by Weldon, Fay
Grace thinks of the muddy ditch in which she lay with Patrick. Chloe of her mother’s bed, and the unlocked door, and Patrick.
‘Yes,’ says Grace, politely.
‘Yes,’ says Chloe, the same.
‘I wish you’d put it off a year,’ says Gwyneth.
When one mother goes, another moves in.
‘Too late now,’ says Grace.
Grace has burnt her boats. Her mother is dead, the baby sent off, her father is having a nervous breakdown. It is all Grace’s fault and she can’t wait to get out of Ulden.
‘It’s not too late,’ says Chloe. ‘You just don’t get on the train.’
Chloe worries lest Grace meet Patrick in London. Perhaps even at the Slade. For did not Patrick, usually so secretive, once let fall that after the war he meant to use his ex-service educational grant at art school? Does Grace know more than she does? Chloe can’t ask. Chloe and Grace never talk about Patrick, for fear of what they might hear, and this major silence sets up a whole chain of little silences between them.
Still, if you’re going to be laid and left, it might as well happen in silence. The humiliation, otherwise, is extreme. Both feel it.
Chloe is wrong, as it happens. Patrick goes to the Camberwell School of Art, not the Slade, and sees more of Marjorie than anyone else. Marjorie has a large house all to herself, after all, and Patrick sees no point in paying rent. He finds her address in his pocket-book. Chloe had given it to him.
Patrick What a superb house. What decadence!
Marjorie I’d clear it up if I knew where to start.
Patrick It would be a shame to do that. I like it as it is. Are you here all by yourself?
Marjorie Yes. Mother’s in South Africa.
Patrick Don’t you get rather lonely?
Marjorie Yes.
Pαtrick The locks don’t look too good.
Marjorie They’re not. Sometimes when I wake in the morning the front door’s ajar. And of course I can’t use the kitchen at all because it’s haunted.
Patrick What by?
Marjorie I’d think my father, except he died in there months after the haunting began. Unless of course these things have a different time scale from ours.
Patrick A ghost is the projection of a living person, not a dead one. If you stopped being so unhappy and depressed the ghost would go away.
Marjorie What makes you think I’m unhappy and depressed?
Patrick The spots on your chin.
Marjorie is fascinated rather than insulted. That the state of the mind and the state of the body might be inter-related is something that comes to her with the shock of truth.
Marjorie How do I stop being unhappy and depressed?
Patrick You get me to move in as the lodger.
Patrick smiles at her. How broad, strong, young and healthy he appears, and how simple, sensible, and straightforward his requests. You would think he was a farmer’s son and not a criminal’s.
Marjorie Mother doesn’t like strangers in the house.
Patrick Your mother’s in South Africa.
True, thinks Marjorie, with a flicker of, what, spite?
Patrick And I am not a stranger.
True. Patrick kissed Marjorie once, in 1946, leaning his strong hands against her small ones, pinning her against the trunk of a poplar tree, and who’s to say what might not have happened if it had not started to rain, or indeed if it had been a different tree, and not a poplar, with its upstretched, unsheltering branches. How Marjorie had trembled. Patrick Bates, grown man, in His Majesty’s uniform, and she nothing but Helen’s plain and awkward daughter. ‘Never mind,’ he’d said then, as if he knew more about her than she did herself, and what can be more erotic than that. ‘Never mind.’
Now Marjorie steps aside, and Patrick steps in. He looks at the ceiling of the long living room, and the criss-cross of curtain rails, from which hang moth-ridden brown curtains.
Patrick What’s that patch of damp?
Marjorie There’s something wrong with the roof, I think. It gets worse when it’s been raining. I don’t understand it. The roof’s two floors up. How could the rain get down this far?
Patrick I’ll see to it.
But he never does.
Patrick moves in with his paints and canvases and suitcases, and makes his home the living room. He goes to Camberwell by day, and paints in the evenings, still lifes at first, and presently Marjorie, at first clothed, and then unclothed. He makes no further demands on her. He does not wish her to cook, or wash, or clean for him. He prefers to eat baked beans cold from the tin, and once the possibility of so doing occurs to her, so does Marjorie. Neither of them, these proud, strong days, likes to be beholden to anyone or anything.
