by Weldon, Fay
We contemplated the mess, and the more we contemplated it, the worse it seemed. At last Clifford solved it.
Clifford said, “Supposing you had your baby in secret, Marion, and you handed it over to us, and we compensated you for its loss. Then you wouldn’t have to have an abortion, Leslie wouldn’t have to confess to his wife, Brenda would have her baby, which would be as pretty as its mother and as able as its father, and I’d have given my wife the best present in the world.”
Leslie didn’t say “How much?” outright, though I thought he might have. We bargained through the profiteroles. I think Brenda thought we ought just to give her the baby, out of love and friendship, but Clifford thought a financial transaction, and a large one, would be preferable. We were breaking the laws of both nations. He didn’t want me changing my mind at the last moment. “What’s money,” Leslie agreed, “compared to peace of mind?” And he suggested that if Brenda went on holiday for a few months before the baby was born, she could return to Cape Town with it in her arms, and no one would know it wasn’t hers. Brenda looked happier than ever.
There is a world shortage of white newborn babies of good healthy stock on offer for adoption. The Marion whom Clifford and Brenda saw was not poor. She had other options. The deal was made at nine hundred fifty thousand pounds. Clifford couldn’t quite bring himself to get to the million. I wept a little into my black café filtre to think of the baby from whom I would be parting, and said I must think about it; it was all so sudden.
I spent every night for a week at a cheap hotel with Leslie. He told Anita he was in Scotland. Leslie said he was doing this for Anita’s sake, not his own; he had somehow to maintain the marital home. I became pregnant at once, and just as well. The week was the most fertile of my cycle. I wondered whether it was a happy coincidence, and thought probably not. Nothing that had to do with Leslie was coincidence. This had been well planned in advance, probably from the moment Clifford had let slip his wife was attending a fertility clinic. I found a paperback entitled Fertility and Contraception: The Facts in the back of Leslie’s car. He had traded in the Porsche for a Citroën. I could tell things were not good for him.
At the end of the week he said, “We’ll only be about three weeks out on your dates. It’ll be just a little overdue.”
I said, “That’s all right. My brother and I were both a couple of weeks premature. It runs in the family.”
I asked why he didn’t make me pregnant before our meeting with the Streisers; he said to make sure I didn’t get any ideas. I didn’t pursue it.
He seemed to me a kind of devil man, pounding away at me with his chief asset in life, as if his future depended on it, which it probably did. The hotel was a hellhole. The bed was one of those old-fashioned narrow ones with a wire mesh for a base, not springs; it sagged in the middle. It was no holiday—though I was using up one of my precious holiday weeks.
I asked Leslie why he was so certain I was pregnant. He said there was an eighty-five-percent chance of it, and that was good enough for him. I asked him why he had had to book us into a back-street hotel in King’s Cross used by whores at worst and strays from the station at best, and not Claridge’s, and he said as he’d be deducting all expenses from my percentage of the Streisers’ payment, he’d assumed I’d want the bill kept as low as possible.
I wondered whether the baby would inherit Leslie’s temperament. If so, I was not sure I would be able to love it, especially if it was a boy. I asked myself if I would want to rear it, and the answer was no. I would produce the baby Brenda wanted, and she would make the best of it. Vinnie’s baby, or Ed’s, or Wallace’s I could have loved, but not Leslie’s. Was it to my credit or otherwise that I never had sexual relations with these three, though I daresay I could have had I tried? I was in and out of their bedrooms often enough. And it seems to be natural for men to want to bed their servants, their domestic or office maids, though not to have babies by them.
I think I was flattered that Leslie meant to have a baby through me, whatever his motives were.
I told Leslie I would have the pregnancy terminated if he did not agree to hand over seventy percent of the Streiser money, immediately, as it came in. One-third on agreement, one-third on delivery, one-third three months after the birth. I argued that since I was going through the actual process, the physical and emotional discomfort of birth, seventy-thirty to me was a reasonable division. He argued that since any baby was half the father’s, and the idea and the contacts were his, fifty-fifty was more than kind to me. We settled at fifty-five–forty-five in my favor, and Leslie said the sooner I had my own gallery the better. The money was going directly into Leslie’s bank account, laundered into some crevice of the dock development deal.
