The Heart of the Country

by Fay Weldon

  Flora sat all in virgin white on the voluminous snowy throne and no one noticed her in time, just sitting there. I think it was her very stillness made her invisible, her very whiteness. Oh my virgin sacrifice! Allow me to descend into maudlin sentiment, just for once. She was all of us, what we once were, young, pretty, innocent and stunned by the wonder of the world, its capacity suddenly to offer good when all that is expected is bad. The giant effigy of Angus toppled back towards the centre of the float, and loomed over the throne, as some kind of root fixture burned through, and bent back still further, and cracked, and down it fell on top of the throne, on top of Flora, and Flora died. I think from the smoke. I hope from the smoke. Something horrible in the foam upholstery. I don’t think she burned.

  Okay. She burned. Consider it. A paragraph of silence while we do. Memorial space, dedicated to writhing, horrified, twisting Flora. My fault.

  And to the others we all know, who died horribly before their time. Not my fault.

  My fault? Ros threw the petrol, I threw the match. I could make Ros do anything I wanted, and I did. Only Ros and me knew what we were going to do. Our demonstration. Our visual fix, so the crowds would know the way the heart of the country was going, and do something about it. So it landed me here. Fine! Flora, the virgin sacrifice, so the world could cure itself of evil and renew itself? Better still! I hope it works. I didn’t mean Flora to die, or anyone to die, of course I didn’t. Fate took a hand. I take it as a good omen that it did. Bad for Flora, good for mankind, in which of course we include women, the lesser inside the greater.

  My guilt, my madness if you like, has been the murder in my heart. I don’t deny it; how can I? Because of the misfortunes of my life I have been murderous, full of hate. The fire didn’t put those feelings out: on the contrary, it inflamed them, at least for a while. Eddon Hill drugs, Dr Mempton’s patience, something, has worked. I feel quite denuded of hate, all of a sudden, as if Flora had stepped down, all virgin white, and graciously extended her lily white hands, that she never once got in the scrubbing bucket, no matter how Natalie Harris and Jane Wandle nagged, and forgiven me. Well, and why not! I was only trying to help.

  Resolutions

  Flora had a funeral to which everyone came. Ros got probation; I got put in here. Something happened to Arthur, who put on weight and aged ten years between the carnival and the funeral, and lost the knack of pulling women. Or so Ros told me. He tried Ros and she simply laughed. Perhaps his good deed did him no good: made his Dorian Gray picture in the attic grow younger so he had to grow older. Virtue is its own reward, don’t think it isn’t, and sometimes it’s a positive drawback. Anyway, with Arthur less randy Jane was happier. Only when she has him helpless in a wheelchair, after a stroke, will she be truly at ease. Sometimes I understand why it is that some men fear some women so: if women are virtuous, if they insist on being victims, then their misery controls to the grave.

  Angus? Angus did not forgive Natalie. He was tired of her, anyway. He’d said she could have the flat free until November, just about getting the timing right. He did not renew the lease, but when he’d calmed down did not deny she’d brought richness and happiness into his life, at least for a while. Jean was rather pleasanter to him, now she was on HRT, or hormone replacement therapy. Her horribleness turned out to be menopausal. Or so he said. Various West Country rings dealing with illicitly imported agricultural chemicals, were uncovered by the police, and the penalties weren’t just fines but prison sentences, so Avon Farmers disappeared only just in time. Arthur started a Garden Centre there instead, where the flowers and shrubs flourished immoderately, and where not a butterfly ever alighted. Something had indeed got into the soil, for good or bad. One of his assistants had a baby born with a crooked leg but that could happen to anyone: there’s an epidemic, remember, of handicapped babies. And another died of cancer, but that was hardly statistically surprising, and in the meantime, how the pot plants in Eddon Gurney bloomed!

  In the delicatessen the till pinged almost nonstop and profits grew, against all expectation. With the coming of Jax had come good fortune. The animal was obviously happier in a home where there were no children. Gerard took anti-depressants and lost his social conscience and thereafter sold luxury foods to the non-hungry with equanimity. Pauline took up weight training: an excellent substitute for sexual activity for those whose husbands grow elderly and uninterested too soon for their liking.

