After the Peace

by Fay Weldon

  The story being that Onan was told by his father Judah to look after his deceased younger brother by providing his widow with children, as was normal practice at the time, but Onan wriggled out of the obligation by spilling his seed. A disappointment to everyone but apparently also to Jehovah, who slew him for his pains. Sebastian earned £25 for his, and it was sharing not spilling. Times have changed but Gods still see everything, which no doubt is why they’re so unpopular. They offend the right to privacy, such an issue these days.

  See Psalm 139, from the King James Bible: ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.’ Sounds like Facebook to me. Ouch! No body space either – tough for Millennials.

  Lost Souls

  Gwinny herself, or I, Gwinny, if you prefer, could be described as a faith tourist, as others are described as conspiracy tourists, drifting from one mad conviction to another. How pointless and time-wasting it was to wander through those misty realms of the Bardo Thodol where time does not exist, wondering why the soul of the child of young Lord Arthur of Dilberne and parlourmaid Elsie Barker back in 1895, should have surfaced again a hundred or so years later in the form of the great-great-grandniece of the then current Lord Dilberne. Who is to say why Rozzie chose the womb of Xandra Smithson (née Barker) to grow in, plus the DNA of that particular test tube for a father, and not that of the ‘5ft 11in writer, thinker, healer ’ where Gwinny’s discorporate finger so nearly fell, only to draw back? Perhaps Rozzie is right and chance rules all. It is difficult to believe that every one-night stand at the back of a pub can evoke so much attention.

  As a property owner in the twenty-first century Gwinny probably saw the outer face of any religion as very little different from the outer face of any municipal planning department. When time comes for a public consultation, decisions will have been made in advance behind the public’s back. The more ‘openness’ is declared, the more secrecy descends. Free choice just does not happen. Souls do not choose their parentage – that’s a Tibetan delusion. The helpless souls follow already settled directives just like the rest of us, and go where they are sent.

  Surely Adela was not sent back to try again on her convoluted path to Nirvana, only to become a Millennial for whom the past was an irrelevancy. For them the moving finger just writes on and on: a TV serial rather than a TV series: why bother to look for a conclusion? There is none.

  After The Ball Is Over, After The Dancers Have Gone

  After the civil marriage signing that followed in Camden Register Office and made the union legal, Gwinny retired to her room and took off her Doric chiton that she’d worn in honour of Goddess Flora, in the expectation that she would bless and make the young couple fertile, and turned on the news, as we over forty-fives so often do, as our sexual energies abate and leave a vacuum behind into which virtuous indignation tends to pour. The news makes excellent fuel for it.

  As it happened the news was about Chernobyl, the Soviet nuclear power plant which had exploded on April 26th spreading radiation far and wide and giving Gwinny ample cause for outrage. Two months after the accident news was still filtering through. Finnish and Danish sources were reporting alarmingly high levels of radiation; nor was the news from Britain good. A nuclear cloud floated over the whole continent, and over England too, except for Somerset, which was miraculously spared, or so the local council claimed.

  ‘No, no sign of it here.’ If you couldn’t see it, hear it, smell it, what danger could there be? The Cold War Geiger counters were rusty and dusty: if they started twitching and peeping at the back of the cupboard there was no-one to see or hear.

  ‘Plant operators had made several mistakes, creating a poisonous and unstable environment in the reactor core,’ said the BBC. The operators had gone ahead anyway, hoping for the best, and the cooling water boiled and turned to steam, and then the control rods got bent in the heat and couldn’t be slid back into the pile – no-one had thought of that at the time – and one way and another there were a couple of explosions in the reactor, which released radioactive smoke into the atmosphere: estimated at 400 times the volume of that from the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

  The world had come to Hampstead Heath that day: you can’t see it and you can’t hear it, but now the world is truly global, thought Gwinny, and nothing from now on would ever be safe, or was that only because now you knew too much about what was going on in the rest of the world?

  The Ukraine – who’d ever head of the Ukraine? A half-life – what was a half-life? Things that were not subject to immediate decay – that did not just fade away like everything else, so one couldn’t eat Welsh mutton for the rest of one’s life? But the panic of the half-life was short, a month or two; people forgot and life went on. The Welsh hill farmers would just have to change their ways, which were pretty rustic at the best of times and needed to change and whoever ate mutton anyway, rancid stringy stuff, and nothing compared to what had happened to the Welsh miners a year back.

  The Dreaded Sounds Of Silence

  The TV went on in No. 24 that day and Gwinny heard about it; how she heard all about it! As soon as the happy pair returned home, before even any sounds of delighted marital congress, Clive switched on the TV, a Mitsubishi 26-inch stereo, the latest thing. Clive liked ‘latest things’. The sounds got fuller and the screens got wider for the next twenty years with never a gap for quiet between. Clive liked the TV on loud: he found the sounds of the outside world reassuring. He needed it, he said: it helped the depression of silence from creeping in and overwhelming him. He even approved of universal Muzak. It filled in the cracks.

