by Weldon, Fay
Ruby received a letter from Social Services at Hounslow. Social Services said a young Australian – who named herself as Liz but would give no further information – had deposited small female twins at their offices, saying England should have them. The father, who according to Liz was English, had abandoned the family some years back: Liz did not see why his nation should get away with it. She did not want them: she had never wanted them. She named Ruby as grandmother, gave her address, and left. Could Hounslow Social Services make an appointment to see her? The girls, now in temporary care, were aged (they thought) perhaps five or six.
‘No,’ wrote Ruby, fervently and swiftly. ‘No! Not on your nelly!’
They came anyway. None so determined as Social Services in search of a home for one stray child, let alone two. Ruby was their only hope. What did Ruby want for her grandchildren? Foster homes?
‘Foster homes!’ said Ruby. ‘You’ve put your finger on it. That’s exactly what I want.’ And weakening just a little, ‘Perhaps just one foster home. Twins! They wouldn’t want to be separated.’
Social Services shrugged. Hard to organize. Ruby gritted her teeth (she was about to get them capped) and stood firm.
‘Good lord,’ Ruby said, ‘who do you think I am? Some kind of all-purpose mothering agent? Besides,’ she said cunningly, ‘there is no proof whatsoever these are my son’s children,’ and she sent Social Services packing, or thought she did.
Joshua, Jason and Ben were shocked. Of course they were. ‘Callous,’ they said. ‘Mum, how can you. You just disowned poor Billy. This is your chance to make up for it.’
‘The way your father died was enough to make anyone callous,’ she said before she could stop herself.
They wanted to hear more but she wouldn’t say more. She scarcely understood herself.
‘Why won’t you take your little grandchildren in,’ they asked. ‘They’d fill your life up. You must be so lonely. We worry about you.’
‘My life is more than well enough filled up and I am not lonely.’
The boys wouldn’t have it. ‘Flesh is deeper than water,’ they said.
‘What you mean’, said Ruby, ‘is that blood is thicker than water, but I never understood what that meant and don’t intend to start now.’
The boys claimed to feel relieved that she’d buried the dog when it died; not just dumped its poor old body in the bin. Callous! They’d never known their mother like this: capable of any cruelty, any irresponsibility.
‘I can’t possibly,’ said Ruby. ‘I’d have to give up my job. And supposing I failed with them the way I failed with your father, failed with Billy?’
‘But you didn’t.’ They were astounded. ‘Billy was just born like that.’ She all but took offence. So she’d made no difference, had she? Wasted a life cooking, cleaning, rushing to catch the bus –
‘You take them in’, she said, ‘if you feel so strongly about blood and water.’ That shook them. They pleaded youth, college, freedom, domestic incompetence, of course they did. The last plea in the list was true enough. They couldn’t even cook. Her fault. She should somehow have found time to let them make a mess of things: they told her so.
Ruby stretched her manicured toes languidly in the warmth of the central heating. ‘Never, never, never,’ she said. But Christmas was coming, wasn’t it, the dangerous time of the year.
‘Just for Christmas,’ said Social Services, who knew they’d get her in the end. ‘Poor little girls! They’re pining for each other. Oh yes, separated now: one’s in Lancashire, one’s in Devon, and both now showing behavioural problems. Disturbed.’
‘Headlocking? Bashing? Head-butting?’
‘Good Lord no. We’re talking little girls, not adolescent boys. Both too quiet and good for comfort.’
‘One week,’ said Ruby. ‘One week, that’s all.’
Judith and Jane, on the doorstep. They looked at her with Jack’s eyes: two quiet good little girls with red hair like their father’s. She felt spiteful towards them: she couldn’t help it. Or were they Billy’s eyes, not Jack’s? Wasn’t that even worse? Reproachful – why did you forget me? Aren’t I your son, your flesh and blood as well? Why won’t you grieve for me? See, I’ve left my children in my place, for you to do better. But this was stupid: they weren’t Jack’s eyes or Billy’s eyes; they were just the eyes of any lost children who’d been taken here, left there, separated, joined, parted, not knowing why they were, who they were, in the end losing even the desire to know: children with shallow minds and empty hearts, without resonance: bright eyes growing duller year by year: causing work, work, work for whoever looked after them, and never a moment’s peace.
