by Weldon, Fay
‘People don’t want a fuss,’ she’d say, ‘just delicious homemade food and good conversation and real friendship. That’s what life is all about.’
Gracey suspected people came because they thought they ought, not because they wanted to. There seemed to be some kind of rota. The Perkins and the Webbs came every fourth week: the Hamiltons every third – and usually the wives came without the husbands: the men so often had pressing engagements or business matters to attend to. Gracey did not mention her suspicions to Shirley: she sang as loud as she could, and as prettily, doing what she could to drown the keening wind.
‘Good heavens,’ they said. ‘She’s a born singer: a natural dancer! And how pretty! Gracey’s going to end up on the stage: she’ll be an international star, wait and see!’
Louder and louder, sang Gracey.
‘I’m so proud of you, Gracey,’ said Shirley. ‘You’re something so special.’
And if Lisa felt jealous, she didn’t show it. Lisa struggled to learn the piano, to complement Shirley’s guitar and copied out songs for Gracey to sing. They were mostly the folk-songs Shirley loved: ‘The Sweet Nightingale’, ‘Now is the Month of Maying’, ‘Oh Mary Don’t you Cry Any More’. They suited Gracey’s clear young voice: her precise diction. They were pure and original, full of hope and love and life with an underlying hint of melancholy.
And now Gracey trembled on the edge of childhood and adolescence – vulnerable. Shirley looked at the local boys with fear. Who would be good enough for Gracey? Did she understand how precious she was, how rare and special and sensitive? How talented?
‘But supposing she does what the other girls do?’ Shirley agonised to Stella, who was now running the Mature Students (Part-Time) Study Centre. ‘Supposing she falls in love with some local boy, at seventeen, marries at eighteen and is a mother by twenty?’
‘It might be the best thing she can do,’ said Stella. ‘To have someone to look after her.’ She spoke rather stiffly. Her own eldest daughter had done just all those things, and now Stella, who used to be so young, was a grandmother.
‘I’ve brought them up to look after themselves,’ said Shirley, ‘to be self-reliant. To know there’s always a way round things. That if you want something, you must go right out there and get it.’
Stella looked round the little home, with its thin rush mats on the floor and its cracked mugs on the shelf, and thought of Shirley and Hamish on the sand dunes, enfolded. ‘It all depends,’ said Stella, shortly, ‘what it is you want.’
‘The girls have never gone without,’ said Shirley.
‘Umm,’ said Stella, and gave Shirley up. Well, she’d done her stint.
Autumn came. Gracey’s shoe size sprung up from five to seven. She was going to be a big girl. Over in Melbourne, her father’s wife gave birth to a daughter, and air-fares rose again. Never mind. The season cast a golden cloak over the island. The sea glittered and was quiet: the layered hills, purple embossed, hung still waiting over the bay. Soon the great winds, the Roaring Forties, would start. Not yet. In the meantime, the valleys and the hills rejoiced, and everyone lifted up their hearts.
‘Paradise,’ said Shirley. ‘Paradise!’ and Gracey’s pretty voice filled the garden, floating out through open windows, and Lisa at last managed the accompaniment to ‘The Sweet Nightingale’.
There was to be an end-of-term cabaret at the school. All the girls who could dance would be in it. An official from the mainland was coming to select three girls for the interstate competitions. Gracey’s chance! Four changes of costume were required. Parents must provide them. The dresses and head wear were easy enough: Shirley could run them up on the machine, from scraps of fabric, but the cost of the shoes was prohibitive. Gracey would need silver tap, red satin pump, black strap heels and squash shoes. Four pairs! Impossible.
Shirley wept; so did Lisa. Gracey was brave.
‘Look Mum, honestly it doesn’t matter. I’ll pretend to be ill. I’ll stay home on the night. It’s all right.’
Shirley prayed. God provided the answer.
‘God helps those who help themselves,’ He said.
‘We work for the money, girls,’ said Shirley. ‘All of us. We have something to offer, after all. The world won’t let us down.’
