Wicked Women
Page 17
“Nice rock cakes,” said Ruthy, “if on the crispy side.”
“It’s one of those ovens,” said Philly, “you can never quite get to understand. Always leaping out of control.”
“Serena never had any trouble with it,” said Ruthy. Philly had not quite realised the oven had once been Serena’s. Presumably Serena had slept in the brass bed with Basil. Philly cooked in Serena’s kitchen: slept in Serena’s bed: Philly replaced Serena. Ruthy had slept in the brass bed with Basil too, by all accounts.
“Did you use Serena’s recipe?” asked Ruthy, yellowy teeth scraping away at the hard little cake, which seemed the best Philly could contrive. “She was hopeless at housework but always a wonderful cook. Just generally creative, I suppose.”
“I’m not a very creative person,” said Philly. “But I wish I could make the house look better.”
“It looks perfect to me,” said Ruthy Franklyn, surprised. “You must make Basil very happy. All this and pregnant too! The famous genes will survive. Serena only ever miscarried. Four times in five years. Basil thought she somehow did it on purpose to annoy, but he would, wouldn’t he? Basil likes a woman to be a woman: simple and sweet and fertile; up to her elbows in soap suds. That’s why he likes you so much, no doubt.” And Ruthy laughed. Why does she dislike me so much? wondered Philly. What went on? Ruthy in Basil’s bed while Serena, out in the rain, banged and pummelled at the back door, stuck forever, swelled in the damp.
White snow hit against the portholes and turned bitter black. It was a storm at sea: foam and black water. How could you tell earth from sea, plant from person? Even the baby seemed to be tossing inside her.
“Do you see much of Basil?” asked Philly. “I know you did in the past, but now?”
“From time to time,” said Ruthy. “But only when he wants something. Right now he wants me to sell an early painting, and his current gallery not to know. Don’t take any of it seriously. I don’t any more. It’s you and the baby he wants,” and Ruthy Franklyn laughed. She went up to the studio, and took the painting she wanted. It was a nude: one of Basil’s very early works: face to the wall for years, its plain wooden frame blackened by smoke. “Since he started swirling the greys and the blacks,” said Ruthy as she left, “he’s hardly sold a thing. Sometimes I think it’s Serena’s curse. I get myself checked over pretty carefully for cancer, I can tell you that. Serena might have been mad but she had a strong personality. She loved Basil. A pity he didn’t love her. But then, he probably can’t love anybody. Not really.” And she looked at Philly with the drop-dead look women sometimes do give pregnant women. You have what I don’t. Die, then!
Ruthy left before the blizzard got worse. Philly felt, and was, alone in the world, and the washing machine, on its fast spin, tipped itself forward on to a loose tile which vibrated and made an echoing sound, worse than the phone, worse than anything she’d ever known, right inside Philly’s head. She thought she’d go deaf. Presently it faded and she could think again. She called Basil at his hotel in Edinburgh but they said there was no guest checked in under that name, and she didn’t have the strength or the will to argue. The walls of the room closed in to encircle her, ridged and streaked; ash filled her nostrils. It was an old tin dustbin she was in, she realised, not the black plastic one she’d somehow envisaged: she was head down in a bin half-filled with water, and what Serena saw, Philly saw, and always would. What Serena heard, clang, clang, so would Philly, forever. As for the first wife, so for her successors.
Philly took a couple of packets of firelighters up to the studio, placed them under the brass bed and fired them. The white valance caught; the mattress smouldered and flared; the turpentine went up satisfactorily: so did the paints. The wooden stretchers of a hundred canvases flickered merrily: the canvas itself puckered, blackened, shrivelled to nothing. Gold leaf, Philly discovered, burns in a series of little spurting explosions. When there seemed no possibility of bed or paintings surviving, Philly went downstairs; the fire came with her. Concrete would not burn; the house itself would survive. Philly watched while streaks of fire raced over the tiled floor, feeding themselves on layer after layer of polish: generations’ worth, as woman after woman had tried to erase the gritty, salty patches of grief and anger that past and future met to create.
