Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  “She doesn’t like me,” said Weena. “But then I’m not a woman’s woman. My mother doesn’t like me either. But you’re not interested in me.”

  “I am interested in you,” he said. She was sitting silhouetted between the desk and the window. The fabric of her white blouse was fine. She wore no bra and the outline of her full breasts was visible: when she moved to adjust the tape recorder the nipple of her left breast flattened against the wood.

  “Well,” said Weena briskly to Defoe Desmond, at Drewlove House, “I didn’t come all this way to talk about fucks past. I came to talk about Red Mercury and its implications for the future of the world. My editor says, though the nuclear threat is far from the top of the world survival agenda, it still has implications for concerned people everywhere.”

  “It does,” said Defoe.

  “I don’t actually drink coffee,” said Weena. “Most people nowadays don’t.”

  “My wife is old-fashioned,” apologised Defoe.

  “I can tell that,” said Weena. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, my editor said it didn’t matter I was science-illiterate, you were such a brilliant populariser even a Gaian could understand you.”

  “Did he really say that?” Defoe was pleased.

  “He did,” said Weena.

  “Your editor seems to loom large in your life,” said Defoe. “What’s a Gaian?”

  “There!” she said, pleased. “At last something I know, and you don’t. Gaia is mother earth as gestalt, a self-healing entity.”

  “Self-healing? How consoling a notion,” Defoe observed.

  “You get so gloomy, you scientists,” she said. “There’s a whole world of hope and happiness out there you know nothing about. Do you think your wife would allow me a glass of water?”

  Defoe went to the door and called Elaine, and asked her to bring Weena a glass of water. Elaine did.

  When Elaine was gone, Weena said, “She doesn’t like me much, does she?”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Defoe.

  “She didn’t even bring the glass on a tray. It’s all thumb-printy. Shall we get on with the interview?”

  “I’m at your command,” said Defoe. Now Weena’s skirt was rucked up to show her long bare legs to advantage. She bent to adjust the tape recorder and again flattened her left nipple against the wood of the desk. It looked an expensive desk.

  “It’s a nice desk,” she said.

  “Eighteenth century, burr oak. It’s been in my wife’s family for a long time. It will have to go to auction.”

  “That’s a pity,” Weena said. “There’s usually some way round these things.”

  “Not this time,” said Defoe. “Or so my wife tells me.”

  “Some people are just doomy,” said Weena. “Life falls into their expectations.”

  “You may be right,” said Defoe.

  “I love nice things,” she said.

  “You deserve to have them,” said Defoe. “Someone like you.”

  Elaine showed Harry and Rosemary Wilcox around the house. “A little less than a manor house,” said Elaine, “a little more than a farm house. It grew, like a living thing. It began as a single stone structure, without windows, this room here, we believe, back in the ninth century. There’s a dwelling here in the Domesday Book: 1070-ish. See how thick the walls are? The farmer, his family, his hangers-on, the animals, all sheltered in here together. A few good harvests, no wars and some clever barter, and the humans can afford to separate out from the animals: they get to live above them. That way you get the warmth but not the stench. You build a staircase up the side of the structure: even get windows with glass. Later you build out and the farmhands and servants live apart from the farmer. You enclose the staircase. You build a big hall and panel it; you begin to get grand. A major upheaval moves the animals out to stables and byres: the servants move up to the attics; the family moves down. You send the farmhands to war and ask the monarch to stay: you get given land, or buy it. Now you’ve got more land, you’ve got more trees and can afford to heat the place. You get more confidence: separate bedrooms for the kids. An elegant frontage gets built in the early eighteenth century, and bathrooms in the twentieth. Farming’s no longer the family business. Second half of the twentieth you sell some of the land off. So, yes, it’s historic: it’s also a mess. Some of the improvers had taste, some didn’t. The bathrooms being a case in point. Wretched little things tucked under the eaves.” The Wilcoxes looked at her blankly.

  “None of the doors are flush,” said Rosemary.

