by Weldon, Fay
Gemma giggles.
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I was happy then.’
She feels almost warm, to Victor. Or is it just his own heat reflecting off her smooth body.
‘Gemma!’ says a voice from outside; it is a deep, reproachful, powerful voice. ‘Gemma, are you in there? Gemma, I know you’re in there!’
Victor is still, startled. Gemma laughs, happily and loudly.
‘Gemma,’ says the voice, ‘oh Gemma, how could you!’
Is it Hamish’s voice, contorted by distress?
If so, what price Victor’s library ladder now? What price the furniture in the billiard room?
Ah, too dear, too dear. Careful now, or the deal will collapse.
Deals are so easily upset. Go carefully! The combatants engage upon a structure flimsier than you would believe: nothing more than the mood of the moment, propped up by past experience, sustained by future hopes; deep carpeted indeed, and in rollicking fashion, by the cheerful instinct to trade and self-enrich; but undermined by self-doubt, remorse, and a weary fatalism. I shall be poor: I shall always be poor: I am the wretched of the earth: the outsider, unloved, unliked. You may think me rich as Croesus, but you are wrong: what about tomorrow? You may believe me greedy as Midas; you misjudge me: I am throwing my wealth away doing you a favour, fool that I am: unhappy as Hamish? Yes, ah, yes! For the moment rich, for always poor.
Hamish, is that you knocking at the door? Then I must redress the balance: and you must win. Take my girl-friend, keep your library ladder: make me pay through the nose for the pile of worm-eaten rubbish in the billiard room: I will accept your terms, allow you to profit out of me. I will have to. I have cheated: taken your wife, though with the best motives in the world, and that was not part of the deal.
‘It can’t be Hamish!’ Victor asks Gemma, implores the heavens.
‘Go away!’ shouts Gemma to the door. ‘Of course it’s not Hamish,’ she mumbles into Victor’s ear. ‘It’s Alice.’
‘But it’s a man, not a woman.’
‘There you are, Alice,’ shrieks Gemma. ‘He thinks you’re a man. You have a very male voice. You’re unnatural. Go away and shave your moustache!’
Alice weeps, great choking sobs of anguish into the panelling of the door.
‘I can’t stand her like this,’ complains Gemma to Victor. ‘She’s so weak and wet. She just goes to pieces.’
‘Say something nice to her!’ entreats Victor. ‘Put her out of her misery.’
‘I’m miserable,’ says Gemma into the pillow, ‘why shouldn’t she be?’
‘I’m not crying for myself,’ sobs Alice to the closed door, ‘I’m crying for you, Gemma. How will you ever get better, if you go on doing what you want, not what you ought? Your soul will begin to shrivel; your legs are beginning to shrivel already. Did you know that?’
‘My legs are not shrivelling,’ Gemma sits up, doing Victor some injury, which she ignores, in her passion. ‘They’re just slim. Not great hefty pillars like yours.’
Alice’s sobs increase.
‘Come inside and see what we’re doing,’ says Gemma. ‘Come in and watch. I know that’s what you want. You have to find out how normal people behave, poor thing.’
Victor opens his mouth to protest. Gemma puts her hand over his mouth. She is smiling, animated, happy: almost alive. Does he feel her toes twitching?
‘I’ll open the door,’ says Alice cautiously, ‘but I won’t look. I must talk to you, that’s all. How could you. Gemma! We all loved you so: you were the only good thing in our lives, when poor mother was so depressed.’
‘She isn’t depressed now. Why not just give in and enjoy it, Alice. You should have stayed at home and made up a threesome.’
‘I am perfectly normal,’ says Alice, desperately. ‘More than you are. While your husband’s with that girl, you’re with him. It’s disgusting. It’s nothing to do with you wanting her baby. It’s wife swapping, that’s all.’
‘Victor isn’t married. How can it be,’ calls Gemma. ‘Do go away and let me get on with my pleasures.’
‘What is it?’ asks Victor, perturbed. ‘What is it?’
For Gemma gasps and cries. Has he crushed her, ruined her; is he killing her? Her breath, which should surely be warm, is icy-cold on his chest.
