by Weldon, Fay
‘Besides, I might want to use it one day,’ says Hamish. ‘A library ladder. It costs all of twelve thousand to furbish that library.’
‘You don’t read books, Hamish. Don’t pretend you do. When are you ever going to climb a ladder to read one?’
Hamish smiles. He enjoys rough treatment.
‘You’re quite right,’ says Hamish, ‘I leave all the reading to Gemma. She’s the cultured one. I just make money. Hasn’t she done wonders with the house?’
‘Wonders,’ says Victor, and Elsa echoes ‘wonders’, but nobody hears.
‘I only did what you wanted, Hamish,’ murmurs Gemma, again in the tone of one who knows she lies. ‘I just hope I didn’t overdo things. Why don’t you let poor Victor have the ladder? He’s set his heart on it, and I’m sure I’ll never climb a ladder again.’
‘True,’ says Hamish.
‘So you’ll sell,’ says Victor, triumphant. ‘I’ll write a cheque for fifty pounds here and now.’
‘You said seventy-five.’
‘Did I? My mistake.’ Victor takes out his cheque book.
‘Now what about the eight dining chairs?’ Hamish stays his hand. ‘I asked you down here in the hope you’d take them off my hands. Set of six and two carvers. Sotheby’s offered £500.’
‘Then take it.’
‘A ridiculous offer. Even I know that. Rooked right, left and centre, but I know those chairs are worth at least £1,200. Saw a set exactly like it in Bond Street. You won’t raise it, Victor? A good profit in it for you.’
‘Certainly not. Not without the ladder. I don’t like your chairs.’
‘You don’t have to like them, Victor. Only sell them.’
‘I can only sell what I like. That’s how the trade works. At least, my end of it.’
‘I don’t like plastic flowerpots,’ protests Hamish. ‘But I sell them by the million.’
‘You don’t have to look into the eyes,’ says Victor, ‘of the person who’s buying them. I do. I tell you what, I’ll give you six hundred for the chairs, and throw in the ladder.’
‘I’ll keep the chairs,’ says Hamish, closing his eyes, but not before a real dart of malignity had glinted from them, ‘and the ladder.’
‘I shouldn’t have mentioned the ladder,’ says Victor. ‘I should simply have put it in the boot of the car. No one would ever have noticed.’
And he too closes his eyes, before the real distress within can be seen.
Impasse.
‘Well,’ says Gemma brightly to Elsa, ‘shall we take our coffee to the library, before the men start bargaining again. And you can tell me all about yourself. I’m dying to hear how the young live now –’
Elsa looks across at Victor for help, but none is forthcoming. She has no option but to follow Gemma’s wheelchair, as it cruises at a speed so brisk that Elsa has almost to run to keep up with it, along window-lined corridors, lit by electric torches held in glowing onyx hands, to the library, where bound books, bought by the yard, unopened and unread, line the walls, and a mock coal fire, electric powered, leaps and sparkles redly if regularly in the stainless-steel grate.
Johnnie runs after them with Elsa’s missing button. She’d forgotten it, hidden amongst the Danish blue and biscuits. To take the button from Johnnie she has to leave go of her waistband, which she has been clutching, and nearly loses her yellow skirt. It is made of old-fashioned artificial silk, cut on the cross, and crumples and stains easily.
Johnnie and Annie lift Gemma from her wheelchair into the deep softness of a purple leather armchair; she settles herself snugly in, like a kitten in a feather pillow. Elsa sits upright on a high-backed Jacobean chair, complete with hard tapestry cushion.
‘So you’re Victor’s assistant,’ says Gemma. ‘What fun it must be. And how clever to know all about antiques. Hamish is always buying antiques: he can’t resist them. We have no children – my fault, I’m afraid – so we have to make do with things.’
‘I don’t know all that much about antiques,’ says Elsa. ‘Mostly I just do the dusting. I’m trained as a typist, actually.’
‘Yes, so Victor said. I hope you don’t mind me giving you the inventories to type? I do like things done properly. I used to be a secretary myself, once. In the days when I walked upon two legs and had a full hand of fingers.’
