by Weldon, Fay
The farmhouse is on a hill and has a view—the high cliff of a river gorge to the south, its face riddled with prehistoric caves; to the west, more hills, more vineyards; and farther up the hill, the yellowy stone walls of a medieval town. Stories of dinosaurs absorb the children, and the heat of the day dampens arguments and protests; in the evening, there’s a safe river pool for them to swim in. In the mornings, someone will go to the Périgueux market: plums, peaches, aubergines, stuffed tomatoes, pâtés, cheeses, poultry (dead and alive) in a profusion that seems natural to the peasant and is a source of wonder and pleasure to the city folk.
The farmhouse sleeps twelve. This year Vinnie and Susan have asked Ed and me, Wallace and Rosalie, Marion Loos, and Antony Sparvinski—Vinnie’s publisher, whose wife has just left him. Everyone thinks vaguely that Sparvinski, who is thirtyish, unworldly, and foreign, might do for Marion. We are beginning to worry about Marion. We feel she is our responsibility. We snatched her out of her natural place in the world, promising her a better one, and now we suspect she is unhappy. A few lines that look remarkably like resentment are beginning to form around her brow as she peels the cucumber for Vinnie’s salad. Vinnie acknowledges that cucumber should be eaten together with the skin, which contains an enzyme that helps digest this otherwise most indigestible of vegetables, but the tender flavor and melting texture of a finely sliced and well-blanched peeled cucumber, Vinnie says, is worth minor digestive distress. We go along with it. Vinnie is our taste-and-culture leader. If he says something’s worth minor distress—for example, peeling and chopping horseradish roots dug fresh from the garden—for the sake of its natural flavor, that’s it: he fires us with enthusiasm, he chivvies us; he points out to us that a cracked and crazed blue-and-white Minton plate, two hundred years old, is a better thing to eat off than a factory-made new Wedgwood, and we agree. Because Vinnie loves the past, being nervous of the present, all our houses are full of old things, antiques; almost nothing is new. Even our towels are bought in junk shops, Vinnie pointing out that the old fabrics pick up moisture better than the new, and he’s right. It’s because of Vinnie that we all have white soap in plain white china soap dishes in our bathrooms, and baths that stand on legs and are impossible to clean beneath. Vinnie believes that the functional is beautiful, so long as it’s more than fifty years old. None of us would dare use “ease of cleaning” as a reason for buying or not buying anything; only gradually have plastics crept into our houses. There was a time when Susan decanted dishwashing liquid into an earthenware jug. Now that it has become usual for men to share housework, even Vinnie can work a washing machine and will use a dishwasher.
Our lot: see us as the brake-lining classes. That is to say, with our ridiculous impracticalities, our love of the old, our suspicion of the new, we wedged ourselves between the unthinkable (that our history would be buried under rubble) and the unstoppable (that profits must be made) and slowed down the headlong rush of the developers to dispose of our past entirely. While we were on our knees polishing some ancient flaking slate floor, carefully refitting and matching worm-riddled window frames, sneering at our neighbors who couldn’t tell old oak from new pine, they, the true revolutionaries, wanted to start over, to seal the cockroaches under concrete, to bury TB along with damp and ignorance, to put the past to the bonfire, as the past put its witches, alive. We were both right. We, in the snobbery of our taste, paved the way, alas (we would see it as alas, of course we would, purists to the bone), for the theme parks and heritage industry which now plague us, with their bonny milkmaids and olde worlde cookies; but if our towns are still discernibly different one from the other, if we have a green field left, it’s because we sniffed and looked down our cultured noses at what was new and convenient. The effort wore us pretty thin. The world leapt out of control. We’re reduced now to using ecologically sound dishwashing liquid, in nonbiodegradable plastic bottles. Vinnie was our hero.
Leslie was our natural enemy. It being against our principles to have enemies, we fraternized; we did what we could to convert him. Some of us even slept with him, to defuse him.
