by Weldon, Fay
Carmen took off her navy school jumper and undid her tie and took that off too.
‘Do you think that’s silicone, Raelene?’ asked Andy of his wife and Raelene refused to look but said, ‘How would I know?’
‘Feel the texture,’ said her son, ‘you’d tell soon enough. A bit of a squeeze and you’d know.’
Carmen took her shirt off and no one noticed. She sat there in her bra. Raelene stared at the draining board and the menfolk at the photograph.
‘Silicone or not,’ said Andy, ‘I wouldn’t complain and nor would you, Steve, if you’re a chip off the old block.’
Carmen took off her bra and sat there naked from the waist up. She had a white skin, and a bosom smaller than Peachey Penelope’s and discreet and rosy nipples. She pecked away at her fish.
‘I’m a chip off the old block then, Dad,’ said Steve, and then caught sight of Carmen and rose to his feet, spilling tea all over the newspaper, at the same time as Andy said to his daughter, ‘You disgusting little bitch, cover yourself up at once.’ Carmen just said, ‘Don’t be so prudish, Dad. We’ve all got them. Why don’t you take out yours, Mum, and give the lads a treat?’
At which Andy and Stephen both left the room in a hurry, leaving their meal half finished. They were both upset.
‘I’ll get the social worker on to you,’ said Andy as he left, ‘for Unruly Behaviour. You’re no daughter of mine. I blame you for this, Raelene.’
Raelene wept into the mess on the draining board.
‘Carmen,’ she said, ‘cover yourself up. You let me down. What are we going to do with you?’
Carmen put on her bra, saying, ‘I’m going to write and ask them to put men’s privates on Page 4. Give the girls a treat.’
Raelene said, ‘You’re the Devil’s own daughter,’ and certainly in those days Carmen could be fiendish and Raelene would complain about her to me when she came over for a cup of tea. But I wasn’t surprised. Landsfield Crescent was point eight of a mile nearer Driver’s safe house, Sealord Mansion, than any other street in Fenedge, and the Wedmore home was on the outer curve of the Crescent, so it caught the full force of trouble, as some houses in a road will get the force of the prevailing wind, not others. You can tell by the way the trees in the garden lean. But I didn’t tell Raelene all that. I’d just say adolescent girls were often difficult for a time but then grew out of it, which I would have thought self-evident, but it’s surprising what people don’t know. What is more, Bernard Bellamy had that day looked into her eyes and seen what he was looking for, so one way and another it’s not surprising she took off a garment or so. Forget the provocation.
‘If I’m the Devil’s child,’ said Carmen to her mother, ‘then you must have had it off with the Devil.’
Raelene dropped the plastic bottle of detergent onto the floor. The red cap fell off and the liquid slunk towards the cat’s saucer unnoticed.
‘Or perhaps one night, seventeen years ago,’ said Carmen, pressing home her advantage, ‘you got lucky and a knight in shining armour came galloping up to you, and had his wicked way, and forgot to take you with him. I just can’t believe I’m that man you call your husband’s daughter,’ and she put on her shirt and took her homework over to Laura’s, and asked Audrey if she could put her school clothes through the wash, so she could be smart for school the next day. Audrey said of course. Audrey ran a one-woman rescue service for the benefit of her neighbours’ children, but it didn’t stop her getting a pain, which she put down to indigestion, caused by worry over her husband Kim’s whereabouts; an unreasonable worry, she told herself, born of the guilt of having in her time been the other woman.
And of course Carmen, Annie and Laura talked and idled their days away instead of working at their lessons and when the time for their final examinations came a year later were even more hopelessly unprepared than could reasonably have been expected. Blame the parents if you like; personally I blame the Devil…
3
The very next day after Driver drove through Fenedge and Bernard Bellamy looked into Carmen’s eyes, I received a letter. Now it’s a known fact that where there are devils there are angels too, and vice versa, so I couldn’t be sure whether the letter was sent by the agents of heaven or hell. It came from a transplant surgeon in a large Chicago hospital who offered to operate on me free of charge, in an attempt to reinstate the flow of blood to my spinal column – by either a kind of backbone bypass or, better still, the clearing of blocked veins by miniaturised balloons – and thus return to me the use of my legs. (Accounts of my condition get written up from time to time in the medical press.) I replied by return yes, of course he was welcome to try, rather to the discomfort of my own local Fenedge general practitioner, Dr Grafton, whose belief it is that his patients deserve whatever afflicts them, and that they shouldn’t struggle too hard to be rid of it. This in turn may be why Mavis Horner has so many patients lining up to visit her. I flew off to Chicago within the week.
