by Weldon, Fay
Another baby. David had not really wanted children in the first place: he had not wanted to get married. He would tell me about it when he lamented the everyday ordinariness of his life. The college, the kids, the shops, the bills, and never anything happening. But a man’s seed bursts from him here and there, unwittingly, and a good man settles down to his responsibility, sometimes with a good heart, sometimes not. Another baby? David felt all of a sudden Milly could have anything she wanted. Suppose Bettina saw him; recognised him, greeted him? Then everything could simply fall apart. Supposing Daddy looked from his child’s hair to the red beard, and remembered some clue, some time, some place? It’s a wise man doubts his child’s paternity, if his wife is Bettina. Supposing this, supposing that?
Let off the hook – but of course he wasn’t let off the hook. The past may be another country, but there are frequent international flights from there to here, especially over the public holidays, when everyone leaves their homes and mills about in search of objects, not caring who remembers what. A papier-mâché bowl here, an Easter card there.
* * *
‘Daddy,’ said the little piping voice: was it like Sherry’s? Was it like Baf’s? It was. ‘Mummy says do you have any more money?’
Silence fell upon the shop. All waited for the reply: mothers, divorcées, widows, working women, and their escorts, should they have them. It’s mostly women who shop. Slips of girls. Redheaded six-year-olds with gap teeth looking trustingly up at alleged fathers. An honest question, honestly asked, in time of recession.
David turned: you cannot look at a single shelf forever. David caught Bettina’s eye. Bettina smiled, in recognition, acknowledgement. Bettina’s mouth was not quite as plump and full as once it had been. Everyone waited. A question publicly asked will be publicly answered.
‘Tell your mother,’ said Daddy loudly, ‘the answer is no. My money’s all gone and your mother has spent it.’
Daddy tipped over the box of Easter cards onto the floor and, parting customers with grey-suited elbows and gold-ringed hands, made his way to the door and out of it. The little girl ran weeping after him. David saw Daddy take his little girl’s hand as they passed the window: he saw her smile: evidently the little girl cried easily and cheered up easily. Sherry had been like that.
If a woman has no money left, perhaps she’ll turn back to love?
Bettina stood irresolute for a moment, all eyes upon her. She looked at Milly, she looked at David. Then she said to Milly, ‘I just love the shop,’ and followed her husband and daughter out. It was four minutes past four.
* * *
Bettina had found herself pregnant: perhaps by one, perhaps by another. Perhaps she had not been unfeeling, whimsical in dismissing him, David, after all, behind the sofa in the History Tutorial Room. Perhaps the dismissal had been an act of love, to let the erring husband off the hook? Perhaps she had simply done what was right? In thinking better of Bettina, in forgiving her, David felt himself become quite free of her. And high time too. Seven whole years!
I just love the shop.
‘What a nice woman,’ said Milly. ‘Saying that. Did she know you or something?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ said David. ‘And you’re the nicest woman I know,’ and he found that, though the first was a lie, the second was true. Happy Easter, everyone! Which speaks for itself: no need for explanation, or excuse.
In the Great War (II)
The Gift of Life
Another story, friend, from the Great War, before the dawn of Equality and Peace, before Sisterhood, from the days when women were at odds with women.
My friend Ellen, a poet, lightly declared war on another man’s wife, an artist.
‘I can take any man from any woman,’ Ellen boasted.
‘Oh no you can’t,’ said the artist. ‘You can’t take mine. We love each other too much. And we’re married. Besides, your legs are short and your ankles are thick.’
‘We’ll see about that!’ said Ellen. ‘Too short and too thick I’m not talking about!’
What shall we call the artist? Y? Why not? Something universal! Ellen waited and worked and pounced, and stole a baby girl from Y’s husband, or that was how Y saw it. Stole his sperm to bring into the world a new being, who had no business here. (We’ll call the husband X: what else, the unconstant factor?)
Ellen called Y on the phone.
‘I did it! I told you so. He loves me,’ she said, ‘not you. He told me so. And here’s the proof of it. I’m pregnant! And, what’s more, I love him in return.’
