by Weldon, Fay
‘It might be a bit of old chicken,’ said Gemma hopefully. ‘Or a very thin turkey’s neck.’
‘Not possible,’ said Marion. ‘We ought to tell the police.’
‘No,’ said Gemma. ‘I’m going away with Mr Fox on Saturday. The police might interfere. I don’t want anything, anyone in the world, to interfere. I don’t care if Mr First is a murderer, I don’t care how you came to have this ring in that drawer: you’re such a liar I don’t suppose I’ll ever know for sure, I just mean to get to Tangiers with Mr Fox.’
‘But Gemma,’ said Marion. ‘It wasn’t Mr First killed Joanna, it was Mr Fox.’
Gemma opened her mouth to scream again, and then stopped. More of Marion’s lies.
‘You go down and say you’re sorry to your parents,’ she said. ‘I’ll put that horrible old turkey’s neck down the loo. I’ll pick it up with a piece of tissue. Otherwise one might get germs.’ So she had always instructed the Hemsley children to pick up – as pick up they would – the little dead furry creatures – birds, stoats, mice, gerbils – which littered their path through life. Something finished, which once lived and exulted, held up by what remained of a wing, a claw, a tail. ‘Gemma, what is it? Gemma, Gemma, what will we do?’
Gemma bent and picked the object up.
‘You only say such a dreadful, silly thing because you’re jealous of me and Mr Fox,’ said Gemma firmly, when she came back from the toilet. ‘But it has no effect. I’m sorry.’
‘He’s a homosexual, everyone says so.’ Marion’s eyes remained piggy and mean. She was exhausted: she was undressing for bed. She wore at night the same white-to-grey vest and pants she wore by day. The skin on her body was dull and goose-pimpled. ‘Everyone’s everything nowadays,’ said Gemma, as lightly as she could.
Great-Aunt May! To hear your little Gemma speaking so! But Gemma was shaken, all the same.
‘How can you love a homosexual and a murderer?’ demanded Marion.
Easily, easily! Even if he was, which he wasn’t. Of course, he wasn’t.
Love, in any case, as any young or even seasoned bride well knows, stands firm between the person loved and any seven or so deadly sins. Once we’re married my dear, why, then you’ll stop it. You’ll stop drinking, gambling, stealing, fornicating, glutting, murdering, buggering – you only do these things because you’re unhappy. And I will make you happy, yes I will. And you will make yourself wholesome, for me. And for our baby.
Mr Fox’s baby. Tiny, bright, sharp eyes. Gemma shivered. The feel of the shrivelled object was still between her fingers.
She went to the bathroom to wash the feeling away with Permutit-softened water and fabulous pink Camay.
She returned, stunned.
‘Marion,’ said Gemma. ‘Marion, wake up. The rings won’t come off.’
Marion laughed.
‘Now you’ve done it,’ said Marion, and so Gemma had.
Gemma’s hand felt heavy now, and not with pride and power, but with greed and guilt, lust and lechery, thus publicly displayed. She was afraid.
Such fear and shame had Mrs Hemsley felt, though in lesser degree, when newly married; hiding her wedding ring from strangers, seeing it not as the symbol of a new honour, but as a visible token of her virginity, her nightly disgrace. As well hold out the bloody sheets! Nor did she care to go about in public with her husband, for fear that others might have too clear a vision of them both, locked in copulation. She felt brazen and embarrassed, when first required to wheel her new baby out into the world for all to see, this mewling creature, direct and living evidence of what she had surely done.
Gemma held her left hand under cold running water: then she oiled the fingers; and soaped the rings; she tugged and pulled with her right hand, she tried levers, nails and teeth, but neither ring would move. Marion tried too, but to no avail. Only when Gemma’s ringfinger was swollen and bleeding before and beyond the rings, did they desist. It was as if some essential chilliness in Gemma’s soul had transferred itself to the metal and caused the rings to shrink. The silver snake clenched its jaws yet more firmly around Queen Katharine’s ruby: and tighter and tighter, locked in closer and closer embrace, danced Mr Fox’s figurines around their diamond. The stone glowed brighter and colder than his eyes.
It hurts the poor to wait upon the rich. Mr Fox’s father had hurt, cold eyes, as did his son, after him. Humiliation, and the answer to it – revolution and murder – criss-crossed through the generations.
