by Weldon, Fay
She goes into the kitchen where pots and pans clatter, and there finds Mrs McLean whipping white of egg into a froth using a wire beater.
‘Stiff!’ says Annie. ‘I think I’ll break,’ to which Mrs McLean says briskly, ‘There’s some muscle ointment in the second drawer along of the dresser. Put it on tonight after your bath.’
The ointment is easily found since it smells strongly of eucalyptus of the most powerful, medicinal and unromantic kind. Annie’s view of it must show on her face.
‘Though we’re not the kind,’ says Mrs McLean, ‘to make a fuss about aches and pains.’
‘I don’t mean to fuss,’ says Annie. ‘I just don’t like the smell of eucalyptus.’
She fears she is not showing herself as the kind of potential daughter-in-law Mrs McLean would like, and enquires, to show willing, though she is not in the least interested, ‘What are you making?’
‘Meringues for tea,’ says Mrs McLean. ‘The men will come home hungry.’
‘You never stop,’ says Annie, meaning it as a compliment, but it is not taken as such.
‘Of course I never stop,’ says Mrs McLean. ‘What would I want to stop for? When you stop you’re dead. When you and Tim are married’ – What? Hold on! You mean we’re to be married? And everyone knows for sure but me? Oh, Carmen, Laura, where are you now? This surely needs some discussion – ‘Jock and I are moving on down to Rongaroa: we’re opening up another station there. Only ten thousand head. We’re not as young as we were. You’ll be glad to be on your own, not with your in-laws. It’s only natural. Here, you finish the meringues.’
Annie takes the mixing bowl and whips on, not knowing what else to do. Mrs McLean opens wide the bottom oven of the big cooker, which has been standing open, and there looking out at the world is a small white lamb. Mrs McLean scoops it out and begins to feed the creature milk from a baby’s bottle. The lamb looks at her lovingly and with absolute trust. With her free hand Mrs McLean manages to unhook the rope which controls the clothes drying rack suspended from the ceiling, lower it gently, and, with the help of her teeth, manoeuvre one of Tim’s shirts off it and on top of the laundry table. Annie marvels.
‘Don’t overwhip those whites,’ says Mrs McLean. ‘Best to add the sugar now.’ Fortunately the sugar has already been measured out. Wishing she had not ignored the offer of the Bellamy House pastry chef to teach her the arts of cake making – she had longed to learn, but knew his large clammy hand would lay itself somewhere or other on her while she did, and his large belly in the stretched white vest would bump into her, and he had a habit of wiping his nose with his fingers and flinging the product into whatever mixture he was busy at, which made her feel quite ill, so she had declined – she stirred the egg white into the sugar.
‘So that’s the pommy way!’ remarked Mrs McLean. ‘Here in Southland we always put the sugar into the white. Still, no reason your way won’t work as well!’ She was always scrupulously fair.
‘Yes,’ Mrs McLean went on in her cheerful, positive way, ‘Tim always likes a good tea. Are you good at scones? Tim’s partial to a good date scone.’
‘I expect I could learn,’ said Annie. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t even know how to make meringues.’
‘Didn’t your mother teach you?’ Mrs McLean seemed surprised.
‘We didn’t go in much for cake baking.’ Annie couldn’t recall Mavis ever making a cake. She could see there was something magical about it. You flung these varying powdery and glutinous substances together with some kind of liquid, and lo, the whole melded in the oven and rose into an edible love offering. Annie thought she would practise and become very good at home baking, the best around.
‘Well,’ said Mrs McLean enigmatically, ‘if the young go abroad they marry abroad, and that’s the truth of it. But I expect we’d all die of stagnation if they didn’t. You did stable the horse, I suppose?’
She took the meringue mixture from Annie, fretted a little over its texture, added a splash of vinegar, and slapped it into perfect shapes on a baking tray and put it in the oven the lamb had just vacated. She gave the oven a wipe out first. The lamb was deemed fit enough to sit in a cardboard box on the windowledge, where it had a good view of what was going on.
