by Weldon, Fay
On Saturday Gemma collected her week’s wages from a distraught Miss Hilary.
‘It’s all very well for you young girls,’ said Miss Hilary, taking a hundred per cent commission on Gemma’s week’s work. ‘You have your life before you. Mine’s all but gone.’
On Sunday Marion’s family took her to Kew Gardens. The first Jumbo jet passed overhead on its way to Heathrow and everybody ooo-ed and ah-d. The azaleas were over.
On Sunday evening Gemma wrote a letter to Great-Aunt May in her nursing home, telling her how she had left the north and was making a life for herself in London.
She never posted it. Years later Marion’s mum found it pushed down the back of the sofa of the three-piece suite, when she was replacing the upholstered furniture with cushions filled with polystyrene chips: something of a fire hazard but no one knew that at the time.
Failing to get a reply, Gemma was of course hurt, and angry.
Gemma dropped the pearl pendant in the wastepaper basket, but Marion’s mum retrieved it. Marion’s mum tried to put it in the top left-hand drawer of Marion’s chest of drawers, which Marion kept for treasures of various kinds, but could not open it.
‘Funny,’ said Marion’s mum. ‘Stuck! I must get Marion’s dad to see to that one day. Smelly, too. What’s she put in it now, the naughty girl?’
One fine day Mr Fox appeared at Gemma’s elbow, and bending sideways with dextrous charm, bit the back of her pretty white neck.
‘I’ve lost seven pounds,’ said Mr Fox, ‘and had a twenty-two and a quarter per cent increase in physical agility. See!’ And he bent and nipped her again.
Nip-nip!
Mr Fox is back! Gemma’s bosom swelled and heaved and burst its bandages.
‘Ooh,’ cried Gemma, suddenly lop-sided.
‘Extraordinary,’ murmured Mr Fox, and went to inspect the parrots.
Gemma blushed, with shame and despair. But Mr Fox’s mind was still on himself.
‘Do you think it’s an improvement?’ Mr Fox asked earnestly. ‘I don’t merely look haggard?’
‘No, no,’ cried Gemma.
Mr Fox cared what Gemma thought.
Mr Fox cared what everyone thought, but how was Gemma to know that?
Mr Fox disguised need with a cloak of contempt, like many another before and since, but Gemma did not see it.
‘I dined on lettuce leaves and water for ten days. The lettuce leaves were limp and the water came out of a tap. And how was horrid Mr First in my absence?’
‘Horrid.’ How smart Gemma is becoming! How she thinks now before she speaks!
‘Gemma, how I’ve missed you! Mr First is in or out?’
‘Out.’
‘Good. Come upstairs.’
And Gemma followed Mr Fox upstairs. So, the world can turn upside down in a moment: thus, boredom turn to joy unconfined.
In a dark comer of Mr Fox’s penthouse, beneath a profusion of fern, a tangle of creepers, worked an elderly cleaning woman, with dustpan and brush, feather duster, secateurs, watering can, fertiliser sprinkler, and perspex cleaner, genteelly cursing as humming birds swept beneath her nose, or through the wisps of her white hair.
Mr Fox behaved as if Mrs Olsen wasn’t there. So did Gemma, learning fast.
Well, the old woman got paid.
What more did she want?
Recognition? Understanding? Sympathy?
She would have to pay them, for those.
‘You’re getting fat,’ said Mr Fox to Gemma.
‘Two pounds,’ confessed Gemma. ‘It’s Marion’s parents. They’re feeding me up.’
‘What for? The killing?’
Was there a glint in his eyes? The glint of Red-Riding Hood’s wolf or Serena’s Bluebeard; wicked eyes peering out of a Disney forest-scape?
Gemma laughed, uneasily. Mr Fox did not laugh.
‘I hope Marion’s keeping her stories to herself?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you?’
‘Yes. Not a word to anyone.’
‘Wonderful to be home again! Health farms are such tedious places.’
And Mr Fox flung down on a leopard skin sofa, and patted the cushion beside him. How lean and predatory he appeared: his body half sunk into feather cushions. He wore very tight denim trousers, open white shirt, and a moonstone pendant.
Gemma sat, cautiously, beside him. Mr Fox sat up, and pushed Gemma so that she sprawled, not as elegantly as she would have wished, back on the cushions. Then he bent over her on one elbow, as Valentino inclined over his white, pure love.
