The Accidental Woman (7 page)

Eternally yours,

Ronny.

Once, Maria would simply have given these letters a cursory reading, and then consigned them to the pedal bin along with the bacon rinds and discarded scraps of fried bread. But now she always folded them carefully, replaced them in their envelopes, carried them up to her bedroom and locked them away in a secret drawer. A secret drawer, I should add, the existence and function of which were perfectly well known to her husband, who had long ago supplied himself with a spare key, and whose habit it was, whenever Maria was in the bath, to while away many a pleasant half hour in reading, and chuckling, over Ronny’s insane avowals of devotion. Thus it was, this morning, that he was able to say:

‘Of course, I have plenty of evidence.’

‘Evidence of what?’ said Maria, by now lingering in the kitchen doorway, longing to run upstairs, the tears glistening against her pale skin.

‘Evidence of your infidelity to me. Your adultery. Your obscene violation of our marriage contract.’

‘I have never been unfaithful to you.’

At this moment Maria felt a peremptory hand on her shoulder, and she stepped aside to let a figure pass through the doorway into the kitchen. It was Angela, Edward’s nanny, a woman some two years Maria’s junior, whose services had been engaged during the long trip to Italy which Maria had made the previous year. Her presence absurdly gave Maria a new energy for argument. She believed that here she had a silent witness for the defence.

‘Who do you mean? Who have I ever betrayed you with?’

‘I’m talking, my dear, about your unchastity, your vile prostitution with your lover Ronald. Your old tumescent schoolfriend. That putrid penis you knew at Oxford.’

Maria said quietly ‘Ronny and I are friends. We have never made love.’

Martin laughed.

‘Of course, I don’t believe that, and neither would a court of law. But in any case it’s quite beside the point. The point is that I have written documentation of your affair. Dozens, scores, hundreds of letters written to you in a ferment of passion. I have taken xeroxed copies of these letters and placed them in the vault of the bank. I have had them scrutinized by a team of highly qualified handwriting specialists. I have had your friend shadowed by a crack squad of private investigators. I know that he frequently spends all his spare time writing to you. I have had his telephone tapped, and have recordings of compromising conversations conducted by the pair of you for fifteen minutes at a stretch. Conversations in which you told him the most palpable lies about my treatment of you. Lies which can be refuted by a trustworthy and disinterested witness. Angela, darling…’

Both Maria, who had been leaning against the doorpost, facing the hall, and Angela, who had been wiping the draining board, turned sharply when they heard these words. Angela in response to the summons, and Maria because she was shocked to hear the nanny addressed with a term, and in a tone, of endearment. Within seconds a sudden and inevitable suspicion had formed, grown, and withered into knowledge.

In order to account for her original decision to employ a nanny in the household, it is necessary to identify the second person in whom Maria had been wont to confide the true state of her marriage. This was none other than her old and dear friend, Sarah. Sarah had returned from Italy a few months later than expected, and had been back at Oxford for more than a term before she got around to locating her old companion. Maria was pregnant by now, and passably cheerful. Sarah was pleased to find that she was married, following the doubts which she had once expressed about Maria’s suitability for that state in a conversation which had made a deep impression on the minds of both women, and which I have helpfully recorded in Chapter Three. Are you happy, Maria, she had asked, just to make sure. This was a word, as you know, towards which Maria’s feelings were ambivalent. I suppose so, she had answered.

