by Weldon, Fay
‘Don’t say that!’ Alan would beg. ‘Don’t say “come on, everyone”.’
‘Why not?’
‘It irritates me. I don’t know why.’
‘Then you’re just being irrational,’ said Maureen firmly, and went on doing it. For a time her ‘come on, everyone’ was rather less peopled than Audrey’s had been – but the friends soon drifted back and everything was just fine, and the damp and droopy rhododendron leaves which rustled in her past, in her dreams, stood up fine and straight and glossy in some kind of imagined sun.
III
Jude’s Story
GUP – or Falling in Love in Helsinki
You’ll never guess what happened to me in Helsinki. How my life changed, when I was there last October. Let me tell you! The trees in that much-islanded, much-forested Northern country – you’ve never seen so many islands, so much forest, so low and misty and large an autumn sun – were just on the turn, the rather boring universal green giving up and suddenly glowing into reds and yellows and browns. ‘Ruska’ is what the Finns call this annual triumph of variety over uniformity; something so dramatic they even have this special name for it. It is, I suppose, the last flaring surge of summer: like a woman of fifty who throws out the black shoes she’s worn all her life and shods herself in greens and pinks, feeling she’d better make the best of things while she can. Not that I’m fifty, in case you’re wondering, I’m twenty-nine; but twenty-nine can feel pretty old. Older, I imagine, than fifty, because around thirty the tick-tick-tick of the biological clock can sound pretty loud in a woman’s ear.
My mother wanted me to stay home, get married, have children.
‘Settle down, Jude,’ she’d plead. ‘It’s what I want for you.’
‘I can’t think why,’ I’d say. ‘You never did.’
‘That’s different,’ she’d say, and pour another whisky and light up her cigar. My mother is a professional golf coach, and has been ever since my father walked out twenty-five years ago. Well, she had to earn a living. She’s a healthy and athletic woman, though she must be over sixty, and men are still for ever knocking at her door, though she doesn’t often let them in. The whisky and cigar syndrome is no problem (or only to my sister Chris), it’s just my mother’s rather old-fashioned way of saying to a man ‘I’m as good as you. What do I want you for?’
‘Christ,’ I say to my sister, ‘the whisky’s well watered. The cigar goes out after ten seconds. What are you worrying about?’ But she’s a nurse. Worse, she’s the kind of nurse who always sees disaster round every corner. It can’t be much fun for the patients. She was seven when my father left.
So anyway here is my mother, who never has, hell-bent on me settling down; just another example of GUP, or Great Universal Paradox, which rules all our lives. You see GUP most clearly at work in any Obstetric Ward, at the very beginning of things, as is only fitting. There you’ll find a woman who wants a baby but it was stillborn, and another who’s just had a living baby she doesn’t want, and someone in for a sterilisation and another for a termination, and another with a threatened miscarriage, and another resting up before sextuplets, having taken too much fertility drug – and all will be weeping. All want different things so passionately; and nature takes no notice at all of what they want. Just rumbles on insanely, refining the race.
What you want you can’t have: what you do have, you don’t want. That’s GUP.
When I went to Helsinki I was in love with Andreas Anders, who didn’t love me. And I was loved by Tony Schuster, whom I didn’t love. My loving Andreas Anders loomed large in my life, and had for seven years. Tony Schuster loving me, which he had for all of seven days, meant to me next to nothing; that’s the way GUP goes. Besides, Andreas Anders not loving me made me feel fat and stupid: so if Tony Schuster was capable of loving someone as fat and stupid as me, what did that make Tony Schuster? Some sort of wimp? In other words, as famously spoken by Marx (not Karl, but the Brother kind) tearing up the long-sought invitation to join – ‘Who wants to belong to a club of which I’m a member?’ GUP!
Talking about Marx, Finland is just across a strip of sea from the Soviet Union, though the government is of a rather different kind and in Finland women seem to run everything, and in Russia it’s the men. It makes a kind of difference. Little Finnish children always look so healthy and bright-eyed and well-mittened and properly fed to keep out the cold. Yes, yes, I know. I’m broody. GUP! Bright, bright clothes they wear, in Helsinki. Terrifically fashionable. Lots of suede, so soft it looks and acts like linen.
