by Fay Weldon
The night before Christmas Ted went to bed before me. I stayed up until after midnight, stuffing the turkey. The twins were home for Christmas. I was pre-menstrual and feeling hard done-by.
‘But you treat this house as a hotel,’ I remember myself saying that day, without any sense of cliché because that’s exactly what they were doing. ‘You bring your dirty washing home and just dump it!’
At other times of the month I’d have been put out if they hadn’t done so. But like their father they were used to me, or at least I hope they were, or they must have spent a miserable childhood one week out of every four, when white witch turned into black.
‘I know it’s your hormones,’ was all Ted would say, thus maddening me the more. ‘I just sit them out.’
The night he died we’d been round to our next-door neighbours, Richard and Jill Woodward, for pre-supper Christmas Eve drinks. Richard ran some kind of motor agency and talked about cars, and Jill, who lived on the proceeds and had facelifts which went wrong, talked about those and her séance experiences. I’d once rashly told her about various apparitions I’d encountered, which thrilled her to bits. But Richard had once called in at the gallery and spent £675 on a signed, dated and authenticated Andy Warhol lithograph of Mickey Mouse, and since then the Woodwards had passed more as friends than just neighbours. They didn’t have a book in the house, unless you include glossy magazines, but Jill’s very pretty and silly in the way men like. There wasn’t much to say, other than to enthuse about their Christmas decorations from Harvey Nichols, and the shapely black branch with a hanging dull gold ornament which they had for a Christmas tree, and apologise for our taste in cheap tinsel. Ted flirted with Jill and I daresay I flirted with Richard just to keep pace.
I do not imagine that the conduct of either of us was enough to induce murderous intent in our neighbours. It was normal in our circles over Christmas: everyone a little tipsy, a little flushed: Jill going out onto the heated patio with Ted for a smoke, and having at least three; a suggestive reference to a wife swap from Richard in their absence. I taxed Ted with his behaviour as we walked home. He had humiliated me, and so forth, left me open to Richard’s awfulness.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake. Your monthly paranoia’s back again,’ was all he said, which of course riled me the more because it was true.
But it was such a calm, beautiful night, with stars in the navy sky and a nearly full moon and frost crunching underfoot, that I forgave him and we even held hands as we went home. I am glad that Ted took with him to the grave, or wherever, the memory of this world at its most enchanted. God gives us landscapes and still, bright skies, I sometimes think, to compensate for what He means to do next. When we got to the front door an owl flew down suddenly from our roof with a great whooshing of black feathers and a piercing downscale shriek, and then a silence, and then the cry of some little night creature as it met death.
‘My God,’ said Ted. ‘What was that?’
‘An owl,’ I said, ‘eating its dinner.’
‘But it was black,’ he said. ‘There aren’t any black owls.’
‘Yes, there are,’ I said, it being that time of the month. ‘Though it’s true they tend to live in Australia,’ I conceded. He could always check; look it up on Wikipedia any time, and he probably would.
‘Lucky I’m not easily panicked,’ he said, ‘or I’d take that as a bad omen. Don’t black birds mean a death in the house?’
Death was not a subject I ever wanted to discuss. I’d lost my birth parents in a most unfortunate way, and then when I was eighteen my adoptive parents were killed. Clive had driven off the road into a swollen river; his body and Marion’s were found the next day. Clive had been drinking, but he was a very bad driver anyway. I’d had a dream that night that they were waving goodbye. Oddly enough, I never worried that anything would happen to Ted or the twins. More denial, I suppose – things too terrible to contemplate.
‘It was an ordinary tawny owl.’ I said. ‘It just looked black in the lamplight.’
‘You’re very good at believing what you want to believe,’ I remember Ted saying, and my feeling cross about that too, but I couldn’t spend too much time resenting his saying it, since it was past midnight and there would be seventeen for Christmas the next day and the turkey not yet stuffed, and presents still to wrap. At least I’d already done the twins’ traditional stockings – a pair of my old tights cut down the middle, assorted nail varnishes, make-up, socks, a silver-papered tangerine in the toe, a few nuts and assorted junk food. Even at their great age they expected to wake up to a Christmas stocking each, and since they were a touch obsessive-compulsive (or so Ted alleged), any change of routine upset them.
I was very short of relatives but Ted had enough for us both. His mother was a good Irish Catholic, and he was one of four. Frank, Hector, Aidan and Ted. Just as small families wither and die out with the years, big families expand; children are born, step-children accumulate, spouses get switched but not abandoned. Aidan was bringing two wives and one of his mothers-in-law. Seventeen were expected. It was not surprising I was up late that night. After I’d finished with the turkey there was all the cutlery and glasses to assemble, and three last-minute presents to wrap – boring-but-needed slippers for Ted, and I’ve forgotten what I got for the twins. I was pleased by what I achieved – firm, neat edges, paper in various shades of pink, tied with gold string and gift tags written out and firmly tied, I was exhausted by the time I got into bed. Ted had fallen asleep. He’d turned off the heating. I undressed quickly in the dark, and I was grateful for his warmth as I got under the duvet. My horror is that he was dead when I got in beside him, and I only felt the warmth because it was so expected, but I don’t think it can have been so. The cold I felt later was so shocking. I had no dreams or any that I can remember. It was a deep dark sleep.
