by Weldon, Fay
To which Annie replied bleakly that she was on a diet, and Laura said she couldn’t work on Saturday nights. She never worked on Saturday nights, Woodie wouldn’t like it.
Mrs Haverill, who was accustomed to handling young female staff, pretended she hadn’t heard. She said Bellamy House expected loyalty and dedication from its staff, a smart appearance and a pleasant manner. If Bellamy House was to be listed as one of the Great World Hotels, as featured in the Economist Diary, which was Sir Bernard’s ambition, the staff must do their bit. She would expect them at six-thirty the following Monday. Uniforms could be purchased at the Gaiety Haberdashery, Fenedge, at specially reduced prices.
‘I suppose,’ she added, ‘neither of you is pregnant?’
‘Why?’ asked Laura.
‘Because it is not Sir Bernard’s policy to employ pregnant women. Guests hardly like to see swelling tummies under smart uniforms.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Laura, thankfully, and then there was one.
Laura joined Carmen on the step. They walked away together, looked back, and saw Annie waving foolishly out of one of the top windows at them. Already she was wearing a little white cap.
‘There’s always the chicken factory,’ said Laura.
‘Never!’ said Carmen. ‘And you can’t anyway: the carcasses are full of oestrogen. You shouldn’t handle them, or you’ll have a female baby with a beard, or a male one with a bosom.’
‘How do you know these things?’ asked Laura.
‘I read The Sun,’ said Carmen.
The steel gates, now cured of whatever circuit ailment had afflicted them, opened as Carmen and Annie approached and then slid gracefully together, separating Annie off from her friends.
Heaven knows where Driver had been but as Carmen and Laura left Bellamy House the BMW swept past them, and its exhaust puffed a rude goodbye, a brownish cloud which hung around in the air for a little before seeming to become granulated. The fidgety cloud danced towards them and turned out to be a swarm of bees.
Carmen and Laura began to run: the cloud pursued. Laura’s long smooth legs attracted some of the little creatures, Carmen’s neck others. The only cover apparent was the Portakabin tucked inside Mr Bliss’s health farm for horses, and it was for this they made, squealing, over the cattle grid, up the steps, pushing open the door without ceremony, falling inside, slamming it shut behind them.
Mr Bliss looked up from his ancient typewriter. He was, he told me later, surprised but not offended. Anyone who looks after other people’s horses, Mr Bliss says, soon learns to be stoical, not exactly hardened, but at least resigned. Clients will hand over their horses to be cured of asthma, then return them to the very stable whose bedding causes the complaint; explain to them that their child washing down the pony in cold water out of doors on a frosty morning is what gives the poor creature its recurring graveyard cough and they’ll react with fury and refuse to pay your bills. Mr Bliss, even as the girls fell into his office, was writing a polite letter to a client who had owned a horse for years and yet needed to be told the difference between hay and straw. The marvel, said Mr Bliss to me, on one of his visits, is not that so many horses are ill, but that so many survive, and flourish, and even appear to like the human race. Mr Bliss’s gentle enthusiasms and mild reproaches are endearing — persuasive even to one such as myself – prickly and unlikely ever to go horseriding let alone stroke one of the creatures on its nose, feverish or not.
‘Bees,’ said Carmen, by way of explanation, picking herself up, brushing herself down, helping Laura up. Mr Bliss went to the door, opened it, looked out.
‘I see no bees,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they’ve gone on up to the stables. I hope so. A bee sting’s good for a horse, especially one with rheumatism. And for mud fever the very best thing.’
‘What about if you’re pregnant?’ asked Laura, rubbing the backs of her legs.
‘I only know about horses,’ said Mr Bliss, ‘but I would have thought very good: a positive life charge for a mare in foal.’
‘If she is pregnant she may not be staying that way,’ said Carmen plaintively, but Mr Bliss, offering Laura a large tube of his special equine antihistamine ointment (organic, compounded of dock and comfrey), said, ‘What’s that strange smell? Is it ozone?’ So Carmen added, ‘but I suppose she’ll have to, now.’
