by Fay Weldon
But she may even be right. Corey makes a better mother than she ever did. A whole race of new young men coo over their babies, cook, cry, splash themselves with perfume. They are more female than their teachers, who are all tough women (male teachers may be tarred by the paedophile tendency) like Polly, who shaves her head and looks like Sigourney Weaver in an Alien film. Perhaps the new men are trying to restore a natural balance, like Cynthia feeling she was entitled to a good time because she had just been through a bad. And we know how that ended.
‘This Henry,’ I say. ‘Does he come round to yours?’
‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘But sometimes he goes over to Venetia and Victor for one of their Friday-night things, and we go too and see him there.’
‘That must be quite a crowd,’ I say.
‘It is,’ she says. ‘It’s fun. And you get real chicken and not National, and real coffee, not roast parsnip or whatever it is.’
‘I’ve never seen him when I’ve been over there,’ I say. Not that I’ve been there much lately. Venetia tends to come down to me.
‘Well, of course you wouldn’t,’ says Polly. ‘Why would anyone in their senses ask him and you at the same time? You won’t acknowledge his existence any more than he acknowledges yours. You refused to take him in when he was a motherless child, and you could have done, but you wanted your sex life with the fascist Edgar, so Karl his father got liver cancer and died. So he’s not too fond of you.’
‘That is the most extraordinary way of looking at things,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you ought to write fiction. It’s in the family, you know.’
There is a crashing noise from upstairs and then silence. They have broken through.
‘What is that noise?’ asks Polly. ‘Are you all right, Mum?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Just some people next door doing building work.’
‘Lucky old them,’ says Polly. She asks why the matter of Henry has come up at all. Has Amos been making mischief?
I say as casually as I can that Amos referred to an Uncle Henry, and I didn’t think it could be her father’s by-blow because surely he was living somewhere in the Irish boondocks, the Dumpling’s mother having taken him in to rear him.
‘He is a man, Mother. He is fourteen years younger than I am. He is not a by-blow, my father and Claire were legally married.’
I ask if he has large feet. I do wish the past was over, but it never seems to be.
She is baffled. I don’t pursue the matter.
Three years back, she tells me, Henry lost his job in the private sector – he was some kind of pig farmer (that figures): but agricultural land is now of course communally owned and ‘efficiently’ farmed. He’d normally just have stayed in his old job and been paid by the State, instead of pocketing profits, but he’d run out on his own community, somehow managed to avoid Job Direction, and come to London.
‘So now what? He’s scrounging off you? He won’t be able to get a job. He’ll be on their lists.’
‘Victor found him a place in the NIFE Registry,’ said Polly.
So the by-blow of the Dumpling survived to really get his feet under my family’s table. And now he is in my house. I am indifferent to his good looks. He used his mother to steal my husband Karl for a father. And for all I know Karl conducted much of his affair with the Dumpling in that very same room upstairs, which was my and Karl’s marital bedroom, when I was off on some book tour in some other country, trusting. I feel the piercing pain in the heart that is physical jealousy, and which I can see I will never grow out of, and which I used to think would age me early and finish me off but no such luck. I keep my voice even.
‘But that’s pure and simple nepotism,’ I declared on the way. ‘Good Lord, this government. And nobody notices!’
‘No more than they noticed Ethan getting to be a NIFE driver, which is one of the cushiest jobs going. Nobody quarrels with Victor, he’s top dog at NIFE.’
‘Venetia quarrels with Victor,’ I said.
‘That’s what wives do,’ said Polly. ‘That’s why I never did anything so stupid as to marry.’ She quarrels with Corey all the time, but never mind.
‘And I don’t know why you describe Victor as a top man: he’s a scientist not a politician.’
‘Mum. NUG doesn’t have politicians, it has management. No-one trusts politicians after the mess they made of things. Victor gave up science ages back and is now NUG Manager, Grade 1, with special responsibility for nutrition.’
