by Fay Weldon
She can hear Sam reciting a list of possible grounds for contesting a will as the noise abates and the room clears.
‘Reasons for contesting a will: lack of knowledge and approval; undue influence; fraudulent wills and forged wills; and rectification and construction claims. None apply. It won’t get them very far,’ says Sam as Gwinny steps out of the loo.
‘Can I move into the property now?’ Gwinny asks Sam.
‘Give me a week,’ says Sam, ‘and it’s all yours. I’ll get in the clearance people from the council. They’ll do it for a tenner out of hours, and sell off what they can.’
Lady Petrie flings her arms round Sam Ipswich and comforts him in the only way she knows. He seems accustomed to it, and doesn’t stop her, though he has a perfectly nice wife at home.
Understanding And Forgiving
God, I’m awful. Anyway, after the will reading I tried to make it up to my brothers – so much is owed to family – but they remained obdurate, and I’m afraid told even more personal secrets, especially mine, up and down the street. If such came to Clive and Xandra’s ears after they moved in they made no mention of it. Xandra was so often out at work, and Clive, sofa-bound, writing his novel on his word-processor and listening to the TV, they didn’t have much connection with the street. They themselves had few relatives who might be curious about the new useful neighbour next door.
Clive was an orphan. His car salesman father had died in a car crash while taking Clive’s mother out for a spin in a new delivery and pushing the car to its limits, showing off. Both were killed. The accident had made the news, largely because the car being tested – a brand-new design Bentley Melrose, a performance car – was seen as ratings fodder.
Clive was only fifteen, and at his desk studying Thomas Hardy’s The Convergence of the Twain, when his headmaster came in and tactlessly broke the death of his parents to Clive in front of the class. He cried, and the embarrassment was even worse than the news.
He then actually saw on the news that evening a clip of the car crash in which his parents had died – the posh Bentley nothing but a crumpled heap of metal and splintered glass – and he could swear he saw his mother’s white leg protruding from the wreckage, or perhaps he imagined it? The young Clive was rather relieved his father was no more – the Madame Clothilde visit having confused him as to where his loyalties lay – but devastated to find his mother gone. It was too early in technology’s history for him to be able to freeze the broadcast at the metal-and-leg shot and make sure. Later in his life Clive complained to Gwinny it had got mixed up with the Thomas Hardy poem about the Titanic and the iceberg:
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Perhaps that memory was why Clive kept reciting poetry when anything particularly bothered him?
A New World And A New Start
I was grateful to Sam Ipswich, but decided enough was enough. He had a wife at home, and a wise woman obeys the fifty-mile rule – no illicit entanglements other than far from home – and Sam lived a mere three miles round the corner and when it came to it was no Greek God. But he was a good straightforward competent lawyer, and a loyal rather than an expensive ally. We occasionally shared a joke together and sometimes a little more. I was, besides, determined to live an uncomplicated and even celibate life. Too late now to have a baby, but how I’d like to have another chance at bringing up a family. I didn’t do too well the first time round, judging by results.
I moved out of the Dorchester and into my new/old home, resolved to suck the juice out of my childhood in the way a child sucks the juice of an orange, first pushing the finger into a hole made in the skin, then putting the fruit to the mouth and squeezing. It pleases the palate and quenches one’s thirst but one must expect the mouth to get a little sore. No. 23 throbbed to the sound of builders and renovators but all was not plain sailing. Like life improvement, house improvement seldom is.
And all that time the essence of his Lordship lay there in a frozen phial, already eight years old, waiting, getting older and older year by year while its thoughtless but legal owner went on to inherit the earldom when his father Oliver died, his mother Lucy becoming the Dowager Countess, and Sebastian marrying the lovely Hon. Veronica Venice in June 1986 (the same month, coincidentally, that Clive and Xandra were married) who then became the new Countess of Dilberne (how her mother-in-law Lucy hated the demotion, how Lady Veronica hated Lucy). In May 1987 Veronica gave birth to the Hon. Victoria Hedleigh – who as a girl, under the law as it was then, was never going to inherit. Little Victoria’s sun being in Taurus the Bull, she did not easily forgive or forget, let alone understand. She was almost thirteen years older than Rozzie. Both girls had their moon in Aries and their Saturn in the ascendant, and were bound to go head to head.
Sorry about this lapse into schizotypal personality disorder, but a flight into astrology is hard to resist. I know well enough, rationally, the absurdity of believing, as Western astrologers do, that people can be divided into twelve personality types according to where the sun is every month, but Indian astrologers (who at least divide us into 365) won’t let you get married, take a job, or sign a contract without consulting them. They can’t all be charlatans, can they?
If only it didn’t seem to work it would be so easy and certainly convenient to dismiss the whole thing as arrant nonsense. But since my sixteenth birthday when I – sweet sixteen and never been kissed – awoke on a bench on Primrose Hill as the sun rose, I have believed in a lot of things that others don’t. That was the day I came of age, met heaven and met hell.
