by Fay Weldon
Not the kind of thing, if you were Alice, you could forgive and forget. But that unforgiving tendency could have come down to her from anywhere – Walter McLean, or possibly Arthur – Walter would have had a more broody kind of temperament to begin with, than his cousin Arthur. The McLeans were a family of dour Scots from Inverness, whose family had arrived in Dunedin on the good ship Numidian in 1863 (probably with a kelpie or two), and moved up to Canterbury and a gentler climate, there to farm sheep and multiply.
Alice declined to tell anyone who her baby’s father was. What business was it of theirs? But mother love is strong, so she got down to see Cynara quite a bit, in a formal kind of way. She had a cool, observant, Alice in Wonderland nature, which suited her looks: wide-eyed, blonde and still, always the illustration, never quite the real thing.
Anyway Beverley married Harry and Harry moved in and all went well, in a sexless kind of way, which was something of a relief. She had to learn to put the tops on jars properly and remember to lock up and how to use the new alarm system, but these were useful virtues, she told herself. Richie drifted over to the Maidment side of the family where his cricket skills were properly appreciated, then he became interested in film, for which Beverley was blamed as representative of the artistic side of the family. Beverley, never having seen herself as particularly artistic, was baffled.
The News of the World, having taken an interest years back in the goings-on in the North West Cadre, and in Beverley, of whom they kept in the files a few ‘compromising’ snaps from her early days, just in case, were delighted by her new royal connections.
They took to following Harry about and unearthed the fact that he was having an affair with a young pastry chef who worked in the Palace kitchens. On and on the headlines went: ‘Rent Boy Serves Up Royal Stew’, and so forth. Beverley ‘stood by him’ – she had long since guessed – but Harry was found hanged, fortunately not in Robinsdale but in the Garrick Club’s men’s lavatory. But it was all unpleasant enough. Beverley could see from those early photographs the tabloid had reprinted of her and Dionne at the Mayfair Photographers’ Club – she in black bra and pants, Dionne in nothing at all – that if it hadn’t been for her Harry would still be alive.
Cynara, at sixteen, was more than old enough to understand what was going on and certainly made it her business so to do. Richie went off to California.
But the funeral was good. Rock Hudson, that icon of heterosexuality, had just been revealed as gay, and the closet door was finally creaking open. The church was crowded; fulsome tribute was paid to Harry’s talents and character; no mention was made of his gayness. Beverley stood up and made a speech. She scorned the congregation for its cowardice, society for its hypocrisy, the press for its scummy cruelty: Harry was gay and that was that and why should he not be? A society which made men like Harry marry women like her and live a life so full of dismal subterfuge they preferred death, just had to change. She challenged the congregation. Let those present who were gay come forward and admit it. She sat down.
There was a shocked silence, and if you could hear the sound of slowly flapping kehua wings it was probably only the wheezing of the sound system, which in churches always seems to have a life of its own. Then someone stood up, and another, and another, they were popping up all over the place – fourteen men, three women – amongst them a few quite famous and recognisable faces – seventeen people ‘came out’ that day. And then the congregation began to applaud. It was a great day, and a glorious moment. And if Cynara was later to ditch Jesper and go to D’Dora, Beverley had no one to blame but herself.
Kehua hang in the sooty plane tree outside 11 Parliam Road where Cynara lives to this day. The road name is admittedly strange. The terrace rows were built by speculative builders in 1904, and the belief is that one of the new breed of women shorthand typists erron eously left an ‘ent’ off the end of the word, but after the plans were approved it was cheaper to leave the road sign as it was and those who lived there soon got used to it.
Alice was so full of horror at the publicity, and what she saw as her mother’s exhibitionism at Harry’s funeral, that she managed to get pregnant again and give birth to Scarlet, presumably in an attempt to prove the basic heterosexuality of the universe. She brought this baby up herself, but rather in the manner of Briony, Jackson’s ex, was a cat mother – the kind whose ambition is to acquire a baby and a house and then get rid of the tomcat. She was to marry a somewhat dull but respectable accountant called Stanley, disliked by Cynara for no good reason, who gave his wife little cause for complaint, until finally an affair with his secretary provided Alice with the ammunition she needed to be rid of him.
