by Weldon, Fay
Little by little the light faded, as layers of cloud moved over the gap that let through the sun. The grey bundles were just patterns made by surf and sand where the beach was uneven, and the rest of the world faded up, and her yellow shoes came bobbing back on the wavelets to knock into her ankles. She picked them up and went back into the hotel.
She prepared to take a bath before dinner but when she turned on the gold taps the water spurted out of the shower unit above and drenched her head, so she showered instead, and afterwards had just to comb her hair dry. It frizzed out to frame her face and she quite liked the look of that. She put on a silk dress which Stephen had hated because it defined her bosom too much. She stared at herself in the mirror.
‘I still look ready for more,’ she said. ‘Ever-ready Millie!’ But somehow the cream and green walls and the pink and green floral curtains and the dappled brown of the armchairs and the ochre of the carpet and barley sugar twists of veneered wood – which were placed here and there for no reason at all – sopped up the words into their dreadful silence.
She went down into the formal, painful elegance of the gold and cream restaurant where penguin waiters busied themselves around the empty tables. She was placed at a central table; one waiter pushed in her chair, another unfolded her napkin and put it with a flourish in her lap, a third lit a candle, a fourth brought the menu, a fifth a wine list, and there were still five more looking on. All these men, thought Millie, but they belonged to a different species. They might as well have been horses and she a cow.
She ate and drank with steady hand, for all they stared. Were they as embarrassed as she? It might be hell, thought Millie, a special hell reserved for the likes of me, for women who murder their mothers and their husbands, defy God, and are vain about their legs.
The pianist took his place at the grand piano, and began to play, especially for Millie. He kept nodding and winking at her. Any minute, thought Millie, I’m going to scream and run. But of course she didn’t. She ordered lobster and now wished she hadn’t: she had to use a little silver hammer to crack the pincers and made a mess of it; fragments of red shell scattered the floor. Had they done it on purpose? Shouldn’t they have done all that themselves, out in the kitchen? Had they guessed, somehow, that she was at heart the kitchen maid?
Now the pianist was playing ‘I’ll See You Again’, and ‘The White Cliffs Of Dover’. No, it wasn’t hell, it was a madhouse where all the tunes were forty years out of date. And still he nodded and winked. He seemed familiar. He reminded her of her father. Uncle, that is. The same greying sideboards, full puffy face creased from years of false smiles. But of course it was not; Uncle/Father would be ninety now, if he were still alive – this man was fiftyish. As I am, thought Millie, ready for more or not. She smiled back at the pianist, which seemed to please him very much. He struck up ‘The Lambeth Walk’ with such abandon that Millie’s foot began to tap, and only paused, in shock, as the man at the piano began to sing along, in the powerful, guttural half-French, half-Welsh lilt of the Channel Isles, mocking the cavernous gilt pretension.
Any evening, any day
As you walk down Lambeth way...
Then Millie sang along as well – tapping her little silver hammer to keep the time.
You’ll see them all
Doing the Lambeth Walk...
Two of the older waiters joined in the last, vulgar Oy, and though the younger ones only managed a laugh and a clap at the end, everyone managed something, and the atmosphere in the room had changed. It wasn’t hell at all; merely heaven waiting for the arrival of the angels. And then, of course, with the realisation, they turned up. The first of the old ladies with sticks and diamond rings tottered into the restaurant, and a whole stream behind, and a few men with sandy moustaches and nothing to do, and some younger couples and foursomes who couldn’t wait to be old, and soon the restaurant was full. It was just that everyone came down at eight, not seven-thirty. The pianist broke into hit tunes of the fifties, and presently winked at Millie, this time with a rather more relaxed and personal intent. Millie understood it to be an invitation for afterwards, and what’s more winked back in acceptance.
Christmas Lists – A Seasonal Story
Towards the end, as Christmas approached, there had to be not just a card list but—
a present list
a food list
a drink list
a party list
a decoration list
and a guest list too.
