Wicked Women (28 page)

Aaron confesses: words twinkle across continents and seas. “Maggie and I lunched. We drank. We shouldn’t have. She asked me back to her place. I went. I shouldn’t have. We succumbed. We shouldn’t have. We were both upset. I was missing you. I felt you’d put your parents before me. Afterwards we both regretted it. I took her to a restaurant so there’d be no embarrassment, so we could get back to being friends, colleagues, nothing more than that.”

“And there just happened to be photographers around,” Jessica drawls. Heat slows words.

“Her boyfriend spies on her.”

“I’m not surprised,” says Jessica. She’s melting. But perhaps that too is just the heat. “What was Maggie so upset about?”

“I’ve no idea,” says Aaron. “I can’t remember.”

“That’s a good sign,” says Jessica. “But if you two have to work together, and I can see you can, supposing she gets upset about something else? What then?”

“Why should she,” asks Aaron, “now she has the part she wants? Please will you come home tomorrow?”

“No,” says Jessica. She feels mean and angry. She’d rather he’d gone on lying. She wants him punished.

“Then I’ll come and collect you,” he says. “Meet me at Heathrow.” She puts the phone down.

More reporters on the step. The family wait for nightfall, then slip away to the hotel. Jessica calls Aaron. He’s already left for England, says his secretary. Everyone has three days off. Maggie Ives is sick. Aaron’s due at Heathrow at 11:30 Friday.

Now it’s 8:30 and Friday. And Harry is saying knock-knock, who’s there, me! And her parents are saying, if she hears them correctly, because they’ll never say it outright, Don’t go to him, stay here with us. Crisis time.

And here was home, where no one said anything outright, so at least everything was open to change. Perhaps she hated Hollywood. Perhaps she hated all America. Perhaps the only people you could trust were family, blood relatives; and husbands weren’t even blood relatives. Other people had serial marriages, why shouldn’t she?

If only this hotel, which claimed to have air-conditioning but had only a hideous roaring box in a corner of the dining room, was more American: if only her child didn’t knock at her conscience, saying “remember me?” then she could think.

Aaron was in the air now, somewhere up above the frozen seas or the hard unyielding land, on wings of love or self-interest, how could she know which? Knock-knock, who’s there? God or the Devil?

Harry put down his spoon and asked politely if he could leave the table. Rosemary said yes before Jessica could speak. He must go to his room to put on sun-block first. Harry said okay.

Bill remarked that he was an unusually good child. Jessica said yes, but she’d had him checked out with a therapist, who’d said no problem, except he might be overly mature for his age. Rosemary observed that Hollywood must be a dreadful place to rear a child: either vulgar wealth in Bel Air or shoot-outs in McDonald’s, and therapists everywhere. Bill said any child was best reared in green fields in a gentle climate; Jessica should get a cottage in the village near them. Presumably Aaron would look after her financing. They’d be near, as families should be, but would of course respect each other’s privacy. And so on.

Harry was now out in the garden: the other side of the long French windows. He threw a ball against the wall, hard: it bounced back off uneven bricks; he’d leap to catch it. Hurl again. The garden was remarkably pretty. English pretty. The high wall was made of slim, ancient, muted red bricks, beneath which were hollyhocks and delphiniums, pleasantly tiered. Drought restrictions were in place, but Bill said he’d looked out of his window in the early hours and seen the gardener using the hose.

“Harry’s got a good throw,” said Bill. “He’ll be good at cricket.”

“Or baseball,” said Jessica. Rosemary groaned. Jessica understood, suddenly, what was obvious but she hadn’t seen: that she was their only child, Harry their only grandchild. Of course her parents wanted her back in the country. She could hardly look to them for impartial advice.
Thud, thud, thud,
against the wall. Knock-knock. What about me? Father, lying but loving, v. doting grandparents? Broken home v. green fields and no air-conditioning?

“We both like Aaron,” observed Rosemary, “you know that, but there’s no denying he’s ambitious!”

What did her mother mean? That no truly ambitious man would put up with Jessica? That she wasn’t bright, beautiful or starry enough for Aaron? That it was a miracle he’d taken her on in the first place? So long as Aaron was the one persuading her to stay while she tried to leave, she could cope. But supposing it went the other way: Aaron decided he preferred Maggie Ives to Jessica? How would she survive then? She was playing games she might regret.

