by Fay Weldon
Our twins, Maude and Martha, did not come, nor did I pressure them to do so. It was too soon after their father’s death. My urgencies – sex and comfort: love, even – were not theirs. All they could see, along I fear with many others, was that the baked meats were barely cold, their widowed mother was remarrying and it was an insult to their father. I told myself that they had finished their college courses, got their degrees and left home: what happened in their old home scarcely mattered. They shared a flat in Camberwell. Both had, so they said, found jobs with the Arts Council. Their new lives had started.
When they came to visit they might have a stepfather sitting at the end of a table where once their beloved father had sat, but he would be a stepfather who would help fund their first steps onto the housing ladder – which was rather more than their real father would have done. I would hereafter be no kind of emotional burden to them. Could they not be glad for themselves, if not for me? But no.
Martha.... Marriage is for the procreation of children, Mum.
Maude.... And best done in your twenties.
Martha.... Our friends will refer to you as the cougar.
Maude.... A cradle snatcher.
Robbie was thirty-nine, four years younger than me. I had the twins when I was twenty-two. Children can be very difficult. When they’re born you think you will have them for twenty years or so and that’ll be it – but it’s not the case. They have you for ever. Maternal guilt and anxiety doesn’t abate with time, not does the child’s resentment against the parent: you didn’t make their life perfect and you can never be wholly forgiven. Just as one can’t forgive one’s own parents. My birth parents put themselves out of court, mind you, by my father shooting my mother; my adoptive parents did their best but brought me up to believe that truth and reality were dangerous things. At least the ghost of my birth mother had the grace to sit on my bed and croon to me; my adoptive mother went into the good night after the merest smile, the touch of a blessing: if my birth father said goodbye I did not catch it – he had blown the top of his head off; and my adoptive father went without saying anything – but then he had been drinking. And Ted – Ted just walked off into the dark wood without so much as a look behind, as if I had been no part of his life at all.
The twins were polite to Robbie, but were no longer wholly trusting of me. They had always seemed to make common cause with Cynara, when she first turned up in the gallery.
Maude.... She is so good with clothes, Mum, and she knows everyone who’s anyone.
Martha.... She’s going to help us find jobs when we leave college.
Maude.... She says never, ever, use soap and water on the face: it dries out the skin.
Martha.... All the kinds of useful things she knows about and you don’t.
And even after Ted died they’d go round to see her from time to time. They’d turn up at the gallery and she’d leave early if she could and take them round the corner to the Ritz for hamburgers. The twins would call me up to let me know and invite me to come along, but I always said I was busy. Perhaps that was stupid and narrow-minded of me. Was I the one at fault? Their new lives had started.
I picked up the phone one more time and got through to her at the gallery straight away.
‘Hi, Cynara,’ I said, ‘This is Phyllis Whitman, remember Phyllis, Ted’s wife?’
‘Ah. Oh yes. Of course. Philly. How could one forget? White witch Philly.’ I felt an acute pang of jealousy, which ran like a shiver from my crotch to my scalp. Stupid, unsophisticated me. Second husbands have ex-girlfriends; first husbands have no doubt confided and joked with women other than their wives. I told myself Ted was well dead; what had happened when he was alive between Cynara and he was hardly of any consequence. Everything fades into the mists of time, anyway. But white witch Phyllis? Ted had sometimes described me to the children as ‘your mother the white witch’, but as a kind of intimate family joke.
It’s what he’d call me when sometimes I seemed to know what was going on behind my back with the children – the way surely any mother does. But Ted liked to see it as magic. And it was true that once or twice a mug I disliked – too garish or too vulgar – had leaped off the shelf and plunged to its destruction, just when I was saying so. I’d have put it too near the edge, that was all. Or the garden tap once or twice ran red like blood, but it must have been rust; or a letter ready for the post disappeared and then appeared in another place, the silly things that happen in households from time to time. But now ‘white witch Phyllis’, and from the mouth of Cynara? How could Ted have blabbed so? Yes, they’d had an affair.
‘That’s the one,’ I said, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. ‘Phyllis the white witch. The one who married Robbie.’ One point to me. ‘I know this is out of the blue and I may be the last person you want to see. But could you have lunch with me?’
