Kitabı oku: «Alice Hartley‘s Happiness»

Wednesday Night

Professor Charles Hartley leaned back in his chair and watched his wife progress through the languid motions of the Dance of the Seven Veils. In the background, from the Hartleys’ tasteful black ash hi-fi system came the whine of an Eastern flute, like a dog shut on the wrong side of a door. Alice Hartley revolved slowly, her large black-ringed eyes expectantly on her husband, her broad feet treading the carpet. Charles Hartley stifled a yawn.

He was not aroused. Deep in the recesses of his baggy boxer shorts The Phallus – the proud symbol of the Professor’s innate superiority over half of the population of the world – lay quiescent, a dozing puppy. There was no urgency. There was no hurry. Mrs Alice Hartley wore several layers of diaphanous petticoats and gauzes beneath her flowing kaftan, and tonight, as a special treat for Charles’s forty-fourth birthday, she had added several scarves trimmed with beads and bells around her neck, waist, and wrists, a djellaba over her head, and a collegiate scarf tied purdah-wise across the lower part of her face.

She would be hours getting that lot off, Professor Hartley thought sourly, and settled himself deeper into his padded rocker-chair. Hours and hours, he thought gloomily and his imagination strayed – as it so often did – to little Miranda Bloomfeather who could step out of her t-shirt and tight blue jeans in fifteen seconds flat – and often, deliciously, did.

Professor Hartley was at that time in his life when a man demands of himself what is the meaning of life, asking: ‘For what was I born? And is this all there is? And what of the great quests which have motivated men through the ages? Where am I going? And what is the Nature of Individualism? Or, more simply: Who am I?’

Like all men who courageously confront great questions of identity and truth, Professor Hartley came to one conclusion. Unerringly, untiringly he struggled through his boredom and his despair until he found the source of his discontent, the spring of his angst, his own private darkness. It was all the fault of his wife.

Alice, he sincerely felt, was part of his past. Part of his struggling, underfunded, undergraduate past. While Miranda, with her pert little bum and skimpy clothes, was undoubtedly The Future. Certainly the disturbing and erotic dreams which awoke him nightly with The Phallus making a little tent of the continental quilt were deeply symbolic, meaning – he was sure – that it was time for a shift of perspective. Time for growth, time for rediscovery, time to change. In other words (in the crude simplicities of layperson’s speech): Professor Hartley was tired of Alice; and wanted Miranda instead.

He planned to explore with Alice, in a free and open adult discussion, exactly where their relationship was failing, and what were his underlying needs. Indeed, he had mentally reserved their next counselling session for just such a revelation. He planned casually to steer the session towards a discussion about growth and change and then lure Alice into expressing a readiness to try a new form of marriage – a more open relationship. Then he planned to confront her with her just-stated wish to leave him; and nobly offer her a divorce. By the time Alice had sorted out what he was doing and what were his intentions Professor Hartley reckoned to have packed her things and changed the locks.

Not that he ever acknowledged – even in his quietest moments – the simple truth that he was deserting Alice. Professor Hartley was educated and nourished in a world which, on the whole, took the male viewpoint as the norm and the female view (when it is offered which, God knows, is rare enough) as aberrant. His boredom with Alice and his lust for Miranda he perceived fondly, as the Spirit of the Age, and therefore inevitable. He told himself that Alice too was ready for change. She was ready to go away, he fondly reassured himself. She was always trailing off for study weekends with the Well Women’s Group, with the Open University, for her training as a New Age counsellor, for her vegan retreats.

Professor Charles Hartley nodded judiciously. At the deep emotional levels where, as a Professor of Psychology, he alone was expert, he knew that Alice had already abandoned him. What he was doing was characteristic male behaviour: hunting down the truth about their lives. He was exhibiting the male courage which makes men leaders, explorers, kings. He was the heir to huntsmen, cavemen, and particularly entrepreneurial monkeys. He had the courage to confront this issue instead of concealing it – as Alice wished to conceal it – behind the now empty rituals of living together.

