Watching Me, Watching You. Fay Weldon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and Audrey wrote, out of the blue. ‘My God,’ said Audrey, ‘life was never like that for you and me. Wish it had been. My fault, perhaps. Helen’s training as a nurse. Shouldn’t you be using your television time to protest about low pay instead of all this full-frontal stuff?’

      Still, it was better than nothing.

      Linda came to live with him in London. She wouldn’t and didn’t sleep with him, though nobody believed it. She was virtuous. Her family didn’t believe it either and cast her off. She spent her time writing letters home on thin blue lined paper with purple violets round the edge. She had unformed, careful writing and her spelling was bad. He found that charming. He still had trouble spelling, himself.

      Forgiveness was a long time coming.

      ‘I’ve let them down,’ she whispered. ‘They trusted me.’

      ‘Perhaps we ought to be married,’ said Brian, though he’d sworn publicly never to do anything like that again. She considered.

      ‘I suppose that would be nice,’ said Linda. ‘They’d forgive me, then. Oh, I do so want you to meet them! I miss my mother and my brothers so much.’

      They agreed to marry at Christmas. It couldn’t be any earlier because Brian had to go to Los Angeles for three months, to work on a film. A thriller.

      He half-wondered whether to take Linda, but she said firmly that she didn’t want to come. ‘I’ll stay home and arrange the wedding,’ she said. ‘Honestly, I’d rather. I don’t really fit in with your smart friends.’

      ‘That’s what’s so wonderful about you,’ he said. He could see that in Los Angeles, where girls were thin and leggy and bronzed, she might not appear to advantage. She liked to keep out of the sun, because it made her nose peel.

      He had thought the wedding would be a Register Office affair, but Linda had set her heart on being married in a white dress with bell sleeves in the village church, and he agreed. ‘It will cost you to do it properly,’ she said, timorously. She had never asked for money before. He gave her a cheque. ‘I haven’t got a bank account,’ she said. ‘If you’re going home,’ he said, ‘your parents can cash it for you.’

      ‘They don’t have banks,’ she said, and he was surprised. What kind of people were they? ‘It’s only a little garage,’ she apologised.

      He was pleased. He thought the peasant soil might be some kind of equivalent to the proletarian earth that afforded his early nourishment. He flew off to LA over the Pole, first class, and did not even try to date the young woman who sat next to him, who wore sneakers and had a little silver snuff box full of vitamin pills and said she was in hospitals. ‘Administration?’ he asked.

      ‘I own them,’ she said, and what with East turning West beneath them, and the sun rising where it had only just set, and rather too much champagne, he felt the world was upside-down and longed for Linda’s stolid charm, and her little feet in high strap heels, rather than those serviceable if sexy sneakers. Stolid? He was rather shocked by that particular choice of word. It was not how one usually described the Virgin Mary. Stolid.

      In love with the Virgin Mary. But he was. He became almost nauseous when confronted with the ravishing Mary Magdalenas of Malibu Beach: human animals doing their copulatory dance under the Studio Ring Master’s whip: the fantasies of an exhausted film industry, taken such definite flesh. He had no trouble resisting them.

      It was not, he saw now, that he had ever been promiscuous. Just that no woman until now had ever succeeded in properly captivating him. ‘Christ!’ said Alec on the telephone, across half the world. But he’d put his commission up to fifteen per cent and since the spring, and the advent of Linda, Brian had been doing well enough and fulfilling his early promise, as money maker if not saviour of society.

      Brian came home on December 14. The wedding was on December 15. Linda was already in Devon. The wedding was all organised, she told him when he rang from Heathrow. All that was required was Brian’s appearance, wearing a suit, and with the ring, early the next morning. She’d even arranged the cars, which should have been the groom’s task. The wedding reception was to be in the Women’s Institute Hall, and they were to spend the night with Linda’s parents, the Joneses, in the caravan in the garden. If it was raining, or snowing, they could squeeze into her bedroom.

      Women’s Institute? Caravan? In December? After Studio City, Malibu and Sunset Boulevard, it sounded strange. But Brian Smith marrying Linda Jones sounded profoundly, agreeably right.

      He was relieved, too, if only by virtue of shortage of time, of the burden of providing friends and family to witness the wedding. He wanted a new life. He did not want the past clouding any issues. In East Devon, down in the South West, he would be born again.

      Honest rural folk.

      Linda’s father met him at the station. The train was late. Mr Jones paced up and down in an ill-fitting navy suit, and boots with buckled uppers. No more ill-fitting, Brian told himself, than my father’s at prize day at the grammar school. The pale grey suits of the executives of Studio City, their smooth after-shaved jowls, their figures jogged into shape, made an unfair comparison. Linda’s father was narrow like a ferret, sharp-eyed like a fox, untidy as an unpruned hedge in autumn, and had thick red hands with bleak oil beneath the nails. One eye wandered, when he spoke.

      ‘Best hurry,’ said Mr Jones, ‘Linda’s waiting,’ and they climbed into an old C-registration Mini, with the back seats taken out and piled with plastic fertiliser sacks and ropes, guarded by a snappy, noisy, ugly little dog. Barking prevented them from talking.

      The garage had a single petrol pump, and was marked No Petrol, and was outside the last house in an undistinguished row of pre-war houses set back from the main road. Brian was rushed upstairs to change, the dog snapping at his heels, into a tiny room with four different flowered papers on the wall, and two beds and three wardrobes and six trays of sausage rolls on boards placed across the beds. He caught a glimpse of Linda as he fled from the dog; she was in brilliant Terylene white. He thought she blew him a kiss.

      What am I doing, he thought, trying to find a place between the plastic beads and greeting cards and Mr Men stickers and the Christmas holly and bells which decked the mirror, so he could fix his tie. He was bronzed by the Californian sun; his face was narrow and handsome and clever. What am I doing? What desperation has landed me here? No, this is jet-lag speaking. I love Linda. Write it in plastic Christmas foam on what remains of the mirror. I love Linda. What has Linda’s family to do with her, any more than mine to do with me? Roots. Aye, there’s the rub. Red Devon soil hardened by winter. What good was that to him? He was used to soot. He was ready. A Rolls-Royce stood outside. Well, he was paying.

      Into the first car he stepped, and Linda’s father came with him. Best man. Linda’s father had trodden in the mess left by the dog in the hall. Linda’s father’s shoe smelt. ‘Overexcited,’ said Linda’s mother. She was stout and dressed in green satin but otherwise might have been anyone. Linda’s cross-eyed brother kicked the dog out of the house. Linda’s wall-eyed brother hoovered up the mess, which was largely liquid.

      ‘Don’t do that!’ cried Linda’s mother. Linda smiled serenely beneath her white white veil. She was a virgin.

      ‘My wedding day is the happiest day of my life,’ she said, though whether to Brian as he passed, or as a statement of policy to God above, or simply to quell the riot he did not know. Mr Jones nipped upstairs to clean his shoe.

      The village church was big and handsome and very cold. A hundred people or so were gathered СКАЧАТЬ