by Weldon, Fay
Ronnie had booked a table at the Trocadero, which was hopeful. At least he saw it as a special event. She’d worn the rather plain blouse and skirt she’d bought in the Kings Lynn boutique, since she didn’t want to frighten him off. She was in moderate figure (she measured herself before she left). 38-25-40 starting from the ground up, too robust for her taste, but tolerable. She hadn’t even developed boils, a spot, or acne. Over melon (for her: these days she obviously had to diet) and soup (tomato, for him) he’d spoken about Poppy, and his love for her.
‘She needs someone like me,’ he said. ‘Someone kind, patient, gentle, understanding. She’s had a hard life, no one really understands. A victim of child abuse. She was seduced by her English teacher at school. She has psychosexual problems.’
‘Poor Poppy,’ said Carmen. Ronnie sighed. His lips were cherubic. His hands were clean, young and smooth. He drank spritzers − half white wine, half sparkling water.
Over salmon (hers: without hollandaise) and steak au poivre (his: with garlic butter) he told her that Poppy had abandonment problems, so he hadn’t told her he was taking Carmen out to dinner. But Ronnie felt he ought to make amends for so embarrassing Carmen at the Newmarket outing: he hoped he hadn’t spoiled anything promising. Carmen assured him there was nothing to spoil. He said he was glad. Things were beginning to look up, thought Carmen. Ronnie said that Poppy was staying with her mother.
‘How strange,’ said Carmen. ‘I thought she was away at a conference with Shanty Cotton.’ Poppy had been taken on by Peckhams as a trainee manager.
‘Oh no,’ said Ronnie. ‘I’m sure you’ve got that wrong. Poppy has no time for older men.’ Carmen did not press the matter. Over black coffee (hers) and deep-filled apple pie and cream (his) he said, ‘You don’t mind me talking to you about Poppy, I hope? I feel you’re a sister to me – in a way we have more in common, you and me, than Poppy and I do – but that’s not the way love works, is it?’
‘I suppose not,’ she said, cast down, but he was looking into her eyes while he said it, and his eyes were liquid and compelling. Once upon a time Driver had nipped her on the neck, to mark her, or so she had suspected at the time. And it was true that the little wound had never properly healed, so she had become quite accustomed to wearing a plaster on it, sometimes hopefully smearing it with antibiotic ointment from Mr Bliss (Dr Grafton now refusing to prescribe antibiotics altogether), but then the plaster would never stick. Now, as Ronnie looked into her eyes, the wound began to hurt quite badly.
‘Is there something wrong?’ asked Ronnie.
She opened a couple of top buttons on her blouse to show him the little red patch. His hand gently opened her collar wider.
‘How white your skin is,’ said Ronnie.
She had assumed, almost hoped, his interest would be medical, but as his hand stroked her neck she could tell that it was sexual. Her wound really was hurting and people were looking. She felt fidgety.
‘I think I’ll have to go home,’ Carmen said. ‘It won’t let me sit still,’ and that was misconstrued too.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Ronnie, and he had risen and paid the bill and was going home with her, hands and bodies touching whenever possible, without even finishing his apple pie, before she’d really thought about what she was doing. She knew she hadn’t wanted it to happen like this: his arm possessively and ungently tucking round hers, hurrying her to bed. She’d wanted him to woo her, persuade her, and then she could gracefully and romantically succumb with a great deal of conversation, and then he would be hers for ever.
‘Carmen,’ he said in the car, ‘I always thought you’d be a great lay,’ but again that wasn’t what she wanted to hear at all. She wanted true love and sex: that was what she was hoping for, after all, had been waiting for all this time.
‘No, you haven’t,’ said Laura, ‘because that equals marriage and marriage equals babies, and you don’t like babies,’ which hurt such parts of Carmen left unhurt for, besides it being untrue, hadn’t she helped Laura with her babies since the first whiff of ozone?
