Trouble

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You’re rambling, Annette.’

  ‘Am I? Sorry.’

  ‘You sound like Marion on a bad day,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘I want to run off with you and look after you.’

  ‘What do you need, Ernie? Why did you call?’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Annette,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘It’s eleven o’clock: you’re meant to be at my office seeing the Oprah Winfrey researcher at half-past, and you’re not even out of bed.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had a meeting,’ said Annette.

  ‘Didn’t Spicer give you the message last night?’

  ‘He must have forgotten,’ said Annette. ‘We got rather tied up. Ernie, I’m not going to do Oprah Winfrey.’

  ‘Why not? Because Spicer doesn’t want you to?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Annette.

  ‘You can’t let him do this to you,’ said her publisher.

  ‘There seems to be rather a lot at stake,’ said Annette. ‘More than you’d imagine.’

  ‘What I need like a hole in the head,’ said Ernie, ‘is a first novelist in a time of recession turning down the Oprah Winfrey Show. Do you want my entire business to go down the drain?’

  ‘If it’s my marriage, or what passes for my marriage, or your business,’ said Annette, ‘I’d rather it was your business down the drain. I need the roof over my head.’

  ‘Do you have a marriage there worth saving?’ asked Ernie.

  ‘It’s not just me,’ said Annette. ‘It’s Susan, Jason, my parents, our friends, the house, the garden, everything. I have to have time to think.’

  ‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘The man’s a monster.’

  ‘He’s the man I love,’ said Annette. ‘You just say that because you want me to do Oprah Winfrey and make money for you.’

  ‘It’s money for you,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘Fiction is your way to independence. That’s why Spicer doesn’t pass on messages.’

  ‘I’m so tired, Ernie, and I keep getting pains,’ said Annette. ‘I expect it’s indigestion. I drank too much champagne last night.’

  ‘Who gave you champagne in your condition?’

  ‘Spicer says champagne doesn’t count as alcohol,’ said Annette. ‘It wasn’t too much in ordinary terms, Ernie, just too much because I’m pregnant.’

  ‘And Spicer doesn’t think of that.’

  ‘He’s a man,’ said Annette.

  ‘I’m a man too,’ said Ernie. ‘I wouldn’t do that. I’d know how to look after you. I know a lot of things. I know Spicer didn’t give you my message. I know Spicer has been seeing a lot of Marion. I know it’s hopeless to try and do business with friends. When Spicer gave me your manuscript I should have run a mile. Get your clothes on and come down here at once, or Spicer will have won.’

  ‘But I’m so tired,’ said Annette.

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Ernie. ‘Spicer made you tired.’

  ‘It wasn’t calculated, Ernie,’ said Annette.

  ‘No? When did Spicer ever not calculate anything? I’m coming round to fetch you. I’m going to bring you back to my office, where you can put your feet up. Then you go on to the studio. What are you going to wear?’

  ‘I haven’t got anything to wear.’

  ‘Borrow something from someone,’ said Ernie Gromback. ‘Spicer gave me that manuscript because he expected me to turn it down. It wasn’t my kind of book. He knew that.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because it was really good.’

  ‘Gilda.’

  ‘Hello, Annette,’ said Gilda. ‘I feel okay again. A false alarm. I did have a bath. Now I’m busy decorating the crib. Steve’s home: he bought all these ghastly things from a car boot sale. White satin ribbons and stuff.’

  ‘Have you got anything I can wear for the Oprah Winfrey Show?’

  ‘What sort of thing did you have in mind?’ asked Gilda. ‘Spicer’s going to be furious.’

  ‘Too bad,’ said Annette. ‘Anyway, Spicer won’t know. I’ll be home by seven, before Spicer gets back. He has an appointment with Dr Rhea at six-thirty. The last one, he says. I was right to do a tweetie-pie, it really worked. Disney wins against Mount Olympus. Spicer and me are on course, truly on course. I just want to be on the Oprah Winfrey Show. They’re not screening it till January, when Spicer will be in France. He’ll never even see it.’

  ‘I do have that blue sort of spotted shift,’ said Gilda. ‘Armani.’

  ‘Shows too much arm,’ said Annette.

  ‘Wear it with a jacket,’ said Gilda. ‘What about your hair?’

