by Fay Weldon
Student friends took Louis to a clairvoyante when he was young. ‘A black cloud hangs over you. I can’t go there, it is too frightening,’ said the fat lady in the black curly wig, with bright rouged cheeks and scarlet lipstick spilling over into the lines around her mouth. ‘No, it is clearing. I see many S’s surrounding you. They protect you. One special S is destined for you but you are kept apart. You will marry someone whose name begins with S and have three children.’
Louis thought it was nonsense but somehow he knew it would come true. There was a signed letter from Princess Di on the wall so the fortune-teller had good credentials. The black cloud would clear, S would protect him. The three children existed in his mind – rather as Mavis and the laundress exist in mine – two girls and a boy. Sally, Susan and Simon.
Louis told Scarlet about that in the early days when he proposed, and she said she liked the names, and he thought that meant she wanted children, but as it turned out she didn’t. Scarlet apparently did not forget what it was like when Lola was born, a creature spewing a strange yellow runny stuff from one end, and a milky fluid from the other. Scarlet was twelve at the time. Cynara had made a fuss during labour, insisting that the male midwife go away, swearing at him like someone with Tourette’s, mixed with racial insults, so the whole staff had walked out and Scarlet was left alone with Cynara when the head showed. Scarlet had freaked and pressed the ‘staff assault’ button, so it was a vast black guy from Security who actually tugged Lola out while Cynara screamed, ‘Get that black man off of me.’ Scarlet had been well traumatised. And then a day later there was a midwife bending over Cynara, whose left breast was oozing pus, saying, ‘Have you bonded yet, Mother?’ as if nothing untoward had happened at all. So no, Scarlet was not actually into babies, though she didn’t spread it around because she realised people thought it was selfish. Scarlet told Louis all this only when they had already been together for a couple of years, but Louis thought, well, she is young, she will change her mind, women mostly do.
What Scarlet was into was buzzing around in her Prius with its low carbon footprint, a perk from a Japanese car manufacturer. She had her own Our Planet, Our Future column in a monthly glossy, and lived amongst free gifts and samples not just from this source but from what came her way from her job as commissioning editor for Lookz, a not-so-glossy weekly. She’d started out as an idealistic graduate on Prospect but had drifted off to where the money was, as everyone did. Being with Louis, with his indeterminate ‘private income’, and his links with the art and fashion world, would help her get back on track. She was quite upfront with Louis about her motives, and he found her frankness entertaining and charming.
Presently Louis realised that Scarlet had a gift for looking you in the eye and appearing to see into your soul while actually her attention was altogether elsewhere. She’d have been thinking about something important, a deadline, perhaps, or how to get her silk blouse back from the cleaners. He had been going on boringly about names beginning with S and she had been nodding politely but hadn’t heard a word. Her mother Alice, whom Louis had met so seldom, had the same gift – which, he concluded, could only make it the more difficult for them to get on with each other. Each knew only too well how little notice the other was taking of what was being said, no matter how impassioned.
In the basement
Spring has come so suddenly this year. I’ve been getting up really early to work, it being the best time for writing, and this morning when I opened the wooden shutters – they’re the original ones; once Mavis would have had the task – a burst of sunlight struck across the lawn. I saw it was vivid green, and the Japanese cherries were in bud. I am really cheered. I can turn the central heating down to three instead of five, and take off the plain mittens a Norwegian fan knitted for me – less distracting than the ones with the bobbles – and unswaddle my knees from the pale mauve throw Vi our cleaner gave me for Christmas. She used to work in this house for Rex’s mother and now she’s gone and so we’ve taken over as Vi’s employers. She comes in on Mondays.
It’s just a coincidence that since we use the boiler room next door to this one for the washing machine and the dryer – and it’s where Vi does the ironing – she passes through here on laundry day. At least once I thought it was coincidence; now I begin to realise it’s the habit of the house asserting itself. The house drives me down here where the actual work is done, it’s the house gets me up early, because work in this house is meant to start early. It can’t stand its shutters being closed in daylight. I belong more down here than up there.
