by Weldon, Fay
When the point of the carving knife met the stretched skin, the flesh split and shuddered apart, and when the knife went into the meat the blade met a kind of pallid, stringy resistance. Audrey’s turkeys dissolved to the touch of the blade, gave themselves up willingly to the feast. But then she basted. Hetty didn’t bother. Philip shivered a little. Audrey was okay, though. She had finally gone to her parents in Edinburgh. Audrey had wanted Martin to spend Christmas up north; Philip felt that was out of the question. This was the house where Martin was accustomed to opening his presents; his elder brother and sisters were coming for the day; the child should not be used in the parents’ disputes.
‘But Mum will be all alone, Dad, if I’m not there.’
‘Christmas is for the children, Martin; stop worrying about the grown-ups. It’s too bad of your mother to make you feel guilty.’
And in the end it had been decided through solicitors – Hetty felt it was always easier on the child to deal with such matters formally – that Audrey could not provide so domestic, peopled and cheerful a festive season as could Philip and Hetty, with their two incomes, so today Martin sat at his father’s table, a little niece on either side of him – how they adored him! If only the boy wouldn’t try and spoil the atmosphere: like his mother, a born wet blanket.
Dr Hetty Grainger’s feeling had always been that Martin might need a little pressure to help him adjust to the new set of interpersonal relationships at home. Dr Grainger should know. She worked with children a good deal, though having none of her own. Dr Hetty was on something called the Victims of Child Abuse service register and spent an afternoon a week counselling at the Family Therapy centre.
‘What’s “civilised’’?’ Martin repeated.
Martin rang his mother frequently, all the way to Scotland. That was understandable, that was okay, except his mother kept him talking and talking, no doubt on purpose. The telephone bill would probably amount, as Hetty observed one night to Martin, laughing her gentle laugh, tucking her short legs between his long skinny ones, to a few months’ worth of her current retainer from the VCA.
* * *
‘The trouble with Audrey,’ Dr Hetty said, ‘is that she’s one of the Pall Bearers of life. I’m using an Avakandrist term here.’
‘A pall bearer?’
‘One of those people who blame others for difficulties they themselves have brought about. They’re the hands which hold back the wheel of life, refusing ever to let go. You can tell them because they always cost you money!’
Audrey had never slipped her leg at night between Philip’s. Audrey had liked to lie parallel but close, taking up whatever position her husband did: her strong, flawed, bony, cool body stretched against his. Only when Audrey was pregnant did she became warm – really warm: it was like sleeping next to a hot-water bottle. Hetty gave Philip her leg as a token but kept the rest of her body at a distance. Hetty was both intimate but remote: less familiar, less familial, more exciting, forever a challenge to be approached with reverence and respect. Sometimes he worried about sleeping in the same bed with Hetty as he had for so many years with Audrey, but Hetty said a good bed was hard to find and had performed some kind of ceremony with candles and incense which would, she said, deconsecrate the bed, free the material object from its person-past. Hetty was spiritual, but not sentimental. Now, answering Martin’s question, she took her time. Everyone waited.
‘Civilised behaviour, Martin,’ said Dr Hetty Grainger, finally, ‘is acting, not acting out. For example, not running up telephone bills simply to spite your father and me.’ She smiled as she spoke, to show she wasn’t being in any way negative, merely constructive. Martin’s eyes narrowed further. Audrey’s eyes could look just like that, thought Philip. Martin should have been allowed to go to Edinburgh for Christmas.
‘Civilised behaviour, Martin,’ said Dr Hetty Grainger, ‘is my understanding why you do such a selfish thing, and forgiving you for it, and helping you not to do it again. You want to hurt me, Martin, because you are angry and jealous: of course you are, you feel there is not enough love in your father for you as well as for me, but there is, I promise you there is.’
And she smiled again at Martin, brown eyes glowing. He did not smile back.
