by Weldon, Fay
Besides, visiting the doctor would occupy the time between eleven thirty and twelve thirty, while we waited to go up to the school canteen for our free lunch. Salades de saison would be served to some 200 musicians and hangers on, along with pork chops and white beans which Frances hated and Jack loved and I put up with, and musicians from other nations, who had strong religious feelings and cultural preferences, would noisily refuse.
Jennifer and Sandy sat in the front of the bus. He drove. She offered advice, consolation and sips of Perrier water through straws, while he reproached her for various matters over which she had no control (the weather, her bosom) and those she had (‘look! there, there! a parking space!’ ‘It’s a double yellow line, you fool!’). There was room for a third up front, but the double bass sat between them. Well, it would, wouldn’t it. She had to lean across it, the instrument which spoiled her life, keeping him out all hours, splitting his loyalty, which she gladly did. I will say this for Sandy, that he exuded an air of great genial sexual confidence – he blinked and winked into the morning sun and preened himself in his wife’s esteem.
Pedro sat behind Sandy: his eyes closed. He was asleep or meditating. His reddish beard glittered in the sun. His body was littered with talismans of one kind or another. He was barely talking to either Jack or me: Jack, on account of being brought in the night before on the wrong chord, or some such matter I did not fully understand: but Jack, according to Pedro, had done it once too often. Jack for his part merely said Pedro was impossible, and didn’t understand jazz. He should stick to folk, where he was so much at home. (The Jumpers despised folk almost as much as Dixie.) These quarrels would flare up amongst the Band, rage for a time, and then subside over a glass of beer on a good break. Jennifer and Frances were used to it. I was not. Pedro was not speaking to me because I had refused to sign his copy of Athena, planet of the Aquarian Age, bringer of peace published by the Astrological Society. (‘But why won’t you?’ Jack asked. ‘Because it’s an outrage to common sense,’ I had replied, and Jack said, ‘For God’s sake sign, or he’ll break another string tonight. The man’s a menace. He’s bringing the whole band down.’ But I wouldn’t.) Now, as I say, Pedro’s soft, kind eyes, with their cold deeper level of hate and resentment (I had seen the same in Godfrey’s) were closed. Sandy speeded up to go over the railway crossing for the sake of the extra bump; he likes to do that.
‘Hold tight, everyone!’ cried out Jennifer, and everyone held tight and the instruments twanged and wine bottles clattered and Frances shrieked, and a strong smell of body odour came from Stevie the trombone player, and Jack and I held hands.
I went to the doctor’s surgery, just up the road from the Credit Lyonnais, and sat only briefly in a small white room amongst posters of poisonous snakes and mushrooms, before being allowed into his consulting room. The French seem a healthy lot – or else begrudge paying doctors money. Doctor Tarval was, or so I thought at first, a not very bright young man in his middle twenties, with an owl face, cropped hair and perfect French manners. Language was a slight problem, since he spoke no English, but the vocabulary of pain can be mimed. He seemed to understand: required me to go behind a curtain and pee into a container, and come back at four o’clock. I asked why, but he was almost as unforthcoming as an English doctor, and said there would be time enough to discuss it then. Jennifer and Frances had come with me. Sandy had locked the keys inside the van, somehow circumventing all Renault’s ingenuity to prevent just such a thing happening (the Band blamed Pedro, clearly today’s whipping boy, for leaning on a lock at just the wrong time) and fortunately after the shirts and instruments had been taken out – but not the Band’s cassettes, which it was Jennifer’s job to display – for which Sandy roundly and publicly blamed Jennifer. Jennifer had for once had enough: her eyes glinted not with tears but with rage, and she shouted (to the amazement of the passers-by – the French are a controlled lot), ‘You mad disgusting insane bully, sell your own fucking cassettes. They stink, anyway. Call yourself a bass player? You couldn’t strum a mandolin.’ Well, she wasn’t going to live that down for quite a while, was she, especially since even I know that a mandolin is a very difficult instrument to play.
