Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (32 page)

 
          
The
day before we set out for
New York
I’d asked Wendy from Aardvark to see if she could come up with anything
about my maternal grandfather, the folk singer.

 
          
‘Tell
me more about him,’ she’d said.

 
          
‘A man too inept to stop my grandmother from going to
America
, too inept to stop her
naming another man as the father of his own child.’
Could
have been
anyone
,
said Wendy’s look. ‘And too inept not to get himself killed in a street brawl
the night after V-E night,’ I added.
‘Allied Victory in
Europe
night.
The war in
Asia
with the Japanese was still going on.’

 
          
‘That
last is something to go on,’ she said. ‘At least there might be press reports.’

 
          
I
said I would try to get more details out of Felicity when I saw her. I’d only
ever had Angel’s version of what went on anyway, and she was hardly a reliable
witness. If Felicity was at last happy in love she might be more forthcoming
about her life and times. She had never really been happy with Exon; she had
been dutiful and well-behaved and half herself. Presumably that was the penalty
you paid for being in a tranquil and suitable marriage. Heaven keep me from it.

 
          
My
own ineptness had to come from somewhere, why not my so far nameless
grandfather? Why was I content to be a film editor and not a director? Why
be
me when I could be Astra Barnes? Perhaps I needed to go
to assertiveness classes? True, I was a very good film editor and she was a
very bad film director, but I might be setting my sights too low. If I’d set my
mind to it and done enough body building I could even have been a film star
like the over-muscled Holly. I had the looks and better hair and certainly
wouldn’t need a body double for my back - but this was of course nonsense. I
was a perfectly ordinary if good-looking woman: whereas Holly had the kind of
personality and looks which made others excuse the sins of folly, perfidy and
self-absorption. Stars, unlike the rest of us, are encouraged by the media to
talk about themselves, ceaselessly, and can hardly be blamed if they begin to
find themselves interesting. They fall for it themselves, forgetting that
others are merely making money out of them. My main problem has always been
that I am not a fool, and have very little capacity for self-deception. I would
make a hopeless film star.

 
          
I
was quite unlike my father, who would believe anything if it flattered him.
Rufus believed that he was a great artist and that the mantle of the muse had
descended upon
him,
and all he had to do was put paint
on canvas and he would be hailed as a great painter. My mother Angel had
believed it too, and to both of them, wrongly, that had seemed the part of her
that wasn’t mad. Rufus was all innocent inspiration; he had left the Camberwell
School of Art after a couple of terms, quarrelling with his tutors and asking
what need
did Van Gogh ever have
of tuition. He
married a derelict American girl he met wandering the streets - my mother, that
is to say - to confirm his bohemianism and further distance himself from his
own Canadian parents.
Europe
was the home of art: centre of sensitivities
denied to the rest of the world:
London
in the sixties the place to be; awash as it
was with LSD, death to the brain cells.

 
          
I
have two paintings of his on my walls; he favoured Fauve, swirls of heated
orange and red. Harry quite likes them. After my father died, of lung cancer,
my grandmother had the rest packed up into crates and put into storage. What
else was to be done with these works of semi-art, semi-decoration? There were
not enough friends with wall-space enough to hang them all - only the rich have
wall-space, and my father’s friends smoked too much marihuana ever to get
going in the world and achieve such luxury. His parents had first disowned him
-
Europe
,
drugs
,
permissiveness
,
art
- and then died, one of those couples so close that if one
goes,
the other goes too. The children of lovers are
orphans, as Tolstoy remarked. What a stick nature created for human beings with
which to beat their own
back,
sharpened both ends. Too
much love or too little of it, and
all the
world’s to
pieces.

 
          
Perhaps
when after my father’s first exhibition my mother made the bonfire of canvases
in the street, she realized the eventual problem of disposal. Her rage with the
gallery seemed irrational even for her: they had actually given Rufus an
exhibition, which was more than anyone else had done, and made not a bad job in
selling the paintings and might even have managed to establish him as a major
artist, but after the bonfire they didn’t have the nerve for it. They expected
gratitude, not police, fire brigade and a madwoman. Word got round, of course,
and suddenly no-one was eager to give Rufus so much as a show, in case his wife
did it again
, or something worse. She
was famous all over town: beautiful but insane and dangerous with it.

