Wait Till I Tell You (15 page)

‘Not in so many words. But there’s my husband. And the family.’

‘Oh nice,’ said Diane and Josephine Cochrane knew that the beauty operative (for so said the words embroidered across the breast of the overall Diane wore) had stopped listening. She braced herself for the torture that would begin when Diane began to activate the machine. The convulsing twinges of electricity that were intended to brace and tone Jo Cochrane’s body till it would bounce if thrown any distance, the unpleasant tingling-hot, trickling-cold feeling of the soggy pads against her skin, the crabtip clips leading from them, bringing the increasingly strong electrical impulse, the live wires trailing over her deadish winter flesh, all these were bearable. Diane’s talk, though, was harder to endure.

Jo put her book very close to her face and tried to look as though she was reading, to
convey
that she was reading. Reading carried out in the usual way wouldn’t look like enough of an activity to transmit itself to Diane. Jo tried to look as though she was thinking, too. She was doing neither. Perhaps because she was actually willing Diane to keep silent, the other woman sensed this and began to talk; Jo had brought about the event by thinking about it, like a person eaten out by a secret until that secret is legible on the skin of its bearer.

‘With me it’s the little things. Nothing’s too much trouble. If I give my heart, it’s given, and there it is. The first one is the only one. If he asked me back, I’d be there over broken glass before you said knife. My mother’s the same. Been like it all her life. You can ice a cake in only so many ways, but the trim’s different each time. And the message on the top. And that’s what keeps me at it. When I seen him dancing on the floor with Andrina I says do I let him walk all over me in public or do
I
walk? The kids was all behind me and they’re attached like pins, all in a burr, close as ’edgehogs. Nothing’s too much trouble for them. I won’t let them lift a finger. That’s how I am. Can’t have other people do things for me if I could do them myself. Every little last thing.’ She paused. Her speech did not break naturally, being excitingly unplotted, but whenever she intended to do something, she stopped, as though she were not geared for simultaneity.

Diane twiddled the knobs on the machine that delivered the convulsions that were meant to make Jo’s body fit to be seen by lengthening and shortening her muscles like so many slugs with salt dropped on them. The central panel of her trunk lifted, tightened, sank. Her sides sucked at her rib cage. The currents that were to deal with her knees attacked with cramps that pulsed at her with the impartial venomousness of jellyfish. Diane spoke unblemished English save for its content and the irregular, almost genteelly specific, loss of an H at the start of a word. The drift of her speech, its lowness of muscle tone, soothed Jo but worried her too, since she was left never knowing when, or how, to respond. She became as jumpy as a deaf actor waiting for a cue. All her senses compensated for her confusion, rallying to try to divine the sense of what Diane wanted to hear.

The cubicle was built of Scandinavian-type wood, with big knots and the odd hole, that Diane had filled with plugs of cotton wool. She’d had the idea of fragrancing these one week in winter when things were slow. The walls were not secure, nor was the bench on which the seeker of beauty must lie to get her shocks. Each seeker got a fresh length of recycled-quality kitchen towel (turkey width) to go under her. This gave a good impression, Diane said. She saved the lain-upon paper towel for her kitchen, where it was meant to go in the first place if you thought about it. Diane’s life was full of such logical considerations. She let her kids stay off school some days because if she had not they would be anyway. That way, she could be sure they went
when
they went, so she said.

Diane had a vision that was not Josephine’s. The fragrant cotton-wool balls kept off stray glances, from the numerous men who passed through, Diane said also. Jo had never seen a man at The Beauty Spot, except for the postie who flung and fled, and it was not easy to see how a stray glance might angle and fix itself so as to penetrate the knot holes in the light wood. Poor man who did achieve this. What he would see might scare him into joining the Church. The Beauty Spot was a walk up the road from the other focus of the village, the disused station, where crafts were sold in the season and home baking all year.

