by Weldon, Fay
After ten minutes or so all five men appeared again, without Oliver; marched down to the launch moored at the jetty, boarded it, and left in the direction of Reading. Trevor went out to the garage and found Oliver hanging as Joanna was later to find him. The back of his hand had been scratched by, presumably, thorns from the rose branch. A few petals lay on the floor. Oliver’s boots had been pulled off and tossed aside. Out of custom, Trevor put them neatly together. On the floor, beneath the hanging body, brushed by Oliver’s hair, lay a single card from the Tarot pack. Trevor recognized it as the Hanged Man. Trevor had had his fortune told often enough to know that the card was supposed to signify innocence and the overcoming of difficulties by sheer good luck, but he had always taken leave to doubt it; the Tarot pack in his opinion was more sinister than its diviners would often allow. In this case he could see the card signified what he had always suspected: death by hanging because you didn’t look out. And above, below, and to the left and right of the signifier, the Hanged Man in person, were the four Queens. Oh, kinky, thought Trevor: what is going on?
He said goodbye to Oliver in the same spirit as Oliver would say goodbye to doomed weeds and went to sit in the kitchen. He opened the shutters. There seemed no point in keeping them closed. He would wait until Joanna came home and let her decide whether or not to call the police. If she did, he could explain the delay as the general inefficiency and stupidity of the man they insulted him by supposing him to be. He tried to call his friend Jamie but the line was dead. That did not surprise him.
He assumed Joanna would understand the significance of the four cards, and he was right.
30
‘On either side the river lie,’ quoted Carl May, from Tennyson,
‘Long fields of clover and of rye –’
‘Barley,’ said Bethany, and Carl May chose to ignore her. Once.
‘That clothe the wold
And meet the sky
And through the fields
The road runs by
To many-towered Camelot.’
‘That’s where my ex-wife lives,’ said Carl May, ‘in Camelot.’
‘I thought she lived at the King’s House, Maidenhead,’ said Bethany. They lay in bed together. The sheets were white. There were blankets, not a quilt. How quaint, had thought Bethany once, how like him, how pure, but now she thought, how old-fashioned, how uncomfortable, how like death. He ignored her. Twice.
‘And up and down
The people go
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below
The island of Shalott –’
‘Shallots, onions,’ said Bethany.
Thrice.
‘Four grey walls
And four grey towers
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle embowers
The Lady of Shalott.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Bethany, ‘ “She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces through the room” – we did it for diction – “the mirror cracked from side to side, the curse is come upon me, cried the Lady of Shalott.” Then she mooned about for a bit and topped herself from sheer boredom. Which reminds me that the curse has not come upon me. What are we to do, Carl?’
Carl was silent.
‘I know you said you had a vasectomy, Carl, but it can’t have worked because I’m pregnant and I’ve been with no one but you, Carl.’
Still Carl was silent.
‘There, I’ve said it,’ she said. ‘I’d been getting really nervous.’
Carl sat up in bed, looked down at her bare breasts, her smooth narrow arms, her blue eyes – she took out her contact lenses at night – and rested his hand upon her throat. Then he moved it down over her body, on the whole quite gently, though tweaking her nipples rather sharply, to which she was not averse.
‘You be careful,’ said Carl, ‘or you’ll end up like Squirrel Nutkin,’ but she didn’t understand the reference. Nor did she have time to puzzle it out, as the whole of Carl May advanced upon her.
‘You were only joking about being pregnant, I suppose,’ he said, presently, disentangling his legs from hers reluctantly, but he felt the first twinge of cramp, to which he was prone.
‘Of course,’ said Bethany. ‘Twice in one night. Wow! What a man!’ She was tired. She used the language of porno films. She did not have the energy for finesse. He did not seem to notice. There was no real reason for her to be tired. She thought it might well be the effect of boredom.
‘I had a man killed today,’ said Carl, pleased with himself. ‘Perhaps that’s it.’
