by Fay Weldon
So that is my family: that is how Amos comes to be my grandchild. His father is unknown. Venetia, to be blunt, was always vaguely in love, albeit platonically, with her stepfather Karl. These are the complications that ensue when marriages cease to be for life, when children are born out of wedlock, when governments, out of some peculiar obsession of their own, discourage marriage by legal and financial penalties, and make the temporary bond more popular than the permanent. Partnerships split apart like seedpods, and the poor children burst out into the world and drift with the wind to take root where best they can, rather than where they were meant. I know I am in no position to talk: I too failed. I was a stupid girl, with little sense of responsibility, of the significance of marriage, of how one’s actions rebound through the decades, how the lusts of the past come back to haunt us. Hamlet’s ghost’s complaint. So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, will sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage. Venetia was born of lust: so was Amos. But then perhaps they are the best children of all: the garbage ones flicker with radiance; they are the most interesting.
How Amos Came To Be Born
Some ten years into the marriage, and there was trouble between Karl and me when I found him embracing another beneath the coats at some artist’s drunken party; words were exchanged. Venetia, also at the party, overheard my tears and protests, and the following week, drunk herself after the Freshers’ ball – she was seventeen and had just started at St Martin’s School of Art – allowed herself to lose her virginity to some passing student stranger beneath a half-finished sculpture of a frog by Paolozzi, which she seemed to think somehow sanctified the act. In Venetia’s world, art was all, as it was in Karl’s. And thus Amos was born, father unknown. I was shocked and concerned for her. At least I could name Venetia’s father, even though I lost touch with him.
‘It’s all your fault,’ I said to Karl, after she came home triumphant with a positive pregnancy test. ‘You beneath the coats, she beneath a sculpture. She felt betrayed by you as much as I did. Why wouldn’t she want to get even with us by getting pregnant?’ We were both in psychoanalysis at the time.
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘I was under the impression we had an open marriage. What are you going on about? It didn’t mean anything. We didn’t even know each other’s names. If you hadn’t made such a fuss Venetia would never have known about it.’
People used to talk like that. These days the young take their sexual relationships seriously. People have a useful habit of turning disadvantages to advantages. Only when Aids made promiscuity dangerous did fidelity become fashionable, at least amongst the educated classes. Fifteen years previously, since the advent of the pill and widespread contraception, sexual adventure had been looked at favourably. Now sexual restraint turned from a bore into a virtue.
As for this ‘open marriage’ – I am sure I had never discussed it with Karl – it was not an age for discussion of anything other than politics. He just assumed it. We both belonged to the same Trotskyist group. Sexual jealousy was considered beneath contempt, which suited men rather more than it did women, and was one of the reasons – along with men’s assumption that we would make the coffee and do the secretarial work – that we moved over into feminism, invented the concept ‘sexism’ – which once defined could be found and deplored everywhere – and the rest is social history and why my daughter Polly is like she is. But back to the party and Venetia’s pregnancy.
‘It is far more likely to be your sexual adventures,’ Karl said, ‘and your example, that have set her off on this path. She should have trained as a secretary. She is no kind of artist. I could wish she had better taste in sculpture, though. If the child turns out to be a frog, serves her right.’
Karl did not like Paolozzi. He was definite in his tastes and, as so many artists of that generation were, convinced that if a work of art was saleable, it was worthless. Commercial success was the sure sign of artistic failure. As I made more money, and my column inches in the papers and magazines lengthened, so I lost artistic credibility in his eyes. He acknowledged the letters of Van Gogh, the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and the novels of Wyndham Lewis as acceptable literature, but very little else. My pathetic kitchen-sink novels, with their occasional inducements to the new feminism, were an embarrassment, though the money they brought in was welcome enough.
