by Weldon, Fay
‘The paralysis started later, on the day we were married. You fell on the steps of the Register Office, after the ceremony. You have not walked since. There is no organic damage, the doctors say. Only an emotional disturbance for which you will accept no treatment.’
Gemma cries, head in hands, nine-fingered. How old she seems! As fantasy drains from her veins, decay creeps in.
‘One story or another, Hamish,’ she says, ‘what’s the difference? It is all the same. It’s the one-way journey we all make from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience. We must all make it: there is no escape. It’s only that love and romance and illusion and hope are etched so deeply into all our hearts that they can never quite be wiped away. They stay about to torment us, with thoughts of what might have been. For you, as well as me. We are fallen creatures: we never quite lose sight of grace, and the pain of our fall is always with us.’
‘I didn’t do the typing, Gemma,’ says Elsa, into the silence. ‘Hamish did it.’
Gemma turns her old and spiteful eyes upon her husband.
‘You have such a humble heart,’ she says. ‘How you wish to be of service! It’s what I most despise in you.’ Hamish says nothing. How haggard Gemma looks, and malevolent. A witch!
‘You deserved to lose Victor,’ says Gemma to Elsa. ‘Little liar, little slut.’
‘I know,’ says Elsa.
‘You had no right to him in the first place. You’re just a bit-part player in other people’s dramas. You’ll never amount to anything else. Do you realise that?’
‘Yes,’ says Elsa.
‘I lost Mr Fox and all my future too, whoever he was and however I did it: it’s all the same. This is a living death I have here in this chair. And don’t think that because others are worse off than me, that’s any comfort. It’s not.’
Gemma, you should have died when your mother did. Great-Aunt May, you should have let Gemma go: not nursed her through her infant illnesses; saved her against a rainy day.
What good did it do you in the end? You died lonely, and were buried alone.
That’s why you did it. Yes, you did. Had no child of your own: so stole your sister’s daughter’s child.
Back and back through the generations goes the good and evil in us. Proliferating, as the peoples of the world increase, raising the banners of their struggle high.
‘Never mind,’ says Gemma softly, to Elsa. ‘Sit here beside me in the sun and we’ll look through Harrod’s baby-linen catalogue, and choose the nursery furniture. Hamish will find it a sixteenth-century rattle. Won’t you, Hamish.’
‘If that’s what you want, Gemma.’ Hamish sits, mournful and depressed, his energy evaporated.
‘Gemma,’ says Elsa tentatively, ‘we don’t even know if it’s conceived, yet.’
‘Then you will stay at Hamish’s side, in Hamish’s bed, until it is. We will rear your child, Elsa, as the living evidence of the renewal of grace.’
‘But what about me?’
‘You? You can go back to your typing pool or wherever you’re happy, six weeks after the birth.’
Gemma stops talking. Elsa stands beside her chair, like some living puppet. Her mouth gapes wide.
But Gemma frowns, and now seems to address herself.
‘What are you saying?’ she asks, and her face is contorted, and an old lady croak comes out of her mouth to match her old lady face. ‘You’re being very naughty, Gemma.’
Great-Aunt May’s words, Great-Aunt May’s voice. Great-Aunt May perhaps. Hamish is on his feet, startled. But it is to Elsa he goes, not Gemma, as if he were afraid the spell might break and she might escape. He clutches her upper arm in his hand. Later she is to find bruises upon it. But Elsa shakes him off, disdainfully and easily, and gives him a quick look, and sees nothing more than a sad old man with strong fingers, a lecherous eye, and a failing prostate gland. She looks at Gemma and sees an old lady in a wheelchair.
‘Run, Elsa, run,’ says Gemma in her new, old, cracked voice, herself transcended. ‘The door’s open. Just run. Please run.’
Elsa, mesmerised, backs towards the french windows, fumbles with her foot by the sill, finds it, steps down. The sun strikes low over the horizon, large and red.
‘Run!’ cries Gemma once more, and her voice is her own again, light and hopeful. It is the voice her mother gave her, and which Aunt May preserved. ‘Run, Elsa! Run for all you’re worth. Don’t fall. Please don’t fall, the way I did. You can do it: go so far and then draw back. I know you can. You must! You must run for me and all of us.’
And Elsa runs, though whether for herself or Gemma she is not quite sure. She runs towards the splintered gate: stops to unlace her platform heels, and then runs on: her head spins, her side aches.
‘Stop her!’ calls Hamish from the terrace. ‘Annie and Johnnie! Stop thief!’
What is it I have stolen, wonders Elsa. His child, his heir, his vision of himself? His hope for a different future?
Annie and Johnnie stand together, arms akimbo, in the gateway. Still Elsa runs. She trips; she falls: she is at their very feet. She cries out in pain, gasps her distress. Johnnie raises the broom as if to belabour her, punish her, but Annie bends and takes Elsa’s arm, and helps her up, pushes her husband aside.
