A snapshot of Lois and Anton on the steps of the National Gallery, posing for a street photographer. In their early thirties. Anton with his dull long face, his heavy Wasserman jaw: Lois a female version, like Guy and Lorna. They held each other’s hand. They did not look like brother and sister, more like husband and wife. ‘I found this one in my mother’s pin cushion,’ said Lucy, ‘after she died, when I had to pack up the house.’
‘Pin cushion?’ I asked.
‘One of those silk puffy padded things you fold over. You kept pins in it in the days when women made their own clothes. You’d keep your precious, private things in there too, soft and snug. Once Anton came to live with us, it was me who was sent off to boarding school too. He went into art dealing.’
Snapshots: metaphorical: Scenes from Felicity’s life, for inclusion in the film narrative in my head. Night-time. Lucy unable to sleep, aged seven, wrapped in a blanket, sitting on her window seat looking out at the long back garden. A full moon. Bare trees, rimmed with snow and frost, bending over the stone walls. A summer house, an octagon with verandah and glass windows. A cat stalking across the lawn. The glow of a cigarette. Uncle Anton leaning against the old mulberry tree which is, they say, three hundred years old. He’s wearing a raccoon coat, fashionable at the time. The back door of the house opening, Felicity slipping out. She’s fourteen and thinks she knows everything and is in love with Uncle Anton. Lucy has teased her about it and Felicity has denied it, blushing. He says he’s going to take her away from all this: he’s going to Australia and she’s coming too. He has a job lined up at the National Art Gallery: she can join the Sydney Dance Company. Felicity is sleek and brown: she has borrowed Lois’s beaver coat. Beneath it her body is scarcely formed, kept skinny from all those ballet exercises. She has bare feet: she dances from foot to foot to keep her toes from freezing. Her red curls toss and glow in the moonlight. Lucy hears the murmur of voices. Does she hear Hove you, I love you from Felicity? The audience does: it’s what it always wants to hear and fears to hear. Anton’s hand moves over the small breasts, the muscled girlish behind. She shivers. She has never felt anything like this before, of such mysterious importance. (Actually, we can do without Lucy’s point of view. Hers was just our way in to the scene. Scrub Lucy.) We watch Anton with Felicity: we follow them. At first he kisses her and she draws back. But he is the ultimate authority: he has the power of life over her. Leave Anton out of it and Lois and Lois’s unchancy behaviour are all she has in the world. Without Lois’s consent she is penniless and homeless, orphaned. And Anton has authority over even Lois. He kisses her. This time she lets him. His tongue goes into her mouth. She doesn’t like that. It is far too personal. She draws back. He pulls her closer. His hands are pushing up her clothes, there is something hard pressing into her stomach: she has no idea what it is. He push- pulls her into the summerhouse. He shifts her on to the wicker chaise longue that winters there. Now she is on her back and he is on top of her, his knee forcing hers apart. She cries out in alarm. That makes him angry. ‘Little bitch,’ he says. ‘You led me on. You know what you were doing, all right.’ His hand goes over her mouth: she bites the hand. Now there’s no stopping him, he will have his revenge. Cut away to long shot. You know the dismal rest.
Back to Lucy. Lucy hears moans and cries from the summerhouse, and half knows half doesn’t know, what’s going on. What can she do anyway? Fetch her mother?
That would makes things even worse, she knows that without knowing why. Now she sees Felicity run from the summerhouse, without the fur coat, white nightdress caught up in her hand, bloodstained. Soon it’s Anton’s turn to come out. He lights a cigarette and leans against the tree and smokes it, snug in the warmth of his raccoon coat.
‘That was the worst thing,’ said Lucy, nearly seven decades later. ‘That he was so casual. That he smoked a cigarette and enjoyed the moonlight, as if all pleasures were equal, and Felicity just another one.’
At breakfast the next morning Felicity avoids Anton’s eye. He comes in cheerful and whistling, and devours liver and bacon and sausages, and urges Felicity to do the same. Then Anton adds, oh and by the way he’s decided not to go to Sydney after all. ‘My mother looked so happy when he said that,’ said Lucy. ‘But Felicity just fainted away. The doctor was called and said it was nothing, she was hysterical. Anton went back to treating her like a child. She was sent back to boarding school.’
