‘Oh yes?’ I asked. ‘They all look pretty vast to me. I hear many American citizens have to be moved around with cranes, they’re so heavy.’
‘They’re the other ones,’ he said. ‘Not the real Americans. In this country you don’t even know how to get hot water out of a shower except in a dribble.’
‘We don’t like to waste hot water,’ I said. ‘The US uses up seventy per cent of the entire world’s energy in its selfish obsession with its own comfort. North America is single-handedly destroying the planet.’
‘We know how to live,’ he said, ‘and stand tall. The rest of the world just creeps around in its own shit.’
‘Europe’s as big as the US,’ I said. ‘You watch out.’
‘Europe’s primitive,’ he said. ‘Look what happened in the Balkans.’ ‘That’s an anomaly,’ I said. ‘At least we don’t still have chain- gangs, and schoolkids shooting up their own classmates.’ This was ridiculous, but we couldn’t stop.
‘You don’t even shave your armpits,’ he said.
‘At least I don’t wear a wig like Holly,’ I said. ‘At least I have hair. Why don’t you go back to her? You only live with me so you don’t have to take a taxi to work.’
‘That’s about the level of it,’ he said, icy.
‘Personally, I take Buffalo’s view of you,’ I said. ‘They got it just about right. Small town boy! So do me a favour, just shuffle off.’
What was upsetting Harry - and I would have been more sympathetic, he was quite right, if I hadn’t been pre-menstrual, which I was, but who’s going to admit to a thing like that - was a stinking review of Forever Tomorrow in the local Buffalo newspaper. All over the rest of the States the film had met with critical approval, if not staggering commercial success. Just not in Buffalo, Harry’s home town. Headed Local Boy Makes Bad, the piece dismissed the film as exploitative, sentimental, badly cast, badly acted and amateurishly filmed. The striving for effect was painful, the contents embarrassing. Harry Krassner had lost the plot and all Buffalo was disappointed. He might see himself as the Boy from Buffalo Made Good but Buffalo was quite happy to see the back of him, thank you very much. The journalist had even dug up a former schoolteacher to say Harry had been an arrogant child, too full of himself to get his homework assignments in on time. And so on and so forth. It was the kind of thing they say, in fact, when they really want to go for you, and there’s something personal behind it. I asked. Yes, Harry knew the journalist. Irene Degusto. She’d been at school with him.
‘You got out of Buffalo,’ I said. ‘Irene didn’t. Of course she’s going to be vile. You probably stood her up at Junior Prom or whatever you call your adolescent shindigs.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ Harry demanded, and that’s how the row began, because of course I was on Harry’s side. But women always make the mistake of trying to explain away misfortune, and to comfort and console, believing they will thus lessen the blow, when they would be better advised simply to join in male rage, despair and general ranting.
It was our first row. It had left both of us so exhausted and surprised that we crept home, and had the sweetest of languid sex, which took us both even more by surprise, it was so intense: it felt more like love than passion. I think even Harry was shaken. As ever, Felicity called when all I wanted was sleep. She had the knack of it. But she wanted to talk about her new love, as women do, at any age, regardless of who wants to listen, and she must do it now, now, now, not wait ’til I got over there. I’d booked the ticket. I was flying on Saturday. Today was Thursday. I said as much.
‘So long as you don’t marry him,’ I said, ‘and you don’t start lending him money, and you don’t mind being seen as a gambler’s moll, I suppose you can’t get into any real trouble between now and then.’
‘He has asked me to marry him,’ she said. ‘I’m taking my time replying. I wouldn’t want to seem too eager.’
I was alarmed, but it would be imprudent to show it.
‘A gambling moll is one thing, a gambler’s wife is just plain dreary. It just isn’t you, Felicity.’
‘You’ve no idea what’s me and what isn’t,’ she said. ‘Things happened to me when I was very young that you don’t know about.’ ‘I know quite a lot,’ I said. And then because I was tired and wasn’t thinking I said something stupid. ‘I know about Lois and Anton. I know what a hard time you had. Poor Felicity.’ There was silence. Then the phone went down. I called back, horrified. At least she picked it up.
‘Look, I’m coming over in a couple of days,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk properly then, shall we? It’s difficult on the phone.’
