by Fay Weldon
Wendy was a clever girl, and Casey had once suggested to Miranda that she at least try Wendy out as a feature writer, but Miranda just laughed and said that was not the way things worked. Perhaps if Miranda had seen how they could or might work, the magazine’s circulation would have risen, not fallen. Or perhaps it was merely that Miranda would not, would not have an astrology feature in her magazine at a time when all the others were going over to them—for everyone, it seems, likes to know what’s going to happen next. (All Miranda kept saying, in her pretty clear voice, was this: ‘Load of old nonsense. Won’t have stars in my magazine.’)
What happened next was that all of a sudden capitalism seemed at the end of its tether. OPEC put up oil prices: the price of petrol rose to 50p a gallon (no one could see how, if energy wasn’t going to be cheap and freely available any more, cities could possibly continue), inflation went up another seven per cent, and on the day (11 June) that Miranda went to Harrods and found there were only two shades of tights available (light and dark) as if it were World War II again, it snowed. It was apparent that even the seasons were out of joint—a clear sign of impending catastrophe. That lunch time she went to a drinks party and was assured by a senior civil servant that ration books for food and necessities had already been printed and would be circulated by July, and in the afternoon she went to see Astro Aster, her boss, and was told it might be better if she went back to feature-writing and let someone else try their hand at being editor. ‘Someone else’ Miranda Casey imagined would be Teresa ‘Tinkerbell’ Wright, who had lately been seen at the Mirabelle with Astro Aster, but never mind all that: Tinkerbell was a good journalist and turned out to be a fine editor, and the magazine went from strength to strength, presently with two full pages in every issue devoted to astrology, and at least one or two surveys on the sexual habits and ambitions of its readers—always a circulation booster. No slouch, Tinkerbell!
‘I think the end of the world is coming,’ said Miranda to Casey that night. They drank champagne to cheer themselves up.
‘The end of the city,’ said Casey. Three budgerigars had been found with their feet turned up at the bottom of the cage. It had been a hot, hot June day and Hattie who was in the middle of her O-levels—once they were in July; in 1974 they were in June: if these days they are in May, why that’s all the more time marking (which is paid) and all the less time studying (which is unpaid), so that can only be an improvement—had opened the windows and Casey was convinced the poor creatures had died of lead poisoning. Though some might say it was a nasty opposition of maleficent planets that caused this misfortune on this day along with so many others: not lead at all. Or perhaps Miranda was being punished for her lack of astrological faith. But how will we ever know?
Hattie came in from her History exam pale and crying and said she thought she’d failed every single O-level and she wasn’t bright enough to get to University and all she’d ever wanted to do was work with horses, and why were her parents so horrible to her, and instead of saying, ‘It’s your hormones, dear,’ Miranda said, ‘We’d better move to the country.’
And so they did. Casey produced his estate agents’ lists with a flourish. He thought they should go southwest—to Wiltshire, say, (horse country) or Somerset (goat country)—not too near London yet not impossibly far.
‘Goat country?’ asked Miranda, and Casey explained that Somerset was the kind of place where people bred goats to provide non-allergenic milk for babies. (The world was not yet additive- or colorant-conscious, but there were faint early ecological and nutritional stirrings down in Somerset, and Casey was conscious of them.)
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goat close to,’ said Miranda cautiously, and Hattie said, ‘Well, I have and they’re horrid; let’s go to Wiltshire. Horses are groovy, goats aren’t.’ (The word ‘groovy’ was still just about passable, at the time. Just about. But Hattie never got things quite right.)
They found a house in Somerset, down on the levels, on the flat green peat plains; a property contained by the squared-off runnels of a network of dykes, edged with stocky, much-lopped willow trees. Five acres of it. They were in it within the year. They sold their London house for £40,000. (It is now worth £650,000. But it’s no use thinking ‘if only’ in property matters. Though Casey was to, many times, like so many of us.)
