by Fay Weldon
She had checked with Cynara, rather hoping she, fearing Scarlet would distract her daughter’s mind from serious issues by taking her to beauty parlours and Harvey Nic’s, would say no. One way or another, Scarlet thought, Cynara would get Lola back to school and resitting her exams, and she, Scarlet, would be safe. But Cynara seemed to have lost all interest in her unfortunate daughter.
‘I hadn’t heard about the Haiti bit,’ was all Cynara had said. ‘And she’ll have lied about her age. But I’ve had enough. Take her, keep her, and for your sake pray she leaves the country soon.’
Which Scarlet took as permission, which she would really rather not have had. She checked with Louis, assuming at least he would object.
‘If it’s okay by Cynara,’ Louis had said. ‘Take the poor girl in. She’s family.’
Scarlet was surprised but on reflection supposes Louis can put up with Lola because she is so smart, smart enough to qualify for the Government’s special needs subsidy as a gifted pupil. She is also quite ornamental, as he puts it. She has a teenage figure, skinny legs and middle, but a somehow blurry, fleshy face, with a jawline that is never quite clean and firm. It stays over-padded. She takes her features from her potato-faced father, not her mother, which as Louis observes is rather a pity. On the other hand Lola has a perfect polished dark-ivory skin, very large blue eyes beneath strong eyebrows, and an overbite that makes her full upper lip stick out in a surprisingly sexy way. Scarlet has every reason to believe Lola is a virgin. She has dismissed any fears that Louis might become sexually interested in Lola, though they have flashed through her mind. Louis has too great a sense of his own dignity not to feel and behave responsibly.
Besides, Lola speaks through her nose. When she gets excited she talks with a sharp whine that Louis admits to finding trying. Lola confided in Scarlet, as she was settling into the upper alcove, that recently someone at a party had told her the reason her voice was the way it was, was because she took too much coke and had damaged the tissues of her nostrils.
‘But that’s terrible,’ said Scarlet.
‘I haven’t snorted a single line since,’ said Lola. ‘It’s bound to get better. I’m only young.’
Scarlet reported the conversation to Louis in the hope that he might think better of having Lola in the house but no such luck. She wonders if Louis has a suspicion of Jackson’s existence, and wants Lola around for the same reason that Scarlet does not, but dismisses that fear too. Guilt can make you paranoiad.
All he said was, ‘You were the same at her age. You took Ecstasy, ran away from home and lived with Cynara. That’s when you changed your name to Scarlet, just to annoy your poor mother. I expect now Lola’s here she’ll change hers to Mary. Don’t fuss so, Scarlet. It doesn’t suit you. She’ll be off soon enough.’
Scarlet had indeed started life with the name Joan, and Cynara’s real name was Mary, but both daughters, at the earliest opportunity, had subverted their mother’s domestic dreams for their futures. The romantic spirit which afflicted the rest of the family had bypassed Alice.
So here Lola was, it seemed, in Nopasaran until her ticket from Help the Harmed came through, which never quite seemed to happen. It had been three weeks already.
‘That was quite a night,’ Lola complained as she squeezed the juice from the last grapefruit. There was not even the most primitive electric juice extractor. The kitchen, state of the art in 1937, was short of power points. ‘Why do you put up with it? You have these rows and when you have sex afterwards it usually goes on only for about ten minutes, shouldn’t it be longer? My friends say half an hour is more usual. And last night it didn’t go on at all.’
Scarlet is mortified. Of course Lola hears. So much for Wells Coates and his design for living in. There is no way Scarlet can go on sharing a roof with Lola, forget with Louis. All she wants is to be with the simplicity that is Jackson, away from Lola, away from Louis, away from the embarrassments of the past. But this would mean leaving Lola alone with Louis, and Lola, Scarlet suddenly perceives, has the gift for what Scarlet can only think of as manifold disruption. It may be one step down from having poltergeists manifest themselves around her, but somehow nothing in Lola’s ambience ever quite goes smoothly. At the very least electrical impulses discharge themselves around her.