Marion, with her instinctive response to paintings, was our friend. It was our duty and our pleasure to offer her what assistance we could. What we valued, what we tried to rescue, as well as the old, was intelligence and response. We would open our houses and our hearts to it. I don’t think it made us better people. The “deserving poor”—those who would acknowledge the standards of their benefactors, who washed their faces and minded their manners—do well enough from century to century. It is the undeserving poor, who are never likely to reflect credit upon us, or do anything other than despise us, who need us: the undeserving of spirit we should turn our attention to. Marion’s brother Peter, for example, who hadn’t an idea in his head beyond X-rated videos.
So picture Marion, elegant even in her much-washed orange shift of a cotton dress, long-legged, large-eyed, wearing rubber gloves to peel cucumbers.
“Marion,” says Vinnie, “you can’t possibly peel cucumbers in rubber gloves. Where’s your finesse? Besides, cucumber juice is good for the skin.”
Marion sighs and takes off the gloves and risks her nails. She is always obliging, always polite, part friend, part protégée, part help. We trust our men to her without thought: betrayal is not in her nature, nor—and perhaps it is the same thing—is abandonment to the moment. In spite of her looks, there is a chasteness in her that seems to deter. She is unlikely to grip the male imagination. I would never be totally easy if Rosalie was alone for too long with Ed, and certainly not Susan; but Marion could spend a morning shopping in Périgueux with Ed, and I wouldn’t prickle, or feel left out, or think that existing secrets were being revealed or fresh ones plotted: I would just know she’d bring back the best and freshest vegetables, the rarest and most perfect cheeses.
This particular morning, Vinnie was preparing a five-course lunch. He had all of us helping. Ed was trimming meat with his fastidious fingers; Wallace was sharpening knives—swish, swish; I was skinning tomatoes; Marion was slicing cucumber; Antony was shelling fresh green walnuts. Susan was excused; she was upstairs writing an article for New Society entitled “Charity: System Bolstering or the Answer to Need.” The more noisily hedonistic Vinnie became, the more Susan retreated into a remote and chilly aestheticism. The door was open; sunlight shone through, and the smell of basil and ripe grapes and hot hills drifted in. We were happy, except for the slight crease of discontent on Marion’s brow. Then the room darkened, and who stood in the doorway but Leslie Beck. It was the first time I had seen him since I’d walked out of Agee, Beck & Rowlands, leaving him, or so he claimed, in the lurch, and myself lucky not to be in the family way. He was wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a red cravat, and looked like the wealthy bounder he was.
“I just happened to be passing,” he said, “in the Rolls. I wondered if you intellectual folk would put up with me, a mere businessman. I’m going on down to Cahors. I thought I might take you all out to lunch.”
We were surprised. We stared. No one said anything. He picked us off one at a time.
“Hello, Rosalie,” he said. “Hello, Nora—long time no see. Hello, Wallace—I was having lunch with Jocelyn; I go over to see her and the girls quite a bit. She said to remember her to you, how much she likes the new program. Hello, Ed—I saw you were in the quotes-of-the-week in my Sunday paper. What was it? Something pithy and witty.” Then he said to Antony Sparvinski, who was small, round, earnest, and nervous, “Hi, Antony. You know, Antony’s publishing a book of mine. Of course, it’s been ghostwritten; I’m told I don’t have the literary touch. It’s in the ‘How To’ series. How to read a surveyor’s report. Back in the domestic market, for my sins, but that’s where the profit is, isn’t that so, Antony?”
Antony agreed. So he was the traitor.
“I never thought you’d make it, Leslie,” he said. “I never thought you’d find your way down here.”
“I did,” said Leslie, “and I brought the
manuscript with me, just to give you some holiday reading.”
“Thank you very much,” said Antony. He looked guilty and helpless. I couldn’t think why we’d thought he would do for Marion.
Then Leslie said to Vinnie, “How’s the cock of the walk? It all smells good. What a pity Anita can’t cook. What a waste of France! Where’s Susan?”
“Upstairs, working,” said Vinnie, and once one of us had spoken, what could we do but acknowledge Leslie, and even feel privileged he had deigned to call.
“Stay to lunch, Leslie,” said Vinnie. “And welcome. Is Anita with you?”
