Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Read online

  ‘Come back for it tomorrow,’ Michael gasped. There was a sheen of cold sweat on his pale face from the effort of humping his end of the Wilton carpet. Alice was flushed, nothing more.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she said. She put a hand on Michael’s bare forearm. ‘Very, very quietly,’ she cautioned him. ‘We don’t want to wake the Professor. This is going to be a lovely surprise for him in the morning.’ She gleamed in the half-light of the hall, thinking of Charles waking to a house stripped bare of all the carefully accumulated possessions of a lifetime. ‘He’s going to think the fairies have been!’ she said gaily.

  Michael, hypnotized and hyperventilating from effort, nodded dumbly.

  Alice led the way. The door to the spare bedroom was tight shut. Behind it, locked in dreams, Charles bore Miranda Bloomfeather to the ground on the white shores of a tropical beach. The towering waves broke over them, Miranda shuddered in grateful ecstasy. The crash when Michael dropped his end of the double pine bed frame was the Pacific rollers beating on the coral seashore. Alice’s squeak of alarm when she lost her grip on her end of the wardrobe was Miranda crying like one of the gulls on ‘Desert Island Discs’, ‘Again! Again! Charles, again!’

  Michael and Alice stood on the doorstep. The house gutted and dark stood empty behind them.

  ‘Could you give me a lift?’ Alice asked.

  Michael’s body was shaking like unset jelly from the strain of unaccustomed exertion. ‘Of course, Mrs Hartley,’ he said gallantly. ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘I’ll get my cape,’ Alice said and went back into the house. Michael collapsed into his seat in the cab. He started the van to get the heater going, he rested his head in his hands on the steering-wheel. He let out a soft sob of fatigue. He had never worked so hard in all his life. He could not have believed he was capable of such hard work. But Mrs Hartley was a wonder! And at her age, and everything!

  Inside the house Alice took her cape from the hook under the stairs. It was the only garment left. All Charles’s clothes, like all Charles’s books, pictures, notes, sporting trophies, horse brasses, like all Charles’s furniture and curtains, were packed up and loaded in the providential van. Alice stole around the house with her cape wrapped close against the chill, confirming that everything, yes, everything, was safely packed up. Only one room of the house was untouched. The spare bedroom where Charles snuffled and dreamed of a tropical paradise and Miranda.

  It seemed such a shame to leave the job half-done. Alice hesitated outside the door once more. She opened it softly and peeped in. Charles stirred in his sleep and turned his face towards the door. Alice crept in. She stood in silence and waited in case he should sense her presence. Waited for one word from him, one word of reconciliation, one word of tenderness.

  ‘Miranda!’ Charles said through clogged lips.

  It was enough! It would have been enough for any woman of spirit. Alice slid over to the window and raised the lower half. She tumbled Charles’s clothes out into the darkened garden. The book by his bedside, the bedside reading lamp. She was sorry that the bedside table was too big, but the rug beneath the bed rolled up and tumbled out easily. Each one of the drawers from the chest of drawers fitted lengthwise as if they had been specifically designed to fling from windows into the silent night.

  Charles in the bed was far away. Michael in the van was dozing with weariness, waking only once to gaze upwards, bemused, as a bedside lamp and three drawers fell lightly through the moonlight to smash into the flowerbeds of the front garden. Only Alice, with a peaceful, satisfied smile on her face, knew that the spare bedroom was as derelict and bare as the rest of the house which Charles had once called home.

  She crept downstairs again and closed the front door softly behind her, then she hitched up her flowing skirts and climbed into the driver’s cab beside Michael.

  He came to with a start. ‘Where can I take you, Mrs Hartley?’ he asked.

  Alice lay back and closed her eyes. ‘Let’s go to your place,’ she said silkily. ‘I want to know you, Michael. I want to plunge into your deepest essences.’

