by Weldon, Fay
6) She checked addresses, with reference to the year’s supply of change-of-address cards. Remarkable the number of people whose telephone number one knew but whose address was irrelevant, except at Christmas time.
7) She prepared a section for late cards – unexpected last moment receipts which required immediate response. A small but important section, which would run at 7% of the whole, and had to be prepared for, otherwise the post-Christmas period would be punctuated by telephone calls. Thank-you-for-your-card, I’m-so-sorry – etc.
8) She prepared a section for the children’s cards—
‘Wait a moment,’ he said (he was still at that stage listening), ‘the children have their own Christmas money.’
‘Yes,’ said Louise, ‘but on December 23rd they will remember who they have so far forgotten, in the face of constant reminders, tutors, teachers, music-masters, the parents of friends who have loved them and left them and fed them and housed them during the year; those who have helped and are needed to help again and who will expect cards, and certainly should have them.’
‘You mean like Polly’s abortionist?’
‘Quite so,’ said Louise. She was beyond taking offence. She hurried on to Section 9.
9) She allocated P, SS or CH ratings to all the names on her various lists, actual and estimated. P = posh, SS = serious, CH = cheap and cheerful, and totalled these. Most P’s would be in the business and duty lists, most SS’s in the family, most CH’s in the acquaintance list – but there were several upgraded CH’s every year. The recipients were simply not cheap and cheerful people any more. Now, to find a rough average of what c each P card, each SS card and each CH card could be this year, with c equalling the total of £100, the sums would go like this: no, she would have to refer to the file for the actual workings.
10) E.P.’s warnings would be entered. Early Postings for abroad. Amazing how many people had left, over the years.
Cross-references had of course to be made to sundries.
Means had to be found of displaying received cards: the mantelpiece had long ago ceased to be adequate: string strung from wall to wall was unsatisfactory as the cards tended to drift towards the dip in the middle: lately, fortunately, wire card stands had started to appear in the shops, each holding about twenty cards, and these could be stood about here and there in the house. They had a tendency to topple, but it was the best solution she could find. Which cards were to take pride of place where was always tricky: people judged you on that, too. If you put the posh ones too much in evidence, you were boasting: if you put the humble ones forward you were being overly sentimental. Of course, anyone who called liked to see their own card well displayed, and unannounced callers were frequent at Christmas time. You just had to predict them. You needed a lot of sherry too, but that was part of the food and drink section in the file, and she was still only on cards.
She found it best, she told her husband, to make separate expeditions to the shops for her various Christmas purposes, otherwise she ended up forgetting things. She would make one or two journeys for the cards, another for the ingredients for the Christmas pudding, another for decorations and wrappings, another for sundries, three usually for presents, and four carloads of food shopping. Drink, fortunately, was delivered, as were hired glasses. But you had to get in early with an order for those, at Christmas time. More advance planning. If they were giving a party, she would make a separate expedition for the food required for that: two parties over the Christmas season, two expeditions, two separate, and if possible remote, cupboards, to store the food in, once bought. The children and their friends, late home one night and hungry, could eat party tit-bits for fifty and still be looking for more.
But she digressed; Christmas was full of digressions. All she could really say was, one learned seasonal tricks from seasonal experience.
She didn’t, she went on, like cutting down on wrappings. Experience proved you always ran out on Christmas Eve, no matter how early you opened the Christmas file, how efficiently you planned. She did try, in the very early hours of Boxing Day, when she was clearing up and the rest of the house slept happily, and boozily, in the knowledge of another good family Christmas spent, to smooth and fold and save at least some of the expensive paper for the following year, but she usually found herself too tired to care: she would just go through the house, abandoning all discrimination, stuffing black plastic sacks with the litter left by generosity and joviality. Twenty-one people to Christmas, each of whom would give a present to everyone else, meant 21 × 20 presents, which meant 420 discarded pieces of paper, not to mention tags, bows, and the debris of crackers. Everyone loved crackers, of course. She had a special page in the file for crackers. Somehow, even so, she always managed to forget the crackers. The children were neurotic about crackers – always had been. Sibling rivalry somehow focused on crackers. Crackers were a winner-takes-all situation. Adam, who had after all suffered three psychic blows, as three times his position in the family had been usurped, had to hold back tears whenever Simon, Polly or Zoë bettered him in cracker-pulling. The only solution was lots and lots of crackers, to make them nothing special. She’d tried no crackers, but Mr Brann had said Christmas isn’t Christmas without crackers, did you forget, Louise, good heavens – you’re usually so organised about Christmas, Louise, meaning but you have nothing else to do, Louise, but buy crackers...
