Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  Miss Jacobs took up her notepad and wrote something in it.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Morna Casey, nastily. ‘Your shopping list for tonight’s dinner? Liver? Brussels sprouts?’

  ‘If you’d lie down on the couch,’ said Miss Jacobs, ‘you wouldn’t see me writing and it wouldn’t bother you.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ said Morna Casey. ‘Sorry. Nothing you do bothers me one little bit, one way or another. And nothing will make me lie down on your couch. Reminds me of my father. My father was a doctor. He smoked eighty cigarettes a day and died of lung cancer when he was forty-three and I was seventeen. He’d cough and spit and gasp and light another cigarette. Then he’d inhale and cough some more. I remember saying to my Uncle Desmond – he was a doctor too – “Do you think it’s sensible for Daddy to smoke so much?” and Uncle Desmond replied, “Nothing wrong with tobacco: it acts as a mild disinfectant, and has a gentle tonic effect.” I tend to believe that, in spite of all that research – paid for by the confectionery companies, I wouldn’t be surprised – about the tobacco–lung-cancer link. It’s never been properly proved. The public is easily panicked, as those of us in PR know. My father enjoyed smoking. He went out in his prime. He wouldn’t have wanted to be old.

  ‘But I’m not here to waste time talking about my father. When you’re dead you’re dead and there’s no point discussing you. I’m here to talk about my dream. It comes in two halves: in the first half Rider is miniaturized – about twenty inches long – and he’s clinging on by his fingertips to the inside of the toilet, and crying, so I lean on the handle and flush him away. I can’t bear to see men crying – and at seventeen you’re a man, aren’t you. That part of the dream just makes me uneasy; but then out of the toilet rise up all these kind of deformed people – with no arms or two heads or their nerves outside their skin not inside so they have a kind of flayed look – and they sort of loom over me and that’s the bit I don’t like: that’s when I wake up screaming.’

  Morna Casey was silent for a little. She stretched her leg and admired her ankle.

  ‘I think I understand the first part of the dream,’ said Morna Casey presently. ‘I gave birth to Rider in the toilet bowl at home. I wouldn’t go to hospital. I wasn’t going to have all those strangers staring up between my legs, so when I went into labour I didn’t tell a soul, just gritted my teeth and got on with it, and it ended up with Hector having to fish the baby out of the water. Now Rider climbs about in potholes – he actually likes being spreadeagled flat against slimy rock faces, holding on with his fingertips. His best friend was killed last year in a fall but I don’t worry. I’ve never worried about Rider. What’s the point? When your number’s up your number’s up. Sometimes I do get to worry about the way I don’t worry. I don’t seem to be quite like other people in this respect. Not that I’d want to be. I guess I’m just not the maternal type. But Rider grew up perfectly okay: he was never much of a bother. He’s going to university. If he wants to go potholing that’s his affair. Do we stop for coffee and biscuits? No? Not that I’d take the biscuits but I like to be offered. Food is an essential part of PR. The laws of hospitality are very strong. No one likes to bite the hand that feeds them. That’s one of the first things you learn in my job. You should really seriously think about it, Miss Jacobs.’

  Morna Casey pondered for a while. A fly buzzed round her head but thought better of it and flew off.

  ‘I don’t understand the second part of the dream at all,’ said Morna Casey presently. ‘Who are all these deformed idiots who come shrieking out of the toilet bowl at me? I really hate the handicapped. So do most people only they haven’t the guts to say so. If there’d been one single thing wrong with Rider, an ear out of place, oesophagus missing, the smallest thing, I’d have pushed him under, not let Hector fish him out. Don’t you like Rider as a name? The rider of storms, the rider of seas? No one knows how poetic I am: they look as I go by and whistle and say, there goes a good-looking blonde of the smart kind not the silly kind, and they have no idea at all what I’m really about. I like that. One day I’m going to give it all up and be a poet. When Hector’s old and past it I’m going to push him under a bus. I can’t abide dribbly old men. When I’m old Rider will look after me. He loves me. He only clambers about underground to make me notice him. What he wants me to say is what I’ve never said: “I worry about you, Rider.” But I don’t. How can I say it; it isn’t true.’

