The Life and Loves of a She Devil (8 page)

Mary Fisher and Bobbo were in the act of love on the white sofa, as Garcia had assumed they would be, when Ruth interrupted their pleasure.

Bobbo wore his best white silk shirt and grey jacket and nothing else. Mary Fisher wore nothing. She made little mewing sounds of pleasure, but hardly, Garcia thought, loud enough to drown the sound of the telephone. If they did not choose to answer it they had no one to blame except themselves for what happened next. Bobbo and Mary Fisher did not at first notice Ruth’s presence, or the children’s; when they did it was Bobbo who wished to stop and Mary Fisher who wished to continue.

Andy and Nicola stood with their mouths open. Their mother did nothing to spare them the sight of their father’s lanky, passionate half-nakedness as he disengaged himself from Mary Fisher.

‘Take the children out of here,’ said Bobbo, sharply, pulling on his trousers, forgetting his underpants. This is no place for them.’

‘It is the only place,’ said Ruth, ‘they will ever get to view the primal scene.’

‘Poor Bobbo,’ said Mary Fisher. ‘I see what you mean. She is intolerable.’ She pulled a yellow fringed shawl around her shoulders, and belted its fronds around her waist with a pink silk cord, so it hung like a dress of the most expensive kind, through which glimpses of delectable flesh could occasionally be seen.

‘Garcia,’ said Mary Fisher, ‘you really should have prevented this intrusion.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said Garcia, averting his eyes, as if his mistress’s nakedness were unknown to him. ‘There was no stopping her.’

‘I imagine there seldom is,’ said Mary, forgivingly.

‘Nicola and Andy,’ said Ruth, ‘you are in a very wonderful and interesting place. It is a converted lighthouse. That is why there are so many stairs. And this is a very famous, very rich lady, who writes books. Her name is Mrs Fisher and your father loves her very much, and you must love her too, for his sake.’

‘Miss Fisher,’ corrected Mary Fisher.

‘I’m sure you will love being here,’ Ruth went on. ‘Look! You can see seagulls outside the windows and if you look down there’s a swimming pool carved into the rocks below. Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘Is it heated?’ asked Nicola.

‘I can’t look down,’ said Andy. ‘Heights make me feel sick.’

‘Then look over here, Andy; there’s a cocktail bar carved right into the old stone wall. Lot of mixers and peanuts and crisps, too. You’ll love those. I’m sure Mrs Fisher will get in orange juice as soon as she can. Won’t she, Bobbo?’

Bobbo stood between his two children as if he felt he ought to defend them, but was not quite sure against what.

‘Garcia,’ said Mary Fisher, ‘I think this lady is simply upset. Take the children down to the kitchen, please. Feed them, or whatever it is that people do with children.’

‘They are not bears, Mary,’ said Bobbo, ‘to be fed with buns.’

Mary Fisher looked as if she doubted this.

‘Ruth,’ said Bobbo, ‘please take the children home. If you want to talk to me I’ll meet you for lunch somewhere in town. But really there is nothing for us to discuss.’

‘I can’t go home,’ said Ruth.

‘You must,’ said Mary, little lips pouting. ‘You simply have not been invited here. You are trespassing. I have dogs, you know. I could set them against you, if I so wished. Intruders have no protection in law. Isn’t that so, Garcia?’

‘Ma’am,’ said Garcia, ‘I wouldn’t advise setting the dogs on anyone. Not Dobermans. Enemies today, you and me tomorrow. It’s the taste of blood, like sharks.’

‘Even so,’ said Mary Fisher.

‘Mary,’ said Bobbo. ‘There is no point in getting upset. It is obvious that the children can’t stay here. They must go home where they belong, with their mother.’

‘Why is it obvious?’ asked Ruth. Nicola was helping herself to peanuts at the bar and Andy had turned on the little portable TV, rather loud. They knew they would be advised when some decision as to their future had been reached. In the meantime they found the discussion both painful and boring.

‘Because I’m simply so bad with children,’ said Mary Fisher. ‘Look at me. Do I seem the maternal type? Besides, if I ever had children they would most certainly be my own. Wouldn’t they, Bobbo?’

She looked lovingly up at Bobbo and he looked lovingly down, and both envisaged their mutual children, as unlike Andy and Nicola as could possibly be.