“Okay, Serena?” she said, leaving by the kitchen door, the one which led out into the alley, and which today opened perfectly easily: the alley where the old tin dustbins stood and the homeless lingered, and the lager louts peed, and Serena had howled and screamed, day after day, night after night, while Basil and Ruthy waited for her to just go away. “Okay now?” she asked.
A GOOD SOUND MARRIAGE
CARRIE CRIED HERSELF TO sleep, and her grandmother appeared to her in a dream and spoke to her. At least Carrie supposed it to be her grandmother. The apparition, or phantom, or whatever it was, who spoke so lucidly, materialised as a pretty but elderly flat-chested woman with short, brown, carefully waved hair, who wore a straight grey soft dress, which came down to mid-calf level, rather thick stockings, and low-cut shoes with little heels and a strap across the top of the foot.
Carrie worked in the BBC’s Costume Design department and, professional even in her sleep, placed the dress as being late nineteen twenties or possibly early thirties. Carrie estimated her grandmother’s age at around sixty but trying for fifty; an age, at any rate, that predated Carrie’s life on earth.
Her grandmother had died at the age of eighty-two, when Carrie was eleven; and Carrie’s mother, Kate, had not allowed the child to go to the funeral. Carrie remembered being much put out. She liked to be where the action was, just as much as her mother seemed always to like her not to be. Trouble at home was one of the reasons why now, at twenty-six, and five months pregnant, Carrie cried herself to sleep. Carrie’s mother, too, was as good as dead; that is to say Kate had scarcely a word to say to her now that Carrie had gone out and married Clive. Kate threw up her hands in horror and just left her alone to get on with her husband and her pregnancy, and Carrie, to her own surprise, felt the loss. She was the first of her friends to have a baby, and who was there to talk about it with, who knew anything about the subject whatsoever? Carrie, on a good day, was glad about the baby, and on a bad day was scared stiff, and the good days were further in between, and from time to time she could only deduce that she had done the wrong thing. She should never have married Clive, who was not lying in the bed beside her as he ought to be; she should never have gotten pregnant. Now Carrie wept, and slept, and dreamed.
“Cut out the crying and the carrying on,” said Carrie’s grandmother, Christabel, or whoever it was. “It’s bad for the baby, and it’s pointless: there’s no grown-up around to hear you and make things better. Worse, you’re one of the grown-ups yourself, not even a child any more. You weep, but now there’s no one to hear, so you weep and weep and weep some more. “When your mother, Kate, made me a grandmother by having you, I can tell you, I wept and wept and wept some more, because the transition of the generations is never properly or finally made. But I was careful not to let David, Kate’s father, your grandfather, know that I was crying, or why, because some things, even in a good sound marriage, are better kept private. Your generation does too much sharing. To share grief is to double grief, not halve it; each spouse likes to believe in the other’s strength, wants the other to stay the grown-up for the moments when he, she, becomes the weeping child again. Childish burdens are to be borne alone, not shared with a husband who himself is worrying because when he combed his hair that morning there was more hair left on his comb than on his head, and that, too, is the beginning of the end for him. And because the fear of growing old masks the real fear, the fear of death, which is as strong and inevitable as death, it is to be faced, not diminished by sharing, washed away by weeping. But you—you cried so long and hard, you forced me out of my grave to rise and speak to you myself. Dead as I am, I reckon I’m still kinder and more responsible than your mother ever is alive.
“You talk very fancy for a ghost,” said Carrie. “Are you just a projection of me telling me about myself, putting into words things I do vaguely feel, or are you really my grandmother?”
“Carrie!” said her grandmother. “A terrible name.”
“I never liked it myself,” said Carrie.
She sat up abruptly in bed and the apparition, instead of vanishing, as Carrie had rather hoped it would, sat down in the wicker chair as if to keep things in balance.
