by Weldon, Fay
In the morning the helicopter came early for Sir Bernard, but before he left he rang his PR agent and told him to arrange a wedding; as soon as possible, to oil the troubled Eastern Scheme waters.
When he had left, Carmen took the tartan rug from the mirror.
Driver’s face leered out of it. His breath misted the glass, which was peculiar.
‘How was that?’ he asked.
‘He’s killing as many birds as possible with one stone,’ said Carmen. ‘We’re getting married with maximum PR.’
‘I told you it would work out fine,’ said Driver, delighted.
‘I suppose it was you who gave him the gift of infinite virility,’ said Carmen, and yawned and stretched with every appearance of languor.
‘He didn’t ask for it,’ said Driver. ‘He said he never had any problems in that respect. I’m glad to know he made it without me.’
‘Indeed he did,’ said Carmen. ‘Now will you please go and see to Annie?’
Whether or not Carmen’s tale was true, whether or not the night spent with Sir Bernard was as chaste as she said − and what we were hearing was just another example of Carmen’s capacity for blocking out her own sexuality; in other words, downright lies − the fates seemed to take her compliance with male authority, her willingness to submit to Sir Bernard, as good enough for them, and Annie ate, and was restored.
Staff Nurse approached Annie that morning as she lay white-faced in Intensive Care, wired up to all kinds of monitors and drips, none of which seemed to do her any good. Her blood pressure was low, her pulse slow: she hadn’t spoken for days.
Said Staff Nurse, hand on hip, ‘I don’t know why this hospital wastes its energy on people who’d rather be dead. If I had my way there’d be no treatment whatsoever for anyone with cigarette-, sex- or diet-related diseases.’
A flash of anger lit up Annie’s eyes. Her pulse took a little leap on its monitor.
‘No point in offering you breakfast,’ said Staff Nurse. ‘You’d only turn up your nose. Anyway, it’s all gone.’
Annie sat up; the monitors went haywire, alarms went off, quietly, so as not to alarm the patients.
‘I’m entitled to breakfast,’ she said. ‘You’re paid to provide me with it, so do it.’ Mrs Haverill could not have done better. Staff Nurse fetched it; Annie ate, not much, but just enough to move her off the critical list.
When Tim arrived two days later, he found Annie sitting up in bed, sipping hot chocolate.
‘Oh, Annie,’ said Tim.
‘Oh, Tim,’ said Annie.
‘I’ll stay home and watch TV with you,’ said Tim, ‘if that’s what you want.’
‘I’ll go out and bunje jump with you,’ said Annie, ‘if that’s what you want –’
And so forth and so on until the need to fix a rapid wedding date was re-established.
‘Isn’t it drenching time?’ asked Annie. ‘You shouldn’t have left the sheep. It was irresponsible. Laura had no business dragging you all the way over here.’
‘I’ll pay her fare over,’ said Tim, ‘and that of any of your friends you care to name.’
‘We can’t afford to waste money like that,’ said Annie. ‘Where would it stop? I have an excellent recipe for apricot chutney; your mother will love it: let’s get home as soon as possible. And we’re not going Club Class, we’re going ordinary, like anyone else.’
20
The local evening papers were the first to run the news of the Bellamy-Wedmore engagement. The headlines were big enough, but respectful. ‘Local Girl Makes Good’ and ‘Peckhams Employee to Marry Boss’. The national media, who picked it up the next day, took off with excitement. ‘The Baron To Marry Bimbo,’ cried The Sun, which was scarcely fair. ‘Frozen Chicken Girl Wins Tycoon’s Heart.’ ‘Say goodbye to hope, girls: he’s snaffled!’ and so forth.
Stephen went out and bought all the papers.
‘Now how did she swing that one?’ asked Andy.
‘I always knew she had it in her,’ said Raelene.
Stephen guffawed, and offended them.
‘You’ll have to get a job, Stephen,’ said Andy. ‘Can’t hang about here for ever.’
‘You do,’ observed Stephen.
‘I suppose it’s time I stirred myself,’ said Andy. ‘Can’t let our Carmen down. She won’t want layabouts in the family now. And how about you cleaning this house up a bit, Raelene?’
‘How about you doing it for a change?’ said Raelene, so swiftly and sharply that to her astonishment Stephen actually got up and started picking up lager cans and putting them in the bin. Andy contemplated a full-length photograph of Carmen, which took up all of Page 4, and said, ‘Personally, I always thought our Car could make it to Page 3 if she tried. But Lady Bellamy isn’t bad. I’m proud of her.’ He started wiping down the front door, in preparation for the arrival of the media.
