An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (12 page)

The front door was wide open. Cordelia pressed the bell and stepped tentatively into a narrow white hall. The exterior of the house was immediately familiar to her. From her sixth birthday she had lived for two years in just such a Victorian terraced cottage with Mrs. Gibson on the outskirts of Romford. She recognized the steep and narrow staircase immediately ahead, the door on the right leading to the front parlour, the second door set aslant which led to the back parlour and through it to the kitchen and yard. She knew that there would be cupboards and a curved alcove on each side of the fireplace; she knew where to find the door under the stairs. Memory was so sharp that it imposed on this clean, sun-scented interior the strong odour of unwashed napkins,
cabbage and grease which had permeated the Romford house. She could almost hear the children’s voices calling her outlandish name across the rookery of the primary school playground across the road, stamping the asphalt with the ubiquitous Wellington boots which they wore in all seasons, flailing their thin jerseyed arms: “Cor, Cor, Cor!”

The furthest door was ajar and she could glimpse a room painted bright yellow and spilling over with sunlight. Sophie’s head appeared.

“Oh, it’s you! Come in. Davie has gone to collect some books from college and to buy food for the picnic. Would you like tea now or shall we wait? I’m just finishing the ironing.”

“I’d rather wait, thank you.”

Cordelia sat down and watched while Sophie wound the flex around the iron and folded the cloth. She glanced around the room. It was welcoming and attractive, furnished in no particular style or period, a cosy hotchpotch of the cheap and the valuable, unpretentious and pleasing. There was a sturdy oak table against the wall; four rather ugly dining chairs; a Windsor chair with a plump yellow cushion; an elegant Victorian sofa covered with brown velvet and set under the window; three good Staffordshire figures on the mantelshelf above the hooded wrought-iron grate. One of the walls was almost covered with a noticeboard in dark cork which displayed posters, cards,
aides-mémoires
, and pictures cut from magazines. Two, Cordelia saw, were beautifully photographed and attractive nudes.

Outside the yellow-curtained window the small walled garden was a riot of greenery. An immense and multi-flowered hollyhock burgeoned against a tatty-looking trellis; there were roses planted in Ali Baba jars and a row of pots of bright-red geraniums lined the top of the wall.

Cordelia said: “I like this house. Is it yours?”

“Yes, I own it. Our grandmother died two years ago and left Hugo and me a small legacy. I used mine for the down payment on this house and got a local authority grant towards the cost of conversion. Hugo spent all of his laying down wine. He was ensuring a happy middle age; I was ensuring a happy present. I suppose that’s the difference between us.”

She folded the ironing cloth on the end of the table and stowed it away in one of the cupboards. Sitting opposite to Cordelia, she asked abruptly: “Do you like my brother?”

“Not very much. I thought he was rather rude to me.”

“He didn’t mean to be.”

“I think that’s rather worse. Rudeness should always be intentional, otherwise it’s insensitivity.”

“Hugo isn’t at his most agreeable when he’s with Isabelle. She has that effect on him.”

“Was she in love with Mark Callender?”

“You’ll have to ask her, Cordelia, but I shouldn’t think so. They hardly knew each other. Mark was my lover, not hers. I thought I’d better get you here to tell you myself since someone’s bound to sooner or later if you go around Cambridge ferreting out facts about him. He didn’t live here with me, of course. He had rooms in college. But we were lovers for almost the whole of last year. It ended just after Christmas when I met Davie.”

“Were you in love?”

“I’m not sure. All sex is a kind of exploitation, isn’t it? If you mean, did we explore our own identities through the personality of the other, then I suppose we were in love or thought that we were. Mark needed to believe himself in love. I’m not sure I know what the word means.”

Cordelia felt a surge of sympathy. She wasn’t sure either.
She thought of her own two lovers: Georges, whom she had slept with because he was gentle and unhappy and called her Cordelia, a real name, her name, not Delia, Daddy’s little fascist; and Carl, who was young and angry and whom she had liked so much that it seemed churlish not to show it in the only way which seemed to him important. She had never thought of virginity as other than a temporary and inconvenient state, part of the general insecurity and vulnerability of being young. Before Georges and Carl she had been lonely and inexperienced. Afterwards she had been lonely and a little less inexperienced. Neither affair had given her the longed-for assurance in dealing with Daddy or the landladies, neither had inconveniently touched her heart. But for Carl she had felt tenderness. It was just as well that he had left Rome before his lovemaking had become too pleasurable and he too important to her. It was intolerable to think that those strange gymnastics might one day become necessary. Lovemaking, she had decided, was overrated, not painful but surprising. The alienation between thought and action was so complete. She said: “I suppose I only meant were you fond of each other, and did you like going to bed together?”

