by Fay Weldon
‘I didn’t think you were that kind of girl,’ he said, ‘and I shan’t see you again. But do please get Rhoda to a doctor.’
Apricot persuaded Rhoda to go to the hospital.
‘What I don’t understand is this,’ said Apricot to Brenda, Belinda and Liese, ‘why was Bernard Parkin sitting next to me on the stairs in the dark if he didn’t want sex!’
They searched for an answer but couldn’t find one. They were full of complaints. They compared notes. What was it men wanted? They asked around. Liese’s father replied, ‘True love.’ They thought this was very continental of him. Ken, when they put the question, replied, ‘A quiet life,’ but they didn’t believe that either.
Exams were approaching; and, with them, trouble on all fronts. Mr Rowse refused to see Rhoda any more because she’d been seen talking to Young Catholics Against Witchcraft. Ken chatted Belinda up so she said she wouldn’t come round any more, or so Brenda reported. Apricot had a row with Belinda. Brenda sided with Belinda, Liese with Apricot. Rhoda vomited blood over the breakfast table. The hospital said she had cancer of the stomach, the throat, the liver, the bladder and everything. Ken, upset, tried to drive his van through the line of Mr Rowse’s patients: he broke the ankle of an elderly man too feeble to jump out of the way. The police were called: arrest narrowly averted. Mr Rowse’s Sunday Angels, or someone, put a dog turd through Ken’s letter box. The council tried to take Mr Rowse to court for fraud and deception, and asked Rhoda to be the star witness for the prosecution but she refused, and had a startling remission, as Mr Rowse had promised her she would if she were only loyal. Mr Rowse left the area and set up elsewhere. He had millions in the bank, rumour went, and had never in all his life paid any tax at all. He went without even paying the cleaner.
Apricot waited until her exams were over and then went down to the Catholic church and hung about until she met Bernard coming out of confession.
‘What were you confessing?’ she asked, bold as brass, walking up to him in her everyday short skirt and torn black stockings, as if the terrible incident on the stairs had not happened at all.
‘Sins of the flesh,’ he said, ‘committed in the head with you.’ That quite compensated for the insult he had offered her on the stairs.
‘Please marry me,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun any more at home. If I don’t get out I might go under.’
He understood her predicament, of seemed to, and, much to Brenda, Belinda and Liese’s disgust, married Apricot in a registrar’s office, in a civil ceremony. She was seventeen. This would do, he told her, until such time as she became converted to Catholicism and they could marry properly. Or not, as the case might be. They set up house in No. 93, which was now to let. She would have to go out to work, it appeared, to see him through college. But at least it was no longer theological college. He could not marry and be a priest. He would be a social worker instead. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Ken, who had given his consent without argument. He had started a new career as a singer. ‘Let’s hope she won’t have to do a milk round.’
When Rhoda died, a month or so later, Ken married his ex-saxophonist’s widow, who understood the rigours and demands of the musician’s life, and who had a teenage daughter. It was the kind of household he understood. Nevertheless, he felt abandoned and betrayed by the women in his life.
Eleanor Darcy speaks to Hugo, and Valerie listens
A: WHY ARE YOU so buttoned up, Mr Vansitart? So singularly ungiddy? You have a love bite on your neck, yet you go on asking me for my views on the multicultural society, on secularism, on Darcian Monetarism. What you really want to know is what men always want to know about women, namely would she, if asked, and if not, why not. And would they want to, if she would.
‘I meant to start the tape a little further on,’ said Hugo to Valerie. ‘However, let me assure you that the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.’ ‘I should hope not,’ said Valerie, but the thought was now in her mind. They sat up side by side in the bed, naked, listening, but Valerie no longer felt safe.
But your training is at stake, your professionalism: you cannot ask the question: so few can. Like everyone else you must have your face-saver; yours in particular being that, in the quality newspapers at least, the mind is interesting, the body is not. Well, keep your face-saver; stay buttoned up. Don’t ask; I won’t answer. So many things you refrain from asking that you’d love to know. For example, how does it happen that I married a good Catholic at seventeen and here I am at thirty-something, childless? Is it because I am a bad woman, a selfish woman, the kind who chooses to stay childless: or am I an unhappy woman, an unfortunate woman, and can’t have them? Barren! Or just an unlucky woman because it just so happened my Catholic husband was infertile? Let me answer, at least this one unasked question.
