by Fay Weldon
There was Charlie Plaister, a plumber friend of her father’s, calling in for a cup of tea, which was rather a worry. But he didn’t seem to recognise her. Why would he? Her hair was down, not in its normal pigtails so no-one could pull them, her lips were thick with scarlet lipstick and she’d opened her blouse a bit so she didn’t have the high-buttoned good-Catholic look people were used to. Her parents might call the police to find her; they might not. They might think good riddance to bad rubbish and just let her go.
She would send a letter to tell them not to worry, that she was all right. She was going to join a folk band and be a singer – her voice was good enough. She’d been Mary in the school nativity play: Aidan and Gwen hadn’t even come along, but everyone else told her how beautifully she sang. She’d send back the money she’d stolen as soon as she was earning.
Once restored, she took the bus to as near as she could get to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where she joined the queue of screaming fans, already forming for the first night of the Norrington Awards and joined in the general hysteria and this would be the night she lost her virginity.
A New Dawn
I do not forget the exultation of that early morning. I remember every detail. How well I slept, how fresh the air, the sudden clarity of colour, the startling sculptured perfection of the daisies, how the air grew still as the sacred grove formed round me, as if the air had been emptied from my lungs, and how the terror of the unknown had made me run. It took a time to fade; even over breakfast the peculiar clarity of the slices of black, black pudding on the white, white plate remained. Indeed, it was not until I took acid that I’d known anything like it, and even that trip was a vulgarised, godless experience, unlike this. I’d had some kind of mystical experience, I suppose, the kind Einstein himself spoke of – he’d experienced one in his youth – when one feels as if one has been touched by some kind of higher or greater truth or power and one never forgets it. The early Church Fathers used to argue prodigiously over whether these experiences were sent from God or Satan, but nobody doubted their existence.
That long-ago experience of mine on the day I ran away certainly didn’t give me any kind of Einsteinian brain power, just a sense of disappointment because nothing ever since has seemed quite real, just a shadow of what it’s meant to be, could be.
I daresay one of the real reasons I’m back in Standard Road is that it’s less than a mile from Primrose Hill, not just to spite my brothers. I do go up there sometimes even now, but it seems a perfectly ordinary place, only the trees are a little taller nearly seventy years on, and the grass and daisies trodden down and litter-strewn by the tourists who climb the hill for the view over London, and the crowds who traipse up there to see the fireworks on November 5th or to watch eclipses of the sun and moon in company. My bench is long gone but at least there’s a quote from William Blake now engraved on a stone wall which reads: ‘I have conversed with the spiritual sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill.’
So I daresay it was Apollo himself, the Sun God, who visited; he can blind you. It was his lyre that I heard, a cosmic pling-plonging, far too like the kind you hear when Sky News is waiting for something awful to happen, and irritates you to hell with its soporific almost-music. Awful, awful. But nothing’s perfect.
I saw Apollo’s statue while visiting ruined Pompeii from the Marina di Stabia on old Bunny’s splendid yacht – called Gwyneth after me; those were the days! And my! He was attractive, sunlit, young, beautiful, all coiled-up energy, and after days of Bunny something of a relief, if only in the imagination. Bunny was sweet but quite an effort.
Apollo sometimes comes back in dreams, I find, when in sleep you’re almost in a strange new lover’s arms – though you can’t quite yet discern his face, but all those sexy feelings have come surging back in the dream, only then everything vanishes away and one wakes, disappointed. The lover’s face, as I then try to recall the dream, resolves itself into Apollo’s, a metaphor, I suppose, for all things one has ever desired in a man, and not, come to think of it, unlike Clive’s. Oh dear. But still a shadow.
And though I paint and paint my portraits in brighter and brighter colours, fauve paint layered on fauve paint (I love Derain’s portraits), which can disconcert clients, I know, but I daresay my time in the sun will come. All I can manage still seems a shadow of what I intend – the clarity and truth of what I glimpsed that morning in the numenistic grove and later, in a slice of overcooked black pudding in a workmen’s café. (Rozzie once asked me what was the strange black circle with the brown dots in the corner of one of my unsold portraits, and I replied ‘blood pudding’ – quite rightly, black pudding being made from oatmeal and pig’s blood – and she looked at me very oddly.)
