by Weldon, Fay
And so on. In other words, he wasn’t properly concentrating. Alison, my good friend, suggested he didn’t concentrate because I was a woman, but I don’t think we have to look as far as that. Most people would rather just go on doing whatever it is they’re doing, bother the sense of it, let alone the morality.
Jack and me; separate, trying to be one. ‘Ask me no whys,’ he says, ‘I’ll give you no becauses.’ ‘Jack,’ I say, ‘what will we do when we get back?’ Jack the wild trumpeter, leader of the Band, husband of Anne, father of Frances, lover of Starlady Sandra, astronomer and media hack! ‘Jack, Jack, what will we do when we get back? Where will we go? What’s to become of us?’
‘Do about what?’ says he, a man of few words, but offering a warning. Think too much about the future and you’ll have no present at all. You’ll live your life tomorrow, never today; be dead before you know it. Song of the wanderer, the nomad, the traveller, dweller on this stretch of the road, self-righteous as all such songs are. I’m right to live as I do: you’re stupid: and here are the words to prove it. Listen to them! How they sing!
‘We have to live somewhere,’ I say, persisting, and he sighs.
‘Women are all the same,’ I feel him say, though do not hear. ‘Must have their pots and pans, their washing machines.’
‘I’d love this to go on for ever,’ he says. ‘But it can’t. I have things to do back home.’
‘What?’
‘Gigs,’ he said. ‘A wedding, a funeral, a fête. The usual things. Except the funeral. That’s not usual. Not much jazz at funerals. Piano player. Dropped dead over the keys, playing “Body and Soul”. In the wrong key. Mind you, it’s tricky. Three chord changes. But he was never much of a musician. And there’s every Monday at the Bell. That’s in Cardiff.’
‘A lot of travelling.’
‘Yes. Now I know who you are, do you still want to tag along?’ There’s a trace of anxiety in his voice, just a trace.
‘Do you mean because I am who I am, or because you know who I am?’
He laughs and holds me closer. He’s not slow, this Jack the mad trumpeter. Agile enough in the head. But he doesn’t reply.
‘Of course I want to tag along.’
‘That’s settled then,’ he says, relief in his voice. But how he hates to be held to plans, confined by the patterns of other people’s expectations. Of course, nothing is settled at all. I am used to rotas, work schedules, menus, lists of guests, Christmas cards received and returned (Matthew’s era), production dates, and the certainty of knowing where I am going to lay my head each night and, what is more, having a clean nightie. Look, I would like to know where I am going to live.
Even Godfrey the Goatherd, he of the vibes and the rural crafts, with whom I spent five wretched years, understood the necessity of having a roof, albeit one that was thatched, and with an ancient thatch, in which insects of every kind sported and worked out evolution’s particular plan for them. Wooden-top Cottage (I ask you!) was eighteen miles from Manchester University, which meant a tedious daily drive for me, but Godfrey couldn’t stand living in cities, and his general view was that if I insisted on pursuing my career that was okay by him, but since he was happy enough to support me, there was no real necessity for me so to do. (Happy to support me he might have been; but he earned barely enough to keep himself in vegan foods, let alone me. One of his theories was that if pushed we could live on grass, like King Nebuchadnezzar.) Work, he said, was a replacement activity: better for me to give up and live next to nature, in tune with the seasons.
Godfrey the Goatherd ‘worked with’ young male schizophrenics and somehow managed to contain my confusion and distress before and after Robin died. That’s why I moved in with him. I came to be sceptical about the ‘working with’, which seemed to add up to sitting around in the company of what even he called ‘weirdos’, drinking wine, smoking marihuana, reading R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, and occasionally offering the kind of advice one drunk, high man will offer another – for which he was paid a small salary by the Social Services. But he seemed to do no better or worse with the young men than did the more orthodox psychiatrists; the clients lapsed in and out of babel in just the same exhausting way, earnestly buttonholing both the sane and the insane, just as loosely connected to reality as ever, but at least, and for the most part, in the same kind of amiable, hazy daze as Godfrey himself. Sometimes violence and horror erupted, but not often. There was a lot of leading in and out of the goats which lived in the fields at the back, and which often got out to munch the forbidden plants which grew under my kitchen windowsill, and sometimes I would come back from the University and find goats as well as men sitting on the broken sofas of the living room.
