by Weldon, Fay
‘Notice the concrete ramp,’ says Victor. ‘Now why is that there?’
‘For Gemma’s wheelchair.’
‘Exactly. And remember not to stare at her, Elsa. In the presence of the disabled behave exactly as if they were like anyone else.’
‘Yes, Victor.’
‘And don’t try to flirt with Hamish.’
‘Of course not, Victor.’
‘But on the other hand, don’t go too far the other way.’
‘I’ll try not, Victor.’
Hamish, following the completion of Ditton House, and at Gemma’s request, is seeking Victor’s advice about the most profitable disposal of certain articles of family furniture. And at Gemma’s suggestion, both Victor and Elsa have been asked to stay for the weekend. Both are flattered and excited. It will be the first time Elsa has met any of Victor’s friends.
‘For God’s sake,’ says Victor. ‘Do up your zip.’
‘Sorry,’ says Elsa. She had undone it earlier, in the car, for Victor’s benefit. Victor, driving at illegal speed, found pleasure in further disturbing Elsa’s equaniminity, by a pinch and a fondle here and there with his free hand. And why not?
Elsa, stopping to do up her zip, stumbles over her own yellow and crimson platform heels and drops her shoulder bag. Its contents roll down the steps: hair rollers, pay slips, brush, old underground tickets, deodorants, contraceptive pills, her change of clothes – pink satin shirt, yellow cheese-cloth blouse, clean red bikini pants – and so on.
Victor helps her pick them all up. He loves her.
Elsa is abundantly lovely. She weighs twelve stone four pounds and is five feet eight inches tall. Her swelling bosom and rounded hips give ample promise of pneumatic bliss. Her skin is white; her cheeks red; her hair browny-gold, and thick, and long. Her face is perhaps rather heavy and her expression sleepy; but whether that is good or bad depends on what you want her for. Her blue eyes, when she can be induced to raise them, are innocent enough. This evening Elsa is wearing her best: old jeans whose every tattered seam she knows and loves and a faded mauve shirt with a button missing.
Ah, she’s beautiful; lush and not louche.
Another button pops now, as she bends.
‘You would have forgotten these,’ says Victor, handing her the pink sachet of contraceptive pills. He’d picked them up from where they were hiding between the claws of a nine-foot Yogi bear.
‘I wouldn’t,’ she protests. But she would, if she could.
Victor rings the front-door bell. Organ chimes sound within. Victor waits, tapping a powerful foot. If Elsa is poor, weak and young, Victor is rich, strong and old. Not quite so rich as usual, mind you, since he abandoned corporate life, and started trying to make a profit for himself, and not other people. But stronger than ever since he took to Elsa’s bed, macrobiotic food and yoga. Old? Forty-four, old? No, it is merely middle-age, but Victor is undoubtedly old by comparison to Elsa who still believes that she will live forever, that nothing is final, and that what is done tonight can be undone next morning.
What a gift, what a blessing, are such beliefs. Once we all had them. Can anything recompense once they are gone? No. Ask Hamish, Gemma, Victor. No. Nothing. The nearness of Elsa merely underlines the loss and aggravates the melancholy. Elsa is young: therefore Victor is old.
Victor is six foot two and weighs fourteen stone. He is a powerful man with a high domed head, and a smooth bald patch, flanked by downy hair, running up and over it, like some spiritual landing strip (Elsa’s fancy) for flights of mature imagination. His soft brown eyes are deep set: his nose is long and hooked: his penis long and sturdy, easily moved to stand erect. No trouble there. No trouble anywhere, except for the occasional cold in the nose or a white-capped pimple erupting on his chin, the better to display his inner juiciness.
The studded doors open: the maid is Vietnamese, middle-aged and intellectual-looking. She does not smile.
And behold, gliding down the long panelled hall to meet them, her powered wheelchair moving with the silence of the most expensive machinery, comes Gemma.
Seen from a distance she is a child: her smile radiant and full of expectation. As her chair approaches, years pass. She is twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five – older, older still. Or is that just a trick of the light? Because she lives in pain, or longs for death? And that is all her expectation.
Gemma stretches out her pretty hand to greet first Victor, then Elsa. She is young, after all. Barely thirty.
