Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Page 11

  ‘Fugitive piece,’ she announced relentlessly.

  ‘My earliest memory.

  It is not how it used to be,

  The swing which swung from the apple tree,

  The clock which stood at ten to three

  On Linden Lea.

  If I could go back there I would –

  Where Nanny smiled when I was good,

  And life held promises, just as it should-

  Be, Linden Lea.’

  Mary stopped with a deep sigh, as if the emotions aroused by her poem were too deep to bear. Then she raised her eyes and looked around the silent circle with a smile of quiet complacency.

  ‘Now tell me!’ she said confidently. ‘You know I always say that the way to learn is to listen to criticism!’ She opened her hands. ‘Tear me to shreds!’ she invited.

  ‘I think it’s very significant – very Freudian!’ Barbara Wray said breathlessly. ‘Really good. I so wish I could write like you do, Mary.’

  ‘Excellent!’ said Piers Winterman. ‘Reminds me of something. I don’t quite remember what.’

  Mary nodded. ‘Who was it said: we love great art because it reminds us of other great art?’ she asked rhetorically.

  No one answered.

  ‘It’s a b-b-bit s-soft for my taste,’ Claud offered. Mary turned on him a look which was as soft as an ice-pick. He choked on a non-existent crumb of carrot cake and hid his face in a teacup.

  ‘Soft?’ Mary enquired glacially. ‘Tell me more!’

  ‘It’s a w-w-w-woman’s poem,’ he said, grasping at biological determinism and inarguable truth. ‘It’s a woman’s p-p-p-poem.’

  Mary glowed. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘It is. Alice?’

  Alice had been thinking about Patricia Simmonds and the flint-faced vicar’s wife. It was coffee time in every kitchen in England – dissection time for the reputation of all village dwellers. Alice knew that either in the house opposite – where Patricia Simmonds barely glanced out of her kitchen window, never pried, and yet acted as census gatherer for the whole lane – or in the vicarage kitchen, her name would be mentioned, her relationship with Michael discussed, and the vicar’s hallucination of dead Aunty Sarah at the supper table would be thoroughly explored.

  ‘I’m sorry, she said with a start. ‘I was miles away!’

  ‘Shall I read it again?’ Mary asked eagerly.

  ‘No! No!’ Alice said hastily. ‘I heard the poem. Tell me, Mary, what is Linden Lea?’

  It was questions like that which had Alice’s welcome in the writers’ circle balanced on a knife edge.

  ‘What is Linden Lea?’ Mary cried incredulously. ‘What is Linden Lea?’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘Why!’ Mary tinkled. ‘Everyone knows that, Alice. You really must make an effort to read a little more poetry. But come now! We can’t waste the whole meeting on my little effort. What have you written, Alice?’

  Alice shook her head. ‘I have been so busy moving I have had no time to write at all,’ she said. She looked apologetic but her heart was singing. ‘The days when I needed you dreary lot to fill in my Sunday mornings are long gone,’ she said to herself. ‘In fact,’ she said out loud, ‘I really fear I shall have to resign as an active member of the writers’ circle. I am so busy these days.’

  There were a few murmurs of regret at the prospect of losing an audience for their writings, but a general sense of relief at having lost a rival. The Suffix University writers’ circle – like many others – hovered on a knife edge of competitive hatred of each other, and solidarity and support against an unreceptive world.

  ‘Shall I read?’ Barbara Wray asked. The others nodded and she fluttered the pages of her pink notepaper pad.

  ‘Little Babs Wray had a golden-furred teddy to match the counterpane of yellow,’ she said. ‘Even when she was a woman, Babs would always remember the girlish prettiness of her childhood home. She could not explain that feeling to Doctor Hinchley. He would have laughed her to scorn! Doctor Hinchley had no time for sentiment, for memories. Doctor Hinchley was a surgical instrument.

  ‘“He feels nothing,” Staff Nurse Smith told Babs. “Every nurse in this hospital would lay down her life for him! But he has eyes for no one. All he ever thinks about is his work!”

  ‘Babs smiled. One day perhaps, he would see her for the girl she was …’

  Barbara Wray broke off. ‘There’s quite a lot more,’ she said. ‘But perhaps that gives you the idea of the way I am working. It’s a whole new departure for me, a much more Freudian approach. You see, I am looking at the childhood of Nurse Babs this time. That’s a much more psychological approach than I have ever taken before.’

