by Weldon, Fay
Dear Tully, continued Brian Moss,
We’ve received a letter from Mr Warby. He and Mrs Warby are apparently reluctant to vacate the premises. Mr Warby is seeing ghosts, and is demonstrably not of sound mind. Under the 1983 Mental Health Act he would need to display this mental unsoundness in a public place. He could then be taken by police or social workers to a place of safety; and thereafter, should Mr Warby be certified in that place by a doctor as being what we call incapable, a Document of Protection could be activated. Mr Warby’s nearest and dearest would then take control of the old man’s property, and for his own safety place him in a residential home. Perhaps he could be persuaded to pursue his so-called ‘ghosts’ out into the street?
In the sad event of Wendy Warby’s death, Lodestar House would then not pass to Mr Warby but to your wife Sara. Mr Warby could argue his entitlement as ‘a family member’ but not if already declared incompetent. The provenance of the property is complicated, as you realise. There are two years of the original tenancy agreement to run, and under new legislation the long-term tenants have the right to sell the freehold at will. Mr and Mrs Warby show no interest in selling, though this unusual, prime property would fetch in the region of one-and-a-quarter million.
My best regards to your wife.
Brian Moss.
Jelly White put the letter to Tully Toffener, which seemed to her to amount to incitement to murder and false imprisonment, into the computer, printed it out, had the printout checked through by Brian Moss and signed by him; then, in his presence, she slipped the letter into a stamped, addressed envelope and sealed it. And then left it to Angelica to go down into the powder room and tear envelope and letter into little pieces and flush them down the lavatory pan. It took three flushes before all the shreds were gone. Angelica did not see why Tully Toffener should be given information it was better he did not have. Atmospheres come off letters. She liked Congo Warby: his scratchy, impetuous letters, his spidery but definite handwriting. The Toffener file exuded something sour and seedy. Angelica was happy to take a risk on Congo’s behalf: she did not have the scruples Jelly did.
Sometimes Jelly felt she was the only moral person left in the world. ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ she could always say, if challenged.
8
At Livermore Gate
‘I don’t know about Brian Moss any more,’ said Tully Toffener to Sara. He drank neat whisky from a chunky crystal glass. She drank gin and tonic from a fluted goblet. A fire burned in the grate although the day was warm. The crimson velvet curtains at the grand, ungainly windows had faded to a thin pinky colour: the furniture was mahogany and too large: the leather sofa, purchased by Sara on a rash day, had been a mistake. It was a hideous room. ‘He never seems to answer letters.’
‘I expect he knows what he’s doing,’ said Sara. She was as thin and scraggy as Tully was tightly stuffed: the piece of crumpled, browny skin around the chicken’s leg when it comes out of the oven, as opposed to the plump moist thigh. She was not unattractive: men liked her. She was often under attack, and in need of defence: she would engage attractive men at parties with long tales of woe and hardship; it would occur to them that the only way to stop all this would be to bed her. But she was true to Tully most of the time and he was true to her: a redeeming feature in both.
‘I bloody hope so,’ said Tully. ‘I get the feeling his mind isn’t on the job.’
And they had their usual pre-dinner discussion about the appalling state of the nation – the way the law protected the insane at the expense of the sane, the poor at the expense of the rich, the unhealthy at the expense of the healthy. Then Ayla the Philippine maid served the steak and kidney pie, and Tully and Sara sat at either end of the dark shiny table and toasted each other in the 1983 Saint Estèphe, opened three hours earlier. But he had to hurry over the apple pie because he had to get back to the House of Commons for a late night debate on the rights or otherwise of the handicapped, in which he was speaking, arguing for a stricter definition of what constituted handicap. His government maintained that whereas ‘disablement’ was not sufficient cause for state benefit, ‘handicap’, at least in some categories, might so do. The apartment at Livermore Gate was a forty-minute taxi drive from the House: were he and Sara to live at Lodestar House a mere ten minutes would do it.
