by Fay Weldon
“Of course,” Defoe said, “the English landed gentry always lived by selling their sons and daughters in return for land and money.”
“I sold myself,” she said, “being an orphan and having no one to sell me.”
“We’re too near the hedge,” he said. “We might mistake a death cap for a mushroom.”
“Or vice versa,” she said. They moved back towards the centre of the field, in the bright light where the death caps never grow.
Later in the day the phone rang. It was Weena.
“Hello, Miss Dodds,” said Elaine.
“How did you know it was me?”
“I recognised your voice,” said Elaine. “You were here only the day before yesterday. Do you want to speak to my husband?”
“Yes,” said Weena. “I would like to speak to Def, Mrs. Desmond, if that’s okay by you.”
“I should warn you,” said Elaine, “he doesn’t like being called Def unless he has given express permission.”
“That’s strange,” said Weena. “He didn’t seem to mind the day before yesterday.”
“So you have some kind of problem today?” enquired Elaine.
“My editor’s looked at my piece and isn’t too happy. He wants some changes made.”
“It seems some women have editors the way some women have husbands,” observed Elaine.
There was a pause while Weena considered this.
“You’re really quite funny, aren’t you?” she said.
“Thank you for the compliment,” said Elaine.
“I really admire that in you,” said Weena. “People say I don’t have a sense of humour, and then I feel bad. But humour goes with being smart, doesn’t it, and I guess I’m not all that smart. I think it’s more important for people to feel, and respond.”
“Then that’s just as well,” said Elaine, “isn’t it?”
“What I’m trying to say,” said Weena, “is that I’d like to come back and ask Def a few more questions.”
“I’m sure you would, Miss Dodds. I’ll get my husband to call back if he’s interested.”
“Do you have some sort of problem with me, Mrs. Desmond? I get the feeling you’re hostile to me. What have I done?”
“Miss Dodds,” said Elaine, “most journalists manage to get what they want in the time allocated. That said, I am not in the least hostile to you.”
“I’m not really a journalist,” said Weena. “I’m more sensitive than that. I’m a writer. I was trying not to be personal, not to ask him what it feels like to be a has-been, that kind of thing, and these are all the thanks I get.”
“Defoe is taking the dog for a walk,” said Elaine. “I’ll get him to call you back. Can I have your number?”
“Def’s got that.”
“He’ll have lost it,” said Elaine. “You know how it is; people write numbers on bits of paper and then the cleaner tidies it up.”
“In my world,” said Weena, “we do our own cleaning. Tell him I look forward to hearing from him.”
“Oh I will,” said Elaine, “I will.”
Francine stopped Weena as she was going out of the apartment.
“Weena,” she said, “I am tired of doing your laundry. Is it too much to ask for you to put your own washing through the machine?”
“It’s in the laundry basket waiting for me to get round to it,” said Weena. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Just that the laundry basket is overflowing, and smelling,” said
Francine. “And has been for weeks.”
“You resent me being my own person,” said Weena. “You want me to keep to some kind of mythical timetable, in which you are always the mother and I am always the child.”
“I am always the mother,” said Francine, “and you are always the daughter; there is no denying that. And now I am a widow, not even a wife, and you are still jealous. Just get that laundry basket cleared.”
“I will not be spoken to like that,” said Weena. “And I do my own washing in my own time.”
But she could feel her mother getting nearer and nearer some essential part of her being, and she could tell that, if she wasn’t careful, she’d be the one to move out.
When she’d slammed out of the house she paused and pressed the bell of her own apartment. “Hello?” enquired Francine.
“It’s my dirty knickers you can’t stand,” said Weena. “It’s the smell of sex. You need treatment, Mother.”
“My dearest,” said Francine, “I don’t. You do. I had an excellent sex life with your father, and you had better face it.” There were no more doors to slam, so Weena strode down the street towards the bus stop, head held high, glowing with anger and frustration, and attracting many a glance, both male and female.
