by Weldon, Fay
I wonder if my father, donator of the genes, ever fell in love? Or did I get my capacity to do so from my mother’s side of the family? This business of genes really intrigues me. I devoted two whole programmes to evolution – I find myself a stern Darwinian when going into the possibility of, for example, there being life on Athena, that miserable, chilly little planet. (Unlikely: improbable to the factor of a trillion or so, in fact.) And my ratings, never vast, dropped 5 per cent while I told the audience so. This was news no one wanted to know. What, no life out there! And we’re all waiting for the starship to arrive and explain all! Someone has to.
I wonder if my father was tall or short? I had only ever seen his face in an old newspaper cutting, and, back in the last century, Mendel had explained to anyone interested that genes don’t blend. It’s not my father’s tallness and my mother’s shortness that makes me of middle height. (My head at Jack’s chin: what a pleasure it is to look up to a man – I had to lower my eyes to meet Matthew’s.) No. We inherit attributes from a male and female parent, but we don’t end up hermaphrodite, do we? So I can’t work back from me to discover my father’s appearance or temperament. What we have are particles of inheritance: maleness being made up of a million million inheritable particles, femaleness likewise. Depending on where the preponderance lies, we turn out to be one or the other. Majority decision, as it were. We inherit, randomly, all kinds of things unnecessary to our survival, simply not contra-indicative of it. We can survive (as a species) pretty well with our remnant appendix: it’s merely an irrelevance, as are the stripes on a zebra. (The schizophrenic gene will presently, no doubt, breed itself out, particle of inheritance by particle. Presently. It’s just tough in the meantime.) As human beings we have a vast surplus of intelligence over what is required for our survival as a species – it may even be contra-indicative to that survival. Down’s Syndrome people, with their extra chromosome, seem more appropriately equipped than the rest of us; they have just enough sense to feed and provide for themselves, an active desire to reproduce, and are far less given to suicidal/martial behaviour than we others, who are in actual danger of wiping ourselves out, something no other species, as far as we know, has so far done. I didn’t put that bit in the programme – Central would have censored it. Talk of Down’s Syndrome in anything other than tones of hushed sympathy they simply won’t have – talk of nuclear death-wish smacks of CND, and ill manners. As for me, Starlady Sandra, I mean to help the evolutionary process along by failing to reproduce. I guess I may have more than a hundred half brothers and sisters walking about today, living evidence of man’s surplus intelligence, my father’s spirit of scientific enquiry, and they won’t necessarily feel the way I do. Bang, bang, you’re dead! Gotcha! That’ll teach you to do nature’s work for it – weeding out the unfit with your own peculiar Darwinian mix of randomness and purpose, which got you labelled back in 1949 at the Nuremberg Trials, even in the days before punchy headlines, the Mad Sadist of Bleritz. You should have tried cosmology, like me, professionally, not taken up genetics as a hobby. Daddy! But then the discipline was hardly invented, back in the twenties, the thirties, when you got given your particular world view.
Now I admit that when I realised my mother’s mad tales about my father were in fact true, not mad at all but quite, quite true, which happened when I was fifteen (Frances’s age), it was quite a shock. I resolved never to have children, never to get married. In the first I have succeeded by way of three abortions (I am remarkably fertile, or so I have been told – my body managing to foil contraceptive devices in the most remarkable way): in the second I failed, more’s the pity. I read Pure Maths at Oxford, worked on a space programme for a time (mathematicians end up everywhere); became a cosmologist, and then developed an interest in simple astronomy, of the sky-gazing kind. Our research team was based at the Greenwich Observatory. I saw this period as a sabbatical, in fact, and it was my good luck, rather than the result of any particular endeavour, which made me the first to postulate, then verify, the existence of Athena. In the meantime, of course, I had had affairs, even fallen in love with, various men: most wanted children: those who did not I did not like. Sad. To prefer a Porsche and a peaceful annual holiday abroad to the creation of children may seem sensible, but it is not likeable. My more complex reasons for remaining childless seemed to me both reasonable and noble, but I seldom wished to discuss these complexities, let alone my family history and shame, with those men I loved, fancied, or felt would do me some good in the world – that is to say, professors, employers, and so on. So they thought me hard and unkind, tough as old boots, which of course I was not. It is not easy to go against blind instinct: it is not easy to do away with babies who have managed to get so far, so very far, towards a viable existence, and now must be blotted out, refused their chance, because I, like my father in his way, have decided to use my surplus intelligence and interfere in evolution’s plan. Still, I had my work to get on with.
