by Weldon, Fay
11
Return of the Citronellas
So what if the Hotel de Ville was haunted? It was pleasant enough sitting outside on the wall with the crumbling majesty of the grey facade behind me, dangling my legs, watching the heavy lorries pass, and the bold little Deux Chevaux; as the hot day relaxed into its pleasant evening, and the sky tinged from a red haze to orange streaks and then dimmed into misty boredom, and the yellow French headlights came on, and I could only tell from the thunder and rumble what was a lorry and what was not.
I kicked my heels against the wall and considered the nature of possession, and whether it was my own eyes, or a demon’s, which regarded the world. Would I, to any passing observer, have the kind of cunning, sideways look I saw on my mother’s face, from time to time, and on Robin’s? Or my father’s cold eyes? I assumed he had cold eyes. Nazis always do. Though how exactly a cold eye is defined I can’t be sure. How is it recognised? My mother’s eyes were brown and people described them as warm and kind, but to me, when not animated by their demons, they looked simply blank. I once saw an optician bring down a tray of glass eyes of all possible shapes and sizes and colours from a top shelf. He blew the dust off them, and there they were, blues, greens, browns and in between: some red veined, some rheumy, some young and clear; eyes for all possible matches. He sold them to an antique dealer who said they were in demand for ear-rings. And I tell you, the expression, the mood, the warmth, the chilliness, was there in these eyes, just waiting to be brought to life. They were invested by sleeping demons. I wouldn’t have worn them to parties, not on your nelly, not ever.
The Citronella Jumpers returned. I could tell them from afar. Their headlights were white, in the English style: a source of annoyance to French drivers. The van was painted acid yellow, but the street lights switched the colour to green. It pulled up behind me. Jack embraced me. Everyone was in fine good humour. A good night’s playing, a receptive audience.
‘I met this feller,’ Frances confided in me. ‘His name’s Jock. He’s one of the Scots Guards. He’s the one who heel-and-toes it round the swords when they cross them on the ground.’
I did not regret not going. I did regret my phone calls to Alison and Jude. Cowardice. Hand in hand with Jack I went into the Hôtel de Ville, and his love, or at any rate, lust folded itself round me like a protective cloak.
Jennifer had contrived sausage, bread, carrot salad and bottles of wine. We sat round the table and ate and if the telephone rang I couldn’t hear it, nor if somewhere Anne wept, and the babies stirred in Clare’s womb, and the fax machines chattered in Jude’s office with their messages from distant Time Zones: ‘Where is she? Where is she?’
12
So, Starlady Sandra
That night after love Jack said, ‘So, Starlady Sandra.’ And I said well why not, somebody has to be. It is, I suppose, my habit to diminish myself: we’ll have no vainglory here. I am a guilty person: I have to punish myself. My mother is mad because I am sane: my brother is dead because my suppressed rage killed him: my father was shot because my birth was used as evidence against him. My anger is all powerful; could blot out the world. So it is never expressed. I am cool, rational, and for ever guilty. I punish myself by ignoring my worldly success. Even the adjective ‘worldly’ diminishes its noun, don’t you see – as if there were some other realer kind of success somewhere else, more worth having. So a therapist – a Jungian, I think – told me before I left her after four sessions, murmuring that I was far too busy to continue seeing someone who merely stated the obvious.
‘Why do you murmur?’ she asked, at the door. (I don’t write these difficult things to people: I don’t hide behind letter and stamp: I have it out face to face.) ‘Why don’t you shout, stamp and scream these things to me?’
‘Good heavens,’ I said mildly. ‘You’re far too nice for that!’ And so she was. But she had cold eyes, which reminded me of my father. I didn’t quite trust her. I felt I could have blown her away with a breath, for all she was nearly six foot and I a mere five foot five. She had bought a couch more fit for her than for me, and I felt its length reaching far beyond my feet, far beneath my head: as if I was on a rack and in danger of being stretched for ever.
‘The reason I felt I’d known you all my life,’ Jack complained, ‘is that I’d seen you on TV.’
‘You might have felt it anyway,’ I said. ‘How will we ever know?’
