by Fay Weldon
‘It’s true,’ said Miss Ferguson, the gym teacher. ‘When she’s working on the vaulting horse she gets this expression of, what – incredulity? Otherwise she’s too good to be true.’
But Miss Crossly who taught maths said just because she was too good to be true didn’t mean she wasn’t. Mrs Barker the headmistress, who had been sent papers on the child’s background, was the only one to know the girl’s history, and said nothing.
Beverley as Head Girl proved to be fair, just and reliable. She knew no boys of her own age. While you wore school uniform you were out of bounds to men, and you could easily be in school uniform until you were eighteen. She had a vague theoretical notion of what went on in marriage between men and women, but had scarcely seen a naked body either in the flesh or in photographs – though there was a Fuseli in the Auckland Art Gallery, The Serpent Tempting Eve, which was instructive, and the Dowson poem, Vitae Summa Brevis, which haunted her, and made her long to be older and better able to understand it.
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
And then of course Cynara:
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finish’d and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
She found it almost unbearable. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t be sure what about. It was so strange, so unlike any passion anyone could admit to in this practical landscape; no one flung roses here. They drank too much beer; but no one called for wilder music or for stronger wine. She was not sure she fancied being Cynara, she of the pale lost lilies. The one of the bought red mouth probably got a better deal of it from Dowson. Then she found from books – teachers never told you this kind of thing – that Dowson had been unhappily in love with a girl of twelve, who was probably Cynara, and died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-two, and Beverley didn’t know what to think.
Beverley at sixteen
Every now and then Arthur would talk about her looking more and more like her mother, and the more she looked less and less like Rita the more puzzled she became. She waited until her parents were out and looked through the drawers marked ‘Private – keep out – that means you’. She found adoption papers in Rita’s drawer that referred to the Canterbury Girls’ Receiving Society. She escaped for long enough on a school trip to the Auckland Library to look up records in the Christchurch Press from the mid-thirties. She came across headlines:
Amberley Tragedy: local farmer and father kills young wife and dog
Walter McLean’s body found by cousin: locum Doctor James (Arthur to his friends) McLean finds slain farmer in ditch
Balance of mind disturbed…financial crash claims new victim
Party-goer Kitchie McLean, 23, new migrant from England, slain in ‘crime passionnel’
‘She never settled’, claim neighbours
Friends say farmer Walter McLean had become recluse
Orphaned three-year-old to be cared for by family friend: local beauty and heiress Rita Davies.
Local beauty and heiress? Rita? It depended on your standards. Beverley went back into the obituaries. Rita’s parents had been killed in a farming accident and she had inherited the farm when she was twenty. That would have made her attractive to Arthur, Beverley could see. Arthur would often talk about the depression and how so many doctors had been out of work, how the war had brought prosperity as well as hardship. Beverley felt fond enough of Rita to be glad she had once been seen as a beauty, even though now she was just another of the tightly permed and kindly, effective matrons, who in practice ran the country while the men ran it in name.
Rita was a good sort, Beverley decided, but not a patch on Kitchie, a snapshot of whom, turning a cartwheel on the lawn, had been published in the Christchurch Press. Beverley felt quite calm and cool about her discoveries, almost numb. Or perhaps she had been numb until now. She thought perhaps she had always known the broad strokes; it was just the detail she was missing. Beverley turned the paper upside down to study her mother’s face. Pretty, short wavy hair, big eyes, and a wide-lipped mouth. She could see she looked like her mother. She would be her real mother, then, but she would always run away before worse befell, as her mother had not. Party-goer Kitchie, shorthand for ‘no better than she should be’. Good wives did not go to parties.
The most satisfactory narrative Beverley could come up with, there in Auckland Public Library, in the free Reading Rooms beneath the Victorian clock and tower that seemed to give the whole city such a feel of permanency, significance and purpose, was that that her father Walter McLean had killed her mother Kitchie, because she was about to run off with someone – could it possibly be popular Dr Arthur Audley? Who had discovered the body and married Rita on the rebound and had adopted her, Beverley, because she was there? Or perhaps because she, Beverley, had on the parents’ death inherited the McLean farm? A matter which was never mentioned.
Now there was a thought.
When Beverley rejoined her school party she had been missing for three hours, and the library was ringing to the call of ‘Beverley! Beverley Audley!’ She was glad they cared, though her real name was Beverley McLean. It was probably wiser not to mention it, at least for the time being. She was given a detention, the first in her school life. Nobody seemed to notice that she was now a different person. So perhaps she wasn’t. That was the trouble: how did you define what you were? How much of her was Kitchie of the pale, lost lilies, and how much was Walter, desolate and sick of an old passion? And how much had she become Beverley Audley the Doctor’s daughter, creature of habit, who brushed her teeth in the mirror and passed exams and helped her mother about the house and didn’t want to upset the apple-cart.
