Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon

by Weldon, Fay

  You have destroyed me, Joanna May said to her husband, in essence, used up my youth, my best years and thrown me out.

  Carl May said to Joanna, men do not destroy women, some women destroy themselves, that’s all; if Joanna May is indeed destroyed, why then he’s glad for her sake since that was clearly what she wanted. Women choose the man they want, said Carl May, the man their calculating eye first falls upon; then, lacking the capacity and the will to stick by that decision, must chew away at their own loyalty – self-devourers all, rapacious of grievance, noisy in complaint – gossiping to neighbours and friends over fences and tables, round fires and out shopping, the yackety yak of the female affronted: first he did this and then he did that, can you imagine, and can you believe it, after all that she does for him how much she loves him the bastard, the brute! And how after all that complaint how can a woman expect to find in her own heart constancy, loyalty, truth or affection? Split a plain and single path into a thousand tracks of conversational interest and how can you expect to find yourself ever back upon the right one? In other words, Joanna May, in the course of our marriage, you talked about me to your friends, committed disloyalty with your mind and after that with your body which was how it was bound to end up. Your fault not mine, said Carl May, your fault, your fault, your fault, not mine. What’s more, I just behaved as any man would behave, said Carl May.

  What, murder? enquired Joanna May and Carl May said you’re mad, you’re insolent, my chauffeur knocked him down, that’s all. An absent-minded Egyptologist, how could he ever bring the dead to life, and you were dead enough yourself by then. Old. A weak man, a nebbitch, a nothing, a better-dead, dead already so far as anyone had ever seen. Trust you to pick a zombie, Joanna May. Your fault for not finding a better man: how could you find a better man, a zombie the best that you could do, your fault that now he’s dead, as dead as you, and you’re alone. Lost him and lost me, lost us both, silly old you.

  Oh phooey, she said, it’s all men’s fault, everyone knows it’s all men’s fault. Ask anyone.

  Just a woman, only a woman, he said next. You should have died twenty years ago, what use to the world are you? A woman without youth, without children, without interest, a woman without a husband; old women have husbands by the skin of their teeth and there is no skin left to your teeth, Joanna May, your yellow discoloured teeth.

  My teeth are not so yellow, said Joanna May, they’re perfectly pearly white as ever. You’re talking about your own miserable molars. And Carl May gnashed them and said he was a man, he was immortal, his immortality lay here in this building, this achievement – by his name on a hundred powerful letterheads he would outrun his death; but what was a woman such as Joanna May, a woman without children, here and now and gone with a puff, blown away like a withered leaf, just for an instant a stretch of limb, a flash of thigh, and gone, a flower that never left a seed, the merest annual, passing thing, a nothing. Here today, gone tomorrow.

  I am so something, said Joanna May. Ask my lover, he’ll tell you what a thing I am, how far from nothing, here today and here tomorrow. I have my lover, my young lover, I have a man a thousand times better than you, who makes me happy and satisfied, which is what you never did. Never, never, never, never.

  Carl May was silent.

  Oh ouch – thought Bethany, better she hadn’t said that, better she’d kept quiet.

  Then the fat was in the fire, oh yes it was. How it spat, how it sizzled and spat.

  Carl May’s eyes seemed to turn a kind of yellow red, as false a colour as Bethany’s own emerald eyes, but the pupil went to slits through which a blackness showed, as her own would never do, or so Bethany hoped.

  Then Carl May said in a voice as cold and clear as ice made from bottled water, let your poor old flabby legs be parted by whom you choose, it will be for money not love – Not true, not true, Joanna May began to say, but of course it was, it was perfectly true – so why then, she said, it’s true for you too you poor old man; and he said no it’s not, you poor Joanna May, you female, the music stops for women long before it stops for men, and pitiful and degraded are the ones who dance on when the silence falls; your dance is over, Joanna May, you thoroughly useless lonely person, and mine is not, why don’t you go away and die?

  Oh flesh of my flesh, love of my soul, husband of my heart, she weeps, to speak to me like this. How can you!

