by Weldon, Fay
‘No,’ she said. ‘And no again.’
‘How about if he marries you? Not even if I make it so he never has enough of you; is yours once, then yours for ever? Contrary to the general rule, which is yours once and then never again, because what was had today is forgotten tomorrow.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘And no again.’
‘We’ll soon see about that!’ he said, and there was another flash of blue light and he’d gone, leaving her to eat the chips, which were truly delicious. She poured the fat off to save it for next time, keeping it carefully away from her nice silk shirt, but it went rancid and greenish very quickly, and she threw it out.
And a couple of days later, there Carmen was in Safeway in her position as trainee sales manager (staff), Peckhams, doing her bit to promote her firm, as part of Shanty Cotton’s apprenticeship scheme (train more, pay less), when who should come out of the office to show her round but Ronnie Cartwright himself. And he quite took Carmen’s breath away: as well he might, being the man of her dreams, as Tim was of Annie’s, and hero of the stories she would tell other less eligible men to keep them at a distance: and herself, to explain the oddity of her existence: that is to say, being a pretty girl on her own, unclaimed (or so she said: though Laura and Annie both, as we know, believed a long-term relationship with Sir Bernard Bellamy’s chauffeur – who was probably married, which was why it was so secret – kept Carmen from any proper fruitful relationship which would lead to marriage and children).
She’d met Ronnie Cartwright only once, years ago, when he’d laid his hand over hers and taught her how to paint the eyes of the Madonna blue. But she knew at once who he was. Ronnie did not remember her at all, but then her looks had improved no end, though it was a misfortune that she, who never had zits, had that very morning developed one in the worst possible place – on the end of her nose. She had nearly called in sick because of it. ‘No doubt about it,’ Ronnie was saying, ‘chicken’s the best business to be in these days. The trend’s away from red meat.’ They walked in the chill air that rose from the frozen-food cabinets. She looked up at him. He was tall and slim, and fresh-complexioned; he was young, ordinary, kind and cheerful; he had a lot of soft brown hair and soft brown eyes: he was the opposite of Driver, who was the man she knew best in the world, and who was tricksy beyond measure, or why should he respond to her refusal to take Sir Bernard Bellamy on board by suddenly thus producing Ronnie Cartwright?
‘These days,’ said Ronnie, in his frankly rather flat and monotonous voice, which was nonetheless most attractive to her, for it smacked of stability, continuity (she felt that if Ronnie were in charge of her looks she’d stay the same shape for weeks on end, or even for a whole lifetime) and the sexy pleasures of controlled domesticity – they would have two children, properly spaced, not four in a hurry like Laura; Ronnie would have a job and climb a career ladder, and there would be enough time and routine to give major life events proper attention – not, like Laura, having to cry out that she was pregnant again before her mother’s ashes were even cooled − and she, Carmen, would be Ronnie’s wife, which was all she had in her heart ever wanted – except every minute the spot on her nose was getting larger, and how could he possibly want her?
‘These days,’ Ronnie said, ‘people just like things pale. They’d rather drink vodka than brandy; white wine outsells red two to one; chicken and fish move faster than beef or lamb. Pork, being in between, pinkish, stays steady. And if you take my advice, young lady’ (Was he on the pompous side? Never! Ronnie was without blemish) ‘you’ll move Peckhams out of battery eggs into free range.’
He waited for her to ask why.
‘Why?’ she asked, though she knew the answer. She’d told Peckhams’ Board often enough.
‘Customers are turning into guilt-stricken carnivores,’ said Ronnie. ‘So they worry more and more about the lifestyle of hens. Go for flavour, even if you have to inject it; free range, if you can afford it, barn if you can’t.’
‘Yes, Mr Cartwright.’ He looked at the hen from the profit angle, not the humanitarian, but considering his training what else could he do?
‘Please call me Ronnie.’ He smiled at her; his teeth were perfect.
‘And I’m Carmen.’
‘Don’t I remember you from somewhere?’
She told him. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘I tried to find you for years. Gave up in the end. You’ve changed.’
He took her hand and looked for a wedding ring and saw none. ‘Not married!’ he said. ‘Nearly everyone is. Just you and me not.’
‘I’m sorry about the spot on my nose,’ she said.
