Alice Hartley‘s Happiness Read online

  Alice slid past the table and swayed towards the door. ‘She’s the one with the nervous stammer,’ she said. ‘Her husband is Doctor Wheatley, the famous art historian who specializes in classical art and the male nude.’ Alice nodded wisely. ‘There is no doubt in my mind about Doctor Wheatley’s preferences,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, that one!’ Michael said, relieved to understand something at last. ‘But what do I do with his wife?’

  Alice paused beside him, twined her strong white arms around his neck and looked deeply into his red-rimmed eyes. ‘Anything she can afford,’ she said softly, and melted into his kiss.

  It was good that the house was big and soundly built. Aunty Sarah’s class took place in the sitting-room at the front of the house and you could hear the screams of malicious laughter from the kitchen, even with both doors shut. Alice’s session on lunar cycles and female arousal was more scientific – Alice used Professor Hartley’s flip chart to good effect and with joyful disregard of the price of paper. From time to time she ordered the curtains drawn so that she could use his overhead projector. She had eyed these artefacts for decades of inferiority and she took especial pleasure in drawing pictures of female genitalia with Professor Hartley’s special overhead projector felt-tip pens, which, for sixteen years, she had been expressly forbidden to touch.

  ‘I feel deeply released,’ she breathed at Michael as they passed in the hall.

  Michael felt deeply released too. He had been a little nervous of Mrs Wheatley. Alice’s instructions had been ambiguous and she had done nothing more to help him than give him a little snack of bright scarlet mushrooms on toast and light a fire for him in the dining-room.

  ‘Just do what she wants and charge her thirty pounds,’ she said.

  When Michael blinked she had smiled. ‘People don’t value things they get for free,’ she said. For a moment Michael had a vision of years and years of dinners and washing-up and Alice’s hopeful face handing out plates and receiving back garbage.

  ‘The more she pays for it, the more good it does her,’ she said wisely.

  Then the doorbell had rung and Mrs Wheatley had hovered nervously on the tiled hall floor.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said, as if she were reluctant to force her name on Michael, this early in their acquaintanceship.

  ‘Hullo,’ Michael said. ‘What would you like to do?’

  Alice spread her arms wide and shooed them into the dining-room, leaving them alone, closing the door behind them. As she paused in the hall for one second she could hear Mrs Wheatley’s voice quaver, crack and then wail through tears:

  ‘Oh, Michael! Since I was seventeen no one has ever … no man has ever … I’ve never dared ask anyone to do … YOU KNOW WHAT!’

  Alice smiled and went away from the door.

  From time to time during the afternoon she hovered in the hall to listen. Most of the time she could hear nothing but breathless little sighs. Once Mrs Wheatley said clearly: ‘I saw a book once with a picture in it, and the man was kind of turned, so that this bit was up against there like this …’

  And Michael replied rather breathlessly, ‘What, like this?’

  Mrs Wheatley’s hushed giggle was somehow smothered. ‘I think I must have seen the book upside down,’ she said.

  Then there was silence again for a while.

  All the classes broke up at about four. Aunty Sarah, spry and beaming, had made them a big pot of tea and Alice took a large carrot cake from the deep freeze, microwaved it to near-edibility, and cut everyone substantial slices.

  Michael ate like a ravenous wolf. Alice and Mrs Wheatley watched him with misty fondness. For one moment their eyes met and Mrs Wheatley smiled at Alice, and blushed like a girl.

  After tea, a couple of the lunar cycles group and three of Aunty Sarah’s oral history group offered to make supper for the rest. Alice waved them towards the freezer as she drifted out to the garden to sit under the apple trees where the apple blossom snowed down on the grass and bees reeled pie-eyed, or perhaps pie-antennaed, on cider-like pollen.

  ‘Mrs Hartley?’

