by Fay Weldon
Scarlet acknowledges that she was glad enough to invite people to the party in Nopasaran’s concrete garden after her and Louis’ non-wedding, there being no other venue like it in all London. A great place for parties, and she knew at the time it would stand her in good stead if she ever wanted to move over into Interiors or World of Design.
‘I’ve had six years of it,’ says Scarlet. ‘That’s a long enough shift. And whose side are you on anyway?’
‘Louis’s,’ says Beverley smartly.
Her knee is aching. Her hair feels horribly greasy. She thinks at any moment she is likely to die and she would at least like to lie in her coffin with her hair at its best. Or do undertakers do it for you anyway? As one gets older it is the kind of thing one wants to know.
‘Just find me the painkillers before you leave, Scarlet. And do remember Louis is real, not a figment of your imagination. He can do real things, turn nasty, change locks, call lawyers, that kind of thing. An abandoned man feels you’ve upset the natural order of things and vengeance is in order. Failing that, he will certainly do what he can to replace you. He will have no trouble. Women prettier and younger than you will be queuing up at the faintest whiff of a free man.’
‘They’re welcome,’ says Scarlet, and looks for the painkillers.
Beverley belonged to another age, in which man was the breadwinner and woman was the chattel, and the man used her jealousy as a weapon against her. ‘If you don’t oblige I’ll soon find someone who does.’ It was demeaning. Changing from one man to another was not the big deal it once was. The Walter and Kitchie story would hardly happen now, the human race evolved, got better, more self-aware. At any rate the middle classes did. Louis’ anger at rejection could hardly make the heavens fall in, invoke hammer blows and lightning strikes from Thor, or whoever it was up there who punished you. All the same, she would be careful and not tell Louis about Campion Tower; he could have her solicitor’s address. Partners switched all the time, everybody did it and everyone accepted it and tried to be civilised, and hearts got broken but soon mended. It wasn’t as if she and Louis had children he could put in the back of the car and fix a pipe up from the exhaust with the engine running.
‘I think you’ve got Louis all wrong,’ says Scarlet.
‘No one ever knows what a man is really like,’ says Beverley. ‘Did Kitchie know what my father was like? I’d say probably not. All that red, sticky stuff when she annoyed him, tried to leave him. I wish I could remember the colour of my shoes, but I daresay I’ve blanked out the memory, and left only my knees going one-two, one-two, all the way to Rita. The blood probably didn’t get up more than an inch or so: it depends what sort of thrashing around my poor mother did. I remember the blue and white checks of my dress, and the red streaks turning black as I ran. I’ve never been able to wear check gingham since. Odd.’
‘You should get over that if you can,’ says Scarlet, fighting back, cool as can be. ‘Check gingham suits any age. It’s lovely stuff. There was quite a fashion for it in the thirties, when most children’s clothes were made at home. I wrote a piece about it once. I daresay Kitchie ran the dress up for you.’
‘I daresay she did,’ says Beverley. ‘But one way and another it ended up quite spoiled. And do make sure Lola isn’t there when Louis gets home. She’s quite capable of saying one thing and doing another. She lives in so relative a universe she lacks even the concept of lie.’
‘Gran,’ says Scarlet. ‘To Lola, Louis is Methuselah. To Louis, Lola is a cultureless baby. Let’s stop fighting. If that story is true and not just you trying to frighten me into staying home, then it’s terrible and I’m really sorry.’
‘It is true,’ says Beverley.
‘And not just you wanting me to start having babies and add to the number of your descendants?’
‘The way things are going,’ says Beverley, dismally, ‘certainly not. Better the line dies out.’
‘I have no intention of breeding. There is more to life than passing it on.’
‘You could have fooled me,’ says her grandmother, so sadly Scarlet relents and says, ‘Tell you what, I have some shampoo in my bag. I’ll stay and do your hair if you like.’
‘I thought you were meant to be running to your lover.’
‘I’ve already texted him to say I’ll be late,’ says Scarlet.