Vi says yes, it’s a bit haunted down here but she doesn’t mind, not as much as she minded seeing the rat run past the window in the snow, or the grass snake in the rhubarb down the end of the garden when she was pegging out the washing on the line. Forget the dryer – everything’s so much fresher, she says, and smells so good, when it’s been hung out. She goes upstairs with a basket of folded, beautifully ironed clothes, proud as the laundress of yesteryear.
Other than Vi pattering through the room it’s quieter down here on Mondays than it is on other mornings. The others are used to me by now and take no notice: when Vi comes I get the feeling they welcome her. I listen out for the sounds that have become familiar, subdued noises from the kitchen, which I think can only be Cook panting and puffing away. She doesn’t sound well. Cooks were an unhealthy lot, eating and drinking too much, leaning over hot stoves in a state of tension, famous for falling dead in the middle of dinner parties. Or had I just read that somewhere and now projected it on to the sounds of water in the pipes? Just as I might very well have interpreted the clanking of the old water system where it hadn’t been renewed as Mavis clearing the grate, the sweep of ashes into the pan? I can think this easily on Mondays when the real living Vi is around, if only because I can hear her properly, not fuzzily. I hear the actual hiss of the water when she picks up the electric steam iron, and the other more shadowy sounds are still. The house is soothed by Vi.
Who’s the snake? The one Vi saw last summer under the rhubarb? We know who the rat is – the one I saw in the winter, dragging its belly across the snow – it’s Jackson. Probably the snake is Lola. I am not sure myself, but I have to get to know before she does. There is a kind of race going on between me and these characters. They are mine and they dance to my tune and I need to keep it like that.
They like to think they have control over their destinies and have free will but they can only dance so far on the end of my chain. If this is how I say it went, this is how it went. Those writers who claim their characters take off on their own are irresponsible. Their personages may escape, but they become lawless and inconsequential. Let them stick to their paths for their own good; rats and snakes though they may be, they need to be true to their natures.
Run, Lola, run
Lola Olsson, at sixteen, has as we know been fast-tracked through school under the gifted children scheme and before she dropped out of education had gained a provisional place studying law at Bristol University. Her mother Cynara is a barrister in the high-profile Human Rights’ chambers of WVB (Wright, Varnes, Bovis). Her father is Jesper Olsson, a big wheel in the museum world and a specialist in Bronze Age artefacts. Lola complains he has Asperger’s and lacks any capacity for human affection. Not that it matters much, she will add, since he has deserted her and gone to live in Dubai, leaving the matrimonial bed available for filling by D’Dora.
It was shortly after Jesper’s departure that Lola failed to turn up to her A-level exams, and so lost her university place. She could have pleaded illness or stress, but chose not to. She had, she said, discovered that her mother was only waiting for her to go off to university before her lesbian lover moved in. So she would not go. She was as open about her motives to her family, teachers, counsellors, interested journalists, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as Scarlet was in discussing with Louis her motives for marrying him.
‘I see no reason to keep your affair with D’Dora secret,’ she told h
er mother, when the latter pleaded for privacy. ‘Why, are you ashamed of being a lesbian? Surely not.’ To which of course there could be no answer. Other than: ‘Why do you suddenly hate me?’ To which Lola, being Lola, replied, ‘Because you are hateful to me.’
A year previously D’Dora Jones, founder of the Lesbian and Gay Sorority, or LGS, a person then unknown to Cynara, had sued her employers, Pinfold & Daughters, for unfair dismissal, alleging sexual harassment. WVB had taken on the case. P&D manufactured mountaineering equipment. Its CEO, Allegra Pinfold, alleged incompetence and deliberate absenteeism. D’Dora became headline news when she said she’d been fired, not for these two failings, which she freely admitted, but claimed they were the result of Allegra’s sexual advances. Allegra Pinfold counter-claimed that she had been the seduced, not the seducer. D’Dora, thanks to Cynara’s skilful defence, won, and was awarded half a million pounds in damages.
