The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780345323750
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 1984-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

MARY FISHER IS DISTRAUGHT. What is happening to her life? Her happiness is held in a broken bucket, and it is all leaking away. First a letter in the post from a girl who claims to be Bobbo’s mistress. Bobbo denies it, of course he does, but Mary Fisher knows by now that such letters are usually true and that this one certainly is. She understands now that unhappiness must follow happiness, misfortune good fortune. That to love is to be vulnerable to fate and to be vulnerable is to invite attack by fate. Bobbo stops denying it, says, very well, it was true but it was over, it meant nothing, you know what typists are, they come today and go tomorrow, ha-ha; dearest Mary, I love only you, you are the light of my life, the lantern of my path; how can you demean yourself to be so downcast by the letter of a nobody? A malicious nobody, at that? And Mary Fisher forgives him; what can she do but forgive him; except lose him, and if she loses him she thinks she will die.

And how can she not forgive him, and how can she not forgive him with the imprint of Garcia’s fingers still recorded in her flesh? But oh, what is sauce for the gander is poison for the goose.

Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower at the edge of the sea, surrounded by walls of privacy and privilege, at one with nature. Once she dallied with the world, but now, with love, the world comes surging in. First it was her lover’s children, then her mother, now it comes in the shape of a policeman, knocking at the door. How the Dobermans bark and dance! She knows nothing: Bobbo knows nothing. ‘This misfortune comes from an unkind fate,’ she says.

‘It comes from your guilt,’ he says.

Mary Fisher reels as if from a blow. Is everything her fault? Of course. She it was, after all, who inspired the love that ruined them. She it was, in the carefee days of un-love, who commanded Bobbo to take her home, who allowed Ruth to be discarded, who lost his children their real mother — there is no end to her responsibilities.

Bobbo weeps. ‘It is all so like a bad dream,’ he says, denying now even that the ground she walks upon is real.

In her mind the High Tower totters, crumbles, stands derelict. It might as well.

Garcia stands at doors and listens. He delights in the downfall of the dwellers in the High Tower. ‘The higher you build,’ he says to me, ‘the further you fall. It is natural justice,’ he says.

‘Not so natural,’ I say, and laugh. She devils are beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing.

Policemen come to the tower when Mary Fisher is not in; they search it, they find the folded letter from Elsie Flower in her jewel box, in the locked drawer, along with strings of pearls from early lovers and emerald brooches, which she keeps, out of the weakness of nostalgia, secret from her Bobbo.

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