Mary Wesley: worth a second read

Matilda is a fifty-year-old widow living in a cottage with a stream running through its garden. It is close to a sea-side village in south England frequented by tourists during the summer. Her sole companion is a gander named Gus. Everytime he sees a visitor come to the cottage, Gus honks to warn his mistress; and if he does not like the visitor, hisses at him, pecks him viciously and chases him out. Gus is in love with Matilda; she is in love with him. Whenever she returns from shopping, he welcomes her with loud honks, defecates wherever he is and refuses to be house-trained. He usually snuggles into Matilda’s lap.

However, Gus is more kindly towards their next-door neighbour, who lives alone in a bungalow down a wooded lane. This neighbour is an ageing bachelor — bald, bearded, pot-bellied — who passes for a Welshman with the name of Jones, but is in fact a Cockney from London. He too is in love with Matilda and calls on her every day. His proposal for marriage was turned down rudely; his attempt to take Matilda to bed was rewarded with a kick down the stairs. It made no difference to Jones; he continued calling on Matilda every day.

There is no ostensible reason for Matilda wanting to end her life. She was in love with her husband who had died a couple of years ago. She got on reasonably well with her four children — all of them now comfortably settled around the world. She had, on a bitterly cold winter night, run into a woman who had seduced her husband. Matilda had pushed her into the frozen Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. The woman’s body was found the next day and her death was taken as a case of suicide. But Matilda did not suffer from a sense of guilt. The only reason for her to call it a day was her belief that one should go in good health and with one’s mental faculties intact, instead of becoming dependent on others and soft in the head.

Matilda plans her suicide carefully. She gives Gus away to a farmer with a clutch of geese, so that Gus would not miss her and keep himself busy by making love to a harem of his own kind. She puts some cheesebread and a bottle of wine in a bag and goes to a secluded beach to enjoy her last meal on a flat rock, before swimming out into the sea and drowning. Her plans are thwarted by a party of youngsters preparing a barbecue. They impatiently wait for “the old woman” to move away so that they can use the rock as a table.

Matilda thus has to look for an alternative site to carry out her plans. And she is thwarted once again — she finds a young man lying with his face buried in the ground. He had also come there to end his life. They get talking to each other. His name is Hugh Warner and he is on the run from the police, charged with the murder of his mother. The papers refer to him as “this matricide”. However, Hugh did not really murder his mother, he had accidentally smashed her skull while trying to kill a mouse that had climbed onto her sofa. The picture in the papers is not his but his brother’s, and the papers have got his whereabouts woefully wrong too. He is reported to have been seen in Prague, Cairo and Japan.

Matilda takes him home, feeds him and looks after him. He is young and presentable and the two of them could have been mother and son. One day, on their way back from shopping, a mongrel tags itself along. They adopt and name it Folly. Meanwhile, Gus ditches his harem of geese and finds his way back to Matilda. He gets along with Folly. Jones makes friends with the ‘matricide’ and plays chess with him. Everything is hunky-dory except that the police are still on the lookout for Hugh. He feels that he would be safer abroad. Incidentally, Hugh has hidden a lot of money under the stairway carpet of his London flat.

Matilda takes a trip to London on the pretext of shopping and meeting old friends. She stays with her late husband’s boss and sleeps with him. She is of the view that sex between willing adults is pleasant enough without there being any love between them. She gets Hugh’s money. She also shops, signing away cheques knowing that she has no money in her account. Back home, Jones readily changes Hugh’s pounds into European currencies and all is set for Hugh to escape whenever he wants to risk it.

Matilda takes Hugh for a swim to her favourite beach. It is deserted. She strips herself naked in order to change into her bathing suit. Hugh notices her still youthful body — her breasts don’t sag, nor is her bottom wrinkled. They bathe in the cold sea and return home refreshed. They eat a heavy dinner with a lot of wine. Then Hugh walks into her bedroom and takes her. Being young, he performs better than Matilda’s husband and another lover she had. There are no emotional hassles and although Matilda knows that it will not last long she is not bothered.

But then, Gus is killed by a fox and his body is brought in by the police. Matilda gives them permission to eat him. Then the police come in with the dead body of Folly. He was run over by a car while following Hugh to the railway station to catch a night train to London. Jones helps Matilda bury Folly in the garden and put a slab of stone on the grave.

With the impediments to suicide thus out of her way, Matilda is back on her beach. She eats a hearty meal of bread, French cheese and wine. She swims out into the sea and is carried away by the current. Her body is found floating by fishermen.

Jumping the Queue by Mary Wesley is an improbable story. I was a quarter through it when I felt that it sounded familiar. Smudges of paan-masala marks confirmed that I had read it. I turned to the last page where I usually enter the time, date and place when I finish reading a book. I had read this one to the day exactly four years ago. My excuse for writing about it is that I enjoyed the second reading. It reminded me of Leda and the swan. I found Wesley’s language, sprinkled with coarse abuses, very palatable and reminiscent of my college days in England.

Just a commercial

Seeing Sachin Tendulkar hit a succession of sixers on television, his daughter asked her mother, Anjali, “Mamma, isn’t it wonderful that, after so many flops, Papa is again hitting sixer-after-sixer?”

Anjali Tendulkar replied, “Beta, he is not playing a match; he is just appearing on a commercial.”

(Contributed by J.P. Singh Kaka, Bhopal)