by Weldon, Fay
Sir Bernard had been down to the ancient graveyard and pronounced it worthless.
‘Just a mess, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Neglected, rubbish soil! Nothing grows. The sooner the hard core’s down the better. We’re not going to be plagued by protestors, are we, Driver? Sacred sites, ancestor worship, the conservation hysteria of the middle classes?’
‘Not if they don’t know about it,’ observed Driver.
Sir Bernard looked at him a little sharply, and said he had no wish to infringe any regulations, he meant to play this by the book, he hoped Driver was aware of this. He didn’t want too many short cuts taken.
‘Look,’ said Driver, ‘let me put it like this. The professional protestors won’t have a leg to stand on. We have excellent lawyers, who specialise in working within the law. Ordinary people round here need and want these developments. Shouldn’t we get out of here? From the look of it, this was just some kind of plague pit.’
They retired to the BMW. The wind whistled and moaned in from the sea and slung sand into Sir Bernard’s eyes.
‘I have no one to talk to, Driver,’ he said. ‘No one who really cares for me.’
‘You have me,’ said Driver. ‘I look after you.’
‘Only because it’s in your interests,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘I need a woman I can love, not just a woman who loves me. Where is Carmen? Why do I have to wait so long?’
‘Carmen’s on ice,’ said Driver. ‘Wait and see. Only a few days left to go.’
The BMW drove off and Sir Bernard’s minions gathered the teams together and said it was henceforth a firing offence for anyone to hold up work because of ‘remains’. Jed Foster felt wholly unappreciated and indeed insulted and told his wife, who told his sister, who was in treatment with Mr Bliss for her smoking problem. Mr Bliss was now enjoying a relationship with Mrs Baker – that is to say he and she ‘were an item’ – and he told her, and by the next evening the protest groups were out in the sand dunes with posters, cameras and pet archaeologists, and collecting names for a petition to the Ministry of the Environment outside Fenedge Post Office. The Devil never has it all his own way. Not quite.
Carmen, thwarted in her dentist excuse, simply got Stephen to call Mr Snape the next morning and say she was ill, and took the bus out to Landsfield Crescent to see Laura, who described herself as alone in the house, although all four children, for once, were with her. But to a depressed mother children are no company. Rachel and Caroline were off school (it was closed for the day to facilitate a teacher refresher course); Sara had stuck a coin up her nose the evening before and had spent much of the night in hospital with Laura, and the baby, now resentful of her plastered hip joint, was grizzling. Laura had been crying. She was accustomed to having Woodie in the garden workshop, available to come and help her with the children whenever emergencies arose. But now Woodie had rented an old warehouse in Fenedge, where there was more space and less distraction, without a thought of her, Laura, left at home.
‘They’re his children as well as mine,’ complained Laura. ‘He seems to forget that.’
‘He has to earn,’ said Carmen, defensive of Woodie, for she was a worker herself and understood what it meant, though Laura did not.
‘Take his side,’ said Laura, ‘that’s right. Along with everything else.’
‘What do you mean,’ asked Carmen, ‘by everything else? I’ve risked being fired to see how you are, and how you are is like this. It isn’t nice at all.’
‘It’s all your fault,’ said Laura, ‘that things aren’t nice. When they bury you, I hope it’s face down.’
Carmen had to sit down to recover from this. Laura cried and said she was sorry. It was just that Kim was a hopeless baby-sitter and she wished he’d gone away and stayed away and never come back. It was thanks to him that Sara had stuck a coin up her nose. Kim had started saying he wanted the house to himself, and he drank too much; what if he took it into his head to throw Woodie and her and the family out? If there was a Woodie to throw out. On her way back from the hospital she’d called in at his new workshop to surprise him and found him there with Angela, kissing. They hadn’t seen her. She’d slipped away. She didn’t want any advice from Carmen, because it was bound to be bad. What should she do? She had four children to think about, and they needed their father, she couldn’t think about herself.
