by Fay Weldon
Scarlet for her part could not see what the fuss was all about. The only real worry about the alcoves was the way sound travelled – you could practically hear the sound of clothes rustling as guests undressed, let alone anything else. Rails would make no difference.
‘You’re sure Louis won’t mind?’ Lola had asked. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’
‘Of course he won’t mind,’ said Scarlet. ‘You’re family. Just don’t smoke.’
What is that fluttering in our ears? Is it a build-up of wax that requires a visit to the doctor’s? It could be anything, anyone from anywhere: the distant flapping of the kehua, or the Furies, or the soft footfall of the grateful dead, or the faint trotting hooves of the watery Northern kelpies? Once the other side kept to their own centuries, their own lands. No longer. It is all globalisation now; the movement through time and space of the traditional emissaries of the dead becomes worldwide, sans frontières. Just a change of pressure in the head, there but barely there as they arrive, or depart satisfied if temporarily depleted. Take your choice: go off to the surgery to check symptoms, hide your head in the sand, or, if you’re old-fashioned and wise like some of us, pray.
Would Louis mind?
Well of course, yes, Louis would mind. The tributaries of the narrative swell, the river banks can’t hold the volume, the pressure of events past and present is too great, the flood waters of the narrative spread over the fields. Fish around down there in the mud and you come up with all sorts of extraordinary things, such as the detail of Louis minding.
Louis could put up with guests easily enough for a night or two, but much longer and they tended to get on his nerves. He liked silence at mealtimes, an end to the hysteria of the day. Scarlet, contrary to one’s expectation, didn’t mind the quiet at all; her days were busy and peopled enough and she could get on with her book, or The Week, or Vogue, and liked to read while she ate. Or, now she could just sit and dream about sex with Jackson until she trembled on the verge of orgasm and had to stop her breath coming so quickly in case Louis noticed. Louis for his part much appreciated Scarlet’s capacity to be silent. Previous live-in companions had got offended and demanded attention and conversation, and had ended up moving out.
Scarlet acknowledged that life with Louis could be very companionable. Sometimes she thought how dreadful it would be if they had children, because she would never get to read the end of a page, let alone a chapter, without having to get up and do something. Louis on the other hand thought he would rather like to be distracted from the increasing melancholy of his thoughts by the cheerful prattle of children. If you brought them up properly and with a certain amount of kindly discipline, he was convinced, they would be quite quiet and not argue with him.
He could see Lola as a case in point: too clever for her own good, a victim of state education and wrongly handled by her family. But he liked her, and rather admired her. He saw her as a free spirit. The more Cynara tried to turn her into a boy, the more determined she was to be a girl. He liked the McLean family: he enjoyed their energy and eccentricity: he liked Beverley, and going round to Robinsdale for family teas and parties. He was sorry Jesper had been dismissed but no doubt he would be back in one form or another. D’Dora was a surprise but he, Louis, could cope better than most. D’Kath and she were both members of the LGS, a gay and lesbian subgroup whose members prefixed their given names with D for Dyke, the better to declare to the world their gender orientation, and he knew what it was wise to say and not to say.
Part of Scarlet’s attraction for Louis, indeed, had been that she was a McLean. Now, asked by her whether he minded Lola coming to stay, he said without hesitation, no, I don’t mind at all, and rather surprised himself. Lola had an annoyingly whiny voice, would be under his feet, interfere with his routine, and might even try to smoke, a habit he detested. On the other hand she had to be rescued from her mother, who was evidently going through a patch eccentric even for a McLean. Three years back he would have said instantly no; the girl was obviously in trouble with her oestrogen. But she had grown out of that now, and certainly so had he.
