by Weldon, Fay
‘Boyfriend?’ I asked, and Laura shook her head.
‘She’s too picky for her own good.’
Laura had this to say to Carmen:
That she’d got to be a bit peculiar: she went to church sometimes. That she didn’t care what she looked like any more: that she knew she, Laura, didn’t either but she had an excuse and that she, Laura, knew that I, Hattie Upton, pitied her but she, Laura, wasn’t to be pitied, honestly: she was happy with Woodie and there was a kind of richness in doing the right thing. (She didn’t say that she, Laura, thought I, Hattie Upton, husbandless, childless, sitting in a wheelchair day in, day out, had a nerve to pity her, Laura, who had a husband, children and the use of her legs, but I knew what she was thinking.) And she, Laura, didn’t believe in abortion and she’d hate Woodie to have a vasectomy. That Carmen was still a virgin and must be the only one of her age in all East Anglia. That perhaps Carmen had some kind of sexual hang-up.
That sometimes Carmen went with Annie to the disco but only because, Laura feared, Carmen was still hoping to run into the elusive Ronnie Cartwright.
(Carmen was living in a caravan on Mr Bliss’s Horse Farm. She had to walk five miles to work every morning and back again. In the height of the season, when Peckhams had their production line running twenty-four hours a day, she would do a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week, on basic hourly rates.)
That if you asked Carmen why she put up with it she said she was the only one on the staff who actually liked working at Peckhams, which was why she kept getting promotion.
That Carmen’s parents were still away: how they’d gone to New Zealand.
Strange, I said, how New Zealand keeps cropping up.
‘It’s the far ends of the earth,’ said Laura. ‘They say it’s like paradise. The Garden of Eden, still operating. If you want to get out of here, wherever here is, it’s the obvious place to go. As far as you can get.’
Sir Bernard? These days he lived in London: Mrs Haverill ran Bellamy House, and Sir Bernard seemed to have lost interest in the hotel. Some kind of planning decision had gone against him. He’d wanted to build a sea wall at Winterton including a marina, but they wouldn’t let him because of the wildlife. A kind of hiccough in his upward and onward career. He’d married Lady Rowena in the end. Boring, boring. Sometimes he came down to the Bellamy House Arts Festival – they’d tried doing opera in the grounds a la Glyndebourne, but it hadn’t taken off. Nothing happened and nothing took off round here. There was a kind of curse on the neighbourhood, said Laura sadly.
I asked about Driver. Laura said, ‘Don’t mention him.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because if you think of him he turns up,’ said Laura. ‘It’s happened twice to me. I spoke of him once and dreamt of him once and the next day he whizzed past me in the BMW. It was spooky.’
‘Did he stop?’
‘Of course he didn’t stop. What would he stop for? This is the place where nothing happens.’
I thought it was just as well I was back in the area. A period of rest can do no one any harm, but you don’t want events just to run out altogether.
A couple of weeks later Laura said to me, ‘I told you not to mention Driver, because he did turn up.’
Laura had been standing at the bus stop at the end of Landsfield Crescent with the three children. Rachel had just begun nursery school and Woodie had taken the car to go to an interview with a local cabinet maker who was advertising for a part-time assistant. Audrey was now on liquid foods, which needed to be supplemented by evening primrose oil – a substance not available on the National Health and expensive, so that the household outgoings were finally exceeding its income, no matter how long and hard Woodie worked. Regular employment was beginning to seem the only option open to Woodie – and everyone knew how once you took that path it ran straight, narrow and boringly through to old age, with never a penny to spare or hope of a breakthrough into the world of artist/craftsman. So Laura was feeling dejected enough as she stood and waited for a bus which never came, Rachel on one hand, Caroline on the other, and the baby in the pushchair. All girls. She’d have liked at least one boy. Woodie said why didn’t she try again, try for a boy. Was he insane? And the BMW glided to a stop beside her and Driver slithered out. The lines of the car were smooth and glossy; it glittered; it was amazingly clean. And Driver’s eyes were bright and blue.
‘If it isn’t Laura,’ he said. ‘Would you like a lift?’
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘The kids would only be sick in the back.’
