by Weldon, Fay
Angelica agreed to call on Una in her Whitehall offices. She had no recollection of being in the bar the previous evening. So far as she could remember, she’d stayed in her room watching television. On the other hand, she could not remember the programmes she’d watched.
‘Angel,’ said Angelica in alarm, ‘we’re not just perforated any longer. We’ve split.’
But there was no reply.
Part 5
Una’s Happy Boys And Girls
1
A Menu Of Permutations
This was Una’s belief:
– that nature, in the beginning, had crudely divided the human race into two genders, male and female. Men had cocks, women had cunts; that was that. Go forth and multiply, was all nature had to say on the subject.
– but that the cock/cunt divide was now obsolete. Sexual desire and procreation had separated themselves out. ‘Men’ could no longer be defined by cock, ‘women’ by cunt: there was a menu of permutations in between. Being hung with a penis, being split by a vagina, was arbitrary anyway. Personality was laid down at the moment of conception, said Una, according to the happenstance of combining intertwining, inherited genes. Gender comes later, she claimed: a matter of chromosomes; a flood of oestrogen, a flood of testosterone working in that base, nothing to do with us. Society continues to collude with nature, which is crude and barbaric, and determined we shall continue to multiply while we are equally determined not to; people grow miserable as they try to do as expected and force their sexuality in the direction of their hung-edness or otherwise. Forget it, says Una.
– she, Una, will set things right if she can; so that anyone could be everything; everyone, anything.
Una’s intention was to turn Lodestar House into a brothel. She was never one to waste an opportunity, and if that brothel was to be for the dead as well as the living, as Maria assured her it could be, so much the better. If Una’s reward could only be in the afterlife, and an enigmatic one at that, for the dead had no means of handing money over, what did Una care? Money was the least of her problems. She had accumulated more than enough over the decades, from the pockets of the guilty and the grateful. Una’s salvation after death was more to the point: it would be useful to have friends and influence people in the hereafter as well as here on earth. Maria did not discount it.
Though Una herself saw nothing to apologise for in her profession – and could argue well enough that she provided a useful social service, offering relief to the frustrated, mercy for wives, the saving of young women from the attacks of sex-starved strangers, and so on, the formal censure of society worried her. She wanted to make amends. She wanted, like anyone else, to be thought well of.
The living sought their contentment, their happiness, their fulfilment, their freedom from anxiety and guilt, through the ecstasies of the flesh.
‘But, Maria,’ protested Una, ‘isn’t it altogether too late for the dead? They have no flesh but only bones, and bones rubbing together create only a squeak and some fine white powder, and no observable pleasure.’
But Maria swore it was never too late; she was in contact with the dead; they’d told her otherwise. Their pleasures were voyeuristic, but real enough. The dead were always present anyway, Maria swore, whenever the living fucked. That was their treat. The living should accordingly join in fleshly congress as much as possible; a notion that suited Una. The little death of orgasm acted as a kind of one-way presentation brothel mirror: on the one side the observers, the dead; on the other the observed, the living, at their most alive, their most powerful at the moment of orgasm, always a magnet for the dead. The air chattered with their presence at such times, but who ever noticed?
Lodestar House, Maria claimed, was alive with opportunistic ghosts. Oscar, Violet, Wendy, Congo; and Maria reported sighting a skinny man who looked like an executioner, and another who seemed to be a pirate, a Tinkerbell-lookalike – but probably vicious – little fairy; just outside the side door crouched a line of Bedouins. ‘You’re deranged,’ said Una. ‘You’re over the top,’ but Maria just shrugged, and said it made no difference to her whether anyone believed her or not, and it made no difference to the ghosts either.
2
Touting Talent
Una had twelve happy boys and girls on the team. This team consisted, officially, of three heterosexual females, two lesbians, one transsexual, one transvestite, two gay men and three heterosexual males – or as thus self-defined; though to work for Una required them to be able and willing to move freely between at least three other gender subdivisions without protest or personal difficulty.