‘I’m alive,’ cries Gemma, triumphant. ‘I’m alive.’
But she isn’t. She’s as cold as the grave.
Years ago.
‘Gemma, naughty girl, come back to bed.’
‘But Mummy’s here.’
‘Your mother’s dead,’ said Great-Aunt May out of sleep. ‘And in her grave.’
And again the shock, and the pleasure, the cold and the fear.
Mother, die! Go.
‘I’m alive?’ asked Gemma, dazed.
‘Yes, you’re alive,’ said Great-Aunt May, ‘but won’t be for long if you stay out there in the cold.’
‘Alive!’ repeated Gemma. Nothing else in the room. No one. But by the time she climbed back into the bed, and pressed herself against Great-Aunt May’s lean dry side, little Gemma was so cold she might well have passed for dead.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Victor.
‘Never mind,’ says Gemma.
11
That night, too, Stan the Polish carpenter, came to Janice, Victor’s wife.
Janice had found him some weeks back through the Yellow Pages – the Post Office’s official directory of tradesmen and services. The wardrobe door in her bedroom kept swinging open and Janice concluded she needed a carpenter.
Victor had changed his style of dress along with his mode of life, and left most of his expensive suits behind in the big mahogany bedroom wardrobe.
‘Don’t give them to the jumble,’ he’d beseeched his wife, during one of the long wrangling telephone calls that followed their parting. ‘Try and sell them: or else don’t ever complain to me or anyone that I keep you short of money. You can’t just sit about and live off me for the rest of your life. You must make some effort. You owe it to yourself.’
Janice had suggested that since now Victor had a retail outlet, he might be better at selling his suits than she, but he had accused her of being possessive, obstructive, and insulting his new profession, so she had advertised the suits in the local newspaper and put For Sale cards in stationers’ windows, but no one had replied, so there in the wardrobe the suits stayed. And something – either the dry summer and subsidence of the soil beneath the house causing the whole structure of the house to tilt; or some alteration in the very nature of the suits themselves, which certainly seemed to get heavier with disuse and depression as the months of Victor’s absence rolled by – had thrown the wardrobe out of true so that the catch would not hold, and the door would swing open even when the room was perfectly quiet and still, and startle her: as if Victor himself was about to step out of the cupboard and fill the house again with his presence.
And what would he not have to say about the state of the carpet? The dust under the bed? Strawberry jam spilt on the velvet chairs and rubbed in, not sponged off? Five of the glass rummers broken? Well, presumably broken, since only seven remained of the dozen she’d bought him for their eighteenth wedding anniversary, out of housekeeping money saved over fifteen of those cheese-paring, housewifely, well managed years.
No.
Victor, stay in your cupboard.
I don’t want your vision of me any more.
I don’t want to have to resist your disapproval, struggling for my pride in the face of your contempt.
Stay where you are. Please.
I don’t want to have to intercede between Wendy and you: not any more. I am tired of explaining to Wendy that you don’t mean to hurt you just can’t help it. I am tired of explaining to you that it isn’t Wendy’s fault she is more interested in embroidery than boys, in the gaining of spiritual grace rather that the losing of her virginity. Wendy is yours as much as mine. You must take some responsibility. It is some hereditable factor working i
n her: it cannot be environmental.
Not with you around, Victor.
She fears him. She sees him, in her mind’s eye, her guilty eye, stepping finally out of the wardrobe, hears him speak, putting into words at last what his reproachful look has for so long mutely suggested.
‘Your child, not mine. My seed was far too much diluted. She didn’t inherit her nature. I’m afraid she caught it.’