‘True,’ he said, wincing.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the neighbours would have a fit. What would they say? Getting into a strange man’s car.’
She was flirting. She couldn’t help it. She was not as lost in domesticity as she thought.
‘Don’t be so boring,’ he said.
‘I am boring,’ said Laura. ‘This is Fenedge, remember.’
‘Well,’ said Driver, ‘don’t blame me. I tried to cheer things up and got snubbed for my pains.’
Driver was wearing jodhpurs and a blazer in navy blue with rather a lot of brass buttons all over: so he seemed to be in uniform. His shoulders were square. His hair was glossy and smooth and a little too oily for her taste. She couldn’t meet his eyes, and didn’t know whether to look above them or below them. She wished she weren’t wearing a shapeless cotton dress and a well-washed cardigan. She wished she hadn’t eaten so many biscuits with her tea for so long, but how else was she to keep herself cheerful?
‘A lovely young woman like you,’ said Driver. ‘You could have had anyone. Still could, without three children round your neck. Why don’t you leave them behind? Forget them, slip into my car and begin a new life.’
‘What, just leave them standing at a bus stop?’
‘Why not? Someone’s bound to look after them. They’ll think a flying saucer took you off; they’ll never blame you. Your husband would make a good mother: a better mother than an earner any day. Those children are his idea, not yours. He took advantage of you at a weak moment in your life. He shouldn’t have done it. If you don’t do something, your life is finished.’
‘I wouldn’t even think of abandoning my children.’
‘You’ve thought of it many times,’ said Driver.
‘Besides,’ said Laura, pretending not to have heard him, ‘they might wander off into the road, under the bus. I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Have it your own way,’ said Driver, and got back into the BMW and drove off, and Laura wished for a moment he’d stayed around just a little longer, persuading. She could see her last chance in life retreating, vanishing, a tail light round a corner. Driver was right: if you don’t do these things on the spur of the moment you never do them at all.
The bus turned up. Its back doors folded open. The bus conductor stood there on the step. Laura lifted Rachel and Caroline up on to the bus; the conductor did not help her. She took the baby from the pushchair and put it under her arm. The baby started crying. Laura turned to fold the pushchair with one arm and one foot and failed.
‘Get a move on,’ said the conductor, and then, ‘Can’t wait about all day,’ and replaced first Rachel and then Caroline back on the pavement. They started to grizzle. The conductor rang the bell; the doors began to close.
‘There’ll be another bus along in a minute,’ said the conductor. ‘We’re late in.’
Laura, looking up from the pushchair, thought for a moment the conductor had Driver’s face, but how could it be Driver?
‘Like hell there’ll be another one along in a minute,’ said Laura, as the doors folded to, but she didn’t think he heard.
Laura gave up waiting after a further ten minutes and turned back towards home. The second bus passed without stopping. Rachel didn’t get to nursery school, and later that day nearly killed Kubrick by picking him up out of his tank to show him to the baby, but fortunately Laura came along in time, so that Kubrick was merely traumatised, and not dead.
She was glad Kim wasn’t around to witness it. Woodie didn’t get the job. He auditioned for it by turning a chair leg on the spot. The cabinet maker said he was masterly but soo slow.
But one step up from nothing happening is things almost happening.
The next Fenedge almost-event was the moving in of a couple of youths, yobbos or punks, with white faces, ringed flesh, tortured hair, leather jackets with studs and chains, and dirty hands, into the house which had once been the greengrocer’s on the corner of the Centre. The owner had had to close due to increased rent and lack of business. The lads, Paul and Tony, forced an entry and set up a squat inside, complete with candles, mess and mantras. The town was fearful of violence and disorder, but the boys turned out to be disappointingly gentle and even helpful – they’d help with my wheelchair of an evening (they were never out of bed in the morning or I daresay they would have lent a hand then as well) – and the landlord – his revenge upon the town – declined to turn them out, so there they stayed; the happening would have drifted from almost-event into non-event, sucked down into the general flatness of the landscape, I daresay, except the whole pattern of the times changed; and before you could say Jack Robinson or ‘Thank God Hattie’s back in town’, events began to erupt, to pile one on top of the other.