‘I don’t much like being compared to a mare in foal,’ said Laura and Mr Bliss apologised, observing that the comparison was not indeed apt, since a mare normally only got into foal after a great deal of deliberation by those in charge of her. He’d left the door open a crack – Mr Bliss seldom shut a door properly, or put a lid back on, or fully closed a drawer, or so Mrs Baker would complain – and a puff of wind scattered his papers, which were many, tattered, and yellowed, throughout the Portakabin. There were bills and summonses amongst them, of course there were. Carmen asked if perhaps Mr Bliss needed an assistant – she would quickly read up on horses – but he said alas, he did not. If they needed jobs, perhaps they should try Little Walsingham. He had an old friend there, a Mr Sallace, who was always looking for suitable people to work for him, and seldom finding them. Just tell Mr Sallace Mr Bliss had sent them. With some difficulty Mr Bliss located his address book.
‘You’re sure you don’t want an assistant?’ asked Carmen.
‘Quite sure,’ said Mr Bliss. ‘Times are hard and getting harder for the equine naturopath. The kind of people who buy horses these days are computer whiz kids and teenage tycoons. They live in penthouses. They put their faith in antibiotics. They believe that their horse ceases to exist when it is not in front of their eyes, and it seldom is after the first rapture of ownership has worn off. But one should not be too surprised: lovers are often like that with one another.’
Little Walsingham! Laura and Carmen were not filled with enthusiasm. They’d been once on a school trip, and found it embarrassing, because Mrs Baker had declaimed from the front of the coach:
‘As ye came from the holy land
Of Walsingham,
Met ye not with my true love
By the way as ye came?’
and so on as Carmen tried to smoke a cigarette without being seen, Laura slept and Annie practised a finger dressing for her First Aid exam and got the girls behind tangled in bandage.
‘I don’t know what it is about you girls,’ said Mrs Baker as they yawned over the window traceries of the fourteenth-century church at Great Walsingham, failed to see a group of barefoot pilgrims on the road to Little Walsingham, and even one nutter shuffling forward on his knees, or marvel at the proliferation of alleged Places of the Shrine. ‘Why do you hate your past?’ In the reign of Edward the Confessor, Richeldis, wife of the local Lord of the Manor, dreamt the same dream two nights running — that the Virgin Mary appeared and asked her to build in Walsingham a replica of the House of the Annunciation in Jerusalem, and assured her that a spring of fresh water would appear to mark the spot. The morning after the second dream, the spring began to bubble, the Shrine was built accordingly; Walsingham became known as England’s Nazareth, and so great were the number who came to it from all over the world that the Milky Way in the night sky was for a time known as the Walsingham Way. On and on Mrs Baker droned. Henry VIII tore down the churches and publicly burned the Shrine at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was no bad thing, Mrs Baker declared, that the power of the land be henceforth invested in the secular authority, not the religious, but the event upset local opinion very much. Well, it was bound to, as the whole area’s income crumbled along with Walsingham’s spires and grottoes, the pilgrims failed to turn up, the inns and the hostels closed down, and the prelates, the merchants, the palmers, the pardoners, the necromancers, the sellers of relics and souvenirs all just went home. Laura, Carmen and Annie stared that day, at Mrs Baker’s behest, at the quaint medieval buildings, the dreary Victorian churches of Walsingham, and had the sense of a grey place once important now drained of life; it felt, Carmen complained at the time,
like being in an old people’s home. The whole class felt it: they were irritable, noisy and uncooperative. This wasn’t their idea of a day out.
‘Sinne is where our ladie sate
Heaven turned is to hell,
Satan sits where our Lord did swaye,
Walsingham oh farewell!’
said Mrs Baker over fish and chips at the seafront at Wells-on-Sea, but the girls were more interested in whether or not she had seen Carmen smoking. Mrs Baker gave up trying to educate them and stared moodily out over the flat estuary sea. She wondered why she bothered. The skuas were dive-bombing the terns. The tide was out, way, way out, as if even the water had lost interest in so dispiriting a land. Carmen disappeared, and the whole coachload of bad-tempered girls had to wait until she was found before they could set off home. She’d slipped into the seafront palmist’s booth. He told her she’d be a teacher and live in a bungalow, so not only did she delay the whole party, but she sulked all the way home. It was not a day that anyone cared to remember.