I called Cliff and Brenda and said that after much thought I agreed to the deal, and listened to Brenda’s sigh of happiness, and marveled that something which would make me so unhappy could make another woman so happy. But I expect, like most women, she thought she could grow the baby into her own image, regardless of its genes. It is in this hope, I imagine, that some women have baby after baby: as the infant gets to its feet and begins to argue, displays its own temperament and character, they quickly have another, hoping this time it will work. It never does, of course, but on they go. Rosalie, Nora, Susan—ever hopeful. At least Anita gave in and stopped after one.
As soon as the first installment arrived, I went straight around to the real estate agents and put down a deposit on the premises that were to be the Marion Loos Gallery. I spent the next few months preparing to buy and borrow stock. People were helpful—surprisingly so. I was more liked than I deserved to be. I was moved by the way contacts and colleagues put themselves out in my behalf. For the last three months of the pregnancy I went to Italy and there toured churches and monasteries; the baby kept me good company. I conversed with him; I instructed him; he was completely my friend. He could not answer back, but I knew and he knew that I was doing the right thing. A baby brought up in a pleasant home with kind parents and three servants anywhere in the world has a better chance of happiness than one brought up in some squalid inner-city room, which was the best a single mother on an ordinary female wage could provide. What is natural, careless maternal love, we both agreed, fetus and myself, compared with the love of nonnatural parents who care profoundly, even unto a million pounds’ worth of love?
For the last six weeks, Brenda came out to Venice to join me. She was very little and precise and eager. Churches bored her, but she liked sitting in St. Mark’s Square drinking the most expensive coffee in the world. I didn’t dislike her one bit. She made me drink chocolate; coffee would be bad for the baby. I hoped for her sake the baby would not take after Ida, or resemble its Uncle Peter. We gave birth in a nursing home outside Venice; I used her name.
If I myself couldn’t manage to have been switched at birth, I would at least make Ida and Eric’s version of my existence true for their grandchild. Switch the mothers, not the child. The baby was a boy, his hair a reddish fuzz. I supposed, from the books I had read, that this would fall out in about three months, and a stronger growth come in, and I was glad it would be left to Brenda to find this interesting, and important.
Brenda gave me an extra fifty thousand dollars after the birth, to make the sum up to a million.
“Don’t let Cliff know,” she said. “You know how men are. So proud! This is from my pocket, because that’s what I feel like—a million dollars!” The original transaction had been in pounds sterling, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her so and spoil her story, even for approximately twenty-five thousand pounds at an exchange rate of approximately two-to-one. I am not all bad, merely unmaternal.
I waved her and the baby goodbye from the Venice Hilton, had a good night’s sleep, which is difficult when you have a newborn baby—I was sorry for Brenda—and then moved into a cheaper and more romantic hotel, which I thought was my style. For a week I comforted myself with the Renaissance, a period which always helps the c
lose observer put human experience into a historical perspective. Then I went home to London—via Milan, where I bought the kind of clothes I thought women who ran West End galleries would wear—and completed the deal on the gallery.
Oddly enough, Leslie seemed to be far more upset about my lack of baby than I was. He had assumed he would have another girl: had believed he could only beget girls. On hearing I had sold his son, he quite took offense.
“You should never have done it,” he said.
“It was your idea in the first place,” I protested.
“You should never have gone through with it. I didn’t think you would. It was just a way of getting you into bed for a whole week.”