Carmen moved into the squat: came in a van on her Thursday afternoon off and took over Tony’s room when he moved off to join ‘The Travellers’ and do the rounds of the summer pop festivals. She brought a bed and bedding, a table, a chair, a mirror; she came over and spoke to me. She said she couldn’t go on walking the long distance to work every day from Mr Bliss’s caravan. From here in Fenedge she would catch a bus; and the rent she had to pay was marginal. She had been promoted on to the night shift at Peckhams, working as Delivery Supervisor. She had given herself two years to save enough to move out of Fenedge altogether, and she reckoned she could do it in that time, though the cost of living and inflation made saving increasingly difficult.
Peckhams had a new managing director, one Shanty Cotton, who was a great believer in worker participation: she was beginning to get some administrative experience which might stand her in good stead in the wider world. She did not look unhappy: just too sensible and practical for her own good. She wore a headscarf, which I hoped was just because she was moving house, but I feared might have become a way of life. People round Fenedge wrap their heads in scarves a lot: the wind blows hard and long over the waterlands and ears get cold and the mind defensive. I would like to report that Carmen put the squat into instant order, cleaning, sweeping and tidying, wiping the encrusted glass of the windows (although ardent vegetarians, Paul and Tony smoked a great deal — both tobacco and other substances), but I am sorry to say she did not. She was not, she said, ‘interested’ in housework. She had to worry more than enough about hygiene at Peckhams: she could not be bothered at home. She only had to look at Laura, with her preoccupation with washing and mending, to see where that kind of thinking led.
I enquired about Annie. Annie, I discovered, had that very week received a letter from her Tim McLean, enclosing an Air New Zealand ticket, Club Class, to Wellington, on to Christchurch, and had flown out on the first available flight.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘things are certainly beginning to move,’ and Carmen said, ‘About time too.’
Tim McLean lived with his parents on a sheep station of twenty-five thousand acres, running some twenty thousand sheep. They were grazed, he wrote to tell Annie, in three mobs on six different blocks for six months at a time. He would explain more when she arrived. The McLean station was most southerly, being in the Southland of South Island, inland from a place called Moeraki, which I was able to look up in the remaindered volumes of Flora & Fauna Around the World. The area, I learnt, was called the Scotland of the South, not just because of the Gaelic place names (Karitane? Tutakahikura? Uhimataitai? Scottish? What were they talking about?) but because of its landscape: ‘rich, evergreen pastures, in spite of the harsh climate which gives such a short grain-growing season’ where the winds blow over a flat, fertile coastal land. I had the feeling Annie was flying to the ends of the earth to a place pretty much like home. Mind you, in East Anglia there were never any moas, those huge flightless birds, now extinct, nor moa hunters, nor the whalers and traders who came, as the skuas come to the terns in the summer, to make the lives of the long-term inhabitants, the Maoris, miserable. The Maoris, who preferred to live in the north by cultivating kumeras or sweet potatoes (Safeway sells them; Alison, when she shopped for me, would always buy them, because once, just once, I said I enjoyed them) down here in Southland, such is the climate, had perforce to become hunters, fishers and gatherers. It is important to remember that in the Southern Hemisphere the further north you go, the warmer it is; the further south, the colder. That their summer is our winter, and our night their day: as if nature were just experimenting, once more, to see what would happen if everything expected was reversed.
Put on your walking boots (serious New Zealand walking boots, well dubbined: no trainers, please) and hike inland, leaving behind the coasts with their abundance of fish, the kanakana, the yellow-eyed flounder, the eel, the koura, the snapper, the dogfish, the mullet, the maitahi (or adult whitebait), the grayling, the upokoroa (though some say all of those have gone now: eaten every one). Pass through the old gold fields, where once grains of actual gold glittered in the black, black sand – for the shores along here are formed from the moraine of the glaciers which once crept down from the Southern Alps to fight and freeze the very sea, but now retreat, retracing their steps, inch by melting inch, season by season, sullenly, leaving a dead, metallic land behind. But further inland a thin fertile soil begins to cover the moraine, and the plains and the foothills are covered by tussock – a short red grass which manages to grow where almost nothing else will. Clamber yet higher, to the steep rocky ridges of Southland, and once again plant life becomes uncommon, though, as they say in the specialist books, full of interest. But what plant was ever not, to those whose preoccupations such things are? Up here, let me tell you, you will come across the tree daisy (Olearia avicennifolia), the toetoe (Cortaderia richardii) and, if you’re lucky, the wine berry (the coprosina), the southern rata (or Metrosideros umbellate) and the ubiquitous kamaki.
