by Weldon, Fay
‘As a matter of fact, yes. Local.’
‘Rigged, you mean. I imagine the trade was there in force, a ring was operating, the auctioneer was in cahoots, and you paid through the nose, poor muggins.’
‘I paid a fair price. I wasn’t after a bargain.’
‘Poor old Hamish. Through the nose again. Well, I’ll take it off your hands for a couple of thousand.’
‘You said two and a half,’ protests Hamish.
‘I’ve had another look at it.’
‘And I’ve had another look at Elsa.’
Victor looks both shocked and pained.
‘We’re not bartering Elsa.’
‘Then what else are we doing?’ Hamish demands.
‘You are doing me a favour: I’m not doing you one, believe me. You are relieving me of the indignity, because indignity it is, of being in thrall to a buxom teenage body and a luminous eye. It makes me nervous. Other men look at her. Young men. I’m too old for her. She’ll be off presently. I can’t stand the strain. I never had it with Janice. I want to get it over with, and she can’t wait. She broke a famille rose palette plate, Chinese, eighteenth century, authenticated, the other day. Knocked it off the wall with a feather duster. That was a sign of a portent, believe me.’
‘Um,’ says Hamish. ‘She didn’t seem all that full of portent to me. She’s not perfect, either. Her legs aren’t right.’ He shakes silently at his own joke. It is the nearest he gets to laughter.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They’re too thin for her body.’
Victor does not deign to answer.
‘Two and a half thousand and the library ladder thrown in,’ is all he says, insouciant as can be.
Hamish’s eyes narrow. He looks now as if he had never laughed in his life.
‘That library ladder belonged to my mother. I’m not selling.’
‘Hamish, you didn’t have a mother.’
‘We all had mothers,’ says Hamish. ‘Pretty young mothers. Mine was a typist, I believe, before she went to the bad. Or so I was told. But perhaps she wasn’t all that pretty: she produced a fairly dreadful daughter, my poor sister Joanna, late lamented. Unless she took after her father. I like to think so. I’ve always fancied typists, for some reason. I like to see them sitting, typing away, heads bobbing, fingers flying. That’s how I met Gemma.’
He is overwhelmed by gloom. He takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes, and peers out between the purple globes of a glass bunch of grapes, as the noise of a passing motorbike swells on the other side of the pallisade wall, and then, instead of passing on, turns into the gateway, and stops and splutters, and the plastic gates open at once, as if the visitor was expected, and the heavy machine skids through the gravel and is brought to a stop at the bottom of the steps, and allowed to drop, as if it was a toy discarded by a wilful child, unlike the owner, leather-suited, swaggering, curly-haired beneath the yellow helmet, who leaps up the steps to bang heavily at the front door.
‘Dear God,’ says Hamish, the light through the glass grapes casting plague spots over his face, ‘it’s her.’
‘Who?’
‘Some dyke friend of Gemma’s. An alleged physiotherapist. Alice Hemsley. Gemma claims to have known her as a child.’
‘Can’t you put a stop to it?’
‘To what? How can you put a stop to something you don’t even know about? How can a man decently stand between a crippled wife and a physiotherapist.’
Hamish is agitated.
‘What was it we agreed?’ Victor asks cunningly. ‘Two thousand and the library ladder?’
‘I will talk about it tomorrow,’ says Hamish, speaking for once like a man of decision. ‘And ask Elsa to check the light-bulbs in her bedroom. Gemma keeps putting in forty watts. It’s impossible to type properly with anything less than a hundred. I tell her so but she takes not the slightest notice.’
8
‘What price dream kitchens now?’ laments Gemma. ‘Who dreams of kitchens except those who have given up dreams of love?’
What can Elsa reply? She holds her tongue. Gemma has taken Elsa down to the heart of the house, to the kitchen. Here Johnnie and Annie work, in the dignified dress of their native land, in a great sweep of shiny-white hygiene – cooking areas leading to pantries to utility rooms to laundries – peering with their alien eyes into the detail of Western domestic preoccupation, padding on soft soles, supervising the clumsy work of a handful of dull-eyed local servants.
