by Weldon, Fay
She left Oliver digging in the drifting outfall from Chernobyl and went inside, to read the report.
Fifteen minutes later she came out and said, ‘I’m going to see Carl right now.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s all too much to be endured,’ she said.
‘Don’t go,’ he said, and had she been listening, had she really cared about him, she would have heard that tone in his voice which is used by bit-part film actors who know that a sudden fatal blow is about to fall, in the next few frames, and try not to show it. But she wasn’t listening; she didn’t care; she was going to see Carl.
16
‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves,’ murmured Carl May, as he paced his elegant office in the tower block in Reading which was the hub of Britnuc’s empire. The building had been designed to dominate the city skyscape, and so it had, but not for long. No sooner had the foundations settled, no sooner the first window cleaner toppled to his death – always the mark of a properly finished office building – than all around arose the thrusting towers of usurping empires – leaner, taller, glassier – but doomed to crumble and collapse, built on the hot and shifting sands of finance, not the rock of industry, the cold power of the atom. Carl May was neither shaken nor dismayed, though the arch of sky he loved was now the merest tent of blue, so high and near the false towers crowded. He knew they would not last.
‘What is that you said, my dear?’ enquired Bethany, looking up from her VDU, upon which she played computer games. He’d had the contraption carried up from a lower floor. In this calm and spacious room all was grey and pink and empty surfaces: uncluttered: all that was needed here was mind: no tools of trade, no paper, pens, or telephones: he was too grand for that. But Bethany must have her toys.
‘I was quoting,’ he said, ‘from The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ It was Carl May’s joke. His empire, his prison! Oscar Wilde, once imprisoned for imprudence in Reading Gaol – still there, that gaunt grey building, still used, not a quarter of a mile away from where Carl May now had his throne – had through that imprisonment received his immortality.
‘Do you think,’ asked Carl May of Bethany, ‘anyone would have taken any notice of Oscar Wilde if he hadn’t gone to prison?’
But how was Bethany to answer a thing like that? She shrugged, and went on playing. He sighed. Carl May was restless. In the outer offices phones rang and minions ran; press officers dealt with queries concerning outfall and infall, becquerels and watertables, cladding and coolants, leukaemia and bone cancer, prevailing winds and drifting particles. Head Office personnel took calls from Britnucs A and D where staff threatened action over the recent tightening of various safety regulations, and from B and C where there was some anxiety that the tightening had not been sufficiently extreme. PR withdrew distribution to better facilitate the instant re-editing of an entire series of linked film for internal, external and educational purposes: no one could say Britnuc was not on its toes since Chernobyl went up; and the External Services division within the day had liaised with Concrete Casings – of which Carl May was also a director – to tender to the Soviet Union so many tonnes of special-grade radiation-resistant (though so far untested in the field) concrete for immediate shipment to Kiev.
Carl, confident in the efficiency and dedication of his staff, reserved his energies for the highest level – that is to say ministerial dealings; but the Government was, on the whole, wisely quiet, until such time as ignorance, panic and bad judgement in the lower levels were either cured, or covered up.
One female journalist did get through to Carl May that day by impersonating the Prime Minister’s voice, but that was the only entertainment in an otherwise boring morning for Carl May. Those who have perfected the art of delegation tend to suffer, in emergencies, from too much peace.
In Carl May’s childhood kennel, there had been a lot to do. Not only had he soothed the savage heart of Harry the bull-terrier but trained him to fetch him scraps of newsprint from the streets around: Carl May himself, being chained by a collar, was in no position to do so. Those were the worst days. But they had not been boring.
‘I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky’
said Carl May to Bethany, but her hand was upon the control stick, her eyes upon the screen, and she seemed not to hear. In theory she worked upon a special personal project of his, an Open Day for Britnuc two years hence, thus avoiding bad feeling amongst his other secretarial staff; it was an arrangement which he could safely cancel nearer the time. He liked to have her close. He realized he had been lonely, and resented his ex-wife Joanna for having by her behaviour rendered him thus, so sadly and for so long. With what great effort had he, Carl May, brought himself to trust a cruel world, and how she had destroyed that trust, completing what his mother had begun.
