by Fay Weldon
‘Now I must be off,’ she said. ‘In Holland we take Christmas Eve seriously.’
We made phone calls. We said don’t expect us tonight, we’d been delayed, we’d be in touch when we knew more. There were plates of free food in the bar, but I wasn’t hungry, not even for little marzipan cakes with windmills imprinted on the chocolate. Chris gnawed a chicken leg. Our numbers came up. There was one room left, a double: they gave it to Chris and me. Everyone else would have to sleep in armchairs and sofas in the lobby. I said to Chris, ‘Please can we give the room to them,’ meaning the young couple, and he looked at them and he looked at me and said ‘Okay.’ He is not a man of many words. They went upstairs, not touching. We slept and partly slept and outside the storm died down.
In the morning everyone said ‘Happy Christmas,’ to each other, and there was big notice up with an arrow saying ‘Yuletide breakfast this way,’ and there was, too. Fresh bread and good coffee and fine eggs. The young couple came down from their bedroom. They had made it up. They leant into each other and smiled soppily at everyone. Chris looked in his pocket and handed them the ring. He had actually stopped to pick it up. ‘I kept it safely,’ he said. ‘I’d have given it to Oxfam.’
The young couple leant into each other in the Cityhopper, the Fokker 70, all the way home. An oil seal had been mended. We had missed Christmas Eve goose and the hire car depot was closed, but my son-in-law would pick us up and we’d be in time for Christmas lunch. We even had the presents with us.
‘Look at you!’ said Chris, as we disembarked into brilliant morning sun. Thor doesn’t have much pull down here in the old West Country. ‘You’re even smarter than a peacock, nicer than a mother hen, and not one bit like the turkey,’ and the world seemed pretty ideal to me.
2003
Why Did She Do That?
Sooner or later all roads lead to Schiphol Airport, if only for an hour or so, on the way from here to there, in transit. It is a vast place. Today we perched on our high stools at the oyster bar where Zones C and D meet. My husband had a new-season herring and a glass of beer, and I had a brown shrimp sandwich and a modest glass of white wine. After that we planned to do our usual thing and go to the art exhibition in the new Schiphol extension of the Rijksmuseum, situated where Zone E meets Zone F. The exhibits change every month or so, and there is always some new skating scene, some famous soldier on a horse, some soothing Dutch interior to be seen, some long dead artist’s glimpse of the love and trust that exists within families, or between mankind and nature. Thus fortified, we would fly on to Oslo, or Copenhagen, or on occasion further afield, along those curving, separating lines on the KLM map – Bombay, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Perth, wherever. And if you are lucky, on the return journey the Rijksmuseum exhibits will have been changed, and there will be yet more to see. That is, of course, if delays and security checks allow you the time you expect to have to spare in that strange no-man’s land called Transit.
Lucky, I say, but thinking about it I am not sure. The paintings in the Rijksmuseum pull you out of the trance which sensible people enter while travelling, checking out from real life the moment they step into the airport, coming back to full consciousness only when once more entering their front door. The technical name for the state is de-realisation, or dissociative disorder: too much of it, they say, and you can actually shrink your hippocampus – that part of the brain from which the emotions fan like airline flight paths on the map – never to recover. It might be wiser just to stare at the departure board like anyone else. But I am with my husband, a rare bird who has never in his life experienced a dissociative state, and is enjoying his herring, and I am emerging from mine in preparation for the Rijksmuseum, and am even vaguely wondering whether I am drinking Chardonnay or Chablis, when there is a sudden commotion amongst the throng of passengers.
The herring stall is by a jeweller’s booth, where today there are diamonds on special offer. ‘The new multi-faceted computer cut’ – whatever that might be: presumably habitual buyers of diamonds know. But can there be so many of them as the existence of this shop suggests? So many enthusiastic or remorseful husbands or lovers around, who want to buy peace at any price, and stop off to purchase these tokens of respect and adoration? Though I daresay these days travelling women buy diamonds for themselves.
