by Weldon, Fay
‘Swallow the tube.’
‘No. Wont.’
‘Die then,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, and she went off to attend to a heart attack (or so he feared) and a young woman with an abscess on her Fallopian tube (or so she said, and she was certainly grim and white with pain and would swallow anything at all, even poison, to put a stop to it). I was formally discharged.
‘Goodbye,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, cheerfully, escorting me to the door.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘tell her if she dies Debbie will get Darren.’
‘That’s an idea,’ said Nurse Emily, but I didn’t think she was going to go back and say any such thing. I had a feeling that if young Dr Love didn’t return quite promptly from the broken back (I’d heard them. Mother of three, drunk, backwards out of a first-floor window. The doctor, slowly and clearly: ‘Mrs Able, do you understand? Try to listen. You are in hospital. You fell out of a window and have broken your back. We are admitting you’) to look in on Sharon, she would simply go into liver failure and die, and Nurse Emily would be busy elsewhere, and Sister Radice would break the news to Darren, who would look up from the sports page and be quite astonished, if so strong an emotion were available to him, which I rather doubted, at what could happen if you took Debbie to the cinema one Sunday night, instead of Sharon.
Stories for Christmas
Who Goes Where?
A CHRISTMAS TALE
‘No!’ said Adrienne. You know how some children are when they’re four?
‘Put on your nice new coat, please?’
‘No!’
‘Look, a spoonful of this lovely apple mousse?’
‘No!’
‘Adrienne, darling, please.’
‘No!’
Little arms stiff, little mouth clamped shut against the world, exercising the power of the much-loved over the one who loves and is thus humiliated. Except that Adrienne was thirty-four, not four, and still doing it, as only the really beautiful can, but nearer to running out of people who loved her than she knew. Or perhaps she didn’t care.
She’d always been like that. Sometimes people forgot, and asked, ‘Adrienne, can I borrow your pink shoes to go to the ball?’
‘No!’
‘Adrienne, could you give me a job to help me out?’
‘No!’
‘Adrienne, your grandma’s ill, will you visit her?’
‘No!’
‘Adrienne, will you please stop sleeping with Cynthia’s husband?’
‘No!’
What Adrienne had – beautiful clothes – Adrienne didn’t share. What Adrienne had won – worldly success – Adrienne took care to keep. What Adrienne didn’t want – like grandmothers – Adrienne abandoned. What Adrienne wanted, like Cynthia’s husband Tyro, she got. Though quite what Adrienne saw in Tyro, whom Cynthia until then had thought was rather ordinary, indeed if anything rather incompetent and messy, Cynthia couldn’t at first work out. Perhaps Cynthia’s opinion of Tyro, in those early days, and her impatience with him, were why Tyro became obsessed with Adrienne, why Adrienne could just pluck him, twist him off the family branch, and there he was, in her hand, ripe and ready, smartened up and polished and writing music for major feature films, no longer just a struggling session hack. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone and once Tyro had gone Cynthia and the three children wept and wept.
‘No!’ said Adrienne when, five years after her marriage to Tyro, Cynthia asked if Adrienne could take the children, Alec aged ten, Alison aged eight, and Edward aged six, for Christmas Day. They wanted to have their Christmas presents at home and go to their father for Christmas dinner. And she, Cynthia, had been asked out somewhere special…
‘No,’ said Adrienne.
‘Why not?’ asked Tyro, mildly. He had a gentle face and wrinkled clothes, no matter how new and expensive they were. But he was a genius, everyone said so these days, so it didn’t matter as much as it otherwise would. Adrienne liked everything perfect. The whole apartment was white, white, white, and frequently photographed in smart magazines. Adrienne was an interior designer: very expensive, in every way.
‘No, because I love you,’ said Adrienne. ‘And Christmas Day is so very special for us.’ (It was, too. It was seven Christmas Eves ago that Cynthia had told Tyro she was pregnant again and Tyro, in panic and despair, had spent the next day with Adrienne and never come home; so Christmas was, as it were, the anniversary of their getting together, the dawn of their great love.)
‘But if the children want to come –’
‘No! Tyro, we have a child of our own now.’
