by Weldon, Fay
‘Shall I tell you what happened at the moment of death?’
Here I maintain that the pinner priests have failed again. The version is garbled, in spite of the excellent equipment. My superiors maintain that the GSWITS, for his own purposes, does his best to keep this particular matter veiled. But the Great Screen Writer has an editor himself, does he not, to whom, presumably, representation from we bit part players in the great drama of the universe can be made? I do not believe that this is heresy: surely we, who have to put up with the pain and torments of the life he has decreed, have a human right to know more. If the GSWITS won’t satisfy us, won’t divulge the plot and purpose, surely those above Him will? The pinner priests say it is not our part so much as to conceive of the GSWITS himself as requiring guidance. But there are many others who think like me – who recognise a B-movie writer for what he is; more of us perhaps than the pinner priests realise.
Miss Sumpter described the moment of death in these terms. Her eyes misted; she was gazing at her hand, held in its turn by her lover’s hand. As she looked, the finger shapes became vague, turned, twisted, entwined and stretched and grew into a handsome, leafless tree on which hung a single fruit – and it was she. The fruit dropped, into something soft, like meadow grass – she imagined that sensation of falling and of being received was the actual moment of death – and as it dropped everything changed; as in the cutting of a film one scene abruptly passes to the next. She was in a long, long corridor; reddish, warm – one wonders whether she describes the birth canal: the reverse journey which must happen, spiritually, as we retreat from life? – and along this corridor she travelled, swiftly and composedly, and with great joy, knowing it was back the way she had come. And, as she passed, person after person stepped from the doors which lined the corridor – friends, some she knew and recognised, others she had forgotten but now remembered. They greeted her, welcomed her, fell in with her – though it no longer seemed her corporeal self, but spirit, soul, which swept along – so that when she reached the end of the endless corridor and stepped out into a great white brilliant space she was, as it were, the summation of everything she had ever known, everyone she had ever greeted, the sum of every flush of excitement, every effort at communication, every animation she had ever experienced – every emotion now showing its true and finer face; every insult and every humiliation now made good, repented of. It was as if, forgiving others in the sheer pleasure and excitement of their company, she needed no forgiveness herself – and she was in paradise, which was, simply, other people. What was more, it was not boring.
Well, so the pinner priests recorded Miss Sumpter’s account of the experience of death. I must say, myself, that if she is telling the truth, and they have recorded it accurately, she has got off very lightly, considering her behaviour in life.
Of course we in the GNFR do try to avoid the condemnation of others but sometimes it’s hard. Though virtue lies in consenting to the parts allotted to us, and we recognise that just as some can’t help being victims others can’t help being oppressors, and that the best we can do is help the Great Plot of Life go forward, with all its myriad, myriad sub-plots, sometimes we can’t help shaking our heads in disapproval. Part of me, the unreformed part, still sees Gabriella Sumpter as an adulteress, a woman too selfish, too self-centred to have children, who did nothing useful in all her life, for anyone. Yet, in the terms of the GNFR, she is a saint. She did not stand in the way of events. She went where the script dictated – where Fate led her. The fault must surely be in my comprehension, not in the manner of her living. Bow the head! Assent!
I try, but the thought will not be kept down – perhaps the GNFR is in error. Perhaps, in this world of initials we seem increasingly obliged to inhabit, as the pace of living hots up, as the GSWITS covers more and more pages, yet another initial is needed? The GNFR must become the RGNFR, the Revised Great New Fictional Religion. Am I perhaps the one to bring it about – not too humble, nor too elderly, after all?
4
‘Well!’ said Honor briskly, when I arrived home that evening and told her something of what was on my mind. ‘This Miss Sumpter has certainly stirred things up!’ There was grilled mackerel for tea. Honor buys it whenever she can, fish oils being so much better for the body than animal fats. The fish shoals are more plentiful now that the human populations of the world have fallen. They are no longer trawled out of existence. I am not fond of fish myself, as a dish, but appreciate their nutritional value. Even so, I am sorry to say, I left the roe on my plate, pushing it under the skin of my baked potato in the hope that it would escape Honor’s concerned eyes. To no avail.
