by Weldon, Fay
‘For one thing,’ said Sonia, ‘you can stop colluding.’
Ros was busy lettering in the ‘F’ of Housewife’s Friend. She laid down her brush.
‘They’re not really our friends, are they!’ she said. ‘Why should I paint lies?’
‘Because they pay us to,’ said Flora, but she put down her hammer. She’d been tacking Terylene lace around the toy town windows. And Natalie, who had been stitching Velcro onto the estate agent’s waistcoat, stopped that as well. Jane snivelled on for a time, but presently was quiet. It was she who spoke first.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that giant at the back is really Angus, and that one in the front is Arthur. So why don’t we make them look like who they really are?’
And Sonia hardly had to say a word. Of their own accord, out of their own oppression, they were back in the ancient spirit of carnival, when the images of the hated were paraded through the streets, and hung from gibbets, or rolled down the hills in burning tar barrels.
They worked through the evening and into the night, and one of those wonderful late autumn evenings it was, when the sun struck low from behind the Tor, and the red lingered in streaks across the sky, and fog formed in puffy lines low over the levels, and reflected the red upward. Oh yes, a numinous evening indeed. Around carnival time, such evenings are common.
Early the next morning Angus and Arthur came up to have a last look at the float. It was covered by a tarpaulin.
Natalie distracted Angus, and Flora distracted Arthur, and each assumed the other had looked beneath. The float was to travel to Glastonbury pulled by Bernard on the tractor, with a generator for the lights tagged along behind. The girls, together with Angus’ Jean, Pauline from the delicatessen and Sally Bains from the school office as reinforcements, were to change into their housewife costumes in the carnival headquarters. The WAEADA float was no. 62; no. 61, travelling ahead, was to be a ninety foot monster – ‘Baghdad Nights’ and no. 63, behind, was to be a ‘Star Wars’ spectacular. Bernard would steer the float to its place in the appropriate layby, and when evening came, the tarpaulin would be rolled back, its merry band of housewives would ascend, Flora, dressed in virgin white, would take her place on the pale swan throne, the generator would hum, the myriad overhead lights would blaze, music would blare and no. 62 would move off.
Human Sacrifice
All these things came to pass.
Arthur and Angus caught up with the float as it rounded the War Memorial corner. Here the crowds were thick and uncomfortable, those behind moving forward to see the better, those in front stepping back so as not to get their feet run over. Brilliant light interwove with patches of darkness: near music mingled with far, blowing in the wind. Marshals attempted to keep the front ranks back, in vain. Children kept breaking from the crowd to buy the silvery balloons, or the horrid hot dogs, or just to play chicken in between the massive, slowly moving structures. The heady smell of hot diesel oil was all around. The procession would stop from time to time to allow its back to catch up with its front, or when a tractor broke down, or some wider than allowed float failed to manoeuvre a corner and had to be manually backed to start the attempt again. Few floats could go into reverse gear. On the WAEADA float Natalie, Sonia, Ros, Jane, Jean, Pauline and Sally gazed enigmatically out on the crowds, and smiled, and waved their feather dusters.
The music that blared out from no. 62 was not ‘Our House’ or even ‘Fly me to the Stars’ but Pete Seger’s all too recognizable ‘Little Boxes’:
‘Little boxes, on the hillside,
Little boxes, made of ticky-tacky – ’
And the auctioneer, of course, was an all too recognizable version of Angus, with fair floppy hair dropping over a self-indulgent brow and a double chin, raising and lowering his hammer. And there was Arthur at the other end of the float, with his yellow waistcoat and his spyglass in his cunning eye, and the key to his back room offered, taken away, offered, taken away – no, as portraits they were not kind.
Some of the crowd sniggered as the familiar pair soared by above them, but on the whole most assumed that what they saw was meant, intended, by persons who knew better than they. They clapped and applauded, and only a child was heard to say, ‘But that man isn’t smiling, he’s snarling like my dog.’ And if only those on the float got the full significance of the blow-up of Ros’ last postal draft plastered over the back of the float, never mind. A full eighteen pounds and sixty-one pence! Landlords live by the DHSS here in the heart of the country. Many, in fact, will take only tenants in receipt of public funds. Rent gets paid direct, and never fails.
