‘I think,’ said Richard, blindly, ‘I would be doing you a kindness in saving you from suburbia and a life of proper propriety.’

  And in a room at the Strand Palace Hotel, after lunch, for her sake rather than his, or so it appeared to him, he did not so much as save her from these things, as make them intolerable to her for ever.

  By five o’clock both were back in the office: Miss Martin was pale and stunned and at her typewriter, and he was trying to catch up with his work. Neither could quite believe that it had happened, and Richard certainly wished that it had not.

  Miss Martin told no one. There was no one to tell. ‘I was drunk,’ she told herself. ‘You know what home-made wine is.’

  Justifications

  Richard quite wanted to tell Bella about the astonishing episode of himself and Miss Martin, but prudence forbade it. She would have laughed at him, from her lordly position, sitting astride him on the study sofa, exacting response from him, payment, this pleasure for that, as if she was the queen and he the subject. Boadicea. Knives on the wheels of her lust, cutting into self-esteem.

  ‘I took her virginity,’ he could have said. ‘It seemed my right, even my duty. She certainly expected me to.’

  ‘Took her virginity,’ Bella would have sneered. ‘A poor Victorian dirty old man, that’s all you are at heart.’

  But he knew there was power in it. That he would never be forgotten: thus his life lasted as long as hers. He would keep that to himself.

  ‘Don’t you worry about all this?’ he asked Bella. He had to ask her something. She demanded rational conversation until the very last minute of their lovemaking, and question and answer seemed the least troublesome means of providing it.

  ‘Why should I worry?’

  ‘In case Ray finds out. He might come home early.’

  ‘Ray never comes home early.’ She was bitter, but he could see her logic. Bella was doing what she was because Ray came home late: it was the grudge she bore against him. It circled and circled in her mind—words rather than meaning. Ray Comes Home Late. Ray could not, therefore, come home early, or she would not be doing this. He could see that the logic might well apply to Bella, making her husband inaudible and invisible if he returned early from his visit to the nubile Karen and her homework problems—perhaps taken ill, or overcome with emotion—but would hardly save him, Richard, from Ray’s anger and upset.

  He said as much.

  ‘Ray wouldn’t be angry or upset,’ said Bella. ‘Why should he? He likes me to enjoy myself. And what else can he expect, the way he never comes home until late. And you’re a friend after all.’

  ‘You don’t think this is an abuse of friendship?’

  ‘It might be a test of friendship. Whenever I go away my friend Isabel sleeps with Ray. She and I are still the best of friends.’

  ‘I expect you compare notes,’ said Richard, gloomily.

  ‘Of course,’ said Bella.

  ‘I don’t want you to talk about me,’ said Richard.

  She sighed and raised her eyes to heaven, revealing an amazing amount of white.

  ‘I don’t think Ray treats you very well,’ said Richard.

  ‘In what way?’ Bella was interested.

  ‘The way he talks about other younger women in front of you. And complains about your tits.’

  ‘That’s just his insecurity.’

  ‘He calls you “the old bag”.’

  ‘He projects his fear of ageing on to me,’ said Bella, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Richard, ‘I do feel bad about doing this, in spite of what you say.’

  ‘Of course you do. It’s the only way you can get it up.’ He found her crudeness horrific and fascinating, and was unable to continue talking.

  On evenings when Richard did not accompany Ray and Bella on some gastronomic jaunt, or was keeping Bella company on Ray’s late nights out, he ate simply enough, with the family. The staple food of the household was fish fingers, baked potatoes and frozen peas. Food, except on special occasions, was regarded as fuel. Tony and Tina, the children, watched television and read books while they ate. ‘Today’s children have no palate,’ mourned Bella.

  The Nash household was for the most part quiet, as if saving its strength for uproar, or recuperating its strength from the last outburst. Helga the au pair washed and cleaned and fried fish fingers and ironed: the children did their homework, Ray wrote in the attic, Bella and Richard silently worked or studiously made their secret love.

  Sometimes it reminded Richard of his parents’ home: the semblance of ordinariness, of kindness and consideration and warmth, as passions gathered and dams of rage prepared to burst.

  Married to Liffey, in the little sweetness of their love, he had forgotten all that. He had learned, as a child, to smile and please and be out of the way when storms broke. Liffey had learned the same lesson.

  Richard would do things with Bella as he believed debased the pair of them.

  ‘No such thing as a perversion,’ Bella would say, ‘so long as both enjoy it.’

  But Richard knew that she was wrong: that in dragging the spirituality of love down into the mist of excitement through disgust, he did them both a wrong. He would never do such things to Liffey. She was his wife. But he had to do them with someone, or be half alive.

  All Bella’s doing, thought Richard. Bella’s fault.

  Or he could have lived with Liffey for ever, in the calm ordinariness of the missionary position, as had his mother and father before him, and known no better.

  Miss Martin had trembled and moaned so much he’d simply got it all over as soon as possible.

