Kehua!

by Fay Weldon

  The wedding to Winter had been a big posh do in Gloucester-shire with a lot of Maidment family and titles on his side and only little Alice and Dionne on hers; which rather relieved everyone, she thought. The roof over her head was now Robinsdale, in North London, spacious enough for meetings and for party members to be put up for the night, and was not too far away from the Soviet Trade Delegation in Highgate.

  There was much coffee to be made, and now she was married Winter had gone off the idea of topless dresses, or indeed parties, and open, companionate marriages – so nothing was much fun, but at least she could put her past behind her, and be, just a bit, like anyone else. There was now nothing wrong with her life except boredom, and so she spent a lot of time worrying about whether Trotsky was the villain or Stalin, and copy-editing the far-left magazine Black Hole. She was soon pregnant with Richie.

  Beverley at thirty-four

  ‘Rosa, I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Have you, Winter?’ He had taken LSD the day before. He still seemed slightly dazed and complained of flashbacks.

  ‘You and I have been very close to each other for some time. Practically pro-hegemonistic; it isn’t good.’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Yes, I know you do. But it is lazy. A woman needs to be free, to be liberated. Marriage is like prostitution, you are a slave, providing sexual, domestic and child-rearing services in return for board and lodging.’

  ‘I’d earn if there were any jobs.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to be working. You are quite busy enough. The children need you. I just want you to be sexually free.’

  ‘Ah, sexually.’

  ‘Joey’s going to be staying over tonight. We all owe him so much. He’s moving to Moscow. He’s appointed me leader of the cadre.’

  ‘I thought it was going to be Clive?’ Clive was the only working-class member of the North-West Cadre. Others tore their jeans, went unshaved, and tried to look poor and oppressed but it seldom worked. Clive wore a tie and polished his shoes, edited Black Hole, was an agent for left-wing writers, and was followed everywhere by MI5. He had great street credibility.

  ‘Joey says I’m probably a better bet,’ said Winter. ‘He’ll decide tomorrow. I really want this, Rosa.’

  He grabbed her hand and squeezed it and looked at her imploringly. What was this about? She realised.

  ‘You mean you want me to join him in the bed tonight?’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s a matter of revolutionary progress, liberation from old bonds of tradition. No one has to worry about getting pregnant any more. Why not? We should offer ourselves to each other freely. I don’t mean you sneak in, nothing furtive. I’ll show you to the bedside myself. He’s expecting you. He really wants you, always has. What do you say, Rosa?’

  ‘Actually, I’d rather not, Winter. He’s too old. And my name is Beverley.’

  ‘You bourgeoise cow,’ he said, and slammed out of the house and stayed out.

  She called Dionne in Paris and said, ‘Why? Why?’ and Dionne said men did that. It was a status thing. Pack behaviour. A dog with a bone will step back and release it when top dog comes along and wants it. That was what executive dinner parties were all about. You were there as a potential offering to the boss.

  ‘Oh,’ said Beverley, ‘I see.’

  Joey arrived, assuming Winter would be there in the house. He did not seem to mind that he wasn’t, other than remarking that Winter always chickened out of group sex. Beverley did indeed join Joey in the bed. Winter was right: why indeed not? And he was not too old; he was a randy old goat. She told him so and he said he had been anointed by the blood of the workers. He fucked for all of them. She had not heard this one before, though she could see it was true enough.

  She asked Joey not to tell Winter the details but he said one had to be open about these matters and tell the truth, otherwise in his experience there was trouble.

  ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Trust between comrades is imperative to the struggle.’

  ‘I always feel you’re laughing at us,’ he complained, as Butt, Crossly, Ferguson and Barker had felt so long ago.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ she said.

  Winter came back about midday. Joey told Winter the liberating deed was more than satisfactorily done and at length, and he was very pleased. He formally bequeathed Winter the cadre there and then, and, more, left a briefcase stuffed with cash behind, to go towards the big Rock Against Racism demo. Then he flew back to Moscow, first class. Joey showed Beverley the tickets.