  ‘I like noise,’ Clive says. ‘It makes me know I’m relevant. People boo and cheer and then I know I’m alive. If I don’t have the background I might just disappear. Some people worry about exploding. I fear I’ll do the opposite; I’ll implode.’

  Besides, as later on he once explained to Gwinny, he needed TV and talk radio to keep in touch with what was going on in the outside world, didn’t he? To keep up with the zeitgeist? He was after all a novelist, as well as an actor. Or was he a playwright or a librettist? There was a nice lesbian girl in Soho who sometimes helped him with the music: he brought her round for a meal once and she was perfectly pleasant and obviously lesbian (you could tell from the haircut and the jeans, so Xandra could stop worrying).

  Xandra preferred silence and space to think; if she was on night shift especially so, but Clive took little notice of what he called ‘Xandra’s sleep thing’: ‘Surely when a whole ward is asleep, that’s the time to snatch a nap, not when I’m up and awake.’

  Clive had private health insurance dating from the time he was Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat so all his vocal cord ops and procedures were covered and he had little concept of what life in a public ward was like.

  As for Clive’s tell-tale squeak, it was the reason his career had failed. His vocal cords were shot to hell. His nearest and dearest, even Clive himself, had almost ceased noticing it, but when the tiny strained noise first came from the glorious hulk of the rest of him, strangers had to stop themselves from laughing and sometimes failed, and then how he hated and despised them and cursed them and their children, so even Xandra flagged in her devotion.

  It had happened gradually – nodules, then actual polyps, developed on his vocal cords. Clive, always so vague about medical matters, thought that too much showbiz cocaine when young was at fault and the voice would recover in time, but it just hadn’t. Xandra, more knowledgeable about medical matters, thought the high notes at the end of the Close Every Door number, in Dreamcoat, sung when Clive was only seventeen, had done the initial damage. Young voices need to be protected from strain. But Close Every Door had always drawn such rapturou
s cheers from the young audience – so much passion and sincerity! – that Clive had delivered the entire song at Mario Lanza volume. Xandra had begged management to take the song down a key or two – something, anything – but she was a mere Benjamin’s wife in the show and dispensable, as Clive was not, and so had been ignored. The show must go on!

  Microscopic laryngeal surgery can work very well, and as jobs had begun to dry up Clive had overcome his initial fear and distrust of doctors and submitted to the procedure. Alas, in four per cent of cases surgery fails to work. Clive was one of the four per cent, perhaps because he didn’t stick to the important post-op whispering rule. He always found it difficult to believe that rules were meant for him as well as other people. And what with the perforated and split septum not only the leading roles dried up – over time the minor roles too. It was as well, as time went on, that Xandra was gaining higher and higher qualifications in what Clive called ‘the bedpan business’ and so earning more and more.

  Clive, understandably, avoided talk-light music programmes on the radio but loved the news, especially the sudden bangs and crashes, the sound of shattering glass and the wail of ambulances. He couldn’t explain why – perhaps it all just seemed so conveniently far away. So long as it stayed over there all was well here. Xandra sometimes wondered what effect the background of constant noise might have on Rozzie, but not enough to do anything about it. One can get used to anything.

  Needless Swelling Of The Population

  But just as H-bomb tests and the Cold War had haunted Xandra and Clive’s early life, just as V-1s had haunted Gwinny’s (the sound had cut out overhead and one had fallen at the end of Standard Road so the foundations of Nos. 23 and 24 were shaken and had required underpinning), the clouds drifting over from the Ukraine haunted the wedding day. Though at least these were not intentional but accidental, the result of human folly and not human venom, still they had their effect.

  The talk that year was all ‘Who wants to bring a child into a world like this? The world is overpopulated anyway – five billion, they say!’ A billion in those days seemed the most incomprehensible number. These days it takes a trillion to impress us.

  Perhaps the Smithsons havered even on their wedding day in their desire to bear fruit and multiply? Perhaps they kept up appearances for Gwinny’s sake, designating the first-floor back room as a nursery and painting and decorating accordingly? Or was that just part of the paranoid personality disorder, the pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalised mistrust of others Gwinny had been told she suffered from? She did wonder.

  Having a baby was not exactly a trendy thing to do, and Xandra and Clive had lived by trendiness since adolescence and might well have more difficulty getting it out of their systems than they anticipated. The birth rate was falling fast as the sheer expense of child care became a factor. No longer just ‘Shall we, shan’t we?’ but ‘How can we afford to? ’ Keeping the newborn in your bottom drawer as Gwinny’s mother Gwen used to would bring social services round in a flash. Though many were taking up marriage instead of drugs to solve their problems, procreation was hardly the point of cohabiting permanently. Not any longer. It was beginning to be more about two working people getting on together and sharing the rent, and Xandra was doing very nicely thank you. So Gwinny could sympathise.

  Gwinny tried not to hear too much about what was going on in No. 24’s marital bed but it seemed to have more to do with athletics than procreation, which did annoy Gwinny just a little.

