by Weldon, Fay
‘Wake her up now,’ said Bob.
‘Certainly not,’ said Hattie. ‘That would be immoral. She has to wake naturally.’
Elaine moved stiffly round the bedroom, frowning and inefficient. Daphne stuffed the more obvious items of clothing and personal necessities into a suitcase.
‘Dad’s been taking something, Mum,’ she said. ‘He’s not himself. Let’s just get away, shall we?’
‘Perhaps it would be better if I stayed,’ said Elaine. ‘It doesn’t feel right just to go.’
‘I can’t leave you here on your own,’ said Daphne. ‘And I can’t stay, so you’ll have to come.’
‘Why can’t you stay?’
‘Because Alison is taking Jumper to the vet at 7.45, and the vet’s a woman and just her type. I’ve been away for three days and I want to get to the appointment too.’
‘Do you mean the vet is Jumper’s type, or Alison’s type?’
‘Alison’s type,’ said Daphne patiently.
‘Oh,’ said Elaine. ‘And then you could have an operation to get to be an animal and then you could be Jumper’s type. Just a thought.’
‘Not a very good joke, Mum,’ said Daphne.
‘Probably not,’ said Elaine gloomily, and waved at the furniture.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’
‘Waving goodbye to the matrimonial fourposter,’ said Elaine. ‘I was born in that bed. I had you in hospital. Peter too. Perhaps that’s what went wrong. Lack of faith.’
‘You’re talking strangely even for you, Mum,’ said Daphne. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’
‘No, wait a moment,’ said Elaine, clinging to one of the four posts of the bed. ‘I could compose a curse. I could curse your father and all his line.’
‘He doesn’t have a line. Just Peter and me.’
‘My mother cursed my father and all his line before she went,’ said Elaine. ‘Before she jumped in the river. They found her down near the reeds. Why shouldn’t I do it too? It obviously works.’
Daphne tried to prise her mother’s arms from the post, but failed.
‘Jesus, what a nightmare!’ she said. ‘Compared to home, International Relations is a piece of cake.’
The phone rang. Elaine let loose the bedpost and answered it.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Yes, as it happens, someone called Weena is in the house. An Eloi. We’re just Morlocks.’
‘Is that Mrs Desmond?’ asked Hattie.
‘Lady Drewlove to you,’ said Elaine. ‘Who ever wanted to be married to a mere commoner?’
‘Lady Drewlove! Wow!’ said Hattie. ‘I thought you were just a Mrs. It was you I wanted anyway, not Weena. I need to warn you. Weena’s no well-wisher. I know: I’m her friend. She’s after your husband. She’ll drive you out, suck him dry, spit him out as a husk. I can’t go on, because you’re out of town and this is my friend Bob’s phone. One of the husks I’m talking about. There are hulks and there are husks.’
‘She’s writing my husband’s biography,’ said Elaine. ‘She seems to be plumping him up well enough, making him rich and famous again: I see no sign of any husk –’
Downstairs, Weena said to Defoe, as she helped herself to raspberry mousse with a meringue topping, done to a turn overnight in the Aga’s plate-warming oven – ‘As soon as she’s gone, call the locksmith, change the locks. Then she can’t get in without breaking in, and you can call the police if she tries. Communicate only through lawyers. Accuse her of violent behaviour. She’ll soon give up and go away and leave you in peace, to be yourself at last. I’ll be here to help you; it’s all going to be just fine!’
Defoe’s head was clearing. The fronds of Weena’s shorts were beginning to separate out, lie still; had ceased writhing and weaving round her leg.
‘Wasn’t that the phone?’ he asked.
‘Not any more,’ said Weena.
Defoe picked up the silent instrument to hear Hattie’s voice.
‘Weena’s got no commission to do Defoe Desmond’s biography. She tried but she failed. There’s no Sunday newspaper serialisation. All that’s for your husband’s benefit. A commission just acts as a pregnancy used to, when a girl wants a man and a home. When she’s got what she wants, the baby, the commission, just somehow fades away. She has a miscarriage: the editor changes his mind. She’s installed, though. She’s okay. Too late for the guy to go back. It happens to the good guys, not the bad. Don’t give up on your husband just because Weena’s around.’
