by Weldon, Fay
After he’d got out of the pond, towelled and walked back to the VIP room, the meters – the ones put in to reassure the visitors – had started to chatter. The area had been cleared, more or less. Media men will risk anything for a story, even stay round chattering meters. What a fuss! They’d wanted to put him in the isolation room and start emergency treatments, but he knew already it was no good. It had been foretold. Let them suck out as much bone marrow as they wanted, he was finished. Philip drove him back to Eton Square. Good for Philip. He’d make the alarms chatter now, too. He wondered if it had been an accident. Probably not. Who had fixed it? Coustain? His own Divination Department? Joanna? He wouldn’t blame her. He wished she was with him. In spite of everything, he wished she was there. He thought Isaac was in the room; he hoped he was: it would be somebody to talk to. But there was no one, nothing animate. No sound at all, unless he was deaf. He would have to take his own journey through death, so alone, without servants, without friends; stand at the Throne of the Most High, and make his explanation there, without support, without witnesses. What could he say? I wanted to know what would happen next? Was that enough? There had not been time: he had been clapped like a bird in full flight, soaring. Fate was unkind, but just.
It wasn’t Isaac. It was Joanna. He saw her blue eyes. He shivered so much he could hardly speak. He said, ‘No, don’t come too near.’
She said, ‘I never did, I never dared. I should have been more brave.’
He said, ‘I know all that. I know. My fault.’
She just stared at him, but at least her eyes moved. They weren’t dead. He had, after all, spared her, saved her. Now he had his reward.
‘Joanna,’ Carl May said, ‘take me, remake me. For God’s sake, remake me.’
‘All right,’ said Joanna May.
55
That was a year of strange events, some wonderful, some terrible: and there are stranger years ahead, no doubt. They don’t frighten me; even death has lost its sting. The future shouldn’t alarm us: how could it possibly be worse than what’s gone before? Little by little, wisdom replaces ignorance, self-knowledge overcomes stupidity, awareness gets the upper hand of cruelty. It is the past which is so terrifying, with its capacity to spoil and destroy the present. That can’t get better.
Little Carl runs round my feet. He’s three years old, an energetic, noisy little boy, with thick pale hair and bright red cheeks, interested in everything, bored by nothing. He can read and write already, and even recite nursery rhymes, which he loves to do, never getting them quite right. If I correct him he has a temper tantrum: he is beside himself with upset and indignation – I have failed to recognize the difficulties he has overcome, the achievement; so great a task for one so small – and his small frame cannot contain such passion. His whole body turns as red as his cheeks, he flails and kicks and beats the ground, the door, me, anything; and then I, hurt in mind and body, have to carry him, as best I can, to his room and shut him in until we both calm down and can begin again. I could beat him black and blue, and am still sometimes tempted to, to punish him for what he did to me, for the unlived life he gave me, so many years of it, the guilt he made me feel, the loss he made me endure, for the deaths of Isaac and of Oliver. Except this innocent has done nothing: I know he could, that’s all, and knowing what he could do also know what I could do, sufficiently provoked; and so I have to forgive him, both in retrospect and in advance.
Easier not to correct him, one way or another, to avoid the confrontation, to let the error go unchecked. ‘Spoiling,’ Gina calls it. Now she has given her children away, how quickly she has taken on Julie’s former role, and become censorious. But I’m older, I know better, I no longer fight for fairness, truth and justice. I just say, ‘That’s wonderful, Carl, how clever you are!’ We christened him Rex, Alice and I. King. Why not? But Julie was against it – a dog’s name, she said – and it soon drifted back to being Carl, little Carl.
Alice, of all of them, Queen of Cups, was the one who volunteered to give birth to little Carl, on condition she didn’t have to rear him. Dr Holly, back in the business, used his own tried and tested techniques of nuclei transfer to bring it about. Alice proved a good and dutiful birth mother: didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, watched her health and her moods – trained as she was in keeping her body well under control. She relinquished the baby to me at six weeks, without protest – glad of a decent night’s sleep, I daresay, and happy enough to let the simple pleasures of narcissism prevail over the more complicated snakes-and-ladders game of motherhood; anxious to get back to work; and knowing I’d bring up the child pretty much as she would. How could I not?
Julie, Queen of Pentacles, is happy bringing up Ben, and little Anthony too; Alec, their adoptive father, comes and goes. He is resigned to the noise, the mess, the constant upheaval; consoled by the sense of present and future, so long as he can fly off from time to time, leave it all behind and tread the clean and flattering corridors of world class hotels until such time as his strength returns and his self-esteem is restored.
