Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (35 page)

 
          
‘A
furious father,’ said Felicity, ‘probably isn’t good.’

 
          
‘He
wasn’t furious with me,’ said William.
‘Just the outside
world.
He refused to sell his paintings. There was no-one out there fit
to appreciate them. My mother died when I was four: my twin brother too. I didn’t
often get to school. Do you know why I like Foxwoods?’

 
          
‘The
noise, the lights, the people,’ she said. ‘Forget the money. Better than
silence and woods and the seasons, for orphans like us.’

 
          
‘Now
you know all about me.’ It seemed to satisfy him.

 
          
‘I
most certainly don’t,’ she said. ‘I may know why, but I still don’t know what.
You’re so secretive.’

 
          
‘You
have your secrets too,’ he said.

 
          
‘Mine
are just habitual: more important when I was young than now.
Sex,
and being a bad girl, and marrying for money, and having a mad daughter.
None of it’s relevant to here and now.’ Here and now, with the strange green
light coming in from the skylights, the only solid, continuing reality was that
of the sculptures and paintings. William and she were the transients, fitful
and unsubstantial by comparison. But she was welcome here: the mad old man
didn’t mind her at all. If he were alive he’d even let her buy a painting.
Usually in places like this you felt driven out, a trespasser, unwelcome.

 
          
‘I
put all that together anyway,’ William said.

 
          
‘Take
me to Foxwoods now,’ she said. ‘Get me to the slots, for God’s sake. I can’t
stand the past. Just remember I don’t have all the time in the world.’

 
          
But
before they set off they made love on the bed in the room where William had
been born. The bed was wire sprung and had lost its tautness with age and the
mattress sagged in the middle: cobwebs hung from the ceiling and the quilt was
soft and dusty. They both felt quite at home, with the bed, the place, and one
another. He was anxious for her approval, she was happy to give it. Here in the
woods there was no-one to judge. And sex for a woman, if she isn’t crying rape,
makes her go to the other extreme and feel trustful.

 
          
There
are too many people in the world. You feel it at
midday
in the centre of
Manhattan
, when there’s gridlock and the yellow cabs
are hooting and howling, and those tall buildings bend over you from either
side, threatening, like parents over an unwanted cradle. You feel it in
London
on a Saturday night in
Soho
, when the gay crowds are out en masse,
making you feel clumsy and female and overburdened by bosom. These particular
crowds know well enough there are too many people in the world: they have no
intention of procreating. What would be the point of creating a further
generation, since in their opinion the pinnacle of human wisdom has been
reached? Since today’s political correctness is the summit of moral
aspiration, why bother about tomorrow?

 
          
Even
the heterosexuals among us, myself, Guy, Lorna, there in New York that spring
weekend, waiting for Charlie to turn up at the Wyndham and take us to Felicity,
failed to see any real need to have children. Guy had a son, it is true, and
argued in a desultory way about access, but I felt his heart wasn’t in it.

 
          
First
we went with Guy to FAO Schwartz. It was Saturday. I fell in love with a soft
gold lion I thought Krassner might like (was I mad) and wanted to spend $200 on
a thinking, talking robot in pink and green. But what was the point? The host
of children I had thought to acquire through the Aardvark agency had failed to
materialize: should I perhaps have one of my own? I trailed round after Guy and
Lorna, feeling left out, as Guy rejected this marvellous and diverting toy on
the ground of its ridiculous expense. He declared that he would spend no more
than $10. If he showed himself lavish there would be no end to his little boy’s
demands, or indeed to the mother’s, who would get it into her head that he
earned more than he had declared to her lawyers. ‘My ex-wife’ had lately turned
into ‘the mother’. She was being asked to submit to tests before Guy would
acknowledge paternity. He had begun to suspect he wasn’t even the real father:
the child looked so little like him, and on access days was difficult and
sullen.

 
          
Come into my world, come into my world,
droned the song from Mr Schwartz’s revolving dome, over and over, mesmerically.
It occurred to me that Felicity might have other secret children hidden away:
it also occurred to me, for I was gaining in wisdom, that if she had decided to
hide them away it might be the best thing to leave them hidden.
Come into my world and spend.
It didn’t
work with Guy. The place was crowded with the beautifully dressed of all ages.
He was taking too long about not buying anything. Even Lorna was getting
impatient with him, lamenting loudly the crude taste, the shock to the eye of
everything on display. I thought it was all perfectly wonderful. But then I
remembered how
Home Alone
2, some of
which was filmed in this store, was such a disappointment after
Home Alone
and I too began to feel
tetchy. I overheard polite, persuasive mothers pretending not to be control
freaks, saw weeping fathers on access leave, observed parents practising their
false togetherness, heard the tantrums of their children and confirmed once
again that motherhood was not for me. Let the world of the children’s toy shop
be lost to me for ever. Let Holly go to her Rodeo Drive equivalent, let Harry
go too, with their odd misbegotten child, let him not surface in my mind all
the time, wondering what he was doing
now,
now, now
and who with.
With whom.
Four o’clock
on a shopping afternoon in
Fifth Avenue
is
nine o’clock
at night in
London
, when compulsive courtship rituals are
hotting up and the drive to sexual completion glitters in both male and female
eye.

