by Weldon, Fay
If I am this paragon of beauty, intelligence and common sense, I am obliged to ask myself, then what am I doing on a lumpy mattress in deepest France without even a proper sheet to cover my breasts but only some kind of pressed fibre blanket, while this new lover, who only yesterday promised fit to be my knight in shining armour, he who would with his coming explain all things and make me truly happy, indicates to me both moral disapproval, physical non-desire, and professional mistrust? But then I remember the feel of his flesh in mine, and know outrage is irrelevant and that I will follow jolly Jack Stubbs to the end of the earth. Indeed I will even join the adoring throng – and I can see I may have to – who wait for the simple energising joy that the concentration of this man, this particular man, focused through his love-making, can bring. If only I can hold my tongue I might yet be the one he keeps in his bed, for ever. Craven, yes indeed, but there it is. My female lost to his male. I love him. It’s hopeless.
‘Look!’ says Frances, indicating a cheek indeed swollen and sore. ‘Just look! This place is swarming with puces. It’s disgusting.’
Oh Frances, Frances, what you mean to say is that your father and myself are disgusting. If only you knew! Shall I whip off the blanket and show you what disgusting is, give graphic form to your no doubt vague imagination? What we do, how we do it? His tongue here, mine there? Of course not. How can I even think of such a thing? Ah, if only I could not! Frances reminds me of a girl called Meryl Lee, at school, who would tag along where she wasn’t wanted: we kept her in tears most of her school life. I feel inclined to do the same to Frances now, to pay her out for my suffering. But of course her father would never speak to me again if I did anything really disgusting.
At least, I suppose not. It has occurred to me in the last few minutes that Frances plays a larger part in Jack’s and my drama than I care to believe: she, no longer a child, not yet an adult, but nubile, fresh and beautiful, with her white cheek and clear, innocent, albeit sulky eye – how can Jack but not look at her speculatively, as a man does a girl, not a father a daughter? Perhaps he fell in love – if that’s how I’m to describe it – with me, as a counter irritant to her? Knowing she was coming on tour with him, he made sure I came too. Anyone would have done. The flight from incest – my friend Jude could make a TV programme all about it.
‘I know what I’ll do,’ I say to Frances, as lightly as I can, smiling. I smile a lot – bare my teeth, that is, turn up the corner of my mouth – particularly when working out what to say next, how to defuse anger, turn away resentment, and so forth. ‘I won’t go into Blasimon today. I’ll stay behind. Why don’t you stay too? Let your father entertain the entertainers on his own!’
Entertain the entertainers! Can groups as serious as Uruguayan folk dancers, Breton bagpipers and feather-legged Gambian pole climbers be called entertainers? They certainly don’t entertain me. How self-consciously, unsmilingly they take their national pride, their ersatz traditions, upon their earnest shoulders. A step and a shuffle here, a head-toss there, a round-and-round we go, male and female facing, passing, touching, breaking, and yawn, and yawn and die from irritation and boredom mixed. La Folklorique! Careful, careful, not to break the languid patterns of the past: cosy and complacent, as if a single nightingale and not the three Horses of the Apocalypse lurked behind yonder tree! (Only the Peruvians, dancing and prancing and piping in an endless circle, like Indian braves around a campfire, make me smile, and that not too kindly. And the Poles at least are less enthusiastic mimickers of long-forgotten, best forgotten rural ways than most, and will even dress up in white muslin and red sashes and dance a drawing room polonaise or so. Otherwise it’s tap and tap, and swirl and whirl, and the wild gypsy fiddling vibrating wax out of the ears, and nothing else to do all day but listen.) Sandy has better things to do than drive the Band’s women between Blasimon and Roc Fumel, or feels he has, so once you’re in Blasimon that’s it, until the next morning, when the Jumpers’ last gig, down at the Cabaret, comes to an end, and the last local goes home. If Jack wants me to stay behind in the Hôtel de Ville, that’s okay by me. But I could do with company; I don’t want to be alone, to be at the mercy of my thoughts. I’ve had eight blissful days spared them, at least in any coherent form.
‘I can’t stay here,’ she says, lip curling. She looks like her father when she sneers. ‘What’s there to do here?’
‘We could look for fleas,’ I said. ‘Or bedbugs.’
