by Weldon, Fay
‘We’ll see what we feel like tomorrow,’ says Janice. ‘If you don’t want the rest of your fish, can I have it?’
Gemma summons Elsa to her bedroom, which is in the eastern turret. It is reached by means of an ornamental lift. Gold doors open as Elsa approaches to reveal an octagonal room. Sunlight filters mistily through the greenish opaque glass of its long windows. A tropical aquarium runs like a broad frieze around the room: flashes of scarlet fin can be seen in and out the bubbles and the stirring water weed. The carpet on the floor is sandy grey; the ceiling is of rippled, muted blue; palms and ferns wave gently in the flow of some concealed air-conditioning system. A fountain fills the room with the gentle sound of splashing water.
‘It’s like being under the sea,’ says Elsa.
‘I’m so glad you said that,’ says Gemma. She is wearing white, edged with bubbles of brown, like the very summit of a breaking wave. ‘Because that’s what the designer promised me, and then I thought I could do it better than him and took over. I think rooms should assert the personality and complement it, and not just be a boring background to one’s life. Don’t you think so?’
‘Yes,’ says Elsa.
‘At any rate I was told that by the only man I ever loved. (Not counting Hamish, of course.) You’ll have a taste for antiques all your life, did you know that? You’ll never be able to go back to the patterned carpets and factory chairs and Woolworth’s paintings of your childhood. First love has that effect. You’re very lucky, Elsa. You might have fallen for a car maniac, or a yachtsman, or a dedicated golfer, and learnt something positively detrimental to your future survival. In later years you won’t regret having met Victor.’
‘I don’t regret it now.’
‘Sit down,’ says Gemma, fondly, patting the frondy pouffe at the foot of her chair, ‘and I’ll go on with my story, my warning to wantons.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’
‘Why not? I don’t mean to insult you. The only sensible thing a pretty girl with no education can do is live off men and get what she can out of it. Where would I be if I didn’t have Hamish? Life for a rich woman in a wheelchair is not so bad: life for a poor one is fairly disagreeable, I imagine. I am only trying to help you to avoid the major pitfalls: the ones I didn’t. Consider Miss Hilary, for example, the unfortunate lady in the employment agency who found me my job. I heard later that she killed herself. Miss Hilary worked hard all her life, and no doubt had a fiancé killed in the war – and after that carnage, remember, there simply weren’t enough men to go round, and none left over for second chances, not if you had a big nose and a big loud laugh and big feet. Not like these days, when there’s a surplus of men and a girl can pick and choose: well, look at you, Elsa! Miss Hilary certainly wasn’t wanton, and much good it did her. She kicked and struggled all her life to keep her head above water, but she’d fallen in a particularly cold patch, and the air when finally she got her head up – a good job, running a department – was so damp and misty as to be almost no better than the water; barely breathable. I imagine she just gave up and went under. At least I found a sunny spot. And I daresay she thought she was wicked, sending off girls of good appearance to model naked at Fox and First, for art’s sake. Though no doubt they’d have got there, one way or another, without her aid. Would you model jewellery naked, for Victor, as I did for Mr Fox?’
‘If he wanted me to.’
‘You’d do anything he wanted?’
‘Yes.’
And so, it seems, she would. The coming night looms large in Elsa’s mind. She feels already the press of Hamish’s poor weak body struggling against her own. She looks forward to it and dreads it as one might a hospital operation: welcoming the appointment time for no other reason than it is appointed, and the attention, the ministering, the drama: fearing death under the anaesthetic, and pain on waking, if waking there be.
Hamish, lie close. Do your best, or your worst, or your nothing. Give me something of your past, and your power, and your wife. Do you lie here at night, Hamish, in this very room, in the grey gauzy bed pushed back against the wall as if it were of no importance? Alongside Gemma, with her lost, dangling legs? Do you part them by force or by habit, or have you lost heart altogether? Perhaps you never come here at all. Perhaps you are her polite and daily husband, and not the instinctive nightly one at all?
Hamish, Gemma is yours; and you are Gemma’s, by virtue, night or day, of the grief you can cause her, which she herself defined as love.
