by Weldon, Fay
Be that as it may, Doctor Grafton was sent for: the general opinion being that I had slipped a disc. His young assistant came instead, rolled me over on to my face, and gave me a sharp, precise crack with the side of his hand in the small of my back. Now I don’t know what happened. Perhaps the paralysis was indeed hysterical; perhaps the Chicago neural graft had finally done its work; perhaps some disc in my backbone, which had been causing the trouble, was released: perhaps the benefit which flowed from Carmen’s assent to her own female nature flowed into me as well − though what feminist would want to hear that? At any rate, feeling and the capacity for movement came back into my legs. It was some months before I was, as it were, fully operational and was able, as they say, to take my place in normal society − though personally I think we were more normal in the Otherly Abled Centre than many outside it.
21
But I must tell you what happened up on the dunes on the evening of the Reconciliation Service. In my mind it was the same evening that I recovered the use of my legs: the same moon shone upon us all, but that’s how I like to remember it, not how it was. It makes a better story. Let us say it was because the whole town and many of the Bellamy House guests were up in the sand dunes, chomping their way through the gravel pits, frightening the waders away, that the roads were so empty that night and events turned out for me the way they did. (Had I arrived later at Mr Bliss’s stables, Dr Grafton and not his assistant might have turned up and matters been very different, but who is to say?)
Sir Bernard, his fiancée Carmen and their driver turned up at Bellamy House during the course of that afternoon. Red carpets awaited them. They had been on a pre-honeymoon in the Bahamas to escape the press. Carmen was tanned, and had a very large diamond ring upon her finger. The first thing she did on her arrival was to take a taxi to Landsfield Crescent to see Laura and Annie. Annie was back from New Zealand, buying her trousseau. She had decided against wearing the McLean wedding dress: she was having a new one made: the fabric woven specially by one of the few remaining mills in the North of England − the very same firm which had made the original. Having discovered just how much money there was in the McLean bank accounts, she had no fear of spending it, and since her will was now stronger than Mrs McLean’s − ‘One brush with death and she’s off, just like my sister,’ mourned the latter − had no trouble extracting all the funds she needed from the family.
Annie and Laura were gratified that Carmen had come to visit them: they’d thought perhaps she’d grown too grand. It was tea time. Caroline and Sara watched TV as they ate. Laura spoon-fed little Alexandra, now at last out of her plaster cast.
‘It’s like feeding birds,’ she complained. ‘Cheep cheep cheep, they go, and call you back if ever you try to get away. Don’t believe marriage is any kind of happy ending. It’s the beginning of trouble. I should never have done it. Why can’t you take my example as a warning?’
But Annie fingered a swatch of ivory silk fabric and Carmen turned her ring so it caught the light: they knew well enough they’d let Mrs Baker down, they said, but it had always been on the cards that they would. Annie said she had the responsibility of twenty thousand sheep, didn’t that add up to something? Carmen said she was already organising private funding for climatological research with relation to the ozone layer, was not that some kind of excuse? Alexandra hiccoughed and regurgitated a great deal of bland porridge and Laura gritted her teeth.
‘Fenedge girls grow rich,’ she said. ‘So what?’
There was a hoot from outside. It was Driver in the BMW.
‘So he’s still around,’ said Laura. ‘How’s your soul, Carmen?’
‘Just fine,’ she said.
The front door bell rang, and Carmen opened it to Driver. His uniform was silvery grey, and glinted like the inside of a plover’s wings.
‘You must come at once,’ he said, ‘the mumbo jumbo’s about to start. Anyone who’s anyone is up at the site, except you three. The protestors are going nuts, the camera crews are out, the Bishop’s setting up, and there are millions at stake. Will Sir Bernard be allowed to proceed or will he not? Will the East Coast be saved from flooding, or will the conservationists win the day and drown the human race? Lover boy wants you up there, Carmen, on the double, so get your arse in gear.’
‘I do what I please,’ she said.
‘No you don’t,’ said Driver. ‘Today’s favourite can get to be tomorrow’s hag. Skinny shanks! Remember I own your soul.’
‘You’d better go up with him, Carmen,’ said Laura. ‘I’ll get Kim to baby-sit and Annie and I’ll come up together.’
The three of them looked at Driver as if they had other plans for Carmen’s soul than that he should claim it so easily, and he sparked a bit and snarled; it was just like the old days.
Now there are varying accounts of this event. All agree that the site had been hard-cored, that is to say spread with aggregate and rolled to provide a flat, dark grey, dead surface, empty of all animal or plant life. The walls of the Roman villa had been flattened, its tiled floors had disintegrated, the holes in the ground that had once been graves were forgotten for ever, the Druid well was obliterated: all had been mished and mashed together to help create this useful and universal flatness. Only the spirits breathing and sighing in the restless air made everyone uneasy. The sun was setting; the moon was rising. The evening was glowing in yellows and oranges, not just pinks and reds, as evenings in this part of the world occasionally do when the winds from the east are about to change, and veer to the north, bringing the wild weather, blowing in the sea birds − the teal, the mallard, the pintail, the shelduck, the eider, the occasional Mediterranean gull, the lapwing. But they’d just take one look and be off again.
