Mrs elizabeth hobbs was leaving her home for a conference where she would deliver a paper on the use of new contrast media for better organ revelation in radio diagnostics. It was a Friday evening and, giving herself ample time, she picked up a bus which would take her to King's Cross and the night train to Edinburgh. Halfway to the station, however, she suddenly became aware of having made a terrible mistake. Earlier on in the day she had removed the second page of her talk from its folder in order to white-out and alter a couple of words. Interrupted by a long and interesting call from a friend who was divorcing, she had forgotten the page in her typewriter. Yes, she could see it now, peeping over the top of the slim black roller in the cosy gloom of her little study. Damn.
Having overcome an immediate sense of panic, for Elizabeth was no performer and needed a text to read from, she studied her watch, made some rapid calculations and decided to risk it. She got off the bus at the first red traffic light and had the luck to find a taxi at once. Only ten minutes later she was asking the driver to please wait outside her house while she popped in and picked up her precious piece of paper.
The house was in the middle of a quiet terrace in Finsbury Park. Elizabeth fiddled for her keys in the tiny front garden. Friday was Richard's karate night, so no point in ringing. He wouldn't be back for a while yet. She had seen him off before she left, and reminded him he was responsible for the cat over the weekend. Richard was always mildly euphoric on Friday evenings, what with the relief at the week's ending and the prospect of a good work-out followed by a pint or two afterwards. He had done a little dance in the hallway, striking mock blows with the sides of his hands. "Going to slay them all," he was boasting. "Hah!" He pirouetted and kicked. But then at the door, as he was leaving, he'd said softly, "Proud of you, Liz."
"I beg your pardon."
"I'm proud of you, getting invited to these conferences. You're an important woman. Congratulations."
She answered gruffly, which was her way. But for a moment, as she had closed the door, she couldn't help enjoying the reflection that after ten years their marriage, unlike her friend's of the earlier phone call, was a success, albeit a quiet one.
Now, letting herself into the house they had sacrificed so much to buy, she found the space oddly still, with curtains drawn and only the faint reflections of sodium streetlighting laid in strips and snakes across the carpet. Without wasting time switching on lights, she hurried to the foot of the stairs, started to climb-and for a moment thought that Taurus the cat must have got trapped in one of the bedrooms. For quite suddenly there was a low whimpering from above.
Elizabeth froze on the third or fourth stair. There it came again. And it most certainly wasn't Taurus. Nor any other cat. She advanced stealthily. Twice she stopped for a few seconds, then again paused in mid-step. By the time she had reached the upstairs landing it was clear that what she was hearing was the sound of a woman approaching climax.
Elizabeth was stunned. She felt the strength drain away through her body, leaving her faint and trembling. Perhaps she was going to fall. The stairs were darkly carpeted below her. Then a great surge of anger brought the energy flowing back. For heaven's sake, the cheek! She took two great strides toward the powder-blue gloss of the bedroom door. But stopped just as her hand was about to settle on the handle. For of course, there was the taxi down there in the street, its meter eating into her limited budget. There was the night train which left in less than half an hour, and there was the international conference that would look so impressive on her curriculum.
The whimpering went on and on. Elizabeth stood quite still and listened. The sound of this other woman's pleasure seemed to fill her whole being. For a moment she thought she would go mad. Then she turned away, tiptoed to her study, carefully released the forgotten page from her typewriter and sneaked back downstairs to the taxi.
The ride to the station she experienced as a whirl of urban landscape and intense but unfocused anxiety. Bits and pieces of buildings, red lights and busy pedestrian crossings were all mixed up with the echoed whimperings from behind that light blue door, so that at times she wasn't sure whether she was most worried about the possibility that she might miss her train or the fact that her husband was at this moment making passionate love to she didn't know whom.
On the train, however, after buffet-bar coffee and at least five cigarettes, she began to get a grip on herself, and when finally she snuggled into her bunk, the dark and regular swaying motion and the quiet, respectful behaviour of her fellow passengers combined to bestow a feeling almost of composure.
So Richard was betraying her. But how long had this been going on? Perhaps tonight was the first time. Or it could have been a question of weeks, months, even years. She had been to other conferences in the past. Perhaps every time she was away he had somebody over. Certainly he had moved fast enough this evening. Then there were the times he went away for a few days, to visit some new site somewhere, or to look at some piece of equipment at a trade fair. Who was to say that he didn't take a girl with him? Or even those days when he worked at home on his computer while she was at the hospital? The opportunities were endless. When you thought about it, he could perfectly well have betrayed her every other day during the whole ten years of their marriage.