“I tried to get the better of the name she christened me,” complained Carrie. “I know what she had in mind for me: she wanted a sporty, woolly-hat sort of daughter with no soul. But I refused to do sports, and I went to Art School and passed my exams and I got my career going, and now I’m having a baby, and I don’t see how we’re going to manage and I’m not sure I want to manage. I can’t give up work. I’m not sure I want to give up work. And we need my salary. You hear such terrible things these days about child care: baby-sitters turn out to be murderers. I have married a man fourteen years older than me with two teenage children, and he says, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll do the baby-sitting,’ but he must be joking. Those kids really hate me.”
“Men are given to wishful thinking, it’s true,” said Carrie’s grandmother. “Not just about baby-sitters but about everything. Your grandfather believed our troubles would be solved when his uncle died and left him his fortune, but his uncle lived to be one hundred and one, and then taxes took it all anyway. But I believed with him, though two minutes’ thought would have told me the prospect of sudden riches was highly unlikely. We had a good strong marriage.”
“And what about all the men I’m never going to meet?” asked Carrie. “I’ve settled too early and too young and how am I going to get out of it?”
The vision quavered and wavered, but it was only the tears in Carrie’s eyes that were doing it.
“I cried a lot, like you, in spite of the good strong marriage,” said Christabel. “And, like you, I always wondered if I had done the right thing, and all my life I waited for the man I really loved to come along. But of course he was there in the bed already. There is no perfect love, there is no perfect man; there is only what you have, there in the bed.”
“There isn’t one in the bed,” observed Carrie, somewhat acidly.
“That’s one of the main reasons I’m in this state now. Clive went to a party. I didn’t feel like going. How could I go? I’ve nothing to wear because my waist is gone. He said he had to go because it was work, not pleasure, so he’d be home before midnight, but now it’s two o’clock and he isn’t home, and I just stayed behind and baby-sat those two monsters created by his first wife, and they made me play Monopoly and fetch the Cokes because I was nearest the kitchen, and who is he with? Where is he? I have married a forty-year-old alcoholic—I don’t care how he denies it—and got myself pregnant, and I wish I were dead. How can the absence of someone you hate so much hurt so much?”
Grandmother laughed, and she seemed to fade out a bit, so Carrie could see the window through her body, and only the shape of her breasts and the two round nipples were apparent. But then she recoalesced, as it were, and sat there, bold as brass.
“We had a good strong marriage, your grandfather and me,” said this Christabel, “and I’m sure I felt like you do now at least once a week, but on average I reckon twice a week, for forty-five years, though rather more toward the beginning and rather less toward the end, he’d roll over me in bed or I’d roll over him and we’d forget our mistrust, and no doubt it will be the same for you.”
“In forty-five years,” said Carrie in horror, “he’ll be eighty-five.”
“And you’ll be seventy-one. So what?”
“The world will have ended before then,” said Carrie. “No such luck,” said the apparition smugly. And there was a kind of click-click-click, which might have been knitting needles, or a beetle in the beams of the old house thirty miles from London where Clive and Carrie lived. They had put the house on the market in order to raise some money and start afresh in a different home, but no one would buy it, thus making Carrie’s stepchildren, Chrissie and Harry, Clive’s children by Audrey, rejoice.
This house was where they’d always lived, and where their mother, Audrey, died. It was theirs. Forget Carrie.
“He only married me,” said Carrie, “to have a mother for his children, to make use of me.”
“If he’d wanted that,” said the apparition, settling in to the knitting of a long, long scarf that seemed to run in and out the centuries, “he’d have chosen someone more naturally attuned to domesticity, a more practical sort, not a natural nibbler from delicatessens, a weeper in bed through the long lonely nights.
“Look at it like this,” said the phantom, “nothing is ever perfect. The dangerous thing for a woman is to wait too long, so she ends with nothing. Time flows the wrong way, starts as a slow and mighty river, then it begins to race along, over shallows, narrower, faster; suddenly it disappears, dives underground and it’s gone and if you don’t look out you’re alone. No baby is ever perfectly timed, no man exactly right. If man and baby offer themselves, accept them. The things in life you regret most are not what you do, but what you don’t do. So you held your nose and jumped, Carrie, and good for you. You’ll learn to swim.
