not because you really are. Are you sure you wouldn’t like coffee?’
‘No,’ said Phyllis. Then she added, urgently, ‘Esther! Living here, alone, with no husband. No boyfriend. Surely you feel – at night –?’
‘No. I live by myself. Just me. Self-sufficient, wanting no one, no other mind, no other body. I live with the truth. I need no protection from it.’
‘Gerry and I,’ said Phyllis. ‘I am so miserable. We are chained together by our bed.’
‘That is your misfortune,’ said Esther, ‘and why you are so unhappy. Bed is a very difficult habit to break. Now let us continue with my story, because yours is very ordinary and I am not concerned with it. In the morning Alan kissed me goodbye – on the doorstep so the neighbours could see – and went to his office. He had had no breakfast. He was feeling desperate and hungover, but dieting seemed to him to be a rich and positive thing. Perhaps that was why, this particular morning, his secretary made such an impression on him, and he on his secretary.’
Susan and Brenda sat in the pub, conscious of their youth and beauty, which indeed shone like a beacon in a boozy, beery world, and Susan gave Brenda her more detailed account of a morning which Esther could only guess at.
‘The typing agency quite often send me to Norman, Zo-Hailey –’ said Susan, naming a large London advertising agency. ‘They always need temporary staff. Girls never stay long. They think it’s going to be glamorous and all they find is a lot of dull old research people plodding through statistics. Married ones, at that. And the pay’s bad, so they hand in their notice. And then again, if they do get to the livelier departments, it soon transpires that men in advertising agencies hardly count as men. What man worth his salt would spend his life sitting in an office selling other people’s goods, by proxy?’
‘Alan seems to have behaved like a man, from what you say.’
‘Alan was different. He was a creative person. Anyway they’re all quite good at pretending to be men. They know all the rules. Their bodies, even, work as if they were men, but on the whole they’re deceiving themselves and everyone else.’
‘Perhaps you and I are only pretending to be women. How could we tell?’
‘We are both flat-chested, it is true,’ said Susan, ‘and when I come to think of it, Alan had very pronounced nipples at the beginning of that fortnight. Almost what approached a bosom. It fascinated me. I had never encountered anything like it before. I began to wonder if I perhaps had lesbian tendencies.’
‘It sounds perfectly revolting.’
‘Not in the least. He has this thin face to counteract it. He was an important man at Zo’s. Everyone seemed to think I ought to be pleased to work for him but all I did was make rather more mistakes than usual. He never got irritated. He just used to sigh and raise his eyebrows at me as if I was a naughty child but he would forgive me. In the end I began to feel quite like a daughter to him. And when one’s father turns lascivious eyes upon one, that’s that, isn’t it? You get all stirred up inside. You begin to want to impress. You find yourself putting on make-up just to come to work. And he’d written this novel, and his agent rang up and raved about it, and I listened on the extension when I was getting the coffee in the outer office. I find there is something very erotic about literary men, don’t you?’
‘I really don’t know. I haven’t been in London long enough. Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be in love with William Macklesfield.’ William Macklesfield was the middle-aged poet who had been seen occasionally on the television, and with whom, on and off, Susan had been sleeping for years.
‘William and I are very close. We are best friends. We have a wonderful platonic relationship with sex lying, as it were, on top of it. But we are not in love. Not the kind of lightning love which suddenly flashes out of a clear sky and tumbles you on your back.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Brenda. ‘Things like that never happen to me.’
‘It’s your pillar-like legs,’ said Susan. ‘And your matriarchal destiny. Your time will come when you are sixty, surrounded by your grandchildren and bullying your sons. When I am an ageing drunken lush only fit for a mental home, then I daresay you will be glad that you are you and I am I. In the meantime I can fairly say that of the two of us, I have the more style.’
‘Thank you very much, I’m sure.’
‘Unless of course, I compromise, and marry. I might become a poet’s wife. But poets I find, are often rather dull. They are in the habit of expressing themselves through the written word, and not through their bodies. William is awful in bed.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Brenda. ‘I thought it was the way a girl responded, not what the man did, that mattered. I never have any trouble. I always thought that girls saying men were bad in bed was just a way of making them feel nervous.’
‘Oh you,’ said Susan, ‘you should write a column in a woman’s magazine. I can see it happening yet.’
‘You were talking,’ said Brenda, devastated, ‘about this lightning stroke which flung you back upon your bed with your knees apart.’
‘I didn’t say with my knees apart. Nor did I mention bed.’
‘I thought it was what you meant.’
‘You are not at all open to forces, are you?’ said Susan. ‘You are an artifact. You are not swayed by passions like me. Anyway, there I was, working in this great throbbing organisation, beginning to fancy my boss, and his wife would ring up every day and ask what he wanted for dinner. He would take her so seriously, I couldn’t understand it. He would think and ponder, and sometimes he would ring her back later to give her a considered answer. It bespoke such intimacy. It drove me mad. She had such a soft, possessive voice. I wondered why he took so little notice of me. And why was there no one I could ring up, in the perfect security of knowing they would be home for dinner, come what may, and obliged to eat what I provided? William kept going back home to his wife for dinner and I found this most irritating. And why didn’t Alan’s wife ring up and ask him what did he want to do in bed that night, or something? Why was it always dinner? Poor man, I thought. Poor blind man. Here was I, young, clever and creative, with depths to plumb, able to take a constructive interest in what really interested him, sitting docile and waiting at his elbow, typing and all he’d do was let his eyes stray to my legs and back again. He was too busy telling his wife what he wanted for dinner. It was an insult to me. I wanted to ask about his novel but he seemed to want to keep it secret. He was so clever. Not just with words, but he loved painting, too. He used to be a painter before his wife got hold of him and destroyed him with boredom and responsibilities. Domesticity had him trapped. Can you imagine, he even kept family photographs on his desk!’
‘A commercial artist, do you mean?’
‘No, I do not. He went to art school. He married her very young, on impulse, and had to give up all thought of being a proper painter. She drove him into advertising, and he ended up a kind of co-ordinator of words and pictures. A man with a great deal of power over people of no consequence whatsoever, and a long title on the plate on his door. How bitter! He should never have let her do it to him. Brenda, do stop making eyes at that Siamese gentleman.’
‘He is not Siamese, I don’t think. But he is very handsome.’
‘I wonder why he seems to prefer you to me. Perhaps it’s his nationality. Do you want me to go on with this story?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then try and concentrate. The first time he actually laid hands on me was the day he started his diet, the day he heard from his agent.’
On the first morning of the diet pigeons chose to strut about the windowsill and embarrass Alan with their intimacies. There was a red carpet on the office floor; red curtains at the window. The standard lamp was grey, and so was the upholstery of the armchairs. His desk was large, sleek,