by Fay Weldon
“Perhaps we should just be married quietly,” Helen said to Otto’s wife, Cynthia, when the whens and hows of the wedding were discussed. Clifford had taken her down to the family home in Sussex to introduce her for the first time and say they were to be married—all this on the one day. Impetuous lad! The house was Georgian and stood in twelve acres. Dannemore Court, reader. Its gardens are opened to the public once a year. Perhaps you know it. The place is famous for its azaleas.
“Why a quiet wedding?” asked Cynthia. “There is nothing to be ashamed of. Or is there?” Cynthia was sixty, looked forty and acted thirty. She was small, dark, elegant, vivacious and un-English, for all her tweeds.
“Oh no,” said Helen, although she had risen in the night twice to go to the bathroom, and in those days, before the Pill was in common use, the symptoms of pregnancy were all too well-known to every young woman. And being pregnant, and unmarried, was in most circles still something to be ashamed of.
“So let’s make all the fuss we possibly can of such an important occasion,” said Cynthia, “and as for who pays—phooey! All that etiquette is so stuffy and boring, don’t you think?”
That was in the big drawing-room after lunch. Cynthia was arranging spring flowers in a bowl: they were fresh from the garden, and of amazing variety. She seemed to Helen more concerned over their welfare than that of her son.
But later Cynthia did say to Clifford, “Darling, are you sure you know what you’re doing? You’ve never been married before, and she’s so young, and it’s all so sudden.”
“I know what I’m doing,” said Clifford, gratified by her concern. It was seldom shown. His mother was always busy, looking after his father’s needs, or arranging flowers in vases, or making mysterious phone calls, and dressing up and rushing off. His father would smile fondly after her; what pleased his wife pleased him. There seemed no room for Clifford, either as a child or now he was grown, between them. They made no space for him. They squeezed him out.
“In my experience of men,” said Cynthia (and Clifford thought sadly, yes, that’s quite considerable) “when a man says he knows what he’s doing, it means he doesn’t.”
“She’s John Lally’s daughter,” said Clifford. “He’s one of the greatest painters this country has. If not the greatest.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of him,” said Cynthia, on whose walls were a minor Manet and a nice collection of Constable sketches. Otto Wexford was a director of The Distillers’ Company; the days of the Wexford poverty were a long time ago.
“You will,” said Clifford, “one day. If I have anything to do with it.”
“Darling,” said Cynthia, “painters are great because they have a great talent, not because you or Leonardo’s make them so. You are not God.”
Clifford just raised his eyebrows and said, “No? I mean to run Leonardo’s, and in the Art World that makes me God.”
“Well,” said Cynthia, “I can’t help feeling someone like Angie Wellbrook, with a couple of gold mines behind her—”
“Six—” said Clifford.
“—would have been a less, shall we say, surprising choice. Not that your Helen isn’t very sweet.”
It was agreed they were to be married on Midsummer’s Day, in the village church (Norman, plus lych-gate) and have the reception in a big tent on the lawn, for all the world as if the Wexfords were landed gentry.
Which of course they were not. Otto Wexford, builder, had fled with his Jewish wife Cynthia from Denmark to London in 1941, with their young son. By the end of the war—which Cynthia spent in a munitions factory, wearing a headscarf, and Clifford running wild as an evacuee in Somerset—Otto was a Major in the Intelligence Forces and a man with many influential friends. Whether or not he actually left the Secret Service was never made clear to his family but, be that as it may, he had risen briskly through the world of postwar finance and property development, and was now a man of wealth, power and discernment, and kept a Rolls Royce as well as horses in the stables of his Georgian country house, and his wife rode to hounds and had affairs with the neighboring gentry. All the same, they never quite “belonged.” Perhaps it was just that their eyes were too bright, they were too lively, they read novels, they said surprising things. Come to tea and you might find the stable-hand sitting in the drawing-room, chatting, as bold as brass. No one refused the wedding invitation, all the same. The Wexfords were liked, though cautiously; young Clifford Wexford was already a name: too flashy for his own good but entertaining, and the champagne would be plentiful, and the food good, though un-English.
