Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  It was by being so meanly capricious with his approval and acceptance that he kept the women around him in a state of adoration. I hesitate to say this of the alleged love of my life but show him a female and he’d try to fuck up her mind.

  Mind-fucker is not a phrase you often hear these days, but when men were men and women were women, and men had the power and the money and women did not, there were lots of them. They were emotional manipulators, insidious, and why I’m still brooding about him and why Venetia is still painting hopeless paintings, which, now she has access to the CiviStore and an unlimited supply of acrylic paints, are thicker and brighter and more defiant than ever. Good for her.

  What I do is call Venetia up and she answers and I ask her if she remembers playing with a little girl called Florrie. She replies, ‘Yes, of course I do. Her father had just killed himself and she cried all the time. I met her again on Friends Reunited, and went round to visit her once or twice. She has a daughter called Amy. Ethan is going out with her. She’s a bit bonkers but at least she has a brain. Why?’

  ‘They’ve borrowed my house to have a meeting,’ I say.

  ‘They’re always having meetings,’ says Venetia. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s only Redpeace. They bring their own coffee.’

  ‘Why can’t they have the meeting in your house?’

  ‘They tried,’ said Venetia, ‘but you know what Victor is. He hates having people in the house he hasn’t invited himself.’

  Well, yes, I do know about that kind of thing. Karl was like that, and Edgar, whom I lived with in this house for seven years from 1982 to 1989. Karl filled the house with painters and antique dealers but couldn’t stand writers, and Edgar filled it with Tory MPs and journalists and conspiracy theorists and couldn’t stand novelists, and let me know it, even though it was my house he had moved into. Perhaps it’s just a male trait. Or merely human: I daresay some women are like that about their husbands’ friends.

  I must get out of the habit of writing ‘husband’. So few women are married these days. Correction: ‘Some women are like that about their partners’ friends.’

  Edgar and I parted on political grounds in 1989, when the Wall came down and that was the end of the Soviet Union and the fear of war. I rejoiced, but Edgar said it was just the beginning of the Sovietization of Europe. As freedom fled east, control would flee west. Europe was just the USSR Lite: the majority of the new European Commissioners were ex-Stasis and the like from the old East Bloc. He was so far to the right, politically, that in the end I couldn’t bear it, and asked him to go. That was a surprise too. He was terrific in bed but in the end principle seemed more important than sex. But I was, of course, growing older.

  Venetia and I chatted a little about this and that – I didn’t mention the bailiffs. Somehow I’d manage to find the money to keep them off. I always had in the past, why not again? I was not finished yet. Then Venetia said, quite casually, she thought she was converting to Judaism.

  Another Surprise

  I said I must just go and switch off the kettle, and by the time I came back I had composed my voice, so it sounded, I hoped, quite normal.

  ‘Any religion is better than none, I suppose,’ I said. ‘But it will upset Amos.’

  ‘What’s Amos got to do with anything? He goes his own way. Actually, you’re quite right, when I mentioned it he kicked your mother’s old dresser so hard he hurt his toe, and then he slipped and fell over. I’m afraid I laughed, it was so funny. But he was having a real temper tantrum, the way he did when he was four. So no, I reckon he doesn’t much go for it.’

  I thought that was probably an understatement. Amos had put up with having one quarter of a mother for years – Victor, Ethan and Mervyn taking the other three – now his mother was betraying the years he had had her to himself, before she lugged him off to live with Victor and build a family which didn’t really include him. Now she was making quite sure it didn’t. No wonder he was behaving oddly. Perhaps the boy wasn’t mad, just upset. I was being silly, elderly, mad myself.

  There were rather odd noises coming from upstairs. A banging, as if someone was hammering. And the chandelier was clinking, as if Karl was home again, and storming about the house, complaining of the idiocy of punters, the price of petrol, the failure of governments, all the things men complain about. The house had been female for too long.

  ‘I don’t think you ought to do it, Venetia,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

  ‘Oh, don’t sound so pious, Mother,’ said Venetia.