Alice used the typical, cowardly, female tactic of behaving as if their relationship was thriving, behaving as if she still cared for him, devoting her life to him as usual. Professor Hartley recognized her day-to-day care of him, her support of his work, and her unfailing, indeed excessive readiness to make love as the despicable ploy it was. It was Alice’s innate female cowardice that made her love him and support him and protect him from the outside world. It was her failure of vision. It would be healthy for them both to break this routine and bourgeois life. Charles stretched longingly and The Phallus lifted its head like a dog when his master calls ‘walkies!’

When Alice was gone…Miranda could move in.

Charles thanked God (a Being remarkably resembling Charles Hartley in appearance, logic, and priorities) that he was not a promiscuous man. Charles knew from his studies in sociology and anthropology that he was a serial monogamist. Charles thought that men who had sexual relations with many women lacked control and self-discipline. He knew that the natural way, the proper way, especially for a natural leader of other men, is one woman at a time – the duration of that time depending of course on the desirability of the woman and the availability of alternatives. This, Charles knew, is not promiscuity. It is not even sexual liberalism. It is Natural Selection, and right now Natural Selection and the whole Darwinian structure of the Laws of Evolution were supporting Charles’s decision to dump Alice and replace her with Miranda.

He smiled at the thought, and Alice, mistaking his expression for arousal, came a little closer and danced within reach of his slack fingers. She took three steps to the right and pointed one large white foot, she took three steps to the left and widened her dark kohl-rimmed eyes, she came even closer and, provocatively, winsomely, trailed one of her gauze scarves across his face. The little beaten coins of gold at the fringe tapped unpleasantly on his cheek and then one struck him, painfully, in the right eye.

‘For God’s sake, Alice!’ he exploded irritably. ‘Do you have to?’

Alice shuddered to a sudden halt, open-mouthed. ‘What?’ she demanded as if she could not believe her ears.

Charles looked at her. She was a dark-haired, large-eyed, full-bodied woman, exotic in her ethnic prints and gipsy shawls. Her cheeks were rosy with exercise and her kohl-rimmed eyes were wide with astonishment.

‘What?’ she said again.

‘I am sick of you,’ Charles said simply, throwing strategy to the winds and telling the truth for once. ‘I am sick of the awful stews you make, and your herbal remedies. I am sick of tea made from flowers, and carrot cake which sticks to the roof of my mouth for hours, even days, after I have finished eating. I am sick of sleeping with the curtains open so that you can have moonlight on your face and be in touch with your lunar cycle. I am sick of your trailing dresses and your weird coloured pop-socks. I want a divorce.’

Alice stood as still as if she had been turned into a pillar of genuine, unrefined rock salt. She pulled the stripy college scarf away from her mouth and, to his horror, Charles saw she was smiling. Worse than that – oh God, much worse – she was laughing at him.

‘Miranda Bloomfeather,’ she said with uncanny prescience.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Charles said weakly. He tried, without success, to erase the picture of Miranda Bloomfeather’s brown buttocks from his mind. Despite his professorial chair in Applied Psychology he could not rid himself of a superstitious belief that his wife could read his thoughts.

‘Miranda Bloomfeather,’ Alice said again. ‘A natural D. You gave her A minus last term. You must think we are all as half-witted as she is.’

A vision of Miranda Bloomfeather’s silky tanned thighs pressed demurely side-by-side under her denim miniskirt dashed through Charles’s mind like a wasp through a picnic. He resolutely turned his eyes and thoughts to the pile of the carpet under his wife’s bare splayed feet. He did not know whom she meant by ‘we’ and he feared she had been indulging in vulgar gossip with Miranda Bloomfeather’s personal tutor – a fellow-member of his wife’s homeopathic consciousness-raising group. Another nut-case woman, he thought miserably.

He tried to recapture the initiative by a swift return to the discussion he had planned. ‘We have both changed, Alice,’ he said sonorously. ‘We have both grown during the time of our marriage. Indeed, we have grown because of our marriage. Now we both have new needs. You and I together must think how we are going to satisfy these needs – yours as well as mine.’