  Val Bains’ back got permanently better at carnival time. He was in the crowds watching when float no. 62 caught fire. He ran forward to help Bernard unhitch the tractor, and in bending and forgetting released some trapped nerve or other in his spine. He took the job in Street at a firm using the new computer technology; it was exacting work if not well paid. He would drop Sally off at work, and collect her on the way home. She was pleased to have so visible and caring a husband.

  Natalie? Well, here’s a turn-up for the books. Natalie stepped into Flora’s shoes, with Bernard in the caravan, up by the tip. He’s ten years younger than she is, but who cares? She had nowhere to go when Angus turned her out of the flat, and she’s always got on well with Bernard and at least didn’t have the children to worry about. Ros went up to see her, not long ago. Natalie said she was happier than she had ever been in all her life. She was properly alive at last, she said, though looking forward to the spring. Winters in a caravan can be trying. No, she didn’t want the children back. What could she offer them? Ros thought perhaps she was on drugs. It was so damp and muddy up by the tip, and Natalie looked so happy without any real reason that Ros could see. But perhaps it’s just sex, sex, sex; you know what Bernard is, forever quenching his moral and mental torment in fleshly pleasures. I hope it is. God knows what will happen to her next: what does happen to the one in three women with children whose marriages end in divorce?

  You are right, it’s worrying about that which has driven me into the nuthouse, and right out the other side. I am, alas, sane again. I am, Dr Mempton says, fit to leave. Why is he being so nice to me? What? I can hardly believe him. How many sessions with the psychiatrist does an ordinary patient have? he asks. One a week? One a fortnight? He’s joking. That is a monstrously low figure. Yes, I do realize he’s been coming every day. It did seem strange. I now see it’s bloody irresponsible, if what he’s saying is true.

  Love? Me? Who could love me? I make him laugh, Bill Mempton says. When was making someone laugh a recipe for love? This is very, very embarrassing, and not what I had in mind at all. Look at me! Puffy face, puffy hands, twitching. That’s the drugs. I talk too much. I am full of hate and self-pity. He knows that, better than anyone. He’ll be saying next all I need is the love of a good man. My God, he’s said it! Do Them Upstairs go for this sort of thing – doctor-patient romances? I hardly think so! Or is it that they reckon anything is better than the Eddon Method? Those deaths must have shaken management no end!

  Not for Sonia Flora’s triumphant puff of smoke, her exaltation: not for Sonia Natalie’s glorious debasement: no, for Sonia comes a proposal of marriage from a good man, who knows her every failing. She can’t accept, of course. Happy endings are not so easy. No. She must get on with changing the world, rescuing the country. There is no time left for frivolity.

  Fay Weldon

  Mid October 1986

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  A portrait of a woman through time. Controversial, disturbing and witty—Fay Weldon’s most ambitious novel.

  Praxis Duveen is a truly modern heroine, buffeted and battered by life, by women and by men, by herself – wry, funny, pretty innocent, knowing – yet surviving. Her story begins in the 1920s in the s
easide town of Brighton. When we leave her in the in 1970s, in London, she has become – despite herself – a world-famous women’s leader.

  I do not wet the bed now; at least not that: though soon, I dare say, the time will come when I do. I dread the day. I do not want to be an old woman sitting in a chair, wearing nappies, nursed by the salt of the earth. It seems unjust; not what Lucy and Benjamin meant at all; rolling about in their unwed bed, year after year, moved by a force which clearly had nothing to do with commonsense or anyone’s quest for happiness: until, their mission apparently accomplished, they rolled apart and went their separate ways, assisted by Butt and Sons, Solicitors.

  I do not want to be an incontinent old lady. I would rather die. I feel today, my elbow throbbing and my toe swelling, that the time for dying will be quite soon. On Thursdays I go down to the Social Security offices, stand in a queue, and draw the money which keeps me for a further week. It should be possible for a postal draft to be sent weekly and myself to cash it at the local post office, but I do not like to make the request. I am an ex-con, and habit dies hard of not causing trouble to, let alone demanding one’s rights of, those in authority.

