by Weldon, Fay
But he didn’t. He was hungry. If he stayed home Jean would give him a boiled egg and some salad and lecture him on cholesterol.
‘Tell me more,’ he said. But she wouldn’t. She would feed him scraps of information as she fed him sight of her breasts, for the pleasure of snatching satisfaction away. ‘I don’t want to get a name for gossip,’ she said, ‘or they’ll stop telling me things. You’re putting on weight,’ she added, not failing to notice that he had to tug at his belt to get it to his normal hole.
Only when they were in the car – a new Audi Quattro, with every modern gadget available, including a bleeper which went off if you exceeded the speed limit you set yourself, of which Angus was extremely proud – did Jean say: ‘What’s more, Mrs Hopfoot came in for Mogadon. She said her daughter had run off with Harry Harris. You know, that blonde girl with the good legs but the screwed-up face? I think perhaps a harelip, not very well fixed. Some said it gave her charm, but I never could see it.’
‘You’re having me on,’ he said. ‘You’re joking.’
‘If it isn’t true, Harry Harris will be sitting at the head of the table, and if it is true, he won’t,’ she said, staring ahead from behind glasses upswept at the corners, with her wide West Country eyes, full of innocence and savagery mixed; and he thought perhaps she wasn’t joking.
A little later she said:
‘Of course, you can’t blame Harry Harris too much, considering what his wife’s like.’
‘What’s his wife like?’
‘She’s been having it off with Arthur, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, back of the shop.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ But he did. He went too fast round a corner and had to brake sharply. The bleeper sounded and he had to grope for the switch to turn it off.
‘I suppose you envy Arthur,’ his wife remarked. And then, as if by the way, ‘Idiotic car, isn’t it! Why did you buy it? All it does is make you look a fool. It’s too big and too flash; it uses too much petrol and it’s impossible to park. You’re such a baby. You think people admire you and envy you for your fancy new car, but they don’t. All they think is, there goes a man with more money than sense.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘Fancy Arthur yourself?’
She yawned, artificially.
‘If I was going to fancy anyone,’ she said, ‘I’d fancy a twenty-year-old, not a middle-aged antique dealer.’
‘Fun evening this is going to be,’ was all he could think of to say.
It wasn’t, of course. Conversation was stilted. Harry Harris was indeed missing. Natalie said he’d gone to London unexpectedly that morning, and had rung from a garage to say he’d broken down on the motorway. No one believed her, but no one said they didn’t. There wasn’t enough smoked salmon. It was impossible to squeeze the lemon. The chickens had dried out. Jean refused the chocolate mousse on account of the cholesterol it contained. Natalie nearly said it came from a packet and was a special low-calorie brand, favoured by Harry, but stopped herself in time. Jane looked as if she were about to burst into tears. The only thing of interest that happened – apart from the negative fact of Harry’s absence – was that Angus admired Natalie’s hoop earrings; it occurred to him that she was just the sort of woman who would enjoy ten minutes’ sex while changing for dinner, or even twenty minutes, and if she saw something in Arthur she might see even more in him, Angus. What’s more, if Harry had gone missing, he, Angus, might be able to help her out.
Angus pinched Natalie’s bottom in the kitchen, going out to help her fetch another bottle of wine – she’d kept the red in the fridge, and taken out the white to warm: well, she was distracted – and she slapped his hand away. Had the instinct for self-preservation been predominant in her mind, she would have welcomed the bruise left by those powerful and monied and possibly helpful fingers. As it was, he was hurt, and never quite forgave her, not in all that came after. Natalie carried some kind of female aura around with her; she carried it like a suitcase: it was fixed to her and yet not part of her, a burden and a delight. It was impersonal and it made men want her to smile at them, and rendered them very irritable if she didn’t.
It wasn’t only men Natalie affected like this: it was women too. Look how I cursed her when she splashed me, driving by like Lady Muck: she with the debts and the runaway husband and not a true friend to her name, only the kind of business acquaintance who’d come to dinner and gossip about her behind her back, and fuck her out of turn, or try to. For love read hate. I brought it all down on her: or the demons in my head did. They feed on love and spew out hate. The more hope there is, the stronger they get. Flat depression, flat despair, is easier. Take my word for it.