“Mother,” said Clifford to Cynthia, on the Sunday morning, “what does Father say about my marrying Helen?” For Otto had said very little at all. Clifford waited for approval or disapproval, but none came. Otto was friendly, courteous and concerned, but as if Clifford was the child of close friends, rather than his one and only son.
“Why should he say anything? You’re old enough to know your own mind.”
“Does he find her attractive?” It was the wrong question. He was not sure why he asked it. Only with his father was Clifford so much at a loss.
“Darling, I am the wrong person to ask,” was all she replied, and he felt he had offended her as well. Though she was cheerful and flighty and charming enough all day, heaven knows. Otto went hunting, and Cynthia made a point of staying home, to be nice to Helen.
“This house is like a backdrop for the stage,” Clifford complained to Helen on Sunday night. They were not leaving until Monday morning. They had been put in separate bedrooms, but on the same corridor, so naturally, and as was expected, Clifford had made his way to Helen’s room.
“It isn’t real. It isn’t home. It is a cover. You know my father’s a spy?”
“So you’ve told me.” But Helen found it hard to believe.
“Well, what do you make of him? Do you find him attractive?”
“He’s your father. I don’t think of him like that. He’s old.”
“Very well then. Does he find you attractive?”
“How would I know?”
“Women always know things like that.”
“No they don’t.”
They quarreled about it, and Clifford returned to his own room, without making love to her. He did not, in any case, like his mother’s expectation that he would—by putting them in separate rooms, but near. He felt insulted by her, and irritated by Helen.
But early in the morning Helen crept into his room. She was laughing and teasing, unimpressed by his bad moods, as she usually was in the first flush of their relationship—and he forgot he was angry. He thought Helen would make up for what his parents had never given him—a feeling of ease and closeness; of not talking behind his back, conspiring against him. When he and Helen had children he would make sure of a proper space for them, between the pair of them. Meanwhile, close together in their white-sheeted bed, in the master bedroom, Cynthia and Otto talked.
“You should take more interest in him,” said Cynthia. “He feels your lack of interest.”
“I wish he’d stop fidgeting. He’s always fidgeting,” said Otto, who moved slowly, serenely and powerfully through life.
“He was born like that,” said Cynthia. So he had been, nine months to the day after his parents’ meeting, as if protesting the suddenness and strangeness of it all. His mother barely seventeen, wild cast-off daughter of a wealthy banking family; his father, already at twenty running his own small firm of builders. Otto had been up a ladder, replacing glass in a conservatory, and had looked down at Cynthia, looking up, and that had been that. Neither of them had expected the baby, nor the pursuing vengeance of Cynthia’s family, snatching contracts from under Otto’s nose, condemning them to poverty and a perpetual moving on. Nor would it have altered their behavior had they known. And no one expected the overwhelming vengeance of the German occupation, the deportation and murder of the Jews. Cynthia’s family made it to America, Cynthia and Otto went underground, joined the Resistance, Clifford han
ded from household to household the while, until all three were shipped to England, the better for Otto to function. The habit of secrecy was never lost for either of them; Cynthia’s love affairs were all to do with it; Otto knew it and put up with it. They were no insult to him, merely the addict’s passion for intrigue. He got his fixes with MI5: but where could she get hers?
“I wish he’d find himself a more solid occupation,” said Otto. “A picture dealer! Art is not for profiteering.”
“He had a hard childhood,” said Cynthia. “He feels the need to survive, and to survive he has to scheme. It is our example; it is what we did, you and I, and he watched us.”
“But he is the child of peace,” said Otto. “And we were the children of war. Why is it that the products of peace are always so ignoble?”
“Ignoble!”
“He has no moral concern, no political principle; he is eaten up by self-interest.”
“Oh dear,” said Cynthia, but she did not argue. “Well,” she said, “I hope this one makes him happy. Do you find her attractive?”
