Bobbo’s mother Brenda did not envy Ruth’s being married to Bobbo. Brenda did not love Bobbo and never had. She quite liked Bobbo, and quite liked her husband; but even there, feelings were elusive.

  The smell of night-scented stock filled the air.

  ‘How nicely she does everything,’ said Bobbo’s mother to her husband, Angus. ‘How lucky Bobbo is!’ Angus stood on the path, waiting for his wife’s playfulness to abate, and for her to stop looking in windows. Brenda wore beige silk and gold bracelets and liked to feel timeless. Angus wore a brownish check suit and a yellow ochre shirt and a blue spotted tie. No matter how rich or poor they happened to be, Brenda always looked a little too elegant, and Angus just a little absurd. Brenda had a little tip-tilted nose and too-wide eyes, and Angus a great fleshy nose and narrow eyes.

  Bobbo wore grey suits and white shirts and pale ties and was careful always to look serious and neutral, biding his time, concealing his power. His nose was straight and strong and his eyes just right.

  Brenda looked into the family room and saw the two children watching television. The remains of an early supper stood on the table. They were washed, combed and ready for bed: they seemed happy, although graceless. But then with Ruth for a mother what could you expect?

  ‘She’s such a good mother,’ whispered Brenda to Angus, beckoning him closer to admire. ‘You have to respect her.’

  Brenda shook her heels free of clinging earth and went round to the laundry room where Bobbo was at that moment removing an ironed, folded shirt from a neat pile. He wore only vest and pants, but hadn’t Brenda bathed him when he’d been a little boy? Can a mother be frightened of her son’s nakedness?

  Brenda did not notice the neat little bite marks on her son’s upper arm: or perhaps she did, and assumed they were insect bites. They certainly could not have been made by Ruth’s teeth, which were broad, heavy and irregular.

  ‘She’s such a good wife,’ said Bobbo’s mother, moved almost to tears. ‘Look at that ironing!’ Bobbo’s mother never ironed if she could help it. In the good times indeed, she and Angus liked to live in hotels, simply because there’d be a valet service. ‘And what a good husband Bobbo has turned out to be!’ If she thought her son was narcissistic, staring so long in the mirror, she kept her thoughts to herself.

  But Bobbo looked in the mirror at his clear, elegant eyes, his intelligent brow and his slightly bruised mouth, and hardly saw himself at all: he saw the man whom Mary Fisher loved.

  Bobbo, as he dressed, was working out in his head a monetary scale for love-making. He felt happier when he could put a fiscal value to things. He was not mean: he was happy enough to spend money. He merely felt that life and money were the same thing. His father had implied it often enough.

  ‘Time is money,’ Angus would say, hurrying his son off to school, out of the house. ‘Life is time, and time is money.’ Sometimes Bobbo would have to walk, because there was no money for the bus. Sometimes he’d go by chauffeur and Rolls-Royce. Angus had made two millions and lost three during the course of Bobbo’s childhood. A life full of ups and downs for a growing boy! ‘In the time you take to do that,’ he’d say to the toddler, Bobbo, trying to lace his tiny shoes with untrained fingers, ‘I could make a thousand pounds.’

  A monetary scale for love-making, Bobbo thought, would have to set the sum of earning-capacity-wasted plus energy- consumed against the balance of pleasure-gained plus renewed-creativity. A cabinet minister’s coitus, however feeble, could work out at some $200, a housewife’s entr’acte, however energetic, a mere $25. An act of love with Mary Fisher, a high earner and energetic with it, would be worth $500. An act of love with his wife would be graded at $75, but of course occurred more often so unfortunately would yield a diminishing return. The more often sex with a particular person happened, Bobbo believed, the less it was worth.

  Bobbo’s mother extracted her heels once more from the well-tended earth of the new lawn, beckoned her husband, and with him made her way to the front of the house. She looked into the living room and there, behold, was Ruth’s mountainous back, bent over the record player, arranging a pleasant selection of pre-dinner and post-dinner music.

  Ruth straightened up, knocking her head against the oak beam over the fireplace. The house had been designed for altogether smaller occupants.