Ranged on the top of the sand dunes were seven earth-moving machines: they were bright yellow themselves, like children’s toys on a massive scale. It was clear they were waiting, poised, for the ceremony to finish, to swoop and begin trenching the hard core for the installation of the pre-stressed metal rods that would provide the base of an automated dock for ocean-going yachts, or so the press had been told. You could tell the machines were impatient. They fidgeted; their long arms hovering and shifting slightly from time to time.
On the slopes beneath the machinery stood the grey-suited executives of the Bellamy Empire, and the planning officials, and the Mayor of Fenedge and his team. They were not in sympathy with this event: respect for Church and State required them to be there, and with solemn faces, though in their hearts all thought it was mumbo jumbo.
Facing them on the other slope stood the protestors, a dishevelled lot, truculent and badly organised, their banners tawdry and hopeless. They’d lost. The Eastern Scheme proceeded. As a sop they’d been given a reconciliation service, offered by a Church which had lain down in front of big business, not the bulldozers, which had failed in its capacity for indignation. The Bellamy House guests, clambering over the ridge from the direction of the gravel pits, made their way to the other slope, where they felt more at home.
In the centre of the hard core stood a small trestle table, white-clothed. A couple of battery-run electric candles flanked a jam jar full of flowers. Late roses from someone’s garden: some pretty bracken. The evening wind sighed and lamented.
Sir Bernard and Carmen were down on the hard core next to the Bishop’s table. A couple of selected newspaper men, a single camera team and one radio reporter were with them, permitted to take advantage of the photo opportunity. The others, out of respect for the Church, were kept back by Sir Bernard’s security teams − Laura and Annie kept Carmen company. Driver parked nearby: he sat in the BMW, as if sulking.
The Bishop had the back of his 2CV open. He’d parked with the protestors. He was youngish and good-looking. He was wearing jeans and a sweater. He took out his robes and put them on. Mavis hovered around to help him; she wanted to adjust the flaps of heavy cream fabric that hung from his shoulders. His assisting clergy tried to edge her away, but she ignored them.
The Bishop took his shepherd’s crook from the back seat − it would not fit in the boot − and walked towards his table. There was scattered applause from the crowd, a Godless lot who saw this as mere spectacle, although impressive. A gust of cold wind rebuked them.
‘Pathetic,’ said Driver to the radio reporter, lowering his window to do so. ‘A service of reconciliation. What for? There’s nothing here that lives or grows. Not any more.’
‘Can I record this?’ asked the reporter.
‘No,’ said Driver, and the window slid up, nearly snapping off the reporter’s nose.
‘Don’t lower the seas,’ said Sir Bernard to the TV man. ‘Raise the land. Save the world and line the pocket! What this planet needs is one strong, good man, one man so immensely rich, immensely powerful, immensely wise, that all consent to his will. One man held back neither by electorate, nor Church, nor fear of failure, sustained by love –’
‘Can I record this?’
‘Certainly,’ said Sir Bernard.
‘Bernie,’ said Carmen, ‘do be careful. You’re getting a little carried away. It isn’t safe.’
‘Don’t be a wet blanket, Car,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘This is a wonderful day. Wonderful! Glorious! A day of triumph! Second only to our wedding day. And there being no more diversity of power, peace and justice shall prevail throughout the world.’
‘Attaboy!’ remarked Driver. He had got out of his car and was egging Sir Bernard on. He was grinning. It was not a pretty sight.
‘You tell ’em!’
‘As there is one God in heaven,’ Sir Bernard told them, ‘so shall there be his equivalent here on Earth.’
Driver’s eyes were unnaturally bright. The TV man wondered if both were high on cocaine. It was more than likely. He had his camera whirring.
‘I suppose we’ll never know now,’ remarked the press man, ‘just what treasures lie beneath our feet.’
‘The site is safely sealed over,’ put in Driver, since Sir Bernard looked blank, ‘for future generations, when new and more precise archaeological techniques have been developed. We are doing both the past and the future a service, as well as making the present prosperous.’
The wind got up a little. The crowd on the left sang ‘For All the Saints’: a scattered sound, but brave. Unbelievers joined in. Sir Bernard had a walkie-talkie in his hand. He liked to be directly involved. The contractor’s voice crackled through it. ‘Shall I keep back the machines, Sir Bernard, or shall we just go on? This delay’s costing a thousand a machine an hour. The men are already on overtime.’
‘Keep ’em back,’ said Sir Bernard, ‘till this charade is over.’
The contractor’s voice came through the radio speakers in the cabs of the earth-mover team. ‘Anyone else turns up any old bones, they join Jed Foster in the dole queue. Understood?’