She was a good mother, and tried to instil proper values in her daughter, and might well have done so had the peer group not become so strong in society, and the eighties so consumerist – at any rate at the end of it there was Scarlet, making the best of what she had, restless, forever optimistic, oddly unquestioning, though always looking over her shoulder to see what better might be on offer. But she is my heroine, a product of her times and Beverley’s past combined, so I’m not going to diss her. Just blame the kehua if she can’t settle.
There are a few clinging to the top of the lofty palm tree in the atrium of Nopasaran – no wonder Scarlet hates the place – and back home there’s one hanging in the grapevine which grows so lavishly and splendidly in the conservatory at Lakeside Chase, Rawdon, where Scarlet spent her first years.
Alice and her accountant husband chose the house so Alice could study the development of mollusc life in man-made lakes. Alice has never seen or heard her kehua, but is always going to the doctors with vague complaints about her hearing, and the flashing lights at the edges of her eyes. They can find nothing wrong.
Beverley and Gerry, an interlude
Gerry was a mate of Harry’s from college days. It was only natural for Beverley and he to get together after Harry’s death, for tea, sympathy and reminiscences. One thing led to another. She appreciated his raw, outland sexual energy, so unlike Harry’s, but perhaps he reminded her too much of Arthur, and while she was humming and hawing about taking him on properly Fiona stepped in and nabbed him and that was that.
Then Marcus came along, and Beverley turned out to be just a bit-part player in that particular life. But then wives so often are.
My view is that in order for her to take her place in the GCGITS’ scheme of things, Beverley needed to be unpartnered in order that the publication of Marcus Fletzner’s best-seller, Slicing the Salami, should happen. Fiona was just the convenient and all-too-disposable tool which allowed this to occur. At any rate, when the book was published and Marcus, his use to the GCGITS over, was well dead, Gerry, minus Fiona, was allowed to drift back on the scene. But not until Marcus’ death had made sure that his book found an immense and influential readership. Nothing, in the world of the GSWITS and the GCGITS, is coincidental. They conspire in the pub.
A conversation between Marcus and Beverley
Marcus came to Robinsdale by appointment.
‘Thank you for seeing me, Mrs Batcombe, I know you’re not too fond of the press. In the circumstances it’s good of you. You’ll be glad to hear that I don’t want to talk about Harry but about the NWC, the North-West Cadre. I am writing a book about neo-Trotskyists and I have come to the chapter on Joey Matthews, and his effect on the institutions of this country and the consequent dumbing down of established culture –’
‘We never called it the NWC,’ she said. ‘We didn’t call it anything in particular. But yes, Joey wuz here.’
Marcus stands on the doorstep and in the trees the kehua stir and flap their wings – they’ve been quiescent since Gerry left, and I reckon they’ve quite caught Beverley’s liking for events: with kehua influence seems to flow both ways.
Marcus is not the kind to catch the sound. If anything he’s an atheist of the Dawkins school. The rain begins; not hard but a dampening drizzle.
He is a big, handsome flesh
y man, carelessly dressed, bright-eyed and forceful, and has made a living for many years by a quick wit and a lively tongue, an eye for the controversial, and entertaining an old-fashioned conceit that Britain should be for the British and there are reds under every bed. He survived until entrapped by the Sunday Times and recorded saying at a drunken dinner party that all immigrants were welcome so long as they pissed on the Koran at Border Control. ‘Then we could go back to the old days of free travel.’ He was recorded and declined to say (a) that his remarks were taken out of context or (b) that he was sorry. The ensuing uproar lost him his job at the BBC and his column in The Times, so he was able to focus on Slicing the Salami, though his publishers wanted him to call it The Gramsci Effect. No one would understand salami slicing, it being a term invented by the Communist leader Rakosi in 1945. But then no one had heard of Gramsci either.
