by Weldon, Fay
And the other 50 per cent, the world’s condemnation of my father, is beginning to look a little weaker. If I could only establish him in my own mind, as a reasonable and well-motivated man.
There were, of course, other charges against him at Nuremberg, other than those of the untoward vivisection of women and children (no one bothered about the exploding women and children of Berlin, at the time, since they weren’t innocent victims, being German) but I try to dismiss this as hearsay. Those SS officers all looked pretty alike. One blond God (or Devil, depending) is pretty much like another. My father (or someone) had a whimsical way of turning up every now and then and shooting sometimes every tenth, or sixth, or fifth, or third or whatever, inmate as they queued up for their soup. There was no discernible system at work – no simple number added or subtracted, nothing to do with odd or even numbers, the days of the week, the number of guards, that anyone could work out, and so no knowing where in the queue one could safely place oneself. So most simply queued, trusting chance and being hungry, and on bad days would even rejoin the end of the queue, there being, as the result of my father’s activities, extra soup to go round. I see no point in denying the slayer was my father; it seems probable enough that he was at it again, mimicking in the camp the random deaths of evolution. Those things which happen by simple accident to a species – the wiping out of a continent by an ice age, say – random, putting a stop to such evolutionary forces as are at work there. Yes, perfectly possible. Oscar would, I suppose, had he lived, now be in his eighties. I am glad I do not have to visit him. He would be an old man in an armchair, with a scarf round his neck, mulling over the adventures of the past, thrilled with all the new statistical evidence and computer models and cunning proofs the Darwinists can these days mount in their denial of the Prime Mover, the Creator, the Intending Mind of the universe. I bet he’d be glad to find he was right, that God didn’t exist. But then again, I daresay he would still see himself as virtuous, as does Edward Teller, Father of the Bomb. Innovator. Saviour.
I wonder why I see him with the scarf round his neck? Unless there’s some connection between a noose and a scarf, and I have a vision of seizing the old wool rag and pulling it tight, in a cloud of dust and frayed fabric, with just enough strength left in it to do its work. Most of us are ambivalent about our fathers. They didn’t hang mine, mind you, they shot him. All that and in the end to prove nothing: but of course the adventure’s in the race, isn’t it, not the winning. An attempt to re-create the universe must always be worth while.
So that’s the horror story at the nub of it all. We are all misbegotten, by one form of monster or another (listen to our mothers). Mine is just an extreme case of an everyday event.
My mother was liberated by the Americans, and taken to a hostel where the diet was less satisfactory than in her little oasis of plenty, and the music was not Mozart but from the American Services Network abroad. Nevertheless, one month later I was born, safely, to all accounts a perfect little replica of my father. How had he managed that? Did he have some inkling of the cloning processes, or were my looks a mere matter of chance, it so happening that all, or nearly all of those that pertained to his looks were disclosed in me, and those from my mother undisclosed, just waiting to pop up in future generations? If Daddy had only realised the unblendability of male and female, he could have desisted from his tinkering and enjoyed my mother in peace.
So really, I suppose, I shouldn’t be surprised that my mother, forty years on, accuses me of being a gasman in disguise, a robber knocking on her door to gain entrance under false pretences, the better to hit her over the head and take all she has. Her neat little blonde baby, her enemy, bursting out from inside her like the creature in Alien. Not much fun, you must agree, for her, or for me, of course, who always wanted her to look at me softly, kindly, and she never did – or only once, when she mistook me for a kitten, but then got cross because I didn’t purr. I remember it well. I was five at the time, and took her censure to heart. She threw me across the room.
‘Forty years on, growing older and older...’ – I can’t remember the rest of the song.
My great-grandfather the kindly bishop who got home safely enough from Venice in November 1939, feeling guilty, I expect – but I daresay also a little relieved – to have so easily mislaid his gypsy granddaughter, presently had no option but to claim her and her little SS baby back. It was happening all over after the war – relatives thankfully lost were turning up everywhere, while (as is so often the way of the Great Creator, who has this passion for irony; a sign no doubt of His great intelligence) those genuinely missed just never came back.
Tamara grew up to ride to hounds (she loved animals), and tear foxes to pieces (an inferior race, I always think: nasty smelly bony things with odd shaped muzzles, though it must be admitted splendid brushes) and met Simon, a pleasant person though of rather shifty financial habits, while he was trying to sell a dodgy horse to the Master of Hounds. He took her and her misbegotten little baby – that is to say, me, little Sandra, on. Robin was born. Tamara got carried off by the men in white. So presently did Robin. I mean not to be.
English telephones ringing in France, ghostly footsteps, splashes of blood! Not insanity, merely myself, wanting to speak to myself; Sandra Harris has an urgent message for Mrs Sandra Sorensen. Dear God, let me not be mad.
