by Weldon, Fay
I remember standing on the stair as my father’s patient was let into the house, and voices sounded, muffled by closed doors, and I knew I was cut off from the real world; that I was alone: that other people would never quite touch me, or me them: that I was only acting this child upon the stair: there was no real and undeceitful me: therefore the voices that came would always be muffled. The prescience was true: children fall into uncontrollable grief when they realize, small as they are, certain truths about the world, and about themselves. ‘I just feel like crying,’ the small child will explain. Don’t believe it. The future is seen: the grief is real and profound.
Only Carl could I hear loud and clear; his voice came through to me not muted, but somehow at first hand. I didn’t like what he said or did: that didn’t matter, it wasn’t the point. When I met him I thought he was rude and plain and rather short, but his edges were somehow defined; quivery, like a real person superimposed against a fake background in an old film. And that was that. I don’t suppose it was love I felt; I think I just recognized an opportunity for being healed, for becoming real, breaking through the shrouding veils and mists, and that for me was all, at the time, I needed. I somehow knew what Carl knew, though I had come to the knowledge in a different way than he. Carl had suffered cruelty and hardship and I had not. Carl’s early world had been small, black, wretched, terrified, until suddenly the clouds had parted and revealed a new bright world, full of privilege, animation, possibility: and with the last drop of strength he had leapt out of the one world into the other. And myself, female, given everything yet nothing, in my grey, muffled, lonely world, bred to serve, to be a supplicant, knew a different kind of cruelty, but the same kind of terror – the inevitability of illness, age, death: the impotence of love. When I lifted my eyes to Carl’s I thought how peculiar, how bright and naked they are – and then realized that was how eyes ought to be. It was other people’s which were out of order, clouded by wishful thinking and self-deception. There were just the two of us, in all the world, who knew what the truth was, and how terrible it is. ‘You have my kind of eyes,’ he said.
It took little to persuade me that I didn’t want children. How had it happened to me that I knew what Carl knew? The thought frightened me. How could you protect your own children from that one dreadful moment on the stair, the prescience of defeat and death? You could feed your children, love them, nurture them, act the good mother, do all you could to be close to them, and still it might happen. On that one occasion when I thought I was pregnant I was afraid. When I had what at the time I thought was a termination I was relieved, as well as angry. Let me not deny it.
When Isaac said of the card ‘Death’ that it meant rebirth too, I took leave to doubt it. But then Isaac’s eyes did not have the naked brightness of Carl’s. I liked Isaac because he talked to me. Even good wives get bored. What are stay-at-home wives, executive wives, determinedly childless, supposed to do, even if, like me, they are wives of captains of industry not the mere foot soldiers? It is all performance in the real executive estate. She must be like the others, or he will know the reason why, and so will they. She must act, in the first few years, as if she waited for a child: she must hold the babies of other women, and sigh with longing, although the little wriggling thing appals and upsets her. Is this the sum of woman then – to be the instrument of reproduction, a walking womb; the pulsing, gurgling, bloody redness inside the whole point of her being? Never, but let her dissemble! Later she must act out the emptiness of not having children; lament her inability to conceive: it is expected of her: though she glories in the leisure of her mornings, the flatness of her belly, her peace of mind in a world where the lot of women appears to be worry, grief, toil and anxiety, as their children, their hostages to fortune, sap their cheerfulness, will and energy. Only later, when it’s too late to change her mind, when the cyclical messiness has stopped, does a kind of truthful desolation set in, as the world around her empties; and she understands that of her own volition she has become one of nature’s dead ends: an experiment set aside, because it didn’t work. Then she may well blame whoever’s around (as I do Carl), whoever, however unreasonably, she holds responsible for her initial decision, the tying of the knot that severs her from the future. She curses fate, instead of herself. Her executive husband has not got quite where he wanted, what he wanted: whoever does? She has seen him through an affair or so: smiled bravely and grimly through this or the other dinner party, when his mistress picked at her avocado and crab salad; worried through his threatened heart attack, put up with the bad temper and depression of his mid-life crisis; and at last she says what about me, me? Where is this promised life, this happiness, this fulfilment? It must be somewhere!
Perhaps, she says, she could be of service to the community. But how? She has learned something about the world, for all the comfort and security of her life: enough to know there’s nothing she could tell the poor and oppressed that they didn’t know already. That what the poor want is not advice but money. She knows above all the value of money: how it keeps people quiet and good. Put a hundred thousand pounds in the hands of a child abuser and he’d stop abusing. She can’t even give all she has to the needy, because she has nothing of her own to give. It is his. The outside world knocks upon her door: she goes to open it, softly on deep carpets, and outside in the storm, begging for shelter, stands a crone, a beggar woman, and it is her future self. She slams the door, she closes her ears: calls up her bridge partner. If it’s not too late, if she’s kept her looks – and why shouldn’t she? – she ‘takes’ a lover. Well, one just happens to come along, even if she’s married to Carl May. Forget takes. A woman gets taken.