  Because I am Lord of the Dance, he says, and I am man and you are only woman, and I am something indeed and you are nothing at all, in spite of your young lover. If he exists, which I take leave to doubt.

  I am so something, she wept, I am, I am, and he does exist and I love him, but already she felt herself vanishing, though she still beat her hands against his neatly suited breast and Bethany yawned to hide her nerves and looked around for a door to leave by, but there seemed to be none, so perfectly, architecturally flush were they with the wall. You have to have good eyesight to detect those very expensive doors and Bethany’s contact lenses had slipped and chafed and her eyes were watering and she couldn’t see a way out at all.

  You are nothing, said Carl May, quite bright and glittery all of a sudden as if the sun had come out to shine on a world of icebergs, hot in pursuit but chilly with it, and what’s more I proved you nothing thirty years ago and I’ve known it ever since, and I swore I’d never tell you, but now I will. I proved then you were nothing so particular after all, and that, to be frank, is when I lost interest in you. I proved it by making more of you, and the more I made of you the less of you there was, so it hardly mattered when you betrayed me, because how can what does not exist betray. One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns; more buns came out of that oven than ever went in.

  What do you mean, she asked, quite soft and quiet all of a sudden, and listening hard, of course she did, so he told her – I cloned you, Carl May said, I cloned you, added another four of you to the world, and he told her how he did it, and Bethany put her oar in and said Carl only did it because he loved you really, did it as a compliment, take no notice of what he says today, he’s bitter and twisted and furious because you’ve got a boyfriend, that’s all, at which Carl May gave Bethany a push and a shove and would have sent her right through the window and windmilling to her death thirty floors below but the windows didn’t open (and just as well, or how the bodies would have piled below, from hatred and self-hatred) so he didn’t bother, just forgot.

  Joanna May, shocked into calmness, paced and thought and considered herself split into five and her gorge rose into her throat.

  Carl May smiled and it seemed to Bethany that his teeth were fangs and growing as long as the wolf’s ever were in ‘Red Riding Hood’.

  There are many of you and many of you gloated Carl May and that means there are none of you because you amounted to so little in the first place. Now see how you like that.

  Joanna May thought a little. All the more of us to hate and despise you, she said, flickering into defiance, and make wax models of you and stick pins into you. See how you like that!

  Superstitious junk, he shouted, and I’m proving it, I’m proving it. Do you know who I am? I am master of mortality.

  Bethany sighed: the children were squabbling again, that was all, perhaps that was all, perhaps it was nothing, could be sighed away, would vanish away like a thirties film disintegrating, unseen in its vault – the mad male cloning scientist crumbling into the dust of fantasy, Frankenstein dissolved, the monster only a dream, a fright, and the world return to normal. But no. It was real. It was true. It was the present – not the future. And it was all Carl May’s fault. It was his fault.

  You’re the devil, said Joanna May, you’re the devil. Your mother was right to chain you up with the beasts, she knew the truth about you. I wish they’d gnawed you to death, eaten you up, why have you done this terrible thing to me, imprisoned me forever in a bad bad dream?

  You did a terrible thing to me, he said, you made your bed and didn’t lie on it, chose a man and wouldn’t stick with him
; you’re a piece of drifting slime in a murky female pool. You’re all alike, you women.

  Carl May, said Joanna May, I’m sorry for you. You look out of the dark prison of your soul which is your body, and the only windows you have are your eyes, your ears, your nose, your touch, and what can you know but what those windows look upon and it isn’t up to much, never has been: a little tent of sky outside a kennel. What a pity you slipped your leash, you should have stayed forever, baying at the moon. I see a different world, said Joanna May, I see one which is perfectible without your tampering.

  I don’t, said Carl May, and my view is the true one, however disagreeable. I see a world of accident and not design, never perfectible left to itself. Besides, I want to amuse myself. I can make a thousand thousand of you if I choose, fragment all living things and re-create them. I can splice a gene or two, can make you walk with a monkey’s head or run on a bitch’s legs or see through the eyes of a newt: I can entertain myself by making you whatever I feel like, and as I feel like so shall I do. Whatever I choose from now on for ever.

