The Life and Loves of a She Devil (23 page)

‘Not so little any more, and very strong,’ Nurse Hopkins lamented happily.

‘But then, so are you!’ admired Ruth.

‘I know, and I think I have the problem cracked at last. They’re trying out a new tranquilliser at Lucas Hill; I can get supplies through one of our staff. It’s going to make all the difference to the child. I’m sure of it.’

‘Do we have anyone in Greenways?’ That was the name of Bobbo’s prison.

‘One of the art therapists, and the Governor’s secretary. Why?’

‘I’d dearly love to meet one of them.’

‘I’d try the art therapist,’ said Nurse Hopkins easily. ‘She has a child in the crèche. She brings him in extra early. She’s a good painter and is trying to get an exhibition together. Her name’s Sarah.’

Ruth had coffee with Sarah in an out-of-the-way coffee house. She enquired about Bobbo.

‘He’s settling down,’ said Sarah, ‘at last.’

‘At last?’

‘He was quite violent for a while, after his sentence. He’s paranoic, of course. He kept saying someone had nobbled the judge. I really think he ought to be in Lucas Hill. The borderline between madness and criminality is always so fine.’

‘At least you get out of Greenways,’ said Ruth.

‘Eventually,’ Sarah admitted. She was dark and full faced and beautiful. She drank black coffee so as not to put on weight and refused Danish pastries. Sarah observed that Bobbo was now a little depressed. She knew, because of the colours he chose to make his raffia baskets in the art room. She tried to make him use bold, primary colours, but he would stick to the duns and khakis. And his visitors upset him.

‘Does he have many visitors?’

‘There’s a little blonde woman comes sometimes.’

‘No children?’

‘No. Probably just as well. It’s bad enough when the woman comes. He just stares into space for days afterwards.’

‘Then perhaps she shouldn’t come! Why doesn’t he write and ask her not to? It’s like children in hospital. They settle so much quicker if their parents don’t visit.’

Sarah said she thought that was a good idea. She’d suggest it to Bobbo. They were really quite close. They’d work something out together at the Moral Rejuvenation Session on Thursday.

‘It sounds quite a nice prison,’ said Ruth.

‘It is, very,’ said Sarah. ‘I don’t know why the suicide rate is so high!’

Ruth wrote to the Hermione Clinic, accepting their terms but asking them to set grant-aid in motion. It never did to let anyone know that money was not a cause of concern.

She said goodbye to her body: she took off her clothes in the lobby where the boots and shoes were kept and studied herself in the mirror there, the only one in the commune she had been able to locate. It stood leaning against a wall; large, gilt-framed and Georgian. The glass was dark and speckled, and chipped where casual boots had kicked it, and a crack ran narrowly from one side to another, but the central portion was sufficiently unmarked to throw back a fair reflection.

She looked at the body which had so little to do with her nature, and knew she’d be glad to be rid of it.

‘That’s right!’ said little Sue of the cross face, the muesli-maker, coming in to harvest the bean sprouts which grew on a dark shelf. ‘Sometimes it feels just wonderful to take off all your clothes. You have such a glorious strong woman’s body!’

‘I think I have to leave here,’ said Ruth.

‘But why?’

‘I need privacy.’

‘Why? Do you have something to hide? You’ll feel better if you tell! We’re all friends. We help one another. And you don’t have to look in mirrors, you know. Other women’s eyes throw back the real reflection. Mirrors can only reflect the body, not the soul, not the woman-spirit. I keep asking them to throw that dirty old mirror out, it’s such a temptation, but no one ever gets round to it.’

‘It’s worth quite a lot. It’s an antique,’ observed Ruth.

At that, Sue picked up a spade and threw it at the mirror, which cracked. Shards fell to the ground, jumped and tinkled a little, which happens when good mercury-based glass shatters, and then lay still.

‘Then we certainly don’t want it here,’ said Sue. Women have been enslaved by material possessions, by male value patterns, for too long.’

A crowd of women turned up to see exactly what the smash was — there was no television in the commune so any untoward event got a large audience — and Sue broke to them the news of Ruth’s departure. They were worried on Ruth’s behalf.

‘How can you turn your back,’ they exclaimed, ‘on love and peace, and the creative joy of pure womanhood?’