  Alice opened her eyes. Before her was one of her students from the lunar cycles and female arousal course, an intense, dark girl, one of Michael’s set from the drama centre. In Alice’s afternoon seminar it had become clear that this girl had enjoyed neither arousal nor a lunar cycle, having managed to resist womanhood and even adolescence by the simple but effective technique of giving up food. She was painfully thin. At her neck one could see the little bird-bones of her pipe-cleaner skeleton. Her legs were so thin one might, absent-mindedly, tie a message to them if the telephone was out of order. It was her bad luck that just when the madness of her family had prompted her to resist adulthood the madness of the fashion scene had decreed that this half-starved asexual shape was the ideal. Therefore Stephanie, and all the girls like her, denied their bodies’ hunger, swathed themselves in layers of grey and black cloth reminiscent of shrouds, and had the satisfaction of knowing themselves to be at the very pinnacle of the woman-hating, sexuality-fearing fashion machine.

  Alice, resplendent in deep red skirt, white blouse, orange headscarf and purple shawl with tinkling bells around her shoulders, shaded her dark eyes with her broad white hand and smiled up.

  ‘Yes, Stephanie?’

  ‘Mrs Hartley, we’d like to dance!’ Stephanie said in a little rush of breathy whisper. ‘We’re missing our aerobics class in town, and we thought, if you didn’t mind, we could do it here.’

  Alice waved a generous arm at the house. ‘Of course,’ she said sweetly. ‘Do you know enough to lead the class?’

  A dull red sneaked up through Stephanie’s tiny arteries.

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘Two pounds each,’ Alice said beneficently. ‘Come and see me when you’ve finished.’

  Stephanie danced off, her tiny feet hardly bending the grass blades of the orchard, and left Alice in sun-drenched solitude. Birds tweeped approvingly in the trees above her head. In the distance Alice could hear the rumble of someone’s motor mower. At One with Nature, Alice let the grass grow under her and all around her. She closed her eyes and gave herself up for sleep.

  She dozed for only a few moments before curiosity got the better of her. Faintly from the house she could hear the deep thud of a bass guitar and the insistent beat of drums keeping time for the patter of light feet as they jogged and jumped in obedience to Stephanie’s squeaked commands. Alice got to her feet and strolled through the sapspringing orchard, through the derelict garden, up to the house.

  Michael, asleep for the second time that day in Professor Hartley’s big double bed, stirred uneasily and rolled on to his back. The thump of the music entered into his dreams and prompted visions of large-bodied older women with crows’-feet around their eyes, and sad, downturned mouths. Michael floated in his sleep, bursting with potency, full of essence, able to heal, restore, renovate. He felt like an organic source of T-Cut. He felt like a god. And all this power and strength came from doing what he had wanted to do more than anything else in the world ever since he was thirteen. Michael snored deeply.

  Alice, peeping through the door, smiled and left him sleeping. She was drawn downstairs to the source of the music in the dining-room. She did not want to disturb the dancers so she went quietly into the kitchen, opened the serving hatch a crack, and peeped in.

  Half a dozen girls had cleared the room for action. The warm Persian rugs were rolled up and stacked against the wall. The dining-room table was pushed back and the chairs carefully placed on top of it.

  In the middle of the room, Stephanie was prancing like an animated Lowry picture, a pin-person in motion. Before her, five other women were echoing her gestures, like large blobby shadows behind a tiny twig.

  Alice watched them. Two of them were young friends of Stephanie, both slight, one a little plumper than the other. The plumper one had beads of sweat on her upper lip and she stamped her feet with especial emphasis and eyed Stephanie�
�s boney thinness with a look of utter envy.

  The rest of the women were younger than Alice, but older than Stephanie. One or two were young faculty wives, their tummies round, their hips thickened. They danced watching the clock, they would have to collect children from child-minders or from school. One or two were postgraduate students, spreading at the hips from years of seated work.

  Two thousand years of progress had brought these women to this pitch of leisure and education. None of them had ever hauled on a rope, none of them had ever heaved wet sheets through a wringer. None of them had ever stooped and lifted and carried weights heavier than a plastic carrier-bag full of shopping. As Alice watched, musing, she saw them dance through exercises which mimicked hauling on ropes, lifting wet sheets, heaving and carrying loads.

  ‘Funny,’ she thought.

  The music changed abruptly.

