by Weldon, Fay
‘She must die, or she’ll go on to ruin other men,’ said Carl May aloud, or just about. The removal men from Carling Antique and Rarities Specialist Transport let slip the giant jar – they felt it had a life of its own, sometimes, but hoped they were wrong – only a couple of inches, but it made quite a bang on the cold marble floor. Carl May seemed not to notice. They breathed again. Carling Transport was a subsidiary of Garden Developments. They specialized also in the moving of rare trees and plants.
‘I’m sorry, darling, I didn’t quite catch that,’ said Bethany.
‘Just something from Othello, my dear.’
‘Oh. We didn’t do Othello in diction.’
‘No,’ said Carl May. ‘I daresay it’s not often done in girls’ schools.’
‘Can I go home to see my dad, since he’s poorly?’
‘Beauty and the Beast,’ Carl May said. ‘Of course you can, my dear. But be back by five thirty this evening. Such a pity you can’t come with me to the lido. I rather thought of going there this afternoon.’
‘The lido?’
‘The Brent Cross Lido. A charming place, prettily landscaped; though I’m afraid the chlorine fumes don’t do the shrubs and flowers much good. Joanna’s favourite place, it seems.’
‘You be careful, my darling,’ said Bethany, ‘don’t be outdoors too long. They say the fallout’s dreadful: worse than Windscale. And to be frank with you, I’m not a lido sort of person. Now the south of France…’
Oh yes, she had a lover. She laid her hand on his arm, a pretty hand, long-fingered, each finger slightly trembling, promising pleasure, but promiscuous.
‘I’ll be back this evening,’ she said and, suddenly giddy and happy again, whirled round the musky gallery, yellow skirt flaring, white shirt gleaming, gold shoes glittering, murmuring fond farewells to the embalmed remains of Gods and kings, waving goodbye to the stolid wooden funereal peasants, even dropping a quick brave appalled kiss on the crown of the liver jar, and then back once again to Carl.
‘I don’t think you got the Othello quote quite right,’ said Bethany. ‘But a good try, Carl-O-Carl! We didn’t do it at diction, but my dad did take me to the theatre a lot. He said there was no need not to be cultured, just because I was kind.’
‘Four,’ said Carl, but Bethany did not even notice. Bethany said, ‘And I may be the Beauty but you are not the Beast. You are not even a fiend in human form, you are just a little boy in a right old state, you silly thing!’ And he was about to say ‘five’ – he’d given her to five – but Bethany was gone, emerald eyes and all, in a flash of yellow white and gold, and in strolled Jacko, Petie, Elwood, Dougie and Haggie so he let her go. The lads claimed to be a pop group. Theirs, they maintained, was a new close-harmony rock sound. They called themselves Barbers of the Bath. Carl backed them with recording studios, equipment, venues, wheels, even though they took little advantage musically of what was offered. Some people will do anything for money, the better to maintain the illusion that they have some purpose in life; and this failing, this conceit, suited Carl very well.
43
Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice.
Gina left Julie in charge of her three children and went to visit her mum.
‘You have let yourself go,’ said Annette, kindly. Her hair was tight permed and blonde and her black plastic belt broad and close around a dieted waist. Bilbo had gone, Annette said. She was now with Nigel, an ex-policeman, something of a racist, but only thirty-five. It was over a bit of trouble with Bilbo, in fact, that Nigel had had to resign the Force. Bilbo was in hospital, more of a cabbage, said Annette, than a man. He’d suffered brain damage. A tragedy. She and Nigel were going to move to the country and open a pub. Start afresh. Nigel had quite a few enemies, Annette said, not without pride. She’d be sorry to sell up their little flat: could Gina take the cat, she’d always liked cats, hadn’t she? How were the kids? How many did Gina have? She’d forgotten. She smelt strongly of sherry; a warm sweet smell which reminded Gina of her childhood.
‘It was never your flat,’ said Gina, ‘it was Bilbo’s flat.’
‘Well, Bilbo’s a cabbage, and what good’s a fortune to a cabbage, and that’s what this place is worth, a fortune. We can buy two pubs and still have some over.’
