Watching Me, Watching You

‘I own them,’ she said, and what with East turning West beneath them, and the sun rising where it had only just set, and rather too much champagne, he felt the world was upside-down and longed for Linda’s stolid charm, and her little feet in high strap heels, rather than those serviceable if sexy sneakers. Stolid? He was rather shocked by that particular choice of word. It was not how one usually described the Virgin Mary. Stolid.

In love with the Virgin Mary. But he was. He became almost nauseous when confronted with the ravishing Mary Magdalenas of Malibu Beach: human animals doing their copulatory dance under the Studio Ring Master’s whip: the fantasies of an exhausted film industry, taken such definite flesh. He had no trouble resisting them.

It was not, he saw now, that he had ever been promiscuous. Just that no woman until now had ever succeeded in properly captivating him. ‘Christ!’ said Alec on the telephone, across half the world. But he’d put his commission up to fifteen per cent and since the spring, and the advent of Linda, Brian had been doing well enough and fulfilling his early promise, as money maker if not saviour of society.

Brian came home on December 14. The wedding was on December 15. Linda was already in Devon. The wedding was all organised, she told him when he rang from Heathrow. All that was required was Brian’s appearance, wearing a suit, and with the ring, early the next morning. She’d even arranged the cars, which should have been the groom’s task. The wedding reception was to be in the Women’s Institute Hall, and they were to spend the night with Linda’s parents, the Joneses, in the caravan in the garden. If it was raining, or snowing, they could squeeze into her bedroom.

Women’s Institute? Caravan? In December? After Studio City, Malibu and Sunset Boulevard, it sounded strange. But Brian Smith marrying Linda Jones sounded profoundly, agreeably right.

He was relieved, too, if only by virtue of shortage of time, of the burden of providing friends and family to witness the wedding. He wanted a new life. He did not want the past clouding any issues. In East Devon, down in the South West, he would be born again.

Honest rural folk.

Linda’s father met him at the station. The train was late. Mr Jones paced up and down in an ill-fitting navy suit, and boots with buckled uppers. No more ill-fitting, Brian told himself, than my father’s at prize day at the grammar school. The pale grey suits of the executives of Studio City, their smooth after-shaved jowls, their figures jogged into shape, made an unfair comparison. Linda’s father was narrow like a ferret, sharp-eyed like a fox, untidy as an unpruned hedge in autumn, and had thick red hands with bleak oil beneath the nails. One eye wandered, when he spoke.

‘Best hurry,’ said Mr Jones, ‘Linda’s waiting,’ and they climbed into an old C-registration Mini, with the back seats taken out and piled with plastic fertiliser sacks and ropes, guarded by a snappy, noisy, ugly little dog. Barking prevented them from talking.

The garage had a single petrol pump, and was marked No Petrol, and was outside the last house in an undistinguished row of pre-war houses set back from the main road. Brian was rushed upstairs to change, the dog snapping at his heels, into a tiny room with four different flowered papers on the wall, and two beds and three wardrobes and six trays of sausage rolls on boards placed across the beds. He caught a glimpse of Linda as he fled from the dog; she was in brilliant Terylene white. He thought she blew him a kiss.

What am I doing, he thought, trying to find a place between the plastic beads and greeting cards and Mr Men stickers and the Christmas holly and bells which decked the mirror, so he could fix his tie. He was bronzed by the Californian sun; his face was narrow and handsome and clever. What am I doing? What desperation has landed me here? No, this is jet-lag speaking. I love Linda. Write it in plastic Christmas foam on what remains of the mirror. I love Linda. What has Linda’s family to do with her, any more than mine to do with me? Roots. Aye, there’s the rub. Red Devon soil hardened by winter. What good was that to him? He was used to soot. He was ready. A Rolls-Royce stood outside. Well, he was paying.

Into the first car he stepped, and Linda’s father came with him. Best man. Linda’s father had trodden in the mess left by the dog in the hall. Linda’s father’s shoe smelt. ‘Overexcited,’ said Linda’s mother. She was stout and dressed in green satin but otherwise might have been anyone. Linda’s cross-eyed brother kicked the dog out of the house. Linda’s wall-eyed brother hoovered up the mess, which was largely liquid.

