by Weldon, Fay
28
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out! Now there’s a desperate doctrine, a right dollop of lateral thinking, a fine biblical recipe for preserving thy view of thyself as a fine and upright person. Kill the bearer of the bad news, would you; much good may it do you. The enemy still advances over the hill. If thine eye lusts, sever the optical nerves; chop off your hand if it strays where it shouldn’t: destroy your ears to keep out the seducing voice: eyeless, earless, legless, armless, roll around in the mire: you will still be in the valley of desire. Just unable to function. After the inquest, after I, Joanna May, had perjured myself and betrayed the memory and love of Isaac King, the better to protect the interests of my husband Carl, I walked back to Eton Square, to the big pillared house which was Carl’s and my home. I walked up the steps, put my key in the lock, and found it would not turn. The key was the right key – it was the lock that had changed. I banged the knocker and rattled the handle but no one came. Yet I’d seen Anna’s pudgy face at the window, just a glimpse of it, or thought I had.
I believed that by perjuring myself I would win Carl’s forgiveness, that it would be over: it could be forgotten. That Isaac’s death was sufficient punishment for me. I stamped and shouted and banged upon the step, and I expect I screamed and cried, I can’t remember. The solid door stood between me and my marriage, my home, my friends, my clothes, my possessions, my past, my future, my life. Those strong upright houses of Pimlico are built to keep the poor out; to keep the rich secure, the noise of riot at a distance. Carl had cast me out of his life; I had become a supplicant: I belonged the wrong side of the door. I knew it was no accident. It bore the hallmark of Carl’s vengeance. The sudden shock of horrid surprise which he knew so well how to deliver, the lightning stroke out of an apparently clear sky. First he lured you into complacency; then, clap, snap, he got you.
I went to the phone box on the corner and rang my own number but no one answered. I wondered what Anna was thinking as it rang and rang, and she knew it was me: poor Anna, straight from the Philippines, witnessing this cruelty, obliged to be part of it. Carl paid her wages. Would she be horrified, or would she just think this is what happens, always happens, always will happen, to women when they cease to please or, worse, step out of line. A plain girl herself, stocky and puffy-eyed, bad-complexioned, hesitant in English, used and abused, fleeing one set of harshnesses to run into another, still thinking herself lucky, allowed to pick up the crumbs of Carl’s and my life. Poor Anna. She’d know whose side she was on: whichever hand had the power, held the food, would be the one she licked. I went back and stood on the step: it began to rain a little: I didn’t know what to do: to go to friends would be to start a scandal: I was still Carl’s wife.
And then the garage door whirred and opened, and the big Volvo backed out, black and shiny and somehow ordinary, with the dent still in the wing which had been the death of Isaac, and in the back was Poudry the solicitor, and in the front was Philip the murderer. And Poudry held the door open for me, and I got inside, because I didn’t know what else to do. And while we drove to a small and rather grimy hotel in Paddington – where someone or other who needed their wages no doubt, and knew which side their bread was buttered, and that it wasn’t my side, had unkindly booked me a room – Poudry told me Carl was divorcing me, that I would be bought a house and given an income, that I was not to set foot in Eton Square again, that I was to think myself lucky.
That my clothes had been destroyed, my papers and my books and my family photographs shredded, and my parents’ marriage certificate and my father’s death certificate too; and no sign of me was to be left in the house, all trace of me was to be destroyed. I was free to begin life again as he would be, without evidence of the past, and I should think myself lucky.
‘Do you think I’m lucky?’ I asked Mr Poudry.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, after thinking about it for a little. We were, I think, both very conscious of the dent in the Volvo’s back wing, and of Philip the chauffeur in the front. Mr Poudry hummed a little in a nonchalant way that reminded me of Pooh, in The House at Pooh Corner, singing a little song the better to sound at ease: ‘How nice to be a cloud, floating in the blue. It makes me very proud, to be a little cloud.’
As it happened my husband was generous. Not that ‘as it happened’ is a phrase that was much bandied about in Carl May’s life. It suited him, for reasons of his own not immediately plain to others, to be generous, or appear to be.
