by Weldon, Fay
‘Let me put it like this,’ said Mr Quatrop. ‘One gets a nose for this kind of thing. I viewed Mr Ludd’s enquiry as the first step on the critical path which leads to a major sale, this one involving three properties.’
And he told Alexandra that Mr Ludd had been toying with the idea of joining forces with Mrs Lint to buy Elder House, the language school. He’d gathered from a hint here and agleam in the eye there they hoped to develop the property after purchase as a centre for theatrical design. Mrs Lint had to get to the stationer’s before it closed, and had gone off, so it might well have been that he, Mr Quatrop, was the very last person to speak to Mr Ludd.
‘Mrs Lint came in with my husband?’ asked Alexandra, ‘to discuss the possible sale of The Cottage and Mrs Lint’s cottage and the possible purchase of Elder House with the proceeds?’
‘That is so,’ said Mr Quatrop. ‘I hope I haven’t upset you in any way?’
‘No,’ said Alexandra.
‘I’ll be closing for the funeral,’ said Mr Quatrop, ‘as a mark of respect. Many local traders are doing the same.’
‘How very kind of them,’ said Alexandra.
‘If you make long-distance calls,’ said Chrissie, ‘you should try the Mercury network. It’s cheaper.’
Alexandra called her agent at his home number, in Richmond. She thought it might steady her. She asked what the part under consideration was. Harry Barney said it was for the lead in a major drama feature, opposite Michael Douglas – high-budget, high-profile – the casting guy had been in the audience on the famous First Night, thought Ludd had star quality, wanted an English accent. But that was the way the cookie crumbled. The only person you couldn’t stand up for an audition was your husband’s corpse – Harry Barney coughed an apology. ‘Sorry. Never could express myself in these matters. Too much emotion.’
‘Harry, you loathed Ned.’
‘Yes, in life. But not in death. He was one of us.’
‘Why did you hate him?’
‘Not as strong as that, sweetheart. I didn’t take all that business too well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ned pulled strings to get Longriff the Doll’s House part. Everyone said it was going a bit far. Wife and girlfriend in the same production. I managed to get you Nora, but it was a struggle. She got it anyway, in the end. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Go slower, Harry. Ned and Daisy Longriff?’
‘Well, yes. You knew, didn’t you?’
‘No. But everyone else did?’
‘Jesus, I’m sorry. Alexandra, shall I come over?’
‘No, I’m just fine, Harry.’
‘It wasn’t anything serious, Alexandra. Never was. It was you he loved. Just had a funny way of showing it. The girls simply lay down in front of him. Anything for a good review. Of course, like as not he wouldn’t give it. That’s what I really hold against him. If you’re going to be corrupt, go the whole way. Half-measures only hurt. The sex was nothing. A man’s a man, girl. That’s why I chose to be gay. And for me it’s a choice; I could give it up any time I wanted. Joke?’
‘Joke, Harry.’
‘That’s my girl, that’s my Ludd. Jesus, one day I might stop all this and settle down and marry you.’
‘I’m flattered, Harry.’
‘Ned’s trouble was he was eaten up with envy. Couldn’t write, couldn’t act, couldn’t direct. Just loved theatre. And you, you could stand on your head and do it all. Envy’s a terrible thing.’
‘I can see that it is, Harry. Got to go now.’
‘I’ll put your more personal things into the small bedroom, shall I, Alexandra? And such bits of furniture as I think aren’t mine?’
Alexandra said if Chrissie didn’t go at once, she was calling the police. She, Alexandra, wanted proper documentation, proper consultation with her legal advisers, before any decision whatsoever could be made in relation to the property. She had her and Ned’s child to think about. Would Chrissie now just go? And how had Chrissie got in in the first place, anyway?
Chrissie said she had a key, she’d always had a key, she’d dreamed for years of using the key again and now she had. Alexandra was a marriage-breaker, a bitch, a cow, a slag; she’d ruined Chrissie’s life without a thought. Now it was her, Alexandra’s, turn.
But Chrissie went.
Alexandra waited for the locksmith to come and change the locks. Then she went to visit her mother.
27
Irene put Alexandra to bed in a nice bright attic room with eaves, its own television, a bathroom with fluffy pink towels and a view of the golf course. She gave her daughter buttered toast and Marmite, hot chocolate and two sleeping pills. Sascha plodded up the stairs and climbed in beside his mother. She held him in her arms and went to sleep.
