The Life and Loves of a She Devil (17 page)

The judge turned down the request. Bobbo went back to prison to await trial.

The dentist fitted Polly Patch with a row of shiny temporary teeth, so that she now talked less thickly and more precisely. The judge was rather sorry. He had liked the thunderous rumble of ill-defined sound that for a time came out of the dark labyrinth of her throat. He had enjoyed thrusting his tongue into the raw chasm where once her teeth had been, rasping it over the little filed points to which her molars had been reduced. She did, however, look a little more ordinary now; she fitted in better with the rest of the household.

Sometimes he wondered where Polly Patch came from and where she was going; but not often. He was used to people appearing before him out of nothing, into the vivid central colour of the court, before disappearing again into the greyness of its perimeter, and perhaps because of his profession rather than in spite of it he asked few questions. He did not have an enquiring mind. He did not need one. A judge waits for facts to present themselves: he does not have to nuzzle them out. Others do that for him.

Polly Patch told him one night that sexual energy illuminated the universe: it must be shone like a torch into its darkest corners. Only then would there be no shame, no guilt, no war. She said that pain and pleasure were one, and that to do what one willed was the whole of the law.

Spoken, as these words were, in harsh tones, from a gaping mouth (for her teeth had gone back to the dentist for reshaping) they had the power of oracle. He thought on reflection that it was the oracle of Hades, not Olympus; of hell, not heaven. Up there on Olympus, where he’d been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.

Polly Patch went on a diet of 800 calories a day, but lost no weight. No one could understand it. Lady Bissop, on the same diet, lost a stone in a month, and became so emaciated that the judge felt a renewal of his sexual interest in her — the more unfortunate she seemed, alas, the more he appreciated her — but she shrieked so loudly he felt obliged to return to the spare room once more and the more stoical and better-padded Polly.

The accountant’s case came up for its preliminary hearing. Much anger was felt because the accused was uncooperative, and would not pass on information to the police as to the whereabouts of his lady accomplice, thus preventing the recovery of the stolen money. She had worked in his office for a time, been fired — presumably to pull the wool over the eyes of the staff —left her husband, flown to Lucerne — and there the trail had been lost.

‘How did he look in the dock?’ asked Polly Patch.

‘Unexceptional,’ said Judge Bissop. ‘He had the grey skin of a man who’s been in prison a long time, and the muddy complexion that goes with prison food.’

‘I daresay he’s used to caviar and smoked salmon,’ said Polly. ‘Poor thing!’

‘Save your pity,’ said the judge. ‘He is ruthless and without remorse. He clings to his story. He’s stubborn.’

‘How long will you give him?’

‘The case hasn’t even come to trial,’ protested the judge. ‘We don’t know what the jury will say. But I’d reckon five years.’

‘Not enough,’ said Polly Patch.

‘Not enough for what?’ He was teasing her. He held the carpet-beater over her buttocks. When he brought it down and raised it again she would have a neat pattern of weals on her flesh.

‘Not enough for my purposes,’ she said.

‘Seven years!’ he exclaimed.

‘That will do!’ she said, and he brought the beater down so hard that for once she seemed to feel it, and shrieked so loud the sound could be heard through the house and the little boys stirred in their slumber, and Lady Bissop sighed a sleeping moan, dreaming as she was of lacing tinned mushroom soup with pepper, and an owl outside hooted into the blackness.

‘The sound of a devil leaving hell,’ he exclaimed, sucking the essence from the bruised flesh, and whether he was talking about him or her who was to say? He began to see that perhaps he belonged to Hades, where the soul and body are one, and not to Olympus after all. Criminals must take their chance and so must judges. The pain of one was the pleasure of the other. Nightly he rammed the message home, bruising the distinction, blurring the divisions between the holy and the unholy, the white and the black; marking and pulping flesh to make it spirit.

