by Weldon, Fay
She went into the kitchen and found Trevor the butler, with his soft hands and soft round face, sitting at the scrubbed-elm table shaking and weeping; and the expensive wall-to-ceiling kitchen units, which he so loved and Oliver found claustrophobic, rising like the walls of a mausoleum around him, and a dozen hanging copper pans caught the reflection of his shock and grief and threw it back and forth across the room, one to another. Well, it was his world: it was fitting.
‘What happened?’ asked Joanna, and Trevor told her.
25
Why was Joanna so late home? Should not her instinct have been, having betrayed Oliver, to go straight back home and warn him? Of course, but her neck hurt, she was confused and upset; she was not convinced, even if she tried to persuade him of it, that Oliver would appreciate the danger he was in. He would say she was imagining it, and go on shaking off dahlia tubers, or whatever he was doing. It was difficult to convey the extraordinary and drastic nature of Carl’s world to a young man whose concerns were so very horticultural, with a dash of rock guitar thrown in. He would be positive about the matter of the clones, which she was not sure she wanted him to be. He would say, ‘Well, you always wanted a family: now you have them. Sisters and daughters both,’ and if she complained that it was altogether too sudden, and done against her will besides, and Carl May’s behaviour outrageous, he would have told her not to be so negative, or the peas wouldn’t swell in the pods or the bees wouldn’t fertilize the pears – some threat, at any rate, to hold over her head – and remind her that the reason she was no longer married to Carl May was because he was outrageous, so why act so surprised?
In the end she called Angela from a phone box and confided in her, and Angela was gratifyingly startled.
‘You mean you didn’t even know, Joanna?’
‘No.’
‘Cloned, and not known it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t like that.’
‘Neither do I, Angela. That’s why I’m calling.’
‘Poor Joanna.’
‘Because you know how all this time I’ve been complaining about having nothing – no children, no career, no family, no husband, nothing I’ve earned or worked for myself: a whole life wasted –’
‘Yes, I do, Joanna –’
‘Well, there was a kind of pride in that, Angela. It was my singularity. He has taken away my singularity. He has shovelled all these bits and pieces at me, and I hate it.’
‘It would make me feel better, I think.’
‘It made me feel like just nothing, Angela; and this makes me feel perfectly dreadful, I can tell you. All I can do is just wander about. I’m calling from a phone box, I’m not even home.’
‘Why did he save it till now, do you think?’
‘Because he was angry, I suppose.’
‘I expect he was. Men don’t much like their ex-wives bursting into their offices. Good old Carl, always has to be in the forefront of everything, even test-tube babies. Tinker tinker with the universe.’
‘I don’t know how you can say that: “Good old Carl.” ’
‘I was being ironic, Joanna.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Joanna, would you say Carl was mad? Answer frankly.’
‘No,’ said Joanna, ‘I’m afraid he isn’t. I think he just likes to have his own way, and get his own back. He’s childish.’
‘I see,’ said Angela. ‘Can I tell Gerald about the clones?’
‘If you feel you have to,’ said Joanna, a little tearfully.
‘Are you going to try and find these creatures?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t suppose they know. It might be an even worse shock for them than it has been for me.’
‘I can see that. A kind of extra mother, dreadfully like oneself. Seeing what one would grow into. Thirty years ago, you say.’
‘Yes.’
‘What it amounts to is you’ve got four identical twins half your age walking round unclaimed.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Well, don’t tell your Oliver or he might go after them.’
‘You mean to kill them? Because they upset me? Like slugs, snails and greenfly?’
‘No I don’t mean that, Joanna. I mean he might fancy them.’
‘Why should he?’
‘Because they’re half your age. You, but more so, Joanna.’
And Angela thought, but was too kind to say, even though she was jealous – how could she not be jealous with Joanna still beautiful, still pulling them in, at sixty – ‘You’d be the first taste of a drug on his tongue, Joanna, and they the real stuff, the full flavour.’ Instead, she said, ‘I hope you didn’t tell Carl about your gardener lover. I hope that wasn’t why he was so angry?’
