Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  Randolph Grove hastily introduced Zoë to Lord Fortuneswell, with the air of a ringmaster tossing a propitiating and delicious gateau to a tetchy tiger. But, strangely enough, our host did not seem to be propitiated, though Zoë batted her eyelids at him, smiled her faint smile, and looked down at her feet. It was a good smile, just a voluptuous curve of the lip; I wished I could have used it for Rosy but it wouldn’t have done; Rosy is too selfish to be voluptuous. Joel had been right: she’s peppermint rock all through with the name Rosy printed on each layer.

  Tiepolo would have gone for the soft mass of feathery hair impinging on Zoë’s hard tight little curve of buttock. It possessed aesthetic besides sexual charm; but Fortuneswell seemed unaffected. Maybe he’s gay? I thought, but that didn’t seem likely, in view of the ravenous looks he was giving me. Should I let him know that I am not a natural blonde?

  Falling off a horse half a dozen times, even when carefully stage-managed, is not really good preparation for a party, and after half an hour or so the various aches and bruises I had acquired during the morning’s shooting began to make themselves felt. Breaking off an innocuous conversation about Fellini with Rosy’s sublime disregard of other people’s wishes, I said,

  “Joel my angel if I have to be at the studio by ten-thirty tomorrow morning, I think we should be on our way.” He had offered to drive me back to town. “I’ve a lot of things to do at home — my Hoya needs watering.”

  “That Hoya!” said Joel. “Hasn’t it smashed its way into the flat above yet?”

  “I wish it had. Then the Craddocks could water it.”

  Masha had given me a single Hoya leaf years ago. At first it grew slowly, a leaf a year, but then went into mathematical progression and would soon be into logarithms. My one-room flat was a jungle.

  Fortuneswell seemed strongly displeased at our opting out, and made various alternative suggestions, such as that he should take me back in the helicopter tomorrow or lend me his Rolls and chauffeur later in the night, but all these I parried with Rosy’s social imperviousness. I didn’t at all want to miss the ride with Joel, my comfortable friend. So we said goodbye and slid away from the happy throng.

  “You really scalped him,” observed Joel, guiding his Porsche through the misty Dorset lanes. Joel may be moth-eaten and unshaven himself but he goes for comfort and high performance in cars and cameras.

  “Yes. I wonder why? Perhaps I remind him of his dear old mum.”

  Joel sniffed. But later, when I came to know Ty better, I wondered if there had not been an element of truth in this idle observation. If so, no tender feelings came into the connection; quite the reverse.

  “My love, you could be Lady Fortuneswell if you play your cards carefully.”

  Joel’s high-pitched imitation of the harpy mother in a current TV serial didn’t fool me; he seemed to mean it.

  “Isn’t there a Lady F already?”

  “No, and never has been. And, no, he’s not gay; I’d know. Just been too concentrated on making his way, no time for fooling around.”

  “Well I haven’t the least wish to be Lady F.”

  “Wedded to your career?” he said with light mockery.

  I considered. I am not really wedded to the stage; having turned to it because that proved to be a way in which I could earn my living, I continued in the profession out of inertia. And, of course, it was fun; exciting occasionally; one met varied and lively people; but was that all I wanted for the rest of my life?

  The truth is, I don’t expect the rest of my life to last for very long. That, indeed, is why all the following events came about.

  Besides, I had no education or training for anything else.

  “Married to James Tybold you’d be in clover,” Joel observed dispassionately. “He’s really loaded. Inherited one fortune from his dad, made another from some gadget, and then he was left a whole chunk to do good with by whatshisname.”

  “Whatshisname?”

  “It’ll come to me in a moment. Founder of pharmaceutical firm who made Accelerin and Ovaroids — he was loaded too. I daresay he had a guilty conscience because one of his products was taken off the market pretty smartly — it made women grow a third breast or something — that was probably why he left the money to James Tybold to do good with. If you married him you could have fun doing good too.”

  “Doing good has a disputed boundary with interference.”

