It seemed Alison’s adoptive parents, the Wallaces, had played little part in her children’s lives.
‘I think they were shopkeepers,’ Lorna said. ‘Rather ordinary. They ran a chain of corner stores, but in the seventies the big supermarkets opened and they lost their money: they retired somewhere dreadful, like the South Coast. Mother didn’t speak of them much.’
I heard the story of the Dowson parents’ meeting. Both had been studying geology at the Imperial College in South Kensington. He was twenty-four, she was twenty-two. They’d married within three or four months, and both sets of parents had disapproved. Guy and Lorna, from the look on their faces, seemed to disapprove too, although they owed their existence to the union. Alison had ended up a stay-at-home mother of the cooking, cleaning variety as was typical of her generation, when learning was, for women, for learning’s sake. Mark had become a palaeontologist, a man of note, the one they could proudly acknowledge as parent. Lorna found a tattered photograph in a drawer of Mark receiving an honorary degree of Cambridge - and another one of him showing the young Prince Charles around a hillside in which something remarkable out of pre-history had been found. If they’d been photos of me I would have had them framed and in pride of place on the wall: even if only in the lavatory to show I took none of it seriously: not so the Dowsons. They had a nervy diffidence about their place in the world. They wouldn’t have gone so far as to throw the photographs away: the bottom of a drawer getting scuffed under other things should have been no surprise.
Mark’s background was county English: both his parents had died recently: the expected inheritance having been swallowed up by nursing home fees, as so often happens these days. The aged live longer, though no more steady on their pins than heretofore. The Dowson grandfather had been a Harley Street physician: the grandmother had edited a natural history magazine. Their snobbery would have been of a vague and throwaway kind, to do with intellect and education rather than wealth: Mark had married below him, Alison being out of nowhere and presumably pregnant with Guy when they married, but at least she had a brain. From her photographs she had been no great beauty, this throwaway child of Felicity’s, though her eyes were good, like her mother’s, and her smile shy and sweet. The young Alison stood stooped and awkward, as Lorna did.
In the fifties abstention was still the favoured method of birth control. Abortion was difficult, surgical and for medical reasons only. If a man got a girl pregnant he was expected to marry her and that was that. Otherwise he was a heel and a cad. Contraception was the man’s responsibility: coitus interruptus the next best thing to no sex at all. If the man failed in self-control, if he got the wrong girl pregnant, too bad: if lifelong unhappiness for both ensued, too bad as well. Sex was meant to happen after marriage, not before: in theory girls stayed virgins until their wedding night: if they didn’t they deserved what they got. Wedding guests stared at the hang of the bride’s dress and speculated. Young couples would go away for a few months after the wedding and return with a baby and be vague about the date of the birth.
* * *
For the Dowsons the church wedding would have been an embarrassment: the social gulf between the groom’s side of the church and the bride’s noticeable. The Wallaces were shopkeepers. That Alison was herself the adopted child of an unmarried mother would not have helped. Like mother, everyone must have thought, like daughter. Product as she was of two disgraced generations, perhaps Lorna’s life problem was that she was trying too hard not to be a bad girl. Parental-in-law disdain might well have extended to Alison’s children, and account for the way the pair of them were so socially ill at ease. Proper social responses, in other words, did not come naturally to them. If you required someone else to pay for your lunch you did not then choose the most expensive dish on the menu. If someone crossed London to come to tea you served more than digestive biscuits: you offered sandwiches as well. It would occur to you that your guest might be hungry. Socially secure people, from whatever class, as Miss Felicity would have put it, knew how to behave. If someone like Wendy pulled a packet of sweets from her Crimplene pocket she would take care to offer you one: Lorna took out a packet of cigarettes, looked inside, said, ‘Sorry, only one left,’ and smoked it without thinking this was in any way odd. But then, most people have quirks of one kind or another, and I daresay I have myself. Habits and actions that seem normal to me but strange to other people, and that no-one has pointed out to me.
When I told Guy and Lorna that I had found them a half-great- aunt Lucy, younger half-aunt to their mother Alison, or rather that she’d found me, they seemed unmoved. What to them was a newly discovered half great-aunt? Widow of a manufacturer of exercise machinery? A person without PhDs or publications? Who cared? And still they did not suggest I visited Alison.
‘If you’re visiting your mother on Christmas Day,’ I hinted broadly, ‘maybe I could come with you?’
‘There’s no point,’ said Guy. ‘She can’t tell one day from another.’ I did not see that the world stopped just because the inside of one’s head stopped. If Alison didn’t know it was Christmas Day they could always tell her, even if she forgot almost at once. The rituals of civilization - even if hardly based in religion any more - must be observed, or what was the point of being civilized?
And she was my half-aunt as well as their mother; I was family too. I resolved to visit Alison on Christmas Day, no matter what her children did or didn’t do. In the meantime I would call on Lucy, if only to get the back story of the film now building in my head, inch by inch, reel by reel, into the totality of its narrative. That Miss Felicity’s life wasn’t finished yet did not occur to me. One tends to write off women in their mid-eighties as simply hanging around until death carries them away. One is wrong.
