by Weldon, Fay
‘So long as there’s none of that crappy feminist junk about sexism in fashion,’ said Alice, ‘you can come on round now. This minute, before I change my mind.’
Jane came, within five minutes. She only lived around the corner it seemed, in Harley Street. Alice lived in Wigmore Street. Alice opened the door. Jane and Alice stared at each other. Alice’s eyebrows were plucked and her hairline had been taken back to give her a high medieval forehead. Jane’s frizzy hair fell down to her eyebrows and beyond. Alice thought she might be looking at herself on a bad day, when she was feeling particularly short and squat. Jane thought, ‘I could look like that if I wanted to. Which I don’t.’
Jane went inside and sat on a sofa covered in the same Liberty fabric as covered her own sofa, only hers was green and this was brown. Still, it was a fairly common fabric. But there was the same Picasso print on the wall. She said as much.
‘Someone gave it to me,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t know anything about art. But there’s a damp stain on the wall so I put it up – the roof’s leaking. What’s it meant to be?’
‘Children playing,’ said Jane.
‘What, those splashes and dots? Well, write down I know nothing about art, and hate children. That should be a start. Who’s it for?’
‘Film International,’ said Jane.
‘Add I hate films too,’ said Alice. ‘I know nothing about them and don’t want to.’
‘But you did once turn down a part. It was that I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘That old thing,’ said Alice. ‘I’m not an actress. I’m a model. I couldn’t remember the lines.’
‘I thought you turned the part down for moral reasons.’
‘That’s what my agent said. I was fired.’
Jane’s pen stayed poised.
‘People aren’t going to want to hear that,’ she said.
‘You talk like me too,’ said Alice. ‘Only I try not to. This is going to be a crappy interview. So let’s forget it.’
A little grey cat jumped up on to Jane’s lap. Jane squealed.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Alice, ‘you have a little grey cat just like that one and Candid Camera is hiding somewhere in the room. I warn you, I’ll sue.’
‘Would it be watching you or watching me?’ asked Jane.
‘Me, of course,’ said Alice.
‘Bloody egocentric,’ said Jane, but both looked for signs of Candid Camera. There was no sign of hoax or hoaxer. They looked at each other.
‘You should do something about your hair,’ said Alice. ‘It’s an insult.’
‘I like it as it is,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t believe in artifice.’
‘Then you’re a fool,’ said Alice, and both fell silent.
Presently Alice asked Jane when her birthday was and Jane replied September first, and Alice said, well, I was born on September thirteenth, so that’s something, but Jane said not enough. Twins could be born as much as three weeks apart, even identical twins.
‘Who’s talking about twins?’ said Alice.
‘I am,’ said Jane. Then she said, ‘But I’m sure if I’d been a twin, someone would have told me. Besides, it’s not in my parents’ nature to give children away. If my mother Madge had had twins she’d have reared them both, and made a good job of it, at least in her terms.’
Alice said, ‘You might have been the one given away. You’re the one who’s egocentric. My mother never did anything she didn’t want. She’d have given away anyone.’
Jane said, ‘I’m certainly not adopted, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’
Though when she came to think about it, she could see that not to be Madge’s natural daughter would relieve her of a great deal of guilt. The wonder had always been that so pretty a child as she had come from a pair so rigorously plain as Jeremy and Madge: friends, both hers and theirs, had remarked on it: she’d hated it: she saw herself as the source of her parents’ discomfiture. If you had no friends, you didn’t have to put up with the pain they caused: she’d learned that early.
‘My mind’s going so fast,’ she complained, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
She was, in Alice’s mirror-lined bathroom, so full of creams, unguents, oils and lotions she could only marvel. She kept books in hers. When she came out she said, ‘I can’t possibly be your twin; we’re completely different,’ but Alice was standing in front of yet another mirror and had combed her hair down over her eyes and there was no doubting it.
‘My experience is,’ said Alice, ‘it’s not that people tell you lies, so much as they forget to tell you the truth. Personally, I trust no one. But then I was brought up with four brothers. All the same, I can see we’re going to have to face up to this. Who’s going to see whose parents first?’