  ‘There’s no first class available on Aeroflot so I have to take the BA flight,’ he said. ‘Moscow always treats me well. The East Germans make you fly economy.’

  Winter called her Bev from then on and screwed her nightly for a week. After that she was perfectly civil to him but more sensitive to the flaws in his character. On occasion, when he felt the need to restore his virility, he would search out people in the party he wanted or needed to impress and offer his wife to them, as a cat will drag in a dead bird and offer it to the one who fills the plate with cat food. She obliged, while feeling rather like the bird, a morally superior bird, of course.

  Beverley at thirty-five

  One Saturday Winter came back with a lot of gear from a camping shop and the famous army surplus store called Laurence Corner, and said he was on his way to Bolivia to join Che Guevara in the bitter fight against the imperialist lackeys. Beverley managed to get hold of Joey in Moscow and Joey only laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know, they contacted me and asked for a reference for poor Winter, can you believe it? But those 26th July people have really got it organised. I wrote back saying: “Good on enthusiasm, poor on brains”. They must have taken him on. Nothing I can do. Make sure he leaves a will.’

  Beverley could have worked harder at dissuading Winter but she didn’t. She didn’t quite send him off to war, but almost. Like the brake cable she’d almost cut all the way through, but not quite. Winter was shot and killed in the jungle within days of arriving in Bolivia, by quite whose side it was never made clear, nor in what circumstances. Che Guevara himself was shot and killed within a month.

  Winter had indeed made a new will, and had left a copy with his solicitors, without telling her. He had left Robinsdale to Beverley but the bulk of his money to the Movement. The Maidment parents and family shunned her, believing it was she who had led their Julian astray. She thought perhaps she had. Anything for a bit of excitement.

  She remembered how before she left Coromandel, on the way to the ferry with her two suitcases, she had crept into Arthur’s garage and lain on her back in the dust and sawed at the brake cable of the Mercury with a kitchen knife. It hadn’t gone through but had probably weakened it a good deal. For all she knew Arthur was dead and she had killed him. It had been simpler when she was called Rosa. If she was Beverley there were too many things to remember. On the other hand she realised she felt more like herself.

  Richie, aged nine, wept copiously for his father for a time and she had to make herself weep too, to keep the child in good face. He was a good-looking, bouncy, cheerful boy, but more Maidment than McLean, as obsessed by sport, cricket in particular, as his father had been with world revolution. She was fond of him but not involved with him and the feeling seemed to be mutual.

  ‘Why? Why?’ she asked Dionne.

  ‘Because if you don’t love the father why on earth should you love the child? I daresay daughters are different – but with the son all you’d see was the way their father slurped spaghetti, or scratched his feet, the kind of traits that annoy you if you haven’t had enough sex with him recently. I’m never going to have children. It’s all much too complicated.’

  Beverley at once felt defensive of Richie: he was his own person, just in some way remote from her. As it was he drifted off towards his father’s family, and seemed more at home with them than he did with her. She thought even then that when he grew up and left home he would go a long way but not have much to do with her, o
r only out of politeness.

  In the meanwhile Alice, seventeen and unmarried, was pregnant and needed her attention, and was asking questions about her father.

  Underpinnings

  The inhabitants of the basement are getting really restless. They keep intruding into my thoughts. Scarlet in particular, of the fiction al ones, is impatient. She has to get to her lover in Costa’s. (I just wrote Castro’s and had to go back and correct it – that’s poor Winter coming through from the fictional dead. All that folly and virility gone to waste. I actually seem to mourn him.)

  But I can’t leave Beverley yet. I have a special duty to her. I can’t leave her stranded and a widow, to play into the common belief that no woman’s life is really interesting after they get to be forty, and that’s pushing it. Why else are parts for women over thirty-five so thin on the ground, and novels about older women so hard to sell, though they are the bulk of the readers? No one wants to know is the brutal answer. I wrote my autobiography once and stopped when I got to thirty-seven. After that, really, who was going to care? Scarlet, Lola and the others will just have to wait. I’ll proceed with Beverley, whom I have certainly set up for an interesting future life.

