by Fay Weldon
Our forefathers ground glass in order to see through spectacles as they aged and eyesight dimmed: for Rozzie and her young friends the lens turns the other way, the better to magnify imperfections. The girl in her selfie, all too anxious about her looks, lowers her head in a gesture of submission, drops her chin and widens her goggle eyes and presents herself to her friends as helpless – poor little victim seductive me: love me, help me, be my boyfriend, do! she cries in her heart even while her mouth utters MeToo. MeToo!
Not that Rozzie ever bothered about her looks; she didn’t have to, she was more or less perfect anyway, and at least knew all about the curvature of the camera lens from a very early age, so was in no danger, as are so many of her daft generation, of going off to the plastic surgeon to get her nose made smaller.
Does this make her behaviour any more excusable? Well, perhaps – her main terror being of homelessness, with which her generation is cursed. So now she owned the freeholds of both 23 and 24. We’d handed them over freely while Mr Ipswich had hysterics. We were no help; we did nothing to foresee the cataclysm coming, or perhaps we didn’t want to. We are the guilty pre-digitals and the post-digitals are the victims. No wonder they despise us, can’t wait to get rid of us.
Screen After Screen
Clive still never bothered to turn the TV off, so blood, death and destruction poured out of the corner of the kitchen all day. We did nothing to develop a sense of compassion in the poor child.
In the years after she got back to her gainful employment, saving lives not ruining her own, screen size rose from 32-inch to 40-inch. Xandra would turn the thing off automatically when she came back from work, but Clive would turn it on again, claiming the higher moral ground – she had saved a life or two that day, true, but had he not borne the humiliation of house-husbanding, rocking a cradle that was none of his own? (Old Irish folk song; Clive’s favourite; the young wife goes out partying: the auld feller is left with the child: – ‘Perhaps your own daddy might never be known, I’m sitting and sighing and rocking the cradle, And nursin’ the baby that’s none of my own.’)
‘Please don’t sing that!’ Gwinny heard Xandra say. ‘Suppose little Rozzie puts two and two together.’
‘But I’m only joking, darling!’ Clive replied. ‘She’s too young to add up. No worries. Intensive Care is hardly partying, I quite realise, and none as virtuous as you. The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do? William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair. I had a hard day too.’
It was the equivalent, Gwinny used to think, of the husband who defies fate by leaving lipstick on the collar, a note in the pocket, bound to be discovered, anything, anything, to relieve the strain of secrecy. The TV stayed on and the screen size got bigger, and ‘Rocking the Cradle’ got more frequent. At least it was a nice tune. The dirty-toed folk singer had sung it the night she lost her virtue in the alley behind the Drury Lane theatre.
Rozzie had a tablet when she was two – a great baby sitter even in its primitive pre-app form – and played Grand Theft Auto at two and a half (when Tommy Vercetti left Liberty City for Vice City); she could read, write and add up when she was three – but that didn’t stop Clive singing the none-of-my-own song – losing interest in video games only when she came across chess at the age of five.
Clive assumed all children were like Rozzie, never having been to the baby clinic – Gwinny would take her – and having no idea about developmental milestones, and so forth. But chess worried him a little. ‘We don’t want her to grow up into some kind of female nerd. Though I suppose it’s rather like horses, a girl gives up chess when she meets her first boy.’
Clive began to call her his Little Major General and would sing her to sleep at night with tongue twisters from The Pirates of Penzance, in a bid, Gwinny reckoned, to mock Rozzie out of too much learning.
‘I am the very model of a modern Major General,’ he’d sing, and Rozzie would stare at him with her large dark eyes – such a contrast to the blonde curls – with puzzled admiration mixed with embarrassment – ‘I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical; I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical, About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.’ But you don’t want to grow up into some whiskery old general, do you, Rozzie, you’re going to be a real little princess.’
But you had to admire him. Clive managed the tongue twister without hesitation or doubt in his powerful tenor voice, with the occasional squeak. The squeak was what still kept producers from hiring him – they’d risk him as an understudy because he’d recover so quickly and carry on unabashed and energetic but audiences would giggle and lose concentration. And he demanded star money and though he looked like a star and behaved like a star he was not a star. But heard through a stud wall from No. 23 he was pretty good, and Gwinny was not above putting an ear to the wall.
In the dull days before Flora relented and gave them Rozzie – it was she, surely, who had guided Gwinny’s finger when she selected aristocratic action man as the one who had provided Rozzie with such excellent genes, and who held Gwinny’s hand steady while she pressed down the pump – both households had built loft extensions (Gwinny paid). She had saved money by soundproofing between Nos. 22 and 23, but not between 23 and 24, not because she wanted to spy on the Smithsons but it was as well to have a vague idea of what was going on with Rozzie; Clive thought nothing of leaving her alone in the house even before she was twelve, at which a normal child is regarded mature enough to be left. And even though Rozzie was not exactly normal, just super normal, it still worried Gwinny. Rozzie was so sensible and rational nothing was likely to go wrong but she liked to keep an eye on things.