In the street outside, Haggie found himself double parked next to a manhole in which none other than Dougie was working on telephone wires, yanking them out and then plugging them in. Dougie wore bright-yellow Telecom overalls.
‘Well, fancy that,’ said Dougie. ‘Looks like yours has gone to visit mine. What’s the connection?’
‘Drugs?’ said Haggie. ‘Do you reckon?’
‘More than likely,’ said Dougie. ‘Or prostitution. Women living alone.’
‘It’s too bad,’ said Haggie, ‘what goes on these days.’
‘The world would be a cleaner place without their likes,’ said Dougie, as Haggie joined him in the snugness of the manhole. ‘Spreading disease with needles and sex.’
‘This isn’t a snuff mission,’ said Haggie. ‘It’s a sniff mission.’
‘One drifts into another, in my experience,’ said Dougie.
‘Mine’s a tough cookie: no doubt about it,’ said Haggie. ‘No husband, no boyfriend, no children. Send a scrap of foreskin, or more, through the post, but if it’s a stranger’s what does she care?’
‘You could slash my girl’s face,’ said Dougie, ‘and all she’d do is call round the photographers, and there’d be even more of them in and out of her bed. Oh yes, they’re tough. You have to admire them.’
‘You don’t,’ said Haggie. ‘You just have to stop them before they spoil the world for everyone else,’ and Dougie said, ‘I’m sure that yellow lead matched up to that yellow socket a moment ago,’ and Haggie said, ‘What the hell, Dougie, what the hell. At least Carl May knows what he’s doing.’
‘I suppose,’ said Haggie.
37
‘This Holly fellow has got nothing to hide,’ Mavis of Maverick told Joanna, seeming disappointed, ‘or if he has, he knows how to act innocent. Easy-peasy to trace.’ Young Mavis strode into the house with muddy boots, reminding Joanna of Oliver, bringing the world with her.
The Bulstrode Clinic, according to Mavis, who – or so it said in the Maverick prospectus – had a First Class Honours Degree in Classics from Cambridge, was one of the first fertility clinics in the country, part NHS funded, part private, properly registered, licensed and inspected: it did legitimate terminations, blew fallopian tubes and stuff (said Mavis, with distaste) and carried out a few properly authorized tests on artificial insemination and ex-utero fertilization (makes you puke, doesn’t it, said Mavis. Why do women want babies?). They also did vasectomies (more like it, said Mavis). When it closed there were letters to the papers saying what were women to do now? (What they did, said Mavis, was to come out as lesbians and sod the men.)
Holly had moved on to the Genetics Research Department of Martins Pharmaceuticals, where he’d been ever since: some files he left, a few he took with him: a common enough practice, in research. He was married, had grown children, lived within a comfortable income, contributed to the odd learned paper: apart from dabbling about in women’s insides, said Mavis, he seemed OK. He wasn’t making an illegal fortune, so far as anyone could see. Of course your ex is a director of Martins, said Mavis, but then he’s on the board of most things, isn’t he, so it probably doesn’t mean much.
Martins Pharmaceuticals, said Mavis, specialized in the manufa
cture of synthetic hormones and made a particularly popular brand of birth-control pill with good sales in Third World countries, and drugs for hormone-replacement therapy in the West for, said Mavis, spoilt old women who wouldn’t give in. Martins had a good reputation, compared to other pharmaceutical companies, for responsibility and reliability – which wasn’t difficult. They had been known to take drugs off the market as soon as dangerous side effects were notified, and not fight through the courts for years to keep them on: they had been known to pay damages voluntarily to people whom their products had blinded and maimed, and their gifts to the medical profession could not be said to amount to bribes. Martins maintained large biotechnology departments in their various divisions, and their latest claim to reputation was the development of a certain Factor 10, which almost amounted to altruism, inasmuch as it offered hope of treatment to sufferers from sickle cell anaemia and everyone knew genetic engineering would eventually breed the disease out of the human race so Factor 10 was not even a long-term money spinner. They’ve cost-accounted integrity, said Mavis, and found it pays.