Jane, Queen of Wands, no longer toys with the idea of working in film: she has settled happily and quite profitably as a journalist – the work suits her better, being more about facts, less about fantasy. She felt obliged to take Sue in because three was too much for Julie, and Alice had done her bit by actually giving birth to little Carl, and Gina wasn’t fit, and a child will take any clone, it seems, for a mother. The essential nature is the same, after all: only the frills are different. Sue then felt the lack of a resident father, so Jane, running comfortably on only a quarter guilt, finally consented to allow Tom to move in. Jane is always out and about so Tom does much of the childminding and cooking, grumbling the while, but the three of them, Jane, Tom, Sue, seem happy enough. Sue sees her birth mother from time to time, of course, but prefers the Jane rather than the Gina version, or at any rate, she’d rather have Tom for a father than Cliff.
Gina, Queen of Swords, now childless, is at medical school but back with Cliff. He still drinks, he still hits her, but not so much or so hard. Pain is indeed addictive, and perhaps the effort of curing it is hardly worth it, if there are no children about. If it’s pleasurable, why not? We’ve had so many oughts and shoulds, all of us, we’ve all but given up being critical of one another. Good for her, say we.
We would have been perfect people if we could, but our genes were against us. We would have been faithful, kind and true, but fate was against us. We are one woman split five ways, a hundred ways, a million million ways.
It’s autumn. I, Joanna May, am out in the garden, raking leaves. I keep things tidy, and growing, in memory of Oliver, and besides, I like to do it. Little Carl runs round my feet and all but trips me up, and falls headlong into a pile of leaves. ‘Careful,’ I say, ‘I’m not as young as I was,’ and I pick him up and set him straight, and he laughs cheerfully and rushes off to set to flight a flock of seagulls, rashly gathered on the lawn: and when the wicked deed is done, and the birds have risen crossly and unwillingly into the air, where they hang around to wheel and squawk their reproach, he stands stock still, amazed at what he’s done. I do love him. Never stopped.
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First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Collins
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1989
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858486
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
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Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Copyright
When Natalie’s husband, Harry, kisses her and their two children goodbye, departs for the office, and never returns, Natalie immediately blames herself. If she hadn’t been cheating on her husband every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, he never would have left her for his secretary, a local beauty queen...
Table of Contents
The Wages of Sin
Oh, the wages of sin!
Natalie Harris sinned, and her husband Harry left for work one fine morning and didn’t come back.
The morning was fine only temporarily. You know what those mornings are, just before the rain sets in? Bright and glittery around the edges; altogether too bright for safety, with a pale blue sky arching much too high above, and beyond the arch heaven knows what, God or the Devil. And before you know it black clouds begin to edge up all around the horizon, like muddy water welling from a blocked drain, and close the sky over with cloud, drizzle and depression, and your quivering glimpse of eternity, good or bad, is gone. There’s just the bus to catch or the washing up to get on with. Just such a too bright morning it was, when Harry Harris left for work and didn’t return, leaving Natalie Harris well and truly in the shit, if you’ll excuse me.
But well and truly there she was, floundering in the excreta (if the word seems less offensive) the human race spits out behind it as it gallops on in search of profit and diversion. Left holding the baby, what’s more – that is to say the two Harris children, Ben and Alice: not everyone’s cup of tea, these two less than innocent mites, and certainly not mine, but Natalie loved them, as mothers love their children, blindly.
It was a Thursday morning. It seemed much like any other. Natalie got up at 7.10. The radio alarm switched itself on: music and chat came through loud and clear. The Harris’ nice new bungalow, complete with dream kitchen, picture windows and parquet floors, lay in the shadow of the Mendip Mast, that vital, quivery, silver wand which reaches up into the sky, erected by man on the highest spot available, in other words as near as can be to the ethereal god of Telecommunications. And Dunbarton, the Harris’ home, on the outskirts of Eddon Gurney, just eight miles from the Mast and halfway between Wells and Glastonbury, had the full benefit of it.
