by Weldon, Fay
She had no difficulty recognising Tim at the airport: she had worried in case she’d dreamt about him so often that the original guest at the Bellamy House Hotel would bear no resemblance to the man in her dreams or the writer of such perceptive and affectionate letters, but it was not the case. All she had to do was shut her eyes briefly, envisage the hero in a teenage comic strip, open them, and there he was: taller and squarer than anyone else in sight, reliable yet tender, his eyes bright and caring and, what is more, directed straight at her, the heroine of her own life; he was at home and at ease in this country as he had not been at Bellamy House. Taller, skinnier, more glamorous girls by far travelled with her, came through Arrivals when she did, girls with high heels, bronzed legs, clearly defined bosoms and smooth arms, but he didn’t seem interested in them — what he appreciated, it seemed, was the workaday, the serviceable, the useful. That is to say, Annie wore comfortable clothes – it was only sensible to travel across the world feeling comfortable, not, as Mavis would say, ‘gripped about the waist’. Her hair had fallen out of curl; she had spilt Coke down her blue blouse on the journey and where she had attempted to wash it out the colour had bleached; all these things he ignored: he went straight to the heart of her. It was a rewarding yet disconcerting experience. Why me? Why me? Of all the girls in the world? What did I do to deserve this? Is it enough, after all, to simply be?
‘Oh, Annie,’ he said, heartfelt, and that was just about all, or all that was apparently needed. He was not given to talking about his feelings. Sheep, yes; his native land, yes; both could render him lyrical, but in matters of the heart it was what you did, and how you did it, not what you said, that counted. Annie was relieved. She too was rendered awkward by too much emotion. Anyone could safely bring Carmen a rose between their teeth, quite safely throw Laura a surprise birthday party; but Annie found gestures suspicious. It came, she confided to Tim in a letter, from once, when she was sixteen, being embraced by her mother and finding she was looking into Count Capinski’s eyes. She’d suffered dreadful anxiety once she’d sent the letter, but a reply came quickly and reassuringly. He expected the event had played into a whole set of already existing fears: no one event could form a whole character, could it? She was surprised that he was both so thoughtful and acute, and so uncondemning or rejecting of her mother’s capacity to be two people at once. It was not what you expected from a sheep farmer.
The Glen Trekker Station, which Annie had envisaged as exactly that – some long low clapboarded outback building with a ticket office, long disused – turns out to be a rather grand squat quasi-Georgian mansion, brilliant white against a bright blue sky, standing alone in green lawns behind paling stock fences with pillars and a porch where others had verandahs; it is the only habitation for twenty square miles. There is an elaborate TV aerial on its roof. Annie supposes, rightly, that reception around here will be bad. There are geraniums and nasturtiums in the flowerbeds; green willows droop around a pond. White, blue, green, red: strong colours to an eye accustomed to the misty greys and duns of East Anglia. She feels bolder. Outside the front door stand a Volvo and two Range Rovers. Dogs bark a welcome. Why me, why little me? Without even a fortune to my name? Are you to be Rochester, Tim McLean, to my Jane; am I to control you with the power of my will, my quietness, my virtue? How is it done?
His mother stands at the door, for all the world like an English county lady, of the kind who so intimidate Annie back home: the ones who are so kind and understanding when Annie is on chambermaid duty at Bellamy House but never leave tips. She has neat, brown-to-grey hair, a weatherbeaten face, a lively expression, white and even teeth (they’re obviously false; she likes them like that: uncompromising), big competent hands and feet; she has a sensible and profoundly rational air – Count Capinski would never be allowed inside that head, not for one moment. Mrs McLean is old stock: the McLeans are used to running things round here; for centuries they’ve been telling people what to do. She is the opposite of Mavis, who has somehow to be sneaky to survive.
‘We’ve heard so much about you,’ she says. ‘Welcome!’
