by Weldon, Fay
There seemed nothing they couldn’t do, or shouldn’t, and everything they wanted to do, with the light on and their eyes open.
‘I’ve never known anything like this before,’ he said.
‘Neither have I,’ she said.
And yet they were just two quite ordinary people, not particularly beautiful, or romantically inclined, or given to this kind of behaviour. Howard had been unfaithful once or twice, but discretely; Elaine, never. Nor did custom diminish their attraction for one another. The more they had, the more they wanted. The more they knew, the more there was to discover.
And how they talked! They could say anything to each other, without fear of being thought foolish. Every detail of their individual lives they could hand over to the other, in the knowledge of safe-keeping.
And every moment they were apart was terrible: restless, scratchy, miserable – they were addicts deprived of their drug.
As for Alice, Sam, Tom and Silv, and Brian, William and Frosty – they inhabited a dim world, where people mouthed and gaped and spoke words which could not be heard.
‘Perhaps I’d better label the children,’ said Alice, sadly. ‘They’re beginning to feel quite upset. And Howard, you’re looking so pale! They work you too hard.’
‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Howard to Elaine. ‘It isn’t fair to anyone.’
‘We have to be together,’ said Elaine to Howard. ‘Surely they’ll understand.’ Elaine had confessed to Howard that she’d never really loved her sons, not as she felt a mother ought. Now she understood why. She had never really loved their father Brian. She’d liked him well enough, and found him not unattractive, and felt safe in his company, and mistaken these feelings for love. Were she to have children with Howard, how different her feelings would be! As it was, William and Frosty would be better off with Brian. Wouldn’t they?
Her mother had gone off and left her when she was eight, and the neighbours had been very shocked – as they wouldn’t be these days. It happened all the time – but that was about all. She, Elaine, had been happy enough to be left with her father; she was all right now, wasn’t she? So would the boys be, and do Brian good to have a taste of what she’d been putting up with without any help from him all these years. No; no one would suffer – except her, as usual. She’d miss the boys, of course she would, far more than they’d miss her. But they’d come and visit.
‘I can’t go on living a lie,’ said Howard to Elaine. ‘It’s not fair to Alice for me to go on living with her, when I’m in love with you. I love Alice: she’s done nothing wrong: she’s been a good wife and mother within her lights – but I’m in love with you.’
Within her lights! What a dim, feeble glimmer they gave off, compared to the incandescent flame that was Elaine. She would close his eyes with her lips, and his whole inner world be ablaze with light and certainty.
He thought it was best to do it suddenly: simply not to come home one day, but leave a letter to be found later. It would save arguments, recriminations, bitterness.
‘I don’t think I’m being cowardly,’ he said to Elaine. ‘I just think it’s the best way. Of course she’s going to be upset, and I’m truly sorry. But, you know, she never asked me if I wanted children. She just assumed I did, and went ahead and had them.’
‘Poor Howard! There seemed to be so little communication between you and your wife,’ lamented Elaine, and already she used the past tense. That was the weekend before the notes were left and the new life started.
They didn’t like to plan too much. Somehow it took away from the magic of everything. All the world loves a lover, and the gods help those who help themselves, and destiny was on their side – matters of mortgages and money and matrimonial homes would sort themselves out in time.
They left their notes, packed suitcases, and went off to a hotel in Blackpool, where they toasted their future in champagne.
‘He’ll have to get a relief receptionist and pay her a proper wage,’ said Elaine, ‘and that’s going to upset him more than anything.’
‘I think her mother will understand,’ said Howard. ‘She gave up everything for love, after all.’
Alice’s mother, as a girl, had been to Dartington Hall (a fee-paying school for the children of the musical intelligentsia) but eloped from there, at the age of sixteen, with a long-distance truck driver. (Alice, rather disappointingly, after all that, had inherited her father’s looks and temperament.) Alice’s mother had once said to Howard, ‘The reason you can’t remember names is because you don’t believe in anyone else’s reality, only your own,’ and Howard had felt there might be some truth in it, and had wanted to discuss it with Alice, but she’d been changing a nappy.
