by Weldon, Fay
The Archduke’s chauffeur had lost his way, and was parked on the corner trying to recover his nerve when Princip came running out of a café, planted his feet, aimed and fired. Princip was seventeen – too young to hang. But they sent him to prison for life and, since he had TB to begin with, he only lasted three years. He died in 1917, in a Swiss prison. Or perhaps it was more than TB: perhaps they gave him a hard time, not learning till later, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, that he was a hero. Poor Princip, too young to die – like so many other millions. Dying for love of a country.
‘I love you,’ I said to Peter, my living man, progenitor already of three children by his chlorinated, swimming-coach wife.
‘How much do you love me?’
‘Inordinately! I love you with inordinate affection.’
It was a joke between us. Ind Aff!
‘Inordinate affection is a sin,’ he’d told me. ‘According to the Wesleyans. John Wesley himself worried about it to such a degree that he ended up abbreviating it in his diaries. Ind Aff. He maintained that what he felt for young Sophy, the eighteen-year-old in his congregation, was not Ind Aff, which bears the spirit away from God towards the flesh: no, what he felt was a pure and spiritual, if passionate, concern for Sophy’s soul.’
Peter said now, as we waited for our wild boar, and he picked over his pepper, ‘Your Ind Aff is my wife’s sorrow, that’s the trouble.’ He wanted, I knew, one of the long half wrangles, half soul-sharings that we could keep going for hours, and led to piercing pains in the heart which could only be made better in bed. But our bedroom at the Hotel Europa was small and dark and looked out into the well of the building – a punishment room if ever there was one. (Reception staff did sometimes take against us.) When Peter had tried to change it in his quasi-Serbo-Croat, they’d shrugged their Bosnian shoulders and pretended not to understand, so we’d decided to put up with it. I did not fancy pushing hard single beds together – it seemed easier not to have the pain in the heart in the first place.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘this holiday is supposed to be just the two of us, not Mrs Piper as well. Shall we talk about something else?’
Do not think that the Archduke’s chauffeur was merely careless, an inefficient chauffeur, when he took the wrong turning. He was, I imagine, in a state of shock, fright and confusion. There had been two previous attempts on the Archduke’s life since the cavalcade had entered town. The first was a bomb which got the car in front and killed its driver. The second was a shot, fired by none other than young Princip, which had missed. Princip had vanished into the crowd and gone to sit down in a corner café, where he ordered coffee to calm his nerves. I expect his hand trembled at the best of times – he did have TB. (Not the best choice of assassin, but no doubt those who arrange these things have to make do with what they can get.) The Archduke’s chauffeur panicked, took the wrong road, realized what he’d done, and stopped to await rescue and instructions just, as it happened, outside the café where Princip sat drinking his coffee.
‘What shall we talk about?’ asked Peter, in even less of a good mood.
‘The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?’ I suggested. ‘How does an Empire collapse? Is there no money to pay the military or the police, so everyone goes home? Or what?’ He liked to be asked questions.
‘The Hungro-Austrian Empire,’ said Peter to me, ‘didn’t so much collapse as fail to exist any more. War destroys social organizations. The same thing happened after World War Two. There being no organizing bodies left between Moscow and London – and for London read Washington, then as now – it was left to these two to put in their own puppet governments. Yalta, 1944. It’s taken the best part of forty-five years for nations of Western and Eastern Europe to remember who they are.’
‘Austro-Hungarian,’ I said, ‘not Hungro-Austrian.’
‘I didn’t say Hungro-Austrian,’ he said.
‘You did,’ I said.
‘Didn’t,’ he said. ‘What the hell are they doing about our wild boar? Are they out in the hills shooting it?’
My sister Clare had been surprisingly understanding about Peter. When I worried about him being older, she pooh-poohed it; when I worried about him being married, she said, ‘Just go for it, sister. If you can unhinge a marriage, it’s ripe for unhinging; it would happen sooner or later; it might as well be you. See a catch, go ahead and catch! Go for it!’
