by Fay Weldon
Getting On With The Neighbours
The neighbours wouldn’t speak to me for a bit, it’s true, and they certainly resented me. The local girl made good is expected to move elsewhere, not just move back in. A few even dropped by at the wake, but apparently sneered at the sandwiches – accustomed as they were to ham or tuna doorsteps – mine being altogether too posh and dainty. With all the hammering and the scaffolding and the white vans coming and going and then my discarding of the brothers, local boys – the news quickly got about – and hadn’t I walked out as a teenager and gone on the streets and so broken my poor hard-working mother’s heart, and now put on airs and talked posh – nothing was ever forgotten or forgiven on their part – so why should I be any different? I got so fed up with it I almost chickened out.
Indeed, as you know, I was on the brink of moving somewhere less dear to my sentimental heart and more appropriate to an aspiring painter than was Standard Road, and had begun looking for an expensive property on the Embankment, where the sweet Thames runs softly by, as the poet Edmund Spenser wrote in 1596 shortly before his house got torched in the Nine Years War in Ireland. If ever I mention the house I nearly bought in Cheyne Walk, Clive quotes Spenser’s very long poem, the better to annoy:
Walked forth to ease my pain
Along the shore of silver streaming Thames,
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
Was painted all with variable flowers,
And all the meads adorned with dainty gems,
Fit to deck maidens’ bowers,
And crown their paramours,
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
I’d been in the middle of negotiations when the For Sale sign went up outside No. 24 Standard Road, and my thumbs started pricking and I withdrew from the negotiations and that was that! And so my bridal day never came. Just as well, no doubt.
When the Smithsons moved in the troilism whispers soon began and carried on for a bit – well, quite a while – a whole fifteen years was to go by until Rozzie came toddling out into the street and called me Gran, for some other scandal erupted and I daresay they soon forgot about the troilism after the Smithsons had been established at No. 24 in ‘newness of life’ for a time. The fabulous wedding had been and gone and now we all had to settle down and wait for Flora to do her stuff. But as I say, life seldom turns out the way one expects it to.
Flora took her time about it and we had to wait until March 1999 for her to come up with the goods. And all the time his Lordship lay in his frozen state in store as the Your Beautiful Baby Clinic went out of business and the Woolland Clinic took its place. Supposing there had been a power cut: supposing his Lordship had been thawed and refrozen and lost his virility in the interim? As it was he was offered at half price because of his anonymous provenance. And Clive could never ignore a bargain. For once he paid, not me. But the sample survived all and took root, and Rozzie wriggled and kicked her way into life thanks to me, as the hands of the clock moved from midnight to just one minute past midnight, and the Millennium Bug failed to clock in. Computer software was not expected by many to survive after January 1st 2000. However, it did. The robotic stuff did not even blink.
Victoria Hedleigh was born nearly thirteen years earlier, and so was expected to inherit after her father’s death, since the law of progeniture was soon to be changed, now that gender was what a person chose to be, not what others assumed. If Dilberne family history suggested that Victoria was a re-run of the bluestocking and lesbian Rosina (1883–1939), just as Rozzie was of the adventuress Rosina’s cousin Adela (1884–1944), so be it. Let those in the Bardo Thodol sort it out.
There it goes again – the schizotypal personality! Sorry.
Can it really be nearly four decades since the glorious wedding on the Heath? Well, time passes quickly if you’re having fun, even if it’s not exactly fun, just what one gets accustomed to. We had grown together, Clive and Xandra Smithson at No. 24, the eccentric Lady Petrie at No. 23. Like plants we have fused together to become inosculated, a somatic hybrid, as Rozzie was to describe us, not unkindly.
Of those thirty years or so the first thirteen were spent waiting for the Goddess Flora to come through with the promises she made on the day of the wedding when I sacrificed to the female deities to ensure a girl child. I didn’t mention that I added a gold ring to the flames to placate the God Mercury – as it happened my wedding ring from Lord Petrie, which caused such angst amongst his relatives. The ring didn’t burn, of course, but I later rescued it from the ashes, and have it by me to this day. No doubt Mercury, God of intelligence and wit, played a part when they were sorting things out in the Bardo Thodol and Rozzie eventually came down, beautiful little prodigy that she was.