‘I’d rather have her than you,’ said X, ‘now it’s happened.’ So Y killed herself. X was sorry. But he didn’t blame himself. In the Great War, men simply didn’t. X turned cold and cruel to Ellen and her child. ‘Your fault!’ he said. ‘I can never truly love you now, or anyone.’
Now a ghost cries out for revenge. I hear it sometimes in the night, decades later. ‘Write me,’ she cries. ‘Write me, not them.’ I try to understand. The voice isn’t Y’s – Y rests easy, I think. No, it’s Ellen calling. Ellen died too, by her own hand. Y reached out from the grave and stabbed Ellen in the back and dragged her down, and X made no attempt to stop Y, or save Ellen, which he could have, well enough, by smiling, forgiving, sopping up the harm Y did by her own dreadful art of self-destruction. He was the hook; he could have let Ellen off it. But no.
Well, it’s true Ellen started it; it was a fierce war – no holds barred: Ellen deserved it: why should she lie quiet? Let her roam and reproach in the darkness. It’s just that on the worst nights I hear two voices, sighing. I even see two ghosts. One is Ellen’s: talkative and proud in death as she was in life, oddly robust: I don’t mind seeing that: I’m rather pleased she’s around, bearing witness to this and that. But there’s another one, a little one, a shadow wraith, dancing and pattering at her mother Ellen’s heels. I try to close my eyes but the pale image burns through the lids. Orchis was six when Ellen killed her. Six; a peculiar age, all spirit and not enough substance: of course Orchis won’t lie down; why should she?
News of suicide travels fast, by telephone, contacts clicking, interlocking! Oh God, oh God, grim news! News of murder comes faster still; runs by word of mouth from house to house. People knock at doors, stuttering, stammering. Add suicide to murder and the whole suburb reels and buzzes within the hour. Who saw them last? Whose fault can it be? If only this, if only that! We always knew, we never knew, we certainly never thought! Oh dreadful, dreadful! How could she, how dare she? Even as we grieve, anger breaks through. Don’t we all suffer? What was so special about her that she found things intolerable? What was so special about her, that she had to do this to us?
More than you’d ever believe claim friendship, standing as near the frightful brink as possible, staring down into the black pit of blame, before drawing back into the sensible, recovering world. But it’s never over. Decades later the sorrow still comes back, and the anger.
The Great War is now decades in the past, back in the Sixties: those were the days when women fought over men, and died for love, or lack of it: but I suppose wars are never truly over, and shouldn’t be, not while we remember their victims.
Well, consider it. Here’s a fine picture for a War Artist. The little child, little Orchis, lying awake, the father far away, disowning, angry. The mother comes with whisky in the sleeptime cocoa: she brings with her a handful of pills. Take just another one, my dear, and just another one. Mother says so! For the cut on your finger, the bump on your head – see, soon all will be well: all troubles cured.
No wonder our children view pills with suspicion: they spit them out; they won’t eat the green-and-red apple; they know the pink bit’s poisoned. You don’t need a stepmother for that. Mothers are dangerous things: they are all witches at heart: give me an apple the same colour all over.
How could Ellen do it? How could any woman do a thing like that? Kill her own child, and then herself? With more competence in death than she ever had in life? No hidden
plea for help here: just surety, and certainty, that death is the proper answer to life.
But listen, I tell you, my friend, Ellen did the right thing. In retrospect I see it clearly. I didn’t at the time. I know more now. If a mother kills herself, she must take her children with her: haul them kicking and screaming through the gates of finality. Let that be your deterrent, friend, if ever you’re thinking of suicide. You look a little too sad, act a little too quiet, for your own good. Did it happen to you? The child who’s left must live out the life sentence imposed by the mother. Few children truly survive the suicide of mothers: bodies go on living, but the mother has taken back the gift of life.
