by Fay Weldon
Pretty little Emma Bovary was more than happy in this company, and many were the tales of love and loss and new determination that were exchanged amongst the women, and many an account of the villainy of men. All were especially fond of Emma, who, being a most imaginative milliner found great favour with the customers, some of whom, being the wives of meat barons, scarcely knew how to arrange a scarf let alone fix a hat.
There was some small trouble amongst the workforce when on one occasion Mr. Rochester came round to buy a grey bonnet, untrimmed, for his wife Jane Eyre, and Emma was found alone in the back room with him, choosing scarlet ribbons. But Emma, reminded that Rochester had in all probability murdered his first wife by pushing her off a roof, agreed not to pursue the matter. Instead, the better to keep her mind off the delights of illicit love, she remembered her role as mother and sent for little Berthe. Charles and Felicite, now having twin sons of their own, were happy enough to see the girl go: she was too like her mother for comfort. Berthe showed considerable musical talent, was enrolled in the New York conservatoire, and within the year had married Lord Henry Ashton of Lammermoor, a baritone. It is thanks to Berthe and Henry’s eldest daughter, a chatty little thing, to whom my grandfather taught the violin, that I come to know so much about Lily Bart’s Hat Shop.
1992
Knock-Knock
‘Knock-knock,’ said the child into the silence. He was eight. The three adults looked up from their breakfast yoghurt, startled. Harry seldom spoke unless spoken to first. He’d seemed happy enough during the meal. The waiter had fetched him a toy from the hotel kitchens, a miniature Power Ranger out of a cereal packet, and he’d been playing with that, taking no apparent notice of a desultory conversation between Jessica his mother, and Rosemary and Bill, his grandparents.
‘Who’s there?’ asked his mother, obligingly.
‘Me,’ said Harry, with such finality that the game stopped there. He was a quiet, usually self-effacing child; blonde, bronzed and handsome.
Perhaps he’d been more aware of the content of their talk than they’d realised. It had of course been coded for his benefit, couched in abstract terms. The importance of fidelity, the necessity of trust, different cultural expectations either side of the Atlantic, and so on: its real subject being the matter in doubt – should Jessica go home to her faithless husband in Hollywood, or stay with her loving parents in the Cotswolds. To forgive or not to forgive, that was the question.
They’d tried to keep the story from the child, hidden newspapers and magazines. It wasn’t a big scandal, just a little one; not on the Hugh Grant scale: nothing like that, not enough to make TV, just enough to make them all uncomfortable, leave home and take temporary refuge in this staid and stately country hotel, with its willowed drive, its swan-stocked lake, its Laura Ashley interior, where reporters couldn’t find them to ask questions. If you answered the questions it was bad, if you didn’t answer them it was worse. The solution was simply not to be there at all.
The story, the embryo scandal, goes thus. Young big-shot Hollywood producer Aaron Scheffer sets off on holiday with English wife of ten years, Jessica, and eight-year-old son Harry, to spend the summer with her parents. At the airport he gets a phone call. His film’s been brought forward, its budget tripled; rising star Maggie Ives has agreed to play the lead. Aaron shouldn’t leave town. He stays, wife and child go. Well, these things happen. Two weeks in and there’s a story plus pics in an international show-biz magazine: Aaron Scheffer intimately entwined behind a palm tree on a restaurant balcony. Who with? Maggie Ives. They’re an item. Other newspapers pick up the story.
No air conditioning in the grandparental home in England: how could it ever work? Why try? The place is impossible to seal. Too many chimneys: too many people in the habit of flinging up windows and opening doors, even when it’s hotter out than in. You’d never stop them. And it’s hot, so hot. A heat wave.
Aaron calls Jessica, much distressed. It’s a set-up, don’t believe a word of it. I have enemies. Jessica replies of course I don’t believe it, stay cool, hang loose, I trust you, I love you.
A chat show runs a piece on spouse infidelity: featuring the phoney airport call; how to get the wife out of town without her suspecting a thing. Ha ha ha.
The heat may be good. It has an anaesthetising effect. Or perhaps Jessica’s just stunned. She cannot endure her parents’ pity: the implicit ‘I told you so.’
