by Weldon, Fay
‘All right,’ she says. ‘If you want to do my typing tonight, you’d better.’
‘I look forward to it,’ he says. ‘I really do. I’m not just doing this on medical advice.’
‘Medical advice?’ She pauses, on her way out into the sunlight, and the patio, and the swimming pool.
‘I have some small trouble with my prostate gland. The doctor says sexual activity is the best remedy.’
Elsa blinks, but whether from the sudden strong light, or from astonishment, she scarcely knows herself.
5
‘Hamish started life as a shorthand typist,’ says Gemma. She and Elsa sit companionably by the pool and wait for lunch. Gemma has recovered her good humour: Victor has gone in to talk to Hamish. Elsa is at ease, sad in her heart, but confident that she at least has only her own pain to put up with, and not the added burden of other people’s. ‘He was in the army. They trained him for it. When he came out he used his demob money to start a secretarial agency. Then another, and then a chain of them, stretching nationwide. He very seldom smiles. Had you noticed? It makes people take him seriously. Soon he diversified and started a chain of low-calorie sandwich bars to feed the girls he’d found jobs for, and then into the house-plant business to provide greenery for their windowsills. There were other enterprises of an artistic nature, on the way. My husband loves beautiful things. Had you noticed?’
‘Yes.’
‘He prefers them inanimate to animate, by and large. He likes to know where he is. Girls and appetites and vegetation are all difficult to control, being likely to wilt and fade for no apparent reason, so he eventually concentrated on plastic plant pots: the solid basis in which others more easily creative can root their aspirations and watch them grow and develop and blossom – or else die, of course, from lack of some essential nourishment. Sometimes I think that is happening to me.’
The pain in Elsa’s heart swells, and bursts. She cries.
‘You’re not crying for me, I hope?’ enquires Gemma. ‘How sweet of you, if you are.’
‘I’m crying for all of us,’ says Elsa, and so she is. For the things she should and could have had, and never did, and never would. ‘That’s very generous of you,’ says Gemma. ‘It seems to me you are rather too generous, one way and another. Has something in particular upset you?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps you are worrying about meeting Janice? Would you like me to telephone and put her off?’
‘No.’
‘Did Hamish say something to upset you? He can be tactless. I love my husband very much but I am not blind to his faults. I’m sure he can’t have criticised your typing: you’re so very good at it. I do envy you. I never had the opportunity to put mine into practice, as I was telling you. Was it Hamish?’
‘No.’
‘You weren’t in the library very long. Well, never mind. I had a nice little chat with Victor. He’s so fond of you. What are you going to do about Victor?’
‘Do? What do you mean?’
‘You shouldn’t let him exploit you. You’ve given up everything for him and got nothing in return.’
‘I’ve got him.’ Yesterday’s truths again, not today’s.
‘Of course. How silly of me. You have Victor, and that makes up for everything: family, job, flat, future.’
‘It wasn’t much of a family, or a job, or a flat, or any kind of future; not without him! I wanted to start everything fresh. I wanted to be something and do something.’
‘Ah yes, Victor said. A rung in the ladder in your clamber up the world.’
‘Victor said that?’ She’s tremulous.
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I was no different.’
And Gemma proceeds with her tale. And although – like any tale told in retrospect – heightened in the telling, purified of pain, reduced to anecdote and entertainment (as a thin stock, boiled away, becomes a thick and tasty sauce), it comes to Elsa more like a burnt offering to the Gods of fortune and misfortune than as a solid meal for the nourishment of the self, she is none the less able to gain some fortification from it.
1966.
Gemma took off her mother’s pearl pendant and put on her great-aunt’s crucifix. Everything, she feared, was going too well. In less time than it took the earth to go once around the sun she had escaped from the Hemsley household, found an interesting job, a friend in the form of Marion, and fallen in love. If she stood clear of the window she would not fall out. Now all that remained was to find somewhere to live, as her suitcase, brown fibre with feeble bolts reinforced by string, reminded her. Perhaps God would help her in this, as the pendant had helped her so far. She fingered the crucifix.
