Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (18 page)

 
          
The
grandfather I did not share with Guy and Lorna was from
Vienna
: he came to
London
to look for his missing sister Lois in
1928, or that is the reason he gave. He may have been what is now called an
economic refugee: his name was Anton Wasserman. He is not by all accounts a
person anyone would much want to have in their bloodline. You can tell I do not
like the Wassermans. My loyalty is to Felicity and to Felicity’s birth mother,
poor Sylvia.

 
          
Lois
Wasserman, Anton’s younger sister, was a child prodigy who came to London in
1913 when she was twelve to study the piano at the Royal College of Music. She
boarded with a family in Gower Street, within walking distance of the Royal
College in Marylebone Road. Within months of her arrival in London the young
Serb loyalist Princip had taken it into his head to shoot the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand at Sarajevo: within months of that event World War I had begun.
Princip was a lad of seventeen, who, fired with nationalistic fervour, took a
pot shot at the Duke’s carriage as it proceeded down the main drag of the city
and missed. He put his gun in his pocket and went round the corner to have a
cup of coffee.
As one does.
The ducal coachman,
dashing for safety, lost his way and ended up asking directions at the very
same cafe where Princip sat.
If you don’t
at first succeed, try, try,
try
again.
Princip
went outside and shot dead the Archduke and the Archduchess too for good
measure. Had he not done so Felicity would no doubt still be living in London
and Lucy and Guy and Lorna and Alison would not
exist.
But you can drive yourself mad thinking this way.
What ifs
can only be endured if they belong to the very recent
past; before lunch is about as far as you can
go.

 
          
With
the outbreak of war anyone with a German name still living in England was
harried, hounded and taken to be a spy. Little Miss Wasserman found her studies
discontinued, her host family no longer prepared to board her and with no means
of travelling home. Her parents in Vienna were unable to help, or not willing
to. Thus Lois was left at the age of twelve to fend for herself. My
great-grandmother Sylvia, herself a pianist, in her kindness took the child
into her home. Here, in the Moore household, Lois grew up. (
Pd
been
to see where the family house once stood on the lower slopes of
Hampstead Hill. It was demolished in the sixties. Public housing tower blocks
now stand where once these dramas took place.
So all our
personal histories are swept away: the bricks which once sopped up the passions
of the past are ground to dust, and perhaps as well.)
Lois was already
part of the household when Arthur was sent off to war as correspondent for
The
Times.
She was there on his return, and
when Felicity was born to Sylvia: she was there when poor Sylvia died of the
flu. Within six months Lois, cuckoo in the kindly nest, had married Arthur:
Lucy was born two months later.

 
          
‘Died
from the flu!
⁵
Perhaps Lois was like Margaret Lockwood, the mistress
in
The Man in Grey
(1943) who murders
the wife as she lies ill with a fever, by throwing open the windows to let the
storm blow in and giving her pneumonia. Perhaps, having got the husband from
the wife, Lois then conspired with the lover to get rid of the husband? Barbara
Stanwyck was forever doing it in all those fifties films, bumping off husbands
to get hold of the insurance money. All that melodrama would not have been
confined to film. Film mirrors reality, and vice versa. It could have
happened.

 
          
Employees
of the Aardvark agency sit in Somerset House, or wherever the national
archive is currently kept, and by finding addresses and studying
dates detect
such dramas. Whatever changes? I don’t suppose poor Sylvia
much cared to stay alive.
You don’t not notice that a
twenty-year-old girl is pregnant
; Lois did not seem the kind to protect
her benefactor from the news.
I'm
pregnant and your husband is the father.
It’s each for themselves, isn’t
it, then as now. I never knew a girl to actually mean:
Oh I don't go with married men,
though it trips off the tongue well
enough - and these days:
Oh, he's not
actually married, just living with her
makes a good excuse. In Lois and
Sylvia’s day there was even more at stake: not just sex and a relationship, but
marriage and all that went with it: home, comfort, children and money -
survival itself. It was worth the mistresses’ gamble. Get pregnant by a man,
enchant him with sexual services, make the wife upset and angry enough, and
chances are he’ll end up marrying you.

 
          
According
to Lucy once Lois had got rid of Sylvia and trapped Arthur, she lost interest
in him. She had memories of Arthur trying to hug and kiss Lois and Lois shaking
him off. He was always gloomy and staring into space and she was always in a
bad temper. (But then children tend to see the worst side of the parents’
relationship. They don’t get into the bedroom to see how the day relates to the
night.) There was trouble over Felicity. Lois had wanted her sent off to
boarding school. Arthur was against it.

 
          
Poor
Felicity, now with an archetypal wicked stepmother, set on cleansing the dead
woman’s brood to make room for her own. (cf.
Babes in the Wood, Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall
et al.)
Get lost! Off to the forest with you! Into
the gingerbread house there to be eaten up; Daddy can't save you now.
Indeed, Daddy can hardly remember who you are, according to the social
Darwinists. The new wife is younger and stronger and does better by his genes
than the one who died. In other words a doting new husband would prefer not to
notice what was going on in his own household.

 
          
‘It
might have been better for Felicity,’ said Lucy, ‘if she had been sent away.
There was always something. She hadn’t made her bed properly or left a tap
dripping, and she’d be shut in her room, sometimes with her hands tied to stop
her getting into more mischief.
Or locked in the cupboard.
She never cried. I remember trying to stuff bread and jam under her bedroom
door, and getting caught and being made to lick up the jam from the floor. My mother
was a horrid woman. Why did my father never notice?’ ‘That’s men for you,’ I
said.

