After the Peace

by Fay Weldon

  But the time came when any pitter-pat mention began to evoke an almost hostile reaction from Clive.

  ‘Just because you helped out with our wedding doesn’t mean we have to live our lives according to you,’ he snapped at me. ‘We live as we want, you live as you want.’ (He seemed to have forgotten about the mortgage guarantee.) ‘So for God’s sake go easy on the pitter-pat.’

  ‘Not that we’re not grateful for all that you do for us, Gwinny,’ Xandra had put in hastily, but otherwise she just sat there looking pretty, and determined not to challenge Clive in anything at all.

  And then when Clive said to me ‘Funny about these migraines, they just seem to come at the wrong time,’ I remembered Marco saying there’s no such thing as an accident when it comes to illness and I wondered if Clive actually wanted a baby as much as Xandra did.

  Life was going along quite nicely for him, after all. There were a few lip-synching openings nowadays, so he could at least act being a singer when he wasn’t actually singing, though he mostly had to keep quiet about it. He didn’t get fame or much money, but he looked good on a stage and girls, or at any rate middle-aged women, would throw themselves at him in matinées and that was always pleasant. And some producers would risk an understudy’s squeak if it was a matinée and not doing too well anyway. And the idea of a baby could be daunting.

  And then there’d been the question of some guilt albatross hanging round Clive’s neck. You could know people so well, and still know so little.

  And whatever Xandra thought and felt she just sat there, looking pretty and happy in Clive’s apparent adoration.

  A Reason For Everything

  [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Do we really want all this next stuff, Gwinny? Sounds a bit obsessional. As if you’re trying to prove that it’s unprotected sex makes women irresponsible. Isn’t it enough to wear them down with all your patronising anti-Millennial blather – for that’s what it amounts to.’]

  Xandra, reflected Gwinny, ordered doctors and nurses around with no problem but when it came to her husband it was a different matter. It could only be a matter of too much unprotected sex. The male ejaculate, so Marco had told her (and in Gwinny’s reading of the New Scientist she saw the theory repeated), contains a cocktail of tranquillising and bonding hormones – serotonin, oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’, making a girl snuggly and affectionate), endorphins, oestrone, prolactin, etc. – a mere 3 per cent of it being actual sperm.

  It is unprotected sex that makes women love so unreservedly. It’s why battered women – be it sexual or emotional battering – keep coming back for more: all the serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, oestrone, prolactin, etc. that addict her to her testosterone-ridden partner. Can’t wait, can’t wait! It’s why there’s love at first sight (or rather, first fuck), why the arranged marriage so often works (ditto), why the longer you’re married the worse your divorce feels, why the use of condoms is advisable in any relationship if a woman wants to keep a level head.

  Xandra hadn’t been using condoms. She’d been trying for years to have a baby. She had all the symptoms of an ejaculate-addicted woman: ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.’ Some men’s ejaculate is particularly potent, some men’s less so, being too weak to lead to addiction, but pleasurable enough in its own right at least until the morning, when she’ll want to get busy with more important matters.

  Meantime, while the old-fashioned girl through the ages (it may be rather different for Millennials, this being the Digital-Anthropocene Age) waited for true love to descend from the heavens in some variety or other of the male prehistoric anthropoidal ape, and for the insensate urge to procreate seize her, there’s always other survival work that must be done! From the Palaeolithic Age, grubbing for insects, to the Iron Age, digging for metals, to the Digital-Anthropocene Age, tapping away on the computer, there’s always work to be done. And forget your duty to procreation: a day’s work can wear you out!

  And certainly Xandra’s unnatural frequent night shifts wore her out, and might have caused a few fertility issues, while still addicting her to what turned out to be Clive’s spermless but super-oxytocined, serotonin-friendly embraces.

  How lucky, then, the super-oxytocined, testosterone-rich men, whose addicted loved ones are in and out of women’s refuges like yo-yos. Girls will always cluster round them while friends and family despair. Clive never hit, and his emotional abuse was subtle, but on a bad day Gwinny would see him as just such a brute, only, like Xandra, to go into forgive-understand-forget mode pretty quickly.

