by Weldon, Fay
‘Well,’ said Bethany, ‘it seems to me your wife lived an empty life and was a shallow woman and you’re well rid of her. But perhaps her life was boring. Perhaps she was just bored. Some women will do anything not to be bored.’
‘She could have gone to classes,’ said Carl. ‘She had no reason to be bored. She had me. Boredom is no excuse for infidelity.’
‘She should have had babies,’ said Bethany, ‘with all that time to spare. Why didn’t she?’ Not that she wanted or anticipated children herself, belonging to a younger generation, one which did not define women as people who had babies.
‘She did,’ said Carl, cunningly, ‘but she never knew it.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Bethany. ‘How can you have a baby and not know it?’
‘In the same way,’ said Carl, ‘as you can have an hysterical pregnancy and be convinced you’re growing a baby when you’re not. That’s what Joanna did to me when she was thirty. She got morning sickness: her belly swelled up. She looked terrible. I took her to this doctor friend of mine, Dr Holly; a very clever man. He just looked her over and sent her out of the room and said to me, “Your wife and Mary Queen of Scots! There’s no baby there, only air and wind.” “What’s the cure?” I asked. “Love and kisses,” he said, “or failing that, a mock abortion, a ceremony of death.” Almost nothing he didn’t know about women. So that’s what we did. Told her she was to have a termination, anaesthetized her, and whee-e-ee, like a balloon going down, went Joanna’s belly. When she woke up she was cured. My lovely wife, slim and fresh and all for me again!’
‘But that’s not having babies and not knowing it,’ said Bethany, ‘that’s not having a non-baby.’
‘Oh so clever she’ll cut herself,’ said Carl May, his old finger running sharply down the skin between Bethany’s breasts, where she should have buttoned her blouse, lifting the white nylon rosebud in the centre of her bra and snapping it back so she jumped. ‘Wait! Joanna knew well enough I didn’t want children: I told her the day before our wedding: she accepted that when she married me. I took that phantom pregnancy of hers badly, an imagined one seemed to me worse than the real thing; let her conscious mind be loyal and loving, in her unconscious, in the depths of her being, Joanna May betrayed me, went against me.’
‘You were to be all in all to each other! Just you, just her! I think that’s sweet – my mother and father were like that, in the beginning. Then they had me, and felt differently.’
‘How could Joanna and I have had children? Do you understand just what sort of inheritance I have? What do you think it’s been like for me, knowing what kind of parents I had, what sort of bestial blood flows in my veins?’
‘Your parents were mentally ill, Carl, that’s all. They must have been.’
‘That’s all? Insanity? All?’
How white he suddenly was. She ran her finger over his lips. They were dry and trembling. He calmed. She had not known he could be upset. She felt privileged, and powerful. Carl May, Chairman of Britnuc, power in the land, TV personality, calmed by Bethany’s young finger.
‘I had myself sterilized when I was eighteen,’ he said. ‘A vasectomy. I would be the end of the line: that particular experiment of nature’s. I chopped down the family tree.’
‘Joanna didn’t mind?’
‘Joanna didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Why should she? What difference did it make? She understood my mind when we were married; we would have no children. There’d be just the two of us.’
‘Tea for two,’ said Bethany dreamily. ‘Just me and you. Two for tea and baby makes three.’
‘Baby makes five,’ said Carl sharply, and nipped her finger suddenly with teeth made sharp and fine by the passage of sixty-three years. ‘While she was opened up we took away a nice ripe egg; whisked it down to the lab: shook it up and irritated it in amniotic fluid till the nucleus split, and split again, and then there were four. Holly thought we could have got it to eight, but I said no. Growth begins so quickly: there wasn’t time. A truly vigorous egg, that one. We kept the embryos in culture for four whole weeks, had four nice healthy waiting wombs at hand and on tap, for implantation. All four took like a dream: there they grew until they popped into the world, alive and kicking and well. Four nice assorted ladies, desperate for babies, got four very pretty little girls: little Joanna clones. Not cloning in the modern sense, but parthenogenesis plus implantation, and a good time had by all. We kept it quiet. So quiet one of the mothers didn’t even know we’d done it. What passive creatures women are: they just lie there, trusting, and let the medical profession do what it wants.’
