by Weldon, Fay
Eleanor’s face crumpled and fell. There were tears glistening in her eyes.
‘You’re such a mercenary bastard,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I bother trying to please you.’
And then Eleanor had gone, on her heel; over to where the Pardoner stood, gently tapping her foot, smiling vaguely. Bob wondered for a moment whether Eleanor and Julie had some kind of sexual liaison but dismissed the thought. Guests started to drift in to dinner without benefit of announcement.
Sorrel kept hold of Bob’s hand, calming him down. His heart had started struggling again. By the time they reached the table, ornate with white napkins in flutes and folds, Bob’s equanimity had returned. I told her, he thought to himself. I finally told her! He thought if he looked at his hand he’d see the two little red marks left by baby teeth, so he didn’t look.
* * *
Sorrel sat next to Bob, leaning into him so far as decorousness would allow.
‘I love your tie,’ Sorrel murmured, ‘it’s the lean, sleek part of you. I don’t care if you did buy it with Lily. I don’t care if it’s old-fashioned. It’s part of you as your children are: I accept them.’ Thus she spoke her familiar litany and Bob smiled and felt better.
But the sense of something ominous in the air remained. Eleanor was sitting a table or so away, next to the Pardoner; she had her back to him; he could not see the expression on her face and was glad he could not.
Bob had asked as his guests old Eisenstein and his wife: and Lara the ex-opera singer and her music-producer husband Pietre who’d just sold eight million rock reissues, quite an achievement, the music business being in the state it was. Lara seemed to be doing her best to disconcert the old dog Eisenstein, to make the ancient frog eyes of Mrs Eisenstein blink. The pair of them had their heyday back in the Fifties: Eisenstein the pianist, Sara Eisenstein the composer, into New York out of the Holocaust. They’d been to see ‘Schindler’s List’ and liked it. It had brought memories back. Any memory would do, it seemed, so long as it was of youth.
Tonight old Eisenstein was wearing one of the new bow ties; floppy, large, lush, the black gold-threaded through. The fabric cut off a weary head from a withered body, but the aplomb remained. Lara was speaking in her loud throaty voice about a current law case; a famous father, a rock star, accused of ritual child abuse: the equally famous model wife, now suing for alimony, his accuser: the child’s remembrance of events, ten years back, the stuff of fantasy and horror films; multiple rape, sexual torture, bondage, snakes, toads, flies, all the nasty things of the outside world internalised, introduced into the body.
‘The child has sexual fantasies but understands nothing,’ Lara said in a voice which could be heard on at least four other tables. ‘The child is hopelessly vague about orifices, objects of penetration, has heard cries in the night suggesting pain, knows something exciting is going on but not what, is furiously jealous anyway, angry at being left out: works out what she can, inadvertently brings herself to orgasm. What pleasure, what horror! How can I be so disgusting, thinks the girl child! Did these visions really come from out of my head? I don’t believe it! Along comes the therapist in later years: quite right, “Sweetheart,” she says, “you didn’t invent those nasty things, you’re much too nice, much too sweet. They were real. Daddy did them.” And thus everything is explained and the childhood guilt absolved. The world returns to its natural order. If the universe is to be good, the father must be bad.’
Sorrel was staring at Lara, upset. Orgasm was still not part of dinner talk, not in her book.
‘No smoke without fire,’ said Sorrel.
Oh, Sorrel, Sorrel. You, too? Bob begins to see the future. His heart starts to beat its promise-of-death tattoo.
Pietre says, ‘Lara’s right. There always has to be a scapegoat, so God can be understood as good. Once we had witches, but now women are the ones who condemn, so it’s the fathers’ turn.’
‘Once it was us,’ old Eisenstein says. He has chicken soup on his bow tie. His chin has shrunk so the fabric collects the drips, not the flesh. ‘The finger of blame moves on, thank God.’
The table falls silent.
After dinner, it was much as Bob expected. Julie came up to him, followed by Eleanor. Eleanor was crying.
‘Now see what you’ve done,’ said the Pardoner.
‘I’ve lost my job,’ Eleanor wept. ‘You upset me so much, Daddy, I didn’t know how to handle it. I was only on trial here, you know. It was a temporary post. They said I had no eye for detail, and I tried so hard.’
‘Face your father,’ said Julie the Pardoner to Bob’s daughter. ‘Tell him. Face the past, face yourself, finally face what happened to you. It’s going to cost us all a lot of pain and money, Bob, if we’re going to help Eleanor. I need a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars, and I need it here and now: it’s essential that your daughter, still in her heart that poor bullied and abused little girl of long ago, witnesses this act of contrition and apology from you. The money will go to the best cause of all; what Eleanor’s treatment will cost, if she is ever to recover from the trauma.’
‘Trauma?’ asked Bob. ‘What trauma?’
‘We worked so hard, Eleanor and I,’ said the Pardoner. ‘You’ve no idea how painful it is, achieving flashback memory. Your daughter ran a fever, she had pains in her joints. But she did it! And this evening, finally, it all made sense. All the memories are there, available.’
‘Came to her between soup and fish, I expect,’ said Bob. ‘The soup was cold, the fish was sour.’