For although Wendy was without a doubt Victor’s child, in as much as one of Victor’s sperm swam up to meet the egg deposited through Janice’s fallopian tubes, other men’s sperm had also swum around inside Janice, before Victor and she were married, and had, it was vaguely felt by both of them, left some disagreeable trace of themselves behind, polluting her procreative byways and highways, as it were, so that Wendy was not only Victor’s child, but Alan’s, Derek’s, Mike’s, Joe’s, John’s, Murray’s and so on, and others whose names she had forgotten or she never knew, and probably took after the sum of all her mother’s lovers, rather than her acknowledged father. Victor had always hoped to marry a virgin: expected to marry a virgin: as his father had done before him: someone as pure and helpful as his own mother: but alas he fell in love with Janice. Or rather, having slept with Janice once, after a dark and drunken students’ party, could not bear the notion of her sleeping with anyone else thereafter, and taking this for love, married her. Whereupon Janice, as if to reassure him, had silently and instinctively made herself as rigid, plain, clean, orderly and respectable as possible; bristling with defences designed to repel any possible sexual boarders, so that merely to look at her was to feel certain that here was a woman faithful to her husband.
Perforce, if nothing else.
Behold wild Janice, married!
What we have here ladies and gentlemen, is no woman, but a housewife. And what a housewife! Note her rigid, mousy curls, kept stiff by spray; her quick eyes which search for dust and burning toast, and not the appraisal, the enquiry, of the opposite sex; the sharp voice, growing sharper, louder, year by year: at home in a bus queue or ordering groceries or rebuking the garage, but hardly in the bed.
Does that suit you, Victor?
No.
But I thought that was what you wanted.
How am I to be desired by all, but still kept for your especial use? My highways and byways unpolluted even by the thoughts of others?
Tell me! Victor!
But Victor, I was only trying to be what you wanted. It isn’t fair.
Go to Elsa, then. I know her by heart, although I have never met her. Who is wanted by all, and desired by all: her inner footpaths well trodden down by the thoughts of men, and women too. Whose hair flows free, and spreads across pillows; whose eyelids rise and fall with automatic erotic intent; whose voice is useless in the grocer’s shop but useful in the bed Elsa, who is everyone’s, whether she knows it or not, in the imaginings if not in the flesh.
Go to Elsa then, while I, Janice, remember who I am. While there’s still time: before my hair is iron grey, like my heart, and there is no turning back.
Janice’s wrist positively aches, slamming the wardrobe door. Presently she feels the task is beyond her, and summons help. Janice sends for Stan, the Polish carpenter. He is a small man; he weighs nine stone two (he tells her so); he trembles; his eyes have the sorrowful appreciation of the immigrant; is he sorry for her or she for him? Before she knows it there she is on the bed, and him on top of her, hammering away with a quivering, nervous intensity. She is to make it all better for him. The grand home of his childhood, his family acres, lost to the State; his wife a common working woman, who cannot even understand his degradation; cannot comprehend that carpenters have poetry in their souls: Janice is to make up for it all. Not that he blames his wife. Her father was a prison officer, soulless, and beat all human aspiration out of her, leaving her merely English. Not her fault – but their mutual doom.
He has always been doomed. Angry, nervous, Polish and doomed.
Six times in one night: eight the next. This takes Janice back; like nothing or no one else: not even the plumber, nor the milkman. Is it mere physical exhaustion, or the rebirth of her sexuality, that leads her now drooping round the house, careless of its appearance, and her own? Slut that she’s becoming, only fit to lie back upon the bed, while Stan the Polish carpenter wreaks his nervous will upon her, expends his tormented energy, and fills her dazed mind with the overflow of his complaints against the world, his wife, the betrayal of his past, his hopes, and his country.
‘It seems to me,’ said Janice, lying there, ‘that you do all right. If I’m anything to go by.’
‘You English,’ he cried, moving up to her mouth to stop her complaints, ‘all you English are the same. You understand nothing.’
But Victor’s king-size bed, with the Slumberland mattress, is large enough for Janice to turn herself so that his mouth, too, is presently stopped.
It seems to Janice, even from her comparatively limited experience with other men since Victor left home, that the physical activity of sex has become a great deal more varied since she was a girl, and lay in the missionary position beneath a variety of men. In those days tongues could only be used in mouths, and penises must only come in contact with vaginas – lest the word perversion be bandied about; and the involvement of hands or instruments carried with it the overtones of a horrid, secret masturbatory activity. And boy-friends, as she remembered, since the general consensus was that love must accompany sex, were supposed to come one at a time. But now, surely, there was a great tumbling of humans all together, and a more diffuse eroticism, which being confined no longer to certain parts of the person in ritual conjunction with the certain other parts of certain other people, need hardly be so limited any more.
