by Weldon, Fay
And Marion, until now, when she comes running to Rosalie crying, complaining that Leslie Beck has turned up in our lives again, and that Anita is dead, has said and thought precious little about any of these matters at all. It always annoys me how for some people day can succeed day and nothing happen; how can after can of cat food can be opened and devoured, trash bag after trash bag of cat litter be put weekly out the door while other people’s children get born and grow up; and how, while their life dribbles away, they continue to act and chatter and behave as if everything were normal, yet actually they are in a state of paralysis, and surely must know it. People can die in that paralysis, that’s the trouble, and only the tears in their eyes as they dumbly depart this life indicate their final awareness of it. Life has been wasted. The Life Force shot by just out of orbit, disappointing, like an expected meteor passing so far from the earth as to make no spectacle at all. If you don’t do something, nothing happens, I keep saying to Marion Loos, and she says, “Shut up, Nora, I don’t want anything to happen. I am perfectly all right as I am. You’re talking about yourself.”
At least one day Anita woke out of her slumber and started doing something, started painting, even though she left it so late she was interrupted by death itself.
Marion, Rosalie, Susan, and Nora, that’s me. Among us we have eight children, now all in their teens, early and late. I will name them but not write about them much if I can help it: all that need be said is that these children provide endless anxiety and occasional gratification, that life has been organized around their existence for years—even Marion’s, who acts as aunt, and says that’s more than enough for her—and that we fondly and wrongly believe our worry about them acts as a kind of talisman. If you lie awake all night in a frenzy of despair waiting for the return of the feckless girl, the drug-taking son, they come home safe. On the whole. Sometimes they don’t. If the despair is ambivalent—mixed with a half-conscious (at best) desire never to see them or think of them again—so much the worse. And if the sight of someone else’s baby continues to fill you with instant, immediate, and genuine pleasure—the triumph of hope, as they say, over experience—so much the better. Their names are (Rosalie’s) Catharine and Alan, (Susan’s) Barney, Amanda, and David, (mine) Richard, Benjamin, and Colin. Marion—nil. The name of Rosalie’s missing husband is Wallace; Catharine’s father is Leslie Beck, as is Amanda’s. Wallace never realized this about Catharine, nor has Vinnie ever wondered why Amanda has crinkly, orangy curls and needs to wear braces. Both Vinnie and Susan have wide jaws and strong, large, even teeth: the fact is that Amanda has Susan’s teeth in Leslie Beck’s foxy, nuzzling jaw; she has endless trouble with them, poor child, while the orthodontist struggles against an unkind genetic fate.
The things you know about your friends you must never, never disclose! In the States, people move a great deal, make new friends, learn the art of starting afresh: perhaps they’re wise. Here in Richmond, England, we tend to stay rooted to the spot, aghast.
So let me take you back from the chaste safety of Richmond, and the nothingness of Accord Realtors, to the dramas and excitements of 1974, to Leslie Beck’s tall town house, No. 12 Rothwell Gardens, London, NW1. It has just been painted white, after eight years of being coated in a rather startling sixties pink. The yellow drainpipes and guttering are now a sensible and prudent black. As does the rest of the nation, Leslie Beck is feeling cautious: a sobriety of vision reflects itself first in color schemes. IRA bombs have been going off in buses and trains; it is not safe to sit near the window in restaurants; worse, the price of oil is going up dramatically as the OPEC countries of the Gulf get together to form a cartel. Color may be brave, but ordinariness is safer. A rumor goes around that ration books are being printed; it is generally felt that the West is collapsing, somehow imploding, and that Marx was right. One up, in other words, to the Soviet Union. Little did we know.
It was a summer morning. It was coffee time. Rosalie maneuvered her stroller up the front steps of Leslie and Jocelyn Beck’s house. Catharine, aged fifteen months, Leslie Beck’s unacknowledged child, sat in a stroller rather too small for her. The elegant magnolia tree in the front garden was in bloom. It was a bright day. Rosalie expected everything within the house to be happy; the dramas and terrors of the outside world, back in 1974, having less effect on domestic life than they do now. In the nineties people will come to their front door weeping, and if you ask why, will reply, “I’ve been watching the news.” Then, not so. Perhaps there were just fewer cameras about.