Did Mr Fox mean it? The romantic intensity of his gaze, the bright eyes searching her face, her throat, her body? Or was he joking?
Mrs Olsen coughed in an alarmed fashion, but Mr Fox took no notice of that.
Mr Fox’s weight was considerable, in spite of the recent loss of seven pounds, but his kiss was light, barely touching Gemma’s lips. His lips moved over hers, from right to left, from left to right, and then were gone. Mr Fox’s hand, however, was firm against her breast.
‘A funny dress,’ he said. ‘All lumpy. Or is it you? Say it isn’t you.’
Gemma opened her mouth to explain: but now it seemed that her lips, like her breasts, were scarcely hers to control. They waited now for kisses: they had little time for words. If they spoke at all, now, it would be to utter protestations of love. Gemma kept her mouth tight shut.
‘I do believe you love me, Gemma,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Which is only right and fitting, after all. Marion loves Mr First or she would have left long ago; and if you love me you won’t ask for a rise, will you, because that would make me really angry. But do tell me, what are you wearing beneath your dress, and why?’
Mr Fox stood Gemma up, removed her dress, unwound Marion’s gran’s bandages and dropped them into the waste-paper basket. Mrs Olsen clattered her displeasure under the umbrella fern. Mr Fox took the dress, took the scissors, and unsnipped a dart beneath the arms. Then, raising her arms above her head as if she were a doll, he replaced the dress.
‘That’s better,’ said Mr Fox. ‘It is usually easier to fit the garment to the body than the body to the garment. And never, never, let me see you again with your hair as you wore it to my party; next time I won’t come back.’
Mr Fox, are you serious?
‘Yes,’ says mother in Gemma’s ear, ‘deadly serious. Listen, learn, advance yourself. This is the way to live.’
‘Gemma,’ warns Great-Aunt May, ‘the man’s an idiot. Your father was an idiot too, but your mother wouldn’t believe me. Gawping and gazing over the footlights.’
‘Are you coming to Tangiers with me?’ enquired Mr Fox.
‘Yes,’ said Gemma’s mouth, who was clearly on Gemma’s mother’s side.
‘Are you a virgin?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Gemma’s mouth.
‘The mixture is almost too strong to tolerate,’ complained Mr Fox. ‘Love, Tangiers, and virginity.’
Mrs Olsen coughed less discreetly. Her gnarled hand was outstretched. Rough, red and old. That’s what you want for me, Great-Aunt May. That’s how you want my hands. I know you. You don’t want me good, you want me miserable. My hands aren’t for dishcloths and hot water. They’re for the caressing of the male cheek, more, the male member. Look at my hands. Fold them in yours, Mr Fox. See the cool, slender, nimble fingers, the rosy palms? Put your thumb there in the hollow of my palm, Mr Fox, let me close my fingers around it. See! Not such a virgin but that I wasn’t born to it. Such tricks!
Is that what you did, mother? Back in the old cinema in Maryport, Northumberland. Please say you did – that I wasn’t conceived altogether without finesse? Not altogether!
‘If I could bother you for my money, sir. It’s three weeks now.’
‘Mr First pays you, I think,’ Mr Fox was vague and cold, his hands gone from Gemma’s. But now her hands were his, with her heart, and her mind, and her lips.
‘Mr First isn’t in, until after lunch.’
‘Can’t y
ou wait, Mrs Olsen? Surely!’
‘No. My husband is crippled: he can’t get out. He’s waiting for his dinner.’
‘How much do we owe you?’
‘Sixteen pounds plus fares.’
‘Sixteen pounds! It’s incredible. And fares? Where do you travel from?’
‘Whitechapel.’
‘Isn’t that walking distance?’
‘Not for me, sir.’
‘Really? At the health farm I walked eight miles a day and thought nothing of it.’
‘Could I have my money, sir?’
‘I’ll make a note of it. And Mrs Olsen, I don’t like being disturbed: will you remember that? And the spider plants have been allowed to become too moist: they’re not flowering as they should be.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. There’s rather a lot to remember – it’s not as if I were a paid gardener.’
‘Any careful and reasonable person could manage. That will be all.’
Mrs Olsen left, rebuked, and without her wages.
‘Treat them tough,’ said Mr Fox happily, his money saved, ‘they love it.’