Then the phone rang. It was Mavis for Laura, to say Annie had been taken into hospital. Annie had something called anorexia and she was in intensive care, and asking for her friends, though, as the Count/Mavis added, no one could say Carmen and Laura had been very supportive friends. Mavis went on to trace back Annie’s troubles from the time she’d failed her exams due to keeping the company of these alleged friends. Mavis was upset. ‘It makes you wonder,’ said Mavis, ‘why you ever have children. All that work, all that orange juice, all the sacrifices, and still it turns out badly,’ and she slammed the phone down.
Carmen and Laura had a brief discussion as to who should look after the kids so they could go off to the hospital. Laura refused to ask Angela, though Carmen thought she should, and since I was sitting across the road waiting for the Centre to reopen, and Alison was visiting me, all four were lugged over, grizzling and snivelling. It was, they assured me, an emergency. It wouldn’t happen again.
‘That girl,’ said Alison after they’d left, ‘was far too young to get married and is far too young to be in charge of anything, let alone anyone. There should be a law to protect people from themselves. Poor little mites, left in the care of a cripple and a crone –’ As soon as their mother had left the room and was no longer a witness to their distress, they stopped grizzling. They fiddled with the controls of my chair instead. Alison then stood on her head to entertain them. The sight of her upside-down face, around which her full skirts fell, displaying her skinny legs and her white interlock bloomers, started them crying again. Standing on her head was Alison’s party trick. Her mother had stopped doing it at ninety. Her daughter, it seemed, meant to outdo her. Alison was so light – in fact, barely six stone – it was not the problem it would have been for someone fifty years her junior, as I am. I am still not too old to have babies myself – not quite. My problem is not merely the biological clock, but how to regain the use of my legs and find an agreeable and useful father for my potential children before it’s too late. I can see these problems might be insurmountable. I was twenty-three when complications following a bodged pregnancy termination required emergency invasive surgery, and a wasp bit the knife-wielding hand mid-stroke, and a section of my neural fibre was inadvertently severed. So you understand why I am preoccupied with concepts of ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’, and the ethical links which join them. ‘Lucky’ to be alive, ‘unlucky’ to be paralysed; ‘deserving it’, as Dr Grafton would say. But deserving what? The luck or the unluck? Forget it.
Laura and Carmen arrived at the hospital to find Annie indeed in the intensive care ward, Mavis and Alan at her side. A drip fed into her veins; she was linked up by wires to an ECG machine. Another measured her blood pressure, tightening around her stick-like arm every few minutes or so. Her chest was bare the better to service the machine, but she, once so plump, now had no bosom at all to speak of, so no one bothered to make her decent. ‘That blood pressure’s too low, doctor,’ said Alan.
‘I am well aware of that, sir,’ said the doctor.
‘That pulse is too slow,’ said Alan. ‘I know about these things.’
‘So do I,’ said the doctor shortly.
‘We don’t want her having any of your pills,’ said Mavis. ‘They kill more people than they cure. Healing is a matter for the spirit, not the body.’
‘Just allow me to get on with it in my own way,’ said the doctor, ‘if you please,’ and then to Mavis, ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mavis. ‘She’s been out of the country.’
‘It’s a cry for help,’ said Alan, ‘that’s what it is.’
‘But didn’t y
ou notice her getting thin?’ the doctor asked.
‘I want Tim,’ said Annie to Carmen and Laura. ‘Tell Tim I love him. I haven’t heard from him, nothing. No phone call, no apology, nothing.’
‘I thought she hated him,’ whispered Laura to Carmen.
‘It was only a lovers’ spat plus air fare,’ whispered Carmen.
‘Don’t make jokes,’ said Laura, but Annie had smiled and a little pink came into her cheeks: and her systolic blood pressure was up two points next time the machine hummed and squeezed her arm.
‘Get me Tim,’ commanded Annie, and closed her eyes, exhausted.
