by Weldon, Fay
But of course I should have known matters would not proceed so peacefully, nor I think did I want them to, or I would merely have grabbed such things as I needed and run, and not bothered with tissue and packing. There was a bang bang up the stairs and Matthew threw open the door and roared, and threw jars and bottles into the mirrors, and then tried to murder me by stuffing a pillow into my mouth – a year’s probation from a friendly judge, I suppose, probably one who’d been to dinner, had he succeeded – and I struggled out and away – he was weeping, and he could hardly see what he was doing, I suppose that’s how I managed it – and though I could hardly suppose the circumstances had been quite so drastic, I understood the feeling of Marie Celeste which had struck me when I first came to the house – of a place left in a very great hurry indeed. The lump of mouldy carrot in the Magimix. I’d gathered Sylvia (his first wife’s name) was houseproud, so supposed an uncleaned utensil the equivalent of my rumpled clothes, everywhere, as he’d tossed them out of the wardrobe, and ripped and ripped.
Well, what did I need with any of it? Or him? I had my cheque book and cheque card in my pocket, and some fifty thousand saved pounds in the bank. But his voice still rang in my ears. ‘Hard, vulgar little tart! No background and no taste. If you knew how people laughed at you behind your back; how I tried to protect you from yourself. Picked you out of the gutter to make something of you! But you can’t resist it, can you. You must go whoring!’
Well, how little we know ourselves! Starlady Sandra, she of Athena fame, picked out of the gutter that was Central TV. But I mustn’t go on. Matthew really got under my skin. Five years of my life dissolving thus into insult.
‘Well,’ said Jack, when I returned to the van, ‘you don’t seem to have come away with much.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It turned out not to be worth the effort.’
‘I expect he was upset,’ he said. ‘I would have been. Under his nose, and everyone watching as we went off.’ I didn’t ask whose side he was on, because I know there is a sense in which men are always on each other’s side, no matter what.
He looked through his diary and said, ‘In a couple of months I’m going to France with the Band; a Festival Folklorique. I’d stay here with you but I can’t let the Band down. So perhaps you’d better come with me.’
And that’s why I now lay here, on a grassy bank in a sunny clime, and heard Jack say ‘Oh there you are; I was looking for you,’ and it was music to my ears, and life and event started up again. I stood up, dizzy, and swayed, and he caught me, his long thin arms around me, as the past caught up with the present.
16
Truth Being Stranger Than Fiction
But the next day I was confined again to the haunted Hôtel de Ville, this time not on account of sulks or wilfulness, but because of a few spots of blood and a pain in my stomach, which I suspected might get worse before the day was out. I do sometimes get the most fearful menstrual pains; I think myself it comes from staring so hard at the stars: the body is determined to root one here on earth; makes its horrid point: woman, woman, female! it keeps saying, in tones of disgust. What makes you think the likes of you can ever be all spirit, understand more than a fraction of what there is to know? Take this, take that! Ugh! Ugh! Or perhaps it is the cramping, crumpling revenge of the unborn baby. I’ll teach you to keep me out – a pinch here, a snatch there: I’ll double you up, I will, since you so decimate me! I have often thought of having my womb removed altogether, but something holds me back. I suppose this something had better now be considered.
Jennifer was most considerate and kind: made me comfortable in the truckle bed: lent me the feather pillow she never travelled without; insisted Frances stay with me to look after me. And oddly, Frances did not protest too much. For some reason or other today she wanted to keep out of the soldiery’s way. Her eyes had a hooded, wary look. Well, she would tell me, or not, what had happened. She sat by my bed and scratched her insect bites and told me about school: she had forgiven me. Well, she had to, or there’d be no one to talk to, and she admitted to finding the Hôtel de Ville somehow quivery and spooky.
‘No such thing as ghosts,’ I said, though when Jack kissed me goodbye – rather quickly and nervously, for my being ill was somehow not included in his vision of our relationship – and went, I had been briefly conscious of the watcher back again. My ghostly lover. Don’t ring me, I’ll ring you. And I had not picked up the phone.