“Anita’s in Cahors with little Polly,” said Leslie, at which we all sighed gently with relief. “Not so little now. I’m on my way down. Well, well, Marion, still at it? They working you as hard as ever? I’d have thought you’d have got your own gallery by now.”
And Marion, instead of turning white with rage around the nostrils, as she was very well able to do, just said, “I need a sponsor first. Perhaps one day I’ll find him,” and went on peeling and slicing cucumbers.
Leslie said, “Now what am I to do with my hungry chauffeur, since you won’t accept my invitation?”
He knew quite well that if he made us confront our egalitarian principles in public, we’d have no option but to live up to them.
“Ask him in,” said Vinnie. “There’s food and drink for everyone.”
“Her,” said Leslie, and we all sighed.
Reader, if you can at this tense moment bear to leave these hot, dreamy, wine-soaked, garlic- and olive-oil-drenched salad days for a little, I’ll take you back to the wet, cold Norfolk afternoon when Ed first met Marion and brought her home to Bramley Terrace.
Ed had commissioned a coffee-table book entitled The Artist and Money. Now he, the picture editor, and a photographer traveled to Norfolk to visit a touring exhibition called “The Bank and the Painter,” sponsored by a High Street bank, to catch up with and photograph a minor Rembrandt etching, The Moneylender, and possibly a couple of Van Gogh café scenes as well, painted in exchange for a dinner and a glass of wine or so.
The exhibition was not a success. There were few people to get in the way while the photographer, having done with the Rembrandt, was setting up for one of the Van Goghs. The tall, pretty girl who had handed out the warm white wine and limp sandwiches nudged Ed and said, “Don’t make a fool of yourself. That one’s a fake. A forgery.”
In those days, Marion had a Norfolk accent you could cut with a knife, which stood to reason: the exhibition was touring the provinces, and the bank was going through one of the nonelitist phases banks go through when the credit centrifuge, in low-interest gear, spins money out in the direction of the common herd, before changing gear and sucking it back in again where it belongs, with the rich and powerful. The purpose of the exhibition was, as well as touting for customers, to demonstrate that famous artists were people, too, and had human problems, and in so doing, by using the cult of the personality, to make art accessible to ordinary folk. Or such was their quite laudable purpose. They had asked for girl Friday volunteers among their branches, and Marion had stepped forward; and because she was pretty, and clearly of the people, she had got the job. She was paid no overtime for this special project and was currently working a sixty-eight-hour week. It was the kind of detail Marion would instantly work out.
“What do you mean, fake? How do you know?” asked Ed, taken aback.
“Well, look at it,” said Marion. “Anyone with half an eye could tell it’s a forgery.”
Ed looked and couldn’t. But, then, paintings weren’t his specialty.
“It’s too polished around the edges,” she said. “It’s too careful for a man who wanted his dinner. Look at the way the light comes out of the lamp. Like Morse code—dot-dot-dash, dot-dot-dash. Too regular. No, it’s a fake. The one on the left’s okay. That’s the Van Gogh. Same subject, different painter; a hundred years or so in between.”
And she passed on with her plate of sandwiches.
The photographer said, “I’ll take the one on the left, to be on the safe side,” and repositioned his camera.
Ed followed Marion into the side room, where the wine was kept, and asked her if she had any special knowledge of the subject, and she said no, how could a bank teller know anything except the denominations of bank notes and how to refuse credit to the unworthy so they didn’t ask twice? At which point the exhibition director, a serious man with a cavernous face, came in and suggested that Marion get on with her work and not waste time talking to guests. And thus Ed reported the conversation:
MARION:
This guest is talking to me. I’m not talking to him. And I’ve worked forty-eight hours so far this week, and it’s only Thursday, so I reckon I’m entitled to a conversation or two.
DIRECTOR:
You seem to have an attitude problem, Marion. It’s a great privilege for you to be asked to work here for us, among these beautiful and world-famous works of art.
MARION:
They’re mostly fakes, Buster. You’ve been had. Why do you think the insurance is so low? There’s a whole lot of people laughing at you up their cultural sleeves.