‘Of course,’ he said to Polly Patch one night, in relation to the accountant, who now seemed to obsess him, ‘they might tempt him to plead insanity. Then he could have an indeterminate sentence, in some secure mental institution, and never get out. Perhaps that’s the best thing to do with a man who’s not just an embezzler but in all probability an arsonist and a murderer as well.’

‘I think it a weakness in the judiciary,’ said Polly Patch, ‘to allow insanity as a plea. Judges must face human evil head on, and not side-step into concepts of mental ill-health. It is the crime that must be judged, and not the motive for that crime, or the reason. The function of the judge is to punish, not to cure, reform or forgive.’

It was a long time since Judge Bissop had heard such opinions so firmly put. He took her words as symptomatic of changing public opinion. The needle of government had been swung for many years firmly over to the left, and the public had been vociferous in its demand for stiffer penalties for crimes against the person rather than against property. But now the needle was shaking, and quivering, and preparing for violent movement; a sharp swing to the right, and property and money would again be sacrosanct and human pain and inconvenience but a passing thing. He welcomed it.

When finally the accountant came to trial it seemed reasonable to Judge Bissop that he should receive a severe sentence. The man’s two children were in court for some of the trial, chewing gum and in general apathetic, and seeming not to care one way or another what happened to their parent. They were dressed sloppily, and reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t remember whom. He thought they should have been presented for the occasion better combed and washed and dressed, and that their demeanour and attire amounted to insolence to the court.

In view of the seriousness of the charges —cold, calculated and deliberate fraud by someone in a position of trust — he could not, as he pointed out to the Defence in his summing up, consider any notion of a suspended sentence, even bearing in mind the many months the accused had spent in custody. Delays in the hearing had been of the accused’s own making, since he refused to admit moral responsibility for his crimes, made no attempt at restitution, even declined to give the police the information they required regarding his co-conspirator. Let the Defence not believe he was a lenient judge — he was a fair one.

The accused had callously abandoned a wife and taken two or more mistresses, thereby causing distress to many, and although a citizen’s private life was his own affair and no business of the court’s — which the jury should remember in reaching their verdict — irresponsibility in one sphere of life was contagious to all others. ‘Moreover,’ he remarked, ‘property is the pivotal point on which is balanced the whole moral structure of society.’ He looked to see if the court reporters had taken this last down, and they had, and he was pleased.

The jury filed out and almost instantly filed back in.

‘Guilty,’ said the Foreman.

‘Seven years,’ said the judge.

Shortly after the trial Polly Patch left Lady Bissop’s employ. The judge arrived home from sitting on a commission enquiring into reform of the abortion laws — he took the view that abortion should remain a matter for the State rather than the individual parent, and be in general disallowed, on the grounds that white-middle-class babies were at a premium, and these were the ones most frequently lost to the surgeon’s knife — and found his wife in tears.

‘She’s gone,’ she said. ‘Polly Patch has gone! A chauffeured car came to take her away. She wouldn’t even take her wages.’

‘She wasn’t entitled to any,’ said the judge, automatically, ‘if she left without notice,’ but he wept too, and so did the children, and all clung together in their grief, achieving a closeness not normally theirs, but to be remembered as long as they lived.

‘I think she was sent by heaven,’ said Maureen Bissop.

‘Or hell,’ said the judge. ‘Sometimes I think that hell is kinder than heaven.’ He had begun to doubt God’s essential goodness.

The judge was presently able to move out of criminal law into tax litigation; this made his sexual life with his wife calmer, even ordinary. He stopped filling his children’s mouths with sand and so forth when they annoyed him, feeling that Polly Patch would not have liked it, and that perhaps, in the great balance of life, their shock and discomfort weighed heavier than his convenience. Lady Bissop and he even had a little girl whom he insisted on calling Polly — but who fortunately was blessed with such good looks as her namesake was not — a cheerful little thing who livened the household considerably. It was in her honour that Lady Bissop abandoned the bold colours of her earlier choice, and took to gentle, tiny floral designs, which had considerable charm.