‘I thought one of the boys would see to the horse,’ said Annie.
‘Boys? You mean Jack and Ben? They’re full-grown men, not boys. You ride a horse, you look after a horse. Rub him down if he needs it, though if it’s Tigger he won’t. Take him to the stables yourself, and unharness him, and mind you wipe the harness properly, but I’d like you to do the potatoes for the potato cakes first. Jock’s partial to potato cakes. Well, you’ll do, I daresay. You’re handy enough. A bit odd, like most people from abroad, but you can’t help that. Jock and I said to each other just last night, well, Annie could just about get her arse in gear if she had to. Tim’s made a good choice there, we said. Trust our Tim.’
And she smiled, a really sweet smile, with her perfect teeth, and a face that had never seen face cream but only good honest water, and Annie felt warm and accepted, and that she had come home, and took up the potato peeler.
I went to Audrey’s funeral. Alison took me. We were late. The coffin bearers, or whatever they are called, felt obliged – because Alison called out to them so to do, crying aloud that surely the living deserved more attention than the dead – to put down the coffin and help me out of the car. Funerals are like this, I know: anything human and improper that can happen tends to, but one does not like to be the source of the untoward event. No one seemed to mind: people are very good, these days, about what Alison, who likes to be in with the trend, has taken to calling the Otherly Abled.
Laura and Woodie leant into each other, she weeping copiously, he trying not to, the three little girls wailing around them. He was a great prop to these women, I thought: rightly a wood carver, being so naturally and agreeably solid himself. Slow to move, slow to earn, but conscientious and good.
I watched with amazement, as did the many friends and family who clustered outside the chapel waiting for the previous funeral service to conclude (they were running half an hour late), as Audrey’s husband – they had after all never been formally divorced – walked towards us up the gravel path that wound from the car park through the Memorial Gardens. He had a beard. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt and sandals. His face was narrow and agreeably haggard. On his arm came a girl who could be none other than Poppy. She was little and lithe and wore a bright blue silk suit through which you could see her nipples. She looked like, and was, the kind of nasty girl men love. The men don’t know they’re nasty, but other women do. ‘Poison Poppy at school and Poison Poppy now,’ as Carmen was presently heard to say, but that was when she’d run off with Ronnie Cartwright.
Laura stopped mid-sob as her father came up to her.
‘I want you to meet Poppy,’ said Kim. ‘We’re just back from abroad. This is a grim day indeed.’ He seemed cheerful enough himself.
‘I’ve already met her,’ said Laura. ‘We did our O levels together and she cheated.’
‘Now, now,’ said Kim.
‘Don’t you now now me,’ said Laura. ‘This is my mother’s funeral. Why have you come?’
‘To pay my respects,’ said Kim, ‘to my wife.’
‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘all I can say is you’ve left it rather late. This is my husband Woodie, and these are our children. Say hello to your grandfather, kids.’
‘He won’t like being called Grandfather,’ said Poppy, giggling into Woodie’s eyes. She could never resist an opportunity.
‘You mean,’ said Laura, ‘you don’t want to be called Granny,’ and Poppy trilled with fright at the idea and Kim remarked that the passage of time hadn’t done much for Laura’s nature, which left Laura speechless at the injustice of it all, outraged, for who was to blame for her nature anyway if there was anything wrong with it but Kim? Yet she was overjoyed in spite of herself to see him again. And how was Kubrick, asked Kim:
the fish should have another twenty years in him if he’d been properly treated.
The funeral before Audrey’s was concluded. Other mourners crunched away; the officiating priest came out to gesture the next uneasy group into the chapel, and the organist played the Dead March rather fast to hurry them all in. Kim stood next to Laura, Woodie and the children. If it hadn’t been for Poppy clinging to Kim’s other arm it would have made quite an ordinary family pewful.
Alison kept saying, ‘Speak up, I can’t hear!’ in a loud voice. She had just had her eighty-seventh birthday, her mother her hundred and fifth. She and her mother shared a birthday. They had both recently been on television together, in a programme called ‘All in the Genes’.