‘Don’t do that!’ cried Linda’s mother. Linda smiled serenely beneath her white white veil. She was a virgin.

‘My wedding day is the happiest day of my life,’ she said, though whether to Brian as he passed, or as a statement of policy to God above, or simply to quell the riot he did not know. Mr Jones nipped upstairs to clean his shoe.

The village church was big and handsome and very cold. A hundred people or so were gathered on the Bride’s side of the church. The acoustics were bad, and there were many small children in the congregation. Brian stood dazed, facing the cross and banks of paper flowers. The Vicar was elderly and dressed in a white gown. Brian heard sound and movement and presently Linda stood beside him, and he felt better, and to the sound of children crying and protesting he and she were married, in God’s sight.

Outside the church, later, there were many photographs taken. He thought he had never seen so many ugly and misshapen people gathered together in one place. He could not be sure whether this was so, and a phenomenon peculiar to this part of Devon, or whether it was just the sudden contrast to the people of Southern California.

Various people young and old, men and women, came up to congratulate him, and in the course of brief conversations let it be known that Linda was not a virgin, had had at least two relationships with married men, one abortion, one miscarriage and had married him for his money. Linda did not seem to be popular. He thought perhaps he was dreaming.

At the reception at the W I Hall, where sherry was served, and also the sausage rolls he had seen on the bed, the Vicar remarked on the cross- and wall-eyes of the Jones boys, and accounted for it by village in-breeding. It’s a genetic weakness, he said. Genetics, he added, bitterly, was a three-syllable word, and words so long were not often heard in these parts.

Jet lag became more pressing. He had to sleep. He remembered making a speech. Linda put on her going-away clothes and the Rolls took them back to the garage. The dog lay vomiting on the path.

‘Now we can,’ said Linda, ‘quick! Before anyone comes home,’ and she pulled him upstairs to the room with the many wallpapers and he removed her clothes except her veil and made love to her. That was what marriage was all about. He thought she probably wasn’t a virgin, but just pretending. He wondered where his silver cuff links were and couldn’t see them. Then he fell asleep. When he woke she was unpacking wedding presents, and singing happily. ‘This is the happiest day of my life! Oh, how I love you!’ said Linda, and gave him a kiss. ‘Look, a toaster, and a lovely casserole with yellow flowers. That’s from Auntie Ann.’

She had not noticed any lack of sexual enthusiasm in him. Was that innocence, or insensitivity, or cunning? His cuff links were decidedly gone. ‘You must have left them in London,’ said Linda. ‘They’ll turn up.’

They had been a present from Rea. For some reason he valued them. But Linda dismissed the matter. Now they were married she seemed much more definite. Her eyelids no longer drooped, in modesty and decorum. She looked him straight in the eye, and lied.

‘The bill from the caterers hasn’t been paid. Could you possibly give me a cheque? Three hundred pounds.’

‘I thought you made the food yourselves.’

‘No. It was all bought in. Every scrap.’ She did not seem to mind that the lie was easily detected, nor the amount improbable. She gave him a little kiss on the nose. ‘Husband! Go on, say wife.’

‘Wife!’

‘Will you come out with us on the Christmas Trees? It would please Dad.’

And so they did. Dad and the two boys and Brian, after dark on his wedding night, with light snow falling, took shovels and borrowed a neighbour’s van and travelled ten miles inland, on to Forestry Commission land, where the pylons were slung from hill to hill, carrying electricity from the Nuclear Power Station to the good folk of Exeter, and there, beneath the wires, hair crackling and tooth fillings zinging, they pirated Christmas Trees. Good healthy well-shaped trees, three foot high, with a broad spread of vigorous roots. Brian dug, and laughed, and dug some more. It was theft, it was dangerous, there were dog patrols to stop such acts, but he felt, at last, that he was doing something sensible and useful. The Jones family were pleased by the muscle and enthusiasm of their new relative. Father Jones, despite the snow, took off his coat, and carefully laid it down beside where Brian rested, and on impulse Brian felt in the inside pocket, and yes, there were his silver cuff links. He left them where they were, and said nothing. What was there to say?

He didn’t suppose the dog was trained to cause uproar: no one was clever enough for that: just that when the dog caused uproar, the cover seemed too good to miss. He thought Mrs Jones might well feed it on cascara, just to be on the safe side.

