by Fay Weldon
“Ned was asleep in bed,” said Alexandra. “He heard a noise; he turned on the light, sat up. And there was Jenny Linden in the room. Jenny Linden has been harassing and persecuting my husband, Mr. Lightfoot. She’s quite mad. He tried to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t. He lost his temper with her—and that’s when he had a heart attack.”
“I expect that’s how it went,” said Mr. Lightfoot.
“Don’t be tactful with me,” shouted Alexandra. “That’s how it did go. Then she took off her clothes to make the most of it, to make everyone believe—”
Ned’s body seemed to be radiating a kind of cold blue light. But perhaps it was only the reflection of Mr. Lightfoot’s neon lights off Ned’s now waxy skin. Did all the blood flow out during an autopsy? Or, deprived of life and movement, did the blood congeal, and shrink and harden? Alexandra tried not to look at the corpse too much: it seemed such a mockery of the real thing. An object offered in replacement: a fake, someone’s attempt to deceive. The real Ned had walked off into the forest; he had not looked behind. He had not even wanted her to go with him.
“She killed him,” said Alexandra. “That mad woman killed my husband.”
“I didn’t hear that,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “You have to be careful what you say. There’s such a thing as slander. I’ve seen a lot in my time but I’ve never seen anyone as upset over a death as poor Mrs. Linden.”
“I’m the widow,” said Alexandra.
“You took your time acknowledging it,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “Every time a body’s viewed something goes out of it, but that’s just my opinion. Now you’re finally here, I’ll leave you alone with your husband. What’s left of him.”
He sauntered off, gaunt and dusty in his badly-cut tweedy black trousers. Practice with the bereaved, competence over death, knowledge of what others would rather not contemplate, earned him a surface of worldly self-confidence, which he oiled with a veneer of spite. He was still an Untouchable, Alexandra consoled herself. People, recognising the undertaker or his wife, moved away in the supermarket, not wanting any suggestion of physical contact. Birds of ill-omen. Crows.
“Ask Dr. Moebius,” said Mr. Lightfoot, turning back. “He’s the one to ask, not me. I could tell it was a heart attack; short but violent; unmistakable. Why he wanted all that business with the autopsy beats me.”
“I expect he just wanted to keep standards up,” said Alexandra.
“Running bodies around here and there,” Mr. Lightfoot said. “It isn’t right. Not much is right about death, these days. In some places they bury the coffins vertically, even though that adds to the digging costs.”
Alexandra sat on a hard chair by the body and stared into space. Ned kept her a kind of implacable company. She didn’t cry. There were two witnesses to the death. One was Ned and he was dead. The other was alive but unreliable. She would like to preserve what dignity she could for Ned, herself, and Sascha. She gave up and drifted into inorganic suspension until it was time to collect the documents from Angela Paddle. She was charged £20, which she thought exorbitant, but did not argue.
Alexandra returned the originals to Jenny Linden. She parked her car around the corner from Eddon Gurney prison. A homely little red car was parked outside Jenny’s house. Alexandra recognised it as Jenny’s: she’d seen it around often enough, here and there, even in The Cottage yard. She walked casually by the house, in the road, her face averted from the window. When she got to the car she dropped the documents on the ground, on the driver’s side. Jenny Linden would be puzzled to find them but would have to make up some story for herself which would solve the problem: they’d fallen out when she opened the door; they’d been there all the time. Whatever. If Jenny’s distress was as great as everyone said she wouldn’t be in a condition to give the matter too much attention. It wouldn’t occur to her that copies had been made, that Alexandra now had some undefined power which gave her access to Jenny’s world, as Jenny apparently had into her, Alexandra’s, world.