After the funeral, Kim told everyone that Poppy was having a baby.
‘I’m terrified for my figure,’ said Poppy, staring at Laura’s comfortable waist, the hips that these days did so well to sit a baby on.
‘That’s really nice,’ said Woodie. ‘A little aunt or uncle for our three!’ He felt so defensive of Laura he’d become almost witty.
‘We’re in very crowded accommodation,’ said Kim.
‘What he means,’ said Poppy, ‘is that the Landsfield Crescent house is his now that Audrey’s dead. It was in joint names and since you’ve had the use of it all this time, it’s only fair that you move out smartish, because we need somewhere to live.’
‘Poppy,’ said Kim, ‘there was no need to put it quite like that. I was only sounding out the ground.’
‘Facts are facts,’ said Poppy, ‘put them how you like. And the fact is that that house is ours by right.’
Kim smiled goodbye, saying he’d be in touch, and led Poppy off. She was grinning and dancing about and seemed more than pleased with herself. This was a crematorium, so flowers were laid around a named plaque on the stone paving at the back of the chapel. The plaque was made of cardboard. The ashes would be available for collection in due course or could be scattered in the rose garden. The late roses were spectacular.
Laura felt a familiar feeling: a kind of clutching in her lower stomach.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. She always knew almost at once. What she felt, Mavis once told her, was the moment the fertilised egg fixed itself to the side of the uterus, digging in its tiny grappling hooks, securing itself. Now that yet another risk had been overcome – the one of being washed away by the general wombic tides – setting itself in for the next set of battles for life, and the mother registered as pain this moment of triumph.
‘I can’t be pregnant,’ she said. ‘I just can’t be,’ but of course she was.
‘I expect it’s picked up Granny’s soul,’ said Rachel, which made Laura feel better.
10
Now it seemed to me that the tides of fortune were in a state of flux, the waters churning and foaming as you can see them do if you take a boat a little way out from shore at just the wrong moment: what a swirling and turmoil there is as the waters going in meet the ones still determined to recede! You have to cling on for dear life.
It was not a good omen for me that the coffin bearers laid down their burden and took me up instead. Wouldn’t it have disconcerted you? Wouldn’t you, in Laura’s phrase, have been spooked?
It was not a good moment for Kim to appear, not good news that he brought: that young Woodie Down and his family had no right, other than custom and practice, to live in Landsfield Crescent. And Poison Poppy was bad news pure and simple.
And yet you can never say, can you, that a pregnancy is bad news, either Poppy’s or Laura’s. Badly timed, disastrous, inconvenient – misconceived, in fact – and adding to both the world’s and the personal burden, as it may well do, still a pregnancy remains good news. You have to cheer the little blighter on, as it digs its teeth in and clings: Well done, you have to say, and mostly feel, to have overcome the million-to-one chance against making it even this far: good on you, mate! Well done! Poppy smirked and Laura tore her hair and waited, seeing that the quality of life she had achieved for Rachel, Caroline and Sara was now in jeopardy, forget Woodie’s and her own. Four? How would she cope? It is of course a generally accepted rule that the simpler organism must be sacrificed to the pleasure and needs of the more complex. How easily Carmen swallowed her oyster, dislodging its little towbar; how easily the rest of us eat a tuna sandwich; with what equanimity do the rich and powerful not live upon the toil of the poor and powerless. Is the horse not shot to save its owner trouble? How blithely an opera house accepts the tax money of those who love pop: for must not the cultured, the sensitive, the responsive take precedence over the philistine? Even a male medical profession accepts, more or less, that the mental health of the mother comes before the life of a foetus (though why this is not extended to fathers too, I cannot imagine, if there is to be any parity of parenting at all).
In the light of all this, if, when Laura said, ‘I’m pregnant,’ Woodie replied, ‘My God, Laura, you can’t be. You have to get rid of it or I quit,’ he must surely be forgiven, though it was a long time before Laura did. Forget the foetus, what about Woodie?