And I don’t think I believed him. In the end, what does motive matter? I don’t suppose God has the time or inclination to divine it before Judgment Day sounds and the dead are raised up in the full clamor of their righteous indignation and vigorous disclaimers. It’s what we do that counts, not why. I opened the Marion Loos Gallery. Leslie got himself onto his financial feet again, and someone else brought up the baby. I didn’t see Leslie after that for a long time. We had worn each other out, in some way I didn’t quite understand, until there he was, standing in my doorway, with Anita’s painting under his arm, and dust motes in the air, disturbing the tranquillity of the day.
Nora
Okay, out of Marion’s head, back to my own. I, Nora, should be better equipped after this practice to explain Marion to Susan, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. Just because I understand what it is to be Marion doesn’t mean others can or want to.
“What shocks you about it?” I ask Susan, but I know that answer perfectly well. It shocks Susan that a woman should take her life into her own hands without permission from social workers. Since Susan is the one who normally interferes in other people’s lives and is not herself interfered with, interference seems fine by her.
“You know perfectly well,” says Susan. “Babies can’t go to anyone just on whim. You’re trying to annoy me, Nora. Next you’ll tell me you think it’s okay to sell your kidneys to the highest bidder.”
I open my mouth and close it again. “No one else’s business if I choose to,” I want to say. “If I’d rather have a custom kitchen than a kidney, why shouldn’t I?” But I don’t want to argue with her. I just think she is quite the wrong wife for Vinnie.
We are in her house in Kew Gardens Square, one of the more desirable locations in the area served by Accord Realtors, and readily salable, should Vinnie and Susan ever wish to put it on the market. In this it is quite unlike 12 Rothwell Gardens in Primrose Hill, though the houses themselves are very similar. In these, the hard times of the property market, location is all-important. In the central-city area, grandiose property above two million pounds can still be sold, as the Middle East empties after the Gulf War, houses with electronic security devices already in situ being in special demand. Anything in an apartment building with a security desk at the entrance and proper surveillance of all callers, and inside the apartment a room (usually a w.c.) already converted to a communications center—steel-walled against bomb and gun attack, with alarm system and radio equipment already installed, into which the dweller can retire at the first sign of trouble—can be sold at once, at the asking price. But good solid family houses in the inner-city area, and the next price bracket down, are now two a penny. Nobody wants them. Nobody can sell them. Only in the suburbs, where citizens still assume they can breathe the air and live without fear of terrorist or personal attack, are such houses in demand.
Susan’s front garden was well pruned and tended. Her brass knocker was shiny. Her door key was on a proper ring, easily accessible, in a tidy bag. She and Vinnie had fought over the years, object for object, his tendency toward creative mess versus her determination to be orderly. I could see that some compromise had been reached, but that the terms of the armistice veered in her favor. The old splintery pine had been replaced by good, well-restored pieces, glossy with beeswax polish. My taste, of course, and Vinnie’s, ran to dog hairs and old favorites and take-us-as-we-are and let’s-eat-in-the-kitchen. Not so Susan.
We went into the drawing room. Flowers had been formally arranged. Bookshelves lined one wall. They sagged. This would have been Vinnie’s victory—a battle won, if not a war. Vinnie disliked being dependent on carpenters, plumbers, painters, electricians. He thought every man of honor should be his own tradesman-craftsman. Susan would cry out for professionals: “Please, please, not another botched job!” Vinnie would say: “Oh, that! I can do that.” And it might take him years, but eventually he’d get round to it, do-it-yourself book in hand. Why pay pounds when you can do it yourself for pennies? Susan would grit her teeth; her mouth had set into the look of someone who gritted her teeth. It was no longer soft and full, vulnerable; it was firm and thin. But he’d won about the books: they were old and shabby, and very few of them had been published post-1950, which meant they were difficult to keep clean. A duster, swept along the shelf, would catch the bindings, the old jackets, and tear them. It was what we at Accord Realtors call “a most gracious room”—that is to say, there was space for a grand piano, on which were some family photographs and Vinnie’s award for Best Food Writer of the Year—something which looked like a copper leg of lamb perched on a brass plinth. He’d spent a couple of years as a food columnist, Susan said, on a Sunday paper. I knew that. I’d read it every week. Vinnie was away. I was disappointed to hear it. Of course. He was in the States, researching the relationship between dairy products and catarrh.