‘What is the name of the book?’ Still she did not let him in.
‘Slicing the Salami,’ he said, making the decision there and then.
‘What does that mean?’
He had to make his pitch from the step.
‘It means demanding a little more each day, like cutting up a salami, thin slice after thin slice, until you have the whole sausage. It was Stalin’s tactic for winning control of Eastern Europe, country after country, by violence, lies and misinformation, and it worked. It remains the Islamic tactic for holy Jihad today. It was what Joey Matthews from Moscow was doing in London, in 1965, slicing the salami, funding the useful idiots. The only question is, quite whose sausage it was. May I come in?’
‘No. You can’t. Useful idiots?’
‘Lenin’s phrase. The young intellectuals, lefties, budding politicians, writers, artists, academics, prelates, all on automatic pilot, who still think it is their duty to destroy the old bourgeois institutions and build the world from scratch. Little by little the Commies still slice the salami of the West.’
‘That sounds like us,’ she said blithely. ‘Transitional demands, that kind of thing. “Make Poverty History”. Sounds good, feels good, looks good on a poster.’
The girls who belonged to the NWC were there to make coffee and provide home comforts, not because of their brains. But perhaps she had a few, thought Marcus. The widow Batcombe, previously Max – he was the freedom fighter who famously died in a shoot-out in a Bolivian jungle, and who yet might make a chapter – was looking promising. Women kept love letters if nothing else. And she had made that speech at Batcombe’s funeral.
‘It would be easier if we could talk inside,’ he suggested.
He could see over her shoulder comfort, order, stability, cleanliness, permanence and prosperity within, all the things he thought he did not need and now suddenly did. It was drizzling, and he had no coat. His personal life was in disarray, his dandruff was bad, his shirt was frayed, even he acknowledged he smoked and drank too much, his girlfriend had left him for a Labour Party activist, his washing machine had broken down and he was hungry. If he looked at Beverley he saw a woman in her mid-sixties who had kept her figure, and had probably had a facelift or two: a smarter, slimmer version of his mother, whom he loved. But at the moment he wanted more than anything just to be let in. She might give him coffee. He hated damp clothes.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you can’t come in. I don’t want to talk about Winter. I have my family to consider.’
‘I’ll leave Winter out of it. I promise.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said. ‘Bears don’t shit in the woods.’
‘I only want to talk about Joey.’
‘As a matter of interest, what became of him?’
‘He died in Berlin, in August 1991, on the day Yeltsin rode the tank and the old order collapsed, to be born again in Brussels. Forgive me if I quote from my own book: “The formal dissolution of the Soviet Union was announced four months later; two months later the final agreement at Maastricht was reached. Was this, for Joey Matthews, born Josef Maybaum, double, even triple agent, victory or defeat?” You see the kind of book it is? No one is going to want to read it. It can do no one any possible harm.’
She finally stood aside and let him in, made him coffee, and even offered him some bread and cheese. She said she could always tell when men were hungry. They looked at you with reproachful eyes. Once it was sex they were after. These days it was food.
The coffee was strong, the Cheddar basic but good, the bread was Waitrose best and there was a linen napkin. It was not how his girlfriends served food. They tore off a section of kitchen roll. They did not eat bread. They always seemed too busy thinking or tarting themselves up to look after the finer things in life. She offered him whisky with his coffee, a single malt, and he accepted and she swigged one too. Then they both had another. Then she brought out the bottle. Better and better.
‘How well did you know Joey?’ He had his recorder on, his pencil out. ‘Was he heterosexual? A lot of those Cairncross guys were ambivalent.’
‘I spent the night with him just up there,’ she said, and she pointed to the ceiling. ‘He was a good fuck, and I still remember it.’
