The Heart of the Country

by Fay Weldon

  Arthur said:

  ‘Natalie, I feel bad about this. But Jane and I were so crowded above the shop, and there was no way you and the kids could stay here, what with the rates and so forth. They are high, aren’t they! And whose idea was the underfloor heating? Very uneconomical, and splits the wood if you have good furniture. God knows what I’m going to do about that! But it’s taken the problem off your hands, hasn’t it, Nat? And at least you know the house has gone to a good and friendly owner for a quick, cash sale.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Natalie.

  ‘You’ll be moving out tonight, I’m told?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Natalie. ‘Don’t worry about me, Arthur. The children are down at the playing fields. I’ll pick them up after the sale, and be out of your life, not to mention your house!’

  ‘But not out of my heart, Natalie. You know that. Ever. Where are you going? Friends? Family?’

  ‘Never you mind, Arthur, I’ll be all right.’ Natalie had her pride, as we know. Not by a flicker would she show that she minded: that Arthur had upset her; Arthur, whose body she had known, had been so familiar with. He with the substantial, friendly girth, with its warm, pleasant smell, and all the pleasure that came with it, and whose mind she had not known at all.

  ‘Anyway, good to know Angus will look after you,’ said Arthur, placatingly. ‘Since you’ll have nothing more to do with me. You’ll get quite a bit from the sale, I imagine. Enough to get you settled.’

  Arthur had not been attending the auction, Natalie could only suppose, though Jane was down there buying an ironing board for 25p, a box of cutlery for 50p, and a set of chairs for five pounds, or Arthur would have understood very well that Angus was not looking after Natalie. On the contrary. The sale had gone largely unadvertised, and the buyers who turned up were mostly friends and colleagues of Arthur and Angus, or customers of Avon Farmers, on the trail of a bargain, and finding many. The new freezer went for fifteen pounds, Angus seeming unable to hear a call of twenty pounds, coming from a man who just happened to be passing, had seen the crowd, and stopped, and now couldn’t believe his luck. It must be something about the acoustics, he supposed, which made the auctioneer keep missing his bid.

  ‘Do you like gardening?’ Natalie asked Arthur, as she picked up her suitcases and prepared to leave.

  ‘No. But Jane does.’

  ‘Good,’ said Natalie, leaving Dunbarton for the last time. ‘This place could be made really nice. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone!’

  She was right. I sit here writing in my cubicle, with the peephole in the door left over from the old manual days, so the nurse could look in to make sure the patient wasn’t swinging from a hook in the wall. She can do that now by looking at a screen, for we are all electronically surveyed, but the peephole remains, in affectionate memory of the past. There’s a central locking system so the duty nurse can lock my door from a distance any time there’s trouble anywhere, or she thinks there might be. Clunk-click! I too think of what I failed to appreciate. I have always wondered how it is that one guard can handle so many prisoners; why there are not more army mutinies, more prison breakouts, why the massacred stand idly by and let themselves be massacred? It’s not just guns and gas and superior muscle power that does it. A critical mixture of coercion and persuasion is no doubt required: and superior knowledge and technology on the part of the warders comes in handy, but it is the fixed notion of guilt on the part of the prisoners that really does it. They have done wrong: therefore they deserve to be badly treated. They are badly treated: therefore they have done wrong. And the unfortunate construe their misfortune as their own fault, and so consent to their incarceration. I sit here on the bed, writing, submitting to electronic surveillance, because somehow I think it’s what I deserve, and because look, it’s better than loneliness. Anything is. Those who are watched are not alone!

  Natalie was walking down to the playing fields with her suitcases when Angus drove up in his Quattro. He had created an unscheduled interval in order to pursue her and speak to her. She should have been flattered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve been childish and vindictive. Jean always says so. She must be right. I shouldn’t throw my weight around like this. I can’t stand rejection, that’s what it is, and you were really rough on me the other night. Still, what we got today should see you right. Deposit on a home. Unless you’re off to join Harry? I assume you are. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ Natalie said. ‘It’s not.’ (Natalie always spoke the truth – I sometimes think for lack of the wit to do otherwise – and so was always believed.) ‘And what’s more you won’t even reach four thousand today, Angus, and I owe nine thousand in debts. There’s still a minus balance.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Natalie, I’m sorry.’ He was, too.

