by Weldon, Fay
The woman had no natural taste, that was apparent. She had re-created her father’s consulting rooms in her husband’s house: dark, highly polished mahogany furniture, dusty pale-green velvet curtains, over-plump greeny chintzy sofas and blue-and-white encrusted Chinese jars of arguable value standing on every available ledge. Twice a week the housekeeper would arrange fresh flowers – unnaturally large blooms – in the bleak white fluted floor-standing Italian vases which stood boringly in each corner of the room.
Bethany assumed, and rightly, that the twice weekly arrival of the peculiar flowers was an expression of gratitude from whatever container-gardener firm had been granted the contract to supply the Thameside Garden Park – a gift, of course, not a bribe. Bethany well understood the difference. Many a gift had she received in her life, before or after a favour. But she could not be bribed – that would be an indignity.
Bethany bent to smell the flowers, which seemed to occupy some point between gladioli and chrysanthemum and withdrew her face at once. They had been sprayed with a strong flower perfume somewhere between violet and rose. It was not her place to comment or improve. She thought longingly of her parents’ suburban garden, filled with nothing more exotic than pansies and roses, and settled down to read The Layman’s Guide to Nuclear Power. It was one thing to appear ignorant; quite another to be so.
9
Carl was on the phone to a certain Gerald Coustain. This is how their conversation went:
Gerald Coustain said, ‘What you’re telling me is that there is no indication of additional radioactivity from any outside source at either Britnuc A or B?’
Carl May said, ‘That is correct. I would add that this is hardly surprising since our instrumentation is not designed to pick any up.’
There was a short silence from Gerald Coustain, who worked for the Department of Energy.
‘You’re being remarkably frank with me,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ enquired Carl, who was still in what Joanna had learned to call ‘a mood’. Bethany had failed him. It was not his time he feared to waste, so much as his emotion – and what were referred to in a booklet he had recently received through the post on the subject of AIDS as ‘bodily fluids’. He was aggrieved. He had made himself vulnerable. It was dangerous. If, as he felt, the experiences of his childhood energized his present, a fire to be fanned and nurtured back to life, that fire was as like as not to go out altogether under the thwack of cold water delivered by Bethany. There was a lot at stake here. A long time ago! What had that to do with it?
‘I have done everything the inspectorate required,’ said Carl May. ‘I have followed its instructions to the letter, no matter how absurd those instructions were. Nowhere could I find regulations appertaining to the upper limits of instrumentation.’
Again there was a pause.
‘Nuclear power is a new industry,’ said Coustain, his voice receding as if he held the receiver further and yet further away. ‘It is essential that the spirit of the law rather than the letter be followed.’
‘Come off it,’ said Carl May. ‘You don’t want Britnuc A and Β off line every time instrumentation shows a rise in local activity any more than I do. You fellows have your own information-gathering network. Don’t come bleating to me every time the shit hits the fan.’
Coustain, thinking he should perhaps make a virtue out of necessity, asked Carl May if he would make some reassuring statement on TV the next day: along the lines he had sketched out: and so Carl May did, in the programme seen by his ex-wife, Joanna May.
10
‘God’s last laugh,’ I said, ‘before he flew off,’ I, the original of the clones of Joanna May. I said it, of course, more for the sake of a neat phrase than anything else: my way of vaguely invoking the name of God whilst yet dismissing him. God was there once, I safely maintain, thus explaining away some intimation of immortality, some general notion we all have of ‘more to this than meets the eye’ whilst disposing of him, whoever he may be, for all practical purposes.
‘Joanna, define your terms!’ – Miss Watson, 1942. A certain Miss Watson taught me English language when I was a schoolgirl. She was in her eighties. Young women were at the time busy making explosives in factories to blow young men up: they had no time to teach their juniors anything. The old were brought out of retirement to be of some use, while the young finished each other off. No wonder the war was so popular with everyone. A long, violent, riotous, disgraceful party! Miss Watson died of a stroke on VE day; and quite right too – the party was over.
