by Fay Weldon
‘I’m not scared one bit,’ said Romula, and they paid their £2 each (the most expensive ride of the fair, and not surprising) and when the cars finally slowed, and sighed, and stopped, they got in, and Romula’s little white hands closed softly around the metal bar. And Ben, top Waltzer Rider, didn’t just twist the car but rode the car, bewitched, mesmerized and enchanted by Romula’s white hands beside his own strong brown ones. After they’d shrieked their fill he took Romula down by the canal, and Romula would have died if he hadn’t.
‘Do what you can and be what you are,’ said Ben to Romula. ‘Life’s simpler than you think. Time you left home, anyway.’
‘AIDS!’ shrieked Liz. ‘AIDS!’ Why did Romula tell her? God knows. Girls shouldn’t talk to their mothers as if they were sisters. They’re mothers. As you grow up they grow old. They don’t like it. More chances for you, fewer chances for them.
But there wasn’t anything Liz could do, and she was going away for a seminar anyway, on ‘Yoga—a replacement for tranquillizers?’ and Evelyn and her son Jo were moving in to keep an eye on Romula.
I’ll do what I want and be what I am.
So every day that week Romula met Ben and she was quite giddy with love and he was quite giddy with something, but the fair was moving on as fairs will: and besides he was married: but somehow the parting seemed right: the grief that followed healing more things than just Romula losing Ben. Round the cars whizzed on the surging floor, faster and faster, big male hands and little white girl fingers.
And every day that week Romula went into the new tattooist who’d opened up in the High Street—‘New needles every customer—free!’—and flourishing the fake passport which was sixth-form common property proved herself over eighteen and had a dragon, like the one on Ben’s right buttock, tattooed on the back of her left hand. Amazing how you can keep a left hand out of sight if you try.
But you couldn’t hide it from a mother for long and when Liz came home she went mad, and threw Romula out of the house. Only temporarily, of course. Afterwards, in remorse, she took Romula on holiday to Greece, to Lesbos.
‘I shouldn’t have gone away when I did,’ lamented Liz. ‘Always looking after other people, neglecting my own child.’
Friends assured her she was wrong, it wasn’t like that at all, and they were right, of course. New advances in cosmetic surgery must surely before long make tattoos removable; the dragon wouldn’t be there for life.
But it was, it was: the veins in her hand ran straight to her heart: it was there in her heart for ever.
I do what I can and I am what I am.
The journey to Lesbos was Romula’s first air flight. Lesbos was tedious, but Romula, gazing at the dragon on her hand, loving Ben, lost for always, for ever and ever, fell in love with flying, and the men who leapt so high above the waves they could stay in the air for ever. ‘A conversion experience’, was how she described it. The kind of thing, sceptics would say, that sometimes happens when unhappiness is too much to bear. But I don’t see it like that. I think she was just born to fly.
Be that as it may, when Romula said she was dropping science and planned to be an air hostess, her mother just said, ‘Okay. If that’s what you really want. Do what you can and be what you are, and good luck to you.’
The Year of the Green Pudding
THE PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT? THIS way? Thanks.
Sir, you have a nice face. I reckon I can talk to you. Tell you about myself? Why not! That’s what you’re there for, after all.
It must be possible to live on this earth without doing anyone any damage. It must be. I try to be good. I really try. I rescue wasps from glasses of cider, I look where I’m going so I don’t tread on ants. The second worst sound I ever heard was when I went to rescue a lamb tangled up in an electric fence, and there was a crackle, crackle underfoot and I was treading on snails, cracking their shells, piercing them, killing them. Why did so many snails congregate in one spot? There was no reason I could see, except mass suicide. But no excuses for me: I should have looked where I was going: the lamb could have waited a second longer: the snails would have been saved. The second worst thing I ever did was murder a duckling. Not on purpose, of course, but definitely murder by neglect. No excuses. I went to put the ducks away for the night, to save them from the fox. I heard a cheep-cheep and assumed it came from inside the shed. I should have checked. I didn’t. The sound came from under the shed. I was deaf to the cheep, cheep, cheep, the little plea for help as darkness fell and the bright eyes of predators gathered in the hedge. I wanted to get back into the warm for a cup of coffee. In the morning there was no duckling. I reckon the rat took it, that blonde little, silly little helpless thing. I saw the rat later, a great fat brown hairy mean thing, and I let it go. I could have taken a stick and beaten it to death. But it had a right to live. Why should the rat’s ugliness, the duckling’s prettiness, condemn the rat to death? Yes, sir, I was brought up in the country.