Alexandra got home to find Hamish worrying about the S to Z’s in Ned’s address book. Abbie had been dilatory; so had Alexandra; there were people yet to be contacted. Alexandra spent an hour or so on the phone going through these last pages, telling friends and strangers the date and time of the funeral. Some knew of Ned’s death, some didn’t. Some groped for consoling words to say to her. Some needed her consolation. It was exhausting. At the end she was no more convinced of Ned’s death than she had been at the beginning. She kept hearing his voice in her ear, and jumping. But it was Hamish’s voice, on the office phone, in another room. Muted, it had the same timbre as Ned’s. As dusk fell the same bats came wheeling out of the old barn in the same way as they always had. Their world had not changed at all: why should it? Perhaps what one mourned for people was that they were no longer there to observe familiar things. Everyone died. It was a terrible system: to plant in the mind the possibility of permanence and then snatch it away.
Of course Ned had not been having an affair with Jenny—it was dreadful that the thought had been put into her head in the first place. Dave Linden had been driven mad by his wife: he had been fed false information; rendered wretched, and was stupid, stupid, stupid to begin with. Everyone knew that. All she had to face was that Jenny Linden had got as far as the bedroom and been the one to find the body. Which was bad enough.
Alexandra called Leah; again using Jenny Linden’s voice. “It’s me,” she sobbed. “It’s me.”
“Be strong and calm,” recommended Leah. “I’ll be able to fit you in tomorrow. I’ve had a cancellation. Let the wife do the earthly part the way she wants: it’s nothing. So the body rots, or the body burns, what’s the difference? You and Ned continue on your spiritual path together.”
“Can you give me a key phrase?” begged Alexandra/Jenny. She remembered that from something Ned had once said. What was it?
“Worst fears,” murmured Leah. “Worst fears,” and put the phone down.
Worst fears.
What did the woman mean by “worst fears”? Was the phrase some kind of therapeutic aid to a peaceful mind? In which the client was meant to envisage the worst that could happen, and because the present didn’t match up to that, feel better?
What would Jenny Linden’s worst fears be? If she, Alexandra, was acting Jenny in a play, what would it feel like? How would it go?
Alexandra took Diamond for a walk in the fields at the back of The Cottage. This is how it went.
Here am I, Jenny Linden, a woman in my mid-forties, my life passing by; loved by a husband who loves me whatever I do, therefore able to do whatever I like and not lose income. I have a little life. I sit in a little house, in a small town, reducing what is large to what is small. The future shrinks, along with the present. I love the theatre, as so many do who have an unsatisfactory life, or feel the need for its enrichment. I am by nature a fan: the extreme example of fan being the one who shot John Lennon; the only way to own his hero wholly being to cause his death. If I can obsessively worship, I can also obsessively destroy.
By chance I, Jenny Linden, have become the fan of one Ned Ludd, a minor celebrity in the outside world, but in the world in which all my yearnings are fixated, that of the theatre. I want him to take notice of me. I have no real view of myself, so it seems to me possible that, if I play my cards right, that my love for him, my obsession with him, will work some kind of magic so he will reciprocate.
I am eaten up with envy for his wife, who is beautiful, worldly, successful, has media attention and press cuttings to show for it. She is so confident I hate her. What does she have that I haven’t? I’ll show her. I will make myself useful to Ned: walk his dog, do his research for free, worm my way into his life; at his death grieve so hard and so publicly the world will believe that we were intimately related, the better to humiliate his widow. I will steal her happy memories: I will disturb and upset her, fill her mind with doubts. If I have no happy memories, neither will she.
Jenny Linden’s worst fe
ars? Now Ned Ludd’s dead? That Alexandra will be revenged on me. That she will damage me, or mine. Stop my husband loving me: now Ned’s gone, I’ll need him. That she will somehow bring me to the realisation that Ned Ludd pitied me but scarcely thought of me, let alone loved me.
Worse, worse, worse. That even Alexandra Ludd can’t be bothered thinking about me; negates me by ignoring me.
Worst fears:
Mine, Alexandra Ludd’s worst fears.
Can I get to this? Be the actress impersonating me?
How would I see myself then?
