Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (17 page)

 
          
It
was remarkable how friends thinned out over Christmas: gays retreated either
singly to the maternal bosom to discuss gender relations, or to the paternal
one to torment it: or in pairs the better to dissect the subtleties of the
reaction they had had to endure over the season: the significance of the offering
of the single bed (rejection) or the double one (acceptance). Single women went
home to their county families to hole themselves up and protest the fullness of
their city lives; lone mothers might ask you round to Christmas dinner, but
what with the childcare absent, the ritual thawing of the turkey serving only
to mark the thinness of the living, and the desperate smoking of joints behind
the children’s backs an embarrassment, made me disinclined to accept
invitations from this source. Two-income professional childless couples offered
the best and most lavish entertainment, with their minimalist Christmas trees
and their elaborate, fashion-conscious meals, but the drug of choice, cocaine,
made everyone jumpy and even evil: I would limp home to my lair exhausted.

 
          
I
thought I would have to spend Christmas Day on my own: disappointingly, Guy and
Lorna didn’t seem anxious to extend an invitation. Though since my first
encounter with them they had become quite friendly and I had been to visit them
on several occasions, their hospitality was never lavish.

 
          
‘We
don’t really keep Christmas,’ said Lorna. ‘Such a hypocritical time: commerce
lurking under the guise of religion.’

 
          
Well,
everyone knows that: they just choose to ignore it, or better still, make a meal
of it and enjoy it. I hoped Lorna would relent: the house on Eel Pie Island
seemed so perfect for Christmas. I would put up the decorations, streamers and
so on, if they were too self-conscious to do so. I wasn’t afraid of
stepladders, as Lorna might be. I would even pay for all the baubles, if the
thought of what they cost was Guy’s problem. Did they have no feeling at all
for tradition? Had this house not been their childhood home? But even as
children, I could see, such were their natures they might not have entered much
into the Christmas spirit. Lorna would have found fault with any toy she was
given: Guy would have worried himself sick in case her gifts were more
expensive than his. Both seemed to have been born with
a wicked waste of money
on their lips. Yet I did not feel Alison
had been like that: the house was too pretty, the lamp-fittings needlessly
expensive, the dish cloths proper Irish linen. And the name on the lintel was
Happiness, though her children had let creepers grow over it, and woodlice
scuttled around in the damp, flaky wood of the board.

 
          
I
was, it was beginning to be evident, rather disappointed in my new cousins. I
looked for lightness in the dullness. Perhaps Guy and Lorna, brother and
sister, were having an affair? But the fact that I had edited a documentary
film on sibling incest,
Family Bond
,
which suggested that among the intellectual classes such deviancy was common,
did not make it true. There was nothing Byronic about Guy: though something of
Dorothy Wordsworth about Lorna.

 
          
At
first Lorna showed no more interest in Felicity’s existence than did Guy. She
actively disliked films; her enthusiasms were reserved for the crystalline
structures with which she
worked,
the subject on which
she lectured. Crystals are no doubt beautiful and extraordinary, but at the
other end of the spectrum from the flashing, changing life of celluloid, and to
the non-scientist, once you have applied an adjective or two, a difficult
subject for conversation. When they discovered that Felicity owned
a
Utrillo, brother and sister became rather more interested
in their new relative.
I suppose, when
you come to think about it, she's our actual grandmother.
I think both had
associated
widowhood
and
living in a retirement home
with
poverty. That she owned a major piece of art intrigued them, though Lorna’s
eyes glazed when I began to tell them the story of how Felicity had acquired
it. Long ago and far away, and how things come to be as they are, held no
interest for them.

 
          
Both
brother and sister had reddish hair and the same long, broad, rather grim jaws,
though Lorna’s drooped to meet her chin and Guy’s tilted aggressively upwards.
Lorna’s hair was the exact same orangey shade as Angel’s and
mine
,
but straight and thin, not crinkly and thick. Glints in what remained of Guy’s
hair suggested the same shade. Clearly the overweening colour gene had come
through from Felicity, but those corresponding to texture and plenty had been
diffused over a couple of generations. Photographs of their father the palaeontologist
showed the same jaw, but set in a pleasanter expression than either of theirs.
He looked, in fact, a rather nice quiet studious person of integrity. A
photograph of Alison as a young woman showed her with straight dark hair, mine
and Angel’s pale skin, Felicity’s widely spaced, rather hooded eyes, and a
lively expression.

