If she passed a bookshop and saw dozens of luridly coloured blockbusters, she knew these bad and, often, young writers were making money. It seemed tragic and unfair that, unlike them, she couldn’t go to a shop and buy the furniture, clothes and music she wanted.
‘You hate me interfering‚’ Mother said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to have got to the end of your life and realised you’d wasted your time.’
‘Like Father?’
‘Filling bits of paper with a lot of scribbling the whole evening.’
‘How can expressing yourself be a waste of time?’
From the age of eight, after seeing Margot Fonteyn dance, Marcia had wanted to be a dancer; or at least her mother had wanted that for her. Marcia had attended an expensive ballet boarding school while Mother, who had never worked, packed boxes in a local factory to pay for it. Marcia left school at sixteen to get work as a dancer, but apart from not being as good as the others, and lacking the necessary vanity and ambition, she was terrified of appearing on stage. Now Mother kept three pairs of Marcia’s ballet shoes on the mantelpiece, to remind Marcia of how she had wasted her mother’s efforts.
‘Alec is always round here‚’ said Mother. ‘Not that I don’t need the company. But it would be good if that writer woman could offer you some guidance about your … work. I expect she knows people employed on the journals.’
‘Are you talking about the newspapers again?’
Mother often suggested that Marcia become a journalist, writing for the Guardian Women’s Page about stress at work, or child abuse.
Marcia went into the front room. Mother followed her, saying, ‘You’d make money. You could stay at home and write novels at the same time. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were doing something that brought something in.’
Marcia had secretly written articles which she had sent to the Guardian, the Mail, Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazines. They had been returned. She was an artist, not a journalist. If only mother would understand that they were different.
Marcia paced the room. The wallpaper was vividly striped, and there was only one overhead light. Her brother used to say it was like living inside a Bridget Riley painting. The fat armchair with a pouffe in front of it, on which Mother kept her TV magazines and chocolates, sat there like Mother herself‚ heavy and immovable. Marcia didn’t want to sit down, but couldn’t just leave while there were favours she required.
Marcia said, ‘All I want is for you to help me make a little time for myself.’
‘What about me?’ said Mother. ‘I haven’t even had a cup of tea today. Don’t I need time now?’
‘You?’ said Marcia. ‘You pity yourself, but I envy you.’ Her mother’s face started to redden. Marcia felt empty but words streamed from her. ‘Yes! I wish I’d sat at home for twenty years supported by a good man, being a “housewife”. Think what I’d have written. Washing in the morning, real work in the afternoon, before picking up the kids from school. I wouldn’t have wasted a moment … not a moment, of all that beautiful free time!’
Mother sank into her chair and put her hand over her face.
‘Better find a man then, if you can‚’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’ said Marcia, hotly.
‘Someone who wants to keep you. What’s that one’s name?’
Marcia murmured, ‘Sandor. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s only a man I’m vaguely interested in.’
‘I wouldn’t be interested in any man‚’ said mother. ‘Those dirty creatures aren’t really interested in you. What does he do?’
‘You know what he does.’
‘Can’t you do better for yourself?’
‘No, I can’t‚’ said Marcia. ‘I can’t.’
Her mother loved living alone, and boasted of it constantly. When Marcia was a child six people had lived in the house, and apart from Mother they had all died or left. Mother claimed that alone she could do whatever she wanted, and at whatever time, apart from the small matter of giving and receiving emotional and physical affection, as Marcia liked to point out.
‘Who wants a lot of men pawing at you?’ was Mother’s reply.
‘Who doesn’t?’ Marcia said.
Marcia recalled Father as he sat on the sofa with his pad and pen. He would casually ask Mother to make him a cup of tea. Mother, whatever else she was doing, was expected to fetch it, place it before him, and wait to see if it was to his liking. It was assumed that she was at Father’s command. No wonder she had taken loneliness as a philosophy. Marcia would discuss it with Aurelia.
They were three generations of women, living close to one another. Marcia’s grandmother, aged ninety-four, also lived alone, in a one-bedroom flat five minutes’ walk away. She was lucid and easily amused; her mind worked, but she was bent double with arthritis and prayed for the good Lord to take her. Her husband had died twenty years ago and she had hardly been out since. To Marcia she was like an animal in a cage, starved of the good things. Where were the men? Marcia’s grandfather and father had died; her brother, the doctor, had gone to America; her husband had decamped with a neighbour.
Marcia went into the bathroom, took a Valium, kissed Alec, and went to her car.
*
That night, alone at home, writing and drinking – as desolate and proud as Martha Gellhorn in the desert, she liked to think – she rang Sandor and told him of her mother’s indifference and scorn, and the concentrated work she was doing.
‘The novel is really moving forward!’ she said. ‘I’ve never read anything like it. It’s so truthful. I can’t believe no one will be interested!’
She talked until she felt she were speaking into infinity. Even her therapist, when Marcia could afford to see her, said more.
She had met Sandor in a pub, after the man she was with, picked from a black folder in the dating agency office, had made an excuse and left. What was wrong with her? The man only came up to her chest! One woman in the writing group went out with a different man every week. It was odd, she said, how many of them were married. Sandor wasn’t.
