and pink and that’s what he liked, he couldn’t bear the harsh brown aggressive kind, and that, I’m sorry to say, is what yours are, slim hungry wife of my employer; I can see them through your dress.
Margot knows she is being unfair. Who of us can help the texture of our nipples? A momentary surge of irritation, no doubt, of guilt about Jarvis, for which she will now pay penance.
‘I’ll take Jonathon home to lunch with me,’ she says. ‘And drop him back this afternoon.’
Guilt, about Jarvis?
Guilt, surely, is too strong a word. What, for something that happened fifteen years ago, when the world was young, and still full of causes and few effects? Surely not. Margot did no wrong, or none that she could recognise. She was not married at the time. True, Jarvis was, but could Margot fairly be expected to take responsibility for, let alone stand in the way of, the imperatives of male desire? And it can’t have been a good marriage anyway, or why would Jarvis have wanted to sweep her out of a party, up the linoed stairs, and into the spare room? A one night stand, no more, no less.
True, Margot was disappointed the next day (whoever isn’t) when the next day came, and the next, and there was no telephone call from Jarvis, no declaration of true love; no such magic, apparently, discovered in her body as would transfigure his life.
But it was a disappointment muted not by experience (and experience indicates that in nine out of ten of these passing sexual encounters, no particular magic is discovered, no great alliances made – but on the tenth – ah! happiness, fulfilment! Love enough to make up for the pain of the nine? Well, more or less) not muted by any such experience, any such calculating promiscuity in the interests of eventual respectability, but by a general apprehension of herself, a thorough muted expectation of life and the part she was to play in it.
Margot, born to be useful; daughter, wife, mother. This excursion into the erotic, this placing of her on him, for that was where he placed her, the better to admire her sweet pink nipples, scarcely seemed a proper part of her nature.
The activity, she felt, contained its own punishment: if virtue carries its own reward, so does sin carry with it a cosmic slapping of the hand, a down, you naughty girl, you presume: when lust fades, the sense of looking silly remains; and some slight knowledge of a door having opened and closed on the fringes of the memory.
Poor Margot, only too happy, after a silent day or two, to forget.
Later, when Jarvis and Lily became Philip’s patients, and baby Jonathon too, and Jarvis was overworked and underslept, and the strain of Jonathon’s early feeding problems telling upon him, not to mention Lily, it was Philip who suggested that Margot could go and work as Jarvis’s part-time secretary – thus killing three birds with one stone, his wife’s restlessness (well, the children were now increasingly busy with their own lives), his patient’s declared need for tranquillisers, and his own monetary difficulties – the latter admittedly too great and hefty a bird to be brought down by such a tiny shaft, but winging the creature nonetheless. A step in the right direction.
Philip always had the feeling, lurking somewhere in the back of his mind, unspoken, that Margot was ungrateful when it came to money, and did not quite recognise the difficulty with which it was earned, nor her good fortune in being allowed to spend what was by rights his and his alone.
Margot, meeting Jarvis for the second time, going to a house which she only dimly remembered, and now found altogether changed, thirteen years after that passionate, private (or so she believes) encounter, recognised Jarvis at once. He did not recognise her. How could he? It had been a dimly-lit party, in the days when most people smoked, and the smell of hot punch had filled the air, and one girl had been much like another, tight-waisted and teetering around on stiletto heels. But one man, then as now, not much like another at all. Poor Margot. Lucky Jarvis.
Margot accepted the offer of a job with alacrity. Why should she not? The advantages were, on the surface, so many. Namely:
(a) Ease of access
The Katkins lived within walking distance. Six and a half minutes (fast) or nine minutes (slow). She would not have to stand about in all weathers at bus-stops, as did Enid.
(b) Good pay and conditions
The pay was generous, and the work easy. Twelve pounds a week for ten hours light secretarial duties in pleasant surroundings, architect designed.
(c) Independence
Margot, at last, would be able to buy clothes without first having to persuade Philip that she needed them. (And Philip believed, profoundly, that the purpose of clothes was to keep the cold out.) She would no longer have to account for every penny which left her purse. Not that she had ever really objected to so doing – and indeed had become adept at covering the cost of unallowed frivolities such as bars of chocolate or cartons of hot tomato soup from vending machines, under the cover of increased expenditure on washing powder, dishcloths, and mango chutney (Philip’s favourite). It wasn’t, as Margot observed to Enid, that Philip was mean. (Look how he never grudged a penny on household necessities.) Just that she, Margot, was extravagant, and he, as the breadwinner, had every right to say just how much butter and how much jam would be spread on each particular slice. What’s more, she would say to Enid, she found the sense of her husband’s control comforting, and even his censure satisfactory. What she did not say, however, and what made her vaguely uneasy, was her awareness that this particular comfort and satisfaction contained a languorous, almost erotic, quality, as if the financial strictures within which her husband held her, had their counterpart in the bonds and whips of her (rare) sexual fantasies. Well, all that would have to stop. Employment, as Enid would say, was the answer to housewifely broodings and fantasies. Satan finds work for idle hands to do, and dreams for idle minds, while fingers play.
(d) Work interest
Proximity to a new baby. Jonathon. Sprung from Jarvis’s lean loins and Lily’s shapely ones. Margot, a lover of infants, finding her own children now too old for handling but still too young to provide her with grandchildren, had begun to crave babies as some people, finding themselves inland, will crave for the sea; or in the middle of a plain, feel they cannot live without a glimpse of hills. Margot would have had a dozen babies if she had had her way. But fortunately she didn’t. Philip felt that to have two children was both sensible and social, as indeed it was. (One must consider the quality, rather more than the quantity, of the human race.) Margot, as a doctor’s wife, was one of the first women in London to have a contraceptive coil fitted. After the initial heavy bleeding and stomach pains she settled down to it well. Again, the sense of her husband’s coital interest, the gratification of his nonprocreative wishes, the very carrying around, inside her, foetus-like, of something she felt so strongly to be his, not hers, caused in her the same languor, the same erotic debility, as did his weekly checking of the household accounts; the shrinking of the weak from the moral blows of the strong. The presence of the coil, moreover, added a sense of dishonesty, even of sin, to their marital embraces and enhanced them, she rather thought, the more. She would not, now, be without her coil. Though sometimes she feared, vaguely, it might be going rusty within, or flaking away in the face of her internal secretions.
Well, her employer’s wife’s baby would do instead of her own. Would stop her, as she put it to Enid, going all broody. She’d have all the pleasure, the pride, the cooing and cuddling, and none of the nappies.
(e) Job satisfaction
The undercurrent of excitement she feels in Jarvis’s presence: of deceit in Lily’s: the sense of secret knowledge, of power withheld: all these entranced her. She did not mention this to Enid. How could she? She barely knew herself, as she barely
