by Weldon, Fay
Instead I rang for Trevor and asked him to fetch me the Yellow Pages. I turned to ‘I’ and there found Investigation Agencies, and ran my finger down the list, passing by the Acme and Advance and Artemis (they cluster their names in the A’s, these places, and advisedly) all of whom I had used in the past and from whom I had sucked all possible juice of entertainment, and presently came to Maverick Enquiries, an agreeably innocent name, I thought – and dialled their number. It is my experience that the cool appearance of any Investigative Report, the comings and goings, contacts and activities of the investigatee neatly and impersonally described, acts like antihistamine ointment on a wasp sting to soothe the obsessional and tumultuous mind, if only – like the ointment – for a time.
I did not report to Oliver what I had done. Oliver thought I should just forget Carl. Oliver thought such a thing was possible – of course he did. Oliver was a nice guy, and young with it. But I had been married to Carl for over thirty years, and Carl was intertwined in my mind and body like the strands of dry rot fungi in the damp bricks of an empty house.
Let Oliver say as often as he liked, ‘Forget him, Joanna, as he’s forgotten you,’ the simple fact was that Oliver had not been alive as many years as Carl and I had been married. But I liked to hear him say it. The young find everything so simple. That is why their company is refreshing. The young, moreover, see it as their duty to be happy and do their best to be so. I was brought up to be happy to do my duty, and so tend to equate happiness with boredom.
I would say to Oliver (or words to this effect), ‘If Carl May has forgotten me why hasn’t he found himself a wife, or even a girlfriend; why does he stay celibate?’ and Oliver would reply (or words to this effect), ‘Because he’s so busy making money.’ Oliver was kind. He could have said, ‘Because he’s in his sixties; too old to get it together,’ but he didn’t, in case I was reminded of my own age, and suffered. Isaac was kind, in the same way as Oliver. He too tried to smooth the path that ran before my thoughts. Too kind, when it came to it, to live in the same world as Carl May. My fault.
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out! I wait for the arrival of the soothing ointment, the person from Maverick Enquiries. I want to be told, as I have been told so often in the past, that Carl still lives as a celibate, in memory of me.
6
How had it come about that Joanna Parsons, that English rose, had married Carl May, this upstart from a kennel? Why, because she fell in love with him, of course, and he with her, and her father was too busy and her mother too complacent to interfere with the course of true love. Nor were Carl’s natural parents in any position to object to the match, being dead, and his foster parents were only too happy at this sudden uxorious turn of events: proof that the trouble they had taken with the boy, and the love and money they had expended upon him, were to be rewarded as they had hoped. He had joined the ranks of the achieving middle classes.
Little Joanna – for this is the way fate often works; sealing in our memories what is yet to come – had, when she was a child, read about the strange case of Carl May in a daily newspaper. The image of the abused and abandoned boy stayed in her mind, waiting, as it were, to pounce. The one to whom she, who had so much, could give so much!
How was it possible, thought little Joanna at the age of ten, weeping (unusually for her) into her porridge and cream, served by a maid, the plate so prettily laid on the white linen cloth, how was it possible that a world that contained so much excellence, pleasure and refinement should be the same world in which a boy could be kept in a kennel, beaten and abused, all but starved to death, have to teach himself to read from scraps of newspaper; a boy whose mother would then kill herself and whose stepfather be battered to death in prison at the hands of a vengeful mob? What, all this, and porridge and cream and dab your mouth as well? What a strange and upsetting world it was turning out to be!
‘That child should not be allowed to read the newspapers,’ her father said, observing her tears. The Parsons lived in Harley Street, above the shop: that is to say his consulting rooms. It was Dr Parsons’ joke. Joanna’s father was a physician: his speciality ear, nose and throat; two windows from the soul’s prison on to the outside world, one organ of communication. The doctor’s function was to keep all three bright, clean and properly receptive. Dr Parsons smoked a good deal, and coughed quite often, and presently was to die of lung cancer, but never made the connection between cigarette smoke and his ill health.
‘The newspapers should print only what is happy and good,’ said her mother, ‘not upset people the way they do.’