‘Victor,’ she cries, in her soft, sad, kitten voice, ‘how wonderful to see a real human being again.’
Her thick pale hair, cut short and square, falls in a fringe to reach her pale grey eyes. Gemma’s chin recedes slightly; her bold teeth push her top lip forward so she seems to pout. Gemma’s beauty is warped. It is an almost-but-not-quite affair; something imposed by force of will on flawed constituents. Gemma is very pale – it is the unhealthy pallor of some hothouse orchid, valued and admired by many and liked by none. But Gemma smiles: how often she smiles – a mixture of love and malice beamed out at the world and those who go about in it more easily than she.
Altogether Gemma has a clever and a knowledgeable look. Victor likes that. He admires a clever woman. Elsa is, somehow, in spite of himself.
‘Don’t you see many real people?’ enquires Victor, taking her hand. It trembles within his, which moves him.
‘Anyone with any spirit,’ complains Gemma, removing her hand, ‘stays away. They either like me and Hamish is rude to them; or they like Hamish and I am rude to them. But you know what marriage is like. And you’ve brought Wendy! How lovely to meet you, Wendy. How were your A-levels, after all that? Your father was so worried.’
‘This isn’t Wendy,’ begins Victor. Wendy is Victor’s daughter. She failed all four A-levels. Art, English, Latin and Sociology. ‘No? I am sorry. It must be the concealed lighting: one can’t see a thing, really. But Hamish likes it. Of course it’s Janice, looking absolutely wonderful, and young enough to be her own daughter. You’ve put on a little weight, Janice. I’m so glad. You were looking ever so thin, as if you had some secret worry. Is it over now?’
Janice is Victor’s wife. Janice is dark and weighs a steady eight stone three pounds. Janice blamed Victor because Wendy failed her A-levels.
‘This isn’t Janice,’ says Victor, laughing. ‘This is Elsa; you asked me to bring her down. You know perfectly well.’
Or, as Victor says afterwards, admiringly, to Elsa. ‘If I had brought Janice she’d only have asked how her typing speeds were. Stop crying! Gemma’s only playing games. The rich do play games with other people. They have nothing better to do.’
‘Everyone plays games with me,’ says Elsa, despairingly, but the guest room soon cheers her up. It has white fur walls and a ceiling frieze picked out in navy and pink. The carpet is magenta (nylon, however, not wool, as the tinny feel between the toes presently betrays); the curtains are crimson flowered, the furniture is black lacquered and the round bed is covered with a spread composed of serried layers of mauve and grey gauzy flounces.
Victor pushes Elsa back upon the bed, the better to complete the unfinished business in the car, but the couple are disturbed by the arrival of the Vietnamese maid Annie, accompanied by her husband Johnnie, who wears glasses and looks to Elsa much like the headmaster of the college of further education where she took her secretarial course.
‘Excuse please,’ says Johnnie, ‘but a mistake has been made. This room is for Mr Dawlish and Mrs Dawlish. Miss Secretary’s room is elsewhere.’
And Elsa, embarrassed to the point of tears – (how she overflows, always; bubbling and erupting into the outside world: she blushes, she cries, she stumbles, she is sick; she gets diarrhoea or cystitis at the drop of a hat; she coughs up phlegm; her nose runs; as if there was far more of her than could ever easily be contained) – Elsa, snivelling, is obliged to follow Annie and Johnnie along ever narrowing corridors to a small room overlooking the central nexus of the house
– the work area where the kitchens are, and the dustbins, and the compost heap, and the coal cellars. This room is as chaste and ordinary as the other was luxurious. It has cream walls, green painted woodwork, a narrow bed with white sheets and grey blankets, a locker, a basin, a plain white towel on a peg and a small yellowy piece of soap in the washbasin. There is no mirror, but under the window stands an old brown office desk. And on the desk is a new typewriter; manual, not electric. On the deck are stacked reams of typing paper: top, carbons, and flimsy in assorted colours. There is a tin filing cabinet – full of empty folders; waiting, but for what? – and a small wastepaper basket.
Elsa throws open the window, and leans out. She is four stories up. Her long hair falls over the sill and down over empty space. She is frightened.
