Cathy knew what handbags were for. She herself carried everything (which wasn’t much) in one pocket, or the other.
She divided her women into two categories: those who could and those who could not.
She had little affection for those who could, they had no need of her, and they were often mistaken. Their secret was not one of class, although that seemed to help, but one of belief, and like all questions of belief, it involved certain mysteries. How, for example, does one believe in navy?
But there were also the women who could not. A woman for example, who could NOT wear blue. A woman who could wear a print, but NOT beside her face. A woman who could wear beads but NOT earrings. A woman who had a secret life of shoes too exotic for her, or one who could neither pass a perfume counter nor buy a perfume, unless it was for someone else. A woman who comes home with royal jelly every time she tries to buy a blouse.
A woman who cries in the lingerie department.
A woman who laughs while trying on hats.
A woman who buys two coats of a different colour.
The problem became vicious when they brought their daughters shopping with them. Cathy could smell these couples coming, all the way from Kitchenware.
Cathy married late and it was hard work. She had to find a man. Once she had found one, she discovered that the city was full of them. She had to talk and laugh and be fond. She had to choose. Did she like big burly men with soft brown eyes? Did she like that blond man with the eyes of pathological blue? What did she think of her own face, its notches and dents?
In the end, she went the easy road with a kind teacher from Fairview and a registry office do. She stole him from a coltish young woman with awkward eyes. Cathy would have sold her a tapestry Gladstone bag, one that was ‘wrong’ but ‘worked’ all the same.
Sex was a pleasant surprise. It was such a singular activity, it seemed to scatter and gather her at the same time.
Cathy fell in love one day with a loose, rangy woman, who came to her counter and to her smile and seemed to pick her up with the same ease as she did an Argentinian calfskin shoulder bag in tobacco brown, with woven leather inset panels, pig-skin lining and snap clasp. It was quite a surprise.
The woman, whose eyes were a tired shade of blue, asked Cathy’s opinion, and Cathy heard herself say ‘DIVE RIGHT IN HONEY, THE WATER’S JUST FINE!’ — a phrase she must have picked up from the television set. The woman did not flinch. She said ‘Have you got it in black?’
Brown was the colour of the bag. Cathy was disappointed by this betrayal. The weave would just disappear in black, the staining was everything. Cathy said, ‘It’s worth it in brown, even if it means new shoes. It really is a beautiful bag.’ The woman, however, neither bought the brown nor argued for black. She rubbed the leather with the base of her thumb as she laid the bag down. She looked at Cathy. She despaired. She turned her wide, sporting shoulders, her dry, bleached hair, and her nose with the bump in it, gave a small sigh, and walked out of the shop.
Cathy spent the rest of the day thinking, not of her hands, with their large knuckles, but of her breasts, that were widely spaced and looked two ways, one towards the umbrellas, the other at the scarves. She also wondered whether the woman had a necklace of lines hanging from her hips, whether she had ever been touched by a woman, what she might say, what Cathy might say back. Whether her foldings and infoldings were the same as her own or as different as daffodil from narcissus. It was a very exciting afternoon.
Cathy began to slip. She made mistakes. She sold the wrong bags to the wrong women and her patter died. She waited for another woman to pick up the tobacco-brown bag to see what might happen. She sold indiscriminately. She looked at every woman who came her way and she just didn’t know anymore.
She could, of course, change her job. She could drive a bus. She could work as a hospital maid in, for example, the cardiac ward, which was full of certainties.
Because women did not get heart attacks. They would come at visiting time and talk too much or not at all. She could work out who loved simply or in silence. She could spot those who might as well hate. She would look at their bags without judgement, as they placed them on the coverlets, or opened them for tissues. They might even let a tear drip inside.
Cathy emptied out her building-society account and walked up to the hat department with a plastic bag filled with cash. She said, ‘Ramona, I want to buy every hat you have.’ She did the same at Shoes, although she stipulated size five-and-a-half. She didn’t make a fuss when refused. She stuffed the till of her own counter full of notes, called a taxi and hung herself with bags, around her neck and down her arms. All kinds of people looked at her. Then she went to bed for a week, feeling slightly ashamed.
She kept the one fatal bag, the brown calf-skin with a snap clasp. She abused it. She even used it to carry things. She started to sleep around.
THE PORTABLE VIRGIN
Dare to be dowdy! that’s my motto, because it comes to us all — the dirty acrylic jumpers and the genteel trickle of piss down our support tights. It will come to her too.
She was one of those women who hold their skin like a smile, as if she was afraid her face might fall off if the tension went out of her eyes.
I knew that when Ben made love to her, the thought that she might break pushed him harder. I, by comparison, am like an old sofa, welcoming, familiar, well-designed.
This is the usual betrayal story, as you have already guessed — the word ‘sofa’ gave it away. The word ‘sofa’ opened up rooms full of sleeping children and old wedding photographs, ironic glances at crystal wineglasses, BBC mini-series where Judi Dench plays the deserted furniture and has a little sad fun.
It is not a story about hand-jobs in toilets, at parties where everyone is in the van-rental business. It is not a story where Satan turns around like a lawyer in a swivel chair. There are no doves, no prostitutes, no railway stations, no marks on the skin.
So there I was knitting a bolero jacket when I dropped a stitch. Bother. And there was Ben with a gin and tonic crossing his legs tenderly by the phone.
‘Thoroughly fucked?’ I asked and he spilt his drink.
Ben has been infected by me over the years. He has my habit of irony, or perhaps I have his. Our inflections coincide in bed, and sometimes he startles me in the shops, by hopping out of my mouth.
‘Thoroughly,’ he said, brushing the wet on his trousers and flicking drops of gin from his fingertips.
There was an inappropriate desire in the room, a strange dance of description; as I uncovered her brittle blonde hair, her wide strained mouth. A woman of modified adjectives, damaged by men, her body whittled into thinness so unnatural you could nearly see the marks of the knife. Intelligent? No. Funny? No. Rich, with a big laugh and sharp heels? No. Happy? Definitely not. Except when he was there. Ben makes me too sad for words. I finished the row, put away my needles and went to bed.
Judi Dench came out of the wardrobe and decided that it was time that she had an affaire herself. She would start a small business in the gardening shed and leave her twin-sets behind. And just when she realised that she was a human being too — attractive generous and witty (albeit in a sofa kind of way) — some nice man would come along and agree with her.