A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor

Author:Elizabeth Mavor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

‘I feel damnably unhappy!’

‘Might you be taking yourself a little too seriously?’

‘You always try to diminish what I do and feel.’

‘Nonsense! You must see that in view of your previous aptitude your present behaviour seems strangely unadaptable.’

‘How “adaptable”, as you call it, should one be?’ Hugh asked.

His mother straightened up from the plant she’d been attending and laughed. To him it was a cruel sound. Exultant. A savage ‘Ha! Ha!’ among the trumpets.

‘Perhaps you were too well organised,’ she jeered, ‘with your wife and your mistress, altogether too comfortable.’ She turned back to her plant, her energetic fingers teak-coloured from crushing and stripping away the sugary infestation of greenfly.

Their bickering was the aftermath of confusion caused by a peremptory ring from the hospital announcing the immediate return of the crash victims. Their return—wounded, bedridden and helpless—was timed to coincide disastrously with the opening of the Rococo Symposium.

For Hugh, disordered by the events of the last week, and indeed for many weeks before that, his mother’s offer to accommodate the two invalids had come as an enormous relief. Jessica had already been farmed out with the sympathetic mother of a school-friend.

‘You sound as though you’re glad,’ he persisted, wanting to provoke a row, if only to relax his inner tension. A moderate row yet sufficiently cathartic. He missed Belle.

‘Glad!’ he repeated.

‘I think I am rather glad!’

‘Why?’

‘Mere pride of sex probably. I don’t enjoy seeing my own sex so shamelessly taken advantage of.’

‘They like it!’

‘So people will tell one. It’s perfectly true, of course, that the world was a much less complicated place when everyone thought as you do. I also see there’s something very fetching about the idea. I mean the idea of born to rule because of your sex: that whatever you did which affected the minds, bodies and possessions of over half the world’s population was not only natural but right. I think if I’d been a man I’d have liked that too.’

‘Some women do like it,’ he insisted. ‘Being exploited. You don’t, but the really feminine ones do.’

‘Very possibly,’ said his mother. ‘I suppose it’s a form of despair—liking it. Though sometimes I feel frightened when I think of what horrors may fill the vacuum created by the cynicism of people like you!’

‘It’s not cynicism, it’s anthropology!’

‘I know, I know. You’ll tell me, very broadly speaking, that there are two kinds of women: the matriarchal ones who, in a male-dominated society, become militant and noisy out of frustration, and the vulnerable, raped captives who either keep quiet or become nags!’

‘Which are you?’

‘Guess!’

‘… though sexual tyranny has nothing on the tyranny of parenthood,’ said Hugh, nimbly changing tack. ‘One can’t even hit one’s mother because there’s some ridiculously unfair inbuilt taboo which prevents it. Mother and son! My God!’

She laughed again. ‘It’s really a clashing of jealousies. You are annoyed that I gave you the day as the French say, and I must agree that it is annoying to be made, created, without one’s permission…’

‘… and you are annoyed that you aren’t a man?’

‘No! No! you’re wrong there.

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