by Fay Weldon
Murder will out. Poverty was not the cause of the crime which was to so affect Beverley’s future and that of her descendants, and concerning which she had stayed silent for so long; rather it was love. And Beverley’s version of an event which happened on the other side of the world in 1937 may not be as accurate as she believes. A different truth may still come back to solve the problems of the present. Novels can no longer sit on shelves and pretend to be reality; they are not, they are inventions, suspensions of reality, and must declare themselves as such. By hook or by crook, or even by the intervention of the supernatural, we will get to the root of it.
Where they live
Where we live influences us, though we may deny it. High ceilings and big spaces make us expansive; cramped rooms and low ceilings turn us inward. Those who once lived where we live now influence our moods. A house is the sum of its occupants, past and present. People who live in new houses are probably the sensible ones; they can start afresh. They may seem shallow to us, hermit crabs that we are, these strange empty people, dwellers in the here and now of new developments; but perhaps a kinder word is subtext-less. How can our precursors in the bedroom where we sleep not send out their anxieties, their sexual worries to us? As you brush the stairs – should you condescend to do so – spare a thought for those who ran up and down them before you. Something echoing from the past, as she changes the sheets in Nopasaran’s alcoves, tossing the soiled bedding down, dragging the fresh up, almost drowns out Scarlet’s lust for Jackson.
Nopasaran, where Louis and Scarlet share their lives, was built in the 1930s when domestic help was easier to come by. It was designed to an advanced taste: hailed at the time as a machine for living in. Machines in those days had a better press than they do today. Louis loves the house; Scarlet hates it. Now she has resolved never to spend another day in it, let alone another night. She wants to go and live with her lover, who has atrocious taste and shagpile carpets – but livelier sexual habits than Louis. A row with Jackson would surely have ended with sex, not a disdainful exit to different rooms, let alone scooped and moulded alcoves.
A lot of people assume that Louis is gay but he is not: indeed he is most assiduous, in a heterosexual fashion, towards his wife. Two or three times a week is not bad after six years of togetherness, but there is nothing urgent about it any more and Scarlet is conscious of a shared falling away of desire, which reminds her that soon it will be her thirtieth birthday, that though she studied Journalism she is working in what amounts to glorified PR, and that her ambitions are somehow being stifled by Louis, who will not take her job seriously while taking his own extremely so.
Louis has a wealthy mother, and it is through her family connections that Louis and Scarlet own Nopasaran, a house-name Louis loves and Scarlet hates. No one ever spells it right: it frequently comes out as Noparasan in articles, and for some reason this enrages her. It can hardly matter, she tells herself. Louis agrees. Perhaps she has the same over-sensitivity to language that he has to design; she earns her living through words, as he earns his through the way things look.
Louis knows how to acknowledge difficulty, to soothe and disarm. He is a thoroughly reasonable, thoughtful and considerate person. Nopasaran – which is Spanish for ‘they shall not pass’: the battle cry in the Spanish Civil War of the Communists at the siege of Madrid – was designed in 1936 by Wells Coates, the Canadian minimalist architect. Enthusiasts come from all over the world – for some reason disproportionately from Japan – to cluster outside and admire, to peer in as best they can through billowing gauze curtains at the rough flat concrete walls.
Scarlet feels particularly bitter about the gauze curtains, which Louis prizes. He managed to acquire some original gauze drapes from the Cecil Beaton set for Lady Windermere’s Fan, the 1946 production on Broadway. Scarlet, unlike Louis, does not feel the pull of history. Nor indeed of the future. She sees in gauze curtains only the worst aspects of suburbia. Last night’s row had started, as so often, with disagreements over Nopasaran. Scarlet argued that it was no place to bring up children – they needed a degree of comfort, and au pairs would never stay: Louis argued that it was entirely suitable for developing their children’s aesthetic and political sensibilities, and talk of au pairs ‘struck terror to his heart’. Surely she must bring them up herself? What was the point of having children if you handed them over to someone else to rear?