‘Why do you want to know all this?’ Mavis asked Joanna May.
Joanna May told her.
‘Bloody men,’ said Mavis, ‘so competitive, always muscling in on women’s wombs. I hope you’re not going to barge into the lives of these wretched young women and stir everything up.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joanna.
‘Well, think about it,’ said Mavis. ‘Thirty years on! How would you like it if your ninety-year-old self came walking through the door?’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Joanna, but she wasn’t sure.
‘Unless you have another reason,’ said Mavis, booted feet up on the sofa, ‘you’re not being straight with me. What else is your ex-husband up to?’
Joanna May told her.
‘I don’t know anything about Tarot cards,’ said Mavis, ‘or all that gobbledygook, but that’s a nasty wound you have there on the back of your neck, and you should get it seen to. A man who can do that to a woman, forget what he can do to other men – which is really of no interest to me, murder-schmurder, call it what you like, it’s a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do affair, and boring with it – but I don’t think he should be let loose on your young versions. God knows what he’ll do, vindictive bastard, since no doubt he thinks he owns them, typical male, taking claim for their creation.’
‘He had a very hard childhood,’ said Joanna May.
‘Childhood-schmildhood,’ said Mavis, ‘reclaim your sisters! I speak both in the political and the family sense.’ She sat on the sofa where Oliver had been accustomed to sit, and, like him, she smoked; and like him she coughed. Her skin was tough, her hair was frizzy, her T-shirt none too clean, but she brought with her energy, common sense and determination. The world was not too much for her: it was for action, not contemplation.
‘Well,’ said Joanna. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps is not enough,’ said Mavis. ‘You must go to Dr Holly straight away. You must insist that he opens his records to you, the ones he took with him.’
‘Can’t you see him for me?’
‘No,’ said Mavis, crossly. ‘There isn’t time. You do it. What are you frightened of? What did men do to you that has made your generation so timid? I accept that Carl May is a special case, he scares even me, but an old fruit like Dr Holly?’
‘He wore such a white coat,’ said Joanna, remembering. ‘He was so kind, he was so clever; and I, I was doing something so very wrong, something I didn’t want to do. I was getting rid of a baby; I was having my husband’s abortion, not his child. I put the Bulstrode Clinic out of my mind and tried not to think about it again. What I did was so very wrong.’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Mavis. ‘You weren’t pregnant. Two psychiatrists certified it as an hysterical pregnancy.’
Joanna May’s hands moved to her small waist, her flat belly, no longer young; she felt her belly swell – she knew it could still. She understood her body’s desire to do just that – its capacity to think wilfully, to deceive itself. She felt herself widen and grow, and then she felt herself shrink again, defeated. Tumescence and detumescence.
‘Oh,’ said Joanna May, cheated all her life.
‘Your husband had a vasectomy early on,’ said Mavis.
‘I see,’ said Joanna May.
Joanna May saw. Joanna May saw back into the pattern of her life, black and white, greys and duns. There are no colours in the inner landscape. She saw a dull web of non-response, picked out by miseries and misconceptions, disappointments and remorse, sparkling away with courage where no courage was needed, glittering with hope where no hope was; of trials overcome where no trials were; a false web, not her own, woven by Carl May: and she was the wretched fly and he the whimsical, scuttling spider.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she had said to Carl May. Where had they been? The States. Boston. She remembered a hotel suite, and a big white boxed-in bath, and taps out of which water gushed with terrifying power. She had been afraid to say it: fear where no fear should be. He did not want children. The day before the wedding he’d told her so – a walk in the park, a moon, a lake, romance, as the world knew it – he’d said, ‘Just you and me, forever, no one else, no children, I don’t want children, to be a child is to suffer…’
‘Not my child, my child wouldn’t suffer, I’d protect it.’
‘Yes, your child too, anyone’s child – to be helpless is to suffer: there’s no escape. Let the human race end here, with us, its triumph, love complete and final, whole.’ And in that understanding she had agreed – only you, Carl, you and me: our no-children and our perfect love thus linked: and the stars, the treacherous messengers of fate, looked down and smiled. Carl and Joanna May, hand in hand.
