Wicked Women
Page 27
We lay thus for some ten minutes. Neither of us was quite prepared to make the first move. In these circumstances one does some instant bonding. And I must acknowledge that what I was about to do was not all that repulsive to me. Franklin did have a really good body. I could identify with my father sufficiently to admire it, to want to have it in sexual attendance on me. I do not want you to feel sorry for me, Miss Jacobs. Sacrifice it was, but to be a sacrificial victim need not be entirely without its pleasures.
I made the first move. I said, “I suppose we ought to do what Management requires of us, in the interest of respectability and what people might think. We ought to fuck.”
At which, within half a second, he was all over me. He was accustomed: I know my anatomy: my hymen had broken when I was fifteen—I remember the occasion: I was at the barre, on points, my right leg stretching. Suddenly—well, there I was, married in essence to The Dance. But I’d known that anyway: certainly that I was betrothed. But now I considered the matter settled. Symbols come along to confirm a conclusion, not to initiate one. So Franklin had no way of telling I was a virgin: I will say that to you now, Miss Jacobs, in all fairness, though of course to my father at the time I had to cry rape: see what Franklin did, and me a virgin! But that was at breakfast, the following morning.
After sex, we slept. Or rather Franklin did. I opened the window and let the mosquitoes in, and moved the sheet away from his body to give them proper access. I sat upright in the bed, knees to chest, and watched the thin, leggy things alight on the soft clammy neck, the nose, under the eyes: with an eager wave of my hand directed them to the softest, most vulnerable places. The head of the penis, the arm-pit. The creatures alighted, settled, drove their poison in, and sucked, and lost their thinness and grew dark red, and Franklin slept, the pure sleep of the jet-lagged; and pink bubbles rose on his skin, even as the hellish bloodsuckers I had summoned up departed, and the bubbles turned to red, tight, miniature volcanoes, and his manicured fingers moved to scratch the swollen tender places in his sleep, and I was glad to see it happen. Franklin was, as he claimed, very sensitive, a mass of allergies. I rejoiced. I laughed in the light of the moon. Once they had served my purpose, I shoved as many flying creatures out of the window as I could; they flew heavily, engorged. I slapped a few others to death. Food slowed them up, more fool they. Then I closed the window, and lay down next to Franklin. I shut my eyes and dreamed of the possibility of love, and permanence, and the blessed ordinariness of an everyday life which could never be mine, but which had seemed to mark my father’s life with Bo, and which I wanted back again, for them.
Why could it not be mine? Well, good heavens—I had given love up, Miss Jacobs, as a bad job. I sacrificed my virginity on the altar of my father’s welfare. Are you crying or laughing? Crying? Good God! You’re easily moved. I suppose in a way it is sad. I am like one of those walnuts, you know. Tough as anything: impermeably sealed; then finally you break in, and what do you find? That the nut inside is shrivelled, inedible. All potential but destined never to grow. A walnut withered in its shell, that’s me.
At breakfast Franklin was a disgusting sight. All crimson lumps and bumps on a white skin, disfigured, despairing, driven mad by his itching parts, one eye half closed, mouth so swollen he could hardly talk, let alone protest his innocence while I wept into my cornflakes and confessed what had happened between Franklin and myself. What Franklin had done to me. Seduced me, abused my innocence, taken advantage of my father’s trust.
My father was sickened. When Bo called through to him later that morning, on my suggestion, the car was on its way to take us away, to the evident relief of Management. We were leaving for London: Franklin was being sent home forthwith to California, paid off; my father and I would summer in Venice. Where of course Bo joined us.
Why do you think I can’t sleep, Miss Jacobs? Is it so wrong to interfere in another’s life? To tell lies to a good end? To pretend love while practising betrayal? Was I not balancing Evil by creating Good? Isn’t that what one’s supposed to do? Was I not justifying my mother’s disappointment, by keeping my father with Bo, making the trauma she endured worthwhile, if only in cosmic terms? When my mother ran from the house, so impetuously, it was because I had accused her of being ruthless and tried to press her to tell me about my father; and she was hurt. I hurt, she dies, he turns up. What’s a mosquito bite or so on Franklin’s white skin, a false accusation of rape, in comparison to that? So many questions! You can’t be expected to answer them: don’t try.
But that’s why I am a dancer, and will stay so all my life. No longer a virgin but that’s about as far as my interest in sex will ever go. Work’s a pushover compared to family life. I want no more of it.
Now that is settled, thank you and goodbye. Send the bill to my father. I will sleep well tonight.
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.
Copyright © 1972, 1978, 1982, 1984, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997 by Fay Weldon
“Run and Ask Daddy If He Has Any More Money” originally appeared in Radio Times, 1993, Hodder & Stoughton, 1994.
“Not Even a Blood Relation” originally appeared in Dempsters, in German Marie Claire, and in Heat Haze, a short story collection published in the U.K. by Orion Books limited.
“Wasted Lives” originally appeared in The New Yorker and in South African Cosmopolitan.
“Love Amongst the Artists” originally appeared in The Times (London), 1991.
“Tale of Timothy Bagshott” originally appeared in British Council Anthology, 1992.
“Through a Dustbin, Darkly” originally appeared in Options, 1992.
“Web Central” originally appeared in The Big Issue.
“A Good Sound Marriage” originally appeared in US Journal, 1991.
“Pains” originally appeared in Cosmopolitan, 1994.
“A Question of Timing” was donated to Teenage Trust, 1993.
“Red on Black” originally appeared in British Council New Writing 4, 1994.
“Santa Claus’s New Clothes” originally appeared in The Observer, 1993
“The Pardoner” originally appeared in Literary Review, 1994.
“Heat Haze” originally appeared in Heat Haze.
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-1245-3
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