The Heart of the Country

by Fay Weldon

  Arthur had offered Flora the role of Mrs Housewife Princess: she who was to sit on the throne. She’d come up to the shop one day with rather a nice painting she’d found on the skip outside her front door, up at the rubbish tip.

  ‘Who, me?’ she said. ‘A housewife? You must be joking. What am I housewife to? A caravan?’

  ‘We’re not fussy,’ said Arthur. ‘No one will mind. You’re liked round here.’

  ‘I’m not even married,’ said Flora.

  ‘Who is, these days?’ he asked.

  ‘You, for one!’ she said. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘me sit on a white throne? You have to be a virgin to do that, and I’m no virgin.’

  Her instinct was right. Only virgins should sit on white thrones, and even then it’s tricky. In the early days of the carnival they’d like as not burn their chosen virgin to death. At first on purpose – later on by accident on purpose. That was the point of the event. Burn a virgin, fire a barn, drown a witch. Clear old scores and start afresh! What do you think the carnival is about? Fun and games? Oh, no.

  ‘We can do without a virgin,’ said Arthur, taking her pretty white hand. ‘We can’t do without you!’

  ‘You give me back my hand,’ said Flora. She was looking particularly pretty that day. She had gold sparkle in her hair and silver dust on her smooth cheeks, and wore one of Bernard’s leather jackets over a shabby suede miniskirt, and high, though broken, stiletto heels. He feared for his floor.

  ‘You just give me a proper price for my painting,’ she said. ‘That’s all you’re here to do. You leave all that other to younger, sillier folk than you.’

  He did not take offence. He liked Flora. He looked a second time at the canvas – maple framed, thick with grime but with quite a nice flower painting lurking beneath, and saw that it was better than he’d at first assumed. He thought it might even be worth putting into auction. He offered her a tenner.

  ‘Bernard says,’ observed Flora, ‘that if you get offered a tenner it’s probably worth five hundred. If you get offered between two and five, then it’s worth about twenty.’

  ‘Bernard doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ said Arthur, but Bernard did. The more you offered, that was the trouble, the more the public thought you were cheating them, and the more likely you were to be doing just that.

  ‘A tenner,’ he repeated, ‘and I’m doing you a favour.’

  ‘It’s a really nice picture,’ she said. ‘I know it is, and if there was room in the caravan I’d hang it up.’ He believed she would, and it endeared her to him, even more than her long slightly bowed legs and her wide eyes and her glitter-dusted brows. If only Jane had appreciated antiques, liked beautiful things, how happy they might have been!

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it in auction, I’ll take 10 per cent dealer’s fee, and you be Mrs Housewife Princess.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ she said. She didn’t believe the bit about only 10 per cent – 90 per cent would be more like it, and how could she ever check – but she was hungry.

  ‘If you want a job,’ he added, ‘go on up to Avon Farmers and help them out on the float. One pound the hour.’ She went. Arthur thought she was wasted on Bernard; he always had.

  And that’s how it happened that Natalie, Sonia, Flora, Ros, and presently Arthur’s Jane were all up at Avon Farmers working on the float in the first week of November just to get it ready. The weather was closing in. The barn was draughty, wind swept the rain across the fields outside in visible sheets, but inside there was warmth and camaraderie, 90p the hour and no questions asked and so what if Flora was getting a pound. Sonia’s and Ros’ children warm in school, with the State paying the heating bills. Something to do. There were no complaints, not at first.

  Praxis

  But Sonia wouldn’t let things go along happily, would she! Sonia wanted justice. Sonia wanted to get to the root of things. Sonia bore a grudge. Sonia knew the history of the carnival – all those afternoons with Edwina, hanging about, out of the cold in the Folk Museum, had not been wasted. Sonia wanted her past to catch up with her present. Sonia hated men. Sonia hated men in the same way as Angus and Arthur, Harry, Stephen and Alec, to name but a few, hated women. It’s just that men have power and women don’t, so men smile and kiss women and hardly know they hate them, even while they hurt them, and women like Sonia, who hop around the world with as many limbs tied as they have children, turn shrill and desperate and go mad so the men can see them coming and get out in time. Maenads, harridans, hags, witches – don’t look at the Medusa, sir, or you’ll see yourself in her mirror eyes, get turned to stone! Harpy hair and writhing snakes! Shall I tear out a snatch of my hair and hand it to you? Would you like that? No?

