by Weldon, Fay
‘I have every right to be here,’ Angela said, stopping to face Bernard, taking in the presence of the first wife, his ex-mother-in-law, her soon-to-be stepchild. ‘I love you and you love me and I want every single part of you, and that means your past as well. If you loved your father, I loved him too, he’s my baby’s grandfather, and I’m entitled to come to his funeral, so I don’t know what you mean, Bernard, by my “cashing in”. I don’t want to hear that kind of mean, miserable thing from you ever again. I’ve heard far too much of it from you lately. I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.’ Then she turned on Maria. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? An ex is an ex, as you’ll find from now on. You depress the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. That godawful grey suit is a case in point and no one’s worn a scarf for years. Self-pitying bitch.’
The nasal voice stopped. It had come bursting in like some destructive gust of wind, thought Maria; everything settled, everything you clung to, was up in the air, whirling. They were all looking at her, waiting for a response. Maurice hovered half-way between Bernard and herself. Oh Eleanor, Eleanor, help me now. I married Bernard in the spring, but then the day was bright and clear. Eleanor smiled and drove my maternal mother out. Let me re-phrase that: together, Eleanor smiling, myself scowling, we held the whip that drove my mother out. Perhaps Eleanor was a false ally, after all. If she smiled it was because now she’d have my father to herself. Of course my stepmother lent me a dress. And afterwards she could afford to be generous. She’d won. Angela wants Bernard to herself, of course she does. She uses different methods, that’s all – sulks not smiles. And Bernard just spreads his hands and thrives in the warmth of our squabbling.
Even as I hesitate, I see Maurice drifting over to Bernard’s side. Mother love? What’s that? What’s required? I want Maurice to grow up to be the best of his father, not the worst. We aren’t meant to be on sides: we are meant to try to be civilised. All my life spent understanding and forgiving – but these are matters of life and death; desperate things. Red on black, black on red: understood but not forgiven. Has my mother come here today to explain that to me? She can’t forgive me, she won’t forgive, she must not forgive me because what I did was unforgivable; nor can she understand it. But she can still instruct me. She won’t look me in the eye, she never will, but she came today to set an example, to help me.
‘My father-in-law,’ said Maria to Angela, ‘mine. And it’s you who have no business here. You can have Bernard’s future, you’re welcome to it, but you can’t have Bernard’s past. That’s mine. You will not unravel my life from this moment back. Why don’t you just go back to the house? Go on back, let me mourn in the peace I deserve. I came first and you came second; all you are entitled to is the dregs –’
‘Bernard!’ wailed Angela, but Bernard just spread his fingers helplessly, and licked his lips.
‘It’s her or me,’ cried Angela. ‘I’m warning you, Bernard.’
‘I do as I like,’ said Bernard. ‘What you do is up to you.’
‘This is our business, not yours,’ said Maria’s mother to Angela, as once she should have said it to Eleanor. ‘You go, we stay.’ And she looked Angela’s suit up and down as if to say this is a funeral, not a wedding; can’t you tell the difference? I’m old enough to do as I like but you’re not. Whoever can have brought you up?
Angela looked at Maria’s mother’s attire and curled her lip.
‘Mutton dressed up as lamb,’ she actually said.
‘Excuse me,’ said a group of black-suited, sleek-haired men, passing through, bearing a coffin on accustomed shoulders. The little cluster of mourners had to part and reform. Maria wondered if the body inside the coffin were male or female, young or old; how they’d lived, how they’d died. Whether they were persecutor, self-interested and invalidating; or victim, understanding and forgiving, this was the outcome. Since there was no justice in death, you’d better find it in life, however disagreeable it made you in the eyes of others, in your own eyes too.
‘Just go away,’ Maria said to Angela, with a snap of anger so sharp and severe it all but cracked and slivered the sheltering bell-jar; or at any rate a breath of cold, fresh, lively air suddenly whipped around their legs: a memento of winter in the presence of spring. Everyone looked startled.
‘Go away,’ repeated Maria, ‘and take Bernard with you.’