  “We could soon replace them with something more modern,” said Harry. “You could really do things with this house.”

  “Look at the state of my heels!” she said. “There are actually cracks in the kitchen floor.”

  “Those are flagstones,” said Harry. “We could tile them over easily enough.”

  “I expect what moved your editor to send you over to me,” said Defoe, “was the documentary on TV last week. I was the nuclear expert he saw, sitting in a Moscow hotel with my face in shifting squares, electronically blurred, to no real purpose; experts are never in real danger. Everyone needs them. The chambermaid always survives the palace revolution. Someone has to make the beds. In my hand I held an anti-rad flask, and in it was a helping of Red Mercury, looking just like goulash. I tilted the flask, and it sloshed around as would any oily stew in a cooking pot, only with a paprika tinge, which is why I compare it to goulash, and why it is called Red Mercury. Hoax or not? A fictitious substance devised by the Russian Mafia—and in fact goulash? Or a real and dangerous addition to the nuclear arsenal, a substance so secret governments deny its very existence. A new element which will give the terrorists’ A-bomb in a suitcase the fillip required to turn it into an N-bomb in a golf ball, capable of destroying life for miles around—with one quick fizzle, one flash of radiation so profound it kills all living things, while leaving buildings, highways, transport, microwave towers, post-office towers to you—and water supplies untouched.”

  “You’re very good at this,” she said, admiringly.

  “I earned my living at it for twenty years,” said Defoe. “I should be.”

  “One thing,” said Weena, “wouldn’t the water supply be contaminated?”

  Defoe brushed the comment away, and accidentally brushed her breast. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t have a thing about body space. I’m the touchy-feely type, as it happens. Aquarius. You’re Taurus, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a man,” he said. “That is all the definition I need. Where was I? Red Mercury, fiction or fact? Oddly, until the stuff was in my hand, I had assumed it was a fraud, a con. But there was a kind of reluctance of movement in the stuff, something about the sluggish way it shifted in the flask, as I said earlier, like chunks of meat in oil, which made me think it was authentic. The natural world hesitates when it’s on the verge of self-destruct. Surface tension prevents the lava spilling out: simple air pressure keeps shifting tectonic plates in place—to bring two pieces of plutonium together to reach critical mass requires a gigantic effort: as improbable as slamming together two pieces of magnetised metal with similar polarity. Everything in nature cries out no, no!”

  Defoe paused for breath.

  “You’re very romantic,” said Weena, “for a scientist.”

  “Scientists have hearts, too,” Defoe said. “Who better than scientists to understand the romance of the universe, the mystery of matter?”

  “Tell me,” said Weena, “if it’s true, if this stuff exists, why do governments deny that it does?”

  “The function of governments,” said Defoe, “is to hold truth in reserve, as a last resort. If it doesn’t exist, so what; if it does exist, then the technology required to fit it into warheads is available only to governments, and major armies.”

  And Defoe produced his diagram.

  “I think it’s wonderful!” she said. “Did you draw that circle freehand?”

>   “I did,” he said.

  “I thought Leonardo da Vinci was the only man ever known to draw a perfect circle freehand.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci and me,” said Defoe.

  Elaine put her head round the door.

  “Do you want to explain the boiler to some people called the Wilcoxes?”

  “No,” said Defoe. “I’m in the middle of an interview.”

  Elaine went away.

  “Does she always do that?” asked Weena. “Interrupt you in the middle of things?”

  “If in her judgement her needs are more urgent than mine, yes.”

  “Well,” said Weena, “I think it’s rather rude to me. As if I was unimportant. You mustn’t worry about being temporarily out of work. The world can’t do without you. You talk so really well. Very few people can do that. That night in the hotel after the show I should never have let you go.”

  “I was tired,” said Defoe. “I don’t suppose I did much talking.

  Have you read any of my books?”

  “No. I know I should have. But I don’t get to read much. But I love reading, all that.”

  “I’ll give you a copy of my latest,” said Defoe. “Science the Terminator.”

