Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon

by Weldon, Fay

  ‘What is that terrible noise?’ Violet cries, and looks out the gate, and perceives the scurrying, shoeless child. ‘What is that poor child thinking of? He’s disturbing the whole neighbourhood!’

  And there is a bang and a crash as a black object falls from out a dirigible balloon, which has been drifting casually down along the river alarming no one. The object lands on the new Thames embankment – that strong brown God, as T.S. Eliot was later to call it, with its alarming propensity to flooding. The high wall of Lodestar House has a noticeable water line some two feet up from the ground, and there is a closable hatch across the lower part of the barred gate to keep the flood tides out.

  The bomb, such as it is, makes a hole in the embankment and uproots new trees and flowers. The hole fills instantly with filthy water – London’s sewage system is nowhere near completed yet – which trickles across the road towards Wendy, Theo and Violet. The urchin is blown along the street but amazingly is unhurt, and reappears a couple of hours later wearing a placard saying ‘All Clear’ and blowing his whistle again. By that time they are still shivering and shuddering inside the house.

  ‘What’s cover?’ asks Theo. ‘And why should we take it?’ And Violet weeps: it is the end of the magic days; she can see it. She has a presage of disaster.

  Wendy hastily shifts the mirror.

  Now she sees herself marrying Congo: it’s her third marriage. How did she ever get to be so old? First Leon, then Mogens Larsen, now Congo and she are marrying in the French Consulate in Cairo because it’s the only place there’s air-conditioning and the season has been so terrifyingly hot and humid. Congo is twenty years younger than she and works for the British Council. She’s come to Cairo with an exhibition of Violet’s paintings, but there is some kind of political trouble and the French Institute have taken over British affairs. She’s wearing a gauzy kind of dress and Congo is wearing flares.

  Wendy recovers her courage and tips the mirror back to her younger days. She was right: the gauzy dress was not sufficient to disguise flabby upper arms. Her spirit was thirty, her flesh double that, and you can’t disguise it and shouldn’t try. Though Congo never seemed to mind.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ says Congo now. But Wendy shakes her head. The world opens out like a flower into calm or stormy weather, closes down at the end of the day. What use are words? What happened to the Epstein fresco? Perhaps it’s still there, under creeper. If she could walk, she would go and see. She can’t be bothered asking Congo. The past is more interesting than the present. When she has run through it, assessed it and assembled it, she will die.

  Wendy and Theo are playing in the garden with the Rice ‘cousins’, Leon, Georgina and Bridget. Their mother Alice hates their coming, but Oscar insists. Light dapples through the leaves of the red beech tree. Leeks are growing amongst the roses, and tomato plants as well. They spring unheralded, because for three hundred years the ground hereabouts served as a market garden, and also, though no one will admit it, Lodestar House has a cess pit and some of its old lead feeders are cracked and household waste escapes into the soil. The garden is certainly very fertile and, these being the days before detergent when soda was the only cleaning agent available, household waste, both kitchen and bathroom, could do nothing but good. Once sewage flowed directly into the Thames, but after the Chelsea embankment was built, it found its way blocked and seeped up wherever it could, between paving stones, into cellars, into gardens.

  Wendy thinks, ‘This is probably the prettiest place in the world, and I am probably the luckiest girl in all the world,’ when her cousin Leon, who is four years older than she, says, ‘When your mother dies, this house will belong to my father, and I’m going to inherit it because you lot are bastards and I’m the only son,’ and Wendy is conscious of a pang of apprehension, a foretaste of an uncertain future. Usually she discounts what Leon says. His name means lion, but he is, in her eyes, a pitiful, wretched, stammering creature whose father fails to love him. Violet has told Wendy so. In Violet’s eyes all human misery is due to failure to love and be loved. Wendy can see that she might have to take Leon seriously. His back is straightening, his chin firming: the need to survive is toughening him up. Soon he will be big enough to strike his father dead, if he so chooses, and he may well so choose. Leon has learned early how not to forgive; how not to be a nice person.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Wendy, throwing Leon a ball he can’t possibly catch. ‘Butterfingers, anyway!’ she calls out as he drops it. Leon looks at Wendy spitefully: his little finger is bending at an odd angle. Wendy’s broken it, and she already knows he won’t forgive her. She wishes now she had thrown it properly.

