by Fay Weldon
‘What a disgusting person,’ said Gilda.
‘No, Gilda, you don’t understand. He wanted me to love him, not just to use him, and he was disappointed.’
‘You are out of your mind. Well, what’s new?’ said Gilda bitterly. ‘There’s such a wonderful smell of rosemary up here. I can see for miles and miles, through the squares of glass in this telephone box. The sky’s like the kind of colour wash they make children do in Rudolph Steiner schools, but latticed. Water colours on wet paper. Susan went to a Steiner school once, till she got so bored I took her out. “Rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savour all the winter long:” That’s just after Exit Pursued By Bear in The Winter’s Tale. Jason was in that. He was very good. Even Spicer said so.’
‘English oil of rosemary is infinitely superior to the stuff you get from France or Spain,’ said Gilda, ‘because of the colder climate, but we never bother to produce it here. Quite a marketing problem for the EC. You worked on a programme with me, Annette. Don’t you remember?’
‘Just about. But it isn’t the green-leaved rosemary that grows round here, the stuff you use to get the oil, it’s the silver and gold kind, with little blue flowers, that just grows. Anne of Cleves wore a wreath of it at her wedding. Was she one of the wives who was beheaded or one of the ones who survived?’
‘I’d have to look it up, Annette.’
‘Don’t bother. Anyway, here we were, this truck driver and I, fighting, and he just opened the cab door and pushed me out, all the way down to the ground, and I rolled into this muddy ditch. It was raining. He got out and looked at me down in my ditch and said I was lucky he hadn’t raped me and strangled me, and drove off. I didn’t think I was particularly lucky; I daresay that was what I’d wanted. So there I was in this ditch, exhausted and without my knickers, which can chill you down a lot, and it was raining, and my neck was hurting and bleeding. I found later there was this great cut in it. I had to have a tetanus jab. He shouldn’t have left me there, should he? Do you think he was worse than Spicer, or better?’
‘Annette,’ said Gilda, ‘truck drivers are expected to be brutes. Terrible things happen to girls on the road. That’s why good girls don’t hitch. But Spicer is meant to be civilised, and you are his wife. Spicer is worse than the truck drivers.’
‘But I might have been fighting him in some way I didn’t understand and he did, so what he did was reasonable?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you, Gilda. And I don’t suppose they’re exactly in competition for worst place, anyway. One must just be grateful for not being raped or murdered, physically or spiritually. I’ll have to go soon. There’s someone wanting to use this phone box. How extraordinary! It’s so isolated up here. Moors to the right of you, moors to the left of you, just this footpath and this phone box in the middle of nowhere, and the smell of rosemary. I couldn’t resist calling you. I hope you don’t mind me reversing the charges. I thought we could talk for ever. And now there’s someone else here. Another person. A man. He doesn’t seem threatening. I can go on a little, I guess. I’ll turn my head and pretend I haven’t seen him. Where was I? Another photograph. In the paper the other day. An old atrocity picture, dating back to the forties. The newspaper reprinted it, with apologies to their readers’ sensitivities, in an attempt to explain contemporary times in Yugoslavia. You don’t want to look, you have to. This photograph was of a young man, alive and well and handsome, except he is being held down by three other young men, looking perfectly cheerful, and a fourth is sawing through his neck with an ordinary wood saw. He’s trying to keep his head in its proper position and there’s a look of total surprise on his face—he’s taken aback—’
‘Please don’t, Annette—’
‘I only mention it because Henry and Buttercup observed that people get so civilised they don’t dare do that kind of thing to you physically, they’ll do it to you mentally. We’re all Serbs and Croats and Bosnians at heart. Spicer’s been sawing through the inside of my head, not the outside, that’s all. People like to do to each other the most gruesome thing they can possibly think of. Sawing people’s heads off is quite funny, in its way. Separating the conscious, aware part from the automatically twitching part. There! That’s the way to do it, that’s final, that’s the end of disappointment. Do you a good turn. Spicer hurts me. I twitch. Get to the spinal column, and he can put a stop to all that and feel good again. Only Spicer didn’t quite manage. I’d laid my head on the block but I got it out in time. Hardly his fault at all. My neck’s healed. Are you crying?’
‘Yes. I thought you were out of the pit. You’re not.’
‘You don’t have to get out of it, Gilda. There isn’t any route out. You just clean it up a bit, grow a few flowers and ask everyone in. Gilda, he’s tapping on the glass, he’s getting really angry. I have to go. Oh dear God, it’s Ernie. What is Ernie Gromback doing out there in a suit and tie and shiny shoes? He looks absurd.’
‘Ernie,’ said Annette, six months later. They were picking up the children from school.
‘What is it, my dear?’ said Ernie.
‘Shall we just drive down Bella Crescent, past the house?’
‘Are you sure you want to?’ asked Ernie.
‘Yes, please,’ said Annette. ‘Tell you what, I’ll shut my eyes till we’re there, then I’ll open them for a second, take in what I see, close them again, and you drive like hell out of there.’
‘We don’t want to be late for Susan and Jason,’ said Ernie. ‘We don’t have much time to spare.’
‘You just don’t want me to see Spicer again in case I fancy him,’ said Annette. ‘Fall back under his spell.’
‘You are so right,’ said Ernie Gromback.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Annette. ‘It was in another country, and the Spicer I knew is dead. A simulacrum walks around in his place. How can you love a simulacrum?’
‘A pity about the property though,’ said Ernie. ‘To be cheated out of it like that.’
‘Never mind,’ said Annette, ‘I could put it all into a novel.’
‘Nobody would believe it,’ said Ernie. ‘Don’t even think of it.’
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Annette. ‘Let’s go straight to the school. I don’t want to drive down Bella Crescent, after all. I know what I would see. The house in a kind of seedy disrepair; its porch somehow shrunk in stature; the steps crumbling; two plates outside the door, with a fresh set of bogus initials on them. Spicer looking out of a top window: a kind of poodle for their pleasure, and Marion too perhaps. The windows will be foggy from a haze of incense, marijuana and the quality of the minds within. There will be a trail of trusting people to the door, looking for someone to believe in, anyone: so what if families split, and in the name of love and peace, malice abounds. You wouldn’t want to see that, and neither would I. It might put my blood-pressure up, and that would be bad for our baby. I reckon we’d better forswear the experience, keep what belongs to the past in the past.’
‘I reckon so too,’ said Ernie Gromback, and turned the car, and they went to pick up the children.
‘Ernie,’ said Annette, as they parked the car outside the school gates. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘Anything,’ said Ernie.
‘Take a look at the photograph.’
‘What, again?’
‘Please,’ said Annette. ‘Do you see a bust of Karl Marx in it?’
‘No,’ said Ernie. ‘I don’t.’
‘That’s okay then,’ said Annette.
‘Put it away in case the children see it,’ said Ernie. ‘Let’s try for a little respectability round here. Thank God it’s a polaroid, and already fading.’
About the Author
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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.
Released in the USA under the title Trouble
Copyright © 1993 by Fay Weldon
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-1262-0
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY FAY WELDON
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia