by Weldon, Fay
‘Nothing’s been right since I’ve been home,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Now I understand why.’
‘You must ask the doctor,’ she said. ‘He’ll tell you.’
‘How can I ask the doctor? I’m going away for three months, now, with this to think about!’
Meg wept. Thompson howled. Timmy stamped and banged and departed.
‘But I’m pregnant!’ she called after him, weeping.
‘Complain to its father, not to me,’ he called back, and was gone. She waited for him to telephone from the dock, but he didn’t. She went up to the hills and sat there and watched and presently saw Polaris glide away out of its dock and sink beneath the water halfway down the loch. Thompson laid his bony chin upon her knee and pressed, and the next day she found a bruise there. She bruised easily, now that she was pregnant.
‘“Truly the light was sweet,”’ misquoted the captain, at the periscope, ‘“and a pleasant thing it was for the eyes to behold the sun.” You see these lumps on my eyelids, Mr Navigator? Cholesterol spots, they say. According to the MD I have to cut down on animal fats. You were first on board this time, Mr Navigator. Have a good leave?’
‘No, sir,’ said Timmy.
Meg went down to Zelda’s, piteously. Zelda was bright and very pregnant. She had new doorbell chimes, ‘Pling-plong,’ they went, when you rang. ‘Pling, pling, plong.’
‘Woodland bells!’ cried Zelda, in triumph. ‘Jim thought I’d like them. Well, that’s the way it goes! Work together, live together, think together. What’s the matter with you, red eyes? No, don’t tell me. You had a row with Timmy and he walked off with a harsh word on his lips.’
‘Yes. Several. Whore. Adulteress. That kind.’
‘And you won’t see him for another three months! Never mind. It always happens. You get used to it. What was it Jim said this time? I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Something perfectly horrid. Ah yes, they want me to help out at the library but Jim said if I took a job I’d grow a worse moustache than I have already. Statistics show career-women grow moustaches. What do they do down on that boat of theirs – study statistics?’
‘But Zelda,’ Meg wept, ‘supposing, supposing – supposing something happens to Timmy and those are the last words he ever said to me.’
‘You’re very egocentric,’ said Zelda. ‘You should be thinking of him, not you. Mind you, he’ll forget he ever said them. Men do. They have no memory for insults given, only those received. Did you say anything terrible to him?’
‘No.’
‘Then that will be next leave. Jim and I take it in turns. It’s the strain, you know. Bad-tempered when they go, bad-tempered when they get back, and a little bit of peace in the middle. Is it worth it?’
The pling-plong of the woodland chimes sounded and Tony came into the hall.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’
‘Hi,’ said the women, cheering up.
It was late spring. The cold wet weather continued unseasonably into April. A few daffodils came up on the hills, but were paled and shredded by the winds, and if the birds sang no one stood about to hear. Meg stayed in the croft and continued to regard herself as a married woman, and to believe what Zelda had said. She was tempted to storm around Tony, shower him with gusts of blame and torrents of reproaches, but somehow it was all too grave and grown-up for that. She had to be still, for the baby’s sake. It was an easy pregnancy: she was fortunate.
Thompson grew more excitable, less controllable. He actually caught rabbits now, and came back bloodied, as if he too had reached man’s estate.
It’s all the men’s fault, thought Meg. All the bombs and the missiles and the schemes and the theories and the rival forms of government, and they make believe that the way to solve things is to see who can blow each other up best: all male, male and angry and mad.
If the Peace Women had still been there, she thought, she would have joined them. You couldn’t in the full flush of early sexual love, but you could later on: you could chant with the rest of them, ‘Take the toys from the boys.’ Oh yes, easily.