Alice’s mother didn’t understand. Nor did Alice’s father, or Alice’s children Sam, Tom and Silv. Nor did Alice. No one seemed to understand true love.
Alice went to their solicitor and had their joint bank account stopped, and rang up his boss at headquarters, and would even have got through to Howard himself had he not sweet-talked the switchboard girl. (She’d been one of the discrete infidelities: the only thing he ever kept from Elaine – who now owned his heart, his soul, his future.)
A private detective turned up at the Blackpool hotel and Howard and Elaine were asked to leave. Howard marvelled.
‘The institution of marriage is an amazing thing,’ he said. ‘Everyone cheats on it, but defy it openly, as we did, and see how the ranks close. Solicitors, bank managers, employers, hotel-keepers – all turn against the hapless renegades.’
But he thought all was well lost for love of Elaine.
‘Look here,’ said his boss, ‘I hear you’ve been taking this woman round the farms, on business trips. And not just leaving her in the car but taking her round the fields, holding hands, that kind of thing.’
‘We’re in love,’ said Howard. Somehow the simplicity of it all rang slightly false.
‘I don’t want anyone disloyal on my staff,’ said the boss. ‘And this is what this is. Rank, heartless, disloyalty to a good wife. I’m very fond of Alice.’
He’d come to dinner once, saying ‘take no trouble, please.’ Alice had served rabbit, which he couldn’t eat, being an Australian, but he seemed to have forgiven her. At any rate he fired Howard.
Howard responded by threatening to sue under the Unfair Dismissal laws, but Elaine dissuaded him. ‘We’d have our names in the paper,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to the children.’
Elaine had telephoned Brian, just to see how the boys were, but he’d put the phone down on her. She’d called round to collect a few things but he’d shut the door in her face and a neighbour told her, anyway, all her possessions were down on the rubbish dump, being picked over by all and sundry. Brian had put them there.
‘So it really has to be a new life,’ Elaine said.
‘Of course,’ said Howard.
They held hands all the way down to London.
‘How wonderful,’ said Howard. ‘Journeys used to seem so long; now they seem so short.’
They felt alive: felt their own selves both within the other and within their own bodies. There were no children to deflect emotion and delay response, or spoil the strange stillness that sometimes hovered in the air between them, as if the whole universe watched and waited, attending the joining of two bodies. Momentous! Love at first sight. True love!
They took a room in London and were surprised and rather aggrieved by the rent demanded, and by the dinginess of the street. Elaine feared lead poisoning. But she got a clerical job in an estate agency next to the Underground station. She was older than the other girls, and felt strange without the protection of her wedding ring, and shocked by the language they used.
‘They’re so crude,’ she complained to Howard. ‘I feel quite sorry for them. They can’t know what sex is like or love is all about, or they wouldn’t talk about it the way they do.’
Howard applied for thirty-two jobs and got none of them. Well, there was a recession. A
lice, contacted by letter, declined to sell the grandfather clock and send Howard the proceeds via a poste-restante address as he suggested.
‘It’s my clock,’ he observed to Elaine. ‘She is nothing but a heartless, mercenary bitch.’
‘We have each other,’ she said, her leg warm and soft across his, at night. ‘And you’ll get a job soon and we can live on my money until you do.’
Alice’s uncle, of all people, managed to trace Howard and turned up to reproach him, and demand money, almost with menaces.
‘People amaze me,’ said Howard, having sent him away with a flea in his ear. ‘Anyone would think we were back in the fifties! What is marriage, after all, but a scrap of paper? Surely these days it’s recognised that a man has a right to fulfil his emotions – to follow his destiny through?’
Elaine, having few people to chat to, confided her story to the landlady. True love plus sacrifice – equals real romance! Surely?
‘Five children between you!’ was all the landlady said, disappointingly. Then she gave them notice. They humped their suitcases to another similar room. It didn’t really make a great deal of difference which end of the street they looked out on, and in fact the bed in the new place was a little wider, and a little less squeaky.
