by Weldon, Fay
Laura feels abandoned. Woodie has an alternative plan. He wants to set up his own business making DIY garden sheds. All he needs is a back garden. If he married Laura, and Audrey lived with them, there’d be no need to sell the house, and she could help with the baby when she felt like it, not otherwise. Because of course Laura would stay home and look after the baby; why have one if you were going to hand it over to someone else?
He was kind, solid, sensible and companionable and Laura agreed to marry him. And whether that was his good luck and her bad or the other way round, who’s to say? You can only say of other people what a pity he did this or she did that: but we’ll never know how much worse it might have been had they not. At least you’re alive to say oh, how I wish I hadn’t emigrated. Nature provides itself, through the act of procreation in an endless juggling of chromosomes, through the two that combine to produce the one with infinite examples of supposing-this and supposing-that and seeing it through to the end; but it is not given to individuals to do so interesting a thing – to rewind life back a scene or two, and play it forward a different way. Only writers can do it and they’re just guessing.
8
Carmen ran into Mrs Baker in the street just before Christmas. She did it literally. Her father was teaching her to drive. She put her foot on the accelerator, not the brake, and the car shot forward through the Fenedge Pedestrian Precinct, and she knocked over Mrs Baker, who was dressed as Uncle Holly and collecting money for the Rainforests, or the Mexican Earthquake, I forget which: at any rate some good cause in some distant place. I was sitting watching from the Handicapped Centre, wondering why there was never a collection to provide decent official transport for the handicapped here at home, when I saw Carmen run into her. Or perhaps I overstate it. Mrs Baker was scratched on her leg, but only slightly, and though personally I thought she ought to go to the hospital for a tetanus jab, so rusty was Andy’s car, she and Carmen went together to the Welcome-In to have a cup of coffee and a mince pie. Andy had turned Carmen out of the car and said he’d die rather than let her drive another yard, and would certainly die if she did: she would have to walk home.
‘I told you so,’ said Mrs Baker, not smugly but in some distress, on hearing that Annie was still a housemaid at Bellamy House and had failed to get promotion to kitchen work – ‘She’s just too good at beds,’ said Carmen – and that Laura was not just pregnant but engaged, and Carmen without a job. ‘I told you girls what would happen if you failed your exams.’ But it was strange. Whenever Carmen applied for work, things fell apart. Firms shut up shop as she appeared – Peckhams Poultry had been closed down to clear its premises of salmonella – and personnel officers took against her for no reason.
‘You are aiming too low,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘One look at you, Carmen, and they can tell you’re only going to stay a week or you’re about to plot a takeover, or tell them what to do.’
Mrs Baker asked about boyfriends and Carmen replied as she always did: that she had met the love of her life, a certain Ronnie Cartwright, and was saving herself for him. She even quoted a line about perfect love from Pelleas and Melisande, thinking Mrs Baker at least would understand. But Mrs Baker told me later she felt responsible for filling her girls’ heads with romantic nonsense when all they were ever going to meet were the local boys. She would campaign to take a number of works off the Set Books list forthwith. Let them be realistic about their chances in the world. Mrs Baker bought another mince pie to console herself and while she was at the counter her eye fell on the local newspaper, and a small advert offering a job for a smart junior at Bellamy Airspace. She took the newspaper over to where Carmen sat beneath the dreadful work of local artists, and Carmen finally called Bellamy Airspace from the telephone box outside the Post Office and asked for an interview.
I watched her from my window. I will swear that when she went in she was pretty enough in her swarthy way, but slightly dumpy, and that when she came out she was beautiful, leggy and bosomy, but repeatedly kicking her feet against the wall as if in a temper.
Carmen called Mrs Baker at home that evening to say she’d got the job. She was to be a receptionist. Her new employers were teaching her elocution and the art of flower arrangement. She was to take courses in make-up and massage. The rest of the time she sat and received parcels and smiled and made clients cups of coffee, and was paid double what she would have got at Peckhams Poultry.
‘It sounds,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘as if they are training you to be a geisha girl.’