  Those in authority, at any rate, in that strange grey world of bars and keys which I have inhabited, where cause and effect works in an immediate way, and the stupid are in charge of the intelligent, and each wrong-doer carries on his poor bowed shoulders the weight of a hundred of the worthy – from prison visitors to the Home Secretary – whose living is made, indirectly, out of crime, or sin, or financial failing, or criminal negligence: or, as with me, the madness of believing that I was right, and society wrong. Who did I think I was? I, Praxis Duveen.

  Madness, I say. Today, certainly, it seems like madness. It’s raining. I can see water seeping beneath the door, and have not the strength to fetch one of my cheap, bright, non-absorbent towels to sop it up. Damp stains the stone floor: I feel a dark stain of wretchedness creeping up to the very edges of that part of my mind, my being, which I usually manage to keep inviolate. The part which is daily reborn with gladness, excitement and gratitude to God (or whatever you call it) because the world exists and is so full of interest and possibility: a part of me which I associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Praxis of the very early years, who would run happily into the waves with shoes and socks on to see what would happen, meet with a slap or two, and do it again the next day, unafraid.

  Praxis, protected by parental love. While it lasted. Paradise was there, then snatched away.

  Children who have been hurt, grow up to hurt. This I know. I knew it, but was helpless in the knowledge. I shouted and screamed, attempted murder or faked suicide, in my children’s presence: conducted the dark side of my erotic nature beneath their startled gaze, careless of the precipice I opened up beneath their feet. I, who guarded them from the fleas of strange dogs, and nasty sights at the pictures, and brushed their hair with loving care. Yes, I did, and so did you, and you: paid back to them what mother did to you.

  I remember clearly that early sense of fear and desolation of which all later fears and desolations are mere shadows. And I handed it on to them: this extreme of terror and horror; the ultimate standard by which they must judge the traumas of their own lives, and will hardly feel alive if they do not attain, and so strive to attain for ever. The shrieks of generations growing louder, not softer, as the decades pass.

  I am ashamed of it: as ashamed of that as of anything I have done: and bewildered as to why I feel compelled to do it. The domestic row existed, I could almost believe, in order to distress the children.

  Perhaps I am dead, and this is my punishment? To believe I am still alive, and live as a useless old woman in a Western industrialised society? There cannot be much worse a punishment. Unless it be to live as a young woman in the East, and see your children die from starvation: or worse, watch them grow up sour, undersized and crippled by curable diseases.

  I touch my elbow to see if I am alive. I am.

  ‘I want to go to school,’ Praxis said to Hypatia, when she was seven; she spoke experimentally, wondering whether it was possible, by mere words, to influence the course of events.

  ‘Always fussing,’ said Hypatia. ‘Anyway we can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just be quiet,’ said Hypatia, who was sensitive to Lucy’s anxieties, and knew that the matter of their going to or not going to school kept their mother awake at night. ‘And wipe your nose, it’s dripping again.’

  Hypatia walked cautiously through life, fearful of disturbing stones in case she saw the insects scuttling underneath. Praxis, she felt, blundered blithely on, aiming careless kicks as she went.

  Hypatia sat inside the house and sewed and embroidered with her mother. Praxis swung on the garden gate and watched the other children going to and from the council school at the end of Holden Road. Noisy, messy, muddled children, even by comparison to herself: shirts and ties awry, satchels broken, shoes dirty, trailing sweet papers as they went. They ran, shrieked, scuffled, stumbled, fell and helped each other up.

  ‘Common children,’ said Lucy Duveen, ‘come away.’

  Lucy taught her daughters to read, write, add up, launder, embroider and sew. She taught them how to boil mutton, unlump a white sauce, stew cabbage and mix a plum duff.

  Henry emerged from his developing room, adapted from the cupboard under the stairs. His business was thriving. He had saved almost enough to put down a deposit on a small photographic studio on the sea-front. He breathed more easily these days. He went to the pub: he had a crony or two there, although he did not tell Lucy. Her fear of gossip, of people Finding Out, was too great for her to be able to view friends with equanimity.

