by Weldon, Fay
These thoughts come to me as we wait for the next batch of prospective house-buyers to come up the drive. We sit in the front garden in the sun and watch for a car to turn in from the main road, down the dip, past the duck pond, and up the drive to the yard. This is an old farmhouse: the yard is still partly cobbled. City drivers hate it: they fear for their suspension. Naively, I once believed, a partly-cobbled yard would be a selling point. The Estate Agent tells me otherwise.
* * *
Edward and I can no longer live here at Grazecot. We are too old, the children tell us, and we agree. Our knees creak. We lose the energy for gardening, though Edward can still prune the roses, and I still cry, ‘Not so hard, not so deep!’ and he makes his annual reply: ‘The harsher the better: no gain without pain!’ The children describe us as ‘rattling round in that great house like peas in a pod’, but I never noticed peas rattling in a pod – broad beans will do it sometimes, if they’re accidentally left on the stalks through the winter: the pods turn brown and brittle and the beans inside shrivel a little and lose their attaching strings as their housing shakes in the wind. But peas don’t rattle: especially modern peas, with their almost edible, tender pods; in extremis turning into mange-tout. Eat everything!
But the children were never interested in the garden. There was too much of it around to arouse their interest. Hetty disconcerted me the other day – she had come to stay, bringing the children: she had had another quarrel with Rory: it is time they stopped it: she is my youngest and nearly forty – Hetty, as I say, disconcerted me by calling a dahlia a poppy. I looked at her aghast and she said, ‘Oh, Mom, you know they all look alike to me. I’m not a visual person; never was.’ And all I said was, as I always say; the familiar rhetoric ‘Don’t call me Mom.’ And Hetty, of course, took not the slightest notice. The protests of mothers blow like a mild, familiar wind round the ears of children, fit only to be ignored.
When Guy, my oldest, was twelve, he brought an American friend home for the school holidays, and the poor boy’s mother died suddenly in the States while he was with us, and I rashly said, ‘Look on me as your mother, Al,’ – the kind of sentimental, silly thing one says in extremis – and the wretched child did. He took to calling me ‘Mom’. His father was already dead, and he was a whole two years with us at Grazecot, waiting to be claimed, by which time all the children called me that: Mom. Al left and simply vanished from our lives: he didn’t even write a thank you letter: some wealthy uncle had finally turned up to fetch him, as if he were out of a Dickens novel. All Al left as legacy was ‘Mom’. He was nearly fifteen by the time he left – I don’t blame him for his discourtesy – fifteen is a self-conscious age, when one is only too anxious to forget the past, and Al, given the opportunity to disconnect the young man from the child, no doubt simply took it. And I was busy enough with my own three, and working too – Supermom, Al called me – up and down to the city on the train, forever trying to catch up with myself, with never quite enough time to feel the pleasure of simply living.
Now the house is up for sale, and I refuse to feel melancholy about it. Edward and myself are by no means finished. We are to buy a small cottage on the seafront at Hastings, on the South-East coast. Hetty’s youngest, Ira, aged ten, advises against it. ‘The South-East is tilting into the sea,’ he claims. ‘The North-West is rising. It’s madness to go South-East. The tide will be rising inside your house before you know it.’ He is a precocious lad: he looks like Edward’s father, and behaves like him too. Ira is a natural collector. He collects CDs: his great grandfather collected butterflies, and stuck them on pins. Ira’s collection is more expensive but more humane.
* * *
Edward once explained to Hetty that ‘Ira’ meant ‘rage’ in Latin; why was she calling his grandchild ‘rage’? But Hetty just laughed and said Ira was the Hebraic for ‘watcher’ anyway, and she thought it sounded nice; who cared what it meant; and Rory said it was a Po-Mo name. ‘Po-Mo?’ I asked.
‘Post-modern,’ Rory replied. ‘A post-modernist is someone who knows the meaning of everything and the value of nothing.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘Hetty was saying Ira isn’t a Po-Mo name; in fact, the opposite.’
