Wicked Women (3 page)

“It can’t be,” said Rosemary, “but it really is! Are you
the
Defoe Desmond?”

“I know of no other,” said Defoe wearily.

“We’re Harry and Rosemary Wilcox,” said Harry.

“The
Harry and Rosemary Wilcox?” asked Defoe, but Elaine frowned at him so he added, “Just a joke! We’re all
the
whoever it is to ourselves, aren’t we! The centre of our universe,” and Rosemary and Harry’s hurt puzzlement turned to smiles.

“Sorry your programme was axed,” said Harry. “But we must all take the rough with the smooth. So now you’re selling?”

“We always planned to sell when the children left home,” said Elaine firmly. “This is the library—note the original panelling.”

“I just love the atmosphere,” said Rosemary Wilcox, who had turned, as Weena put it to Hattie later, from a moaning cow into a buzzy bee. A glimpse of a celebrity can do that to some people, albeit one teetering on the brink of has-been-ness.

“Let me show you the Conservatory,” said Elaine. “We haven’t had the staff to keep it up properly, but there’s a very good fig tree, nearly a hundred years old. It was planted the day my grandmother was born.”

And she moved the Wilcoxes on, looking at her watch and raising her eyebrows at her husband, as if to suggest he hurried things along with Weena if he could. Weena caught the look.

“The bitch!” said Weena to Hattie later. “Treating me like dirt and thinking she’ll get away with it. I don’t know how Def stands her.”

“Def, now, is it?” said Hattie. “As in blind and deaf?”

“Calling him Def makes me feel owned and owning. Like a child.”

“And another wife bites the dust!” said Hattie.

“Oh, Elaine—” said Defoe, as his wife left the room.

“What is it, Defoe?” asked Elaine.

“If you’re going upstairs, could you bring down a copy of
Science the Terminator?
I want Miss Dodds here to have one.”

“We only have the shelf copy left,” said Elaine.

“Then we’ll lend it to her and she’ll have to bring it back.”

“I am very good with other people’s books,” said Weena. “I always return them.”

“Oh, so you live locally?” enquired Elaine. “I thought you told me you’d come up from London.”

“I visit the area quite often,” said Weena. “And I do so love this house.”

“You are welcome to buy it,” quipped Elaine. “Unless outbid by Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox here.”

“There’s a lot of modernising to do,” said Harry Wilcox to his wife as the party moved on. “To bring the place into even the twentieth century, forget the twenty-first.” Defoe overheard. His ears were finely tuned and trained, after years of studio work, to catch remarks on the fringes of discussion.

“What did you have in mind,” demanded Defoe, now on his feet and pursuing Harry Wilcox. “Flush doors and an avocado bathroom suite?”

“Defoe dear,” said his wife, “calm down! And please remember we already have an avocado bathroom suite.” And she smiled cordially and led her guests to view further features of the house. It was clear, from the look exchanged between Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox, that she was now wasting her time. This was a property they were unlikely to buy.

Defoe, his object obtained, calmed down quickly. He and Weena discussed his motives in leaving the field of theoretical nuclear physics, where he had started his career, his move to the Ministry of Defence on his marriage to Elaine, and thence into weapons development, and finally, when his children were born, into the media. “So, because you had a family to keep,” said Weena, “you couldn’t follow your chosen path. Just think of it—you could have been the one to harness the power of the sun. Nuclear fusion, and all that.”

“I was not a world-class scientist,” Defoe said. “With or without my marriage.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said. “You get a kind of aura off some people. I get it from you. Charisma.”

“In the eight weeks since the programme ended,” said Defoe, “I fear mine has somewhat faded. But it’s good of you to mention it.”

“Your wife shouldn’t have humiliated you like that,” said Weena.

“Like what?”

“Showing you up like that in front of those people,” said Weena, “about the bathroom suite. As if you didn’t know your own house. But some men just like bitches. Or else they get so they don’t notice.”

Elaine came into the room with a copy of
Science the Terminator,
and found Defoe scowling at her. “Is something the matter?” she asked, surprised.

“Consult your conscience,” he said.