Apollo, like Zeus, like all the Gods, can change form, though Zeus mostly did so in pursuit of his lustful ambitions – a swan, an eagle, a bull were as nothing – but I do think it might well have been Apollo with his lyre who turned up at Drury Lane that night in the form of the folk singer with the dirty toes.
Another dreadful thought occurs to me. Clive might indeed be my son, taken away from me and adopted, perhaps even by the car dealer. But no, the dates don’t tally. Thank God. There’s too long a gap. People have been known to tell terrible whoppers when it comes to age, mind you, but if indeed Clive is noble Apollo’s ignoble son, then I must add incest to my crimes and I’d rather not do that. He said he was fifteen when he might have been eighteen and abashed to be found a virgin at so old an age. Gwen might have had many reasons to fudge the date of my birth. But no, enough is enough.
So I moved back to the house where I was born and restarted my life as a respectable woman, no longer a source of shame but a spinstery portrait painter – always my ambition – having finally finished the art course at the Slade which I had long since abandoned.
But if you’re lucky in life you’re unlucky in love. I have ended up with no husband, no children of my own, and no family other than the faux-family Smithsons. If I was ‘lucky’ in choosing Sebastian to be Rozzie’s father, or unlucky, you, my reader, must decide. I was certainly to spend a great deal of time and energy dealing with the consequences.
Mind you, considering the slovenliness of the Your Beautiful Baby Clinic, Rozzie was certainly lucky in being born at all. God knows what might not have happened in the phial as it lay there. Twenty whole years! Sure they say sperm, once frozen, lasts for ever, but how can anyone know? And supposing it’s thawed by accident and then refrozen; what about power cuts?
Whatever, it lived, it worked – the main problem was that no-one liked to tell Rozzie she was a sperm bank baby. The same way no-one liked to tell my mother Gwen about the birds and bees. Just as no-one told me I wasn’t Aidan’s child until I was ten and then it was a brutal telling. I suspect it was one of the reasons I ended up at too young an age if not on the streets, at least in some very clean, comfortable and well-run brothels, treated rather like a delicate race horse.
The Neighbours Move In
The Smithsons moved into No. 24 the year after I’d moved back in next door. That was in 1986, when they got married and resolved, just as I had done, to settle down and live a better life; and we became close. They bought the property for £95,000 and are still in it, Xandra on the edge of retirement, and Clive still waiting for his big break, for his ship to come in, even though it came and went when he was seventeen and played Joseph in Dreamcoat. My father had bought the property for £250. These days No. 23 is worth 2,000 per cent more. Xandra and Clive signed it over to Rozzie one day when they were feeling particularly guilty. Parents can do this so long as they then live on for at least seven years. So while Rozzie owned the roof over their heads she could at any time have decided to throw them out. She did not, but liked to keep the threat hanging there.
I have become quite a figure in Camden Town, I am told, an elderly woman cycling through the back roads (cycling keeps rheumatoid arthritis at bay) grey hair flying behind, paint-stained denim jacket, bright yellow socks,
narrow calves pumping away, head down into the wind. An old hippie with a tale to tell in a world gone wrong.
It was in the twenty years before Lord Sebastian spent his sperm that we most spoke of love, and when I reckon it was that the bad karma of our present days started to build. It was that careless, stupid, smug Aquarius generation of mine, with its hymns to hair, drugs, equality, freedom, that led to what we have now and the poor, baffled, indignant, work-deprived, renting-not-owning Millennials. All you need is love, we sang. Ho, ho, ho. Stick a flower up the barrel of the gun, and trust to luck.
A Confessional
And now I suppose I have to tell you something which may help you understand this strange relationship between Clive and myself. And I am not even sure that it did happen, just possibly happened much earlier, before even Xandra was part of our lives, but you might see it as significant, as I try and keep you in the picture as to our lives and loves. It doesn’t reflect very well on me, I’m sorry to say.
