Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Read online

  Thereafter he parked outside shops and drove away again, all in the same direction. It naturally took him a little longer to get home since if a car parked in front of him Michael had to wait for it to move away before he could escape; but he enjoyed the practice, and the car – which until today had never before gone further than the university and back – perhaps enjoyed the journey.

  It was half past eight before Michael paused outside the gates of Rithering Manor, judging them for distance, and then got out and paced the curve, before cruising carefully up the drive. He was not a confident driver and the curve of the drive was awkward, so that it was a quarter to nine before he parked the car in the driveway and went in by the front door. It was only then that he noticed that there were a lot of other cars in the driveway, and the house was brightly lit. There was music playing loudly, and the high joyful sound of older women laughing without their husbands in earshot. Michael stumbled in, his arms full of groceries, and then reeled to a standstill.

  It was a party.

  It was a tremendous party.

  And Aunty Sarah was there, still in her white nightgown and white cap but with a brilliant rainbow shawl thrown over her shoulders which Michael recognized as one of Alice’s. Most of the Suffix Theatre Players were there, Michael recognized the Lesbian Actress-tors Association, who insisted on playing cross-dressing parts, generally Shakespeare; and their hapless young male hangers-on who weakly agreed at casting meetings to wear dresses if the women thought that was the real message of the play. There were a whole load of older women whom Michael had never seen before, but one or two seemed vaguely familiar. Surely that woman sprawled along the back of the chair, her hand possessively clenched on the belt of Peter Travis, was the Vice-chancellor’s wife? And the grey-haired woman lying on the floor, dipping grapes into wine and feeding them to Michael’s friend Stephen, was the Dean’s sister?

  Michael blinked. If this was not a particularly feverish nightmare (as he had first most reasonably supposed) then there was a party going on, in Aunty Sarah’s house, with Aunty Sarah entertaining all of the senior faculty wives and most of Michael’s young male or lesbian friends.

  Michael dropped the bag of groceries, and at the noise Alice glanced around and came over to greet him, stepping casually around a woman who looked not unlike the university chaplain’s wife, who seemed to be nuzzling the neck of one of the university’s Gay Rights activists (Women’s Section).

  ‘Darling,’ she said delightedly. ‘Welcome to the inaugural party of the SAM – Sarah, Alice and Michael – Growth Centre! Isn’t it a wonderful surprise?’

  ‘Mmmminnnnnhhhh?’ Michael demanded.

  ‘I knew you’d be thrilled,’ Alice cried, linking her arm in his. ‘And look at Sarah,’ she said.

  ‘Sssaaammmnnn?’ Michael almost queried.

  ‘It worked better than I could have dreamed!’ Alice said. ‘Of course she was angry and unsympathetic. She’s been cooped up in that poxy little room ever since the end of the war.’

  ‘Waaahhhrrr?’ Michael interrogated.

  ‘Yes!’ Alice exclaimed. ‘I don’t even know which war! She could have been there for years!’ She glanced over at Aunty Sarah who was sucking with a peaceful expression on an enormous curved meerschaum pipe. ‘Extreme sexual dysfunction,’ Alice said in an undertone. ‘Coupled with raging hypochondria, an excessive power drive, over-capitalized and under-used.’

  Michael ceased his contributions to Alice’s discussion and instead lifted his head and sniffed. He was not part of the élite of Suffix who habitually smoked cannabis, but none the less he had sat and breathed behind a few ageing postgrads at lectures on existentialism, and he recognized the smell of the smoke which was hanging heavy in the air of Aunty Sarah’s sitting-room, weaving its attractive, irresistible web from Aunty Sarah’s pipe; which, even as he yelped in horror, made him giggle and watch, sniggering, as Aunty Sarah got high, high, high as a housemartin. And all around her the Faculty Wives Support Group ate magic mushroom canapés, and cannabis-and-chocolate brownies, and hung loose with inadequate and sexually over-anxious kids, young enough to be their children.

  ‘And so delicious,’said the wife of the Dean as she pitched her face down into the expectant lap of Michael’s friend George who had, until this evening, worn a Marilyn Monroe wig and insisted on being called Georgie.