He looked rather surprised. It was not, she supposed, the kind of thing you mentioned. She wished she were more like other people.
‘It is quite lively,’ he acknowledged, ‘for a mere zit. Quite lights up the day. What are you doing for dinner tonight?’
So life changed: as quickly as that. But before she could reply there was a commotion somewhere in the store. Loudspeakers asked Mr Cartwright to come to Checkout 8 at once. He smiled, with too much courtesy and not enough regret for Carmen’s liking, and departed.
Carmen followed after: she knew who she would see. It was fated. There was Poppy, holding up the line at Checkout 8. She was wearing a white suit and very high heels. Her pretty little mouth moved and moved; her high little voice went on and on.
‘It was disgusting, filthy, dirty. I will tell my friends never to come here again. My nerves are in shock. I do not want a simple replacement, I want compensation. I was disgraced in front of my friends. It spoiled an entire dinner party. My dinner guest of honour bit into an after-dinner chocolate and there wasn’t a cherry inside, just a horrid little wodge of cat’s fur. Or something worse.’
In her hand she held an open box of liqueur chocolates. Half were gone.
‘You are holding up the line, miss,’ the checkout girl was saying. She’d said it three times already. ‘If you are making a complaint, kindly go to the Manager’s office.’
‘I’ll hold up the line if I want to,’ said Poppy. ‘The public puts up with far too much. They’re on my side. Now I’m crying. You’ve upset me. Cat fur! Or worse!’
Ronnie Cartwright led Poppy off. She was crying. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue, which he provided.
‘People are always trying that trick,’ said the checkout girl to the line. ‘You buy the most expensive box of chocolates in the shop, eat most of it, find something in one of them, or say you do, and bring it back. Then you get another couple of boxes free, and if you’re lucky a ten-pound note as well. It’s the cash compensation they’re after. God, how I hate customers!’
Carmen hovered outside the Manager’s office until Ronnie and Poppy came out. Poppy was being brave and dependent. Ronnie was enchanted. He led Poppy to Sweets & Confectionery and gave her two large boxes, crimson velvet with ribbons, from the shelves. Carmen drew nearer; she had her clipboard with her. Ronnie looked through her and past her.
‘You’re not, I suppose,’ she heard him say to Poppy, ‘free for dinner tonight?’
Poppy handed him back the boxes as she consulted her pretty little leather diary.
‘I have a cancellation,’ she said, ‘as it happens.’
Carmen drifted off into the Fish section, where there are always few customers, the better to weep unseen. And who should be there but Driver, inspecting a dead lobster?
‘They boil them alive, you know,’ he remarked. ‘Happy?’
‘No,’ said Carmen.
‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ said Driver. ‘Just think what poor Sir Bernard feels. Men feel rejection as keenly as women. You’re not going to feel happy until you do as I say, and neither are your friends, and neither is anyone round here for some time to come.’
And a fuse must have gone somewhere, because there was at that moment a flash of light and a puff of smoke, and Carmen had a kind of spectral vision of the real face of Driver, hoofed, clawed, malevolent and somehow seedy, for a se
cond before he was gone. Then there was a real problem with the frozen fish because the flash had apparently generated a great deal of heat and warning lights on the cabinets were already beginning to spark on and off. Ronnie couldn’t continue Carmen’s familiarisation tour, he regretted, because of this latest emergency. She slipped away. Poppy had already gone. Carmen caught sight of herself in one of the mirrors in the cosmetic section, and saw that the end of her nose was misshapen and hideous.
It was weeks before the boil – for that is what it was, and it required treatment by antibiotics – had finally subsided and her face was back to normal, that is to say, in general imperfect. None of her clothes fitted her any more. She could no longer get her calf muscles into her slender boots, and her jeans wouldn’t fasten around her waist. But at least her bosom didn’t bounce when she walked, and no one whistled after her in the street. The flowers in the baskets got some kind of mildew and died, in a sticky mess.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world Annie bunje jumped. Bunje jumping is a sport which originated in New Zealand and is soon to be recognised in the Olympic Games, although it is banned in Britain as too dangerous to attempt. The participant stands on a bridge high over an estuary or river or road with elastic rope tied to specially made boots. He or she then hurls themself into space, and bounces up and down head downwards in the air several times as the rope breaks the fall, before being hauled in, or rescued by boat. The weight of the participant is calculated against the tension in the rope, so that the participant does not continue to dive headfirst into the riverbed or the rope simply snap. The art is to skim the surface and get the hair wet, but not dash out the brains. It was this sport that Tim earnestly required Annie to enjoy with him, and since she loved him and they were engaged, she did.
