Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (19 page)

 
          
Lucy
was not inclined to put any blame on Arthur: no, he was Lois’s victim and that
was that, and she herself was the product of the union so how could she
disapprove of both parents without wishing herself out of existence? How much
easier for all of us if humans hatched out of eggs, anonymously, so our
problems began when we cracked the shell with our infant beak, and not before.
No such luck. Lucy only lived in comfort because Sylvia had once died. All our
cheerful todays depend upon someone else’s fairly terrible yesterdays. I’m glad
they pulled down my ancestral home: there’s so much misery embedded in the
walls.

 
          
But
we have no information about that: it’s all speculation, what went into the
good-night Ovaltine and what didn’t. Did the dying Sylvia shiver for little
Felicity, wondering how she’d survive without her mother, left to Lois’s
mercies? No doubt she did. And still there was nothing she could do. The waters
washed over her.

 
          
Real
life is unsatisfactory, there is no resolving anything properly: you can go on
for ever simply not knowing: murder doesn’t always out: the only ‘end’ is
death. Films at least offer resolutions, and answers, and solutions, the boring
bits edited out. We who have lived through the cinema age have been blessed. It
is not surprising we take to mind-altering substances: they being the next best
thing.
Like being at the cinema in our own body, looking
inwards.

 
          
Within
a month of Arthur dying, in 1925, Lois’s brother Anton had moved into the
house.
Back to the Barbara Stanwyck wife/ lover scenario,
plus incest.
If it was
Hollywood
, the lover couldn’t be the brother too.
You’d have to go to a French film for that, or a German, or indeed one of the
few out of
Austria
, shadowy, dark and dramatic.

 
          
‘Life
got better when he moved in,’ said Lucy. ‘Mother cheered up. We were glad he
was there. He’d make jokes and we’d sing round the piano. The food got better.’
Felicity was allowed home for the holidays, and soon was taken out of school
altogether and permitted to join the others in the dining room. Anton organized
ballet lessons for both girls, for which only Felicity had the talent. ‘I was
always Miss Clumsy,’ Lucy said. ‘Anton didn’t take any more notice of me than
Father did. It was always Felicity this and Felicity that.’

 
          
‘But
Lois let her go to classes?’

 
          
‘My
mother always did what Anton told her,’ said Lucy. ‘I wonder now what went on
between them. At the time it didn’t occur to me. You think I’m exaggerating
about my mother, don’t you,’ she added, eyeing me suddenly quite sharply, and
my silence told her she was right.

           
‘You’re so protected, you young
things,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea what the world can be like, what people get
away with if they think no-one’s watching. In the days before social workers
all kinds of things went on, and nobody thought the worse of you. Nowadays it’s
gone the other way. You can’t do a thing without being spied on.’

 
          
She
would not be patronized: she would take the initiative and come to me before I
went to her. She would see me off. She was still Lois’s daughter, for all she
would rather not be. It’s dangerous to hate your mother: you are obliged to
hate yourself as well, and that can make you vicious. I was glad not to be a
motherless, fatherless child in Lois’s care. I would have fared as badly as did
Felicity, I daresay, under the incestuous Lois Wasserman, onetime child
prodigy, presently stepmother and maybe murderess. Lucy took out a scrapbook
from her smart Italian leather shoulder bag.
Photographs.
We looked at them together.

 
          
Snapshots:
literally, from Lucy’s
scrapbook. A yellowed newspaper cutting dated 1913: a photo of Lois at twelve,
the caption -
Arrival of the child
prodigy from
Vienna
.
On thin paper, much folded and refolded,
and now cracking along the creases, an article about the nature of the child
prodigy. Poor Lois, harking back no doubt to what might have been, had Princip
not taken the opportunity offered a second time by fate, and World War I not
started. What a sour offering by the Gods of Chance, which was to end so many
million young male lives, and embitter so many women. The child Lois stared out
of the faded picture, sullen, sensuous and plain, slightly pop-eyed, the family
jaw stuck out in defiance.
Poor Lois, as well as everyone
else?
What had she ever seen of family love?

 
          
Come
to think of it, what did I know about it either? At least I tried not to go
round doing other people damage. But if Holly linked up with Harry in any
definite kind of way and then she died and I moved in with him how would I
behave to his child?
Any better than Lois?
Would I too
deal in humiliations and emotional torture? I’d have to be more subtle about
it, of course, because these days, Lucy is right, people notice. I’d probably
just do what was socially acceptable and send it off to summer camp while I got
on with my work, and I don’t suppose Harry would notice what was going on any
more than Arthur had. Already I refer to this mythical child as ‘it’. Already I
am
hating
and resenting it. Easier to take the
position Lucy had arrived at, with the wisdom of the decades, which I was
prepared to acknowledge, that her mother Lois was born evil and stayed evil and
forget it.

 
          
A studio portrait
of the family: Arthur
and Sylvia, loving husband and wife with little Felicity clinging on to her
mother’s hand, aged about three, and Lois leaning just a little into Arthur,
managing to command the group. It was she whom the eye went to first. She had a
nice figure, one could see that, shapely legs and pretty ankles below a
knee-length, sporty, pleated skirt, and glowing with youth, and with her hair
short and marcelled into rigorous waves, her jaw could easily be overlooked.
Sylvia looked strained and pretty and faded and brave, and older than Arthur,
who smiled happily and innocently at the camera, his head inclined ever so
slightly away from his wife and towards Lois.