‘Civilised behaviour,’ said Dr Hetty Grainger to the whole table, her entire being alight, spoon poised over the brussels sprouts – the whole serving system (Philip, turkey and nut-roast; Henry, plum sauce; Hetty, vegetables) was held up – ‘is coming to terms with and controlling our negative emotions, letting go. It is the manners which come from an open heart. It is sharing and caring. It is the open acknowledgement of our passions. It is moving over to let others in. It is smiling, even when we don’t want to, until the smile is real. We must try to be civilised, we must act civilised, otherwise we end up as the Serbs and the Croats, at each others’ throats. Literally. Here in the Andrew family we’ve tried and we’ve succeeded, and, as I say, I’m proud of us all. That’s my speech for today.’
She lowered her bright eyes; her face sweetly pink with emotion, vulnerable and charming. No wonder Philip loved her.
But Martin stared on, unsatisfied. Dr Grainger ignored him.
‘Where’s Granny?’ asked Sal, who was four. ‘Why is that lady in Granny’s chair?’
‘Granny chose not to be here,’ said Philip, ‘And I’m sorry about that too. She was invited, of course.’
‘But she chose not to be civilised,’ said Hetty.
Now Sal’s eyes narrowed. Some characteristics do seem to run in the genes: or was she just copying Martin?
‘Shall we pull a cracker, Sal?’ asked Philip, quickly.
‘No,’ said Sal pushing away her plate. ‘Crackers come between turkey and pudding, not now, stupid.’ And neither Sal nor Sue, who was three and took her lead from Sal, ate a thing thereafter. Angie apologised for her children.
‘They’re so fussy about their food sometimes. And of course they’re exhausted. They were so excited last night they couldn’t sleep. What with Santa Claus and coming to Grandpa and Granny for Christmas Dinner...’ Her voice faltered.
‘Audrey preferred to be in Edinburgh,’ said Philip, unnecessarily. ‘You know how she loved those Scottish winters.’
‘Mum isn’t in the past tense for me,’ said Henry. ‘Not yet, at any rate.’
Martin, strangely, was holding Sal’s little hand against his heart. Perhaps she gave him strength.
* * *
‘Let go of the past,’ said Dr Hetty Grainger quietly and softly from her carver chair at the head of the table. ‘I would have welcomed Audrey here today, but she refused: not even for her own children would she come. That is her decision. We must accept it, rise above the sorrow it causes us. Let us raise our glasses to a future filled with love.’
‘I think you’re a selfish bitch,’ said Martin to Dr Hetty Grainger, clearly and stoutly. ‘You’ve no business sitting there. That’s my mother’s chair. She’s meant to be serving the vegetables, not you. Those are her plates you’re handing round. You didn’t even heat them. You talk so much everything’s gone cold.’
‘Little Martin,’ said Hetty, ‘I understand your aggression but there’s more to this ritual than heated plates. Christmas is not about food, or presents, but about rebirth. It’s the festival of starting over, and that’s what we’re trying to do. As for chairs and plates and so on, your mummy told us she didn’t want any of the material objects in this house, that your daddy could have them all, and since your daddy and I share everything, love and life, that includes the relevant things as well. Your mother walked away from all this of her own free will because she couldn’t understand love; she was not a spiritual person. And your daddy worked for this lovely house all his life, didn’t he? Your mummy just sat and enjoyed the fruits of his labour until one day the bough was empty and no fruit fell. Everything is ripe for the time it’s in; love must be worked for, earned. So here’s to the future!’
How luminous her eyes were as she rais
ed her glass.
‘Bitch,’ said Martin again. ‘Why does nobody see she’s a bitch?’
‘Don’t embarrass your stepmother,’ said Philip. But nobody was following Hetty’s example and raising their glasses. It seemed she was drinking alone.
‘Is that lady sleeping in Granny’s bed?’ asked Sal. ‘There was a nightie under the pillow which wasn’t Granny’s. I bet she is. Why doesn’t Grandpa stop her?’
‘Don’t call him Grandpa any more,’ said Hetty. ‘Call him Philip. Grandpa is so ageing.’ She was barely forty herself.
‘Bitch,’ said Martin again, and now he’d said it thrice it was Emperor’s New Clothes time. The Andrews saw Hetty Grainger more clearly for what she was: a horror came amongst them. All except Philip, of course, so deep in his positive transference was he.
