by Fay Weldon
The Yatt House staff would have a Saturday afternoon off once a month if it could be organised – looking after the gentry was a 24/7 affair – and a jaunt to Evensong every Sunday afternoon, when Sunday lunch was cleared away and a cold Sunday evening supper for upstairs had been prepared and laid. It isn’t far to go; All Saints’ Church, designed by Pugin, is just across the road. Once a year staff would have a weekend off to visit their families.
‘There now, that be a good job, quist,’ I hear a woman say, in my head or out of it. I also know I cannot believe the evidence of my own ears, since someone told me the other day that ‘quist’ in these parts was once used much as ‘innit’ is today. I have somehow got this notion of a wicker basket piled high with fresh, ironed, folded washing, and am all too likely to dredge my mind for convenient evidence.
The room is getting noticeably colder, but at least the sounds from the time-slipped world are diminishing, fading back to their proper place in, I imagine, somewhere around 1900. According to the local directory of that year a Mr and Mrs Bennett and their three sons Ernest, William and Thomas lived in this house. At any rate it feels safe enough for me to get up, turn the heating on again, listen to the gentle hissing and gurgling as hot water in the here-and-now world flows back into the pipes, and get back to my laptop.
Unfortunately it is now my characters’ turn to take offence at my neglect of them; they will not come easily to mind, other than that Alice née McLean, daughter to Beverley McLean, is up in Chester on her knees praying for her daughters, christened Mary and Joan (now Cynara and Scarlet, the ingrates), and for funds for a new church building. I am tempted for some reason to make Alice a member of the Minnesota Light of the Divine Canyon Church, but this is what I mean by characters getting out of hand. She will be simply Church of England and devout. Someone brought up by Beverley will quite reasonably seek stability, faith and respectability in their middle age. I’m having trouble enough getting Scarlet out of Robinsdale and into Jackson’s arms as it is, without involving an evangelical church in Minnesota.
In the kitchen at Robinsdale
‘Are you running to someone,’ asks Beverley, ‘or just running away in general?’
‘To someone,’ says Scarlet, automatically, though she had meant to tell no one. ‘Actually, it’s Jackson Wright, you know, the film star?’
‘No I don’t, I’m sorry,’ says Beverley. ‘I don’t go to the pictures very often. Films are so noisy nowadays.’
‘He’s rather like Russell Crowe.’ Scarlet refrains from adding ‘with vampire teeth’, in case it gives Beverley the wrong impression. Jackson is the gentlest man.
‘I’m afraid that doesn’t help. Is he expecting you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I just remember the shock your poor Uncle Richie had when your Aunt Solange came knocking on his door with a suitcase in either hand, saying she had run away from her husband and children and was moving in with him. He wasn’t expecting her at all. In fact he could hardly remember her name, but she had red hair, which he remembered from various art film festivals in the Rocky Mountains. It is so easy in these exotic locations for girls to get the wrong end of the stick. Your Uncle Richie thought he was passing the time every now and then, but she was a nice girl and assumed it was true love, just because he said it was. He let her stay – he had a film to finish and no time for domestic issues – and they are still together to this day and so far as I can see perfectly happy. I am sure it will work out okay for you too.’
Scarlet wonders why no one in her family takes her seriously. Perhaps if she could get out of fashion and into current affairs it would be better? As it is, in Cynara’s eyes she is a traitor to the feminist cause, in Louis’ eyes she is devoid of aesthetic understanding; in Lola’s eyes out of touch and over the hill; and her own grandmother dismisses the very idea of a ‘career’ – saying there was no such thing, only a bunch of self-styled feminists fooled by capitalism in the name of divide and rule, lured on by the idea of promotion to keep them working harder and longer than one another to the point of exhaustion. And her mother Alice hadn’t even cared enough about her to come to her wedding to Louis, saying ‘she didn’t have the time’. Which Cynara tactlessly reported to Scarlet as Alice thinking Louis and the whole fashion world was made up of homosexuals and druggies and she didn’t approve.