“I see what he sees in her,” said Otto cautiously. “But she’ll lead him a dance.”
“She’s soft and natural, not like me. She’ll make a good mother. I look forward to grandchildren. We may do better with the next generation.”
“We’ve waited long enough,” said Otto.
“I just hope he settles down.”
“He’s too fidgety to settle down,” said Otto, serenely, and they both slept.
Helen wept a little when she returned to Clifford’s home, Clifford’s bed.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I just wish my parents were coming to my wedding,” she said, “that’s all.” But in her heart she was glad. Her father would only make some kind of scene; her mother turn up in the old blue ribbed cotton dress, her eyes red-rimmed from the previous night’s row. No. Better forget them. If only now she weren’t beginning to feel sick in the mornings. There still might well be reasons—the change in routine, the nights of wild love-making, the many dinners out—and she so accustomed to frugal student’s fare, or the pork, beans and cider-if-you’re-lucky routine of the Lally household—but it was beginning to seem unlikely. No quick pregnancy tests in those days, no vacuum abortions on the side. Just, for the former, a toad which got injected with your urine and laid eggs and died forty-eight hours later if you were pregnant, and laid eggs and survived if you weren’t, and for the latter an illegal operation which you, like the toad, had to be lucky, or very rich, to survive.
But of course the mere fact of worrying could so upset your cycle you never knew where you were. Oh, reader, what days! But at least then the penalty for untoward sex was a new life and not, as it can be now, a disagreeable and disgraceful death.
Another month and Helen could not disguise from herself the fact that she was in fact and in truth pregnant, and that she didn’t want to be, and that she didn’t want Clifford to know, let alone his parents, and that to go to doctors (two were required) for a legal abortion would require more lies about how damaging to her health and sanity pregnancy would be than she—so sane and healthy—could sustain, and that she couldn’t tell her friends because she couldn’t trust them not to gossip, and her father would kill her if he knew and her mother simply commit suicide—around and around the thought flew in Helen’s head, and there was no one she could turn to for help and advice, until she thought of Angie.
Now, reader, you may think this is no more than Helen deserved, to turn for help to a woman who bore her nothing but malice, however good—and she was very good—at disguising it Angie had so far been: giving little dinners for the handsome young couple, chatting away to Helen on the phone, recommending hairdressers and so on—but I do beg you to feel as forgiving as you can about Helen and this initial rejecting of her newly conceived child, our beloved Nell.
Helen was young and this was her first child. She had no idea, as established mothers have, of what she would be throwing away, losing along with the bathwater. It is easier for the childless woman to contemplate the termination of a pregnancy, than for those who already have children. So, please, continue to bear with Helen. Forgive her. She will learn better with the years, I promise you.
GOING TO ANGIE FOR HELP
HELEN ROSE OUT OF her snowy white bed one morning, holding her pale, smooth stomach, which was in inner turmoil, and telephoned Angie.
“Angie,” she said, “please come over. I have to talk to someone.
Angie came over. Angie walked up the stairs and into the bedroom where she had spent four memorable if actually rather unsatisfactory nights with Clifford, in all their eleven months together. Well, not exactly together, but in the promise of—eventually—together, or so she had assumed.
“So, what’s the matter?” Angie asked, and noticed, for Helen was feeling too ill to so much as fasten her brown silk nightie properly, that Helen’s white, full breasts were fuller than ever, almost too full, and felt for once rather proud of the chic discretion of her own, and quite confident that, if she managed this right, Clifford would eventually be hers.
Helen didn’t reply. Helen flung herself back upon the fur bedspread and lay crumpled and disheveled but still beautiful, and wept instead of speaking.
“It can only be one thing,” said Angie. “You’re pregnant. You don’t want to be. And you don’t dare tell Clifford.”
Helen did not attempt to deny it. Angie was wearing red hot-pants, and Helen did not even have the spirit to marvel at Angie’s nerve, considering her legs, in so doing. Presently words formed out of tears.