But they weren’t listening to me. They like to talk to each other, to tie each other up in knots, and if sometimes they tie in the fringes of someone like me, by mistake, they take no notice. One has to struggle free without help. Hetty and Rory would have fewer rows if they were each less clever at the other’s expense, it’s obvious, but who wants their mother to say a thing like that, let alone notice? Hetty walks out on Rory at least twice a year, usually waiting for the school holidays to do so, so the kids’ schooling isn’t interrupted. Then she comes to us, bringing them too. She and Rory have long, long, wrangling phone calls, on our bill, before they are finally reconciled, amid tears and laughter; and fortunately the walls and floors at Grazecot are thick, so the bedspring twanging is muted. Once their rows would agitate and distress me, if only for the children’s sake, but in the end the little ones knew the pattern well enough for themselves, and appeared unconcerned. Their mother’s sudden stays gave me time to inculcate at least some semblance of table manners in my grandchildren, and to get them into the habit of washing night and morning. A woman who can’t tell a dahlia from a poppy because she’s so busy with the inside of her head needs her mother around to help her with her children. Hetty tells me so herself; half-demanding, half-apologising. I don’t think Hetty ever got beyond sixteen. She’ll say so herself. How is she going to cope without this place to come to? Without Grazecot? She says she’s glad the place is going; she says if the family home doesn’t exist, she’ll just have to grow up. Ira says, ‘Mum, you’re a Professor of Economics at King’s. You want to grow up too?’
And Ed says ‘no pain, no gain’. Lettice gave me a Jane Fonda tape one Christmas – most of the kids come home for Christmas most of the time; though life, time and partners sometimes of course intervene – and the ‘no pain, no gain’ concept really appealed to Ed. It seemed to explain a lot about life: why pleasure now so seldom leads to pleasure later. But then Ed likes a slogan. He once joined Alcoholics Anonymous, I’ll swear, in order to be able to hear himself saying, ‘I am an alcoholic’. His drinking was not in truth excessive; he just loved drama. I think Ed sees the selling of Grazecot as some kind of verbal, rather than real, activity. ‘They were rattling round like peas in a pod. So of course they had to sell’ sounds somehow right. As if ‘selling’ were some kind of species’ activity: not something made up of a series of small events: an initial wayward speculation, hardening into decision, leading to a phone call to an Estate Agent; and then the hell as teams of professionals move in, to make their point and make their money and make you feel ignorant and not as good as the next person. While they get rich and you get poor.
My grandfather the butterfly-collector left me Grazecot when I was eighteen, thus circumscribing and defining my life, driving a pin through my middle, trapping me here. Now the pin is being withdrawn. The wound will be severe, but the edges clean. It’s what I want; the sensible thing. I will heal quickly. Obviously there is no sense in Ed and myself staying rattling in a winter wind. Let some other family take the place over: Grazecot needs young energy, new money, new standards. Dimmer switches: on and off has apparently become too simple for a source of light. Remote control for the curtains. Forget closing them by hand, with nothing to go wrong.
I will live happily with Ira’s tides lapping through my living room. I love the sea. I love storms. I love the excitements of the ocean. Sometimes I have really hated Grazecot: it’s altogether in the wrong place, I have complained; stuck on a hillside miles from anywhere: it swallows money. If it hasn’t needed re-roofing, it’s needed new plumbing: the septic tank has always seeped: there’s no mains water: no gas, come to that. The Gas Board say they’ll bring in a supply for £8,000 approx. Oh thanks, we say. The Electricity Board say, if we complain about power cuts, we’re lucky to
have electricity at all. The wiring needs to be modernised: it’s a fire risk. Falling branches carry our telephone wires with them. And the Estate Agent raises his eyebrows – Grazecot has all the disadvantages of a country house, apparently, but few of the advantages. A four-lane link road was recently driven through along the path of the old drovers’ track up on the ridge, within sight of the house – which is apparently bad news – and within hearing distance as well – which is worse – if the wind’s from the North, and it often is. Apparently the house is too exposed: certainly all the trees in any position to do so fell through the roof over the decades. Yes, you really get to feel the weather here at Grazecot. I hate Estate Agents. My house, my beloved house: my home, my history, my children, my family, my life.