Picture me there, last September. Nipping down into the town to buy this or that, the envy of my sister Chris. I earn ten times as much as she does, I daresay. She’s two inches shorter than me and I’m five foot six, but she’s two stone heavier. She’d look pretty strange in a mauve sort of fluted leather skirt, the kind I bought for me. No GUP factor here. Facts are facts. Chris says it’s the hospital canteen. I say ‘It’s your way of not getting involved with men.’
‘You’re so right,’ she says, munching another Mars Bar, ‘look what happens when you are: look at you! Look at Janice!’
‘That sugar’s worse for you than tobacco and alcohol,’ say I, thinking of Janice’s (that’s our mum) cigars and whisky.
‘No it’s not,’ she says. ‘Nowhere near, and I should know, I’m a nurse.’
I love my sister Chris, and I wish she’d go on a diet and meet some man and settle down. GUP!
Anyway, here we were, in Helsinki, making a six-part thriller called Lenin in Love for BBC TV, on film. Helsinki’s Great Square is the same period, same proportions, same size as Moscow’s Red Square, so it gets used by film companies a lot. Filming in Red Square itself is always a hassle: there’s a lot of worried security men about and they like to read the script and object if it says anything detrimental about their country and it so often does, doesn’t it: I mean, that’s the whole point of thrillers – and the queue for Lenin’s tomb is always getting into shot, and you can hardly ask them to move on, when they’ve railed all the way in from Tashkent or wherever to be there. So off everyone goes to Helsinki to film the Moscow bits. They made Doctor Zhiυago there.
Andreas Anders is the Director of Lenin in Love. Tony Schuster is the cameraman. I’m the PA. You’d think a bright girl like me (I have a degree in Politics and Economics: I moved over from Research to Production five years ago; thinking, rightly, I had more chance of being close to Andreas Anders that way) could think about something other than love but at twenty-nine it gets you, oh it gets you! Twenty-nine and no children or live-in-lover, let alone a husband. Not that I wanted all those things. GUP! In the film and TV world there’s not all that much permanent in-living. You just have to pack up and go, when the call comes, even when you’re in the middle of scrambling his breakfast eggs. Or he, yours. Men tend to do the cooking, these days, in the circles in which I live. Let’s not say ‘live’. Let’s say ‘move’.
I was the researcher on Andreas Anders’ first film. I was twenty-three then, straight out of college. It was a teledrama called Mary’s Son and about this woman’s fertility problems. It was during the first week of filming – he took me along with him: he said he needed a researcher on set though actually he wanted me in his bed – that I both developed my theory on GUP and fell in love with him. And at the end of the second week he fell in love with his star, Caroline Christopherson, the girl who was playing Mary. And I was kind of courteously dismissed from his bed. Nightmare time. I’d got all through college repelling all boarders, if you understand what I mean. But Andreas Anders! Look, he’s got a kind of pale haunted face, and wide, kind, set-apart grey eyes, and he’s tall, and broad-shouldered, and has long, fine hands, and what could I do? I loved him. That he should look at me, little me! Pick me out, ask for me! Even for a minute, let alone a week, let alone a fortnight; until he fell for Caroline Christopherson. And he married her. And now she’s world-famous and plays lead in big budget movies, and is a box-office draw, and Andreas
doesn’t like it one bit – he’s the one with the talent, the creativity, the brains, after all: she just has star quality – and when it gets bad for him, why there I am in bed with him again and he’s telling me all about it. They have a child, Phoebe, who gets left behind with nannies. Andreas doesn’t like that. I don’t say ‘But you’re the one doing the leaving too,’ because I never say to him what I really think. That’s what this one-sided love does to you. Turns you into an idiot. I hate myself but I’m tongue-tied.
