by Weldon, Fay
Gina saw Julie watching and thought who does that woman think she is, staring, and why is she so familiar: do I know her from somewhere? And what was a woman like that doing, sitting in a McDonald’s, in a pale cashmere jumper, trying to get her pearly teeth into a Big Mac when everyone knew you didn’t bite but somehow drew the layered substance into your mouth. Prettier than me, thought Gina; taller, thinner, younger, certainly richer: dressed so you hardly noticed, but you could tell expensively, and looking miserable but down her nose. If things had gone differently for me, thought Gina, if I’d been given a chance in life, if I hadn’t had these bloody children, if someone, anyone, had had the heart to stop me, got me to school, let alone college – but they hadn’t, had they. No one had cared. She felt herself beginning to cry. She was stuck here in McDonald’s, marooned. Now she’d stopped walking and taken her foot off the ground she didn’t think she could put it back down again. It would hurt too much. Moreover, she had set things in motion at the doctor’s she could not control, and wished she hadn’t: there would be more violence ahead: how was she going to collect Sue at four o’clock: she could send Ben, she supposed, but Ben would resent it, Ben had never wanted Sue to be born any more than Sue had wanted Ben to exist; and worse, she, Gina, wouldn’t be there to stand between the two children and their father when they got home: and they were as likely to be met by blows, insult and humiliation, as chips and a video: you could never be sure with Cliff. Sue could walk home on her own, and would if no one turned up, but she would sulk for days and that would feed back tension into the whole family and make matters worse. Ben always wanted things to get better: Sue somehow wanted them to get worse, so whatever awful thing it was would be over quicker. Only, one row was just like another. When Cliff was sorry, and making amends, he was the best person in the world, but these days his being sorry was turning into a memory: a hope. She had failed her marriage, herself, her children.
Gina caught sight of her face in a mirror, and the tears running down it, and thought she didn’t look so bad after all, almost glamorous, and then realized she wasn’t looking at a reflection of herself but at the woman opposite, who was also in tears.
‘Well,’ said Gina, startled into friendliness, ‘I suppose all women look the same when they’re crying.’
‘I don’t cry,’ said Julie, ‘I never cry,’ stopping on the instant, though the same thought had crossed her own mind: that looking at Gina she was looking at a reflection of herself. What a terrible thought! She gave up battling with the Big Mac and sipped a little black coffee and dabbed her eyes with a lace handkerchief. (‘A lace handkerchief!’ thought Gina, astounded, blowing her own nose on a McDonald’s serviette.)
When Ben came back with the two Big Macs, one Chicken McNuggets, three large fries and two milk shakes, Julie gave up altogether and joined Gina at her table. Julie said, ‘You’re so lucky to have children; we can’t have any,’ and began to cry again. Gina wished she wouldn’t cry in front of the children, but Ben seemed impervious to this extra distress, just stared stoically into space over his hamburger. He was a handsome child; but he did, she acknowledged, look pale and nervous. How would he grow up? ‘You could have mine,’ said Gina, joking, but Julie said, quite seriously, ‘It’s not the same. And I have this great house with no one to fill it, and somehow it makes things worse to have so much of what you don’t want. I am never going back into that house again. I’m not. I don’t care what anyone says.’ Even as she spoke she realized she was, in her own mind, peopling her world with concerned observers, who of course in reality didn’t exist. Lonely so lonely!
‘Aren’t you lucky,’ said Gina. ‘I have a house with too much to fill it, and I reckon I’ve got to go back into mine, I’ve no option.’
Gina looked across at Julie and again had a sense of familiarity. Had they known each other as children? At school? She couldn’t put her finger on it. Julie looked at Gina and thought this woman is like the sister I never had, and doesn’t she just need cheering up, cleaning up, and taking over. I could do some good here, for once in my life.
Ben said, ‘Mum, there’s a man following us. He was behind us when we left the doctor’s and there he is, sitting over there –’ and he pointed to where a young man in a suit sat behind a copy of the Sun, hiding his face. He had chosen a coffee and an apple tart. There was a briefcase on the empty chair beside him.
Gina said, ‘Well, I haven’t lost all my charms, then,’ and Ben, who didn’t seem to take to Julie but kept looking at her curiously all the same, went into a real sulk at being made, as he felt, to look a fool. Sometimes, when in a mood, he was so like his father, Gina quite disliked him. One of the problems about bringing yourself to divorce point, deciding this was the man you hated and not the man you loved, as you had rashly thought at the beginning, was not just the practical one of how you went and where you went, or the emotional one of how you lived on your own, coped on your own and put up with loneliness, but how, if you hated the man, you went on loving the children, who were after all half his. You saw the father looking out of the eyes of the son. The whole business of it taking two to make one, Gina had long ago decided, made being a mother and doing it right all but impossible. She found her daughter easier. She just told her what to do and she did it. But that irritated her, too. Where was the girl’s spirit? And she would snuggle up to Cliff, too, as if she was taking Cliff’s side, as if she’d just move in with him the moment Cliff had battered her mother to death, and that drove Gina mad. It was all horrible; everything all went right or it all went wrong.
