by Weldon, Fay
Hamish, no doubt, foresaw Victor’s plan.
Victor says as much to Elsa.
‘In any case,’ he adds, ‘the beds here are comfortable and I don’t think I can face the shop again tonight.’
‘I could make the shop much more comfortable,’ says Elsa, eagerly, ‘if only you’d let me. We could curtain off the whole raised dais and have a little cooker and a permanent bed.’
Victor laughs, though gloomily.
‘You’ll be asking for fitted carpets next,’ he observes. ‘Scratch any woman and there’s a Janice waiting to get out.’
‘But it was you who said the shop was uncomfortable.’
‘That doesn’t mean I want it comfortable.’
Victor is irritated and irritable. Hamish has outwitted him. He does not enjoy it.
‘There’s a train at ten-thirty tomorrow,’ says Victor to Elsa. ‘I’ll drop you off at the station after breakfast, agree a price with Hamish through the day, and be with you by evening.’
Elsa raises her blue eyes to his.
‘Victor,’ she says. ‘I’m going back when you do, and not a moment before.’
Victor helps himself to more chocolate mousse. With Janice, he thought, I used to eat like this nightly. I was not forever rumbling, with a stomach full of brown rice and short-cooked vegetables, and a sprinkling of nuts: carbohydrate, roughage and protein, yin and yang, in proper proportion, ensuing long life and a cancer-free bowel. But is a long life with Elsa so much preferable to an early death with Janice? If I took Janice to a station, at least she would get on the train I thought best.
Janice is my wife. Elsa is the typist.
‘Are you ashamed of me?’ demands Elsa.
‘Not ashamed,’ says Victor, cautiously. Victor hates to tell lies.
He finds the act demeaning and undignified. But nor does he like to hurt, if he can help it. ‘It’s just that Janice and Wendy are serious, and you somehow aren’t. I don’t want them hurt. It’s a great pain to a woman of my wife’s generation to see herself supplanted. You have your life in front of you: hers is behind her. And as for Wendy, it is probably disturbing for her, in a Freudian sense, that you share a birthday with her. I hadn’t realised it, until Gemma pointed it out.’
‘My life is serious to me,’ protests Elsa, indignant.
‘Dear Elsa,’ says Victor, ‘I love you because you aren’t serious. Don’t you understand. Girls of nineteen aren’t renowned for their deep seriousness. Their egocentricity, perhaps.’
‘I’m only eighteen,’ says Elsa, ‘until tomorrow. Please don’t be like this. Don’t spoil my birthday for me.’
‘Don’t spoil my birthday for me!’ Victor marvels. ‘And please, having said it, don’t bore me ever again by claiming to be a serious person. Look how you left home – in a fit of pique. Look how you left your job – on an impulse. How you moved in with me, to share my sofa. On a whim.’
‘It wasn’t pique, or impulse, or whim – it was love. I loved you.’
‘Love may have been the excuse, but it certainly wasn’t the reason. I notice you put love in the past tense. At least you have the honesty to do that, with thoughts of Hamish in your mind. The lustful millionaire. You can’t even be serious about sex.’
‘All you think about is your library ladder. You think things are more important than people.’
Victor takes his cup of coffee to sit outside in the warm moonlight and be away from such petty wrangling. Janice seldom answered back.
Elsa goes to the sedan chair and telephones Marina, and presently feels better, having revenged herself on Victor by discussing his sexual predilections in some detail. Marina raises the possibility of a strain of voyeurism in her girlfriend’s boyfriend.
‘I wish I had your problem,’ says Marina, ‘I really do.’
The lights of the swimming pool are illuminated, dimming the moon. Where once the spiky shapes of trees could be seen glowing softly in celestial light against a hot starry sky, now all beyond the pool is dense, velvet black. Victor goes indoors, irritated by this abuse of nature.
Alice wheels Gemma to the side of the pool. Elsa follows. Alice wears a black one-piece suit, Gemma wears a white silk wraparound shift. Hot air from mighty blowers warms the already mild night.
‘You ran away,’ complains Gemma. ‘Spoilt the mayonnaise and ran away! Young girls find it so difficult to face the consequences of their actions. And you never met my Alice properly. I used to look after her when she was a little girl. Now she looks after me. She’s a trained physiotherapist. She is going to teach me how to walk again, aren’t you, Alice!’
