by Weldon, Fay
‘Let me be blunt and to the point,’ he said.
‘You always are,’ said Carl.
‘I’m in a fix,’ said Scotland. ‘My wife is screaming at me all hours of the day and night –’
‘I thought she was in Iceland,’ said Carl. Susan Scotland, born in Alabama, had recently been appointed US Lady Ambassador to that chilly, prosperous country.
‘She is,’ said Scotland. ‘I don’t mind her screaming in person, but she screams over the international telephone system, and causes me embarrassment, for nothing is private to a man in communications who has enemies; you have no idea the language she uses. I don’t want it to get about, for her sake.’
‘I have to be at a meeting in ten minutes,’ said Carl, ‘or I’ll have enemies.’
‘I’ll be brief,’ said Scotland. ‘I want you to take this bimbo of mine off my hands. These girls topple presidents and bishops, and I don’t want this one toppling me; she could be on the phone to the gutter press day and night; she’d upset my wife.’
‘Hughie,’ said Carl, ‘you are the gutter press,’ but Hughie took no notice. Susan Scotland’s recent distress had been caused by press photographs of her husband and a young woman named Bethany bathing and sporting naked in the waters of a trout farm: they had been published not only in rival newspapers but throughout his own extensive syndicate. ‘You’ll shit in your own nest for a profit,’ she’d wept down the line from Reykjavik, thus shocking and alarming her husband.
‘Hughie,’ said Carl, ‘I don’t need a bimbo. I am a serious person. I am not like you: I am not in the habit of splashing about naked in trout tanks.’
Hughie said, ‘Carl, those were free-range trout, it was a pool, not a tank, and a hot day, and a man can surely do as he wishes on his own property. You know I’ve diversified into fish farms? If my wife wants to see more of me let her come back from Iceland.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Carl, ‘but no. Pay the girl off. Isn’t that what people do? What’s the worry?’
‘You’re a dry old stick,’ said Hughie, ‘and getting worse since your wife left.’
And Carl went to his meeting. But presently he was tempted out to lunch by Hughie: few people can resist the lure of an inside story. Even Carl May could be affected in this way. Hughie, rather disappointingly, chose an obscure restaurant.
‘I can cope with governments,’ said Hughie, ‘and monstrous taxes and creeping socialism but I cannot cope with women. Take this bimbo off my hands. She keeps crying. Why do women spend so much time in tears?’
‘Why me?’ asked Carl, picking at a lemon sole. He ate little, and drank less. He preferred his fish unfilleted.
‘These girls have to move upwards,’ said Hughie, ‘or they get offended, and that’s when the trouble starts. And you have class. I have style but you have class.’
‘Me?’ asked Carl, surprised. ‘Me? Class?’
‘How many women have you slept with in your life?’ asked Hughie.
‘One,’ said Carl. ‘My wife.’
‘That’s class,’ said Hughie. ‘Why don’t you leave that fish alone? It comes from the North Sea; it will have died of pollution, caused by your outfall.’ Carl May was Chief Executive of Britnuc, a corporation which had become involved with the rehabilitation of the old Magnox nuclear power stations, two of them sited on North Sea shores. ‘Freshwater fish are the meat of the future. Do me a favour, I’ll do you a favour.’
‘What?’ asked Carl.
‘I’ll hold the story on the plutonium leak last March at Britnuc A. No one else has got it.’
‘They haven’t got it,’ said Carl, ‘because there wasn’t one.’
‘The public’s too sanguine about nuclear power,’ said Hughie, (How was he to know Chernobyl was to blow?) ‘They need stirring up. So do you. Bethany’s the girl to do it. Those press photos didn’t do her justice.’
‘I only read the financial papers,’ said Carl.
‘Out of touch,’ said Hughie. ‘You don’t want to lose your touch. What you need, mate, is a bit of pain to stir things up again. You’re slipping.’
It seemed to Carl that he would use less energy obliging Hughie Scotland than disobliging him, and so he agreed to take the girl Bethany on to his personal staff, Scotland paying her wages. The rich stay rich by staying mean. Fish with the bones in cost less than fish with the bones removed.
