by Weldon, Fay
Now let my story begin. For three days we journeyed. For four days we had stayed at the disused town hall, the Hôtel de Ville of the village of Roc Fumel, twenty kilometres from the town of Blasimon-les-Ponts, where the Band played by day in the cafés and in the market square; and by night in the Cabaret – when it could get itself together that is. And for eight nights and seven days my mind had been held caught, captive, stopped like a video with the pause button pressed. On the ninth night, for some reason, it started up again, busier than ever.
For some reason, I say, but in my heart I knew why, though I resisted the knowledge. My disguise had been penetrated. Jack knew. Sandra the secretary had become Starlady Sandra, and love was no longer enough: she needed all her wits about her, yet again.
3
So Let Us Begin With – A Burst of Radioactivity
I explained my theories on form, style and content to Jack, the mad trumpet-player, but I don’t think he was listening. He was asleep. It was three or so in the morning: he’d had a hard day’s night; the cabaret audience would rather have had rock than jazz and let the Band know it. The musicians finished early and aggrieved, and for once we came home before two, but instead of making love Jack fell asleep, or pretended to. How was I to tell which? I hadn’t known him long. Men are so full of surprises. I ran my forefinger down his hairy thigh but there was no response – in him, at any rate. His flesh was somehow turned away from me. Was it my doing or the world’s? There were rich fields for speculation here, but I resolutely turned my mind away from them, quelling as best I could those feelings of resentment and spite which welled up in me. So my grandmother had taught me to do, and her mother her likewise – a lesson which goes back to Victorian times. Too much thought, it was supposed, could overheat and damage the female brain, too much response tip it into hysteria, too much speculation lead it into dangerous erotic areas. Better by far for a woman to train her mind to dwell on pleasant notions and images, to avoid introspection or self-analysis, to sidestep the consciousness of her desires, or else the winds of passion might blow the poor frail thing altogether away. Well, they may have been right. For here I was; I, the lady astronomer, altogether swept away, lying on a truckle bed under a single harsh blanket, a hard bolster beneath my head, in a high square room empty save for four beds – two unused – and a child’s desk, the plaster of its walls crumbling, its wooden floors disintegrating, in a disused town hall in a village not far from Bordeaux, France. Swept away, blown away, Sandra the lady astronomer: she who was used to the grace and comfort of Greenwich, London, from whence the mean time originates. It didn’t bear thinking about.
I tried Jack’s thigh again. Nothing. He had firm, agreeably sinewy flesh – the spirit, forget my body, quite melted with expectation. Never mind. The pangs of unsatisfied desire are easily enough dealt with, as I had learned during my years with Matthew. Treat them like a stomach ache: see them as something disagreeable but temporary and the pangs subside, and no damage done – or not much, not much. In other words, I thought of something else. I had rather hoped not to be obliged so to do with Jack. Indeed, until this moment, when he used his body as an instrument of pain, not pleasure, I had on the whole managed not to.
I heard sniffling from the next room. It was Frances, Jack’s daughter; she was crying. If I could hear her crying, what could she not hear (on a good night) of Jack’s and my love-making? I did my best to be quiet – and he might or might not have been trying; as I say, I hardly knew him well enough to tell – but I couldn’t suppose my best was good enough, as my history teacher Miss Martin would say of my essays, and his was certainly not.
‘What do you mean, Sandra, you can only do your best? Your best isn’t good enough. The truth is in your marks, and this one is A minus. Not good at all, Sandra. You with a minus!’
I had suggested to Frances that she slept in the room above, not next door – this French town hall, this Hôtel de Ville, could sleep thirty-two with ease – eight rooms with four beds in each, mattressed and blanketed as some civil defence exercise – and the band and entourage occupied only five rooms and ten beds, so Frances could surely have her choice, but she claimed upstairs was haunted and, besides, the stairs were rotten, and supposing her foot went through them in the middle of the night, in the dark – the only light switch which worked was downstairs, by the front door – and so on and so forth, and chose the room next door to Jack and me. So she would have to take the consequences: I had done my best. The girl was fifteen; she was in any case her father’s responsibility, not mine.
