by Weldon, Fay
‘You never even liked me,’ he said. I shan’t go on with this account. Neither of us came out of the episode well. He’d come because of the new divorce laws – which he himself, of course, had helped construct. He wanted a divorce as quickly as possible, and he wanted me to sign an affidavit as to my generally impossible behaviour, which I duly signed. He said he’d thought he’d better catch me while he could, before I disappeared – as he put it, smiling, his temper much improved now he had my signature, my mark, as if that somehow contained and controlled me, and now he could work magic spells on me in my absence – into the wild blue yonder. And I suppose he was right.
Jude came in on the dot of three, no doubt as planned. She’d had lunch at the Café des Routiers. I’d had none. My jeans were beginning to feel very loose upon me, and no longer agreeably tight. She’d had snails, faux-filet, a nice goat’s cheese and café noir. I asked her. She seemed surprised, but Matthew explained my love of such detail.
‘You might be able to get into my dresses,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to go to all these functions and give dinner parties. It’s part of the job. No such thing as a free lunch.’
‘We’re going to live very quietly,’ said Matthew, ‘and raise a family.’
Well! His jaw and her nose: her liveliness, his determination. ‘I hope it’s a boy,’ I said, and left. What had seemed very trivial, being the sexual relationships of the childless, now attracted to itself, in my eyes, a certain gravity. If people, even the most unlikely, come together to raise children, there seems a certain inevitability about it all. And it is interesting how often it is the most unlikely, the least apparently suited, who want to have children, as if nature for ever scoops up those who stray too far from her net, and flings them back in there, willy-nilly. There! You of six foot four and you of four foot eight! Deviate from the norm, would you? Oh no. You Jewish Princess and you lumberjack – thought you’d keep it going your way? Not on your nelly – it’s twins for you! Even the participants in these evolutionary dramas seem to feel surprised. They certainly look it in wedding photographs. No wonder the guests get drunk.
Matthew took me to the door. He handed the signed affidavit to Jude before he left the bar, surreptitiously, but I noticed all the same. He thought I’d snatch the paper back. He couldn’t believe his luck. No doubt I’d signed away home, maintenance, everything. I didn’t care. Jack would be pleased with me. Can’t go one way, have to go the other.
‘See you back at Central then?’ asked Jude.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
‘Don’t think too long,’ she said.
‘Why – do you want my job as well?’ I asked. But you can go on like that for ever. I said goodbye as nicely as I could, disappointed in her. I’d thought she was a romantic figure, and here she was, consenting to the missionary position for the sake of a gravelled drive and a nice letter box and my bath salts. I went down the road, drawn by the sound of the Band, squeezing back against shop fronts, as trails of enormous lorries did their after-lunch (fuck you) dash for wherever, feeling as affronted as Elizabeth Bennet when she turned down boring Mr Collins only to have her best friend Charlotte take him.
I wondered how much to tell Jack of all this and decided it would be very little. One of the benefits of being with someone so unacquainted with one’s way of life and thought is that there can really be no point in the exchange of confidences and the asking for advice. I have always been very bad at the latter. Jack, not being interested in my marriage, could hardly be interested in my divorce. And I could scarcely expect him to be sympathetic with the internal tumult, the nervousness, that tends to ensue when the one you think you’re leaving turns out to be leaving you.
It was to my surprise that I discovered a plump, agitated figure weeping upon Frances’s shoulder, as she sat on a stone bench beneath the trees of Blasimon-les-Ponts’ central square, where the cars neatly parked in the shade, at that agreeable and tidy angle so admired by the French, but which leaves a useless triangle at either end of the row. The English, with their blunt four-square approach, at least find room for one more car. However, I daresay I digress. The weeping woman was of course Anne. The Band played on; ‘Hindustan’, followed by Jack singing in a hoarse croak ‘The girls go crazy about the way I walk –’ (walk, of course, being a euphemism for you-know-what) – rather bravely, I thought, in the circumstances. I sat down beside Anne. She moved abruptly away so that my flesh did not touch hers. I understood the feeling. I had not wanted to touch Jude after hearing her intention of marrying Matthew. He’d assured me nothing had been ‘going on’, but then he’d said to me all kinds of things that had not proved true – most importantly, that he’d do everything in his power to make me happy. Now I do not believe it is any man’s obligation to make any woman happy, and I would not hold him to that – she should learn to make herself happy – but he should have refrained from making me actually unhappy.
