by Weldon, Fay
‘For being such messy things,’ she said. ‘God didn’t get us right, if you ask me, something went wrong, so He’s taking it out on us. Do you think I’m mad? I’m always saying things like that. People at school say I’m mad.’ She spoke with the complacency of her age: glad to be mad.
I wonder what it would be like to have her as my daughter. She’s fifteen; I’m forty-two. She was born in the year of a termination, the one I had by Godfrey the Goatherd. I am revising my opinion of Frances. I rather like having her about. I might even teach her to read, write and think, as her mother has so singularly failed to do. Her father, of course, cares nothing for the education of a daughter. On the whole he thinks the better informed someone is the more boring they are.
‘Discover a planet!’ I found myself apologising the previous night. ‘Anyone can discover a planet! All you have to do is have the right backing and look in the right place.’
I know it is not given to many of us women to make precisely that statement, but its like is made up and down the country by successful women in various professions, as male members wilt and quail.
‘But, darling, it’s only a little promotion.’
‘I won’t really be making more than you, darling, not if you take the babyminder into account.’
‘Darling, I’m only the token woman on the Board.’
‘Darling, they’re so short of women to be Dames they’ll choose just anyone. Now to be an OBE, like you, is really something.’
‘I only make all this money because the public has no taste. The more you make, the worse you are. Everyone knows that!’ And buggery is all the rage, in certain circles. If you think there’s a connection, that’s up to you. Male frustration constructively contained. I’m not complaining; Sandra the Stargazer is not complaining, only mentioning. The way round it is to lie there and enjoy it. That way family life continues. I might have got on better with Matthew if he had only heard of it.
22
A Certain Rhythm
What, live without a fixed address? Me? I’m not sure about all this. Receive no letters? I am accustomed to certain rhythms in my life. I like the morning paper to come through the letterbox. I like my day to start with very cold orange juice. I like the sense of my mind starting from cold, like the engine of my car, to its agreeable morning purr. I like my fingers on the computer keyboard; the pen in my hand. I like a full-length mirror on the wall, unsmudged, unsmeared. In fact, I feel pretty much as my grandmother must have done, when she declined to abscond with her gypsy lover.
I, on the other hand, like Mad Jack’s stubbly chin: I like his wide mouth, his even teeth, his bright eyes and long fingers. I like the music he makes. I like his past, meeting up with mine to form this powerful present. If I have to, I will do without my certain rhythm, and think the privilege of a fixed address well lost for love.
I sit at the window where lately the splashes of blood appeared and disappeared – there is no sign of them now – clearly, the way to deal with these little demonstrations of a traumatic past, seeping through the barriers so sensibly erected by our conscious minds, is to ignore them, as one might the tantrum of a naughty child. I watch the Band getting out of the van, instruments glinting in the pale light. For once their voices are lowered – in deference to what? Me? Frances? I hardly imagine so. More likely the moon. Jack, long, lean-thighed, quick moving, somehow elongated, fit for a Goya portrait. My breath catches in my throat. My heart lurches. I speak advisedly. Love it may be, but the symptoms of love and death are not so dissimilar. I have an ECG trace of my own heart to prove it. (Where? Where are my belongings? Where are the traces of my history?) I have always travelled light, but this is going too far. I should have taken more from Matthew’s house. I should not have provoked him. Now he has control of my past, as a witch has control of the person whose fingernail clippings she possesses. I thought I was happy enough with the contents of the nylon bag I brought with me in the bus – I thought that some money in the bank, a cheque book, a credit card or so, an address book with the numbers of friends and colleagues, and a change of pants and a change of jeans was all I needed – my past, after all, being carried in my memory if I needed to refer to it, my present being an ongoing situation – but here I am, wanting sight and feel, the physical actual sight and feel of a strip of blue, waxed, lined paper containing a portion of my cardiac history. Oh, how much weaker am I than I thought: where is my home? where are my slippers? – and I remember how I once did possess, in my late twenties, a pair of mauve high-heeled fur-lined slippers of wonderful vulgarity, which I can only have bought to annoy Godfrey the Goatherd – whatever became of them? – of the copper-bottomed saucepans I like? my manuscripts? My familiar desk is still at Central, it’s true, and in it the kind of pleasant, familiar things one keeps in office desks – nail varnish, love letters, unanswered fan letters, a few floppy discs which contain my attempts at writing, as recorded by a kindly secretary attached to the Wild Life programme, the producers of which spend so much time hovering over burrows or lying in wait for foxes – the miracles of nature taking for ever to film – that she is only too glad of something to do, if only my typing. Perhaps the ECG trace is in my desk at Central?