‘It’s all right for Alice,’ said Howard, signing on at the Job Centre. ‘She can stay snug and secure in the matrimonial house and live off social security because she’s got the kids. But a man has to labour for the rest of his life and pay out God knows what in stamps, and never see a penny return.’
Did God know what? Perhaps. Elaine telephoned Howard from work to find out how he’d got on at the Job Centre.
‘Darling!’ she said.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘Elaine, of course,’ she replied.
‘Who did you say?’
‘Elaine.’
There was a silence. Then—
‘Oh, sorry, darling. I was dreaming.’
Nevertheless it had been said, and was the beginning of the end. He knew that she knew, and she knew that he knew, and so forth, that although love flowed out of him, freely and passionately, it was the love itself that mattered, and not the object of the love. They were both, when it came to it, strangers to each other.
Oh Mary Don’t You Cry Any More
‘We live in Paradise,’ said Shirley to her two girls, Gracey and Lisa. ‘Paradise! There is so much to be grateful for.’
Gracey and Lisa went barefoot, not from poverty, or ignorance, or lack of shoe-leather, but because the climate was good and feet grow better unconfined by shoes.
‘The original inhabitants did well enough without shoes,’ remarked Shirley. ‘If they didn’t need them, why should you?’
The aborigines, the first Tasmanians! ‘But they’re dead, all dead horribly, and narrow and tall and black besides, and Lisa and I are alive, and plump and small and white, and the pebbles feel sharp between our toes,’ Gracey sometimes almost said, but never did, for Shirley’s sake.
Gracey and Lisa wore well-washed denim trews which showed their pretty bodies to advantage, Shirley said, and simple blouses and their hair grew long and thick.
‘You don’t have to spend much on girls,’ said Shirley. ‘Not if everyone pulls together. And it’s wonderful what you can pick up second-hand down at the market, or by swapping with friends. It’s years since we’ve been into a clothes shop.’
Lisa’s eyes were perhaps a little narrow, her face a little pinched, as if the world squeezed in upon her rather hard. Well, she was two years younger than Gracey and had spent proportionally longer without a father. Gracey’s eyes opened wider and wider as she grew, facing life unafraid, Shirley said, welcoming experience. Gracey’s mouth grew softer and fuller as puberty neared, not tighter and narrower, as often happened to the girls on the mainland, where the ground baked and the hot dry air sucked softness out of the soul. This was Tasmania – Paradise, as Shirley said. No wonder Gracey was such a beauty.
‘The girls and I have fun,’ said Shirley, ‘we really do! Who needs money? The beach is free and the sun and the air, and the people are so wonderfully kind. Life is what you make it!’
She would laugh, wryly, at the turn of fate which had led her into exile with her engineer husband.
‘If a husband has to leave you with two young girls to support, then he’d better do it in Tasmania, rather than anywhere else in the world.’
No one was surprised when he left: Shirley was into yoga rather than working, playing the guitar rather than ironing shirts, and left him at home looking after the girls while she went to meetings and lectures and mind-expansion groups.
‘Just because you’ve brought me here to the end of the earth,’ she’d say, in those days, ‘there is no need for my mind to sink back into it.’
She’d give him books to read but he did not understand why there was any necessity to read them. He didn’t live in his head a minute longer than he had to. He loved squash, and bush-walking, and beer.
‘I don’t love him,’ she’d weep to her friends. ‘It was a terrible mistake. We are just not suited.’
Presently, she found someone she thought she was suited to, and flew to the mainland for a secret weekend, but that was a mistake too, and her husband found out, and felt it was the last straw, and she was too proud to persuade him that it wasn’t, and he left.
Now he lived in Melbourne; he’d found someone else: he sent money back every fortnight, but he’d never been generous: the air-fares were terrible; he hardly ever saw the girls. He had a new baby son.
‘We have each other,’ said Shirley, ‘Shirley and Gracey and Lisa, strong against the world! Not that we have to be strong, the world is a friendly place. If you smile at it, it smiles at you! What I really mean is, united with the world!’