Anne. I asked how she’d got there. She said by train. She glared at me. She had blue swollen eyes, and bits of her, not all, had been in the sun. The left side of her nose was particularly pink.
‘Facing the engine,’ I said. And Frances, said, interested, how do you know that, and I said well, she’d have been travelling south-west and getting the sun from the east, and Anne slapped Frances for general treachery, and Jack sang louder and louder and the crowd caught on and clapped and cheered and stamped. Anne didn’t slap me. I would have, in her place. ‘How did you know where Jack was?’ I asked.
‘He sent me a postcard,’ she said. And I didn’t believe her at first, but she took it out of her well-worn, very English, crocodile bag with its stiff metal clasp (people are extraordinary, really) and showed me a postcard of Blasimon-les-Ponts. She allowed me only a glimpse of the other side but I registered Jack’s writing, a letter-post stamp, and a brief message. I am not slow. Anne put her trophy back in her horrid bag.
‘I’m staying,’ she said to me, defiantly.
‘You can’t come all this way and not stay,’ I said, reasonably. I saw no reason now to be kind. ‘Would you like me to ask at the Hôtel de France if there’s a vacant room. I’m afraid the town is very crowded. I expect Frances has told you. The Band and us lot are billeted up at an Hôtel de Ville – that’s a town hall, you know, not a proper hotel, with no proper facilities – simply miles and miles away.’
‘You lot!’ she said, ‘you lot! You cold shameless woman. I think you’re insane. What are you doing with my husband!’
‘Fucking him,’ I’m afraid I said, and somehow that defeated her. She looked horrified, and wept some more, and turned her head from side to side, hopelessly, as if there was nowhere now she could crawl to and hide, so as not to show her shame and defeat. Well, I recognised that feeling too, though I hadn’t had it for a long time. Not since I’d been a student and went to call on my boyfriend one night, to surprise and please him, and found him in bed with a friend of mine. Such friends women have! Think of Jude, and her so keen on God!
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but there it is. He’s a musician, and you can’t tie them down.’
‘You tell me!’ She was getting angry again. ‘You tell me that! Do you think I don’t know that? My Francie, my Colin?’ Had Jack even mentioned Colin? He hadn’t! I looked at Frances. ‘Colin’s my little brother,’ remarked Frances. ‘He’s five. He’s over-active. Little pain he is too –’
Anne was mouthing; the words had trouble coming out of her mouth, as if she’d had a stroke. The words were willed, but somehow just not there properly.
But I could understand more than enough of what she said. A tale of martyrdom and misery, of masochism and monstrous male manners. (Ms were the consonant she had most trouble with, oddly enough.) Jack off with his trumpet, no proper family life: practising all day and the neighbours complaining; him not there at the children’s births because he was off at a gig; his drinking, his wretched leaving capacity, the friends who could pull him away, the nights out with other
women – ‘But of course,’ I said. ‘Of course. Didn’t you know all this when you married him?’
It didn’t stop her. On she mouthed and mumbled. A dreadful absentee father: she left them with him for a week – they lived on chips and he brought his girlfriend home.
‘But why have children, if it’s all so terrible? Why carry it on?’ On she went. On Jack played.
‘Oh don’t, don’t,’ begged Frances. People stopped listening to the Band and started listening to Anne instead. That wouldn’t do. Jack wrapped up the gig. His lip was going, that was all; or he’d have carried on, I had no doubt of that.
Jack stood over her and sighed. She seemed old and he seemed young.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘It will only upset you.’
‘I came last year in the middle,’ she said, perfectly clearly when she spoke to him, her victim, ‘and you sent her away.’ Her? My predecessor?
‘This time it’s different, Anne.’
‘I’ve heard you say that a hundred times.’
‘Hardly a hundred.’ How amused he seemed. But how else was he to deal with her? Such a dreary old woman! One longs for a decent rival.
