by Weldon, Fay
Liese said, ‘But, Apricot, you can’t speak like that about your mother. Anyway she didn’t desert you. She came back as a ghost.’
‘I’ll have no talk of ghosts in this house,’ said Bernard, ‘that’s for sure.’
She liked him to be masterful. She liked to be frugal: to have money and carefully dole it out. She would never be feckless; not like Wendy, not like Rhoda, not like Ken. She listened to Bernard’s account of his faith with increasing mystification. She liked Bernard. She liked the way his mind went back and back in layers: how he tried to justify emotion with reason. She enjoyed figuring it out. She liked his torments, his inability to be happy, his sense that he must be busy saving the world. Where Ken wanted to jolly the world along, Bernard wanted to push it and shove it for its own good. He knew, or thought he did, what was right and what was wrong, and she was glad he did, or thought he did. She knew otherwise. He was taking a degree in sociology. He had a government grant to do so. As a married student he received extra money. She wondered if he had married her to get the better grant. As she had married him to get away from home, she could scarcely complain if he had. She thought his Catholicism, the emotion he mistook for faith, was a pity. As soon as she had recovered from the months of Rhoda’s illness, and come to terms with her death, and adjusted to the sudden change in her circumstances, she would do something about it.
They slept in twin beds in the front bedroom of 93 Mafeking Street. There was lino on the floor and lace curtains at the window. There was no bathroom, but a bath in the kitchen covered by a shelf. Bernard would lie awake for hours waging his nightly battle with carnality, slapping it down, groaning. Ellen just went to sleep.
‘You’re unnatural,’ he would complain.
‘I expect I am,’ she would say. Then one day she said, ‘Please, Bernard, I want to become a Catholic.’
‘It’s not possible. You have no religious instincts. I’m not blaming you. You were brought up in a hotbed of superstition and anarchy: you can’t help it but it’s hopeless.’
‘But I do believe; I do have faith: I have recovered from my childhood. Honestly, Bernard. I believe what you believe, that God came down to Mary, who was a virgin, in the form of a dove – or was that to her mother, so that Mary could get pregnant and be an immaculate conception, which had to happen on account of how sex is so polluting, and give birth to Jesus? That way everyone born after that particular time would have their sins forgiven so long as they believed in Jesus. I don’t want to go to hell because I don’t believe in Jesus. I wouldn’t even go to limbo, Bernard, because I know about Him and haven’t converted: I’ll have to go to hell. Please, Bernard, let me be converted or we’ll be separated after death and I couldn’t bear that.’
‘You’re not sincere!’
‘I am, I am! I’m your wife. If you don’t let me be converted, then you’re sinning. You’re depriving God of a soul.’
Night after night she’d nag, and in the morning would peck his cheek affectionately if he walked by the cooker where she was frying up his bacon and eggs for breakfast. She dressed trimly for work; neat white blouse, tight black skirt, bright seventeen-year-old eyes: no ladders in her tights now she was settled and happy. He didn’t like her going out looking so smart and cheerful. Who might she not meet? He didn’t trust her. ‘You aren’t serious,’ was all he could say.
‘But I am, I am. Isn’t this what you believe? Haven’t I got it right? Well, I believe it too.’
‘Not put the way you put it.’
‘That’s why I have to have instruction, Bernard. So I’ll put it properly. And then He cursed the fig tree because it was barren: I don’t want to be cursed, Bernard. So I suppose one day sooner or later we’ll have to do this disgusting thing in order for me not to be barren, but I don’t look forward to it. Do you? And then He was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, and at Mass the bread and wine actually turn into flesh and blood, so you shouldn’t have breakfast that morning but take it on an empty stomach. And when the Virgin Mary died she rose from the dead too; not just her soul went up to heaven, but her body too.’
‘No, Ellen, that is not the case.’
‘It is, Bernard. The Pope declared it in 1954. Transubstantiation of the Virgin Mary. And it hasn’t been rescinded. It took them nineteen hundred years to decide, but then God dwells in eternity, and the Church too, so there’s no hurry. Fancy that, Bernard! Isn’t that somehow just neat? Do you think she went up with her arms raised; I kind of see her that way. And were they old arms or young arms? Would they change on the way, or before her body began to rise? I wouldn’t like to rise to heaven except in my prime. Would her wishes be taken into account? I do need instruction, Bernard. Where is heaven, anyway, for her to go to in the flesh? I’d always seen it as in some other dimension. Can flesh move from one dimension to another? I am so ignorant I can’t bear it!’