  ‘I’ll do it under the shower now,’ said Annette.

  ‘Someone’s bound to tell Spicer,’ said Gilda. ‘You won’t get away with it.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Annette. ‘There’s no possible way I can know what to do for the best so I’ll do what I want.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Gilda. ‘What the hell.’

  ‘What the hell, Gilda, what the hell. In my mother’s good days she used to quote from archy and mehitabel. Archy was a cockroach, Mehitabel was a cat. They typed each other letters on the office typewriter: they couldn’t manage the upper case. Mehitabel used to sign off: “what the hell, archie, what the hell.” So that’s what I’m signing off to you, Gilda: what the hell, gilda, what the hell.’

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘I think so. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Doctor McGregor, casualty officer. Who are you?’

  ‘I don’t know you,’ said Annette. ‘You have really nice straight teeth.’

  ‘Thank you. Try and understand what I’m saying.’

  ‘Why can’t I?’

  ‘You’re still feeling the effect of the anaesthetic. Now, what is your name?’

  ‘Annette.’

  ‘That’s a very pretty name,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘Could we have a second one? And an address? Even the luxury of a next-of-kin?’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ asked Annette.

  ‘We like to know these things,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘You are in hospital, Annette. You collapsed in a taxi you’d picked up in the street. You didn’t have a handbag with you. Just some loose change in your pocket. So you’re a mystery to us.’

  ‘That’s not my fault. I couldn’t find my bag and I was in a hurry.’

  ‘Good. If you can remember that, can you tell us your second name?’

  ‘Shan’t.’

  ‘Where are you? Can you remember that?’

  ‘In hospital.’

  ‘Good girl. We’re admitting you. We’re waiting for a bed in gynae.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Annette.

  ‘We need to find your husband.’

  ‘Do I have one?’ asked Annette.

  ‘We had to cut off a wedding ring when you were under the anaesthetic. And some bangles. I hope you don’t mind. There was a nasty mess beneath them.’

  ‘I wish I could remember more,’ said Annette.

  ‘Don’t worry. It will come back. You’re very thin, but well-dressed. Designer clothes, nurse said. We don’t see many of those.’

  ‘Thin? I’m enormous,’ said Annette. ‘Vast like a mountain, like a cleft hill, like Lilith’, like Medusa; I’m about to flood the world.’

  ‘Oh Christ, she’s gone again,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘It may not be just the anaesthetic. She may be disturbed.’

  ‘She’s in some kind of therapy,’ said the nurse. ‘We were doing that stuff in Bereavement Counselling. I’m new in this hospital. What’s the deal on foetus disposal? Incinerator?’

  ‘At seven months? Coffins, memorial service and counselling,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘We do things properly here.’

  ‘You mean my baby’s dead?’ asked Annette.

  ‘Don’t try and sit up,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘You’ll find it difficult for a couple of days. You had an emergency caesarian. You were haemorrhaging. A flamboyant toxaemia: you’re lucky to be alive. Why did no one pick it up? This
is what our entire antenatal service exists for. The baby didn’t make it. We couldn’t pick up a foetal heartbeat. I’m sorry. She had probably been dead for a couple of days. This is no way to break this kind of thing to anyone. That was why I needed to find your husband. You do have a husband?’

  ‘Listen, and you hear your own heartbeat. Listen hard enough and it’ll tell you the story of your life. Whether it’s comedy or tragedy depends only upon where you stop, at a good bit or a bad bit. But the heart doesn’t let you stop,’ said Annette on to the tape machine Dr McGregor gave her. ‘It just goes on and on, carrying its owner along with it, past the definite conclusion its owner longs to have. My resentment at this is nothing to do with suicidal inclinations: just the desire for proper endings and understandings, proper tyings-up, in real life as well as fiction. Not that you care about my mind, Dr McGregor; your area is my body. One of the rules of writing feature films, or so Ernie Gromback told me, is that if everything’s looking just fine three fifths of the way through, the next two fifths must be devoted to making everything go sour. If all is black and sad three fifths in, thereafter you move relentlessly towards your happy ending. If I could see losing the baby as three fifths of the way in, I could then look forward to happiness. Or was the three fifths point when Wendy startled me with “Oh, born on Christmas Day, a little Capricorn, a little goat.” And the five fifths when the new casualty nurse said “What’s the deal on foetus disposal here?” It felt like five fifths at the time but the heart goes on beating, and before you know you’re carried on into some other film, quite possibly three fifths of the way through and sitting up and paying attention again, wondering what’s going to happen next. The plural of foetus is foeti but catch a nurse, anyone, knowing that and acting upon it. People in hospitals have more sense than to be sticklers. She came up and apologised later. She’d thought I was unconscious but I’d just had my eyes closed.’