She slept for fifteen hours until Sascha woke her by prising her eyes apart. He told her about the eight kittens. She told him Ned had died, gone to heaven, gone for a walk in a forest to look for God. Sascha asked if they could have one of the kittens. Alexandra said no, dogs didn’t like kittens and kittens didn’t like dogs. Sascha said yes they did. Couldn’t they send Diamond to go for a walk with Ned in the forest and not come back like Ned? Alexandra said yes, that wasn’t such a bad idea. She found she’d quite gone off Diamond.
Then she thought of Lucy Lint’s marmalade cat and said she’d only have a kitten if it was a tabby. Sascha cried and stamped.
Alexandra looked at Sascha and thought he was very like Ned. Really he was a stranger to her. She found it difficult to believe they were intimately connected, in the way people said. The fact was, she seemed to have suddenly un-bonded with Sascha. She hadn’t known that this was possible.
She presumed it would pass. It would have to. In the meantime she could act as she was trained to do. She would play loving mother.
‘Poor little Sascha,’ she said, ‘but never mind. We’ll see Daddy again in heaven.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Sascha. ‘I want to stay here for ever, with Gran and the orange kittens.’
‘But don’t you want to go home and see The Cottage and Diamond and all your friends?’
‘I don’t have any friends,’ said Sascha. ‘They take my toys and you make me share and then they get broken.’
‘There must be some grown-ups you like,’ said Alexandra.
‘I like Lucy,’ said Sascha. ‘She gives me toffees in the morning. You never do. She keeps them under the pillow especially for me. Oops.’
‘Oops, what?’
‘I wasn’t to say. There’s ghosts under the bed. They keep bumping in the night.’
Alexandra left Sascha doing somersaults on the bed, shrieking for joy in a way which would make social workers shiver, and crying, ‘Watch me, watch me!’ and went down to breakfast.
‘I told him,’ Alexandra said.
‘How did he take it?’ asked Irene. She wore a yellow track suit and had been out jogging. She was stirring honey into yoghurt. Her husband Abe, the banker, sat stolidly reading the Telegraph. They seemed a very happy couple.
‘I’m not sure he took it in,’ said Alexandra.
Sascha came down and said, ‘Ned’s gone for a walk in a forestand he isn’t ever coming back, so I don’t have to go home. I can stay here. I don’t like Theresa. She’s too big. ’He went out into the garden.
‘There’s no way,’ said Abe, ‘that Sascha can go home with you now, not in the state you are.’
‘What sort of state is that?’ asked Alexandra.
‘Bad,’ said Irene. ‘Come back and collect him in a week, when you’re ready. We’re not trying to steal him from you.’
‘I believe you,’ said Alexandra. ‘I think.’
She drove back to The Cottage. She liked driving. She turned on the radio and thought of nothing. Then she heard a programme called ‘Theatre in London Today’ and they were talking of Daisy Longriff’s performance in A Doll’s House. There was a discussion about art and nudity. Someone said it was like l
istening to Hamlet in Australian, and someone else said it was the most ravishing and intense performance he had ever seen. Someone said the theatre would be dark on Monday in remembrance of Ned Ludd, that Great Man of the Theatre, whose funeral was on that day: someone else said that was a rumour, to promote ticket sales. It was, they said, that Alexandra Ludd, probably the best serious female actor the country had, natural successor to Vanessa Redgrave etcetera, etcetera, was so prostrate with grief in their country home she might not be returning to the role. Well, thought Alexandra, now the bare-tits award goes to Daisy Longriff: I get to be serious. At last. But she didn’t think much. She switched to another programme. It was easier.