Oh Holy Father, Cruel God, All Powerful Simulator of an unkind universe; He in whose image I am made. Male and female created He them, the bastard! That’s the point. They shot you, nailed Him: couldn’t stand it. Quite right too. All this misery, inadvertent human woe, random cruelty – from avalanche to divorce to child neglect to typhoon, the rages that create war, the greed that creates hunger – made He all them. Disgusting, if you ask me, from the slurp of copulation to the strawing up of pulped placenta. What the hell, Daddy-oh! Perhaps it’s you on the telephone.
17
Chew You Up and Spit You Out
I felt better. The pains had gone. I got out of bed, feeling the floor dusty and splintery beneath my feet. I put on T-shirt and jeans. I washed. I did not look behind me. It wasn’t that I was frightened. I just did not want to see what still might be there to see.
I remembered Eugenie, our pretty neighbour when I was a child; when our peculiar family lived in what once had been a vicarage, and she lived in the church; allegedly deconsecrated: but personally I always felt a vengeful God still dwelt therein. She was a wide-eyed, very thin, nervy creature, a weaver of tapestries depicting country scenes. She had her bed in what had once been the minstrels’ gallery, and her weaving frame where once the altar had stood. Plaques remembering dead babies and brass dedications to village benefactors were embedded in the walls. On the anniversaries of their deaths, Eugenie (I expect she was born Joan or some such name) would place little pots of flowers beneath their memorials; more in hope of keeping their spirits quiet and not making a nuisance of themselves, than from any real sentiment, or so it seemed to me, even as a child. Eugenie suffered a series of disasters emotional and financial while living in the church – and of course laid the fault at the building’s door. Even as a child I could see the folly of this – if you live in a damp cold building difficult to heat, you will contract rheumatism: if you engage in a non-profitable profession (and the crafts are simply not well paid) you will run into debt: if you believe all you need is a man to make your life complete, that man will not turn up – or if he does, will stay for a night or so, and briskly depart, before you can lay claim to his soul. And a night or so, what’s more, does not constitute an affair, does not entitle you to talk publicly about your broken heart, as did Eugenie. But she was a good neighbour, and kind to myself and Robin, and would sometimes let us use the bath, installed in what had been the vestry and the only warm place in the church. The window of our Rectory bathroom was broken, and remained so for year after year. Through the hole icy winds blew, in winter, and in the summer wasps would drift in from their nest in the apple tree, a branch of whi
ch had thrust itself right into the room, through the open pane. We took very few baths. When I was fifteen I sawed off the branch, went to the glazier, bought some putty and fitted a new pane, thus upsetting my grandmother very much. She ranted and screamed and said I was no flesh of hers. She apologised next day – it was just, I think, that sometimes the sum of the male side of my being was too much for her, its accumulated foreignness. I learned from my grandmother how little people like change, how much they value the problems caused by their own inefficiency. This, of course, was brought home to me, vividly, as the Citronella Jumpers journeyed through France.
Eugenie finally ran out of the church – literally, one Sunday morning – refusing to go back. She left it in a truly terrible state for the next purchaser, an architect, who complained to the Estate Agent and argued that a couple of hundred pounds should come off the asking price. The place was riddled with dry rot, wet rot, deathwatch beetle. Eugenie had neglected it. He wanted her back to prove his point, to thrust his competent knife into rotten beams, crumbling plaster, so she would not have the face to argue.
‘I can’t go back,’ she said. ‘It’s haunted.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said the Estate Agent, ‘or you’ll lose the sale altogether.’
So Eugenie lost the couple of hundred pounds that would have bought her a nice little car: which if she’d had she wouldn’t have been knocked down as a pedestrian on one of the new zebra crossings, would she, and been killed, six months later. The Curse of the Haunted Church! The architect, a shrewd man, as you can tell, made no complaint at all about the ghosts of dead babies, or misfortune dogging his footsteps: his business prospered and clients loved to dine beneath the vaulted beams. Mind you, he’d had proper central heating put in, and spotlights shone against the stonework, and he objected to the Parish Council about the way every now and then villagers would come into his garden to put flowers on the gravestones he kept as conversation pieces and he had the practice stopped. That’s the way to deal with the past! Keep it in its place, or it’ll get you, even if it has to trail you across fields and cities, and make you stumble beneath a bus: your own past or someone else’s. And above all keep the house in order: keep it placated.
Eugenie failed to keep the place in order: so it got her. Reached out and got her. Perhaps it was not my past, but the Hôtel de Ville itself, which so oppressed and haunted me.
So I took Jennifer’s brush and swept down a wall or two, and pinned up some falling wallpaper. I went out into the fields and picked some wild flowers. I put them on the table in the jam jar which had contained the excellent French apricot conserve. But it was not enough. The sense of desolation merely increased. What was it I’d picked up; what was it had fallen in behind me, on my way back from the square to the Hôtel de Ville, down the back road, past the shuttered bungalows with their neat pots of mauve hydrangeas and red geraniums and yellow dahlias, standing smart and orderly like Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1814 before it went off to the slaughter: a summer dream defeated by a Russian winter. The lifelessness of France in summer! The ghosts of dead men under every hedge; bodies swing in memory from every lamppost. The people have forgotten: the land itself has not. It still mourns. My ghostly lover, some young man who can’t forgive death for the denial of his pleasures. Just as my unborn babies will not forgive me. Oh, I could have picked up anything, anyone, along the road.