All grew longer with the years. Finally, Louise opened an actual Christmas file, which would start in the first week of September, as soon as she had settled down after the summer holiday. By settling down she meant
— putting piles of post-holiday clothes through the washing machine.
— sorting, ironing, folding and finding places for the above.
— drying, shaking, brushing and storing the children’s tents and backpacks.
— finding space for touring bicycles somewhere other than the hall.
— collating, answering and paying accumulated letters and bills.
— telephoning, soothing, and generally re-establishing contact with relatives and friends.
— collecting, de-fleaing and worming pets.
— finding, collating and if necessary purchasing assorted school, college and sporting wear.
— putting in early orders, before the rush, for coal, wood, oil and getting the heating system serviced.
— getting the car serviced.
— getting the garden back under control.
The Christmas file, opened more-or-less as soon as all this was more-or-less done, would be closed in the second week of January, after the last straggling revellers had drifted back to work, and the last thank-you letters or I’m-sorry cards posted.
Then she would look at her hands: she would see broken nails and chapping skin and stand-out veins and know it was as much her fault as the season’s. Why didn’t she wear rubber gloves or remember to use handcream? Other women did. Perhaps it was her form of protest? But why did she want to protest? It was what she wanted to do, turkeys and tinsel and toys. She loved Christmas. Christmas was a kind of powerful bell, chiming once a year, deep and profound, to mask the passage of life. There was no point staring at her hands and lamenting the passing of the years. They passed anyway. She lived a busy and useful life. She loved her husband, and he loved her. The children were healthy and lively and attractive. She had nothing to complain about, except a kind of extraordinary proliferation, a domestic infiltration, which meant you couldn’t keep Christmas in the head any longer, but had to keep lists, and even lists of lists.
‘The difficulty is,’ Rupert (Louise’s husband) said to Louise, when they were both forty-five, ‘that we’re pinned between the generations. As the family below grows up, the family above grows down. One lot’s too young and the other lot too old to be responsible for themselves, so we have to do it.’
She made a list of the people he had to support. She made it on the paper napkin of the restaurant where they were having their twenty-second wedding anniversary dinner. It was 1979. The restaurant had offered linen napkins as late as 1977, before being finally forced, by the increasing costs of laundering, to go over to paper.
‘We shouldn’t mind,’ said Louise, comfortingly, ‘it means the laundry workers are getting a better deal.’ But Rupert minded. What was the point of struggle and success, if the traditional rewards melted before your eyes, disintegrated?
The list of the people Rupert supported, according to Louise, in 1979, went like this:
— Louise
— Adam (19)
— Simon (17)
— Polly (15)
— Zoë (12)
— Louise’s parents (contributions towards)
— Rupert’s parents (contributions towards)
— Rupert’s sister-in-law (contributions towards)
— Rupert’s nephew and niece (school fees)
— a
workforce of 48 people
— secretarial staff of 3
— Louise’s cleaning lady
— the unemployed (contributions towards)
— non-ratepayers (contributions towards)
— the sick, the infirm, those too old, too young, or too disturbed in the head to work.
‘Not only are we pinned between the generations,’ said Rupert, ‘but we are squashed by ubiquitous taxes. We, the workers, the wealth-producers of this country, are just a thin, thin filling between thick slabs of non-productive bread. The thirty per cent of the population who work have to carry the burden of the seventy per cent who don’t. No wonder we’re tired.’ He never used to talk like that. Louise supposed it to be just the general drift towards the right that happened as men grew richer and older.
In 1979 Rupert’s firm – known as Rupert’s Own to the family – was in some slight difficulties, but nothing, no one imagined, that couldn’t be lived through. One day the recession would end. It just had to be lived through.