Shirley meant the girls to grow up positive and optimistic. If she’d made a mistake – well, two mistakes, first in marrying their father, secondly, in leaving him – her children weren’t going to suffer for it.
How they laughed and sang about the house, all three of them! Shirley played the guitar. ‘Where have all the young men gone?’
The sun shone in the summertime, over Paradise: in the evenings the wall of Mount Wellington hung deep blue over the town, in the mornings, if you were up on time, stretching sleepy eyes, it was greyish pink.
‘It’s a wall to protect us,’ said Shirley, but Gracey wasn’t so sure. Did the mountain protect, or threaten? Gracey had been up to the other side. It was scrubby and bare and like the moon. It was inhuman: it didn’t like her or like anyone. One day it would shrug and shake all Hobart into the sea, and not think twice about it. There were ghosts in Hobart. Horrible things happened. A man climbed into a water tank to escape a bush-fire and was boiled alive. A sea captain ran his ship into the harbour bridge and a piece just fell out as if it was made of Lego and everyone who happened to be on it was killed. There was a beach where the first settlers had tied the aborigines to stakes and waited for the sea to rise and drown them.
‘Paradise!’ sang Shirley, to now efficient guitar chords. She’d scraped and saved and raised the money to pay for classes. Gracey went to dancing lessons once a week.
‘So we don’t have a freezer, or a car in the garage, but we have each other, girls, and good friends!’
The sun beat on the little clapboard house and the rain drummed on the tin roof, and gaps widened. The friends of Shirley’s youth, the witnesses to her mistake, were married to husbands who were growing richer year by year. These days they brought champagne to picnic lunches on the beach: they got themselves trained and found part-time jobs. They looked uneasy when Shirley brought out her guitar.
‘We were all hippies in our youth,’ they said, ‘but of course the world’s moved on!’
What did they mean, ‘moved on’? It went round, as it always had. Some were good, some were bad, and you knew which side you were on. By night lights sparkled and danced in the bright, watery air, as they had
always done. Go due south, and there was Antarctica.
‘We’re not at the bottom of the world, girls,’ said Shirley. ‘We’re at the top of it.’ And she took the globe out of its stand and replaced it upside down, to prove her point, and they all laughed. Their little family, suspended in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, the Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Galaxy, the Universe, Space.
‘Christ,’ said one of her friends, ‘if only Shirley wasn’t so fucking brave’ and Gracey overheard. She listened at night and sometimes thought she heard her mother crying. Or was it just the wind keening around the house; dead men wailing for lost life? Tasmania is a windy place.
Father’s money came more sporadically, didn’t go so far. The State stepped in, and helped.
‘You see, girls,’ said Shirley, ‘the universe is kind. People help each other. The thing to do is repay: don’t ever let something be for nothing! Work hard, do your best.’
Lisa did her maths homework far into the night. Gracey worked and worked at her dancing; she could raise her left leg nearer to her nose than could anyone else in her class.
Shirley got drunk one night at a beach barbecue and drifted off into the sand dunes with Hamish Hunter.
‘Girls, I don’t want you to be puritanical about sex. Life is love, and touching, and closeness. Don’t let anyone ever tell you it’s wrong.’
Only Hamish Hunter was Stella Hunter’s husband and Stella was Shirley’s best and most supportive friend, and it was a small town, and if Stella forgave, which she did – well, everyone had been drinking: poor Shirley; she couldn’t be expected to live like a nun the rest of her life, and there weren’t many spare men drifting round, in a community where there were one hundred and forty women for every one hundred men – but it was certainly some time before everyone forgot, and somehow afterwards Shirley was on the outside, not the inside. She held her head high.
‘Straighten your backs, girls! Walk tall! My beautiful girls – all I ever wanted in the world. Proud spirits, brave and free!’
Gracey sang prettily. Guests would observe it. Shirley always made a point of asking people round to Sunday brunch. She’d make vegetable soup, and beans and bacon.