‘The roe is full of natural goodness,’ Honor said, ‘do try to eat it. You need the skin of the potato for roughage. Besides, you know how you love potatoes.’
Indeed I had been very fond of potatoes in my youth, before butter was recognised as a health hazard and pepper was banned altogether as a carcinogenic agent. And of course, kind and generous as she is, it is natural for Honor still to see her husband as a young man. So I ate up without fuss.
‘There, now,’ she said, when I had finished, ‘You’ll live for ever, and have all the time and energy in the world to reform the GNFR.’
‘It is not a laughing matter,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Let the Muse of Comedy descend, and may all our prayers go to ensuring happy endings!’
She was ideologically correct, of course, so I let her frivolity pass. But later, when we were jogging around Hyde Park, I returned to the theme.
‘It is quite clear to me,’ I said, ‘that the GSWITS allocated to us mortals is a mere B-feature writer.’
‘So you keep saying,’ she said. Honor pants rather, when jogging, but then is of heavier build than I. We stopped, on her behalf, and rested our backs against one of the great new fast-growing deciduous oak trees which these days make our parks so attractive. If only science could do as much in its search for the vaccine as it has for horticulture!
‘The evidence is’, I said, ‘that the GSWITS has the unhappy tendency of His kind to introduce disasters – cyclones, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and man-made explosions to get Himself out of narrative difficulties.’
‘I hope no one can overhear us,’ said Honor. ‘This talk smacks of blasphemy.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It is a perfectly legitimate area for discussion, and no pinner priest will deny me my right to interpret my god in my own way. Besides, I hardly imagine they have the oak trees bugged. I am not denying the GSWITS in any way, let me make that clear; on the contrary, I maintain only that the effort of His creation must be to see that He takes His task seriously, and fulfils His brief accurately.’
‘Quite so,’ said Honor. She is a good girl.
‘One day everyone will recognise it. I have known it from an early age – it dawned upon me in my youth: full up to here with Watergates, Irangates, plummetting Boeings, Titanics raised, Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls and the first rumbling of AIDS, it came to me that the writing in the skies was nothing to do with art and literature, but the simple narrative of commercial sensationalism. That here was not even a main-feature but some kind of hotch-potch of a supporting fictional exercise.’
‘Shall we continue?’ asked Honor. ‘We have four more laps to do. If we fill our cards tonight we can have the weekend free.’ Exercise of a regulation kind is compulsory, if excess taxes are not to be paid. To be elderly is not to be exempt. It is the citizen’s duty to stay healthy, and our ageing population is remarkably fit.
‘We will be happier when we can accept the flawed nature of the GSWITS,’ I said, as we ran. ‘We will have fewer expectations and more sense of free will.’ We rounded the pleasant corner where the purple Bougainvillaea streams from the giant Redwoods – who ever thought to see such sights in Hyde Park! – and padded through the glowing flowered tunnels of the underpass (in the last five years they have induced even tropical flowers to bloom in the cold half-dark).
/> ‘A new race of pinner priests will presently arise,’ I proclaimed to my panting witness, ‘and the RGNFR will be triumphant!’
‘The RGNFR?’ she enquired.
‘The Revised Great New Fictional Religion,’ I explained.
‘And I suppose you’ll be the Lord High Priest.’
‘Naturally,’ I replied. I hoped she was not being facetious. My wife is a serious and practical person, but I sometimes think offers too much at the shrine of the Muse of Comedy. At any rate the muse tends to descend at inappropriate moments.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘when you are, will you re-call the likes of Gabriella Sumpter, or will you let her rest in peace?’ I gave the matter some thought.
‘I will re-call her,’ I said, ‘but when I do, it will be with the whiff of sulphur, not the taste of ambrosia.’
‘You mean you will re-invent hell?’