After her monologue, she asked Sandor what he was doing.
‘The same‚’ he said, and laughed.
‘I’ll come and see you‚’ she said.
‘Why not? I’m always here‚’ he replied.
‘Yes, you are‚’ she said.
He laughed again.
She saw him, a fifty-year-old Bulgarian, about once a month. He was a porter in a smart block of flats in Chelsea, and lived in a room in Earl’s Court. He considered the job, which he had obtained after drifting around Europe for fifteen years, to be ideal. In his black suit at the desk in the entrance, he buzzed people in, took parcels and accepted flowers, went on errands for the tenants, and re-read his favourite writers, Pascal, Nietzsche, Hegel.
None of the men she had met through the agency had been interested in literature, and not one had been attractive. Sandor had the face of an uncertain priest and the body of the Olympic cyclist that he had been. He was intelligent, well mannered and seductive in several languages. He could, when he was ‘on’, as he put it, beguile women effortlessly. He had slept with more than a thousand women and had never sustained a relationship with any of them. What sort of man had no ex-wife, no children, no family nearby, no lawyers, no debt, no house? She marvelled at her ability to locate melancholy in people. She would have to unfreeze Sandor’s dead soul with the blow-torch of her love. Did she have sufficient blow? If only she could find something better to do.
‘See you, Sandor‚’ she said.
She swigged wine from the bottle she kept beside her bed. She managed to fall asleep but awoke soon after, burning with uncontrollable furies against her husband, Mother, Sandor, Aurelia. She understood those paintings full of devils and writhing, contorted demons. They did exist, in the mind. Why was there no sweetness within?
*
She arrived an hour early at Aurelia’s house, noted where it was, parked, and walked about the neighbourhood. It was a sunn
y winter’s day. This was a part of London she didn’t know. The streets were full of antique shops, organic grocers, and cafés with young men and their babies sitting in the window. People strolled in sunglasses and dark clothes, and gathered in groups on the pavement to gossip. She recognised actors and a film director. She looked in an estate agent’s window; a family house cost a million pounds.
She bought apples, vitamins and coffee. She chose a scarf in Agnès b. and paid for it by credit card, successfully averting her eyes from the price, as she had earlier avoided a clash with a mirror in the shop.
At the agreed time Marcia rang Amelia’s bell and waited. A young woman came to the door. She invited Marcia in. Aurelia was finishing her piano lesson.
In the kitchen overlooking the garden, two young women were cooking; in the dining room a long, polished table was being laid with silverware and thick napkins. In the library Marcia examined the dozens of foreign-language editions of Aurelia’s novels, stories, essays – the record of a writing life.
There was a sound at the door and a man came in. Aurelia’s husband introduced himself.
‘Marcia.’ She adopted her most middle-class voice.
‘You must excuse me‚’ the man said. ‘My office is down the road. I must go to it.’
‘Are you a writer?’
‘I have published a couple of books. But I have conversations for a living. I am a psychoanalyst.’
He was a froglike little man, with alert eyes. She wondered if he could see her secrets, and that she had thought he’d become an analyst so that no one had to look at him.
‘What a ravishing scarf‚’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Goodbye‚’ he said.
She waited, glancing through the chapters of the novel she had brought to show Aurelia. It seemed, in this ambience, to be execrable stuff.
She caught sight of Aurelia in the hall.
‘I’ll be with you in one minute‚’ said Aurelia.
Aurelia shut the door on the piano teacher, opened it to the man delivering flowers, talked to someone in Italian on the telephone, inspected the dining room, spoke to the cook, told her assistant she wouldn’t be taking any calls, and sat down opposite Marcia.
She poured tea and regarded Marcia for what seemed a long time.
‘I quite enjoyed what you sent me‚’ Aurelia said. ‘That school. It was a window on a world one doesn’t know about.’
‘I’ve written more,’ Marcia said. ‘Here.’
She placed the three chapters on the table. Aurelia picked them up and put them down.
‘I wish I could write like you‚’ she sighed.
‘Sorry?’ said Marcia. ‘Please, do you mean that?’
‘My books insist on being long. But one couldn’t write an extended piece in that style.’
‘Why not?’ said Marcia. Aurelia looked at her as if she should know without being told. Marcia said, ‘The thing is, I don’t get time for … extension.’ She was beginning to panic. ‘How do you get down to it?’
‘You met Marty‚’ she said. ‘We have breakfast early. He goes to his office. He starts at seven. Then I just do it. I haven’t got any choice, really. Sometimes I write here, or I go to our house in Ferrara. For writers there’s rarely anything else but writing.’
‘Doesn’t your mind go everywhere except to the page?’ said Marcia. ‘Do you have some kind of iron discipline? Don’t you find ludicrous excuses?’
‘Writing is my drug. I go to it easily. My new novel is starting to develop. This is the best part, when you can see that something is beginning. I like to think‚’ Aurelia went on, ‘that I can make a story out of anything. A murmur, a hint, a gesture … turned into another form of life. What could be more satisfying? Can I ask your age?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
Aurelia said, ‘You have something to look forward to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘One’s late thirties are a period of disillusionment. The early forties are a lovely age – of re-illusionment. Everything comes together then, you will find, and there is renewed purpose.’
