by Weldon, Fay
To which Laura replied, ‘Because it’s so nasty and mechanical. I just trust my baby to be there.’
They were waiting for the Employment Exchange to open. They’d been waiting for one thing or another all summer, while the mock yellow irises (Iris pseudacorus) and the marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) turned the fen woodland bright, and the dragonflies and the damselflies hatched (dragonflies are larger than damselflies, and don’t fold their wings, which is how you tell the difference) and the skuas turned up on the beach to make the life of the common tern wretched for the season, and the slipper limpets changed sex, and on the saltings the glasswort (Salicornia sp.) and the sea campion (Silene maritima) sprouted – enough, enough! It’s just that the Handicapped Centre had a shelf full of remaindered nature books, donated free, for good reason. The girls, as I was saying, had been waiting for one thing or another all summer; first for the end-of-term disco, then for Laura’s menstrual period to start (it didn’t: first not one, then not two) and for Audrey to be let out of hospital, and perhaps even for Kim to repent and come home to look after her, and for Woodie to come home from a carpentry YTS course in Shropshire; then for the letters through the post which would say they’d failed their exams (they came), and to be in a mood to make proper life decisions (which never did arrive), until one day there could be no more waiting, if ever they were to get out of there, and there they all were, obliging their parents, finally waiting for the Employment Exchange to open. A queue was already forming outside it, but they felt above joining it. They would sit on the War Memorial steps until they were well and truly ready. They were in no hurry.
They were pleased to be further delayed by the approach of a bright young woman, with un-Fenedge-like high heels, and the kind of perfectly made-up face which was not often seen in these parts, and especially not first thing in the morning. In her hand she held a clipboard. She was engaged in market research. (She’d caught a glimpse of me in my open window, and craned in, but quickly uncraned again on seeing my wheelchair. Obviously her research was focused on those with working legs. I thought her manners rather bad.)
She introduced herself to the girls as Maureen; she smiled with perfect teeth; she said what a lovely day it was; she said when someone was in business, as she was, all days were lovely. The positive approach inspired confidence. That morning she was targeting females between sixteen and twenty, socio-economic group CDE, and look, good luck had come her way! Three of them in a row!
Laura said she was probably a B, but didn’t mind being a CDE if that helped. Maureen asked her the number of taps there were in the house, and Laura said five, including the one in the garden; so Maureen wrote her down as borderline B/C, but on being told — Laura liked to tell everyone – that she might be pregnant marked her down at once to borderline D/E. She was talking about earning potential, she explained, to make Laura feel better, not disposable income or educational qualifications. And on hearing that none of them had A levels and that they were late school leavers with O levels but without training, and currently unemployed, she shook her head and said they fell into a nasty section of her curve: they shouldn’t have taken the summer off; there was a seventy-two per cent chance of their all being pregnant within the year, a forty-two per cent chance out of that seventy-two per cent of their getting married before the birth of the baby, twelve per cent after, and forty-six per cent of not getting married at all. Twenty-six per cent of that forty-six per cent would cohabit, and seventy-four per cent would live off the State. There was an eighty-three per cent likelihood that they would still be living in Fenedge twenty years from now.
‘What chance of us growing rich?’ asked Annie.
‘Zero,’ said Maureen, without even pausing for thought.
Laura said plaintively that there was more than one kind of rich than money rich – there was rich in babies, in personality, in love, in virtue or experience – you could surely stay in Fenedge and still end up rich somehow? – but Carmen and Annie had given up listening. They were stricken. It is never very cheering to find yourself part of a statistic. Laura’s voice faded away. Then she said, ‘I suppose that’s the kind of thing my mother’s always saying, and look at her! I’d better shut up.’ Then she brightened. ‘If the baby’s a girl I’ll call her Polyanna.’