Marjorie’s chin gets less spotty.
Helen moves to Australia. For two terms she fails to pay Marjorie’s tuition fees at Bedford College, where she is studying Classics. The Registrar sends for Marjorie, and refers to Helen, in a perfectly kindly way, as ‘one of these difficult parents’. Marjorie is most indignant on her mother’s behalf, preferring to blame the mail for her shortcomings. At Patrick’s suggestion she sells three Etty portraits for fifteen pounds each, to pay the bill. They were stacked in the wood shed in the garden, until he brought them in.
One night Marjorie, untroubled for some time, wakes in sudden terror, spirit breath upon her cheek, and runs to Patrick for comfort. He sleeps, fully clothed, in a roll of blankets beside the long, once luxurious, sofa. But he will not allow Marjorie in beside him, though he does not himself understand why not.
He sends her back to the troubled, heaving darkness of her room, which no amount of electric light seems able that night, to brighten.
‘If you are the bride of darkness,’ he tells her as they breakfast off cold tinned macaroni cheese, ‘and I suspect you are, then who am I to come between you and your succubi? It is too dangerous.’
‘But I get so frightened,’ she says. ‘And what are you talking about? I know it’s only projection and neurosis and so on.’ She does not love Patrick. She feels too close to him for that. He is father and brother in one.
‘Just lie there and try to enjoy it,’ says Patrick. ‘Like any other woman. God knows what you and your other world invader are breeding. It is not this house that is haunted, it is you. I don’t want to catch it from you, your spiritual VD.’
‘It’s not catching,’ says Marjorie, miserable. Is there to be no end to the dreadful things she is responsible for?
But perhaps it is a catching, or at any rate, a transferable ill. A few months later Patrick comes back from college with a full bottle of Grand Marnier he has found in the gutter, and he and Marjorie drink it all between them, and in the morning find themselves entwined together on the floor, sick and hungover, and though Marjorie’s mind has little remembrance of what exactly happened, she has the physical knowledge that her body, this morning, is undoubtedly different from what it was the night before, and she, all unbeknownst, handed some kind of season ticket to enter worlds she has so far only heard about.
And as for Patrick, it is certainly true that about this time a kind of natural goodness inside him becomes clouded over; or perhaps it is only that the violent gloom which marked his entry into the world begins to take its toll upon his personality – at any rate he has, thereafter, the gift of bringing disaster not so much upon himself as upon the heads of people less accustomed to it than he. Though Patrick, one might say, has been rendered immune in infancy to Marjorie’s disease, others, more fortunate than he, have not. These are the people Patrick seeks out, thereafter, and these the people he in his turns infects and destroys.
The entering of one person into another is seldom without meaning, or without result, breeding at best children and at worst death; at its lowest, disease and humiliation; at its most pedestrian, status and relief; at its most profound, animation, spiritual change and happiness – and no amount of Grand Marnier can undo a moment of it.
All those grey other people scurryin
g about the streets of our cities – do not under-rate them, or the power they carry, each of them, in the great and convoluted scheme of things.
Patrick under-rates no-one. It is his power.
Grace calls once at Frognal to see Marjorie, finds Patrick installed, and disappears instantly. These days she presents herself as a virgin.
For Grace’s Christie feels virginity to be essential in the woman he loves, whilst he does his damnedest to dispose of it.
38
Christie is that year’s Bachelor Catch. While the winter snow lies impacted month after month, and half Europe starves, and the bombers overhead carry food for Germany instead of bombs, and the gas dwindles to a flicker, and the electric lights waver, and strangers stand close to each other for comfort – Christie shines before Grace like a beacon of hope and promise. He is all clear-cut, up-standing (but only in marriage) masculinity. Christie is Grace’s ambition. Not a diploma, not a career, nor the world’s recognition, not any more. Just Christie.