‘Miranda Bloomfeather,’ Alice said, smiling broadly. She opened her scarlet mouth showing large white teeth. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.’

‘Now look here,’ said Charles. ‘I am trying to have a serious and civilized conversation with you, Alice. It is nothing to do with Miranda. That is a quite separate issue which I will discuss when you are feeling calmer.’

As usual, the suggestion that Alice was not calm sent her into a towering and uncontrollable rage. ‘Calm?’ she shrieked. ‘I am calm! But I’ll tell you what I’m not! I’m not clammy! I’m not creepy! I’m not an impotent old stick who can only get it up with a nineteen-year-old on his office floor!’

Charles could feel a throbbing in his temples which meant that Alice was giving him one of his tension headaches. ‘We won’t talk now.’ He got up swiftly from his chair and went towards the door. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. ‘I can feel a headache coming on. I deplore your tone and language, Alice. I shall be raising this at our marital counselling session tomorrow.’

‘Who started it?’ she demanded instantly. ‘Who started up about the carrot cake? Who wanted a divorce five seconds ago, and now wants a quiet life?’

Charles turned, his hand on the door. ‘I do,’ he said. He meant he wanted the divorce but Alice screeched with laughter at his assent.

‘I’ll give you a quiet life!’ she exclaimed. With one bracelet-manacled hand she swept the blue Ionian pottery vases off the mantelpiece so they crashed into the fireplace. The bunch of very old dried flowers in the cold grate exploded into dust and sterile pollen.

‘There!’ she shouted defiantly.

Charles looked at her with weary satisfaction. ‘You just make work for yourself, Alice,’ he said and went out, closing the door behind him with the restrained click of a man who knows himself to be in the right.

‘Ha!’ Alice said to the unresponsive door. Less certainly, with a little quaver in her voice she said it again: ‘Ha!’

She could hear him going softly upstairs, his suede shoes making little crunching noises on the cork matting. Ten years ago he would have wrestled her down to the floor and taken her with passion and anger on the hearthrug among the shards of china and the dried flowers. Five years ago he would have walked out, but she would have run after him in tears and they would have made up in the comfort of their large pine bed. Even at their most recent quarrel, last month, he had pompously departed but then thought of something so irresistible that he had come back in to say: ‘And another thing…’ and they had fought on until they reached a compromise which each could privately call victory.

Now she stood still while the dust settled and the Arabic music moaned on. He did not come back; not even with some cutting phrase assembled on the stairs and too good to leave unsaid.

And she let him go.

Liar that he was, Charles was right for once, she thought moodily, stirring her big toe among the shreds of long-dead hydrangea. They had changed. Perhaps it was time to move on.

But she was damned if he was going to have it all his own way! Alice was not one of those injured wives who wear betrayal like a mourning brooch. She could not face the thought of Charles’s colleagues’ muted condolences when she met them in the university health food shop. They would rally round to let her weep on their shoulders while they patted her back and rubbed discreetly against her front. They would sympathize to her face, and when their wives were listening; but when they were alone with Charles they would say ‘ho, ho, ho’.

‘Ho, ho, ho,’ Alice whispered resentfully into the quiet room. ‘Ho bloody ho.’

It was so ageing to be left for a nineteen-year-old, she thought miserably. She looked at herself in the mirror over the marble mantelpiece. The lights were darkened and the reflection was kind. But no one could look from Alice to Miranda Bloomfeather and have the least doubt that Charles Hartley had swopped his old wife for a young mistress. Alice rested her face against the cold surface of the mantelpiece and struggled against the profound blow to her deepest self – her vanity.

There was a tap on the front door. It was so soft that for a moment she thought she had misheard it. But then it came again, louder, two taps. Alice glanced at her reflection in the mirror, impatiently tweaked off the djellaba, threw back the mass of her dark hair and went out into the hall and opened the door.

There was a young man on the doorstep. When Alice opened the door he pulled off his woolly bobble-hat and smiled nervously.

‘Oh!’ he said. His voice was light, shy. His smile was engaging. His close-cropped brown hair was curly, his pebble glasses magnified his eyes, which were pale and blue. Alice felt a rush of unexpected and uncontrollable lust.