“Both of those things.”

“Why did it end? Did you quarrel?”

“Nothing so natural or uncivilized. One didn’t quarrel with Mark. That was one of the troubles about him. I told him that I didn’t want to go on with the affair and he accepted my decision as calmly as if I were just breaking a date for a play at the Arts. He didn’t try to argue or dissuade me. And if you’re wondering whether the break had anything to do with his death, well you’re wrong. I wouldn’t rank that high with anyone, particularly not Mark. I was probably fonder of him than he was of me.”

“So why did it end?”

“I felt that I was under moral scrutiny. It wasn’t true; Mark wasn’t a prig. But that’s how I felt, or pretended to myself that I felt. I couldn’t live up to him and I didn’t even want to. There was Gary Webber, for example. I’d better tell you about him; it explains a lot about Mark. He’s an autistic child, one of the uncontrollable, violent ones. Mark met him with his parents and their other two children on Jesus Green about a year ago; the children were playing on the swings there. Mark spoke to Gary and the boy responded to him. Children always did. He took to visiting the family and looking after Gary one evening a week so that the Webbers could get out to the pictures. During his last two vacs he stayed in the house and looked after Gary completely while the whole family went off for a holiday. The Webbers couldn’t bear the boy to go to hospital; they’d tried it once and he didn’t settle. But they were perfectly happy to leave him with Mark. I used to call in some evenings and see them together. Mark would hold the boy on his lap and rock him backwards and forwards for hours at a time. It was the one way to quieten him. We disagreed about Gary. I thought he would be better dead and I said so. I still think it would be better if he died, better for his parents, better for the rest of the family, better for him. Mark didn’t agree. I remember saying: ‘Oh well, if you think it reasonable that children should suffer so that you can enjoy the emotional kick of relieving them—’ After that the conversation became boringly metaphysical. Mark said: ‘Neither you nor I would be willing to kill Gary. He exists. His family exists. They need help which we can give. It doesn’t matter what we feel. Actions are important, feelings aren’t.’ ”

Cordelia said: “But actions arise out of feelings.”

“Oh, Cordelia, don’t you start! I’ve had this particular conversation too many times before. Of course they do!”

They were silent for a moment. Then Cordelia, reluctant to shatter the tenuous confidence and friendship which she sensed was growing between them, made herself ask: “Why did he kill himself—if he did kill himself?”

Sophie’s reply was as emphatic as a slammed door. “He left a note.”

“A note perhaps. But, as his father pointed out, not an explanation. It’s a lovely passage of prose—at least I think so—but as a justification for suicide it just isn’t convincing.”

“It convinced the jury.”

“It doesn’t convince me. Think, Sophie! Surely there are only two reasons for killing oneself. One is either escaping from something or to something. The first is rational. If one is in intolerable pain, despair or mental anguish and there is no reasonable chance of a cure, then it’s probably sensible to prefer oblivion. But it isn’t sensible to kill oneself in the hope of gaining some better existence or to extend one’s sensibilities to include the experience of death. It isn’t possible to experience death. I’m not even sure it’s possible to experience dying. One can only experience the preparations for death, and even that seems pointless since one can’t make use of the experience afterwards. If there’s any sort of existence after death we shall all know soon enough. If there isn’t, we shan’t exist to complain that we’ve been cheated. People who believe in an afterlife are perfectly reasonable. They’re the only ones who are safe from ultimate disillusionment.”

“You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you? I’m not sure that suicides do. The act is probably both impulsive and irrational.”

“Was Mark impulsive and irrational?”

“I didn’t know Mark.”

“But you were lovers! You slept with him!”

Sophie looked at her and cried out in angry pain. “I didn’t know him! I thought I did, but I didn’t know the first thing about him!”