‘Can we talk about me, Mum?’ asked Gina.
‘Little Miss self, self, self,’ said Annette. ‘Some people never change.’ She looked closely at Gina. ‘I told you not to marry what’s-his-name,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t listen. You never used to have a bust like that!’
‘His name is Cliff,’ said Gina, ‘and you were all for my marrying him. In fact you talked me out of a termination just to get me married and this place to yourself.’
‘It was always just right for two, never for three,’ said Annette. She kept budgerigars now, and the living room, with its view over the market, was warm and musty with the smell of birds, and birdseed, and the air stirred with the soft brush of feathers. ‘And you mustn’t be bitter. I’m sure you don’t regret that little baby now! Mothers never do.’
Annette offered Gina tea and biscuits and when Gina accepted a biscuit raised her eyebrows.
‘Mum,’ began Gina, and Annette said, ‘I’m sure I’m not old enough to be your mum, Gina. If you ask me I look more like your younger sister than your mother. I certainly weigh a lot less.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ said Gina. ‘I’ll be gone before your Nigel gets home,’ and after that Annette was a little kinder.
‘Mum,’ said Gina. ‘I met a woman who’s exactly like me in all sorts of ways and we went to a clinic to be tissue-typed and it turns out we’re identical twins.’
‘What a peculiar thing to want to do,’ said Annette. ‘I expect all kinds of people are twins and don’t know it. They certainly don’t go rushing off to clinics to find out. It’s rather like squeezing your breasts to see if you’ve got lumps: better not start or you’ll only find them. A hit and miss kind of thing, I imagine, tissue-typing, whatever it is when it’s at home, but you know what these clinics are. They told a friend of mine she had cancer and they’d got the slides mixed. She got the radium treatment and the worry while the other one stayed home happy and died. They’ll tell you anything that suits them, these doctors.’
‘Mum,’ said Gina, ‘I’m going to sit here until you tell me.’
Annette’s mouth clamped shut, to demonstrate that she did not respond well to threats, but opened again soon enough.
‘Don’t you try and blackmail me, young lady.’
‘I’m not blaming you, Mum,’ said Gina. ‘I can see twins are a real handful and my dad had thrown you out and you were very young and you couldn’t be expected to cope. But I want to know. I have a right to know: was I twins?’
‘No such thing as rights,’ said Annette, acutely. ‘Just such a thing as it would be nice if only, only it usually isn’t. All I can say is the doctor never said anything about twins to me. Mind you, I was under anaesthetic at the time. Anything could have happened. Anything. A girlfriend of mine was raped under anaesthetic, but would anyone believe her? No.’
She had some more sherry. She drank it by the teacup full. As she filled and refilled Gina’s cup – and she proffered little thin china cups with saucers, flowered and gold-rimmed – with tea, she filled and refilled her own with sherry.
Gina wondered what Nigel was after: cosiness, or daftness, or pneumatic sex, or budgerigars, or just the money for two pubs and some over, or to have what Bilbo had, poor Bilbo, or perhaps it was true love, who could tell?
‘You aren’t telling fibs, are you?’ she asked presently, hoping against hope for maternal reassurance, comfort. ‘You didn’t adopt me, by any chance? I wasn’t some other mother’s cast off twin?’ to which Annette replied, ‘No such luck. Split me coming out, you did; God knows why I did any of it. I must have been mad. All that fuss and trouble and pain and you not even my own child, from what I could make out, though I never could make out much. They talked so fast, th
e pair of them, and one of them not even a doctor. It was the end of my marriage, not the beginning of it, contrary to all their fine promises. If they were wrong in that what else were they wrong in, that’s what I want to know. A twin! They should have told me that. If it was a boy you might have grown up to marry him. You’d have had to be warned. To tell you the truth I was glad when you got pregnant – at least it showed you were normal. I always had a feeling you mightn’t be. Like a mule, that’s the one, isn’t it, or do I mean a donkey, the one that’s a cross between a horse and a something else? At any rate, it’s sterile. That’s what I thought you might be. Sterile. Unnatural. I thought you ought to have that poor little baby. It might be your only chance. And Cliff wasn’t so bad. You have to forgive me, Gina. I did the best I could.’