‘All you have to do is decide to walk, and then you’ll walk,’ booms Alice. ‘You’re just lazy, and selfish, and spoilt.’
‘I have a hysterical paralysis,’ says Gemma, ‘which is scarcely my fault. You’re so old-fashioned, Alice.’
Elsa’s mouth drops open. Gemma beams at her.
‘There’s really nothing wrong with me,’ says Gemma, ‘except I haven’t been able to walk for more than a decade, of course.’
She claps her hands, and orders Elsa a glass of cold milk, and two whiskies for herself and Alice.
Alice unwraps Gemma from her silk shift.
‘I wish you’d take off that ridiculous pendant,’ she says.
‘It belonged to my mother,’ protests Gemma, clinging to it.
‘Much good she ever did for you,’ says Alice, lowering Gemma’s white, naked body into the pool with her massive golden arms. Gemma floats happily, her body slight and pretty, her arms thin, her legs likewise, but otherwise perfectly formed.
Alice jumps in beside Gemma, turns her on her front, and supports her waist. Gemma’s white arms splash feebly: her legs trail uselessly if prettily behind.
‘Kick,’ cries Alice. ‘Kick, Gemma, for all you’re worth.’
‘Can’t,’ moans Gemma.
‘Won’t, you mean,’ roars Alice. ‘I’m going to let you go. You’ll have to kick or you’ll drown.’
And she lets go of Gemma, but since Gemma seems perfectly happy to drown, has to catch her again, and even raise her head from the water.
‘It’s the pendant,’ says Gemma. ‘It weighs me down.’
‘Then take it off.’
‘Shan’t.’
Gemma emerges dripping and triumphant from the water and is patted dry. She has shaved her pubic hairs, which gives her body an air of depravity and innocence both. It seems to belong to a child, yet begins to show signs of age. It is as if Gemma’s body, saved from the shocks and storms of pregnancy, is fading before it has ripened – like sterilised milk kept too long, which taints and goes off, but can never turn suddenly, rottenly sour. ‘I left you some typing,’ says Gemma to Elsa when she is back in her chair. ‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes I did,’ says Elsa. ‘I’ll do it in the morning.’
‘Elsa’s such a wonderful typist,’ says Gemma, falsely, and Alice eyes Elsa without enthusiasm.
‘You’re like the opposite ends of a spectrum,’ observes Gemma.
‘Two female bookends supporting between you a whole row of alternative life forms. I am telling Elsa the story of my office days, Alice.’
‘Which version?’
‘Listen, and you’ll find out.’
1966.
Up went Gemma, up the circular staircase, to take shorthand from Mr Fox. If she tripped – if she fell – but of course she did not.
Girls in love do not often fall: they have magic wings upon their feet.
Gemma tapped on Mr Fox’s door.
Mr Fox, dressed in a white caftan and gold chain, opened the door to let her in.
‘Don’t tap on doors,’ he said. ‘Just open them. It’s vulgar to tap. Even butlers never tap on doors.’
‘What the butler saw,’ said Gemma, bright as a button, ‘and no wonder!’
‘You’re late,’ said Mr Fox, unimpressed.
‘Marion kept me. I’m sorry.’
‘Never apologise. If accu
sed of a fault, compound the offence by an even worse action. Was she chatting on? Marion frequently chats on.’
‘Yes, she was. I don’t think she’s all there.’
‘Really? She seems all too solid flesh to me.’
Mr Fox nodded towards the desk. Gemma sat in a seat shaped like an orchid. It was not very comfortable.
‘Don’t keep gaping, Gemma. It’s irritating. Learn not to be impressed.’
‘It’s just this room – oh-ow!’
A humming bird tangled in Gemma’s hair.
Mr Fox disentangled it, gently, lovingly. Was it the little fluttering bird he loved, or Gemma?
Gemma trembled at Mr Fox’s touch.
‘We should write to a client or two, I daresay. Lady Sylvie What’s it has had her ears altered by cosmetic surgery, the better to accommodate my ear pieces. She complains that gold is too heavy; she wants to know if there is some new lightweight alloy available, some spin-off from the space programme.’