13
‘I have a lot to do this morning,’ says Gemma to Elsa, ‘so I shall leave you now. Mr and Mrs Ramsbottle are coming to Sunday dinner. This is a duty weekend for Hamish and me, one way and another.’
‘A duty weekend?’
‘When we do what we ought, socially, not what we want. We have one every six months. I want you to remain quietly in your room, so as not to dislodge any possible pregnancy.’
Gemma means to have a perfect baby. It will be Hamish as he could have been and not as the world has made him: herself sent out into the world to run, laugh, love and multiply, free in movement and response. Everything she once was and now is not. She will nurture the baby through its growing period as Hamish nurtures a delicate but genetically sound specimen of some new variety of pot plant, by a mixture of science and close attention, until it blossoms into profitable life.
‘There is more profit in people than in things,’ murmurs Gemma to the bemused Elsa. ‘If only Victor realised that! They can be renovated and polished up, just like Georgian bureaux and Victorian sideboards. It’s much more fun! And Elsa, try and think nice thoughts. The egg needs to grow in a hormonally benign environment. We must keep you calm and happy, and Annie will bring you some milk mid-morning. I’ve brought just a little typing with me. Will you do it by lunch-time? I don’t want to tire you; for your own sake. There’s nothing more pleasing to the spirits than doing something you’re really good at.’
She locks the door behind her. She does not want Victor diffusing, as it were, any possible pregnant brew. Presently Elsa gets out of bed and looks at the work Gemma has left. Gemma needs lists, in triplicate, of the ingredients needed in the making of, variously, dashi and owan-rui, bento and zensai, sashimi, gohan, sushi, menrui, mushimono, yahi-mono, nimono, nabemono, aemono and sunomono. Nor is her handwriting good. Lists have to be sent in triplicate to various exotic food importers, and a copy of the entire correspondence to date, with estimated prices, sent to an educational trust for the disabled, whom Gemma maintains are obliged, under the terms of their endowment, to ship the ingredients by air from Tokyo at reduced rates. Gemma means to take a course in Japanese cookery in the near future.
Elsa retires to bed, and waits for Victor to rescue her. He must. Or else Hamish will have to divorce Gemma and marry her. She does not doubt but that she is pregnant: she has a kind of curling, tickling feeling inside; and a muffling blanket between the world and herself. And just as well. Elsa’s mother Sheila always knew within hours when she was pregnant, and thus described the sensation. ‘Here comes the blanket!’ As if nature tossed a faintly disagreeable tranquilliser in her direction, as an old lady might toss a covering on an over-noisy parrot’s cage.
Abortion? No. Elsa has seen too many slides and leaflets issued by the Society for the Protection of the Unborn, to fancy that. She has even marched in their parades, beneath the banner of the wretched foetus.
Hoist, yet again, by her own kindly, obliging petard.
Presently Hamish unlocks the door and sits down to do the typing. Will he declare love, offer marriage, suggest a settlement?
No.
‘Marriage is a very strange institution,’ observes Hamish, typing out a recipe for Temple of Jade nabe, offered to the educational trust as typical of the difficulties to be surmounted, especially if the harusame, or transparent noodles, are to be home-made, and real inchiban dashi used rather than mere chicken cubes, ‘you think you’re marrying some empty-headed girl, rather against your better judgment, and what do
you end up with? Gemma! I’m not worthy to lick her boots. I started off being sorry for her. Now I worship her. Why she puts up with me I can’t imagine.’
‘Perhaps it’s your money,’ says Elsa, unkindly.
‘She despises my money,’ says Hamish, sharply. ‘Everyone does. Gemma is generosity itself. Not many wives would make such a sacrifice. To offer their husband a baby through another woman.’
‘Not many women would agree to it,’ remarked Elsa, blanket up to her chin.
‘I think they would, if you made it worth their while. Gemma and I have decided to offer you twenty-five pounds a week from the day pregnancy is established, until six weeks after the birth. I think you’ll agree that’s very generous.’
Elsa’s look must show that she considers it a very small payment indeed, for he quickly adds, ‘and full board, of course.’
‘I’m not going to live here, whatever happens!’ protests Elsa.
