by Fay Weldon
Ethel was more sensible: she perched on the edge of her chair ready to take off at any minute and didn’t sink back into it, as he did. Trust a man. She didn’t think they could have got through security if they had guns or knives; the metal detector would have picked them up, but they were a bit dozy downstairs and who would like to stop a man with a gold Concorde tiepin if he walked round it not through it. The rich can pass through the eye of security more easily than the poor. And the Ethel creature could easily pass herself off as someone in accounts, and get waved through. She might even be in accounts, which could explain both why she looked familiar and had got through the checks. Personally Doris wouldn’t trust her further than she would throw her – not far, because she was a good size fourteen – she was just the kind of mousy type who runs off with the Pensioners’ Social Fund to go on some ghastly holiday in the Bahamas. That being the sum of her aspirations.
Ah-hah! Ethel Handy, of course she’d looked familiar. In all the newspapers a couple of years back. Headlines because of what the Judge had said: Lord Longue, the same Judge as had tried Grace for trying to kill her: ‘Much as I pity you, today’s woman should be able to stand firm against blackmail. There is nothing to be ashamed of in nudity. It is something to be proud of.’ Well, unless you were a size twelve or above. But it had given the feature writers a field day. What is there left to hide? That you’d pay good money to hide?
‘We don’t want money,’ said the convicted fraudster, now. What little squinny eyes she had, poor thing. ‘All we want is for you to leave Walter Wells alone. You do anything more to upset my friend Grace and we’re broadcasting this on the Internet, with copies to the regular newspapers. They’ll love it.’ Doris stretched out a hand to grab the tape. She couldn’t stop herself.
‘You’re welcome to it,’ said Ethel. ‘We’ve got lots of copies back home. In fact we’d like you to keep this one. What was in the fizzy orange? Rohypnol?’
‘What was it Judge Tobias Longue said?’ asked Doris, in control of herself again, and she leant back in her chair with her hands clasped behind her neck, as if unafraid of any attack. Body language was always important. ‘"Today’s woman should stand firm against blackmail?” He was quite right. She should. And I will. Do your worst. Broadcast and be damned.’
She was gratified to see Ethel looking mortified. ‘It’s the way they say,’ said Doris, openly yawning. Attack is the best form of defence. ‘A prison sentence doesn’t stop when the gates clang open. Poor Ethel.’ She smiled at Hashim. ‘Did you know your friend was a jailbird? Four years for a truly mean fraud? I hope the tiepin isn’t real because she’s only after one thing. Money. You’d better look after yourself. She’s a monster.’
But now the pair of them were looking around as though searching for escape, scared, blinded by spot lights, which suddenly now, in emergency mode, illuminated every corner of the studio. The alarm was sounding outside in the corridor. It made a terrible racket. Doris hoped there was nothing going out live in any of the other studio suites; no amount of soundproofing would help. Outside men were shouting.
Hashim had lurched headfirst out of his chair, and was on his feet and pulling Ethel after him: they were making for the Emergency Exit behind the velvet curtains which framed the set, clanging its old-fashioned metal bar open, grating the door closed behind them. That’s a fast runner, she thought. Jordan Royals don’t run like that. Only criminals and con men. ‘They went that a-way,’ she said, pointing to the other Exit, the one Hashim and Ethel had not used. She didn’t know why, she suddenly had a fellow-feeling for them.
34
Carmichael asked Mr Zeigler where he could find his Mum. Mr Zeigler huffed and puffed and said there was a girl called McNab in Flat No. 32 on the third floor but no-one of that name who would be Carmichael’s mother. ‘Could be your sister, I suppose,’ he said. ‘She’s in there now with her feller, won’t be too happy to be disturbed, I warn you. All this coming and going, more men going into that apartment than ever come out of it. People leaving packages, God knows what, drugs, child porn? Don’t blame me if I get rid of them as soon as I can. People get killed for less. There was a knifing round the corner only the other day.’