Even while she asked Louis whether he minded Lola coming to stay, Scarlet chafed. Fuck it, anyway, why did she need his permission? She invited who she wanted. This was her house as much as his, morally if not legally. Louis had said once, at the hectic time of the abandoned wedding, that he’d put Nopasaran in joint ownership, but Scarlet didn’t think he’d ever got round to it as she’d never been asked to sign anything. And it would only have stirred up Annabel, who had put £50,000 towards the mortgage, and there would be no end to the lawyers and the explanations. Annabel loved consulting lawyers. It wasn’t as if Lola would be any extra cost to Louis. She, Scarlet, paid the food and utility bills, and promptly, almost as though the sooner she got rid of her money the better.
Louis had difficulty parting with money. He wasn’t exactly mean – he just viewed all bits of paper in a domestic context as suspect and dealing with them was a waste of talent and time. Yet at MetaFashion, it seemed, he was perfectly efficient. But that is so often the way of it, she supposed. People’s neuroses surfaced at home, while at work they appeared perfectly reasonable people.
‘Of course Louis won’t mind,’ Scarlet had said. She really wanted to help poor Lola. Sure, she needed to sit her exams, and get her degree and so on, but there was lots of time. Lola had been fast-tracked through the educational system much too young; do her good to catch up with a bit of real life. If you could cope with inner London as Lola did, you could cope with Haiti. For all her apparent street wisdom, Scarlet was just an innocent. Three weeks later there will Lola be, on the end of the phone to her mother, bad-mouthing poor Scarlet and demanding to come home.
At home with Cynara
Cynara is already worn out when Lola’s phone call comes. Physically, because she’s in the middle of shifting so much of D’Dora’s ‘stuff ’ out of her own bedroom, which until lately she has shared with Jesper, into the spare room. Until D’Dora’s arrival, the spare room was designated as Lola’s bedroom. But D’Dora has decided to use it to store her ‘stuff ’, thus freeing up space in the marital bedroom as D’Dora likes to call it. The couple plan to have a civil ceremony as soon as Cynara’s divorce goes through. D’Dora’s ‘stuff ’ is bulky, heavy and strange; it consists of odd-shaped exercise machines, S&M dungeon basics – stocks and shackles which she swears she doesn’t use but doesn’t want to throw away – mountain-climbing gear, and at least six pairs of muddy boots – albeit only a size three. D’Dora is very tiny and very pretty. All of which, plus craft equipment for a home business they mean to set up together, results in Cynara finding herself moving, with D’Dora’s ‘stuff,’ into Lola’s room while D’Dora stays conveniently out of sight. D’Dora works for Kids R Us, where she counsels deprived children, which is why she is a trained expert in ‘tough love’.
Cynara is worn out emotionally because of the tough love imperative. She wants Lola back home again but then D’Dora will withdraw her love and Cynara can’t bear that. The discovery that she’s a lesbian seems to have rooted Cynara somehow in her physical body, so her intellectual being doesn’t get a look-in, and that’s shocking; she is so used to it being there, censoring her capacity for pleasure. She’s taken to eating butter rather than margarine, simply because it tastes better, regardless of the fact that it’s not good for you. She needs time and space to get used to her new self. And she doesn’t think she’s fit to look after Lola any more; look at the mess she’s made of it so far.
It is unfortunate that Lola calls her mother in Parliam Road after three weeks’ silence, just as these thoughts are going through Cynara’s head.
No. 11 Parliam Road, NW2 is a small, mean but practical terraced house, its ground-floor front converted into a garage, a kitchen extension out the back with the bathroom on top of it, and a sooty plane tree all that is left of the front garden. Many a time Jesper has wanted to move to a more salubrious dwelling, and many a time Cynar
a has refused. She wanted to be where the ‘real people’ were. Also, it was easy to keep clean, convenient, near the Underground and Lola’s school; and she could be at work in Holborn within twenty minutes.
Now she sees she was stupid. If Lola wants to come home, where can she be fitted in? Cynara should at her age be living in a bigger, grander house. She could easily have afforded it. She rode out the media storm Lola whipped up for her, and her relations with WVB have survived, just, but does she want to stay with them? She has lost interest in legal work. Once it seemed fascinating. Now it seems boring. She can hardly bear to answer the phone. Her mobile is switched off. She has abandoned ongoing cases to her assistants.
