by Fay Weldon
I reckon Mavis is the tweeny, one down from the kitchen maid, two down from the cook. Life in the basement is strictly stratified. She’s setting up for tea in the staff dining room and I can’t see her but I can feel her. It’s okay. She’s just there, left over from the past when the generations got swept up. She’s companionable. A flapping sound. That’s her shaking out the tablecloth: she hasn’t bothered to use the crumb tray, so the crumbs are scattered all over the floor. We’ll get mice at this rate. Cook will be furious if she sees. Mavis doesn’t want me to pay her any attention, she just wants to get on. Like Lola, she’s sixteen, going on seventeen, but without the luxury of Lola’s discontent, or Lola’s postmodern anorexia. She has long, rather greasy dark hair – hot water is not easily come by, it is fifty years before the invention of detergent, and instead of each hair being coated with glossy conditioner it is coated with a soap scum which thickens it but makes it dull. Adding vinegar to the rinsing water helps but never enough. Mavis has a rounded figure, nice innocent brown eyes and a plump, still unformed face. I don’t know how I know what she looks like, but I do. I see her as one would see an old photograph, mottled by age.
Like Mavis, I too must get on with my work. Is it cold in here? Yes, it is. But how can that be? The central heating is blasting away: the heating engineer who last worked on the house got his figures wrong so the large rooms are underheated and the small rooms too hot. I know that ghosts and cold chills are associated, but I reckon that warmth too is suffering a time slip at the moment. If Mavis shivers so do I, that’s all. Or even more plausibly, since there are now a few inches of snow just the other side of a thin sheet of glass, it’s not surprising that I am cold. I put on the mittens with the coloured-wool bobbles on the knuckles, which Lizzie gave me for Christmas, to keep my fingers thawed. Lizzie lives hereabouts; she is a friend, teaches the flute and keeps sheep, and I watch the bright bobbles fly as my fingers speed up. Lizzie has been down here to the basement to see my new office and assures me the house isn’t haunted. It has a perfectly nice atmosphere. She speaks as one who has experience of these things.
The first murder: a set piece
‘You never told me,’ says Scarlet.
She can see the Alexandra Palace mast between the trees. She feels it is probably transmitting invisible rays of evil, jagged and ill-intentioned, cursing her designs for the future. Why did she have to find this out now? She feels wronged: and frightened that her resolution might drain away. In Japan, if a criminal act occurs in the family, the guilt and shame remain for generations. Even two hundred years later you sometimes can’t get a job. Criminality ran in the blood, like Korean ancestry. She had researched an article on it, so she knew. Her great-grandfather had murdered her great-grandmother back in 1930-something-or-other, and no one had seen fit to mention it, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.
‘Well, no,’ says Beverley. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, not if you hadn’t mentioned love at first sight. It’s the kind of thing that’s better forgotten. Then Walter my father went and shot himself. Well, men often do, in these circumstances. They’ve killed the thing they love. Though I don’t suppose Louis has a gun. But do remember that murder, as well as victimhood, runs in your veins. I’d be more worried for this Jackson, if he ever runs out on you. But not to worry. I’ve managed to get through life without being accused of murder, as have all you young ones. Alice would be shocked at the very thought. Beryl Bainbridge had a near miss from your sister Cynara some years back, mind you. Asked for her definition of “woman”, Beryl replied, “Why, a person who has babies,” and Cynara ran on to the platform and attacked her. Mind you, if you count abortion as murder, Cynara is certainly a dab hand at it.’
‘That’s absurd,’ says Scarlet, who has had two terminations herself.
‘But we won’t worry about that too much,’ says Beverley. ‘According to Maori mythology the ghosts of aborted or miscarried babies stay around to look after the family, so you two younger girls are well protected. They’re probably a match for the kehua.’
‘The kehua?’
‘They flap around on the edges of one’s vision if the proper rituals aren’t carried out after death,’ says Beverley. ‘They can’t get home. They live in trees. They attach themselves to the living, and do what they can to bring them back to the pa, the home village. Kehua can be a real drag. Mind you, we were only pakeha, white people, and I left New Zealand decades back. I can hardly have brought any with me. Me and mine are no use to them.’