Come carpenter, carpet layer, car mechanic, accountant: come one and all. Since this sensation, this forgetfulness, is all we are after. What I think of you, now, man, not what you think of me. Who cares? You’ll be gone in the morning. Pray God.
And since my mouth, my comment, can be stilled not by your mouth, but right to the source of my objection with your erect penis: and I can stop your comment on me by using up your tongue between my legs; and I can obtain relief from self-observation by stopping thinking, if only momentarily – and with this particular carpenter the law of diminishing returns seems to operate – after my fourth orgasm and your third the brain seems to work again.
I am still myself, for all of you.
About the time that Alice comes battering at Victor’s door, Janice wriggles free from Stan and says, ‘The wardrobe door is open again. Won’t you for God’s sake fix it? It’s what you came for.’
Her voice has lost its harshness of quality. Her hair, unwashed and uncurled for some weeks, has regained a natural sheen. It clots greasily and heavily around her face. It pleases him and suits her. Her mouth has relaxed its grimness of line. She is abandoned to all decency. She is herself again: heavy, sprawling, and available, freely demanding of him and herself.
‘You English women are cruel,’ says Stan. ‘You wish to humiliate me. To remind me that I am only the carpenter. The useful little man around the corner, hein?’
But presently, singing and still naked, he takes his screw-driver and removes the lock, and lathes the length of the drawer, and by accident removes some beading, which he then has to hammer back.
Bang-bang.
Janice sits up in bed, marvelling. Never has she seen such cheerful bungling. It is as if all his potential skill with tools has concentrated in the living one.
Wendy. Where’s Wendy? How does Wendy fare while her mother relives her past, and so thoughtlessly and selfishly redefines her nature?
Wendy’s doing nicely, thank you. Wendy, the while, has been to the church choir social, and eaten half a dozen fattening scones and drunk six small glasses of sweet sherry. Here she has encountered a post-graduate student from Milwaukee doing research into fading religious attitudes in Western Europe. His hair is curly, he is half h
er size: his face is lively and impish, as is his mind. Her slow head tries to follow his quick movements as he goes about the room, making enquiries of one churchgoer and another. Wendy is patient, as is her nature. Finally he comes to her. He asks his initial questions: finds her replies promising, sits her in a corner: takes notes: enquires about her attitudes to God, to sherry, to her mother, to her father, her sexual experiences, if any, her parents’ attitude to sexual matters. Presently his hand stops writing: he asks the questions for himself, and not for his further degree. And Wendy, scarcely noticing the transition, continues to talk in a manner she never would have done had she not had so much sherry and believed herself to be furthering the cause of knowledge, science and truth; in so doing she offered herself to him as she was, and not, perhaps, as she would have liked to be, or her father might have wished she was.
The young man took her home, and it being a warm night, they bought fish and chips and sat together on a park bench to eat them: and he, knowing that her virginity was a bother to her and had driven her father from home, relieved her of it in the laurel bushes behind the bench; an episode disturbed only by a passing and indifferent policeman’s torch, and then by a sudden change in the weather, making them scuffle through the undergrowth for their clothing. Neither, afterwards, had any desire to part, or felt any desire to be off and finished with the episode, but walked together hand in hand, bodies rubbing together at every opportunity. She asked his name at the front gate, and asked him in to share her bed – an offer he gladly accepted.
The noise of hammering came from the house. Janice’s window was brightly lit and the curtains not closed. A woman sat on the front step. She wore a headscarf, and spectacles, and seemed angry. She spoke with the flat sour accents of the underprivileged and defeated.
‘My husband’s in there with your mum,’ she said. ‘Mending her wardrobe, like as not. If it’s not that it’ll be her ceiling rose. Listen to him, hammering all hours of the day and night. Mind you, he’s not English.’
