by Weldon, Fay
‘Shouldn’t we stop?’ asked Sir Bernard, but he didn’t press the matter, for his soul was so nearly not his any more, and the black BMW slithered on through the flatlands, where the alder trees abound, and ashes and the silver and downy birch, bowed low by bindweed, towards the oak woodlands of the heath.
‘Tell you what,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘you get me that girl for a wife, and I’ll follow whatever script you put in front of me.’
‘For a wife?’ asked Driver.
‘For a wife,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘I want her body and soul. I am a man of swift decisions. She is my Marguerite.’
‘Sir Bernard,’ said Driver, ‘Marguerites are in scarce supply these days. Busybodies like Mrs Baker put ideas in their heads. They pass exams, lose the knack of perfect love.’
‘Then see to it,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘that they don’t.’
If you treat the Devil like a servant, he tends to act like a servant, and do what he’s told, at least for a time.
The fire caught the wood above the stage; the entire school was evacuated, and the Fire Brigade called. The engines came promptly, but water from their hoses, rather than fire, damaged the structure of the roof, and the school was closed for two weeks for emergency repairs.
‘Annie, Carmen and Laura,’ said Mrs Baker to her best girls, ‘this couldn’t have come at a worse time for your exams. Already you’re falling behind with your studies. If you don’t get your exams, what will become of you?’
Laura said, ‘I’ll get married and have kids.’
Annie said, ‘Help my mother with her clairvoyance.’
Carmen said, ‘Be a call girl.’
And they all said exams weren’t the be-all and the end-all of life, look at Sir Bernard, who did well enough without, but they were only teasing Mrs Baker, or she hoped they were.
The local newspaper merely reported that a fire had broken out at Fenedge High during an address by Sir Bernard Bellamy, and the school had consequently been closed for structural repairs. It could not, said the Headmistress, have come at a worse time for girls now studying for public examinations.
4
As Mrs Baker observed to her friend Mr Bliss in the pub, over a glass of wine and a plate of mashed potato and sausage, ‘I don’t know what it is about parents! They wait for the weeks just before A levels, and then they divorce, or die, or break up the home, or sell the house, almost as if their sole intent is to blight their children’s lives.’
To which Mr Bliss replied, ‘I don’t have children myself; I only have horses. But I’ve noticed how often they fall lame just before a race. They blight their own lives without any help from anyone.’ Mr Bliss was in his late fifties. He ran a centre for ailing horses; he used natural herbs in their treatment, though, as he was the first to admit, it might merely be the passage of time which restored them to health, rather than comfrey, or feverfew, or borage. He had a puzzled, gentle air. Mrs Baker and he met in the pub from time to time. Mrs Baker was a widow, he a bachelor. He considered her wilder statements calmly, gave them due attention, and contributed to the discussion his own experience of the world, although that was on the whole limited, as he would explain, to horses. Mr Bliss visited me from time to time in Landsfield Crescent, and I always enjoyed his company. Sometimes he came on his horse, Snowy, and would tether it at the gatepost, which always created an agreeable flurry up and down the Crescent.
Now I am not arguing that Laura, unlike Carmen, was specifically singled out by the Devil to fail her exams; I am merely remarking that the more girls who failed to get through them the more staff would be available to chambermaid up at Bellamy House Hotel, and the more competition for the jobs there would be – which would lower wages. The Devil, unlike God, works in not so mysterious ways as you might think. When self-interest rules, motive is always apparent.
The very day that Fenedge High reopened after the fire, Laura came home from school to find her father on the landing, replacing the waterweed in the tropical fishtank which stood in the window, and sorting out the confusion of wires that service such tanks – a line each for heater, thermostat, airstone pump, filter, and two for its neon lights. In the tank swam a large black ornamental carp, its elaborate fins stirring gently, its big eyes goggling, backed into a corner by the intrusion of a human hand and arm into its home. ‘Poor Kubrick,’ said Laura. ‘He hates change. Why are you home, Dad?’
Kim replied that he was home to make sure Kubrick was all right, and that he was entrusting the fish to Laura’s care. She would find feeding instructions on the cork noticeboard in the kitchen. And he had something to tell Laura.