  Another push at the mirror but there’s no getting rid of certain scenes: they are part and parcel of the dreadful past.

  Now they’re in the big living room with its acres of green Morris curtaining, the pewter mugs on the medieval refectory table, its tiled and vaulted ceilings. Violet is crying. Oscar, oddly supportive of Leon, wants Wendy punished for breaking Leon’s finger, or that’s how Wendy construes it. Oscar is saying that Wendy is ill-mannered, violent and tomboyish, and needs proper discipline and to go to school.

  ‘You don’t love me any more!’ weeps Violet, and Oscar huffs and puffs. Men don’t like talk of love, not once their sweethearts are mothers, as Violet says to Wendy.

  Wendy is made to go to school, which she hates. She attends Marshall Hall, a progressive girls’ school in Fulham.

  These days Wendy is careful not to be alone with Leon, who has taken to putting his hand up her skirt if he possibly can, saying that if she doesn’t let him he’ll have her turned out of her house the minute her father dies, so she has to stand still and let him do what he wants, though why he should want to she cannot understand. She wishes her clothes were less advanced, like everyone’s thinking, so he had more of a problem getting inside them. Wendy understands that Leon might very well kill Oscar quite early on, but Oscar becomes a war artist, goes to the Front and dies before Leon is old enough to do it. Wendy tries to cry about Oscar’s death, but can’t: Violet weeps enough for a whole street-full of war widows, which annoys Wendy, for some reason. Violet has a house, a small annuity and friends. Oscar was Alice’s to grieve for: mourning is surely a luxury reserved for official wives and current mistresses.

  Miss Reynolds, the Classics mistress at Marshall Hall, looms large in Wendy’s life. Miss Reynolds has a habit of stroking Wendy’s hair and holding her hand tight; kissing her when she gets Latin verbs right, slapping her when she construes them badly. Wendy finds it impossible to talk to Violet about any of it: Violet still believes that the world is a beautiful place. It’s why Violet is so popular with the men around her, Wendy can see that. Violet even in the end grants Oscar eternal life in her head: she will, she knows, meet up with him in heaven. Violet becomes a spiritualist and holds séances in the dining room: curtains are pulled, hands stretched and touched around the table. Ectoplasm forms and frightens Wendy out of her wits, but the medium employed, as a laundress might be, to attend the sessions turns out to be a fraud. Yet Violet remains, as she describes it, a spiritualist socialist.

  Who can Wendy consult about her problems? What exactly is Leon’s now long-healed little finger doing, still pressing up beneath her bloomers, longer and more enquiring now and most insistent? What are Miss Reynolds’ tear-filled eyes and moist warm mouth about? Ask Violet and she’d have it that they were the mere expression of free thought, free love and the energies of the life force.

  No, there is no one for Wendy to talk to. Judy the maid, Mrs Bates the cook, are not suitable confidantes. The circumstances of the servants’ lives are too different from her own. Judy has an out-of-wedlock baby and Violet employs her in the same spirit as she takes in stray kittens. Because others are so unkind, she, Violet, must make up the balance. Mrs Bates lives in, and is a respectable widow. Theo is a boy and her brother; Wendy would be far too embarrassed to speak to him. Leon grows two feet in six months.
Wendy remains petite. ‘A pocket Venus’, Violet calls her, but Wendy knows she’s being kind. What she really means is ‘dwarfish’.

  Push the mirror again.

  Wendy’s fifteen. Violet goes to visit Lady Annette Columbia, who wears flowing oriental robes and has fluffy blonde hair; who, with her daughter Cynthia, is giving a party in a house in Bayswater. Violet takes Wendy along. It’s Wendy’s first dance: there’s an ebony floor, a wind-up gramophone to supplement a string quartet. Violet dances with, amongst others, Aleister Crowley, later known as The Beast 666. Cynthia Columbia has cropped hair and wears a tie and dances with other girls. Violet’s good friend Nina Hamnett, an artist, warns Wendy that Cynthia is probably a lesbian and suggests Wendy keeps out of her way.

  ‘A lesbian? What’s that?’ asks Wendy.