He wondered, as he sometimes did, whether to trace the clones of Joanna May, and see how they had turned out, and whether one of them might not do instead of Joanna, but he could see the folly of it. The capacity for infidelity, Carl May suspected, ran in the genes; it could not be in the rearing – for surely Joanna had had a calm, tranquil and orderly rearing; she had seemed neither too fond of her father nor too antagonistic to her mother, and yet she had succumbed – and all he would do was set himself up again for the same shock and sorrow. Joanna at half her age would still be Joanna.
Bethany, thought Carl May; now Bethany was a different matter. She knew where her bread and butter lay. She had been bought. She acknowledged the transaction. He had taken, as it were, an option out on Bethany, body and soul. When it ran out, he would either renew on his terms, if he so chose, or let it lapse, and she would be free to go. He felt well disposed towards her. She gave him pleasure. He told her things he never told anyone. It would not last.
He did not want it to last. He felt humiliated as well as pleased, lessened as much as augmented. She was less than him in everything but youth.
‘It is sweet to dance to violins,
When love and life are fair,
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air –’
said Carl May aloud.
Bethany hummed a little song as she worked upon her game: little trills and tweets rose round her, as if flocks of tiny birds flowed from her machine: her red hair fell enchantingly upon her face.
‘Do you understand that?’ asked Carl May.
‘Understand what?’ she asked. Carl May felt a stab of displeasure: it cut between his ribs like a knife.
‘To dance upon the air is to hang,’ he said. ‘Love is a hanging offence.’
‘Why’s that?’ she said, not caring.
‘Because each man kills the thing he loves,’ he said, ‘which was where we began.’
‘You didn’t kill Joanna,’ said Bethany, ‘only her boyfriend, so what are you going on about?’ On her screen, in search of paradise, she dodged monsters and beheaded and delimbed her enemies with a sword which flailed every time she pressed the space key.
Carl May thought if he had Bethany cloned, he could perhaps undo the effects of her upbringing. If he got Holly to remove one of Bethany’s eggs, fertilized it in vitro with any old semen, removed the resultant nuclei and reinserted the nuclei of any one of Bethany’s DNA-bearing cells (which the new dehydrating technique had made just about possible), and then had the egg implanted in a womb as stable and orderly as that of Joanna’s mother – and such wombs could be found, now as then; their owners crying out for implantation – why then Carl May might create a perfect woman, one who looked, listened, understood and was faithful. If he reimplanted the egg in Bethany herself – but no, that would be hopeless; she was spoiled, sullied, somehow she would reinfect herself.
‘Shoo fly,’ murmured Bethany. ‘Shoo fly, don’t bother
me,’ and ping, ping, wimble, doodle, cheep cheep, splat went the little fluttering doves and ravens, the electronic sounds of victory and defeat – he’d made her turn the volume right down but still the small inanities, the false excitements, trembled and hovered in the air, insistent. He decided the cloning of Bethany would be more trouble than it was worth: it would require more time and energy than he had available. She made him feel tired, and that was the truth of it. Old King David’s maidservant may have warmed his bed but she sure as hell carried him off quicker. He would be too old by the time Bethany was reissued, as it were, to get the benefit of it.
Now, if he had himself cloned, as he’d threatened Bethany – then the two younger versions of themselves could indeed pair off. But what use would that be to Carl May? Another body would feel the pleasure: another mind register it. Odd how the notion kept reasserting itself – that what one clone knew, would be known by all: what one felt, the others would feel; that to make clones was to create automatons, men without souls – soldiers, servants, deprived of will, decision. How could it be so? Did the common misconception suggest that the soul, whatever that was, would be split, divided out fairly amongst the repetitions – as if nature and God were indeed in some kind of partnership? For every new exercise in human diversity – a quarter of a million of them every day – God would dole out only one soul? They were in short supply? Nonsense! He wanted to talk to Joanna about it. Joanna the faithless, the betrayer: Joanna who mocked him, whispered about him behind his back, trapped and tortured him. Joanna Eve.