I shan’t dwell upon the ins and outs of catheters, the fancy drugs and startling lasers that contributed to my treatment; indeed, I can’t remember much of it, I swallowed so many rough large red forgetfulness pills. I only mention the event to explain that I was away from my window for six months or so, and that when I returned to my watching post, my legs no better and no worse, it became apparent that there had been an exciting development or so in my absence. Exciting, that is to say, in Fenedge terms, if not Chicago’s.
Sealord Mansion had been bought by Bernard Bellamy, who was now Sir Bernard Bellamy, knighted for services to industry, struck on the shoulder by a sword wielded by the Queen herself. It is a fact that to be made a knight you have to be able both to kneel and to bend your neck, and that on occasion certain individuals, too old and stiff to do such things, have had to decline the offer on account of their infirmity, but Sir Bernard Bellamy had no such problem. He looked these days as Elizabeth Taylor looked after three months in a health hydro – younger, skinnier and fuller of future than ever – now that Driver drove him everywhere.
Sir Bernard, it appeared, had diversified out of catering – he made his initial fortune selling chicken patties in the Chick-A-Whizz franchise concern – into the hotel business. Sealord Mansion, that mecca of the naturalists, had at the stroke of a pen become Bellamy House, and the builders been moved in to strip both the inside and the outside of the building to make it look less like what it was, an admiral’s folly, and more like an hotel, American style, and one fit for the rich and famous. A Save Sealord group, composed mostly of botanists and bird-watchers, had risen and fallen in my absence; been defeated in their struggle to permit the house, in whose attic bats bred, and in whose grounds rare heathers and ferns grew, to remain undisturbed.
‘Can all these people be wrong?’ Bernard had enquired of Driver, ‘and only me be right?’ That was when Driver was nudging his way through a crowd of some eighty placard-bearing people, whose hearts were clearly in the right place, and whose spelling was excellent, which is not necessarily the case with the protesting classes. ‘Save the Hippuris vulgaris!’ they read. ‘Protect Our Typha latifolia!’ ‘Our Whincnat Is Precious To Us’, ‘The Wheatear Shall Not Perish’, ‘Long Live Sealord, Home To The Hooper Swan’, and so on.
‘Very easily,’ Driver had replied. ‘For every man who wants to achieve something, there are at least a hundred who try to hold him back. And just look at the Adam’s apples of these particular folk; how they jerk up and down in their scrawny throats in rhythm as they chant! Hard to take them seriously.’ And Sir Bernard Bellamy looked and laughed, for what Driver said was true. The Devil is often right about things: it helps explain his power over the hearts and minds of men.
And the other sad truth was that Sealord Mansion, built by an admiral for a child mistress a couple of centuries back, had in the first place been a bodge job dedicated to an unholy purpose, and had caused outrage when it was built, so that the outrage which attended its change of use, to use the planners’ term, was
thereby undermined.
And so when Driver drove over the foot of one young bird-watcher and lamed him for life, the protest fizzled out, instead of gaining force as could have been expected. But then again, though it is in the nature of bird-watchers to endure great discomfort in pursuit of their ends and think nothing of cold and damp and shortage of sleep, they perhaps see too much virtue in stillness and silence: they are simply not the kind to persist in aggro.
