by Weldon, Fay
‘Why’s that?’ asked Gemma, as she followed Marion round the pot plants, learning their names and daily watering requirements. Crocus, Weddellina, Maranta, Passiflora, Oleander, Stephanotis. How sadly the names fell from Marion’s lips. Paphiopedilum Sukhokulii. She had to project her voice over a background din which Gemma could not at first identify, but presently concluded to be the raised voices of a host of parrots, whose aviary, gold latticed, mosqued shaped, was placed like a fragile dome over the splashing indoor fountain.
‘The work doesn’t suit some,’ replied Marion, ‘nor quite frankly, does this style of office. The flimsy’s always damp from the fountain and the ink runs on the files, and the parrots get loose sometimes and shit all over the outgoing mail. But I think it was mostly that she thought she might put on weight from all the tasting. Mr Fox does a lot of experimental cooking and likes to have a second opinion. I don’t much care for foreign foods myself; not outside their country of origin, anyway. It spoils one for abroad, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, quite!’
‘Be careful not to overwater the Salix Setsubra. It’s the devil. It’s crazy to try and grow it indoors. But as they say, you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps... I work mostly for Mr First. He’s the brains behind the organisation, and the money. Mr Fox is just the talent. You’ll be working for him.’
Mr Fox! Mr Fox, whoever and whatever you are, Gemma loves you. Are those your footsteps overhead? Yes. What are you thinking, feeling? Do you know about me?
‘But what doing?’ persisted Gemma.
‘Any job’s what you make of it. They keep me for the heavy work – typing, filing, and so on – what nobody else can be bothered to do. That’s my fate in life. Yours is more on the PR side. Customer relations. And a bit of modelling, of course. Mr Fox likes to try out his pieces.’
‘Not with my clothes off?’
‘Not if it’s ear-rings. But you can hardly model a navel stone or a pubic gem fully-clothed, can you? But don’t worry. Mr Fox doesn’t regard working girls as human. You have to be someone special – have a title, or be a famous model, or immensely rich, in the gossip columns – before he thinks you belong to the same species as him.’
Mr Fox. This is Gemma. That is not how you’re going to think of me. Do you hear?
Gemma went to the window and cautiously looked down. Toy people and clockwork cars moved below. There was no guardrail or any sill to the bow-shaped sweep of window, with its squares of thin glass set in fine lead frames, which curved out from floor to ceiling. Through any one of the squares a man, a woman, might easily fall.
‘Keep away,’ said Marion sharply.
‘It doesn’t look very safe.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘Someone might have a nasty accident.’
‘They have, and I’d rather not talk about it, thank you very much,’ snapped Marion. ‘Turn the Amaryllis daily, or else it grows crooked.’
‘What sort of accident?’
‘I was only joking,’ said Marion, but Gemma knew, from long experience of Hermione, Hannah, Helen, Hortense and Alice, that Marion was lying. ‘One of the panes was broken when I came in one morning, that was all. It was a week before anyone would come to mend it: everyone said it was too dangerous. We couldn’t even sue the architect. He’d gone bankrupt – well, Mr First kept him to the penalty clause in the contract. Late completion. These are my hyacinths. I keep them behind the duplicator in case Mr Fox sees them. He might drop them out of the window. Well, they’re ordinary, aren’t they. And now you know the flowers, you’d better get familiar with the stock and the prices in case any of the public call. They do sometimes. Not often. There’s a lot of mail order. Mr Fox spends half his time at Ascot, or Lord’s, or houseparties, making useful contacts, and the rest of the time upstairs in the penthouse, working out designs. He doesn’t like to be disturbed.’
Mr Fox. This is Gemma. You won’t mind me disturbing you. Mr Fox, I will disturb you to the roots of your being.
‘The trouble is,’ said Marion dismally, ‘I can’t keep a straight face. When I see a water-soluble brooch at four thousand pounds it just makes me want to laugh.’
‘It wouldn’t make me laugh.’
