Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  And Beverley came up with the idea of not attempting to satisfy the girls at all: simply keeping what was hers by legal right. The girls settled down to the situation presently. When Beverley died, after all, Cowarth Court and the Titian could be sold, and the funds divided, and in the meantime their mother was quiet, and in mourning, and dwindling in a somehow satisfactory way: a thin, grieving figure in grand surroundings on a low income, wandering dusty halls but at least maintaining the fabric: keeping the roofs mended and the chimneys cleaned. And the Titian was improving in value year by year. The girls would visit from time to time to see it was safe, and their mother well.

  John failed in his inevitable legal battle with the National Trust. He didn’t even get costs. Beverley was unsympathetic. “You English nobs think you can live off your past,” she said. “That’s all finished, but you won’t face it.” Which was a bit rich, the girls agreed, considering how well Beverley had done out of exactly that past. And not even a blood relation!

  Exactly a year after their father’s death, Beverley asked her three daughters to tea. She told them she had an announcement to make. “She’s going to sell the house!” they rejoiced. “She’s going to sell the Titian! She’s going to move into sheltered accommodation!”

  The girls came together in Edwina’s car, though fearfully. Edwina was a ferocious driver. They were surprised to see scaffolding up on Cowarth Court and workmen busy everywhere. “Where’s she got the money from?” They were wild! “Has she made some deal with the National Trust? If she has, we will have her declared incompetent by reason of insanity!”

  But Beverley came down the steps towards them serene and cheerful. She was out of widow’s black and into a pale yellow sweater and a very short skirt. She had on 15-dernier tights and the girls remembered how good her legs had always been. Accompanying her was a short but good-looking guy of, they guessed, around forty. Twenty years younger than she. An architect, perhaps? A lawyer? What was their mother up to?

  “This is my fiance, Brian,” said Beverley. “We’re getting married next week.”

  “Hi, Edwina, Thomasina and Davida,” said Brian. “I’ve heard such a lot about you lot. I guess your mother wanted a boy!”

  “You are completely disgusting!” said Edwina to her mother later, on the phone. “What will people say? You have betrayed our father!”

  “I know older people do have sex, but do you have to flaunt it?” asked Thomasina. “That short skirt! And you were holding that man’s hand! It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Now Mother,” said Davida, “you can’t replace Father so why do you try? You can only make a fool of yourself. Pop stars and actresses can get away with toyboys but a woman like you simply can’t. You just don’t have the style. Can’t you be content to just be yourself?”

  “They none of them know what kind of woman I am,” said Beverley to Brian later, in bed. “They’ve only ever thought of me as Mother, something you draw the strength out of till there’s nothing left.”

  “Don’t get upset,” said Brian, “they were bound to take it hard.”

  “If I’d been the one to die,” said Beverley, “they’d have expected Hughie to marry again. And someone younger too. What’s the matter with them?” The girls wouldn’t come to the wedding. No. They wouldn’t.

  “We don’t have to get married,” said Brian, “if it upsets everyone so much. Perhaps that’s the answer. We love each other. I’ll just move in and we’ll live as man and wife.”

  “Besides,” said Beverley, “if I do marry you I become plain Mrs.; Countess is out the window.”

  So they didn’t get married. The entire extended Cowarth family pretended Brian didn’t exist. Beverley found herself marginalised. It made her angry. All those years of being on nothing but Cowarth sufferance! The male protection goes, and you’re out, out, out.

  “He’s immensely rich,” said Edwina to her sisters. “She’s done it again!” Edwina had set a private detective on to their mother’s lover. He was found to be an Australian without education—he had made a fortune in computers, and now, no doubt—so typical of the nouveau riche—felt he deserved to look at a Titian after a hard day’s work. He had first met Beverley three years ago, one evening when he’d been installing—in his Aussie hand’s-on way—the National Trust’s great new state-of-the-art computer. Had their mother and this man been having a secret affair all this time? Was this why Hughie had got cancer and died? Suddenly, to believe anything about their mother, no matter how dreadful, became second nature to the girls.

  “She used her title to trap him!” declared Thomasina. “Why else should one of the world’s most eligible millionaire bachelors”—for that was what Brian had been before she nobbled him—“take up with a cowgirl from New Zealand?”

  “She’s a manipulative, greedy bitch,” said Davida, for once losing her cool. “I hate her! She only didn’t marry him so as not to lose her title.”

  Oh, the girls were angry with their mother. But as children will, they soon settled down to the new situation. Brian gave them a few thousand pounds between them and they looked at him with more favour. At least their mother was too old to disgrace them by having a baby. She’d had a shot in the arm, that was all, of life, love and energy. Grudgingly, they thought, Good for her! If Beverley left Cowarth Court away from them, or tried to give the Titian to her new lover or anything like that, they agreed they’d go to law.

  “I don’t know why they’re all so difficult and moody,” said Beverley to Brian, “it must come from Hughie’s side of the family.”