 
          
*
* *

 
 
         
Guy was persuaded to buy a Ping-Pong
set for $12.50. When he had finally done we went back to the Wyndham and there
found Charlie and the Mercedes waiting. Jack had said we were welcome to use
the car: though alas he had the builders in at Passmore, and Joy’s guesthouse
at Windspit was unavailable, so we would have to make our own arrangements as
to where we were to stay during our visit to the Golden Bowl. But they would of
course be delighted to see us.

 
          
In
the few months since I had last seen him Charlie had turned into an American.
His face seemed to have widened and flattened out: his glittering eyes to have
become less wary. He no longer had the air of a mountain tribesman: he moved
with a casual and athletic grace instead of the aggressive tautness of someone
about to fire a Kalashnikov into the air for no particular reason, and which
had so frightened and attracted Joy when she first encountered him. Charlie
dwarfed Guy, it was apparent to both Lorna and me, and indeed to Guy, who
disliked the look of him from the start. Guy, who normally seemed on a male
enough scale, in Charlie’s
presence
appeared puny,
narrow-shouldered and unhealthy. Some men (Krassner among them) have the gift
of doing this to other men. Charlie’s teeth, once broken and blackened, now
gleamed in a white, even, healthy row and spoke of health and vigour. Guy’s by
comparison were crowded, cramped, and yellow. He would not see fit to waste
money on his teeth, and anyway had that European propensity to believe that
because God burdened you with a flaw - such as a too large nose or a double
chin - it was your moral duty to live out your life according to His Will
rather than to your liking. That cosmetic dentistry, let alone plastic surgery,
was somehow cheating. That you were dealt a hand at birth and it was your life
task to make the most of it, not organize a re-deal.

 
          
I
saw Lorna staring at Charlie, her mouth dropping open, as if taken by surprise.
I saw that Lorna could actually be quite attractive: that she was younger than
she dressed and felt.
That when her face pinkened round the
edges, as it was doing now, she actually looked rather sexy.
That if
she’d have her hair
done
, and not
just sensibly dunked in a basin and washed, it would turn into an asset rather
than a celebration of dreariness. That if she’d wear clothes which didn’t
shroud her but actually suggested she had a body as well as a mind, she
wouldn’t have to put up with Guy. She could look outwards into the world and
find a lover there. Forget being her mother’s daughter, she was her
grandmother’s granddaughter as well.

 
          
‘Hi,
Charlie,’ I said, as he tossed our cases into the trunk as if they weighed
nothing. What all-American muscles. He had been working out.

 
          
‘Hi,
babe,’ he said. ‘Howya doing?’

 
          
‘Just
fine,’ I said, ‘just fine.’ But I wasn’t. I had loosed forces beyond my
control.

 
          
‘So
am I,’ he said, ‘yes sirree I am!’ He too would have seen
Father of the Bride
and looked in on a make-believe world in which
people said
babe
and
howya
and
yes
,
sirree
, and
contorted his life until it came true. We are all postmodernists now.

 
          
The
drive to
Rhode
Island
took three and a half hours. I sat next to Charlie. Lorna and Guy slept on and
off in the back seat. They were jet-lagged and gave in to it. I knew how to
fight against it and to put up with the way the world lurched into a muzzy
cartoon and out again, without taking to sleep as a defence. Charlie’s voice
drifted in and out of my consciousness. He had lost the doffing subservience of
the illegal alien, so suitable to the job of the chauffeur, and with it the
reluctance to talk. He was a
US
citizen now. His mother and grandmother
were on their way to it, he told me, as were two of his male cousins, but Amira
and Esma, both his wives - he was a Muslim - were having problems. He would
have to acknowledge one and deny the other, since under
US
law only one wife at a time was acceptable.
Marriages over here had to be serial.
But which one to
choose?
He did not wish to upset either. Amira had sons and Esma
daughters so the latter perhaps needed him more. But unless he made a decision
soon the women might find themselves and their children deported. Bosnia under
the UN was not a place to which anyone would want to return. Sarajevo was still
without light and heat much of the time. I suggested that he formally marry one
under US law, and then quickly divorce her and so be free to marry the next
one. We were only talking scraps of paper, as the German Ambassador reproached
the British, when on Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914 they insisted on
taking a neutrality treaty seriously, and thus launched millions into mud and
death,
forget Princip the seventeen-year-old danger boy.
Over the Top
- a Harry Krassner film,
1995. I hadn’t cut that one, but I saw it three times. And that was before I’d
even met him.

