by Weldon, Fay
‘There’s a lovely piece of fish for tea,’ she said. ‘Grilled with a squeeze of lemon. Only a hundred and sixty calories for six ounces. In the old days,’ Raelene said, ‘I thought your insides were just a kind of factory: it took in what it needed and chucked the rest away. But apparently the body doesn’t know it’s a factory. It takes what it gets and gobbles the lot, poisons and all. You have to be so careful what you eat, Carmen.’
But Andy said (he did sometimes resist a little), ‘If your dinner’s got your number on it it’s got your number on it, that’s your old dad’s theory, Carmen. My, we are looking remarkable today!’
Carmen thought she might one day have to have cosmetic surgery to get the size of her breasts reduced. Clothes did not hang as she liked them to. It was difficult to get going what they called in her Dress Management course ‘a line’. Her figure seemed to be variable, as that of other girls was not. She had plucked up her courage and been to Dr Grafton about the state of her nipples, which kept changing shape, colour and size. Could this be skin cancer? He had been scrupulously correct in his examination, but said they looked perfectly in order to him, quite within the ordinary run of nipple, though Carmen might need to use a suction cap when she had a baby, to give the baby something to get hold of. It had, as it happened, turned out to be a day when the aureole was roseate, very pale pink, and the nipple itself hardly prominent at all. She quite liked them like that.
‘I know they’re in order,’ she said to Dr Grafton, ‘it’s just that they keep changing. They’ll be quite different tomorrow. And yesterday they were brown and tough.’
Dr Grafton thought she might be in the grip of a psychosis – to be obsessed by the state of the nipple surely indicated some overwhelming sexual anxiety? – and offered Carmen counselling, but she declined. She said yes, she did have a boyfriend, his name was Ronnie Cartwright, just to get out of the surgery. But it was a relief to know she didn’t have skin cancer. She hoped he was right: by all accounts Dr Grafton was so often wrong. Perhaps the condition was hereditary? She asked Raelene, who said Carmen was obviously still growing, and she, Raelene, had read an interesting fact in The Independent. (Stephen had started taking The Sun to school every morning to his science class, leaving nothing to read over tea, so Raelene had switched to The Independent.) Apparently, Raelene said, Marks & Spencer affirmed that the female shape altered to suit fashion. Bodies, in fact, grew into what society desired them to be.
‘So?’ asked Carmen.
‘So well I don’t know,’ said Raelene. ‘But life is full of surprises.’
And thus it turned out to be, the day Raelene took Carmen’s coat and hung it up for her – something that had hardly happened since the day Carmen was born, presaging change and indicating guilt.
‘Your dad and I have something to tell you, sweetheart,’ said Raelene as Carmen toyed with her hundred and sixty calories of pure protein. ‘We’re going on a world cruise. We may be gone for quite some time. But if you don’t see the world now, when will you? The things you regret are the things you don’t do, not the things you do do. Right?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Carmen, doubtfully. It’s true to say that no one likes their parents taking off across the world, no matter what they think of those parents. ‘What about Stephen? He’s still at school. Isn’t he too young to leave?’
‘He’s off to Dounreay,’ said Andy. ‘Am I proud of that boy!’ Stephen looked up from a book called The Metaphysics of the Quark and said, ‘Day release from Cambridge next year. Work experience this. Forget fission, this is fusion,’ and went back to his book. ‘So now Stephen’s sorted,’ said Raelene, ‘and finally got his head screwed on the right way, and you’re in full-time work, your dad and I are free. And your Auntie Edna will keep an eye on the pair of you. We’ve put the house up for sale to keep the bank happy. All you have to do is show people round and put them off.’ Carmen thought for a little, then she said, ‘But you haven’t got the money for a cruise.’
‘Oh yes we have,’ said Raelene. ‘Grandma turned out to have quite a bit in her will. What a surprise! Just enough to blow on a really nice year or so in the sun.’
‘I see,’ said Carmen.
‘So that’s settled,’ said Raelene in her new bright manner. ‘I don’t know about not eating pork. Sometimes I really fancy a bacon sandwich.’