‘And now,’ said Mr Fox, ‘now that we have had our interlude, Gemma, and I am reconciled to London, and the office, which is not without its pleasures, though scarcely real life, you will perhaps earn your wages by doing some modelling for me. You may undress behind the bourbon rose bramble, savouring its sweetness the while. Take all your clothes off, if you please: scraps of fabric merely distract the eye and distort the sense of proportion.’
And while Gemma took off her clothes, Mr Fox put on a white nylon coat and a French onion-seller’s black beret, and presently sculpted around Gemma’s white upper arms a mould for an arm-bracelet with jewel settings incorporated. Mr Fox worked intently and happily: had only he been able to fill twenty-four hours of the day thus working, fulfilling his intended destiny, how admirable a person might he not have been!
When he was satisfied with his achievement, he put down his tools, and sighed, and the far-off look left his eye, and the glint returned, and he blinked at Gemma’s body, as if remembering it.
‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘Tangiers.’
Then Mr Fox crossed to a coconut tree and unhooked from it a double coconut, which Gemma had believed to be simply growing there, and from a hinged drawer carved in its rather repulsive hairy shell drew out a single antique ring. A red stone gleamed in a silver snake’s-mouth setting.
A ruby! At least Gemma assumed that it was a ruby, and not red glass. Mrs Hemsley owned a massive gilt necklace whose whole purpose was to house a ruby chip. Gemma had been sent to Maryport on several occasions to pawn it, secretly, at the pawn shop there.
Mrs Hemsley! Mrs Hemsley had not written to Gemma since she left home; nor did any of the girls; not even Alice, who had sworn eternal devotion. That she had not let them know her address, and that their letters to the YWCA went unanswered, much to their distress, quite escaped foolish Gemma. Gemma was angry with Mrs Hemsley and bitter too. Too bitter at not being written to, to write.
‘Hold out your left hand,’ said Mr Fox. Gemma stretched out her hand.
‘With this ring, etc.’ said Mr Fox, joking, and pushed the ring on to her third finger. The ring was too small, or her finger too large.
Gemma cried out in pain, as it went over her knuckle.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mr Fox, surprised.
‘My finger’s gone numb,’ said Gemma. ‘It feels cold.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Mr Fox, ‘see how beautiful your hand looks, with the ring upon it. You have perfect hands: or as perfect as nature can achieve. The artist, of course, outdoes nature. It is his function. The ring now on your finger belonged once to Katharine, Tsarina of all the Russians. Or so they say, and thus I paid. A very wicked lady. Wickedness comes expensive. Goodness is a far cheaper and more boring phenomenon, especially in retrospect.’ Mr Fox stretched out Gemma’s arm, gently inclining her hand, so that it dropped slightly beneath the weight of the ring. Both surveyed the effect.
‘Remarkable!’ said Mr Fox. ‘How the old masters knew their work. However defenceless and naked the body, the ring still symbolises power. And in this case, of course, a certain amount of passion, and cruelty. You are wearing Queen Katharine’s ring, Gemma. Katharine of all the Russias!’
‘But surely that’s very valuable?’
Gemma spoke with her own mouth, spontaneously. Mr Fox scowled, or as much as he ever scowled, for fear of deepening the lines on his brow.
‘That is besides the point,’ said Mr Fox, tartly. ‘Now kindly look at yourself in the mirror.’
In the centre of the room stood a giant tree trunk, from which green nylon foliage curled upwards. Mr Fox twisted a knot in the wood and a door swung open. Mr Fox’s wardrobe. On the back of the door was fixed a rather cheap full-length mirror. Into this Gemma stared. Mr Fox stood behind her, and stared too.
‘You should shave the pubic area,’ said Mr Fox, ‘dark hair catches the eye and spoils the effect. Mary Quant has hers cut heart shaped and dyed green; all very well if that’s where you want the centre of attention, but otherwise disconcerting.’
Gemma lifted her heavy hand towards the mirror.
‘This hand will never do washing up again,’ thought Gemma, with the dreadful clarity of prophetic vision. ‘It will never again be fit for simple things, or easy pleasures.’ She sighed.
‘You might well sigh. Every time you look at your body from now on, Gemma,’ said Mr Fox, ‘you will see a slight falling away from perfection. Over twenty is over the hill for a woman. But now you are all glory, and I adore you. I worship the human form.’