Which meant that Gwinny too, along with Rozzie, heard the wars, and realised that peace never came. As one war rolled by, another took its place. Landscapes, if you were watching, changed, or at least the backdrop did, thus giving useful variety to the cameraman, as did different languages to the sound man, though the screams and moans, the bangs and crashes of explosions, Rozzie too noted from the youngest of ages, always sounded much the same, whatever the ethnicity of those involved. The Somali wave of whimpers and screams gave way to the Kosovo conflict when Rozzie was in the womb – ‘conflict’ sounding more rational and controllable a word than actual ‘war’, though it looked and sounded pretty much the same on the screen. In swift succession in Rozzie’s life there came the Philippines, Horn of Africa, the Congo, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the Twin Towers – how everyone crowded round the telly for that. A great day for burying other news, that one! Then the War on Terror – great news for the US arms industry and the faltering trade in UK torture devices – and offering years of teary telly opportunities for so many, in Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Pakistan, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan – one after another all blaring out from the TV. Gwinny used ear plugs.
It never occurred to Clive to switch the thing off and he did so like the volume up high, as if blocking out the possibility of disagreeable thought. He saw war and violence as something happening somewhere else and far away. He took the haunted eyes of starving children for granted, the whimpers as they died, the blood and terror as shells crashed and tanks crushed, the snapping of bones and howls of maternal anguish as he lovingly spread Marmite, her favourite spread, on his almost-child’s toast. All that stuff, nothing to do with him or his family.
Buried in many a mind – not least Clive’s, as Gwinny came to realise – is the memory of some terrible fall from grace, too painful to surface. Some distant disaster, small or great, which changes our lives and alters us for ever. In Gwinny’s mind it was her brother Geraint saying she was not family but her mother’s by-blow, a bastard, and her father was not her
father. For Clive it was when he was seventeen and saw on the evening news a clip of the car crash in which his parents died, and his mother’s white leg sticking out of the wreckage. It shouldn’t have been screened but these things happen.
What Clive went on not remembering, Gwinny was relieved to find out, was any connection between the girl from Madame Clothilde and the person who became his next-door neighbour.
Xandra put up with Clive’s TV addiction – and addiction it was – from a mixture of love and compassion. Gwinny just kept her ear plugs handy. Rozzie looked and listened and made what sense she could of it. Real life seemed pale and wan to all by comparison to the attractions on a screen which had grown to 60 inches by the time of her thirteenth birthday. Clive liked to own the newest and best, while retaining his vision of himself as a bohemian creator, and Xandra, maternal guilt by now well established, worked overtime to make sure he had the newest and best to hand. If reality ever ran out of death and destruction there was always drama on the telly. A murdered girl here, a raped one there – always young and nubile – as plot fodder for the thriller; blood and gore and open-heart surgery if it had to be doctors-and-nurses, not serial-killers-and-cops.
A Very Clever Little Girl
Rozzie, asked by Gwinny when she was ten why she wasn’t watching Downton Abbey like everyone else, told Gwinny she was ‘fictioned out’. She didn’t like ‘made-up stories’. They weren’t true. They were childish – her favourite term of opprobrium at the time.
‘Don’t you like beginnings, middles and ends?’ asked Gwinny cautiously. ‘The good being rewarded, the bad being punished?’
‘No,’ said Rozzie calmly, ‘because that’s not what happens in real life. Mum’s good, so she gets shit pay for important work; Dad’s bad but he gets to sit on a sofa all day and watch telly and leaves Mum to earn. Where’s the justice in that?’
Gwinny could see that this was a fair assessment of the situation, if rather an alarming one, and asked whether she, Gwinny, was in Rozzie’s opinion good or bad.
‘Mixed,’ said Rozzie,’ but at least you do what you say you will. If I was ruler of the world I’d ban all fiction. It’s bad for people, it gives them a false view of the world.’
Gwinny did not pursue the matter. Rozzie seldom said more than a sentence at a time but when she did it was, well, awesome. The child saw too much and knew too much and expressed herself too well for any normal ten-year-old. Miss Wessler, headmistress of the local primary school, had Rozzie’s IQ tested when she was eight and it came out at 140 on the adult intelligence scales, which was as far as it could go, so they reckoned the test was faulty, and tried another test instead which goes up to 160, but there Rozzie rated only 135, so the (part-time) school psychologist abandoned any real attempt to define her abilities. If she finished a two-hour exam in ten minutes, well, Nature threw up these sports from time to time.
Rozzie, Gwinny concluded, had deliberately messed up the second paper, seeing the benefit of pretending to be more like other people if she wanted to be liked. To be bright, but not too bright, was advisable. But pretence could be maintained for only so long. By the time she was ten Rozzie was losing her friends – one bored, withering look would do it – and worse, the goodwill of the teachers as she corrected their spelling and gasped at their ignorance.
Tact was not necessarily Rozzie’s strong point. The perfectly modulated words which came out of the pretty little mouth when she was small were not always kind, just told the truth of what she was thinking and feeling. But as she grew older she realised, perhaps in response to Clive’s quote from T. S. Eliot – one of his favourites – that ‘humankind cannot bear too much reality’, moderated her behaviour, and she soon learned how to flatter and charm. But it was a learning process, rather than one which sprang from her heart.