  And Weena actually clapped her hands with pleasure, and dropped her pen in so doing.

  Perhaps Defoe would have helped Weena find the pen under the desk, but Elaine entered with Harry and Rosemary Wilcox.

  “It can’t be,” said Rosemary, “but it really is! Are you the Defoe Desmond?”

  “I know of no other,” said Defoe wearily.

  “We’re Harry and Rosemary Wilcox,” said Harry.

  “The Harry and Rosemary Wilcox?” asked Defoe, but Elaine frowned at him so he added, “Just a joke! We’re all the whoever it is to ourselves, aren’t we! The centre of our universe,” and Rosemary and Harry’s hurt puzzlement turned to smiles.

  “Sorry your programme was axed,” said Harry. “But we must all take the rough with the smooth. So now you’re selling?”

  “We always planned to sell when the children left home,” said Elaine firmly. “This is the library—note the original panelling.”

  “I just love the atmosphere,” said Rosemary Wilcox, who had turned, as Weena put it to Hattie later, from a moaning cow into a buzzy bee. A glimpse of a celebrity can do that to some people, albeit one teetering on the brink of has-been-ness.

  “Let me show you the Conservatory,” said Elaine. “We haven’t had the staff to keep it up properly, but there’s a very good fig tree, nearly a hundred years old. It was planted the day my grandmother was born.”

  And she moved the Wilcoxes on, looking at her watch and raising her eyebrows at her husband, as if to suggest he hurried things along with Weena if he could. Weena caught the look.

  “The bitch!” said Weena to Hattie later. “Treating me like dirt and thinking she’ll get away with it. I don’t know how Def stands her.”

  “Def, now, is it?” said Hattie. “As in blind and deaf?”

  “Calling him Def makes me feel owned and owning. Like a child.”

  “And another wife bites the dust!” said Hattie.

  “Oh, Elaine—” said Defoe, as his wife left the room.

  “What is it, Defoe?” asked Elaine.

  “If you’re going upstairs, could you bring down a copy of Science the Terminator? I want Miss Dodds here to have one.”

  “We only have the shelf copy left,” said Elaine.

  “Then we’ll lend it to her and she’ll have to bring it back.”

  “I am very good with other people’s books,” said Weena. “I always return them.”

  “Oh, so you live locally?” enquired Elaine. “I thought you told me you’d come up from London.”

  “I visit the area quite often,” said Weena. “And I do so love this house.”

  “You are welcome to buy it,” quipped Elaine. “Unless outbid by Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox here.”

  “There’s a lot of modernising to do,” said Harry Wilcox to his wife as the party moved on. “To bring the place into even the twentieth century, forget the twenty-first.” Defoe overheard. His ears were finely tuned and trained, after years of studio work, to catch remarks on the fringes of discussion.

  “What did you have in mind,” demanded Defoe, now on his feet and pursuing Harry Wilcox. “Flush doors and an avocado bathroom suite?”

  “Defoe dear,” said his wife, “calm down! And please remember we already have an avocado bathroom suite.” And she smiled cordially and led her guests to view further features of the house. It was clear, from the look exchanged between Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox, that she was now wasting her time. This was a property they were unlikely to buy.

  Defoe, his object obtained, calmed down quickly. He and Weena discussed his motives in leaving the field of theoretical nuclear physics, where he had started his career, his move to the Ministry of Defence on his marriage to Elaine, and thence into weapons development, and finally, when his children were born, into the media. “So, because you had a family to keep,” said Weena, “you couldn’t follow your chosen path. Just think of it—you could have been the one to harness the power of the sun. Nuclear fusion, and all that.”

  “I was not a world-class scientist,” Defoe said. “With or without my marriage.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said. “You get a kind of aura off some people. I get it from you. Charisma.”

  “In the eight weeks since the programme ended,” said Defoe, “I fear mine has somewhat faded. But it’s good of you to mention it.”

  “Your wife shouldn’t have humiliated you like that,” said Weena.