Elaine did, finger on chin, a mockery of anxiety on her face. “If it’s about the bathroom suite,” she said, “we’ll talk about it later, when this interview is finished.” She handed her husband the book he had asked for.

“What shall I write in it?” Defoe asked. “My mind goes blank.”

“It’s the shelf copy,” said Elaine. “The one that’s not supposed to leave the house. You’re lending it, not giving it.”

“So I am,” said Defoe. “You will be sure to bring it back, won’t you, Miss Dodds? Next time you’re in these parts?”

“Or you could post it,” said Elaine. “If you registered it first.”

“And when you come next time,” said Defoe, “you must be sure to stop for lunch. Now the children are grown, now I’m out of TV, now I’m confined to quarters, as it were—”

“Oh I will,” said Weena, reluctantly moving herself from her place in the sun, so the light no longer made a halo of her hair, so the curve of her bosom could no longer be seen. “I will.”

“Let me see you to the door,” said Elaine.

“Thank you, Mrs. Desmond,” said Weena, “you’ve been ever so kind. Can I call you, Mr. Desmond, if my notes don’t make sense? Or the recorder hasn’t picked everything up?”

“Of course you can,” said Defoe. “These days I have time to spare.”

But he did not catch her eye as she left the room, and she thought that was a bad sign.

“You went too far, too fast,” said Hattie on the phone that evening, “from the sound of it. You shouldn’t have slagged off his wife. Men like to do that themselves; they don’t like others doing it.”

Weena called Bob Ratchett in his bedsitting room. Lawyers had got him out of the matrimonial home and his wife and children back in it. He was in debt. None of his family would speak to him. This is what love can do for a man.

“Oh God, darling,” he said, “it’s you.”

“We’re just good friends,” said Weena. “Remember?”

“Come round and we’ll talk about it,” said Bob.

“What I want to talk about,” said Weena, “is the possibility of my writing a biography of Defoe Desmond, for a ginormous advance.”

“Well,” he said, cautiously, “I think the time for Defoe Desmond is past. He peaked five years ago. And since the Berlin Wall came down, forget it. On the other hand—”

“On the other hand what?”

“Come round and talk about it,” said Bob Ratchett.

“Okay,” she said.

The next morning Defoe and Elaine got up before breakfast to go mushrooming in the fields behind the house. Their golden Labrador gambolled ahead. Little circles of white amongst the short horse-cropped grass drew them first here, then there. They held hands.

“Everything has to change,” observed Elaine. “I may be the fifth in the line of generations who have walked about this field and gathered mushrooms, but I no longer own the house. You do. I live here by your courtesy. I never wanted you to put it in our joint names. When you offered, I resisted.”

“Yes, why did you do that?” he asked. “I used to think it was your desire to be dependent.”

“I married you for your money,” she said, “or rather for your ability to buy back the house I loved. Then I came to love you more than I loved the house. I thought I should be punished.”

“I’ll have to think about that one,” he said. They picked more mushrooms. He no longer held her hand.

“Now when we sell the house I love,” she observed, “the money will be yours.”

He thought a little. The basket filled to overflowing. Still they wandered.

“But you and I will live on it,” he said. “I could put half in your bank account, if you prefer. But I have been supporting you for many years, and you have never worked.”

“When the mortgage and the overdraft are paid,” she said, “there won’t be much left. How uncomfortable change is, that it should oblige us to have such difficult conversations.”

The dog set off a rabbit. The rabbit raced down one side of the hedge, the dog down another. The rabbit won. The dog sat down and panted, looking daft, which he was.

“Of course,” Defoe said, “the English landed gentry always lived by selling their sons and daughters in return for land and money.”

“I sold myself,” she said, “being an orphan and having no one to sell me.”

“We’re too near the hedge,” he said. “We might mistake a death cap for a mushroom.”

“Or vice versa,” she said. They moved back towards the centre of the field, in the bright light where the death caps never grow.

Later in the day the phone rang. It was Weena.

“Hello, Miss Dodds,” said Elaine.

“How did you know it was me?”

“I recognised your voice,” said Elaine. “You were here only the day before yesterday. Do you want to speak to my husband?”

“Yes,” said Weena. “I would like to speak to Def, Mrs. Desmond, if that’s okay by you.”

