Free Wicked Women by Fay Weldon

she stared up at it, mouth open and paralysed, as it arced towards her, over and over, and down, Elaine’s best bread knife with the serrated edge. But the knife missed her, and buried itself haft-deep in the lawn. Weena grabbed her bag and ran. Defoe slammed the door after her and turned the locks just as his wife and daughter came down the stairs.
    “I reckon I was just in time,” said Hattie to Bob. “If I’d come straight round, if I hadn’t waited for Amy to wake, I wouldn’t have bothered to get through to Defoe Desmond’s wife.”
    Bob had found no clean sheets, but had straightened those already on the bed and brushed away the crumbs, ready for next morning’s breakfast. She could forgive him.
    Weena went to her office and found her name off the door and her desk gone. She had no job: she was one of many similarly made redundant. Nor was Dervish there to cajole and persuade, blackmail and charm. He had left a message to say if she attempted to stay, she’d be thrown out. She could collect her wages the following week.
    Weena went to her apartment and found the lock changed and her suitcases out, and the white satin blouse, now the same grey as Elaine’s wood ash, hanging on the doorknob by way of explanation.
    “She can’t prove it,” said Weena aloud, “she’s got no proof!” but no one was listening. She thought she heard the sound of Dervish’s voice, Dervish laughing in his particular pleasure, and knew that she had lost. She had gone too far.
    Weena went to Hattie’s apartment but there was no one there. So she went round to Bob’s to cadge a bed for the night but Hattie was there and Bob wouldn’t let her in. It was no good going to Bob’s wife, who once had been Weena’s best friend, because she wasn’t speaking either.
    Weena used the last of her money taking a taxi to the crematorium where her father was buried, but it was so vast, so many crosses, so many plaques, it seemed there were more people dead in the world than alive. She lay face down on the grass and tried to commune with her father, but failed. She reckoned he had gone and she was on her own. She had driven everyone away.
    A man with a good profile in a good suit stood alone by a grave: the sky was rosy pink, the moon rising. She thought everything was beautiful. She would begin again. She felt reborn in goodness: her spirits rose: she was elated.
    “I spent the last of my money on flowers for my mother’s grave,” she said softly to the man with the profile. He was perhaps in his mid-forties. “I didn’t stop to think how I’d get home.”
    He turned his face to hers. He looked quite like her father, as she expected: intelligent, personable, interesting. It was the pattern fate made in front of you, laying out its crazy paving slabs. You got to anticipate what the next one would be. First you stepped on one, then on another: there was scarcely any choice. You tried not to fall between the cracks, and the attempt was the only free will there was. Lately they’d taken to shifting beneath her feet: she’d got things wrong. But you lost some and won some: you couldn’t blame yourself.
    “Otherwise it’s the end of the line for me too,” said Weena. “I might as well join those here gathered.”
    “They wouldn’t have you,” he said, having studied her for a little.
    “You’re far too alive for that. Let me give you a lift in my Rolls. In the presence of the dead the truly living must stick together. And so few of us are truly alive.”
    They walked off together into the sunset, if not hand in hand, at least hip to hip; defiant, in anticipation of things to come.

RUN AND ASK DADDY IF HE HAS ANY MORE MONEY
An Exercise in Italics
    W ELL NOW! IT WAS Easter and my friend David was helping his wife Milly Frood in the shop when he heard a voice he recognised crying loud and clear across the crowded room, “Run and ask Daddy if he has any more money,” and his blood ran cold.
    Easter is upon us now. It is a season