It is true that a week or so before the incident of the coats Karl had found an assignation note, half falling out of my jacket pocket as it hung upon its peg, and had read it, turned pale, stuffed it back in, and gone on up the stairs. The incident was not mentioned. And I had thought least said soonest mended, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it was then that he began to fall out of love with me. I daresay I had left the note in my pocket to make sure Karl would find it – or so my analyst was determined to believe – just as he had the next week made sure I would find him beneath the coats at the party, with a scraggy-haired girl with big, dirty bare feet.
It was part of the culture at the time that any minor sexual peccadillo on either side of a partnership would be overlooked. The drugs of the day were not always as strong as they are now, but usually enough to make anyone dizzy. Karl and I were both in analysis, and understood only too well the concept of acting out – of performing an action to express, often subconsciously, one’s emotional conflicts – the results of such action all too often being antisocial or self-destructive. Everything we did was under each other’s, and our analysts’, scrutiny, and just as we delivered dreams to fit the analyst’s convenience, we would deliver our actions likewise, to fit the script the analysts were writing of our lives. We understood this in each other – or I had supposed we did.
Amos existed as a by-product of my infidelity, or Karl’s, or the analysts who prompted us to discussable action, or merely the demon lust come to take possession of my precious daughter. Whatever. Or perhaps somewhere up in the Bardo Thodol or the Tibetan Book of the Dead it was written that the soul of Amos should choose just such parents as Venetia and a stranger, to bring about the divine purpose of stopping the great wheel of government if only for an instant, so when it started up again, as such wheels always will, it set off in a slightly other and better direction. And why, now, Amos sat upon the stair with me, and dissembled, as people will with their old grans, whom they assume to be a bit daft but are not necessarily so.
Li’l David was small but oh my
Li’l David was small but oh my
He fought big Goliath who lay down and dieth
Li’l David was small but oh my…
I’m preachin’ dis sermon to show
It ain’t nessa, ain’t nessa
Ain’t nessa, ain’t nessa
It ain’t necessarily so
Bang bang bang-de-bang. They are still there. They want my worldly goods. I am not so stuck on possessions as they imagine. I could go down and open the door to them and let events take their course, and say so to Amos, but he says on no account am I to do that. The bailiffs will go away in time and then we will have the opportunity of smuggling most of the valuables out. I wonder who he means by ‘we’?
It occurs to me that the men at the door may be after Amos, not me at all. This is a worrying thought, if also a comforting one. But no. If they were CiviSecure they would simply break in. No, it is my money and possessions they are after. But you can’t get blood out of stone. I hear there are vast warehouses all over the country full of repossessed goods. No-one wants them any more, or can afford them even at knock-down prices. The nomenklatura take their pick on Sunday afternoons, or so it is said, but very quietly.
The Stairs
When I was in my early thirties I would sit upon these very stairs when Karl and the children were asleep, and write and write my novels. I used wide-spaced A4 pads and a Pentel pen. Karl was irritated by the sound of a typewriter; so many things irritated him: fox hunters, Conservatives, pop music – jazz was okay: he played New Orleans trumpet whenever he got a chance. He was suspicious of
domestic machinery of all kinds; so the stairs had to be swept down with a brush and pan – not the Hoover, with its bump, bump, bump down the stairs as I dragged it down after me, or the whirr of the washing machine, with its annoying change in sound levels as it changed pace from soak to wash to spin, so in the end it seemed easier to lug the nappies round to the launderette.
The novels were popular, being a celebration of outrage at the domestic fate of women at the time, and over the years. The hessian stair carpet with the holes, which had nearly sent us to our deaths many a time, I replaced; but the nylon mix with its static electricity gave Karl a headache. Fortunately pretty soon I could afford pure wool. Mothproofed, of course – I sometimes thought this was what gave me headaches, but Karl insisted.
Otherwise I found the stairs a good place to write. I was not cut off from the life of the household, yet not quite part of it. The children were reassured by my presence there, and would bypass me deftly, and not stop to cling, or whine, or demand, or plead, but simply get on with their lives. My life in the advertising agency had trained me in instant recall, cured me of the belief that one needed peace and quiet to write. One did not – one needed only desperation and deadlines.