18
Tell Me About Your Wife
‘Jack,’ I said that night. ‘Jack, tell me about your wife.’ When I was in bed with Jack I forgot all about ghosts.
‘My ex-wife.’ He nibbled my ear as if to muffle the words.
‘Ex in law or in your heart?’ I asked.
‘In the one that’s most important,’ he said. So I knew he was still married.
‘Did you really ask her to come on tour with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Ask me no whys and I’ll give you no becauses.’
My ears were blocked by his fingers, my mouth by his mouth: all my orifices were agreeably blocked up, so for a time the sensations inside me were all-important. But it could not last for ever. These things can’t.
‘What are we going to do when we get back?’
I felt a wary stillness in him. I should not ask. But how could I not ask? Join your life to another’s, and you must know what goes on inside their head, if only in order to dovetail your actions to theirs. Herein lies the penalty of company. To live alone is to be free, but who wants to live alone? I even joined my life to Matthew, rather than be on my own. The cosmos is a kind of company, a never-ending puzzle, but gives the impression of being dreadfully still; judgmental, even – though one knows just what a whirling, buzzing, roaring, dancing maelstrom it is. If all the bits were just moved closer together, stripped of the illusion of immensity, we’d see that clear enough. Listen, folks, it’s just tiny, compared to – compared to what? Alas, we don’t know. All we know is that it’s there, beyond our comprehension, still further, greater patterns made not by divine intent, but by the cumulative chance events of endless aeons.
And of course, since the small echoes the great, and the differences between the world of simple rocks, stones and isotopes and that of living matter are not so dissimilar, save in the latter’s complexity and its capacity to reproduce itself in more or less identical form (the more or less being the crux, of course, ending up in the difference between the amoeba and the giraffe) it should not surprise me that illusion is inherent in what goes on between me and Jack. More (or less) than meets the eye, the nose, the ears, the mouth, the fingertips, or that other sense we traditionally ignore – the sexual responses somewhere inside us; that seventh sense. Because, if you ask me, I’ll tell you that’s what it is, which combines the other six with its own peculiar awareness of meant, meant, meant.
Nature’s way, you may piously say, of stopping my monthly bleeding, my horrid pains, the unseemly tricks me and my Dutch cap get up to, my version of the Thames Tidal Barrier, wilfully barring the onflow of history into the future, crying fuck you all – what about me, me, me? diverting it elsewhere, until the tide ebbs, gives up. Not nature’s way, I say. Illusion.
We don’t talk much, Jack and I: not in the way of exchanging ideas, comparing our particular visions of the world. Rather less than before, I think: before he found me out as Starlady Sandra, she who has the heavens at her fingertips. But I don’t mind. Though I love to have friends, intimates, confidantes, I have never felt the need for what is called ‘intellectual companionship’. Mathematics is a solitary activity: I became accustomed early to keeping my thoughts a private matter between myself and some sheet of paper, or some blackboard, or later some computer. Others were welcome to look in, of course, but could scarcely expect to contribute. Space scientists and astronomers are not on the whole the liveliest people in the world: they tend to see only detail, not the wonder of it all. (I hasten, politely, to say but of course, of course there are exceptions.) Perhaps they are right; stare into the heart of things too long, and be blinded! More prudent to tiptoe round the edges, taking sneaky sideways glances in, pretending not to. Only when I came to preside over Matthew’s dinner table did I meet people who dealt easily and eagerly with ideas, but with a kind of condescension, such a swift, ironic sense of their own superiority as quite gave me indigestion. They made their bread and butter the incoherent of the world, and I didn’t like that. I prefer the Citronella Jumpers, who squabble and rankle all the time with one another, on the simplest level, but have some kind of intuition, a non-verbal wisdom, which they in all generosity love to communicate. What harm can they do? The singers and dancers of this world?
I said to Matthew once:
‘As well sentence a rock to three months’ imprisonment for standing on a footpath and tripping you up, as a man for getting drunk and breaking a window.’
‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘A man has free will, a rock doesn’t. Where is my dinner jacket?’
‘Ar
guably,’ I said, ‘no man has free will.’
‘Argue away,’ he said. ‘But where is my masonic apron? Put your drunk in prison and he won’t do it again.’
‘Computer studies prove a period of imprisonment makes no difference one way or another,’ said I. ‘If you put rocks in prison you could still earn your living and the warders do without all that nasty smelly slopping out.’
‘You are impossible,’ he said. ‘Save this kind of thing for your programme. Hand me my tie. No, not that one, you fool. The dress tie, not the bow.’