  “Don’t do good then,” he said placidly. “Enjoy yourself for a change. What would you do if you could choose?”

  At once I had a mental picture of the blue squills under the big cedar. I’d poke bulbs into the earth, I thought. Plant avenues. Build stone walls and train creepers over them. Lay out formal gardens furry with lavender and catmint, pounced with pinks and roses. Give back something of what we have taken and destroyed.

  “Why are you so set on marrying me to Fortuneswell?” I said, without mentioning this thought. “Why can’t I go on as I am?”

  “I worry about you,” was Joel’s unexpected reply. “Specially just now. Got the notion that you’re heading for a fall.”

  In a moment’s wild temptation I considered telling Joel about the racking chest pains, the intermittent numbness in my right leg and arm, the forehead twitch, the mysterious ache in my neck and jaw . . . As a matter of fact, I thought, skipping the follow-up, his worries were unfounded; I’d hardly have time to do anything stupid.

  Anyway, might not marrying Fortuneswell be that? A thoroughly disagreeable man, I had thought him, with all the Yuppie vices and no virtues. (Of course it was true he could afford to send me to the best clinics and consultants; but then, they say that you really get better treatment on the Health Service. But I don’t want to be cobbled up like an old sock, obliged to pretend gratitude for care that I’d prefer to do without. An overdose is quicker and tidier. But then, but then, what about Fitz . . . ?)

  These profitless thoughts revolved in me as we sped on towards London.

  I never confide my innermost terrors to anybody. Shame, I suppose, inhibits me. I lost the habit of confidentiality at the age of six or so, when even the self-centred child I was could see that Masha’s daily worries burdened her too much without my adding to them.

  I can remember the occasion: I was afflicted with a griping pain in my abdomen, probably due to over-indulgence in greengages; we lived then in a little north-country rectory with one overburdened tree.

  “Masha, I’ve got rather a bad pain.”

  “Oh, Katya, have you?” Her voice conveyed that this was the last straw. She was encamped outside Papa’s locked study door, behind which he had, for three days, been wrestling with his soul in a mixture of prayer and hunger-strike aimed, ostensibly, at grabbing the attention of God.

  “Edred, my dear, don’t you think it’s time you came out and had something to eat?”

  “My pain’s really bad, Masha,” I repeated, clenched with urgency.

  “Well, you know where the soda-mints are, in the medicine cupboard. Suck two. And take your temperature — have you got a headache?” She laid a preoccupied hand on my forehead. “It seems cool enough. I wonder — they couldn’t possibly be period pains? No, you are much too young for that . . . Edred, I do really think it is time you took a few spoonfuls of soup.”

  Slowly I crept upstairs to the medicine cupboard. “And try putting a hot water bottle on your stomach,” Masha called after me absently . . .

  In due course my pains abated. Pains mostly do. Either that or you die. And next time they recurred I knew better than to bother Masha; I found my own remedies. Studying to be a nurse was one. Even if that misfired, I found out a useful amount about the things that can cause pains; enough to supply me with symptoms for life.

  Masha told me after Papa’s death that only then did she feel at liberty to do much worrying about anybody else; he was a full time job.

  O
h, what a waste!

  “How lucky it is that women have experience in looking after children,” she said. “Or they’d never have the patience to look after men.”

  It seemed to me there was a fallacy there. Didn’t the men come first? But she went on,

  “Men are a much harder job because you have to cope with their helplessness, but at the same time do that without embarrassing them by drawing attention to it. Because if the illusion that they are stronger and more efficient than women is taken away, they really have nothing left, poor dears . . . The really important thing,” she said, fixing me with her firm grey eye, “the really important thing is not to let them feel guilty. Because once they do, they’ve really got you over a barrel. They’ll expect you to feel sorry for them, and sympathise with the pangs of guilt that assail them for neglecting you — or whatever it is they haven’t done.”

