by Weldon, Fay
The bed bugs on the observatory level had resisted all attempts to eradicate them: they lodged between the plastic skins that had been stitched between the old curving lead window frames to take the weight of the plaster, and no amount of pumping in insecticide seemed able to stop the creatures creeping out at night to bite the guests. These were the cheaper, attic rooms, it is true, but it was still not good for any hotel’s reputation to have even the economy-class guests wake up in the morning quite drastically spotted by red weals and white lumps. (Bed bugs have been known to bleed a child to death.) Word gets round.
But down in the restaurant area the staff had other preoccupations that evening than moonlight and bed bugs. Mrs Haverill was making their lives miserable, the more so because Sir Bernard and a Miss Wedmore were to dine that night. She was giving Henry, the waiter whom Carmen had encountered at the Trocadero, but who had moved to Bellamy House, where, though wages were lower, tips were allegedly higher, a particularly hard time. ‘Henry,’ said Mrs Haverill as Henry passed with a tray heavy with glassware, sent back by her for polishing three times, ‘one moment, if you please. This is Bellamy House, not the caff you have been accustomed to. You do not go up to guests in the bar and say “whaddya want?”. You say, American style, “Good evening, and how are you today? My name is George and I am here to serve you.” Will you repeat that?’
‘My name isn’t George, it’s Henry.’
‘Your name is what I say it is, young man. And how are you today − the emphasis is always on the “you”, to make the customer feel special. It’s friendly and yet respectful. Personalised staff-customer contact is the pillarstone of the Bellamy Empire, and if it doesn’t suit you, you find work elsewhere.’
‘Good evening, and how are you today?’ said Henry. ‘My name is George and I am here to serve you.’ That said, Henry was permitted to put his tray down. His biceps bulged and ached. He wished he had not left the Trocadero, whose policy it was never to rehire those who had once left its employ.
Mrs Haverill opened the door to Carmen. Mrs Haverill wore black. Her jaw was set square, as the jaw of one who had had to endure many things: her eyes were mean, as the eyes of one who meant to endure no more. Carmen felt as if perhaps she was the last straw. She wished she had a dark anonymous coat to cover up the white dress, but none had appeared upon the scene. Driver had either not thought of it, or decided against one. She felt conspicuous and alone, and supposed this was the lot of the bad girl. Good girls got escorted.
‘You’ll be the girl for Sir Bernard,’ said Mrs Haverill bleakly, and began the walk up the winding stair to the balcony level and the first-floor suites. Carmen followed, as she supposed she was meant to do, and then stopped.
‘Mrs Haverill,’ she said to Mrs Haverill’s back. Mrs Haverill continued upwards. Carmen tapped her on the shoulder. Mrs Haverill jumped as if stung − she was not accustomed to human touch, it seemed − and turned to face her. ‘You know my name perfectly well,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you use it?’
‘You’re interchangeable,’ said Mrs Haverill. ‘That’s why. And I hope you’re not thinking of dining with Sir Bernard in public in that dress.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s white,’ said Mrs Haverill. ‘It is an insult to the brides of this country. Well, some of us work and some of us get by.’ And she continued up the stairs, Carmen following after. Carmen wondered if, when her soul was gone, she could have Driver strike Mrs Haverill dumb: but perhaps when your soul was gone it wouldn’t seem important − you’d just be impervious to insult: not suffer and smart under humiliation, because you’d ceased to be conscious of it. Driver would not have to alter the world for her sake: just rewrite her nature, for the benefit of the one, the disadvantage of the other. Easy peasy.
Sir Bernard’s suite was large, ugly, grand and rich with deep red leather. A pair of stag’s antlers loomed over a carved wooden fireplace. There were dark oil paintings on the walls: large ones gilt-framed, crowded with deep cliffs, chasms, stormy skies, tossing dark green foliage, and clusters of what looked like fireflies, silvery, gleaming against the black crags.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Like it? It’s just been refurbished.’
‘Love the paintings,’ she said. ‘Hate the room.’
