Henry is licking honey off his fingertips suggestively. ‘Shall we do that again?’ he asks. ‘Light of my life.’
‘No,’ says Letty and rolls out of bed. Her bare sticky feet touch the carpet and she is saved.
Moral
Few of us can resist temptation the first
time round, and we should not blame ourselves too much if we fail. It’s the second time that counts. Let sin pass lightly on and over. Persist in it and it wears your soul away.
Letty’s sense of guilt evaporates, washed away in the knowledge of her own virtue and fondness for her friend. Guilt is to the soul as pain is to the body. It is there to keep us away from danger, from extinction.
And good Lord, think what might have happened had Letty stayed for a second round! As it was she got into her own bed just minutes before David came through the door. His father had rung from Cardiff and the jewellery had been found and the burglary hadn’t happened after all. Letty hadn’t had a bath, thinking she’d leave that until the morning, but David didn’t seem to notice. Indeed, he fell on her with unusual ardour and the condom broke and he didn’t even seem to mind.
If she’d stayed in Mara’s bed David would have come round to find Letty and at worst killed Henry – fat chance! – and at best told Mara, or if not that then he’d have been able to blackmail Letty for the rest of her life. ‘Do this or I’ll tell Mara’ – and she’d have had to do it, whatever it was: go whoring, get a further degree (not that there wasn’t some attraction in surrendering autonomy…)
But as it was it all worked out okay. Letty had her 10 minutes of sublime pleasure, felt anxious, felt guilty, and was rewarded by having her cake and eating it too. I don’t know what happened to the sheets. I daresay Henry calmed down enough to put them through the washer-dryer and get them on the bed again before Mara got back. I hope he had the sense to rinse out her nightie in the basin at hand temperature, not hot.
I do know that in the following week Henry sold the Fiesta and got a Jaguar which could outrun the Porsche any day, and he used the joint account to do it. He felt better about himself.
I allow Letty, having observed the moon, to sleep illicitly with Henry once, but not twice. It is a balancing act and she got it right.
It is doing what you should, if only in the end, and not what you want which makes others respect and like you, and to be respected and liked by others is a very good way to be happy.
Save your moral strength for what is important.
The Inevitability of Anxiety
What makes women happy? Nothing, not for more than ten minutes at a time. Anxiety, doubt and guilt break through.
‘Supposing my boyfriend comes back?’ ‘Have I left the fish out for the cat?’ ‘Should I be doing this?’
Blame nature.
It’s the hormones doing it, interfering with our happiness, not the mysterious thing called me.
Instinct rewards us by gratifying our sensual appetites. It also punishes us if we go too far.
It is when we are following the promptings of instinct, doing what nature suggests, going through the motions of procreation – however unlikely they are to succeed – even in the midst of our triumph and greatest pleasure that other warring instincts set in. ‘Clean the cave, keep the baby safe, are the food stores okay? What’s that rustling at the back of the cave? Can it be the sabre-tooth tiger? We can’t just lie here enjoying ourselves! Hasn’t he finished yet? Is the fire going out? Might a vulture swoop down to get the baby? What’s the woman in the next cave up to? Has he noticed my spare tyre? Is she a better bet than me? Will he go to her?’
While he, the man, is thinking solely about pleasure and completion, concentrating on the task in hand, our female minds are already wandering.
He: ‘Is something the matter, darling? You seem to have lost interest.’
She: ‘I just remembered I left the butter out of the fridge. Sorry. Now where were we?’
Our instincts overlap and contradict each other: the one to make babies struggles with the need to look after the ones already there; the one to compete with our friends with our need to have them at our side. It leaves us confused.
Sex with the new true love brings bliss, optimism, unguarded delight – and then: ‘Am I too fat, will he notice my varicose vein, will the baby wake, will his wife come back, should I have told him I loved him?’
With the wedding, it’s all ‘Will the flowers arrive, should I have worn this tatty veil, should I really be doing this?’
With the promotion, ‘Will my friends hate me, will my new office be okay, will my partner leave me if I earn more than him?’
The pleasure in the new baby is balanced out by the anxiety that goes with bonding. Bonding is one of the worst tricks instinct plays on us. The baby cries; the mother leaps to attention. It is a lifetime’s sentence to anxiety. It doesn’t get better with time. And it is not open to reason. Experience may tell us that the teenager late home is usually late home. But mother love is panicking: ‘He’s come off his bike. There’ll be a call from the hospital.’
The baby’s quiet – and it makes you happy and proud to have got him through to the end of the day. ‘But perhaps he’s stopped breathing?’ Wake him and see!
There are so many things to be anxious about. The baby’s not breathing. You only mascaraed one eye this morning. Sheer pleasure can trigger anxiety. When you’re nibbling caviare, or taking a taxi home loaded, or feeling spaced out at a concert, what do you think? ‘I shouldn’t be here. I am going to be punished. I shouldn’t be doing this. Something terrible is about to happen. I do not deserve to be happy.’
Well, maybe you don’t. That may be the trouble.
We are more than creatures of the cave, ruled by instinct. We are moral beings as well.
Guilt, Offshoot of Anxiety
Guilt also stands between you and enjoyment. It’s an offshoot of anxiety.
‘Shouldn’t have done this, shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have had a one-night stand. Shouldn’t have eaten a bar of chocolate…’
It too is instinctive, hardwired in. It applies itself to any number of situations. When we succumb to ‘inappropriate’ sexual desire, eat the forbidden chocolate – anything that makes us feel bad – that’s when the instinctive self, determined to satisfy its appetites, is in conflict with the socialized self.
‘Ought not to endanger my relationship. Ought to lose weight.’
Feel