Mischief Page 4

  ‘You can come home with me, Erica,’ says Alison. ‘God knows what Hugo will say. He hates matrimonial upsets. He says if you get in between, they both start hitting you.’

  Erica gurgles, a kind of mirthless laugh. From behind her, mysteriously, a child steps out. She is eight, stocky, plain and pale, dressed in boring Ladybird pyjamas.

  ‘Mummy?’

  Erica’s head whips up; the blood on Erica’s lip is wiped away by the back of Erica’s hand. Erica straightens her back. Erica smiles. Erica’s voice is completely normal, ladylike.

  ‘Hallo, darling. How did you get here?’

  ‘I followed you. Daddy was too angry.’

  ‘He’ll be better soon, Libby,’ says Erica brightly. ‘He always is.’

  ‘We’re not going home? Please don’t let’s go home. I don’t want to see Daddy.’

  ‘Bitch,’ mutters Maureen, ‘she’s even turned his own child against him. Poor bloody Derek. There’s nothing at all the matter with her. Look at her now.’

  For Erica is on her feet, smoothing Libby’s hair, murmuring, laughing.

  ‘Poor bloody Erica,’ observes Alison. It is the first time she has ever defied Maureen, let alone challenged her wisdom. And rising with as much dignity as her plump frame and flounced cotton will allow, Alison takes Erica and Libby home and installs them for the night in the spare room of the cosy house in Muswell Hill.

  Hugo isn’t any too pleased. ‘Your smart sick friends,’ he says. And, ‘I’d beat a woman like that to death myself, any day.’ And, ‘Dragging that poor child into it: it’s appalling.’ He’s nice to Libby, though, and rings up Derek to say she’s safe and sound, and looks after her while Alison takes Erica round to the doctor. The doctor sends Erica round to the hospital, and the hospital admits her for tests and treatment.

  ‘Why bother?’ enquires Hugo. ‘Everyone knows she’s mad.’

  In the evening, Derek comes all the way to Muswell Hill in his Ferrari to pick up Libby. He’s an attractive man: intelligent and perspicacious, fatherly and gentle. Just right, it occurs to Alison, for Maureen.

  ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ he says. ‘I love my wife dearly but she has her problems. There’s a dark side to her nature – you’ve no idea. A deep inner violence – which of course manifests itself in this kind of behaviour. She’s deeply psychophrenic. I’m so afraid for the child.’

  ‘The hospital did admit her,’ murmurs Alison. ‘And not to the psychiatric ward, but the surgical.’

  ‘That will be her hysterectomy scar again,’ says Derek. ‘Any slight tussle – she goes quite wild, and I have to restrain her for her own safety – and it opens up. It’s symptomatic of her inner sickness, I’m afraid. She even says herself it opens to let the build-up of wickedness out. What I can’t forgive is the way she drags poor little Libby into things. She’s turning the child against me. God knows what I’m going to do. Well, at least I can bury myself in work. I hear you’re an actor, Hugo.’

  Hugo offers Derek a drink, and Derek offers (well, more or less) Hugo a part in a new rock musical going on in the West End. Alison goes to visit Erica in hospital.

  ‘Erica has some liver damage, but it’s not irreversible: she’ll be feeling nauseous for a couple of months, that’s all. She’s lost a back tooth and she’s had a couple of stitches put in her vagina,’ says Alison to Maureen and Ruthie next day. The blouse order never got completed – re-orders now look dubious. But if staff haven’t the loyalty to work unpaid overtime any more, what else can be expected? The partners (nominal) can’t do everything.

  ‘Who said so?’ enquires Maureen, sceptically. ‘The hospital or Erica?’

  ‘Well,’ Alison is obliged to admit, ‘Erica.’

  ‘You are an innocent, Alison.’ Maureen sounds quite cross. ‘Erica can’t open her poor sick mouth without uttering a lie. It’s her hysterectomy scar opened up again, that’s all. No wonder. She’s a nymphomaniac: she doesn’t leave Derek alone month in, month out. She has the soul of a whore. Poor man. He’s so upset by it all. Who wouldn’t be?’

  Derek takes Maureen out to lunch. In the evening, Alison goes to visit Erica in hospital, but Erica has gone. Sister says, oh yes, her husband came to fetch her. They hadn’t wanted to let her go so soon but Mr Bisham seemed such a sensible, loving man, they thought he could look after his wife perfectly well, and it’s always nicer at home, isn’t it? Was it the Derek Bisham? Yes she’d thought so. Poor Mrs Bisham – what a dreadful world we live in, when a respectable married woman can’t even walk the streets without being brutally attacked, sexually assaulted by strangers.