Elsa lies upon the bed and shivers. She does not like being alone. She is one of seven children. She is not a good typist. She tries, but even if she gets the words correct, sheets emerge from the machine crumpled, untidy and smudged. The typewriter sits on the desk like some unfair challenge; the filing cabinet like some test she knows she will fail: the drop from the window an unspoken threat.
Defenestrated!
A fairy story comes to Elsa’s mind: that of the incompetent peasant girl who boasted of her prowess at weaving, and was shut up in the castle by the king and set to work weaving hanks of straw into gold. Has Elsa likewise claimed to be what she is not – a secretary, when in fact she can barely type a line without smudges and mistakes? Is her presumption now to be punished? And who is her Rumpelstiltskin to be; the dwarf who visits by night and performs the impossible task, claiming her first-born child unless she can guess his name?
Oh, grief so harshly punished! And poor Rumpelstiltskin, fit only to be used and abused! This and many other bitter tales Elsa would tell her brothers and sisters at bedtime.
But perhaps she is being too gloomy: perhaps the typewriter is coincidental: perhaps her nightly visitor will be the prince whose face must never be looked at, in case he’s seen to be a toad after all. Well, easy enough not to look. Just to lie back and accept.
Or perhaps, since she is so clearly now imprisoned in a tower, snatched out of Victor’s double bed by the witch Gemma, her prince will come to rescue her, climbing the tower, using her yellow hair as a rope? But how did that one end? Alas, he was toppled from the tower by the witch, and blinded by the brambles below, never to look on beauty again.
Elsa shivers. Although there seems little forbidden to her about her own beauty, perhaps God has other ideas?
The door is pushed open. The prince? The dwarf? The toad? But no, it is only Victor. He has to bend to enter the room. His high-domed much-scarred head catches, nevertheless, on the lintel: he cries out in pain. Blood flows. Elsa laughs. He carries folders in his hands. Recomposed, he is brisk and businesslike.
‘Gemma wants these in triplicate, Elsa,’ he says. ‘It’s an inventory of what she wants sold.’
‘You mean it’s a working weekend?’ Elsa is plaintive, dabbing his bald landing strip with tissue. ‘I thought I was a proper guest.’
‘Well –’
‘They wouldn’t ask Janice to type –’
‘Janice can’t type. Women should be useful. You are. It’s a compliment.’
Elsa is slightly mollified.
‘I’ll make a dreadful mess of it. I’m much too tired now.’
‘She wants it by morning.’
‘I’ll do it after dinner.’
Even as she speaks, Elsa has the sensation that some fixed pattern of events has moved into place, and is now firmly locked, and that whatever she says or does now in this household will be according to destiny, and not in the least according to her own desire.
Or is it just that, throughout her childhood, whenever Elsa said ‘I’ll do it later’ her mother slapped her? But no – our feelings of doom, our intimation of immutable fate, must surely be deeper than this.
‘What will you do before dinner?’ Victor asks Elsa, and supplies the answer by falling upon her once again, peeling off her jeans, removing her shirt and occupying her body, her brain and the whole range of her sensual responses.
Before Victor leaves Elsa, the better to change for dinner, he looks out of the window. ‘The business end of the house, I see.’ He laughs. Then the smile fades from his face.
‘If that’s what I think it is –’ says Victor, whose talent it is to discover beauty and history in what to others seems just an old worm-eaten piece of wood; and to Elsa’s surprise he is out on the windowsill and shinning down the drainpipe, careless of any danger to himself, to examine more closely what to Elsa’s careless eye looks like a rather stout and shabby curtain pole, left behind, no doubt, by the painters, and stuck in the corner where the coal cellars and dustbin shelters meet.
And it is, of course, what Victor thinks it is. Victor, working some hidden brass catch, unfolds the pole into two hinged parts, joined by the most elegant series of wooden slats.
‘I knew it,’ he calls up. ‘A library ladder. Late eighteenth century.’
To climb up the drainpipe again seems impossible. Victor closes the ladder, tucks the resulting pole under his arm, and goes back into the house through the kitchens, without a further look upwards, to where Elsa’s long hair glints palely in the dusk.
2
Other people’s tables!
Gemma’s table is round and made of rosewood, and seats twelve people. The chairs are mahogany and heavy late Victorian. The cutlery is silver and Regency. The glass is Waterford; the place mats are embroidered with alpine scenes. The walls, almost entirely curtained, portray embroidered episodes of Haiti history, in hot reds and oranges.