Beverley’s golden age, when you come to think of it, is probably as much now as it ever has been, enjoying the peace and tran quillity of Robinsdale, her family helping her out, elderly suitors thinking of visiting, private health insurance and behind her a life if not well spent, certainly lived to the full. The only thing Beverley lacks is youth, though some may see that as overwhelmingly important. We should not grudge her good fortune; she has had a hard time getting here. Three husbands down and possibly still one to go.
Night in the basement
It’s cosy down here. Supper upstairs is over – a rerun of yesterday’s, when we had people round. Couscous, minced beef and vegetables stirred together and reheated in the wok, and the remains of the fruit salad, by now slightly fermented and the better for it. Often I give up writing for the day at suppertime – but it’s nine now and I’m still in writing mode so I thought I’d spend another couple of hours at the computer checking over that last conversation between Beverley and Scarlet and the description of Nopasaran. Years ago I stayed in a Wells Coates house in Yeoman’s Row in Kensington and I’ve never forgotten it. Wells himself even once called by. Architects tend to live anywhere but in houses they have themselves designed. He was a very good-looking man. The house was so chic and so uncomfortable, and its inhabitants so truly good to me when I ran away from my own home that I still remember them with gratitude. I got a dreadful cold in the nose: ‘Weeping with the nose, not with the eyes’, a psychoanalyst later said, in the days when analysis was all the fashion. ‘Not surprising. Always the shift downwards.’
I may have Nopasaran inhabited now by entirely fictional folk, but someone obsessive like Louis was bound to end up buying it, someone smart like Scarlet bound to share it with him. The flapping kehua are worldwide; the inheritance of trauma past, English version, follows me from generations back. The central heating is purring away. The boiler switches itself on and off. Too good to last.
There is a slight rustling noise from inside the storage cupboards that have been fitted sometime in the last fifty years, where once a kitchen grate used to be. A mouse? I open the cupboard. No movement. Just shelves and spare china and glasses put there for safety, but no apparent origin for the rustling, and now the sound of metal on metal, which might be there and might not. It’s easy to imagine things. I shut the door again, quietly. I know what it is. It’s the kitchen maid again. It’s Mavis. She’s clearing the grate of ashes and laying the fire – scraps of paper from Mrs Bennett’s waste-paper basket upstairs, kindling chopped by Teaser the outside boy, and small coal. The chimney will still be warm, the kindling and coal will have dried out nicely, and the house is on a hill so this fire always draws nicely. She’ll have no trouble lighting it.
I hear Mavis sigh: she must be tired but she likes to do things properly, even this late. The Bible tells her to be diligent. She is. I can’t see her today, but I’m in her mind. She will be up at five to put a match to the fire, and lay for the staff breakfast at six. Cook will be down at five-thirty. Mr Bennett will breakfast at eight, before going off in the gig down the steep hill to Loddenham Station to catch the train to Salisbury, where he practises law. Cristobel Bennett likes her breakfast in bed. The three little boys, Ernest, William and Thomas, and their nanny, will have trays brought up to the nursery. Thomas is the one who survived the war to inherit the house. I don’t know what Nanny’s name is, for some reason. Perhaps she’s never been granted one? Just generic ‘Nanny’.
Silence now from the cupboard. Light, young footsteps across the floor in front of me, a puff of air as the lamp is extinguished and a slight smell of acrid oil smoke and its gone. All so quickly
it might not have happened at all. I’m not frightened. Not a haunting, just a timeslip.
The Bennetts imposed their stamp upon Yatt House and it has not yet got out of the habit of following the routine it kept for so many years. We of the future are the ghosts, the shadowy people who will follow on. All the same I think I’ll go upstairs now.
Now, about Louis
Another day, another chapter. Some novels, as I say, charge along like a river in flood; others spread sideways and lie calmly over neighbouring fields. This is one of the latter. I’ll get Scarlet to Jackson eventually, but not yet.
