Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon

by Weldon, Fay

  MR. COLLIER:

  I say! That’s a dress and a half. I thought we might stay in. There’s dinner in the oven; the maid prepared it. It’s her night out. A real luxury, a live-in maid. If the property market doesn’t start looking up, she might have to go.

  He chatters on. Wallace used to be silent. He would brood, his mind on distant mountain peaks. Mr. Collier—he likes her to call him Sandy, but in her head he’s still really Nora’s Mr. Collier—shows her the rest of the house: shiny modern furniture from Harrods, Chinese carpets, hideous vases, cocktail cabinets. The Pekingese snaps at their heels.

  MR. COLLIER:

  Not the nicest dog in the world, Rosalie, but my wife’s dog. It’s a comfort to me. You know about all that. A Svengali turned up in her life. I know they said in court it was the other way round, but women always get the blame. You’re something of a feminist; you know all about that. She didn’t deserve to die. Women make mistakes; she was unlucky.

  He begins to look less and less like a murderer; Nora, more and more of an alarmist. But he pours great dollops of gin into her glass and not much tonic, and Rosalie sees he puts great dollops of tonic into his own but not much gin. At the top of the stairs he pauses, faces her; she faces him. He comes closer; he kisses her; no arms around her; his tongue goes into her mouth. Well, that’s all right.

  MR. COLLIER:

  Oh, Rosalie! I’ve been so patient. I haven’t wanted to lose you. I’ve been through a lot, you know. So have you.

  ROSALIE:

  I suppose you didn’t hear back from the lawyers?

  She wants Wallace declared dead. She wants Wallace declared not dead. What she doesn’t want is to dream of Wallace’s skeleton, bleached and rattling in a mountain wind, picked over by birds, with Wallace’s still-living eyes staring at her, reproachful. Mr. Collier’s trousered legs offer reprieve, unless he, too, is death dressed up. It’s hopeless.

  MR. COLLIER:

  Not yet. I’m a very respectable man, Rosalie. I take this seriously, please believe me. I don’t want us just to have sordid sex. I want a proper relationship with you. Marriage.

  Sordid sex. Can she live with a man who speaks of sordid sex? Yes, she thinks she can, in the Tudor manse. They could ask people to dinner. She could live as Jocelyn Beck once lived, long ago: in propriety. Anyway, he hasn’t said he thinks sex is sordid; just upheld that casual sexual relationships are sordid. All kinds of perfectly decent people believe that, including Wallace, as do most men that she can see, if far fewer women. She positively wants him now to undo her zipper, free her from the constraints of the dress. She is wearing her high-heeled shoes. They are too tight. If he would show her the bedroom she could take them off casually, fall back on the bed and say, “Oh, Mr. Collier—no, oh, Sandy—of course we’ll be married. You and only you, forever more,” and open her arms. It is his fate to kill, hers to be killed.

  Does she hear a crackling in her ears, as Anita Beck’s studio burns, as the flames approach, sweep through the length of the room, embracing the past, destroying it, sucking up the sea, the cliffs, the stretch of sand, sparking and arcing, spitting and steaming? Something, at any rate, deafens her to reason.

  Mr. Collier shows her the bathroom before he shows her the bedroom. It is a big room. The floor is tiled; there are scorch marks on the tiles. The bath is pink, the taps are gold. The toilet has a pink furry cover.

  MR. COLLIER:

  Here’s where it happened. Here’s where he tried to kill me; here’s where she tried to save me. She didn’t mean me to die. I couldn’t make the court understand that.

  Mr. Collier for some reason puts in the stopper and turns on the taps. The Pekingese curls up on the pink furry mat that surrounds the toilet and looks soulful. Mr. Collier advances on Rosalie and undoes her zipper.

  MR. COLLIER:

  Let’s have a bath together. I love to take baths. I take them at all times of the day and night. We’ll drink gin together; we’ll see what happens next.

  ROSALIE:

  Here? Where it happened?

  MR. COLLIER:

  Yes. It must be exorcised. She’d want that. She wanted me to be happy. She didn’t mean for any of it to happen. He was after my property. He wanted the house. It was the time prices were peaking, but he wasn’t to know that. None of us did.

  The bath is full. It is a very large bath, semicircular. He pours in bath salts. They are scented. Steam rises from pinkish water. Is it cyanide? Mr. Collier takes off the white dress.

  MR. COLLIER:

  White, my wife’s favorite color. A wardrobe full of white dresses. Virgin white. You are so like her. Beautiful! The court case, everything: like a dream. I was so distressed. Smell the scent in the steam. Don’t you love that?

  She bends, she inhales. Why doesn’t he?

  He isn’t taking off his clothes. Why not? But it is absurd to imagine a man will murder not one woman but two in the same bath. One he can talk himself out of, but two? Of course not. Either way, Rosalie does not want to turn back. She is dizzy. Something will happen now.

