by Weldon, Fay
‘Brian had no business bringing me to a place like this,’ she said. ‘We so seldom go out. I was really looking forward to it, and now we’re here he dumps me. I haven’t even got money for a taxi home. I’m not well. I need to go home and take an aspirin. Everything seems so foggy in this revolting place.’
A couple were coming down the stairs: they looked real enough, and happy, and together. The man wore a grey suit; the girl, who was perhaps the sister of the one she’d seen earlier, flitting about with no clothes. But this one seemed reputable and pleasant enough, in jeans and T-shirt.
‘You’re Brian Moss’s wife,’ the young woman said to Oriole. ‘Is there anything I can do? I used to work for him once. I guess I owe you a favour.’
‘If you owe me a favour,’ said Oriole Moss, ‘then lend me the money for a taxi home.’
‘Let’s take her home,’ said Humphrey. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The three of them left unobserved: pushing past a middle-aged couple on the step, who stood there with a young girl, perhaps sixteen. She’d been crying, but spoke formally, firmly and politely.
‘Mother will be inside,’ the girl was saying. ‘I’ll be all right. Thank you for seeing me home, Miss Ruck.’
And then the three from the past were gone, except the girl’s voice still lingered –
‘If that’s what a party is, it’s loathsome!’, but it might have been Oriole speaking; neither Humphrey nor Angela could be sure.
Humphrey and Angela booked in at The Claremont for the night. They had nowhere else to go.
‘Welcome back, Lady Rice,’ said the Commissionaire, but Angela didn’t hear him. Humphrey did, but said nothing. In the elevator she said to Humphrey, ‘Call me Angelica: Angela’s much too singleminded a name. It never suited me.’
‘You’re Edwin’s wife,’ he said, as she lay in foam in the marble bath. ‘Of course. That’s who you are. His ex-wife, I should say. I heard he married again.’
‘Forget all that,’ she said. ‘I’m no one’s daughter, no one’s wife. I am myself, started again.
‘Edwin’s ex-wife,’ she said. ‘Myself at last.’
That night, as new lovers will, they told each other their life histories. In the morning Angelica woke and listened for the voices in her head but there were none that she could define, let alone name: just an agreeable kind of buzzy awareness, laid in layers, interleaved with the possibility of future, and she found herself reborn.
She looked out the window of The Claremont and saw Ram and the Volvo. He was looking up at her.
‘Look!’ she said to Humphrey, ‘there’s the man with all my luggage, back again.’
But Humphrey was asleep. She looked at him closely and saw he was much too old for her. She went to the window and waved. Ram waved back, and beckoned. She nodded and dressed and went down to him.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
For your next wickedly witty Fay Weldon, read on or click here.
Or for more information, click one of the links below:
Fay Weldon
More books by Fay Weldon
An invitation from the publisher
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following to quote from copyrighted material:
The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare, and The Society of Authors as their representative.
First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Flamingo
First published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1995
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858745
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Part 1: A Perforated House
Chapter 1: Edwin’s Divorce Petition
Chapter 2: The Velcro That Is Marriage
Chapter 3: Lady Rice’s Sea Of Sorrow
Chapter 4: Initial Transformations
Chapter 5: Office Business
Chapter 6: Angel Is Born
Chapter 7: History
Chapter 8: Anthea In The Linen Room
Chapter 9: Jelly At Work
Chapter 10: Post Coital
Chapter 11: Alimony As Justice
Chapter 12: The Perforated Personality
Chapter 13: Breaking Out
Chapter 14: Angel’s Outing
Part 2: An Attempt At Diversion
Chapter 1: Family Attack
Chapter 2: The Wicked And The Good
Chapter 3: Tully Toffener And His Powers
Chapter 4: Welcome To Our Wonderful World
Chapter 5: No Grand-Daughter Of Mine
Chapter 6: Trouble Brewing
Chapter 7: Closer To Congo
Chapter 8: At Livermore Gate
Chapter 9: Sara Attempts To Visit Her Grandmother
Chapter 10: Scenes From Wendy’s Life
Chapter 11: A Property Worth Having
Chapter 12: Edwin’s Offer
Chapter 13: Lady Rice On Her Alter Egos
Chapter 14: A Curse From The Past
Chapter 15: An Unbelievable Narrator
Chapter 16: Ajax Is Born
Part 3: Ajax’s Aga Saga
Chapter 1: Angelica First Brings Edwin Home
Chapter 2: How They Told Edwin’s Father
Chapter 3: The Wedding
Chapter 4: Lady Rice, One Year Into Her Marriage
Chapter 5: Lady Rice, Three Years Into Her Marriage
Chapter 6: Lady Rice, Eight Years Into Her Marriage
Chapter 7: Trouble In The Group
Chapter 8: More
Chapter 9: Dinner Party
Chapter 10: Morituri Te Salutant
Part 4: Houses Disinhabited
Chapter 1: Tensions
Chapter 2: A Gust Of Chilly Wind
Chapter 3: A Mother Returns
Chapter 4: A Sniff Of Skin
Chapter 5: Official Business
Chapter 6: Angel Goes Home
Chapter 7: A Short Visit To Mrs White
Chapter 8: Dilapidation
Chapter 9: Renovation
Chapter 10: Perforation
Part 5: Una’s Happy Boys And Girls
Chapter 1: A Menu Of Permutations
Chapter 2: Touting Talent
Chapter 3: Restoration
Chapter 4: Unification
Chapter 5: A House Revealed
Acknowledgement
Copyright
Thirty years ago, Joanna May’s husband conducted a terrifying experiment. The result? Jane, Gina, Julie, and Alice; his wife Joanna, replicated four times. And all of them, Joanna included, are suffering at the hands of the men in their lives...
