‘Don’t let the soup get cold, Ruth,’ said Bobbo, as if this was her usual habit

  ‘Hairs!’ was all Ruth said.

  ‘It’s a nice clean dog,’ said Brenda. ‘We don’t mind, do we, Angus?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Angus, who did. As a child Bobbo had always wanted a dog, and Angus had always prevented him from having one.

  ‘Can’t you even keep the dog out of the soup?’ asked Bobbo. It was the wrong thing to say, and he knew it as soon as it was said. He did try not to say ‘can’t you even’ to Ruth, but it did slip out whenever he was feeling at odds with her, which of late had been more and more.

  Tears appeared in Ruth’s eyes. She picked up the soup tureen. ‘I’ll sieve it,’ she said.

  ‘What a good idea!’ said Brenda. ‘Then no harm’s done.’

  ‘Bring the soup back at once,’ cried Bobbo. ‘Don’t be so silly, Ruth. It isn’t a disaster. It’s three dog hairs. Just pick them out.’

  ‘But they might be the guinea pig’s,’ said Ruth. ‘He was running along the dresser shelf.’ She liked the guinea pig least of all the children’s pets. Its shoulders were too hunched and its eyes too deep. It reminded her of herself.

  ‘You’re tired,’ said Bobbo. ‘You must be tired, or you wouldn’t talk such nonsense. Sit down.’

  ‘Let her sieve the soup, dear,’ said Brenda, ‘if it’s what she wants.’

  Ruth got as far as the doorway. Then she turned back.

  ‘He doesn’t care whether I’m tired or not,’ Ruth said. ‘He doesn’t think of me any more. He only ever thinks about Mary Fisher; you know, the writer. She’s his mistress.’

  Bobbo was shocked by this indiscretion, this disloyalty, but also gratified. Ruth was not to be trusted. He’d always known it.

  ‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘it’s very unfair to my parents to involve them in our family problems. It’s nothing to do with them. Have pity, will you, for once, on the helpless bystanders.’

  ‘But it is something to do with me,’ said Brenda. ‘Your father never behaved like that; I don’t know where you get it from.’

  ‘Kindly respect my privacy, mother,’ said Bobbo. ‘It’s the least you can do after the childhood I led.’

  ‘And what was the matter with your childhood?’ demanded Brenda, turning quite pink.

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ said Angus. ‘I think you should apologise to her for that. But fair’s fair, Brenda, I think you should leave the young people to sort things out in their own way.’

  ‘Father,’ said Bobbo, ‘it was just that kind of attitude in you that gave me one of the most appalling childhoods any child could have.’

  Mary Fisher had lately been explaining the roots of his unhappiness to him.

  ‘I never made your mother unhappy,’ said Angus. ‘Say what you like about me, but I never deliberately did harm to any woman.’

  ‘Then all I can say is,’ said Brenda, ‘you did it by accident.’

  ‘Women are always imagining things,’ said Angus.

  ‘Especially Ruth,’ said Bobbo. ‘Mary Fisher is one of my best clients. I’m very lucky to have her on my books. I certainly value her both as a creative person — she’s remarkably talented — and I like to think as a friend, but I’m afraid our Ruth has a suspicious mind!’

  Ruth looked from one parent-in-law to the other and then at her husband and dropped the tureen of mushroom soup, which flowed over the metal rim where the tiles stopped and the carpet began, and the children and the animals returned, summonsed by the sound of new disaster. Ruth thought that Harness was laughing.

  ‘Perhaps Ruth ought to get out and get a job,’ said Angus, on his knees on the floor, spooning soup back into a bowl, but less fast than the carpet absorbed it, so that he had to press the spoon hard into the pile to extract the precious grey liquid. ‘Keep herself busy: less prone to imagining things.’

  ‘There are no jobs,’ Ruth pointed out.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Angus. ‘Anyone who really wants one can get one.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Brenda. ‘What with inflation, recession and so on … You don’t mean us to eat that, do you, Angus?’

  ‘Waste not, want not,’ said Angus.

  Bobbo wished to be far, far away, with Mary Fisher, to hear her bubbly laugh, hold her pale hand and put her little fingers one by one into his mouth until her breathing quickened and she wet her own lips with her pink, pink tongue.