Lola finishes squeezing her grapefruit, and licks the pulped fragments in their shell with her very pink, vibrant tongue, and Scarlet wonders how her own life would have been different if Lola had not been born. Certainly the messy horrors of Lola’s birth had been enough to put Scarlet off motherhood for life. If Lola had crept in unnoticed would last night’s row have been so dreadful? Had Cynara’s child turned out to be a boy, would D’Dora now be in Cynara’s bed? D’Dora being Cynara’s new lesbian lover.
Lola is the kind of girl, Scarlet sometimes thinks, who’d once have made the milk go sour when she passed a churn. The female equivalent of a Jonah: the unlucky one whose presence on board is enough to make the ship sink. And then she is ashamed of herself for thinking such uncharitable thoughts.
‘When Mum did it with Dad, you could hardly hear when they had sex,’ she goes on. ‘Now she’s with D’Dora there’s more noise. A lot of giggling and slapping and dressing up. I think perhaps it’s S&M. It can go on for hours. They never even think about my exams and how at my age I need sleep.’
‘Too much information,’ says Scarlet. ‘Allow your mother some privacy.’
‘Why? She doesn’t hide anything. She’s all for openness. She threw Dad out and invited D’Dora in. It didn’t occur to her I might not want two mothers, I wanted a father and a mother like other people. I can’t wait to get to Haiti.’
Lola had been tested for Asperger’s but failed to make the grade – she was normal, just too bright for her own good, they said – but at least had qualified for the gifted category, which was a lesser grant but still useful.
‘And it’s even worse here,’ Lola persists. ‘Rows are even more upsetting than sex. And there’s not even a proper bedroom to sleep in so I can close the door. Why do you stay with Louis? He hit you. Mother would die if I told her. Why don’t you just move out?’
‘There’s you to look after,’ says Scarlet.
‘I’ve got friends,’ says Lola. ‘They have sofas. I don’t need you. I can be out of here by this afternoon. I will be. Can I borrow your transparent white top thing?’
‘No you can’t,’ says Scarlet, automatically.
‘Why not?’
‘It isn’t decent.’
‘You wear it,’ says Lola, ‘when you go and meet that man.’
‘I don’t meet any man,’ says Scarlet.
‘You are such a liar. And Louis never notices a thing. Or perhaps he does and doesn’t say anything. What’s his name?’
‘Jackson Wright,’ says Scarlet.
‘Wow!’ says Lola, impressed. ‘So what stops you?’
‘You,’ says Scarlet. ‘I can’t abandon you.’
‘Like I said, don’t mind me,’ says Lola. ‘You go and I’ll be out of here before Louis gets back.’
Scarlet thinks: well then, that’s it, last obstacle to new life overcome. What was there to lose? She could work from Jackson’s flat in Campion Tower as well as she could from Nopasaran. All you needed these days was a laptop and an iPhone and you could be anywhere in the world. She had to put in an appearance at the office two or three times a week max; and now she’d be able to walk from Soho, not have to make the tedious journey from Belsize Park. She was certainly not weighed down by possessions, having accumulated so few over the partnered years. Louis’ taste reigned supreme. Early in the relationship she’d brought home a set of really pretty dinner plates she’d seen in a sale in Selfridges’ window and he’d been so rude about them she’d thrown them at him one by one, and even then he had only worried about the walls, which was absurd because they were rough Bauhaus concrete anyway and the odd dent wasn’t going to show. So if she travelled light, so light that home was merely a concep
t, like Nopasaran itself, not a reality, and there was nothing to bind her to it, Louis had only himself to blame if she cut loose.