How can I compete with C.C., as he calls her? That kind of film starry quality is real enough: a kind of glowing magnetism: a way of moving – just a gesture of a hand, the flick of an eye – which draws other eyes to itself. I don’t look too bad, I tell myself. Though I suppose where C.C. looks slim I just look plain thin. Both our hair frizzes out all over the place, but hers shines at the same time as frizzing. I do not know how that effect is achieved. If I did, friend, I would let you know. I look more intelligent than she does, but that’s not the point. On the contrary. ‘Judgmental,’ Andreas Anders once said I looked. That was when we were doing a studio play up at Pebble Mill. Light from the Bedroom. My first PA job. C.C. was giving birth to little Phoebe in Paris while we were taping in Birmingham. Andreas couldn’t leave the show: well, could he? We stayed at the Holiday Inn. He is the most amazing lover.
I don’t let on how much I care. I pretend it means nothing to me. If he thought it hurt, he’d stay clear of me. He doesn’t mean to be unkind. I just act kind of light and worldly. I don’t want to put him off. Would you? GUP again! If you love them, don’t let them know it. ‘I love you’ is the great turn-off to the uncommitted man.
And now here’s Tony Schuster saying ‘I love you’ to me, leaning down from his dolly as he glides about in the misty air of Helsinki’s Great Square. The mist’s driving the lighting man crazy. The scenes are meant to be dreamlike and misty, but all prefer the man-made kind to God’s kind. Easier to control.
‘Let’s leave this life,’ Tony says. ‘Let’s run off together to a Desert Island.’
‘You mean like Castaway?’ I ask. I know film people. Everything relates back to celluloid.
‘How did you know?’ He looks surprised. He’s not all that bright. Or perhaps I’m just too bright for everyone’s comfort. Anyway, for all his gliding to and fro on his great new black macho electronic camera with its built-in Citroën-type suspension – ‘This camera cost £250,000,’ he snaps, if anyone so much as touches the great shiny thing – I just can’t take Tony seriously. He has quite an ordinary, pleasant, everyday face. He’s thirty-nine, and has a lot of wiry black hair. Andreas’s hair is fair and fine. ‘I love you!’ Tony Schuster yells, for all the world to hear. ‘Run off with me, do!’
I think his loving me so publicly annoys Andreas, but he doesn’t show it. Tony’s one of the top cameramen around: they can be temperamental: it’s as well for a Director to hold his fire, unless it’s something that really matters – a smooth 50-second track in, for example – not like love, or desire, which everyone knows is just some kind of by-product of all the creative energy floating around a set.
‘I love you’ is a great turn-off for the female committed elsewhere. GUP!
Sometimes I agree to have a drink with Tony though, when it’s a wrap for the day, and we’d all stagger back to the bar of the Hesperia. Except for Andreas, who’s staying at the Helsinki Inter-Continental. When I heard C.C. was coming to join her husband and hold his hand through the whole month of Helsinki shooting, I put them in a different hotel (I do location accommodation, inter alia) from the rest of us. I thought I couldn’t bear it. We’d be going off to Rome presently, anyway, and she wouldn’t be following us there. Going, not back to Phoebe, oh no: but back to Hollywood for some rubbishy block-busting new series.
‘It’s so clichéd I can’t bear it,’ Tony would moan. ‘The PA in love with the Director! You’re worth more than that.’
More than being in love with Andreas? How was such a thing possible?
Tony was thirty-nine. His wife had just left him, taking the children. He’d been away from home just once too often. When she wanted him where was he? Up the Himalayas filming Snowy Waste or under the Atlantic with Sonar Soundings or in the Philippines with Lolly a go-go (he needed the money). When he didn’t turn down Lenin in Love because he couldn’t miss an opportunity of working with Andreas Anders, the Great Director (time, he thought, to move out of commercial film into Art, and get a bit of video experience too), Sara waited for him to say ‘yes’ to the call from his agent, and he did, of course, having said he’d say no, and then she packed.
‘You love films more than me,’ she said. And so he did. Now he thought he was in love with me. I knew what was going on. She’d left, he was sad and worried; love on the set’s a great diversion. On the whole, you last as long as the project does; not a moment longer. Sometimes it sticks – look at Andreas and C.C.; me and Andreas – but mostly it’s all, as I say, just this surplus energy taking sexual/romantic form. I know so much, and so little too. GUP!