  She hears the sound of sirens. Is it the police? But it’s only the front doorbell, ringing and ringing and ringing, getting the better of the crackling and buzzing in her ears. She thinks perhaps there is some kind of drug in the pink powder, the pink water. He is offering her something to drink; he is adding it to her glass of gin, which she still has in her hand.

  MR. COLLIER:

  Oh, damn. I’d better go and see who it is. Get them to go away. This is a night for just the two of us.

  Mr. Collier pushes open the bathroom door. She follows him to the top of the stairs. She has no clothes on. It doesn’t seem to matter. He opens the front door; she hears Wallace’s voice. In her head she sees his skeleton, his bony hand upon the bell. The door opens farther; Wallace is pushing it as Mr. Collier tries to close it. The hand seems as much flesh as bone. She walks down the stairs toward it. Wallace stands there.

  WALLACE:

  For God’s sake, Rosalie, what are you playing at? If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

  Wallace is back from the grave, and Rosalie, too.

  I, Nora, take credit for that. I’m pleased with myself; I have the courage to be me again. I was at home waiting for something more to happen. You can become addicted to event very quickly. I was waiting for the police to arrest me, for Ed to come home. The phone rang. It was Wallace.

  WALLACE:

  Nora?

  NORA:

  Is that you, Wallace? Where have you been?

  WALLACE:

  Is that all you have to say?

  NORA:

  Yes.

  WALLACE:

  Can I speak to Ed?

  NORA:

  He’s not here. Try him at Susan’s.

  WALLACE:

  Have you been drinking?

  NORA:

  Yes.

  WALLACE:

  Where’s Rosalie? I finally get home after all that, and there’s no one in.

  Wallace has been suffering from amnesia. He found himself penniless and without documents on the China coast; he’d worked his passage from Essen on a tanker flying the Liberian flag. It had taken him forever to get back. Well, that was his story, and he was sticking to it. He might get his job back at the BBC on the strength of it. My own view was that he had met up with some lady from a mountaineering club more his style and type than Rosalie and gone off with her. Changed his mind and decided to come home.

  I told him where Rosalie was. I told him despair and grief had driven her into the arms of the Richmond electrocuter; I had tried to stop her, but she was stubborn. He should get round to the Tudor manse and put in his bid before she was permanently gazumped by Mr. Collier.

  I sat at the window and waited. Colin and Amanda were out. I was alone in the house. It was tranquil, as a barren landscape is tranquil. I wondered how long Ed had been seeing Susan, how long he had been saying one thing and thinking another, as I had since the summer with Leslie Be
ck, and whether or not it mattered. The panic, anger, fear, and black jealousy engendered by helplessness, by nonaction, had burned away, shriveled up, when I set fire to Anita Beck’s studio. I was left scoured, clean, and trusting in the fate which had held me up over a cat and so given Marion back her son, and punished Leslie in those areas in which retribution were required, and not others, and which had produced Wallace in the nick of time to save Rosalie, and which now brought Colin, not with Amanda, up the path. He looked so like Ed, I thought at first he was. Ed, coming home, forgiving and forgiven.

  Colin said, “I hope you don’t mind. I’m not seeing Amanda anymore. It’s over. She keeps telling me what to think.”

  I said, “I don’t mind.”

  Colin said, “That’s the only reason.”

  I said, “Of course.”

  He said, “It doesn’t matter whose child you are. You’re still yourself.”

  I said, “That’s right.”

  He said, “I’ll speak to you when you’re feeling better.”

  I said, “I feel just fine,” but he went away to find some Diet Pepsi. He said Rosalie’s Catharine had got onto the college hockey team, and I said that’s nice.

  I waited to see what would happen next. Perhaps now I would be able to give up smoking. The thought prompted me to open a new pack. There had to be some source of pleasure in life, even though it kills you. Self-destruction is the natural state; anything else is an effort.

  The gate clicked. I looked up. Vinnie was coming down the path. I hadn’t thought of that. His face was not set and grim; he had not come to talk about Susan and Ed, to be gritty and rancorous. He was smiling. He was coming to talk about us.

  Mr. Collier has not been into the office for a week. Mr. Render has been out most of the time. The telephone has scarcely rung. I have written and written and written. I think everyone concerned is in a state either to endure the truth or to deserve it, though I am sure no one ever welcomes it.

  Marion calls. She tells me Anita Beck’s studio caught fire; they think sun through the skylight, focusing on glass, was enough to do it. Everything has been so dry and hot. Fortunately, Leslie is insured. With the money he can do up the house and buy himself an electronic wheelchair for his old age, Marion says. Aphra has decided against living with her boyfriend. Marion has had to raise Barbara’s salary. She can’t stand babies, never could. Jamie is staying with her. He thinks he will go to art college in London. What was I doing on Leslie Beck’s doorstep? Trying to buy behind her back? Do her out of a commission? What does it matter—the paintings are burned. The Tate’s lost all interest, thus saving the nation from further shame.