  ‘Darling,’ says Nina, ‘a lesbian is a girl who likes girls, not boys,’ but Wendy still doesn’t understand. Babies get born when married men and women share beds, or so she has been led to understand; though how to explain herself away is difficult. Perhaps she was an immaculate conception? Further enquiry could only lead her into the dark, forbidden and attractive territory which no one talks about. Nevertheless, at this stage Wendy trusts her mother to have done the right thing by the rules of the bohemian society to which she clearly belongs. Only no one has told Wendy quite what the rules are. They seem mostly to consist of saying one thing and doing another. Wendy is becoming anxious, argumentative and critical, and Violet doesn’t like it.

  Nina warns Wendy off Aleister Crowley, saying not only is he a common little conman with no breeding, but is also in touch with The Devil. Go to his apartment, as Nina had recently done, and discover that fires would mysteriously break out in corners of the room. ‘At first I tried dousing them with water from the flower vases,’ said Nina, ‘until I discovered that water didn’t quench the flames. But then the flames didn’t burn my hand either, so I learned to put up with them. I expect they were all in my head.’

  Later in the evening; Wendy observed Nina dancing with Cynthia Columbia; they pressed their bodies together and looked into each other’s eyes. Wendy did not enjoy her first dance. She felt clumsy and that the guests were not loveable, serene and artistic as she had expected, but as troubled and complicated as the parents of her friends at school. She would have danced with The Beast 666, but he didn’t ask her. He was dancing a rather clumsy waltz with Violet. Later they disappeared together, without a thought for Wendy.

  ‘You poor dear,’ said Berta Ruck, the novelist. ‘I expect she just forgot she’d brought you along.’

  It is left to Berta and her husband, Oliver Onions, to take Wendy home to Lodestar.

  ‘What a monstrosity,’ observes Mr Onions, peering up at the great grey turrets. ‘You poor little thing!’

  Wendy cries; she does not like to have her home insulted, nor does she like to be so humiliated by her mother. Forgotten! Bertha assures her that Violet hasn’t done it on purpose; that Mr Crowley has strange and secret powers to control others, especially beautiful women, and make them do his will. Berta and Mr Onions drive off, leaving Wendy at the gate. She can’t wake the cook, and she hasn’t got a key, so she has to break in the cloakroom window, which is easy enough – she has been doing it since she was little – but she manages to hurt her ankle. Now see what you’ve done, Mother!

  Wendy finds herself alone in Lodestar House for the first time in her life. She imagines it is haunted. She wonders what dark and secret things are happening to her mother. She sleeps. When she wakes it’s morning and her mother is in her room, apologising. But Violet looks rather pale and sleepless and her mouth is swollen.

  ‘I completely forgot you; how can I forgive myself? My poor little darling! What a wonderful man. Do what you will shall be all of the law! What a revelation!’ There are sweet odours on Violet’s breath: Mother sways, Mother sings; she stretches her arms, draped with gauzy scarves, to heaven. The arms are not as young as they used to be, Wendy notices. ‘With all my being: all of it, every little corner of it, I must consent.’

  What is Mother talking about now? Wendy decides to be a Marxist, not a Fabian. She needs something with a little harshness in it, a little discipline.

  Later the newspapers reveal that Lady Columbia, ‘society hostess’, has no right to her title, and is a trumped-up nouvelle riche. There are a succession of scandals relating to Aleister Crowley, and his relationship with very young girls. Violet stops swaying around the house, sweetly breathing, and weeps and breaks things.

  ‘All he wanted was to get to you through me,’ she snarls at Wendy. Somehow hope and love are vanishing. It’s as if the tidal estuaries of the Thames, the strong brown God, now suck in blood from the killing fields of coastal France. Wars are never as far away as anyone hopes. Fear, hate, blood flow uncalled for, unlooked for, in a tidal backsurge. Wendy has no idea what her mother is talking about: but finds herself freezing in the violence of Violet’s response. Adorable has become difficult to adore: it is too violent, angry: whim has turned into dangerous unpredictability. Theo is away at school: he mutters and murmurs over the holidays about the public disgrace of being his mother’s son. An artists’ model, now notorious whore: ‘Fancy Woman to the Beast’, as the papers put it, in a divorce case.

  ‘What do you mean?’ begs Wendy. ‘What do you mean, Theo?’, but he won’t say. She beats her fists against the lych gate, wanting to get out into the forbidden land, frightened to go. ‘Take cover, take cover!’