  As Ruth’s mother-in-law prepared to flatten her nose against the windowpane and be playful, Ruth turned. Even through the distorting glass it was clear that she had been crying. Her face was puffy and her eyes swollen. ‘The suburban blues!’ murmured Brenda to Angus. ‘It affects even the happiest!’ As they watched Ruth clawed wild hands to heaven, somewhere above the sea-green ceiling, as if entreating the descent of some dreadful god, some necessary destiny.

  ‘I think she’s a little more upset than usual,’ said Bobbo’s mother, unwillingly. ‘I hope Bobbo is being good to her,’ and she and Bobbo’s father went to sit on the low bench outside the house and stare into the deepening evening that fell over Nightbird Drive, and talk in a desultory way about their own and other people’s lives.

  ‘We’ll give her time to calm down,’ said Bobbo’s mother. ‘Dinner parties, even when they’re only family, can be quite a strain!’

  Bobbo’s mother had a calm word and a quiet and pleasant thought for every occasion. No one could understand whence Bobbo’s questing, striving, complaining nature came. Bobbo’s father shared his wife’s capacity for positive thinking: sixty-six and two-thirds of the time such thinking was justified. Things often turn out for the best, if you expect they will: then all you have to do is leave well alone. But Bobbo, unlike his parents, did not like leaving things to chance. Bobbo’s ambition was a one hundred per cent success rate in life.

  Bobbo finished dressing. He took his laundered, folded clothes for granted. When he stayed with Mary Fisher the manservant, Garcia, saw to these things; that Bobbo took for granted too.

  ‘What is Mary Fisher having for supper?’ wondered Bobbo, as his wife had earlier, and longed to be one of the delicate morsels his mistress put into her mouth. Ah, to be absorbed, incorporated! A slice of smoked salmon, a segment of orange, a drop of champagne!

  These were the delicacies that Mary Fisher loved to eat, working out the fantasies of others. Fastidious, impossible Mary Fisher! ‘A little smoked salmon,’ she’d say, ‘really costs no more than a large quantity of tinned tuna. And it tastes so much nicer.’

  It was half a lie and half the truth; it was like so much that Mary Fisher said, and wrote.

  Bobbo went into the living room and discovered his large wife clawing at empty air.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I bumped my head,’ she said, and he accepted the lie because his parents would be there any minute, and he had, besides, very little interest any more in what his wife said or did, or why she cried. He forgot Ruth, and wondered, as these days he often did, what exactly was the nature of the relationship between Mary Fisher and Garcia, her manservant. Garcia sliced the smoked salmon, uncorked the champagne and polished the wide glass panes of the lower floors inside and out. Other household tasks, more menial, he delegated to the maids. Garcia was paid $300 per week, which was twice what live-in menservants were customarily paid by other of Bobbo’s clients. Garcia carried little pots of coffee in to his mistress and put them on the great glass table on its pale steel pier, upon which Mary Fisher wrote her novels, on thin, thin paper with clear, red ink. Her writing was spidery and tiny. Garcia was tall and fleshy and dark and young, and his fingers were long and sometimes Bobbo wondered where they strayed. Garcia was twenty-five and just the look on him sent Bobbo’s mind at once to sexual speculation.

  ‘But Bobbo,’ Mary Fisher would say, ‘surely you aren’t jealous! Garcia’s young enough to be my son.’

  ‘Oedipus was pretty young too,’ was Bobbo’s reply, making Mary Fisher laugh. How pretty her laugh was and how easily it came. Bobbo wanted no one to hear it but himself. Yet how could he possibly be with her all the time? Certainly there was no other way of keeping her to himself and ensuring her fidelity but by being there. Yet Bobbo had money to earn, work to do, children to father, and a wife, clumsy and weeping and boring though she might be, to husband. He had undertaken marriage: he would see it through. And since he suffered, so would Ruth.

  His wife seemed to him to be immeasurably large, and to have grown larger since he told her of his love for Mary Fisher. He asked her if she was putting on weight, and she said no, and stood on the scales to prove it. Fourteen stone, three pounds. A pound or so less, even, than usual! It could only be in his mind, then, that she loomed larger.

  Bobbo put on a record. He thought it might drown the sound of his wife’s crying. He chose Vivaldi to soothe himself and her. The Four Seasons. He wished she would not weep. What did she expect of him? He had never claimed to love her. Or had he? He could hardly remember.