But Ruth thought she could, very easily. They made her pay $27 for her laundry and confiscated her few small belongings, including alarm clock and leather gardening gloves, in lieu of notice, and declined to drive her to the station, three miles away. Ruth had to walk. They watched her go with hostile eyes.

Ruth bought a First Class ticket to Los Angeles and the Hermione Clinic, and took the next flight out. She had no luggage, other than a few books, bought at the airport. There was nothing from her past that she wanted to bring. Such few telephone numbers as she would need were in her head.

M
ARY FISHER LIVES IN
the High Tower and wishes she didn’t. She doesn’t want to live anywhere, in fact. Quite frankly, she wants to be dead. She wants to be at one with the stars, and the foaming sea, she wishes the flame of her life to burn out and be over, for ever. She is romantic, even when suicidal.

Father Ferguson says, ‘This can’t go on, it is a sin.’

‘I know,’ says Mary Fisher. She believes in hell now. She is in it already, and knows she deserves it. She has carnal knowledge of a priest!

‘You tempted me,’ he says.

‘I know,’ is all she says. He packs his canvas bag and goes visiting Alice Appleby, whose novels are a success, and whose wise and lovely face stares out from bookracks everywhere. He is not a good lover. He has had so little practice in his life. Perhaps Alice Appleby will do the trick.

Mary Fisher receives a letter from Bobbo asking her not to visit him anymore. ‘Your visits prevent me from settling —’ Mary Fisher thinks somehow he’s found out about Harness. She can’t get the thought out of her head. She is to blame for this too. She stops visiting.

She stands at the window of the High Tower and almost jumps. But how can she? She is trapped by her own awareness, her own new understanding, and indeed, her new kindness. How would her mother live without her at the end of her life, or Andy, or Nicola, just emerging into theirs? Mary Fisher must be there to love them, because there is no one else to do it, and perhaps, who knows, no one else ever will. And what sort of example would it be, if she were to hand back the gift of life? It is a baton in a relay race: it must be handed on properly or the whole race stops. Love will be the end of her indeed, but in its own way, its own time.

Mary Fisher isn’t feeling well. She looks in the mirror and sees that her hair is thin and her complexion dull. She has lost weight. When she goes down to the village she is just another scurrying, ageing woman, holding on to what is left of her life. Eyes slip past her.

The bank writes to tell her she is badly overdrawn. She must put the High Tower on the market. She is not sorry to do so. She tells Garcia and Joan — the only staff left — that they can have no more wages.

‘You can’t do that,’ says Garcia.

‘I can,’ she says, staring Garcia straight in the eyes. He drops his. She wonders why she did not do it long ago. What was there ever to be frightened of, except coming face to face with her own guilt?

‘But where will we live?’ ask the children, and old Mrs Fisher. For once they are subdued, and kind and likeable. ‘How will we live?’

‘As other people do,’ she said. ‘In a small and sensible house somewhere. There’ll be enough money left over for that.’

But it comes too late. She is tired, tired. With success comes failure. Her body has noted her earlier despair, seized its opportunity, returned to disorder, to misrule. The steady flowering pattern has lost its head, spun into disorder. Now cells proliferate without intent, set free like children out of school.

Mary Fisher has a nasty recurring pain across her back. She goes to the doctor. He sends her to hospital for investigation. He does not think the prognosis is good.

She goes into hospital, protesting, saying, just like anyone else, ‘But I can’t possibly go. There’s far too much to be done. How will they all get on without me?’

Mary Fisher, without knowing it, is almost happy. If happiness is anything, it is a feeling of being essential.

Would-be purchasers come and look over the High Tower. Property prices have fallen and the cost of petrol is high. No one really wants to live so far from anywhere: and the cliff face is crumbling, and perhaps soon the whole edifice will topple into the sea? The cost of ensuring it does not will be exorbitant: it is as if nature itself will have to be braced, supported and strengthened, if life is to be tolerable.