On this strip of pale blue waxed paper that I now so irrationally miss, is the record of the pattern made by my heart in one of its occasional attacks of tachycardia, when it reverts to its foetal speed, some 200 beats the minute. The pattern is aesthetically pleasing: a steady, satisfying, regular beat driving across the paper, as a pen drives along the page; it is just that the upstrokes and downstrokes are far too close together for comfort – as they can be, to continue the analogy, in various groups of words.
‘Pipetting up palpitating placenta’ for example, and all those s’s – Starlady Sandra, Sandra Sorenson – but that I daresay is fanciful. These attacks of tachycardia (see what I mean? the upstrokes again? the overheated rhythm?) are brought about, depending on what doctor you care to listen to, by black coffee, alcohol, a shortage of potassium, stress, undisclosed emotion, the attempt to deny the past, or by the possession of an extra bundle of nemones in the heart, through which the electric cardiac charge can short-circuit. (Oh Daddy-oh, was this your doing? A defect, running through your genes, or those of my mad mother? Or just a copying mistake in the DNA?) The ailment is professionally linked – doctors, writers, journalists and media folk tend to suffer from it – nature’s way, perhaps, of eventually phasing out those people too sharp for their own good or that of the species – the sick should really die off before they can reproduce, and the weak remain unprotected – a point I put to a casualty doctor while he prepared to return my heart to normal by injecting intravenous Verapamil, but he remained grim faced and merely wrote something in my notes. (I took the opportunity of reading them, later – ‘patient agitated and rambling’.) These medical men are not great ones for laughing on duty. I daresay my father was not a bundle of laughs as he worked. Tamara, of course, laughed a lot, rather as poor Mrs Rochester did, up and down dark corridors. As a child, I frequently woke to its sound. My version of the primal scene. Well now, my heart, as recorded on this particular strip of blue paper, was in the throes of one of its pets, its little demonstration of its traumatic past – I do try to take my own advice and ignore its childish tantrums, and sometimes it works, gives up and reverts to normal, but more often nowadays it requires the paternal intervention of the medical profession, and injections of this and that. The ‘that’ on the blue strip I so particularly miss is the record of the time they injected stryamine intravenously, instead of verapamil, and first I had a catch in my throat, of the kind I have now, waiting for Jack in the moonlight, my love, and then my heart lurched, and lurched again and I cried out first in love and then in terror, as I died, I swear I died, and came alive again, and there is the record on the page – the heart just stopping, stopping, the straight line running across the page, unmarked, running across, not even upstroked, down-stroked by palpitating placentas or Sandra
Sorenson, or Nazi SS; then, thank God, thank God, starting up again all over the place, the beats leaping out of control, off the paper, like seismological needles shaken right off the page, then by some miracle the steady habitual beat reasserting itself, starting up again: regular, even, conventional. Thank you, Daddy: you engineered me well, whatever else you did.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ I say, when I am able. ‘I see I am alive again.’
But they don’t care for jokes, as I say. When he’s gone Sister says, ‘We’d run out of Verapamil. But you’re all right now, that’s the main thing.’
‘That’s the main thing,’ I agree.
But now, as my heart lurches, I think of death as well as love. I wonder where my home is, and why I have never had one. ‘Home is where the heart is,’ Frances said today. She speaks so seriously, her great eyes so solemn, uttering the myths of our society with such reverence I don’t like to dent her faith and start arguing. Oh, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, returning to the pre-natal state!
Starlady Sandra Sorenson, S.S.S. An extra S, an extra bundle of nemones. What terrifies me is the way it all ties up.