  Miss Jacobs raised an eyebrow. Morna Casey looked at her watch.

  ‘I have a meeting at three thirty,’ said Morna Casey. ‘I mustn’t let this overrun. I’m on a rather important special project at the moment, you may be interested to know. I’m handling the press over the Artefax scare.’

  Artefax was a new vitamin-derivative drug hailed as a wonder cure for addictions of all kinds, manufactured by Maltman and considered by some to be responsible for a recent spate of monstrous births – though Maltman’s lawyers had argued successfully in the courts that, as the outbreaks were clustered, the Chernobyl fallout must be to blame – particles of caesium entering the water table in certain areas and not in others.

  ‘So you’ll understand it’s all go at the moment,’ said Morna Casey. ‘We have to restore public confidence. Artefax is wonderful, and absolutely harmless – you can even take it safely through pregnancy; you’re not addicted to anything, and all it does is have a mild tonic effect. Our main PR drive is through the doctors.’

  Morna Casey was silent for a little. Miss Jacobs stared out of the window.

  ‘Well yes,’ said Morna Casey presently. ‘I see. If I changed my job the dreams would stop. But if I changed my job I wouldn’t worry about the dreams because it wouldn’t matter about the job, would it. All the same I might consider a shift in career direction. I don’t really like working for the same outfit as Hector. It does rather cramp my style – not that he can do much about it. I do as I like. He knows how boring he is; what can he expect?’

  ‘There’s a good opening coming up,’ said Morna Casey, ‘or so I’ve heard on the grapevine, as head of PR at Britnuc; that’s the new nuclear energy firm. I think I’d feel quite at home with radioactivity: it’s like nicotine and Artefax – in reasonable quantities it has this gentle tonic effect. Of course in large quantities I daresay it’s different. But so’s anything. Like aspirin. One does you good, two cure your headache, twenty kill you. In the Soviet Union the spas offer radioactive mud baths. Radon-rich, they say. They’re very popular.’

  ‘Thank you for the consultation, Dr – sorry, Miss – Jacobs. I won’t be needing to see you again. I’m much obliged to you for your time and patience: though of course one can always do this kind of thing for oneself. If I ever give up PR I might consider setting up as a therapist. No planning permission required! A truly jolly pièce de rich gâteau, if you ask me.’

  And Morna Casey adjusted her short taupe skirt over her narrow hips and walked out, legs long on high heels, and Miss Jacobs, whose hand had been hovering over her appointment book, put down her pencil.

  1986

  Chew You Up and Spit You Out

  A cautionary tale

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the house to the journalist, in the manner of interviewees everywhere, ‘it is rather a triumph, after all I’ve been through!’ The journalist, a young woman, couldn’t quite make out the words for the stirring of the ivy on the chimney and the shirring of doves in the dovecote. She was not of the kind to be responsive to the talk of houses – and who would want to be who wished to sleep easy at night? – but she heard enough to feel there was some kind of story here. She’d come with a photographer from House & Garden: they were doing a feature on the past retold, on rescued houses, though to tell the truth she thought all such houses were boring as hell. Let the past look after the past was her motto. She was twenty-three and beautiful and lived in a Bauhaus flat with a composer boyfriend who paid the rent and preferred something new to something old any day.

  ‘Let’s just get it
over with,’ she said, ‘earn our living and leg it back to town.’

  But she stood over the photographer carefully enough, to make sure he didn’t miss a mullioned window, thatched outhouse, Jacobean beam or Elizabethan chimney: the things that readers loved to stare at: she was conscientious enough. She meant to get on in the world. She tapped her designer boot on original flagstone and waited while he changed his film, and wondered why she felt uneasy, and what the strange muffled breathing in her ears could mean. That’s how houses speak, halfway between a draught and a creak, when they’ve been brought back to life by the well-intentioned, rescued from decay and demolition. You hear it sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night in an old house, and think the place is haunted. But it’s not, it’s just the house itself speaking.

  The journalist found Harriet Simley making coffee in the kitchen. The original built-in dresser had been stripped and polished, finished to the last detail, though only half the floor was tiled, and where it was not the ground was murky and wet. Harriet’s hair fell mousy and flat around a sweet and earnest face.

