‘Alec is always round here‚’ said Mother. ‘Not that I don’t need the company. But it would be good if that writer woman could offer you some guidance about your … work. I expect she knows people employed on the journals.’
‘Are you talking about the newspapers again?’
Mother often suggested that Marcia become a journalist, writing for the Guardian Women’s Page about stress at work, or child abuse.
Marcia went into the front room. Mother followed her, saying, ‘You’d make money. You could stay at home and write novels at the same time. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were doing something that brought something in.’
Marcia had secretly written articles which she had sent to the Guardian, the Mail, Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazines. They had been returned. She was an artist, not a journalist. If only mother would understand that they were different.
Marcia paced the room. The wallpaper was vividly striped, and there was only one overhead light. Her brother used to say it was like living inside a Bridget Riley painting. The fat armchair with a pouffe in front of it, on which Mother kept her TV magazines and chocolates, sat there like Mother herself‚ heavy and immovable. Marcia didn’t want to sit down, but couldn’t just leave while there were favours she required.
Marcia said, ‘All I want is for you to help me make a little time for myself.’
‘What about me?’ said Mother. ‘I haven’t even had a cup of tea today. Don’t I need time now?’
‘You?’ said Marcia. ‘You pity yourself, but I envy you.’ Her mother’s face started to redden. Marcia felt empty but words streamed from her. ‘Yes! I wish I’d sat at home for twenty years supported by a good man, being a “housewife”. Think what I’d have written. Washing in the morning, real work in the afternoon, before picking up the kids from school. I wouldn’t have wasted a moment … not a moment, of all that beautiful free time!’
Mother sank into her chair and put her hand over her face.
‘Better find a man then, if you can‚’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’ said Marcia, hotly.
‘Someone who wants to keep you. What’s that one’s name?’
Marcia murmured, ‘Sandor. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s only a man I’m vaguely interested in.’
‘I wouldn’t be interested in any man‚’ said mother. ‘Those dirty creatures aren’t really interested in you. What does he do?’
‘You know what he does.’
‘Can’t you do better for yourself?’
‘No, I can’t‚’ said Marcia. ‘I can’t.’
Her mother loved living alone, and boasted of it constantly. When Marcia was a child six people had lived in the house, and apart from Mother they had all died or left. Mother claimed that alone she could do whatever she wanted, and at whatever time, apart from the small matter of giving and receiving emotional and physical affection, as Marcia liked to point out.
‘Who wants a lot of men pawing at you?’ was Mother’s reply.
‘Who doesn’t?’ Marcia said.
Marcia recalled Father as he sat on the sofa with his pad and pen. He would casually ask Mother to make him a cup of tea. Mother, whatever else she was doing, was expected to fetch it, place it before him, and wait to see if it was to his liking. It was assumed that she was at Father’s command. No wonder she had taken loneliness as a philosophy. Marcia would discuss it with Aurelia.
They were three generations of women, living close to one another. Marcia’s grandmother, aged ninety-four, also lived alone, in a one-bedroom flat five minutes’ walk away. She was lucid and easily amused; her mind worked, but she was bent double with arthritis and prayed for the good Lord to take her. Her husband had died twenty years ago and she had hardly been out since. To Marcia she was like an animal in a cage, starved of the good things. Where were the men? Marcia’s grandfather and father had died; her brother, the doctor, had gone to America; her husband had decamped with a neighbour.
Marcia went into the bathroom, took a Valium, kissed Alec, and went to her car.
*
That night, alone at home, writing and drinking — as desolate and proud as Martha Gellhorn in the desert, she liked to think — she rang Sandor and told him of her mother’s indifference and scorn, and the concentrated work she was doing.
‘The novel is really moving forward!’ she said. ‘I’ve never read anything like it. It’s so truthful. I can’t believe no one will be interested!’
She talked until she felt she were speaking into infinity. Even her therapist, when Marcia could afford to see her, said more.
She had met Sandor in a pub, after the man she was with, picked from a black folder in the dating agency office, had made an excuse and left. What was wrong with her? The man only came up to her chest! One woman in the writing group went out with a different man every week. It was odd, she said, how many of them were married. Sandor wasn’t.
After her monologue, she asked Sandor what he was doing.
‘The same‚’ he said, and laughed.
‘I’ll come and see you‚’ she said.
‘Why not? I’m always here‚’ he replied.
‘Yes, you are‚’ she said.
He laughed again.
She saw him, a fifty-year-old Bulgarian, about once a month. He was a porter in a smart block of flats in Chelsea, and lived in a room in Earl’s Court. He considered the job, which he had obtained after drifting around Europe for fifteen years, to be ideal. In his black suit at the desk in the entrance, he buzzed people in, took parcels and accepted flowers, went on errands for the tenants, and re-read his favourite writers, Pascal, Nietzsche, Hegel.
None of the men she had met through the agency had been interested in literature, and not one had been attractive. Sandor had the face of an uncertain priest and the body of the Olympic cyclist that he had been. He was intelligent, well mannered and seductive in several languages. He could, when he was ‘on’, as he put it, beguile women effortlessly. He had slept with more than a thousand women and had never sustained a relationship with any of them. What sort of man had no ex-wife, no children, no family nearby, no lawyers, no debt, no house? She marvelled at her ability to locate melancholy in people. She would have to unfreeze Sandor’s dead soul with the blow-torch of her love. Did she have sufficient blow? If only she could find something better to do.
‘See you, Sandor‚’ she said.
She swigged wine from the bottle she kept beside her bed. She managed to fall asleep but awoke soon after, burning with uncontrollable furies against her husband, Mother, Sandor, Aurelia. She understood those paintings full of devils and writhing, contorted demons. They did exist, in the mind. Why was there no sweetness within?
*
She arrived an hour early at Aurelia’s house, noted where it was, parked, and walked about the neighbourhood. It was a sunny winter’s day. This was a part of London she didn’t know. The streets were full of antique shops, organic grocers, and cafés with young men and their babies sitting in the window. People strolled in sunglasses and dark clothes, and gathered in groups on the pavement to gossip. She recognised actors and a film director. She looked in an estate agent’s window; a family house cost a million pounds.
She bought apples, vitamins and coffee. She chose a scarf in Agnès b. and paid for it by credit card, successfully averting her eyes from the price, as she had earlier avoided a clash with a mirror in the shop.