‘You are going to say next,’ said Scarlet, ‘that my job is of no importance.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Louis, ‘just that any literate girl from a mediocre university with a 2: 1 could do it and you are worth more than that.’
He meant it as a compliment but she did not see it like that. He had been to Oxford, she to Kingston.
She said that one thing was certain: until they lived in a proper house she would not be breeding. Two-year-olds weren’t any good at scuttling up ladders to bed. They tended to fall.
‘This is a proper house,’ said Louis. ‘We are privileged to live here. What you really mean is that you’ve decided against having children.’
‘No I haven’t. I just want them by a man who isn’t a total nutter.’
‘I resent that,’ said Louis. ‘Have you been drinking? Wells Coates brought up his own children in this house. My grandmother used to visit him here.’
‘Any minute now you’re going to reveal that this is your an cestral home,’ said Scarlet.
‘No. I am just telling you that the only way I am ever going to leave this house is feet first.’
‘Me, I’d leave it with a hop, a skip and a jump,’ said Scarlet. ‘And I may yet.’
Scarlet had been drinking caipirinhas, clubland’s current favourite, snatching a quick drink with Jackson before getting home from work, and Louis had shared a bottle of champagne with a colleague before leaving Mayfair, where he works. Lola had been staying, though she was out late tonight, and that had disturbed their usual equilibrium, making them see each other as outsiders saw them, not necessarily to their advantage. Both were quicker to anger than usual. Starting a family was normally a subject they skirted around, but that evening they had both piled into it with energy. Louis maddened Scarlet further by raising his eyebrows and sighing as if to say, ‘What have I done in marrying a woman so bereft of aesthetic understanding?’ He should have refrained: it was this look from him that tipped her into defiance, making Jackson’s tasteless shag pad and pile carpet seem not so bad after all, for all the module in Art History she had done at Kingston, alongside her Journalism degree.
But then Louis did not suspect Scarlet of having an affair; it would be too vulgar of her. That she would allow herself to become physically and, worse, emotionally involved with someone as flashy and uneducated as Jackson was not within his comprehension. That Scarlet could move from a lover’s bed into the marriage bed within the space of an hour – as in the last couple of months she had, five times, on her way home from work – well, it shocks even your writer. Louis would be dumbfounded, undone. But Scarlet is good at hiding her tracks; it is part of the fun.
It occurred to her even now, mid-row, that without the deceit Jackson might not seem so attractive. She had loved Louis and lusted for him when hiding that relationship from her family. They would find him boring, etiolated like some rare, pallid, carefully nurtured hothouse plant. Scarlet, out of Beverley, being more the tough, all-purpose, all-garden, all-climate-growth, adaptable and robust kind. As it happened, when she did finally present Louis, they liked him and said he would be good for her (what could they mean?) and even seemed to be more on his side than hers.
Louis is tall and thin and gentlemanly; he has a cavernous kind of face, good-looking in an intellectual, sensitive, gentle-eyed, slow-moving kind of way. Observers tended to murmur about ‘the attraction of opposites’. Beverley once remarked that theirs was the kind of instant unthinking sexual attraction that usually moves on to babies, as if nature was determined to get the pair together whatever society might have to s
ay, but Scarlet, whose second three-year contraceptive implant is coming up for renewal, and who has already booked her appointment with the doctor to see to it, has so far thwarted nature.
‘So what you are telling me,’ said Scarlet, as the row moved up a notch, ‘is that I have to choose between this house and you.’ He was being wholly outrageous.
She heard the kind of chattering noises in her head she sometimes hears when she is about to lose her temper. It is somewhere between the clatter of cutlery in a kitchen drawer being rattled as a hand searches for something urgently needed that isn’t there, and the chatter of a clutch of baby crows rattling their throats in a nest. It sounds like a warning to run away, but probably has some boring cause to do with plumbing – there is a pump perched up in the roof next to something called a coffin tank.