  It’s 1974.

  Winter. A chill wind blowing, a colder one still to come. A three-day week imposed by an insane government. Strikes, power cuts, blackouts. Maureen, Ruthie and Alison work by candlelight. All three wear fun-furs – old stock, unsaleable. Poppy is staying with Ruthie’s mother, as she usually is these days. Poppy has been developing a squint, and the doctor says she has to wear glasses with one blanked-out lens for at least eighteen months. Ruthie, honestly, can’t bear to see her daughter thus. Ruthie’s mother, of a prosaic nature, a lady who buys her clothes at C&A Outsize, doesn’t seem to mind.

  ‘If oil prices go up,’ says Maureen gloomily, ‘what’s going to happen to the price of synthetics? What’s going to happen to Mauromania, come to that?’

  ‘Go up-market,’ says Alison, ‘the rich are always with us.’

  Maureen says nothing. Maureen is bad tempered, these days. She is having some kind of painful trouble with her teeth, which she seems less well able to cope with than she can the trouble with staff (overpaid), raw materials (unavailable), delivery dates (impossible), distribution (unchancy), costs (soaring), profits (falling), re-investment (non-existent). And the snow has ruined the penthouse roof and it has to be replaced, at the cost of many thousands. Men friends come and go: they seem to get younger and less feeling. Sometimes Maureen feels they treat her as a joke. They ask her about the sixties as if it were a different age: of Mauromania as if it were something as dead as the dodo – but it’s still surely a label which counts for something, brings in foreign currency, ought really to bring her some recognition. The Beatles got the MBE; why not Maureen of Mauromania? Throwaway clothes for throwaway people?

  ‘Ruthie,’ says Maureen. ‘You’re getting careless. You’ve put the pocket on upside-down, and it’s going for copying. That’s going to hold up the whole batch. Oh, what the hell. Let it go through.’

  ‘Do you ever hear anything of Erica Bisham?’ Ruthie asks Alison, more to annoy Maureen than because she wants to know. ‘Is she still wandering round in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Hugo does a lot of work for Derek, these days,’ says Alison carefully. ‘But he never mentions Erica.’

  ‘Poor Derek. What a fate. A wife with alopecia! I expect she’s bald as a coot by now. As good a revenge as any, I dare say.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with alopecia,’ says Alison. ‘Derek just tore out chunks of her hair, nightly.’ Alison’s own marriage isn’t going so well. Hugo’s got the lead in one of Derek’s long runs in the West End. Show business consumes his thoughts and ambitions. The ingenue lead is in love with Hugo and says so, on TV quiz games and in the Sunday supplements. She’s underage. Alison feels old, bored and boring.

  ‘These days I’d believe anything,’ says Ruthie. ‘She must provoke him dreadfully.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Derek, Alison,’ says Maureen. ‘Perhaps you just don’t like men. In which case you’re not much good in a fashion house. Ruthie, that’s another pocket upside-down.’

  ‘I feel sick,’ says Ruthie. Ruthie’s pregnant again. Ruthie’s husband was out of prison and with her for exactly two weeks; then he flew off to Istanbul to smuggle marijuana back into the country. He was caught. Now he languishes in a Turkish jail. ‘What’s to become of us?’

  ‘We must develop a sense of sisterhood,’ says Alison, ‘that’s all.’

 
Alison’s doorbell rings at three in the morning. It is election night, and Alison is watching the results on television. Hugo (presumably) is watching them somewhere else, with the ingenue lead – now above the age of consent, which spoils the pleasure somewhat. It is Erica and Libby. Erica’s nose is broken. Libby, at ten, is now in charge. Both are in their nightclothes. Alison pays off the taxi driver, who won’t take a tip. ‘What a world,’ he says.

  ‘I couldn’t think where else to come,’ says Libby. ‘Where he wouldn’t follow her. I wrote down this address last time I was here. I thought it might come in useful, sometime.’

  It is the end of Alison’s marriage, and the end of Alison’s job. Hugo, whose future career largely depends on Derek’s goodwill, says, you have Erica in the house or you have me. Alison says, I’ll have Erica. ‘Lesbian, dyke,’ says Hugo, bitterly. ‘Don’t think you’ll keep the children, you won’t.’