All she knew was that now, on the rare occasions she got to Auckland and passed the Library, she looked away, and hated and despised the tower and clock as small and provincial and dull, where once it had seemed impressive.
She matriculated early and was accepted by Auckland University for the following autumn.
Beverley’s seventeenth birthday party
On her seventeenth birthday Rita and Arthur told Beverley there were things she needed to know and the time had come to tell her. But by the time they got round to telling her everyone was a little drunk.
Arthur her father had given her a violin for her birthday – she was good at music – and her mother a pair of brown court shoes, with one-and-a-half-inch heels, to celebrate her growing up, and a scarlet lipstick which looked horrible to Beverley so she said she’d keep it for a special occasion.
‘This is a special occasion,’ said Rita, hurt. ‘But have it your own way.’
They had had a special birthday meal when Beverley came back from her holiday job as a ward orderly at the cottag
e hospital across the road. Roast chicken and kumera and peas from the back garden, and peaches and nectarines with cream for pudding, and Beverley had been allowed a glass of sherry. The parents got through many bottles of beer that evening and Beverley wished they wouldn’t. It made them noisy and excited and they were usually so quiet.
She asked for more sherry, because now they’d given up beer and started on the sherry the more she had the more quickly they’d finish the bottle. They were feeling generous, and they gave her glass after glass of the thick, sweet, brownish liquid.
‘Let us have some music,’ cried Arthur, and Rita put on her favourite 78, The Wedding of the Painted Doll, with the blunt thorn needle that needed replacing. ‘More sherry,’ he cried, and Rita told him to calm down, what was the matter with him? He seemed almost to be crying, but telling her she was adopted, and she bet they weren’t going to tell her all the truth, just a bit of it. What was going on? Arthur was Dowson, calling for madder music and for stronger wine: the shadow was Kitchie’s. If he was Dowson, Cynara was Kitchie.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finish’d and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Rita scarcely had the ‘bought red mouth’ of Dowson’s description: it didn’t make sense. Beverley went into the bathroom where she smeared her lips with the scarlet lipstick, and found the bra pushed into the back of her drawer, and the dress with the oyster-shell design now much too short and tight for her, and went back into the living room wearing them. She thought there’d be some sort of row about it, but there wasn’t. Rita stared at her with a kind of hostility and said, ‘You’d best break into your savings, and get something decent that fits.’ But she could hardly complain, since she was the one who had given Beverley the lipstick. As for Arthur he put his hands over his crotch and said nothing.
There were flapping noises in Beverley’s head and flashings before her eyes. She was not used to alcohol. But she noticed well enough where Arthur’s hands were and arched her back and thrust out her chest and flung back her head and ran her fingers through her hair to provoke him. She somehow couldn’t help it. She had seen the Coromandel bad girls parade down the high street ‘flaunting themselves’ as Rita described it: now she was doing it and she liked it. Cynara was Kitchie, her mother, of the pale lost lilies, white with loss of blood; she, Beverley, would be the bought red mouth and survive.
‘Stop that,’ said Rita sharply, so Beverley did.
‘Go on,’ said Arthur, ‘tell the girl what you need to tell her and be done with it.’
He crossed one leg over the other and bent sideways to switch on the lamp and his domed forehead gleamed. Then a moth got under the shade and fizzled up, and the smell of scorched insect was everywhere.
Rita told Beverley that she was adopted and that they loved her very much and had been in two minds about telling her, but on balance thought they should. The speech had been prepared and Beverley had already seen it in Rita’s Keep Out drawer. Beverley asked about the circumstances of her birth.
Rita said she would tell her, but Beverley must be careful what she said to other people about it. Better to keep it secret. Others tended to think misfortune was catching, like the measles. There was no way – as there was not, at the time – that her birth parents could be traced. Arthur and Rita had been unable to have children of their own and had decided they wanted to adopt, and had chosen her from among dozens at the Girls’ Receiving Society in Christchurch. Beverley asked if they knew anything at all about her real parents.
‘We are your real parents,’ said Rita.
Beverley said politely, of course, but could they tell her anything at all about her genetic parents? They said they had found out that her mother had been a young university student from Canterbury College in the South Island who had got herself pregnant by a soldier – an officer – so she had been offered up for adoption.
‘Says you!’ said Beverley, rather rudely, and then composed herself. ‘It’s a nice story, and I’m sure you tell it to make me feel good, so thank you. Especially the officer bit. But my mother was a farmer’s wife in Amberley called Kitchie McLean and my father Walter allegedly cut her throat because she was running off with another man and then shot himself, and you took me in, which was nice of you, Rita, and probably quite advantageous to you, Arthur, but it doesn’t change the facts of the matter. I am the daughter of a whore and a murderer.’