‘I suppose she could still be using her married name,’ said Carmichael, ‘though she wrote to me that she wasn’t now. Grace Salt?’
‘That’s the woman who did the murder,’ said Mr Zeigler. ‘In the newspapers. The landlords would draw the line at that. Mind you, these days anything goes. I’m just the one out in the front line, they don’t think about that. Sitting here facing that door all day. Any nut could walk in off the street. No! No-one here called Salt.‘I’ll try Number 32,’ said Carmichael. He patted the trembling old hand and was rewarded with a limpid, eager smile, which he ignored.
It had not occurred to him that his mother might not be here. He should have called and let her know he was coming. But he liked the imprévu, and to be impetuous, and he didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Face to face was so much easier. He should have come over for the trial but he didn’t want his name in the papers. He should have visited her in prison, of course he should, but his therapist had said cut the ties that bind, you’re in a new world, you’ve got a new life, everyone deserves to be able to start again. And you shouldn’t miss your appointments just at this juncture in your treatment. It was only when the treatment drifted towards the suggestion that his homosexuality was more an acting out, a defiance of his father, than an innate state of being, and the realisation dawned that the creep was a) homophobic and b) in love with Carmichael, that he broke free and began to use his own judgement.
He was now with Toby, a stage designer, but Toby was in New Zealand staging a massive theatrical show for some Berlin architect which involved tying up Mount Cook, the damaged volcano, in strands of hand-plaited Maori flax, or some such thing, while acting out Riwi’s Last Stand below, and Carmichael had felt the need for London again and took Air Japan out of there for a break. Just a couple of weeks. He reckoned Toby could be faithful that long, but he wouldn’t risk it much longer. He was a bit too zonked by jet lag to worry any more, in any case.
He knocked on the door of No. 32. And again. He couldhear movement inside. He gave in and rang the bell. A good old-fashioned echoey ring, that was something. Carmichael was always reluctant to press bell-pushes, for fear of hearing chimes, which got on his nerves terribly. In some respects, he could see, he was like his father, who preferred everything to be plain, sensible and straightforward. How Barley had got muddled up with Doris Dubois, God alone knew. The other mistresses had been of the classic bad-girl type, suffering alone over Christmas and holidays, in the end demanding marriage, at the first whiff of which request Barley had dumped them. Or else they got fed up and moved on to better prospects. Three concurrent girlfriends had gone just after Carmichael had taken his A-levels.
‘Not until the boy’s got through his exams,’ Barley would say to them. ‘I can’t risk upsetting him.’ Before A-levels it had been SATS, then GCSEs: for others who came later it would be Carmichael’s BA, then his Master’s, at the London School of Embroidery. And Doris Dubois had made it there after all others had failed. Perhaps only because Carmichael had gone to Australia, so that there were no further procrastinating excuses that Barley could offer. His Dad’s remarriage was in a way Carmichael’s fault. If only he could have stayed a boy forever.
It was an older brother of his schoolfriend Clive, Wentworth by name, who’d tapped Barley’s office phone early on, thus providing the younger boys with hours of innocent pleasure. The tap was keyed to pick up only women’s voices at a certain pitch. Had Barley only been gay, as Clive pointed out, Barley would have been spared the intrusion. Wentworth was a computer nerd and now on various Internet regulating bodies. Clive was in industrial design.The door was opened by a young woman, recently out of bed, thick hair mussed, bare footed and wearing a man’s rather well-washed black shirt. The colour was good but the fabric defeated.
&nbs
p; ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ said Carmichael. ‘I’m looking for a Miss McNab. This is the number she gave me. She must have got it wrong.’
‘Carmichael darling!’ cried the young woman, and threw her arms around him.
‘Mother?’ asked Carmichael, and he could see that it was she. At any rate there was a photograph of him aged three on a beach with a woman who looked remarkably like this one.