But on the day of their return to Walsingham, in search of Mr Sallace and a possible job, the mood of the place had changed. It was late August after all, and late August is a time for political coups, for race riots and murders, for prisoners to sit on prison roofs, for troops to move, for tanks to roll, for farmers to burn stubble (if there is nothing more interesting about to raze); the ocean presses closely in on the land, to see what’s going on, and slops up and over. It’s a season for thunderstorms and lightning strikes; the nose picks up the scent of smoke and cordite everywhere; those who can retreat to country cottages to see the dangerous season out: and the very good prepare to go on pilgrimage to Walsingham to pray for themselves and the rest of the world.
Today the pilgrims were out in number. Queues formed outside the little Anglican Shrine; the services within were non-stop. The incense censers swung all day; candles glittered and guttered; the air was heavy with smoke and scent and sweat, and loud with blessings and Amens. At the new Catholic church just outside the town, altogether airier and more hygienic, the conviction was that here, not there, was the true site of the Holy Shrine. The market square was thronged and noisy. The ritual Protestors shouted on their street corner, declaring the presence of idolatry, demanding that God strike everyone dead but them; street choirs of hymn singers outsung each other; the religious relic shops were doing good business, selling crosses and Madonnas, I ♥ Jesus T-shirts, Walsingham mugs and egg cups, holy pictures, rosaries, Greenpeace posters, Save the Rainforest balloons, special editions of large print Bibles, and so forth, as fast as they could take the money. Good times!
Carmen and Laura found Mr Sallace’s workshop in a dark and smelly medieval back alley, cobbled and puddly with God knew what but it stank, led to by a sign saying ‘Glossop’s Pious Artefacts’ and a pointing arrow. The door was small and wooden, as crooked as the wall it was set in. Carmen knocked and an old man flung it open. He was not pleased to see them. He was small, wizened, bad-tempered and as warped in his ancient body as his door was in old oak, but behind him opened out a surprisingly large, light and airy studio; there was a smell of paint and wet plaster in the air, and a sense of people properly and industriously employed, and Carmen and Laura longed to join them.
But Mr Sallace was not impressed by Mr Bliss’s name, and said there were no jobs going, would they go away. Carmen had to put her foot in the door again, and say they’d hitched all the way to get there, to which Mr Sallace merely replied he didn’t approve of hitching.
‘All the way from Fenedge,’ said Laura. ‘It took for ever.’
At the mention of Fenedge Mr Sallace cheered up and asked if they knew Mavis Horner the Healer. He’d been to her once for arthritis and hadn’t had a moment’s trouble since. He peered up at them as he spoke, so twisted was his backbone, and on hearing that they were friends of Mavis’s daughter let them in, and said he might be able to help after all. He took them over to the trestle tables of the Madonna & Saint section of the studio, and there for the first time Carmen set eyes on Ronnie Cartwright, who, up to his tanned and muscly elbow in plaster, was easing a woman-size Madonna out of her cast. He was twenty-one and had brown curly hair, a nice smile and a straight nose.
‘Love at first sight,’ said Carmen to Laura later.
Ronnie took Carmen’s hand in his while he showed her how to pop blue Madonna eyes into their sockets. He told her he was only doing this kind of work temporarily, that he had ambition, that he was going into marketing, that he meant to be well up the promotion ladder of Safeway in another five years, that Glossop’s Pious Artefacts was a lost cause: same blue mantle, same sweet smile, same blue eyes turned to the same heaven. If you didn’t diversify, you withered away, though it took five hundred years to do it. If you asked Ronnie, the five hundred years were just about up.
‘I thrilled to his touch,’ said Carmen on the way home. ‘I really did. We are meant for each other.’
