by Fay Weldon
And finally I met him! Peter! He fulfilled all my requirements, as I did his. He looked for the perfect mother, as I looked for the perfect father. We married, and agreed we would wait a year before starting a family so the children would be born into a settled and secure domestic framework. And that year, I may say, was exceedingly happy. I had always felt, because of my early experience, that sex was not for me. That year with Peter proved me wrong! Then, according to plan, I became pregnant with Janet, and of course after she was born sex became impossible. She could only sleep if she was in the bed with us, and then only if she was at the breast, and I got an ulcer, and you know how it is with small babies. Well, you don’t, do you. Let me just say Janet was a sensitive baby, and cried a lot, and then when Harvey came along he turned out to be hyperactive, and I’m sorry to say Peter’s views on child-rearing began to change: they simply did not coincide any more with mine.
Does this sound like the tale of a mad woman? I promise you I am not mad.
Peter was teaching at the time, and spent far too much time away from home. I know he had obligations to pupils and college, but he had obligations to his children as well. I insisted that he always be home by bathtime. It is imperative that children have the reassurance that a rock-solid routine provides. But sometimes, on some spurious ground or other, he would be absent. I would have to watch their little faces fall. Splashing about in the water, so important to the development of their tactile responses, their creative drive, just wasn’t the same without Daddy. And so he and I began to quarrel. The atmosphere in the home became tense, and that’s so very bad for children. They pick up really quickly on vibes.
Peter could, and would, sometimes even in front of them, say terrible things to me. ‘Why do you always ask those children questions?’ he’d yell. ‘Why do you say, “Are you sleepy? Would you like to go in your cot?” Why don’t you say, “You do feel sleepy, darling. Now I’m putting you in your cot”?’ And of course the answer was so obvious! For one thing, children are not there for the parents’ convenience, to be shut up; for another, even with the smallest child it is important to develop consciousness of self. The child knows what it feels; it is up to the parent to decipher those feelings and act upon them. I don’t tell my child it is hungry: I require it to give me an accurate account of what’s going on in its head. That way it learns self-expression. How else? Peter would accuse me of unforgivable things—of over-stimulating the children, of depriving them of pleasure—by which he only meant he’d shut them up if he could by shoving ice lollies in their mouths which would rot their teeth and give them a liking for sweet things which might stay with them all their lives, for all he knew. Or, I’m sorry to say, cared. Please don’t think he was a bad father, he wasn’t. He loved Janet and Harvey immoderately, and they loved him, which was of course the trouble. I’d feel like tucking them under my arm and running off with them, but how could I? Within two minutes they’d be grizzling and pining for their father.
The upshot of our disagreements over child-care, together with the actuality of those two small lively children, meant I was easily riled and distressed, and spent quite a lot of time in tears which I could not control. Try as I would to be brave and bright for the children’s sake, I failed. They would see me red-eyed and depressed, and hear Peter shouting. It couldn’t go on. It is the most traumatic and damaging thing for children to hear their parents rowing. Unforgivable to let it happen but it was not my doing. It began to look as if we had to part. Between us we had to provide two loving and caring environments between which Harvey and Janet would travel, since we could not make one. Now I knew I would do my part in this. But I was not convinced he would do his. Already Peter was seeing another woman, a junk-food addict whose idea of an afternoon out with the children was to go to McDonald’s on the way to the zoo—can you imagine, a zoo?—the torment of those poor wild caged creatures—and Janet and Harvey actively encouraged to gawp and throw peanuts. Now I’m well aware that it’s best for children to see their parents happy, and Peter’s sex drive was such that he could only be happy if it was more or less satisfied. I had no grudge whatsoever against his girlfriends, one or all of them, so don’t be misled by anyone who says mine was a crime passionnel. It was most definitely—if crime it was—a crime maternel. An act committed for the sake of the children which involves the death and/or disenabling of an incompetent and/or damaging parent. It wasn’t Peter’s fault that this was what he was. Blame God, if you must blame anyone, for creating parents and children whose emotional interests overlap but do not coincide. But there it was. I could see no other way out of an impossible bind.