Harry’s happy in the grandparental English garden. He is studying the life cycle of frogs. He helps tadpoles out of their pond, his little fingers beneath their limp back legs, helping them on their way. Once tadpoles breathe air, he says, everything about them stiffens. Jessica feels there’s no air around to breathe, it’s too hot.
Best friend and neighbour Kate, back in LA, calls to say Jessica, you have to believe it, you need to know, everyone else knows, Aaron’s been seeing Maggie for months. That’s why she’s got the part.
Jessica can’t even cry. Her eyes are as parched as the garden. Forget tragedy, forget betrayal, how could she ever live in a land without air conditioning?
Phone calls fly. Her father Bill frets about the cost. Aaron says not to believe a word Kate says. Kate’s a woman scorned. By whom? Why, Aaron, the minute Jessica’s back is turned. Come home now, Jessica, pleads Aaron, I love you.
* * *
‘I’ll think about it,’ says Jessica. She asks her mother whether it’s safer to trust a husband or a best friend? ‘Neither,’ says her mother. ‘And Aaron probably only wants you home for a photo-opportunity, to keep the studio quiet.’
The first reporter turns up on the doorstep. Is she hurt? How does it feel? He has other photographs here: they’d like to publish with her comments. Will she stand by her man? Doors slam. No comment. More phone calls.
Aaron confesses: words twinkle across continents and seas. ‘Maggie and I lunched. We drank. We shouldn’t have. She asked me back to her place. I went. I shouldn’t have. We succumbed. We shouldn’t have. We were both upset. I was missing you. I felt you’d put your parents before me. Afterwards we both regretted it. I took her to a restaurant so there’d be no embarrassment, so we could get back to being friends, colleagues, nothing more than that.’
‘And there just happened to be photographers around,’ Jessica drawls. Heat slows words.
‘Her boyfriend spies on her.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ says Jessica. She’s melting. But perhaps that too is just the heat. ‘What was Maggie so upset about?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ says Aaron. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘That’s a good sign,’ says Jessica. ‘But if you two have to work together, and I can see you can, supposing she gets upset about something else? What then?’
‘Why should she?’ asks Aaron, ‘now she has the part she wants. Please will you come home tomorrow?’
‘No,’ says Jessica. She feels mean and angry. She’d rather he’d gone on lying. She wants him punished. ‘Then I’ll come and collect you,’ he says. ‘Meet me at Heathrow.’ She puts the phone down.
More reporters on the step. The family wait for nightfall, then slip away to the hotel. Jessica calls Aaron. He’s already left for England, says his secretary. Everyone has three days off. Maggie Ives is sick. Aaron’s due at Heathrow at eleven-thirty, Friday.
Now it’s eight-thirty and Friday. And Harry is saying, ‘Knock-knock, who’s there, me!’ And her parents are saying, if she hears them correctly, because they’ll never say it outright, don’t go to him, stay here with us. Crisis time.
And here was home, where no one said anything outright, so at least everything was open to change. Perhaps she hated Hollywood. Perhaps she hated all America. Perhaps the only people you could trust were family; blood relatives; and husbands weren’t even blood relatives. Other people had serial marriages, why shouldn’t she?
If only this hotel, which claimed to have air conditioning but had only a hideous roaring box in a corner of the dining-room, was more American
: if only her child didn’t knock at her conscience, saying ‘Remember me?’ then she could think.
Aaron was in the air now, somewhere up above the frozen seas or the hard unyielding land; on wings of love or self-interest, how could she know which? Knock-knock, who’s there? God or the Devil?
Harry put down his spoon and asked politely if he could leave the table. Rosemary said yes before Jessica could speak. He must go to his room to put on sun block first. Harry said OK.
Bill remarked that he was an unusually good child. Jessica said yes, but she’d had him checked out with a therapist, who’d said no problem, except he might be overly mature for his age: Rosemary observed that Hollywood must be a dreadful place to rear a child: either vulgar wealth in Bel Air or shoot-outs in McDonald’s, and therapists everywhere. Bill said any child was best reared in green fields in a gentle climate, Jessica should get a cottage in the village near them. Presumably Aaron would look after her financing. They’d be near, as families should be, but would of course respect each other’s privacy. And so on.
