by Weldon, Fay
Damaged people go on living: hide the damage from themselves; eat, sleep, most fervently reproduce themselves, laugh, cry, even offer up some verisimilitude of love, but are never what they could have been, should have been.
Mr Fox, Leon Fox, dancing up to his penthouse, partly living, mostly dying, clinging to illusion, power, and grandeur with his well-manicured fingernails, how he snatched at the surface of other people’s lives!
Mr Fox, Leon Fox, up in his penthouse room, stared at his face in the Art Nouveau mirror, and feared the falling of his hair and the rotting of his teeth.
Downstairs Gemma fed the parrots their daily ration of birdseed, and refilled their cut-glass water bowls.
‘Mr Fox’s father was a waiter at the Ritz,’ said Marion, back in the office after making a pendant delivery to the Dorchester, where a visiting film-tycoon had touched down on his way to Tokyo: touching here, touching there, living on front-money for a film which never would be made, never could be made.
‘Only nobody’s supposed to know, so don’t let on I told you.’
‘A waiter! I don’t believe you.’ Gemma was shocked.
‘A very bad waiter too,’ said Marion. ‘He hated food and he hated rich people. They say Leon is over-compensating. That was a very rude pendant Mr Fox did for that film-tycoon. In gold, too. A naked girl sitting on a fat man’s knees while he was doing goodness knows what, I didn’t look too closely. There was a magnifying glass in the box – there always is – but I didn’t use it. Our clients seem to love to be insulted. It was a portrait, if you ask me. Mr Fox couldn’t bear to deliver it himself, I had to go. You know what he’s like about other people’s physical appearance. I don’t know how he puts up with me. Mind you, it’s fat people he can’t abide, most of all. And I suppose I’m just stocky, not really fat.’
‘Mr Fox must be wonderful with his hands,’ was all Gemma would say, and it was then that Marion caught sight of the paperknife, sticking point down into the lime-green desk. It quivered, as she looked. What made it shudder so? Was it the seagulls, which now thudded, in a sudden spasm of senseless flocking against the convex sheets of glass; or the nearer, gentler flutter of parrots’ wings? The birds were lively today. Sometimes they would perch silently on their bare branches, hour after hour, beady eyes flickering, sulking behind silver mesh, which they could all too easily evade, if they had the wish. Then some impulse of light or noise, or distant rhythm, would animate them, as now, and they would flutter, squirm, squawk and eventually, defying the symbol of their servitude, fly up and over the silver mesh, and about the room, and batter against the windows. Sometimes the birds inside and the birds outside would, between them, shatter the glass with the clash of their discontent, and feathers and even specks of blood would fly.
The knife, held in the flimsy flaking plastic, toppled and fell even as Gemma turned her attention to it. Marion’s stolid face, drained of colour, was given an unexpected pattern of light and shade, of grief and gauntness, as if the marks of daily experience, daily endurance, daily horror, lingered only marginally beneath her pallid skin.
‘What are you doing with that knife?’ asked Marion, in dead tones.
‘Nothing,’ said Gemma, much like little Alice, surprised in mischief. And she went across and picked it up and tested the sharpness of the blade.
‘Put it down,’ said Marion.
‘Mr First said he’d cut my throat with it, Marion,’ said Gemma with haughty blitheness, ‘if I didn’t go out to lunch with him.’
Marion neither smiled nor relaxed.
‘Then perhaps you’d better,’ she said, carefully.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Gemma, startled. ‘He’s only a dirty old man.’
As if dirty old men were not to be pitied, understood, and had no right to the satisfaction of their needs, but could be dismissed out of hand!
‘No older than Mr Fox.’
‘I can’t believe that. Mr Fox has lots of hair.’
‘It’s woven hair.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A plastic surgeon takes strands of pubic hair and grafts it on to the scalp. That’s why Mr Fox’s hair is so springy and curly. It’s woven. Gemma, I don’t think you can go on working here.’
‘Why not?’
This job, her shared room with Marion, her love for Mr Fox – these were all Gemma had in life: the foundation blocks on which her future was to be built.
Why not? Why not, indeed?