What was the worst sound I ever heard? It was the sound of Cynthia’s crying outside her bedroom door, while I lay inside with her husband. Crocus we called him. He had a thick thatch of yellow hair, which brightened up dull rooms. Cynthia was my best friend, so you understand the ‘we’. The worst thing I ever did? Why, to be there with him in the bed.
I’m a middling sort of person, don’t you think, sir? Of middle height and middle size, and I buy the kind of clothes that are labelled S, M or L; kind of floppy, not tailored. I choose the M. My hair, left to its own devices, is mid-brown and my shoes are size five, the middle size they say, though I think statistically sixes are more normal now. Our research department says the population’s getting bigger. My eyes are a kind of middle grey and I wear a medium make-up base. Really I’m sometimes surprised family and friends recognize me in the street. I smile a lot, as you’ll have noticed, showing these middling-even teeth, but my friends sometimes complain I have no sense of humour. I just think they’re sometimes not very funny in what they say and do. For instance, I think Irish jokes are dangerous and cruel and I also think one has to say so, out loud, there and then, if anyone begins. There’s one joke I heard recently which did make me laugh, out loud. It goes like this. ‘Question: How many radical feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: That’s not funny.’ So I do have a sense of humour. Anyway, that’s enough about me.
Why am I here? My department head sent me to discuss my resignation. Did I mention that I’m a vegetarian? No? Actually I try to be a vegan (that’s someone who doesn’t eat any dairy foods, never mind just the cow itself, both on health grounds and because if eating the cow is murder, drinking the milk is theft), but I don’t always succeed. I’m like A. A. Milne’s king—‘I do like a little bit of butter on my bread.’ I hope all this doesn’t make me sound rigid and boring; I don’t honestly believe I am. I just do try to get by doing as little damage as I can. And I make a very good onion and potato pie!
That’s since Crocus. Not the pie, the not doing damage. What happened about Crocus was this. I was twenty-five. A funny sort of age: not really young, but not really old: just too old to enter the best beauty contests. I felt more on the shelf then than I have done before or since, I don’t know why. Cynthia, as I say, was my best friend. She and Crocus had a little boy of two, Matthew. They’d had to get married because Matthew was on the way. Cynthia wasn’t much good with babies, and I was round there a lot helping. I wasn’t married, I had no children, I was just more competent than she was. It wasn’t difficult. She once put salt in his bottle instead of sugar. She shouldn’t have put sugar in anyway: it’s unnecessary and fattens without nourishing, but try and tell Cynthia anything like that. Cynthia wasn’t middling to look at, not at all. Cynthia was narrow-waisted and long-legged and long-backed and had natural blonde hair, one of those white, fragile skins which go with it, and dark blue eyes, the blue you see when you look out of Concorde’s window. (I have been in Concorde: I am full of surprises. Crocus used to say I was full of surprises.) I
talk of Crocus in the past tense because it’s all over between him and me, and Cynthia’s in the past tense because she’s all over. She’s dead. What happened was this. I know I’m a long time getting round to it, I’m sorry, it’s just so dreadful, I rattle on and put it off.
Concorde? I was working on the Liver Pâté Account. They were serving it on Concorde, on little pieces of toast, with free champagne cocktails. The client offered me a free flight. Why are you so interested in Concorde?