One way or another, considering the pattern of the times, I was not surprised to see, on my way home from the funeral, Carmen and Driver standing outside the greengrocer’s in animated argument. Alison was so surprised she drove into a bollard outside the Post Office, and as I did not have my seat belt on I went headfirst into the windscreen and woke up in the local hospital. It was as well I did because when they X-rayed me for possible concussion they picked up the shadow of a brain tumour: I was flown back forthwith to Chicago, where no one exactly said that neural fibre was regenerating okay but in the wrong place, though I think that was what was happening. They removed the tumour, and I suspect reimplanted some of it in my lower spine because, when I woke after an eight-hour operation, I was on my face and well bandaged across the lower back. I’d asked them just to get on with it all. I no longer wished to be a well-informed patient. I preferred for the time being just to be a martyr to medical science. But this is not my story. I am sorry if it keeps intruding. Let me just say they flew Alison over with me ‘to hold my hand’ − Good God! Energetic old ladies are adored by everyone, it seems. I was, as it happened, glad enough to have her with me, but they weren’t to know that. She is, I suppose, a mother to me, a source of both pleasure and woe: good deeds and bad. She is someone I can blame.
Carmen came to visit me in the Kings Lynn hospital, between the diagnosis of the brain tumour and my transfer to Chicago. I was feeling perfectly well: the tumour, just above the hypothalamus, was causing very little trouble. I asked them to redo the X-rays in case there was some mistake, and they did, but it was no mistake: there it sat in the cerebral cortex – a little knot of neural fibre the size of a marble.
‘Hattie,’ said Carmen, ‘I want to ask you about the soul. Do people have souls?’
Now why does she come and ask me about such a thing? Don’t I have troubles enough of my own? Can’t she see I’m ill? She has a rather foxy look today – her face thinner than usual, the eyes almond-shaped, so large they seem almost wraparound: yet clearly it’s Carmen.
‘I know nothing more than you,’ I said. ‘It’s a word, a concept which sums up a person’s individuality. The bit of them you think would go on after death if there were such a thing as immortality.’
‘Could you lose it, do you think?’
‘How would I know?’ I was beginning to get a headache. It didn’t seem possible that the marble could sit where it was and do no harm at all. ‘I suppose you might very well wear it out during your lifetime. Use it up with bad deeds and selfishness, and then, when the time came, you’d just die.’
‘If somebody offered to buy it, then the only penalty would be blanking out at the end of your life, not hell or anything like that?’ I didn’t think it could be Carmen sitting there. I thought it was probably a nurse after all.
‘But why would anyone want to buy it?’ I asked.
‘Because I am the love
of Sir Bernard Bellamy’s life,’ said Carmen, ‘and he’s the one who’s sold his soul to the Devil, and he’s demanding me as his reward. But I don’t fancy him one bit and, fortunately, apparently I can’t be offered without my consent. And if I’d lost my soul I would easily give that consent. As it is, I won’t, no matter what the stick and what the carrot.’
‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Just take advantage of the carrot, while it lasts.’ I noticed that ‘By Courtesy of Sir Bernard Bellamy’ was engraved on the TV set in the corner, and I assumed my mind was rambling.
‘How’s work?’ I asked, always a safe thing to ask.
‘That’s going really well,’ said Carmen or whoever. ‘I’ve been promoted. I’m Staff Rep. on the Board. Peckhams are moving out of oven birds into egg production.’
‘It comes to the same thing in the end,’ I said. ‘You eat them after they’ve grown or before they’ve grown, what’s the difference?’ and with that wet-blanketing remark I lost consciousness.
I do remember Mavis coming to me waving a card – the official announcement of Annie and Tim’s engagement. When the nurse was out of the room she moved my pillows and made me sit up (they like me to lie as flat as possible) while she laid hands on me: thumbs on my temples; little fingers round towards the stem of my neck. She had little white podgy fingers. All Mavis was on the little podgy white side – except for her bright blue pop eyes. She was really pleased about Annie’s engagement.