Dr Parsons had disappointed a family of generals and majors to go into medicine. He was a man of moderate height with regular features, fair hair and bright blue eyes – the latter a recessive gene. He came from the North East – he was of Scandinavian stock.
Mrs Parsons, daughter of a West Country solicitor, had pleased her family by marrying a man a notch or so above her in the social scale, three inches taller, four years her senior, and well able to support her. She was slightly built and reckoned beautiful, with high cheekbones, wide green eyes, and the red hair sometimes inherited from two black-haired parents. She was of mixed Norman and Celtic stock. The strands of the different races met in their child, Joanna: she was beautiful, strong, healthy and bright, as if to encourage just such a blending.
‘Do stop that child snivelling,’ said Dr Parsons. ‘Take away that newspaper.’ The maid did so.
Mrs Parsons dabbed Joanna’s eyes tenderly while rebuking her crossly. ‘You have no business crying,’ she said. ‘Remember there are others far worse off than you!’
It is the custom of intelligent and competent men to marry women less intelligent and less competent than themselves. So mothers often have daughters brighter than they, and fathers have sons more stupid. It does not make for happiness. Nature looks after the race, not the individual.
Joanna stopped crying the better to puzzle it all out. But she did not forget Carl May. She saved him up, as it were, till later: stored him in her mind. One day she would make it all up to him. In the meantime she learned her letters and presently Latin and Greek, at an all-girls’ school, and amazingly nobody stopped her, for the more a girl knows the more trouble she has finding a husband who knows more. But then prudence prevailed and she went on not to university but to a finishing school in Switzerland, where, in the interests of a future marriage, she was taught the mastery of flower arrangements, the organizing of dinner parties, the proper control of drunks (speak firmly but politely), servants (likewise), and the finer points of deportment. She ‘came out’ gracefully, being presented at Court, in the traditional way, when the ceremony was revived at the end of the war, and at her very first dance just so happened to meet Carl May, a pale, intense, not very tall but good-looking young man who worked at the Medical Research Council in Hampstead. He had not been on Active Service: his was a reserved occupation.
Carl May was famous already as the young man who’d started life in a kennel. Joanna Parsons’ heart went out to him at once: she saw him as the solution to a puzzle which had worried her all her life. His body went out to her, in trust and confidence; and though his head regretted she was not of the titled, moneyed classes, he thought he could put up with that. He needed a wife to look after him and he needed one now. He did not need children, but he did not tell her that, not at once.
‘I love him so much, Mummy,’ said Joanna. ‘I do so want to marry him. I want to make the past up to him. I want to make him happy.’
‘If you love him you should marry him,’ said Mummy. ‘After all, I loved your father.’ It was 1949, the nation was three years into socialism, everything was upside down. The young man had fought through heavy odds to end up well educated and well spoken: what were a few years in a kennel? They would make him appreciate her daughter the more. It was time the girl was out of the house: she made her mother feel faded, dusty and stupid. Mrs Parsons wanted Dr Parsons to herself again.
‘I
want to marry him, Daddy,’ said Joanna, waiting for opposition. But none, to her disappointment, came.
‘Why not?’ was all her father said. He’d rather she’d married a doctor and perpetuated a race of physicians; he’d rather the young man had faced up to Hitler directly, but those few hard early years should at least help keep the young man’s feet on the ground, and besides, Dr Parsons was busy. Men had brought back odd diseases from the African deserts and the jungles of the Far East; ears heard wrongly, noses smelt falsely and words came strangely from tortured throats. And it was time the girl was out of the house. The vivid presence of the daughter made him discontented with the mother.
Only Joanna’s Aunt Anne was against the match: she said, ‘the child who’s beaten grows up to beat,’ but she was years ahead of her time and regarded as an hysteric. What a hopeless doctrine it would be, if true! That we never recovered from our past! What price progress then? For what applied to individuals applied to nations, and societies too. So much the world was beginning to see.
