by Weldon, Fay
Carl tried to listen to Jacko’s report. For the hors d’oeuvre, Alice, light and astringent (but too much lemon). For the fish, Julie, tentative and delicate (but a little stale, a little flat, too long out of the water). For the entrée, Gina, full-blooded but overcooked. Jane, a delectable dessert except salt not sugar had been put in the topping.
Faithful, monogamous? The Barbers of the Bath allowed themselves sounds of derision, close-harmonied snorts. Promiscuous at best, lesbians at worst. Carl May said perhaps it was because they had never met the right man, and the four young men shuffled their great Doc Martens eighteen-hole boots and looked uneasy: they had not expected words for the defence spoken by the prosecutor. They had understood their task to be to report adversely.
‘So what’s the message, sir? What’s the next step?’ Jacko asked.
Gina and Jane, meat and dessert. Too rich and indigestible. He had an old man’s gut, it had to be faced. Those two would have to go. Alice and Julie would replace Bethany, one or the other. Which would he choose? Hors d’oeuvre or fish? One too lemony, one a little stale. Why not both together? They’d consent. They’d do as he asked, as Joanna always had. They’d love him, as Joanna had. Of course they would: they were Joanna. When he multiplied her he had not so much tried to multiply perfection – that was a tale for Holly – he had done it to multiply her love for him, Joanna May’s love for Carl May, multiply it fourfold: to make up for what he’d never had: Carl May, the bitch’s son. But love was strong, when it came to it: you couldn’t stand too much of it: Joanna had been more than enough. It took Bethany, a sorbet between courses, tasted, relished, to restore a jaded palate, a tired appetite. Alice and Julie it would be. Five thirty-seven.
He tried to speak. His voice shook: he stopped.
‘Instructions, sir?’ asked Jacko. They sang the word, in inefficient close harmony. Inst-instr-instruct-instruction-instructions. He wished they wouldn’t. His leg began to itch badly. There was a whining and whuffling in the air: it was the snuffling harmony of a bitch and her litter of pups. He’d lived amongst the excrement and the noisy, messy warmth of the litter and got quite fond of it. The need to love, for a child, is stronger than the need to be loved. When he was hungry, he’d sucked from her. But that had been when he was very small: he’d been told that: he didn’t know if it was true. Five thirty-eight.
‘Oh yes, instructions,’ said Carl May. His voice came back, and his will. He told them Jane and Gina would have to go. Julie and Alice would be fetched. Their ten eighteen-hole Doc Martens boots marched out, blurred by a flurry of dangling fabrics.
49
When Bethany went home to Putney she found her father weeping and alone.
‘I knew there was something wrong,’ she said. ‘I knew I wasn’t lying. What’s the matter?’ Patsy had gone, torn the flowers from her greying hair, been born again as a Christian, and given up her life of sin, said her Dad. Now Patsy was living in an hotel for born-againers, going from door to door, converting as she went.
‘But, Daddy, it wasn’t sin,’ said Bethany. Empty coffee cups stood around, and biscuit crumbs, and sugar bowls with mice droppings in them, and piles of stained sheets on the floor. He needed her. Upstairs there was the sound of revelry. ‘It was never sin. Sometimes I’d wish I’d been brought up differently, sometimes I thought that you didn’t know what you were doing, the pair of you. Sometimes I was so scared – you and Mum never knew quite what was going on, you thought what they did was just ordinary sex, but sometimes it wasn’t, you have no idea. I tried to be kind, I tried to be loving, I tried to bring happiness into other people’s lives, especially the disabled, but, Dad, they sometimes sure as hell weren’t bringing happiness into mine.’
‘Don’t you start,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve had a bellyful. We had good times, didn’t we? Don’t take that away from me along with everything else. Your mum will be round here before long, trying to make me believe in Jesus Christ, and I can’t, I just can’t. Remember how he cursed the fig tree?’
‘Well, I can’t either,’ said Bethany, sadly. ‘I can’t believe. We went to the theatre too often. You made me read too many books.’
‘I suppose you hold that against me too,’ he said.
‘Of course I don’t,’ said Bethany. ‘Let me help you get this place cleaned up before Mum comes back. She’ll just die if she sees it like this.’
‘You will stay, won’t you?’ said Dad. ‘This is where you belong, your proper home.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bethany. ‘I really don’t know.’
It was three o’clock.
‘Who’s upstairs?’ Bethany asked.
‘That’s another thing,’ said Dad. ‘I think I’m getting old. People don’t seem to go. Once I used to tell them, quite quietly, it was time to get dressed and go, and they went.’
‘You always were a big man,’ said Bethany.
‘I don’t register that way any more,’ said Dad. ‘It’s got worse since your mother moved out. Now I tell them to go and they don’t: or worse, they turn up and walk in and use the bedrooms without so much as a by your leave, any time of day and night, as if this was Liberty Hall, and don’t even put money in the box. I don’t know who’s up there, Bethany. You’ve got to help. I need you here.’