Frances said personally she was going off to the café, but I didn’t move. So she lingered, looking depressed.
‘You knew when you asked me I couldn’t leave Colin,’ moaned Anne. ‘He’s right in the middle of his allergy tests.’
‘He doesn’t have to have allergy tests. All he needs is for you to cheer up and he’d be fine. You shouldn’t have come. It was very naughty.’
‘But you sent me a postcard.’
‘I sent you a postcard asking you to start the car every few days, or the battery runs down. I didn’t say come.’
‘But it’s what you meant.’
How dare she look at him like that, speak to him like that, as if she were in his head! How dare she have his car in her garage, as she presumably did. And what car? He hadn’t spoken to me about any car.
‘Frances and I will go down to the café,’ I said, ‘and leave you two together. Let me know what you work out.’
It was time for me to go to the doctor. I thought he might well have something of importance to impart, it being that kind of day.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘puis-je vous offrir mes félicitations. Vous êtes enceinte.’ Or words to that effect.
‘Pardon?’
‘Seulement deux ou trois semaines, mais vous êtes certainement enceinte.’
Pregnant. Ah yes. They have the most sensitive tests for extra oestrogen these days. But the pain? An ectopic pregnancy, perhaps? I had to draw a diagram before he understood what I meant. Then he shook his head vigorously.
‘Mais non.’ Just one of those things: one of the Fallopian tubes a little swollen. It sometimes happens. A week or two and all would be well.
Oh yes, I thought, it certainly would.
‘Everything okay?’ asked Frances, as I came out.
‘Fine, fine.’
‘Mum shouldn’t have come down. It’s embarrassing for everyone. But she’s like that. Dad’s always had women. I’m used to it, why can’t she be? She could just wait quietly at home and look after Colin and wait for him to come back.’
‘But, Frances, this time he isn’t going to come back. This time it’s for keeps.’
‘Oh what a mess,’ she carolled, with a sudden burst of good cheer. ‘What a mess! What a mess!’ She was like her father, like the whole Band.
‘Do you play an instrument?’ I asked, suspiciously.
‘I play the accordion,’ she said, ‘and I sing quite a bit. Not with this band, though. I’m folk.’
Well, there it was. I was feeling very tired. Rather a lot had happened. I left her in the café being chatted up by the waiter and found Sandy and the bus, just as a mechanic finally levered the back door open; I piled coats in the long back seat and lay down and fell asleep. Enough was enough.
I woke up to find the van was on the way home to the Hôtel de Ville. Anne was sitting next to Frances. Jack was sitting by himself. In the front, Sandy and Jennifer sat stiffly, not talking. Presumably Sandy had not yet forgiven his wife for her outburst of ingratitude. Pedro was asleep. Stevie sat upright and disapproving, staring out into the bouncy night. I looked at my watch. It was ten thirty. Jack came and sat next to me.
‘I didn’t want to wake you up,’ he said. ‘You know I love you. I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world.’
‘Um,’ I said, and went back to sleep. Starlady Sandra, Jack’s fancy woman, impregnated yet again! Oestrogen makes you sleepy, even so early on in a pregnancy.
We got out of the van in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Anne was still crying, but silently. I bounced around, organising her bed for the night: blankets, a spare bolster; one of the horrid hard French kind.
‘You’d better share Frances’s room!’ I said brightly. The Band was silent, disliking Anne for her misery, me for my cheerfulness, my capacity to organise. No one blamed Jack. It was just the women again, making trouble for men.
‘Night, everyone,’ I said, firmly and loudly, and got into my half of Jack’s bed, and presently heard Anne get into hers next door, and then Frances, and a few murmuring words between them. The Band was having their goodnight drink in the kitchen, winding down after a day’s playing. You know what performers are. It was two o’clock before Jack came to bed.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘I thought you’d be asleep,’ he whispered. ‘Anne’s going back on the train tomorrow.’
‘Thanks for telling me!’
‘Don’t be sarky!’ He’d drunk too much. What was too much? I no longer knew.
‘No. I meant thanks for telling me.’