‘But that’s like being in the Cabinet. You’re joking.’
‘Mum, Venetia lives like a queen up there. Roast chicken, real coffee; they have a generator and their own power supply. There’s a crew from CiviFilm coming to take pictures of the family next Friday. There are security men everywhere, though, which is horrid. The houses on either side were taken down last week. There’s plaster dust everywhere. Hasn’t she told you?’
No, she hasn’t. She only told me she was thinking of converting to Judaism. Venetia, my little atheist! I wonder what’s really going on? Perhaps it’s some kind of bid for family harmony, respectability? I can see my side of the family must be something of an embarrassment to Victor if he’s set on political ascendancy. Well, even Bush had a brother. So does Obama.
Perhaps I should have opened the door to the bailiffs? Perhaps they came with good news? An NUG Manager Grade 1 is not going to let his mother-in-law go bankrupt. But no, no, life is not that easy. That’s Pollyanna thinking. But I am still brooding about the by-blow, in my house, upstairs. If he visits Victor, has a job with NIFE, and yet slaps up NUG is scum posters on repossessed houses for Redpeace, is he an agent provocateur? What kind of double-double agent can he be? Mind you, everyone knows that NIHE, the National Institute of Homes for Everyone, is at daggers drawn with NIFE, and everyone is on NIFE’s side because at least very few of us are hungry, just bored with our food, while many of us are homeless. When it comes down to it there is a lot to be said for efficiency.
Polly says she has to get on with her marking, she has to go. She says she’s glad she told me about Henry. But the more they put it off the more difficult it had become. No-one wanted to give me a heart attack; my resentment of poor Claire and Henry was bordering on the pathological, did I realize that?
‘Oh I do, I do,’ I say, and ask where Henry is living.
‘He’s squashing in with Ethan and Mervyn in Hunter’s Alley,’ says my daughter, ‘while he waits for housing allocation. He’s been there for months. I don’t know how they all manage. But the girls go over there a lot. They’re all over there now. They’ve got involved with Redpeace. Thank God they’re beginning to show an interest in something other than hair-bands and make-up.’
‘Well, no, Polly,’ I feel like saying, ‘actually they are all in my house at this very moment,’ but I don’t. I have learned some prudence over the years, and that sometimes it is better to think before one speaks, even – well perhaps especially – when family is involved. This is just such a moment. My house is bigger than Hunter’s Alley and at this very moment is getting even bigger, extending into No. 5, and perhaps the girls just came over here on impulse and forgot to tell their mother. But I think not. Because the pretty dusky girls at the door are of course my own grandchildren, Rosie and Steffie, and I had failed to recognize them. Polly must be quite right; I do neglect them. Mind you, they had been wearing hoods and the body language of today’s bouncy adolescent girls does not reflect that of their elders. Even so. But at least I had remembered their names without difficulty.
Rosie and Steffie, now joined with their cousins in an activist cell, planning to evade CiviCams (which is a criminal offence – as, I may say, is moving personal valuables to the detriment of the community interest) to race unseen through the potato field, and out into Rothwell Street, and no doubt use the same route to get in again, carrying with them, what? – forbidden posters, and leaflets today, leading to peroxide and fertilizer tomorrow – as NUG reminds us, in the same way governments in t
he past assured us, and equally falsely, that marijuana use today inevitably leads to heroin use tomorrow. All that sounds pretty active to me, the kind of activity governments since time began have not liked. I am too old for all this. Of course I am on my family’s side. Of course NUG is an atrocious government and protest is necessary. I just wish they’d go away and organize it somewhere else. Revolutionary zeal still has power to move me and play me Pete Seeger on YouTube and I am flooded with nostalgia –
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you or me,
Says I, ‘But Joe, you’re ten years dead,’
‘I never died,’ says he…
‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’
Says Joe, ‘I didn’t die.’