‘You’d have to have inner resources to live here,’ said Miranda, nervously, the first time she saw the house. It was a square stone house with creepers growing over it, and a kind of flat blank look. Hattie shuffled amongst spring nettles in bare legs and shrieked, thinking a thousand insects were biting her, but she didn’t move out of them. She’d never encountered such plants before. (She was a city child, and way back then school trips had scarcely been invented, so what was she to know about the country?)
‘You have got inner resources, Miranda,’ said Casey, firmly, and perhaps it was some kind of blessing, or else a command (after all, Miranda had promised to ‘obey’ Casey when she married him back in nineteen fifty-something, that being the habit of the times), because lo and behold all of a sudden Miranda did have inner resources. She put on her wellies and rubber gloves and unlocked the nettles from the soil, and remade the garden of Highwater House single-handed. She DIYed, and plastered and repaired one outhouse to make a design studio for Casey, and turned the old cider house into a study for herself. They meant to work and earn from Highwater House—he drawing, she writing. Casey would go up to his offices once a week: she would turn freelance, write articles about country life, visit editors and colleagues once a month. There was a post office, wasn’t there, not so far away, and a telephone, and friends would visit: no need to be out of touch, not these days. How modern they felt—those days. (Though in retrospect, long, long before the days of the fax and the answerphone and the bleeper and the cordless telephone and the high- speed train, it’s hard to see how they could seem so. Perhaps the sheer amazement of reaching the moon back in 1969—having rock-hard evidence that the skies were not magic but all too comprehensible—had not worn off.)
Wendy smiled and waited. She’d been brought up in the country. On Casey’s days in town she made sure the office tea came in porcelain cups with saucers; she threw out the rough-hewn rural pottery mugs which were thick and rough on the tongue but all the rage. She said if ever he wanted to stay over he could: she had a spare room. Casey said no thank you.
Casey had an aviary built for the budgerigars at the bottom of the garden: it was architect-designed. (The locals looked on with amazement.) During the long hot summer the birds died of heatstroke under the design-conscious glass roof. All but two, that is; a breeding pair fortunately; but something—badger, weasel, fox, who was to say—presently clambered in through the sluice tunnel and got those. Casey quite went off the idea of budgerigars. It was all too discouraging.
Hattie was right about her O-levels, at least. She failed the lot. Casey wanted her to go back to London and stay with aunts and go to a crammer’s but Hattie wouldn’t.
‘You moved me here against my will,’ she said. ‘Now put up with the consequences.’
She took a job as an apiary assistant, tending bees for Peatalone Honey in hat, veil and long white handling gloves and gown. She looked bulky. She was never slim: heaven knew where she got it from—Casey thin to the point of angularity; Miranda with her hand-span waist—.
Except within a short time Miranda’s waist grew muscular and thicker. The calves of her legs grew broad and tough. Her chin was more determined: her eyes more shrewd. The third pair of rubber gloves (how quickly the brambles punctured them) were the last she ever wore. She lost interest in feature-writing, or perhaps it lost interest in her.
For the move to the country is not good, career-wise (the ‘wises’ came in that decade, and have never gone away, more’s the pity), for journalist, musician or actor—anyone who works freelance and wants to be employed. You need to be in the heart of things—that is to say, not requiring the expense of a long-distanc
e phone call to find you, nor likely to charge expenses for the journey up for an interview or briefing. If it’s you or someone else a taxi-ride away, the someone else gets the job. But Miranda didn’t mind. Miranda had her animals. Animals admire you, love you, need you, watch you: animals don’t promote you and then demote you: animals don’t prefer Tinkerbell Wright to you or judge you by the length of your skirt: they obey you, you don’t obey them. The only thing is, animals multiply—then what do you do? Eat them?
‘Eat them!’ said Casey, of the twenty-four black-faced Jacob sheep. ‘To the slaughterhouse with them, eat them!’ They’d bought four in to keep the grass down. One ram, three ewes. That, in a season (for they were fecund and healthy sheep), made three rams, seven ewes. Two seasons on and the incestuous flock was up to twenty-four, and the young rams were killing each other, butting and horning to death, and there wasn’t enough grazing land available.