‘Mad,’ I wept, once, as I made them all borage tea to sip, goats included.
‘You mustn’t say that,’ Godfrey said, gently taking me by the hand – he had a beard and soulful eyes: Pedro the guitarist and he are much alike, now I come to think of it – ‘these people must not be called mad. Theirs is the true experience. You do yourself no good, or them, by using these labels.’
‘Nor them, you,’ I said, and wept some more. I very seldom cry but I was weak; I had recently had another abortion, through which Godfrey held my hand, deploring the while my rejection of the life force – but not sighing too loud, in case I changed my mind, for even he could see the inconvenience of my being pregnant. He did not understand my determination not to propagate, which I rashly attempted to explain to him, for he saw insanity as a blessing, not a tragedy. But we needed my small salary as junior lecturer to help support the dope-smoking, borage-sipping, goat-keeping habits of himself and his coven of patients. I was a year into my doctoral thesis, too – a mathematic model of sexual selection: how height and weight in humans is affected by polygenes, leaving out diet and other environmental variables. (Large groupings of genes, each one of which will have an infinitesimal effect on the growing organism, but which together add up to something significant, are known as ‘polygenes’.) Those were the days in which I was having to work late into the night on my thesis, and, what was more, by candlelight. Godfrey felt that electricity had something to do with the increasing amount of mental disturbance (or whatever it was that was so described): one had to be careful in our contemporary society. Since he also felt that the colourings and preservatives put in food could affect the mental processes, and was heartily laughed at, loudly, at the time, by nutritionists, it is perhaps too early in the world’s history to declare him wrong about electricity.
Where was I? Oh yes, my concluding conversation with Godfrey. I wept, as usual. He was benign and fatherly.
‘Mad!’ I wept.
‘Don’t say that,’ he rebuked, ‘these people are as sane as you, probably more so.’ (Or words to that effect.)
‘I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about you!’ I remember saying, through my tears.
He breathed in, hard, rolled his big brown eyes upwards in the attempt to forestall wrath and said:
‘Poor Sandra, you’re tired! Why don’t you give up this silly work of yours, and help me with something really worthwhile!’
It was shortly after this that I left. But I continue to hold Godfrey in some esteem. He and his kind pulled up the blinds, as it were, on those long dark lonely corridors of madness: made it almost a sign of grace, a gift from God, to have madness in the family. The blinds have been lowered a little since, of course: the mad are grouped with the socially inadequate, and certainly not admired any more, as they were in the sixties and seventies; their asylums are closed and they are left to stand about on street corners, occasionally gibbering and erratically jerking, and from time to time raping, strangling or mutilating a passer-by; but they are not hidden, strait-jacketed, to be a source of secret shame and disgrace.
My stepfather Simon died of cancer of the stomach when I was twenty. Cancer was then a word still scarcely spoken: a hushed whisper: a misfortune: yet another source of family disgrace. But
little by little, as madness came out of the closet, so did cancer. The dying crawled out of their back rooms to sit at the family table, and guests even came to tea: and Nancy Reagan told the world she had cancer of the breast. Some things change for the better.
So good for Godfrey the Goatherd, say I, and may his herds flourish, and his dope grow strong and green, but not with me. No. After Godfrey I lived with my Professor for a little; and then, when that broke up, on my own, until in a moment of weakness, after all the business of the hard-rock little Planet Athena, I married Matthew.
19
Where Will We Live?
‘Jack,’ I say, ‘Jack, where will we live?’ How hard it is to be a free spirit!
‘Why,’ he says, ‘in the van.’ So I am to live like a gypsy, am I, without a postal address?
‘You take your washing round to your wife,’ I say. ‘I can hardly do that.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘She’d put your delicate things through the heavy soiled white wash. She does that to me when she’s angry. I have no socks left unshrunk.’
