by Fay Weldon
49
Valerie Valeria’s Eye Falls On Tyler
He will be useful to her...
Ms Laura tottered into 2CC/12 where Valerie preferred to work these days – the second floor being less exposed to spray from breaking waves than the ground floor. When the tide was high rivulets of seawater would run down the window forming strange Rorschach inkblot shapes as they ran, leaving a salty crust behind. Was that her mother’s face? The man who assaulted her when she was seven? Could that be her cat, Joey with head lowered, tail raised? She was probably imagining it all, and it was highly unlikely that ghosts could tap your memories so effectively, but the fact remained that offices on the second floor had a much better atmosphere than ones on the ground floor.
‘And when I said that was because they kept sending us young men she told me to put my request in an email and put the phone down on me before I’d had an opportunity to say I didn’t use email.’ Ms Laura was lamenting to Valerie that it was already mid-December, and she had failed to get sufficient temporary catering staff for the event on the 21st. The Jobcentre Plus in Shapnett hadn’t been in the least bit helpful, and were even rather rude, claiming the IGP had turned down too many of their applicants.
Valerie, who thought it wise to keep Ms Laura onside, merely suggested that she should try putting a card up in the St Rumbold’s shop. It was sometimes sensible to side-step bureaucracy. Ms Laura said her legs didn’t allow for traipsing down there.
Ms Laura was one of seven trustees on the IGP’s Board of Governors. Well, eight, if you included Bobbo. Valerie already had Ms Bradshap onside, also Ellen the photographer and Ms Swithin the accountant; Ms Laura, she suspected, remained undecided in her loyalty. Before long, Valerie reckoned, the Board would realise – or with any luck the Charity Commissioners would point out – that they could do with an injection of youth and energy. A majority vote would be required. If the vote were to split, the She Devil would have the casting vote. Valerie, who saw running the IGP as a useful career step towards a high position at, say, Amnesty or even the WHO, very much needed Ms Laura on her side.
Valerie said she’d run down with a card to the village store herself. Ms Laura said she thought it was about to rain. Valerie, missing sun-soaked Australia, said, ‘Whenever is it not?’, and the two women laughed companionably as though half a century of difference in their ages was as nothing. They made out the card together. Valerie suggested saying ‘minimum wage plus 10 per cent’, Ms Laura said that was setting a dangerous precedent, and Valerie prudently conceded.
50
Opportunity Knocks
Valerie falls – if not in love, at least in lust.
The village of St Rumbold’s wasn’t far down the road and Valerie had been glad of the excuse to get out of the office and deliver Ms Laura’s card to the little shop. The wind had dropped as soon as Valerie was out of the shadow of the High Tower; the wintry sun shone out of a clear blue sky, frosted branches sparkled and seagulls soared above. It was a beautiful day. Valerie realised she did not get out enough. The company of the old could be debilitating. She admired her hands as she walked. Small, firm, white, perfectly polished nails, colour-matched to her lipstick – Estée Lauder Defiant Coral – not a liver spot to be seen; such a relief after the old withered hands she had lately become accustomed to working alongside. She carried the appointments-vacant card carefully, as though it were a missive from the Gods.
Elated by a sudden happiness, she did a little skip and a jump of pleasure. The world was her oyster. Bad things were safely in the past. Her mother’s suicide when Valerie was sixteen, the oh-so-painful split with her adored and apparently adoring Charlotte in Sydney (the split the reason why she had applied for this any-old job in the first place) were all fading into the past very satisfactorily. Another hop and a skip, and she was dancing along this deserted road and a song going through her mind. ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep!’ Her mother’s favourite song. The kind which once it landed in your head you couldn’t get rid of for days.
Valerie Valeria was the little bird who’d lost her momma. That was what had happened. She had woken up one morning and her mother was gone, not a word of warning, gone, not just far, far away but further than anyone could ever reach. Roselle Valeria had hanged herself, on the spurious grounds that her husband, Valerie’s father, had left her for a younger model. And here her daughter was, dancing to the vulgarest of tunes (an absurdly cheerful one if you considered the lyrics) and chirpy-cheeping in the road. But somehow Valerie couldn’t help it. There was another song, the Beatles’ ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’, very rude too, lurking around somewhere, interfering, but not nearly so good a tune.