They sat without speaking for almost two minutes. Then Cordelia asked: “You went to dinner at Garforth House, didn’t you? What was it like?”

“The food and the wine were surprisingly good, but I don’t suppose that’s what you had in mind. The dinner party wasn’t otherwise memorable. Sir Ronald was amiable enough when he noticed I was there. Miss Leaming, when she could tear her obsessive attention from the presiding genius, looked me over like a prospective mother-in-law. Mark was rather silent. I think he’d taken me there to prove something to me, or perhaps to himself; I’m not sure what. He never talked about the evening or asked me what I thought. A month later Hugo and I both went to dinner. It was then I met Davie. He was the guest of one of the research biologists and Ronald Callender was angling to get him. Davie did a vac job there in his final year. If you want the inside dope on Garforth House, you should ask him.”

Five minutes later Hugo, Isabelle and Davie arrived. Cordelia had gone upstairs to the bathroom and heard the car stop and the jabber of voices in the hall. Footsteps passed beneath her towards the back parlour. She turned on the hot water. The gas boiler in the kitchen immediately gave forth a roar as if the little house were powered by a dynamo. Cordelia let the tap run, then stepped out of the bathroom, closing the door gently behind her. She stole to the top of the stairs. It was hard luck on Sophie to waste her hot water, she thought guiltily; but worse was the sense of treachery and shabby opportunism as she crept down the first three stairs and listened. The front door had been closed but the door to the back parlour was open. She heard Isabelle’s high, unemphatic voice:
“But if this man Sir Ronald is paying her to find out about Mark, why cannot I pay her to stop finding out?”

Then Hugo’s voice, amused, a little contemptuous: “Darling Isabelle, when will you learn that not everyone can be bought?”

“She can’t, anyway. I like her.”

It was Sophie speaking. Her brother replied: “We all like her. The question is, how do we get rid of her?”

Then for a few minutes there was a murmur of voices, words undistinguishable, broken by Isabelle.

“It is not, I think, a suitable job for a woman.”

There was the sound of a chair scraping against the floor, a shuffle of feet. Cordelia darted guiltily back into the bathroom and turned off the tap. She recalled Bernie’s complacent admonition when she had asked whether they needed accept a divorce case.

“You can’t do our job, partner, and be a gentleman.”

She stood watching at the half-open door. Hugo and Isabelle were leaving. She waited until she heard the front door close and the car drive away. Then she went down to the parlour. Sophie and Davie were together, unpacking a large carrier bag of groceries. Sophie smiled and said: “Isabelle has a party tonight. She has a house quite close to here in Panton Street. Mark’s tutor, Edward Horsfall, will probably be there and we thought it might be useful for you to talk to him about Mark. The party’s at eight o’clock but you can call for us here. Just now we’re packing a picnic; we thought we’d take a punt on the river for an hour or so. Do come if you’d like to. It’s really much the pleasantest way of seeing Cambridge.”

Afterwards, Cordelia remembered the river picnic as a series of brief but intensely clear pictures, moments in which sight and sense fused and time seemed momentarily arrested while
the sunlit image was impressed on her mind. Sunlight sparkling on the river and gilding the hairs of Davie’s chest and forearms; the flesh of his strong upper arms speckled like an egg; Sophie lifting her arm to wipe the sweat from her brow as she rested between thrusts of the punt pole; green-black weeds dragged by the pole from mysterious depths to writhe sinuously below the surface; a bright duck cocking its white tail before disappearing in a flurry of green water. When they had rocked under Silver Street Bridge a friend of Sophie swam alongside, sleek and snout-nosed like an otter, his black hair lying like blades across his cheeks. He rested his hands on the punt and opened his mouth to be fed chunks of sandwiches by a protesting Sophie. The punts and canoes scraped and jostled each other in the turbulence of white water racing under the bridge. The air rang with laughing voices and the green banks were peopled with half-naked bodies lying supine with their faces to the sun.

Davie punted until they reached the higher level of the river and Cordelia and Sophie stretched out on the cushions at opposite ends of the punt. Thus distanced it was impossible to carry on a private conversation; Cordelia guessed that this was precisely what Sophie had planned. From time to time, she would call out snatches of information as if to emphasize that the outing was strictly educational.