She drew him into the flat saying he should have warned her, supposing she hadn’t been there, she was hardly ever here these days and Mr Zeigler couldn’t seem to keep anything in his head any more. He only ever did what was easiest. She supposed that’s what people did when they got to be old. ‘Have you had cosmetic surgery, Mum,’ Carmichael asked. ‘Or is that a wig, or what? What’s going on round here?’ ‘Please don’t say that kind of thing, Carmichael,’ she begged. ‘I don’t know what to think. At first we thought it was just happiness, but when you open the door to your own son and he doesn’t recognise you – Carmichael you’re looking wonderful yourself, bronze and square and not in the least limpid.’ He let that last go. She went on. ‘Carmichael, we have a terrible feeling, Walter and I, that I’m getting younger and he’s getting older. We’re swapping.’
‘Come off it,’ said Carmichael. ‘The age of miracles is past. I’m just jet-lagged and you’re looking pretty good, but it’s probably just not having to live with Dad any more.’
A man came out of the bedroom, dressed in good shades of black, but as if he were living four or five decades back, not now. Carmichael put him as in his early forties. ‘Well, Mum,’ he said, ‘… is this the one you wrote to me about or is it a new one?’
‘Carmichael!’ said Grace, shocked. ‘Of course it’s the same one. What do you think I am? This is Walter Wells, the painter.’
Carmichael found he was not so upset at the idea of his mother having sex with a man other than his father as he had expected. Whatever their chronological ages the ones in their head were different. Walter was no gigolo, Grace no older woman being taken advantage of. They looked more like Adam and Eve than anything. He needn’t have flown over in such haste and alarm. If Toby played up in NZ he would have his mother to blame. There was no not accepting her as his mother when it came to whose fault was whose: it lay fairly and squarely at the maternal door. As his therapist had pointed out, it is a mother’s duty to save her children from their father. Grace should have left the homophobic Barley long ago, when Carmichael’s sexual orientation became evident. Some things the therapist had got just about right.
Of course some of it had been Carmichael’s fault. He should have relayed the contents of the phone messages from the mistresses years back. But once you start hiding things it is hard to stop. And he hadn’t wanted to hurt her. He’d assumed that when Barley got to his mid-fifties he’d stop playing about. And Grace had been punished enough.
Though, actually she seemed to be having too good a time: almost as if she had reverted to an age before Carmichael was in existence. The carefree life of the unchilded, who having nothing better to do than have a good time, spend money,and consider their innermost feelings. It was spooky. Elderly divorced mothers are not meant to look like Eve.
They ordered in a pizza – a pizza? his mother had never in all her life brought in a pizza – and drank red wine. Australian, what was more. Carmichael raised the age issue and asked if Grace had seen a doctor about her fears. It was always possible there was a rational explanation. What with the completing of the human genome, and the kind of interference now possible into the process of ageing, who was to say what went on? What was in the drinking water? At least in Oz you could be sure of unpolluted tap water: one of the reasons he’d gone to Sydney was for the Blue Mountain water: in London it had been filtered through the kidneys of Reading and Slough once or twice by the time it got to the taps of WC1, and was still full of oestrogen from the birth pill girls took between babies, which couldn’t be filtered out. It was well known there was a greater concentration of young middle-class, health-conscious mothers in Reading and Slough than anywhere else in the country; God knows what they were all taking these days. Longevity pills, perhaps.
‘You’re talking too much,’ said his mother. ‘Just like old times. God, it’s good to see you again, Car.’ She never called him Car.
Walter Wells said it was an ingenious solution but he thought it was more complicated than that. He was a bit of a pompous git, thought Carmichael. Though Carmichael wouldn’t throw him out of bed if he was that way inclined, which he doubted. Mum had done pretty well for herself. She was right, Walter Wells did look a bit the way Carmichael hoped to look, fifteen years on. Hair not too much receded, an air of competence, of being in charge, attractive to all genders. Walter drank agood deal less than Grace, Carmichael noticed. At least there was someone around to stop Grace hitting the bottle, which had always been on the cards. Sometimes when he was small she’d been quite drunk when she put him to bed, slurring over the words in the children’s story she was reading to him. The therapist had made quite a meal of this too. ‘I have been to see a doctor,’ said Grace. ‘But they won’t admit the evidence of their own eyes. And they say their equipment is faulty if it comes up with any answer that they don’t expect.’ ‘Perhaps we need to take you to an alternative healer,’ said Carmichael. ‘Someone whose mind is open, not closed. Preferably a non-European. In Oz you get to realise just how hidebound this old country is.’