4
‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,’ Carl May whispered to himself and sang,
‘With vassals and serfs by my si-i-de,
And of all the assembly gathered there
You were the joy and the pri-i-de.’
And well might he sing, and thus, as some months later he stepped from the back of a limousine and his sneakered foot touched conquered ground, while the Thames ran by as busy and significant as the ancient Euphrates.
Bethany Turner stepped out from the other side of the limousine and a different tune ran through her head. ‘Shoo fly,’ she whispered and hummed, ‘shoo fly don’t bother me, for I belong to somebody.’ And she thought, of course, if she belonged to somebody, that somebody must be Carl May, her rich grey man, but she was wrong. Bethany loved, like a million million other women, someone who existed only in her head, who would never, in all her life, materialize. She loved a phantom, in whose image Carl May stood.
‘What are you singing?’ she asked Carl.
‘Tunes from the dog-house,’ he said. ‘Tunes from the doghouse, that’s all.’
It was a joke. For Carl’s mother had kept him much of the time, when he was little and hungry and stole, chained up in the dog’s kennel in the yard, to teach him a lesson. His father was a dead dog: his mother was a bitch. That much he learned. ‘Marble Halls’ would drift over the neighbouring fence, from next door’s wind-up gramophone, and sustain his assaulted spirit. The child Carl shivered, he wept, he slept, he dreamed, and later he made the dream come true, as a few, just a few children, can.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What are you singing?’ For Carl heard everything, however soft, especially soft.
‘Tunes from a childhood,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’ As for her, she’d been brought up in a whorehouse. Thrust people down when young and most stay down. A few rise up, like Carl and Bethany, and then if they’re lucky they find each other.
He took her arm in his and they walked off to inspect this especially poignant part of his empire, there beside the Thames, and were happy for at least this one hour: he had found someone he truly desired, whom he could mould to his will, and she had found someone she truly admired, who would do as she wanted; the past, they thought, was now well and truly over. None so dangerous as those who believe they are happy, and are not. They flail around them, laying waste.
How at home they felt, young Bethany, old Carl, in this wasteland of razed warehouses and mean streets. Her high crocodile heels caught in crevices where weeds and grasses still found temporary hold, just enough dusty soil to live. His spongy-soled sneakers made light work of cracked, uneven surfaces. Soon builders and container-gardeners would move in and a new People’s Park spring up all around: fast-food concessions in ferny precincts; disco dancing in leafy glades; Goofy and Peanuts and Garfield fighting it out in flowery pastures. Miniature sheep would graze on new enriched turf for the delight and wonder of young and old; there would be fireworks by night, TV stars by day, entrance £5 per head and few extras, and all thanks to the ingenuity and enterprising thrust of Riverside Gardens plc, the funding of the DTI, the involvement of local government, and Riverside Developments Inc.
Carl May was on the board of both Riverside Gardens and Developments. Six months after its no-doubt-royal opening, Riverside Gardens was destined to pack up its container plants, crate its miniature sheep, fill whole lorries with stacks of well-watered turf and move on to the next inner-city waterside site. Then Riverside Developments would move in, all planning permission and social grants agreed by the local housing authority, to erect high-price housing for those
young professionals who wanted a river view and easy access to the City, and who were prepared to pay for it.
In this way everyone would benefit: not only the people who flocked to the part Disneyland, part Garden Centre of the People’s Park – in particular a thousand thousand dispossessed fathers who needed somewhere to take their children on access weekends – but those who would obtain a minimum of six months’ employment in its running: that is to say craftsfolk, fast-food concessionaires, builders, painters, waitresses, gatekeepers, security men, artists and artistes, cleaners, hedgers and ditchers, occupational therapists and so on. And after they were gone there would be permanent employment for the servicing agents of the young property-owning incomers – janitors, hairdressers, manicurists, dress designers, drivers, dentists and so forth. Yes indeed, all would benefit, and not least the profit and status of Carl May himself: Carl May of Riverside Parks plc, Riverside Developments Inc., and many other interlinking business concerns beside, including the one of which he was Chairman – British Nuclear Agents, Britnuc for short.