I moved out of the Suffolk Ease hotel only when the decorators finished in the King’s House. I could have left at any time, but the hotel was a desperate place and suited me. I had a room to myself: others, immigrants, lived twenty-five to a room, in a stench of urine and cooking, refugees from one horror or another – flood, famine, persecution, torture, war. Carl, booking me in here, meant to tell me something. So I sat it out, recovering from my own desolation, my own sudden loss of home. I had no one. The other lodgers had each other. Night after night I sat alone in a room, sitting on a bed – damp stains on the wall, the murmur of human grief around, crying children – staring at television: a woman of more than fifty, whom even money couldn’t save. And I wanted to see Carl, and he wouldn’t: I wanted to talk to Carl, and he wouldn’t. How could he do it? How could he wrench us apart? If it hurt me, surely it hurt him? I mourned Isaac but I mourned for my marriage more.
And all Mr Poudry would say, when I visited him in his office, was, ‘You are very lucky, Mrs May,’ and one day he added, ‘It might be a good idea to move out of the Suffolk Ease: you’ll forgive me for saying so, but there is beginning to be about you the pong of the underprivileged.’ And I looked at him closely for the first time and saw he was not more than thirty: it was the weight of authority had aged him in my eyes. I wouldn’t go. The hotel was where Carl wanted me to be. I was obedient. Only when I moved into the King’s House did I begin to find my will again, or some of it. I washed, I dressed, I looked after myself: I became accustomed to life without Carl. Sometimes I even enjoyed it. I began to like the vision of myself, the drama of a woman lonely and alone, living in isolation, rejecting the world which rejected her.
Then I employed Oliver as a gardener: and one day he took out his guitar and sang some folk song to me, some wispy song of lust and longing, and asked me if I’d like to play the guitar, and I said yes, and he put the guitar in my arms, and stood behind me and put his arms round my arms, and that was that. I no longer thought about Carl. I was cured. I assumed he was cured too. I thought I was safe from Carl.
I thought all would be well if I did not love Oliver: I could not let myself love him. I knew quite well what would happen if I did. That if I cared when it ended – and it must, it must, I knew in my heart it must though my head pretended otherwise – the pain this time would kill me. A lump in my breast, a swollen lymph gland under the arm and that would be that. And who would there be to come to my funeral? Gerald (reluctantly) and Angela (weeping: if only for the loss of a good gossip) and Mr Poudry and the accountant, and a nurse from the hospital if I’d remembered to smile while dying; and Carl would not come, or if he did, it would be so the press didn’t pick up the fact that he had not. The funeral was not worth the dying for: let Oliver be a nightly visitor to my bed, let him return me, little by little, to the fullness of the world, but that must be all. It should not be difficult. I had loved Carl May: having loved Carl May, I could not easily fall in love with, become emotionally dependent upon, sexually infatuated with, addicted to, a gardener who played rock guitar.
Oliver died and I found it was true. I had not loved him. You only know what you’ve got once it’s gone, and it wasn’t much. Trevor the butler gave an account of Oliver’s death, his murder – and how could it be anything but murder: a man doesn’t easily hang himself by his feet – and I heard the account with equanimity. I winced, for it was a horrid thought that a life which could bring me to life, purply-red, strong and pulsing, had changed suddenly and permanently into limp white rotti
ng tissue. I wept a little, because Oliver had been cut down in the spring of his life, and of the year, with the whole blossoming, blooming, fruiting season yet to go. I was saddened because now my evenings would have to be spent alone, the forbidden pleasure, the companionable calming marijuana joints no more. I was shocked, pale and shaking – a physical reaction, I imagined – but the roots of my being were untouched, steady, compacted in dry earth. I surprised even myself.
If thy love offend thee, pluck it out.
