Mischief

by Fay Weldon

  During the last eight weeks I have gone at least twice a week to the hairdresser. Nothing to prevent me blow-drying my own hair: it’s just at such times you feel the need to be ministered unto. As if it takes a bevy of supporting beauties just to get one woman to meet her lover! As if she carries with her the concentrated energy of women everywhere – their desires, their fulfilment, not just her own. Takes a dozen girls to adorn one bride.

  * * *

  My stylist Joanna had just come back from New York with tales of high life and a mind generally at the end of its tether. The kind of stories that make you think you’d better defect: that they do things better in Moscow. I can only say that kind of thing to you, Miss Jacobs; husband Roland, well, ex-(possibly) husband Roland, being so politically serious. He married me the better to despise my frivolity. He told me only this morning that in fact he now despises me so thoroughly he is obliged to divorce me: I’ll telephone home – home? – when I’ve finished this session with you and if there’s an answer he hasn’t left and he’s still my husband, and if there isn’t, he’s gone and he’s not. Never a dull moment. I’ve been putting off calling home or ex-home all day. It’s all right if you keep moving and keep talking – it’s only with stillness and silence that the panic sets in.

  Now what Joanna said – her hair is so long she can sit on it, though I can’t think why she’d want to – was that in New York cannibalism is all the rage. Not whole people – parts of people; amputated limbs and so forth. At least I hope that’s what she said. I do have this incapacity sometimes to hear what is actually being spoken. In retrospect, I can hardly have been hearing with any accuracy what Anton – that’s my love, my lover: that is to say, my love, my ex-lover as from precisely seven days ago – was saying, or the end of the affair would not have been quite so unexpected; from bed to nothing in ten swift minutes. Anyway, according to Joanna, human flesh, either discarded bits of body, or – I suppose we have to face it – whole bodies, and tender young bodies at that, especially acquired for the occasion in some appalling and unthinkable fashion, are selling in New York for $2,000 a pound, and served stewed at all the best parties. And the other currently fashionable epicurean delicacy, Joanna says, is the brains of living monkeys, eaten with special long-handled silver teaspoons. Just tether your monkey and slice off the top of its skull and there you are.

  I tried not to think about it. I thought about Anton instead, about wrapping my legs round his thin body and pleasuring him as he pleasured me. About a curl here and a streak there and whether a fringe is really what I need: if the hair is back from the face the character may indeed show, but was it character Anton wanted? I doubted it. And, when it came to it, what he wanted was a space in his head filled; some little wounded part made good, some little chilliness warmed. He had fun with the small words that indicated love, concern, possession, even permanence: he liked me to listen to them. He knew, I fear, that I was waiting and hoping for them –

  And I? I wanted everything. I can’t help it. Men run away from me in droves, as others come running towards me. I am the far end of the swimming pool: the side you have to touch before turning and swimming back. As fast as you can towards: as fast as you can away.

  Doesn’t it frighten you, Miss Jacobs, to think how soon we’re going to die? No, nothing frightens you, because your heart is pure, your soul is good.

  Monkeys’ brains and long silver teaspoons. Shall I describe Anton to you? His beautiful haggard face, his lean body, his brilliant eyes, his quicksilver mind, his charm? Dear God, his worldly importance! Anton never walked if he could run. Yet I’m sure his wife saw him with more accuracy than I ever did: she would see him as I see Roland; as sheer living, walking, snoring, predictable, day-to-day folly. She would see in Anton a man re-running, decade after decade, without any alteration but with much surface embellishment, five glorious years of youth. A man for ever between twenty-eight and thirty-three, as life and event rolled by. Yes, of course, Miss Jacobs, he had a wife. Has a wife. Why are you surprised? Men like Anton have wives. In this brave new cannibalistic world of ours, all proper men are married, all proper women too. It’s our prudence, our reality, our safe familiarity while we nibble and guzzle the private parts of comparative strangers. Oh strange new wondrous delicacies!

  I try to forget amputated limbs at $2,000 a pound; I try to forget the monkeys’ brains, as I try to forget, as my husband can’t, the missiles gathering, forget the whole frightening insanity of the world. I try to relish only this: the conjunction of man with woman, in the face of common sense and decency.

