by Weldon, Fay
‘I suppose,’ said Gemma as an afterthought, ‘Shepherds’ pie is not the sort of thing you meant.’
‘No. Though it might just do on a special evening of English cuisine. If the mince was sirloin and the mushrooms fresh. Mediterranean cookery is the in thing. Garlic, tomato purée, fresh herbs, and olive oil.’
‘You can’t buy those things in Cumberland.’
‘Can’t you? No wonder you came south. Come through to the kitchen.’
And Gemma spent the rest of the day in the steel and glass kitchen that lurked behind a wall of vines, as Mr Fox’s amenuensis. Gemma was useful: she peeled the garlic cloves, opened the cans of tomato purée, pounded cardamom seeds, slivered salt pork, drained boiling beans, sliced sausage and browned nuggets of best lamb, deftly and prettily, as Mr Fox started preparations for his own special brand of cassoulet, to be served at Friday’s party.
Did Mr Fox want Gemma for her body, for her self, or as kitchen hand?
For myself, cried Gemma in her heart, for myself!
‘When Marion dreamed her dream,’ Mr Fox said casually, as Gemma scoured the saucepans, ‘where did she stand to witness the event? Or did she float unseen, as if she were the guardian of the late and little lamented Joanna First?’
‘Down in the corner between the filing cabinet and the wall – it’s all greys and blacks down there. Quite soothing.’
‘And she saw Mr First’s face clearly?’
‘There’s not much mistaking it, is there.’
‘I hope she doesn’t talk about her dream. It wouldn’t be wise. It might make Mr First quite angry.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would.’
‘Perhaps you should tell her so.’
‘I will if you want me to.’
‘What else would you do if I wanted you to?’
‘Anything,’ said Gemma simply.
And Mr Fox paused in the reading of a recipe book and said, ‘On Saturday week I am going to Tangiers to see a client. He wishes to be fitted with gold thonging for his shins. Will you come with me?’
‘What time on Saturday?’
‘Do you only travel at certain hours on Saturdays, Gemma?’
‘It’s just that I have to collect my wages from the Agency, or I can’t live. Between ten and eleven.’
‘One forgets. How one forgets!’ Mr Fox struck his white smooth hand to his handsome brow.
‘They pay me twenty pounds. How much do you give them for me?’
‘Forty.’
‘It’s exploitation!’ Gemma’s face grew pink with indignation. ‘Life is exploitation,’ observed Mr Fox, who seemed neither surprised nor put out by the fact. ‘If one wasted time worrying about it, I’m sure one would get nothing done at all. Our plane goes at mid-day. You will be able to collect your wages before we leave.’
A party invitation, and a weekend too!
‘And Gemma,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Don’t talk to anyone else about Marion’s dream, will you.’
‘I won’t,’ said Gemma. ‘I won’t.’
Gemma smiles at Elsa, and says goodnight. Alice wheels her to her room.
10
Hamish comes to Elsa in the middle of the night. So King David came to his young wife, no doubt, to warm his old, cold bones. But whoever cared about her?
First, kindly Hamish typed the work Gemma had left for Elsa to do. One top, one pink, two blues and a yellow. Six letters to various London department stores, Gamages, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, Barkers and Bourne and Hollingswoith, requesting details of all models of washing-up machines currently available on the market, specifying colours in stock and alternatives out of it, maximum and minimum measurements, method of waterflow, rinse-aid dispensing, and so on.
‘I think Gamages has gone out of business,’ said Hamish, at the first letter. ‘The trouble with Gemma is that she lives in the past.
‘One of Gemma’s troubles,’ added Hamish presently.
And he typed on, a thin figure in a red silk dressing gown and sealskin slippers. Elsa lay with the bedclothes up to her chin, considering her past, and her future, the end of her dreaming and the beginning of reality. She was sleepy and warm, and not unhappy. Hammish had brought an electric fan heater with him, since the central heating seemed to lose its efficacy on this floor of the building, or had been turned off for reasons of economy.
‘I enjoyed being in the Army,’ said Hamish, over the second letter, ‘much like the orphanage but the food was better, and I made my name as a typist. That’s what happiness is, so far as I’m concerned. A sense of achievement. I feel I have achieved very little in life.’