29
The gardens of the King’s House ran down to the river Thames, gently sloping, occasionally terraced. The river split to form an island, shared by a little group of houses, of which Joanna’s was the biggest and best. The jetty, however, was seldom used. Oliver did not like the water, and Joanna mistrusted it. The garden was old; first established in the eighteenth century, used originally as an overflow for Kew Gardens, neglected and cosseted by turns. ‘What a pity you don’t like gardening,’ Oliver would say to Joanna. ‘Looking after a garden is like looking after children. Feed plants and they grow, neglect them and they suffer. It’s all rewards and punishments – with more than a dash of chance thrown in, in the form of weather. I’m sure you’d be good at it.’
But what Joanna liked was to sit out on a sunny morning, and breakfast at leisure, dressed in white as often as not, watching Oliver work: the garden and herself presently drifting into one: she the prize lily, a little past peak flowering perhaps, but still what the garden was all about: the culture and cultivation of beauty.
She liked to sit in the spring and summer and watch the pleasure boats go by, music approaching, passing, fading – while those who had the gift of life, the understanding of enjoyment, the privilege of friendship, went sailing by. Or so it seemed. Joanna did not doubt that on closer acquaintance the crews and guests aboard the yachts, steamers and launches were as vulgar and foolish as anyone else, as prone to anxiety, misery and jealousies as she: that the music masked a thousand discontents, and that the champagne moved to mock exhilaration, not necessarily the real thing: nevertheless the illusion was pleasant, there was no need to get too near. She did not grudge these river people the possibility of happiness, at least, and certainly admired their ambition to achieve it. ‘Such a lovely day! Let’s go on the river…’ Still, she had managed the lido, with Gerald and Angela: that was water and outing enough.
On the afternoon of that day, the day Joanna, her own resentments finally focused, had gone to Reading to have it out with Carl, Oliver, having finished with the rhododendrons, was weeding out the herbaceous borders. He worked with a hoe, standing to unsettle the shallow roots of the clover which crept up from the river bank in spite of all efforts to prevent it; or, occasionally, kneeling, with fork and trowel, to dig out plantains, patiently easing out the long, stubborn root, loosening soil and levering back and forth until they gave up, apologizing as he did so for thus putting paid to their best endeavours. His habit of talking to plants of all sorts, including weeds, and especially weeds he meant to destroy, quite irritated Joanna.
‘If you’re going to kill them, kill them,’ she’d say. Oliver would droop his lids over his soft brown eyes to mask his displeasure, giving him what she called his ‘I meant to please but now look’ spaniel look; his hippy look, of reverence to all things, gentle, kind and understanding; his Age of Aquarius look. Then she’d say, ‘I don’t know why you don’t just use weedkiller, like anyone else,’ just to incense him, to watch the pallor of determined sweetness give way to the pink of indignation, and then she’d laugh and he’d know she was teasing.
But these pleasures were over now. An expensive-looking pleasure launch of the kind Oliver least liked, being moulded in some kind of new fashion to give it rounded, bulbous lines, and in a colour Oliver knew to be called Whisper Pink, trimmed with Whisper Cream, its CD playing Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, cut its engine, its music, on the stretch of river which ran by the King’s House, slid slowly into the jetty and tied up. There were five young men on board, strangely dressed.
Oliver straightened up, and watched the five young men disembark and come towards him, up the garden path where the tiger tulips bloomed on either side. They smiled, but he knew they were not friendly: something about the tense way they held their necks; he knew at once that retreat would be more dangerous than standing ground, that to placate would be safer than to challenge. They were, he thought, in their mid-twenties. They talked and joked amongst themselves, halfway between yobbo and yuppy: yobbo down below, layers of ragged and chain-strewn trouser; up above, collar, tie and suit jacket. Their heads were apparently shaven, and they wore bowler hats.
‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ the leader said. His name was Jacko. He was blond and beautiful. ‘You the gardener?’
‘Yes,’ said Oliver, ‘that’s my trade.’
‘Got quite a bit of age to it,’ said the second in command. His name was Petie. He was dark and sulky. ‘This garden has.’
‘That is certainly so,’ said Oliver. ‘It was old when George Three bought it and renovated it for his mistress.’