And so they did. Tommy: three months old. The last six months had, for Adrienne, been perfectly dreadful, though Tommy had rather liked them. Adrienne had had no idea, or she’d never have got pregnant. She was just coming out of the nightmare.
‘That doesn’t mean the other three don’t exist.’ Tyro was being unusually obstinate. ‘We could manage. I’d cook.’
‘No,’ said Adrienne. ‘It’s impossible. Bloody Nanny’s got the weekend off.’ It was their joke – Bloody Nanny like Bloody Mary – or rather Adrienne’s joke. Neither Tyro nor Nanny thought it was all that funny.
When Tyro was out of the room, Adrienne picked up the phone and called Cynthia and said, ‘Just you leave us alone. Stop whining and pestering. Live your own life, look after your own kids. They ought to be with you at Christmas anyway.’ And she was going to go on about how Tyro was not going to pay Cynthia’s telephone bill any more, it was time Cynthia tried standing on her own two feet, not sponging all the time, and her voice was beginning to rise and crack as it did when she was cross and sounding rather less like Fergie’s and rather more like Janet Street-Porter’s than she cared for it to be, when Tyro came back into the room, so she said instead, in her best lightly modulated voice, ‘Cynthia, the children are all at school now, full time. Surely it’s time you got a job? Then you could be more independent. You can’t wallow in the past for ever. Tell you what, Tyro could take them all out for lunch on New Year’s Day. I think he’s free then. Wouldn’t that be sort of symbolic and lovely?’ Then, putting down the phone, she said to Tyro, ‘How did you ever come to marry that woman? Were you depressed, or something?’
‘We’re giving a party New Year’s Eve,’ said Tyro. ‘I won’t be up to much on New Year’s Day.’
‘The children will hardly notice,’ said Adrienne. ‘Certainly not those three. They’ll be too busy spreading the walls with tomato sauce. You’d think for the money we pay her your first wife would manage to bring them up halfway decently. What does she do all day?’
Adrienne was astonishingly lovely. Her lips were pink and clearly defined, her teeth little and white and even: so people tended to watch her mouth while she spoke, rather than listening to the words which came out. Perhaps that was part of her trouble: she’d never learned. And she was clever, and competent, and Tommy, even when Bloody Nanny took her bloody days off, lay quiet and good and beaming, perfectly tucked in, designer mobiles swinging about his crib just so. Perhaps Adrienne was just lucky, or perhaps if you deal with babies firmly and decisively that’s how they are – who knows?
But now Adrienne saw Tyro standing there looking at her rather oddly, so she moved towards him and put her arms around him to put out of his head any wrong thoughts he might have and lured him into the bedroom, and pushed back the white-satin-layered-over-cream-suede coverlet on to the white carpet – and let him make love to her but afterwards he still said, ‘All the same, if Cynthia wants Christmas Day off, and has somewhere to go –’
‘No!’ said Adrienne.
‘Because if Cynthia found someone, and was happy, why then –’
‘No!’ said Adrienne, who found herself wanting Cynthia not to be happy even more than she wanted herself to be happy. ‘No, no, no!’
Tommy would be properly brought up and would play in the nursery, as designed by Adrienne Charles – she was trying to patent it but it’s oddly hard to patent nurseries – whe
re there was everything a child could want and every surface could be wiped clean and there was a vacuum vent which you switched on overnight gently to extract dust and with the dust, germs, and there was a filter system which removed lead from the city air – and the fact of the matter was Adrienne did not want Tommy to think Alec, Alison and Edward were anything to do with him at all, just because they shared a father. Cynthia’s children were plain, noisy and clingy: Alec whined, Alison sniffed, and Edward threw things. Sometimes she’d join them for a meal when Tyro took them out but only on Tyro’s insistence. Edward would spend the time under the table, not at it, and nobody did anything to stop it and once when she tried to get up she found he’d tied the laces of her little cream eelskin shoes together. Everyone had laughed. She didn’t let them come to the apartment. They’d hate it, just as much as she’d hate having them. At home they had Arsenal paper on their bedroom wall, or so Tyro said. How come Tyro knew? Adrienne wondered. He didn’t surely visit Cynthia? No, of course not. The children must have told him: Arsenal wallpaper! She, Adrienne, felt and behaved as if her life started the day she met Tyro: why couldn’t he do the same for her? Men and women were equal now: Cynthia had had the children more or less against Tyro’s wishes, which made them hers, not Tyro’s. Cynthia hadn’t understood how Tyro needed space in which to work, to develop his talent. How could he do that, with three little children crawling round his feet? Cynthia had been selfish: had let herself go: got fat: couldn’t help Tyro in his profession: had no friends in meaningful places: what had Cynthia expected? All their friends agreed.
