by Fay Weldon
It was assumed in Coromandel that Beverley was the Audleys’ child. Rita would have liked more children but Arthur had said Beverley was enough and pointed out that a doctor’s wife always had a great deal to get on with. She had to keep the appointments, run the surgery, offer medical advice when he was on his rounds, help at the hospital in an emergency and act as the neighbourhood’s unpaid social worker. There was status, more so than in being a farmer’s wife, but there was work too.
There’s a nice solid patch of conventional prose to be getting on with. It works. No more faces now appearing in the wallpaper and fading out again, no more mysterious footfalls, just the steady pitterpat of the rain falling the other side of the window, and a firm reality.
‘Ve haf vays of making you write,’ the Great Cultural Gauleiter in the Sky is saying to me, in no uncertain terms. For your information, the GCGITS is the one in charge of all cultural events in the Western world, big and small. He it is who creates bizarre coincidences and accidents when any creative work is under way. It is his doing when the composer of the unknown music ‘just happens’ to be sitting next to the film director in the pub when he goes for a drink. Why John Stuart Mill’s maid just happens to burn Carlyle’s manuscript, so an improved version has to be written. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is a well-known case in point – had his pistol not happened to miss the apple on his wife’s head and get her temple instead, would post-modern fiction have got under way, would Kerouac’s paper-roll manuscript of On the Road have survived rejection by forty publishers intact? Was this why Kerouac told people the book had been dictated by the Holy Ghost? The GCGITS (whose acronym is as unpronounceable as the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God) looks after, or destroys, the tiniest sparrow too, and is now producing ghosts out of the wall to dictate what happens next in this book.
He and the GSWITS – the Great Screen Writer in the Sky who is composing the script for world events, and who alas is a rotten writer, a B-movie writer, what with his fall of Troy, his Marie Celeste, his grassy knoll, his global warming, his Credit Crunch, his Bernie Madoff, his Underpants Bomber – is making fictional events come so thick and fast I fear he’s building up to a really bizarre end – like a child’s story I just received. Written for a competition by an eight-year-old boy, it finishes, as he gets bored, thus: ‘– and then suddenly there was a great explosion and that was the end of everything – a-a-a-a-argh!’ The GSWITS and the GCGITS are down at the pub most of the time, I fear, egging each other on. And there’s no one, absolutely no one, in charge of anything.
But this is just me putting off the moment of decision: I could now go and follow Jackson as he visits his supremely uninteresting ex-wife and children in Battersea, and tries to down-scale her monthly maintenance cheque, I could stay with the young Beverley, or I could give you a further update on Cynara, D’Dora and Lola. Or I could give you an update on me. Guess what, it’s going to be me. Me, me, me, that’s all you get these days. But it is relevant, and for once I’m not in the basement.
A friend from Glastonbury drops by
Janice Barrington is an old friend; I knew her well when we were both young things in advertising and lived around the corner from each other. I hadn’t seen her for some twenty years, and she hadn’t been to Yatt House before. I was pleased to see her when I emerged from the basement and stopped work for the day. She was looking okay, if a bit shaggy-haired and startled, and rather older than her years, with the unkempt look of people who live in the country, see no point in getting up to town, and would weave their own clothes if they could. I don’t suppose I looked much better: a rabbit startled in the dark by sudden headlights. The sunlight seemed very bright when I opened the door to her.
She had once been as bright, smart, rational and self-possessed as, say, Scarlet, but had married a mean kind of man, who had left her with two small babies and no means of support other than state benefits. She had moved to Glastonbury, thinking she might as well be poor in Glastonbury, home of the Festival, astrologers, crystal shops and King Arthur, as anywhere else, and soon discovered everyone who lives there is, by rationalist standards, and indeed mine, nuts. The further south-west you go in England, the more spiritual, poetic and poor everyone becomes. Janice’s children are grown now and one of them – as his horoscope predicted, you may be sure – ended up rich and sufficiently unlike his father to house his mother in a nice little new bungalow just outside the town. I was glad for her.