Andy said, ‘Speaking for myself, doll, bacon’s an integral part of my life.’ He turned the pages of a brochure. ‘Where’s the nearest port to the Silk Route? Or is that inland?’
Carmen found herself forgotten. She studied her nails. Yesterday they had been oval; today they seemed almond shape. She had gone from a D cup to a B overnight though, which was a relief. Her parents had stopped noticing. Anyone can get used to anything.
The phone rang. Stephen answered it. It was someone called Bernard for Carmen. Carmen took the phone saying she didn’t know anyone called Bernard, and then discovered it was Sir Bernard Bellamy. He wanted her to dine with him that very night. Carmen said she couldn’t, she’d already eaten, but then felt suddenly very hungry – what’s a hundred and sixty calories to a growing, changing girl? – and said okay. He said he’d send his chauffeur.
‘Who was that?’ asked Raelene.
‘Nobody,’ said Carmen shortly. Her breasts felt heavier by the moment. She felt she could never trust anyone again. The world changed too suddenly for her liking. She had survived her childhood by feeling superior to her parents, managed to adjust as they began to occupy the moral high ground: now they were backing out altogether: snatching an already rippling carpet from underneath her feet. She felt like crying.
Andy said, ‘Now don’t you throw yourself away, Car. Looking the way you do these days, you could catch some rich Arab.’
Raelene said, ‘Our Car will marry for love, not money. She’s just waiting for Mr Right to come along.’
Carmen said, for what she feared would be the last time, ‘If you wanted to call me Car, why did you name me Carmen?’
She went to her room and fell asleep, and woke only when Andy banged upon her door and called, ‘Car, it’s your date. Funny kind of minicab.’
And I watched from my window as Carmen came down the path between the rugosas, the pink and the crimson. I noticed people’s legs, particularly, because of the state of my own. Hers were perfect today, lean, long, serviceable. She wore a leather miniskirt at the top of them, covering a tight little bum, just about. My Aunt Michelle called it ‘bum’. I’m sorry. It used to upset my mother if I called it that. ‘What do I call it then?’ I asked once. I knew she didn’t like ‘bottom’, thinking it both imprecise and mealy-mouthed. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said.
Driver got out of the BMW and opened the door for Carmen and Andy said from the step, ‘Evening out with the company chauffeur, I see,’ to which Carmen replied, ‘That’s right, Dad. See you later.’
‘Mind you do,’ said Andy, ‘and not too late at that.’
‘If I’m not old enough to look after myself,’ said Carmen bitterly, ‘why are you two going off round the world?’
She couldn’t get over it. Abandoned! She snivelled in the back of the car and took no notice of the landscape, though it was a particularly beautiful evening, and even the straight green and brown lines of the beet fields seemed luminous as the low sun struck through them. The sun was sinking red and round, behind stark lightning-struck trees, as if in a rather bad painting.
‘Wonderful evening,’ said Driver from the front. ‘Aren’t you thrilled? A date with Sir Bernard. Shouldn’t you have dolled yourself up a bit?’
‘He can take me as he finds me,’ said Carmen. ‘And this is my best skirt.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Driver. ‘I thought perhaps you and I should have a little talk,’ and he drove off the road, bump, bump, bump, into a patch of the old woods, and parked the car beneath a particularly gracious oak tree. Though all this part may have been a dream. A flock of birds, those humble sparrows which are so much eve
rywhere that no one watches out for them, rose at once from the branches and left them in peace. A little table stood beneath the tree, spread with a red check tablecloth. Two chairs faced each other. And there they sat, Driver and she. She had a glass of wine in her hand.
‘Now I’ve given you a little on account,’ said Driver to Carmen then, ‘it’s time you did one or two things for me.’
‘What have you given me on account?’
‘Item, beauty in the eye of the beholder,’ said Driver.
‘I don’t think much of your idea of that,’ she said. ‘It keeps changing.’
‘So does the beholder,’ said Driver. ‘I could give you Beauty itself if you’re not satisfied.’
‘So men would look after me in the street?’ she sneered. ‘They do that already.’
