The Life and Loves of a She Devil (11 page)

Andy’s feet were astonishingly smelly. The Dobermans were for ever picking up the scent and tearing through the High Tower barking. And Harness the spaniel was of course now a noticeable member of the High Tower household — Bobbo had retrieved him from the neighbours after the fire, and found him not only traumatised but suffering mites as well, a skin infestation with which he then infected the Dobermans. Scratch, scratch, scratch! Doberman hair, fortunately, is short, but spaniel hair is long, and was everywhere. Nevertheless, Dobermans are powerful dogs, and their scratching shook the floors by day and night; even the stone walls, designed to withstand as powerful seas as nature ever intended, sometimes seemed to tremble in the dark hours of the night; scratch, shake, shudder, shake!

Mercy the cat, also brought to join the household, was vexed and troubled by the change, and became old Mrs Fisher’s familiar; naturally enough, according to Bobbo. Now she was given to leaping on Mary Fisher’s lap and secretly sucking away at the silky folds of her dress, as at a nipple. Some form of bleach in the cat’s saliva, indeed, left nipple patterns in the fabric which dry cleaning could not remove. In this way Mercy had ruined some of Mary Fisher’s loveliest dresses.

‘The cat’s upset,’ was all Bobbo would say. ‘She’ll get over it in time. Give her more milk!’

‘How long is “in time”?’

‘Years,’ Bobbo said.

Bobbo went to his office in the city for two days every week. He did not like to let Mary Fisher out of his sight for longer than that. He did not trust Garcia. The rest of the week he worked at home, and rather rashly delegated responsibility to his staff. His clientele, thanks to his association with Mary Fisher, now included many writers of great wealth, if not distinction.

Bobbo on the whole was happy. He had more or less what he wanted. He had the family he had always wanted, the home he wanted, the style he wanted. A rich, beautiful and famous mistress to love and worship him. If she failed in his estimation, he would withdraw his sexual favours for a time, and speak in flattering terms of other, pretty, younger women he had encountered, and so brought her, confused and anxious, to heel. These days she was not looking her best, and knew it. Sometimes her fingernails broke and she couldn’t be bothered filing, painting and protecting them, but put the worrying finger in her mouth and tugged with her teeth and pulled the whole top segment of nail off, down to the quick.

Mary Fisher could no longer cry out in the act of love, because old Mrs Fisher was listening and so were the children. Nicola listened out for Bobbo; Andy for Mary Fisher: he sorted his way through her silken underwear whenever he could. Nicola tried to dress in the way that Mary Fisher did, and looked extraordinary. Mary Fisher suggested to Bobbo that doors and walls should be put where no doors or walls used to be, in order to achieve a degree of privacy, but Bobbo wouldn’t hear of it.

‘This place is magnificent,’ said Bobbo. ‘It would be a shame to turn it into something ordinary. You must be careful, Mary, not to turn into a suburban housewife!’

But that of course was what part of him yearned for her to be, and worked for her to be. To stop work, to cease earning, to wash up: to be what his mother never was. His.

Mary Fisher finished a novel,
The Far Bridge of Desire,
and submitted it to her publisher; it was returned for extensive alterations. She was alarmed, upset and disconcerted. For if Mary Fisher had lost her touch, if a million million women stirred in their Valium dreams, reached for a Mary Fisher novel and sank back into slumber again, disappointed, that was tragedy indeed. The loss was not just Mary Fisher’s, but theirs. If in Tashkent, in Moosejaw, in Darwin and St Louis they said we needed Mary Fisher and she betrayed us, her misfortune was multiplied a million times.

And why had it happened? She couldn’t understand it. She had taken more care with this novel than with many another. She thought that in the end that might make it better. She’d shown it to Bobbo during its writing, as any loving woman would her man, and he had even helped her with it. He’d wanted her heroes to be a little more grave, a little less tall —‘Like you, you mean, Bobbo?’ she’d laughed, but he’d frowned and asked her to be serious — a little more sensitive to the arts and a little less given to blood sport. He’d corrected her grammar, improved her construction, sharpened her plotting and reproached her for her way of stringing adjective upon adjective, as if words were building blocks and the aim to construct the highest possible tower. Bobbo had been to university: she, Mary Fisher, had not. He should know. She charmed, but he
knew.

