by Weldon, Fay
Mr Shaving came home and seemed astonished at Erin’s grief. ‘I married you because you were calm, plump and in control,’ he said. ‘Now you are hysterical, thin and full of demands. What has happened to you?’
‘Marriage to you’, she replied, ‘has happened to me, as it happened to your other wives. Where are they now?’ And she stamped her foot.
‘Dead and gone,’ he said, ‘since you force my hand. And all died for love of themselves, not me. Samantha took her life because I spent a night with Sally Anne; so I married Sally Anne, what else could I do; but within the year Sally Anne had recourse to the rope because of her guilt about Samantha, and Sally Anne returned to haunt my next wife Jennifer, with whom I was when Sally Anne died, so she lost her wits and swung, and none of them cared for me enough to contain their own lechery, guilt and folly. They only cared about themselves, and each other.’
‘And what are your feelings about your poor dead wives?’ asked Erin.
‘I have none,’ he said. ‘They did what they did. We must all take responsibility for our own lives and, as with our lives, our deaths.’
‘Try and feel,’ said Erin, who had been attending a therapy group for the wives of depressives, to Mr Shaving, and she led him to the barn where his wives had one by one swung and dangled from the same stout hook. It was a haunted, gloomy place and oppressed her spirits terribly, and his as well, though he would not admit it.
‘I feel nothing,’ he said. ‘I only behaved as a man behaves when he follows his nose and gets on with his work.’
‘Follows his nose nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s something else he follows!’
‘Why should a man not?’ asked Mr Shaving, ‘since it’s in his nature so to do? Why can’t you be happy with me as I am with you; I fill your pocket and I fill your bed: we even watch telly together. My unconscious is my own, not yours.’
‘I married all of you,’ she said, ‘including that. Including your soul.’
‘Oh no, you did not,’ he said, and stalked off, as she later heard from Datawhile, to an evening out with an heiress in a seaside town, and he never came back. Divorce papers came with the post. Erin wept and wailed.
‘If only I hadn’t said this,’ she wrote to Marion, ‘if only I hadn’t done that, he’d still be with me now. If only I’d left his soul alone!’
‘His mother hurt him when he came out,’ wrote Marion. ‘You could tell by the mark on his forehead. It wouldn’t matter what you said or what you did, he was born to make women unhappy. Not all men are like that, of course.’ She was happy with Cas again. She’d given the party, and the de Klerks had come and charmed her. Elspeth wrote to Cas and wrote to Ted: ‘I’m terribly worried about Erin. She sits in the barn all day feeling sisterly to the three poor dead Mrs Shavings. Supposing she comes out in sympathy, and leaps from the rafters herself?’
Cas and Marion caught a plane straight over from Johannesburg and Ted took his bicycle out of the shed and rode the hundred miles south and they all arrived at the same time, just as Erin was in the barn putting the noose around her neck.
‘More men in the sea than ever came out of it,’ said Marion, removing the rope. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Anything, that is, but suicide.’
‘You were just fine until you married,’ said Ted. ‘I blame your mother.’ But at least he and Marion shook hands and shared a bar of chocolate, and Cas was jovial.
‘I’ll get you a divorce lawyer, Erin,’ said Cas. ‘You’ll do well out of this!’ and Erin quite brightened. It’s hard to give up lobster and champagne if you’ve wasted years on tuna and goats’ milk, and you know it: and a relief to realize that income need not stop when marriage does, if that marriage has been to a monster.
Elspeth called Datawhile and got Erin’s file reopened at no extra cost. Within a year Erin had remarried; now she was wife to a wealthy left-wing County Councillor with a social conscience; he was a reconstructed man, in the feminist sense. In fact he talked about his responses and his feelings so much, and about how he could best make amends for the sins of his gender, that she sometimes fell asleep before he got round to sex. But, as Marion said, it was probably better this way than the other.
‘The greatest thing you’ll ever know,’ said Marion, ‘the hardest thing you’ll ever learn, is how to love and be loved in return. Look at me! Five marriages and I made it! I’m so happy I could almost change my politics!’
