To tell a lie you need an alibi. And to create you need the pictures to come. Writing of the cinema in 1926, Virginia Woolf speaks of the eye and the brain working together. The eye needs help. It needs the machinations of the mind. Pictures must be developed in the mental backroom, linked and chained together, sequenced. The piece below is an edit of the piece I wrote before because Edith does not really know what it is she is developing; only that she has seen something somewhere on screen at the cinema, where shapes are born from light playing off the dark. This is an illusory life born in the small depression behind the retina called the fovea. Here, if your eyes are working, visual acuity is strongest. Here, all your images are processed, and you leap upon them like a fish hooked to a line grappling to release herself. But it is too late. She’s been caught. The image is too strong for you to let go, and so you cling to your cinematic lie like a kiss.

‘And are you quite sure, Edith, that what you say is correct?’

        ‘Quite correct. Mr. Jarvis is selling inappropriate material.’

        ‘What sort of materials. What are you saying Edith?’

        ‘Mr. Jarvis is selling things under the counter.’ She paused and took a small breath. ‘Magazines for men.’  She paused again and waited to see if Mary was ready. Beak open. Eyes fluttering and closing, sucking up her little worms. Mary was ready. Oh, how she was ready!

 But how to put it? She didn’t know. Edith did not have the right vocabulary. A lie can only be a lie if you have the right materials laid out. A smooth ready-made. The housewife in the film had her friend to rely on. A quick phone call and there she was, her smug alibi tweaking her eyebrows before dinnertime. Mary Norton, that was her name. She who had spied her neighbour out with a good-looking man drinking champagne in town.

‘Oh, darling! I thought it was you! I said to my cousin – you remember my cousin Hermione don’t you – I said I thought it was you. I kept peering and peering. Didn’t you see me? You must have thought me terribly rude.’

‘How silly of me. I didn’t see you . . . I’m terribly short-sighted you know. Fred always says so.’

‘ I say, who was that good looking man you were with? He just flew down the stairs now . . . what on earth did you say to him my dear to make him run away like that?’

Edith wondered how to tell her lie. Someone must have told a similar story before of young girls filing up and down the backstairs after dark. Lean shadows running down the wall jittery and unsteady, giggling, hands out along the wall. ‘Mind yourself, mind yourself. Mind how you go!’ His hand tapping each one gently on the shoulder. Tap, tippet-tap, tap, keeping tabs. Mr. Jarvis always kept good accounts – nice and tight --- a squeeze on the bottom. Edith could see it all, her dark fantasy, his fall. They do wear ridiculous shoes these days, don’t they? Those heels, so high, I saw a girl in a café the other day and I swear she was wearing three-inch heels to serve tables. Mary’s voice was intervening. A stumble, a trip, a fall, it’s to be expected dressed like that. Mary’s cheeks flushed pink blooms. She was not one for rouge, but here she was standing with her cup in her hand, the church hall dispersing, the important people draining away. Tables being folded, the last dregs of tea being tipped from the tureen -- Edith had timed it well – Mary huffing and puffing under her breath about to burst and dying to know. Think of what it might bring her, and Mary pulled herself up tall as the church spire above her head.

But a cipher, Mary. An interfering woman with a red face, her hands in every drawer pulling them open with such haste. Where are the accounts, where? Mary is dying to know. Pen in her hand, she will write him a letter, a nasty letter. Two women conspiring can bring down a man. There are so many ways in this day and age to wage a war. Everyone is dying to eviscerate. How do you skin and bone a fish, your delicacy of a story? What knife do you pull from the drawer? The silver handled.

        ‘Have you seen this first hand, Edith? Are you sure?’

        ‘I have.’ Edith’s wavered, but then she launched herself and carried on. Already she was tilting towards her lie. It was within reach, she could smell it, the sour odour on her tongue. She leapt at it with her handle. There it was, her lie, capering through the air. A saucy picture unfurling, a fish on the end of her line, caught, strangled.

        ‘I have. Frilly knickers, a woman with her legs in the air, a man on top of her . . .’

Edith was thinking of one those postcards they sold in the kiosk off the front.  Cartoon-silly and exaggerated. Pink and brown flesh and bottoms like saucers. Plump men with their trousers down. She wondered who on earth bought them. Mr. Jarvis? She couldn’t quite see it, and for a moment Edith knew the whole thing was quite absurd. How could it possibly happen? Like this.

People went out for lunch and drank champagne, and then couldn’t bear separating. They laughed and laughed and lifted their glasses to their lips and found they were terribly gay just speaking of ordinary things. And the orchestra played along and the woman playing the cello with false teeth was there on stage looking terribly grim, glasses bobbing, teeth slipping and sliding -- was that a wig she had on? They laughed at her, at every little thing, their bodies collapsing in like marionettes -- they laughed until it hurt. Love hurts, its’ hooks, they pull at you in the middle; and always there is someone crashing in. Mary red in the face, a paroquet with her beak bobbing greedily over the seeds pecking.

‘We must proceed carefully, Edith. This will cause ructions. No one expects this sort of thing.’

Or perhaps they did. Sex is just another everyday matter, and sometimes it is lovely. Bodies churning in space. Frothing up and spilling out. Making tall and soft arches underneath the covers. Cries like doves or screech owls. Wings flapping, he covers her mouth. Still, she wouldn’t go back to his flat. She said no, no, I must go home. I must go back to my husband. Still, there was sex which builds its own little house inside you — and she jumped off the train and rang back up the stairs -- he had looked so lost and forlorn, so desolate, just like a schoolboy wanting her --- his back turned away from her, slouching home feeling frustrating, heels kicking hard. What had he done to deserve this? Jealousies, rivalries, looks and glances. A well-timed glance, a lance flying across the room, delicate and sharp. Catch it in your hands, it doesn’t burn, your hands and mine reaching across the counter, fingers intertwining --- hers are cool, his warm, propinquity. They smile.

People turn a blind eye to passion. It is all done in the dark. Only one candle lit so they can see one another’s face. A candle on the windowpane; the curtains drawn, they do not scream and shout. Love is too frail to survive much noise. They must be quiet; then, after a while, go out into the sunlight. Only cowards skulk around in the dark. Lovers go boating.  

And he knows you do not get into a boat with her and hold her hand unless you were willing never to speak her name. Love is a fantasy best kept to a diminutive boat in a diminutive boathouse. Small measures, small flames, the owl and the pussycat. The lovers had lit a stove and shared a cup of tea, the young doctor and the housewife, how terribly English. They had dried out together after their boating trip and he had announced love while she bowed low beneath him holding her cup in two hands blowing steam.

‘You know what has happened don’t you?’

And she replied ‘Yes,’ which was truthful, and the doctor suddenly beamed. He had announced love and she had said yes. His smile was as long as their rowing boat, ear to ear, but he was not a good sailor and they had come a-cropper under the low-lying bridge. They did not know the river, the currents, the tides. What river were they on? No, it was a lake. One of those old-fashioned lakes you find in municipal parks. There was a picnic, there must have been a picnic, and there had been the glance – several -- and she had known, and he had known, they had known together. That tug from the middle of your guts -- not your heart as they usually say --- but from the diaphragm, the lungs, a tight band girdling you. Without him you cannot breathe; the world is constricted, buckled up.

‘You know what has happened, don’t you?’

Oh, yes, Edith knew. Oh, how she knew.