Scarlet had reacted by throwing a hissy fit, saying, very well then, Louis and I will live in sin if that’s what you prefer, calling off the wedding, and having the party without the ceremony, which few realised had not happened, they having gone straight to the reception in Nopasaran’s concrete garden. A good compromise. A marriage is a piece of paper; a wedding party the real thing. Who cared about parental approval anyway? That had been years back. Scarlet had since made it up with Alice, who had even quite come round to Louis, and looked forward to grandchildren. Now Alice would have Jackson Wright to contend with.
‘And you’ve known this film actor some time?’ enquires Beverley.
‘I went to his place three weeks ago to do an interview, and that was that,’ says Scarlet. ‘We’ve seen each other every day since then, except Sundays.’
‘I can see explaining this to Louis could be quite difficult,’ says Beverley. And she goes on to say that some warning before leaving home is customary, if only an e-mail or a fax, if anyone uses the latter any more, before saying goodbye. ‘Your sister Cynara at least e-mailed her husband out jobhunting in Dubai to say he was out on his ear and D’Dora was moving in. I’m afraid the whole thing has rather upset Lola. How is poor Lola? Are you leaving her at home with Louis? Is that quite wise?’
Scarlet observes that this is the twenty-first century and a male and a female can be in a room together without actual sexual congress occurring, and besides, Lola is family.
‘Not blood family to Louis,’ says Beverley, and Scarlet goes off to text Jackson and says to make that tea, not lunch. She is obstructed by family matters.
‘I hope you understand, Scarlet,’ says Beverley, ‘that Lola only came to stay with you in the first place to get back at her mother. And that you took her in to spite your sister, steal her toy. Children go to great lengths to be revenged on their parents, and siblings are almost as bad: they spend their time trying to drive the others out of the nest. Obviously Lola will now make as much trouble as she possibly can. Nature did not build happiness into the system, only the urge to survive.’
It occurs to Scarlet that Beverley is losing her marbles, retreating into some obscure Freudian fantasy about sibling rivalry. Is her brain going? Will she soon be sitting dribbling in a corner? Had not she, Scarlet, done everything she could not to take Lola in? If anyone had put pressure on her it was Louis.
‘This running away habit can get compulsive,’ says Beverley. ‘I am the first to admit it. But you younger girls seem to do it for fun. You look for excuses to go, not reasons to stay. Alice uses Jesus, Cynara uses D’Dora, you’re using Lola. At least Cynara has the sense to stay in her own home and ease poor Jesper out. Louis is a perfectly nice man. If you want to have affairs, have them. But don’t leave home.’
‘He’s dull,’ says Scarlet.
‘It’s not a crime to be dull,’ says Beverley. ‘There are worse faults.’
‘And anyway,’ says Scarlet, ‘we aren’t legally married so he isn’t my husband.’
‘Another cop-out,’ says Beverley. ‘If you had married him you would be safer from Lola. That’s how it works. Other women take a partnership as an invitation to mess things up, a marriage as a warning not to. Women without men are unhappy.’
Scarlet bites back the retort that Beverley was one to speak: she has married three men and buried three, and seems happy enough. Bad enough to have a sister who is a mad lesbian feminist, a mother who is a mad Jesus freak, and now a grandmother who, having started out as a mad Marxist, has ended up as a prim moralist. Why couldn’t she, Scarlet, have come from a normal family? Perhaps she was switched at birth? The mo
re she thinks about it the more likely it seems.
‘Extremes, like murder, run in the family,’ says Beverley. ‘The whole lot of you have a talent for acting out. Cynara became a feminist to annoy Alice, Alice took to religion because I was a Marxist. You, Scarlet, have reacted by becoming the most non-aligned person I have ever met. Perhaps it’s an advance. I dread the moment when Lola discovers the joys of alignment, joins animal rights and starts planting bombs.’
Murder in the family
‘Extremes, like murder, run in the family.’
Scarlet had been startled when Beverley said this, but it came as no surprise to Lola, who already took pleasure in the fantasy that her great-grandmother was a serial husband killer. When asked by Scarlet to take over the mercy food-runs to Robinsdale, Lola had looked astonished and responded, ‘On my own? No thanks. I’d be shit scared.’