Defoe put the receiver down. The words might have been real, or they might have come from heaven. He did not recognise the voice, but the statements made were the more convincing for that. His hand tightened round Weena’s thigh.
‘You’re hurting me,’ she protested. ‘I bruise so easily. I’m Weena the Eloi. My mother named me after the girl in The Time Machine, did I ever tell you that? She wanted to diminish me from the moment I was born.’
‘I’m the King of the Morlocks,’ he said, picking up the bread knife, ‘and I’m going to eat half of you for lunch, and the Queen shall have the other half for tea.’
The knife was at her throat and she was on her feet in an instant.
‘Get out of here now,’ Defoe said. ‘Just out.’
‘I’ll tell everyone,’ Weena said. ‘I’ll tell the press. I’ll tell them you raped me. I’ll tell them everything.’
‘Tell away,’ he said, ‘because who’s interested? No one. It’s the end of the line, Weena, for you and for me, and you’re lost and I’m saved.’
‘Take me now,’ Weena pleaded, thrusting out her chest at him, but the T-shirt seemed unerotic, the breasts pointless. ‘This is so exciting! I’ve never wanted a man so much –’
‘It won’t work,’ Defoe said, brandishing his knife, pursuing her. ‘It worked once, it worked twice; three times and you’d have me. Serpent! Slimy, cold creature. I’ll cut your head off!’
And Weena turned and ran out of the house. He followed her to the door and flung her green leather bag after her, and the bread knife after that, so it glinted in the air and almost got her: she stared up at it, mouth open and paralysed, as it arced towards her, over and over, and down, Elaine’s best bread knife with the serrated edge. But the knife missed her, and buried itself haft-deep in the lawn. Weena grabbed her bag and ran. Defoe slammed the door after her and turned the locks just as his wife and daughter came down the stairs.
‘I reckon I was just in time,’ said Hattie to Bob. ‘If I’d come straight round, if I hadn’t waited for Amy to wake, I wouldn’t have bothered to get through to Defoe Desmond’s wife.’
Bob had found no clean sheets, but had straightened those already on the bed and brushed away the crumbs, ready for next morning’s breakfast. She could forgive him.
Weena went to her office and found her name off the door and her desk gone. She had no job: she was one of many similarly made redundant. Nor was Dervish there to cajole and persuade, blackmail and charm. He had left a message to say if she attempted to stay, she’d be thrown out. She could collect her wages the following week.
Weena went to her apartment and found the lock changed and her suitcases out, and the white satin blouse, now the same grey as Elaine’s wood ash, hanging on the doorknob by way of explanation.
‘She can’t prove it,’ said Weena aloud, ‘she’s got no proof!’, but no one was listening. She thought she heard the sound of Dervish’s voice, Dervish laughing in his particular pleasure, and knew that she had lost. She had gone too far.
Weena went to Hattie’s apartment but there was no one there. So she went round to Bob’s to cadge a bed for the night but Hattie was there and Bob wouldn’t let her in. It was no good going to Bob’s wife, who once had been Weena’s best friend, because she wasn’t speaking either.
Weena used the last of her money taking a taxi to the crematorium where her father was buried, but it was so vast, so many crosses, so many plaques, it seemed there were more people dead in the world than alive. She lay face down on the gr
ass and tried to commune with her father, but failed. She reckoned he had gone and she was on her own. She had driven everyone away.
A man with a good profile in a good suit stood alone by a grave: the sky was rosy pink, the moon rising. She thought everything was beautiful. She would begin again. She felt reborn in goodness: her spirits rose: she was elated.
‘I spent the last of my money on flowers for my mother’s grave,’ she said softly to the man with the profile. He was perhaps in his mid-forties. ‘I didn’t stop to think how I’d get home.’
He turned his face to hers. He looked quite like her father, as she expected: intelligent, personable, interesting. It was the pattern fate made in front of you, laying out its crazy paving slabs. You got to anticipate what the next one would be. First you stepped on one, then on another: there was scarcely any choice. You tried not to fall between the cracks, and the attempt was the only free will there was. Lately they’d taken to shifting beneath her feet: she’d got things wrong. But you lost some and won some: you couldn’t blame yourself.