Defoe returned from his walk with the dog.
“Anything happen?” he asked.
He professed to love the country, but lack of event bothered him.
Anything happening is better than nothing happening. Who wants the last days of peace, when they could have the first days of war?
Most things are good at the beginning.
“Very little,” said Elaine.
“What am I meant to do with my day?” he asked.
“Sell the house and move to town,” she said. “Invest the money, and live near to our children: pick up what work you can. We have reached the end of the line. The end of the Cold War put thriller writers out of business: the end of the arms race is the end of those whose business it was to comment on it.”
“It hasn’t ended,” he said. “It has just gone underground. I need to say that to people.”
“They’re not listening,” she said. “There are other threnodies being sung.”
“You’re very hard,” he said.
“We should never have hoped for permanence. Even this house won’t stand. If they do away with the local line, the road will come instead, bear everything away. What are five centuries in the history of a house, the story of a family? Let’s leave with dignity, while we can, before the others realise.”
“But I love this house.”
“You love the theory of this house, and the history of this house, and the way you came into possession of this house. And the way it reflects status upon you. But the house itself? Harry Wilcox was right. It needs modernising. It could burn down tonight, and us with it, the wiring’s so bad. Let Lila Swain fight the closing of the branch line. She won’t win, and if she does, worse will happen. In fifty years this house will not be here; or you and me either. We will be underground, or burned and scattered. The cities eat up the countryside: it is time they did. People must eat, must have space to move in and air to breathe: they’ll kill to get it.”
“So nothing happened in my absence,” he said, “except you started brooding. What you say is nonsense. The cities are more dangerous than the countryside: everyone knows that.”
“To live in isolation anywhere is a luxury,” said Elaine, “without a perimeter wall, steel gates, and an entry system.” He yawned. He was bored. He was accustomed to sound bites, not stretches of speech. What would he do now the dog was walked?
Peter was Defoe and Elaine’s son. Now the phone rang in his penthouse. Peter was thirty-one, and an investment broker for a direct insurance company. He had a cold in the nose, or so he said, and was not going in to work today. His new partner Rick, aged twenty-three, had stayed home from his antique shop to keep him company. Rick picked up the phone and handed it to Peter. “It’s your sister Daphne,” said Rick in his soft, sweet voice.
“I called the office,” said Daphne accusingly, “and they said you were ill. Are you shirking again?”
“I’ve made enough money for them lately,” said Peter. “I’m taking a day off.”
“Was that your new young man?” asked Daphne. “If so, it sounded suspiciously like a girl. Can I meet him/her soon?”
“It’s a him,” said Peter, “and I’d rather leave it for a while. I am not sufficiently convinced o
f your gender orientation to risk losing him to you.”
“Honestly,” said Daphne, “these days I am only interested in hers.”
Daphne and Peter had looked so similar when young, one had often been mistaken for the other. They had enjoyed that. There was a mere ten months between them. She was the younger. Peter would have his hair cut short: Daphne would take the scissors and do the same to hers. Peter would grow his: so would Daphne. “Did you know they’re going to sell the house?” asked Daphne. “Mum’s already showing people around.”
“Dad won’t like that,” said Peter. “What, sell the old homestead? Out of the family? That’s terrible. Why?”
“There isn’t a family left,” said Daphne. “Only you and me, and we’re not going to propagate. We’re the end of the Drewlove line: the Desmonds are nobodies—they go on and on, but mostly in America, believing they’re somebodies.”
“But selling the house!” lamented Peter. “Without reference to you and me!”
“They’re like that,” said Daphne. “Entirely selfish. Just an announcement. Five hundred years in the family and just like that—our family home, our childhood refuge—to be sold!”
“But do you want to live in the middle of a wood?” asked Peter.
“Certainly not,” said Daphne. “It’s okay for weekends, I suppose.”
