by Fay Weldon
Onwards. But first allow me a little discursion now into the history of Beverley, Gerry and Fiona.
Gerry had been a good friend of Beverley’s second husband Harry, architect to the Queen. Harry had died – by his own hand – exposed as gay by the News of the World – ‘Queen’s architect found in bed with male Palace employee’ – at a time when homosexuality was still scandalous and certainly not admitted to be close to the monarchy. Gerry had courted Beverley assiduously for a whole three years after Harry’s death, while she held him off. He got tired of waiting and one day ran off without warning with a fellow geologist. Love amongst the rocks and sediments.
Fiona, plainer and more academic than Beverley by far, had tiny hands and feet and noticeably short little fingers, which had made Beverley, who had strong broad colonial pioneering hands, dismiss her at first as any kind of rival. Effective rivals often come in deceptively callow forms. Better to be ousted by someone younger and prettier than by someone plainer and thicker. It’s less painful, being explicable. Beverley had failed to notice the impressive string of degrees after Fiona’s name, let alone her willingness to follow Gerry to the ends of the earth, which she did. Norway, the Orkneys, Iceland, the Faröes – where Gerry went Fiona gladly went.
Gerry thus snatched away, Beverley married Marcus Fletzner the journalist, who had been researching a book on the scandal around Harry’s death. That had lasted four years, before he too died, stumbling under a train in the wrong company.
Gerry had lived and worked contentedly enough with Fiona in various places in the Borean far North, until she died of leukaemia. Beverley felt it was not surprising. Fiona had been a bloodless sort of person. And there is always a little Schadenfreude when a person responsible for discomfiture or embarrassment is removed from the world. It is a kind of victory. You have survived to give your version of the tale. They have not.
Gerry and Fiona had gone up from Tórshavn in the Faröes to the far island of Kalsoy for Christmas. It is not as cold up there as you might suppose as the Gulf Stream brushes around the islands. On Twelfth Night they’d been to the little fishing village of Mikladalur; it has pitch-black wooden houses with green turf roofs, and a pretty, white, red-roofed church in which model ships are strung from the ceiling, offerings from those grateful to God for preserving them in dangerous seas.
People keep a traditional watch for the seals here – folklore has it that they congregate in a cavern in these parts every Twelfth Night, throw off their skins and dance as the people they once were, before the sea took them. Fiona had wanted to go: she was born on Skye and loved the folklore of the sea creatures and the kelpies of the rivers and lakes.
‘But how do you know which twelfth night?’ said Gerry.
‘The Christian one will do,’ said Fiona, ‘and besides, we have the time.’
So in that strange lonely holiday time after Christmas, Gerry and Fiona turned up on the dawn of Twelfth Night to stand where the tussock met the sand beneath a reddy-grey sky and to gaze out over a flat sea.
‘Red in the morning, shepherds’ warning,’ said Gerry, ‘there’s going to be a storm.’ They were the only people there. They were wrapped up well against the cold. Nothing happened except a shaggy horse came wandering down by the shore, stood still as if in a painting, and then wandered off again.
‘That was no horse,’ said Fiona. ‘That was a kelpie. A water spirit.’
They were in a light-hearted mood. They went back to the boarding house to have breakfast, walked and bird-watched through the short day, and came again to the church and the shore at dusk, and stood there to wait and watch with a few other seal-sighting hopefuls. Someone played the fiddle, a cheerful ring dance about the selkie wife who shed her seal skin and married a farmer, and sure enough as Gerry and Fiona watched, presently a single seal did come ashore. Clouds were racing past the full moon: it was hard to be sure what was happening: everything gleamed so, and then yes, it was really a seal, and then another, and another, shiny sea creatures, so elegant in the water, so clumsy on land, flopping forward amongst the rounded rocks and driftwood, driven by God knows what – some say they respond to impending earthquakes on the seabed, hundreds of miles away, and Fiona collapsed.
She’d been complaining of tiredness, which was why she and Gerry had taken the holiday. A helicopter took her to the hospital at Tórshavn, where they did a white blood cell count, then whisked her off to Copenhagen. There they changed every drop of her blood, and watched her turn from pale to pink, but diagnosed acute lymphatic leukaemia and by the end of January she was dead.