“Poor Vinnie,” said Susan, “they keep his nose to the grindstone. I think he’d much rather be writing books on the nature of reality, but that kind of book doesn’t sell.”
And I held my tongue and didn’t remind her of Vinnie’s book on the nature of dreams, which had sold but had not suited her view of her husband as a person of the flesh, which left her as a creature of the spirit. In order that she be ethereal, he must be solid. Or so Vinnie had often complained, breaking off more French bread, spooning out more apricot confiture, while Susan sipped her black coffee. That was the summer they weren’t getting on too well, the summer she’d left with Leslie Dong the magnificent.
“Nora,” said Susan, “there’s something I need to share with you.”
I know this “sharing.” It means someone is determined you’re going to end up thinking just as she does. She wants you on her side. And she doesn’t mind hurting you. I didn’t say “I see. And not just the cost of Anita Beck’s painting.” If my Colin and her Amanda were sharing my kitchen in the nude, she and I might well end up joint grandparents. Vinnie and Susan, Ed and Nora, Rosalie and—who? Wallace, down from his mountain? Mr. Collier the mad electrician? All brought together again, with Anita Beck’s painting of Leslie Beck’s bedroom on the wall, to keep the past in tune with the present. I did not think Marion would be washing dishes for us; some things change.
“Share away, Susan,” I said, and felt almost fond of her again. I had been jealous because her house was twice the size of my house, and because she ran a charity and I worked part-time at Accord Realtors, and because Vinnie still had energy and initiative and Ed liked to sit at home and watch TV. And because she had Leslie Beck’s daughter and I, at best, could only have Leslie Beck’s grandchild. But there was more that we shared than that drove us apart: a whole past. I forgave her.
And she shared. She shared.
She told me some things I already knew and some I did not.
She told me how angry she had been with Vinnie and all of us the day she left for Bordeaux with Leslie Beck and Lady Angela. Not because of anything in particular we had done but because of what we were, because we were self-indulgent and self-satisfied and could talk only of food and babies. She was not like us; she had things to do, and here she was trapped with a husband and two small children she had acquired almost by accident. She was being sucked down by hot sun and wine, and the crackle of cicadas was making her deaf, and her
brain was ceasing to work, and she kept tripping over half-naked children.
“We were on holiday,” I said. “We were just being, not doing.”
“Nora,” Susan said, “you and Rosalie, whenever was either of you doing, not being, unless in bed with Leslie Beck?”
She shared with me. Leslie Beck had told her and Lady Angela, as they took the B-roads down to Cahors, across the river Lot, to the high plain where the hot south begins and the air smells of overripe peaches, that any woman was his for the asking. Lady Angela had laughed and told Leslie Beck he was a braggart and a liar and a vulgarian, and he said every woman could be had, all it needed was a little planning: the only thing women ever needed was the opportunity and a man who wanted them. And he was a man who liked women. And the women he had had never forgotten him.
“Why’s that?” asked Lady Angela, and Susan, who was irritated and annoyed by Leslie Beck, said from the back, “Because of the size of his thing, Lady Angela, that’s what he means.”
“How do you know?” asked Leslie Beck, surprised. “You’re not one of my women. Not yet.”
“Because Marion saw it by mistake,” said Susan, “and she told me, and I told Rosalie, and Rosalie told Nora.”
“And now you’ve told Lady Angela,” said Leslie Beck, well satisfied, and then had to remind her to drive on the right, because she’d veered directly into the path of an oncoming truck. Lady Angela said it made no difference to her, she was gay, but she’d heard that the length of the male member was not important to heterosexual women. What did Susan say? Susan said she was in no position to make comparisons.
Susan shared with me that she wished then very much that she was back with Vinnie and the rest of us, talking about food and babies. She hated talking about sex. But the conversation was burnt into her memory.
