Free Wicked Women by Fay Weldon Page B

was looking peculiarly attractive in a cashmere dress, in seasonal yellow, belted by a linked chain which for all anyone could tell was made of pure gold; the whole setting off her bosomy figure, little waist and black hair to advantage. Daddy was grey-suited, good-looking, gentlemanly and wore a solid gold tie-pin. David thought he looked extremely boring and rather stupid, but David would, wouldn’t he?
    “David, this has to stop,” Bettina had said to him in the History Tutorial Room one day, seven years ago. “You are a married man and I’m going to be married too. The ceremony is next week. I wanted to tell you earlier but didn’t like to, because I didn’t want to upset you. You are the only man I’ll ever really love but I have to think of my future. We have to be realistic. You could never support two homes in any comfort and I’m just not cut out for employment. I’m not that kind of person.” He’d thought his heart would break. He was surprised it went on beating. Later he’d told himself he was lucky to be out of a trivial, passing affair with such an unfeeling, whimsical person, but he’d never really believed himself. The truth was that he’d taken no real pleasure since in Milly’s straight hair and earnest face; He could see Milly was good, but what a man wanted was something more than honest worth. Sometimes he felt guilty because others called his wife Frilly Mood, ironically, but then he’d tell himself she’d always been like that. Not his doing.
    His blood ran cold —I say this advisedly. When David heard Bettina’s voice—last heard on the floor behind the sofa in the History Tutorial Room—echoing through the shop at two minutes past four, he felt a chill strike down his head to his right shoulder, into his arm and down to his fingers, and he had the feeling that if that section of blood didn’t warm up before it got back up to his heart, that organ would freeze and this time stop once and for all. So much a heart can stand, no more.
    David turned his back on his customers, lest he be seen and recognised by Bettina, and busied himself looking for a Peruvian crucifixion scene, grateful that his heart had survived the shock. But not before he had seen the little girl obediently leave her mother’s side and head through shopping bags and spring-clad elbows towards her father. Bettina, near the door, was clearly interested in purchasing the papier-mâché bowl at £65; Daddy flicked through Easter cards at the back of the shop.
    The Peruvian crucifixion scene consisted of six pieces in brightly glittering tin—a crimson Judas, a gold Jesus, a navy Pontius Pilate, a scarlet Mary Magdalene, a pale blue Madonna, and a black cross.
    The little girl had red hair like David’s own. Bettina had black hair; Daddy’s was fair and painfully sparse, as if responsibility had dragged a lot of it out. The little girl must be six years old. Her front teeth were missing, to prove it.
    The Easter cards were the cheapest things sold in the shop. For 75p you could buy cards depicting bunnies and chickens; from there on up to £2 you could find anything an artist in a time of recession could invent. Milly and David Frood saw the innovation of the Easter card as one of the more sinister accomplishments of the Greetings Card Industry. Whoever in their youth had heard of an Easter card? All part of the commercialisation of religion, etc., etc. Obliged to live by commerce, the Froods despised commerce. Who doesn’t?
    Such things pass quickly through the mind when sights are seared into a man’s heart, and he doesn’t know what to think or feel, and he’s gazing at a shelf.
    David felt a familiar hand upon his arm. It was his wife’s. “Perhaps we should have another baby,” she said, to his further astonishment.
    “Why now?” he asked. “Why mention it now in the middle of such a rush?”
    “Because we’re always in a rush,” said Milly Frood, answering back, quite out of character, “as