by Fay Weldon
‘Another of the rules’, Gabriella observes, ‘is that virtue is its own reward. No one becomes rich by doing good. Aldred gave up his country practise and he and I moved to London where he could the better continue his research. Aldred’s mother bought us a mean little flat in Hackney, within walking distance of the Mile End Research Institute. The beds were damp. Aldred’s mother was both a Catholic and a militant socialist, and did not, frankly, like me: no doubt she thought Aldred should have stayed with his boring wife and children and been a humble country doctor for ever. But people must, of course, aspire: there is no stopping them, no preventing them, if that is in their nature. Aldred’s mother should have saved her breath to cool her porridge. He was her only child. She wished to make him in her own image: a Christ amongst the sufferers. She could see in me, I expect—apart from the sheer youth and erotic energy which had, or so she thought, seduced her son away from the stony path she had laid out for him—that nature, so contrary to her own, which despises sufferers, which believes the halt, the lame and the old are better put out of their misery quickly, leaving the world to those who best inherit it. No wonder the beds she provided were damp!
According to my grandmother’s book there are few things more dangerous than damp beds. No bed should ever be allowed to become so. The moist air of a damp bed carries away the natural heat of a body with the most dangerous rapidity. The body becomes chilled; disease, and often death, ensue. Sit up all night rather than sleep in a damp bed, my grandmother advised. Or, if you are only suspicious of dampness and wish for a night’s rest, wrap yourself in a blanket and cover yourself with all the clothes you can find, so as to allow no escape of heat. After I had spent several nights so covered up, Aldred agreed that we should move to a house more suitable to my tastes, with rooms of a decent size, and a staff flat, so the servants could keep themselves to themselves, and not intrude on our bliss. I found just such a house in Orme Square, tucked in behind Hyde Park and Queensway. Wisteria hung its purple fronds over low windows; there was a little iron gate: I knew we would be happy there.
‘Aldred was worried about the general expense and the distance from his work, so I contrived to find him a post in Harley Street, which was only just around the corner, as assistant to Mr Clive Cunningham, the famous cosmetic surgeon. Everyone, I think, must take shifts at virtue. Aldred had saved the country from the scourge of meningitis: now he deserved to have some comfort, and some fun. The ailments of the rich, I always think, are easier to accept than the illnesses of the poor. And, the rich being more sensitive, the relief of their suffering is just as gratifying to the doctor. What’s more, the financial rewards are better! To sit up night after night as young lovers in a country cottage is one thing; to sit up in a damp-bedded Hackney slum quite another. It simply could not be. I would go up to Mr Cunningham’s rooms after surgery hours. He was a man of great charm and persuasion—though if my dear Aldred was twice my age he was as old again.
‘Such interesting and well-paid employment as Aldred had been fortunate enough to acquire did not then and does not now come easily, and I had made certain promises to Mr Cunningham, and kept them—I must say perhaps with a little more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary. The fact was that as Aldred advanced in his profession, as he became more prosperous, he became duller. The fiery, dedicated young man who rescued me from distress and destitution made a far better and more romantic lover than the young surgeon who charmed matrons into facelifts! And, do remember, I was not married to Aldred; he had put the house in my name, in recompense, but what are the obligations of gratitude compared to the obligations of marriage? Oh, very few! And that, perhaps, is why I never chose to marry.
‘I was still fond of Aldred. How sad it is, that we turn those we love into what we want, and then find that what we want we do not love! Easier to love a house, I think, than a person. And what a charming house this was; with its little walled back garden, and its pear tree; and walks across the park to the shops, and riding in Rotten Row, and glasses of wine with theatrical people—I loved the theatre—and, for work, the supervision of the servants, or, for excitement, a visit to Mr Cunningham, perhaps even unannounced.
