by Fay Weldon
Rozzie listened patiently and sweetly and said, ‘But you’ve known me from birth, dear Mr Ipswich, and I’m not like that. I love the old dears to bits. I’ve left home but I can manage on my own. I’d just feel so much more secure if I had some assets behind me. If I needed a bank loan, or backing for a start-up – I have a few ideas.’
And Mr Ipswich just gave up – I reckon she gave him an Aphrodite smile – and we signed and after that were in her power and reluctant to cause her any trouble in case our paragon of sweetness, light and brilliance turned nasty.
I realised I could not in all conscience (well, self-interest) go to poor Sebastian and warn him.
From Out Of The Bardo Thodol
[Writers’ Huddle: ‘This will put many readers off. Do rethink. Too many are averse to supra-natural speculation, and you’ve already had a fair go at them – warn them, perhaps, to skip this section and go to the next?’]
If I were a superstitious kind of person, which I am not, being a thoroughly rational person, just a believer in many overlapping universes – I could see karma at work, what we all deserved, or at least some wild plan hatched in the Buddhist Bardo Thodol, where time as we know it does not exist.
‘Used loosely, the term “Bardo” refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one’s next birth, when the soul is not connected with a physical body, the consciousness experiences a variety of phenomena.’ [Maurice, deputy Group Convenor of the Writers’ Huddle: ‘Thank you Wikipedia – tell them you’ll give them a bit of money, Gwinny!’]
It may well be that the soul of Adela, born 1884, niece of Isobel, Countess Dilberne, born 1860, came into existence again as Rozzie Smithson, born in the year 2000, perhaps with a chance of getting it better this time round. And also, of course, of getting the title. Greed is imbedded in the human soul, and even as a child Rozzie always asked for more.
No coincidence perhaps, just more Bardo Thodol stuff, that it was I, Gwinny, who just so happened to choose the 9th Earl’s sperm. When I came to visit old Great-Aunt Mallory in the Dower House, I showed her a very much mended silver-rimmed glass bowl that Xandra had given me on my birthday, reputedly valuable, which had come down to her through the generations of her more humble lineage. Mallory recognised it as one apparently given by Adela to Elsie.
And I was two Welsh cousins removed, via my Welsh father Aidan, a genealogist I employed had discovered, via my Welsh father Aidan, to Xandra, Elsie’s descendant. Elsie, Mallory reckoned, must have been born around 1879, and was the parlourmaid up at Dilberne Court. Elsie had been given the bowl to keep her quiet about a family scandal concerning Adela’s daughter Vivvie. Vivvie had become pregnant out of wedlock by a thriller writer called Sherwyn, giving birth to Mallory and her twin Stella in 1923. Adela, in love with Sherwyn (by then her own son-in-law), had tried to claim the twins as her own. And here was I, Gwinny Rhyss, child of the nineteen forties, wielding the turkey baster in 1999 for Xandra, a family relative, however distant. (DNA gets everywhere, so long as it’s through the female line, as is well understood in the Jewish religion.) Myself, Gwinny, always the serving maid, toiling away as I had done for my mother Gwen, and Xandra parlourmaid, low in the hierarchy of servants. The Bardo Thodol, it seems, likes to keep one in one’s place.
Perhaps even Xandra could claim distant lineage with the Dilberne family, through some vague Chicago connection, albeit illegitimate. The original Viscount Arthur Hedleigh, who had ended up as a car manufacturer in the States, had also when young rather put his sperm about, if rather less rashly than had his descendant Sebastian. Mallory suggested that some might well have drifted Elsie’s way. The dance that goes on between upstairs and downstairs in these great English country houses seems to go on for ever. Mind you, Mallory herself can be quite mischievous, perceiving nonsense and stirring the pot.
Who Is Sent Where?