The Pardoner stared at him, at last showing signs of emotion.
‘You fathers are unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Still so callous! The night-time visits, the foul intruding member, the threats, the bribes, the terror! And then your wife Lily became aware of what was going on,’ said the Pardoner. ‘Lily left you in order to rescue her little girl. Of course your wife hated you: you were hateful. An abusing father.’
‘This way everything is explained, Daddy,’ said Eleanor, piteously. ‘Please understand. Everything is explained.’
So Bob took out his cheque book and signed a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars on the spot and Sorrel came hurrying up and said, ‘What is going on here?’
Bob said, ‘I am just paying for the remission of uncommitted sins, so that I can go to heaven,’ at which Sorrel hit the Pardoner and Eleanor actually spat at Sorrel.
Bob took off his bow tie, elaborately untying the long silk ends, feeling the ache in his shoulders, still broad, still strong in spite of it all, and said, ‘This thing is strangling me.’
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Bibliographical Note
Run and Ask Daddy If He Has Any More Money published in Radio Times, 1993; Hodder & Stoughton, 1994.
Wasted Lives published in New Yorker and in Cosmopolitan (South Africa), 1993.
Love Amongst the Artists published in The Times, 1991.
Tale of Timothy Bagshott published in British Council Anthology, 1992.
Through a Dustbin, Darkly published in Options, 1992.
A Good Sound Marriage published in US Journal, 1991.
Pains published in Cosmopolitan, 1994.
A Question of Timing donated to Teenage Trust, 1993.
Red on Black published in British Council New Writing 4, 1994.
Santa Claus’s New Clothes published in Observer, 1993.
The Pardoner published in Literary Review, 1994.
First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Flamingo
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1972, 1978, 1982, 1984, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral ri
ght of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858066
Head of Zeus Ltd
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Alexandra Ludd has been a widow for less than seventy hours, her husband, Ned, former theatre critic and stay-at-home father to their young son, Sascha, having died of an apparent heart attack. Alexandra, beautiful, adored darling of the London stage, is too overcome with grief to realize she’s been lied to: Ned didn’t keel over in the dining room, as her good friends told her. He died in their marital bed—and he wasn’t alone...
Table of Contents
1
‘I’ve never seen a dead body,’ said Vilna. ‘Can I come too?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Abbie, and they went down to the morgue together.
As Vilna and Abbie got into Abbie’s little car, Diamond the labrador jumped up at Vilna. Now there was mud all over Vilna’s frilly white blouse. Vilna shoved the animal away with the side of her knee-high boot and then tried to get him in the crotch with a high heel. She missed. So Diamond ran round to the driver’s side and leapt up at Abbie. Abbie was wearing an old grey sweater and didn’t mind. Diamond wouldn’t try Vilna again: he was accustomed to animal-lovers. Vilna’s rejection of him had made a great impression.
‘Poor dog,’ said Abbie. ‘Poor dog. He’s lost his master. He’s bound to be upset.’
But Vilna was too busy rubbing her twisted knee to reply. With every movement Vilna jangled. A charm bracelet much loaded with chunks of gold hung from her wrist. Heavy jewelled strings fell between up-lifted breasts no longer young. She had a hooked nose, deep close-set eyes, coiffeured blonde hair and a wondrous energy best suited to the city. Abbie, on the contrary, was much at home amongst green fields and mud. She wore sneakers, jeans and an old grey sweater on which dogs’ hair wouldn’t show much. These were the clothes she’d worn when the call from The Cottage came. She hadn’t been home to Elder House since. Neither woman wore a seat belt. Somehow a visit to the morgue forbade it. In sympathy, let them invite death.
The Cottage looked like a child’s idealised drawing of home. Centre path, square garden, drive to the right, tree to the left, door in the middle, two windows flanking it, three balancing above, tiled roof with two chimneys, one on each edge. The place was built in grey local limestone, creeper-covered, and surrounded by fields. It had stood here in its present state, as a home for the gentry, for 150 years. Before that it had been a farm, before that a cottage, before that a hovel, though one mentioned in the Domesday Book, circa 1070 A.D.
Alexandra, the widow, sat without moving on the edge of the brass bed in the marital bedroom upstairs and stared into space. She had been like this for two hours. The space she stared into was framed by fine tendrils of Virginia creeper which had driven in between window sash and frame, and neatly quartered by the bars which contained the window panes. The old glass had survived in all four quarters: it was thin, valuable, glittery, uneven, and probably mid-Victorian. Alexandra could see the duck pond, and Diamond racing after Abbie’s car to the top of the drive where it met the road to Eddon Gurney. Whether Diamond ran into the road and was killed, or not, seemed of no consequence. As it happened Diamond stopped, and lived.
Alexandra sat in suspension. She had a vision of herself as a particle in a test-tube of viscous liquid which drifted neither up nor down, but was obliged by the laws of nature to stay exactly where it was. She found it was easier to have an idea of herself as something inorganic than organic. This was Tuesday afternoon. Ned had died on the Saturday night. Alexandra had not been there when he died. She had been in London, 130 miles away, recovering from an evening on stage, as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Since then, wherever she was, Alexandra had been drifting in and out of this state of suspension. She supposed it was shock.