Princip saw the Archduke’s car parked outside, and went for it. Second chances are rare in life: they must be responded to. Except perhaps his second chance was missing in the first place? He could have taken his cue from fate, and just sat and finished his coffee, and gone home to his mother. But what’s a man to do when he loves his country? Fate delivered the Archduke into his hands: how could he resist it? A parked car, a uniformed and medalled chest, the persecutor of his country – how could Princip, believing God to be on his side, not see this as His intervention, push his coffee aside and leap to his feet?
Two waiters stood idly by and watched us waiting for our wild boar. One was young and handsome in a mountainous Bosnian way – flashing eyes, hooked nose, luxuriant black hair, sensuous mouth. He was about my age. He smiled. His teeth were even and white. I smiled back and, instead of the pain in the heart I’d become accustomed to as an erotic sensation, now felt, quite violently, an associated yet different pang which got my lower stomach. The true, the real pain of Ind Aff!
‘Fancy him?’ asked Peter.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I just thought if I smiled the wild boar might come quicker.’
The other waiter was older and gentler: his eyes were soft and kind. I thought he looked at me reproachfully. I could see why. In a world which for once, after centuries of savagery, was finally full of young men, unslaughtered, what was I doing with this man with thinning hair?
‘What are you thinking of?’ Professor Piper asked me. He liked to be in my head.
‘How much I love you,’ I said automatically, and was finally aware how much I lied. ‘And about the Archduke’s assassination,’ I went on, to cover the kind of tremble in my head as I came to my senses, ‘and let’s not forget his wife, she died too – how can you say World War One would have happened anyway? If Princip hadn’t shot the Archduke something else, some undisclosed, unsuspected variable, might have come along and defused the whole political/military situation, and neither World War One nor Two would ever have happened. We’ll just never know, will we?’
I had my passport and my traveller’s cheques with me. (Peter felt it was less confusing if we each paid our own way.) I stood up, and took my raincoat from the peg.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, startled.
‘Home,’ I said. I kissed the top of his head, where it was balding. It smelt gently of chlorine, which may have come from thinking about his wife so much, but might merely have been because he’d taken a shower that morning. (‘The water all over Yugoslavia, though safe to drink, is unusually highly chlorinated’: guide book.) As I left to catch a taxi to the airport the younger of the two waiters emerged from the kitchen with two piled plates of roasted wild boar, potatoes duchesse, and stewed peppers. (‘Yugoslavian diet is unusually rich in proteins and fats’: guide book.) I could tell from the glisten of oil that the food was no longer hot, and I was not tempted to stay, hungry though I was. Thus fate – or was it Bosnian wilfulness? – confirmed the wisdom of my intent.
And that was how I fell out of love with my professor, in Sarajevo, a city to which I am grateful to this day, though I never got to see much of it, because of the rain.
It was a silly sad thing to do, in the first place, to confuse mere passing academic ambition with love: to try and outdo my sister Clare. (Professor Piper was spiteful, as it happened, and did his best to have my thesis refused, but I went to appeal, which he never thought I’d dare to do, and won. I had a first-class mind after all.) A silly sad episode, which I regret. As silly and sad as Princip, poor young man, with his feverish mind, his bright tubercular
cheeks, and his inordinate affection for his country, pushing aside his cup of coffee, leaping to his feet, taking his gun in both hands, planting his feet, aiming and firing – one, two, three shots and starting World War I. The first one missed, the second got the wife (never forget the wife), and the third got the Archduke and a whole generation, and their children, and their children’s children, and on and on for ever. If he’d just hung on a bit, there in Sarajevo that August day, he might have come to his senses. People do, sometimes quite quickly.
A Visit from Johannesburg
or Mr Shaving’s Wives
Marion flew in from Johannesburg to see her two daughters Elspeth and Erin. Marion was sixty-four but you’d never have known it. Her arms were bare, lean and tanned and braceleted with thick bands of gold. She wore silk dresses from Hong Kong and her blue eyes were large and bright with added oestrogen, and she had a brand-new husband who owned a gold mine. She said she just had to get out of South Africa for a time: Mandela was free and all hell about to break out: this always happened when there was a weak government.
