Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon

by Weldon, Fay

  Why don’t I scream? What are you after? Abreaction? I know the terms – my daughter Angela’s a psychiatric nurse, as I told you, and doing very well. You think I was finally traumatised at the last Dégustation? And that’s why I can’t walk? You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? I expect you’re a feminist – I notice you’re wearing a trouser suit – and like to think everything in this world is the man’s fault. You want me to scream out tension and rage and terror and horror? I won’t! I tell you, France is a joyous place and we all loved those holidays and had some wonderful meals and some knock-out wines, thanks to Piers, and as for his driving, we’re all alive, aren’t we? Piers, me, David, Angela, Fanny, Brutus. All alive! That must prove something. It’s just I don’t seem able to walk, and if you would be so kind as to call Piers, he will shift me from your sofa to the chair and wheel me home. Talking will get us nowhere. I do love my husband.

  The Sad Life of the Rich

  Millie made her confessional to the sea, since there was no priest to receive it. ‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I have cheated and lied to get what I want.’ The sad sea scraped against the grey shore, and the wet wind whipped around her Magli shoes. She wondered whether their yellow leather would lose colour where it met the creeping salt damp of the beach, or whether that only happened to cheap shoes? The beach was empty; the other hotel guests stayed in their rooms and waited for the wind to die down and the sun to appear.

  Millie assumed there were other guests but it was hard to be sure. Sometimes she caught a flicker of a skirt disappearing down a long pink and gold corridor, or a grey trouser into a carpeted lift, and there was a murmur of chambermaids behind closed doors – so something was going on somewhere. There was a girl who smiled like a robot behind the reception desk, and if Millie left her room for five minutes to buy a paperback in the hotel shop her bed would be straightened and the ashtray emptied by the time she got back. Lights flicked on and off in her room to tell her when the hairstylist was ready. He was real: his boyfriend, he said, was a literary agent in Miami. That was a bright spot – he must have liked and trusted Millie to tell her that. But otherwise the staff kept out of her way and the guests kept to their rooms, either because they feared meeting each other or because their arthritic limbs prevented them from reaching the corridor.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Millie, ‘forgive me!’ But she could not raise her eyes to the sky for there was too much rain in the wind. Millie felt her flesh grow goose-pimply. She thought she saw a long greyish bundle rocking in the surf, and looked again and it was gone. Well, this was a beach on Guernsey, and that was imagination, or else a vision. Who cared? A taxi driver had insisted on telling her about World War II on the Channel Isles – the forced labour camps, the starvation, the treacheries, betrayals, slaughter: how the Guernsey beaches, when the high tide receded, would be studded with dead bodies. But that was forty years past, and Millie’s was the generation for which the sacrifice had been made – it was for the children; that the children should live in peace and freedom and prosperity. That was what everyone said. ‘And so I did,’ said Millie, to the bundles which might have been there, and might not have been there. ‘Thanks a million.’

  The sand spattered up and stung the pink, shiny skin of Millie’s calves. Her legs, she feared, had been damaged by the depilatory cream the beautician in the hotel salon had used. Millie had asked for a leg wax but the girl had studied her legs and simply refused. Millie’s veins, she said, were too near the surface. It happened to older women. So she had used a cream which had stung far more than the wax would have when it was torn off. There was nothing wrong with Millie’s veins: how could there be, when you finally had what you wanted – even though you’d had to lie, cheat, steal and murder to get it – and had started a new life? Didn’t your veins somehow start afresh with you?

  Well, no. God got you, somehow He got you. Mother always said that He would.

  There’s nothing wrong with my legs, Millie thought. No one would know they’d been going for fifty years. The wind howled and the clouds parted and Millie managed to look up and saw a beam of sun, like the eye of God, striking down at the sea and now, as the pattern of clouds shifted, it moved on towards Millie and contained her, so that she stood bathed in light.