Bethany was twenty-four. She wore high crocodile shoes, ginger stockings, suspendered beneath ginger woollen jodhpurs held by leather bands at calf and waist, a not very clean white cotton shirt, highwayman’s style and well unbuttoned, chains of gold butterflies round neck, waist and ankle. Her red hair had been untidily pinned up with a Spanish amber comb: she wore emerald-green contact lenses in her eyes. The look of the wanton was intentional, and as fake as her orgasms: she could do student, or executive wife, or lady doctor just as well. The only school exam she’d ever taken was Drama and she’d got a credit for that. But she could think of easier and livelier ways of making a living than being an actress, and recognized it as folly to waste her father’s training in being what men wanted.
Carl stood 5 foot 10 inches in his shoes, or had done last time he was measured, thirty years ago, in the days when he still needed life insurance to set against mortgages. Suspecting that time might have shrunk him, thinning the discs in his spine, as time does, he now wore elevated shoes. He knew the value of height when dealing with other men: but also that height is in the mind of the observer, it is a matter of bearing rather than actuality. He saw no deceit in the elevated shoes: he would have reached at least 6 foot 3 inches had it not been for severe malnutrition in early childhood, or so he had been told: he knew he was in essence a tall man. He wore carefully casual clothes for this outing with Bethany: he had a natural tendency to be dapper, to wear carnations in buttonholes, which he was at pains to overcome. To dress too carefully was to display nervousness. He had the well-developed chin of those accustomed to telling others what to do. His hair remained thick, though white.
The gap in their ages, the gulf in their manners, their way of dressing, the sense of his wealth in proportion to that wiliness born of helplessness in her, the very place in which they walked – exploiter and exploited (but which was which?) – made their perambulation altogether disreputable. People looked after them puzzled and not altogether pleased, as if expecting something sudden and terrible to happen any minute – as if a bulldog and a kitten, not a man and a woman, were out walking together. But Carl and Bethany saw in their looks only admiration and envy.
Carl and Bethany returned to their limousine to drive over rough ground to a site of special interest, where a brass plaque was to be set into the ground: a place of pilgrimage for future generations.
‘Perhaps,’ said Carl, modestly.
‘How can you doubt it!’ said Bethany, as expected of her.
The mythology of Carl’s past had become familiar to the public, and even to himself: his childhood had indeed, by constant reference, been all but sucked dry of pain, drained of poison. Yet this pain, this poison, he knew well enough was the source of his energy, his power.
‘Let there be buildings!’ Carl May had only to cry, pointing to an arid landscape, and lo, so there would be. In the beginning, it is true, unlovely stubby concrete profitable blocks arose, but then, confidence breeding confidence, came the glassed towers and steel pinnacles of the finest architectural imagination. And all at Carl May’s command – he, who until he was ten had lived in a shed down here by the river, chained with the dogs.
‘Let there be beauty!’ Carl May had only to murmur, he whose stepfather had battered and abused him, and lesser men would scurry forward with trees and flowers – albeit grown in container pots with soil substitute, well sterilized against all insect pests – and yes, there would be beauty, of a sort.
‘Let there be light!’ Carl May ordained, and nuclear power stations sprung up at his command and pumped their power into the National Grid. He, who was rescued by a teacher at the age of ten, half-dead, passed into council care, thence to foster parents and public school, Cambridge, business school and the Institute of Directors. He, who had everything except what he wanted – that is to say that which was not to be bought with money, that cluster of blessings which trip off the tongue as faith, hope and charity.
‘See,’ said the world, ‘anyone can do it. It is perfectly possible to rise above circumstances, however dire those circumstances may have been. An unhappy past can be no excuse for the actions of murderers, sadists, child abusers, wife batterers, criminals of any kind. Carl May did it – so can you!’