‘You’re getting upset,’ he said. They were in bed. She talked on. He had this meeting in the morning. He wanted to sleep. ‘No, I’m not upset,’ she said. ‘I’m just telling you about Christmas. I’m still on cards: we’ve just had a minor digression into wrappings and crackers. I haven’t started on presents, let alone food, let alone drink.’
She was still talking at four in the morning; he had managed to fall asleep. When he woke, with the dawn, she was describing the unthawing of the turkey and the search for a big enough roasting pan, not too big for the oven, and the hope that the unending roll of foil would not in fact choose that day to end.
Rupert said, as he woke, ‘If Luke was alive, he might have been able to help me,’ and Louise hit him. He hit her back and they rolled about in the bed, as they had so often in love and laughter, biting, scratching, snarling and hurting. It had never happened before, never.
Rupert went to work without breakfast. His cheek was scored by her nails. She had a sprained wrist.
‘A wonderful way to meet my creditors,’ he observed as he got into the Jaguar. It was not a new car, but it was splendid. Crimson, with real red leather upholstery.
‘Really, creditors?’
‘You just spend your Christmas money,’ he said. ‘Open your file, and have a happy Christmas.’ She would have slashed his tyres, and possibly his throat, but he left smartly, before she could. He did not deal properly with the creditors – a little more enthusiasm, a little more energy and perhaps he would have carried the day. As it was, he failed.
When he returned that evening she was glad to see him, and he to see her. The habits and affections of years can stand up to a little truth-telling. He could complain, with fairness, that her inability to enjoy the good things he gave her – that is, the family Christmas – undermined the point of his very existence, and she, equally fairly, that he failed to appreciate how much that existence depended on her martyrdom, but each complaint held the other in equilibrium.
Christmas came and went.
In February the factory was closed: in March the Official Receiver was called in. It was amazing how quickly things moved, once they’d begun. The house was put up for sale, and sold, with contents, at a knock-down price. Rupert was morose and drank a great deal: he suffered from nightmares. He slipped a disc, and had to lie on his back in his parents’ home while Louise found somewhere to live, and sorted the children out. Polly moved in with her boyfriend; Zoë, who was still at school, moved in with the Parsons grandparents, and for the first time started working for her exams, as if realising that if she didn’t, she’d have to live
with them for ever. Veronica, who seemed greatly invigorated by Rupert’s and Louise’s misfortunes, suddenly got herself a job and a new flat, and said Adam and Simon could stay with her whenever they wanted, and she’d do Christmas that year, for everyone.
By October Rupert and Louise were living in a very small terraced house in an outer suburb, just where the city drifted off into countryside. There was no chance of Rupert finding work for a year or so – until his back was better and his mental state more positive. He was now a declared bankrupt, which meant that he could not sign cheques or engage in business activities. After many visits from social workers and much dealing with bureaucracy, Louise managed to arrange for him to get welfare payments, on which they lived. He did not like going out: he thought people would stare at him. He did not want the children to visit, to witness his failure, his downfall. ‘What do you mean, failure?’ she would cry out in irritation. ‘It isn’t failure, it’s the way the world is now. There are three million unemployed, apart from anything else, and most of those don’t even have bad backs.’