My worst fear used to be that Ned would die and leave me alone to reinterpret a world so long and well-interpreted through his eyes. Man and wife grow together, sop up each other’s natural juices, there is no avoiding it: if there is a child grown in her it is the joint essence of them both: the character and nature of the child infects the mother, and through the mother the father too. Thus the unit is sealed together, bonded without, suffusing within. This is why death or divorce is so shattering: wrench out a piece of the whole and what’s left is like a raw shank of beef hanging in the kitchen bleeding. The child feels it just as much. It’s the sharing of the bed does it, thought Alexandra. There should be more separate beds, separate bedrooms, coming untos—
How lovely the evening was. She could look back and see the two chimneys of The Cottage showing over the ridge. If she retraced her steps it would reveal itself to her, little by little. That familiar solid structure, waiting patiently for her return, holding its breath: child and mother both: home. You could not love a house as you loved a person, of course not, but you almost could. Old houses acquired personalities, the sum of all who had lived in them. Mended, painted, refreshed, cleaned, they glowed at you, acknowledged you; spick and span, they made you dance: neglected, took your pocket money. Ned was gone, but lived on in the roof, the stone, the beams that had absorbed his attentions; which had often made him groan, as a parent will a child who overspends but still is loved. The climbing roses Ned had planted at the foot of the house, now mingled with the leaves of the Virginia creeper, crept higher and higher; their great red sensuous globes hung beneath the eaves. Ned was gone but they went on; blooming, fading, falling, renewable, as Ned was not. The broad beans on their pyramids swelled and grew big and tough without him: but now at least would survive to seed themselves. So much of what Ned did continued. She, Alexandra, lived; the house and garden were now both her consolation and her obligation. She must remember the woodworm in the settle: do something before it spread. All it needed was injecting, minute hole by minute hole, minuscule death-dealing to minuscule enemies.
Home, and all that went with it: where Sascha had been conceived and born; where Ned, in spite of all, had held her, loved her, nurtured her, as she had him. So many meals cooked, so many friends welcomed, so much good conversation. The books on the shelves, the familiar, exhilarating life of the mind, the world’s attention focused here, the conclusions of mankind dissected; the laughter exchanged, the wonders explained, marvels revealed. A good marriage; a good place to be, to have been. Where there are angels there will be devils too. Woodworm, Jenny Linden, crows nesting in the chimneys, greenfly, bad reviews, rejected manuscripts; minuscule enemies in comparison. The furniture, the precious pieces, Ned’s and her pride, built up over years, dusty finds in antique shops, shoddy bits from junk stalls, rescues from skips, neglected pieces inherited, which she and he would restore, beeswax-polish until they glowed with richness revealed; as if the pieces themselves acknowledged their rescue and lived again and were grateful. Memories were the real treasure: these no one could rob you of.
She wished she could remember more about the day at Kimmeridge Bay. Quite an outing, quite a party. Had her mother been there? Sascha and she had found a fossil ammonite, almost perfect: its simple spirals formed 500 million years ago.
Ned had had it polished and it was kept on the marble mantelpiece in the living room: where Ned had been watching Casablanca. Ten minutes of it. Then changed his mind.
Worst fears.
Alexandra put her mind back to them: she made herself. Ned has died. I am bleeding. I have the past, but no present; yet I will make a future.
If I were an actress impersonating me, if I was getting to the root of me, if I was doing, as a dramatic exercise, the worst fears, highest hopes part, I would say my worst fear is that Jenny Linden is not insane, that Ned and she were having an affair, that she was in bed with him, in our brass bed into which he had invited her, and that he died fucking her, so great was his excitement and pleasure. That for a time the jerks and pantings of the dying man echoed the jerks and pantings of a joy which once I thought was reserved for me but was not; and stopped, and he was dead.
There, it is said. It is the simplest thing to believe, and therefore probably true. The Doctrine of Parsimony, Occam’s razor. Thank you, Mother.
