by Fay Weldon
Aroha has a Master’s in Anthropology from King’s College London. She’s a lovely, warm, rounded, vibrant creature and I am pleased to have her in my basement, and little graceful Tahuri too, who says she has just found the ghost of a daddy-long-legs on my unswept windowsill and holds it up by one fragile leg to examine it.
‘Does this have a kehua?’ she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer, just drops it into a dusty corner where it joins its family of assorted dried-up, dead-and-gone insects. We all go up for tea in the living world.
The next night it snows and it settles, so when I go down early to work and open the shutters, light streams in and for once the room is actually bright, so I don’t have to turn on the overhead light. The early sun is making the snow sparkle, and the red spindle-berries glow in the hedge the far side of the garden, so it’s all white, green and red, like the Italian flag. And then I see a large rat run across the snow just in front of my window, leaving a trail where his belly dragged. Mice leave rather charming little footprints, rats leave runnels. Well, well, it’s all metaphor.
Running into a trap
Let me remind you. Scarlet is our heroine, Louis her common law husband, and Jackson her lover. She is between her husband and her lover, but although we are already on page 23 she has still not got any further than her grandmother’s kitchen where she has brought food for the freezer. It is this sort of novel, I am afraid. Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise. Well, never mind. It is what it is. If Scarlet had lived in a more ordinary house we could have got on faster; had she only known, she could have blamed Louis for this too, for making her live in Nopasaran. Yet the unofficial wedding party was held in its garden and she was happy enough about it at the time. So much sexual guilt will do you in. Blame and opprobrium are hurled with abandon by the betrayer towards the innocent party.
Beverley is the grandmother with the new knee and the splendid kitchen in Highgate. So far referred to but undescribed are Scarlet’s mother Alice, a staunch Christian, and Cynara, Alice’s daughter, fifteen years older than Scarlet, who is a staunch feminist barrister. Staunchness runs in the family, though it does seem to have rather bypassed Scarlet. Lola, whom we met briefly pretending to be asleep in the spare room at Nopasaran. Lola, who is Cynara’s daughter and Scarlet’s niece, is a treacherous little bitch, staunch only in her desire to have Louis and Nopasaran for herself.
The goodies from Waitrose that Scarlet unpacks – should you have a yen for such detail – include creamy fisherman’s pie, lamb biryani chicken with lime and coriander, oriental salmon with lima beans, steam-fresh broccoli, par-cooked croissants. (I am really hungry as I write this – I have had no breakfast and it is already lunchtime.) Scarlet, as we know, had hoped to be out of the house by mid-morning, but now that she has rashly blurted out the truth, her grandmother will clearly not let her go without further discussion. Scarlet wishes she’d stayed quiet and waited for news to seep through to friends and family in the normal way. As it is there will be uproar enough when they find out.
You can’t do this, Scarlet, her mother will say. Just stay where you are and see it through. You inherit instability from your fathers. Both you girls do. I will pray for you as ever – what else can I do? – but sometimes I feel I’m wasting God’s time.
You are, you are, Scarlet will want to say. Not that there is a God. And Alice will want to reply, What are we then? A plague of woodlice on a rock hurtling through space? So they will not have the conversation. The subject is too fundamental. Neither mother nor daughter is quite prepared to cut the other off. Both hope the other will recover their reason and believe as they do.
Scarlet’s sister Cynara will roll her eyes sigh and say, Out of the frying pan into the fire. Do think again, Scarlet. Louis isn’t so bad, but isn’t there some nice woman you can shack up with? Anyone can see you’re a lesbian. Which they can’t. But then Cynara’s specialty is seeing what she wants to see, not what is, and what she sees everywhere is the villainy of men.
But Scarlet does rather look forward to telling her friends of the severance of her bond with Louis. The more boring ones will no doubt protest briefly and say, You can’t do this to us. We’ve got too used to saying Louis-and-Scarlet. The others, the fun ones in fashion PR, will say, Jackson Wright? Wow! Go for it, Scarlet. But all they know is that Jackson got a lot of column inches for his last vampire film, so their advice can’t be relied upon.