  I didn’t ask if Masha had studied other specimens of the male sex besides Papa or whether he was her Everyman. When young she had been beautiful: photographs show her round-faced, eager, with a cloud of dark hair loosely piled in a chignon, longer than Zoë’s probably, when it was down, great eyes sparkling with hope and enthusiasm. I daresay she was a bit like Dodo. And, like Dodo, she had to go and marry Papa.

  Thank heaven she never had to worry about Fitz. They were in total harmony from the very first moment.

  And if there were any worrying factors in my life, I kept them from her. It was the very least I could do.

  Joel dropped me at my flat, and next day he came round to the Pyramid studios and took reams of pictures of me which got into magazines and, in a mild way, I became a celebrity. I don’t know how long the celebrity side would have lasted under its own steam, because meanwhile James Tybold began courting me intensively. He telephoned three, four times a day, took me to lunch at the Ritz, and to first nights, openings, and private views; he sent me bouquets and potted plants and Liberty scarves and liqueur chocolates, and when I laughed at these conventional gifts he asked what I really wanted and I said a cheetah kitten and a bicycle. When he instantly produced the bicycle (handmade with fifteen gears, more suitable for the Andes than London, how Masha would have loved it!) I quickly cancelled the request for the kitten because I couldn’t think where it would fit in my one-room flat or lifestyle.

  Being wooed was fun, I must admit. Never in my life had I been the focus of such attention and spoiling. Can you wonder that I enjoyed becoming the object of someone else’s wholehearted, obsessive pursuit and admiration? And the prospect of enjoying this fun, this pampering, for life? — unlimited light and heat for ever, never another worry about gas bills, phone bills; no more need to trudge to sales or buy clothes that don’t fit and alter them; no more stingy anxieties about how to scrape through Christmas without ruinous expenditure? Never again look at the right-hand side of the menu?

  Is it so surprising that in the end I said yes?

  II

  PEOPLE TENDED TO think that Pat Limbourne and Elspeth Morgan must be Lesbians, but this was not the case. They had simply known each other all their lives, and after Elspeth retired from teaching, and Pat, having risen as high in journalism as a female could aspire to, had flung out of her job in disgust and taken to freelance work, the two decided to set up house together. Elspeth was a born spinster; cordially relished the company of the male sex but never had the least wish to cohabit with one of them. At seventy she had so many occupations and interests that the farewell to the school over which she had presided for the previous twenty years passed without the slightest twinge of regret: she corresponded with learned societies, kept hens and goats, wove, gardened, carpentered, made pots, lectured on these matters, dashed off rather capable watercolours, and was proficient in karate and archery. Her friend Pat, ten years younger, had once dipped into matrimony for a short, harassed period, but her tongue was too acerbic and her nature too masterful to render the experiment anything but disastrous. After the divorce, various brief involvements proved sufficient; she preferred to retain the males that she knew as friends, not lovers. By this means their inefficiency, dilatoriness, inability to reach decisions, laziness, volatility, messy habits, unpunctuality, and infinite range of psychosomatic infirmities, need not be her responsibility.

  As she once said to Elspeth: “Observant intelligent men with a sense of humour are so rare that, if you come across one, the only thing to do is to cherish him like an exotic orchid; it would be asking too much to expect him to be capable or deedy; and I haven’t time.”

  Elspeth merely nodded in reply; she was not given to garrulity, particularly when her hands were occupied.

  Both ladies had adventurous impulsive temperaments and greatly enjoyed a change. They dealt together harmoniously; a mutual fondness and strong respect outweighed the intermittent bursts of exasperation which the habits of each called out, from time to time, in the other. Elspeth was able to forgive Pat’s slapdash untidiness, and Pat, Elspeth’s enraging way of abandoning a day’s dishes unwashed in the kitchen while she occupied herself outside, separating bulbs or sorting pea-sticks. Both had travelled widely and held down responsible jobs, both were capable administrators and enjoyed transactions with other people. After they set up house together Pat continued her freelance activities and sporadic forays into public affairs; it was on one of these that she ran across Lord Fortuneswell when both, due to previous connections, were involved in setting up a Dorset Youth Theatre Trust. No particular liking was involved, but suave young tycoon and middle-aged sharp-witted woman acknowledged in one another an affinity, a kindred spark; thereafter they maintained a pattern of intermittent contact; Pat Limbourne directed the more intelligent of her TV and newspaper friends to Fortuneswell for interviews and proposed him for several public and charitable positions; he put various opportunities in her way and, when he was looking round for administrators to run his Caundle Quay project, recalled Pat and her elderly friend.

