The Heart of the Country

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You ought to tell them about Harry,’ said Sonia.

  ‘But I have nothing to say,’ said Natalie.

  And indeed, what was there to say? ‘Your father really loves you.’ Absurd. ‘He really loves me.’ Nonsense. ‘He’s coming back soon.’ Unlikely. ‘He’s gone mad, had a brainstorm.’ Lies. He’d left her and the children in the shit and buggered off and what was the point of talking about it. Least said, soonest mended.

  She’d written to Harry’s father in Geneva, finding the address by chance on the back of a Christmas card envelope while she was packing up Dunbarton, and there had even been a reply. No, he hadn’t heard from Harry, nor did he expect to. He was sorry to hear what had happened but the state of his health and his finances would not allow him to get involved. Piss off, Natalie, in other words. She hated Harry and hated to see him in her children. She grieved for them and was cold to them at the same time. Just as Sonia saw Stephen looking out of the eyes of Teresa, Bess and Edwina, Natalie saw Harry in Alice and Ben. Once you have children by a man, that’s it. You are never free of him, unless you can free yourself of your children too. Chances are you can’t. Chances are they’ll turn up at your funeral and throw a rose or so into your grave.

  Sonia gets on all right without her children. If they want to strike up a relationship with her when they’re teenagers and can wipe their own noses that’s fine by Sonia. Their stepmother, Sandy, is okay. Sonia used to know her well. Steady, Catholic, moral, plain, doesn’t say much but tidies up a treat. Will suit Stephen down to the ground. Sandy will never be found in delicto flagrante, or in flagranto delicte, or whatever, when Stephen goes to open the back of the family car. Sandy will never crack sour jokes and upset people. Sandy will stop Edwina painting her toenails and backcombing her hair at the age of five. Five, yes. Was four, is five. Sandy will have given Edwina a birthday party. Stepmothers are always in the business of doing better than the mother. Sandy will have put up with the racket and boredom and mess of the party without a murmur. And cleared it up, quick, so Stephen could stand in front of his hearth and have a quiet glass of sherry before dinner. Let Sandy do it. Good luck to her. She’ll need it. It’s Sonia the kids will want later. Sonia will never lose them now. Those you want for ever, give away. Like boomerangs, they’ll return.

  Sonia hopes Sandy made the cake herself, that’s all. That it wasn’t a shop one; not for Edwina, who’s so special.

  Here come Sonia’s pills. She needs them! Goodnight.

  Bright and Purposeful

  Where did I leave Natalie? Why, up in the Abbey grounds, chatting to Peter in that rather cosy, companionable way which means you want a job and the other might have one. ‘There’s a waiting list for working here,’ said Peter. ‘And the Abbey Fathers are very traditional. Outdoor work is man’s work, so far as they’re concerned. But you could try up at the quarry, if you’re desperate. Emphysema land.’

  ‘Emphysema?’ Really, Natalie knew nothing.

  ‘Dust in the lungs,’ said Peter. ‘Kills you in the end. But by that time you’ve got your cards, and are off. Why should they care? And what can they do about it? Spread used tea leaves when they blast, to keep the dust down?’

  ‘I’ve just got to get myself out of this situation,’ said Natalie. ‘Since there’s no one to help me I’ll have to help myself.’

  ‘Try the quarry then,’ said Peter. ‘The Devil helps those who help themselves.’

  Since taking his advice, although it was always enigmatic, had turned out well in the past, Natalie took it now and the next day went up to that part of the old quarry which was still being worked, in the section of the hill above Bernard and Flora’s caravan. White dust shrouded the road and fields for yards around. It crunched underfoot as Natalie walked. Sirens sounded, and a whole section of Somerset hillside crumbled and collapsed in its own special granite cloud. A line of ancient giant rock-crunchers prepared to receive that day’s splendid dinner. The ground shook beneath her as the rock fell away.

