by Weldon, Fay
The Bulstrode Clinic experiments in parthenogenesis had long since ceased, becoming irrelevant as the whole field of genetic engineering and microbiology opened up. Dr Holly had moved on to run an enterprising and well-funded Research and Development unit at Martins Pharmaceuticals, an international conglomerate of which Carl May presently became a director. Here his field was at first the decoding of DNA; at which time the visits and special requests of Carl May became less frequent, rather to Dr Holly’s relief. But later Holly moved on to the development of dehydration techniques in relation to egg-cell nuclei; there was much excitement and talk of Nobel Prizes – and all of a sudden Carl May was back again, having met up with Isaac King, requiring that Holly drop everything and search the gut of an ancient Egyptian body, dehydrated rather than mummified, which he just so happened to have in his possession, for cells with sufficient intact and living DNA for nuclei transference to be possible. Holly hinted, rather than protested, that he had better things to do than bring the past to life, since the present was surely difficult enough to cope with. He tried to keep the matter light in the interest of his funding, and in the attempt made matters worse than he had thought possible.
‘If our motives are impure,’ said Dr Holly blithely, ‘we will suffer for it: we will be caught like birds in a trap.’ The Curse of the Pharaohs was in his mind: Tutankhamen’s curse which, according to Isaac King, pursued leading Egyptologists all over the world – tumours and heart attacks killing at an unusually early age, cancers and road accidents striking others down – so that the quality, forget the number, of professors in the subject fell as the best and brightest of them were removed from the human race. Dr Holly half-believed it, half did not, could joke about it.
Carl May did not consider it a joking matter. Carl May dismissed the matter of the Curse of the Pharaohs as the merest, most vulgar of superstitions; how could any scientist even half-believe such junk? Handling a lot of dusty, ancient, possibly carcinogenic material could well result in early death. Road accidents? Well, Egyptologists were by their nature impractical and vague. The myth of the absent-minded professor had its roots in truth. They just didn’t look where they were going. They got killed. Dr Holly, rashly, disagreed. He was a professor himself, he reminded Carl May. He was not absent-minded, not in the least.
The Curse of the Pharaohs, Carl May then pointed out, was no more than a warning, albeit engraved in stringent stone and in a prominent position. It was the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of a burglar alarm: ‘If anyone enters my tomb with unworthy intentions, be warned. I will catch him like a bird in a trap and stand witness against him by the throne of the Lord of Eternity.’ The Ancient Egyptians, Isaac King had explained to Carl May, who now took the trouble – and he was a busy man – to explain it to Dr Holly, caught their birds in clapnets, the two wooden sides of a net coming smartly and suddenly together, and that for the bird was that: kept trapped until it was time to be killed and eaten, or killed and embalmed by some patron who would gain credit in the afterlife for so doing. Absurd!
‘You never know,’ laughed Dr Holly, ‘just when the past will catch up with you! You should always be prepared. Embalm a bird or two!’
Carl May did not laugh. Carl May took irrational offence. ‘Gobbledygook!’ he cried, and Dr Holly found his department’s grant cut presently by many millions. For once too piqued to apologize or oblige, Dr Holly allowed his department to limp on as best it could, left the pursuit of Nobel Prizes to others, and diversified into the safe, cheap and interesting study of brain-cell activity in identical twins. Carl May did not take this side-stepping sitting down: no, he fretted, threatened and fumed – but shortly afterwards came the unfortunate matter of Isaac King’s death, and the divorce of his wife, and he was quiet. Something seemed to have knocked the spirit out of him, at least for a time.
19
I, Joanna May.
Isaac King taught me many important things. Carl May taught me many boring things, mostly about how to keep him happy.