  Lucy was worried by the matter of the children’s schooling: worry made her unreasonable. She would divert her mind from its proper preoccupation, and busy it with trifles: and then accord the trifles the emotional weight that better befitted the preoccupation. Anxiety, anger, and a sense of injustice, welled up in her at the notion of Henry’s lack of breeding, and blotted out her panic at the thought of the girls’ birth certificates, which would have to be produced when and if they ever enrolled at school.

  Close inspection of their birth certificates would reveal the girls to be illegitimate, and their true names Hypatia Parker, and Praxis Parker; the mother’s name being entered as Lucy Parker, spinster. And though in the column for father was written not the humiliating ‘unknown’, but ‘Benjamin Duveen, occupation, gentleman’, the disgrace of mother and daughters would become known.

  ‘I want to go to school,’ said Praxis to Lucy.

  ‘And mix with common children? Is that the kind of girl you turn out to be?’ Lucy responded, with such a contorted face, and such unmaternal ferocity that her younger daughter was thereafter reluctant to present her mother with a need, let alone a want, for fear they should all tumble over the precipice into madness and despair.

  ‘Mrs Duveen,’ said Henry, ‘the law of the land requires that children go to school. Now the law of the land has never done anything for me except compel me to go to war and ruin my health, but nevertheless it exists, and the children must go.’

  ‘His health is a small thing for a gentleman to sacrifice for his country,’ replied Lucy, adding, with meaning, ‘I should have thought.’

  ‘I’m no gentleman,’ said Henry. ‘I thought you understood that.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘perhaps you had better take your meals in the kitchen, with Judith.’

  ‘Very well,’ replied Henry, to Lucy’s dismay. ‘I think I will.’

  He retired back under the stairs, where, half-crouching, he developed his prints. He had hoped to convert the small back bedroom to a darkroom but Lucy thought that room much too good for photographs. The stair cupboard would do. She had begun to enjoy despising Henry.

  When Henry appeared at supper, as usual, for mulligatawny soup, stewed mince (it was Wednesday) and apple tart, Lucy said ‘I thought you were going to eat in the ki
tchen,’ and Henry took his plate and went. He absented himself from Lucy’s bed thereafter, letting it be understood that he would not return there until she invited him back into the dining-room, but she did not relent. She put out her shoes for him to clean, however, and clean them he did.

  All this for Praxis was safety: waking up in the morning in the bed next to Hypatia: the dull routine of the house, of the day: Henry’s comings and goings: Hypatia’s moods: Judith’s sulks: learning to read: going to the children’s library: (talking to no one as instructed: hurrying straight home) there, running parallel, was a pit, just an edge away, of violence and hatred, screams and blows, fears, illness, death. Lucy sometimes showed Praxis a face which came straight from the other side: a witch face, demoniacal, tormented. Hypatia would show that face too, on occasion. ‘Let’s see who can make the ugliest face,’ she’d say, and promptly produce a devil mask straight from the other side, which terrified Praxis so that she’d cry. ‘Baby,’ Hypatia would deride, satisfied, and Praxis would sleep with her head under the blankets, in case she woke up in the morning and caught Hypatia with her devil face, before she’d had time to remove it.

  Hypatia wished her harm, Praxis accepted that. Sometimes she’d relent, and they’d play sevens against the garage wall. Throw, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, turn, catch; throw, bounce, bounce, clap, catch; on and on for a whole afternoon, or until Judith emerged shrieking that she’d hand in her notice unless the thudding stopped.

  Judith was a local girl, nearly thirty, unmarried. Her breath was bad: no one else cared to employ her. Black haired, black browed, black chinned, broad of face, and body: slurred of speech, coarse of hand, and sullen. That, at least, was how Lucy saw her. Pale, delicate Lucy. Judith received fifteen shillings a week, paid through Butt and Sons, solicitors. She affected a marked dislike of men, but seemed to attract sexual violence. She was propositioned by workmen, molested by strangers, became quite used to the pad-pad of unknown feet behind her, and carried a heavy handbag, which she would swing skilfully as a hand or arm appeared.