In the middle of April a strange thing happened. It was on a morning that had dawned so clear and still and fine that there was no mistaking winter had ended: and Meg could see that for weeks now, hidden by the windy, unseasonable veil, the spring had been preparing for its surprises. The trees, which only the day before had seemed lean and black, could today be seen to be plump and hazy with fresh green leaves. Peonies had sprung up where she’d thought there was nothing but brown earth: and there were pansies and polyanthus underfoot. Meg stood on the doorstep, her face raised to the warmth of the sun, and knew that summer and good times were coming. Thompson sat on the path and did the same. She saw now that every branch seemed to have a bird upon it; and a row of starlings sat on the dry-stone wall and that they too had their heads turned towards the warmth. And where the wall had crumbled to the ground sat a rabbit, perfectly still, and behind that a sheep, quietly staring in at her. The cat – borrowed from Amanda down at the library to keep the mice population down – jumped from the path to the windowsill, and sat there, and one or two of the assembled company twitched a little, but quickly settled again. It was as if all living creatures united in their pleasure in the day, in their relief that the hard times were over and the knowledge that good times were coming; and that all, in this, were equal and understood one another.
Thompson was the first to break the unnatural peace. He yelped and barked and shot after the rabbit. The sheep trotted off, the birds rose squawking, the cat disappeared into the bushes after them. The normal rules of kill or be killed reasserted themselves. It seemed, at least in the animal kingdom, a kind of game, to which everyone consented.
Meg blamed Thompson. When he came back from his chase, leaping and prancing and slavering, she hit him and shouted at him and chased him through the house, shrieking. Then she was ashamed of herself. Thompson crawled under the sofa and growled when she came near, and when she put her hand beneath it to make friends he snapped at her.
A little later the telephone rang. It was one of the local farmers, asking her to keep her dog under control. He was running the profit off his sheep. If it went on, he’d have to shoot him.
‘It’s not my dog,’ said Meg, feebly. ‘It’s my husband’s, and he’s away. He’s in the Navy.’ She thought that might soften his heart.
‘Aye, I know all about that,’ said the farmer. ‘And I know you’re pregnant, and I’m sorry for you, lass. But what are you Navy folk doing up here on our land? You’ve got your own world, you stick to it. Your dog’s your luxury. My sheep are my necessity. That dog’s an untrained working dog, and there’s nothing worse. He’d be better off dead.’
After that Meg kept Thompson in the house, or took him for walks on a lead, and in her heart Thompson and Timmy became the same thing, the same burden.
Down below the China Seas Jim said to Timmy, ‘What’s the matter, old man?’
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ said Timmy. He was surprised Jim had noticed anything: he saw himself as a bright clear day, sunny and smiling. The black clouds rolled and swirled about the edges of his unconscious, but with an effort of will he kept them back. Blue skies, smiling at me!
‘If it’s Zelda,’ said Jim, ‘don’t worry. I know all about that. These things happen. It’s all over now. Zelda doesn’t like me being in the Navy. It’s a half-life for a woman. They have a right to something more. So she has her revenge: then tells me. I don’t blame you, old man, and I don’t blame her.’
Timmy counted the sentences as Jim spoke them. Nine. He’d never known Jim say more than four in a row before. He was moved by a sense of the importance of the occasion, and presently felt a burden had gone from him he didn’t even know he had been carrying.
‘I wonder what the time is at home?’ he said.
The captain consulted a dial or so.
‘Eleven-thirty in the morning,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Because that’s
my time for contacting Meg,’ he said.
‘Telepathy?’ asked the captain. ‘The Ruskies do it all the time. I suppose we shouldn’t lag behind.’
Timmy listened in, but felt no answering call from Meg, and felt at once lost and vulnerable and said, ‘I suppose there are many innocent ways a man’s tie could get to be under one’s wife’s bed,’ and the captain said, ‘Quite so.’
‘I blame myself, sir,’ said Timmy.
‘That’s the secret to it all,’ said the captain. ‘Let’s drink to that!’
‘Drink, sir?’
‘Life is sweet,’ said the captain, ‘and a little white wine won’t do us any harm.’
He took down from the back of the shelf one of Zelda’s two canisters of white wine.
‘But, sir,’ said Jim, ‘it’s bœuf au poivre for dinner, with green peppers, not black, the way it ought to be. Shouldn’t we be drinking red?’
‘Desperate times, desperate measures!’ said the captain, opening one of the canisters of white wine. Then he pricked his finger with a needle and let a drop or two of blood fall inside. ‘Here’s to universal brotherhood!’ he said. ‘And to all our faults!’ The blood barely discoloured the wine so he added some drops of cochineal as well. ‘We’ll leave it a rosé,’ he said. ‘Compromise, that’s the thing.’