Rupert’s Own made dashboard instruments for specialist cars, for both home and export markets. The current difficulties were:
— contracting home markets
— new employment taxes
— inflation
— increasing union pressure
— the high cost and low quality of raw materials
— shortage of skilled labour
— a strong pound, limiting competitiveness abroad
and so forth. If the new light Californian wine they drank with their Osso Bucco – for everyone nowadays was diet conscious and meant to live for ever – tasted slightly sour, and he longed for good old-fashioned rich and gravelly claret, it was hardly surprising.
‘Well,’ said Louise, ‘never mind! I suppose we’ll be allowed to grow incompetent with the years in our turn, and then our children will have to look after us, as well as their children and then they’ll know what it was like for us.’
But would they? Nothing was what it had been. The children seemed uninterested in careers or earning money, but were content enough to just get by, and there was a distinct lack of grandchildren in their particular patch of the world. Without grandchildren how could there be grandparents? Self-help, it seemed, would have to go on till the grave, and beyond. You’d have to say prayers for yourself, for who else would there be to pray for you?
Louise and Rupert’s wedding anniversary was on December 3rd. In their early years together they’d saved the discussion of Christmas plans, such as they were, for that particular day.
— what do you want for Christmas?
— are we going to your parents or mine?
— if we bought Adam and Simon bunk beds would they accept that as a Christmas present, or would we have to supplement it with, say, a robot for Adam and a teddy bear for Simon, knowing they’re each sure to want what the other’s got?
— what shall we buy the in-laws?
The first Christmas had been the best – 1957. She and Rupert, students, he of engineering, she of mathematics – defying both sets of parents, neither going home, sharing the Christmas holidays in the days – well, the nights – before people did that kind of thing.
— a fir branch of a Christmas tree
— one silver star upon it
— a chicken and some packet stuffing
— a pound of potatoes for roasting
— some peas, some mushrooms (luxury) for frying
— a Woolworth’s Christmas pudding
— top of the milk to pour upon it
— some cigarettes, from her to him
— a new black bra, from him to her
— from both of them unto the other, the gift of themselves, the knowledge that this was the beginning, the great adventure
— a single bottle of wine.
Enough, enough! ‘No present,’ said her parents, the Parsons, ‘not this year, since you’re not coming home, but we understand and when you both actually get married we’ll put down the deposit on a house for you.’
General, but conditional, as always.
‘They really believe,’ Rupert and Louise sighed and smiled, unable in their happiness to take offence, ‘they really believe we’ll end up like them!’
Rupert’s parents gave him a dozen pairs of throw-away socks, and her a cookery book, which she still used, year after year, for the Christmas pudding. But at the time she puzzled and brooded. Presents have meanings – if the giver isn’t aware of it, the recipient usually is. She wrote alternatives down on the back of the one Christmas card she received that year – it was from a former boyfriend and she despised it.
Throw-away socks to Rupert – significance of
a) I can’t be trusted to wash his socks properly: i.e. domestically incompetent.
b) I’m not the kind to wash socks at all: i.e. a slut.
c) I’m eager to wash his socks: i.e. trying to trap him into marriage.
d) I shouldn’t waste my time washing his socks: i.e. too good for him.
Well, which did they mean?
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Rupert, ‘they just gave me some throw-away socks.’
Recipe book for Louise – significance of
a) Can’t cook and should learn: i.e. has at least some kind of future with Rupert.
b) So boring that’s all she can do: i.e. has no future at all with Rupert.
The gifts seemed to be throwing up inconsistent signals. She didn’t understand them.
‘Look,’ said Rupert, ‘let’s not worry about this kind of thing. Stop making lists. It isn’t necessary.’
‘I have a kind of feeling it is,’ she said.
