Free Wicked Women by Fay Weldon Page A

when we should reflect upon our sins and consider the pain we cause others, especially those who have no choice but to put up with us; this trauma of self-knowledge, self-revelation, culminating on Easter Friday, leaving us Saturday to shop and recover, so that on Sunday we can wake exhilarated to our new selves—and then have Monday to calm down a bit and prepare to get back to work. Should, should! Mostly we just give each other cards and Easter eggs and are grateful for the holiday.
    David is in his early forties. He has not very much reddish hair and an abundant, very red beard. He wears a tweed jacket. He is now a professor. He used to be a mere lecturer but his Polytechnic turned into a University and voilà! there he was, Professor Frood, a pillar of society: looked up to and trusted: a family man. A really nice guy, too: the trustful kind, prone to loving not wisely but too well, as the best people are. But that is all in the past, of course. Professors can’t muck about. There’s too much at stake. All that a man can do is hope that the past, burrowing away like some mole through the pleasant green fields of his present, doesn’t surface and spoil everything in an explosion of mud and dirt.
    This particular Thursday before Easter, at two minutes past four in the afternoon, it seemed as if it very well might.
    Milly Frood is sometimes spoken of by friends as Frilly Mood. They’re being ironic. She’s a really un-frilly, serious, nice, good woman. She has straight hair and a fringe and a plump, rather expressionless, round face and a body well draped in unnoticeable clothes. The Frood children, Sherry and Baf, now in their teenage years, have never wittingly eaten sugar or meat under their own roof: Frilly Mood has seen to that. The kids are healthy if a little thin, and very polite. Frilly Mood’s done well by them. It is no crime to be serious.
    The shop is between the Delicatessen and the Estate Agents, down the High Street. It’s an upmarket gift shop, selling the kind of decorative things nobody needs but everyone likes to have, from papier-mâché bowls (French) in deep, rich colours, at £65; black elephant pill boxes (Malaysian) at £2.75; fluffy rabbits (Korean) at £12.35; little woolly lambs (New Zealand) at £8.50 and decorated Easter eggs (English) at £4.87, and so on. Pre-Easter is these days almost as busy a time as pre-Christmas. Everyone feels the need for a little unnecessary something extra, or what is life all about? Where are the rewards?
    David was helping Milly out in the shop over the pre-Easter rush. And why should he not? The Poly (sorry, University) was closed for the holidays (sorry, vacation) and in Milly’s words, David had “nothing better to do.” His wage remained that of a lecturer no matter that he was called a professor. You can re-name everything you like, but harsh facts don’t alter just because you’ve done so. In other words, money was tight and if Milly could do without extra staff so much the better. Nevertheless, David felt that helping out was a humiliation, and blamed Milly for it. In Milly’s view a man was only working if you could see him working, and who can see a man thinking?
    The voice he recognised was that of Bettina Shepherd; the voice had a most attractive actressy double timbre (that’s in italics because it’s French, not because it has significance for this story) and it was familiar because there’d been a time when it had spoken many words of true love, murmured many a sinful suggestion into his ear. But all that had been some seven years back, a long time ago: longer, surely, than was needed to make that man now feel responsible for the man then. Do we not all grow an entirely new skin every seven years? Should a man not be allowed to start anew; as with a driving licence, should the passage of time not wipe out past misdeeds?
    Daddy was the man Bettina referred to: he was at the back of the shop where the inexpensive trinkets were. Bettina