by Fay Weldon
‘Mum’s therapist?’ The twins nodded in unison. They seemed really shocked and miserable, he thought, now the hysteria had died down.
‘Everyone needs a personal life,’ he said, comfortingly. ‘And it’s Mum’s business, not ours.’
‘Out of her fucking mind,’ said Madison.
‘Finally flipped,’ said Mason.
It was Nicci’s sleeping plans which seemed to have upset the twins more than her sexual orientation. Nicci’s proposal had been that Tyler could keep his room – you could only just get a small single bed into it anyway. She would share the en suite with Matilda; Madison and Mason would move in together; Jane and Jilly (Matilda’s girls, seventeen and fourteen) would have Mason’s room. So they’d let her know what they thought of that.
Things had thus turned nasty. Nicci and Matilda were all loved-up and mooning in the kitchen instead of unpacking. It had started with Jane and Jilly opening a window because their room smelt of Matilda’s joss sticks, so letting all the central heating out. Mason had emptied a whole bottle of scent onto her bed. Jane had asked Madison to turn The Cnuts down because of her homework so Madison had put it on a loop and turned it up to maximum. Jane had opened all the windows and Jilly had turned on all the lights. Madison had dropped Nicci’s smartphone down the loo, she couldn’t remember why but she had been provoked. Mason had tried to grab Matilda’s phone, shouting that she was going to ring Child Protection and get Jane and Jilly taken into care by reporting them as being in a sexually non-safe environment; Matilda tried to use a thumb lock on Mason (specifically forbidden under the Mental Care Act, 2008). Nicci kicked Matilda in the crotch. She had kicked back. Jane and Jilly tried to pull Nicci’s hair out. There had been so much noise and violence that Mason and Madison had no choice but to put essentials together and leave.
The twins locked arms, beehives all but tangling, a four-legged splodge of mauve and pink under the fake-Georgian streetlight, and wept.
‘Our mother doesn’t love us,’ they cried in unison, then turned to Tyler and said viciously (Mason more so than Madison, there were some differences), ‘Loser, what would you know. Stop staring. Bloody man!’
The Uber car came and Tyler wondered whether he ought to go with them to make sure they were all right. But he was so tired he just waved them goodbye and went inside. They would have to look after themselves.
59
The She Devil Goes To Town
But Valerie makes a detour on the way home.
On the 16th of December the She Devil went up to London to speak at a symposium organised by the University of the Third Age on the necessity for gender-friendly medication for older citizens: IGP research had revealed that most drugs had been initially tested on males and calibrated for larger, younger bodies – an issue far too often overlooked by a male-dominated medical profession where, though there was parity in numbers, male doctors worked full time, while female doctors preferred part time.
Valerie accompanied the She Devil. They travelled in comfort in the back seat of the Mercedes, one old lady in her eighties, one young woman in her twenties. It was midnight, very late for the She Devil to be out. They were on their way home, travelling south. Valerie lowered the tinted window of the Mercedes to breathe in a little unconditioned and unscented air, but shut it again as a red security light in the carpeted ceiling flashed and a pleasant female voice warned ‘Achtung, Achtung, Fenster, Fenster!’ and the chauffeur turned her head and said, ‘If you open the window, darlings, I can’t be responsible for temperature control.’
This was Leda, a serious and intent young woman in her thirties from the IGP’s Security team, certificated to a high level in close protection and evasive driving. She wore her peaked uniform hat at a jaunty angle: Valerie rather fancied her, or had, though the idea of penetrative sex appealed perhaps more than it once had. Leda was a smooth and able driver.
‘I find it shocking,’ said the She Devil, ‘that this machine costs so much and yet can only talk to us in German.’
‘It is German, and second-hand: it would have cost so much more to have an English-speaking satnav put in, and we’d have had to wait for delivery.’ She’s amazing, thought the She Devil, the girl has an answer to everything! They were travelling in the Institute’s own bullet-proof Mercedes S600 Guard, bought at great expense at Valerie’s insistence. This was almost its first outing.
