Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

‘I imagined it was Goebbels,’ said Lucille, her eyes deadpan but her lipsticked mouth twisting like jelly worms to keep the laughter in. ‘I did a bloody good job of it.’

‘You must be thirsty,’ said Venetia. ‘Henry! Oh, where’s he got to? Henry!’

Bettina adjusted a wonky peg on the line.

‘Well, well, well,’ came a man’s voice. ‘My wife, doing housework.’

Bart. Standing at the conservatory doors in white linen trousers and a blue shirt, holding a glass and a cigarette. Appearing the way his mother always seemed to appear at doorways – lazily, casually. Cat-like. He was thin, almost as thin as he’d been for his role as Edward Crabbe. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, showing brown arms, and his face too was brown, except for the squint-creases around his eyes. He had a folded-up beach blanket draped over one arm.

‘Bart.’ She said it carefully, as if testing out the word.

‘Bettina. You look well.’ He saw Ivy, who was staring at him, goldfish-mouthed, all her poise gone.

‘This is Ivy, my friend and colleague. Ivy, this is my husband, Bart.’

He tipped an imaginary hat to her. She regained her equilibrium – good for her – and merely nodded, her eyes giving out nothing.

‘I’ll get out of your hair,’ said Bart. ‘You won’t see me much. Have fun with your friend.’ A slight emphasis on that last word. He strolled past them and went down the garden, towards the path that led to the beach.

Venetia and Lucille had been watching all this. A pair of thirsty old sponges. Venetia looked upset – she hadn’t known quite how bad things were. Lucille, clearly, had.

‘Henry!’ shrieked Venetia, the sound like a starter pistol. Bettina snatched up her basket and they rushed into the house.

Bettina’s room had a view of the countryside. She used to loathe the countryside, the scraggly, parochial quaintness of it. The unsexiness of it. She took her clothes bag out of the basket and put each item – trousers, blouse, cardigan, dress, underwear – in the correct drawers. Her toothbrush she left on the dressing table. She brought out the wrapped-up pistol and put it on top of the wardrobe, standing on tiptoes and nudging it with her fingers until it was out of sight. She returned to the window. A few cows, a gypsy caravan glinting far off in the distance. Clear skies save for the odd sneeze of cloud. She started crying – a sudden storm, the kind that has you bent, that aches through the middle.

They spent the days at the beach mostly, lying side by side on a picnic blanket and reading their respective books. Monty’s old pavilion had been taken down fifteen years earlier, but not before one of its great white gull-shitted tarps had been snatched away by a gale-force wind and blown up into the cliffs, where it had snagged itself on a rock. It was there still – a crumpled white mess, high up, reflecting the light on sunny days so that the eye was always drawn to it.

The beach was a long stretch of pale sand and grey pebbles curving off into the far distance and usually empty of people – twenty miles along it joined Brighton Beach, and this was where you went if you wanted people. Bart was most likely up near the cove-end, partly enclosed by an arm of jagged rocks – he’d always liked dabbling his feet in the rock pools there. When they came down for breakfast in the mornings he’d already be gone, his empty porridge bowl left on the table next to an ashtray with three butts. He took his evening meal at a nearby pub which served fresh fish.

On the second night, while Ivy was playing solitaire in her bedroom, Bettina went downstairs to find her mother – also playing solitaire, funnily enough – in the sitting room. There was a glass of some sort of spirit at her right-hand side.

‘Where’s Lucille?’

‘She’s gone to the cinema with Bart. They’re running an old Clark Gable.’ She sipped her drink, eyes on the cards laid out. ‘I’d have liked to have seen it myself, but that would mean I was picking sides.’ She placed a four of clubs on a five of diamonds. Made the row neat with a little push of her fingernail.

‘Don’t be silly. You should have gone.’ Bettina sat opposite her mother. ‘I’m sorry you’re stuck in the middle like this.’

‘Not as sorry as I am.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘Fix your marriage.’

‘What marriage? I don’t have a marriage to fix.’

Venetia put her cards down. She took her cigarette out of the ashtray and inhaled, her mouth wrinkles deep and long, like seismic ruptures. ‘Anything that is broken can be fixed,’ she said.

‘So wise.’

‘Don’t belittle me. What I’m saying is true.’

‘Really? Tell that to someone with a shattered spine.’

‘Shut up, you silly child, and listen for once in your life.’

Sighing, Bettina propped her elbows on the table and dropped her chin into her palms. She was going to start on about how marriage was hard work and compromises must be made.

‘You and Bart are both dominant characters. You’re defensive and full of yourselves and neither of you knows how to submit to another’s will. With your father and I, he was the more dominant. He had the edge. And so I would submit to him. Don’t make that face – it wasn’t because he was a man, it was because I’m pragmatic. My own father taught me much about power and so I came into my marriage well equipped. I want you to listen to what I’m about to say next, and if you absorb at least one thing, let it be this: everything is about power.’ She nodded to herself and drank from her glass. ‘Everything is about power.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Bettina.

Venetia slammed her glass down on the table. ‘Everything! Every relationship, every interaction, small or large. From buying a set of curtains from the haberdashery to marriage and child-rearing. Parents, employers, friends, children. Everyone, everything.’ She lit a cigarette from the embers of her dying one, maintaining eye contact. ‘People who think they’ve won all the power don’t necessarily have all the power. And those who exert dominance are often weak little children underneath it all. Your father was weak. I submitted to him because I was truly strong. His shows of strength were just that – a show. And so, every time – are you listening? And so, every time he got his own way, I pictured him as a small brat at a fair who pouts and rages until he finally gets that ice cream. Enjoy that ice cream, I’d think. It tastes good, but it’s going to rot your teeth and make you fat, and oops – look, you just dropped it all over yourself! And look at me. No ice cream on me. I didn’t want the ice cream, I didn’t need the ice cream, I was already full from dinner – nourishing beef and cabbage stew. Now go and clean yourself up, little boy.’

Bettina started laughing – she couldn’t help it. ‘So what you’re essentially saying is that you dealt with your debasement by enjoying a gloating sense of superiority.’

‘No! The point is, I didn’t need the ice cream because I was already full. The ice cream is power. Or rather, illusory power.’

Bettina dropped her face into her hands and snorted out air. Ice cream! Preposterous. ‘I’m not capable. I’m just not. I’d rather walk across hot coals than go grovelling to Bart.’

‘What about the children?’

‘Don’t bring them into it,’ she said, wearily.

Venetia lowered her head and said, in a quiet voice, ‘And must you flaunt that girl in his face? I wasn’t born yesterday. I have eyes. Those little looks you give each other.’ She shook her head. ‘Lucille sees it too, and then she sees her son alone, at the beach, and I’m sorry, Bettina, but if I were in her place, I’d think you were the devil. It makes it very hard for me to stay on your side.’