‘If you don’t know what failure means, you’re a fool,’ he said. He was not pleasant to her. Much of the time he seemed to actively hate her. He slept as far away from her as he could, at night. She told herself it was because they were so close to each other, he couldn’t distinguish which was him and which was her, and since he hated himself must seem to hate her. It was temporary, she told herself. It would pass. She remained as pleasant, and as positive, and as bracing as she could.
The winter closed down. Christmas was coming. She had saved a box of Christmas decorations, from the Fall – as she described it – but she didn’t put them up. What was there to celebrate?
‘Veronica has asked us for Christmas dinner,’ she said, at the beginning of December.
‘We can’t afford the fares,’ he said. She knew he meant that he could not bear the humiliation of sitting at someone else’s table, and not the head of his own. She did not press the point. They did not go to Veronica’s. Some thirty Christmas cards came through their letterbox that year, most of them with kindly notes inscribed, ‘Just a greeting! Don’t bother to respond!’ Why had she never thought of that? Why, because to accept is so much more difficult than to give. She had never realised that. She began to be sorry for the recipients of her generosity in the past.
It snowed a little. The ground crackled agreeably underfoot. A branch nailed itself, with frost, against the chilly bathroom windowpane. They both stood and admired it.
‘It’s so simple and so beautiful,’ said Louise. ‘Chinese!’
‘Japanese,’ he corrected her. He smiled, she thought for the first time since they had come to live here. He rubbed his hands together.
‘Let’s light a fire,’ he said. ‘Get warm. We can gather sticks in the lane.’ He built a great mound of dead wood in the back garden, gritting his teeth against the pain in his back. Louise wondered if the wood was not somehow someone else’s property, but kept her thoughts to herself.
A very heavy parcel arrived from Madeleine in Australia. When opened, it proved to be a food parcel. It contained Australian tinned and dried fruits and jams, and some kangaroo soup and some dried baby shark.
It was Louise’s turn to weep and weep from the shame and desolation of it all, and to rage at him, and her moral collapse seemed to make him better. They were regaining some kind of equilibrium. He dried her tears and was fond of her again.
‘Now you know what I feel,’ he said. He made love to her that night, and very frequently thereafter.
‘We have time to develop the art,’ he said. ‘At last.’
Welfare provided a ten-pound Christmas bonus that year and she spent it on a chicken, some potatoes, some mushrooms (luxury!) and a Christmas pudding from Woolworth’s. The Brann parents sent two bottles of wine, the Parsons parents a kitchen gift-set of washing-up bowl, brushes and so forth, in red plastic. The children appeared with various inappropriate but touching gifts on Christmas Eve, guilty about the proper Family Christmas, now at Veronica’s, but unwilling – ‘thank God,’ Rupert said – to renounce it, and somehow feeling the better and the more united, for their parents’ reduced circumstances.
Christmas Day dawned to a clear blue sky and the crackle of frost. They lay in bed for a long time, and presently he got up and put the chicken in the oven. He bent to light it without wincing. His back was much better.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘now we’re back to the beginning, there’s nothing to stop us starting all over again. But let there be no more lists.’
And Then Turn Out the Light
In Newcastle, New South Wales, they have the highest hysterectomy rate in the entire world. There, healthy organs are whipped out by eager surgeons in the nick of precancerous time. There is even a special laboratory, a special building, where removed organs are stored, in a frozen state, so that students can examine them at their leisure. See, a perfect ovarian duct! See the tiny budding eggs: each one the potential half of a human being, that could have loved and been loved, and laughed and wept and planned and hoped. But what use is half a human being: the ageing female organ, everyone knows, no longer attracts the male. So whip it out: cut, nick, clip and sew: implant a source of oestrogen and the organ’s owner is good as new: a reliable baby-sitter for its grandchildren, not bleeding, given to moods, hot flushes or the distressing growth-gone-wild of cancer. It’s all in the best interests of the community: the operation prolongs life. Statistics prove it.