‘Personal difficulty’ could make itself evident mid-trick, that was the problem, and difficulties came in many forms. Maria’s problems with the other world were one kind – clients could be put off their stroke by ectoplasm. The man in the blond wig and high heels could have quite another. If not properly liberated for gender conditioning, he/she could upset him/herself, or worse, his clients, by suddenly shuddering, pulling back from some intimate activity and crying aloud in psychic pain, ‘But what is going on here? Does this make me a lesbian, or what?’ And doubt would even end in violence, as primitive, instinctive passions surfaced, with their mad insistence that seed should not be wasted, not spilt into infertile ground, making both men and women murderous. But such events, thank God, were rare. If the ambience was pleasant, the atmosphere good, civilisation and civility survived.
‘It’s all very well,’ said Una to Maria, on their return to Whitehall, ‘but it will cost the earth to convert Lodestar House, to bring it back to life, to give it back its atmosphere. I could do better renting some big house in Mayfair, converted already, the way other people do.’ ‘It will cost you heaven if you don’t,’ said Maria bleakly, and her little face was crumpled and wizened, as if she were her own grandmother. She was convincing enough, old or young: Una capitulated.
That evening in The Claremont bar where they were enjoying a pleasant, and purely social, evening, Maria nudged Una and said, ‘Look over there – she’s a split!’
Maria was speaking of a pretty blonde girl in a tight black dress, long-legged and giggly, leaning up against the bar, looking no different from many another of her kind, talking to the barman.
‘What do you mean? How can you tell?’ demanded Una.
‘I can tell by her aura. There’s two or three in there.’
‘Like you and your grandmother?’
‘Quite different,’ said Maria, patiently. ‘My grandmother just visits me when I need advice. Forget her. This girl has at least two female, one male, permanently resident. She could take my place on the team.’
‘I know who that is,’ said Una, thoughtfully. ‘She’s also Brian Moss’s ex-secretary.’
Later she asked the barman if he knew the girl. He replied, ‘She’s resident here. Name of Lady Rice. You’d never think it, would you, someone like her? But divorce affects some people like that. She’ll wake up murdered one morning if she’s not careful.’ He looked Una up and down. He’d seen a few like her in his time, his expression said, at work in the bar. But he warmed to her, as most people did.
‘Get her out of my hair,’ he said. ‘Save her from herself. She’d be better off going professional. She drinks too much.’
3
Restoration
‘There’s a difference between professional and amateur,’ said Una to Angel in the Whitehall offices, ‘especially if you’re working for me. You must put the client first, not yourself.’
‘I always do,’ said Angel.
‘It’s the “I” you need to forget,’ said Una. ‘My clients pay you to be what they want, so they can discover who they are. What you are is neither here nor there, and the point is you must never try to know. The minute you have categorised yourself, you’re in trouble.’
‘It suits me,’ said Angel, and it seemed to her to do so, though she couldn’t be sure why.
‘Angel,’ begged Angelica. ‘Don’t do it. This is not for us
.’
Angel didn’t seem to hear: Angelica, angry, managed to walk her into a door when she was leaving the room. It was a sharp and sudden blow to the temporal lobes. Angel felt quite dizzy. She put her hand to her head and discovered a bump and a graze; but fortunately no blood.
‘Do you have trouble with your physical co-ordination?’ asked Una, puzzled, when Angel had recovered.
‘Not that I know of,’ said Angel. ‘I just didn’t notice that the door wasn’t open.’
‘It’s one of her other selves,’ said Maria, who was sitting in on the interview. ‘She’s angry. That’s not so good. She might be destructive.’
‘Maria,’ said Una, ‘you are a better judge of the dead than the living. Anyone could walk into a door. Find a plaster for the poor girl, do.’
Maria fetched a plaster.
‘Oh, hooray!’ said Una. ‘Here he is; our favourite architect!’
Susan’s one-time husband had walked into the room: his beard, once black, was grey. He wore a baseball cap. He seemed furtive; a melancholy but friendly man in disguise, expecting a bailiff under every table, a Revenue man every time a telephone bleeped.