Isaac taught me that there need never be an end to seeing. Isaac insisted that I could look at the stubbed-out cigarettes in an ashtray and see beyond it to the meaning behind – know that everything has significance, even if it comes, for a time, to this trash. Those who grew the leaf and waited and prayed for the rain to come: those who profited by its processing and selling: those who smoked it, and defied death: those who stubbed it out, envisaging life – all are part of it. Even in that detritus of ash and grime was something to be marvelled at, something to make you quite giddy with delight. Isaac smoked, of course, and had no intention of stopping, and as it turned out, he was justified, his death by misadventure preceding any major damage to lungs or circulatory system. Carl did not smoke. Carl meant to live for ever in perfect health in a world he hated.
Isaac King taught me that patterns are being woven around us every minute of the day: if we have eyes to see them, they are there to see. When the stray cat miaowing on the doorstep one morning turns out to be the illegitimate grandchild of the grey Persian owned by your father’s favourite patient, long deceased, there is no need for surprise. All things are interrelated: the cat was lost and found just to make sure all the cogs were locking properly; or some loose overlap, perhaps, needed to be sealed. The Egyptians knew how cats, who have their own strong familial links, interweave with ours, and our friendships and ventures. Fate offers us hints: shrugs if we don’t take notice. No skin off its nose. Isaac taught me to accept mystery. Carl May believed in cause and effect, action and consequence, and nothing much else, except the laws of probability. He thought it was so obvious it didn’t need teaching, or no doubt he would have. Brides get taught.
I once tried to explain to Carl what I meant by ‘fate’ but he didn’t listen: he went on reading the Financial Times, fidgeting slightly to demonstrate his irritation. That was after Isaac and I had started sorting out exhibits together, but before our further intimacy.
The word ‘fate’, of course, did not help me, being inadequate to describe the sense of a multifarious, infinitely complex, dreamy yet purposeful universe which I had in mind – being altogether too singular a word, too single-purposed, like a chisel driven hard into the delicacy of experience. A single brain cell, one amongst millions, millions, were it self-conscious, might I suppose have just such an inkling of what was going on around it. The ‘Fates’ had it better, being at least plural, something capable of consensus, though separately driven.
Miss Watson taught me, I remember, that the concept of One God, Jehovah, was a great step forward for mankind – an end to all those piddly little Gods with brazen feet it thereafter became a capital offence to worship. I had done my best to believe her, but as Isaac and I unpacked and recorded from straw and sand the little artefacts, the various little deities of Ancient Egypt, our eyes melting from time to time and hastily looking away, I began to see the concept of a single God as a narrowing of our perception, not an expansion: the beginning of the long slow end of civilization and not its dawn at all – this cowardly insistence of ours on leaders, fuehrers, the someone who knows exactly what’s going on and what’s best for everyone; the One above All who demands our loyalty, our obeisance. Undemocratic. The truth is many, not one. Carl May was my Jehovah: it did me no good. I preferred Isaac. Now there’s Oliver. More, more! More and more Gods, each to be worshipped in a different way before lightning strikes us to death.
Isaac King nudged and nurtured my body into a capacity for orgasm, that stretching of the body until it meets the soul, with its astonishing shudder of recognition, elation. Proof, proof, cries the body, proof of my purpose, sinking back into languor, all passion spent: I knew it was there if only I looked hard enough. I perceived it, stretched for it, touched it, just with my fingertips encountered the infinite for an instant! I told you so! We’re all in this together – we share it, one day we’ll know this joy for ever, out of body. Those of us who can – which does not include those faithfully married to Carl May – must pass
the message on to those who can’t. It’s OK. I told Carl May that day in the gallery just what pleasure Isaac gave me, and he seemed not to understand what I was talking about. Well, he wouldn’t want to, would he?