  Maureen says, ‘That was the first and last time Derek ever hit her. He told me so. She lurched towards him on purpose. She wanted her nose broken; idiot Alison, don’t you understand? Erica nags and provokes. She calls him dreadful, insulting, injuring things in public. She flays him with words. She says he’s impotent: an artistic failure. I’ve heard her. Everyone has. When finally he lashes out, she’s delighted. Her last husband beat hell out of her. She’s a born victim.’

  Alison takes Erica to a free solicitor, who – surprise, surprise – is efficient and who collects evidence and affidavits from doctors and hospitals all over London, has a restraining order issued against Derek, gets Libby and Erica back into the matrimonial home, and starts and completes divorce proceedings and gets handsome alimony. It all takes six months, at the end of which time Erica’s face has altogether lost its battered look.

  Alison turns up at work the morning after the alimony details are known and has the door shut in her face. Mauromania. The lettering is flaking. The door needs repainting.

  Hugo sells the house over Alison’s head. By this time she and the children are living in a two-room flat.

  Bad times.

  ‘You’re a very destructive person,’ says Maureen to Alison in the letter officially terminating her appointment. ‘Derek never did you any harm, and you’ve ruined his life, you’ve interfered in a marriage in a really wicked way. You’ve encouraged Derek’s wife to break up his perfectly good marriage, and turned Derek’s child against him, and not content with that you’ve crippled Derek financially. Erica would never have been so vindictive if she hadn’t had you egging her on. It was you who made her go to law, and once things get into lawyers’ hands they escalate, as who better than I should know? The law has nothing to do with natural justice, idiot Alison. Hugo is very concerned for you and thinks you should have mental treatment. As for me, I am really upset. I expected friendship and loyalty from you, Alison; I trained you and employed you, and saw you through good times and bad. I may say, too, that your notion of Mauromania becoming an exclusive fashion house, which I followed through for a time, was all but disastrous, and symptomatic of your general bad judgment. After all, this is the people’s age, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, right through to the new century. Derek is coming in with me in the new world Mauromania.’

  Mauromania, meretricious!

  A month or so later, Derek and Maureen are married. It’s a terrific wedding, somewhat marred by the death of Ruthie – killed, with her new baby, in the Paris air crash, on her way home from Istanbul, where she’d been trying to get her young husband released from prison. She’d failed. But then, if she’d succeeded, he’d have been killed too, and he was too young to die. Little Poppy was at the memorial service, in a sensible trouser-suit from C&A, bought for her by Gran, without her glasses, both enormous eyes apparently now functioning well. She didn’t remember Alison, who was standing next to her, crying softly. Soft beds of orange feathers, far away, another world.

  Alison wasn’t asked to the wedding, which in any case clashed with the mass funeral of the air-crash victims. Just as well. What would she have worn?

  It’s 1975.

  It’s summer, long and hot. Alison walks past Mauromania. Alison has remarried. She is happy. She didn’t know that such ordinary everyday kindness could exist and endure. Alison is wearing, like everyone else, jeans and a T-shirt. A new ordinariness, a common sense, a serio-cheerfulness infuses the times. Female breasts swing free, libertarian by day, erotic by night, costing nobody anything, or at most a little modesty. No profit there.

  Mauromania is derelict, boarded up. A barrow outside is piled with old stock, sale-priced. Coloured tights, fun-furs, feathers, slinky dresses. Passers-by pick over the stuff, occasionally buy, mostly look, and giggle, and mourn, and remember.

  Alison, watching, sees Maureen coming down the steps. Maureen is rather nastily dressed in a bright yellow silk shift. Maureen’s hair seems strange, bushy in parts, sparse in others. Maureen has abandoned her hat. Maureen bends over the barrow, and Alison can see the bald patches on her scalp.

  ‘Alopecia,’ says Alison, out loud. Maureen looks up. Maureen’s face seems somehow worn and battered, and old and haunted beyond its years. Maureen stares at Alison, recognising, and Maureen’s face takes on an expression of half-apology, half-entreaty. Maureen wants to speak.

  But Alison only smiles brightly and lightly and walks on.

  ‘I’m afraid poor Maureen has alopecia, on top of everything else,’ she says to anyone who happens to enquire after that sad, forgotten figure, who once had everything – except, perhaps, a sense of sisterhood.

  1976

  The Man with No Eyes

  Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona.