M
ARY FISHER LIVES IN
the High Tower and considers the nature of loss, and longing. She still tells lies to herself; it is her nature. She believes that the rain falls because she is sad, that storms rage because she is consumed by unsatisfied lust and the crops fail because she is lonely. It has been the worst summer for fifty years and she is not at all surprised.

It is my opinion that Mary Fisher does not suffer as other people suffer. What she feels now is petulance. She is bothered by having too much of what she doesn’t want — her mother and the two children — and too little of what she does want Bobbo, sex, adoration and entertainment.

Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower and finds that food has no taste and the sun has no warmth, and is surprised.

Mary Fisher should know better. She was brought up in the gutter by a part-time whore of a mother, but she has wiped all that from her mind. Still she pretends the world is not as it is, and passes the error on. She will not learn: she will not remember. She has started another novel,
The Gates of Desire.

Bobbo builds a new life in the prison library and suffers from depression, and loss of liberty, and the absence of Mary Fisher, or that part of her he remembers most clearly, the bit where the legs split off from the body. Sometimes, I imagine, he tries to think of her face. But Mary Fisher’s features are so regular and so perfect they are hard to remember. She is all woman because she is no woman.

Well, time passes: little by little all things proceed to the end I have appointed for them. I do not put my trust in fate, nor my faith in God. I will be what I want, not what He ordained. I will mould a new image for myself out of the earth of my creation. I will defy my Maker, and remake myself.

I cast off the chains that bound me down, of habit, custom and sexual aspiration; home, family, friends — all the objects of natural affection. Not until then could I be free, and could I begin.

The extraction of so many of my teeth was the first step to the New Me. The dentist did not in fact remove them all: he filed every alternate tooth down to a point just below the gum line. The pain of the filing was intense: worse than any the judge inflicted. And the general day-to-day grinding and pounding of what was left was not pleasant — but then nor was living with the judge.

Il faut souffrir
, as I pointed out to him, in order to get what you want. The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffer everything. The people in a really lamentable state, of course, are the ones who suffer at random, and gain nothing. Lady Bissop is a case in point.

I wanted Bobbo to receive a long sentence because my sentence was long. I wanted him put on ice, as it were, until I was ready for him.

Sometimes I wonder how it is that I can be so indifferent to the mental discomfort — I won’t say suffering, because Bobbo is warm and fed, and has no responsibilities — of a man who fathered my children, and who has spent so much time inside my body. The very fact that I wonder disturbs me. I am not all she devil. A she devil has no memory of the past — she is born afresh every morning. She deals with the feelings of today, not yesterday, and she is free. There is a little bit of me left, still woman.

A she devil is supremely happy: she is inoculated against the pain of memory. At the moment of her transfiguration, from woman to non-woman, she performs the act herself. She thrusts the long, sharp needle of recollection through the living flesh into the heart, burning it out. The pain is wild and fierce for a time, but presently there’s none.

I sing a hymn to the death of love and the end of pain.

Look how Mary Fisher squirms and wriggles on the pin of remembered bliss. How she hurts! Moreover, she hears all too clearly what the villagers say. She has no one now to stop her ears with endearments and enticements and the lovely flatteries of the flesh. She hears more, in fact, than there is to hear.

Down in the village, or so Mary Fisher believes, they say that the owner of the High Tower is wilfully childless — that is to say selfish, that is to say hardly a woman at all. They say she is brutal to her poor mother, and keeps her locked in a room. They say she is cruel to her lover’s children; a really vicious step-mother. They say she is a marriage-breaker. Some say she drove her lover’s wife to suicide, for didn’t the poor woman disappear? They say that in her greed and wickedness Mary Fisher drove her lover to crime, and then, either hot with lust for her manservant, or angered because her lover, sickened by her nature, wouldn’t marry her, betrayed him: failed to save him from prison.

They say it is people like Mary Fisher who move into a community and put property prices up so that local people can no longer afford to live in their own village.