by Fay Weldon
‘For God’s sake, girl!’ Clive said once, when Rozzie was on her way out to her chess club dressed in drab denim jeans and jacket. ‘Brighten yourself up – you’re thirteen. Quite old enough for a little lipstick.’
Rozzie needed nothing to ornament her then or later. Aphrodite had been present at her birth. She was all symmetry – even when and if she was scowling. If anyone had been there at Clive’s birth it would have been Adonis. Clive was not above an eyebrow pencil or a spot of lip-liner; at least I saw them in the bathroom of No. 24 and Xandra didn’t use either.
I’d always worried because Rozzie was told nothing about her ‘birth circumstances’, as Xandra and Clive referred to the turkey plunger business; the books all said introduce the subject early, but Clive saw no reason to do so.
‘When ignorance is bliss it’s folly to be wise,’ he was fond of misquoting if ever I brought the subject up.
Xandra would just say, ‘Don’t let’s talk about it, please, Gwinny. It upsets Clive, and there’s more than enough to cope with as it is. Different generations deal with things differently. It’s a new world.’ And once she played the age card. ‘I daresay things were very different in your day, Gwinny. You were alive in the last war. But genetic technology is now a part of life. No-one is going to get upset.’
Which was about the most stupid thing I ever heard her say. But then she and Clive didn’t use condoms. Perhaps with every intimate encounter they passed stupidity between them in the form of soothing hormones. There had to be some excuse, so I allowed them this, understanding and forgiving being still my motto.
But disclosure of the truth had to happen sometime. I remembered how shocked I’d been to discover my father was not my father. When Clive then said, ‘Of course such good looks as Rozzie’s got she’s inherited from me, not you, Xandra, ha-ha,’ and Xandra made no objection, but laughed as if she found this amusing, I realised that they had all but forgotten the turkey basting.
On the occasion of Clive’s lipstick advice I was about to bring the conversation round to inheritance and sperm banks as tactfully as I could. But the terrorist murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby was on TV and Clive turned the sound up. It was the latest Panasonic TX-P50GT60B, 50-inch plasma screen, so there wasn’t much conversation after that.
Trying To Forgive And Forget
For Gwinny the understanding-and-forgiving crunch didn’t come until her father’s funeral. She had had enough spare time during her stint with Lord Petrie for a certain amount of self-improvement; she’d educated herself, taken college exams, taken art and creative courses but most importantly been twice weekly to the most expensive and fashionable psychotherapist in town, a Mr Marco Lyonstone. She’d even taken Marco with her on board Gwyneth so she wouldn’t miss sessions whenever they went abroad. Lord Petrie hadn’t minded: indeed, if he ever noticed! When old Bunny had passed me over to Lord Petrie he included Gwyneth in the bargain.
Marco had abandoned Freudian analysis for the softer, kinder shores of Jungian psychotherapy. The difference, he said, was that the analyst works through silence, not saying a thing other than a very occasional query, followed by a doubtful/surprised/censorious rise of the eyebrows, but lays the patient down on a couch and waits – often for well-paid years – for the patient to get tired of listening to the stream of their own nonsense and to cure themselves (or not).
The psychotherapist, on the other hand, is on your side the moment you walk through the door, explains how everyone else is to blame and the best thing you can do is ‘break the ties that bind’. Once you’ve done that, you’re theirs for life.
The latter’s a more fun job, Marco would say, stretching his rather good tanned and oiled body out on deck as he sunbathed and told me what to do, think and feel.
My problem was suppressed rage, he told me, which explained the bouts of depression which occasionally affected me. The answer was not to let the rage out but to learn to forgive. ‘To understand is to forgive’ was his watchword one therapist-hour – fifty minutes actually: twice a week for three years. He even wrote a self-help book on the subject and very well it sold, too – he was not poor. It was advice I tried to follow – until the day of my father’s funeral when I realised just how crazy that advice was, and how it leads to the apologising, therapeutic world we live in today.