Our dinner that night up at the housing estate consisted of kale and potatoes with a few scraps of sausage stirred in. Teresa, Bess and Edwina ate it without argument and afterwards we all watched Top of the Pops. When I look back on that time it seems happy enough – compared at any rate to now. I blame Natalie for what happened.
My shrink says I am prepared to blame everyone except myself for my fate. If I practised understanding and sympathy more, he says, I might blame less, and be the happier for it. More brutally, if I learned not to hate myself, I might not hate others, and then he might even let me out of the madhouse. He is ever hopeful! He thinks arson (one of my crimes, or madnesses) is a declaration of hate. I think arson is a pretty fine idea, one way and another. Fire is beautiful. What it burns is dross, rubbish; it eats up ugliness: it devours the debris of lost hope: it obliterates the imperfect. The ashes from a really good fire are soft, young and fine. I loved Natalie. I didn’t wish her any harm. When her troubles came upon her, how the vultures moved in! Then for a time, I was her only friend. It was she who betrayed me, not the other way round. If to want happiness for yourself is to be guilty, then, yes, I am guilty. But I am not full of hate and rage, on the contrary. I wish I was – then I could see a way out of this dismal place.
Shuffling ladies in shapeless cardigans are forever bringing me cups of over-sugared tea, which it would seem churlish to refuse. They ask me why I write instead of joining in their singsongs, and I just nod and smile and they seem not to notice that I haven’t answered. Someone did once ask what I was writing and I replied ‘Just therapy’ and she said ‘Novel or autobiography?’ and I was at a loss to reply. Not that it mattered; she shook her double chins at me and drifted off, like anyone else. It’s the drugs produce the double chins. But none of my questioners seems to have any teeth. Can this be the result of too much tannin? How bad people are at looking after themselves!
That was dinner, anyway, on the night of the day Harry Harris left for work, and never came home.
Chomp, Chomp, Grittle-Grax, Gone!
The fox was out that night. It got Ros’ duckling. Ros lives across the road from me in Wendover Drive. The duckling was a pretty little thing. It had been reared by her two daft hens. One of her kids had found this still warm duck’s egg under a hedge, and since Ros’ hens spent every spring and summer broody, without ever so much as laying an egg in return for their keep, she put the blue egg where a single addled white shop egg had rested for six weeks or so and look, folks, it hatched! How excited we all were! Silly little cheeping, trusting, mismatched creature. Small things please small minds: us, that is, up in the housing estate. Those of us who live off the State get smaller and smaller minds. We don’t take the newspapers, perhaps that’s it. Then the fox got the duckling. Ros’ children cried. So did Teresa, Bess and Edwina. I could have wrung its neck. The duckling’s, not the fox’s. The duckling stirred delight in us, who had no business to be delighted; we, the rejects of the system, the rejects of marriage, the unsupported mothers who live off the State. Cheep, cheep, it went: saved by a miracle, hatched by besotted elderly spinsters, it made us think that nice things still could happen. I don’t blame the fox. It only acted according to its nature. Chomp, chomp, grittle-grax, gone!
Natalie told me she saw it, or its brother, run
across her lawn. After the guests had gone she was putting out the rubbish in her bin – she was like that: never left waste until the morning – when the fox ran across her back lawn. She saw it in the light which shone out from her kitchen. It stopped and stared at her with its red eyes, seeming quite unafraid, and then loped on.
Foxes have a nasty habit of killing everything in the henhouse and leaving the debris behind and the straw and the walls spattered by blood and feather. They like to kill, not just to eat, or so the story goes. But every creature has its defenders, and I heard someone say on the radio the other day that the fox is not really blood-crazed: it’s just that its instincts can’t cope with walls. In the wild its victims would all have run off before it could get to them. I leave that for you to think about.
