by Weldon, Fay
Living Rough
Well, at least I never had to live rough, as did Flora, Natalie’s cleaning girl. Her address was The Caravan, The Rubbish Dump, Eddon Gurney, where the crows wheeled and the flies swarmed. She lived there with her boyfriend Bernard. They’d spend the cold weather in the caravan’s double bunk, and so didn’t really suffer, as others would, during the winters. But the old felt the cold that year; they had no love to keep them warm; they died like flies of hypothermia. It was in all the papers. Flora’s mother was fifty-three. That to Flora seemed old. When the temperature fell below freezing she would ring her mother in her council flat in Leeds to see how she was. She didn’t put money in the box. She used Harry Harris’ phonecard, which she’d nicked. At least she had a mother. My mother had a continental background, and was never very healthy (the war, I suppose) and died when I was three. My father was a journalist and drifted off into nowhere: he was an alcoholic, more or less; well, as I say, he was a journalist. I was a bright child; got a degree in Eng. Lit., married Stephen, a West Country engineer, and thought, all that is behind me. My mother, my mother’s terrible memories: my father, my father’s weakness. Stephen and I will be happy for ever in the heart of the country. We will start from here on down. That’s what I thought.
Dr Bill Mempton asked me today why I identified so with Flora? Flora, who sat on that float as Mrs Housewife Princess 1986. Talk about false pretences! Flora, who lived in sin, with Bernard? No Mrs, she! Housewife? The nearest Flora ever got to housewifery was sloshing a too-wet mop over Natalie’s floor! But never you mind details like that. This is the heart of the country. Flora was the prettiest and youngest of us, and Angus and Arthur wanted her to be Mrs Housewife Princess, so she got to sit in the gold conch shell at the carnival, as half-Madonna, half-Virgin. Both the mother who loves her child, and the girl who looks forward to love.
What I did inherit from my mother, who as a young girl was in Dachau, is the vision of the charnel house inside my head, the spitting devils and the piles of dead human flesh. It’s a race memory, that’s all. Nothing important. Nothing, good Dr Bill Mempton, that you should have to fear.
Bargains
This is how Arthur first encountered Flora. Picture her a week or so after Harry Harris had left Natalie. Natalie had failed to turn up at Arthur’s antique shop on a Tuesday and a Thursday and a Tuesday again; and Arthur reckoned that was about that, and didn’t want things stirred up anyway because an affair with a securely married woman is one thing, if you are securely married yourself, and an affair with a woman whose husband has left her is quite another. But he missed her: he was partly grateful she hadn’t seen fit to make emotional demands on him and partly aggrieved.
Arthur went up to the tip one Friday morning, after a restless night, to see if anything had turned up. Now well-established antique dealers such as Arthur don’t regularly visit local rubbish tips. They leave that to the runners, knockers and totters, those scurrying people at the bottom of the trader’s pile, those whose function it is to locate, recognize and rescue the scraps and remnants the past has left behind, anything from a broken leg by Chippendale to a farmer’s pig bench to a piece of cracked Lalique to an old postcard. Some of it – not much, but some – does escape their searching fingers, their greedy eyes, and ends up on the local rubbish dump, tipped there by the innocent, those who think an old fireplace is better ripped out and replaced by a modern one, and that flat doors are preferable to panelled ones; indeed that anything new must be preferred to something old. And though it was not any more Arthur’s role in the complex structure of the antique trade – he who had risen to have his own shop, and actually sell to the private punters, and not just to others within the trade – to go scavenging, but to leave all that to those whose business it properly was, he sometimes did. He stopped the Citroën by the tip in the early morning, and took a stroll, just to see what was in there. He couldn’t help it. He loved the excitement.
This morning he was surprised to see a caravan parked some little distance from the row of skips where the public came to dump their black bags of peelings, eggshells and cat hairs, their old fridges, shoes, bottles and occasionally their rather good sidetables, not to mention their deceased grandma’s bentwood rocking chair. The semi-official totter at the Eddon Gurney tip was a certain Hopalong, recently taken into hospital, as Arthur knew well enough.