Maureen asked if by any chance Laura was in the first trimester and Laura said yes, and Carmen said not for long she wasn’t, one thing taken with another Laura would just have to get rid of it; she couldn’t ruin her whole life because of a night on the tiles with Woodie’s zits; and Annie said that was a very wicked thing for Carmen to say, what about the transmigration of souls? Laura would be interfering; and Carmen said what a load of New Age junk, and Laura responded to another of Maureen’s questions by saying she’d be washing the baby’s nappies by hand to give it a proper start in life, so she wasn’t interested in brands of washing machine. Maureen took herself and her clipboard off to Boots the Chemist, which was just opening its doors, saying, ‘Don’t play silly buggers with me’, when what should I see but the black BMW nosing round the corner of the Employment Exchange into the precinct. Then the sudden uproar made sense. Obviously trouble went ahead of Driver as well as behind; nets were cast forward as well as trailed, to haul up and focus every scrap of dissent around.
Driver’s window slid down and he said to Carmen, ‘Tell you what, you can have a freebie – just to show you what I mean,’ and off he drove. At least that’s what Carmen said he said; to which Annie said Carmen was cheating: she, Annie, was the only one still a virgin, and Carmen hotly denied it. I thought I saw the BMW move backwards, like a film rewinding, back out of the square, but I may have been wrong and, what is more, I had a clear impression that Driver was waving at me, in a knowing kind of way, as if he knew more about me than I knew myself. I didn’t like that. And my toes were tingling again. And I could see through walls, right into the Employment Exchange, where Carmen, Annie and Laura now sat. Spooky.
They sat on chairs welded into a convenient row – convenient, that is, for manufacturer, purchaser and whoever had to sweep the floor beneath them, but not for those who sat upon them – so that Carmen pressed into Annie and Annie into Laura, and they presented a kind of untidy wodge of unhealthy pale young female flesh topped by clouds of hair. They were not sufficiently differentiated to attract the lecherous looks that one by one they would have – even Annie, for youth is youth even though the clothes it wears, and the look in its eyes, mean it would rather not think about sex, or not yet.
Carmen began to wriggle, and Laura said, ‘Do keep still, Carmen. You’re driving me mad.’
Carmen said, ‘My bra’s too tight.’
Annie said, ‘Lucky old you. I don’t even need one.’
Carmen disengaged herself from the others and stood up, and all the male eyes in the waiting room went to her, and the hooks of her bra at the back where it fastened gave suddenly, and there were her breasts unconfined beneath her white sleeveless T-shirt, a tangle of untidy undone bra and bosom. Carmen went to the Ladies room and when she came out she said, ‘Something’s wrong with me. It must be hormonal. I reckon I’ve gone from an A cup to a C overnight. It’s disgusting. I flop when I walk. And my waist’s got small, so my hips poke out in a ridiculous way. And I swear my legs are longer, or somehow my skirt has got shorter,’ and she squeezed herself in between Annie and Laura with her arms over her chest, and sat sulking.
‘I expect you’re still growing,’ whispered Laura, for everyone was staring. ‘They say you don’t stop till you’re twenty-three.’
‘Yes,’ whispered Annie, ‘but people’s legs don’t suddenly grow longer. Carmen’s right. Something’s terribly wrong.’
When Carmen’s name was called, and she had to stand up to go to Employment Officer Mr Prior’s booth, a kind of sigh travelled around the room. Both men and women stared. Although there was a head-on robustness about her figure, clothed as it was in a far too tight T-shirt and a skirt on the short side even when she
’d put it on and now shorter than ever, there was a fine-boned tranquillity about her face, as if she’d never had to give it a second thought from the day she first observed its perfection. She frowned a little because her feet were now too long for her shoes and growing and narrowing even as she stood there, so they hurt, but even the frown was delicate, and the skin on her brow smooth and perfect: that same facial expression which yesterday would have meant Carmen was in a sulk now made her seem charming, and in need of help.
Carmen pointed to her feet with a little moan of dismay, a fluttering of pale fingers, and Laura and Annie watched in fascination and alarm as soles and uppers parted to make room for her toes, no longer stubby but elegant. They all stared at her hands: the fingers had narrowed and lengthened; her nails were almond-shaped and pearly pink, and not their familiar flaky, rather dirty, bitten-down-to-the-quick selves.
‘I expect we’re dreaming this,’ said Laura. ‘It’s a joint hallucination.’
‘Miss Wedmore?’ enquired the crackling loudspeaker in the corner once again. ‘Miss Wedmore? To Mr Prior please.’