Next to the diamond boutique is a shop selling luggage, and a booth offering amaryllis bulbs at ten euros for two. As a point-of- sale feature I see they’re using a reproduction of that wonderful early Mondrian painting you can see in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ‘Red Amaryllis with blue background.’ I bet that cost them a bit. It’s midday by now and comparatively quiet in Schiphol: few customers and lots of staff, like a church when they congregation has left after a big service and the clerics are busy snuffing out candles and changing altar cloths. How do these places ever make a living? It defeats me.
A woman and her husband walk past us in the direction of departure gates C5-C57. They are in their forties, I suppose. I notice her because she walks just a little behind him and I tend to do the same, whenever I am with a man. It is a habit which annoys husbands, suggesting as it does too much dependency, too little togetherness, but in a crowded place it seems to me practical. You don’t have to cut a swathe through potentially hostile crowds, and passage can be effected in single file. Couples who face the world side by side, I am prepared to argue, assert coupledom at the expense of efficiency. And it must be remembered that Jacob sent his womenfolk to walk before him when angry neighbours obliged him to return to the family farm – so that the wrath of his brother Esau would fall first upon the wives, and not upon him. As it happened Esau wasn’t in the least angry about the business of the potage and was simply glad to see his long lost brother again. But lagging behind is always safest, in a world scattered with landmines, real and metaphorical. This woman seemed well aware of their existence.
I was hard put to it to decide their nationality; probably British, certainly Northern European. They had a troubled air, as if worried by too much debt and too little time ever to do quite what they wanted to do, always grasping for something out of reach, disappointed by the world, not as young as they’d like to be, or as rich as they deserved to be. I blame the Calvinists and the work ethic: people from the warmer South have easier ways, less conscience and more generous hearts. Something at any rate was wrong. The flight had been delayed, or it was the wrong flight, or they didn’t really want to go where they were going, or they didn’t want to go together, or she was thinking of her lover or he of his mistress. But I didn’t expect what was to happen next.
She was I suppose in her mid-forties: a respectable, rather pudding-faced, high-complexioned, slightly overweight, stolid blonde with good legs and expensive hair piled up untidily in a bun. She was trying too hard. Her skirt was too tight and her heels too high and slim for comfortable travel. She wore a pastel pink suit with large gold buttons. The jacket stretched a little over a middle-aged bosom: that is to day it was no longer perky but bulged rather at the edges. She carried a large shiny black plastic bag. The husband who walked before looked like a not very successful business man: he wore jeans, a tie and a leather jacket, not High Street, but not Armani either, and you felt he would be happier in a suit. His face was set in an expression of dissatisfaction, his hair was thinning: he had the air of one beset by responsibilities and the follies of others. There was no doubt in my mind but that they were married. How does one always know this? We will leave that as a rhetorical question: it being parried only with another, ‘why else would they be together?’ and the import of that exchange is too sad to contemplate.
But I thought of that tender 1641 Van Dyck painting of the newly married pair, William Prince of Orange, aged fifteen, and Mary, Princess Royal of England, aged ten, and took comfort. The weight of the world is upon the young pair, and all the troubles of state and domesticity, and they are brave and beautiful in the face of it. And I sipped my Chardonnay, or Chablis, and watched
the couple walk by, and wondered about their lives. They were on their way, perhaps, to visit a first grandchild and had never approved of the marriage in the first place: or to visit her parents, whom he had never liked. Something like that.
And then one moment she is walking beside him – well, a little behind him, as I say – and he says something and she suddenly falls on her knees before him: it is quite a movement: she seems to shoot out from behind him to arrive at floor level, twisting to face him. It is the same movement you see in the Pinter play, Homecoming, I think it is, the one in which the man proposes to the woman, shooting right across the stage on his knees to entreat her to be his.
A few years back, when Harold Pinter was playing the part himself at the Almeida theatre, he lamented that his knees were no longer up to it. He was sixty. It was at one of those pre-performance meet-the-author sessions. I proposed a solution, namely, that he could alter the part to suit his knees. Just write out the proposal. It was after all his play. Pinter was horrified. The lines were sacrosanct, they had entered into the canon, were no longer Pinter’s to change. They dwelt with other scared texts in some dissociated state of their own: stage directions which had to be served and suffered for, by the writer too. I really admired that.