‘How dare you,’ Felicity said to me. ‘How dare you pry into my life. I wish I’d never had Angel, I wish she’d never had you. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you to come over. I just want to be left alone to start over.’
It was a double whammy. I doubled up as if in pain.
‘I’m coming to Rhode Island and that’s that,’ I said, and put the phone down and realized it was truly pain: my period had started and my whole body was protesting. I cried for a bit and then the phone went again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that. Of course you must come. But just don’t interfere.’
And Krassner slept on, as Krassners will. I think that what happens just before I have a period is that I turn atavistic and want to drive men away. Female cats do it to tom-cats, just before the females have kittens. Bite and snarl at them ’til they slink off. They say it’s in case the male cat eats the kittens, which toms sometimes will, but who’s to say what a female cat thinks? You can watch her behaviour and work out some Darwinist rationale to do with survival-friendly tactics, but I think it’s just to do with the surge of impatience any female gets with the male when she’s preoccupied. This great lolling creature with its impractical masculine attitudes. When you’re pre-menstrual the sharp understanding and clear vision of the unconscious is nearer the surface, that’s all, and it’s probably the accurate one. The rest of the month is all self-deception and wishful thinking and unreasonable smiles.
34
I visited Guy and Lorna for Saturday lunch. They had few friends - partners are easier to acquire than friends, for some people. Guy had an ex-wife to moan about, which somehow occupied the space most people reserve in their brain for friendships: and Lorna had a dolefulness which could be mistaken for unsociability and would put people off. They had each other for company, why should they bother with the rest of the world? They liked me to come over, though, to divert them with tales of ridiculous goings-on in filmic places. Lorna had once had an affair, she confided to me today, with a fellow academic which had droned on for years - cinema, or a show, dinner, then bed, but as she pointed out to me the films got worse over the years or seemed to, and the shows more and more predictable, and in the end even habit was not enough: she started making excuses, like the flu, for not turning up: he’d have family in town, whatever, likewise. After a couple of years the weekly intervals became two, then erratic, then stopped altogether. She still worked with him occasionally - they were setting up a museum space for a display of latest ventures in the wonderful world of crystallography - there weren’t any really, only better ways of making the old ventures look pretty - but could hardly imagine, let alone remember, what she had seen in him. I’d had variations of just such desultory relationships over the years: I supposed a lot of people got married on the strength of them, in a might-as-well mood, in which case no wonder a lot of people got divorced.
* * *
Lorna improved as you got to know her better, or so it seemed to me. She talked more easily. I was touched and pleased by her confidence about the lover. I told her a little about Harry. We laid the table for lunch in the conservatory at the back of the house. It was a bright day: there were little yellow crocuses sticking defiantly out of the lawn: the Thames was running full and furiously at the end of it. The boatmen were out, the pleasure steamers busy, megaphoning away. Lorna prepa
red a bleak salad with no dressing and found packets of ham in the back of the fridge. You can tell a person’s temperament from the state of their icebox. Lorna had a frugal, saving, but ever hopeful disposition. Little saucers of congealing stew, a mug of juice from boiled carrots, a third of a sponge cake: a single old cold Brussels sprout - such a waste to throw leftovers away. I made a vinaigrette and she expressed delight at what it could do for a salad, and I taught her how to make it, but I didn’t suppose she’d ever turn her hand to it when I was gone. She wouldn’t want to indulge her senses. She was a brilliant crystallographer, I had no doubt; an appreciator of icy delights, not fleshly ones. She served frozen peas and carrots mixed, without salt or pepper or butter. But it was all right; I was not there for culinary delights. She was being generous with her confidences, and indeed her lunch, and it was a real effort for her and I appreciated it.
Harry had gone to have a shave and a haircut somewhere grand in Mayfair, and after that he was meeting a sound engineer in a pub in Wardour Street. I’d told him nobody went to pubs any more, only to clubs. He said how come in that case the pubs were so full? All those people spilling out on to the sidewalk didn’t look like nobody to him. I said he knew what I meant and I needed a rest and was going to go visiting family out in the suburbs. At least now I had one to visit. I loved being able just to say it. Family at last.
