by Weldon, Fay
Matthew wanted children: I did not. It was our chief quarrel – or at any rate his. But I knew what they’d be like. Little city children, of the wealthy, well-groomed kind: smooth and orderly, with the clear complexions and sensitive mouths of those who go to private schools. Matthew’s children! One would trot them between dancing class and the orthodontist, and produce another race of Matthews. It was not to be borne. Neither were they.
Jack’s child – ah, now there was another matter. But too late now, thank God.
My friend Clare, mother of so many, would reproach me for my determination not to have children. ‘It’s unnatural,’ she’d say. Only through motherhood, her thesis was, could you embark upon that journey of self-discovery which was the purpose of our existence upon this earth. Poppycock, I’d say. Romantic twaddle. What is this talk of ‘purpose’? Nature sets traps to lure us into motherhood, that I’d agree: but once the trap is sprung she offers precious few rewards for her Nature’s purpose. I could as well declare victory, to finally produce a generation which wouldn’t want to reproduce itself. Enough would be enough. And I’d make Clare shut up about her virtue in thus producing her noisy, tormenting children: I liked her, almost loved her, in spite of her children, not because of them. I remained lean, lithe, small-breasted, flat-stomached, barren, a defiance and a lure to men, and that’s how I liked it.
Forget the breather at the wall, the watcher by the gate: the steady footsteps after mine. Perhaps the first child, unborn, claiming life through me? He’d be in his mid-twenties now: of military age. It didn’t bear too much thinking about. I was sorry to have deprived him of his sexual pleasures, the joy of young strong limbs – but then think what I’d saved him, all the humiliations and despondency flesh is heir to. He should thank me, not haunt me.
Just then the scent of mint and lavender mixed, and the hot sun beat down, and the doves cooed and pecked, and I wished that Jack would hurry home, and all of a sudden I was scared out of my wits.
9
Scene in a Car Park
We will put the matter of my haunting to one side, stop nagging and picking away at this ghostly knot – for no doubt it has many strands, composed of my own guilt and the world’s past – and consider the scene at Reading Car Park. It was a scene made quite unnecessarily by Jack’s appalling wife Anne, and if I were the kind to be embarrassed, I would have been devastated.
Now Jack and Anne had been living under the same roof but apart for some years. They had separate bedrooms. They kept together for Frances’s sake: the girl had her schooling to get through. Any formal separation, they felt, would upset her too much. Jack was away a great deal, playing with the Citronellas and other bands in various parts of the country, or on tour abroad. And Anne had a good job which was her main preoccupation.
When I told Clare all these things, she fell about with mirth, saying it ought to be on the back pages of Cosmopolitan, it was how all married men described their marriages, and I was a little offended. She’d missed the point.
Jack was a musician. Musicians make bad husbands: women who want good husbands should know better than to marry them. They are frequently drunk, or high on drugs or both and are seldom available for ordinary social events; dinner-dances on Saturday nights for example, or Friday meals with friends. How can they be? Those are the very nights they’re doing a gig. How can they take the children to Saturday afternoon football when they’re playing from three to six at the town Fête, the local Agricultural Show? They leave home anxious and nervy and come home over-excited and abrim with either self-pity or self-congratulation. They conspire with other members of the Band to denigrate the role of wife, girlfriend, mother – women and their claims and desires being the common enemy of all musicians. For it is WOMAN who wants them to stay home – a terrifying adult extension of the original mother who keeps their boy in when he longs to go out.
A musician is a bad husband but a fine man, he inspires love. But woe betide the woman who believes she’ll change him, confine him, alter him, as Anne did Jack. (I would never do such a thing. I wouldn’t be such a fool!)
But alas, alas, the musician needs a wife, and a smiling, cheerful one too: someone to wait up for him at night with interested questions and hot soup: someone to pay attention to the bills and answer the phone and keep his diary: to keep the roof mended and the children educated. How else but by having a wife is he to live, once he’s past the first flush of impetuous, noisy youth? In a bedsitting room: in a converted van parked over a city sewer? Some do: they have to: their wives get fed up with them and throw them out.
