by Weldon, Fay
Now of course it can’t have been Holly. Holly lives with us, miles away from Hampstead. But I suppose it could have been some descendant of The Cat’s, some second cousin or other of Holly’s, which explains the resemblance. I try not to think that Holly did indeed send her spirit out that night, and that is why the poor creature has no energy left and sits in her little nest in the grass outside the house and waits to die, which – and I suppose I must face it – she will soon do. And why Jenny lives, who I thought would die. For ten whole years I dreaded the ring of the telephone which would tell me she was dead.
No, more like something good I once did, once upon a time, just fed back into the pattern of events and worked out okay, and came back to rescue me. Us. Pow! So that phone call never came. Forget the cats. What are cats?
That is all, Miss Jacobs, for today.
The following stories have previously appeared elsewhere: ‘Subject to Diary’ (Lear’s, 1989); ‘I Do What I Can and I Am What I Am’ (Elle, 1989); ‘The Year of the Green Pudding’ (There’s More to Life Than Mr Right, Piccadilly Press, 1985); ‘Ind Aff’ (Observer, 1988); ‘A Visit from Johannesburg’ (Blaubartchen, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990); ‘Au Pair’ (Honey, 1985); ‘Down the Clinical Disco’ (New Statesman, 1985); ‘Sharon Loves Darren’ (Soho Square, Bloomsbury, 1988); ‘Who Goes Where?’ (Woman, 1989); ‘The Search for Mother Christmas’ (Woman, 1988); ‘A Move to the Country’ (Listener, 1988); ‘Chew You Up and Spit You Out’ (Woman, 1989); ‘The Day the World Came to Somerset’ (Just Women, 1989); ‘A Gentle Tonic Effect’ (Marie Claire, 1988).
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An invitation from the publisher
First published in great Britain in 1991 by HarperCollinsPublishers
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1991
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858073
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.headofzeus.com
In “Christmas Lists—A Seasonal Story,” the endless lists created by a suburban couple become a metaphor for marriage, family, and enduring love. In “Delights of France or Horrors of the Road,” a woman goes to a psychiatrist to cure her sudden, inexplicable paralysis, unaware that her constant bragging about her brilliant physicist husband conceals a raging fury. “Redundant! or the Wife’s Revenge” takes place in a plastic surgery ward, where Fay Weldon finds an ironic humor. The title story, Polaris, introduces newlyweds Meg and Timmy, whose union is tested when Timmy is called away to naval duty and Meg discovers a shocking secret.
Table of Contents
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Polaris
Delights of France or Horrors of the Road
The Sad Life of the Rich
Christmas Lists – A Seasonal Story
And Then Turn Out the Light
The Bottom Line and the Sharp End
In the Great War
Birthday!
The School Run
Who?
Oh Mary Don’t You Cry Any More
Redundant! or The Wife’s Revenge
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Polaris
The dog was called Thompson, a name without significance, except that Timmy’s nephew, aged ten, had named him so. It was an innocent, respectable name. Thompson was a springer spaniel: a strong, handsome, long-haired creature, silky brown and white and full of powerful, unnamed emotions. ‘Never seek to tell thy love,’ misquoted Meg, from Blake, trying to stare Thompson out, ‘love that never can be told—’ And Thompson stared back at Meg, and seemed to be weeping. It was Meg who dropped her eyes.
The dog Thompson loved Timmy as a man loves another man, and the man Timmy loved Thompson as a man loves a dog. That, Meg decided, was the cause of Thompson’s distress.
‘He’s perfectly happy,’ protested Timmy, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. ‘That is just the way dogs look at their masters. There is nothing unhealthy in it.’
They were plastering and painting their first house, their first marital home, on the hills above the naval base where Timmy was stationed, there where the cold North Sea meets the sandy Western Scottish shore, there where Polaris dwells. They were using white paint; no frills, just a bleak beauty, a background. That was what they both wanted. Security insisted they put in a telephone, otherwise they’d have gone without that too. They needed only each other. The telephone was in and working before anything else, before even the electricity cable arrived to link them to the mainstream of the world.
Now they mended and smoothed and renovated, making good what had gone before. The shaggy Scottish sheep came to stare at them through gaps in the old stone walls, where once windows had been, and soon would be again. The sheep made Thompson jump.
‘Silly beast,’ said Timmy fondly. ‘He’s afraid of them. He only understands southern sheep.’ Yet he expected Meg, also transplanted from south to north, to be brave.
Meg and Timmy prayed that it would not rain until the roof was watertight, and God answered their prayers and sent a long hot dry summer, heather-scented. And Meg and Timmy sawed and hammered and twisted pipes and made love when the spirit moved them, which was often. Down at the Base the other wives trotted in and out of each other’s nice new bungalows, with papered walls in pretty pinks and greens, and said that Meg was mad; but no doubt time would cure her, as it had cured each of them in turn. Time, and experience and winter. A cold lonely winter or two, with Timmy away, and she’d move down to the Base, for the company and the coffee and the moral support.
