The Accidental Woman Part 4

6. Her First Mistake.

Six years later, as the unfortunate consequence of having chosen to eat gammon on that hot afternoon, Maria is sitting in silence with her husband at the family breakfast table. Her son Edward, aged four, is contemplating with resentment the egg which his mother has once again failed to boil to his satisfaction. Maria's state of mind is one of misery, a misery such that I cannot describe and you probably can't imagine, so we'd better just leave it. Martin, her husband, is reading the newspaper, or at least pretending to, for in fact he is secretly preoccupied with a scheme which his next words will introduce, and of which Maria has not, as yet, the least inkling. It is summer again, warm indoors and out.

It is customary, of course, when it comes to stories like this, to believe whatever the author tells you, and yet I can imagine that for some of you there might be a problem in taking at face value my a.s.sertion in the first sentence of this chapter. I repeat, that if Maria had not chosen gammon, she would not have married Martin. For gammon, as you know, is often very salty, and liable to induce thirst, and if Maria had not been thirsty she would have had no reason, no reason whatsoever, to go into a tea shop that afternoon after saying goodbye to Ronny. And if she had not gone into the tea shop, she would not have chanced upon her old friend Louise, and if she had not chanced upon Louise, Louise would not have invited her to a party that night. And she would not have gone to the party, and she would not have met Martin, for where else could she have met Martin, who lived in Ess.e.x and had never been to Oxford in his life before or since? She had never loved him, and he had never loved her, but he was looking for a wife and she was looking for something to do, so they seemed as well suited as most couples ever are. They had a whirlwind courts.h.i.+p, consisting of much s.e.x and a bit of theatre-going, married in October, honeymooned on the Riviera, and produced their first and only child exactly sixteen months later. Maria was by now twenty-three, pus.h.i.+ng twenty-four, and she was already aware that she had made a bad mistake.

Finally Martin laid down his newspaper and coughed. Maria sensed that he had something important to say. She stiffened imperceptibly in her chair.

'How long have we been married now, Maria?' he asked.

Edward forgot about his boiled egg and began to look on with interest.

'Five years,' she said, 'and nine months.'

'Hmm...' Martin leant back in his chair, and gazed at the ceiling as if in thought. 'In that case... in that case I think it's about time we got a divorce.'

Maria looked at Edward.

'Edward, why don't you run upstairs and play? Why not colour the book I bought you, and then I'll come up and see how well you've done.'

'I'd rather listen,' said Edward, whose delight it was to refuse everything his mother asked of him.

'The child can listen if he likes,' said Martin. It was a family trait.

'On what grounds?' asked Maria.

He pretended not to have understood her.

'On what grounds do you want a divorce?'

He made a show of deliberation.

'There are a variety of grounds, of course,' he said, 'On which I could divorce you. You have not been a good wife to me. You are not a good mother to little Ted.' Here he patted the child on the head. Edward smiled. 'There are various arguments, in short, which I could put forward to a court of law. For instance, you do not fulfil my s.e.xual needs. For some time now you have made no effort to fulfil my s.e.xual needs.'

Effort, indeed, was a desideratum when it came to fufilling Martin's s.e.xual needs. Physical effort of a high order. Maria had not suspected this at first, she had thought him a gentle lover. They had lain in bed together, naked for obvious reasons, and he had touched her so lightly, drawn closer to her so gradually, that she had not been afraid of him at all. Love making had been a pleasure, unaccountable though this may seem. Anyway, that had not lasted for long, it stopped soon after the wedding in fact. Maria was surprised, therefore, to find after eight months that she was carrying a baby, for the forms of intercourse which Martin enjoyed, and in which she was his unhappy accomplice, were not such as would normally lead to conception. Violence came to play an important part. Nothing nasty, just the occasional stranglehold or bite, it was rare for him actually to kick her in the face at such moments. All the same he did beat her sometimes, it was difficult to know why and Maria always forgot to ask at the time. She had n.o.body to tell about it, because she and Martin now lived in Ess.e.x, where she had no friends except for a few neighbours, women mainly older than Maria who came round for coffee now and then in the morning, and tea in the afternoon, but who never ventured to inquire whether the weals on her neck were the marks of s.e.xual pa.s.sion or merely of anger; and even if they had, Maria may not have been able to remember. No, their conversation mainly concerned vegetable prices, and the respective merits of various brands of soap powder, and the advantages and disadvantages of wearing make-up. Not that Maria wasn't interested in these questions as well, for Martin let her have very little money to buy food (he never did any shopping himself) and insisted that the house be kept clean (although he never helped to clean it) and insisted that Maria should look nice (or what he considered to be nice). So these things were important to her, too. But there never seemed to be much sympathy between Maria and her neighbours, or fondness, or friends.h.i.+p, or even liking. In fact it was as much as she could do to put up with their company for more than half an hour at a time.