  Alice nodded, smiling. She was far away. Last night Michael had shown her what Mrs Wheatley meant by ‘YOU KNOW WHAT’. Alice had been surprised at the extent of Mrs Wheatley’s girlhood reading, even if the book had been upside down.

  There was a murmur of appreciation for Barbara Wray’s earliest memory. No one could criticize Barbara who had published, repeatedly, and they had not. Only Mary raised the question of whether this was a fugitive piece entitled ‘My earliest memory’ or, in fact, the start of a new Nurse Babs novel – and thus outside the remit of today’s session.

  Barbara opened her blue eyes very wide and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?’ she said sweetly. ‘When the Muse is upon me – I follow where she leads.’

  ‘I s-s-suppose I’m outside the r-r-remit too,’ Claud volunteered. He flipped open his notepad and started to read in a staccato shout with no trace of his stammer:

  ‘Brett jammed the machine-gun trigger down as far as it would go and watched the targets jump and splinter through the cross of the night-sight. It reminded him of his earliest memory when he had been a little boy walking beside the pond in the park and watching the ducks. Then, too, he had been mad with anger towards the ducks. Every crust he had thrown them had been a bull’s eye on a duckling’s head. His score never fell below 100 per cent. They had said of him then, as they said of him now … He never misses …’

  Claud broke off. ‘I th-th-thought it might turn into a new n-n-n-novel,’ he said. ‘I th-th-thought I might call it … Duck!’

  ‘Duck?’ asked Alice, momentarily coming out of her reverie.

  ‘A sort of p- a sort of p- a sort of pun,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh,’ Alice said, losing interest again.

  ‘And my p-p-publishers like short titles,’ he said. Everyone who had large, unbound manuscripts hidden in cardboard boxes in the broom cupboard flinched at the casual ownership of ‘my publishers’.

  ‘They like titles like Rage! and Blood! and Sweat!’ Claud said. ‘I thought Duck! would be another good one.’

  ‘But right outside the remit of today’s meeting,’ Mary said swiftly. ‘If no one has anything which addresses the topic, I actually wrote another poem I can offer you.’

  ‘I wrote something,’ Letty Finch said quickly. She cleared her throat and began.

  ‘By the side of Worthing Pier

  By the shining big-sea water,

  Played all day beside the shallows,

  All day long beside the shallows,

  Little Letty in her bathers.

  Watched the seagulls eating crisp-packs

  Learned their names, and all their secrets,

  Paddled in the outfall water,

  Letty in the outfall water!

  Catching typhus and e. coli.’

  Lettice broke off – ‘I stopped there,’ she said. ‘But I think it has a certain rhythm, don’t you?’

  ‘Typhus?’ Barbara asked incredulously. ‘E. coli?’ She smiled and leaned forward and tapped Letty on the knee. ‘When you’ve been writing doctor-nurse novels as long as I have you will know that the one thing you never mention is disease or medicine. The readers just won’t take it.’

  ‘Hardly poetic topics!’ Mary tinkled. Mary knew that poetic topics were about Linden Lea, and the village swains, and children like little angels w
ith eyes as blue as the sky praying, like as not, at the foot of their tiny truckle beds.

  ‘It’s Green,’ Letty Finch said defiantly. ‘People ought to know! There is an epidemic just waiting in the outfall of sewers, I was going to go on and take it all in – dolphins, whales, oil spills, the greenhouse effect. I think poetry should campaign!’

  Alice nodded, smiling. There had been a time when she too had thought poetry should campaign. There had been a time when she too had tried to make ‘ozone layer’ rhyme or scan – either, she had been past caring. But now she stretched with the sensuality of an overfed cat, now Alice had finished with words. She believed in primordial rhythms and non-verbal, but hyperactive, body language.

  Piers grunted. ‘Reminds me of something I used to know at school,’ he volunteered. ‘Here, I’ll read you mine.