‘You have no pattern for a happy married life,’ laments my mother. ‘All my fault.’
‘I don’t want to be married,’ I say. If I was married how could I follow Andreas round the world? But I don’t tell her that. His favourite PA! I’m good at my job: by God, I’m good at it. He won’t find fault with me.
‘Without you!’ he once said (that was Love in a Hot Climate: we were in a really ritzy room at the Meriden in Lisbon: C.C. was off in Sydney and Andreas thought she was having an affair with the male lead – whose name escapes me though everyone gasps when you mention it – and he was finding solace in work, and me), ‘Without you, Jude, I wouldn’t be half the director I am!’ A real working partnership we have, oh yes! His fingers running through my hair when there’s nothing else to do and hotel rooms in strange cities are lonely, aren’t they.
Before I left for Helsinki my mother said something strange. ‘Your father ran off with a girl from Finland,’ she said. ‘Our au pair. Just make sure you come back.’
Now my mother never said anything at all about my father if she could help it. And Chris and I didn’t ask. Questions about our dad upset her. And it doesn’t do to upset a woman who is a golf coach by profession. She gets put off her stroke, and if she loses her job, how will you live? Our house went with the job. On the edge of the golf-course. Thwack, thwee, muted shouts – to me the sound of childhood.
I expect if your husband ran off with the Finnish au pair you wouldn’t want to dwell on it much. So this was the first I’d heard of it. Chris and I tried to trace him, when she was twenty and I was eighteen, but we never got very far. And I can’t say we tried hard. Who wants to be in touch with a father who doesn’t want to be in touch with you? Apart from the fun of the thing, I suppose. And Chris had been oddly worried about Helsinki, too.
‘You and your lifestyle!’ she said, when I rang the Nurses’ Home to say I was off to work on Lenin in Love. She’d just been made Night Sister of Men’s Orthopaedic. Quite a cheerful ward, she said. At least they mostly got better. ‘Can’t you ever stay in one place? You’ll get AIDS if you don’t watch out. You film people!’ (Reader, she had my lifestyle all wrong! There’d only ever been Andreas Anders, apart from a few forgettables, and that just a week or so here and there over a whole seven years. It was pathetic really. Somehow men seem to know if your emotions are occupied elsewhere. You send out ‘I belong to someone bigger than you’ signals, just as much if you’re wretchedly involved as if you’re happily married.)
Anyway, Janice and Chris were right to worry, as it happened. Because this strange thing did happen to me in Helsinki. I was with Tony, who was too obtuse, I suppose, to notice the signals, and was persisting, and I was explaining why I wouldn’t go to bed with him, and what was wrong with his psyche, and he was looking quite wretched and pale, as men will in such circumstances. We were walking in the open-air Rural Life Museum – a whole park devoted to the artefacts of F
inland’s past. It was Sunday. There were elegant wooden church boats to hold a hundred people, in which an entire village could row itself to church if it so chose; ancient farmsteads, moved plank by plank from distant places, and so forth, but my attention was caught by one of those familiar groups of people, complete with cameras and sound equipment. This lot were clustered round and filming one of the enormous orange toadstools with yellow spots they have in these parts. Proper traditional pixie toad stools.
And the sound man put down his gear – he was taking white sound, I presumed: a toadstool hardly makes much noise, even in its growing, which can be pretty rapid – and walked over to me. He wasn’t young. Sixty or so, I suppose. Quite heavy round his middle: pleasant looking: intelligent: glasses.
‘Hello,’ he said, in English.
‘Hello,’ I said, and I thought where have I seen that face before? And then I realised, why! whenever I look in the mirror, or when I look at Chris: that’s where I’ve seen it. More the latter, because both Chris and he were overweight. It looked worse on her. He was really quite attractive.
‘You’re with the English film crew, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I saw you in the Square yesterday. It had to be you. Jude Iscarry.’
‘Or Judas Iscariot or Jude the Obscure,’ I said, playing for time, because my heart was pounding. ‘Take your pick!’
