Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You know nothing about anything,’ she repeats now. ‘What country person, after dark, sits with the windows open and invites in invisible strangers? Especially ones who are blind.’

  Well, Edgar is angry. Of course he is. He stares at her bleakly. Then Edgar steps out of the back door into the rain, now fitful rather than torrential, and flings himself upon his back on the grass, face turned to the tumultuous heavens, arms outspread, drinking in noise, rain, wind, nature, at one with the convulsing universe.

  Minnie joins her mother at the door.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ she asks, nervous.

  ‘Being at one with nature,’ observes Minette, cool and casual for Minnie’s benefit. ‘He’ll get very wet, I’m afraid.’

  Rain turns to hail, spattering against the house like machinegun bullets. Edgar dives for the safety of the house, stands in the kitchen drying his hair with the dish towel, silent, angrier than ever.

  ‘Can’t we go on with Monopoly?’ beseeches Minnie from the doorway. ‘Can’t we, Mum? The money’s only got a little damp. I’ve got it all back.’

  ‘Not until your father puts that chair back as it was.’

  ‘What chair, Minette?’ enquires Edgar, so extremely annoyed with his wife that he is actually talking to her direct. The rest of the holiday is lost, she knows it.

  ‘The ladderback chair. You asked in something from the night to sit on it,’ cries Minette, over the noise of nature, hung now for a sheep as well as a lamb, ‘now put it back where it was.’

  Telling Edgar what to do? Impudence.

  ‘You are mad,’ he says seriously. ‘Why am I doomed to marry mad women?’ Edgar’s first wife Hetty went into a mental home after a year of marriage and never re-emerged. She was a very trying woman, according to Edgar.

  Mad? What’s mad in a mad world? Madder than the dice, sending Minette to jail, back and back again, sending Edgar racing round the board, collecting money, property, power: pacing Minnie in between the two of them, but always nearer her father than her mother? Minnie, hot on Edgar’s heels, learning habits to last a lifetime?

  All the same, oddly, Edgar goes to the ladderback chair, left pulled back for its unseen guest, and puts it in its original position, square against the table.

  ‘Stop being so spooky,’ cries Minnie, ‘both of you.’

  Minette wants to say ‘and now tell it go away –’ but her mouth won’t say the words. It would make it too much there. Acknowledgement is dangerous; it gives body to the insubstantial.

  Edgar turns to Minette. Edgar smiles, as a sane person, humouring, smiles at an insane one. And he takes Minette’s raincoat from the peg, wet as he already is, and races off through the wind to see if the car windows have been properly closed.

  Minette is proud of her Bonnie Cashin raincoat. It cost one hundred and twenty pounds, though she told Edgar it was fifteen pounds fifty, reduced from twenty-three pounds. It has never actually been in the rain before and she fears for its safety. She can’t ask Edgar not to wear it. He would look at her in blank unfriendliness and say, ‘But I thought it was a raincoat. You described it as a raincoat. If it’s a raincoat, why can’t you use it in the rain? Or were you lying to me? It isn’t a raincoat after all?’

  Honestly, she’d rather the coat shrunk than go through all that. Silly garment to have bought in the first place: Edgar was quite right. Well, would have been had he known. Minette sometimes wonders why she tells so many lies. Her head is dizzy.

  The chair at the top of the table seems empty. The man with no eyes is out of the house: Edgar, coat over head, can be seen through the rain haze, stumbling past the front hedge towards the car. Will lightning strike him? Will he fall dead? No.

  If the car windows are open, whose fault? Hers, Minnie’s?

  ‘I wish you’d seen that Mona shut the car door after her.’ Her fault, as Mona’s mother. ‘And why haven’t you woken her? This is a wonderful storm.’

  And up he goes to be a better mother to Mona than Minette will ever be, waking his reluctant, sleep-heavy younger daughter to watch the storm, taking her on his knee, explaining the nature and function of electrical discharge the while: now ignoring Minette’s presence entirely. When annoyed with her, which is much of the time, for so many of Minette’s attitudes and pretensions irritate Edgar deeply, he chooses to pretend she doesn’t exist.

  Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona, united, watching a storm from a holiday cottage. Happy families.

  The storm passes: soon it is like gunfire, flashing and banging on the other side of the hills. The lights go out. A power line down, somewhere. No one shrieks, not even Mona: it merely, suddenly, becomes dark. But oh how dark the country is.

  ‘Well,’ says Edgar presently, ‘where are the matches? Candles?’

  Where, indeed. Minette gropes, useless, trembling, up and down her silent haunted home. How foolish of Minette, knowing there was a storm coming, knowing (surely!) that country storms meant country power cuts, not to have located them earlier. Edgar finds them; he knew where they were all the time.

  They go to bed. Edgar and Minette pass on the stairs. He is silent. He is not talking to her. She talks to him.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re lucky. All he did was make the lights go out. The man with no eyes.’

  He does not bother to reply. What can be said to a mad woman that’s in any way meaningful?

  All night Edgar sleeps on the far edge of the double bed, away from her, forbidding even in his sleep. So, away from her, he will sleep for the next four or even five days. Minette lies awake for an hour or so, and finally drifts off into a stunned and unrefreshing sleep.

  In the morning she is brisk and smiling for the sake of the children, her voice fluty with false cheer, like some Kensington lady in Harrods Food Hall. Sweeping the floor, before breakfast, she avoids the end of the table, and the ladderback chair. The man with no eyes has gone, but something lingers.

  Edgar makes breakfast. He is formal with her in front of the children, silent when they are on their own, deaf to Minette’s pleasantries. Presently she falls silent too. He adorns a plate of scrambled eggs with buttercups and adjures the children to eat them. Minette has some vague recollection of reading that buttercups are poisonous: she murmurs something of the sort and Edgar winces, visibly. She says no more.

  No harm comes to the children, of course. She must have misremembered. Edgar plans omelette, a buttercup salad and nettle soup for lunch. That will be fun, he says. Live off the land, like we’re all going to have to, soon.

  Minette and Mona giggle and laugh and shriek, clutching nettles. If you squeeze they don’t sting. Minette, giggling and laughing to keep her children company, has a pain in her heart. They love their father. He loves them.

  After lunch – omelette with lovely rich fresh farm eggs, though actually the white falls flat and limp in the bowl and Minette knows they are at least ten days old, but also knows better than to say so, buttercup salad, and stewed nettles, much like spinach – Edgar tells the children that the afternoon is to be spent at an iron age settlement, on Cumber Hill. Mona weeps a little, fearing a hilltop alive with iron men, but Minnie explains there will be nothing there – just a few lumps and bumps in the springy turf, burial mounds and old excavations, and a view all round, and perhaps a flint or two to be found.

  ‘Then why are we going?’ asks Mona, but no one answers. ‘Will there be walking? Will there be cows? I’ve got a blister.’

  ‘Mona by name, moaner by nature,’ remarks Edgar. But which comes first, Minette wonders. Absently, she gives Minnie and Mona packet biscuits. Edgar protests. Artificial sugar, manufactured crap, ruining teeth, digestion, morale. What kind of mother is she?

  ‘But they’re hungry,’ she wants to say and doesn’t, knowing the reply by heart. How can they be? They’ve just had lunch.

  In the car first Mona is sick, then Minnie. They are both easily sick, and neatly, out of the car window. Edgar does not stop. He says, ‘You shouldn’t have giv
en them those biscuits. I knew this would happen,’ but he does slow down.

  Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona. Biscuits, buttercups and boiled nettles. Something’s got to give.

  Cumber Hill, skirted by car, is wild and lovely: a smooth turfed hilltop wet from last night’s rain, a natural fort, the ground sloping sharply away from the broad summit, where sheep now graze, humped with burial mounds. Here families lived, died, grieved, were happy, fought off invaders, perished: left something of themselves behind, numinous beneath a heavy sky.

  Edgar parks the car a quarter of a mile from the footpath which leads through stony farmland to the hill itself, and the tracks which skirt the fortifications. It will be a long walk. Minnie declines to come with them, as is her privilege as her father’s daughter. She will sit in the car and wait and listen to the radio. A nature programme about the habits of buzzards, she assures her father.