‘Well yes, I did.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Angela. ‘Wasn’t that rather stupid?’
‘Yes,’ said Joanna.
‘I hope your clones are more prudent than you,’ said Angela, ‘or their nearest and dearest will be having a terrible time. I think you should go straight back home and warn this gardener of yours. Gerald takes Carl quite seriously, you know.’
‘I should hope so,’ said Joanna.
Joanna went and walked about Richmond Park, in totally impractical shoes. When she was thirty she had imagined all her troubles would be over by forty, there would be nothing left to go wrong: at forty she had imagined the same about fifty, and at fifty she had given up: she still found herself walking about distracted and alone, carefully refraining from crying, just as she had when she was a child.
She remembered coming home from the Bulstrode Clinic and that time she had really wept, from physical weakness more than anything else, or so she had supposed. She remembered that the doctor’s name had been Dr Holly. Holly and May, she’d thought at the time, berries and flowers. Red berries, white flowers, and nothing coming out of either.
Well, she’d been wrong about that. Too much had come out of it. She would go back to Oliver and tell him everything, everything, no matter what Angela said; they would go off for six months to some secret destination. New Zealand, perhaps. The soil was good, she believed, and the gardens were wonderful. If he loved her, he would believe her; they would go. Or she would apologize to Carl; tell him she’d been making it all up. Something. Her head ached, her neck hurt: she had to sleep.
26
Angela went straight up to Gerald’s office after she’d talked to Joanna; she took the car to the station, the train up to London, a taxi to the Department, and Gerald came straight out of a meeting to see her. She hadn’t been to his office for eight years, he reminded her, not since the time their eldest son had made a passing girlfriend pregnant and she’d been upset.
It was Joanna May, she told him. Joanna had phoned her from a callbox on Reading station to tell her the most extraordinary story. Gerald said perhaps he’d better get back to his meeting, since it wasn’t family, and the less he knew about the Mays the better and the same went for Angela, and the news from Chernobyl was not good, it was still belching peculiar things into the atmosphere, and there was more trouble with the monitoring equipment. He might have to go back to Britnuc for help. But he didn’t return to the meeting, of course. They went to the canteen instead, for tea. Not liking the look of the pastries, he had the steak and kidney pie: she took the braised beef and mushrooms. Both had roast potatoes, boiled potatoes and buttered parsnips as well. It would keep them going until supper-time.
‘It probably isn’t the equipment’s fault; it’s just the technicians don’t know how to use it,’ said Angela, which hadn’t occurred to Gerald. He admitted they were barely trained. The truth was, the nation was totally unprepared for such an emergency. If emergency it was – radiation was still pretty much an unknown quantity. The danger was not critical or immediate – damage would show up in the morbidity statistics of the future when a different government altogether would be in power.
‘I hope you were careful,’ said Gerald.
‘I wouldn’t put it past Carl May to have our phone tapped.’
‘Neither would I,’ said Angela. ‘Is cloning someone without their knowledge illegal?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Gerald. ‘I hope so.’
‘The other thing that bothers me,’ said Angela, ‘is will Carl try and get rid of the gardener?’
‘You mean fire him?’
‘I mean kill him, like he did the professor. What Joanna calls “that thing with Isaac”.’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Gerald. ‘There was more to that than met the eye. I nipped over to the Home Office and had a look at the files.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Always useful to have a hold over a fellow like Carl May,’ said Gerald, and there was a gleam in his eye she seldom saw but liked to see. Not for nothing had he risen through the ranks of public service; she used to know the reason well: these days, as his face grew softer and pudgier, she tended to forget. All round them people drank herbal tisanes and ate muesli bars. No one took tea seriously any more. She cleared their plates, and went to fetch spotted dick. Custard was off.
‘I hope you like foam cream,’ she said when she came back. ‘There’s no custard and it’s kind of stiff without any lubrication at all. What did the files say?’