‘You remind me of the Incredible Hulk,’ said Annie. ‘His clothes were always splitting as his true nature appeared.’
‘Oh, thank you very much,’ said Carmen, and went in to see Mr Prior, whose chronological age was twenty-eight but who liked to appear fifty. He seemed overwhelmed by Carmen’s general appearance. He did not meet her eyes, but shuffled through papers with trembling hands. He apologised for there being so little work on his books: he would do his best. Of course Peckhams the chicken factory, the biggest employer around, was out of the question: Miss Wedmore wasn’t the sort to work with frozen chickens; and he didn’t think she would be happy doing domestic work at Bellamy House Hotel. But there did happen to be one vacancy which had just come through. What luck! Bellamy Airspace, a new charter airline, was looking for a trainee stewardess. ‘What a coincidence,’ said Mr Prior. ‘How seldom the ideal applicant and the ideal job turn up together!’
‘I don’t want to be a flying waitress,’ said Carmen. The improvement in her looks had not softened her nature.
‘But every girl dreams of being an air hostess,’ said Mr Prior, rather offended. ‘Flying the world, after all!’
Carmen almost made a rude joke, but the new configuration of her lips — perfectly moulded: a natural smooth line of clear rose around a cupid’s bow of softer pink – somehow prevented her from saying words too upfront for comfort.
‘I prefer to have my feet on the ground,’ said Carmen instead. ‘And if I’m going to be a waitress I’d rather do it at Bellamy House Hotel with my friends,’ and even as she spoke she felt her bosom diminish and her waist widen, and either her skirt lengthened or her thighs shortened, and her shoes, so far as she could see, were now only fit to be thrown away. She felt sleepy. Mr Prior changed his mind about her and said quite sharply, ‘If you feel the air hostess position is not for you, I respect your decision. It is foolish to take up a career which is beyond your capacity.’
Annie and Laura, offered a choice of up at Peckhams the chicken factory – piece work; although the plucking was done by machine, the gutting was hand done, and good money could be earned if you were fast and efficient and in good health – or Bellamy House Hotel, chose to apply to the latter. Such work was only, or so they told each other, until each could get her act together.
6
Annie, Carmen and Laura walked all the way from Fenedge to Bellamy House Hotel. The event is imprinted into their minds: the long straight road to Winterwart, the hot afternoon, the white dust, that day when they set out to meet their fate, or at least to have their interviews. Now, it’s a good half hour’s walk from Fenedge to Bellamy House Hotel (forty-five minutes to Winterwart) and many still walk it daily, there and back; for though these days the Bellamy House Courtesy Car is despatched to pick up guests who arrived at Kings Lynn or Norwich stations, or to meet the little Lear jets which fly into Bellamy Airspace outside Fakenham, its function is to oblige the leisured, not to transport staff. A courtesy car, Bellamy House bound, overtook Carmen, Laura and Annie that very afternoon but did not stop, and rendered them despondent. They feared this was the pattern of life to come. Some rode in carriages, others walked. And how did you get to be one of the privileged? How did you get from here to there?