Bethany blinked, but was careful not to let her body tauten against Carl’s. She no longer felt tired. Then she thought, well, one pregnancy joke deserves a murder joke. A death for a life. Silly old you.
‘He didn’t suffer,’ said Carl.
‘If you’re going to kill a man,’ said Bethany, ‘why bother if he suffers or not?’
‘One does bother,’ he said. ‘For some reason. I don’t wish to inflict pain, or terror. Some lives simply need to stop. Have you ever had a termination, my dear?’
‘Once.’
‘Well, there you are. You understand.’
Bethany put on her contact lenses and turned her eyes green, and fluffed out her red hair, and pranced about the room. It could do no harm.
‘Who was Squirrel Nutkin?’ she asked.
‘Squirrel Nutkin danced about in front of a wise old owl,’ he said from the bed, ‘taunting him and teasing him, asking riddles and telling jokes.’
‘What sort of riddles?’
‘Riddle me, riddle me, riddle me, ree,
How many strawberries swim in the sea?
I answered him as I thought good,
As many red herrings as grow in the wood,’
said Carl May, ‘for example.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Then what was the point?’
‘Nothing happened and nothing happened.’
‘Then what?’
‘Something happened. The old owl pounced and ate Squirrel Nutkin up and there was peace in the wood again.’
‘Oh,’ said Bethany, and put on her clothes rather quickly. Sometimes he did give her the creeps. But presently her spirits were restored, for she was indeed young and she found herself singing her favourite song:
‘For a young man he is young
And an old man he is grey,
And a young man’s back is good and strong,
Get away, old man, get away.’
‘I haven’t finished yet,’ said Carl May. ‘Indeed I have only just started,’ so she had to get back into bed again, but that was not really what he was talking about.
31
Thus thought Joanna May, missing Isaac King badly (for he knew what the cards meant, and she could only guess): now, if the four Queens of the Tarot pack, or, as some would have it, the long-lost Egyptian Book of Toth, are seen together, they denote nothing worse than arguments. If reversed, however, the argument might become excessive; fatal, even. In conjunction with the Hanged Man, a card from the Major Arcana, which when reversed denotes selfishness and sacrifice, rootlessness and riot, things don’t look too good. If you laid all at the head of an actual hanging man, murdered, they might begin to look very bad indeed. And, as the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups could be seen to represent all the women in the world – excepting only the few from the Major Arcana, the High Priestess and the Empress (positions Joanna May and Angela might contend for) or the female half of the Lovers (which might well suit Bethany), these great cards having in their own peculiar way dominion over all the humble folk of the four suits – why then, things might be looking quite appalling for all the women in the world.
Prudently, Joanna spoke none of this aloud. She merely said to Trevor, ‘Gobbledygook. The police will not be interested in what they say is gobbledygook: they will not understand the insult and the threat involved
: go and fetch those cards and put them in the kitchen drawer, and don’t even mention them.’
Joanna May called the police. Of course she did. What else could she do? The duty sergeant she spoke to said they would send a police car the moment one was available. He was soothing and competent. He said if she was certain her gardener was dead, leave him where he was and touch nothing. It sounded, from her description, like some kind of inadvertent death by way of sexual perversion, and was at least less messy than a crucifixion. They’d had quite a lot of those lately: a lot of nuts in the homosexual community: they were sending an ambulance, but that might take even longer than the police car. Emergency services were stretched.
‘I don’t think he was gay,’ said Joanna May.
‘Gay, bi, hetero,’ said the duty officer, ‘makes no difference to us. We are not prejudiced. Where did you say? The King’s House? The big place on the island? Wait, that’s come up on the computer recently… yes, here we are… knew I’d seen it. Trevor Hopkins, occupation butler: indecent behaviour. And this one was the gardener, you say?’
‘The charge against Mr Hopkins was not proven,’ said Joanna May. ‘In fact the charge was dropped. What’s it doing on your computer?’