It was to revive the pain and thus maintain the level of his achievement that Carl May took green-eyed Bethany down to the banks of the Thames. So, on this very pilgrimage, he had on occasion taken his blue-eyed wife Joanna. But that had been in the days when the mean and horrid streets still stood, before Carl May had conceived the idea of Riverside Parks plc, and Riverside Developments, and the main area of his fame and accomplishment (apart from his notable capacity to overcome the rigours of the past) was seen to be in the new world of nuclear power, the harnessing of the atom for mankind’s advancement, that peace, happiness and prosperity might reign henceforth, and so forth.
‘Without my wife,’ Carl May had said for all the world to hear on radio and TV, ‘I am nothing.’ He was brave enough to bare his soul in public, or at any rate such part of it as he wished the public to know. ‘The love of a good woman’, he had joked, ‘behind any great man!’ only half-joking, and popular psychologists at once put pen to paper. ‘You see,’ they said, ‘the wife can do for a man what the mother did not. No one should give up hope: no personality is irredeemably lost, destroyed. The narrow eyes of the tormented, anxious child, the thin mouth of the frightened child – they need not be permanent. With time, and love, those eyes will open wide, the mouth fill out. Fear not.’ Carl May believed it too.
5
A couple of days before Chernobyl went up, making a large world into a small one, by reason of our common fear of radiation – the invisible enemy, the silent murderer, that which, like age, creeps in the dark – in this case consisting of a myriad, all-but-immortal particles, too small for the eye to see, of one man-made radioactive isotope or another (selenium, caesium, strontium – you name it, we invented it) flying through the air and causing death and decay wherever it fell, at any rate in the popular imagination – I, Joanna May, read of another strange event.
A girl in Holloway, doing three years for cheque offences, plucked out her eye. The technical term for this is ‘orbisecto de se’, and very nasty it is, for those who have to clear up afterwards and put flesh and head back together. The human eye, if you regard it without emotion, is a glob of light-sensitive jelly attached by strings of nerves and muscles to the convoluted tissue mass of the brain, in itself a fine ferment of electrical discharges. But it works, it works. The ‘you’, the ‘me’, the ‘I’ – behold, it sees! The soul in the dark prison that is the flesh looks out through the senses at the world: the senses are the windows to that dark prison. And what the soul longs to see is beauty; smiles, grace, balance – both physical and spiritual – love in the maternal eye. It longs to see evening light over summer landscapes: crimson roses in green grass: birds flying, fish leaping, happy children playi
ng – all that stuff. Yes, all that stuff.
What the contemporary eye gets to see on a good day is Mickey Mouse: it can just about put up with that, some joke is intended in the ugliness. The white lacy Terylene of a wedding dress makes up for a lot. A nice strong erect penis, viewed, can reconcile a lustful girl to some grimy back alley. But three years in Holloway! What is the eye, the I, to make of that!
Three years in Holloway, three years of grey concrete, the stuff of anti-life, the stuff that keeps radioactivity in (at least temporarily) or out: three years of looking at old Tampaxes in corners and cigarette stubs and grime and grey tins holding the brown slime of institution stew, and any sane person would be tempted to pluck their eye out, let alone the mad, who more than anyone proceed by punning. The word in action. The deranged pursue their sanity down the only alley known to them: giving language more meaning, more significance, than it was ever meant to have.
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. And quite right too. Broadmoor’s a handsome place, set grandly in the wild hills: a great sweep of dramatic sky; old bricks not new concrete. One eye in rural Broadmoor’s better than two in suburban Holloway, any day. She plucked her eye out and got transferred to Broadmoor. That’s where one-eyed girls go.
I wanted to write to Carl to say, ‘Carl, Carl, did you read about the girl in Broadmoor who plucked out her eye?’ but how could I? I had betrayed Carl, spoiled the achievement which was his life, made of him a murderer (how could one doubt Carl’s hand in Isaac’s death: as well believe that Kennedy’s assassin – and his assassin’s assassin, and his assassin’s assassin’s assassin – all died of random acts) and Carl May had divorced my mind as well as my body – of course he had. And that was the hardest thing of all to bear.
