The Life and Loves of a She Devil (7 page)

She went into Nicola’s room and saw that it was not only strewn with sweet papers but that Nicola had been trying to make three feather pillows out of one torn duvet. She knocked over a bottle of white spirit that Nicola had failed to seal.

Bobbo’s study, at the back of the house, not so overlooked by the neighbours, was littered with papers. Ruth had been going through the drawers, sorting out her possessions and his, dividing their lives. Two large wastepaper baskets were more than full and there were two bags made of black plastic — the kind that is cheap but tears easily — stuffed with out-dated documents, bills and letters, leaning against the desk, waiting to be put out of the house. Ruth drew the curtains to keep the sun out, sat down at Bobbo’s desk and smoked one of the cigarettes she had taken from Carver’s table. She did it inexpertly, not normally being a smoker, and did not much care for it, and when she had smoked half stubbed it out and threw it into the wastepaper basket at the foot of the curtains. She stubbed it out carelessly, and it smouldered. How could a non-smoker know? Most fires, when extinguished, go out and stay out.

Then Ruth left the room, leaving the door open. A cool draught blew through. She went back to the kitchen, where the oil was beginning to bubble and, after a little thought, called forgivingly to Harness and Mercy, who were so startled by this attention that Harness took refuge beneath the double bed in the master bedroom and Mercy leaked away on top of it, in her usual mixture of vengeance and fright.

Ruth ignored nips and scratches and removed both animals from the house. She forgot the guinea pig. He had earned forgetfulness. She dragged the double mattress off the bed, heaved it over the bedroom balcony railings and down into the side garden, which her neighbour, Rosemary, overlooked.

Ruth began to hose down the mattress. Rosemary from next door looked over the low fence. Her hair was in rollers.

‘What are you doing, Ruth?’ she asked.

‘It’s the animals,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s either do this or buy a new mattress. You know what cats are!’

‘Not if they’re neutered,’ said Rosemary, and went back inside. She reappeared presently, saying, ‘Can you smell burning?’

‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘If anything’s smelling it’s this mattress.’

Rosemary went back in, to reappear shortly.

‘Are you sure there’s not some kind of fire?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that smoke at the back of the house?’

‘Good God,’ said Ruth, ‘I think you’re right.’

At that moment the kitchen exploded. It was ten in the morning, exactly. The two women ran to call the fire brigade and the police from the telephone in Rosemary’s house.

‘Thank God the children are out!’ said Rosemary. ‘Where are they?’

‘At MacDonald’s,’ said Ruth, and Rosemary, even at such a moment, tut-tutted.

Ruth wept and wailed and clung to her neighbour, and the black fumes from burning polystyrene prevented the firemen from rescuing Richard the guinea pig in time. The limp body was brought out, extracted too late from smouldering hay.

‘He didn’t suffer,’ said a fireman, ‘the smoke got him first.’

‘But I loved him, I loved him,’ cried Ruth, and the chief of police thought, poor giant lady, she had to love something, and now she has nothing.

‘They shouldn’t allow these new foam chips,’ said the fireman. ‘It happens all the time. One minute a home’s there, the next it isn’t.’

The fact seemed to gratify them. Their hoses merely seemed to exacerbate matters. Smoke clouds billowed over Eden Grove, blotting out the sunlight in Nightbird Drive. Neighbours, many in curlers, gathered and clung and whispered.

‘It never rains but it pours,’ they said. ‘Poor Ruth, what will she do? No husband, no home and the guinea pig dead!’

But in their hearts they were glad she was going. She had never really fitted in. When she had given lunches something had always gone wrong, and Andy looked up the knickers of the little girls, and Nicola was rumoured to steal. The neighbours offered tea to the firemen who took off their boots and helmets and sat their smoky handsome selves on pale polystyrene sofas, and if children and husbands were out, in one or two instances nipped up to the bedrooms. Fire and danger and disaster are great aphrodisiacs.

‘So you’re the lady of the house,’ said the insurance man. He arrived at ten fifty-five to view the scene and assess responsibility and blame. He had been notified of the fire by the police. They reported all house fires on the spot. There had been too many of them lately.

‘I was,’ said Ruth, brave through her tears.