  I don’t believe you, said Joanna May.

  Believe what you like, said Carl May. Chernobyl has exploded and now all things impossible are possible, from now on in.

  And then Joanna May just laughed and said do what you like but you can’t catch me, you’ll never catch me, I am myself. Nail me and alter me, fix me and distort me, I’ll still have windows on the world to make of it what I decide. I’ll be myself. Multiply me and multiply my soul: divide me, split me; you just make more of me, not less. I will look out from more and different windows, that’s all you will have done, and I will watch the world go by in all its multifarious forms, and there will be no end to my seeing. I will lift up my heart to the hills, that’s all, to glorify a maker who is not you. I should carry on if I were you, cloning and meddling, you might end up doing more good than harm, in spite of yourself, if only by mistake.

  Carl May snarled and his eyes grew redder still for this was the heart of the evil empire and he was its lord, or so it seemed to Bethany, and he dug his yellow fangs into Joanna’s neck just above her genteel string of pearls and he scraped up a piece of her skin with those disgusting teeth and went to the little designer fridge where he kept his whisky (for guests) and his Perrier (for him) and he took out a little box and with a spatula scraped the flesh, the living tissue, of Joanna May off the teeth and shook it into the box with a short sharp shake and put it back in the fridge and said now I’ll grow you into what I want, he said, I can and will, see how you like that, I’ll make you live in pain and shame for ever more, I have brought hell to earth.

  Joanna May just laughed and said Carl May you’ve really flipped, wait till I tell Oliver about this, Oliver loves my soul not my body he loves my mind, my hope, my courage, me: he loves about me what you loved, Carl May, and still do, you silly spiteful thing, judging from how you behave. I was made in heaven not hell, as you were. You’re not king of the Dark Domains, that’s all in your mind, you’re just head of Britnuc and in a state because of Chernobyl and the guilt and responsibility you feel and the whole world nagging on.

  Carl May said if you’d loved me properly, Joanna May, if you had kept your word, I would make roses without thorns, I would make dogs who didn’t want to bite, I would make all men kind and good and wonderful, and women too, I would create a sinless race, I would perfect nature’s universe, because nature is blind, and obsessive, and absurd – consider the ostrich – and has no judgement, only insists on our survival, somehow, any old how: nature is only chance, not good or bad. All I want is the any old how properly under control, directed, working better: I, man, want to teach nature a thing or two, in particular the difference between good and bad; for who else is there to do it? But how can I, because woman makes man bad, I know it, I feel it. Joanna May, you nearly saved me once, you nearly made me good, and then you failed me, that is why I can’t forgive you. You have made me bad, Joanna May: if I’m the devil that’s your fault: if I create monsters, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.

  Oh phooey, she said. So I’m Eve to your Adam, am I, that old thing. Take your own apple, bite its flesh, give me a break. All I wanted was a little conversation, for once: all I was doing was discussing the apple: if you chose to see that as temptation, God help you.

  And Bethany saw them both standing in the Garden of Eden, Carl and Joanna May, or thought that was what she saw – Carl May long-limbed, tall, ruddy and eager, as he ought to have been, if everything had gone right, and Joanna May young again and looking down her perfect nose, as ever, just a sniff of disdain about her and in the sniff of that disdain the root of much trouble to come, perhaps even all of it, and between them they stared at the apple, red one side, green the other. Carl May bit first, choosing the red half, the better half, the riper half, and that made Joanna really spiteful. But Bethany had taken pills that morning, to get her through the day, as people will these days, and the pills were tiny and the pillbox in a muddle and as her lenses had scraped her eyes were blurred and she could easily mistake the yellow and the red, so who knows what she saw.

  Thank you, Carl, for the gift you have given me, said Joanna May, cheerfully, and now I’m off to find my sisters, and I bet I find them different every one, different as sin and yet the same.