I suppose if I reject the idea of a crime passionnel, the Woodwards could still have been in the pay of the NSA and slipped Ted some kind of poison and me a Mickey Finn which only cut in four hours later. I certainly slept very heavily that night and Ted did not wake at all. But poison seems unlikely. More likely Cynara is nuts.
I stirred at seven, looked at the clock and went back to sleep until nine, when I woke, thinking of the Christmas turkey and the seventeen for lunch, and became conscious that the body beside me was a different temperature from mine. Whatever your temperature when you go to bed with someone else, when you wake you share the same warmth. When I went to bed the night before I had been cold and I had experienced his body as warm. Now it was the other way round. With my eyes still closed I searched for an extra blanket to pull over me in order to warm Ted. He had thrown his bedclothes off in the night.
He was lying facing away from me and, still half asleep I tried to turn him towards me which was usually a doddle because he’d cooperate even in his sleep, ever ready for sex, but his body was oddly heavy and inert. I thought he’s dead without any real evidence for it and got up and went round to the other side of the bed to see his face, and he was lying there looking just as usual with his eyes open, but I was right; there was no life in him. The eyes were unseeing. His soul, as I’d describe it these days, had left the body. Gone somewhere else: this was the immediate impression, as I voiced it at the time, without thinking, without rationality intervening. He’s left me. Not that he had stopped being, but that he had gone away.
Ted was dead. I felt quite rational and without emotion. I happened to have the mobile number for old Dr Nevis, our family G.P. so I phoned him, and he said he’d come round at once. I sat by the bed and waited in case Ted woke up, but he didn’t. Dr Nevis came and said, ‘He’s gone.’ I felt like asking him where to, but I didn’t.
The doctor phoned the ambulance and I gave them directions in a competent and practical way. I knew Ted was dead but modern medicine is such these days that if you get an apparent corpse to a hospital in time even the dead can be brought to life. I was of course in shock. Then I went to wake up the twins
but the room they shared was empty: they weren’t home from their party. I checked the answer phone.
Maude.... We’re sleeping over, Mum.
Martha.... But we’ll be home early.
Maude.... To help with the turkey.
Martha.... I’ll do the bread sauce.
Maude.... I’ll do the brandy butter.
Then they clicked into silence.
Dr Nevis said he was afraid that he had to go, he’d left a small goose in the oven. Then Jill Woodward came in to ‘be with me’. I had to calm her down. We put the turkey in my oven. The ambulance came. I couldn’t find Ted’s mobile with his brothers’ numbers on it so there was no way I could stop them and theirs coming for Christmas dinner. I went with the body to the hospital where Ted was registered DOA, and saw him settled in the morgue. I got home at about midday: the twins were back saying ‘Where is everybody?’ and I had to tell them their father was dead. Jill seemed incapable of saying it. She was busy stripping our bed and putting the sheets into the washing machine at ninety-five degrees.
The twins are identical: long blonde hair, blue eyes, cherub-mouthed, small, neat and perfectly formed, and cool, very cool. They move as one, think as one, and as far as I can tell feel as one; they absorbed the news thoughtfully, joined their little hands together as they would when shocked and surprised, and wept a single tear each. I didn’t weep or wail or scream either; perhaps they inherited non-affect from me.
Maude.... Does that mean we won’t be going to St Moritz?
‘It does,’ I said. We’d booked to go skiing as a family in the New Year.
Martha.... That’s all right, Mum. We didn’t really want to go anyway.
Maude.... We were only doing it for you and Dad.
The twins are very academically clever, and though I have never had them tested I would imagine they’d come out somewhere low on the autistic scale of non-empathic response, just high enough to give some people the heebie-jeebies.
I thanked Jill Woodward and said I had to get on. She wept a little more and left, I think very shocked and dismayed, but then so was I: she just showed it more. The twins and I prepared lunch, silently; we basted the turkey, peeled potatoes for seventeen and prepared the gravy.
Maude.... I’ll do the bread sauce.
Martha.... I’ll do the cranberry.
They cleared up as they went along, which was in their nature, being particular and methodical. They put in the extra sleeves of the Edwardian dining room table, laid it beautifully – crackers, Christmas napkins, plastic holly centrepiece – and a place setting for Ted at the end of the table, writing ‘Dad RIP’ on his table mat and going out into the damp garden to find sprigs of holly to make into a wreath to enclose the mat. They are very clever with their fingers.
The phone rang and it was Dr Nevis saying there had to be an autopsy but it was ‘difficult’ since it was the holiday season and to warn me there might be ‘delays’. I told him this wouldn’t make much difference to Ted. He asked me how I was and I said I was making Christmas dinner: I explained it was a family gathering; all Ted’s relatives were arriving from Ireland. I didn’t like to turn them away, and to hold an impromptu wake now would save them all a lot of travelling expense later. Dr Nevis offered me Valium and sleeping pills. I said no.