But at least Carmen had, finally, got Ronnie Cartwright home, although not in the mood she had anticipated. Stephen’s girlfriend Allie was there in Stephen’s room, to make things worse – not in the bed; they didn’t have a bed, just rolling about noisily on the floor with the door open – and the house Carmen had been keeping sweet, clean and inviting for just such an occasion, always with Ronnie in mind, now looked like an airport’s whorehouse and smelt of stale beer, cigarettes and sex. Ronnie followed her straight into her bedroom and was just beginning to take off her blouse, tearing at buttons, and she was beginning to help him, and thinking what price Poppy now, this is fine whichever what way, when the telephone by the bed rang and it was of course Poppy, wanting to speak to Ronnie. Poppy had traced her lover through the Trocadero and Directory Enquiries.
‘Oh my God, Poppy,’ said Ronnie. ‘Are you okay? Poor darling… yes, I was talking business with Carmen; then she developed this allergy: I had to get her home; yes, of course I’m coming at once: of course I’ll meet the train. Poor darling!’
And that had been that. Poppy had had a row with her parents, or so she said, and was on her way home. Ronnie arranged his clothing and left, and she knew from the way he hurried, as she watched from her grimy window, that he was glad to have escaped: whatever madness it was had deserted him: from now on it was all embarrassment.
Now Carmen wept into Laura’s shoulder, which Laura could have done without, and spoke words Laura never thought to hear from Carmen’s mouth.
‘I can’t think; I can’t work; my life’s going to pieces, and all I can do is wait for the phone to ring in case it’s him.’
‘Why don’t you ring him?’ asked Laura, irritated.
Woodie came in from the workshop in the garden where he was making up Angela’s sandwich counter. The sound of the drill had been bugging Laura all morning.
‘I don’t want Ronnie to think I’m chasing him.’
‘You are,’ said Laura shortly. ‘Why don’t you just give up. He’s a creep anyway. Spritzers! Great lays! Whoever says great lays?’ Carmen wept.
‘You don’t understand him. Ronnie doesn’t love Poppy; he loves me in his heart, I know he does. He can have Poppy too, I’ll put up with that, so long as I’m somewhere in his life. Otherwise I’d rather be dead. Truly, I’d rather die than live without Ronnie.’
‘I can’t stand this,’ said Woodie. ‘She’s hysterical,’ and he slapped Carmen, who shuddered and came to her senses, or at any rate had the grace to look startled and confused, vulnerable and large-eyed as a horse in its maiden race at Newmarket.
‘What was I saying?’ she asked. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Love, love, love, you were saying,’ said Laura. ‘Die, die, die. You’ve gone insane. You’re bewitched. What’s happening round here?’
At this point the phone rang. Woodie answered it.
‘It’s your friend Annie,’ said Woodie. ‘She’s at Gatwick and she’s crying and wants someone to pick her up. Who does she think is going to pay for the petrol?’
‘Carmen,’ said Laura to her friend, ‘you have to sleep with Sir Bernard Bellamy, because this is getting too much. You are upsetting the laws of man and nature.’
‘No,’ said Carmen, ‘I won’t.’
Meanwhile, Sir Bernard Bellamy’s earth movers, their work on the bypass done, had moved coastward and started filling in the gravel pits and levelling the sand hills created over aeons by the slow surges of the Wash. Bellamy Scientific Enterprises had come up with evidence that as the sea levels rose there could be no avoiding the harsh fact that land levels had to be raised all along the north and eastern coasts of the Wash to prevent inland flooding. Too bad if this disturbed the attractive habitats that the birds so enjoyed – the salt marshes, tidal reed beds, brackish and fresh marshes, the willow copses and plantations, the sandbanks, the shingle pits, the dunes – and would alas mean the end of the avocet colonie
s and suchlike ornithological delights so that the boom of the bittern would never again be heard on a wild March day: too bad! But at least people could sleep safe in their beds at night, and not wake to find chairs floating round their living rooms, and the tide sweeping in under the door. Since change was, inevitably, in its way, the Bellamy Advisory Council reasoned that to establish a chain of yachting marinas – cleverly adapted to cope with high tides and flooding – would make the whole enterprise self-funding and save the Government millions. Bellamy Quarries (Mendip branch) were opening up a new hillside in the south-west and there was now a plentiful and cheap supply of aggregate which was already being railed in for the Fenedge bypass – the ground in these parts was sandy to a great depth, which made the construction of feeder roads comparatively simple (if dusty). It should therefore also be possible to create, as part of the overall coastal development concept, and at minimum cost, a badly needed new airport to serve the needs of the North-East Midlands. While Sir Bernard held conversations at ministerial level about these changes to the landscape, his earth movers just got on with the immediate job of levelling gravel pits and sand dunes. Sir Bernard did not believe in wasting time.