 
          
It
seemed Alison’s adoptive parents, the Wallaces, had played little part in her
children’s lives.

 
          
‘I
think they were shopkeepers,’ Lorna said. ‘Rather ordinary. They ran a chain of
corner stores, but in the seventies the big supermarkets opened and they lost
their money: they retired somewhere dreadful, like the South Coast. Mother
didn’t speak of them much.’

 
          
I
heard the story of the Dowson parents’ meeting. Both had been studying geology
at the Imperial College in South Kensington. He was twenty-four, she was
twenty-two. They’d married within three or four months, and both sets of
parents had disapproved. Guy and Lorna, from the look on their faces, seemed to
disapprove too, although they owed their existence to the union. Alison had
ended up a stay-at-home mother of the cooking, cleaning variety as was typical
of her generation, when learning was, for women, for learning’s sake. Mark had
become a palaeontologist, a man of note, the one they could proudly acknowledge
as parent. Lorna found a tattered photograph in a drawer of Mark receiving an honorary
degree of
Cambridge
- and another one of him showing the young
Prince Charles around a hillside in which something remarkable out of
pre-history had been found. If they’d been photos of me I would have had them
framed and in pride of place on the wall: even if only in the lavatory to show
I took none of it seriously: not so the Dowsons. They had a nervy diffidence
about their place in the world. They wouldn’t have gone so far as to throw the
photographs away: the bottom of a drawer getting scuffed under other things
should have been no surprise.

 
          
Mark’s
background was county English: both his parents had died recently: the expected
inheritance having been swallowed up by nursing home fees, as so often happens
these days. The aged live longer, though no more steady on their pins than
heretofore. The Dowson grandfather had been a Harley Street physician: the
grandmother had edited a natural history magazine. Their snobbery would have
been of a vague and throwaway kind, to do with intellect and education rather
than wealth: Mark had married below him, Alison being out of nowhere and
presumably pregnant with Guy when they married, but at least she had a brain.
From her photographs she had been no great beauty, this throwaway child of
Felicity’s, though her eyes were good, like her mother’s, and her smile shy and
sweet. The young Alison stood stooped and awkward, as Lorna did.

 
          
In
the fifties abstention was still the favoured method of birth control. Abortion
was difficult, surgical and for medical reasons only. If a man got a girl
pregnant he was expected to marry her and that was that. Otherwise he was a
heel and a cad. Contraception was the man’s responsibility: coitus interruptus
the next best thing to no sex at all. If the man failed in self-control, if he
got the wrong girl pregnant, too bad: if lifelong unhappiness for both ensued,
too bad as well. Sex was meant to happen after marriage, not before: in theory
girls stayed virgins until their wedding night: if they didn’t
they
deserved what they got. Wedding guests stared at the
hang of the bride’s dress and speculated. Young couples would go away for a few
months after the wedding and return with a baby and be vague about the date of
the birth.

 
          
* * *

           
For the Dowsons the church wedding
would have been an embarrassment: the social gulf between the groom’s side of
the church and the bride’s noticeable. The Wallaces were shopkeepers. That
Alison was herself the adopted child of an unmarried mother would not have
helped. Like mother, everyone must have thought, like daughter. Product as she
was of two disgraced generations, perhaps Lorna’s life problem was that she was
trying too hard not to be a bad girl. Parental-in-law disdain might well have
extended to Alison’s children, and account for the way the pair of them
were
so socially ill at ease. Proper social responses, in
other words, did not come naturally to them. If you required someone else to
pay for your lunch you did not then choose the most expensive dish on the menu.
If someone crossed London to come to tea you served more than digestive
biscuits: you offered sandwiches as well. It would occur to you that your guest
might be hungry. Socially secure people, from whatever class, as Miss Felicity
would have put it,
knew how to behave.
If someone like Wendy pulled a packet of sweets from her Crimplene pocket she
would take care to offer you one: Lorna took out a packet of cigarettes, looked
inside, said, ‘Sorry, only one left,’ and smoked it without thinking this was
in any way odd. But then, most people have quirks of one kind or another, and I
daresay I have myself. Habits and actions that seem normal to me but strange to
other people, and that no-one has pointed out to me.