‘Just that prosecution was against the public interest,’ said Gerald. ‘That fellow King had a pretty dicey record, anyway. He was collecting brain tissue from Egyptian mummies and taking it to some lab somewhere and trying to grow an ancient Egyptian. Garden Enterprises was funding the lab.’
‘What a peculiar thing to want to do,’ said Angela, ‘considering how the population of Egypt grows of its own accord. By a million every nine months, I believe.’
‘I don’t know about peculiar,’ said Gerald. ‘It might have been rather interesting, if it had worked. Anyway the Home Office didn’t seem too upset the professor was out of the way. So I don’t reckon he was got rid of just because Carl was jealous. Something else was going on.’
‘Poor Joanna,’ said Angela, ‘she won’t like that at all. But at least it means the gardener is safe. Well, safe-ish.’
‘So long as he keeps out of the rain,’ said Gerald. ‘That seems to be the main danger, these days. Personally, I hope he stays out in it, and his balls fall off. Are you sure there’s no custard?’
‘One wonders a little,’ said Angela, ‘about the wisdom of having a man such as Carl May in charge of quite so many nuclear power stations.’
‘They’re very old ones,’ said Gerald.
‘I should have thought that made matters worse.’
‘Not really,’ said Gerald. ‘They’re like old cars. You can patch them and repair them and keep them on the road; and they give you due warning when something bad is going to happen. They knock and clank a bit: in time for you to do something about it. It’s the new ones that are the problem: all built-in, fail-safe factors, and non-labour-intensive, because human error is always the non-calculable hiccough, ergonomically speaking: nothing at all to go wrong in the new ones, but if it does, pow!’
‘All the same,’ said Angela.
‘We’d never have him in charge of the new ones,’ said Gerald, reassuringly. ‘Don’t you worry. As it is, he’s a popular fellow and a public hero and good for the image of the nuclear power industry.’
‘But he’s a murderer,’ said Angela.
‘Hush,’ said Gerald, ‘that’s a very strong way of putting it. All these fellows tend to dispose of their enemies one way or another: if governments can do it, they think, why can’t they, quite ignoring the electoral mandate. One can’t condone it but it does happen. At least Carl May confines his activities to the personal sphere.’
‘Think about it, Gerald,’ said Angela.
‘He isn’t mad,’ said Gerald. ‘One draws the line at people who’re mad, in charge of anything.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Angela. ‘I’m not so sure about him being sane.’
‘We’ll see what transpires,’ said Gerald. ‘We’ll keep a careful eye on things. Are you really sure there’s no proper custard?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Angela, brushing away a flake of suet pudding which stuck to her hairy chin.
‘Pity,’ said Gerald. ‘This cream is rather much.’
27
Had Joanna bitten back her anger, jealousy and resentment, and not visited Carl, her life would have gone calmly on: as it was, she was saved. Without the assault of these passionate saving graces she would have aged slowly and gracefully, developed a touch of arthritis here, a backache there: Oliver would have drifted off – men with guitars seldom stay, as she knew in her heart; a few languorous, heart-strumming chords, and they’re off – and her fate would have indeed been that of the elderly woman who has never been employed, has no husband, no children, no former colleagues or particular interests, a handful of friends still around, with any luck (though their particular loyalties stretched by distance, exhaustion, their own problems) but who is fortunate enough to have a lot of money.