In 1956 (the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Uprising, Anthony Eden as Prime Minister. Refrain wins the very first Eurovision Song Contest) my baby is born. But that’s a buried memory I try not to think about. Whew! I mean, enough is enough. Though I have always found events, like personality disorders, do tend to cluster.
Between the reading of the will and the wedding came the funeral and the wake. ‘Between the idea And the reality Between the m(n?)otion And the act Falls the Shadow’. If the funeral was the idea, the Shadow was the wake, when reality crushed all Gwinny’s hopes of a return to ‘normal family life’. Her understanding-and-forgiving mood came to an abrupt end.
You Can Forgive But Can You Forget?
It was only with the funeral that I had finally realised how wrong Marco was. That ‘understand and condemn’ is a much healthier approach to life than ‘understand and forgive’. Let me tell you about this funeral.
The row over the reading of the will was bad enough, but once the coroner had released the body (it took more than six months, so busy were the forensic labs, and coroners being in such short supply), having found nothing suspicious, then the funeral could go ahead. I paid top whack at Golders Green cemetery – the least I could do – and asked the brothers round for the wake. I thought, I hoped, they would have become used to Dad favouring me the bad girl above them, the respectable ones who had followed in his professional footsteps. I was wrong.
I had spent the six months cleaning and decorating No. 23, having found that when it came to it the ‘out of hours for a tenner’ council house clearance people actually did a fiver’s worth of work. So I set to myself, scrubbing and swilling as I had in my early days – the same floors, the same stairs, and in so doing exorcised much of the stains of the past, for now I was doing it willingly, out of love and affection, not under duress.
Odd, I thought, that the bedroom of any old man has the same feeling as the next, no matter what their income, Lord Petrie or Aidan Rhyss, rich or poor – an air of depletion, a sad sparseness as they wait for death.
You can do a lot of thinking while cleaning. I thought of my friend Tess back in the home for unmarried mothers who hanged herself when they took he
r baby away for adoption and left her howling and her dress stained with milk. I came back from prayers and found her hanging from a hook in our dormitory. She was dead but her breasts were still dripping with milk.
Her handbag had seemed lively enough when she was alive: poke your finger into its leather and it bounced back, resilient. As soon as she had gone the energy drained out of her bag too. I had to go through her few pathetic belongings – the nuns didn’t want to get too close to a suicide – and there was no life left in her bag either. She had taken it with her, or it had volunteered to go. It too was a fresh corpse, limp, flabby and desperately sad. I poked my finger into the leather and it just stretched and split. I was sixteen, she was seventeen. I walked out of The Sound of Music when it came my way ten years later. Sixteen Going on Seventeen: I could never abide that song.
Buried memories. Life can turn out so differently from one’s expectations. I daresay that’s why I have all these odd beliefs. That there’s more to life than meets the eye. It’s not a personality disorder – it’s just simple experience of what happens on the ground, in the world we live in, not the scientific version.
When I stripped Aidan’s bed his nylon sheets had the same limp look and feel of departed energy as Lord Petrie’s 100 per cent Egyptian cotton. I noticed that the analogue alarm clock by Aidan’s bed was the same make (the London Clock Company) as the one by old Bunny’s, except Bunny’s was rather jewel encrusted and a gift from some Sultan or other while Aidan’s came from Woolworth’s. I expect the same derelict feel went with King David’s room, or tent – it being 1000 BC – when he lay with Abishag the Shunammite in his old age, but didn’t shag her.
Just call me Abishag. Except I was by no means a virgin. I just lay in Lord Petrie’s bosom and gave him heat. Same principle: 1 Kings 1–4:
Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.
No, poor old bugger; Viagra hadn’t yet been invented.
But I digress. The funeral went as normal funerals do. The brothers had wanted a ‘simple’, in other words a pauper’s, funeral in an unblessed lot, but I paid for the best Golders Green would do in conjunction with St Christopher’s Church. I slipped away early to finish preparations for the wake, which I had organised at No. 23.
I’d dug out the oil portrait of my father I’d done when I was fourteen – a splendid piece – from a dusty old cupboard where it had been relegated, presumably since I ran away, my name never to be mentioned again. I dusted it of spiders and cobwebs and put it back where it had originally hung in the front hall, in pride of place. I was head of the family, after all. I took down all the photos of the boys’ sporting triumphs – the soccer team, the Boxing Club, the Rhyll Road choir, the karate team – they were yellowed and faded, and needed to be taken down.
I put on the kettle, opened the wine and uncovered the sandwiches and bits I had taken the trouble to make by hand – during the Lord Petrie days I had been consulting Constance Spry’s cookery book, so there were breaded chicken drumsticks and cheese and pineapple (fresh pineapple, not tinned) on sticks for the older folk, and tiny cream profiteroles for those not on diets.
I’d even rushed down to Woolworth’s in Kentish Town Road to buy a couple of extra-large teapots. About thirty people from the church, the pub, the local Welsh Male Voice Choir turned up. Sam Ipswich, now my solicitor, came along and a scattering of neighbours looked in – Dad had kept himself very much to himself in the end. If they seemed to look at me a trifle curiously, why! curiosity is a natural thing, and one must not give in to the paranoiac tendency.