‘It seems that Sir Bernard Bellamy,’ said Carmen, ‘likes all his female employees to be truly feminine. Just not pregnant,’ she added, remembering Laura.
It was noticeable during the next few months how the luck of Fenedge changed. Peckhams reopened, its salmonella count at last within levels acceptable to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food; the remains of a Roman villa and its splendid tiled floor were discovered not far away, and this attracted visitors with archaeological interests if not much money, so that the many local bed & breakfasts flourished. Sheets which had lain folded in airing cupboards were brought out and aired; egg cups were brought forward from the backs of cupboards, shaken free of dead flies, and washed. Children were made to sit up at table and mind their manners in case paying guests arrived, and they did! Bellamy House brought enough wealthy people into the area to allow a fancy restaurant or so to open up: pubs had themselves refurbished: a Japanese Auto concession was granted to the town, then the launderette bought in a dry-cleaning machine, so you could take your clothes in and collect them on the same day! Hitherto garments had been sent to Kings Lynn and it would be a minimum of five days before they were returned, and the local depot manageress was likely to reject your offering, fingering your cashmere jumper with the egg stain on the front, saying, ‘You don’t want to waste your money getting that dry-cleaned. Wash it at home. It’s perfectly safe.’ And you would and it wouldn’t be. There was to be a new science wing at Fenedge School for Girls; the place was now designated as a Community Resource Centre and attracted extra funding from the Local Education Authority. Evening classes in upholstery and astrology had started up. A scandal involving royalty hit the headlines and the girls involved turned out to be the daughters of a local vicar, so the media turned up en masse and put Fenedge on the map at last. ‘Flirts of Fenedge.’ The City Fathers (City, indeed!) had the War Memorial cleaned up, and the flowerbeds replanted. A bus service finally operated, to link Fenedge and neighbouring villages, and the cinema reopened, with a new Dolby stereo sound system, one of the best in the whole country.
It wasn’t so much that good things happened as that bad things ceased happening. Or perhaps the Devil was looking the other way: was off stirring things up somewhere else. Bad luck for them. Sir Bernard Bellamy was off too; he had diversified into Scandinavian shipping.
Mavis and Alan suggested to Annie that she lived in at Bellamy House: they thought she’d be better placed for promotion.
‘You mean there’s no room any more in my bedroom for your office,’ was Annie’s first reaction. ‘That is to say, no room in your office for my bed.’
‘You can’t stay home for ever,’ said Alan, reasonably. ‘You’re a working girl now. If you’d tried harder and passed your exams and gone to college, it would have been different. But no, you wouldn’t listen.’
‘I did so listen,’ said Annie. ‘I listened to Count Capinski, if you remember. It’s all his fault.’
‘Don’t say that name aloud,’ said Alan, alarmed. ‘Don’t even think of him or he might come back.’
Lately Mavis’s reputation had soared, recovering from the initial knock it received when Count Capinski first disappeared. For a time her healing powers had seemed to desert her, but now she was back on course, or said to be. Warts vanished and backache went at the touch of her fingers. As Dr Grafton became increasingly eccentric, not just failing to diagnose cancer until too late — which anyone can do – but refusing to prescribe antibiotics or make hom
e visits, and suggesting to patients that wholemeal bread and meditation would cure heart disease, Mavis’s laying on of hands seemed more and more acceptable. It was true that you had to pay Mavis and you didn’t have to pay Dr Grafton – or only through your taxes — but at least Mavis wasn’t judgemental, and didn’t equate stress-related ailments – which meant everything which could go wrong with body or mind – with personal sin. Mavis was far more likely to tell you that you were a victim of demonic possession, which could hardly be your fault. You’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. So these days she was popular, and was spared much of the putting the living in touch with the dead that she’d been obliged to in the past, if only in order to earn a living. She’d found that exhausting and irritating, if only because the dead had so little of interest to say once they’d been summoned. Now she just laid on hands and felt the healing power channel itself through her, and could see the results.