  ‘Okay,’ said the site manager to Natalie. ‘You want to be the gofer? You be the gofer! You’re here in person, which is more than can be said for the one we employ now. No phone call, nothing! Can’t say I’m sorry; his mum’s up here all the time, about one thing or another. The trouble with today’s young, they can’t tell a job from a classroom.’

  ‘What will I have to do?’ She had no idea, but she was astonished and gratified to find a job was so easy to find.

  ‘Make the tea, run errands, copy out the work chits. Can’t use a computer out here: the dust gets into the works.’

  ‘And the lungs,’ she said, coughing, but he didn’t seem to think that was funny. Not one bit.

  ‘Shift work Monday to Thursday: 6 a.m. till 2. Thursday through Saturday: 3 to 11. Forty quid.’

  ‘The day?’

  ‘The week,’ he said. ‘No arguments. Take it or leave it. If you don’t take it someone else will.’

  ‘I can’t manage on that!’

  ‘Lady,’ said Bob, for so he was called, ‘that’s no concern of mine. Try for Family Income Supplement, if it’s not enough. Don’t expect me to keep you in luxury. Start on Monday.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked, in rather more friendly tones than before.

  ‘Eddon Gurney.’

  ‘Oh, Eddon. No bus. I’d give you a lift up in the mornings but the wife wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ said Natalie.

  Now what Natalie failed to notice, being not, as we have observed, the most perceptive or sensitive girl in the world – in spite of what I’ve said to the contrary in the past, in Natalie’s defence: I do think it takes a pretty obtuse kind of person not to notice when a husband plans to leave – was the flash of the Quattro round corners and hedges wherever she went. Angus was well and truly hooked on Natalie, as men can sometimes be on women whose moral approval they want. Of course Angus wanted her body – who wouldn’t? – but he wanted her to like him, approve of him, admire him and tell him he was doing just fine, as well. All those very reactions, in fact, a man can reasonably expect from a wife, but seldom gets, and Angus certainly did not receive from Jean.

  ‘I reckon you’re a closet queer,’ Jean would say, blaming him for her lack of orgasm.

  ‘You were a fool to buy this car,’ she’d say, every time the garage filled it up yet again. ‘More money than sense!’ ‘She’d never look at you, you’re past it – an old man with a paunch,’ she’d say, if he admired some woman on TV. ‘Why can’t you take up an honest profession,’ she’d say, if he pulled off some stupendous property deal.

  ‘Big fish in a little pond,’ she’d say, if he got his name in the local paper. And if he gave her a cheque, out of the blue, she’d say ‘Now what are you trying to buy?’ Or if he bought flowers, ‘What have you been up to, Angus?’

  What he liked was Natalie’s silence, her soft, occasional glance towards him, the tremble of her bottom lip, how feeling hard done by, as she must about the auction, she had not ranted or raved. She wouldn’t talk to him, true, but she’d get over that. Moreover he had let it be known to Arthur that he and Natalie were in what Arthur liked to describe as a ‘leg-over situation’. He wanted it to be true, he was humiliated that it wasn’t true: he meant to make it true.

  So when Natalie left the quarry in the pouring rain and started walking down the hill, it just so happened the Audi Quattro happened to be passing.

  ‘Give you a lift, Natalie?’

  She’d said no often enough on the road to school, outside the house, by the post office, and at the shops, quite automatically. Now her lips seemed stiffened by white dust and she needed shelter. She stayed quiet and just got in. ‘What are you doing here, Natalie?’

  ‘I’ve got a job.’

  ‘What do you want with one of those? Do you no good. Wear you out.’

  ‘I want to be independent.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I thought all you gir
ls together were happy enough living off the State. I could get you a job.’

  ‘What doing?’

  Angus thought fast.

  ‘We’re entering a float for the Carnival. Needs someone to be in charge – what’s wrong with you?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Natalie.

  ‘No strings attached,’ he pleaded.

  ‘No.’ She didn’t even bother to think about it. She just said no. It annoyed him.

  ‘Eighty pounds a week, cash, no tax deductions.’