It was unfortunate that his voice came through the public address system as well as in the cabs, but fortunate that the Bishop’s voice overlapped his.
‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, let us remember that in the distant past others like us walked to this very spot, in the same spirit as we do today, to lay their dead to rest, give thanks for their lives, and commend them to God, in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord −’
Driver guffawed, but the Bishop’s voice was rich and convincing and no one joined him in his derision. The Bishop held up his arm as if to hold back the bulldozers: a small, white, defiant figure centred in a black wasteland; he was Canute failing to hold back the waves of progress, but he was magnificent. A sigh ran round the living crowd, and subsumed the sighing of the dead. Mavis later swore she saw their spirits streaming off towards the west: white, like liquid gossamer, released, leaving the place which had held them captive for so long.
‘Man does not live by bread alone and woe to them that do not understand it − those who deny that Christ is within them,’ said the Bishop to the elements, and to all those who had ears to hear, and heard.
‘Eternal God,’ he said, and the sound carried out to sea, ‘who holds all souls in life: shed forth, we pray, upon your whole Church in paradise the bright beam of your light and heavenly comfort −’
Driver yawned but yawned alone.
‘− so that at last our dead brethren enter into the fullness of eternal joy, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.’
‘That’s got to be that,’ said the contractor, more publicly than he knew. ‘Back to work. Stand by to fire charges.’
Many of the crowd took to their heels. The table was hastily folded. Even the Bishop retreated. Laura and Annie clung together but wouldn’t abandon the action: they felt they saw too little of it.
‘What fools people are,’ cried Sir Bernard. ‘You offer them progress, they choose superstition.’ He held Carmen fast to his arm. She couldn’t have run if she’d wanted to. A whistle blew: birds wheeled into the air. Stones and dust flew all around them. The stones missed; the dust fell on everyone except Driver, who stayed shiny black and magnificent, proud as a raven perching next to a flock of raggedy, rusty crows. Sir Bernard ignored it all.
‘Let God himself,’ cried Sir Bernard, ‘marvel at man’s audacity. We will change the course of the rivers, we will reshape the mountains, we will reform our coasts − we will make the very globe bend to our will.’
‘Come off it, Bernie,’ begged Carmen. ‘What are you doing really? Spoiling a few acres, unsettling a few birds. Don’t say these things. It’s dangerous.’
‘The valleys exult,’ cried Sir Bernard. ‘Leviathan bows down. Like a worm I crept from the soil. Colossus-like I stride the earth −’
‘He’s flipped,’ said Laura. ‘You can’t marry a madman, Carmen.’
‘Leave now,’ begged Annie, but Carmen just said ‘I love him’ and wouldn’t be moved, not even when another explosion showered them with debris. They could see on the rim of the site the crowds melting, cars departing. The sun was sinking fast.
Sir Bernard left the group and scrambled to the top of a dune, the better to appreciate control of the landscape. He flung his arm to the sky.
‘See how the God approaches, a raging fire behind, a furious storm before. Let all heaven and earth be my witness: may my valleys be for ever full: the silver and the golden bowl intact for ever: this is the day of man’s creation, man’s victory over God − may this day last for ever!’
Now I bodge this together from many people’s accounts. I was not present. All agree that the Bishop’s service was inspirational, and that Sir Bernard stood on the edge of the site and raved, and that Carmen swore she loved him and seemed to mean it. Mavis says that she saw the sun rise again in the west and make its way back across the sky as if reality were in rewind, but she was the only one to do so.
All agree that Sir Bernard clutched his heart and had some kind of seizure − that he fell to the ground and rolled down the slope and lay there as if dead, as another explosion sent rock and debris flying and all for a second stood stunned. Some confirm that Driver said something bizarre, like ‘Jam today was what he wanted: he couldn’t wait for jam tomorrow, but tomorrow always comes,’ and that his voice was louder and stronger than it ought to have been, but probably because he had his radio system switched on and it was coming over the loudspeakers. It is clear that Carmen called out for an ambulance and Driver gloated and said, ‘Too late for all that resuscitation rubbish now. His soul is on its way to me: I feel its approach, I tingle, I tingle,’ and jerked about like Elvis Presley, and that Sir Bernard too twitched quite a bit before lying still.
And only Laura claims that with the last explosion she, Annie and Carmen found themselves in blackness, surrounded by a ring of flames, and that Sir Bernard’s body lay at their feet, that Driver, in a black-to-grey outfit suitable for the Lord of the Ravens, all metal feathers and broad shoulders, faced them and that his eyes were pools of fire; and that she was brave enough to tell him what nobody but her truly believed, or Dr
iver could conceive of − that Carmen’s relationship with Sir Bernard was platonic, that she was still a virgin, that the tears Carmen wept over Sir Bernard’s body were virgin’s tears, and so she had cheated him, and kept her soul, and so had Sir Bernard. I don’t believe all that. I think that’s just the fantasy of a girl who’s at it all the time, does not take proper contraceptive precautions, and has four children as a result.