Down here machinery whirrs, purifying the air, disposing of smells, sterilising dish cloths, sucking up dust, spewing out ozone – and at the moment shredding cabbage for the evening meal, and dripping oil at calculated intervals into churning egg-yolks to make its mayonnaise.
Gemma is going to make Elsa’s birthday cake – the one Elsa must share with Wendy, Victor’s daughter.
Gemma points out the travel posters on the walls – distant scenes of golden shores and pounding waves, and laughing native women bearing produce on their heads.
‘I’ve been to all those places,’ she says sadly. ‘I don’t have to cheat and get them from travel agencies, like some people do. But the places are never quite like the posters. Just rows and rows of new hotels and oil on the beaches. So much better to want, than to have! I am afraid we are all at the end of our dreams. Aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘But what do you hope for, Elsa, in the end?’
‘Not to be like my mother,’ says Elsa, ‘that’s all.’
Gemma steers her chair into an alcove especially designed for its accommodation, and waits for mixing bowl, wooden spoon and ingredients to be set in front of her. In her hand she holds Great-Aunt May’s cookery book, its tattered pages spattered with the mixtures of past ages, carefully preserved between perspex sheets.
Gemma weighs her ingredients with care, taking the weight of three eggs in flour, butter and sugar.
‘Of course this isn’t a proper sponge,’ says Gemma. ‘A proper sponge is made without butter, but is rather dry and rubbery as a consequence.’
One of the eggs slips and breaks between her fingers, as, automatically, she clutches to save it. The shell is unusually brittle and paper-fine.
‘What a horrible egg,’ Gemma cries. ‘It’s unnatural! Nothing’s right! Nothing’s what it should be, any more.’
She stretches out her sticky hand for Elsa’s attention. Elsa wipes it with kitchen paper, between the slender fingers and round the unsightly stub of the missing ring finger.
Annie fetches another egg. The weighing process re-starts.
‘Does my finger repel you?’ enquires Gemma, as she flicks a switch and butter and sugar blend.
‘No,’ says Elsa, poor Elsa, and then – ‘well, not much.’
‘I can’t really think what I’m doing alive at all,’ complains Gemma. ‘Not only am I of no possible use to anyone but I positively repel people as well. As for poor Hamish, he should never have married me. It is a great misfortune for a rich man to have a barren wife.’
‘I don’t think having children is all that important,’ says Elsa. ‘The point of life can’t just be to hand it on, can it?’
‘But it is, it is,’ moans Gemma, adding eggs, one at a time. ‘You’re quoting Victor, in any case, I know you are.’
‘Anyway Victor and I don’t want any children. He has one already, and as for me, I know what I’m missing, don’t worry.’
Gemma looks quite taken aback.
‘I hope not many girls feel like you, or what will my friends do for grandchildren?’
Gemma sifts the flour into the now white and creamy mixture in the bowl.
‘I thought you told me you loved Victor? In which case, surely you want to pledge a token of your love, to future generations? To join your genes to his and see what happens next?’
‘It’s not Victor’s child I don’t want,’ protests Elsa. ‘It’s any child. I’m not interested in the future. I’m interested in the here and now.
There are far too many children in the world, anyhow.’
‘Not as far as I am concerned,’ says Gemma, sharply. ‘Though I seem to remember thinking the same when I was your age, and looking after Hermione, Hannah, Hortense, Helen and Alice. But now I begin to feel like one of nature’s dead-ends. Nature has observed me, and decided against me. She will breed eels which give electric shocks, and seagulls with internal desalination plants, and fish which turn red at the approach of the opposite sex, but she will not let me hand on my inheritance. I am the weakest, and she will not let me survive.’
‘You could always adopt,’ says Elsa, with that streak of practicality which both irritates and refreshes.
‘It’s not the same,’ says Gemma, not to be comforted. ‘Though I have tried. But there’s such a shortage of babies to adopt: only idiots go through with unwanted pregnancies these days, and who wants an idiot’s child? After hostilities ended in Vietnam Hamish flew me out there – he had a consignment of mutated orchids from the defoliated areas to collect – but I couldn’t see a baby I liked. Then I came across Annie, who was widowed and pregnant, and flew her back here to oversee the pregnancy, but I’m afraid her husband turned out to be merely foxing dead – he’d been in the Southern Government – and the baby was born prematurely and died, and I was left with Annie and Johnnie, and no baby. All my life I have been dogged by the unexpected. Nothing turns out right for me. Even this cake I am making now – I have to take the most stringent precautions, or else it will most certainly not rise. When I was with Great-Aunt May I could throw them together and they never went wrong. Now the light has failed me and I must put my faith in domestic science. My mother could never bake a proper cake, according to Great-Aunt May.’