‘That’s two for tea and four babies make six, Carl, not five.’
Carl bit Bethany again. ‘Wrong!’ This time she yelped, and quite reminded him of his younger days. ‘There wasn’t anyone to tea. There ain’t a father in the whole wide world,’ crooned Carl May, ‘that gave help to my poor old dutch. All on her lonesome ownsome. Her DNA and hers alone. She was thirty. She was growing little hairlines round her eyes: so I gave time itself a kick in the teeth. It seemed a pity to let it all go to waste, when you could save it so easily.’
‘Like an old Magnox power station,’ said Bethany; he looked at her sharply.
‘Don’t be so cutesy,’ he said, not even bothering to bite, so she desisted.
‘Well,’ said Bethany, ‘all I know is if it was me I’d have told her. I’d never have managed to keep it to myself. I can’t keep the smallest secret, let alone cloning someone and not telling them!’
‘It’s sensible to keep things in reserve,’ said Carl May. ‘Information may not be wisdom, let no one tell you it is: but knowledge – ah, when it’s secret knowledge is power.’ And Carl May looked at Bethany hard, until she wondered which of her secrets he knew and wasn’t saying.
‘No,’ said Carl May, ‘she’ll never get it out of me. Let her go to her grave not knowing. She chose loneliness: let her be forever lonely.’
‘But now I know,’ Bethany said, ‘what about me?’ and wished at once she hadn’t opened her mouth.
‘You’ll keep it to yourself,’ Carl May said, and she thought, yes, I will: on the whole I better had. I can see I better had.
‘One day you might tell her,’ she said. ‘You never know what’s going to happen next. One day you might, to punish her. To take away her singularity.’
‘A long word for such a little girl,’ he said, and pinched her with sharp-filed fingernails – she’d given him a manicure: he enjoyed that: he on the chair, she crouched on the floor, red hair falling – better, she could see, in future, to file his nails less sharp or use words that were less long, or both.
‘What can happen next,’ asked Carl May, ‘that I don’t know about: what can surprise a man like me? I win. I always win. I need to win, as other people need sex, or food, and that’s all there is to it.’
Bethany shivered, and hoped Carl May hadn’t noticed, but of course he had. So she looked and spoke as bright as could be. ‘I wouldn’t like to have a lot of little me’s walking about,’ she observed. ‘One of me is quite enough,’ and the jabbing nail turned into a stroking hand, a pressing mouth, and she felt safe: yes, she felt safe enough. One of her, she told herself, was more than enough for him. Besides, she wasn’t perfect, not like Joanna: on the contrary, she was flawed; she knew it: people had told her so often enough. Now she was glad, not sorry, Carl May had noticed. If the penalty of perfection was reproduction she could do without it. Her bone structure was not good: she was pretty rather than beautiful – she had her mother’s chin: it would droop and double by the time she was thirty: she was all artifice: she inspired lust not love: she was cunning not wise: bright not clever: could memorize well but not categorize easily: was a good guest but an over-effusive hostess: affectionate but not constant – being able, at will, to switch that affection in the direction which most suited her, and often tempted to do so. These things Bethany knew about herself. She was in fact too vulnerable to the passage of time. She wa
s the kind who went off early. Never mind, when she lost her capacity to charm she would start a business: an employment agency: a chain of them perhaps: Carl May would help her, pension her off: she would be powerful through money, that safe and snazzy stand-in for sexual pleasure. She liked to be safe. She didn’t like to be bored. It was difficult to keep a balance between the two.
‘What a pity you can’t have babies,’ she said, quite forgetting to whom she was speaking. ‘I’d like to have your babies. Then I’d always have something of you to love!’ Men liked to hear that kind of junk, but Carl merely shook his head impatiently, as if some gnat had bitten him, so she shut up and let him get on with it.