Poor Fiona, who was rambling towards the end, kept assuring the nurses the seals had claimed her red blood cells for their own – the phocids needed extra haemoglobin for diving, the seas being so polluted they must dive ever deeper – and left her only the white ones. It wasn’t the nurses’ fault they could do nothing. It was hers. What was the point of Gerry explaining to her that she’d been working with benzene: a series of experiments on the emulsification of oil and brine, and the varying levels of pH toxicity in sea water, and just hadn’t been careful enough. Benzene kills, but not phocids.
Women can pass out of male lives with surprising ease. When Beverley wrote to Gerry with her condolences she had a letter back within the week, suggesting they get together again. He saw himself as a practical man, a man of decision and action. She had said no but they could, eventually, resume their friendship. Since then he had become an on-and-off semi-suitor. She supposed he coveted her house as much as he did her. He had lived a wandering life and had no fixed abode, and hers would do very nicely to retire into in his old age. But if you waited for a man without self-interest you would wait for ever.
She should not have Skyped him when she was feeling bored, as one should not go shopping when one is hungry. He might indeed take it into his head to come over and rescue her. Men were forever rescuing you and landing you in worse trouble than when you began. She should not have stirred him up. But she was fed up with the way the young had it so easy: how confident they were, how they dreaded so little and expected so much. She wanted a companion to tell things to, true – but surely she could employ a ghost-writer just to get it all down? Suddenly her past needed a proper airing. She had had to wait many decades to feel able to face it.
She went back to her book. It was only a dog-eared copy of an old Tom Clancy thriller, which she could reach from her sofa without having to get up. The book was both too familiar and boring, so she put it down and got through to Louis on his mobile.
The trouble with Beverley, as she would be the first to admit, is that she will do anything for a bit of excitement. The conversation with Gerry has merely whetted her appetite.
Down here writing
It’s not working. Yet here I have been behaving properly as a writer, have I not? Uninvolved, temperate, superior, rational, in command of my material, but good practice has not been as I hoped; it has not been enough to hold back the meta-real. The sounds are beginning again. It may be nothing to do with the wind direction, just something to do with too-abrupt changes in the temperature – or am I looking for excuses? We had five days of really hot sunny weather, during which time I was pleased to be down here in the cool, but now suddenly overnight it’s a normal English June, which means hail is battering the roses, and I am seeing as well as hearing things I had rather not. I really can’t blame the weather any longer. For a writer to brush too close to the other side is a dangerous business: to talk of ghosts is to create them. ‘Talk of the Devil’ – and all that. Janice was the final straw. I can hardly believe that writing about the seal creatures of the North, the shape-shifting selkies, let alone Maori kehua, is going to summon a whole batch of Victorian domestic ghosts to the here and now, yet it seems to be so. It’s not just some harmless timeslip but something more disconcerting and even threatening.
Today my senses seem rather too acute for comfort. From time to time there’s another sound in the room, a raspy asthmatic breath
ing. I once lived with my mother in a converted barn, where horses had been stabled, and she swore that on quiet evenings she could hear them breathing.
I look around; there’s no one there, of course, just the old sheet which keeps the dust out, draped over the portable midi keyboard that’s kept down here in case of gigs. Just an old sheet, I say, but actually it’s quite special to me, so worn from use and many washings that its original red and green French swirls have faded to something beautiful. It’s seen me through many beds and many marriages. I bought it at enormous expense from a linen store in Sloane Street back in the seventies; it cost £120 even then, king-size. Those were the days.
It’s not moving or swaying or anything, just this kind of ticking sound and a sniffling from beneath it. Perhaps the midi piano has virtual air in virtual organ pipes, if that’s what they have. Perhaps, probably, not. I would think a wall heater behind it had been turned on, and the plumbing was coming to life, but there’s no wall heater there. Not quite ticking now, more the sound of chopping on a wooden board, and then it slows, stops, starts again. I realise what it is. My eyes are watering slightly. It is the cook chopping onions a hundred or so years ago. I can swear it’s that. And if that’s all it is it’s not so bad at all. But I had a nasty fright.