Certainly it was Bernard’s initial belief, in the early days of our marriage, that contraception was a sin: Papal authority held it to be so, and Bernard’s allegiance was to the Pope. Because the Pope, according to Bernard and his friends, alone among all men had the ear of God, and God, it seems, thinks the more people down here on earth the better. God is the Great Factory Farmer in the Sky; closer and closer we are crammed together, the Pope our Bailiff, hatching our young for his profit, for, as the Bishop said to Marie Stopes, the purpose of man is to increase the flow of souls to God and to stand between God and his purpose is surely sin. And men like my husband Bernard, full of love and trust, look up to heaven with adoring eyes, victims of the phenomena of positive transference which the tortured so easily develops for his torturer, and plunge about in female flesh crying, ‘Only procreate and all will be well.’ Men do so long for someone to be in charge. In Darcy’s Utopia each man will attempt to read the mind of God and not rely on others to do it for him.
Q: Are you telling me that Darcy’s Utopia will be a secular society?
A: Yes, Darcy’s Utopia will be a secular society. Men and women can believe whatever they like about the nature of God, and worship whomsoever they like, from trees to cows to Mohammed, but in the privacy of their own homes.
Q: As in the Soviet Union in the heyday of religious persecution?
A: No. As in Darcy’s Utopia, in the future we aspire to. There are few lessons to be learned from history. Because things went wrong in the past does that mean they will necessarily go wrong again? Of course not! Because we are different! Do we not know more than we ever did about crowds, power, group behaviour, motivation, national and religious hysteria and so forth? We know ourselves, as once we did not. I promise you, we have progressed! Had those early Communists received their education in a contemporary society, understood themselves and others better, they would have laid down a rather different and more workable framework for the new society. We contemplate past failures of humankind in its search for the perfect society and become depressed. It will never work, we say! But it will, it will! What did we expect? That we’d get it right first time round? How could we? It may take a couple more hundred years, a thousand, but we will get there. Let me repeat, in Darcy’s Utopia Church and State will be firmly separated: religious broadcasting will be forbidden on the grounds that it is divisive, racist, sexist, and an incitement to violence as belief structure clashes with belief structure—Christian at the hands of the Jew, Hindu the Muslim, Protestant the Catholic, Sikh of Buddhist, Capitalist of Communist, and of course vice versa—and no doubt the Moonies and the EST-ites will soon be kneecapping one another with a clear conscience. Incitement to non-thought, conversion to blind belief, will be considered the most antisocial of all crimes. It is from closed minds that so many social evils flow.
Q: I thought you said money was the worst thing?
A: You try and catch me out, Mr Vansitart. The streams of evil flow and merge: their source is myriad. Are you hot? Why don’t you take off your jacket? Here …
Valerie listened for suspicious sounds on the tape, and despised herself for so doing. But only the occasional innocent—so far as she could tell�
��twang of the springs of the hideous black and red sofa punctuated the interview.
A: Mr Vansitart, what courage it takes to think! To acknowledge that we stand alone on this whirling ball of rock which we call earth, hurtling God knows where through space, and that there is no God to hold our hand! God not so much the Prime Mover—we can do without him—but the God who understands what’s going on. There must be some really nice, other, stationary, less-inconceivable place, we think, than the world; some permanent non-whirling static heaven somewhere where fairness and justice triumph. Surely! If we can conceive of it, it must exist. And it would be really nice to think that the ones who keep the rules are going to get there. So we dream up sets of rules, we try and live by Holy Books, from the Ramayana to the Koran to Das Kapital by way of the Bible. Words are magic, words are power.