23
Highs and Lows
Jack said, between numbers, between swigs of red rough wine, as if casually, but I know by now it was not, ‘Someone in town was looking for you.’
‘Who?’ I asked, alarmed.
I wanted us to go to bed but the party was still going on. It was past three. We had to be up by seven. Nobody seemed to care. Jennifer stifled her yawns and smiled brightly. She knew it was no use protesting. The Band was winding down from its night’s performance. Nothing a musician despises more than a party pooper, someone who can’t stand the pace, puts earplugs in their ears, hides the drink, departs, or stands between him and the girl of a passing, drunken dream. Frances had gone to sleep over the table: well, that was allowed. Her red hair spread over a surface dark with spilt wine, dirty plates, sodden labels, bread crusts and broken glass. (Jennifer had had beans soaking all day. She’d cooked them up when the Band returned. She put salt in the boiling water. Salt should never go near beans. It toughens the skins: makes them more indigestible, more fast-food. Never mind. Who was I to say? I am a lady astronomer. They will forgive me if I keep my knowledge specific to my trade, and profess ignorance of nearly everything else, from how to keep a man to how to find my way to how not to cook beans.) Frances’s delicate white hand curled in her sleep, around the encrusted cup used as a serving ladle. She had not lost her virginity to Douglas, only her heart. He was married, and had foolishly told her so. I was proud of her: not because she was virtuous, but because her will had triumphed over her inclination. I felt somehow it was my doing. I had shown her it was possible to get by without being too agreeable.
The instruments were out. Pedro was playing folk, Jack New Orleans, and Karl something that sounded like the Birdie Song. Glasses were filled from mammoth plastic containers that looked like petrol cans, and whose interiors were corroded, I was convinced, by the crude red wine they contained, of the vinegary kind Jesus was no doubt offered on the cross. Thirst quenching, pain deadening. Much of it got spilt: flung away with cries of disgust, and then more, optimistically, poured. Jennifer did not clear up, though I knew she longed to. The sight of a dishcloth would have offended. The talk was mostly of why all were playing in different keys and how this could be remedied. It was not. Sandy was convinced Pedro’s guitar was a banjo. Pedro became angry. When he was angry he moved his crowned tooth with the tip of his tongue, and glared, gat-toothed, but it did not stop him playing. Strands of his long greasy hair fell into his wine: he tossed his head back in his rage and splattered the room. I was glad I was wearing my black T-shirt and not my white. There was some familiar talk about how the Band was being billed by the Festival Organisers: fists and feet were banged: murders and rapes planned. Bente sat patiently smiling as if nothing untoward were happening. Suddenly she began to cry, and left the room. Hughie followed her. Deprived of one of their number, they contented themselves with agreeing amongst themselves that he was a rotten player anyway, and no loss to anyone.
It would have been difficult in such circumstances for any ghost to materialise. I wouldn’t if I were it, not if my ears were in any way responsive. I wondered if I was in the right company, and thought perhaps I was. I preferred this to gliding amongst Matthew’s friends, in my little black dress, answering questions about the Planet Athena or discussing the property boom, and drinking Muscadet, or in Godfrey’s world, in my Laura Ashley smock, discussing ley lines and listening to nonsense about birth signs, or with my academic friends, in skirt and sweater, agitating about university appointments, the achievements of children, the vintages of wine. Different worlds, different parties.
Though frankly I would rather be in bed with Jack, and was hurt that he was somehow pushing at the borders of our unspoken spheres of influence – like Russia invading Afghanistan, the US establishing its bases in Turkey – and claiming these late hours for the Band, not allocating them to me.
Jack’s idea to get out the wine: Jack’s idea to start playing. Jack’s idea to keep everyone out of bed as well as himself. Jack was angry. Someone was looking for me. Well, what made me think I could just disappear, that I was of so little interest to the world they’d just let it happen? Was I not a kind of fulcrum, that present point where the past and future balanced, where the dead met the living, not to mention heaven and earth: they wouldn’t let me go so easily.
‘Who was looking for me?’ I asked again, after Jack had finished playing ‘The Red Flag’ (or ‘Maryland’, depending on who was paying for the gig) while Pedro played ‘Strawberry Fair’ and Karl a fandango. Oddly, it sounded rather good.