‘Men are more comfortable with women who are lesser than they,’ he said, ‘but personally, I can put up with a little discomfort.’
‘A degree in astronomy,’ I said, ‘is nothing. A master’s in mathematics paltry. I can’t make an audience feel a common cause, lift its spirits, get its blood singing, hormones pumping. You raise your trumpet to the stars and sing to them. I just catalogue and annotate. I am mere secretary to the heavens, if not, as I let you believe, research assistant to the vice chairman of the Royal Astrological Association.’ Or words to that effect, whenever I could, for want of breath, his mouth on mine.
‘Jack,’ I said, in other words. ‘You are greater than me. I look up to you and admire you.’
‘And look,’ I said, ‘it’s not a high-profile programme: not all that many people watch it, and those who do are mostly senior citizens, half asleep in their chairs, too tired to put out the cat and switch off the telly: trapped by their own inaction.’
Jack, Jack, I said, in other words: don’t worry about the spectacle of me, ogled by millions, by too many – for all I could do with high collars and genteel voice, it made me more the stuff of fantasy than ever. Take ’em off, rip ’em off! How can the woman who is everyone’s be for one alone? Of course I hadn’t wanted Jack to know: ever to say ‘So, Starlady Sandra.’ Fame in a man is for a woman a great aphrodisiac: fame in a woman appeals to the man who likes public fucking. Pity.
‘Look,’ I pleaded, in the name of love, which would now have to conquer many hazards, ‘it’s only half an hour or so once a month, and most of the time on screen it’s charts, diagrams and special effects, not even me. I’m just a passing presenter.’
He laughed and said not to worry, it didn’t matter one way or another how I earned my living; I was to stop overpresenting my case, I was protesting too much, but wasn’t it me who discovered the Planet Athena?
‘Only by mistake,’ I said. Well, almost by mistake. A couple of orbits askew needed some kind of explanation. I invented an explanation, focused the lenses, clicked the cameras, and lo, there it was! ‘The Press latched on to it,’ I said. ‘That’s all that happened.’
‘No one cares any more,’ I said. ‘Five years ago is for ever ago. I’m a whatever-happened-to person. Honestly, you have nothing to worry about.’
He appeared to sleep.
‘Look,’ I said, before he could wake, or appear to, and forestalling a discussion initiated by him on the alleged difference in our incomes, ‘I don’t get paid a great deal; not in terms of, say, what the makers of TV commercials make. Peanuts. A pittance. And what I make I spend on clothes. I did have a little house in London before I married Matthew but he wanted me to sell it, as a token of my love for him: he wanted me, as it were, to demonstrate a wholehearted approval of our togetherness. No bolt holes for either of us! So I did, and Matthew invested the money for me in high-risk investments and lost most of it in last year’s stockmarket crash. So I was more dependent on him than ever. Or so he thought. He didn’t know I didn’t mind being penniless. He would have minded very much, and didn’t understand that not everyone was like him: or rather, believed that everyone not like him was eccentric, or in some way untrustworthy. He had his own money invested in the money market, and did well enough, as many with friends in high places did at that time.
‘Jack,’ I said, or words to this effect, ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to be lying on a lumpy mattress with you, with nothing but a nylon bag of possessions to worry about: travelling light, travelling free.’
Jack asked into the dark, and I knew then
he only appeared to sleep, to listen to my monologues the better, ‘Weren’t you angry about the money?’ and I replied no, I didn’t have the time, and he said ‘Yes, you were angry or you wouldn’t have run off with me. I am your revenge.’
‘No, no,’ I said, childlike, ‘it isn’t like that.’
‘I don’t mind being your revenge,’ he consoled me. ‘If I have to put up with your being the centre of attention I will: and if I have to put up with your earning more than me, how about buying me a new trumpet case in Bordeaux, so I don’t have to mind so much?’
‘I will, I will,’ I promised. Love, honour, obey and support, as long as we both shall live. Been to India, lately: seen the men silting, while the women building workers heave and shovel: been to Africa, where the men smoke ganja and the women hoe the brick-hard soil: been out to dinner and counted the number of times your hostess gets up? No wonder the men feel bad about it.
