‘No one’s home,’ said Bettina, ‘nor will be for hours. I gave my staff tickets to see my husband’s new play.’
‘Oh, you sweetheart,’ said Jean.
They were in the dining room. Jean dropped her cigarette into a china cup, grabbed Bettina and spun her around, bending her over the table with great control, so as not to thump her pregnant stomach.
And then, in a hot whisper: ‘Cunt. Cunt. Cunt.’
Jean had come to Britain intending to stay a couple of weeks before moving on to Berlin, but had quickly fallen in love with London and ingratiated herself within the literary scene, hobnobbing with various writers and academics. She lived in a perfectly satisfactory maisonette in Chelsea, spartan and neat, to which she invited Bettina one evening. She fed her cheesecake and port, took her to her bedroom, ordered her to strip… and then an hour of something Bettina would never tell a living soul about ever.
By the fifth meeting, she allowed Bettina to touch her. She murmured instructions in a voice that shivered unsurely – ‘A bit lower… Faster… No, use the tip… Two fingers now… Keep doing that… Keep doing that.’ Bettina was grateful for these demands because she didn’t fully know what she was doing. When Jean finally came, her thigh spasmed like a dog having its belly scratched. She curled up next to Bettina, not quite touching her.
‘Do you ever fuck your husband?’ she said. ‘You feign a lot of headaches, I bet.’
Bettina stared at the ceiling. She and Bart had agreed to only confide the nature of their relationship to those they fully trusted. ‘He feels squeamish about doing it with the baby inside me.’
Jean tutted. ‘Silly man. Pregnant women are crammed full of hormones and it makes them go at it like wild bitches.’
Bart seemed supportive of the affair, on the surface at least, but he was moping more than usual, and when she came home from Jean’s he’d be sitting in front of the fire in a sulk. Jealous, probably. Because she was giving her attention to someone else for a change. She found herself almost hoping that he’d challenge her: ‘I don’t want you seeing that woman any more.’ Something like that. She could then list all the reasons he was being a hypocrite and a chauvinist. ‘You got to have your boyfriend living in our house, which I supported,’ she’d say, ‘and now you have the nerve to boss me around?’ In these hypothetical arguments she was always near tears, smoking a cigarette with a shaking hand. ‘You’re a bastard and a fraud!’ And then she’d break down crying, and oh, how sorry he would be!
Six weeks in, everything changed. Bettina came to Jean’s house one evening, and rather than the usual order of business (sex), Jean offered her a drink and some chocolates and they sat down to talk. Jean had a lot of thoughts on the women’s question and had read many scholarly articles about it. Bettina didn’t think much about such things, having only one broad opinion on the matter: that women were not inferior to men. Possibly sensing her boredom, Jean changed the subject, telling her about her youth; of falling in love with a school girlfriend at the age of fifteen and having her heart broken. Of falling in love with another girl at seventeen. And having her heart broken. And more of the same. Her brothers were proud Klansmen and had once beaten a ‘pansy’ half to death. Her mother was controlling (surprise, surprise) and her father was mean and surly and had never – honestly, never – said a single nice thing to her. ‘I genuinely felt that if I died, he’d feel nothing but relief,’ she said coolly, as if commenting on approaching rainclouds.
It was all terribly predictable; a woman as emotionally guarded as Jean didn’t get that way after a childhood spent skipping merrily through daisy-dotted meadows.
Jean abruptly stood up. ‘I’d like to go to bed now. Go home, please.’
Bettina stared at her. ‘I didn’t come here to talk, you know.’
‘I’m not in the mood. Go home and sort yourself out.’ She flapped a dismissive hand. ‘Or get the charlady to do it.’
‘I don’t have a charlady!’
‘Let yourself out,’ said Jean, leaving the room.
Bettina was frozen still in her chair. She ate some more of the chocolates, not tasting them, barely even registering them in her mouth. I don’t have a charlady. That was funny actually. That was – Bart would think it hilarious. But by God, she was furious. Positively molten. She smoked her cigarette down to the filter and leaned over her bulging stomach to stub it out in the ashtray. Paused. Dropped it instead into Jean’s unfinished bourbon. She picked up her coat and purse and headed up the stairs. She was going to give Jean a piece of her mind. She was going to let her have it: you are a clumsy kisser and a selfish conversationalist. You use fancy terminology because you’re insecure about your intellect, and rightfully so. You are a poser. You position the books in your shelves so as to impress visitors, with Virginia Woolf closest to the sofa – I know this to be true. I’ve read your attempts at prose in the ledger you keep hidden under the bed and it is derivative and dull. Your nostrils are often flecked with little snot scraps. I think you might be evil. Oh, yes, all this and more.
The bedroom was empty. Bettina was about to leave when she heard a muffled voice come from the far corner. ‘Go home.’
The wardrobe? She couldn’t be in the wardrobe. Preposterous. But the wardrobe, the giant beechwood wardrobe where Jean kept all her shirts, was the only thing in the room that could enclose a full-grown human being. She approached it, her heels knocking against the varnished floorboards.
Jean was hugging her knees to her chest at the bottom of the wardrobe.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Bettina. ‘You’re thirty years old!’
‘Fuck you!’
The shirts hanging overhead cast a shadow over Jean’s head. Bettina reached in and parted them, exposing her pink-mottled face and glimmering eyes.
‘Oh – oh dear.’
‘Leave me the fuck alone!’
Sighing, Bettina got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the wardrobe. It reeked of laundry starch and shoe polish. She reached out to move aside Jean’s hair, and of course she flinched away, violently, like a child – a wounded, furious child. Bettina sighed again. She wrapped her arms around her, squeezing her in close, knowing that again she’d resist – which she did, jerking away and making a horrid whining sound. Well, children were easily dealt with: Bettina smacked her around the side of the head and said, ‘Stop being a baby!’ Jean stiffened and finally relaxed into her arms.
‘Fancy, a bastard like you crying.’
Jean laughed. Wiped her nose with her sleeve. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise for crying. You’re human. As it turns out.’
‘No. I’m sorry for wiping my nose on my clothes.’
‘Why the wardrobe?’
‘It feels safe in here,’ she said, resting her head against Bettina’s shoulder. ‘I’ve got a whole sob story about it. About closets – we call them closets. You want to hear my sad little story?’
Bettina nodded.
‘When I was little, my brothers used to lock me in the closet. The first time they did it I was terrified; I banged on the doors, I kicked and I kicked. But no one came to let me out. I – I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this – it got to the point where I needed to pee. So I went in my grandfather’s shoe – don’t you laugh, Betty, I won’t forgive you for it. I was so ashamed. And I started thinking I’d run out of air and die. I was terrified. So I started pretending I was in a storm shelter and there was a tornado heading my way, and I’d be the only safe person and everyone else would die. My mom, my dad, my brothers, they’d all die. But I’d survive. This brought me great comfort.’