The local amenity planners propose a golf course on the fields at the back of the house, the Estate Agent tells us. The farmer who owns the fields is being paid by the EC to keep them out of food production. At least that means no more insecticide-spraying from the air, I say brightly, but the Estate Agent just shakes his head and clucks his tongue and says, ‘If you can see cars if you look one way, and people if you look another, it hardly counts as country living,’ and asks us to drop our price. There’s no demand for properties like ours, he says; neither one thing nor the other. Not grand enough for the gentry: too large and rambling for young families. ‘It’s a vicarage type of dwelling,’ he says. ‘There’s no demand for them any more. “Rambling” is no longer a selling plus.’
I have come to see Grazecot as a symbol of a changing world. What happens here is happening everywhere. When it comes to it, myself and Ed, and Guy, and Lettice and Hetty are helpless. The real world stampedes in. We just have to dodge out of the way: creep into our little shelter by the sea and hope the new reality doesn’t come after us. We’ve been subject to forces we may not understand but have come to realise that there’s no avoiding them. We’re not daft. As above, so below.
We had a dreadful time five years ago when Lettice’s cruise ship was hijacked by terrorists. She had a job as Entertainments Officer. We read about it first in the newspapers: no one informed us. Eight people had been killed. No names were given. I sat where I’m sitting now, on the lawn, in the evening sun, in frozen panic. I could not act. I had not realised until then that fear could paralyse. I could not even answer the phone. How was it possible to sit in this familiar place, amongst this familiar green, while madmen ran amok for a cause hitherto plausible, and threatened your child? Why should pretty Lettice, whose greatest crime was to be silly (to be as wilfully ignorant of politics as Hetty was of gardens), who liked to take her life day by day – ‘Who cares about gain?’ she’d say, ‘so long as there’s no pain’ – why should Lettice be the one to get swatted like this by the flailing of real life? I wished then I had never had children: never held these hostages to fortune: had not been trapped by Grazecot, by my affection for it, by my sense of what my forbears require. I had never seen beyond my own nose, never recognised responsibility other than to my nearest and dearest, and was now being punished for it.
Hetty had been trouble enough. At twenty-one, mid-college, she started a sexual relationship with a girlfriend, and made me go to consciousness-raising classes for the parents of lesbians. We parents looked at each other aghast – not because our daughters were lesbians but because they insisted on making such a song and dance about it: because they assumed their decision to come out would be a significant enough event-in-common for us parents to need to form a support group. I went along twice; then Hetty met Rory and that was the end of her lesbian phase and I was let off the meetings. When I cook dinner for their children, trying to ignore the hysteria, I sometimes wish she’d stayed firm in her principle. I do not see the bearing of children as of any particular value: I don’t even want my children to be happy: I just want them to keep out of my hair, which I suppose is more or less the same thing.
I certainly did not want to find myself paralysed by fear because Lettice, usually so good at looking after her own interests, her own comfort, was marooned on a hijacked liner in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Ed looked it up for me. A blue flat patch on a map criss-crossed by squares. Truly the world is an insane place: even the way we picture it is peculiar, if traditional. Flat, on paper: an abstract rather than an actual truth. As it was, Lettice was just fine: not even shocked: awed by the physical beauty of the hijackers, finding their particular type of murderousness attractive: the tourists they had killed – inadvertently, Lettice claimed – ugly and worthless by comparison. Hetty was made furious by the way Lettice spoke.
Guy said that was why Lettice said it in the first place; to annoy Hetty. Lettice spent most of her life, said Guy, annoying her family one way or another. Bringing us down, or so she believed, by dropping out of school young, being actively anti-intellectual, taking hopeless jobs, bringing home homophobic boyfriends to meet Guy. Guy just laughed. Guy was not exactly gay: but people assumed he was. He was attractive to, and attracted by, persons rather than bodies of any particular gender, let me put it like that. ‘Bi-sexual, you mean?’ people would say if you tried to explain. City people, that is. The neighbours did not seek explanations, nor were they judgemental. If Guy helped chase a straying heifer, or rescued a cat from a tree, spent his money at the village shop when he came home for weekends and was generally helpful, what did they care what our son’s sexual orientation was?