  Michael was not precisely a virgin. He had, for instance, been to bed with three girls. One in the third term of his first year when the combination of hot sun and unexpectedly potent lager had numbed Michael’s nerves and her resistance; one in the first term of his second year after the excitement of a dress rehearsal of Measure for Measure; and one in the second term because she was new to the Theatre Players and mistook him for someone important. On each occasion Michael had suffered from that common scourge of young Englishmen which is caused by insufficient action and excessive imagination. The ladies, of course, had suffered also.

  Weeks, indeed months of celibacy had not quietened Michael’s over-active libido and from the moment he had seen Mrs Hartley’s white knee, white thigh and dark (but surely it couldn’t have been?) he had been in a state of sexual arousal so extreme that he had found the strength to hold his end of the wardrobe when Alice had dropped hers. When he learned he was to take her and the furniture to some unknown destination he was in a fever of lust. Not that he desired to do anything with, or to, Alice Hartley.

  Oh no.

  Michael was desperate to get back to his own bed to enjoy the thought of that white knee, white thigh and darker, darker, darker – perhaps it really was!

  But when Alice leaned back and shut her eyes and asked to go to his place, Michael lost all desire and nearly fainted with fear.

  His bedsitting-room was in a purpose-built student hall of residence not far from the stripped shell which had once been the Hartleys’ house. Michael drove with manic concentration, partly because he was afraid of the height and weight of the vehicle and the way Professor Hartley’s furniture shifted when they went around corners; but also because driving helped him to keep his imagination from the question of what Mrs Hartley meant by wanting to plunge into his deepest essences. At her age, she surely couldn’t mean … but perhaps she did?

  Michael eased the van to a standstill and switched off the engine. The big vehicle shuddered. Alice lifted her head and opened her dark eyes.

  ‘Take me,’ she said.

  Michael wound down the window, furiously rotating the handle in error for the door handle. Alice smiled mysteriously, the smile of a woman who is flowing with deeper forces than any mere man could comprehend. She opened the door her side and dropped down to the ground. After a moment’s thought she reached inside the cab and pulled out the djellaba and college scarf so despised by the abandoned Professor. Wrapping the djellaba around her head and the scarf around her mouth she followed Michael up the echoing well of stairs, down the fluorescent-lit corridors to the doorway to his room, and inside.

  ‘It’s not much,’ Michael started nervously, indicating the cramped single bed and the small desk. On the narrow window-sill stood a lone carton of date-expired milk and a solitary pot of decaying yoghurt.

  ‘Do you have music?’ Alice asked. Her voice was slurred, deeper. She seemed taller.

  Michael gave a little whimper of apprehension and fell back on the bed, pressing, as he did, the play button on his little cassette player. The tinny sound of folk music filled the silent room and once again, for the second time that evening, Alice rotated slowly in the sensuous steps of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

  But what a change in the attention of the audience!

  Michael was transfixed, his mouth wide open, the round lenses of his glasses misting up as his little panting breaths condensed on the glass. Alice, casting a languorous sideways glance over her shoulder, saw the colour drain from his face, and then saw him flush pink as a rose as she tossed aside another multicoloured scarf to lie in a heap in the corner.

  Michael gulped. Nothing like this had ever happened in his life before. He had never even heard of anything like this ever happening to anyone before. He had never even read about it in books ever.

  He did not know it was the Dance of the Seven Veils – if pressed for a name he would have thought
it was the Dance of the One Hundred and Forty-Two Veils, as Alice Hartley spun around faster and faster, and scarves flew from her as if torn away by centrifugal force, until she was dancing in the centre of his room surrounded by a hailstorm of rainbow silks, wearing nothing but her kaftan which she slowly undid at the neck and let drop and drop and drop over her grand white shoulders, her jogging warm breasts, her rounded belly, her proud broad hips, and her dark … her dark … her dark – it really was!

  Michael Coulter pitched head first into his pillow and let out a despairing wail: ‘Oh God! Too soon again!’

  A younger woman (or one with somewhere else to go) might have flounced from the room; but Alice did not flounce.

  A woman with higher expectations would have been angry; but Alice had been married for years and was inured to sexual disappointment.

  She excavated Michael’s tearful face from his pillow, she stripped him, as efficient as an old-fashioned ward sister before the NHS reforms. She laid him on his back, spread-eagled and spent, and then with two skilled hands she plunged up to her elbows into his essences.