  ‘No coffee for me,’ said the journalist. ‘Caffeine’s so bad for one! What a wonderful old oak beam!’ The owners of old houses love to hear their beams praised.

  ‘Twenty-three feet long,’ said Harriet proudly. ‘Probably the backbone of some beached man o’ war. Fascinating, the interweaving of military history and our forest story! Of course, these days you can’t get a properly seasoned oak beam over twelve feet anywhere in the country. You have to go to Normandy to find them, and it costs you an arm and a leg. And all our capital’s gone. Still, it’s worth it, isn’t it! Bringing old houses back to life!’ The girl nodded politely and wrote it all down, though she’d heard it a hundred times before, up and down the country; of cottages, farmhouses, manors, mansions, long houses: ‘Costs you an arm and a leg. Still, it’s worth it. Bringing old houses back to life!’ Spoken by the half-dead, so far as she could see, but then she was of the Bauhaus, by her very nature.

  ‘What’s the matter with your hands?’ the journalist asked, and wished she hadn’t.

  ‘Rheumatoid arthritis, I’m afraid,’ Harriet said. She couldn’t have been more than forty. ‘It was five years before we got the central heating in. Every time we took up a floorboard there’d be some disaster underneath. Well, we got the damp out of the house in the end, but it seems to have got into my hands.’ And she laughed as if it were funny, but the journalist knew it was not. She shuddered and looked at her own city-smooth red-tipped fingers. Harriet’s knuckles stood out on her hands, as if she made a fist against the world, and a deformed fist at that.

  ‘So dark and gloomy in here,’ the journalist thought and made her excuses and went out again into the sun to look up at the house, but it didn’t warm her: no, the shudder turned into almost a shiver, she didn’t know why. The house spoke to her, but the breeze in the creepers which fronded the upstairs windows distorted the words. Or perhaps the Bauhaus had made her deaf.

  ‘You should have seen me only thirty years ago!’ said the house. ‘What a ruin. I must have fallen asleep. I woke to find myself a shambles. Chimney through the roof, dry rot in the laundry extension, rabbits living in the walls along with the mice, deathwatch beetle in the minstrels’ gallery, the land drains blocked and water pushing up the kitchen tiles, and so overgrown with ivy I couldn’t even be seen from the road. What woke me? Why, a young couple pushing open the front door – how it creaked; enough to wake the dead. They looked strong, young and healthy. They had a Volvo. They came from the city: they had dogs, cats and babies. They’ll do, I thought; it’s better if they come with their smalls: they’ll see to the essentials first. My previous dwellers? They’d been old, so old, one family through generations: they left in their coffins: there was no strength in them; mine drained away. That’s why I fell asleep, not even bothered to shrug off the ivy. I woke only in the nick of time. Well, I thought, can’t let that happen again. So now I put out my charm and lure the young ones in, the new breed from the city, strong and resourceful. They fall in love with me; they give me all their money: but they have no stamina; I kept the first lot twelve years, then they had to go. Pity. But I tripped a small down the back stairs, to punish it for rattling the stained glass in its bedroom door, and it lay still for months, and the parents neglected me and cursed me so I got rid of them. But I found new dwellers soon enough, tougher, stronger, richer, who did for a time. Oh yes, I’m a success story! Now see, even the press takes an interest in my triumph! Journalists, photographers!’ And the house preened itself in the late summer sun, in the glowing evening light.

  ‘I say,’ said the photographer to Julian Simley, as he wheel-barrowed a load of red roof-tiles from the yard to the cider house, ‘you should get the ivy off the chimney; it’ll break down the cement.’ The photographer knew a thing or two – he’d just put in an offer for a house in the country himself. An old rectory: a lot to do to it, of course, but he was a dab hand at DIY, and with his new girlfriend working he could afford to spend a bit. A snip, a snip – and worth twice as much, three times, when he was through. Even the surveyor said so.

  The house read his mind and sang, ‘When we’re through with you, when we’re through with you: you can call yourself an owner, who are but a slave, you who come and go within our walls, for all old houses are the same and think alike,’ and the photographer smiled admiringly up at the doves in the creeper, as they stirred and whirred, and only the journalist shivered and said, ‘There’s something wrong with my ears. I hear music in them, a creaky kind of music, I don’t like it at all.’