  ‘It was my fault,’ admitted Millie. ‘I killed him. The vicar said a special prayer for Stephen on his sick-bed and I didn’t join in. I kept my mouth and heart shut because I wanted him to die. Just for a moment, but it was the wrong moment; it was touch and go, and he died. When I got back from church he was dead. I got all his money and now I’m rich. So what are you going to do, send me to hell?’

  Oh, thought Millie, I’ve never in all my life been braver than this; standing on a beach in the very eye of God, defying Him. So bright was the light in which she stood that all around seemed black, and she was alone in the universe. ‘So what now, God?’ she said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  She waited, and there was silence, just a sense of the grey bundles rocking out at sea. ‘I know I was mean to my mother,’ said Millie, ‘but she was mean to me. I didn’t ask to be born!’

  Mother was Mary, a trained nurse and a Catholic, and the latter got the better of the former, so Millie had been brought to term. Then Mary pretended Millie was the daughter of her deceased sister. Society was kind enough to unmarried mothers in wartime, but Mary was never one to be kind to herself. So Millie called Mary ‘Auntie’ and sometimes lived with her and sometimes didn’t. Millie’s father Bill was the entertainments officer at the US air force camp, and Mary was one of the nice girls bussed in weekly to dance with the brave lads from overseas. But Bill was local and Welsh, and thereafter Mary sometimes lived with him and sometimes didn’t, for Bill was not a Catholic and was married to someone in Ireland.

  The war disrupted many lives. Mary took a job as a telephonist/receptionist in a posh country hotel and her niece came out of the orphanage to live with her. Bill got a job playing the piano in the Nitery at the hotel, and became Uncle. Millie went away to university on a scholarship to do French and German, and one night Bill telephoned and said in his common Welsh/Irish voice that Auntie was very ill, she was to come home, and Millie said she had her finals the next day and couldn’t come. Bill wept.

  ‘She’s not your auntie,’ he said, ‘she’s your mother.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Millie, with a rage such as she had never known before, and put the phone down on the pair of them, and slept soundly and sat her exams, and did very well, and rang home the next day and found that Auntie had died. She went to the funeral, but Uncle wouldn’t speak to her, and presently he went home to be father to some other, younger children in Ireland. Millie, going through his papers years back, found photographs of them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Millie now, ‘Dad and Mum. Or do you only hear me if I say Uncle and Auntie?’ It was conditional surrender.

  After that, Millie could invent her own parents: an English father who owned a sugar plantation in Barbados; a mother who was an international concert pianist. They travelled a good deal. If you were going to lie, Millie realised, you’d better really lie. Nervous half-truths got found out – proper whoppers seldom did. With her language degree, Millie got a job as a grade one typist in the Foreign Office. Parents who travelled a lot worried Security a little, but not so much that they actually checked up. She’d reckoned on that, and her name and her degree were true enough. Her would-be boss, an under-secretary of trade, liked the look of her legs, which were truly stunning, and indeed the rest of her, and she was obviously not spy-material, this Millie Mason, this well-bred, well-spoken, beautiful, discreet English girl. She worked in Paris, in Bahrain, in Tokyo and all over, keeping company with young men called, vaguely, Teddy Ormly-White, and flat-sharing with young women called, vaguely, Pamela Brown-Cliff-Brown. Money was a problem, but an amazing amount could be extracted from coat pockets in the shadowy cloakrooms of nightclubs and the neat ones of international conferences, but especi
ally the former, and in the right currency, too.

  ‘Forgive me, God,’ said Millie, twenty-five years later, trapped in her pool of light, ‘but remember that I was being robbed myself, underpaid. I stayed a grade one typist. Men with the same qualifications became administrators.’ She thought for a moment that the waves would rock one of the men’s bodies right up to her feet, but it drew back again, into the darkness.