35
What a thrill to see Carmichael at the door, and looking so strong, healthy and almost, dare I say it, heterosexual. At any rate he’s stopped being closety and chippy and feeling the reason for this, that and the other is his gayness. I daresay Barley would have found some other reason for being dismissive of him. Fathers do. And Carmichael was always so good-looking if he’d only stand up straight and look you in the eye, and now he does. The wide-open spaces have done him good: he has filled out to fill them. So difficult in gloomy, narrow, grimy Soho to stride about being yourself as you can in Sydney’s Kings Cross. I don’t know if Carmichael is totally happy with this Toby of his: he doesn’t seem secure in his affections, not as Walter and I are, but perhaps we set impossible standards.
Carmichael came at an opportune moment. Walter and I had been standing in front of the mirror naked, looking at one another when the knock came, and then another and then the long peal of the bell. I’d just got out of the bed and glimpsed myself in the mirror – which for years I’ve hated doing – and had stopped to stare in amazement.
There I was, long-backed, slim, high apple-breasts: had I ever looked like this when young or was this someone else’s body altogether? And Walter, also naked, stopped and stood beside me. He wasn’t just a slip of a youth any more. His hair was receding: he looked intelligent rather than ingenuous. He was turning into a variation of his father, which sooner or later he must in the end do, and which they say is ‘natural’, but seems pretty peculiar at the best of times. If we are all so temporary, what is the point of so much individual consciousness? As for myself, whatever was happening to me was ‘unnatural’, that is to say without any precedent that I so far knew about.
We saw one another as the mirror saw us, with more truth than either of us could manage on our own, and turned to each other and embraced. We both knew in our hearts, I think, that the only thing that would stop this reversal was to desist from lovemaking. We also both knew we would neither of us do any such thing. And that not to desist was a kind of slow suicide. For I would get younger and vanish away at one end of the scale, and he would vanish away at the other, and into what great silence.
And then the door-knocker banged and banged and the bell rang and rang.
‘Perhaps it’s Ethel come back with the tape,’ I said at first. But I knew she would never bang or ring so hard. Ethel, though brave, was tentative and a little ingratiating in friendship, not noisy and full of demands. The missing tape betokened a lost friend: she had betrayed me but that was the worst of it. T
he only person who had anything to fear from the tape itself was Doris, and if she wanted to pay for it, then lucky old Ethel. What was more, Ethel had vanished, whichwas not without its good points, since it left the Tavington Court bed free for Walter and me, should we so decide to use it, as we just had. And there was no way my love for Walter was going to be shaken, no matter what was on the tape, no matter what Doris had contrived to make him do in the forgotten hours. We had lost all interest in hearing it.
The outside world demanded entry and I went to open the door, admiring the smooth white fingers of my hand as I did so – had I really had such lovely hands as a girl? Perhaps so, but who had been there to notice them except Barley, and he wasn’t given to compliments. All Walter had to do was raise my fingers to his lips and they turned beautiful. Perhaps Walter was creating me as he created Lady Juliet on canvas, and myself, and now Doris, or at least part of her. Perhaps I was the subject of an artist’s ploy and not the cause of it. Perhaps Walter created the world around him to fit in with his vision of it, and I now had no real identity outside his love. Without it, I would just fade away, like a pixel on a computer screen when the power’s turned off. Perhaps this was all his doing, and none of my responsibility. Barley used to boast that he created me. Now Walter was un-creating me.
But I opened the door to Carmichael and doubt faded. I was Grace Dorothy McNab, girl of this borough, and what is more I was a mother, and this was my son. And all manner of things would be well.
