by Weldon, Fay
When Wendy, dazed by the suddenness of events, took out her front door key and opened the door, the little woman in the headscarf ran in ahead of her and Kim – for that was the young researcher’s name – and up the stairs and into Janice’s bedroom, and flew at her rival, scratching and biting, as she sat naked and correct in the bed. It took Stan, Wendy and Kim together some effort to drag her off, by which time Janice was mauled, bleeding and shaken.
Stan’s wife sat and cried in the kitchen while Janice made her a cup of tea. Stan had dressed and gone home, but not before his wife had spat at him.
‘I’m not blaming you,’ said Stan’s wife to Janice. ‘If it’s not you it’s someone else. I only wish women would stick together a bit. It’s not for me I mind – not any more – it’s for the children. He’s never at home. He’s either off giving his money away at political meetings or screwing the lady clients so his work never gets done. Then he quarrels with them or their husbands find out so he never gets paid. I don’t mind what he does with his cock; he’s got to do something with it that’s for sure, and it’s better than having it in me all hours of the day and night, God knows. It’s a kind of nervous twitch he’s got.’
Stan’s wife raised her head and looked about her, as if for the first time conscious of her surroundings. She looked at the unwashed dishes, the grime on the cup she drank from, the bottle lids and scraps of paper on the floor; the crumbs on the sideboard, the congealed fat on the table, the burnt debris on the cooker.
‘I’d be ashamed to live like this,’ said Stan’s wife. ‘A real pigsty. Well, he likes a good wallow.’
Stan’s wife left.
Janice, Wendy and Kim sat round the kitchen table for some time after her departure. Kim’s hand itched with desire to take notes, but he desisted.
‘You can’t go on like this, mum,’ said Wendy. ‘You’d better get dad back.’
‘Do you want that?’ enquired Janice. Her left eye was swelling, and her hands were trembling almost as much as had the carpenter’s penis, erect. Stan’s wife, she had noticed, trembled too. Her nose had been running, as if in her passion she had manufactured extra juices, and a drop had hung trembling unnoticed for some time, from her nostrils. The less Janice had to do with the carpenter, and his like, the better.
A pity. It had all seemed so simple. Summoning bed companions out of thin air, dismissing them again at will. All of them less than she, as she had been less than Victor.
‘I’m all right,’ said Wendy, with simple pride. ‘Now I’ve met Kim. I can take daddy or leave him, if you see what I mean. Kim’s coming to stay with us. He’s only got a kind of self-service hotel in South Kensington, and he doesn’t like it very much. It smells of cooked cabbage, he says. This place smells a bit too, but we’ll soon get it cleared up. Won’t we, mother.’
‘You clear it up if you want to,’ said her mother. ‘Nothing to do with me. But what will your father say, if he stays?’
‘Nothing I can’t make good use of in my thesis,’ observed Kim, in the constructive fashion that marked his passage through life.
‘It’s hardly up to father to say anything,’ said Wendy, her hand travelling down towards Kim’s crotch, as naturally and easily as if she stretched it out to stroke a kitten.
Let Victor cope, thinks Janice, taking a tranquilliser and going to bed and sleep. The wardrobe door does not fall open, although Stan had no time to fix the bolt. Her orifices are still sensitive and uneasy from his quivering searches of them; her eye is hurting; as is the deep scratch, red-edged, that runs from her thumb to her wrist; and her mind thuds from the insults offered to her by his wife. But her head no longer aches. On the contrary, it feels well healed and perfectly content. Even without the tranquilliser she would have slept well.
Elsa, too, sleeps soundly, after Hamish’s departure, but is presently awakened by a rattling of her door handle and the soft booming of Alice’s extraordinary voice in the corridor outside. Elsa sits up, and shivers. The room is cold. The weather has changed in the night; the window is shut but the wind has managed to find a crack and she feels it chilly on her cheek. Outside the night is draining from the sky, leaving it bleak and grey yet streaked with a kind of shine, as if the walls of heaven had been far too harshly scraped in the new wind’s scouring away of the night.
‘Let me in,’ begs Alice, ‘let me in. I must speak to you.’
‘I can’t,’ says Elsa. ‘I’m locked in. It’s some mistake.’