  I have got Beverley the would-be parricide to Robinsdale and explained why she is as she is, and will certainly tell you presently about the other husbands: Batcombe, the architect, and Marcus Fletzner the famous right-wing journalist and drunk, and how Beverley was implicated in those deaths too, and how the kehua in the flapping of their wings can drive one to drastic action, more sometimes than just an imprudent running away.

  It is suddenly really hot up here. We are in the middle of a heat-wave, and I’ve been going out into the garden sometimes, and walking amongst the daisies; yesterday I was brave enough to look in through the window of the basement room and see the mauve wrap which Vi gave me still over the back of the typing chair which seems to be just waiting, and think, all that ghost stuff is nonsense, I’m going to go and work down there where it’s cool.

  But then I overhear Rex, who is talking to his old soldier friend Martin the picture-restorer, describe Janice as the kind of person who turns the milk sour when she passes by a churn. Where did he get that imagery from, I wonder? It feels a bit Victorian to me. It’s the kind of thing Mr Bennett would say of someone. Worse, it’s how I had Scarlet think of Lola. All this energy is bouncing about from person to person, the dead and the living, the fictional and the flesh-and-blood, and won’t lie down. Like Arthur seeing little Beverley’s bloody footsteps, I have the feeling it’s all my fault.

  Uneasy it makes me too that the floors of Yatt House no longer seem much of a barrier. Even that protection is dissolving. Lately there have been odd disturbing incidents upstairs: the whiff of a cigar once or twice in my lovely, airy office. It can only be Mr Bennett. This fine room was after all once his and hers, the very bedroom in which for a time he was not allowed, lest a further pregnancy should kill his poor wife; so that red-blooded man – I know, I got a glimpse of him, and he was certainly macho enough to even flutter my papers – will have stomped up and down smoking of an evening when she had retired, and then come up to force himself upon her instead of going downstairs to find Mavis.

  I don’t suppose Janice has to put up with cigar smoke in her nice new bungalow. At least she invites the other side in, they don’t come unasked.

  Another thing is that yesterday I heard the sound of panting from the corner, and looked up from my computer, and there was Bonzo, stretched out under the window trying to cool down. I looked out to see if Martin’s old Rover was in the drive but it wasn’t, so I thought oh, we must be dog-sitting again. And when I looked again Bonzo wasn’t there. He must have slipped out, which was rather clever of him in the time available. When I went downstairs next I said to Rex, ‘I see we’ve got Bonzo,’ and he looked surprised and said, ‘No, Martin’s not been round.’ So there you are, make of that what you can.

  If these phenomena are indeed to do with global warming, sudden extremes of weather, snow or wind, storm or swelter, the deliverers are soon going to be doing a brisk business.

  The deliverers, you will remember, are the ones the church sends in to do exorcisms. Knowing my luck, the one that turned up would probably be back from the Bennetts’ time, someone wearing a top hat, sent from the now decommissioned church across the road, bell, book, candle and all. And they’ll be trying to exorcise me. I don’t suppose I’m in danger, but people do just drop dead sometimes, like young Michael Jackson.

  And what about Cristobel Bennett? Now she’s propped up in bed in my office, clamouring for attention. I can’t see her, or hear her, she’s just dictating what I write: Oh, Mr Bennett, Mr Bennett, leave Cristobel alone! Mary Stopes the birth-control heroine didn’t come along till a decade or so later to explain that every time a woman has a baby she doubles her chances of dying. The men, bishops, judges and legislators, didn’t want to know – you could go to prison for advocating contraception – so it was a brave thing for a woman to say. Childbirth is not a nice way of dying, and takes a long time. I expect this nice office of mine, so pleasant for me, once echoed to screams, and any number of servants could not help. Downstairs Mavis haunts, upstairs Cristobel.

