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Alice
Hartley’s Happiness
Philippa Gregory
Table of Contents
Professor Charles Hartley leaned back in his chair and watched his wife progress through the languid motions of the Dance of the Seven Veils. In the background, from the Hartleys’ tasteful black ash hi-fi system came the whine of an Eastern flute, like a dog shut on the wrong side of a door. Alice Hartley revolved slowly, her large black-ringed eyes expectantly on her husband, her broad feet treading the carpet. Charles Hartley stifled a yawn.
He was not aroused. Deep in the recesses of his baggy boxer shorts The Phallus – the proud symbol of the Professor’s innate superiority over half of the population of the world – lay quiescent, a dozing puppy. There was no urgency. There was no hurry. Mrs Alice Hartley wore several layers of diaphanous petticoats and gauzes beneath her flowing kaftan, and tonight, as a special treat for Charles’s forty-fourth birthday, she had added several scarves trimmed with beads and bells around her neck, waist, and wrists, a djellaba over her head, and a collegiate scarf tied purdah-wise across the lower part of her face.
She would be hours getting that lot off, Professor Hartley thought sourly, and settled himself deeper into his padded rocker-chair. Hours and hours, he thought gloomily and his imagination strayed – as it so often did – to little Miranda Bloomfeather who could step out of her t-shirt and tight blue jeans in fifteen seconds flat – and often, deliciously, did.
Professor Hartley was at that time in his life when a man demands of himself what is the meaning of life, asking: ‘For what was I born? And is this all there is? And what of the great quests which have motivated men through the ages? Where am I going? And what is the Nature of Individualism? Or, more simply: Who am I?’
Like all men who courageously confront great questions of identity and truth, Professor Hartley came to one conclusion. Unerringly, untiringly he struggled through his boredom and his despair until he found the source of his discontent, the spring of his angst, his own private darkness. It was all the fault of his wife.
Alice, he sincerely felt, was part of his past. Part of his struggling, underfunded, undergraduate past. While Miranda, with her pert little bum and skimpy clothes, was undoubtedly The Future. Certainly the disturbing and erotic dreams which awoke him nightly with The Phallus making a little tent of the continental quilt were deeply symbolic, meaning – he was sure – that it was time for a shift of perspective. Time for growth, time for rediscovery, time to change. In other words (in the crude simplicities of layperson’s speech): Professor Hartley was tired of Alice; and wanted Miranda instead.
He planned to explore with Alice, in a free and open adult discussion, exactly where their relationship was failing, and what were his underlying needs. Indeed, he had mentally reserved their next counselling session for just such a revelation. He planned casually to steer the session towards a discussion about growth and change and then lure Alice into expressing a readiness to try a new form of marriage – a more open relationship. Then he planned to confront her with her just-stated wish to leave him; and nobly offer her a divorce. By the time Alice had sorted out what he was doing and what were his intentions Professor Hartley reckoned to have packed her things and changed the locks.
Not that he ever acknowledged – even in his quietest moments – the simple truth that he was deserting Alice. Professor Hartley was educated and nourished in a world which, on the whole, took the male viewpoint as the norm and the female view (when it is offered which, God knows, is rare enough) as aberrant. His boredom with Alice and his lust for Miranda he perceived fondly, as the Spirit of the Age, and therefore inevitable. He told himself that Alice too was ready for change. She was ready to go away, he fondly reassured himself. She was always trailing off for study weekends with the Well Women’s Group, with the Open University, for her training as a New Age counsellor, for her vegan retreats.
Professor Charles Hartley nodded judiciously. At the deep emotional levels where, as a Professor of Psychology, he alone was expert, he knew that Alice had already abandoned him. What he was doing was characteristic male behaviour: hunting down the truth about their lives. He was exhibiting the male courage which makes men leaders, explorers, kings. He was the heir to huntsmen, cavemen, and particularly entrepreneurial monkeys. He had the courage to confront this issue instead of concealing it – as Alice wished to conceal it – behind the now empty rituals of living together.
Alice used the typical, cowardly, female tactic of behaving as if their relationship was thriving, behaving as if she still cared for him, devoting her life to him as usual. Professor Hartley recognized her day-to-day care of him, her support of his work, and her unfailing, indeed excessive readiness to make love as the despicable ploy it was. It was Alice’s innate female cowardice that made her love him and support him and protect him from the outside world. It was her failure of vision. It would be healthy for them both to break this routine and bourgeois life. Charles stretched longingly and The Phallus lifted its head like a dog when his master calls ‘walkies!’
When Alice was gone…Miranda could move in.
Charles thanked God (a Being remarkably resembling Charles Hartley in appearance, logic, and priorities) that he was not a promiscuous man. Charles knew from his studies in sociology and anthropology that he was a serial monogamist. Charles thought that men who had sexual relations with many women lacked control and self-discipline. He knew that the natural way, the proper way, especially for a natural leader of other men, is one woman at a time – the duration of that time depending of course on the desirability of the woman and the availability of alternatives. This, Charles knew, is not promiscuity. It is not even sexual liberalism. It is Natural Selection, and right now Natural Selection and the whole Darwinian structure of the Laws of Evolution were supporting Charles’s decision to dump Alice and replace her with Miranda.
He smiled at the thought,