  Richard could see that Miss Martin too might come to enjoy it. Perhaps it was his duty to ensure that she did: to bring her to the enjoyment of sex, before casting her back into the stream of life from which he had so tenderly fished her? The more Richard contemplated the notion, the more attractive and the more virtuous such a course appeared.

  There were, Richard thought, three kinds of women, and three kinds of associated sex. Liffey’s kind, which went with marriage, which was respectful and everyday, and allowed both partners to discuss such things as mortgages and shopping on waking.

  Bella’s kind, which went with extra-marital sex, and self-disgust, and was anal and oral and infantile, and addictive, and so out of character that nobody said anything on waking if only because the daily self and the nightly self were so divorced.

  Miss Martin’s kind, which involved seduction: the pleasure of inflicting and receiving emotional pain: in which the sexual act was the culmination not to physical foreplay—for orgasm was in no way its object—but of long, long hours, days, weeks, of emotional manipulation.

  It would not be possible, nor indeed desirable, Richard thought, to find these three different women in one body; he could never satisfy his needs monogamously. Could any man?

  On Wednesday morning Richard said to Miss Martin, whose hand shook more than ever when she handed him his coffee, whom he had had to reprove more than once for carelessness in typing, and who was now wearing her hair curled behind her ears—‘I like your hair like that.’

  It was the first personal remark he had made to her since their return from the Strand Palace Hotel.

  Miss Martin blushed. Later he asked her out to lunch. He knew she would not refuse: that she would make no trouble for him: and make no demands. She was born to be a picker up of other people’s crumbs. Well, he would scatter a few. She needed the nourishment: and the more wealth that flowed from him, the more there would be to flow. Richard knew that in sexual matters the more you give out, the more there is to give.

  Nature

  Inside Liffey, a cystic space appeared in the morula of her pregnancy, which now could be termed a blastocyst. It grew sprout-like projections, termed choriomic villi. It drifted down towards the cavity of the uterus. So each one of us began: Nature sets us in motion, Nature propels us. It is as well to acknowledge it.

  And by Nature we mean not God, nor anything which has intent, but the chance summation of evolutionary events which, over aeons, have made us what we are: and starfish what they are, and turtles what they are: and pumpkins too, and will make our children, and our children’s children what they will be, and an infinitesimal improvement—so long, that is, as natural selection can keep pace with a changing environment—on what we are. Looking back, we think we perceive a purpose. But the perspective is faulty.

  We no longer see Nature as blind, although she is. Her very name is imbued with a sense of purpose, as the name of God used to be. God means us. God wills us. God wants for us. We cannot turn words back: they mean what we want them to mean; and we are weak; if we cannot in all conscience speak of God we must speak of Nature. Wide-eyed, clear-eyed, purposeful Nature. Too late to abandon her. Let us seize the word, seize the day; lay the N on its side and call our blind mistress Nature.

  On Thursday night the calm of the Nash household was disturbed. Ray and Bella had a row. Both thought they behaved as rational people do when provoked beyond endurance, and both were in error. Ray and Bella acted as people act when their metabolisms are disturbed, as Nature works its terrible, its integrating changes in the body, and the messages received from the outside world are both distorted and distorting.

  Bella wept. Ray shouted. Ray said he was in love with Karen because she was sixteen, had a mass of red hair and a tiny mouth.

  ‘It isn’t love,’ cried Bella. ‘It’s lust.’

  ‘It’s love, Bella, love,’ he shouted, and the volume of his voice made African objets d’art, lean mahogany phallic things, tremble on the pine bookcase.

  ‘But she’s a fool. How can you love something that’s less than you.’

  ‘Perfectly well,’ he shouted.

  ‘What do you mean by love?’ she yelled.

  ‘What any teenager means.’

  ‘You’re not a teenager. You’re a poor impotent old man.’

  ‘And you’re a jealous old cow.’

  She snatched up a sharp fruit knife and advanced upon him and he was frightened and fled, and in the bedroom Helga, reading Tina and Tony their bednight story, raised her voice and tried to protect her charges from the noise of adult life.

  Bella, having taken up her knife and wielded it, felt better. She was indeed jealous. Nature had rendered her jealous, thus giving her children (or so Nature thought, living as she does so much in the past) a better chance of survival. Even as Bella was ashamed of the emotion, so did acting upon it fulfil and satisfy her—as to act upon all the major impulses which Nature dictates—whether they be aggressive, defensive or procreative—fulfils and satisfies.

  If it feels right, it is right, according to Nature, but not, alas, to man. At the same time as feeling better, Bella felt ashamed, and upset, and confused.

  The voice Bella gave to confusion, grief and resentment was the more violent inasmuch as her unused ova—laid down, waiting for delivery, when she herself was still in the womb—were beginning to atrophy with age, and her cyclic production of oestrogen and progesterone was at a critically low level. She was suffering, as the months went by, from an increase in premenstrual tension, and from mild indigestion. She was forty-four—an early age for such symptoms of menopause, the average being forty-eight point five—but such things happen. Though by and large, those whose periods begin early, continue late. In sexual matters, to those that hath, is given more.