Au Pair
‘It’s all a matter of landscape,’ Bente’s mother Greta wrote to her daughter from her apartment in the outer suburbs of Copenhagen, there where the land tilts gently and gracefully towards a flat northern sea, and the birch trees in spring are an almost unbearably brilliant green, and at night the lights of Sweden glitter across the water, with their promise of sombre wooded crags, and dark ravines, and steeper, more difficult shores altogether. ‘The English are dirty because they are so comparatively unobserved. They can hide behind hills from their neighbours. Dirt is normal, Bente, all over the world. It’s we in the clean flat lands who are out of step.’
Bente’s mother was fanciful. It was one of her many charms. Men loved her absurdities. Her folly made them feel strong and sane. Greta had wide grey eyes and flaxen hair, a good strong figure and a frivolous nature. Her daughter had inherited her mother’s looks, but not her nature. Bente’s father had been Swedish-born. He had passed on to his daughter, Greta feared, his deep Swedish solemnity, his high Swedish standards. He had been killed in the war. After that, neighbours said then, and still said, Greta had slept with enough German soldiers to man a landing raft: she was lucky to be accepted back into the community. Greta said she had only done these things on the instructions of the Resistance, the better to gain the enemy’s secrets. Be that as it may, there was no arguing but that Greta had gained a taste for sex, somewhere along the line; and Bente had not, even by the age of twenty-three, not even with her mother’s example to guide her. Bente was glad to get away from Copenhagen and the tread of male footsteps on her mother’s stair, and to come as an au pair to London, the better to learn the language. And Greta was glad enough to see her stunning, unsmiling daughter go.
But within a week Bente rang in tears to say that the Beavers’ household was dirty, the food was uneatable, she was expected to sleep in a damp dark basement room, she was overworked and underpaid, and the two children were unruly, unkempt, and objected to taking baths.
‘Then clean the house,’ said Greta firmly. ‘Take over the cooking and the accounts, move a mattress to a better room, and bath the children by force if necessary, or better still get in the bath with them. The English are too afraid of nakedness.’
Bente sobbed on the other end of the line, and Greta’s sailor lover, Mogens, moved an impatient hand up her thigh. Greta had told Mogens she’d had Bente when she was seventeen. ‘But I want to come home,’ said Bente, and Greta said sharply that surely Bente could put up with a little dirt and discomfort. Adrian Beaver was a Marxist sociologist/journalist with an international reputation and Bente should think herself lucky to be in so interesting a household and not abuse her employers’ hospitality by making too many long distance calls on their telephone. Greta put down the phone and turned her attention to Mogens. Lovers come and go: children go on for ever!
There was silence for a month or so, during which time Greta, feeling just a little guilty, sent Bente a leather mini-skirt and a recipe for steak au poivre using green pepper, and a letter explaining her theories on dirt and landscape. Bente’s next letter home was cheerful enough: she asked Greta to send her some root ginger, since this was unobtainable in the outer London suburbs where she lived and she had only four hours off a week, and that on Sundays, and could not easily get into central London where most exotic ingredients were available. Mr Beaver was developing quite a taste for good food. Mrs Beaver had objected to her wearing the mini-skirt, so Bente only wore it in her absence. Mr Beaver worked at home: life was much easier now that Mrs Beaver had a ful
l-time job. She, Bente, could take over. The house was spick and span. When she, Bente, had children, she, Bente, would never leave them in a stranger’s care. But she, Bente, liked to think the children were fond of her. She got into the bath with them, these days, and there was no trouble at all at bath time. Mr Beaver, Adrian, said she was a better mother to the boys than his wife was. She was certainly a better cook!
Greta’s new lover, Clifton, from the Caribbean, posted off the ginger without a covering letter. Silence seemed, at the time, golden. Greta knew Bente would just hate Clifton, who was probably not yet twenty, and wonderfully black and shiny. Greta told him she’d had Bente when she was sixteen.
Bente rang in tears to say Mr Beaver kept touching her breasts in the kitchen and embarrassing her and she thought he wanted to sleep with her and could she come home at once?