Hobart market must be the loveliest market in the world. On the cobbled waterfront, in the shade of great civilising English trees, stalls are laid out with space to spare. The light that glances off the sea dances back from cut-glass decanters, and sun-polished aubergines, and Star-Wars ear-rings, and mirrors on the ‘Literacy for Nicaragua’ stall: and a couple of students sing ‘There is a House in New Orleans’, and someone else plays ‘Greensleeves’ on a flute, and the days of hope are back again. Calm, prosperous people walk to and fro, meeting friends; children, elated by the heady air, dance and skip. The police keep a low profile. It is the world before it lost its innocence.
Here, on the last Saturday morning in April, Shirley, Gracey and Lisa took up their pitch, in the main thoroughfare. Shirley sat on the cobbles, and played the guitar. Lisa held on to the music sheets, and moved the open guitar case the better to receive the twenty – and fifty-cent pieces they expected. Gracey stood and sang.
‘Oh Mary don’t you cry any more,
Oh Mary don’t you cry any more...’
Her little voice piped shrilly. She was a child, not a woman, after all. Passers-by walked on without hearing. Gracey’s voice, so charming, so miraculous in the family room, here in the open air lacked the power to command. Shirley had forgotten to bring the blanket: Gracey’s feet were bare. The cobbles were not so clean and rain-washed as they had assumed: there was in fact a patch of oil where Gracey stood and piped her song.
They moved to the edge of the kerb. Those who did hear moved by, embarrassed or appalled. Gracey saw a school-friend – well, she’d known that would happen.
‘You sound lovely, darling,’ said Shirley. ‘Isn’t this fun! And look at all the money!’
Gracey looked. There were perhaps twelve coins in the guitar case. Three dollars at most.
‘Oh Mary don’t you cry any more,
Oh Mary don’t you cry any more...’
The first winter wind stirred up along the quay. It moved slowly, strangely: stripping one tree at a time of its leaves. Dead men’s fingers, powerful and industrious.
‘Oh Mary don’t you cry any more...’
The wind had reached the tree in the shade of which Gracey stood. A shower of leaves beat down around her.
‘Oh pretty, pretty! A shower of gold!’ cried Shirley.
The wind blew harder. It blew the lid of the guitar case shut; it snatched the music sheets from Lisa’s fingers; it blew the song right back into Gracey’s mouth, into her lungs. She sang, but there was no sound, only the dreadful whoosh of the wind, the coming of Winter.
Up and down the market glass smashed and wood slammed, and used clothing flew up into the air and the trestle on which Middle Earth herbs were displayed collapsed, and the song was driven back into Gracey’s mouth, and she was saved.
Gracey cried, at last, little-girl tears.
‘Only the wind,’ said Shirley, on the way home, ‘only the wind, without the wind it would have been okay. We would have been all right.’
But Gracey knew it wasn’t so.
Redundant!
or
The Wife’s Revenge
Well now, friends, let’s have a little light relief. Let me tell you the story of what happened to Esther and Alan in the twenty-fourth year of their marriage. It was an episode distressing enough for those involved, although no doubt diverting and instructive for their friends. And what are friends for, but to provide the raw material for debate and exhilaration? (You may remember Esther and Alan in the earlier years of their marriage; when both went on a diet and Esther left home, briefly, and you may be surprised to find that instead of the son they had then, they now have a daughter, by name Hermes. But that’s the prerogative of the writer – to c
hange the rules as work proceeds. If you can’t accept it, close the book!)
Envisage now one of our new palace hospitals: a concrete tower without, nicely carpeted within, with grave young things in white coats and folders stepping in and out of slow lifts, and the occasional dressing-gowned patient coughing or limping or spluttering, having wandered out of the patients’ day rooms, and little alcoves here and there fitted with tea-bars, staffed by jolly volunteers, where the visitors can buy white sugared buns and a fix of caffeine. And where the feel of seedy anxiety mixes with the lingering stench of gangrene and floats in the purified air; and paint the walls with whatever gloss colour the designer decrees, they will still pale and roughen too soon with the notion of things running down, running out – of desperate saving measures, which will never quite work. Any cure can only be temporary, after all.
But that’s the public wards, and we are meant to be here for light relief. There’s a private wing too, and that’s where Alan is. What did he work all those years for, if not for a little privilege? Things aren’t so serious in the private wing. Money’s a fine cushion for a worried head.
Mind you, Alan had the cushion snatched away, rather suddenly. Bang, thump! It happens to the unlikeliest people, these days. Redundant!