‘It’s no mistake,’ booms Alice through the door. ‘Victor’s with Gemma and they don’t want you to know.’
Alice goes round to the back of the house, out into the kitchen courtyard, and climbs up to Elsa’s window, using the library ladder to get her some part of the way; after that she relies on cornices, decorative alcoves, and concrete gargoyles for footholds. She is a heavy girl and in passing breaks the top rungs of the library ladder.
Elsa winces at the thought of Victor’s inevitable displeasure, and leans out to help Alice, and wonders whether perhaps it might not be preferable to topple down and end everything, than to endure the pain that had clutched her heart at the thought of Victor with Gemma.
But when Alice, slipping, clutches at Elsa’s hair and makes her cry out and all but pulls her from the window, Elsa knows that she wishes to live and means to live, and pulls herself back inside and Alice too with an ease which surprises her.
Elsa closes the window and gets back into bed; her eyes feel stretched and wide with lack of sleep, and too much untoward emotion, come too suddenly. Alice huddles at the end of the bed, under blankets.
‘What am I going to do,’ mourns Alice. ‘How am I going to live? Even Gemma despises me.’
Elsa draws Alice in beside her. It is the nearest, for a long time, that she has lain next to a contemporary, more or less, in age: she is surprised to remember the difference between stretching naked next to a young person, and next to one who is old. It is the whole difference between the sensation of immortality and that of mortality. When she lay with Victor, lay with Hamish, death lay between them in the bed. They bridged him, but could not ignore him. Death waited, was made to wait, but clearly wouldn’t wait for ever. Is this the last time? Or this? Or this? Will I die before tomorrow night? A stroke, breast cancer, heart attack?
Elsa kisses young Alice, whose distress is merely that she will have to live for ever, as she is. Elsa covers Alice with her body; lets her hands comfort and penetrate Alice as if it were her own body she thus cajoled. Alice, made like any other woman in detail, though not in broad outline, cries out and calms, and smiles in the cold light. Thus Elsa did with her school-friends, on many an educational and recreational school journey to the Swiss Alps, the Italian Riviera, the Austrian Tyrol, until the exchange rate made such journeys difficult. Though Elsa worked weekends at the greengrocer’s to save the money to pay for them.
‘I’m not a lesbian,’ says Alice, ‘though Gemma thinks I am. I have trouble with my hormones, that’s all. Is that my fault? I am as normal as the next person – just unhappier.’
‘You seemed so sure of yourself this morning,’ murmurs Elsa, half asleep. ‘I was quite afraid.’
‘Come away with me,’ begs Alice. ‘Victor’s too old and anyway he’s married, and Gemma’s spoiled all that for you.’
‘I shouldn’t have gone with Hamish,’ Elsa reproaches herself, as if automatically. ‘Victor only went with Gemma to be revenged. And Gemma too. It’s all my fault.’
‘You’re so simple,’ says Alice. ‘It was all planned by Gemma. Everything always is. She means Victor to leave you and Hamish to impregnate you and her to keep the baby so she can torment it as it grows up. And she’ll get her way. She gets her way with everything except her own legs’.
No, thinks Elsa. Surely not. I can’t be pregnant. Can’t be.
‘If that were true,’ says Elsa, sinking backwards into sleep, ‘Gemma would be a very wicked person. And I don’t know anyone wicked. So it can’t be true.’
But Elsa is asleep. Alice lies beside her, sleepless and miserable. Presently the door is unlocked and Gemma enters, as Alice had indeed supposed she presently would.
Alice smiles sweetly up at Gemma.
Gemma smiles sweetly at Alice. Behind her comes Johnnie, with a breakfast trolley.
‘It’s stuffy in here,’ says Gemma. ‘Do open the window, Johnnie.’
Johnnie opens the window, and stands behind the trolley. There is a glint of expectation behind his glasses. So no doubt he stood, polite and expectant, in his native land, watching the tides of power sweep over the wretched and helpless of the earth; assisting it on its way, diverting it now and then to mulch the occasional head raised to block its path; listening; waiting; thriving on the cries of the tortured, the maimed, the burned. And now, hot coffee, thick cream, fresh rolls, crisp bacon. Breakfast! What are good times without the bad? The pleasures of the privileged are much enhanced by the cries of the unfortunate.