‘Perhaps Martin had better go to his room,’ said Philip to Dr Hetty, and Dr Hetty said that was a good idea. ‘Aloneness quiets the unquiet spirit,’ said Dr Hetty Grainger.
So Martin ran weeping to his room, into loneliness, except that Sal and Sue came running after him to keep him company and when Martin put his head under the pillow to bury his grief, they did the same, sharing the same breath. They ended up giggling, not crying.
The grown-ups finished their meal in silence, and that evening Martin made his phone call to his mother longer than ever, this time on purpose.
* * *
‘I told them,’ said Martin proudly. ‘I told them what she was. I saw her off. You can rely on me.’
Baked Alaska
You know what it’s like, Miss Jacobs, when you’re having an affair? Forgetting appointments, neglecting children, running off to the hairdresser, having your eyelashes dyed; stopping and staring in mirrors instead of passing by with averted eyes – as if all of a sudden the fact that you’re alive and have a body matters – and you’re back with the sense of Mystical Connection. I’m an addict to extra-marital love: an addictive personality: one whiff of a cigarette and I’m off again: a drop of sherry in the Bombe Surprise and I’m out of my skull by dawn.
I can feel your eyebrows shooting up, Miss Jacobs, even though I can’t see them. I have to lie here on this couch, which is a little too hard and rather short. What do your men clients do? Dangle their legs? Or perhaps you only get to see dwarves? I haven’t been to see you for eight weeks. I’d quite forgotten how dreadful it is – talking into space like this.
What you always forget is that just because you’re connected, the object of your love is not necessarily, let alone permanently, so. As if you’d made a telephone call and the other person has spoken for a little and then wandered off, and not hung up, so that not only can’t you speak to them, but you can’t use the phone either, for anyone else –
I know I told you I was going to Alaska, on business. That my employers had sent me on a trip to learn about Alaskan business methods. It was a lie. You mean it sounded true? So unlikely as to be true? Wonderful! Affairs are all lies: one gets really good at them.
I daresay even you have lovers, Miss Jacobs. There’s someone for everyone: somewhere out there are men who will admire the stony bleakness of your regard, the ferocious tugging back of your hair, the toughness of your blemished skin, your unsmiling mouth. I envy you. You couldn’t even begin to pretend: you are all truth and permanence as I am all frivolity and change. I know only the silly side of the coin: what it is to be loved for blonde curls and sulky looks, and that peculiar gift for idiotic discrimination I foster, which certain men find so entrancing. ‘Oh no, I can’t possibly go there, or eat this, or see that!’ With a flick of red fingernail, despising this, adoring that – men love the carry-on, for a while at least: then they get bored.
During the last eight weeks I have gone at least twice a week to the hairdresser. Nothing to prevent me blow-drying my own hair: it’s just at such times you feel the need to be ministered unto. As if it takes a bevy of supporting beauties just to get one woman to meet her lover! As if she carries with her the concentrated energy of women everywhere – their desires, their fulfilment, not just her own. Takes a dozen girls to adorn one bride.
* * *
My stylist Joanna had just come back from New York with tales of high life and a mind generally at the end of its tether. The kind of stories that make you think you’d better defect: that they do things better in Moscow. I can only say that kind of thing to you, Miss Jacobs; husband Roland, well, ex-(possibly) husband Roland, being so politically serious. He married me the better to despise my frivolity. He told me only this morning that in fact he now despises me so thoroughly he is obliged to divorce me: I’ll telephone home – home? – when I’ve finished this session with you and if there’s an answer he hasn’t left and he’s still my husband, and if there isn’t, he’s gone and he’s not. Never a dull moment. I’ve been putting off calling home or ex-home all day. It’s all right if you keep moving and keep talking – it’s only with stillness and silence that the panic sets in.
