by Weldon, Fay
And was that luck, or was that luck, that Laura’s baby Rachel was the most peaceable baby ever, and slept and smiled, and that Woodie, in spite or perhaps because of his youth, doted upon his small family, and that Audrey was in remission and could help Laura with Rachel, so Woodie could make garden sheds in the back garden, dovetailing joints and smoothing edges with such beautiful precision that everyone admired them, although each shed, being a work of art, would take so long to make that few could buy them if they were costed out right. And Laura insisted that Woodie cost them out right, including the cost of labour in the end price. Everyone knew you had to do that. But then one of Woodie’s many aunts died and left him just enough money to see them through the first year, if they were careful. Woodie’s mother was forty-four when he was born, his father sixty-three. Now they lived far away and scarcely impinged upon the young couple’s life: more like distant grandparents than parents, content with a photograph of the baby and a card at Christmas. Was that luck, or was that luck?
But Carmen said to Driver, ‘I don’t know so much. I think we just stopped being unlucky.’
Driver fizzled a bit.
‘Item. I’ve got rid of your parents. They were always going to be an embarrassment.’
‘I love my parents.’
‘Too late,’ said Driver. ‘Many’s the time you’ve wished them dead in your heart. I’m just sending them off on a world cruise, so be grateful to me. No such thing as a free lunch,’ and she was pressed up against an oak tree, pinned against it by his powerful shoulders, and her skirt was up around her waist; well, perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. Annie was convinced for a time that everything Carmen said about Driver was not a sexual fantasy but the opposite, an a-sexual fantasy, the truth being that Carmen was having it off with the chauffeur, who was pimping for his employer and cheating on him. But then Annie went through phases of believing the worst about everyone. Laura was never quite so sure. She was content to believe that Carmen just couldn’t tell dream from reality.
‘Item,’ said Driver, pausing. ‘All this,’ and he put the forest on pause as well, so Carmen could properly appreciate it, or that’s what it seemed he did. The moon had risen, somehow, somewhere, unnoticed, only to be stopped now in its course, so that the forest was motionless and all things natural lost their untidiness, their imperfections, and were sealed into neat and tidy pattern: leaves and branches in a complex black tracery, unshifting, interlaced with silver, bathed in the still moon’s melancholy light. The moon is always melancholy, if you ask me. Very few understand its motions, or care to, other than astronomers or astrologers, and that’s depressing to begin with. Is that a waning or a waxing moon up there? Why is it shining in the dawn sky today, when yesterday you could see it at midnight? Does it matter? Do you care? No. The fact is the moon is all over the place and few of us like it or can be bothered with it. The sun’s uses are at least observable, and what is more you can’t look it in the eye without going blind, so it has your respect, but the moon is both random and useless, like a fragment of torn cartilage in a knee joint, causing trouble. It drags large masses of water after it, or so they say, but who believes that in their hearts? All the moon is fit for is to remind us of our place in the universe; it doesn’t please me to remember how insignificant and short-lived I am. No way. If the moon decides in its whimsical manner to shine in on Landsfield Crescent, I draw the curtains at once. On one occasion Alison got me to the Handicapped Centre so early, in her anxiety to avoid the non-existent traffic jam of the Fenedge rush hour, that the moon was still vast in the dawn sky, and I had to sit in its light, since the County provides no curtains, and, thinking of Carmen, became full of gloomy prognostications as to what would happen to her and hers if she chose to offend Driver.
‘Item,’ said Driver, ‘not only have I already given you many gifts but there are more yet to come. For example,’ he said, ‘if I can stop the moon, I can make a moment last for all eternity. Indeed, I can fast-forward and rewind the world, not just put it on pause. Think what that does for sex.’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Carmen. ‘That is disgusting,’ for Driver either was or wasn’t lunging into her as she leaned against a tree trunk, or else she was sitting ladylike at an ethereal table in a moonlit forest – who could tell? – or was simply sitting in the back of a car, a good girl being driven to a date with a rich man, upset because her parents were leaving home, and was dozing off. Whatever had happened, time had for an instant stopped.