  Alice Hartley had a small peculiarity – which Michael, despite his dazed and delirious state, could not help noticing. She seemed to have some especial use for his essences; for just when he arrived once more at crisis point, she arranged matters in such a way that The Phallus (which Michael knew familiarly as ‘Blinkie’) was between her encouraging hands, and then she retreated to the corner where his little basin stood, her hands cupped before her as if she were transferring a rare and precious tropical fish from one tank to another. Then Michael heard the noise of her briskly slapping cream into her face and neck.

  Michael was a third-year student in the English Literature department – naturally his reading was superficial and scanty. He had no idea that semen is said to be a remarkably efficacious anti-wrinkle cream. He had no idea that one reason for Alice’s loudly expressed delight was that she thought she had found an inexhaustible supply.

  Thursday Morning

  They did not sleep well. The bed was too small for two to rest in comfort, especially when one of the pair was a statuesque and beautiful woman long neglected, and the other was a shrimpy and sexually-frustrated youth. By the time that Michael’s window had lightened with the early sunlight of summer they were mutually satisfied, and mutually exhausted. They both believed themselves to be deeply in love.

  There was an abrupt loud knocking on the door. Michael clutched at Alice wide-eyed.

  ‘Could that be your husband, Mrs Hartley?’ he asked in a frightened whisper.

  Alice beamed with satisfaction at the thought. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You answer it, I’ll hide by the sink.’

  The sink in Michael’s room was recessed in the wall. If Alice stood very still and breathed in and did not breathe out, she could not be seen in a casual inspection of the room from the door.

  Michael nodded, bundled as many of the scarves as he could grab under the bed, and opened the door.

  ‘Urgent message,’ said the porter. ‘You Michael Coulter?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael.

  ‘Urgent message from the Dean’s secretary,’ said the porter. ‘Thought I’d bring it straight over.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Michael said. He took the envelope and came back into the room, closing the door behind him.

  Alice was red-cheeked and gasping.

  Michael turned the envelope over and over in his hands.

  ‘I suppose I’d better open it,’ he said.

  She took it from him with a quick authoritative movement and passed her broad hand first one side of the envelope, and then the other.

  ‘There is nothing in here which will distress you,’ she said certainly. ‘Objects have auras just as people do. There is nothing in here which will cause you any pain. This has a healthy aura. It will be news of a development for you, for growth. Nothing bad.’

  Michael was deeply impressed. He opened the envelope with new confidence. It read:

  REGRET TO INFORM YOU,

  AUNTY SARAH NEAR DEATH.

  COME AT ONCE.

  It was signed ‘Simmonds’ with the letters ‘GP’ afterwards.

  Michael looked blankly at Alice.

  ‘Were you very close to your Aunty Sarah?’ she asked.

  Michael shook his head. ‘I hardly know her,’ he said. ‘She is much older than my father, a funny old biddy who lives out in the old vicarage at Rithering. I’ve only been over once since I’ve been here. I should have gone more often I suppose.’

  ‘There you are then!’ Alice said triumphantly. ‘The auras are never wrong. I said it was a healthy aura.’

  ‘Not very healthy for Aunty Sarah,’ Michael said reflectively.

  Alice paused. ‘She is just moving to another plane,’ she said. ‘Will you go and see her at once?’

  ‘Will you come?’ Michael asked quickly and then blushed. ‘I mean’, he said, ‘I suppose you’ve got loads of other things to do, moving house and all that.’

  Alice looked surprised, she had forgotten the furniture. She had, in any case, nowhere to go.

  ‘That can wait,’ she said. ‘We do not yet know each other well, Michael, but I can promise you that I would never waste my time on trivial housewife details.’ She hissed the word housewife through clenched teeth. She had not forgotten Charles’s slight on her carrot cakes. ‘Not when there are elemental forces at work. The great chasms of death and birth are around us all the time. We must be ready for them. I will come with you.’