Tales of Wicked Men
Wasted Lives
Love Amongst the Artists
Leda and the Swan
Wasted Lives
They’re turning the City into Disneyland. They’re restoring the ancient facades and painting them apple green, firming up the medieval gables and picking out the gargoyles in yellow. They’re gold-leafing the church spires. They’ve boarded up the more stinking alleys until they get round to them and as State property becomes private the shops which were always there are suddenly gone, as if simply painted out. In the eaves above Benetton and The Body Shop cherubs wreathe pale cleaned-stone limbs, and even the great red McDonald’s ‘M’ has been especially muted to rosy pink for this its Central European edition. Don’t think crass commerce rules the day as the former communist world opens its arms wide to the seduction of market forces: the good taste of the new capitalist world leaps yowling into the embrace as well, a fresh-faced baby monster, with its yearning to prettify and make the serious quaint, to turn the rat into Mickey Mouse and the wolf into Goofy.
Milena and I walked through knots of tourists towards the famous Processional Bridge, circa 1395. I had always admired its sooty stamina, its dismal persistence, through the turbulence of rising and falling empire. It was my habit to stay with Milena when I came to the City. I’d let Head Office book me into an hotel, to save official embarrassment, then spend my nights with her and some part of my days if courtesy so required. I was fond of her but did not love her, or only in the throes of the sexual excitement she was so good at summoning out of me. She made excellent coffee. If I sound disagreeable and calculating it is because I am attempting to speak the truth about the events on the Processional Bridge that day, and the truth of motive seldom warms the listener’s heart. I am generally accepted as a pleasant and kindly enough person. My family loves me, even my wife Joanna, though she and I live apart and are no longer sexually connected. She doesn’t have to love me.
Milena is an archivist at the City Film Institute. I work for a US film company, from their London office. I suppose, if you add it up, I have spent some three months in the City, on and off, over the last five years, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Great Retreat of Communism, a tide sweeping back over shallow sand into an obscure distance. Some three months in all spent with Milena.
Her English was not as good as she thought. Conversation could be difficult. Today she was not dressed warmly enough. It was June but the wind was cold. Perhaps she thought her coat was too shabby to stand the inspection of the bright early summer sun. I was accustomed to seeing her either naked or dressed in black, as was her usual custom, a colour, or lack of it, which suited the gaunt drama of her face, but today, like her City, she wore pastel colours. I wished it were not so.
Beat your head not into the Berlin Wall, but into cotton wool, machine-pleated in interesting baby shades, plastic-wrapped. Suffocation takes many forms.
‘You should have brought your coat,’ I said.
‘It’s so old,’ she said. ‘I am ashamed of it.’
‘I like it,’ I said.
‘It’s old,’ she repeated, dismissively. ‘I would rather freeze.’ For Milena the past was all dreary, the future all dread and expectation. A brave face must be put on everything. She smiled up at me. I am six foot three inches and bulky: she was all of five and a half foot, and skinny with it. The jumper was too tight: I could see her ribs through the stretched fabric, and the nipples too. In the old days she would never have allowed that to happen. She would have let her availability be known in other, more subtle ways. Her teeth were bad: one in the front broken, a couple grey. When she wore black their eccentricity seemed a matter of course; a delight even. Now she wore green they were yellowy, and seemed a perverse tribute to years of neglect, poverty and bad diet. Eastern teeth, not Western. I wished she would not smile, and trust me so.
The Castle still looks down over the City, and the extension to that turreted tourist delight, the long low stone building with its rows of identical windows, tier upon tier of them, blank and anonymous, to demonstrate the way brute force gives way to the subtler but yet more stifling energies of bureaucracy. You can’t do this, you can’t live like that, not because I have a sword to run you through, but because Our Masters frown on it. And your papers have not risen to the top of the pile.
* * *
Up there in the Castle that day a newly-elected government were trying to piece together from the flesh of this nation, the bones of that, a new living, changing organism, a new constitution. New, new, new. I wished them every luck with it, but they could not make Milena’s bad teeth good, or stop her smiling at me as if she wanted something. I wondered what it was. She’d used not to smile like this: it was a new trick: it sat badly on her doleful face.