Table of Contents
1
This has been a year of strange events: some wonderful, some terrible.
In the autumn a great wind swept through my garden one night, and toppled two oaks, three maples and a chestnut tree, all top-heavy with wet leaves, rooted in sodden earth. Had the gale come a week later the leaves would have been gone and the trees no doubt survived: a week earlier an
d the earth would have been dry and the roots steadier, and all would have been well. As it was, the chestnut crashed through the conservatory and set off all the alarms, which joined with the sound of the gale to frighten me out of my wits, so that I would have telephoned Carl, my ex-husband, and forthwith begged for his forgiveness and the restoration of his protection, but as the chestnut had brought down the wires I couldn’t. By the morning the wind had died down and I, Joanna May, was my proper self again, or thought I was.
I went out into the garden and studied the sorry fallen giants, their earthy boles pointing unnaturally skyward, their scuttling insect population stricken by sudden cold and light: and wondered if there was any way of yanking them to their feet again, resettling them in the soil, making good what had been spoiled, but Oliver, my gardener and lover, told me there was not. The truth had to be faced – the trees were finished. That was the end of them: now all they could do was slowly die. I found myself weeping and that was very strange, and wonderful.
And that evening when preparing for bed I looked into my mirror and saw the face of an old woman looking back at me, and that was very strange and terrible. I attended to this apparition at once with astringent masks, moisturizing creams and make-up, and by the time Oliver padded into my bedroom on bare young feet with earthy nails, I, Joanna May, looked almost myself again; but there is no avoiding this truth either – that the task of rehabilitation will get more difficult year by year. Most things get easier the more they are done – but not this. The passage of time makes fools of us all.
I said as much to Oliver and he replied, ‘Well, you’re sixty, and should be used to it by now,’ which is easy enough to say when you are twenty-eight, as he was. Personally I had expected to live for ever, frozen in time at the age of, say, thirty. ‘I don’t mind how old you are,’ said Oliver that night, ‘let alone how old you look. It’s you I love.’
‘Love’ I could understand, but what did he mean by this ‘you’? Small children (so I’m told) start out by confusing ‘me’ with ‘you’. Addressed so frequently as ‘you’, their clever little minds work out that this must be their name. ‘You cold,’ they say, shivering, as the wind blows through the window. ‘Not you,’ comes the response, ‘me.’ ‘Me cold,’ says the child, obligingly. Presently the little thing progresses to the gracious ‘I am cold.’ But is the ‘me’, the ‘I’, really the same as that initial ‘you’ with which we all begin; the sudden bright consciousness of the self as something defined by others? Perhaps we did better in our initial belief, that the shivering cold is jointly experienced, something shared. I wonder.
Well, well, we will see. And as so often happens, the events that ensued ensured that I did see. Any enquiry, however primitive, this ‘you’ of ours manages to formulate in its mind as to the nature of reality, is met at once by such an eager response from that reality, such a convulsion of events, as to suggest that its only function is to provide us with examples, illustrations, of propositions that occur to the mind. Like Directory Enquiries, existing only to be asked, there to be consulted.
By the end of that year of strange events, I can tell you, when I looked in a mirror, I saw a face that would need a great deal more than a jar of wrinkle-cream and some exfoliator to bring it back to order. I was indeed old. Having children makes you old. It is the price we pay for immortality. God’s last laugh, imposing this extra penalty on mankind before he flew off, leaving time the murderer behind, just waiting.
2
The great October wind frightened Jane Jarvis, aged thirty. It howled and raged outside her attic window, and quivered the panes until one of them actually cracked and shattered; then it swept in and around the room, bringing wet and cold with it. Rain spattered the TV screenplay she was sitting up late to read for Home Box-Office, and the wind somehow pried the sheets loose from their binder and swept them into the air and fluttered them round the room. Jane Jarvis thought the wind was alive: that it was some kind of vengeful spirit: that it whined and whinnied like the ghost of her aborted baby, long ago. She went into her bedroom and shut the door on the wind and the manuscript – not one she would recommend, in any case – and tried to sleep, but could not. She considered the temporary nature of all things, including her own life, and panicked, and rang her live-out lover Tom when she heard the clock strike three to say she’d changed her mind, he could be a live-in lover, they’d have a baby, but no one answered and by the morning prudence and courage had re-established themselves in her head and heart. She tacked strong polythene over the broken window; there would be a long wait for a glazier. The streets of London glittered with slivers of broken glass.
