The Rules of Life by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online Page A

fulfilment, which is to be cautiously approached, lest it lead to the premature end of the story and not its lengthy continuation. Do they not hold that an unspoken, secret love is the best love of all? Gratifying to him or her who nurtures it, causing no trouble to anyone around? Indeed the GNFR does! So I shall allow myself to love secretly. Yes. I shan’t tell Honor; I shall simply let love gnaw away like a worm in the bud. It’s quite safe. Time stands between Gabriella Sumpter and myself—the steady tick, tick, tick of the falling decades intervenes. Gabriella lives, weeps, feels, and yet is dead and buried. I cannot touch her, cannot have more than an inner corporeal reaching, body to soul, soul to body; her voice lives in my head, not hers. Gabriella, my love.
    There, it’s said! GSWITS, have mercy upon us, even as we have mercy upon you! So goes our prayer. Forgive us as we forgive you. Learn from us as we learn from you. Accept me as I strive to accept you, forgiving you for the fault of making me ill-favoured, humourless and self-righteous. Gabriella, my love!
    ‘Well,’ says Miss Sumpter, ‘what happened just then? I seemed almost to pass out: I heard again the strange silence that descends when mere physical attraction passes into love: the blotting out of the physical world, the approach of the real one. Aldred told me this was probably the effect of phenylalanine, the hormone which is secreted in extra quantity in the brains of those who fall in love—that same hormone which disturbs appetite, makes the eye shine, the skin glow, the whole body receptive to sexual activity, and is as addictive as heroin. (It is a substance found in chocolate, incidentally, which is why, they say, chocolates are the favourite gifts of suitors. Only taste this, and you will love me !) It is quite possible, said Aldred, that with the first surge of phenylalanine the hearing areas of the brain are affected, and that this, and nothing more, is what the nuministic sense of quiet, as of the God descending, is all about. He may be right. It does not worry me one way or another. I do not think the effect is one whit diminished because the cause can be understood. And I have no brain any more, no body, and still I hear it. It outlasts even death.
    ‘How happy Aldred and I were in our country cottage. I look back upon those days with pleasure. Roses grew around the door, and there was money enough for proper household help. Our house was small, and seemed smaller to me because I was accustomed to moving about in the grand if neglected rooms of Covert Hall. After my mother died, the place had been let go to rack and ruin. The staff never stayed—my father was always reluctant to pay them wages. Either they were, he said, too ugly to deserve any, or, if they were not, then he had slept with them and so felt they should clean up for nothing, as wives do. So, of course, one by one, they left. And I was taken out of school—the headmistress had married and I daresay did not want me about as a constant reminder of her past weakness. Besides, the issue of the owing school fees became, in the end, as money matters do, impossible to fudge—and my father’s assumption was that if his wife was dead, and the servants gone—why, then his daughter would see that his meals were on the table, and that there were always clean clothes to put on. A hungry man in a gravy-stained suit may be a fine poker player, but where will he find proper opponents to play against, or any with money worth losing?
    ‘But these matters were now in the past. I resolved to forget my father and my mother, who had both died so dramatically. There is a very pleasant man here, by the way, who died recently in Bengal: a gentle bird-watcher, who took great care, as I did, in life, never to tread on a worm, never to crush an ant or squash a fly. The poor soul was literally eaten by a tiger while pursuing a rare owl into the jungle. Ah, one may admire creation, but one