Don’t you think, Mr Vansitart, that the really nice thing about human beings is the notion we do have that things ought to be somehow fair—though nowhere in nature do we have evidence that God understands the concept at all. Justice simply does not seem to be built into the system. All I can conclude is that the human race, at its best, is really very much pleasanter and kinder than this God it invents to hold its hand. The closer men get to God the nastier they get: the more judgemental, the more punitive, the more murderous in their determination to have got God right, and everyone else to have got God wrong. The Pope says that since God initially made us multiply, as is obvious from looking around even the famine fields of Ethiopia, we’d better do as much of it as we can. God needs his nourishment, his daily fix of souls as by the million every day we drop off the perch, and so Bernard and Apricot—renamed Ellen as a condition of marriage—if they’re to do God’s will, must reproduce till the cows come home, though nowadays of course the cows never leave home in the first place, they’re linked up permanently to milking machines. So how can they come home? In and out, in and out, him into her, after the pub—drunkenness is encouraged in Catholic societies: another incitement to non-thought—bang, bang, whoosh, and bingo, there’s another one. If you don’t look out.
Q: I take it you wouldn’t describe yourself as having a maternal nature?
A: How right you are. Congratulations on a comparatively giddy question. Fortunately during the first few months of our marriage Bernard, how shall I put it, practised asceticism—I had no chance of getting pregnant, or very little, and after that he was converted to Marxism, and though we were at it all the time for years, he stood over me daily to make sure I ingested a contraceptive chemical. ‘Ellen! Time to get up! Time to take the pill!’ It was our duty, he felt at that stage, to desist from overpopulating the planet. And what sort of world would we be bringing children into? It wasn’t fair on them to give them life. Better not to exist at all. Spared the curse of life! With Bernard, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. In Darcy’s Utopia the paradox of procreation is dealt with very simply. But I think you’re still much too stiff and male and professional: I will talk about that with Valerie, when she can be bothered to come along. What I do so like about Valerie is how relaxed she is! I have talked more than enough for today. Shall we ask Brenda for a cup of coffee? Or I have some vodka in the fridge.
Q: Vodka? What a brilliant idea.
Here the tape ran out. Hugo told Valerie that nothing else of import had been said. ‘What did she mean by relaxed?’ demanded Valerie. ‘I’m not in the least relaxed.’ He did not reply, merely smoothed her lips closed with his fingers, only to part them again with his tongue. ‘Incitement to non-thought!’ ran through her head as she went under, into the soft seas of non-self.
Valerie suffers from emotion
I’VE NEVER FELT SEXUAL jealousy before. I have seen it in others, and despised it. What a lack of self-belief is here displayed, I have thought; what lamentable failure of nerve. I have noticed women at parties distracted and uneasy, seen them leave the group they’re in to join another, where their partner, they fear, is having too good a time, his attention too focused for comfort on another woman. Men do it too, of course, but I think women do it more often. Perhaps they are just more practised in forethought, especially if they have children. Act now, save trouble later! But this particular act is counterproductive: it brings trouble nearer. The man knows quite well what’s going on, sees his freedom restricted, his dignity insulted, his lust observed, if lust it is, and is angry and resentful either way. And how public—
Jealousy—destructive, pointless, pitiful, pathetic! Or so I thought, in the good days, the wonderful days, before I felt it. Now I see it’s the energy that makes the world go round. Mine, mine, you can’t have it! Hugo is mine, not Eleanor’s. Hugo is visiting Stef, his wife; I don’t mind that so much, not quite so much. Perhaps I acknowledge some former claim. Wives are boring things. How I must have bored Lou. Always there, never jealous. Never valuing him enough to be jealous, never arriving suddenly to catch him out, never finding his mail interesting enough to steam open! Nothing more insulting than a non-jealous partner.
‘So there you go, Lou, off to Amsterdam with the Philharmonic! Have a nice time. See you Wednesday.’ Never even thinking what sort of nice time. Isn’t she rather attractive, the girl harpist: has he noticed the bend of her white swan neck, the discreet flicker of her fingers; wondered how the neck would seem, the fingers flicker, in more intimate a situation? Or Lou, jealous of me? Is he jealous now? Does he suffer? I think not. This is what irks, what irritates. I have gone, and Lou doesn’t mind, hardly notices.