“I don’t want to live in it either,” said Peter, “and Rick gets dreadful hay fever.”
“Then that’s that,” said Daphne. “They’ll get a good price and leave us the proceeds.”
“If they don’t spend it first,” said Peter. “They may have been living beyond their income. I hope they haven’t run up too many debts.”
“I hope they’re not upset. Dad won’t have liked losing his job.”
“He’ll have liked the fuss that went with it,” said Peter. “Ought we to go down?”
“Oh God!” said Daphne.
“Oh Jesus,” said Peter. “Heaven preserve us from these turbulent parents.”
He sneezed so much they had to abandon their conversation. Rick brought Peter herbal tea: Alison, Daphne’s partner, brought her coconut cookies she’d made herself that morning, and served them with grubby hands. Peter and Daphne always attracted simple, loving, dedicated others. It was their talent.
Back at Drewlove House, Defoe came downstairs again. “You’re sure no one called?” he asked. “While I was out walking the dog? The phone was completely silent?”
“Actually the boring girl from the New Age Times called,” said Elaine. “I forgot about that. She wants to come back and do the interview again. For all you and I know, she is in league with robbers and is simply casing the joint. I should be careful if I were you. I did what I could to put her off, but obviously not enough.”
“Pity. Witness to my humiliation. Vis-ä-vis your jibe about the avocado bathroom suite,” he said.
“It isn’t like you to be so sensitive.”
“You think I am without sensitivity?” he asked, prickly.
“I did not say that.” She was patient.
“So is she coming back?” he asked. He looked in the crazed glass of the mercury mirror and thought he looked good. Early nights and a domestic bed and less stress opened the eyes and firmed the skin. He would leave the decision to his wife: whether Weena came, or stayed away.
“I said you’d call her.”
“Then I hope she left her number? She gave it to me but I think I lost it.”
“I took it again,” she said, and found it for him, and left the room.
Mrs. Mary Hadfield was at the front door, to beg Elaine to join the committee which was to defend the branch line.
“Your wife wasn’t very nice to me, Def,” said Weena on the phone. “She seems to have some problem where I’m concerned.”
“I can’t think what that can be,” said Defoe.
“It’s not as if she knew,” said Weena. “At least, I presume she doesn’t.”
“Know what?” For a moment he was baffled.
“That we fucked,” she said.
“Hush!”
She laughed. “You’re so guilty!”
“Of course she doesn’t know,” said Defoe. “Tell me, in your world, would Elaine have a right to object if she did know?”
“She might come at me tooth and claw,” said Weena. “That would be real. That would be okay. But objecting in a clinical way, no.
People have no right to be sexually possessive.”
“No? Give me the wisdom of your generation. I love it!”
“Because that limits lives, Def. It’s the opposite of liberation. We’ve got to learn to love one another.”
“What, all in one great flower-strewn bed together? I am back in my youth.”
“Don’t mix me up, Def. It isn’t fair. I’m not very smart. Anyone can take advantage of me. Please don’t you, Def.”
“Sorry,” said Defoe. “What are you wearing?”
“Nothing,” said Weena, which was a lie. She was wearing a designer white satin blouse of her mother’s. It had gold embroidery down the front and Weena wore it over her jeans and a black T-shirt, the better to save the latter from the slops of cornflakes and milk she had consumed before making the phone call, lying on her front on the floor; the black fabric too easily picked up cat hairs from her carpet. Her mother had worn the white satin blouse to her father’s funeral underneath a tailored black suit. Weena had thought the outfit unspeakably vulgar. The crematorium chapel had been hot. Francine, her taste for once impugned, had taken off her jacket, and thereafter glittered like a beacon in the funereal gloom, attracting eyes away from the coffin as it slid on its rollers into its suggested immortality behind pink silk curtains. “She never loved him,” Weena thought, finally seeing the proof she sought. “Never, never.” Now she thought that the sooner the blouse was accidentally ruined, the better: certainly before the anniversary of her father’s death, fast approaching.