She called Jackson. He answered, presumably from bed, in his deep throaty voice. He didn’t get up until after eleven. Sometimes Scarlet would go round to the Campion Tower penthouse at midday and find him still in bed, warm and vigorous and inviting. Afterwards they would shower together beneath a generous blast of water and sometimes the sex would start all over again. Nopasaran’s shower had been exceptionally fine in 1937, no doubt, but was down to a dribble now. The original shower head, advanced for its time, was, alas, in all the architectural records, and Louis became hysterical and threatened murder and suicide if Scarlet suggested it was replaced. Though she had to admit Nopasaran’s bath was sumptuous, Carrera marble, rather like the ones you got in the old Savoy before the makeover. She had stayed there with a lover or two. Indeed, she had tried out many of the best hotels in London. The beds in the Ritz were best, but there was always building work going on somewhere, as in so many of the old hotels, and the sudden noise of pneumatic drills could be disturbing. New places, like Campion Tower, with its ten storeys and its glassy curved frontage, sensitive to Soho’s planning requirements if not their spirit, needed little maintenance.
‘I want to move in with you,’ she’d said to Jackson, just like that. ‘I want to come with my suitcases right now.’
There was only the briefest of pauses. ‘That’s fantastic,’ he said. ‘You’re actually going to leave hubby?’
She wished he had not put it quite like that. What sort of world did he live in where people referred to their partners as hubby? Perhaps it was ironic? But Jackson, she had to admit, was not hot on irony.
‘Yes I am,’ she said, and the die was cast.
‘You’re not going to change your mind? I don’t want my life shattered, not again.’
Jackson’s life, shattered? He hadn’t told her about that, whatever it was. So far all he had dwelt upon was the shallowness of relationships pre-Scarlet. Well, he would tell all, given time. Somehow she had assumed that Jackson, unlike Louis, had lived a charmed life, unafflicted by pain or trauma, that he had sprung into life fully formed in order to provide her with a bed to move into. But of course it was not like that.
‘I won’t do change it,’ she said.
‘Then I can’t wait.’
He sounded as if he meant it. It wasn’t a very good line, not an actor’s line, a worked-on line: it was genuine. The only bad thing about Soho was the parking. But she could get a resident’s parking space as soon as she moved in. And it was not some kind of major life decision, this was just a moving in, with not even a party to celebrate it.
Jackson told her he was on his way out now; he had one or two things to do, a meeting with the Upstairs, Downstairs movie people, which might drag on, but if she got to Costa’s at lunchtime he would meet her there. She should park in the underground car park and he’d be down to help her with her suitcases. Everything was going to go right in her life from now on in. He admired her. She was so brave. He couldn’t wait. Nor could she. He uttered a word or two of love, and she found parting, even just putting down the phone, to be such sweet sorrow it must be true love.
And that was that. Scarlet was off. You know how it is, reader, you know how it is, even though you so sensibly equate true love with neurotic dependency. Love has its charms, and wilful abandonment of common sense is one of them. Jackson actually had to go to his ex-wife’s house in Battersea to collect his driving licence, and had been dropped from the Upstairs, Downstairs film that very week, and knew it. But he also knew what impressed women and what did not, and being banned from driving was one of the latter.
There were a few things Scarlet needed to clear up before Louis came back and found her gone. She must get the address book on a memory stick, answer a few e-mails which needed to be replied to that morning, take the box files marked ‘family’ and ‘legal’, and be off. If everything was in good order when Louis returned then he’d have nothing to complain about other than her actual absence.
Beverley! What about Beverley? Scarlet remembered she was meant to be stocking her grandmother’s fridge that very morning. Beverley refused to have a live-in nurse while she convalesced, so it was left to her family to do it. ‘Family’ usually meant Scarlet, the others being so preoccupied with their own affairs. Her mother was skulking up in the North, Cynara was changing partners and her husband Jesper was now out of the picture, and Lola always looked blank if asked to help. Well, that was okay. Scarlet reckoned she could get round to Waitrose, buy and deliver at speed, try not to get into conversation, get back to pick up her bags and still be well on time to meet Jackson for lunch. She would ask Lola to pack for her. Lola would know what she needed. She shared Scarlet’s taste in clothes. Cynara had done what she could to educate Lola out of excessive femininity but had failed. One of Lola’s current complaints was that while she, Lola, wasn’t even allowed to show her tummy, let alone navel pierce, and everything had to be machine washable at forty degrees, D’Dora had brought with her all kinds of frilly and velvety sensuous things that had to go to the dry cleaners, not to mention – as Lola was pleased to point out – chains, whips, black leather hoods and long red latex boots, which D’Dora claimed was a collection of Victorian erotica, more rare and valuable every year.