8
The day they went down to the river, Carl May returned to the subject of his ex-wife, and his secret knowledge. He and Bethany sat side by side in the back of the limousine. Perhaps he thought she was too confident: he liked to have her a little frightened. He knew how to frighten her. It’s always pleasant to do what you’re good at doing: hard to refrain from doing it. Anyway, Carl May had said, ‘You could always give birth to one of my clones. I could use your womb to implant me.’
‘What a lovely idea!’ said Bethany, in her best and politest voice. ‘They can’t really do that, can they?’
‘Oh yes they can,’ said Carl May. ‘I’ll take you down to my friend Holly. There’s an advance on freezing now: the rage is all for drying: keeps the nuclei intact. It used to be just frogs and below: now it’s sows and upwards. Shall I take you down to Holly? Prickly Holly?’ He pinched the tip of her little finger, and they watched it turn blue between the bloodless nails of his thumb and third finger.
‘He must be rather old by now,’ said Bethany, and wished she hadn’t.
‘No older than me,’ said Carl May, but added kindly, ‘Lost his nerve, lost his bottle, you’re quite right,’ and he let her finger go. She sucked it. He liked that.
‘One of you,’ said Bethany, ‘is more than enough for me. I’d be exhausted. I want you, not your clone. What would be the point of a clone?’
He nipped her neck. She was covered with little bruises in tender places: mementoes of Carl, he called them. She loved them.
‘It would come in handy,’ he said. ‘It could stand in for me here and there – at banquets, for example, when all anyone needs is my presence; when my opinion counts for nothing. It would save my digestion.’
‘But what would you do while you stayed home?’ asked Bethany, whose idea of pleasure it was to be out, not in.
‘Learn not to need to win,’ he said and, as if to make up for a lifetime of over-controlled Joanna May, flung himself upon Bethany, digging his teeth vampire-like into her neck, tearing her blouse, his hand approaching her crotch from the top, not the bottom, down between her clothing and her skin, forcing her belt to give and break, without any thought at all for the presence of Philip the chauffeur in the front seat. Philip was indeed embarrassed by their moans and groans, but Carl May paid well: it was a privilege to work for such an employer, who had led a lonely and prudent life far too long, and the girl was not reluctant, on the contrary, so he put up with the embarrassment easily enough. He had faced worse in the course of his job – the poisoning of Joanna’s dogs for one thing, the backing his car into and over Joanna’s lover Isaac for another, as required of him by Carl May. Who was he to object to anything? What kind of moral stance could he take? What outrage would now be justified? Once a servant, an employee, has decided that loyalty to the one who pays him supersedes all other moral obligations, and has acted upon that decision, to change the mind becomes impractical, not to say dangerous. Reason and self-interest must be called upon to counteract the pangs of sensibility.
Philip kept his eyes on the road and drove slowly beside razed warehouses, over broken tarmac, where the weeds kept bursting through.
‘You know far more about me than you should,’ said Carl to Bethany, after his final climactic gasp.
‘It was all just a story anyway,’ said Bethany prudently. ‘All that about clones. Just to frighten me.’
‘Of course,’ he said. Then he added, ‘But just think, if there were more of me, and more of you, how much pleasure we would bring into the world!’ and he actually smiled, and she remembered that she loved him and was pleased to give him pleasure.
He slept a little. Bethany stared out of the window on to a broken landscape. Philip parked the car. His employer woke up with an old man’s start: a shiver: where was he? The river air was in his nostrils: the air of his childhood: a flowing tide of soot and despair mixed: there in his mind for ever, lying low but always there. He got out of the car. Bethany followed. The sun went in and a cold wind blew across the river.
‘I brought you down here,’ said Carl to Bethany, ‘so you could see for yourself how I began. Of course it’s all gone now – but where we stand used to be the corner of Jubilee Road and Bosnia Street. This is where the brass plaque is to be.’
And Bethany said, ‘If it was all so nasty, why do you want to come back? Or is it like a loose tooth? You want to jiggle it even though it hurts?’
