by Weldon, Fay
Elsa feels it. Elsa sleeps. The notion is too strong to keep in consciousness.
‘You did the typing, I see,’ says Victor, at seven-fifteen. He means to slip back early to his own room so as not to disconcert the servants. ‘You’re really getting quite good. Perhaps it’s the machine? I must have been tired: I didn’t even wake. If you keep on like this, Elsa, you’ll be able to type my invoices, which will save us quite a bit.’
Elsa says nothing. What can she say?
‘Something rather awkward,’ says Victor, running his hands down her naked backbone, so that she shivers. ‘Apparently Janice is coming down on Sunday. I’d no idea. We’d better get you back to London on Sunday morning. What a lovely strong back you have. Janice was always slipping discs.’
Elsa cries.
‘But darling, it’s for your own sake. I want to save you embarrassment. It’s very bad of Gemma. Except, poor soul, she has to live her life by proxy at the best of times. One has to forgive her. If I play my cards right, she might even commission me to do her antique buying for her. She could certainly do with someone. A good eye and no discretion. Hamish, on the other hand, is all discretion and no eye. Why is it that money always ends up in the wrong hands?’
‘Why won’t you come back to London with me?’
‘I’d love to. You hardly imagine I like it down here? Not our scene, is it, and the diet will take years off our lives. But it depends how the deal’s going, you must see that. And if Hamish is after you, the sooner you’re safe back in the shop the better.’
‘With the other furniture? Why don’t you just put a “sold” sticker on me?’
‘You’re very ungrateful,’ says Victor. ‘I’m doing my best for you.’
‘If you’re staying I’m staying,’ says Elsa narrowly and with finality, and Victor looks quite distressed, as if a lobster he had thought was dead had suddenly started waving claws at him.
And Victor departs, having pecked Elsa formally on the nose, to save the servants more distress.
During the course of the morning they change the sheets again, although so far as Elsa could see there clearly is no need. It had been a restless night, but one far from passionate.
4
‘Gemma has no natural taste,’ complains Victor at breakfast. ‘Whoever heard of boil-in-the-bag kippers served on a silver salver?’
The breakfast chafing dishes are munificently displayed on a late Victorian mahogany sideboard: porridge, cereal, rather thin cream, the guilty kippers, stewed kidneys, kedgeree, sausages, toast, marmalade and dusty honeycomb. Hamish has already eaten – oatmeal porridge and salt, Elsa deduces from the traces left behind. Gemma takes breakfast in her bedroom.
‘The coffee’s Nescafé, too,’ Victor groans. ‘The rich do have such extraordinary areas of meanness. Of course, neither of them was born to it.’
Victor’s father was a dentist, and his mother a librarian: they lived in Winchmore Hill, a prosperous outer suburb of London: and although the family were poor by comparison with the neighbours, its members were no strangers to the finer things of life. Vivaldi played on the gramophone and de Buffet reproductions hung on the wall; and for a time, in the thirties, Victor’s family house was a refuge for professional people and artists in flight from Hitler’s Germany. There had been an excitement to life then, quite missing from it now; at any rate until the previous year, when the convulsions in his life had started; his wooing of Elsa, his forsaking of wife and child (in their interest as well as his own – what use to anyone is a marriage founded on hypocrisy?), rendering him alternately elated and anxious, but seldom bored.
‘Gemma was a typist like me,’ says Elsa proudly, piling her plate high with the kedgeree, which she eventually favoured. ‘She was telling me.’
‘Gemma would tell you anything,’ says Victor, ‘if it suited her purpose. Hamish is no better. Did you hear him say the library ladder was his mother’s?’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘He didn’t have a mother, let alone a father. He was brought up in an orphanage, with his sister. Then she died too.’
‘Poor Hamish.’
Victor eyes Elsa narrowly.
‘You have quite a soft spot for Hamish, Elsa, in spite of what you say. It doesn’t surprise me. I know full well I’m just a rung on the ladder in your journey up in the world.’