‘Man or woman?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘It was just a note with your name on it, on the Festival noticeboard.’
‘Written or typed?’
‘Handwritten, in green ink. Some lover, I expect.’
‘Why would I have a lover who used green ink?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
‘If it seemed urgent,’ I remark, ‘why didn’t you bring it back for me?’
‘Because it’s nothing to do with me. If that’s how you want to live, lovers leaving you urgent messages all over France, that’s your business.’
Karl has taken up ‘Hindustan’. Jack can’t resist playing too. And Pedro. They manage a fair rendition. I give up and go to bed, on my own. No ghosts appear.
24
A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight
Yes indeed! They’re all here. Jack’s wife, Matthew and Jude from Central TV with her frizzy hair, her powerful personality, her muddy complexion and her straight nose. They all turned up today.
Jude and Matthew have the last two rooms in town, Jude in the Hôtel de Cheval Blanc and Matthew (naturally) in the Hôtel de France, where they take American Express Cards.
There is nowhere for Anne, so she is sleeping next door to Jack and me, in Frances’s room.
I write this by moonlight: sitting at the haunted window, writing pad on my knee. Jack lies asleep in the bed. He had a great deal to drink tonight, and besides, the day’s events have shaken him. Out like a light, lucky him.
What made me think I could just disappear? I am the point where the mad, the bad and the infamous meet. I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.
‘Come back to bed,’ says Jack.
‘No,’ say I.
This is what happened.
The minibus left the Hôtel de Ville at nine forty-five. The first gig was to be at ten thirty, au-dessous du Monument aux Morts. The Band had actually held a meeting, after breakfast, to decide what to wear, what to play, and various technical matters about breaks and keys. A week into the tour, and they were actually getting it together. As for me, I was practising inefficiency. It had occurred to me – forget the personal satisfactions my failings aroused in other people – that efficiency is neither wante
d nor needed in the modern world. There is not enough to do and far too many people to do it. Better just for all of us to bumble along. I wore a white T-shirt – Frances had kindly washed it for me – and jeans. She had lent me a pair of her bikini briefs, too.
‘Fit enough to travel today?’ asked Jennifer.
‘I’m feeling much better,’ I said, politely.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Because we can’t have poor Frances stuck away on nursing duty, can we? After all, this is her annual holiday.’ Meaning, the likes of you can holiday any time, with other people’s husbands, forget about the likes of us. I was feeling pretty good, I must say (except for this pain which would suddenly dart in from the left to somewhere beneath the navel, hover for half a second, and then depart: enough to startle, not quite to hurt. I rather liked it.) And I was looking rather good. Too much sex may weaken you, but it gives you a pleasant swollen-mouthed glow as well. I looked better than Jennifer did. She had a bad mosquito bite just beneath her left eye. Perhaps that was the matter with her. I offered her some Boots’ Sting Relief, without which I never step abroad.
‘I expect one of the good things about getting older,’ says Jennifer, ‘is that the curse gets shorter.’
Some women just sit there, working out how old you are from things you let slip – old films you say you’ve seen: what age you were when you had a beehive hairdo – and Jennifer was one of them. But I blamed her husband Sandy – he was one of those men who talk about their wives as ‘old bags’ and talk about their sexual conquests in their presence. So I forgave her.
‘It certainly does,’ I said brightly. But I thought, for all I felt so good, I would call in and see a doctor when I got to Blasimon-les-Ponts. The French have this agreeable system which actually allows you to go to one and pay for a diagnosis and treatment, which they will actually discuss with you. In England doctors like to keep their conclusions to themselves, or written up in very secret notes. You are not even allowed to know your own blood pressure, as registered by them. A strange, barbaric country. (This can only be my father talking: sometimes, when my mouth is not moved by my polygenes into its disapproving moue, I feel it stretched into a kind of Dr Strangelove grimace – tee hee hee! the mouth goes in a kind of sadistic mirthlessness and I am then quick to reform my thoughts and feelings, making them, as far as I am able, more mine than my forebears. What more can a girl do?)