‘Your money?’ Elsa enquired.
‘It means nothing.’
‘Then why don’t you give it all away?’
Hamish’s fingers paused for a second or so, before they resumed their efficient rhythmic dancing over the typewriter keys.
‘It’s never made me happy, so why should I inflict it on anyone else?’ he said, triumphantly.
Over the third letter Hamish said – ‘I spent some months in an open prison once. Nothing criminal, you understand. A small misunderstanding about the definition of fraud. It was much like the Army, only without the typing. I didn’t enjoy that. On the other hand I didn’t dislike it all that much. Never having had, in my life, a sense of freedom, the enforced loss of it did not seem too distressing. Life itself is a prison. I long for the end of it.’
Now he turns and stares at Elsa, remembering why he is here.
‘Lovely thing,’ he says. ‘You don’t feel like that about life, do you?’
‘No,’ says Elsa.
‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,’ he says. ‘I find it rather embarrassing.’
‘I don’t mind,’ says Elsa, and she doesn’t. She is grateful that he is doing her typing, and flattered that he has confided in her.
Victor, she concludes, talks more and says less.
‘Just let me finish the typing,’ says Hamish.
Over the fourth letter Hamish says, ‘I am a nicer person than I used to be. Living with Gemma stretches the imagination. Gemma, on the other hand, is not so nice as she was. Sometimes I think the devil has got into her soul. She did not lose her virginity to me, but to a rather bad man – a business partner of mine. A woman’s first lover injects her with good or bad. Did you know that? Who was your first lover?’
‘Victor.’
‘Really?’ Hamish sounds interested. ‘Then I will be your second lover?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ says Hamish contentedly. ‘Victor should not be all that difficult to neutralise.’
Hamish, stop typing. Come to bed.
Victor, thank you. You have revealed my true nature to me. You have peeled away the layers of love, fear, fidelity, dependence – call it what you like, and left me naked and unashamed. Hamish, come to bed.
And indeed, Elsa is now consumed by an erotic energy; a desire to sleep not just with Hamish, but with all the men in the world. Hey you over there! Man! Come to bed. Handsome, young, rich, powerful, or otherwise fortunate – is that you? Excellent! Come inside. Because what I know and perhaps you don’t is that by some mysterious but certain process of osmosis I will thereupon draw something of these qualities into myself. Don’t run away – I need you! I must have you. I must sap your good fortune, drawing it into myself through the walls of my vagina, gaining my pleasure through your loss. Sex is not for procreation, it is for the sharing out of privilege.
You over there! Poor old man. Ugly, tired, crippled, half-witted – come along, hurry, quickly, inside, out of the cold! I’ve something to give you; I am generosity itself: I will share my stolen goods with you; I will redistribute good fortune through the media of my generative organs; I will make the world a fairer, better place, gaining my own pleasure through degradation, falling into a final shudder of wonder, down there at the slimy roots of the world.
You and me, the outcasts of the world.
Come to bed,
Hamish.
I will take some of Victor’s stolen energy and hand it on to you. I will take some of your power, your ability to control the world, which Victor badly needs, and pass it on to him tomorrow.
I will mix his cheerfulness with your gloom, and balance the world better.
So long, just so long, as sex does not stop its dancing game, and settle back grimly where it belongs: so long as I don’t get pregnant. So long as my generative organs generate energy and not simply flesh and blood.
Well, that’s easily managed. Since Victor seldom actually comes anywhere that could possibly make me pregnant, presumably I can manage matters likewise with Hamish.
Hamish come to bed. Grey, dry, gloomy Hamish, difficult and kindly. Old Hamish, rich Hamish. Let me take some of that: something of your past, something of your power. I won’t suck you dry: don’t worry. Not quite.
‘Will you let Victor have the library ladder?’ asks Elsa, as Hamish types the fifth letter.
But Hamish smiles his rare smile, and does not reply.
When Hamish has finished the sixth letter he says, ‘The trouble with Gemma is, she hasn’t enough to do. We already have three dishwashers.