  She shook her head. He wanted to shake her. He took her back home, or to her half-home, down at Sonia’s. The Quattro had parked outside better places, his expression said. Slumming, where the little children swarmed, and all of them fatherless! As are 23 per cent of all the nation’s children of course, but someone like Angus wasn’t counting. Takes a mad woman in a loonybin to actually count. One child in thirty these days is born physically handicapped. Did you know that? Sonia saw it on a poster only yesterday. And no money for research any more. The only people doing research are the drug companies themselves – the ones who make Thalidomide and allied substances. That’s the way it goes, these days. For the heart of the country read the pocket of the country.

  ‘Any time you want out!’ Angus said. ‘But I suppose you two ladies are snug enough,’ and he was pleased to see Natalie reacted to that. Just a spot of colour in her porcelain cheek, but nonetheless a reaction. She had lost the dishevelled look of the early days of Harry’s leaving, he was sorry to see. Except for a little patch of quarry dust left unbrushed on the side of her skirt, she was otherwise well turned out. When it rained the dust would turn not so much to mud as to a thick gluey paste. No brushing it off then. It won’t be long, thought Angus.

  Sonia too knows what it is to love Natalie, to want to raise a spot of red on the porcelain cheek.

  Bargains

  In the meantime, Bernard has gone up to Arthur’s, there in the shadow of Gurney Castle where the cobbled streets meet the ancient castle walls, and all is grey, grey, grey, except for Arthur’s yellow waistcoat when he comes outside to arrange his wares. Bernard dresses in leather, and other mirk, as befits today’s dustbin young. It’s their elders who bounce about on lively polished toes in bright, soft wools and won’t be defeated. Bernard had brought with him the leather bucket recently appropriated by Flora; his purpose was to flog it to Arthur.

  In order to enter the shop Bernard had to pass through Arthur’s outside wares – today including a rather pleasant but battered games table: a japan box with broken drawers and an over-varnished pig bench with a cracked basin and ewer upon it. Arthur would put such bargains out of doors, hoping to get rid of them quickly, before their sorry state finally defeated him, and he sent them off to the restorers, spending more on them than he was ever likely to get back.

  A certain Sandra Radlett came out of the shop as Bernard went in. She was twenty-two or so, with a clear skin and wide-apart blank blue eyes: like a doll, Bernard thought. He wondered what she was on that had made her pupils enlarge. (The young notice things like this.) He supposed sex could do it. Arthur pecked Sandra Radlett on the cheek, patted her on the bottom and said:

  ‘Now don’t get serious. We’re in this for laughs.’ She tittered obligingly, nervous of Bernard, and left. Sandra worked in the bank, and took a late lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Jane no longer lived above the shop, of course, but Arthur was a man of habit.

  Arthur did not seem pleased to see Bernard. He knew trouble when he saw it.

  ‘Why aren’t you up at Avon Farmers?’

  ‘I’m on nights.’

  ‘That’s promotion! Time and a half! Congratulations.’

  ‘It’s okay if you’ve got no principles,’ said Bernard, and Arthur thought he was joking, but Bernard was serious, and taller than Arthur, what’s more. ‘Trouble is, I have.’

  ‘Cheap food for the millions,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s what this country wants, that’s what this country gets. Down there at Avon Farmers you’re doing your bit for Britain.’ And he laughed.

  But Bernard just went on staring, so Arthur stooped and took the leather bucket. ‘Funny old bucket,’ he said.

  ‘Georgian, I reckon,’ said Bernard.

  ‘George the Sixth, yes.’

  ‘Leather. Not many of these about.’

  ‘They’re all over the place,’ said Arthur. ‘Common as mud.’

  ‘Twenty quid to you,’ said Bernard.

  ‘You’re joking. Couldn’t raise a tenner on it. It’s been about. I’ve seen it somewhere.’

  ‘Couldn’t have,’ said Bernard. ‘Turned up on the dump. If you’re not interested, I’ll take it somewhere else.’