Louis is very good-looking, in a peaceful, etiolated, fold-your-clothes-before-bed kind of way. He is lean and aesthetic-looking and a great relief to Scarlet after roaring, fleshy, ranting Eddie. Louis went to public school, feels at home in those clubs where the Princes go, has friends amongst the titled and can take you anywhere. Scarlet rather likes that.
Louis had worked with Scarlet as a colleague for a time, while she was doing PR for MetaFashion. Louis admired her for her energy, her determination, her general good cheer, her competence, her ability to make light of difficulties and later, her ability to make him feel good while making love. It came automatically to her and if she was usually thinking about something else he had no idea of it.
Louis’ mother is called Annabel: she is a lone parent with genteel aspirations and family money. See him as the child an Anita Brookner heroine might have had, supposing an acceptable suitor had turned up to woo her and then she’d turned him away, although pregnant, on moral grounds. Perhaps he was already married and she didn’t wish to upset his wife. However it happened, Annabel, being not short of family means, was able to send Louis to a good public school where he was only moderately unhappy. He was too arty and unfunny for general acceptance, but he was respected for putting on house plays. His nickname was ‘Poofter’, a soubriquet spoken matter-of-factly, without any particular animosity. He had a gift for piano playing, for maths, and theatrical skills. It was generally assumed that one day he would be an old boy of whom the school would be proud.
The male art teacher seduced him early, but by sixteen he had developed a crush on the Matron’s daughter, fifteen-year-old Samantha, which was reciprocated, and they were caught by Matron in flagrante in the laundry room. His nickname changed overnight to ‘Sexbomb’, which Louis saw as progress, but too late to make him any happier; especially since, though not expelled, he was asked to leave at the end of term.
His mother was horrified. What would she tell her friends? Samantha was sent to a boarding school elsewhere. Stuart the art teacher, feeling betrayed by Louis, committed suicide, hanging himself from a pulley hook in the Art Block. Louis found him. Louis did not seek Samantha out after the fuss had died down.
Louis still occasionally has dreams so bad he wakes up making that choking sound people make when they are trying to scream but are asleep. And Scarlet will wake up too and try to comfort him.
‘You have post-traumatic stress disorder,’ says Scarlet. ‘From that dreadful time at your toff school.’
‘That’s absurd,’ he says. ‘It’s indigestion. You gave me mozzarella cheese for dinner.’ He wants to be unmoved by emotion but is greatly prey to it. It affects him physically and his digestion is delicate. Her digestion is tough as old boots.
Louis wishes he had never told Scarlet about the art teacher, let alone about Samantha. He feels the shared knowledge gives her mastery over him. It’s dangerous: sometimes he even fantasises she’s a witch who steals fingernail clippings and uses them to cast a spell against their owner. However, the confidence was freely given, in the heat of his first love for Scarlet.
Scarlet washes Beverley’s hair
Scarlet helps her grandmother to the bathroom. Beverley’s hair has thinned against the scalp, rather horribly. But it will be the easier to wash and will dry quickly. Scarlet thinks of Jackson’s fingers through her own luxuriant hair, and rejoices. He will grab it with a strong hand and force her mouth down on his cock and keep it there until she has to gasp for breath. She likes that. It is not how Louis behaves at all. Just the thought of it makes her falter and catch her breath.
‘Are you not feeling well?’ asks Beverley.
Beverley realises she won’t be able to bend her head down into the basin. The blood rushes to her head these days and she gets a touch of visual migraine, lightning zigzags round the edges of the cornea. Scarlet, who is also sometimes affected, as is Cynara, but not Alice, swears aspirin cures it, but aspirin thins the blood, which means if you have a stroke you can get excessive bleeding in the brain, which can kill you even if the aneurysm doesn’t, so thank you very much, Scarlet, but no thank-you.