That Jenny Linden eased herself out from under my husband—does an erect penis go limp in death, or stiffen harder? To find out I would have to ask her, and I cannot bring myself to ask that. She would stare aghast at the clawing hand which so recently pleasured her, the popping eyes which just a while ago were clouded with passion and intent and now were blank, and she fell or crawled out of the bed. Wondered no doubt for a moment whether to leave like a thief in the night, but decided that the drama was too tempting to be left, and called Abbie. “Oh, Abbie, Abbie, come at once. A terrible thing has happened. Ned’s died in my arms.”
And perhaps, who knows, her husband Dave.
“Oh, Dave, Dave, what will I do? The man I love is dead. I’m so unhappy. Now I only have you.”
And Dave hadn’t come, but Abbie had. She came round at once, decided I, Alexandra, had to be saved, swore Jenny to secrecy, dragged the body off the bed as lately and repeatedly Alexandra had dragged Diamond, got the limp and heavy thing as far as the top of the stairs, couldn’t continue, covered the body with a blanket, called the doctor, called me, Alexandra, called Mr. Lightfoot, calmed Jenny as best she could, called Vilna to get Jenny out of the house, watched the body carried on the stretcher to Mr. Lightfoot’s ambulance. Abbie had taken the sheets from the bed and laundered them—what was on them: semen, blood, spittle, urine, excreta? Presumably everything burst out from a dying man. Was the stored semen gone or about to go when death intervened? Abbie the good friend. She’d know. Jenny would know. Alexandra would never know. She’d never ask.
Worst fears. There, that’s over. Nothing worse than that. Unless perhaps Jenny Linden was on top of Ned, not beneath. He liked that. It would have been nice if that had been reserved for me.
Saving graces.
None of it was like this at all. That Ned heard a noise in the night and got out of bed where he lay alone and peacefully, missing me, Alexandra, whom he loved, and found Jenny the mad woman in the house, had been alarmed, and had therefore died where he stood. (Yes, and that Abbie just put the sheets through the wash as a kind of nervous domestic tic.)
That Ned might have bedded Jenny Linden, if he did, not because he planned to but on the spur of the moment. (Yes, and had left Sascha with Irene and not joined Alexandra in London because he really did have work to do.)
Or perhaps Jenny Linden was blackmailing him, or she had hypnotised him, or he thought if he did it once she’d give up and go away in peace. (Yes, and Jenny Linden was an alien from outer space.)
And Ned was so overcome with guilt he had died mid-illicit-fuck. (Yes, and she’d tied him down and raped him.)
Worst fears:
That she, Alexandra, had been deceived by Ned in his life: that the grief she felt for him was wholly compromised, so it would never heal, never go away, because she had no idea what she was grieving for. And not knowing, and never being able to know, there was no “her” at all. That was the truly worst fear: her own non-existence. She was something elusive, a conjurer’s effect, produced by the trickery of someone, for the entertainment of others.
Which was what she did for a livin
g, come to think of it. A living despised even as it was earned. Or as Ned would say, “The theatre would be okay if only it wasn’t for the bloody actors. Not you, my darling. Present company excepted.” As if it ever was.
Worst fears:
That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was the lie: a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life. She who had flickered a little for Ned’s entertainment, brightly, to Ned’s temporary advantage, was herself as sour and transitory as the rest of a foul creation. That in receiving Ned’s flesh into her body, so often and with such powerful awareness of love—so that it seemed to be far more than physical excitation and a sacrament, a connection through to the source of the universe, the light which suffused all things, and was there, if you had eyes for it, in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies—that in this she had been mocked.
Best Remembrance:
That it had happened, that connection, that joy, when, on the Monday night before he left London she and Ned had made love, not just sex, not just fucking; love. That was the truth of it. Afterwards he had looked straight into her eyes; Ned’s soft look, and said “I do love you.” She would hold to that. (Yes, but why the “do”—as if there had ever been doubt of it? And why did Ned sometimes say to friends, “Oh, Alexandra: so unobservant for such a clever person.” Well?)