‘I’ll take them to the launderette,’ I say, ‘along with mine. Your future will be soft socks, delicately laundered.’ Anything I will do for him, anything: or that part of him which so wonderfully, nightly, becomes me. I will bath in the public wash-house, if I must.
‘You’ll miss your work,’ he says, ‘your friends.’
‘I’ll sit in the van and write a book,’ I say. ‘I’ll follow you to every gig. I will never be bored. We could,’ I add cautiously, ‘get a radio telephone.’
‘I suppose so,’ he says, ‘but it might be the beginning of the end.’
‘Then we won’t have one,’ I say. ‘There will be only you and only me.’
‘Anne keeps my diary,’ he says. ‘The bookings come through to her. I call her once a week, from a pay phone. Or go round.’
‘I’d rather you called her,’ I say.
‘I think I’ll have to,’ he said, ‘at least for a time. She’d got herself into a real state. Perhaps I’d better call her tomorrow, calm her down.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I say.
‘I have to have someone to keep the diary,’ he says.
‘I’ll do it,’ I say.
‘How can you, from the van?’ he asks. And he starts to sing in a husky voice, like some old, old black folk singer, ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. I realise he’s a little drunk. He gets through two bottles of wine a day at least, and quite a lot of beer. Playing the trumpet is thirsty work. Matthew drank no more than half a bottle of wine a day, and unlimited Perrier water.
A kind of cold creeps into my heart: and worse, I have the sensation that the hot hard fleshy tool around which my own soft flesh is wrapped, is not flesh at all, but cold metal: like some kind of makeshift rod – wire coat hanger not hazel dowsing twig. The effect is the same: the wire twists and turns as does the twig, but the process is different.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you like my voice?’
‘I love your voice,’ I say. ‘I love you,’ and the magic works, and he is warm again, and the ghostly lover, the grave dweller, who was there for a moment, is gone.
Jennifer Says...
‘But where will you and Jack live?’ asks Jennifer.
‘In the back of the van,’ I say.
‘It won’t last,’ she says.
‘It will,’ I say.
‘He’ll go back to his wife.’
‘He won’t,’ I say.
‘She keeps his diary,’ says Jennifer. ‘He’ll have to. And there’s Frances to think of and one thing leads to another. What he usually does is live in the van all summer and with Anne all winter.’
We’re whispering. We’re in the kitchen. It’s four in the morning. I couldn’t sleep, and got up and came downstairs, braving ghosts. I found Jennifer wrapped in a blanket, head on the table, dozing. Sandy felt too hot and sweaty to have her in his bed, she said. So she got out of it.
Hearing this, I feel an expression on my face that quite shocks me. I remind myself of my grandmother. I borrow Jennifer’s mirror – she has one in her bag, of course, and study my face, and yes, there it is, in my pursed and disapproving lips! My father’s narrow, perfect Gestapo lips – he must have been the handsomest SS officer in the whole German army – but on them my grandmother’s expression whenever she said ‘I don’t approve of that!’ or ‘Oh no, it wouldn’t be safe’. Is this the result of environmental variables, or of the dreaded polygenes? What the hell; I pull myself together. If Jennifer wants to play masochist it’s nothing to do with me. I rearrange my face so it displays less disapproving lineaments.
‘She won’t have him back,’ I say.
‘She will,’ says Jennifer. ‘She’s the kind who thinks half a man is better than no man at all. And he has no right to ask you to live in the back of a van. What will people think of you? You’ll amount to nothing.’
‘The back of the van’s just fine by me,’ I say. I, Sandra Harris, Stargazer Supreme, Lady Astronomer, aged forty-two, non-procreator of the race, herself an end in itself, not a mere hander-on of life, will live in a van to the end of her days, if that’s what Jack the mad trumpeter decrees.
This woman I hardly know, who appears to be me, goes back to bed and settles her body in beside the man she hardly knows. His hairy arm moves round her smooth back. Forty-two she may be but her skin’s as smooth and pale and freshly ironed as ever, and she’s off with the raggle-taggle gypsies oh. Oh, and oh, and oh again.