  The Art Of Forgetfulness

  Perhaps the folk singer at the back of the theatre, sixty-eight years ago, was just such a ‘strong sperm’ person. Gwinny understood and forgave, but just never forgot. Perhaps she saw him as Apollo in the guise of a folk singer, coming down from the summit of Primrose Hill on that memorable day all those years ago. ‘I have conversed with the spiritual sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill’! If it happened to William Blake it could happen to Gwinny. She’s nutty enough. Perhaps Apollo saw her and fancied her and followed her down from the top of the hill and took the shape of the folk singer. (I shan’t say stranger things could happen, because probably not.)

  Sometimes Gwinny dreams of the folk singer. He comes through the door to where she sleeps, says he still loves her and will make everything all right. It’s a junkie’s dream, an addict’s dream, if ever there was one. Gwinny still yearns for what ruined her. And Clive? Aphrodite must have been really addicted to Zeus if she put up with so much hurt from him. And wasn’t she, Gwinny, like Xandra, guilty of putting up with a lot from Clive? That unfortunate possible incident of the lost virginity had been far more recent a one-night stand than the occasion in Drury Lane.

  Oh, be gone, false thought, false memory!

  Facing The Facts

  Plop, plop, plop, dripped the leaking glass roof of No. 24’s new conservatory on the evening that matters maternal came to a head. That wasn’t until October 1998 (when Hurricane Mitch made landfall in Central America, killing an estimated 18,000 people). Boreas, God of the North Wind, was howling and the rain got in between two slipped glass panes. The drips began to fall unusually fast, plop-plop-plop-plop-plop-plop now, so everyone was a bit tense in spite of the good hashish Clive had just brought back from one of his slightly mysterious visits to Soho.

  My fault. I had made a burnt offering to Boreas in the hope he’d go easy on Nos. 23 and 24 and he hadn’t responded in any useful way; on the contrary. I was suing the building contractors, whom I had paid; there was a law suit under weigh and Mr Ipswich had recommended the slipped panes were used as evidence, but these things tend to go on and on.

  My plea to Boreas, I could see, was along lateral-thinking lines – if you can’t raise the bridge, lower the river – and that might have been why he overlooked the petition – ‘get up a stepladder and do the bloody thing yourself’ – but the sacrifice should have included horse hair and mugwort, but I had substituted a clipping of Simkins Two’s cat hair and sage, so it wasn’t really fit for purpose and all I had done was annoy the God. All that winter the North Wind in London blew and blew and blew.

  Getting pregnant was all just a matter of time perhaps, I thought, but time did go on and on: not necessarily wasted time, of course, and the Smithsons had twenty more years’ worth of time than me. But they didn’t have as much as they thought, or certainly Clive thought. Because suddenly instead of being in her thirties Xandra was nearly forty and the drip, drip, dripping of her untried womb became a matter of urgency. The best babies were born if you were in your mid-twenties, everyone knew, and after that it was downhill all the way.

  Well, everyone knew except Clive, who was wilfully ignorant when it came to anything to do with the working of the human body. Odd in someone who verged on having a hypochondriacal personality disorder. Marco had described Lord Petrie as such as we lay on the deck of Gwyneth and tanned in the Mediterranean sun. It was a very kind and diplomatic way of describing any hypochondriac, parano
id schizophrenic, OCD nutter, a bank robber – whatever. At least it suggested a cure was available. But Marco also suggested that I had a profound ‘dependent personality disorder, namely sex addiction, triggered by early trauma’ – well, take your pick of them! – which was why I put up with the dying likes of Bunny and his Lordship when others didn’t. Sex addiction didn’t bother me – a very useful trait in the profession in which I found myself – but I found ‘dependent personality’ a real turnoff and Marco and I drifted apart.

  Anyway, whatever personality disorder afflicted Clive, it made him quite difficult to deal with, especially when it came to bodily matters – fond of him as I was. It was as if he had handed all the responsibility for his physical being over to others simply in order to be able to blame them.