‘It’s not safe.’ Marion’s head was lowered. Again the gauntness, the look of madness. Well that, of course, was what it was. Marion was mad. Her parents knew it. And that was why there had been talk of homes, or putting away: why Marion still lived with her parents, hadn’t broken away to start her own life. Marion was mad.
Oh, God, thought Gemma, now what have I got into? Will Marion take the knife and plunge it into my heart? That was the kind of thing, in Gemma’s experience, that mad people did.
Mrs Dove had been mad. Mrs Dove the butcher’s wife had killed her two children, and then herself, to save them all (or so she whispered, dying) from the Roundheads. Mrs Dove lived in a wooden house halfway up a hill at the end of an unmade road: the butcher used to come home in the evenings up to his elbows in dried blood. It was his joke. He had a round bald head, and little puffy eyes, and drank a great deal of beer. Mrs Dove had a four-mile walk into the village, and suffered from phlebitis; few people cared to visit her. The cottage smelt. The children, girls, had long hair, which she arranged carefully, with curling tongs, into Cavalier ringlets. Poor little dead girls, saved forever from the Roundheads; good dead butcher’s wife, mad as a hatter.
Nothing wrong with her, a few said, except him. Poor him, most people said. Married to a mad woman. Worse, a mad woman who gave herself airs, to the extent of putting her death before her life. What arrogance! That’s the worst of madness – the arrogance that goes with it. The determination to keep others out, to see the world as you choose to see it, not as others assure you that it is. Peopling the world with Cavaliers and Roundheads! It all ended in death, and more blood than even the butcher had dreamt of: of course, it did. Death is the only sensible way out for people who will not, cannot, relinquish their belief in a world that others do not see.
‘Not safe?’ Gemma humoured Marion. Gemma was restored, brave as a blind bat tangling in a lion’s mane. Thus she had humoured little Alice when the latter saw visions. Dead Mr Hemsley, at the top of the stairs, shaking his fist at his fifth, his youngest daughter.
Mad!
‘But yesterday you were so keen on my staying here.’
‘Yesterday was different.’
‘You want them for yourself, don’t you.’ Gemma was spiteful. ‘Mr Fox and Mr First. You’re jealous, because Mr First wants to take me out to lunch, and I took Mr Fox’s coffee up. You just don’t like competition.’
‘It’s not like what you think. Please put the knife down. It turns me over to see you with it. Put it back in the desk drawer where it belongs, and forget it.’
‘But there’s blood on the blade,’ said Gemma, and so indeed there was. A few flakes of rusty brown still clung to the pitted blade.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Marion. ‘It’s not blood, it’s rust. It must be rust. I had a dream about that knife, if you want to know. It’s been about the office for a long time. It’s very sharp. Ophelia, the last girl, broke a fingernail, and didn’t have her nail scissors, and tried to smooth it with the knife, and it slipped, and she cut her finger. There was blood everywhere. But we wiped it really clean. So it must be rust. It was after that I had the dream.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Come closer. The walls are very thin. They always are in new buildings. And the ceilings. Sometimes Mr Fox has model girls up there in working hours. The floorboards creak. Not like my parents’ bed creaks, though. A different pattern of noise altogether. I don’t know what happens, or what they do. I don’t care.’
‘Your dream,’ said Gemma, gr
itting her teeth. Presently she would go up to Mr Fox and take dictation, and nothing would do but that she, Gemma, would make the floorboards creak, in whatever pattern Mr Fox chose, and the more unlike the Ramsbottle’s creaking the better. Gemma would offer Mr Fox her virginity, and that surely could not be refused? In the meantime, there was Marion’s madness to be dealt with, disposed of.
Oh, foolish Gemma, foolish virgin.
‘I dreamt I was working late – overtime,’ moans mad Marion. ‘I was down in that corner, sorting out the bottom filing cabinet. The pink and black one. The drawers stick, I’m afraid. I’d stopped for a cigarette; I was sitting on the floor in the almost dark, having a little think about going to Scandinavia one day and seeing fiords. I’ve always wanted to see fiords. Mum and dad love beaches and garlic, but, as for me, I love towering mountains and deep, still water. You never know what’s there. In the Mediterranean you know all right. It’s all floating about on the top of the water. French letters and worse. None of your mystic samnite swords, mysterious, wonderful. One day I’ll get north, by myself. I’m not very good at being by myself. I get dreams.’