  Unlike me, Angus had no trouble feeling remorse. But too late, of course. The thing about remorse is that it’s a perfectly safe emotion. It always is too late.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘To friends?’

  Natalie thought a little.

  ‘The thing about friends,’ observed Natalie, ‘is that I suppose I could say Jean and you were our friends, and Arthur and Jane. So on the whole I’d rather stay with enemies.’

  ‘You’re something else,’ he said, in admiration, as she walked past and on, and into the playing fields where the Quattro couldn’t follow, or not without damage to its paintwork. He went back to the auction, and let the prices ran in Natalie’s favour. He would earn her love, somehow, now he had worn out his malice.

  Shock

  Natalie came to live with me. Not before she had moved into the council hostel, of course. She collected the children from the playing fields and with a suitcase in either hand walked on into the Emergency Hostel in Eddon Gurney.

  ‘Why didn’t you come straight to me?’ I asked her later.

  ‘I didn’t like to,’ she said. ‘Anyway, they were expecting me.’ A feeble answer, but then she was tired. She’d been allocated a room in Redfield House, once a convent, now roughly converted to multiple use; one family to a room, and communal cookers in the corridors, out by 9.00 in the morning and not in before 7 in the summer, 6.30 in the winter.

  ‘The worst thing about the hostel,’ Natalie said, ‘was that they’d painted bright colours over dirty walls: yellows and pinks and greens, in the hope of cheering the place up. But it was beyond cheering, and so were we.’

  Well, that was her point, wasn’t it? She wanted to be really worthless, really degraded, really at the bottom of the pile, our proud Natalie. Really finished. That’s how the end of a marriage takes some people. They find themselves cleaning other women’s houses, or with some horrible skin disease, or whoring to make ends meet – anything to punish themselves for their failure. Failure? Well, of course. Their failure to be loved, every woman’s task, duty, to find someone to love them. Dragging the kids along as often as not, to witness the punishment.

  Natalie had just stood there, since Harry left, and let herself be cheated, robbed, insulted and misled by Arthur, Angus, Alec, the bank manager, the police, the school, the DHSS – everyone. You could hardly blame them for doing it. She was like one of those little dolls weighted at the bottom, the only point to whose existence is that you try to knock them over. The dolls come on up again, swaying and smiling – they’re vaguely female – but Natalie was doing her damnedest to stay down.

  It was Ben and Alice who shocked her back to her senses: so she shot suddenly upright and this time stayed there. Their poor white traumatized faces stared at her from the bunk beds – inmates had to provide their own sheets and she’d brought these in the suitcases. The hostel kindly provided charity blankets. (Now everyone with any sense uses duvets there’s a glut of discarded blankets all over the country and they’re freely available.) Natalie was just sitting, too tired even to unfold the rather stained sofa bed and get onto it and go to sleep. She couldn�
��t turn the overhead light off: a greenish ten watt bulb glimmered permanently overhead. The light stays on in case the children wake in a strange place and are frightened, or that’s what they say, but they don’t mean to make these places too comfortable, do they, or who’d make the effort to get out of them? ‘Their faces were so greeny-white and ghostly, and they were so quiet, I realized what I’d done,’ Natalie said. ‘I realized they only had me. Harry wasn’t coming back to rescue us. I clapped my hands and said very loudly, ‘All right! Up! We’re getting out of here,’ and they both sat up at once.