Divorce, when it comes to it, is so crippling to the child’s psyche, is it not? The children suffer appallingly when a family breaks up. Statistics show that a paternal death has a less damaging effect on the children than divorce, so long as the family home is maintained and family income does not fall. So what else could I do, Miss Jacobs? In my children’s interests?
I insured Peter’s life and he and I, his girlfriend and the children went for a country walk and we picked mushrooms, including a death cap, and I made a beef casserole that evening, and he and she ate it—I am a vegetarian and I never let the children eat beef because of the possibility of mad cow disease but Peter of course would never renounce beef: what he liked he had to have—and it proved as fatal as the books said. Don’t worry—I got the pair of them into hospital promptly so the children witnessed nothing nasty. I hadn’t realized how suspicious coroners and police can be—I suppose I do tend to think everyone is as child-centred as I am. But this is not insanity, Miss Jacobs, is it? I was doing my best for my children, as the statistics in our society suggest the best to be: and I must get back to them as soon as is humanly possible, for their sake. I presume the court won’t be so stupid as not to understand that? What do you think?
A Pattern of Cats
MISS JACOBS, I THINK our cat Holly is going to die. She has changed the habits of years. Instead of sitting on top of the kitchen dresser, or in the corner between the bookcase and the desk in the living room, she sits in a little patch of grass the other side of the path that runs past our back door. She sits there day and night; she has worn a little dirt nest for herself where no grass grows, fitting her just right: she comes in for meals, but then back she goes. If you try to stop her she squeals and moans. The weather has been so hot and dry for so long, and the nights so warm and full of movement, I thought it was just that—a change in the climate had changed her habits. But last night it rained and there she still sat, in her little muddy nest, pathetic and bedraggled. She complained loudly about it all when she came in for food, but back she went nevertheless, to curl and sit and be dripped upon by delphiniums. What does it mean? I should take her to the vet, but what would I say? This very ordinary tabby cat has changed her habits but otherwise, apart from being a little thin, shows no symptoms of illness? Besides, I’m frightened. Suppose the vet says she has cancer, kidney failure, a tumour? That I must make the decision for Holly as to when she must die? Who am I to make this decision: How did I ever come to be in charge of this small life? It’s not the gravity of responsibility you envisage when the little fur-ball of energy first comes bouncing through your door and scrabbles up your velvet curtains, right to the top, leaping and clawing and ruining the surface, and sits on the curtain rail reproaching you, imploring rescue.
That was fifteen years ago, Miss Jacobs. Holly is fifteen, and that’s old for a cat, isn’t it? Don’t you multiply their years by seven for the human equivalent? But that makes her one hundred and five years old, and she certainly isn’t that. I’d give her seventy-three in human terms. A neighbour brought her round one morning seventy-three years ago, saying, ‘If you don’t take in this creature it’s the water bucket for her,’ so of course we did. We moved over, made room for her. Our proper cat had been run over. There was indeed a vacancy, which we had meant to fill, when the time was right, when our pet-keeping courage was back, with a Pers
ian or a Manx, or something interesting and glamorous. And so we always had the sense about Holly that she’d been foisted upon us; she wasn’t quite chosen; she was never a talking point, just Holly the workaday tabby: dismissible stand-in for the proper family cat. Not a nice way to live, though she was always well fed, and wormed, and even stroked when anyone thought about it. I just don’t want her to die. It seems important that she shouldn’t, this ordinary cat.
I remember that the curtains Holly clawed her way up and ruined that first morning, as I railed against fate and the consequences of my own good nature, were particularly ordinary themselves. It embarrasses me even to think about them. They were of the dusky-rose velvet kind, totally unimaginative. But I daresay they suited the clutter we lived with then; the chaos of books and papers and children’s homework, and interesting shells brought back from the beach, and uncleared plates, and the hairdryer on the bookshelf and the football boots left under the table, required a neutral background to sop it up. Jenny was thirteen then, Carl was six. Don and I were forty-something. And Holly was just beginning.