Beverley is making it all up, thinks Scarlet. Her father wasn’t even called Walter, he was a doctor called Arthur and there was a mother called Rita. This Kitchie has never been mentioned. And even if it is true, this is not Japan, and though it may be news to me, it is extremely old news. An event that happened seventy years ago can hardly be relevant today. As for kehua, ghostly flappings about the head, that way madness lies.
It was true that Scarlet herself occasionally suffered from zigzag flashes out of the corner of the eye, and had even complained about these visual disturbances to the doctor, but he had said it was a form of visual migraine and prescribed aspirin, which always worked.
All the same the ground seemed to have slightly shifted beneath her feet, as if she were getting out of bed after an earthquake she’d slept through, and found the floor was sloping. Last night she seemed to remember she’d picked up the bread knife and said to Louis, ‘I’ll kill you.’ He had taken the knife from her hand because of course she had no intention of using it, and she had let it go easily enough before anyone hurt themselves. Though she had managed to nick his wrist and blood had flowed. Had she known then what she knew now, that murderous genes ran in the blood, would she have refrained from picking up the knife in the first place, or would it all have been worse? Apparently, when the knife goes in through living flesh it meets less resistance than one supposes, which is why knife wounds so often end up fatal.
‘One-two, one-two, down the dusty road,’ says Beverley. ‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Running away is so often the best answer, second best to doing nothing. But that’s enough of that.’
‘Running away’ was all very well as a phrase, and Scarlet could see it was fine in theory, but then if you did there would be no home. It was like a piece of careful knitting, which you could undo by pulling a single thread and then suddenly it was just a pile of wool and no garment at all. She could change her mind now and no one would know a thing – except Lola, of course, waiting in the wings, packing Scarlet’s runaway case even now, egging her on to leave, and if she, Scarlet, didn’t follow through, Lola would despise her for her lack of purpose, her dithering and flapping, and rightly so. The coward’s course was to do nothing, and that was the path Beverley was trying to make her follow. Well, she would not. She was young and brave: she would throw herself into the future as Lola was throwing herself into Haiti; would not run like Cynara from Jesper the frying pan into D’Dora the fire; or like her mother into the arms of Jesus. She was doing something far less drastic: holing up with Jackson for a little but still very definitely her own person. If she stayed with Louis she would end up a mother in Nopasaran and that would be the end of personhood, the end of her. She was already late with her life: she was nearly thirty and what had she achieved?
‘Poor Cynara,’ her grandmother was saying. ‘She got all that feminist stuff so wrong. It was just a capitalist plot to lower male wages by getting women into the workforce. Which happened, and now look. We told them so but they dismissed us as male stooges. Now the rich are richer and the poor are poorer and no one can do anything about it. I don’t suppose before you rush off to your lover you have time to wash my hair?’
‘Oh Gran,’ protests Scarlet, ‘I really do have to rush. And it is such an important day for me. Doesn’t your carer come this afternoon?’
‘I’ve run out of shampoo,’ says Beverley. ‘And if she pops out to get some she’ll bring back some kind of harsh stuff li
ke oven cleaner because anything else is a wicked waste. You’ve no idea what these people are like.’
Scarlet compromises by staying to make her grandmother a cup of coffee. Beverley likes it hideously strong, with brandy in it. Scarlet does not mention that she has a couple of Alterna White Truffle shampoo sachets in her Chloé tote bag, being a wash-everyday person, and you never know quite where you’ll end up. Scarlet bought the bag mostly to annoy her sister, who is affronted by needless extravagance. And she certainly doesn’t want her grandmother asking how much the shampoo costs. As it is she has to peel the price labels from the Waitrose shopping before she brings it into the house, in case her grandmother demands she takes it all back and goes to Lidl’s.