  I apologized for interfering. If I hadn’t told Cynthia not to go to Turkey she might very well not have gone, because that’s the way people are – contrary – and would still be alive today. I do try not to tell people what to do, but I am one of nature’s ‘why don’t you?’ people and it’s hard to resist. Other people’s lives seem so easy compared to one’s own, if only they’d do the sensible thing.

  ‘I suppose that means Victor has been taken back into the fold,’ I said. ‘It’s quite a business, isn’t it, being accepted as Jewish?’

  ‘It’s long, serious and difficult,’ she said. ‘But now all the children are away from home I have the time.’

  I was conscious of a reproach here. My fault. I had given her three boys a house in the days when Victor lived on a Cancer Cure salary, without proper consultation, thus enabling them to live away from home. And now of course Venetia missed them and her life was empty and if I didn’t like the idea of her converting to Judaism, too bad, I had only myself to blame. And Victor would think me the worst kind of interfering mother-in-law.

  I said mildly that I thought all scientists were atheists and dead against the idea of an Intelligent Designer. She said these days Victor was more a management man than a scientist. It seemed he had a real logistical flair.

  ‘But no more Nobel potential?’ I shouldn’t have said that.

  ‘It’s rather more important than that,’ my daughter said, and the bell rang again and since Amy was upstairs I went to answer it. She’d said there was one more to come.

  I opened the door to a tall, vigorous, quick-moving man with thinning dark hair, beetly eyebrows in need of a trim, and a protruding jaw which instead of making him look Neolithic and subhuman, made him on the contrary look intelligent, as if the jaw went ahead determined to search out the truth. He was not spindly tall, but simply scaled up all over, like a male hero in a fifties action film. He did not stand relaxed on the doorstep, but impatiently, like a runner waiting for the off. I stood back to let him pass. He was the kind of man I would have gone for as a young woman, which alas I no longer am. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him. But that is true of many people I meet these days. They look familiar and turn out to be the children, or even grandchildren, of old friends, colleagues, lovers, neighbours. If you stay in one place for long enough, familiar genes congregate.

  ‘They’re upstairs,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad of that. The Cam on the corner’s not far off being mended. They’re working on it now,’ he said, as he went on up. He had an Irish accent.

  ‘I didn’t know it was broken in the first place,’ I said. He paused and looked down at me.

  ‘You’ll not be opening the door to anyone else then, will you,’ he said.

  He was accustomed, evidently, to issuing instructions and having them carried out. I resolved to open it to anyone who came.

  The penalties for interfering with CiviCams had become severe. Five minutes having fun stoning them to death and, unless you were quick, because other cameras always filmed the cameras, you could end up in prison for three years. Surely the Redpeace lot hadn’t dared put them out? Part of me was on their side, part of me wasn’t. I realized who the tall handsome man with thinning hair was. Now there was a surprise and a half. Henry, orphan son of Karl and the Dumpling; not the feeble wretch I had assumed, but a man of vigour and substance.

  Son Of The Dumpling

  When Karl left me in 1975 it came as a total s
urprise, and not a good one. Indeed, it all but destroyed me. After more than thirty years you’d have thought I’d be over the shock but it doesn’t seem to work like that. Time somehow bypasses these profound personal affronts, as water will flow around and not over a stone. The current may smooth the worst of the jagged bits of hurt but not so you’d particularly notice. There’s the rock, still there, harder and more obdurate than anything else. These are affronts to one’s identity – and it is a matter of identity: one’s very being, if you are prevented from making the connection between you now and you then, sends you off into an alternative universe not of your choice and not of your liking.

  Polly, in her early adolescence at the time, and who even then saw the world through a feminist lens, maintained Karl left me because I grew too successful. He had married me as a sexy, pretty, nice little earner, an antidote to his previous wife, also a painter, who had turned out to be quite bonkers and dangerously bonkers at that, like my own Aunt Faith. Perhaps that was why I was so instantly attracted to Karl? It’s not just that people with similar problems cluster together, so do their relatives – the one’s who’ve had to cope. Or perhaps I just liked Karl’s looks, short but stocky and muscular, like Picasso. The smooth olive skin, the slightly cruel, sensuous curve of the mouth, the smell of good food and wine and garlic and sex that seemed part of him. When we got together he was the serious one, the artist, the one people took seriously, And then suddenly there I was, icon of the feminist movement, treated with reverence as a writer, and the eyes of the world shifted, though only briefly, to me.