“I can’t have a baby,” wept Helen. “Not now. I’m too young. I wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
“What any sensible person does with babies,” said Angie, “is hand them over to nannies.”
And this, of course, in the world in which Angie moved, was just what mothers did. But for all that Helen was only twenty-two and (as we have seen) as selfish and irresponsible as any other pretty, willful girl of her age, she at least knew better than Angie in this respect. She knew that the handing over of a baby would be no easy matter. A baby draws love out of its mother, and the necessities occasioned by that love can change the mother’s life altogether, making her as desperate, savage and impulsive as any wild animal.
“Please help me, Angie,” said Helen. “I can’t have the baby. Only I don’t know where to go and anyway abortions cost money and I don’t have any.”
Nor had she, poor girl. Clifford was not the kind of man to put money in a woman’s bank account and not ask for proof of where every penny had gone, not even if that woman was his legitimate fiancée. Clifford might eat at the best restaurants, where it was useful to be seen, and might sleep between the finest, most expensive cotton sheets, because he liked to be comfortable, but he kept very careful accounts. So this had to be done without Clifford’s knowing. What a fix Helen was in! Just consider the times. Only twenty years ago, and a pregnant girl, unmarried, was very much on her own: no Pregnancy Advice Centers then; no payments from the State, just trouble whichever way she turned. Helen’s best friend, Lily, at seventeen, had an apparently successful abortion but after two days had been rushed to the hospital with septicemia. She’d hovered between life and death for some six hours, and Helen sat on one side of the bed and a policeman sat on the other, and he was waiting to charge Lily with procuring an illegal abortion operation. Lily died, and so was spared the punishment. Probably two years behind bars, the policeman said, and no more than she deserved. “Think of the poor baby!” he said. Poor little Lily, was all Helen could think. Now how frightened she found herself: frightened to have the baby, frightened not to.
Angie thought fast. She was wearing fashionable hot-pants but did not (as we know) have the best legs in the world. They were pudgy around the knees, and gnarled about the ankles; and as for her face, well, the thick makeup the times required was unkind and the hot South African sun had toughened her skin, and so
mehow grayed it, and she had a thick, fleshy nose. Only her eyes were large, green and beautiful. Helen, curled up on the bed, tearful and unhappy, soft, pale, female, tugging at her brown silk nightie (suddenly too small) in the attempt to make it cover her properly, and altogether too beautiful, inspired in Angie a great desire for revenge. It is really not fair that some women should have the luck of looks, and others not. You must agree.
“Darling Helen,” said Angie. “Of course I’ll help you! I know an address. An excellent clinic. Simply everyone goes there. Very safe, very quiet, very discreet. The de Waldo Clinic. I’ll lend you the money. It just has to be done. Clifford wouldn’t want you pregnant at his wedding. Everyone would think he’d married you because he had to! And it’s going to be a white wedding too, isn’t it, and simply everyone looks at waists.”
Simply everyone, simply everyone! Enough to frighten anyone.
Angie booked Helen into the de Waldo Clinic that very afternoon. Helen had the misfortune—rather expected by Angie—of being put into the care of a certain Dr. Runcorn, a small, plump, fiftyish doctor with thick glasses through which he stared at Helen’s most private parts, while his stubby fingers moved lingeringly (or so it seemed to Helen) over her defenseless breasts and body. What could the poor girl do about it? Nothing. For in handing herself over to the de Waldo Clinic it seemed that Helen had surrendered dignity, privacy and honor; she felt she had no right to brush Dr. Runcorn’s hand away. She deserved no better than its tacky assault. Was she not doing away with Clifford’s baby without his knowing? Was she not outside the law? Whichever way she looked, there was guilt, and Dr. Runcorn’s glinting eyes.
“We don’t want to leave the little intruder in there any longer than we have to,” said Dr. Runcorn, in his wheezy, nasal voice. “At ten tomorrow we’ll set about getting you back to normal! A shame for a girl as pretty as you to waste a single day of her youth.”