On balance, she had decided, she was probably Walter’s child. It could be that she was Arthur’s, and Walter had found out. If she pushed her hair back from her face her forehead was domed, but then lots of foreheads were. It could even be that Arthur had murdered both Kitchie and Walter, because she, Beverley, was his child, and he wanted both his child and the farm, and had faked the suicide, in which case she was still the daughter of a whore and a murderer.
Holding brief
I worry, reader, that as I get further into this you’ll forget about the others milling about in the basement and you do need to keep them in mind. I will go down and sort them out presently, when I’m a bit stronger, but in the meantime life for them has moved on only an hour.
Scarlet is currently in her Prius on her way to Soho with two suitcases. She decided to use a car instead of a taxi in case Lola chose to borrow it in her absence. She could take the keys but it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Lola knew how to hot-wire.
Lola is indeed currently looking for the keys.
Jackson is caught up in a tremendous jam in the Strand and is panicking in case Scarlet changes her mind.
Louis is waiting for Samantha to visit him in his office. She just happened to be round the corner in Liberty’s, her favourite shop, when he got through to her.
D’Dora is looking up Facebook to find more details about the pretty girl she met at The Dungeonette last night, and forgetting that she is meant to be standing in for a colleague who has gone home with flu.
Cynara is wondering how much she really wants to earn her living working with felt flowers.
Beverley has almost fallen asleep over the Tom Clancy book, which is so heavy it tires her wrist, and is still worrying in case she has brought up her children all wrong.
Gerry has his flight booked back to London and Beverley.
And now I am in the middle of a thunderstorm. Sturm und Drang. Really black clouds racing behind the church tower: I can’t see a lightning conductor but I expect there is one, we’re on such a high point. The interval between lighting bolts and thunder claps is shorter every time, it is coming this way: I have displeased the basement folk. I am meant to be writing about Beverley. A crash shakes me and the room, even as the space flashes brilliant electric white; there’s the smell of sizzling moth. I’m not usually frightened by storms but this time I am. It’s gross. Odin is out to get me.
‘Where are you?’ I cry to Rex.
He comes down from his attic, says there’s a wonderful view from up there, better shut down the computer, it’s protected against surges but you never know. Save. Shut down. I do.
A drunken scene in Coromandel
The storm has passed, but it was right overhead; the lightning hit the old rowan tree, the one with the pink roses over it. They are no more, withered and gone, once flung so riotously with Dawson’s wild living throng. Quickly back to the Coromandel of long ago, before worse befalls.
Where were we? Yes.
‘Daughter of a murderer and a whore,’ Beverley was saying to her adoptive parents. She knows she is overstating her case but she has reason to be aggrieved. She is at an age when honesty seems to be of great importance, and instead of being grateful to Rita and Arthur, especially Rita, for taking her in in the first place, and trying to preserve the child’s good opinion
of her birth parents in the second, Beverley chooses to see only hypocrisy and deceit. She could say more. She could say Arthur fathered her, and murdered her father Walter, she could accuse Arthur of marrying Rita for her money and ask what happened to the farm she, Beverley, presumably inherited, but she does not. She is wise. And whore and murderer is enough to be getting on with.
After she says this there is silence. Then Rita says:
‘Your mother was a sweet, lovely girl married to the wrong man. She was looking for love, and deserved it.’
‘She deserved what she got,’ says Arthur.
And Beverley thought, well then, no, probably not her father; Arthur was not the mystery lover. Otherwise their lines would have been the other way round. And only then did they want to know how she had found out.
‘I know because I was there,’ said Beverley, ‘and I remember stamping about in the blood.’ She doesn’t quite remember that bit but, as I say, she is aggrieved. ‘Can we stop having this conversation now before things get worse?’
‘You can’t possibly remember,’ said Arthur. ‘You were too young.’
‘It was in all the newspapers,’ said Beverley. ‘With really big headlines.’
‘You were too young to read,’ said Arthur.
‘I could read when I was three,’ said Beverley. ‘And anyway I read all about it in the Auckland Library. It was like an epiphany.’
‘Whatever that means when it’s at home,’ said Rita, suppressing the urge to slap her daughter. ‘Real mother’, indeed, after all that. If she hadn’t taken Beverley in she could have had two children or more of her own. They’d have been bright enough, Arthur being a doctor, and she could at least have read their minds, as ordinary mothers of ordinary children did. And Beverley was quite right, as she all too often was: Kitchie had a whore’s temperament and Beverley had inherited it, look at her strutting around just now in a dress three sizes too small for her, and she, Rita, had always rather fancied Walter herself except he had a vile temper.
