The Life and Loves of a She Devil (25 page)

The wide windows were open; the drapes stirred in the hot night air. He loved her. She would never be grateful. He did not expect gratitude any more. He had made her as a mother makes a child: to be its own self, not hers. And as in any child successfully reared, it is indifferent to the parent.

‘You’ll have to marry me,’ he said to her. ‘We’ll have to have children.’

‘But I don’t want children,’ she said. ‘I am busy earning the present, not the future.’

Dr Black, overhearing the proposal, and feeling that his colleague was taking an unfair advantage, if only in presuming on his unmarried state, took offence and tried to hit Mr Ghengis, succeeding only in knocking off Mr Ghengis’s glasses and falling amongst the vegetarian curry and nutty chick-pea salad. A fellow guest, darting backwards as bottles fell and glasses broke, trampled on Mr Ghengis’s glasses and shattered them.

Sounds of animosity roused the bear out of his tranquillised stupor. He got to his feet and lurched into a kitchen cabinet, toppling it and spilling bulk purchases of wholewheat flour and brown rice over the floor. He nosed about for a while before leaning against the back door. Under his weight it opened, and so he shambled off into the night, ignoring the open door of his cage, which he was normally supposed to regard with affection as familiar and his home.

Guests panicked and screamed. ‘He’s perfectly harmless!’ cried Mrs Black but one of them insisted on ringing the police. This particular guest came from the army establishment the other side of the escarpment, where vast areas of desert were reserved for the military, and missile testing — one of the reasons, no doubt, why land prices locally were low, for occasionally the sky, even at midday, could be seen to be illuminated with strange lights, which made the nervous more nervous still.

The police arrived and proposed to search for the beast, which they declared they would shoot on sight. On its tour of the States so far, they informed Mrs Black and her guests, it had killed four dogs and mauled two children, nastily but not fatally, and damaged property valued at a quarter of a million dollars.

Mrs Black, who had hoped to do her fund-raising a little later in the evening, understood that her efforts would now be wasted and that the party, which she had never wanted to give in the first place, was a disaster. Guests were already leaving with that particular party-leaving politeness which means there will be giggles and gossip the next day. Only Miss Hunter, of course, lingered.

‘You must be satisfied now,’ Dr Black was saying to this blonde, simpering doll on stilts, ‘if grown men are fighting over you. Leave your legs as they are. You are beautiful, you are popular, you can go to a party and cause infinite trouble: you are the show-girl type. The balding businessman’s dream. We’ll reduce the thighs and slim the calves, of course, but have mercy on us. Don’t make us attack the bone. It isn’t too late. We can pay the team off. You must understand, it’s risky. You might even die.’

Miss Hunter looked at Dr Black and shook her head. ‘You are a very, very naughty boy,’ she said, and her voice sounded as Mary Fisher’s had, long ago. ‘Breaking Mr Ghengis’s glasses like that!’

‘He has another pair,’ said Dr Black, almost weeping, and Miss Hunter, under Mrs Black’s nose, beckoned him out on to the balcony, and there they sat, cuddling, as if Mrs Black didn’t exist at all, under the velvet canopy of night, where the stars hung like lanterns. So, once, Mary Fisher would have behaved.

Mrs Black, washing up glasses, resolved never to give another party, never, and to divorce her husband and next time marry someone without hypocrisy, possibly from the army, who understood how much more satisfactory it is to kill and die for a cause, in the shadow of some great loyalty, than to try to live for ever in the framework of the personal and the trivial. Presently Dr Black drove Miss Hunter back to the clinic, but not before accusing Mrs Black of unforgivable rudeness to his guest.

T
HE HIGH TOWER IS
empty, and silent, except for the wind, which rustles up and down the stairs, in through the empty space where once the great front door stood, and Ruth knocked and the Dobermans barked and the traitor Garcia opened and the end began. Then out goes the wind through a broken windowpane or two. Passing dealers have removed the door, and wandering boys aim stones at the windows. No one likes an empty building. Why should they? It is a rebuke to aspiration. Decay invites dereliction, and vice versa. No one quite believes the ‘Sold’ sticker pasted over the board which says ‘For Sale’. The tower perches too near the edge of the cliff, and the cliff crumbles. Either the cliff has stepped backward, out of the sea, or the tower forward, towards it. Enough to make anyone nervous.