So I took her off to a café and bought her a brandy, and Frances came too, and Jennifer cried and shrieked for a little, and I said Sandy must be feeling a fool for having so stupidly locked the keys in – she hadn’t thought of that. Her loyalty was so ingrained, she believed he must have somehow done it on purpose – and she would do better to laugh than cry. And presently she felt better, and told us a little about her past – an only child brought up by an elderly father, without the gift for friendship, envying other children their large families, their busy lives: Sandy’s secretary originally, then deposing his wife, moving on, taking over their three children, having two of her own; but they were now almost grown and the loneliness was closing in again. People know so much about themselves, I thought, yet remain so powerless to control their lives. It explained Jennifer’s ‘come on, everybody’ syndrome; the need to be necessary, the short cut to being loved. I thought then that it would make a good short story.
‘I’m sorry for his first wife,’ I said. ‘With you coming flashing along like a dreadnought.’
‘You can talk!’ said Jennifer, and Frances shrieked, ‘Hark at her!’ and pointed at me, and downed a brandy, fifteen going on forty, and we all laughed some more. It was a good half hour. We were all, I suppose, under what might be called tension. But I thought perhaps I was undergoing some kind of sea change, due to the sun’s heat, and the music, and Jack, and all this writing down of the past; and that perhaps there was such a thing as ‘discovering yourself’ and that indeed you might end up being nicer than you thought, at least on the top layer. Then I went to the doctor.
When I came out I saw Matthew’s car outside the Hôtel de France. Shiny Mercedes are rare in this part of the country. They tend to keep to motorways and major cities, where they don’t get dusty and scratched. It took up too much of the road: other vehicles queued to get past. There was no doubt it was my husband’s car. I leaned against a wall.
‘What’s the matter?’
I looked round, I can only suppose wildly, for I am a contained kind of person, usually, and found myself staring straight into Jude from Central’s eyes. I fainted.
I have never fainted before. Very occasionally I have wept, but never fainted. It is not pleasant, and pleasant. Not pleasant because of the black whirling nauseous tunnel which swirls through your head and sucks you in and takes you over; pleasant because of the sheer sensuousness of it all, as body takes over from mind, simply takes it upon itself to wipe it out. I wonder if animals spend a lot of their time in this agreeable, sexy state? I hope so, for their sakes.
I need time to collate everything that’s happened inside my head and out of it, although for the most part I’d just been sitting and writing while I waited for my lover to turn up and the erotic stupor to take over. Like being on drugs. But things had been going on, more than even I quite understood. The past was catching up with me – well, that was okay; I’d just stood still and let it – but here it was in practical reality, in the stolid shape of Matthew and the lean and hungry one of Jude – and I hadn’t reckoned on that. No wonder I fainted. I was playing for time. Still am.
Where was I? Back in the café, feeling fine, my wits collected, my eyes wary, Jude saying Central had sent her down to make sure I was okay.
‘Going to come up with next month’s programme, you mean,’ I say.
‘To make sure you’re okay,’ she repeats, patiently. ‘You can have a year’s sabbatical, they say. They understand what pressure you’ve been under.’
‘What does that mean? I haven’t been under any pressure at all.’
That stops her. I just fell in love, lust, with Jack and ran off. I wasn’t under pressure; I was bored.
‘That’s not what Alison and Bobby told me. They would have come themselves if only they’d had the t
ime. Anyway, it’s a face-saving thing, isn’t it,’ she says vaguely. ‘If Central are going to give you a year’s sabbatical they have to justify it to the accountants. So it doesn’t look so much like a bribe, more like a medical matter.’
‘You mean they want to get rid of me for a year?’
‘Oh God, Sandra,’ she complains, ‘you’re difficult.’
‘I’m not difficult,’ I say. ‘I just like to know what’s going on.’
And so on. There’d been a small piece in the Mail about my going off with a jazz band to the South of France. Central’s spies had followed it up. I wonder who’d put the piece in?
