by Fay Weldon
I caught a glimpse of Mavis’ face, pale but pretty, with brown button eyes and a naughty mouth, and then the pair of them faded out, and a sound-only background track started again; Mr Bennett’s heavy breathing as he lunged downstairs, Mavis’s little squeal: but no words, no pictures. The GCGITS was editing the tape as it looped, messing around; he will sometimes allow a glimpse, no more. Well, I could cope with that. Nothing terrible was happening. Mavis was obviously in command of the situation. Little girls can be quite competent when it comes to dealing with big men. I felt quite privileged to be allowed this vision of the past; it was like having one’s screenplay performed, one’s own invention, until now confined to words on paper, coming to life as actors seize the words and voice them. There is nothing more gratifying.
But then something more disturbing happened. Janice looked in on her way back from the Rosicrucian course in Salisbury. The doorbell rang and I saved the text, and went upstairs to answer it. Rex usually does but it was a Thursday and I knew he was out at the market. Janice looked even odder than she had on the outward journey: her eyes even more poppy and her hair flatter and straighter and thinner, as if all of her was being consumed from within, leaving her even less substantial amongst her voluminous hand-crafted garments. The passage of the spirits through the body as you channel them from one world to the next can quite wear one away, it seems. (Not so, alas, with fictional characters, or perhaps I just take care to pad myself well with flesh to stop it happening; though come to think of it writing in the basement had mysteriously left me thinner, though I eat as well as usual.) Janice wouldn’t take tea or coffee or fruit juice, but only hot water. Rex came back from the market and put the fish in the fridge, and then excused himself and fled upstairs to the attic. Janice’s spiritual absurdities disturb him; he is a good Christian, as am I. Faux religions tend to bring the real ones into disrepute and it distresses him to witness it.
I asked Janice politely if it had been a successful course, and she said yes, it had, it had sharpened her channelling powers. Humanity was learning a great lesson at this time.
‘We must learn to realise our Godhood, that we are intertwined with the Prime Creator and all that exists,’ she said. ‘Over the weekend that understanding became part of me.’
I said I was glad for her. She said her over-self was stronger than ever; her connections with superior alien intelligences firmer; this was a crucial transition time in helping earth bring in an era of peace. The old ones were with us to guide us to the light. She had been especially chosen to play her part.
I asked if she had met anyone interesting and she smiled and looked almost pretty and said a Master had come amongst them, a superior being, who had chosen her to share an intimate encounter. Well, I was pleased for her, though the encounter didn’t seem to have returned her to sanity; on the contrary. The ‘good shag’ that men so often believe is ‘all she needs’ can be counter-productive. Mind you, one didn’t know how good or otherwise it had actually been, and ‘Master’ sounded a bit exploitative. But I didn’t delve any further.
She had a proposition to put to me, she said, which was really why she had come by. The vibes in my house had been so strong she wanted to bring round a party of ghost hunters from Glastonbury to stay in the house overnight. She would charge £100 per person; she could probably get a group of twenty people and we would share the profit. I said no, my home and its past were not up for commercial exploitation and anyway Rex would never hear of such a thing. Husbands, like mothers, are very useful for citing as reasons why one cannot do as one is asked.
She said it was a pity and hoped I would change my mind. She was sure I would. I was something of a medium myself, she told me, though I was in denial. She had been to a very enlightening session on the development of psychic powers and could now see my white aura, which meant spirits were part of me. The automatic writing was part of it all, surely I realised that? It was often used by spirits to communicate; did I astral travel? Sometimes she felt when she read my work that I had been in my dreams to these places I wrote about. I was pleased to hear that she read my work, though she probably didn’t buy – she was not the sort – she’d use the library.
Janice asked if she could go down into the cellar and just sit a while, and having disappointed her about the ghost hunters I said yes and she disappeared down the worn stone steps. I trusted she wouldn’t meet Mr Bennett on the way. I left her to it. I realised too late she would see the garlic and would now never let me alone. Within five minutes she was upstairs again. She was fluttering her hands and looked upset, though it was always a bit difficult to tell what was upset in Janice, and what was enthusiasm. It turned out to be enthusiasm.