But that’s how it is with demon lovers. It’s all speculation in retrospect and certain uncertainty thereafter – the blood test for the baby never proves anything definite, or, though you use the very latest tissue-typing techniques to prove or disprove paternity, you can be sure the results will get mixed up in the lab, or even just lost – yet they’ll give you a moment of orgasm so piercing it echoes for ever throughout your life. But Carmen had said the wrong thing: denied something she shouldn’t have – the moon recommenced its course through the sky, and the dung beetles busied themselves in the rot, the debris and the detritus of the forest, scuttling here, scuttling there, and now Carmen could see only too well that Driver had stopped in a layby used as a public convenience by the many admirers of the old forest. My grandmother used to tell me that in the eyes of the Maker people are eternity’s dung beetles: their function to scavenge and salvage what is wholesome out of all things disgusting and nasty, but I don’t suppose she knew any better than the next person.
‘Do as I say!’ snapped Driver in a flurry of sparks, as metal feather scraped on metal feather.
‘I’ll do as I please,’ she said.
Be all that as it may, Carmen was not in a good mood when Driver delivered her to the Trocadero, one of the new smartish restaurants recently put up on the outskirts of town, in classic supermarket style – that is to say, having a central roof peak (thatched in this case) and two long low wings on either side, easy to erect, quicker to dismantle. Inside it was all pinks and crimsons, gold mirrors and little shaded lights, to create an effect that was both hygienic and sexy, smart yet intime. It was a favourite place for a rendezvous, for that special occasion, for your son’s twenty-first, for a Golden Wedding, or just to say thank you, according to the ads in the local paper. Wives would have had their hair done for the occasion.
‘Going somewhere special?’ the hair stylist would ask.
‘The Trocadero,’ the client would boast, and out would come the rollers, the tongs, the backcomb. Everyone knew the Trocadero night-to-remember style. How quickly new customs arise! Carmen just thought Sir Bernard was a cheapskate – though later, looking back in a more kindly fashion, she understood he just wanted to be private, not recognised by all and sundry. He stood up as she followed the waiter in. He was not quite as old as she remembered, but almost.
He took her hand in his. It trembled. He drew her to him for an instant. She rolled her eyes to heaven, not caring whether or not he saw. He let her go. They sat down. The napkins were paper, not even linen.
‘Carmen,’ said Sir Bernard, and he smiled his crinkly, bright-eyed, famous smile. ‘Such a lovely name! I’ve become something of an opera-goer myself. Do you love opera?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I was called after Carmen Jones. That’s a musical.’ She had not yet started on her Music & Art Through History, courtesy of Bellamy Airspace.
Carmen bit the heads off langoustines and spat them out. She had no intention of being nice to Sir Bernard. She just wanted dinner. She didn’t see why she couldn’t have the one without the other. She was wearing a T-shirt along with her leather skirt. Unfortunately her breasts were at their most tip-tilted, her nipples at their most prominent, and her hair at its shiniest, and the kind of reddish gold it had recently settled down to being. Her perfect white teeth made a neat clean job of the little cooked creatures’ heads and her lips made a delicate moue as she spat them on to the plate, and Sir Bernard watched entranced and not disgusted. ‘So natural,’ he said. ‘Like the
girls I remember when I was a boy. Unspoiled, untamed.’
He talked of love and she talked of Ronnie Cartwright, from which I deduce that her relationship with Driver was indeed purely spiritual, for what was her love for Ronnie but love in the head? Once upon a time his hand had touched her hand, and although that gave great promise of what T. S. Eliot used to call pneumatic bliss (or so my Aunt Nettie told me), that was all.
Sir Bernard talked of concerts and operas, of plays and of having film stars and Nobel Prize winners to dinner, and Carmen said she liked watching television.
He talked of security, of property in her name, of fast cars and furs (furs? He was so old-fashioned!), of her family looked after, of the end of anxiety. She said she wanted to die at thirty. What point in being alive was there after that?
He talked of palazzios and yachts, of holidays abroad, of jet-setting and servants, and she just said, yes, and think of waking up next to you. She was rude, though he still, just about, thought it was charming.