‘Shoo fly,’ murmured Bethany. ‘Shoo fly, don’t bother me!’
‘What are you singing?’ he asked.
‘Just something that goes through my head,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It has no words,’ said Bethany, but she lied. The words were clear in her head. If you went on from ‘Shoo fly, don’t bother me, For I belong to somebody,’ you got to:
For an old man he is old,
And an old man he is grey,
But a young man’s heart is full of love,
Get away, old man, get away.
Bethany stopped singing. She felt sad, to be so young and yet so old, twenty-four going on forty-two.
17
The clones of Joanna May would have been faithful if they could, but fate was against them. Like their master copy, Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice, for good or bad, were of a nature which preferred to have the itch of desire soothed, settled and out of the way rather than seeing in its gratification a source of energy and renewal. Here comes sex, they said in their hearts, here comes trouble! But trouble came. There was no stopping it, for them or anyone.
Of the four, Jane Jarvis made the best and closest approach to monogamy. Her chosen parents, Madge and Jeremy, were academics – chosen by Dr Holly of the Bulstrode Clinic in conjunction with Carl May, of course, rather than herself, but when did any infant have the choice of its environment? No, the child is landed with what it gets, albeit sharing with its natural parents a characteristic or so – his brown eyes and her crooked little finger and a tendency to sniff, not to mention the bad temper of a maternal great-grandmother, the musical ability of a paternal great-uncle – which may or may not make the family placing easier when the baby erupts into it. But little Jane, long awaited, painfully implanted, was eagerly received into the world by parents who knew she was nothing to do with them, and didn’t care, and never said: she was cherished, taught, instructed, cosseted, pressured and expected to pass exams, which she obligingly did. At sixteen she appointed – or so her manner suggested – an unkempt and unsuitable lad as her permanent boyfriend, much to his surprise and gratification and her parents’ initial dismay. While other girls moaned, giggled, sighed, heaved, chopped, changed, got pregnant, gang-banged, gossiped and groped themselves out of any hope of further education, pretty little Jane Jarvis sat studying, her faithful and besotted Tom beside her, making coffee and replenishing pens and paper as required.
When she was seventeen, her quasi-father Jeremy the economist, the most steady and rational of monetarists, owl-eyed, unimpassioned, kindly and distant, startled his family and the campus by making one of his junior lecturers pregnant. He seemed sorrowful that the event had caused distress and concern; he announced the news at breakfast the day after Jane sat her English Α-level and the day before her Sociology exam, thus greatly compounding his offence. ‘Surely it could have waited,’ wept Madge the Eng. Lit. structuralist. ‘Are you trying to destroy her as well as me?’ Jeremy seemed puzzled: he said he was going with Laura to the ante-natal clinic so he would be late home for tea. Laura had been a frequent visitor to the house and had coached Jane in Economics, since Jane somehow cut off when offered instruction by her father.
Jane got a Β in English and A’s in Economics and Sociology. The results arrived the day Laura gave birth to a boy. ‘You see,’ said Jane to Tom, ‘adversity just makes me concentrate the more.’ Oxford let her in: she’d done the three Α-levels in one year.
Madge wept and said to her husband at breakfast, the day the letter came from Oxford, ‘I don’t want you, I don’t need you, go to her if that’s what you want.’
‘Look here –’ he said.
‘Go, go!’ she screamed, so he went. Perhaps that was when Jane caught the row virus: her quasi-mother, rushing out of the room, beside herself, brushed one bare ageing arm against Jane’s young one.