‘Run along, Missie. Quick,’ she says. ‘Out of here!’
But Elsa, standing again without breath to move, turns and stares back at Gemma and Hamish, and what she sees is etched forever in her mind.
Gemma is on her feet, out of her chair. She is reaching, craning, walking forward. She is unsteady, but she is over the step and on to the terrace and past Hamish, as if she too would, could, might perhaps somehow reach the gate and freedom. Annie and Johnnie run back towards Gemma. But she shakes her head: she needs no help from them. She turns back to Hamish instead, and takes his arm, and stands swaying beside him.
Gemma laughs. Gemma walks, on her husband’s arm. One step forward, one step back. Collapse. Then up again, off again. Gemma smiles her triumph; he smiles his. They are each other’s child: they do not need Elsa’s. Never did.
Gemma and Hamish walk side by side back into the house. Annie and Johnnie follow.
Elsa, forgotten, turns away and limps out of the gate. She has stubbed her toe and scraped her arm in falling. Her feet are bare. Thorns and brambles scratch her.
Not far from the gate is a telephone box. Elsa reverses the charges and speaks to her mother: or rather, cries disconsolately down the telephone for a while, and then utters her list of complaints. She has no money, no home, no job, no friends, no Victor. It is as her mother said it would be.
‘You were quite right,’ sobs Elsa. ‘Men are beasts.’
‘I never said men were beasts,’ protests Sheila, ‘just that you were a fool. Gone back to his wife, has he?’
‘Yes. Can I come home, Mum? I’ll share with Sally and Sophie.’
‘We’re very crowded. You’ve got used to grander things.’
‘I haven’t. Honest I haven’t.’
‘You’ll have to work. I can’t have you moaning under my feet all day, eating us out of house and home, the way you used to. They’re looking for people down at market garden. Pinching out tomatoes.’
‘My fingers will get green. The smell makes me faint.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Derek keeps asking after you, you’ll be glad or sorry to hear.’
‘Derek? Who’s Derek?’ Elsa really can’t remember.
‘You were at school with him. He’s on the milk round.’
‘Oh him. The one with acne.’
Sheila sighs.
‘How are you getting back?’
‘I’ll have to hitch.’
‘Be careful.’
Oh, home, safety, peace. Eternal irritation, and eternal consolation.
Elsa walks a good half mile down the road, unkempt, barefoot, and distrait, before a garage van going in to London picks her up. She is home by half-past eleven, in time for the epilogue on television, and
cocoa with her brothers and sisters.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
For your next wickedly witty Fay Weldon, read on or click here.
To find out about Fay Weldon, click here.
To discover more books by Fay Weldon, click here.
For an invitation from the publisher, click here.
First published in 1978 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1977
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858011
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Copyright
In this superlative anthology, Fay Weldon introduces readers to a cast of mothers, children, wives, and lovers—all of them unforgettable, timeless female characters. In “Subject to Diary,” a successful forty-ish career woman sits in an abortion clinic pondering motherhood.
In “The Year of the Green Pudding,” a woman who seems to doom everyone and everything she touches vows never to fall in love again. And an analyst’s office is the setting for a series of stories that feature four female patients—including a murderer—who lay bare their souls.
Table of Contents
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Stories of Working Life
Subject to Diary
I Do What I Can and I Am What I Am
The Year of the Green Pudding
Four Tales from Abroad
Ind Aff
A Visit from Johannesburg
Au Pair
How I Am is How You Are
Tales of the New Age
Down the Clinical Disco
Pumpkin Pie
Sharon Loves Darren
Stories for Christmas
Who Goes Where?
The Search for Mother Christmas
Three Tales of Country Life
A Move to the Country
Chew You Up and Spit You Out
The Day the World Came to Somerset
As Told to Miss Jacobs
A Gentle Tonic Effect
Moon Over Minneapolis
Un Crime Maternel
A Pattern of Cats
Copyright
Stories of Working Life
Subject to Diary
If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.
Oriole Green gave her name to the clinic receptionist, an unsmiling girl with dark skin and blonde hair and almost no eyebrows at all, who punched Oriole’s name up on the computer and then asked her if she’d been to the clinic before. Oriole said yes, without thinking, for she was under considerable stress, and the girl with no eyebrows punched some more buttons and then said flatly, ‘You’re lying. You haven’t.’
Oriole was on the eve of her fortieth birthday and for fifteen years had been spoken to, on the whole, and at least out of the bedroom, with politeness and respect. Though in the bedroom, she had noticed, men who were most – no, reverential was the wrong word, as was courteous; guarded was perhaps more accurate – were the ones who most wished to take her down a peg or so: called her names, slapped her around a little. Oriole didn’t mind: it was a relief. It was the price, she reckoned, a woman paid for being successful. Nothing was for nothing.