  Millie fell in love. That was terrible. Millie fell insanely in love with Michael, a young trainee under-secretary with wide blue eyes and the face of a surprised child. She slept with him at once instead of building up to it over three months – as one should, if in love but not wanting marriage – or not at all, at least until after the wedding ring was on the finger, if you wanted a man for good. So of course Michael didn’t respect her. She didn’t realise it, and blurted out the truth about Auntie and Uncle, and giggled over the plantations and the concerts in the deceptive warmth and safety of that wonderful bed, and he went right off her. ‘A tissue of lies,’ he said, taking offence, glad of the excuse to get away from the totality of Millie’s passion. After that she was careful not to fall in love – if you caught it early, like a cold, there were ways of nipping it in the bud. And when Michael announced his engagement to Susan, she let Susan know about the prostitutes Michael frequented (well, once) and Susan broke it off, and no one ever knew why, except Susan and Millie.

  ‘I’m sorry, God,’ said Millie, ‘but that was the way the world was in those days. Truth and love just couldn’t abide together. As for Susan, I’m sure Michael was gay, at heart, so it was just as well.’

  The bodies rocked their reproach: they were all around, she was sure, but she could not see properly beyond the circle of light. ‘But how was I supposed to live?’ begged Millie. ‘Everything changed so fast. There was no one to tell you. So far as you were concerned, God, well, you’d let the war happen so your street credibility, I can tell you, was nix. Nix. A girl had to look after herself.’

  Millie got involved with a group of American artists and musicians living in the shadow of Montmartre. Perhaps this was the world she belonged to? She’d leave the formality of the Embassy flat with its shiny issue furniture and the nice girls and the formal, randy men who visited them; and fall into a sea of paint and mess and drink and music and unmade beds with men who laughed and drank and were noisy, and girls who shrieked and raged and swore they’d never marry. Of course in those pre-pill days you had to rely on men to take precautions, and drunken artists are forgetful, or else just plain selfish, and there she was, pregnant, and none of them had any intention of marrying her. And Susan, who’d found she was pregnant by Michael after she’d broken off the engagement, had had an abortion and died from it, and Millie was beginning to understand by now the patterns made by fate, and knew she’d die too if she tried the same thing.

  ‘You’d have done it, too, wouldn’t you?’ she said, and the sea now lapped her Magli shoes, but she wouldn’t move back. Remorse was vanishing: she could never hold on to it long. Resentment kept welling up.

  Millie had to marry. There wasn’t much time. She chose Harry Scott-Evans. He had no chin but he loved her and she’d been using him to take her out when she’d needed a change. So now she led him on; when he persisted, she protested – not so much to prevent him but so he was aware she was more or less unwilling. When it came to it, she cried out, not in passion, but as if she was a virgin and he was hurting her. Well, he didn’t have much experience. Afterwards she wept and said, ‘What if I become pregnant?’ and he said, ‘I’ll look after you,’ and she saw him every day after that, as if she truly loved him, and was sweet and gentle and domestic but shook her head and moved his hand if he tried to do anything more than kiss her. When after three weeks she wept again and said she thought she was pregnant, he said, ‘Millie, that’s wonderful. I’ll marry you. I’ve got a leave coming up in two weeks...’

  ‘I wasn’t stupid, God,’ said Millie. ‘But you didn’t make me stupid, did you? So what did you expect?’

  So there she was, an Embassy wife, and presently had to admit that her parents were dead – both doctors, killed in an air raid – and he hadn’t been too pleased but had to put up with it and was really nice to her and she began to feel better – that is to say bad, because of course baby Julian wasn’t his at all, but he never knew it.

  ‘I don’t know why it is, God,’ said Millie, ‘that getting better involves feeling worse. What a real bastard you are.’ She took off her bright yellow shoes and kicked them out into the waves in the hope of dispelling the shadows, but it didn’t work. All that happened was that the shoes were gone, and the grey bundles still rocked and bumped up against each other.