Harry still lay asleep in the twin bed. He’d been home late the night before. Natalie took twenty minutes washing, dressing, plucking, preening. (The rest of us pull on a pair of jeans and yesterday’s sweater: not Natalie.) She let Jax the Alsatian out and Tweeny her little grey cat in. (Cats should be kept in at night: it is brutal to do otherwise, but Natalie didn’t know this. How ignorant she was at this stage in her life!) At 7.35 she woke Ben and Alice. They had separate rooms. Alice kept hers tidy and Ben his untidy. At 7.40 she woke Harry and offered him a choice of shirts. (She ironed on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, watching television.) But Harry took his best white silk slimline from the very back of the cupboard and wore that. Natalie was glad when Harry had a shirt, any shirt, on his back. She did not like the texture of his skin. It seemed to her to be too white, too soft, too spotty. They’d been living in the Pipeline Road, Banjul and there at least, under the African sun, his skin had been brown and tougher and younger.
At 8.35 Harry drove off in his Cortina; Natalie and the children stood in the front porch and waved goodbye. Even Jax the dog sat and stared.
‘Don’t be late tonight!’ said Natalie. ‘Remember we have people to dinner.’
‘I’ll be back at six-thirty,’ he said, ‘On the dot!’ and they kissed each other and Harry drove off. How anyone watching would have admired and envied that particular domestic tableau, under the glittery sun.
Mind you, I’m not surprised the Harris household was in trouble. It lived in yet another shadow, being equidistant from the Mendip Mast and Glastonbury Tor. This latter is the solid, ancient hummocky hill which dominates the flat lands in the Somerset Southwest, and from some angles looks like a lady’s breast. It’s tipped by a crumbling tower, which those who’re determined claim looks like that breast’s erect nipple. So you could say if you are determined – and many who live round here are – that the Mast was male and the Tor was female: certainly the Mast is modern and the Tor ancient. The Tor transmits as well, if you ask me, though rather fitfully: probably alpha waves from King Arthur’s sleeping brain. The great king is buried in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey, at the foot of the Tor; not dead, they say, but sleeping, to wake in the hour of England’s need. And this is it, if you ask me. So the alpha waves have been hotting up lately, and he’s stirring all right, and what with the Tor transmitting its mystic messages of oneness, allness, wholeness, and so forth, and the Mast streaming out Dallas and Robin Day, it’s not surprising the Harris household quivered and shook and broke into little bits. Well, that’s about the only excuse I can think of for Harry Harris, who wasn’t a bad guy, really. Just panicky about his life and his business, which was failing.
Some said, unkindly, when they heard Harry Harris hadn’t come home but had run off with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, she with the blonde cloud of hair and the thin lips, how did his wife know he hadn’t come home? I mean, could she tell? And it was true that this ordinary businessman in his Ford Cortina, with his ordinary haircut, suit and tie, this apparently conventional businessman, so conventionally these days into computers, did seem to melt into the background of the village and be what we expect of our neighbours, rather than ourselves – that is to say, to be ordinary, anonymous and under control. He did listen a great deal to Radio 2, however, a station which beams out olden goldies – or is it golden oldies? – and feeds the nostalgic and romantic imagination, daily reviving memories of long lost youth. This should perhaps have warned Natalie her husband was in love. In love. Ah!
In love with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978. The carnival queen. His secretary. Even village beauties must work, these days.
> Picture Natalie. Round face, blonde-haired, pretty as a girl in an early Charlie Chaplin movie, with that same blank look of sexy idiocy on her face. It was as if she was born to go round with subtitles: Help me, saυe me. Poor little me. It was how she had been brought up to look: not her fault. And, as it turned out, when faced by disaster she was in fact competent enough. In fact, by the end of the story – or as much of it as I’m in a position to tell – Natalie was looking less like a heroine and more like a call girl, but that’s life, isn’t it? Carry on a decade or two, or three, and I daresay she’ll look like a little old lady. A little old lady or a little old man, that’s where all our futures lie. What does it matter? It’s what happens on the way that counts.
And listen, Harry Harris not coming home that evening was at least something happening, wasn’t it! If he had come home, life would have gone on as per usual for ever, Natalie dream walking, Harry sleepwalking, and that would have been even worse than disaster for both of them. Natalie was lucky. It’s not everyone’s good fortune to have things occur in their lives, just like that, out of the blue. No, usually if you want things to change you have to make them change, and most of us don’t want the responsibility. So we do nothing and drift on in unsatisfactory situations, waiting for magic, which doesn’t happen.
The saving disaster happens in our heads, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve never imagined your nearest and dearest dead or swallowed up or gone: swum out to sea and not come back, the house burnt down or the Bomb fallen. And imagining it is wanting it. Of course, if it really happened – well, pray God or the Devil it hasn’t, it won’t – if it does your guilt won’t make it easier to bear. That’s what I mean by the wages of sin.