And she holds up her left hand for Elsa’s inspection. The ring finger is entirely missing. The stump is well-healed, smooth and white, but all the same Elsa feels sick and faint. Will she faint?
No. Gemma kindly pours her some brandy.
‘And you live at home, Elsa?’
‘No. I’ve quarrelled with my parents.’
‘What about?’
‘Victor.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘I live with Victor, you see. In a room behind the shop. We love each other. He’s such a wonderful man, not old at all. He’s given up everything. He’s renounced his home, and his job, and all his past life, just to be able to do his own thing.’
‘And you’ve given up nothing?’
‘No.’
Gemma meditates.
‘For a man who’s given up everything,’ says Gemma eventually, ‘Victor has a very large car.’
‘He needs that for his work.’
‘I was only quoting poor Janice,’ says Gemma lightly, ‘who makes such a meal of a simple thing like paying off the mortgage. And will you be staying the whole weekend, Elsa?’
Elsa would run home that very moment if she could. Batter against her mother’s door, pleading for forgiveness; break into Victor’s shop and hide her head under the late Victorian satin pillows, beneath the Edwardian patchwork quilt, or the Art Nouveau sofa which is her and Victor’s bed, and a very dusty one at that. How she wheezes and sneezes, these days. She lives her life in a cloud of dust. Well, better that than in the typing pool, where the mustiness of new concrete walls covered with acrylic paint, and the long expanses of nylon carpet, created such a degree of static electricity as made many a poor girl jump and cry out at least ten times in a working day.
In the managerial offices they applied an anti-static spray to the carpets but the cost of general application was reckoned far too high. Girls in offices jump and cry out for one reason or another.
‘I’d thought I’d been asked,’ murmurs Elsa, unhappily.
‘My dear, of course you were. Victor’s assistant. We were going to have the whole house and contents valued; and will, so long as Hamish and Victor remain on speaking terms. Victor’s so clever about everything, it makes Hamish quite cross. But I had no idea that you and Victor were so close – and Janice is bringing Wendy to Sunday tea. It’s her eighteenth birthday.’
‘It’s my birthday, too, on Sunday,’ says Elsa, eventually. ‘I’m going to be nineteen.’
‘What a coincidence! Sharing Victor’s daughter’s birthday! I daresay you feel destiny has a hand in your relationship?’
‘Yes,’ says Elsa.
‘And Victor feels that too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course if you want to stay, and Victor doesn’t mind, I can make a cake for the both of you.’
‘Does Victor know Janice is coming?’
‘You must ask him that yourself. I’m sure Victor would never deliberately wish to hurt anyone.’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ says Elsa. ‘He’s the kindest man in the world.’
‘And now you and he are to be married!’
‘Married?’ Elsa is startled. ‘He isn’t even divorced. Why bother? If two people love each other! Marriage and divorce are only about property, after all.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Victor. In a perfect state there wouldn’t be marrying or taking in marriage.’
Gemma ruminates.
‘Do you think mostly what Victor thinks, Elsa, or do you have your own thoughts, too?’
‘Victor teaches me everything. I was very ignorant until I knew him.’
‘You remind me of myself when
young,’ says Gemma, and ceases to be censorious, and becomes – or appears to become – quite easy and friendly. ‘I’m sure it’s much more civilised for you and Janice to meet,’ she says cosily, ‘and I daresay you and Wendy will get on. You must have so much in common.’
Elsa nods, as if fearful and modest. But she is not. Something has hardened in her heart. She wants struggle, conflict, victory. She has the scent of triumph in her nostrils: the taste of sexual power between her soft red lips. Something instinctive and nasty surfaces, hardens, takes possession: other women are her enemy, she perceives. Men are there to be made her allies: her stepping-stones to fulfilment and worldly success. Herself, her children cradled in luxury and safety. (Well, how else is she to do that, on a typing speed of thirty-five, and shorthand fifty-three?) Elsa looks sideways at Gemma and thinks why, if I wanted, I could have Hamish too. Then where would you be, helpless in your chair, with your unworkable legs and your mutilated hand! Sitting there, patronising me.
Johnnie fills Elsa’s glass with more brandy. His dark head bends until it all but touches her white bosom. You, too. If I wanted.