‘Bitch!’ shouted Angus to Natalie, keeping pace with the float. ‘What have you done?’ She looked away, smirking, it seemed to him. ‘Ungrateful bitch!’ But a surge of the crowds came between them, and the music rose all around to deafen him and she seemed to forget he was there altogether. Arthur, on the contrary, seemed to see the joke. He laughed and puffed as he walked beside the float, parting the crowds. He called out to Flora, ‘I’ve got something for you!’ but she was too busy being Mrs Housewife Princess of Ticky-Tacky Land to hear.
‘Bitch!’ cried Angus to Natalie, catching up again. He was beside himself at her treachery. He had given her everything and now look, she had been laughing at him all the time.
‘You never loved me,’ she shrieked down at him above Pete Seger and the crackle of lights and the hum of generators and the cries of street sellers. ‘You only wanted me because Arthur wanted me.’
‘I don’t love you!’ he shouted, above the roar of the tractors and the yells of children – ‘not after all this. Bitch!’ Oh, he was over excited!
‘I thought for a week I loved you,’ said Natalie, ‘because I needed you and there was no one else, and you have to have someone. But I don’t love you any more!’
‘Thank God for that,’ he shrieked. ‘I want you out of that flat by the end of the week.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she yelled. ‘I will be!’
And she waved her feather duster at him and brushed him out of her life.
Angus ran ahead to tell Bernard, who was driving the tractor which pulled the float, that he was fired, but Bernard was chanting a little song, in his fine West Country burr. It went like this:
‘Dieldran, mecadox, antimicrobae
Auteomycin, chlorotetraclin,
Magic sulphameyathhe, and wonder Bio-eater – ’
‘You’re fired!’ shouted Angus again. It was hardly fair of Bernard. All these substances were being phased out up at Avon Farmers in favour of those which had EEC approval.
‘I fired myself yesterday,’ said Bernard. ‘I’m pulling this float for the love of it. I went to a funeral yesterday. My mate the gravedigger told me human bodies took a long time to decompose these days, they’re so full of preservatives. You keep your wage packet. I’d rather sell smack at the school gates any day. It’s safer.’
‘Little boxes, on the hillside…
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky…’
sang Pete Seger, as he’s been singing since the fifties. Nothing changes.
I said my piece then, from my moving stage. I shouted it at the crowds. Most of them didn’t hear. If they did, they thought I was part of the act.
I told them about the wickedness of men, and the wretchedness of women. I told them they were being had, cheated, conned. That they were the poor and the helpless, and the robber barons were all around. They were being poisoned for profit: their children were being robbed of their birthright: the very rain that fell, the forests that grew, were being sold off, to be resold back to them. That they lived here in the heart of the country in the shadow of cruise missiles, in the breeze from Hinkley Point. That it was up to the women to fight back, because the men had lost their nerve. The crowd applauded my performance, though they missed the gist of the words. That was something. I pointed to the effigy of Angus on my right and Arthur to the left.
‘I blame the guilty men,’ I yelled. ‘Seducer
s, fornicators, robbers, cheats!’
How they cheered!
And this was the signal for my friend Ros to pick up the Georgian leather bucket, standing so innocently there beside Flora’s conch throne, but actually filled with petrol by me just before I began my speech. Ros flung the contents over Angus’ effigy. I flung a lighted match after it. I hadn’t realized quite what the impact of flame on petrol is. In a word, startling. The crowd yelled, in horror, surprise and, I fear, delight.
Fire’s wonderful. So pretty, don’t you think? Not final and grudging and finite, like an explosion, but always offering a tentative, if noisy, way out. If, if! cries the fire. If I don’t catch, shrieks fire. If you’ve got water, if you can block out my oxygen, find the blanket and locate the extinguisher, perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll let you off this time! I’ll go out. Any offers? Got any ifs for me? What? None? And then stronger and stronger comes the roar – no, no stopping me now, no putting me out; on your head be it. See, I’m unquenchable, I’m everywhere, everything, crackle, leap and bound and lo – all gone! Up in flames, into ashes, into dust, goodbye!