24
Also, of course, women in their seventies have a continuing life and a will of their own. Lucy, Felicity’s younger half-sister, turned up at my door. She had been alerted by Wendy that I was making inquiries into her past life. I was quite shocked, as if I’d been turning over earth with my spade, as was my legitimate right, and all of a sudden a small furry creature had leapt out of its underground lair and bitten me on the nose, slapped me round the ears with great strong mole-like hands. This investigation was not quite the one-way street I had imagined. I stopped digging, but what I unearthed had a life of its own.
She was still slender and elegant, straight-backed like Felicity, and unlike Felicity, of the kind who has managed to live a life without untoward alarms, within accepted conventional boundaries. I could tell from her controlled courtesy, by the way she looked in polite puzzlement around my flat, as if wondering where the three-piece suite could be, why the curtains hung from loops of fabric and were not properly fitted, why the freezer was in the living room, and who had painted it with scenes from Disney’s Fantasia. She was well dressed in taupes and beiges, though one felt that the instinctive preference for poster blue, demonstrated by those who grow old without ever quite growing up, was only just held at bay. She had just such a blue ribbon woven into carefully curled, still thick, perfectly white hair. On the left hand she wore a broad gold wedding ring, and on the right a diamond ring of the kind it is unwise to flash around in Soho. They might not quite cut off the finger to get it but the finger could get dislocated in the tug. I had known it happen.
Wide, helpless blue eyes looked with apparent trust from a face grown old around them: I say ‘apparent’ because in some women of an older generation this way survival lies. If you’re helpless and pretty enough, some man is bound to come along to change the tyre, marry you and fetch your handbag for the rest of his life, which will probably be shorter than yours, and what is more he will leave you the money so you can enjoy your widowhood in peace. When Lucy told me she had been recently widowed and that her husband had manufactured exercise bicycles, I was not surprised. If the only way respectability can be acquired is at the expense of deep seriousness, so be it. I can earn my own living. I was born four decade
s later than Lucy. I have a skill, a talent and a training. Other women are not so lucky.
Lucy had telephoned before she arrived to check that I was in, and when I warned her that there were lots of stairs but no light, told me that she was not bothered by stairs but liked to have a handrail. I had to think before I replied that yes, there was one. The young, I suppose, just run up and down stairs with confidence, taking two at a time if they’re in a hurry: the old go more carefully: perhaps from a shakier sense of balance or simply because experience has taught them that falls are nasty things. They like a good rail. Even as I put the phone down I knew I should have told her there wasn’t one and put her off. Her timing was terrible.
It was a Saturday afternoon: Harry Krassner was flying in the next day: the soap opera of my own life demanded my attention. Holly had decided to keep the baby: she disapproved of abortion. Harry had let me know this in the same breath as he asked if he could stay over at my place. I’d said for him to call when he arrived, to see if it was convenient. I had hoped to make a late appointment at Harvey Nichols or somewhere to have my legs waxed. (Me, Sophia King, exerting myself thus over a man? It hardly bore thinking about. If God gave a woman hairy legs surely it was man’s duty to put up with them? Wasn’t there some Country Music song, ‘Did I shave my legs for this?'.) Perhaps Lucy’s unexpected arrival was both a warning from on high and a salvation. If Harry Krassner took off because my legs were not up to Hollywood standards of silky smooth, I was well rid of him. And anyway once you give a subplot legs and start it running that’s it - interweave itself it will, following its own rules, as intricate as the ribbon winding through Lucy’s white hair. (It might have been a wig, but I didn’t think so: I think the Good Hair Fairy was there at her birth, as it had been at mine.)
I finally understood the baffling question that writers get asked - Once you have invented your characters do they take off in their own direction f Most writers reply sensibly, if disappointingly, No, they may try but Vm the one in charge round here, but here was Lucy, whom I had relegated to the past, making her appearance in the present, taken off indeed, climbing my steep stairs, declining to be passive, and quite capable of distorting by virtue of truth and actuality the elegant pre-credit sequence of the film forming in my head. That film, of course, being the biopic of Felicity’s life.
Lucy sat rather pointedly with her back to the Fantasia fridge - I realized she was right: it had seemed a good idea once, in the days of comparative poverty when there was time and energy to spare, and now there was none, whenever was it to be remedied? - and took command of the meeting. Her little-girl voice carried well. The cat slunk off under the cooker. It was the old-fashioned kind with legs. No time for that either. I was astonished that Harry from Hollywood put up with me at all. Lucy said in tones of childish formality that she was pleased to hear that Felicity was alive and well but that so far as she was concerned the past was better left alone. For her it was not so pleasant a place. She did not want private detectives snooping around in her life. She did not want to be in touch with Felicity: what could they have in common after so long? Her astrologer had advised against it, as had her doctor. Her solicitor had warned her that there might be endless trouble over wills and so forth. On the other hand, if Felicity wanted to find her long-lost baby, she, Lucy, did not want to stand in the way. She would give me one interview, here and now, tell me all she knew, and that would be that.