Most fathers just faded away after a divorce: she’d assumed Tyro would do the same. It wasn’t even as if the children were charming or attractive. They were horrid.
So that was that. No! Tyro could take Cynthia’s children out on New Year’s Day when Adrienne would be busy cleaning up after the party. Bloody Nanny was taking Tommy home with her over the holiday weekend, which was a help. It was an important party.
Six days before Christmas Tyro went and brought home a Christmas tree, a real one, of a hopeless shape, and insisted on putting it up with Woolworth’s decorations placed just anywhere, anyhow, instead of the elegant silver one she’d planned for the party: and the expensive crystal balls she’d just been and bought were altogether wasted. What was the point? She avoided making love with him for five full nights; she assumed he’d make the connection. And in the meantime she made lists and organized; all kinds of important and influential people were coming along. The green Christmas tree continued to look ludicrous in its setting, but she reckoned she’d persuade Tyro to take it down on Boxing Day. No one kept to the Twelfth Night ritual any more. They couldn’t or the whole country would be awash with dead pine needles.
On Christmas morning, before they opened their presents, stacked all silver glitter at the end of the bed, Adrienne wrapped her long legs round Tyro’s and forgave him, but he didn’t seem to have his heart in it.
‘What’s the matter, my sweetheart, my darling, my genius, love of my love, light of my nights, my life?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. Well, of course he did. It never does to ask men what the matter is because they either refuse to say or don’t know, or offer the wrong answer. So Adrienne sensibly just coaxed him back to happiness, and to focusing on her, which came to the same thing. She’d bought him a brilliant new suit for Christmas, for the party, made of a new washable silk which was meant to look crumpled even before it began. And he gave her a lapel brooch made of glass, diamonds and platinum, which was actually rather lovely but when she looked closer she could see it was made in the shape of a teddy bear, and who wore lapel brooches anyway? Men were always hopeless with presents. A teddy bear! They tried to turn you into a mother, and when you were a mother they got fed up and left. That’s how her own father had been. She felt a surge of love for Tyro: the emotion made her helpless, and afraid, yet agreeably dependent, as if she were a child again. She put a little honey on a little square of toast and fed it to him: which was a real gesture since honey was so sticky, and it was only because Tyro insisted that she ever even had it in the house. But still he seemed somehow cut off. She hoped she hadn’t overdone the no-sex run-up to Christmas: she’d made it all right now anyway. She loved him. He knew that.
He ate the proffered morsel – really he had no choice – but then he got up and dressed. He put yesterday’s socks back on.
‘I’m going now,’ he said.
‘Where?’ she asked, startled.
‘To see the children. I’m going to spend the morning with them.’
Afterwards she seemed to remember screaming: she hoped she remembered wrong: people should be civilized. But Christmas Day, their Christmas Day. How could he? But he did. Why? She couldn’t understand. She must have been stunned, in shock. She wandered around the apartment alone and she wasn’t wearing any clothes at all, and yet everything else was normal; just quiet and empty. She wanted to pick up Tommy but he wasn’t even there: she hoped he was all right: of course he was all right. Bloody Nanny was trained to her eyeballs which was half the problem: Adrienne had had to give in over time off at Christmas for fear of losing her: at least she’d insisted the baby went with the stupid girl: a half-victory if not a whole one. Anger rose through shock: indignation: outrage. She locked the front door against Tyro’s return. She pushed his Christmas tree right over, she didn’t know she was so strong: and there were needles everywhere and splintered bits of glass and she ground the awful crude chocolate nicknacks into the carpet – and then she picked up the phone to ring Cynthia but thank God, thank God, had the sense to put it down again. She started calling her friends instead: but they seemed cool, ever so cool.