Marion regarded the suitcase with disfavour and presently hid it behind a curtain woven out of silver string.
‘It wouldn’t do for Mr Fox to see that,’ she remarked. ‘Mr First will see it, of course, when he goes through to his office, but that doesn’t matter. Mr First is a bit like me. We’re neither of us much good in the showroom. Him with his dandruff and me with my spots. The customers are beautiful people, like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘Yes. So you’ll take over the selling, if you don’t mind. I can’t stand the customers, to tell you the truth. They’ll waste hours of your time and never buy a thing.’
‘But I’ve never done any selling. I’m trained as a shorthand typist.’
‘Who wasn’t? It’s perfectly easy. Just never let them take anything on spec and never accept a cheque without ringing the bank first. I wish I worked in a solicitor’s office, I really do. Or if only I could do social work, or train as a nurse –’
‘I’m sure you could.’
‘No. It’s no use. I’m saving for my next holiday. I always am. We’re a three-holiday family, you see. I always tell myself I’ll give in my notice after I come back but I never get around to it. And my family likes me working here. It’s a privilege. I meet people I never would in the run of things. Elizabeth Taylor was in once. They can’t get over that.’
Gemma shook her head in wonderment. So far from Cumberland, so soon!
‘If I were you, dear,’ said Marion, ‘if you don’t mind me saying, I’d take off that crucifix.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s cheap, isn’t it.’
‘Yes. Woolworth’s.’
‘If you were a princess you’d get away with it; being what you are, you can’t.’
Plain, stoical Marion talked with the ease and confidence of a trained economist buying a joint of beef from an incompetent butcher. Gemma removed her crucifix.
‘My great-aunt gave it to me,’ she said. ‘She’s the only relative I have. She lives in Cumberland, in an old people’s home.’
‘Cumberland’s ever so nice,’ said Marion. ‘We went there one year. We take our first and second holidays abroad, and the third one here at home.’
Gemma drops the crucifix into the lemon-shaped wastepaper basket.
‘I didn’t mean throw it away,’ Marion protested.
‘But if it’s cheap and nasty –’
‘Your great-aunt gave it to you –’
‘I don’t care about the past,’ said Gemma, and meant it. ‘I only care about the future.’
‘It’s a crucifix,’ said Marion. ‘I’m sure it’s unlucky to throw a crucifix away. Stands to reason. I’ll look it up under “Superstitions” in the Occult Weekly special supplement. My mother’s collecting the whole edition. We’re up to T and U so you’re in luck.’
So Gemma, indifferent, placed the abandoned crucifix in the top left-hand drawer of her lime-coloured egg-shaped desk with its starry perspex top, and on it the IBM Golfball, in mellow-yellow and pineapple, but without a plug at the end of its lead. Here, in the left-hand top drawer, Gemma found what remained of the predecessor. Blue nail varnish, a silver hair spray, two false fingernails, two packets of crisps (the new vinegar flavour), one half-melted Mars bar, a tube of Pretty Feet for the removal of hard skin from the heels, and
a lucky Cornish pisky.
‘Ophelia left her lucky pisky behind,’ observed Gemma.
‘She got herself out of here,’ said Marion briskly, ‘that was the main thing –’ and then, quickly (after the manner of little Hortense when she said no, it wasn’t her who wet the bed but a strange little boy had come in and done it), Marion added, ‘She was wasted here, that’s all I mean. Her speeds were so very good. Ninety typing and 130 shorthand. She was a nice girl but she wasn’t right. Now I’m just popping out for some fresh coffee. I get freshly-roasted beans every day and start grinding them the moment I put on the kettle. That way we preserve its full aroma. Or so Mr Fox says. He’s very particular.’
A look of anxiety crossed her face. She hesitated.
‘Marion,’ said Gemma, ‘is something the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ lied Marion. In just such a tone would Hannah say ‘nothing’ – home from school in tears and with a black eye and a torn dress.