‘Hush,’ he says. ‘Remember Frances.’ In some matters, let it be said, he is more delicate than she.
20
The Unclassed
The ‘unclassed’ is a word seldom used these days, but much in vogue at the turn of this century. It refers to people who by virtue of personal choice, happenstance (a very recent word, this one) have lost their position in the world. Or who chose to throw it all away and live in vans. They may be defiant about it, or wretched, or try to hide it, but those who remain firmly fixed and secure in their position in the world, who make lasting and sensible marriages, who look after their money properly, who have clean tablecloths at properly laid tables, recognise them for what they are at once, and look to their pockets, and to their daughters. It is often, but not always, a matter of money.
The classed sleep with the unclassed but do not marry them, because then they become unclassed themselves.
These are the ranks of the unclassed:
Any man or woman who married too far above or below them on the social scale.
Any woman divorced and not speedily re-marrying, preferably her lover.
Any man made redundant and not quickly re-employed at a higher salary.
Anyone on Social Security.
Anyone dying of an incurable disease.
Anyone ‘in the media’. That is to say, anyone questioning or commenting on a society in a way disruptive to that society. Actors, artists, writers, musicians and so on, who seem to prefer the company of the unclassed to that of the classed, and who form a demi-monde, of some slight interest to the classed, who will sometimes have one or two to dinner at a time. (Painters, in particular, oddly, often make great efforts to appear classed. In England they appointed each other RAs, that is to say, Royal Academicians, and put on dinner jackets and smoke cigars and comment on the wine, but it doesn’t really work.)
Anyone whose parents do not have a fixed abode, or are not married.
Anyone who was born as the result of a genetic experiment, or conceived in a test-tube, by in-vitro fertilisation.
Do you understand? It is not a matter of snobbery (a bus driver can be as classed as a stockbroker) but of belonging, or not belonging, either intentionally (which is at least something) or unintentionally by virtue of birth, which is – as the French say – bas de gamme. The unclassed are rubbish and that’s the fact of it. Yet there are so many of us, and more every day, test-tubes popping all over the land.
Astronomers ar
e not normally unclassed. But Sandra Harris, astronomer, forty-two, struggling to be classed all her life, by way of passing exams, gaining degrees, changing partners, moving house, making and saving money, pretending her past did not exist, was de-classed yet again when she discovered the mouldy Planet Athena (mouldy! would that it were. Mould implies moisture, warmth, fungus, life) and became the object of media attention, and not even marrying Matthew Sorensen made it any better. Stargazer Sandra!
To be unclassed is one of the most painful experiences of being alive, if you ask Sandra Sorensen, S.S., or anyone in a Social Security queue for the first time.
Yet Jack the mad trumpeter seeks unclassification willingly, embraces it for all our sakes. That’s why I love him.
21
How’s Your Pains?
‘How’s your pains?’ asked Frances the next day. She must have fallen asleep while sunbathing; her system had broken down and her long left leg was bright red, and her long right leg was pale.
‘Much better,’ I say. She doesn’t seem too pleased.
‘Would you like to borrow a Tampax?’ she asks, and I realise she wants to be sure I’m actually bleeding, which will prevent my sexual congress with her father. Little does she know.
In actual fact I was now hardly bleeding at all any more: perhaps my body, knowing where its maximum pleasure lay, was taking steps to make itself properly available to Jack the mad trumpeter. Buggery is okay, but not okay: not quite true love. What is the best that can be done in certain circumstances is always in danger of being the thing that needs to be done: like Valium or heroin: an addiction, self-defeating: pleasure turning into necessity.
‘The curse!’ laments Frances. ‘Why do you think God invented it? Punishment, I suppose. Serving women right.’ We are sitting next to each other on the bus. Jack is up front with Sandy arguing over the day’s programme.
‘But why should we be punished?’ I had a feeling she might somehow know, that she possessed her father’s intuition, would put her finger right on it.