‘That’s the spirit! Remember, we’re here to help you. A writeoff, I should say. But no lives lost, that’s the main thing.’

‘There was the guinea pig,’ lamented Ruth.

‘We’ll help you buy another,’ he said. ‘Or at any rate sixty per cent of another. Unless of course there was negligence. I took a quick look at your file before I came down.’ He offered her a cigarette.

‘Do you smoke?’

She accepted it.

‘Thank you. I’ve smoked a lot since my husband left. You know how it is. Nerves.’

‘Perhaps that’s how it started? A cigarette in a wastepaper basket? Not properly stubbed out? It’s so easy.’

‘It might have been,’ said Ruth. ‘In fact now I come to think of it, I was sorting papers in Bobbo’s room, and started crying —oh!’ She clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘What have I said?’

‘The truth is always best,’ he said, busily writing.

‘Oh, no, no!’ wailed Ruth. ‘Whatever will poor Bobbo say?’

At eleven o’clock Andy and Nicola arrived, pleased with their second breakfast and their punctuality, and the taxi turned up as well, and Ruth, carrying a black plastic bag of rescued belongings, pushed the children into the back, and got in the front beside the driver. He feared her large thighs would get in the way of the hand brake. She was a strange sight — her face smoke-blackened and her eyes glittering.

‘We’re going to the coast,’ she told the children. ‘We’re going to see Daddy.’

The driver surveyed the dark shell of her once lovely home. ‘Was that yours?’ he asked, awed. The children were crying in the back, but were so full of hamburgers their distress was more token than anything else, and trauma on the whole avoided, which was what she had anticipated.

‘Let’s just get away,’ Ruth begged. ‘It does the children no good to look at a scene like that. The end of the life they’ve known.’

He accelerated obligingly. Ruth looked back when the taxi reached the top of the hill and saw No. 19 Nightbird Drive as a lost tooth, a black and empty socket, in an otherwise gleaming, smiling mouth and was glad.

‘What about Harness, what about Mercy?’ wept the children. They did not mention the guinea pig, and she did not remind them.

‘They’re alive,’ said Ruth, ‘and I’m sure the neighbours will look after them; they’re so fond of animals!’

‘Our books, our toys!’ they wept.

‘Gone, all gone,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure your father will buy you more.’

‘Are we going to live with him?’

‘You have nowhere else to live, my dears.’

‘You, too?’

‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘Your father lives with someone else now, and there’s no changing that. But I’m sure she’ll be happy to have you, she loves him so much.’

M
ARY FISHER LIVES IN
the High Tower. She loves it there. Was there ever a more enchanting address? High Tower, the Old Lighthouse, World’s End? When Mary Fisher bought the place five years ago it was a ruin. Now it is the outer and visible sign of her achievement. She loves the way the evening sun stretches across the sea on to the old stone and makes everything a warm soft pinky yellow. Who needs rose-tinted glasses when reality is so cosy? It can be done, you see. Mary Fisher has done it.

It is dangerous to love houses, to put your trust in buildings.

Who needs a knight in shining armour when Bobbo is there, in his beautifully laundered shirt, in his well-cut, fine-seamed suit, made in best, in softest mohair, and full of adoration, admiration? Mary Fisher has made her books come true. It can be done. She’s done it.

It is dangerous to love men, to put your trust in love.

It is even more dangerous to have house and man in the same basket.

I could have told Mary Fisher that but she didn’t ask me. Besides, she devils do not offer advice. Why should they?

The flames were wonderful. They warmed my chilly blood.

G
ARCIA ENJOYED WORKING AT
the High Tower. He had personal charm, physical strength and an easy nature and was well suited to his work. He alone could keep in order the Dobermans which guarded Mary Fisher’s property: they loped at his heels and so he had no trouble in keeping the rest of the staff — two maids, a cook and a gardener — in order too. Garcia had his own room, with a sea view, and which was warm in winter and cool in summer. He was young and healthy. He sent his wages home to his mother in Spain; he did not know that she had married again. In his spare time he would go down to the village and drink. There were three young village women and two young fishermen all in love with him, and because he could talk fast and convincingly and had great sexual energy, none of them minded too much about the existence of the others. If any man could be deemed happy that man was Garcia.