Sir Bernard stood beneath the antlers, nursing a glass of sparkling water. He wore a black dinner jacket and black bow tie, so Carmen could hardly make any judgement of him at all: he seemed to be someone in an old film. If she touched him her hand might go right through the screen. Or perhaps he was a hologram. He was taller and thinner than she remembered: he might well have a star part in this film − be the villain himself. The old Sir Bernard, pre-Driver, would have had to make do with one of the bumptious minor baddies clustering round the Mafia boss. Perhaps this was all Driver offered − to promote you first from a non-speaking to speaking part, then from supporting actor to lead, from lead to world star.
Carmen could see, looking through the open door to the bedroom, a wide double bed with a dark red quilt, heavy crimson and gold tapestry curtains hung at the windows, caught back by a tassel. Perhaps those newly rich and famous always harked back to the grandeur of the Victorian past, in the same way as men who officially change sex and become women seem to like to go back to the fifties and wear twinset and pearls and sensible shoes. They choose what to them seems respectable, safe and boring, likely to last for ever.
Sir Bernard and Mrs Haverill, who seemed inclined to hover, for which Carmen was grateful, were having an altercation about whether Sir Bernard and his friend were to dine in the main restaurant or have a side table in the Bistro. Sir Bernard preferred the latter since he thought Carmen would find it less stuffy there: Mrs Haverill was determined they should dine where she had decided, that is to say, in the main dining room. There would be fewer witnesses, she suggested. Or perhaps Sir Bernard would prefer to cancel and a waiter should just bring up a tray with champagne and two glasses. Bellamy House had recently bought in some very reasonably priced champagne for just such occasions.
‘Look, Mrs Haverill,’ said Sir Bernard, surprisingly patient, ‘if I want to be seen dining with Miss Wedmore behind a potted plant, I will.’
Carmen looked more closely at the paintings and discovered that the fireflies were in fact faeries, with gossamer wings, dancing in the wind, regardless of the apparent danger of being battered to death against rocky crags.
Mrs Haverill left. Sir Bernard remarked, ‘I keep trying to fire that woman but I never quite manage. This place runs at such a profit, I relent at the last moment. She is famous for her awfulness. There are a whole lot of customers out there, it seems, who love nothing more than to be bullied and insulted. And I’m always surprised at how low the staff turnover is. So you like the paintings? A treasure trove of Martins turned up in someone’s attic. I stepped in before the Tate and got the lot for three million. A bargain. I suppose you identify with the faeries. Your white dress, this dark room−’
‘I hope I’m more substantial than that,’ said Carmen. She could see herself in the mirror behind the dreadful wall candelabra. Her face had changed between the front door and Sir Bernard’s room. Her eyes were deeper set. She thought she looked more interesting and rather less pretty, and was quite pleased with herself.
Sir Bernard said how he’d looked forward to meeting Carmen again. Their last encounter had gone badly. He’d been in a state: just broken up with Lady Rowena, the interior designer. His contract with her firm continued, however, perforce. Sometimes he thought they were taking their revenge. He was much better at controlling men than he was women. Look at Mrs Haverill… was he babbling on? He was nervous. He wished he could have a drink to steady him up, but he no longer drank, well hardly ever. Would Carmen care for a glass of Chablis? He’d open a bottle.
Carmen would. He did. His hand touched hers when he gave her the glass. He was no hologram: his skin against hers was dry and warm. She understood that he was real.
He
suggested they go down to dinner. Carmen said really it wasn’t necessary. He said sadly, ‘I see. You want to get it over.’ She denied it. Sir Bernard said, ‘One of the problems of being a new man, made over in some more desirable image, is that matters take on a new significance. A year or so back, a pretty girl who knew what to expect, a glass of wine, a closed door − there’d have been only one outcome, but now I’m a serious person. I wish that I were not. I can see this is going to be difficult.’
Carmen said, ‘Being made over, becoming a new woman, works the other way for me. What price virginity now, say I? How can you know the world and its ways if you know nothing about yourself, let alone the other sex?’
