by Weldon, Fay
I hadn’t been with Milena for three months or so. Now, like her City, I found her changed. I wondered about her constancy. It occurred to me that it was foolish of me to expect it. As did the rest of the nation, she now paid at least lip service to market forces: perhaps these worked sexually as well. Rumour had it that there were now twenty-five thousand prostitutes in the City and an equal number of pimps, as men and women decided to make the best financial use of available resources. I discovered I was not so much jealous as rather hoping for evidence of Milena’s infidelity, which would let me off whatever vague hook it was I found myself upon. Not so difficult a hook. She and I had always been discreet: I had not mentioned our relationship to a soul back home. Milena was in another country; she did not really count: her high bouncing bosom, her narrow ribcage and fleshless hips vanished from my erotic imagination as the plane reached the far side of the mountain tops – the turbulence serving as some rite of passage – to re-imprint itself only as it passed over them once again, on my return.
The cleaning processes had not yet reached the bridge, I was glad to see. The stone saints who lined it were still black with the accumulated grime of the past.
‘Who are these saints?’ I asked, but Milena didn’t know. Some hold books, others candles; noses are weather-flattened. Milena apologised for her ignorance. She had not, she said, had the opportunity of a religious education: she hoped her son Milo would. Her son lived with Milena’s mother, who was a good Catholic, in the Southern province – a place about to secede, to become independent, to ethnic-cleanse in its own time, in its own way.
‘I didn’t know you had a son,’ I said. I was surprised, and ashamed at myself for being so uncurious about her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘It’s my problem,’ Milena said. ‘I don’t want to burden you. He’s ten now. When he was born I was not well, and times were hard. It seemed better that he go to my mother. But she’s getting old now and there’s trouble in the Southern province. They are not nice people down there.’
Once the City’s dislike and suspicion had been reserved for the Russians. Now it had been unleashed and spread everywhere. The day the Berlin Wall fell Milena and I had been sitting next to each other in the small Institute cinema, watching the show reels of politically-sound directors on the Institute’s books, in the strange, flickering half-dark of such places. Her small white hand had strayed unexpectedly on to my thigh, unashamedly direct in its approach. But then exhilaration and expectation, mixed with fear, was in the air. Sex seemed the natural expression of such emotions, such events. And perhaps that was why I never quite trusted her, never quite loved her, found it so easy to forget her when she wasn’t under my nose – I despised her because it was she who had approached me, not I her. If Joanna and I are apart it’s because, or so she says, I’m so conditioned in the old, pre-feminist ways of thinking I’m impossible for a civilised woman to live with. I am honest, that is to say, and scrupulous in the investigation of my feelings and opinions.
‘Why didn’t you put the child into a crèche?’ I asked. It shocked me that Milena, that any woman, could give a child away so easily.
‘I was in a crèche,’ she said bleakly. ‘It’s the same for nearly everyone in this City under forty. The crèche was our real home, our parents were strangers. I didn’t want it to happen to Milo. He was better with my mother, though there are too many Muslims down there. More and more of them. It’s like a disease.’
I caught the stony eye of baby Jesus on St Joseph’s shoulder – that one at least I knew – and one or the other sent me a vision, not that I believed in such things, as I looked down at the greeny, sickly waters of the river. I saw, ranked and rippling, row upon row of infants, small, pale children, institutionalised, deprived, pasty-faced from the atrocious City food – meat, starch, fat, no fruit, no vegetables – and understood that I was looking at the destruction of a people. They turned their little faces to me in despair, and I looked quickly up and away and back at Milena to shake off the vision; but there behind her, where the river met the sky, saw that nation grown up, marching towards me into the mists of its future, a sad mockery of those sunny early Social Realist posters which decked my local once-Marxist, now Leftish bookshop back home: the proletariat marching square-jawed and determined into the new dawn, scythes and spanners at the ready, only here there were no square jaws, only wretchedness; the quivering lip of the English ex-public schoolboy, wrenched from his home at a tender age, now made general; the same profound puzzled sorrow spread through an entire young population, male and female. See it in the easy, surface emotion, the facile sexuality, the rush of tears to the eyes, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, pleading for a recognition that never comes, a comfort that is unavailable. Pity me, the unspoken words upon a nation’s lips, because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom, yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that; but mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that? Murmur as a last despairing cry the latest prayer, market forces, market forces, say it over and over as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won’t work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me.
‘I think the fog’s coming down,’ said Milena, and so it was. The new dawn faded into it. A young man on the bridge was selling black rubber spiders: you hurled them against a board and they crept down, leg over leg; stillness alternating with sudden movement. No one was buying.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I expect you made the right decision about Milo. What happened to his father?’ I turned to button her cardigan. I wanted her warmed. This much at least I could do. Perhaps if she was warm, she would not feel so much hate for the Southern province and its people.
‘We are divorced,’ she said. ‘I am free to marry again. Look there’s Jesus crucified. Hanging from nails in his hands. At least the communists took down the crosses. Why should we have to think about torture all the time? It was the Russians taught our secret police their tricks: we would never have come to it on our own.’