When I first met Don he had a cat called just ‘The Cat’. I was jealous of her. She was sleek and black and vaguely Siamese. When I moved in she ran away, and Don was so concerned that I said to him, I remember, ‘I suppose you’d rather have the cat than me,’ and he looked at me with his clear hard blue eyes and said, ‘If I thought too much about it, perhaps I would,’ so I never said anything like that again. He would not gratify my neuroses: he would not allow me to whirl up emotional storms. I think that’s why I stayed. I was so astonished that someone wouldn’t want them, wouldn’t exploit them. Jenny was five: she’d had a succession of uncles; once she’d even been kidnapped by the jealous wife of a man I was in love with and had to be rescued by the police—but I told you all about that, Miss Jacobs: we worked that one through—and I knew it was time I stopped that kind of life, the storms and the wonders and the sexual passions, for her sake. Jenny was always the one good thing; her father was the one true love, the one central passion, but he died. I had no cats during those disrupted and illegitimate and wonderful days. They were wonderful. The fifties. I grieve for them. I grieve for them because now we know too much, and then we knew too little, and to know too little is better than to know too much. To be innocent is to be in touch with the infinite and unafraid. And we can never go back to where we were, but must go on, however grievous that may be.
The Cat came back after a week and acquiesced to my presence. She became the proper family cat. She never again slept on Don’s bed, but on a cushion I put down for her between the polished anthracite stove and the bookcase. I think she really appreciated the new warm heart of the house. She grew more stolid, even plump. I think she liked the centrally heated core of the bedroom, where Don and I made love; the energy that throbbed out from it and made the houseplants grow and the cakes rise in the oven and gave birth to Carl, and nourished Jenny so she stopped pining and whining and started skipping about. I think The Cat even liked me. She had been presumptuous in her almost human love for Don, and knew it, and was relieved that I had restored some kind of natural balance to the situation. He and I were the masters of the universe, the givers of life; that is to say of Whiskas and a fitting place by the fire. She had no real right to the bed, and felt it. Dogs and cats will sleep on beds if they can, but it makes them feel guilty, and uneasy. In any case they prefer the quiet beds of children or single people: the beds of the young married are too tumultuous, albeit, as I say, life-enhancing; the air in the marital bedroom is too busy for a cat to lie there peacefully for long. The souls of possible children mill around, waiting for permission to enter, to begin, creating a psychic disturbance.
Jenny wasn’t happy when Carl was born, but what could we do about that? Carl has his right to life. Jenny came home from school at the age of seven with a diagram of the human reproductive organs and asked if it was true that Don and I had done that to produce this baby and I said yes and she sulked for days. I think some damage was done to her then. Jenny sleeps around a lot, but I don’t think she enjoys it much. She enjoys the power she has over men, she says: she enjoys the sense of inevitability, the realization that you don’t have to do anything but exist, be anything but what you are, as the male determination takes over, from the first grasping of the arm, the steering of the elbow, out of bars or restaurants towards the bed.
‘You must have a low self-image,’ I say, ‘in that case.’
‘I have,’ she says.
‘I didn’t give you one,’ I say. ‘Don’t blame me for that. I spent years telling you how pretty you were, how good you were and this and that, and so you were. And so did Don.’
‘He wasn’t my real father,’ she said.
‘Your father was dead or you would have had him.’
‘No, you would,’ she said, spitefully, leaving me breathless—that was at a time we were still rowing. What can you do? The human situation is at fault, Miss Jacobs. If only men gave birth to girl babies, and women restricted their output to boys, and each suckled offspring of the opposite sex, why then I imagine girls would be as cheerful and confident and positive as boys. They wouldn’t have to creep around trying to please, forever looking for the satisfaction that men naturally have; of once having controlled, owned, taken total nourishment from a creature of the opposite sex, and then, loftily, discarded it. Only then, and that will be never.
Sometimes at night The Cat would disturb Don and me. We would be woken by the familiar ghastly caterwauling, the lament of tormented souls. We would go to the window. There The Cat would sit in the back garden in the moonlight, centre of a circle of yowling toms, and when she’d had enough one would move and break the spell and The Cat would split and run, wailing and squealing, and in the morning she’d be on the step, not deigning to use the cat flap, waiting for milk and meat and acknowledgement, bringing with her untold tales of mystery and drastic pleasure.