Alexandra, exhausted by this spasm of self-awareness, actually stopped sitting on the bed and lay down upon it.
Here, for twelve years, she had been accustomed to lying naked next to Ned, his warmth against hers. When they went to bed she would be cold and he would be hot. When they woke in the morning their temperatures would have evened out, so she could scarcely tell her body from his, nor wanted to.
She did not lie for long. The mattress felt uncomfortable beneath her shoulders. Perhaps a spring had gone. She got up and went to the bathroom. She could tell she was feeling better, but the improvement hurt, just as blood will when it returns to de-constricted limbs.
Her face in the mirror didn’t look too bad, just rather lopsided and like her mother’s. But she knew the mirror was unduly flattering. The glass was mercury-based and dated perhaps from 1790: the surface was agreeably blotched and crazed, and rewarded anyone who looked into it with its kind opinion.
Ned and she would look in it together and he would put his arm round hers and say, ‘What a divine couple.’ No more. She would not find his like again. Alexandra was trying not to cry too much because she was meant to be back on stage a week today. Torvald would have to call her his ‘little lark’ and she would have to give a convincing impression of a lark-like Nora, no matter what her personal circumstances. So much professionalism demanded. A Doll’s House was enjoying an unexpected success and an unexpectedly long run: eight months to date.
Diamond came pounding upstairs, where he was not allowed and seldom came. He jumped up on to the brass bed and folded himself into a sulky ball. Alexandra went after him to drag him down. He went limp and stubborn, like some protester the police were trying forcibly to remove. Alexandra persisted and succeeded. Diamond skulked downstairs. He growled at Alexandra as he went, which was unusual.
The bed had never been broad enough for Alexandra’s tastes. She liked a wide, wide mattress on which you could lie at any angle, but Ned liked her lying close, so she put up with its narrowness. The bed was a fine piece, probably 1820s, its brass ends finely wrought and curlicued. It had, fortuitously, been left behind by the previous occupants of The Cottage, as this large house was known locally in remembrance of centuries past.
Perhaps the bed had not been so much left-behind as deliberately never-collected. The couple who last slept in it had died in hospital within a week of one another. He was ninety-seven, she ninety-four. Their heirs had despised anything old. At least the old folk had not died in the bed itself. Though since in an old house every room you lived in had probably had someone die in it and every old chair you bought from an antique shop had witnessed some dire event, what did it really matter if they had? Life drifted away from everything in the end.
They’d changed the mattress for a new one all the same, but kept the high wooden base, and Ned and Alexandra lay unfashionably but comfortably close at night. A pity if now a spring in that mattress had gone.
Abbie had changed the sheets before Alexandra arrived home from the London flat where she, Alexandra, stayed while working. Abbie had even put the dirty sheets through the washing machine. They’d been hanging on the line in the back garden by Sunday midday, which was when Alexandra had got back home. She’d noticed them flapping greenly in the wind amongst the tall artichoke plants.
The corpse was already gone by the time she arrived. She’d been both sorry and glad about that. The body had been taken of
f for an autopsy: compulsory, since Ned had not seen his doctor within the previous three months. If the ambulance hadn’t taken the body when it did, there would have been a twenty-four hour delay before it could call again. Dr Moebius, summoned by Abbie, had made the decision the body should go when it could and not hang about to wait for Alexandra’s return. Alexandra had missed the body’s departure by five or so minutes.
Later on Sunday Abbie had taken the green sheets from the line, folded them, and put them back in the linen cupboard, having already made up the marital bed in candy-striped blue and white. Abbie had a domestic nature, apparently undisturbed by sudden and tragic events. Alexandra wished Abbie had left the sheets alone. They would have smelt of Ned, not fabric-softener as the striped ones did. But other people, plunging about in one’s linen shelves, seldom make the right decision.
Alexandra went down to the kitchen, glad to find that the house was empty. Between Sunday and Tuesday Abbie had rendered the whole house spotless. While others mourned and tore their hair, Abbie cleaned. Now there was a note on the white scrubbed table – a solid block of bleached elm, circa 1880, rough-hewn, with a slab base, originally used as a laundry table. It read: ‘Mr Lightfoot called from the mortuary. Ned’s body has just arrived back, so we are going down to have a look. Didn’t want to disturb you sleeping. Try to eat something. Abbie.’
‘We?’ Abbie and Vilna? Surely not. Alexandra didn’t mind Abbie viewing Ned’s body before she did. Abbie was a good if bossy friend. It was Abbie who had called the doctor and ambulance in the early hours of the morning. Everyone had thought Ned might be still alive but actually he was dead. No doubt Abbie had gone along to the morgue now to make sure all the arrangements were suitable: that nothing would upset Alexandra that didn’t have to. Perhaps she meant to see that the slab on which Ned lay was properly clean? In any case, Abbie had already seen the body, lying in the dining room, where Ned had apparently fallen in the throes of his heart attack. Abbie had been the very first to see it. Why shouldn’t Abbie continue to communicate with the corpse if it made her feel better?