Garcia admired Mary Fisher for her style, her looks, her wealth. He thought she was placed above him as the shiny moon is above the dark earth, there where nature had ordained. During the four years of his employment he had made love to her on five occasions. He saw it as only right that he should serve her needs, tactfully and unobtrusively. If she cried in the night he would go to her, and in the morning they would be mistress and manservant again, formal as ever.

Other of her lovers came and went, all richer, grander and more powerful than he, and he did not resent them. How could he? Their rights in the world were greater than his. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, and so forth. And she needed her lovers — as indeed she needed him, Garcia, for her work, for her writing. How was Mary Fisher to describe the tremors of the flesh, the yearnings of the heart, if she did not feel them? They are so soon forgotten, just like the pangs of childbirth.

When Bobbo arrived with his two suitcases Garcia was at first merely disconcerted. When Mary Fisher welcomed Bobbo in, became pink and tremulous and fluttery with pleasure, and made room for his clothes in her closet, Garcia was displeased. He had assumed that were Mary Fisher ever to join her life to another’s it would be to someone even richer and grander than she. She would cease to be the moon — she would become the sun. Bobbo, Garcia had always felt, was only a cut above a servant himself; an advisor, a professional. A city man who knew nothing of the sea or of coastal life; who walked on the edges of cliffs to show that he was brave and strolled at the sea’s edge in a storm to show who was master, and who did not understand what salt did to glass, or wood or human flesh, and ordered the windows opened in a high wind, the better to feel the force and glory of nature. Not only did he lack power, he lacked wisdom. Garcia sulked and sent a maid up with the early morning tea.

When Garcia saw the taxi come up the drive of the High Tower and Ruth and the children get out, he was gratified. Ruth, he knew, meant trouble. She had come to dinner once, and torn a hole in a valuable rug and spilled red wine on a white Portuguese lace cloth, leaving a stain which not even professional cleaning could remove.

Mary Fisher was in the studio with Bobbo when the taxi arrived. Garcia took it upon himself to ring through on the internal telephone but neither Mary nor Bobbo answered. They were, he assumed, too busy making love to answer. He felt angry, dispossessed and restless, like a rooster in the farmyard when one of the hens prefers the second-in-command.

Ruth rang the bell on the great oak door. The Dobermans leapt up against it, barking, shaking the massive boards. He heard the sound of wailing, frightened children. He restrained the dogs and opened the door.

‘I have come to see my husband,’ said Ruth above the uproar. ‘And the children have come to see their father.’

She stood upon the steps like a figure carved in stone: a giant chess piece, a clumsy black rook come to challenge the little white ivory queen. The dogs whined and fell silent. Garcia thought she had the same expression in her eyes, a reddish glitter, as his mother had on the day she’d flung his drunken father out, risking murder at his hand. He crossed himself. Ruth smelt slightly of smoke, which made him think of hell-fire. He stood aside to let her pass. He was both frightened and challenged by her. Garcia of the five compliant lovers, three female, two male, thought he could dice with the Devil if he wanted. And why not? All a man had to do with fear was outface it.

‘Where are they?’ she asked, and Garcia pointed upwards. He saw no reason to save Bobbo and Mary from the consequences of their actions. Ruth nodded and went up the circular stone stairway that was the centre of the house. The stairs were wide and low — the cold indoor stone warmly carpeted in pink. The children toiled up behind her, complaining because there was no lift. Ruth moved her large bulk upwards, round and round, with surprising ease. Garcia, following on behind, thought perhaps he could manage her: she would be his three girl friends rolled into one. He could reduce the loving courtship rituals the village girls demanded by two-thirds and still find satisfaction. The term ‘bulk buy’ came into his mind.

Ruth reached the top landing of the lighthouse. Mary Fisher’s great studio room spread itself out beneath cantilevered oak beams. The wood was old, hard and seasoned by salt water. Once these beams had formed the backbones of Elizabethan battleships, men o’war; or so the architect had said. The cost of the conversion from lighthouse to dwelling had been some $250,000 and had provided employment for many, locally and from afar. Ruth knew this: she was familiar with Mary Fisher’s accounts. Bobbo had spent a lot of time with them at Nightbird Drive, as if he could not get enough of them at the office but had to bring them home.