‘I certainly want her punished,’ I said to my own surprise. ‘Oh yes. I want her punished.’
Honor, wisely, did not pursue the matter. We rested and talked about the dowry we would give our granddaughter to take with her to Scotland. The young cannot take out insurance these days, and it has become the custom for the older generation to make these new starts in life, as and when they become inevitable, as pleasant as possible. There is travel into Scotland, but not, of course, out of it, and though the new communications technology can make the actual physical whereabouts of the friend or relative all but irrelevant the new technology must be afforded. Even something as simple as the holograph telephone is expensive. Fortunately we pulp priests of the GNFR are well rewarded for our pains. And pains they are.
I arrived at the Museum the next morning to find Playback Temple No 3 already occupied, and had to make do with cubicle No 5, where the console has seen better days. I was irritable and my calves ached, but at least, thanks to Honor’s encouragement, we had filled our cards and could presently enjoy a weekend free of exercise. What would I do without my dear wife?
5
Well! Miss Sumpter then went on to talk of laundry. In fact at times she seemed more concerned with the rules of laundry than the rules of life.
‘One of my earliest memories’, says Miss Sumpter, ‘was of attending a children’s mass dressed in a crisp white cotton dress, trimmed with blue velvet braid. My mother, Emerald Lacey-Sumpter, took great care to see that I was always prettily and appropriately dressed, or rather saw to it that Nanny McGorrah accomplished the task. I must have been five. The sermon was given by Father McCree, a priest with little piggy eyes and a soft mouth. He told us a story of the great and wonderful party which was being given up at the castle, to which all the children, rich and poor, had been invited. (The only condition of entrance was that the child had to arrive at the front door clothed in spotless white.) And how one little girl, properly dressed and on her way to the party, stopped at a bush full of dark-red, luscious blackberries, and was tempted, and pulled a single branch down and carefully, carefully picked one, believing she could eat and not get dirty. But as she let go the branch a cluster of berries brushed the front of her dress and stained it purple, red and black! There was no getting those stains out! The little girl stopped by a brook and did her best, but though the sparkling water ran for a while blood-red, her dress was even messier than before. Weeping and disgraced, and trailing behind the joyous, spotless throng, the poor child stood at the palace gates begging to be let in, but the gatekeeper, sadly and gravely, shook his head and the gate was shut in her face. All the other children went in to endless bliss. Not she!
‘“Do not, I beg you”, said Father McCree, at the children’s service, “be like the little girl who in her willfulness stained her purity.” How I hated the priest with his little piggy eyes and his soft mouth; he’d never tasted a big ripe luscious blackberry in all his life. I knew it intuitively, even as I knew his fat white hand, if only it dared, would creep up under my crisp blue-braided cotton dress, and stretch the gap between my pale pink knickers, and in and up to peek and pry, as if the nails of his fingers were eyes and could see.
‘When I got home I spilled ink all over my dress. I wanted to be stained. Nanny McGorrah did her best to get the splodges out, but used hot water instead of cold, thus fixing the stain. Ink-spots should be removed by dipping the part first into cold water, and only then into hot, then spreading the fabric on the hand or the back of a spoon, pouring a few drops of oxalic acid or salts of sorrel over the stain, and rubbing and rinsing in cold water until removed. Alas, my mother, Lady Emerald, was no more knowledgeable than Nanny McGorrah in such matters; all their efforts achieved was the spreading and splodging of the stains, and the dress had to be abandoned altogether. A pity. My mother could never keep her mind on anything difficult or unpleasant for more than five minutes at a time. My father was consistently unfaithful to her, knowing it scarcely mattered. A new hat or an outing to a tea-dance would quickly cure any sense of grievance she might have. I think they were very, very happy together. I was their only child. I took care to be pleasant and loving towards them, whilst reserving kicking, biting, spitting and shouting for Nanny McGorrah, who loved me in spite of it. I remember concluding at an early age that she was obliged to love me, inasmuch as I was her source of income.