  A pill, please. I must finish the story.

  The WAEADA float was to take to the road on the Wednesday night. On the Tuesday morning Arthur’s wife Jane came up to see if she could help. She was carrying the leather bucket. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were red with crying, but her clothes were expensive. The others were dressed by Oxfam.

  ‘Are you sure you want to?’ asked Sonia. ‘We’re all on the dole. You don’t want to get infected.’

  But Jane said Arthur had sent her up. She cried into her pot of paint until finally Ros asked her what was up. She said that she kept getting telephone calls from someone who put the phone down when she answered and it was getting her down. ‘You mean it might be one of Arthur’s fancy women?’ asked Flora, right out. ‘Don’t you take any notice of those: those are just his sillinesses. Arthur’s all right.’

  ‘She wouldn’t keep ringing if it was still going on,’ said Ros. ‘Whatever it was, it’s finished.’

  But in spite of this comfort Jane still trembled and wept so much she had to be given a cup of tea.

  ‘Marriage!’ she said. ‘But what’s the alternative? I’m too old to start again. And he can do as he pleases because what in the world is there to stop him?’

  ‘You can’t stop them,’ said Natalie, ‘all you can do is feel differently about it in your head. You can learn not to care.’

  What did Natalie know about it? What she’d lost to Marion Hopfoot was nothing. What Jane was losing was really quite something. What Sonia had lost was even more. Natalie saying what she did made Sonia even crosser. While women adapt, and adapt and adapt, men will continue to get away with everything. If Jane hadn’t come up weeping and wailing to the barn at Avon Farmers, if Natalie hadn’t been so complacent, perhaps what was to happen wouldn’t have happened.

  ‘I reckon,’ said Sonia, laying down her paintbrush, ‘you can stop men doing things.’

  ‘How?’ asked Natalie. These days her attitude towards Sonia was not quite antagonistic, but certainly somehow defiant.

  ‘For one thing,’ said Sonia, ‘you can stop colluding.’

  Ros was busy lettering in the ‘F’ of Housewife’s Friend. She laid down her brush.

  ‘They’re not really our friends, are they!’ she said. ‘Why should I paint lies?’

  ‘Because they pay us to,’ said Flora, but she put down her hammer. She’d been tacking Terylene lace around the toy town windows. And Natalie, who had been stitching Velcro onto the estate agent’s waistcoat, stopped that as well. Jane snivelled on for a time, but presently was quiet. It was she who spoke first.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that giant at the back is really Angus, and that one in the front is Arthur. So why don’t we make them look like who they really are?’

  And Sonia hardly had to say a word. Of their own accord, out of their own oppression, they were back in the ancient spirit of carnival, when the images of the hated were paraded through the streets, and hung from gibbets, or rolled down the hills in burning tar barrels.

  They worked through the evening and into the night, and one of those wonderful late autumn evenings it was, when the sun struck low from behind the Tor, and the red lingered in streaks across the sky, and fog formed in puffy lines low over the levels, and reflected th
e red upward. Oh yes, a numinous evening indeed. Around carnival time, such evenings are common.

  Early the next morning Angus and Arthur came up to have a last look at the float. It was covered by a tarpaulin.