‘It all makes work for the working man to do,’ said Gemma, brightly. So said the plumber, when Hortense had pierced the rain-water tank for the fourth time, with a home-made bow and arrow.
‘I am not a working man,’ said Mr Fox. ‘I am a creative artist. When I was a boy of twelve I went to my father’s place of employment, and there, sitting at a table sat the Begum, the wife of the Aga Khan. The glittering of her jewels will remain with me to the end of my days. How hard she worked, I thought, at being herself; and how triumphantly she succeeded. Where she walked, all eyes turned. My father was a waiter, and quite invisible. I tell you this only because I know Marion will already have let you know the details of my parentage – the insignificant can always be relied upon to diminish those they envy. She did, didn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘In any case I determined there and then to be significant, to work hard at my existence. Dictation is very boring. I shall leave it all, on second thoughts, to Mr First, who is a very boring person, and fortunately, fairly invisible. Apart from his penchant for young girls, of course, which sometimes brings him sharply into focus. I am giving a little party this week for a group of friends: we will eat a little food, smoke a little pot, get a little high. Nothing extreme. Will you join us?’
A party invitation!
Oh, Mr Fox.
Gemma was mesmerised by Mr Fox’s sing-song voice. She lifted her eyes to his: they were blue-green, and oddly blank; they roved to and fro; they reflected (had she but known it) a profound anxiety.
He loves me, was all Gemma thought. He knows I am a princess in disguise and not really a typist at all. That though I lie on a hundred mattresses, I can detect the pea beneath them all. Mr Fox’s fingers moved from Gemma’s cheek to her breast: it was a professionally inspired gesture, but how was she to know a thing like that?
Though where professionalism stopped, and eroticism began, who was to say?
‘Pretty,’ said Mr Fox. ‘A good regular shape. I did very well for a time with spun-sugar circlets for the breasts – in the fun-trifle range – but word got round that the stickiness spoiled the pleasure, rather than enhanced it, and demand fell off. Well, life is long and art is short.’
Gemma, with Mr Fox’s fingers at her breast, standing closer to a man than ever in her life before – except when approached by the doctor and dentist – felt his breath upon her cheek. It had a warm, sweet, pepsodenty smell, covering up some ranker, ferous odour: she welcomed it, and with it some essential corruption. To prefer what is bad, because it is exciting, to what is wholesome and pure is most certainly corrupt, and Great-Aunt May had told her so.
Mrs Hemsley had told Gemma so as well. So had the dentist’s wife. It was in the Bible, after all. Book of Judges. Bees nesting in a dead lion’s stomach: out of strength coming forth sweetness. If you have a mind for that kind of thing.
As Mrs Hemsley and the dentist’s wife did.
After the dentist’s death, Mrs Hemsley moved in with the dentist’s wife, at first for company and later for comfort as well. The children were grown and gone by then, except for Alice, once little, now big. The dentist’s wife presently qualified as a dentist herself, and took over her deceased husband’s practice, extracting his old fillings with a shocked and ultra-professional frown. Mrs Hemsley’s cupboard, once so bleak and bare, was soon stuffed with tinned crab, tinned salmon, tinned cream and such luxuries as the village store could afford. Here presently, where once Gemma had obtained her pound of lentils, her half stone of oatmeal, her quarter pound of butter, was to thrive a delicatessen counter, selling grammes of smoked salmon and kilogrammes of muesli, the better to please a changing clientéle, much reinforced by lady couples of a certain age and income, who had taken retirement cottages in the area. Even poor Mrs Dove’s cottage was bought up, converted, given running water and electricity, and the bloodstains of the floor erased by a power sander, engaged in bringing up the texture of the fine elm floorboards.
Alice qualified as a physiotherapist and unwillingly left home, her position usurped by the dentist’s wife. How unfair fate can be: poor little Alice, training herself so magnificently, in mind and body, to be her father’s vindication, her mother’s salvation, to be in the end unneeded! Self transcendence swept away, overwhelmed, by the dynamism of events. The dentist’s wife keeping Mrs Hemsley in every comfort – as many tinned black cherries as she likes, as much Heinz tinned custard – so that the money Alice sends home weekly is but a drop in the pool filled daily by the flow from the dentist’s widow’s practice.