It took the housewives on the float a moment or so before they realized what had happened. Fire has that effect. You tend to stare at rapidly ascending tongues of flame, and admire their beauty, before realizing they can hurt, burn and destroy. They leapt from the float in what I see as the order of their desire for survival. Jean was off first (she would!) then Natalie, then Ros, then Sally, then Jane, then Pauline and then myself, Sonia. I would quite happily have died there.
And Flora?
Flora didn’t get off the float at all. She was mesmerized not by the flames but by her good fortune. What had happened was that Arthur had just handed her a cheque for two thousand pounds. He’d put her flower painting into a Sotheby’s sale and it had fetched two thousand two hundred. He’d taken for himself only 10 per cent and he need never have mentioned the sale at all. He’d done what he said he would. He had achieved a moral act, finally. It killed Flora.
People shouldn’t change their natures, just like that. It doesn’t do. Surprise is bad for people. It was sheer surprise which kept Flora sitting there gawping at the cheque. The light bulbs on the top of the float were cracking and popping in the heat. The crowd was now bending backwards and away out of danger. There were shouts and cries: Bernard was uncoupling the tractor. ‘Baghdad Nights’ was standing off: ‘Star Wars’ was being manoeuvred backwards.
Flora sat all in virgin white on the voluminous snowy throne and no one noticed her in time, just sitting there. I think it was her very stillness made her invisible, her very whiteness. Oh my virgin sacrifice! Allow me to descend into maudlin sentiment, just for once. She was all of us, what we once were, young, pretty, innocent and stunned by the wonder of the world, its capacity suddenly to offer good when all that is expected is bad. The giant effigy of Angus toppled back towards the centre of the float, and loomed over the throne, as some kind of root fixture burned through, and bent back still further, and cracked, and down it fell on top of the throne, on top of Flora, and Flora died. I think from the smoke. I hope from the smoke. Something horrible in the foam upholstery. I don’t think she burned.
Okay. She burned. Consider it. A paragraph of silence while we do. Memorial space, dedicated to writhing, horrified, twisting Flora. My fault.
And to the others we all know, who died horribly before their time. Not my fault.
My fault? Ros threw the petrol, I threw the match. I could make Ros do anything I wanted, and I did. Only Ros and me knew what we were going to do. Our demonstration. Our visual fix, so the crowds would know the way the heart of the country was going, and do something about it. So it landed me here. Fine! Flora, the virgin sacrifice, so the world could cure itself of evil and renew itself? Better still! I hope it works. I didn’t mean Flora to die, or anyone to die, of course I didn’t. Fate took a hand. I take it as a good omen that it did. Bad for Flora, good for mankind, in which of course we include women, the lesser inside the greater.
My guilt, my madness if you like, has been the murder in my heart. I don’t deny it; how can I? Because of the misfortunes of my life I have been murderous, full of hate. The fire didn’t put those feelings out: on the contrary, it inflamed them, at least for a while. Eddon Hill drugs, Dr Mempton’s patience, something, has worked. I feel quite denuded of hate, all of a sudden, as if Flora had stepped down, all virgin white, and graciously extended her lily white hands, that she never once got in the scrubbing bucket, no matter how Natalie Harris and Jane Wandle nagged, and forgiven me. Well, and why not! I was only trying to help.
Resolutions
Flora had a funeral to which everyone came. Ros got probation; I got put in here. Something happened to Arthur, who put on weight and aged ten years between the carnival and the funeral, and lost the knack of pulling women. Or so Ros told me. He tried Ros and she simply laughed. Perhaps his good deed did him no good: made his Dorian Gray picture in the attic grow younger so he had to grow older. Virtue is its own reward, don’t think it isn’t, and sometimes it’s a positive drawback. Anyway, with Arthur less randy Jane was happier. Only when she has him helpless in a wheelchair, after a stroke, will she be truly at ease. Sometimes I understand why it is that some men fear some women so: if women are virtuous, if they insist on being victims, then their misery controls to the grave.