‘Another of Gemma’s troubles,’ he adds, presently.
When Hamish has collated and piled the finished typing, properly and neatly, he crosses to Elsa’s bed and tentatively pulls back the sheet.
‘We all have our ways of being perfect,’ he says. ‘You have yours and I have mine.’
Hamish turns out the light and gets in the bed beside her, and lies cold and still. It is a very narrow bed.
‘We could just lie here,’ he says, his voice unexpected in the dark. ‘If that’s what you’d prefer. We are our own people as well as Gemma’s.’
She does not understand what he means.
‘Do what you want,’ says Elsa. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ says Hamish, ‘which is more to the point. My eyes are bigger than my parts, always have been. I’ve never been quite like other people. Always on the outside, looking in. My mother didn’t like me. She kept my sister at home; put me in an orphanage. She despised her husband, my father. She complained I took after him. She only kept him to torment him. The way Gemma keeps me now.’
The sudden spurt of bitterness stirs him into life. Elsa senses, rather than feels, his organ hardening, rising.
‘Poor Gemma,’ says Hamish, ‘it’s not her fault. The devil’s in her. I should have saved her. I should have saved my sister too, but I didn’t. I need women, I even love them, but I can’t say I like them very much.’
Hamish sighs, quiescent again.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Elsa, kindly, turning towards him, enfolding him in soft, dark maternal arms. ‘Really sorry.’
‘There’s something unlikeable about me, mind.’ Hamish complains. ‘That’s why my mother never visited me when I was a child. She’s still alive. She lives in poverty and misery, and suffers from hyperthermia, I hear. I don’t care. Why should I care? She did nothing for me. Why should I do anything for her?’
‘You must have loved her once. You have to get back to that,’ says Elsa with wisdom beyond her years, ‘or you’ll be miserable for ever.’
‘I suppose you love your mother,’ he says bitterly.
‘Oh yes, yes!’
Of course she does. Loves her, fears her, pities her, resents her, escapes her, joins her, loves her. Is saved.
‘I might send her something one day,’ says Hamish cautiously, his head buried babylike in the crook of Elsa’s warm arm. ‘Buy her love, if that’s the only thing that works. Perhaps if you could help a little, Elsa? With my present predicament, I mean.’
Elsa’s large warm hand creeps down; persuades him for a time into automatic rather than willing vigour; and then she falls asleep. She is tired.
‘I told Gemma I was too old to be a father,’ she thinks she hears Hamish say, through vague dreams of Victor, and half waking later, finds that Hamish is on top of her and inside her, and that she is lying relaxed, legs apart, arms above her head, as a small child sleeps. Hamish, gaining confidence, covers her eyes, her mouth, her ears with unexpected kisses, blocking her away from her senses. His own face is wet with tears.
‘Hamish,’ she wishes to say, remembers she ought to say, as she would with Victor, who is clearly altogether a more controlled, more experimental, and less desperate man in his sexual behaviour than is Hamish, ‘let’s do it another way, not this way, more exciting’ – but Hamish is clearly beyond any rational communication, and as for herself, she is carried away now beyond reason, and the possibility of becoming pregnant is now a side-issue, a bonus if it were to be so, the rare presence of the god, the amazing illumination, which repeated ritual entreats, and entreats, so powerfully and repeatedly indeed as to almost forget its own original intent.
Nor does Elsa feign orgasm, as she does with Victor. Old Hamish, unloved but desired, with the troubled prostate gland, his sad, unwilling organ, convulses her with an implosion of abandonment: as if streams of sensation, running strong again, the ground grateful after drought, had finally filled up and overflowed the black pool of desire and destiny: that same pool her mother bequeathed her at her birth, empty, dry, but waiting to be filled, as her own mother did for her, and her mother’s own mother, back to the beginning of time.
‘I like sex,’ says Elsa, meditatively and gratefully after Hamish has finished and withdrawn, and lies startled and gratified, beside her again. ‘That’s the trouble: I like sex.’
‘No trouble,’ says Hamish. ‘No trouble.’