The midwife knocked upon Meg’s door and found her sitting grimly on a chair, Thompson’s lead wound round her wrist, and Thompson sitting at her feet, unwilling, and chafing and wild-eyed. He barked at the midwife, and strained to get to her, not to attack, but to welcome her in.
‘I should let the dog go,’ said the midwife. Meg did, and Thompson leapt forward and the midwife went towards him instead of cringing back, as most people did when faced with the noisy, welcoming Thompson, and thus managed to keep her balance. Presently Thompson calmed.
‘How long had you been sitting like that?’ she asked.
‘About an hour,’ said Meg. ‘But I know his moods. If I let him out when his eyes look like that, he goes straight after the sheep, and then he’ll get shot.’
‘It might be the best thing,’ observed the midwife.
‘Timmy would never forgive me,’ said Meg, who had begun to weep. She was seven months’ pregnant. She lay on the bed while the midwife felt round her belly.
‘You didn’t come down to the clinic,’ said the midwife, ‘so I thought I’d just pop up here to see if all was well, which it is.’
She took a casual look round the kitchen shelves to see if there was any food, which there was. But she still wasn’t easy.
‘Hubby away, I suppose,’ she said, ‘being Crew No. 2. And we mustn’t ask when he’s due back, must we?’
‘No, we mustn’t,’ said Meg. ‘And he couldn’t be fetched back, even if I were dying. Not that he’d want to be fetched. He might miss the end of the world, and he wouldn’t like that.’
‘Can your mother come and stay?’ asked the midwife.
‘She doesn’t like dogs,’ said Meg shortly. ‘And she doesn’t like Timmy, and she doesn’t like the Navy, and she told me this would happen and I said let me run my own life, Mother. And I don’t think she likes me either, come to think of it.’
‘What about your husband’s parents? You don’t seem to be in a state to be left alone.’
‘I hardly know them. What I do know, I don’t like. It’s mutual, I think.’
‘Isn’t there somebody who could take the dog?’
‘The dog is my responsibility. I’ll see it through if it kills me.’
‘Your legs are very scratched. Why is that?’
‘Because I was taking Thompson for a walk. He pulled me through some bushes.’
‘Put him in kennels.’
‘Timmy would never forgive me. Perhaps I should go into kennels and Thompson could have the bed all to himself. Until Timmy comes back. Then they’d share it and be perfectly happy. He only married me because he needed a kennel-maid.’
‘I think I’d better ring the doctor up,’ said the midwife. ‘I can’t leave you in this state.’
‘I’m not in a state,’ said Meg, weeping copiously. ‘I was only trying to entertain you. Pow! Three schoolboys with their fingers on the trigger. It’s all so funny!’
The midwife made Meg take a tranquillising pill, and Meg asked for a few extra for Thompson, but the midwife wouldn’t oblige. She said she’d return later with the doctor and Meg was to stay where she was.
But after the midwife had gone for half an hour or so, Meg gave in to Thompson’s whinings and snappings and put him on the lead and took him for a walk. Thompson walked sedately for a little but then started pulling and tugging, and finally wrenched the lead right out of her hand – or perhaps she just gave up holding it – and was off after a rabbit. She stood on the brow of the brackeny hill and looked down to a slight valley and a wooded culvert and then the hill rose again and on the opposite slope were sheep. She saw Thompson’s small shape pelting downhill: she watched him lose the rabbit in the undergrowth of the valley, and then saw him emerge the other side and stand for a while, watching the sheep.
‘But I knew this would happen,’ she said aloud. ‘It was bound to happen.’
And the sheep scattered as Thompson leapt amongst them, biting and yelping, and she saw a man with a gun coming over the top of the hill. She waved her arms and yelled and started running, but watched the gun being raised and pointed and saw a little puff and then heard a crack, and Thompson had jumped in the air and fallen, in slow motion, and the sheep spread out, away from the centre of the scene, as if interpreting some formal dance routine. And because she was looking at the farmer she didn’t watch where she was going, and tripped, with her foot in a rabbit hole, and fell; lost consciousness and, regaining it seconds later, felt a dreadful pain in her side and an even worse one in her head, for which she was totally responsible. She was manufacturing hate, and rage, and pain; all by herself, with enormous energy.