‘You don’t need me at all,’ said Tom. ‘You’re self-sufficient.’
‘I need you for some things,’ she said, in the lingering sensuous voice that came so oddly from her rather thin, ladylike lips, ‘of course I do. It’s just I’d be mad to give all this up.’ By which she meant freedom, independence, control over her own life.
‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Cold and over-educated and selfish.’
‘Just rational,’ she said, but Jane Jarvis was hurt. She took care not to show it. She had her pride. She did not want him; she did not want to lose him. She did not know what she wanted – except her career. Soon, if she played her cards right, she would be head of the London office of HBO.
‘Where were you last night at three in the morning?’ she asked.
‘That has nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘How can it?’
The wind lobbed someone else’s chimney through the neat suburban roof of the home of Julie Rainer, aged thirty, and spoiled its perfection in many ways, and broke the round fish-bowl in which Samson the goldfish spent his timeless, circling days, and Samson died on the wet thick pile of the carpet. Julie was frightened and wept and in the morning rang the vet and asked him, in her lingering bedroom voice, why she brought death to so many small lives and he said they died in the glare of her perfection; and she puzzled over the answer for days. When he rang her the following week and asked her out to dinner she accepted the invitation. She liked the smell of antiseptic on his fingernails and her husband was away.
The wind not only frightened Gina Herriot and Gina’s three children Ben, Sue and Anthony (ages twelve, nine and two) but crashed an oak tree through the bonnet of the car in which they were sleeping. None was hurt, but the frame was bent and the doors were jammed and had to be opened up by the iron claws of the emergency services, as if it were a can of beans and they the can-opener. The car was parked in the road outside the house where the Herriots lived. The children’s father, Cliff Herriot, had been drinking, and it was sometimes easier, as Gina explained to the social worker in her gentle, sexy voice and using language of a violence which issued oddly from her rather thin, ladylike lips, to lock him in than lock him out. Gina seldom confided so much of the detail of her situation to anyone, having her pride, indeed too much of it, but the violence of the wind had frightened her, more than her husband ever did. Fortunately the report went missing, since it was made out at the time the contents of all Social Service file cards were being transferred to disc: or perhaps because fate has a propensity to behave in the same way to people of similar nature. Events fall out, this way or that, beyond our apparent control, yet in keeping with our expectations.
Gina was thirty, but born seven weeks prematurely, and this initial misfortune, this first hard, grating sharpening of the knives of fate, echoed like a sound, a siren song, through her life. ‘Trust Gina’, her neighbours said to each other, ‘to be in the car when the tree fell,’ but they didn’t say it to her face. They feared her calm, quick look of disapproval: she did not like personal comments or appreciate advice. Her nose was broken but she remained chilly in her beauty: like Grace Kelly, they said, in that old film. ‘Why doesn’t she leave Cliff?’ they asked. ‘The brute!’ But they didn’t ask her to her face. Anyway, they knew the answer. She loved him.
As for Alice Morthampton, aged thirty, in the wom
b a week longer than her mother-apparent had expected, the great wind bypassed her: of course it did. Alice was smiled upon by different stars than were Jane, Julie and Gina. The storm cut a swathe through southern England, passing from east to west, taking in London on its way, but Alice was not in London at the time, but in Liverpool, where she was engaged in a photo session: smart clothes against demolished warehouses.
‘Smile, damn you, smile!’ Angus the photographer had implored her during the day, but Alice Morthampton would not, saying in her languid, croaking voice that she knew better than he; she had surely been employed to actively not-smile, since that was her speciality. She spent the night in bed with him, however. ‘You don’t care about me,’ he complained. ‘You only do this for the sake of your career.’ And she sighed and said she wasn’t sure why she did it, she certainly didn’t enjoy it: her career would get on well enough without him, probably better – and as she felt his assault upon her, as it were, weaken and tremble within her at least had the decency to apologize for her habit of speaking the truth, even when least welcomed, so he felt man enough to continue.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Whatever that means,’ she said, apparently unmoved by either desire or emotion, or perhaps too proud to show either. The storm caused a short delay on landing at Heathrow the following morning, true: aircraft were slewed across the runways and took time to move: but on the whole the fates were on Alice’s side.
Jane, Julie, Gina, Alice: these were the clones of Joanna May.
3
After Carl May divorced his much-loved wife, Joanna May, for infidelity and had her lover killed, he lived celibate for several years (as did she) concentrating upon his business interests, which were many and various. But nature abhors a vacuum, in particular one to do with sex, and presently a Mr Hughie Scotland, aged forty-five, a TV and newspaper magnate, fleshy, vigorous and wilful, reached for his address book and ran his finger down the M’s. Then he called Carl May on his personal number, not even leaving it to his secretary to do. She was crying anyway. His staff often did: tears dropped into the word processors, doing them no good at all. But Hughie Scotland was rich enough not to worry.
