by Weldon, Fay
Concorde? I was working on the Liver Pâté Account. They were serving it on Concorde, on little pieces of toast, with free champagne cocktails. The client offered me a free flight. Why are you so interested in Concorde?
Cynthia went into hospital to have her second baby. She’d had a dreadful pregnancy, poor thing; the baby was pressing on the sciatic nerve. I moved in to look after little Matthew – and Crocus. Cook meals – you know how men are not supposed to be able to. Though if you ask me they just don’t want it known quite how good they are, in case it gets around. She was in for forty-eight hours. I think Crocus and me could have got through that, even though we were alone. I mean talking formally and not catching each other’s eye, though what he wanted was to be in bed with me and what I wanted was to be in bed with him, and we both knew it. Not saying, not touching, made it stronger; that’s the way it goes. The whole air crackled between us. But we could have held out, I know we could. Cynthia would have come back and it would all just have faded away. Things do. But the hospital rang and said the baby wasn’t up to its birth weight: Cynthia wouldn’t be back till Saturday. That was the Wednesday. And on Wednesday night, after visiting hour – he’d taken chocolates (Crocus was like Cynthia: he never would believe just how bad sugar is for you) and I’d taken grapes – we came straight back and went to bed together. Not the spare room – it was too near Matthew’s room – but their bed, Crocus and Cynthia’s bed. I told you about his hair, didn’t I? Blonde! Cynthia had dark-red pillowslips. I shall never forget – And Thursday evening we went to see her again, at visiting time, with never a flicker, all that sex didn’t seem any of her business somehow, and the new baby was just lovely and Matthew seemed really fond of it – it was a girl – and Cynthia said she wanted to call her after me because I was such a good friend and, do you know, I felt not a twinge of guilt. Does that make me odd, or just like anyone else? I didn’t mean to hurt her, but Crocus and me – it just seemed more important than anything else: what made the world go round and the stars shine and the wind blow and so forth. And all of Friday, when Matthew was at playgroup, and as soon as he’d been put down at six o’clock, we were in the bedroom – actually not in the bed most of the time, on the floor – does that make it better or worse? And then suddenly the door opened and there was Cynthia and the baby. She’d discharged herself, we later heard: I don’t think because she suspected anything, she just didn’t like hospital food – not enough sugar, I suppose – and knew the baby was doing fine in spite of what the hospital said.
She shut the door quickly so she couldn’t see us – it took us some time to get ourselves together, or rather not-together – and we could hear her weeping the other side of the door. Just quietly weeping.
Crocus went out to her, but she didn’t stay, she just handed him the baby and left. And by the time I’d got myself together – I never was a fast dresser – and he’d handed the baby to me and was gone after her, it was too late. She went down the Underground and threw herself under a train. The poor driver. I think of the poor drivers when anything like that happens.
Anyway, that was that, sir. Crocus couldn’t bear to be in the same room with me afterwards, and I think I’d have screamed if he’d touched me. It just sort of shook us right out of it. The young one didn’t get called after me, that’s all I know. And that she’d been on antidepressants and had threatened suicide in the past. Neither of them had told me that. So what sort of friendship was it? Do you think they were ashamed, or something? Shouldn’t you be frank, with friends?
But that was the end of my love life, at least for a time. It put me right off men, I can tell you. I got the blame, of course, and it ought to have been forty per cent of the blame – fifty per cent each and an extra ten per cent for him because he betrayed a marriage partner which is worse than betraying a friend. But of course I got a hundred per cent of it from all and sundry, especially sundry, especially men. I moved out of the district and I got a job here. I’d always wanted to work in an advertising agency. But now I have to resign. Why? I’ll tell you.