I commented on the contradiction between her wanting her son to have a Catholic upbringing, and her dislike of the Christian symbol, the tortured man upon the cross, but she shrugged it off: she did not want the point pursued. She was not interested in it. She saw no virtue in consistency. First you had this feeling; then that: that was all there was to it. No parent had ever intervened between the tantrum and its cause; no doubt Milena along with her generation had been slapped into silence, when protesting frustration and outrage. She was wounded: she was damaged: not her fault, but there it was. What I’d seen as childlike, as charming, in the early stages of a relationship, was in the end merely irritating. I could not stir myself to become interested in her son or in a marriage which had ended in divorce. I could not take her initial commitment seriously.
* * *
‘I’m pregnant,’ Milena now says. ‘Last time you were here we made a baby. Isn’t that wonderful? Now you will marry me, and take me to London, and we will live happily ever after.’
Fiends come surging up the river through the mist, past me, gaunt, thin, soundlessly shrieking. These are the ghosts of the insulted, the injured, the wronged and tortured, whose efforts have been in vain. Those whose language has been taken away, whose bodies have been starved; they are the wrongfully dead. All the great rivers of the world carry these images with them, over time they have infected me by their existence. They breathe all around me. I take in their exhalations. I am their persecutor, their ruler, the origin of their woes: the one who despises. They shake their ghoulish locks at me; they mock me with their sightless eyes, snapping to attention as they pass. Eyes right! Blind eyes, forever staring. They honour me, the living.
‘Is something the matter?’ asks Milena. ‘Aren’t you happy? You told me you loved me.
’ Did I? Probably. I remind her that I’ve also told her that I’m married.
‘But you will divorce her,’ she says. ‘Why not? Your children are grown. She doesn’t need you any more. I do.’ Her eyes are large in their hollows: she fears disaster. Of course she does. It so often happens. I can hardly tell whether she is alive or dead. To bear a child by a ghost!
Milena is perfectly right. Joanna doesn’t need me. Milena does. The first night I went with Milena she was wearing a purple velvet bra. It fired me sexually, it was so extraordinary, but put too great an element of pity into what otherwise could have been love. There seemed something more valuable in my wife Joanna’s white Marks & Spencer bra with its valiant label, 40A. Broad-backed, that is, and flat-chested. I supposed Milena’s to be a 36C. English women lean towards the pear-shaped; the City women towards the top heavy. It’s unfashionable, dangerous even, to make comparisons between the characteristics of the peoples of the world, this tribe, that tribe, this religion or that. The ghouls that people the river, who send their dying breath back, day after day, in the form of the fog that blights the place, mists up the new Disney facades with mystery droplets, met their end because people like me, whispered, nudged and made odious comparisons, and the odium grew and grew and ended up in torture, murder, slaughter, genocide. Nevertheless, I must insist: it is true. Pear-shaped that lot, top heavy this. And if I suspected Milena’s purple velvet bra of being some kind of secret police state issue, or part of the Film Institute’s plan to attract hard currency and Western business, an end to which their young female staff were encouraged, even paid, it is not surprising. Had I been of her nationality, I knew well enough, her hand would not have strayed across my thigh in the film-flickering dark. I was offended that the Gods of Freedom, good health, good teeth, good nourishment, prosperity and market forces, whom I myself did not worship, endowed me with this wondrous capacity to attract. I could snap my fingers and all the girls in Eastern Europe would come trotting, and fall on their knees.
‘Milena,’ I said, and I was only temporising, ‘I have no way of knowing this baby is mine, if baby there be.’
Milena threw her hands into the air, and cried aloud, a thin, horrid squeal, chin to the heavens, lips drawn back in a harsh grimace. There were few people left on the bridge. The fog had driven them away. The seller of rubber spiders had given up and gone home. Milena ran towards the parapet, and wriggled and crawled until she lay along its top on the cold stone, and then she simply rolled off and fell into the water below; this in the most casual way possible. From my straightforward question to this dramatic answer only fifteen seconds can have intervened. I was too stunned to feel alarm. I found myself leaning over the parapet to look downwards; the fog was patchy. I saw a police launch veer off course and make for the spot where Milena fell. No doubt she had seen it coming or she would not have done what she did, launched herself into thick air, thin, swirling water. I had confidence in her ability to survive. Authorities of one kind or another, as merciful in succour as they were cruel in the detection of sedition, would pull her out of the wet murk, dry her, wrap her in blankets, warm her, return her to her apartment. She would be all right.
I walked to the end of the bridge, unsure as to whether I would then turn left to the police pier and Milena or to the right and the taxi rank. Why had the woman done it? Hysteria, despair, or some convenient social way of terminating unwanted pregnancies? I could take a flight back home, if I chose, forty-eight hours earlier than I had intended. The flights were full, but I would get a priority booking, as benefitted my status, however whimsical, as a provider of hard currency. The powerful are indeed whimsical: they leave their elegant droppings where they choose – be they Milena’s baby, Benetton, the Marlborough ads which now dominate the City: no end even now to the wheezing, the coughing, the death rattling along the river.
