The Life and Loves of a She Devil (26 page)

It was nine months before Ruth could take so much as a step. Mr Ghengis wanted to wait for a further three months before beginning on the arms, but she insisted that they be done at once. She was, she said, beginning to be bored.

She had relented and learned French, Latin and Indonesian during her convalescence. She had given herself courses in World Literature and Art Appreciation. She had done all the sensible things his patients always believed they would do when confined to bed and with time to spare, but almost never did. There had been one attempted suicide on her account, by a young trainee nurse whose doctor boy friend used to linger over-long in Ruth’s room.

Ruth received a letter from home, black-edged. It was from Garcia. This time she did not weep, she smiled. ‘My friend is dead,’ she said. ‘Long live my friend.’

She flew home for the funeral; she made much use of a wheelchair, but every day could take a step or two more, and use her hands more freely. She had lost sensation in two fingers and the scarring on legs and upper arms was still noticeable. It was winter; it did not matter. She was rich enough, in any case, to follow winter around the world, if it suited her. She measured, in height, five foot six and a half inches high: round the bust, thirty-eight inches, the waist twenty-four inches, and the hips thirty-seven. Cortisone injections, given at intervals, gave her pretty face a childish innocence, subverting the harshness of experience, and kept her hair luxuriant.

Ruth went to Mary Fisher’s funeral wearing silky black, and diamonds. She went in a Rolls-Royce, and did not get out, but watched the funeral from a distance, sitting in the car. The cemetery was by the sea: wind blew spray against the windows. The words of the preacher were forced back into his mouth. A handful of people, a few old friends and former colleagues, gazed and tried to listen. Old Mrs Fisher, ever curious, came over to Ruth’s car to investigate, and stared in through the glass with rheumy eyes, and gestured to Ruth to wind down the window. Ruth obliged, though she did it by pressing a button.

‘I thought it was her for a moment,’ said old Mrs Fisher. ‘Just like her to send her own ghost to her funeral! Poor little slut. Well, out of the slime, back to it. But I saw her out! I always knew I would.’ And she hunched back into the wind, to her daughter’s graveside, where Ruth thought she saw her weeping.

Nicola and Andy were not present. They were not, after all, flesh and blood. And had Mary Fisher not destroyed their home, their mother and their father? Make amends even as Mary Fisher had, these things could not be undone.

Bobbo was there, between two warders. He was not handcuffed; there was obviously no need. His eyelids had thickened, and his hair turned grey. He seemed to be sleepwalking, unable to comprehend the meaning of the open grave, or indeed of anything much. He saw Ruth on the arm of her chauffeur.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m your wife,’ she said, and held him with her young, enchanting eyes, and smiled her sweet new smile.

‘My wife died,’ he said, ‘long ago.’

He seemed to want to move away, and turned, but the warders took an arm each, alert to his sudden animation, and held him so that he had no choice but to look at her again.

‘You are my wife,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I seem to have trouble remembering things. But there was someone called Mary Fisher. Aren’t you her?’

‘This is Mary Fisher’s funeral,’ said one of the warders, as if to a child. ‘So how can that be Mary Fisher?’

They apologised to Ruth and took their prisoner, who was by now clearly upset, away. He needed, they felt, more sedation. He was being treated for depression, as it was, with electric shock therapy.

Bobbo was glad to go. The outside world was always full of dreams — flickering out of vision and into nightmare and back again. Prison at least was real, and safe.

Ruth employed good lawyers, who set about securing Bobbo’s release. She considered returning the capital sum originally embezzled, but decided against it. Serene men of good intention now ran the parole board: they were not concerned with money any more than Ruth was with abstract virtue. Bobbo would be set free soon enough.