Henrietta and Shanty Cotton studied the photograph as they ate breakfast.
‘Fancy that,’ said Henrietta. ‘Carmen Wedmore of all people. Isn’t that just lovely? Except I’m afraid it will keep the Sacred Site out of the headlines for a while.’
‘That’ll be what Sir Bernard has in mind,’ said Shanty Cotton. He was eating muesli with skimmed milk. He had stopped eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and was not looking so red in the face.
‘I’m sure it’s true love,’ said Henrietta, and Shanty Cotton was ashamed of himself. Poppy would never have said anything so sweet and trusting. He decided that Poppy was not a good person to have in his life. He would get rid of her before Henrietta found out. Not that he was normally averse to Henrietta finding out − it kept her on her toes − and he felt ashamed of this too.
He leant across the table and squeezed her hand and her face turned pink with pleasure. It was a wonderful thing to be able to do for another human being, and so simply. To turn Poppy pink with pleasure a man had to exhaust himself, and eat muesli.
Kim saw the photograph and said to Woodie and Laura, ‘They’ve air-brushed it.’
‘They have not,’ said Laura.
‘If I say anything you contradict it,’ said Kim. ‘I’ve had about enough of it. Why can’t you be more like Angela? Now there’s a woman to be getting on with.’
‘Then you just get on with her,’ said Laura and got up and put on her coat.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Woodie and Kim in unison. They liked her to stay in one place, she had found, and do nothing unpredictable.
‘I’m going to see Angela,’ said Laura.
‘You can’t do that,’ said Woodie and Kim in unison.
‘I can,’ she said, and she did.
‘I think,’ said Laura to Angela, ‘the best thing is for Kim to move in with you to save you from yourself. Then Woodie and I will have the house to ourselves.’
‘Would I have to cook for him?’ asked Angela. She seemed to have the mental age of a child of nine.
‘Yes, you would,’ said Laura. ‘And you and he can baby-sit for Woodie and me, so long as you’re never alone with Woodie in a room again.’
‘All right,’ said Angela placidly. ‘Kim’s quite old, but I don’t mind.’
‘Move me out and move me on,’ said Kim, when he heard. ‘I don’t mind. I deserve it. You keep the house. I’m a black plastic bag man, at heart. Always was: what do I need with a house? All I need is someone else’s nice warm bed and no responsibility. What about Kubrick?’
‘Take Kubrick with you,’ said Laura. ‘Look after him yourself.’
And after that there was no more trouble between Woodie and Laura. She came to me to ask for my views on sterilisation, and I said I didn’t advise it, though what did I know? Woodie had a vasectomy instead and, though that always smacks to me of self-punishment, I daresay he thought he needed punishing. But I believe it was the reversible kind. Whoever knows what’s going to happen next?
The photograph of Carmen presented itself to Alan and Mavis, newsprint blowing in the wind, rattling through the sky, landing at
their feet. They had seen it before but naturally studied it again. ‘She isn’t wearing a bra,’ said Mavis. ‘I’ll swear she isn’t. Our Annie would never be photographed like that.’
‘Our Annie is doing all right for herself,’ said Alan. ‘She’s found true love and that’s more important than marrying money.’
They were up at the construction site; sitting by the side of an oblong hole in the ground, where a skeleton in a lead coffin had been discovered. Whoever it had been was over six feet tall without the skull, which was missing. Archaeologists had put the bones in a plastic bag and labelled them: they’d taken photographs of the coffin and carted that away as well.
‘I call it grave-robbing,’ said Mavis to one of them: a tough young man with a red beard, who was removing the pegs in the ground that had distinguished Bronze Age from the rest. They had lost interest in this part of the site: the pegs were needed elsewhere: they were in short supply. Someone had turned up an elaborate tiled Roman paving, in good order.
‘That’s no grave,’ he said, kicking sand into it to prove his point. ‘Once everything’s gone it’s a hole in the ground.’
‘Not to the spirit which laid in it,’ said Mavis, her pale eyes rolling a little, as if Count Capinski were coming back. He hadn’t been around for a while, not since Annie had risen from her sickbed and walked. Mavis and Alan had held hands while they walked up to the site.
The archaeologist moved on, complaining of the number of gawpers and gapers who not only made it hard for the contractors to get on with their work, but in their ignorance trampled scientific evidence underfoot. There was a lot to be done – the bulldozers were due to roll. Yes, yes, there was plenty of time to do the job properly. People made such a fuss. They were sentimental.