Maria may not have known what happiness was, but she could recognize unhappiness when she saw it, and she was seeing plenty of it by the time that Sarah next contacted her. This was not for a while. Sarah had by now left Oxford. Are you happy, Maria, she had asked again, just for form’s sake. I suppose so, Maria had answered, but her answer in this case was promptly invalidated when she immediately burst into tears and sobbed on Sarah’s shoulder for no less than thirty-five minutes. (You will have noticed that Maria has started to develop quite a tendency to give vent to her emotion in this way. Don’t worry, it won’t last.) She did not go into details, however, on this occasion. It was not until another year had passed, or more, I get so confused about time, that she let everything out, all the secrets of her terrible mistake. She told Sarah the lot, she even showed her the marks. Sarah was speechless, she had nothing to say, in fact her first response was to burst into tears and to sob on Maria’s shoulder for no less than thirty-five minutes. Divorce him, was her eventual advice. But Maria would not, for the frankly feeble reasons given earlier. Time and again, then and subsequently, Sarah attempted to persuade her to leave her husband. But the child, Maria would say, and besides, where would I go, and what would I do. Finally Sarah was able to answer this question. She was offered a temporary job at a school in Florence, and her employers rented a house for her, a great, crumbling palazzo on the north side of the city. It was far too big for her to live in alone, so she invited Maria to come and stay for as long as she could. But the child, said Maria. Nevertheless Sarah’s invitation was so pressing that she summoned the courage to ask Martin whether he would approve the idea of her taking a long holiday, for the sake of their marriage, as she rather quaintly put it. To her surprise, Martin was agreeable, although in fact there was nothing very surprising about this at all, he was profoundly bored with Maria’s company and the origin ally very limited fun of kicking her about the house was already wearing off. He suggested that a nanny should be engaged to look after Edward, and chose for this purpose Angela, a typist from his office with whom he had been having an athletic sexual relationship for several months. Maria did not suspect this, for some reason. But then she had gone very soft since her marriage.

And so for nine months she enjoyed freedom, a sort of freedom anyway, the freedom to live in one of the world’s great cities, away from her husband. They were happy days, full and enriching, sunny for the most part but with always, in some corner or other, an element of shade, and not the cool and beckoning shade to which one retreats from the blaze, but the advancing gloom, dank and noisome, of her return to England and to Martin. Towards the end of her holiday this shade became so oppressive, so consuming, that Florence came for Maria to be a place of horror, and she decided to cut short her stay, leaving early one morning after writing a hurried note to Sarah, and arriving home the next day, nearly a month sooner than her husband had been expecting her.

‘There’s just one thing, Maria,’ Martin had said, that evening, after they had eaten together, and talked, for all the world as if they were a happily married couple pleased to be together again after long separation, ‘I think that Angela should continue to live here. You will find her a great help. Edward, of course, has become very attached to her. She has become indispensable to me.’

Maria now knew what he had meant.

‘You called her darling,’ she said.

Martin ignored this comment, or possibly didn’t hear it, for it was spoken very quietly.

‘You will confirm, won’t you, my sweet,’ he said to the nanny, sliding his arm around her waist, ‘that I have been the tenderest and most considerate of husbands to Maria. You would tell the court, wouldn’t you, love of my life, of her ill treatment of Edward, her cruel neglect, her failure to fulfil her obligations towards her loyal and devoted spouse.’ He turned to Maria. ‘Angela and I will marry, of course. I spoke to the vicar about it last night. The honeymoon is all arranged. We fancy a short cruise, in the Mediterranean. The tickets are all booked.’

‘Supposing,’ Maria began, but couldn’t be bothered.

‘There is no chance, my dear, simply no chance at all, of my losing the case. A divorce will be granted, on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown of marriage. Even if I choose, out of motives of sheer human decency, to suppress the fact of your adultery, I will have no difficulty in proving unreasonable behaviour. You failure to satisfy me sexually is evidence enough of that. Can you consider the humiliation involved, the self-hatred, in having to turn to a servant, a mere domestic dogsbody, for physical gratification? As for the custody of Edward, there will be no argument about that. Your unsuitability as a mother is obvious. You have attempted suicide. You have deserted him and left him to be brought up by a complete stranger while you cavorted around Europe. The court will have no hesitation in giving him over to the care of his father and his beloved nanny.’

After a silence, the nanny asked, ‘Are you going to put up a fight?’

She looked at her husband, and shivered, and shook her head. Maria knew when she was beaten.