Mice run in and out of the rooms, and fleas, after the cat and dogs went, made the old carpets flicker and jump for a while. But now they’ve given up and gone. Slugs move happily about the stone kitchen floor.

Perhaps it was better before. Perhaps anything is better than peace.

Mary Fisher lingers on in hospital. Her hair has fallen out, as a result of treatment. Garcia and Joan have gone, taking their baby with them, the hole in its heart mended with the last of Mary Fisher’s money. They have gone to live with Garcia’s mother in Spain, to comfort her in her old age, with the money saved and stolen by her son over the dancing years.

Nicola lives in the village with the science teacher from her school: one Lucy Barker. Nicola loves only women. Andy works as a garage mechanic. His boss has taken him in to live, out of kindness. Andy is indistinguishable from the village boys; he hangs around street corners and longs vaguely for a life he will never have.

I visited the High Tower when I was having my nose done. I drove through the village in my Rolls-Royce, and by chance I saw Andy, emerging oil-stained from beneath a parked car. I knew he was my son, but I felt nothing. He is nothing to do with me. And I waited outside the house where Nicola lives and saw her emerge: she has Bobbo’s frown and my build. She lurches and lurks; there was a sullen content about her. She will never make a she devil. My children have been sucked into the sea of ordinary humanity, swirled down and under, and are back where they belong: they are unspectacular, and I imagine quite content.

Old Mrs Fisher, obliged to look after herself, does very well, better than her daughter, which was always her ambition. She lives in the district where she was born, on her own, and manages very well. She visits her daughter once a week. A smelly, waddling visitor, she is feared by the nurses and shakes her head over her daughter and suggests that her illness is the wages of sin. Mary Fisher smiles and pats the old hand that once nursed her. The Sister of the ward is a mature woman, whose first steps back into the world, when wifehood and motherhood were at an end, were through the Vesta Rose Agency. She is fond of Mary Fisher. She looks after her well.

Mary Fisher is not visited by Bobbo, although surely, on compassionate grounds (for she is dying), they would let him out to do so if he asked. He wants nothing more to do with her. He loved her, and love failed. But he blames Mary Fisher, not love, as he should.

I stand at the foot of the High Tower and I look out to sea, which is impervious to human influence, and I look inland over the fields and hills, which are not, and which take the beauty into themselves that human eyes grant them. Mary Fisher, in losing this landscape, had added to its loveliness. I know that; I always have. How could Mr Ghengis and Dr Black have given me beauty, except through love?

I will build up the High Tower. I will tear up the clumps of grass that now grow between the paving stones. I will shore up the cliff, making it safe, but I will look mostly inland and not to sea. I will look out, as Mary Fisher looked out from her bedroom window, sitting up after a night of love with her Bobbo — my Bobbo — to where the new morning sun glances over hills and valleys and trees, and know, as she did, that it is beautiful, and make this my acknowledgment of her, my grief for her, all that I have to give her. She is a woman: she made the landscape better. She devils can make nothing better, except themselves. In the end, she wins.

O
N THE NIGHT OF THE
party at which the bear escaped Ruth returned to her chaste room at the clinic and refused Dr Black admittance. Mrs Black, said Ruth, with some complacency, would be upset if her husband did not return with reasonable promptness.

Ruth closed her eyes for sleep with the comfortable thought that for a pretty woman the future lay in refusing men rather than submitting to them — or, indeed, hoping for their advances. As a corollary, she reflected, perhaps only a plain woman would be in a position to develop sexual expertise and an appetite for sexual pleasure, as a pretty one would not; but Ruth had had, after all, years enough in which to practise and acquire the latter. She would have the best of all worlds, of heaven and hell. She slept well. She did not hear the shouts and shots as the police tracked down, cornered and slaughtered the bear in the far reaches of the clinic’s grounds: in the pretty, shaded corner where herbicides, fertilisers, insecticides and pumped water, stolen from Colorado, had created an oasis of lush and stunning green, where the facelift patients most loved to raise their bruised countenances to the dappled sun.