Tully had dropped gravy on his tie. He went to the bedroom to find another. Sara followed him. They embraced and, full of dinner as they were, had what they liked to refer to as a ‘quickie’ on the floor of the walk-in wardrobe. Ayla, coming in to turn down the bed, disturbed them. She was standing transfixed when Tully, on top of Sara, looked sideways to see her stolid, sandalled feet just by him. She came from a peasant background: her face was broad and her look was sullen. Neither liked her.
‘Fire that woman,’ said Tully, as Sara knotted his fresh, pink silk tie for him. ‘Don’t tell me she has nowhere to go, and four children to keep –’
‘If she couldn’t support them,’ said Sara, ‘she shouldn’t have had them in the first place –’
‘My, you’re tough,’ said Tully, admiringly. ‘She’s ugly, she has no tact, she’s obviously an illegal, she can’t cook, and we could get someone better than her at half what she has the nerve to ask. Thank God there’s no legislation yet to protect the rights of incompetent servants, and if I have my way there never will be.’
And off he went to the House of Commons, and Sara fired Ayla.
‘I not do it again,’ said Ayla. ‘More careful next time.’
‘I want you out of the house,’ said Sara, ‘within the hour. You are simply not fit to work in a civilised household. It’s not your fault: you come from a primitive background and you simply don’t understand how things are done over here. My diamond ring is missing. Think yourself lucky I don’t press charges.’
Ayla cried, and said she had nowhere to go, and just stood helplessly, so Sara went into the small box room where Ayla slept on a camp bed, and packed up her few belongings into a black plastic sack and put them on the front steps, and held the door open until Ayla gave in and joined her possessions.
‘I come to collect my letters?’ begged Ayla. ‘Letters for me from my children?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Sara. ‘I am not a forwarding agency.’ And she slammed the front door.
She had another gin and tonic and then noticed that the dinner things were still uncleared. She rang up the twenty-four hour ‘At Your Service’ agency.
‘What, again, Mrs Toffener?’ asked the dismal voice at the other end of the phone. ‘What happened this time?’
‘This time,’ said Sara, ‘you sent me a thief and a voyeur. I need someone else within the hour. Someone honest, reliable and not physically deformed, if it’s not beyond your competence. The apartment is a tip. My husband is a Minister of the Crown; some standards are expected.’
‘Mrs Toffener,’ said Marty Walker, ex-social worker, on duty that night, responding to the urgent calls of the great, the famous, and the wealthy in one kind of domestic distress or another, ‘when you say Ayla is a thief, do you have any proof of that? You shouldn’t make these allegations otherwise. And did you pay her wages in lieu –?’
‘Good God,’ said Sara, ‘the woman’s an illegal: she has no rights.’
She slammed the phone down and started to cry. Sometimes she wondered why she was so disagreeable but could find no answer. Perhaps if she’d had children she would have developed some nicer, kinder side of her nature? But she doubted it. They being small and helpless, she’d have merely bullied them too. And the children would have added Tully’s genes to hers to create themselves, and would probably just bully back: grow up to commit patricide, matricide.
Sara went out to collect Ayla and her black bag from the step. Ayla was waiting there, as Sara knew she would be. She had nowhere else to go. This kind of incident happened every few months or so.
9
Sara Attempts To Visit Her Grandmother
Compani
es are reluctant to offer flood insurance for properties in Lodestar Avenue. It is too near the River Thames and every year the level of the water rises as new embankments and levels contain and speed its flow. Besides, the river is tidal, and though there are great new flood barriers at the river’s mouth, the seas are rising, are they not, and once or twice a year the city’s newspapers panic and say this time we are finally out of luck. The moon is full, a swollen tide, the wind is strong and from the East, nothing can save us now. Why, in such a climate, should insurers take a risk? They, whose ambition in life is not to take risks though their function is to do so.
Gerald Catterwall engaged Sun Life in a long correspondence on the subject of their refusal to offer Wendy Musgrave flood cover, and they relented; sensibly, since I notice from the files no claim has ever been made in this respect.
But I like to think of Sara Toffener, beating upon the side door of Lodestar House – the front door is all but hidden by ivy, and has obviously not been opened for a decade or more – in her attempt to gain admittance, looking behind her to make sure that black flood water was not trickling down the steps after her.