Isaac King taught me about the Tarot pack and how it was possible to contain the world in just seventy-eight cards – shuffle the pack, deal them, and observe the pattern of the times: the Ancient Egyptians were great diviners. That there was a Major Arcana of twenty-two cards, which represented the great guiding passions of mankind; intellectual, moral, material. That there were four suits, Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups, from which our ordinary Diamonds, Clubs, Spades and Hearts derive. How, broadly, Wands stand for the power of the intellect, Pentacles the strength of the material world, Swords the capacity for endurance, Cups for aesthetic and sensual perception. Or so Isaac interpreted the cards; the power to interpret hieroglyphics at the tips of his fingers. Isaac was so clever: I was so proud of him: I felt I caught intelligence from him: and also, I daresay, something of his impracticality. It is wonderful to be taught: it is almost worth the years of ignorance to have it so suddenly, wonderfully stop. But I wanted my fortune told: I wanted to know the future. His future, my future. The cards are not for telling fortunes, Isaac said. They’re for focusing the mind on the patterns which the world around you makes. But I wouldn’t have it.
That was before we’d been to bed. Sex was in the air: it was inevitable: it was the best, the most powerful of times.
‘Tell my fortune,’ I repeated.
‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.
Will we go to bed, I wanted to know. When, where, how, what will happen next? Will you be the fulfilment of my life, will you take the cup of my emptiness and fill it to the brim, and so forth. But I didn’t tell Isaac any of that. I wasn’t quite such a fool.
‘I just want to know,’ I said, ‘what’s going to happen next.’
Isaac acquiesced. Isaac shuffled the pack, picked out the four queens: Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups. ‘Pick the one that most represents you,’ he said, but none seemed quite right to me. I reached for the Empress instead: a card from the Major Arcana. She held the world in her hands: it was what I felt like at that moment. ‘Work with that,’ I said.
So Isaac took out the Empress, put back the Queens. I shuffled the cards. He laid them face down:
The Empress in the middle was at number one. Above me, two was what ruled me: beneath me, three was what underlay me. Four was what I was leaving. Five was what I was approaching. The significance of the positions of six, seven and eight I can’t remember – it scarcely seemed important at the time. Nine was the final outcome: that was what I waited for.
Isaac King turned over the cards.
The four Queens surrounded me. Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups: above, below, to left and right. I cannot remember what stood at six and seven; but at eight there was the Hierophant; at nine, Death, a skeleton riding on horseback.
Isaac looked at the Hierophant and laughed.
‘There’s Carl,’ he said.
I, Joanna May, looked at Death and moaned.
‘Death means nothing,’ said Isaac. ‘The card’s reversed. It means rebirth, new life; not what you think at all.’
‘That’s your story,’ I said.
‘But those four Queens,’ said Isaac King, ‘that’s really something. I don’t understand it.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I didn’t shuffle the pack properly, that’s all that means.’
He laughed and swept the cards together and wouldn’t say any more. I begged him to tell me more. I touched him in the begging, and though he wouldn’t tell the cards for me, he kissed me and that was the beginning, and I forgot about the Tarot.
Except I told Carl that Isaac was teaching me about the Tarot pack: I couldn’t resist it. I told Carl about the hand the Fates had dealt me, I tried to suggest to my husband that perhaps there was more to life than here and now, birth and death, that ‘because’ was a more complex word than he dreamt of – but he wouldn’t have it, of course he wouldn’t.
‘I thought he was some kind of academic,’ said Carl May, ‘and he turns out to be a charlatan. Is the fellow weak-minded? Is his brain as limp as his shirt collar? Will I get a proper PR return on the gallery? Who does this fellow think he is?’