But after the ‘discovery’ of Athena, that miserable lump of rock, in its distant, unlikely orbit – and quite when an asteroid stops and a planet begins is merely a matter of scale, but the Royal Astronomical Society was short of funds (whoever isn’t?) and could do with a bit of publicity, and nothing like a new planet for making a splash and putting up the membership, and I sometimes think Athena was perhaps actually put in my way, one dark night, rather than I seeking it out, but never mind – I have a low self-image, according to a therapist I once visited; which is why these feelings of omnipotence and paranoia keep warring in my rather inadequate bosom (see?), and find it hard to credit myself with any real achievement – anyway, there I was on television rather a lot, and I look better on screen than off it (thank you, Daddy, for your Aryan cheekbones, your thin straight nose, your rather square shoulders, narrow waist: you looked smashing in your SS uniform, especially designed for the likes of you) and I kept getting phone calls and letters from this Matthew Sorenson who really admired me for my mind, my independence, the way I dealt with success. In other words, fame turned him on. He was, he said, a barrister. Now that did impress me, and I agreed to meet him for dinner, and before I knew it he was a frequent visitor to my rather pleasant two-room flat in Bayswater, pacing up and down, talking, talking, about every subject under the sun. Now I rather liked that. Most people I knew could talk about one or two matters – few ranged widely over the spectrum of human interest. He had a rather pink face – he drank quite a lot – and a self-important jaw. I did not fancy him in bed at all, which did not stop me getting into one with him from time to time. It wasn’t that the talk wasn’t interesting, it was just sometimes I longed for silence, and the heave, heave, grunt, grunt of mindless sexual congress was the nearest I could get to it. There was no escaping him, I don’t know how it happened. He was always there; when I opened the front door; when I finished at the studio; on the phone at the observatory; picking me up for lunch. He bought me jewels. Jewels! He introduced me to his friends, who were impressed by me, this woman of achievement. How they all talked, and laughed, and shrewdly, wittily commented as if the world was there for their observing, and all the suffering in it meat for their witticisms. I remember after one particularly scintillating evening, after Matthew had brought me home in the Mercedes (a rather perky little vehicle) and I had kissed him goodbye on the step, and he had groaned his passion, ‘But why won’t you let me in? You did last Saturday’ (he had such a memory for names and places and times which I somehow did not believe in at all), I waited for him to go and then took a ride on the underground just to be with ordinary, incoherent, tired, stumbling human beings again. Why then, you ask, did I marry him? Because he narrowed down the paths of my exits, until they were all blocked except the one signposted ‘wedding’ and that was the only one I could find, as I ran blind and dizzy here and there, with the Press on the phone and the cameras at the door, and journalists wanting to know who I thought this year’s worst-dressed man was, and what was my favourite scent/cause/dessert and what
was my star sign, and literary luncheon-organisers wanting me as their speaker. I had a feeling that only lawyers and barristers could keep any of it in calm proportion, mocking at it as they did. ‘Sandra, darling, you can’t take it seriously. You’re a nine-day wonder!’ So I just plain and simply married Matthew and moved into his house in Dulwich, the one his last wife had vacated a year or so before, leaving her very tasteful, boring, everlasting pure wool sea green carpets behind her, not to mention a Magimix in which was still wedged a piece of fungoid carrot. The home felt like the Marie Celeste.
‘Did she leave in a hurry?’ I asked Matthew.
‘Not soon enough for me,’ was all he said, bleakly, and I wondered how she had offended. Well, it should have been a warning.
‘What did she do?’ I asked.
‘What wives do,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’ That should have been more than a warning. ‘But you won’t be like that, will you? You’ll keep an outside interest. Your little programme.’
Now that we were married my programme had become not a major contribution to the world, or to celestial affairs, but a ‘little programme’. Well, what did I expect? Why should it be different for me than for the generality of women? I made my contribution to dinner-party conversation, ideas for the coming next month’s programme would be postulated over the melon and parma ham and consolidated over raspberry mousse and discarded over rather inferior goat’s cheese: I made a pretty enough picture at the end of the dinner table and presently there were fewer solicitors and more judges on my left and right. That, it seemed, was the object of the exercise, of the marriage. Matthew wished to be promoted to the Bench. It was, I supposed, not too bad a bargain. Matthew paid for my bed and board and I was able to save my not inconsiderable earnings. Central paid for at least some of my clothes, and the Tax Inspector kindly agreed that what I spent on the rest was tax deductible, and Matthew all but encouraged me to buy the kind of little black dresses he felt suitable for an accomplished dinner-party hostess. Rather boring design magazines came to photograph the inside of our house: the Mail did one of its pieces on ‘Who’s to Sunday Dinner’ and Matthew clocked up four judges and wives over very traditional roast beef.
‘Well done, Sandra,’ he said, on that occasion. ‘I’m very proud of you. Now if only we can persuade the Press to drop the Starlady Sandy absurdity –’
‘They would drop it,’ I said, ‘and very quickly, if you were not so anxious to have them around.’