She loves him. Oh, indeed she does. Her heart quickens at the sight of him, her bowels dissolve with longing. But she will not, she cannot, succumb to his embraces. He takes her on his boat, well chaperoned (yes, he sails) and up mountains, rather less chaperoned (yes, he climbs). He offers to buy her a flat (yes, he can afford to) but no she will not. No diamonds, thank you, Christie. No wrist watches. No gifts, no bribes, my dearest. Chocolates, yes, oh thank you! And orchids, and invitations to dinner and a taxi ride home, and yes, a kiss, and yes, you may touch my breast (how wicked we are!) and quickly, quickly, goodnight, Christie. My own, my love, my dearest dear. I would die for you but I will not sleep with you.
Christie stops off at Soho on the way home and spends an hour with a tart. How else will he survive?
She loves him. She means to marry him. How else will she survive?
‘I can’t,’ Grace says to him, weeping, wriggling out of his arms on some deserted shore. It is night. The moon shines. The whole world waits. ‘I can’t. I’m not that kind of girl. If I say no, I know you’ll leave me, and then I’ll die, but no, no, no. Oh Christie, if you knew how I loved you!’
What a risk she takes. He nearly leaves her, she doesn’t know how nearly. Grace disturbs first his nights and then his days, and Christie has enterprises to keep going, and an office, and a staff and a million to be made.
Grace wins the unofficial Slade Prize, not for the most accomplished student, but for the Most Desirable Girl of the Year. Christie stays. He likes success. Grace’s eyes are incredible: her skin through the very effort of virtue has the pallor of debauchery. When she walks, sometimes, her knees knock together as if she was a young colt and could hardly control them. It’s as if, Christie thinks, you only had to push her and she’d fall down and wait, knees obligingly apart.
But she doesn’t, and she won’t. Grace wins.
‘Grace, will you marry me?’
What a catch, everyone says! This thirty-year-old, tall South African with his land-owning father, his background of parched veldt and black servants, and his riches; and his naïveties about the English social scene, born out of Cavalcade and Mrs Miniver and Brief Encounter and The Way Ahead, making a fortune in pre-stressed concrete, lording it over the new light-weight aggregates. You can build high on London clay, these days, as never before. London can become New York. Christie’s first to realize it. The safety factors are uncertain. No-one knows quite what they are. Christie tells them, if they ask.
Christie arranges the wedding, the way he arranges anything. He must forego his ambition of a wedding quite like the one in Father of the Bride, for the Bride’s Mother is dead, and the Bride’s Father disaffected in Bournemouth, but Christie does what he can.
The wedding is held in a church in the Sussex village where Christie’s English aunt lives. The reception is in a marquee set up in the garden. The sun shines, bells ring, flowers bloom, the virgin bride, beautiful and translucent in white, comes down the aisle. The groom stands beside her; the union is blessed. Was ever there a more charming couple? Cucumber sandwiches, strawberries, champagne. A thunderstorm. Laughter, tears, off to Cornwall and the honeymoon in the Bentley with the old shoes tied behind.
Those little fishermen’s cottages, those deserted rocky shores. You could make love on a beach, in those days, and there wouldn’t be a soul for miles. (It isn’t like that now. The Life Guard would have you up for indecency in five minutes.) Christie is sated: so is Grace, languid as can be. Tactfully but persistently he inquires about her already ruptured hymen. These things are important.
Horse-riding, she says.
And so it might be, after all.
Then back to St John’s Wood and life as a young matron. There’s no reason that anyone can see, in those innocent days, for Grace and Christie not to live happily ever after.
Grace even conceives, on her wedding night.
What judgement, what skill, what luck. Playing Grandmother’s footsteps with fate. Wanting just enough, never too much.
Good days!
Grace gives birth to a boy in March. Piers. Two years later, Petra is born. They are rather delicate, fragile, whiney children, as if all the strength of preceding generations has gone into the parents and left none over for these afterthoughts. Grace loves them, intemperately.
And Marjorie! Marjorie goes to Grace’s wedding. (Patrick is not invited.) She is happy for her friend, and her complexion is clear and spotless. She wears a New Look dress with soft unpadded shoulders, tight waist, and full skirt – and needn’t have bothered because at the reception, sheltering from the thunderstorm under an oak-tree, she meets Ben, who does not care in the least what she looks like but likes to listen to what she says.
