows and opening doors, even when it’s hotter out than in. You’d never stop them. And it’s hot, so hot. A heat wave.

Aaron calls Jessica, much distressed. It’s a set-up, don’t believe a word of it. I have enemies. Jessica replies of course I don’t believe it, stay cool, hang loose, I trust you, I love you.

A chat show runs a piece on spouse infidelity: featuring the phoney airport call: how to get the wife out of town without her suspecting a thing. Ha ha ha.

The heat may be good. It has an anaesthetizing effect. Or perhaps Jessica’s just stunned. She cannot endure her parents’ pity: the implicit “I told you so.”

Harry’s happy in the grandparental English garden. He is studying the life cycle of frogs. He helps tadpoles out of their pond, his little fingers beneath their limp back legs, helping them on their way. Once tadpoles breathe air, he says, everything about them stiffens. Jessica feels there’s no air around to breathe, it’s too hot.

Best friend and neighbour Kate, back in LA, calls to say, Jessica, you have to believe it, you need to know, everyone else knows: Aaron’s been seeing Maggie for months. That’s why she’s got the part.

Jessica can’t even cry. Her eyes are as parched as the garden. Forget tragedy, forget betrayal, how could she ever live in a land without air-conditioning?

Phone calls fly. Her father Bill frets about the cost. Aaron says not to believe a word Kate says. Kate’s a woman scorned. By whom? Why, Aaron, the minute Jessica’s back is turned. Come home now, Jessica, pleads Aaron, I love you.

“I’ll think about it,” says Jessica. She asks her mother whether it’s safer to trust a husband or a best friend? “Neither,” says her mother. “And Aaron probably only wants you home for a photo-opportunity, to keep the studio quiet.”

The first reporter turns up on the step. Is she hurt? How does it feel? He has other photographs here; they’d like to publish with her comments. Will she stand by her man? Doors slam. No comment. More phone calls.