 
          
A snapshot
of a family picnic: Lois and
Arthur leaning into each other on the grass, little plain Lucy sitting with her
legs stuck out in front of her: Felicity a little way away from the group,
making a daisy chain. Angel had taught me how to do that; pick the daisy with
as long a stem as you can, make a slit towards the bottom of the stem with the
thumbnail, thread the next daisy through, make another slit, and so on. I
supposed Felicity had shown Angel. No doubt Sylvia had found time to teach
Felicity before she died. Daisy chains didn’t seem Lois’s cup of tea, somehow.

 
          
Another press cutting.
Felicity at perhaps thirteen, little girl in a ballet dancer’s tutu, thin
graceful arms stretched high: a shy yet confident smile. Caption:
Local girl wins scholarship to Royal Ballet
Company.

 
          
‘She
never took it up,’ says Lucy. ‘She wasn’t allowed. Mama said dancing was bad
for the back and gave you big leg muscles. But I had to go on with lessons: my
legs weren’t worth bothering about.’

 
          
A snapshot
of Lois and
Anton on the steps of the National Gallery, posing for a street photographer.
In their early thirties.
Anton with his dull long
face, his heavy Wasserman jaw: Lois a female version, like Guy and Lorna. They
held each other’s hand. They did not look like brother and sister, more like
husband and wife. ‘I found this one in my mother’s pin cushion,’ said Lucy,
‘after she died, when I had to pack up the house.’

 
          
‘Pin
cushion?’ I asked.

 
          
‘One
of those silk puffy padded things you fold over. You kept pins in it in the
days when women made their own clothes. You’d keep your precious, private
things in there too, soft and snug. Once Anton came to live with us, it was me
who was sent off to boarding school too. He went into art dealing.’

 
          
Snapshots: metaphorical:
Scenes from
Felicity’s life, for inclusion in the film narrative in my head.
Night-time.
Lucy
unable to sleep, aged seven, wrapped in a blanket, sitting on her window seat
looking out at the long back garden.
A full moon.
Bare trees, rimmed with snow and frost, bending over the stone
walls.
A summer house, an octagon with verandah and
glass windows.
A cat stalking across the lawn.
The glow of a cigarette.
Uncle Anton leaning against the old
mulberry tree which is, they say, three hundred years old. He’s wearing a
raccoon coat, fashionable at the time.
The back door of the
house opening, Felicity slipping out.
She’s fourteen and thinks she
knows everything and is in love with Uncle Anton. Lucy has teased her about it
and Felicity has denied it, blushing. He says he’s going to take her away from
all this: he’s going to
Australia
and she’s coming too. He has a job lined up
at the
National
Art
Gallery
: she can join the Sydney Dance Company.
Felicity is sleek and brown: she has borrowed Lois’s beaver coat. Beneath it
her body is scarcely formed, kept skinny from all those ballet exercises. She
has bare feet: she dances from foot to foot to keep her toes from freezing. Her
red curls toss and glow in the moonlight. Lucy hears the murmur of voices. Does
she hear
Hove
you, I love you
from
Felicity? The audience does: it’s what it always wants to hear and fears to
hear. Anton’s hand moves over the small breasts, the muscled girlish behind.
She shivers. She has never felt anything like this before, of such mysterious
importance. (Actually, we can do without Lucy’s point of view. Hers was just
our way in to the scene.
Scrub Lucy.)
We watch Anton
with Felicity: we follow them. At first he kisses her and she draws back. But
he is the ultimate authority: he has the power of life over her. Leave Anton
out of it and Lois and Lois’s unchancy behaviour are all she has in the world.
Without Lois’s consent she is penniless and homeless, orphaned. And Anton has
authority over even Lois. He kisses her. This time she lets him. His tongue
goes into her mouth. She doesn’t like that. It is far too personal. She draws
back. He pulls her closer. His hands are pushing up her clothes, there is
something hard pressing into her stomach: she has no idea what it is.
He
push- pulls her into the summerhouse. He shifts her on to
the wicker chaise longue that winters there. Now she is on her back and he is
on top of her, his knee forcing hers apart. She cries out in alarm. That makes
him angry. ‘Little bitch,’ he says. ‘You led me on. You know what you were
doing, all right.’ His hand goes over her mouth: she bites the hand. Now
there’s no stopping him, he will have his revenge.
Cut away to long shot.
You know the dismal rest.

 
          
Back to Lucy.
Lucy
hears moans and cries from the summerhouse, and half knows half doesn’t know,
what’s going on. What can she do anyway? Fetch her mother?

 
          
That
would
makes
things even worse, she knows that without
knowing why. Now she sees Felicity run from the summerhouse, without the fur
coat, white nightdress caught up in her hand, bloodstained. Soon it’s Anton’s
turn to come out. He lights a cigarette and leans against the tree and smokes
it, snug in the warmth of his raccoon coat.

 
          
‘That
was the worst thing,’ said Lucy, nearly seven decades later. ‘That he was so
casual. That he smoked a cigarette and enjoyed the moonlight, as if all
pleasures were equal, and Felicity just another one.’

 
          
At
breakfast the next morning Felicity avoids Anton’s eye. He comes in cheerful
and whistling, and devours liver and bacon and sausages, and urges Felicity to
do the same. Then Anton adds, oh and by the way he’s decided not to go to
Sydney
after all. ‘My mother looked so happy when
he said that,’ said Lucy. ‘But Felicity just fainted away. The doctor was called
and said it was nothing, she was hysterical. Anton went back to treating her
like a child. She was sent back to boarding school.’

 
          
* * *