He began to talk about her job at Bellamy Airspace and how her prospects there might improve if she and he were close, and get rather disastrously bad if they were not, and Carmen’s eyes narrowed.
He said now I have tested you and I understand why you are different from other girls. You cannot be bought. You hold yourself dear. You are worth the conquest, worth the prize. Will you marry me, my dear?
At which she rose to her feet and spoke in a very loud voice, so all the women with that day’s hairdos turned their stiff necks, creasing the make-up they had so carefully worked down to neckline level, and their menfolk risked the discomfort of their unaccustomed collar and tie and did the same.
‘Jesus,’ said Carmen, ‘that’s enough of that. My body’s one thing, my life is another. I’m going home.’
‘But what about your flambéed apricots?’ pleaded Sir Bernard, his hand on his love object’s arm, but she shook him off, although the waiter’s face, seen through the brandy flames, which flared and threatened to engulf the Trocadero, looked remarkably like Driver’s own.
‘Feed them to the dogs,’ said Carmen, ‘and marry one of them.’
And she walked out through the smoke and flame. The entire restaurant was evacuated within minutes; refurbishing work took four months, but Carmen had made her point.
The very next day Tim was summoned back to New Zealand by his mother to cope with an outbreak of liver fluke in his twenty thousand-strong flock; and though he and Annie exchanged addresses and promised to write and phone she knew it was too soon for him to leave – one week more and he’d have asked her to go with him. As it was, she was afraid he would forget her. They hadn’t been to bed together. He had wanted to. She had demurred, thinking there was lots of time. And New Zealand was so far away – as far as you can go.
Audrey had a relapse and had to go back to hospital, Baby Rachel got a sticky eye infection and Laura found she was pregnant again and had German measles, and went right off Woodie. And they’d forgotten that the aunt’s legacy would be taxed.
As for Carmen, she got a redundancy notice through the post within the week, and had spent one week under the length of time in continual employment which would have earned her cash compensation. That was the day after she’d waved Raelene and Andy off on their Round-the-World-Cruise. They’d only put the house on the market to keep the bank quiet – but they’d left unpaid debts behind them to the value of the property – in the confident expectation that it wouldn’t sell. But a buyer turned up at once, and the bank threatened to foreclose if the sale didn’t go through.
‘Bad luck,’ said Mr Prior to Carmen. He remembered her as stunning, but this girl was nothing special. He offered her a job at Peckhams Poultry, and she took it. He was rather sorry about it, all the same.
9
From my bed in the Clinic I can see out over the lakes to the office spires of Chicago. I am on the twelfth floor; there are thirty above me, eleven below. I try to find some significance in this, but fail. I like it here. Years pass. I know the pattern the sky makes: I watch the mists gathering and dispersing on the lake: the changing shades of its green fringes as the sunlight comes and goes: the flux and flow of traffic along the lake road. I hear only the muted average of city noise: all excesses – shrieks, wails, the whispers of plots, the firing of guns, the popping of champagne corks, the squeals of brakes, the revving of engines – are through the double glazing, calmingly evened out to a determined, competent purr. I’d rather be here than in Fenedge, any day, don’t think I wouldn’t. We all have our ways of getting out.