  “Like what?”

  “Showing you up like that in front of those people,” said Weena, “about the bathroom suite. As if you didn’t know your own house. But some men just like bitches. Or else they get so they don’t notice.”

  Elaine came into the room with a copy of Science the Terminator, and found Defoe scowling at her. “Is something the matter?” she asked, surprised.

  “Consult your conscience,” he said.

  Elaine did, finger on chin, a mockery of anxiety on her face. “If it’s about the bathroom suite,” she said, “we’ll talk about it later, when this interview is finished.” She handed her husband the book he had asked for.

  “What shall I write in it?” Defoe asked. “My mind goes blank.”

  “It’s the shelf copy,” said Elaine. “The one that’s not supposed to leave the house. You’re lending it, not giving it.”

  “So I am,” said Defoe. “You will be sure to bring it back, won’t you, Miss Dodds? Next time you’re in these parts?”

  “Or you could post it,” said Elaine. “If you registered it first.”

  “And when you come next time,” said Defoe, “you must be sure to stop for lunch. Now the children are grown, now I’m out of TV, now I’m confined to quarters, as it were—”

  “Oh I will,” said Weena, reluctantly moving herself from her place in the sun, so the light no longer made a halo of her hair, so the curve of her bosom could no longer be seen. “I will.”

  “Let me see you to the door,” said Elaine.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Desmond,” said Weena, “you’ve been ever so kind. Can I call you, Mr. Desmond, if my notes don’t make sense? Or the recorder hasn’t picked everything up?”

  “Of course you can,” said Defoe. “These days I have time to spare.”

  But he did not catch her eye as she left the room, and she thought that was a bad sign.

  “You went too far, too fast,” said Hattie on the phone that evening, “from the sound of it. You shouldn’t have slagged off his wife. Men like to do that themselves; they don’t like others doing it.”

  Weena called Bob Ratchett in his bedsitting room. Lawyers had got him out of the matrimonial home and his wife and children back in it. He was in debt. None of his family would speak to him. This is what love can do for a man.

  “Oh God, darling,” he said, “it’s you.�
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  “We’re just good friends,” said Weena. “Remember?”

  “Come round and we’ll talk about it,” said Bob.

  “What I want to talk about,” said Weena, “is the possibility of my writing a biography of Defoe Desmond, for a ginormous advance.”

  “Well,” he said, cautiously, “I think the time for Defoe Desmond is past. He peaked five years ago. And since the Berlin Wall came down, forget it. On the other hand—”

  “On the other hand what?”

  “Come round and talk about it,” said Bob Ratchett.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The next morning Defoe and Elaine got up before breakfast to go mushrooming in the fields behind the house. Their golden Labrador gambolled ahead. Little circles of white amongst the short horse-cropped grass drew them first here, then there. They held hands.

  “Everything has to change,” observed Elaine. “I may be the fifth in the line of generations who have walked about this field and gathered mushrooms, but I no longer own the house. You do. I live here by your courtesy. I never wanted you to put it in our joint names. When you offered, I resisted.”

  “Yes, why did you do that?” he asked. “I used to think it was your desire to be dependent.”

  “I married you for your money,” she said, “or rather for your ability to buy back the house I loved. Then I came to love you more than I loved the house. I thought I should be punished.”

  “I’ll have to think about that one,” he said. They picked more mushrooms. He no longer held her hand.

  “Now when we sell the house I love,” she observed, “the money will be yours.”

  He thought a little. The basket filled to overflowing. Still they wandered.

  “But you and I will live on it,” he said. “I could put half in your bank account, if you prefer. But I have been supporting you for many years, and you have never worked.”

  “When the mortgage and the overdraft are paid,” she said, “there won’t be much left. How uncomfortable change is, that it should oblige us to have such difficult conversations.”

  The dog set off a rabbit. The rabbit raced down one side of the hedge, the dog down another. The rabbit won. The dog sat down and panted, looking daft, which he was.