Ruby slept badly on Christmas Eve. Children’s noises woke her in the night. She was angry. She’d had enough of all that. She went into the living room, whence the noises came. Stop it, stop it, stop it! Her heart beat fast and furious.
Judith and Jane sat on the floor staring at the fireplace, waiting. Judith had a dustbin lid and carving fork; Jane had the frying-pan lid and the carving knife. Their little eyes were fierce and eager. They were together, intent, as one. ‘What are you two doing out of bed? Go back at once!’
‘We’re waiting for this Father Christmas,’ said Judith, unmoved.
‘He’s not allowed to come in,’ said Jane firmly. ‘This horrid person.’
‘But he brings presents,’ said Ruby. Did they know nothing?
‘They’re only pretend,’ said Judith. ‘He dresses up as other people. Uncle Jason said so.’
‘No one asks him in, he just comes,’ said Jane, ‘all black with soot, Uncle Joshua said so.’
‘We’ll get him, we’ll kill him,’ said Judith.
‘We won’t let him in here. It’s nice here,’ said Jane. They both wore chainstore pyjamas, washed-out, faded, ironed into flatness.
Brand-new mothers, same old story. Wash and wear.
‘The nerve of it,’ said Judith. ‘Coming in where he’s not wanted. When he should be at home with his wife. Uncle Ben said so.’
‘Dirty old man,’ said Jane, ‘that’s all he is.’
And they whetted their weapons on their tiny thighs, and gazed at the blank black chimney, their small midnight faces fervent, as they waited for the deceiver, the imposter, the divider of lives.
‘This won’t do,’ said Ruby. ‘Not at all. I have this special relationship with Father Christmas. He’s my friend. I won’t have him spoken of like this.’
And that was the end of Ruby. The little girls stayed, if only to learn better. One week became two, two weeks became months, months became years. And the terrible thing was, no one seemed in the least surprised, not Social Services, not Ben, not Jason, not Joshua, not even Billy, who actually one day sent a letter, to which Ruby replied, in affectionate terms, in pencil because she couldn’t find a pen.
Ruby said to Margaret, ‘Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don’t do badly, I don’t do well, I just do it.’
Merry Christmas, young and old, and may all your endings be as happy!
Three Tales of Country Life
A Move to the Country
Casey Green paced his living room and said, ‘I can’t go on like this.’ He was six foot three and lanky with it, and his knees were somehow loosely hinged, and his living room was fourteen feet in one direction and ten in another, so his pacing seemed rather like that of a man in a prison cell, for all he was so comfortably at home.
‘Can’t go on like what, my dear?’ asked Miranda Green, his wife. Miranda was five foot four and slightly built, and she could have paced quite comfortably, but didn’t bother to. She perched on her stool at their breakfast bar, elegant – though scarcely long – legs crossed neatly at the ankles. It was 1974. Mini skirts were still half in and half out: Miranda kept hers two inches above the knee. She had good knees.
‘Living in
the city,’ replied Casey Green, and the six adult yellow budgerigars in the big cage on the inner wall chorused their approval and the eight baby chicks tweeted to keep them company. It isn’t everyone who can persuade budgies to be fertile, but Casey managed. Miranda didn’t care for the somehow fusty smell that so many birds in a room create, but she liked Casey to be happy.
‘Casey’s my pet,’ she’d say to friends. ‘Casey’s all the pet I need,’ and so he seemed to be. Spiritually she combed and groomed him, and spiritually he preened. Casey and Miranda. They didn’t have cats or dogs for fear of making the budgies nervous, though Hattie, their daughter, had recently come home from Hampstead Fair with a goldfish which they’d had to house. Goldfish are not happy in bowls, going round and round gazing at nothing: life in a prison: eternal boredom. Goldfish have to have tanks and water weeds and company: they need events, like anyone else: like all living creatures. Even an earthworm enjoys a challenge: an especially crusty piece of soil to penetrate: you can tell by the squirm of its tail. So Casey said. The goldfish had so far cost £43 to keep happy, and that was back in ’74.