Elsa’s mouth gapes at the unfairness of it all.
‘You do have a lot of fillings,’ he observes. ‘I suppose your early years were spent awash in a sea of Ribena and ice lollies.’
Victor’s childhood had been severely regulated so far as diet was concerned: brown bread, the Hay diet, carbohydrates and protein never presented at the same meal; vitamin supplements and thyroid extract pills taken as a general tonic, until his heart raced and his brow sweated.
‘You’re in a horrid mood,’ complains Elsa.
‘You’re not behaving very well, Elsa.’ Victor lays down his fork amongst the orange scraps of dyed kipper skin.
Elsa gets up and leaves the table. Her rather heavy jaw is set in mulish fashion. So her mother’s would set sometimes, in obstinate defiance of her fate, her husband, anything that stood in her way.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I forgot to take my pill,’ says Elsa, an excuse which will take her anywhere.
‘Dear God,’ he groans. ‘You’re a mad woman.’
‘I don’t suppose Wendy ever forgets her pill,’ says Elsa, as she leaves. Wendy, in fact, needs to take no contraceptive measure, in as much as she is a virgin and likely to remain so for some time.
Elsa goes, but not to take her pill: rather to make a phone call to her friend Marina, from the furry seat of a sedan chair converted into a telephone booth and set cosily in the panelled front hall, beneath antlers, gargoyles and crossed swords. Marina is a former school friend of Elsa’s who now lives with a married sister, shares a room with her four-year-old nephew, has a clerical job in a department store, and gets much pleasure from Elsa’s worldly exploits, to which she acts, in her own words, as Eminence Grise.
‘What’s it like?’ breathes Marina. She is a dumpy girl with a pale face, wild brown eyes, legs without ankles, and a high, piercing voice which she modulates, not always successfully, to a sexy whisper.
‘Wonderful,’ hisses Elsa. ‘Guess what we had for breakfast?’
Marina guesses correctly.
‘You do manage to play your cards right, Elsa. I’m eaten up with envy. I had the last of the Weetabix. All crumbs. And now their washing machine’s broken down so I have to go to the laundrette, while you go swanning round this millionaire’s house. Is he away?’
‘No. Why should he be?’
‘Rich people usually are. I suppose he fancies you?’
‘Yes. Well, I think so.’ Elsa giggles.
‘Good. Wake Victor up a bit. That man takes you for granted. You must take every possible opportunity to make him jealous, Elsa.’
Marina was Elsa’s head-girl, at school.
‘But I love Victor. I don’t have to play games.’
‘Yes, we all know about you loving Victor. But what about when Victor goes back to his wife?’
‘He won’t go back to his wife. We’re together for ever.’
‘Not unless you play your cards right. Now Elsa, you’re to sleep with this millionaire if you possibly can.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you never know when it mightn’t come in handy. If you’re born a femme fatale, and you clearly are, Elsa, you owe it to yourself to make the most of it.’
‘How’s my mum?’ enquires Elsa, changing the subject. She admires Marina’s enthusiasm but is beginning to doubt the extent of her worldly wisdom. Marina lives down the road from Elsa’s family.
‘She’s all right. Saw her in the pub last night with your dad; She had a new hair-do. Streaks. I was out with Petie – you know, the one with bad breath and all he could afford was cider so I’ve got a splitting head this morning. Haven’t you
made it up with your mum yet?’
‘No,’ says Elsa.
‘Quite right,’ says Marina. ‘All they ever want you to do is what they did, and look how they ended up.’
‘Did she look as if she missed me?’
‘No. You should worry: shacked up with an antique dealer and fancied by a millionaire, and all I’ve got is Petie and his bad breath.’
‘Look Marina, I’ve got to go.’
Victor stands outside the sedan chair, his bad humour evaporated, beckoning.
‘Is it Victor?’
‘Yes. Thought so from the change in tone. Randy, is he? Kippers have that effect on men.’
‘I thought it was supposed to be me.’