‘Well,’ said the doctor, who was of the new holistic school, ‘people can die of broken hearts as well as anything else.’
‘She might die?’ asked Carmen, to whom this had not occurred.
The doctor just shrugged and went off in response to some other emergency, and Carmen hoped he was being like this to keep Alan and Mavis in their place, but could not be sure.
Count Capinski spoke from Mavis’s mouth. He said, ‘The omens are bad. There is a Jonah amongst us. She must sacrifice herself or be the sacrifice,’ and then Mavis clamped her mouth shut and opened it again to say in her own voice, ‘You girls are so selfish and so preoccupied you didn’t even notice your own friend had galloping anorexia.’
Alan said, ‘Fair’s fair, Mavis, we didn’t notice either, what with one thing and another.’
– to which Mavis replied, ‘You mean your toy trains,’ and Alan said, ‘I meant that man you make me share your bed with.’
Annie opened her eyes and said, ‘Home Sweet Home, goodbye’ and closed them again, and a nurse came along to change the drip and shooed the lot of them out.
When Carmen left the hospital she was crying.
‘Well?’ asked Laura.
‘Okay,’ said Carmen. ‘I give in. I’ll sleep with Sir Bernard. Anything.’
On the way home Carmen passed Mr Bliss outside the Post Office. He was collecting names for the petition organised by the ‘Stop the Sacrilege’ section of the ‘Save Our Past’ group. The protest movement had split, within days, into factions, which, while not overtly hostile to one another, had trouble getting along. New Agers felt antagonistic to the Christian groups, who were complaining about the desecration of Christian remains but ignoring the pagans: archaeologists did not wish to offend the developers more than they could help: the respectable Heritage people did not wish to be involved with the only just respectable Green Peace party, which, along with the SPB (Society for the Protection of Birdlife), wanted the wildlife parks preserved, or with Friends of the Earth, who objected on principle to marinas; but all agreed in this: that they did not want Sir Bernard’s earth movers to roll on another cog, that here was an area of public concern, and all were prepared to lie down, indeed almost looking forward to lying down, in front of the giant machines. After that, any coincidence of ambition stopped, and argument began.
‘These nutters can’t put a stop to the whole Eastern Scheme, can they?’ asked Sir Bernard. He’d never known anything like it. Every environmental organisation in the country seemed to be turning out and The Sun’s headline yesterday had run ‘Bellamy Boobs’. He hadn’t liked that.
‘I doubt it,’ said Driver. ‘Too busy cutting each other’s throats, as per usual. What we need is some big PR stunt.’
‘I need a new girlfriend,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘Get me Carmen.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Driver. ‘What will you give for her?’
‘Anything,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘Done,’ said Driver.
‘And clean up those headlines while you’re about it,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘No problem,’ said Driver, or at least I could only assume from the next day’s headlines – ‘Stand Up To ’Em, Bernie!’ – that their conversation had gone thus. Some subeditor may have been bribed, of course, but I don’t like to believe that: I would rather conceive of a conversation of cosmic intent.
Yet here was Mr Bliss battling on, stopping passers-by in the face of the inevitability of defeat, ignoring his own sore feet. It was an October day and very windy. Carmen’s hair, which was growing longer and redder by the minute, whipped around her face. Mrs Baker, sitting at her folding table, on her folding chair, had a hard time keeping leaflets and questionnaires from flying around the square. The public was obstinate this morning: they trusted no one: they were on Bernie’s side: they didn’t want to be laughed at in the popular papers.
‘What we need round here is jobs and houses,’ said one passer-by, ‘not meddlers like you.’ And the next said, ‘I hope you have a licence: you’re causing an obstruction: I’ll report you for this.’ After that a number said, in effect, ‘What’s good for Sir Bernard is good for Fenedge,’ and others, ‘There’s only old bones up there. Dead for ages. So what?’ and the librarian, who should have been sympathetic, refused to sign, saying, ‘There’s more than enough talk about ghosts and curses in this town. Don’t say you’re infected too, Mr Bliss, Mrs Baker.’ It was depressing.
