Mischief by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online

me. Alison says, I’ll have Erica. ‘Lesbian, dyke,’ says Hugo, bitterly. ‘Don’t think you’ll keep the children, you won’t.’
    Maureen says, ‘That was the first and last time Derek ever hit her. He told me so. She lurched towards him on purpose. She wanted her nose broken; idiot Alison, don’t you understand? Erica nags and provokes. She calls him dreadful, insulting, injuring things in public. She flays him with words. She says he’s impotent: an artistic failure. I’ve heard her. Everyone has. When finally he lashes out, she’s delighted. Her last husband beat hell out of her. She’s a born victim.’
    Alison takes Erica to a free solicitor, who – surprise, surprise – is efficient and who collects evidence and affidavits from doctors and hospitals all over London, has a restraining order issued against Derek, gets Libby and Erica back into the matrimonial home, and starts and completes divorce proceedings and gets handsome alimony. It all takes six months, at the end of which time Erica’s face has altogether lost its battered look.
    Alison turns up at work the morning after the alimony details are known and has the door shut in her face. Mauromania. The lettering is flaking. The door needs repainting.
    Hugo sells the house over Alison’s head. By this time she and the children are living in a two-room flat.
    Bad times.
    ‘You’re a very destructive person,’ says Maureen to Alison in the letter officially terminating her appointment. ‘Derek never did you any harm, and you’ve ruined his life, you’ve interfered in a marriage in a really wicked way. You’ve encouraged Derek’s wife to break up his perfectly good marriage, and turned Derek’s child against him, and not content with that you’ve crippled Derek financially. Erica would never have been so vindictive if she hadn’t had you egging her on. It was you who made her go to law, and once things get into lawyers’ hands they escalate, as who better than I should know? The law has nothing to do with natural justice, idiot Alison. Hugo is very concerned for you and thinks you should have mental treatment. As for me, I am really upset. I expected friendship and loyalty from you, Alison; I trained you and employed you, and saw you through good times and bad. I may say, too, that your notion of Mauromania becoming an exclusive fashion house, which I followed through for a time, was all but disastrous, and symptomatic of your general bad judgment. After all, this is the people’s age, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, right through to the new century. Derek is coming in with me in the new world Mauromania.’
    Mauromania, meretricious!
    A month or so later, Derek and Maureen are married. It’s a terrific wedding, somewhat marred by the death of Ruthie – killed, with her new baby, in the Paris air crash, on her way home from Istanbul, where she’d been trying to get her young husband released from prison. She’d failed. But then, if she’d succeeded, he’d have been killed too, and he was too young to die. Little Poppy was at the memorial service, in a sensible trouser-suit from C&A, bought for her by Gran, without her glasses, both enormous eyes apparently now functioning well. She didn’t remember Alison, who was standing next to her, crying softly. Soft beds of orange feathers, far away, another world.
    Alison wasn’t asked to the wedding, which in any case clashed with the mass funeral of the air-crash victims. Just as well. What would she have worn?
    It’s 1975.
    It’s summer, long and hot. Alison walks past Mauromania. Alison has remarried. She is happy. She didn’t know that such ordinary everyday kindness could exist and endure. Alison is wearing, like everyone else, jeans and a T-shirt. A new ordinariness, a common sense, a serio-cheerfulness infuses the times. Female breasts swing free, libertarian by day, erotic by night, costing nobody anything, or at most a little modesty. No profit there.
    Mauromania is