‘Mrs Hartley!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am sorry to trouble you so late, but we were moving scenery later than we meant.’

Alice noted the large removal van behind him. She tossed back her hair and glowed at him. ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘Won’t you come in? I don’t quite know what this is all about?’

He stepped lightly over the doorstep. The hall was narrow. Alice turned so that her large rounded breasts brushed against his denim jacket.

‘It’s Suffix Theatre Players,’ he said. His voice quavered into a little squeak but he soon had it under control again. ‘We’re doing a play “The Intruder”, and we need a psychiatrist’s couch. Your husband very kindly said we could borrow his. I’ve come to collect it. But perhaps I’m a bit late.’

Alice gave a little gasp. ‘Wait here,’ she ordered and she spun on her bare heel and pattered quickly upstairs. A faint tinkling sound from the little bells and the coins followed her as she opened the door to the spare bedroom at the front of the house where she guessed Charles had retreated.

He was lying flat on his back in the spare bed. A small brown bottle of Mogadon pills beside his bed indicated that he had avoided a further confrontation with Alice by hiding in deep sleep. The slow sensual grunts which came from his half-parted lips indicated to a wife who knew him well that he was not hiding from Miranda Bloomfeather.

Alice’s dark gaze hardened. Then she closed the door softly and went back downstairs. The moon face of the young student looked up at her as she came down like some dark goddess descending from an inner place of sacrifice.

‘Professor Hartley’s asleep,’ she said sweetly. ‘But I’ll help you with the couch. I’ll just slip some sandals on.’

The student dumbly nodded.

‘What’s your name?’ Alice asked. She pulled up the layers of kaftan and silk petticoats to tie the straps of her sandals. The student caught a glimpse of pale knee, of pale thigh, of darker – could it be? surely not? –

‘M-M-M-Michael Coulter,’ he said.

Alice stroked down her layers of skirts. ‘Michael,’ she said, as if the word had some hidden meaning. ‘How lovely! My name is Alice.’

‘He – llo,’ Michael said weakly. He had a terrible feeling that he was behaving like a wimp.

‘Now,’ Alice said determinedly. ‘Do you have much space in that lovely big van of yours?’

Michael gulped and waved his arms vaguely in the air to indicate wide open spaces. The van was quite empty. He had hired it in error, thinking he was getting a little tailgate wagon. When he had come to collect it he had found a vehicle the size of a pantechnicon and a bill to match.

‘Would you do me a favour?’ Alice breathed.

Michael goggled, nodded.

‘I’m moving house,’ Alice said. ‘Could you help me take a few, just a few of my special things now? I’ll come back for the rest in the morning. I’ll help you with the couch – and would the Professor’s desk be of any use? – and then we can put some of my little things in.’

Alice rolled up her skirt at the waistband. Michael took off his jacket. They set to work.

They started with the study. Alice insisted that the Suffix Theatre Players should have anything which would add authenticity to their set. They stripped the study of all the furniture, the rugs, and even the Professor’s framed degrees off the wall and the curtains from the window.

‘Charles won’t mind!’ Alice said blithely.

They moved on to the dining-room, the kitchen, and the sitting-room. They had to leave the piano: it was a baby grand.

‘It seems a shame,’ Alice said sorrowfully. ‘It looks so lonely there, all on its own, with no other furniture in the room and the carpet up off the floor.’

‘Come back for it tomorrow,’ Michael gasped. There was a sheen of cold sweat on his pale face from the effort of humping his end of the Wilton carpet. Alice was flushed, nothing more.

‘Upstairs,’ she said. She put a hand on Michael’s bare forearm. ‘Very, very quietly,’ she cautioned him. ‘We don’t want to wake the Professor. This is going to be a lovely surprise for him in the morning.’ She gleamed in the half-light of the hall, thinking of Charles waking to a house stripped bare of all the carefully accumulated possessions of a lifetime. ‘He’s going to think the fairies have been!’ she said gaily.

Michael, hypnotized and hyperventilating from effort, nodded dumbly.