“I predict for you a good strong marriage in which there will never be peace—for who wants peace?—but much gratification: this is only the first of your children. It will be the kind of marriage that attracts both saboteurs and hangers-on. See that as the sign of its strength. Clive-and-Carrie, people will say, as once they said David-and-Christabel, and the very words will be bound together. David-and-Christabel, Jim-and-Kate, Clive-and-Carrie. Those are the generations. Audrey-and-Clive turned out to be a mere hors d’oeuvre—you’re the main course. That sometimes happens. But Jim-and-Kate became Jonathan and Kate and that was wrong, and you never forgave your mother for divorcing and remarrying, so she’s dead to you, and you to her, because the new names simply didn’t fit. You, Carrie, quite rightly, stayed loyal to the concept of Jim-and-Kate. As I daresay your stepchildren for the moment stay loyal to Audrey-and-Clive. But you’ll win, Carrie. You’re the second marriage, but it’s the strong one, the long one. Clive and Carrie, sturdy and central.”
“How do you know?” Carrie jeered.
“I know what I know,” said the grandmother, darkly, as befitted a messenger from the other side. “And if you take my advice, you’ll bring your mother, that naughty, selfish girl, back to life now that you’re having a baby of your own. You will need her. It might even be good for her to think about something other than herself.”
“I know everything I need to know about childbirth from books,” said Carrie. “New knowledge. Modern knowledge. Not mid-wives’ talk. What would you know?”
“Take my advice if you won’t take hers,” said the great-grandmother-to-be. “Just remember, nature kills. When it comes to the birth, go for least pain if you’re given a choice, and may God have mercy on mother and child.”
“It’s only five months,” said Carrie, “and already I don’t see how it’s ever going to get out.”
“Exactly,” said the grandmother.
The ghost of Christabel looked askance at the knitted scarf. “I don’t knit,” she said. “I swear I never knitted. My own grandmother Frances Mary knitted, and I hated the clacking, the clicking, while I lay awake at night, frightened of ghosts, wondering
how babies ever got out.”
“Now see what’s happened,” said Carrie. “You’ve turned into a ghost yourself.”
“So will you,” said Christabel shortly. Then the knitting was gone, and the phone on the bedside rang. Christabel remained where she was, to Carrie’s surprise.
“So?” said Carrie snappily into the phone, assuming it was Clive.
“What happened?”
A woman’s voice replied. “Clive asked me to tell you he’s on his way home. He’d drunk so much I didn’t like to let him drive. I called a taxi and it took forever to come.”
“Who are you?” asked Carrie, rudely.
“I’m Andrea,” said the voice. “Tim and Andrea; we were Audrey and Clive’s best friends. But now Tim and I are divorced. It’s’ Tim and Valerie, and so far just Andrea and Andrea. Didn’t Clive tell you?”
“No,” said Carrie, pride forbidding more inquiry. “But thanks for not letting him drive.” She put the phone down.
“A saboteur,” said Christabel. “It’s a good sign. They cluster round at the beginning. They see the oak tree’s trunk thickening, swelling the graceful branches which mean children budding, just here, just so, and they don’t like it; they want to shake it to bits; they resent it; all good strong marriages attract the saboteur. Women will creep up on him, sly and beckoning. Men will slip up your stairs while he’s away. ‘Try me,’ they’ll say. ‘I’m better.’ And so they might be, so reason may tell you; but all they are in truth are saboteurs. Turn the peaceful ones into hangers-on; ask them to baby-sit. They will, if only from guilt.”
“What was he doing in this woman Andrea’s house?” asked Carrie, and she felt the baby weigh her down, or she’d have gotten out of bed and broken things, in spite of her grandmother’s presence. “I’ll divorce him,” she said, “that’s what I’ll do. I’ll leave now before he gets home. I’ll go and sleep on my friend Vera’s sofa. He doesn’t love me, his children hate me. I should never have done it. I must have been mad. I could have married anyone and I married a middle-aged alcoholic widower who can’t keep his productions under budget and will be fired any moment.”