* * *
Four months later Felicity felt ill and was growing fat and had no idea why. Lois, noticing her changing shape, beat her with her fists and told her the brutal facts of life, that is to say how sex and procreation were linked. Felicity was a moral imbecile, Lois claimed, dirty, disgusting and lewd.
‘If what you say is true,’ said Felicity, ‘then Anton is the father.’
Then there was indeed uproar. Anton denied responsibility, and seemed entertained by the situation. Felicity was no better than she should be: he had seen her creeping out of the house at night, in Lois’s beaver coat. God alone knew what company she kept. She’d been with the servants too much and now behaved like them. She’d got herself into trouble and was lying to get herself out of it. Devious, sluttish and sly.
There is no way Felicity is going to be believed. Lois throws her forcibly out of the house, push-pulling her, driving her with the force of her rage. She is driven by cab to the Society for the Care of Unmarried Mothers, or SCUM, in Coram Street in Bloomsbury, and there left upon the doorstep, as if she were an abandoned baby and not an abandoned mother. There being nowhere else to go Felicity sits down upon the steps to consider her lot in life, and by the end of the day is delivered to the care of nuns who run a sanctuary for the mothers of illegitimate children. She will work for her keep. Here Felicity stays through her pregnancy, expected to remain inside the grounds to avoid embarrassment to others, praying three times a day for God’s forgiveness, fed meagrely, coldly housed, and locked in at night. The sanctuary is attached to a Convent: Felicity’s job is to scrub the long tiled corridors, along which the clean and virtuous feet of the exalted and the celibate so softly tread. She accepts the world’s version of her. This is what she is fit for. Sometimes she thinks Anton will come and rescue her, but mostly she doesn’t. She keeps the company of girls and women from twelve to forty, all of whom, though pregnant, have failed to find a husband. Some are simply bewildered, some traumatized by rape: some are street girls whose abortions have failed. Some have been thrown out by their families, some never had them in the first place.
* * *
Felicity is one of those stunned by fate. She is in a state of shock, and the boring, steady rhythms of the days, the requirements of penitence, the orderly growing of the baby within her, give her time to recover from all kinds of things from which she did not know she needed to recover. The death of first mother, then father, the arrival of the cruel stepmother in between; the sudden, shocking jolts of cruelty and spite into a life once protected and serene, the understanding that God is not good - all these things she was able to assimilate and come to terms with, in a short five months. She cried a lot at first, and was expected to. Otherwise nothing much happened. (How to express the importance of nothing happening! A challenge to any filmmaker.) She did learn a thing or two.
She saw that she might live among the helpless scrapings of humanity, but that nature hadn’t given up on them, not one bit, or their bellies and breasts wouldn’t be swelling so; only society had, so society was an ass. She learned the more elaborate facts of life, and how she was hard done by: she was taught how to make a living from selling sex. She discovered she was perceived by the other girls as beautiful, stylish, witty and a cut above the rest of them. This surprised but gratified her. They placed great hope in her. They sent her in to deal with the nuns over the matter of no Sunday supper, and won. It was easy. No one was as bad as Lois. Felicity was almost glad to be where she was.
She knew she would be obliged to hand the baby over for adoption. It called out to her from t
he womb for approval and concern and she hardened her heart. She had no choice. She thought perhaps she could see a lawyer: perhaps she could make some claim on her father’s house, but how could she afford a lawyer? She had seen the will in which everything had been left to Lois and Lucy, Arthur having come across love letters to Sylvia which proved that Felicity was not his child. How did you refute that?
Little Lucy contrived to find out where Felicity was and got to see her, just the once. The news from home, if you could call it home, gave Felicity no reason to hope for any sudden change of heart from Lois, any regret, any self-reproach, any admittance of moral responsibility. The police had turned up to take Anton away: there was a fraud charge outstanding back home in Vienna. He had represented himself as an art dealer in connection with the theft of a painting by Klimpt: the police had finally caught up with him. ‘What did Felicity say when you told her that?’ I asked Lucy, all these decades after the event.