What’s he doing here? He’s having a face-lift. That is to say, he had one, a week ago, not to mention a cut and a stitch or so in the epicanthic fold above the eye. That takes years off. And ageing executives who want jobs had better take as many years off as they can. But Alan’s not healing very well: the bruises don’t fade, the tissues don’t join. Why? Mr Khan the surgeon is worried.
Well, that’s what Mr Khan says. We can hardly suppose the condition of Alan’s epicanthic folds keep him awake at night. Other things do that. Pony the nurse for example; longing for Pony does on occasion keep him awake. Mr Khan is a cosmetic surgeon of enormous wealth and great skill. (People certainly get richer dealing with the discomforts of the privileged than they ever do dealing with the sufferings of the humble.) He is married to Mrs Professor Khan, a brain surgeon, of beauty, presence and renown, who terrifies him. Mrs Khan even has morality on her side, since she works for the National Health Service, in what her husband refers to as the Free Wards. He works there sometimes too, of course, for form’s sake and because he gets a little tax relief, repairing burn cases and torn flesh. But Mrs Professor Khan will never, ever, agree to work in the private wing. She will never be rich, not really rich, but she will always be virtuous and she sleeps very well at night. Pony is neither virtuous nor rich nor beautiful nor brilliant, but she is young, very young. If she doesn’t sleep well at night at the moment, it’s because she keeps having to get up to spend a penny, having been made pregnant by Mr Khan. At this very moment, as Mr Khan steps over the threshold from the public to the private wing, off lino and on to carpet, she is waiting to tell him the news.
Mr Khan is dusky and immeasurably charming: he comes from somewhere on the Indian sub-continent: he has dark, almond-shaped eyes, heavily fringed: he has sensuous fingers. He makes love in the spirit of the Kama Sutra: he hums love songs as he operates, as he shapes a little bone here, remoulds a little flesh there: remaking man, and woman too, in an image better than God himself managed. How can Pony resist him? She doesn’t. Pony is small and pixie-faced and has blonde fly-away hair flying away beneath the white frilly cap they wear in the private wards. She’s a nurse by the skin of her teeth: her father is an ex-Minister of Health. It gives her a boldness with specialists an ordinary nurse would never have.
Mr Khan sweeps down the corridor: he is king in his kingdom. Where he goes nurses look deferentially and patients look admiringly, and offer thanks. Many wear burnouses, even here in hospital; and women chadors, but their eyes glow in warm gratitude, above the black and virtuous folds.
‘Mr Khan! Mr Khan!’ Pony breathes, stepping out from behind a portable sterilising unit left untidily in the corridor by a porter who went on strike yesterday for increased pay, and will probably do the same tomorrow. All is not well in our hospitals, especially in the private wings. Not often do rich and poor come into quite so intimate contact: it is inflammatory!
Mr Khan stops briefly, and smiles kindly at her; so some early morning mercenary, fresh and spruce from his military bed, tuned and bright for killing, might pause to smile at some little Persian kitten. He moves on: she runs after him. Other nurses have good strong quiet sensible shoes: Pony manages to break the rules and wears little heels; for medical reasons: her insteps demand them. Even so, she has to gaze up into Mr Khan’s face. It is very agreeable, for both of them. Mrs Professor Khan is taller than her husband.
‘Well, Pony?’
‘Bobby,’ whispers Pony. ‘I’m pregnant.’ And her little face radiates enchantment, wonder and gratification.
‘Oh,’ says Mr Khan, stopped in his tracks. Then he resumes walking.
‘What are we going to do, Bobby?’ asks Pony, falling into step beside him.
‘We’ll have to talk about it,’ says Mr Khan, ‘but not now, not here.’
‘You’re always so busy!’ she mourns. ‘But then you’re so important. Just like Daddy!’
Ah, Daddy!
‘It’s true,’ says Mr Khan, ‘that many people depend upon me. In the meantime, I love you very much and your news makes me very happy.’
Pony beams.
‘Bobby,’ she says, ‘I have to tell you that your wife was waiting for you in her office just now but she went home. I told her you were busy, and so you are! I was right. She’s so busy too, isn’t she? She waited only twelve and three quarter minutes.’
