by Fay Weldon
Chloe There’s always the BBC.
Marjorie What’s the point? Mother never even had a television, you know. I’m sure it was in case she saw my name on the screen.
As if in affirmation, Helen stirs and opens her eyes. She withdraws her hand from under Marjorie’s and relapses again into quiescence. Marjorie endures.
Chloe Why don’t you go home and sleep, Marjorie? I’ll stay.
Marjorie She might wake up and miss me.
Chloe You’ll go on wringing and wringing, won’t you, trying to squeeze a drop of affection out of an old dry bone. No wonder you take in so much washing.
Marjorie smiles, pleased at the notion, and lies down on one of the empty beds, and closes her eyes.
Marjorie I’ve been thinking of Midge.
Chloe So have I.
Marjorie We just stood back and let her die.
Midge the Mason’s daughter. Patrick, turned out of Frognal by Helen, goes to live with Midge. Who’d have thought it?
Not Midge’s parents, Mrs Martha and Mr Mervyn Macklin, stationer and Master Mason. Midge is their fourth child and their only daughter, and at the age of fourteen winner of the Luton Child-Artist-of-the-Year competition.
Mrs Macklin is a worrier. She worries about Midge’s health and happiness, and Mr Macklin’s secret Masonic rites. Mervyn keeps no other secrets from her; what is this disloyalty? Martha tries to break into the locked suitcase in which Mervyn keeps his robes: Martha wheedles, Martha begs, Martha cries, to no avail. Mr Macklin keeps his secrets. Midge his daughter aids and abets him. Daddy’s girl, not Mummy’s.
Mrs Mahonie next door tells Martha that what Masons do is to kiss the arses of goats in secret conclave. ‘What children men are,’ she says. ‘Like little boys, always trying to piss higher than anyone else. To see who can make the ceiling stink, as well as just the walls.’ Midge is not allowed to speak to Mrs Mahonie.
Midge is the triumph of the Macklin family: she is what they have worked and lived and bred for over generations; someone who will step out and away from the world of small streets and corner shops, and into something rich, grand and strange. Their offering to the middle classes.
Mervyn and Martha see Midge off to Art School, fearful for her virginity, her future, her sanity. She seems such a frail offering, this thin childish creature, with her stick-like legs, her mousy hair, her sparse bosom and her fierce loyalties.
They do well to be afraid. Midge takes an attic flat in Camberwell—unheated, unfurnished, and cheap, as two Doberman Pinschers roam the floor below—and within a month Patrick is installed there with her.
The female turtle wades out of the sea and on to the shore; digs a hollow and with infinite effort lays some six hundred eggs, covers them with sand, and dies, exhausted. The eggs hatch; the infants scramble for the sea. A thousand sea-birds lie in wait. Perhaps one turtle escapes, and reaches the waves. The quickest, the liveliest, the fittest to survive—or just the luckiest.
Is Patrick good luck or bad? Midge to her dying day—not long removed—maintains that it is good. Stubborn to the end.
Why then is she always crying? Is it her nature, or is it Patrick, or is it her nature making Patrick what he is?
Mr Macklin comes to London to rescue his daughter.
‘It’s my life,’ Midge says. ‘Let me lead it.’
‘You’re thin and ill,’ says Mr Macklin, ‘and wasting yourself and your talent—our talent—on that man. I’ll go to the College authorities. I’ll get him sent down.’
‘He’s left college already,’ says Midge, ‘and so have I. It was a waste of time. What can Patrick learn? He’s painting portraits and doing well. I’m perfectly all right.’
But she isn’t. Patrick cannot bear to give her money. He wants Midge to live with him for love, not for what he can provide. She does.
Midge is taken off to hospital suffering from malnutrition. How she cries, missing him.
Mr Macklin conceives a plan to poison Patrick. He sends him chocolates through the post, which Patrick prudently feeds to the Doberman Pinschers. They do not die, but their diarrhoea leaves dead patches over a wide circular area of Camberwell Green, to be seen to this day. (The park-keepers insist the dogs be kept on leads, so the owner takes them out on reels of kite string.)