‘His nurse knew, of course, and there was always a danger she might tell Aldred. She had to go. Poor woman. It was not, I suppose, her fault; Mr Cunningham claimed she was efficient, and that may be so, but she had a perpetual cold in the nose, and would obviously have been better employed in the public nursing sector, not the private. She reminded me of Nanny McGorrah. To have a head cold, of course, is to weep with the nose instead of with the eyes: it is a mere displacement of grief. The cure is not in aspirin but in self-discovery. Oh, how wearisome life is …’
Here her voice breaks again. Poor woman! What is the point of disturbing her? We cannot help what we are: we cannot any of us go back into the past and undo what we have done—
‘This place I am in now’, says Miss Sumpter, and it seemed to me that at this point her voice began to age alarmingly, ‘is a strange kind of paradise indeed. The corridor between life and death is free of guilt, filled only with the marvel of simply being; but here we must try to understand what we are, and why we are: oh, it is all sub-text, it is so difficult …’
I do suspect the pinner priests of putting words into Miss Sumpter’s head. She was not herself a member of the GNFR: concepts such as ‘sub-text’ must be strange to her. Unless, indeed—and this I find truly exciting—we have it even righter than we know, and the blinding truth of our worldly existence has been revealed to Miss Sumpter after death and through her confirmation and reassurance given back to us. In which case praise be the GSWITS, praise be! Forgive Thou my unbelief!
‘Aldred discovered us,’ my Gabriella continues, when she had regained her strength. ‘I would not have had that happen for the world. I did not want to hurt him. It was just that the danger of being discovered added so greatly to our pleasure: the sound of his calm, wise voice in the next room as Clive’s fingers found my nipples, his mouth the parting between my legs, made the action what it was. It dared the God Eros, compelling him to show his presence—but of course one day Aldred opened the door, which Clive had forgotten to lock—
‘“I say, Cunningham, old fellow—’”
‘And then Aldred saw what he saw. He did not hit his rival but he did hit me. A man seldom hits his superior—whom he sees as having greater status, who earns more than he, and is more attractive than he, having lured his woman away. No, such a man merely bows his head and slinks away, defeated—and humiliated. It is the woman he hits, for in their hearts all men despise women, as the cock despises the hen who serves him, as I despise the servants who serve me. Aldred fortunately did not hit me very hard, just enough to perforate an eardrum and make himself feel guilty. Mr Cunningham departed quickly on an urgent case, leaving Aldred to help me to my feet, to wrap a lace tablecloth—a not very interesting, machine-made piece of lace, and rather grubby—around my naked body.
‘“You are a bully and a ruffian,” I sobbed. “You will not even marry me; all you do is neglect me! Do you think you have all this”—and I indicated the sombre splendour of the room—“for nothing? No, it is thanks to me! And see, you show your gratitude! By hitting me! What sort of love is that? You may apologise, but I will not be able to hear you, because you have made me deaf!”
‘It never does to apologise to men, even when in the wrong. All they remember then is your error. It seals into their minds the fact that you have done something to be sorry for. They will never forget it, and will reproach you to the end of your days. Better far to move the blame from you to them. And when discovered in flagrante delicto, the rule is, never apologise, always justify.’
Here the voice paused, and this time when it resumed it had become fluttery and desperate: it reminded me of the sound of the wings of a moth trapped near too bright a lamp. ‘What are they saying to me? That I am wrong? That the rules of expediency are not the rules of life? What do they mean? Someone, help me
! There are blackberry stains—I will never get them out. I have tried chloride of soda, essence of lemon and Dab-it-off and nothing helps. Oh hurry, hurry, before the words fade! Perhaps I have not much time. Perhaps when I am healed I will have nothing to say, or the means to say it?’
But after a short, frightening silence in which I thought the lamp had altogether burned her up, my beloved’s voice resumed, young and bright again, as if these frights and warnings had been nothing, were mere passing afflictions. ‘I went home and shut the door and would not let Aldred in for a week. How ill, tormented and tired he looked by the time I relented. My ear was quite better by then, or I would not even have considered opening the door. Poor Aldred was beside himself with jealousy and longing. He begged that we should sell the house, and he would forget medicine, and we would go off together—somewhere, anywhere—only we must be together and I must never, never be unfaithful to him again.