He locked away his books on Catholic theology but she took the bus to the Westminster Cathedral and bought more from the bookshop there. When he came home from college she’d be reading The Catholic Mind. She read the Catechism in bed at night, occasionally sighing; she would turn towards Bernard and her long hair – she wore it up for work, half-down in the home, fully down in bed – would fall over her face, over her white shoulder.
‘We’re not going to succumb, Bernard,’ she would say if he made a move towards her, and she’d toss her head back in a swift, moving, golden curtain. ‘You and I are going to be strong against temptation. We are going to nurture our souls, not give in to lust. We aren’t animals – God has blessed us with free will. By sacrifice and submission and by the Grace of God I mean to become a truly serious person, fit to make a new beginning and become a Catholic and a proper wife to you. We’ll be married in the Catholic Church, and I’ll teach all our children to be good Catholics. I’ll have eight, I think. After that we’ll stop having sex.’
Bernard’s mother sent a Christmas card and in the name of Catholic family unity Ellen invited her to stay. Bernard cringed. Mrs Parkin smoked. Bernard, who neither smoked nor drank, had to keep opening the windows. She was a widow, fleshy, piggy-eyed, slack-mouthed, with a taste for sweet sherry. She wore a cross around her reddened crinkly neck, wore black as befitted her widowed state, and her hair in tight grey curls between which lines of white, stretched skin showed. She brought as a present a portrait of Mother Mary as she appeared to the children at Fatima, executed by someone of sentimental disposition, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, the mould fashioned by someone of a melancholy and austere frame of mind. Ellen put them in pride of place above the fireplace in the front room downstairs. The fireplace held a gas fire; the walls were a figured cream paper: the three-piece suite of maroon uncut moquette. There was a glass-fronted mahogany cupboard where Ellen insisted on keeping Bernard’s family photographs, which she had found at the bottom of a suitcase. The Parkins had migrated from Dublin when Bernard was eight, young enough to take advantage of an educational system which allowed bright children to climb up and out of their allotted place in society. Bernard’s father had been a builder, his two elder brothers were house painters; his older sister was married to a carpenter: another just left nursing to be married; his two younger sisters were still at school and planned to go to college against their mother’s wishes.
‘They’ll never find husbands,’ complained Mary Parkin, ‘if they’ve too much knowledge in them. It’s unsettling for a girl.’ And she crossed herself. A touch to the forehead, a touch to the left of the chest, the right, and the solar plexus: rapid, never quite touching self: Jesus crucified an inch before the body, forever.
‘It certainly is!’ agreed Ellen. ‘Look how I gave all that up for Bernard! It’s so important for a wife to be able to look up to her husband. It’s because she can’t we get all these divorces.’ And she too crossed herself.
Mrs Parkin would take quick sidelong looks at her new daughter-in-law, hoping to catch her out, but there she’d always be, merry as a chicken, tra
-la-lahing amongst the pots and pans in the kitchen, or lipsticking her lips in the frameless octagonal mirror in the parlour, or telling her rosary in front of the Virgin, apparently more devout even than Bernard, the most devout of all her sons. She’d hoped Bernard would grow up to be a priest: now he’d taken up with a woman. She didn’t trust Ellen one bit.
‘You mustn’t worry about my not being Catholic,’ said Ellen. ‘I’m going to convert the minute Bernard thinks I’m serious enough. Do you think being serious is the same as being unhappy, Ma?’
Bernard’s mother was not accustomed to such questions: she shook her head and took another fag and another cup of tea and longed to be off to stay with her eldest son. She felt uneasy amongst non-smokers and a home without children didn’t feel right, and Bernard didn’t look happy.