‘I don’t think it’s sentimental,’ said Mavis when he’d gone. ‘I think if a body’s three thousand years old or three days old it deserves the same respect. Not to be put in a plastic bag and dumped on a shelf in some college somewhere so someone can get a degree.’
She and Alan sat for a little beside the hole in the ground, out of respect for the dead, and contemplated mortality, and the fact that the University Archaeology Unit, which was doing a study of the site, was employed by Bellamy Enterprises, and no doubt wished to be employed again. The unit of whichever university accomplished the most work in the least time for the minimum pay, and kept the public at bay, and never held up the development schedule, and fulfilled the letter of the law − which insisted that ancient sites, once discovered, were at least minimally investigated − was the unit which survived to work again.
‘Six feet tall and without a skull,’ said Mavis. ‘I wonder who he was, or what happened,’ and she shivered. ‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t nice. I can feel it.’
The sky above them was yellow-streaked and sulphurous. Birds flew overhead: to Mavis and Alan they were nameless: though Mavis knew a raven when she saw one − which she never liked to do, particularly in the gardens of her patients, since they were birds of ill omen. If she did catch sight of a raven she’d get the family to call in Dr Grafton at once, just to be on the safe side. She could feel a breath on her neck. Perhaps it was the wind, perhaps it was something else. She could hear the whispers of distress around: a vast uneasiness rising from the earth.
‘Funny place, this,’ said Alan. ‘Never seen anything like it, betwixt and between,’ and indeed it was a melancholy place, spoiled as a landscape, but not yet hard-cored, concreted, put to human use. The Eastern Scheme was in temporary abeyance as injunctions were received and fought by the Bellamy lawyers, who expected a satisfactory outcome. The press, as Sir Bernard had anticipated, had stopped nagging about the rights and wrongs of the development. Its readers, only cursorily concerned with such matters, were far more interested in the Wedding of the Year, and what special qualifications Carmen could possibly have thus to entrap the untrappable Sir Bernard. They could unearth no previous boyfriends, which was in itself suspicious, though Poppy gave an interview in which she let slip that in her opinion Carmen had got promotion by sleeping with her boss, and then gained access to Sir Bernard by sleeping with his chauffeur. This sent the press belting round to Shanty Cotton’s home, but the Cottons were on a second honeymoon. Sir Bernard’s driver was on a bodyguard course somewhere in Switzerland and could not be found. The Sun came to the conclusion, welcome to its readers, that Carmen was a virgin; although features about the new celibacy fell on stony ground. To be a virgin, they quickly realised, was to be pure when all around were impure, and that was interesting. Celibacy, which implied no one was at it anyway, was a bore.
Old newspapers whipped around Mavis and Alan as the wind rose. Someone had fetched them in for packing human remains and artefacts, no doubt, and then forgotten them.
‘Tell you what, Alan,’ said Mavis, ‘I think we’d better get the Church in to do an exorcism.’
‘Can’t you do it?’ he asked, surprised.
‘I’d rather it was someone official,’ she said, and felt better at once. The wind which whirled the newsprint took another layer of sand off the dunes which Jed Foster had already skimmed with his skimming machine. (Jed Foster had lost his job, for reasons quite unconnected with his disclosures about the site, or so it was said.) Mavis and Alan got sand up their nostrils, and between their teeth, and when Alan had a bath that night there was sand in his belly button. Mavis took a bath with him, since the Count was not around. She said she felt he’d finally died, poor old man, of cold and disease in his dungeon somewhere long ago. It was rare for the spirits of the living to travel, said Mavis, and out of their own time, but it sometimes happened, at least according to her books. She hoped she’d made his last days easier. She was pleased, Mavis said, to have Alan to herself again, now that Annie was finally off their hands. The bath was quite a squeeze, since neither of them was as slim as they used to be.
Alan said, ‘Well, I’m glad you finally decided three’s a crowd.’
Mavis said, ‘I told you that years ago, when you made me have Annie.’
That at least is how I imagine the scene. At Mavis’s instigation the local bishop was asked by the protestors if he was willing to perform some kind of religious ceremony over the graves and, to many people’s surprise, he agreed. It could not be exorcism, he said, because there was no real evidence of hauntings, only at Mavis’s say-so, but a service of reconciliation was perfectly in order. And that too is how it happened that Count Capinski never made another appearance, and Mavis closed up her healing shop. Dr Grafton, suddenly busy, took on a young assistant, who had more faith in what were known locally as ‘doctors’ drugs’ than did his employer, and those who believed in them chose to see the younger man. The medical needs of the neighbourhood were at least adequately served at last.