The caravan had, as it were, its back to the tip. It looked up towards the cliff, quarried unnaturally out of the hillside some twenty years back, and now awash with creepers and flowers. A pretty enough place, if you didn’t look back over your shoulder, and held your nose in high summer. Just now, in the spring, it was at its best.
A young man came sauntering round the side of the caravan. He had cropped blonde hair, brushed upwards – the modern style – wide eyes, and a chiselled, handsome, rather cold face; he wore tight jeans and a T-shirt and was pulling on a leather jacket with many zips. He seemed aggressive. He walked towards Arthur and didn’t stop walking, or talking. ‘Any old iron, any old iron!’ he jeered. ‘Any old Georgian chairs, any old stripped pine washstands, left over from last year’s November 5th? No, buster, is the answer: no straight off. If there’s anything going, I get it, and you and your sort are not welcome up here.’
‘What makes you think I’m a dealer?’ asked Arthur.
‘I can tell them from a mile off,’ said Bernard. ‘Scum of the earth.’
At that moment, as Arthur stood his ground – he was not a coward and had his dignity to think about – Flora came out of the caravan. She was wrapped in a silk kimono and her hair was dishevelled. She seemed to Arthur entirely beautiful – the Virgin and the Madonna mixed in one – as young, bright and careless as the flowers which draped the cliff behind her, and with entirely the wrong man, that is to say Bernard of the many zips and uncouth attitude. Bernard turned to see what Arthur was gawping at and saw Flora.
‘Get the coffee on, Flora, for God’s sake,’ Bernard said. ‘Stop trolling about not properly dressed.’ She went back inside, giggling, but not without a flash of bare white breast beneath black and red silk. As I say, Arthur was a fine figure of a man, and beneath the leather Bernard could seem quite weedy.
‘I don’t want to tread on any toes,’ said Arthur, mildly enough. ‘I was expecting to see Hopalong.’
‘I live here now,’ said Bernard. ‘I know you! You’re the geezer up at Castle Antiques. You’re the feller having the affair with my old lady’s employer. Hopalong said you sometimes came up.’
‘You can’t have a caravan up here,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s illegal. And you can’t make insinuations like that, without finding a knife between your ribs one of these dark nights.’
‘We’re all illegal these days,’ said Bernard. ‘Even the police, and it wasn’t so much an insinuation as a congratulation.’
‘In that case you’d better come up and see me some time,’ said Arthur. Totters need dealers and dealers need totters in the same way as bread needs cheese and vice versa. It is better for the cheddar not to quarrel with the slice.
Arthur looked over Bernard’s shoulder and saw the source of Bernard’s temporary unwisdom, a rather good Georgian chair on top of the skip marked ‘cardboard only’ in Hopalong’s crabby hand. Poor Hopalong, dead a day, and already someone filling his shoes! But there’s a good living in totting: it was bound to happen.
‘Let me know how it goes,’ he said.
‘I have my own contacts,’ said Bernard.
‘I doubt that,’ said Arthur, and drove off.
‘You shouldn’t have said that about him and Natalie Harris,’ said Flora, back in the caravan, taking off the kimono. ‘It was only I saw her go in there one Tuesday.’
‘Hit the nail on the button, if you ask me,’ said Bernard. ‘Good to know the wrinklies are still at it. There’s hope for us yet.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Flora.
The general hopelessness of their lot was Bernard and Flora’s
theme song. They sang it happily as the sun rose and the sun set. Even when they were both working, him on a tractor or down the school gate selling smack (only once: he got frightened), she up at the Harrises or doing school dinners (only for a week: she couldn’t stand the grease and heat), they saw themselves as irrevocably and permanently unemployed. They had their little home and it was knee-deep in flowers. It was better than a cottage any day because all you had to do was move it an inch here or an inch there and you didn’t have to pay rates. They got by; they had each other: they got by very nicely.
There was a screech of Citroën brakes. Better to make friends than enemies. Besides, he wanted another glimpse of Flora.
‘Would you like a job?’ Arthur asked Bernard, who appeared naked in the caravan door.
‘Who, me? I’ve got a job. I’m totting.’
‘Totting’s part time. This is a proper job.’
‘What sort of proper job?”