I, Joanna May! See how easily it comes to me to turn from ‘I’ to ‘she’ – joining my lot with other women, universalizing an experience, as if the better to justify myself. As if I, a woman who never gave birth but has four daughters, an only child with four sisters, could ever be quite like anyone else. Perhaps what Dr Holly took away from me at the Bulstrode Clinic was not so much my identity, as my universality. He made me particular, different from other women: he turned me into someone of scientific interest. Worse, he stole my soul, the thing that threads me through and back to the human race, and never mind that in my heart I’d tied a knot in it, it wasn’t too late at thirty to change my mind, give it a sharp tug, untie it, take my chances along with everyone else, not let the moment on the stair last a whole life, but send my children and my children’s children on down through the centuries, mingling and mixing with the others, sharing and partaking, into the future. I think when they took that part of me, the singular me, away, and interfered, they stopped me in my tracks. It isn’t reasonable to think so, but when Dr Holly says to me, ‘You haven’t changed,’ I think he’s right, and I think it’s his fault I haven’t changed. He has stolen thirty years of life from me. And now it’s too late. For me, but not for them. I have my four more chances, and that’s how I must see it.
How had it been for the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups? If Dr Holly was not interested, I was. I would ask them. I wondered if they lived their lives, or acted them. I wondered if they had their equivalent for the moment on the stairs, and if they had overcome it, as I, their master copy, had not. I felt what it was to be Dr Holly, to want to find out: I felt the pleasure of it. I felt what it was to be Carl, and want to change the world: I felt the power of it. But most of all, I wanted to see what I would be, born into a newer, more understanding world: one which allowed women choice, freedom and success. Perhaps I had merely been born thirty years too early and that was the only trouble. The young Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups: myself the ageing Empress: not devastating, frightening, shocking any more – just how very interesting to see how it all turned out. What fun it would be – that rare commodity.
It was with pleasure, animation and excitement that I waited impatiently for Mavis to come to me with the names and whereabouts of my sisters, my daughters, my twins, myself.
41
Angela called Joanna May.
‘Darling, how are you?’ asked Angela. ‘I wondered if you had any clues as to your ex-husband’s current mental health.’
‘One or two,’ said Joanna. ‘Why?’
‘Well,’ said Angela, ‘Gerald is getting quite alarmed. I tell him there’s no need. I tell him that for a man to wipe out his wife’s lovers may not be legal, or nice, but it doesn’t mean he’s insane.’
‘Angela, I know you’re only joking but I think this telephone may be tapped.’
‘Ah. Well, listeners hear no good of themselves. My husband says your husband wants him to employ the entire staff of the Divination Department over this fallout business.’
‘Then perhaps he should, Angela. I’m very fond of Gerald.’
‘But then everyone will think my husband is insane.’
‘He will at least be around to refute the view, Angela.’
‘I see. You mean, on the whole, it’s best to do what Carl May wants.’
‘For the moment,’ said Joanna May, ‘yes.’
‘In that case,’ said Angela, ‘Gerald is right. Gerald says it’s quite alarming that this man should be in charge of such large sections of the nation’s wealth and property.’
‘These large companies more or less run themselves,’ said Joanna. ‘The man at the very top is so often a figurehead. Part of Carl’s trouble is that he gets bored.’
‘Gerald thinks something should be done about it.’
‘Listeners may hear no good about themselves,’ said Joanna, ‘but they sometimes hear very useful things. Shall we meet and talk you know where?’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Where I saw and admired Gerald’s nice soft feet,’ said Joanna.
‘Ah, so that’s what you were looking at,’ said Angela. ‘He thought it was his varicose veins. You sound much better.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Joanna, ‘I’m better. I’m sorry about going on so the other day.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Angela, of the hairy chin and thick legs, and the waist as broad as her hips, salt of a world fresh sown with salt. ‘That’s OK.’
42
‘I’ll be waiting at the corner
Of the bottom of the street,
In case a certain little lady goes by.
Oh me, oh my,
In case a certain little lady goes by’
sang Carl May. ‘I wish I’d learned the ukelele,’ he said, ‘but in the circles in which I moved when a child it wasn’t done!’
He and Bethany were in the May Gallery. The morning sun shone in the east window and made the place almost cheerful. Workmen – they wore glasses and were elderly – gently inched in from outside a large earthenware vat dating from the sixteenth dynasty, the great days of Egypt. The hieroglyphics were worn: it seemed to the untrained eye a rough-hewn if workmanlike artefact.