I had been to Mavis myself, and once again had felt the strange, none-too-pleasant tingling in toes normally unused to sensation. What’s more, she had seemed quite inadvertently to have cured a skin condition on the back of my hand, which had never fully healed since I had an allergic reaction to some kind of drip they gave me in Chicago. Dr Grafton had finally agreed to sending further X-rays and CAT scans to Chicago – one could die while the medical profession sorts its etiquette out: their mistrust of one another is only equalled by their mistrust of their patients – and now they started writing to me again. The backbone bypass had worked, they assured me, it was just that it had instantly blocked; the bypass now needed its own angioplasty: they wanted to fill it with miniature balloons which they’d blow up inside the artery to clear it. They’d lately developed a new and better technique to accomplish this, they said on the phone: why didn’t I come over? ‘We’ll get the blood flowing!’ they said. ‘One way or another, Harriet. We won’t be defeated!’ But there was something in their tone of voice so like Alison’s as she addressed the watery sky and defied God that I was reluctant to accept their offer. I thought I’d just sit there in my window a little longer and observe what was going on, and take time to make up my mind. Perhaps the tingling meant the bypass was clearing the traffic jam in my arteries, of its own accord, without the need for surgical intervention.
But enough of me. There was Annie crying that day into her vegetable soup, feeling abandoned: she mustn’t be forgotten: let’s return to her predicament.
‘She’s crying because she’s tired,’ said Mavis. Mavis had turned vegetarian. ‘She’s a meat eater. Carnivores exhaust themselves with animal passions.’
‘It’s nothing to do with being tired,’ said Annie. ‘It’s relief. I’ve wanted to live in at Bellamy House for ages, but I thought you’d be hurt if I said so. Most people are very nice to me at work, and you get used to the ones that aren’t. Even Mrs Haverill being horrid is okay: at least she’s taking notice of me. Up here it’s all allergies and rheumatics and dead spirits and body bags in the freezer, and everyone trying to be nice when they don’t feel like it, and too busy to care about me one bit.’
‘You’re being unfair,’ said Mavis.
‘Let her say her piece,’ said Alan. ‘She’ll feel better when she has.’
‘Everything I touch up there at Bellamy House is nice,’ said Annie. ‘It’s silky or soft or somehow heavy. Here everything’s scratchy, cheap and tinny.’
‘It’s all good value for money in this house,’ said Alan. ‘Not a penny wasted.’
‘Value for money means ugly,’ said Annie, ‘and the longer I’m up at Bellamy House and not here the less ugly I turn out to be.’
‘You’re not ugly, dear,’ said Mavis. ‘Whatever makes you think a thing like that?’
‘The mirror,’ said Alan, and laughed before he could stop himself. But that was only habit. The fact was that Annie was looking distinctly better. She’d lost weight and her eyes seemed bigger, even quite large and soulful, and she was sometimes able to wash her hair in one of the guest bathrooms if there was time and it was Mrs Haverill’s day off so that it fluffed agreeably around her face instead of lankly hanging. Alan actually apologised for laughing, and it was with the good wishes of her family that Annie packed a trunk, and moved up the hill to be resident staff at Bellamy House. She had a little attic room to herself, and Mrs Haverill let her use up the half-finished circlets of lavender soap from the guest bedrooms, and quite often yesterday’s croissants would be served for breakfast, dunked in milk by the chef and heated up briefly in the oven for the staff.
Laura and Woodie got married, quietly, because Audrey was back in hospital and it didn’t seem a time for much rejoicing, but there were pretty flowers on the Registrar’s table and she had a new dress, the first for ages. Her father Kim did not come. She sent an invitation to the last address she had for him, the minute she knew her mother would be in hospital for the ceremony, but she didn’t hear back. She expected he had moved house again. She’d been told by friends that Poppy had lost the baby, so her father need never have left home in the first place, but Woodie helped Laura accept the fact that probably her father had really wanted to go, not just had to go. And that yes, perhaps Kim had indeed thought Kubrick the fish more important than his own daughter. An older generation of men could be like that, said Woodie, especially men young in the sixties, whose brains had been addled by hallucinogenic drugs. But Woodie, said Woodie, was a new man and different. He had feelings and could give voice to them. He spoke to Laura seriously on their wedding night. He knew she hadn’t been certain about the wisdom of getting married, but he was convinced they’d done the right thing. He loved her. There wouldn’t be much money, but they’d manage. He would make sure Laura’s life was rewarding and interesting. They would travel – they could always go camping, even to Europe if she wanted. The great thing about being self-employed as he was, or was about to be, was that the harder you worked the more you earned. Well it must be like that, mustn’t it? There was a tremble in his voice and Laura realised that Woodie was as scared of the future as she was, and stopped worrying about whether or not she loved him: it was obvious that she did.