Midge goes home to recuperate, stays three weeks in impatience and misery, in the room above the shop, and then goes back to Patrick, who marries her; to be revenged, he says, on Mr Macklin for his murderous attack and the wilful damage of Camberwell Green.
Midge, asked to leave the flat while Patrick paints his portraits, discovers he sleeps with his sitters. Everyone else has known for a long time. She goes home. She comes back. But to what? How Midge cries.
Patrick has taken a studio in London and is having an affair with Grace, who does not care whom he sleeps with or how so long as it’s only art; and he has smart ruthless friends, amongst them Oliver and Chloe, who terrify Midge. Midge, mousier every day, snivels and sniffs in her lonely sleep.
Midge gives birth to Kevin. Patrick, entranced by the visual aspects of motherhood, moves back. It is a dreadful time. Midge does not mind going hungry herself, or wearing jumble-sale clothes or Grace, Chloe, and Marjorie’s cast-offs, but when the baby cries from hunger and she has to borrow money from Chloe, while Patrick loses hundreds every night at poker, she is distressed, and cries, and the baby cries, and Patrick can’t stand it, and moves back with Grace.
Patrick oscillates between Grace and Midge. Weeks at the studio, weekends at the flat. Years pass. He buys bones for Midge to boil. There’s lots of nourishment in bones, he says.
Midge can’t go home any more. Her father has had a stroke and her mother nurses him and takes in lodgers and says to Midge ‘if you don’t mind I’d rather think of you as dead.’
Patrick impregnates Grace one drunken night, quarrelling with her the while, gets out of bed and goes home to Midge who has forgotten to take her pill and impregnates her.
Women conceive more easily when they’re crying, Patrick observes.
Grace, distraught, embarks on the abortion from which Oliver, at Chloe’s instigation, rescues her.
Oliver knocks on the door of the clinic. A pretty Irish nurse with steely eyes opens the door a crack. Does he have an appointment? No? Then he can’t come in.
But Oliver can and does, and the staff bundle Grace out of the building, sniffing trouble in the wind. Even though she doubled the money in the surgeon’s envelope, they would not touch her now. They are superstitious, as well they might be, dealing with death. Trouble breeds trouble, they all know that.
If your aircraft’s delayed, don’t board it. Bomb scares breed engine failure, and vice versa.
Grace proceeds with her pregnancy with an ill-will. She smokes, drinks, takes tranquillizers, tells Chloe if it’s a mongol, if it’s deformed, then it’s Chloe’s fault. Grace won’t see a doctor, won’t book a hospital bed, goes out shopping on the day the baby’s due, and in the labour ward encounters Patrick on his way to visit Midge.
Patrick stays with Grace, to watch the birth, and afterwards goes back to live with her. He admires her spirit. Midge keeps crying.
Grace calls the baby Stanhope, the name least likely to please, and parks it with Chloe most of the time.
Midge tries to get National Assistance and can’t. She is entitled to money from the State only if she starts divorce proceedings. Divorce Patrick? How can she? Patrick is her husband. Her children’s father. She loves him. One day, surely, he will settle down. Age and impotence, if nothing else, will eventually effect a cure. Or Grace will lose interest in him.
Grace sees Midge’s love for Patrick as nothing to do with her. Such singleness of spirit, in Grace’s post-Christie eyes, is nothing but masochistic and destructive folly. Midge should divorce Patrick, oblige him through the courts to support her properly, and set him free to follow his own nature. By what right, she asks, does Midge demand fidelity from Patrick, who is not equipped to give it?
She, Grace, demands nothing. She enjoys what there is to enjoy, and has ironed physical jealousy out of her soul. If she torments Geraldine it is for fun, and not from any sense of despair. Grace says.
She sends Kevin and Kestrel presents, however. She has some sense, or so Oliver says, of having deprived the children of something, if only a father.
Oliver takes fatherhood seriously.
Chloe, in Midge’s company, feels neither natural nor comfortable. She longs to take up a scrubbing-brush and scrub Midge’s floors, make up curtains for the bare windows, provide a toy-box for the children’s toys, a private doctor for Kestrel’s eye, handles for the chest of drawers. But she does not. She does not wish to offend Midge, by seeming to offer so simple a solution to her misery, and ignoring the greater, inner cause of it. Besides, she feels humble in the face of Midge’s devotion to a cause so vital yet so hopeless.