DIRECTOR:
Are you drunk?
MARION:
No. I’m just shit-tired. You were too cheap to pay what the national galleries wanted: you rented from private houses and got a load of rubbish. The etchings are second-rate; the plates must have been hacked to pieces. Those poor bloody painters—they have to put up with you when they’re alive, and you’re still buggering them when they’re dead.
DIRECTOR:
I hardly think a girl like you is qualified to pass an opinion on art. Now will you get back in there and do what you’re paid for, and all you’re fit for, and serve the wine.
MARION:
I’m ashamed to. It’s warm. Even a girl like me knows white wine should be cold. And it’s sweet. They’ll all have headaches in the morning. Worse than after my mother’s tonic wine.
DIRECTOR:
Perhaps it would be a good idea if you left now and didn’t come back.
MARION:
You mean I’m fired?
DIRECTOR:
Yes. (Exit Marion) I’m sorry about this. Head office insisted I recruit from the philistine ranks. I told them it wouldn’t work, and I was right.
Ed, the photographer, and the picture editor passed Marion in their taxi on the way to the station. They stopped the taxi.
Marion said she had no money until payday and nowhere to live. No, she refused to go to her parents’ house. She would not give in. No, she did not think the bank would take her on again; if they offered, she did not think she’d accept. Banking stifled her; there were no proper promotion prospects for women, anyway. Being “good with figures” got women as far as bookkeeping, seldom accountancy. Doing what she was told to do by people stupider than she upset her. No, she would rather go on the streets.
The taxi meter clicked up. The publishing collective would miss its train if they delayed further. Marion consented to get in the taxi and go to London with them, and Ed brought her home to Bramley Terrace. We had no spare room, so we found her space in Leslie Beck’s basement, and she helped out with Hope and Serena in the evenings and with my Richard and Benjamin, and Rosalie’s Catharine, and Susan’s Barney, and did her course at the Courtauld, melding the households into a yet tighter unit, as she went from one to another, sopping up the standards of what are now called, in an attempt to diminish them, the chattering classes, but which I would rather call the classes with conscience—of whom, I fear on a bad day, as with French-provincial cookery, the world will not see the like again.
We belonged to a level of society somewhere between the street protesters and the bourgeoisie establishment. We were the shock absorbers of the nation, the swing voters: if our patience grew thin, we’d change the way we voted. It was our only power—that and the sense that sheer strength of communal good intent, shared indignation, woul
d somehow magically influence the course of events. We went to the theater, read novels, talked politics, waxed indignant, followed the news, listened to the radio, were active men and women in the PTA, brought our children up to be nonracist, nonsexist—when that concept presently dawned upon us all—and to empathize with others. (“Colin, but why did little George beat you up in the playground? No, don’t hit him back. Talk to him. Understand him, and forgive. Become his friend.”) We had given up on our generation, finally understood our own powerlessness, our littleness of vision, as the more desperate and drastic energies of the world swept in and engulfed us, like the ocean swamping some secluded rock pool. We put our faith in the future our children would create, if only we created them properly. It was, I think, and still is, a noble vision. And I continue to believe Amanda and Colin in my kitchen, Amanda naked and cheerful, metal teeth gleaming and unabashed, Colin in his courteous towel, will do better than we.
Ed brought Marion home; we believed there was some sort of better life she could attain. We treated her like a car whose engine hadn’t fired properly: we thought if we really tried, and pushed and pushed her to the brow of the hill, and let her run down, the engine would splutter to life, and she’d carry on under her own energies. And the trouble was, now she’d run down the hill and was in a dip none of her choosing, but ours, and the engine hadn’t quite fired. Marion stood at the sink peeling cucumbers in rubber gloves until told not to by Vinnie; she was nearly thirty; she hadn’t married; she had no children; she lived in a bed-sitting room and worked in this art gallery or the other as an assistant, until the day she’d tell management what she thought of them and either walked out or was fired. And the gallery world is small, and her reputation preceded her. “Marion? Marion Loos? No, I don’t think so.” Though she was never brisk and brutal with us. We were her safety and her hope.
