by Weldon, Fay
I do what I can and I am what I am.
Men would take Romula’s small hand, hold it, pass a finger over the lines of the blue, curling, disfiguring dragon and say, ‘How did you come by that? What happened?’ But she never told them. She told me, though, when I met her at breakfast in Singapore, so I’m telling you. Should you come across her, when you travel Skyways, should the little lace half-glove on the hand of the girl who brings your coffee, tongs out the hot towels (Club Class only), slip back to reveal the macho stamp of the dragon, please keep it to yourself. I wouldn’t want her to think a confidence had been betrayed. Details have of course been altered to protect her identity. And in a way it is everyone’s story: everyone, that is, who doesn’t do what their mother wants.
I do what I can and I am what I am.
When she was fourteen, Romula had the prettiest hands: soft but not puffy, delicate but not feeble, slender fingers just right for rings – not so short they looked stubby, not so long they seemed to have a life of their own and were scary, as fingers can be; her nails were healthily pink and almond-shaped: the skin of the hand translucently white – but then she was a natural blonde: blue veins made a faint tracery beneath the skin, and the ones on the back of her hand travelled straight to her heart, she knew they did.
‘Romy, stop waving your hands about and get on with your homework! The way out of all this is education.’ Liz’s hands were big, square and rough: they were competent: they made you feel safe: only once had Romy’s father raised his fist to Liz and Romy – that was when Romy was three – and Liz had pushed him out the door for ever.
‘We’ll manage on our own,’ she said. ‘No man’s better than half a man,’ and presently she was standing on platforms waving her own big, effective hands about, speaking on the rights of women, while little Romula stood somewhere apart, standing on first one foot, then another.
‘When I grow up,’ said Romula at five, ‘I’m going to be a nurse.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Liz and all her many female friends in chorus. ‘You’re going to be a doctor.’
Romula thought that was a perfectly horrid idea and took off her dungarees and borrowed one of Sylvie’s party dresses (Sylvie lived next door and Liz wished she didn’t) and went straight out and played in the garden like that. She wasn’t often so naughty, though. She cried afterwards and told Liz she didn’t know why she did it, and it was true, she didn’t.
I do what I can but I’m not what I am.
When Romula was crossed in love or unhappy in any way she’d develop a little wart where the top of her thumb rubbed against her forefinger. When she was in love again, happy again, it went away. Men looked at Romula’s hands a lot, in a speculative way, which at first vaguely alarmed her. Other girls had legs which got looked at, or necks, or breasts, or eyes – it was Romula’s hands which mesmerized, promised, enchanted.
That was what women did to men, Romula believed, at sixteen. Mesmerized, promised, enchanted. Then they married you and you lived happily ever after. She told her mother so.
‘What are you talking about?’ shrieked her mother. ‘Dear God, what am I going to do with you?’
Romula was struggling with physics, chemistry, biology: her mother had to fight the school’s obstinacy, stupidity and sexism to achieve it. And she had. Liz always got what she wanted. Romula was to be a doctor. The pressure of the pen raised a blister on Romula’s middle finger. The blister went septic. She couldn’t work for months, it hurt so; she failed exams.
I try but I can’t and I’m not what I am.
When she was sixteen, a fortune-teller read Romula’s palm.
‘What pretty hands,’ she said. Well, everyone said that. But then she said – ‘You’ll grow up to break your mother’s heart. See there, the gap between the head line and the life line, where they rise. That’s good for the child, bad for the parent. Unbiddable!’
Yet Romula was the sweetest, gentlest thing. Not a scrap of her father in her, that roistering, fornicating, loud-mouthed bully. Liz missed Romula’s dad, for all she claimed she didn’t. Romula knew it. But when men go, women must make do, and Liz had her pride. Everyone makes a virtue of necessity.
When she was seventeen Romula said to Liz, ‘I’m going to the fair with Sylvie.’ Sylvie was still living next door. Sylvie giggled a lot. She had little red raw knuckly hands which were never quiet: ‘Like her mouth,’ said Liz. Sylvie had left school: now she did nothing in particular. She wore very short skirts and her hair was yellow-blonde, not natural blonde, like Romula’s.