‘Is it a dream you’re telling me about, or can I get on?’ So Gemma chided little Hannah, who chattered night and day. ‘Because personally it’s nearly mid-day. I’m supposed to be going upstairs to take dictation from Mr Fox.’
And that’s not all I’ll take. Mr Fox will undress me, button by button, zip by zip, and stand me naked before him as I have stood before a mirror a thousand times, and his eyes will see what no man has ever seen before, and his hands go where no hands have been before.
Except the doctor. Damn the doctor.
‘Oh yes,’ said Marion. ‘The dream. Anyway there I was in the dream in that corner in the half dark dreaming of still water, when I heard a scream, and a woman came running in here, completely naked; and all the birds flew up suddenly, screaming and battering – though you know they can get out whenever they please – and she had no business being naked: she was very fat and all blobbing about, buttocks and breasts, and I saw it was Mr First’s sister –’
‘The one who killed herself?’
‘Mr First’s sister, that’s right. And he came running in after her, this man in my dream, from Mr First’s office, and he hit her on the head with that lamp. It’s alabaster.’
Alabaster is tricky stuff, prone to marking and discoloration. The round globe of the lamp which Gemma now regarded, was veined and mottled with a darkened patch where a head may well have hit. What a blunt instrument it would make, in the fevered, mad imagination of a disturbed typist!
‘It’s a very lovely, very gracious lamp,’ said Marion, ‘but heavy, I’ve noticed that. The woman fell, and that seemed to make him angry, as if she should have risen again, seeing stars, like a comic fat woman in a cartoon: and he bent over her and tried to get a ring off her finger, but he couldn’t. You know what rings are when you’ve put on weight. And he just picked up that knife and he sliced at it in a temper, and the finger and the ring still on it flew across the room and landed in my lap. I was wearing my best beige skirt. I just crouched, terrified. I thought, now he’ll murder me. But he didn’t look for the finger, or the ring, or see me. He just opened the window – you can, you know, there’s a special lever for the window cleaner, which pivots them open; terribly dangerous – and he toppled her out. There was blood all over the floor from her finger, you can see the marks still, though I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed –’
‘That was where Ophelia cut her finger. You told me so yourself. You’re mad, Marion.’
‘I’m not mad. It’s not mad to dream. It’s very good for the persona. And while his back was turned I nipped out and I heard the squeal of brakes and shouts, and when I got down to the street there was this crowd and oh, Gemma, Gemma –’
‘It must have been very upsetting for you, Marion, Mr First’s sister jumping the way she did. No wonder you have dreams.’
‘But I think I had the dream before she jumped. I don’t know. It’s all muddled up.’
‘Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist.’
‘I did. He gave me valium. The worst part of the dream was what I did with the finger. I took it home and put it in the top drawer in my bedroom. With all my nice things. You know, scarves, and belts and nail-varnish. I wrapped it in tissue, with a bit of cotton wool at the end in case it leaked blood.’
‘Your mum and dad are right,’ observed Gemma. ‘You need a holiday.’
‘If it was a dream.’ Marion was tearful. ‘If it wasn’t for real. How can a girl be sure? I remember what happened in the dream much more clearly than I remember what happened last year at the Canary Isles. There was this waiter. My mum and dad are always going on at me to have a holiday romance, so I did try, with a bottle of red Spanish and the waiter behind a windbreak, but I could hardly remember a thing the next day to tell them. They do like to be told things. If you could find a fault with my mum and dad it’s the way they like to be told things.’
‘Of course it was a dream,’ said Gemma. ‘You’re frightened of Mr First in real life, so you’re frightened in dreams. Now I’m going up to Mr Fox to take dictation.’
Marion opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again: a look of spite crossed her face, as would cross Hermione’s when she blew down Hannah’s card houses and pretended it was the draught that did it.
‘Go on up,’ said Marion. ‘See if I care.’