He felt shocked and excited. ‘I danced with the woman who danced with the Prince of Wales.’ He had his chapter. Joey had come alive. Now it would be easy. He looked at her again and some kind of erotic quality seemed to have entered into her, to which he responded. If Joe had done it so would he.
‘I was sold to pay for a Rock Against Racism event,’ she said.
Better and better. He asked if the NWC had taken all their papers with them: was there anything left? She said they took nothing; without Joe they were hopeless, without Winter they were distraught. All their stuff was still in her attic; they were always meant to be taking it away but no one had ever turned up.
‘Would I be able to look through them?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s too much of it. You’d be here for ever, cramping my style. I’m looking for a husband.’
He could see he might have to marry her. Which he did, selling his flat to pay his debts, moving into Robinsdale. She was ten years older than he. Her family was aghast, and stayed away whenever they decently could. Their mother had not only married a right-wing, racist, atheist fascist, but one notorious for his views, embarrassing in the very association. Their reaction pained Beverley, but she was busy again and her bed was filled. He was companionable but not particularly active in bed, which suited her, and he made her laugh, as she did him. The kehua hibernated. Laughter puts them to sleep.
It took Marcus two years to finish the book, during which Beverley helped with the research, and Marcus grew sleek and smooth, joined AA, stopped taking cocaine and won back a few friends. In the attic he and Beverley found membership lists, accounts, diaries and correspondence, and also £2,000 in cash. She found compromising photographs of comrades who had once been young and were now in high places, running universities, hospital trusts, prison reform, the media and charities. A couple were ministers of the Crown. No one had ended up poor. It seemed that to be a justified sinner – as Marcus categorised all ‘lefties’; those who believed the means justify the ends – guaranteed worldly success and wealth, and that to have a secret agenda made a person effective in the world.
Beverley, categorising, listing, annotating, précising, handed the stuff over to Marcus without comment, other than to say she thought he should be careful. Marcus spent many hours with his publishers’ lawyers: Beverley, ever practical, hired a security guard to look under the car every morning. Various interests tried to have the book banned. Hostile reviews came out even before publication. Marcus loved every minute of it, Beverley hated every minute.
She lamented the night she had spent with Joey: she lamented even more that she had invited Marcus over the doorstep. The past was the past, what did it have to do with the present? She rashly said as much to Marcus.
‘Do you understand nothing?’ he demanded. She thought he had taken to cocaine again. Worse, he had decided that the odd glass of wine would do him
no harm. ‘Don’t you see how this country is being destroyed by these cancerous, lying scum?’
She did not read the proofs. He told her once too often that she was a stupid, provincial cow. She’d been getting terrible migraines, kehua wings beating in her head, visible in the vein on her temple, so her family worried. Run, run, run. She told him to find a wife who suited him better, and did indeed run to the divorce solicitors.
One-two, one-two, little knees up and down beneath the blue and white checked dress, little bloodstained footprints in the yellow dust.
She went to stay with her friend Dionne in Paris. The kehua followed her and took up residence in the hydrangeas out on Dionne’s patio. Dionne was just selling the last of her Chagalls. The suitors had not dried up, but Dionne’s interest in them had. She would rather read the books she had forgone in her youth. Beverley did not get to the launch of Slicing the Salami.
Marcus had done as Beverley suggested and found a young woman who thought as he did – as it happened, a member of the BNP – and invited her to live in Robinsdale while Beverley was away. Then Marcus changed the locks so Beverley couldn’t get in without breaking in. The lawyers advised her against this latter act. Perhaps when it was over, all agreed, Marcus would revert to sanity. They had really both got on very well until this happened. Marcus called her from a pub when she was in Paris and said he was sorry, he had put the new key under a stone beneath the lilac tree if she came home when he was out. He blamed Beverley for provoking him.
‘Perhaps I did,’ said Beverley to Dionne. ‘I am not a nice person. I thought I was but I am not. Look at me, I have betrayed my friends. Why, why did I do it?’