Scarlet could point out as much as she liked that by the time any woman reached eighty the odds were that most of her husbands would have gone before to the grave, but reason cut no ice with Lola. The price Lola demanded if she was to fetch and carry for Beverley on her sickbed was to be allowed to drive Scarlet’s little Toyota Prius, green as green can be. She was a good driver – Lola was good at most things, other than getting on with her family – the problem was that she was too young to have a licence. Scarlet reckoned it would be okay, Louis was determined that it was not. Louis won, Scarlet capitulated and Lola sulked. Scarcely a day had gone by since Lola had moved in that was not marked by some such emotional and unnecessary storm. Occasionally Louis won, as on this occasion, sometimes Scarlet, but mostly Lola.
The deaths of Beverley’s husbands were certainly dramatic, though hardly suspicious. The first to die was Winter Max, in 1967. He was a Marxist believer with private means, who disappeared on his way to join Che Guevara in the jungle and was presumed dead. The second was Harry Batcombe, the Architect Laureate, who took his own life after being involved in a homosexual scandal. The third was Marcus Fletzner, a right-wing journalist and notable drunk, who fell beneath an Underground train. Foul play was not suspected. The feeling in the family has always been that Beverley was pleased enough to see them go, but that Lola went too far in supposing murder. Beverley did not like being bored, that was all; the men she chose were at least seldom boring, and not likely to die peacefully in their beds in the first place.
‘The dysfunctional fly to each other like iron filings to a magnet,’ Louis once said to Scarlet. ‘But better a family like yours than one like mine.’
He made the assumption that his own family was functional, which always rather puzzled Scarlet. Louis did a great deal to annoy his mother – taking up with Scarlet being one of his major departures from good form.
Or perhaps ‘murder in the family’ merely refers to Cynara’s history of terminations? Is that how Beverley sees them? Cynara was always sexually active, while at the same time renouncing contraception as part of the male plot against women. Perhaps Lola is a single child because, of all her succession of pregnancies, Lola was the only female conception? The others being male and therefore not wanted in the world? Single-handed Cynara fought back against the beliefs of China, where the girls are aborted and the boys are treasured. She wanted to right the balance. She was a trained barrister, specialising in gender law. She liked justice.
‘Tell me more about murder running in the family,’ says Scarlet, and instantly wishes she hadn’t.
The chutney, the coffee, the potato and tomato mash – just add water and stir – are now stacked in the cupboards. The mixed mushrooms with red wine polenta, which is to be Beverley’s lunch, is gently heating in the slow oven of the Aga – which is a six-oven model. If Scarlet sits down and listens, who is to say whether she will get to Costa’s even by teatime? She will need to check through what Lola’s packed, and make sure she hasn’t nicked the white transparent top she bought from Brown’s in South Molton Street for £105 (it is Jackson’s favourite) and confirm that Lola has actually taken her suitcase and left Nopasaran, as she promised. She can see that leaving Lola alone with Louis is not necessarily sensible, as Beverley points out, he not being a blood relative.
Moreover, Scarlet is seized by another anxiety. Supposing Jackson doesn’t get the text, turns up at lunchtime, thinks she has decided to go back to Louis, and changes his mind? Supposing he’s just another prize dangled before her by fate, only to be cruelly snatched away? Like the job on the New York Times op-ed pages that was once so nearly hers, that would have changed her life. Only someone else got the job, even younger and cheaper than she was. Like Eddie, the wealthy sports journalist, the one before Louis, who was so exciting and moved in with her and was an ex-alcoholic and ex-gambler, a frequenter of multiple-Anons, only it turned out he wasn’t any kind of ex of anything after all. He broke the place up when she said she wasn’t going to lend him any more money. He left shouting and screaming and stormed back to his previous girlfriend, a half-bottle of Scarlet’s best whiskey under his arm. He said it was all Scarlet’s fault for starting him off drinking again.