‘Mind you, the prices do mesmerise. If you see a lot of pieces at eight thousand, four thousand begins to seem cheap. That’s how it works. Mr Fox designs mostly in solid gold or spun sugar. This head-dress here is in the middle range. Barley sugar flavoured, polyurethane coated for display purposes only. He sells a lot of manacles like these; that’s for the kinky lot. And personally I don’t like looking at the armpit jewels too closely for fear of what I might see. Not that I’m shocked – I’m as broad minded as anybody – I just don’t like to be reminded of what doesn’t apply to me. Sex, and all that.’
Marion looked as if she were about to cry. ‘I just make myself useful,’ said Marion. ‘There’s always room for someone who likes to be useful, don’t you think?’
So the dentist’s wife back home had once, sadly, spoken to Gemma. The dentist’s wife worked as her husband’s receptionist; she mixed the amalgam for him, and was the source of several of his various income tax allowances. Her hands were a great deal more deft than her husband’s; her business brain just as acute; her response to other people’s needs (and her empathy with their pain) considerably more pronounced; but her bosom was flat, her complexion muddy, her teeth protruding, and her legs crooked, so her opinion of herself, at any rate during her husband’s lifetime, was low. ‘Always room for someone who likes to be useful!’ And Gemma looking at the dentist’s wife, had marvelled that she put up with a husband who would dive between the breasts of the young lady patients on the shallowest of pretexts; just as she marvelled that Mrs Hemsley put up with having five unwanted daughters, in order that her husband might have the son he deserved.
Gemma, mind you, was young, arrogant, and pretty.
Now Gemma looked at Marion – that anxious, friendly, unerotic person – and both liked her and despised her; and subtly altered her own stance, so that both bosom and bottom were a little more pronounced and the length of her skirt appeared provocative and wilful, rather than merely provincial.
Mr Fox, come to me!
Mr Fox thereupon came rattling down the iron staircase, took a cursory look at Gemma, said ‘You’re the new girl. You’ll do. Feed the parrots, will you. Bottled water, never tap. Too much chlorine,’ and rattled on up the stairs again, leaving behind him a strong smell of garlic and talcum powder mixed – and a general impression of lithe, small buttocked blue-jeaned masculinity, combined with a face of almost feminine beauty: wide-eyed, red-lipped, clear complexioned, to which a brown silky goatee beard, which seemed to come from another age, and to belong to another person entirely, adding a slight touch of – what? Ah yes. The freak show at a touring circus to which Gemma had once taken Hermione, Hannah, Helen, Hortense, and little Alice, gaining free entrance under an insecure canvas flap – the price of admission being clearly beyond Mrs Hemsley’s purse – and which had caused such an uproar in all their lives. Little Alice, though sworn to secrecy, had finally told her mother about it, thus betraying Gemma, her guilty love; and although Mrs Hemsley, once informed, could have forgiven the excursion, she could not easily forgive the degree of deceit entailed in accomplishing it without her knowledge. Hers were the deceased vicar’s children, after all, and not just anyone’s and since the new incumbent, a lively fresh-faced youth, seemed too interested in his choir boys to set about providing the village with another generation of clerical children, the ex-vicar’s wife felt her responsibility the more. No wonder she made a fuss. Uproar.
Be that as it may, Mr Fox’s arrival, departure, and passing blessing left Gemma breathless with admiration and a strong sense of vindication, as if the disastrous visit to the freak show to see the hermaphrodite, the mermaid and the bearded lady, had after all had a richer meaning, a greater significance, than either she or Mrs Hemsley had at the time realised. Perh
aps Alice knew it, somewhere in her heart, and wished then, as always, to protect Gemma from the consequences of her own destructive desires.
‘I’ve done the parrots,’ said Marion, sourly. ‘I’ll show you the filing. If the names are double-barrelled, and they often are, I file under the last names. Pinks in this drawer, green in that, and whites in here. The parrot cage needs cleaning once a week in hot water, once a month in cold. Otherwise things start to smell, and Mr Fox wouldn’t like that.’
‘And Mr Fox? What’s he like?’
‘Don’t be greedy,’ was all Marion would say to that, and there was a look of fear upon her face, which Gemma did not understand. What need for fear is there, after all, in those who minister to the needs of the powerful, be they kings, bishops, business executives, the designers of spun-sugar jewellery? The barber survives the palace revolution, the chambermaid the coup, and the good clean typist is always in demand although blood may flow on the board-room floor. And Marion, her button eyes efficiently if sadly focused on the complexities of the Fox and First card-index, the columns of matching figures which to her have the sanctity of beauty – this side balancing that, in proper harmony – would be abused, exploited, overworked, underpaid, but truly valued, so long, at any rate, as her eyesight lasted.