The rattle, now more like a smoker’s cough, seemed to be coming from up above her and she looked up, but there was only the thirty-foot chamaedorea palm tree, planted by the architect seventy years ago and still growing up towards the atrium skylight, and a source of yet another dissatisfaction. Its leaves were stirred gently by the fan that switches on automatically whenever the lights go on to save the plant from too much condensation and consequent mould – Wells Coates left nothing to chance – and would at least turn itself off after an hour was up. Perhaps it was to do with the fan rather than the plumbing? The lower leaves of the palm were discolouring and needed to be removed but how could Scarlet get up there to do it? Why couldn’t she have a living room like anyone else, with a couple of armchairs and a sofa and a telly?
‘No,’ said Louis, bluntly. ‘What I am telling you is that you have to choose between no children and me.’
This was strong stuff. Scarlet was usually the one who issued edicts. Again, unwise of Louis; the balance stops wavering, tilts towards Jackson.
‘Well, sorry,’ said Scarlet, ‘if you won’t move house to somewhere more sensible and not out in the sticks, that’s about that, isn’t it? I like my life as it is. It’s far too early for me to start worrying about having children and why should I have them with a man who cares more about a pile of crumbling concrete than me. Sorry, but there are other fish in the sea.’
What she meant, of course, was that she loved Jackson more than she loved Louis, and just at the moment if she wanted anyone’s children it would be Jackson’s, and when Jackson kissed her goodbye outside the BarrioKool club in Shoreditch earlier that evening, saying, ‘Move out from him, move in with me, let him take his gauze curtains and go back to his mum,’ the feel and promise of his arm across her back made her catch her breath. ‘What have you got to lose? A house built seventy years ago by some tosser?’
So lightly had Jackson swept away decades of aesthetic aspiration, dedication and financial investment on Louis’ part that a kind of shift took place in Scarlet’s vision. If Nopasaran was not to be taken seriously, was Louis either? Louis could be seen by others not as an alpha male but as a pretentious wanker. At least Jackson had the respect of a lot of howling, enthusiastic, underdressed girls. The chattering from the tree dwindled into the kind of sparky noise which the cooker makes when you press the electric button to light the gas, but somehow suggested there was no time to be lost. Run, run, run was what she was hearing.
‘If I was choosing between you as you are tonight and the house I’d certainly go for the house,’ said Louis.
As you are tonight. He is hedging his bets; he is at his school-teachery worst. Why can’t he just commit himself and say: ‘I hate you’? Scarlet despised him the more. He was like his mother, po-faced and prudent, bloodless.
‘Pity you couldn’t have married your mother,’ said Scarlet, ‘instead of her opposite.’
Louis launched a furious blow into the air, which Scarlet managed to be in the way of, so that his knuckles scraped her cheekbones, thus giving herself the more reason to do what she wanted without qualm. Truth, tears, rage, insults, hysteria, then blended into distasteful memory; all that was clear to Scarlet now was that Louis took her favourite pillow with him to the lower spare alcove in the hope, he said, of silence and a good night’s sleep. Scarlet of course lay sleepless, while her husband presumably slept soundly, after the fashion of men, for the rest of the night.
So that was the row. And in an upper spare room, or scoop, or alcove, Scarlet’s niece Lola, who had slipped in unnoticed after her night out, listened to and cherished every word and wondered how best she could use them to her advantage.
In the basement
For your information, reader, your writer is working on her laptop down here with the spiders in her basement, where she has set up office, away from e-mail, landline and winter draughts. Stone walls prevent contact by mobile. It is very silent, even lonely, and the only music is the sound of the boiler switching itself on and off, and the washing machine stirring and churning in the otherwise empty room next door.
Yatt House is on a hilltop, large, square, stone and respectable, typical of the kind built in the 1840s for the wealthy professional classes. There is an acre of garden, and crumbling outbuildings. My workroom is part of the old servants’ quarters, and the hard blue-limestone stairs down to it are worn in their centre from their constant toiling up and down, up and down, labouring to keep those upstairs fed, watered and comfortable. For some reason I feel it to be my natural place down here, and I like it, but I reckon the last time anyone replastered or decorated was in 1914, when the young men of the house – three sons – went off to war, poor things, and only one returned.