The need for a presidential limousine had come up at a Board meeting, following a suggestion from Valerie, whose stock had been high at the time – her fundraising efforts having proved so successful that the IGP for once had money in the bank. If Valerie said the appearance of prosperity bred prosperity, she was probably right. She had been asked to address the Board in person. Only the She Devil herself objected to her reasoning.
‘But Valerie, who’s going to fire a gun at me? I’m an old lady. We live in a peaceful land. We fight the gender war, but we must put our trust in voices, not weapons.’
‘You never know,’ said Valerie, sombrely, the amazing eyes flashing from under the thick black eyelashes as she looked up. ‘History shows that sooner or later words must give way to actions if ends are to be achieved. It’s inevitable. The Mercedes I have in mind, an S600, is only armoured to stage one, which is bullet-proof. I could have suggested nine, which is bomb-proof. But that’s only really necessary for Heads of State and gets rather heavy to steer. And the extra cost is atrocious.’
Ruth had been outvoted four to seven, which was troubling.
The used car had been bought in the face of the She Devil’s wishes, an entirely unnecessary £200,000 had been spent, and nicknamed the Iron Maiden. Once upon a time such a defeat would have been unthinkable. The She Devil wondered if she had the will to resist the rise and rise of Valerie Valeria. The girl was bright and energetic, a force to be reckoned with, but she seemed incapable of realising that though gender might be on a sliding scale, men were still born bigger, stronger and less empathic than women: if women gave way to biological imperatives, the patriarchy would come surging back. The price of liberation was eternal vigilance. Too much accommodation of the male principle was dangerous; male/female apartheid was the only way ahead.
‘Diavolessa,’ said Valerie, out of the darkness, ‘we’re five miles from home. Shall we drop by St Rumbold’s and take a look at the house where Tyler lives?’ Valerie quite alarmed herself. This was the worst kind of crush behaviour. It was unrequited love which drove silly girls to stand mooning outside the loved one’s house: just to look at the same sky, breathe the same air. Ridiculous! She was Valerie Valeria who was gay – and she felt this for a boy? How her friends would gloat.
‘Supposing we didn’t,’ said the She Devil. ‘An even better idea, it being the middle of the night.’ But Valerie was already waving her hand over some contact pad and the window between her and Leda slid open. Valerie was already organising the detour.
‘Do we have to?’ asked Leda. ‘Her Ladyship must be tired and the petrol light went on a mile back.’
‘The Diavolessa is never tired,’ said Valerie. ‘And no one runs out of petrol in a car like this.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Leda. ‘So the sensors can’t be working. I’m ever so sorry, Val. I should have checked with the diagnostics before we left. It’s the first time I’ve driven this thing. I’ll make it up to you.’
‘I’ll make sure you do,’ said Valerie with meaning and the She Devil asked what all the giggling and whispering was about, but was ignored. Leda had to stop the car to read the instruction book, and Valerie got in front beside her to help.
Then there was trouble because the estate was so new that not all its streets came up on satnav. Valerie stayed in the front with Leda. The She Devil drowsed in the back, and eventually Echo Close was discovered after the Iron Maiden had nosed and nudged like some great black worm through a warren of quiet sleeping streets, tightly packed, all more or less identical.
Eventually they pulled up in a short row of rathe
r larger houses. Most of them were unoccupied, but one was blazing with light from all its opened windows. Dreadfully loud and discordant music made the air quiver. Swearing and shouting came from inside.
‘This is where my grandson lives?’ asked the She Devil, wide awake. ‘With his mother, my daughter?’ Valerie admitted that it was.
‘I see we have rather come down in the world,’ was all the She Devil said, and then – with such ferocity that Leda turned the car and left, fast – ‘Home, Leda, at once. These people have nothing to do with me.’
Nor did the She Devil talk to Valerie all the way home.
60
I Always Meant Well
Wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h!