‘I love my wife as well, Pony,’ Mr Khan reminds her, ‘but of course not in the same way as I love you. Over the next week or so we’ll work something out. Now, to business! How is Mr Lear?’
(Mr Lear is, of course, Alan. Once he was Alan Sussman, but that was when he had a son, before he had a daughter, and in the days that he was vaguely Jewish, and consumed by an inner angst: these days he is tormented by practicalities, such as losing a kingdom and an income and, of course, in the manner of fathers everywhere, tormented in various ways by his daughter. Grown children go too soon, or go too late, or to the wrong place or, worst of all, don’t go at all.)
‘I’m very worried about Mr Lear,’ says Pony, composing her face into a grave nurse-like mask. (Well, she’s not exactly losing sleep over Alan, any more than is Mr Khan. She regards him in the way nurses do regard patients – as essentially fictional characters.) ‘He does seem so depressed. I mean, clinically depressed.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Mr Khan, ‘anti-depressant depressed?’
‘He was once diagnosed as depressed by his GP,’ says Pony, ‘and was given them. I asked him how they’d worked and he said they gave him nightmares and I said that was only imagination, and he said quite so. I don’t somehow seem to get through to him, Bobby. Perhaps he has been badly hurt by women?’ And her little lips tremble with sympathy, and Mr Khan pauses again, to admire her sweetness, and to instruct, which he loves doing, and which his wife, over the years, gives him fewer and fewer opportunities so to do.
‘There is certainly some reason,’ says Mr Khan, ‘why the healing process is delayed: why the tissues refuse to knit: why such a simple operation as a face-lift, which should cause a mature man no trouble at all, has proved so traumatic in this particular case. My sweet Pony! To think that you are carrying my child! How fortunate women are: all a man can do is tinker with creation: a woman is creation itself!’ And he continues his stride down the corridor, with Pony trotting after him.
‘Bobby,’ says Pony firmly – not for nothing is she her father’s daughter – ‘actually, men create babies too. I see this one as being as much yours as mine. I just do the carrying around! I don’t even have to do that for us any more. We could take this baby out of me now, deep-freeze it for a little, and put it back in somebody else’s womb altogether, and both of us watch it come out, hand in hand.’ She is referring to advances
in gynaecological technique recently accomplished only a few yards down the corridor from where they are standing.
‘Not quite, Pony, not quite yet,’ says Mr Khan. ‘Though no doubt in time such techniques will be perfected, and I take your point.’
It is at this moment, while Mr Khan and Pony are locked in their loving war, that a little party of three sweep by them. Esther goes first, lean and freckly and passionate, for all the world like Katharine Hepburn in Venice in Summer Madness, a woman, though fifty, clearly in her confident sexual prime. Behind her go a pair one could take for brother and sister; Freddo with Irish good looks, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped with bright blue eyes and thick black hair and a sharp thin nose – wearing his best navy suit for the occasion, and his working boots. Freddo is Esther’s lover. And Hermes is here too. Hermes, as you know, is Esther and Alan’s daughter. She is twenty-four, going on fourteen, pretty as a picture, bright as a button and cross as two sticks. Hermes feels badly done by.
Pony is out of sympathy with visitors. They mess up the rooms and upset the patients. She stands between the Lear entourage and her charge.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks. Mr Khan admires her courage. Only his wife has as much.
‘To see Mr Lear,’ said Mrs Esther Lear, ‘in Room 341. I know that is his room. It was on Reception’s computer.’
‘He is not supposed to have visitors,’ says Pony. Hermes and Freddo prepare to turn back, but Esther will have none of it.
‘I am his wife, my dear,’ says Esther. ‘And husband and wife are one flesh.’
Pony has that superstitious fear of the word ‘wife’ common, thank God, to the mistresses of adulterers, and it is she who stands aside. The Lear party pass on.
‘It isn’t right,’ complains Pony to Mr Khan, who is standing in rapt fascination, staring after Esther Lear. ‘I know he wants his face-lift kept secret from his wife. He told his family he was on a redeployment course for redundant executives in the North of Scotland. He wanted his new face to be a surprise for them. He told me so. He confides in me, you know. And he doesn’t like his wife one little bit. They live apart.’