Anyway, the elderly hens couldn’t run off. The fox got them too. The duckling just vanished, but bits of hen were everywhere. Well, they’d done their bit, I suppose. What good’s an old hen that doesn’t lay eggs, any more than a woman too old or too cut about to have children? I was sterilized after Edwina. Stephen thought it a good idea. Three little girls in as many years, after ten years of trying and nothing. Delicious at the time! But where was it going to end? And then, I don’t know, it was as if my non-pregnancy or perpetual pregnancy was the only solder that kept us interested in each other. When I wasn’t in the market for babies and sex was for sex’s sake Stephen just seemed to lose interest. Then I fell in love with Alec, our solicitor, and Stephen acted as if he were Othello and I was Desdemona, only I’d recovered from the strangling and absolutely spoiled the play. And if you ask me it was my hysterectomized state which prevented Alec from taking me seriously. What man wants a woman without a womb, any more than he wants a woman with a womb that age has dried up? It goes against nature.
Mind you, it was said in my defence at the trial that my hysterectomy had preyed upon my mind. I pleaded guilty but insane and the plea was accepted. I must have been mad. All you have to do with a prison term is just sit it out and it comes to an end, and you go home – or whatever’s left of home after you’ve been out of it for a decade or so. But if you get sent to a psychiatric hospital, or ‘loonybin’ as we who know them still call them, you only get out if and when some psychiatrist swears you are now sane. And who’s ever going to swear that about another human being? Chomp, chomp, grittle-grax, gone! Ros’ duckling and me, but not Natalie. Natalie proved too tough for predators.
Anyway, as I was saying. The guests went home and Natalie was about to put the chicken bones in the bin, when she realized there was nothing to eat for tomorrow’s dinner. She took the debris back inside, filled a saucepan with water, put the bones in, then scraped the plates into the pan as well, including a bit of gristle chewed and rejected by Jean – Natalie was sure she was as healthy as a human being could be – put the lid on tight and boiled up the lot before she went to bed. She would serve it tomorrow for dinner, as soup. She was learning.
She dreaded going to bed, but in fact fell immediately and soundly asleep, and had no dreams, or at any rate none that she could recall.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ Alice asked, first thing.
‘Dad will really have to speak to that garage,’ said Ben. ‘It’s too bad.’
He spoke in his father’s voice, and Natalie had to refrain from slapping him. I am not saying that Natalie did not love her children: merely remarking that it is easier to love a child who is the fruit of passionately desired loins, if you see what I mean, than to love a child to whose begetter you are indifferent or whom you actively dislike. And Natalie had never been passionate about Harry’s loins.
They used to believe that love children – that is to say, children born out of wedlock – were always beautiful; a romantic view, of course, presupposing village love, not sordid urban accident by way of proximity or drunkenness, and not statistically viable; but it is something, I suppose, that people want to believe. Teresa, Bess and Edwina are good-looking enough. Regular features, good teeth. Though Edwina has (or had, when I last saw her – their father does not let them visit) those rather sad screwed-up little eyes which children get when they have suffered too many blows from fate. Perhaps now she is with her father and not her mad, bad mother they will begin to look more confidently at the world. (Self, self, self, Sonia. You’ll never get out at this rate.)
‘Your father’s away on business,’ said Natalie to Ben and Alice. What else could she say? It had a convincing enough ring: the nice impenetrability of the male reason for being off and out of the home. Away on business! What business? Where? They didn’t ask.
Now Natalie’s Volvo, with its pitiful pool of petrol in the tank, and the yellow warning light not just flickering but full on for the last eight miles, was parked in front of the house. The garage, kept for Harry’s Cortina, stood empty, with only a dusty spot or two of oil to mark the place where it ought to be, at 8 o’clock in the morning. Jax was hungry. Natalie found a can of bolognese sauce at the back of the cupboard and fed him that. He looked reproachful but ate it.
‘I don’t know what Dad would say,’ said Ben, ‘if he saw you do that. What a wicked waste of money!’
‘Dad isn’t here to say anything,’ said Natalie, and somewhere from the back of her mind, creeping out from under the thick wodge of stupor that seemed to fill it, came the notion, like a thread of silk in a flannel cloth, that being able to do what you liked, as you liked, without comment, might be a pleasant thing. That, in fact, there might be life beyond marriage.