  Natalie distracted Angus, and Flora distracted Arthur, and each assumed the other had looked beneath. The float was to travel to Glastonbury pulled by Bernard on the tractor, with a generator for the lights tagged along behind. The girls, together with Angus’ Jean, Pauline from the delicatessen and Sally Bains from the school office as reinforcements, were to change into their housewife costumes in the carnival headquarters. The WAEADA float was no. 62; no. 61, travelling ahead, was to be a ninety foot monster – ‘Baghdad Nights’ and no. 63, behind, was to be a ‘Star Wars’ spectacular. Bernard would steer the float to its place in the appropriate layby, and when evening came, the tarpaulin would be rolled back, its merry band of housewives would ascend, Flora, dressed in virgin white, would take her place on the pale swan throne, the generator would hum, the myriad overhead lights would blaze, music would blare and no. 62 would move off.

  Human Sacrifice

  All these things came to pass.

  Arthur and Angus caught up with the float as it rounded the War Memorial corner. Here the crowds were thick and uncomfortable, those behind moving forward to see the better, those in front stepping back so as not to get their feet run over. Brilliant light interwove with patches of darkness: near music mingled with far, blowing in the wind. Marshals attempted to keep the front ranks back, in vain. Children kept breaking from the crowd to buy the silvery balloons, or the horrid hot dogs, or just to play chicken in between the massive, slowly moving structures. The heady smell of hot diesel oil was all around. The procession would stop from time to time to allow its back to catch up with its front, or when a tractor broke down, or some wider than allowed float failed to manoeuvre a corner and had to be manually backed to start the attempt again. Few floats could go into reverse gear. On the WAEADA float Natalie, Sonia, Ros, Jane, Jean, Pauline and Sally gazed enigmatically out on the crowds, and smiled, and waved their feather dusters.

  The music that blared out from no. 62 was not ‘Our House’ or even ‘Fly me to the Stars’ but Pete Seger’s all too recognizable ‘Little Boxes’:

  ‘Little boxes, on the hillside,

  Little boxes, made of ticky-tacky – ’

  And the auctioneer, of course, was an all too recognizable version of Angus, with fair floppy hair dropping over a self-indulgent brow and a double chin, raising and lowering his hammer. And there was Arthur at the other end of the float, with his yellow waistcoat and his spyglass in his cunning eye, and the key to his back room offered, taken away, offered, taken away – no, as portraits they were not kind.

  Some of the crowd sniggered as the familiar pair soared by above them, but on the whole most assumed that what they saw was meant, intended, by persons who knew better than they. They clapped and applauded, and only a child was heard to say, ‘But that man isn’t smiling, he’s snarling like my dog.’ And if only those on the float got the full significance of the blow-up of Ros’ last postal draft plastered over the back of the float, never mind. A full eighteen pounds and sixty-one pence! Landlords live by the DHSS here in the heart of the country. Many, in fact, will take only tenants in receipt of public funds. Rent gets paid direct, and never fails.

  ‘Bitch!’ shouted Angus to Natalie, keeping pace with the float. ‘What have you done?’ She looked away, smirking, it seemed to him. ‘Ungrateful bitch!’ But a surge of the crowds came between them, and the music rose all around to deafen him and she seemed to forget he was there altogether. Arthur, on the contrary, seemed to see the joke. He laughed and puffed as he walked beside the float, parting the crowds. He called out to Flora, ‘I’ve got something for you!’ but she was too busy being Mrs Housewife Princess of Ticky-Tacky Land to hear.

  ‘Bitch!’ cried Angus to Natalie, catching up again. He was beside himself at her treachery. He had given her everything and now look, she had been laughing at him all the time.

  ‘You never loved me,’ she shrieked down at him above Pete Seger and the crackle of lights and the hum of generators and the cries of street sellers. ‘You only wanted me because Arthur wanted me.’

  ‘I don’t love you!’ he shouted, above the roar of the tractors and the yells of children – ‘not after all this. Bitch!’ Oh, he was over excited!

  ‘I thought for a week I loved you,’ said Natalie, ‘because I needed you and there was no one else, and you have to have someone. But I don’t love you any more!’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he shrieked. ‘I want you out of that flat by the end of the week.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she yelled. ‘I will be!’

  And she waved her feather duster at him and brushed him out of her life.