The hilarity of exhaustion and despair turned sour when they arrived back at the house with some fifty Christmas Trees and unloaded them in the backyard. Mrs Jones had an old tin bath ready outside the back door, filled with boiling water. The brother with the wall-eyes bound the living green of the trees with twine. Mrs Jones dumped the roots in the boiling water, and the cross-eyed brother reloaded them on to the van. Linda stood by and watched the murder. ‘What are you doing? Why?’ he shouted at them, but the wind was strong, and snow flicked off the ground, and the water bubbled, and the stereo in the house was on loud to cover their nefarious deed. Cliff Richard. He thought he could hear the trees screaming as they died. ‘Just boiling them,’ said Linda, surprised.

‘But why, why?’

‘It’s just what we do.’

‘It can’t make any difference to you,’ he cried. ‘No profit lost to you if they grow.’

‘People always boil the roots,’ she said, looking at him as if he was daft. ‘It’s the done thing.’

He could see she took him for a fool, and despised him for it, and had tricked him and trapped him, for all he was bright and old, and she was thick and young.

He stumbled inside and up to the bedroom and fell asleep and slept, with the smell of boiling tree in his nostrils, and flakes of sausage-roll pastry in the sheets, and woke, with Linda next to him. Her skin was clammy. She wore a cerise nylon nightie, trimmed with fawn nylon lace. He went downstairs to the coin telephone in the hall and rang Alec. ‘I think I’ve found the right place for me,’ he said, and indeed he had. He had bound himself by accident to a monstrous family in a monstrous place and had discovered by accident what he felt to be the truth, long evident, long evaded. It was that human nature was irredeemable. ‘I think I’ll stay down here for a while with my wife,’ he said. My wife! All aspirations and ambition had been burned away: old wounds cauterised with so sudden and horrific a knife as to leave him properly cleansed, and purified. ‘Next to nature,’ said Brian with a dreadful animation rising in him: the writer’s animation; ‘with cows and cider and power lines and kind and honest country folk. I think I could really write down here!’

‘Christ!’ said Alec. He seemed to have fewer and fewer words to rub together, as his stable of writers found more and more.

Breakages

‘We blossom and flourish As leaves on a tree, And wither and perish But nought changeth thee —’

sang David’s congregation in its laggardly, quavery voice. Some trick of acoustics made much of what happened in the church audible in the vicarage kitchen, where tonight, as so often, Deidre sat and darned socks and waited for Evensong to end.

The vicarage, added as a late Victorian afterthought, leaned up against the solidity of the Norman church. The house was large, ramshackle, dark and draughty, and prey to wet rot, dry rot, woodworm and beetle. Here David and Deidre lived. He was a vicar of the established Church; she was his wife. He attended to the spiritual welfare of his parishioners: she presided over the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute and ran the Amateur Dramatic Society. They had been married for twenty-one years. They had no children, which was a source of acute disappointment to them and to Deidre’s mother, and of understandable disappointment to the parish. It is always pleasant, in a small, stable and increasingly elderly community, to watch other people’s children grow up, and sad to be deprived of that pleasure. ‘Oh no, please,’ said Deidre, now, to the Coronation Mug on the dresser. It was a rare piece, produced in anticipation of an event which had never occurred: the Coronation of the Duke of Windsor. The mug was, so far, uncracked and unchipped, and worth some three hundred pounds, but had just moved to the very edge of its shelf, not smoothly and purposively, but with an uneven rocking motion which made Deidre hope that entreaty might yet calm it, and save it from itself. And indeed, after she spoke, the mug was quiet, and lapsed into the ordinary stillness she had once always associated with inanimate objects.

‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise — In light inaccessible —’

Deidre joined in the hymn, singing gently and soothingly, and trying to feel happy, for the happier she felt the fewer the breakages there would be and perhaps one day they would stop altogether, and David would never, ever find out that one by one, the ornaments and possessions he most loved and valued were leaping off shelves and shattering, to be secretly mended by Deidre with such skills as she remembered from the early days, before marriage had interrupted her training in china restoration, and her possible future in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Long ago and far away. Now Deidre darned. David’s feet were sensitive to anything other than pure, fine wool. Not for him the tough nylon mixtures that other men wore. Deidre darned.