“I could take the car and drive to meet him,” said Jessica to her parents. “He and I could at least talk. I owe him that. I’d just about make it to the airport in time.”

“I’d have to drive you,” said Bill. “My car has gears. You can only drive automatic.”

“Bill can’t possibly drive you,” said Rosemary. “It’s much too hot. His heart won’t stand it. We don’t have air-conditioned cars over here, which is just as well for the ozone layer. And I daresay you think you could afford a driver, but where would you find one at such short notice?”

Such silly practicalities! But still they stood in her way. It was Fate. Better, Jessica thought, to stick by her original decision. So public and powerful an insult from husband to wife could not be excused, and that was that. All her friends would agree. The waiter poured more coffee. “Good to see the little fellow enjoying himself,” he remarked. Everyone nodded politely. Harry came in from the garden. “If I died,” he said, “you’d forget me at once.”

“We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t,” exclaimed Jessica. “We all love you so much!”

And even Bill and Rosemary, though talk of such emotion came with difficulty to their lips, assured their grandchild of undying and unflinching love. “No,” said Harry, refusing their comfort. “I’m right about this. I’m just not important to you. In a couple of hours you’d forget all about me. In fact if I were out of your sight for just ten minutes you wouldn’t remember who I was.” And he bowed his head beneath the shower of protests and went back into the garden, to his ball.
Thud, thud, thud.

Jessica stood up and said, “Dad, give me the keys. I’m going to meet Aaron. I’m going to bring him back here, you’re going to be nice to him; then we fly back to Hollywood. I’m not leaving Aaron, I’m not divorcing him, I love him. And I have to think of Harry. Every good boy deserves a father; we’ve made him so dreadfully insecure. I hadn’t realised.”

Bill handed over the keys.

“We all have to think of the children,” he said.

“We abide by your decision,” said his wife. “For Harry’s sake.”

“Tell Harry I’ll be back with his father,” said Jessica. “Tell him to stop worrying.”

Bill and Rosemary watched as the car lurched and shuddered on the gravel drive while Jessica got the hang of the gears. Then the car shot off into the heat haze, grating and grinding, out of the shade of the willows into the sun. The waiter hovered. Harry stopped throwing and came to stand beside them, watching.

“Where’s Mom gone?”

“Mummy,” corrected Rosemary. “She’s gone to meet your father.”

“Um,” said Harry, approving but not especially so. Then he said,

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?” asked Rosemary.

“Told you so!” said Harry. “Forgotten me already! Ten minutes and see, you’d forgotten all about me. Gotcha!”

And Harry laughed uproariously, cracking up, bending over a gold and damask chair to contain his stomach and his mirth, making far more noise than they’d ever heard him make before. And the waiter was bent over laughing too, holding his middle. “I told him that one,” said the waiter. “Poor little feller. He needed a laugh! We all do, this time of year.”

When Harry had finished laughing he went serenely back into the garden, for more throwing, thudding, catching. The heat seemed to affect him not one whit.

“I
’M SO HAPPY WE
can all be together like this,” said Dr. Hetty Grainger. She sat in the antique carver chair at the head of the Andrews’ festive board. There was turkey for the carnivores, and nut-roast for the others, with a rich plum and chestnut sauce to go with it, to prove vegetarians can be indulgent too, not to mention sensuous, should ritual so demand. There were crackers on the table, and paper hats, and the scent of incense to remind everyone that the Hindu, the Buddhist and the Christian gods (did not the Trinity make three?) come from the same source, are of the same oneness. The Andrews were the kind who normally went to church once a year, to midnight service on Christmas Eve. But not this year.

Dr. Hetty Grainger’s voice was sweet and low. She murmured rather than spoke, so that all the Andrew family, usually so noisy, fell silent to hear her speak. “I’m so happy we can all be together like this.”