It was the last time Ruth was to sleep soundly for many, many months. The discomfort described by her doctors amounted to acute pain; increasing doses of morphia and major tranquillisers clouded her mind but could not sever the connection between sensation and response. She did not, in fact, wish to be free from the pain: pain, she knew, was the healing agent. It marked the transition from her old life to her new one. She must endure it now, to be free of it hereafter. In most lives pain drags itself out, a twinge here, a discomfort there, idly distributing itself throughout a lifespan. Ruth would have it all now and be done with it. Yet she was aware that it might kill her in transit, so concentrated was it in its sweep and power.

She screamed in the night, sometimes. They kept pills safely locked up and the windows were laced with elegant steel bars. Not that her plastered legs would take her anywhere, but one never knew. She was not, they had come to the conclusion, an ordinary person. If she could not use her legs perhaps she might choose to walk on her hands?

There was an earthquake, a nasty rumble, the crust of the earth yearning to split along the line of its weakness, the San Andreas fault. That was the day after the major operation to her femur was performed: life-support systems had to be switched over to the emergency generator. They thought they would lose her in the seconds it took. Ruth observed their pallor, their distraction. When she could speak she said, ‘You needn’t have worried. An act of God won’t kill me.’

‘Why not?’ asked Mr Ghengis. ‘I don’t imagine He’s on your side.’

‘He has the Devil to contend with,’ said Ruth, before lapsing back into unconsciousness.

Mr Ghengis begged her to be content with two and a half inches taken from the femur but she would not.

A violent electrical storm on the eve of the second major operation fused the power supply again. Such storms were not unusual in the area. The sudden darkening of the day, the violent clouds tumbling through the unnatural dark, the rifts of sudden, piercing light: but this was, unusually, a dry storm. No rain fell to gladden the heart hereafter, in the sudden sprouts of green and general giddiness which could be expected to compensate for the earlier terror.

‘God’s angry,’ said Mr Ghengis, suddenly frightened, longing to go back into obstetrics. ‘You’re defying Him. I wish we could stop all this.’

‘Of course He’s angry,’ said Ruth. ‘I am remaking myself.’

‘We’re remaking you,’ he said sourly, ‘and in one of His feebler and more absurd images, what’s more.’ He had come to hate the photograph of Mary Fisher.

Electricians worked all through the night checking the circuits that worked the pumps and levers and valves that could imitate, if only temporarily, and on a part-by-part basis, not as a gestalt, the workings of the human body.

‘The only thing we can’t control,’ said Mr Ghengis, ‘is the spark, the little spark of life. But we’re working on it. And of course the weather.’

‘You’re going to have trouble with your legs for the rest of your life,’ Mr Ghengis warned her, for the last time. ‘You’ll have to be on blood-thinning medication; there’ll always be a danger of clotting; and God knows how the abbreviated arteries will hold — the muscles will probably go into spasm. You’re mad.’

That morning she had a financial report from her advisors, ‘Then I am a mad multi-millionairess,’ she said, ‘and you will do as I say.’

Medical journalists, of the kind who roam the surgeries of the world in search of yet more bizarre transplants and the laboratories in search of two-headed dogs and giant mice, congregated around the clinic. But Ruth had covered her tracks well; they could find out nothing about her, neither her nationality, her marital status, nor her age. She was a woman who wanted to be shorter: that was all they knew. They stole the clinic’s records, but could find no history for Marlene Hunter. There was a flurry of articles and features on height as a function of character and a moulder of personality; on short men who became generals and tall women who became nobody, and on which came first, looks or personality. How dogs grew to look like their masters; wives and husbands like each other; adopted children like adoptive parents. These facts were discussed, and dismissed, since there was nothing anyone could do about them. The world lost interest.

Ruth hovered, moaning, drifting, on the edge of life and death. Another electrical storm seemed to stimulate her into life, lightning hit the clinic’s TV aerial and for at least six hours there was no TV reception. Ruth opened her eyes at the initial bang and during the next few hours her temperature fell to normal, her blood pressure rose, her heart steadied and she sat up and demanded food. Dr Black, who had dropped the image of Venus on her conch since Ruth’s rejection of him, was heard to refer to her as Frankenstein’s monster, something that needed lightning to animate it and get it moving. He was assumed to be referring to Mr Ghengis as Frankenstein, not himself; the relationship between the two men had deteriorated recently.