When the litigants left the Royal Courts of Justice after the verdict, Allegra physically attacked Cynara on the steps, shrieking that it was a dyke-ist set-up, and that Cynara and D’Dora were in a relationship, which was not initially the case, though during the four weeks of the court case it had become one. The attack had ended up on YouTube. The media furore had sent the hits on Cynara’s blog off the scale, greatly increased the number of her WVB clients, firmed up Jesper’s decision to take an offered Dubai job, and attracted journalists to Lola’s school the week she was due to take her A-levels.
‘Yes, and the dog ate her homework,’ said D’Dora, cuddling Cynara to comfort her, when she brought home the news of her daughter’s rebellion. ‘More excuses. She spent too much time on computer games and not enough on revision; the reason she didn’t sit her exams was because she knew she’d fail. Nothing to do with you and me.’
Lola spent a week with friends and came back with large black pupils and hollow eyes and the announcement that she had been taking hard drugs but what did her mother care?
‘So what are you going to do with your life, Lola?’ asked Cynara, distraught. ‘What about your exams, law school, your future?’
‘You should have thought of that,’ said Lola, ‘before getting rid of my father. I’m getting out of here and you can’t stop me. I can use my own money.’
And it seemed that she had just handed it all over – some £2,000 accumulated in dribs and drabs since birth – to a charity called Help the Harmed, which dispatched young people to crisis points worldwide, where they could make a difference. The charity had booked her up for a three-month stint in Haiti at a Christian camp well away from any voodoo centres, and now she was waiting for the ticket to arrive. Cynara needn’t worry to look out for it in the post, said Lola, she had given Nopasaran as a forwarding address. Aunt Scarlet, who might not be very bright but at least had style, not to mention contacts, and with whom she was going to stay, was less likely to lose letters out of malice than was D’Dora.
The latter had taken matters into her own hands and moved in to the home to comfort Cynara, who, what with press persecution and Lola’s disappearance – once she had been gone three days the police had been alerted – had been beside herself with anxiety.
‘Does Scarlet know of this plan?’ asked Cynara, thin-lipped because she thinks perhaps Scarlet has been egging Lola on. Scarlet behaves towards Lola more like a flighty sister than a responsible aunt.
‘No she doesn’t,’ said Lola. ‘But she soon will.’
So that’s how Lola comes to be staying with Scarlet and Louis. And, given even more strength by Lola’s arrival, why the kehua are so madly and effectively fluttering their wings. Run, run! they are noisily beseeching Scarlet, descendant of Beverley, child of Kitchie McLean and her murderous husband, as once they urged little Beverley. It seems to be working. When a child finds a mother murdered by the father it does not bode well for that child, or for the descendants of that child through the generations, especially if the purification rituals are not properly done. The kehua of the Maori, like the Furies of the Greek myths, will follow the straggler and his or her kin across the world if they have to. They are family, hapu, and that’s enough for them.
The tohunga, priests, of the Ngai Tahu, in whose Southern lands the murder happened, were in no position to perform the cleansing ceremony. The two bodies, sullied, ended up in the morgue in Christchurch instead of in the local Maori standing place, the Takahanga Marae, and the pitiful remains were cursorily dealt with. So much so that some of the local kehua were obliged to follow little Beverley all the way up to Coromandel in the subtropical North, the land of the Ngati Whanaunga, to where she and her new, makeshift family, Rita and Arthur, had escaped. The kehua hoped to gather the child back into the fold; the adoptive parents to save the child from scandal and distress. All meant well.
But here in Coromandel the Ngai Tahu kehua were not at ease, though they stayed. They were used to rolling pastoral land, not this craggy watery beauty. Their presence stirred up rival taniwha, those disagreeable monsters that rise from time to time from the deep dark pools of the bush to protect the iwi, or tribe. Taniwha are clad in fur and feather, grand as any tribal chief, both protector and destroyer, with a row of cruel spikes along the hulking backbone, great creatures with birdlike heads, vengeful eyes and savage, toothy, curved beaks, there behind your eyelids when you go to sleep. Whatever frightens you, that’s what they’ll be.