‘But the way I do it
works
,’ she protested. ‘Millions of readers can’t be wrong. Can they?’

‘Darling Mary, indeed they can. It is not the number of readers that count, surely, but the quality of the reader. You are worth more than this. It upsets me to see you selling your talent the way you do, writing trash. You could be a serious writer.’

‘But I
am
a serious writer.’

Trash! She suffered. He enfolded her little limbs in his muscled arms and kissed her better. He did, he did! Sometimes it was all so like her novels. So why wouldn’t he believe her, why couldn’t he believe what she wrote? Or rather what she used to write, when love was in the head and not in the flesh?

Love was real, and life was everlasting, and endings were happy. Were they not themselves the living proof that romance was real? Bobbo and Mary, happy for ever in the High Tower? But Mary Fisher’s voice faltered just a little as she proclaimed it.

Mary Fisher rewrote her novel in the old sloppy way, in secret, and regained her publishers’ confidence and her own, at least for the meantime.

‘Darling,’ said Bobbo, not sleeping with her for three days —three whole days! — after publication day, ‘it’s not that I’m disappointed in you, it’s just that instead of changing the book you should have changed your publishers! Since you can aspire to something higher than a mass market, why don’t you?’

‘Because it doesn’t pay so well,’ said Mary Fisher, harshly, staring at the electricity bill. Until she’d met Jonah, the rich and elderly socialist, she’d been poor. Her father had left home in her infant days and her mother had entertained a gentleman or two to pay the rent, one of whom had been Jonah. Poor Jonah hadn’t lasted long, after marrying Mary Fisher. And then a daughter turned up to contest the will. After that Mary Fisher had to fend for herself.

‘We have each other,’ said Bobbo. ‘Isn’t that enough? My practice is building beautifully. If I had your full support behind me it would do even better. Then you wouldn’t have to write at all.’ Bobbo parts her lips with his tongue and her thighs with his body and says he is all hers, and she is all his, and perhaps it is true.

Mary Fisher considered the nature of lust, and the self, and sacrifice. Mary Fisher was not what she was, and knew it. The little tough nut at the core of her frail being was chipped and breaking. She could feel it. Lust corrodes as love does not. Lust is all hard hammer blows, cracking and splitting. Love is a slippery, velvety cloak to hide in. Lust is real and love is the stuff of dreams, and dreams are what we are made of. A million million women couldn’t be wrong. Could they?

Bobbo’s blue eyes stared into hers; if she closed her eyes he opened them with his fingers, gently. He wanted her to see the truth.

Part of the truth of life, Mary Fisher now observed, was the sorry nature of its end. Old Mrs Fisher’s body and mind were out of step. The mind stayed bold and wayward and unloving: the body querulously dependent. If she was to be kept quiet she must be tranquillised; if she was tranquillised she drooled and wet the bed, or worse, the brick crevices of the High Tower. Staff complained.

‘So what am I to do?’ Mary Fisher asked the doctor.

‘It’s one thing or the other,’ he said. ‘There is no perfect solution. She is your mother and you must love her and care for her, as she loved you when you were helpless. That’s all you can do.’

It’s hard to love a mother who has never loved you. Nevertheless, Mary Fisher, presented with her duty, did not avoid it. She tried.

Mary Fisher started and finished a new novel in the space of three months. She called it
Ace of Angels
but her publishers felt it lacked conviction. It was too intricate; it lacked the driving simplicity of her earlier work. A kind of gritty reality kept breaking in. The readers wouldn’t like it. One page romance, the next fable, the next social realism! Her publishers looked at each other. Well, she was growing old. How old? No one knew.

It didn’t matter to Bobbo how old Mary Fisher was. Bobbo thought she was probably about forty: at any rate she was timeless and her throat was firm and her little hands were white, and the memory of the giantess and the humiliation of his marriage to a freak was fast receding, and he loved Mary Fisher and loved to show it, and he was the maypole round which the tangled skeins of her happiness wound and unwound, strong and firm and for ever.

‘I heard you! Disgusting! Animals!’ cried Mrs Fisher, popping up from somewhere. ‘My daughter’s fifty if she’s a day. I have proof. Want to see her birth certificate?’