‘And what is more,’ Mary Fisher went on, ‘this house is simply no good for children. There are so few doors and so many stairwells to fall down, and the dogs are snappy. Isn’t that so, Garcia? The best place for them is with you, Ruth, in their own home, with their own mother. Of course Bobbo should visit them, eventually, and he means to do so as soon as you have calmed down, but you know how he dreads rows. And it wouldn’t be good for Andy and Nicola to see you two at loggerheads. We have to think of them.’

‘As soon as you are in a smaller house, Ruth,’ said Bobbo, ‘you’ll feel better. There’ll be less work. You won’t be tired and depressed all the time. And I’m not insensitive. I do understand that living in Nightbird Drive, with all the memories it holds for you, of life with me, must be upsetting for you. The sooner it’s sold, the better.’

‘I’m glad we’ve had this talk,’ said Mary Fisher. ‘It clears the air. Bobbo needs all the capital he can raise. We want to build an office for him here: a cantilevered extension. I know the tower looks large, but it’s simply amazing how small it really is. With all the advances in information technology in recent years he can all but run his practice from here, and need only go to the town office twice a week. We don’t want to hurry you, Ruth, but the sooner the house is sold the better. Bobbo wants to pay his way: he simply doesn’t want to have to feel indebted to me; I’m sure you understand that.’

‘The thing is, Mary,’ said Ruth, ‘there simply isn’t a house to sell. It burned down this morning. And there simply isn’t a home for me to take the children back to, unless we burrow in the ashes, so they’ll have to stay here.’

When Bobbo had finished blaming Ruth for her carelessness, and Mary Fisher had telephoned the police and the fire department to verify Ruth’s story, and Andy and Nicola had realised that the guinea pig was dead, and the noise had died down, except for an occasional asthmatic gasp from Bobbo, Mary Fisher said, ‘I suppose that in the circumstances the children had better stay, for just a day or two, while we work something more sensible out. Garcia, will you drive Mrs Patchett to the station? She must have had such a tiring day. She can just catch the evening train, if she goes now.’

And she left the room, her little white behind twinkling through the yellow fronds, her part in the conversation clearly at an end. But not before she’d caught a glimpse of Nicola’s casual heel grinding crisps into the Persian rug, and Andy spurting Coca-Cola from his mouth all over the whitewashed walls, as he accidentally sneezed.

Ruth prepared to go.

‘But what about their things?’ asked Bobbo, following after her. ‘Where are their things? Trainers and underpants and jerseys and toys and colouring pencils and so on.’

‘All gone. Burned. Buy some more.’

‘I’m not made of money. And it’s Saturday, and the shops are closed, and it’s Sunday tomorrow.’

‘It very often is,’ said Ruth. ‘Just when you want something you find the shops are closed.’

‘And what about their school, Ruth? They’re going to miss school.’

‘Find them another.’

‘There
are
no schools round here.’

‘There are always schools for those who want them,’ said Ruth.

‘But where are you going?’ he demanded. To friends?’

‘What friends?’ she enquired. ‘But I’ll stay here, if you want.’

‘You know that’s out of the question.’

‘Then I’ll go.’

‘But you’ll leave an address?’

‘No,’ said Ruth, ‘I don’t have one.’

‘But you can’t just desert your own children!’

‘I can,’ said Ruth.

Garcia escorted Ruth to the front door. The Dobermans panted after her. She exuded some new scent: of triumph, freedom and fear, all mixed. They found it heady. Their noses ruffled up under her sage-green smock.

‘The dogs have good taste,’ said Garcia. He sat her in the back of the Rolls-Royce. ‘Which way are you going?’ he asked. ‘East or west? Platform One or Two?’

‘Either will do,’ she said. ‘Just put me on a train.’

He understood that she was crying. He looked over his shoulder and saw her large shoulders shaking.

‘It had to be done,’ she said. ‘There was nothing else to do. It was them or me.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on them,’ said Garcia, and meant it. ‘Anytime you want to telephone, I’ll let you know what’s going on.’

‘Thank you, Garcia.’

‘Do you want him back?’ he asked. He supposed she would. Men have trouble believing that women can ever do without them.

‘Yes,’ said Ruth, ‘but on my own terms.’

‘What are they?’

‘They’re rather special,’ was all she’d say.

She took the eastbound train; a very tall, very large lady with a dirty face and red-rimmed eyes, wearing a sage-green, tent-like dress and carrying a black refuse sack full of personal belongings hitched over one shoulder.

‘Why does that woman look so funny?’ asked a little boy, who sat opposite Ruth in the train.