‘Anyway,’ said Jude, ‘either way, they want to know what’s happening. Production dates are looming and there’s been nothing from you.’
‘I just can’t be bothered,’ say I. ‘Have another drink.’
The sounds of Dr Jazz echoed up the street from the War Memorial.
‘You look very odd,’ she says. ‘Exhausted and not very clean. Are you living rough? Do you want to come home with me? We can fly back together from Bordeaux, at five o’clock.’
‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘I have nowhere to go, once I’m back. My husband threw me out.’
She looks surprised.
‘That’s not what he says. He says you had some kind of breakdown. You know he didn’t get his Judgeship, or whatever it’s called?’ She sounds severe.
‘Actually I didn’t know that,’ say I. ‘Still, try, try, try again! He’ll do it one day.’
‘You know he’s here in Blasimon-les-Ponts,’ she says.
What’s she playing at?
I rise.
‘I’d better go and help the Band get back into the van,’ I say. ‘They’re kind of locked out. It’s the sort of thing that happens. See you around, I expect. Don’t you just love this kind of Festival? There’s two whole hours of Bulgarian State Folkdance at two this afternoon. That’s in the stadium. They do a splendid knee-slapping turn. The thighs are a real turn-on.’
Even as I spoke, I wondered who and what I was betraying, for I heard myself fall back into the old media side-speak; the making of jokes where none should be. Jack was right: I had become infected with the dreadful virus of urban worldliness, and there was no health in me. Some vital sensibility had been deadened by long exposure to studio lights. I could not maintain my interest in Bulgarian wedding dances for more than an hour at a time. They entranced Jack. They wearied me. We were not altogether at one. It had to be faced. I was at home with Jude. I did not trust her, but I was at home with her. We talked, as they say (‘they’ being those I most despised), the same language. I could laugh with the Band, and listen to the Band, and spend my nights with the leader of the Band, and involve and concern myself with the women of the Band, but who could I speak to in the Band who would have the slightest notion what I was going on about? While Jude would get at least 80 per cent of what I had to say, and put a researcher on to the other 20 per cent, checking on the detail. Why, one day a team of us might even come to some conclusion about the Nature of Experience, given a little help from the Religious Affairs department.
‘Look,’ I said to Jude, using the language I deplored, but knew she would understand, ‘I’m sorry, but I need some space. I’m trying to make some kind of choice here; you understand?’ She’d lately produced a Drama Series called Life Choice: she ought to understand. Women wondering whether to change jobs, leave husbands, have babies, tell lovers they had AIDS, that kind of thing. A real bore, straight off the pages of New Society – unless the choice happens to be yours, when of course it can only be of considerable interest.
‘Okay,’ Jude said, ‘you can have till tomorrow.’ (In radio they move slowly: they’re all on thirty-seven-year contracts and it feels like it. In telly it’s here today and gone tomorrow, so stamp on a foot, make a mark, stab a back, while you can. I love it!) ‘But at least go and talk to Matthew. He’s come all this way to see you.’
‘You talk to him,’ I said. ‘What’s more, you marry him.’
‘He has asked me to,’ she said.
I remember the moment when I discovered Athena – poor Athena! I had been so angry with her! All she did was whirl about in her own rather unexpected orbit; a simple thing, a lump of stone, incapable of reproduction, helpless in the grip of her own qualities, which kept her suspended there between heaven and hell, and not so different, when I come to think of it, from myself. And what a shock it was, understanding how all the figures worked out, wondering why it hadn’t been obvious before: the same kind of shock, come to think of it, as fainting. Not an altogether pleasant shock, because one’s been such a fool not to have realised it all before; but pleasant because it all works out so well, fits together so admirably. Oh, what a flash of light. Matthew and Jude.
‘Wait a moment,’ I said. ‘But you love that other fellow, that director.’ (See Appendix III!)
‘It’s never done me any good,’ she said. ‘And I’m very fond of Matthew; not in the neurotic way I love Andreas.’
All this talk of love! It is absurd.