  They would be the ideal pair, he recognized, to live in a prototype house, function as caretakers and godmothers for the community, present an image of good sense, domesticity, and sobriety to combat any notion that Caundle Quay might degenerate into a nest of hippies and drop-outs. No one who tasted Miss Morgan’s brown bread, observed her flowerbeds full of huge peonies, or encountered Pat Limbourne’s shrewd raking stare could entertain such a notion for more than an instant.

  No scruple about uprooting two elderly ladies and entirely altering their way of life would give Fortuneswell a moment’s pause: he proposed the plan to Pat, meeting her at a library opening; her imagination instantly kindled at the prospect of becoming pioneer inhabitant of a Dorset Greek village (pioneer, that is, apart from Father Athanasios, already installed) and, in the space of a ten-minute conversation, the whole arrangement was set in train. Pat’s decisions were always made in this way.

  “We are growing tired of Twickenham,” she said. “Elspeth needs a shake-up now she’s sold her school. And the neighbours are beginning to grumble about the goats. I lived in Dorset as a child — glad to go back there. Still have friends.”

  Elspeth received the news of their imminent departure from the house where she had lived for thirty years with total calm; she organized transport for the goats — “They will have a much better diet in Dorset” — transferred her favourite garden plants to pots for the move and, when she learned that the house they were to occupy was already supplied with traditional Greek furnishings, made arrangements to have her own rather good Victorian pieces despatched into store.

  “We should have little Shuna come and live with us, don’t you think?” she suggested to Pat. Shuna was a kind of adopted great-niece, orphan of a disaster-bent daughter of friends who had come to an untimely end.

  “Why not, good idea,” agreed Pat. “Caundle will be much better for her than that boarding school — she can run around in the fresh air and help with the goats. Glifonis, I mean; must try and remember to call it
that.”

  With minimal fuss the two ladies transplanted themselves, Pat’s only stipulation being that she must have a dark-room with a sink. An outbuilding was adapted for this purpose, seven-year-old Shuna was removed from her convent school and, until there should be a nucleus of other incomers’ children large enough to justify a school bus to Dorchester, she learned her lessons with Elspeth who, of course, was amply qualified for the task. Shuna, a solitary, self-sufficient little creature, throve in the unusual atmosphere of Caundle/Glifonis, spent hours silently observing the operations of the Greek builders and could already have passed an examination in traditional Greek construction techniques; she explored the whole terrain of the village, such empty houses as were built and awaiting occupancy, and the neighbouring coastline; formed an acquaintance with Father Athanasios and his dim, richly-scented, gorgeously decorated church; found her way down to the pebbly, fossil-studded beach, flew her kite, and talked to herself continuously.

  “Is it quite all right for that child to talk to herself so much?” reflected Pat one evening, pulling off her gumboots before sitting down to a late cold supper. Neither of the ladies could be bothered to waste time on elaborate cookery. They lived on corned beef, cold potatoes and lettuce from the garden. Elspeth made a few loaves and a batch of scones from time to time.

  “She doesn’t talk to herself but to the Toe tribe,” corrected Elspeth, transferring the mud-clotted boots to the porch. Dorset and the Greek builders jointly provided an unlimited supply of red gluey clay, but a cobbled and marble-stepped main street was under construction. “Shuna’s conversation is perfectly grammatical and rational; I don’t see any cause to correct the habit. Besides, it keeps her in practice for the day when real companions arrive.”