‘Otherwise it’s the end of the line for me too,’ said Weena. ‘I might as well join those here gathered.’
‘They wouldn’t have you,’ he said, having studied her for a little. ‘You’re far too alive for that. Let me give you a lift in my Rolls. In the presence of the dead the truly living must stick together. And so few of us are truly alive.’
They walked off together into the sunset, if not hand in hand, at least hip to hip; defiant, in anticipation of things to come.
Run and Ask Daddy
If He Has Any More Money
An Exercise in Italics
Well now! It was Easter and my friend David was helping his wife Milly Frood in the shop when he heard a voice he recognised crying loud and clear across the crowded room, ‘Run and ask Daddy if he has any more money’ and his blood ran cold.
Easter is upon us now. It is a season when we should reflect upon our sins and consider the pain we cause others, especially those who have no choice but to put up with us; this trauma of self-knowledge, self-revelation, culminating on Easter Friday, leaving us Saturday to shop and recover, so that on Sunday we can wake exhilarated to our new selves – and then have Monday to calm down a bit and prepare to get back to work. Should, should! Mostly we just give each other cards and Easter eggs and are grateful for the holiday.
David is in his early forties. He has not very much reddish hair and an abundant, very red beard. He wears a tweed jacket. He is now a professor. He used to be a mere lecturer but his Polytechnic turned into a University and voilà! there he was, Professor Frood, a pillar of society: looked up to and trusted: a family man. A really nice guy, too: the trustful kind, prone to loving not wisely but too well, as the best people are. But that is all in the past, of course. Professors can’t muck about. There’s too much at stake. All that a man can do is hope that the past, burrowing away like some mole through the pleasant green fields of his present, doesn’t surface and spoil everything in an explosion of mud and dirt.
This particular Thursday before Easter, at two minutes past four in the afternoon, it seemed as if it very well might.
Milly Frood is sometimes spoken of by friends as Frilly Mood. They’re being ironic. She’s a really un-frilly, serious, nice, good woman. She has straight hair and a fringe and a plump, rather expressionless, round face and a body well draped in unnoticeable clothes. The Frood children, Sherry and Baf, now in their teenage years, have never wittingly eaten sugar or meat under their own roof: Frilly Mood has seen to that. The kids are healthy if a little thin, and very polite. Frilly Mood’s done well by them. It is no crime to be serious.
The shop is between the Delicatessen and the Estate Agents, down the High Street. It’s an upmarket gift shop, selling the kind of decorative things nobody needs but everyone likes to have, from papier-mâché bowls (French) in deep, rich colours, at £65; black elephant pill boxes (Malaysian) at £2.75; fluffy rabbits (Korean) at £12.35; little woolly lambs (New Zealand) at £8.50 and decorated Easter eggs (English) at £4.87, and so on. Pre-Easter is these days almost as busy a time as pre-Christmas. Everyone feels the need for a little unnecessary something extra, or what is life all about? Where are the rewards?
David was helping Milly out in the shop over the pre-Easter rush. And why should he not? The Poly (sorry, University) was closed for the holidays (sorry, vacation) and in Milly’s words, David had ‘nothing better to do’. His wage remained that of a lecturer no matter that he was called a professor. You can re-name everything you like, but harsh facts don’t alter just because you’ve done so. In other words, money was tight and if Milly could do without extra staff so much the better. Nevertheless, David felt that helping out was a humiliation, and blamed Milly for it. In Milly’s view a man was only working if you could see him working, and who can see a man thinking?
The voice he recognised was that of Bettina Shepherd; the voice had a most attractive actressy double timbre (that’s in italics because it’s French, not because it has significance for this story) and it was familiar because there’d been a time when it had spoken many words of true love, murmured many a sinful suggestion into his car. But all that had been some seven years back; a long time ago: longer, surely, than was needed to make that man now feel responsible for the man then. Do we not all grow an entirely new skin every seven years? Should a man not be allowed to start anew; as with a driving licence, should the passage of time not wipe out past misdeeds?