‘That’s just sexiness,’ he said, ‘with a dollop of prettiness. Any young girl has that. As it is, it’s all worry and anxiety: how do you not get pregnant, how do you best use face shaper, did you remember to shave your legs? Are the tops of your arms over-fleshy? It’s too much like hard work getting the right look for the right man at the right moment. But Beauty, the Real Thing, you don’t have to do anything about. You just carry it round inside you: it shines out from the middle, nothing to do with you. Protects and perfects as it works. No one worries about hairy legs, and they won’t be hairy anyway: your body respects the image you and others have of it. Men try to get to the heart of it through you. They have to possess it, they need to own it. It’s like gold: it causes fever.’
‘I don’t want it,’ said Carmen.
‘Don’t try my patience,’ he said. He had high cheek bones. He’d taken off his chauffeur’s cap. His hair was glossy. He stared beyond her as he spoke. She found she was glad she didn’t want him to look at her. The shoulders of his uniform were square and the fabric was figured with something that had the texture of feather but glinted with metal, as if steel wings were folded beneath. She thought perhaps she had fallen asleep in the back of the car: was she not on her way to a date with Sir Bernard Bellamy, which in itself was dreamlike enough? Dreams within dreams within dreams! Where could you stop? She drank some more wine, and she could feel it run down her throat: that was real enough, essential fuel for the fluttering there inside. She wondered exactly where amongst all that palpated flesh her soul could be: and what was the soul? Was it the organising principle that kept the parts working, or just the difference between life and death? And why did Driver want it, anyway? And would it matter if he had it? Perhaps it affected the cosmos and not her, in which case why bother?
I am putting thoughts into Carmen’s mind. All she told Laura, who told me, was that when she took the second sip of wine, she was suddenly conscious of her insides working; she could see herself from the inside out, a collection of organs, throbbing in a not very pleasant but clearly interrelated way, wrapped in skin; she could feel everything her body was doing, from the blood running through her veins into the tips of her toes, to the hairs growing out of her scalp: there was no peace. None of it ever stopped.
Nor would Driver. ‘Beauty keeps you young,’ he said. ‘Next best thing to immortality. The body ages around it, of course, but the thing itself is like a jewel; indestructible. If you have beauty you get to be loved but don’t have to do any loving in return. But the real point about beauty is that it gives you power. Beauty is all the power that women ever have. And power is what women want.’
‘Mrs Baker wouldn’t like to hear you say a thing like that,’ said Carmen. ‘Mrs Baker says you can get where you want, male or female, if you really want it. It’s knowing what you want is the problem.’
Driver laughed in a disagreeable way. Carmen felt he didn’t appreciate Mrs Baker as she did.
‘Without beauty,’ he said, ‘women only have the power men let them have.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Carmen. ‘I promise.’ For he was sparking and smoking a bit, like his own engine, overheated.
‘So what else have you done for me?’
‘Item,’ said Driver, in a lordly way, as if he had the whole world under his thumb. ‘Good luck all round, for you and your friends.’
Carmen pondered this. It was true that her own life was going well; that Laura had given birth to a baby girl with scarcely a spasm of pain (‘My,’ said Nurse Phaby, who had also brought Laura into the world, ‘you are a lucky girl! You certainly don’t take after your mother!’); and that Annie had had the most remarkable stroke of good fortune.
Annie had actually met the man of her dreams while laying a carpet on the attic stairs of Bellamy House. The top floor had finally been opened for guests, in response to popular demand; forget that the increase in the number of guests strained the hotel’s kitchens and leisure facilities to the very limit of their capacity, that the water supply was barely adequate to reach the remoter bedrooms, and the staff to guest ratio – what Mrs Haverill referred to as the SGR — moved from one to five to one to ten with no concomitant rise in wages. Annie now worked until seven at night, and did up to eight hours further a week on the Cooperative Task Force, or CTF, the function of which was to undertake odd jobs around the place, thus avoiding the necessity of Mrs Haverill taking on extra staff. Carpet-laying was this week’s task. It was Annie’s favourite. She loved the tough resilience of the carpet: the brightness of the nails, the sharp quick bang of hammer on head. She loved getting it right. Everyone else was hopeless at it. She had a mouthful of nails: she knelt on one stair, stretched up to the next, sat back on her heels to survey her work. Someone came up to stand behind her. She assumed it was Eddie, her current CTF colleague. She did not bother to look round.