But Hamish, I mean to have you. Victor says so. And I will afterwards have power over Hamish, and Victor, and Gemma, and myself.
I will be free.
And afterwards, perhaps Hamish will see me right, give me some money. I could buy some new jeans, some moisturiser, without having to ask Victor and having him discuss at length the brand of jeans desired or the morality of face cream. No, I would send any spare money at once to Sheila. The new school term is coming and the young ones will want new shoes and Sheila struggling to pay for them. Sheila will not hear of the handing down of used shoes from older children to younger. Such a practice is bad for the feet.
Oh, mother, what is happening to me?
Gemma smiles at Elsa in a kindly fashion. Elsa cannot meet her eye.
‘Well, I was much the same at your age: I would do anything for love. And it was a good job I had at Fox and First, by any standard. Does Victor pay you well?’
‘I don’t exactly get wages. If I need anything he gives me money. He’s very generous.’
‘Does he stamp your insurance card.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Of course not. Why should you? Victor is your insurance against an unkind future. So he was to Janice. At any rate you have somewhere to live, not too hot, not too cold, not too damp, not too dry, otherwise I daresay the antiques would rust or warp or split. I was lucky too, in that respect. I failed to find a room of my own and went to lodge with Marion’s family. I shared her bedroom. She wanted me to. She was accustomed to sharing with her gran, but when that old lady became incontinent and had to leave, she found herself lonely, in a room all to herself. She suffered from night fears, poor girl. Understandably, as it turned out.’
1966.
Swinging London! Yellow Rolls-Royces, carrying pop stars from recording to recording; Minis with darkened windows to hide the unknown excitements within; housewives carrying psychedelic shopping bags; the smell of marihuana rising in cinemas, public transport, and over polite dinner tables. The first brave schoolboy began to grow his hair long and was expelled for his pains. The barricades were not yet up but the tumbrils rumbled in the distance. Oh, the fun of revolution before the bombs began to burst! Gemma, of course, heard no distant rumblings. She heard only the pounding of her own heart; the steady timeless pulse of love.
Gemma loved Mr Fox.
What’s more, she believed what he said.
When Mr Fox said to Gemma that first morning, in relation to the warm coffee, that living was an art, not an experience, she believed him. It was also a selective process, Mr Fox said, and the more stringent the selection, he said, the finer the end result would be. It was important to take a firm stand against the second best; against warm coffee, against pink angora jumpers, and so on, and all things either spiritually, physically or emotionally lesser than they should be. He, Mr Fox, was a creative artist, responsible for wresting beauty out of the chaos of experience. Beauty was born out of beauty, therefore Mr Fox tried to look only on what was beautiful.
‘What do you do with the ugly things?’ enquired Gemma.
‘Burn them, break them, destroy them.’
‘What about ugly people? You can’t destroy them.’
People, Mr Fox admitted, could be a problem. In the meanwhile he required fresh coffee to be brought up to his penthouse and would Gemma kindly oblige?
Gemma would.
Mr Fox went upstairs. Not just as any mortal would, not two at a time, but three. Gemma marvelled. S
uch godlike energy! Gemma set about making Mr Fox’s coffee. Gemma failed to close the lid of the coffee grinder properly so that when she switched it on, fragmented coffee beans flew into the air and about the office, as if a volcano had spewed its grit into the heavens. The noise brought Marion running from Mr First’s office. She seemed distressed.
‘It’s the last straw! Now I have to sweep it up, I suppose. Who else is going to? I’d hand in my notice,’ said Marion, not for the first and not for the last time, ‘if only it wasn’t for my holiday pay. As for Mr First, he’s perfectly horrible. He just said he hoped he hadn’t made you cry. That means he’s glad he did.’
‘He did not make me cry so there.’
‘He liked you,’ said Marion. ‘But then everyone likes you. Even me.’
And she got down on her hands and knees with the green and yellow dustpan and brush and swept and cried at the same time.
She was distraught, and reminded Gemma of little Alice, crying her heart out in the shrubbery, unmoved by offers of homemade sweets. ‘Gemma don’t ever leave us. Gemma don’t go. You’re the only friend we’ve got.’
But Gemma went.