The sniffling stopped. Frances had nothing to cry about that night; nothing but quiet emanated from Jack’s and my two pushed-together beds, except that now, half-expected, half-resisted, I began once again to be conscious of, inside my head, silent to the outside world, that awareness somewhere between hearing and feeling, of the wild pitter-patter of thought. Jack’s fault. Look at it like this. He had plucked out the needles of my sensuality, raised them like control rods out of a reactor, and now the processes of the mind took off again – electrons and neutrons whizzing here and there where they had no business to be, only barely in control, in their effort to get themselves back in balance.
Form, style, content – in that order of importance. The cosmos is composed of intricate patterns which contain the key to its purpose. That is what I mean by form. The cosmos also has a certain style which can be recognised and predicted. We can, by observing the particular style of our own galaxy, project ahead our own discoveries: that is to say, know what we are looking for before we find it. (Neighbouring galaxies have different styles, which we do not yet understand, but presently will.) Content, mere stars, planets, black holes, and so forth, are the mere stuff of the universe: pawns moved here and there to demonstrate form and style. Content is last and least.
I explained so much and more to Mad Jack the trumpet-player, but, as I say, I don’t think he was listening: he was asleep. And just as well, if I wished my disguise unpenetrated. Why should a research assistant be offering this instruction aloud, in the middle of the night: albeit a secretary working at the Greenwich Observatory, for such the Band and Jack supposed me to be. Now everyone knows astronomers are nuts: their clerical staff are supposed to be sane.
Of course, I, Sandra Harris, was in truth no research assistant but – until eight days ago, when I had blown it – was next in line to being Astronomer Royal. I it was, now let me reveal to you, who five years ago discovered the Planet Athena (since taken up by astrologers everywhere as the planet which explained all the things they hadn’t so far been able to) and with it, at the age of thirty-seven, discovered the penalties of success, worldly fame and a high income. That is to say, that men don’t like you for it. Listen, it’s not all that difficult to discover a planet, if you have a mathematical training and my instinctive understanding of form, style and content, and can perceive, by the tingling of your toes, just where the gap in the universe must be. But try telling that to a would-be lover.
Just a tiny little planet, honestly, Jack, and its discovery a small matter in the light of other of my astronomical achievements. To discover a planet is not to invent it, any more than Columbus invented America. But from the fuss, you would have thought so. What a to-do! I would have called it Harris, as the planet Herschel was named after Herr Herschel, that being my prerogative, but what sort of name is that for a planet? The planet Harris? It was before the days I became Sorenson, which just might have been possible. Athena, I thought. Someone childless, as I am, projecting a somewhat pure and disdainful image, as I do. Or try to. Princess Grace-ish.
‘Jack,’ I said to my sleeping lover, ‘Jack, if the audience didn’t respond to you tonight it may be that you failed to observe the euphonies of form, style and content. If such things are attended to, even the unconverted will become enthusiasts. Those who love Rock, your anti-god (rivalling only Dixie in your abhorrence) will dance about and enjoy themselves and find in your evening’s performance total satisfacti
on. The Citronella Jumpers don’t have to worry about style. It’s yours and that’s that. Content, now, I admit, is scarcely under your control – you know only so many numbers between you – but form – ah, form! If instead of standing on the platform and playing whatever came into your head, in response to your perception of the audience’s requirements – quite often a faulty response, if you ask me – you got some kind of rhythm going, a slow number, then two fast, then a blues, then two fast, then a slow – or whatever – the audience would fall into the pattern of your requirements, and you would not have to grope to satisfy theirs. Get the form right, grasp the whole before the detail, and then it will surely add up to more than the sum of its parts and that,’ I said, ‘holds good for an evening’s performance by a jazz band touring foreign parts, or a painting on a gallery wall, or, as I have come to discover myself, a short story. Content is next to nothing, style counts, but form is all: just a pity it needs something to work upon. God, the great creator, despises the material universe, his content, as anyone can observe: it is full of errors. Just as you, Jack, playing ‘Dr Jazz’ in your nonchalant way or ‘When the Saints Come Marching In’, those numbers which the crowd loves above all, despise the very notes you play, and hardly bother to get them right. Too easy, too straight, too head on, too, God help us, popular! You, who want to be loved, but can’t bear to be loved, in music as in life! The notes are tools to an end, the best you can use, not the end in itself. The end is something vague and great you grasp for!’