You care all right, thought Gemma. You love Mr Fox. Clearly, the whole world loved Mr Fox, since Gemma did. And Gemma, with a hardness, a coldness she did not know she possessed – well, all of us are nice, charming enough people, until tried by circumstances and hard times, and then, and only then, do we find out what we really are – adjusted her hair in the mirror, and pursed her lips and made – and all for poor plain Marion’s benefit – the faces any pretty girl does make in the mirror, and took a shorthand pad, and Marion’s freshly-sharpened pencils, and ran upstairs to Mr Fox’s lair.
Round and round, up and up.
Fifteen stairs to destiny.
‘Alice!’ cries Gemma, here and now stretching out her thin arms in welcome. And Elsa’s hand slips, so that a whole dollop of oil falls into the egg-yolk, and the thick mass instantly curdles and thins. ‘Alice, at last! How I’ve waited for you.’
Alice Hemsley, bold and beautiful, in black trousers and white shirt, tall, tanned and handsome, hook-nosed, swaggers hands on hips. Her hair is black, short and curly, and her cheeks full and pink beneath their bronze. Her voice booms huskily. Her bosom is high and very full. The eye searches it out, in the attempt to define male or female, and finding it, is both surprised and gratified.
There are tears of welcome in Gemma’s eyes. Elsa is unaccountably jealous.
‘I was angry with you,’ says Alice. ‘So I waited.’
‘What for? What have I done?’
‘You weren’t at your great-aunt’s funeral.’
‘She was dead. What difference did it make?’
‘You should have gone.’
‘I sent money for the burial. I’m crippled; it’s difficult for me to get about.’
‘You get off on holiday all right.’
‘If I’m going where I want, if there’s pleasure and warmth at the end of the journey, I manage quite well. If I don’t want to get where I’m going, the pain in my legs is intolerable. Do you want me to suffer?’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t,’ Alice is brisk. ‘Everyone else does.’
‘Were there many people at the funeral.’
‘The matron of the Nursing Home and myself.’
‘You see! I couldn’t have borne it.’
‘You never visited her. You left it to me.’
‘You’re good with the old and sick – I’m not.’
‘She gave up everything for you, and what did you do for her?’
‘Kept her company for sixteen years of my life. My life! A young girl cooped up with an old woman.’
; ‘Now you coop yourself up, since she’s not here to do it.’
‘I’m glad she’s dead,’ says Gemma, savagely. ‘Her whole life was a reproach to me. She was so good – and where did it get her? Ten years crippled with arthritis and two people at her funeral.’
‘And how many will you have if you go on like this?’
‘I’ll pay an attendance fee. Then I’ll have hundreds.’
Elsa is forgotten. Elsa leaves, before the state of the mayonnaise is noticed, and goes to her room, to take her forgotten pill, quickly, before worse befalls. But she cannot find the packet in the otherwise empty desk drawer where she put it, and though she searches everywhere it does not come to light, which, thinks Elsa, puts an altogether different complexion on everything.
9
‘Of course,’ says Victor gloomily at dinner, ‘at the first cold snap they’ll turn on the central heating and that will be the end of everything.’
‘In what way?’ enquires Elsa. Elsa and Victor dine alone, on thick pea soup, cold game pie served with potato duchesse and coleslaw (the sauce a vinaigrette, and not mayonnaise) followed by chocolate mousse and cream. The Buddha gazes down upon the two diners. Annie waits upon them, her hands obliging, her mind clearly absent, bent upon some political reflection or another.
‘All the good furniture will warp and split.’
‘They’ve got to keep warm.’
‘The Jacobeans managed to keep warm without central heating. So did the Georgians, the Victorians, and the Nouveau Artistes, and not only did they look after the artefacts of the past, they made good stuff of their own. And what’s happened to us? Factory-made rubbish and central heating. The dawn of comfort was the sunset of creativity.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Elsa, and then, ‘Couldn’t we just go home now while no one’s watching? Just get the car and go.’
Victor has already considered this possibility. It would be possible to smuggle the library ladder out, under the back floor of the Volvo; on penalty, of course, of losing Hamish’s friendship and the furniture in the billiard room, but keeping Elsa for himself. The car, however, is now locked away behind electronically sealed doors in one of Hamish’s garages.