Anthea said, ‘So Tyro should see his children. It’s Christmas,’ and, ‘I was going to call you. Philip and I won’t be able to come on New Year’s Eve –’ and Philip was head of the Philharmonic PR.
And Dulcie said, ‘Look, I’m busy. I haven’t even got the turkey in the oven yet; you wanted Tyro, you got him, don’t ask me to sympathize. And Sam and I can’t come on Thursday night. Sorry and all that.’ Sam owned the biggest chain of bathroom design shops in the country.
And David said, ‘Darling, this isn’t the time. I’m a bit busy,’ and she knew what that meant and it upset her even more. She was used to David waiting and adoring in the wings.
And Maureen said, ‘I don’t want to hear anything more against poor bloody Cynthia. She isn’t perfect but who is? Actually she and I are good friends nowadays, and Darryl and I came to a decision we somehow didn’t come to when we should have and we’re going to Cynthia’s on New Year’s Eve –’ and Maureen practically ran Paramount, but that was nothing compared to the treachery.
And then there wasn’t anyone else to ring; so she got through to Nanny who sounded surprised and said of course Tommy was fine, why shouldn’t he be?
She rang her mother whom she hated and said Happy Christmas and hated her a little less. But her mother only seemed to care about Tommy, and made a fuss about him not being there, as Adrienne had known she would. Why had she even bothered? And where was Tyro, Tyro, her one true love: at least with three children in a poky flat he couldn’t be in bed with Cynthia? Could he?
She rang Cynthia. The phone rang and rang. Perhaps he could. Perhaps Cynthia had dropped the children off somewhere – Adrienne was helpless: there was nothing she could do.
Adrienne wept till she was ugly. Adrienne put her teddy-bear brooch through the waste-disposal unit. Adrienne put Tyro’s new silk suit through the heavy-soil white wash. Adrienne, by the time it was on the final rinse, thought, ‘I’ve gone mad.’ The thought calmed her down. It was madness to believe you could possess other people: re-create the world in your own interests. All the same, she tried Cynthia again. One of the children answered.
‘Is that Alec, Alison or Edward?’ she asked, quite nicely. ‘Because this is Adrienne.’
‘It’s Edward,’ said Edward. ‘I don’t want to speak to you.
You’re horrid.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Adrienne. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh well,’ said Edward. ‘Sometimes I’m horrid too. Everyone says so.’ That made her laugh, and laughing, after so much crying, melted a block of ice in her heart, or that’s how she described it to Tyro afterwards. Cynthia took the phone.
‘I didn’t ask him to come round here,’ said Cynthia, before Adrienne could speak. ‘In fact it’s a bloody nuisance he’s round here, because I’ve got a friend coming to dinner. Men always get their timing wrong. Still, the kids seem pleased. Mess everywhere. Why is it that the happier kids are the messier they are?’
‘I really wouldn’t know a thing like that,’ said Adrienne.
‘That figures,’ said Cynthia. ‘And what’s the matter with you? You haven’t said one nasty thing to me so far.’
‘The Christmas spirit’s got my tongue,’ said Adrienne.
‘Tyro’s just leaving to get back to you,’ said Cynthia. ‘He wouldn’t let me answer the phone the first time; he knew it would be you and he’d have to go. And this time Edward just picked it up before I could stop him.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Adrienne, ‘if the children want to come back with him they can. If that helps you out, it’s okay with me. It’s a stupid sort of Christmas dinner with caviar and stuff, but there’s lots of it. Only perhaps they want their turkey with you.’
‘Well!’ said Cynthia. ‘Well, well! I’ve gone vegetarian so it’s only mock turkey and lentils here; they won’t mind missing that one bit. They’re on their way.’
And so they were. By the time next Christmas came there was turkey for dinner, Tommy, under Adrienne’s feet as if she were just any ordinary mother, played on a deep-rose carpet getting pine needles in his hair, and the nursery suite had been converted to bedrooms for when Alec, Alison and Edward came to stay.
‘It’s just so exhausting saying no,’ said Adrienne, wearing the teddy-bear brooch Tyro had bought her to replace the one she’d somehow lost. Her new habit of saying yes brought its own problems, of course, but that’s another story, for the summer holidays.