Rothwell Gardens is a row of twelve rather grand, late-Victorian houses, fronted by a pleasantly leafy private road, which sweeps off Rothwell Lane and back into it again, taking in a narrow strip of land as it does so, to nurture the trees which provide the leaves which put up the price of the houses no end. (Remember, I write this in a realtor’s office; these details occupy my mind.) Rothwell Lane in the seventies provided excellent shopping facilities: a small grocer, a drugstore, a hardware store, a stationer, an antique shop, a shoe repairer, and so on. Now, of course, things have changed. The business tax has driven these useful and friendly shopkeepers out of business, and bathroom design and lingerie shops have taken their place. (Marion says they must be tax-loss enterprises—she sees no way they can make a decent living for anyone.) Now the dwellers of the Rothwells—the Lane, the Crescent, the Gardens—go up to the new Sainsbury’s in Camden Town like anyone else, fighting their way through a maze of traffic and fumes to get there, waylaid and made to feel guilty by the new beggars and street dwellers of Camden.
The houses of Rothwell Gardens inspired loyalty and love. The rest of us moved out of the area as the horrors of the inner city pressed in upon us: Susan and Vinnie went first, to Richmond; Rosalie and Wallace, Ed and myself followed. But Leslie Beck stayed where he was, clung to the property through good times and bad—married for it and pimped for it, suffering, no doubt, as it suffered, from storms, blocked gutters, woodworm, and despair. (If the house fails, by some sympathetic magic, the owner fails, too. These things are known but seldom spoken of at Accord Realtors.) Twelve Rothwell Gardens is now worth a million pounds—if Leslie can find a buyer, that is. How much he would profit by selling it is another matter. It may be mortgaged above its current value, for all I know. Building societies and banks, at the time of the real estate boom in the eighties, often advanced money in excess of the value of the house, leaving borrowers who assumed, wrongly, that those who lent money would be meaner and more prudent than those who borrowed it, in the end, both sorry and astonished.
The Becks, being the grandest of us, and living in the biggest and best house, were well able to patronize the rest of us. No doubt we resented it. Rosalie and myself lived in Bramley Terrace, around the corner, a pleasant row of tall narrow houses built in the 1820s to the same classic design, like facing like, and still, I was pleased to see when I went retracing our old stamping grounds the other day, intact. These houses are now worth some half a million pounds (if you can find a buyer)—smaller by a third than the Rothwell Gardens property, but worth more proportionately, being cheaper to maintain and, if you can stand running up and down the stairs, easier to live in. Back in the sixties, a couple such as Ed and myself, the one a publisher’s junior editor, the other on the editorial staff of the Consumers Watchdog, could comfortably afford to buy a house in Bramley Terrace, even when the other lost her job for attending too much to her children and too little to her work. Or so it was alleged.
I took Rosalie’s Catharine with me on this outing into the past. I thought she might like to see the place where she’d spent her first few years, the streets in which she played. In the seventies, little girls could still play in the streets. Catharine said none of it seemed familiar at all. Then she went down on her knees.
“Are you praying?” I asked in alarm, but she was only shortening herself, to see if the street was recognizable from a different angle. And, yes, indeed it was, or so she claimed.
“Can you reme
mber being happy?” I asked. What we want, after all, is for our children to remember happy childhoods, though many of them seem to have grizzled throughout, and it was none of our doing, I’ll swear.
“Only if I don’t think about it too carefully,” she replied, and I wondered what in the world Rosalie and Wallace could have done to make it happier.
“I always felt like a cuckoo in the nest,” she said.
Well, what are any of us except statistics? According to research on tissue typing, one in seven of us does not belong to the father we think we do. Add to this mere ordinary variations of temperament, intelligence, and rather aesthetic perception, and it is hardly surprising that so many of us feel like cuckoos, not fitting in the nest in which we find ourselves.