I lay flat on my back, for that seemed to help the pains, and felt his hands over my stomach, my breasts, a breath on my cheek. Or perhaps that was merely the shadow of Jack, still lingering? I shut my eyes: I tried to sleep: even ghostly lovers sleep: when one does, the other does: I was in no mood for love. My stomach ached too much. The hands, if such they were, seemed insistent on a response I was not prepared to offer.
But presently they gave up: my body was my own again. I had choked off this unwelcome visitation. I had the sense of being alone: the pains were not too bad: in fact had all but ceased. I was free to think. And obviously it was the matter of my own birth which must now be thought about. Doctors could find no physical reason for the acuteness of my monthly affliction: ‘Covert stress,’ they said, as if I denied the existence of anything unusual, and to date I had huffed and puffed my scorn at their diagnosis.
Well, a sexually active woman with no children by the age of forty-two, can, when it comes to a gynaecological history, be only a collection of negatives. A story of pains, spasms, blood, fluxing, flowing and failing, which no one wants to hear about, since it’s all to no avail. I took the pill for a time, which calmed me down to a brisk, regular, calculable flow, but it made the thoughts in my head somehow confused – I can only describe them as coming two at a time, instead of the swift-stepping neat brisk one-after-another kind I am accustomed to, and can cope with.
However, many’s the time I have lain on high hard tables, legs apart, with male medical hands inside me, rubber gloved if one’s lucky, feeling a this or feeling a that. What can they know? What can they be feeling for? Some ritual here that is beyond rational understanding, but part of the male desire to be in on the female act of creation: and of course my experience has not been a patch on that of my friend Alison; she of the twins and the genetic counselling. And yet male interest in female insides, the determination to be there helping, with scalpel, light, tweezers, dabs of chemicals, squirts of hormones and whatever, gets us nowhere, except increasingly to indicate that we are all without guide, leader, Prime Mover – God, that is – but all hopelessly, helplessly accidental.
This is, I think, what my father set out to prove, when he impregnated my mother in the manner he did, a manner hardly likely to lead to a peaceful and ordinary gynaecological history. Mind you, ordinary people are in pretty short supply, if you ask me. Because something is unlikely, doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Life on earth is unlikely to the factor of 48 to the trillion, or some such statistic, but here we all are. And here I was, daughter of a man who back in the late forties, before the invention of computers – which have made actual genetic experimentation unnecessary – did his best to discover this and that about inheritance, and was enormously interested, I read in the Press cuttings, or at least according to the officer for his Defence, in not just the whats and hows of the human race, but the whys. A polygene, a polygene – what I inherited was a pretty fine group of characteristics! His murderous nature, his capacity for killing is undisclosed in me (as is his particularly long penis, myself being female) but might well show up in the next generation. All the more reason for me to keep my genes to myself. It was fortunate that I was bleeding, evidence of my non-pregnancy. Not a lot, just a little, but with occasional spasms of pain. Well, heaven knows what goes on within, in the dark and murky recesses, what physical or psychological disturbance Jack has stirred up, if I was thus to be kept at home.
Home, this crumbling haunted place, with its tiered, high, square rooms, each one empty save for the four-cornering of the truckle b
eds, waiting, no doubt, for some evil emergency! Fire, explosion, flood – or the arrival of an unexpected jazz band into an already overstretched community, with some slight moral right to housing, inasmuch as its members are prepared to stand under the War Memorial and incite the citizens to revelry! Home! What have I come to!
Now my father was no doubt an intelligent man and too bright and civilised for promotion to the very highest ranks of Nazi thuggery. He became medical officer in one of those camps where non-desirable races – those most closely aligned to the monkeys – that is to say gypsies and Jews and others recognisable from the shape of their skulls as being very like chimps, and lagging behind in the evolutionary race – were used as work-horses. It seemed a really bright idea to my father and his lot – you got all the lowest grade humans to work in the factories – a) they wouldn’t mind and b) it would free the rest for visionary and artistic activities. Well, fair enough. Our educational system achieves much the same end, though by way of IQ levels and not racial characteristics, though both of course being matters over which the individual has very little control. But the Jews and the gypsies didn’t have the stamina it took, and weren’t cheerful about it, so the camps became death camps, where the unwanted, and those who were messing up the genetic pool, could be eliminated, for the sake of the future. Well, it happens all the time. Many a generation has to suffer for the general improvement. All those young men in World War One, dying for a World Set Free from War. All those citizens in Hiroshima, dying so GIs could live. Oh yes, it happens all the time. If you ask me, my father’s defence counsel made a hash of the job: all he offered was the genuine spirit of scientific enquiry which motivated my father, and it wasn’t enough.