Marion looked at the way her daughters lived and was shocked. Neither was married. They lived together in a country cottage: Elspeth bred sheepdogs and Erin worked in the local school library. Neither looked after her appearance. Elspeth was thirty-eight and had hairy legs and her clothes smelled of damp dog, and Erin was thirty-five and at least two stone overweight. In the evenings they ate beans on toast and watched television.
‘You girls ought to be married,’ said Marion, aghast.
‘There’s no one around here to want to marry us,’ said Elspeth and Erin, ‘and, if there were, we might not want to marry them.’ Marion had run off from their father Ted when Elspeth was eight and Erin was five, leaving Ted to bring them up. ‘What do women need with men or men with women?’ he’d asked, all through their childhood.
‘They never had a mother’s care at the age they needed it most,’ said Marion, weeping on the phone to Cas, her new husband. ‘I let those girls down. It’s all my fault.’
‘It’s never too late to make amends,’ said Cas, who had a cheerful and optimistic disposition.
He comforted his wife as best he could. But Marion was still upset. She called Ted and said how dare he let her daughters get into such a state. Ted said the girls were perfectly happy and Marion was to leave them alone. What she’d begun would just have to take its course.
Marion put off her return flight and said to her girls, ‘Life is better with a man. You don’t have to earn your own living and there’s always sex when you want it and someone to talk to when the day is done.’
They said, ‘We like our independence and we talk to each other when the day is done, though we see what you mean about sex. But all the best men are married, and if they’re not there’s something wrong with them. They’re either maniacs or impotent or gay. Or all three.’
‘Oh, pshaw!’ said Marion, ‘there’s always someone perfectly decent about,’ and in spite of their protests she put them in touch with a dating agency and filled in the forms on their behalf and then had to fly back to Johannesburg, where Cas had been having trouble with the servants. If people are free to work where they will, how do you get them to work for you at all? Marion blamed Mr de Klerk, for letting Mandela out.
‘Our mother is a fascist and a reactionary,’ said Elspeth, washing and re-washing her best navy jersey to get the dog smell out.
‘She seems very lively,’ said Erin, picking her way through a mixed green salad without dressing. She was on a diet.
‘The wicked often are,’ said Elspeth. Elspeth was the one who’d suffered most when their mother left their father, being the elder.
The phone rang and it was the man from Datawhile. A Mr Leonard Shaving had been in touch. He would be pleased to meet both Erin and Elspeth. He would take them both out to lunch at the Crown and Cheese on Sunday. Mr Shaving’s height was six foot two, his weight thirteen stone two, his complexion ruddy, his income large, his property various, his visage attractive, and he had a degree in philology.
‘That’s the plus,’ said Elspeth. ‘What’s the minus?’ People had been trying for years to sell her dogs she didn’t want.
The man from Datawhile was hesitant. Then he said, ‘He has a birthmark on his forehead and has been married three times already.’
Elspeth and Erin thought a little. But they were no longer content with just each other and a life of no change and little excitement: such was the effect of their mother’s sudden eruption out of the land of peaches, gold and injustice.
Elspeth said, ‘Most men just hit and run: at least this one stays round to marry.’
Erin said, ‘I like the sound of a man who doesn’t give up.’
Elspeth said, ‘In any case, I rather fancy a short-term marriage,’ and Erin said, ‘Better a divorcee than left on the shelf.’
Both said, ‘Mr Gorbachev has a birthmark on his forehead and it’s perfectly charming: the whole world agrees.’
Three marriages, they decided, were nothing. Their mother was on her fifth. And what harm could there possibly be in Sunday lunch at the Crown and Cheese?