Bernard said, ‘I can’t do that. I’m the chief mourner. He’s my father. I have to stay. But you don’t have to, Angela. Really it’s best that you don’t. Wait in the car.’
And Angela walked meekly off to wait. Maurice moved over to stand by his mother’s side.
‘That’s better,’ said Maria’s mother. ‘At last!’
‘What’s more, I’m not living beneath a baby,’ said Maria to Bernard, ‘let alone you, Angela and a baby. What do you think I am?’
‘That’s okay,’ said Bernard. ‘Now my father’s dead I can afford to move out. You can have the whole house.’
They stood together in the chapel, and afterwards went their separate ways. Bernard to Angela and a new baby, Maria and Maurice back home, Maria’s mother back to her cards. Red on black, black on red; red on black, life on death.
Going to the Therapist
Santa Claus’s New Clothes
Baked Alaska
The Pardoner
Santa Claus’s New Clothes
‘I’m so happy we can all be together like this,’ said Dr Hetty Grainger. She sat in the antique carver chair at the head of the Andrews’ festive board. There was turkey for the carnivores, and nut-roast for the others, with a rich plum and chestnut sauce to go with it, to prove vegetarians can be indulgent too, not to mention sensuous, should ritual so demand. There were crackers on the table, and paper hats, and the scent of incense to remind everyone that the Hindu, the Buddhist and the Christian gods (did not the Trinity make three?) come from the same source, are of the same oneness. The Andrews were the kind who normally went to church once a year, to midnight service on Christmas Eve. But not this year.
Dr Hetty Grainger’s voice was sweet and low. She murmured rather than spoke, so that all the Andrew family, usually so noisy, fell silent to hear her speak. ‘I’m so happy we can all be together like this.’
Although now in theory an Andrew herself, Dr Hetty had retained, if not exactly her maiden name, at least the one she’d acquired on her first marriage: Grainger. She’d done this, she said, for her patients’ sake. Troubled as they were by one kind of stress or another, they hankered, or so Dr Grainger said, for the tranquillity of continuity. To turn from Dr Grainger into Dr Andrew would be to rub the salt of her own new-found happiness into the wounds of her clients’ neuroses. ‘Tranquillity’ was one of Dr Grainger’s favourite words. She used it a lot. The Sea of Tranquillity on the moon, for example, was a place with which Dr Hetty Grainger felt she had some special connection. It sent its sentient spirit out to her. Just to think of this unearthly place – so quiet, so dark, so cool, so beautifully named – lulled Dr Hetty Grainger and soothed her when she was in any way stressed.
‘She’s okay, I suppose, but she’s ever so sort of astral,’ said Penny, aged nineteen, on first meeting her father’s therapist, soon to be her new stepmother. ‘I always thought the moon was just a cold lump of rock which caught the light of the sun as it went round the earth. Or is it the other way round? But apparently no: the moon is all sentient spirit and significance and stuff. Or is she just talking crap?’
And Chris, Penny’s sister Petula’s boyfriend said, ‘No, it isn’t crap. I think what Dr Grainger has to say is really interesting. This is the New Age, after all. Everything means something. And at least she makes your father happy.’
And, after that, opposition to Hetty Grainger within the Andrew family fell away. She made their father happy.
This year the Christmas Eve service on local offer seemed to the family a rather formal, old-fashioned and decidedly chilly event, in a church which had needed a new heating system f
or years and never got one. Hetty didn’t want to go, anyway, so in the end nobody went. It would have felt impolite to leave their new stepmother behind.
Hetty Grainger was shortly built and mousily pretty, with soft natural hair which fell brownly around a pale plump face. But her hips were wide and filled the antique carver chair at the head of the table almost as amply as had those of her predecessor, Mrs Audrey Andrew. Dr Hetty didn’t diet, as Audrey had. Dr Hetty knew that if you ate a healthy, wholesome diet, as additive-free as could be managed, you would be the weight and scale that nature intended, not that fashion dictated. If fate had made you pear-shaped, so be it.