Johnnie stands easily behind the trolley, and watches, and smiles.
‘I expect you were cold in the night,’ says Gemma kindly. ‘I know I was. The weather’s changed. Which of you kept the other warm, I wonder?’
‘It was her,’ says Alice, thus displaying cowardice and conceding defeat all at once.
‘Get out of bed,’ says Gemma, and Alice does so, naked, hiding her body from Johnnie with her large lean hands. She makes twice of him, but what has that got to do with anything? Small men wield power: hold keys, apply electrodes, write execution lists, initiate policies. Before them the merely massive fall back, powerless.
Gemma’s chair whirs. She glides towards Alice, who backs towards the window.
‘Get out of here,’ says Gemma, ‘the way you came.’
Alice half falls, half climbs out of the window: and half climbs, half falls to the ground, where she lies collapsed and crying.
‘My eyes,’ she cries. ‘I’ve scratched my eyes. I can’t see. There was a bramble –’
‘That comes from seeing things you shouldn’t,’ calls down Gemma, and drops Alice’s jeans and T-shirt down after her, from between distasteful fingers.
‘You can open the gates for her,’ says Gemma to Johnnie. ‘We don’t want her here. Run along.’
Johnnie leaves. He does not run.
‘Well!’ says Gemma, alone with Elsa. ‘Well! Breakfast?’
She encourages Elsa to sit up in bed, and lends her a pink silk wrap to put round her shoulders. She touches each of Elsa’s nipples gently with her own cool finger.
‘Breast milk can be deep-frozen now,’ says Gemma. ‘Isn’t that useful!’
‘I see you did the typing,’ says Gemma, pouring coffee. ‘And so beautiful! You must have a deeply feminine nature. To type well is to desire to please.’
‘I hope Alice was merely trying to keep warm in your bed and nothing else,’ remarks Gemma, buttering toast. ‘I am afraid she has some kind of genetic deficiency, and is sexually ambivalent. Her mother is a confirmed lesbian. There is a lot of it about. It is nature’s answer to the population problem. I can’t bear anything unnatural myself. Can you?’
Alice’s motorbike can be heard to spit, and sob, and roar. The great wood-veneered gates open by Johnnie’s remote command. ‘I am disappointed in Alice as a person and as a physiotherapist,’ says Gemma, slicing the top of an egg. ‘She was very clumsy. And how could I have gone to Great-Aunt May’s funeral? I have trouble enough getting to places I want to get to. The reason there was no one at her funeral was because she was so boring no one wanted to go. And she had no business sending me off to be a mother’s help, as if I were a skivvy.’
Gemma’s eyes are bright with remembered rage.
‘My mother would never have allowed it,’ says Gemma. ‘And if Great-Aunt May had looked after my mother properly, had the roof mended so it didn’t leak, my mother need never have died. I hate Great-Aunt May. I’m glad she’s dead. She deserved to die.’
Gemma plucks the pendant at her neck.
‘I’ll leave you some more typing after breakfast,’ says Gemma, recovering her equanimity a little, although there are tears of passion in her eyes. ‘I would like you to stay in your room this morning, and rest.’
‘Alice had a father,’ says Gemma, bitterly. ‘All those Hemsley girls had a father. I didn’t. I was a bastard, a skivvy, and everyone knew it. There’s no excuse for Alice. She had every advantage.’
‘It doesn’t matter how long ago your childhood was,’ says Gemma, by way of explanation. ‘It is never finished. Never.’
‘And now,’ says Gemma, calmer, ‘while you drink your coffee I’ll get on with my story.’
Mr Fox’s party, May 12th, 1966.
Gemma had borrowed Marion’s mother’s white satin dancing shoes, circa 1930, and Marion’s gran’s white silk shawl, circa 1915, and worn it over a semi-topless black lace dress bought from the now re-opened boutique at the foot of Fox and First’s offices with money borrowed from Marion’s dad, and had been to the hairdresser in her lunch-hour to have her hair made bouffant and springy to the touch with lacquer.
‘Ugh!’ said Mr First, touching it with a thin, dry finger. ‘The more money you girls spend on your looks, the worse fools you make of yourselves.’
Gemma cringed, as anyone might well do from the murderer – even if one thus defined only in someone else’s dream.