‘So long as I don’t get pregnant,’ says Elsa, back in the real world again. Ah, sorrow. Victor waiting somewhere else; Gemma wronged; herself discovered; the antique shop waiting. Real life.
‘But I thought that was the whole point,’ says Hamish, but again Elsa does not hear. She is asleep.
She wakes briefly when Hamish leaves the room. She thinks she hears him or someone, turn the key in the lock, and means to get out of bed to investigate, but, of course, merely goes back to sleep.
Gemma goes to Victor’s room in the middle of the night. He wakes, startled by some unnatural noise, and turning on the bedside lights, finds Gemma gazing down at him from her chair.
‘Let me in,’ Gemma complains. ‘I’m cold.’
She wears a fine wool deep blue gown. Her hair is pale and smooth, her eyes large and bright, her skin young in the lamplight.
What can Victor do?
He leans forward and up and stretches out his arms and she half tumbles, half falls, to lie beside him.
He unwraps her from her robe, and lies her white neat body beside his and covers them both, for decency and warmth, with the quilt.
‘I’m so helpless,’ she murmurs. ‘And Elsa is with Hamish. I don’t know how you can sleep.
‘One shouldn’t mind such things,’ she adds, placing his warm brown hand on her chilly white breast, ‘but one does.’
She wears her mother’s pendant. It falls between her breasts. Victor leans on his elbow and looks down at Gemma.
‘I won’t hurt you?’ he enquires.
‘Oh no, no. It might even bring me to life,’ she assures him earnestly. ‘The doctor said as much sex as possible, but I’m afraid with Hamish that is very difficult, though it’s recommended for him too. I am his wife: he respects me. He requires a wicked woman.’
‘Gemma, you seem quite wicked enough to me.’
‘Victor, make me warm: help me: drive the devil out of me: bring me to life.’
To bring Gemma to life: to make her walk again! Victor is his parents’ child.
How Victor’s mother rescued things: wasps from jam, woodlice from the flames, spiders from the bath. His father was as bad – ancient monuments from collapse, national institutions from disintegration, teeth from decay. In the end both moved to larger prey: the wasps, woodlice and spiders, the monuments, institutions and the molars were left to their own devices: all Victor’
s parents’ energies focused in upon the wretched of Europe. They would save civilisation itself, if they could.
And so they did, losing Victor on the way.
‘I’ll help you, Gemma,’ says Victor, kindly, his large bulk moving over hers. How both to exert his strength, expend his own energies, without crushing the strength from her? (So his mother pondered. How to wash the jam from the wasp, without drowning the poor creature?)
Gemma smiles, with icy invitation.
But surely Victor will melt the ice: or is it implacable, not ice at all, but chilly steel, running the length and breadth of her, allowing her not even the physical movement of her legs?
Gemma’s eyes remain open, wide-eyed and clear; her breath comes a little faster: she is otherwise composed.
‘You must leave Elsa alone,’ says Gemma coolly, to the flushed and impassioned Victor. ‘Leave her to me. She’ll be upset enough when she discovers.’
‘Discovers what?’
‘That her prince is a toad.’
Gemma laughs. Victor pauses. But since his making love to Gemma is in spite of her, and not because of her, he does not pause for long.
‘Stop talking,’ is all he says. ‘You’re not at the hairdressers.’
Gemma looks faintly puzzled.
‘But I always talk,’ she says. ‘What’s happening between my legs is nothing to do with my brain. Is it supposed to be?’
Victor is incensed. He turns her over on her face. Her mumbled protests stop. She pants, she moans, and finally cries out.
He turns her over again.
‘Good heavens,’ says Gemma lightly, ‘I feel like a pancake on a griddle: turned and turned again. Hamish only ever does it one way. I talk to him all the time. Is that wrong? How is one to know?’
‘Poor bloody man,’ says Victor, crossly; and then, happily, if wrongly, ‘That won’t please Elsa. One position!’
‘That’s enough,’ says Gemma, startled, as Victor lies her on her side, with himself beside her: it seems calm and companionable, to him. ‘That’s more than enough. Stop it!’
‘Stop behaving like the Queen,’ says Victor sharply. ‘You’re only the typist, as you keep saying.’