‘Do shut up,’ said Laura. They’d failed to get that job either in the end. Carmen, on trial, had painted the Madonna’s eyes mantle-blue, and her mantle eye-blue, and Laura, though painting the toenails the proper pink, had revealed to Mr Sallace that she was pregnant. She was far too young to have a baby, Mr Sallace said, and there was lead in the paint, and he showed them the door. Carmen asked if they could get paid for the two hours’ work they’d done for free and he pushed them both out and slammed the door between her and Ronnie. And she hadn’t got his number or he hers. She was too proud to go back in and ask for it. They hung around a little to see if Ronnie would come out of his own accord, but he didn’t.
On the way home who offered them a lift but Driver? He stopped quite a little way ahead and Carmen had to run fifty yards up to the car window before she realised who it was.
‘Lift?’ he asked.
‘No thanks,’ said Carmen.
‘Have it your own way,’ said Driver, cheerfully enough. ‘Suffer if you want. You’ll soon come round to my way of thinking. What were you doing at Walsingham? Job-hunting?’
‘Yes,’ said Carmen. ‘But no luck.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there wouldn’t be, would there? The airline job’s still open. You’d look great in the uniform.’
‘No,’ said Carmen.
‘You’d meet some great guys,’ he said. ‘Your sort of people. Not your average supermarket executive type. Have some ambition, Carmen.’
‘You don’t let up, do you?’ she said.
‘No, I don’t,’ he said.
‘True love conquers all,’ she said.
‘Ho, ho, ho,’ he said.
Laura cried out and Carmen looked back to see her flat on her face in the road. A rabbit had run out of the hedge in front of her and tripped her up. Carmen ran back to help her and broke her heel.
‘The trouble with bad luck,’ said Driver, just before he roared off, ‘is that it’s catching as measles, and your friends are the first to go down with it.’
‘Supposing I lose the baby?’ asked Laura.
‘You won’t,’ said Carmen. ‘No such luck.’
A kind of minor blight fell over the area. A thunderstorm unleashed itself over the land, flattening such crops as had not yet been harvested; sudden run-off from the roads caused a sewage flowback into a stream leading to the River Wissey, a stretch of which lost enough oxygen to kill a few hundred fish: rain came through the ceiling of Mr Bliss’s Portakabin and spoiled his whole drum of girth gall powder, a mixture of kaolin (cheap) and cobwebs collected by local children (extremely expensive): up at Bellamy House a gutter leaked and an entire panelled ceiling, painted before it had properly dried out, collapsed with a crash. Annie, who was just passing, got plaster in her hair and there were five days to go before hair-washing night. I was on my way from the Handicapped Centre to Alison’s car, being half lifted, half carried by total strangers, when the famous downpour started: I’m sure it cured my helpers of good deeds for life. But not of course Alison, whose ancient face was lifted to
the watery clouds, her thin hair plastered across wrinkled cheeks, her scalp pink and sore-looking where it showed.
‘Do your damnedest, God! We won’t give in!’
Runs of bad luck
Some people’s bad luck is other people’s good. Your bad luck when your windscreen shatters: but it’s excellent luck for the garage. I spent three hours in a garage yesterday while mechanics replaced Alison’s windscreen. I can’t just walk away, you see.
Good luck for Audrey that the ‘For Sale’ sign she has put up outside the house attracts a buyer the very same day. Bad luck for Laura, whose home it is, who’s feeling low. The romance of pregnancy is not materialising, only the problems.
Does she love Woodie? How do you know you’re in love? Neither Carmen nor Annie is able to tell her, though Annie supposes it to be when it doesn’t even occur to you to ask the question.
Good luck that Woodie’s come home early from his course to take responsibility for the baby; bad luck that it means he won’t get his diploma.
Good and bad luck that Woodie wants to marry her. One evening, Laura faces Woodie and Audrey across the kitchen table. She hopes she can divide and somehow rule.
‘If you took the house off the market, Mum,’ says Laura, ‘you and I could live quietly here with the baby and bring it up together. I’d get a job. We’ll manage the mortgage somehow, and Woodie can visit.’
They just stare at her.
‘You do mean to help with the baby, Mum?’
‘I have to think of myself,’ says Audrey. She says it a lot these days. ‘It’s your baby, not mine.’