Gemma clutches the pendant she wears. It seems a cheap and shoddy thing, to Elsa, containing an old-fashioned artificial pearl.
‘But at least,’ says Gemma, ‘I have never had to endure the swelling up, the grossness, of pregnancy, or the humiliation of giving birth.’
‘It’s not that part I mind,’ says Elsa. ‘I think I’d rather enjoy all that. It’s just afterwards. Never going anywhere without a bottle and a bagful of bits and pieces, and disturbed nights, and never really doing what you want, or as you like, ever again.’
‘I’d have a nanny to see to all that,’ says Gemma. ‘If only I had your temperament.
‘If only,’ adds Gemma, ‘I had your body.’
Gemma eyes Elsa speculatively. Elsa shuffles her large and shapely feet, none too clean between the toes.
‘For all I know,’ says Elsa, nervously, ‘I’m completely infertile. I’ve been on the pill since the beginning, so how would I know.’
‘I am quite sure, Elsa,’ says Gemma firmly, ‘that you are abundantly, gloriously fertile, and if I were you I’d throw away your horrid pills and find out.’
Elsa is too shocked to reply. Gemma bears the cake tin, lined, greased, and floured (although clearly non-stick) and two-thirds full of a light, white, swirly mixture which seems barely to contain its own energy, in its impatience to be rising and hardening, and is clearly of the male gender, to the oven in the wall. The oven has especial magnetic doors, to prevent any inadvertent slamming and consequent collapse of the rising batter following upon sudden loss of carbon dioxide.
‘And are you looking forward to meeting your stepdaughter tomorrow?’ asks Gemma, lightly.
‘I mightn’t stay,’ says Elsa. ‘Victor’s not too keen on my staying.’
‘I hope he’s not ashamed of you?’
‘No. If he’s ashamed of anyone he’s ashamed of them,’ says Elsa, with brilliant clarity. ‘And since I’m not married to Victor, and don’t want to be, I’m not Wendy’s stepmother. We’ve finished with all those titles. Wife, husband, in-laws, steps and so on. They were the cause of all the trouble.’
‘You may change the system,’ says Gemma. ‘You may do without the bits of paper – the marriage certificate, the birth certificate, the deeds of the house, and the mortgage papers – but the people involved remain much the same. There is really no escape.’
Gemma summons Johnnie, and says something to him which Elsa cannot hear, and then leads Elsa through to the buttery where the evening’s mayonnaise is in trouble. A fault has developed in the oil-drip feed, and the egg-yolk has failed to coagulate.
‘Will you do it by hand for me?’ asks Gemma to Elsa. ‘I’m afraid my wrists tire so easily! It’s rather a tedious occupation, but I’ll go on with my story while you do.’
So Elsa sits, with aching left wrist, dripping oil, drop by drop from a jug, into a bowl of egg-yolk held steady at the base by a damp cloth – fetched steaming from the steriliser in wooden tongs – and beats with aching right hand, and Gemma, cursed or blessed, sits and smiles, and talks, and fingers her cheap pendant.
1966.
Years, years ago.
Mr First was gone, back to his office.
Gemma’s happy mood was spoilt.
Gemma took the paperknife and stabbed it into the lime-green desk, causing flakes of plastic to leap into the air. Again and again, she struck, and wished the desk was human flesh. But whose? Her own? Mr First’s? Or even Mr Fox’s? Gemma hardly knew. It was the flesh of all the living world she hated, and wished to hurt. And would no one come to stop her?
Surely. Great-Aunt May, where are you now?
No one. Stab, and stab again!
Perhaps the blade would break and fly into her face and blind her.
For such was Gemma’s conviction that she led a charmed life, that she could afford the luxury of such dreadful thoughts. And where was Mr Fox? Gemma had dreamed of him all night, and imagined that such dreams must surely be reciprocal. Had it meant nothing to Mr Fox?