I turned to the right, where the taxis stood waiting for stray foreigners, anxious to get out of the fog, back to their hotels.
‘The airport,’ I said. He understood. ‘To the airport’ are golden words to taxi drivers all over the world. This way at least I created a smile. To have turned left would have meant endless trouble. I was thoroughly out of love with Milena. I wanted to help, of course I did, but the child in the Southern provinces would have had to be fetched by the Catholic mother, taken in. There would be no end to it. My children would not accept a new family: Joanna would have been made thoroughly miserable. To do good to one is to do bad to another. But you don’t need to hear my excuses. They are the same that everyone makes to themselves when faced with the misery of others, and though they would like to do the right thing, simply fail to do so, but look after themselves instead.
Love Amongst the Artists
‘Happy Christmas, my own true love,’ said Lucy to Pierre, on the morning of December 25, 1899. She woke amongst a flurry of white sheets and feather pillows and this was the nearest she would get to seasonal and romantic snow, for the day was mild and they were in the South of France, not Connecticut, which was Lucy’s home, or Paris which was Pierre’s.
Pierre stirred but did not wake. Lucy whispered in his ear again.
‘Happy Christmas, my own true love,’ and this time he murmured a reply.
‘If you and I are to be free souls, Lucy,’ said Pierre with a clarity apparently quite undiminished by slumber, ‘we must put all such religious cant behind us,’ and closed his eyes again and slept on. His arms lay brown and young amongst the sheets and his dark hair was wild and curly on the pillow and she loved him. But she loved Christmas too, and always had.
Morning sun shone in through the little square window and bounced back from the whitewashed walls. She smoothed down her white cambric nightgown and wound her hair back around her head and pinned it up, and climbed down from the high bed, and crossed the bare wooden floor and looked out of the undraped window. She could see across a river valley to vineyards which marched across hills like soldiers going to their death. She put the image from her mind. And if there was a smell of rottenness in the air, as if all the grapes which should have been gathered in the autumn to make wine had been allowed to fall and fester on the ground instead, that was nothing worse than French plumbing. Some things had to be bad, Pierre said, so bad there was nothing left for them to do but get better.
‘Religion is the opiate of the people,’ said Pierre from his pillow. ‘God is a drug fed by the masters to the poor and hungry, so they are content with poverty and hunger. Jesus was never born: heaven does not exist. Blind belief is a thorn in the side of mankind and we will pluck it out.’
In one more week it would be 1900, the dawn of the twentieth century, and into that dawn would strike through the light of new hope and new liberty, and all the energy of free thought and free love, untrammelled by convention, and Lucy’s soul soared at the thought that Pierre and she were part of it: that he and she were one step ahead of that new dawn. They would be in Paris by New Year’s Eve to be amongst the anarchists; they would gather there together to drink to the future: the passionate brotherhood of the enlightened, and their sisters in that passion.
What a different stroke of midnight it would be from the one she would have envisaged just a few months back: a single glass of wine raised solemnly at the first stroke, in the parlour, in the company of Edwin her husband and Joseph her brother, and then to bed. And each stroke sounding its annual dirge to lost hope and failing passion: its welcome to the triumph of boredom and the death of the soul.
Pierre left the bed and stood beside her. He was naked. Lucy could not become accustomed to it. She had been married to Edwin for fourteen years and had never caught more than a flash of white limb in the bathroom, a movement of bare flesh above her in the bed. Now Pierre unpinned her hair so it flowed around her shoulders.
‘So never name that day again,’ said Pierre, ‘or it will drag you back to the Lord of the Dark Domain,’ and they both laughed. Lord of the Dark Domain was their name for Edwin. Lucy’s husband wrote no
vels for a living; once every five years or so, to the acclaim of serious critics, he would have published an extremely melancholy book, the text so closely printed that Lucy had no patience with it, but then she was not expected to. Edwin loved Lucy for her folly; she was his child bride, his pretty wife: now he would see how he had misjudged her! Now he would find out: now that another man understood her talent, her intelligence, her quality, her passion.
‘All the same,’ said Lucy, ‘it comes as a shock! No mince pies, no gifts and ribbons and best dresses? Never more?’
‘Never more,’ said Pierre, ‘or you will be dragged back into the Hell of Domesticity, which is the Death of Art.’
Pierre was a composer of fine if difficult song cycles which so few people in the world could understand that when Pierre came to New York from Paris to perform, the concert hall was all but empty, the tour was cancelled and Pierre left penniless and stranded in a strange land. Edwin, as an act of kindness, had offered him work for the summer, teaching Bessie and Bertie the piano. Bessie was twelve and Bertie was ten. They would wake this Christmas morning to a house which lacked a mother. Lucy put that image from her too. Bessie had Edwin’s beetling brows; Bertie aped Edwin’s clipped, dry manner of speech. They were Edwin’s children more than Lucy’s. Pierre saw it. Edwin claimed it. The law acknowledged it: let the law have its way.
