by Weldon, Fay
Except within a short time Miranda’s waist grew muscular and thicker. The calves of her legs grew broad and tough. Her chin was more determined: her eyes more shrewd. The third pair of rubber gloves (how quickly the brambles punctured them) were the last she ever wore. She lost interest in feature-writing, or perhaps it lost interest in her.
For the move to the country is not good, career-wise (the ‘wises’ came in that decade, and have never gone away, more’s the pity), for journalist, musician or actor – anyone who works freelance and wants to be employed. You need to be in the heart of things – that is to say, not requiring the expense of a long-distance phone call to find you, nor likely to charge expenses for the journey up for an interview or briefing. If it’s you or someone else a taxi-ride away, the someone else gets the job. But Miranda didn’t mind. Miranda had her animals. Animals admire you, love you, need you, watch you: animals don’t promote you and then demote you: animals don’t prefer Tinkerbell Wright to you or judge you by the length of your skirt: they obey you, you don’t obey them. The only thing is, animals multiply – then what do you do? Eat them?
‘Eat them!’ said Casey, of the twenty-four black-faced Jacob sheep. ‘To the slaughterhouse with them, eat them!’ They’d bought four in to keep the grass down. One ram, three ewes. That, in a season (for they were fecund and healthy sheep), made three rams, seven ewes. Two seasons on and the incestuous flock was up to twenty-four, and the young rams were killing each other, butting and horning to death, and there wasn’t enough grazing land available.
‘Eat them!’ Hattie said. She was courting a fellow beekeeper, an eighteen-year-old lad with no small talk and red knuckly hands. (‘She’s not going to marry him or anything?’ worried Casey. ‘Of course not,’ Miranda assured him. ‘She’s not as silly as that.’)
No one wants to buy young rams; you can’t even give them away. They got as far as the freezer and there they stayed. ‘Let’s not keep sheep any more,’ said Casey. But Miranda didn’t listen. She loved sheep. She bought a bigger freezer and gave joints away to the friends from London – though, unfortunately, they came visiting less and less often. They turned out to have been more colleagues than friends.
Then there were the dogs. You have to get a puppy if you live in the country. Of course the puppy grows up into a bitch and it seems unkind not to let nature take its course and before long you have nine more puppies and you can’t find homes for all of them because the father’s unknown (a puppy’s father doesn’t have to have a pedigree but it does seem to need an address) so you keep two –
And cats. Everyone loves cats. And hens. Chickens are adorable. Ducks are really witty. Geese are silly but brave. And all multiply.
‘Why not stay the night?’ asked Wendy of Casey. Wendy didn’t even have a cat. She didn’t like the smell of animals, she said. She could just about put up with a budgie, but that was all.
And dogs leap up and put muddy paws on clean clothes and these days Casey kept his good suits in the office and changed when he got there. He thought he’d better stay up in town a couple of days a week. The firm was busy.
‘No thanks,’ said Casey to Wendy, and he stayed with his aunts. But he did slap her bottom (no feminist she) and add, ‘You’re a very wicked woman, Wendy.’
Miranda was no longer interested in the rights of women, the vaginal orgasm, the cuisine of India or any of the things she used to know and care about. Now she read Pigs and Their Care and The Happy Poultry Keeper and Casey would crack open his breakfast egg (so many eggs!) and like as not find a baby chicken in it.
‘I say, Miranda,’ he said. ‘Let’s go on holiday. China, or somewhere.’
‘I can’t,’ she said briefly. ‘I can’t leave the animals.’
‘Stay over,’ begged Wendy. ‘You know you want to.’
‘Can’t,’ said Casey, firmly. ‘I love Miranda.’
Then Miranda got a goat. She got a nanny goat. Its name was Belinda. It was a delicate animal. Cold winds made it cough. It would be brought in to lie by the fire, in the evenings, with the four dogs. It smelt.
‘Miranda –’ said Casey.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ said Miranda. ‘But the goat-house isn’t wind-proof. I haven’t got round to mending it yet. I’ve been doing the sandbags.’ Highwater House had not got its name for nothing. In a wet winter it tended to flood.
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Hattie. ‘Since no one ever thinks about me I might as well get married.’