‘But, Dad,’ said Bethany. ‘Carl May needs me too. I’m only on leave of absence, as it were.’ And she cooked him a meal. Only omelette and beansprout salad, because of course he didn’t eat meat, but better than boiled eggs and toast, on which he lived. It was four o’clock.
‘Beauty and the Beast,’ Bethany’s father remarked, watching her clear and wash up. ‘I must say you’re looking good. Why bother with a beast? I’m proud of you. We were right about sex, weren’t we, your mother and me? We grew you proud and true.’
Bethany’s father had a cavernous, grizzled face. His thick hair had turned greyish since last she saw him. He reminded her of Father Christmas, the kind she’d been taken to in stores when little and on whose knee she most hated to sit; agony shone out from behind the joviality. You had to not notice, for fear of hurting feelings. To hurt feelings was the real sin. It was four thirty.
‘We’d better put locks on the doors,’ she said. ‘And the front door, and the back door, and get a dog.’
‘I don’t believe in locks,’ her father said. ‘Lock the door and get robbed. The only time I ever locked my car was once in an underground car park and when I got back someone had broken into it and I had to get a new door.’
She’d heard the tale a hundred times, and taken many a lesson from it. If you kept the door unlocked, as it were, you didn’t get raped. Some personal doors, alas, were on permanent lock; she sighed. Her father, for all his experience, for all his principles, was an innocent. She’d had stitches twice, and neither she nor her mother had liked to tell him. She was glad her mother was born-again. She hoped she was happy.
‘We can’t have strangers coming and going,’ Bethany said. ‘Things have got to change.’
‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘The world goes round on love and trust. I’ve always believed that. Besides, we have nothing to steal.’ He made a concession. It was his principle to make concessions, save face wherever possible. ‘But a dog, now… your mother always wanted a poodle.’
‘I’ll get you an Alsatian pup,’ she said, and ran down the market and did so once she’d cleared up the rest of the house. The bedrooms were disgusting. It was five thirty-five. She’d said she’d be back at Britnuc at five thirty. She could feel Carl thinking about her. She didn’t want to feel it. He spooked her. ‘For a young man he is young, And an old man he is grey,’ she sang as she cleaned, as much to dull the puppy’s lamentations as anything else: it had been torn too young from its mother. But where was the young man? Where were they all? They so seldom travelled First Class and she so seldom Standard Fare. They never met.
‘Don’t lose your trust, Bethany,’ her father said, petting the puppy in a way which once would have made her jealou
s, but which no longer did now her father was old. ‘My little girl. Don’t ever forget how to love. Keep the flag of faith flying.’
She said she’d try. Somehow there seemed no place between the two of them, Carl May and her father, where she could properly dwell. It had to be one or the other, and she didn’t like cleaning, so that settled it. It was five forty-six. She called Carl May, and said she’d be late back, but she would be back. She was on her way.
50
How desperately I, Joanna May, tried to be myself, not Carl May’s wife. Even in exile, even divorced, I was married to him, linked to him. She married to him is so different from he married to her. She occupies a little space in his head; he surrounds her, encloses her, as a white leucocyte surrounds some invading cell: if he puts his penis in her it’s just to test the breeding warmth: he’s really there already. He can escape, she can’t. She is squeezed in there, in his head, without room to manoeuvre. Even in Isaac’s bed, his uncomfortable, lumpy-mattressed bed, his comfortable arms, I was Carl May’s wife, his employer’s wife, source of his funding: he was my illicit lover. Therein lay the excitement, the pleasure. I could understand Carl’s rage, I could understand my guilt, but not his jealousy. How could he be jealous when what I was doing could hardly be acting, could only be reacting? When Carl divorced me and Oliver climbed into my smooth, firm, clean and luxurious bed, Oliver was my comfort, my consolation, because Carl May had eased me out of his life, as the head’s squeezed out, eased out, of a pimple. If Carl May did it painlessly, it was for his own sake, not mine: he didn’t want any nasty, unsightly inflammation left behind.
When I acknowledged my sisters, my twins, my clones, my children, when I stood out against Carl May, I found myself: pop! I was out. He thought he would diminish me: he couldn’t: he made me. I acknowledged fear – what would they think of me? I recognized shame – I am old, so old. I faced my rage – how dare they exist. I felt desire, and a great swelling energy, a surging pleasure, the joy of being one of a million million, part of the life of the universe, in all its absurdity, its tremulous glory: I was part of a living landscape, and the function of that life was to worship and laud its maker, and the maker was not Carl May: he had not made me: wife I might be, but only part of me, for all of a sudden there was more of me left. The bugles had sounded, reinforcements came racing over the hill; Joanna May was now Alice, Julie, Gina, Jane as well. Absurd but wonderful!
Carl May could not go on. I let Angela know, who let Gerald know; a man may murder his wife’s lovers, but cannot be mad in charge of four nuclear power stations. I was no longer just a wife; I was a human being: I could see clearly now.
If thine eye offend me take a good look at yourself. If thine I offend thee, change it.
It’s not lies that kill the soul, it’s the effort to believe the lies, especially your own. Carl’s dead, white face on the TV screen alarmed me, and should have alarmed the world sooner than it did. The walking dead can’t be in charge. There is no room for zombies.