Though at least the urge to dance faded, this quite unreasonable sense of elation remained when she reached the store. The old biddy stuck the card on her notice board with a smile. As she turned to go, Valerie caught sight of a young man working between the stacks: elation and good cheer took a quantum leap into something greater.
It wasn’t so much love at first sight, as lust at first sight. Odd, because this normally happened for Valerie with girls, not boys. But this particular boy – early twenties, she reckoned, with the face and physique of Adonis – was something different, special. And he looked so perfectly alert and intelligent as well: most males discovered sweeping shop floors tended to look sullen and discontented. Intelligence did matter to Valerie, as wasn’t the case with so many of her friends, who liked to virtue-signal non-élitism. Where had this paragon of delight been all her life? Valerie had been practising celibacy lately, and she had to acknowledge that her senses were probably sharpened as a result. Or did she recognise him from Facebook?
‘Who is the young man?’ she asked the old biddy.
‘Pretty boy, isn’t he?’ she replied, and she told Valerie he was Tyler Finch Patchett slumming it, and was the unemployed grandson of the She Devil who had family in these parts, not that any of them spoke to one another, or perhaps Lady Patchett would see fit to find him a proper job – everyone should pull together in these hard times.
So this was Tyler in the flesh, and she was right! He would look so, so good heading a Widdershins Walk! Young and virile and full of hope. He was the future! She would not give up. And if she could get him up to the High Tower she could get to know him better, and who knew what would happen next.
A sudden gust of cold wind whipped round her ankles. Valerie was struck by so unaccountable, unexpected and unfamiliar an attack of shyness she fled from the shop, telling herself that at least now she had a real face to a real name it would be safer to go through Facebook.
51
At Last! A Close Encounter For Tyler And Valerie
Since Mary Fisher – dead or alive – just cannot leave well alone.
Mrs Easton is the widow who runs the village shop in St Rumbold’s and runs it very well indeed, thank you. It is far from posh but it is serviceable if you have little money to spare, and few in the village do. Mrs Easton is pleasant, helpful and always good for a chat. But she is old, old; the kind who writes handwritten letters and makes out shopping lists, takes statins and has no idea what social media is, let alone a hashtag. Old, old. She is the kind the young most despise. She has a landline for a phone and has no computer. Algorithms do not apply. It is a marvel her kind survives at all.
But Tyler is not like most of the young: he likes the old and overlooked, being young and overlooked himself, and they like him. He does what he can to assist Mrs Easton, sweeping up lentils from the cracks between her floorboards because her back hurts when she bends.
Besides, needs must when the Devil drives, and Tyler does not want to be sanctioned by Miss Swanson at the Jobcentre Plus. His undertaking of voluntary work in the community helps his status as an active jobseeker, not a scrounger.
How the lentils, little pinkey-orangey things, come to be on the floor so often is a mystery; rats, people suppose, gnawing away, little teeth biting through plastic, though they leave no other t
races, and the packets seem to be still untouched upon the shelves. Mrs Easton has rung the council in Lewes, and they have sent in the rat catcher but no rats were caught.
Mrs Easton may be seventy-three, but she does her best to keep the store ship-shape and clean and ready for inspection, fighting an ongoing battle with the forces of entropy – demonstrated only too forcefully by the occasional plague of bluebottle flies, let alone the ongoing scouring effect of the sand and sea-spray mix which nightly beats upon her shopfront. She likes to be professional, feeling that the health and wellbeing of her clientele is her responsibility. Hers is the only shop left in the village – all the others have long closed. Mrs Easton is fond of Tyler and grateful for his help. Old she may be, but she is a practical and cheering sight, wearing her kitten heels (‘Widefit’ from Marks & Spencer), smart white blouses and black skirts from the charity shops in Lewes – as it happens, Nicci’s cast-offs.