I do believe if you try, sir, if you really try, you can get through life without causing damage. I just hadn’t been trying over the Cynthia/Crocus business. I did, after that, I promise you. I checked up on all my dates; if they said they were married I wouldn’t go out with them, I wouldn’t even be alone with them. If they said they weren’t married, or divorced, I still checked up on them. Thirty per cent who said they weren’t, were, can you imagine that? And the other seventy per cent – I just wasn’t interested. I was working as a secretary then, sir, not a copywriter as I am now, but hoping, always hoping! Yes, I do get to meet the clients. I suppose I am attractive, in my middling kind of way. You know how it is – there’d be business lunches, business dinners: but I’d just go off home, I was so discouraged, frightened of trouble. I think that client who sent me off on Concorde got really cross, but I couldn’t help that. If you don’t feel anything, you don’t feel anything. And then I met Martin. You know Martin, he’s an Art Group Head here. Attractive? Crocus was nothing compared to Martin. You know how it is, you touch and there’s this surge of electricity – it’s almost as if you’ve been stung? And I thought to myself, look, I can’t go on atoning for ever for what I did to Cynthia and her children, if I did; because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve got to have children of my own, get married, settled, some time. And Martin was crazy about me. And I was crazy about him. And I thought this is really working, really something – you know that kind of confidence you get when everything’s in balance?
And then he told me he was married. I hadn’t checked up, I didn’t want to check up, I didn’t want to know. But he told me. He said theirs was an open marriage, she didn’t mind. I minded. I said no, that’s it, that’s the end. He said go and visit her: and I said no. What would she do if I visited her? Walk straight under the nearest train?
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never.’
He brought her round to me. She said I was welcome to him. She’d met somebody else: she wanted a divorce. I was to feel free, to make her feel better.
So I felt free. By God, I felt free. At last, it seemed to me, a penance which I thought was endless had worked itself out. I was free to be happy. The anxiety lifted. I hadn’t realized what it was, this black terrible cloud I’d been living under. Anxiety. If you’ve suffered from it you’ll know what it’s like: if you haven’t, sir, count your blessings. It’s like a physical pain, only it’s attached to your feelings, and there’s no cure for it, because it has no reality, no real cause in the outside world, so you’re free to attach it to any number of things. But what are you anxious about? they ask. The answer you give is aircrashes, or AIDS, or you’ve forgotten to turn the gas off, or you’ve offended your best friend (that’s always a good one for me) but the answer is, it’s not about anything, it’s just anxiety, free-floating anxiety, and you’d rather be dead but you don’t try because you’re too anxious about failing. I guess Cynthia wasn’t anxious. Just depressed. But Martin cured me of every sad, negative feeling I ever had. It’s been a wonderful year, a whole year of happiness. We became proper vegans together; we jogged, being careful not to step on snails; we joined the League Against Cruel Sports, until we decided it was cruel to humans; and I taught Martin not to kill wasps but just to sit still and leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone, and to pick spiders out of the bath with a postcard and cup. Then you lot gave me promotion at work. I actually became a copywriter! It seemed to me I could love Martin and do nobody any harm.
But now it’s January the second and I have to hand in my notice to you, sir. I have to, sir. This is what happened. Haven’t you heard? You know I’m on the Fresh Ginger Account, sir? And that we took all those full-page spreads in the women’s magazines? And that I did the recipe for the Christmas Pudding? And that it went in in July, so that everyone’s puddings would have time to mature by Christmas? I didn’t check the recipe, sir. I was too happy with Martin to bother. I remember thi
nking, shall I check this through once again or shall I quickly, quickly go downstairs to the canteen and meet him for a drink. You get somehow starved of some people, at a certain stage in a relationship, and really suffer if you can’t see and touch and be with them. And that was the stage Martin and I were at. And I didn’t check the recipe. I forgot to put the sugar in. The typist left that line out and I didn’t check. And, sir, those full-page spreads are read by tens of millions, and one in ten actually made the pudding, covered it with foil, left it to mature, put it in boiling water on Christmas morning, turned it out piping-hot after the turkey, and it was green. Green. Mould. Inedible. Green puddings by the million, sir, and my fault. A million family Christmases spoiled, because I was in love.
Yes, I said was. Every bit of feeling’s vanished. I don’t think I could bear to touch Martin now. I don’t know what it was all about, all that feeling, all that kissing, all that love. Except I seem doomed to cause trouble. I’m never going to fall in love again, sir, never, never, never.