As a child, Elsa ate at many tables, but seldom sat to eat. Her stepfather being a sergeant in the RAF, and there being nine in the family, there was seldom enough room for all around the tables provided by the Air Force, let alone time enough in anyone house to acquire a sufficient number of chairs. Elsa, being the eldest, served as waitress.
Someone has to.
In any case, Elsa always liked to make herself useful, and, as everyone observed, she hardly looked like someone who needed feeding up. On the contrary.
Now Elsa’s stomach is uncomfortably full of spinach quiche, boeuf bourguignon, courgettes, pasta tossed with olive oil and basil, mixed green salad, profiteroles with whipped cream and chocolate sauce: not to mention gin and peppermint. Liebfraumilch and Côtes de Beaune.
Elsa stifles a belch. The one retaining button pops off her yellow skirt. Johnnie, acting as waiter, his headmaster spectacles glinting in the light from the Venetian glass chandelier, retrieves the button from the foot of a lifesize statue of the Buddha, and politely lays it on Elsa’s side plate, where the last scraps of biscuit and Danish blue, pressed upon her by the ever-hospitable Gemma, still wait to be eaten.
Can she? No.
‘No cheese?’ asks Gemma, bending forward, perturbed. Gemma wears white silk. Her cheeks are delicately rouged. She has eaten little and drunk less. Unfair.
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Never mind,’ Gemma smiles kindly, and surveys her dinner table and her guests as a birthday child might survey the careful icing on its cake before devouring it.
Hamish and Victor are locked in happy combat (and have been since the quiche was removed) over the future of the library ladder.
Hamish! Gemma’s husband, millionaire, manufacturer of flowerpots, and unhappy with his lot in life. Elsa eyes him covertly throughout the meal; whether he sees her through his pebble glasses she cannot be sure. Certainly he behaves as if she were not there. He is a thin, scrawny, elderly man, much Adam’s-appled, who eats ravenously, as if he could never in all his life get enough food, and who twitches and jumps if anyone speaks suddenly. Hamish seems to enjoy Victor’s company. Victor, who could make two of him, moves easily about the world: has his finger on mankind’s pulse; beauty, art and history.
Hamish’s bank-balance, on the other hand, could swallow
Victor’s a hundred times or more. The fact worries both of them: it would be idle to pretend it didn’t. In the meantime, Hamish is happy to allow Victor to bully him.
‘But I don’t want to sell it,’ says Hamish, adding butter to his Cheddar cheese. ‘I’m very fond of that library ladder. It belonged to my mother. She used it to get apples from the loft.’
‘Then what was it doing, out for the dustmen?’ enquires Victor. He is feeling slightly sick. It has been a long time since he has eaten meat; now he has even accepted the second helping Gemma piled upon his plate, without asking! Victor follows, normally, a macrobiotic diet, but for reasons of health rather than principle, so had no scruple about accepting so delicious a boeuf bourguignon. His body, alas, is not so quick to adjust as his mind.
‘It wasn’t out for the dustmen,’ protests Hamish. ‘It was waiting for the restorer, wasn’t it, Gemma.’
‘Of course, Hamish,’ croons Gemma, in the tone of one who knows she lies. Victor raises his eyebrows.
‘I should change your restorer,’ says Victor. ‘Whoever he is, he does a rotten job.’
‘Everything he does comes back perfect,’ says Hamish.
‘Exactly,’ says Victor. ‘Shockingly over-restored.’
There is silence; Johnnie clears the plates. Has Victor gone too far?
No.
‘I expect you’re right,’ says Hamish gloomily, a drop of chocolate sauce falling from his long nose, where it had accidentally lodged. ‘I’ve got no taste at all. Better face it.’
‘No such thing as no taste,’ says Victor cheerfully. ‘You like what you like, so long as you’re prepared to pay for it. I just don’t like to see a good library ladder out for the dustmen, and the rungs used by painters to wipe their brushes on. I’ll give you fifty quid for it.’
Hamish laughs.
‘It belonged to my mother. I’m not selling.’
‘Seventy-five.’
‘It’s worth two hundred at least,’ puts in Gemma.
‘Be quiet, Gemma,’ say both men, together and sharply.
