by Weldon, Fay
‘I don’t like to think of him dying alone,’ said Alexandra.
Sam said, ‘Why wasn’t he in the London flat making you cocoa anyway?’
Alexandra said, ‘He had too much work to do,’ and began to cry, so Sam concluded the call.
The next call was from Irene, Alexandra’s mother. She lived with her fourth husband next to a golf course in Surrey. She had Romanoff blood, way back in the past. ‘How are you, darling?’ she asked. ‘Has Ned been back to say goodbye to you yet?’ And Irene explained, as she often did, that the dead would appear in dreams to the bereaved in order of their closeness and say goodbye. Ned, she implied, was being laggardly, in death as in life.
‘He’s been, Mother,’ said Alexandra, as diplomatic in Ned’s death as she was in his life. ‘I expect he was waiting until after the autopsy, when he could settle.’
‘I’d rather not think about that,’ said Irene. ‘As for Sascha, he’s just fine. Don’t worry about him. I’ll keep him here till you’re ready.’
Alexandra had been to her mother’s to see Sascha on the Saturday afternoon. She had expected Ned to bring the child up to London at the weekend as usual, after nursery school. Then, apart from Saturday night, they’d have the weekend together as a family. Instead Ned had taken Sascha to Irene’s on Thursday and left him there, claiming pressure of work. He’d gone back home and two days later died, around midnight, ten minutes into Casablanca.
‘But I want Sascha with me,’ said Alexandra. ‘I need him. He’s my child.’
‘I daresay you do need him,’ said Irene, ‘but what does little Sascha need? He needs a cheerful mother, an organised home, and proper child care while you’re at work. So I’ll keep him till you’ve got your act together, if you don’t mind, in his interests not yours.’
‘But I have to tell him his father’s dead,’ said the daughter.
‘What’s the hurry?’ enquired the mother.
‘Shouldn’t one tell a child at once?’ asked Alexandra. ‘Won’t he find out?’
‘Not if he can’t read the papers,’ snapped her mother. ‘Because I’m certainly not going to tell him.’
Alexandra recalled how the news of her own father’s death had been kept from her for a week or more, till Irene felt strong enough to tell her. She had always resented it. A similar fate was being prepared for Sascha.
‘OK,’ said Alexandra. She was exhausted. Perhaps after she had talked to Hamish tomorrow she would simply drive all the way to Sussex and pick up Sascha. The child care, Theresa, wasn’t yet back from holiday, but that hardly mattered now.
It seemed unlikely that Alexandra would be back to work by the following Tuesday. She supposed, speculatively, that it would be possible to back out of the production altogether. They would hardly hold her to her contract. Daisy Longriff might yet get the part of Nora on a permanent basis.
It occurred to Alexandra that Longriff would come between Lint and Ludd in an address book.
‘Alexandra,’ said Irene. ‘Now I don’t want to upset you, you’re upset enough already: but there’s something strange going on here.’
‘What?’ asked Alexandra. She felt bad-tempered as well as tired. Her mother was convinced, as mothers often are whose own lives are not above suspicion, that Ned was unfaithful to her daughter. Alexandra could explain and explain that these days men could have women friends and women men friends without any sexual sub-text, but Irene would have none of it.
‘What time did Abbie call you?’
‘Six in the morning,’ said Alexandra. ‘From the house. It took me two hours to get over the shock, and I drove down on my own which I shouldn’t have, and ran out of petrol and didn’t arrive till twelve, and the ambulance had just taken the body away. It was terrible.’
‘Poor Alexi,’ said Irene, in the soothing mother’s voice which at the best of times made Alexandra want to cry. ‘You still won’t see it. What was Abbie doing at The Cottage at six in the morning? More like half past five, because it seems she called the doctor before she called you.’
‘Jesus,’ said Alexandra, ‘I don’t know. Mushrooming; leaving edible fungi at Ned’s door. Taking her students out to look at an English dawn. Needing a telephone: the students are always en crise. Whatever.’
‘Darling,’ said Irene. ‘You’re in denial.’
Alexandra slammed the phone down. It buzzed again.
Dr Moebius said, ‘I’ve been trying to get through to you for hours, Mrs Ludd. There’s either no reply or the line’s busy. Now it’s very late.’