‘Just that he should have gone to Australia while he could.’
‘And that was all? She didn’t seem to hate him?’
‘Why should she? She shouldn’t have gone into the garden with him that night. She didn’t have the instincts of a good girl: she was born bad, my mother was right about that. Innocence is no excuse. After Felicity went away Anton left as well; my mother was half-mad. It was probably she who betrayed him to the police.’ I said that even if you looked at Felicity as fifteen-year-old jailbait she was only doing to Lois what Lois had done to Sylvia, and serve her right. But surely she agreed Felicity was very harshly punished?
‘I expect it made things easier for Felicity,’ was all Lucy said, ‘when it came to giving the baby away. Knowing the father was a criminal.’ She didn’t ask me about Alison’s fate and I didn’t tell her. Talk of Alzheimer’s in the presence of the old is always tactless.
‘And a rapist,’ I said. She looked blank, but as if the other side of blankness she didn’t like me very much at all.
‘Adoption was the best thing,’ said Lucy, firmly. She stood up to leave. The interview was ended. If I were Phyllis Calvert in The Man in Grey she would certainly throw the windows wide and let the storm get me.
It was at this point that I asked her to reconsider her decision not to be in touch with Felicity and she refused, but with a sudden surfacing of the charm and wit which left me liking her. She too had had a lot to put up with. Who hasn’t?
26
At three o’clock on the afternoon of 3 January Jack had a telephone call from his sister-in-law, Joy. She was distraught. On three occasions recently she had called Charlie on his mobile phone and found it switched off. She had on each occasion put on her snowshoes and gone over to the Guest House, the door of which had been opened by yet another new female face who did not seem to understand what Joy was talking about when she asked where Charlie was. English-speaking reinforcements were called for from within the ranks of Charlie’s ever-growing family. Obviously, Joy protested to Jack, contracts of employment meant nothing to these newcomers: the female shrug when finally the question was translated had suggested men did what they wanted when they wanted and it was no use complaining. Worse, said Joy, the Mercedes was not in the garage. Hadn’t their agreement been that Jack would give her warning when he used Charlie’s services?
Jack decided at that moment, as Joy’s voice shrieked over the snowy fields, and he was able to hear her both over the telephone and from her house as well, that it was no use trying to replace Francine. He wished he had never shifted house to here: he was bored, he was lonely, he was being punished for having cheated Felicity out of $200,000.
He was taking Prozac. He was at his best in the barbecue season, and this was not it. This was a lonely and stand-offish neck of the woods: the local women-alone had been in to look him over as a potential man in their lives, but since he did not suit them, too noisy and brash, perhaps, for the quiet, genteel landscape, the even tenor of their lives, they’d left him alone and failed to ask him over. Sociability alone was not enough. Former friends, the couples he and Francine had one way or another acquired, came to visit once or twice to see if he was okay, said how splendid to be living next to family, and disappeared from his life. He had compounded the misfortune of bereavement - who wanted to be reminded that eventually it would happen to them - by the sin of moving away, always seen as a form of disloyalty. He was doomed to wither into old age with Joy tormenting him and only Charlie and his growing household to interest him. He envied the lot of the toothless old men of the Balkans, so frequently seen on CNN, lumped together with the women and children while the young men went off to have fun with guns, but at least included as family, and still battling it out with the old women as to who was in charge. He could have talked about this to Francine but Joy did not even have CNN, she wasn’t sufficiently interested in the outside world. Joy seemed as lonely and isolated as he was, but she didn’t notice, she had the gift of making a lot of noise, perhaps this was why. He did his best to infuse her lonely house with noise and energy, but he could not keep it up for long, single-handed. Felicity had been wise to move the few miles into Rhode Island: life seemed livelier there. The nearer the ocean the better perhaps: more happened. Who knew what ships, enemy or friend, might not appear any moment, over the horizon. The flash of a sail, the drift of a smoke stack. You had to keep your eyes skinned, whatever century you lived in.
‘I thought you had a rest every afternoon,’ he said.
