by Weldon, Fay
Jennifer’s story ‘Come On, Everyone’ – the one I stopped writing when faced by Robin’s ghost, as a consequence of which I made the painful phone call to Alison, is the second story in the appendices. I have even changed Sandy’s profession in the interest of his anonymity, and because I am becoming more prudent. I really like Jennifer (on the whole) and don’t want to upset her.
7
Trying to Get Through
After Alison had replaced the receiver so abruptly and unkindly I walked further into the village in the hope of diversion – laughter, conversation, conviviality, but of course these are not the hallmarks of a French village in the middle of August. Anyone who cared for them must be off to Blasimon, listening to the Citronella Jumpers, living it up at the Folklorique. The streets were deserted, the windows shuttered. I looked for the dribbling Ghost of Tourist France, but even he was gone, back to the postcard from whence he came. Red and orange flowers grew in tidy patterns in bungalow gardens, and a few hens pecked about in the road. A dog barked and danced about at the end of a chain as I passed, but it was a puny thing and I barked sharply back and it stopped. (I identified the creature with Alison, rather sharply. Somehow, consciously or unconsciously, she had sent her spirit out to invest the animal.)
The village square was equally deserted and lined with short stubby tidy trees, which afforded no shade in the midday sun. On one side was a closed boulangerie, a closed charcuterie, and a shuttered, all-purpose store. The only cars were four parked Citroëns, none of them new. One tilted to its side, was covered by a plastic awning and had a very flat tyre. The metal rim of the wheel rested on the road. I was sure the owner, who took the trouble to shade his car, would be distressed to know that this was so. Perhaps he had gone away, on holiday? But did he have no friends, who must see, and would replace the tyre in his absence? I wondered if, when it came to it, I had friends who would do such a thing for me. Alison would not: not at the moment. If she would not visit my brother’s grave, selfish bitch, why should she change my tyre? Jack would, of course he would, but then he was my lover. Matthew, my lawyer husband, would not: firstly because he’d think it was a mechanic’s task, and then because it might have some legal significance in the matter of our divorce, suggesting that he still saw me as an extension of himself and therefore entitled to maintenance, which would not do. He’d let my car rot, and me if he could. Jude, my friend and colleague, producer of Sandra’s Sky, and a practical person, would do it at once, of course – or see that it was done, wishing to preserve her white fingers and polished nails. Unless, unless of course, some obscure magazine chose to publish ‘Falling in Love in Helsinki’ in my absence, and she happened to come across it, and recognised herself. I felt like crying. I, who so seldom cry.
During the past year, and because I do not believe in wasting time, I had looked for a way of productively filling in the evenings at Green Gables, Greenwich, while Matthew was out with the Masons, or the League of Lawyers against the Common Law, or whatever. I had hit upon the idea of writing short stories. I would manage one a week, print it out by the score, and during the following week feed it through the Royal Society’s postal franking system to all appropriate magazines, whether literary, house, trade, or hobby, from the London Review to the BBC’s Ariel to the Nursing Times by way of Fisherman’s Weekly, Aerospace and Autocar. By thus flooding the short story market, it seemed to me, and indeed opening up new ones, and with very little capital outlay, I could almost guarantee eventual publication. And so indeed it had proved. But there were, as so often, consequences of my actions I had not properly considered. I had not taken sufficient steps to render my characters convincingly fictional – and now being separated from the word processor had no means to recall the particular magazines which had received ‘Falling in Love in Helsinki’ and so could not calculate the likelihood of Jude coming across it by accident.
I stood outside the telephone box in the square and wondered whether or not to call Jude, and find out if she were still my friend. There was no wind: it was very hot. I enjoy heat, but not in a place like this, not when it’s a conspiracy between desolation and discomfort. My T-shirt stuck to my skin and my jeans chafed, and I was hungry and thirsty and alone, and I thought eyes might be peering at me from the cracks of shutters. How could I know? There was a kind of shrieking in my head: the harpies beat about me with their wings, and clawed me with their talons, saying, no, no, run, run: you can’t look back, look what happened to Orpheus when he looked back – lost Eurydice and got torn to pieces by the mob, and he was a man, what hope is there for you, a woman? And the furies buffeted me too, saying this is your punishment, this desolation, put up with it. Pride goes before a fall. So I could hardly hear at all the calm reasonable voice which said look, she’s your friend, your colleague: you owe her something, indeed a lot. Get in touch, let her know what’s happening: she’ll want to know. But ah, was she my friend?