Elsa puts the phone down. She had meant to ask Marina’s advice as to whether or not to meet Janice, and what to say if she did, but, as usual, had been deflected.
‘Come for a walk,’ says Victor, importunately, putting his arm in hers, leading her past the kidney-shaped swimming pool, where Elsa catches a glimpse of Hamish, black-trunked, skinny limbed, floating upward on the water, like some bloated fish, and through the rose gardens, where long-haired young gardeners work, and through the woodlands to a clearing, where they can be alone, and where stands an ivy-clad (the ivy pot-grown and still in the nursery containers in which the plants were delivered) plaster statue of the Goddess Diana, Queen of Chastity. Here the sunlight catches Elsa’s lovely, tumbling hair (how Marina envies it: how, gazing at it, she sees the manner in which her own life might change, but never will) and he bears her to the ground beneath him, and for once she does not notice – or at any rate makes no complaint about – the rocks in the small of her back, or the nettles against the backs of her knees, but is caught up somehow in his passion – which observed, somehow dampens his own.
‘What’s the matter, dear?’ she asks, concerned. He rather wishes she would not call him ‘dear’. So his mother called him, in her absent, bookish way.
‘Nothing’s the matter.’
‘If you’d rather I didn’t see Janice, I won’t.’ She is never difficult for long.
‘It’s not that.’
‘What, then?’
‘Do you know what I really want?’
‘Anything,’ she says valiantly. ‘Only isn’t it rather public here? I mean, for anything extraordinary.’
Victor has versed Elsa in the many varied tactics of love-making: she is always obliging, if seldom enthusiastic. Well, she is young: she will learn.
‘I want you to make love to Hamish.’
Elsa does not reply. Her limbs go dull and heavy.
‘Don’t be upset, Elsa. Not if you don’t want to.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t want to own you. I want to share you. You’re too much responsibility.’
‘Not because of your deal? The library ladder?’
‘What do you take me for?’ He is hurt. ‘Besides, I know you fancy him. You told me so. You don’t know how wonderful it is to be able to tell you what I want. I never could with Janice! So many important things that could never be said. Not like you, blessed Elsa, under the sun or the stars, in doors or out, it’s all the same to you. Please, Elsa.’
‘If it means all that to you,’ says Elsa doubtfully, but she feels the life flowing back into her limbs, under the pressure of some excitement in her head, not her womb: a kind of bold eroticism mixed with fear; as if she stood on the threshold of some new world, which one step might carry her across, but once taken, could never be retraced.
‘What about Gemma?’ she asks finally, when his mouth is lifted from hers and she can speak.
‘You never said what about Janice, as I remember,’ says Victor firmly. ‘Too late to start thinking that way now. I’ll look after Gemma, anyway.’
He could hardly mean what she thought he might mean.
‘You won’t think less of me afterwards?’ she asks.
Victor laughs.
‘You’re half my age,’ he says, ‘and twice as old-fashioned. I do love you.’
Victor departs by himself, to save any possible embarrassment, to start work in the library with Hamish. Elsa follows some few minutes later, flushed and happy. She pauses in the rose garden, to admire. Around her, still wet with their early morning sprinkler, red and white hybrid tea roses burst into their unnatural, multi-petalled life. Iceberg, she detects, and Ena Harkness.
‘How pink you are, my dear,’ observes Gemma, appearing from the other side of a crimson floribunda in an antique garden chair (with its original caning), which she propels by virtue of small brass handles set in the plump leather upholstery. ‘So different from Janice, who always seemed so pale and distraught. Thank you for the typing; excellently done. I was afraid I might have kept you up too late, and you’d neglect it. I’ve left another pile for you; I hope you won’t mind. I couldn’t sleep last night. I stayed up till early morning making an inventory. I have become anxious about property. I know it’s unreasonable, but I can’t help it. Money is such a tyranny, you’ve no idea. Did you sleep well?’
‘Yes.’