‘Good God,’ he said, huffing and puffing – I was sure that he would be a Judge very soon – he had the looks and the mannerisms and the habit of getting things wrong and falling asleep quite suddenly in the middle of a sentence – really, he had no need to worry – ‘I don’t encourage them! Seedy lot! Media rubbish. Gutter press: your kind, not mine.’ I don’t think, personally, he could tell the difference between Interior and Woman’s Realm.
‘Anyway,’ he said, a little feebly, ‘it’s touch and go. Sandra’s bad enough, without Starlady in front of it!’ One of the unclassed, that was me. Once we were married, he made me very aware of it. I was without a proper family. Susan’s father, my great-grandfather, had been a bishop, but that was a long way back and didn’t count any more. The women round the dinner table (I will not call them friends) had names from the English counties – Melissas and Amandas and Fionas – but Sandra? Where did that come from? (Clare, of all the guests, was the one I became fond of. She too had married her solicitor more or less by accident, and her general air of delinquency kept me going through many a scintillating, awful evening.)
‘All I’m trying to say,’ said Matthew, ‘is play it cool.’
And he put the phrase in quotes and laughed with self-satisfaction. How clever he was! The language of the streets.
‘Just for the moment.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No scandal,’ he said. ‘No more topless bathing. No more transparent blouses. Nothing for the press to get hold of.’
‘I am not in the habit of making public demonstrations of myself,’ I said. Nor was I. I rather enjoyed the general modesty of my clothes; and my general air of sobriety and responsibility on screen. I knew I was joking, but few others did – only those who (rarely; I was busy, and tired from cooking) got to raise my skirt and see the red suspenders underneath, in an age when women wore tights and suspenders were definitely not for holding up stockings. With Matthew I put on an old flannel nightie – well, it seemed hardly worth the effort to wear anything else. Grunt, grunt, groan, groan, and the same old position.
‘What’s good enough for missionaries is good enough for me.’
Had it not been for the sense of time passing – which so afflicts women of spirit and aspiration – I would really quite have enjoyed myself with Matthew. It was not hell. One has to live somewhere.
It was a day or so after his plea that I did not attract attention to myself – what can it be other than a generalised guilt which makes men so convinced that their wives are always on the brink of bringing about their downfall – think of Adam, eating the apple and blaming Eve – when he himself had behaved so badly to his previous wives, Lilith (who argued) and Talith (who was unutterably silly) that he was beyond taking any moral responsibility for himself – that we attended the ‘do’ at the Astronomical Society in the Observatory Grounds. Some centenary or other: another PR ploy.
It was a beautiful spring evening. Food was served on tables outside the Marquee: the Thames flowed grandly by, and these days even sports a live fish or so, not just those grimly floating belly upwards. The great and famous were there. You know what these occasions are like. (If you don’t, you haven’t missed much, except, I daresay, the opportunity to dress up.) A girl very seldom meets the man of her dreams on such occasions. The men are far too closely escorted. Fights almost never break out: the food is unexceptional, colleagues meet colleagues and compare notes, contacts are made and information passed on about vacancies arising in the astronomical world. There are always a few cameras, and sound and lighting men from local, not national, TV, some rather bored and yawning newshounds and the mere stringers of gossip columnists, seldom the real thing. Though of course of late there’s also often been me, Starlady Sandra, always good for a pic or two and what’s in the stars for her, not that anyone out there is interested, it’s just if not her, who? Whom? With a few mild and kind exceptions, astronomers are on the whole plain and boring people, of interest only to each other – at least until Athena and myself hit the headlines, which did I admit stir everyone up a little. Anyway, there I was, wearing a thin white silk dress with a perfectly respectable button-up-to-the-neck front, but slightly on the tight side – all these dinners, what did Matthew expect? – and my breasts, if small, and hardly worth so much as enclosing in a bra, so I never do, are certainly boldly nippled.
‘Sandra, are you sure –?’
‘Sure of what? What’s the matter with it?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’ Breasts embarrassed him. Nipples embarrassed him more. I was always rather surprised that he so stuck by the missionary position, which put him in such intimate contact with the fleshy things. I don’t think I disliked Matthew at the time as much as I may now seem to; it’s just that he did some fairly unforgivable things, the following day.
So there was me, and there was the Band, filling in between the Brady Quintet, who agreeably played extracts from the Water Music and (of course) ‘Jupiter’ from Hoist’s The Planets and a little Mozart, and a Scottish pipe ensemble who played sentimental Scottish ditties. Then the Citronella Jumpers came on loud and strong. I never drink at these functions – I like to go home clear-headed and be able, being hangover free, to have the whole thing well and truly in the past by the next morning. But this time I thought, fuck it, and I did. I drank. I drank glass after glass of champagne and I studied the Band.
Well, Karl was more classically handsome and Pedro more soulful and Sandy leered lecherously at the crowd in general and me in particular, but Mad Jack
the trumpeter was the one for me.