‘You won’t be frightened when I’m away?’ Marion asked.
‘Of course not.’
‘Don’t go near the window. If there’s a knocking sound it’s only the starlings, or the sea gulls. They’re such a pest, and half-blind, most of them. Try and ignore them.’
‘What if a customer comes?’
‘Almost no one comes before mid-day. They stay in bed during the morning after the night before. It gets ever so lonely here. I’m glad you’re here, Gemma, I really am. I wouldn’t want to lose you.’
And Marion took a ten shilling note from the smoked glass petty-cash jar and went out to buy the coffee.
Mr Fox came rattling down the spiral iron staircase – he had changed into a cream suit – and passed through the office with no more than a friendly whistle to the birds, who rose in a cackle, and not so much as a glance at Gemma.
Gemma, both disappointed and relieved, bent her pretty head over the filing system, trying in vain to remember Part Five of the Office Routine section of her Correspondence Course, and presently felt a kind of cold dead breath, only slightly tainted with the warm exhalations of the living, on the back of her neck. Gemma jumped, and shrieked, and there stood Mr First, grey faced, pale haired, ageless behind a business man’s rimless glasses: his lips drawn back in the bloodless snarl she had quite happily observed in television versions of the story of Count Dracula, but had scarcely ever expected to encounter in real life.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, as a squire might address a poacher.
‘I work here,’ replied Gemma.
‘No one would mistake you for a customer. What’s your name? Or do you prefer to be the cat’s mother? Ha-ha!’
Thus Gemma’s teachers had been accustomed to address her, with sarcasm and insult mixed. It was not so very new to her, nor surprising, though she had always hoped that as she grew older the insults of her superiors would become less frequent, and finally die away altogether. But no.
‘I’m Gemma Joseph,’ she replied, with dignity and ease. ‘The new temp.’
‘Oh God,’ said Mr First, and showed the whites of his eyes. ‘Here, file these. In the PR file. Do you expect me to walk round holding them all day?’
‘They’re photographs,’ protested Gemma. Nowhere in Lesson Five to Eight, Filing, had there been any mention of photographs, and Gemma felt, like many an earnest student before her, that the world must be wrong because the book couldn’t possibly err.
‘File them under the name of the person photographed, idiot.’
‘But there’s more than one person in some of them’
‘The person in the foreground. Are you mad? You are certainly incompetent. I hope you are mad. If the agency send us somebody incompetent that’s fate, and a fairly usual one at that. If they send us a mad person we can sue.’
‘Mr Fox is in all the photographs. He may not be the nearest to the camera, but he is certainly smiling hardest. I shall file them under F.’
Mr First snatched the photographs out of Gemma’s hand.
‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘leave the filing to Marion. Tell her to come and see me when she gets back. Is Mr Fox in?’
‘I think so,’ said Gemma.
‘What has thinking got to do with it? You either know or you don’t. What a waste of time you girls are.’
It seemed to Gemma, however, as Mr First gazed up the circular staircase towards Mr Fox’s quarters, that he was in the grip of some kind of terrible indecision, and that his rudeness to her had been automatic bluster, designed to mark anxiety and loss. Just so had little Hermione nagged and stamped, whenever anything went wrong. Mind you, Hermione had been Gemma’s least favourite Hemsley child. Alice the most favourite.
‘He’s not in,’ said Mr First, with what almost sounded like relief, and Gemma – whose face in those days was normally impassive – shot him such a forgiving smile, all white, pearly teeth and brilliant eyes, that Mr First blushed. A purply hue, rather than a rosy glow, creeping unbecomingly over grey skin: but a blush all the same.
‘You should smile more often,’ barked Mr First, and backed from the room, spectacles flashing in the light reflected from the green spun-glass chandeliers, bouncing off the red wings of a flying squawking parrot, so that Gemma could not see the expression of his eyes.
Gemma took half a crown from the petty-cash jar and went to buy an electric plug for the typewriter. (‘Initiative and its Rewards’: Lesson Eleven – Office Routine.)
