by Weldon, Fay
‘Your mother said you’d gone into films,’ he said. ‘Chip off the old block.’
‘You’re my father,’ I said.
‘Fraid so,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know she was in touch with you,’ I said. It was all I could say. Tony just stood and looked on. Moments in a person’s life!
‘I passed through five years back,’ my father said, ‘but she advised me strongly to keep away, so I did. Though I’d have liked to have stayed. Quite a powerful stroke, your mother.’
‘She’s had to develop it,’ I said.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘But she always was independent, wanted to be father and mother too.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ I said.
Tony left us and he, my father, whose name was Saul Iscarry, took me out to lunch. We had pancakes, caviar and sour cream, washed down by tots of vodka. The best food in the world. The Finns have the highest heart disease rate in the world. So Chris had assured me, before I left.
My father had eventually married his Vieno, my mother’s au pair, and actually gone to the Moscow Film School, and now he was one of the best sound men in the world (he said) and had Finnish nationality, but lived in Leningrad and Vieno was a doctor, and they had three children, and what with visa problems and general business and so forth there hadn’t been much point in keeping in touch, let alone the time. (Roubles are just one of those currencies that make it difficult for a father to support his abandoned children.) But he’d thought of Chris and me a lot.
‘Big deal,’ I thought, but said nothing. What was the point?
Now we were in touch, he said, we must keep in touch. He was glad I was in films. The best life in the world, he said, if you had the temperament. But why was I only a PA? Why wasn’t I a producer, at the very least? Ah. Well. He said he’d like to see Chris. How was she? Just fine, I said. She’d have to come over and see him some time, since visas for him were so complicated. If you ask me visas are as complicated as you care to make them, but I didn’t say that either.
I said Chris would be over to see him next Easter. That gave her six months to lose three stone. She should be able to do that. A girl likes to be at her best when she meets up with her old dad.
‘You’ve grown up a fine handsome girl, Jude,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of you,’ and you know, that meant a great deal to me. More than it should have. If anyone was to take the credit for the way I was it should have been my mother. Oh, Great Universal Paradox which runs our lives – that what should please us doesn’t, and what does please us, shouldn’t!
He had to go back to work, he said. The pixie toadstool called. The crew could not be kept waiting. When could it ever, in any country, in any language in the world? We exchanged addresses. He went.
And I took myself off to the little Greek Orthodox church that’s tucked away behind the Great Square, and there I sat down. I had to be quiet: absorb what had happened. I didn’t kneel. I’m not very religious. I just sat, and thought, and rested. The unexpected is tiring.
It’s a small, ancient building: a chapel rather than a church. But it blazes with intricate icons and gold leaf and crimson velvet; everything shimmers: there’s no way it can’t: there must be a thousand candles at least stuck all around, lit by the faithful at their own expense. It’s a sensuous, somehow Mediterranean place, stuck here as if by accident in this cold northern land. The air was heavy with incense: that and candle smoke smarted the eyes: or was I crying? And in the ears was the gentle murmur of the faithful, the click click of the telling of beads. Yes, I was crying. But I don’t think from wretchedness. Relief, happiness almost, at something completed. My father: no longer fantasy, just a man.
And there in front of me, a couple of rows nearer the great glittery altar; was sitting Andreas Anders. He looked round and saw me. I wished he hadn’t. I wanted to just go on sitting there, alone, thinking. But he got up and came to sit next to me. How good-looking he was. His bright eyes glittered in the candlelight.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s not coming to Helsinki after all. Had you heard?’
By ‘she’ he always meant Caroline Christopherson. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’d better give her up altogether, don’t you? Divorce, or something drastic. I can’t stand the strain.’
‘Let’s go outside,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the place for such conversations.’ Nor was it. As I say, I’m not one for religion, but some sort of God was here in this place, albeit in heavy disguise, and didn’t want to hear all this soggy, emotional mish-mash.
So we went out, Andreas and me. And he tucked his arm into mine and said, ‘Shall we go back to the Inter-Continental, just you and me?’ and I pulled my arm away and said, ‘No, I won’t. What a monster you are!’ and heard myself saying it, and knew I meant it, and there I was, out of love with him. Just like that.
‘A monster?’ he asked, hurt and confused. But I didn’t even want to discuss it. It wasn’t worth it. I’d see the Lenin in Love through of course, because I was a professional, but that was all. The man was an egocentric maniac.
I left him staring after me, his turned worm, and I went back to the Hesperia Hotel and found Tony in my bedroom and told him to stop messing about and for heaven’s sake somehow get his wife and children back. If he wanted to get out of the business, let him do it with the proper person.
‘Is this what finding a long lost father can do?’ he asked, as he left. ‘And I had such high hopes...’
And all I could do was suppose it was: that, and simply Finland itself.
In the past Finland has always been conquered or annexed or governed by someone else – this vast flat stretch, on top of the world, of islands and forests – but now it has its own identity, its own pride: it looks not to its previous masters, Sweden and Russia, but to itself. How odd, to identify so with a nation! Perhaps it’s hereditary, in the genes: like ending up in the film business. My dad ran off with a Finn: one mustn’t forget that. Perhaps he somehow felt the same connection; and can be forgiven.