Harry was now out in the garden: the other side of the long French windows. He threw a ball against the wall, hard: it bounced back off uneven bricks, he’d leap to catch it. Hurl again. The garden was remarkably pretty. English pretty. The high wall was made of slim, ancient, muted red bricks, beneath which were hollyhocks and delphiniums, pleasantly tiered. Drought restrictions were in place, but Bill said he’d looked out of his window in the early hours and seen the gardener using the hose.
‘Harry’s got a good throw,’ said Bill. ‘He’ll be good at cricket.’
‘Or baseball,’ said Jessica. Rosemary groaned. Jessica understood, suddenly, what was obvious but she hadn’t seen: that she was their only child, Harry their only grandchild. Of course her parents wanted her back in the country. She could hardly look to them for impartial advice. Thud, thud, thud, against the wall. Knock-knock. What about me? Father, lying but loving, v. doting grandparents? Broken home v. green fields and no air conditioning?
‘We both like Aaron,’ observed Rosemary, ‘you know that, but there’s no denying he’s ambitious!’
What did her mother mean? That no truly ambitious man would put up with Jessica? That she wasn’t bright, beautiful or starry enough for Aaron? That it was a miracle he’d taken her on in the first place? So long as Aaron was the one persuading her to stay while she tried to leave, she could cope. But supposing it went the other way, Aaron decided he preferred Maggie Ives to Jessica? How would she survive then? She was playing games she might regret.
‘I could take the car and drive to meet him,’ said Jessica to her parents. ‘He and I could at least talk. I owe him that. I’d just about make it to the airport in time.’
‘I’d have to drive you,’ said Bill. ‘My car has gears. You can only drive an automatic.’
‘Bill can’t possibly drive you,’ said Rosemary. ‘It’s much too hot. His heart won’t stand it. We don’t have air-conditioned cars over here, which is just as well for the ozone layer. And I daresay you think you could afford a driver but where would you find one at such short notice?’
Such silly practicalities! But still they stood in her way. It was Fate. Better, Jessica thought, to stick by her original decision. So public and powerful an insult from husband to wife could not be excused, and that was that. All her friends would agree. The waiter poured more coffee. ‘Good to see the little fellow enjoying himself,’ he remarked. Everyone nodded politely.
Harry came in from the garden.
‘If I died,’ he said, ‘you’d forget me at once.’
‘We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t,’ exclaimed Jessica. ‘We all love you so much!’
And even Bill and Rosemary, though talk of such emotion came with difficulty to their lips, assured their grandchild of undying and unflinching love.
‘No,’ said Harry, refusing their comfort. ‘I’m right about this. I’m just not important to you. In a couple of hours you’d forget all about me. In fact if I were out of your sight for just ten minutes you wouldn’t remember who I was.’
And he bowed his head beneath the shower of protests and went back into the garden, to his ball. Thud, thud, thud.
Jessica stood up and said, ‘Dad, give me the keys. I’m going to meet Aaron. I’m going to bring him back here, you’re going to be nice to him; then we fly back to Hollywood. I’m not leaving Aaron, I’m not divorcing him, I love him. And I have to think of Harry. Every good boy deserves a father; we’ve made him so dreadfully insecure. I hadn’t realised.’
Bill handed over the keys.
‘We all have to think of the children,’ he said.
‘We abide by your decision,’ said his wife. ‘For Harry’s sake.’
‘Tell Harry I’ll be back with his father,’ said Jessica. ‘Tell him to stop worrying.’
Bill and Rosemary watched as the car lurched and shuddered on the gravel drive while Jessica got the hang of the gears. Then it shot off into the heat haze, grating and grinding, out of the shade of the willows into the sun. The waiter hovered. Harry stopped throwing and came to stand beside them, watching.
‘Where’s Mom gone?’
‘Mummy,’ corrected Rosemary. ‘She’s gone to meet your father.’
‘Um,’ said Harry, approving but not especially so. Then he said, ‘Knock-knock.’
‘Who’s there?’ asked Rosemary.
‘Told you so!’ said Harry. ‘Forgotten me already! Ten minutes and see, you’d forgotten all about me. Gotcha!’