The clustering, sheltering, rattling kehua are nothing compared to the taniwha when it comes to terror, but are lighter on their feet and clearly get about more. As little Tahuri suggests, the overhead locker of an aircraft will do just fine if they are obliged to travel, as once did the hold of an ocean liner when Beverley left her native land and came to England.
Lola’s move to Nopasaran
It was on D’Dora’s advice that Cynara did not put more obstacles in Lola’s way when she announced that she was going to stay with Scarlet. D’Dora was a great advocate of tough love. ‘Never show you care’ was her motto. ‘The one who shows most love loses.’ And since D’Dora’s tactics had worked so well on her, Cynara, leaving her a trembling, love-sick, sexually obsessed wreck, with her marriage finally ended, and rumblings from senior partners that she had brought in the wrong kind of clients, she could see such tactics might well work with Lola. If she told Lola to go, Lola would want to come back. And Cynara loved Lola, though it was sometimes hard to remember.
‘Go,’ she’d said. ‘Go, if your Aunt Scarlet will have you, though I bet Louis kicks up a fuss. I don’t suppose you can do her much damage; she thrives on media attention.’
Lola did not hang about. Within hours Scarlet was on the phone to Cynara saying Lola wanted to come and stay, and that was okay with her, but was it with Cynara? And Cynara was saying Scarlet should be aware that the letter from Help the Harmed might never turn up: why would a respectable charity take on a disturbed girl who wasn’t yet seventeen? They might take her money but hardly her. At which Scarlet felt so strongly on Lola’s side she quite forgot about Jackson and how she wanted Cynara to say no.
‘I don’t think you should call your own daughter disturbed,’ she said. ‘Frankly, Cynara, with all this D’Dora business I think we could fairly say you are the one who is disturbed.’
‘I am not disturbed,’ said Cynara. ‘You are homophobic.’
They brought the phone call to a quick end. Alice had trained both girls to keep the family peace at all costs. Some families row all the time and are in a perpetual state of ‘not speaking’. Alice found this vulgar, and un-Christian. ‘If you can’t find anything agreeable to say,’ she would tell them, ‘don’t say anything at all.’ The family solution, if things got tough, was just to stay out of each other’s way for a while.
‘It’s not going to be more than a week or so, I suppose?’ Scarlet asked Lola, all the same.
‘Oh no,’ said Lola. ‘Days, I imagine.’
Though in truth Lola too suspected that Help the Harmed had found out that she was not yet seventeen, and were delay
ing her passage until her birthday in three months’ time. There had been various text messages on her mobile from them which she failed to open. She was not really all that keen on going to Haiti.
Scarlet had been shocked to hear Lola’s account of what was going on at home. Cynara seemed to have flipped her lid. Of course people should be free to choose the sexuality they wished, and Scarlet of all people understood the compulsion of sexual desire, but throwing out a husband and father against the daughter’s wishes, and moving in a lesbian lover was surely extreme. She would of course, now it was a fait accompli, give Lola every help she could. Lola was ‘difficult’, everyone knew: but then Cynara was difficult too. Scarlet had always believed she could make a much better business of bringing up Lola than her sister ever had. And, even if Lola did find out about Jackson, the girl wouldn’t tell Louis. She would surely be on Scarlet’s side.
Lola would have to use the raw upper grey alcove for sleeping, Scarlet warned. The concrete here was unpainted and gloomily greasy and it was quite a climb. The more congenial lower alcove, cosier, painted grey and pink, with the original cushioned flooring, was currently being fitted with safety rails. English Heritage and Building Regulations between them had negotiated for months with Louis’ lawyers over how best a compromise could be made between respect for the architect’s Brutalist vision and the survival of the occupiers. They had come up with a stainless-steel option of slim, elegant rails, which horrified Louis, but which Scarlet actually rather liked. Louis had no option, such was the bureaucracy and the legal cost of arguing, but to seem to accept the compromise graciously. It was within the bounds of possibility that the health and safety authorities could condemn Nopasaran as unfit for human habitation, if such was their whim. They had power to do almost anything, so far as he could see. So he had best be polite.