by Fay Weldon
I prayed for a parking space so there was one, just outside the clinic – Hail Mary, full of grace, let me find a parking space. I’d been to a convent school in my childhood years. The nuns’ habitual sharp rapping of knuckles might have driven any formal religion out of me, but had left me with useful survival skills.
The Brilliant Baby Clinic took up only one floor of the building: the waiting room served another dozen doctors. It was something of an anti-climax. We must have looked an odd trio, coming in together.
Xandra, a small, neat, even-featured blonde person, was in a smart white shirt, a straight black knee-length skirt and bold silver chain round her neck with matching shell-shaped earrings and conventional enough. Long ago gone were the tribal print skirts and low-cut peasant blouses of her youth.
Clive, good-looking as ever, wore jeans and black polo neck and a fashionable stubble. Since the unforgettable floral wedding on Hampstead Heath twelve years back he had grown from sinewy youth into very acceptable, craggy, broad-shouldered manhood. The hair was not thinning at all, which was just as well for a man who still hoped to make his living on stage and screen.
Gwinny was a mere 5ft 2in and at first glance seemed a skinny child, dressed in navy jeans and pink cotton sweater, with streaks down the front where she had wiped Chrome Yellow and Venetian Brown from her hands. She had been so lost in her art when Xandra called to collect her she had just run from the house in paint-splashed black trainers and the Basque beret she was seldom seen without. Everyone could see she was a painter, a noble bohemian wedded to her art, not just a childless lady living alone in a dull little house. Only if you looked more closely did you notice the wild hair that burst from the confines of the hat was iron grey and see that the lustrous dark eyes that looked up at you should you say hello were lined with crow’s feet. Gwinny saw clothes as functional, there to keep you warm and decent, and stop mosquitoes biting. Some women are like that.
Xandra, who never left the house in disarray, marvelled, and perhaps envied just a little. She found spontaneity difficult, though she tried.
More Waiting
Xandra was whisked away at once, swept away by silent, impatient forces as soon as she went in – we were ten minutes late: Xandra having got herself into quite a tizz about something or other before we left, unusually for her. Fortunately she was a quick form filler and had all the extras with her – specimens, X-rays etc. She might not be super bright but her efficiency made up for it.
The two of us were in the waiting room for what seemed hours, so it was just as well, Clive joked, that parking wardens were in such short supply a car could still stay where it was for as long as needed. There was no television, and it was too early in the world’s history for any of the i’s, be it Pods, Phones or Pads. The presence of others in the waiting room inhibited conversation. We sat on stiff upholstered armchairs, the backs still with antimacassars for quick laundering.
There was a big oval table in polished mahogany, copies of Country Life and Punch, and a scattering of fee-paying patients, as silent and reverent as NHS users are not: a group of decrepit old ladies in wheelchairs with their minders, a couple of white-robed Arabs with their niqabed womenfolk, and an oppressive silence. Time passed. Only the air quivered, Gwinny thought, with a hundred years’ worth of expected bad news.
Gwinny quietly leafed through Country Life but Clive grew increasingly restless.
‘I’m not going to wait much longer,’ he murmured into Gwinny’s ear, when the hands of the clock reached half past one. There was a rustle of disapproval round the room. All eyes turned to them.
‘You pay all this money and they treat you like this!’ The more his indignation swelled, so did the squeak. Someone suppressed a giggle. It came from one of the niqabed wives. The sound inflamed Clive the more.
‘I’m off!’ and he rose to go. Gwinny pulled him back into his chair.
‘There’s no way I’m going to miss this audition.’ While he whispered he didn’t squeak. ‘It’s a turning point. They’re looking for a new 007. My agent said go along; they have new technology that evens out sound. My voice will be just fine.’
He had stopped whispering. Everyone was listening. They had no option. The fog-horn changed to a violin squeak with every second word.
‘I know, Clive,’ she said. ‘But this is important too.’
She refrained from saying that Clive didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the part. Pierce Brosnan was auditioning. Management might in theory find it possible to dub his voice – the script itself demanding little complex chatter, just a few quotable phrases – but why would they bother? More fish in the sea all dying for the part.