‘But doesn’t anyone ever die?’ she asked Tim as they kitted up in the Club House.
‘Only if they calculate the tensions wrong,’ he said.
She hurled herself into space at his bidding, resigned to death. When she stopped bouncing she stared into rapids eighteen inches or so below. She could see the metal in the rocks sparkling beneath the water. She wondered if it was gold. She was rather disappointed when the boat turned up beneath her and she was lowered into it. It was an inelegant process. Tim was in the boat, pleased and proud.
‘Did you like that?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.’
‘I loved it,’ she said, but she felt that the general splaying of her parts entailed in her rescue, and the way the blood had run into her head, leaving her flushed and swollen, was unfeminine and unromantic. She was not convinced she was what they called in Southland a sporty type. Could she really face so energetic and courageous a life as Tim wished for her? She wanted to be pale and delicate and looked after, not windswept, healthy and strong.
‘Good on you,’ he said, not noticing her reticence, the politeness in her voice, and that was worst of all. She felt lonely. ‘That’s my girl!’ he said. ‘Next weekend we’ll go camping.’
‘Terrific,’ she said, but she dreaded putting on her genderless walking boots once more, and feeling their clodhopping weight, every step suggesting that there was better in life than getting good fresh air into your lungs, which was what Mrs McLean seemed to believe was the highest form of happiness. That, and the achieving of perfection and efficiency in baking, which Annie was on her way to doing. These days she could fling a batch of scones into the oven and they’d come out light and golden every time. She knew which lambs were worth hand-rearing; she knew how to clean the steel knives; she knew how to sand the verandah rails without getting splinters in her hands; she could rub down and stable a horse; she could help Mrs McLean rethread the loom; and still, though there was much talk of the wedding, there was no mention of its actual date. Mrs McLean said to Annie one day, ‘I reckon it’s time you and Tim shared a room. No point you going pitter-pat down the corridor all night. It wakes Jock and me up: why wear out two beds when you can wear out one?’
Neither Annie nor Tim had in fact been pitter-pattering down the corridor at night. On the contrary, they’d been sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, the virtuous, the genderless, the affianced but not married, though their daytime embraces often these days led them to the brink, though never over the edge, to him inside her. ‘Not till we’re married,’ he’d say. Which was what How to Love One Person For Ever suggested, so how could she object?
So after that she and Tim slept together, and Mrs McLean’s sister, who had just come to stay, and seemed very like Mrs McLean except she cooked less and played bridge more, occupied Annie’s room. Sleeping with Tim was indeed a rich and wonderful experience; and worth waiting for, as he was the first to say: within weeks they had moved from the missionary position in the bed – which was really all either she or he had ever envisaged – to rolling about on the floor in all conceivable patterns of limbs. Every degree in the range of human emotion, it seemed, had its appropriate release in sexual endeavour. They would appear at breakfast exhausted and pallid, leaning into one another, while Mrs McLean fried eggs. Annie was excused cooking breakfast and eating it, but it was only natural that she should wash up. Tim breathed into her neck while she did so, and occasionally took up a dish towel. Mrs McLean’s nieces and nephews, staying with their mother, were young persons accustomed to leisure and never helped around the house, which Mrs McLean fretted and frowned about, but what could you do? Mr McLean became more and more taciturn the more people there were about.
One of the nieces said at tea time, ‘What became of Wendy, Tim?’ A silence fell and there was a kind of nudging around the table. Tim didn’t reply. Annie said boldly, ‘Who’s Wendy? Come on, out with it!’ in the way she thought one of them would have done, but no one answered her. Some of Mrs McLean’s walnut chutney was produced, and cries of congratulation and amazement created a useful diversion. Tim told her later Wendy was a girl he’d once been engaged to for a short time; she’d gone off with his best friend: if he was a lonely kind of person that was perhaps why. It had made trusting difficult for him, he said. That’s why he needed to be sure, before he committed himself: he’d been really and truly up the creek, no two ways about it, for a time.