‘I told you!’ said Angelica. ‘You need me! Now shut up and let me do the talking.’
‘Humphrey,’ said Una, ‘I’ve done this completely mad thing: I’ve taken over the house where I was born. It’s totally derelict. Maria tells me it’s haunted, but she would, wouldn’t she? I want you to do it over for me. Or are you up to your eyes in work?’
‘I haven’t exactly been up to my eyes in work,’ said Humphrey, eyes fixed on the blonde girl leaning against the wall while Maria fixed a plaster to her temple, ‘since my ex-wife put the evil eye on me, and I had to have electric shock treatment. What sort of conversion? Domestic or working? House of shame and sin or pleasant family home? I don’t make moral judgements. What you see is what you get; I am a defeated man. Who’s this? Haven’t I seen her before?’
Una said she was new on the team so she doubted it. But then, you never knew; it was a small world.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Humphrey.
‘Angela,’ said Angel. ‘Angela Maize.’
And it was true.
Una raised her eyebrows but entered this into her computer. ‘Angela Maize, approx 120 lbs; approx 5′6″; approx blonde; good appearance, regular features, good-natured, poor co-ordination, no distinguishing marks, possible split personality.’
‘Have I met you before?’ asked Humphrey.
‘No,’ said Angel.
‘My misfortune,’ said Humphrey, putting her on hold, as it were.
‘But I can’t take on any work,’ said Humphrey to Una. ‘It’s impossible. Because I’m bankrupt; I have no offices and no secretarial staff. You know that. You’re playing with me, the way powerful women play with helpless men. Cat and mouse.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Una briskly. ‘Payment in cash. You can use Angela for staff. I know she has secretarial skills, because I once saw her in action. I’ll deduct her wages from your fee. You can work from Lodestar House. Then you won’t hang about; you’ll have to make it habitable.’
It was an offer Humphrey couldn’t refuse. His kindly, morose face broke into what was almost a smile.
‘Suits me,’ he said. ‘Since the real world despises my talents, I must descend into the underworld. Like Orpheus.’
Angela just nodded and smiled.
‘Angel,’ said Angelica urgently, ‘who is this woman? What have you done?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Angel, pathetically. ‘She’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Nor me,’ said Angelica. ‘She doesn’t hear a thing I say. She just does what other people expect. She’s a straw in the wind. She’s what others want. It’s my fault. I made you hit your head. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve never heard you say sorry before,’ said Angel. ‘I’m confused. I want to go to sleep. It’s all such a battle.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ agreed Angelica. ‘We deserve a rest. She can’t do any harm. Let’s leave it to her.’
And, concurring for once, they drifted away.
Ajax said, ‘Is no one at all listening? You can’t do this. You will lose your narrator, your history. We’ll vanish altogether… Angel, I relied on you. You are my vigour, my permanence through the ages –’
But he was talking to thin air.
4
Unification
Angela and Humphrey stood at the side entrance of Lodestar House, beneath the dripping stone arch. The key turned in the lock, but rusted levers did not engage; the tumblers jammed. The two of them put their shoulders to the door and pushed; the wood around the hinges gave. The lower edge of the door, reluctantly moving, scraped away a layer of mould on the stone floor.
‘My God,’ said Humphrey.
There had been an exponential growth within, it seemed, of entropic chaos. Congo’s and Wendy’s living breath, however old and feeble, had served to keep the worst away: now that was stilled, the forces of dereliction had taken over. Cobwebs now fell from the ceilings in mats, not flimsy strands; sprung floorboards gaped; wall beams powdered; entire steps of the staircase had dry rotted away into dust and tendrils. There was background noise of scuttling and squealing, a sound of dragging as if tiny dormice had grown overnight into major league rats and were already lining nests for yet more dreadful, upscaled progeny.
‘This is nothing…’ said Angela, thinking of Rice Court, but even as she said it, she forgot.
That evening, by which time Angela lay companionably side by side with Humphrey on Wendy’s mattress – now on the floor, for the dealers, unasked, had cleared the remaining antiques, including the old lady’s bedstead – Humphrey asked Angela for an account of herself.