  ‘You could try contacting your friends on the telephone,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘I’m no therapist, but shouldn’t you be sticking to the point? I’m a busy man.’

  ‘Just give me another tape,’ said Annette. ‘You are under no obligation to listen. Indeed, I hope you won’t. I don’t want to speak to my friends. I can’t be sure who they are, not even Gilda. And I don’t feel like saying “I’m just fine.” Not yet. But it’s true that from spending so much time on the phone I have become accustomed to understanding my own life through my ears: so I need the tape. Call it aural predilection if you like, and it may well have to do with overhearing the rows between my mother and my father as a child: listening through doors: working out patterns. I used the patterns in Lucifette Fallen, a novel I wrote, Dr McGregor. A stupid and pretentious title for a rather neat, too controlled, short novel. But you are obviously too busy to listen to all that.’

  ‘The girl from Oprah Winfrey was furious when she heard I was in hospital,’ observed Annette to her tape recorder, ‘and had lost the baby. “Now what am I going to do?” she said. “Annette Horrocks was to be the centre of the show. And I’ve had to come all the way into town for nothing.” Ernie Gromback wrote to tell me about it: Ernie seems to be the only person left in the world able and willing to write a letter. I’ve had no visitors. It’s not their fault, I know, but it doesn’t stop me feeling deserted. If I have visitors, if anyone from the outside world comes near, my blood-pressure zooms up. Dr McGregor’s getting it under control, Staff Nurse says: they drip various drugs plus antibiotics into my arm. As well as toxaemia I had septicaemia, its source of origin, where the skin had broken beneath one of the bracelets. The nurses bring me three-times-daily messages from Spicer: of the I’m-thinking-of-you,-darling, get-better-soon kind, but they somehow lack conviction. I can’t quite feel Spicer’s real, though I send loving messages out again. Poor Spicer: his baby too, his idea becoming my flesh. It’s just hard to feel and think “poor Spicer”.’

  ‘I had a Bereavement Counselling session: a young woman called Anya told me the sense that Spicer wasn’t real could only be a function of the drugs I was being given. Such medicines poisoned the mind, she said: she disapproved of them. She described herself as an holistic healer. When the drugs stopped, she told me, I’d bring Spicer to life again, and have proper sympathy with him. She made me visualise a flight of white marble stairs and at the top a place where I had been happy. She held my hand and persuaded me to climb, in my mind, a step at a time towards this goal. I obliged, though I felt embarrassed. It was unfortunate that the place at the top was a McDonald’s: Anya thought I was mocking her when I said so: I wasn’t. I just remembered taking Susan and Jason out to the cinema one day, and we ended up at McDonald’s, and we were all, for some reason, pleasantly and simply content, stealing each other’s French Fries. In my “visualisation”, as she called it, the man behind the counter was large, strong and surrounded by a brilliant white light: he had a face which looked as if it had been hewn out of a piece of wood. I imagined I was seeing Jesus, but I didn’t tell Anya that: I didn’t know her well, but enough to tell she wouldn’t want Jesus described as a fast-food counter-hand. It was my vision not hers, anyway, and the paramedics being under instruction not to excite me, when I mentioned McDonald’s she smiled stiffly and brought the session to a rather sudden end, which I’m sure she wasn’t meant to. She left me with instructions to visualise a mandala; which I gathered looks rather like a pie-chart with four divisions in different colours, representing intuition, intellect, sensation and emotion. The trick is, apparently, to get the colours evenly-balanced in your mind, and hold them there for two minutes. Then you become less “stressed”. I did try. Really. I don’t want to be a mocker. Spicer hates mockers. Cynicism, he once told me, is sneering at your own soul. I don’t want to do that.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Dr McGregor, ‘since we are under instruction to work with non-orthodox healers when practicable, to save the cost of expensive drugs, we’ll give hypnotherapy a go. A pleasant young man has just joined the team. His name is Peter. I will send him along to you.’