If I’m forced into a corner by the ghost of Miss Watson, who returns to me often in dreams, I would define God as the source of all identity: the one true, the only ‘I’ from which flow the myriad, myriad ‘you’s’. We acknowledge him in every ‘I’ we so presumptuously utter. Now what could be more all-pervasive than that?
Carl once told me God flew off the day Fat Boy was exploded in the Nevada Desert, when man entered the atomic age (though of course man – and woman – had in fact entered it long before, when Pierre and Marie Curie first started sieving and filtering their dusty mounds of pitchblende), leaving the field to the likes of my husband. But I prefer to think He flew off when the first flicker of television appeared upon the screen. He knew he was beaten. For Lucifer read John Logie Baird, inventor of TV, toppling the Ultimate Identity from his seat of power: spoiling the currency of ‘I’ forever. The ‘you’ that is the real ‘I’, the one perceived by others, the one understood by the child in that initial bright vision, now watches the ‘you’ that that you perceives. There is no end to it. Our little shard, our little divine shred of identity, so precariously held, is altogether lost as we join the oneness that is audience. My clones and I. After I found out about the clones I began to worry a lot about ‘I’.
As for evil – which everyone knows is the absence of God – what could it do when God took off but take up residence in the source of its trouble. The minute parents, those stoical folk, look away, evil creeps out of the TV set and settles in the wallpaper. The children ask for sneakers now, not proper shoes. Why? Because sneakers have long laces, long enough to hang a person by. And every year the laces get longer and tougher, the better to do it; to hang, to dangle yourself or others. Why bother to preserve the ‘I’? It’s seen too much of sights not fit for human eyes, it is not fit to live. It no longer believes in life: all it gets to see is corruption, seared, torn and melting flesh. There is no ‘I’ left for any of us. The great ‘I’ has fled, say the eyes in the wallpaper: only the clones remain, staring.
If the I offend thee pluck it out. Idopectomy.
My children who are myself pun too. Bloody clones. That was Carl’s doing.
On hearing the first news from Chernobyl, I sent Trevor the butler to the Post Office with a telegram to Carl May my ex-husband saying, ‘Yah boo sucks, signed Milly Molly Mandy’, but Trevor came back saying the Post Office now sent only greetings telegrams – Happy Birthday, Congratulations on your Wedding, and so forth – and I decided silence was the better policy. One must go with the flow of events. If waves slap against your face, turn back to shore.
The next day Carl made a statement to the press saying (or words to this effect), ‘It can’t happen here. Our reactors are constructed on a different principle from theirs. Children may safely drink milk though sheep may no longer safely graze on the uplands.’ His lies were soft and persuasive, as ever: and his face calm and handsome. It had the tranquillity of a death mask: as if someone had placed a waxed cloth over his corpse’s face – after it had been composed by the undertaker, of course – and moulded it into shape and propped body and mask up before the cameras and used puppet strings to work the mouth and eyelids. Carl was dead, pretending to be living. That is what a diet of lies does for you – and now I am no longer with him what else will Carl choose to eat but lies? There is no nourishment in them, the spongy junk food of the mind. The soul dies from malnutrition.
I longed to tell him so – yah, boo, told y
ou so – to ease the itch of spited, spiteful love, watch the pale dead face suffuse with the living pink of rage, but I didn’t. Let him stay dead. It was what he chose when he threw me out: it is why he lived without a woman after I was gone.
I dedicated my life to Carl: I threw away the children I could have had, for his sake, to keep him happy. Isaac was nothing; a side-show, a weak man: he died and I scarcely noticed. Oliver is nothing either, when it comes to it: a pet which curls up alongside, by a warm fire, or on a forbidden bed, to be indulged. Better than nothing, that’s all, poor Oliver. Of course Carl is dead, dying: so am I, without him. But Carl is at least able to blow up the world while he waits. I’m not.
11
The clones of Joanna May also blamed their nearest and dearest for the accident at Chernobyl, with rather less reason than did their original.