She forgot to buy a screwdriver. On her return she used her nailfile instead. Lesson Eleven, again, Resourcefulness.
When Marion returned, she seemed displeased at the event.
‘The office should never, never be left unattended.’
‘But there was nothing to do here.’
‘That’s your good fortune,’ snapped Marion.
‘Mr First came in and was horrible,’ said Gemma, hoping to elicit pity. None came.
‘That’s normal,’ said Marion. ‘Ugly men are always horrible to pretty girls. I have a girl-friend who’s a model. When we’re out in her mini, she gets roughed up all the time by lorry-drivers and middle-aged men in Volvos. I’m afraid to go out with her. She only asks me along for contrast anyway. Me I’m just the plain friend every pretty girl needs.’
If Marion was hoping for contradiction, Gemma could give her none. She asked instead how photographs should be filed.
‘Under the name of the event, stupid,’ said Marion, and she slammed down the striped electric kettle so hard that the pure water (bottled in France) spilled down on to the flowery Formica of the kitchen annexe. Then she ground the coffee so furiously in the grinder, that the windows shook, and birds on either side of the thin, thin glass rose noisily into the air.
Gemma retreated to her desk and studied the photographs more closely. Most showed groups of young men and women: slender men with shirts unbuttoned to the waist, and women likewise: and many with a Fox and First navel stone glittering to advantage. In all the photographs Mr Fox hovered, well buttoned, white shirted, the king taking pleasure in his court. And he smiled just as confidently as any king might smile, who has his paid executioner at his elbow.
Well, a typist can look at a king. If a cat can do it, so can she. The first photograph was put down; and the second, and at the third Gemma paused.
‘Marion,’ called Gemma, ‘who’s this in this photograph? It looks like the cook, wandered in from the kitchen.’
And so it did: a face leering over Mr Fox’s shoulder, out of place and out of fashion, forty if she was a day; fat, grossly fat, with a pendulous lip, bulbous eyes, rolls of flesh spoiling what line there was of her dowdy dress; and her cheek leaning against Mr Fox’s own.
And Mr Fox still smiled.
Marion put down the coffee, took the photograph, and tore it up into shreds. Her hands were trembling.
‘Why did you do that?’ Gemma asked. ‘I only wanted to know where in the file it would belong.’
‘It doesn’t belong anywhere.’
‘Everyt
hing can be filed. It said so in Lesson Six, Office Routine. And if things can, people can.’
‘She can’t be, and that’s that. Thank God.’
‘Why not?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Is she someone relative?’
‘Yes she is, nosey parker. Mr First’s sister.’
‘There you are!’ Gemma is triumphant. ‘One would never have guessed,’ she added. ‘He’s so thin and she’s so fat.’
‘Glands,’ observed Marion. ‘Something wrong with her thyroid. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr First had acromegaly. That’s a disfunction of the adrenal glands. Giant-like excrescences form.’
‘You do know a lot,’ admired Gemma. Well, flattery is easy.
‘We believe in self-improvement,’ muttered Marion. ‘My dad has a Teach-Yourself-Diagnosis manual. He reads it aloud in the evenings. Anyway, do me a favour, just forget Mr First’s sister and forget I ever mentioned her.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s dead, if you want to know.’
‘I could file her under C for Corpse.’
Oh, Mrs Hemsley, you were right to get rid of Gemma. You managed it just in time.
Marion, pale-lipped, does not reply.
‘How did she die?’
‘Never mind,’ Marion poured pure boiling water on to freshly ground coffee in a heated pottery jug – a rather ordinary jug, but with a brown French glaze – and stirred with a wooden spoon especially reserved for the purpose.
‘But what happened?’ Gemma persisted.
‘Nothing.’
‘You don’t get dead just by nothing.’
Even Mr Hemsley had died of a coronary, the arrival of a blood clot at the heart, and not just disappointment at the birth of his fifth and final daughter Alice. Everyone knew.