Then Carmen came by and luck changed. ‘Keep at it!’ said the passers-by, queuing up to sign. ‘This is our town, not theirs. A crying shame what they’re doing up there,’ or ‘The little people against the big company! Good for you!’ or ‘Hopeless, but let’s give it a try.’ Eddie from the Welcome-In came over with free cups of tea. ‘Had enough of these lorries,’ he said. ‘It’s time to act. Someone in the disabled place could have been killed. Supposing it had been bricks not balsa?’ A languid wasp, the last of the season, struggled in a cup of tea. Mr Bliss rescued it with one of the leaflets. This one read ‘Bellamy’s Triumph is Britain’s Shame’.
‘Good morning, Carmen,’ said Mr Bliss, looking up from his task.
‘How goes it? Like the hair! What is it? Henna?’
Carmen looked at her reflection in the glass of the Post Office window and said, ‘Yes, I’m a redhead,’ because she could see she was. She’d started the morning mouse.
‘Mrs Baker,’ asked Carmen, ‘you remember the Faust legend? All that stuff about Mephistopheles?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘and so would you if you’d paid any attention to me at school. It’s a terrible thing for me to sit here and watch the young women of this town, whom I am meant to have educated, get into the state they are, especially you, Carmen. Helpless and hopeless.’
‘Why didn’t Faust ask to stay immortal, and cheat the Devil that way?’
‘Because Mephistopheles had set the goal posts: that is to say a trap. If ever Faust wished the day would never end, on that day he would die.’
‘You mean he wasn’t allowed to put life on Pause: stop it at the dirty bits?’ Andy and Stephen were for ever doing that. Pressing the Pause button on the video remote control: moving the picture frame by frame. Girls with spread legs in the 18 Certifícate: was that flicker of flesh what they thought it was? Usually it was.
‘Nothing to do with dirty bits,’ said Mrs Baker tartly. ‘Goethe’s Faust was engaged in earthworks: moving mountains and so forth. Employing an army of workers: irrigating dust bowls, making the desert bloom: putting right what God had neglected to do. I even remember you doing an essay on it. You got the one A you ever got.’
‘Sometimes Annie and Laura and I used to steal Antoinette Ridley’s essays and copy bits out of them,’ said Carmen. ‘Perhaps it was one of those.’
‘You three were the reason I gave up teaching. Why do you want to know about Faust?’
‘No real reason.’
‘It’s quite cheering,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘that you’re interested, and can still get your tongue round the word Mephistopheles. I might even go back into teaching once Mr Bliss and I are married.’
A puff of wind caught up the leaflets on her table and rearranged them. ‘Despoliation Rampant!’, ‘The Vandals of Waterland!’, ‘Stop the Sacrilege!’
‘I brought in a dress for Oxfam,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘You can have it if you like. Nineteen for
ty something. I wore it only the once to a dance. I think it might do for you.’ She had it rolled up in a plastic bag beneath the table. ‘Mind you, I was an altogether different shape from you,’ she said, ‘when I was a girl. We used to go in more at the waist and out at the hip, but I expect you can alter it.’
Carmen shook it out. It was white taffeta, scooped low at the neck, oddly bridal in effect.
‘I expect I’ll fit it,’ she said sadly, ‘by the time I come to wear it.’
‘It’ll need steaming out,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘Perhaps your mother will do it for you?’
‘I can do it myself,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m a big girl now.’
In the letter box Carmen found a letter from Mr Snape at Peckhams. It had been delivered by hand. By her continued absences from her place of work, it declared, Carmen had broken the terms of her contract. She was hereby relinquished: let go. This too seemed a deliverance.
Carmen called the hospital and Staff Nurse told her that Annie was off the critical list but still dangerously ill.