‘Don’t say it,’ said Laura.
‘I have to, puss,’ said Kim, ‘and I want you to remember that whatever happens between your mother and myself, we both love you very much.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Laura sourly. ‘You love me so much you are going to get a divorce.’
‘No one’s saying anything about a divorce,’ said Kim. ‘That’s just a piece of paper. Your mother and I are going to live apart for a while. Now don’t make things difficult for me, puss.’
‘Don’t call me puss,’ said Laura. ‘And if you did get a divorce it would be a great relief. You’re not invisible, you know. You’ve been seeing Poison Poppy for more than a year now, and the whole world knows it, especially my friends. It hasn’t been very nice for me, I can tell you.’
‘Your generation is too prudish,’ complained Kim. ‘The thing is, she’s going to have a baby.’
‘That is disgusting,’ said Laura. ‘She is my age. I went all through primary school with her, and she was poison then and she’s poison now, and I don’t see how a baby could survive inside her.’
‘I know you’re upset, puss, but I have to do what’s right,’ said Kim, putting his forefinger under Laura’s jaw and lifting her head so he could look into her eyes, thus greatly embarrassing her. ‘You do see that – it isn’t a happy situation for me. I love your mother very much, but Poppy is having a baby.’
‘Yuk,’ said Laura. ‘If you go off and live with her you just take Kubrick with you. Let Poison Poppy look after it.’
‘Poppy doesn’t believe in keeping pets,’ said Kim, ‘and that’s a very silly and childish nickname you call her by,’ and by the end of the evening he’d packed and left, leaving Audrey sitting at the kitchen table staring into space, and when Laura tried to focus on the reasons for the First World War her eyes blurred too and it all made a great deal less sense than usual, not that it ever made much.
As for Annie, she was so tired in class that on one or two occasions Mrs Baker actually had to shake her awake. Annie declined to give the reasons for her exhaustion; it was left to Carmen to explain that Annie lay awake at night, fearful of hearing the Count as a third party in the parental bedroom. And on occasion the Count tried to chat her, Annie, up: Mavis’s mouth would open and instead of her mother’s voice asking her to do the shopping, or make tea, or get her nose out of her book, which was bad enough, the Count would be telling her how long it was since he’d had a woman, and asking her to give him a little kiss. There had also been some poltergeist activity in the kitchen: Annie’s favourite cup had hurled itself across the room and broken, and Alan had blamed Annie on the grounds that poltergeists were only ever active in the presence of neurotic teenage girls. Annie’s claim that she was not the neurotic one in the family – on the contrary, wasn’t she Head Girl of Fenedge High? — was taken by her parents as a personal affront. One way and another Annie’s home life was not conducive to study.
Nor was Carmen’s life tranquil. Andy, Raelene and Stephen all came down with food poisoning. Dr Grafton came and went at number 19, and the Borough Epidemiologist too. Raelene had purchased six chicken pies at half-price because they were a day past their sell-by date; she had put them straight away into her freezer. Alas, Andy had unplugged the cabinet in order to use his battery charger and forgotten to reconnect it for a day or two, and quite what had happened inside the freezer dur
ing that time Raelene didn’t know; nevertheless she was convinced that the pies would be okay warmed up. Carmen, who declined to eat the pie her mother served her and was mocked for her prudence, was the only member of the family not affected. She was therefore the better able to nurse them through their illness, cleaning up after them as their bodies appeared to deliquesce, spooning water into their fevered mouths. Raelene, who had eaten the pie Carmen refused, was obliged to spend a couple of days in hospital. For some ten more days Carmen got no school work done, nor were her family grateful; rather they seemed to feel Carmen had somehow unjustly cheated fate.
Annie, Laura and Carmen, in the week before their exams began, bunked off school and went down to sit on the banks of Sealord Brook – the very same stream which ran through the grounds of Bellamy House Hotel where it was being widened to provide a jet-ski pond – to lick their wounds, lament their fate, and wonder why they were all so suddenly thus afflicted. Down here the great hairy willowherb – Epilobium hirsutium – grows, and marsh valerian, and milk parsley, and sometimes – in the month of May — swallowtail butterflies hover and dance. It was a bright, bright afternoon and it was difficult to feel miserable, but they tried.