To stem a returning sense of outrage and hysteria, Elizabeth Hobbs consciously clung to the notion that she was a practical modern woman who could handle whatever life threw at her. She stared across the gloom of the compartment. The rhythm of the carriage slithering over its rails seemed to help. She lifted a corner of curtain and caught glimpses of the countryside. What was it she had so confidently said to her friend Joyce on the phone that afternoon? "I'm sure if you look back over the whole experience you'll find it was positive. Its ending like this doesn't make your whole life with Ken meaningless." Well, what of the dark landscape of her own marriage, now that night had so suddenly fallen on it?
Richard. She couldn't remember whether he had asked her or she him. Certainly they had both been very happy to marry. They'd lived together for a year after leaving university, then his company had asked him to move south. If she were to follow him she would have to give up her job. In recognition of this sacrifice, they married. Anyway, they had been such lovers then, and life so excitingly all before them.
In London she hadn't even tried to get a new job, since what she planned to do was have a family right away. At least two, probably three children. Elizabeth was a woman who hated cant and fashion so instinctively that she had always been outspokenly anti-feminist. She had wanted to be a wife, a mother, to care for Richard, to care for children. Without subscribing to any particular institution, she was a religious woman. She believed in things. She yearned to create a world of ceremony and innocence: the ideal family, such as she had enjoyed in her own childhood.
Except that two years had passed, three, and no baby arrived. They did test after test. They talked about it as two intelligent, well-balanced people would. They considered fertility drugs, test-tube fertilisation and other contemporary wizardry, and ruled them out. Science graduate as she was, such manipulation somehow ran counter to Elizabeth's notion of what was right. She wanted children, but it was important not to have to turn the world upside down in order to have them. They must be an expression of all that was natural in life.
Anyway, the tests all came up negative. Apparently there was nothing wrong with either Richard or Elizabeth. The hospital said that children were bound to come sooner or later. One gynaecologist, however, admitted that perhaps there was some odd incompatibility of which his profession knew nothing. In any event, there came a point where they simply stopped talking about it. Enough was enough.
Elizabeth went back to work in the pharmacy of a large London hospital with an exciting research team. She was talented. She enjoyed her job and progressed rapidly. Yet she could not shake off a sense of disappointment. This was not what she had wanted of life. And at home, the couple's relationship seemed to have lost momentum: they were no longer quite sure what they were supposed to be doing. Yes, they made love regularly, yes, they went on exciting, even extravagant holidays, had friends over to lavish meals, accepted invitations to parties and enjoyed them. But the feeling that all was before them had now gone; indeed, there would be moments when Elizabeth in particular was struck by an acute sense of futility. They had been trapped, she would find herself thinking, in a backwater, denied entrance to the great ocean of life. And although she was aware that such thoughts were foolish and that she was very lucky to have a career which allowed her much fulfilment, nevertheless whenever she consciously prayed-which was almost every day, perhaps on the tube or in the hospital-it was to ask God please to show her some way forward, please, please, not to let things go on the same forever.
She wondered about this now, watching villages glance by like hallucinations, tens of thousands of sleeping families. She wondered if that sense of frustration hadn't always been more profound than she had liked to think. Her increasingly sour sense of humour, for example, or the way their sex life oscillated from the most routine satisfaction of physical need to a desperate search for novelty which often bordered on the perverse. There was so much wistfulness there, so much making one thing do for another. Not to mention her obsession with the cat, cuddling the animal on her knee at her desk late into the night, buying double-cream for him at weekends. And perhaps it wasn't true that they didn't talk about it. Perhaps they talked about it all the time. When he said he was proud of her, what was he doing if not consoling her for her childlessness? When she told him to look after the cat, what was it but a parodied appeal to fatherliness?
In the space of two hours, with that relentless back-and-forth thoughts have when sleep will not come, Elizabeth Hobbs systematically broke down a years'-old vision of her marriage and substituted it with another. She and her husband were no longer two mutually supporting lovers and friends wisely accepting their destiny and using their talents to develop interesting and socially valuable lives and careers. No, they were two bored, frustrated workaholics who had proved inadequate to deal with the curse of infertility. He resented her for caring about it so much. She resented him for not caring about it enough. In the end, to inject excitement into his dull, futureless life, Richard had started to have affairs.
Suddenly she hated him. Why hadn't he been more frank with her? Why couldn't they have talked, somehow forced their way out of the corner together? No, he simply introduced deception into the general morass of tainted feelings, satisfied himself in the crudest possible way, and the hell with her.