And so she did, to the young man with the knuckly hands. She sank into the peat bogs without a trace except for three children in as many years: they lived in a council house and took The Sun and kept hens in the garden and were, or so Miranda thought, happy enough. Casey was horrified.
‘Well,’ said Wendy, ‘you have to be careful with girls. Where they are is where they marry. Are you coming home?’
‘No,’ said Casey.
The nanny goat needed a billy goat. Miranda bought one in. It was very stubborn and Miranda’s thighs were so black and blue from where she’d pulled and it had butted that she and Casey could seldom make love. One night the central heating failed and Casey came home late from London – nearly midnight – and found Miranda asleep in a chair by the fire and the two goats lying on the marital bed. ‘I’d move them’, said Miranda, waking, ‘if I could. But you know how stubborn goats are.’
‘I’ll soon move them,’ said Casey, taking up the DIY axe.
‘Don’t be so brutish,’ said Miranda. ‘Besides, where else are they to go? I’m having heating put in the goat-house but it isn’t ready yet.’
The next time Wendy asked, Casey said ‘yes’, and he never left her either. How sparkly clean Wendy’s house was: it smelt of polish and scent: she sprayed her one pot-plant with insecticide. There was nothing living in the place except him, and her, and one well-trained busy Lizzie.
These days Miranda has a whole herd of goats, organically fed, and sells the best and finest low-fat goat’s yoghurt to Holland & Barrett: she does a very good line in goat’s cheese too. And the few friends who still call say to one another, ‘But she’s beginning to look like a goat – little mean eyes and stocky legs and a whiskery chin!’ I’m afraid that they are right. But Miranda is perfectly happy about it, we mustn’t forget that.
Chew You Up and Spit You Out
A CAUTIONARY TALE
‘Well, yes,’ said the house to the journalist, in the manner of interviewees everywhere, ‘it is rather a triumph, after all I’ve been through!’ The journalist, a young woman, couldn’t quite make out the words for the stirring of the ivy on the chimney and the shirring of doves in the dovecote. She was not of the kind to be responsive to the talk of houses – and who would want to be who wished to sleep easy at night? – but she heard enough to feel there was some kind of story here. She’d come with a photographer from House & Garden: they were doing a feature on the past retold, on rescued houses, though to tell the truth she thought all such houses were boring as hell. Let the past look after the past was her motto. She was twenty-three and beautiful and lived in a Bauhaus flat with a composer boyfriend who paid the rent and preferred something new to something old any day.
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ she said, ‘earn our living and leg it back to town.’
But she stood over the photographer carefully enough, to make sure he didn’t miss a mullioned window, thatched outhouse, Jacobean beam or Elizabethan chimney: the things that readers loved to stare at: she was conscientious enough. She meant to get on in the world. She tapped her designer boot on original flagstone and waited while he changed his film, and wondered why she felt uneasy, and what the strange muffled breathing in her ears could mean. That’s how houses speak, halfway between a draught and a creak, when they’ve been brought back to life by the well-intentioned, rescued from decay and demolition. You hear it sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night in an old house, and think the place is haunted. But it’s not, it’s just the house i
tself speaking.
The journalist found Harriet Simley making coffee in the kitchen. The original built-in dresser had been stripped and polished, finished to the last detail, though only half the floor was tiled, and where it was not the ground was murky and wet. Harriet’s hair fell mousy and flat around a sweet and earnest face.
‘No coffee for me,’ said the journalist. ‘Caffeine’s so bad for one! What a wonderful old oak beam!’ The owners of old houses love to hear their beams praised.
‘Twenty-three feet long,’ said Harriet proudly. ‘Probably the backbone of some beached man o’ war. Fascinating, the interweaving of military history and our forest story! Of course, these days you can’t get a properly seasoned oak beam over twelve feet anywhere in the country. You have to go to Normandy to find them, and it costs you an arm and a leg. And all our capital’s gone. Still, it’s worth it, isn’t it! Bringing old houses back to life!’ The girl nodded politely and wrote it all down, though she’d heard it a hundred times before, up and down the country; of cottages, farmhouses, manors, mansions, long houses: ‘Costs you an arm and a leg. Still, it’s worth it. Bringing old houses back to life!’ Spoken by the half-dead, so far as she could see, but then she was of the Bauhaus, by her very nature.