Sir Bernard was awed by the notion that she really was a virgin: in his experience girls were just sewn up. He had assumed Driver was exaggerating.
Carmen said, ‘There’s no virtue in it. I see it as neurosis. I’m just not normal. One of those women the fertility clinic won’t inseminate. There’s something wrong with them, everyone agrees.’
But the conversation was becoming clinical, too rational for comfort, or so Sir Bernard complained. Carmen could see that her new self, if it were to please, would have to work hard not at being bright and entertaining, but at being low-key and a little dull, or it might offend. She found herself wishing to please Sir Bernard and that was strange. She thought she caught a glimpse of Driver’s eyes looking at her out of the candelabra mirror but could not be sure. Sir Bernard’s will prevailed and they went down to dinner in the main restaurant. Mrs Haverill’s bleak face was split by a smile. The waiter came up to them and said, ‘Good evening. And how are you today? My name is George and I am here to serve you.’
Carmen said, ‘You are not so George, you are Henry.’
Henry said, ‘Mrs Haverill says I have to be George or I’ll lose my job,’ which was not of course exactly what had been said, but what George felt to be the case.
Sir Bernard said, ‘Well, that’s it. Mrs Haverill goes. She makes a nonsense of everything and this restaurant is stuffy beyond belief,’ and he made a note to remind himself of it. It was true that it was the eyes of the elderly only which were fixed on Carmen, and there was no one present vigorous or powerful enough to be worth the impressing. It was a disappointment. Carmen too felt it. Sir Bernard and she talked courteously about various matters − the short-sightedness of those trying to hold up the Eastern Scheme, with which Carmen found herself agreeing; whether or not Carmen liked opera: it was Sir Bernard’s passion, though not yet Carmen’s, in spite of her name (honestly: opera, in Fenedge!) but got no further than the hors d’oeuvres − melon and Parma ham for Sir Bernard, avocado and cassis sauce for Carmen − before she dropped a little cassis on her bodice.
‘It is very oppressive in this restaurant,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘It’s said to be haunted. There are too many dead eyes looking at us, and now you have spoiled your dress. We had better go upstairs and put cold water on it before it stains for life. That is what my mother used to do.’
She had not thought of him having a mother. They talked about her on the way upstairs. Of course he had loved his mother, very much, but she had not loved him. She had done her duty by him, no more. A religious woman who hated her husband, she and the cold east wind blowing in from the North Sea had made his childhood miserable: had defeated his brothers but had rendered him the more expansive, the more ambitious. Since he couldn’t rule her he’d rule the world. He’s always known it.
The bathroom was a big chilly room, with marble bath and basin and an ugly swan carved in white stone from which the water flowed. She took off her dress and handed it to Sir Bernard. He put one towel beneath the stain and dabbed at it expertly with another, which he wetted beneath the tap.
Driver had not bothered to provide underwear, so she was wearing, as usual, a pair of Raelene’s knickers and a bra done up with a safety pin. She wished now she had done better. She was not so much sluttish in her choice of undergarments as taking proper precautions against unexpected shape change, but how was Sir Bernard to know this? Though he was more likely to believe her than anyone else she knew. He handed her a towelling dressing gown from behind the door, without looking at her properly. She thought perhaps all the girls on his arm had been for show only. She did not wish to think so.
‘It’s very difficult,’ he complained, waving at the bed in the next room, ‘getting from here to there.’
Carmen said she could get into bed and turn off the light and he could undress in the bathroom and come through. He thought that would be a good idea. He said she must not construe his dithering as lack of enthusiasm. She said she would not.
I only have Carmen’s word for all this. By the time the episode had passed through her imagination and mine, the account of it may not much resemble any actual event, let alone any characters living or dead, as they are described in that cowardly denial on the screen before the film begins, which nobody ever reads.