She came in through the front door to our house and the first thing she said (instead of what most people did: ‘What a lovely house, aren’t you lucky, just look at that view’) was: ‘Oh dear, I don’t know how you can live in an old house like this.’ Which I took to mean she was jealous and wanted to make me feel bad.
I said, but the English like to live in old houses, and she said houses sop up the vibes of whoever lived in them, reflected them back, and were pretty much bound in the end to infect anyone who lived there with bad karma. The older the house was, the worse the effect. She personally had felt so much better since she started living in her new bungalow. More energy, no more depression.
It was not a good start to a reunion. But old friends are old friends and I excused her inwardly on the grounds that she had had a difficult life, and I made her coffee and we chatted about the children and so forth, but actually I wanted to get back to Beverley, Scarlet, Cynara, Lola, friends and family. We were sitting in the kitchen when she suddenly shivered and said, didn’t I feel a cold draught, so I closed the window I had just opened. I had offered her hot milk in her coffee, and left the pan on the Aga, and it had boiled over. Not much, I’d got it in time, just a drop or two – but she’d raised her eyebrows and said, from the look of me I’d been working too hard. Thanks.
‘Here it comes,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘I knew it. The poltergeist smell.’
I asked her what kind of smell poltergeists had and she said it was very distinctive. Acrid, like electrical wires overheating and a slight metallic whiff of opium poppy. Had I noticed any activity? I said I had not, and to me it smelled like burned milk. She then said she had been studying as a medium and could tell from my body language I was in denial. I ignored this and said I didn’t know people could study to be mediums, I thought it was a gift which you either had or didn’t have, and personally I was pleased not to have it. Here and now were quite enough to be getting on with. She said there was more to life than getting through it, and I had a sense of déjà vu, and realised it was Scarlet saying, ‘There is more to life than passing it on.’ So I replied, like Beverley, ‘You could have fooled me,’ and then thought really it was pretty pathetic to be mimicking your own fictional characters.
Janice looked around the house without much interest and asked me how I coped with so many stairs. She looked in my pretty living room and shuddered, saying something very unhappy had happened here. She poked her face around the door to the basement stairs and said, ‘Ugh, I’m not going down there, darling. Bright red smudges on little blue shoes. Terribly like blood.’
I thought, ‘That’s okay, she’s only picking up on little Beverley, and at least now we know her shoes were blue,’ and then thought it was really wise to stay away from the occult, it could so easily drive you mad.
‘I’d try to stay above ground, if I were you,’ she advised, ‘there are so many walk-ins about. It’s the war, you know.’
Walk-ins, it seems, are spirit refugees from the Twin Dog Star Sirius, where a war is going on between the organic and the inorganic life forms. Yes, we are on the side of the organic. Mostly they’re a high form of life, angel incarnations of an elevated kind, but there are one or two baddies amongst them, who tend to hover at ground level or below. They can move into your body at will, and can make you steal, cheat and even murder someone without you knowing anything about it.
‘How convenient,’ I said, and she looked hurt, and I was sorry. But I was feeling thoroughly foolish for having succumbed to my own other-world fantasies. I could see
them all of a sudden for what they were, nourishment for saddos and weirdos with not enough to do. It would have been polite to offer Janice lunch but I didn’t. I just wanted her to go.
She gave me her card, saying that if I wanted any advice she was there for me.
Janice Barrington, clairvoyant and medium extraordinaire. Karma cleared, houses delivered, walk-ins contacted. Don’t trust your luck, trust me! Terms and conditions – and an e-mail address. Well, it was one way of making a living, and did explain her rather odd behaviour. I excused her. She was drumming up business as I daresay she had to. The son had lost his job in the City. The more ghosts she saw the more she would earn, and a house like mine was a godsend; and I was a sitting duck. She was off to the School of Occult Studies in Salisbury where she was studying for a diploma in Rosicrucian approaches to ageless living, with presumably extra modules on body language.