Greta said what nonsense, sex is a free and wonderful thing: just sleep with him and get it over. There was silence the other end of the line. Clifton’s hot breath stirred the hairs on Greta’s neck. She knew the flax was beginning to streak with grey. How short life is!
‘But what about his wife?’ asked Bente, doubtfully, presently.
‘Knowing the English as I do,’ said Greta, ‘they’ve probably worked it out between them just to stop you handing in your notice.’
‘So you don’t think she’d mind?’
Clifton’s sharp white teeth nibbled Greta’s ear and his arm lay black and thick across her silky white breasts.
‘Of course not,’ said Greta. ‘What are you getting so worked up about? Sex is just fun. It’s not to be taken seriously.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Bente, primly.
‘Bente,’ said Greta, ‘pillow talk is the best way to learn a foreign language, and that’s what you’re in England for. Do just be practical, even if you don’t know how to enjoy yourself.’
Clifton’s teeth dug sharply into Greta’s earlobe and she uttered the husky little scream which so entranced and interested men. After she had replaced the receiver, it occurred to Greta that her daughter was still a virgin, and she almost picked up the phone for a longer talk, but then the time was past and Clifton’s red, red tongue was importuning her and she forgot all about Bente for at least a week. Out of sight, out of mind! Many mothers feel it: few acknowledge it!
Bente wrote within the month to ask if she should tell Mrs Beaver that she and Mr Beaver were having an affair, since she didn’t like to be deceitful. Adrian himself was reluctant to do it, saying it might upset the children and it should be kept secret. What did Greta think?
Greta wrote back to say, with feeling, that children should not begrudge their parents a sex life; you had to take sex calmly and openly, not get hysterical. Sex is like a wasp, wrote Greta. You must just sit still and let it take its course. It’s when you try and brush it away the trouble comes. Fanciful Greta!
Bente wrote to say that Mrs Beaver had moved out of the house: simply abandoned the children and left! What sort of mother was that? She, Bente, would never do such a thing. Mrs Beaver was hopelessly neurotic. (Didn’t Greta think her, Bente’s, English had improved? She had been quite right about pillow talk!) Mr Beaver had told his wife she could continue living in the spare room and have her own lovers quite freely, but Mrs Beaver hadn’t been at all grateful and had made the most dreadful scenes before finally going and had even tried to knife her, Bente, and Mr Beaver had lost half a stone in weight. Could Greta send her the pickled-herring recipe? She enclosed a photograph of herself and Adrian and the boys. She and Adrian were to be married as soon as he was free. Wasn’t love wonderful? Wasn’t fate an extraordinary thing? Supposing she and Adrian had never met? Supposing this, supposing that!
Greta studied the photograph with a magnifying glass. Adrian Beaver, she was surprised to see, was at least fifty and running to fat, and plain in a peculiarly English, intellectual, chinless way, and the Beaver sons were not little, as she had supposed, but in their early adolescence and ungainly too. Her daughter stood next to Mr Beaver, twice his size, big-busted, bovine, with the sweet inexorable smile of a flaxen doll. Greta did not want to have grandchildren, especially not these grandchildren. Greta, one way and another, was in a fix.
Greta had fallen in love, in a peculiarly high, pure, almost sexless way – who’d have thought it! But life goes this way, now that! – with a doctor from Odense, who wanted to marry her, Greta, save her from herself and build her a house in glass and steel where she could live happily ever after. (Perhaps she was in love with the house, not him, but what could it matter? Love is love, even if it’s for glass and steel!) The doctor was thirty-five. Greta, alas, on first meeting him, had given her age as thirty-four. Unless she had given birth to Bente when she was ten, how now could Bente be her daughter?
‘You are no daughter of mine,’ she wrote back to Bente. ‘Sex is one thing, love quite another. Sex may be a wasp, but love is a swarm of bees! You have broken up a marriage, done a dreadful thing! I never wish to hear from you again.’