Dr Hetty’s husband Philip Andrew, engineer, regarded his new wife fondly from the other end of the table, carving knife poised ready to start on the turkey. His chin had doubled compliantly and happily since Hetty had replaced Audrey. Now his body was heavier but his life was agitation-free. Dr Hetty was against conventional medicine. The weighing of the body, the measuring of blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on, was just the orthodox doctors’ way of adding to the stress of modern life.
Dr Hetty Grainger should know: she’d trained as an orthodox doctor. But a patient had died under her care in the hospital where she’d had her first job; not her fault: an inquest had exonerated her; but Dr Hetty had realised just how dangerous medical practice could be and had chucked the whole thing in. She’d wondered what to do with her life, had happened to meet Swami Avakandra, had been most impressed, had trained as an Avakandrist – a six-month residential course – and thereafter counselled in the Swami’s name.
The Jungians looked kindly on the Avakandrists, who mixed the search for the archetype with a rich interpretation of symbols, made extensive use of dream and hypnotherapy, acknowledged a deep inherited collective unconscious, whilst teaching that the knowledge of ultimate reality came through sexual love rather than through cognitive processes. A state of ill health, whether mental or physical, would arise when a spiritually sensitive individual, consciously or otherwise, distanced himself from that ultimate reality. The task of the Avakandrist healer/therapist was to lead that individual back to appropriate paths of awareness. And thus Hetty had led Philip.
‘I’m so pleased,’ Dr Hetty Grainger went on, ‘that after the upsets of the last year we can all come like civilised people to the Christmas ritual!’ And she raised her glass of wine to all of them, the glass being one which just happened to have been Audrey’s favourite. A strand of blue ran through the clear stem. Audrey had bought it at a car boot sale which she’d gone to with Philip, just a couple of years back. The goblet had turned out to be Venetian glass – what a snip! That had been one of the couple’s last outings before Philip, facing possible redundancy at work, suffering from enigmatic heart pains, had become Dr Grainger’s patient, or client, and had realised that the time had come to think about himself, not his family. Everyone’s spiritual duty was to themselves.
‘Yes, I’m so pleased we have managed to be civilised!’ murmured Dr Hetty Grainger. ‘Divorce and remarriage needn’t be a source of grief and anger, if only they can be seen for what they are; a healthy re-adjustment and re-arrangement of family relationships.’
And the Andrew family nodded an only slightly muted agreement. On either side of the refectory table were seated Henry, son No 1, aged twenty-six, strong and handsome, and his pretty wife Angie with the little girls Sue and Sal; Petula, twenty-two, daughter No 1, with her artist boyfriend Chris, and Penny, nineteen, daughter No 2. And of course Martin, aged nine, Audrey and Philip’s last child, the afterthought, the happy accident, the apple of everyone’s eye. Child No 4. Son No 2.
Martin alone looked puzzled. Martin alone responded.
‘What’s “civilised”?’ asked the child. Interesting! They all waited for Dr Hetty’s reply. Dr Hetty would know. She was the one with the insights, who knew what maturity meant, who knew how peace of mind was achieved. She it was who had brought the Andrew family all together again round the Christmas table, in harmony after the previous season’s dispersal and disarray. Dr Hetty who that day had stood in what was once Audrey’s kitchen and was now hers, and had worked so hard to prepare the turkey, in spite of her vegetarian convictions, and made the nut-roast, and the plum sauce with chestnuts, and boiled the organic pudding. Who, with Philip, the father, had strung the home with tinsel and sparkling globes, and adorned the tree with decorations taken from the cardboard boxes into which Audrey had so carefully packed them two Twelfth Nights back, before placing them in the cupboard under the stairs. Here Dr Hetty had come across them. ‘So pretty!’ she cried. ‘In some things Audrey had such good taste.’ Oh, Dr Hetty was generous.
In fact Dr Hetty Grainger was doing everything she could to repair the damage to nerves and family-togetherness perpetrated by Audrey, who had been so insanely negative, so angry, so bitter, so antagonistic to the point of insanity when her husband had fallen in love, wholly, fully, totally and for the first time, at the age of fifty-seven.
‘But this marriage has been dead for years,’ said Philip to Audrey. ‘Why are you being like this? What are you objecting to? Surely it’s better to be open about these things?’