Sometimes early in the morning, when she was around three, Polly would come down wrapped in her blue dressing gown with the pink bobbles, ignoring me, and sit in front of the letter box waiting for the postman to arrive. When the letter box clicked open she would growl like a dog, catch the letters as they fell, wait for the sound of the postman’s feet retreating, and push them out of the house again. She was always a very territorial little girl. Karl was a good father to Polly, and I saw no reason why she should become such a feminist, and continue to see all men as oppressors, long after the liberation revolution had been won and the world feminized. There are as many women being chauffeured down the centre lanes of our cities as there are men, and I am sure the women are the most draconian of all. I expect feminism is in her nature as much as in her nurture. And of course the postman was a man.
When her stepdaughters Steffie and Rosie were small she would throw out their My Little Ponies, Barbie dolls and any toy in pink, green or purple as soon as they came into the house. I regret to say I would make a point of giving them fairy castles in violet and mauve, and Cinderellas in white crinolines, carefully chosen not to quite be within the embargo but nearly. Corey their father would notice and laugh. He is an amiable man, and the laugh seems to rise from the depths of his being to embrace the whole room and everyone in it. The laugh entrances Polly, who takes the world so seriously and literally, even as she disapproves. Her bark is worse than her bite: at least I hope so. My little stepdaughters would go and search the bins after she had thrown their treasures out and retrieve them, and she didn’t seem to notice. The gesture is the thing and they all know it.
For his part Karl scarcely noticed Venetia when she was growing up. The more she adored him the more he overlooked her. He was perfectly pleasant to her: she was a blonde, handsome, straight-forward, clever child, who took to painting to win her stepfather’s approval, and kept it up all her life. But he believed she had no ‘real’ talent, and was without that personality which harboured the true artist. In other words she was not like him. She was not his. She did not look like him, think like him, or suffer like him. She would never weep over the letters of Van Gogh; but would laugh uproariously over comics. She might come top in maths and science, but that only made her the more suspect in his eyes. He put up with his stepdaughter for my sake, but she did not interest him. For which I suppose I should be grateful – many a mother suffers when the stepfather she chooses for her child is too admiring and noticing of the growing girl for comfort.
Bang-bang-bang de-bang. Again. What are they trying to do to us? Break our nerve?
‘It may be,’ I say to Amos now, ‘that I deserve my fate. That I do indeed have a debt to society. The bailiffs at the door have right on their side. I lived off the fat of the land for a while: but what had I done to deserve it? For a few words on paper which if they did anything at all disrupted society, upset the natural balance of the genders, trained women to despise men, and so on.’ But I am only trying the words out for size. I do not believe them.
A Pattern Of Surprises
That story I was telling you about Cynthia falling out of the DC10; it did not end there. Not even death is final. The past comes towards us, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, to make our futures. The aircraft disintegrated in the air and many of the bodies just fell out and tumbled down to the ground, still strapped to their seats. Did they die as they fell? Were they unconscious when they hit? Or did Cynthia float down in her seat, drifting this way, drifting that way, and have time to think on the way, ‘I should never have left the children’? If she could have, she would have. That’s motherhood for you. I don’t suppose she bothered to think, I should have listened to my friend Frances. Now she’ll be able to say, ‘I told you so.’ So many things we don’t know, will never know. A Day of Judgment would be good, in which all things were made clear. Who was on the grassy knoll when Kennedy was killed? What would have happened had King Harold won at Hastings? What did my friend Cynthia think as she fell from the sky? And yet certain things have a way of emerging, splinters of fact working their way out from the flesh of the past. And then, like as not, one wishes they hadn’t.
That air crash was all surprises. I had a letter a couple of months later from my friend Liddy in Venice, California, enclosing a death certificate, saying could I do something for her, her husband Terry had committed suicide. She had told his old parents in London he had died of a heart attack, because it seemed kinder than the truth. Who wants to know their only son has given back the gift of life? Only now they wanted to see the death certificate. Could I have it forged, so it no longer said death by his own hand, but by cardiac arrest?