‘We’re not going to pass,’ said Laura.
‘We’re going to let Mrs Baker down,’ said Annie.
‘We’ll never get out of here,’ said Carmen. ‘We’ll have to take local jobs and marry local boys.’
‘That’s if we’re lucky. Who’s ever going to marry me?’ said Annie, and it was true that in those days, when other girls are at their prettiest, a kind of unbearable plainness suffused her, a muddiness of complexion, a puffiness of skin, a lankness of hair. Or perhaps it was just depression. Carmen and Annie stared at their friend and could see that she was indeed a worry.
‘There’s always someone for everyone,’ said Laura comfortingly.
‘You’re okay,’ said Annie. ‘You’ve got Woodie.’
And so it seemed Laura had, one way or another. Woodie had returned not as suitor but as family friend, to be supportive in the bad times which followed her parents’ separation. He was kind to Audrey, in the lordly charitable way of very young men who cannot understand what all the fuss is about, and brotherly to Laura. He even once persuaded Audrey to go to the cinema with him in spite of the stomach pains which made her think she’d just rather sit at home and suffer. Her doctor, Dr Grafton, the one who sees illness as God’s punishment for lack of serenity, told her the pains were due to stress and she should pull herself together, eat more and cheer up.
‘All I’ve got,’ said Annie, ‘is Count Capinski saying come here my little milkmaid and chasing me round the kitchen.’
‘You’re making it up,’ said Carmen.
‘He did it once,’ said Annie. ‘He did.’
‘Your mother ought to see a counsellor,’ said Carmen.
‘She is the counsellor,’ said Annie, and laughed, and looked better at once.
‘We’ll all get jobs and save up so you can have a nose job,’ said Carmen.
‘It’s not how you look that matters in the world,’ said Laura primly, ‘it’s your personality,’ but they all knew it wasn’t so: that was just the kind of thing people told them. Would Prince Charles have married Lady Di if she hadn’t been pretty?
Annie said, ‘The only good thing that happened all last week was that while Count Capinski was having yet another bath – he’s the only one allowed to use all the hot water he wants, because of the dungeon – he had this kind of flash from heaven that a horse called Yellowhammer was going to win the three o’clock at Newmarket. So Mum leapt out of the bath and went to find Dad – she didn’t even wrap herself in a towel – and told him to put a ten-pound bet to win. Dad doesn’t believe in gambling, so I had to go all the way to the betting shop. And Yellowhammer won. And then I had to go all the way back again to pick up the winnings. Two hundred and twenty pounds. They only gave me two. The rest went to the Temple of Healing Light. That’s the Wednesday afternoon do; it’s half-price when the rich pay for the poor. Dad says no one should benefit from gambling.’
‘If the Count can predict the future,’ said Carmen, ‘and if you asked him nicely, would he give us our exam questions? Then at least we’d know what to revise.’
‘I expect he’d want to steal a kiss,’ said Annie. ‘I hate the way he puts things. I’m really glad I didn’t live in the past, if that was what it was all like.’
‘A kiss is a small price to pay,’ said Carmen, ‘for our key to a successful future. Look at it as a mother’s kiss.’ Annie just stared at her, so Carmen said, ‘Well, we’ll all go then, or at any rate we’ll think about it.’
And they put their plan on ice for a whole twenty-four hours.