‘I’ll never be like them,’ Meg told Timmy, of course she did. ‘I’m different. I married you, I didn’t marry the Navy.’
‘You’ll have Thompson for company,’ was all he said, ‘when I’m away.’
‘Oh, Thompson!’ scorned Meg. ‘Scratching and bouncing and fussing! All feeling and no brain.’
‘He’s just alive,’ said Timmy. ‘He can’t help it.’
‘I’d rather look after a brain-damaged child than a dog,’ said Meg. ‘Any day! At least you’d know where you were.’
‘You wouldn’t rather,’ Timmy said, his face not loving and laughing at all but serious and cold, just for an instant, before relaxing again into its pleasant ordinariness.
Her own, her lovely Timmy! How could she be afraid of him? He was handsome in the way heroes are handsome – broad-shouldered, big-framed, blond and blue-eyed – and had made her, who was accustomed to being always slightly delinquent, somehow not quite like other people, into the heroine of her own life. Timmy had given her a vision of perfectibility. He had married her. But she wished he didn’t have a beard. If she couldn’t see his mouth, how could she properly judge his feelings? Perhaps his flesh was warm but his bones were cold?
Timmy’s beard and Thompson! Well, she could live with them.
She had had lo
vers more temperamental, more experimental, more – if it came to it – exciting than Timmy, but none who had made her happy. He moved her, she tried to explain to him, into some other state. He changed her in his love-making, she said one morning as they puttied glass into window-frames, into something that belonged to somewhere else, somewhere better.
‘Perhaps it’s the somewhere else you say Thompson comes from,’ he said, joking, no doubt because her talking about intimate and emotional matters made him uneasy. But she chose to take it the wrong way, and didn’t talk to him for a full six hours, banging and crashing through their still fragile, echoing house until he dropped a hammer on his toe, and made her laugh and she forgave him. Her anger was a luxury: both understood that and thought they could well afford it. Her little spats of bad behaviour were a status symbol of their love.
They made love outside in the yellow glow flung back from the old stone walls as the sun set.
‘Never let the sun go down on thy wrath,’ said Timmy. Sometimes he said such obvious things she was quite shaken; phrases that merely flitted through her head, and out again, Timmy would give actual voice to. She thought perhaps it was because she’d had more experience of the world than he. He’d spent a long time under the seas, some six months out of every twelve, since he joined the Navy as a cadet.
Besides, he’d been to a public school and a naval college and only ever mixed with the same kind of people; she’d been to art school and had a hard time with herself in one way and another, brought up by a mother she never really got on with: without a father. Timmy took life simply and pleasantly and did as he wanted, without worrying, and was generous. She worried and was mean: she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t throw away a stale crust unless there was a bird waiting to eat it, whereas Timmy would pour milk down the sink, if the sink was nearer than the fridge and he was tidying up. She had to save, he to spend. But in a sense it didn’t matter: between them the opposites balanced out. His prodigality and her frugality, caught steady on the fulcrum of their love.
Thompson slept under the bed, and when they made love at night would be both jealous and fascinated. He’d roam the room and shuffle and lick their toes.
‘Dogs shouldn’t be in bedrooms,’ said Meg.
‘Love me, love my dog,’ said Timmy, and she found she’d been waiting for him to say it for a long time. Once he had, she settled down to put up with Thompson, third party to their marriage, the fixture under the marital bed. She even bought flea powder down at the PX on the Base, on one of their weekly trips in. And a special comb for Timmy’s beard.
In the Autumn Timmy must expect to go on his tour of duty on Polaris. Three months on, three months off, more or less; sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Security demanded uncertainty. But Meg could not believe it would ever happen. Timmy would say things like:
‘You’ve got to take a driving test before the Autumn, Meg,’ or,
‘I have to have at least the kitchen finished before I go,’ and she would somehow wonder what he was talking about. Her father had died when she was six. The death had been expected for a year, but how can a child expect a thing like that?
Timmy made her read a book about the care of dogs, and said, ‘My brother used to take Thompson when I was away, but now I’ve got you he’s your responsibility.’
But then September did come and the first cold wet day, and they lit the fires in smoky chimneys, and marvelled that the roof was rainproof and the walls windproof. The phone rang at six the following morning and Meg woke from sleep to hear Timmy saying, ‘Aye-aye, sir’, and she thought it must be a dream, but the space beside her in the bed became cold, and she saw Timmy, lean and naked, dragging out the suitcase from beneath the bed, and he put on a blue shirt and navy socks, and she saw, or thought she saw, Timmy put a pistol into a kind of shoulder harness which he slung over the shirt, and then a navy woollen jersey over that. Could one imagine such a nasty, arid, deathly black metal thing as that pistol? Surely not! And all of a sudden Timmy looked like one of his nephew’s Action Men, the one with the beard. She thought his movements had become jerky. She closed her eyes. Timmy bent and kissed her.