And that’s the strange thing that happened to me in Helsinki, last October, and how my life changed. And I called this story ‘Falling in Love in Helsinki’, not ‘out of love’ because although it’s true I fell out of love with Andreas, out of love with love (which is a real blight) somehow I fell into love with life. Or with God, call it what you will, there in that chapel. Anyway, sufficiently enamoured of just the sheer dignity of creation to realise I shouldn’t offend it the way I had been doing. I think everything’s going to be all right now. I’ll make out. I might even leave the film business altogether. Not go into a convent, or anything so extreme. But I might try politics. It’s what I’m trained for.
As for GUP, the Great Universal Paradox, that’s real enough. What I marvel at now is how so happy so many of us manage to be, so much of the time, in spite of it.
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An invitation from the publisher
First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1988
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The appendices have been published as short stories in the following magazines: ‘A Libation of Blood’ in More Magazine (New Zealand), January 1988; ‘Come On, Everyone!’ in Marxism Today, December 1987; and ‘GUP – or Falling in Love in Helsinki’ in Woman (UK) on 23 May 1987.
The lines from the song ‘Why did she Fall for the Leader of the Band?’ and the sheet music which appear on the jacket are copyright © 1935 and reproduced by kind permission of Peter Maurice Music Co Ltd, London WC2H 0LD.
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Desig
ns and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858721
Head of Zeus Ltd
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Into the lives of Marion, Nora, Roaslie and Susan erupts Leslie Beck, an old flame not quite extinguished. Recently widowed, though somewhat weepy Leslie is still a man with the Life Force. To the four friends he is Leslie the Lucky, Leslie the magnificent – his force forever pulls. Old secrets stir, old rivalries are resurrected and scores are settled as the friends are catapulted back into their murky past...
Table of Contents
Dedicated to
NELL LEYSHON
without whom this novel could not have been written in the form it is
NOTHING HAPPENS,
AND NOTHING HAPPENS,
AND THEN EVERYTHING HAPPENS.
Marion
Leslie Beck came to see me the other day. He was carrying an oil painting under his right arm. In the past, his arms had always seemed too short for his body, but now he’d had to stretch the right one to contain the painting, and the left was keeping it company, so today he looked not wider than he was long, like a rugger player, but too attenuated for his own good, like the kind of basketball player who gets goals just by reaching over everyone else’s head and dropping the ball through the hoop. Whereupon everyone cheers and shouts, though personally I can never see there’s any merit in merely being taller than anyone else. Or perhaps Leslie Beck had just got thinner, and I had shrunk as well. At any rate, our relative sizes had altered, one way or another, in my favor.
Leslie Beck had never, it seemed to me, been quite tall enough for his wives: first Jocelyn, then Anita. Marriage is easier when the man is noticeably taller than the woman: it makes the balance of power, usually in the man’s favor, seem a more natural state of affairs. Then there is less resentment against the male assumption of superiority. I am not married, so am in a position to notice these things without great pangs of anxiety and fear. In actual terms, Leslie Beck had once been five foot ten and was now coming in at about five foot eight. Two inches can make a lot of difference.
Leslie Beck, I realized, must be pushing sixty. Perhaps his true nature was showing through, as natures in the end do; and I found I wasn’t liking it. For though Leslie Beck’s red hair seemed crinkly and plentiful, it occurred to me now that it was quite likely not hair at all but a rather expensive wig; and though his step was jaunty, I wondered if it might not drag the minute he was round the corner, and though he seemed to carry the painting without effort, it might have needed a pause and a couple of deep breaths before he pushed open the door to achieve that effect. In fact, I found I’d gone right off Leslie Beck, for no fair reason. Sixty happens to everyone, sooner or later. That is, if he’s lucky.
“Hi, little Marion,” he said.
“Why, hello, Leslie,” I said. “What’s that you have under your arm?”
“A painting by Anita,” he said. “I thought you might be interested.”
And Leslie Beck laid the painting, which was done on a proper, expensive, prestretched canvas, five feet by four feet, on the big desk which I keep clear for just such eventualities, and unwrapped it. Swathes of polystyrene bubble wrap fell to the floor and lay about like sheets of cracked ice subjected to unnatural forces. Leslie Beck was taking good care of this painting.
“How is Anita?” I asked. He paused. He looked at me. His eyes were still blue, though rather paler and more watery than once they had been. Now tears came into them.
“I’m being very brave,” he said, “but she’s dead.”
And I looked around the gallery, the Marion Loos Gallery, just off Bond Street, my pride, my achievement, my family, the source of my income (such as it was, the country being in recession) and my security (such as it could be, with tides of violence and unrest lapping at our doorstep), and I was glad I had placed my trust in material objects and not in human beings. But the sun chose that moment to come out from behind a cloud and shine directly in through the plate-glass windows; and the paintings currently on exhibition, by a certain Scottish artist, William MacIntyre, which should have responded to the sudden light, at least in theory, by flinging back their own innate energy, matching solar power with human vision, failed to do so and just looked dull and as if no one were ever going to buy them, or could reasonably be expected so to do. I could see dust motes floating in the air and smell the exhaust fumes of the city traffic which had seeped into the gallery along with Leslie Beck. Nevertheless, appearing at that moment, the sun struck some kind of light right into my head and made me feel quite dizzy—not, I think, with grief for Anita, but with the revelation of some powerful allied emotion. Perhaps it was just dislike of Leslie Beck.