It was in those waiting, childless thirteen years that Xandra climbed patiently towards the top of her NHS career ladder, Clive battled with his voice and professional problems (and if I may say so his own vanity) and I established myself as a talented portrait painter in my studio in the loft extension. They were not wasted years. In the second decade Flora relented and let Rozzie come whizzing in from the Bardo Thodol via myself and the turkey baster, and we coped with her IQ test rating, 140 and counting. And in the third decade we coped with the reality of Rozzie, Millennial, elder child of Sebastian, Lord Dilberne.
In retrospect the first ten years of the new Millennium were heaven: the second were more or less hell. And it was all our fault that it happened. Silence is not golden, ignorance is not bliss when it comes to deceiving a child about their real parentage. Rozzie did not forgive.
Goddess Flora can curse as well as bless; on the surface she is all things lovely and pleasant, but in her shadow side harpies linger, those beautiful, dangerous, destructive, ravenous bird ladies of Olympia, one of them I fancy these days with the face of Lady Adela Riddle.
And perhaps as Rozzie came to woman’s estate, with the first drop of blood the harpies showed Flora’s shadow face: cold, clever, greedy and rational. That day at the West Hampstead Hellenism Reborn Centre I should have added mint to the sacrifice. I forgot. Perhaps the gold wedding ring was a mistake – gold is associated with Mercury, God of the intellect and quick thinking. He never got on too well with Flora.
Mea culpa. (So much of a woman’s life is mea culpa.)
Part 3
Three’s Company, Four’s A Crowd
I’ve already explained that it’s Gwinny telling this tale, not some omniscient narrator, and how she feels happier shifting into the third person should she feel embarrassed or distressed. In the third person she can get a more objective view of what actually went on. She can look at herself with a little less of the me, me, me, which in the first person one can hardly avoid. It’s just that occasionally, like now, impartiality slips. I have, she has, something to confess.
I told you that when the Smithsons moved in the rest of Standard Road gossiped themselves into a frenzy about perceived troilism, and only ceased when years later little Rozzie staggered down the street at sixteen months calling me Gran. Then the rumours finally stopped and it was all semi-apologetic: ‘Silly old us, they’re not perverts after all, she’s his mother not his lover.’ We did not advise them of their misapprehension, merely encouraged Rozzie to call me Gran more often. Rozzie, after all, had no grandparents of her own, all were in their graves and spinning or not as their natures dictated.
As ‘Clive’s nutty mother’ I made sense to the neighbours, the mythical one who had started life in Standard Road, run off and gone to the bad, only to return as a wealthy widow with an illegitimate child, without even the sense to move anywhere upmarket.
The worst anyone could do was pity Xandra for having such an interfering mother-in-law – ‘Poor Xandra, what a fate!’ I was now the evil mother-in-law, bossy and controlling, but no longer a sexual deviant. It was a kind of promotion.
But I avoid the point. I am meant to be coming clean. I implied e
arlier that there was never latterly anything sexual between me and Clive but I lied.
There was one small incident but only one in all our thirty-something years or so of togetherness. We were normally very careful not to touch one another unnecessarily, of course, as a mother sometimes is with a favourite son, or a father with a daughter, in case something brewing unconsciously suddenly explodes.
Anyone who is familiar with making homemade wine will understand. Pressure builds unseen and unthought of. Then bang goes the glass demijohn, and shards of glass are everywhere, sticking out of the plaster in the walls, all over the floor and swimming in oceans of red sticky sweet stuff, and with any luck not piercing your skin or your carotid artery, which can be fatal, I believe.