Of course it’s true my father was offered promotion outside the camp several times – a point made much of by the prosecution – but he chose to stay. That is to say, he wasn’t commanded to stay, in the ordinary manner of military affairs. He declined – but again the defence made pitifully little of this – on the grounds that he wanted to do the human race a good deed. He was acting in the same spirit as did Alison’s surgeons, when they offered her a selective termination: just have the one, mother: not the two! – thus offering Sophie’s choice to a later race of mums – remember Sophie, of the Styron novel, who was told to decide by a Nazi officer which of her two children was to live? It was seen (by a man) as a hard and beastly choice, but if you ask me it was better than none. Why didn’t she just grit her teeth and get on with it, or kill herself and both children with the materials at hand if she couldn’t bear it? Moan, moan, moan, Sophie! I’m my father’s daughter and have eliminated a number of my children in my time, and paid the man who held the scalpel very well to do it. That too was to perfect the race, by keeping my father’s seed out of it.
My father’s trial took up only two columns in The Times, which in those days, I grant you, was more closely printed than now. Fewer people read it but paid it more attention.
My father’s name was Oscar von Stirpit. My mother’s was Tamara Wells. She was half-gypsy. My grandmother Susan, the bishop’s daughter, had this Lawrencian encounter with a gypsy behind the bushes. Off with the raggle-taggle gypsies oh! But she didn’t go off with them. No. She stayed home and gave birth to Tamara, and everyone was enormously kind and forgiving.
And haven’t I succeeded where my grandmother did not? At least I ran off, with the leader of the Band, the King of the Gypsies: I didn’t just cower at home! And, dear God, even as this thought occurred to me, I heard the telephone ringing, English style, somewhere, nowhere. And how could I answer, stop it: don’t ring me, I’ll ring you. Coming out tonight, sweetheart? Oh, dear Lord, Thou who dost not exist, Deliver Me!
I put my head under Jennifer’s pillow but it didn’t blot out the sound. I counted. After thirty non-existent rings the non-existent bell stopped. Thirty. Why thirty? Thirty pieces of silver? The image of betrayal? Or something to do with that imaginary line that separates the woman under thirty from the one over? The rise in the figures for abnormal births? Take your pick, according to your therapeutic discipline. Fried, addled or hung, as my grandmama would say. Freud, Adler or Jung.
My abnormal birth. Okay. A pun. Not exactly an abnormal baby – I had all my parts, thanks to my father’s skill – just abnormally conceived. Though now I came to think of it, fairly matter of fact these days, just done with anaesthetics and willing patients. Whipping out eggs by the dozen and fertilising a few and replanting them, and selectively terminating, or freezing the rest for later: surrogate mothers, and test tube babies, and other blessings. Thank you, Father, first in the field! It’s just in those days those young women didn’t understand: would rather have done it in the normal way, in bed with the central light turned out, but the little light on the bedside table softly burning, not my father’s way, in the hard bright cruel light of meaning. That’s what it was: they didn’t understand. I’m proud of you, Father, in spite of your War Crimes Record! I’ll be proud of you if the effort kills me: doubles me up with pain once a month.
Footsteps outside, now. What prowls around? Gather your courage, look out the window. No one. Silence. Something sticky and red on the window sill, where your ring finger rests; the one that wears no ring, and wouldn’t, couldn’t. (Matthew’s gave you a detergent rash beneath it.) Your own blood? No. Brownish and aged; a stain, a splash. No, not even blood, a trick of the light. Oh Lord, Frances, anyone, where are you? What happened here once at the Hôtel de Ville? Those little dents in the building’s façade – bullet holes? Could blood have splashed up as far as this? And rain and wind and time simply failed to remove it, wash it away? Surely not. An atrocity is no more than the sum of its parts, hardly an excuse for haunting. We all die. Some die young. Many die unfairly. What’s so special? The trouble with studying the macro-universe, dealing in infinitesimal distances and sizes to the trillion, and the micro-universe, dealing in fractions likewise, is that, as I keep complaining, all this middle ground of lumbering shapes and unwieldy minds and primitive sensibilities lacks impact, lacks horror. Especially if you are determined to be proud of your father. Forget your mum. I look again: the stains are gone.