  ‘First thing I remember is Pa lashing into me with six of the best. Good thing too. He must have caught me doing something that was out of line. And that’s how you treat children, catch them young, train them up, and don’t spare the rod. Very like dealing with natives too. When I was in the Gurkhas we used to say “catch them young, train them up, and don’t spare the rod.” Why, I remember …’

  ‘Gracious, is that the time?’ Mary interrupted. ‘Piers, we have to break into your reading here, I have to go and I am sure Alice has a thousand and one things to do.’

  Alice nodded and smiled. Everyone got to their feet and packed their manuscripts away in their bags with scrupulous care. There was a sense of euphoria which came from relief of the ever-present fear that someone would criticize – or worse still, praise and then pinch your writing.

  ‘Theme for next month!’ Mary cried above the noise. ‘My happiest moment!’

  Piers nodded. ‘That’s easy!’ he said. ‘When I was commissioned. You’ll be sorry to miss that,’ he said to Alice.

  Alice nodded. ‘I will,’ she lied convincingly. ‘My happiest moment!’ she said thoughtfully. She looked at the group of talentless, joyless plagiarists with an indulgent eye. The merest glimpse of Alice’s recent happy moments would have shocked them senseless. ‘I will join you again as soon as I get settled here and then I shall have all these treats to look forward to!’ Alice said kindly.

  She shepherded them out into the hall but Babs Wray lingered behind the rest. The others straggled out into their cars, and Babs hovered on the doorstep.

  ‘I hear you’ve left the Professor?’ she asked, her gerbil face screwed up in pretended sympathy, her voice an avid whisper. ‘Don’t keep it all to yourself, Alice, you must talk it out. Otherwise it’s just all too Freudian.’

  ‘I’ve left him,’ Alice confirmed coolly. The billowing sleeves of her blue gown were like huge rolling waves threatening to sweep Babs out of the house and away; but she clung to the doorpost like a determined barnacle facing the spring tides.

  ‘You must talk it through!’ she declared. Babs was starving for gossip. Her eyes were bright with insincere sympathy. ‘I know how badly he treated you, Alice, all these years I have seen it! I have longed to speak before but now you can confide in me without reserve!’ She slid an arm around Alice’s soft waist and hugged her, as if she would squeeze words out. ‘Tell me, dear!’ she said. ‘You can tell me everything!’

  ‘Not much to tell really,’ Alice said cheerily, unwrapping the arm as if it were an apron string.

  ‘I hear he left you,’ Babs said. ‘You know me, I never gossip – but everyone is saying that he has run off with Miranda Bloomfeather – one of his students!’

  ‘No,’ Alice said, her smile hardening.

  ‘Don’t cut yourself off like this!’ Babs pleaded. ‘Tell me what is happening, Alice! Share your troubles with me!’

  Alice detached Babs’s hand, which was clinging to the doorknob, and with infinite gentleness shoved her off the doorstep.

  ‘I left him,’ she said. Babs was thrust towards the car by the mere force of Alice’s unstoppable will and a hand in the small of her back. Babs’s feet moved away while her eyes boggled backwards.

  ‘I left him,’ Alice repeated with emphasis.

  Babs goggled over her shoulder as Alice propelled her towards the car.

  ‘But why?’ she asked. ‘He’s a Professor, and head of department, Alice! Why leave? He has tenure!’

  Alice opened the car door. Babs’s little hands fastened on the blue billowing sleeve.

  ‘I thought you were so happy, Alice,’ she said. ‘I thought you had everything a woman could want! Why leave?’

  Alice pressed Babs in her pudgy stomach at the same time as leaning on her shoulder. Babs folded abruptly in the middle and Alice thrust her backwards into the passenger seat of the car.

  ‘Because he was a rotten lay,’ Alice said in her clear ringing voice. ‘Tell everyone, Babs. He was a rotten lay and always had been.’

  Babs emitted a short scream of shock.

  Alice smiled benignly and slammed the car door. Mary Hutchinson, whose ears had been waggling like a satellite tracking aerial, was white with shock. George Groves, in the back seat with Sarah Finlay, looked blankly at Alice.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Alice called, waving her broad white hand. ‘Goodbye.’

  Michael was waiting for her in the kitchen, wearing only his blue jeans, blinking owlishly into the steam of a cup of decaffeinated coffee. Alice looked at his skinny naked chest and felt her desires smouldering.