Alice came out in alarm from her bedroom. From her window she could see two men in suits coming up the drive. They had left their Ford Escort in the road, where it was causing quite an obstruction; but they didn’t seem to care. One tried the driver’s door of the Volvo and, finding it open, got in and started the engine: it whirred, then died.
‘Mummy,’ cried Alice, ‘someone’s stealing the car!’
But of course they were merely repossessing it. Harry had not kept up the payments. They showed Natalie documents which she did not understand.
‘It won’t start,’ said the would-be driver, reproachfully.
‘There’ll be trouble if the vehicle is damaged in any way,’ said his companion. They seemed unmoved by Natalie’s wide, troubled eyes and pale face. She was not used to that. Did one lose the power to affect men, along with a husband?
‘It’s out of petrol, that’s all,’ she said, and they got a can of petrol out of the Escort, fed the Volvo and drove it out.
‘You are a fool,’ said Ben. ‘You shouldn’t have told them that. Then they’d have had to have gone away and Dad would have come back and sorted it out. He’s going to be ever so angry.’
‘How are we going to get to school?’ asked Alice.
‘By taxi, idiot,’ said Ben.
‘We’re going to walk,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s a lovely morning.’
‘Walk!’ said’ Ben, speaking as one who has no legs. ‘I can’t possibly!’
‘Then stay home,’ said Natalie, briefly, so he went away to pack his books and came back to say the handle of his briefcase was broken and he had to have a new one that very day. Natalie told him he could keep his books in a plastic bag and he snorted his derision. He was upset about the seizure of the car. Who wouldn’t be?
‘It’s like The Railway Children,’ said Alice. ‘We’re reading it at school. Their father’s falsely accused and goes to prison and then they’re very poor and have adventures.’
‘You’re so stupid!’ said Ben, and pulled her hair. So Alice went for Ben with her nails and Natalie slapped both their faces so hard it actually hurt, and after that they behaved. She, who never slapped children, beginning to behave like the rest of us! Distraught + distracted + dismayed = slaps and shrieks.
Natalie stood numbed and carless in her kitchen when the back door pushed open and there stood – no, not Harry, but Angus. He carried a dead hen by its legs.
‘Excellent dinner last night,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d drop by and
say thank you in person.’
‘It was a horrible dinner,’ she said. ‘The chickens were dry. Fish and chips from the Chinese takeaway would have been nicer.’ Yes, Chinese takeaways have reached even as far as Eddon Gurney, Somerset.
‘I thought I might have missed you,’ he said. ‘Your car’s not there.’
‘It’s having a service,’ she said, not even sure why she lied.
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I thought I passed it on the road. Being driven by a man I know. Works for a hire-purchase company.’
‘Can’t have been,’ she said.
‘Harry’s car’s not in the garage either,’ said Angus. ‘He’s off early.’
‘Yes, isn’t he?’ she said. She didn’t like Angus. He was too fair and fleshy for her taste.
‘Have it your own way,’ he said. ‘Do you want a chicken? Fox left it.’
There was a drop of blood upon her tiled floor.
Natalie thought once, twice, thrice.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and Angus put the dead bird, feathers and all, in her fridge. Why does he feel so much at home, she wondered? Coming in without knocking, opening her fridge without so much as an if you please. I told her the answer later. Men have a group consciousness, just as ants do. If one falls off the shelf another fills the gap. It’s only natural, especially if there’s honey around.
‘Your fridge is almost empty,’ he said. ‘Not a pretty sight. I reckon you’ll be needing some help, girl.’
‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Natalie.
‘Have it your own way,’ he said. ‘How are you getting the kids to school?’
‘We’re walking.’
‘I’ll give you a lift.’
‘It’s a fine morning. We often walk.’
‘You’ve got friends, I suppose? Family?’
‘Of course I have.’ But she hadn’t. And whose fault was that? She shouldn’t have looked down her nose at the likes of Pauline, not to mention me, Sonia. She should have written to aunts who sent her birthday cards. She’d thought herself too good for too many people, said ‘I prefer the company of men’ once too often. Pride comes before a fall; a sense of sisterhood with sad experience.