7. Redunzl

To lose her son pained Maria no end, but to be free of Martin was in every other way a relief. It freed her to move to London, and to live with Sarah, to enter, in fact, upon one of her better phases. This is going to make for rather boring reading, I’m afraid. Such periods are more interesting to live through than to contemplate, as Maria herself discovered, for in later years she was never able to recall it without a yawn. It was only on the most painful experiences in her life that she looked back with any interest, whereas her months with Sarah resembled a calm sea, the dullest of all ideas. Variety was decidedly lacking. It would be true to say that the history of one day would be the history of the whole period, so we might as well have the history of that day, chosen not quite at random. The one I have in mind came towards the end of the idyll, and was quite eventful, in its quiet way.

We join Maria in Regent’s Park. It was her habit on days which, like this one, were not too busy, to walk into the park to eat her lunch and to escape, for a while, the bustle of the office. She would find a vacant bench in one of the most secluded parts of the park and sit there for nearly an hour, sometimes thinking, sometimes looking around her, sometimes dozing and sometimes feeding the birds. For this last purpose she would bring with her a paper bag full of stale crumbs. Today she also had a packet of sandwiches, egg and cress, bought at a takeaway in Baker Street. These turned out to be disgusting. She ended up eating the stale crumbs and throwing the sandwiches to the birds. That soon got rid of them. Alone, Maria closed her eyes and listened to the sounds around her. It sometimes surprised her to realize that she very rarely listened to the world, and that she was seldom in any useful sense conscious of the noises of footsteps, traffic, voices, the wind, so that lately she had taken a resolution to pay more attention to this aspect of things. It was a way of emptying her head, too, of all the scraps of conversation, real and imagined, and of music, remembered and invented, with which she was otherwise plagued night and day. It was a long time since Maria had heard silence, real silence, and it would be a long time before she heard it again. But she was not averse to the sound of Regent’s Park at lunchtime. It was a winter’s day, sunny but essentially cold, and the park was not busy. She could hear two men talking in Japanese, and a baby crying, and a woman saying, There, there, presumably to the baby, and the cooing of hungry pigeons, and the shouts and laughter of distant children. At the back of all this was the loud hum of the city going about its business.

Maria was in a good mood. She did not enjoy her work and was not looking forward to going back to it that afternoon, but her distaste for the job usually comprehended nothing more serious than boredom, and she recognized with periodically recurring amazement that in all other respects she had hit upon a way of life which rather seemed to suit her. She liked living with Sarah. She got on passably well with her other flatmate, Dorothy. And she was even beginning to like London, for those very things which she had believed would make her hate it, for its bruising impersonality, for the anonymity which it afforded her, for the fact that she could pass through it unthought of, uncared for, unthreatened. She preferred to be at the mercy of the places in which she lived, to feel that she meant nothing to them. All her life she had, it was starting to seem, been at the mercy of forces beyond her control, so perhaps she had come to feel comfortable that way. This does not mean that Maria accepted no responsibility for her own actions. She knew, for instance, that there had once been a moment at which she had been presented with a choice as to whether or not to marry Martin, and she knew that she had made that choice too quickly and too carelessly. All the same, it seemed to her that chance had not played entirely fair. How was she to know that her fiancé would turn out to be, at the end of the day, and to be perfectly frank, and when all was said and done, a malignant shit, not to put too fine a point on it? And was it her fault that the choice had to be made at a time when she was alone, unhappy, and quite without a direction in life? It was too easy to get bitter, though, and besides, Maria never sulked, especially on sunny winter afternoons. She was also rather shocked to have found herself using the phrase ‘direction in life’, like one who had lost her wits. The only direction in her life led south-west out of the park into Baker Street, and she would have to follow it in about ten minutes, she knew that perfectly well. After that there would be a new direction, due north towards Hornsey, and so it would go on, turn and turn about, until she lost the use of her legs, or the inclination to use them, whichever was the sooner. Another fifty years or so. This partial statement of the case appeared to please her, for she smiled, and an old woman who happened to be passing, thinking that the smile was directed at her, smiled back. What presumption, and yet Maria didn’t resent it, so amiable was her temperament when the circumstances were in her favour, so indiscriminately philanthropic was her disposition when life was being just a tiny bit decent to her. As a girl she had been quite lovable, would you believe. Memories of her childhood, her cheerful, pampered childhood, dripped back into her mind that afternoon. She did her best to keep them out. How her parents had loved her, how happy they had been in those days. Maria usually fought against ideas like this. Therefore she rarely went home to visit her parents, for she found it painful to compare their present state of lonely contentment with the sustained and infectious moods of joy which she knew she had once inspired in them, even when she was being an ungrateful little brat which was, on reflection, most of the time. Edward had never inspired joy like that in her, although she had always assumed that he would, one day. Basically families were a mystery to Maria. Her brother represented the only aspect of that life with which she was still at all in sympathy. And this was one reason why she had invited him to dinner that evening.