‘You can’t go!’ she cried, in panic. ‘You can’t!’
‘Someone has to,’ he said.
‘What, blow up the world?’ she demanded.
‘Darling,’ he said patiently, ‘stop the world from blowing up. If you wanted to have this conversation you’ve had four months to do it. It isn’t fair to start it now. I have to go.’
‘But there has to be more notice than this!’
‘There can’t be,’ he said. ‘Security.’
His face had its carved look again, but elevated from the simple planes of the child’s toy to the more complex and serious kind one might see on a monument to the dead, at the entrance to a War Graves Cemetery, where the rows of simple white crosses stand as such a dreadful rebuke to the frivolous. ‘Look after Thompson for me,’ he said, and left, closing the door between himself and the dog, and of course himself and her, but she felt that Thompson came first. She watched from the window as Timmy bounced down the stony path on his bicycle into the valley fog, and vanished into the white nothingness of the rest of the world.
Timmy left his bicycle with the security guard down at the docks. It was padlocked next to Rating Daly’s new lightweight eight-speed racer, and the security guard undertook to oil it at weekly intervals.
‘Hurry up, sir,’ said the security man. ‘They’re waiting to do the fast cruise: said they needed their navigator.’
Polaris submarines, before setting off to sea, which they like to do at unprecedented times and unexpected states of tide, need to test their engines by running them at full speed. But so that the whole coast can’t tell by the sudden rumble that a Polaris is on its way out, the engines are fast-cruised just for the sake of it, from time to time. A rumble in the water, the quivering of the sea and sand where children play, may mean something, but equally may not. No one wants to think about it too much.
There are five British Polaris submarines: these compose Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. They have a home base. They have to have that in the same way that people have to have beds. They are very large, like whales. They can’t be hidden, so they try to be unexpected. In theory each Polaris slips in to home base every three months or so, under cover of dark, usually in the early morning. First Crew goes home silently, by bicycle or car. Second Crew, warned by a single phone call, eases itself from its bed and is on board with as little fuss as possible. Security would like to keep the crews secluded in barracks for maximum secrecy, if only they could. But you can’t push submariners more than a certain way, or who’s going to choose to be one? Polaris’s crew have to stay sane; and it is common wisdom that the way to stay sane (at least for men) is to have lots of sex and lots of children. So they have to put up with married men, and though they prefer them to live on Base (as second best to barracks) if they insist on living with their wives in crumbling crofters’ cottages on the bare hillside they put up with that too. It just makes a little more work.
Instead of hurrying on board Timmy asked if he could use the telephone in the security hut to call his wife.
‘Just married, aren’t you, sir,’ said the security man enquiringly, and dialled the number himself. But he used a coded number from a list he held. He took no chances. Only then did he hand over the instrument.
‘Meg,’ said Timmy, ‘how are you?’
‘I’m in bed,’ said Meg, ‘and Thompson’s on it, not even under it, and he’s licking my face.’
‘Look after yourself,’ said Timmy, ‘and think of me every morning at eleven-thirty.’
‘I’ll think of you all the time.’
‘Make a special effort at eleven-thirty – it’s a quiet time on board – and I’ll try and pick up the signals.’
‘Is it allowed?’ asked Meg, not without bitterness. ‘Isn’t telepathy a breach of security?’
‘It depends,’ said Ti
mmy, in all seriousness, ‘on what you do with the information received.’
‘Where are you calling from?’ asked Meg.
‘Somewhere,’ said Timmy. ‘But there’s a grey wharf and a shiny wet bright sea. Has the mist cleared up there?’
‘It has,’ said Meg, and she looked out of the window on to a pristine day resting over autumn hills, and felt her sense of loss and anger subside. All the same, she said, crossly, ‘I think all this security business is nonsense.’
‘It’s only for a few hours every now and then,’ said Timmy. ‘And we shouldn’t be talking about it.’
‘I don’t care who’s tapping this phone,’ said Meg. ‘The way to confound the tappers is to overwhelm them with detail! And what’s to stop me ringing my cousin whose friend works in the Russian Embassy perhaps, and weeping on her shoulder and saying Timmy’s just left me for his tour of duty?’
‘My dearest,’ said Timmy, cautiously. ‘Two things. First, we’ll lie about on the bottom of the loch for a while, before actually moving off, and secondly I expect you’ll find you can’t make outgoing calls on our phone, at least for a little while. It’s for all our sakes. You want me home safely, don’t you?’
That silenced her.