Marcia looked at the poster of a film which had been made of one of Aurelia’s books.
She said, ‘Sometimes life is so difficult … it is impossible to write. You don’t feel actual hopelessness?’
Aurelia shook her head and continued to look at Marcia. Her husband was an analyst; he would have taught her not to be alarmed by weeping.
‘It’s those blasted men that have kept us down‚’ Marcia said. ‘When I was young, you were one of the few contemporary writers that women could read.’
‘We’ve kept ourselves down‚’ said Aurelia. ‘Self-contempt, masochism, laziness, stupidity. We’re old enough to own up to it now, aren’t we?’
‘But we are – or at least were – political victims.’
‘Balls.’ Aurelia softened her voice and said, ‘Would you tell me about your life at the school?’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘The routine. Your day. Pupils. The other teachers.’
‘The other teachers?’
‘Yes.’
Aurelia was waiting.
‘But they’re myopic‚’ Marcia said.
‘In what way?’
‘Badly educated. Interested only in soap operas.’
Aurelia nodded.
Marcia mentioned her mother but Aurelia became impatient. However, when Marcia recounted the occasion when
she had suggested the school donate the remains of the Harvest Festival to the elders of the Asian community centre, and a couple of the teachers had refused to give fruit to ‘Pakis’, Aurelia made a note with her gold pen. Marcia had, in fact, told the headmaster about this, but he dismissed it, saying, ‘I have to run all of this school.’
Marcia looked at Aurelia as if to say, ‘Why do you want to know this?’
‘That was helpful‚’ Aurelia said. ‘I want to write something about a woman who works in a school. Do you know many teachers?’
Marcia’s colleagues were teachers but none of her friends were. One friend worked in a building society, another had just had a baby and was at home.
‘There must be people at your school I could talk to. What about the headmaster?’
Marcia made a face. Then she remembered something she had read in a newspaper profile of Aurelia. ‘Don’t you have a daughter at school?’
‘It’s the wrong sort of teacher there.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I was looking for something rougher.’
Marcia was embarrassed. She said, ‘Have you taught writing courses?’
‘I did, when I wanted to travel. The students are wretched, of course. Many I would recommend for psychiatric treatment. A lot of people don’t want to write, they just want the
kudos. They should move on to other objects.’
Aurelia got up. As she signed Marcia a copy of her latest novel, she asked for her telephone number at school. Marcia couldn’t think of a reason not to give it to her.
Aurelia said, ‘Thank you for coming to see me. I’ll look at your chapters.’ At the door she said, ‘Will you come to a party I’m giving? Perhaps we will talk more. An invitation will be sent to you.’
From across the road Marcia looked at the lighted house and the activity within, until the shutters were closed.
*
Marcia waited beside Sandor at his porter’s desk until he finished work at seven. They had a drink in the pub where they had met. Sandor went there every evening to watch the sport on cable TV. He didn’t ask her why she had suddenly turned up, and didn’t mention Aurelia Broughton, though Marcia had rung to say she was coming up to see her. He talked of how he loved London and how liberal it was; no one cared who or what you were. He said that if he ever had a house he would decorate it like the pub they were sitting in. He talked of what he was reading in Hegel, though in such a garbled fashion she had no idea what he was saying or why it interested him. He told
her stories of the criminals he’d known and how he’d been used as a getaway driver.
He asked her if she wanted to go to bed. His request was put in the tone of voice that said it was just as fine if she preferred
not to. She hesitated only because the house in which he had a room could have been a museum to the 1950s, along with the failure of the two-bar electric fire to make any impression on the block of cold that sat in the room like death. There was also the hag of a landlady who would sit at the end of his bed at midnight.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve just given her Crime and Punishment to read‚’ Sandor laughed, following Marcia into his room. Books were piled on the floor beside the bed. His washing hung over the back of a chair. All his possessions were here.
Lying down with him, she noticed his loaf of white sliced bread and carton of milk on the chest of drawers.
‘Is that all your food?’
‘Bread and butter fills me up. Then I read for four or five hours. Nothing bothers me.’
‘It’s not much of a life.’
‘What?’
‘You’re not in prison.’
He looked at her in surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that he wasn’t in prison, and didn’t have to make the best of nothing.
He kissed her and she thought of inviting him to her house at the weekend. He was kind. He would entertain Alec. But she might start to rely on him; she would always be asking for more. If anyone requested him to yield, shift or alter, he left them. She might not want him, but she didn’t want to be forsaken.
After, she stood up to get dressed, looking at him where he lay with his hand over his eyes. She couldn’t spend the night in such a place.
*
That night, for the first time, she wished Alec weren’t in mother’s bed. Marcia slept with her face in his unwashed clothes. In the morning she didn’t write. She had lost the desire, which was also her desire for life. What illusory hopes had she invested in Aurelia? Seeing her had robbed Marcia of something. She had emptied herself out, and Aurelia was full. Where would she find the resources, the meaning, to carry on?