  Michael threw his arms around her naked waist and pressed his face into her neck. He felt a sudden stirring as if his deepest essences were ready for plunging again, but Alice gently disengaged herself.

  ‘Not now,’ she said softly. ‘We must go to your Aunt. The old lady will be waiting for you, she may want your help to move her into a fresh astral plane. You must centre yourself, root yourself in the earthly elements. I will help you.’

  Michael nodded obediently, put both feet into one trouser leg and fell to the floor.

  Alice regarded him with affection. ‘Get dressed,’ she said. ‘I have to go to the health centre and see someone. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  She threw her gown over her head and tied half a dozen scarves about her person, three on her head, one on each wrist, one at her waist, and slipped from the room.

  Outside, the campus was quiet with the early-morning stillness of centres of great learning. Students were not yet awake and those faculty members who had survived the most recent wave of redundancies and were still clinging to salaries and offices were writing their novels, their guides to Provence, and malicious letters to specialist journals. Alice glided easily across the dew-soaked grass with her wide dancing stride and ran lightly up the steps to the university medical centre and into the counselling room.

  Professor Hartley was at the window, he had been watching her. Sitting in his shadow was a small elderly woman in grey. She wore pale grey shoes, stone-grey tights under a buff-grey skirt. Her shirt was grey silk, her cardigan was shapeless-grey. Her hair was natural grey. Her smile was professionally serene.

  ‘Welcome, Alice,’ she said kindly.

  Alice tossed her an angry look. Her husband she totally ignored.

  There was a short silence. Professor Hartley seethed in silence like a small culture of poisonous yeast.

  ‘Shall I start?’ the counsellor asked.

  Alice, who had been gazing sulkily at her red varnished toes peeping through her golden sandals, glanced up and shrugged her broad shoulders. The Professor nodded.

  ‘I notice you have arrived separately this morning,’ the counsellor said, her voice carefully neutral. ‘Would you tell me, Alice, why that is?’

  Alice glowered at her. ‘I imagine you know perfectly well.’

  The counsellor’s raised eyebrows and innocent look expressed total bafflement. ‘What do you mean, Alice?’ she asked with playgroup patience. ‘Remember our rule here: no ambiguou
s statements!’

  Alice jerked her head at Professor Hartley who was standing with his back to the window, blocking the light. ‘I imagine Charles has told you that I have left him!’ Alice said defiantly.

  The counsellor put her head on one side like a small grey canary. ‘And if he had told me, and please notice, Alice, that I do not say he has told me, what do you imagine that Charles would say about you?’ she asked.

  Alice laughed shortly. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not again. I have wasted years trying to work out what Charles thinks. I have wasted a lifetime trying to please him.’ She pointed an accusing finger at the counsellor. ‘You have wasted hours and hours trying to work out what Charles wants. I am here today to say only one thing: that I am not coming into this dreary room to have you two ganging-up on me any more.’

  Charles Hartley pushed himself up off the window-sill, pulled a chair towards him, and sat down leaning forward earnestly, his hands clasped, as if he were praying for Alice’s redemption. ‘I don’t know why you are so angry with Mrs Bland, Alice,’ he said, in his special marital-counselling voice. ‘It makes me wonder what it is that you are so angry about in yourself?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Alice said again. ‘Not that one. I am not angry with myself. I am angry with you, Charles. You are pompous, you are a liar, and I will not be ditched by you for some stupid undergraduate.’ Alice swung around on Mrs Bland. ‘And you,’ she said. ‘You are One of Them!’

  The counsellor’s placid smile did not waver. Her eyes flicked to Professor Hartley as if seeking expert opinion. He nodded at her. ‘Delusional Paranoia,’ he said softly.

  The counsellor’s face grew yet more serene. ‘Why are you abusing your husband, Alice?’ she asked. She gave a little humble smile. ‘And why are you insulting me?’

  Alice choked on her anger. ‘I don’t trust either of you!’ she said, stammering. ‘You know! You both know! You both know what I am angry about!’

  ‘And what is that?’ asked Mrs Bland. She looked to Charles. His face was a portrait of hurt bafflement.