More, an initial nasal twang suggesting a cocaine dependency had worried producers in the first place. Jobs had turned up less and less. Unfair, since Clive hadn’t touched the stuff for ages, but these days truth was becoming less important than perception. And then there had been a scandal or two: ‘Joseph and his multi-coloured threesome’ in the Daily Mail. (All lies of course – my brothers again, spreading rumours – Xandra stood by him – Mr Ipswich saved our bacon and the Mail paid up.) But mud stuck. And then the squeak-over had developed into the kind of thing that could make audiences laugh. Like the niqabed girl just now. No wonder Clive was easily upset.
‘There’s no point in me just waiting. She can tell me when she gets home. It’s just she won’t like being told she has to give up her job. You can take her home. Or she can drive herself. You pay all this money and they treat you like this!’ he repeated, squeaking even louder. Gwinny did not remind him. Another of the niqabed wives stifled a giggle. The sound inflamed Clive the more.
‘I’m off!’ and he got up and left. Gwinny followed him out into the reception area.
‘I’m not missing this audition. It’s make or break.’
‘I know, Clive,’ she said, ‘But isn’t this important too?’
‘God, you’re an interfering bitch!’
Clive shook himself and apologised at once. ‘I’m sorry. This is very nervy-making. I didn’t mean it at all. My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Hamlet.’
‘But Clive, I think you’re in next. They said they wanted to see you too.’
‘You’re joking! What, for me to wank into some test tube? We’ve been through all this. I’m only here to keep my wife company. I’d no idea she’d take as long as this.’
‘But it’s so important to find out if either of you are infertile.’ It came out more head-on than Gwinny hoped. She rued the day. Though at least those in the waiting room couldn’t hear.
‘Infertile? Me? I’m as fertile as the next man, more so. What are you insinuating?’
Clive slipped, as he tended to do if agued with or criticised in any way, into a different personality, an alternative Clive, someone who didn’t recognise you, blink or look agreeable but stared with glassy hate-filled eyes and swore readily. Gwinny reflected that husbands and hospitals seldom brought out the best in each other. Though when he was in a real rage, she’d noticed, the voice changed pitch and became less squeaky, just uncomfortably loud.
He calmed a little. ‘Gwinny, you know as well as I do that Xandra just doesn’t like it when things don’t go to plan. She can’t complain I don’t fuck her enough.’ [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Not again! Far too many already. Every fuck’s a lost reader. Try “do it”.’] ‘She knows I love her to bits. No, I’m off. Sorry and all that,’ and he shouldered the bag that carried the audition brief and added veracity to his claim of an appointment, and prepared to go. Gwinny could only hope he hadn’t taken Xandra’s earlier ‘I’m not the jealous type’ too literally. In Gwinny’s eyes Xandra was very definitely the jealous type. A proper bunny boiler. In Clive’s eyes, she was a self-described loving and complaisant wife.
But the ‘God, you’re an interfering bitch!’ still rankled. As if her motive, born out of simple friendship, were somehow suspect. And now James Bond? He was absurd.
It was just
as well that Xandra came into the waiting room just then to say they had to come back in two days’ time. They’d done some tests and had to wait for the results to come through.
‘Typical! Bloody incompetents,’ said Clive, as they hurried out of the building, loud enough for the receptionist to hear. When he got home later that evening it was to say the audition had run over time so he needed to go again in a couple of days.
A Scene Better Forgotten
After yesterday’s dramas at the fertility clinic Gwinny thought she had best leave the Smithsons for a while: for Clive to calm down and Xandra to see reason. But after Xandra had been home from work for an hour or so No. 24 knocked loudly twice on the upstairs party wall, followed by seven little knocks, the code for ‘come round for a meal at seven’. (Well, take yourself back in time to 1999: phone calls from a landline were expensive, so why call when you could knock?)