‘You were abused in childhood yourself, so a suspended sentence and an apology to the victim, please,’ says the Judge. ‘Sorry people died,’ says the Minister of State, ‘but there were so many overlooked cases I couldn’t keep up. I’m only human.’ The bank/social media/diesel engine/mesh implant scandals. ‘So, so sorry to our customers for this breach of trust!’ says the CEO, tears in his eyes. Apologise, and you don’t go to prison. ‘Knifed your mother because she deserved to die, did you? Social services must have failed to pick up your mental health issues. They owe you an apology.’ How we are obliged to forgive one another!
This therapeutic, apologetic, victim-oriented, impractical, team-, not leader-led twenty-first-century world we lot left the Millennials to cope with is of our making. No wonder Rozzie wants us to apologise for bringing her up the way we did. She blames the four of us indiscriminately for her creation; we, the half-baked ones – me, Clive, Xandra and Sebastian, Lord Dilberne. Personally I blame Rozzie herself; she obviously chose to come to four parents rather than the normal two when she was up in the Bardo Thodol. Not that Rozzie, she, the arch Millennial, the crude reductionist – in dictionary terms ‘a person who analyses and describes a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents’ – has any time for that old Tibetan Book of the Dead stuff.
Not Fit
Rozzie once said to me – she was in full excoriating mode; we had just been interviewed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as to her right to the Dilberne title – that my claim to be a fit person to bring up children was hardly valid. On reflection I can see that Rozzie was right. I was not fit. I had lied through my teeth to the court, insisting I was mentally stable and not the whole cluster of personality disorders I realise constitutes me. They’d seen through me when I addressed the judge as Themis, Goddess of Justice. I saw members of the court look at one another, as if to say ‘another nutter’.
When I am under stress the distorted thinking disorder can get out of control. Rozzie had made her usual good impression. I had not: my fault.
People often blame their parents for ruining their lives – and it’s good to find someone to blame, for whose life turns out the way we dreamed when we were small? – but these days I blame my male siblings. I’ve long since forgiven my parents who no doubt did the best they could in the light of their own natures and, I may say, lack of education; but I don’t forgive my loutish brothers, Geraint, Owen, Trefor and David.
I will go into the third person here as I try to look at my relationship with them coolly. I can see I may be being unreasonable. I realise I live under a cloud of personality disorders. It becomes difficult to find the ‘real me’. Marco says there is no such thing as the real self; we just move from one personality disorder to another, but then, being irreligious, he has no sense of soul, as I do. I go on looking for it.
But from the sacred to the mundane. Let us look in on the scene in the office in Mornington Crescent in 1985 when my father’s will is being read.
A Matter Of DNA
1985… a good year: Live Aid, inflation not too bad, Madonna in all our heads, the Aids epidemic almost under control, and for once we’re not officially at war with anyone so we can concentrate on developing our own small family battles.
The family solicitor – Sam Ipswich from Norwich, how could one forget it? – is reading the will. Sam Ipswich has been Aidan’s solicitor for a few years, dealing with small matters of bounced cheques, leaking pipes, insurance claims, building contracts, overdue monies and so forth. Aidan, as did Sam himself, has a reputation as an honest and reliable individual, who did what he said he would if he possibly could. The same cannot be said
of Aidan’s sons, who have on occasion come to Sam’s attention, not always in the best way, in cases of fraud and general flakiness.
Heaven knows what unhappy combination of Aidan and Gwen’s genes led to this awfulness. None of their children were spared. Only Gwinny, inheriting a different DNA from her father, who although a hit-and-run lover, must have been a prince amongst men, came out of it well. Some bright young medical student with a social conscience, perhaps, coming to the mines to study working conditions and seeking comfort a long way from home. When she thought about it, which was quite often in her dreams, the medical student turned into a philosophy lecturer or a famous writer, but always with the coal dust smeared on the handsome, strong-jawed Apollo face though with her own eyes, her own sensuous mouth. The dream would stir a quite inappropriate thrill of desire. But fortunately she would always wake before anything serious happened.
But I must return, please, to the reading of the will and the present tense, free from any tendentious comment from me, me, me too, determined as I am to maintain through thick and thin that I’m a victim.
Death Of A Good Plain Man
Aidan Rhyss has died suddenly in his bed in No. 23, widowed and alone and in his eighties, but still a regular congregant at the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady up at St Margaret’s Road, walking briskly up the hill to mass on Sundays and Wednesdays, apparently sound in wind and limb. His four sons have long ago left home though all remain local boys, married with families, engaged in the building trades, and would occasionally drop by to see how the old man was getting on and ask his advice on some obscure building problem – how to underpin a 400-year-old wall, how to raise a tile roof in one go.