‘Forgive the cliché,’ he’d say, tapping his broad, strong fingers on his solid oak desk, ‘but time is money. Saves it for the community: makes it for the individual. And in these matters of public concern, as the Bellamy Eastern Scheme most certainly is, community and individual interests are as one!’ And the bulldozers rolled in, nudging their solid heads into mountains, tossing them high, while everyone tried to figure out the significance of what he said. Sir Bernard was so genial, so charismatic, so engaging, it was hard even for civil servants, least of all ministers, to find fault with him. His eyes seemed to get bluer, not paler, every year: now they were almost as blue as Driver’s.
He was sometimes seen for a time with a girl on his arm, not of the bimbo kind but someone well bred, highly educated, often with some notable artistic talent, who could be taken anywhere and fit in, be it to Chequers, the opera or a nightclub, but the relationship never lasted long. Afterwards the one discarded would speak of Sir Bernard fondly and sadly, and with admiration, letting the press know only ‘It just didn’t work out. I wish him every happiness.’ The press liked to speculate as to who would finally win the heart of Prince Bernard (for so they dubbed him), the man who had everything, yet nothing, because he didn’t have true love. How lyrical and sentimental the yellow press waxed: this great man, who was saving the whole Eastern Seaboard from destruction while the Government twiddled its thumbs, their unhappy, romantic hero! But that’s by the by.
17
In the course of levelling the sand dunes, a certain Jed Foster, a Bellamy skimmer driver (whose sister Sunny was a paraplegic and shared, perforce, my interest in ornithology) perceived a number of what he assumed to be human bones in his sandy load – it is hard to mistake children’s skulls. Contrary to custom and practice, he stopped his engine and got out of his cab to take a better look. He had uncovered, it transpired, what could only be an ancient graveyard – lidless lead coffins, skeletons, artefacts, golden crosses, swords wherever he looked. The bodies were lying east-west, which any earth-mover operator knows means the remains are Christian, not pagan (these are usually laid north-south). There were female bodies too – you could tell they’d once been women because strands of long hair still lay around their skulls, and little shiny stones lay in the form of necklaces beside them, the stones being immortal, only the strings that once had linked them succumbing to time. Four of these female bodies, as Jed observed and shuddered, lay eye socket down – which meant they had been executed, for adultery, or witchcraft, or nagging, or whatever female sin at the time seemed unpardonable. The souls of those buried face down are meant never to rise to their Maker.
Jed Foster was working on his own. The western sun was sinking; the terns and the skuas fought it out in the skies above: a single bittern flew over, croaking: an orangey glow struck over the newly turned land and rendered it beautiful. Jed Foster saw gold gleaming, and silver too. As well as bones he now saw shards of pottery: he saw a buckle and a big-bellied figurine, a fragment of leather: a shoe. He was a good man; he resisted the temptation to loot, he picked up nothing. He backed the skimmer off the site, took up sand from elsewhere and, with his great shovel slowly moving, gently dusted the whole area over until it was thinly and decently hidden. Then he went home, washed, changed, and got to a phone box. He thought it unwise to contact his foreman. He would go straight to the top. First he rang Bellamy House and was put through to Mrs Haverill, who said that no one was able to speak to Sir Bernard, who did Jed Foster think he was: Sir Bernard was not in residence anyway: he was very seldom at Bellamy House: why ever did Jed Foster think he would be? Jed persisted and Mrs Haverill grudgingly gave him a London number to call in the morning, saying she doubted anything Jed Foster had to say would be of the slightest interest, let alone advantage, to Sir Bernard. When Jed Foster got home, and had stopped smarting from his conversation with Mrs Haverill, he told his wife what he had discovered. He knew it was something amazing. He had felt awed, he said. Mrs Foster told Miss Foster, my sister in disability.