  ‘Now we’ll work on our bums,’ Stephanie said brightly. The whole group collapsed to the floor in a disciplined heap and lay panting noisily on their backs. As Alice watched, her eyes widening in surprise, they heaved their pelvises towards the ceiling and swung their hips first to the right, and then to the left and then thrust straight up and down in movements which could only be described as convulsive.

  ‘Push!’ Stephanie shrieked encouragingly. ‘Clench those buttocks! Push … and … push … and push … and push!’

  Upstairs in his sleep, Michael’s smile broadened.

  Downstairs, Alice swung the hatch wider and watched openly.

  These women, she thought, were not getting enough basic exercise during the day. Nor were they getting enough basic exercise at night.

  The Growth Centre could help people who wanted to push with their pelvises. The Growth Centre could use people who wanted to lift heavy weights and pull things.

  Alice’s mind ranged over the derelict orchard and the deep-rooted weeds. The large trunks of old rotting trees which overhung the drive, the fencing which was holed and patchy, the pot-holed drive which needed a fresh load of gravel fetching and spreading.

  She nodded wisely, and smiled at Stephanie who was showing the class how to lie flat on your back, raise your legs vertically in the air and then bob up and try to knock yourself out by smashing your face on your knees. Alice shut the hatch and went to the sitting-room and drew some notepaper towards her.

  ‘“Gardening Therapy Course,”’ she wrote. ‘“NB see Voltaire’s Candide.”’

  Eleven of them sat down to supper. Aunty Sarah stayed resting in her room but came down when there was no danger of having to do the washing-up. A couple of Michael’s friends from university dropped in and talked about veganism and the peace movement. They, three of the younger women, and Stephanie, asked to stay the night and Alice raided the linen cupboard and found enough sheets, blankets and pillows for all of them.

  They all went to bed early. The moon was in an interesting stage of the cycle and Alice wanted to lie with moonlight on her face. She stirred but did not waken at the continual patter of bare feet crossing and re-crossing the landing during the night. In the morning everyone contributed ten pounds each to demonstrate commitment to the communal spirit of the Growth Centre.

  ‘How are we doing?’ Michael asked when the last guest had gone, and he and Alice were sitting alone at the scrubbed kitchen table.

  Alice pulled the second tea towel full of money towards her.

  ‘I think we’re making something like three hundred pounds a day,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘That’s gross, mind.’

  ‘It is gross,’ Michael agreed.

  Alice started scribbling on paper for a few moments, then she lifted her head and said: ‘If we can do the courses for which we already have students, and some other things come up, then I think the Growth Centre will make something like eighty thousand pounds clear profit in the first year.’

  Michael blinked. ‘My father will be terribly pleased,’ he said. ‘He didn’t seem to be too keen on us living here. He’ll be amazed when he knows we’re making money.’

  Alice shot a glance at him. ‘You’ve spoken to your father?’ she asked carefully, keeping her voice light.

  Michael nodded. ‘I always talk to them on a Thursday. Father takes the afternoon off from the office to play golf, so first I talk to Mother and then I talk to Father.’

  Alice was uncomfortable but she kept her face serene and nodded. Professor Hartley would have been warned at once by that especial pleasant blankness; but Michael saw only polite interest. ‘When did you do this?’ she asked.

  ‘While I was waiting for you at the drama centre,’ Michael said easily. ‘I suddenly remembered and went to the pay phone. I always reverse the charges anyway.’

  Alice let out one minute fearful breath. ‘And did you tell them all about us?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes!’ Michael’s smile was happy. ‘They didn’t say much, but then they never do. I told them that Aunty Sarah was dead after your herbal tea and that we were in love, except that I thought you’d have to go back to your husband. I didn’t tell them about the Growth Centre because I didn’t know then that it had started.’

  Michael got up to put the kettle on. Alice waited for more horrors, but he seemed to have nothing further to add.

  ‘And what did your mother say?’ Alice asked, her voice determinedly under control.

  ‘She asked who was doing my laundry,’ Michael said matter-of-factly.

  Alice’s growing sense of panic was overtaken by bewilderment. ‘Laundry?’ she asked.

  Michael hastened to reassure her. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I do it at the university launderette, on Saturday night.’