‘I think Gemma wants you to. She can keep a proper eye on you if you’re in the house. Things do go wrong. Look how poor Annie lost her baby when Johnnie turned up. Gemma was most upset. A little girl, too.’
Hamish finishes the typing, and leaves, with a polite nod, locking the door behind him.
‘I’ll take Gemma the typing and say you’ve done it,’ he says as he goes. ‘You and I have our little secrets, don’t we. In the face of such perfection, I find one has to.’
Over Sunday late-morning drinks Hamish offers Victor the contents of the billiard room for one thousand pounds, with the library ladder thrown in.
‘I’ll give you a token ten pounds for the lot,’ says Victor. ‘And think yourself lucky. It was not part of the bargain that you should impregnate Elsa. If you have, which I doubt. If you can, which seems even more unlikely.’
‘There is no need to get heated,’ observes Hamish. ‘And you may well be right about my diminished fertility. I am an old man and obviously not as virile as you: but by Gemma’s account you did no better with her last night than I have, recently. Disappointing.’
Victor falls silent.
Presently bargaining resumes, at about the thousand mark.
Elsa is allowed down to Sunday lunch. Brown soup, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, carrots and peas, followed by apple tart and cream. Like a dinner on a railway train, Elsa thought. She was very hungry.
Embarrassment was saved by the presence of Mr and Mrs Ramsbottle, and the ex-vicar of the parish and his young church-worker wife. He had been asked to resign from his position, not on his divorce but on his remarriage to his young parishioner, on her sixteenth birthday.
‘Hasn’t our Gemma done well for herself,’ says Mrs Ramsbottle, confidentially, to Elsa. ‘And not one bit proud! She remembers her old friends. She lived with us when she first came to London. We were like a mother and father to her. She never had parents of her own. And she was like a daughter to us. We had one of our own, of course; Marion. But I’m afraid she didn’t turn out well.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In a hospital, dear, with her nerves. We visit her on the third Sunday in every month. We put her off today, to come here. I know she’ll understand: she’s a good girl at heart. She doesn’t complain anywhere as much as she used to; of course, the tranquillisers help.’
‘Gemma still sticks to the English cuisine,’ says Mr Ramsbottle, ‘I notice. Well, I’m coming round to it myself. We’ve been everywhere, Marion’s mum and me, tasted everything. There’s nothing like home, young lady, in the end.’
‘We booked up on the first flight of Concorde,’ says Marion’s mum, ‘and that just about finished us. It wasn’t just the expense, it was seeing the earth so little below. Such a little place!’
‘Times were better when we didn’t know so much,’ says Marion’s dad, sadly.
Marion’s mum gulps over the sour local cider, served in cut glass cider mugs.
‘We have a man of the cloth amongst us,’ says Marion’s dad, ‘perhaps you have a word or two of comfort to offer?’
‘What about?’ asked the ex-vicar, startled.
‘I just wonder where things went wrong,’ says Mr Ramsbottle.
‘The outside world is much as it always was,’ says the ex-vicar, briskly. ‘We project into it our own state of mind, that’s all.’
He picks a juicy piece of meat up from his plate, and quite without self-consciousness, pops it between his young wife’s firm, pale lips. She has, at the best of times, a slightly reproving look. She accepts the tit-bit, however, as the lesser of various possible evils, and even seems to enjoy it.
Marion’s mum and dad, disconcerted by the vicar’s lack of spirituality, have a change of heart after coffee and mints, and decide that they can just fit in a visit to Marion.
‘After all,’ they say, not without a hint of reproach, ‘it is our day for visiting, and she is our daughter. Our own flesh and blood. And what a lucky girl she is; such a lovely view from the window. Rural England at its leafy best.’
While Gemma, at her most gracious, waves the Ramsbottles goodbye, Victor takes the opportunity to manage a few minutes alone with Elsa, who has been forbidden after-dinner coffee by Gemma, but allowed to telephone her friend Marina, from the sedan-chair booth, provided she reverses the charges.
‘Christ, I’m sorry, Elsa,’ says Victor. ‘We’ll get out of this somehow.’
By sitting her on his knee and leaning backwards he is hidden by the faded antique curtains, and can penetrate her without being seen.