  But the time came when even Clive noticed that Xandra was becoming edgy and disconsolate. It was a Thursday. We were waiting for Clive to come back to No. 24 with curry from the Indian takeaway. When it was curry we usually ate at my place because I didn’t mind if my long wooden table ended up with turmeric stains – I saw them as stains of honour. Xandra, far more particular than me, would spend hours scrubbing away at hers. And Clive did tend to swing the bag rather boldly on the way home, so the lids were messy when you took them off, and some of the contents would overflow, and the chicken korma end up with the lamb passanda. But the power had gone off at my place, and Clive had promised not to swing the bags.

  Xandra had had a particularly bad day at work. A six-year-old had had to have her life support taken away and Xandra had been removing a couple of IVs and the breathing tube when the poor mother changed her mind so blows were exchanged and it had ended up in a general fracas in a ward which was meant to be calm and quiet.

  ‘All the top brass were there to witness,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a thing when you have to withdraw life support, and it’s grim and I hate doing it. I don’t like to tell Clive because all he’ll say is I shouldn’t be doing the job in the first place if I want to get pregnant.’

  ‘Poor Xandra,’ I said, and she just burst into tears. She put down her healthy freshly squeezed orange juice and she said, ‘Sod this. I need spirits.’ She seized the vodka bottle from the table – I was having a Bloody Mary – and filled her glass to the top before I could stop her, and swigged it back.

  ‘Sod the baby,’ she said ‘Fuck everything. If this is what it takes to get pregnant I give up! Sorry, Gwinny. You want it, Clive wants it, but I’m sore and swollen for him trying, and I’ve had it!’

  At which moment Clive let himself into the room singing ‘The last rose of summer, ’tis blooming alone,’ his voice only squeaking when he got to ‘faded and gone’.

  Clive was in one of his exuberant moods and they were wonderful to behold. He was like Zeus himself, all munificent grandeur, benign and beautiful, radiating all the world’s energy and goodwill – though it could switch all too quickly into bad mood Zeus, with thunderous brow, lightning darting round his temples, hand raised to throw his thunderbolts.

  On top of the foil containers was a perfect long-stemmed white rose, which he handed to Xandra. I knew it was a sign from Flora.

  ‘For you, my darling,’ he said. ‘To all three of us, soon to be four of us!’

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ I asked.

  ‘The railings of No. 14,’ he said. ‘The last rose of summer, blooming alone, I couldn’t resist it. She’s a horrid old bat, anyway.’

  More trouble down the road to be sorted out, but I would have to leave it alone for now. I was so immensely cheered by this sign from Flora. I could feel expectation pricking in my thumbs.

  ‘I can’t do it, Clive,’ Xandra was saying. ‘We’ll adopt. I’ll do anything, I’ll live childless all my life. Look at Gwinny. She’s perfectly happy. But I will not sacrifice my life for a baby who is not going to happen.’

  Happy Zeus was turning into dangerous Zeus. I doled out the curry onto waiting plates. I knew what everyone wanted. Xandra automatically used the paper roll to clear up what I had spilled.

  ‘That’s a bit rich, Xandra,’ he said, ‘after what we’ve been through together. It can’t be your decision alone.’

  And he told her what a natural mother she would make, generous, loving and intelligent, a born looker-afterer. She had the baby blues, that was all and perfectly natural. He’d been reading the baby books. He would be there when she went back to work and there’d be Gwinny to help; the first weeks might be sleepless, but she had maternity leave. ‘The world is moving into the e-twenty-first century (should we all survive the Millennium Bug, inshallah). There’s no disgrace in it for me. Lots of women these days go out to work and earn more than their husbands.’

  ‘You mean you’d be a house-husband?’

  ‘So far as my writing would allow. I quite look forward to the young mummies at the school gate.’

  ‘They’ll adore you,’ said Xandra, quite cheering up.

  Which was true enough. To the love-hungry mothers of North London with high incomes and boring husbands Clive would seem a dream come true. No-one would notice his little squeak of a voice, so long as he paid them some attention and was not under stress. There was no further protest from Clive.

  ‘Promise you won’t be jealous of the young mummies. You know my heart belongs to you.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not the jealous type.’

  In my experience this was more often said than meant. ‘My wife won’t mind’ is often said just before she turns up at the bedroom door, hammering and yelping in rage. I have a couple of bald patches in my head.