Her uncle Richie, whom she seldom sees, but admires, and who is paranoid on the subject of gayness, will eventually call from Hollywood and say something along the lines of, Oh so Louis finally decided to come out, did he? And Scarlet will leap to Louis’s defence, and in so doing lose her resolve to leave him. Scarlet likes Louis. She is fond of Louis. She just doesn’t love him – at least not today – and certainly not in the carnal way she loves Jackson – and she hates living in Nopasaran – but she does not like others denying his heterosexuality. What would that make her?
She hates the way people just can’t leave other people alone to live their lives in the way they want, but most of all she hates the way she cares what other people think of her. She feels resolve drifting away. She has to get out of here. There is twittering in her ears. She is just not where she should be. She has not run far enough yet.
It is her own fault. She should have kept her mouth shut and said nothing; she could already have escaped from Nopasaran at last, looking out over the Soho rooftops from Jackson’s fabulous apartment in fabulous Campion Tower, in Jackson’s fabulous bed, with Jackson’s fabulous body beside her. Louis has narrow shoulders and few muscles; he is a life-of-the-mind man. Jackson, so far as Scarlet knows, is a life-of-the-body man. All these life-altering things happening, and here Scarlet still is, trying to decide whether moules marinière can be frozen or should be eaten before their sell-by date. Should she put the delicate little white cucumber sandwiches out for Beverley’s tea or not? Will they dry and curl up? Life keeps leaping from the mundane to the cosmic and back again.
As for Beverley, she thinks the girl is looking decidedly shifty. I haven’t described Beverley in any great detail. She looks much like any other seventy-eight-year-old, one who has seen better days and become, as the old do, somehow fuzzy round the edges. But she’s not too bad; when she comes into a room she brings energy with her: she does not deplete it in those around. Her figure remains trim, her heels stay more high than flat, in spite of the recent trouble with her knee. She has a vulgar tendency to wear satins and velvets, and what the unkind would call bling: large pieces of gold and platinum jewellery better suited to evening than day.
The antique yellow-velvet sofa where she nurses her recovering leg is under a window, where tiny, elegant fronds of Virginia creeper, red and green, push in under the frame. In winter it is almost impossible to keep the room warm, in spite of the Aga’s year-round, patient efforts. The north wind can blow in quite cruelly, but it’s not too bad today. The other side of the daffodils the lawn runs down to a little stream that flows between reeds and marks the end of the garden. Someone once even saw a fish here, really tiny, but nevertheless a sign that the energies of nature cannot be denied for ever. In the 1730s a minor tributary of the River Fleet escaped when the rest of the flow was diverted into underground culverts, and has flowed in a trickle through the back garden ever since, to disappear from sight where the brambles and elders of Highgate Cemetery grow thickest, there where Karl Marx’s massive bearded headstone stands.
Beverley’s house Robinsdale too has its history, which should not be ignored. Its very bourgeoisity seems to have attracted to it revolutionaries of one kind or another. It gave them shelter and comfort even while they despised it. A very parental kind of house, in fact, late Victorian, solidly built, if in a rather gloomy Gothic style, double fronted and detached, complete with turrets and, apart from the problem with the windows, fortunate in that its owners and tenants have always maintained it well. But the
n revolutionaries tend to spring from the educated middle classes, and to keep their own houses in order, whilst undermining the structures that oppress the masses. A wealthy but radical owner of gold mines in South Africa had the house built for his American wife, Ellen, in the 1890s. Here, in the healthy air and light of Highgate, she ran a small progressive school for the daughters of aspiring professionals. She was the one who named it Robinsdale, after the birds who twittered to her on her first inspection of the site.
The school continued in her spirit after her death in 1925, and the famous free-thinker and educationalist Dora, wife to Bertrand Russell, was a frequent visitor in the twenties and thirties. The school closed during the Second World War and was converted in the fifties by its new owner – a founder member of the New Communist Party of Great Britain – into a private dwelling. Beverley, being of a no-nonsense disposition, sees nothing incongruous with the house name, though her children have always found it naff, and don’t understand why she doesn’t just take the name board on the gate away and call it No. 15 Elder Grove, which it is on the council records, or better still, sell it as an old people’s home or a school and live somewhere more practical. But she won’t.