It happened, or would have happened if it had, in 1978, back when we were strangers. 1978: the year in which inflation had fallen to 8.3 per cent; Mr Callaghan-the-forgotten was Prime Minister, the one between Mr Heath-of-the-Five-Day-Week-and-the-power-cuts and Mrs Thatcher-of-the-Belgrano-and-the-selling-off-of-the-family-silver fame; the year Julie Covington still sang Don’t Cry for Me Argentina; Xandra’s mother bought one of the new microwave ovens; and Clive’s mother took Clive, a lad of fifteen, to see Star Wars.
I reckon the latter gave Clive a love of heroics which never left him. He himself was a half-way house between Harrison Ford, with a dollop of Frank Sinatra thrown in, and his mother kept telling him so, not without reason.
Anyway it was 1978. I was thirty-nine and a professional courtesan. That was before I went on, very prudently, for age-related medical reasons, to leave the sleep-your-way-to-the-top game (and game it was; a gamble; you won some, you lost some) and settle down as an ordinary person. I was never in the very top echelons of harlotry, you must understand, the A-list is for taller girls than me: B- or C-lists are rather a relief to leave. You never quite know who you’ll meet, or how they’ll conduct themselves.
I do sometimes wonder as I pedal down Camden High Street on my sturdy ex-police bike – wicker grocery basket in front, this skinny-legged old woman in a bright yellow sweater for visibility, flowing grey hair sticking out from under my beret, no helmet for me, no way! – what people would think if they realised how rich and strange my life had been. Though this of course can be said of many old people (though most, unlike me, prefer not to attract any attention). Some may suspect, but no-one knows.
The Clive of fifteen I encountered in 1978 was the most beautiful boy, almost girlish, dark curly shiny hair, black-fringed blue eyes, a smooth chin, not yet with enough testosterone for stubble. He told me his first name. He didn’t mention his second name. I was quite a looker myself in those days, I must say, though my looks went off quickly – the ever lurking arthritis helps no-one. That, as much as sheer exhibitionism, is why these days I try to keep cycling: they say constant movement staves off the aches.
I was doing a favour in London for Madame Clothilde, the high-end Parisian Madame. Yes, for a time I was as fancy as that: I could charge a lot, though Madame certainly took a good rake-off, and the lifestyle is extremely expensive. You have to look good for dinner at the Dorchester, be ready for a yacht trip to the Antibes or a shoot in Scotland at a moment’s notice. It requires a large wardrobe and the very best face creams.
Clive’s father, a top-of-the-range car dealer, was one of Madame Clothilde’s lesser clients, and had brought his son along to lose his virginity. Traditional fathers still did that kind of thing in those days, as anyone who ever went to a louche nightclub will testify, especially if the sons looked a little feminine, were too close to their mothers, and so in danger of turning out gay, and this Clive was just so lovely, tentative but sweet. I did what I could. It was over in an hour. He was more than a willing collaborator, but very shy.
At least I think it was Clive: that was certainly his name, but whether it was the same Clive as the one who lives next door I can’t be sure. One Clive amongst so many, and for all I know he gave me a false name anyway! People are very sparing with names when doing what they’d rather was not made public. The grown-up Clive certainly doesn’t make any connection – all that was well behind me by the time I guaranteed the Smithsons’ mortgage in 1986.
And how could he recognise me? I was no longer the call-girl type, blonde, high busted and long legged whom he’d spent an hour with years ago, just a gaunt and mousy make-up-free cycling neighbour when the estate agent came round in an effort to get No. 24 off the market.
The house had stood empty for some five years and attracted nothing but damp and dust, and only a few likely buyers, and even they’d all pulled out. Until Xandra and Clive turned up and I began to wonder whether this was the same Clive as I’d encountered eight years back.