  Angus ran ahead to tell Bernard, who was driving the tractor which pulled the float, that he was fired, but Bernard was chanting a little song, in his fine West Country burr. It went like this:

  ‘Dieldran, mecadox, antimicrobae

  Auteomycin, chlorotetraclin,

  Magic sulphameyathhe, and wonder Bio-eater – ’

  ‘You’re fired!’ shouted Angus again. It was hardly fair of Bernard. All these substances were being phased out up at Avon Farmers in favour of those which had EEC approval.

  ‘I fired myself yesterday,’ said Bernard. ‘I’m pulling this float for the love of it. I went to a funeral yesterday. My mate the gravedigger told me human bodies took a long time to decompose these days, they’re so full of preservatives. You keep your wage packet. I’d rather sell smack at the school gates any day. It’s safer.’

  ‘Little boxes, on the hillside…

  And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky…’

  sang Pete Seger, as he’s been singing since the fifties. Nothing changes.

  I said my piece then, from my moving stage. I shouted it at the crowds. Most of them didn’t hear. If they did, they thought I was part of the act.

  I told them about the wickedness of men, and the wretchedness of women. I told them they were being had, cheated, conned. That they were the poor and the helpless, and the robber barons were all around. They were being poisoned for profit: their children were being robbed of their birthright: the very rain that fell, the forests that grew, were being sold off, to be resold back to them. That they lived here in the heart of the country in the shadow of cruise missiles, in the breeze from Hinkley Point. That it was up to the women to fight back, because the men had lost their nerve. The crowd applauded my performance, though they missed the gist of the words. That was something. I pointed to the effigy of Angus on my right and Arthur to the left.

  ‘I blame the guilty men,’ I yelled. ‘Seducers, fornicators, robbers, cheats!’

  How they cheered!

  And this was the signal for my friend Ros to pick up the Georgian leather bucket, standing so innocently there beside Flora’s conch throne, but actually filled with petrol by me just before I began my speech. Ros flung the contents over Angus’ effigy. I flung a lighted match after it. I hadn’t realized quite what the impact of flame on petrol is. In a word, startling. The crowd yelled, in horror, surprise and, I fear, delight.

  Fire’s wonderful. So pretty, don’t you think? Not final and grudging and finite, like an explosion, but always offering a tentative, if noisy, way out. If, if! cries the fire. If I don’t catch, shrieks fire. If you’ve got water, if you can block out my oxygen, find the blanket and locate the extinguisher, perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll let you off this time! I’ll go out. Any offers? Got any ifs for me? What? None? And then stronger and stronger comes the roar – no, no stopping me now, no putting me out; on your head be it. See, I’m unquenchable, I’m everywhere, everything, crackle, leap and bound and lo – all gone! Up in flames, into ashes, into dust, goodbye!

  It took the housewives on the float a moment or so before they realized what had happened. Fire has that effect. You tend to stare at rapidly ascending
tongues of flame, and admire their beauty, before realizing they can hurt, burn and destroy. They leapt from the float in what I see as the order of their desire for survival. Jean was off first (she would!) then Natalie, then Ros, then Sally, then Jane, then Pauline and then myself, Sonia. I would quite happily have died there.

  And Flora?

  Flora didn’t get off the float at all. She was mesmerized not by the flames but by her good fortune. What had happened was that Arthur had just handed her a cheque for two thousand pounds. He’d put her flower painting into a Sotheby’s sale and it had fetched two thousand two hundred. He’d taken for himself only 10 per cent and he need never have mentioned the sale at all. He’d done what he said he would. He had achieved a moral act, finally. It killed Flora.

  People shouldn’t change their natures, just like that. It doesn’t do. Surprise is bad for people. It was sheer surprise which kept Flora sitting there gawping at the cheque. The light bulbs on the top of the float were cracking and popping in the heat. The crowd was now bending backwards and away out of danger. There were shouts and cries: Bernard was uncoupling the tractor. ‘Baghdad Nights’ was standing off: ‘Star Wars’ was being manoeuvred backwards.