The side door was below ground level. To get to it you had first to pass through a kind of lych gate in the high grey brick wall which enclosed the property, using the rusty iron ring handle which left reddish-black marks on the hand, and down a short flight of stone steps, through much vaulted and pillared masonry which oozed water (or so one hoped it was: perhaps it was sewage, from some fractured pipe or other) in slow drops upon the head. The flight of steps which rose above were these days decorative, not functional, leading nowhere but to stone patterns inset into brick. Someone along the decades, probably Una, Sara’s mother, the trouble-maker, had seen fit to block up the original front door: or perhaps the structure had suffered bomb damage, and a temporary measure had drifted into permanence.
Tully Toffener felt, rightly, that to live in Lodestar House – especially as the Heritage Department would pay for the house’s repairs and modernisation – would reflect well upon his status and standing. The garden could be sold off for development, for yet further millions. Or he could be bold and do the developing himself. Nothing wrong with an apartment block or so at the bottom of the garden. But Lodestar! – a house which had been in the in-laws’ family for generations – Good Lord, how naturally a title would then come. And Tully twisted Sara’s moral arm to persuade her of it. Poor little Sara, sent away from home at three, and none the nicer for it. Victims are seldom nice: that is the effect of victimisation. Evil is not easily rectified. It is as infectious as measles: it has a knock-on effect: ripples as smoothly as dominoes will, each one tipping the next, falling one after another.
‘Let’s just get the Lodestar matter settled,’ Tully would say, ‘then we’ll have children.’ And Sara hardly liked to say she did not particularly want children for fear they would inherit Tully’s genes, as if they would not be bad enough without, but took the point well enough that he was wielding an axe above her head, though only he believed that axe had substance.
To have children, if you were Sara, you had to have servants, nannies, and Sara’s files at Catterwall & Moss were already thick with correspondence about staff who had robbed her, or were demanding unreasonable compensation for dismissal; enquiries about the penalties for illegal entry into the country and so forth. She had learned from Tully the gift of hanging axes.
‘When we finally get possession of Lodestar,’ Sara had once said crossly to Tully, having temporarily just got rid of a girl who’d worn Sara’s best shoes to go to a wedding and thought she wouldn’t be discovered, ‘I’m as likely to burn it down as restore it, and build some nice new labour-saving bungalow in its place, and live without servants altogether,’ and Tully had looked at her admiringly, for he loved everything that was drastic in her nature, and when she was pink with anger looked almost pretty, and said, ‘Over my dead body, so it’s suttee for you, my girl. Lodestar will stand and you will be Lady Toffener and London’s premiere hostess, or it will be the worse for you.’
And he wished he had the nerve to ask Sara to wear her high-heeled shoes to bed and to tie him up to the bedposts, but he never quite could.
10
Scenes From Wendy’s Life
Sara comes to visit Wendy, claiming to be her grandchild, but Wendy sees this as some kind of time-slip, some spacewarp reversal, some peculiar anomaly of sequential logic. She herself is the child. She can see herself now, in this very room, at the age of six, standing transfixed in front of a mirror, in a white dress, all folds and flounces, calf length, snugly belted, and with stout lace-up boots.
‘Is this me? Is this who I am?’ she asks.
The mirror answers ‘Yes, and always will be.’
‘How did it happen?’ she asks. ‘How did I come about?’ but this is beyond even the mirror to explain, not that Wendy cares. Wendy can tell she is no bad thing to be – pretty, wilful, bright, temperamental. A yell from her can bring the adult world to its heels: a smile and a toss of her head brings its attention. She puts on her mother Violet’s shoes and clatters about the room. In her mother’s footsteps. She will be a bohemian like her mother, and have lovers like her mother, and be in charge of this house, and hummingbirds will fly about its vaulted ceilings. She kisses the mirror. Life is all future.
‘Congo,’ murmurs Wendy. ‘Don’t sell the mirror. I can see the mark where I kissed it. Let’s sell the mirror last of all.’