‘You’re too tough to worry,’ he said. That shook me. ‘What I like about you,’ he said, ‘is your toughness. I’ve never met anyone like you. I’d be safe with you.’
Well, I could see it. He would. Never feel sorry for anyone in his life again, never feel obligated. ‘You won’t ever leave me, will you?’ he says. ‘I need you.’
He falls asleep. Well, I don’t know. What does it matter? The whole human race is doomed. How can a species survive if a disease turns up which is sexually transmitted and invariably fatal in mothers and babies? The species will struggle along an aeon or two, but that’s it. Fight it back with the tools of civilisation, drugs and vaccines, but the first major earthquake, ice age, war and that’s it. Some such disease carried off the dinosaurs, if you ask me. Humans, cats, monkeys, all now get AIDS: heaven knows what else; they haven’t started testing. I don’t give any of them long. Not that it makes much difference: presently too the earth must fall into the sun: and it’s all words, all word games, all these notions of immensity, because our own individual deaths come first.
That dreadful woman lies awake and snivelly in the room next door, and her boring daughter who plays the accordion likewise. And here I lie, whatever it is in there splitting and twisting and copying and growing; my father’s blue eyes, or my mother’s brown: Jack’s sinewy neck, my pretty straight toes. We will never know. What’s the point: the species will never be perfected, were perfection in mind, which of course it isn’t, just endless workable forms. Of course Jack’s and my set of variables would work; would breathe, eat, sleep, fuck; but what would it mean? Why bother? And what of this child Colin, with his hyperactivity and his asthma? Does his fool of a mother know about additives? Colorants? Tartrazine? Probably not. Why has she left him behind; why isn’t she at home looking after him? A mother’s first duty is to her child, not her husband. I feel my grandmother’s pursing of the lips. I don’t even bother to rearrange my face in denial of my ancestry. Look, who wants a child? I am the only child I properly know. I got my father shot, I drove my mother mad. My brother Robin killed his father with grief, nearly did the same for me, his half-sister. There’s children for you. I think of my grandmother in her garden. Susan. The quick sudden smile. A kind of glitter of life, glimpsed behind hedges, be
tween roses. No wonder the gypsy vaulted the lych gate, for all her pious ways.
Does Bloody Anne weep because I’m here with her husband, who no longer loves her, or because if he’d gone to a different gig, the night the moon shone over Greenwich Observatory, she’d be in his bed instead of me? Is it me she hates, or the permutations of fate? What can I do about it?
I know very well what I can do about it. I am the fulcrum where the past and future balance, in which I am like anyone else. But I am also the point where the mad, the bad and the infamous meet: the possessed and obsessed. I had better get it right – this infinitesimal spark of moral decision which is apparently required of me. Let us pray! Great Father, Cruel God, simulator of the Universe, in whose image I am made, etc? No, better not: no help there, God the Bastard! What the hell, Daddy-oh! I shall have this baby, even though it looks at me with your cold blue eyes. And Bloody Anne can have her Jack back, Jack the mad trumpeter, though it breaks my heart. Frances can learn her accordion in peace. Central can have me back, and I will go on patiently instructing the millions. Matthew and Jude can copulate in peace and tranquillity, pursuing both the future and their own ambition. I shan’t mock it. No. I shall listen one more time to the Citronella Jumpers and then go home – I can stay with my friend Clare while I sort things out – to nurture this baby and allow it its passage into daylight, since it’s so determined to get there. He, she or it. The ‘it’ is what I worry about, of course. Who doesn’t, these days?
Appendices
I
Alison’s Story
A Libation of Blood
‘Mum,’ said Alison, ‘give me some advice.’ Mum was sixty-five and Alison was thirty-nine. Mum was widowed, which is never a nice thing to be, but what can you expect? Women outlive men.
‘You?’ asked Mum in some astonishment. ‘Me give you advice?’ Mum had left school at sixteen and gone into the WRACS and packed parachutes. That was as far as her education and training had gone. Alison had gone to college and taken a degree and then a diploma in the Social Sciences. Mum had one child: Alison had three. ‘What can I know that you don’t know?’