As for Carmen’s household, great things were happening there. Raelene had discovered aerobics and the benefits of a low-fat diet: she could bend to pick up the cat dish and wash it; she remembered to buy worm pills for the dog: she served only boiled vegetables, never fried, and sprinkled ground vitamin and mineral supplements into the muesli. Andy and Stephen grumbled but ate what was put in front of them. Raelene, as she lost weight, jumped up and down from her chair to put things straight and wipe surfaces. She couldn’t abide dirty clothes: the washing machine and dryer rumbled all day long and into the night too. She planted roses in the garden, even making the hole big enough to spread the roots properly, and adding peat and humus into the sandy soil. She chose a Dortmund climber (R. Kordesii) for the north-facing wall (crimson red with a white eye) and rugosas Frau Dagmar Hastrup (pink) and Rosenaie de l’Haij (crimson purple) for the beds in front. Andy, at her request, painted the house, not in colours left over from assorted jobs, but in proper brilliant-white outdoor paint, two coats. Raelene began to answer the phone, instead of just switching it through to the answering machine when it rang, and would even leave Andy a record of calls received and made. She had the van insured and the reverse gear mended, which made proper parking possible. Parking tickets came less frequently.
What brought these changes about? Who’s to say? Families sink and rise again. Aerobics and weight loss helped, as did the fact of Carmen’s being employed, but Stephen’s metamorphosis was probably most responsible. Stephen had pulled himself together, as boys of a certain age sometimes do: he discovered a talent in himself, a capacity for and an interest in science. Dragging a magnet through iron filings had filled him with an enthusiasm for the workings of the natural world. It was his good fortune to have at college an excellent physics teacher whose bad fortune it was to have halitosis so severe that it limited his
employment potential. Mr Parker had ended up teaching the dregs of the education system, the unteachables, the alienated, those accustomed to living with smells, their own and others, and rather liking them. Mr Parker’s presentation of the engineering problems posed in the supporting of two female breasts of variable size with fabric and wire in one garment further fired Stephen’s interest. Tests showed him to have an innate mathematical ability, and before long, via a rather morbid interest in nuclear catastrophe, he was absorbed in the rarefied world of particle physics, and destined, the school thought, for Cambridge.
‘We were lucky,’ said Mr Parker to the Headmaster in the corridor. ‘Sheer fluke that we picked him up. I wonder how many children we lose as we nearly lost Stephen – doomed by our low expectations of them?’
‘It wasn’t luck,’ said the Headmaster. ‘The system is devised to pick them out, get them on–’ and he hurried off, opening a window on the way. But Mr Parker was given an A level class to teach the following year, and got three pupils to Oxbridge, so it looked as if his luck had changed too.
The notion of ‘my son the genius’ affected Andy greatly; he had dropped a couple of stone as Raelene stopped frying and now the world seemed full of hope and possibility. He paid his bills, engaged in dialogue with dissatisfied clients, even went over to the Horners and did a couple of days’ work in the garage, free of charge. It was true that in error he switched off the big chest freezer, now placed, for some reason, in the back of the garage (what did such a small family want with so big a freezer?) but luckily Alan noticed and turned the power back on.
One day, just before Laura’s baby was born, Carmen came back home early – she’d been at her Flower Arrangement and Other Office Skills course in Kings Lynn – to find her parents looking through holiday brochures. Raelene leapt up and took Carmen’s coat, brushed it down, and hung it on a padded hanger on the back of the door, and offered her food and drink.