Picture the scene that day at Schipol. Now the woman wails aloud like an animal, a human bereft, a cow that has lost its calf, hands clasped towards her husband in entreaty; her hair toppled around her face, her red lip-sticked mouth smeary and gaping wide, her back teeth dark with old fashioned fillings. Her heels stick out oddly at the end of lean shins, as if someone had broken her bones, but people’s legs do look like that sometimes when they kneel at the Communion rail. Her skirt is rucked up, too tight and short for this sudden, passionate, noisy activity. She is not like a virgin, beautiful in prayer; she is a fat middle aged woman with thin legs having a mad fit. She is praying to him, beseeching him, have mercy, Lord, have mercy.
At the Oyster Bar glasses pause mid air; people all around pause in their transit and look to see what’s going on. The husband takes a pace or two back, embarrassed and bewildered, and stares at the wife. He is trying to look as if she is nothing to do with him. At least he does not disappear into the crowds. Perhaps she has his passport.
Something stranger still happens. Women staff come out of the shops, first hesitantly, then with more deliberation, towards the source of the noise. There are two young girls with bare midriffs, but most are brisk and elegant older women, in crisp white shirts and black skirts and sensible shoes. They cluster round the wife, they help her to her feet, they brush her down and soothe her, soothing, clucking, sympathising. She stops the wailing: she looks round their kindly, consoling faces. She feels better. She manages a tremulous smile.
An armed policeman approaches: he is dismissed by this Greek chorus of female nurturers with a look, a dismissive flick of a hand, a derisive finger, and he melts away. It occurs to me that the Nurturers, ever more difficult to sight than the Norns, who weave the entrails of Nordic heroes to decide their destiny, or those Mediterranean Furies, who drive us mad with guilt – have actually put in an appearance at Schiphol. Like the Lover at the Gate, unseen until the hour of need, who fills up the bed when the husband departs, these benign creatures turn up in an emergency, so long as it is dire enough. I have always suspected they existed, though unsung in fable, but I had never sighted them until now. And in an airport! I am privileged.
Then, as if this was her destined fate, and this was their purpose, the Nurturers propel her towards her waiting husband. She does not resist. She is tentative and apologetic in demeanour. The expression on his face does not change – ‘I am a man much set about by troubles, bravely enduring.’ The nurturers turn back into shop assistants and disappear behind their counters. The couple walk on as if nothing had happened, towards Zone C, she still just a little behind him. She pushes her hair back into its proper shape, and wobbles on her heels. She may have hurt her knees.
Back at the oyster bar things return to normal. Eating and drinking continue. The crowds close behind them. Schiphol flows on. Lunchtime is approaching: Noise levels are increasing.
‘Why did she do that?’ my husband asks, bewildered. ‘Is she mad?’
‘He may well have driven her mad,’ I say, ‘but she will not have got there on her own.’ And as we make our way to the Rijksmuseum I tell him how I imagine the day has gone for the blonde woman, and how she has been driven to distraction, to the point of falling upon her knees in a public place and wailing, imploring him to stop, just stop, her state of desperation so extreme that she managed to summon the Nurturers. What I tell him is, of course, only one of a dozen possible scenarios.
‘Marcelle,’ he said to her this morning –we will call her Marcelle, she looked like a Marcelle, and we will call him Joseph, perhaps in the spirit of mild irony: Joseph, after all, stood steadily stood by Mary in the hour of her need: he did not take a step back and try to disown her when she embarrassed him so. ‘Marcelle, did you remember to call Sylvia about Alec last night?’ Marcelle is busy packing, in a suitcase not quite big enough for all her needs. They are up early. They have a flight to catch.
Marcelle and Joseph will live in a detached house with its own thick carpets and good reproduction furniture and a designer kitchen. He will have one married daughter by an earlier marriage and they will have two teenage children between them, and a neat garden, in which anything unruly will have been cut down to size. She will use bark chippings, that ugly stuff, to keep the weeds down. Joseph: Ugly, what do you mean, ugly? Well, you should know. But I am not made of money: we cannot afford a gardener more than once a week, for God’s sake. Just get him to use bark.’ Once long ago, Marcelle dreamed of romance and roses round a cottage door: and once indeed Joseph picked a single cherry in an orchard and brought it to her. That was when she was first pregnant with Alec and Joseph was emotional about it. She kept the pip for ages, and even tried to make it sprout by putting it in water. Then she would have a whole little tree covered with cherries, but nothing happened except that the pip just lay there and the water grew cloudy and sour and she had to throw it out. All that was left was a ring round the glass which no amount of scouring would remove. Still, even that was a consolation. A memento of something good.