‘Why do you have to go with Sylvie?’ asked Liz. ‘Come to that, why do you have to go at all?’ There was a reason Liz didn’t approve of fairs – something to do with either goldfish or equal opportunities, though Romula couldn’t be bothered to remember which. Romula was going to the fair, and that was that. Everyone was going to the fair.
‘Who else is there to go with?’ said Romula, snarling.
‘Jo,’ said Liz. ‘Since you insist on being heterosexual.’ Jo was Liz’s friend Evelyn’s boy. He was training to be a social worker. He was sensitive and caring, and stuttered.
‘I like Sylvie and I don’t like Jo,’ said Romula. ‘And Jo may be what you see as heterosexual but I don’t and nor does Sylvie.’
Honestly, she was a misfit: a prawn in a pool of gleaming trout. What her mother had to put up with!
I do all I can but I’m not what I am!
And then Romula had a really big row with her mother. Liz had just read Romula’s school report. Romula had a sweet disposition (Liz: They must be joking!), a caring nature, was popular with friends and teachers, and tried hard at lessons. She had an A in Housecraft (now a unisex subject after Liz’s letters to the school), a D in Biology, and E’s in Chemistry and Physics. (Liz: They’re doing it on purpose. They must be!)
‘Romula,’ said Liz, ‘you are an embarrassment to me and always have been and that’s that!’
‘I suppose you wish you’d never had me,’ said Romula.
‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ said Liz. ‘But it might have been easier if you’d been a boy, and I never thought I’d live to hear myself say that. I should have groaned when you came out, not cheered. Go to the fair, if that’s what you want, and good riddance.’
Romula gelled her hair and went to the fair in a short mauve frilly skirt and white lace top borrowed from Sylvie. She had to wear her trainers because that was all she had and she was a size 7 and Sylvie a size 3, but they looked okay. She wore a glass diamond ring on each finger: and, such was the magic of her hands, they didn’t look cheap and nasty at all.
It was a warm excited night: honky-tonk tunes and sentimental ballads fought it out between and over the rides, the stalls, the shrieks and screams, the arcade machines. The lights on the ground dimmed the moon into nothingness. The site was crowded, but not so you couldn’t move. Romula and Sylvie had paper money in their pockets. Romula felt quite peculiar: elated and ashamed by the last thing she’d said to her mother: for some reason it made her skip about.
‘I’d have left you too if I’d been my father.’
‘He didn’t leave, I threw him out.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ cried Romula in triumph. ‘You made him feel useless, you made him feel wretched, so he left, and I expect now he’s the happiest man in the world. I hope he is!’
That’d teach her! Mother, stony-faced dragon in jeans and a sweatshirt. But she was a good woman too: she worked at the Well Woman Centre, for the love of people (well, women), not money. You had to acknowledge it. Only not just now, just not tonight, the night of the fair.
Sylvie and Romula stopped by the Super Disco Waltzer, and fathers with children on their shoulders brushed by (and Sylvie shrieked because now there was candy floss in her hair). And they wondered if they dared.
I do what I dare and I am what I am.
The floor of the Waltzer rotated, faster and faster round its mirrored central pivot, and from its central mirrored pivo
t music streamed, and jets of steam which spurted out rainbow fog, and through the fog the murmur of a female voice – ‘You want to go faster? Scream louder! Scream louder!’ – poured like soft liquid over the clutching, shrieking, dizzy riders, and the louder they screamed the faster they spun, for as the floor rotated it rose and fell: and on this moving, surging base the open cars rotated and spun; and disco lights and spotlights swung and danced and raced from the whirling ceiling above: and all of a sudden Romula saw the ride attendants, the Princes of the Fair, one for every three cars, the young men who rode the Waltzer for their fairground living, who battled with the surging floor like fishermen in a storm, dancing and leaping to stay in the same place; their task to spin the cars as they passed.
‘Fixed orbit satellites,’ said Romula to Sylvie. (Romula paid attention in Physics whenever the subject left the ground. Above a hundred feet and Romula listened. So our vocations make their presence known in early life.) As for Sylvie, she had no idea what Romula was talking about. How could she?
Romula thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful, so magical as the young men, strong, lithe, muscled, not a brain in their heads, as Liz would have said, and who cared? She thought she would faint. The men lunged and pushed, and round and round them went the cars like crazy things, with the white stunned faces of the riders appearing and disappearing as they spun.