Mr Fox, where are you? Gemma needs you, wants you.
Her need, her want, rings through the universe.
Mr Fox, I am unused, I am waiting. Defy my need, defy your own existence. I am the empty vessel of the Almighty.
Mr Fox, do you hear? Are you deaf?
Where are you?
Hidden away upstairs in your penthouse, watching Wimbledon on the television screen which nestles in the heart of a great yellow knitted orchid? Or gone out the evening before, to spend the dark hours in nameless debauchery, and not yet returned?
Mr Fox, you are unfair.
Stab, and stab again.
‘Destruction is not pretty,’ a voice behind her said.
Mr Fox.
‘Don’t damage things, Gemma. Value them. Temper fades. Weals in wood endure forever, witness to the dark side of our nature. People heal. Things do not. Has Mr First upset you?’
‘Yes.’
‘He upsets me too, my dear, but holds a purse-string or so, so bear with him for my sake. But perhaps, don’t be alone with him too long. A bad temper and a mean nature is more infectious than an attack of measles. As with ugliness, it rubs off. Too long exposure to Mr First might be dangerous, Gemma, in more ways than one. See, already, how you are driving the knife into that poor pretty desk? I’m sure that yesterday you would not have dreamt of doing such a thing.’
Gemma turned slow luminous eyes upon her employer. Mr Fox stretched out his elegant, manicured hand and touched his typist’s cheek.
‘Gemma,’ he said. ‘Gemma. It is a lovely name. I’m glad we found you, or at least that Miss Hilary did: she is very good to us and understands our needs. Now kindly feed the parrots and give them fresh water. Not from the tap. They prefer bottled spa water from the Midi: they have a natural discrimination which must be encouraged. It keeps their feathers spruce. And at mid-day – neither earlier nor later – you will come up to the penthouse, Gemma, for dictation.’
‘My shorthand isn’t very good.’
‘I am pleased to hear it, and not at all surprised. Language is too beautiful, too serious, too subtle in its proper form for a sensitive person to easily reduce to scrawls upon a page. Mr Pitman is responsible for more cultural debasement than was ever laid at poor Genghis Khan
’s door.’
‘Yes, Mr Fox.’
Genghis Khan. Who’s Genghis Khan?
‘All the same, I do hope you are a fast writer. I don’t want my words to be wasted, lost in thin air.’
‘No, Mr Fox.’
‘Thank you, Gemma. Pretty child.’
And Mr Fox danced away on light feet up the circular stairs, coloured lights from the ever circling chandelier catching upon his pale suit, with its interwoven hint of glitter. And his diamonds, or what passed for diamonds, flashed as he went; the lapel pin, the ring, the bracelet, the pendant lurking in the bushy hairs of his chest; could they be real?
Yes. They could. They were.
Mr Fox, dandy.
The absurdity, the glory of the extreme.
How Mr Hemsley would have snorted: how the doctor, the dentist and the butcher would have sneered. Yet how they would all have envied.
Mr Fox, oh, Mr Fox, you are an idiot, and Gemma loves you. She has searched the universe, and found you.
People heal, things do not. So Mr Fox spoke to Gemma, falsely.
Did Gemma heal, after the death of her mother? Gemma was only three years old when her mother died, absorbing sorrow into growing brain, and bone, and tissue. Did her nature take a twist and a turn, like a gnarled pear tree branch grafted on to a young apple tree? For all that Great-Aunt May took little Gemma into her own bed after the funeral, and consoled the small cold body, by night, with the warmth of her older, tougher being, did little Gemma really heal?
Little Gemma, waking, in spite of Great-Aunt May, would see her dead mother’s face pressed against the windowpane, calling to be let in.
Or do you think Gemma withstood, without some alteration in temperament, the sight of her earlier, living mother, coughing blood into the cracked scullery sink, her gaunt face reflected back from a window rattling in the cold north wind?
Do you think Gemma survived, unscathed, the anonymity of her father, that roving repertory actor, who scattered his seed backstage, or in the alleys round the theatre, or in theatrical lodging houses: children springing like flowers where he walked, or at any rate thrust his procreative loins? Growing up to live, and partly live.