Gwinny could see Rozzie would have to be found some special school for gifted children before reasons were found to get rid of her as ‘difficult’, and said so. Clive protested vigorously. Rozzie did not need any kind of ‘special school’, she must stay in the mainstream and learn to get on with other children and not be rude to her teachers. Xandra disagreed and thought Rozzie should leave before she got into any trouble and it went onto her school record. The important thing was always to have a clean record.
‘I’m very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous. In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major General,’ Clive sang to Rozzie over tea, over the rattle of gunfire and exploding IEDs in Afghanistan, and without a flicker of a squeak. ‘That’s all very well but if you’re not going to grow into that leathery old nerd of a major general what you have to learn is how to be kind to others.’
‘Daddy,’ said Rozzie, carefully scraping the icing off a bun before she ate it, butter-less. She had no intention of getting fat. ‘You sang that so perfectly I think you must be superman. But what you need to learn is to be kind to me. If I stay where I am I will get bored and go to the bad and you wouldn’t want that.’ She turned her lovely liquid eyes to her father and smiled in adoration – she was good at that – and his resolve melted. She must go wherever she wanted.
So that was that. They turned to Gwinny in expectation, and Gwinny found a private school, St Katherine’s Anglican School for Gifted Girls, who said they only had room for near geniuses, child prodigies, in fact, but offered her an interview. ‘They’ll say that to all the parents,’ explained Rozzie, and went along alone. They let her in. It was not cheap but Gwinny paid the fees. She realised that her wealth was not endless, but there was still more than enough to go round and she could see how much Rozzie needed her.
Neither Xandra nor Clive seemed to have noticed just how extraordinary a child they were raising. They took it for granted: Xandra because she was so busy with her nursing career, and Clive because he was too worried about the state of his vocal cords to pay much attention to anything else going on in the world. And how they did justify themselves!
In the early days Xandra attributed Rozzie’s brightness to the fact that she, Xandra, was a working mother. ‘A year old and already walking and talking! You see, far better for a baby to be in a crèche than cooped up with just one person. It develops sociability and brain power! A stay at home mother is no good for a child. And anyway, Clive’s at home.’
Clive attributed Rozzie’s intelligence to his own influence. He would forget it could hardly be an inherited trait; enough that she was brought up with him at home. He might not have been to college, but drama school provided a better training in empathy and the arts than any Russell Group university could provide.
He was not the best stay-at-home dad in the world. ‘I’m just no good as an early riser,’ Clive maintained. ‘I need my beauty sleep if I’m to find employment. I’m an actor, after all. You’re an early riser, aren’t you, Gwinny.’ And Gwinny was, so she did a lot of what was necessary in collecting and delivering from crèche to nursery to primary school.
‘See!’ Xandra would say, when the girl was at primary school. ‘Rozzie’s doing so well at school! Passing all her exams and good as gold. They say that’s what happens if you have a working mother – you grow up self-reliant and IQ points ahead of the rest. I love her so much. If I’d been a stay at home mother I’d only have smothered her individuality. I’ve been doing Jung for my psychiatric qualification and know all about the devouring mother.’
‘It’s nurture not nature that counts,’ Clive would say. ‘She sees a lot of me: of course she’s bright and beautiful. Cute. And a lovely little voice. No sign of migraines, unlike her poor dad. Anyway, so long as she’s happy. She’ll be a beauty when she grows up. She’ll be an actress. It’s in the blood.’
‘Actor,’ Xandra said automatically, and Clive quickly corrected himself. He was rhetorically more of a feminist than even his wife. Though Xandra would be saying how nurses knew more than doctors when it came to keeping people alive, it was left to Gwin
ny to talk about being a writer, a director, a producer, not just an actress, a doctor not a nurse, running the world. Aim high. Rozzie would just look at Gwinny with a faintly amused air.
Ministers for Education came and went before Rozzie was eleven. David Blunkett, Estelle Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls and Michael Gove. Rozzie could name them all, and give a brief résumé of their intentions and achievements, flattering and otherwise. Gwinny liked to think it was her habit of condemning educational theorists, as Ministers of Education tend to be, that promoted Rozzie’s interest in world affairs. It couldn’t be the Smithsons. Xandra was too busy saving lives to notice, Clive too fascinated by bangs and bombs on the TV to wonder why they were going off, and fully occupied learning poetry by heart and preserving his voice against over-strain – the doctors said he had to be careful, the less he used it, the less the squeak – to take much notice. Rozzie said the squeak was the equivalent of a stammer: most people stuttered when they were stressed and spoke. Her father stuttered when he sang, because for him, song, not speech, was the source of stress.
Ignorance Is Bliss
They somehow managed to overlook the intervention into Rozzie’s existence of the sperm bank; the fact that Rozzie had a biological unknown, un-named father other than Clive. There was certainly never any mention of it. Mind you, it’s an awkward and embarrassing conversation to have with any child. The man you think is your Daddy is not your Daddy never goes down well. And the mere existence of Rozzie, so pretty and clever and good, reflected a certain glory on Clive, who longed for glory but found it so elusive.