So why was Marion afraid?
Gemma pauses in her tale. Victor comes striding out of the house from the direction of the library, and passes out of sight amongst the colonnades and statuary.
‘What a handsome man Victor is,’ says Gemma. ‘Some men get so much better looking as they get older. I take it you don’t much care for your own generation?’
‘No.’
‘Who would? I do sympathise. Nevertheless, it seems hardly fair on your elder sisters.’
‘I’m the eldest.’
‘I was speaking of the human family, not your mother’s.’
Elsa blushes and grinds her tiny teeth. She is becoming tired of being condescended to. Some revolutionary spark ignites within her. If she can bed Gemma’s husband, by God she will. To serve her out, if nothing else.
‘Never mind,’ says Gemma, patting Elsa’s large white knee. ‘I know just how you feel. And I know I’m very old-fashioned, speaking of men as goodies to go round. But remember the dark ages in which I was reared – in which man was one’s future meal-ticket. But you have been reared in the brilliant light of self-awareness: you have all the advantages. You are free from the fear of pregnancy, free to choose an equal as a mate, to live with him as and when you please, by mutual consent; you can be as sexually active, or idle, as you wish, and no one to think any the worse of you for that. You can stand on your own two feet. It just seems rather unfair of you to stand on Janice’s toes. She’s not nearly as agile as you. Though, I grant you, half the size.’
Victor, to Elsa’s relief, now approaches them. He is in a good humour.
‘Love your chiffonier, Gemma,’ he says. ‘The one in the library room. But why have you painted it with scarlet gloss?’
‘Because I like scarlet gloss.’ She is stubborn.
‘You’re a big girl now,’ says Victor, indulgently. ‘You’re too old to know what you like.’
‘Advice about what I like and what I don’t like comes expensive.’
‘Not mine.’
‘Is Hamish selling you all that boring stuff in the billiard room?’
‘So far.’
‘Good. I suppose it isn’t boring at all, but valuable, and you’re laughing at us?’
‘Only out of the side of my mouth you can’t see. And did you know your ironing table is oyster oak?’
Gemma laughs, merrily.
‘Elsa,’ she says, ‘perhaps you’d better go and see if Hamish needs you in the library. I want to talk business to Victor.’
‘Yes, run along,’ says Victor, as he used to say to Wendy, run along, from the very first day she rose from crawling position to sway on her tiny feet. Eventually she became good at running, and made a very fine wing at hockey, and even, later, occasionally captained the school team.
‘Run along, Elsa.’
Elsa gets up – her knees creak as she does so – and walks towards the library. Her heart hurts. The kedgeree weighs heavy in her stomach. She is conscious of the pair of them watching her, and of the movement of her buttocks in her jeans. Before breakfast, since clearly it was going to be a hot day, she cut off their bottoms to make knee-length shorts. Now she wishes she hadn’t.
Gemma calls. Elsa turns back.
‘Elsa,’ she says, ‘how many are there in your family, of which you say you are the eldest?’
‘Seven.’
‘How wonderful! How fertile! It runs in the blood, I suppose. Hamish and I are such dead-ends. Childless. It’s a matter of grief to both of us. But it makes us rather more vivid people, I daresay; so much natural energy damned up inside us.’
Elsa opens her mouth to speak. Gemma nods her dismissal. Victor declines to meet her eye. Elsa goes to the library. Hamish sits at the head of the table, in a tall Jacobean side chair. He wears an open-necked shirt, as if to emphasise the informality of the occasion, but his movements are stiff and agonised, and his face is coloured with embarrassment. He toys with a carved ivory-handled paperknife, but carefully, as if to illustrate the sharpness of its cutting edge. Hamish smiles, with difficulty. Smiling does not come easily to him at the best of times, but he has seen other people do it and he knows it has to be done.
‘So you deigned to come.’ His voice is harsh.
‘I was sent.’ Elsa stands first on one foot and then the other. So she stood before her headmistress, who had the same difficulty with smiling, the same rasping voice, harsh with the genuine attempt to be kind.