Pensive, but not yet gloomy, she made her way back to the office. Maria worked, as I said, in Baker Street, in the offices of a women’s magazine. Her job was to look after the photograph library. Whenever somebody wanted an illustration for an article, whether it was the publicity still of a famous actor or a full colour photograph of the steak and kidney pudding featured in that week’s recipe, she had to provide it, either from the enormous box files which filled the basement in untidy stacks, or, if no suitable picture was to be found there, from some agency which could supply one or arrange for a new picture to be taken. Someone with a greater sense of humour would have found it easier to take this job seriously. As it was Maria simply thought it silly and dull, and put as little energy into it as possible, her approach in fact frequently verging on the absent-minded, for it was not rare for her to supply a picture of a steak and kidney pudding in place of that of a famous actor, and vice versa. These fits of abstraction prompted her colleagues to coin a nickname, ‘Moody Mary’, a fact which might have amused Maria, had she been able to remember that that was what they had called her at school, and had she been endowed with a greater sense of humour. Instead it gave her a certain amount of private annoyance. It would be no more than the truth to say that Maria did not like her colleagues, and it would scarcely be false to say that Maria’s colleagues did not like Maria. Not that a perfectly healthy working relationship cannot be maintained between colleagues who dislike or even hate each other, of course, but it would be stretching things to say that Maria’s working relationship with her colleagues was healthy.

Let us not exaggerate here, though. Besides, first of all we must describe these colleagues, attempt a little bit of characterization for a change. The first surprising thing about Maria’s colleagues is that most of them were men. Yes, although this magazine addressed itself to an audience of women, on subjects such as were thought to fall exclusively within the woman’s experience, it was written and edited almost entirely by men, although some of them adopted assumed, female, names for this purpose. Take, for instance, its leading story writer, a man called Barry, who had previously earned his living as a chartered surveyor but who now wrote romantic serials under the pseudonym Nesta Vypers. His latest effort,
The Heart Will Walk
, told the affecting narrative of a young ballet dancer who, after being crippled in a road accident, gradually falls in love with the motorist who has run her down, then miraculously recovers the use of her legs when he at last kisses her at the end of a long romantic push around Hyde Park, and promptly marries him with a cavalier disregard for his appalling track record of wrecked marriages and motoring offences. Barry and Maria had been on frosty terms ever since she had described this story, in an unguarded moment, and upon being pressed for an opinion, as a load of old cock. (In her years away from Oxford she had not lost all her critical faculties.) Among the other writers was one called Lionel. He edited the agony column, offering his readers advice on problems marital, domestic, romantic, personal and sexual. The tide of his column was ‘Chastity Wise – a Shoulder to Cry On’, and this was a typical exchange:

Dear Chastity, My husband and I have been happily married for five years, until last week. Every Sunday at lunchtime he goes down to the pub and drinks nine pints of Guinness with his friends from the Rotary Club, while I stay at home and do the roast. His favourite is beef with carrots and mash. This week they were all out of carrots so I gave him parsnips instead. When he saw there were no carrots he called me a filthy name, threw his dinner in my face and them emptied the whole of the gravy boat all down my dress. I have never known him like this before. Please tell me what to do as I am at my wit’s end.