 
          
After
Arthur’s death things got even worse for Felicity. She’d be sent downstairs to
live with the servants when punishment was required, which pretty soon was more
or less permanently. She’d sleep in the attic and eat in the kitchen, while
Lois and Lucy ate in the dining room. (Shirley Temple in
Poor Little Rich Girl
came to mind.) Lucy was told to call her May,
not Felicity, the latter being too fancy a name for an orphaned girl with no
family, who would have to make her own way in the world. (Some overtones of
Jane Eyre
crept in at this point, the
one with James Mason as Rochester.)

 
          
‘I
think Felicity quite liked the drama,’ said Lucy. ‘She was always such a little
actress. She said there were worse things than peeling potatoes and it was more
fun with the servants anyway. One day she thumbed her nose at Mama and then she
really did get sent off to boarding school.’

 
          
‘Like
the one in
Jane Eyre
,’ I said. ‘Or
was it Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall?’

 
          
She
looked at me blankly. I was beginning to feel uncertain as to how reliable a
witness Lucy was turning out to be. She recounted Felicity’s early life in a
narrative in which myth and archetype mingled and mixed. I did the same, of
course, only I use film as my reference. Lucy used the Arthur Mee’s
Fairy Books
on which she had been
reared.
Each to their own.
Lucy saw her mother as her
enemy and because her mother hated Felicity, allowed her enemy’s enemy to
become her friend, and so let the narrative follow where it led, without shame.

 
          
‘How
did your father die?’ I asked, allowing her time to calm down.
Her father, my great-grandfather, Arthur, who had had the
misfortune or the weakness to fall for the wrong woman in his middle age and so
destroy the happiness of generations.
Married to Sylvia, he had
impregnated Lois. In these practical and unmelodramatic days the word
‘husband’ has become unfashionable. Even women with marriage certificates
sometimes prefer to call the men they sleep with ‘partners’ so as not to be out
of tune with the times. Alas, partner has no in-built drama, contains no sense of
coercion, no in-built
Thanatos,
no
tragedy. It is not the stuff of major film. Okay for a subplot but you can’t
hang a film on it, let alone risk a generation of real human beings, as once
you could. Something lost, and something gained, as we industriously smooth
away our capacity for personal pain, by taking good care not to run into it.
Lucy was one of the early aficionados.

 
          
‘I
don’t know how he died,’ Lucy said. ‘We were told he was ill, and he’d been in
bed for a month, with the doctor coming and going.
No-one
told children much in those days.
My mother came out of the front
bedroom one morning and told us he was dead, that’s all.’

 
          
Lucy
could not or would not be more informative, though I pressed her. But I could
envisage the scene. Lois coming out on to the landing, in one of those straight
long flat-chested dresses with pleats, looking down at the upturned faces of
the two girls, Felicity at ten, Lucy at three.
Victorious.
Your father is dead
. And nothing
being the same afterwards: that sudden extraordinary line drawn between the
past and the present. It was said to me too.
Your father is dead.

 
          
‘We
were neither of us allowed to grieve, I do remember that,’ said Lucy. ‘She
couldn’t bear us crying at the best of times. We got slapped if we did. We were
told it was for the best. Felicity wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. She
dressed up for it and then Lois told her she couldn’t go, it wasn’t
appropriate, Arthur wasn’t her real father. There was a terrible scene.
Felicity hit and scratched and Lois just laughed and said she was the coalman’s
daughter. Sylvia had been a slut. But we’d seen the
coalman,
he was hideous so we knew it wasn’t true. One way or another I got to the
funeral but Felicity stayed locked in her room.’

 
          
‘You
don’t think Lois was unbalanced enough to have poisoned your father?’ I asked,
half as a joke, but Lucy was serious enough when she said that it wouldn’t
surprise her. Lois wasn’t in the least unbalanced, reported her daughter, just
cruel and evil. And Arthur had made a will just before he died leaving
everything away from Felicity, to Lois.

 
          
‘What
used to worry me most of all, even back then,’ said Lucy, ‘is that after father
died he fell into a pool of silence. No-one talked about him: it was as if he’d
been some kind of nuisance wasp they’d batted out of the way. Mama kept a
photograph of him in the living room, I suppose in case visitors came and she
had to play the grieving widow, not the merry one, but there were hardly any
visitors anyway. I don’t know why she bothered. I thought there must be
something wrong with Felicity, something bad, to get her treated the way she
was. When Felicity told me she’d had a mother who’d once slept in my father and
mother’s bed I didn’t believe her. Surely this woman would have left some trace
behind, but there was nothing, nothing. Not a hairnet, not a cup or saucer, not
a book. Then when my father died it was the same thing. All his personal things
went, vanished. She missed his slippers for a whole year, but only because I
hid them. I’d sleep with one of them under my pillow, and I once caught
Felicity doing the same.’

 
          
I
said it was all long ago and over, and she had the grace to say, ‘But nothing’s
ever over.’

 
          
Snapshots: metaphorical:
a scene in
which Sylvia is dying of flu in the bedroom, and Lois is allegedly nursing her,
but doing as bad a job of it as she can without anyone noticing, and Arthur
coming home from his day at
The Times
,
and being waylaid by Lois who says Sylvia is sleeping soundly (she’s not: she’s
too weak to move but she overhears) and takes him to her bedroom as she has a
dozen times before and gets herself pregnant. If Arthur has done it once he’s
almost obliged to do it again. Once a man is compromised in this kind of
domestic situation he has to go on. He has to keep the other woman happy
otherwise she’ll tell his wife. Because once the wife knows, that’s the end, so
you might as well have a good time while you can, while it lasts. Round and
round.