[Writers’ Huddle: ‘Half the world believes in reincarnation, Gwinny, so it can’t all be absurd. Carry on. Our members just agreed by a vote of seventeen to fourteen that there is no proof that there’s no such thing, and it’s certainly more fun to contemplate than is the sudden shock of blankness, non-existence, total annihilation which the atheists insist on. “The Calvinist tendency in spiritual terms,” as one of our most successful best-selling members observed. What a waste that finality would be! Nature abhors waste. And by the way, apologies for suggesting the Hampstead group. Some of our more vociferous members have resigned from the group. Let’s just get on with the fantasy, the fictional stuff. All success to your elbow. email from Felicity X, the new Group Convenor.’]
So, anyway, I, Gwinny Rhyss, who likes to think she’s Elsie’s descendant, found herself wielding the turkey baster – these days you can find a rather less crude purpose-built fertility pipette from Boots – in the service of Xandra. I wonder what jeers and cheers there were in the Bardo Thodol when the plunger sent the pale slightly sweetish stuff, the source of human life, shooting out. But as I say, I am a practical kind of person, not given to fanciful belief or speculation, just the reliable if inquisitive next-door neighbour, witness to the Smithson life. I live at No. 23 where I was born. The Smithsons live next door at end-of-terrace property, No. 24, and moved in thirty years ago. That’s all. And when Rozzie owned us I was not as wealthy as I had been and feared eviction. I had as Mr Ipswich tells me, spent money like water.
For the next few months when Adela – sorry, Rozzie – came to visit us she was living with Facebook friends, she said, and doing a degree in law. A model of respectability. She had a thousand blog followers. She was sweet and helpful.
I caught a glimpse of her down the sidebar of the MailOnline one Sunday. It was admiring her ‘enviable curves and pert bottom’ at an A-list celebrity party. With any luck, I thought, Rozzie would have forgotten all about Sebastian, and decided, along with Brecht, that nurture triumphed over nature and we were her true family. She had merely left home rather early after a row with the parents. But teenagers would be teenagers.
At least the MailOnline wasn’t talking about wardrobe malfunctions and boob slippages, and the other guests were quite respectable. Indeed, I noticed that Monty Castlehaven was one of the guests and Rozzie looked more like granddaughter than daughter, but no Sebastian in sight.
I took it she was just getting on with her life. So were we all. Xandra was now a member of the local Clinical Commissioning Group, and saving hard, and Clive’s voice was reasonably good, though never quite as steady as it had been on that remarkable evening on the doorstep of No. 24 – how long ago it seemed – and he even had a steady job in our local Repertory Light Opera Society. I was painting away furiously for a new client; we were all trying to adapt to a vegan diet.
Time passed. Rozzie’s visits were not so frequent. Then one day she phoned and said she was coming the next day, so we did the cleaning and tidying one does before a landlady arrives, expecting to see her perhaps with an engagement or even a wedding ring on her finger. But no.
She congratulated us on our vegan carrot and caraway crackers and then said she had good news. She had a well-paid new job as an archivist. I asked her where and she said at 3 Belgrave Square, working on a private collection of ancient books and music scores. It was a live-in job.
I tried not to show any alarm, thinking she might be trying me out, and paranoiac clusters rising all over the place. I decided if I just happened to call by Belgrave Square, since she had mentioned the address, I could now do so without raising suspicion. She ate all the vegan crackers. They’re not all that filling.
Oh The Spurning And The Spurting!
I was in luck. When I knocked upon the door and asked for Miss Smithson the door was opened by Sebastian himself. He was in his slippers and rather casually dressed, in jeans and an old sweater but looked relaxed and cheerful and even young for his age, though his blond hair was quite sparse and thin. He had blue eyes. He told me that Miss Smithson was o
ut shopping. I told him I was Rozzie’s grandmother, that not being far from the truth.
‘Oh, lucky you!’ he exclaimed. I feared the worst. He told me she would be back in half an hour, if I cared to wait. I said I would and sat down on one of the stiff brocaded chairs in the hall. I thought it could do with a good dust and a bit of a polish, but servants are in short supply and old retainers long ago died off.
‘Oh, wait in the library,’ he said, and I followed him into the magnificent oak-panelled, book-lined room. ‘Rozzie works here. She’s our very skilled archivist. We’re so lucky to have her here. We’ve even persuaded her to live in, and she’s no trouble, no trouble at all.’ Bet she isn’t, I thought. Wait until she shows her claws. He brought me a glass of very pale sherry, and I sipped it. It was so dry it was hard to enjoy. But then I am a Welsh builder’s daughter and my plebeian tastes are hard to overcome. I do like a nice dark sweet sherry.
‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ he asked suddenly and I explained that in a past life I had been Lady Petrie and had been to a charity event or two in this very house.
‘Dear good old Peterloo,’ he cried. ‘I remember him well,’ and insisted he call his mother Lucy and his daughter Victoria down to meet me. His son Dennis was down at Dilberne Court sprucing the place up. It was falling down. I told him I had met Mallory and asked how she was. ‘Battling on,’ he cried, ‘battling on.’
Lucy declined to come down.
‘I’m afraid she’s rather taken against our Rozzie. You know what mothers are.’
Victoria came down to meet me in full battle-axe mode, and said rather sourly, ‘Oh, Rozzie’s grandmother. How old is that girl?’ I said seventeen or eighteen and I thought Sebastian looked rather annoyed at so unnecessary a question.
Then Rozzie came home from her shopping with bags that did not look as if they contained coffee beans and biscuits but more like stuff from South Molton Street, and at which Victoria looked askance, and the gathering quickly dissolved.
When I was alone with Rozzie we exchanged pleasantries and I explained I had just come by to check out where she was working. She seemed almost pleased to see me and showed me some of the early Baroque music scores she was cataloguing. I said she seemed to know what she was doing, and she flashed me a thank-you smile.
‘I feel my natural home is here,’ she said as she saw me out. Well, perhaps it was. Interfering would do no good to anyone.
Truth Will Out
About a week later there was a knock on the door of No. 23 at around seven o’clock in the evening. Clive and Xandra were off at the cinema watching La La Land. To my complete surprise it was Sebastian.
‘Nice place you have here,’ he said. ‘Not so large, of course, but a lot cosier. One could relax here.’ By which he meant the washing up was piling up in the sink, and all the ironing piled on the chairs. I leave suburban tidiness to Xandra. I asked him how he knew where I lived and he said he’d looked up Lady Petrie on Google.
‘And no doubt a whole lot of newspaper cuttings as well,’ I said, ‘and a lot of old scandals.’
He agreed, but said he remembered me because I’d been so nice to old Peterloo and obviously made him happy. But that was not why he was here, rather because I was Rozzie’s grandmother. I knew what it was like for there to be a great age gap between spouses and did I think it would work? Since his wife Veronica had died he’d become increasingly lonely. He was thinking of asking Rozzie to marry him.
Round and round it goes, I thought. There is a certain inevitability in the pattern of our lives. As in La Ronde, that old French film of the fifties. I’d seen it at the Everyman when I was pregnant with Anthea, spending my last penny before I moved into the Home for Fallen Girls. The film had quite cheered me up at the time.
Now I could see I had no option.
‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea.’
‘But why not?’
I told him he was her father, and gave him chapter and verse. He remembered almost nothing until I quoted his spinning, spilling, spurning, spurting line back to him.
‘Good line,’ he said, and then he remembered.
He was pale. I thought he might faint. I had to put my arms round him. He reminded me of Peterloo and the way shock had always affected him.
He had already been seduced by Adela – sorry, Rozzie. No doubt she had used her Aphrodite smile. There would have been no way the poor man could have resisted. And yes, he had already given her clothes and jewels – she was so nice when she was nice, so horrid when she was not. Gradually the horror of it sank in.
‘But it’s incest!’ he cried. ‘I didn’t know. Supposing she tells. The police can drag me through the courts. Someone in my position. The public disgrace, the humiliation. My poor family! Poor me!’
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and now you too are in her power. She’s merciless. She’s a Millennial.’
‘But why, why?’
‘She wants revenge,’ I said. ‘Millennials do. They hate the old on principle. We deserve it. The things we shouldn’t have done which we did. They find us out in every way.’
‘But what can I do?’ He was weeping.
‘Nothing. Just go on being nice to her. Humour her. Don’t upset her.’
He wept some more. I comforted him in the only way I knew.