Gina sighed, amazed that she had once taken this woman so seriously, longed to please her, hoped to impress her, and with the worldly competence that enveloped her like some cloud of embracing, protective mist the minute she was out of the children’s company, soon had the details of her birth, and an old appointment card for Annette to see Dr Holly at the Bulstrode Clinic.
‘I know you think I haven’t a heart, dear,’ said Annette, ‘and sometimes I think you’re right, but I kept that card as a memento. Time and time again, when the occasion arose to throw it out, I refrained. I knew it would come in handy. I’ve always done right by you. Didn’t I come and rescue you from Granny and Gramps that time? Say what you like, when you needed me I was there.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ said Gina, ‘you certainly were!’ and was off to the Bulstrode Clinic by the next available Underground train. She went to Acton Central and took a bus down Acton Lane and found the Bulstrode Clinic. But it was now a lending library. A white car stood outside, all white, startlingly white. She noticed it. There were a lot of them about, these days. They must, she thought, be very hard to keep clean. Only very particular people would own them.
The librarian was of the old school, motherly, dustily dressed; she stood at the noticeboards and pinned up leaflets on rate support, rent rebate, family allowances and Citizens Advice.
‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘We’re about to close.’
‘I want to know where the Bulstrode Clinic is,’ Gina said. ‘Where it went, if anywhere. Where Dr Holly can be found.’
‘I’ve told you once,’ said Mrs Avril Love, sublibrarian, for so her badge proclaimed her.
‘No you didn’t,’ said Gina. ‘I only just came in.’
Mrs Love looked at Gina more closely.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were someone else. My eyesight is going, and then what use am I going to be to anyone? Mind you, all you young things look alike to me.’
She shut the library door, switched off the library computer; she offered Gina a cup of tea. She wanted company. She was in no hurry to get home: the later she got home the more likely someone else was to make the tea. Gina was the third young woman in a week to ask about the Bulstrode, after years and years of nothing. What was going on? Something finally come home to roost, the way things did? Birth would out, like murder. Funny things had happened up the Bulstrode, she’d always said so. They’d been fiddling around with women’s eggs all that time ago, doing God knows what, the field even less regulated then than it was today. More people walking round who came out of a test-tube than anyone realized, said Mrs Love. She served tea in wholesome mugs, with biscuits. In the end the past caught up with you, said Mrs Love. No use running. She’d had an abortion there herself: she often wondered what they did with the poor dead foetus – and if it was dead. How could a woman know? They knocked you unconscious and did what they wanted: you couldn’t object; what you were doing was wrong, illegal. She was sorry to have to speak like this, it sounded unhinged, but she’d never recovered from the experience, for all it was thirty-five years ago. She’d never married: the Mrs was a courtesy title. If Miss was on the library badge, the young mocked her and the old patronized. Ms didn’t ring true, not for her. She never had more children: that had been her only chance, she’d blown it. Odd though, that she’d come to work in the very building where it had happened. Sometimes she thought life was just a pattern of spoiled expectations which you weren’t allowed to forget. Was Gina a Catholic?
‘No,’ said Gina. Mrs Love said she nearly was. She’d taken a diet pill. It made her talkative. She was sorry. How old was Gina? Thirty? No. Too young to be her child grown-up. Because Mrs Love always had this notion that at the Bulstrode they’d take your baby away and just implant it in someone else’s womb, like moving a fish from one tank to another. She hadn’t killed her baby – somewhere it lived. Did Gina think that was possible?
Gina said she really didn’t know. She thought it was more complicated, more difficult than that. She had begun to feel very tired. First her mother, then this.
‘And to think,’ said Mrs Love, ‘I lost my baby here – well, gave it away, what kind of mother is that, to give her child away, hand it over to death, and now you lot come along, three of you, and say you were born here, and there’s nothing here but books, books. Doesn’t it make you feel funny? It did the other ones who were in here asking. They were twins if you ask me, though they said they weren’t.’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Gina, ‘it makes me feel really very funny,’ and went home feeling hunted and haunted, and told Julie she thought there might be more than just the two of them, and that she wasn’t going to see Dr Holly on her own – Julie would have to come with her.