And here a dozen frozen wombs! Young man, young woman, you, who have no thought of death; of such thawing flesh was your nursery made. Perhaps here, on the slab, is the very one? Did not Mother have her womb out, only last year? And was the surgeon once her lover, when you were ten and she was young? You can thaw and re-freeze the organs only two or three times – after that the texture goes. Never mind: it has served its purpose. Grown a baby or two, and helped in the education of a new race of doctors. Doctors are good people. They do what they can. They have to live, of course, and the more wombs, ovaries and so forth they remove in a year, the richer they are, and the more peacefully the ponies of their little daughters graze in the escarpments that ridge the coast north of Sydney.
Loss and gain, loss and gain! Your loss, my gain.
Tandy was a doctor’s daughter herself: born and bred in Newcastle. As a child she had a pony called Toddy. Doctors’ daughters experience more sexual assaults at the hands of doctors than do the daughters of men in other professions. Now there’s an odd statistic! What can be the look in the doctor’s daughter’s eye? What can the glint be, that cries out for ravishment at the hands of such normally respectable folk? Oh Daddy, Daddy, pay me some attention! No matter what, no matter how unwelcome: anything will do! Anything! Are we to believe it?
Or perhaps doctors’ daughters just go to the doctor more often than other women? Surely that must be it. Doctors don’t usually treat members of their own family.
When Tandy was twelve, a paediatrician laid her on her back, divided her legs, put his hand up between them, tweaked and poked and explained that the sudden, terrifying bleeding signified only a ruptured hymen.
‘Good thing we live in a civilised country,’ he said. ‘No blood-stained wedding sheets required for our little Tandy. It’s riding that does it!’
‘But Toddy’s such a well-mannered little horse,’ said Mandy, Tandy’s mother. She had wide bright eyes and a gentle manner, as did her daughter.
‘Even so,’ said the paediatrician, ‘a sudden bump with the legs parted, and there you are. Virgin no more.’
He came to dinner sometimes. His hair was turning grey. Tandy thought he must have told his wife – a tall woman with hooded eyes – and she no doubt had told her friends. Virgin no more!
When she was fourteen and at school Tandy kept company with a fifteen-year-old boy, John Pierce. Such associations were frowned upon. It was back in the fifties, after all, and Tandy wore a gym slip and a panama hat. They loved each
other, filled each other’s skies with a kind of pink sunrise glow.
‘Something’s happened to that girl,’ remarked her father, the doctor, over breakfast.
‘Oh my God!’ said her mother.
John Pierce’s mother complained to the school that Tandy Watson was preventing her son passing his exams. Authority had already observed their affection: the way they held hands, leant into each other. The school buzzed with rumours that they’d gone the whole way. Tandy’s mother’s eyes widened with alarm and fear as the police were mentioned: the possibility of punitive action. Fourteen-year-old girls, in those days, were supposed to be virgins, and anyone who suggested otherwise to them went to prison.
‘Good God,’ said Tandy’s father, ‘let’s find out. Open your legs, girl.’
Tandy did, up on the patients’ couch. Tandy’s father frowned, paled, consulted with Tandy’s mother.
‘But, darling,’ said Tandy’s mother, ‘that business with the horse a couple of years back – had you forgotten?’
He had, of course.
‘Goddamned horse,’ he said. ‘Did you or didn’t you, girl?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t and neither did he.’
‘Why couldn’t you say so before?’ he demanded, irate, although nobody had thought to ask her before. ‘I believe you, girl. Get your pants back on.’
And she did, and her mother, lying, announced her virgo intacta to all the world, but Tandy lost all interest in John Pierce, and had to think hard before saying anything to her father. Nothing seemed to come naturally any more, between him and her. Perhaps he knew it: he hrummed and hraaed a lot when Tandy was in the room.
Tandy wanted to be a doctor but her father said it wasn’t a fit profession for a girl: there were too many terrible sights to be seen, for anyone in that line of business. Tandy went to college to do English literature.