‘Okay,’ she said, not ingratiating, not dismissive. ‘When?’
‘Today?’ I was pushing my luck.
‘We’ll say my local at one, then.’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘What’s happened? Fallen out of love already? Darling, I do so hope not!’
There was something instantly appealing about Cynara. She was up for anything. The elderly art collector who had married her and left her all his money and his collection had made a good choice. She exuded energy and good cheer: she was charming, clever and without apparent malice; she kept her word, and had an eye for art – and had to all accounts nursed her old husband devotedly through his terminal illness. Just as Ted had made a good choice in accepting her into the business. She was not the gold digger I had assumed her to be. Ted had been praising me, not mocking me, when he called me a white witch. But why was I thinking like this? A second ago I had been thinking just the opposite. What was happening to me? Somehow I must get my moods under control – these sudden swings between hate and love, fear and over-confidence, between unreasonable trust and unwarranted suspicion.
But what Cynara had said was true. I’d indeed fallen out of love with Robbie, just like that, like some silly girl, and within the hour. I clung to this understanding as a drowning woman might cling to a log swirling down some swollen river in Ted’s dark forest. I must not dismiss Robbie as some silly boy: he might well be an actual danger to me. Why else the shiver up my spine, why else was I calling up Cynara, the least likely of all allies, looking to her for help?
2
The Caprice in St James turned out to be Cynara’s local. (Ted used to go to The Tavern in Shepherd Market for beer and pork belly.) She arrived ten minutes late, wearing a reddish gold faux-leather dress which matched the colour of her hair. I couldn’t decide on the make. Jason Wu? True, I once spent a month as an intern at Vogue Italia but new couturiers spring up like wildfire in a drought and one has better things to do than try and keep up. I had decided not to compete, in any case: what was the point? Cynara outclassed and outranked me so totally that the best I could do was look anonymous. I wore a five-year-old M&S sensible spotted blue-and-white dress, and no doubt looked like one of those PR people, or even a dresser, who’s got into the shot by accident, whose job is to be a foil to the glamorous while looking mildly pleasant and supportive.
Cynara ordered fish and chips for both of us, which she said were the best in London. I was grateful. My instinct when worried is to eat everything in sight, and I was indeed nervous.
Over our vodka martinis I said I had a few things I needed to get clear in my head: I was sorry I had dragged her out on such short notice.
‘Robbie texted me,’ Cynara said, ‘to say if you were in touch I should take you to the Caprice for lunch, but on no account to say too much. I texted back nobody tells me what to do and I’d say whatever I fucking felt like. These boys think they can get away with murder. We girls must stick together, don’t you think?’
I couldn’t reply: I was spluttering and choking. I had no idea Robbie was in touch with Cynara – I had thought she was safely in the past: but apparently not. Wai
ters hovered around and looked concerned, if only because I was with Cynara and she was obviously someone of consequence. She looked at me with kindly concern. Waiters brought me water while others slapped my back. I recovered. She leaned forward and dabbed tears from my cheeks.
‘Poor darling,’ she said. ‘You are such an innocent. Robbie keeps in touch with me. He has to; I know where the bodies are buried. Don’t worry so: we were only ever bed buddies. And nothing sexual at all any more, darling, it’s just work, though he is quite a dish and I’m sometimes tempted. But I was fond of Ted and I owe you something, we all do, so I’m here. But I have to get back to the gallery by two-fifteen. Someone’s bringing in a fake Picasso, so I’ll make this fast. You know Robbie’s with the NSA?’
‘The NSA’ I asked. ‘What does that stand for?’ It was dawning on me that she was on drugs – why else was she so bright, glittery and fast?
‘You’re kidding me. The National Security Agency,’ she said and looked at me with pity. ‘Portal Inc are best buddies with the NSA though rumour has it ADA’s involved.’
‘ADA?’
‘Search engine. Oh, forget it! An actual physical cable running through from the Bay Area to the new US embassy.’
I was mystified.
‘But I thought everything these days was wireless.’
‘Cable’s unhackable,’ Cynara said, ‘or so they hope.’