Annie is shown the house — the wide hall with its polished board floors and rag rugs, the Victorian umbrella stand without umbrellas, the parlours leading out of the hall – large square rooms where nobody goes, with antique furniture, family heirlooms, and real paintings by European artists on the walls; everything well dusted and lavender-polished. Flies buzz at the windows; voices echo; shoes squeak. It is very quiet. The real life of the house goes on at the back, Mrs McLean assures Annie – in the kitchen. Who has time to sit down anyway? There is always so much to do. Everyone’s hands are always busy. If Mrs McLean has a spare moment she weaves rag rugs. If Mr McLean sits – and he has a bad hip, he sometimes has to – he cleans his guns. As well as keeping the accounts and the stockbooks, buying farm machinery and new animals, supervising the dagging and dipping, the drenching and docking, he trains sheepdogs for shows in his spare time. Marjorie McLean, it becomes apparent, as well as weaving rag rugs, cooks, bakes, sews and bottles fruit with one hand, while publishing the local WI’s newsletter with the other. She can mend a leaking gutter, wire a shearing shed, says her son, milk a cow, deliver a baby and a political address, and dress up to be a Top Table Lady at the local dinner dance, without thinking twice about any of it. She makes Annie feel helpless and hopeless by comparison, though at home Annie always seemed more competent than most. Annie has, Annie notices, been put in a bedroom as far as can be from Tim’s, and there are no carpets on these upstairs corridors either: it is a very echoey house, one way and another, except for the kitchen, which hums and rumbles with very expensive major kitchen equipment as well as minor — ice-cream mixers, milk-shake makers, automatic lamb feeders, sixties classics and the clock, clock, clock of the loom on which the rag rugs are made. The kitchen needs constant servicing, constant cleaning. It is an enormous room, with many subsidiary rooms off it, in which dogs are groomed, chickens hatched, dough put to rise. Bellamy House was nothing to it. Annie and Tim have not yet slept together, and though he kisses and cuddles her even now, when they are alone, he puts her from him should their embraces become too intense. He has changed. Now it’s she who wants to and he seems not to. Why does he delay? Is there something wrong with this paragon or is he just thoroughly nice and good, and feels he needs to know her properly first now matters have become serious? And how many years will this take? He is, she notices, reading a book called The Return of Victorian Courtship: How to Love One Person For Ever. Is this what it’s about? Annie finds that here at the other end of the world there is no one to talk to about these things. She longs for Carmen and Laura, her friends. They’d put everything in some kind of context; explain to her why it’s so impossible to get out of Tim a clear answer to a simple question, if only she could formulate the question. Is there some culture block going on here, some traditional New Zealand custom, or is it, as usual, her? Annie sits eating whitebait, whole tiny little pink-white fish, fried in batter, with black pinhead eyes still showing through the coating, wishing she didn’t have to, and wondering whether she’s meant to be marrying him or whether she’s just a friend, no more than that.
Or, as now, she sits on a tussocky hilltop on a horse next to Tim and he calls her sweetie, and she is even suddenly afraid. So far from anyone, in this strange if beautiful land at the far ends of the earth.
‘You’re brooding, Annie,’ said Tim. ‘I don’t like to see that. No use blaming your mum and dad for what you are.’
Is he using her confidence in the letter against her? Surely not.
‘It’s a hard life, Annie,’ he said, ‘here or anywhere. But we don’t want anyone saying you’re a whingeing pom.’
‘What’s a pom?’
‘You are. Mind you, the kids will be kiwis.’
‘So we’re having kids.’
‘My word yes,’ he said. ‘Any objection?’
‘We’d have to get married first,’ said Annie boldly. His horse
fidgeted. No one on horseback is ever completely still. He stared into the wind: so frequently having to do it that it seemed to have carved the planes of his face. He was wonderfully handsome.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you and me know each other by now, and you get on all right with my mum. So I reckon we could take the plunge.’
No one can take this away from me, thought Annie, whatever happens next. Tim McLean’s proposed to me. We were on horseback together on a hill somewhere in the world, and this handsome man proposed to me. Do you hear, Carmen, Laura? In the end I was the one to get out of there, the one least likely to succeed; if you could only see me now!
‘I reckon we could,’ said Annie nonchalantly: her toes curled in her dubbined boots. ‘But I think you’d have to ask me properly. You’ll have to get off your horse, for one thing.’
He did, which enabled her to get off hers, and ease her aching buttocks.
‘You do like sheep?’ he asked her. ‘You weren’t just saying it? Being a station wife is a full-time job. You have to like sheep, and horses.’
She couldn’t remember having said she liked sheep. It was not like her to tell so downright a lie: wouldn’t she have been more evasive?