  ‘You’re going too fast,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s for when I say twelve and you come down to eighteen, and neither of us will say fifteen. You’re losing your cool. But you have an instinct. Tell you what, we’ll make it fifteen, and when you’re finished at Avon Farmers I’ll take you on as my assistant.’

  ‘Finished? Is there something you know I don’t know?’

  ‘All good things come to an end,’ said Arthur. ‘Even Avon Farmers.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Bernard. ‘Nerve poison?’

  Arthur sighed pointedly and handed over three five-pound notes for the bucket and Bernard said:

  ‘And another eighteen. That’s what Mrs Harris owes Flora and never paid.’

  ‘Why should I pay Natalie Harris’ debts?’ Arthur was afraid of the answer but couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Because you bought her house for sixty thousand and a couple of months on you’re selling at one hundred and twenty, and that’s sixty thousand clear profit and I reckon you can afford it.’

  Arthur paid up.

  ‘I worry about you, boy,’ he said. ‘Good thing there’s no Mafia round here or you’d end up head first in a drainage dyke.’

  Ah, the heart of the country!

  Gratitude-Schmatitude

  Natalie’s job. She shouldn’t have taken it and I told her so. She had no social conscience at all – or else she was just naive. Up at the quarry they were lowering the going rate every month. Now it was down to just two pounds a week more than the basic benefit and women like Natalie still turned up to take it, beaming their gratitude.

  ‘It’s better than being on the dole,’ said Natalie to Sonia.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ I said. ‘Did he mention Family Income Supplement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I explained and explained that FIS was a hidden supplement for employers, but she couldn’t seem to grasp it. Somewhere inside herself she was still on the employers’ side. A good night’s sleep or so and some help with the children and a suitor to reject, and she bounced right back and looked and acted as if she belonged to the haves and not the have-nots. FIS, I explained, was for nuclear families, the inept but good, not the abandoned mothers, the sloppy and bad. I asked her who was going to look after the kids – me? And she said she’d manage, and I said she meant I would. I asked her how she was going to get to work each morning. I asked her where she was going to live because it certainly wasn’t going to be with me, because people were saying she and I were lesbians and although I for one didn’t have anything against lesbians, I didn’t want Stephen to turn up and take away the children because of my immoral life.

  I got a spot of pink on her cheeks all right. I got her waving her arms around, bright pink and shouting stop it, stop it, stop it. I put my arms round her because I was sorry I’d done it and she pushed me away, saying:

  ‘Don’t do that,’ and I hated her. This love business doesn’t flow the same way round all the time. The energy flows the other way and you hate.

  There’s a lot of energy floating around here. It pours out of the Tor, on just a few days every year – you can feel it. Even though the sun’s rising in the east and the Tor’s in the west it still manages to cast some kind of shadow over you. On those days I’d keep the kids off school and we’d all go
off to Weston or somewhere for the day. You can hardly swim, it’s not the South of France, but you can watch the rip tides, and look up the numbers drowned that year. That day I didn’t have the fare to Weston – they’d put the fares up again. I just had to stay home and face myself and by and meet the energy from the Tor. The house is bang on a leyline. Not good. It’s better to be just off it. Open the front door and the back, on some days, and you can practically see, feel, touch the Powers walking through it, pacing on their march from here to there, balancing the Universe. Nonsense, but true. Or as they say of the cream cakes – naughty but nice. On other days, open both doors and all you get is a draught and a flurry of waste paper.

  While Natalie was screaming her head off in my house and thinking perhaps Angus was a better bargain than sharing with a lesbian lunatic, Bernard had gone back up to Flora with a bottle of champagne. I’m glad her life then wasn’t all bad. I say that, but actually think champagne’s acidy stuff and not a patch on a good claret. My father (allegedly) drank himself to death on good claret. Bernard was talking, as men will, about the moral dilemma he found himself in and Flora, as women will, was suggesting he just got on with the job in hand and stopped yacketing and boring her to death.