He caught up the ringed hand and pressed it to his lips: but lightly, jokingly.
‘You may keep the ring,’ said Mr Fox.
‘Me? Queen Katharine’s ring?’
‘For the moment.’
‘Oh thank you, thank you.’
But how difficult it was to please Mr Fox.
‘You are not a little girl to say please and thank you,’ said Mr Fox severely. ‘I am not giving you a treat, I am doing you an honour.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Never mind. Be careful with the ring, Gemma.’
‘Of course.’
‘Don’t wash up in it.’
‘Wash up? Never!’
‘Don’t slap an admirer with it, however importunate the lout might be. It might loosen the stone.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘And Gemma, don’t let Mr First see.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because Mr First lays neurotic claim to various valuables about the building. But beautiful things belong to those who value them, not those who paid for them. Don’t you agree?’
‘Oh yes, yes! I’ll put it in my bag at once.’
‘You may wear it home, Gemma. It marks you as mine. But go home now before Mr First returns, and take Marion with you. I shan’t deduct the time from either of your wages: I am a generous man. But I want to be alone; to feel solitary; to let the muse flow. And Gemma, once you have the ring home, keep it in a safe place. Until I ask for its return.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Gemma, impetuous, leant forward and kissed Mr Fox on his cool, dry lips. Mr Fox smiled, cool and dry.
Mr Fox, Gemma loves you.
Well, of course, that was what Mr Fox intended.
‘Gemma,’ said Mr Fox, ‘remember to dress before you go.’
12
Gemma pauses in her tale. Victor stands in the doorway, the colour beneath his cheekbones heightened, chin pale beneath its stubble: thus he appears in times of illness and unusual stress. The top of his head seems more bare and more shiny than usual. His area of baldness has crept noticeably down to meet his ears. This morning, washing his hair in the acid green wash basin to clear away the sweat of the night, he was disconcerted to see what looked like seaweed floating in the water. Closer examination proved it to be what he feared – lanks of his hair, come unattached in the n
ight, and including those strands which he brushed across the top of his head to soften the line where haired skin and bare skin met. The discovery had a nightmare quality, which failed to dispense even after the rhythms of the day had asserted themselves.
Stress, of course. Stress, seeping today to the hair follicles, tomorrow to the heart, or the brain, causing haemorrhage, or coronary, or both.
Careful, Victor. Things move too fast. Your body warns you. But where are you to pin the blame? Perhaps the sudden change of diet has unsettled your constitution? The shift from yin-and-yang to high cholesterol? Or the unexpected change in the weather? Victor’s father swore that on days the weather changed his patients felt pain more acutely. Voltaire swore that when the north wind blew the whole English race fell into a deep depression, and no coffee house was worth visiting. Or was it something worse: was it the loss of his love for Elsa, which had acted as a kind of charm against age, illness and the forces of decay? And did he in fact no longer love her; or had he merely suppressed his feelings for her in the exhilaration of offering largesse to Hamish, that sorry millionaire, who had nothing to his credit but worldly success, money, and, of course, Gemma. Victor hardly knew. Yesterday, had you asked Victor what love was, Victor would have replied, ‘What I feel for Elsa. My attachment to life itself.’ Today, locks of his hair lying stranded on the bottom of the wash basin, he would reply, ‘I don’t know. An insanity, perhaps. Something felt by the young.’ Or was it all Gemma’s doing – inciting Elsa, deceiving Hamish, sapping his strength, tormenting his mind, stealing his bodily juices?
The sight of Gemma and Elsa together disconcerted Victor. So he had worried at the sight of Janice and Wendy together, wife and daughter, heads together over the kitchen table. Plot and conspiracy!
‘Elsa,’ says Victor, ‘aren’t you even dressed yet? Your train’s in forty minutes.’
If only I could come with you, Elsa. Abandon pride, endeavour and my vision of myself. Never see Hamish, much less Gemma, ever again. Forget my concern for the artefacts of the past. Not care that a library ladder lies out in all weathers rotting to matchwood. See it for what it is, and not a symbol. Agree with everyone else that it is our living that matters, and not the manner of our living. Elsa, I am stranded out here, upstream, in the shallow tributaries of human existence, floundering, but still trying: while you go swimming blithely, strong body tumbling along in the current, downstream, midstream, to extinction in the sea. Elsa, understand me.