‘You’re scared,’ said Sylvie. ‘Too scared to have a go on the Super Disco Waltzer!’
‘I’m not,’ said Romula, but she was, she was – of her future, her past, of sex, of men, of life, of her mother, of everything. And well she might be. It’s terrifying.
I am what I dare but I’m not what I hope.
‘Men love women for their future,’ Romula said to me over breakfast, ‘women love men for their past.’ Bad news but true, I thought, though who wants to know it? What enchanted Romula about the Riders was not just what they were but ‘where they’d been I couldn’t go, what they felt I’d never know’; not just the blue tattoos flashing on their strong arms under the disco lights as they spun the cars and leapt like fish over waves to keep their balance – ‘really they were like dancers’ – or the gleam of white teeth and red mouth, or the moving of buttocks beneath tight jeans – all of that yet none of that. Something more.
‘I can’t explain except to say I loved Ben for his past, and his strangeness, and his newness, not just his muscles or the tattoos on his arm, and the ground which was like waves and his mastery over it.’
‘I’m not scared one bit,’ said Romula, and they paid their £2 each (the most expensive ride of the fair, and not surprising) and when the cars finally slowed, and sighed, and stopped, they got in, and Romula’s little white hands closed softly around the metal bar. And Ben, top Waltzer Rider, didn’t just twist the car but rode the car, bewitched, mesmerized and enchanted by Romula’s white hands beside his own strong brown ones. After they’d shrieked their fill he took Romula down by the canal, and Romula would have died if he hadn’t.
‘Do what you can and be what you are,’ said Ben to Romula. ‘Life’s simpler than you think. Time you left home, anyway.’
‘AIDS!’ shrieked Liz. ‘AIDS!’ Why did Romula tell her? God knows. Girls shouldn’t talk to their mothers as if they were sisters. They’re mothers. As you grow up they grow old. They don’t like it. More chances for you, fewer chances for them.
But there wasn’t anything Liz could do, and she was going away for a seminar anyway, on ‘Yoga – a replacement for tranquillizers?’ and Evelyn and her son Jo were moving in to keep an eye on Romula.
I’ll do what I want and be what I am.
So every day that week Romula met Ben and she was quite giddy with love and he was quite giddy with something, but the fair was moving on as fairs will: and besides he was married: but somehow the parting seemed right: the grief that followed healing more things than just Romula losing Ben. Round the cars whizzed on the surging floor, faster and faster, big male hands and little white girl fingers.
And every day that week Romula went into the new tattooist who’d opened up in the High Street – ‘New needles every customer – free!’ – and flourishing the fake passport which was sixth-form common property proved herself over eighteen and had a dragon, like the one on Ben’s right buttock, tattooed on the back of her left hand. Amazing how you can keep a left hand out of sight if you try.
But you couldn’t hide it from a mother for long and when Liz came home she went mad, and threw Romula out of the house. Only temporarily, of course. Afterwards, in remorse, she took Romula on holiday to Greece, to Lesbos.
‘I shouldn’t have gone away when I did,’ lamented Liz. ‘Always looking after other people, neglecting my own child.’ Friends assured her she was wrong, it wasn’t like that at all, and they were right, of course. New advances in cosmetic surgery must surely before long make tattoos removable; the dragon wouldn’t be there for life.
But it was, it was: the veins in her hand ran straight to her heart: it was there in her heart for ever.
I do what I can and I am what I am.
The journey to Lesbos was Romula’s first air flight. Lesbos was tedious, but Romula, gazing at the dragon on her hand, loving Ben, lost for always, for ever and ever, fell in love with flying, and the men who leapt so high above the waves they could stay in the air for ever. ‘A conversion experience’, was how she described it. The kind of thing, sceptics would say, that sometimes happens when unhappiness is too much to bear. But I don’t see it like that. I think she was just born to fly.
Be that as it may, when Romula said she was dropping science and planned to be an air hostess, her mother just said, ‘Okay. If that’s what you really want. Do what you can and be what you are, and good luck to you.’
The Year of the Green Pudding
The Personnel Department? This way? Thanks.
Sir, you have a nice face. I reckon I can talk to you. Tell you about myself? Why not! That’s what you’re there for, after all.