That day at the lido Gerald had a word with someone, who had a word with someone, who had a worker in the field, of course he did.
Sometimes accidents, or events as they are called, do occur without prompting in relation to the fuel rods of the old Magnox stations. Are bound to. The spent fuel rods – fissile uranium wrapped in magnesium – are removed from the pile when they’ve worn out their usefulness, are no longer capable, poor tired things, of sustaining a reaction. They’re taken out, in sequence, en bloc, as they went in – some thirty at a time. But sometimes rods which are not quite spent, may even have quite a vigour to them, get in with the others: they too get dumped in the cooling ponds – square concrete-sided pools, open to the air. Such events do happen – it hardly seems to matter much. No one’s going to swim in the pools, are they! What does it matter, if the dials do go round a second time, a third time, a tenth time, and no one notices – or in this particular case, cares to notice, gets paid not to notice; who’s to say what goes on, no skin off anyone’s nose, unless, that is, the owner of the nose is vain enough, proud enough, sufficient of a scorpion to sting himself to death. When it would be the scorpion’s fault, no one else’s. The old-fashioned dial readouts should have been converted to digital display long ago, but if management is mean, mean, whose fault is that? Management baying at the moon – snapping, howling: how dare you shine so bright! It doesn’t stop the moon.
Accidents will happen. No such thing as an accident.
I, Joanna May. Or perhaps now, just Joanna.
51
Joanna, at the age of sixty, chaired the first meeting of her life. Her clones appointed her chairperson. The meeting took place in Julie’s house, where Mavis had led her. On arrival they found a Volvo, a Citroen and a Porsche in the drive. They could hear the sound of children playing, or squabbling, not to mention TV-set, radio and hi-fi all turned up loud.
‘How very peculiar,’ said Mavis, who wore for the occasion a long brown woollen coat of amazing plainness. ‘My report says this one, Julie, lives very quietly, and has no children. Isolated, rather the way you are. An “executive wife” is what they call this particular brand of woman.’
‘Perhaps she’s had no choice,’ said Joanna. ‘Or perhaps she lacked the courage to have friends. Look how brave I have to be to have Angela!’ Joanna wore a nice little black suit and high heels to give herself confidence, or perhaps to annoy Mavis.
‘Perhaps they’ve found each other already,’ said Mavis.
‘Yes, perhaps that’s it. All of a sudden, like you, she has a family. And noise and drunkenness breaks out!’
Mavis rang the bell, because Joanna hung back, and knocked, and tapped upon the window, and finally was heard. The door was flung open.
‘Mother!’ cried the clones, elated and irreverent, ‘it must be Mother!’, as Joanna May stood in the doorway, startled. They crowded round, inspecting, touching, laughing. Even Joanna, accustomed to sobriety, could see they’d been drinking. But she was relieved they had recognized her with so little difficulty: had no doubt at all but that she was theirs.
‘Mother!’ she said. ‘Oh, I see. I’m to be mother, am I!’ She looked them up and down: she hushed them and tutted them. She felt like her own mother, disapproving; she felt a flicker of forgiveness for the poor dead woman. Mother! The girls would have to take the consequences, the general brisk comment and interference for their own good. Joanna May, mother, refused champagne, fearing alcoholism; she accepted tea. (Mavis took what remained of Alec’s whisky from the mahogany-and-glass cabinet.) Wildly, the clones asked Joanna for her opinion of them: they insisted, insisted. They wanted a proper mother’s report – at last, they would have what every daughter wants, a mother to wholly appreciate them.
‘I see,’ said Joanna May. ‘You want my true opinion, do you? My maternal view? Then here it is.’
She, Joanna, didn’t like one bit the way Alice had taken back her hairline; it was vulgar; she felt Julie’s sweatshirt was too informal considering this was her house and she had guests, and what is more she didn’t care for the patterned drink coasters, they were common; she thought Jane should comb her hair properly – and it was much too short – and Gina should lose some weight and stop smoking. She couldn’t help saying these things. They were true: she was right about them: they must listen to her. It was for their own good. She had been around longer than them: she knew.
Joanna felt resentment rising in her daughters; they were oppressed: they wanted her to go away, and yet she’d hardly said a word to them, had she, nothing that wasn’t necessary. Just she didn’t like this and she didn’t like that. Which was true. And for their own good. And look how they drank – alcoholics, every one! They drummed and tapped with their fingers: they were one split into four: they defended each other: to attack one was to attack all. Joanna May stopped as suddenly as she began. She had shocked herself as well as them.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Joanna May, ‘but this is the penalty of daughterhood. I reme
mber it well. The mother must make the daughter as much like her as possible, unthread, unknit, the father in her. In this case, as it happens, my father is your father: you are me, so there’s no point in me doing it, but still I can’t help it.’
‘I do it to Sue,’ said Gina. ‘I can’t help that either. I don’t do it to the boys: I let them be themselves, I could never work out why. I suppose that’s what it is: you try and unravel the father out of the daughter. How else can she be properly female?’