28
Theresa lived with her family in Pig Cottage, a small stone house standing on its own at the highest point of the Drovers’ Road, which led out of Eddon Gurney, over the hills to Selsdon, where there was a McDonald’s and a library. In the past in these parts, Ned had told Alexandra, the shorter valley roads would become impassable in winter: mud, mire and flood water could make them dangerous. Then the shepherds would drive their flocks along the summits of the hills, and so the Drovers’ Road came into existence – through high places barely fit for habitation: windy, bleak and far from water. Pig Cottage was reputed to be haunted – passers-by would report strange blue flickering flames burning within – but that was when it was derelict, and had no doors and windows, and the local farmer used it to sty his pigs. The methane from their slurry would on occasion spontaneously ignite. The council had eventually requisitioned the place, allegedly to house the troublesome Nutwich family, though some said to annoy the water company. There was no electricity, no piped gas – but the Water Board, under new regulations imposed upon it by the Government, had been obliged to provide a water supply, at great cost. Mrs Nutwich had eight children, of whom Theresa was the youngest but by no means the biggest. By some trick of the genes – her side, for the children were by different fathers – all were wellabove six foot tall, and broad, strong and pale with it: slow and amiable. Ned said it was nothing to do with genes: it was the pig slurry did it.
Alexandra could see the problem of remaining in the neighbourhood. Everywhere she went she would remember something Ned had said, or done, and be humiliated because what she had thought special to her was not. Where she had seen him-and-her, Ned had seen him-and-her-her-her. She, Alexandra, was diminished by an equivalent fraction of the number of ‘hers’. If there were too many she might all but vanish away, dwindled to the point of invisibility.
Alexandra had dropped off and collected Theresa often enough. She had never been inside the house. The Nutwiches were known to be private people. But now the door was opened by a very pregnant young woman, fine-boned enough to snap, skinny and small except for the vast bump in her middle, tight under stretched fabric. She would be one of the boys’ wives; a privileged stranger. Alexandra hoped the birth wouldn’t prove difficult.
The room was small, square, cosy and stuffy, a three-piece suite in an orange checked fabric; comfy chairs drawn up round the TV; a round table, a Madonna in a gold frame, bleeding hearts on the walls. Over the table was her, Alexandra’s, best lace tablecloth (Belgium, 1835, approx. £230). A fire burned in the grate, glittering on Ned’s copper fire-tongs in their stand (1910 Arts and Crafts, £550). A Victorian birdcage with a canary in it, singing. So this was where the birdcage (1851, Great Exhibition style, £900) had gone. It had disappeared, mysteriously, from the barn, though no one had been quite sure when.
Theresa came down the stairs slowly; thud-thud-thud. She scowled at her pregnant sister-in-law.
‘We don’t let people in here,’ Theresa said. ‘This is our place.’
‘Sorry,’ said the pregnant girl, and scuttled.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Theresa. ‘It’s not the way it looks.’
‘I’m not thinking anything,’ said Alexandra, wishing she had not come round, not come in. ‘Though I would like the tablecloth back, some time. No hurry.’
‘You just shove it in the wash,’ said Theresa. ‘I look after it properly. It’s so delicate. It’s antique. It’s safer here.’
‘All the same,’ said Alexandra, mildly.
‘So, what do you want?’ asked Theresa. On her home ground she seemed a different person. More bad-tempered, more aggressive. ’All the way up here! It’s my day off. I deserve some peace. I’ve been upset too. You think you’re the only one, but you’re not.’
Alexandra said she understood that: everyone was in quite a state. She explained to Theresa that Sascha wouldn’t be back for a week: could Theresa hold on for that long? Theresa said she supposed so, if Mrs Ludd didn’t mind paying her to waste her time.
Alexandra said she didn’t. She would need help sorting Ned’s clothes. Perhaps Theresa could come down to The Cottage and help her, and then she wouldn’t be wasting her time.
Theresa said she wasn’t paid to sort through dead people’s clothes, she was paid for child care.
Theresa sat down in an armchair, pushing the arms out with her bulk as she did so. They were already half-off: effectively, they were hinged. Alexandra sat in the chair opposite. A small child with a grubby face and bare legs ran between them, and pinched some potato crisps from a glass bowl which Alexandra observed to be her own, leaded crystal, French, circa 1705,£830. Theresa slapped the child’s legs as she ran off. The hand was large: the blow sudden. The child let out a howl.
‘Don’t worry, I don’t hit yours,’ Theresa said. ‘Ned said not to so I don’t, but life with Sascha would be a lot easier if someone did. That kid is spoiled rotten.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean by spoiling,’ said Alexandra. ‘Do explain.’