She would have given up the King’s House in time. It would have come to seem, as her body shrunk, too big, too echoey, too frightening, too empty. Most women end their lives in bedsitting rooms, one way or another; possessions exhaust; they get discarded. Even pets become too much of a responsibility. The walls close in as the years pass: rooms get smaller. Joanna might have joined, for a time, those groups of women who go from good hotel to good hotel, up and down the coasts in winter – in to the cathedral cities in summer – filling up the vacant rooms of hoteliers, who smile to see their income coming through the door, but whose hearts sink at the very sight of them, boredom and grievance incarnate. And how can these old ladies, these outlivers of men, not be boring, being so bored themselves? And how can they not complain, whose very life is a reproach to the young and vigorous? Joanna May’s mind would have narrowed with her life: she would have stopped contemplating the nature of existence, stopped worrying about the constituents of identity, thought only of whether Tuesday’s lamb chop and mint sauce was any more or less digestible than Wednesday’s escalope and mushrooms. These terrible things she knew in her head: they lurked on the edge of her consciousness. And with that instinct for the preservation not just of life but of aliveness, not just the body but the soul, Joanna acted; driven by indignation, whipped-up emotion, frothed up to twice its proper size like a dollop of cream in a fast-food restaurant, she was moved to confront Carl in his lair, knowing perfectly well that he’d snarl and scratch, that his snarls and scratches were dangerous, and she was glad of it.
Why else had she married Carl May, in the first place, but to be saved from boredom? The boredom, the depression, of childhood, of home? Why had she brought about the divorce, but because boredom hadn’t been routed, no: it had been creeping behind her for thirty years, waiting to pounce, and it had almost caught up with her again, peering out from behind soup tureens at official dinners, perching on the white ties of elderly gents at functions, waving; nothing to talk to Carl about any more: or anything he was prepared to listen to, his life so divorced from hers, yet she so used to him, he to her, they could hardly tell each other apart.
Something had to happen.
Isaac happened. Isaac talked, talked, everything interested him; more, he listened. Illicit excitement sent boredom running, far far away, over distant hills: but excitement, danger, was like a drug, you got used to it, you needed more. At first, sex in his bedsitting room was enough, more than enough, mad enough, with the strange smells of toothpowder, and undone laundry, and disorder, books and papers everywhere, bits of old pottery, half a mummy’s head; dead flowers in a vase, from 4000 BC for all she knew, the old sometimes looked so new, the colours so bright, the shapes so distinct. And Isaac’s voice wonderfully on and on, including her in his universe, and the universe seemed to have a history, a purpose, a meaning, which started in the past, collecting as it went, arriving at now. Carl’s universe started in the futur
e and came back to today – it collected nothing. Well, that was understandable. Carl May’s experience of the past was not pleasant, so he looked to the future, of course he did. But then Isaac’s bedsitting room was not enough: she got used to it: it seemed too ordinary for something as extraordinary as Isaac and Joanna May, wife of Carl: boredom crept back, nearer, began to wave, sitting on mummy cases, on the edge of the chipped bath, sooty from an ancient gas-fired geyser, which puffed out black dust if you wanted hot water to wash. In the end the gallery was the only place he wouldn’t come, this ghost of her own past, outdone at its own game by the half-haunted gloom, the watching eyes of history, which seemed to approve – or Isaac said they did; sex was just fine with the Ancient Egyptians, according to him – and of course in the gallery it was perfectly possible for Carl to come in at any time. They must have been mad. She must have been. But again, she was angry. A woman without children, now wanting children, too late to have children. Carl’s fault. She loved Isaac, let Carl know it. He deserved it. Something had to happen. And one day it did: Carl pushed the door open.
And that stopped Carl being bored, for a time. He’d got too cosy anyway: he was the media’s darling, the Government’s blue-eyed boy. Garden Enterprises was under way. Britnuc was belching clean air into a threatened atmosphere – with only the occasional release of unscheduled radioactivity, which was in any case the least of many polluting evils. Something had to happen.
Carl May, before his wife’s infidelity, was beginning to get pains in his chest. His was the kind of boredom which destroys life, like a slowly creeping fungus on a pear tree, causing leaves to wither and fruit to fall, unripened. Let him lose his wife, then, thought Joanna: that’ll cure him: a swift blast of fungicide in the form of jealousy, outrage, anger. She’d been right. Carl shook himself and thrived. Only in the shaking he’d shaken her off too. She hadn’t done it for his sake, had she, but for her own.