‘People love where it is in their interests to love,’ remarked Miss Sumpter, ‘that is another observable rule of life. Love is the great excuse: I cannot leave my wife because I love her means, “I cannot leave my wife because of the inconvenience and trouble involved, and besides I am frightened.” I will not leave this nannying job because I love the child merely means, “the devil I know is better than the devil I don’t.” Nanny McGorrah was a weak, sloppy, amiable and sentimental woman. Her stomach – she undressed in front of me thinking, wrongly, that my childish eyes were uncritical – hung in folds over white flannelette drawers. I resolved I would never allow my stomach to do such a thing. My father’s belly stuck out proudly: it went before him as a token of his amiability, prowess and success. Timothy Tovey’s, I may say, did the same for a year or so, when he was in his early fifties. Janice put him on a diet. (Put him on a diet! What impudence. How wives do delight in pretending to be mothers!)
‘Timothy Tovey would come straight from some dinner party, where his wife had obliged him to dine on melon, lean steak and salad and black coffee, to the bedroom at Terra Rosa, where I would press cream chocolates between his lips with my tongue, to assuage his hunger. Or else he would simply go out to dine, publicly. Hunger, even more than lust, makes a man imprudent. Janice could not understand why he took so long to lose weight. Poor Timothy, married to such a fool! But, of course, a rich fool. We both benefited from Janice’s wealth, and connections.
‘I have never been an ostentatious spender: it is vulgar to be seen to spend. But it is undeniable that I have always liked to be surrounded by what is fine, and delicate, and subtle – and such things are not cheap. Our bedspread was of golden lace laid over black lace, laid over white: Frieda Martock would come in once every three months to see to its cleaning. The three layers would first be unpicked and separated. To clean the gold lace she would mix the crumb of a 2lb loaf with ¼lb of powder blue – still to be found in a few hardware shops. The crumb would be rubbed fine and the blue mixed with it, and the mixture simply laid plentifully on the lace, until it brightened. Then the lace would be brushed clean with flannel and rubbed up gently, very gently, with a piece of crimson velvet. The result never failed. The black lace would be passed through a warm liquor of water and bullock’s gall (Harrods supplied this, for a large fee: I used Janice’s name) then rinsed out in cold water. A small portion of glue would be dissolved in boiling water, and the lace passed through it; Miss Martock would clap the stuff here and there with her rheumy hands – clap, clap; the sound of attention to detail rang through that pretty proper little house, as it had for more than two hundred years – to revive and restore its texture, and then pinned it in a special frame to dry.
‘It was i
n fact the frame of one of the very large family paintings which my first suitor, the arsonist Walter James, had taken into his head to burn, hoping thus to avenge his wrongs. The frame had escaped the fire: it was the last thing my father managed to save before the fire consumed him too, and now it served this excellent purpose. That did for the black lace – the layer of white silk bone lace took longer than anything, of course. First Miss Martock had to unstitch the composing pieces – the spread was made of twenty sections, each nine inches wide. These she wound around some six especially prepared muslin-wrapped glass bottles, tacking lightly into place to prevent wrinkles, matching edge to edge exactly. Over these layers she would place a linen cloth, which she would rub firmly with soap and cold water, and leave overnight for the lather to seep through the layers. The whole would then be rinsed through and through with cold water – never hot, for hot water yellows any white fabric, and of course weakens it – preferably outside, but never in direct sunlight. The lace would next be unwrapped, laid flat to dry, restitched, the covering layers of black lace and then the gold sewn, and the whole placed back upon the bed. Sometimes Timothy Tovey and I made love upon the bedcover and not beneath it: gold lace is ever so slightly scratchy, and we liked that. I felt it was right that my skin should suffer, even as the lace did, and vice versa – that to contribute, even in a minor way, towards this pinnacle of human pleasure, the feel of his flesh in mine, mine around his, tongue to nipple, nipple to teeth, was worth a little damage to the lace! Even that we should, in the course of time, wear it altogether away seemed no bad thing.