  Robinsdale, that gentle home, was so much younger than Yatt House and had not had much time to accumulate real distress in its walls. Though I daresay the kehua perched in its trees and looked mournfully around the Antipodean foliage and longed for the darker greens of home, and for Beverley and her kin to react as they should: that is, go home and perform the necessary rituals. Slim chance we have, they must have thought, but they were in no position to do much of anything but flap and rattle and precipitate action that might be as harmful as helpful. The Furies can chase you with guilt until you take to your heels and jump over a cliff, but the kehua are not like that. They just want you home where you belong, with the whanau.

  Back to Beverley, and sanity

  After Winter died the North-West Cadre dissolved and re-formed elsewhere – its members so well trained in the ways of Gramsciist entryism that now they hold positions of power in many of our institutions, playing a significant role in the non-elected European Council, turning Europe into the Soviet Union Lite, as was always their intent. Or so Beverley’s third husband Marcus was to insist, and though bright and witty enough, he was a noted conspiracy theorist. In the end, indeed, his mind was so muddied with drink, drugs and paranoia that he couldn’t even dodge a train when he saw it coming. Beverley could not possibly be blamed since she was in Paris at the time, but it is possible to manipulate events from a distance.

  An eligible and attractive widow with a good house and an agreeable nature is never going to be short of suitors. Nor was Beverley. Some she entertained, some she did not. Like women everywhere she hoped that true love would come along and solve all her problems, sweep her away on waves of certainty and overwhelm her with transcendent emotion, that sort of thing, but when after a couple of years she had not been so swept away she settled for Harry Batcombe, a slight, good-looking man with no personal baggage to drag around that she knew of: kind, gentle and well read – not in fact unlike the man Scarlet would later choose as a partner – and very useful when it came to controlling the builders Bev had just hired for her new conservatory.

  Harry worked at Buckingham Palace and saw the Queen in person every month or so to discuss the redesign and restoration of the galleries there, and frankly, Marxist Beverley was as much a sucker for royalty as anyone, and impressed by his Palace connections. Another bonus was that Harry got along well with Cynara, Alice’s daughter by the Unknown One.

  Beverley could never quite forget Rita’s dictum that most men would not want to take on another man’s child. She’d assumed that Winter, in taking on Alice, had been a kind of enlightened exception – yet here was another one. Children, the Pill having created a shortage of the little creatures, had become prizes to be valued, rather than seen as an expense, a blight on a busy man’s life
, and a usurper of the mother’s emotion.

  When Alice became pregnant at seventeen, just as she was off to study marine biology at Leeds – she liked fish and was good at science – she pressed Beverley more closely about her father and her grandparents.

  ‘Your father was a medical student,’ Beverley said. ‘I met him on holiday but he gave me a false name and disappeared. That was the kind of thing young men did, even nice ones, in those days. And your grandparents? Well,’ and she told Alice a version of the truth, about murder and suicide and tiny bloody footprints. She didn’t mention Arthur. She never mentioned Arthur. If she thought of Arthur these days, which was rarely, she imagined his Ford Mercury crashing down the hillside near Kennedy Bay and him meeting his death in a fireball. The fuel tank on those cars was huge.

  How the kehua congregated, flapped and squawked that day when Beverley told lies to Alice. They have a strange soundless squawk which makes you think the pressure in your ears has changed, and which made Alice so fearful she ran to the abortionist. But Beverley ran after her and dissuaded her from the vile deed, saying she Beverley would look after the child for ever more if she let it live. Kill one, save one.

  So now Alice lived in Leeds studying fish and little Cynara lived in Robinsdale, where the vibes were good, apart from the strange creatures hanging batlike in the trees, which I daresay would show up when lightning played over Highgate. But few would be looking. A stray one hung up on a beech tree near the biological sciences faculty at Leeds, but Alice was young and her immune system was good, and whenever it told her to run back to her mother she managed to discount it.

  Why should I, she said to the voice in her head. The less I see of family the better. Forget the family in the past, the one in the present was bad enough: there was all that business with her stepfather Winter and the North-West Cadre: and she’d seen Beverley, with her nightie torn, leave the spare room where Joey Matthews was sleeping, one early morning when her stepfather was not home.