‘You are a sarcastic bitch,’ shouted Theresa, getting to her feet. The chair came with her. Theresa had to knock it away from her flesh. One of the arms finally detached itself so it fell separately. ‘Mr Ludd gave me all these things. You can’t prove he didn’t.’
‘I’m not giving them a second thought,’ said Alexandra.
‘Who do you think you are, anyway?’ said Theresa. ‘You never loved Ned, you don’t even love your own child. Everyone knew that. You just had him to save your marriage. Why bother to have a baby at all if you just give it to someone else to look after? That’s what beats me.’
‘Because I have to work,’ said Alexandra. She could see that without Ned’s presence in the house Theresa as child care was impossible. She had already given in: she could hardly be bothered to fight.
‘You don’t have to work,’ said Theresa. ‘No one has to work. You just love it, your face in the papers. If you wanted to, you could live off benefits like everyone else, but you don’t want to. You have to be someone special. You have to have someone like me to be better than, so you can boss them about. I’m so sorry for that poor little boy: he needs a firm hand and a visit to a psychologist. He’s disturbed.’
‘It was your red bracelet on the bed,’ said Alexandra. ‘Just your style. If it isn’t stolen, it’s plastic.’
‘Nothing happened,’ said Theresa. ‘I swear it on my life.’
Alexandra wanted to ask the nature of the non-happening but in the end didn’t. What was the point of that either?
‘I guess we’ve reached the parting of the ways,’ she said.
29
Alexandra called by the morgue. Ned had company now. A metal trolley on wheels had been placed next to his. A small group of shocked relatives stood and stared at the body of a thin, elderly woman. Her jaw was bound to keep it closed. It was strange, thought Alexandra, how few people seemed to die, considering everyone did; how few dead bodies a living person encountered; how shocking it was when they did.
Alexandra had never hit Ned in life: though he had hit her once, during the herpes episode. But she hadn’t taken it badly; rather she had taken responsibility for his state of mind. She had assumed he was part of her, she an extension of him. She thought perhaps women minding men hitting them was a re
cent cultural innovation: in the past women had never tried to be separate from their husbands, or claim their separate personality. The aim was to incorporate, not stay distinguished. His flesh yours, your flesh his. But Ned’s death had put a stop to all that. So far as she was concerned, his part of the union was dead, hers went on living. Separation, individuality, had been forced upon her. She would have hit him now but could hardly do so in front of the old lady’s relatives. One was meant to respect the dead, unless the Government declared them an official enemy, in which case you just shovelled them into common graves so you didn’t get the plague. Alexandra aimeda quick kick at the trolley wheels instead: the trolley clanged into the end wall. Ned’s body shuddered, but stayed in place. She walked out. The others stared after her, further bewildered.
30
Alexandra called at Elder House. Abbie’s coolness had evaporated. She greeted her friend with a hug. Arthur wasn’t there. He had taken the students on a coach trip to Lyme Regis, where they were to have cream teas and look at Jane Austen’s house. Abbie was making plum jam. The air in the kitchen was full of a pungent sweetness. Abbie hoped the plums were not too ripe. They should have been picked a week earlier. ‘But you were looking after me,’ said Alexandra. ‘So they stayed on the bough.’
‘True,’ said Abbie. ‘But being with you at such a time was the most important thing of all. We’re friends.’
‘But you were angry with me yesterday,’ said Alexandra, ‘and now you’re not. Why’s that?’
Abbie didn’t reply. So Alexandra described to her, complete with mime and appropriate facial expressions, the circumstances in which she had fired Theresa.
‘I always knew Theresa was hopeless,’ said Abbie. ‘You’re so easily conned, Alexandra, you can hardly blame others when they do it.’ And Abbie went on at some length as to how Theresa had been OK while Ned was there to keep an eye on things, but now what was she, Alexandra, to do: she couldn’t just land Sascha with a stranger at a time like this; he’d be traumatised enough; losing his father, his mother away all week. Babies were one thing: you could pay through the nose and get qualified nannies, but four-year-olds knew too much of what was going on ever to be shuffled off and not know it. Alexandra would just have to give up work for a time. Abbie knew Alexandra would be bored stiff in the country. She’d miss the thrills and the publicity and the media attention, but once a woman had a child, she was a mother first and foremost, and Alexandra must put Sascha before anything. Otherwise she was being selfish.