  Michael felt his world perceptions roll and creak and shift.

  Alice pressed a hand-rolled cigarette into his limp fingers.

  ‘I don’t …’ he stammered. ‘I promised my father I’d never …’

  She laughed indulgently. ‘Silly boy,’ she said, her dark eyes warm with love. ‘This isn’t anything bad. It’s herbal tobacco. It’s all organic!’

  It was only later that night, after everyone, including Aunty Sarah, had taken their clothes off and danced about the flowery garden in the white unjudging moonlight, and then collapsed in a heap of communal affection and exhausted sexuality, did Michael remember to ask Alice which herb when smoked in enormous quantities makes people take their clothes off and giggle about their husbands.

  And it was at dawn that Alice, rearranging the rainbow shawl around Aunty Sarah’s naked shoulders as the old lady lay in a fretwork of slim young limbs, said dozily, ‘Cannabis leaf, darling. Very useful for constipation. That’s why I gave so much to Aunty Sarah.’

  And Michael, his head pillowed on the warm breasts of the Dean’s wife, and the limp Blinkie softly held by Alice, nodded sleepily and said plaintively: ‘I get constipated too, you know.’

  Alice smiled at him under her long dark eyelashes. ‘We all do,’ she said profoundly.

  Friday

  The morning, when they all awoke – the two dozen or so of them, casually coupled in strange tangles like a new and alternative Rubik cube puzzle, sorting out first: whose bodies belonged to whom, and then: who owned which sandals and scarves and 501 jeans – the morning could have been embarrassing. But Alice made it seem the continuation of a delightful party. Not a hangover, not an end of something, but a wonderful and promising start.

  ‘Now!’ she said importantly when everyone had drifted through to the kitchen and was eating damp and doughy wholemeal bread and drinking herbal tea. ‘Now! I have prepared some lifestyle analyses and some personal programmes which I want to talk through with each of you in detail. I shall be in the dining-room and I will see each one of you for an individual consultation. Michael will show you in.’

  She swept past them all, through the connecting door into the dining-room. Michael could hear her singing softly as she whisked the dust sheets off the imposing mahogany dining-table. He scurried in after her.

  ‘What d’you want me to do?’ he demanded.

  Alice turned and smiled at him.

  ‘Send them in, one at a time,’ she said. ‘When I’ve seen each one, send them out of the front door. Take at least twenty pounds off each of them, that’s the enrolment fee. They’ll pay more when they’re really growing.’

  Alice met Michael’s blank look of utter ungrowing incomprehension and shrugged her firm white shoulders under her white peasant blouse. Her dark red skirt swished as she moved purposefully about the room.

  ‘Mi – chael,’ she said silkily.

  Michael guppled (initially a typing error, but so perfect a description of his action I cannot bring myself to conform with the limited vocabulary of people who discount such insights).

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Out there,’ she said, nodding her head to the kitchen door. ‘There are more than a dozen women who have had nothing like a satisfactory sexual experience for years. For years, Michael!’

  Michael guppled again and nodded.

  ‘Out there also are a number of young people who are urgently seeking sexual experience with partners of any age, race, persuasion, or gender and failing signally to find anyone.’

  Michael nodded again. His lonely evenings in his room, and his fevered fantasies into his abused foam-rubber pillo
w were too recent to be denied.

  Alice smiled confidently. ‘We bring them together,’ she said. ‘They grow.’

  There was something troubling Michael in the back of his mind, but he was not sure how he could phrase it without giving offence to Alice.

  ‘Is this really what a growth centre does, darling?’ he asked.

  Alice smiled. ‘You work in the ways which come to hand,’ she said certainly. ‘Look at Sarah! I brought her back to life when conventional doctors had pronounced her dead, didn’t I?’

  Michael nodded. Sort of.

  ‘Look at Mary Daley, the university chaplain’s wife! All that anxiety about the spiritual purity of their marriage and it turns out that she really prefers girls!’

  Michael nodded. Possibly.

  ‘Look at us!’ Alice breathed. ‘Aren’t we the best, the very best thing which has ever happened to either of us?’