‘I used to,’ Joy snapped. ‘Not any more. Someone told me that it was because of my afternoon nap that I sleep so badly at night. When you get to our age it’s important to change the pattern of your days. I thought I might drive over to visit Miss Felicity. Now this! No chauffeur! What else does one keep a chauffeur for, but to be spontaneous?’
Prozac, or something, or the need for event, had made Jack overconfident. He told Joy that every afternoon Charlie drove William Johnson to the Golden Bowl to see Felicity.
They’re courting,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you glad for your friend?’
There was a short silence from the other end, and then: ‘Not that con artist she met at the funeral?’
‘That’s him,’ said Jack. ‘Charlie says he seems okay.’
‘Charlie would say that,’ said Joy. ‘He’s a con artist too. Look how the devil exploits us! For all I know he’s running a whorehouse from above my garage. William Johnson! Obviously a false name: it’s too ordinary not to be. He’s decades younger than she is: he’s just after her money. You should see the dump he lives in.’
‘She seems to like him,’ said Jack.
‘If you mean what I think you mean,’ said Joy, ‘that is revolting. People of that age have no business having sex. It’s too upsetting for those around. If Felicity has a toy boy then she’s being taken for a ride. It’s shaming, embarrassing and humiliating. Next thing is he’ll marry her and run off with all her money.’
‘I guess seventy-two seems quite old to be a toy boy,’ said Jack mildly. ‘And we have no idea if they’re having sex.’
‘It’s Felicity so of course she’s having sex. Exon hadn’t been dead a month but she was having it off with some antique dealer who came to the door. He must have been some kind of pervert or else half-blind. He went off with the oak dresser, and to all accounts she got a good price for it so he must have been halfwitted as well. Whose side are you on anyway?’ yelled Joy, and Jack watched a deer which had come cautiously to where woods met the fields, but now took sudden flight and was gone. Joy said she was calling the Golden Bowl and would not have her limo, her limo, dammit, used for assignations with unsuitable men by an old lady who had lost her marbles.
‘What do we say when they find out?’ asked Felicity. She lay naked in the bed with William. They touched, her left flank of familiar flesh stretched up against his right unfamiliar flank, but becoming more accustomed by the day, looking up at the ceiling, occasionally at each other. They missed the anonymity of the night, both agreed. Day was all very we
ll until the fourth decade, then the dimmer the light the better. Close the curtains as you wished, daylight was cunning and seeped in round the edges of the window frame. To lie together in the dark, in the actual night, as other people did, was what both wanted. But that meant commitment, and declaration to the outside world, and neither was quite ready for that, though neither was quite sure why. And so far they simply lay in the bed, because that made talking easier. His hand sometimes strayed to her breast, to find out more about it, and for once she wished she had her former body back: it was as if now the power of her will was obliged to sustain her physical existence and keep proving it: whereas once the body had run off so boldly with the self, taking over: the firm bosom, the bouncy flesh, flying ahead of the will, having to be restrained.
It was pleasurable, it was companionable, it was even exciting: the nerves still ran from the nipple to everywhere, but that excitement was not what this was about. It might, she thought, be about true love, something she had heard speak of, and pretended to experience, but perhaps never had. Something to undo the time she preferred not to think about, the first rough hands ever on her reluctant, obedient, unknowing breast. Contemporary wisdom, which to someone of Felicity’s age and experience seemed mere folly, maintained that you could never recover sexually or emotionally from such a beginning as hers. But far worse things had happened after, and indeed before - how could you compare the death of first mother, then father - the father who had betrayed you twice, first by bringing the likes of Lois into the house, next by failing to stay alive and abandoning you to her cruelties altogether - than that gross hour on a moonlight night in a summerhouse in the garden. Anton, with his questing, searching, bullying member, tearing into your surprised self. The voice used to groom and entice, soft lies going ahead, seductive messengers of the evil that followed. The baby, tearing its way out of your equally surprised self, sheets a mass of blood to the annoyance of nuns. But you recovered. You forgot. You took good care to forget: you forgot everything you could. You got on with what was left of your life, made something of it, just to show your defiance. You would not be defeated.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 17