Lochanbeg was an abrupt wee border village pressing close to the sides of an old road that it refused to allow to grow wider. Women came to the village in great numbers, having done so from the first day Diane arrived with her electric exerciser. There was reputed to be a larger machine over near Dumbarton, it was said, but it was situated in a great open place with mirrors and other individuals in need of improvement, according to one customer of Diane’s, who came right the way over from her guest house by Peebles and swore by Diane’s machine. Other ladies, too, agreed, that the charm of The Beauty Spot was its smallness.

‘It’s homey,’ they would say, a word always used when a place is not a home, or not a home of choice. The chief charm of The Beauty Spot was its near invisibility. The social word might have been discretion; the fairer word was incongruity. Yet women drove in their cars rather solider than those locally reared from all over the lowlands to be subjected to the electricity that was directed by Diane through their unloved fat and into their disused muscles. Diane herself was a curiosity. She had arrived from England with her machine, with a clutch of English children by her first husband. She was to be the second wife of Gibson Renfrew, who owned the big local garage where they did a steady trade in 4-wheel-drive vehicles about five months of the year, and made up the shortfall in sandwiches and souvenirs come the season. It had been a thinning living till Diane appeared with her slimming machine, after which many profitable contacts had been made.

When you stepped on to the forecourt of Gibson Renfrew’s showroom, the asphalt gave. Beneath it, the heather was waiting, as it always did unless you gave it no hope at the root, to come back. Gibson was a big man with a small mother; he was easily led astray by women, but his mother saw to the sorting-out. Diane had come from the south to the house of her mother-in-law and the children of her husband’s first wife, and she had them all subdued and happy right away. A baffled happiness had furred up the usually sharp relations of the Renfrews. No one could say why, but the effect was noted. Mrs Renfrew senior had said, and to be heard, that ‘Diane was a woman of her word’. It was thus become a known fact.

Jo Cochrane said, ‘I’m reading.’

‘Why did you ever not say? I can’t be expected to read your thoughts, can I now?’ Diane spoke kindly. She never took offence. She was chewing lo-cal gum and eating a nice Rice Krispie and syrup flapjack to her elevenses. Rice Krispies fell with stunned sweetness to stick to the wide rubber bands that bound Josephine round her least taut parts.

Josephine Cochrane thought of the confusion undergone by the modern body. She considered the state of Diane’s gum as it must be when she had reached the end of the day and its snacks. Diane turned up the power of the currents leading to Jo’s legs.

‘You’re not reading now, are you?’ Jo waited. It came when she had hoped it had passed. ‘Aren’t you having yourself too good a time?’ The current at the top of her legs was as high as it could be. At least the girl-talk was over. No worse to come but this rather bracing self-inflicted – and costly – pain. But Diane continued, ‘Too good a time to waste it reading?’

‘She only says it because it’s what she thinks I want to hear,’ Jo said to herself. She was reading ferociously now by dint of counting the number of ‘fors’ on the page. It being a book by a Scotswoman, there were twice the usual number for the word has more than just the single use.

‘Flapjack?’ said Diane.

‘No, thankyou just the same.’ Jo thought she might try a joke. ‘I’m here because of too many flapjacks. In principle.’ There she went. Why could she not rest without being strict for the truth? Who cared if she didn’t precisely eat flapjacks?

‘They’re high in fibre. I’m surprised you got that way,’ Diane indicated the many surfaces of Jo, ‘by just eating flapjacks. After forty isn’t it, you’ve the face or the figure, not both. They say. That’s what they do say.’

Jo wanted to ask her why, if this was so, she continued to sell the notion that you could have both with the collaboration of an electric current and some almost Victorian-seeming paraphernalia to harness and apply to the vexed face and/or figure.

With a laxness shocking and pleasant, the current sank and was gone. Already Josephine heard the voice of the next seeker.

She was speaking to Karen, who did electrolysis and waxing and was off on a course to Wick, to learn thalassotherapy and the physiology of the nose.

‘I do it for myself alone, and not the outside world,’ said the voice of an older woman. Emerging from the insecure wooden booth without her tights, Josephine stopped for a moment, dazzled by the freedom her limbs had forgotten in their fifty minutes of constriction. She looked for the speaker in the low front room of The Beauty Spot. Mrs Renfrew senior was speaking. ‘My daughter-in-law,’ she was saying, ‘gives people what they want. She’s a girl in a thousand.’