  ‘Natalie,’ Ben said, ‘I think we’d better stay just for the night. Get some sleep. We’ll think in the morning.’ (it was the first and only time he ever called her Natalie. Usually it was Mum, or Ma, or You. (The softer form, Mummy, was left for Alice.) But now he spoke to his mother as if she were an equal. This shocked her, too. Between them, Harry and she had deprived their son of his childhood – not that he’d been making too good a job of that, either, to date. Privilege and self-doubt mixed makes some people obnoxious, and Ben was one of them. In the short time he was with us up at the estate, he improved enormously: privilege had been snatched away, and his sense of being the one male amongst so many helpless, hopeless females did wonders for his self-esteem. He was okay, was Ben, in the end.

  ‘No,’ said Natalie, ‘we’re going right now! We are simply not going to spend the night in a place like this.’

  And the children dressed and Natalie packed, and they tiptoed down the yellow and pink stairs (no carpet) in the greeny light from the horrible unquenchable bulbs. The warden – I shall call her Ms Frostbite because I never did get to hear her name – popped out of the ground floor front room where she was watching the late-night horror (no doubt) and said:

  ‘Where are you going? What irresponsibility is this? How dare you take those children out after bedtime! Don’t you know that room was booked for you? Don’t you know by accepting it you were keeping others out?’ and so forth, but Natalie took no notice and kept on walking, and so did the children, and the door closed behind them and no one followed them, and they were free. In the dark, in the cold, penniless, hungry, and alone, but free.

  It took them forty-five minutes to walk to the Boxover Estate. Once they heard a police car, and hid behind a hedge until it passed. Perhaps it was looking for them, perhaps it wasn’t. Were there laws concerning vagrancy? Natalie didn’t know. There was a full moon. There was almost no traffic. The countryside seemed to hover – as if the fields lay quivering an inch or so above the brown earth – patterned with strange silvery shadows. Natalie had never seen it like this before. Even the children were impressed. ‘It’s like fairyland,’ said Alice.

  ‘You’re such a baby,’ said Ben, but he said it kindly. He carried one of the suitcases. Alice helped Natalie with the other, and though this was more trouble than it was worth, as the corner of the case kept banging into her ankles, Natalie did not try to stop her. Neither child complained about tiredness, hunger or thirst, and now they were out of the hostel and their mother was in charge of them and herself again, the colour had come back to their cheeks, albeit a strange translucent moonlit pink, the like of which Natalie doubted she’d ever see again. Crunch, crunch, crunch went their footsteps, echoing. An owl hooted, a fox barked.

  ‘I like this walk,’ said Alice. It was their moment out of time.

  Her knock got me out of bed. Knocks after midnight usually mean trouble. I opened the door and there Natalie stood in the moonlight with her children, half apologetic, half stubborn. She didn’t say anything. Her presence explained itself.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said. I was wrapped in my blue silk kimono, circa 1930, 80p from Oxfam. ‘End of a quiet life. Come in. You can have the sofa, the kids will have to make do with the floor.’

  You’ve got to stick together, down here at the bottom of the world. As I say, all you have in the end are your friends.

  Interlude

  Of course Sonia loved Natalie. Of course she was in love with her. Wouldn’t you be? Who else was there for her to be in love with? Some women can’t go out their front door without meeting up with a randy wood-carver or an alcoholic one-eyed sailor, while others get into a state where they only ever meet other women. Men somehow dissolve out of their life altogether. This had happened to Sonia. So when Natalie knocked upon her door in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and dramatic, what did you expect would happen?

  Don’t misunderstand her. Sonia would no more have touched Natalie than have picked up a dog’s turd with her bare fingers, even a dog she knew well. She would, that is to say, have considered any kind of physical approach shuddery, and she certainly could not imagine kissing Natalie. Sonia would have found the deed embarrassing and disgusting. Sonia was no lesbian. On the other hand – now, how can she explain this to you? – Sonia could quite see herself in the same bed with Natalie, clasped, clasping and intertwined, giving and receiving all kinds of pleasure, in imitation of the act (as she remembered it) with men: in the interests of comfort, consolation, present-quenching excitement and emotional and physical gratification. But not somehow kissing.