The farmer was putting his coat beneath her head. She felt her eyes cross and wary and her mouth pulled up in a sneer. He said something which ended, as so much did in these parts, ‘forbye’; and then his face had gone and so was he, and if she turned her head – her body being pinned by so much pain – she could see where Thompson lay. His skull was partly gone; bits of shredded flesh stuck to something which was white and presumably bone, and also bits of a kind of grey badly wrapped parcel, which was presumably brain; the seat of all Thompson’s troubles.
She was glad Thompson was dead. She hoped the baby was dying too, and then herself. She wanted the world to end: if she could have ended it then and there she would have. Pressed the button, finished it all. Ashes and dust and silence. The thought was so strong it seemed like an explosion in her head: not a sharp decent crack, like the one which had shattered Thompson, but a kind of reddish rumble, which presently carried consciousness away with it.
Zelda bent over her; she was in an ambulance. The midwife was there, too. She was knitting a white scarf with red stripes – as best she could, for the road was bumpy. An ambulance attendant studied his nails.
‘What is Timmy going to say?’ reproached Zelda. ‘Poor Thompson!’
‘Oh, shut up, Zelda,’ said Meg, automatically.
‘Is she coming round?’ asked the midwife.
‘She’s being very rude,’ said Zelda. ‘Is that the same thing?’
‘What happened?’ asked Meg.
‘Acute abdominal pain for no apparent reason,’ said the midwife. ‘It happens sometimes. Don’t worry, the foetal heart’s strong and steady: so’s yours.’
‘Did I dream it?’ asked Meg. ‘Is Thompson dead?’
‘Thompson’s dead,’ said Zelda. ‘What is Timmy going to say? You should have put him in kennels, Meg.’
‘Don’t persecute the wee lassie,’ said the midwife.
‘It’s the best thing for her,’ said Zelda. ‘I know her backwards. Look! It’s brought the colour back to her cheeks.’
Meg wept for
Thompson.
‘I thought I’d blown up the world,’ she said, presently. ‘I’m glad it’s still here.’
‘Takes more than you, dear,’ said the midwife.
‘Three of us like me, and we might,’ said Meg, ‘all too easily,’ but the midwife didn’t take the reference. Zelda did. Zelda said, ‘Well, I’ll have no talk of the end of the world in front of the children. So far as I’m concerned their fathers are guarding our shores and protecting our future, not to mention paying the rent, and to say anything else is negativism. Women for the Bomb, that’s me!’
‘You’ve been seeing too much of Tony,’ said Meg.
‘I just hope,’ said Zelda, ‘that when my baby’s born it manages to look like Jim. So now you know.’
Meg spent the rest of the day in the Base hospital and in the evening they sent her home by ambulance. She kept thinking she saw Thompson, out of the corner of her eye; but when she looked fairly and squarely he wasn’t there. But his spirit lingered around the house, on the stairs and under the bed; and every door and window-frame had been scored by his strong claws.
The next morning Meg spoke to him seriously.
‘Thompson,’ she said, ‘you’re here and yet you’re not here. You’ll be off soon, I expect. Did you die for a purpose, to teach me a lesson? I feel there is something to be learned. I wish I knew more clearly what it was. I know I wasn’t grateful for what I had, and I should have been. I expected a humble, grateful, easy animal, who would consent to be loved, who could be controlled; and instead I had you. I wanted for a husband the projection of my own fantasies, and instead I had Timmy. No wonder he fought back. I thought it was other people who were angry and violent, not me; but it wasn’t so. It was me as well. It’s never them, is it? It’s us.’
And she was silent, and seemed to hear Thompson’s patient, heavy breathing.
‘Thompson,’ she said, ‘take your spirit out of here, and go to the bottom of the sea, where the big silent ships glide in and out, and tell your master I’m sorry.’
Down on Polaris two Routines came through. One was from the Family News Service. The captain put it in a folder and said nothing.