‘You aren’t going to stay a typist forever, I daresay,’ murmurs Gemma.
‘No,’ says Elsa.
‘Be careful,’ says Gemma, suddenly and sharply. ‘I know what you are thinking and I know where it can end. To be wanton, and yes, you are wanton – with your life, your sexuality, your future – is a dangerous matter. You are greedy and careless at the same time, and have made yourself a hundred times more stupid than you need be. Women do; they have to, if they are determined men shall be their masters; if they refuse to look both into the faces of men and into their own hearts.’
Elsa opens her mouth to speak.
‘Be quiet. I know it isn’t comfortable. I know that self-knowledge is painful. I know that to think you are a princess and find you are a beggar-girl is very disagreeable. I know that to look at a prince and find he is a toad is quite shocking. I also know, and you will probably never have the opportunity to find out, that to think you are a beggar-girl and end up a princess is perfectly dreadful.’
Elsa blinks, startled.
‘I can read your heart, Elsa, because I can read my own. I have a story to tell. It’s a fairy tale. I love fairy tales, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you would. Princes, toads, princesses, beggar-girls – we all have to place ourselves as best we can. This one is the story of Mr Fox and Lady Mary. Lady Mary the High Lord’s daughter was betrothed to the noble Mr Fox. And the message was written in letters of fire in Mr Fox’s house, the day before her wedding, when she stole into his house to see what she could see. “Be bold” written above the first door, and all within was grand and quiet: “Be bold” above the second, and likewise; but “Not Too Bold” above the third: but in went Lady Mary on tippy-toe, and there she found a charnel house and her beloved Mr Fox feasting with his friends; a robber baron, that he was, her Mr Fox, and feasting on human flesh: and as she crouched in her dark corner, a finger flew across the room, and fell into her lap and on it was a ring. So she slipped the ring from off its finger, and crept away and showed it to her brothers; and when the next morning came and with it her marriage day, and handsome Mr Fox came up the aisle, her brothers fell upon him and killed him; and so justice was done.’
Tears stand in Gemma’s eyes. Bewilderment shines from Elsa’s.
‘Do you think it was justice? Or did it just mean that more were dead than were before? I don’t suppose she ever married after that. Well, would you?’ enquires Gemma.
‘What’s so interesting about the story?’ asks Elsa. Where’s Victor? What’s he doing? What can Hamish offer him by way of company and entertainment that she, Elsa, cannot?
‘What is so interesting about it,’ says Gemma firmly, ‘is that I heard it one night on someone else’s transistor radio, read by Dame Edith Evans. I was on a train: I had a sleepless night in front of me. And the very next morning I met a Mr Fox and fell in love with him; and rings and fingers, or the lack of them, featured prominently in my life thereafter. Had you never noticed the way the secret world sends out signs and symbols into the ordinary world? It delivers our messages in the form of coincidences: Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.’
‘Just a coincidence,’ muttered Elsa, disbelieving.
‘Just a coincidence! I love Mr Fox and you say just?’ Gemma is outraged. ‘It was many years ago, as they used to say at the beginning of fairy tales, when the world was fresh and young – and so was I – but it was not imagination. It was in 1966.’
1966.
Not, as Gemma observed, that the year made men any kinder or girls less foolish; all that can be said of it for sure is that skirts were definitely worn shorter by the fashionable, and even referred to as pussy pelmets.
Picture Gemma, in the year 1966, at the age of nineteen, arrived in London from the distant provinces where time stood still – as could be seen from her green tweed skirt, which reached down to her knees, and the twin-set (jumper and cardigan), which blurred the outline of her chest. The twin-set was in dusty-pink, and around her neck she wore a metal pendant, pearl-shaped, set with an artificial pearl. So her mother had walked before her, though never in London, city of sin. (Sin enough in Cumberland, where she had lived, without looking abroad for it.)
Now her daughter, Gemma, more adventurous, five good fingers still on each hand, walked on two good slender working legs down Carnaby Street, London, and saw her contemporaries with their skirts high above their knees, and breasts clearly outlined beneath thin fabric, and even, here in Carnaby Street, at the heart of the world’s fashion events, a few going bra-less, precursor of what was to come.