‘There’s always tomorrow morning,’ said Alexandra, with a temper better reserved for her mother. ‘What’s your hurry? People are a long time dead.’
‘It was you I was concerned about,’ said Dr Moebius, a little stiffly. ‘I have not seen you since your husband died.’ Dr Moebius headed the local Health Centre. He was known to be a pleasant man, a bad diagnostician, and gullible; much given to acts of faith. He was as likely to recommend acupuncture as surgery, meditation as medication. He was a favourite with terminally ill patients, who looked forward to having him at their death beds. He would pray, and believed in heaven.
‘I could do with some sleeping pills,’ said Alexandra. She had searched out the carton in the bathroom cabinet but found it empty. She’d remembered it with at least eight tablets left Perhaps Ned had needed them, in her absence.
‘Not a good idea,’ said Dr Moebius. ‘Lime tea’s just as efficacious and easier on the liver. I wanted to tell you the autopsy report is in. Massive myocardial infarction; a heart attack, in layman’s terms. What we all supposed. Unfortunately the forensic people have only done half of what I required, so the body has had to go back to them. Technically I should have asked your permission first, but Mr Lightfoot’s ambulance was on its way back to the lab, empty –’
‘You wouldn’t want to waste the opportunity, I can see,’ said Alexandra. ‘But if my husband died of a heart attack, isn’t that all you need to know?’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Dr Moebius. ‘The labs take liberties. I asked for a brain dissection – there was a possibility of cerebral haemorrhage. It was not the lab’s decision to take. They cut corners. You’ve already viewed the body, in any case.’
‘I have not,’ said Alexandra.
‘Oh,’ said Dr Moebius. ‘Mr Lightfoot said you had.’
It seemed perfectly possible to Alexandra that Mr Lightfoot was right. What did she know? She was only the wife.
No sooner had that call finished, when her mother was back on the line.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Irene. ‘I’m not offended. I know how upset you are and how difficult for you this is. But why haven’t you asked Abbie what she was doing at The Cottage at five in the morning?’
‘Six.’
‘Half past five,’ conceded Irene. ‘Well? Isn’t it an obvious thing to ask? How can you deny you’re in denial?’
‘But one would, wouldn’t one?’ remarked Alexandra. There was such a sharp dividing line between the world in which Ned was alive and the world in which Ned wasn’t, there seemed something indecent in trying to link the two. ‘And then Ned died,’ was like a tidal wave which swept through your dining room carrying everything before it, flinging all familiar bits and pieces everywhere, snapping and sheering in its violent onward rush. To try and retrieve and piece together this one mingy little detail seemed almost impolite. Had he been frightened? Or was it all too sudden? Did he gasp for air look round for help and find her not there? Ten minutes into Casablanca? What could he have found so upsetting in Casablanca? Did one need to be upset to have a heart attack? Or did it just happen? He’d switched the video off: had he walked about the house feeling uneasy, searching for breathing air?
‘Darling,’ said Irene, ‘are you OK?’
‘Things just suddenly hit me,’ said Alexandra. ‘Sorry.’
‘People are like quarks, darling,’ said Irene from her house at the edge of the golf course. ‘They wink out of one
part of this universe and wink in somewhere else, simultaneously.’
‘You’re optimistic. Ned’s plodding up a hill somewhere,’ said Alexandra bleakly, ‘in a hideous, doomy fog, and I can’t help him.’
But she told her mother she’d ask Abbie for more detail, and her mother went away.
The next call was from David, a colleague of Ned’s. He was weeping and incoherent. He’d only just heard the news. Alexandra was sympathetic and comforting, but she held the phone a long way away from her ear.
When David had gone, Alexandra called Abbie.
‘Abbie,’ she said, ‘my mother wants to know. What were you doing in my house at half past five in the morning?’
‘I’d had a row with Arthur,’ said Abbie, as if she had been waiting for the question. ‘I’d gone for a drive to calm myself; I was driving along the main road; I could see The Cottage with every light blazing. I thought Ned was in London: he usually is at weekends: I went down to see what was going on, in case it was burglars. I looked through the dining-room window and saw Ned on the floor, so I went on in. The door wasn’t locked. You never lock your doors. You’re too trusting. OK? I wondered when you’d ask.’