  ‘We’ll be gone a couple of hours,’ warns Minette.

  ‘That long? It’s only a hill.’

  ‘There’ll be lots of interesting things. Flints, perhaps. Even fossils. Are you sure?’

  Minnie nods, her eyes blank with some inner determination. ‘If she doesn’t want to come, Minette,’ says Edgar, ‘she doesn’t. It’s her loss.’

  It is the first direct remark Edgar has made to Minette all day. Minette is pleased, smiles, lays her hand on his arm. Edgar ignores her gesture. Did she really think his displeasure would so quickly evaporate? Her lack of perception will merely add to its duration.

  Their walking sticks lie in the back of the car – Minette’s a gnarled fruit-tree bough, Edgar’s a traditional blackthorn (antique, with a carved dog’s head for a handle, bought for him by Minette on the occasion of his forty-second birthday, and costing too much, he said by five pounds, being twenty pounds) and Minnie’s and Mona’s being stout but mongrel lengths of branch from some unnamed and undistinguished tree. Edgar hands Mona her stick, takes up his own and sets off. Minette picks up hers and follows behind. So much for disgrace.

  Edgar is brilliant against the muted colours of the hill a tall, long-legged rust-heaped shape, striding in orange holiday trousers and red shirt, leaping from hillock to hillock, rock to rock, black stick slashing against nettle and thistle and gorse. Mona, trotting along beside him, stumpy-legged, navy-anoraked, is a stocky, valiant, enthusiastic little creature, perpetually falling over her stick but declining to relinquish it.

  Mona presently falls behind and walks with her mother, whom she finds more sympathetic than her father as to nettlesting and cowpats. Her hand is dry and firm in Minette’s. Minette takes comfort from it. Soon Edgar, relieved of Mona’s presence, is so far ahead as to be a dark shape occasionally bobbing into sight over a mound or out from behind a wall or tree.

  ‘I don’t see any iron men,’ says Mona. ‘Only nettles and sheep mess. And cow splats, where I’m walking. Only I don’t see any cows either. I expect they’re invisible.’

  ‘All the iron men died long ago.’

  ‘Then why have we come here?’

  ‘To think about things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The past, the present, the future,’ replies Minette.

  The wind gets up, blowing damply in their faces. The sun goes in; the hills lose what colour they had. All is grey, the colour of depression. Winter is coming, thinks Minette. Another season, gone. Clouds, descending, drift across the hills, lie in front of them in misty swathes. Minette can see neither back nor forward. She is frightened: Edgar is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘There might be savage cows in there,’ says Mona, ‘where we can’t see.’

  ‘Wait,’ she says to Mona, ‘wait,’ and means to run ahead to find Edgar and bring him back; but Edgar appears again as if at her will, within earshot, off on a parallel path to theirs, which will take him on yet another circumnavigation of the lower-lying fortifications.

  ‘I’ll take Mona back to the car,’ she calls. He looks astonished.

  ‘Why?’

  He does not wait for her answer: he scrambles over a hillock and disappears.

  ‘Because,’ she wants to call after him, ‘because I am forty, alone and frightened. Because my period started yesterday, and I have a pain. Because my elder child sits alone in a car in mist and rain, and my younger one stands grizzling on a misty hilltop, shivering with fright, afraid of invisible things, and cold. Because if I stay a minute longer I will lose my way and wander here for ever. Because battles were fought on this hilltop, families who were happy died and something remains behind, by comparison with which the Taniwha, sightless monster of the far-off jungle, those white and distant shores, is a model of goodwill.’

  Minette says nothing: in any case he has gone.

  ‘Let’s get back to the car,’ she says to Mona.

  ‘Where is it?’ enquires Mona, pertinently.

  ‘We’ll find it.’

  ‘Isn’t Daddy coming?’

  ‘He’ll be coming later.’

  Something of Minette’s urgency communicates itself to Mona: or some increasing fear of the place itself. Mona leads the way back, without faltering, without complaint, between nettles, over rocks, skirting the barbed-wire fence, keeping a safe distance from the cows, at last made flesh, penned up on the other side of the fence.