She would really like another suitcase especially for her cosmetics, but Joseph doesn’t like heaving cases about. Who does? Jars are heavy and bulky: creams for the eyes and the neck and the lips and the bust, each one magically different, are probably interchangeable, but she is nervous of being without a single one of them. She can’t make up her mind. She packs and re-packs: she slips jars into her shoes to save space, but the weight is unavoidable. Joseph: ‘Couldn’t you do without the gunk for just a couple of days and nights? It’s not as if they seem to make any difference. You’re over forty, nearly fifty. Surely the days when face creams would help have passed? Take them to the Charity Shop and be rid of them.’ As if charity shops took half empty jars of cream, however expensive. What do men know?
‘I called but there was no answer,’ says Marcelle. She lies.
‘Did you leave a message on Sylvia’s answer phone?’ asks Joseph. He has already packed. It takes him five minutes. He is decisive. Joseph: ‘One of us has to be.’ Now he is brushing his teeth. She cooked him his breakfast but had none herself. He likes a good breakfast; she is never hungry first thing in the morning. Joseph has good teeth: Marcelle spends a lot of time at the dentist. Joseph: ‘My mother made sure I had milk everyday. You really shouldn’t let Alec and Carla drink those disgusting sweet drinks all the time. It’s not as if you were passing on any particularly good dental genes – at least from your side.’ But how do you stop teenagers from eating and drinking exactly what they want? It wasn’t as if Joseph was around all that much at meal times to train them to do anything at all, let alone sit down when they ate and drank.
‘I couldn’t,’ says Marcelle. ‘It wasn’t switched on.’
‘That�
��s strange,’ says Joseph. ‘Sylvia is usually so efficient.’ Sylvia gets called ‘Sylvia’ a lot, even when ‘she’ would be more normal. Marcelle notices these little things. According to Joseph, Sylvia is elegant, Sylvia is intelligent, Sylvia has perfect teeth, what a good dress sense Sylvia has. And so slim! Such a pretty figure. Sylvia is like a sister to Joseph, and tells everyone so, though of course they are no blood relation. Sylvia has twin girls of fifteen: very smart and well behaved and no trouble at all. Joseph: ‘Sylvia knows how to bring up children.’ The only thing wrong with Sylvia is her husband Earle. Joseph thinks Earle is something of a slob, not worthy of Sylvia. Earle and Sylvia are Joseph and Marcelle’s best friends, and their children like to spend time together. But over the last five years Earle has crept up the promotion ladder and Joseph has stuck on a certain rung while others clamber up over him.
The fact is, Marcelle does not want to call Sylvia. It was late; she was tired, now thank God it is too early. Seven years ago Joseph spent a night with Sylvia in an hotel, at a sales conference. He had come home in the morning – smelling of Sylvia’s scent (Joseph: ‘Why do you never wear scent any more, Marcelle?’ Marcelle: ‘Because I am too busy. Because I never remember to put any on. It made the babies sneeze and I got out of the habit’) and had confessed and apologised and she and Sylvia had talked it out, and they had agreed to forget the incident, which had been, well, yes, both unfortunate and unexpected. Joseph: ‘I am so sorry, Marcelle. It should not have happened. But she is such a honey, such a sweet dear, you know how much you like her, and she is having such a hard time with Earle. I can only conclude somebody put something in the drink or it would never have happened. It meant nothing: just a silly physical thing. And she is your friend. I feel much better now I’ve told you.’ Yes, but in an hotel? A night? Full sex? Behind the filing cabinets would have been more understandable. Sylvia: ‘I am so, so sorry, Marcelle, I would never do anything to hurt you. I will always be open with you. It was a silly drunken thing – someone must have put something in the office drink. Completely out of character and it will never happen again. We both have our marriages and our children to think about, so shall we both just say “closure” and forgive and forget?’ So Marcelle had. Or tried to.