We reached the Processional Bridge, which crosses the river between the Palace and the Cathedral. ‘The oldest bridge in Europe,’ said Milena. We had walked across it many times before. She had made this remark many times before. Look left down the river and you could see where it carved its way through the mountains which form the natural boundaries to this small nation: look right and you looked into mist. On either bank the ancient City crowded in, in its crumbly, pre-Disney form, all eaves, spires and casements, spared from the blasts of war for one reason or another, or perhaps just plain miracle. But Emperors and Popes must have somewhere decent to be crowned, and Dictators too need a background for pomp and circumstance, crave some acknowledgement from history: a name engraved in gold in a Cathedral, a majestic tomb in a gracious square still standing. It can’t be all rubble or what’s the point?
I offered Milena my coat. It seemed to me that she and I were at some crucial point in not just our story, but everyone’s; that the decisions we made here today had some general relevance to the way the world was going. I could at least share some warmth with her. My monthly Western salary would keep her in comfort for a year, but what could I do about that? Not my doing. If she wanted a new coat from me it would have nothing to do with her desire to be warm, but as a token of my love. She didn’t mind shivering. Her discomfort was both a demonstration of martyrdom and a symbol of pride.
‘I am not cold,’ she said.
The City is a favourite location for film companies. The place is cheap; its money valueless in the real world and its appetite for hard currency voracious, which means good deals can be had. The quaint, colourful locations are inexpensively historicised – though the satellite dishes are these days becoming too numerous to dodge easily. And there are few parking problems, highly-trained post-production technicians, efficient labs, excellent cameramen, sensitive sound-men, and so on – and cheap, so cheap. Those who lived in the City had escaped the fate of so much of the hitherto Russian-dominated lands – the sullen refusal of the oppressed and exploited to do anything right, to be anything other than inefficient, sloppy and lazy, in the hope that the colonising power would simply give up and go away, shaking the dust of the conquered land from its feet. And the power it had amassed lay not of course in the strength of the ideology it professed, as the West in its muddled way assumed, but in the strength of arms and organisation of that single, colonising, ambitious nation, Russia. Ask anyone between Budapest and Samarkand, Tbilisi and the Siberian flatlands, and they would tell you who they feared and hated.
Russia, the motherland, announcing itself to a gullible world as the Soviet Union. Harsh mother, pretending kindness, using Marxist-Leninism as the religious tool of government and exploitation, as once in the South Americas Spain had used Christianity.
In the City they kept their wits about them; too sophisticated for the numbing rituals of mind-control ever to quite work: the concrete of the workers’ blocks to quite take over from the tubercular gables and back alleys, to stifle the whispers of dissent, to quieten the gossip and mirth of café society. McDonald’s has achieved that now with its bright, forbidding jollity, and who in the brave new world of freedom can afford a cup of coffee anyway, has anything interesting or persuasive to say now that everyone has what they wanted. Better, better by far to travel hopefully than to arrive, to have to face the fact that the journey is not out of blackness into light, but from one murky confusion into another. Happiness and fulfilment lie in our affections for one another, not in the forms that our societies take. If only I was in love with Milena, this walk across the bridge would be a delight. I would feel the air bright with the happiness of the hopeful young.
Be that as it may, the City was always better than anywhere else for filming, Castle and all. Go to Rumania and you’d find the castles still full of manacled prisoners clanking their chains; try Poland and you’d have to fly in special food for your stars; in Hungary the cameraman would have artistic tantrums; but here in the City there would be gaiety, fun, sometimes even sparkle, the clatter of high heels on cobblestones, sultry looks from sultry eyes, and of course nights with Milena in the fringy, shabby apartment, with the high, white-mantled brass bed, and good strong coffee in porcelain cups for breakfast. Milena, forever languidly busy, about my body or about her work, off to the Institute or back from it. Women worked hard in this country, as women were accustomed to all over the Soviet Union. Equality for women meant an equal obligation to work, the official direction of your labour, sleeping with your boss if he so required, the placement of your child in a crèche, as well as the cultural expectation that you get married, run a home and empty the brimming ashtrays while your husband put his feet up. Joanna would have none of that kind of thing; for the male visitor from the West the Eastern European woman is paradise, if you can hack it, if your conscience can stand it: if you can bear being able to buy affection and constancy.