‘Of course I love sheep,’ she said.
‘Okay, Annie,’ said Tim, ‘please will you marry me?’
‘Shouldn’t we sleep together first?’ asked Annie, but he seemed disconcerted, even embarrassed by that, so she added, ‘though I can see we could be old-fashioned about this, if we decided.’ She didn’t want to put him off.
White dots moving on the plain below attracted his attention. ‘We’ll talk about it all later,’ he said. ‘Those sheep will be in Saunders Creek if we’re not careful,’ and he hopped back on his horse, just as two vigorous, handsome, wide-jawed, curly-haired men, Maoris, galloped up and over the ridge on violent, stocky little horses. Tim, by sudden contrast with the other two, seemed almost washed out, too pale, too finely drawn of countenance to be altogether convincing as a leader of men, too indecisive, though still, by virtue of some secret power (perhaps just money in the bank), he was conceded by all to be in charge: he the master, they the station hands.
‘Bloody hell, Tim,’ called one of them as they thundered past, ‘they’re heading up Saunders Creek.’ Without a further look at Annie, the love of her life set off behind them. The three men hollered and shouted sheep-language – to which the sheep seemed deaf − as the horses, which seemed more hot-headed still than their masters, descended the hill slopes towards the plain. They were having a wonderful time. It will always be like this, thought Annie: a woman in this land, indeed in any land, will be the spare-time pursuit: some necessity will always arise to which she will take second place. Do I care? No. I want him. I’ll change him. Just because he was born to sheep, doesn’t mean he has to stay with sheep.
At least I assumed that’s what Annie thought that day, on horseback on a hilltop, because that’s what women so often think, presented with a man whose perfection is marred by a single fault. For example, he drinks. Or he’s a philanderer. Or he gambles. Or he’s unemployable. Or he doesn’t want children. Or he’d rather look after his sheep than them. I’ll change him, whispers the little gnome of wishful thinking who lodges in Everywoman’s brain, feeding off True Romance until he grows so fat he pops right out of her head, leaving her sane again; I’ll change him. And sometimes she succeeds, though mostly she doesn’t.
And meanwhile, back home, Audrey lay in a hospital bed, which was nothing unusual, but this time the sister said she might not be going home again, and Laura and Woodie, checking out her chart when Sister was out of the room, perceived that Audrey was on heavy doses of morphine, which meant that her addiction or otherwise to the drug was irrelevant. It is from such clues that relatives of the very ill come to understand that death is imminent: the word is seldom mentioned, as if the uttering of it brought it nearer, and the whole point of the institution, after all, is the struggle against it, to which all are sacrificed.
‘I want to see Kim before I go,’ said Audrey.
‘No one knows where he is,’ said Laura. ‘If he knew you were ill I’m sure he’d come.’ Though they all knew by then that he wouldn’t.
‘Tell you what,’ said Audrey, ‘take a small ad in the newspapers. Say that Kubrick’s dangerously ill; that’ll flush him out,’ and she actually laughed, which was enough to make her catch her breath and, in the catching of it, die. It is something to die laughing, especially if you’re Audrey.
Laura and Woodie sat by her bed for some five minutes before they called a nurse. They didn’t want anyone to attempt her resuscitation and, to everyone’s credit, nobody did. They went together to collect the children from the neighbour who’d offered to look after them. Her name was Angela. She was a single mother, and she lived across the way from Laura, next door to Mavis and Alan, in Landsfield Crescent, in the house which had once been Carmen’s. Angela was blonde, buxom and had an easy, amiable nature. More men, in Mavis’s phrase, went in her front door than ever came out of it, but her little daughter Effie played and sang up and down the Crescent, and was a good friend of Rachel’s; and Angela was a good neighbour, prepared to feed cats and look after children in an emergency. In fact she’d do anything for anyone – ‘especially’ (Mavis again) ‘someone else’s husband’.
Woodie went off to the undertaker to arrange the funeral and Laura went through her mother’s drawers and cupboards, sorting out the best for Oxfam, the worst for the black rubbish bags. There is something extraordinarily miserable about the intimate possessions of the newly dead: they are denatured, wretched, the energy of their existence suddenly stolen from them; they hang listlessly from hangers, cluster greyly in drawers, overwashed. Laura looked out of the window and saw that the black BMW was parked outside the door, or she thought it was. Or perhaps it was a hearse? She went downstairs and opened the front door, but there was nothing there. It had been a vision, an apparition, a hallucination. It hardly mattered which since it was all in her mind, not in the real world. At least, since Audrey was already dead, a ghostly hearse could not be prophesying her mother’s death.