‘The sleep of the virtuous! Did you have the kedgeree for breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought some of it had gone, at last! We refreeze, and reheat thoroughly. It’s supposed to be safe, but one sometimes wonders. Food’s such a price, though, and it’s a crime to waste food, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
Gemma is wearing a pale yellow blouse which reflects unkindly on her complexion. She seems sallow and tired. The morning light, which makes Elsa seem at one with the bounding, procreative universe, merely puts Gemma out of tune with her existence: makes her seem herself like something often frozen, often barely rewarmed, after a previous night’s feast.
‘You don’t have to agree with me all the time,’ remarks Gemma. ‘I expect it was Victor told you to say yes or no and nothing else?’
‘Yes.’ Elsa is surprised.
‘And you paid attention to him! How wonderful! You do remind me of myself when young, Elsa. Come and sit with me by the pool, and the servants will bring us iced coffee and sugary biscuits, and I’ll go on with my story.’
‘I think Victor wants me in the library.’
‘You’ve done quite enough for Victor already this morning.’ remarks Gemma, tartly.
Elsa blushes. Was Gemma there watching? Can she have heard what was said. Perhaps the statue of Diana hides a microphone? Hardly. If Gemma knew the tenor of their conversation, she would not now, surely, be so friendly? She would be hysterical after the manner of Sheila, Elsa’s mother, on discovering a love letter in her husband’s pocket, reducing that nice much-pursued man to instant, abject apology, total remorse. Wasn’t that how wives behaved? Or were the rich different?
Gemma sits Elsa on a tapestry cushion at her feet and continues her story, occasionally stopping to pop a sweet-meat into both their mouths. Elsa has the uncomfortable feeling she is being fattened. But for what?
1966.
Interminable years ago! What have we not suffered and learned since then?
Gemma’s first job. First and last, as it turned out.
The Fox and First offices were on the top two floors of the narrow building in Carnaby Street where we last observed Gemma, falling in love with the tight-buttocked back of young Mr Fox. On the seventh floor were the showrooms, and Mr First’s office: on the penthouse floor, reached by a narrow wrought-iron circular staircase, circa 1860, was Mr Fox’s flat.
An expensive conversion had turned poky rooms into glass-lined expanses where psychedelic fantasy ran riot, sprawling over walls and ceilings in brilliant streaks. Far down below, anyone who had the courage to stand near the sheet glass window wall and look down, could see the flower-children wander, not yet discredited by time, events, and the emergence of their own natures.
The theme within was, as it were, curvaceous. The office desks, lime green, shaped like giant eggs; the filing cabinets were concealed in a series of pink plasti
c balls, heaped one on the other, as if laid by some other-worldly hen. Fox and First jewellery was displayed in the holes and crevices of mock Barbara Hepworth pieces, in transparent yellow perspex, suspended from the ceiling by gold chains.
In the midst of this, health shoes (especially built for the comfort of wide feet) firmly planted in the orange and mauve streaked carpet, stood Marion Ramsbottle, twenty-eight, stocky, desperate and determined, dressed in cheap black skirt and white blouse; the outward expression of her inner fantasies focused only, one might imagine, in her black net stockings and bright green, satin-bowed, duchess-heeled shoes. Marion’s hair was back-combed and lacquered into a stiff fuzz, resilient to the touch, which stood like a halo round her head; and, angel-like, Marion wore an expression composed of kindness, self-righteousness and patience-sorely-tried, upon her pale and frankly spotty face. In her plump hand was a starry perspex watering can, with which she attended to the many pot plants. Gemma was half relieved, half disappointed to see so familiar and reassuring a person. If you ignored the shoes and stockings, Marion might have been one of twenty girls in the soprano section of the local Handel choir back home.
If one could ignore the shoes and stockings, of course. Perhaps one couldn’t. Shouldn’t.
‘So you’re the new girl,’ said Marion, in her weary voice. ‘The agency rang through. At least you’re a blonde. The last girl they sent, Ophelia she called herself, had red hair. It clashed with the furniture. Mind you, she only lasted a week.’