Angela could give none. She had walked into a door, she thought, and now suffered from amnesia. But here she was, and it would do. She was as she appeared on Una’s computer. An approximate person, with no peculiarities, saving a not unpleasant loss of memory. She had been kept in good order, apparently. Her legs were shaved, her hair recently washed. She had no complaints; why should he? He should just see her as a living doll.
Humphrey, a man who quickly brought all conversations round to himself, said kindly that he only wished he could develop amnesia, and start again. He tried to help her remember herself, but she had only her handbag with her, and within nothing more than cosmetics and an account from The Claremont. She had a memory of being brought to Una’s Whitehall offices in a Volvo by a man who had driven off with her suitcases, and had upset her somehow. She had a feeling he’d said he washed his hands of her, he never wanted to set eyes on her again. But men did say that kind of thing, didn’t they, when they meant the opposite? No other details. Presumably all clues to her identity had gone with the luggage. She didn’t want Humphrey chasing anyone up, turning over stones; nor, when it came to it, was he eager so to do. A sleeping pill overdose, only just survived, not many months back, seemed to have dampened his own curiosity about the past.
‘Some rich client, I suppose. The Claremont’s famous for them,’ said Humphrey. ‘Una might know something, but why stir things up?’
They lay together for warmth and safety, the house breathing and cursing around them, some larger, chthonic, bad-tempered entity enclosing them in its womb. Both were fully clothed, for warmth. Humphrey claimed impotence. He could only properly respond, he said, to idiotic and helpless women, and Angela, he claimed, terrified him with her efficiency. It was true enough that, whatever her lack of personal memory, she had clearly not forgotten her skills. She was assertive and self-confident. During the afternoon, she had found and plugged in the telephone, located and mended burnt-out fuses so that now the electricity was back on. Warmth was beginning to creep back into the house. She had even unblocked a toilet. She had sent Humphrey out to the shops to buy pails, brooms, detergents and plastic sacks, light bulbs and six radios. While he was out she had left messages on answerphones all over London seeking builde
rs’ estimates.
‘Surely that’s my job?’ he said, protesting.
‘I can’t wait around,’ she said, ‘for you to be sensitive and responsive. I’ve got to get things done.’
That was the kind of thing Susan had said to him. It wasn’t surprising, Humphrey told Angela that night, that when her practised hand crept beneath his clothes it encountered only soft and helpless parts. What did she expect? This had been his wife’s experience, too. Bullying wives get quiescent men.
Angela laughed and they both fell asleep.
Angela laughed a great deal: the ghosts retreated, the rats fell silent. Thereafter, she kept her hands away from Humphrey’s parts; nor did he approach her. Neither of them mentioned this failure in lust to Una, who, once the house was halfway rid of its ghosts, would come over daily to discuss her ambitions for Lodestar.
Angela kept the six radios on, day and night, one on each of the landings in different parts of the house, playing music from different pop stations. The noise was dreadful, or so Humphrey complained. He wanted the radios tuned to one classical station, but she wouldn’t allow it.
‘The past is the problem,’ Angela would say airily. ‘The secret of happiness is to forget it altogether. Spring up anew every day. Treat your life like someone else’s.’
‘Pollyanna!’ he accused her, loath to forgo his melancholy. He remembered vaguely once calling someone else Pollyanna, the trusting, annoying little girl who looks for good in everything; but he couldn’t quite place whom. Humphrey’s memories of his wife, his child who wasn’t his child, his past life, were fading too; swallowed up in the black hole of Angela’s softness. He thought he’d change his name, but he couldn’t decide what to. He felt he was healing, though he couldn’t be sure from what injury. Angela said she felt the same way. He moved slowly: he became lethargic. He needed to shave only twice a week. He felt that perhaps Angela was indeed sapping him of manhood, but only of the savage kind that sent black bristles starting out of his skin. He understood that he was happy. The house took shape around him, at Angela’s bidding, with a little mild intervention from himself.