Clearly there was nothing left for her now. God hadn't let her become a mother, and now even her cherished role of wife was meaningless. Richard had betrayed her terribly. Sobbing silently in the humming dark, Elizabeth passed a wretched night.
the following morning, in her hotel room, this woman on the brink of middle age made herself up more carefully than usual and didn't even go over her talk. Making her way to the lecture hall, she found herself unusually vibrant and aggressive, answering back sharply to everybody who spoke to her. What was more, she was invaded by a dangerous sense of possibility. All those people round her. How many of them were using the conference as a cover for illicit affairs, a hunting ground for lovers and mistresses? How many of them, she asked herself, cared about their work one hundred per cent? Had they really dressed so smartly, put on their perfumes and aftershave, their fine watches, jewelry and cosmetics, merely to discuss the latest in drug development? Weren't they all, on the contrary, quite deliberately jostling each other here in the foyer, vaguely hoping that, as in a one-in-a-million collision between atomic particles, some wonderful thing might happen, some new world be revealed? Heaven knows, Elizabeth thought, she had herself been approached often enough at conferences, even when all her body language had been screaming unavailable. This was life. Cut and thrust. Bring and buy. Commerce. There was no innocence and precious little ceremony. That was merely a façade that children saw. And for her, there would be no children.
"from this,"-Elizabeth Hobbs clicked out one slide-"to this"-she introduced another-"is, as I think you will all agree, a remarkable development."
The screen showed clearly a bladder with the tiniest of tumours in the top right hand quadrant. The learned audience leaned forward in their seats. They were impressed, and immediately her presentation was over, the questions began. In particular, one handsome young Dutch researcher earnestly suggested ways in which the new contrast media Doctor Hobbs had spoken of might be further improved if used in tandem with the new generation of X-ray electronics his own company was developing. Very soon, he claimed, the body would harbour no secrets at all. No sooner had something changed within, than they would be able to produce an image of it without. Elizabeth smiled at the final applause, feeling sick inside. The tension of speaking over, she found herself limp and lost. Why, oh, why had he done it?
But now someone had grasped her firmly by the elbow. "Excellent," a voice said. It was Professor Harvey, administrative head of her London hospital's research programme. "Well done." He had been waiting for her as she came off the platform. "Some fascinating prospects too, by the looks of it. Lots to pursue." Elizabeth looked at him quite blankly. Professor Harvey explained: "Our Dutch friend from Med Elec, you know. It seems there's a very real chance of private sector sponsorship. In fact I've already invited him to dinner. If you want to come along, we could pick his brains together." She said, "I'd love to."
The Dutch researcher turned out to have other arrangements for dinner, but without further discussion, Elizabeth and Phil, as he always invited everyone in the department to call him, ate together anyway in an Angus Steak House. When, after a bottle of excellent wine, she burst into tears which were at once deliberate and genuine, and began to tell him that her marriage was a disaster, that her husband had been betraying her for years. Professor Harvey's chosen method of consolation was to retail similarly conventional stories of marital infelicity. His wife hadn't wanted sex for some years now. Yes, she would occasionally do it, but only out of a sense of duty, which was worse than not doing it at all. She never wanted to go anywhere or do anything, but complained bitterly if he wasn't around every moment of his spare time. He felt trapped, but of course could never leave her because of the children.
Throughout this conversation they maintained a lot of eye contact, managed to make a few wry jokes, touched knees under the table twice. Leaving the restaurant he put an arm around her waist and she immediately turned to embrace and kiss him. They kissed deeply and with some urgency before returning to her hotel room.
Where the surprise came. Elizabeth knew that she was acting out of bitterness and resentment. So what she expected was merely a brief bout of pride-satisfying sex, a revenge fuck, if you will, against all her better principles. With deliberate self-destructiveness she was stamping on her life, on her vision of life, because it hadn't worked, because she had been treated badly. It was the symbolism that counted for her, the having done it, not any pleasure that might be derived. And instead, this tall, grizzle-haired man whom she had worked beside for five years and more without ever thinking of him as a lover, proved unspeakably exciting and tender: the way he touched, the way he kissed, the way he spoke to her so softly, undressed her so gently. Before long, Elizabeth realised she was in for a long night of erotic adventure such as she had previously thought of as existing only in the worst kind of fiction. The older man's genuine affection and the urgency of his desire soon inspired a reciprocal sensuality in herself that she would never have imagined possible. The plushness of the expenses-paid hotel room and the poignant awareness that most probably this was a never-to-be-repeated experience did the rest.
having thus spent Friday night weeping in the train over her past life, Saturday night revelling, and Sunday night weeping on the train at the thought that the future might never again offer her anything so intense in the way of pleasure and emotion, Elizabeth Hobbs was mentally and physically exhausted when she at last climbed into bed with her husband on the Monday evening-to discover that he wanted to make love. She was shocked.
"Come on." Richard nudged his knee between her thighs. "I feel on form tonight. How about it?"
She hadn't meant to say anything immediately. She had planned to let the dust settle, see how she felt, keep an eye on him over the next few weeks perhaps. See how she felt about Phil, too.