Lou and I have always presented a good public face: we make a happily married couple, a busy professional pair; she in the media—seen as a little suspect, a little too clever for her own good—he in the interpretive arts: sensitive, hard-working, dedicated: often away. Just as well, they say, that Valerie has the children and her work to keep her occupied. Perhaps, in retrospect, rather a dull pair to have at a dinner party. Lou and Valerie. Most of the friends are from the music world, not the media: they don’t mix easily. Orchestra talk is very different from newspaper talk, and, as so often, the husband’s occupation wins. Musicians are by their very naming good—media folk are noisy, rackety, flip.
Lou, Valerie, Sophie, Ben. One of the strangest things is how little I think of Sophie and Ben. As if I were not one person as I had always thought, but divide very simply and cleanly into two—the erotic and the maternal. The erotic has swept in and taken over: split the maternal off, like a tree split by lightning—one half stands and grows, the other simply falls and dies.
I say I do not mind Hugo visiting Stef but why is he so long away? It’s time he came home to me. I do not like the thoughts in my head. I need his presence to drive them away. He said it was to discuss the children but what was there to discuss? She will look after them, no doubt, as Lou will look after Sophie and Ben. Let him communicate with her by letter, if he must: let solicitors arrange money matters. Stef has a good job: she can support herself. She is a financial journalist with her own by-line. She is a cold, unfeeling and unresponsive woman: she must be, or Hugo would not have left her for me. She was his youthful mistake: she is in the past tense. She lives in time: Hugo and myself out of it. I wonder if I were to kill her, if she were dead, if she were knocked over by a car, would that make the jealousy, that mixture of anxiety, grief and fear of exclusion, simply stop? Is it Eleanor’s notion or mine that sex in itself is a drug: that its effects are like heroin? In which case I can see jealousy as one of the nastier withdrawal symptoms. Only Hugo, once again in me, part of me, driving in like a needle into flesh, will stop this particular distress.
I look Stef and Hugo up in the telephone book. I punch out the numbers. The hotel phone sings its special little sickly Stef-and-Hugo tune. A child’s voice answers. No doubt Peter, aged eight. The eldest. The other two are twins; aged four, I seem to remember Hugo saying. Peter ought to be in bed. What kind of a mother is she? I find I am lost for words: put down the telephone, but not before a woman snatches the phone and says, ‘Who’s that? I know
who that is! Bitch!’ before I cut her off. She shouldn’t speak like that, behave like that, in front of her own children: No wonder Hugo prefers Valerie the Comparatively Well Behaved.
Presently the phone beside the bed goes. It is Hugo. He can come for an hour. Why only for an hour? Isn’t he living here with me? Never mind, never mind.
I hear his step; I open the door into the hotel corridor. It has a timeless, placeless look: it could be anywhere in the world. There is not enough air on earth for me to breathe: my love is consuming all the oxygen in heaven. We are on the floor together: the door has to swing to on its own, as it is designed to do, though more for the sake of security than lovers. Oh, the fix, the fix!
Now I am myself again I can get on with Lover at the Gate.
LOVER AT THE GATE [4]
Bernard and Ellen’s Catholic months
‘YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT,’ SAID Ellen to Bernard on the first night of their wedded life. ‘Sex is not only sinful, it’s disgusting.’
‘You shouldn’t not do it because it’s disgusting,’ said Bernard, ‘but because it’s carnal.’
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘The more you pay attention to the body, the less attention you’ve got left to pay the soul. I really do understand that.’
She agreed with him whenever possible. That way, she imagined, domestic harmony would lie. They took the little house two doors away from Ken and Rhoda; her own to play with, to sweep and dust and arrange as she liked, and meals for two to cook at her discretion, and her father and grandmother just down the road so she had both a respite from them and could keep an eye on them, not too close but not too far. Though what the eye saw was increasingly dismal. Then one day Rhoda went off like a damp squib into eternity: and after that it went into a sort of déjà vu double vision, watching Ken and his ex-saxophonist’s widow get together. She slept a good deal.