  Part 2

  A Case History

  Let me tell you a little about myself. Well, quite a lot, actually. Not that I want to make this a misery memoir. In some ways I’m blessed, and with Capricorn strong in my chart the older I get the better my life is. But there have been quite a few bumps on the way. The circumstances of one’s birth mould us all, of course: just as the rather extraordinary manner of Rozzie’s birth affects her, and why I spend so much time considering her background and the particular energies the decades have brought which have created our new Millennium. We live in a nation where violent events circle round us but seldom intrude into our private lives: so far – I fear the noose tightens and no amount of wishful thinking will save Millennials from the chaos that threatens. The bullet blasts away the flower in the barrel, soft snowflakes turn quickly into the trampled mud of the battlefield. But enough of all that. I want to talk about me.

  Me, Me, Me #MeToo

  Gwinny had been born in No. 23 Standard Road, Kentish Town, North London, the eldest child of five and the only girl. Her father Aidan Rhyss, a jobbing builder, had come to NW5 in the late thirties the better to make a decent living. Times had been hard in Wales but now there was work to be had in London where war preparations were already under way. Air raid shelters had to be built, blackout curtains fitted. Belsize Park Underground was being adapted for the storage of Government documents. Aidan was a good tunneller; Belsize Park, NW3, is just around the corner from Kentish Town so that was where Aidan, along with quite a few others from the Rhondda Valley and thereabouts, set up shop.

  But London was a strange and distant place, and not wishing to come alone, Aidan had brought a new wife with him. This was Gwen, a pretty sixteen-year-old runaway made pregnant not by Aidan but by an opportunistic stranger, whether by rape or just a surfeit of politeness and sheer ignorance on her part Gwen never made quite clear.

  ‘I didn’t know what he was after but I didn’t want to offend,’ she’d say in her lovely soft Welsh lilt. Aidan, a kind and generous man, had taken her in. She was a smart hard-working girl, thrown out by virtuous Catholic parents from her home in the Rhondda Valley for fear she’d corrupt the rest of the family, and she was living on the streets.

  Whichever or whoever it was – as Gwen was to describe it to her daughter, one day when she had taken a little too much drink – a tall, dark stranger had knocked on Gwen’s door when her parents were out. She had politely offered him a cup of tea, and thinking nothing of the strange activities he seemed to want – being innocent of the facts of life, and not wanting to offend – had done as he suggested. He then disappeared down the garden path never to be seen again, leaving Gwen no longer a virgin and with a bun in the oven. And Aidan had taken her in and now counted her as one of the family, and Gwinny should be grateful and always treat him as her father.

  Gwinny, trying to determine why she was so different from the rest of the family, being small, delicate and fairy-like while all the others seemed to lumber and hulk, preferred to believe she had been switched at birth and was really a princess.

  But No Place Like Home

  Aidan had money enough saved to buy the little two-up, two-down terraced house in Standard Road, built cheaply in the 1870s. Each house was designed for four families or twenty or so single men. For heating there were two little coal-burning fireplaces, one upstairs, and one downstairs.

  Now, with pregnant Gwen installed and Gwinny on the way, Aidan ripped cracked linoleum from the floors and replaced it with new; stripped torn wallpaper from the walls, re-plastered, painted and even built an extension out at the back to serve as kitchen and in time an indoor bathroom to replace the WC in the back garden – the better to set about ‘building his family’, as seventy years later the Woolland Clinic was to describe this time-honoured process.

  So Gwinny was born in June 1939 to the sound of much hammering and the smell of damp plaster in the smaller of the two-ups, the birth attended by a midwife from round the corner, who dropped cigarette ash ‘down there’, or so Gwen complained.

  There was still no bathroom, no hot water – only a single cold tap in the kitchen when they moved in: so water had to be boiled for birth, bath and nappy washing. General warmth in the winter months was dependent on coal kept in a sack in the hall, carried in the scuttle to be burnt in one of the little fireplaces. Soon there was also an upright oil stove, a smart green ‘Aladdin’ with a smoky wick which always needed trimming; it could be moved from room to room if you co
uld stand the fumes, the coughing and the spluttering.

  But it was Aidan’s home and he loved it. And Gwen said she did, though she always pined for the valleys that had thrown her out and disinherited her, that being human nature, and took a little too much drink by way of consolation.

  And Gwinny loved it too or she would surely not have determined to move back into it in later years, when she could well have chosen somewhere far more salubrious. This pathetic property, if you are interested in this kind of thing, is now worth more than one and a half million, and rising.

  Wealth can be measured, they say, by the number of taps you have in your home. A nice house in the suburbs will have eight or ten (remember bath and shower) plus one for the garden hose (a single mixer tap counts as two); the most miserable studio flat in the city will manage at least six. Sink: two. Wash basin: two. Bath or shower: two. If there’s a real shower and not an attachment: two more. These days, what with the posh loft extension, and the hoped-for breakthrough to No. 22 – though only basic work has been done, thwarted as she has been by legal arguments from envious neighbours – Gwinny has a count of thirty-two. This obsessive tap-counting behaviour may be nothing to speak of clinically, but is a mild outward manifestation of an inner anxiety personality disorder, of which Gwinny knows she must beware. Just sometimes deep breathing doesn’t help and she succumbs.