 
          
Thereafter
Rufus, with reason enough, blamed Angel for every rejection he ever had, for
all the shakings of heads and the
not for
me, I’m sorry
that was all he got from galleries everywhere - and since for
the not-quite-good-enough painter the world is all rejection the marriage
didn’t have much chance, forget Angel’s evident and increasing fits of
insanity, the shaving of my head, the living in cardboard boxes and so on. My
father found a nice plain normal girl in the end, a secretary called Angela who
gave him bed and heart space on and off and kept him sane. I don’t know what
became of her. She took me in sometimes, in emergencies: she made rice pudding
in the oven, and sprinkled it with nutmeg. She was nice enough, as was her rice
pudding, but we all knew she didn’t count. She wasn’t a major player.

 
          
After
my mother’s death I lived with Rufus, on and off, but he was not a focused
father: he spent most of his time in his studio, afraid to look at me in case I
took after my mother and went mad. I was never afraid of this myself, oddly
enough. I was the sanest one of all: I didn’t paint or smoke dope or drink: I
got on with my life, passed exams and went to the cinema. When my father died,
which took him only two months from diagnosis to death, it was a relief to me,
the end of a complication: now there was only me, with Felicity far away. Rufus
had loved my mother and now he was with her. That must sound strange but the
other side of her insanity, of her hatred, of her urge to destroy and
self-destruct, lurked this most gentle and lovable person. I am too brisk to be
like her in this respect, too rejecting of sentiment: I suppose I have had to
learn to be. These days, though, since she won’t come to me, I cross the ocean
to visit Felicity, to put my toe in the water of complication. I am getting
braver.

 
          
Difficulty at the Beginning.
The
I Ching
again.
Six (that’s two heads and a tail) in the second place means:

 
          
Difficulties pile up,

           
Horse and wagon part.

           
He
is not a robber;

           
He
wants to woo when the time comes.

           
The
maiden is chaste.

           
She
does not pledge herself.

           
Ten
years, then she pledges herself.

 
          
But
Felicity could not afford ten years before she pledged herself. The normal
rules which apply to the rest of us - such as reading the
I Ching
when you’re in love to see how things are going to turn out
- do not apply at the extreme ends of life, in youth or age. But at least the
I Ching
seemed to have a good opinion of
Mr Johnson.
He is not a robber.

 
          
Difficulties pile up!
I hadn’t reckoned
on company. I like to be alone on flights, I like the way life ceases to be,
even as one’s desire to keep it going is at its strongest. Had Angel flown
above the clouds more she might not have killed herself: she would have been
too practised in the fear of death.

 
          
As
it happened, Felicity had earlier that day cast the coins to get her own
reading from the
I Ching.
She threw
Difficulty in the Beginning.
This was no
more than a coincidence. Do the
I Ching
five
or six times a day and the odds against hitting on a particular one out of
those available - there are sixty-four different combinations possible if you
cast three coins six times - are not astronomical. It takes only sixteen
people in the same room at a party for the odds of there being two people there
with the same birthday to be greater than not. Felicity was glad to hear that
William Johnson was no robber, for she too interpreted the oracle literally.
The
I Ching
itself elaborates on the
theme.

 
          
When in time of difficulty a hindrance is
encountered from a source unrelated to us, we must be careful not to take upon
ourselves any obligations entailed by such help, otherwise our freedom of
decision is impaired, if we bide our time, things will quieten down again. And
we shall attain what we have hoped for.

           
Since the days when she wondered
whether Exon was going to propose marriage or not, Felicity had scarcely opened
the book, until the determination to sell Passmore and strike out into the
world had been made. There had been so few decisions to reach in the quietness
of widowhood. At any rate once the funeral had been arranged, and all that
business, and then the shock of being alone accepted, together with the
understanding that because of her age life was likely to remain like this. It
wasn’t too bad. You got to quite like being able to do your own thing and go
your own way without comment, in your own time. Nothing much happened to widows
of mature years.