And Harry laughed uproariously, cracking up, bending over a gold and damask chair to contain his stomach and his mirth, making far more noise than they’d ever heard him make before. And the waiter was bent over laughing too, holding his middle.
‘I told him that one,’ said the waiter. ‘Poor little feller. He needed a laugh! We all do, this time of year.’
When Harry had finished laughing he went serenely back into the garden, for more throwing, thudding, catching. The heat seemed to affect him not one whit.
1993
Wasted Lives
They’re turning the City into Disneyland. They’re restoring the ancient facades and painting them apple green, firming up the medieval gables and picking out the gargoyles in yellow. They’re gold-leafing the church spires. They’ve boarded up the more stinking alleys until they get round to them and as State property becomes private the shops which were always there are suddenly gone, as if simply painted out. In the eaves above Benetton and The Body Shop cherubs wreathe pale cleaned-stone limbs, and even the great red McDonald’s ‘M’ has been especially muted to rosy pink for this its Central European edition. Don’t think crass commerce rules the day as the former communist world opens its arms wide to the seduction of market forces: the good taste of the new capitalist world leaps yowling into the embrace as well, a fresh-faced baby monster, with its yearning to prettify and make the serious quaint, to turn the rat into Mickey Mouse and the wolf into Goofy.
Milena and I walked through knots of tourists towards the famous Processional Bridge, circa 1395. I had always admired its sooty stamina, its dismal persistence, through the turbulence of rising and falling empire. It was my habit to stay with Milena when I came to the City. I’d let Head Office book me into an hotel, to save official embarrassment, then spend my nights with her and some part of my days if courtesy so required. I was fond of her but did not love her, or only in the throes of the sexual excitement she was so good at summoning out of me. She made excellent coffee. If I sound disagreeable and calculating it is because I am attempting to speak the truth about the events on the Processional Bridge that day, and the truth of motive seldom warms the listener’s heart. I am generally accepted as a pleasant and kindly enough person. My family loves me, even my wife Joanna, though she and I live apart and are no longer sexually connected. She doesn’t have to love me.
Milena is an archivist at the City Film Institute. I work for a US film company, from their London office. I suppose, if you add
it up, I have spent some three months in the City, on and off, over the last five years, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Great Retreat of Communism, a tide sweeping back over shallow sand into an obscure distance. Some three months in all spent with Milena.
Her English was not as good as she thought. Conversation could be difficult. Today she was not dressed warmly enough. It was June but the wind was cold. Perhaps she thought her coat was too shabby to stand the inspection of the bright early summer sun. I was accustomed to seeing her either naked or dressed in black, as was her usual custom, a colour, or lack of it, which suited the gaunt drama of her face, but today, like her City, she wore pastel colours. I wished it were not so.
Beat your head not into the Berlin Wall, but into cotton wool, machine-pleated in interesting baby shades, plastic-wrapped. Suffocation takes many forms.
‘You should have brought your coat,’ I said.
‘It’s so old,’ she said. ‘I am ashamed of it.’
‘I like it,’ I said.
‘It’s old,’ she repeated, dismissively. ‘I would rather freeze.’ For Milena the past was all dreary, the future all dread and expectation. A brave face must be put on everything. She smiled up at me. I am six foot three inches and bulky: she was all of five and a half foot, and skinny with it. The jumper was too tight: I could see her ribs through the stretched fabric, and the nipples too. In the old days she would never have allowed that to happen. She would have let her availability be known in other, more subtle ways. Her teeth were bad: one in the front broken, a couple grey. When she wore black their eccentricity seemed a matter of course; a delight even. Now she wore green they were yellowy, and seemed a perverse tribute to years of neglect, poverty and bad diet. Eastern teeth, not Western. I wished she would not smile, and trust me so.
The Castle still looks down over the City, and the extension to that turreted tourist delight, the long low stone building with its rows of identical windows, tier upon tier of them, blank and anonymous, to demonstrate the way brute force gives way to the subtler but yet more stifling energies of bureaucracy. You can’t do this, you can’t live like that, not because I have a sword to run you through, but because Our Masters frown on it. And your papers have not risen to the top of the pile.