‘It’s all beyond me,’ I said, all innocence. The dumb one Robbie went and married. ‘Anyway Robbie works for Portal Inc as a scientist not some kind of spy.’
‘A neuroscientist,’ she corrected. ‘Neuro-schmeuro and now well into psycho-pharms. It’s where the funding is. Doxies, all that.’
‘Doxies?’ But Cynara did not elaborate. She was talking fast. It struck me she was as nervous as I was. She kept looking past my shoulder, but perhaps only to see which celebrity had just walked in.
‘Robbie serves strange new masters, Phyllis. Portal Inc poached him from Pfizer in the first place. Easy-peasy, no-one earns much anymore in pure neuro. Scientists follow the money. Who doesn’t? Say Portal Inc and you might as well be saying NSA.’
‘But that doesn’t make Robbie some kind of spy.’
‘I work for the NSA, and that doesn’t make me a spy either. But I’m an art dealer, and we can all do with a little government subsidy. Were you followed on your way here?’
‘I hardly think so,’ I said.
‘Did you check?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I did, because Robbie texted me to meet you here if you asked. But I didn’t see anyone,’ Cynara said. ‘They’re very clever.’
Paranoiac, too. Her teeth would be receiving messages next. She’d had them done in the US. They were very large and very white, like Robbie’s. I was conscious of the thin, translucent flimsiness of my own.
‘I don’t think anyone would find it worth their while following either of us,’ I observed.
‘Oh darling, you’ve no idea, have you,’ she said, ‘just how important you are to the future: that is to say, how much money they’re prepared to spend on you. Same thing. But I think we’re probably safe, as it happens. Not enough time to plant mikes. He only texted this morning.’
It is very pleasant to be told you are important, but rather alarming to have someone suggest you are being spied upon. Our fish and chips came. I asked for extra mayonnaise; the tartare sauce does for the fish but what about the chips?
‘I do so adore you! Chips! Simply no-one eats chips.’
I did not remind her that she was the one who ordered them. She ignored her chips and removed the batter carefully from the pure, white, flaky, non-fattening fish, though she was to get through all the tartare sauce in its little silver gravy boat, and manage at least a teaspoon of the accompanying pea purée. I had a feeling she was perpetually hungry, as so many really slim women are. I was glad Robbie preferred women with a little more flesh on them. I had traipsed all this way and all Cynara was prepared to tell me was drug-driven paranoiac nonsense. I might have known it. The batter went on to Cynara’s side plate and she gestured to the waiter to take it away. He did, and took her dish of chips away too without even asking. Evidently she was a regular customer, and he was used to her ways. She preferred to have the chips taken away on request, rather than just not come in the first place. It made her feel virtuous.
‘Do you want to know how I met Robbie?’ she asked. I said I was more interested in why I was important to the future but there was no stopping her. Robbie, she said, had come into the gallery about a Van Meegeren Vermeer they had in the window at £5,500 and tried to beat her down to £3,000. They had ended up in bed together. Robbie had been taking Doxies so she hadn’t stood a chance and the next morning she’d let him have the painting for £3,250. Ted had been furious.
‘Really?’ I was trying to be polite. It didn’t sound at all like the Robbie I knew.
‘What happens when you take Doxies?’
‘Sod all happens if the woman takes them, but when the man does he passes on extra SSRI in his cum, and she ends up so passive, pleased and loving she’ll do anything he asks. The lab keeps them under lock and key but Robbie nicked some. I told Ted he should be grateful I even earned us £250, but he wasn’t having any. He’d no idea about Doxies.’ Cynara at least lowered her rather piercing voice so the whole restaurant didn’t hear. ‘But then he didn’t need them. Dear sweet Ted, I so miss him. Well, I suppose you do too, white witch. Do you mind being called that?’
‘It’s minimally better than black witch,’ I said coolly. I wondered exactly what it was she missed about dear sweet Ted. ‘These Doxies seem to be really something.’
‘Viagra is so yesterday!’ She was attracting looks from all over the room. She was the poshest totty in the room, evidently. ‘Viagra makes them good in bed, Doxies make women fall in love with them.’