  She does talk. But we have to be patient with long-term friends. They’re illustrations—object lessons fate puts in our way, ever hopeful we’ll come to a conclusion or two.

  “We’re all saved from shame,” I observe. “I have to go now, Marion. I’m not supposed to be on the phone too long.”

  I can tell she’s offended. I wonder whether to call Vinnie. He is at my house, writing the book Susan would never let him write, on the nature of reality. This is not the fate Susan planned for Vinnie. She wanted him miserable, in perpetual darkness, once she turned the light of her eye away from him. Too bad.

  It is so much easier writing fiction than autobiography. I gave up the latter for good the day Ed went. Real life is simply not like this, is it. If Ed goes, Vinnie does not turn up. In the real world Amanda stays around to haunt and disturb. The Tate does not call up about Anita Beck’s rather bad, sad painting. Her magic studio does not exist, or if it does, I do not get to see it. But doesn’t life in fiction proceed with éclat! In the real world, Marion grows old alone. Once she’s given Jamie away, he’s gone for good. No one ever knows the truth about Mr. Collier, or what became of Wallace. The children launch themselves into the patternless chaos of their own lives: Catharine does not get on the college hockey team, though this, at least, saves her from muscly calves and tough shins.

  Never mind. Leslie Beck is true. Leslie Beck the magnificent; Leslie Beck and his Life Force, moving through our lives, leaping, unstoppable, like electricity, from this one to that one, burning us up, wearing us out, making us old, passing on, its only purpose its own survival. Leslie Beck, enemy of death, bringer of life: the best thing that ever happened to us.

  Well, there you have it. Did we do right, did we do wrong? Forget Leslie Beck. Were we good women or bad? I suppose we’ll never know, unless there’s a Day of Judgment, and we’ll find out then. There certainly seems to be a human craving for such a day; but, alas, the needs of humanity at large, like the needs of the individual, are seldom satisfied. We’re all too hungry for our own good. I think Marion was right to sell the baby; she’d have made a dreadful mother—though, oddly, of all of us, she was the one most open to moral scruple. A good person. The others of us did all right by our children, more or less, and I suppose must draw whatever moral credibility we can from that. Nor do I think Leslie Dong the magnificent is necessarily a bad man: the cards he deals at least consist of pleasure and children, not like, say, those of General Schwarzkopf, who hands out cards of glory and death. Many seem not to take offense at that, either.

  It’s in the shuffling of the cards, I daresay, that the whole point and purpose lies, and in the capacity for reminiscence, picking over the past, fictional or otherwise. Since God won’t give us a Day of Judgment, or chooses to delay it interminably, we have to write our own.

  This is now going in a drawer. Mr. Collier tells me Accord Realtors is finally going to close its doors. After the boom, the bust; and serve us right.

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  Fay Weldon

  More books by Fay Weldon

  An invitation from the publisher

  First published in 1992 by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  This eBook published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1992

  Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia

  The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs 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) 9781781858004

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  Clerkenwell House

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  London EC1R 0HT

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  Marion

  Nora

  Marion

  Nora

  Marion

  Nora

  Marion

  Nora

  Marion

  Nora

  Copyright

  For Elsa, a weekend in the country with her suave new lover and his millionaire friends proves that life and love are both more magical and more murderous than Elsa had ever supposed, and that the Sixties are better escaped from than returned to...

  Table of Contents

  1

  We all have friends who are richer than ourselves and they, you may be sure, have richer friends of their own. We are most of us within spitting distance of millionaires.

  Spit away – if that’s what you feel like.

  But, after the manner of the
se things, Elsa, who has not a penny to her name (except the remnants of last week’s pay packet), knows Victor, who is an antique dealer, who knows Hamish and Gemma, who are millionaires.

  And Victor and Elsa, one Friday evening, cursed or lucky things, sit in Victor’s big new light-blue Volvo at the gates of Ditton House, where Hamish and Gemma live, and wait for the great teak veneered doors to open and let them through.

  Victor is forty-four. Elsa is nineteen, and his mistress. A year ago, when Victor was still a tax accountant, he fished Elsa out of his typist’s pool. She flapped and wriggled a little, and then lay still, legs gently parted.

  Some technological inadequacy righted, the great gates swing open. Victor starts the engine: the car moves forward. The house stands in all its brand new colonnaded majesty before them. The sun sets red and large in the trees behind.

  ‘My God,’ says Victor. ‘What a nightmare.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Elsa.

  ‘Use your eyes,’ says Victor. ‘Now what style would you say that was? Tudor, Regency, Victorian, Spanish villa, ranch, or unfinished Mediterranean hotel?’

  ‘All of them,’ says Elsa.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Victor, and Elsa glows with the pleasure of being right. She loves it when he says ‘exactly’.

  Elsa and Victor walk up the steps to the brass-studded front door. The steps are lined with stone Disney-style beasts, who regard the pair with cold eyes.