Now I had checked various Count Capinskis out with the help of the Fenedge Mobile Library, soon to be demobilised, and had indeed traced a fairly nasty specimen of Capinski back to fourteenth-century Cracow. This one seemed to be some kind of early Polish Rasputin, a man alleged to be both a practitioner in the black arts and the Queen’s lover; he had led a general uprising against the King, burned alive a church full of people, and been thrown into a bottle dungeon and left there to languish, since the general belief was that to put a magician to death would merely increase his powers. It is perfectly possible – though not likely – that Mavis had read the same book — Bad Men in History — and absorbed its contents unconsciously, as those people are said to do who are regressed by hypnosis into remembering the lives they believe they lived before death. The history books and chronicles used to check out their stories turn out to be the very ones which initiated the fantasy in the first place: what is occurring is a kind of living plagiarism. I do not believe Mavis consciously deceived her family and clients when she spoke with the Count’s voice; nor do I believe he was really in there with her; she just thought and acted as if he was. She and he had been over on occasion to try to heal my legs; she would lay on hands and I would feel the familiar healer’s tingle, and the Count would invoke the Powers of Light in his guttural broken English, but nothing of a healing nature ever actually happened. But Mavis did it out of the goodness of her heart: she came over with the Count several times and didn’t charge a penny for it. And at the time I for one, in spite of the Count’s historic past, had quite grown to trust him. Mavis said he was company for her while Alan was away; Alan said he added class to the Temple of Light; and as for Annie’s allegations, well, girls as plain as Annie are prone to sexual fantasy. And something had to be done. Matters were going from bad to worse. Mrs Baker summoned Annie, Carmen and Laura to her office. Their essays on Lady Macbeth were in front of her.
‘What is the matter with you three?’ Mrs Baker demanded. ‘You use family trouble as an excuse for idleness. It’s disgraceful. If you do that now, what chance have you got later on in life, when you have husbands and children? The brightest girls I have, and their heads emptied out of all sense, all information! You are on the road to self-destruction. If you do not get to college you will be dependent on a man forever, for the wage of an untrained female is never enough to keep her in dignity or comfort. So you will marry, and what is marriage, as George Bernard Shaw said, but legalised slavery? Unpaid work in return for your keep, attended by daily humiliations. Who gets the best piece of steak, the only egg in the fridge? He does! He’s bigger than you and more powerful than you, and he allows you to wheedle and charm a little pleasure from him now and then, and the law offers you a little protection, it’s true, but not much. All you have to bind him with are chains of love and duty, and they’re pretty flimsy, believe you me.
‘And don’t tell me,’ added Mrs Baker, ‘that the world has changed since I was young, for it hasn’t.’
The three girls stared at her, unconvinced. And Mrs Baker looked from one to another of them and picked at the layers of dusty black fabric she wore and said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking if you pass exams you’ll end up like me. I tell you this, you pass exams
and end up like me if you’re lucky.’
Still they stared.
‘Life is short,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘and life is shit,’ and stalked out of the room.
And that clinched it. The next day Annie, Carmen and Laura sat in Mavis’s hall on the row of chairs kept for patients, and waited. On the door handle of the front room hung a notice which said ‘TEMPLE OF HEALING – DO NOT DISTURB’.
‘Fancy having to line up to see my own mother in my own house,’ said Annie.
‘Look at it this way,’ said Carmen. ‘It’s not your mum you have to see, it’s Count Capinski.’
‘I want my mum back,’ said Annie. She was near to tears, and Laura was not happy either.
‘It feels like cheating to me,’ she said. ‘I expect this was what my dad felt like while waiting for an assignation with Poison Poppy.’
The others felt it would be unkind to contradict her.
The Temple door opened and an elderly man with a florid face limped out. He was smiling. ‘She’s a wonder,’ he said to the girls. ‘It’s a miracle. I am completely cured. And that Count is such a gent. He adds real tone to Fenedge. He says you can go in now.’
And in they went and Mavis looked up from the hard chair in which she sat enthroned alone in the room, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you three. What do you want? We’re doing Temple. It’s very tiring,’ and then the Count spoke from her lips: ‘Never too busy for your daughter and her charming friends, dear lady. What can I do for you today? Warts, arthritis, colds in the nose? Puppy fat, a thing of the past! God sends his healing power through me, into this blissful age of plenty.’
‘We just want a little glimpse of the future, Count,’ said Carmen.
‘We want to know what questions will come up in our exams.’
‘The nerve of it!’ said Mavis. ‘That’s cheating.’
‘Nem problemi,’ said the Count, in the same breath, quite crowding out Mavis’s disapproval, and a voice which they recognised as Mrs Quaker’s of the French department referred them to Flaubert and the justification or otherwise of Madame Bovary’s suicide, and Tom Ellis (History) suggested they compare the Corn Law and the Poll Tax riots, and Mrs Baker (English) said forget Banquo and concentrate on Lady Macbeth, and so on throughout the range of their subjects while Carmen took notes.