Cynthia went into hospital to have her second baby. She’d had a dreadful pregnancy, poor thing; the baby was pressing on the sciatic nerve. I moved in to look after little Matthew—and Crocus. Cook meals—you know how men are not supposed to be able to. Though if you ask me they just don’t want it known quite how good they are, in case it gets around. She was in for forty-eight hours. I think Crocus and me could have got through that, even though we were alone. I mean talking formally and not catching each other’s eye, though what he wanted was to be in bed with me and what I wanted was to be in bed with him, and we both knew it. Not saying, not touching, made it stronger; that’s the way it goes. The whole air crackled between us. But we could have held out, I know we could. Cynthia would have come back and it would all just have faded away. Things do. But the hospital rang and said the baby wasn’t up to its birth weight: Cynthia wouldn’t be back till Saturday. That was the Wednesday. And on Wednesday night, after visiting hour—he’d taken chocolates (Crocus was like Cynthia: he never would believe just how bad sugar is for you) and I’d taken grapes—we came straight back and went to bed together. Not the spare room—it was too near Matthew’s room—but their bed, Crocus and Cynthia’s bed. I told you about his hair, didn’t I? Blonde! Cynthia had dark-red pillowslips. I shall never forget—And Thursday evening we went to see her again, at visiting time, with never a flicker, all that sex didn’t seem any of her business somehow, and the new baby was just lovely and Matthew seemed really fond of it—it was a girl—and Cynthia said she wanted to call her after me because I was such a good friend and, do you know, I felt not a twinge of guilt. Does that make me odd, or just like anyone else? I didn’t mean to hurt her, but Crocus and me—it just seemed more important than anything else: what made the world go round and the stars shine and the wind blow and so forth. And all of Friday, when Matthew was at playgroup, and as soon as he’d been put down at six o’clock, we were in the bedroom—actually not in the bed most of the time, on the floor—does that make it better or worse? And then suddenly the door opened and there was Cynthia and the baby. She’d discharged herself, we later heard: I don’t think because she suspected anything, she just didn’t like hospital food—not enough sugar, I suppose—and knew the baby was doing fine in spite of what the hospital said.
She shut the door quickly so she couldn’t see us—it took us some time to get ourselves together, or rather not-together—and we could hear her weeping the other side of the door. Just quietly weeping.
Crocus went out to her, but she didn’t stay, she just handed him the baby and left. And by the time I’d got myself together—I never was a fast dresser—and he’d handed the baby to me and was gone after her, it was too late. She went down the Underground and threw herself under a train. The poor driver. I think of the poor drivers when anything like that happens.
Anyway, that was that, sir. Crocus couldn’t bear to be in the same room with me afterwards, and I think I’d have screamed if he’d touched me. It just sort of shook us right out of it. The young one didn’t get called after me, that’s all I know. And that she’d been on antidepressants and had threatened suicide in the past. Neither of them had told me that. So what sort of friendship was it? Do you think they were ashamed, or something? Shouldn’t you be frank, with friends?
But that was the end of my love life, at least for a time. It put me right off men, I can tell you. I got the blame, of course, and it ought to have been forty per cent of the blame—fifty per cent each and an extra ten per cent for him because he betrayed a marriage partner which is worse than betraying a friend. But of course I got a hundred per cent of it from all and sundry, especially sundry, especially men. I moved out of the district and I got a job here. I’d always wanted to work in an advertising agency. But now I have to resign. Why? I’ll tell you.