‘Hand me the other box of tacks,’ she asked, and whoever it was did.
‘I’m going to run out of underfelt,’ she said. ‘There’s another roll in the cleaning cupboard next to the Mozart suite.’ It was fetched. ‘They’re so mean in this place,’ said Annie. ‘They won’t buy proper staircarpet underlay. I think the CTF is a con. Mrs Haverill goes on about us pulling together, but what she means is, we pull, Sir Bernard profits and she’s in love with Sir Bernard. They’re crazy to open up the attic rooms. There are bats up there, and bed bugs in the brass beds. Do you know about bed bugs?’ And she described the dreadful things: how they can wake after a hundred years, desiccated by the decades until they look no more than flakes of paper, to creep in the night towards some sudden new source of warmth and damp – that is to say, some sleeping human being, whose only crime is to be warm and damp. The little piece of paper, turning less paperlike every second, creeps towards its victim, and reaching him, her, jabs with its proboscis, injecting both anaesthetic and anti-coagulant so the flesh doesn’t hurt or bleed, and no alarm is raised; then peacefully it squats and sucks out human blood until it’s no longer papery but bloated, fat and pink. Then, satiated, it crawls away, or scuttles up the curtain, to hide beneath the window pole – oh, bed bugs are cunning! People who’re badly bitten sometimes have to be given blood transfusions. Pity the guests, said Annie, in the newly opened attic floor, of Bellamy House, once Sealord Mansion.
All this Annie spoke, and more. And then she looked up and who was standing staring at her but the man of her dreams, not Eddie, who was short and squat and the stuff of nightmares. (It seemed to be either Sir Bernard or Mrs Haverill’s quite deliberate policy to staff the hotel with the most presentable females available and the least presentable males. Or perhaps it just is, as research will tell us, that pretty women get employed before plain ones, and physical appearance is not so telling a qualification for employment in the male. Perhaps this accounts for the (to the rational) apparently irrational rejoicing of the world when a baby boy appears from out of the womb and not a baby girl: it just doesn’t matter what he looks like, how crooked his nose, how lumpy his figure, how crossed his eyes, how feeble his legs — he will get a job and find a spouse.) The man of Annie’s dreams, the tall dark stranger from overseas whom Count Capinski had once promised her
, was broad-shouldered, muscular and well fleshed. He had a square jaw, thick dark hair, bright blue eyes, the look of a man slow to anger, too courteous to complain overmuch; the kind of man, in fact, who illustrates the more romantic stories you still sometimes find in women’s magazines. What is more, he had an unmarried, questioning, questing glance. ‘Let me tell you about the sheep tick one day,’ he said. ‘Or the lifestyle of the liver fluke. Nothing in the world like the liver fluke.’
‘You’re not Eddie,’ was all Annie could say in her dismay, and she spat tacks from her lips as she spoke. He picked them up with strong working fingers, square-nailed. The nails were not manicured and polished as were those of most of the male guests at Bellamy House: they looked, as nails can, well scrubbed but still ingrained with this and that, in spite of all efforts.
‘No, I’m not Eddie,’ he said. ‘I’m a sheep fanner from New Zealand. I have a room up these stairs, and it has a brass bed, so it’s not so much of a buggaroo if I can’t get up them because you’re in the way.’
And he asked her to have a drink with him after supper; there was no one in this back of beyond to talk to, he said, no one to have a decent conversation with him since he’d left his sheep farm in the South Island two weeks back to inspect the roe deer of East Wretham Heath with a view to purchasing. You should never buy, he said, an animal you hadn’t set eyes upon, let alone a hundred of them, any more than you should marry a girl who hadn’t cooked you dinner. A girl who could lay carpet and talk about bed bugs wasn’t your usual run of Pom, said handsome Tim McLean, so would she do him the honour of having a drink? You bet she would! Little Annie Horner, blossoming into if not quite a beauty, at least something near it, at the sight of that jaw, those pillars of legs, the sound of the deep – if slightly nasal, it must be admitted – male voice, and all his attention focused on her. Was that luck, or was that luck, for Carmen’s friend Annie?