The Coronation Mug rocked violently. ‘Stop it,’ said Deidre, warningly. Sometimes to appear stern was more effective than to entreat. The mug stayed where it was. But just a fraction further and it would have fallen.

Deidre unpicked the last few stitches. She was in danger of cobbling the darn, and there is nothing more uncomfortable to sensitive skin than a cobbled darn.

‘You do it on purpose,’ David would complain, not without reason. Deidre’s faults were the ones he found most difficult to bear. She was careless, lost socks, left lids unscrewed, taps running, doors open, saucepans burning: she bought fresh bread when yesterday’s at half price would do. It was her nature, she maintained, and grieved bitterly when her husband implied that it was wilful and that she was doing it to annoy. She loved him, or said so. And he loved her, or said so.

The Coronation Mug leapt off its shelf, arced through the air and fell and broke in two pieces at Deidre’s feet. She put the pieces at the very back of the drawer beneath the sink. There was no time for mending now. Tomorrow morning would have to do, when David was out parish-visiting, in houses freshly dusted and brightened for his arrival. Fortunately, David seldom inspected Deidre’s drawer. It smelt, when opened, of dry rot, and reminded him forcibly of the large sums of money which ought to be spent on the repair of the house, and which he did not have.

‘We could always sell something,’ Deidre would sometimes venture, but not often, for the suggestion upset him. David’s mother had died when he was four; his father had gone bankrupt when he was eight; relatives had reared him and sent him off to boarding school where he had been sexually and emotionally abused. Possessions were his security.

She understood him, forgave him, loved him and tried not to argue.

She darned his socks. It was, today, a larger pile than usual. Socks kept disappearing, not by the pair, but singly. David had lately discovered a pillowslip stuffed full of them pushed to the back of the wardrobe. It was his wife’s deceit which worried him most, or so he said. Hiding socks! That and the sheer careless waste of it all. Losing socks! So Deidre tried tying the socks together for the wash, and thus, in pairs, the night before, spun and dried, they had lain in the laundry basket. In the morning she had found them in one ugly, monstrous knot, and each sock oddly long, as if stretched by a hand too angry to know what it was doing. Rinsing had restored them, fortunately, to a proper shape, but she was obliged to darn where the stretching had worn the fabric thin.

It was always like this: always difficult, always upsetting. David’s things were attacked, as if the monstrous hand were on her side, yet it was she, Deidre, who had to repair the damage, follow its source as it moved about the house, mending what it broke, wiping tomato purée from the ceiling, toothpaste from the lavatory bowl, replanting David’s seedlings, rescrewing lids, closing doors, refolding linen, turning off taps. She scarcely dared leave the house for fear of what might happen in her absence, and this David interpreted as lack of interest in his parish. Disloyalty, to God and husband.

And so it was, in a way. Yet they loved each other. Man and wife.

Deidre’s finger was bleeding. She must have cut it on the sharp edge of the broken Coronation Mug. She opened the table drawer and took out the first piece of cloth which came to hand, and wrapped her finger. The cold tap started to run of its own accord, but she ignored it. Blood spread out over the cloth but presently, fortunately, stopped.

Could you die from loss of blood, from a small finger cut?

The invisible hand swept the dresser shelf, knocking all sorts of treasures sideways but breaking nothing. It had never touched the dresser before, as if awed, as Deidre was, by the ever increasing value of its contents — rare blue and white pieces, frog mugs, barbers’ bowls, lustre cups, a debatably Ming bowl, which a valuer said might well fetch five thousand pounds.

Enough to paint the vicarage, inside, and install central heating, and replaster walls and buy a new vacuum cleaner.

The dresser rattled and shook: she could have sworn it slid towards her.

David did not give Deidre a housekeeping allowance. She asked for money when she needed it, but David seldom recognised that it was in fact needed. He could not see the necessity of things like washing-up liquid, sugar, toilet rolls, new scourers. Sometimes she stole money from his pocket: once she took a coin out of the offertory on Sunday morning instead of putting a coin in it.

Why did she stoop to it? She loved him.

A bad wife, a barren wife, and a poor sort of person.

David came home. The house fell quiet, as always, at his approach. Taps stopped running and china rattling. David kissed her on her forehead.