The road from Fenedge to Winterwart runs parallel to the coast for a time, and then veers off towards it. It passes first through the beet fields, interrupting the long straight lines of low foliage which run sternly on either side to meet the horizon, allowing all the space in the world to the sky and the winds – painters love East Anglia because of the light – then crosses a patch of the old wood, where the oak, the ash, the maple and the beech stretch above the road to form a dappling canopy, before coming to the straight and boring conifers of the Forestry Commission – at least the crossbills love the conifers, if nobody else does. (Crossbills are small parrot-like finches; their presence anywhere excites birdwatchers very much.) Then the forest in its turn gives way to grassy fields, and the white paling fences of the ‘Convalescent Centre for Ailing Horses – Prop. Mr E. Bliss, Homoeopathic Remedies a Speciality’. And then, in time gone by, as reward and privilege, two thirds of the way to Winterwart, you would reach the high wrought-iron gates of Sealord Mansion, and peer through them to its wonderful formal garden, for so long in marvellous wrack and ruin: yew hedges falling into delphiniums, ivy creeping into the disused fountains, clematis and climbing roses fighting for space and light, and everywhere butterflies – the silver spotted skipper, the holly blue, the painted lady, the Duke of Burgundy (the latter if you were lucky) – attracted to the garden by the presence of nettles, St John’s wort and lady’s-smock (Cardamine pratensis) – plants that botanists agree deserve more than to be dismissed as weeds. And there, half-hidden by abundant foliage, you would see the great house with its glass rotunda – once home to one of the biggest telescopes in Europe – its curving glass panels (an architectural wonder) cracked and broken, the better for bats and barn owls to fly in and out. This was surely Driver’s safe house – its facade cracked and crumbling, pulled to pieces by weather and ivy; the absurd cherubims weathered noseless, the bolts of the big black front door rusted through – a door which local legend said opened of its own accord on Halloween night to let out the year’s batch of vampires, which would then fly howling and cackling over the fens and the forests and the marshes, bringing the next year’s crop of trouble. All this, for the sake of Fenedge and environs, to bring prosperity and energy to the area, and offer opportunities for local employment – or so Sir Bernard suggested in his Change of Use application to the Planning Committee -was now to be swept away: cleaned up; tidied; brightly lit and unspooked; renamed Bellamy House as Windscale was renamed Sellafield, in a piece of potent magic.
And though Alison says to me, ‘I always found the place perfectly pleasant and I’m very sensitive to atmospheres,’ I thought if she could so misjudge herself, she could also misjudge the house. But what do I know? As I say, I never saw Sealord in its decay, which was also its prime. I was taken to its smart restaurant once, after Sir Bernard had got his hands on it, and found it very boring: the smoked salmon dry and the lamb cutlets overcooked and flaky, though of course I didn’t like to say so.
As Carmen, Laura and Annie approached what was rapidly turning into the Bellamy House Hotel, workmen were taking down the old iron gates, and putting up a steel security barrier, which was to open by remote control. The girls were early for their three o’clock appointment with Mrs Haverill, the housekeeper, so they just sat down by the side of the road and watched. Carmen, Annie and Laura remarked to one another, with nudges and giggles, that the workmen were unusually skeletal; their expressions were dour; there was no opportunity here for banter, whistles or agreeable bridling. They were not local workmen, that was for sure. Annie wondered where Sir Bernard had dug them up, and that convulsed them again.
On the other side of the gate,
tractors and diggers swept up and levelled the overgrown flowerbeds and the remnants of lawns, crunched up the ornamental lead border markers, turned up the little bones in the pets’ cemetery, and made one mass, one mess, of a thousand different things, from the heath spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza maculate) to the dewberry to the dog rose to the Digitalis purpurea (or foxglove) to the paving slabs brought south (with great difficulty) from York, to the melon frames; shovelling soil so that the entrance to the underground ice house must remain forever hidden – but everything passes; everything that grows must die, everything that’s built must crumble; it’s just sad to be around when it does. Enough.
A whirr was heard and a wind arose, and a smart black and red helicopter came down over the row of beeches – fortunately, they were to stay – onto a make-do helipad behind, and out of the machine stepped Sir Bernard and Lady Rowena, whom Driver had been trying to palm off on Sir Bernard for some time. Lady Rowena had done Driver a favour or two in her day: he owed her something now, that is to say, marriage to someone as energetically rich and famous as Sir Bernard; and failing that, she could at least serve to make Carmen jealous, should the occasion arise, and she be Sir Bernard’s final choice. Driver likes to keep all his options open as long as he can. Don’t you? Who knows what’s going to happen next?
Lady Rowena had a long, haughty face and upswept hair. She wore fine leather boots, britches and a crisp white shirt. She had a long back and a stylish very flat what the Americans refer to as ass and my grandmother as ‘derrière’. Over her shoulder was flung an ugly leather bag, hand-stitched, of good quality. She had a loud plummy voice.
‘Some things won’t do,’ said Lady Rowena to Sir Bernard, her voice carrying in the wind. ‘Some things will and some things won’t, and this is one of the things that won’t.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Sir Bernard, who still remained socially insecure, at least just a little. His father, after all, had been a local farm boy, who later took to breeding boiling fowls.