Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  When she pulled herself out of the pool, she felt awkward and unattractive; she regretted her freckled, friendly face, her strong, muscular body: men liked her, but that was all. She worried at once about her epileptic brother: she would have to confess to it. Then who would want her? Her brother’s existence spoiled everything. Her eyes were pink and smarting. She wished she were not a swimmer: she would like to be Diana the Huntress, chaste and fair, icy and cool like the moon, not goose-pimpled.

  “I like swimming,” Gosling said.

  “I love it,” she said, and forgot about Diana and thought his brown eyes grew troubled for a minute, and then he dived back into the water and swam lazily and confidently up and down the pool, knowing quite well she was waiting for him.

  “You could be a champion if you tried,” said Eileen, as they drank hot chocolate from the drink-dispenser. Her mother had told her the way to win a man was to flatter him, and Eileen wanted to win Gosling as never before had she wanted to win a man.

  “I don’t want to be a champion,” he said. “I just enjoy the water.”

  “Oh, so do I!” And so she did: she loved the buoyancy of her body in this murderous liquid, which healed and soothed when it didn’t kill. Water was both adversary and friend: it parted in front of her, closed behind her. How powerful she was when she cleaved the water. Eileen cleaved unto Gosling the day they met, and after that they never wanted to part. Not really. She didn’t tell him all the things that swimming meant to her, partly because she didn’t know she was unusual and thought most people felt the same, and partly because she did not want to love what he only liked. While Eileen had an intense relationship with water, Gosling just swam. He’d swum, he said, in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel; even in the Dead Sea.

  “But the Dead Sea isn’t really water,” Gosling said. “It’s just a chemical soup.” The Dead Sea had brought tears to his eyes. He hadn’t liked that. He was an engineer and travelled the world, bringing back to Eileen, who became Leda on their wedding day, all kinds of strange presents.

  Leda stayed home and looked after her stepdaughter Nadine, and presently her own baby Europa, and joined a swimming club and won a race or two.

  Leda told Gosling about her victories when he returned from abroad and he raised an eyebrow. “Swimming is something to enjoy,” he said, “it shouldn’t be something competitive,” and she was obliged to agree. He told her about the ocean rollers of Florida and the surfing there, so they thought about these natural wonders instead of victories at the local swimming club.

  The family went for an excursion to the seaside: Gosling and Leda and Nadine and Europa; they pottered about rock-pools and avoided the patches of oil on the sand, and Leda tried not to wonder how far was the coast of France and just how fast she could swim there.

  Gosling swam and dived and ducked and lashed about. He was, oh yes he was, the real water baby his mother had defined; he was the gosling who was never quite the duckling who never quite became a swan. He was passed over for promotion. Perhaps he had spent too much time on foreign beaches, and not enough in foreign offices. But he was the man who liked swimming: he thought the world well lost for that. His mother had died of cancer, painfully, when he was a young man, at the time when it seemed important for him to renounce and defy her: at the wrong time.

  He felt his mother had given him contrary instructions. She had named him Gosling, in the hope of his becoming a swan: she had called him water baby, and water babies surely did not grow up.

  When he was on foreign trips he was unfaithful to Leda. He stayed in hotels where there were swimming pools, and always some girl, who did not swim but splashed about, who would admire Gosling’s prowess, his lazy confidence in the water, his wet, rippling muscles which gave promise of excitement to come. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Gosling would say to Leda. “I like them, I don’t love them.” Gosling did not believe in lying. “We must be honest with each other,” he’d say.

  Leda started training in earnest. Her times startled the trainer at the local swimming club.

  “You’re four seconds off the Olympic crawl record,” he said. “Four seconds is a long time,” said Leda.

  But she talked about it to Gosling when he returned from New Zealand, where the beaches are long, white and clean, and the girls likewise.

  “Crawl is not a swimmer’s stroke,” he said. “It’s the competitor’s stroke. An antagonistic, angry sort of swimming. Nothing to do with water, just with doing down your fellow human beings. At best see crawl as the getting-somewhere stroke, not the being-someone stroke.”