As the campaign to Save Our Past got going, at first under the leadership of Mrs Baker and Mr Bliss, then under those more professionally experienced, all this became common knowledge. Sunny Foster was a Heritage enthusiast and believed her duty to the past was greater than her duty to her brother’s employers, although her sister-in-law did not agree: ‘Don’t make a fuss,’ she begged. ‘He’ll lose his job!’ and told everyone everything. It was thanks to Sunny that the first volunteers from Fenedge went out with broom and brush and pan and carefully hand-skimmed sand and soil from the site of the graveyard and the Bronze Age settlement that it served, and the Roman trading estate nearby, and that thereafter half of Fenedge set up camp with folding chairs and thermoses, to guard the site and keep Sir Bernard’s diggers at a distance, while the other half of Fenedge tried to egg the bulldozers on.
‘What is this sentimental nonsense?’ cried the unemployed and homeless of Fenedge, or those about to be so rendered. ‘What we want round here is work and housing and medical care, forget the spotted redshank, forget ancient graveyards and the bones of the dead. What about our living ones, our hips that need replacing?’ ‘Not an inch of this country is not littered with human bones, ancient remains,’ said the realists, the rational, and those with vested interests in the development, ‘if you dig down just a little. What’s so special about this lot? Cranks and lunatics!’ ‘We don’t know,’ sighed the lamenteers, ‘it just somehow seems wrong; not necessary to dig just here: these graves are a sign that we shouldn’t!’ But the high tides of the season were so very high at both new and full moons, as the autumnal flights of the shore waders began, that the Eastern Scheme, as it was now called, was well able to claim necessity rather than choice. Dig we must, and dig right here! So what if the black and white oyster catchers would never again stream sedately by, to be overtaken by the swifter bar-tailed godwit and the grey plover; soon all would be forgotten and the yachts of the rich sail sedately by, also a beautiful sight. And who would care, let’s face it, except obsessive and depressive people with Adam’s apples who had no idea how to run the world? And what came first, the comfort and entertainment of busy humans, or the preservation of an entirely unnecessary and outmoded wildlife? It wasn’t even as if you could eat rare birds: they are hopelessly tough. And what was meant by ‘rare’? There were thousands of them, millions. Sometimes you couldn’t see the land for feathers –
But all these arguments were to come. In the meantime, Jed Foster’s call interrupted a conversation between Driver and Sir Bernard. The latter was in melancholy mood. Envisage it, as I do, closing Decline and Fall. I read too fast.
‘I have everything a man can want,’ Sir Bernard said to Driver, ‘save the one thing. And that’s the one thing you promised me. Everything else I achieved on my own, without
you –’ Driver stifled a yawn: he had heard all this before from all kinds of people. Any man with sufficient energy, said Sir Bernard, enough brain and guts can make money. If he has enough money he can walk with kings. If he diets he can lose weight: if he exercises he can become strong. If he studies he can learn a language. If he has power, beautiful women will lie down in front of him. What sensible, energetic man needs you, Driver, in other words, Luck Bringer, whispering in his ear? As a short cut to charisma, perhaps − otherwise, what can it profit a man to lose his soul? These days, surely, a man has his life within his own control.
If Jed Foster had approached his task from the east, not the west, the evening sun would have dazzled him; perhaps he would not have caught the glint of human bones. The relics of the sacred site would have been shovelled up and dispersed amidst somersaulting mountains of sand. Had Sir Bernard not been talking along the lines he was, and so irritating Driver, who is to say that the instant’s decision, in which Jed Foster turned his wheel left instead of right, would not have gone the other way?
‘Where is true love?’ asked Sir Bernard of Driver. He was hanging from wall bars in the gym attached to his private suite at the Ritz: he believed this hanging lengthened his spine: something, certainly, had lately made him taller. Even a man’s height is under his control.