She asked me who Alice was. She had met such a nice woman down there, with a high forehead, called Alice – who was singing hymns and praying for someone. I asked her what she was singing. Janice replied, ‘A hymn. Glad that I Live am I. And what a beautiful, golden, positive hymn it was. I had no need to be frightened. The spirits in the basement were plentiful but all were well intentioned: I could get rid of the garlic, it didn’t work anyway.
The trouble with the mad is that they often sound so convincingly sane one can begin to think as they do. I did not want to believe that she had picked up on my Alice, who was pretty much a subsidiary character anyway. Perhaps the Bennetts’ cook had been called Alice? Though a nice woman praying did sound rather more like my Alice up in the North than the basement cook in the past, from whom I had mostly got rather irritated and possibly drunken vibes. It was no use asking Janice what Alice looked like because I did not know either. I had not turned my attention to a description because she hadn’t actually appeared on the scene, just been someone in the background who disapproved of gays sufficiently not to come to her own daughter’s wedding in case she was marrying one. So I asked her who this Alice had been praying for, which was rather brave of me, considering. Janice said she couldn’t be sure, someone whose name started with a C: Clara? Cynara?
And that did it. I moved my laptop back up to my regular office on the first floor, where I have a pleasant view of the Pugin church and pink roses growing up the old rowan tree. My mother-in-law, aged ninety-three, died in this room – it was once the master bedroom, where the Bennetts would have slept or tried to sleep, but it was peaceful and bright, and sunlight chased away ghosts and fancies. And I am in the real rational world again, and ready to carry on.
I am now going to move to Part Two, where I will give an account of Beverley’s growing up and the various adventures which brought her to Robinsdale. Just remember to keep in mind the story so far, please, while I get on with the mater familias.
Remember that Scarlet is about to meet Jackson at Costa’s.
Jackson is on his way back from visiting his ex-wife Briony.
Gerry is on his way to rescue Beverley, who by virtue of Scarlet’s good deed has been set free, released from kehua, Furies, grateful dead, kelpies, whatever, or however the dysfunctional genes which plague this family are registered.
Lola is on her mission to seduce her uncle Louis, who, reluctant to save Scarlet from herself, is calling up his lost love Samantha.
Cynara is heaving D’Dora’s possessions about and feeling guilty about Lola.
And Alice, one can only suppose on Janice’s evidence, is praying for Cynara.
It is possible for you to simply move on to Part Three and get back to how the family resolved their problems, by one simple murder, and be done with Beverley. It depends on how interested you are in how life experience, over time, makes one what one is. But if you’ve got this far, you might as well just read on.
The ‘one simple murder’, by the way, was spur of the moment, but I’ll try and make it work.
PART TWO
Beverley, pre-pubertal
By the age of seven Beverley regarded both her parents as crass usurpers, and had decided with her friend Evelyn that she too had been switched at birth and was a princess by rights. But by tw
elve she had quite fallen in love with the man she knew as her father, and was proud to claim him as her own. He had, she thought, the looks of Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel, screened at the Coromandel Town Hall in 1942, to that small town’s great excitement. Dr Arthur Audley was well fitted to play romantic leads. He was long-nosed, high-browed, short-jawed and sensitive, with haunted and haunting eyes and full, sensuous lips. His women patients adored him, though by now he was noticeably ageing and his hair was receding, making his tall brow taller still. Rita had grown tougher and more gauntly horse-like as the years went by; she was kind, busy and practical, but lacked eroticism. Beverley liked her but dismissed her as of no account, disparaging her as she grew into her disdainful teenage years with just a raised eyebrow here, a quizzical eyebrow there. It drove Rita mad.
‘Do you think she knows?’ she asked Arthur once.
‘There’s nothing for her to know,’ Arthur said. ‘She was too small.’