‘Why’s it so special?’ asked Bethany. She wondered how many questions she’d asked in the last few weeks, in order to make Carl feel good by supplying her with answers. She wondered how she was going to get out of this. She wondered if Hughie Scotland could help. She was frightened of Carl May, who seemed to get happier and jollier with every day that passed. She didn’t even correct him, saying, ‘I’m leaning on a lamp post on the corner of the street,’ and just as well, as it happened.
‘This jar contains the dust of ancient liver,’ said Carl May. ‘Liver cells are rich in DNA. The ancient Egyptians mummified their dead to keep them in good shape for their journey to the next world. Nothing died unless you wanted it to in that fair land, under the wide Mesopotamian sky: everything went on for ever: so there was nothing to fear. The God Osiris died only as the sun set: he rose again. The priestess aroused the God and gave birth to the King and all was well in the world of men. And because there was no fear of death, no terror, simply a passing on, agreeable or disagreeable as it might be, all men were good, and all women too, and kind. Sometimes a bit stupid, of course. But they didn’t shut their children up in kennels, or beat them, or torture them, or rape them, to express their disapproval of life, because life simply was, infinitely variable, infinitely long-lasting, and there was happiness upon earth. And the secret of it all lies there in the dust of all those livers, which are so very rich in DNA.’
‘How do you know it’s people’s livers? Couldn’t it just be dust?’
‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,’ said Carl May, ‘could stop a hole to keep the dust away. Dear little Bethany, we know it’s liver because the hieroglyphics say so. Embalmers sucked the brains of the dead out through the nostrils, and the entrails out through I’ve forgotten where, including the liver, and saved them all in case of need in great big separate labelled jars like this one. This is a liver jar.’
Bethany felt quite dizzy and blackness made clouds around her. She’d never fainted in all her life, not even when her father had suggested she made a one-armed man happier than he ever had been in his life before – a service the complete in body must always surely be happy to render the incomplete – and she’d seen her father’s choice for her had a hook instead of a hand, and she was only fourteen, but she thought she might faint now.
‘I knew this existed,’ said Carl May. ‘That moony fellow Isaac King tried to say it didn’t, but I knew he was lying. They had it at Liverpool University all the time. The pool of livers! I think we must get old Holly over and show him what we’ve found. Would you like that?’
Bethany hadn’t liked the way Dr Holly had looked at her. She didn’t much like the way anyone looked at her. At first she had thought the looks were admiration and envy; but now everyone seemed to think she was somehow cheating. She didn’t know what she was supposed to have done. Carl May was being good to her. She was being good to him. Yet somehow she seemed to have stepped out of line. At home, there had never been this particular feeling of unrightness. Things at home were sometimes sleazy and sordid; here they never were: servants cleaned the bath and changed sheets: cats never passed worms on the table: but luxury seemed to make things worse, not better. Nothing was real. Perhaps she was just homesick.
‘I liked Dr Holly very much,’ said Bethany. ‘It would be good to see him.’
And Carl May wondered, now what is the matter with this fragrant girl, this Scotland hand-on, this product of the outer suburbs, this despoiler of my celibacy, this firm-fleshed luxury, this stirrer to pleasure, this brightness which flickers on and off like the sun behind a yew tree on a windy day, this little liar – what is the matter with her? I know what it is, she has a lover. She can’t be bothered to turn the brightness on for me. She’s thinking of him and anything will do for me.
‘Is something the matter, Bethany?’
‘It was the thought of all those livers mixed up, that’s all; it made me feel quite faint.’
‘I hope they’re not too mixed up, Bethany, or we’ll have a hard task in front of us. I hope they’re still nicely layered so we can tell one individual from the next. Are you sure that’s all that the matter is?’
‘Well, Uncle Carl…’
‘Don’t call me uncle, Bethany.’
‘Sorry. It’s what I used to call my father’s friends, back home. And talking about my dad, I had a phone call from him yesterday. He’s not too well.’
Then he knew she was lying. She’d had no such phone call. Every morning at Britnuc Carl May was handed a private pink folder, in which were reported the substance of all phone calls made and received at Eton Square, the King’s House, the Coustain residence, and many another household besides, not to mention industrial firms and government departments. Knowledge is power, as Carl May had been told at school: ‘Scientas est potentas’. Carl May the sceptical, Carl May the shrewd, looking up the original text, found ‘scientas est potestas’ instead. Knowing is to be empowered. More like it. But, understanding why the misprint was preferred, he told no one; just hugged the empowering truth to himself. Truth was power. Truth was so disagreeable
you could, if you had the stomach for it, keep it pretty much to yourself. Joanna his wife was one of the very few who understood these things; in her bones, in her blood, for no good reason: in her genes: Joanna May, Carl May’s ex-wife, to whom he had trusted his being; here in this very room: this place, no longer young, no longer his, no good to him; but empowering him, proving yet again the world was what he knew it was, the empire of despair, beneath the little tent of blue that men call sky.
