Undue Influence Read Free

that Wiggy had been the mistress of a married man for the past six years; there was no point in worrying my mother with that sort of information. Sometimes I wondered if she knew what an illicit affair involved. I would not have put it past her to doubt the validity of such attachments, although Wiggy and I were of an age to have chalked up a certain amount of experience, most of it uncertain. But even so, the rueful quality of the experience notwithstanding, I always felt I knew more than my mother ever had.
    On her bedside table my mother kept the first present my father had ever given her, a copy of The Golden Treasury inscribed ‘To Madeleine, the epitome of womanhood’. This has always struck me as noble but inadequate, as if he had to trust the poems to do his courting for him. And yet there was something decent about that gift: it could foretell nothing but marriage. They all got married in what I think of as the old days. My generation hardly goes in for it in the same way, too enlightened, I suppose, too progressive, too career-oriented. I admit that my notions of marriage are archaic, as I suspect is the case with most women. In my case there is a particular reason for this, or perhaps one I have simply adopted from my reading of the bundles of defunct women’s magazines storedin the basement of the shop. These date from the early 1950s, an age when men wore hats and went to the office and women stayed at home and wore aprons and mysterious underclothes. These articles are immensely reassuring, as if marriage were a seamless garment with no snags in the fabric.
    The letters to the dignified women who are supposed to know about these things all evince the same perplexity, albeit in different guises. ‘Should I let my boyfriend go all the way?’ The answer is always the same: if he respected you he would not demand it, even suggest it. This prospect of shamefaced young people—for the young man must have been in a state of disarray—is amazing to me. These days intimacy takes place at the beginning of the affair rather than at the end, and the women giving the advice are only too eager to reveal their own histories of alcoholism and anorexia. In the letters to ‘Worried. Ealing’, tolerance is urged on the less than happily married. Also humorousness. This might have made for an easier life but it seems unnecessarily fatalistic.
    It is the illustrations to the stories that capture my attention, one in particular: a woman is shutting the garden gate of her house behind her as she prepares to do her morning shopping. She wears gloves and a small hat shaped like a pancake; she has a wicker basket over her left arm. The gate behind her is the sort of sunray pattern that probably still exists somewhere, for people do not change their garden gates in obedience to the dictates of fashion. Needless to say we do not have that sort of gate in the environs of Montagu Mansions. I do not know what this woman does when she gets home again. She manages to be elegant in an old-fashioned way. It would not occur to her to worry about her weight.
    From three o’clock onwards, or so it seems to me, she anticipates her husband’s return on the evening train. What doeshe think as he strides manfully in at the sunray gate? Not a lot, I would say. They are both bound to be very well mannered. On what happens when they retire to the bedroom, having spent the evening darning socks and listening to the wireless, the magazines are silent. A virginal discretion is maintained throughout, as if married couples need no instruction, are privy only to their own secrets. Sex is underdeveloped, and yet it seems so peaceful. Naturally someone of my generation could not envisage such a union, which seems faintly dreadful. And yet the image of that woman in the pancake hat, on her way to the sort of shops where customers are served by a man in a brown overall, has stayed in my mind for some time. It holds a definite attraction, as if one might,