  Ruth left the room. He heard the click of the oven opening: he heard a little cry, a crash. She had burned her fingers. The vol-au-vents were on the floor—he knew it. And so small a distance to carry them—from the oven to the table!

  Bobbo turned up the volume of the music and went in to find chicken and cream sauce and pastry on the lino-tiled floor and the dog and the cat already scavenging. He kicked the animals into the garden and pushed Ruth into a chair and told her not to upset the children, who were upset enough by her behaviour as it was, and scraped everything up methodically and as hygienically as possible, reconstituting if not individual pastry cases then at least a suggestion of a large, single, chicken-filled flan. It was in the interests of hygiene that Bobbo left a thin film of food upon the floor. He estimated its value at some $2.

  He required the cat and the dog to come and lick up the film, but both were now sulking outside and would not come back in. Instead they sat upon the wall, next to his parents, and like them waited for the domestic climate to change.

  ‘Do stop crying,’ pleaded Bobbo in the kitchen. ‘Why do you make such a fuss about everything? It’s only my parents coming to dinner. They don’t expect all this effort. They’d be perfectly happy with a simple meal.’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t. But I’m not crying because of that.’

  Then what?’

  ‘You know.’

  Ah, Mary Fisher. He did indeed know. He tried reason.

  ‘You didn’t expect me, when I married you, never to love anyone again?’

  ‘That is exactly what I expected. It is what everyone expects.’

  She had been cheated, and knew it.

  ‘But you’re not like everyone, Ruth.’

  ‘You mean I’m a freak.’

  ‘No,’ he said, cautiously and kindly. ‘I mean we are all individuals.’

  ‘But we’re married. That makes us one flesh.’

  ‘Our marriage was rather one of convenience, my dear. I think we both acknowledged that at the time.’

  ‘Convenient for you.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because you think in clichés and talk in clichés.’

  ‘I suppose Mary Fisher doesn’t?’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t. She is a creative artist.’

  Andy and Nicola, the children, appeared in the kitchen door: he little and light, she large and looming. The wrong way round. He seemed more girlish than she. Bobbo blamed Ruth for having got the children wrong. He felt their mother had done it on purpose. His heart bled for them. Children open up exquisite nerves and twang them daily, painfully. He wished they had never been born, even while he loved them. They stood between him and Mary Fisher and he had strange dreams in which they came to sorry ends.

  ‘Can I have a doughnut?’ asked Nicola. Her response to domestic crisis was to ask for food. She was very overweight. The expected answer, ‘No’, in its uttering, would set up a counter-irritant and thus save her parents from more distress. They would be so busy chiding her they would forget to chide each other, or so she believed; wrongly.

  ‘I have a splinter,’ said Andy. ‘Look, I’m limping!’

  He demonstrated, walking through the film of food, limping on into the living room, treading sauce into the carpet. It was autumn green, toning prettily and safely with avocado walls and sea-green ceiling. Bobbo reckoned the greasy footprints would add $30 to the cleaning bill. Come its annual overhaul, the carpet would now have to go for Special and not Regular cleaning.

  Outside, Angus and Brenda decided that Ruth would by now have recovered her composure. They left their wall and came up the garden path and rang the forest chimes of the front door. Pling-plong!

  ‘Please don’t embarrass me in front of my parents,’ begged Bobbo, and Ruth began to weep the harder: she uttered great gulping sobs and heaved her giant shoulders. Even her tears seemed bigger and more watery than other people’s. Mary Fisher, thought Bobbo, wept nice neat little tears, which had an altogether stronger surface tension than his wife’s and would surely be worth more on the open matrimonial market. If only there were such a thing, he would trade Ruth in at once.

  ‘Come in,’ he said to his parents at the front door. ‘Come in! How wonderful to see you both! Ruth has been peeling onions. She’s a little tearful, I’m afraid.’

  Ruth ran up to her room. When Mary Fisher ran, her footsteps were light and bright. Ruth’s weight swayed from one massive leg to another and shook the house each time it fell. Houses in Eden Grove were designed not just for littler people, but for altogether lighter ones.