‘Did he now?’ said Elwood, who was black and beautiful. ‘Those old geezers weren’t half naughty boys.’
And Haggie and Dougie, who were pale, thin and spotty, and didn’t fill their trousers or their suit jackets nearly as well as the other three, kicked a tulip or two out of the ground.
‘Pity to do that,’ said Oliver, mildly. ‘That’s quite a rare flower. A black tulip. Not my favourite, as flowers go, a black flower being unnatural, if you ask me, but some people like them.’
In answer, Dougie and Haggie tore up handfuls of daffodils, and Oliver didn’t mind that so much. They were more or less over and he’d been going to move them, in any case, to some less-overlooked patch of ground where they could deteriorate in peace and wait for their replanting in the autumn. But he pretended dismay, since that was what they wanted.
‘Can I help you fellows?’ he asked, wondering where Trevor was. Trevor would sometimes come out in the mornings with a cup of coffee, and sit on a stone wall in the sunshine and talk about the minutiae of his life with his lover – he was having an up-and-down relationship with a masseur at a nearby health farm – and Oliver would listen patiently and respond constructively. If Trevor looked out of the window and saw the young men he might, with any luck, call the police.
‘Is the missus out?’ asked Jacko.
‘The missus is out,’ said Oliver, ‘but the master’s in,’ half a truth being in his book better than no truth at all, albeit in the circumstances any lie might have been justifiable. Those capable of knocking off the heads of black tulips, in passing, were in Oliver’s eyes quite capable of knocking off human heads.
‘That’s a lie and a half,’ said Jacko. ‘The mistress is out as we very well know – and what a naughty boy you are, Oliver, young enough to be the lady’s son – and the master ain’t here neither.’
‘If you know,’ said Oliver, brightly, ‘then why ask me?’ and was quite pleased with his own courage. He’d said the same thing, at the age of four – according to his proud mother – to his teacher when asked what three and two made. ‘If you know, why ask me?’
Jacko took out his fob watch and looked at it, and took off his hat to reveal a topknot of golden curls, and nodded to Elwood, who opened his briefcase and took out a length of bamboo pipe. Petie took out a dart from the yellow child’s lunch box he carried, and Petie carefully handed the dart to Elwood who put it in the hollow tube and blew the other end, hard and sharp, and it landed in the back of Oliver’s hand, the one that was carrying the trowel.
‘Ouch!’ he said, and dropped it, and Jacko, Petie, Elwood, Dougie and Haggie counted to five in unison and Oliver felt numbness running up his arm and down to his heart. He noticed the sudden quietness of his whole body, as it stopped beating. He thought, this is what it must be like for a fuchsia killed by frost; when water turns to ice, and that was all he thought.
Trevo
r was coming out to meet the lads. He had seen the gleam of yellow hair when Jacko took off his hat, and the flash of handsome male profiles, and wanted to know what was going on. He feared no evil on his own home ground.
But they were bending over Oliver, whoever they were, and turned their smiling faces towards him, and one said, ‘It can only be Trevor, the man’s man,’ and he detected in their smiles something which made him shiver. ‘Better get in the house, Trevor, before it’s you as well,’ so he did. He walked smartly back into the house and locked the back door and slammed shut the stainless steel mesh shutters on the windows from the security console. He watched through the mesh but they did not come after him, and he was affronted, as well as relieved. It seemed he was no business of theirs. Instead, they picked up Oliver and carried him shoulder high into the garage, which had once been a barn. Trevor thought they were singing something.
He did not call the police. He had enough trouble with the police. They followed him when he went out shopping, just waiting for him to go where they assumed he was going, to the public convenience that is, the better to pounce and get him for some disgusting act or other, which he would never perform, but they quite happily invent.
After five minutes Haggie reappeared and looked over the garden in a puzzled kind of way. He called to his friends, ‘What’s a shitty rose look like anyway?’ and Petie came out and wrenched a branch off a rose bush, and went back into the garage, Haggie following.