Gwinny had spent the day at her easel on not exactly a portrait but a half-way step towards a landscape, after Arcimboldo. This one was called Landscape of the Heart: and instead of vegetables or flowers the face was filled with draped baby blankets, rattles, soft toys, locks of golden baby hair and only the occasional hideous imp peeking out. The thought of a baby next door fed her creativity in some way. It would need to be a girl of course, friend not enemy. If she herself could do some of the rearing while Xandra worked – and she could see that with Clive as a house-husband it might end up quite a lot – Gwinny reasoned she might get it right this time round, do better than she had with her horrid little brothers. She’d be more patient, she wouldn’t slap so much.
She’d waited for a girl when she was small, but out they’d popped, boy, boy, boy, boy. Gwinny didn’t want her perfect girl to come out with a temper like Clive’s. Or a loser like Clive, come to that. Because that was what Clive was, with his vanity and nasal cocaine voice and the play that would never be finished, let alone performed, leaving Xandra to earn the living. No. She just didn’t want the baby to turn out at all male.
When Gwinny tapped on the door of No. 24 at seven o’clock that evening it was Clive, not Xandra, who opened it to her. He looked square and bold and surprisingly cheerful. He wore black cords and a black vest showing beneath a black denim shirt and some startling black and white Black Indigo trainers, as befitted a famous actor. His teeth seemed very white and his smile was wide and seemed quite genuine. His brown hair had been streaked with blond, and was silky, thick and bouncy as ever. Enough to make anyone want to run their fingers through it. He looked a good ten years younger than his years.
Today, Gwinny could certainly see what Xandra saw in him: Xandra was pushing forty and looked it: perfectly neat and tidy like any office worker, any dweller in one of Pete Seeger’s Little Boxes. Today, Clive looked as if he lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills, still blessed with the inviting bloom of sexual possibility. Xandra would have to look out. Clive was devoted, if naturally indolent, but might not stay so for ever.
For all she had been to RADA, Xandra had turned out to be something of a bureaucrat at heart. Very different from Gwinny, who had left home at fifteen – albeit almost sixteen, but still underage – and even into her sixties, for all she lived in a little box, at least kept her eccentricities in dress and behaviour. She was a born artist and as such kept a certain allure as creative artists do.
(Gwinny still regrets the time she’d been with Sebastian outside Cheyne Walk. She should have bought that house when she could – they’d thrown out a really good easel and various odd lots nobody wanted of stubby oil brushes and random half-empty pots of good-quality paints, though mostly in sombre colours of brown and purple and so lasted for ever. She should have run off with those rather than the old purple velvet sofa with broken springs. Gwinny had always felt these things brought her luck.)
But this evening Clive had opened the door of No. 24 not with the usual accepting grunt, but by flinging his arms round her, kissing her, not just twice but three times and not just mwah-mwah-mwahing but actual soft lips against cheek. Very continental, and even a suggestion of sexual interest in his hug, of which Gwinny had never before been aware. But then for once she was wearing a dress which showed her figure – still good, and certainly better than Xandra’s – not her usual dungarees, and she had washed her hair and taken care with doing so, and then smudged her eyelids with kohl so her eyes looked sultry and large. She’d felt there was something different in the air tonight and had dressed for it.
Even disregarding his looks, Clive seemed twice the man he’d been in Dr Vellum’s waiting room, and certainly a lot more amiable. But why? No-one surely would have been mad enough to actually give him the James Bond part, even if he had got to the audition in time, which Gwinny doubted. The voice was hopeless. There would have been at least fifty actors with noticeable star qualities applying. A lead in a musical twenty years back and little of any note since would hardly have been a recommendation. Yet here he was, suddenly exuding star quality and good cheer?
Clive could suddenly have been released from a bi-polar cluster personality disorder – the new word for manic depressive – but Gwinny dismissed the thought. Marco had explained that the switch from depressive to manic happened over weeks: this was too abrupt; but split personality, though rarer than anyone thought, was a distinct possibility. Certainly no fit father for a child. Just as well mumps had struck in his teenage years. It might well have to be a donor.
