Worst Fears

by Fay Weldon

  When David had gone, Alexandra called Abbie.

  “Abbie,” she said, “my mother wants to know. What were you doing in my house at half past five in the morning?”

  “I’d had a row with Arthur,” said Abbie, as if she had been waiting for the question. “I’d gone for a drive to calm myself; I was driving along the main road; I could see The Cottage with every light blazing. I thought Ned was in London: he usually is at weekends: I went down to see what was going on, in case it was burglars. I looked through the dining room window and saw Ned on the floor, so I went on in. The door wasn’t locked. You never lock your doors. You’re too trusting. Okay? I wondered when you’d ask.”

  “It’s just my mother wanted to know,” repeated Alexandra.

  “That figures,” said Abbie. “She doesn’t miss a thing.”

  “Why do you think Ned turned all the lights on?” asked Alexandra.

  “I have no idea,” said Abbie. “Why don’t you try to sleep, Alexandra? I’ll come over if you like.”

  “I’m just fine,” said Alexandra. She thought Abbie’s answer was rather pat. It sounded rehearsed. But then it would be. How did pathologists get into a skull to examine a brain? Anything but think of that.

  5

  ABBIE SAID TO ARTHUR: I don’t think she believed me.

  Arthur said to Abbie: It’s just as well. She has to find out sooner or later. She has to know. Can we forget Alexandra and can you take some notice of me?

  Abbie said to Arthur. Why does she have to know? What are friends for? Not to speak the truth, that’s for sure.

  Arthur covered her mouth with his hand. They were rolling about on the heavy old bed in marital bliss. The sheets were white, starched and ironed. Abbie and Arthur lived in Elder House, an old rectory next to a disused church a couple of miles from The Cottage. The church bell still hung in its tower and on stormy nights, depending on the way of the wind, it would suddenly peal out. Then students from many lands would run out into the corridors of Elder House in terror of ghosts and spirits. Arthur and Abbie would calm them. In the morning over the breakfast table Abbie would read them the scene in Jane Eyre where Miss Ingram and her friends, roused by the mad wife’s shrieks, run out into the corridors and encounter Jane, flitting about in her white nightie. The students would eat their traditional English breakfast—sausage, bacon, egg, mushrooms—while they listened. Impressed by their own reactions they would sign up for yet another course. These were experiences to last them all their lives. Arthur and Abbie would just have a little fruit, a little yoghurt, and some black coffee. They could have had the bell removed easily enough, or de-gonged as a dog is de-barked, but preferred not to.

  Abbie and Arthur ran a residential school for would-be English teachers from foreign lands. Bored with teaching, they went on teaching. They had no choice. They could not sell Elder House—no one wanted it—so they made the best of what they had. They were good at that: a stoical couple.

  Presently they slept. Downstairs the help still laboured, laying-up for breakfast, clearing away the students’ late-night coffee and biscuits. She was lucky to have the job. The countryside is pretty, Arthur would say, because there are so few people in it, and the reason there are so few people is because there are so few jobs.

  Abbie went into a cave and saw Ned behind a pane of glass, smiling at her. He sat on a rock like a merman. His legs had fused into a tail. Waves lapped up against the glass. She waved. He waved back. Abbie moved on, as if she were in an aquarium and there was something more interesting to see further on. It was a casual encounter, like a one-night stand.

  Abbie woke Arthur and told him what she had seen. “Ned won’t like having a tail,” said Arthur. “No chance of a leg-over now.” He went back to sleep.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” said Abbie. “It was a vision. I woke up before I had it.”

  She woke Arthur again.

  “All that wailing and screaming on Saturday night, all that commotion,” she complained. “Ned being dead was the least part of it. Even calling the ambulance was just to keep Jenny quiet. The reason I went to see the body was to convince myself he was dead.”

  “Did it?”

  “No,” said Abbie. “Not at the time. I believe it now I’ve seen him in the aquarium. He’s in a different place from ours.” She began to cry. Arthur woke up enough to comfort her. “You’re something,” he said. “Try and either wake up or go to sleep.” She woke up.