‘What do I do to deserve it?’ rasped Mr First, disappearing into his office. ‘No one likes me.’
Mr Fox’s party.
Gemma was humiliated. Her breasts, by comparison with the minor swellings exhibited by the other women in the room, seemed to her own eyes to be gross, and Mr Fox’s earlier admiration of them surely ironic rather than sincere. She was obliged to swathe them with her shawl and look rather like Great-Aunt May on a particularly cold day.
Mr Fox set her to making champagne cocktails, spoke to her as if she were the maid, and otherwise ignored her.
Oh, Mr Fox!
As for Gemma’s hair, all the other women had silky hair, close-cropped.
Gemma served champagne cocktails.
The party sank down upon silky cushions, pot smoking, acid popping; beautiful people rolled on to and over other beautiful people, limbs pallidly interlocked, without energy or particular interest.
Not Gemma. Provincial, uneasy Gemma.
As for the men, if that’s what they were, with their pretty, depraved faces, they took no notice of Gemma.
Gemma, who are you, after all? No one titled, or rich, or black, or amazing. You are a typist, and loving Mr Fox will not change that.
Not this evening, anyway. Love’s a trivial commodity here.
More champagne cocktails. A sugar lump doused in brandy at the bottom of each thick eighteenth-century rummer, filled to the brim with champagne and adorned with a sprig of mint. Delivered into trembling, fastidious, manicured hands.
An oddly old young man, whose hair was dyed elderly grey, and pupils turned red by means of contact lenses, pulled Gemma’s shawl aside, peeked inside, laughed, closed the shawl again and offered her a drag on his reefer.
‘Go on,’ murmured Gemma’s mother in her ear, ‘go on. Join in! Or do you mean to let me down? Be a typist all your life? I left you everything I could – looks, ambition, a body to be used as a weapon in the world. I didn’t make it; but you can, Gemma. Go on, accept!’
‘Gemma!’ whispered Great-Aunt May, shocked. ‘Don’t you dare! Everything I’ve taught you! Virtue, obedience, self-control, submission to God’s will!’
Gemma fingered her pearl necklace, which had looked appropriate in Marion’s mum’s mirror, but now looked merely pathetic. Gemma hesitated.
The young man raised what would have been his eyebrows had he not shaved them off and pencilled others in.
Mr Fox left the party with two heiresses and a society photographer.
Gemma moaned.
The young man, bored, moved on.
Gemma went home by underground.
Round, on points, to Great-Aunt May. Mother scrabbles at the window, dead nails scouring the glass.
Gemma went home to shiver all night, under the duvet, the latest notion fresh from the Continent, feather quilt replacing blankets, in a pale blue cotton seersucker cover; as found in the houses of those in tune with modern living. Those who could afford to be really closely in tune with modem living also, no doubt, enjoyed central heating. Marion’s mum and dad did not.
Marion’s mum and dad had waited up for Gemma to return, the sooner to hear her tales of high life.
Gemma could not even cry in peace.
Marion, not having been asked to the party, had gone to bed early with a sleeping pill and slept soundly.
‘Such a wet blanket, that girl!’ observed Marion’s mum. ‘Not surprising she never gets asked out.’
‘She’ll marry an undertaker and disgrace us all,’ said Marion’s dad, comfortingly.
When at last Gemma was in her chilly bed, under the duvet, clutching the feathers around her, crying softly from pain and humiliation, Marion stirred in her sleep and wept a little herself, as if keeping Gemma company.
Mr Fox then absented himself from the office for some ten days. Nothing more was said of the trip to Tangiers. Gemma’s bosom remained, as if it were, expectant, thwarted and searching for someone to finger it. She could have sworn that in the interim it grew another couple of inches, and tilted upwards, waiting. It began to seem to Gemma that her breasts had a life of their own, offering themselves insensately to the world, regardless of her wishes for them. She bound them savagely flat with the elastic bandages Marion’s gran had used for her knees, and wore Marion’s mum’s sister’s white satin wedding dress (circa 1928) to the office.
Mr First, murderer, sister-slayer, raised his eyebrows and sneered as he passed through the office. Business was slack, and except for cleaning out the parrot cages, there was little to do.