'Why do you want a divorce?' she asked now. 'Have I done something wrong?'

'No, I wouldn't say you've done anything wrong,' said Martin. 'But five years is long enough to be married to any woman, in my opinion. To tell you the truth, you have started to bore me. You have been boring the living daylights out of me for several months now.'

'I see.'

Maria could not meet her husband's eye. She looked to her son for support, but this was a complete waste of time. He had s.h.i.+fted his chair closer to his father's, and the two of them were holding hands under the table. She got up slowly and carefully, walked to the kitchen window, and stared out.

Why, though, had she herself not divorced Martin years ago, on the grounds of mental cruelty, on the grounds of physical cruelty, on any one of any number of tenable grounds? She had considered the idea, often enough, but had always decided against it, for the sake of her son, Edward. Perhaps this seems out of character. For instance, Maria has not, until now, appeared particularly self-sacrificing, and she has not, until now, appeared particularly stupid, and yet stupid she would surely have to be not to have noticed that Edward bore towards her the sort of malice which stood every chance of ending in matricide. Yes, of course Maria had noticed this, and yet she loved her child. She knew full well that he adored his father (they were kindred spirits, after all). She knew too that nothing would make Edward hate her more than to be taken away from him. At the same time she believed that to leave Edward to the care of his father alone would be to destroy him. She cherished a rather loopy conviction that if only she were to persist, to offer the ungrateful infant all that she could in the way of maternal affection and attention, she might yet save him from the path he was set upon, which seemed at present to be that of a psychopathic killer. Her motives here were not entirely selfless, all the same, for the desire to see her son improve his character was not quite as strong as her determination that she should one day win his love.

'What about Edward?' she asked, turning.

'I beg your pardon?' said Martin, with polite surprise.

'Who will keep Edward? Who will bring him up?'

'Why, I will, of course. Who did you think?'

'Sometimes,' said Maria, hardly knowing why she went on, 'it is customary for the mother to retain custody of her child.'

'I hardly think that is likely to happen in this case,' said Martin, 'although, if you think the matter is worth bringing up, perhaps we might at least consult the boy's own inclinations.' He turned to Edward and ruffled his dark hair gently. 'Well, Ted, who would you rather stay with, your mother or your father?'

'You, Daddy,' said Edward.

Maria, putting up a resistance which seemed more and more irrational, said, 'No court would take his wishes into account. He's too young.'

'They would too,' said Edward.

'You don't know what you're doing?' Maria shouted.

'If they didn't listen to me, then I'd tell them.'

There was a short silence.

'Tell them what, Ted?' his father asked, in a very quiet voice.

'How she tried to kill herself'

Maria gasped.

'How do you know that?'

'I told him, naturally,' said Martin. 'The boy has a right to know these things.'

So, for that matter, has the reader. I should tell you, then, that on at least two occasions following her marriage to Martin, Maria had attempted to take her own life. It was on the basis of this fact that I ventured earlier to describe her state of mind as one of misery, a word usually to be treated with caution but which seemed, after mature consideration, to fit the bill in this instance. For it is very hard, as a general rule, to judge people's states of mind from external circ.u.mstances, and yet it occurred even to Martin that his wife was, perhaps, slightly cheesed off when, returning home from work one evening, he caught her in the very act of trying to do herself in. For Heaven's sake, dear, he had said, take your head out of the oven and pour me a gin and tonic. He had had a hard day at the office. Exactly how he felt about Maria's suicide attempt is hard to determine, for it is very hard, as a general rule, to judge, etc., but my guess is that he was neither especially surprised nor displeased, since it increased after all his hold over her. All he had told her, anyway, was that it is no longer possible to kill yourself by putting your head into a gas oven. You can do yourself a mischief that way but this is hardly the same thing. Maria took careful notice of his advice and next time tried to do it by overdosing on sleeping pills. A messier business altogether, and one which, after four and a half hours cooling his heels in a hospital waiting room while his wife had her stomach pumped, he found it much harder to accept with equanimity. It was this incident which he had reported to his son, who received the information, as far as I know, with perfect composure, seeming to expect no less from his mother. Extraordinary sang froid for a three-year-old, I think you'll agree. Maria had made no further efforts to do away with herself. There had been days when she had contemplated it, but the last attempt had shaken her up rather, and she had no particular desire to put herself through indignities like that again.