‘If ever I’m going to be out for a couple of hours,’ he said, ‘you make sure you’re out for at least five. Why’s that?’
‘What am I meant to do?’ I asked. ‘Hang round counting the minutes ’til you come back? Is that what you want me to do? Is that what Holly does?’
‘Why do you keep mentioning Holly?’ He looked genuinely puzzled, but men are good at that. ‘What has she got to do with it?’
‘I never mention Holly.’
‘Yes you do. You talk about her all the time.’
‘That is a complete lie,’ I said. It was too, and we both knew it. Holly was on my mind, not his. He stomped off about his business and I stomped off about mine. We each called the other on our mobile phones within the half-hour, though having some difficulty getting through because of it, to make sure the other hadn’t taken the tiff seriously. The existence of the mobile has caused a difficulty in plotting in the drama-adventure category of contemporary film: trees’ and trees’ worth of storyline once depended on people being out of contact with one another. Now, though at a physical distance, or in a remote spot, they can talk to one another nonstop. Why didn't they just call the police? has been replaced by Why didn't he just call her on his mobile and explain? But so it goes.
I sat and watched the Thames flow softly, while we sang our life songs. Once indeed the river had run softly, spreading itself where it chose: now so much of it had been confined inside embankments that it ran focused and strong, and had changed from wandering female into charging male. Guy, who had been in his room finishing a deposition to his lawyer, came down to join us. His ex-wife had accused him of sexual abuse of his little son, and he was understandably upset. His lawyer had been reassuring and said it was a common charge these days which most judges had the sense to ignore. To thus accuse the father saved the mother the bother of organizing access days, made her feel better about initiating divorce, and made an easier explanation to her child in later years. Your father was a total bastard. The Court agreed. There was nothing I could do.
‘I’m sure that isn’t true of most mothers,’ I said piously. Guy always made me feel pious. But like Harry, he would have nothing of soothing palliation. I could see how distressing the accusation was, and how disturbing to the child even to be aware of it. So many of the bad TV films I had cut in my time - a couple of misspent years spent electronically editing tape - had involved some kind of dysfunctional family, in which the traumas of today were laid at the door of childhood abuse - wicked stepfathers or fathers. It was as if decades of subfusc TV drama was necessary to compensate for that one sharp fifties film, Sybil, when the damage was done by the mother, and the daughter took flight into multiple personality. Once that primal scene was disclosed, the personalities closed up again, and there Sybil was again, one charming person, healed! Though what was so good about being one person instead of a number was never made quite plain. I suppose in the fifties not to know where you had been the night before would be horrendous: nowadays, at least in the world of pubs and clubs, it wouldn’t be anything out of order.
I tried to cheer my cousins up. There is no such thing as a free lunch and Lorna had trusted me with her confidence, so after Harry I repaid them with lurid tales of my mother Angel, my father Rufus the artist, and my and their grandmother, Felicity. I didn’t tell them how Angel died. I did not tell them how Alison came to be born - they were not particularly interested and it was not an edifying tale, other than that it demonstrated, to me at least, just how heroic Felicity was. She was such a survivor, I said, catching piety from Guy. To which Lorna responded bleakly that she could never understand what that meant. Either you were a survivor or you were dead, you didn’t have much choice. Sometimes I thought the inside of her head was rather like the inside of her fridge. Not given to wild statements or random promises. Mine is either totally empty or crammed with whole sides of smoked salmon and French cheeses and organic butter and slabs of chocolate. There seldom seems an in-between state: I don’t know how it happens.
Lorna found sufficient curiosity in herself to ask about the person who had first turned up on her doorstep with news of my existence, and I explained Wendy from the Aardvark agency. We laughed a little about the name. Guy expressed himself shocked by the agency’s methods of rooting out information, which in the light of the Data Protection Act were surely illegal. Lorna said no harm had been done: Guy said ends never justified means. They even had a sort of quarrel: their voices rose as if they were children. I almost expected Alison to come rushing in to tell them to stop it at once. How different life would have been, I thought, if I had had brothers and sisters, a family home like theirs. I almost envied them.