‘Well, I must run,’ she said, as she got into her valiant little banger. And I thought, it’s all women do, really, isn’t it, run. Tuck the children under the arm and try and find somewhere better, safer. You get into the habit when they’re small and then just carry on.
I went down to the basement and travelled swiftly north, from whence the Borean wind blows. Better a cold wind than warm deceiving Livas, who blows in God knows what from the southwest. I’ve seen Boreas on Greek vases, a massively strong, winged old man with shaggy hair and beard, and a violent temper to match. But I can cope with him, better than I can Livas’ sneaky demons. I bet Livas looks like a male version of Janice.
What Beverley does when Scarlet leaves
When Beverley heard the front door click behind Scarlet and was convinced that she had indeed left the house, she put down her book, took her laptop and Skyped her friend Gerry Askell in the Faröe Islands. Modern technology is wonderful.
At sixty-seven Gerry was eleven years Beverley’s junior. Not that eleven years, at this stage of the game, made much difference. She switched the camera on: now that she’d had her hair done she looked okay, and webcams, showing a moving, talking image, have the knack of transmitting the spirit of the person, not just their looks. Gerry, responding, clicked his camera on. He had very little hair to worry about these days, anyway, and besides, was confident enough that women usually liked the look of him. His general appearance was of someone halfway between a man of action and an academic: he had a good strong build, a square face, bright eyes and a stubbly chin, which with a day or two of neglect would burst into a shaggy beard. He felt himself, not without reason, to be a veritable Harrison Ford of a man.
Beverley could see beyond Gerry to the gabled, grassy roofs and red wooden buildings of Tórshavn, and the North Sea beyond. There was no way she would ever move there, but it was pretty to look at. And perhaps it would be wiser to have Gerry stay where he was, all promise and no fruition. She liked having him at the end of a phone. It had been too long. But whether she actually wanted the exhaustion of having him in her bed was another matter. Beverley could see his gold fillings and the ridges along the top of his mouth. His deceased wife Fiona, Beverley’s rival, had not ensured that he looked after his teeth properly.
Gerry for his part could see the daffodils of an English garden behind the clump of Beverley’s expensively shampooed hair, and the arms of her expensively upholstered sofa, and the various lineaments of a contented old age which he would rather like for himself. He was in the Faröes, and had been for ten years or so, studying the second of the three plates of volcanic basalt which composed the island, one of which had lately proved to be oil bearing. But oil prospecting was a young man’s job. His employers were thinking of pensioning him off. It was a good enough pension but even oil companies went bust, and he needed security, company and comfort. Gardens, a warm sun and daffodils beckoned, and Beverley still looked in pretty good nick and might even see him out.
And Beverley, seeing her ex-lover again, remembering the good times not the bad, and feeling a real pang of affection for him, could see she might do worse than to encourage him. She did not want a quiet life, to go peacefully to her grave. This could only be why she had Skyped him.
‘I’m in a muddle, Gerry,’ she said. ‘I’m quite upset.’ She had become good at playing helpless over the decades, and was of a generation who saw no need to be anything else. She was a lapsed Marxist, not a feminist.
‘What’s gone wrong?’ he asked. ‘I can come over if you need me.’
‘No thank you, Gerry.’ The tune from The Beggar’s Opera ran through her mind. By keeping men off you keep them on. Tra-la-la. All the old tricks, still there.
‘It’s Scarlet. You know Scarlet?’
‘My dear, how can I not? I know all your family like the back of my hand. You are the Marxist, Cynara the feminist, Scarlet the non-aligned and Alice is the born-again Christian.’
‘Not exactly born-again. Kind of refound. I believe she’s a Methodist, not a charismatic; anyway, she’s certainly very much in love with Jesus at the moment. It may change, it has before. Cynara has decided she’s a lesbian.’
‘These girls will do anything to annoy. I don’t suppose it will last long. And Scarlet? I hear she has Lola living in an alcove halfway up a wall with no safety rail, Cynara is hopping mad with her, and Scarlet is about to run off with Jackson Wright the vampire.’