  I tell you I loved him, Miss Jacobs: it is how I sanctified disgrace: how I justified the dangerous absurdity of our behaviour: this running through the machine of a different and forbidden tape. I set up this terrible, painful affair, the little short-lived merry haphazard affair, as an actual alternative, an actual radical alternative, Miss Jacobs, and not as the optional extra that Anton saw it to be. I took it seriously. It was my escape route from death.

  * * *

  And yet how many times have I not myself seen my accomplice in sex as an optional extra, the affair as a trivial in-and-out relationship, when the man has believed it to be world-shaking, shattering and permanent. Ah, the biter bit!

  Why Alaska, you ask suddenly? Are you keeping up with me? Why did I tell you I was going to Alaska? Because Alaska is cold, cold, Miss Jacobs, and one senses the ice already encroaching upon the fire, before it is even lit.

  Because my mother used to make Baked Alaska, a fundamentally boring dish. Whale-fat ice cream (in her case) encased in meringue made from a packet; contents: dried egg white, stalibiser, emulsifier, permitted (who says?) artificial flavouring and colouring, put in the oven the better to shock the palate with cold and hot – nothing else is going to.

  Anton was great on restaurants; accused me of being unsophisticated because I would not spend £80 on an indifferent meal for two; would rather give it to charity or feed the ducks. He would spend $2,000, I bet you, on a spoonful of the brains of living monkeys, should opportunity present.

  Baked Alaska. My mother. My mother served Baked Alaska and I should be grateful. She was trying to tell us something, I think. Life is not what you think. This warm cosy meringue will turn into cold ice cream and set your metal teeth-fillings zinging!

  Alaska again. Yes. Well, Anton was warm outside and cold inside. He was not swayed by feeling. By a passing curiosity, I think, because I’d got my name in the papers and he loves celebrity. Didn’t I tell you that? I won the Secretary of the Year Award. Yes, little me. I can book-keep like an angel, write shorthand like a dervish, take board room minutes like a High Priestess. I could also stand on my head and run a multi-national corporation if I wanted to, only I can’t be bothered. (That’s what you feel like when you’ve won an Award – it goes to your head.) It was when I’d told Anton I could do his job better than he could – Anton is a director of an oil company, did I explain that? – he became a little cool, and then I complained of his coolness and he became colder, and then I wept and said I loved him, which of course was fatal and the end of the affair. He is the kind of man who must woo and never win. And what am I when it comes to it? Miss PA of the year.

  Life, love, Miss Jacobs. Love is all we have left, and its excitements, while (as Roland keeps reminding me – you know how involved he is in the peace movement; he is so busy loving peace he has no time to love me: no wonder I run around with other men) while, as I say, the nuclear missiles gather, from Alaska to the Western Australian desert. Love. Sex. Missiles. Penises. Yes, of course there is phallic imagery here, Miss Jacobs; did you doubt it? A penetrative fear. I am the victim who invites attack. If I did not invite attack, the missiles would not gather; the men would pass by prudently; the world would be at peace. Mea culpa. Only, Miss Jacobs, this is the energy that makes the world go round, gets the children born: I can’t control it. Takes more than me.

  * * *

  I have lied and cheated and lost over a tri
vial affair of the heart – because my heart was involved and Anton’s was not, and that is the nub of the humiliation I now feel – and what can any of this matter? ‘I cannot feel,’ Anton said to me, ‘about you the way you clearly feel about me. I’m sorry but there it is. I did not mean to hurt you.’

  But he did. It’s better to feast on the living than the dead. The taste is better. That’s why I got fed upon. But this may be the last time. What I feel like now, Miss Jacobs, is the monkey. I tethered myself with my own desire. I invited Anton under my skin with his scalpel blade: slice! he went; oh sharp, sharp – and then with a long teaspoon he supped off my living brains, trying them out for flavour and then, finding them really not good enough after all for his epicurean fancy, he spat them out with disdain. And the monkey chatters a little, automatically, and dies. I shall go home to my husband now and calm him down. I bet you anything he’s still there.