‘“Not even for your sake, Aldred? I only did it for you!”
‘“Not even for my sake. And we will have children: then you will he happy and content—”
‘“How can we have children? If we can’t marry—if she won’t divorce you? Don’t you see how I have to live, Aldred, disgraced in the eyes of the world? I have to live in the demi-monde. Make my friends amongst artists, writers, actors and other disreputable people, who are all fun and charm, no doubt, but it can hardly count as proper life. They are not proper people. What have you done to me? I came to you an orphaned virgin of sixteen—”
‘He begged me to say no more and actually offered to kill his wife if that would suit me. But I said no, I had no wish to be a murderer’s wife. Nor did I have any desire to go to Bolivia, or New Zealand, or any of the other places he suggested. We would stay where we were, and he would go back to work as Mr Cunningham’s assistant. Aldred protested that he could never, ever, stand such humiliation as that, but, as I pointed out, he had no choice. Who else would employ him on such favourable terms? Cosmetic surgeons, unlike medical researchers, are interchangeable. I, for my part, vowed never to see Mr Cunningham in private again—nor did I, or only once or twice, when he claimed his hand trembled as he operated from sheer deprivation of me. It does not do to make these emotional breaks too quickly. Another rule: men like to feel that they are doing the giving up. If you are seen to give them up they take offence and can turn quite nasty.
‘So now we made it up, dear Aldred and I, and sealed our new beginning with many kisses, and our house grew to feel warm and safe again. I took a degree in Fine Arts at the Courtauld Institute, and Aldred learned, eventually, to work happily with Mr Cunningham, though I think it was a little hard for him. Men are such seekers after status! See two cockerels, fighting over who shall rule the roost, stand crowing in the dung heap, and fluff the feathers of the silly hens! Well might blood flow, for the one who loses hardly lifts his head again to groan, let alone crow, and eats last, on leftovers, and grows thin and wretched, despised even by the lamest, scraggiest hen.
Aldred is here on the other side: my beloved Aldred is with me. He took my hand as we swept along the corridor between life and death. He took it as a brother would a little sister’s: we were warm and safe together. We mistook our roles in life, or they were mistaken for us. How full of error the world is! We should have been family, brother and sister: the sex between us was born simply of youth, energy and proximity. All that we had was great affection, the one for the other—and of course my capacity to cause him pain. Mr Cunningham is over here too. He left cosmetic surgery some time in the early eighties and became a specialist in in-vitro conception and artificial insemination, a venture which ended badly. His clients believed they were being fertilised by the sperm of ‘virile young medical students’, but in fact of course the sperm was all his, and it was reckoned at the court case that there are some five hundred of his children in Central London alone. Well, why not? And though his clients were disconcerted—indeed, some were appalled—to know that their children had been fathered not by some vaguely imagined Adonis but by this wizened, trembling, shortsighted septuagenarian, they should not have worried. Once indeed and in truth Clive Cunningham had been Adonis enough, and sperm does not acknowledge age. It is forever in its prime.
‘Clive Cunningham took my other hand as we swept along the corridor of the dying and I saw a smile pass between him and Aldred in the glow of events that joined us all, in which there was no pain, only connection. I say smile, I say saw, because these are the only words I have to describe what is beyond words—such feeble, incomplete instruments they are! Let me go, whoever you are! Why do you make me speak, use words where no words belong, only connection? Truly I was mistaken: I have no rules to give you: there is such a tangle in the sewing box! Where does one thread begin, another end? How can I know? Please let me rest in peace!’
My poor Gabriella’s voice faded out. She seemed to suffer. I wanted not to hear, but how could I refuse experience? I threw switches and turned dials, almost to overload. I would not let her go.