‘It was their timing that was so awful,’ Jane lamented to Tom later. When she went up to Oxford, leaving her mother alone in the big house, with its many bookshelves and bicycles and good prints, she found she was pregnant. Madge offered to have the baby; she needed something, anything, and Jane almost consented, but in the end she couldn’t, she didn’t, she had her future to think about. She had a termination at twelve weeks: a boy. A couple of years later Jeremy returned home: so that was just as well. It had been a kind of convulsion in all their lives, that was all. Everything smoothed out again. Laura married someone her own age and went to Sweden with the child. Madge became Professor of American Studies. Jeremy just seemed somehow older, and more tired, as if he’d tried something terribly important, and had failed at the last hurdle.
At the degree ceremony – she got a First in Eng. Lit. – he kissed the back of her neck with dry tired lips and said, ‘I’m proud of you. I wish you were mine,’ and she did not understand that, or pursue it, as she would have had it been some puzzling line in Beowulf or Sir Gawain. Some things are safer thought about than others.
And she’d ditched Tom by then. She had to. He was off at Art College in London, making a mess of things, quarrelling with his tutor, refusing to train for a career in advertising, too proud for this, too good for that, scratched and sore about the abortion, no matter that he understood the necessity, approved in theory, knew her body was her own, and so forth, knew there was lots of time for both of them – it had just been that baby, at that time – but he would keep reminding her, would keep upsetting her, and she needed a boyfriend on the spot, to save trouble and tantrums all around. Tom had to go.
Men pursued her, waylaid her, entreated her favours; yet when and if she looked in a mirror she could see only an ordinary, expected face, nothing special. Madge had never noticed how she looked, only what went on in her head. No one at home had told her she was pretty: Jeremy had seemed to notice her exam results more than herself, though responsive enough, it had seemed, to Laura. It was all a bother; too much to think about. She took up with a young man, a certain Stephen, a mathematician, good-looking, undemanding, as quiet and steady as Tom was noisy and wayward.
‘You faithless bitch,’ yelled Tom down the phone. ‘You’re never here,’ she moaned, ‘and when you are you’re horrid.’ ‘I have to get my degree,’ he shrieked, ‘how can I be there?’ ‘I don’t see why you can’t be here,’ she murmured. ‘What do artists need with degrees?’ ‘You’re cold, manipulative, selfish,’ he said. ‘You want to own me, control me. You treat me
halfway between a little boy and a stud.’ ‘Then you’re well rid of me,’ she said. And he said, ‘It’s education has done this to you. It’s changed you. Everything’s in your head: there’s nothing left in your heart. You don’t know how to be natural any more: last time I was with you, you actually poured my coffee into a dirty mug. You’ve even forgotten how to wash up.’
‘Good,’ she said, and put the phone down. She stayed with Stephen for six years but wouldn’t marry him, as he had hoped and expected, because of the problem of her needing to be in London – she had a good first job as a reader for MGM – and him having to begin his life as a chartered accountant in Newcastle, which was the only place he could get a job, so, coolly, she did without him. Well, fate was against her. If he’d been offered a job in London she would have stayed with him.
Madge and Jeremy were disappointed. When it came to it, it seemed they wanted her to be settled and ordinary, not independent and special. So much of it had been all talk.
And then Tom came back into her life, as they say in the magazines and, although it hardly seemed what she wanted, it was familiar, and would do. He filled her bed and sat opposite her in restaurants and they shared the bill, but he always had the feeling, did Tom, that she was looking over his naked shoulder – him on top of her, no variations considered – to see who was there, who had come to the party more important, more interesting, than he. And she would croon and stroke her little grey cat, sadly, even directly after they’d made love, as if it was his fault, as if he were the gatekeeper to some other, more richly sensuous world than this, but would not let her in. When actually it was the other way round.
Julie Rainer’s chosen parents were not academics and did not believe in girls taking examinations: on the contrary: they had a feeling, vague though it was, that too much thinking made girls undomesticated and argumentative. If Julie was seen with a book, her mother Katie would say, ‘Don’t mope about reading: why don’t you go for a nice walk?’ or ‘Look, there’s some washing-up to do,’ and Julie would obligingly put the book away. Her father, Harold, worked in Sheffield for a firm of stockbrokers: Kate did voluntary work around and about: they lived in a pleasant house with a large garden.