No, mum must not be forgot, though she always wanted to forget me. Tamara’s raggle-tag dad, the dark-eyed gypsy, kept in touch with the girl he’d wronged. That never happens in song and fable, where girls lean their backs up to thorns and weep their days away for lack of a good man, the one that’s so hard to find once they wear their apron high. In 1939, when she was ten, Tamara was taken off by the batty bishop, my maternal grandfather, to visit her gypsy dad, whose home base was in Bohemia: a place even then a tourist trap. My grandmother’s father the bishop Edward took the child across Europe, and then went on down to Italy; to take a look at the Religious Art of Venice, planning to come back up when the month was up. Traumatic enough for my mother, I would have thought, as an event; but very few in those days paid much attention to the emotional sensitivities and whims of children. Nor indeed had Edward seemed to notice the newspapers were suggesting that war was about to break out and everyone had better stay home. So while my maternal great-grandfather Edward was inspecting the Grand Canal, my maternal grandfather was swept up with all his tribe and incarcerated for the sake of future generations, who could well be spared the nomadic subhuman messiness of the gypsy. And little Tamara, with her dark eyes and hair and olive skin, ended up in my father’s laboratory.
It is odd, isn’t it, this notion of the genes not blending. I think my father, unacquainted as he was with the notion of particles of inheritance, but assuming there would be one gene for dark colouring, and another for fair, was trying to work out, while more or less accepting Mendel’s laws, which suggested otherwise, the truth of the old limerick:
There once was a white man called Starkie,
Who happened to marry a darkie.
The result of their sins,
Was quadruplets, not twins,
One white, one black, and two khaki.
Now of course scientists and doctors often do come up with truths convenient to politicians and employers. Think of wicked old Lysenko, proving the inheritance of acquired characteristics, so convenient to Marxists! Listen, you! You just behave like a good revolutionary, be brave, strong and true, and your children will be likewise! And how about all those doctors employed by Imperial Tobacco, insisting for decades that cigarettes weren’t bad for you at all, if anything mildly beneficial: a gentle disinfectant. The Nazi party wanted genes to blend. Father just helped prove they did.
Obviously the younger the women who bore the babies the better: and the fairer the donor, and the darker the receptor, the easier to trace various traits through the generations. So very dark girl children – especially the gypsies, who tended to be pretty – were fed oestrogen from fresh placentas removed from other mothers at various stages of foetal development and brought to maturity early. Then impregnated – the techniques of fancy fertilisation not yet having been developed – in the natural way, by the blondest and best. Look, the same kind of thing happens to animals, all the time, in laboratories all over the world, and the animal liberation theologists would argue that this is not better than using human beings to find things out, but worse. Humans have voices. They can protest. ‘No, no, no!’ I daresay they got used to it, though pulped fresh placenta must be pretty disgusting, sometimes drunk as it was from tubes attached to still living women. That’s the worst of it. And it worked: that at least was something. Girls as young as nine had babies: it was also interesting to find out what effect the immaturity of the mother had on the foetus, so many were removed for study. My mother was really lucky, and was all of fifteen when I was born, at the very end of the war; difficult to fertilise (a sign of natural superiority) and one of those chosen to live in comfort and tranquillity listening to Mozart during the course of her pregnancy. I like to think perhaps my father was fond of her, though I don’t know why he should have been. She was never very likeable, as I have already detailed, by virtue of her illness. Last time I visited her she asked me who I was, and when I replied ‘your daughter’, she fetched one of the nuns and told her I’d said I was the gasman, but there was something odd, because she only had electricity, so she wasn’t to open the door to me, was she? In other words, she gibbered. And, as I say, though her early experiences were certainly traumatic, and my brother Robin’s were not, he ended up as peculiar as she. Unless of course Lysenko was right, and acquired characteristics can be inherited? Or perhaps it was just a simple, if unlikely, coincidence (but that’s all coincidences are – unlikely events) in which case at least 50 per cent of my reason for not having babies is out of the window.