Unless of course the wretched woman manages to turn herself from wife to mother. But that’s of short-term benefit: in the end a thankless task. The man cries out for his mother, and gets her, but it wasn’t really what he wanted – no, not at all. Women who play mother – who nurture, cosset, bite back harsh words – get left, as if they were the real thing. The wide erotic world beckons: why should he stay at home? It isn’t natural. Such wives are left not just because they’re boring – which they are – but because every beautifully laundered towel, every well balanced, timely meal, every caring constructive word, is seen as an octopus coil which will tighten, confine and strangle unless severed. And the man is right to go. For the woman who lives her life through a man is truly manipulative and dangerous: she has him retired and in slippers, or pottering round the garden in no time at all. Or worse –
The telephone rings. The musician’s wife answers. ‘Can Bill, Tom, Harry, do a gig this Saturday night?’ ‘No, sorry, hadn’t you heard? He’s had a stroke.’ At last, at last – the wife sings in her heart. Bill, Tom, Harry will be home on Saturday night, not out with the boys. Or what’s left of him. And the horror stories fly round the musical world – another good man, a true fighter, bit the dust, destroyed by womankind! Those who give life, also bring death.
When the minibus arrived at Reading Car Park, to pick up Jack and myself and take us on to Newhaven, it was followed by a nine-year-old rusty Ford Escort, the kind that only the depressed and poor consent to drive.
‘Oh, Good God,’ said Jack, ‘what a bitch!’ (I think he was referring to fate, rather than to his wife.) ‘It’s Anne.’
And this dumpy little lady got out and came towards us and I didn’t like her one bit, nor the expression on her face.
‘You bastard!’ (him) ‘You cow!’ (me) ‘How can you do this to me? In front of everyone! In front of Frances!’ For there was Frances, pale face pressed against the glass of the minibus window. It was the first time I’d seen her. I didn’t deign to reply to her screeching mother.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ said Jack, mildly. ‘Just standing here in a car park.’
‘Do you want me to kill myself?’ she shrieks. ‘Is that it?’
‘Well,’ says Jack, ‘that has to be your decision. You certainly make my life scarcely worth living.’
Sandy gets off the bus.
‘I did my best,’ he apologises to Jack. ‘But she followed us all the way from Maidenhead. I offered to take a message but she wouldn’t have it.’
Karl gets off as well.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘can’t you two settle your differences somewhere else? It’s bad for the girl.’ And if you look, you can see tears roll down Frances’s cheek, smudging into the glass.
Anne collapses from the heights of rage into the depths of self-pity.
‘I thought I’d see you at Maidenhead,’ she whines. ‘You said you’d be there. Me and Frances thought you’d be there.’ Ungrammatical, too; to add to her failings.
‘I was going to be there,’ says Jack, patiently. ‘But I had to do a fill-in job for the Pilots’ Association at Heathrow. So Sandra and me picked up the minibus here. Was that wrong?’ She is too chokey and teary to speak. She looks terrible. She has wide feet in collapsed brown flat-heeled shoes. I tap my neat little boots impatiently. I take a size 4 and am light enough to wear high heels with ease. Jeans tight over slim tilted calves, a gap of
flesh and then the curling top of leather boots – and what old cardigan was that that she was wearing? One longs for a decent rival.
‘I asked if you wanted to come along,’ says Jack, ‘and you said you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t know you were taking her: that flashy bitch.’ She meant me, Sandra, she of the clear profile, neat hairdo and high buttoned boots, who monthly presented the Marvels of the Night to the waiting millions. She, who discovered the Planet Athena, a flashy bitch! Imprecise and inaccurate, as well as ungrammatical. There was nothing to recommend her.
She’d followed the minibus from Maidenhead. Karl had picked up Pedro, Steve, Hughie and Bente outside Camden Town Marks and Spencer, Jennifer and Sandy at Slough, and Frances at Maidenhead. (Bands go in for these elaborate arrangements: that they ever get to gigs at all always amazes me.)