Julie said to Gina, ‘Why don’t you come home with me until you sort things out?’
Gina said to Julie, ‘What about your husband? What would he say? He wouldn’t like it.’
Julie said, ‘He’s never there, and if he does turn up, so what? The house may be in his name legally but it’s mine morally, and it needs filling up with people. I do what I want with my own house.’
‘Well,’ said Gina, ‘in that case, yes, OK,’ and that took Julie aback, but she was not the kind of person to go back on her word.
‘What a day of surprises,’ Julie said, as she helped Gina limp to the car. Ben pushed Anthony.
‘Yes, isn’t it,’ said Gina. ‘But my motto is, something always turns up at the last moment!’
This had not been Julie’s experience but she supposed that if you were consistently afflicted by misfortune, as Gina appeared to be, you would develop, as antidote to it, the art of optimism. Julie had never had the opportunity of so doing. The misfortunes that afflicted Julie masqueraded as good fortune, and so were the more difficult to locate, comprehend and deal with. If your husband blacked your eye and threw you downstairs, you at least knew there was something wrong. If your husband was away most of the time, but paid large cheques into your bank account, how could you tell what was going on?
‘There is another child,’ said Gina. ‘A girl. We have to collect her from school.’
‘Oh Good Lord,’ said Julie, startled. ‘Well, never mind. The more the merrier.’
If that husband came home to a house suddenly full of women and sticky, sulky, noisy children, none of them his own, it might force things to some kind of issue.
As the two women left the restaurant, two young men got up from separate tables and followed them. They met at the door, engaged in a brief conversation, and strolled down the street together. They got into the car parked behind Julie’s, and when Julie pulled out, so did they. All this Ben noticed but did not say. His mother had laughed at him, now she would have to take the consequences. It was the same kind of drastic, horrid, nourishing feeling his father often had about his mother, and Ben knew it, and though he didn’t like it there wasn’t much he could do about it. You could stop how you acted, but hardly how you felt. This new friend of his mother’s, picked up at random in a McDonald’s, seemed to have something of the same quality. He didn’t like it. And where were they all going? It seemed that their lives were about to change, and n
o one had the courtesy to explain it to him, let alone consult him. But he could see that simply to be away from home for a time, without the fear of bangs, crashes and screams in the night, not having to put up his own defences against his mother’s terror or hurt, not to have to watch anxiously for the turns and changes in his father’s mood, not to have to listen out for his mother’s putting of her foot in it, which he sometimes thought she did on purpose, not to feel so confused about Sue, whom he felt obliged to protect but didn’t want to, would be a great relief.
‘You OK, darling?’ asked Gina.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. He’d missed another day at school, and no one seemed to bother about that, either.
‘Do you often go to McDonald’s?’ Gina asked Julie.
‘No,’ said Julie. ‘Hardly ever. Only when I’m upset; then I like it. It’s as if you were more like other people than you thought, and you might as well accept it. We’re all in the same boat together.’
‘That’s what I feel too,’ said Gina, feeling quite uneasy, that there was more to all this than met the eye. She wished there wasn’t. In better times, she would have got out of the car there and then. But like so much else, once you had children, it became a matter of necessity, not choice. Where you were was where you stayed.
The car that followed them was white, all white, from its white-painted hubcaps to its white-coated aerial; a vehicle fit for angels from some phantasmagorical heaven and on the front seats, grey-suited, prosperous and clean, two young men who might have been God’s accountants. The boot of the car was slightly open: part of a bicycle stuck out of it. People stared at them and forgot them.
Petie said to Elwood, ‘Well, fancy you.’
Elwood said to Petie, ‘Fancy you. Wheels within wheels. Just as well, my calves are aching.’
Petie said, ‘That wasn’t a coincidence, was it, that was drugs. That was the McDonald’s connection.’
Elwood said, ‘It was, and was I glad to see it. I’d begun to think that was no lady but a wild goose set up by Carl May to get his money’s worth out of us.’
Petie said Carl May knows what he’s doing and Elwood said you mean Jacko says Carl May knows what he’s doing and Petie said it’s the kids I’m sorry for and Elwood said we were all kids once even Carl May, especially Carl May, and Petie tuned the radio to rock but Elwood wanted classical so they had an argument about that, and Elwood drove rather hard around a corner just as Petie was feeling the sharpness of a knife against his thumb, so they ended up outside Julie’s house with rather a lot of blood on the white upholstery. ‘Serve you right,’ said Petie, child at heart.
36
The Queen of Wands and the Queen of Cups.
The Queen of Wands tossed and turned in her penthouse bed and the moon shone in. ‘I want, I want,’ she said aloud, but she wasn’t sure what it was she wanted, except perhaps what she couldn’t have, that is to say Tom. And him she could have, if she would, which she wouldn’t. Some barrier stood in her way: some wall of glass. She could not allow herself to be happy.