‘So what’s up?’ I asked, when Clive opened the door to me. The light in the bedroom was on. Xandra was upstairs.
‘I’ll tell you later. But just listen,’ and still on the doorstep he opened his mouth and sang: ‘The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music.’
The voice that came out of the strong frame and the soft lips was no longer fog-horn, or violin-squeaky and laughable, but deep and profound. Almost an Elvis Presley sound. It was a shock. It was a marvel. And also, one of my first thoughts, rather worrying for Xandra. Instead of one or two hard-of-hearing school-gate mothers after her husband, which she could manage, no squeak meant dozens. An observable catch. Knickers thrown on stage time.
These thoughts raced round my mind as Clive shared the pleasure of his saccharine song – fortunately he thought one verse was enough – bellowing the improving words down the street for all the neighbours to hear, proudly declaring his new identity as King of the Castle. Gwinny was thinking furiously as she did from time to time: thoughts without words, a kind of non-verbal gibber, especially when she had been to the chemist and bought some Pro Plus wake-up pills, which she often did before she went round to the Smithsons. She must try and cut down.
‘No, tell me now,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘What a story!’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to wait.’
And he burst into further song, there upon the doorstep. It was ridiculous. But oh, the voice was thrilling! Like the deep Welsh voices of my childhood in the Midland Railway Choir which annoyed my mother. Gwen always preferred Aidan safely at home. Now, in the glow of the street lights, Clive was singing, Mario Lanza-like, someone’s terrible version of Trees, an even worse poem when set to music than on the page.
I could see Xandra’s shadow silhouetted in the upstairs window as now she patiently and methodically changed from uniform to cooking and cleaning wear. She’d put the light on, by accident or perhaps not, as I sometimes thought, being something of an exhibitionist, and encouraging the neighbours to see what they could, which, considering our neighbours, was not exactly wise.
I think it was almost to stop Clive singing Trees that I let him kiss me and pull-me-push-me round to the side of the house, when the kisses slipped from cheek to mouth, and press me against the wall standing up, and I cannot remember what happened, we are now in 2023 and that was back in 1999, and it was only a few minutes but I had to arrange my dress: for once, fortunately, I had not been in my jeans. Clive was singing Trees again as we went back into the house – where Xandra was now in the kitchen cooking supper. But the
acting profession is like that. They need sex to lubricate their voices. It means nothing. I’m sure he forgot it. I never mentioned it.
An Explanation
Gwinny had followed Clive into the conservatory of No. 24 where the table was already laid and there were flute glasses for champagne on the coffee table, which Gwinny always thought rather vulgar. What was wrong with French café glasses? Flutes were thin and easy to spill and tended to break in the washing machine. But at least Xandra had dinner in the oven. Gwinny could smell it. Beef, onions, garlic. Clive’s favourite. If Xandra had her way it would be M&S’s fish pie. But then she was a working woman.
Xandra came in to vacuum the conservatory with her new Dyson vacuum cleaner. Gwinny was still happy with her old Hoover Constellation though its capacity for picking up dust was limited. Xandra seemed to have noticed nothing untoward. She was wearing an overall over her dress while she worked – there was no denying she was a fantastic housekeeper: ‘An orderly mind needs an orderly house to keep it company,’ Xandra would say.
She vacuumed with one hand while tidying with the other, emptying Clive’s ashtray into the path of the new machine, bending and reaching to push away Clive’s many screwed-up handwritten pages and a few bloodstained tissues as it approached them. She seemed tireless and a touch fanatical. Clive stood and watched, grinning like a maniac.
The Dyson was put away, a few cushions plumped, then into the kitchen where the papers were binned, the dishwasher cleared and the things put away ready for the next batch, and her overall removed. Only then did she turn and welcome Gwinny.
‘Darling, you’re so early.’
‘No,’ said Gwinny firmly. ‘I’m punctual.’
‘Then it’s me. My fault. But one way and another it’s been such a day! Clive has his voice back. Didn’t you hear it?’
‘I thought it was someone’s radio.’