It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t mean to die. But I was all she had. A stepmother. Nicci’s real mother had run out on her and her father was in prison. I should not have disappeared from her life when I did. I should not have let the little seed of cancer take root and destroy me. I should have stayed alive to take her out of that dreadful free-thinking school, and given her a little self-respect and a sense of proportion, taught her that ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’, and to tell a man you love him when you are fifteen and are on the pill is to put temptation before him he cannot resist, no matter how plain, spotty and fat you are.
Bobbo was not much use to her. He was a typical man of his generation, who saw children as the mother’s concern, not the father’s. He fed them and clothed them and had a sense of ownership but what they felt was no concern of his. He was simply there to provide. And after Bobbo was with me, of course, he did not even have to do the providing – and then the She Devil contrived to have him put in prison so he had even less obligation to his children, who were thus doubly abandoned. It may have even been a relief to him not to have the responsibility any more. So whom did little Nicci have to look up to then? Only me. And I died.
The school did not let her out to come to my funeral. The real mother was nowhere to be found, but I was only a stepmother.
After every successful revolution, as Father Ferguson, once my mentor and guide, told me, it’s the next generation, the children, who pay the price. He was right. The feminists will have their revolution, he predicted, albeit a bloodless one, and change the social order, and little by little the new order will become the establishment, and that in its turn will be challenged and overthrown. So civilisations proceed, until they themselves collapse and die. Father Ferguson was a real downer to a girl like me. He had no faith in love.
I should have put Nicci on a diet the moment she stepped through the door moaning not that her mother had let the family home burn down but that she hadn’t bothered to save the girl’s guinea pig from a horrible death. I was too busy covering up my nakedness and my hair after the mussiness Bobbo had made of it – I was always happy to prove my love to Bobbo whenever and wherever he wanted it; a woman in love can do no less: Bobbo in his great love for me could be on the ardent and impatient side. I should have explained all this to Nicci. Should, should, should! So many shoulds... how they torment me!
One thing to have a man’s baby because you love him so – quite another to fail to terminate an unintended pregnancy with twins, even though the father will pay, and he will have to support you and yours for ever and ever. But all my fault! I must take the blame for Nicci’s perfectly horrible behaviour. Ugh, what a loathsome child!
How easily and fluently expressions of remorse flow from my lips. That’s because they are untrue. I tell lies, as is my custom. I am a writer of romantic fiction. Lies flow from my lips as they do from my pen. Happy endings are rare. Love does not end with a kiss and a wedding, life goes on afterwards, all difficulty until it ends – if you’re lucky, unlike me for whom it doesn’t.
Oh wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h, woe is me, mea culpa! Is that what you want, Momus, Great Script Writer in the Sky? Will that satisfy you?
The smell of dry rot is bad today. I am growing to quite like it. I fan the fungus as I circle the High Tower. Perhaps it will collapse and crumble. Wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h!
61
Meet Your New Sisters
All change for Tyler.
By the time Tyler waved goodbye to his sisters it was all but half past two. He had had a long hard day. Another morning with Miss Swanson, and then Hermione, careering around on the back of her motorbike and in her bed. Then all this with the twins. And now his mother with her new lifestyle to be faced. And before that the remarkable if dreamlike encounter with the girl from Australia in Mrs Easton’s shop. He marvelled at how boring life could be for years on end and then suddenly and alarmingly erupt into exciting event. But no way it wasn’t exhausting.
All seemed serene when he went inside. The front door entered straight into the living room thanks to flexible spacing, so there was nowhere to hang his coat or put his woolly hat. There were half-unpacked boxes scattered all over the white nylon carpet. The boxes were of the smart kind that professional furniture movers deliver in advance of the move, so presumably the therapist’s arrival had not been an impetuous move but a considered decision. His mother was the kind who did things in a hurry. Matilda had always struck Tyler as being rather the opposite – slow and deliberate. This was all Matilda’s doing.