‘Your mother’s bound to go to heaven,’ said Ellen to Bernard on the afternoon of the morning his mother left. It was teatime. She had made scones. ‘She never misses Mass. Lucky her, a proper Catholic! And I expect if your father hadn’t died she’d have had at least twenty children! The salt of the earth, your mother.’ She stirred four spoons of sugar into her cup. ‘What a pity cirrhosis got to him so early!’
‘Don’t do that,’ he begged. ‘You’ll get fat.’
‘I’m not vain,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want me to be vain. Vanity is a sin.’
‘You’ll get just like my mother.’ In the past, he had only ever spoken well of his mother, when he spoke of her at all.
‘I’d be proud to be like your mother,’ said Ellen, and she glanced towards Mary smiling on the mantelpiece and crossed herself.
Bernard put down his scone. He had lost his appetite.
‘My mother,’ said Bernard, suddenly, talkative at last, ‘is a mean-spirited, disgusting bitch; a big fat mammy, and to think that I was born from between her legs makes me want to vomit. She made my life hell. She sneered and bullied and slobbered: she nagged my father to death, and when she wasn’t nagging she was muttering. I hate her. Why did you ask her here? What are you trying to do to me, Ellen?’
And he got to his feet, skin white beneath his little beard and his brown eyes desperate, and swept the Virgin Mary to the ground, where she failed to break.
‘Just as well she’s plastic,’ said Ellen placidly. ‘It must be very unlucky to break the Virgin. More bad luck years even than breaking a mirror. But that’s superstition, isn’t it? I hope it isn’t a mortal sin, for your sake.’
Bernard jumped upon the Virgin and she cracked and flattened. ‘I don’t think you should,’ said Ellen doubtfully. ‘You weren’t like this when I married you. Jumping on poor Mother Mary. It won’t diminish her powers one bit!’
He wept, his head upon her knee, and presently his hand crept up between her knees and she didn’t even pull away with a ‘Sweet Jesus, what do you think you’re doing?’ but drew the curtains to and lit the gas fire to warm them both. She had an approved menstrual calendar and knew it was more or less – or at least with an acceptable risk factor – her safe time of the month.
‘It was worth waiting for,’ she told Brenda. ‘You were wrong and Belinda was right.’
The next day Bernard went to talk to Father William, and came home to say yes, it was okay, Ellen could take instruction and, if all went well, could become a convert to Catholicism. They would be properly married in church: they’d discuss the question of children later. Ellen undressed for bed and fell on her knees and prayed, instead of getting into it.
‘Now what?’ he demanded. ‘Are you thanking God?’
‘I’m praying to Mary to restore my virginity,’ said Ellen. ‘Don’t interrupt.’
‘What are you talking about, Ellen?’ he demanded, grabbing her by the hair. ‘Are you insane?’
‘She can do it, honestly,’ said Ellen. ‘It says so in a little book I got from Our Lady’s Bookshop. She can restore virginity not just in the soul – well, anyone could do that – but in the body, if you pray enough and feel sufficiently remorseful. Actually in the flesh, the way she went up to heaven. I simply adore Mother Mary. I wish I could make an unconditional “yes” to God the way she did. I do so want to be pure in body and mind. She had a head start, of course, what with her mother being immaculate too. I don’t somehow see Wendy as having me that way. We succumbed to temptation once, Bernard, but I’m sure Mary will forgive just so long as we never, ever do it again.’
Bernard let her hair go.
‘You win,’ he said. ‘I’ll become an atheist.’
‘That’s going too far too fast,’ said Ellen, getting into bed. ‘The position mightn’t hold. How about an agnostic?’
But he felt that position to be untenable. It was cowardly. If you lost your faith you lost your faith, and that was that. He understood the absurdity of his beliefs. He regarded them now as he regarded other ordinary but embarrassing habits of youth: odd hair styles, a passion for cheap cologne, eccentric dressing, strange obsessions – all things to be grown out of. He even thanked Ellen for this new, sudden, unexpected leap into maturity. But some few weeks later she happened to bring home from the library a volume of Marx’s early writings.
‘It was a conversion experience,’ said Ellen to Liese. ‘His hand shook, his mouth fell open. He believed.’