“I thought you’d know,” he added. As if everyone would be familiar with the details of his life and times. He, Leslie Beck.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Next time you have a group show,” he said, “perhaps you’d hang it. What do you think?”
But I was not, for once, looking at the painting for “good” or “bad,” or anything except its narrative. It was an interior; its subject was Leslie and Anita Beck’s bedroom, which I remembered well, from the time she’d been off somewhere. Where had it been? Visiting children or ill parents—the likeliest thing. Some episode, anyway, in the kind of discursive family life other people have, but not me, never did have, nor, I imagine, ever will. I have cats, and they suit me very well.
“It is an unbearable tragedy,” he said. “Just when Anita had finally discovered her talent.”
“Quite so,” I said.
“I thought in the six- or seven-thousand range,” he said.
Aphra came toward us, so I didn’t bother to say “You’re joking.” Aphra was hopping.
“Why, hello,” said Leslie Beck appreciatively, the way men often do when Aphra appears. Aphra is twenty-four and has a great deal of dark brown frizzy hair which springs energetically from a perfect forehead and coils messily down over hunched and narrow shoulders. Her nose is too large and her mouth too narrow, but her skirts are very short and her energy level high, and no one seems to worry about details of feature, least of all Aphra. She was wearing black-and-white-striped tights, the stripes going down the leg, not round. Though from time to time I beg her to dress more calmly, so as not to offer competition to the paintings on the wall, she never will. Aphra bent down to rub her toe, which she had badly stubbed, and she folded her body easily in the middle, and Leslie Beck noticed that, too. Another age, another time, another place, he would have whistled.
“That’s a nice painting,” said Aphra. She had done a night-school class in fine art and felt entitled to pass opinions, though I asked her not to. It was true, though I wished it were not, that the paintings she liked most were the ones which sold first.
“My wife painted it,” said Leslie Beck. “It’s a study of our bedroom. It was on my suggestion that she started painting. She needed something for herself. You know what it’s like for women. She’d never have started if I hadn’t encouraged her.”
“Well,” said Aphra, “she certainly seemed to like your bedroom,” and she hopped and limped on to do, or so I hoped, the mail.
And then Barbara came out of the stockroom, and Leslie Beck said, “Well, hello,” in the tone of a middle-aged roué, and certa
inly not an elderly widower. Of my two assistants, Aphra, being in her twenties, was a less practical proposition than Barbara, or so Leslie Beck seemed to deduce. Barbara had a degree in fine art and a librarian husband and a small child, and the kind of gentle, puzzled look young mothers who have recently acquired this status tend to have. She was not too beautiful, not too young, and looked as if she were just waiting for someone to explain things and make her happy.
“Hello,” replied Barbara, courteously and formally, and passed on.
“You know how to pick your staff,” observed Leslie Beck, and I returned my attention to the painting. The same cream curtains, the same white cotton bedspread—but the good, expensive things do, of course, last. The wallpaper was striped. I had remembered it as floral: that, at least, had changed. I remembered the pleasure Leslie Beck had given me on top of the white bedspread, there being no time for us to open up the bed, and I remembered my envy of the softness of Anita Beck’s pillows; but the memory was diffused, as if another person had inhabited the body whose legs spread open, welcoming and willing on another woman’s bed, while Leslie Beck gave and took the amazing pleasure he felt was his to give and take.
Now, the painting was not my cup of tea, as the woman who had painted it had not been, either, she who had ousted Jocelyn and been the subject of Leslie Beck’s complaints: her plainness, her dependency, her laggardliness and general dreariness—those qualities, in fact, I most hoped were least characteristic of myself. The painting was muzzy around the edges, photographic in attempt and achievement in the middle. “Why, look”—I could already hear the words at the opening—“you could almost pick up that comb and use it!” Well, I didn’t want that kind of work on my walls, even in a corner badly lit in a group show: I had my pride; I did not want to make so easy a living. Such paintings sell well in the middle market, in the middle price range, but there’s no fun, no risk, no outrage in thus playing safe. You could die of boredom—or, alternatively, promote Barbara to manager and just go home and wait for the source of income to dry up. As for the comb itself, old-fashioned and silver-backed, Anita Beck had simply failed to perceive what was invested in it, and I felt she should have. That was what painters were for. I had picked up that comb in my time, pulled it through my hair. Leslie Beck and my own urgencies had tangled it, both moving my head this way, that way, in and out of Anita Beck’s soft square feather pillows. I’d needed a comb. Myself and who else: we had used the comb and then, no doubt, picked our hairs out of it, not so much out of concern for Anita, the second wife, as to save Leslie Beck embarrassment.