Marco always warned me about that. ‘You have a paranoiac personality disorder,’ he would say. ‘A generalised mistrust of others. You live in fear, suspecting a conspiracy against you. You invent strange religions to protect you; you even create Hellenic Gods to come to your rescue. Why else do you see me as Mercury?’ What a reductionist the man was – though very good-looking, I must say, as he lay well oiled and sunbathing on the deck of Gwyneth.
All kinds of people were there at Dadda’s wake, even the man who read the gas meter who just happened to be passing by, everyone except Aidan’s sons or even grandchildren. It was embarrassing. People were beginning to drift away – the condolences given, memories of the oldster exchanged, all the elegant food eaten and the drink finished – when the four Rhyss boys and their appurtenances suddenly crowded in. They had seen fit to stop off at the pub on the way to drown their sorrows, and a massive, moving, noisy, half-drunken lot they were.
The smell of alcohol and cheap scent wafted in with them; the men in too tight black funeral-and-wedding suits. Shiny black fabric strained over protuberant bellies and caught the light. I’m an artist so I notice these things. And their womenfolk! Increasing weight was clearly a problem for the whole Rhyss family (except thank God me: I inherited from my real father, the handsome medical student).
The mountainous wives all wore bulky fur coats, padded shoulders and wide-brimmed black hats which clashed together and so caused shrieks of laughter and/or dismay – so blowsy, so noisy! Crowding in with them came a host of spotty, lumbering lads and lasses, dragged along against their will and showing it. They went round draining the dregs of other people’s sherry glasses. I do not forget the sudden shattering of the peace of my decorous, well-planned gathering: this vulgar Rubensesque invasion.
Trefor of the nappies looked at my portrait of our father in his prime, laughed and said, ‘Well, you didn’t know the old bugger very well, did you! Put it back in the cupboard where it bloody belongs.’
‘Give it to me and I’ll put it in my paint-stripper tank,’ said Geraint, the one who’d labelled me a bastard all those years ago, and he pretended to vomit. I’d loved Dadda even though he wasn’t really my dad. He’d read me stories when I was a child. My mother was always ‘too busy’.
And Owen of the stolen bike said, ‘Whoever did that painting couldn’t tell one end of a fucking brush from another,’ which hurt, though I knew he only understood house painting.
And David of whom I had been slightly fond looked round my nice clean and white-painted living room, what he could see of it for guests, and said, ‘Very spick and span for a massage parlour. Scrubbed fucking heartless. Mum always said you were a scrubber at heart.’ How they all chortled at the joke.
I could tell they’d been working themselves up into a frenzy at the pub about me having the house and not them. But it was no excuse: they were hard to forgive. I tried. But Geraint’s wife Sylvia drew her skirt away so as not to touch me as I passed, and hissed ‘bitch’ at me, at least I think she did, and Owen’s blowsy mistress whispered loudly: ‘Hush, Sylvie, don’t! She’ll hear.’
They tipped the last of the sherry down their throats and demanded ‘proper drink’, and finding none, sent one of the wives back to the pub for whisky, beer, crisps, porky scratchings and pickled eggs. While they waited, cursing her the while, they made themselves comfortable, settling down to roll joints and spill ash and grind cigarette ends into the polished floors.
Mr Ipswich had been about to leave when they arrived but he stayed to look after me. He was kindness itself, a quiet, gentle, firm man, and quite good-looking in a bespectacled kind of way.
And then David, the only unmarried one of the brothers – I think he was gay – asked me from out of a cloud of dope smoke why I had not gone to my mother’s funeral and I said no-one told me she had died and he said, ‘Well, it was you who cast us off, not the other way round. You fucking broke her heart, you know. She said you had bad blood from the tramp
who raped her.’
Well, I wasn’t going to argue, was I, explain what kind of wonderful man my father was, not some brutish oaf of a rapist, and fed up with their jeers and sneers and bad language, not to mention the smell of drink and cheap scent which had wafted in with them, I threw them all out of my house, my home.
‘Get out of here!’ I shouted, altogether losing my cool and I imagine my posh accent. ‘I’m not made of fucking wood. No. 23 is mine, not yours. I’m fucking fed up with the whole shitty lot of you. Get out and stay out!’
And they just looked at each other and then me and someone muttered, ‘Language!’ (that was a laugh) and someone else, ‘Sensitive little pussycat, isn’t she, considering,’ and they went off to the pub, no doubt. Mr Ipswich held the door open – all the other guests had long since escaped – and slammed it behind them.
‘Check your toilet rolls,’ he said. ‘Owen will have them for sure.’ And so he had. He’d have taken the light bulbs if he could.
I’d see the brothers out and about sometimes with their kids and sweethearts and whores, but they’d cut me dead, and I them. They were out of my life and my consciousness. I was free to do as I liked. I thanked Mr Ipswich in the only way I knew, and like the Smithsons next door, ‘resolved to put my old ways behind me, having truly and earnestly repented of my sins, and was in love and charity with my neighbours, and intending to lead a new life’ (C. of E. Book of Common Prayer) and was celibate thereafter, I swear.