If she had lived in a city, Mrs Renfrew senior would have said, ‘She’s a girl in a million.’ As it was, a thousand was a million to her. Lochanbeg was never busy, and since the railway line had gone it was less so. Tourists came like bright ghosts of day in cars and buses but vehicles that had brought them took them away. There was not the old pleasure of holding people strange in the village till they had buried at least a generation. Mrs Gibson Renfrew senior set down the box of frosted butterscotch furls she’d made for the home bakery up the road. Her life was fuller now she’d Diane in her family; there was more in the way of things to do.

‘Of course, I’d to test the icing for it was sweet enough,’ she said to Diane, ‘and fresh sponge out the oven on a cold morning fills the inner man like a cladding. Anyroad, it was good right enough I knew I was coming in to you, dear, so’s I knew it would do no harm if I’d a wee taste.’

Diane was ushering her mother-in-law into the booth where old copies of
The People’s Friend
lay stacked on top of one another, the pages stuck together – as the pages of recipe books sometimes are with grease and sugar – with massage cream, patent slimming gel (drawn, so it declared, from the wasps of the Yucatán), baby powder and the crumbs of home baking.

Josephine muttered to Karen that she wasn’t going just yet, went into the leanto outside lavatory, put her tights over her tingling and insulted hind quarters and wrote out a cheque. She preferred to do this where Diane wouldn’t see her and feel a touch insulted, somehow less artistic, for being paid.

For that was Diane’s secret. She was an artist of what people wanted to believe. She kept life on the move. Well might one ask what was the point of coming many miles to be attached to a machine of unproven efficacy in the diminution of the expanded flesh and then passing down the grassy street to purchase fresh home baking, but Josephine understood it now, in the shining tussocked meadow behind The Beauty Spot, looking along the steely row of stone village houses with the telly aerials too big for their chimneys.

Diane speeded up the cycles, making guilt fresh for all her ladies, helping them to notice their ordinary pleasures by making of them sparkling vices. Or that was what she did for Josephine. For her mother-in-law she apparently was a magician who could make something not have happened, who could magic away, even absolve, the sweet peccadilloes either past or anticipated. It was a curiously Roman idea in this stern bosom of the nation. To each her own sweet self-deceit.

Time had stood still in Lochanbeg, and now it was being moved along. Where once the comings and goings of the trains had marked the days of the men, the domestic round the rhythms of the womenfolk, it was now the electrical nocturne of the screen that occupied the men, the fight with natural appetite that gave bite to the lives of the women. Diane was the reminder to live to consume, the modern equivalent of the bad conscience, the siren of redoubled gratification. She was democratic in her temptations. Pensioners, the unemployed, sick, or full-time education sufferers all received the chastening attentions of her machine – at very much reduced rates. Diane was a corroboration of human weakness, an indistinct tempter, a blur of deleterious sugar to take or leave like fairground cotton candy. Her swarm of speech, its cloudiness, was like her attendant spirit. Clichés and half-ideas, good but inconclusive impulses struggling perpetually with overmastering appetite, were her familiars, a cloud of sprites, confused, modern, unavailable for marshalling, afraid of the stern light of scrutiny and discipline, the old hard virtues of every village like this one; until recently.

Up in the sky the clouds spanked along behind the hairy soft green hills. The wet blue road to larger towns, to wider roads, to other lives, to the outside world, led over the hills.

Josephine Cochrane, electric with appetite, set off through the dazzling smirr for the railway station bakery where cakes lay in the place of journeys and intention, things to be consumed in the place that had been the focus of work and hungry curiosity.

SEVEN MAGPIES

The train was passing between still, high fields of standing corn. The light over the fields had a talcy glow that lightened and ceased to shimmer a yard or so into the sky. From time to time a small area of field flicked under a switch of wind, the specific unanimated flick of a creature’s pelt. Rangy wild oats over the wide crop and flimsy poppies at its edges were the only intimations of natural disorder. Nothing much was moving but the train through this thinly chivalric part of England.