  Leda thereafter swam breast-stroke instead of crawl, to her trainer’s annoyance, but soon excelled in that as well. She swam for the County team and won a cup or two. And then rather a lot of cups. They began to line the walls.

  “Of course back-stroke is the one that requires real swimming talent,” said Gosling. It was his own best stroke, and Leda’s weakest. They swam a jokey sort of race, one day, back-stroke, and he won, and after that they were happy for a time. But she knew she had not really tried to win, just been polite: won time and his favour, just for a little.

  Gosling was good company, liked good food, good drink and bad women; he could tell a good story. For some reason, friends who liked sport faded away, or perhaps they were gently mocked out of the house. Presently there was no one to ask exactly what the silver cups on the sideboard were, or to care, or admire. The task of polishing them became oppressive; there was so much else to do. Gosling referred to them in any case as “Leda’s ego-trip” and she began to be embarrassed for them, and of them. The cups went into the spare room cupboard in the end; the surfboard came out of it, and they went on family weekends to Cornwall, where they all surfed.

  Surfing made Leda impatient: she did not like waiting about for the waves, or the messy rough and tumble of the water in their wake. She wanted to conquer the water, cleave it, and enlist its help to do so: as a man about to be shot might be induced to dig his own grave. It was a horrible simile, but one which came to mind, and made her ashamed.

  Gosling loved the surf and the thrashing water. “You have to abandon yourself to the sea,” he said. “And then you reap its’ benefits. How anyone can waste their time in swimming pools, I can’t imagine. You know why your eyes hurt when you’ve been in them? It’s other people’s piss does the damage—not chlorine, as is commonly supposed.”

  When Leda came home from the swimming pool her eyes would be pink and swollen. When Gosling admired other women—not unkindly or over-frequently—he would always refer to their bright, wide, young eyes.

  Sometimes Leda’s heart ached so much she thought she was having some kind of seizure. She could not distinguish physical from mental pain. Still she swam.

  One evening, when Leda was eight years married, and within a year or two of being past her swimming prime—which Gosling would mention in passing from time to time—and actually in the running for the English Olympic team—a fact which Leda did not mention to Gosling at all—Leda made her usual excuses and left for the pool. This was the evening when the final Olympic selection was to be made. Evenings were family time and it was Leda’s practice to stay home if she possibly could, but tonight she had to go.

  As Leda walked out of the house, a young woman walked up to it. “Someone called Gosling live round here?” asked the bright, clear-eyed young girl. “He wrote the number on a cigarette paper, but I lost it. You know what parties are.”

  “Not really,” said Leda. “I’m usually looking after the children.”

  “God save me from children,” observed the girl, “and, after children, from husbands. This one’s mother should have called him Jack Rabbit.”

  And the girl walked one way and Leda walked the other, and that night Leda knocked two seconds off her best and was selected for the England team. Pain in the muscles alleviated pain in the heart: concentration on the matter in hand lessened the bite of
jealousy. There was no pleasure in the victory, the record, the selection, the smiles of those who’d trained her, believed in her, and now saw their faith justified. All Leda felt after the race, as she smiled and chatted, and accepted adulation modestly and graciously, was the return of pain.

  When Leda got home that night, the bedroom smelt of someone else’s scent, but Gosling made love to her sweetly and powerfully, and the electricity glanced from them and round them and seemed to embrace the universe and she knew he loved her, in spite of everything; in spite of her annoying habit of winning, coming first, competing. “She was only here,” he said when Leda commented on the smell of scent, “because you weren’t. You were swimming.”

  The word had become bad, somewhere between sinning and shamming. Gosling hardly ever swam himself, these days. It was as if she had stolen his birthright. He, who should have been a water baby, should have gambolled for ever on the water’s edge, was now forced by Leda onto dry, arid land. She was his mother’s enemy.