It did not occur to Carl May to be sexually jealous. How could the servant be preferred to the master? I was affronted. Pique made me guiltless. The more he spoke, poor blinkered Carl May, the more I lost my respect for him, my fear of him. I felt justified in infidelity: it was a wonderful feeling: my spirit soared like a bird, circling, dancing, dizzy with sunlight: I was allowed to be happy. I was born to be happy. I remember sitting on my hands to weigh myself down, as though the very discovery would somehow waft me away. We were sitting, as I remember, in some riverside restaurant. It was night. Lights flickered over running water, and made patterns on the deep red silk of the dress I was wearing. There were only the two of us. It must have been our wedding anniversary, or we’d have been in company – some politician, or magnate, accompanied by boring wife. I’ve no doubt but that I appeared equally boring. Who is she? Oh, Carl May’s wife. What does she do? Nothing. She is Carl May’s wife. What does she think? Nothing. She is Carl May’s wife. What does she feel? Nothing. She is Carl May’s wife. My mother died on the fourth anniversary of my wedding to Carl May. I felt nothing. Carl May had somehow made my feelings for my own mother illicit – as if my life began with my marriage, and that nothing that went before was of any significance: not even the root of my very being, my mother. I went to the funeral alone. Carl May was in China. He did send a telegram and flowers: a wreath, too enormous for the coffin. My poor mother. Everyone should be mourned: remembered: somehow sustained in their journey through the afterlife, until the need for it is gone. Isaac taught me that as well: but I had never until that moment connected it to my mother.
‘Superstitious nonsense,’ Carl was saying. ‘And by God I’ll prove it nonsense.’
‘How will you do that, Carl?’ I asked, politely. ‘People have been trying to prove or disprove magic, prophecy, ESP, since the beginning of time, and haven’t succeeded.’
‘I’ll prove it,’ he said, ‘if it kills me.’ And he started the Divination Department. I was glad to think the conversation had at least had some effect upon him. And in that original hand of cards – the first time the cards are dealt for someone the reading is always clear, always significant – was indeed my future. It was just that Isaac was to die, not me. No wonder he swept the cards up and reshuffled as quick as he could.
And I remember now what the cards at six and seven were. Six was the Star, kneeling by her pool beneath a sliver of moon; seven was the Fool, reversed. Treachery, one would imagine: self-delusion. I talked too much. I betrayed Carl, by finding sexual fulfilment with Isaac; and Isaac, because I couldn’t resist telling Carl.
I, Joanna May. No longer ‘Eye’. Acting; not observing. Doing, not looking. Dangerous, murderous, and not even knowing it.
20
Joanna May, impassioned at last by virtue of the blue-foldered report from the Maverick Enquiry Agency, which told of Bethany’s existence, went straight to the heart of Carl May’s evil empire, his glassy prison. She meant to tell him a thing or two. She rose by means of a pink and white escalator from the fountains and greenery, marble and glass of the reception levels, and smoothly ascended through layer upon layer of noise and tumult, panic and excitement, bells and clatter, of messengers running, girl clerks checking and pot plants wilting unattended. Then, audacious, was whisked up unchecked in a cage of green glass studded with yellow lights, right into the still centre of the storm, the quiet nexus of energy, the Executive Floor. She walked straight past secretaries on her expensive sensible heels and right into Carl May’s office suite where all was silent, sparse and aesthetically correct. The nerve of it! There she found her husband, her ex-husband, flesh of her flesh, heart of her heart, with that tragic ruined gir
l, that Bethany, that almost beauty, with her sad brightness and her ersatz emerald eyes, his long pale tampering fingers tangled in her hennaed hair. And some might think it served Joanna May right, but she did not.
No. Joanna May spoke the truth to Carl May, or the only truth she knew: that once long ago she’d handed her life to him for keeps, as she was expected by all and sundry to do, being nothing but a girl, in truth, love, and hope, and what had Carl May done? Why, he had not only rendered these things sour for her forever, but drained her being dry as if it were an orange; with powerful lips sucked up the juice and the flesh through a hole in the skin the size of a sixpence, and then thrown the poor flabby thing away. And now look, now look, now look, Joanna May wept, self-pity overcoming rage. Look at me!
An orange, Carl May laughed, an orange. I thought women got thrown away like old gloves, not old oranges, and Joanna May screamed and shouted and banged her fists against his chest, and he didn’t even catch hold of them to stop them, so distasteful did he find her flesh, or pretended to. And Bethany thought at last, at last, boredom is ending here, at last something’s happening, not this quiet, this still, this nothingness, from which all things emanate but yet is nothing. So bored, she thought, I’ve been so bored. Ex-wives are better than nothing.
