by Louise Welsh
“Oh,” said Phyllis. “Well I had the other combination, two boys and a girl. Ned’s an animal feed operator but his real love is Heavy Metal, much good it’s done him. Peter’s an accountant – no, I keep forgetting, they don’t call them accountants any more. They’re financial consultants now.”
“Like refuse collectors. ‘My old man’s a dustman.’ Remember that?” said Viv. “Then there was ‘My old man said follow the van, and don’t dilly-dally on the way.’ My mother used to sing that. I divorced my old man, by the way, sometime back in the seventies.”
“I’m sorry,” said Phyllis.
“Don’t be silly,” said Viv. “I’ve realised I’m a natural chopper and changer. Or rather, I start off enthusiastic and then spot the feet of clay. It’s a regular pattern. I did eventually find the love of my life, when I was in my sixties, but he died. What about your daughter, though? Didn’t you mention a daughter?”
“Yes,” said Phyllis, blinking. “Sarah. She went into the book business. In fact, she’s the one who dreamed up the idea behind this festival, and now she runs it. Artistic Director of the Festival of Immortals, that’s her title.”
“Good Lord,” said Viv. “The opportunities there are for girls these days!”
“ It’s a full-time year-round job as you can imagine,” said Phyllis, gaining confidence. “She spent months this year trying to persuade Shakespeare to run a workshop but the most she could get him to do was half-promise to give a masterclass in the sonnet. He’s supposed to be arriving by helicopter at four this afternoon but it’s always touch and go with him, she says, it’s impossible to pin him down.”
“Good Lord”, said Viv again, and listened enthralled as Phyllis told her anecdotes from previous years, the time Rabbie Burns had kept an adoring female audience waiting 40 minutes and had eventually been tracked down to the stationery cupboard deep in congress or whatever he called it with Sarah’s young assistant Sophie. Then there was the awful day Sarah had introduced a reading as being from The Floss on the Mill and George Eliot had looked so reproachful, even more so than usual, but Sarah did tend to reverse her words when flustered, it wasn’t intentional. Every year Alexander Pope roared up in a fantastic high-powered low-slung sportscar, always a new one, always the latest model. Everybody looked forward to that. Jane Austen could be very sarcastic in interviews if you asked her a question she didn’t like, she’d said something very rude to Sarah last year, very cutting, when Sarah had questioned her on what effect she thought being fostered by a wet-nurse had had on her. Because of course that was what people were interested in now, that sort of detail, there was no getting away from it.
Last year had been really fascinating, if a bit morbid, they’d taken illness as their theme – Fanny Burney on the mastectomy she’d undergone without anaesthetic, Emily Brontë giving a riveting description of the time she was bitten by a rabid dog and how she’d gone straight back home and heated up a fire iron and used it herself to cauterise her arm. Emily had been very good in the big round table discussion, too, the one called “TB and Me,” very frank. People had got the wrong idea about her, Sarah said, she wasn’t unfriendly, just rather shy; she was lovely when you got to know her.
“They’ve done well, our children, when you think of it,” commented Viv. “But then, there was no reason for them not to. First-generation university.”
Phyllis had tried to describe in her memoir how angry and sad she had been at having to leave school at fourteen; how she’d just missed the 1944 Education Act with its free secondary schooling for everyone. Books had been beyond her parents’ budget, but with the advent of paperbacks as she reached her teens she had become a reader. Why couldn’t she find a way to make this sound interesting?
“Penny for your thoughts, Fuzzy,” said Viv.
“Viv,” said Phyllis, “Would you mind not calling me that? I never did like that name and it’s one of the things I’m pleased to have left in the past.”
“Oh!” said Viv. “Right you are.”
“Because names do label you,” said Phyllis. “I mean, Phyllis certainly dates me.”
“I was called Violet until I left home,” confessed Viv. “Then I changed to Viv and started a new life.”
“I always assumed Viv was short for Vivien,” said Phyllis. “ Like Vivien Leigh. I saw Gone with the Wind five times. Such a shame about her and Laurence Olivier.”
“Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff!” exclaimed Viv. “Mr Darcy. Henry V. Henry V! That was my first proper Shakespeare, that film.”
“Mine too,” confessed Phyllis. “Then later I was reading ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, – I’d been married myself for a while – and I came to the last verse and there it was, that shower of arrows fired by the English bowmen, just like in the film. The arrows were the new lives of the young married couples on the train and it made me cry, it made me really depressed, that poem.”
“Not what you’d call a family man, Philip Larkin,” said Viv.
“Not really,” said Phyllis. “You know, thinking about it, the only time I stopped reading altogether was when they were babies. Three under five. I couldn’t do that again.”
“I did keep reading,” said Viv. “But there were quite a few accidents. And I was always a Smash potato sort of housewife, if I’m honest.”
“I wish I had been,” said Phyllis enviously.
She cast her mind back to all that; the hours standing over the twin tub, the one hundred ways with mince, nagging the children to clean out the guinea pig cage, collecting her repeat prescription for Valium. That time too she had tried to record in her memoir, but it had been even more impossible to describe than the days of her girlhood.
“It’s not in the books we’ve read, is it, how things have been for us,” said Viv. “There’s only Mrs Ramsay, really, and she’s hardly typical.”
“I’ve been bound by domestic ties,” said Phyllis. “But I’m still a feminist.”
“Are you?” said Viv, impressed.
“Well I do think women should have the vote so yes, I suppose I am. Because a lot of people don’t really, underneath, think women should have the vote, you know.”
“I had noticed,” said Viv.
“It’s taken me so long to notice how the world works that I think I should be allowed extra time,” said Phyllis.
At this point she decided to confide in Viv about her struggles in Life writing. For instance, all she could remember about her grandmother was that she was famous for having once thrown a snowball into a fried fish shop; but was that the sort of thing that was worth remembering? Another problem was, just as you didn’t talk about yourself in the same way you talked about others, so you couldn’t write about yourself from the outside either. Not really. Which reminded her, there had been such a fascinating event here last year, Sarah had been interviewing Thomas Hardy and it had come out that he’d written his own biography, in the third person, and got his wife Florence to pretend that she’d written it! He’d made her promise to bring it out as her own work after he’d died. The audience had been quite indignant, but, as he told Sarah, he didn’t want to be summed up by anybody else, he didn’t want to be cut and dried and skewered on a spit. How would you like it, he’d asked Sarah and she’d had to agree she wouldn’t. This year she, Sarah, had taken care to give him a less contentious subject altogether – he was appearing tomorrow with Coleridge and Katherine Mansfield at an event called The Notebook Habit.
“Yes,” said Viv, “ I’ve got a ticket for that.”
This whole business of misrepresentation was one of Sarah’s main bugbears at the Festival, Phyllis continued. She found it very difficult knowing how to handle the hecklers. Ottoline Morrell, for example, turned up at any event where DH Lawrence was appearing, carrying on about Women in Love, how she wasn’t Hermione Roddice, how she’d never have thrown a paperweight at anyone, how dare he and all the rest of it. Sarah had had to organise discreet security guards because of incidents like that. The thing was, people
minded about posterity. They minded about how they would be remembered.
“Not me,” said Viv.
“Really?” said Phyllis.
“I’m more than what’s happened to me or where I’ve been,” said Viv. “I know that and I don’t care what other people think. I can’t be read like a book. And I’m not dead yet, so I can’t be summed up or sum myself up. Things might change.”
“Goodness,” said Phyllis, amazed.
“Call no man happy until he is dead,” shrugged Viv, glancing at her watch. “And now it’s time for Charlotte Brontë. I had planned to question her about those missing letters to Constantin Heger, but I don’t want Sarah’s security guards after me.”
The two women started to get up, brushing cake crumbs from their skirts and assembling bags and brochures.
“Look, there’s Sarah now,” said Phyllis, pointing towards the marquee.
Linking arms, they began to make their way across the meadow to where the next queue was forming.
“And look, that must be Charlotte Brontë with her, in the bonnet,” Viv indicated. “See, I was right! She is short.”