Matilda was lying back in an armchair facing Nicci in hers; a pleasant enough looking person, if rather square and dumpy, twice as broad as his mother but rather better looking, with flat short brown hair, in jeans and sweater. He didn’t mind her as a person; she had been quite supportive of him in therapy sessions, though he did not like to envisage what she and his mother would actually do in their shared bedroom. At least they were not holding hands or anything, but slumped opposite each other looking quite exhausted.
Matilda raised a weary hand in greeting.
‘He wanders in when the trouble’s passed,’ said his mother. ‘Typical man. Meet your new sisters. That’s Jilly, that’s Jane.’
Jilly was stringing up Christmas decorations above the chaos of the floor. They were of the hand-made and rather vapid variety, but Tyler was pleased to see them. Nicci and the girls did not really do Christmas, though they had microwave M&S turkey dinners on the day itself. Jane was in the kitchen area patiently emptying a packing crate of bowls and dishes onto one of the normally bare kitchen shelves. The Finch Patchett family tended to graze rather than cook. Nicci claimed that feminists didn’t cook, but if Tyler ever offered to give it a go, told him she didn’t want him messing up her kitchen.
Both girls seemed of the quiet, studious, old-fashioned kind. They smiled at him as if in welcome – to his own home. They seemed to quite like the look of him. He thought perhaps this new life would not be so bad. Honestly, really, it couldn’t be worse than what had gone before. With a sex life his mother might even be happier?
Jane and Jilly, up so late, were sent to bed. They went without arguing. Matilda got up and said she thought everyone deserved a nice cup of something. There was organic hot chocolate on the counter as well as tea and real coffee, milk in the fridge along with eggs and cheese, butter and marmalade, nut cutlets and jars of jam and peanut butter. Usually there was only tomato sauce. Tyler marvelled.
He excused himself and went up to bed. The twins had packed in a hurry and left items of strewn clothing along the corridor. He undressed and put on an orange polyester nightie of Mason’s. He felt happy and relaxed and safe, and slept soundly.
He woke briefly to hear a thundering knock at the door. There were blue flashing lights outside. It was the police, summoned by a report of a disturbance. But they soon went away and Tyler went back to sleep.
62
A Matter Of Ethics
Dr Simmins is distraught.
It was the 18th of December. Three days until the Widdershins Walk. When Valerie, usually so conscientious, was late with her morning coffee, the She Devil imagined something had gone wrong with the preparations. So much could: Luxuriette might have been closed down by Health and Safety (a cockroach in
festation?), Amethyst Builders might have used water-based paint on surf-splashed wood, computers might have crashed at Harrods Wedding Boutique – it was amazing in this modern world that anything worked at all.
But then Valerie had a magic touch: everything usually went smoothly when she was around. She was amiable, easy and optimistic and everything turned out well for her – she expected that it would, so it did. The She Devil wished she herself had that knack. Was it Napoleon who said the best quality a general could have was to be fortunate? Valerie had just been born lucky. So most likely nothing had gone wrong. Valerie was probably just having a nice lie-in with Leda and couldn’t drag herself away from her bed.
The She Devil had a glorious view from her window if she sat up in bed on a good-weather morning. Today – a crisp clear morning, an early sun. An expanse of sea, green hills in the background, white foamy waves breaking on rocks below, for once almost no wind, and an arch of cloudless pale blue sky above. It seemed almost too good to be true, as though nature itself were waiting, laughing up its sleeve, plotting drama and disaster. On such a clear and peaceful day a bomb fell on Hiroshima, the Twin Towers came down, the tsunami rolled over Fukushima.
The tap on the door was almost a relief. The She Devil put on her splendid red velvet dressing gown to go and open it. This took her a little time. Her arms didn’t stretch as easily as once they had. Valerie had wanted to turn it into a cloak for the She Devil to wear when she headed the procession, but the She Devil would have none of it. If procession there must be, so be it, but she drew the line at fancy dress.
‘Coming in a minute,’ she said, because opening a door was no longer easy and automatic, and when she was fresh out of bed it took time to draw breath and manage balance.