‘You will stay,’ begged Marion now. ‘You won’t let Mr First drive you away? You won’t just not turn up tomorrow? I couldn’t stand another new face.’
‘Of course I’ll stay. I like it here. At least it’s not boring, is it.’
‘No. It’s not. And what’s more, if you’re looking for somewhere to stay, you can come to my place. We’ve got a spare bed. My mum and dad would get on with someone like you. I’m a bit of a disappointment to them, to tell you the truth. I’m getting nightmares, you see. I can hardly bear to close my eyes. It’s only since Mr First’s sister and the accident. But I’m all upset, and that’s the fact of it.’
‘Accident? You said she jumped.’
‘Well, she wasn’t dead when she landed and then she was run over by a car, so it was an accident, really. A traffic accident.’
‘No it wasn’t. It was suicide. Why did she do it?’ Gemma persisted.
‘She was making a nuisance of herself.’
‘What sort of nuisance?’
‘I don’t like to talk about it.’
‘Tell me.’ Naughty Hannah, this time. Refusing to tell Mrs Hemsley where she’d hidden the tin opener. Hannah couldn’t abide baked beans, which was a pity, since they were her staple diet.
‘Miss First fancied Mr Fox,’ Marion went positively red in the face, just like Hannah blurting the truth. ‘And Mr First didn’t like it. I don’t want to talk about it, Gemma. You know what these new buildings are like – the walls are awfully thin. If you offer to pay my mum four pounds a week, she’ll be ever so grateful; and my dad can drive us both in in the mornings. Did Mr Fox really ask for you to take up his coffee? Up to the penthouse?’
‘Yes.’
Time enough. Marion would presently disclose all. Hannah always confessed to the whereabouts of the tin opener, when hungry enough.
‘Then I suppose you’ll have to. But Gemma, dear, do be careful.’
Gemma, up the circular staircase, round and round and round, in the service of her beloved, noticed only that she had a broken fingernail. Gemma must be very careful, Gemma thought, to hide such a blemish. Such a falling away from perfection!
Mr Fox’s penthouse was an octagonal structure perched on the main roof of the building. Quick-growing ivy vine extended fronds and stickers over its eight windows. Within, he had contrived a yellowy jungle gloom: palms grew about the room; stuffed jungle animals glared from under and over metal furniture, upholstered for the most part in leopard skin. A flock of humming birds darted to and fro amongst the underbrush. Mr Fox was nowhere to be seen but his voice came from the floor.
‘Is that my coffee? I’ve been waiting. What took you so long?’
Mr Fox was in his bath. It was a steamy jungle pool, sunk into the floor, from which the smell of musk arose. The water was murky. Water lilies floated on the surface, through which his white, sinewy shoulders broke. His eyes were little, and sharp, and gleaming.
‘I don’t lie in the bath to get clean,’ remarked Mr Fox, ‘but to get ideas. I clean myself first under a shower. Put the tray by the water’s edge, my dear. And try not to blink or look surprised. It’s rude to notice nudity: not rude at all to be nude.’
‘Yes, Mr Fox.’
‘Do you like my bath?’
‘Isn’t it rather difficult to clean?’
Mr Fox sounded quite peeved. ‘Now how would I know a thing like that?’
‘Are the water-lilies plastic?’
‘Plastic, to me, is the worst of the four-letter words.’
Gemma, trying to spell plastic in her head, put down the tray without remembering to hide her broken nail.
‘One of your nails is broken,’ remarked Mr Fox. ‘I hope we are not going to find you slovenly. Every movement, every activity, every object must be given its due – then such accidents don’t happen. But you walk well, Gemma, and move gracefully. I like that.’
‘Thank you, Mr Fox.’
‘Any time,’ observed Mr Fox, and sank deeper into his bath so that the water lilies swung gently over the surface of the water, beneath which a rather slight, pale, naked but clearly male body stirred. Gemma was accustomed to the bodies of females, but had had little contact so far with males, apart from a teacher or so, the doctor, the dentist, and poor dead Mr Hemsley, whose spirit lingered so in the house he left behind.
Little Alice, pulling on trousers instead of a skirt, saying that’s what daddy wants. I saw it in a dream.