‘Eat them!’ Hattie said. She was courting a fellow beekeeper, an eighteen-year-old lad with no small talk and red knuckly hands.
(‘She’s not going to marry him or anything?’ worried Casey. ‘Of course not,’ Miranda assured him. ‘She’s not as silly as that.’)
No one wants to buy young rams; you can’t even give them away. They got as far as the freezer and there they stayed. ‘Let’s not keep sheep any more,’ said Casey. But Miranda didn’t listen. She loved sheep. She bought a bigger freezer and gave joints away to the friends from London—though, unfortunately, they came visiting less and less often. They turned out to have been more colleagues than friends.
Then there were the dogs. You have to get a puppy if you live in the country. Of course the puppy grows up into a bitch and it seems unkind not to let nature take its course and before long you have nine more puppies and you can’t find homes for all of them because the father’s unknown (a puppy’s father doesn’t have to have a pedigree but it does seem to need an address) so you keep two—
And cats. Everyone loves cats. And hens. Chickens are adorable. Ducks are really witty. Geese are silly but brave. And all multiply.
‘Why not stay the night?’ asked Wendy of Casey. Wendy didn’t even have a cat. She didn’t like the smell of animals, she said. She could just about put up with a budgie, but that was all.
And dogs leap up and put muddy paws on clean clothes and these days Casey kept his good suits in the office and changed when he got there. He thought he’d better stay up in town a couple of days a week. The firm was busy.
‘No thanks,’ said Casey to Wendy, and he stayed with his aunts. But he did slap her bottom (no feminist she) and add, ‘You’re a very wicked woman, Wendy.’
Miranda was no longer interested in the rights of women, the vaginal orgasm, the cuisine of India or any of the things she used to know and care about. Now she read Pigs and Their Care and The Happy Poultry Keeper and Casey would crack open his breakfast egg (so many eggs!) and like as not find a baby chicken in it.
‘I say, Miranda,’ he said. ‘Let’s go on holiday. China, or somewhere.’
‘I can’t,’ she said briefly. ‘I can’t leave the animals.’
‘Stay over,’ begged Wendy. ‘You know you want to.’
‘Can’t,’ said Casey, firmly. ‘I love Miranda.’
Then Miranda got a goat. She got a nanny goat. Its name was Belinda. It was a delicate animal. Cold winds made it cough. It would be brought in to lie by the fire, in the evenings, with the four dogs. It smelt.
‘Miranda—’ said Casey.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ said Miranda. ‘But the goat-house isn’t wind-proof. I haven’t got round to mending it yet. I’ve been doing the sandbags.’
Highwater House had not got its name for nothing. In a wet winter it tended to flood.
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Hattie. ‘Since no one ever thinks about me I might as well get married.’
And so she did, to the young man with the knuckly hands.
She sank into the peat bogs without a trace except for three children in as many years: they lived in a council house and took The Sun and kept hens in the garden and were, or so Miranda thought, happy enough. Casey was horrified.
‘Well,’ said Wendy, ‘you have to be careful with girls. Where they are is where they marry. Are you coming home?’
‘No,’ said Casey.
The nanny goat needed a billy goat. Miranda bought one in. It was very stubborn and Miranda’s thighs were so black and blue from where she’d pulled and it had butted that she and Casey could seldom make love. One night the central heating failed and Casey came home late from London—nearly midnight—and found Miranda asleep in a chair by the fire and the two goats lying on the marital bed.
‘I’d move them’, said Miranda, waking, ‘if I could. But you know how stubborn goats are.’
‘I’ll soon move them,’ said Casey, taking up the DIY axe.
‘Don’t be so brutish,’ said Miranda. ‘Besides, where else are they to go? I’m having heating put in the goat-house but it isn’t ready yet.’
The next time Wendy asked, Casey said ‘yes’, and he never left her either. How sparkly clean Wendy’s house was: it smelt of polish and scent: she sprayed her one pot-plant with insecticide. There was nothing living in the place except him, and her, and one well-trained busy Lizzie.