In their case, of course, near did not necessarily or permanently mean dear, and this was either an affliction ironed into their genes, or the common cross of humanity, as may be decided by events. Nor was the tendency to blame irrationally peculiar to these four women, of course: it afflicts all mankind. When the weather is fine on polling day, the sitting government is returned. If the weather is wet, it gets thrown out. And that’s that.
Jane Jarvis listened to the news on the radio and slammed her attic windows shut to keep the radioactivity out. A pity, because it was such a fine spring day, but to keep out the bad you had to keep out the good. Then she returned to the brass bed where her lover lay. It was Saturday, and lunchtime. Presently they’d get out of bed and walk into Soho for something to eat. Her flat was in Central London: she had the whole attic floor of a big house in Harley Street. She could afford it. Such was the reward of beauty, intelligence, education, and the capacity for making decisions others feared to – saying, simply and firmly, ‘this is good but not profitable’ or, ‘this is bad but commercial’, or ‘this is neither good nor profitable’, or, just occasionally, ‘this is both good and commercial’ and having the results bear her out. Tom designed book jackets and lived in half a house in Fulham, and earned a quarter of what she did, for eight times as much work. He would take her out to lunch, so she would have to eat spaghetti, not oysters.
Jane Jarvis was 5 foot 7 inches tall; precise and orderly in mind and body. She measured 36 inches around her chest, 24 inches at the waist and 36 round her hips, as had her original at the same age. Her nose was straight and perfect; her eyes widely spaced: her cheekbones high, her top lip a little short, the bottom lip a little thin: her gaze was direct. To wash her hair she dunked it in a basin of soapy water, rinsed it and towelled it dry. It frizzed out round her head. She belonged to some new, insouciant age. She walked like someone who knew herself to be free. She lived at the top of No. 30 Harley Street. Her original had spent her childhood in No. 34.
‘I want the windows open,’ said Tom, when she got back into bed. ‘I can’t sleep with the windows shut.’
‘I didn’t realize you had come here to sleep,’ she said.
‘Besides which, why bother?’ he asked. ‘If there is radioactivity out there glass isn’t going to stop it.’
‘It will stop alpha rays,’ she said.
‘Smarty pants,’ he said.
‘You can’t bear it if I know things you don’t,’ she said.
A row was approaching through the window: no glass could stop it: the hideous black cloud of the spirit: tumulus and cumulus fighting it out: lightning flashes of dire perception, thunderclaps of rage, hail storms of battering distress; every passion and woe of the past returned to plague the present, bent on turning love to hate. They knew it, Jane and Tom: both looked uneasily out of the window: they could see rooftops and sky: no sign yet of the storm they expected to see, but they knew it was coming, in spite of there, in the real world, a blue sky, a few white clouds. On the bed the grey cat Hattie sensed their unease and stopped purring. Tom put his hand on Jane’s thigh, the better to forget what was going on out there, seen or unseen.
‘I thought you wanted to sleep,’ she said.
‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I live here? Then we could use beds the way other people use them. We wouldn’t have to be in bed in the middle of the day.’
‘I like it like this,’ she said.
‘You don’t love me,’ he said. ‘It’s obvious.’ He removed his hand. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word love,’ he said. ‘You’re over-educated. What do you think I am, some kind of stud?’
It really made no difference what they were arguing about. Her reluctance to marry, settle, wash socks, have children – which he saw as just a habit of thought, a pattern of belief, an ongoing fear of change, something more to do with the ascendancy her mind had somehow gained over her body than anything to do with her essential nature; his failure to match his sexual desires to hers, which she registered as a hostile act; his intention to punish and humiliate her for earning more than he did; his fear of giving voice to his feelings; his inability to offer reassurance and comfort; his failure to acknowledge her equal status; her lack of taste, as he saw it; his lack of understanding, as she did. One way or another accusations and insults began to crackle in the air, feelings no longer contained but given voice to. You did this and you said that. Wimp and harpy, bastard, bitch. Unfaithful! Gutter slut and macho pig and the simple, friendly, curing pleasures of desire fulfilled denied – and just as well, perhaps, lest sex itself become the weapon, and then indeed there’d be an end to everything, and neither in their heart wants that. But spite and rage preferred – preferred, that’s the shocking thing, the self-revelation that hurts and wounds – chosen above love and kindness not just by the other but by the self. Not so much the other hurt, humiliated by the other, as the self by the self. The row is with the self, the other stands witness, accepting the bruises: it is some kind of horrid, magic, contrapuntal duet: variations on a theme; how can the unloveable, my self, be loved by you; your fault that it cannot. Projection. Simple! He accuses her of his own deficiencies: he hands them over. She does the same to him. Outrageous! How can I be expected to put up with this? And what is more, and have you forgotten; accept this evidence, accept it or I’ll kill you, that you do not love unloveable me! Unforgivable!