Little Alice, with a daddy never seen in the flesh, but known in the spirit.
The unusual sight of Mr Fox, white, gentle, bare beneath the water, moved Gemma to compassion. His body seemed vulnerable, vulnerable as a girl’s might be. Perhaps there was not so much difference, after all, between him and her, between the male and the female? Perhaps he felt, and hoped, and suffered too, just as any woman might?
Gemma smiled at Mr Fox.
Mr Fox smiled at Gemma.
The world stood still.
Mr Fox leapt from his bath, lithe, lily-white and dressed for some reason in red and black striped swimming-trunks. Mr Fox embraced Gemma, so that her twin-set and skirt glistened with moisture.
‘Your ear lobes are delicious,’ he said, nibbling them. ‘I look forward to a future in which they model many a pretty sugar ear-piece. But that’s enough for now. Just go away downstairs and type or whatever it is you do. And tomorrow, when I see you again, do try and wear something different, something more appropriate to the spirit of the age. There’s a boutique next door – at least I think they’ve re-opened; they had to close for repainting after a rather nasty accident in the street outside. Try them, at any rate.’
But how Gemma was to afford new clothes, Mr Fox did not say. Nor did Mr Fox offer to advance her any of next week’s wages. Marion, however, offered to lend Gemma any of Marion’s gran’s clothes she might care to have, and Gemma was able to array herself in some very pretty shawls and lacy dresses and granny-boots, left over from the days of Gran’s youth at the turn of the century.
Marion’s home in Finchley was abundantly cosy, and Marion’s mother and father as kind as could be. The colours here, in this semi-detached suburban house, with the narrow back garden where the marrows grew and the washing hung, were as vivid as in the Fox and First office and perhaps less unexpected.
Here, in the room where the family sat and ate their supper in front of the television, the carpet was of a red Indian design; the wallpaper willow patterned, the curtains of flowered chintz, and the three-piece suite of tartan wool. Shelves, display cabinets and mantelpiece were crowded with mementos from holidays abroad: dolls of different nationalities were tacked around the walls, their arms raised, by virtue of the nails that held each beneath its armpits, in row upon row of forlorn entreaty.
On the first evening of her stay, Marion’s mother Audrey, forewarned by a te
lephone call from Marion, came home especially early from the betting shop where she worked, and made Gemma a special celebratory mixed grill. Liver, bacon, kidney, sausage, egg, chips and tomato; followed by tinned peaches and a rather strange custard and a strong cup of tea. After supper, leaving the three-leafed oak-veneered table, and the place mats with scenes from the Italian lakes, Marion’s father, Arthur, a compositor by trade, settled his solid, friendly bulk into one of the armchairs, took out his pipe and puffed a slow reflective puff or so. Audrey settled into the other chair with her knitting, and Marion and Gemma sat side by side on the sofa. Marion, who seemed surprisingly restless for someone who had eaten so much, leafed through holiday brochures. Gemma longed for bed, and tried to keep awake, and failed, and dozed.
Presently Arthur spoke.
‘That was a good supper, Marion’s mother. As good as any I remember. That was zabaglione with the peaches, Gemma. Real Italian zabaglione, made with brandy, not even wine. Made you sleepy did it? Well, no harm done, Marion’s friend. You know you’re safe with us, that’s why you sleep. Shall he who is amongst enemies sleep? Shall we have a drop of slivovitz to round the evening off? What do you say to that, Marion’s friend?’
‘Drop of what?’ asked Gemma, startled.
‘Slivovitz. Yugoslavian plum liqueur. We were in Yugoslavia back in ’61. Still some of the good old slivo in the cocktail cabinet. Gets a bit encrusted but that makes it stronger. Are you warm enough, girl? You’re a pale lass, not like our Marion.’
‘Boiled beetroot, I suppose you mean!’ interposed Marion. ‘I’d be a shade less red if I didn’t have to roast year in year out in the southern sun.’
Arthur ignored his daughter.
‘Are you warm enough, Marion’s friend? Shall I turn the flicker-fire higher?’
‘You’re boasting, Marion’s dad,’ said Marion’s mum, proudly enough. ‘It’s not manners. What will Gemma think?’