‘I can’t go on like this,’ said Casey Green in May of’ ’74. ‘I can’t go on living in the city.’
‘Where else is there to live?’ asked Miranda Green, in astonishment. It was 5 May to be precise. OPEC was getting its act together.
‘In the country,’ said her husband.
‘Oh, Casey,’ said Miranda, before she could stop herself. ‘What a terrible idea!’ Then she went off to her job as editor of a women’s magazine. She wasn’t very good at the job: rumour had it it was only hers because she’d had an affair with Astro Aster, the publishing tycoon. A totally unfair and untrue rumour, of course: but monogamy in those days was rare and a little unfashionable. All the same, the circulation of Miranda’s magazine was dropping.
And Casey went off to his job as head of a design firm whose ideas were in worldwide demand, and got his secretary Wendy Dove to find him lists of country properties for sale. ‘The country!’ said Wendy Dove, who was five foot nine and what you might call strongly built, and wore trousers all through the era of mini skirts. ‘What a lovely idea! If only I could afford not to live in the city! But what makes the country so nice is that there are no people in it, and the reason there are no people in it is because there are no jobs.’
Wendy was a clever girl, and Casey had once suggested to Miranda that she at least try Wendy out as a feature writer, but Miranda just laughed and said that was not the way things worked. Perhaps if Miranda had seen how they could or might work, the magazine’s circulation would have risen, not fallen. Or perhaps it was merely that Miranda would not, would not have an astrology feature in her magazine at a time when all the others were going over to them – for everyone, it seems, likes to know what’s going to happen next. (All Miranda kept saying, in her pretty clear voice, was this: ‘Load of old nonsense. Won’t have stars in my magazine.’)
What happened next was that all of a sudden capitalism seemed at the end of its tether. OPEC put up oil prices: the price of petrol rose to 50p a gallon (no one could see how, if energy wasn’t going to be cheap and freely available any more, cities could possibly continue), inflation went up another seven per cent, and on the day (11 June) that Miranda went to Harrods and found there were only two shades of tights available (light and dark) as if it were World War II again, it snowed. It was apparent that even the seasons were out of joint – a clear sign of impending catastrophe. That lunch time she went to a drinks party and was assured by a senior civil servant that ration books for food and necessities had already been printed and would be circulated by July, and in the afternoon she went to see Astro Aster, her boss, and was told it might be better if she went back to feature-writing and let someone else try their hand at being editor. ‘Someone else’ Miranda Casey imagined would be Teresa ‘Tinkerbell’ Wright, who had lately been seen at the Mirabelle with Astro Aster, but never mind all that: Tinkerbell was a good journalist and turned out to be a fine editor, and the magazine went from strength to strength, presently with two full pages in every issue devoted to astrology, and at least one or two surveys on the sexual habits and ambitions of its readers – always a circulation booster. No slouch, Tinkerbell!
‘I think the end of the world is coming,’ said Miranda to Casey that night. They drank champagne to cheer themselves up.
‘The end of the city,’ said Casey. Three budgerigars had been found with their feet turned up at the bottom of the cage. It had been a hot, hot June day and Hattie who was in the middle of her O-levels – once they were in July; in 1974 they were in June: if these days they are in May, why that’s all the more time marking (which is paid) and all the less time studying (which is unpaid), so that can only be an improvement – had opened the windows and Casey was convinced the poor creatures had died of lead poisoning. Though some might say it was a nasty opposition of maleficent planets that caused this misfortune on this day along with so many others: not lead at all. Or perhaps Miranda was being punished for her lack of astrological faith. But how will we ever know?