‘What’s the matter with your hands?’ the journalist asked, and wished she hadn’t.
‘Rheumatoid arthritis, I’m afraid,’ Harriet said. She couldn’t have been more than forty. ‘It was five years before we got the central heating in. Every time we took up a floorboard there’d be some disaster underneath. Well, we got the damp out of the house in the end, but it seems to have got into my hands.’ And she laughed as if it were funny, but the journalist knew it was not. She shuddered and looked at her own city-smooth red-tipped fingers. Harriet’s knuckles stood out on her hands, as if she made a fist against the world, and a deformed fist at that.
‘So dark and gloomy in here,’ the journalist thought and made her excuses and went out again into the sun to look up at the house, but it didn’t warm her: no, the shudder turned into almost a shiver, she didn’t know why. The house spoke to her, but the breeze in the creepers which fronded the upstairs windows distorted the words. Or perhaps the Bauhaus had made her deaf.
‘You should have seen me only thirty years ago!’ said the house. ‘What a ruin. I must have fallen asleep. I woke to find myself a shambles. Chimney through the roof, dry rot in the laundry extension, rabbits living in the walls along with the mice, deathwatch beetle in the minstrels’ gallery, the land drains blocked and water pushing up the kitchen tiles, and so overgrown with ivy I couldn’t even be seen from the road. What woke me? Why, a young couple pushing open the front door – how it creaked; enough to wake the dead. They looked strong, young and healthy. They had a Volvo. They came from the city: they had dogs, cats and babies. They’ll do, I thought; it’s better if they come with their smalls: they’ll see to the essentials first. My previous dwellers? They’d been old, so old, one family through generations: they left in their coffins: there was no strength in them; mine drained away. That’s why I fell asleep, not even bothered to shrug off the ivy. I woke only in the nick of time. Well, I thought, can’t let that happen again. So now I put out my charm and lure the young ones in, the new breed from the city, strong and resourceful. They fall in love with me; they give me all their money: but they have no stamina; I kept the first lot twelve years, then they had to go. Pity. But I tripped a small down the back stairs, to punish it for rattling the stained glass in its bedroom door, and it lay still for months, and the parents neglected me and cursed me so I got rid of them. But I found new dwellers soon enough, tougher, stronger, richer, who did for a time. Oh yes, I’m a success story! Now see, even the press takes an interest in my triumph! Journalists, photographers!’ And the house preened itself in the late summer sun, in the glowing evening light.
‘I say,’ said the photographer to Julian Simley, as he wheel-barrowed a load of red roof-tiles from the yard to the cider house, ‘you should get the ivy off the chimney; it’ll break down the cement.’ The photographer knew a thing or two – he’d just put in an offer for a house in the country himself. An old rectory: a lot to do to it, of course, but he was a dab hand at DIY, and with his new girlfriend working he could afford to spend a bit. A snip, a snip – and worth twice as much, three times, when he was through. Even the surveyor said so.
The house read his mind and sang, ‘When we’re through with you, when we’re through with you: you can call yourself an owner, who are but a slave, you who come and go within our walls, for all old houses are the same and think alike,’ and the photographer smiled admiringly up at the doves in the creeper, as they stirred and whirred, and only the journalist shivered and said, ‘There’s something wrong with my ears. I hear music in them, a creaky kind of music, I don’t like it at all.’
‘Wax’, said the photographer absently, ‘can sound like that.’
Julian Simley said, ‘Christ, is that ivy back again? That’s the last straw,’ which is not what you’re supposed to say when you’re telling the press a success story of restoration, or renovation, in return for a hundred-pound fee, which you desperately need, for reclaimed old brick and groceries. ‘I haven’t the head for heights I had.’
‘You fool, you fool,’ snarled the house, overhearing. ‘You pathetic weak-backed mortal. Let the ivy grow, will you? Turn me into weeds and landscape? Leave me a heap of rubble, would you! Wretched, poverty-stricken creature: grubbing around for money! You and your poor crippled wife, who’d rather fit a dresser handle than tile the kitchen floor! I’ve no more patience with you: I’ve finished with you!’ and as Julian Simley stood on a windowsill to open a mullioned pane so the photographer could get the effect of glancing light he wanted, the sill crumbled and Julian fell and his back clicked and there was his disc slipped again, and he lay on the ground, and Harriet rang for the ambulance, and House & Garden waited with them. It was the least they could do.