Those who looked beyond the headlines as the Bellamy romance broke would have seen a brief paragraph announcing the death of one of the oldest women in the country, that of Alison’s mother, whose heart had simply stopped beating in her sleep. ‘Fancy having to wait,’ said Alison after the funeral, which she made me attend, ‘to be eighty-seven before you’re free of your mother and can be your true self!’
She said she thought now at last she was allowed to give up and be old. She stood on her head for the last time. She ceremoniously tore up her driving licence. She would have to look after herself from now on, she told me. She thought she would look for some kind of sheltered accommodation. I would have to visit her, from now on. I said that might be difficult. She said the least I could do was make the effort.
The County agreed to ferry me by ambulance to and from the Otherly Abled Centre in Fenedge, since the new back entrance allowed their vehicles proper access. The town had taken on a new lease of life − it didn’t exactly bustle, but it had certainly become busier − as a result, I suspect, of the arrival of the media to examine the life and times of Carmen Wedmore and discover how exactly it is that poor girl catches rich man. The pubs filled up: even Angela’s sandwich van
made some kind of profit. Trade begets trade. The greengrocer was sufficiently heartened to buy back his shop from Raelene and Andy, for whom Sir Bernard purchased a house in Landsfield Crescent, where they said they’d always felt most at home, and Fenedge was gratified once more by the sight of oranges and apples, pears and plums and a nice healthy cauliflower or two in its otherwise grey and frankly lifeless centre.
My daily ambulance rides were comfortable enough but, after my adventures with Alison, boring. One evening, desperate for diversion, I took it upon myself to visit Alison in the old people’s home whither she had, following her mother’s death, almost instantly departed. Mr Bliss’s stables had changed hands once or twice and were now Restawhile and home for twenty elderly residents. ‘Rest a while till what?’ Alison asked bitterly, even as she put her possessions up for sale and moved in. ‘The grave?’ But it was her choice to be there. I left in my chair at five-thirty in the evening, for a journey that I knew would take more than an hour and exhaust me. It did. It rained a little. I was uncomfortably damp beneath my layers of plastic. The new kerbstones installed on what I remembered as halfway between country track and country road jolted my spine badly as my wheels encountered them. The light was bad, worse than I had anticipated. I had brought a torch, and needed it. But then the skies cleared: and there was the moon, rising and full. I realised I was on the road towards the Devil’s safe house, and that I had been rash in attempting the journey. I half expected to see hordes of vampire bats swooping towards me, but of course that was nonsense. Sealord Mansion had long been Bellamy House and helicopters, if anything, now took the place of the vampires. But I could hear the sound of the natterjacks, or thought I could, and that was eerie − the sound of a busy, alien life still managing to hold on somewhere between bank and launderette. A fox crossed the road in front of me, with what might have been a chicken in its mouth.
He stopped and stared with red eyes − I shone my torch at him: in artificial light animals always seem to have red eyes − and then trotted on: his mouth impolitely full. There were no cars on the road: it was just as well. It is bad enough for the motorist to be held up by cyclists, far worse to have to crawl along behind a plastic-clad woman in a wheelchair. But as the moon rose higher my fear dissolved. Good and bad, I saw, were made even in the same light: the star − or was it a planet? Venus perhaps? The library service did not normally carry books on popular astronomy, but I could always ask – which kept the moon company kept me company too. To live in the world was not to be lonely: it was an insult to it to be bored: a privilege to exist at all, even without the use of legs. I turned into Mr Bliss’s stables, as everyone still called the place − forget Restawhile – and made my way up the lane where once Laura and Carmen had run on a hot summer afternoon, terrified by a swarm of bees. I found the front door in the dark − no one had bothered to install an outdoor light − and reached forward for the bell and reached so far I simply fell out of my chair, and hit my side a crack on the metal boot-scraper, and rolled on my back, and lay there, contorted and in agony, calling out but unheard until Alison, who naturally liked to make herself useful wherever she was, opened the front door to put the milk bottles out. (In fact the milkman no longer called, for the local dairy had ceased its delivery service, and the bottles had to be fetched in from the step again, but no one had the heart to tell Alison so. She was born, I imagine, with the knack of creating extra work for others, and remained so until the end of her days. Perhaps it was sheer amazement at what she had created that kept her mother alive for so long.)