‘We’ll have to tell her one day,’ said Rita. ‘Supposing someone from Amberley comes up here and puts two and two together and she finds out?’
‘We’ll tell her when she’s seventeen,’ said Arthur. ‘She’s growing up to be quite a looker. She’ll be more than old enough by then to know who she wants as a father and who she doesn’t.’
Which Rita thought was a slightly odd way of putting it, but didn’t say so. She was glad enough that Arthur had agreed that Beverley needed to be told eventually. A lot of families thought family secrets should be just that. Arthur went on to talk about incest and how rare it was in the Maori tribes and how common amongst the white pakeha in isolated areas, and the conversation moved on, to Rita’s relief.
Arthur had a new Ford Mercury with a mighty V8 engine, of which he was inordinately proud. It was a great black monster, which had survived Axis submarines to get to New Zealand. It climbed the hills with impressive alacrity –some were so steep in Coromandel that the old Model Ts could only get up them in reverse gear. Little Beverley would sit in the front passenger seat beside him in the Merc when he went on house calls, sharing his pride. She was the Doctor’s daughter, and the title gave her a sense of prestige and status which stayed with her for the rest of her life, and which even in direst circumstances would come to her aid. If some strange man bent over her naked body taking his pleasure at her expense, breathing fish and chips vinegar over her (only once, that), or she was reduced to cleaning toilets for a living, she could still say to herself, ‘Yes, but I’m still the Doctor’s daughter.’
Rita wouldn’t go with Arthur on these excursions, too terrified of the hairpin bends, the rough surface of unmade-up roads, the precipitate drop down the mountainside if anything went wrong. Beverley was without fear. One day, halfway over the hill road to Kennedy Bay, the engine began to steam and they had to stop and get out and wait for it to cool. Arthur opened the bonnet and showed her how engines worked.
‘Lie down beside me here,’ he said, so she lay beside him in the yellow dust and he pointed out the brake cable and said this was the way to get rid of enemies. You weakened the cable by slicing it almost through with a Stanley knife. On these steep hills, with these hairpin bends, brake cables were a matter of life and death. Beverley thought that was a strange thing to say. He could be quite a frightening man, as well as a charming one. They lay there in the dust until the engine cooled; then they got up and brushed themselves down and continued on their way.
She’d waited three hours in the car that day while he delivered a baby. It was a difficult birth: a Maori family, and they had no money to pay. She wondered if there was anyone he wanted to kill? He was so good to his patients, but not always nice to Rita.
‘Quite the little figure you’re getting there,’ he observed, on the way home.
She was wearing a summer dress with a pattern in blue and white oyster-shape whirls and she quite liked it, except she had noticed that instead of falling straight down it poked out a little on either side of her chest. It hadn’t quite occurred to her that she was going to turn into a woman. She preferred herself as an eternal child. She blushed, and he laughed, and brushed his finger up against her cheek, affectionately, and through the cotton dress to feel the nipple, which stood up the way it did when she was swimming and the water was cold. That made her tingle and there was a sudden sort of plunging feeling between her legs. She supposed it was all right but wasn’t quite sure. Then he added, ‘Every day in every way, more and more like your mother.’
It didn’t make sense. She didn’t look in the least like Rita. Rita these days was flat all the way down and getting flatter. Did he see nothing? She stopped going out with her father on house calls, saying she had too much homework to do. She had, too. She was doing English, Maths, Latin, History, French, Chemistry, Physics and Biology for her school certificate. Beverley lost her admiration for Arthur and padded around after Rita instead, grateful for her attention, helping her with the surgery, looking after the livestock grateful patients left in lieu of payments – chickens, ducks, rabbits, once a sheep. She asked Rita if she could get a bra like the other girls, and Rita found her a strange garment with circular stitching, which made her small breasts stick forward like beacons. The men who stood around outside the Star and Garter waited for her to go by with the milk pail after school, and at home she would catch Arthur looking, so she stopped wearing the bra: instead she wore a too-tight vest, one she’d grown out of, to flatten herself, and got on with her lessons.