‘Hush, hush!’ said the mother, and took him to sit somewhere else.

M
ARY FISHER HAS BUILT
her tower around her, and cemented the stone with banknotes, and lined the walls inside with stolen love, but still she is not safe. She has a mother.

Old Mrs Fisher lives in a house for the elderly. I know, because a monthly payment goes to the matron, and there is a question as to whether the extras (one bottle of sherry a week, four packets of chocolate-chip biscuits) are tax-deductible. The file is thick. Bobbo is good at detail. So is Mary Fisher. Bobbo moves his tongue over Mary Fisher’s left nipple, quickly, from right to left, and she gives a little gasp of pleasure.

But I need a little time. Soon I will mend but now I hurt. The she devil is wounded: she has slunk back into her lair: the ogre motherhood paces outside with heavy feet.

I must think of this grief as a physical pain. I must remember that just as a broken leg heals with time so with this psychic injury. There will be no disfiguring scar tissue: this is an inner wound, not an outer one.

I am a woman learning to be without her children. I am a snake shedding its skin. It makes no difference that the children are Nicola and Andy, that they lack charm. A child is a child: a mother, a mother. I twist and squirm with guilt and pain, even knowing that the quieter I stay the quicker I will heal, slip the old skin, and slither off renewed into the world.

I’m sure I miss them more than they miss me. They have been the meaning of my life: I have merely served their growing purposes, as old Mrs Fisher once served her daughter Mary.

G
EOFFREY TUFTON CAME TO
this particular Travelodge three times a year, and went from firm to firm in the city, promoting new advances in information technology. Once he had flown from country to country doing the same thing but on a grander scale, dealing with orders worth tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But something had happened — his personality had not fitted, or he had failed to clinch a deal just once too often — or perhaps it was his wife’s refusal to blend, to enter into the company spirit; he could not be sure — and the air trips became fewer and the rail trips more frequent, and promotion did not come, and inflation overtook his salary and these days he was glad enough of the Travelodge, and the drinks at the bar he could acquire on his expense account.

It was his fifty-first birthday and he had no one with whom to celebrate — if such a day merited celebration. He had weighed himself and discovered he was a full stone heavier than he thought. Worse, he had a stubborn conjunctivitis in one eye: it itched, it wept, it drizzled pus. His doctor had suggested the ailment was psychosomatic in origin, which made him yet more miserable. He was unsightly, overweight and useless. He kept his bad eye to the wall, in the corner of the bar, and drank, and watched his fellow salesmen pick up the girls who came in, discreet night visitors, and knew he had no chance with them at all. His eye smacked of disease. They thought nothing of age or paunchiness, except to put their prices up, but were nervous of skin eruptions, inflamed eyes, or sores around the mouth. And why not? He was half glad, because he did not like deceiving his wife, although she was to blame for many of his troubles, but only
half
because she lately had taken a job of her own, all but out-earning him, and depriving him of his sense of purpose, his reward for the life he led — that is, the thought that he supported her.

He watched Ruth come into the bar. She had to bend her neck to pass through the mock-Tudor arch. She was wearing a white trouser suit in a shiny fabric and all eyes turned towards her, and a breath of astonishment was exhaled through the bar, and one of the girls — well, she was pony-tailed but from the look of her upper arms was nearing fifty — giggled aloud. The plump man who sat beside Geoffrey said to him, ‘Specialised tastes, I presume.’

Geoffrey felt sorry for the uneasy-looking giantess, and moved over to sit beside her and bought her a drink; thus, he felt, saving her face. He could not keep his bad eye hidden from her for ever.

‘That looks nasty,’ she said, peering at it. ‘Have you rubbed it with gold?’

‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘Should I?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you don’t exactly rub, you roll. You roll the evil away.’

And she demonstrated, taking off her wedding ring and rolling it over the infected eye. The metal was surprisingly smooth and silky, and afterwards the eye felt soothed.

‘Yes, but see here,’ he said, ‘I’m not evil. I know it looks evil, but that’s the eye, not me. I’m a nice guy, really.’

‘There’s something you don’t want to see, I expect,’ she said. Her own eyes were luminous and perfect. They had a pinkish glitter which he assumed was a reflection from the little red satin lampshades. He looked at the other girls, who had a shadowy quality, as if very little stood between them and nothingness, and then at Ruth; it was as if she was rough-hewn in granite, and the sculptor had left suddenly to go to lunch and never came back, but he was grateful for her substance.