  “And what did Vilna mean by saying Ned was so good at it? What does Vilna know?” demanded Abbie. “She’s a monster. She’s competing for the status of most-bereaved. She’s the kind who moves in after a death and squabbles over who’s the closest, who’s suffering most. It’s disgusting. She’s ghoulish.”

  “If she’s a monster and a ghoul,” said Arthur, “why have her as a friend?”

  “Because there are so few people round here to talk to,” complained Abbie, and fell asleep. He, of course, could not.

  6

  MORNING. WITH NED NOT there Alexandra could stretch across the bed. She took what consolation she could from this. Nor was Sascha there to stalk into the bedroom, as was his habit, with his straight back, curly blond hair and censorious blue eyes, to start the day earlier than either she or Ned wanted. She must learn to extract Ned from these sorts of mental equations. Erratum: earlier than she wanted, drop the Ned. A kind of chilliness crept in from the periphery of the bed. What would she do for sex now? What had she done before she was married? She could hardly remember. Sex, it seemed, was as forgettable as a dinner out; set-asideable as a floppy disc. Relationships got remembered: they were there on the hard disc. Alexandra had the feeling Ned lay on top of her, forbidding such thoughts: a heavy but intangible weight: a consolation. They had been married for twelve years: fifty-two weeks in the year, sex on an average, she supposed, of three times a week. Rather less lately, since A Doll’s House had disrupted their lives but paid off the overdraft; but then more often at the beginning of the relationship to outweigh that. Five times a week, say, in the first two years before they were married: four times a week after that—marriage did seem to have a dampening effect: five to six times during late pregnancy—pregnancy, for her, did the opposite. Twice a week, even once a week, in the months after Sascha’s birth—three times a week on average seemed a good but conservative bet. Twelve times three times fifty-two fucks. One thousand eight hundred and seventy-two. Jesus., No wonder, on the most basic level, she now felt bereft. And never once with a condom. How much of Ned had she not absorbed, literally? The broken spring was there again, between her shoulder-blades.

  Alexandra heard a kind of keening noise outside. The bed no longer tempted her. She went to the window and looked out over the garden, the hedge, the field beyond, the duck pond. Early morning light made everything glittery, almost too bright to see clearly. Downstairs Diamond began to bark. She could see a figure lurking just beyond the hedge: someone was skulking, and wailing. She saw, as so often in the last few days, but did not absorb. The real world ran like a TV film you watched or didn’t watch, fitfully, according to mood.

  Alexandra thought bereavement was like bonding: you grieved for the dead as you bonded with a newborn baby. There wasn’t much you could do about either. The response was bred into you; it was genetically determined, physiological, beyond your control. If a spouse died, or a parent, a child, a sibling, or to a lesser extent when a friend or colleague died, or to a greater extent again a king, a president, a pop-star or a religious leader, why then you grieved. You couldn’t help it. You hurt. You stopped, just as if you had a physical pain or a fever, to wait for healing. Tears flowed. You could not even see sufficiently to act. Grief was nature’s way, no doubt, of preserving the group against unnecessary death. That person did that. That person died. Don’t you do it. Don’t let that happen again in a hurry! Grief for the old is tempered, mild; grief for the young is acute, survival-friendly for the tribe. As is grief’s companion emotion, the desire for vengeance.
Hang the killers! Bomb the bombers! Sue the doctors! No further justification needed, swoop over the hill to loot, plunder, rape; steal the Sabine women, replenish the tribe. Vengeance sucks up grief, buries it. Nature’s satisfied. The Gods demand human sacrifice, always did; the hideous divine maw sucks in the living, chomps down on warm flesh, kills, devours. Then healing Nature gapes open its mouth and new life pours out of it, raw and writhing, an endless, ever-multiplying stream. One day it will choke on the sheer volume of its production: it has to.

  More wailing from outside. A peculiar keening; an ethnic chant. Alexandra took no notice.

  You had to separate out the mourning from the death. Grief was not particular to Ned. Had she married another man, and had a child by him, and he had died last Saturday night, she would be in just this same state now. Others would say, in an attempt to explain the irrationality of the emotion, “Oh, you grieve for your own death. Another’s death reminds you of your own mortality. The closer that life was, the worse it is for you.” But it wasn’t necessarily so. Fear of death was reasonable: terror of the unknown, of the grim forest of non-being: but grief for oneself? No. Grief in advance for the others who in their turn will mourn you—should there be any—would be more appropriate. It was a terrible thing for anyone to be plunged without warning or their consent into mourning, but what could you lament for the dead themselves? Death came to everyone. If it came suddenly so much the better. Lucky Ned. Poor Alexandra.