She employed architects and builders; carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers and plumbers to work on the High Tower. Constructional engineers, shoring up the cliff, had managed marginally to alter the configuration of the entire harbour so that the force of the waves was no longer directed at the tower. So teatime would be less dramatic, but at least safe. She employed a landscape designer and a handful of jobbing gardeners to restore the beauty of the grounds. She paid them well. The front door was replaced — the architect found a sturdy chapel door which fitted well and looked good. She traced and brought back the Dobermans and had both animals neutered. Advancing age had now sobered them considerably. She wrote to Garcia, asking if he would consider returning to the tower to work.

A letter presently came from Garcia accepting Miss Hunter’s offer of employment. He would come without wife and child, however: they would stay behind in Spain to keep his old mother company.

Ruth returned to the Hermione Clinic for continued physiotherapy and a few minor bodily adjustments: an ingrowing toenail was seen to; broken veins on the cheeks needed more laser treatment; facial moles kept struggling to reappear.

‘First in,’ as Mr Ghengis remarked, ‘last out.’

Dr Black had handed in his notice. He and Mrs Black were going to the Third World: he to work among deprived and underprivileged humans, she among the crocodiles.

‘If he wants to waste his God-given talents doing what any half-trained nurse could do,’ Mr Ghengis remarked, ‘that’s up to him.’

It seemed to Ruth that at last the time had come to return to the High Tower. She could walk with ease, even run a little. She could lift a two-pound weight in either hand. Her circulatory problems were under control. She no longer needed the Hermione Clinic. She no longer needed anyone. She danced with Mr Ghengis in the dew of the morning, as the sun rose red and round over the escarpment, and with every step it was as if she trod on knives; but she thanked him for giving her life and told him she was going.

N
OW I LIVE IN THE
High Tower, and the sea surges beneath as the moon circles and the earth turns, but not quite as it did. Garcia has to clean a different set of windows; the spray falls differently: he marvels at it. Even nature bows to my convenience. I pay him the same as did his previous employer. What was once too much is now too little: inflation has eaten away at its value, but he doesn’t realise it and I haven’t told him. Why should I? If you want to keep servants you must treat them badly. The same, I find, applies to lovers.

Garcia comes often to my bedroom at night, knocking and whispering with love. Just occasionally I let him in. I make sure Bobbo knows, and suffers; that is the only pleasure I take in Garcia’s body. To join with him is a political, not a sexual act, for me if not for him. How emotional men are!

Bobbo loves me, poor confused creature that he has become, pouring my tea, mixing my drinks, fetching my bag. He has us both in the one flesh: the one he discarded, the one he never needed after all. Two Mary Fishers. His eyes grow dull, as if he were already an old man. That is what humiliation does. He could have something done about his thickening eyelids, of course; he could have plastic surgery and be young again, but he would have to ask me for the money. I wait for him to suggest it, but he doesn’t. How weak people are! How they simply accept what happens, as if there were such a thing as destiny, and not just a life to be grappled with.

Sometimes I let Bobbo sleep with me. Or I take my lovers in front of him. What agreeable turmoil that causes in the household! Even the dogs sulk. I cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused me, and more. I try not to, but somehow it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was, merely of power. I have all, and he has none. As I was, so he is now.

Good. Life is very pleasant. I sit up in bed in the morning and look out over the landscape. Some people say I’ve ruined it, with artificial copses and granite-fountained fish ponds and the rest, but I like it. Nature gets away with far too much. It needs controlling. I have many friends. I am very hospitable, and charming, and there’s always a nervy excitement at my parties. The food’s superb. There is smoked salmon and champagne for those who care for that kind of thing — I have rather more Eastern and exotic tastes myself.

I tried my hand at writing a novel, and sent it to Mary Fisher’s publishers. They wanted to buy it and publish it, but I wouldn’t let them. Enough to know I can do it, if I want. It was not so difficult after all; nor she so special.

I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious.

Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel,
The Fat Woman’s Joke
, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series
Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil
, the film adaption of her 1983 novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1983 by Fay Weldon

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

978-1-4804-1238-5

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