Yet there she was in New York, ten, eleven years later, with her breasts heavy and sore, like the breasts of her friend Nancy, and feeling sick, as her friend Helen had been, and all her being focused in on this one wonderful fact: a baby, a baby! Treachery to Carl, but he’d understand, he’d forgive; surely their meshing was not so tight now, not so complete, as to forbid a little budding-off to come between; his past must seem a little further off, the remembrance of it not so desperate. Surely! What was her love worth if it hadn’t healed him, hadn’t undone the past sufficiently to make the future possible? Carl May had been kind. But he had said no.
And now, see! The kindness a lie: the no unnecessary. No living baby there: a notional baby in the head, not a real one in the womb. She’d had a spaniel once, whose nipples grew, whose sides heaved – nothing there, said the vet: an hysterical pregnancy. Animals do it a lot, said the vet, if you stand between them and their purposes. The bitch, Carl May had said; I’ve half a mind to have the thing put down. He’d laughed. A joke. Kick it and that will cure it. Later the animal had simply disappeared: it and its labrador companion. Dog thieves, people said. Now she wondered. A lifetime believing Carl May was sane, seeing black where white was, white where black was; if you practised too long you could no longer tell. You just saw what was convenient, what sounded best, what kept you out of trouble. Perhaps he’d envied even her dogs.
‘Just you and me,’ Carl May had said. ‘Just you and me.’ So back from Boston to England, off to the Bulstrode, to meet charming Dr Holly. Really nice, when it came to it, understanding so much, interested in everything. After the termination she’d felt he owned her body. She would have run off with him if she could, if she’d known how to go about it. But she never knew how; she’d had no practice. It was a trick you learned: as a kitten learns to scratch earth to cover its mess. If there’s no one to teach it, it never learns. Tales of Joanna May, the deceived, the self-deceiver.
No baby, no abortion. No pleasure in the sadness, no delight in the grief, no soaring knowledge of I can, I can, I have, I am real, a woman, a grown woman, here’s proof of it at last – likewise no regret, no shame, no sense of courage failed, of having thrown a child away, because that child’s life
was not worth hers. Selective breeding, Carl May had said. Come now, Joanna, if you make a fuss, if you weep and wail, I’ll think you don’t love me wholly, totally, as you promised you would, for ever and ever, in the park, with the moon, the most perfect moment of my life. Was it yours? Oh yes, Carl, yes. A sacrifice on the altar of Joanna’s love for Carl, Carl’s love for Joanna.
All lies, all lies. What was a mountain was in fact a chasm: what looked a chasm had been a mountain. Falling when you thought you were climbing. What a fool she’d been. What fools women were: they didn’t need mothers to teach them folly.
Lonely and alone these last few years; used to it: liking it. I alone, Joanna May, in the perfection of my childlessness, the tragedy of this single drama: content here in the centre of the web of my life, what’s left of it, repairing it as Carl May tears it: only not my web, it now turns out, a borrowed web, too late now, to build my own.
These clones, these sisters, these daughters, what are they to me? I know nothing about them. Let them die. Carl was perfectly right: to live is to suffer. And not just the child, but the adult too. It never stops. The clones, like their original, are better dead. I don’t have the courage to die, to kill myself, to put an end to the shame, the rage, the desire, the fear that is Joanna May. But let them die, those other versions. No action is required by me. Leave it to Carl May to act. That at least is familiar, true, comforting.
‘It must be upsetting,’ said Mavis. ‘All this kind of lovey-dovey complication.’
‘It is a little,’ said Joanna May, politely, vaguely.
Joanna May saw herself at the centre of a web: what did it matter who built it? It was no one’s responsibility but her own. She perceived that she was held suspended, harmless and impotent, by the equal forces of the passions which stretched the web, one at each corner. Shame, outrage, fear and desire, the four saving and refining passions of the universe, holding her suspended, centring in her in exactly equal proportions, cancelled themselves, nullified Joanna May. The shame which should purify, the outrage which should move to action, the fear which should quieten, the desire which should sanctify, brought to nothing.