GRANDPA’S GHOST
Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon (b.1931) was brought up in New Zealand and returned to Britain when she was ten. She read Economics and Psychology at the University of St Andrews. Weldon worked briefly for the Foreign Office and as a journalist. She also had a successful career as an advertising copywriter before becoming a full-time writer. Weldon has published thirty-four novels, five short story collections and numerous plays for stage, television and radio. She lives in London. Her memoir, Auto Da Fay, was published in 2002.
It’s been such a horrible year,” said Marta to Griff. “Do we have to have a party?”
“It hasn’t been too bad,” said Griff, who was the cheerful one. “Nobody’s died, nobody’s been ill, we own the roof over our heads and we’ve paid the gas bill. Isn’t that worth celebrating?”
“I just want to cry,” said Marta. She was 38, past the age when actresses get work easily, and she’d been “resting” for a full 18 months. She felt discarded and unlucky. Griff worked in IT at the town hall.
Right now they had a hard time making ends meet. They had two children: Bernard and Meryl, 12 and 10. Bernard hated his school, Meryl loved hers. But then Meryl had her mother’s looks.
As her maternal grandmother Emma said, “The prettier you are, the easier your life.” Grandpa Paul had never said anything nice in his life; now he haunted the house at 12, Chicklade Grove where they lived. Or so Meryl swore.
“Grandpa again,” she’d say when the cat was sick in her shoe, or Bernard broke his hockey stick, or when Marta left the bathroom tap on and the ceiling came down, or someone’s football came through the kitchen window, or the postman put next door’s letters through their door.
“Oh please don’t,” her mother would beg. “Grandpa’s dead and buried and out of the way.”
“No he isn’t,” Meryl would say. “He’s in the corner of the cellar stairs pretending to be a blanket and saying, ‘Heh, heh, heh,’ when you go down to read the gas. It’s why you can’t get a job. It’s why no one buys the house.”
Which was nonsense of course, and who believed in ghosts in this day and age? Marta’s dad hadn’t even died at No 12, but in a hospice five miles away. Emma, her mum, had died two years before him, patient and good, worn out from putting up with Paul’s meanness, his shouting and his jeering “heh, heh, hehs”.
It wasn’t as if anyone went down into the dark, dank cellar if they could help it. Why would they? Only Griff sometimes, to check the meter, and the would-be buyers who came, saw and went away. They’d already dropped the price by £30,000. A whole year and it hadn’t sold.
“A party, a party!” the children begged. “On New Year’s Eve!”
“We’ve nothing to celebrate,” said Marta. “And we can’t afford it.”
But Griff was adamant. True, funds were tight because the unexpected kept happening: the drains had blocked, a tree had fallen through next door’s roof and Griff had broken a leg trying to move it – but he refused to be downhearted.
“If you’ve had a run of bad luck,” he said, “all you can do is gather friends round and drink to a better future. So let’s do it!”
Reluctantly, Marta started ringing round. It was amazing what a lot of people responded, even at such short notice. Next door asked if they could bring a friend who was staying, a Trinidadian Glaswegian – a very special man. “Fine by us,” said Griff, “he can do the first footing. We’re all on the fair side.”
“Eh?” asked next door.
“Scottish New Year legend has it that the first one over the threshold brings good luck if he’s dark, bad luck if he’s fair. We’re in need of a dark-haired person.”
“Ah,” said next door. “You’re on!”
The party was to be on Tuesday night. On the Monday, Griff went out into the cold to bring home the special offer on Strongbow and Stella, prosecco for the ladies plus two bottles of own-brand vintage champers at £15.99 for midnight. The fridge was full of mince pies baked by Meryl, so Marta would have to take the champagne to the cellar to keep it cold.
No one liked the cellar stairs, especially now Meryl had started telling everyone that her grandfather was living down there, a ghost disguised as an old blanket, and the cause of all the accidents.
“Poor old Grandpa Paul,” said Meryl. “He gets the blame for everything.”
“No, I do,” said Bernard. Marta had just shouted at him for trying to chop down the For Sale sign.