  Harry got promotion and she had another baby, Sophie, and gave dinner parties, and yawned behind her hand, and had an affair with Stephen, who wanted her to run off with him, so she did, leaving Julian and Sophie behind. She’d never be really rich with Harry, who turned out to have very few interesting family connections, and never even went hunting or fishing, but lived off his salary and thought holidays a waste of time. Otherwise, he was thoroughly nice and thoroughly boring, and she had no real complaints. It was just that Stephen was rich and exciting, and a publisher and a patron of the arts, which meant that she’d get the best of all possible worlds. She could be rich and comfortable and secure – and have all that wonderful conversation about whence art and whither literature and what sex who was. And what’s more she loved him. Only Stephen didn’t want the children. He was right. Julian wasn’t bad – and was quite good at drawing – but Sophie was a pain in the neck, and chinless, like her father, and Stephen only ever wanted the best of everything. Better they stayed behind where they were loved and needed. But of course the world never sees it like that.

  ‘You’re mad, God,’ confided Millie, and waited for death, but death didn’t come. The sky just grumbled a little, but still the shaft of light stayed. ‘Whatever a girl does, it’s wrong. If she has babies, if she doesn’t have babies; if she tries to prevent them or she doesn’t; if she kills them before they’re born, or lets them live and leaves them after. And the penalties are kind of drastic, aren’t they? Cancer if you don’t, septicaemia if you do; a stroke if you take the pill and a Down’s baby if you don’t – get yourself sterilised and grow hairs on your chin! Show me a woman who’s got it right!’

  A kind of breath of assent came from the hotel, where the arthritic limbs of old ladies twinged and stirred in expectation of dinner.

  But, of course, marriage with Stephen wasn’t what she’d thought it would be. Happy endings kept turning into dire beginnings. After the first affair – which he’d discovered, and forgiven, because though he was still passionately in love with her (he said) he didn’t like sex all that much – he’d moved her into the country where there wasn’t so much temptation (he was right) and did his entertaining in town. He liked to come home after a hard week’s work and relax and enjoy Millie’s company and the countryside. Stephen didn’t want to go on holidays either. The real trouble was that he was mean: it really hurt him to see money just dribbling away, and the richer he was, the worse he got. So Millie scrubbed her own floors and sewed her own clothes – she had to. She understood him. She’d had a tough upbringing too: when you grew up, the people you were with had to bear the brunt of it. He put up with her, she’d put up with him.

  They had an adopted child, Helen. After ten years of having Millie’s fertility studied, it was discovered that the fault was Stephen’s. That was a whole three years after Millie had agreed to adopt a child Stephen had had – or so Stephen believed – by a girl with whom he was having an affair. ‘I’ll never see her again, only take in the child, Millie. Then I’ll have something of hers; then I can bear it.’ So Millie had, and then it turned out that Stephen wasn’t the father anyway, couldn’t be – what a mess life was! If a man fell insanely in love with you, he could fall insanely in love with someone else, and she supposed she deserved it. If you
followed your inclinations into someone else’s bed, however temporarily, there was always a penalty to be paid.

  And then he’d got Parkinson’s disease; he was ten years older than Millie and everyone, it seemed, gets something in the end. There she was, trapped by ties she did not understand – of loyalty, sympathy, compassion, shared experience – to a man trembling in a wheelchair who would not pay out fifty pence for a little gadget to turn pages (so she, Millie, had to hang around and do it), but who had that same week paid over five hundred pounds for a Ben Nicholson sketch. And meanwhile Helen called Millie Mother, for years believing that’s what Millie was, when in fact she was some kind of painful honorary auntie.

  ‘I should have let Helen go on believing the lie,’ said Millie. ‘It did no good to tell her the truth. But she drove me mad; I lost my temper. I’m sorry, God.’ She’d been punished enough at the time, she thought. Helen had walked out on the ‘pair of them’ as she called her surrogate parents, and Stephen had barely spoken to Millie for months. And then he’d just died, while Millie was in church. Murdered, by Millie’s act of omission.

  ‘Well, God,’ she said now, ‘you certainly don’t give up! You just sing the same old tune, over and over, until we either go deaf or pay attention.’

  She’d sold the house and the art collection and given half to Helen, which was good of her, considering, and here she was, rich as Croesus and missing Stephen – who had done nothing but tremble in a wheelchair for years and drive her mad – on the first proper holiday she had ever had in her life, and of course it had to be on a haunted beach.