It must be possible to live on this earth without doing anyone any damage. It must be. I try to be good. I really try. I rescue wasps from glasses of cider, I look where I’m going so I don’t tread on ants. The second worst sound I ever heard was when I went to rescue a lamb tangled up in an electric fence, and there was a crackle, crackle underfoot and I was treading on snails, cracking their shells, piercing them, killing them. Why did so many snails congregate in one spot? There was no reason I could see, except mass suicide. But no excuses for me: I should have looked where I was going: the lamb could have waited a second longer: the snails would have been saved. The second worst thing I ever did was murder a duckling. Not on purpose, of course, but definitely murder by neglect. No excuses. I went to put the ducks away for the night, to save them from the fox. I heard a cheep-cheep and assumed it came from inside the shed. I should have checked. I didn’t. The sound came from under the shed. I was deaf to the cheep, cheep, cheep, the little plea for help as darkness fell and the bright eyes of predators gathered in the hedge. I wanted to get back into the warm for a cup of coffee. In the morning there was no duckling. I reckon the rat took it, that blonde little, silly little helpless thing. I saw the rat later, a great fat brown hairy mean thing, and I let it go. I could have taken a stick and beaten it to death. But it had a right to live. Why should the rat’s ugliness, the duckling’s prettiness, condemn the rat to death? Yes, sir, I was brought up in the country.
What was the worst sound I ever heard? It was the sound of Cynthia’s crying outside her bedroom door, while I lay inside with her husband. Crocus we called him. He had a thick thatch of yellow hair, which brightened up dull rooms. Cynthia was my best friend, so you understand the ‘we’. The worst thing I ever did? Why, to be there with him in the bed.
I’m a middling sort of person, don’t you think, sir? Of middle height and middle size, and I buy the kind of clothes that are labelled S, M or L; kind of floppy, not tailored. I choose the M. My hair, left to its own device
s, is mid-brown and my shoes are size five, the middle size they say, though I think statistically sixes are more normal now. Our research department says the population’s getting bigger. My eyes are a kind of middle grey and I wear a medium make-up base. Really I’m sometimes surprised family and friends recognize me in the street. I smile a lot, as you’ll have noticed, showing these middling-even teeth, but my friends sometimes complain I have no sense of humour. I just think they’re sometimes not very funny in what they say and do. For instance, I think Irish jokes are dangerous and cruel and I also think one has to say so, out loud, there and then, if anyone begins. There’s one joke I heard recently which did make me laugh, out loud. It goes like this. ‘Question: How many radical feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: That’s not funny.’ So I do have a sense of humour. Anyway, that’s enough about me.
Why am I here? My department head sent me to discuss my resignation. Did I mention that I’m a vegetarian? No? Actually I try to be a vegan (that’s someone who doesn’t eat any dairy foods, never mind just the cow itself, both on health grounds and because if eating the cow is murder, drinking the milk is theft), but I don’t always succeed. I’m like A. A. Milne’s king – ‘I do like a little bit of butter on my bread.’ I hope all this doesn’t make me sound rigid and boring; I don’t honestly believe I am. I just do try to get by doing as little damage as I can. And I make a very good onion and potato pie!
That’s since Crocus. Not the pie, the not doing damage. What happened about Crocus was this. I was twenty-five. A funny sort of age: not really young, but not really old: just too old to enter the best beauty contests. I felt more on the shelf then than I have done before or since, I don’t know why. Cynthia, as I say, was my best friend. She and Crocus had a little boy of two, Matthew. They’d had to get married because Matthew was on the way. Cynthia wasn’t much good with babies, and I was round there a lot helping. I wasn’t married, I had no children, I was just more competent than she was. It wasn’t difficult. She once put salt in his bottle instead of sugar. She shouldn’t have put sugar in anyway: it’s unnecessary and fattens without nourishing, but try and tell Cynthia anything like that. Cynthia wasn’t middling to look at, not at all. Cynthia was narrow-waisted and long-legged and long-backed and had natural blonde hair, one of those white, fragile skins which go with it, and dark blue eyes, the blue you see when you look out of Concorde’s window. (I have been in Concorde: I am full of surprises. Crocus used to say I was full of surprises.) I talk of Crocus in the past tense because it’s all over between him and me, and Cynthia’s in the past tense because she’s all over. She’s dead. What happened was this. I know I’m a long time getting round to it, I’m sorry, it’s just so dreadful, I rattle on and put it off.