“I should warn you,” said Elaine, “he doesn’t like being called Def unless he has given express permission.”

“That’s strange,” said Weena. “He didn’t seem to mind the day before yesterday.”

“So you have some kind of problem today?” enquired Elaine.

“My editor’s looked at my piece and isn’t too happy. He wants some changes made.”

“It seems some women have editors the way some women have husbands,” observed Elaine.

There was a pause while Weena considered this.

“You’re really quite funny, aren’t you?” she said.

“Thank you for the compliment,” said Elaine.

“I really admire that in you,” said Weena. “People say I don’t have a sense of humour, and then I feel bad. But humour goes with being smart, doesn’t it, and I guess I’m not all that smart. I think it’s more important for people to feel, and respond.”

“Then that’s just as well,” said Elaine, “isn’t it?”

“What I’m trying to say,” said Weena, “is that I’d like to come back and ask Def a few more questions.”

“I’m sure you would, Miss Dodds. I’ll get my husband to call back if he’s interested.”

“Do you have some sort of problem with me, Mrs. Desmond? I get the feeling you’re hostile to me. What have I done?”

“Miss Dodds,” said Elaine, “most journalists manage to get what they want in the time allocated. That said, I am not in the least hostile to you.”

“I’m not really a journalist,” said Weena. “I’m more sensitive than that. I’m a writer. I was trying not to be personal, not to ask him what it feels like to be a has-been, that kind of thing, and these are all the thanks I get.”

“Defoe is taking the dog for a walk,” said Elaine. “I’ll get him to call you back. Can I have your number?”

“Def’s got that.”

“He’ll have lost it,” said Elaine. “You know how it is; people write numbers on bits of paper and then the cleaner tidies it up.”

“In my world,” said Weena, “we do our own cleaning. Tell him I look forward to hearing from him.”

“Oh I will,” said Elaine, “I will.”

Francine stopped Weena as she was going out of the apartment.

“Weena,” she said, “I am tired of doing your laundry. Is it too much to ask for you to put your own washing through the machine?”

“It’s in the laundry basket waiting for me to get round to it,” said Weena. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Just that the laundry basket is overflowing, and smelling,” said

Francine. “And has been for weeks.”

“You resent me being my own person,” said Weena. “You want me to keep to some kind of mythical timetable, in which you are always the mother and I am always the child.”

“I am always the mother,” said Francine, “and you are always the daughter; there is no denying that. And now I am a widow, not even a wife, and you are still jealous. Just get that laundry basket cleared.”

“I will not be spoken to like that,” said Weena. “And I do my own washing in my own time.”

But she could feel her mother getting nearer and nearer some essential part of her being, and she could tell that, if she wasn’t careful, she’d be the one to move out.

When she’d slammed out of the house she paused and pressed the bell of her own apartment. “Hello?” enquired Francine.

“It’s my dirty knickers you can’t stand,” said Weena. “It’s the smell of sex. You need treatment, Mother.”

“My dearest,” said Francine, “I don’t. You do. I had an excellent sex life with your father, and you had better face it.” There were no more doors to slam, so Weena strode down the street towards the bus stop, head held high, glowing with anger and frustration, and attracting many a glance, both male and female.

Defoe returned from his walk with the dog.

“Anything happen?” he asked.

He professed to love the country, but lack of event bothered him.

Anything happening is better than nothing happening. Who wants the last days of peace, when they could have the first days of war?

Most things are good at the beginning.

“Very little,” said Elaine.

“What am I meant to do with my day?” he asked.

“Sell the house and move to town,” she said. “Invest the money, and live near to our children: pick up what work you can. We have reached the end of the line. The end of the Cold War put thriller writers out of business: the end of the arms race is the end of those whose business it was to comment on it.”

“It hasn’t ended,” he said. “It has just gone underground. I need to say that to people.”

“They’re not listening,” she said. “There are other threnodies being sung.”

“You’re very hard,” he said.

“We should never have hoped for permanence. Even this house won’t stand. If they do away with the local line, the road will come instead, bear everything away. What are five centuries in the history of a house, the story of a family? Let’s leave with dignity, while we can, before the others realise.”