The row is vaporous: it circles blackly, out this window, into that: it never stops; when you make up others begin: their turn next; always someone’s. It feeds on itself, it feeds on you, the more you give in to it, the bigger it grows, the more powerfully it affects your neighbours, down here in the shameful gutter world, up there in the reeling attic sky, breeding every ill that flesh is heir to.
Keep your mouth shut, keep it shut, take a pill to knock you out. How gently, silently, this ire crept, the first cold wet breath through slammed shut windows. You shut the window: I want it open: Why? Because you want it shut, I shut it, knowing you didn’t want it. Why don’t you love me? Why, because I’m unloveable, but not as unloveable as you. And what is radiation compared to this virus already in the bloodstream?
Oh yes, a virus. The row comes like a virus. Unseen, unheard, unknown. It comes in a droplet, through a break in the skin, the brushing of flesh, a flavour in the air, a particle inhaled. Once in the blood it’s there for ever, an infection; a lingering, debilitating disease, flaring up from time to time. Once you’re sensitized, the first time you succumb, there it is, yes, for ever; a spiritual TB, before the development of antibiotics; sometimes it kills, sometimes it doesn’t: it just doesn’t go away; it merely hides to wait its triggering. Can’t wait! AIDS of the spirit.
In the end Jane Jarvis scratched and clawed Tom Jeffrey and he left the house saying he’d rather die than return to face the virago, and they didn’t make it up till Sunday, when they went out to supper and she ordered oysters and he let her pay. He was growing a beard. Lemon juice trickled amongst the black bristle. He had a square jaw and even teeth. He was a good-looking man, a sensitive man, a talented man. One day the world would recognize him. He would make a good fathe
r. He wanted to be a father.
Oh yes, indeed a virus, caught somewhere along the way by Jane Jarvis, at Oxford perhaps. He certainly thought that was where she’d picked it up.
It could not be in the genes, could not be in the nature, must be culturally induced, caught. Joanna May suffered a severe attack at the age of sixty, but had not been previously afflicted. Her relationship with Carl had ended with the murder of a third party, true, but that was Carl’s doing and coolly done; no one had ever shouted, screamed or clawed. No, there was this to be said for Joanna and Carl – they never descended hand in hand, step by step, into that shocking desert landscape where the air is rent with whining and spiteful complaint, and the self stands isolated and terrified in all its snarling, scratching fury.
Jane Jarvis said to her Tom as he left, in the rain, ‘With people like you in the world, how can it be anything but doomed. I hope you inhale beta particles and die.’
And this was the man she loved, or tried to love, or hoped to love, and knew if she didn’t love, who else would there be?
Julie Rainer heard on the news that a radioactive cloud hovered over the country, and blamed the Russians, since her husband was away on business as he so often was, and there was no one else to blame. She closed the windows and poured away the milk. She stalked her lonely, perfect, tasteless house and filled in yet another form for yet another adoption agency: checking her lies against a note of previous lies in a booklet kept solely for this purpose. Her husband could not have children: he was infertile. She had spent hours, hours of intensive life with doctors’ fingers and spatulas inside her, investigating, before they turned their attention to him: it was her fate, her destiny, she felt, to have these prying feelers there. She despised herself. She lacked the courage to be artificially inseminated, she lacked the courage to leave her husband, though she did not love him, whatever that meant. She felt she would gain courage in the end: but by then it would be too late to have babies.