‘I didn’t think it was dead,’ said Audrey, ‘and neither did you until you started going to see that bitch. How much does she charge you for the privilege of breaking up your marriage, your family, your life?’
‘She’s trying to save my life,’ said Philip. ‘You wouldn’t understand. She believes in me, she listens to what I’m saying. She’s patient, she’s kind, sweet, gentle, never in a hurry.’
‘You pay her to be those things,’ wept Audrey. ‘I’m just your wife. What chance do I have?’
None, it seemed. He had walked into her surgery, Dr Hetty Grainger had looked up from behind her desk and met his eyes and seen Osiris to her Isis. The love and compassion she felt for all her patients had blossomed at that moment into something amazingly particular. Philip Andrew was what her life was all about. Dr Hetty Grainger, his. Both had had to wait through dreary years, but now the time of decreed fruition had come. Her marriage was over; his family all but grown. Their drudge through the material world of pre-love was at last finished. Even before the sexual contact, so intrinsic a part of Avakandrist healing, both had understood that this was destiny. The initial touch, her finger stroking his check, had merely confirmed a love, a connection, already in existence.
Philip Andrew, engineer, nuts and bolts man, hadn’t known a thing about Isis and Osiris, but it all made sense when Dr Hetty explained it: spouse and sister both. His own previous ignorance now horrified him: why had he waited so long to start living? Yet he was fond of Audrey; he loved his children. He did not want to hurt them. He could only hope in the end wife and family would understand.
He loved the way Dr Hetty Grainger could explain and define not just the world but him to himself. She knew so much! But then she worked for a living; she wasn’t idle; she got out into the world; she was open to fresh ideas. Audrey had always stayed home; she was a traditional wife. Her very existence could only be parasitical not just on her husband’s maleness and income but on his mind. Audrey had docked her husband’s spirituality as she tried to dock his sexuality, by owning it, withholding it, confining it. Not her fault, probably, but there it was. No wonder poor Philip had heart pains.
Hetty, for all her prim and gentle looks, would do anything Philip wanted, follow anywhere her patient’s sexual fantasies led. This, too, was part of the Avakandrist teaching: the approach to ultimate reality through strange and winding paths, through unconditional yet unpossessive physical love. The Avakandrists didn’t make much of this aspect of their doctrine in their public statements, didn’t stress it too much in their publications; the world was a sexually nervous place, all too likely to unfairly misunderstand, to use scandal to condemn a life-enhancing and primarily spiritual movement. To put it bluntly, spouses, at the best of times the source of stress, would object too much if they knew too much.
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nbsp; But now it was Christmas Day; the second since the split, the first since Philip’s divorce and remarriage. Hetty was now training, at Philip’s expense, as a straightforward Jungian: she’d lost her dedication to the Avakandrist doctrine – her new husband did not want her showing too many male clients the way to health and happiness, selfish of him though it might be – and the family was once again gathered together under one roof and all was peace, prosperity and understanding. Tranquillity. Thanks to Hetty’s strength of purpose and the lawyer she’d recommended to Philip, Audrey had failed in her attempts to take the house and disrupt the family.
Everything was fine, in fact. Except for Martin, staring at Hetty, still waiting for an answer, his big eyes narrowed in his little face. He spoilt his looks when he scowled. A pity Martin was so much Audrey’s child in both looks and temperament: Martin the afterthought, the late child; the mistake, to put it bluntly. Philip had not wanted his declining years – or so he had regarded them pre-Hetty – filled with first nappies and infant protest, then school bills and teenage trouble; Philip had thought it self-willed and selfish of Audrey to go through with a late and unplanned pregnancy. Though once Martin had arrived he was of course welcome.
‘What’s “civilised”?’ Martin asked again, and Hetty publicly pondered. Everyone waited. Philip noticed that the skin of the turkey was pale, dry and stretched, not brown, wrinkled and juicy as it would have been had Audrey cooked it. As she had done for the family for how many years? Twenty-six? Well, Christmas was a tricky time for everyone, as Hetty had pointed out, now so many made sequential marriages. Meanness of spirit created a ‘who goes where’ syndrome.