It’s raining hard outside. Perhaps whenever it rains hard she chops onions. Perhaps Cook, whose name is Mrs Avis – the Mrs is a courtesy: she is really a Miss – was chopping onions, with tears streaming out of her eyes and said one day back then, ‘My tears are going as hard as they raindrops,’ and somehow the moment has lingered, and whenever it rains really hard the moment re-creates itself. I hope it’s onion tears, not tears of grief: I hope it doesn’t presage something awful; no, it’s surely more like the fluttering of the kehua above Scarlet’s head, with their bad advice heard or not heard.
I’m pretty sure the kehua have left Beverley alone; surely Beverley has been cleansed and is liberated: why otherwise did I make her stand beneath the shower, and set off in pursuit of Gerry? How else can I know as much as I do about her childhood, other than now she is letting me in to look at her memories?
No, these are onion tears, not funeral tears. They don’t mean I’m going to pop my clogs any moment now, even before I finish this book. Do they?
What a wet day it is; the wheelbarrow Maureen has left outside my window is six inches full of water. Maureen is our gardener – this house still requires its servants, it seems. She makes wicker-work cradles and coffins and when she has time she hews and digs for us. Not today. No one with any sense goes out on days like this unless they have to. The daisies on the lawn, the other side of the window, at my eye level, haven’t even bothered opening. The buttercups seem defeated and the remaining apple-blossom pink is dulled and sodden. The washing machine is churning away in the room next door – on the hot wash with the towels so there’s a warm sudsy smell.
I am going upstairs to have a cup of coffee. If this room is haunted how am I going to finish this novel? Mavis and Mr Bennett were a kind of conceit; this feels a bit too real. How do I know about Mrs Avis? Did I simply make it up?
Then fortunately upstairs the doorbell goes, and I hear Bonzo bouncing in to be dog-sat by Rex my husband, who comes down from his attic fastness to offer him affection, concern and lamb bones. Bonzo comes galloping down the cellar stairs to make sure I’m here, bringing a healthy wet-dog smell with him; he stares puzzled at the draped piano and then decides it’s okay whatever it is, circles me, nuzzles me, lollops upstairs again to slurp water and crunch lamb bones. He’s a Welsh collie; they’re really smart. If he thinks it checks out, it does. I will postpone my coffee, agree with Bonzo that it’s just one of those things, stay where I am and get on.
Louis at work when Beverley’s call is put through
MetaFashion is in Maddox Street, in that rather dim, elderly section of London between Bond Street and Regent Street where property speculators have not yet got a foothold, and things look pretty much as they did in the fifties. Small family businesses continue to operate. Tailors sit cross-legged under first-floor windows and sew by hand, the law of ‘ancient lights’ still in force, so no new building can stand between them and their right to light. MetaFashion employs a regular staff of sixteen when things are quiet, rising to as many as fifty when they’re busy – designers, carpenters, sexually ambiguous electricians, butch builders, and a clutch of eight regulars, girls (more or less) too anorexic to be sexually active, but good with needle and thread. There’s a showroom in front, offices above, and extensive workshops behind. Icehouse Vamp was finally shipped out the day before; approved designs for Caribbean Mayday are not yet in from Moscow, so today, thank God, they are quiet.
MetaFashion is a family company owned and controlled by Louis, who is also its business manager, his mother Annabel (a sleeping partner, who likes to be kept informed) and his cousin D’Kath, who inherited it from her mother Amanda Stapleton, the society beauty and heiress. Fortunately D’Kath and Louis get on very well, and she is one of the few people at MetaFashion who does not assume, to Louis’ chagrin, that he is a closet gay. D’Kath is the acknowledged driving force of MetaFashion; she it is who selects the staff, barks at the men, hisses in a sibylline way at women, and has a pool of coffee-making interns at her fingertips, pretty girls who turn up to learn the trade, earn no money and wear lipstick well. Those with less than well-defined lips apply for jobs in vain.