Surgeons are transplanting neural fibre from some wretched frog into my backbone in the hope of achieving some degree of nerve regeneration. These days they don’t have enough to do. Physicians are taking over; invasive surgery is unpopular. Taking heart from my reports of tingling in my toes, these surgeons will not now give up on my legs, though I’m sure I did long ago. They treat me for free – or, look at it another way, though I try not to, being grateful, I allow them to experiment on me free of charge. It would be very interesting if the experiment succeeded, I can see that: it would have all kinds of significance, bring hope to the hopeless, all that. We make jokes about whether I’ll start leaping around the room, froglike, or whether I can see undue signs of swallowing in my throat. They are easily entertained, these doctors: the feeblest of jokes and their serious faces light up as if some great gift had been bestowed on them. Then the door closes behind them, and I find myself sad, watching the traffic patterns lace below, wondering what the monstrous sorrow can be: the one which lies at the roots of the universe, so that we’re left with such poignant echoes of it in our lives, and have to work it through, so patiently and painfully, aeon after aeon; child grieving for parent, husband for wife, each afflicted with grief for the other, not just the self, which, God knows, is bad enough. What happened once to spoil everything so? I daresay the story of Adam and Eve is not as laughable as most of us sophisticates suppose; perhaps it has the seeds of truth in it. Perhaps once there was indeed a Garden of Eden, and we were turned away from it, and left with what is bound to seem imperfect and spoiled, a disappointment, since we have in our bones, our genes, that glimmer of perfection. But I think it must be the sin and sorrow of gods, not of humankind, which afflicts us, since we find even its mere shadow so intolerable. We have been wrongly accused. Humankind were just dragged in tow like servants, lowly subjects of whichever God turned up, obliged to share his troubles, sop them up. I don’t think the belief in one God, not many, was the philosophical advance we were told it was in school: I think it’s more tolerable to believe we are suffering whimsically, because once Jupiter or his like erred.
When I got back to Fenedge, having failed to grow sufficient neural fibre to carry commands from my brain to my knees, though I could now tense and relax the muscles in my thighs and repair just a soupçon of the wastage of years, I found little had changed. It was as if the place and the people had simply marked time, waiting for my return, for my ongoing observation of them, before doing anything to alter their lives.
Laura had three children, not one, but she hadn’t had to do anything to achieve that: just lie there with her legs open. It is a great pity that women, being as it were opted into pregnancy by instinct, then have actively to opt out if they don’t want to mother a child. It requires great nerve, foresight and endurance so to do – more than Laura possessed. Three babies within four years! But at least she’d learned to drive. In my absence Alison had her driving licence removed: she had put her foot on the accelerator, not the brake once too often, and gone through the window of the public library. She was appealing against the decision, however; she was claiming ageism: others who were worse drivers even than her, she maintained, managed to retain their licences in similar situations. The matter was going to the High Court. Because of her age and status she was entitled to Legal Aid.
So Laura, in the meantime, took on the task of escorting me daily to the Handicapped Centre. Driving th
e new baby around in the car was one of the few ways, it seemed, of putting the child to sleep, and since Laura could claim a transport allowance, petrol money, for rendering me assistance on the way in to Fenedge and the shops, such as they were, she was happy to do so. So once again I found myself sitting at my window in the Centre, far too many days a week, watching life go by, or not go by. But at least a new batch of nature books had been donated, I assumed from the same source as before.
‘So, what’s been happening?’ I asked Laura, shortly after my return.
‘Nothing much,’ she replied. Rachel and Caroline flanked the carry cot in the back. They of course had to come too. Our journeys were noisy and sticky and frayed my nerves. Caroline, from the back seat, liked to tangle her fingers in my hair. Laura was looking pretty enough, but stolid, the way girls are when life closes in on them too soon, and she had put on weight. She favoured cotton dresses as being the easier to wash, and woolly cardigans for warmth, and flat shoes for sense.
Woodie had speeded up with the garden sheds, she said, and there was now just enough money to get by on, so she mustn’t complain. Audrey had had six operations, but was now in remission, so they had to be grateful. Laura hadn’t heard from her father, but so far as she knew he was still with Poppy; that was something. I thought Laura was rather overdoing her Polyanna act and said so. She said somebody round here had to stay cheerful. I remarked that the car was rather full of fumes and could this be good for the children? and Laura said Woodie kept soldering the exhaust system back on to the car but it kept shaking loose. But wasn’t she lucky to have such a handyman for a husband?
‘Oh yes!’ I said.
Annie was still working up at Bellamy House. She had been promoted to Floor Chambermaid and was on an incentive bonus. She had had a desultory boyfriend or so who always broke with her, or she with them; she still corresponded with Tim, the sheep farmer from New Zealand, and this Laura felt spoiled her chances with other boys, or theirs with her. But Carmen was doing really well at Peckhams Poultry: she had been promoted out of the production line and was now a delivery manageress and a union rep.