Now Joanna was sixty, and disgraced: she had failed, in the end, to make the past up to her husband, failed to make him happy. And Carl was sixty-three. Age wears out the resolution of youth: or look at it another way – the past seeps through into the present, as the garish colour of underlying old wallpaper, left unstripped for one reason or another, but usually financial, will eventually show through to the pale expensive layer on top and spoil everything.
7
‘She should be thoroughly punished for making you so unhappy,’ said Bethany to Carl, when he ran through his life for her, the way new lovers do.
‘My mother is dead,’ he said, surprised.
‘I didn’t mean your mother,’ she said. ‘I meant your wife.’
‘Oh that old woman, that Joanna May,’ said Carl, ‘who cares about her?’
Bethany had heard that kind of thing before, for all she was so young. On the night she met Carl, she turned over in bed and said, ‘I’m twenty-four going on forty-two and you’re sixty-three going on thirty-six, so who’s counting?’ And Carl stopped counting there and then, though of course the world did not.
That first night he said to her, ‘You’re the second woman I’ve slept with in all my life,’ and she said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and he did not care if she believed or not: he just got out of bed to make some calls to Australia, and so she believed him.
‘I was totally faithful to Joanna all my married life,’ he said, when he had finished his calls and got back into bed. He had skinny white hairless shins but she did not care. ‘That was my folly.’
‘What happened?’ asked Bethany, though she knew pretty well; these things do not go unnoticed, even in circles of power, where policemen seldom enter in.
‘I found her with another man,’ said Carl, easily, though this was the first time for several years he had found words for the event. Well, who had there been to speak to? And in so saying, he bound Bethany to himself, or so she thought. She was safe with him now, she told herself: he would not, could not, surely, pass her on to some subordinate.
‘What did you do?’ asked Bethany audaciously, and audacity was rewarded, as it so often is.
‘I killed him,’ said Carl, even more easily. ‘That is to say, I had him killed. But it amounts to the same thing.’
Bethany wondered how the deed had been done, but did not like to ask. Screams in the soft suburban night had many a time disturbed her childish sleep; she had never liked to ask. Once she did and her mother slapped her. ‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ Mother said, and Bethany had believed her.
‘Why him not her?’ Bethany enquired further, now, of Carl. ‘Most men kill the woman and leave the man.’ Twenty-four going on forty-two, no doubt about it, reared in a whorehouse! The things she knew for all she never asked.
‘I left her alive,’ said Carl dreamily, ‘to suffer from the loss of me.’
‘Most women left alone for that reason,’ said Bethany, ‘just find someone else.’
‘Not when they’re old,’ said Carl. ‘Don’t you want me to tell you how I disposed of her lover?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said, so he didn’t. Confidences are dangerous. Witnesses get killed. Those who know too much disappear. The world is not a safe place, even for the well intentioned; especially the well intentioned.
‘Why did Joanna betray me?’ asked Carl May, that first night, he who so seldom displayed ignorance or doubt, thus suddenly loquacious. ‘I don’t know much about women. What did my wife need that she didn’t have? I still can’t understand it. We’d been married nearly thirty years. She was never much interested in sex; what did she want with another man? She had more than enough to do – the house to look after and so forth; I was good to her: attentive when I had the time: generous – she could spend as much money as she liked on clothes, though she never would: ask Joanna to choose between Dior and Marks & Spencer and she’d choose Marks & Spencer. It was her background – middle of middle. Revenge of some kind? Insanity? She liked animals more than people: she said so: it hurt me. She had a little grey cat which died. That upset her. And then of course the dogs – it’s true I got rid of the dogs. But she never found out about that. It can’t have had anything to do with that. No, it was just in her female nature, buried deep, but there it was. The need to betray, to spoil, to turn what is good bad. The bitch goddess, at it again.’
‘How do you mean, Carl? Got rid of the dogs?’
He was not in the habit of explaining himself, and she knew it. But still she asked, and he replied, as she knew he would. As he trusted her body, so he began to trust her mind.