Within three weeks she has left Frognal and is living in a tiny flat in West Kilburn with Ben. Ben is an architectural student and has been asked to the wedding because his father is a business contact of Christie’s. Ben, himself, has many doubts about Christie’s business methods, let alone his constructional ones, but keeps them to himself. Ben’s family is Zionist. Marjorie wonders whether, having a Jewish father herself, and feeling sympathy with that much suffering race, she should not become a Jew herself? But Ben, who takes his Judaism in a political rather than a religious sense, feels it to be unnecessary. As for marriage, there is lots of time for that. They have a sure sense of a long future together. Besides, if they married, she would lose her grant, finally obtained from a reluctant local authority after many solicitors’ letters and injunctions from Helen in Mexico.
Chloe is asked to Grace’s wedding, but cannot attend. She has other matters to occupy her mind.
39
Chloe offers to cook the children’s supper, but Françoise, now quite cheered up, will not hear of it. The most she will allow is that Chloe can help. She bustles about in Chloe’s kitchen as if it were her own. Chloe feels ill at ease: as if she were the stranger, not Françoise.
Some people, thinks Chloe, can make themselves at home anywhere. Françoise clatters and sings amongst another woman’s pots and pans and thinks nothing of it. It has taken Chloe all of ten years to regard this house as her own. It is as if, having had no proper home as a child, only a room shared with a mother, she has no right to achieve one now. Her adult life is plagued with the notion that she has no real entitlement to anything, to have only what she can snatch when no-one’s looking.
And Oliver, of course, stretching out his control to cover the choice of colour of the spare-room wallpaper, the books in the shelves, the newspapers through the letterbox, the food in the cupboard, the greenfly in the garden, the money in her pocket, does not make matters easier. She knows it. All the same, she thinks, it takes two, as always. One to stretch out greedy hands, the other to decline to push them away: out of fear, or idleness, or stupidity or force of habit. All Chloe has to do is go into a Garden Shop, buy a chemical insecticide, put that into the syringe instead of soap and water – and there you are, no greenfly.
But will she? No.
>
When Chloe first meets Oliver, she is sitting primly on a cushion. She is shy, and not at ease with the others. That is, she looks down her fine patrician nose and appears superior. Chloe does not have a boyfriend, and is naturally anxious that this should be put down to her discriminating nature rather than her lack of capacity to attract. She is raw enough as it is with the humiliation of being pitied, as she is, for having no proper home, no proper family, no proper clothes; not even, she suspects, proper breasts. (The slight ladylike mounds which she soaps, rinses and dries so carefully each morning, seem to her to be sadly inadequate. Not that she has any means of actual comparison, of course – other girls, like her mother, dress and undress, wash and dry themselves, either in privacy or behind towels.) And though she weighs a stone more than she used to – she lives in a students’ hostel and has grown plump from too many potatoes and too much misery – the extra weight seems to lie around her hips. Perhaps she is going to turn out pear-shaped, like Marjorie? It is her fear. And now as she sits on her cushion and looks down her nose, her cotton skirt nips her tightly round her waist. It is pretty pink check fabric, which once curtained the Ladies Cloakroom at the Rose and Crown, until faded beyond hope by the afternoon sun.
Oliver, coming late to the party, only there because he could not sleep, disliking his host and by implication his guests, mistakenly believes that Chloe, sitting on her cushion, looking clean and shockable and the kind of girl most likely to annoy him, is in the company of the President of the Dramatic Society, who sits at Chloe’s feet and lays his head upon them for no other reason than that he has a headache and wishes to die. When he finally pulls himself together enough to go and look for another drink, Oliver takes his place. He strokes Chloe’s ankle. Chloe looks down upon his head, black, curly, silky and riotous. Does she have a premonition, then, how familiar this particular head of hair is to become to her? How she is to watch it, over countless breakfast tables, flourish, fade and thin? Perhaps. Why else does she stay, and listen, and respond, and not obey her impulse simply to get up and walk away, or at the very least move her ankle out of his reach and her future too?