And nor did she, and both lived happily ever after: the mother in the flat, clean, cheerful land: the daughter in the dirty, hilly, troubled one across the sea, where fate had taken her. How full the world is of bees and wasps! In the autumn the birch trees of Denmark turn russet red and glorious, and the lights which shine across from Sweden seem hard and resolute and the air chilly, and the wasps and bees move slowly and sleepily amongst the red, red leaves, and how lucky you are if you escape a sting!
How I Am is How You Are
‘Hello. How are you today?’ came from the waiter’s mouth. And he didn’t quite speak, and he didn’t quite murmur, and he didn’t quite whine; what he did was greet, and he greeted with such a sweet smile, such a generous crumpling of mouth muscles, a squeezing of big brown eyes, you might almost have thought he meant it. But since the guest with the leather hat and the sandals, and the thick hands so battered by the over-use and accidents of decades as to be all but impossible to clean, and the woman in the blue-and-white spotted dress, cartwheel hat and blue-and-white striped shoes, just stared at him, as if taken aback by the question, the waiter flicked his napkin around their empty, perfectly clean table and went away.
‘The word “greet” in Scotland means to weep, to grieve, to mourn,’ said Aileen.
‘I don’t follow your train of thought,’ he said.
‘Well no,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose you do. Rowena says she likes Mexicans, they’re such sweet guys, she personally has nothing against chicanos. Though of course nowadays few people use that term, she says. There are so many immigrants here you never know where any of them come from: seeping up over the border from anywhere in the South, and they all just get lumped together as “Latinos”. If you’re an illegal you get to be called a silent immigrant, which I suppose is quite polite. Rowena Gersh says there are now thirty million people in Los Angeles County and eighty per cent of them speak Spanish, so the twenty per cent are probably wise to be polite.’
‘Which one is Rowena Gersh?’
‘Rowena Gersh is my agent.’
‘The one with the tiny feet?’
‘Yes. I expect so. Though I have never noticed her feet. She was here earlier, wishing you good luck.’
‘The one who’s not coming to my show? She is a bitch. I don’t know why you have anything to do with these dreadful people.’
‘She’s coming later. She’s having drinks with Spielberg. Some deal or other.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘What, that she’s coming later or meeting with Spielberg?’
‘That I can just sit here on my own for five minutes. The twittering round here is like a nightmare. Doesn’t anyone ever sit still, or silent, in this town?’
‘You are not actually on your own, you’re with me. Would you like me to go away too?’
He studied her. Large chunks of ice clinked in thick glasses all around.
‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that now you are older your
nose seems to have grown in proportion to your face? Or perhaps it is that your cheeks have sunk. When I first met you, I’ll swear you had a little button nose like a doll. Now it’s almost beaky.’
‘I certainly feel less doll-like than I did twenty years ago,’ she said. ‘Do you like my dress?’
‘Well, no. It’s smart and silly. Isn’t it too short?’
‘No. Rowena Gersh helped me buy it. She said it was very LA. The style is casual, the fabric formal, everything matches and everyone is supposed to notice. Rowena Gersh, if you remember, is my agent, the one who’s seeing Spielberg about a script of mine.’
‘I hope she likes you. I see no evidence of it, from the dress. Or, God help us, the hat.’
‘Hello. How are you today?’ greeted another waiter, in passing. He had close-shaven white hair and a cavernous face, and brown, brown eyes. There seemed to be as many waiters as there were guests. All around arose the well-trained murmur; the formal acknowledgement that the rich deserve to be happy and content, not just in their bodies but in their minds as well, and that the poor must be considerate of the rich, not because the rich have money which the poor need so badly, but because the poor really like the rich. The rich are good guys and the poor are sweet guys. How are you? Have a nice day!
‘I have worked out, Rix,’ said Aileen, ‘that the only reason we can go on calling women and blacks and Latinos and the underclass “minorities”, although in actual numbers they overwhelm the majority ten times over, is that each minority soul is worth one-eleventh of each majority soul; only thus can the minority reasonably claim to be the majority. Powerful and strong the majority stands, spreading a little misery, a little kindness, complacently buffing its extra special soul.’