‘You’re quite right,’ said the duty officer amiably. ‘It shouldn’t be there. No doubt it’s on its way to wiping.’
It was an hour before they arrived, and an hour and a half before the ambulance came to take the body to a morgue. The police doctor said there’d be an autopsy but it looked to him as if the young man had had a heart attack while engaging in some kind of kinky sexual activity – there was no evidence of foul play. No end to the things that people got up to: a pity: from the look of his garden he was good at his job. The world was short of gardeners.
‘And of police officers, too,’ said the plainclothes man, hurrying him on. They had another suspicious death waiting. Four men had arrived. They questioned Trevor, but kindly, to his surprise. He told them nothing about the boat, about the bully boys: just that he’d gone out to the barn to take Oliver his coffee: had found him swinging, dead and upside down, and gone inside and just sat, till Joanna came home. If they thought there was more to it, they didn’t say. It would only take everyone into the complex and miserable area of sexual deviance, and Mrs May’s butler had, from the look of him, suffered enough.
‘What we don’t want’, said the police officer, by way of explanation, ‘is copycatting. If it gets into the papers, before we know it everyone’s hanging from their ankles trying to get heart attacks. We have enough to do –’ and they left. The body had already gone, by ambulance.
Joanna May called Angela and told her all about it. Angela offered to come over but Joanna said she was OK. Only quite some time later did she begin to weep.
32
God flew off in three stages, if you ask me, Joanna May, the childless and the cloned, and none of them anything, I have now decided, to do with nuclear bombs or Logie Baird.
God the Father flew off on the day mankind first interfered with his plans for the procreation of the species: that was the day the first woman made a connection between semen and pregnancy and took pains to stop the passage by shoving some pounded, mud-steeped, leaf up inside her. He flew off in a pet. ‘But this is contraception,’ he cried, ‘this is not what I meant. How can I work out my plan for your perfection and ultimate union with me if you start doing this kind of thing?’
God the Son flew off the day the first pregnant woman made the next connection and shoved a sharpened stick up inside her to put an end to morning sickness and whatever else was happening inside. ‘But this is abortion,’ he cried, ‘it’s revolting, and no place for a pro-lifer like me to be.’
And God the Holy Ghost flew off the day Dr Holly of the Bulstrode Clinic, back in the fifties, took one of my ripe eggs out and warmed it, and jiggled it, and irritated it in an amniotic brew until the nucleus split, and split again, and split again, and then started growing, each with matching chromosomes, with identical DNA, that is to say faults and propensities, physical and social, all included, blueprint for four more individuals, and only one soul between them.
Call me egocentric if you like, but that’s when the Holy Ghost flew off, muttering, ‘Christ, where is this going to end?’ for it’s been trouble ever since, hasn’t it, all downhill; war, and riots, and crime, and drugs, and decadence, and dereliction, and delinquency, because there’s no God. Well, there’s no bringing him back; it’s up to man to step in and take over. (I say ‘man’ advisedly; I don’t think women will have the heart, the courage.) He gave us minds, didn’t he, and the aspiration to do things right, as well as the tendency to do them wrong.