Where other similar companies struggle in a recession, MetaFashion – in its noisy, panicky, excitable way – prospers. It reads the minds of top designers, tempers fantasy with practicality, meets its deadlines, produces themed sets and catwalks that do not crumble, or bend, or trip the models, and most importantly knows how to pack safely and transport efficiently. Thanks to Louis, it also makes a profit. Louis is much appreciated for his sensitivity, his tact, his reliability and his business acumen. Unlike Scarlet, he operates on a you-win/I-win basis and has no truck with head-games.
But this is not how Louis wants to be known. He wants his creativity to be understood and appreciated. He wants to write his novel: it is all in his head; he watches and observes, a still centre, while those around him whizz and snap like sparklers and fizzle out. He has forgotten all about the row with Scarlet when he gets the call from Beverley. He has been on the phone to the Moscow fashion house, trying to explain that to combine a concept of Mayday as an English spring ritual, a call for help for aircraft in distress, and the Caribbean as a pirates’ playground may prove difficult. Mind you, MetaFashion had had a thematic difficulty with Icehouse Vamp, just shipped off to Paris in numbered parts ready for reconstruction the other end – a fantasy of blue-and-silver trees in which models rose from coffins on to a gold-leaf-covered catwalk. Gold leaf always impressed clients but was actually cheaper than you’d think. That phone call was made and successfully concluded and now here was Beverley on the phone suggesting he drop everything and go to Costa’s in Soho because Scarlet had taken his suitcases and was running off with a film star called Jackson Wright.
Had Beverley been able to say ‘running off with your wife’ it might have made more impact – the impulse would be to run off and get the property back, and beat up the thief. But the impulse is not so strong when it comes to partners; the other is a person, not property, and this has both advantages and drawbacks. Louis felt he had one or two things around the office he had to see to before he made his way to Costa’s. Scarlet was a free agent. He had hoped she was not ‘seeing someone else’, but found he had no trouble imagining that she was.
Scarlet did not share his enthusiasm for Nopasaran; the offence she took when her mother declined to come to the projected wedding had always seemed disingenuous – she had simply decided to keep her options open in case someone better came along. Now she had made it clear that she did not want children, so really it would be sensible of him just to stay where he was and not pursue her. It would certainly please his mother if he did not.
Yet Scarlet and
he were accustomed to one another, and he half loved her, and it was not common sense that was of prime importance here; rather it was sensibility. He did not like to think of her with another man. He assumed she had never brought whoever it was home to Nopasaran: she surely would not go as far as that. He would in time go after her. But not at once. Let her not think he would come running: he had an independent life outside MetaFashion, outside Nopasaran, outside Scarlet. She was bluffing: trying to get him to sell the house. Well, he wouldn’t.
Instead he made a call to Samantha, the Matron’s daughter from long ago. He had traced her through Facebook, one morning after a particularly savage row with Scarlet, and acquired her number through a mutual friend. He had not called her until now, but merely kept her phone number in his wallet, which he knew Scarlet was not interested enough to search. Samantha had many, many friends. Her favourite film was ET, which Louis and she had seen together, in the school days before disaster, before Stuart had hanged himself and thus made everything thereafter impossible. There was one particular Facebook snapshot with her husband, standing on a sand dune on a family holiday: her husband was shorter than she was, and it looked as if her sandals were cut with the leather seam in the centre. It was a camping holiday: the tent was in the background. It was so different a world from the one Louis inhabited that he had ventured no further. Now he did.
How Jackson is getting on
Jackson is running late. Cleaning up for Scarlet took more time than he thought and then the traffic was bad. It is possible, he can see, that he may soon lose his licence. The night the police stopped him his drinking companions ought to have taken his keys away before he set off for home, instead of plying him with yet more booze. Full of arseholes, the Hampstead pub where that fuck of a second-rate TV director hangs out and holds court. Jackson is normally careful about his alcohol intake. Drugs are one thing, can even brighten the eye and speed the mind, but alcohol blurs a man’s looks, and he is honest enough on a good day to face the fact that he earns his living as much by his looks as by his acting ability.