  Photographers took pictures of Leda. Her body, once so unluminous, prosaic, now seemed something remarkable and beautiful. With it went the nation’s hopes.

  “I can’t have Europa exposed to this kind of thing,” said Gosling. “It’s one step up from skin-flicks. Surely the least you could do is allow them to photograph you clothed.”

  “But I’m a swimmer,” said Leda. “They have to take me in a swimsuit.”

  “You hardly have the figure for it,” he said. He looked at her body without affection, without admiration, and raised his eyebrows at the folly of the nation.

  But always, when the time came and the flag dropped and the water embraced her in its deathly, lovely clasp, Leda would fight it back with its own weapons; she would make it her servant. She would say, vaguely, when people asked her if she was tired or cold or nervous, that she was used to hardship. No one quite understood what she meant by this, for a friendly engineer husband and a little daughter significantly named Europa could hardly count as hardship.

  Oh faster, faster: concentrate the will. In the last resort it is not the muscles, not the training, that counts; not up there at the extremity of physical achievement: no, it is the will; it is the pulling down from the sky of a strength that belongs to someone else, in some other world where fish fly and birds swim and human beings are happy.

  Swimming, sinning, shamming. Water blinding eyes, deafening ears, to sights that should not be seen and sounds that should not be heard.

  On the night of the European Championships, Leda’s mother rang from Bermuda: her brother was dying.

  “You must fly out at once,” said Gosling. “Not even you, surely, can put a competition above life itself.”

  But Leda did. At seven forty-five she was not on a Boeing 747 on her way to Bermuda, but at the pool’s edge at Wembley. She took half a second off her best time, came in first, and only then did she fly out, and her brother was dead when she arrived. “But you’re glad he’s dead,” observed Gosling when she cried. “Don’t be so hypocritical,” and he was right, she was, because the epileptic fits had frightened her when she was a child. The writhing, the jerking, the foaming; somewhere in her mind between sex and swimming; something to be ashamed of: something to be admitted to boyfriends, and be ashamed of being ashamed.

  Swimming, sinning, shamming. Something held between the teeth to stop the tongue being bitten off. Or was that boxing?

  Leda had loved her brother, all the same, as she loved Gosling. Part of her, part of life.

  “And you thought winning a race more important than seeing him alive for the last time!” he marvelled.

  “I don’t want to win,” she said. “I can’t help winning. You make me win.”

  He didn’t understand her. Leda cried. The more she cried by night, the faster she swam by day, eyes tightly closed against water out, or water in.

  “It must be difficult for Gosling,” people began to say, “being married to someone as famous as you.”

  Famous? Did that count as fame? Her picture on the back page, the sports page, not even the front? The Olympics were coming up. Gosling certainly found that difficult.

  “Europa needs a natural life,” he’d say. “You should never have had a child.”

  Leda cried. Naiad, child of tears, creature of mythology. If you wandered round Mount Olympus, you could always find a Naiad weeping in the corner of some pool, half tree, half water, all female: creating the tears that filled the pool, that gave you enough to swim in.

  Europa went off to boarding school to be out of the glare of publicity. Gosling insisted. Poor little girl, her mother an Olympic swimmer! How could a child develop normally, in such a home?

  Tears gave Leda an ethereal look, added eroticism to her body. Her freckles faded, as if the kisses of the sun were of no avail against the embraces of the night. And how they embraced! Leda and her Gosling, Gosling and his Leda: the music of the spheres sang around their bed. By night, in the forgetful dark, all was well. By day Leda remembered Europa, whom she should never have conceived, and missed her.

  “In a way,” said Gosling, “I suppose you could see something epileptic about winning swimming races, swimming faster than anyone else. It has to be done in a kind of fit. It certainly lacks grace. A matter of frothing and jerks. I can see it runs in the family.” And he laughed. It was a joke. “I hope Europa is spared.”

  Europa, aged six, home for the holidays, ran a very high temperature on the eve of the next Olympic trials; she had convulsions.