So leaning over the basin is out, and letting the back of your head rest on the edge of the basin when sitting backwards can also cause a stroke, so she will just have to undress and stand in the bath while Scarlet uses the shower head. Beverley hates the feeling of her hair when it’s greasy, when what’s left of it lies flat and thinly against her head. When it’s freshly washed it can fluff up and the thinness is not so apparent. She hates being old. You can tell yourself as much as you like that everyone takes shifts at being young, and the thought that all will come to it in the end – if they’re lucky – is some consolation but not enough.
‘I just felt a bit dizzy,’ says Scarlet. ‘But I’m okay.’
‘Perhaps you’re pregnant?’
‘In your dreams,’ says Scarlet. ‘No, I expect I’m adjusting to having a murder in the family.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Beverley. ‘It was a long time ago and you young people have so much to think about. Leaving home. Running away. Breaking up. Global warming. Credit Crunch. All these terms you throw around to make light work of complicated things. You all talk and think so fast, trying to pigeon-hole everything and get back to the next e-mail and make sure the bed of your choice is waiting.’
Scarlet helps Beverley take her clothes off. Beverley still has limited movement in the knee, and complains it is aching. There is the ongoing fear that she has contracted MRSA. But she hurts in her mind more than in her body. Once she had a body to be proud of. Now it takes an act of will not to mind being seen naked.
Scarlet feels an unaccustomed tenderness at the sight of her grandmother’s body; it is so frail and yet so tough. The skin that wraps it is a couple of sizes too large, yet has to somehow fit, so it solves the problem by wrinkling. Yet the body still works well enough just to move the brain about from place to place, which is its only real purpose once the possibility of procreation is gone. Scarlet finds there are tears in her eyes. One day, she thinks, she will make her peace with her mother too, but not just yet.
‘Bless you, Gran,’ she says, without quite knowing why and Beverley looks surprised and touched. Sprays of water from the shower head bounce off her body; water streams down from her now wet head of hair and the sun breaks through a cloud and a shaft of sunlight illuminates Beverley in a golden cloak, which lasts a moment and then is gone again. And Scarlet thinks of the sequence in the old film She, when She Who Must Be Obeyed stands once too often in the path of the rolling, rumbling wheel of immortal flame, and withers into dust. If in the wavery translucence a minor kehua slips from Beverley to cling to Scarlet’s T-shirt it would hardly be surprising; these creatures get about.
Beverley feels solid enough when Scarlet dabs her dry.
‘Thank you for staying to do that,’ she says when it is done and she is dried and dusted again. She feels unburdened and almost young again, as if with dirt and grease removed, her body and mind can get going again.
Louis thinks it over too
While Beverley is having her hair washed Louis is wondering whether he should call Scarlet and apologise. He said things the night before that he now regrets. He cannot remember the detail of what was said – which Scarlet can – but he remembers it as unpleasant and uncivilised. He had to take a knife from her, though she let it go easily enough.
His mother had murmured when she first met Scarlet, ‘Isn’t she rather hormonal for you, darling?’ and a little later, ‘She’s not very good on classical music, darling, is she?’ and then, ‘Darling, she’s a real sweetheart, but she’s not going to feel very much at home amongst the architects, is she?’ And once, ‘If you set the dear girl down halfway between a kidney-shaped dressing table with frills and a William Morris chest, she’d gravitate towards the dressing table.’
But once she had accepted the permanence of the relationship, Annabel was sweetness personified – she just kept away. Louis has found Scarlet and lost a mother, and believes it is well worth it, but he wants Scarlet to acknowledge the fact. He wants her to admit that living in Nopasaran – he is not blind to its defects – is worth it. He wants her to assure him that her occasional disappearances – less and less occasional – are because something has indeed come up at the office. He wants her not to name-drop in company. He wants her to have his children. He wants her not to have asked Lola to stay, because although he is over it now, Lola went through a stage when he could not help noticing the sexy appeal of her upper lip and the body language she used when Scarlet was not looking. Lola would cross and uncross her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, as she leant back on her chair wearing Scarlet’s flimsiest tops with no bra and thrust her small tits at him. And that was when she was thirteen. Now she is three years older she behaves better, is almost plain, and more ruled by her brain than her body.