Carl may be wicked, but Carl’s right. Takes a wicked man to be prepared to think like Carl, that’s the trouble. I know how Carl May thinks: though not always what he thinks. I know what he was doing; I know why his teeth did not draw blood. Carl is not interested in my blood: blood cells do not contain DNA. A good place for obtaining DNA, from the tissue at the back of the neck. What Carl does with it depends upon what he feels like. So many things are possible. He could take a fertilized egg from, say, Bethany, give it the blueprint for my growth, put it back inside her, and she’d give birth to a little me. Would she like that? Perhaps she would. Perhaps mothering a man’s first wife might make you feel altogether better about her. All these relationships are about incorporation, if you ask me, everyone in one big bed together – me, Carl, Oliver, Bethany, Isaac – all rolling around, warm and safe and companionable: we only get upset when we’re left out in the cold. If I had a cell from Isaac I would ask Bethany to re-create him, in penance for taking Carl from me. And death would not divide us any more. If he were dug up from his grave, there’d still be enough residual DNA there, even now, to do it. But I won’t do that: it seems forbidden, as forbidden as abortion ever was. I don’t think Carl will do it: to impersonate God is a terrifying thing. Even for Carl, who as a child bayed at the moon. Microbiologists get so far, then lay down their tools, put aside their electron microscopes: take up gardening instead: they frighten even themselves. These days scientists talk a great deal more about God than does the rest of the world: they acknowledge magic – though they call it ‘propensity’, or ‘something intervenes’. ‘Something intervenes,’ they say – as they break matter down to its smallest definable particles, the merest flicker in and out of existence of the most fragmented electric charge – ‘or else our observation alters it.’ What is that but obeisance to the shadow of the God who ran off, the God they drove off, when bold and young and frightened of nothing!
What Carl could do, what Carl might well do, for Carl controls the scientists, since Carl has the money, is mix up some of my chromosomes with those of some other creature and set it growing, and know more or less what would get born, forget a fingernail or two. He could snip out the section that decrees I will have long and elegant legs, and snip in a section from someone else’s DNA, someone with short piano legs, the kind without ankles. He could give me a dog’s back legs. If he wanted, he could do horrible things. He could do good things: sometimes he wants to do good things. Just as man can use nuclear weapons to make war or keep peace, to destroy or build, Carl could make me live with arthritis for ever or keep me disease free, never to catch cold again. He could interfere with my mind: make me nicer, more gregarious, kinder, happier, more socially conscious: he couldn’t control the environment I grew up in, not in the short term, but if everyone was kinder, happier, loved their children better, didn’t shut them in kennels – why then presently the environment of the growing child would indeed change, improve, step by step, little by little. Look at it this way, Carl would say, every time a woman uses contraception or has an abortion, she interferes with natural selection. Not this baby, the next baby, says the mother, bold as brass, standing in nature’s way. Let’s go for a better father, or a better environment: let’s hang on a bit. That’s what it’s about: that’s what’s important. Not the first baby th
at comes along but the best baby, the one that’ll have a decent chance in life. And let’s do better by the ones we have, stop at two, not six. Quality, not quantity. Choice, not randomness, and there being no God, why not? That’s what Carl thinks.
In the meantime, being unreconstructed himself, and cured of the notion that death is final – for it isn’t, not if he can keep the genetic line running – Carl May has killed Oliver, and now he means to kill the clones. He has told me so, by way of the cards. He thinks this will hurt me. He offered me a family: now he snatches it away again. But I’m not at all sure that I recognize their right to life, these thefts from me, these depletings of my ‘I’, these early symptoms of the way the world is going. I might myself be rather in favour of termination. I must think about it.
Time to consult the Maverick Agency once again. I like the Maverick Agency. They make me feel the world is real, that the boats on the river, the cars on the road, are truly there. That a debt could affect you, a bullet kill you. Everything in this house is so still and quiet. The weather is warm. The windows are open. The watered-silk curtains, palest green, stir just a little. In the garden the weeds are growing, that’s all, with no Oliver to clear them. And the caesium falls, and the strontium, and God knows what, silent, minute, invisible, as Carl makes his deadening presence felt.
33
Jane, Julie, Gina, Alice.
In the lives of the clones of Joanna May something stirred, some instinct of self-preservation was awakened, and not in that fact itself (for what woman does not wake in the morning once or twice in her life saying ‘this can’t go on a moment longer’) but in the timing of that fact, lay whatever strangeness there might be to find. As Joanna May, Empress of inner space, fought for once to control her life, so too did the four Queens – Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups (rulers of the provinces, as it were), fight to control theirs, not quite sure what had moved them to action, groping for understanding of their own behaviour, and not quite finding it, so looking for justification instead.