That single sexual incident Gwinny speaks of – how she does wander off; nervous, probably – was in January 1999 (Kosovo war: Nostradamus predicts it will cause massive landslips but it doesn’t), a whole thirteen years after she and the Smithsons first become neighbours. It was the night after Clive went back to the Woolland Clinic, there to receive the diagnosis – mumps in adolescence; not a living sperm in sight; just these concentrated, heavy-duty, feel-good hormones – verdict: infertility, but a life full of adoring women. That was the very night when Clive’s voice came back full throated and glorious after years of squeaks and bleats, and he opened the front door and embraced me, and it turned into a kiss, and tongues were involved and then a totally unexpected sudden bending over and leaning back like a practised couple. I could only hope the neighbours weren’t watching through the windows. They would have added incest to their list of sins.
Look, it was a very emotional moment for both of us. I was sixty and should have known better. I paid their mortgage, built their loft, paid a few direct debits, was Lady Petrie to his wife’s mere Mrs, and so was in a position of power over Clive which I should not have exploited. But it was in no way harassment, which I suppose Xandra might have claimed had the matter ever reached public attention or come up in a divorce. Few secrets are ever kept between couples for long. Adulterers beware.
It’s just sometimes I find the old call-girl habit of first touch and immediate response does resurface easily, even years later. It’s what stops clients feeling embarrassed and nervous and not knowing quite how to proceed, which is more common than you might suppose. Let the pro make the first tactile approach, and make it quick. The oldest habits die slowest.
Neither of us ever mentioned the incident again. It was clearly inappropriate between long-term neighbours. And it hadn’t happened before and it hasn’t happened since. Just the once – if we forget that other incident back in 1978 which might or might not have happened. I am very fond of Xandra. And look, I have somehow drifted into the first person. Confession, as any Catholic will tell you, eases the mind greatly.
Waiting, Waiting, Waiting
For a whole decade the Smithsons did nothing to prevent a baby being conceived. But still no-one worried – other than Gwinny, of course. ‘Give it time,’ the putative parents thought. ‘Give it time. We’re so young!’
The nineties turned out to be such a busy, even entertaining decade. Passed like a flash. Margaret Thatcher turned to John Major, turned to Tony Blair. Many at that glorious wedding party didn’t after all achieve redemption but became clubbers, and the Smithsons tried to stay out of it, not always successfully, as the soul boys, jazz funkateers, rare groove heads, electro poppers and the still sometimes apologetic seekers after gay culture made their pitches for the future – and fashions in altered mind-states swept the land in a series of tsunamis and retreated, leaving a fair proportion of wrecked and broken minds behind. But not theirs.
Isms came and went, political correctness rose and fell and rose again, and hate crime became a matter for the police. It was the Age of Therapism. Satanic Ritual Abuse was replaced by False Memory Syndrome (if you were fat your father had abused you) and a more generalised therapy, the talking cure, became the answer to every ill – depression, broken marriage, migraine, headache, amputation, a massacre in the playground, IRA attack, any natural disasters, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes – talk it all out, don’t brave it all out; always remember, never forget, always apologise. Scrape and scrape away at the old scar tissue – that’s the only way to heal a psychic wound, end a trauma. And house prices went up and up and life expectancy with it.
And all through that decade I waited for Flora to come through with the baby girl she’d promised. I busied myself with this and that: it was not time wasted. I had my painting to get on with. I occasionally broke my vow of celibacy, and nothing passes time quicker than the thrill of the occasional affair, but nothing serious.
And then there were the Smithsons to look after. They needed me. Xandra moved slowly but surely up her NHS career ladder in a job she loved, Clive pursued his singing career – he’d once played the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and let no-one forget it – learning poetry and writing the greatest verse-novel the world had ever known. If only he could find a middle, let alone an end.
Ten years in which endless dinners were eaten out; friends made and unmade, drifted on, disappeared or died; parties dressed up for and recovered from – myself always an honoured guest: an older generation than theirs but no-one seemed to mind – I was young at heart, wasn’t I? – and a baby vaguely tried for, but every twenty-nine days – Xandra was always very punctual – the drip, drip, drip of blood, as all that pleasure came to nothing. And time passed and time passed.