So I spoke, and spoke, and spoke, and Jack slept on. Just as well, for it’s a rare man likes to be told what to do in his own best interests. Even I, Grace Kelly of a lady astronomer, know this. But perhaps he did hear or his unconscious did. For when dawn broke, balm to my unsleeping eyes, Jack raised his narrow head from the hard bolster, and squinted with his brown eyes into the sun which slatted into the dusty room through a broken shutter and said:
‘You must get fucking bored, listening to music you don’t understand.’
‘Never bored,’ I said. ‘It gives me something upon which I can focus my thoughts.’ If nothing else, I am grammatical.
‘That’s what I mean,’ he said. ‘Jazz is an experience, not a focus for thought. So don’t feel obliged to come along. Stay home if you want.’
Jack wakes up suddenly, into full alertness. Not for him the eye rubbing, moans and groans of other men. Sleep comes to him as an unwelcome interruption in his life’s business, descending suddenly, and rising rapidly, like a blind on a too-tight spring, whirr-rr, whizzing. He’s very thin, long and thin. Long, blond and thin, with bright darting brown eyes. Women love him. I would see their eyes follow him: and he look back with speculative interest – not so concerned with the state of their bodies – or so he would give the agreeable impression – but their souls. The very thought of it that morning, the very breadth of the arc of his interest, made me feel quite nasty.
‘You mean I put you off,’ I remarked. ‘And that’s why you missed notes last night.’
‘I don’t miss notes,’ he said.
‘I was joking,’ I said, but I wasn’t. Even I, a lady astronomer, discoverer of the Planet Athena, planet of the nuclear age (according to New Astrologer) can tell a missed note when I hear one, or rather, fail to.
‘You don’t put me off,’ he said. ‘You turn me on, that’s all. I can’t wait for us to get back to bed. If occasionally I do miss a note, that’s why. It’s letting the Band down. It has to stop.’
You think this speech pleased me? It did not. Judge a lover, judge anyone, by what he does, not what he says. Don’t listen to a man: words are treacherous. Watch his body language, how he passes you the salt, or fails to. Is he there by your fire, or calling on the telephone to say he wished he was? These things tell you more, far more, than words. Beware the man, I say, who declares his desire, and fails to demonstrate it. It was not coincidental that these, the first words – rather than deeds – of commitment and passion Jack the mad trumpeter had uttered to me – ‘I can’t wait for us to get back to bed’ – were spoken after the first night of our acquaintance in which we had not spent at least a part struggling and striving each to get nearer the other; to become one, as the lost electron, the stray neutron, cast out by its nucleus, struggles and strives for ever to find a home, whizzing here and there to the great detriment of all around, especially organic matter – butting its head into cells, causing pandemonium, disorganisation, and even death. What Jack meant, but didn’t say, was that he had discovered my identity, was discomposed to the point of playing badly, was angry with me, feared impotence, had hardly slept a wink but merely pretended to, and now was thoroughly upset. But would he say so? Like hell he would!
At that inopportune moment, Frances came in. I try to understand and forgive Frances. I explain to myself that no doubt she felt as if she was afflicted by a great burst of radioactivity, as her father and myself heaved away on our side of the wall. She had all the symptoms: she kept complaining of feeling sick, and headaches, and so forth, and her little fingernail was turning black (mind you, she had slammed it in the minibus door) and her father put it all down to foreign food and strange water and the strain of travel, but I knew well enough what it was. It was her father’s and my struggle to become one, as the isotope of a metal struggles to lose its oddity, which had poisoned her. I could almost feel sorry for Frances, but how she did tag along! Well, she could tell the story to the papers for all I cared.