‘What’s the matter, Elsa?’ Marina keeps asking in one ear. ‘Your voice keeps fading. Is something the matter?’
‘We’re both being used,’ complains Victor in Elsa’s other ear. ‘Abominably used. Hamish actually tells me this was a duty weekend. Those extraordinary people to Sunday dinner! What an insult. A calculated insult. The whole thing’s calculated. He only asked me here to con me into buying his billiard room rubbish. Friendship! If you look at it closely there’s not a single piece that’s right. I’d make a great mistake buying it at all. And Gemma only asked you here because of her hare-brained maternal schemes.’
He falls silent at last, his mind eased by Elsa’s unchanging warmth; his own again: now cleansed of the trespasser. He closes his eyes, sighs with the relief of it all, however temporary. Elsa, still trying to detail the contents of Gemma’s typing to Marina, gives up the attempt.
‘It’s no use wasting the phone bill like this,’ complains Marina. ‘If you’re going to talk nonsense, at least don’t reverse the charges.’
And she puts down the telephone.
Victor is back in the drawing room before Gemma can become alarmed at his absence.
Janice, of course, is Gemma’s trump card. She arrives triumphant, as Gemma knew she would; one eye black and puffy, and with her daughter escorted by a personable young man.
‘Dear God,’ cries Victor, seeing his wife thus damaged, leaping forward to take her hand. ‘What happened?’
Janice withdraws her hand, coolly.
‘Really,’ she says, ‘it’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Who’s this?’ demands Victor of Wendy, seeing Kim.
‘We’re living together,’ says Wendy, flatly. ‘In my room.’
The cake is on the central table in the tea room: frilled in silver, embossed in pink and white icing, with the message ‘Happy birthday twins!’ upon it in little yellow furry balls.
‘I had to place each ball with a tweezer, separately!’ says Gemma, proudly.
The cake is flanked by plates of tea-time delicacies – little ham sandwiches, tiny sausage rolls, delicate eclairs. The cups and saucers are Spode, the teaspoons sterling silver. The chairs and table are of flimsy bamboo, Japanese-style, and uncomfortable. A plinth is set out with music chairs and stands, as if for a small orchestra, but in fact the background music, of the soothing palm court kind, comes from a cassette player.
Elsa is fetched down from her room. Janice and Wendy view her benignly. Kim
has his notebook out.
‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ says Janice. ‘I hear you make Victor truly happy. The sooner we’re divorced and you two married the better.’
Elsa opens her mouth to say she does not believe in marriage, but closes it again.
‘What fun to have a step-mother one’s own age,’ says Wendy distantly, leaning back into Kim so that he could hardly control his pencil. ‘I could knit you a wedding dress, in silver rope. They’re quite fashionable at Register Offices, I believe. I saw one in Vogue.’
‘You have to be thin,’ says Elsa.
‘Isn’t it amazing,’ says Gemma, to Victor, ‘that your daughter and your new wife should have birthdays on the same day! I know there’s a year between them but even so, what a coincidence.’
Kim grunts something beneath his breath.
‘What did you say?’ demands Victor, sharply. ‘Nothing,’ says Kim.
‘You did,’ says Victor. ‘Come on! Speak up like a man.’
Victor’s cheek-bones turn pink. The chairs provided are obviously too small and weak to support his bulk. He strides the room, hovering with menace over his new usurper’s comparatively frail form.
‘I said,’ says Kim, giving in, ‘not all that amazing. Merely incest fantasy acted out. Not unusual in men with unclaimed daughters of beyond the age of consent.’
Silence falls. Janice and Victor both blush. Elsa’s mouth falls open. Kim and Gemma smile. Only Wendy remains unperturbed. But she takes out her knitting and keeps her fingers busy, lest, as Kim remarked afterwards, they were tempted to stray where they had no business. It was not advisable, Kim said, for children to see parents of the opposite sex, or indeed the same sex, walk naked about the house. So had Victor and Janice walked, for Wendy’s benefit. So had Victor’s parents, for him.
‘Do cut the cake!’ suggests Gemma. ‘Both of you together, since you’re both birthday girls.’
Elsa and Wendy overcome their reluctance to touch one another, and together slice the cake. It is light and fragrant.
‘Both big girls, aren’t they,’ says Kim, making a note of it.