Everyone knew Jack was bringing me along; his mistress, not his wife. Everyone knew he’d been seeing this woman for at least two months, since he met her at the Royal Astrological Society in the grounds of the Greenwich Observatory, and they’d gone off together into the shrubbery. These things do not go unnoticed. It had therefore been the more embarrassing for the gang to have Anne following in the Escort.
‘Try and lose her,’ Pedro had muttered to Sandy, and Sandy did try, but Anne had been too clever. The spirit of vengeance sharpened her eye, made her foot nifty on the accelerator, her hand on the steering wheel.
‘Anne,’ says Jack, reasonably, ‘Sandra’s just a friend. She loves jazz. You hate it. She’ll be company for Frances. It’s not as if we were still married.’
This confuses her.
‘But we are,’ she stutters, looking round for help, which is not available. Even Frances isn’t listening. Frances is mulling over her own problems. She doesn’t see her father all that often, and had hoped to have him to herself. I reckon her tears are self-pity, rather than distress. Just as her mother’s are manipulative, and not grounded in any real emotion.
‘Only in the eyes of the law,’ says Jack, ‘and I wish you wouldn’t make these scenes in public.’
‘We’ve got to get on,’ says Sandy. ‘We’ve got this ferry to catch.’
‘You’d hate it where we’re going,’ says Jack. ‘Hardly a souvenir shop in sight. So don’t spoil it for the rest of us, okay?’
It’s not okay. She hasn’t finished with us yet. She boards the minibus and tries to yank Frances out, shrieking that Jack’s not going to take her abroad, but Frances resists.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she says. ‘Do give over. I want to go with Dad. Why don’t you just go home and make yourself a cup of tea.’
At which Anne just gives up and gets back, sobbing gently, into her mouldy little car, and drives off into the night, and Jack and me unload our things from the back of my snappy little Citroën (six months old) and find our seats and we’re off.
Not that we had much luggage. Jack had his two trumpets, the briefcase with his music, and a battered old suitcase. I had a swiftly packed nylon bag. I was running away from home, not to mention my life. I needed to travel light, though stylish. I had taken no books; I was bored with my mind, and the feeling of non-encumbrance was delightful.
Just a pity Frances existed: was there sitting on the bus, her eyes swollen with reproach and self-pity. Her mother’s daughter – except the daughter had youth and looks, even I would admit that. Most things are forgiven the young, so long as they’re not dogs, when they join their elders in the invisibility stakes – the ones we do not see but like to blame.
‘If we ever get back,’ I said to Jack, as the minibus took the M3, and Sandy misjudged the speed of the oncoming traffic and there was much swerving and honking and catastrophe was narrowly diverted, ‘you ought to do what you keep talking about, and sell the matrimonial home and split the profits. As it is, she obviously feels she has some claim on you.’
‘Oh,’ he said vaguely, ‘there’s Frances to think about. And if I had money in the bank I’d only spend it.’
That’s how it is, between musicians and musicians’ wives. Nothing ever quite settled or definite: sentences no sooner said than forgotten, arrangements no sooner made than changed.
Jennifer said ‘Oh, Sandy! Do be careful! There are some terrible drivers on the road!’ and everyone laughed except Sandy, who muttered under his breath, and Jack took my hand and held it to his chest, as if I were a precious possession.
But just a little, just a little, I think my passion for Jack diminished that night at Reading Car Park: his connection with Anne, she of the bloated face and wide flat feet, rubbed off a little of the sheen of love. I wanted a better rival.
10
A Summons from Afar
The ghost had gone: that is to say I no longer – how can I put it? – felt waited for, as if some moral bailiff stood by the gate. I went out into the road, and a dog – a mangy, yellowy animal with a pointed snout and little sharp eyes – trotted by about its business, loose skin wobbling beneath its belly, elongated teats dangling. Bitches after childbirth are not a pretty sight. See, I thought. There! If there were some presence standing there even this ribby thin creature would have the energy to react. And no sooner had I thought this than the animal cast a sideways glance at me, and stopped, teats quivering, and stared, and its hackles rose, and it looked at me with terror and hate, and turned tail and fled, howling. I promise you this happened.