A young Muslim woman is claiming damages from her employer who runs a hair salon. She has been fired for turning up to work in full niqab. While she is working out her notice, fully veiled, the shop windows are broken on three occasions. Is it her brothers who object to her working, or Islamophobes who object to the niqab? The girl herself says she has grown a nasty wart on the side of her nose so she wears a veil not for religious reasons but aesthetic ones. Is the employer entitled to fire her or not? It had seemed so interesting and important, now it just seems depressing.
And Jesper quite understandably now says he wants half the value of the house. If she doesn’t regain her interest in her job, how is she going to live? And support Lola? And support D’Dora, who hates to have financial matters discussed and makes her feel an uncreative fool if she does? And who so far has paid nothing towards her keep? The disadvantages of living with D’Dora are becoming more and more apparent.
When it came to moving furniture, for instance, Cynara missed the husband D’Dora had ousted. With Jesper’s help, what she was doing would have taken her half the time. He was physically strong and as a male his spatial awareness was better than hers. Even D’Dora acknowledged this particular superiority of the male, it being useful up mountain peaks in adverse weather conditions when ‘mental visual rotation’ was required, though not enough, in D’Dora’s opinion, to make up for the multiple other failings of the gender.
And if only D’Dora didn’t travel so heavy. Jesper always travelled light. He would set out for foreign places with a change of underpants, a spare sweater and a memory stick in a backpack. What has she, Cynara, let herself in for?
And though Lola is giving D’Dora as an excuse for dropping out and leaving home, Cynara can see the advent of D’Dora hasn’t exactly helped. Jesper is the one really at fault, in not showing strength and fighting back. But Cynara has to admit that D’Dora didn’t just happen. Both she and Jesper had weakly bowed down to a force of nature; the marriage, growing in the wrong place, had simply cracked and fallen like a lone pine tree in a mountain gale. But then she couldn’t be expected to go on suiting Lola’s convenience for ever. Lola had become impossible.
Can a few hours of sexual exhilaration a few times a week really be worth all this trouble? Cynara is weighing all these things in the balance when the phone rings, and it is Lola.
In the battle to show the toughest love, who will win: Cynara or Lola? Lola, by wanting to move back in, has declared defeat. But if Cynara declares a truce and lets Lola back into the house, she will have to shift all D’Dora’s stuff into the garage and henceforth join the battle for parking places in the street, where there is no residents’ parking. This, for Cynara, is the tipping point. She decides. All you need is sex.
Beverley once told Cynara that nature had designed teenagers to become so difficult that when they left home the parent felt not grief but relief, and Cynara had dismissed the notion as ridiculous; now it seems a perfectly reasonable supposition.
Tough love wins. Cynara decides to say no to her daughter.
Understanding Louis better
Just a little more about Louis. Samantha the school matron’s daughter used to wear shoes in which the two pieces of leather were cut and joined centrally, not down the sides, and Scarlet was wearing similar shoes when Louis first met her. Sometimes he thinks that the ‘love at first sight’ surge of attraction that overcame him when he met Scarlet at a media party was because of the way two pieces of shoe leather were stitched together. This, and the need to prove his heterosexual credentials.
Louis had hoped when he declared his intention of marrying Scarlet that his colleagues at MetaFashion would stop pressuring him to go with them to gay clubs. But then when the wedding was cancelled, and only the party remained, they giggled and assumed he and Scarlet had made a non-marriage of convenience. ‘You closety old girl, you!’ they cheered. Wasn’t her sister the famous Cynara Olsson, the gender lawyer who was all over TV, and who kept both a husband and a lesbian blog in which she complained about him? That was style.
But these he knew to be unworthy motives, and when he and Scarlet were not living through the fall-out of a row, which lately had become a great deal of the time – more especially since she had met Jackson, though she would have vigorously denied that this was the case – Louis blanked out these thoughts, and remembered they had got together because he loved her, and because she and he balanced each other – she so outgoing, confident and sociable, he with the quiet inner seriousness she knew she lacked.