Alice led the way. The door to the spare bedroom was tight shut. Behind it, locked in dreams, Charles bore Miranda Bloomfeather to the ground on the white shores of a tropical beach. The towering waves broke over them, Miranda shuddered in grateful ecstasy. The crash when Michael dropped his end of the double pine bed frame was the Pacific rollers beating on the coral seashore. Alice’s squeak of alarm when she lost her grip on her end of the wardrobe was Miranda crying like one of the gulls on ‘Desert Island Discs’, ‘Again! Again! Charles, again!’

Michael and Alice stood on the doorstep. The house gutted and dark stood empty behind them.

‘Could you give me a lift?’ Alice asked.

Michael’s body was shaking like unset jelly from the strain of unaccustomed exertion. ‘Of course, Mrs Hartley,’ he said gallantly. ‘I’d love to.’

‘I’ll get my cape,’ Alice said and went back into the house. Michael collapsed into his seat in the cab. He started the van to get the heater going, he rested his head in his hands on the steering-wheel. He let out a soft sob of fatigue. He had never worked so hard in all his life. He could not have believed he was capable of such hard work. But Mrs Hartley was a wonder! And at her age, and everything!

Inside the house Alice took her cape from the hook under the stairs. It was the only garment left. All Charles’s clothes, like all Charles’s books, pictures, notes, sporting trophies, horse brasses, like all Charles’s furniture and curtains, were packed up and loaded in the providential van. Alice stole around the house with her cape wrapped close against the chill, confirming that everything, yes, everything, was safely packed up. Only one room of the house was untouched. The spare bedroom where Charles snuffled and dreamed of a tropical paradise and Miranda.

It seemed such a shame to leave the job half-done. Alice hesitated outside the door once more. She opened it softly and peeped in. Charles stirred in his sleep and turned his face towards the door. Alice crept in. She stood in silence and waited in case he should sense her presence. Waited for one word from him, one word of reconciliation, one word of tenderness.

‘Miranda!’ Charles said through clogged lips.

It was enough! It would have been enough for any woman of spirit. Alice slid over to the window and raised the lower half. She tumbled Charles’s clothes out into the darkened garden. The book by his bedside, the bedside reading lamp. She was sorry that the bedside table was too big, but the rug beneath the bed rolled up and tumbled out easily. Each one of the drawers from the chest of drawers fitted lengthwise as if they had been specifically designed to fling from windows into the silent night.

Charles in the bed was far away. Michael in the van was dozing with weariness, waking only once to gaze upwards, bemused, as a bedside lamp and three drawers fell lightly through the moonlight to smash into the flowerbeds of the front garden. Only Alice, with a peaceful, satisfied smile on her face, knew that the spare bedroom was as derelict and bare as the rest of the house which Charles had once called home.

She crept downstairs again and closed the front door softly behind her, then she hitched up her flowing skirts and climbed into the driver’s cab beside Michael.

He came to with a start. ‘Where can I take you, Mrs Hartley?’ he asked.

Alice lay back and closed her eyes. ‘Let’s go to your place,’ she said silkily. ‘I want to know you, Michael. I want to plunge into your deepest essences.’

Michael was not precisely a virgin. He had, for instance, been to bed with three girls. One in the third term of his first year when the combination of hot sun and unexpectedly potent lager had numbed Michael’s nerves and her resistance; one in the first term of his second year after the excitement of a dress rehearsal of Measure for Measure; and one in the second term because she was new to the Theatre Players and mistook him for someone important. On each occasion Michael had suffered from that common scourge of young Englishmen which is caused by insufficient action and excessive imagination. The ladies, of course, had suffered also.

Weeks, indeed months of celibacy had not quietened Michael’s over-active libido and from the moment he had seen Mrs Hartley’s white knee, white thigh and dark (but surely it couldn’t have been?) he had been in a state of sexual arousal so extreme that he had found the strength to hold his end of the wardrobe when Alice had dropped hers. When he learned he was to take her and the furniture to some unknown destination he was in a fever of lust. Not that he desired to do anything with, or to, Alice Hartley.