  Sonia is a disturbed woman. She does not act the way the consensus agrees that a woman should feel and act. That is to say if she kills someone she should feel remorse. If her children are taken away from her she should feel grief. If she takes money from the State she should feel gratitude. If she falls in love with another woman, admit she is a lesbian. Sonia just won’t.

  What strikes Sonia is how un-free any of us are, to act, be and feel the way we want. Things are offered, then snatched away. Sex with a man gives you such a stunning sense of safety. There you are, suddenly the size of two people, not one: not frightened any more, totally loved, needed, used, valued. As long as it lasts. It’s an illusion, isn’t it? It stops: it presents you with perfection and then snatches it away. He rolls off and away and you’re half what you suddenly perceive is your proper size, and he’s back to his wife or his bank balance or his mates or whatever it is that’s preoccupying him. How quickly, as young girls, you lose your rightful expectations. Your first lover isn’t likely to be loving, tender, permanent, true, is he? The statistics are against it. It’s your uncle or his best friend or your best friend’s boyfriend, or you’re gangbanged or taken for a laugh or so drunk you can’t even remember except you’re pregnant. And it’s a loss. It’s a real loss. Why is it men pay so much for the privilege of deflowering a virgin? It’s because they’re getting real value for money. Virginity is real, it’s a proper state, all rightful expectation, and self-righteousness, not just the run up to being fucked by all and sundry. This is why Sonia is glad Stephen has custody, care and control of Teresa, Bess and Edwina. Sonia has no illusions left. Little girls need illusions. Stephen will do them very well: he is all expectation and self-righteousness – look how he behaved over Alec. His daughters will learn from Stephen and look after their virginities until they’re ready to hand them over to nice, caring, loving, boring permanent men. If they stayed with Sonia they’d be running after strangers in no time at all, in order to talk to them, and take their sweets, and go behind the bushes, never to emerge again.

  Okay, give Sonia a fix. What loathsome drug is choice for today? Go ahead, poison her, calm her, finish her off. It’s all attention, isn’t it. Attention-seeking devices, like all you Eddon shrinks with your Eddon Method. Goodnight. Sonia will try and do better tomorrow.

  Second Home

  So there Natalie was the next morning, sleeping on Sonia’s sofa, with Ben and Alice in sleeping bags on the floor amongst the uncleared-away toys, and a little white kitten, rashly strayed in from next-door’s garden, batting one of Alice’s curls against her ear for the pleasure of watching it bounce back. At least it was one step up from the Emergency Hostel – though it was not clear from Ben’s waking expression that he thought this was the case. He had a clear view underneath the sideboard to a collection of dusty socks, little girls’ knickers and random fem
ale rubbish. At Dunbarton furniture was properly pulled out and swept behind.

  In the kitchen Sonia was trying to muster seven bowls for cornflakes.

  ‘It can’t be permanent,’ she said. ‘But I expect I can sort you out. You’ve come to the right person. I’m a one-woman Claimants’ Union.’

  ‘I’m grateful,’ said Natalie.

  ‘Don’t ever be grateful,’ said Sonia. ‘You have to learn not to be grateful or it’ll be the end of you. You’ll sink into the Supplementary Slime and never crawl out. Cultivate resentment. It gets you further.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m putting you out terribly,’ said Natalie, in her genteel little girl’s voice.

  ‘You are,’ said Sonia, ‘to be blunt. The DHSS aren’t going to be too happy to discover I’m harbouring a fugitive from the Hostel. The way they’ll look at it is, what right do you have to turn your nose up at the taxpayers’ offer of accommodation? And they’ll find ways of punishing me. They might even stop my 20p a week soap powder allowance. I get that for Edwina’s sheets. She wets the bed sometimes. Does Alice wet the bed?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Pity. You’re really missing out. Does Ben have asthma?’

  ‘No,’ said Natalie.

  ‘Encourage a wheeze or two,’ said Sonia, ‘if you can. They really go for asthma up the DHSS. Instant sympathy. Sometimes people die from it, you see, and they don’t want to be blamed, or thought hardhearted.’