Sam Ipswich knows from a birth certificate he found once amongst the old man’s papers that there used to be an older daughter, not seen or heard of for many years, but rumoured locally to have gone to the bad. So when Lady Petrie contacts him (the death was reported in the local paper, the Ham & High) he asks her to come along to hear the will read. The date of the funeral has been postponed until after the required autopsy, which could take weeks, even months, but the old fellow is well frozen up at the hospital mortuary so the delay is of no consequence. The old fellow obviously died of natural causes, but was just doctor shy, as so many of these old fellows are. Lady Petrie offers to pay for all costs, which is good of her since Sam would probably have trouble getting the brothers to cough up.
The brothers have been in touch. Sam understands that they are eager to hear the will read. They expect to inherit some fortune which does not exist, or at the very least a share from the sale of the house, itself no use to them since they themselves have moved either up to Hampstead or more shrewdly up to Primrose Hill – now fast moving up in the gentrification stakes – there to pursue their regular careers in building and plumbing, clasping their boring little children and wives (in that order: all are great sentimentalists) to their philistine bosoms. They are artisan slaves to the arty folk who were moving into the area. It has not occurred to them that the big sister who vanished back in 1955 when they were children, never to be seen or heard of again, will resurface. Nor does Sam tell them in advance; he is under no obligation to do so.
Sam does not look forward to the meeting. Siblings, especially brothers, tend to behave very badly after a parent dies. They steal, cheat and plunder, have rows and quarrel and sometimes never make up, and no-one seems quite sane for at least six months after the deceased has been laid to rest, when they sheepishly reassemble and embrace one another.
Sam, who is a nice guy, thinks that grown-up children are more to be pitied than blamed. It is not greed so much as unconscious sibling rivalry, he will argue, as all compete to be the one most loved, the one most deserving of parental attention. ‘I was the favourite, so I deserve the most! Fuck you!’, ‘I was the one who was breast-fed longest, so obviously I was the one most valued.’ And the Ming Dynasty vase is smuggled out, and the Georgian silver salver disappears and ‘I’m sure the Japanese golf clubs were in the attic, well, where are they now?’ And the blame game begins.
But here they all are, crowded into Sam’s small law-book-lined office in Mornington Crescent on a really hot day, one Volvo 760, one Leyland Sherpa and one Transit van parked outside. All four of them are six-footers and wide too with bellies going before; wriggling on chairs they overflow, sweaty and fussed – and already perching on the desk when they arrive, elegant legs swinging, in a bright green suit with very square shoulder pads, and on apparently good terms with Sam, is a slim woman beyond her first youth but still a looker, introduced as Lady Gwyneth Petrie, née Gwyneth Rhyss.
‘Thank you, Sam,’ says Gwinny into the ensuing silence. ‘Hi, Geraint, Owen, Trefor and David. Yes, Gwinny herself, your big sister. Remember me?’
Geraint is the first to recover. ‘Oh, the bad penny. Yonks ago. Stole everything there was to be stolen, and ran off to whore on Primrose Hill. What are you doing here? You’re not one of our fucking family. Mummy’s little bastard. Dad took you in out of pity. Not that the old grouch ever showed any to me. Him and his belt! Want to see my bum? Still scarred. These days he’d be in prison.’ That sets the scene.
‘Respect, please, Geraint. Gwyneth was properly adopted by your good father back in 1939,’ Sam Ipswich – or is it Norwich? – intervenes. He’s a brave man. ‘Lady Petrie is legally Mr Rhyss’s oldest child.’
Geraint snorts and falls silent, as sudden worry replaces bluster. Big runaway sister back here because she’s been left something in the will? Could it be? Not that the old fool had much to leave, only a few sticks of furniture, some rusty old vintage tools, and of course the house. Geraint has assumed that if any of the others get any of the house he might want to buy them out and they’d let him.
‘You! You’re the one who opened my piggy bank with a tin opener,’ says Owen to Gwinny. He’s on his feet, red face sweating, pointing, enraged. ‘Bitch! I fucking needed that money.’