Bits of plaster flake from the walls and dust collects from nowhere on the flagstone floors, as do fallen leaves, though I have no idea how they get in. Concrete filler crumbles into tiny black balls and drifts across the shiny white windowsill beneath the cracked shutters, where someone once bodged a repair. But my laptop works as well here as anywhere, thanks to WiFi, and it is warm, so the drama Scarlet is about to release into the world by her intemperate and imprudent action, her running away from home, can grow and blossom unhindered by fingers too cold to work the keyboard. Which is what happens in my proper, smart office upstairs when the prevailing south-west winds blow hard and cold.
The ground slopes away from the house quite steeply here, so that my window is at ground level. It overlooks a narrow concrete patio and then a stretch of green grass falls away, so it is far less sinister than the rooms at the front, where the old iron ranges and the locked wooden cage around the wine racks still remain. It is a kindness to call them rooms at all – cellars would be more accurate, lit as they are by tiny grated windows set into the brickwork. The room I have chosen to work in must have been the servants’ sitting and dining room. The old bell rack is still here, and the rusty mechanism quivers when anyone rings the front-door bell, though I cannot find any wire that connects them.
The house above is safely bright, cheerful and light, and children love to open the door to the basement and look down the worn stairs to the dark space below where I lurk. Some venture down to explore, some don’t. My little grandchild Tahuri came yesterday, shuddering with delighted fear. She’s four, and half Maori, of a warrior tribe, and brave.
‘Do I have to go down?’ she asked first. I heard her.
‘Of course not.’
‘I want to, but suppose there are kehua?’
‘Kehua live in New Zealand,’ said her mother, ‘on the other side of the world. They don’t have them here in England.’
‘They could come in an aeroplane’. She pronounces the word carefully, aer-o-plane. She is proud of it. ‘They could have come with us, in the luggage rack.’
‘The kehua are just spirits who come to take you home after you’re dead. They’re perfectly friendly unless you’ve done something really, really bad.’
‘Are they making that rattling sound I can hear down there?’
‘No, that’s just your granny typing on the keyboard.’
‘I’m a bit scared.’
‘Don’t be,’ says Aroha. ‘
Kehua live in trees, not houses.’
‘Do they hang from the branches upside down like fruit bats?’ Tahuri asks.
‘I expect so,’ says her mother.
Tahuri decides it’s safe enough to come down. She is very brave. Aroha follows.
I ask Aroha to tell me more about kehua and she says they’re the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, adrift from their ancestral home. They’re not dangerous, just lost souls making themselves useful, though people can get really frightened. Transfer them to another culture and they’d be ghostly sheepdogs, snapping at your ankles to make you do what you should while scaring you out of your wits. Kehua see their task as herding stray members of the whanau back home, so the living and dead can be back together in their spiritual habitation. Kehua are the ones who come to collect your soul after the proper death rituals have been performed: the ones who make you homesick if you’re away too long from the urupa, the graveyard, a beautiful place special to the tribe. Kehua put thoughts into your head to get you there, and not necessarily sensible ones. They’re not very bright, just obsessive in their need to get the whole hapu back together in one way or another.
‘The hapu?’
‘The Maori are very family-conscious,’ says Aroha. ‘Hapu is what they call their kinship group, which is a subgroup of the iwi, or tribe. The taniwha, river monsters, who guard the iwi, are a very different matter. You don’t want to meet them in a place you don’t belong on a dark night. They have teeth and talons and can do you physical harm. Kehua just use mental and emotional pressure.’
I ask her what kehua look like and she says nobody quite knows, you hear them rather than see them, they’re thought to have wings, which they rub together to make a clattering chattering sound. It registers with you as good advice but you’re not wise to listen. They’re like the grateful dead of Central European mythology, or the Jewish dybbuks, or the hungry ghosts in Japan. They try to return you a favour but they understand only what the dead want, not what the living need, so they get it wrong. Poor things. They haven’t much brain. Why should they have? They’re dead.