 
          
Charlie
told me that now the builders were in Jack Epstein spent so much time over at
Windspit that he, Charlie, was going to suggest his own family moved into
Passmore. They needed more space; they were sleeping three to a room in the
guesthouse above the Windspit garage: there was nowhere to put the animal feed.
Passmore’s garage was full of used cars, which Jack, unable quite to retire,
was hoping to sell. It was ridiculous. The builders were cheating Jack: his
boys could do a better job of the woodwork. Summer was coming, of course, but
the grazing was bad. The soil had to be tilled, and left, and fertilized, and
tilled again. It would take a couple of years. No-one in the area knew how to
look after land. Esma’s sister Drusa was pregnant again: no not by Charlie, of
course not, but by a US citizen, which might turn out to helpful in solving her
immigrant status. Drusa had been working in an old persons’ home in Mystic: one
of the old men had put her in the family way. Charlie had thought she’d be safe
enough, but no. American men of all ages turned out to be sex fiends, forever
at addiction clinics.

 
          
I
felt a chill up my spine. I asked Charlie to turn the heating up. He did. The
chill didn’t go away. I asked him what the name of the home was.

 
          
‘The
Rosemount,’ he said. ‘Not much of a place but a job’s a job.’ I didn’t want to
hear anything more, but he told me, once he’d negotiated the Mercedes through
New Haven and on to Route 91. He’d been ferrying the old gentleman about,
mostly to see my grandmother, but sometimes to the Foxwoods Casino, where Drusa
had been working until her illegal status emerged and she was fired. Mr Johnson
had obligingly put him in touch with Maria who ran the Rosemount, who’d found a
place for Drusa. She got $8 an hour, which for an illegal wasn’t bad.

 
          
‘Are
you trying to tell me that Miss Felicity’s friend is the father?’ I made myself
ask.
Best not to ask questions at all if the answer might not
be to your liking.
Which is of course why questions like,
Do
you love me more than her?
or
Where were you last
night?
are
best avoided. Charlie glanced at me
sideways and I caught a glimpse of the weathered mountain tribesman still there
beneath the smooth American tan.

 
          
‘For
only a couple of thousand dollars
,
⁵
he
said, casually, avoiding the question, ‘there are ways of getting Drusa
citizenship which don’t entail marriage.
A shame to mess Miss
Felicity about, when she’s so happy.
Quite the Miss Daisy, I thought,
that first time I drove her to the funeral.’

 
          
Oh
yes,
Miss Daisy
, the film held in
common, the cultural resonance, the point of reference, all there in Charlie’s
head already, and no doubt in Amira’s, and Esma’s, and the mother and the two
male cousins, and Drusa’s new baby imbuing Hollywood by osmosis in the womb.
And maybe the sheep and the goats and the cows on the grazing that needed
improving would be acting like cartoon characters next. There’d be
Bambis
abounding in Connecticut of
course, but at least no
Dumbos
because of the climate, and no
Babes
either because of Islam. (Not a film which did well in the Middle East.)
Foxwoods was peopled by the cast from
Pocahontas
and Charlie himself, ploughing up the land, was
Davy Crockett.

 
          
‘Mummy,’
I’d said to Angel once, ‘which is my back ear?’

 
          
Davy, Davy Crockett,

           
King of the wild front ear.

 
          
Or
conversely
bloody tears flow
, as the
I Ching
put it and Guy had mimicked, as
I suddenly realized, only this morning.
Enough to make your eyes weep blood.
Blackmail.
Let ’em flow! Let ’em weep! Let ’em roll!

 
          
‘In
matters of paternity,’ I said vaguely, ‘truth is important. No-one should hide
anything.’ Charlie shrugged, as if it wasn’t important. It had been a good try,
and one he would have been ashamed to have neglected. We turned off at the
Hartford Interchange.

 
          
Behind
us Lorna woke with a little cry. Charlie looked over his shoulder and gave her
a smile of glittering intimacy. If he found himself technically unmarried here,
dual US/UK nationality might suit him. You can have more than one wife at a
time if it’s your religion and you’re living in Britain. He could end up with
three legitimate wives, I could see that. They’d all be living in Twickenham,
in Happiness, ploughing up the garden and a fishnet cast across the
Thames
. And the new Lorna might even take her
mother Alison back to live at home: Amira and Drusa, from the sound of it, had
better backs than Lorna. I needed a rest from the living nightmare which was
worse than any I could encounter while asleep. I slept.