‘How can you possibly know this?’ Beverley was startled. ‘You’re in the middle of the North Sea.’
‘Because I’ve just clicked off from Cynara.’
‘Why on earth? What has Cynara got to do with you?’
‘In the old days, Bev, I spent time in your bed. We all but lived together. Did I make so little impression on you? Cynara was around. I was her father figure. But I see you have forgotten. No wonder I fled to Fiona’s arms…’
Back in the mists of time Gerry had left Beverley’s bed as the sun rose and by the time it set had married a fellow geologist called Fiona. Fiona had finally met her come-uppance, dying suddenly of leukaemia. That had been two years ago. She had forgiven Gerry, though he had caused her grief. Death is the final victory over sexual rivals; animosity weakens and disappears.
‘…Cynara and I always got on. We kept in touch. I hated women and she hated men. We’d sound off together.’
‘Cynara never told me this.’
‘Why would she? She liked me and you hated me.’
‘That was only when poor dear Fiona was alive.’
‘Don’t you poor dear me,’ said Gerry. ‘At least I’m only one wife down, you’re three husbands. Wouldn’t that make any man rather nervous?’
‘Men have no staying power,’ she said. ‘Poor dear Winter got himself shot, your friend poor dear Harry died by his own hand, and poor dear Marcus fell under a train. No common cause.’
‘Only exhaustion,’ he said. ‘Shall I come over? Just for a week or two?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, and heard the fall away of the Skype connection as she clicked the red button. She’ll think about it but perhaps leave it at that. Why bother with flesh and blood since the picture on the screen provides so agreeable, intense and temporary an association?
She did not like the idea of Cynara keeping in touch with Gerry. It was going behind her back. It was bad enough when daughters defied you, hardly worse, it seemed, than when granddaughters did. She had failed her children. They resented her. They had interpreted her ‘so long as you’re happy’ approach as idleness and lack of concern. Perhaps it had been. Alice was still acting out – Cynara maintained that her mother’s flirtation with Jesus was a response to Beverley’s long love affair with Marx; that Richie’s flight to Hollywood and his homophobia were precipitated by Beverley’s marriage to the bisexual Harry; that her own childhood had been so marred by her grandmother’s disastrous heterosexual affairs it was no wonder she had turned to women for safety and comfort. But then, Beverley comforted herself, Cynara was a born blamer – her mother, the law, men, her assistants, anyone. The hell with it.
Beve
rley, Gerry and Fiona
There’s this novel laid out like flood water over fields, quite calm and serene. And then all of a sudden Janice the trainee medium from Glastonbury comes tearing over the surface of the water like a speedboat, churning things up, sending waves slapping to the shore and making a terrible noise. She has shocked me back into some kind of sense. I have to forget all this ghostliness and get this story moving. The past has been clinging on to me: holding me back: making the present spread wide instead of moving on into the future. Somehow I have to get all this massive weight of water draining away from the fields and rushing through its proper channels again, and I promise I will. Even if it means moving out of here and shifting my laptop to some new bungalow in an urban estate. Free, as Janice would say, from the vibes coming out of these walls.
I should have been more understanding of Janice and asked her to lunch. One needs to be on good terms with witches, mediums and sorcerers. They can strike you down with writer’s block in a mere flutter of kehua around the head, forget the Furies.
But back to the story and I will try and keep out of it for a while. I am doing myself no good by engaging with the real ghosts that live in these walls around me, while inventing these characters of mine. I am really disconcerted by the way Janice picked up on little Beverley while ignoring Mavis and the weekly laundress, both of whom at least once had a real existence in time. Novel is novel, I am I, ghosts are ghosts, fictional characters are fictional. It is surely not too difficult to keep them apart in one’s mind. If I continue the novel in a more orthodox manner and keep clear of the diary form things should go more smoothly. To move upstairs and write in a more conventional space would seem a dereliction of a writer’s duty, which is not to shy away from experience. Nor is it their nature. I am not surprised that Scarlet is a writer, as yet only of fashion journalism, but given time who knows what she will blossom into.