I stepped into the shade of the booth and found all my loose change and rang Central TV in Norfolk (where, where, asked the operator) and was put through to Jude.
‘Hello,’ she said, and I put the phone down. How, where, could I begin?
I like to think that after I put the phone down the conversation between Jude and her assistant Marcia went like this.
Jude: That sounded like Sandra. I hope she’s all right. We got cut off! Perhaps she’s been kidnapped.
Marcia: I do hope not! I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to Sandra!
Jude: She’s been under a good deal of strain lately. It’s a nuisance about the programme but we’ll manage somehow. Keep her place open while she decides whether or not to return. She’s so popular with the public, in any case, we really have no option but to put up with anything she chooses to do.
Marcia: On full pay while she makes up her mind.
Jude: Of course. She must have been very unhappy with Matthew to run off like that. What a tedious bore that man is! She had every justification.
Marcia: Or very much in love with someone we don’t know about!
Unfortunately this conversation is making the harpies and furies shriek with laughter. I sit on a stone bench in the little patch of shade afforded by the lopped and pollarded tree above and try it again. This time Jude is speaking to Alison, over lunch. They sometimes meet up.
Jude: I just so happened to come across this story by Sandra in a FinnAir magazine.
Alison: I suppose it was all about you.
Jude: Let’s say it was written round me, rather than about me. Well, that’s the writer’s prerogative, isn’t it. All life is his, her raw material.
Alison: You don’t feel, as I do, that she’s parasitic on our lives, has betrayed our confidences?
Jude: Oh no, not at all! And nor should you.
Alison: I did, but I’ve recovered. I’m off to France with Bobby at the weekend to see if we can trace her, make sure she’s okay. Perhaps you should come too?
Jude: I’ll think about it. Because, I must say, I do get rather tired of being treated like her mother. I’m so much younger than she is. So why is she always so desperate for my approval?
Ouch! Let’s bring that one to an end. Now the question is posed I can get on with my life. I blank my mind out and roll up the bottoms of my jeans – with difficulty because they’re as narrow as can be – to let the sun get at least to my shins. I wish I had gone into town with the Band: I would be spared the pressures of my own company. ‘GUP – or Falling in Love in Helsinki’, my story about Jude, forms Appendix III of this book. It deals with GUP, or the Great Universal Paradox; the one which states that what you want you can’t have; what you do have, you don’t want. If it seems appropriate, read it now. Otherwise, let it wait a little, until such time as I suggest.
8
Bringing to Life
I did not wish to be defeated by this town. I wanted to bring it to life. It seemed to me that money might be the magic required so to do. Money, I had often been told, opened many door
s. I had money in my pocket – six ten-franc coins and four hundred-franc notes. I sat on my stone bench under its deformed tree and jingled it. My experience is that if you do this, sooner or later, and usually sooner, someone will come and, taking you for a fool, do their best to extract it from you. This at least is activity, energy in action. I longed to see some.
Sometimes of course you have to wait quite a while. I remember going on an outing with my mother, when I was nine and Robin was three, and she was in, if not sane, at least competent mode. We went to the beach for the day. We sat by a rock pool, clear, deep and happily and prettily fringed with seaweeds and salty flora: and my mother Tamara prised open mussels and dropped little portions of pinky yellowy flesh onto the clean pale sand of the rockpool floor, and said ‘Wait! Now wait!’ And Robin and I waited, and presently a small crab appeared out of nowhere, and then half a dozen prawns, and feasted, and such was their joy, such the commotion, that the very rocks around began to move and a giant claw shot out, and grabbed the best for itself. ‘See!’ said my mother. ‘First the small fry, then the large. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’ And we puzzled over this, Robin and I. It made sense, but no sense. Nevertheless, I have always observed – jingle money and wait, and something happens, whether you like it or not.