Angus? Angus did not forgive Natalie. He was tired of her, anyway. He’d said she could have the flat free until November, just about getting the timing right. He did not renew the lease, but when he’d calmed down did not deny she’d brought richness and happiness into his life, at least for a while. Jean was rather pleasanter to him, now she was on HRT, or hormone replacement therapy. Her horribleness turned out to be menopausal. Or so he said. Various West Country rings dealing with illicitly imported agricultural chemicals, were uncovered by the police, and the penalties weren’t just fines but prison sentences, so Avon Farmers disappeared only just in time. Arthur started a Garden Centre there instead, where the flowers and shrubs flourished immoderately, and where not a butterfly ever alighted. Something had indeed got into the soil, for good or bad. One of his assistants had a baby born with a crooked leg but that could happen to anyone: there’s an epidemic, remember, of handicapped babies. And another died of cancer, but that was hardly statistically surprising, and in the meantime, how the pot plants in Eddon Gurney bloomed!
In the delicatessen the till pinged almost nonstop and profits grew, against all expectation. With the coming of Jax had come good fortune. The animal was obviously happier in a home where there were no children. Gerard took anti-depressants and lost his social conscience and thereafter sold luxury foods to the non-hungry with equanimity. Pauline took up weight training: an excellent substitute for sexual activity for those whose husbands grow elderly and uninterested too soon for their liking.
Val Bains’ back got permanently better at carnival time. He was in the crowds watching when float no. 62 caught fire. He ran forward to help Bernard unhitch the tractor, and in bending and forgetting released some trapped nerve or other in his spine. He took the job in Street at a firm using the new computer technology; it was exacting work if not well paid. He would drop Sally off at work, and collect her on the way home. She was pleased to have so visible and caring a husband.
Natalie? Well, here’s a turn-up for the books. Natalie stepped into Flora’s shoes, with Bernard in the caravan, up by the tip. He’s ten years younger than she is, but who cares? She had nowhere to go when Angus turned her out of the flat, and she’s always got on well with Bernard and at least didn’t have the children to worry about. Ros went up to see her, not long ago. Natalie said she was happier than she had ever been in all her life. She was properly alive at last, she said, though looking forward to the spring. Winters in a caravan can be trying. No, she didn’t want the children back. What could she offer them? Ros thought perhaps she was on drugs. It was so damp and muddy up by the tip, and Natalie looked so happy without any
real reason that Ros could see. But perhaps it’s just sex, sex, sex; you know what Bernard is, forever quenching his moral and mental torment in fleshly pleasures. I hope it is. God knows what will happen to her next: what does happen to the one in three women with children whose marriages end in divorce?
You are right, it’s worrying about that which has driven me into the nuthouse, and right out the other side. I am, alas, sane again. I am, Dr Mempton says, fit to leave. Why is he being so nice to me? What? I can hardly believe him. How many sessions with the psychiatrist does an ordinary patient have? he asks. One a week? One a fortnight? He’s joking. That is a monstrously low figure. Yes, I do realize he’s been coming every day. It did seem strange. I now see it’s bloody irresponsible, if what he’s saying is true.
Love? Me? Who could love me? I make him laugh, Bill Mempton says. When was making someone laugh a recipe for love? This is very, very embarrassing, and not what I had in mind at all. Look at me! Puffy face, puffy hands, twitching. That’s the drugs. I talk too much. I am full of hate and self-pity. He knows that, better than anyone. He’ll be saying next all I need is the love of a good man. My God, he’s said it! Do Them Upstairs go for this sort of thing – doctor-patient romances? I hardly think so! Or is it that they reckon anything is better than the Eddon Method? Those deaths must have shaken management no end!
Not for Sonia Flora’s triumphant puff of smoke, her exaltation: not for Sonia Natalie’s glorious debasement: no, for Sonia comes a proposal of marriage from a good man, who knows her every failing. She can’t accept, of course. Happy endings are not so easy. No. She must get on with changing the world, rescuing the country. There is no time left for frivolity.
Fay Weldon
Mid October 1986
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