  Men almost never leave a wife for an empty bed – I remember my friend Claudia saying that – and though of course Karl claimed he left for reasons of integrity, it was also because he had taken up with the Dumpling, an art student sculptor of unimaginably stolid female nudes. She had integrity. I apparently had none.

  I woke one morning, late back the night before from a rehearsal, so tired I couldn’t remember afterwards whether Karl was in the bed or not when I got into it. But anyway in the morning his side of the bed was cold. Nor did he ever return to it. An explanatory letter came a few days later. I would, he observed, have scarcely noticed his departure, so busy making money was I, let alone mind if he was gone; as I keep saying, he was a mind fucker. He and the Dumpling had gone to live in Somerset in a farmhouse with studio space and a good north light, where they could both work, without the disturbance of phone or newspapers, or the constant eruption of PR I found so essential in my life.

  ‘My relationship with the Dumpling, in case you’re wondering,’ he wrote, ‘is not a sexual one and never has been. We have a bond between us in the love, understanding and the practice of art, which, frankly, is not your scene.’

  They planned a smallholding, where they would keep sheep and hens and geese, and live a country life, in tune with nature. (The return to nature was big in the mid-seventies: the price of oil had gone up to 50p a gallon and the end of urban civilization was at hand. The intellectual middle classes fled in droves to live in farmhouses, eat from the hedgerows and make nettle soup.)

  Dumpling loved animals, Karl explained. He was divorcing me for adultery; the papers would be in the post as soon as he got round to it. He claimed in the letter, in the familiar handwriting that I so loved, in dark-blue ink on yellow paper, ‘You have been serially unfaithful to me, and I have evidence of it.’

  ‘Have you?’ asked my friend Claudia.

  She is a screenwriter and now lives and works in Hollywood. I sent for her when I received the letter. When she came round I was sitting on my bed staring into space. I stayed like that for a day or two, after she’d left. I lost three pounds in two days. Despair and anger can do that to you, can burn up the calories like nothing else, but it’s not a way I’d recommend.

  ‘Have you?’ she asked.

  ‘There is some truth in his claim,’ I acknowledged. ‘But nothing that meant anything.’

  It hadn’t either. The idea of free sex and ‘open marriage’ was all the rage in the progressive political and social circles I’d been moving in, especially amongst the men, though the women tended to need some talking into it. Jealousy in a woman was an ignoble and anti-revolutionary act and enough to have her discarded. It took the eighties and Aids to sober everyone up again.

  ‘What evidence?’ Claudia asked.

  ‘I do write love letters sometimes,’ I said. ‘I do like to express myself in writing. I am a writer, after all.’

  And I had missed the box file marked LL – for Love Letters – with all the drafts and redrafts in it. I’d thought my secretary must have misfiled it and forgotten to check up. That was before the days of computers. One made hard copies and kept them in box files.

  ‘You’re insane,’ said Claudia. ‘Why didn’t you burn them?’

  ‘I was keeping them for my archive,’ I said.

  My archive – all the writings and rewriting and memorabilia had been sold to the University of Indiana; I was proud of that. I liked to think of the future poring over my love life, and who was to know they weren’t fiction anyway? Drafts for some novel?

  ‘He’s going to come back, isn’t he?’ I said to Claudia. ‘He’s not going to break up everything we have. He’s gone a bit mad. He’s seeing this new therapist who doesn’t like me. He couldn’t possibly do this to the children, to me. We need each other. We’re made for each other. He keeps saying so. We were nothing, either of us, until we met. Our lives were a mess and then suddenly everything came together. He just has this rural dream about hedgerows and living next to nature. I didn’t take enough notice of it. He’s just trying to frighten me so we move from here and go and live in the country together.’