  The past. Minette at Mona’s age, leading her weeping mother along a deserted beach to their deserted cottage. Minette’s father, prime deserter. Man with no eyes for Minette’s distress, her mother’s despair. Little Minette with her arms clutched rigidly round her father’s legs, finally disentangled by determined adult arms. Whose? She does not know. Her father walking off with someone else, away from the wailing Minette, his daughter, away from the weeping mother, his wife. Later, it was found that one of Minette’s fingers was broken. He never came back. Sunday outings, thereafter, just the two of them, Minette and mother, valiantly striving for companionable pleasure, but what use is a three-legged stool with two legs? That’s what they were.

  The present? Mist, clouds, in front, behind; the wind blowing her misery back in her teeth. Minette and Mona stumble, hold each other up. The clouds part. There’s the road: there’s the car. Only a few hundred yards. There is Minnie, red hair gleaming, half-asleep, safe.

  ‘England home and safety!’ cries Minette, ridiculous, and with this return to normality, however baffling, Mona sits down on the ground and refuses to go another step, and has to be entreated, cajoled and bluffed back to the car.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ complains Minnie. It is her children’s frequent cry. That and ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’

  ‘We got tired and came back,’ says Minette.

  ‘I suppose he’ll be a long time. He always is.’

  Minette looks at her watch. Half-past four. They’ve been away an hour and a half.

  ‘I should say six o’clock.’ Edgar’s walks usually last for three hours. Better resign herself to this than to exist in uneasy expectation.

  ‘What will we do?’

  ‘Listen to the radio. Read. Think. Talk. Wait. It’s very nice up here. There’s a view.’

  ‘I’ve been looking at it for three hours,’ says Minnie, resigned.

  ‘Oh well.’

  ‘But I’m hungry,’ says Mona. ‘Can I have an iced lolly?’

  ‘Idiot,’ says Minnie to her sister. ‘Idiot child.’

  There is nothing in sight except the empty road, hills, mist. Minette can’t drive. Edgar thinks she would be a danger to herself and others if she learned. If there was a village within walking distance she would take the children off for tea, but there is nothing. She and Minnie consult the maps and discover this sad fact. Mona, fortunately, discovers an ants’ nest. Minnie and Minette play I-Spy. Minette, busy, chirpy, stands four square between her children and desolation.

  Five o’clock. Edgar reappears, emerging brilliantly out of the mist, from an unexpected direction, smiling satisfaction.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘I can’t think why you we
nt back, Minette.’

  ‘Mummy was afraid of the cows,’ says Mona.

  ‘Your mother is afraid of everything,’ says Edgar. ‘I’m afraid she and nature don’t get along together.’

  They pile back into the car and off they go. Edgar starts to sing, ‘One man went to mow.’ They all join in. Happy families. A cup of tea, thinks Minette. How I would love a cup of immoral tea, a plate of fattening sandwiches, another of ridiculous iced cakes, in one of the beamed and cosy teashops in which the Kentish villages abound. How long since Minette had a cup of tea? How many years?

  Edgar does not like tea – does not approve of eating between meals. Tea is a drug, he says: it is the rot of the English: it is a laughable substance, a false stimulant, of no nutritive value whatsoever, lining the stomach with tannin. Tea! Minette, do you want a cup of tea? Of course not. Edgar is right. Minette’s mother died of stomach cancer, after a million comforting cups. Perhaps they did instead of sex? The singing stops. In the back of the car, Minette keeps silent; presently cries silently, when Mona, exhausted, falls asleep. Last night was disturbed.

  The future? Like the past, like the present. Little girls who lose their fathers cry all their lives. Hard to blame Edgar for her tears: no doubt she makes Edgar the cause of them. He says so often enough. Mona and Minnie shall not lose their father, she is determined on it. Minette will cry now and for ever, so that Minnie and Mona can grow up to laugh – though no doubt their laughter, as they look back, will be tinged with pity, at best, and derision, at worst, for a mother who lives as theirs did. Minnie and Mona, saved from understanding.