M
R GHENGIS ENJOYED HIS
work. It seemed to him that it was one of the few occupations in the world which could not be faulted. Social work could be seen as system-bolstering, ordinary doctoring as fostering the interest of the pharmaceutical companies; teaching as the enslavement of the young mind; the arts as idle elitism; business of any kind as grinding the world’s poor beneath the capitalist heel, and so forth: but cosmetic surgery was pure. It made the ugly beautiful. To transform the human body, the shell of the soul, was, Mr Ghengis felt, the nearest a man could get to motherhood: moulding, shaping, bringing forth in pain and anguish. True, the pain and anguish were not strictly his but his patients’. Nevertheless, he felt it. Nothing was for nothing.

He thought he would enjoy working with Marlene Hunter. He saw her as a giant parcel to be unwrapped: the kind of parcel that was passed round at a children’s birthday party, clumsily wrapped by a kind mother, in layer after layer of crumpled paper, the simpler for inexpert little fingers to unfold. And there, eventually, when the music stopped for the last time, would the treasure be! The gift, the present. He looked forward to it, and to her gratitude.

He showed Miss Hunter to her room himself. It was a gentle lilac colour, delicately scented, much like the clinic’s writing paper. Drips and respirators and the shiny white apparatus of modern medicine were kept beneath smooth wraps, in a discreet corner. Wide windows looked out over a red desert: in the distance rose a cliff face; an escarpment. In the foreground clustered the rich and luxuriant flora that plentiful water provides in a climate where it does not come naturally, or easily.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

‘My mother would have loved it,’ she replied.

He thought he might leave her vocal chords untautened: a voice that sounded harsh out of a massive frame might sound husky, and by inference sexy, from a slighter one. It was the balance of male and female in the body that attracted, he had observed. A male desire in a fragile body, a deep voice in conjunction with a delicate gesture, and so forth: duplicity and artifice, and not simplicity at all.

Miss Hunter did not choose to mix with her fellow guests. She kept mostly to her room, watching television or flicking through magazines.

‘You could learn a language,’ he suggested, worrying for her.

‘Why should I?’

‘You may want to travel,’ he said, surprised. ‘Afterwards. People often do. They like to show their new selves off.’

‘Let them learn to speak my language,’ she said.

‘Well, it would be something to do,’ he repeated. She made him feel forlorn, as if he were the servant of her desires, and not their master. ‘There’s a lot of waiting about in this business. Besides, surely improvement of the mind is a good thing, for its own sake?’

‘I am here to improve my body,’ she replied. ‘There was never anything wrong with my mind.’

He was her Pygmalion, but she would not depend upon him, or admire him, or be grateful. He was accustomed to being loved by the women of his own construction. A soft sigh of adoration would follow him down the corridors as he paced them, visiting here, blessing there, promising a future, regretting a past: cushioning his footfall, and his image of himself. But no soft breathings came from Miss Hunter. Well, he would bring her to it.

He attended to her face first He padded out the tissue beneath the eyes, just a little, and lifted the fold above them; now less of the white beneath the iris showed, and more above it, so that her eyes suddenly became wide, candid and innocent, and large in proportion to her head: they were enchanting, as kittens’ eyes are enchanting, or indeed the eyes of the young of any species — even of the crocodile.

Mr Ghengis’ assistant, young Dr Joseph Black, so bold and randy on the baseball field, so delicate and pernickety at the operating table, marvelled at the face Miss Hunter aspired to have. They had a blow-up of Mary Fisher’s photograph, one of those provided by Ruth, projected on the wall in the operating theatre where they worked.

‘It seems a familiar face,’ said Dr Black. He recollected where he had seen it — where else but on the back of various book jackets in the clinic library. Not that any of the patients were great readers: they leafed through magazines and complained if they were out of date. Only occasionally would one or two of them settle down to a romance or a thriller. But they liked to have the books there; they felt insulted if they were not. They believed themselves to be readers at heart, temporarily resting while under stress.

When Miss Hunter’s eyes had healed they broke her cheekbones and flattened them out: and when the bruising had abated somewhat they trimmed and altered the line of the jaw bone. They took hairless skin from her rump and grafted it along the hair line, taking it back to give her a smooth, clear brow. They lifted the skin beneath the jaw, stretched it over the cheeks and tucked it in. They filled fine wrinkle marks around the mouth and nose with silicone and treated broken veins with laser darts. They nicked off the moles, hairs and all, and took the opportunity to tilt the corners of her mouth upward, so that now her expression was one of agreeable expectation.