That was three surprises in one. (A) Terry? Dead? How could he be? Nobody had told me: he was the love of my life; if I hadn’t married Karl I would still be yearning after him day and night. Indignation mixed with grief. (B) Suicide? But why, how? (C) Why did Liddy think I was the kind of person you asked to forge death certificates? But she was right about me, because I ran straight round to a friend, a commercial artist, weeping, and asked him to do it and he did.
I wept because Terry was dead, the one who came to me in dreams – and still does, though I am in my eighties. He never made it beyond his thirties. A working-class lad, dark, handsome and chippy, lots of shiny black hair, hooded eyes, infinitely glamorous. He rode a motorbike, made me drunk on Cointreau one night, delicately removed the plain woollen dark green dressing gown my mother had made for me – he said it made him laugh, but it was all I had – and took my virginity. That was 1953. I was nineteen, and felt my virginity to be a great curse. Men until then had seemed too polite and responsible to take it away.
That was the greatest surprise I ever had – the first acquaintance with sex. Such a surprise my spirit left my body and watched from a corner of the ceiling while the act was performed. I never looked back: sex was not just a many splendoured thing; it was the only important thing in the world. He was no ardent swain, more’s the pity, but I think he liked me, and I passionately and madly adored him. At the time he was having it off with my best friend Liddy (not that the phrase was used in those days: sex was a serious matter, and she had his engagement ring – just as well, contraception then being by the withdrawal method only). She was the pale, slender, doe-eyed beauty: I was the plain friend every pretty girl likes to have, to act as foil.
Whenever Liddy was out of town he would come secretly to my bed in the basement, and when he was in bed with her in the attic, which was mostly – I would weep and weep into my pillow. I suppose that by the time she sent the death certificate she knew this. I don’t think she knew at the time. We all believe our sexual activities can stay secret: in my experience they never do. Someone always tells. In the end Liddy married him and I daresay in one of their ro
ws the subject came up. And she may well have felt I owed her a favour.
I rang friends. Terry! Suicide! Twenty years out of college and we alumni had kept in touch. More surprising that sixty years on those who survive still do. It was soon after the war – families had disintegrated, homes been destroyed, populations dispersed – stuck up there in the Scotland, on the end of a long damp dishrag (so my mother described it) we students were one another’s family.
‘Oh yes, that Terry.’ They were slightly disparaging about him, even in his death. He was never really one of them: he did science; they did humanities: never the twain should meet, except in bed. ‘Oh yes, Terry. Working for the Douglas Aircraft Company. The one whose DC10 just fell out of the sky. You had a friend on that? Oh, bad luck.’
And then the next surprise. Liddy came over from California. The daughter, Florrie, came too. She was twelve. She played outside with Venetia while we talked. She looked like her father; the same hooded eyes, the same dark shiny hair. Part of me thought she should be my child. Liddy said if you’re wondering why he did it, that air crash in Paris played on his mind. He blamed himself. She’d come back from shopping and found him with a bullet through his brain and a gun in his hand and a file in front of him. It contained all the memos he’d sent to the company saying their DC10 was unsafe, there was no way an aircraft should be built with the control cables running the length of the fuselage floor, when that floor was not reinforced, and loss of pressure could collapse it. They’d sat on his memos and done nothing. A lot of people were killed.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘my best friend was on that aircraft.’
I thought if he’d been married to me he wouldn’t have killed himself. I would not have let the memos go unanswered, the fuselage would have been strengthened so when the cargo door blew out its floor wouldn’t have collapsed and the control cables would not have been severed and everyone would have got safely home, though no doubt a few might have been sucked out with the pressurized air as it fled the aircraft. If I had not lain around weeping and had more courage and more sense of self-worth and had any idea how to set about it, which to others seemed to come naturally, but not to me, I might taken Terry away from Liddy and Cynthia’s children would still have a mother. She would have clung on and not been sucked out.