Now what Joanna said – her hair is so long she can sit on it, though I can’t think why she’d want to – was that in New York cannibalism is all the rage. Not whole people – parts of people; amputated limbs and so forth. At least I hope that’s what she said. I do have this incapacity sometimes to hear what is actually being spoken. In retrospect, I can hardly have been hearing with any accuracy what Anton – that’s my love, my lover: that is to say, my love, my ex-lover as from precisely seven days ago – was saying, or the end of the affair would not have been quite so unexpected; from bed to nothing in ten swift minutes. Anyway, according to Joanna, human flesh, either discarded bits of body, or – I suppose we have to face it – whole bodies, and tender young bodies at that, especially acquired for the occasion in some appalling and unthinkable fashion, are selling in New York for $2,000 a pound, and served stewed at all the best parties. And the other currently fashionable epicurean delicacy, Joanna says, is the brains of living monkeys, eaten with special long-handled silver teaspoons. Just tether your monkey and slice off the top of its skull and there you are.
I tried not to think about it. I thought about Anton instead, about wrapping my legs round his thin body and pleasuring him as he pleasured me. About a curl here and a streak there and whether a fringe is really what I need: if the hair is back from the face the character may indeed show, but was it character Anton wanted? I doubted it. And, when it came to it, what he wanted was a space in his head filled; some little wounded part made good, some little chilliness warmed. He had fun with the small words that indicated love, concern, possession, even permanence: he liked me to listen to them. He knew, I fear, that I was waiting and hoping for them –
And I? I wanted everything. I can’t help it. Men run away from me in droves, as others come running towards me. I am the far end of the swimming pool: the side you have to touch before turning and swimming back. As fast as you can towards: as fast as you can away.
Doesn’t it frighten you, Miss Jacobs, to think how soon we’re going to die? No, nothing frightens you, because your heart is pure, your soul is good.
Monkeys’ brains and long silver teaspoons. Shall I describe Anton to you? His beautiful haggard face, his lean body, his brilliant eyes, his quicksilver mind, his charm? Dear God, his worldly importance! Anton never walked if he could run. Yet I’m sure his wife saw him with more accuracy than I ever did: she would see him as I see Roland; as sheer living, walking, snoring, predictable, day-to-day folly. She would see in Anton a man re-running, decade after decade, without any alteration but with much surface embellishment, five glorious years of youth. A man for ever between twenty-eight and thirty-three, as life and event rolled by. Yes, of course, Miss Jacobs, he had a wife. Has a wife. Why are you surprised? Men like Anton have wives. In this brave new cannibalistic world of ours, all proper men are married, all proper women too. It’s our prudence, our reality, our safe familiarity while we nibble and guzzle the private parts of comparative strangers. Oh strange new wondrous delicacies!
I try to forget amputated limbs at $2,000 a pound; I try to forget the monkeys’ brains, as I try to forget, as my husband can’t, the missiles gathering, forget the whole frightening insanity of the world. I try to relish only this: the conjunction of man with woman, in the face of common sense and decency.
I tell you I loved him, Miss Jacobs: it is how I sanctified disgrace: how I justified the dangerous absurdity of our behaviour: this running through the machine of a different and forbidden tape. I set up this terrible, painful affair, the little short-lived merry haphazard affair, as an actual alternative, an actual radical alternative, Miss Jacobs, and not as the optional extra that Anton saw it to be. I took it seriously. It was my escape route from death.
* * *
And yet how many times have I not myself seen my accomplice in sex as an optional extra, the affair as a trivial in-and-out relationship, when the man has believed it to be world-shaking, shattering and permanent. Ah, the biter bit!
Why Alaska, you ask suddenly? Are you keeping up with me? Why did I tell you I was going to Alaska? Because Alaska is cold, cold, Miss Jacobs, and one senses the ice already encroaching upon the fire, before it is even lit.
Because my mother used to make Baked Alaska, a fundamentally boring dish. Whale-fat ice cream (in her case) encased in meringue made from a packet; contents: dried egg white, stalibiser, emulsifier, permitted (who says?) artificial flavouring and colouring, put in the oven the better to shock the palate with cold and hot – nothing else is going to.
Anton was great on restaurants; accused me of being unsophisticated because I would not spend £80 on an indifferent meal for two; would rather give it to charity or feed the ducks. He would spend $2,000, I bet you, on a spoonful of the brains of living monkeys, should opportunity present.
Baked Alaska. My mother. My mother served Baked Alaska and I should be grateful. She was trying to tell us something, I think. Life is not what you think. This warm cosy meringue will turn into cold ice cream and set your metal teeth-fillings zinging!