Dear Worried, There is no easy way to remove gravy stains. You should handwash the garment in hot water and if ordinary powder doesn’t work, try using some white spirit. As for the long-term problem, why not keep a stock of carrots handy in the deep freeze?

These, then, were the two thorns in Maria’s flesh. Not that they ever came to blows, or even that an atmosphere of unbearable mutual animosity was created, or even that they treated her much worse than the other people in the office did, or they did the other people in the office. No, Maria was merely subjected to a stream of little discourtesies, a string of subtle signs of disrespect, recognizable but barely definable as such. For instance, whenever she passed Barry in a corridor, or on the stairs, she would smile at him, not because she associated the presence of Barry with emotions which made her want to smile, rather the opposite, but because when you pass someone on the stairs like this, it is customary to give some token of recognition. Now Barry would invariably smile back, but not in the same way. His smiles were sudden and rapid acts of aggression. He would direct his face towards Maria, allow a brittle grin to flash across it for perhaps half a second, and then resume his former expression before turning away, so that her last view was of his angry mask. It was his way of reminding her that he was quite capable, where she was concerned, of perverting such polite conventions to his own ends without, technically, violating them. What mystified Maria was his readiness to perform this tiny ritual of personal aggrandisement several times a day, day in, day out, all year round, whenever, in fact, chance determined that their paths should cross. But, as you know, Maria was generally not unhappy during this period, so she did not let it bother her much, any more than she let Lionel bother her. Lionel had a penchant which was still more amusing. His delight, whenever he and Maria approached a door together, was to hold the door open without looking behind him, as if out of habit, and then to glance back at the last moment, see who it was for whom he was holding the door, and let it fall shut in her face. Pleasant variations could be performed on this routine, on those not infrequent occasions when he would be passing through a doorway in the company of another woman, with Maria bringing up the rear. He would ostentatiously hurry ahead and hold the door open, standing aside to admit the woman, who might be either the magazine’s general editor or the girl who opened the post and made the coffee, it didn’t matter, and then he would let it shut just as Maria, fully aware of her mistake, would be attempting to come through it. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly sparkling humour, he would even give the door a little kick with his heel, in order to impart extra velocity. Maria, who had more than once had a carefully arranged pile of photographs knocked out of her hands and thrown into disarray by these means, could frame no plausible explanation for Lionel’s behaviour and thus found herself unable either to resent or to condemn it.

After work that evening, Maria did not go directly home. She had some shopping to do. She took the tube to Archway, and then caught a bus up Highgate Hill. She had left a little early, with permission, and arrived just as the shops were starting to close. By now she was feeling quite extraordinarily cheerful. London at dusk from the top of a bus had seemed strange, homely and entrancing, at first by turns and subsequently all at once. She had almost forgotten to get off. Now she clutched Sarah’s shopping list and hurried from shop to shop. The most important things were the vegetables, but there was also the meat, of course, and they were low on flour and last night when they were planning the meal they had been unable to find any basil, although both could have sworn that they had some. In fifteen minutes it was all done and she started making for home.

Seated around the table that evening, counting clockwise, and starting with Maria’s brother, who sat at the head, were Bobby, Dorothy, Ronny, Maria, William and Sarah. Of these only William, if I remember rightly, has not been mentioned before. He was a friend of Sarah’s, in fact that is putting it midly, he was a close friend of Sarah’s, so close that all their colleagues at work, which was where they had met, confidently expected an engagement to be announced in the near future. Sarah and Maria both thought that this was very funny, and loved to joke about it together. They think we’re going to get married, Sarah would say, laughing. How absurd, Maria would say, shaking with mirth. They just can’t understand, Sarah would say, with a smile, that in this day and age it’s quite possible for a woman and a man to see a lot of each other, even to love each other, without there being anything romantic or sexual in it at all. Blinkered isn’t the word, Maria would say. She and Sarah understood each other very well, in those days.