Beverley, as it happens, has vague plans to marry again – she comes from a generation of women who like to be married – but the plans are still embryonic and she will not mention them to her family. Would they carp and agitate, suspecting her judgement and wondering what would happen to their inheritance if some new man, some fortune hunter, were to step in and claim it? They are all principled, in their different ways, and unworldly, not interested in gaining wealth, but they certainly do not want to see it disappearing.
Beverley’s hair is in need of a wash. She likes to look her best, even at her age, in case a new man should walk through the door. She could well afford to hire someone to come in and do it, but when Scarlet suggests it Beverley is dismissive. It seems a needless extravagance. Beverley has seen hard times and good times, and is always fearful that the bad times may come again. She has been widowed thrice. Perhaps she attracts death, for it always circles her, while leaving her alone, other than to dump unexpected wealth at her door. Certainly she sees herself as ‘prone to sudden events’ as an astrologer once described it, something to do with Uranus and Aries being in the ascendant when she was born. Neither her mother nor father was around in her childhood to confirm the exact time of her birth – the father having killed the mother and then himself, as Beverley now relates.
‘You’re not concentrating, Scarlet,’ complains Beverley. ‘I tell you something I’ve kept hidden all my life and all you have is a mild worry about whether or not you inherit unfortunate genes. Well, you do, though two generations down they are quite diluted. God knows what your father brought into the family. But it’s no use. You have sex on your mind. Just finish with the groceries and then fetch me my plant spray.’
Scarlet, surprised, gives up stacking Beverley’s frozen-food chest, and fetches the ugly green plastic flask Beverley uses to mist her geraniums. Beverley lifts the blanket that keeps her warm, pulls up her skirt, and gives her still quite shapely bare legs – albeit the left thigh still badly bruised from the surgeon’s efforts – a quick blast of water, and then asks Scarlet to come closer. Whereupon she aims a similar blast at Scarlet’s cheek, just below the spot where Louis allegedly hit her.
‘I get the water from the stream at the bottom of the garden,’ says Beverley by way of explanation. ‘In the old days the water from the River Fleet was thought to have healing powers. I find it works very well on the computer. When it crashes I give it a quick blast.’
Scarlet pushes back her damp hair in outrage. She presses her fingers where the bruise was meant to be, but feels no tenderness. She cannot think which is the worst conclusion: to suppose that there was no bruise in the first place, or that the water has done the healing. She decides the solution is not to think about it at all.
Down in the basement
I don’t think it’s haunted down here where I write. It’s just that at night there’s a general feel of busyness around me, a sense of movement, an urgency, a stirring in air that’s never quite still. It’s okay, I almost like it, it’s company. Just sometimes, like now, when I’m working late at night and invention falters and I pause and become conscious of my surroundings; and the dishwasher upstairs in the scullery has finished, and the chandeliers in the library above me have stopped tinkling and I know this means Rex has gone to bed, only then do I feel in the least spooked. If I listen hard there is something near by interrupting the silence, and I wish that it wasn’t.
It is a sound I can interpret only as an intent breathing too close by for comfort, and then a hissing and silence, hissing and silence, and a suggestion of the satisfaction of work well done – as if whoever’s standing next to me is inviting me to share their pride. Which I would, I am sure, if only you, ghost, whoever you are, were meant to be here, but you aren’t. You’re out of your time, your time is way back then, when you were the laundress with your steam iron, down here where the basic work of Yatt House has always been done, at least for the longer part of its existence. What I hear is the hiss of steam as a hundred years ago you press the iron on to damp fabric and then lift it again. And press, and lift. It is perfectly possible that it’s the radiators cooling down now the central heating has clicked itself off for the night, but I don’t think so. Go away anyway. This is my room, my space, my year to occupy it. I have work to get on with.