I sat jingling in the square for ten minutes or so: a shutter in the house next to the boulangerie was thrown back with a clatter that made cats hop and pigeons rise and a young woman appeared in the window. She had a baby on her arm. What did she find to do all day, I wondered, behind the blank façade of the house? She seemed cross. I was not surprised. Then the blind of the boulangerie rattled up: fermé became ouvert. I went in and bought a long thin loaf with a ten-franc piece. The bearded woman in the faded navy dress who served me counted out change unwillingly, as if knowing it would just give me more to jingle in my pocket. It did. The doors of the charcuterie and the supermarché were now open. I bought sausage from the first and wine from the second. On both occasions I was served by women. As I left, the doors closed behind me in a kind of exhaling breath which I felt to be part relief, part disappointment. The relief was that peace had been restored: the disappointment that no one’s fortune had been made by its disturbance. But there, nothing is as bad as one fears or as good as one hopes. I was disappointed in them, too. What is the point of a town without men? Or inhabited only by the ghosts of men?
For I must report that as I walked back with my provisions to the empty Hôtel de Ville, I heard footsteps behind me, echoing my own. I stopped. They stopped. I looked back. No one. An echo, perhaps? But I could see no wall to make such a reverberation of sound; just the dull, empty, hot street, and ugly wrought-iron gates with their tubs of practical red flowers. Dogs which should have barked didn’t. And when I resumed walking, the steps came after me again – and not with the shuffle of the dribbling ghost, or the light tentative movements of Robin, but with a strong, young, forceful pace, so I kept thinking whoever or whatever it was would catch up with me, that someone would appear at my elbow, but of course no one did. The unseen follower did not pursue me into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville: the footsteps stopped as I came up to the little grassed slope to the gate – and I looked behind again and saw nothing unusual except that the sturdy-if-rusty child’s swing, which for some reason stood on the slope, was creaking to and fro, to and fro. And that of course could have been the wind. Winds do get up quickly in these parts – not that I felt any when I licked my finger and held it up. But of course, my not feeling it did not mean it was not there. These things are so subjective.
I nodded towards the swing and went inside the gate. It never does to show fear, even to ghosts: which is another way of saying we must face the past and our own guilts unafraid. And even if this one was, as it were, nothing to do with me, I doubted the capacity of any ghost to do the here and now any harm. I was not afraid. Was I not Sandra Harris the great and famous, next in line to Astronomer Royal (if so I chose), mistress of Mad Jack Stubbs the trumpet-player, dweller in the here and now, and invincible? All the same, the hairs on my arms stood up, the back of my neck tingled, my body betrayed me. I showed the physical manifestations of simple fright.
Now it is important, when presented with the unknown or unexpected, not to panic; not to flail about with limbs and mind, but to switch smoothly into emergency gait, and deal swiftly and calmly with the symptoms of the untoward at once, and ponder underlying causes later. So no doubt my father would have done.
So, a ghost stood at the gate, waiting and listening: summoned up by myself, raised by some accord between myself and it? His ghost, perhaps? My father’s?
My half-brother had already been to visit: bringing his disordered soul to bear on mine. Why not my father now, a visitation of malicious order, to bring me back to heel? But the universe would hardly be so concerned with me, and besides there seemed no threat or danger here: nothing even very personal: just some kind of statement that needed to be made, in the strong, steady, unseen step. I breathed deeply: the tickling feeling of impending fear receded. Let him stand and wait, whoever he was. I would just get on with my book, and he, or it, would drift away and become one with the hot smell of mint and lavender mixed, on the other side of the wall.