This is no complaint, only a comment. The women like doing it, so where’s the harm? Any man, cries the woman – unless she’s pretty, educated, a good earner and under thirty, when she reckons she can pick and choose – is better than none. Half a man, if she’s a Muslim and has to share him with another – better than indignity and No Sex. My friend Jude made a TV series about it. Women Who Serve. She sees Sandra’s Sky as a rather boring sideline: a kind of tarted-up late night science programme of minority interest. The ratings we get seem to astonish her.
‘It’s the high-necked blouse,’ I say. ‘It attracts the porno audience.’ That’s the kind of thing Jude’s able to understand. That mankind is also interested in its origin and its destination and sees in the heavens, quite rightly, the pattern that will solve the problems of its existence, quite escapes my media friends. The gorilla idly masturbates behind bars in London Zoo, and the audience gawps, but it’s the gorilla eyes that really get to them: that sad black wisdom.
Alison said to me when I told her Matthew had proposed marriage –
‘Well, well! Aren’t you lucky. Not many men will marry a star.’
‘Firstly,’ I replied haughtily, ‘I am not sure that marriage is the end all women must automatically desire: secondly, what do you mean by lucky; it is no more than I deserve: and thirdly, far from Matthew loving me in spite of my fame, it was my fame that led him to seek me out.’ That was at the very height of my starladydom: I had recently discovered Athena, and named the blasted rock in a public ceremony, and was wanted on game shows, chat shows, as token woman in shows discussing anything from the decline of socialism to the nature of the arts/science divide. I was blonde, as well as bright. Former boyfriends crawled out of the woodwork then: old one-night stands; faces I had forgotten (and parts as well, thank God) to remind me of a past I had assumed I had put behind me for ever. Only Matthew, carrying assurance and the world’s approval on his stocky shoulders, came to me out of the present, offering me a life worthy of my sudden new status. Little me.
‘You’re wrong,’ I told Alison. ‘Somebody wants me.’
‘You are your sample of one,’ she said, disappointed. Whoever likes to hold a faulty theory, so easily disproved. I preened; she fidgeted her unbelief.
I like to have these conversations with other women about the nature of our sexual selves. They deal in generalisations, they come to no conclusions, but they pass the time agreeably: the problem for a childless, unmarried woman lay in providing sufficient fuel for the conversational fire. I was glad to have this new episode with Jack, this new experience, to pile onto the general conflagration. Presently no doubt I would also have a divorce to discuss and compare. Pity my poor grandmama! Her family life was such a pattern of shameful secrets – illegitimacy, insanity, cancer, divorce, bankruptcy; all unthinkable, unsayable, weaving in and out: each by itself the cause of doom, gloom and anxiety, family secrets and nightmare, of pacing up and down behind closed doors – let alone piled on top of one another as they were for her. And no telephone helplines at her fingertips, just think of it! Else she might not have wished me and Robin unborn so often, and Robin might not thus have rendered himself. He knew he brought shame on others, and that’s what in the end he couldn’t bear. Oh, the shame of it, Robin! The disgrace. Well, well. And all my fault, for sopping up such sanity as there was in my mother’s nurturing blood, leaving nothing but madness for him. But the devil’s work, not mine, surely, thus to reduce my glory, my despair, to this kind of grim, bleak banality. If Robin had kept going until, say, a year ago, and had then jumped beneath his train, all of us involved would have reacted less grievously. The train driver could have looked at the statistics and learned that he had a one in four chance of such a thing happening to him in his working life, and gone to British Rail Medical for counselling: my grandmother and myself would have joined a Mind support group and learned how-to-cope, comparing ourselves to others in the same situation. Robin’s torn and bloody corpse and his tormented mind would be thoroughly devalued, but we would have been saved. But it was a full twenty years ago he killed himself, and the world was still young in the ways of emotional self-preservation. There is of course no support group for children of such fathers as I had, nor will there ever be. We are too few, our fate...
