Possession

by Celia Fremlin

  *

  And now, while I watched him, a tiny frown came onto his face. He looked at his watch.

  “Look,” he said. “I hate to break up the party; but it is getting late, and if I’m going to drive you home….”

  At once a little fuss started, his mother reminding him that the roads were slippery with rain, that Saturday night was the worst time in the week for accidents; wouldn’t it be safer, really, if we took the tube? To our great relief Mervyn brushed aside this depressing suggestion, and cut short further argument by going off to get ready. Tried to cut it short, rather, because what actually happened was that his mother immediately trotted out of the room after him like a faithful little dog. We heard a door close; we waited a few moments; and then I went myself out into the hall to fetch our coats from the pegs where they had been hung.

  The voices through the closed door were low at first; but when I had just put my own coat on and was about to reach up for Sarah’s, I was suddenly aware that one of the voices—the female one—had changed to a piercing whisper, far more audible than the previous confused mumblings.

  “Remember what I said, Mervyn!”—the words hissed and whistled through the closed door like the night wind in some ruined chimney. “You know what I said I’d do if it ever happened again. Well, I meant it! I meant it, Mervyn!”

  CHAPTER VII

  “WELL, I TOLD you she was nuts, didn’t I?” Peggy pointed out contentedly; and she seemed so pleased with herself that I hadn’t the heart to remind her that what she had actually said was that Mrs Redmayne was possessive. That the lady in question should also turn out to be nuts was just a piece of luck for Peggy; and I didn’t grudge it her. She deserved all that and more for the comfort she dispensed.

  As now.

  “I’m sure, Clare,” she consoled me. “I’m absolutely two hundred percent sure, that that was all she meant! I mean, what could possibly be more in character for a woman like that, than to threaten suicide whenever her wretched son looks at another woman?—‘If you marry this girl, I’ll kill myself’—that’s what she must have been saying. She must have been saying it for years, and the poor mutt must have been believing it! The big, soppy fool!”

  Her strong arms pounded away at the cake-mix in the bowl, and I realised that already I was feeling better. Her powerful, unqualified opinions about absolutely everything are like an iron lung to me at times like this; they are the callipers, the spinal jacket of my soul when it has gone weak as jelly over fears for one of my children. This is why I had rushed in next door so early this morning, as one might rush to the doctor’s surgery—and with far more certainty of cure. Well, not of cure, I suppose, because Peggy’s certainties are just as often wrong as they are right; but Oh, how they alleviate the symptoms! Half the previous night I had lain between sleep and wakefulness, puzzling over those mysterious whispered threats that I had heard through Mrs Redmayne’s closed door. ‘I meant it, Mervyn, I meant it!’—all night the words had wandered distorted through my dreams, had hammered in my half-waking thoughts, and in the fevered, sleepless darkness I began to feel certain that they referred in some sinister way to Sarah. Huge, swollen fears for her safety padded through my mind, shapeless as shadows, and even the coming of the morning did not dispel them. Yet here was Peggy, sane and sure, and without the smallest shred of evidence either way, dismissing the lot of them! Harold, her husband, is always telling Peggy to look at the facts before jumping to a conclusion; but how gloriously Peggy can jump without them!—an Olympic athlete in comparison with his halting, timorous progression: facts tangle round his legs like briars, obstructing all further movement, while Peggy soars like a winged goddess over the whole wretched jumble, and lands, sure-footed and triumphant, at her decisions. Facts are all very well in their place, she tells Harold, but you want to show them who is master; and while there are no doubt quite a lot of scientists who base their careers on just such a philosophy as hers, Harold is not one of them.

  So I watched now with awe, and with mounting confidence, as she swooped to the very heart of my anxiety, and gave me her verdict:

  “Look at it this way, Clare,” she said. “Let’s suppose, just for the moment, that it wasn’t just a phoney, hysterical suicide threat that you were listening to. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that she really was threatening blue murder against her son’s fiancée. Well, so what? It’s obvious that she’s made the same threat before, whatever it was. All that about ‘again’ and ‘last time’—obviously this is quite a familiar conversation to them both. Well, all right: but she hasn’t ever done what she’s threatened, has she? I mean, I take it that her past isn’t littered with the bodies of murdered damsels found on her doorstep?”

  I laughed. But even as I did so, a picture came into my mind—the picture of a man hanging by his neck in his own garage. Not a damsel, admittedly; a middle-aged man. And fourteen years ago at that. How could it have anything to do with Mrs Redmayne’s current feelings about Sarah? Or could a woman’s whole personality be so distorted by the shock of her husband’s suicide that …?

  Suicide? Another thought came to me. Had it been proved to be suicide? Had the unhappy man left a note, or something? But even if he hadn’t … even if there was a suspicion of murder …? I wished desperately that I could tell Peggy the direction my thoughts had taken, but of course I had promised Sarah not to. “Especially not Peggy.” She had said, well knowing where my greatest temptation would lie.