Guy was finely-built, soft-voiced, sweet. He was my oldest child and only after the girls came along did I wonder whether there shouldn’t be more difference between the male and the female child. He never wanted guns, or motor cars. He always loved dolls. When he got to his teens he had first girlfriends, then boyfriends. Later, it occurred to me he had been conceived as a girl, but one who then, by some carelessness of nature, developed male genitalia; when I had this in my mind, it was easier to define my son. He was, as they say, well-hung, but never particularly sexually active. Now he is married to the most extraordinarily beautiful transsexual, sufficiently female to allow a marriage between them to take place. They seem very happy: companionable, exotic, a trifle camp but witty and lively. They run an interior design firm in Brighton. It has been a strange fate for Ed and me, here at Grazecot, to produce this new version of person; for so it seems to me Guy is. Fit for a new race, whose purpose is not so much to multiply, but to see the importance of themselves in the here and now. Ed and myself belong, with our ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy, to a generation who never lived now, but who were always, with our preoccupation with family, children, bricks and mortar, security, keeping our powder dry; somewhere in the future, seldom now. We were anxious, as they are not – beyond whether a dye takes properly, curtains hang smoothly, that Christmas will be fun. And it does, they do, it is: Guy and his Staria make sure of it. They work hard, but without anxiety. I am proud of them, my Guy and his Staria; so is Ed, though at first he was disconcerted. It is strange enough for a woman to give birth to a man; how can the female produce the male? It seems to go against both reason and nature, but a woman learns to get used to the notion. A man has never even had this simple lesson in accepting the unlikely. He has to start from scratch, dealing with not quite the unthinkable, but the so far unthought.
The world must move on, with its motorways and its wind machines (they are threatened, too, as an alternative to the golf course) and its new genders, and Ed and I must step aside. Neither Guy nor Hetty nor Lettice are interested in living here at Grazecot. It is too far from the city. Who would they talk to? How would they get to work? The countryside itself has become irrelevant: fit only for parents.
I find this resignation dreadful.
We will put most of the furniture into auction when the house is sold. It will not fetch a good price. Most of it is too large for small, modern houses, where cental heating radiators take up most of the wall space anyway.
Ed fell in love with one of Lettice’s girlfriends. She passed the gilt-framed mirror, and paused and patted her corn
-silk hair – she had one of those other-worldly, translucent faces you get sometimes on sixteen-year-old girls, as if they were composed of two beams of light meeting and accidentally sustaining life. By eighteen she was just an ordinary pretty girl, but at sixteen she was amazing. I could see why he loved her, but it was painful. I felt ordinary and heavy, a plain domestic creature, painfully and pointlessly rushing here and there to no apparent purpose, long past my sell-by date. I have never liked the mirror since: it showed me what I did not want to see. The eternal gesture of the seductive girl: the response of the man: the pain of the woman passed over, left behind; and that stricken women in the mirror was myself: my own wall, my own mirror, me. The mirror will go to auction. I don’t want it.
She rejected him, of course, and he stayed home, grateful for my comfort. It was never a role I wanted – comforter – but better than none. I think I forgot it all sooner than Ed did. The tides of family swept us on. Now we are that rare thing: a well-suited couple who have survived well enough to rattle around in an empty house; to hold hands together like Darby and Joan as we go into the twilight of our years.
But this is specious twaddle. Even as I murmur these familiar words I realise the house is far from empty. Guy and Staria have left us two cabinet-makers working in the Barn; Ira is in the attic with the old train set; a friend of Lettice’s is in the guest room recovering from what I suspect is an OD of acid.
‘I don’t want to sell this house at all,’ I say to Ed. A car is turning into the drive.
‘Too late to turn back now,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Fair to whom?’ I ask. He doesn’t reply.