 
          
Winters
came and went, and summers too, and sometimes Sophia came to stay and more
often she didn’t.

 
          
Joy
next door’s deafness
increased,
and her determination
not to wear an ear machine with it. Joy’s sister Francine had died and Joy had
been in extra noisy tumult for a time, torn between grief and relief.

 
          
Joy’s
driving licence had nearly been revoked: she had driven into someone else in a
parking lot and driven away once too often, without so much as leaving a
telephone number, but had escaped with a fine. That was almost an excitement.

 
          
A
family of
Northern
Parulas
- blue
warblers with yellow throats and breasts - had established itself in a lilac
tree in a swampy dip in the garden.

 
          
Otherwise
what had happened? Just that tying the shoelaces became a little more difficult
and getting out of the bath presented more of a problem than once it had. But
on the whole she had been glad of the peace. Life took you up and shook you by
the scruff of your neck and landed you somewhere almost without your own
volition. Like being picked up by a tornado and dumped somewhere else and
finding you were okay and it was rather better than the place you had left,
just unfamiliar, though you were certainly bruised.

 
          
But
the wounds of a lifetime healed, and here you were, and here was William, but
now what about her freedom? Was she diplomat enough to manage marriage, living
together, describing and accepting the other as
my.
My
spouse,
my
partner.
To go through the
explaining and justifying of this one person to all the others - see how it
already was with Nurse Dawn, with Joy, with Jack? Sharing a bed, trying not to
snore: getting to the stage where you could not distinguish the self from the
other and behaving accordingly: uttering reprimands which were really
selfreproaches: a stream of consciousness which passed for conversation. At
eighty-three, getting used to all that again?
In return for
what?
Sex, which she now valued more as a token of esteem rather than a
source of overwhelming physical pleasure? While she wasn’t looking it had
ceased to be an all-consuming need.

 
          
*                                 
*                               
*

 
 
          
In
this she could see she was in tune with the times: these
days
people went to clinics for liking sex too much. The pendulum swung, and swung
too far: to be allowed your sexual pleasure, which had once been the passionate
ambition of women, the very symbol of freedom, the end of bourgeois repression,
no longer counted for much. For a woman to take her pleasures like a man was
not an interesting aspiration: rather, men took pains to take theirs like
women: all feeling and sensitivity, not brute power and enviable lust. Mind
you, as men got older they had little choice. William had approached her
nervously at first: had later gained confidence. But he too had caught the
spirit of the times; he wanted to please her, he did not just wait to be pleased.

 
          
Companionship?
Of course he offered that.
Security?
No, not that. You could win shooting craps, but you could also lose. But if she
made sure he spent his money, and didn’t let him touch hers, what did she have
to worry about?
Nothing.

 
          
She
realized that the last line she’d thrown was actually a changing line - three
heads, which being so totally yang could only turn to yin (it was nonsense, so
much nonsense, of course it was). Any moment now the portrait of what was to
come would turn to two heads and a tail.
Six at the top.
She knew before she read it that it wasn’t
going to be good.

 
          
Horse and wagon part.

           
Bloody
tears flow.

 
          
No,
not good at all. It could hardly be worse. She moved on to the hexagram that
resulted from the changing line. Number four.
Holding Together.
Better.
Much better.

 
          
Holding together brings good fortune.

           
Inquire
of the oracle once again

           
Whether
you possess sublimity, constancy and perseverance:

           
Then
there is no blame.

           
Those
who are uncertain gradually join.

           
Whoever
comes too late Meets with
misfortune.

 
          
The
trouble with the
I Ching
was that you
read it and believed what you wanted to believe and ignored what you didn’t.
You

might
as well wait for what was going to happen
and then look back and know what it was. Why be in such a hurry? Because, dear
God, she was eighty-three, and there was so little time left. She cast the
coins again, and got
Youthful Folly.

 
          
Number
four.

 
          
The young fool seeks me,

           
At
the first oracle I inform him.

 
          
Forget
it.