‘He should have replaced the sill,’ thought the photographer, ‘I would have done,’ and the house hugged itself to itself in triumph.
‘We can’t manage any longer,’ said Julian to Harriet, as he lay on the ground. ‘It’s no use, we’ll have to sell, even at a loss.’
‘It’s not the money I mind about,’ grieved Harriet. ‘It’s just I love this house so much.’
‘Don’t you think I do,’ said Julian, and gritted his teeth against the stabs of pain which ran up his legs to his back. He thought this time he’d done some extra-complicating damage. ‘But I get the feeling it’s unrequited love.’ The house sniggered.
‘But how will we know the next people will carry on as we have? They’ll cover up the kitchen floor and not let it dry out properly, I know they will.’ Harriet wept. Julian groaned. The ambulance came. The journalist and the photographer drove off.
‘You want to know the secret?’ the house shrieked after them. ‘The secret of my success? It’s chew them up and spit them out! One after the other! And I’ll have you next,’ it screamed at the photographer, who looked back at the house as they circled the drive, and thought, ‘So beautiful! I’ll withdraw the offer on the rectory, and make a bid on this one. I reckon I’ll get it cheap, in the circumstances. That looked like a broken back, not a slipped disc, to me,’ and the house settled back cosily into its excellent, well-drained, sheltered site – the original builders knew what they were doing – and smiled to itself, and whispered to the doves who stirred and whirred their wings in its creepers. ‘Flesh and blood, that’s all. Flesh and blood withers and dies. But a house like me can go on for ever, if it has its wits about it.’
The Day the World Came to Somerset
‘You can tell the children by the mothers,’ said Miss Walters. ‘Show me a tidy mother; I’ll show you a tidy child.’ She spoke definitely. She always did. She knew what the world was like.
‘Or the mothers by the children,’ said Mrs Windsor, unexpectedly. But she was only an auxiliary; the staff room
didn’t take much notice of her. She was paid next to nothing. She came in from outside to hear reading, or help in the Infants Class, clearing up accidents or tying shoelaces. ‘What I mean is, if I see a child who is happy and easy and bright, I know that child will have a kind mother.’ But then, as Miss Jakes, who taught Class 4 and came from London, had remarked (in the new educational patois they all hated), Mrs Windsor was nothing if not child-centred. Soppy, that is.
East Bradley Junior was just about the smallest school in Somerset; threats of closure rumbled like thunder round its ears, and perhaps it was the noise of that thunder which deafened Mr Rossiter, the Headmaster, to the murmured protests of children and staff as he stalked the corridors, tall, grey, stooping, shouting and snapping at the children (and usually the wrong children), demanding peace, quiet and order in classrooms, school hall, staff room, everywhere; putting this out of bounds, declaring that out of order, putting pupils in corners for wearing red socks, disallowing trainers, and even standing infant wrongdoers in the wastepaper basket to prove just how worthless their chatter was. The two dinner ladies had caught his manner. Children who did not eat up were made to eat up, which kept Mrs Windsor busy cleaning up pupils who had been unexpectedly and distressingly sick. Mr Rossiter hated the PTA, but had to have one. The PTA raised money and the school was short of money. Without the parents, the school secretary would have had no typewriter, let alone paper for the endless notes, messages and reproaches which streamed out of the school to the parental world. Mr Rossiter had liked the old days, when a line had been painted on the school playground and a notice above it said ‘No Parents Beyond This Point’; even though the LEA’s policy had obliged him to remove these in the mid-sixties, it was the mid-seventies before the parents had ventured over the non-existent line. But now there seemed no keeping them out. The new-style parents – mostly the ones down from London – would be in the classrooms before school, after school, chatting to teachers and pupils, even popping their heads round doors while lessons were in progress, with messages about aunties or swimsuits or lost packed lunches. Lots of pupils took packed lunches. Mr Rossiter didn’t like that. It somehow loosened the school’s grip upon the child. It smacked of change: change smacked of chaos.