The mirror is a cheval glass, mounted on stout Victorian legs, practical but not beautiful. Wendy can change the angle of the glass with her walking stick. Then it shows her other scenes.
Wendy runs out of the house into the garden; her brother Theo follows. They look like the children in an E. Nesbit story book. Or has Wendy got memory and the book illustrations confused? It scarcely matters. Theo’s wearing loose knickerbockers, as loose and unrestricting as Wendy’s dress. The Musgraves are a family of free thinkers, progressives; Violet is a member of the Fabian Society – ‘Fabian, my dear, was a Roman General who was proud of conquering little by little.’ Little by little, the Fabians believe, socialism will triumph, and all mankind be glad and free. Cure ignorance, poverty and disease and you will cure all human ills, because mankind is good except where these three evils make it bad. It was a plausible enough belief at the time: though World War I made a nasty dent in the smooth surface of burgeoning human aspiration, the expectation of progress.
Both Wendy and Theo are handsome, well cared for, and much loved children. They are both illegitimate; that is to say, born out of wedlock; purposely produced according to current theories of free love. George Bernard Shaw, a frequent visitor to Lodestar, maintains that marriage is a form of friendship blessed by governments: H.G. Wells, who also often dines with Violet, thinks it is the duty of any superior male (as he most evidently is) to propagate his genes.
Violet had listened, and worshipped, and believed, and some said Wendy was Shaw’s daughter, and Theo was H.G. Wells’s son, but Violet said no, both children were fathered by her friend and lover Oscar, who loved her deeply, but being married already was not in a position to marry her, even had she consented to marry him.
Marriage was all about property anyway, said Violet, whose eyes were enormous and the colour of the flower after which she was named; she had soft brown massy hair which could be piled on top of her head after the fashion of the day, and a long, elegant neck and a very white skin against which pendants and ear-rings always looked good. She had a high plump bosom; she went without corsets, being a progressive and a bohemian. She was a fine painter, mostly of portraits, occasionally of landscapes, which earned her the respect of her circle, and had a temperament and intelligence as refined and interesting as her work. She had started life as an artists’ model, and everyone knew what that meant – a girl from nowhere. She had been fortunate enough at the age of eighteen to get an actual nude modelling job at the Slade School of Art, where kindly and concerned people had
looked over her and then after her; had discovered talent in her and, what is more, had developed it, and where she met Oscar Rice Musgrave, then Professor of Fine Art, who, hopelessly enamoured of her, had installed her in Lodestar and taught her the social graces as well as theories of art and politics. After Wendy’s birth, he made over the property to Violet, to his wife Alice’s distress. But a man must follow the Life Force: Free Love is a principle as well as a justification. What can Alice do?
It’s 1914. In spite of Violet’s socialist principles, Wendy and Theo have never been allowed to play in the street, as urchins do. One day they are peering into the forbidden world from between the bars of the castellated lych gate, when one of the forbidden urchins runs by blowing a whistle and crying, ‘Take cover, take cover!’ And they see he is wearing a sandwich-board bearing the same notice, which they can read but he quite probably cannot. The child points skywards as he runs whenever he can, between whistles.
Violet comes running out of the house, a waft of oil paint and turpentine following. Her apron is streaked with bright artists’ colours. She is permitted by society, by virtue of her talent, to be a little messy. Her children adore her: so do all the great men of her day, many of them other women’s husbands. The wives will look sideways at Wendy and Theo searching for resemblances. In summer, Violet loves to give dinner parties on the lawn. There are a couple of sandstone Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures stuck casually in the flowerbeds. Sandstone is barely durable or waterproof, but never mind. Art is everywhere and sculptures two a penny, and the artist off at the Front so can’t protest anyway. A casual mother-and-child fresco in the garden wall is a gift from Epstein; dustbins are thrust up against it. Inside the house, proudly presented but carelessly regarded, are Mucha etchings, William Morris tiles and furniture, a couple of Holman Hunts, Wyndham Lewis drawings. Alice, Oscar’s wife, charms no one and receives no homage, no gifts, but has the advantage of respectability.