  Michael melted, utterly convinced. Yes, oh yes, oh yes. Blinkie The Phallus, weary from the exertions of last night, none the less stirred feebly, and reminded of last night, yearned once more.

  ‘Well then!’ Alice said triumphantly. And when Michael did not respond other than to make a little moaning noise of lust she nodded at him. ‘This is the way forward!’ she said. ‘It is a perfect and traditional partnership. The older woman and the younger man. The older woman and the younger woman.

  ‘There is no reason’, she added, her voice hardening slightly, ‘why mature, not to say elderly, not to say disgusting old men should be the only ones who seek and find young partners.’

  ‘Right,’ Michael said, as if he understood anything. ‘So I show them in to you, one at a time. Right!’

  It worked rather well actually.

  To Michael’s young friends Mrs Hartley had the authority of a seer. They had all suffered well-fed childhoods and excessively good educations so they were naturally faddish in their eating habits and averse to complex ideas and the process of logical reasoning. For them, Mrs Hartley’s spiritual certainties, her understanding and tolerance of their sexual inadequacies and her disdain for their academic studies all indicated a leader they would pay good money to follow.

  For Mrs Hartley’s friends, the faculty wives, any medical or spiritual system which permitted or even acknowledged female lust would have been a merciful relief. For years they had repressed their sexual desires in good works, miserably cruel exercise programmes, or half-baked Eastern philosophies. For years they had ignored or discounted their sexual frustration – accusing their nerves, their allergies, their menstrual problems – anything but acknowledge the fact that they had seriously hot pants and no prospect of relief. Mrs Hartley’s joyous call to get in touch with Nature, with the ebb and thrust of natural energy as exemplified in young male students, and her detailed description of the rising of the essences of young partners, called to their deepest souls, to their hearts and to other nearby and more demanding organs.

  Then Mrs Hartley wrote them out strict detoxification programmes in which they had to give up all their favourite foods and drinks, and then she stung them for a week’s housekeeping money. They left with a feeling of being richly rolled over, in every sense of the word.

  And they all made appointments to return.

  Sarah and Alice were sitting either side of the kitchen table when Michael came back into the kitchen, after waving off the last newly enrolled client, swinging a tea towel held at the corners like a sack stuffed with coins and paper money; and from the faculty wives substantial cheques drawn on joint accounts with lies on the cheque stubs ready for their husbands’ inspection.

  ‘How did we do?’ Alice demanded.

  ‘We’ve got nearly six hundred pounds here,’ Michael said, awe-struck. ‘I’ve never even seen so much cash!’

  Alice smiled. ‘More tea, Sarah?’ she asked casually, and poured her another cup.

  Michael looked nervously at his elderly relation. She was wearing this morning an ancient purple dress which reached to the floor, heavily encrusted with jet beads. A black toque hat with purple egret feathers nodded on her head.

  ‘Oughtn’t you be resting in bed?’ he asked. He was ransacking his brain trying to remember the night before. Aunty Sarah surely had been with them when they were dancing in the moonlight. But it was not possible, it could not be remotely possible, that she had been there when everyone had come back into the house, stretched out before the fire and rummaged in each other’s warm bodies for their own private satisfactions. That could not have taken place.

  Aunty Sarah beamed at him, the discontented old wrinkles around her eyes crazing like a good-tempered alligator.

  ‘I should think I ought,’ she said. ‘I’m shagged out.’

  Alice smiled understandingly. ‘You pop up to bed then, darling,’ she said easily. ‘Have a nice rest. I’ll call you in plenty of time for lunch. You’re doing your oral history class this afternoon remember.’

  Alice nodded to Michael and explained: ‘Sarah is leading a group exploring the oppression of women throughout the ages, by reaching deep into our own histories. It should be fascinating.’

  Michael nodded with convulsive and meaningless movements like one of those dogs which used to be popular seated in the back windows of cars to irritate other drivers.

  ‘She has some especially interesting things to say about the young men of the Great War,’ Alice said. ‘Some really interesting revelations about the lost generation.’