After Carl was born The Cat had kittens: just the once. The vet said female cats will sometimes do this: some hormone deficiency lowering their fertility; we were lucky, he said. She had two kittens, one black and like herself, one ordinary and tabby. The black, a tom, went to my friend Audrey; the tabby, female, to a friend of a colleague at work, whom I never met, which I daresay was irresponsible, but Carl was teething and I was short of sleep and Don was away and I was having some doomy affair, and you know how things get sometimes. There’s no time to do things by the book. Sometimes I wonder if Holly isn’t the granddaughter of The Cat. She could be. Holly came from a litter in Audrey’s area of London, her father an unknown but black tom: who knows what goes on in the cat world, except that it overlaps and links with ours? Holly and The Cat have the same temperament—broody, impulsive and bad-tempered—and Holly in her youth had a kind of watchfulness which always reminded me of The Cat. Except that The Cat regarded our home as hers by right. Holly is more careful, as if sensitive to being some kind of long-term guest, only allowed in by courtesy. Poor Holly. I should have been more welcoming on that first morning.
The Cat had not a single white hair anywhere: which is, I believe, unusual. Such cats are in demand by witches, someone once told me, searching poor The Cat for evidence till she scratched and ran; which just shows you witches are nutty. Unless, of course, there is some physiological link between the temperament of certain cats and their pigmentation—bearing in mind the fact that, for an unknown reason, a large proportion of all-white cats are born deaf—which means you could rely on an all-black cat to be intelligent, responsive and dependent. In which case anyone who looked to their witchly status would be wise to seek one out. Otherwise, nuts!
Holly, like broody, impulsive and bad-tempered The Cat, is also intelligent, responsive and dependent. When Holly was seven, forty-nine cat years old, I was tempted to bring a kitten into the house. It was the prettiest, liveliest, sweetest little thing. It pranced around, entertaining us; it would jump on my knee as I sat and twirl around and pat my
face with a soft paw and then settle and purr. And Holly sat on the top shelf of the dresser and sulked, and she wouldn’t eat and she wouldn’t drink; and there she sat, glowering and suffering, stiff with jealousy, awkward and plain, and I gave in and gave the kitten to a friend. As with children, as with kittens, the prettiest get adopted first. Holly came down from the shelf and for a day or two attempted to prance and dance and entertain us; she sat on my knee but was too big to twirl and never realized a cat sits comfortably on a human lap only when facing outwards, so she’d slip off and dig her claws in to save herself and I’d scream and it was terrible. Presently, thank God, for it was a most humiliating exercise, she forgot and went back to being her charmless, stolid self, and we all settled down, but I never tried bringing another kitten into the house. We were doomed to Holly.
Jenny was seven when Carl was born. I didn’t give Carl away. Carl was an easy, happy, loving baby. I didn’t feel the same fierce protectiveness for him that I had towards Jenny, my fatherless child. I don’t think I ever clutched Carl to me, the way I did Jenny. I didn’t have to. It seems to have done him no harm.
I lament for both Jenny and Carl the fact that they know so much about sex. Sex seems, to them, to have lost the majesty and power it had for my generation. I think they have seen too many pictures, too many films, too much pornography. We only got to see a naked body, and then only a piece of it, in a changing room, or at home, and then by accident. Quickly covered. Our children can name the parts of the body. We could not. There is a word for every activity. We had none. We were moved by instinct, not knowledge. All was dark, and wonderful. For myself and my friends love and sex were another world which ran parallel to the real one. Sex was a secret we hugged to ourselves. There were these two worlds to live in: one in which you could walk on air, in elation, forever unsafe but buoyed up by the knowledge, he loves me, he loves me and I love him, sustained by the discovery of undreamed-of pleasures, the excitements of carnal nights, the swooning languor of exhausted mornings in forbidden beds—and the other everyday feet-on-the-ground existence of ordinary practical virtuous life. And you could be two people at once: indeed were two people—even four, for do not the sleeping and the waking life provide us with another doubling? And so we were never bored. At least while love lasted.