So that was how Scarlet, an unwilling listener to Beverley’s life story, came that morning to be unloading ready-made meals from Waitrose into Beverley’s fridge, while Jackson went off to see his ex-wife and Lola packed, and did the chambermaid’s trick of stuffing a few of Scarlet’s more delectable undies beneath a cushion to steal later.
Meanwhile the kehua hung unseen, folding and unfolding their shadowy wings like fruit bats, from the branches of the palm tree that exploded its fronds in Nopasaran’s atrium, and chattered in excitement. Something was happening in the McLean hapu, for whom they had responsibility. Louis was at his office wondering if he should call Scarlet or let her stew, and the widower Gerry, Beverley’s erstwhile sweetheart – whom we have yet to meet – was on the Faröe Islands, wondering whether a man would be wise to woo a woman who, however charming and wealthy, had already been widowed three times. Desire calls so often, yet practicalities and prudence intervene.
Back to the basement
Find your writer fresh and rational this Monday morning, after a good night’s sleep and in charge of her material. Alas, it becomes apparent, those who hover around the brickwork, the old kitchen range, the wine cellar and the laundry tubs are also in fighting form, determined to make their presence felt.
Rex dismisses what I hear as ‘auditory hallucinations’ and I daresay he is right. There is nothing other-worldly to be seen, just rather a lot to be heard. I am not saying any of these sounds exist in actuality; it’s just that I – defining ‘I’ as the sum of my senses, and how else can it be done? – hear things for which there is no obvious explanation. The laundress is back with a vengeance. I denied her existence last night and she is determined to make her point. I suspect that a hundred years ago or so she used to turn up on Monday mornings and has no intention of stopping, though a long time ago lost her corporeal form. I think she liked doing the laundry. I hear the sound of whooshing water and taps running – she is late enough in the house’s history for there to be taps, though there will have been many visiting laundresses before and I daresay a few after – and hear the sound of bristle brush on fabric and the squeak of a wringer as the handle revolves and the rubber cylinders turn. There’s also the fitful sound of what could be a woman singing. But then again it might be the plumbing of the house above or the central heating radiators down here – they are turned up high; it is very cold today – and it’s true one interprets sound as one does sight, in accordance with what one expects.
I get up as smoothly as I can from my desk – I find I do not want to draw attention to myself, almost as if I am according her more right to be here than I have, which
is absurd – scuttle to the wall, turn the knob of the central heating panel to off, and get back to my desk as quickly as possible. I don’t want to disturb the status quo, lest I stir something up even more unsettling. The panel cools, its gurgling and hissing stops. But that leaves the other sounds, clearer than ever. What I’m hearing is what I heard vaguely last night, but now in detail: someone wetting the clean dried sheets, applying the iron – heated on the range – so the steam rises, hissing, and then the heavy hot weight smooths the damp, newly boiled white laundry: the sheets, the embroidered pillowslips and tablecloths, the aprons, and the master’s shirts. The folding is being done to perfection, edge to exact edge. I reckon somebody who once worked here was so proud of their work they never quite wanted to go away. I prefer this comforting version of servant life, rather than the alternative – that past misery keeps their spirits trapped down here. Life may be hard but people have a great gift for enjoying it.
A house this size – substantial but not too grand – would have had a cook, a nanny when the children were small, a maid and perhaps a tweenie to assist; a manservant, a gardener’s boy, and a groom. The cook would have slept down here near the kitchen, female servants would have slept up in the attics under the eaves, two or three to a bed if necessary – where now my husband has his office and plays his piano. The outdoor staff, the men, slept above the stables. No one was necessarily unhappy, and they certainly weren’t lonely. At least they were safe, warm and fed, which was more than could be said for many.