  ‘Wankers,’ the old lady said in her clear upper-class voice. ‘And poufs, most of them.’

  Michael’s blank bemused gaze nodded around towards his elderly relative.

  ‘I thought you were bedridden,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I thought you couldn’t walk.’

  ‘Nowhere to go,’ she said, as if that were sufficient explanation. As Michael still looked blank she laughed, setting the purple egret feathers jiggling. ‘Nowhere to go, nothing to do,’ she said.

  ‘Sarah took to her bed after a shock,’ Alice explained. ‘She never got up again and after a while people simply assumed she could not walk.’

  ‘Betty Foster’s tea dance,’ the old lady said with sudden energy as the memory came vividly back. ‘There she was, proud as punch in pillar-box red silk. And my Ma making me wear nothing but bloody white all the time.’

  Alice nodded, her face as sweet and understanding as a priest hearing confession.

  ‘Pissed me off,’ the old lady said. ‘No decent men around anyway, and Vaughan Sutcliffe trailing about after her all afternoon, teaching her to Charleston for God’s sake. Came home in a temper, kissed the chauffeur for spite, caught by Pa in the back seat of the Rolls with my knickers down. Nothing else I could do.’

  Michael gawped helplessly and gazed at Alice for translation.

  ‘Fainted,’ the old lady said. A cunning smile came into her eyes. ‘Chauffeur was a clever lad,’ she said reminiscently. ‘Told my Pa he was resuscitating me. Funny way to go about it I’d have thought.’

  ‘Did your father believe him?’ Alice asked, smiling.

  ‘Had to!’ Sarah said. ‘Most men would believe anything rather than think that women are normal human beings. Besides,’ she said consideringly, ‘brains don’t run on the male side in my family. You might have noticed with young Michael here.’

  Alice did not deny this, Michael noted.

  ‘Took to my bed,’ she recounted. ‘Carried down to the parlour every day by the chauffeur, carried upstairs again every night. Convenient that. Had my few flings. But never met a man worth getting up for.’

  ‘I thought you were ill,’ Michael said.

  Aunty Sarah smiled gently at him. Her old face gleamed with hard-won wisdom and an aged toughness.

  ‘Lots of ways of getting your own way,’ she said. ‘But if you’re a gel, it’s best to be sneaky.’

  She gave a little yawn.

  ‘You’d better have your rest,’ Alice said gently.

  Aunty Sarah got up from the kitchen table and waited bef
ore the kitchen door until Michael jumped up to open it for her.

  She paused as she went past him and Michael froze, wondering what was coming next. She patted his cheek with a hand half-encased in a violet lace mitten. ‘You’d be worth getting up for,’ she said proudly. ‘Take after me, you do! Proper little alley-cat you are! I enjoyed watching you.’

  She smiled her sweet little-old-lady smile at him and went upstairs. They heard her steady step up to the spare bedroom, and the closing of her bedroom door.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Does she know about Thomas the cat?’ Michael asked irrelevantly.

  Alice glanced at him. ‘She’s forgotten all about him,’ she said. ‘She is nearly ninety you know, Michael. You must make some allowances.’

  ‘Are we allowed to stay here?’ he asked. ‘Even though …’ he tailed off.

  ‘Even though I cured her and she’s still alive?’ Alice asked. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘So …’ Michael’s little voice shrank away to nothing.

  Alice waited.

  ‘So what do we do now then?’ he asked feebly.

  Alice rose from the table and stretched languorously. Her large breasts pressed against the thin translucent cotton of her peasant blouse, visibly contradicting theories about the idiocy of rural life. Any class which can design clothes of such moral hypocrisy that they manage to be tremulously innocent and irresistibly arousing at the same time needs little advice from fin-de-siècle, anally obsessed, German intellectuals.

  ‘I think …’ she said sweetly, ‘that we should follow Aunty’s example and have a little nap. She’s teaching oral history this afternoon, I’m doing lunar cycles and female arousal, and you’ – she glanced at a sheaf of notes – ‘you are taking Mrs Wheatley on a one-to-one counselling session.’

  ‘I am?’ Michael gaped. ‘Which one is Mrs Wheatley?’