‘Bedbugs!’ she shrieks, rather nasally. Her voice is not her best point. ‘But these are mosquito bites. They’ve got to be.’
‘If you say so,’ I say, cool as can be, and leap out of bed, allowing her a glimpse of my figure, neat and contained as hers can never be, and not an insect bite mark on it anywhere (though quite a few of her father’s) before pulling on my pants, jeans and Citronella Jumpers T-shirt – the extra-small size. Frances wears the XL.
‘Of course they’re mosquitoes,’ says Jack, who has the male knack of believing what he chooses to believe.
‘Of course they are,’ repeats Frances, who has the female knack of believing what a man wants her to believe.
‘Of course they are,’ I agree. If you can’t beat them, join them. I’m already relieved that Frances won’t keep me company. She finds nothing I say interesting, let alone witty. She doesn’t like me and, what’s more, I don’t want her to like me.
‘But you can’t expect a lady cosmologist to know anything about insects,’ says Jack, and he lies down on the bed and turns on his side; a fairly typical male reaction, in my experience, to bad news. So he knows!
‘Ah,’ I say, ‘my secret is out,’ but Jack doesn’t reply. Oh Jack, wild Jack, please recover quickly. I am still Sandra, Jack’s Sandra, whatever my profession, whatever my income, whatever my fame.
‘What’s a cosmologist?’ asks Frances.
‘An astronomer, actually,’ I say.
‘Are you really?’ she asks, interest quite lighting up her blank though glowing eye: it is quickness of thought which makes eyes bright: a surfeit of mere oestrogen will make them glow. And then Frances says, ‘What are Leos like as boyfriends?’
‘Not an astrologer,’ I say, ‘an astronomer.’ I try to be kind and patient, but why is it so difficult for ordinary people (ordinary people!) to distinguish between those who make a foolish living telling fortunes from the stars, and those who study the nature and destiny of the stars themselves?
‘Isn’t it the same thing?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say.
‘That’s a pity,’ she says, ‘because my friend Ady has a boyfriend Ken and he’s a Leo and someone told her Leos beat their wives so she’s going to break it off.’
‘Lucky old Ken,’ I say. Jack stirs in the bed. I think he’s laughing. I hope so. Jack’s had some kind of education and has in his time read a book or so, but I despair of Frances, whose mother calls a woman’s magazine a book, and comes from an environment where conversation is at best the interchange of information, at worst a sulky exchange of grunts, tauntings and insults. Children need to be exposed early to abstract notions, or they never get the hang of them, never find the framework which will make themselves interesting to themselves, and so to other people – let alone bother to make the distinction between the vile trade of the astrologer and the noble calling of the astronomer.
‘What do astronomers do, then?’ she asks.
‘Study the stars,’ I say.
‘How boring,’ she replies. ‘Our school went to the London Planetarium once. I couldn’t see the point. All I got was a crick in the neck.’
‘Don’t speak to her like that,’ says Jack, sitting up in bed. ‘She’s a famous lady.’
‘How did you find out?’ I ask.
‘Everyone knew but me,’ he says, ‘as the husband said to the wife.’ He smiles too brightly, even for jolly Jack Stubbs, all white even teeth and stubbly chin and the veins and muscles of his thin neck start out, and I don’t know that I trust the smile. ‘She’s on TV once
a week,’ he says to his daughter, ‘and she never even told me.’
‘Once a month,’ I defend myself. ‘Late night.’
‘That’s not really famous,’ says Frances, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so. All kinds of people are on after midnight.’ And she ambles out, victorious.
‘Well, that put you in your place,’ says Jack, and I know I am right not to trust his smile. ‘And you shouldn’t walk about with no clothes on in front of her. It may be all the rage in your media circles but not where I come from.’
That said, he jumps out of bed.
‘Not media,’ I say, ‘mathematical and cosmological circles. TV is only the tip of my iceberg.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he says, and pulls on his underpants (yesterday’s) and I feel like a child deprived of its lollipop or, more accurately, a donkey of its carrot. Jack is, as they put it, well hung. That, I fear, is the carrot I’d followed south. And what with the harpies and the furies wielding their stick, their many-thonged whip, from behind, how could I not? Where it went, I followed.
‘I didn’t tell you lies,’ I said, ‘just not the whole truth.’