The Return Of The Warrior Queen
As you know, I was born and brought up in No. 23 until I was fifteen when I got cheesed off with my family, and ran off in search of greener fields for a future of my own making, not theirs. That was in 1955, the year of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock and Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line. I was a serious fan. I’d wanted to do art at school and Aidan and Gwen wanted me to be some kind of domestic drudge: that was all they thought of me. I didn’t belong to them anyway: I belonged to my real father, who was perhaps out there somewhere looking for me, Gwen having taken me with her when she ran off with Aidan who didn’t want me anyway. As I say, I was fifteen.
So when I moved back in in 1985 as Lady Petrie, having inherited No. 23 – my third inheritance, and the most memorable, being from my father – I was shocked back into common sense. I had tried him to the limits of endurance yet he had forgiven me. I would start again where I had left off; I had taken the wrong path, but now I would take the right. I would give up my old depraved ways, and I would go his way instead: steady, reliable, even-tempered, long-suffering, noble Aidan.
I had No. 23 cleared out, repainted and mended and moved back in. See me as a Claire Zachanassian, the heroine of the Friedrich Dürrenmatt play, The Visit, who returns as a wealthy widow to the village where she was born to seek her revenge.
That was certainly the way my four brothers saw me, but I left them alone. I did not seek them out. Silence can be the best revenge. My brothers hoped to contest the will on the grounds that I, having broken my father’s heart by the disgrace I brought upon the family’s name, shouldn’t be the one to inherit, but they had no case. And I had a good local lawyer, who knew on what side his bread was buttered.
My brothers still live in North London, successful artisans; builders and plumbers all. They do not visit me nor I them. If any of the wives pass me in Sainsbury’s they cut me dead, pointedly drawing away from me as if any actual contact might pollute them. I have no doubt they stir up trouble up and down Standard Road, but I leave it alone. Unlike Claire, revenge is not in my nature. I fear the Tar Baby too much. The Tar Baby is a doll made of tar and turpentine, used by the villainous Br’er Fox to entrap Br’er Rabbit. The more you fight it the closer you stick. My father would read me the Uncle Remus stories when I was a child and they made a great impression. Good intentions come back and bite you. Best not to get entangled.
All mixed inextricably in my mind with memories of Leadbelly’s Gallows Tree, and somebody’s Hangman – ‘Oh, hangman stay thy hand, and stay it for a while, for I fancy I see my true love a-coming across that yonder stile’. But somehow the true love never turned up for me, and MacColl’s Prickly Bush – ‘Once you get into the prickly bush you’ll never get out any more’ – made more sense for me.
And now I struggled to get out of the prickly bush, too delighted with this opportunity to start my life anew than seek more revenge. I had too much to get on with. By then I had realised I was an artist at heart: all that grande horizontale stuff had been
my violon d’Ingres. The painter Ingres was sure his real life’s work was to play the violin, but he was no good at it it. Visitors, coming in droves to buy his very successful paintings, used to block their ears when they heard him play and beg him to get back to his easel.
My real role in life is to paint people as they really are, not how they’d like to be, translated into abstract form by the medium of paint. I sense their souls. Alas, not everyone has the courage to face what they really are. But then art is not to do with popularity, is it? The true artist community despises those who seek commercial success. Art must be for Art’s sake!
Living in the same street as you were born does have its disadvantages. People know too much about you and uncalled-for rumours do get about – in my case mostly propagated by my brothers, who still live in the neighbourhood and cannot forgive me for having inherited a home they feel is rightfully theirs. Some people are just petty and evil. Their motivation was always to drive me out, and after a couple of years they nearly succeeded.
‘More men go into that house then ever come out of it,’ I overheard the old trout from No. 17 say. I’m pretty sure she was the one who helped deliver Geraint in a shower of cigarette ash, but I was beginning to feel a tad paranoiac. I might have been wrong.
‘High time she took herself elsewhere if she thinks herself so grand.’ That was No. 21. I didn’t think myself grand. I wasn’t grand. I was just going back to my roots. To which surely one is entitled? But the postman had brought a letter addressed to Lady Petrie and that had put the cat amongst the pigeons. Escaping the past can be a real problem.