Daddy was the man Bettina referred to: he was at the back of the shop where the inexpensive trinkets were. Bettina was looking peculiarly attractive in a cashmere dress, in seasonal yellow, belted by a linked chain which for all anyone could tell was made of pure gold; the whole setting off her bosomy figure, little waist and black hair to advantage. Daddy was grey-suited, good-looking, gentlemanly and wore a solid gold tie-pin. David thought he looked extremely boring and rather stupid, but David would, wouldn’t he?
‘David, this has to stop,’ Bettina had said to him in the History Tutorial Room one day, seven years ago. ‘You are a married man and I’m going to be married too. The ceremony is next week. I wanted to tell you earlier but didn’t like to, because I didn’t want to upset you. You are the only man I’ll ever really love but I have to think of my future. We have to be realistic. You could never support two homes in any comfort and I’m just not cut out for employment. I’m not that kind of person.’ He’d thought his heart would break. He was surprised it went on beating. Later he’d told himself he was lucky to be out of a trivial, passing affair with such an unfeeling, whimsical person, but he’d never really believed himself. The truth was that he’d taken no real pleasure since in Milly’s straight hair and earnest face. He could see Milly was good, but what a man wanted was something more than honest worth. Sometimes he felt guilty because others called his wife Frilly Mood, ironically, but then he’d tell himself she’d always been like that. Not his doing.
His blood ran cold – I say this advisedly. When David heard Bettina’s voice – last heard on the floor behind the sofa in the History Tutorial Room – echoing through the shop at two minutes past four, he felt a chill strike down his head to his right shoulder, into his arm and down to his fingers, and he had the feeling that if that section of blood didn’t warm up before it got back up to his heart, that organ would freeze and this time stop once and for all. So much a heart can stand, no more.
David turned his back on his customers, lest he be seen and recognised by Bettina, and busied himself looking for a Peruvian crucifixion scene, grateful that his heart had survived the shock. But not before he had seen the little girl obediently leave her mother’s side and head through shopping bags and spring-clad elbows towards her father. Bettina, near the door, was clearly interested in purchasing the papier-mâché bowl at £65; Daddy flicked through Easter cards at the back of the shop.
The Peruvian crucifixion scene consisted of six pieces in brightly glittering tin – a crimson Judas, a gold
Jesus, a navy Pontius Pilate, a scarlet Mary Magdalene, a pale blue Madonna, and a black cross.
The little girl had red hair like David’s own. Bettina had black hair; Daddy’s was fair and painfully sparse, as if responsibility had dragged a lot of it out. The little girl must be six years old. Her front teeth were missing, to prove it.
The Easter cards were the cheapest things sold in the shop. For 75p you could buy cards depicting bunnies and chickens; from there on up to £2 you could find anything an artist in a time of recession could invent. Milly and David Frood saw the innovation of the Easter card as one of the more sinister accomplishments of the Greetings Card Industry. Who ever in their youth had heard of an Easter card? All part of the commercialisation of religion, etc., etc. Obliged to live by commerce, the Froods despised commerce. Who doesn’t?
Such things pass quickly through the mind when sights are seared into a man’s heart, and he doesn’t know what to think or feel, and he’s gazing at a shelf.
David felt a familiar hand upon his arm. It was his wife’s. ‘Perhaps we should have another baby,’ she said, to his further astonishment.
‘Why now?’ he asked. ‘Why mention it now in the middle of such a rush?’
‘Because we’re always in a rush,’ said Milly Frood, answering back, quite out of character, ‘as anyone not on the dole these days is. And I just saw a little girl in the shop with hair the same lovely colour yours was when you were young: and I thought, last chance for a baby. I’m nearly forty now.’ Before David could reply, a voice behind him said, ‘Is there no one serving here?’ and Milly Frood turned quickly back to her work and David was let off the hook.
* * *
The familiar hand had cooked his food, burped his babies, returned the VAT, encouraged him in love and in illness, and it was a whole seven years since he had even been grateful for it, he realised. Now suddenly he was. But the habit of disparagement remained. ‘Why mention it now?’ he’d said, discouraging spontaneity, being disagreeable. He was ashamed of himself.