"I really go for big-time successful women, you know." He was whispering with his mouth against her ear in the dark. His hand was at the hem of her nightdress. "Like to take you from behind against the podium with the whole auditorium watching."
"Oh shut up," she said coldly.
He drew back. After a moment he said with contrition: "Sorry. Is something up? Read the mood wrong." When she didn't reply he went on softly: "Thought after the tension of the big occasion you might want to unwind with Uncle Dick. You know? It did go well, didn't it? Thing is by the way, I'll have to be off myself tomorrow and Wednesday. Shopping centre site we've got to check out in Dunbarton of all God-forsaken places. Thought you might want to give a hardworking man one for the road." That did it.
"Dear God, the hypocrisy!" she said.
"You what?"
"The frigging hypocrisy! We might as well separate at once."
"What are you talking about?"
"You. About your little trips. I know exactly what you're going to do in Dun-bloody-barton, if that's where you're really going, if you're not just going to be tucked away in a bed and breakfast in Walthamstow or something."
"But Liz," he protested. "What's got into you?"
Turning abruptly in the bed, she said, tense and low: "Now listen, Ric, last Friday night I had to come back to pick up something I'd forgotten and I heard everything. No, don't interrupt. I heard everything, okay? And in the end I don't even really blame you. Our lives have got pretty boring and if you want to cheer yours up that way, then fine by me. But don't come this lovey-dovey hypocritical slush now when all you're doing is warming up for tomorrow's poke with Little Miss Hot-Between-the-Legs."
There followed a long silence as they stared at each other across the gloom of their matrimonial bed.
"What exactly did you hear?" he said at last.
"You know perfectly well."
"Tell me."
"A woman," she said. "Coming. Here, in this room."
"And so?"
She couldn't believe it. "What do you mean, and so? She wasn't masturbating, was she?"
"No"-and he actually managed a strangled laugh-"She was screwing Ken."
"You what?"
Ken was one of Ric's karate partners and husband to the friend who had phoned Elizabeth on Friday afternoon with an update on her sad divorce story.
"Sometimes when you're away for a couple of days, I've let Ken have the house to sleep with his girlfriend. They've got nowhere to go and he doesn't want Joyce to know. He feels it would upset her unnecessarily."
"You let Ken use the house to have an affair?"
"I was at karate. I dropped the keys on the way."
"But you must be out of your mind!"
"I just felt sorry for him. You know what a pain in the butt Joyce has always been. He says he can't afford a hotel because of the crazy settlement she's insisting on. And he's desperately in love with this girl."
When his wife just lay there speechless, Richard finally realised: "God, what an awful weekend you must have had. I'm so sorry. If I'd ever thought you... How careless of me. But you know I'd never be unfaithful, come on, Liz, you know I'm not that kind. Listen, let's make a pact, if you ever, ever, have any sort of doubt about me, talk to me at once and we'll sort it out. I mean, phone me, even if I'm in Australia. But don't spend a whole weekend suffering like that."
He pushed his face across to kiss her and she burst into tears. Her body shuddered. He stroked her lightly, not trying to make love now, but just to comfort. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he muttered over and over. "Forgive me. What I've put you through."
Some time later, despite Elizabeth's exhaustion, it was Richard who went to sleep first. Meanwhile his wife lay, hands behind her head, watching shadows stretch and flit across the ceiling. Somehow it seemed impossible simply to return to her old vision of things. She had been so sure of his infidelity, mapped out its logistics and emotional motivation so thoroughly. Mightn't it be, she wondered, that this business with Ken was just some tall story he had always had up his sleeve in case of a crisis? Perhaps. But she would never know, would she? Because even if she phoned Ken and he confirmed, it might merely be because Richard had brought him in as an accomplice. Or then again, if he denied everything it might equally be because he did care very much about Joyce not finding out. She couldn't know. Anyway, what she had done was done now. Justified or not.
Elizabeth propped herself up on one elbow, much as she had on the train two evenings ago. She looked at her husband. Either he was entirely innocent, as his sleep-smoothed features seemed to suggest, or he was quite ingenious. Then she smiled and almost burst out laughing. In any event, he had certainly given her one of the most exciting weekends of her life. Too bad for him if he hadn't had the fun she had. She leaned over and kissed him lightly below one eye.
Perhaps ten minutes later another thought occurred. She shook her husband awake and very determinedly coaxed him into some sweet if rather predictable lovemaking. Because if, by some miracle, she told herself now, responding eagerly to his kisses, this weekend fling should turn out to have offered the answer to her wifely prayer, if by some extraordinary combination of chance or divine intervention her old, old, dream was about to come true, then it would be important to have one's tracks well covered. Wouldn't it? The same went for any other affairs she might have, of course. What a calculating creature I have become in just three days, Elizabeth Hobbs mused, pressing down on her husband. n