These days Miranda has a whole herd of goats, organically fed, and sells the best and finest low-fat goat’s yoghurt to Holland & Barrett: she does a very good line in goat’s cheese too. And the few friends who still call say to one another, ‘But she’s beginning to look like a goat—little mean eyes and stocky legs and a whiskery chin!’ I’m afraid that they are right. But Miranda is perfectly happy about it, we mustn’t forget that.
Chew You Up and Spit You Out
A CAUTIONARY TALE
‘WELL, YES,’ SAID THE house to the journalist, in the manner of interviewees everywhere, ‘it is rather a triumph, after all I’ve been through!’ The journalist, a young woman, couldn’t quite make out the words for the stirring of the ivy on the chimney and the shirring of doves in the dovecote. She was not of the kind to be responsive to the talk of houses—and who would want to be who wished to sleep easy at night?—but she heard enough to feel there was some kind of story here. She’d come with a photographer from House & Garden: they were doing a feature on the past retold, on rescued houses, though to tell the truth she thought all such houses were boring as hell. Let the past look after the past was her motto. She was twenty-three and beautiful and lived in a Bauhaus flat with a composer boyfriend who paid the rent and preferred something new to something old any day.
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ she said, ‘earn our living and leg it back to town.’
But she stood over the photographer carefully enough, to make sure he didn’t miss a mullioned window, thatched outhouse, Jacobean beam or Elizabethan chimney: the things that readers loved to stare at: she was conscientious enough. She meant to get on in the world. She tapped her designer boot on original flagstone and waited while he changed his film, and wondered why she felt uneasy, and what the strange muffled breathing in her ears could mean. That’s how houses speak, halfway between a draught and a creak, when they’ve been brought back to life by the well-intentioned, rescued from decay and demolition. You hear it sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night in an old house, and think the place is haunted. But it’s not, it’s just the house itself speaking.
The journalist found Harriet Simley making coffee in the kitchen. The original built-in dresser had been stripped and polished, finished to the last detail, though only half the floor was tiled, and where it was not the ground was murky and wet. Harriet’s hair fell mousy and flat around a sweet and earnest face.
‘No coffee for me,’ said the journalist. ‘Caffeine’s so bad for one! What a wonderful old oak beam!’ The owners of old houses love to hear their beams praised.
‘Twenty-three feet long,’ said Harriet proudly. ‘Probably the backbone of some beached ma
n o’ war. Fascinating, the interweaving of military history and our forest story! Of course, these days you can’t get a properly seasoned oak beam over twelve feet anywhere in the country. You have to go to Normandy to find them, and it costs you an arm and a leg. And all our capital’s gone. Still, it’s worth it, isn’t it! Bringing old houses back to life!’
The girl nodded politely and wrote it all down, though she’d heard it a hundred times before, up and down the country; of cottages, farmhouses, manors, mansions, long houses: ‘Costs you an arm and a leg. Still, it’s worth it. Bringing old houses back to life!’ Spoken by the half-dead, so far as she could see, but then she was of the Bauhaus, by her very nature.
‘What’s the matter with your hands?’ the journalist asked, and wished she hadn’t.
‘Rheumatoid arthritis, I’m afraid,’ Harriet said. She couldn’t have been more than forty. ‘It was five years before we got the central heating in. Every time we took up a floorboard there’d be some disaster underneath. Well, we got the damp out of the house in the end, but it seems to have got into my hands.’ And she laughed as if it were funny, but the journalist knew it was not. She shuddered and looked at her own city-smooth red-tipped fingers. Harriet’s knuckles stood out on her hands, as if she made a fist against the world, and a deformed fist at that.
‘So dark and gloomy in here,’ the journalist thought and made her excuses and went out again into the sun to look up at the house, but it didn’t warm her: no, the shudder turned into almost a shiver, she didn’t know why. The house spoke to her, but the breeze in the creepers which fronded the upstairs windows distorted the words. Or perhaps the Bauhaus had made her deaf.