* * *
I am not a writer, I am an editor. I can speculate but not invent. I suppose I could have worked it out for myself, but the truth turned out to be even more dramatic than I would have dared suppose, and being reported by a seventy-five-year-old out of the memory of the child she once was, had already been conveniently turned into a shaped narrative: a tragedy, as it happened. I could see why Lucy did not want her view of the past upset after all this time: a happy ending for Felicity was not within the scheme of her universe.
Lucy had the characters well defined: her father, Arthur, was the wronged hero, Felicity the tragic juvenile lead whom the villain, Uncle Anton, had wronged and ruined, and Lois her mother was the wicked witch. It was pre-sound cinema, black-and-white film with piano accompaniment. Felicity was Clara Bow, wide-eyed and trembling, shrinking back against a wall while the landlord threatens her mother with eviction unless she surrenders to him. She was Alma Taylor, orphaned, wronged, thrown out into the snow. If she had ended up a gauzy creation who shopped at Bergdorf Goodman and owned a Utrillo, Lucy really didn’t want to know.
If it had been me in Felicity’s shoes, all those years ago, I would have curled up and died then and there. Or I would have lined up with the other ruined girls to jump off Waterloo Bridge. But perhaps these days we just know too much about trauma, both emotional and physical, to believe we can survive and this is why we don’t. If there is no language for the bad things that happen they are not so firmly sealed into our consciousness, our memory. They can drift off and be lost in the next experience. We’re talking about a time when the word cancer was never spoken aloud, when insanity in the family was kept secret, when if a girl was raped she kept quiet because otherwise she was not just damaged but disgraced and unmarriageable, and how could a girl live other than by marriage or the goodwill of men? Even a couple of decades into the century only a very exceptional woman could earn a living wage, other than on her back. For all their frills and affectations and fashions, their shingled hair, their pretty pleats and flattened bosoms, women were, as ever, into the basic matter of survival.
* * *
The Fates have a way of doling out the same hand of cards to a woman, over and over. The cackling sisters had decided that Felicity was to get some pretty nice cards sprinkled with a few really nasty ones bound to mess the others up. They sent along a Fairy Godmother to the christening to give looks, charm, energy, courage, wit - then took away her parents, gave her Lucy’s mother Lois for a wicked stepmother, brought Lois’s brother Anton into the household, obliged her to give away her perfect baby and just when she’d managed to cope with all that, gave her the double whammy of Angel. It’s true that if there wasn’t Angel there wouldn’t have been me, but what use am I to my grandmother? A cynical, distant, unmarried, unmaternal young woman who’s never going to give her great-grandchildren, who’s going to bring her branch of the family tree to a distinct and sudden stop.
Because not me, I’m not going to chance it. What, leave the baby which comes out to the cackling sisters? They’re too mean, they have a rotten sense of humour, everyone knows. I’d rather trust a genetic scientist and that’s not saying much. Pick the sexiest dad in the world and the baby could still be a throwback. It’s like picking your lead player with a pin from the telephone directory instead of going to central casting and getting a star. You have no control over what starts growing inside. Even if it was okay to begin with you could take a drink too many or passively inhale and from what everyone says you could turn it into a serial killer or the Hunchback of Notre Dame. You could find yourself lumbered by, and like as not bonded to, the wholly unlovable.
Lucy had had two children by her second husband, an importer of exercise bicycle parts. One, the girl, was a specialist in aboriginal art in Western Australia and the boy was a banker in Hong Kong. She did not seem to miss them. Perhaps they had left the country not to escape from over-possessive maternal love but so as not to be reminded of the lack of it. No, neither had any children. They were Too busy enjoying themselves’. I decided I wouldn’t chase this pair up. My great-grandfather was their grandfather, true: but the generations were too askew and sheer distance and airfares seem to thin the bloodline no end. And Lucy too was destined to be another shrivelling, dropping branch of the family tree. Poor Mother Nature: I who so mistrust her could almost feel sorry for her - so many dead ends these days, or so many experiments taken over by the subjects, crying, ‘Enough, enough.’
After Lucy had told me the story of Alison’s birth I made a halfhearted attempt to persuade her to c
hange her mind and get in touch with Felicity.
‘No,’ she said, firmly. ‘It would shift the ground on which I stand, and my legs are too old to cope, for all I cycle every day.’
And all of a sudden she was like Miss Felicity and I caught a vision of family, and of the continuation of mirth, that most precious of nature’s creations, running through the generations and was charmed, and sorry that it was to stop, but not sorry enough. The gift had bypassed Guy and Lorna: it explained their literal plod, plod, plod through life. I hoped it wasn’t more that that. There was something in them that seemed slightly worse: a banality. Why did people talk about the banality of evil? But because evil is banal, does not mean that all things banal are evil. Coal is black, but not all things black are coal. Forget it.
She rose to go. I helped her down the stairs. The phone rang as we were halfway down. It was not switched to answerphone. I let it ring itself into silence. I had a feeling it was Harry. I did not call back to find out. Perhaps I would not have him in my home again. Why should I be made miserable by a man whose only interest in me was that I saved him a taxi fare to work?
I know I haven’t yet handed over Lucy’s account of Felicity’s early years but some things take more time to assimilate than others. Like making the key scene in the movie: you often keep it to last.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 15