Her periods started, and the news that this was going to happen to her once a month, five whole days of that month, was shocking. She worked it out. That was a sixth of your life until you were fifty when you might as well be dead anyway.
Rita must have told Arthur because he looked at her in the odd way men had begun to and said, ‘I hear you’re quite the little woman, Bev.’ She would have to change her name. Bev was intolerable: Cynara, perhaps, after Dowson. ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.’ And she quite went off Rita, too. They’d talked about her behind her back.
Lola, pre-pubertal
Just a short break from my account of Beverley, because I was thinking of Lola at the same age, and wondering whether heredity showed through as far as a great-grandchild. It didn’t. Lola became for a time so ethereally lovely that people of all genders, all ages, looked after her in the street. The sudden burst of oestrogen, running so near the surface of a tender, still childlike skin, was almost shocking in its impact. But Lola didn’t mind: she liked it: she knew everything: she watched porn. It became her habit to sit on her father’s knee while they watched TV, her firm peaky breasts pressed into his chest, her chin nuzzling into his neck. Jesper would shift uncomfortably and say, ‘You’re too old for this, Lola,’ and once Lola replied ‘Why call me Lola then? It’s a bad-girl’s name. What did you have in mind for me?’
Her mother Cynara had caught the daughter’s eye and knew that she was being teased and not very pleasantly, and that what Lola felt for her mother was not so much love, as competition and anger. Cynara had had to subdue the impulse to slap. The stage passed quickly, thank God, the transparent quality went, so that by sixteen she was just another pretty, too-thin girl in a too-short skirt. She still had her virginity, so far as Cynara knew. As D’Dora remarked, ‘Lola sees herself as Paris Hilton and probably has plans to wait until it’s legal and then surrender it on YouTube.’
Beverley lived in a culture where children were seen and not heard, schoolgirls didn’t date, nudity was shocking, porn unobtainable, and at the approach of puberty the sexes were segregated. Even in the primary schools there were separate entrances for boys and girls. You did not answer back, and you respected your elders and betters.
There, I should not have left Beverley. It is eleven o’clock on a hot Sunday morning and I can hear the church bells ringing, though there are no services over the road. The sound must be blowing up from St John’s in the High Street. The window is wide open. And something flies in. It looks like a ba
by hummingbird, tiny, darting, brightly coloured, wings beating so fast they’re just a blur. It rests for a moment on the top of my computer and stares at me with tiny glassy eyes, and is off again, and I am worrying for it almost as much as for me that it will blunder into something and hurt itself. Then, as suddenly as it has appeared, it is out of the window and is gone. Rex comes in – I must have cried out – and I describe this apparition and he laughs and says it was a hawk moth, and closes the window. But I take it as a lesson not to deviate from my account of Beverley, without straying into Lola territory, and then the untoward is less likely to happen. Sorry, folks.
Beverley at Fifteen
Beverley was a weekly boarder at Thames High School for Girls (founded 1880: motto, Ut Prosim Patriae – That I may be worthy of my country). The bus journey from Coromandel took a couple of hours along the coast road, and landslips or sudden torrential floods often made it impassable for days at a time so it was more sensible for her to board. The school uniform consisted of a blazer with the school crest, a white shirt, a pleated gymslip which disguised the figure, lisle stockings and lace-up shoes, a felt hat in winter and a panama in summer. In high summer a blue and white checked summer dress in cotton with a white collar was optional. Beverley chose never to wear it, which others found a little strange, but she was otherwise a gregarious, biddable, clever child among clever children, youngest in her class, serious but popular, with a gift for entertaining her friends, a way with words and no trouble at all to her teachers, other than the slight lift of the eyebrows, surprise at others’ total crassness, that had irked Rita. She was even made Head Girl, in spite of a few doubts expressed in the staff room.
‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Miss Butt, who taught Latin. ‘She runs rings around us and pities us.’