‘It’s just my mother wanted to know,’ repeated Alexandra.
‘That figures,’ said Abbie. ‘She doesn’t miss a thing.’
‘Why do you think Ned turned all the lights on?’ asked Alexandra.
‘I have no idea,’ said Abbie. ‘Why don’t you try to sleep, Alexandra? I’ll come over if you like.’
‘I’m just fine,’ said Alexandra. She thought Abbie’s answer was rather pat. It sounded rehearsed. But then it would be.
How did pathologists get into a skull to examine a brain? Anything but think of that.
5
Abbie said to Arthur: ‘I don’t think she believed me.’
Arthur said to Abbie: ‘It’s just as well. She has to find out sooner or later. She has to know. Can we forget Alexandra and can you take some notice of me?’
Abbie said to Arthur: ‘Why does she have to know? What are friends for? Not to speak the truth, that’s for sure.’
Arthur covered her mouth with his hand. They were rolling about on the heavy old bed in marital bliss. The sheets were white, starched and ironed. Abbie and Arthur lived in Elder House, an old rectory next to a disused church a couple of miles from The Cottage. The church bell still hung in its tower and on stormy nights, depending on the way of the wind, it would suddenly peal out. Then students from many lands would run out into the corridors of Elder House in terror of ghosts and spirits. Arthur and Abbie would calm them. In the morning over the breakfast table Abbie would read them the scene in Jane Eyre where Miss Ingram and her friends, roused by the mad wife’s shrieks, run out into the corridors and encounter Jane, flitting about in her white nightie. The students would eat their traditional English breakfast – sausage, bacon, egg, mushrooms – while they listened. Impressed by their own reactions, they would sign up for yet another course.
These were experiences to last them all their lives. Arthur and Abbie would just have a little fruit, a little yoghurt, and some black coffee. They could have had the bell removed easily enough, or de-gonged as a dog is de-barked, but preferred not to.
Abbie and Arthur ran a residential school for would-be English teachers from foreign lands. Bored with teaching, they went on teaching. They had no choice. They could not sell Elder House – no one wanted it – so they made the best of what they had. They were good at that: a stoical couple.
Presently they slept. Downstairs the help still laboured, laying-up for breakfast, clearing away the students’ late-night coffee and biscuits. She was lucky to have the job. The countryside is pretty, Arthur would say, because there are so few people in it, and the reason there are so few people is because there are so few jobs.
Abbie went into a cave and saw Ned behind a pane of glass, smiling at her. He sat on a rock like a merman. His legs had fused into a tail. Waves lapped up against the glass. She waved. He waved back. Abbie moved on, as if she were in an aquarium and there was something more interesting to see further on. It was a casual encounter, like a one-night stand.
Abbie woke Arthur and told him what she had seen.
‘Ned won’t like having a tail,’ said Arthur. ‘No chance of a leg-over now.’ He went back to sleep.
‘It wasn’t a dream,’ said Abbie. ‘It was a vision. I woke up before I had it.’
She woke Arthur again.
‘All that wailing and screaming on Saturday night, all that commotion,’ she complained. ‘Ned being dead was the least part of it. Even calling the ambulance was just to keep Lucy quiet. The reason I went to see the body was to convince myself he was dead.’
‘Did it?’
‘No,’ said Abbie. ‘Not at the time. I believe it now I’ve seen him in the aquarium. He’s in a different place from ours.’
She began to cry. Arthur woke up enough to comfort her.
‘You’re something,’ he said. ‘Try and either wake up or go to sleep.’ She woke up.
‘And what did Vilna mean by saying Ned was so good at it? What does Vilna know?’ demanded Abbie. ‘She’s a monster. She’s competing for the status of most-bereaved. She’s the kind who moves in after a death and squabbles over who’s the closest, who’s suffering most. It’s disgusting. She’s ghoulish.’
‘If she’s a monster and a ghoul,’ said Arthur, ‘why have her as a friend?’
‘Because there are so few people round here to talk to,’ complained Abbie, and fell asleep. He, of course, could not.