‘Deidre,’ said David, ‘what have you wrapped around your finger?’

Deidre, curious herself, unwrapped the binding and found that she had used a fine lace and cotton handkerchief, put in the drawer for mending, which once had belonged to David’s grandmother. It was now sodden and bright, bright red.

‘I cut my finger,’ said Deidre, inadequately and indeed foolishly, for what if he demanded to know what had caused the wound? But David was too busy rinsing and squeezing the handkerchief under the tap to enquire. Deidre put her finger in her mouth and put up with the salt, exciting taste of her own blood.

‘It’s hopelessly stained,’ he mourned. ‘Couldn’t you just for once have used something you wouldn’t spoil? A tissue?’

David did not allow the purchase of tissues. There had been none in his youth: why should they be needed now, in his middle age?

‘I’m sorry,’ said Deidre, and thought, as she spoke, ‘I am always saying sorry, and always providing cause for my own remorse.’

He took the handkerchief upstairs to the bathroom, in search of soap and a nailbrush. ‘What kind of wife are you, Deidre?’ he asked as he went, desperate.

What kind, indeed? Married in a register office in the days before David had taken to Holy Orders and a Heavenly Father more reliable than his earthly one. Deidre had suggested that they remarry in church, as could be and had been done by others, but David did not want to. Hardly a wife at all.

A barren wife. A fig tree, struck by God’s ill temper. David’s God. In the beginning they had shared a God, who was bleak, plain, sensible and kind. But now, increasingly, David had his own jealous and punitive God, whom he wooed with ritual and richness, incense and images, dragging a surprised congregation with him. He changed his vestments three times during services, rang little bells to announce the presence of the Lord, swept up and down aisles, and in general seemed not averse to being mistaken for God.

The water pipes shrieked and groaned as David turned on the tap in the bathroom, but that was due to bad plumbing rather than unnatural causes. She surely could not be held responsible for that, as well.

When the phenomena — as she thought of them — first started, or rather leapt from the scale of ordinary domestic carelessness to something less explicable and more sinister, she went to the doctor.

‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘do mumps in adolescence make men infertile?’

‘It depends,’ he said, proving nothing. ‘If the gonads are affected it well might. Why?’

No reason had been found for Deidre’s infertility. It lay, presumably, like so much else, in her mind. She had had her tubes blown, painfully and unforgettably, to facilitate conception, but it had made no difference. For fifteen years twenty-three days of hope had been followed by five days of disappointment, and on her shoulders rested the weight of David’s sorrow, as she, his wife, deprived him of his earthly immortality, his children.

‘Of course,’ he said sadly, ‘you are an only child. Only children are often infertile. The sins of the fathers —’ David regarded fecundity as a blessing; the sign of a woman in tune with God’s universe. He had married Deidre, he vaguely let it be known, on the rebound from a young woman who had gone on to have seven children. Seven!

David’s fertility remained unquestioned and unexamined. A sperm count would surely have proved nothing. His sperm was plentiful and he had no sexual problems that he was aware of. To ejaculate into a test-tube to prove a point smacked uncomfortably of onanism.

The matter of the mumps came up during the time of Deidre’s menopause, a month or so after her, presumably, last period. David had been in the school sanatorium with mumps: she had heard him saying so to a distraught mother, adding, ‘Oh mumps! Nothing in a boy under fourteen. Be thankful he has them now, not later.’

So he was aware that mumps were dangerous, and could render a man infertile. And Deidre knew well enough that David had lived in the world of school sanatoria after the age of fourteen, not before. Why had he never mentioned mumps? And while she wondered, and pondered, and hesitated to ask, toothpaste began to ooze from tubes, and rose trees were uprooted in the garden, and his seedlings trampled by unseen boots, and his clothes in the wardrobe tumbled in a pile to the ground, and Deidre stole money to buy mending glue, and finally went to the doctor.

‘Most men,’ said the doctor, ‘confuse impotence with infertility and believe that mumps cause the former, not the latter.’

Back to square one. Perhaps he didn’t know.

‘Why have you really come?’ asked the doctor, recently back from a course in patient—doctor relations. Deidre offered him an account of her domestic phenomena, as she had not meant to do. He prescribed Valium and asked her to come back in a week. She did.