Laura came over to me and wept on my knee for a time and then perked up and said, ‘Well, at least Woodie won’t have to live with his mother-in-law any more. We’ll have the house to ourselves; all ours!’ And she snivelled and cheered up a little. ‘Only somehow,’ she said, ‘I only have Woodie and the kids because of Audrey, and now that Audrey isn’t there, I feel peculiar about them, as if we’re all in the wrong place at the wrong time. What have Woodie and the kids got to do with me, really? How did they come about?’
My toes were tingling; my skirt was damp with her tears. I had not set out in life to become any kind of counsellor, but that is how women trapped in wheelchairs often end up. They can’t get away. And the black BMW really was parked outside Laura’s door; I could see it, and Angela was leading the four little girls up the street towards it, each one with a nose white and frothy from a Mr Whippy soft ice cream.
‘I do wish she wouldn’t,’ said Laura. ‘I try to bring them up sugar-free.’
Driver leant out of his window and said to Angela, ‘My, what a lot of little girls! Makes you wonder where all the men are!’ and Angela, whose Effie was the result of a long affair with a married man, everyone knew, said, ‘They’re all married to someone else,’ to which Driver replied, ‘Well, what the mind doesn’t know the heart can’t grieve over.’
‘What do you want?’ said Laura to Driver sharply. She was quite dangerous. The recently bereaved often are: they’ll stand no nonsense. The perceived margins between life and death widen: it’s important to stand well back, take no risks. Driver seemed quite disconcerted by her sharpness.
‘Just to say hello to everyone,’ he said. ‘And to little Rachel, Caroline and Baby Sara. And of course Effie. I know little Effie well.’
Little Effie had wide blue eyes and a slender body and she put her finger in her mouth and smiled at Driver
and danced her little bottom this way and that. She was only five. Too many uncles, Laura concluded, but at the same time a helpful neighbour was a helpful neighbour and now Audrey was gone she couldn’t afford to criticise Angela.
‘I’m not in the mood for socialising,’ she said to Driver, but didn’t wish to give him the satisfaction of knowing why.
‘I was really sorry to hear about your mother,’ he said, nevertheless.
‘How do you know about my mother?’ asked Laura. He had been visiting Mavis, he said, to have a wart on the sole of his foot treated, and Mavis had just heard from Alan, who was now working at the morgue, collecting bodies from hospitals all over the county, that Audrey’s corpse was amongst those collected. Morgue provision had recently been rationalised and centralised: a whole county can collect a lot of corpses in a single day, but friends and neighbours still get noticed.
‘I wonder if you’ve any news of Carmen?’ asked Driver. ‘I can’t find her address. I can’t somehow sniff it out. I have something to tell her to her advantage,’ but Laura just snapped, ‘You needn’t think I’m going to tell you a thing,’ and snatched her children from Angela, and shovelled them inside the front door and then left them to their own devices and shut herself in her bedroom and wept. She had to call Angela later and apologise.
‘Poor thing,’ said Driver kindly to Angela, ‘I expect she’s upset,’ and Angela said, ‘Well, Audrey’s well out of it. What had she to look forward to? Nothing but pain and disappointment.’
‘Quite so,’ said Driver.
A couple of days later, as I sat consulting my books on the lifestyle of New Zealand sheep, I watched Laura knock on the door of what was still known in Fenedge as ‘the old greengrocer’s’. She knocked gently, though bravely, since the windows were scrawled with words such as ‘Hate’, ‘Destroy’, ‘Destruct’, and ‘Fuck the Pigs’, and someone had splintered the door by kicking it with a boot with reinforced metal toes. I had watched him do it. One of the resident lads had taken in a white-skinned female waif who apparently did not belong to him, and someone else, a youth from out of town, was after the pair of them. They’d escaped out of the back window and come over the roofs to half jump, half fall to the ground right in front of my window; then they loped off. Without a doubt, Driver was back in town and we were all feeling it. And if Driver was back, would Sir Bernard be far behind?