‘Here, see, a strand,’ she went on, after a while, as if fingers and mind had been busy un-plaiting. A strong one, a central one, around which the tangle forms. Yes—see!—that must be Timothy Tovey. It is plaited and woven and multicoloured; it is shot through with silver and gold. How wonderful it is! But look! Someone has washed him badly, made the water too hot. The colours have run. It need never have happened. Any person can be washed, if proper care and attention is paid, even those which say “Dry Clean Only”—which is mostly only a manufacturer’s convenience—oh, my poor head! What is a word, and what is a label, and what is a principle, and who can we trust? …’
Here, for all my efforts, the tape ends, abruptly; and, fortunately, with it the sensuous spell cast over me by that elderly woman, Gabriella Sumpter, dead these three months. Lucky for Honor: how does a woman deal with a husband in love with a re-wind? I have no doubt he moons and picks at his food and longs for death, the sooner to join his beloved, to be part of the joyous throng in the Great Script Conference—for that, I have no doubt, is where Gabriella Sumpter found herself.
Honor would have done her best to keep me in this world, and fed me on dumplings and lemon meringue pie, packet-made. I don’t think she has ever washed a garment by hand, let alone ironed one. She does not even possess an iron: she pushes a week’s multicoloured laundry into the washing machine and switches it to ‘whites, heavy’ and gets on with her life. That is why my underclothing is always harsh and pinkish-purplish. But neither would Honor have deceived me with the likes of Clive Cunningham.
I counted my blessings, shook the spell of Gabriella Sumpter from me, and prepared a solid and constructive report on the Sumpter Tapes for the coming GNFR Synod. I argued that they contained no evidence that the GSWITS was attempting to contact his humble creation, or giving us the reassurance we need that we have, indeed, through our contacts with the re-winds, put our fingers on the meaning of the universe.
The rules of laundry are not the rules of life! I included some fairly strong criticism of the current clique of pinner priests. The report may well be something of a sensation. But I was not finished with Gabriella Sumpter. That night she came to me in a dream: a high-bosomed sixteen-year-old girl in a white dress, singed around the hem, her hair dishevelled, her lovely eyes wild. She begged me to take a message to Janice Tovey, to say there was nothing to grieve about, since everything was part of everything else. How familiar, how sweet her voice was. But I decided I would do nothing; Janice Tovey would hardly welcome such a message. Re-winds are everywhere these days, and the messages they send are not necessarily more sensible in death than in life.
On the following night Gabriella came again, and this time Honor saw her too: the presence in our bedroom was so bright it was as if someone had switched on the light. Honor, usually such a sound sleeper, woke with a start and, seeing a stranger in the room, groped for the teeth she kept in a glass beside the bed. I have no doubt she wanted to look her best, for
Gabriella, at some thirty years, was the most ravishing creature I have ever seen, dressed in the cream-coloured muslin nightdress she had spoken of, gathered under perfect breasts with a lilac ribbon, dark hair flowing round the sweetest face.
‘Tell Timothy Tovey to hurry,’ she said. ‘Tell him he is the thread that binds us together.’ At that she faded out—but not, I thought, without a slight frown at the grey pinkly-purple state of our bed-linen; though that last may be my imagination.
‘Who on earth was that?’ Poor Honor was terrified. I explained a little of the story, and she suggested, wisely, that perhaps I should do what I had been asked and get in touch with the Toveys, in case Gabriella next chose to appear in her winding sheet—no matter how beautifully made by Miss Martock—fresh from her grave and deliquesced about the eyes. A horrible thought!
So that is what I did. The Toveys lived in a magnificent house on Hyde Park. It is one of the sadder features of the GNFR that it tends to maintain, indeed even increase, such inequities as already exist between the haves and the have-nots. Although dramatic individual stories of rags to riches, riches to rags, are a common enough feature in Western societies nurtured under the GNFR, on the whole there is little social mobility. The poor just gently get poorer; the rich, not so gently, get richer: our religion seems to breed social passivity. To consent is not to strive. The idea is so important in the formation of civilisations, is it not? Notions of socialism and a fair society faded along with Christianity: the eighties finally saw them off. The GSWITS, I fear, is a great admirer of Dickens.