“Don’t do this to me,” said Defoe. “You are provoking me on purpose.”
“No clothes at all,” said Weena, “and I am lying on my back on a white carpet. When I do this my breasts turn into kind of fairy cakes, but at least not pancakes, as, for example, my mother’s do.”
“I know that,” said Defoe. “I remember your breasts well. And is your hair all spread around? Over your shoulders, framing your face?”
“I guess so,” said Weena.
“Just tell me when you’re coming to visit me,” said Defoe, “before someone interrupts us. For God’s sake!”
“We have a right to talk,” said Weena. “Even people in prison are allowed to talk. Wives don’t own a man’s soul. All no-no’s exist to be broken. The brave break them. I’ll come down on Tuesday.”
“Monday,” said Defoe. “Come in the morning: stay to lunch. Elaine goes to her pottery class on Monday afternoons.”
“Pottery! Wet clay draws the spirit out of people. After that they develop a kind of hard crust. Sometimes they get crazed. Lots and lots of little lines.”
Elaine had never shaded her face from the sun. It was indeed lined, and could be thus described. But she remained attractive: intelligence animated her and gave her grace.
“That way there’ll be time between Elaine going to her pottery class and the 5:15 train.”
“Time for what?” asked Weena. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and wiped that down the front of the satin blouse.
“I don’t know what for,” said Defoe. “I don’t care. Just for us to be together, in whatever way you like.”
“I haven’t much time to think about any of this,” said Weena. “I’m trying to get an article on fluoride pollution to Dervish by Friday afternoon.”
“Is that your deadline?”
“No. The editor’s usually in a good mood then, that’s all.”
“I never knew anyone in a good mood on Friday afternoon,” said Defoe. “Peak time for good moods is Tuesday afternoon.”
And so they chattered on,
as lovers, or almost lovers, will.
“What can you see in a man like me?” Defoe asked.
“Charisma,” said Weena. “Brains, good looks, charm and practicality.”
“You don’t mean that, Weena.”
“I do,” said Weena. “I’ve always moved amongst pygmies. But you’re a giant amongst men. My editor would say careful, persons of restricted growth or look for another way of saying what I mean, but that’s the way it came out. He gives me a really hard time, sometimes.”
“Fuck your editor,” said Defoe, and there was a short, surprised silence from Weena.
“I’m sorry,” said Defoe. “Bad language on the phone is never a good idea.”
“That’s okay,” said Weena. “A giant with a wife who wants to cut him down to size. Avocado bathroom suites! Perhaps your mother was the same? What was she like?”
“A nightmare,” said Defoe, “but someone’s coming. I must go. Monday morning? I’ll meet the train at Abbots Halt at 12:15.”
Weena put the phone down, took off the blouse and went along to the bathroom where the laundry basket overflowed with her dirty clothes—blacks, reds, navies and greys. She carefully shoved the blouse into the sleeve of a sweatshirt, so no glimmer of white could be seen, and dumped both back in the basket. She knew that presently her mother’s nerve would give and she would shove the lot, unchecked, into a too-hot wash. And serve her mother right, and Weena could play the innocent when the blouse was discovered, grey and ruined, its sheen and its memories gone forever.
Francine answered the telephone to Dervish, Weena’s boss. She held her ruined, once-white blouse in her hand.
“Can I speak to Weena?” he asked.
“I don’t know who she is,” said Francine, and put the phone down.
It rang again.
“Wrong number,” she said this time, but before she could hang up Dervish spoke.
“You’re Weena’s mother,” said Dervish, “and I don’t know who she is either, so we’re on the same side. Is it a child, is it an employee, is it Superbitch? Since her father died, she’s been a nightmare! I’m her employer. Hello.”
“She’s been a nightmare since the day she was born,” said Francine. “Daddy’s little jail-bait. So why don’t you fire her? Does she have some hold over you?”