The Childless Years
It was true that sometimes Gwinny felt vaguely persecuted, like the lonely circling satellite planet to a central Smithson sun, the one who has the spare key to the house and never loses it, the one who can be called upon when any difficulty looms. But then she had put herself in this position. And no doubt for their part the Smithsons felt it too: the sheer weight of gratitude, of being obliged. Gwinny next door, the portrait painter, artist, wild child with wilder hair, with her odd religions and strange beliefs, and her degree in English Literature (who took in the New Scientist, delivered weekly, compared to Xandra’s Vogue, delivered monthly), wife to no-one, mother to none, so always available for a chat and a chore, to share a joint (after the glow of the wedding had faded), to let in the cat, open the door for the dishwasher man, take over when either of the Smithsons was off sick or in trouble, the one who had paid their mortgage, to whom they had to feel indebted. Maddening. Worst of all, who was obviously, year after year, waiting for Xandra to fall pregnant, but so seldom mentioned it. There’d be patches of coolness between the next-doors but they soon recovered. Gwinny would find a gentleman friend; Clive would get a part, Xandra yet another promotion; the sun would shine again.
Clive worried about his health quite a lot, almost to the point of hypochondria, though what with the ongoing mystery of his vocal cords that was hardly surprising. At least BUPA paid for all that, thanks to that insurance policy still active from the Dreamcoat days. So through the childless years there were occasional trips to A&E with mysterious aches and pains which normally turned out to be false alarms – indigestion not heartache, sore throat not laryngitis, a cold in the nose not the Hong Kong flu – and Gwinny would run him up to the hospital and wait for him. If Xandra had a minute she’d run down from Intensive Care to be with her husband. Whom she loved, no doubt about it. She, like her husband, was highly sexed.
Every family needs a neighbour like Gwinny – the one who takes you in from the storm if your electricity goes off, your central heating shuts down (in her attic she has emergency oil lamps and an old Aladdin heater), pays your mortgage because she likes to give more than receive, and has your roof mended along with her own out of sheer goodness of heart, takes the husband in to Emergency and the cat to the vet, and presumably, should you decide to have a baby, might very well end up doing quite a lot of the minding, while you got on with your career.
Clive might not have the makings of the best father in the world, but th
ere would always be Gwinny next door to help. When the time came, just not quite yet. Drip, drip, drip, as Flora turned away her face – though every mid-month Gwinny made a little excursion on her bike up to the Hellenism Reborn Centre with appropriate offerings for burning.
I Had Sinned
And so it was that I acted as the Smithsons’ nurse/provider/guardian angel through their childless years: none of this seemed onerous to me, just natural. I had the time, the money and the inclination. Why not? I had no family of my own, having broken all contact with my four huge horrid brothers, and I served as a kind of all-purpose mother for both Clive and Xandra.
And if every now and then I felt the non-appearance of a baby was a punishment for past sins, giving up my own baby for adoption as I had when I was sixteen, I tried not to let it surface. I’d had no choice. They’d snatched my little girl Anthea away at six weeks old, time enough for me to have bonded, for the milk to be in full flow, and handed her to people as anonymous as Lord Sebastian when he spurted out his sperm, crying, as later reported by Monty in the Dilberne Spillage Case, ‘Oh the spilling, the spurning, the spurting of the spunk!’
It was 1956. I was sixteen years old, a Catholic girl who thought she had sinned, and had no way of supporting myself, let alone a child as well. There were no state benefits, only National Assistance, which offered help to male bread-winners (women’s wages were seen as pin money) but certainly not to unmarried mothers, and Charity, which can be very cold indeed. In my case the very conditional comfort of strangers of the kind the nuns offered in the Sacred Heart Home for Fallen Girls, Paddington, and think myself lucky. (They’d changed the name from ‘Fallen Girls’ to ‘Mothers and Babies’ but the ethos was the same. You were a disgrace to society.) I had to choose between an orphanage and adoption for my bastard child. There was no way I could keep it myself. I chose adoption, being promised a nice middle-class Catholic family. And that was the last I heard of Anthea, carried off at six weeks old in another woman’s arms.