We all have ghosts to haunt us. Mine seem particularly near. Sometimes as I stare up at the stars, when the heavens arch above me, before I begin the defining and focusing business that brings this section or that of the galaxy into precise and narrow attention, I seem to catch sight of a face, formed no doubt by the vagueness of the starry clouds, as do the hills and valleys of the full moon – why, there’s the man in the moon, romantics amongst us say to a race of children who know well enough there’s no man there, only that bleak and rocky emptiness. He’s taken a step or two back, I daresay, into the constellations of the Milky Way, and that’s who I see. ‘You’re always seeing things,’ my friends complain. I saw Jehovah himself once; I was on a tour of Israel, with a group of astronomers. We went round in a minibus, escorted by a handsome army captain, armed with a machine gun. We took the narrow dusty road to the Dead Sea, through a land bleak and rocky as the moon, but as hot as the moon is cold, baked rather than frozen, and up and up the hill to the cleft in the rocks which would let us down again into the valley of that salty, mechanical sea, which is nothing more than heavy metals in suspension and good for neither man nor beast – though I believe they have spas there nowadays; and use the black and sinister mud to cure psoriasis – and I saw Jehovah’s face loom down through the clouds: he was the God of Vengeance all right; a surprisingly personal Patriarch; he would have spoken to anyone in his bearded old man ire, his eruptions of outrage, and made them tremble. Both paranoic and obsessive, I thought, with his vengeance wreaking and his detailed rules for his terrible laws, and his insistence that everyone kept them, and, seeing him, I was more than ever glad my brother had died young. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, and when I ventured to open them the vision was gone; all there was by the side of the road, viewed briefly as we passed, was a burning bush: flames flickering, flaring, quickly dying: a wisp of smoke; gone. ‘Was that a burning bush?’ I asked the captain. We were lovers, as it happened. I hadn’t slept properly or long enough for four nights: it makes one visionary. He laughed. ‘It happens,’ he said, ‘people throw cigarettes out of cars.’
Well, I see these things, or think I do. Sometimes I am pursued by the pattering of little feet, and know they are the ghosts of my dead children. All women have these, pitter-pattering round them like leaves rustling from a tree in autumn: the spirits of children conceived and destroyed, or merely unborn by virtue of her disinclination to allow them life. Every month she keeps her legs crossed, takes a pill or whatever, another one rustles and falls, reproachful, wasted. It’s the aborted ones who are vociferous, bold in their game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, tugging at the coat of their ferocious mother: ‘I got so far,’ they say, ‘so very far. Why did you stop me?’ And the answer ‘why, for the sake of tho
se already living’ is as little satisfactory as my Israeli captain’s answer to me, when I beheld a burning bush – ‘People throw cigarettes out of cars.’
But I won’t have them brought into being, I won’t. I make myself deaf to the pleas of the unborn. As many as my father brought into existence, I will keep out of it. I will make things even, as the whole universe craves to do: to balance its books, as the isotope struggles for ever, to the detriment of all around, to bring itself to heel, to get electron and neutron in proper proportion.
Let him stand outside the wall and breathe his ghostly breath, and wait; I won’t have his children, no I won’t. Though the hot scent of mint and lavender rises – perhaps as he moves, and the herbs crush beneath his feet. For that’s what he is, I bet. He is the universal father.
He is Godfrey the bearded goatherd, with whom I lived for five years, who at first begged and pleaded with me to have his child: but I wouldn’t. I knew how they’d be. Little country-cottage children, muddy, shaggy-haired; with slow minds and droopy eyelids. Their noses would run in the icy winds, which the cottage walls would fail to exclude. And how would I get on with my work?
For I knew what pregnancy did to the mind, the animal stupor which descended upon the will: the horrible apathy: the seductive voice in the head which said ‘what is the point of striving, of endeavour? Just be, be; split, procreate; forget yourself, be the vessel through which the future can express itself’ – a feeling so strong it made the journey to the abortionist almost impossible. The footsteps lagged: the will only just triumphed, I can tell you.
But that was when I was eighteen: look, the father was sixteen. It was impossible. Everyone said so, even the family doctor.
Around thirty, I was broody. I would look into prams, coo at babies. I hated myself for it. For still I would be me, me: I would not split myself, define myself; I was flesh and spirit: I would not let the flesh win. I would take what pleasures I could from it and not pay the awful female price. My place was somewhere else: my business pulling the stars down to earth, not motherhood.