  The voice that Ray gave to anger and despair was the more violent, inasmuch as his supply of testosterone was uncomfortably diminishing, leaving him prone to sulks, moods, depressions and outbursts of rage. Karen, being young, even tempered, clear of complexion and of spirit, seemed the more enchanting. He felt that youth was infectious, and it was true enough that by stimulating his sexual appetite, Karen might stimulate his supply of testosterone, and make him better tempered, for a while. In the meantime, his tongue was acid and his moods were black.

  Presently their parents stopped shouting, crying and stamping, and Tina and Tony slept. Next morning Helga swept and cleaned with a set face.

  ‘I only stay because of the children,’ she said. It was her theme song. She ironed Richard’s shirts, beautifully.

  ‘How can I thank you?’ he asked.

  From her look, he could tell. He wondered why he had suddenly become so desirable to the opposite sex, and concluded it was because he had become available.

  Richard, observing Helga, suspected that there was perhaps a fourth kind of woman, and a fourth kind of sex.

  Helga, and sex-as-payment. Helga would iron his shirts, and then demand to be brought to orgasm. She would work as busily and concentratedly on that as she did his shirts. As the iron was to the shirt, so would his penis be to her satisfaction.

  He did not wish to put his theory to the test. Later, perhaps. Bella was upset enough as it was.

  ‘You know,’ said Bella on Friday night, after he had sent Liffey a telegram to say he’d been delayed at a meeting, and would return on Saturday morning. ‘You’re terribly angry with Liffey.’

  ‘Why should I be angry with Liffey?’

  ‘Because she won’t let you be a man. She wants you to be a little boy, so you can romp hand in hand with her through green fields, for ever.’

  ‘I’m not angry with Liffey,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes you are. That’s why you’re doing these terrible primitive things to me. I’m her stand-in.’

  Richard wished Bella would leave the inside of his head alone. There were a thousand motives which could be attributed to every act, but none of them made the act any different.

  He had been angry with Liffey. Now, he was not. Or so he believed.

  Inside Liffey (7)

  By Saturday morning the fine hairs of the blastocyst inside Liffey had digested and eroded enough of the uterus wall to enable it to burrow snugly into the endometrium and there open up another maternal blood vessel, the better to obtain the oxygen and nutrients it increasingly required.

  This implantation, alas for Liffey and her doctors, occurred in an unusual part of her uterus—in the lower uterine segment. Too far down, in fact, for safety or comfort. Perhaps this was a mere matter of chance—perhaps, who’s to say, it was a matter of Mabs’ ill-wishing? If prayers can make plants flourish, and curses wilt them, and all living matter is the same substance and thought has a reality, and wishing can influence the fall of a dice, and kinetic energy is a provable thing, and poltergeists can make the plates on the dresser rattle, why then Mabs can curse Liffey’s baby, and Liffey protect it, as bad and good fairies at the christening.

  Liffey looked up at the sky and thought it was beautiful, and the blastocyst clung where it could, not quite right but not quite unright, and growth continued and the so-far undifferentiated cells began to take up their specialist parts, some forming amniotic fluid, some placental fluid, and some becoming the foetus itself. The degree of specialisation which these later cells would eventually achieve would be rivalled nowhere else in the Universe, enabling their owner to read, and write, and reason in a way entirely surplus to its survival.

  Nature intends us to survive only long enough to procreate. We have other ideas. Ask any woman past the menopause, withering like a leaf on a tree, and fighting the decline with intelligence, and oestrogen. Ask any man, reading Playboy, whipping up desire. These extras, too, Nature gave us. Why? Are we to assume Divine Intent, and fall on our knees, set the S the right way up, go back to Nature, and retreat to God? Never!

  Liffey’s child was to be male. Liffey contributed her share of twenty-two chromosomes plus the X chromosome which was all she could, being female, hand over. Richard handed over twenty-two chromosomes, plus as it happened, a Y sex chromosome. Forty-four plus an XY makes a male. Had Richard handed over an X sex chromosome—and there was a roughly fifty per cent chance that he would do so—the forty-four plus an XX would have made a female. The sex of the child was nothing to do with Liffey—who left to herself could only have achieved a girl—but was determined by Richard.

  The ratio of male to female babies conceived is some 113 to 100 but by the time of delivery has dropped to 106 to 100, since the male embryo is marginally the more likely to perish. So Liffey’s baby, being male, and placed too low in the womb for maximum safety, already had a few extra odds working against its survival. Neverthless, it had survived a few million obstacles to get this far, and if there is such a thing as a life-force, a determination in the individual of a species, as distinct to the group, not to give up, not to perish, not to be wasted, why then Liffey’s baby had that determination.

  Marvels

  On Sunday morning Tucker and two of his children,

  Audrey and Eddie, came round to visit.