Carmen took off what she was wearing and arranged herself neatly in the bed. The sheets were white cotton: the kind no doubt his mother favoured. She could see herself in a long swing mirror. Her hair was longer than she remembered, and a darker red than before; her breasts were above the sheet. She didn’t like them at all: there was a pronounced curve upwards from the ribcage to the nipple; they were immodest. She looked again at her face in the mirror and Driver looked back at her. She shrieked and covered her breasts with the sheet. It is a terrible and shocking thing to look in a mirror and see someone else’s reflection.
‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ said Driver. ‘I’m your father, after all. And those are my breasts, not yours. They’re sensational. I must say I can hardly forgive you for your underwear, but I suppose you’re here and that’s the main thing. It’s been quite a battle.’
‘How’s Annie?’ asked Carmen.
‘All depends,’ said Driver, ‘on what happens next. I want no screaming rape, meaning I can’t do this, I won’t do that, all the stupid things girls say. I want a happy, cheerful, secure and satisfied Sir Bernard delivered back to me in the morning, and then I’ll see about Annie’s breakfast.’
‘Mind you do,’ said Carmen, and hopped out of bed and threw a tartan rug over the mirror. His voice ranted on a little and then gave up. She put on the white towelling robe and sat on the end of the bed. Sir Bernard came in from the bathroom. He wore a red silk dressing gown with a black Chinese motif. His shins were hairy and his feet were bare. His toes were long.
‘You’re not making this easy,’ he said.
‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘This is your responsibility, not mine.’
‘The thing is, let’s face it,’ he said, ‘it’s impossible.’ He sat on the end of the bed beside her. ‘In the days when I drank, it was no problem. I lurched drunkenly forward and the woman fell drunkenly backward. But once you’ve told them about your mother her shadow hangs over you and spoils the fun.’
‘I don’t know how it’s done either,’ said Carmen, ‘that’s always been my problem. Why I’m in the state I am now. My friends have no trouble.’
‘When you’re actually presented,’ Sir Bernard complained, ‘with what you’ve specified, the kind of thing you say you want on the Dating Agency form − slim, red-headed, intelligent, cultured girl with tip-tilted breasts − it’s all too much. You’re terrified it might go wrong.’
‘Tall, slim, handsome executive type, non-smoker, non-drinker, sensitive −’ said Carmen. ‘I thought I meant Ronnie Cartwright, but I see now it could be you.’
He lay a tentative hand upon her knee: it remained tentative. He withdrew it. They sat side by side, companionably, but without touching.
‘All the same,’ he said. ‘It seems a pity. I do so hate to waste an opportunity. By my not wasting opportunities the Bellamy Empire has grown big. But not, alas, in this case, the Emperor.’
He said he thought his initial instinct had been right. He needed to marry her. In the quiet familial bed there would be no troubl
e. He would be as potent as the next man, probably more so. What did Carmen say? He would be honoured if she married him. They would wait until their wedding night for this kind of thing. If she would forgive the cliché, he wanted all of her, not some of her.
Carmen told me she thought of Annie, and of Peckhams, and of life ever after in Dullsville, Tennessee, and of Laura’s children for ever snivelling into their paper hankies; and she thought she could redecorate Sir Bernard’s suite and cheer him up, and she thought she might make up to him where his mother had failed, and she thought how perhaps when she’d said Ronnie Cartwright she’d always meant Sir Bernard anyway: and she thought no girl in her right mind would refuse such an offer: what was twenty years’ difference in age anyway: if there was no sex it might be just as well, and there might be: he was just behaving as a gentleman should. And while she was thinking, Sir Bernard spoke: ‘My millions would be at your disposal. I’ll get on with developing the world, keeping the wheels turning; you get on with saving the whale, the ozone layer and the rainforest. So long as you don’t interfere with my long-term plans, do what you like.’
‘Done,’ said Carmen.
‘Carmen,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘don’t tell Driver about this turn of events. If there’s anything he hates it’s anti-climax.’
‘Done,’ said Carmen.
They kissed on it, politely but lovingly, warm moist lips (hers) against warm dry ones (his). They slept in their dressing gowns, side by side.