There were only two people to whom she ever confessed her unhappiness (two people and one cat, to be precise, but her visits home were by no means frequent). Incredulity will no doubt rear its ugly head again when I tell you that the first of these was Ronny. Not that she saw Ronny very much, for he now lived in London, and there subsisted between him and Martin a hatred of such intensity that it would have been on the whole tactless for him ever to have come to visit them in Ess.e.x. He had been mortified to hear of the marriage, and when Maria, during the early months of her pregnancy, had first come to visit him at his London flat, he had initially refused to see her, and such was his pique that it took him more than three minutes to relent. Subsequently however, he had invited them both to dinner, and it was on that evening, an evening disastrous for other reasons (Ronny was a hopeless cook) that he and Martin had first conceived their fierce and mutual detestation.

'I can't eat any more of this,' Martin had said, hurling his knife and fork into the fireplace. 'It's like trying to eat a plate of s.h.i.+t.'

'It doesn't surprise me in the least,' said Ronny, 'to learn that the sensation of eating excrement is familiar to you.'

Maria looked helplessly from one to the other.

'I like this wine,' she said brightly. 'Where did you get it?'

'If you ask me, he p.i.s.sed into the bottle,' Martin quipped.

'Your inability to distinguish between urine and Sauvignon '75 surprises me, I must say,' answered Ronny. 'May I ask where you were brought up? In a barn, I presume.'

'At least I don't live in a b.l.o.o.d.y barn, that's more than can be said for some people. Where did you get this furniture, the local tip?'

'Darling, please don't be rude,' said Maria. 'Ronny will get upset.'

'I shall never be upset,' Ronny said, 'by the guttural chatterings of a malignant baboon. When your charming husband utters a word of sense, then I shall respond accordingly.'

'f.u.c.k face,' came Martin's riposte.

'd.i.c.k nose,' Ronny countered.

And yet the curious thing was, that Martin could be quite polite about Ronny in his absence. You have a letter from Ronny, I see, he would say at the breakfast table. Is he well? Read me out the interesting bits.

But Maria would never read any of it out loud, because Ronny's letters to her were usually along the following lines: Dear Maria, I hope you are well. I love you and want only to devote the rest of my life to your service. My only wish is to be near you, my only hope is to tear you away from the monster to whom you are wed and to lay myself at your feet. If ever you need me, my darling, I will be here, ready to follow your footsteps wherever they lead. Everyevening I sit by the telephone waiting for you to call.

Maria, divorce Martin and marry me. I wors.h.i.+p you. I have always known that my only purpose in life is to bring you happiness. Be mine.

The car is at the garage again. The man says the plugs need changing.

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 sc.r.a.ps 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 pa.s.s 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 unchast.i.ty, your vile prost.i.tution with your lover Ronald. Your old tumescent schoolfriend. That putrid p.e.n.i.s 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 doc.u.mentation of your affair. Dozens, scores, hundreds of letters written to you in a ferment of pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sably 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 pa.s.sed, 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 s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p 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 s.e.xually 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 s.h.i.+vered, 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 j.a.panese, 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 pa.s.sably 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 pa.s.s 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 fiance 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 s.h.i.+t, 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 pa.s.sing, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sumed 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sumed, 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 c.o.c.k. (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 s.e.xual. The tide of his column was 'Chast.i.ty Wise a Shoulder to Cry On', and this was a typical exchange: Dear Chast.i.ty, 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 pa.s.sed Barry in a corridor, or on the stairs, she would smile at him, not because she a.s.sociated the presence of Barry with emotions which made her want to smile, rather the opposite, but because when you pa.s.s 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 aggrandis.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.e.xual in it at all. Blinkered isn't the word, Maria would say. She and Sarah understood each other very well, in those days.

By the time the first course was served, a little idle conversation had taken place and it had become clear that by a happy coincidence the spirits of all those present were good. They embarked with enthusiasm on a light helping of fettucine, tossed in cream and b.u.t.ter, sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan and spiced with a little nutmeg, and served with a medium dry Italian white which did much to enhance the already festive atmosphere.

'It's moments like this,' said Bobby, 'that make everything worthwhile. I sit at my desk all day, in an overheated office, poring over figures and looking at the clock, and I think to myself, Robert, what's the point of it all. Then I come here, and in a few minutes life seems worth living again. Good wine, good company, good food...'

'Wonderful food,' said William.

'Delicious,' said Ronny.

'You could go to a restaurant,' said William, 'and pay fifteen pounds, and the food wouldn't be nearly so good as this.'

'Fifteen pounds?' said Ronny. 'Fifteen, did you say? I was in a restaurant last week and it cost me twenty-five pounds. Twenty-five! The food was cold, the meat was tough, the greens were off and the cream was sour. There's nothing to beat a home-cooked meal.'