‘I was jealous,’ said Carl May to Bethany. ‘I didn’t like the way she stroked the dogs. I didn’t like the way they nuzzled her, as if they’d been there many a time before. Or how she’d talk to them instead of me. It upset me – a kind of spasm attacked my throat: such a lump in it I couldn’t swallow. Once, looking at her with them, I almost fainted. A lot of people depend upon me. I have to keep myself steady for their sake. I had the animals stolen: I was going to sell them; then I realized I’d have to have them poisoned. You know how dogs will find their way back home. But enough of all that.’
‘You did the right thing,’ said Bethany, who felt quite safe, having no dogs to poison, no lover (so far) for Carl May to destroy.
Bethany knew well enough the value of the benefits she offered her new lover; how hard, once enjoyed, they were to do without: the sheer surprise, the sudden joyful restoration of self-esteem, as conferred by the sexual act when performed with the right (even though unlikely – especially the unlikely) person. Moreover, Bethany surprised even herself: she had never known the magic work so well before: not in the many sometimes profitable, sometimes distressing couplings of her adolescent days; not even when she moved away from home and the suburbs to the nightclubs of the fashionable world, not even then had she and whoever come even near it; no, not even with Hughie Scotland, Carl’s predecessor, not for all his fame as a media stud. Those others had not seemed to notice any lack of anything. Those others had given her money, cars, racing tips, sexual satisfaction, all kinds of things – but what Carl May gave Bethany, in return for his pleasure, was confidence. And what she felt he felt too. Oh yes, she was safe enough. He wouldn’t want to do without her. So Bethany believed. So Joanna had believed.
‘You be careful,’ said Patsy, Bethany’s mother, when Bethany reported back to her that she was moving on from Hughie Scotland to Carl, and rather liked the new arrangement. ‘Don’t go falling in love. Love’s all misery and muddle and never any profit.’
‘Don’t talk like that!’ said Bill, Bethany’s father, to his wife. ‘You and I are in love, always have been, and look at the profit we’ve made! Look at the child we made! Our Bethany, child of love. No wonder she’s sought after; and fate is on her side, it’s obvious. Carl May! That really is the big time.’
Patsy and Bill, ex-flower-folk, kept a house of moderate ill fame in
an outer-London suburb, halfway down a very long quiet street. They went together to local pubs: he brought home lonely men, she brought home lonely women. They brought them together in the upstairs bedrooms of the large suburban house, charging an agency fee. Bill mowed lawns for the neighbours; Patsy would meet their children out of school if they were ever in a fix: they were an obliging pair, they took care to be, no one ever complained. Where did altruism stop, self-interest begin? Hard to tell. Whoever can, of other people or themselves?
Patsy and Bill met in the fifties, at the cinema. Gigi was showing: Audrey Hepburn of the wide brown eyes as the girl reared in the brothel who found true love, Maurice Chevalier as her protector. ‘Thank heaven for little girls,’ he sang, with all the faux-innocence of that sickly decade. There at the cinema, to that tune, Patsy and Bill fell in love, and reaffirmed that love at a rerun in the sixties, at a half-empty local cinema, while they were trawling for custom amongst the dispossessed and empty-lifers at a Tuesday matinée, and there, in the back row, Bethany was conceived in a fit of wholesome life-trust. How else should they rear her but as Gigi was reared? So the beauty advice came from women’s magazines, and the style was suburban not fin-de-siècle Parisian, but never mind, never mind! Bethany was created.
And Patsy and Bill, proud in their achievement, while valuing the joy of sex, all sex, and perhaps overvaluing Bethany their daughter, for a time all but priced her out of the market; many was the boring night she spent alone: lying empty, as a house may lie empty while its value increases. That was when she was fifteen. Noticing what was happening, they brought the price down.
All things are chance, thought Bethany, who bore no malice against her parents, no resentment for the manner of her upbringing, or thought she did not. I might have been born in Africa in time of drought, she thought, and had stick arms and legs, and a stomach which stuck out: I might have been born an Eskimo, and hardly seen my legs and arms at all, so cold would it be to undress: as it was I was born to Patsy and Bill, and if they had not been so foolish, so trusting, and so adored Audrey Hepburn, would I have been born at all? And now here I am with Carl, and happy and safe, so what’s the point of complaining? But he still hasn’t got his wife out of his system. Something must be done about that.