This is the world for me, Gemma thought. But even while she thought, she stopped in a doorway, and took off her mother’s pearl necklace, and put on the crucifix her great-aunt had given her on her sixteenth birthday.
‘Gemma,’ Great-Aunt May had said, ‘you’ll need this, too.’ Though quite what she meant Gemma was not sure. Gemma’s mother had died when Gemma was four, from (some said) too many late nights and too much rackety living, or (others said) from TB aggravated by self-neglect. Be that as it may, Eileen was certainly dead, and had left her arthritic aunt May to look after Gemma, which that lady did willingly, if painfully, until her own seventieth year, and Gemma’s sixteenth birthday.
On that day, after giving Gemma her mother’s false pearl (symbol of sin and excitement: Eileen had been wearing it the night Gemma was conceived: pressed up against an alley wall; fully dressed in twin-set and pearl, but her skirt up and her knickers down; the alley cat!) she had produced her own great-auntly crucifix, as if the second gift might somehow neutralise the power of the first. And then she had added another blessing, and had rung up the Council to take back the cottage (rent seventeen shillings and sixpence a week) in which Gemma had spent her childhood, and thrown herself upon the mercies of the National Health Service, and Gemma into the care of the local Children’s Department.
For the young to be free of the old – this is a blessing indeed. Great-Aunt May knew it; and knowing it, relinquished Gemma without a thought to the loneliness of her own old age. Such courage, such sacrifice is not uncommon: it is taken for granted and goes mostly unnoticed. It is remembered by its beneficent only in dreams, if then; but has its results, perhaps, in those small unexpected ripples of family kindness which overlap from generation to generation. The good we do lives after us: for ever and ever.
Great-Aunt May died: Gemma did not go to the funeral. But never mind. If Gemma had the crucifix now, she would hand it on to Elsa. She has lost it long ago: she talks, instead. Elsa listens, and wonders why Victor and Hamish talk so long: and Johnnie fills her gla
ss again.
With her pearl in her handbag and her crucifix around her neck, Gemma stopped at the foot of the building where the Gallant Girls Employment Agency had sent her for her first job, and looked up and up its glass facade and marvelled that technology could construct a solid building out of a substance so essentially fragile as glass. Coloured lights played upon the surface, from within, so that even at eleven-ten on a Monday morning it seemed to demonstrate that work could be fun, that man need not waste his substance in seriousness, but could get by just as well by having a good and colourful time.
Even as Gemma stood and gasped, a yellow Rolls-Royce slowed up beside the building, and a young man in a white suit leapt out and ran past Gemma, and up the pink-veined marble steps, and into the Art Nouveau, gold-embossed lift and was gone, leaving an impression of pale good looks, lithe body and perfect teeth behind: and Gemma took off her crucifix and put her pearl back on, and followed him inside.
When Gemma was taken over by the Children’s Department she was kept for a week or two in a Children’s Home and then found employment, by a kindly social worker, as mother’s help to a widowed vicar’s wife in a remote Northumbrian village. Gemma had distinctions in eight O-level subjects, and would perhaps have benefited from further education, but the vicar’s wife, Mrs Hemsley, had five daughters and was desperate, Gemma disinclined to return to school, and the pressure for places in the Children’s Home was great. The closing of railway stations and coal pits in the area, in the undoubted interests of efficiency and progress, had resulted in considerable local unemployment, and the consequent breaking up of families and the taking of children into care. Gemma merely happened to be there, at the time. And let us not think that we get what we deserve, any of us: some of us are better at triumphing over obstacles, that’s all.
Gemma worked for Mrs Hemsley for three years. She had her keep and thirty shillings a week pocket money. During the day she and Mrs Hemsley together looked after Hannah, Hermione, Helen, Hortense and Alice. During their evenings, the two of them washed, ironed, mended, and tidied. Gemma was not unhappy at first: the little girls were fond of her and she of them. Mrs Hemsley was generous with everything except money, which was understandable, because she had so little of that to spare, living as she did upon a widow’s pension and the precarious kindness of the Church. She made up for it by giving a lot of advice, which Gemma ignored.