All the same I am contemplating giving up for the night. But I am startled by a sudden dreadful banshee wail, and another, and another. The neighbourhood cats are going courting. But it’s an eerie sound, less feral than human. And this one drives me upstairs fast. I remember what Aroha said about the kehua, the spirits of the homeless dead, and how they like to inhabit animals and birds: the screech of the morepork bird in the velvety Maori night is a case in point. I don’t suppose the kehua can travel from the other side of the world, and why would they want to, but I close down my computer quickly, check the shutters are properly barred, turn off the lights and get to bed and human companionship as quickly as I can.
Scarlet’s plan for leaving home
Where were we? Scarlet, the morning after the row, had woken alone in the double bedroom alcove, and heard Louis leave for work, half an hour earlier than usual. He did not come in either to apologise, say goodbye, or enquire after her bruise, so there was no obvious reason to amend her midnight decision to leave home, and at once. It was true she had a panicky moment or so. Supposing he was actually glad to see the back of her? Then she, not Louis, would be devastated. There was little point in leaving if not to punish him.
But he would no doubt call during the course of the day, having calmed down a little, and suppose things to be back to normal, only to find her mobile blocking him and no one at the end of the landline. And serve him right. He had admitted he loved Nopasaran more than he loved her, and must take the consequences. She need feel no guilt. At least Jackson was prepared to say he loved her. The big gentle brown eyes that so entranced teenagers, especially for some reason when his vampire fangs grew and dripped blood, had gazed into hers as he spoke and had been impossible to disbelieve. It would not last – she was no fool – but it did not have to last. Whatever did, these days? Jackson would serve as the lever to prise her apart from Louis, put an end to the absurdity that was her life with Louis. Yet when Jackson said he loved her she felt vaguely embarrassed. What did he mean by it? He wanted to fuck her, obviously; more, he had fucked her, and wanted to do it again. But was it more than that? What was the difference between being motivated by love, and motivated by lust? She had certainly never said ‘I love you’ to Jackson, let alone to Louis, except sometimes she thought she had felt it.
So few people talked of love any more. Mothers were often saying Remember I love you to their children, especially when they were splitting up with the father and going off with someone else, but so few adults sa
id it to each other. Possibly gays did but not heterosexuals. This was just not the age of romance. It seemed rather sad.
So when Jackson declared his love she subdued embarrassment and did her best to forget he was an actor and for all she knew merely parroting the lines of a scene in which he played some romantic lead. Stage rather than TV, perhaps some musical – he had a thrilling voice – stage plays being on the whole more sophisticated. I love you, I love you, I love you works well in song but nowhere else. If something seems too good to be true it may well be so, like investing your money in Icelandic banks. That you should meet someone like Jackson who was available, lived centrally, was sexual dynamite, had sufficient status not to worry about hers, earned good money – look at the Campion Tower penthouse – who did not play emotional games, was not a cynic, but actually rather simple, equating sex with love in an old-fashioned way, and on top of all this said he loved you. True, he didn’t read books; but that would be a relief. Louis read so many.
So now, Scarlet pulls on her vintage Levis and a navy Prada stretch T-shirt – raising arms made sore from where Louis had grabbed and squeezed them – and is pleased to feel the pain because it reminds her how impossible Louis is, and how no one can possibly blame her for leaving. She goes to the kitchen where Lola is making some kind of herbal tea. She has forgotten Lola. What is to be done about Lola? Sixteen-year-old Lola.
Scarlet has offered Lola sanctuary and now can hardly just abandon her. Lola dropped out of school four weeks back, not before stirring up a perfect storm of bad publicity for her parents, had a big row with her mother and went straight round to her aunt and asked if she could stay for a couple of weeks. Home had become unbearable. She was, said Lola, expecting an e-mail on her iPhone about her passage to Haiti, where she had been accepted by a disaster charity as an aid worker. Lola wanted to make a difference, save the world. How could Scarlet say no? Except that getting out to meet Jackson might be more difficult if Lola was around.