  “And do remember, Clare,” Peggy was continuing. “That I’ve met her. She struck me as exactly the kind of hysterical little egotist who would go in for threatening to kill herself every time she doesn’t get her own way. I expect she gets away with it, too. You know—all little and weak, and knowing just which knobs to press in her son’s guilt mechanisms! Ugh!”

  It did seem quite likely. There are mothers like that, even nowadays. Not that I had ever before met one myself—all the mothers of adult sons that I knew were counting the minutes to the time when the dear boy, and his tape-recorder, and his appetite, and his girl-friends, and his effect on the electricity bill, would all disappear together, leaving his parents with peace, space and leisure, for the first time in twenty-odd years. But as I say, possessive mothers do exist, they must, or how could so much be written about them, and how could we spend so many happy hours feeling superior to them? Many’s the time that Peggy and I have read smugly aloud to each other those gentle understanding articles that urge us not to cling to our children for companionship; and at such times the almost indecent glee that we both feel at the sight of luggage piled in the hall ready for a child’s departure seems like a major virtue. We realise then how special we are, and how unlike the ordinary run of mothers. No one needs to lecture us in the magazines: we are the elite; we are the ones who have won the battle against maternal possessiveness.

  Yes, we have won it; and if, now and again, we get the feeling that it was somehow much too easy, we try to push the thought away. For victory is sweet, and having won it, no one likes to feel that it was after all only a phoney war.

  And that’s why we were so pleased, Peggy and I, to have found a real, flesh-and-blood example of a mother who had failed to win this victory. We fell upon the situation with innocent zest, as if it had been a well-cooked meal. It was all so perfect, you see; she was a psychiatrist’s dream, was Mrs Redmayne; she had everything. An immature personality; an only son; a dead husband to provide an excuse for emotional blackmail. She also had no friends, no job, no outside interests; she had the time and the money to lead a life so empty that her wretched son was by now the only thing she could find to fill it, and onto him (we told each other) she was pouring all the unbridled emotional energy of a frustrated, idle woman. Obviously, the Oedipus thing was in full spate, with Mervyn as its unhappy victim.

  Or something. Anyway, whatever the exact nature of Mrs Redmayne’s neurosis, she was clearly the kind of mother that we could pride ourselves on not being, and for a little while
we gave ourselves up to the full enjoyment of this negative glory. Or at least Peggy did. I couldn’t feel quite the same gusto myself, because, for me, it was important that the unfortunate son should turn out to be at least a nice chap; a potentially good husband, and a presentable family acquisition, whom I could show off to my friends. Of course, he might still prove to be all this, but it was impossible not to fear that his mother’s neurosis might in some way have rubbed off onto him. Hastily, I put together the case for the defence.

  “The hopeful thing about the whole business is the fact that Mervyn stands up to her,” I asserted, with a slight emphasis on the Christian name; Peggy had been referring to him as “the poor goop” and “the silly great boob” just a little bit more often than I, as prospective mother-in-law, could really relish. “I mean,” I went on. “He humours her to the extent of living at home, and staying with her most weekends; but he certainly doesn’t give in about everything. They had several little brushes while we were there; and he certainly stuck to his guns about marrying Sarah. He even seemed to imply that he and Sarah would be moving to Bristol and leaving Mum behind in Bayswater!”

  “Good for him!” Peggy nodded approvingly. “It’s all quite exciting, really, isn’t it? Fancy Sarah married! Goodness, I wish someone would marry my Pat! But that’s the trouble with marriage; men always seem to pick just the girls you could have got rid of anyway. You know—the ones who can type, or teach, or something; I suppose it’s the ones who know how to do that sort of thing who also know how to catch a man. Oh, for the days of arranged marriages! In the Middle Ages, if you’d had a girl like Pat, who didn’t want to take A-levels, and couldn’t bear office work, and cried over her UCCA forms until they were too smudged to send in—why, you’d have married her off to some knight on a white charger, so dumb he wouldn’t know any better till he got her home. What a marvellous system!” I agreed, cautiously; but pointed out that these benefits, like most others, had to be paid for.

  “There was the dowry,” I reminded her. “The dumb knight wouldn’t be that dumb—he’d remember to come down on Harold for something like a third of his riches.”

  “Just like the Income Tax people,” retorted Peggy. “But at least there’d be something to show for it. And it would be optional, too. You could look at her ugly, sulky face, with the tears dripping down it, and decide just how much it was worth to you to get rid of it….”

  I gathered that Peggy and Pat had been having one of their scenes this morning. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I kept quiet. “A marvellous system!” Peggy repeated savagely, gathering up the empty cake bowl and pitching her cooking utensils into the sink with a murderous clash of metal. “Dowries may have been expensive, yes; but so is everything that really makes life more comfortable. And nowadays you don’t even have the option. There’s no one, now, who you could pay to take your daughter away at eighteen.”