‘But I don’t want to hurt you in any way,’ she added. Well she wouldn’t, would she?
‘Matthew needs building up,’ said Jude. ‘You really sapped his confidence.’
‘Poor Matthew,’ said I.
And there I will leave that scene. I went up in the bushes behind the castle and there Jack the mad trumpeter and I embraced, and the sun shone, and the butterflies crossed bluely past my hazy eyes, and green grasses tickled my arms, and oh, oh, oh again, but I don’t know, I was scarcely concentrating. Of course one doesn’t have to: in fact it often seems the less one does the better it goes, only afterwards you can hardly remember, and I like the memory to be there, the seventh sense still feeling its input, only barely tamped down, waiting to go again; while at Greenwich I turn and open the dome to the skies, or at Central I wait for the studio lights to shine, or the computer at Imperial College to come on line, or the graphite rods to rise (I’m talking about the old Magnox, I know; now all but obsolete) and the pile to start up, and the mind, which the body feeds – I swear to you, for all this love and lust, the body is just something that feeds the mind, through the seven senses – to get going –
Look, what am I doing on this hillside with this itinerant musician, while everything collapses around me? Jude means to move into my horrible house, and it instantly seems not so horrible, merely mine. She means to have my dreadful husband – and likewise the ‘dreadful’ fades and the ‘my’ looms.
‘Is something the matter?’ asks Jack.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Frances said you went to the doctor.’
‘I have a little hay fever,’ I say, not the sort to claim pity for female problems. The pain seemed to have gone. Fainting had quite shaken it out of me. Afterwards Jack went off to lead the Band in a parade round the streets and I went to the Hôtel de France to face Matthew. Jude wasn’t there. My husband was very formal and correct, in open-necked shirt, blue trousers, white socks and black city shoes.
‘Did Jude pack for you?’ I asked, ever curious.
‘Jude’s been very busy,’ he said, ‘but yes.’
‘She certainly has,’ I said. ‘I’ve only been gone three weeks.’
‘You haven’t been idle,’ he said. ‘You look like the slut you are.’ There was no suggestion of reconciliation, then.
‘How long has it been going on between you and Jude?’ One has to ask.
‘Nothing’s been “going on”. After your leaving in the manner you did, I had no option but to look round for someone else.’ His jaw is beginning to tauten, his lip to tremble; his nose is inflamed and his cheeks getting pinker by the minute. I understand now why he has come so far to speak to me. He wants not to speak, but to hit. We’re in the bar of the Hôtel de France, however, not in our bedroom. He may have to restrain himself.
‘You bitch,’ he begins. ‘You witch. Do you understand what you did to me? First you humi
liate me in public, then you lose me the only thing I’ve ever wanted. You cold, cold bitch. Do you understand? Is there no way of getting through to you?’
‘I hear what you say.’ It is bound to madden him. It does. I don’t like myself.
‘I could kill you,’ he says. I feel very depressed. I can see he is justified in his desire. I married him to suit myself. Well, he did the same to me but the strong (me) should look after the weak (him) and not let self interest win. I am sorry to see Jude falling into the same trap.
‘How long was there between my predecessor going,’ I asked, ‘and my arriving?’ I had never thought to ask. That calmed him. It was clearly a matter of pride.
‘Seven weeks and two days,’ he said. ‘She was another one!’ Another one like me, by inference. Greedy, self-interested, loving him for his big house and his nose for a good bottle of wine, not him, the boy his mother had loved. Or perhaps she hadn’t loved him. Some people are just born unlovable.
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I said, with some sincerity. To my horror he began to cry. Seven weeks and two days. He’d be breaking his own record with Jude, I expected. At least I’d left more for Jude to clear up than a mouldy carrot in the Magimix.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘it’s embarrassing.’ So it was. The bar was filling up with African dancers; wild, lean men with feather headdresses and painted bodies. They made Matthew look very strange. I offered to go out and buy him a pair of canvas shoes from one of the market stalls, and that started him off again.