Sir, there is a little brown spider by your elbow. Don’t move, you might squash it.
Four Tales from Abroad
Ind Aff
or Out of Love in Sarajevo
This is a sad story. It has to be. It rained in Sarajevo, and we had expected fine weather.
The rain filled up Sarajevo’s pride, two footprints set into a pavement, marking the spot where the young assassin Princip stood to shoot the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. (Don’t forget his wife: everyone forgets his wife, the Archduchess.) That happened in the summer of 1914. Sarajevo is a pretty town, Balkan style, mountain-rimmed. A broad, swift, shallow river runs through its centre, carrying the mountain snows away. The river is arched by many bridges and the one nearest the two footprints has been named The Princip Bridge. The young man is a hero in these parts. Not only does he bring in the tourists – look, look, the spot, the very spot! – but by his action, as everyone knows, he lit the spark which fired the timber which caused World War I which crumbled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the crumbling of which made modern Yugoslavia possible. Forty million dead (or was it thirty?), but who cares? So long as he loved his country.
The river, they say, can run so shallow in the summer it’s known derisively as ‘the wet road’. Today, from what I could see through the sheets of falling rain, it seemed full enough. Yugoslavian streets are always busy – no one stays home if they can help it (thus can an indecent shortage of housing space create a sociable nation) and it seemed that as if by common consent a shield of bobbing umbrellas had been erected two metres high to keep the rain off the streets. But the shield hadn’t worked around Princip’s corner, that was plain.
‘Come all this way,’ said Peter, who was a Professor of Classical History, ‘and you can’t even see the footprints properly, just two undistinguished puddles.’ Ah, but I loved him. I shivered for his disappointment. He was supervising my thesis on varying concepts of morality and duty in the early Greek states as evidenced in their poetry and drama. I was dependent upon him for my academic future. Peter said I had a good mind but not a first-class mind, and somehow I didn’t take it as an insult. I had a feeling first-class minds weren’t all that good in bed.
Sarajevo is in Bosnia, in the centre of Yugoslavia, that grouping of unlikely states, that distillation of languages into the phonetic reasonableness of Serbo-Croat. We’d sheltered from the rain in an ancient mosque in Serbian Belgrade: done the same in a monastery in Croatia: now we spent a wet couple of days in Sarajevo beneath other people’s umbrellas. We planned to go on to Montenegro, on the coast, where the fish and the artists come from, to swim and lie in the sun, and recover from the exhaustion caused by the sexual and moral torments of the last year. It couldn’t possibly go on raining for ever. Could it? Satellite pictures showed black cloud swishing gently all over Europe, over the Balkans, into Asia – practically all the way from Moscow to London, in fact. It wasn’t that Peter and I were being singled out. No. It was raining on his wife, too, back in Cambridge.
Peter was trying to make the decision, as he had been for the past year, between his wife and myself as his permanent life partner. To this end we had gone away, off the beaten track, for a holiday: if not with his wife’s blessing, at least with her knowledge. Were we really, truly suited? We had to be sure, you see, that this was more than just any old professor-student romance: that it was the Real Thing, because the longer the indecision went on the longer Mrs Piper, Peter said, would be left dangling in uncertainty and distress. He and she had been married for twenty-four years; they’d stopped loving each other a long time ago, naturally – but there would be a fearful personal and practical upheaval entailed if he decided to leave permanently and shack up, as he put it, with me. Which I wanted him to do, because I loved him. And so far I was winning hands down. It didn’t seem much of a contest at all, in fact. I’d been cool and thin and informed on the seat next to him in a Zagreb theatre (Mrs Piper was sweaty and only liked TV), was now eager and anxious for social and political instruction in Sarajevo (Mrs Piper spat in the face of knowledge, Peter had once told me), and planned to be lissom and topless – I hadn’t quite decided: it might be counterproductive to underline the age differential – while I splashed and shrieked like a bathing belle in the shallows of the craggy Croatian coast (Mrs Piper was a swimming coach: I imagined she smelt permanently of chlorine).