  Nicola kicked the cat, whose name was Mercy, out of the way, and the cat went straight to the grate and squatted, crapping its revenge, and Brenda wailed and pointed at Mercy, and Harness became over-excited and leapt up against Andy in semi-sexual assault, and Ruth just stood there, a giantess, and did nothing, and Bobbo lost his temper.

  ‘See how I have to live!’ he shouted. ‘It’s always like this. My wife creates havoc and destruction all round: she destroys everyone’s happiness!’

  ‘Why won’t you love me?’ wailed Ruth.

  ‘How can one love,’ shouted Bobbo, ‘what is essentially unlovable?’

  ‘You’re both upset,’ said Angus, giving up the soup to the carpet. ‘You’ve been working too hard.’

  ‘It’s a lot for a woman,’ said Brenda. ‘Two growing children! And you were never easy, even as a boy, Bobbo.’

  ‘I was perfectly easy,’ yelled Bobbo. ‘You just resented every moment you spent on me.’

  ‘Come along, Brenda,’ said Angus. ‘Least said soonest mended. We’ll eat out.’

  ‘A good idea,’ shouted Bobbo, ‘since my wife has already thrown your main course on the floor.’

  ‘Temper, temper,’ said Brenda. ‘In Los Angeles they build houses without kitchens, because nobody bothers to cook. And quite right too.’

  ‘But I spent all day doing this,’ sobbed Ruth. ‘And now no one’s going to eat it.’

  ‘Because it’s uneatable!’ shouted Bobbo. ‘Why am I always surrounded by women who can’t cook?’

  ‘I’ll ring you in the morning, pet,’ said Brenda to Ruth. ‘You have a nice bath and get a good night’s sleep. You’ll feel better then.’

  ‘I shall never forgive you for being so rude to my mother,’ said Bobbo to Ruth, coldly, and loud enough for his mother to hear.

  ‘Don’t you go putting the blame on her,’ said Brenda, cunningly. ‘It was you who was rude, not her. I am a perfectly good cook, I just don’t care to do it.’

  ‘Marriage isn’t easy,’ remarked Angus, putting on his coat. ‘It’s like parenthood, something people have to work at. Of course, usually it’s left to one partner rather than the other.’

  ‘It certainly is!’ said Brenda meaningfully, drawing on her gloves. She was not focusing properly: she had forgotten to put anti-perspirant under her right arm, and her pretty tan blouse was beginning to show a single dark under-arm stain. She had a lop-sided look.

  ‘Now do you see what’s happening?’ Bobbo turned on Ruth. ‘You’ve even set my parents quarrelling! If you see happiness you have to destroy it. It’s the kind of woman you are.’

  Brenda and Angus left. They walked away down the path, side by side but not touching. Domestic strife is catching. Happy couples do well to avoid the company of the unhappy.

  Ruth went into the bathroom and locked the door. Andy and Nicola took the chocolate mousse from the fridge and shared it.

  ‘It would serve you right if I went to see Mary,’ said Bobbo to Ruth, through the keyhole. ‘You have worked terrible mischief here tonight! You have upset my parents, you have upset your children, and you have upset me. Even the animals were affected. I see you at last as you really are. You are a third-rate person. You are a bad mother, a worse wife and a dreadful cook. In fact I don’t think you are a woman at all. I think that what you are is a she devil!’

  It seemed to him, when he said this, that there was a change in the texture of the silence that came from the other side of the door; he thought perhaps he had shocked her into submission and apology: but though he knocked and banged she still did not come out.

  SEVEN

  SO. I SEE. I THOUGHT I was a good wife tried temporarily and understandably beyond endurance, but no. He says I am a she devil.

  I expect he is right. In fact, since he does so well in the world and I do so badly, I really must assume he is right. I am a she devil.

  But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she devil the mind clears at once. The spirits rise. There is no shame, no guilt, no dreary striving to be good. There is only, in the end, what you want. And I can take what I want. I am a she devil!

  But what do I want? That of course could be a difficulty. Waverings and hesitations on this particular point can last a whole life long — and for most people usually do. But not, surely, in the case of she devils. Doubt afflicts the good, not the bad.