‘Humble! I can’t think why,’ says Marjorie. ‘With Oliver bringing home clap.’ Chloe had to tell Grace, in case Patrick as well as Oliver had been infected from the same source, and of course Grace had told Marjorie. ‘You show the same absurd devotion to Oliver as Midge does to Patrick. And Oliver isn’t even an artist.’
‘That’s altogether different,’ says Chloe. ‘Oliver doesn’t deny by word or deed that I’m his wife. Patrick’s every waking breath is a denial of Midge.’
And she believes it, too, like Midge. One day, one day, Oliver will calm down, stay home, acknowledge her own sexual supremacy over all the rivals he has found for her, and watch television with her through the evening of their years. That Oliver, as Christie did to Grace before him, will take it into his head to push this neglected looming wife of his into Patrick’s arms—in what can only be seen as an attempt to assuage his own guilt, or an excuse for further unpleasantness, or just a liking for emotional escalation, she is not to know. All she knows now is that Midge seems in some vague way her, Chloe’s, moral superior. And that she cannot ask her to her dinner parties, because how would Midge fit in amongst all the film people (who have sunken baths and marble front-door pillars) she must ask to dinner for Oliver’s sake. And how can she, with so much on her mind, be forever traipsing over to Acton in order to cheer up Midge, and listen to her tales of woe?
As for Marjorie, she is at work all day, and recovering from work all night. Marjorie can’t be much help. Marjorie uses Midge, as tactfully as possible of course, in a documentary about women with wasted lives. Marjorie feels that Midge cramps Patrick’s style.
‘Everything changes,’ says Marjorie. ‘You have to accept that it does. Because you had good times once doesn’t mean you have any right to have them now. Midge should never have had the children. It was selfish madness.’
Meanwhile, Kevin and Kestrel tug at Midge’s skirt and cry, and pester and mess. Kestrel’s eye gives constant trouble. It is always inflamed and weeping.
Midge is behind with the rent. She is given notice to quit. She goes to a phone-box and rings Grace’s flat, and asks for Patrick, but Grace spends so much time fetching him, that by the time he gets to the telephone Midge’s money has run out, and all he can hear is the dialling tone.
Midge has no present to give Kestrel for her second birthday, although Chloe, Marjorie and Grace have all sent little packets through the post. That’s something.
‘If anything ever happened to me,’ Midge once said to Chloe, ‘would you look after the children?’
‘Of course,’ said Chloe, not thinking. ‘What do you mean, if anything happened?’
‘An accident,’ Midge replied.
Midge takes all the sleeping pills the doctor has ever given her—she has been saving them over the years—on the eve of Kestrel’s birthday. In the morning she does not wake, and the children tug and pester in vain.
Marjorie, passing by on the way to an outside location, calls in, finds her thus, gets the ambulance, summons Chloe, and goes on to work. Well, what else is to be done?
No point in sitting around, letting grass grow under bridges.
Grace says what kind of future did Midge have anyway, if she’d been saving sleeping pills she must have had a suicidal nature; and was clearly looking for a scapegoat, and she, Grace, hereby refused the role. And what kind of woman did a thing like that to her children? Suicide, says Grace, is an act of hostility, and the murderer/murderee deserves censure, not pity.
All the same, from that time on, she seemed to lose her interest in Patrick.
Chloe took Kevin and Kestrel home. Patrick made no protest. But later, when Oliver suggested that he and Chloe might adopt them formally, he shook his head. In that case, says Oliver, pushed for money at the time, although paying Patrick some £2,000 to paint Chloe, you might pay towards their upkeep. Chloe, clothed only in her towel, on the very last sitting, all others having been completed without Patrick making a gesture other than purely artistic towards her, or she to him, brought up the subject of maintenance out of loyalty to Oliver, of course; she could never have done it for herself. But Oliver spending so much on her! £2,000 for a portrait. His brothers-in-law having just publicly paid a thousand each towards the cost of a forest on Mount Sinai.
Patrick Chloe, try and understand. If I give money away I can’t paint.
Chloe It’s not giving money away. It’s spending it on your own flesh and blood.