  Or people would say, “Poor Ned. He won’t be there to watch his child grow up.” But that didn’t wash either. Children grow up to grow away. The younger the child, the purer, the more exquisite the parental feeling. Not to be there to see your child grow up would be the blessing, not the curse. It was pointless to search for reasons: grief accompanies bereavement—it is nature’s stick—as joy accompanies birth—it is nature’s carrot.

  Grief was luxurious, in the way porridge on a cold morning is luxurious, or a cold shower on a hot day, or water when you are thirsty, or a languid kiss between lovers: anything which holds you at that pleasurable point where the satisfaction of the senses and the need for survival meet. She would go with it, not fight it. It would cure itself, as a broken leg heals itself, with a little help from friends.

  The wailing and keening below was louder now; so was Diamond’s barking. Just beyond the hedge, if she craned, Alexandra could see a brown hunched back moving to and fro. It seemed to be some kind of animal, roaming up and down as animals will, restless and miserable, in a confined space. But the confinement was wilful, unless the creature was on some kind of chain. And how could that be? Downstairs, trapped in the morning kitchen, Diamond hurled himself against the closed back door. He wanted out.

  Alexandra dressed quickly, glad now of an occupation. Trainers, jeans, one of Ned’s shirts: denim; tough, rough fabric, which partly restored the feeling that she and he were one; and went down to the kitchen. She put Diamond on the lead and went out the back door. The dog pulled and tugged her round to the front of the house, to the privet hedge which divided garden from field. A human head rose into view on its far side. It was Jenny Linden, still keening; blotched face and puffy eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Alexandra. Jenny Linden stopped wailing.

  “I only wanted to take the dog for a walk,” she said. She had a soft voice and a West Country lilt. She reminded Alexandra of Gollum in The Hobbit, a pale, white, underground thing; solid yet sinuous. Diamond wrenched the lead away from Alexandra’s surprised hands, and leapt at Jenny Linden. He leapt in welcome, in friendship not hostility, and Jenny scratched him under the ears in the way Ned was accustomed to do. Alexandra never did that. She did not want to break her nails.

  Alexandra watched as Jenny fell on her knees, embracing Diamond.

  “Oh poor dog,” she cried, “poor dog. Poor us!” Diamond licked Jenny’s face with enthusiasm and Jenny let him. Presently she became aware of Alexandra staring.

  “Did I wake you or something? Leah says I have to let my grief out.”

  “Leah?”

  “My therapist. She taught me how to keen. Didn’t Ned tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About Leah. I suppose he wouldn’t. You would have laughed. What am I going to do? I want to die.”

  Her podgy face was puckered. She was in her mid-forties, older than Alexandra. Her short hair was unkempt and needed washing. She wore no make-up. She put her little white soft hand on Alexandra’s lean arm, and Alexandra felt the touch like an electric shock and pulled away. “I only came to see if I could walk Diamond,” Jenny Linden said. “He likes to get out early. But you don’t know that. You have to sleep late every morning because of the theatre.”

  She raised her double chin to the heavens and wailed again. The early moon was still in the sky, palely loitering. It was a really beautiful morning, Alexandra noticed. Dew on the roses, a spiderweb glittering in the very early sunlight. Where was Ned? This was why you grieved for the dead, because they could no longer be part of the exhilaration of renewal.

  “Glad that I live am I,” she sang at the other woman until she stopped her dreadful, Leah-recommended keening and stared in astonishment. Two could make a noise as well as one, and hers, Alexandra’s, at least was more disciplined and had some meaning. She had hated ululation at Drama School, though she could set up as good a classic wail as anyone else. Dirges seemed mindless, and she didn’t like that. She preferred a hymn, and offered one, dimly remembered, roughly quoted.

  Glad that the sky is blue

  Glad for the country lane

  Glad for the fall of dew.

  After the sun the rain,

  After the rain the sun.