6
Morning. With Ned not there Alexandra could stretch across the bed. She took what consolation she could from this. Nor was Sascha there to stalk into the bedroom, as was his habit, with his straight back, curly blond hair and censorious blue eyes, to start the day earlier than either she or Ned wanted. She must learn to extract Ned from these sorts of mental equations. Erratum:earlier than she wanted, drop the Ned. A kind of chilliness crept in from the periphery of the bed. What would she do for sex now? What had she done before she was married? She could hardly remember. Sex, it seemed, was as forgettable as a dinner out; set-asideable as a floppy disc. Relationships got remembered: they were there on the hard disc. Alexandra had the feeling Ned lay on top of her, forbidding such thoughts: a heavy but intangible weight: a consolation. They had been married for twelve years: fifty-two weeks in the year, sex on an average, she supposed, of three times a week. Rather less lately, since A Doll’s House had disrupted their lives but paid off the overdraft; but then more often at the beginning of the relationship to outweigh that. Five times a week, say, in the first two years before they were married; four times a week after that – marriage did seem to have a dampening effect; five to six times during late pregnancy – pregnancy, for her, did the opposite. Twice a week, even once a week, in the months after Sascha’s birth – three times a week on average seemed a good but conservative bet. Twelve times three times fifty-two fucks. One thousand eight hundred and seventy-two. Jesus. No wonder, on the most basic level, she now felt bereft. And never once with a condom. How much of Ned had she not absorbed, literally? The broken spring was there again, between her shoulder-blades.
Alexandra heard a kind of keening noise outside. The bed no longer tempted her. She went to the window and looked out over the garden, the hedge, the field beyond, the duck pond. Early-morning light made everything glittery, almost too bright to see clearly. Downstairs Diamond began to bark. She could see a figure lurking just beyond the hedge: someone was skulking, and wailing. She saw, as so often in the last few days, but did not absorb. The real world ran like a TV film you watched or didn’t watch, fitfully, according to mood.
Alexandra thought bereavement was like bonding: you grieved for the dead as you bonded with a newborn baby. There wasn’t much you could do about either. The response was bred into you; it was genetically determined, physiological, beyond your control. If a spouse died, or a parent, a child, a s
ibling, or to a lesser extent when a friend or colleague died, or to a greater extent again a king, a president, a pop star or a religious leader, why then you grieved. You couldn’t help it. You hurt. You stopped, just as if you had a physical pain or a fever, to wait for healing. Tears flowed. You could not even see sufficiently to act. Grief was nature’s way, no doubt, of preserving the group against unnecessary death. That person did that. That person died. Don’t you do it. Don’t let that happen again in a hurry! Grief for the old is tempered, mild; grief for the young is acute, survival-friendly for the tribe. As is grief’s companion emotion, the desire for vengeance. Hang the killers! Bomb the bombers! Sue the doctors! No further justification needed, swoop over the hill to loot, plunder, rape; steal the Sabine women, replenish the tribe. Vengeance sucks up grief, buries it. Nature’s satisfied. The Gods demand human sacrifice, always did; the hideous divine maw sucks in the living, chomps down on warm flesh, kills, devours. Then healing nature gapes open its mouth and new life pours out of it, raw and writhing, an endless, ever-multiplying stream. One day it will choke on the sheer volume of its production: it has to.
More wailing from outside. A peculiar keening; an ethnic chant. Alexandra took no notice.
You had to separate out the mourning from the death. Grief was not particular to Ned. Had she married another man, and had a child by him, and he had died last Saturday night, she would be in just this same state now. Others would say, in an attempt to explain the irrationality of the emotion, ‘Oh, you grieve for your own death. Another’s death reminds you of your own mortality. The closer that life was, the worse it is for you.’ But it wasn’t necessarily so. Fear of death was reasonable: terror of the unknown, of the grim forest of non-being: but grief for oneself? No. Grief in advance for the others who in their turn will mourn you – should there be any – would be more appropriate. It was a terrible thing for anyone to be plunged without warning or their consent into mourning, but what could you lament for the dead themselves? Death came to everyone. If it came suddenly so much the better. Lucky Ned. Poor Alexandra.