 
          
When
I told Guy and Lorna that I had found them a half-great- aunt Lucy, younger
half-aunt to their mother Alison, or rather that she’d found me, they seemed
unmoved. What to them was a newly discovered half great-aunt?
Widow of a manufacturer of exercise machinery?
A person without PhDs or publications?
Who cared? And still
they did not suggest I visited Alison.

 
          
‘If
you’re visiting your mother on Christmas Day,’ I hinted broadly, ‘maybe I could
come with you?’

 
          
‘There’s
no point,’ said Guy. ‘She can’t tell one day from another.’ I did not see that
the world stopped just because the inside of one’s head stopped. If Alison
didn’t know it was Christmas Day they could always tell her, even if she forgot
almost at once. The rituals of civilization - even if hardly based in religion
any more - must be observed, or what was the point of being civilized?

 
          
And
she was my half-aunt as well as their mother; I was family too. I resolved to
visit Alison on Christmas Day, no matter what her children did or didn’t do. In
the meantime I would call on Lucy, if only to get the back story of the film
now building in my head, inch by inch, reel by reel, into the totality of its
narrative. That Miss Felicity’s life wasn’t finished yet did not occur to me.
One tends to write off women in their mid-eighties as simply hanging around
until death carries them away. One is wrong.

 
          
Also,
of course, women in their seventies have a continuing life and a will of their
own. Lucy, Felicity’s younger half-sister, turned up at my door. She had been
alerted by Wendy that I was making inquiries into her past life. I was quite
shocked, as if I’d been turning over earth with my spade, as was my legitimate
right, and all of a sudden a small furry creature had leapt out of its
underground lair and bitten me on the nose, slapped me round the ears with
great strong mole-like hands. This investigation was not quite the one-way
street I had imagined. I stopped digging, but what I unearthed had a life of
its own.

 
          
She
was still slender and elegant, straight-backed like Felicity, and unlike
Felicity, of the kind who has managed to live a life without untoward alarms,
within accepted conventional boundaries. I could tell from her controlled courtesy,
by the way she looked in polite puzzlement around my flat, as if wondering
where the three-piece suite could be, why the curtains hung from loops of
fabric and were not properly fitted, why the freezer was in the living room,
and who had painted it with scenes from Disney’s
Fantasia.
She was well dressed in taupes and beiges, though one
felt that the instinctive preference for poster blue, demonstrated by those who
grow old without ever quite growing up, was only just held at bay. She had just
such a blue ribbon woven into carefully curled, still thick, perfectly white
hair. On the left hand she wore a broad gold wedding ring, and on the right a
diamond ring of the kind it is unwise to flash around in Soho. They might not
quite cut off the finger to get it but the finger could get dislocated in the
tug. I had known it happen.

 
          
Wide,
helpless blue eyes looked with apparent trust from a face grown old around
them: I say ‘apparent’ because in some women of an older generation this way
survival lies. If you’re helpless and pretty enough, some man is bound to come
along to change the tyre, marry you and fetch your handbag for the rest of his
life, which will probably be shorter than yours, and what is more he will leave
you the money so you can enjoy your widowhood in peace. When Lucy told me she
had been recently widowed and that her husband had manufactured exercise
bicycles, I was not surprised. If the only way respectability can be acquired
is at the expense of deep seriousness, so be it. I can earn my own living. I
was born four decades later than Lucy. I have a skill, a talent and
a training
. Other women are not so lucky.

 
          
Lucy
had telephoned before she arrived to check that I was in, and when I warned her
that there were lots of stairs but no light, told me that she was not bothered
by stairs but liked to have a handrail. I had to think before I replied that
yes, there was one. The young, I suppose, just run up and down stairs with
confidence, taking two at a time if they’re in a hurry: the old go more
carefully: perhaps from a shakier sense of balance or simply because
experience has taught them that falls are nasty things. They like a good rail.
Even as I put the phone down I knew I should have told her there wasn’t one and
put her off. Her timing was terrible.