Jackson too is in a rush
Jackson Knight is an ex-child actor who starred in the 1980s remake of the children’s film Danny in the Orchard and later as the teen hero of the Vampire Rising trilogy, and as a well-endowed young man in a number of unspectacular art movies. He hovers on the edges of B- and C-list celebrity and has made the columns of the Daily Mail, by virtue of appearing from time to time as an A-list squeeze. He has recently all but rescued his career by accepting the part of Hudson, the charming Scottish butler of admirable rectitude, in the big-budget film remake of the old TV show Upstairs, Downstairs. A drunken altercation in a pub with its director had left him without the part, or indeed an agent.
‘Sorry, Jackson, you just don’t get it.’ Mike Bronstein had got through to him the next day. ‘Sure, he’s a TV director and never made a movie, but the Internet is the future, TV is the present and movies are maybe dead. And in my book – sorry mate – so are you. There is such a thing as politesse.’
Jackson then told Bronstein what he thought of him. Bronstein and his exploiting like were the scum of the earth. Twenty per cent in return for a few phone calls – what a shit way to earn a living. Bronstein told Jackson he was yesterday’s man and had better get himself a job as a taxi driver. He wouldn’t find another agent, unless he turned himself into a gay icon, which was a good idea. Heterosexuality was so last week, my dear. Hadn’t Jackson realised? Probably not, being one sandwich short of a lunch box, one nostril short of a snort. He, Bronstein was shutting up shop, going home to look after his grandchildren. He was needed at home: he couldn’t keep them in nannies any more. The film business was finished. So was he. He had busted a gut to get Jackson the part; as it turned out too many people had been looking for an excuse to get rid of him. Jackson had played right into their hands.
Jackson and Bronstein had ended up weeping on each other’s shoulders in Groucho’s, but that still didn’t mean Jackson had an agent. Business would pick up again; it always did. An actor’s life was full of ups and downs. It wasn’t as if he was a girl and finished at thirty-seven. There was no point in telling Scarlet: he could scarcely tell himself. Losing the part meant he was in deep shit financially, which was astonishing, and for the first time in his life left him actually wondering how to pay the rent. He rented because he didn’t want his ex-wife, or any future wife, to grab the home. Now he regretted it, though a man like him had to be careful; women flocked, but often for all the wrong reasons.
Scarlet earned good money and there was obviously more in the background – he had once filmed in Nopasaran – and the fact was not far from his mind when she called that morning and he said yes so promptly. But only of course one of the reasons. He liked her. He liked the way she had big breasts confined within a narrow frame. She made him feel he had a brain, that he was more than a sex toy. He wanted to move up the scale, intellectually and artistically. Of course she could move in. It would make the gossip columns. It would be easy enough to dump his latest, a small-time lingerie model of undoubted looks, serpentine body and sexual talent, with a gift for wrapping her long legs around a man’s neck and practically knotting them. But she had no conversation, let his washing build up; he owed the dry cleaners money. That very morning some old biddy who didn’t know who he was had all but refused to return his Diesel jeans from the other side of the counter. The jeans could be washed, apparently, but he didn’t understand the instructions. What did a triangle with a line through it mean?
And that’s the kind of person Jackson is, and if Scarlet wasn’t so bored by Louis and fed up with Nopasaran she would not have been taken in by him for one minute. More, Jackson is both charming and needy, and has his sexual uncertainties. Bronstein is too old to understand. Since the world stopped seeing itself as being composed of two genders, but rather of a multiplicity of them – so far as desire if not procreation is concerned – the problem of who’s good, who’s bad; who’s the hero and who’s the villain, has become confused. And the sexually ambiguous, like the dysfunctional, cling together. You’re confused, I’m confused – wow! You don’t even have to touch if you’re on the Internet – you’re just in each other’s company.
I the writer am not condemning Jackson. If a lingerie model slithers down from the tree of knowledge and twines her legs around his neck, why on earth should he resist? And if she brings a friend with her, why not? Who’s talking about love round here? They may soon be talking about money because so far as they know and the world knows Jackson is loaded.
Now since Scarlet will be turning up with her suitcase, he quickly changes the sheets on the bed, tidies up a little, checks the sofa for stray panties – that happened to him once: one night’s girl had found last night’s scraps of torn lace, but had only laughed and asked what was the matter with the bed, though Jackson preferred the sofa; the bed smacked of permanence. And he would have to get down to his ex-wife’s house in Battersea that morning to collect his driving licence, because if Scarlet was moving in it might be difficult for him to get out without her finding out where he was going, and he had to present the licence at the police station before the end of the week.