And I thought whatever it was is no longer outside me but in me: now what was I to do? Or had it always been there, and I had somehow left it behind, in my mean-minded, snarly shopping trip to the village? And now it was back in again, and I had succeeded in stirring up some awful sediment to such an extent that even a passing bitch, running back no doubt to her pups, had noticed and reacted?
I used as a talisman against my inner demons the memory of Jack and myself, out to sea, in our berth on the ferry, fucking and fucking while the ship (one of those roll-on, roll-off, roll-over types) banged up and down into the waves as if in sympathy with our cause. Let the stars drift unobserved in the heavens, unannotated and recorded, let Matthew rant, let Anne weep, only this counted. In and out and up and down, and the swooning blackness pierced by light as we remade the universe, Mad Jack and me.
A butterfly alighted on my hand, and fanned its wings a little, and then flew off: a gesture of reconciliation, perhaps: or else the thing was just too drunk and simple to understand its danger.
Then the telephone rang inside the Hôtel de Ville. Now this was not surprising: a town hall, even in France, even one not used for its bureaucratic purpose for a year or so, may have a line still connected; a wrong number may have been dialled: or indeed for all I knew Monsieur le Directeur du Festival was trying to contact the Band – an extra gig, perhaps tomorrow morning, early: or – and this I did not want to contemplate – perhaps I had stirred up sufficient sediment, in my calls to Alison and Jude, to allow my whereabouts to be traced.
I thought at first I would let it ring unanswered, and then something struck me as odd. The ring was not the long-burr-silence-long-burr-silence of the French system, but the burr-burr, burr-burr of the English. Now how could that be? I stood in the kitchen and the ringing disturbed the motes in the air, where the low sun shone through the window above the shallow stone sink; otherwise I would have thought the sound was imaginary. I went looking for the instrument – into the big empty front room whence, once, the business of the town had been conducted. The ringing stopped – nor was there a telephone there that I could see, or anywhere in any of the other big square ground floor rooms. A thin torn cotton cloth hung before a doorless cupboard beneath the staircase and on one of the shelves, indeed, rested one of those old black wall telephones, but it was broken; more than simply disconnected – discarded. All the same I felt nervous of touching it. When I moved the cloth it threw up a cloud of dust, and I sneezed, and sneezed again and startled myself.
Now from much study of the heavens, since I was a child, I know how difficult it is to find anyt
hing one does not have the confidence of finding and how easy to find anything one means to find. I looked again for the instrument, willing myself to see it. But still to no avail.
I was, I admit it, frightened. Of course the sound might have been produced in my own head: the dancing motes of dust caused by the burr-burr, burr-burr could have been visionary. It was unusual for two senses to be involved in these phenomena, but not, I suppose, impossible.
I went back to sit in the kitchen and heard footsteps outside in the courtyard, and looked out into the dusk, relieved, glad of human company, but there was no one there. The pang of disappointment which seized me was very great: it made my throat tighten: and I thought, how strange, this is altogether the wrong emotion: fear would be more reasonable. And then indeed panic set in and I ran from the Hôtel de Ville – taking up my pad and the rest of the bread (I’m not daft and was certainly hungry) – and set myself up beneath the yellow arc light which stood where the N89 crosses the little D9, just to the right of the Hôtel de Ville, where the companionable and sensible traffic passes, and where notions of life and death are practical things. Stop and wait for the lights, or you’re dead! At least these small matters appear to be within our control; do not contain the menace of evil rampant and malicious – the lights, for example, staying green of their own volition when they should have turned to red, causing some head-on smash by accident on purpose of malice. Or does the driver just see green, when others see red, so great is his/her underlying wish for death, if only to ease the burden of guilt? Perhaps only the guilty see and hear ghosts, are afflicted by demons? And only a few of the guilty at that, not all of them, or we could scarcely move about for paranormal phenomena, pick up an egg without it leaping from our hand, breaking on the ground, and just sitting there, frying. Or whatever. And the death rate on the road would be vastly, vastly higher.