D-OXY-S. I worked it out: Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin. Happiness hormones all, known in the tranquiliser world as SSRIs, serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, the world’s favourite pleasure enhancers, depression avoiders. It all figured. Take the pill and pass it on through the male ejaculate. Bond with him, lady – I love you – then melt: whatever you say, dear. Take the painting cheap. Take anything. Take everything. You want to hit me? Oh please, please do! This was the future, which the NSA, according to Cynara, was spending money bringing about. It was progress; it was bound to happen. I ate another couple of chips. Was it happening to me? The more sex, the more tranquillised I was? Addicted to Robbie? A Robbie on Doxies? At least he didn’t hit me.
‘Are lots of men on them?’ I asked. I hardly knew what else to say.
‘Good God no,’ she said. ‘They only go out to male agents on surveillance work. Really bad form on Robbie’s part, nicking them just to save himself a measly two thou. Portal Inc found out – I realised what had happened and told them: there was such a terrible row but what could I do? I was working for the NSA myself; I owed them something. You know they can trace practically every stolen artwork in the word? Good to have them on one’s side.’
‘I expect it is,’ I said, reeling. ‘Cynara, you did say something about me being important to the future. Little me. Why would that be?’
‘You’re such a little solipsist, darling,’ she complained. ‘It’s all me, me, me.’
But she did consent to explain it was because telepaths were two a penny, so were mediums, but telekineticists were in short supply. I must have looked at her with blank astonishment.
‘Poor dear Ted always said you were in denial,’ she said. ‘The rest of us knew if you didn’t like a mug it just committed harakiri on the spot. Ted used to tell me and I told Robbie. It fascinated him.’
‘That’s just absurd,’ I said. ‘I once put a mug too near the edge of some shelf, and it juddered itself off, that’s all. We’re near the railway; the container trains are very heavy. The normal laws of physics apply.’
But she wasn’t listening.
‘What
ever. It wasn’t just household crockery: you’d hear voices, see ghosts, there was always a parking space. Real witchy stuff. You and the paranormal are just like that.’ She entwined her fingers to make her point. ‘You were very close to Ted when he died. If anyone could get a genuine word from the other side it’d be you. And that’s what they’re after. They want the dead to start yielding up their secrets. I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They Doxied Robbie up to the eyebrows and put him in to keep an eye on you. And they were right. It’s paying off. Last night you materialised a piece of mud from the other side. They’re very excited. Mud today, a revenant tomorrow.’
She had moved her lovely head close to me. She was whispering in my ear. Her eyes were large and luminous, her breath smelt faintly of fish. I moved away. She was mad and it might be catching. I humoured her, even as I hated her.
‘But Cynara, why would “they” want to raise people from the dead? Do you mean your employers?’
‘Darling it isn’t just the NSA. It’s all of them. ADA, Nile, Gateway, LoveBill, Whispring, all the big boys, all in it together. They mean to live forever. Make Hell’s foundations quiver, the gates to fall, death to have no dominion. They’re very rich. What, have it all end in nothingness? Unacceptable! So now it’s all immortality, daily changes of blood, brain transplants, contacting the other side. String theory, white holes, oneirology, alternative universes – pursue the dead and the dreaming to the other side of the cosmos. They’re trying the lot. Millions, billions going into Portal Inc. They want a revenant to pick his brains, so how about fetching your Ted back from the dead. You’re the key. They need you.’
I finished my chips.
‘Oh eat, eat,’ Cynara said, ‘You need your strength, you sweet old-fashioned girl you. You’ve gained at least a couple of stone since you married Robbie. It quite suits you; you look better placid.’
Cynara was trying to upset me, and succeeding. So much was clear: anything would do: my previous husband had been murdered, my current husband had been ‘put in’ to marry me by forces unknown and unknowable: her affair with Robbie was still ongoing; she had been having one with Ted when he died (poor dear Ted!) if all else failed I had put on weight. This was her revenge for my having stolen Robbie from her at Ali’s private view. She didn’t do things by half. I realised how little I cared if Robbie was still seeing her, but how much I still cared whether or not she had once ‘seen’ Ted. Which was absurd because Robbie was very much alive and my body, so frequent was our intercourse, seemed almost merged with his. Yet still the handful of ashes that was Ted raised more passion.