But this was not a bedroom. This was not a suitor, an impregnator, an erotic hit-and-runner, this was a chit of a fat-faced girl behind a desk in the Serena Clinic for Women, a double-fronted house in a dusty suburban garden where pregnancies were terminated for money, and such a girl, who was doubtless paid twice what her equivalent in the public sector would be, should not feel entitled to be rude to clients. The girl wore a pink name-tag on her white coat. It read ‘Daisy’. Daisy should smile and be friendly and helpful; and out of human kindness, what’s more, not merely in the interest of good public relations. Except, Oriole supposed, a girl in her early twenties who was not pregnant, who was not a supplicant for termination, would feel superior to her less fortunate sisters. Or perhaps, more likely, since the waiting list at the clinic was long, the problem was merely that no one had bothered properly to train the reception staff. Even in the private sector, termination came under the heading ‘seller’s market’.
‘I must have made a mistake,’ said Oriole, returning rudeness with courtesy, as one should. She had most certainly been to the Serena Clinic twice before, only, of course, as she would have remembered sooner had she not been under stress, using another name on each occasion. On her first visit, when she was 28, she had given her married name, and on the second, when she was 36, her boyfriend’s surname, out of some kind of rivalry, she now supposed, with his wife. At the time she had just felt better using his name, not her own. But now she had given the clinic her own original name, her school and professional name: as if finally she accepted responsibility, not for a child exactly, but at least for the non-event the child must of necessity be: and she felt less somehow hole-in-corner, in fact rather open and brave.
Even ‘child’ sounded wrong. A putative non-child perhaps: an alleged and accidental non-child. Of course this non-child, this growing cluster of cells, had in a way to be congratulated, inasmuch as, so successfully and so far, it had evaded all the powerful suggestions that it should not be, should not come into existence, egg and sperm by some miracle of happenstance colliding and joining, the two amongst millions not to succumb to the hazards set up by nature itself – a too acid, too alkali womb: a too early, too late arrival of the egg and/or delivery of the sperm: and so forth; oh, well done, well done! Not to mention the more considered incentives towards not-to-be: the contraceptive poisons, the rubber sheaths, the hormone-induced non-receptivity, the other many traps and fail-safe devices invented by humanity to stop itself breeding itself out of existence. What, survived all this? Still living? And then, once fertilized, to have clung on satisfactorily; to have successfully set the welcoming mechanism of the host body into vigorous motion – oh yes, you had to congratulate this cluster of dividing cells, even as your own surging hormones sickened you. Well done, well done, you had to say, for having got so far! But also, so sorry, I do have to hit you on the head at this the last and greatest hurdle. I don’t want you. You can’t survive if I don’t want you. You got it right, but in the wrong body. A factor beyond your comprehension: one you were too tiny to comprehend, let alone forestall. That the whole great intended unit should notice you as you grew, and turn against you. For now that your scale has changed other forces must come into play. Pipped at the post, oh brave and courageous one, the one amongst millions. What was the month now? June? Left to itself it would be born in November.
‘Fu
nny thing to make a mistake about,’ said Daisy un-cheerily. She had a hairy upper lip, and had bleached the dark hairs, which was a mistake. Why didn’t she just tweeze them out? ‘Sit down,’ said fat-faced, greasy Daisy, as if Oriole’s standing was in itself a nuisance.
Oriole sat down. There was one other person in the waiting room, which was painted pale pink and had pictures on the walls of pretty ladies in crinolines, in silhouette. She was a thin girl with a white face and red-rimmed eyes, who lowered her eyes to her copy of House and Garden rather than meet Oriole’s. There was an article inside the magazine, Oriole knew, in the series ‘Successful Women’, featuring Oriole Green. Oriole had cut it out and pinned it on her kitchen wall. She was proud of it. The thin girl flicked past the page.
Oriole had been named for a bird, so her mother said: born to soar and fly. Of course you succeed, said her mother, proudly. Sometimes Oriole felt like a bird: she had a lean, small, muscly body covered by the finest designer feathers, a small beaky nose and bright sharp intelligent eyes, and a lot of reddish hair: she could feel herself sometimes hopping about: this appointment, that appointment, up those stairs, down that lift, pecking around, then soaring, soaring –
There was an uncomfortable silence in the waiting room. The thin girl snivelled, and lit up a cigarette.
Oriole took out her diary and looked through November. It was a busy month. Ex-King Alleyne of a minor Arab state had his book coming out: the Shrinks were making a comeback: there was the Head Office Conference in Reykjavik: all fourteen branches would be represented. She, Oriole Green, personnel manager, would be speaking. In December the company was going public. You had to prepare people for change, even if change was to their advantage people hated it; hers was to be the keynote speech. How could you fit in having a baby with all that, even if you wanted one, loved the father? Neither of which she did, not for lack of trying. How could you find a man to love; a man who was altogether admirable and superior to yourself, once you were past, say, thirty, and earning well? And you didn’t have babies by, marry or set up home with men you didn’t love. Did you? Others seemed to, it was true, but only women with no standards, no expectations, no subtlety.