To get to Sealord Mansion in the days before it became the Bellamy House Hotel, the proper way, the walkers’ way – or so I am told: I must rely upon others in this instance – you would scorn the main road. You would walk inland in a northerly direction from the sea wall at Winterwart, leaving behind you the tidal flats, where the waders and wildfowl abound; you would crunch across the shingle stretches where the yellow-horned poppy grows, and the hound’s-tongue and the curled beet too; you would skirt the flooded gravel pits, which the sticklebacks so love, and where a bittern was once sighted, and so reach the heather-clad dune slacks, where the ling and the rare cross-leaved heath abound. A little further inland and you would pass the habitat of the rare natterjack toad – that strange burrowing creature with its unnaturally short back legs, whose habit it is to utter such eerie cries of a summer evening as to scare the unwary out of their wits — proceed further still, into the woodlands, down the banks of the reed-lined stream and then, finally, under the green arms of the willows, you would come to Sealord Mansion itself, shuttered, dilapidated, but beautiful enough in its disorder, its grounds so richly rewarding to the botanist – anyone searching for the rare royal fern, the Osmunda regalis, or the even more rare crested buckler – and an excellent and undisturbed breeding ground for the siskin, the redwing, the redpoll and the brambling and every warbler you can think of. What did they care if Sealord was the Devil’s safe house; what do flora and fauna need to know about these things?
Some pleasures are no longer. Sealord Mansion is now Bellamy House Hotel, and a breeze-block wall bars the rambler’s way from the sea, and bright green lawns roll neatly over the levelled high dune ridges; the gravel pits are filled the better to fashion a golf course, so the red-breasted merganser calls no more, and only the natterjacks remain, their voices, unloving and unloved, calling through the summer nights. But that’s enough of all that nature talk. What’s gone is gone.
I never saw any of it anyway.
While I was away in Chicago trying to grow a new backbone, Sir Bernard Bellamy spoke at Fenedge High School for Girls. Driver encouraged him so to do. The event was not a success. Perhaps Driver had his reasons for wishing it thus to turn out.
‘But this really is the back of beyond,’ complained Sir Bernard as the BMW took the road from the new improved Bellamy House Hotel, with its mock Tudor facade and grand new steps flanked with an imported palm tree or so to add a touch of the exotic. Workmen were still at work: the grand opening was yet to come. The helipad was being built where once a little colony of the rare pasque flower grew. ‘Are you convinced it’s ripe for development?’
‘The back of beyond,’ said Driver, ‘normally provides a pool of cheap labour for men of vision such as yourself. That is to say, people content to be happy in their own way, which is not ours. Fenedge may not be sin city, but nor do we want it to be.’
‘I’ve never spoken to schoolgirls before,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘Just deliver the speech we agreed upon,’ said Driver, who seemed a little irritated. ‘Say the lines and leave the stage; have your cup of tea afterwards, a piece of the cake baked by the Home Economics class, be pleasant to everyone, and they’ll all be lining up for jobs at Bellamy House Hotel. You’ll see.’
‘I may throw away the prepared speech and speak from the soul,’ warned Sir Bernard. ‘It’s what I usually do and it’s always worked to date.’
At the very mention of the word soul, Driver lifted his handsome head and sniffed the air, like a fox trying to pick out chicken.
‘You have quite a snuffle there again,’ said Sir Bernard, who knew that Driver was after his soul, but being unconvinced that he had one, felt that selling it was a risk well worth taking. Sir Bernard was accustomed to selling things that did not exist – eternal youth, perfect health amongst them — having a strong financial interest in one of the nation’s leading health food chains. There was a slight bump, as if the car had run something over.
‘That wasn’t a cat, I hope,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘Good Lord no,’ said Driver. They drove on in silence.
By the time they reached the uncompromising square brick building which was Fenedge School for Girls it was raining: the kind of sweeping misty drizzle which so often affected the area, although no doubt it helped the wild flowers grow. (Plants can absorb moisture through their leaves as well as their roots.) A small group waited under umbrellas to greet Sir Bernard. Mrs Baker, Head of English, was there: a woman in late middle age with a beautiful Renaissance face perched on an overflowing body, which she had clothed in layer upon layer of dusty black, in a way that was almost Islamic. Sharing her umbrella were Carmen, Annie and Laura, the three of them making one of her.
‘Welcome, Sir Bernard,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘to Fenedge School. We have been so looking forward to your visit. These days we depend so very much on the support of local enterprise.’