Rosalie and Wallace lived around the corner at No. 7 Bramley Terrace. The houses on their side of the Terrace were without gardens, they having been stolen by the big houses of Rothwell Gardens in the 1890s. The lower branches of the Bramley apple trees, which had originally been part of a large orchard, and had given the Terrace its name, were now used for the swings of the Rothwell Gardens’ children. The kids of the rich can flourish anywhere: their parents have seen to that. Wallace climbed mountains and was away a lot. Rosalie looked after the kids and occasionally restored antique china. Bramleys are the large green sourish apples which fluff up when cooked and make excellent pies. Items of fact are easy to pluck out of the memory; affect—by which I mean feeling, response—is more of a problem.
Perhaps we were all cuckoos in nests to start with, which is why we ended up in our ancient apple orchard, like seeking out like, trying to puzzle out what was going on. The Bramleys, for all of us, was a new neighborhood, a step up toward where we felt our natural home to be. You could say, in relation to Leslie Beck, that once settled there, we set out compulsively to create as many new cuckoos as seemed feasible within the bounds of matrimony and accepted behavior. The life of the cuckoo, after all, is pretty good: uncomfortable in its nest to begin with, but rapidly and ruthlessly consuming all available nourishment until its maturity; and then it’s off. It was hatched both greedy and ungrateful.
Rosalie came out of Scotland as a girl; her father was a baker; she rode down to England on the back of her boyfriend’s bike, the works of Tennyson in her satchel; she ditched him, went to secretarial college, moderated her Glaswegian accent, got in bed with an antique dealer, learned furniture, ditched him, took up with a bookseller, learned the language and attitudes of the artistic middle classes, met Wallace outside a TV studio, and married him. (Her bookseller had just revealed a wife.) Wallace was tall and good-looking, difficult and remote. Nor was the marriage nearly as bad as it could have been. Rosalie admired him; she, too, was carried away, for a time, by the mystique of the mountain. She could, she once told me, enjoy sex with anyone. This could only be her good fortune.
I think Wallace treated sex with Rosalie as he treated mountains: something to be attacked with energy, but not too often; surmounted, finished, a flag planted to automatic applause, and then a nice long rest. He looked as craggy as one of his peaks, with bony knees and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was alert and practical and considerate enough once problems were explained, but you could wear yourself out explaining. Silence and suffering might sometimes seem a preferable option, and I suppose along with those go, if only as alliteration, a propensity to secrets. Rosalie looked robust enough; she had a lot of dark hair which half hid her very pale face and grew so vigorously you thought she’d have had energy enough to look after herself, whatever happened, and so it proved. She would keep what you could see of her rather heavily hooded eyes downcast. Her mouth was almost lax. In the beginning she looked good in trousers, having a long, straight back and narrow hips, but she never seemed to know it, or, at any rate, to care enough to retain these assets after Wallace fell off his mountain. When Rosalie opened the door to you, you knew she would not judge you, or take offense. If you were her friend, you were part of her life, and that was that. She was generous; Wallace was not. Rosalie liked the fridge full. Wallace liked it empty. Rosalie poured wine to the rim of glasses while Wallace winced.
Since Wallace dictated the amount of housekeeping money available, Rosalie was unable to keep up with the Becks when it came to giving dinner parties, nor do I think she wanted to. The Becks liked to serve champagne, and begin the meal with smoked salmon, followed by something like boeuf Wellington—badly enough cooked by Jocelyn, Leslie’s first wife. There would often also be a trifle, Leslie’s favorite dessert, rich in cream and brandy. Leslie was both rich and lavish, and liked to be seen so. Susan and myself fought back with Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Cookery, putting our trust in good cooking and hard work rather than lavish ingredients: Rosalie would serve beef stew and dumplings and be done with it, and Wallace would say, “You see, you don’t need to be rich to eat well,” and would be the only one not to notice that Jocelyn was moving her feet under Rosalie’s kitchen table to shift away the children’s toys, and had the air of someone going slumming and not liking it. Leslie just ate with gusto and enjoyed himself.