Mr Shaving was as handsome, rich, charming, tall and intelligent as his description, and his birthmark no more disfiguring than Mr Gorbachev’s, but the attraction was between Erin and him, not Elspeth and him, and it was Erin, the librarian, he asked to marry him. Elspeth hid her disappointment from her sister and the very week of the engagement won Best Dog at Crufts for a sheepdog, Fluffy Danube, and was asked out to celebrate by the owner of Runner-Up Best Dog, the terrier Ratty IV, whose old blue jersey was even smellier than hers had been before its thorough washing. The smell of wet dog is comforting.
Marion and Cas flew over for the wedding. Ted wouldn’t attend as he didn’t want to set eyes on Marion and besides, went nowhere where he was expected to wear a shirt. He had checked up on Mr Shaving and discovered that his three previous wives had hanged themselves. Elspeth and Erin were offended and said that was (a) hearsay, (b) scandal; (c) obviously neurotic women would make a beeline for a man as pleasant and kind as Mr Shaving and (d) they were glad Ted wasn’t coming to the wedding. Marion pointed out that in Ted’s eyes no good could ever come out of anything so speedy and sexy as a Dating Agency: he was an old-fashioned, jealous old fart and leaving him was the best thing she’d ever done.
The wedding day came and Erin was down to a size 12 and the sun shone and everyone rejoiced, and forgot about Ted, and the owner of Ratty IV came along with Elspeth, and there were obviously more wedding bells in the air: but Elspeth did not cancel her subscription to Datawhile: you could never tell. Mr Shaving whisked Erin back to his large country house, where maids did all the work. He did not want his wife to spoil her nails checking out books in the library so Erin gave up her job and spent her time polishing her nails instead, and thinking about Mr Shaving, as he liked her to do. And life was indeed, as her mother had told her, better with a man. She didn’t have to spend her time working, and there was usually sex when she wanted it, though not always. In the evenings he was often melancholy so she would keep her thoughts to herself.
‘But it’s so wonderful when he smiles,’ said Erin to Elspeth; ‘It’s well worth the times when he doesn’t.’ But Elspeth thought Erin seemed a little, somehow, abstracted, as if more things were Erin’s fault than Erin had ever realized.
‘He’s the kind of man who buttons up his feelings,’ Erin wrote to her mother. ‘If only sometimes he’d cry and let them go! But you know what men are! They never talk about their emotions.’
‘Darling,’ Marion wrote back, ‘Men hardly ever have feelings: that’s why they so seldom let them go. It’s not that they want to cry and don’t: it’s that they just don’t want to cry. Sounds to me as if he’s turning out to be like Ted – a real depressive!’ She and Cas thought they might be getting a divorce. He wanted her to give a party and ask the de Klerks as guests of honour. Marion said she had no intention of honouring the betra
yers of white South Africa.
‘Take no notice of Marion,’ said Elspeth to Erin. ‘She’s old-fashioned and bitter, and has quarrelled with Cas. Get your husband to talk about himself. Find out why his other marriages failed. Communication, that’s what’s needed in a marriage. Laugh together, love together, cry together.’ She and Ratty IV’s owner were going to Preparing-for-Marriage classes, organized by the Church, though they hadn’t yet quite decided to marry.
But Mr Shaving wouldn’t talk about himself, or his previous wives. He said life was here and now; and they were married and that was that. He didn’t say he loved her, because, Erin said to Elspeth, that wasn’t his style. Erin told Mr Shaving that she loved him at least once a day, and she thought it pleased him, though it embarrassed him.
One day Mr Shaving had to go away on business, or so he said, but Erin called the man at Datawhile and discovered that Mr Shaving had kept his file at the Agency open and that he’d made four contacts since their wedding. How Erin wept and wailed. She called Marion who said briskly she shouldn’t make such a fuss; this was what marriage was like: had she ever said any different? Erin called Elspeth, who said contacts didn’t necessarily mean sex: perhaps he took a philological view of marriage. Erin said he never spoke to her about philology, she didn’t know what it was, how could she find out now she wasn’t allowed in the library; she was on her own in the world, she always had been; how she suffered! Nobody understood! She called her father but Ted replied, ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’ It was a bad day for everyone. Some days are like that.