Marta switched on the new EU long-life low-wattage bulb. She hadn’t been to the cellar for ages. The bulb cast a gloomy light on the discarded possessions of the decades – old sewing machines, bicycles, car batteries, leather suitcases – when she heard it.
“Plumbing?” she said aloud.
“Heh, heh, heh.”
That noise again. Spooky. On the corner where the stairs turned, there was a pile of old clothes, or blankets or something – or someone, leaning against the wall. She switched on her torch to brave a closer look – and a pair of glittering eyes shot open. “Heh, heh, heh” again.
The eyes had a cartoonish quality; the “heh, heh, heh” was the jeering half-giggle that her father would make when her mother said something stupid. Or was it coming from Marta herself?
She retreated backwards up the stairs as fast as she could, dropped the torch, tripped and fell a good 10 steps, taking with her the plastic bag that held the vintage fizz.
“You’re lucky you didn’t break your wrist,” said Griff. “I wish you’d be more careful!” They were in the hospital. But once all the blood, pain and fear had passed, Marta ended up with no more than a bad sprain and a stitch or two where broken glass had gone through the plastic bag.
“Not Mum’s fault, Dad,” said Meryl. “Just Grandpa again. It’s his house.”
“Not any more,” said Marta. “It’s mine. I deserve it.”
She’d had a long, hard journey with her father. He’d first barred her from his door when she was 16 and went to drama school against his wishes. Emma had had to sneak out to visit her own daughter.
“You have to forgive him,” her mother had said. “He’s only trying to bring you to your senses. He’ll calm down.” Paul had, and Marta had been allowed back in. But when, after college, she and Griff had moved in together, Paul would make his displeasure clear by going to the pub whenever they came round, even after Bernard was born.
“Little brat,” Paul had called him. Then when baby Meryl was coming along and Griff and Marta thought it was time to get married, Paul wouldn’t go to the wedding.
“Have some mercy,” her mother said. “Your father can hardly walk you down the aisle when you’re seven months pregnant. Can’t you make do with a register office?”
But Marta couldn’t: she wanted a white wedding in a church with her father to give her away. It didn’t happen. Then, four years later, E
mma got a brain tumour – probably from secondary smoking, the doctor said – and Marta blamed her father.
Indeed, she’d burst into tears at the funeral and spoken the truth in front of everyone: “If it wasn’t for you, Dad, she’d still be alive. You killed her.”
After that, father and daughter didn’t speak. It wasn’t that Marta didn’t try. She sent cards and made phone calls, but they were never returned. And when the old man fell ill with lung cancer and she’d gone to visit him at the hospice, he’d refused to see her. He’d asked the nurse to send her away. Marta was dreadfully hurt. Then when he died she’d refused to go to his funeral.
“Marta!” Griff had been shocked. “But he’s your father!”
“He disowned me,” she said. “So I disown him. Anyway I hate funerals and I have an audition.”
Griff took Meryl and Bernard to the funeral, and Marta stayed home. No one was more surprised than Marta when the will was read and he’d left her the family home: five bedrooms, one bathroom, large garden. They were thrilled to be able to move out of their rented flat and join the property-owning classes.
But what a poisoned chalice! Inheritance tax, new roof, community charge, utility bills – it was impossible. They would downsize: No 12 went on the market, but no one would buy.
At the party, Marta had her arm in a sling and found herself telling her misfortunes to the Trinidadian Glaswegian, who was a very handsome man with soft, intelligent eyes. She even told him how her dead father was sitting on the cellar stairs cursing her. But then she had had quite a lot of prosecco.
“I don’t suppose he’s cursing you,” said the Trinidadian from Glasgow. “He’s just sitting on your cellar stairs because you didn’t go to his funeral – and he’s unburied in your heart.”
“Don’t be silly!” said Marta, shocked. Whose side was this guy on?
“And you’re so guilty,” went on the Trinidadian, “that you made yourself fall down those stairs. No such thing as an accident.” Marta bristled.
“What did your mother die of?” he asked.