‘You girls are all the same. None of you are prepared to accept the slightest responsibility for your actions.’ So says Hamish now, as once the headmistress said.
‘If we’re all the same, why pick on me?’ Did she say that then? Or did she merely want to, and lacked the courage.
Hamish stops smiling. He waves Elsa towards a polished pig bench, on which she sits.
‘Well?’ she asks, when his silence becomes oppressive.
‘You don’t seem to like me very much,’ he complains. ‘What was Victor talking about? You know he had the nerve to offer me two hundred for this table? Two hundred for a really majestic piece of oak like this. I’ve seen one like it at Sotheby’s go for over four thousand.’
‘Perhaps it’s reproduction. They sometimes are.’
She knows that much.
‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘Just look at that wood. It’s got a nice bit of age to it, you can tell... Can’t you?’
He’s unsure.
‘They beat them with chains, sometimes, to age them.’
‘People like Victor?’
‘Of course not,’ she cries. ‘Victor’s the most trustworthy man in this world. He has his hang-ups, more than I thought, but he wouldn’t ever lie about furniture. He loves furniture as he loves...’ Her voice trails away. What does Victor love?
Hamish smiles his cracked smile.
‘… He loves his life,’ she finishes.
‘He loves you? Does he?’ How he grates!
‘He’d do anything for me, and I’d do anything for him,’ she says, but again her voice dies away, its power and passion fading.
These are yesterday’s truths, not today’s. Yesterday she loved Victor, childishly, as a child might love its father within the glory of omnipotence; today she is left with Victor’s reality, and yesterday’s words still leaping to her lips. Tears start into her eyes.
‘You are crying,’ says Hamish, and turns his own head away. Tears glint behind his thick glasses. So, occasionally, her stepfather would turn his head, stumbling unexpectedly into self-pity, saying – ‘The men don’t like me. I have no natural authority. All they notice are the stripes on my arm.’
‘You shouldn’t cry,’ says Hamish. ‘Something as beautiful as you shouldn’t cry. I love bea
utiful things. I reach for them, but they’re always just beyond me. Do you understand? I’m crippled.’
Elsa stops crying, interested. What does he mean?
‘I’m not much good at the things I want to be good at.’
Sex, does he mean?
‘You can make money,’ she consoles him.
He shrugs that off, irritated. A smell of hot oil fills the air, a dark mist swirls before her eyes. Some of the lamp wicks, she notices, are burning unevenly; others are too high. Elsa is familiar with the problem. Her mother Sheila would light the rooms by oil when the electricity supply, as frequently happened, was disconnected for non-payment of the bill. Now she attends to the lamps. He watches, marvelling.
‘I did your typing,’ he claims. ‘Doesn’t that make you like me?’
‘No. It gives me the shivers.’
‘There’ll be some more tonight. Gemma will want it done.’
‘Then I’ll do it myself.’
‘She won’t think much of your typing.’
Elsa hesitates: she wants Gemma’s good opinion. But then she wants everyone’s good opinion. Some girls do. She knows it, and knows it gets her into trouble.
‘I enjoy typing,’ he says. ‘I love to see it emerging clean and neat upon the page. It’s the nearest I get to painting pictures. To be an artist – now that would be to be a man. To write a book; to have a finger on the pulse of humanity – you’re laughing at me?’
‘No,’ she says, and she isn’t. He takes off his glasses, and rubs his tired eyes. She looks at him, safe in the knowledge that now she can at least see better than him. His face, without its glasses, seems vulnerable: his eyes tired and sad. Yes, I could, she thinks. I could make him better. I could please him, and please Victor, and please Marina and Gemma need never know. And if I don’t particularly please myself, does it matter?
Once Elsa, as a consequence of wearing tight jeans, nylon knickers, and taking antibiotics, developed a nasty case of vaginal thrush. The ensuing inspections, probings and treatments, in a teaching hospital and in full view of thirty medical students, had perhaps eroded her romanticism, and the notion that penetration by the male, whether with the scalpel, the probe, or the penis, must necessarily be accompanied by love. If I could put up with all that, she thinks, I can surely put up with Hamish. It would be selfish not to.