The attic was now a penthouse. Thus the landlords advertised it, threatening to call in her mortgage if she didn’t cough up for the roof: they had put it on the market just to frighten her: they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on: she’d put her solicitors on to them. It would be all right in the end, it would, it would, if only the moon didn’t seem to rock so in the sky, if only her limbs didn’t twitch with longing, the feel of Tom’s body beside her so lacking, if only her savings would last for ever, if only she had the energy and will to go out and find another, better, less blackmailing lover than Tom, but she didn’t, she couldn’t.
All you had to do, she supposed, if you wanted sex, was to get dressed and go out in the night street and walk about, and see what happened next, and something would. Only such an act was unthinkable. Why? What did other people do? Did they have possible partners lined up, waiting? The longer she lived in the world the less she knew about it. It baffled her.
Other people had the gift of peopling their lives with friends and colleagues; went to outings, parties, reunions, but she remained solitary, distant, voices sounded from the other side of the glass wall, muffled: people’s smiles were distorted. She waited for some kind of matching private intimacy to happen, but it didn’t. She’d known Tom for so long he’d gotten through the wall, but perhaps he was the wrong one: how could the only one be the right one? Was that the trouble? Perhaps she just couldn’t believe her luck?
She would go home for the weekend: she would retreat and lick her wounds a little: she would try and feel close to her parents. Difficult to look her father in the face since his strange adventure with Laura: difficult to feel close to her mother since she’d been so wounded: no matter how unaffected Madge seemed to be, how bright her intelligent eyes still shone behind her pebble glasses, she now sapped the energy of Jane’s youth: she no longer fed it, nourished it. Madge had been mortally wounded, and that was the truth of it and there was no strength left in her.
‘I’m depressed, that’s all,’ thought Jane, no longer wanting anything, and remembered standing as a small child in the hall of the big, pleasant house, and seeing through the glass door of the study her father working at his desk: and the other side of the study window the dim stumpy form of her mother, working in the garden. She’d begun to cry, for a reason she didn’t then understand, from the sense of not-belonging, sense of having herself received some mortal wound, and knowing, with the clear prescience of a child, that she would thereafter limp through life: there was no healing this. Yet nothing had happened – just the sight of an ungainly woman through glass, and the understanding that beauty of spirit and beauty of body were not the same, and that the knowledge itself could maim for life.
She was grown-up now: she had controlled her life: she had remained free of emotional and domestic commitments for just such an eventuality as had now happened – she was free to move to Los Angeles where the obvious career opportunities were: the English were popular: their special talents appreciated. And now she didn’t want to go. Nor did she want to lie where she was, in an empty bed, staring at a moon tossed by clouds. Where did clouds come from? She scarcely knew what clouds were, let alone why they were. It was all intolerable. The thing to do, obviously, was to let ‘I want’ get the better of ‘I don’t want’. Desire must triumph over reluctance. But how?
The Queen of Wands felt like the kitchen maid. She gave up sleep, got out of bed and switched on the light, and a sensor peeped gently in a van parked outside, and Haggie, who had been sleeping therein, woke and yawned and took out his notebook.
Jane got on with her work, her diversionary activity. She went through files and cuttings. She was writing a series of articles for Film International on ‘Images of women: the changing generations’. She could not get excited about it, but it was work, it would keep her name up there in front of those who mattered. In the morning she could try and contact Alice Morthampton, who had the reputation of being a smart-arsed bitch. A year back she’d turned down a film part – typecasting, playing the lead, a model. She’d turned it down on moral grounds, the screen view of the model’s life being so far from reality, she said, it was intolerable, and the producers refusing to change the script. Well, you were as moral as you could afford to be, supposed Jane. Alice Morthampton must be pretty rich. Pretty rich. She could not understand why Alice Morthampton was considered so beautiful. A face was just a face. The features were regular, it was true. There were two kinds of women, Jane supposed, the ones who looked like herself, and this Alice, and the others, the majority, who looked like Madge. Jane took out a ruler and measured the proportion of eyes to nose, to ears, to jaw on a fashion shot of Alice, and then did the same for herself, in the mirror. As she thought, pretty much the same. It proved something, she wasn’t sure what. She was suddenly very tired.
Morthampton – house of death. She hoped not. Jane went back to bed and fell promptly asleep, forgetting to turn off the light, so H
aggie was up pretty much all night.
The Queen of Cups.
Alice lay in bed with eyepads over her eyes and considered the emptiness of her life, and wondered why nobody liked her and decided it was because she didn’t like them. She could see the justice in it. She thought if she called her agent and instructed him to double her fees she would then halve her work and be just as rich. If she priced herself out of the market altogether, why then she would have forced an issue: she would have no option but to change her life. She might have to anyway. She had a feeling sour looks were going out of fashion and smiles were coming back and she wasn’t going to start smiling for anyone; before you knew where you were they’d have you doing idiot shots, up telegraph wires and under water on your head.
The phone rang. It was some woman journalist without an appointment; freelance, too, not even an assignment. Alice thought perhaps she’d better try to be pleasant. When it came to it, self-destruction was a frightening thing.