  ‘You’ve been meeting Aleister secretly,’ says Violet. ‘I know you have, you nasty little creature. That’s why he doesn’t want me any more.’

  The cook leaves, the maid leaves. Friends don’t call. Wendy is too distressed even to cry. One night, Violet crawls and screams on the stone floor.

  Leon, bold and brave in flannels, almost handsome, now almost calling-up age, calls to visit his father’s other family. Wendy, for once, is glad to see him. Leon takes over and summons the doctor. Leon ‘steals a kiss’ as he calls it. Violet is diagnosed as having ‘a nervous breakdown’, and is taken away to a clinic. Leon pays: he tells Wendy he’ll allow her to live in Lodestar, and Wendy doesn’t even have the sense to ask to see documents, assumes Leon would not tell lies of enormous stature. For some reason, Violet going off to a ‘clinic’ seems the grubbiest thing of all that’s happened. School is Wendy’s only comfort. She lives in Lodestar House alone for a month or so; Mrs Bates the cook has pity and comes back for a time. Now at least Wendy has company, but she gets head lice. Mrs Bates takes paintings and sculptures to Portobello Market and sells them for food. Oh, it is the worst of times.

  Leon asks Wendy to marry him and she agrees. No one forbids the marriage. There’s no one to forbid it. Violet’s raving away in a padded cell somewhere. Theo won’t come to the wedding. No one has ever said anything openly about a shared father: ‘cousins’ pleases everyone better. The lost girl Wendy will now, thank God, be Leon’s responsibility. And Leon’s mother Alice, Oscar’s widow, cuts Leon out of her life on the grounds that her son, in marrying H.G. Wells’s by-blow, is no longer worthy of the family name.

  Lodestar House becomes heavy with secrets that later generations would think of no consequence, but are nonetheless oppressive: the sheer weight of them could kill the soul. The vaulted ceilings, the curving staircases, which an architect saw as springing heavenward, a paean of praise to love and laughter, tight and freedom, the new spirit of the coming egalitarian century, become echoey, horrid, sinister; Lodestar is the forgotten dungeon beneath the palace: foul water seeps from the walls, as blood would seep from the earthen walls of the trenches where young men by the million died. But people will make their own individual wars; manufacture their own griefs. Those were the days when to be mad was to bring shame, the word cancer was not spoken aloud, to have a child out of wedlock was a disgrace, to have an illegitimate child enough to get a woman locked up in an asylum as a moral imbecile, and the penalty for attempted suicide was death by hangin
g. Enough, indeed, to kill the questing soul, the enquiring intellect. But houses recover as people recover: Lodestar was one day to come into its own again.

  11

  A Property Worth Having

  Jelly was not unhappy. The more files she brought home to The Claremont, the more concentration she applied to them, the quieter Angelica, Angel and Lady Rice remained. She found herself without personal history or active sexuality; a woman without sorrow, recreated every day. Sometimes in the evenings she had a headache, which she suspected was created by her other selves, hammering away for head-time, airtime, but she denied it to them. She needed a rest. Besides, she was a moral entity – it seemed to her the others were not.

  She became studiedly virtuous: she could see that Angel was the worst threat. She no longer employed Ram to take her to the office. She would see the Volvo hovering, but would shake her head and walk briskly, head held high, to Bond Street Underground, while he attempted to follow her, against the flow of the traffic. She slapped Brian Moss down: literally, aiming a blow at his well-suited crotch, which quietened him considerably. If Lady Rice rocked nightly in her sea of sorrow, if Angelica went to Fenwicks on Saturdays or for late-night shopping, Jelly at least did not know about it.

  Nightly Jelly filled her notebooks: scraps of fact, fiction, essay. She kept them hidden at the back of the clothes cupboard, amongst her shoes. The number of pairs, she noticed, were increasing: shoes and boots she would never, as Jelly, wear: platform-soled, absurdly pointed or brutishly squared – nothing at all to do with convenience or the shape of the human foot.

  She summoned Angelica to reproach her.

  ‘Why do you do this?’ Jelly demanded. ‘Why do you waste so much time, energy and money buying absurd things you never need and don’t wear?’