Only the State of Israel, boring the world with talk of the holocaust (that old thing! Forty odd years ago. Forget it!) nags on, and has become, of course, a dab hand at a passing massacre itself. But that, they say, is not the same. That was unpremeditated. Dead’s dead, say I, and may the living never again envy the dead. The nations of the world limp on, denatured, as are their citizens, unable as ever to face their own past. Well, I can say no better for myself, can I?
13
Breakfast Time
‘Eggs, anyone?’ asked Jennifer. She’d acquired a dozen, from somewhere. The scrawny hens, then, must be capable of laying. There were no egg cups, so we ate scrambled eggs on fresh bread. I offered her money, but she said no – Jack paid into the Band kitty for himself, Frances and Anne, and since Anne hadn’t come along but I had – We’re doing the washing up. That is to say, she does it, and I politely hover.
‘Do you know Anne well?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She used to come to gigs sometimes to keep an eye on Jack, but she wasn’t really interested.’
Ah. That almost sounded like a gesture of friendship.
‘You didn’t come yesterday,’ she pointed out. Not so good.
‘I wasn’t feeling very well,’ I said. Better than that Jack preferred me not to go, which she would misconstrue.
‘Oh you poor thing! Would you like an aspirin?’
‘I’m better today.’
‘So you’ll be coming with us? Good. That’s company for Frances. I’m sure it’s all perfectly okay, but there are all those soldiers and she is only fifteen, and I’m not her mother –’ Her voice dies away.
‘Neither am I,’ I say, and her hands move busily in the dish water, where they seem very much at home. Good Lord, how has this woman achieved a dishcloth?
‘Did you ever read The Swiss Family Robinson?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she says, surprised. And then, ‘Should I have?’ as if I were the one able to judge ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’.
She polished up a saucepan really nicely, and quite unnecessarily. Presently she said –
‘Poor Anne, she doesn’t stand a chance, does she?’
Rejected wives have few friends. They die for the unmarried women who were once their friends. They must make new alliances amongst their own kind – the abandoned and desolate; the un-coupled. ‘Not much,’ I said.
I tried to explain that Anne was out of the running before I turned up and that notoriety is a contradiction to sexual bliss, but she wasn’t listening. Sandy came in, with his big double bass and she dived for her all-purpose bag and brought out Brasso and a cloth folded into a neat plastic packet. Sandy smiled kindly at her, but his eyes flickered to me, Starlady Sandra, Jack’s sex kitten (a kitten rather past its first youth, admittedly): if she’ll h
ave Jack she’ll have not anybody, no, not Pedro the guitar-player or Stevie the trombonist – but surely she’d have king of the back row, the bass player, and if she would, he would: and Jennifer caught the look. Too bad. Now what would I do for a friend? Sandy took polish and cloth and saw to the brass keys which wound the strings. I watched amazed.
‘I’d do it but he doesn’t trust me,’ said Jennifer. ‘You know what these men are like with their instruments.’
‘Just wonderful,’ I said with feeling, and she looked at me with her mouth puckered, wondering if I meant what she thought I might have meant. Sandy knew I did, and raised his eyebrows ever so slightly at me. Why do these men, I asked myself, always choose women less quick in the mind than they? (To say ‘more stupid’ would be unkind.) The answer, I daresay, is that only such women are prepared to rush after them proffering Brasso and cloth. Or perhaps it’s the very preoccupation with dishrags and polishing cloths which renders a woman puzzled and slow. Poor men, I think, poor men, always in such a fix.
The washing up finished, Jennifer called through the echoey building. The ghosts didn’t stand a chance in the face of such good-hearted practicality.
‘All right, everyone! Time to hit the road!’
‘Don’t say that,’ muttered Sandy beneath his breath, but if I could hear it so could she. She was meant to. She took no notice, just wrinkled her nose at him, flirtatiously, and he wished she wouldn’t do that either.
‘So it’s okay for me to come today?’ I said to Jack. He had not made it plain whether or not I would be welcome on the bus, for reasons of his own but very much to do with whether he or I would henceforth have the upper hand. I’m not daft. These things must be worked out.