‘I’m so bored in this crummy place,’ moaned Nicola, who had put on another ten pounds.

‘I’m sick,’ hiccuped Andy, and was, over everything.

Garcia wasn’t there to clean it up — he was at the vet with Harness, whose leg had been badly bitten by one of the Dobermans (not the bitch) whom Harness had tried to mount. Mercy the cat chose that day to urinate in Mrs Fisher’s bed. At least that’s what Mrs Fisher said. The two maids handed in their notice. Garcia was not there to charm them into submission with promissory glances from his liquid brown eyes. Mary Fisher was seen to wash dishes by a photographer from
Vogue,
who called on a speculative appointment, and whom she didn’t have the strength to send away.

Bobbo was beginning to find the drive between the city and the High Tower oppressive. Quite often, these days, he stayed overnight at his office, or with friends. Friends?

‘Oh, Mary!’ said Bobbo. ‘How can you be jealous? You know I love you. You are the beginning and end of my life!’ Except on Wednesday nights, thought Mary Fisher. Then where are you?

One Wednesday night, Mary Fisher wept in the desolation of family love and Garcia heard and stood beside her bed, icily wistful, recalling former times. She asked him to leave but he didn’t, and what could she do? He knew too much and too little and if he handed in his notice she would be lost. She knew it: she would be altogether crushed between the mills of the present and the future, with no cushion from the past to insert between them. So she didn’t scream as he slipped into her bed. In any case, who would have come? The Dobermans? Mary Fisher wanted to have everything and lose nothing. She always did.

Mary Fisher’s
Ace of Angels
was published, but only just.

Garcia asked for a rise. She had no option but to give him one, although Bobbo objected.

‘We must be a little careful, surely, Mary?’

‘Oh, money!’ she pooh-poohed, but didn’t feel it. The last royalty return was way down. Perhaps she was going out of fashion? No one had filmed one of her romances for six years, now she came to think of it.

‘How is she looking?’ Ruth asked Garcia one day; she telephoned him from time to time, just to see how things in the High Tower were getting on. He would tell her, with alacrity, and without remorse. Mary Fisher no longer inspired his loyalty.

‘She is beginning to look old,’ he said.

M
ARY FISHER LIVES IN
the High Tower and nearly, nearly prefers death to life. Beneath her balcony the great seas beat themselves upon eternal rock. What shall she do to be saved?

Mary Fisher must renounce love, but cannot. And since she cannot Mary Fisher must be like everyone else. She must take her destined place between the past and the future; limping between the old generation and the new: she cannot escape. She nearly did: almost, she became her own creation.

But I stopped her. I, the she devil, the creation of her lover, my husband. And she needn’t think I’ll stop there. I’ve only just begun.

T
HERE IS ALWAYS A
living to be earned doing the work that others prefer not to do. Employment can generally be found looking after other people’s children, caring for the insane, or guarding imprisoned criminals, cleaning public lavatories, laying out the dead or making beds in cheap hotels. Payment is usually small, but enough to keep the recipient alive and strong enough to get to work the next day. There is always, as governments are fond of saying, work for those who want it.

Ruth, after leaving Mrs Trumper’s employ, went straight to a students’ café in the university area of the city and spent an hour or so drinking coffee and watching the young people who came in and out. She finally approached a pale but handsome young man who sat by himself, with his books, in a corner, and who was treated by the others with interest and respect. They would come up to him, chat for a little, and occasionally money would pass hands, or slips of paper, or small packets.

‘I wonder if you could help me,’ she said.

‘That is my profession,’ he said. ‘But I usually help the young.’

‘I am starting my life again,’ she said, ‘and I find you can do so much without certificates, but not everything.’

‘There are always loopholes,’ he said. ‘I see the world, increasingly, as a knot of worms in a bucket, slithering about, looking for loopholes.’

‘A worm is small and thin,’ she said, ‘and I am not.’

He agreed that this was so, and someone such as she might well need certificates. They were of course more difficult to organise, being labour-intensive, and skilled labour at that, than either sex or drugs, and would be expensive. But he would see what he could do.

Ruth obtained two certificates of general education, one in English and one in Mathematics, for which she paid $50 each. She had him make them out in the name of Vesta Rose, a name which in her childhood she had always longed to have.