Hattie came in from her History exam pale and crying and said she thought she’d failed every single O-level and she wasn’t bright enough to get to University and all she’d ever wanted to do was work with horses, and why were her parents so horrible to her, and instead of saying, ‘It’s your hormones, dear,’ Miranda said, ‘We’d better move to the country.’
And so they did. Casey produced his estate agents’ lists with a flourish. He thought they should go south-west – to Wiltshire, say, (horse country) or Somerset (goat country) – not too near London yet not impossibly far.
‘Goat country?’ asked Miranda, and Casey explained that Somerset was the kind of place where people bred goats to provide non-allergenic milk for babies. (The world was not yet additive- or colorant-conscious, but there were faint early ecological and nutritional stirrings down in Somerset, and Casey was conscious of them.)
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goat close to,’ said Miranda cautiously, and Hattie said, ‘Well, I have and they’re horrid; let’s go to Wiltshire. Horses are groovy, goats aren’t.’ (The word ‘groovy’ was still just about passable, at the time. Just about. But Hattie never got things quite right.)
They found a house in Somerset, down on the levels, on the flat green peat plains; a property contained by the squared-off runnels of a network of dykes, edged with stocky, much-lopped willow trees. Five acres of it. They were in it within the year. They sold their London house for £40,000. (It is now worth £650,000. But it’s no use thinking ‘if only’ in property matters. Though Casey was to, many times, like so many of us.)
‘You’d have to have inner resources to live here,’ said Miranda, nervously, the first time she saw the house. It was a square stone house with creepers growing over it, and a kind of flat blank look. Hattie shuffled amongst spring nettles in bare legs and shrieked, thinking a thousand insects were biting her, but she didn’t move out of them. She’d never encountered such plants before. (She was a city child, and way back then school trips had scarcely been invented, so what was she to know about the country?)
‘You have got inner resources, Miranda,’ said Casey, firmly, and perhaps it was some kind of blessing, or else a command (after all, Miranda had promised to ‘obey’ Casey when she married him back in nineteen fifty-something, that being the habit of the times), because lo and behold all of a sudden Miranda did have inner resources. She put on her wellies and rubber gloves and unlocked the nettles from the soil, and remade the garden of Highwater House single-handed. She DIYed, and plastered and repaired one outhouse to make a design studio for Casey, and turned the old cider house into a study for herself. They meant to work and earn from Highwater House – he drawing, she writing. Casey would go up to his offices once a week: she would turn freelance, write articles about country life, visit editors and colleagues once a month. There was a post office, wasn’t there, not so far away, and a telephone,
and friends would visit: no need to be out of touch, not these days. How modern they felt – those days. (Though in retrospect, long, long before the days of the fax and the answerphone and the bleeper and the cordless telephone and the high-speed train, it’s hard to see how they could seem so. Perhaps the sheer amazement of reaching the moon back in 1969 – having rock-hard evidence that the skies were not magic but all too comprehensible – had not worn off.)
Wendy smiled and waited. She’d been brought up in the country. On Casey’s days in town she made sure the office tea came in porcelain cups with saucers; she threw out the rough-hewn rural pottery mugs which were thick and rough on the tongue but all the rage. She said if ever he wanted to stay over he could: she had a spare room. Casey said no thank you.
Casey had an aviary built for the budgerigars at the bottom of the garden: it was architect-designed. (The locals looked on with amazement.) During the long hot summer the birds died of heatstroke under the design-conscious glass roof. All but two, that is; a breeding pair fortunately; but something – badger, weasel, fox, who was to say – presently clambered in through the sluice tunnel and got those. Casey quite went off the idea of budgerigars. It was all too discouraging.
Hattie was right about her O-levels, at least. She failed the lot. Casey wanted her to go back to London and stay with aunts and go to a crammer’s but Hattie wouldn’t.
‘You moved me here against my will,’ she said. ‘Now put up with the consequences.’
She took a job as an apiary assistant, tending bees for Peatalone Honey in hat, veil and long white handling gloves and gown. She looked bulky. She was never slim: heaven knew where she got it from – Casey thin to the point of angularity; Miranda with her hand-span waist –