Lady Petrie idly swings an elegant leg. ‘When I was thirteen and you were nine, who lied for you when you were stealing bikes and the police came after you? I did.’ Owen puffs and huffs and falls quiet. He’s always been a kleptomaniac.
‘Mr Norwich here says whenever you leave his office his toilet rolls go with you,’ says Gwinny. She might have slapped him a bit hard, she’d admitted to Mr Norwich, but Owen would steal the nappy pins from under your nose while you were changing him.
‘Don’t you bad mouth my big brother. Stuck-up little tart!’ puts in Trefor. ‘Mum always said that’s what you were. And lover boy’s name is fucking Ipswich not Norwich.’ She’d had to wash Trefor’s nappies with cold water: and he’d taken longer to get potty trained than any of them.
Trefor looks daggers at Sam, taking out his notebook and making a note: it was clearly going to be horse’s-head-in-the-bed time soon.
Geraint laughs and says, ‘Not too good at your geography then, Lady Whorish Muck. Bastard Ipswich, as he is widely known in the vicinity, is a con-man and a fucking liar. See any poor old man and he’ll rip him off. Undue influence if you ask me. Ask anyone.’
Sam refrains from reacting. He reflects that to work as a sole solicitor amongst the needy is not the kind of higher service to humanity he had believed in when he started out. Better to have joined the police instead of the law and sent more people to prison, rather than toiling away keeping them out of it.
And then David, the leanest and most intelligent of them, the one Gwinny has almost been fond of, the one who came bum first into the world, ripping his mother apart, says, ‘You killed our mother. Broke her heart when you left. Stole her purse and crept off to become a whore.’
‘Come back as Lady Muck,’ puts in Owen. ‘I wonder what swill you swam in? First stop Primrose Hill.’ Gwinny had told Sam Ipswich she’d toil all the way to the sandpit in the playground so Owen could throw sand in rich children’s eyes, and work out which bikes were worth stealing.
‘I didn’t ever whore on Primrose Hill,’ says
Gwinny. ‘I can tell you that much.’
‘That’s a lie!’ says Geraint. ‘Charlie Plaister saw you the night you left, out of your mind on drugs with a boob hanging out. You’re a disgrace to the family, drove poor Dad to his grave with the shame of it. You broke his heart.’
‘That’s right,’ says Owen, ‘That’s why we didn’t send the police after you when you vanished. He saw you next morning in the caff too. You were on the game even then. You brought disgrace to our family name. Mum tried to beat the evil out of you but she didn’t try hard enough. Weak as a kitten, poor Mum.’
‘I don’t see why you’re even in this room,’ says Geraint. ‘We’re a decent law-abiding family here and you’re nothing to do with us, born out of wedlock to whoever and whatever, a slut and a whore. And if my father has left you a penny, I’ll fight the will to my last breath, won’t I, Sam. You know me.’
‘Indeed I do, Geraint,’ says Sam Ipswich. ‘And that’s quite enough from all of you. To save further ado, I can tell you that Aidan Rhyss, in memory of the great service his eldest daughter rendered to her mother in her infirmity, and to you boys in your growing years, and as a token of Aidan’s lasting affection and admiration, has left to his eldest daughter, Lady Gwyneth Petrie, the property and contents of No. 23 Standard Road, NW5. David gets his vintage tools and Geraint the contents of his savings book, circa £200, towards the purchase of candles to be lit every Sunday for the souls of Aidan and his beloved wife Gwen.’
‘There’ll be no candles lit by me,’ says Geraint, into the stunned silence. ‘Poxy old bastard. Not a tiny bit of gratitude. After all I did for him. I’ll contest the will.’
‘Perhaps had you visited more…?’ says Sam. There is a silence, then mayhem ensues and all four of them, making no doubt for the pub, bump bums, stomachs and fists in the small hot room as they compete for a too narrow door. Gwinny locks herself in the loo for safety, as they swear and spit. She can’t remember such a sudden eruption of noise and activity since police raided Madame Clothilde’s twenty years back, and that time too she’d had to lock herself into a far more salubrious loo until the invaders had been paid off. Here everything is peeling and spidery and the toilet rolls have gone – presumably to Owen, who would have secreted them about his lavish person.