‘Down Avon Farmers. New trading company. A hundred and twenty a week.’
‘What’s the catch?’
‘Hard work,’ said Arthur. ‘Long hours. Holding your tongue and minding your own business.’
‘Make it a hundred and fifty,’ said Bernard.
‘A hundred and thirty,’ said Arthur, ‘and I don’t know why I bother.’ But a sharp bright boy was needed up at Avon Farmers and Arthur knew a sharp bright boy when he saw one. Nor did he want too many insinuations, let alone congratulations, floating around the countryside. He had his wife to think about.
‘Perhaps you’ll bring up that chair some time,’ said Arthur. ‘Bit of old rubbish but might be worth something.’
‘I will,’ said Bernard.
And that’s how Bernard got the job at Avon Farmers – where presently he was to meet up with Natalie – by knowing too much and speaking his mind.
Arthur drove on to meet Angus, who was looking over the new Avon Farmers Trading Estate. This consisted of a corrugated iron barn and a group of Portakabins at the end of a farm track, to the north of Glastonbury Tor. Here Avon Farmers – a nebulous grouping of farmers, farm suppliers and businessmen – were to sell cheap imported agricultural chemicals and foodstuffs. By the time the Ministry inspectors got to hear of the existence of the warehouse, it would have evaporated, or, if it proved very successful, have moved on to the next county. Such subterfuge would not have been necessary had unreasonable EEC regulations not prevented the sale of certain fertilizers, growth promoters, hormones, insecticides and fungicides – used to advantage and without harming a soul in various parts of the world – to the detriment of British farmers. As it was, the home producers deserved the best deal they could get, and Avon Farmers meant to see they got it.
‘Time you got a new car, Arthur,’ said Angus, speaking from his Quattro.
‘I’m fond of the old Citroën,’ said Arthur. ‘They don’t make cars like this any more. I’ve found us a new lad. Lives up at the tip in a caravan with the most beautiful girl in the world.’
‘Who? Not Natalie Harris?’
‘Not Natalie,’ said Arthur, severely.
‘Lucky she’s got you to lean on,’ said Angus. ‘In this the hour of her distress.’
‘Me?’ said Arthur, surprised.
‘So they say,’ said Angus.
‘Not any more,’ said Arthur. ‘She’s gone right off me.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Angus. ‘I wouldn’t want to tread on your toes.’
‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’
‘There’s a rather good piece coming up in Friday’s auction, Arthur. I’d appreciate your holding back.’
‘Say no more. ’Tis done. What?’
‘A davenport. Original Waring and Gillow. Just for a friend. A personal favour. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’
‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, Angus, and your sprats are other people’s mackerels. How’s the Quattro?’
‘Fantastic! How’s the Citroën? Really? Sounds a bit clanky, to me.’
‘It’s like the wife,’ said Arthur. ‘Wearing out, but I’m fond of her.’
The wind was chilly. A too wide, bonded lorry crept up a too narrow lane towards them.
‘What’s that?’
‘The stuff from Brazil, with any luck,’ said Angus. ‘Now we can really get going.’
‘I suppose it’s safe,’ said Arthur.
‘Good God,’ said Angus, ‘don’t be such an old woman. DDT did us fine for decades. It doesn’t change overnight. But look at the fuss they make now!’
‘Give my love to Natalie when you see her,’ said Arthur.
‘I certainly will,’ said Angus.
Well, a nod is as good as a wink to a county auctioneer, and so Natalie was sold to Angus against a return unspecified, but one day to be claimed. So the world proceeds, by one good turn, balanced by another. And the local insects bit the dust and calves and piglets got a load of growth promoters which fed carcinogens into the food chain, but who were they to care? They were too busy balancing their sudden, new, startling weight on the already too flimsy slats in the intensive care unit. And their owners got richer by the good, lean, popular kilo.