After Eddie, Louis had seemed a model of stability and genuine concern. It seemed so difficult to get everything into one person. She hadn’t realised how trying ‘dull’ could be. Now, thinking of Jackson, she has a strange airy feeling of exhilaration, fear, lust and anticipation mixed, that starts between her thighs and moves upwards to part her lips; it’s a kind of psychic breathlessness.
But it is too late. The definitive question has been asked. Scarlet is going to have to hang around to listen to the answer and Beverley will make a meal of it. As she does.
‘If you can bring yourself to sit down for a second, I will tell you. I swore I never would but circumstances require it. You’re not the only one with secrets.’
So Scarlet sits and finally listens to Beverley’s story, out of family courtesy, but she would much rather live in the here and now. She does not really want to know about the past.
A break for lunch
Come to think about it, your writer doesn’t really want to think about the past either: she can see that her current view of the next pages is all too likely to suddenly shift and change; and so, moved by the thought of mixed mushrooms with red wine polenta, which she too happens to have in her freezer, she is now going to break for lunch. Writing makes you very hungry: it’s a matter of the more you put out the more you need to take in. And food can steady you, whirled around as you so often are by a sudden flurry of possible alternatives. I am going to put on a lot of weight, I can see, between now and the end of the book, glued to my desk as I choose to be, instead of taking healthy exercise.
I go upstairs and wait for the microwave to do its work. It’s bright up here too, and the trees in the front garden are heavy with snow: the noise of traffic is muffled. Technology would soon have done all those servants out of a job anyway. Hot water comes out of taps, warmth radiates from the central heating, the Hoover takes the place of the brush, the dishwasher washes the dishes, the washing and drying machines do the laundry. The world moves on, and we must do our best to keep up.
We still labour and toil but at less physically exhausting things. I can write novels in the basement while the household more or less looks after itself. Mind you, nothing ever runs quite smoothly. There have lately been signs of poltergeist activity upstairs too, not just auditory hallucinations, but disappearances. Just little annoying things.
The other day Rex said, ‘Where’s the key to the back door?’ and I said, ‘It’s still in the lock, where you left it,’ because I’d just seen it there a minute ago. He went to look. It wasn’t there. We searched high and low and finally used the spare. The next day I found the missing key tucked away between two stacked cans of tomato purée on the shelf by the cooker. How could it possibly have got there other than by some agency wanting to make a minor nuisance of itself? Because we couldn’t explain it – other than that I was deranged, which I was not prepared to accept – we forgot it. Just one of those
things. Like the letter from the bank, which disappears from the kitchen table and is found later in a room where nobody’s been – the Coronation mug which falls and breaks, and must have leapt by itself from the hook it hung upon, because neither hook nor handle seems to have broken – that kind of thing. Yet there the pieces of china lie, and if you catch your finger on a sharp edge it will bleed. Nothing like blood for proving a reality.
Okay. Overlook these random events. There are such things as joint delusion and who wants to doubt the immutable laws of physics? Lunch was fine. But the gas bill was in and a letter from Inland Revenue. It will be baked potatoes and cheese from now on, and from Lidl’s at that. No more of this Waitrose frozen-food nonsense. My agent has gone to New York to see Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. It feels fitting. I fear I will end up like Veronica Lake, my childhood idol, who died alone and in penury. Or the prolific Walter Scott, who died worrying about money, looking for another plot to the bitter end. He had his family to support.
It is thankfully that I return to Scarlet and her grandmother and the house in Highgate. I sit down on my typing chair and bring the laptop back to life. But escape into the alternative universe is not so easy today. I don’t think this basement room can be described as technically or formally haunted, any more than is upstairs. Let me just say it seems rather more busy than usual down here; the air, which ought to be still, is overactive.
Where my typing table stands once stood a big solid pine table round which the staff would sit for meals. ‘Mavis, Mavis, where be you too?’ a voice calls, or perhaps it doesn’t, how can I tell? Because you hear it in your head doesn’t mean it has been said. Novelists have overactive imaginations: it’s why they make bad drivers. They’re always envisioning some scenario of disaster just over the brow of the hill.