  Alice blinked. ‘You told her that Sarah was dead and that you were living with me except that I had gone back to my husband, and she asked you about your laundry?’

  ‘She always asks about my laundry,’ Michael said reasonably. He saw Alice was looking bemused. ‘It’s how she shows her love,’ he said with dignity. ‘She asks about my laundry and I tell her I have enough clean underwear. It’s how we communicate affection in my family.’

  Alice nodded. She had a sense of rapidly gathering doom, and the news that Michael’s family were all as crazy as coots was not helping.

  ‘And your father?’ she asked. ‘What did he say?’

  Michael screwed up his eyes to aid the process of memory. ‘Oh, the usual things I expect,’ he said, absent-minded. ‘“When are you going to get some work done?” and “when I was your age I was half-way through my apprenticeship”, and “if I have to come down and see that nancy personal tutor of yours again there’ll be trouble”, and “whatever you do, Michael, don’t get tied up with drugs and women”, and “don’t come running to me when you run out of money because I haven’t got any”.’

  ‘Did he say anything about Sarah? About me?’ Alice asked.

  ‘We got cut off,’ Michael said. He frowned as he cast his mind back to the conversation. ‘Oh yes! That’s how the phone got into the Jaguar. You ripped the phone out of the box when you drove off, Alice.’

  Alice looked utterly blank. She had not noticed the phone in Michael’s hand. ‘But your father,’ she pursued. ‘Did he say he was going to do anything about Sarah? About this house?’

  Michael looked vague. ‘I think he said not to do anything, and not to touch anything,’ he offered. ‘He generally doesn’t like anyone doing anything very much.’

  Alice nodded. ‘He doesn’t sound as if he has a very positive Life Force,’ she said absently.

  Michael shook his head with anxious emphasis. ‘No, no, Alice,’ he said. ‘He’ll go on for ever. Besides, it’s all tied up in insurance policies and trusts, and you wouldn’t like their house.’

  Alice hadn’t quite meant that, but she saw little point in correcting Michael. She had a sensation of dread clutching in a familiar way around her gut. She had thought that the Growth Centre was safe with her abilities, Aunty Sarah’s support and Michael’s unstoppable essences. But now, like an Eve in a latt
er-day Eden, Alice learned fear.

  ‘Where do they live?’ she asked. She was hoping that Michael would say Arbroath or the Isle of Man.

  ‘Tunbridge Wells,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Nice and close. They’ll probably pop over and see us next week sometime. I said they should. In fact, now I think of it, Dad said he’d be down as soon as he could. And that he would get his man on to it. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’ He smiled happily at Alice. ‘They always like to meet my friends,’ he said cheerily.

  Saturday

  The aerobic gardening class was a remarkable success. Stephanie had been hesitant about the concept, arguing wasps and stinging nettles; but when she saw the large hi-fi speakers loaned with unconscious generosity by the university drama centre, and heard the heavy drum beat echoing in the overgrown garden, she was inspired. Alice explained that all aerobic dance was substitute work, performed as an inadequate alternative to hard manual labour. Their bodies were, in fact, crying out for the drudgery of rural toil. Alice grew persuasively anthropological about the alienation of women from their natural work. She explained how women since the dawn of time have heaved things, lifted things, cleared and gardened. Alice urged them to be authentic, to get in touch with their inheritance, with Nature, to get to grips with reality, and offered them – instead of little dances with chopping motions of the hands – the real thing: axes and half a dozen fallen trees to work on.

  Ten pupils had arrived for the aerobics class this morning: a pair of identical and indistinguishable twins who introduced themselves shyly as Gary and Timofy, and their friend Jonafon, as well as two new faculty wives, who arrived lugging babies in backpacks and looking harassed.

  ‘Leave them with me!’ Alice cried. ‘I love babies! And you must be exhausted. What you need is an hour’s aerobo-work and then half an hour’s relaxation.’

  Two pairs of eyes shadowed black with exhaustion from sleepless nights and loneliness boggled helplessly at Alice.

  ‘Poor darlings!’ Alice said to them. ‘Babies are a blessing, but such hard work.’