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Joe says, ‘What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize…
From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,’
Says he, ‘You’ll find Joe Hill.’
I am almost in tears at the memory of youthful togetherness we found in the Labour Movement of my teenage in the fifties. Yes, but even so, this is my nice home and I have a few years left and I would like to save what I can. I don’t want Redpeace damaging my prospects. If I’d bought No. 14 Hunter’s Alley instead of No. 11 there was an extra room and they could have had their meetings there, but No. 11 was £75,000 cheaper and my income was dropping – even I had noticed that. Royalties were coming in with a nought missing.
But it would be good to have the valuables out of the room upstairs; the Paula Rego and the possible Brancusi and the first editions. So much for Joe Hill and the Labour Movement.
That room upstairs served as my and Karl’s marital bedroom and many were the acts of joyous congress that took place there, and many the rows and reconciliations. He filled the whole house with stock from his antique shop, to my outrage, so I could hardly move through the rooms for stripped pine and old oak, and wood-worm and the smell of woodworm treatments filled the air, and I worried about little Polly breathing the stuff in, though Karl poohpoohed the idea. We are all much more health-conscious now.
And the stairs, on which Amos and I had taken refuge. Early on in the marriage I moved twelve aspidistra plants in their green Victorian plant holders, which sat two per stair so Polly was always tumbling down them, and put them outside the house, in a row along the iron railings, to wait for Karl to take them away. It was a public demonstration of my despair. But all Karl did was put them in our Volvo and take them round to his shop, and put his mattress on the floor and live there with them until I begged him to come home. And he sold the aspidistras to his best and prettiest lady clients and reported how he’d delivered them personally and how, unlike tasteless me, they had loved and appreciated their charm and worth. So I didn’t try that again.
In the back garden, where now Redpeace was constructing their rat run, Karl used to keep a chemical bleaching tank for pine furniture – we had grown the prettiest clematis, a Daniel Deronda, over the tank to disguise it, and it was covered by a safety mesh, but one night a cat jumped in and the mesh broke and the next morning Karl pulled the poor creature out; it looked like a dying rat, but Karl took it round to the vet, and fetched it back two days later, looking splendidly healthy, and parasite free, pumped full of anti biotics and oestrogens. And we set the creature free and she presumably went home and no-one would ever know the adventures she had had, other than to say, perhaps, ‘My, Kitty’s looking good! And her fleas have gone! Wherever she disappeared to, it was good for her!’ That sticks in my mind. So much goes on behind our backs we never get to know.
The antique business had not begun when I first moved into that bedroom. I was thirty, and Venetia was seven. Karl was an artist, and this was his studio and there was a couch he slept on. When I got pregnant with Polly he moved his easel out and put it up in the attic, along with some very doomy paintings by his previous wife, which had heretofore lined the room. She had gone mad (‘No wonder!’ I would screech, during our rows) and was confined to a mental institution; he was in the process of divorcing her when we met.
Just my luck, the times convulsing as they currently are, if that previous wife turns out to have had a child by Karl he forgot to mention and it just so happens she or he is now also a member of Redpeace. Political agitation is in Karl’s blood. Look at Henry; at Amos; Steffie and Rosie, one generation down, have caught it. Romantic radical impulse may run through my veins, but it doesn’t extend to action. I blame Karl, but I think he would have told me. He loved me, at least for the time being.
He moved his easel out with some ceremony, and said he had decided to give up art and be a married man and concentrate on being a stepfather to Venetia and father to the coming baby. And I was so impressed and pleased and thought, He really loves me! And he has not picked up a brush in ages anyhow, just filled the bedroom with dustsheets and the smell of oil paint and turps and on the floor old stiff hog brushes in cloudy jam jars, and now there will be room for a proper bed, and me as a fixture and true love triumphs, and all our troubles are over for ever. Instead of thinking, as I should have, Uh oh, before long he will blame me for stopping him painting. Which was what happened in the end. He said early on a man couldn’t be an artist and a family man and instead of saying what nonsense, of course you can, I took his word for it and believed it; I was a very idle thinker in those days, and if anyone said anything definite enough, I believed them, and besides I loved him and thought everything he said was wise and somehow final. I fear I still love him, even though he’s dead and gone, and died in circumstances that still make me wince with pain, in the arms of another, subsequent version of Dumpling I didn’t know about. Though I was with Julian by then. How can I blame him?