  Two years to the day after Hughie died, Beverley summoned her children again.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “There’s a clinic in Rome does it for women of my age. They take away one of your eggs, fertilise it with your lover’s sperm, re-implant it and Bob’s your uncle. Or at any rate your little brother. Sometimes one has to use a surrogate womb, but they think in my case it won’t be necessary.”

  The girls would hardly speak to their mother. Sex at sixty was disgusting, but now to talk of a baby! Good God!

  Edwina said she found something perverse about a baby emerging from withered loins: it was flying in the face of nature; the very idea made her feel sick.

  Thomasina said poor little baby! It wasn’t fair to it: its mother mistaken for its grandmother—even its great-grandmother—at the school gate: who would play football with the child at weekends? What happened when it found out its origins? The discovery could only cause unbearable trauma and suffering. She knew about babies! She’d had one. Society hadn’t begun to think through the ethical implication of this kind of thing.

  Davida said Beverley was being entirely selfish. She was trying to dance long after the music had stopped: it was pathetic; Beverley was sick in her head. For all her training, Davida said, she, Davida, just couldn’t come to terms with this: it was too monstrous.

  And the rest of the Cowarths said that to do such a thing was against God’s will, or if God didn’t exist—which as a family they increasingly believed—nature’s plans for humankind. Hughie’s widow, they complained, seemed indifferent to the fact that the Cowarths were, traditionally, a Catholic family. But what could you expect of a woman who used contraception and had thwarted Hughie of his heir and so driven him to his death? But Beverley was deaf to the lot of them. She said to Brian:

  (1) It was no more perverse and unnatural to accept medical help to have a baby than it was perverse and unnatural to use penicillin to stop pneumonia. If it could be done, what was the matter with it? Women commonly used HRT to postpone ageing: the menopause was not some sacred watershed, some divine punishment to women for their sexuality, just a gradual insufficiency of oestrogen. People just got hysterical about older women having babies. They became totally irrational and invented nonsensical arguments.

  She was sure that if you asked the child at any stage in its life it would state it would rather be alive than not born at all. If it decided otherwise
it could soon enough take itself out of this world. But it should certainly at least be offered the choice. Who was her second daughter, anyway, to seek to deny her fourth child life? Had Thomasina’s childhood been perfect? No! Then by what right did Thomasina insist on perfection for others on pain of their death—or non-existence, which was the same thing? Was it better to be met at the school gate by, say, an alcoholic, or an old mother? No one stopped drunken mothers having babies: or ill mothers, or poor mothers; or only surreptitiously. And at least she, Beverley, could meet the child in a Rolls-Royce. As for the football argument, that was pathetic. What percentage of the nation’s children were taken to football matches by their fathers, anyway? Precious few! What made Thomasina think they’ d enjoy it if they were? Beverley was glad, however, that her daughter recognised the next baby would be a boy.

  As for being sick in the head she was not: she, Beverley, was profoundly sane. She’d given birth to three ungrateful and ungracious girls who had been mean to her from the beginning, despised her for her origins and taken their father’s part against her, whenever they could. She wanted a fourth child. She wanted another chance. Fourth time lucky. Dear God, she too wanted a boy, and now medical birth technology made it possible, she’d have one. It might not be pleasant, it might not be easy, but she was strong, happy, wealthy and wise. And the nursery wing, thanks to Brian’s money, was finally properly heated. If she tired or weakened, a battery of nurses would be available to help, and though that too might offend some who felt only a mother’s care would do, and a baby ought not to be born at all who couldn’t experience it, her daughters had had her, Beverley’s, total care and were they grateful? No! They chose to remember the things that went wrong, not the things that went right. The worm has turned, said Beverley, and I’m off to Rome in the morning.

  It was as well that the Rome clinic had taken its fees in advance—hundreds of thousands of dollars—because on the way to Rome news broke of a discovery in the field of artificial intelligence that would eventually put Brian out of profit, and probably altogether out of business within the year.

  Three years to the day after Hughie’s death, Beverley stood on the steps of Cowarth Court, Brian by her side, and showed her new baby to her daughters. “His name is Edwin,” she said.

  They sulked, especially Edwina.

  “But that’s a Cowarth name,” they said, “and you’re not even a Cowarth.”

  “This is a Cowarth,” said Beverley. “This is Hughie’s child and heir. Hughie had his young and healthy sperm deep-frozen years back, in case I died and he eventually re-married. It seemed the least I could do for your father, finally to bear his son—so this is the new Lord Cowarth.”

  John’s claim to the title was outdated. The National Trust lost its gamble and its claim to the Cowarth estate. All now belonged to baby Edwin and, through him, in effect, to Beverley and Brian for the next twenty-one years.

  “Just as well I didn’t ever marry Brian,” said Beverley to her daughters, “or the child would have been legally his, and not Hughie’s at all, forget whose sperm was whose. Baby wouldn’t even have had a title!” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, she could have added, but didn’t.

  Eventually Beverley married Brian and by nature of being mother to an Earl continued to call herself by the courtesy title of Countess. The College of Heralds are still arguing the rights and wrongs of the matter.