Redemption
When I try to write about Flora I keep wandering off into the villainy of men. The point is that pretty young women are expendable. Nobody likes them, except the men who are currently involved with them. Their mothers envy them, their fathers are disturbed by them, their plainer siblings resent them, their teachers dislike them. They have a hard time growing up, and a hard time when grown. A pretty girl driving a Mini will be driven off the road by lorry drivers as a matter of course. What’s she doing on the road? Driving is work, not entertainment. Professors refuse to give them degrees, in case they’re accused of prejudice. Their husbands don’t trust them. Everyone knows what a pretty girl is for, that’s the trouble. If Flora had been plainer, Bernard might have married her and not treated her like a skivvy and a slave. (Plain girls marry earlier, statistically, than pretty ones.) Look at her now, as I do, cleaning Natalie’s floor long after Natalie had the wherewithal to pay her for so doing. Pretty, and therefore persecuted! Flora’s piled-up, streaked-in, frizzed-out hair has toppled halfway down her creamy cheek. She keeps trying to push it up again with her delicate white fingers, and has put a streak of grime across that selfsame creamy cheek. This is, I admit, beginning to get to me. How sad that these things must pass! The creamy cheek one day will be no longer; as will that female movement of the hands through the hair, to puff and prettify. Sad, I say – yet that part of me given over to jealousy and envy is not sorry, but glad, that all things flesh are mortal, especially the flesh of the prettier members of the great universal sisterhood.
‘I’m not going to work here for nothing,’ said Flora, crossly, putting away the mop, helping Natalie extract Angus’ dead hen, feathers and all, from the freezer. ‘Why should I wash your floors, if not for money? Bernard says if you like he’ll come and take away a couple of chairs in lieu.’
‘Those chairs cost eighty-five pounds each two months ago. I only owe you fifteen pounds.’
‘You should have bought antiques,’ said Flora. ‘Then they’d have had a re-sale value.’
‘Harry liked new things,’ said Natalie. These days she talked about Harry whenever she could. She thought she should. He’d been gone for three weeks. She had told the children he’d gone to Spain on business, and that there was trouble getting money through. That’s why Ben wouldn’t have a new briefcase for his books and Alice six new hair slides. She thought Alice believed her but that Ben did not. She’d told them they were changing schools at half term and Alice had turned white and said nothing and Ben had flushed and thrown a book at her and said he hated her.
‘Always a mistake to do what a man likes,’ said Flora now, as if she knew everything in the world. ‘They get bored, if they have everything their own way.’
‘So it seems,’ said Natalie. Why was she confiding in the help? She regretted it, now.<
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‘And he just walked out without a word!’ said Flora. She felt like Natalie’s younger sister, which was why she kept coming up to Dunbarton and working for no money. ‘Aren’t men pigs. But I can’t believe you didn’t see it coming.’
‘If I was someone different I expect I would have,’ Natalie said. ‘But I’m me.’
‘You don’t do much screaming or shouting,’ said Flora.
‘There’s no one to hear me,’ said Natalie, sadly, and apart from Flora, there was indeed no one. Only Angus, who had asked himself to dinner, out of the blue, to eat his chicken. It proved impossible to pluck the feathers from a deep-frozen hen, but Flora offered to at least hack off the head with a chopper before she left.
‘You won’t have the nerve, Mrs Harris,’ she said and Natalie accepted the offer with relief. She had only ever bought oven-ready birds.
The heavy knife whacked down upon the creature’s neck, stretched as it was across the chopping board, head dangling, and a frozen globule of blood flew across the room and landed upon the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
‘I never liked that picture,’ said Natalie. ‘Although I know I’m supposed to. Could I ask you something, Flora?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Did you steal my jewellery?’
‘No.’
‘Then he did it,’ said Natalie. ‘The bastard,’ and she picked up a cup and threw that at the sunflowers. The cup broke and the picture fell off the wall. The return of rage, as I say, marks the beginning of recovery. It was at that point that Natalie stopped walking round like a zombie and thereafter flustered and wept and stormed and went round with red eyes and a haggard face like any other wife left suddenly with no money and the children. It takes years to recover properly, of course, before you can assume that because you woke bright eyed and calm to the day, you will continue thus until its end, without suffering a fit of melancholy, rage, distress, remorse, jealousy or some other unpleasant emotion. One in every three marriages ends in divorce. It happened to Natalie, it happened to me, it had happened to most of us on the carnival float that night – and all agree, all we have in the end are our friends.