Don’t think that down here in Southland you’ll find an easy land for anyone to inhabit; the skeletons left behind by the moa hunters show that the earliest settlers led hard lives, bones and joints eroded by digging and paddling, and few lived to be thirty…
And to this our Annie is going? This wild wasteland where plant and glacier fight it out? Was this the paradise promised to her by Count Capinski, once upon a time?
Yes, certainly there is birdlife here enough to satisfy the keenest ornithologist – the kapake, the kiwi itself, the weka, the pigeons, the parakeets, the tuis, the korimako or bell bird – but whenever did Annie bird-watch? The bush and the rainforest must be noisier here than anywhere else in New Zealand, but that’s not saying much, since the norm is such a profound deep green silence, in which the fall of a leaf can make you jump, and besides Annie is accustomed to the clattering of pans in the Bellamy House kitchen and the whirring of a dozen vacuum cleaners in mid-morning distress, and what noise does a kiwi make anyway? Some even deny that this, the patron bird of New Zealand, the Apteryx mantelli, lives down here at all; but Keri Hulme, the Booker Prize winner, has seen one and that’s all the evidence I need. The young of the koekoe, or long-tailed cuckoo, are called mimi – and their droppings are sweet and edible. Oh wild and wondrous land! But when will I ever put on laced walking boots, to see these things for myself; though I long to be there, who is there to buy me a ticket? Alison, whose mother is a hundred and four, says that when she comes into her fortune she will take me round the world, but I expect Alison’s mother is immortal. And how, in the meantime, will Annie fare? Will she appreciate this wild paradise, by turns deep green, tawny gold and rust red?
I’ll tell you how Anni
e’s faring. She’s out riding with Tim – not the gentle, formal riding of the few lessons she took with Mr Bliss in anticipation of one day, one day, actually getting to the Land of the Long White Cloud, but the vigorous, impatient riding of those who use horses in the course of their work. Tim is out searching for some twenty missing sheep who may or may not have got into an area known as Saunders Creek, where the terrain is pockmarked by ravines and craters (though you can find the black stilt lurking in the shallow backwaters, so it’s worth a visit) where it is not prudent for the McLean sheep, the McLean livelihood, to wander. They will lose their footing, fall, die. The McLeans will lose profit, though of course Tim will also feel for their sorrows. If sheep fall on their backs, and there is no one to rescue them, they just lie there struggling and pathetic, legs helpless and hopeless, until they die of despair, or of thirst, or of the collapse of their lungs, whichever comes first.
‘Come with me, sweetie,’ Tim said that morning to Annie. She did not mind him calling her sweetie, although it seemed oddly old-fashioned, even condescending; she did not mind anything he did: she did not mind the pain and stiffness consequent upon her getting on a horse. She just went with him. She looked very good in jeans, plaid shirt and her swannie, the universal NZ anorak, a gift from Tim. (‘An engagement gift,’ he said. Was he joking? Did he mean it? If he did, where was her ring?) The outdoors suited Annie more than ever did the indoors, let alone the frilly bib-apron to which Mrs Haverill had of late doomed all the female staff at Bellamy House, with ‘Be Proud of the Spirit of Service’ embroidered in yellow over everyone’s bosom. Annie had not worked her notice out at Bellamy House. ‘Come at once’ said Tim’s letter, so at once she’d gone. Just not turned up at work: left no message; made no apology. Her future called. She’d worried on the flight that so quick a response on her part might be imprudent — wasn’t it better to feign indifference in matters of the heart, rather than admit enthusiasm? – but came to the conclusion that since she wasn’t the sort to play flirtation games, she’d better not start trying now. It would only go wrong.