 
          
It
was a Saturday afternoon: Harry Krassner was flying in the next day: the soap
opera of my own life demanded my attention. Holly had decided to keep the baby:
she disapproved of abortion. Harry had let me know this in the same breath as he
asked if he could stay over at my place. I’d said for him to call when he
arrived, to see if it was convenient. I had hoped to make a late appointment at
Harvey Nichols or somewhere to have my legs waxed.
(Me,
Sophia King, exerting myself thus over a man?
It hardly bore thinking
about. If God gave a woman hairy legs surely it was man’s duty to put up with
them? Wasn’t there some Country Music song,
‘Did
I shave my legs for this?'.)
Perhaps Lucy’s unexpected arrival was both a
warning from on high and a salvation. If Harry Krassner took off because my
legs were not up to Hollywood standards of silky smooth, I was well rid of him.
And anyway once you give a subplot legs and start it running that’s it -
interweave itself it will, following its own rules, as intricate as the ribbon
winding through Lucy’s white hair. (It might have been a wig, but I didn’t
think so: I think the Good Hair Fairy was there at her birth, as it had been at
mine.)

 
          
I
finally understood the baffling question that writers get asked -
Once you have invented your characters do
they take off in their own direction f
Most writers reply sensibly, if
disappointingly,
No, they may try but Vm
the one in charge round here,
but here was Lucy, whom I had relegated to
the past, making her appearance in the present, taken off indeed, climbing my
steep stairs, declining to be passive, and quite capable of distorting by
virtue of truth and actuality the elegant pre-credit sequence of the film
forming in my head. That film, of course
, being
the
biopic of Felicity’s life.

 
          
Lucy
sat rather pointedly with her back to the
Fantasia
fridge - I realized she was right: it had seemed a good idea once, in the days
of comparative poverty when there was time and energy to spare, and now there
was none, whenever was it to be remedied? -
and
took
command of the meeting. Her little-girl voice carried well. The cat slunk off
under the cooker. It was the old-fashioned kind with legs. No time for that
either. I was astonished that Harry from Hollywood put up with me at all. Lucy
said in tones of childish formality that she was pleased to hear that Felicity
was alive and well but that so far as she was concerned the past was better
left alone. For her it was not so pleasant a place. She did not want private
detectives snooping around in her life. She did not want to be in touch with
Felicity: what could they have in common after so long? Her astrologer had
advised against it, as had her doctor. Her solicitor had warned her that there
might be endless trouble over wills and so forth. On the other hand, if
Felicity wanted to find her long-lost baby, she, Lucy, did not want to stand in
the way. She would give me one interview, here and now, tell me all she knew,
and that would be that.

 
          
* * *

           
I am not a writer, I am an editor. I
can speculate but not invent. I suppose I could have worked it out for myself,
but the truth turned out to be even more dramatic than I would have dared
suppose, and being reported by a seventy-five-year-old out of the memory of the
child she once was, had already been conveniently turned into a shaped
narrative: a tragedy, as it happened. I could see why Lucy did not want her
view of the past upset after all this time: a happy ending for Felicity was not
within the scheme of her universe.

 
          
Lucy
had the characters well defined: her father, Arthur, was the wronged hero,
Felicity the tragic juvenile lead whom the villain, Uncle Anton, had wronged
and ruined, and Lois her mother was the wicked witch. It was pre-sound cinema,
black-and-white film with piano accompaniment. Felicity was Clara Bow,
wide-eyed and trembling, shrinking back against a wall while the landlord
threatens her mother with eviction unless she surrenders to him. She was Alma
Taylor, orphaned, wronged, thrown out into the snow. If she had ended up a
gauzy creation
who
shopped at Bergdorf Goodman and
owned a Utrillo, Lucy really didn’t want to know.