Jocelyn served dinner on a shiny mahogany table set with the family silver and place mats with “Hunting at Redhen” upon them. Redhen was her uncle’s estate. Leslie always drew attention to the mats. He had married above himself, and wanted everyone to know it. He had trained as a surveyor: competence and confidence had enabled him to rise to the top of the old established firm of chartered surveyors, once Agee and Rowlands, now Agee, Beck & Rowlands, and how he managed to sneak in there between Agee and Rowlands and become managing director was perhaps because Chas Rowlands was eighty and an Old Etonian who didn’t understand the necessity for work, and Leslie Beck was young, vital, and offered clients glasses of champagne instead of cups of tea, and had friends in the Ministry of Works who, like himself, had passed through grammar school and gone on to Cambridge.
Jocelyn’s father was a country doctor whose cousin was an earl; Jocelyn rode to hounds, and if she knew nothing else, knew how to behave, and how other people should. Leslie was vague about his own background—his father a civil servant in Lancaster? What did that mean? Train driver? Tax inspector? Whatever it was, Jocelyn, albeit not startlingly pretty, and without fortune, by virtue of her birth and breeding enabled Leslie Beck not just to live at No. 12 Rothwell Gardens, but to entertain, and feel at home among bankers, stockbrokers, and junior ministers of the Crown, the kind of people who could do a man in business a good turn or two. Leslie and Jocelyn Beck had two little girls, Hope and Serena, who were wide and stocky, as was Leslie, and who had inherited their mother’s rather large nose and close-together eyes, but not his red, crinkly, and vigorous hair. It was, perhaps, not the most fortunate combination of parental looks, but Rosalie and Nora, Jocelyn’s friends, supposed that when puberty overtook the girls, they would blossom. Something would have to happen.
At the time Leslie changed Jocelyn for Anita, Susan and Vinnie were living in Bramley Crescent, a street very similar to Bramley Terrace, only curved, following probably the original path of the river which marked the orchard boundaries and now ran underground, to well up in the basements of the big houses of Bramley Square, and give such a damp problem as to reduce their market value by at least a third—a state of affairs which went on for decades, until the housing boom of the eighties made such details as possible subsidence immaterial. Crescent prices were always twenty percent above Terrace prices; Crescent houses had managed to hang on to their back gardens and dated from ten years earlier, so they kept many original Georgian features, in the form of delicately railed balconies, ceiling roses, and marble fireplaces—rather too pretentious for the size of the house at the time of building, in fact, rather nouveau, I would have thought, but looking pretty good a hundred and fifty years on, and much sought after. The paper value of Vinnie and Susan’s former house in the Crescent is some three-quarters of a million pounds; of Ed’s and mine in the Terrace, under a half million. I don’t know why
this should make us feel inferior, but it does. Only Leslie Beck, of all of us, still lives round there. Anita died there.
This kind of property detail didn’t occur to me until I started work at Accord Realtors. Please bear with me. I am reminded of the weaver bird, who spends his life building elaborate nests, picking up pieces of glass and silver foil, displaying them before his home. Look at me, look at me, what have I not achieved! How it sparkles! Come live with me and be my love—oh, glorious me!
Susan worked as a speech therapist for the local education authority, those being the days when such specialists were publicly funded; so she had not just the value of her house but the constant reassurance of her virtue to keep her warm, not to mention Vinnie, who had recently qualified as a doctor and was large, plump, fleshy, noisy, emotional, sensual, and animated. At that time they were seen as a foil for each other: Susan cool, critical, earnest, neat, humorless. But those were the days when Vinnie won every time, when society itself was on the side of the hedonist, the bon vivant, and Susan loved him and would take his views and his tastes, and not struggle for her own identity.
Vinnie worked part-time in the Bramley surgery and wrote Help Yourself to Health books, which sold well—well enough for Vinnie and Susan, when they felt the time had come to leave the central city for the suburbs, to buy a big house in the best part of Kew, still near enough to Richmond for us to meet up in the supermarket, when fate so decrees, but way, way beyond anything Ed and I could afford, let alone Rosalie, out of the proceeds from Wallace’s insurance policy.