  “Of course she doesn’t have epilepsy,” said the doctor, surprised.

  “Of course she has epilepsy,” said Gosling. “He’s only trying to comfort you. But drugs control it very well, don’t worry.”

  “Next time her temperature gets as high as that,” said the doctor, leaving, “sponge her down, don’t wrap her up.”

  Leda was chosen for the final team. Flashbulbs clicked. Gosling shut the door in the face of newspaper people.

  “This is unendurable,” he said, and slept on his side of the bed, not touching. When she put down an ashtray or a vase of flowers he would move it at once to a different place, as if to signify she did not exist. He would sprinkle condiments lavishly upon the food she cooked, as if to change its nature; or would push away the plate entirely, and say he was not hungry, and go out and come back with fish and chips, and eat them silently. Gosling was increasingly silent. When she went out training, he did not raise his head: nor did he when she returned.

  Europa’s illness returned. The doctor remained puzzled.

  Europa’s fever rose. Now it was one hundred and six degrees.

  Gosling wrapped her in blankets.

  “Don’t, don’t,” cried Leda. “We must cool her down, not heat her up.”

  “That’s nonsense,” cried Gosling. “When I was ill as a child my mother always wrapped me up well. Don’t fuss. It’s your fussing makes her ill.”

  Leda seized Europa up, hailed a taxi, and ran with her into the hospital. Here staff put the burning scrap in ice-packs and her fever fell at once. In the morning she was perfectly well, nor did the fever return. Leda missed an eve-of-tour practice, but that was all. She did not go back to Gosling. She stayed at the hospital that night and the next morning her mother flew in from Bermuda to take care of Europa, and said of course Europa should go to Moscow to watch her mother win a gold medal: anything else was not just absurd but nasty.

  The next night they all stayed in an hotel; grandmother, mother and daughter; and laughed and talked and cracked jokes and ate chips while photographers clicked and reporters asked questions which she did not answer. Finally she drove them out, and had her family to herself.

  Gosling rang Leda just before she left for Moscow to say he could not face life without Europa; he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. “Die then,” said Leda, and went on to win the Gold.

  TALES OF WICKED CHILDREN

  TALE OF TIMOTHY BAGSHOTT

  PICTURE THE SCENE. FRAME it in yo
ur mind’s eye. We are looking at a great new development to the east of the City, with the eye of a TV cameraman (we will call him Les) who loves the very idea of it, who sees beauty in a tower block slanting cool and clean into a windy sky, and in the blossom drifting from the instant trees of the Garden Centres, and in the majesty of a great steel and glass pyramid so vast he can hardly lose it from his frame, even if he wanted to, even if he was paid to, which you may be sure he isn’t: symbol of the city’s wealth and busyness. Les sees no point in dwelling on the TO LET or FOR SALE signs, or the homeless who drift like the blossom up against the concrete walls, already stained by soot, weather and urine, or on the rats which nose up out of the flooding sewers; Les prefers to focus his lens on the beautiful faces of the PR women and the gently crumpled Armani suits of their employers, and who wouldn’t? His shots are disciplined, beautifully framed. He’s one of the best around.

  But what’s this? We’re into fiction now? Thank God for that. We need no longer take anything seriously. We know all that other bad news, don’t we; indeed, we’re pleased, to know it so well. How are the mighty fallen, we rejoice! Serve them right, we cry—the bastards, the property developers, sticky fingers in the pension fund: serve them right for being richer than us, for sending their useless unecological spires into the godless sky. Forget all that. We have a story to tell. Let’s turn our cameras west a little, while we consider our children, all our victims. Let’s turn our minds to the tale of young Timothy Bagshott, son of Jim Bagshott, property developer, swindler, charmer. Les, are you on line? Sound-man; are you there? Paul, are you happy? (Most soundmen are called Paul, and directors always say, “Paul, are you happy?” and Paul always replies, “Yes.” So I have a vision of all Pauls as happy men or liars, take your pick.)