  This be the way of life,

  Till the work be done.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” said Jenny Linden, though Alexandra could not see that she had displayed anger in any way. “I’m the one you should be sorry for.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Alexandra.

  “I loved Ned,” said Jenny, “and he died. You didn’t love him. There, I’ve said it.”

  “You need treatment,” said Alexandra. Now she was angry. “But I have enough to think about at the moment, besides nutters. You’ll just have to look after yourself.”

  “I understand your anger,” said Jenny piously. Then her little eyes gleamed with malice. “Ned always said you’d be angry and destructive when you found out. Dog in the manger!” she yelped, and turned and ran, little dumpy legs going one-two, one-two, little feet turning out, heavy bum jiggling, into the mists which still drifted round the foot of the poplar trees where the ground dipped. Ned and Alexandra had planted the poplars together when they first moved down to The Cottage. Twelve in a row, ten feet apart, a hard day’s work, but gratifying. Diamond had already shot off in front of Jenny Linden, barking. Crows rose in response: a black spiky crowd swelling over the copper beeches which shielded the field and The Cottage from the top road. Birds of ill-omen, so plentiful round here.

  Alexandra went to the kitchen and made herself some coffee. The old packet was now finished. She threw it in the bin. Ned had opened it. It was in this way, she supposed, that traces of the dead removed themselves from everyday life. All that would be left would be his works on the shelf: books about Ibsen. Then no doubt his view of Ibsen would finally fall out of fashion. The books would drift off to the secondhand bookstalls, and on to a few, idiosyncratic, old-codgery shelves; and just a handful of people would be left to say, wonderingly, “Ned Ludd—that rings a bell,” and the bell would be for Ned Ludd, the Leicestershire village idiot, who in 1782 destroyed a stocking frame on the grounds that it was putting him out of a job, and after whom the Luddite rioters were named. Not Ned Ludd, the Ibsen scholar. Not even Alexandra Ludd, actress, who once used to get her name and her picture in the paper so often: Nora in A Doll’s House, at a time when women had decided to make Nora their mascot in their final drive to be free of male tyranny. Perhaps there’d be some re
ference to the Ludds for scholars, in the theatrical section of some CD-ROM. There’d be so little left for people to do in the future-present, they’d have nothing better to do than put up the past on the screen, and stare at it; listen to the voice saying: “Ludd, Ned,” and reading out the supporting text. No one would bother to read. Why make the effort?

  Jenny Linden. Why had Diamond gone off with her so readily? It was out of character. Diamond was suspicious of most people, unless he knew them well. The house seemed eerily quiet: now that the dog’s broken breathing, wheezes and snorts were not there, she noticed them. Alexandra suddenly missed Sascha: the sudden determined rushings of his little feet, the energy in the air that meant he was about. It was too early to call Irene. But Sascha would be up: he would be in front of the television, staring at the Teletext he couldn’t read. It was, he averred, his favourite programme. He must come home as soon as possible. She wanted her arms around him.

  She poured the coffee but did not drink it.

  Jenny Linden. Jenny Linden never got asked to the Ludd parties. Why not? Others yet more foolish, yet more hopeless, got asked along. Jenny used her little podgy fingers and her enthusiasm to earn her living. She was the theatrical equivalent of an architectural model maker. She would sew, in miniature, the costumes the designer had in his or her head so that the director could approve, alter, enthuse or carp. It was a perfectly respectable occupation. It brought her in a living wage. She lived in a little period cottage in Eddon Gurney, opposite the prison. Ned had once taken her, Alexandra, to visit Jenny in her studio, which turned out to be her front room. He wanted Alexandra to see the costumes Jenny was doing for a production of Peer Gynt—an exact copy of those used for the London production of 1911. The visit must have been four years ago: she remembered being pregnant with Sascha at the time. Ned had rung Jenny in advance, to say they were coming. It had been a perfectly formal visit. Jenny had opened a bottle of wine, fluttered her pleasure at a visit which evidently meant a lot to her, and showed off the little dolls’ dresses with, to Alexandra, pathetic pride. Ned had asked if he could photograph them for his book on Peer Gynt and Jenny had said yes. What had happened since to give Jenny cause to say she loved Ned, Alexandra had no idea.