  In time the girls came to accept their little brother and, I’m sorry to say, respected their mother the more, if only for being so thoroughly selfish and bad. They certainly became far more polite to her, and agreed that it was their father’s doing that their names were what they were, rather than their mother’s, though without much evidence either way. As to their being obliged to shelter from the cold in the stables, had they not liked horses anyway? They were good girls at heart.

  TALES OF WICKED MEN

  WASTED LIVES

  THEY’RE TURNING THE CITY into Disneyland. They’re restoring the ancient facades and painting them apple green, firming up the medieval gables and picking out the gargoyles in yellow. They’re gold-leafing the church spires. They’ve boarded up the more stinking alleys until they get round to them, and as State property becomes private the shops which were always there are suddenly gone, as if simply painted out. In the eaves above Benetton and The Body Shop cherubs wreathe pale cleaned-stone limbs, and even the great red McDonald’s “M” has been especially muted to rosy pink for this its Central European edition. Don’t think crass commerce rules the day as the former communist world opens its arms wide to the seduction of market forces: the good taste of the new capitalist world leaps yowling into the embrace as well, a fresh-faced baby monster, with its yearning to prettify and make the serious quaint, to turn the rat into Mickey Mouse and the wolf into Goofy.

  Milena and I walked through knots of tourists towards the famous Processional Bridge, circa 1395. I had always admired its sooty stamina, its dismal persistence, through the turbulence of rising and falling empire. It was my habit to stay with Milena when I came to the city. I’d let Head Office book me into an hotel, to save official embarrassment, then spend my nights with her and some part of my days if courtesy so required. I was fond of her but did not love her, or only in the throes of the sexual excitement she was so good at summoning out of me. She made excellent coffee. If I sound disagreeable and calculating it is because I am attempting to speak the truth about the events on the Processional Bridge that day, and the truth of motive seldom warms the listener’s heart. I am generally accepted as a pleasant and kindly enough person. My family loves me, even my wife Joanna, though she and I live apart and are no longer sexually connected. She doesn’t have to love me.

  Milena is an archivist at the City Film Institute. I work for a U.S. film company, from their London office. I suppose, if you add it up, I have spent some three months in the city, on and off, over the last five years, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Great Retreat of Communism, a tide sweeping back over shallow sand into an obscure distance. Some three months in all spent with Milena.

  Her English was not as good as she thought. Conversation could be difficult. Today she was not dressed warmly enough. It was June but the wind was cold. Perhaps she thought her coat was too shabby to stand the inspection of the bright early summer sun. I was accustomed to seeing her either naked or dressed in black, as was her usual custom, a colour, or lack of it, which suited the gaunt drama of her face; but today, like her city, she wore pastel colours. I wished it were not so.

  Beat your head not into the Berlin Wall, but into cotton wool, machine-pleated in interesting baby shades, plastic-wrapped. Suffocation takes many forms.

  “You should have brought your coat,” I said.

  “It’s so old,” she said. “I am ashamed of it.”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “It’s old,” she repeated, dismissively. “I would rather freeze.” For Milena the past was all dreary, the future all dread and expectation. A brave face must be put on everything. She smiled up at me. I am six foot three inches and bulky: she was all of five and a half foot, and skinny with it. The jumper was too tight: I could see her ribs through the stretched fabric, and the nipples too. In the old days she would never have allowed that to happen. She would have let her availability be known in other, more subtle ways. Her teeth were bad: one in the front broken, a couple grey. When she wore black their eccentricity seemed a matter of course; a delight even. Now she wore green they were yellowy, and seemed a perverse tribute to years of neglect, poverty and bad diet. Eastern teeth, not Western. I wished she would not smile, and trust me so.

  The Castle still looks down over the city, and the extension to that turreted tourist delight, the long low stone building with its rows of identical windows, tier upon tier of them, blank and anonymous, to demonstrate the way brute force gives way to the subtler but yet more stifling energies of bureaucracy. You can’t do this, you can’t live like that, not because I
have a sword to run you through, but because Our Masters frown on it. And your papers have not risen to the top of the pile.

  Up there in the Castle that day a newly elected government was trying to piece together from the flesh of this nation, the bones of that, a new living, changing organism, a new constitution. New, new, new. I wished them every luck with it, but they could not make Milena’s bad teeth good, or stop her smiling at me as if she wanted something. I wondered what it was. She’d used not to smile like this: it was a new trick: it sat badly on her doleful face.

  We reached the Processional Bridge, which crosses the river between the Palace and the Cathedral. “The oldest bridge in Europe,” said Milena. We had walked across it many times before. She had made this remark many times before. Look left down the river and you could see where it carved its way through the mountains which form the natural boundaries to this small nation: look right and you looked into mist. On either bank the ancient city crowded in, in its crumbly, pre-Disney form, all eaves, spires and casements, spared from the blasts of war for one reason or another, or perhaps just plain miracle. But Emperors and Popes must have somewhere decent to be crowned, and Dictators too need a background for pomp and circumstance, crave some acknowledgement from history: a name engraved in gold in a Cathedral, a majestic tomb in a gracious square still standing. It can’t be all rubble or what’s the point?