‘Or, as I might say, I didn’t get the tune wrong, I just missed a few notes.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, who am unused to apologising. Craven!
‘That’s all right,’ he says, but I don’t think it is. If a man runs off with a bored housewife, that’s what he bargains for, not that she should suddenly display herself as a lady astronomer with a hundred ephemerides at her fingertips, and he not a differential equation in mind. All he has then, he must think, to keep her quiet, is his well-hungedness, and what reliance can he place on that? Or should he, if he’s a man of dignity and proper self-esteem? Who wants to fuck their way to Paradise? Half the way, perhaps; not all the way: some of it at least must be spent in companionable conversation, minds and hearts in tune.
Oh Jack, wild Jack, leader of the Band! I leaned into him, and put my head against his shoulder – as I loved to do: Jack is six foot two: Matthew the same height as myself; that is to say five foot five, though broad with it – and the arms he puts round me are, I think, dutiful rather than enthusiastic.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘let me explain.’
‘Explanations are boring,’ he says. And so they are, so I go to the bathroom and stand outside on bare, splintered boards, waiting for Bente to finish gargling in her musical Scandinavian way. The only water in the Hôtel de Ville comes from the cold tap of the bathroom basin, and that comes in a rusty trickle. Jennifer, Sandy’s wife, has put a plastic bucket under the basin so that the WC cistern can be filled when and as necessary, which is often, because fruit, wine, excitement and hot weather keep the Band’s bowels active.
And I envisage the bathroom back home at Greenwich, where my erstwhile husband Matthew paces and grunts as is his habit, naked, hot and soft from the bath, his little blunt finger of a willy lost somewhere in the pink, folding flesh of his being. The floor is tiled with flowered ceramic, and the taps are gold and the bathroom suite navy blue, and the bath itself a Jacuzzi.
Bente came out of the bathroom.
‘You didn’t tell us you were famous,’ she says.
‘I’m not,’ I say.
‘Karl says you are.’ It would be Karl. Mischief-making at seventy-two! Shaggy white locks shaking; rheumed eyes gleaming.
‘Rumours, rumours,’ I say.
‘Please? I do not understand the word.’ She wouldn’t.
‘Never mind,’ I say.
‘Jack will mind,’ she says, smugly. ‘There is a problem with the toilet. It is blocked.’ And off she goes, to braid her hair and polish the struts of her boyfriend’s drums, or pick the dandruff flake by flake from his pillow, or clean between his toes, or whatever of the many services she provided in return for his love.
And so indeed the toilet is blocked. Disgusting water reaches nearly to the brim. I take the handle of the lavatory brush (provided by Jennifer) and, shutting my eyes, and my nostrils with my spare hand, drive it down into the wodge of newspaper and worse, and am rewarded by the whoosh of water as the mass clears, and is sucked away and clean (well, cleanish) water wells up and steadies at an inch or so below its normal level, indicating that all is well below.
My stepfather would be proud of me. Then I fill the basin and wash, and wash, and wash, but who will wash my sins away? Sins of commission, of lust, lechery and pride. And sins of omission, of failing to leave a forwarding address.
4
Breakfast at the Hôtel de Ville
‘Come on, everyone,’ Jennifer cried, and her voice echoed in melancholy fashion up and down the dusty corridors of the Hôtel de Ville. Sandy brought Jennifer on the trip because she was, as he explained to everyone, a fool of a woman but useful. She was little and pretty and anxious. Everyone liked her except me, and even I took exception to her on the flimsiest of grounds – that is to say, that she took being called a fool of a woman as a compliment, the best a proper man could do by the way of a wife.
‘Come on, lazybones,’ she cried out now, into the silence. ‘Come on. Let’s get the show on the road. The bus leaves at ten and everyone not on it gets left behind.’ (Oh she was, she was, a fool of a woman! Perhaps Sandy had it right.)
Now Jennifer was a good kind woman and I could see why her husband had brought her along, in spite of the opinion of her he so continually voiced. She could map-read, and pack swiftly, and thought it necessary (no one else did) to clean out the minibus from time to time, and produce clean, ironed, emerald green shirts for the Band to wear at formal gigs over acid green T-shirts. And also, of course, for the mutual pleasure of their nights together, a pleasure which I did not doubt. He was a deep-voiced, large-nosed (always a good sign) fellow, and I daresay with a deep and powerful stroke or so, of the kind he employed upon his chosen instrument, which could produce an agreeable enough response in Jennifer.