Within a few months she needed more than a suitcase under his bed for her clothes: she needed drawers and cupboards. She had a kind of vision of the way things were going to be. ‘Let’s just go to bed,’ he said. And so they did. Bounce, bounce, on top of the bulging suitcase. They went to the market and bought a proper chest-of-drawers, and by the following Christmas had a flat, not a room, and a cupboard under the stairs to stack the suitcases, and by the next Christmas were married and on the 1st of December the following year Louise gave birth to Adam. She had to spend Christmas Day in hospital because
a) the baby was slow to suckle
b) her stitches went septic
and Rupert went home to his parents, the elder Branns, and had far too much to drink. Now that would never have happened had it been her parents, the Parsons.
— one glass of sherry before dinner
— one bottle of wine with dinner, no matter how many guests
— and more than enough rum in the pudding for anyone, let alone brandy on top of it.
‘We’ll all be too tipsy to listen to the Queen’s speech,’ Mrs Parsons would say in alarm, as the wine cork was pulled, and because it was Christmas everyone tut-tutted in sympathetic alarm, instead of saying sadly, ‘I wish to God we were!’
For the following ten years the young Branns went alternatively to his parents on Christmas Day, and her parents on Christmas Day. Louise, Rupert, Adam, then Simon, then Polly, then Zoë. The senior Branns lived thirty miles away, the Parsons forty-five, fifteen miles, wonderfully enough, further down the same road. The car would be packed neatly and quickly on Christmas Eve, as would the children’s stockings. Into the car, as well as the everyday nappies, wipes, carry-cots and so forth went:
— 1 neat cardboard box, containing four prettily wrapped presents, two for the senior Branns, two for the Parsons.
They’d call in on the Branns for mid-morning sherry and mince pies and to drop off the presents, if they were Christmas lunching at the Parsons, and if lunching at the Branns, would drive on to the Parsons for Christmas high tea, and to drop off their presents. Simple.
When the children grew to complaining age – which seemed remarkably early – Adam and Polly complained when they went to the Branns, and Simon and Zoë when they went to the Parsons. The Branns were generous, noisy and slapdash about
their Christmases – the Parsons careful, tidy, exact and full of ritual.
‘Couldn’t we just relax and have our own Christmas, in our own home?’ Rupert would lament. ‘Do we have to do all this organising?’ But neither wanted to hurt anyone. It seemed to them that the parents needed them, to add event to their increasingly quiet and suddenly elderly lives.
In those days, when Christmas still started (just) in December, an allocation of money would be made by Rupert, scrupulously administered by Louise. The sum available went up every year, as Rupert’s Own became little by little more prosperous, but every year he had less and less to do with its spending: there was not enough time, not enough energy. ‘I suppose it’s a sensible division of labour,’ said Rupert, sadly, ‘but I do miss all the present-wrapping!’ And the notion somehow grew up between them, that she was the lucky one, because she had the annual making of Christmas, and he had to do without.
While the young Branns and their children spent Christmas Day away from home, Louise would make do not so much with a list as with a master-plan scribbled on the back of an envelope. If total spending was to be £x, then it would be allocated thus:
Branns & Parsons
Children
Each other
Employees, friends, relatives
Sundries, inc. cards, decorations, wrappings
The initial division in caring, the allocation of love, its spread across the field of acquaintance, was acknowledged on the chart, and then a money value given to that allocation. How else was it to be done?
As the children grew older, the chart had to be adapted; the in-laws received less, the children more, proportionately.
And in the end, after ten years of marriage, on the eleventh Christmas, she abandoned the chart, and started lists.
That was the year they moved to a big Victorian house with a large, long dining room, and Louise picked up a heavy oak refectory table for almost nothing (in the late sixties, when oak was still unfashionable) and they had an excuse for saying, at last – ‘Look, come to us for Christmas! Everyone!’
And so they did; though the older Branns were to go on alternate years, for a time, to Rupert’s brother Luke, and his wife Veronica, and their two children, Vernon and Lucinda, cousins to Adam, Simon, Polly and Zoë. Louise rather wondered, at the time, at the slight look of relief, not despondency, which crossed the in-laws’ faces at the notion that the tradition was to change.