‘You can trust me,’ said Annie. ‘Completely.’
‘Too right!’ he said, and smiled his rare, broad, beautiful, endearing smile, and she wondered how this Wendy could have done such a thing: given up Tim for another.
Annie wrote a letter full of such good cheer and frank revelation to Laura, which Laura then showed to Carmen, so that Carmen could only have been relieved. Driver had been making empty threats. Her friends were safe: and Carmen was just having to put up with being herself for a while, and people saying, ‘Are you okay, Carmen? You look a bit under the weather,’ which really meant they thought she looked terrible. When the gift of beauty is withdrawn, you do. You have lost the art of presenting yourself to best advantage.
As for Laura, she had been astonished shortly after the new baby (Alexandra) was born, when there came a knock on the door at one o’clock in the morning. She was up feeding the baby, and Woodie was up with her. Her pregnancy had disturbed him: but now the baby was here he was attentive and loving once again, and Alexandra, fortunately, was one of those infants who just smile, and feed, and sleep, and glow – the very opposite of Sara, who was a discontented misery from the start, and the reason, no doubt, Woodie had been so against the possibility of having to raise another one like her.
On the doorstep stood Kim. He had a suitcase and no Poppy. It had been snowing lately, and the bare feet in the sandals were blue with cold.
‘I’ve come home at last,’ he said. ‘I’ve split up with Poppy. I’ll have the spare room. You lot can have the rest; it’s the least I can do for you. Well, what do you say?’
Woodie and Laura looked at one another. Alexandra snuggled and rooted at Laura’s breast. She covered the baby more closely with her shawl.
‘It’s up to
you,’ said Laura to Woodie. ‘You’re in charge here.’
‘It’s okay by me if it’s okay by you, Laura,’ said Woodie.
Kim bounded in − he was never short of energy − and up the stairs to see how Kubrick was.
‘Tank’s a bit murky,’ he called down in his rich voice, waking all the children, who staggered out of their rooms to see what was going on. Sara clambered over the side of her cot, at which she was adept.
‘And I can see a patch of white spot,’ he accused.
‘I keep putting in medication,’ said Laura, lying, ‘but it never clears up.’ Kubrick goggled at Kim through the glass, Laura said to me, as if this was what he had been waiting for for years, but I think she was talking about herself. Father was finally home, repentant, or more or less, and the world was set to rights at last.
‘Children,’ she said, ‘this is Grandad.’
‘My name is Kim,’ said her father sharply. ‘The word Grandad, or worse Gramps, is never to be spoken in my hearing. Remember this is my house.’ But Laura could see he was joking, more or less. Rachel and Caroline had to share a room from then on, but that was okay. Since they’d moved Rachel to her own room she’d kept seeing Audrey’s ghost by her bed in the night – or claiming she did – though Dr Grafton said it was an attention-seeking device in the light of the arrival of the new baby, and they were to take no notice. All the same, it was as well she was sharing with her sister again. If Kim was back sharing a room with Audrey’s ghost, it would serve him right and no doubt keep her contented and quiet. If she couldn’t have him living she’d have him dead.
But of course Driver was saving his fire, that was all, making them all feel safe and secure the better to devastate them later. And Landsfield Crescent itself was feeling the brunt of misfortune. Plans for the new development (badly advertised) had been pinned up in Fenedge Town Hall; a public meeting (ditto), though poorly attended, fulfilled all legal requirements. The file of objections was mysteriously lost, and before you knew it the earth movers were in the beet fields (whose ownership had been silently changing over the last couple of years) and the bypass was being built, and Landsfield Crescent was from time to time showered with a kind of black, grainy, lifeless dust, which effectively blocked any attempt by a growing plant to break out of the earth into sunshine now it was spring. Poor little Sara developed quite nasty asthma, and I was rather happier now to sit in the window of the Handicapped Centre than at my Landsfield Crescent post, and quite looked forward to the hoot of Alison’s car in the early mornings. She had had one of those dreadful musical horns installed, which always seems an insult to those braving perforce the perils of the road. What have jokes to do with traffic?