  ‘No, darling,’ said Claudia, ‘he’s divorcing you. He’s found some art student he prefers to you and he’s moved in with her and he’s going to claim this house and try to make you keep him and his new bint on your outrageous earnings.’

  ‘But they don’t have a sexual relationship,’ I said.

  Claudia just laughed.

  ‘He’s been to a divorce lawyer who’s told him what to say and he’s saying it.’

  I was silent while I took this in.

  ‘You can put it all in a novel,’ she added. ‘You’re a writer. Nothing’s wasted.’

  It was all there, I could see. How I’d failed to look after him, humiliated him in public, made him leave the house in unironed shirts, would ask his friends to dinner and then forget so he had to run out to the fish and chip shop (that happened once), was so busy with my (so-called) ‘career’ that I would forget to collect the children from school (twice) and so on. It all added up to ‘mental cruelty’. Concepts of feminism were by no means established in the land: certainly not in the law courts. Wives in the eyes of the law were still meant to stay home and serve men. So of course Karl got his divorce, and of course he’d been in bed with her all along. The girls told me. They quite liked her.

  I fought the case. I lost it, threw a lot of money down the drain and annoyed my daughters. The press got hold of it, and Venetia and Polly, not to mention a couple of passing (married) lovers, dug up by Karl’s divorce lawyers, all had their pictures in the papers. Karl blamed me for that. Karl blamed me for everything. But at least the law at the time was such that I only had to support him, not, as would happen today, share all my income with him for the rest of my life. My magic life.

  But my magic life stopped when Karl and I divorced. There was trouble with agents, lawyers, accountants, libel cases: money still poured in but poured out even faster. I bought Karl out of the house to his rage: he had planned to have it – the Dumpling loved it – and the house in the country too. His folly for having put half of it in my name. But in his anger he stripped the place of all our possessions – he claimed them as ‘stock’ from his antique shop, and got away with it – and there was nothing left of our past except the heavy brass fish door-knocker of which I am currently so conscious. I replaced everything. I spared no expense.
The battered old Welsh dresser turned into Chippendale. The Hotpoint washing machine became a Bosch. If I could not have love I would have nice things. The resale value of them is precisely nothing.

  And then Edgar moved in – I could not bear an empty bed – and he and his cabal of right-wing friends engaged in some strange Pinochet-friendly scheme, which involved me becoming a Lloyd’s Name. In 1993 that was more of my capital down the drain. Polly said it served me right for getting involved in insurance scams. I took her point, and held my head low in shame. I bit back mentioning that it was thanks to the scam that she and Corey and the two girls could afford a house. It was in the days before liar loans got going and they needed £15,000 for a deposit, so I helped out, and was glad to do so, although I didn’t much like the house they chose. It had good high ceilings but was damp and dark. Then Corey tore a ligament in his thigh and his dreams of being an international rugby player, Samoa’s pride, were thwarted. Polly’s principles kept her at the coalface as a teacher, rather than moving on and up through the educational career structure into administration, where she belonged, and a more comfortable life. They needed me, and as always I obliged.

  Had they shown gratitude, now that would have been a surprise. Both girls seem to have picked up Karl’s attitude to me, and feel it is their inalienable right not to take me seriously, to see my success as a fluke, a symbol of the cultural degradation of our times. I have been found out. Many a lady writer feels that at the best of times: that she will be unveiled any minute as an impostor. That the review will one day appear: ‘Why have we been taking this writer so seriously? She can’t write for toffee.’ And that will be that. It is not a worry that plagues men. On the whole, women who get bad reviews crawl under the blankets and hide: men writers roar and go round and beat up the critic, or at least think about it.

  After Edgar there was Julian from what was then Czechoslovakia in my bed. He was a very family-oriented man, which I like, but which meant his brother and then his mother and sisters were living with me, and he was not, and no-one was able to work until they had visas. Which took ages. And Karl got cancer of the liver, which is terminal, and very quick. I went to see him in hospital and we agreed we should never have parted. Everything had gone wrong for us both since we did.