So far as I could see it was no contest at all between his wife and myself. How could he possibly choose her while I was on offer? But Peter liked to luxuriate in guilt and indecision. And I loved him with an inordinate affection, and indulged him in this luxury.
Princip’s footprints are a metre apart, placed like the feet of a modern cop on a training shoot-out – the left in front at a slight outward angle, the right behind, facing forward. There seemed great energy focused here. Both hands on the gun, run, stop, plant the feet, aim, fire! I could see the footprints well enough, in spite of Peter’s complaint. They were clear enough to me, albeit puddled.
We went to a restaurant for lunch, since it was too wet to do what we loved to do: that is, buy bread, cheese, sausage, wine and go off somewhere in our hired car, into the woods or the hills, and picnic and make love. It was a private restaurant – Yugoslavia went over to a mixed capitalist–communist economy years back, so you get either the best or the worst of both systems, depending on your mood – that is to say, we knew we would pay more but be given a choice. We chose the wild boar.
‘Probably ordinary pork soaked in red cabbage water to darken it,’ said Peter. He was not in a good mood. Cucumber salad was served first.
‘Everything in this country comes with cucumber salad,’ complained Peter. I noticed I had become used to his complaining. I supposed that when you had been married a while you simply wouldn’t hear it. He was forty-six and I was twenty-five.
‘They grow a lot of cucumber,’ I said.
‘If they can grow cucumbers,’ Peter then asked, ‘why can’t they grow mange-tout?’ It seemed a why-can’t-they-eat-cake sort of argument to me, but not knowing enough about horticulture not to be outflanked if I debated the point, I moved the subject on to safer ground.
‘I suppose Princip’s action couldn’t really have started World War One,’ I remarked. ‘Otherwise, what a thing to have on your conscience! One little shot and the deaths of thirty million on your shoulders.’
‘Forty,’ he corrected me. Though how they reckon these things and get them right I can’t imagine. ‘Of course Princip didn’t start the war. That’s just a simple tale to keep the children quiet. It takes more than an assassination to start a war. What happened was that the build-up of political and economic tensions in the Balkans was such that it had to find some release.’
‘So it was merely the shot that lit the spark that fired the timber that started the war, et cetera?’
‘Quite,’ he said. ‘World War One would have had to have started sooner or later.’
‘A bit later or a bit
sooner’, I said, ‘might have made the difference of a million or so: if it was you on the battlefield in the mud and the rain you’d notice: exactly when they fired the starting-pistol: exactly when they blew the final whistle. Is that what they do when a war ends: blow a whistle? So that everyone just comes in from the trenches?’
But he wasn’t listening. He was parting the flesh of the soft collapsed orangey-red pepper which sat in the middle of his cucumber salad; he was carefully extracting the pips. He didn’t like eating pepper pips. His Nan had once told him they could never be digested, would stick to the wall of his stomach and do terrible damage. I loved him for his vulnerability, the bit of him that was forever little boy: I loved him for his dexterity and patience with his knife and fork. I’d finished my salad yonks ago, pips and all. I was hungry. I wanted my wild boar.
Peter might have been forty-six but he was six foot two and well-muscled and grizzled with it, in a dark-eyed, intelligent, broad-jawed kind of way. I adored him. I loved to be seen with him. ‘Muscular-academic, not weedy-academic,’ as my younger sister Clare once said. ‘Muscular-academic is just a generally superior human being: everything works well from the brain to the toes. Weedy-academic is when there isn’t enough vital energy in the person, and the brain drains all the strength from the other parts.’ Well, Clare should know. Clare is only twenty-three, but of the superior human kind herself, vividly pretty, bright and competent – somewhere behind a heavy curtain of vibrant, as they say, red hair, which she only parts for effect. She had her first degree at twenty. Now she’s married to a Harvard Professor of Economics seconded to the United Nations. She can even cook. I gave up competing when she was fourteen and I was sixteen. Though she too is capable of self-deception. I would say her husband was definitely of the weedy-academic rather than the muscular-academic type. And they have to live in Brussels.