Patrick That’s what Midge said. She was never faithful to me. She was having an affair with the man who owned those Doberman Pinschers. That’s why I tried to kill them.
Chloe That’s absurd. Don’t say such things about Midge. She loved you. Why do you always have to make matters worse than they are?
Midge’s funeral was a desolate affair. Midge was buried, not cremated. Mrs Macklin pushed Mr Macklin in a wheelchair to the side of the grave. Mr Macklin tried to leap at Patrick’s throat but only succeeded in falling out of his chair on to the ground. Patrick, who seemed drugged or drunk or both, and quite out of his mind, had come to the funeral with a fifteen-year-old heroin addict, whose industrialist father wanted her committed to canvas while still presentable.
Grace did not come at all. Oliver, Chloe and Marjorie were there.
Patrick danced a kind of horn-pipe on Midge’s grave, until forcibly stopped by Oliver, who put out a leg so that Patrick tripped and lay on the earth where he had fallen, behind a large tombstone. He and the girl then attempted to have ritual intercourse there and then, for the sake, Patrick said, of the harvest, but both passed out before achieving any such thing.
Fortunately the Macklins had gone by then, off in their black hired Rolls-Royce, and only a younger and more forgiving generation remained.
Patrick Then don’t ask for money for the children. If Oliver can afford to get me to paint you, he can afford to keep my children. Besides, it gives you something to do, Chloe.
Chloe I have quite enough, thank you Patrick.
Patrick Really? Wouldn’t you like another baby?
Chloe Yes. But I keep miscarrying.
Patrick That’s Oliver all over. The most uncreative character I ever met. He puts the finger of death on everything. Scripts, women, booze-ups; babies, now.
Chloe, accustomed as she is to the daily sacrifice of herself on the altar of Oliver’s creativity, is quite shocked. And the miscarriages his fault, not hers? It is too much to take in.
Patrick Would you like me to give you another baby, Chloe? Since I can’t give Kev and Kes any money, the least we can do is offer them a sibling.
Chloe How do you know I’d get pregnant? It’s nowhere near the middle of the month.
Patrick Of course you would.
Chloe I didn’t last time.
Patrick You held that against me?
Chloe Yes.
Patrick How you women do bear grudges.
And there Chloe is, intertwined after all these years with Patrick, conceiving Imogen. It does not occur to her that Patrick will tell Oliver that he is the father of her baby, but of course, when Oliver repeats his demand for money
for Kevin and Kes, and holds up payment of Chloe’s portrait, Patrick is driven to. And Chloe does not miscarry, which is proof enough.
Oliver forgives Chloe. Chloe does not forgive herself, or Patrick.
sixty
CHLOE DOZES BY HELEN’S bed. She is short of sleep. She wakes, with a start.
‘Poor little Midge,’ Marjorie says from the bed where she lies, as if she too were a patient. She is crying.
Chloe Why don’t you cry for yourself, for a change? Why choose something ten years old?
Helen’s eyelids flutter but do not open.
Marjorie If I started I might never stop. All the things I should have done, and didn’t do. Wasn’t it strange the way I called in at Midge’s flat that morning making myself late. I never had before. Too late to help, all the same. I drove round and round the block first, like some kind of zombie. If I’d only obeyed the impulse, and not struggled against it.
Chloe It’s always like that when people die. If only.
Marjorie And poor little Kevin opened the door. He could just reach. There was nothing I could do, except what I did. Call the ambulance and wait for you. But I think something else was expected of me, and all I did was just go back to work.
Chloe What do you mean, something else?
Marjorie I don’t know. Just being there. Or at least finding out for certain whether she was going to live or die. I didn’t really want to know. Such cowardice. And I shouldn’t have used her in that documentary. It can’t have helped. All the things one does, and shouldn’t.
Chloe What else?
Marjorie Handing Ben that light-bulb. I was angry with him. He was going to see his mother and I knew she didn’t like me, so I made him reach too far. I hoped he’d fall off. And the other thing, the awful thing—I didn’t send mother a telegram when father came home. I don’t think I did. I went to the post office to send it, and I know I wrote it out, and then I think I just screwed it up, Chloe.
Chloe Think?