 
          
If
it had been me in Felicity’s shoes, all those years ago, I would have curled up
and died then and there. Or I would have lined up with the other ruined girls
to jump off Waterloo Bridge. But perhaps these days we just know too much about
trauma, both emotional and physical, to believe we can survive and this is why
we don’t. If there is no language for the bad things that happen they are not
so firmly sealed into our consciousness, our memory. They can drift off and be
lost in the next experience. We’re talking about a time when the word cancer
was never spoken aloud, when insanity in the family was kept secret, when if a
girl was raped she kept quiet because otherwise she was not just damaged but
disgraced and unmarriageable, and how could a girl live other than by marriage
or the goodwill of men? Even a couple of decades into the century only a very
exceptional woman could earn a living wage, other than on her back. For all
their frills and affectations and fashions, their shingled hair, their pretty
pleats and flattened bosoms, women were, as ever, into the basic matter of
survival.

 
          
*                
*                
*

 
 
          
The
Fates have a way of doling out the same hand of cards to a woman, over and
over. The cackling sisters had decided that Felicity was to get some pretty
nice cards sprinkled with a few really nasty ones bound to mess the others up.
They sent along a Fairy Godmother to the christening to give looks, charm,
energy, courage, wit - then took away her parents, gave her Lucy’s mother Lois
for a wicked stepmother, brought Lois’s brother Anton into the household,
obliged her to give away her perfect baby and just when she’d managed to cope
with all that, gave her the double whammy of Angel. It’s true that if there
wasn’t Angel there wouldn’t have been me, but what use am I to my grandmother?
A cynical, distant, unmarried, unmaternal young woman who’s never going to give
her great-grandchildren, who’s going to bring her branch of the family tree to
a distinct and sudden stop.

 
          
Because
not me, I’m not going to chance it.
What,
leave the
baby which comes out to the cackling sisters? They’re too mean, they have a
rotten sense of humour, everyone knows. I’d rather trust a genetic scientist
and that’s not saying much. Pick the sexiest dad in the world and the baby
could still be a throwback. It’s like picking your lead player with a pin from
the telephone directory instead of going to central casting and getting a star.
You have no control over what starts growing inside. Even if it was okay to
begin with you could take a drink too many or passively inhale and from what
everyone says you could turn it into a serial killer or the Hunchback of Notre
Dame. You could find yourself lumbered by, and like as not bonded to, the
wholly unlovable.

 
          
Lucy
had had two children by her second husband, an importer of exercise bicycle
parts. One, the girl, was a specialist in aboriginal art in Western Australia
and the boy was a banker in Hong Kong. She did not seem to miss them. Perhaps
they had left the country not to escape from over-possessive maternal love but
so as not to be reminded of the lack of it. No, neither had any children. They
were
Too
busy
enjoying themselves
’. I decided I wouldn’t chase this pair up. My
great-grandfather was their grandfather, true: but the generations were too
askew and sheer distance and airfares seem to thin the bloodline no end. And
Lucy too was destined to be another shrivelling, dropping branch of the family
tree. Poor Mother Nature: I who so mistrust her could almost feel sorry for her
- so many dead ends these days, or so many experiments taken over by the
subjects, crying, ‘
Enough, enough
.’

 
          
After
Lucy had told me the story of Alison’s birth I made a halfhearted attempt to
persuade her to change her mind and get in touch with Felicity.

 
          
‘No,’
she said, firmly. ‘It would shift the ground on which I stand, and my legs are
too old to cope, for all I cycle every day.’

 
          
And
all of a sudden she was like Miss Felicity and I caught a vision of family, and
of the continuation of mirth, that most precious of nature’s creations, running
through the generations and was charmed, and sorry that it was to stop, but not
sorry enough. The gift had bypassed Guy and Lorna: it explained their literal
plod, plod, plod through life. I hoped it wasn’t more that that. There was
something in them that seemed slightly worse: a banality. Why did people talk
about the banality of evil? But because evil is banal, does not mean that all
things banal are evil. Coal is black, but not all things black are coal. Forget
it.

 
          
She
rose to go. I helped her down the stairs. The phone rang as we were halfway
down. It was not switched to answerphone. I let it ring itself into silence. I
had a feeling it was Harry. I did not call back to find out. Perhaps I would
not have him in my home again. Why should I be made miserable by a man whose
only interest in me was that I saved him a taxi fare to work?

 
          
I
know I haven’t yet handed over Lucy’s account of Felicity’s early years but
some things take more time to assimilate than others.
Like
making the key scene in the movie: you often keep it to last.