Today Tyler sees a card in Mrs Easton’s window advertising a job. It is handwritten and has the IGP logo on it, a phallic-looking tower with waves crashing around its foot. It goes:
‘Part time work at the High Tower to trained catering staff over weekend of Dec 21st–23rd, £7.85 per hour (minimum living wage), no Sunday overtime’, then a phone number and email address.
Well, it’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, certainly better than the food bank in Brighton, though Mrs Easton can usually be relied upon for the odd frozen chicken pie or bag of sprouted potatoes.
‘They’re always desperate for extra catering staff up there,’ Mrs Easton observes as Tyler puts his broom aside to enter the details in his phone. ‘I can’t think why they don’t pay staff properly and be done with it. It’s for some big do or other, “widershins walking”, whatever that may be, lots of bigwigs staying. Anyone who’s anyone is coming; though I doubt it myself, far too near Christmas, people will be wrapping presents.’
Mrs Easton warned Valerie about it being too near Christmas for take-up but Valerie had just laughed and said the people she was after had minions to do their Christmas shopping, they just did the partying.
‘I despair,’ says Mrs Easton. ‘People today!’ At which a stack of Jaffa Cakes slowly and graciously collapses like a tower being demolished and the packs lie scattered on the floor.
‘Now how did that happen?’ asks Mrs Easton. ‘Did you catch it with your elbow?’
‘Not that I noticed,’ says Tyler.
‘You must have,’ says Mrs Easton firmly.
‘That young Valerie brought the card in herself just now,’ says Mrs Easton. ‘Bright red lipstick and legs up to her armpits. I reckon she was glad to get out. Everyone so old and serious, and the electrics gone again, probably.’
‘I didn’t see her,’ says Tyler, as he sets about re-erecting the display. He really likes the sound of Valerie with her bright red lips and legs up to her armpits and asks if she’s likely to be calling in again. Perhaps he’d better go and see her – sometimes you get a good response from a potential employer if you turn up in person, as Miss Swanson at the Jobcentre Plus never tires of telling him. Mrs Easton says there is no point in Tyler applying since the High Tower only takes on girls – the IGP being some kind of feminist charity. Tyler literally stamps his foot in frustration and rage and the Persil display trembles and loses its crown.
‘That is totally unfair and probably illegal because of the new equality laws,’ says Tyler.
Mrs Easton says that since the card asks for catering staff without mentioning gender the High Tower is acting within the regulations. In practice it just so happens that they take on only females. She watches in dismay as Tyler’s face grows hot, flushed and swollen; his lip quivers in an apparent fit of despair, hurt and bewilderment mixed. He wipes his knuckles across his eyes and they come away wet with tears. It’s some kind of moment of truth. He is usually so cheerful and even-tempered. Mrs Easton is shocked. She takes him into her back room and gives him a bottle of Coca-Cola from stock. He calms down and apologises.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s just every move I make, ever since I began, girls get there first. I’m a second-class citizen.’
‘Well,’ says Mrs Easton, briskly, ‘Buggins’ turn for men now, I daresay?’
There’s a noise from the shop. When they go back in to investigate they find the whole tower of Persil boxes has fallen to the floor. A sudden gust of wind is rattling the shop windows so hard that the panes are threatening to crack and break.
52
Sudden Gusts! Sudden Gusts!
Practice makes perfect.
Wooo-h, wooo-h! Sudden gusts are easy to do, but I’m aiming for more subtlety: better temperature control and so on. It’s rather like learning to whistle – I never knew quite how one did it – or learning to waggle one’s little toe independently of the others.
I’m managing to control the muscles of my non-existent mouth better all the time: pursed, tiny and ladylike for the sudden icy gusts, medium wide for a steady blow and wide as wide for the angry shout of a good storm. I can think of obscene analogies but I won’t go into them.
When that foolish girl does her Widdershins Walk (she’s such a doll, that Valerie, suggestible as anything) I’ll have to make sure she doesn’t get much fun out of my Tyler. Premature ejaculation will serve them both right. I shall try stirring a mini whirlwind and sweep the whole lot of them out of the way and into the sky. Though I probably won’t: they’re all so sensible, well-intentioned and politically-correct it would seem a pity. On the other hand, groups of people sceptical about ghosts disconcert me and diminish my powers no end.