‘Well,’ said Liese, who was now engaged to a nice young architect called Leonard, and who was proud and plump and stuffed as full of delight as a feather cushion – over-stuffed, Brenda remarked – ‘I suppose it’s better to believe in something than nothing. Leonard isn’t orthodox, thank goodness, or I’d have to shave off all my hair. He worships me, I’m glad to say.’
A bust of Lenin stood on the mantelpiece where once the Virgin smiled. The theological books went to the jumble sale; political science took their place. Friends no longer came to gather in prayer, but to further the revolution. Bernard believed. He understood that heaven and hell were here on earth, and that little by little heaven would drive out hell, and that the efforts of men of intelligence and goodwill should be dedicated to hastening that process; and that even the word ‘should’, with its implication of duty and overtones of guilt, was in this brave and newly discovered world, inappropriate.
‘“The abolition of religion as the ‘illusory’ happiness of men is a demand for their ‘real happiness’,”’ he read aloud to Ellen. ‘“The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”’ How bright his eyes were. His shoulders squared and straightened. He no longer walked in guilt, but in hope.
The twin beds went. The saxophonist’s widow refused to lie in Ken and Rhoda’s bed, so Ken offered it to Bernard and Ellen: they took the offer, rightly, as a gesture of approval, and the four of them carried it one very early morning from No. 97 to No. 93. ‘You can’t lie in that bed,’ said Brenda, ‘it isn’t decent. It’s the bed your mother and your grandmother slept in with your father.’ She was engaged to a lecturer in economics: a straightforward young man. They were saving to get married. They would have everything new.
‘I like the idea of it,’ said Ellen. ‘It gives me a sense of continuation.’
The bed was old, soft and lumpy. She felt she would draw strength from it. She needed strength: her and Bernard’s nightly love play would go on for hours, limbs lurching and surging in some kind of gladiatorial combat as if the one who weakened first lost. Oddly, she felt less happy, less content, less well able to go about her daily business than she had in the three painful months of her sexual abstinence. Perhaps sex was a drug. The more you had the more you needed. First the relief, then the surge of pleasure, then the peace: then the niggle of dissatisfaction growing into active discontent, into a sense of loss, of desperation, of craving – and then the fix. People would do anything to others in order to get the fix. But perhaps she was just short of sleep: there were other ways of looking at it.
‘Marxism is to Catholicism as methadone is to heroin,’ said Ellen to Belinda, ‘but enough of an
improvement to count.’
Belinda said she didn’t have a boyfriend, but Brenda, Liese and Ellen knew she was having an affair with a married man.
‘She has low self-esteem,’ said Brenda, ‘from being so fat, and a romantic nature. That’s how it ends up.’
Ellen said, ‘Then why doesn’t she go on a diet?’
The remark got back to Belinda, who didn’t speak to her for years thereafter.
‘Apricot was one thing,’ said Belinda, ‘but Ellen is just too ruthless for comfort. Ellen and Lady Macbeth? Nothing in it!’
Valerie’s garden interview with Eleanor Darcy
Q: So you stayed happily married to Bernard for fifteen years?
A: Journalists always make the assumption that to be married for a number of years is to be happily married for those years. What has the length of time to do with it? Couples stay together for any number of reasons other than happiness: questions of money, children, accommodation or idleness, depression, habit, fears above all: fear of what the neighbours will say, fear of loss of status – fear of going without sex being chief amongst them. And I daresay the worry about what to do with the cat or the problem of finding spare time in the executive diary keeps other unhappy couples together. But yes, as it happens, Bernard and I were happily married for fifteen years, in the face of all likelihood, and against the prognostications of our friends.
Q: To what do you attribute this success?
A: Success? Why do you equate being happily married with success? However, we’ll let that pass. I attribute it to frequent and energetic sex, to our not having children, to my habit of deferring to him, and lying about my actions, my whereabouts, my politics, my emotions and my orgasms.
The day was bright. They sat in the back garden at Eleanor Darcy’s insistence. Trains passing the other side of the wooden fence interfered with the recording. Brenda’s children played in the paddling pool. Valerie faced into the sun. Eleanor wore a pretty straw hat. Valerie wore a little scarf around her neck to hide Hugo’s love bites. She could not see the state of Eleanor’s neck because Eleanor wore the collar of her crisp white blouse up. Why, on so hot a day?
