Philippa Gregory - Alice Hartley‘s Happiness

‘What?’ she said again.

‘I am sick of you,’ Charles said simply, throwing strategy to the winds and telling the truth for once. ‘I am sick of the awful stews you make, and your herbal remedies. I am sick of tea made from flowers, and carrot cake which sticks to the roof of my mouth for hours, even days, after I have finished eating. I am sick of sleeping with the curtains open so that you can have moonlight on your face and be in touch with your lunar cycle. I am sick of your trailing dresses and your weird coloured pop-socks. I want a divorce.’

Alice stood as still as if she had been turned into a pillar of genuine, unrefined rock salt. She pulled the stripy college scarf away from her mouth and, to his horror, Charles saw she was smiling. Worse than that – oh God, much worse – she was laughing at him.

‘Miranda Bloomfeather,’ she said with uncanny prescience.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Charles said weakly. He tried, without success, to erase the picture of Miranda Bloomfeather’s brown buttocks from his mind. Despite his professorial chair in Applied Psychology he could not rid himself of a superstitious belief that his wife could read his thoughts.

‘Miranda Bloomfeather,’ Alice said again. ‘A natural D. You gave her A minus last term. You must think we are all as half-witted as she is.’

A vision of Miranda Bloomfeather’s silky tanned thighs pressed demurely side-by-side under her denim miniskirt dashed through Charles’s mind like a wasp through a picnic. He resolutely turned his eyes and thoughts to the pile of the carpet under his wife’s bare splayed feet. He did not know whom she meant by ‘we’ and he feared she had been indulging in vulgar gossip with Miranda Bloomfeather’s personal tutor – a fellow-member of his wife’s homeopathic consciousness-raising group. Another nut-case woman, he thought miserably.

He tried to recapture the initiative by a swift return to the discussion he had planned. ‘We have both changed, Alice,’ he said sonorously. ‘We have both grown during the time of our marriage. Indeed, we have grown because of our marriage. Now we both have new needs. You and I together must think how we are going to satisfy these needs – yours as well as mine.’

‘Miranda Bloomfeather,’ Alice said, smiling broadly. She opened her scarlet mouth showing large white teeth. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.’

‘Now look here,’ said Charles. ‘I am trying to have a serious and civilized conversation with you, Alice. It is nothing to do with Miranda. That is a quite separate issue which I will discuss when you are feeling calmer.’

As usual, the suggestion that Alice was not calm sent her into a towering and uncontrollable rage. ‘Calm?’ she shrieked. ‘I am calm! But I’ll tell you what I’m not! I’m not clammy! I’m not creepy! I’m not an impotent old stick who can only get it up with a nineteen-year-old on his office floor!’

Charles could feel a throbbing in his temples which meant that Alice was giving him one of his tension headaches. ‘We won’t talk now.’ He got up swiftly from his chair and went towards the door. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. ‘I can feel a headache coming on. I deplore your tone and language, Alice. I shall be raising this at our marital counselling session tomorrow.’

‘Who started it?’ she demanded instantly. ‘Who started up about the carrot cake? Who wanted a divorce five seconds ago, and now wants a quiet life?’

Charles turned, his hand on the door. ‘I do,’ he said. He meant he wanted the divorce but Alice screeched with laughter at his assent.

‘I’ll give you a quiet life!’ she exclaimed. With one bracelet-manacled hand she swept the blue Ionian pottery vases off the mantelpiece so they crashed into the fireplace. The bunch of very old dried flowers in the cold grate exploded into dust and sterile pollen.

‘There!’ she shouted defiantly.

Charles looked at her with weary satisfaction. ‘You just make work for yourself, Alice,’ he said and went out, closing the door behind him with the restrained click of a man who knows himself to be in the right.

‘Ha!’ Alice said to the unresponsive door. Less certainly, with a little quaver in her voice she said it again: ‘Ha!’

She could hear him going softly upstairs, his suede shoes making little crunching noises on the cork matting. Ten years ago he would have wrestled her down to the floor and taken her with passion and anger on the hearthrug among the shards of china and the dried flowers. Five years ago he would have walked out, but she would have run after him in tears and they would have made up in the comfort of their large pine bed. Even at their most recent quarrel, last month, he had pompously departed but then thought of something so irresistible that he had come back in to say: ‘And another thing…’ and they had fought on until they reached a compromise which each could privately call victory.

Now she stood still while the dust settled and the Arabic music moaned on. He did not come back; not even with some cutting phrase assembled on the stairs and too good to leave unsaid.

And she let him go.

Liar that he was, Charles was right for once, she thought moodily, stirring her big toe among the shreds of long-dead hydrangea. They had changed. Perhaps it was time to move on.

But she was damned if he was going to have it all his own way! Alice was not one of those injured wives who wear betrayal like a mourning brooch. She could not face the thought of Charles’s colleagues’ muted condolences when she met them in the university health food shop. They would rally round to let her weep on their shoulders while they patted her back and rubbed discreetly against her front. They would sympathize to her face, and when their wives were listening; but when they were alone with Charles they would say ‘ho, ho, ho’.

‘Ho, ho, ho,’ Alice whispered resentfully into the quiet room. ‘Ho bloody ho.’

It was so ageing to be left for a nineteen-year-old, she thought miserably. She looked at herself in the mirror over the marble mantelpiece. The lights were darkened and the reflection was kind. But no one could look from Alice to Miranda Bloomfeather and have the least doubt that Charles Hartley had swopped his old wife for a young mistress. Alice rested her face against the cold surface of the mantelpiece and struggled against the profound blow to her deepest self – her vanity.

There was a tap on the front door. It was so soft that for a moment she thought she had misheard it. But then it came again, louder, two taps. Alice glanced at her reflection in the mirror, impatiently tweaked off the djellaba, threw back the mass of her dark hair and went out into the hall and opened the door.

There was a young man on the doorstep. When Alice opened the door he pulled off his woolly bobble-hat and smiled nervously.

‘Oh!’ he said. His voice was light, shy. His smile was engaging. His close-cropped brown hair was curly, his pebble glasses magnified his eyes, which were pale and blue. Alice felt a rush of unexpected and uncontrollable lust.

‘Mrs Hartley!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am sorry to trouble you so late, but we were moving scenery later than we meant.’

Alice noted the large removal van behind him. She tossed back her hair and glowed at him. ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘Won’t you come in? I don’t quite know what this is all about?’

He stepped lightly over the doorstep. The hall was narrow. Alice turned so that her large rounded breasts brushed against his denim jacket.

‘It’s Suffix Theatre Players,’ he said. His voice quavered into a little squeak but he soon had it under control again. ‘We’re doing a play “The Intruder”, and we need a psychiatrist’s couch. Your husband very kindly said we could borrow his. I’ve come to collect it. But perhaps I’m a bit late.’