  “Well, there’s the universities,” I said cautiously. Cautiously, because university is a sore point in Peggy’s household. Peggy herself doesn’t mind so much, but Harold, the brilliant scientist, had always assumed first that his children would be clever—which they are—and second that they would use this cleverness for excelling at academic work, which they do not. They don’t exactly refuse to stay at school and to apply for university places; but they make it quite clear that it is all being done as a favour, just to humour the adults. Naturally this attitude infuriates their father whenever he lets himself be aware of it; and his fury, shrill and inadequate as a grasshopper, infuriates Peggy; and then they have a family row on their hands. What makes it even more annoying, from Peggy’s point of view, is that she doesn’t care whether the children go to university or not. She cares about Harold’s caring, and about his irritating way of showing that he cares, and about the children’s even more irritating ways of showing that they don’t; but beyond this she just wishes that they’d all shut up.

  Nevertheless, she only smiled at my reference to the explosive subject.

  “The universities? What a hope! They only take them for half of the year! And then, after three years, they give them back to you! Look at Liz!”

  We looked at Liz, metaphorically speaking; and for a minute we basked in the familiar, consoling knowledge that our troubles with our children were at least less than hers. Liz has been a great support to us in this way, over the past few years; in times of stress we turn to her like those zoologists’ baby monkeys, who run to their experimental wire mother for an empty sort of substitute comfort.

  It wasn’t always thus: and in a way I suppose it serves Liz right, this uncongenial rôle that she now fulfils in our lives. Once upon a time, you see, it was she who was the successful one, the smug and patronising victor in the Cat-Race. Hers were the little boys who talked fluently before they were two; who didn’t wet the bed; who mixed happily with the other toddlers at the local play-group, instead of standing about the way Janice used to, sucking her thumb and looking like a case-history of maternal deprivation. They were never smacked, or told to speak nicely, dear, and yet they were quite well-behaved, and could all read before they were five. And during the ensuing years, while the rest of us wrestled variously with school-phobias, stammers, National Health spectacles, and addiction to comics, Liz’s boys sailed onwards and upwards, with straight limbs, enquiring minds, and a positive liking for salads and bodybuilding protein.

  “I got them into good eating habits right from the beginning, you see,” Liz used to say blandly—just as if the rest of us had deliberately inculcated the obsessional demand for chips and ice-lollies against which we feebly struggled.

  And so it went on. Liz’s boys passed their O-levels brilliantly, excelling particularly in maths and science subjects. As Liz never tired of pointing out to us—at school concerts, and on speech days, and in the Saturday morning queue at the butcher’s—maths and science are the subjects nowadays: they are forward-looking, and they also (though Liz didn’t put it quite like this) carry a vague aura of superior virtue about them and of special privilege. Her face used to glow, in those days, as she talked about maths and science, though her knowledge of both subjects was vague in the extreme. I think she felt that her boys had boarded a special train that was going to take them into the twenty-first century ahead of the rest of us. Through a rosy haze of maternal pride she saw them gathered around the pearly gates of the Future, arrayed in the white coats of their calling, while the rest of us bowed down before them in worship. Something like that. Anyway, she was insufferable.

  I’m not blaming her. I’d have been the same in her place. In fact, I very nearly was, for my children were clever, too. So I know what it feels like. But what with Janice’s tantrums, and Sarah’s passion for Noddy books, as well as the glasses she had to wear to correct her squint, I had the smugness knocked out of me early, at a stage when a mother is still malleable and able to accept her humble position in the Cat-Race without too much injury to her pride.

  Not so poor Liz. Her troubles came to her too late, and for a long time we knew nothing about them, for she was too proud to tell us. The first time I realised that something was wrong was when I saw her in the street one Saturday morning, just after her youngest son, Tony, had passed his O-levels brilliantly in ten subjects, and yet she didn’t rush across to ask me how Janice and Sarah were getting on. That is a sure sign that something is wrong, when a mother doesn’t manoeuvre you into a position where you have to ask after her children. It means that she no longer has anything to boast of; and this, for Liz, was strange indeed.

  Slowly, over the ensuing months, the truth about Liz’s changed status began to leak out. First that her eldest boy, Giles, had come down from university without a degree: then that the second one, Pete, was refusing to go back for his second year, in spite of having passed brilliantly all his first year exams: and finally it transpired that seventeen-year-old Tony had run away from school and was living with some girl in Wolverhampton.

  Not for long, though.
Not for long in Wolverhampton, I mean; because Liz’s family seem to suffer from an irresistible urge to bring their disorderly problems home and sort them out under the parental roof. We are continually hearing that one or other of the boys has left home to get married, or to live with some girl or other, and then, the next time you visit the house, there the three of them still are, sitting round their parents’ well-filled table, as if nothing had happened: and yet another skinny young woman with huge eyelashes and a smokers’ cough is being introduced to you, and you do the best you can to distinguish her from the one who has just edged resentfully past you on the stairs; from the one who was sobbing down the telephone as you came in through the hall; and from the one who is lying asleep on the sofa in a pair of purple trousers, and whom people refer to in hushed tones as Poor Sonja.