Alice tears through the south on her motorbike, in the pay of the Avon County Council, peripatetic physiotherapist, sleeping bag and spirit store in her rucksack, travelling rough, strong hands at the service of the poor, the weak, the lonely, and the aged.
Gruff, kind Alice. Handsome Alice.
But this is now, and that was then.
Gemma was intoxicated by Mr Fox’s breath, lulled by his fingers’ peaceful, artistic exploration of her breast beneath its blouse.
‘Did Marion tell you anything else?’ enquired Mr Fox.
‘No.’
‘Nothing?’
‘She talked a little about Mr First’s sister.’
‘I was afraid of that. How the vulgar love to batten on tragedy.’
Mr Fox, Mr Fox, you really do not like Marion at all. Marion is my friend. Well, girlfriends must fall when boyfriends push.
That’s one of the laws of nature.
‘But why did Miss First do such a dreadful thing? Did she really jump, not just fall? I could never kill myself. I always want to know what happens next. They might land on the moon, or something, and if I were dead I’d never know.’
‘You are young: you are still curious. She was old. Better dead.’
‘To be old isn’t a crime.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘It will happen to all of us,’ Gemma protests.
‘But not yet. And besides Joanna First was ugly.’
‘People don’t kill themselves because they are ugly.’
‘They should.’
Gemma gaped. Mr Fox laughed, and bared Gemma’s left breast, and thoughtfully stroked her modest pink nipple.
‘Typists!’ he said. ‘Don’t be a typist for long, Gemma.’
Mr Fox bared Gemma’s right breast.
‘Quite symmetrical,’ he said. ‘That’s most unusual. You could usefully do some modelling for me, Gemma. Miss Hilary at Gallant Girls has come up trumps again.’
He rebuttoned her blouse; his interest, one might well believe, and more’s the pity, had indeed been professional. Gemma, whose instinct it had been, upon her uncovering, to fall into Mr Fox’s arms and have his mouth pressed to hers in passionate and adoring kisses, stood still swaying slightly in the force of unaccustomed desire, and greatly puzzled.
The fronds of a palm tree drifted gently above.
Presently she regained her balance.
‘Joanna First,’ said Mr Fox, appearing out of the undergrowt
h, ‘was better dead. She was stupid, gross, ugly and except that she was rich, and perhaps provided a little extra employment to the labouring masses, was of no use in the world. She did not speak, she whined. She was greedy. Well, we are all greedy, I daresay, but her greed lacked style. She would take my most beautiful jewels, slobbering, and put them on her gross fat fingers, and round her pendulous breasts: my navel gems would be invisible in the rolls of fat that swathed her belly. My armpit studs would be lost in a forest of coarse hair; and my sugar pubic-shields likewise. They were not meant for the likes of her. She made made my jewels ridiculous. She took the magic out of everything.’
‘So does her brother, Mr First.’
‘We need Mr First, Gemma. Just as we need Marion to do the typing and the filing. But we must not be contaminated. What else was Marion talking about?’
‘A silly dream she had.’
‘Let me guess. It won’t be hard. The Marions of this world always dream about their bosses. I hope you don’t dream of me, Gemma.’
‘No. Oh, no.’
Great-Aunt May had been right to worry about Gemma’s lies.
‘Marion dreamt she saw Mr First murder his sister, that’s all,’ said Gemma, lightly. ‘Saw him chop off her finger, and then throw her out of the window.’
‘Mr First did that? How gruesome!’ Mr Fox looked quite startled. ‘And how phallic. What happened to the finger?’
‘She put it in her drawer,’ said Gemma, and giggled.
‘With the ring still on it?’
‘It was only a dream,’ Gemma protested. But Mr Fox had stopped listening. He had seated himself at his camouflaged desk, and was leafing through folders of designs. He did not ask Gemma to sit down. She stood beneath her palm tree like some lost girl in a jungle and wondered sadly whether she should go or stay.
‘Can you cook?’ enquired Mr Fox, out of nowhere.
‘Shepherds’ pie,’ offered Gemma, eagerly. Mrs Hemsley’s favourite. On Saturday Gemma would buy a bottle of Heinz tomato sauce: on Sundays the girls would be allowed to finish the bottle on their midday shepherds’ pie. Their life was not without moments of glory – Gemma saw to that.