But Widdershins is just not a good idea. It has always been known to be baneful. Momus won’t like it. Though he does like events, things that happen: such as old Bobbo dying. Bobbo hasn’t got long, but is that nature or is it Dr Simmins? God knows what she puts in her syringes.
53
Can This Be True Love?
Or is it Mary Fisher meddling again?
Valerie had come down to the village with no other idea in her mind than to walk straight back to the High Tower once she’d delivered the card. But she was so overcome by emotion after seeing Tyler that she went instead into St Rumbold’s church to recover. She lit a candle for her mother. The church grew suddenly cold and windy. Once she was outside the weather took such another turn for the worse that she was obliged to take shelter back in the village shop.
Perhaps she just wanted to take another look at Tyler to see if he was real? He was. He was behind the counter now. He smiled at her with his kind and understanding soft blue eyes. He was flushed and pink around the eyelids. He even gave a little sniff. He’d been crying. Resistance melted away. She had vowed never to have anything to do with men again, crude penetrative creatures, but perhaps this one was different. He was capable of tears: he was vulnerable, like a girl, full of feeling, had anima as well as animus. Was his left cheek swollen: did he perhaps have toothache, poor thing? It marred the perfect symmetry of his face.
Now where did that phrase come from? Of course. School. ‘Tyler, Tyler, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ Or something. Wasn’t there something else about a lamb and the tiger lying down together? She could see the temptation.
‘You again?’ said Mrs Easton, out of nowhere.
‘I was just going to say,’ said Valerie, flustered, ‘about the card. We’re really desperate up at the High Tower. If a man applied I daresay we wouldn’t say no. I’ve never agreed with their policy – it’s just the others.’
‘Ah yes, those others,’ said Mrs Easton, who was not so dim as she appeared, and this flustered Valerie even more. She was not used to fluster. The world usually advanced in orderly footsteps instead of rushing at her with new experiences. She had become too accustomed to life in the High Tower. She must get out more. Look what happened when you did. Tyler.
Ambition was all very well and sacrifices must be made in pur
suit of the new true feminism. The She Devil must be toppled from her perch and she, Valerie Valeria, was the one to do it. All that. And everyone knew that any girl who wanted to get to the top had to avoid babies at all cost – but surely, just occasionally? There was always the morning-after pill, though she’d have to go in to Lewes to get it.
‘Do you hear that, Tyler?’ asked Mrs Easton. ‘Men allowed. Reason has at last prevailed. Hope for the world yet. Time and a half, too.’
‘No thanks,’ said Tyler, and apologetically to Valerie, ‘Family reasons. And it’s no fun being the odd man out amongst a whole lot of women.’
‘Tyler doesn’t think much of her Ladyship up in the High Tower,’ said Mrs Easton. ‘She being a Patchett and his estranged granny. But like a lot of families round here they don’t get on too well.’
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ said Tyler, who seemed almost as besotted by Valerie as she by him.
He stared at her as one entranced. His tongue was loosened. He explained the family relationship to Valerie, his mother’s suffering at the hands of a narcissistic mother, the villainous She Devil. Valerie said she worked for Tyler’s grandmother and understood only too well how Tyler’s mother must have suffered by illogicality and unreason. The She Devil kept on changing her tune and double-binding about a simple thing like a Widdershins Day. Valerie’s own mother had killed herself: apparently a suicidal impulse was strong in the narcissistic parent – ‘Look at me, me, me,’ they cried.
Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep. Did Valerie think that, or did she sing it? Perhaps she too had a narcissistic mother? Perhaps that was why she and Tyler had this bond? Both seemed to feel it. The bond. The greater than you feeling. Tyler was six inches taller than she was. She could lay her head upon his manly chest. She did. She felt protected. He felt protective. She needed him. He needed her. It was oh, so all sorts of lovely.