  And with no apparent trouble at all she found a door in the perfect wall and was out of it and gone but on her way down in the lift she wept, and she nearly stumbled getting off the escalator, she trembled so. What woman of sixty would want to meet herself at thirty: rerun of some dreary old film, in which she gave a bad performance, like as not, and split-screen technique at that.

  21

  Bethany said to Carl May, ‘That was a perfectly horrid thing to do, scraping her neck like that. You’re nothing but a Dracula.’

  And he said, still in a bad mood, ‘Be careful or I’ll do it to you too. You might be helped by a little sorting and a proper upbringing, so I should shut up if I were you, or you’ll have a very sore neck indeed.’

  So she did shut up, for a time. But unlike Joanna she could see the advantage of being more than one: the thought did not horrify her at all, not one bit. The more of her the better. She would sit back while the other clones did the shopping, yes she would; after all she could rely on them bringing back what she wanted, choosing what she would choose – until, thinking about it, she realized that was like believing you were Marie Antoinette in another incarnation, and not one of her maids, which was more likely statistically (one of Carl May’s favourite words) there being so many more ordinary people than queens in the world. One of the other clones might seize command, and Bethany would be doing the shopping while the Queen clone was the one just sitting – and Bethany wouldn’t know what was going on in the Queen’s head, really, except she’d know it was pretty much what was going on in her own, which might or might not be a help. But somehow Bethany felt she would indeed have the benefit of extra strawberries and cream upon the tongue, not to mention all the lovemaking multiplied, because she’d know what the others would be tasting, feeling, doing, not just having to guess.

  And, then again, though Bethany loved her parents, she could see they had not brought her up in a safe or sensible kind of way. Reared in another fashion, encouraged in different directions, Bethany might be a fashion designer, or fly an aircraft, not be just a girl who lived by her looks. Or would she? How could one tell? Except by trying.

  Bethany said to Carl May later that evening, when he had calmed down and lost his satanic overtones, and she and he were in the bath – it was too small for their cavortings (she knocked her elbow quite painfully) and white, which she thought boring and old-fashioned – ‘What happened to Joanna’s clones? Didn’t you want to find out?’ and he said, ‘Good heavens, you didn’t really believe that tale did you? I was annoyed with Joanna, that’s all.’

  This time Bethany didn’t believe him. Bethany said, ‘You did so do it. You just frightened yourself with what you’d done.
You realized, and stopped, the way people do. You set things marching you couldn’t control, so you just shut your eyes, and left it to the other people to clear up the mess! Like the waste from your power plants. What’s going to happen to that?’

  Twenty-four going on forty-two. He got out of the bath. Either she annoyed him with her perspicacity, or irritated him with her stupidity. She confused him. He would be filled with tenderness and gratitude towards her, when she had rendered him some peculiar sexual favour – though in theory that was when he should most despise her – and yet wish to push her out of the window if she failed to read his mind properly, or was insensitive to his feelings. Carl May did not like being confused.

  ‘Oh,’ said Bethany, ‘now what have I said? Why did you get out of the bath?’

  ‘Because I banged my knee,’ he said, wrapping himself in a towel, which smelt of Bethany, sweet and warm and agreeably cheap, ‘and bed is more comfortable. Let’s go to bed.’

  In bed she said, ‘If you were making it up about the clones – and you told me about them yourself once before; did you forget? – why did you take that piece from her neck?’

  And he said, ‘To frighten her off. Who wants ex-wives dropping in at any time of day or night, making scenes?’

  ‘Well,’ said Bethany, ‘if you ask me, it was a bit drastic. Most men don’t behave like that when they find their ex-wife has a lover. And after all, it’s only natural that she should. You have me, after all. And there can’t be one law for men and another for women.’

  ‘Oh yes, there can,’ said he.

  ‘Well, don’t have him run over too,’ said Bethany, ‘or there’ll be more talk. Punish him some other way. Have a thousand of him made, each one with a high sex drive but impotent. That should pay him out.’

  ‘I’ll pay him out the simple old-fashioned way,’ he said, and looked at his watch and laughed aloud.