  In the evenings three of them sit down to play Monopoly. Edgar, Minette and Minnie. Mona, being only five, sleeps upstairs, alone, in the little back bedroom, where roses, growing up over the porch and along under the thatch, thrust dark companionable heads through the open lattice window. Edgar and Minnie, father and daughter, face each other across the table. Both, he in his prime, she in early adolescence, are already bronzed from the holiday sun, blue eyes bright and eager in lean faces, dull red hair bleached to brightness by the best summer the Kent coast has seen, they say, since 1951 – a merciful God allowing, it seems, the glimmer of His smile to shine again on poor humiliated England. Minette, Edgar’s wife, sits at the kitchen end of the table. The ladderback chair nearest the porch remains empty. Edgar says it is uncomfortable. Minnie keeps the bank. Minette doles out the property cards.

  Thus, every evening this holiday, they have arranged themselves around the table, and taken up their allotted tasks. They do it almost wordlessly, for Edgar does not care for babble. Who does? Besides, Mona might wake, think she was missing something, and insist on joining in.

  How like a happy family we are, thinks Minette, pleased, shaking the dice. Minette’s own face is pink and shiny from the sun and her nose is peeling. Edgar thinks hats on a beach are affected (an affront, as it were, to nature’s generosity) so Minette is content to pay the annual penalty summer holidays impose on her fair complexion and fine mousy hair. Her mouth is swollen from the sun, and her red arms and legs are stiff and bumpy with midge bites. Mona is her mother’s daughter and has inherited her difficulty with the sun, and even had a slight touch of sunstroke on the evening of the second day, which Edgar, probably rightly, put down to the fact that Minette had slapped Mona on the cheek, in the back of the car, on the journey down.

  ‘Cheeks afire,’ he said, observing his flushed and feverish child. ‘You really shouldn’t vent your neuroses on your children, Minette.’

  And of course Minette shouldn’t. Edgar was right. Poor little Mona. It was entirely forgivable for Mona, a child of five, to become fractious and unbiddable in the back of a car, cooped up as she was on a five-hour journey; and entirely unforgivable of the adult Minette, sitting next to her, to be feeling so cross, distraught, nervous and unmaternal that she reacted by slapping. Minette should have, could have diverted: could have sung, co
uld have played Here is the Church, this Little Pig, something, anything, rather than slapped. Cheeks afire! As well they might be. Mona’s with upset at her mother’s cruel behaviour: Minette’s, surely, with shame and sorrow.

  Edgar felt the journey was better taken without stops, and that in any case no coffee available on a motorway was worth stopping for. It would be instant, not real. Why hadn’t Minette brought a Thermos, he enquired, when she ventured to suggest they stopped. Because we don’t own a Thermos, she wanted to cry, in her impossible mood, because you say they’re monstrously over-priced, because you say I always break the screw; in any case it’s not the coffee I want, it’s for you to stop, to recognise our existence, our needs – but she stopped herself in time. That way quarrels lie, and the rare quarrels of Edgar and Minette, breaking out, shatter the neighbourhood, not to mention the children. Well done, Minette.

  ‘Just as well we didn’t go to Italy,’ said Edgar, on the night of Mona’s fever, measuring out, to calm the mother-damaged, fevered cheek, the exact dosage of Junior Aspirin recommended on the back of the packet (and although Minette’s doctor once instructed her to quadruple the stated dose, if she wanted it to be effective, Minette knows better than to say so), dissolving it in water, and feeding it to Mona by the spoonful though Minette knows Mona much prefers to suck them – ‘if this is what half an hour’s English sun does to her.’

  Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona. Off to Italy, camping, every year for the last six years, even when Mona was a baby. Milan, Venice, Florence, Pisa. Oh what pleasure, riches, glory, of countryside and town. This year, Minette had renewed the passports and replaced the sleeping bags, brought the Melamine plates and mugs up to quota, checked the Gaz cylinders, and waited for Edgar to reveal the date, usually towards the end of July, when he would put his ethnographical gallery in the hands of an assistant and they would pack themselves and the tent into the car, happy families, and set off, as if spontaneously, into the unknown; but this year the end of July went and the first week of August, and still Edgar did not speak, and Minette’s employers were betraying a kind of incredulous restlessness at Minette’s apparent lack of decision, and only then, on August 6, after a studied absent-mindedness lasting from July 31 to August 5, did Edgar say ‘Of course we can’t afford to go abroad. Business is rock-bottom. I hope you haven’t been wasting any money on unnecessary equipment?’