Although now in theory an Andrew herself, Dr. Hetty had retained, if not exactly her maiden name, at least the one she’d acquired on her first marriage: Grainger. She’d done this, she said, for her patients’ sake. Troubled as they were by one kind of stress or another, they hankered, or so Dr. Grainger said, for the tranquillity of continuity. To turn from Dr. Grainger into Dr. Andrew would be to rub the salt of her own new-found happiness into the wounds of her clients’ neuroses. “Tranquillity” was one of Dr. Grainger’s favourite words. She used it a lot. The Sea of Tranquillity on the moon, for example, was a place with which Dr. Hetty Grainger felt she had some special connection. It sent its sentient spirit out to her. Just to think of this unearthly place—so quiet, so dark, so cool, so beautifully named—lulled Dr. Hetty Grainger and soothed her when she was in any way stressed.

“She’s okay, I suppose, but she’s ever so sort of
astral,”
said Penny, aged nineteen, on first meeting her father’s therapist, soon to be her new stepmother. “I always thought the moon was just a cold lump of rock which caught the light of the sun as it went round the earth. Or is it the other way round? But apparently no: the moon is all sentient spirit and significance and stuff. Or is she just talking crap?”

And Chris, Penny’s sister Petula’s boyfriend, said, “No, it isn’t crap. I think what Dr. Grainger has to say is really interesting. This is the New Age, after all. Everything
means
something. And at least she makes your father happy.”

And, after that, opposition to Hetty Grainger within the Andrew family fell away. She made their father happy.

This year the Christmas Eve service on local offer seemed to the family a rather formal, old-fashioned and decidedly chilly event, in a church which had needed a new heating system for years and never got one. Hetty didn’t want to go, anyway, so in the end nobody went. It would have felt impolite to leave their new stepmother behind.

Hetty Grainger was shortly built and mousily pretty, with soft natural hair which fell brownly around a pale plump face. But her hips were wide and filled the antique carver chair at the head of the table almost as amply as had those of her predecessor, Mrs. Audrey Andrew. Dr. Hetty didn’t diet, as Audrey had. Dr. Hetty knew that if you ate a healthy, wholesome diet, as additive-free as could be managed, you would be the weight and scale that nature intended, not that fashion dictated. If fate had made you pear-shaped, so be it.

Dr. Hetty’s husband, Philip Andrew, engineer, regarded his new wife fondly from the other end of the table, carving knife poised ready to start on the turkey. His chin had doubled compliantly and happily since Hetty had replaced Audrey. Now his body was heavier but his life was agitation-free. Dr. Hetty was against conventional medicine. The weighing of the body, the measuring of blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on, was just the orthodox doctor’s way of adding to the stress of modern life.

Dr. Hetty Grainger should know: she’d trained as an orthodox doctor. But a patient had died under her care in the hospital where she’d had her first job; not her fault: an inquest had exonerated her; but Dr. Hetty had realised just how dangerous medical practice could be and had chucked the whole thing in. She’d wondered what to do with her life, had happened to meet Swami Avakandra, had been most impressed, had trained as an Avakandrist—a six-month residential course—and thereafter counselled in the Swami’s name.

The Jungians looked kindly on the Avakandrists, who mixed the search for the archetype with a rich interpretation of symbols, made extensive use of dream and hypnotherapy, acknowledged a deep inherited collective unconscious, whilst teaching that the knowledge of ultimate reality came through sexual love rather than through cognitive processes. A state of ill health, whether mental or physical, would arise when a spiritually sensitive individual, consciously or otherwise, distanced himself from that ultimate reality. The task of the Avakandrist healer/therapist was to lead that individual back to appropriate paths of awareness. And thus Hetty had led Philip.

“I’m so pleased,” Dr. Hetty Grainger went on, “that after the upsets of the last year we can all come like civilised people to the Christmas ritual!” And she raised her glass of wine to all of them, the glass being one which just happened to have been Audrey’s favourite. A strand of blue ran through the clear stem. Audrey had bought it at a car boot sale which she’d gone to with Philip, just a couple of years back. The goblet had turned out to be Venetian glass—what a snip! That had been one of the couple’s last outings before Philip, facing possible redundancy at work, suffering from enigmatic heart pains, had become Dr. Grainger’s patient, or client, and had realised that the time had come to think about himself, not his family. Everyone’s spiritual duty was to themselves.

“Yes, I’m so pleased we have managed to be civilised!” murmured Dr. Hetty Grainger. “Divorce and remarriage needn’t be a source of grief and anger, if only they can be seen for what they are; a healthy re-adjustment and re-arrangement of family relationships.”