  Nature Or Zature

  How cunning evolution is, so to make a woman docile and loving, not wanting to hurl father and his irritating offspring into the nearest ditch, but to stay around and love, love, love him and all who goes with him. But oh! The anxiety that single bonding event brings with it! It is the root of all jealousy. Dear God, let him not leave me! Let him not be off with someone else sowing the seed, the selfish gene! Then when he’s back and she has the baby it’s all double-bind stuff: Please, please show your love again, now, now! I need my oxytocin fix! But what’s that? The baby’s squalling; what do I do? I know he’ll starve, I have to go, now, now!

  Mother Nature doesn’t care one whit for mother’s happiness. Nature is merciless. I don’t know why women put so much trust in her. She’s the one who sets father off to distribute his genes to the next womb offered, the minute mother and baby seem to be able to look after themselves. Break your heart, what does Mother Nature care! So long as grief doesn’t sour the milk, but baby’s usually just about weaned by now.

  If your partner ‘won’t commit’ that’s Nature’s doing. She’s a real bitch. He just doesn’t feel like it? Nature’s whispering in his ear – she can look after herself, why should he bother? He’s really only into helpless women he can look after, and where, nowadays, can he find one?

  ‘Lie Nature on her side and call her Zature,’ says Gwinny. ‘She’s your enemy, not your friend. All Zature does, when you’re past procreating age and have served evolution’s purpose, is cast you off like an old glove, dry you up and wither you up, so you go on wanting others but no-one goes on wanting you. Zature has no intention of keeping you happy: all she needs from you is to die so she can use you as fertiliser.’

  Gwinny says all this to anyone who will notice, and that’s certainly no-one in her Readers’ Group, let alone the Writers’ Huddle she goes to now she’s writing the story of the Smithsons, Rozzie and herself. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to Rozzie soon enough. As I’ve pointed out to you wedding guests – ‘the Wedding-Guest here beat his breast For he heard the loud bassoon’ – we’re still on the detail of how Rozzie came to be born at all.) Both groups have suggested she cut all these tedious sequences out; they will only bore the reader, but Gwinny finds herself as insistent and annoying as the Ancient Mariner with whom she identifies.

  The Readers’ Group is mostly composed of singletons – well- educ
ated, successful, ambitious and attractive young women in their thirties who spent their twenties tossing their glossy heads, and spurning their suitors while they waited for Mr Right to come along. He didn’t, her standards being so high – earn more than me, be nicer than me, more fun than my girlfriends, drive a Ferrari to my little pink VW, have more status than me (all more of Zature’s idiotic tricks – she’s so A-list herself where was she going to find such a paragon?). Nor is he likely to turn up now. All the Mr Rights seem to be off with silly girls in their twenties.

  The grey hairs bent together in the Writers’ Huddle are no less distraught. Twenty-three years into the new Millennium people talk faster, walk faster and think faster. Reality itself has gone upside down. Only the young, standing on their heads, seem to understand it. But they’re good at points of grammar and structure and what to do if you want to get published. I don’t always follow their advice but I feel amongst friends and keep going. Get back to the story.

  Some External Intervention Is Needed

  Xandra, Clive and I were seated round the table eating a Christmas dinner for three from M&S (£15.00 with trimmings) and drank red wine and smoked Afghan Gold. On special occasions, which seemed to get more and more frequent with the years, Gwinny gave up her No Alcohol rule, and Clive and Xandra their No Smoking. Xandra was wearing high heels, a smart if tight white skirt, a navy shirt and clunky pink ethnic beads brought back from a holiday in Morocco, much enjoyed. The year was 1998.

  It was a special day so we were eating in the new glass conservatory at the back of the house rather than the kitchen and rather wishing we weren’t, it being a little chilly and draughty. Boreas the North Wind was having a field day, rattling the glass and pelting it with sleet as if this new structure had no business being where it was. Clive was reciting the Rime of the Ancient Mariner as his Christmas gift to us. Xandra had given him a new 26-inch TV to replace the small one which used to be in the nursery. I had given him a very nice old edition of the complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though he left it by his plate and got gravy on it almost at once. I might as well have given him a Penguin mass market paperback and saved myself sixty quid. But at least when he was reading poetry his voice seldom squeaked and his voice was quite lovely; light yet powerful.