‘Starlady Sandra in run-away Romance: daughter tells all.’ You know the sort of thing. Not that I care about the world’s opinion; its inability to distinguish between astrology and astronomy is what really oppresses me. Not the way it behaves but how stupid it is.
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘time to get up.’
And so ended my hopes of at least some kind of sexual entendre with Jack before the day began. I like being woken in the morning by the thrust of the male member, before the mind is up and working, and the parts are swollen and stiff outside, but responsive and willing within, so orgasm comes suddenly and unexpectedly, taking the body quite by surprise. But words had already been spoken this morning and unwelcome words at that; the mind was working only too well, and the God Eros (or so it is my opinion) doesn’t too greatly care for that, so I don’t suppose Frances has spoiled much.
Picture the scene, the unedifying scene. Me and Jack sitting up in bed, naked. I small, pale, precise of feature and form, short hair in a blonde unruffled (alas) bob; he tall, olive-skinned, strong, muscly but narrow, fair haired, bright eyed, very white of even tooth: me with two soft round breasts, pink (not brown, thank God) nippled, and those nipples pointing to the ceiling, not (thank God, or my father, as we shall see) towards the door or floor; he with the ribs showing beneath the skin, arching strongly out of the central breast-bone, hair matted; and Frances looking at us, trying not to look at us. She’s a big girl; an early developer, beautiful, broad-shouldered, big-breasted, narrow-hipped, long-legged, with a mass of red hair and a white white skin and only a freckle or so and a spot or so to aggravate her, and a wild, untidy look, so at odds with the mien and style of the neat, contained, tough young women of France. Eyes follow her, as they follow Jack, but with curiosity as much as admiration. She feels it. She doesn’t much like France, but doesn’t know why. (Apart from my presence in that land, of course, where she’d hoped to get her father to herself.) She was wearing white shorts and an acid green Citronella Jumpers T-shirt which swelled firmly and agreeably over her chest. Her long legs were a mass of inflamed and lumpy mosquito bites. Or perhaps, of course, the bites of bed bugs. I wouldn’t be surprised. She should have taken the room upstairs. Eros imposes his own punishments, in his own way.
‘What’s the French for fleas?’ Frances asks. ‘I’ve been bitten all night. I didn’t sleep a wink.’
‘Puces,’ I say. ‘Les puces. Bitten, were you? Lucky old you.’ Fortunately neither Frances nor her father can be bothered working out the last three words, or el
se are unable to do so, by reason of the slowness of their minds. I do not at first cover my breasts with the sheet. If Frances comes in without knocking she will see what she will see. But Jack frowns: he understands the value of hypocrisy: well, so do I. I respond to his frown. I pretend that I’m only in bed with Jack for medical reasons, or because there’s only one bolster available for every two beds, and pull up the covers to make myself respectable. I feel Jack relax.
How odd it is that I should have to take moral responsibility for this affair of ours, as if he, jaunty Jack Stubbs, would be safely and demurely at home with his wife if it were not for Seductive Sandra. Not fair! But then life in its observable patterns is grossly unfair; nor did I, in truth, any more require it to be fair, since the time I discovered Athena and the scales had begun to tip so unjustly in my direction: not just pretty (in a ladylike kind of way) bright (when I cared to show it) newsworthy (if I wanted to be) but a casual picker-up of planets from the sky! Why should I of all people want things to be fair? My legs were twice as long as dumpy Anne Stubbs’, my eyes twice as large, my cunt (if you will forgive my bluntness) twice as tight, and I’m fed up with pretending to be what I’m not – that is to say, respectable, reputable and boring. Twice? I exaggerate, but you know what I mean. Why should I want to give up these things? These are the benefits I was born with, the perks I picked up out of mess and muddle, and general bloodiness – why deny them? Those benefits which I have earned – the esteem of my peers, the money due to my status – prove to be no use to me at all, when it comes to dealing with Mad Jack.