  1988

  GUP

  or

  Falling in Love in Helsinki

  You’ll never guess what happened to me in Helsinki. How my life changed, when I was there last October. Let me tell you! The trees in that much-islanded, much- forested Northern country – you’ve never seen so many islands, so much forest, so low and misty and large an autumn sun – were just on the turn; the rather boring universal green giving up and suddenly glowing into reds and yellows and browns. ‘Ruska’ is what the Finns call this annual triumph of variety over uniformity; something so dramatic they even have this special name for it. It is, I suppose, the last flaring surge of summer: like a woman of fifty who throws out the black shoes she’s worn all her life and shoes herself in greens and pinks, feeling she’d better make the best of things while she can. Not that I’m fifty, in case you’re wondering, I’m twenty-nine; but twenty-nine can feel pretty old. Older, I imagine, than fifty, because around thirty the tick-tock of the biological clock can sound pretty loud in a woman’s ear.

  My mother wants me to stay home, get married, have children.

  ‘Settle down, Jude,’ she’d plead. ‘It’s what I want for you.’

  ‘I can’t think why,’ I’d say. ‘You never did.’

  ‘That’s different,’ she’d say, and pour another whisky and light up her cigar. My mother is a professional golf coach, and has been ever since my father walked out twenty-five years ago. She had to do something to earn a living. She’s a healthy and athletic woman, though she must be over sixty, and men are still for ever knocking at her door, though she doesn’t often let them in. The whisky and cigar syndrome is no problem (or only to my sister Chris). I see it as just my mother’s rather old-fashioned way of saying to a man, ‘I’m as good as you. What do I want you for?’

  ‘Christ,’ I say to my sister, ‘Mother’s whisky is always well watered. The cigar goes out after ten seconds. What are you worrying about?’ But Chris is a nurse. She was seven when my father left. I was four.

  My mother’s determination that I should settle down seems to me a fine example of GUP. What do I mean by GUP? It’s the Great Universal Paradox which rules our lives. See it at work in any obstetric ward, at the very beginning of things. There you’ll find a woman who only ever wanted a baby but hers was stillborn, and another who’s just had a living baby she doesn’t want, and someone in for a sterilisation and another for a termination, and another with a threatened miscarriage, and another resting up before sextuplets, having taken too much fertility drug – and all will be weeping. All want different things so passionately; and nature takes no notice at all of what they want. Nature just rumbles on insanely, refining the race.

  What you want you can’t have: what you do have, you don’t want. That’s GUP.

  * * *

  When I arrived in Helsinki I was in love with Andreas Anders, who didn’t love me. And I was loved by Tony Schuster, whom I didn’t love. My loving of Andreas Anders loomed large in my life, and had done so for six years. Tony Schuster loving me, which he had for all of seven days, meant to me next to nothing; that’s the way GUP goes. Andreas Anders not loving me made me feel fat and stupid: so if Tony Schuster was capable of loving someone as fat and stupid as me, what did that make Tony Schuster? Some sort of wimp? In other words, as famously spoken by Marx (not Karl, but the third brother) tearing up the long-sought invitation to join – ‘Who wants to belong to a club of which I’m a member?’ GUP.

  Finland is just across a strip of sea from the Soviet Union, though the government is of a rather different kind and in Finland women seem to run everything, whereas in Russia it’s the men. Finland is noble but Russia is exciting. Little Finnish children always look so healthy, bright-eyed, well-mittened and properly fed to keep out the cold. Yes, yes, I know. I’m broody. Bright, bright clothes they wear, in Helsinki. Terrifically fashionable. Lots of suede, so soft it looks and acts like linen.

  We were in Helsinki to make a six-part thriller called Lenin in Love for BBC TV. Helsinki’s Great Square is the same period, same proportions, same size as Moscow’s Red Square, so it gets used by film companies a great deal. Filming in Red Square itself is always a hassle: there’s a lot of worried security men about and they like to read the script and object if it says anything detrimental about the Soviet Union – and the script usually does: that being the whole point of cold-war thrillers. Their wrongness, our rightness. The queue for Lenin’s tomb is always getting into shot, and you can hardly ask the punters to move on, when they’ve railed all the way in from Tashkent or Samarkand to be there. So off everyone goes to Helsinki to film the Moscow bits. Doctor Zhivago was made in Finland.