  I want revenge.

  I want power.

  I want money.

  I want to be loved and not love in return.

  I want to give hate its head. I want hate to drive out love, and I want to follow hate where it leads: and then, when I have done what I want with it, and not a minute before, I will master it.

  I look at my face in the bathroom mirror. I want to see something different.

  I take off my clothes. I stand naked. I look. I want to be changed.

  Nothing is impossible, not for she devils.

  Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman, and there the she devil is.

  Excellent!

  Glitter-glitter. Are those my eyes? They’re so bright they light up the room.

  EIGHT

  AFTER ANGUS AND BRENDA had gone off into the gathering dusk, their mood of cosy jollity quite broken, and the children had gobbled the last of the chocolate mousse, and the cat Mercy had finished chewing away at the soup-soaked carpet, and Harness the dog had disgorged next door’s avocado mousse under the kitchen table, and Ruth was locked in the bathroom, changing her very nature, Bobbo packed his executive suitcase. It was of real red-brown leather with brass trimmings, and unnecessarily heavy.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Ruth, coming out of the bathroom.

  ‘I am leaving you and going to stay with Mary Fisher,’ said Bobbo, ‘until you learn to behave better. I cannot stand all these scenes and sulks about nothing at all.’

  ‘How long for?’ Ruth asked presently, but Bobbo did not bother to reply. ‘And why?’ she asked. ‘I mean really why?’ But she knew what the answer was. Because Mary Fisher was five foot four, self-supporting, childless, had no pets except a cockatoo or so, did not claw the air with desperate hands, and could be taken anywhere without shame. And that was even leaving out the power and mystery of the love that naughty little Mary Fisher inspired in Bobbo’s bosom.

  ‘What about me?’ asked Ruth, and the words sped out into the universe, to join a myriad other ‘what about me’s’ uttered by a myriad other women, abandoned that very day by their husbands. Women in Korea and Buenos Aires and Stockholm and Detroit and Dubai and Tashkent, but seldom in China, where it is a punishable offence. Sound waves do not die out. They travel for ever and for ever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

  ‘What about you?’ Bobbo said, to which there is never any answer. ‘I’ll send money back,’ Bobbo was kind enough to add, packing his shirts. They were ironed so well and folded so neatly he had no trouble in doing so. ‘You won’t really be able to tell the difference whether I’m here or not. You take little or no notice of me when I am here, and of the children none at all.’

  ‘The neighbours will be able to tell,’ Ruth said. ‘They’ll speak to me even less than they do now. They believe misfortune is catching.’

  ‘This is not misfortune, exactly,’ said Bobbo. ‘Merely the consequence of your actions. Anyway, I’ll be back soon, I expect.’

  She did not think so, for he took his big green canvas suitcase too; and the ties he wore for special occasions.

  Then he went out and Ruth was left alone, standing on the autumn-green carpets between avocado walls, and in the morning the sun rose and slanted through the picture windows and it was obvious that they needed cleaning, and that Ruth was not going to clean them.

  ‘Mum,’ said Nicola, ‘the windows are filthy.’

  ‘If you don’t like them,’ said Ruth, ‘you do them.’

  Nicola didn’t. Bobbo rang from the office at midday to say he had proposed to Mary Fisher and she had accepted him, so he would not be coming back. He thought Ruth ought to know, so she could make her own plans.

  ‘But —’ said Ruth. He rang off. The divorce laws had recently been liberalised so that both parties to the marriage did not have to give their consent to the putting asunder thereof. Just one would do.

  ‘Mum,’ said Andy, ‘where’s Dad?’

  ‘Gone away,’ said Ruth, and Andy made no comment. The house was in Bobbo’s name. Its purchase had been made possible only by virtue of Angus and Brenda’s assistance, after all. Ruth had come to the marriage with nothing. Except size, and strength, and those she still had.

  ‘Where’s dinner?’ Nicola asked presently, but there was none. So she spread peanut butter on to sliced bread, and handed it round. She used the bread knife to get the peanut butter out of the jar, and cut her finger, and threads of blood laced the finished slice. But no one remarked upon it.