I was still suffering from Felicity’s sudden attack on me. To be wished out of existence by one’s flesh and blood is not nice, even if Felicity had apologized. I felt accursed, unlucky. I was sorry for myself, still all grated up the wrong way and insecure. Flarry had said perhaps now I understood why he had felt so bad about the attack from Buffalo, and I acknowledged the reproach. To be told to stay away, you’re not wanted and never have been, is horrid.
And then again trauma is never done. People hand on the damage they’ve had done to them, these days we all know that. Felicity did what she could, as is God’s purpose for us, to absorb and incorporate and de-barb her father’s infidelity (how it all started, after all), her mother’s death, Lois’s cruelty, Anton’s abominations, the random humiliations and shames she had encountered over the years as she did what she had to do, but seldom chose to do. But only a saint could absorb it all: that’s why the world lurches little by little downhill, bouncing from one evil to the next. Little acts of bitchiness, little shreds of unreason which hurt others, which you didn’t mean to do but just somehow find you did, grease the general human slither down into entropy. We are all alchemists, trying desperately to turn base metal to gold, which can never quite be done. Felicity managed brilliantly, skittering along the surface of her life, still at it after all these years. Personally I can’t stand the heat and so stay out of the kitchen. Except Krassner seemed to be dragging me into it, by the scruff of my neck. I hurt, how I hurt! But quite where the hurt was coming from I could not make out. If your motives are good, surely nothing can go wrong?
35
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! I don’t know where the phrase comes from; from which little section of my childhood; it becomes the kind of luminous chant there always in the back of the mind, an exhalation, a relief, the recurring echo of some past elation, which serves to set the present dancing, render it bearable.
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said! What did he say
? He said my mother was out of her mind, and therefore no-one around her is to be blamed, because how do you cope with the deranged; they bite the hand that feeds them, and so if you try to snatch your hand away, how can you help it? When brains are wired wrong, though the reasoning power’s just fine: when the emotions are assembled in force but overwhelmed by the priorities of the frontal lobes where morality is seated (this is right and this is wrong: this is good and this is bad, and I’m the only one in step) all hell breaks loose. I always thought those lobotomy surgeons in the fifties who snipped away at random in the frontal lobes where conscience lies -1 had to edit a trepanning in Death of a Genius; I could only do it Valiumed to my eyebrows, and demanded danger money - were on to something. If the patient didn’t die at least they ended up happy, being morality- free. Amazing how ought always causes such trouble. Cocaine has the same effect: releasing people from their sense of duty to truth, to others, to everything. I bet one day they find the white stuff works on the frontal lobes, and they genetically engineer the coca plant to make sure it doesn’t. I digress, naturally. This is hard stuff to face.
* * *
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum saidl Felicity is not to be blamed. In 1945 Felicity, then an entertainer at an American airforce base in Norfolk, England, got pregnant by one Sergeant Jerry Salzburger of Atlanta, Georgia. He married her in a civil ceremony the day before he was posted back home and she was shipped out later to join him. That was the GI Bride scheme, in which after World War II the brides and acknowledged children of American servicemen from all over the world, in a generous if unexpected gesture, were gathered in. There was no-one to meet Felicity at the station; indeed, no news of her arrival had gone before, or else no-one had bothered to open official envelopes. But she had his address, and enough money for a taxi. The taxi driver propositioned her, pregnant as she was, but she said she was to start a new life. He was handsome and white and stubbly and amiable; this was white trash land. She said no. Begin as you mean to go on. She found Jerry Salzburger lying drunk on a broken bed under a filthy blanket in a shack in the middle of a chicken farm. A little boy of around six - Felicity could tell because his two front teeth were missing, who said his name was Tommy and his daddy was Jerry and his mummy had left home - was doing his best to look after fifty Rhode Island Reds. Excellent birds - superior reds of the old Mohawk line, with perfect head points, lustrous blood-red quills and beetle green tails, bought from a Mrs Donaldson of Decatur with Jerry’s demob money, but already too distracted and distressed, moth- eaten and wormy, to think of laying eggs. Many were practically bald - birds eat their own feathers to offset nutritional deficiencies. Feather picking can lead to bleeding, sores, infections or even death. Thus deprived of our needs, we self-destruct. The smell was terrible.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 23