I went upstairs to put on a clean dress and change my wet shoes. I put the twins on the front door to explain what was going on to the arriving guests: I could hear them from upstairs.
Maude.... We have to tell you our father’s dead.
Martha.... Last night in his sleep. Mother’s just back from the morgue.
Maude.... The doctor says it’s not suspicious.
Martha.... But please do stay for lunch.
Maude.... Mum needs to keep busy.
Martha.... It’s the way she copes.
Maude.... We all cooked it together.
Maude-and-Martha.... Do stay! Turkey and all the trimmings. Waste not, want not.
If the twins were being at their most Aspergery it was not surprising; first an all-night party; then their father, there yesterday, gone today. I hurried down. All who arrived stayed. They came in assorted executive cars, provided by their hotel in Knightsbridge. They seemed stunned and upset and took time to settle. They were sombre and embarrassed over the turkey but cheered up over Christmas pudding and drank and toasted and laughed and chattered; even the twins smiled, if only in unison. We all distributed presents as planned. Ted’s were put aside on the hall stand, still wrapped, to go straight to charity. Only the present from me to Ted stayed under the Christmas tree. When all the guests were gone I looked at the tag on the slippers I’d wrapped for him the night before, and it was blank, though I remembered very clearly writing out his name. Still, one can be mistaken. But to me it was as if Ted’s presence on this earth was being rapidly and steadily obliterated by forces greater than me. Well, odd things happen.
December 25th and 26th were public holidays so I couldn’t get down to the Harrow Civic Centre to register the death until Thursday the 27th. When I found I was not entitled to a certificate because the coroner had to sign off the autopsy and I needed various papers I didn’t have, I fainted. I was picked up, sat down and given water by a Civic Centre employee wearing a Happy Winter Festive Season broach that flashed on and off very close at eye level. Reality dawned and grief began.
Cynara’s words in my head… ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’
Why had the body seemed so cold when I woke? Was that natural? Weren’t bodies meant to take time to cool down? Could the chill be indicative of some kind of poison? But wouldn’t an autopsy pick such a thing up? I came back from the Civic Centre wondering exactly where Ted was. I’d assumed he’d be in the morgue where I’d left him: I rang them and they said they’d signed it out to the undertakers of my choice – oddly named Loam & Leap, chosen from a list the morgue gave me. I called Loam & Leap who referred me back to the medical attendant who had signed the death confirmation, apparently different from a death certificate.
I went round with the twins to the surgery. Old Dr Nevis was ‘away on a well-earned holiday’ so they gave us an earnest young man who stared goggle-eyed at the twins. Pretty identical twins, especially if they have long blonde hair, are much in demand in the porn industry, and heaven alone knew what erotic fantasies came to his mind. The twins have a lot to put up with – and all my fault, according to the latest findings of the medical profession. Being starved of mitochondria in the maternal womb, their degree of identicality was extreme – ninety-three percent, Robbie reckoned, though I would not let the girls be tested. There are too many scientists wanting to prod and poke identical twins as it is.
Of course the twins are angry with me: I’ve so often failed them. Once when they were about eight and arguing and giggling in their private language in the back of the car I turned and slapped them both and almost crashed the car. They shut me out after that; they were cold to me, and made do with me as servant, not as a loved and trusted Mummy. They adored Ted. Motherhood can make one mad.
And then of course I’d let Ted die and thus failed in my wifely responsibility of keeping him alive. I’d find them glaring at me in the same way as when they were four, when they’d fallen down in the gravel path and hurt a knee, and I represented a world which had treated them unfairly. Or they’d start one of their peculiar sibling arguments about who was most upset. Sometimes they’d both stop talking in mid-sentence and one or the other would begin to cry great big terrible sobs, usually Martha, because Maude tried harder not to screw up her face, having read an article which her sister seemed not to have, about how weeping developed wrinkles. They worry so about their looks, like so many of their contemporaries and not at all like me. I don’t bother much about my appearance. I always seem to have too much to do other than simply comb my hair, drag on clothes and find my shoes in the morning, forget make-up. But that may be just what having twins does to a woman.
Pre-motherhood, I’d spent a lot of my youth staring into a mirror, like my girls do today.
Cynara’s words in my head: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’ But one way and another I did not think the twins were so angry with me they would collude with Cynara’s ‘they’ in the murder of their father, even to obtain the possibility of replacing him with some stepfather who could provide them with all the goodies Ted could not. I could safely remove my girls from suspicion.
But I wasn’t happy they were with me when I asked Dr Nevis’s young locum about the necessity of an autopsy. It seemed that because Ted had died young, in apparent good health and had not seen the doctor in the last three months of his life, an autopsy was required. An autopsy! The twins were fascinated.
Maude.... Do they think Mum did it?
Martha.... She was the last person to see him.
Maude.... It can’t have been us.
Martha.... We have an alibi.
‘No-one’s suspected of anything,’ the young man replied, startled back to his senses, erotic fantasies abandoned. ‘They’ll assume SADS, Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome. Largely a hereditary condition. Nobody’s fault, just most unfortunate.’