  ‘Wax’, said the photographer absently, ‘can sound like that.’

  Julian Simley said, ‘Christ, is that ivy back again? That’s the last straw,’ which is not what you’re supposed to say when you’re telling the press a success story of restoration, or renovation, in return for a hundred-pound fee, which you desperately need, for reclaimed old brick and groceries. ‘I haven’t the head for heights I had.’

  ‘You fool, you fool,’ snarled the house, overhearing. ‘You pathetic weak-backed mortal. Let the ivy grow, will you? Turn me into weeds and landscape? Leave me a heap of rubble, would you! Wretched, poverty-stricken creature: grubbing around for money! You and your poor crippled wife, who’d rather fit a dresser handle than tile the kitchen floor! I’ve no more patience with you: I’ve finished with you!’ and as Julian Simley stood on a windowsill to open a mullioned pane so the photographer could get the effect of glancing light he wanted, the sill crumbled and Julian fell and his back clicked and there was his disc slipped again, and he lay on the ground, and Harriet rang for the ambulance, and House & Garden waited with them. It was the least they could do.

  ‘He should have replaced the sill,’ thought the photographer, ‘I would have done,’ and the house hugged itself to itself in triumph.

  ‘We can’t manage any longer,’ said Julian to Harriet, as he lay on the ground. ‘It’s no use, we’ll have to sell, even at a loss.’

  ‘It’s not the money I mind about,’ grieved Harriet. ‘It’s just I love this house so much.’

  ‘Don’t you think I do,’ said Julian, and gritted his teeth against the stabs of pain which ran up his legs to his back. He thought this time he’d done some extra-complicating damage. ‘But I get the feeling it’s unrequited love.’ The house sniggered.

  ‘But how will we know the next people will carry on as we have? They’ll cover up the kitchen floor and not let it dry out properly, I know they will.’ Harriet wept. Julian groaned. The ambulance came. The journalist and the photographer drove off.

  ‘You want to know the secret?’ the house shrieked after them. ‘The secret of my success? It’s chew them up and spit them out! One after the other! And I’ll have you next,’ it screamed at the photographer, who looked back at the house as they circled the drive, and thought, ‘So beautiful! I’ll withdraw the offer on the rectory, and make a bid on this one. I reckon I’ll get it cheap, in the
circumstances. That looked like a broken back, not a slipped disc, to me,’ and the house settled back cosily into its excellent, well-drained, sheltered site – the original builders knew what they were doing – and smiled to itself, and whispered to the doves who stirred and whirred their wings in its creepers. ‘Flesh and blood, that’s all. Flesh and blood withers and dies. But a house like me can go on for ever, if it has its wits about it.’

  1988

  Ind Aff

  or

  Out of Love in Sarajevo

  This is a sad story. It has to be. It rained in Sarajevo, and we had expected fine weather.

  The rain filled up Sarajevo’s pride, two footprints set into a pavement, marking the spot where the young assassin Princip stood to shoot the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. (Don’t forget his wife: everyone forgets his wife, the Archduchess.) That happened in the summer of 1914. Sarajevo is a pretty town, Balkan style, mountain-rimmed. A broad, swift, shallow river runs through its centre, carrying the mountain snows away. The river is arched by many bridges and the one nearest the two footprints has been named The Princip Bridge. The young man is a hero in these parts. Not only does he bring in the tourists – look, look, the spot, the very spot! – but by his action, as everyone knows, he lit the spark which fired the timber which caused World War I which crumbled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the crumbling of which made modern Yugoslavia possible. Forty million dead (or was it thirty?), but who cares? So long as he loved his country.

  The river, they say, can run so shallow in the summer it’s known derisively as ‘the wet road’. Today, from what I could see through the sheets of falling rain, it seemed full enough. Yugoslavian streets are always busy – no one stays home if they can help it (thus can an indecent shortage of housing space create a sociable nation) and it seemed that as if by common consent a shield of bobbing umbrellas had been erected two metres high to keep the rain off the streets. But the shield hadn’t worked around Princip’s corner, that was plain.