And Carl knew he had been deceived in her: she was not after all what he hoped. He was disappointed in her, hurt; he had forgotten what it was to be disappointed, hurt. Bethany did not begin to understand the significance of his achievement. She belonged to the TV age: nothing surprised, nothing impressed: real life rolled off a scriptwriter’s pen. To have started here, yet come to this! Magnificent, but she could not see it.
The chauffeur buttoned his coat and straightened his cap, feeling the alteration in his master’s mood: though if you’d asked him he’d have said, ‘Just something in the air, that’s all: just something in the air that chilled me, reminded me of this and that. I wouldn’t work for anyone else: not for twice the wages and half the hours. It’s an honour.’ He’d been in tanks in the war and killed men for less reason than he killed for Carl, which was from loyalty, obedience and self-interest mixed.
‘But it’s all such a long time ago,’ said Bethany, compounding her error. She felt the cold wind in her hair and round her chin and cutting down against the white and tender skin of her still partly unbuttoned bosom; harsh against the grazed skin where he had sucked and bitten her neck. Had he told her where they were going she would have worn boots and brought a scarf. With almost every step over the uneven ground she caught the leather on her high heels; they would be badly snagged: she would have to have them rewrapped. He was thoughtless.
‘If you’re not interested we can go home,’ said Carl. She understood then, too late, too late, that the cold wind was somehow his doing, and said, ‘Of course I’m interested,’ and then, ‘They say one’s childhood is never over. Do you think that’s true?’ But it was no use: the cold wind whipped and zapped through her red hair, and that was the only answer she got.
‘You are not sufficiently interested,’ Carl May said, ‘for me to waste any more of my day on you.’
They rode home in silence, to the big boring house at 20 Eton Square, Belgravia, where the May collection of Egyptian art and artefacts was housed in what used to be the stable block, open to the public on the first Wednesday of every month. Very few of the public in fact took the trouble to attend. The windows had been blocked up to save specimens from the dangers of direct natural light; the ceiling rose to a central peak: the single door was arched: the room, though vast, was for all the world like a kennel. It was a dismal place. But Carl liked it, which was all that mattered.
As the chauffeur pulled up outside 20 Eton Square, a small group of reporters rushed to meet the car. Microphones were pushed under Carl’s nose and flashbulbs popped. News was coming through that the power station at Chernobyl had blown, and in the light of the fact that two of Britnuc’s plants, like Chernobyl, were WCRs, water-cooled reactors, could he make a statement? Was the public in any danger?
‘Making electricity is not like making a sponge cake,’ he said kindly in his soft gravelly voice. ‘It is dangerous and t
hings go wrong. When I know exactly what has happened at Chernobyl, if anything, I will be in a position to make a statement. Not before.’
‘But, Mr May, the public is worried.’
‘The public is right to be worried,’ he said, smiling, and closed the front door, swiftly, and upon Bethany’s right foot. The picture of the snagged and torn leather upon the six-inch heel of her shoe was upon the front cover of a tabloid newspaper the next day. ‘May Faces Snags,’ it said, going on to speak of the unseen killer which now stalked Eastern Europe. Other newspapers relegated the item to the middle pages. It was one of those stories which was to grow and grow, as wind patterns in the upper atmosphere made nonsense of national boundaries.
Carl went straight to his study to make telephone calls, his face still set cold against Bethany.
Bethany was a practical young woman. She dumped her shoes in the bin, feeling that since they brought her no luck they might as well be discarded, changed into more restrained clothes, dabbed ointment on her neck and, in the cold light of the bathroom, brought her hair under better control. She did not like the bathroom. It was too large, too full of marble, too brightly lit, and the washbasins were antique and their porcelain, being finely crazed, never looked quite clean. She did not like the house; Joanna’s house. She did not like the servants; Joanna’s servants – who did not like her, with her tiny knickers left everywhere and her strewn junk jewellery and hairpins, and her waterproof make-up smeared on sheets and cushions: but that was her role; how Carl liked it; they would just have to get used to it. In fact Bethany came to the conclusion she did not like Joanna, whose ladylike presence in the house was still too clearly felt for comfort.