The Fight Against Homelessness
The next time Rozzie came to visit us she was very much acting to the manor born. She was wearing a fur coat though the weather was warm. Like Clive she had no taste.
The news was not good. My advice to Sebastian had gone somewhat awry. He had given away the title of Baron of Montewan, as under Henry VIII’s charter of 1532 he was entitled to do, along with Dilberne Court and the 5,000 acres remaining of the original estate. When Sebastian died, Rozzie would own it till she wills it away to her oldest child, be it male or female, regardless of the seven-year rule. She would continue in Isobel and Adela’s footsteps and go on improving the place to fit the Millennium until it did not recognisably exist at all. And Sebastian, like all his predecessors to the title, would go on believing that amor vincit omnia, and chafe and wriggle and do nothing.
Memories of the past will be satisfactorily extinguished. Mallory will die of shock when she has to be transported elsewhere. What would Rozzie care? The old were useless. I blame all those pre-millennial history teachers who saw the past as another country but not that they did things differently there, and so turned the past into the present.
He may think he gives away everything because otherwise she will expose his crime and drag him through the courts and bring the family name into disrepute, but really because he is still ‘in love’ with Rozzie. He will love her whatever she does. He cannot help himself. He may yet marry her.
Rozzie twirls her pearls – she knows, she knows! I told him and he told her: secrets are impossible to keep. Maybe because I told Sebastian that Rozzie was his daughter, maybe because I comforted him in the only way I knew. But it scarcely matters which, either offence will do. The girl’s a Millennial. She puts feelings above facts. She tells us she’s really sorry but she feels she has to evict us. She needs Nos. 23 and 24 – now as it happens one house; we finally ‘broke through’ – for her staff. (Oh, I think: that Cheyne Walk house! The things we regret!) But we have three months before we have to go. She’s being very generous, she says. We see her politely out. There is no way to comfort anyone at all.
A Scandal
The next person to call at my door is Victoria. She is in a great state of agitation. She had her way with the Succession to the Throne Act, 2013 and now she will inherit and not her brother Dennis. ‘He’s a degenerate anyway,’ says Victoria. She has no time for him. But now there’s another problem. Rozzie, well known to boast that she’s in a relationship with her father, a much older man, is now claiming to be the eldest child and is thus entitled to inherit. Rozzie’s case is that her existence should hail from the date the paternal sperm was spent, not her birth. Absurd. But a dr
eadfully lefty (Victoria’s description) Star Chamber is taking Rozzie’s plea seriously. The papers call it the Dilberne Spillage Case , and the whole family is the source of abuse and ridicule. Victoria is almost ashamed to leave the house. Does Gwinny know anything about Rozzie’s birth that might help her, Victoria? She believes Gwinny is quite close to her father.
Gwinny says she can’t help, she doesn’t dare to. But she hopes Victoria has done all the required DNA tests and has urged the court not to take them too seriously.
‘Why not?’
‘Well,’ says Gwinny. ‘One of Clive’s grey hairs looks very like one of Sebastian’s grey hairs. It would be a simple thing for Rozzie, knowing Rozzie, to switch them. In the laboratory, if need be.’
‘You really think–?’ Victoria was incredulous.
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Gwinny. ‘I’ve really no idea.’ And she didn’t.
Part 6
Exodus
Rozzie was found dead in her bed in Belgrave Square the next morning. Police and medical reports suggested dopaminergic neurotoxicity and the coroner confirmed an accidental overdose of amphetamines. A syringe, a box of Ritalin pills and a cut-glass jug engraved with the Dilberne crest – a heart, and a banner claiming Amor Vincit Omnia – were found on the little Chippendale bedside table. Strange, because Rozzie was not one for love.
Rozzie had not been down to breakfast and Victoria had gone up to call her, since the maid was waiting to clear. Rozzie had been lying naked on top of the coverlet and had seemed to be breathing but when Victoria had tried to feel her pulse there was none to be found. The family doctor had been called and declared the young woman to be dead and the authorities had been summoned. Or so Victoria described what she thereafter referred to as ‘the incident’.