  FIVE

  NOW. IN MARY FISHER’S novels, which sell by the hundred thousand in glittery pink and gold covers, little staunch heroines raise tearful eyes to handsome men, and by giving them up, gain them. Little women can look up to men. But women of six foot two have trouble doing so.

  And I tell you this; I am jealous! I am jealous of every little, pretty woman who ever lived and looked up since the world began. I am, in fact, quite eaten up by jealousy, and a fine, lively, hungry emotion it is. But why should I care? you ask. Can’t I just live in myself and forget that part of my life and be content? Don’t I have a home, and a husband to pay the bills, and children to look after? Isn’t that enough? ‘No!’ is the answer. I want, I crave, I die to be part of that other erotic world, of choice and desire and lust. It isn’t love I want; it is nothing so simple. What I want is to take everything and return nothing. What I want is power over the hearts and pockets of men. It is all the power we can have, down here in Eden Grove, in paradise, and even that is denied me.

  I stand in my bedroom, our bedroom, Bobbo’s and my bedroom, and compose my face the sooner to return to my matrimonial duties, to wifedom and motherhood, and my in-laws.

  To this end I recite the Litany of the Good Wife. It goes like this:

  I must pretend to be happy when I am not; for everyone’s sake.

  I must make no adverse comment on the manner of my existence; for everyone’s sake.

  I must be grateful for the roof over my head and the food on my table, and spend my days showing it, by cleaning and cooking and jumping up and down from my chair; for everyone’s sake.

  I must make my husband’s parents like me, and my parents like him; for everyone’s sake.

  I must consent to the principle that those who earn most outside the home deserve most inside the home; for everyone’s sake.

  I must build up my husband’s sexual confidence, I must not express any sexual interest in other men, in private or in public; I must ignore his way of diminishing me, by publicly praising women younger, prettier and more successful than me, and sleeping with them in private, if he can; for everyone’s sake.

  I must render him moral support in all his undertakings, however immoral they may be, for the marriage’s sake. I must pretend in all matters to be less than him.

  I must love him through wealth and poverty, through good times and bad, and not swerve in my loyalty to him, for everyone’s sake.

  But the Litany doesn’t work. It doesn’t soothe: it incenses. I swerve: my loyalty swerves! I look inside myself: I find hate, yes: hate for Mary Fisher, hot, strong and sweet: but not a scrap of love, not the faintest, wriggling tendril. I have fallen out of love with Bobbo! I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.

  SIX

  ‘BUT WHY WAS SHE crying?’ asked Brenda of Bobbo, as Ruth lumbered upstairs and the house shook. ‘Is it the time of the month?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Bobbo.

  ‘Such a nuisance for a woman,’ said Brenda, and Angus coughed a little, embarrassed at the turn the conversation was taking.

  Presently Ruth came down, smiling, and served the soup.

  Twelve years now since Bobbo first met Ruth. She was one of the girls working in Angus’s typing pool. Angus was in the stationery business, working up to his second million, which the introduction of Value Added Tax was later to whittle away to nothing. Angus and Brenda were for once living in a house, not an hotel, which Bobbo appreciated, although he himself was away at his Further Studies. Accountancy exams go on for many years, keeping the son (it is usually a son) unusually dependent upon the father.

  Ruth was a helpful, willing girl, able to concentrate and not for ever staring at her reflection in mirrors. If anything, Ruth avoided mirrors. She lived away from home, although still in her teens. Her bedroom had been needed to accommodate her step-father’s model train set. She and the train could not safely share a room, because of her clumsiness and the delicacy and sensitivity of the equipment. One of them had to go, and Ruth was the easier to move. It can take months to adjust train tracks properly and permanently: a young woman can settle anywhere.

  So Ruth had taken up residence in a hostel mostly inhabited by shop girls; a particularly light and fine breed of young woman. The belts that cinched their tiny waists would scarcely encompass one of Ruth’s thighs.

  The leaving of the childhood home had been unemotional: it was obvious to everyone, including Ruth, that she had outgrown the place. She did not like to make a fuss. Her school had been a convent, run by nuns of the more superstitious, less intellectual kind; it concentrated on teaching the female and household graces, and examinations, apart from those in shorthand-typing, were not taken. The training encouraged stoicism, not selfish emotions, nor attention-seeking tears.