Driver stood to one side; he did not need an umbrella: the rain fell all around but not on him. He held his over Sir Bernard’s silvery head, a model chauffeur, always there but never ostentatiously so.
Mrs Baker introduced Laura, Annie and Carmen to Sir Bernard. ‘These are my best girls,’ she said. Mrs Baker’s best girls! By that she meant the girls least likely to succumb too soon to the local boys; girls who would go out into the world and show just what a woman could do, unburdened by domesticity; girls who would pass their exams without trouble. And the exams were only a month away. Annie was Head Girl; she meant to follow in her family’s footsteps, and go into the healing arts, that is to say, nursing. Laura was Head Prefect; she planned to go to the University of East Anglia, and Carmen was to do Art & Design at the local Polytechnic. All this Mrs Baker told Sir Bernard, careless of the weather.
But no one was listening. It was raining too hard, and the wind blew the words back into her mouth, and as for Sir Bernard, he was staring hard at Carmen. Rain glistened on her eyelashes; she was, as my grandmother used to describe it, ‘in good face’ that day, and when she saw Sir Bernard staring she blushed, and looked more enchanting still.
‘Shall we go inside?’ suggested Driver, because he did not at that time include a chit of a girl like Carmen in his plans. She was not the Marguerite he had in mind for Sir Bernard. Her soul was far too firmly hers; and what’s more it swam around in the sphere of Mrs Baker, a woman he disliked on sight, for all she wore layers of black. He could not abide a plump woman, and that was that; a plump good woman was anathema to him.
Sir Bernard stood on a platform in front of two hundred and fifty-three girls and listened to Mrs Baker’s introductory talk, or half listened, because Carmen was standing at the very back of the hall, just by the back exit. He would rather she had sat in the very front, but at least he could see her. She is my Marguerite, he thought, and it’s up to the Devil to provide her. Mrs Baker was speaking about the transition from the world of school to the world of work, and the usual guff about equal opportunities and women making their presence felt in business and politics, so he paid no attention to his notes and spoke from the soul.
‘I reckon all your noses,’ he said, ‘are too pretty to be kept to the grindstone. I reckon too many people spend too much time telling the young what they ought to hear, and not what they need to hear. Which is this. What this nation needs, to solve its employment problems, is for women to return to the home; to stay out of the workforce once they are married. What’s so bad about staying at home?’
Mrs Baker shuffled discontent and disapproval beside him, but he took no notice.
‘I
t’s our experience,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘that throughout the Bellamy Empire the most efficient executives are the ones with stay-at-home wives, the ones who create happy families, healthy children, and give a man something worth fighting for. A man’s duty is to support a family; a woman’s duty is to make a home he’s happy to come back to –’
He could see Driver at the side of the stage. Driver was shaking his head at him. Sir Bernard carried on.
‘Book-learning,’ said Sir Bernard to the girls, ‘is not much use to a girl, and don’t let your teachers tell you otherwise. I left school at fourteen; I never passed an exam in my life –’
The stage was lined with curtains allegedly fireproofed. But now a little flicker of flame ran up them. Perhaps it was the fierce focusing of Driver’s eyes that set it off, and it was then fanned by Mrs Baker’s flush of outrage – though of course it might have been the caretaker’s cigarette, discarded but not stubbed out as he entered a No Smoking Zone – but, whatever the cause, Carmen at the back of the hall was the first to see the flames. She shrieked, ‘Fire! Don’t panic!’ and the whole audience rose as one girl and filed neatly from the hall, well drilled as they were in proper emergency procedure, while Laura, Annie and Carmen counted them through. They did not believe in the fire, but they trusted Carmen to get them out of a boring situation if she could.
Sir Bernard and Driver left by the side entrance, made hasty goodbyes and drove off.
‘Why didn’t you keep to the script?’ said Driver.
‘I was speaking from the soul,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘I was speaking the truth as I know it,’ and Driver buried his head in his handkerchief and sneezed, and there was a bump as they ran over something.
‘That was a dog,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘It shouldn’t have been in the road,’ said Driver. ‘You must never swerve to avoid an animal: it can cost human lives.’