But now is now and there is the sound of moving furniture upstairs and from the ground floor next door the sound of creaks and bangs which make me think the back door is being freed. Amos said that Amy had the Neighbourhood Watch plans. How does she come to have these? Is she perhaps like some old Marxist and practising entryism? When you join the movement you want to subvert? Unless she is an NUG spy and practising a double bluff and checking out Redpeace? In which case I must warn Amos. But he must have thought that out for himself. And until I know more I am just going to say nothing, stay in bed and write, warn nobody, not even suggest to Polly that her children are in bad company. Well, when were one’s children ever not?
What Is Going On?
I am beginning to get a fair idea of what is going on. It concerns National Meat Loaf, the very stuff Amos and I were eating, along with the last of the tomatoes from my window box, when the first surprise knock on the front door came, and made us dive for the safety of the stairs. And it concerns NIFE.
Amos is an opportunistic fellow; I do not think he had any of this planned. I think the knock on the door came as much of a surprise to him as it did to me. But he knew once the bailiffs, or secret police, or whoever they were had gone, that there was a window of opportunity, that the CiviCams on the street were out of action – no doubt the bailiffs had reported it – and seized the opportunity to host a Redpeace meeting. The Neighbourhood Watch requires prior notification of any private gathering of six or more people, with names and ID scans – all the pubs have gone out of business, most of the café chains have gone; no custom and no coffee – so spontaneous gatherings are rare. Former town halls have been converted to CiviGet-Together Centres, and they’re safe and well regulated, as NUG keeps telling us, but they’re too gloomy and shadowy for comfort, haunted by the ghosts of dead aldermen and their pinchpenny ways. Mind you, pinchpenny is back in fashion.
Redpeace is not a banned organization – NUG ‘favours free speech’ – but I did look up the Redpeace website the other day and found it simply wasn’t there. There was just a ‘this page is unavailable’ message. Thinking back, I was prett
y sure there had been nothing particularly inflammatory there. Something boring about family values – that’s okay; NUG is pro-family, so long as the children are in school for most of their waking hours, and not overly influenced by their parents – and a more entertaining article about the theoretical right or otherwise of parents, sexually abused themselves as children, to be cloned and rear themselves into adulthood, thus putting right what has been spoiled by the father. Cloning stays a fairly contentious issue with the public, but NUG stays quiet on the subject. Speculation has it that livestock cloning was well under way during the Hunger – the alarming period when food prices rose so dramatically – but went wrong within the year and had to be halted. As had initially been feared, cloned animals – even once researchers were past the initial problems of inflammation of the brain and spinal cord disorders, overly large foetuses and placental problems which put the host as risk – turned out to have weak immune systems. Some new virus or bacteria was bound to come along and thrive, wiping out not only cloned animals but infecting the non-genetic stock. Which was what happened. Did Redpeace have some special interest? And NUG some new sensitivity? Was that why the webpage had been pulled? I must ask Amos, or such of the gathering upstairs who eventually saw fit to acknowledge my existence.
And talking about entryism, infiltration, what about Henry? Was it anything to do with Victor, initially working in stem-cell biotechnology, and now risen high in Food Excellence (slogan: Devoting Resources To Your Nutritional Satisfaction)? If Henry had been thrown out of a non-GM pig farm to make way for newer breeding methods, he was hardly likely to be a Victor fan. Yet he had used Victor’s influence to worm himself into a job at NIFE. But then so had Ethan.