  ‘Hypnotism!’ said Annette, and the bleepers on her blood-pressure monitor began to sound. He switched them off.

  ‘Well?’ asked Dr McGregor on his rounds the next day. ‘What happened? It didn’t go too well, I hear.’

  ‘Listen to it on the tape,’ said Annette, turning her head into the pillow, ‘if you’re really interested and not just being polite. It’s all there.’

  Dr McGregor took the tape away.

  ‘This Peter, this person from the fringes, was slight and sweet and had soft thick wavy hair, nut-brown, and a baby face. It was, as I feared, Peter, Peter Pan, Pan the Goat God. Rhea had got into my head. So I expected him to bring out a pipe and start playing it to me, and found myself looking down to see if he had cloven hooves. He didn’t: he had brown shoes, rather worn but much polished. So perhaps he was a Peter Pan after all. He told me that if I would allow myself to be put in a light hypnotic trance he would locate the psychological trauma which, according to him, was sending the blood pounding so through my veins and keeping my blood-pressure high. This account of my condition seemed to me to beg many questions: I asked him if he had any medical training and he said no: but he’d studied psychology at college and found he “had a knack for hypnotism.” Even the most orthodox practitioners had begun to view many forms of illness as internalised behavioural problems—which had always been obvious so far as facial tics, stammers, addictions and so forth were concerned—and hypnotherapy was proving a useful, inexpensive, effective and non-toxic form of treatment in many cases: in particular the lowering of blood-pressure. I then asked him what he would do with the psychological trauma once he located it in me, and he said if appropriate he would re-lay the memory so it ceased to be traumatic’

  ‘“Tell me more, Peter,” I said, “tell me more,” thinking of the way Spicer now recalled the matter of the bacon sandwiches, and he replied that actually, though the re-laying of memory was considered okay in the States, it was still
seen as unethical in Europe. I was fortunate that the hospital I was in had a management team imported from the US, and so long as a treatment worked, didn’t bother too much with the detail of how or why it worked. How, I asked, did he do this locating?’

  ‘“A traumatic memory,” Peter said, “could be located by regressing the patient—a victim of, say, child abuse—to the period of its occurrence, recalling the episode in its fresh form and re-tuning it, as it were, persuading the child/adult that the fear, self-loathing and sense of guilt experienced was inappropriate and by bolstering accompanying feelings of affection, response and gratitude, even creating them if necessary. The memory, dusted down and polished up, would then be re-laid in the adult mind as something that could be coped with—still unpleasant, perhaps, but no longer traumatic. A whole range of behavioural problems could quickly and cheaply be dispersed by Re-lay Hypnotherapy.”’

  ‘I only report what Peter Pan told me, though I can’t quite believe it. An isolated instance perhaps, but you surely couldn’t wipe away an entire childhood’s wretchedness by simply persuading the victim to forget it? Surely memory would re-emerge through its coating of forgetfulness? Old stains beneath new wallpaper? I asked him if you could re-lay pleasant memories with nasty ones, turn a pleasant seaside outing into a horrid one, a good sexual experience into something oppressive and smothering: by restructuring a past, turn a wife against a husband, a husband against a wife, and he said oh yes, he assumed so, but who would bother?’

  ‘“Does this apply to everyone?” I asked. “Can everyone be hypnotised?” and he said one in a hundred perhaps not, and so you could get any woman into bed with you, bar the one in a hundred, by persuading her that you were the most attractive man in the world, and Peter Pan said, well yes, most women, eighty in a hundred. But he, though he admitted he had been tempted, would never do anything like that. Common wisdom held that you couldn’t get anyone to do anything under hypnosis that went against their conscience, because they would snap out of the trance at once. But with a little ingenuity any hypnotist could alter the perspective in which that conscience worked—the mildest person would take an axe to a door if told a child was dying behind it, the most honest would rob a bank if persuaded a nation would perish otherwise. A truly loyal wife could find herself in a situation in which disloyalty was the only appropriate answer: if the hypnotherapist is the Chief of Police say, and the husband about to be put to torture, then what can the wife do but oblige the Chief of Police to keep the husband safe?