  They ate silently.

  Nicola, Andy and Ruth consumed their food sitting in front of the television. So little groups eat, women and children, when the world falls apart.

  Presently Ruth muttered something.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Nicola.

  ‘Dumped,’ said Ruth. ‘That’s what happens to the plain and virtuous. They get dumped.’

  Nicola and Andy rolled their eyes and looked to heaven. They thought she was mad. Their father had said so often enough. ‘Your mother’s mad,’ he’d say.

  In the morning Nicola and Andy went to school.

  Some days later Bobbo telephoned to say that he would allow Ruth and the children to go on living in the house in the meanwhile, although the place was obviously too big for them. They’d be happier in something much smaller.

  ‘In the meanwhile till what?’ she asked, but he did not reply. He said he would pay her $52 a week until further notice, which was twenty per cent above the legal minimum. Thanks to the new legislation which gave second wives a fairer deal, he was required to support only his children. Able-bodied first wives were expected to stand on their own feet.

  ‘Ruth,’ said Bobbo, ‘you have very good, very solid feet. You’ll be okay.’

  ‘But it costs at least $165 a week to run the house,’ said Ruth.

  ‘That’s why it will have to be sold,’ said Bobbo. ‘But do bear in mind that when I’m not there costs will come right down. Women and children don’t consume nearly as much as men; statistics prove it. Besides, now the children are at school, in fact nearly grown up, it’s time you went back to work. It’s not good for a woman to moulder away at home.’

  ‘But the children will be ill; school holidays are half the year; and besides, there are no jobs.’

  ‘There is always work for those who want it,’ said Bobbo. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  He was telephoning from the High Tower. In a corner of the great room Mary Fisher bowed her pretty neck and wrote sweet words about the nature of love.

  ‘His fingers moved suddenly and she felt their tips trail provocatively across her skin to the trembling softness of her mouth,’ wrote Mary Fisher, and Bobbo put down the telephone and she put down her pen, and they kissed, and sealed their future together.

  NINE

  MARY FISHER LIVES IN the High Tower with my husband, Bobbo, and writes about the nature of love, and sees no reason why everyone should not be happy.

  Why should she think about us? We are powerless, and poor, and have no importance. We are not even included in everyone.

  I daresay Bobbo sometimes wakes in the night, and she asks what is the matter, and he says I am thinking about the children, and she says, better the way you did it, making a clean break, not seeing them, and he believes her, because Andy and Nicola are not the kind of children to tug anyone’s heart-strings, let alone someone whose hairy legs are entwined with Mary Fisher’s little silky ones.

  And if he ever says, ‘I wonder how Ruth’s getting on,’ she will stop his mouth with a morsel of smoked salmon, a sip of champagne, and say, ‘Ruth will make her own way in the world. After all, she has the children. Poor me, I have none! All I have is you, Bobbo.’

  My two children come and go, sucking sustenance, nuzzling away, but I have nothing to give them. How can I? She devils have dry dugs. It takes a little time to become wholly she devil. One feels positively exhausted at first, I can tell you. The roots of self-reproach and good behaviour tangle deep in the living flesh: you can’t ease them out gently; they have to be torn out, and they bring flesh with them.

  Sometimes in the night I scream so loud I wake the neighbours. Nothing ever wakes the children.

  In the end I sucked energy out of the earth. I went into the garden and turned the soil with a fork, and power moved into my toes and up my stubborn calves and rested in my she devil loins: an urge and an irritation. It said there must now be an end to waiting: the time for action had come.

  TEN

  CARVER LIVED IN A HUT DOWN at the Eden Grove sports oval, where he was caretaker. He was over sixty, whiskery and wrinkled, but bright eyed. The skin of his arms was red and tough, but where it stretched over his belly it was white, thin and taut. The hut stood where the tennis courts and the running track met, and was where Carver was meant to keep mowers and rollers, and exercise his supervisory duties by day: but now he stayed there by night as well, lying on a foam rubber mattress under a dirty blanket, sometimes sleeping, more often not. He was an employee of the local authority — half a charity, half useful. He reported bee swarms and chased off children and courting couples.