And while her family taught him about generosity and immediacy of response, he in his turn had been able to teach her many things to which her family seemed blind. How to choose a good bottle of wine, how to tell the difference between a Monet and a Manet, how not to apologise or explain, how not to let your social aspirations show – Scarlet sopped up his instruction like blotting paper; and in the end, he thought, displayed the quizzicality, sophistication and self-confidence that a good education brings. Anyone, meeting Scarlet casually, would assume she had been if not to Oxford, at least to Bristol or St Andrews.
For her part Scarlet could admit that his love of Nopasaran – before she realised how difficult and time-consuming a house it was to live in; minimalism meaning high maintenance, as she assured her friends – demonstrated something special and endearingly eccentric about Louis. It was a point of singularity, and of many gratifying conversations. Louis was not like other men.
Louis’ mother Annabel, her expectations of a career for her son as a concert pianist or a latter-day Einstein dashed, let him drift out of her quiet life. She too assumed he was gay, and his proposed marriage to Scarlet took her by surprise. This bright, noisy, effective, undereducated girl – a BA in journalism from Kingston? Where was that? – this quiet, thoughtful man: what perversity could have attracted him to her?
When the wedding was cancelled Annabel was relieved, but went to the party along with everyone else, in a floaty grey outfit and a powerful white hat, curious about the girl’s relatives, and finding them disconcerting, people of little background, goodish looks, some notoriety, forceful opinions, and not a title between them, she smiled sweetly at them all. Then, duty done, she allowed them to absent themselves from her life. She rather hoped Louis and Scarlet would split up before there were children. The world was overpopulated as it was, and she did not want to end up with grandchildren who took after their mother and not their father. They probably would; the genes, she could see, were strong.
That’s enough of Louis, more than enough, other than that he makes love in the missionary position. That used to be no problem to Scarlet: she would be thinking of something else anyway; orgasms came easily, just a kind of shiver on the surface when she turned her attention to what was going on. If she wanted anything more profound or exciting she could look for it outside the home. Louis wouldn’t notice, so it didn’t count as infidelity or betrayal of trust. But now she has found Jackson, suddenly it is not so okay as it was. Indeed, it now constitutes a real grievance. If only they had ever got married she could argue that the constant missionary position amounted to mental cruelty, grounds for divorce.
She has tried talking about it to Louis, as the therapists advise, but if she starts any conversation during sex his thing shrivels and weakens at once, and if sh
e tries at other times he looks so distressed and embarrassed she desists. She is fond of him, and would rather not distress and embarrass him. But she does feel this lack of imagination in him legitimises the unholy passion she feels for Jackson.
Another place, another time
The basement is quiet today, and has been for a couple of weeks, enough to make your writer feel all this vaguely paranormal disturbance has been wholly of her own creation. If she doesn’t write about them it doesn’t happen. So she’s stopped.
All the same I have a premonition that they’re all only biding their time; that if they’ve stopped chattering and Mavis has given up clearing her grates, it’s only because the cold weather has rendered them somnolent. When the north wind changes to a south-westerly, and the hard winter ends, there may again be more general downstairs activity to be heard, more vibrancy in the warmer air. Mavis may be back scattering crumbs, and Cook and the laundress be back about their business. Next time round, is my fear, I may actually see someone walk between me and the window. I don’t want that to happen, so I will get quickly on to another subject.
The weather sites tell me northerly winds have set in for quite a while, and I am relieved, safe for the moment to deal with the fictional kehua without stirring up too much other-worldliness down here.
I will transport you back to Coromandel, New Zealand, in the 1940s, placing time and distance between you and the flashy metropolitan people we have been discussing. Beverley spent most of her childhood in Coromandel, and the place is very relevant to what she has become today, as childhood landscapes are, and to the fortunes of her children, her grandchildren and now, indeed, her great-grandchildren.