‘In the meantime,’ said Gina to Julie, ‘it looks as if my mother’s the one who had us. Yours just bought you in.’
But Julie was in the honeymoon stage with the children: there were fish fingers and wet towels everywhere and she didn’t mind one bit. She’d bought a tropical fish tank and set it up and called the vet to ask his advice, and he’d said he’d come round to see if it was fit for fish and she’d said OK but only to see the fish and he’d said of course and both knew different. She told everyone Gina was her sister. Her sister and her children had come to stay. Now when the neighbours talked about the price of children’s shoes, so could she. Cliff called round, of course he did, and Julie wouldn’t let him see Gina; Julie was cold and reasonable and said a cooling-off time was required, that was all, and he agreed but both knew differently. Cliff was intimidated by the cleanliness, the orderliness, the ordinariness of the house, the net curtains, the glimpse of parquet and framed prints when the front door was opened: this was how people were supposed to live, he could only imagine. He’d never somehow achieved it himself, or rather Gina had failed to achieve it for him. Weeds grew round his and Gina’s door. What could he say, what could he offer? Cliff did not want to be a bad husband, he said so: it distressed him to be one: he was just too young to be a father of three: the wrong person to be Gina’s husband, or else she was the wrong person to be his wife. ‘Quite so,’ said Julie, crisply, closing the door. ‘Come back on Wednesday week and we’ll see how things are. Who’s right for who, if anyone.’ He’d banged once or twice upon the door to prove a point and then left, apparently satisfied. No one had asked him for money.
‘The more of us the better,’ said Julie. ‘There could be a hundred of us and I’d be glad.’ As Gina had got thinner, she’d got plumper. They could wear each other’s clothes.
When Alec rang from the airport she said, ‘Look, why bother to come home? It’s a long way. You’d rather be in an hotel.’
He said, ‘There isn’t an overnight laundry service.’ After a short pause he said, rather pathetically, ‘I’m sorry, Julie. I hadn’t realized things had got so bad. I don’t know what this is all about.’
She said, ‘I do. If there aren’t any children, there isn’t any point.’
He said, over the noise of the airport, ‘If only you did something: had a job. It’s like coming home to a stage set. You hardly seem to exist.’
She said, ‘But you didn’t want me to work, you wouldn’t let me. You wanted me
there when you came home: you wanted proper home-cooked meals, you said you had enough plastic hotel food, airline food.’
He said, ‘Did I say that? I can’t remember.’
She said, ‘I can hardly hear you. Why don’t you check in at the Sheraton or the Holiday Inn –’
‘– the Hilton,’ he said.
‘– and call me from there.’
‘OK,’ he said and he hung up, but he didn’t call back.
‘There could be a thousand of us and it’d be OK,’ said Julie. ‘The thing is, I’m not my mother’s daughter. I thought I had to be like her, but I don’t. I’m free to be me. Now everything can change.’
‘You’ve still got to share,’ said Gina. ‘You got rid of her but now you’ve got me. You can still see your limits, your outline. And instead of your mother, you now have to put up with mine.’
‘But it doesn’t defeat me,’ said Julie. ‘How can I explain it to you? I don’t know your mother, and since she didn’t bring me up she doesn’t count as my mother, and she’s nowhere near as boring as the one who did. Boring, boring, boring. I thought I had to be boring, and I don’t.’ She danced about the house, elated.
Sue was wetting the bed; Julie didn’t like that at all: it was smelly. She wanted to make Sue wash the sheets, but Gina said no, that made things worse. The children were upset. They’d lost their father. They were grieving.
‘It can’t be true,’ said Julie. How could they miss a man like that!
‘They were born loving him,’ said Gina. ‘And it’s not so long since they were born.’
‘There’s such a thing as contraception,’ said Julie. Women without children are smarter, tougher and more decisive than women who have children. Women with children are torn in so many directions they become kind, nice and hopeless in their own interests in the effort to understand themselves, let alone their children. Gina tried to be like Julie, and Julie like Gina.