Beverley talks about her will
Beverley drinks her coffee; Scarlet, fearful always for her complexion, sips hot water.
‘I really do appreciate your company, Scarlet,’ says Beverley. ‘Especially in the circumstances. I’d alter my will to give you even more money but I fear this new scoundrel actor of yours would only get his hands on it. It would end up with his first family. It always does.’
‘He hasn’t got a first family,’ says Scarlet. ‘And he isn’t a scoundrel.’
‘Of course he has a first family,’ says Beverley. ‘They always do. Sometimes it’s in the past and sometimes it isn’t. But it’s always the way. And the brightest girls end up with the worst men. Look at me. Bright girls long to be absolved of their cleverness. Louis would run through your inheritance but at least he’d put it into bricks and mortar. That mad house of his. I’m assuming you have it in joint names? You’re a fool if you haven’t. Now Jesper’s gone, anything I leave Cynara will end up with D’Dora and the Lesbian and Gay Sorority. But perhaps that’s better than it all ending up with Lola, which would happen if Jesper was still around. Do be careful of Lola. She has endearing qualities, but many of the more undesirable family traits.’
‘Like murdering people?’ asks Scarlet, thinking she is joking, but Beverley just shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘More people do that than you would ever imagine.’
Beverley’s knee is hurting. She thinks perhaps the wound, not yet quite healed, has been infected with MRSA after all. Everyone who has recently been in hospital has become a little nervous of these things. It’s rather like the days of her youth back again – when people were reluctant to go to hospital in case they never came out: go in feet first, come out feet first. There was no MRSA then, she reflects, but there were no knee replacements either. Nothing is for nothing. Scarlet, as Beverley notices, in spite of her earlier ill-concealed longing to get away now, now, now, seems rather reluctant to do so. Perhaps some of the things Beverley has been saying are sinking in? It’s unlikely, she knows. Wisdom has to be reborn with each generation.
‘Gran,’ Scarlet is saying, ‘I have no choice. Last night L
ouis hit me. You must see that is unforgivable?’
‘Who won’t forgive it?’ asks Beverley. Her mouth sets in a grim straight line, which it sometimes did, for no apparent reason, and which Scarlet, even as a small child, when the mouth was plumper and fuller than it is today, always wished it wouldn’t. ‘You? Or some mass consensus driven by your sister and her lesbian friends?’
‘This is nothing to do with Cynara,’ says Scarlet. ‘And why do you have to say lesbian friends, why can’t you just say friends? Men shouldn’t hit women; I hope at least we agree on that. I have no intention of ending up a battered wife. If a man hits you it is practically your duty to leave.’
‘I see no sign of injury,’ says Beverley. ‘Perhaps you had been drinking? Most domestic rows are fuelled by alcohol, and those involved regularly deny it. Too much champagne at MetaFashion for Louis? For you, perhaps too many vodka martinis – or whatever it is you drink these days – with your lover earlier on?’
MetaFashion is the business Louis runs and partly owns, designing and shipping sets for fashion shows the world over. A lot of accurate logistics and camp tension goes with the job. Everyone’s gay except Louis.
‘I was not drunk,’ says Scarlet, glossing over the detail of the vodka martinis, which Beverley had not got exactly right. ‘Louis had been drinking champagne with his partner D’Kath, because they’d finally got Icehouse Vamp out of the workshops and off to Paris.’
‘I can’t follow you,’ says Beverley. ‘But at least you take an interest in his work.’
‘I don’t just take an interest,’ says Scarlet. ‘I give him most of his ideas.’
‘I know, I know,’ says Beverley. ‘And Louis makes you live in this dreadful house way out in the suburbs, that is to say, practically round the corner from me, which is falling to bits and on which he spends a fortune. Wealth trickles away. But it is not an awful house; people from all over come to admire it and you are a very, very lucky girl to have ended up in it.’