  ‘I’d have thought you might have encouraged them to join a class and grow?’ he remarked.

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘They don’t need therapy, they have their writing. If their life is unfulfilling they just write about a better one.’

  Michael looked surprised. He had been studying English Literature for some time now but the idea of authorship as a prolonged fantasy, without emission other than words, was a new one to him.

  ‘Do all authors do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Alice said. ‘They just pretend that things are how they want them to be.’

  ‘And readers like this?’ Michael asked, surprised.

  ‘No one ever asks them,’ Alice said wisely. ‘I should think they hate it, but if they want something better then they have to write it themselves, and then they’re not readers any more but writers. Then they have to say they like each other’s books. That’s what is meant by the literary élite.’

  Michael looked at her with profound admiration. ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘I never really understood English Literature before. Thank you.’

  Alice looked at his concave chest and his thin arms, his warm brown puppyish eyes and the interesting convex curve in his jeans.

  ‘Come upstairs and thank me,’ she said temptingly. ‘I’ll tell you all about Beowulf.’

  Alice and Michael rolled around on Professor Hartley’s posture-sprung bed with the relaxed sensuality of established lovers. The sunlight streamed through the windows, outside the birds cheeped encouragement to their nestlings and, perhaps, even to Michael and Alice, whose naked coupling bodies may have appeared like remarkably large and wriggley worms. Sometimes Michael was on top, pitching and rolling on Alice’s energetic heaves – a sensation very like masturbating on a lilo in stormy seas. Sometimes Michael was beneath her, struggling with a sensation near terror when she sat up and then bounced enthusiastically up and down like a new plump recruit to the Pony Club, hell-bent on mastering the rhythm of the rising trot on a skinny Shetland. Sometimes Michael lay absolutely still as Alice swarmed over him, his slight body engulfed by her ample curves and folds, sometimes he whimpered as she ground the bony cusp of her pelvis on his. Alice paid no attention – neither to his seasickness, nor to his brief cries of pain. She hummed – a deep burbling sound which came from low in the smooth white column of her throat, and rolled easily and triumphantly from one obscure sexual position to another. Her black almond-shaped eyes were closed, her dark hair tumbled about her serene face as she bobbed and rocked with Michael gibbering between pleasure and pain underneath her. She threw her arm
s around Michael and flung herself sideways towards the mattress, rolling as she went, so that Michael would bob up on top. However, Michael’s slight weight was insufficient counterbalance to Alice’s heavier momentum – she misjudged the distance and they crashed off the bed to the floor, Alice landing hard on her back with Michael, gripping like a baby koala to its Mum, on top of her.

  Alice let out a delighted giggle. ‘Michael, you beast!’ she said breathlessly. ‘Oh God, I love it when you treat me rough! Take me!’

  Michael nearly asked ‘where?’ but caught the question back in the nick of time. Inexperienced he may have been just a few short days ago – but he had enjoyed an intensive course in Alice’s sexual appetites and he recognized certain keywords. For instance, when Mrs Hartley begged him ‘don’t hurt me!’ that was his cue to slap her very gently on her firm, rounded flanks. This was a process which had to be undertaken with a certain amount of caution. On one occasion Michael’s enthusiasm had overtaken his innate gentleness and he had slapped too hard whereupon Alice had dealt him a blow which made his head ring. Thereafter Michael understood that his image as a brutal male was largely symbolic.

  But when Alice said ‘take me!’ there could be no confusion. It was an invitation for rapid thrusting movements in whichever direction seemed appropriate. And when she said, screamed, or whispered ‘oh yes, yes, yes’, Michael could relax with the satisfaction of a job well done and reward himself with the rapid gallop into his own release.

  Michael, clinging to Mrs Hartley’s bucking body as she breathed ‘take me’, cast his mind back to his glossary of sexual terms and obediently bounced up and down very quick. He found this process so exquisitely enjoyable that it was difficult, indeed nigh impossible, to bear in mind that he must continue doing this until Mrs Hartley screamed ‘OH! YES! YES! YES!’ Michael only knew one way to achieve this. While Mrs Hartley throatily groaned, ‘Oh, take me, take me!’ Michael tunefully started the refrain: ‘Ten green bottles …’