  Andreas Anders is the Director of Lenin in Love. Tony Schuster is the cameraman. I’m the PA. I have a degree in Politics and Economics and moved over from Research to Production five years ago; seeing I had a better chance of being close to Andreas Anders. You’d think a bright girl like me would think about something other than love, but at twenty-nine it gets you, it gets you! Twenty-nine years old and no children or live-in-lover, let alone a husband. Not that I actually wanted any of those things. In the film and TV world there’s not all that much permanent in-living. You just have to pack up and go, when the call comes, even when you’re in the middle of scrambling his breakfast eggs. Or he, yours. Men tend to do the cooking, these days, in the circles in which I live. Let’s not say ‘live’. Let’s say ‘move’.

  I’d been the researcher on Andreas Anders’ first film. I was twenty-three then and straight out of college. It was a teledrama called Mary’s Son, about a woman’s fertility problems. It was during the first week of filming – Andreas took me along with him: he said he needed a researcher on set though actually he wanted me in his bed – that I both developed my theory on GUP and fell in love with him. At the end of the second week Andreas fell in love with his star, Caroline Christopherson, the girl who was playing Mary. And I was courteously and instantly dismissed from his bed. Nightmare time. I’d got all through college repelling all boarders: now this.

  But Andreas Anders! His face is pale and haunted: he has wide, kind, set-apart grey eyes, and he’s tall, and broad-shouldered. He has long, fine hands, and what could I do? I loved him. That he should look at me, little me, in the first place! Pick me out from all the others? Even for a minute, let alone a week, let alone a fortnight, what a marvel! At least when he fell for Caroline Christopherson it was serious. They got married. And now she’s world-famous and plays the lead in big budget movies, and is a box-office draw, which irritates Andreas, since he’s so obviously the one with the talent, the creativity, and the brains: Caroline just has star quality. When it gets bad for Andreas, why there I am in bed with him again and he’s telling me all about it. They have a child, Phoebe, who gets left behind with nannies. Andreas doesn’t like that either. I don’t say, ‘But you’re the one doing the leaving too,’ because I seldom say to him what I really think. That’s what this one-sided love does to you. Turns you into an idiot. I hate myself but I’m tongue-tied.

  How can I compete with C.C., as he call
s her? That kind of film-starry quality is real enough: a kind of glowing magnetism: a way of moving – just a gesture of a hand, the flick of an eye – which draws other eyes to itself. I don’t look too bad, I tell myself. Though I suppose where C.C. looks slim I just look sturdy. Both our hair frizzes out all over the place, but hers shines at the same time as frizzing. I do not know how that effect is achieved. If I did, friend, I would let you know. I look more intelligent than she does, but that’s not the point. On the contrary. Andreas Anders once complained I always looked judgemental. That was when we were doing a studio play up at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios, Light from the Bedroom. My first PA job. C.C. was giving birth to little Phoebe in Paris while we were taping in Birmingham. Andreas couldn’t leave the show: well, how could he? He and I stayed at the Holiday Inn. He is the most amazing lover.

  I don’t let on how much I care. I pretend it means nothing to me. If he thought it hurt, he’d stay clear of me. He doesn’t mean to be unkind. I just act kind of light and worldly. I don’t want to put him off. Would you? GUP again! If you love them, don’t let them know it. ‘I love you’ is the great turn-off to the uncommitted man.

  And now here’s Tony Schuster saying ‘I love you’ to me, publicly, leaning down from his dolly as he glides about in the misty air of Helsinki’s Great Square. The mist’s driving the lighting man crazy. The scenes are intended to be dreamlike, but all prefer the man-made kind of mist to the one God has on offer. Man’s is easier to control.

  ‘Let’s leave this life,’ Tony says. ‘Let’s run off together to a Desert Island.’