I do believe if you try, sir, if you really try, you can get through life without causing damage. I just hadn’t been trying over the Cynthia/Crocus business. I did, after that, I promise you. I checked up on all my dates; if they said they were married I wouldn’t go out with them, I wouldn’t even be alone with them. If they said they weren’t married, or divorced, I still checked up on them. Thirty per cent who said they weren’t, were, can you imagine that? And the other seventy per cent—I just wasn’t interested. I was working as a secretary then, sir, not a copywriter as I am now, but hoping, always hoping! Yes, I do get to meet the clients. I suppose I am attractive, in my middling kind of way. You know how it is—there’d be business lunches, business dinners: but I’d just go off home, I was so discouraged, frightened of trouble. I think that client who sent me off on Concorde got really cross, but I couldn’t help that. If you don’t feel anything, you don’t feel anything. And then I met Martin. You know Martin, he’s an Art Group Head here. Attractive? Crocus was nothing compared to Martin. You know how it is, you touch and there’s this surge of electricity—it’s almost as if you’ve been stung? And I thought to myself, look, I can’t go on atoning for ever for what I did to Cynthia and her children, if I did; because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve got to have children of my own, get married, settled, some time. And Martin was crazy about me. And I was crazy about him. And I thought this is really working, really something—you know that kind of confidence you get when everything’s in balance?
And then he told me he was married. I hadn’t checked up, I didn’t want to check up, I didn’t want to know. But he told me. He said theirs was an open marriage, she didn’t mind. I minded. I said no, that’s it, that’s the end. He said go and visit her: and I said no. What would she do if I visited her? Walk straight under the nearest train? ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never.’
He brought her round to me. She said I was welcome to him. She’d met somebody else: she wanted a divorce. I was to feel free, to make her feel better.
So I felt free. By God, I felt free. At last, it seemed to me, a penance which I thought was endless had worked itself out. I was free to be happy. The anxiety lifted. I hadn’t realized what it was, this black terrible cloud I’d been living under. Anxiety. If you’ve suffered from it you’ll know what it’s like: if you haven’t, sir, count your blessings. It’s like a physical pain, only it’s attached to your feelings, and there’s no cure for it, because it has no reality, no real cause in the outside world, so you’re free to attach it to any number of things. But what are you anxious about? they ask. The answer you give is aircrashes, or AIDS, or you’ve forgotten to turn the gas off, or you’ve offended your best friend (that’s always a good one for me) but the answer is, it’s not about anything, it’s just anxiety, free-floating anxiety, and you’d rather be dead but you don’t try because you’re too anxious about failing. I guess Cynthia wasn’t anxious. Just depressed. But Martin cured me of every sad, negative feeling I ever had. It’s been a wonderful year, a whole year of happiness. We became proper vegans together; we jogged, being careful not to step on snails; we joined the League Against Cruel Sports, until we decided it was cruel to humans; and I taught Martin not to kill wasps but just to sit still and leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone, and to pick spiders out of the bath with a postcard and cup. Then you lot gave me promotion at work. I actually became a copywriter! It seemed to me I could love Martin and do nobody any harm.
But now it’s January the second and I have to hand in my notice to you, sir. I have to, sir. This is what happened. Haven’t you heard? You know I’m on the Fresh Ginger Account, sir? And that we took all those full-page spreads in the women’s magazines? And that I did the
recipe for the Christmas Pudding? And that it went in in July, so that everyone’s puddings would have time to mature by Christmas? I didn’t check the recipe, sir. I was too happy with Martin to bother. I remember thinking, shall I check this through once again or shall I quickly, quickly go downstairs to the canteen and meet him for a drink. You get somehow starved of some people, at a certain stage in a relationship, and really suffer if you can’t see and touch and be with them. And that was the stage Martin and I were at. And I didn’t check the recipe. I forgot to put the sugar in. The typist left that line out and I didn’t check. And, sir, those full-page spreads are read by tens of millions, and one in ten actually made the pudding, covered it with foil, left it to mature, put it in boiling water on Christmas morning, turned it out piping-hot after the turkey, and it was green. Green. Mould. Inedible. Green puddings by the million, sir, and my fault. A million family Christmases spoiled, because I was in love.
Yes, I said was. Every bit of feeling’s vanished. I don’t think I could bear to touch Martin now. I don’t know what it was all about, all that feeling, all that kissing, all that love. Except I seem doomed to cause trouble. I’m never going to fall in love again, sir, never, never, never.
Sir, there is a little brown spider by your elbow. Don’t move, you might squash it.
FOUR TALES FROM ABROAD
Ind Aff
or Out of Love in Sarajevo