Make no mistake about it, these musicians are randy fellows and the instruments they choose to play, the music they care to make, reflect the manner of their love-making, their compulsion to beget. And if I unfashionably bracket the two, I daresay it is because I was reared by my grandmother more than my mother and am still permeated with the notions of the world before contraceptives were freely available, when the sexual drive was seen as something which suited nature’s purposes, not man’s; existing to create babies. The associated pleasures and excitements ensured the continuation of the race. Those who liked it fucked, and their genes survived. Those who didn’t, failed to reproduce. Thus a race who liked sex was created. Sexual pleasure was both the stimulus and the reward for reproduction: God’s way (great-grandmother) Nature’s way (grandmother) evolution’s way (mother) of making sure we fucked and fucked and fucked again, for the better continuance of the race, the more variant its surviving form. I have a special interest in evolution, in genetics, for reasons I will presently relate. My mind goes to it, whenever it can.
‘Breakfast up, everyone,’ cried Jennifer. ‘Don’t let the coffee get cold!’ And up and down the corridors floorboards creaked, and the murmur of voices arose, and doors opened, and Jack came bounding along the corridor towards me (a puff of dust rising with every footfall) and whirled me round and kissed me full on the lips.
‘Oh, you idiot,’ he said, ‘you idiot. What do you want with the likes of me?’
‘Just you,’ I said. ‘Only you.’
‘It’s no kind of life,’ he said, ‘to be married to a Band. When I think of what you’re used to.’
‘You mean I’ll turn into Jennifer?’
‘No such luck,’ he said, and vanished into the bathroom.
‘This toilet isn’t blocked,’ he called out, in satisfaction. ‘Rumour said it was, that we had to use the lamp-posts like the dogs we are.’
I did not claim credit for the unblocking, for fear of overwhelming my man with my competence.
‘Jack, Sandra!’ called Jennifer. ‘Where are you two lovebirds? Just because Sandra’s
a star doesn’t mean she doesn’t need breakfast.’
‘Go down and face them,’ Jack called to me, from behind the closed door. ‘I’ll be a minute or so.’
And so I did. I went down to face my audience, my critics, in the high square kitchen, where spiders wove their webs and beetles pattered about the dusty floor, and slugs laid silver patterns on broken tiles, or had done until Jennifer put an end to their fun; she stayed up late the night we arrived, dizzy from exhaustion, to clean up, as she put it. So we could all start fresh in the morning, as she said. And so we did, because it was Jennifer who ran about the house, shifting mattresses, finding bolsters, fairly allocating the grisly grey blankets, while the rest of us just sat on the stairs, and finished off Steve’s red plastic flagon of yet grislier red wine, reluctantly shifting over whenever Jennifer pushed by: and so were saved the hours of grumbling negotiations while a consensus was reached on who should do what, and where, and worse, why. Easier, it was silently agreed, for Jennifer just to do the lot.
‘So there you are,’ said Jennifer brightly, filling in the awkward silence that fell upon the group around the table as I came into the room. They had been talking about me. ‘So that’s why you looked so familiar! A telly star. Why didn’t you tell us to begin with?’
‘We would have carried your bags,’ said Karl.
‘Aren’t we honoured,’ said Hugh, moving over, brushing not-so-pretend dust from a fruit box that served as a chair. He had a square plump face and was thinning on top, for all he was still in his twenties. He was the best drummer in the country, a distinction he shared with at least a hundred others, similarly described. He was hopelessly dyslexic, and (other than by speech, with which he was economical) could communicate only by drums. Bente thought he was a genius, because he’d told her so; she hovered over him, attending to his every whim. Why not? She had a well drummed upon look. I sat down and smiled vaguely, as I have learned to do when under attack, and Jennifer laid before us fine fresh bread, good Normandy butter, apricot jam with tiny whole (pitted) apricots still observable, hot foamy milk and weak grainy coffee. (I knew she’d slip up somewhere and she did, on the most important item) and some of us (not me) cried ‘wonderful! a miracle! how do you do it, Jennifer?’ or words to that effect, as expected, and she looked up, modest and triumphant, and looked shyly at Sandy whom she adores, for the pleasure no doubt of his slow base strokes.
