by Fay Weldon
For women, bird's-nest, tortured hair and startled eyes were giving way to caftans, flowing hair and a more natural look: the idea was to seem as if one had just fallen dishevelled out of bed after a lively night; the concept of Europe was not known in the land; there was just abroad and home. We lived in a tall, pretty house in Primrose Hill. It was a time of change and flux in Chalcot Crescent, as it is now in the fictional Wilkins Parade. The immigrant Irish were being driven out and replaced by bohemians - artists, writers, painters, musicians. Houses which had once contained three or four families now housed one or two.
Look out of the window of our Chalcot Crescent house, in the Sixties, and see Primrose Hill, green and pretty, rising steeply from the flat lands around, skirted by railway lines, with its view across inner London to St Paul's. The world of Down Among the Women centred here, this demi-para-dise. You could hear the lions in London Zoo roaring at night. We could afford to be trusting; we kept the front door key on a string the house side of the letter box. In summer we didn't even bother to close the front door, let alone lock it. When someone nipped in and stole the radio sitting on the hall stand we were most surprised and upset. We had a local fishmonger, cobbler, grocer and hardware shop. We heated the house with anthracite stoves, dusty and fumy. The coal merchant tipped his sackfuls of anthracite into the coal hole in the pavement in front of the house, and I'd carry it up in bucketfuls. In theory the men did it - in practice it was usually the women. Those were good days.
In September 1961 I met Ron Weldon at a party and moved in with him, becoming a householder, and leaving behind for ever, or so I hoped, the poverty and anxiety of being a single mother. Ron was still married to Cynthia Pell, also a painter, but she was no longer with him. His daughter Karen, then aged thirteen, was. I was still legally married to a man much older than myself, a headmaster, who as a result of his own sexual hang-ups had encouraged me to a life of what would then have been called sin, and is now more properly called dysfunctional behaviour. (I notice that Mrs Kovac was a call girl before taking a course and setting up her own small business.) I was no longer with the husband, but living in a fifth-floor walk-up flat in Earls Court with my mother and my son Nicolas, visited by the Dane. I fell out of love with the Dane and into love with Ron. In those days love was such a simple sufficient imperative. You went where it led you.
It took Ron and me two years to get our divorces, and we married in June, 1963 in Camden Town Registry Office -Hetta and William {Seven Types of Ambiguity) Empson were our witnesses. (He was to become 'Sir', she was to become 'Lady' - as surprising and welcome an event as when Beryl Bainbridge was to become 'Dame'. Hang around long enough, and anything can happen.) In 1994 I was to marry again in the same place, also in June. (This 'was to' is legitimate. This is autobiography.) On both occasions we had a Chinese meal afterwards. The first time I couldn't manage the chopsticks and was humiliated to have to ask for a fork. The second time I didn't have to ask. Some things you pick up without really trying.
The wedding was a mere formalisation of a relationship that we both assumed was to be life long. I should not really speak for Ron because he died the day our divorce came through in 1994, but I think it to be the case for him and I know it was for me. So fast and sudden, indeed overnight, was the switch in both our lives, after that initial meeting in 1961, so complete and satisfactory the apotheosis from wretchedness to happiness, certainly for me, probably for him, that I assumed fate had a hand in it. All this, though a long time coming, was simply destined. It was a miracle.
When in those early years, by virtue of the fact that I had plays and novels published, could speak in public, sat on committees when asked, and looked okay in photographs, others offered me a degree of admiration and respect, I assumed this too was fate. I must have been very irritating to others. And I was wrong, and a very hard lesson it was. It was happenstance.
Once in bed with Ron there seemed during that decade no reason ever to be out of it, other than what duties the children required and the necessity of earning a living. And of course parties. We were both sociable people, and liked to offer and receive hospitality, so one way and another a noisy and much-peopled household created itself around us. As child succeeded child - Dan, Tom and Sam following on from Karen and Nicolas - and the visiting nephews and nieces, Christopher, Rachel and Ben, the family developed its own traditions and habits of living. But the central premise, as it were, was the marital bed, which was antique, brass, curly, high and wide.
When we married Ron put down his paintbrush and said, 'A man cannot be an artist and a good husband.' I did my best to refute his conviction: I was flattered but I did not want to be responsible for what might come to be seen as a sacrifice. I quoted Rembrandt, Rubens, etc, but he retaliated with Van Gogh, Gauguin and a dozen others and won on points.
After Daniel was born Ron opened an antique shop round the corner from the house in Regent's Park Road. The shop was to become more of a social centre than a serious emporium. Here Ron kept open house during shop hours, and partied with his customers. What was sold as junk then are the antique treasures of today. Welsh dressers, ships' mastheads, Jacobean chests, Georgian commodes, copper saucepans, Dutch tiles, Venetian chandeliers. The week he opened the shop he cleared a truss factory, its contents untouched since 1926. I washed tray after tray of dusty glass eyes. Big, blue veined ones, little, dark piggy ones. They were snapped up and turned into earrings.
The treasure trove from Ron's shop sits well in the houses of those who have grown great and famous over the years; George Melly, David Bailey, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett. 'Look,' people still say to me today, 'that's one of Ron's dressers. It's still missing one brass handle.'' Or, 'That's a Ron clock. It never worked.' Or, 'you know what I was offered for these six chairs the other day! To think I bought them for ten shillings!'
Ron preferred potential to fulfilment, but then a painter often does, the vision in the head always outstripping what ends up on the canvas. He kept his respect and reverence for what time had imbued with grace, what some craftsman, long ago, had taken pride in making. His talent was to hypnotise customers into believing, with him, that they had got the most amazing bargain, the most beautiful object in all history, and that it looked better unfixed, unrestored, unfacelifted, than ever it would done up. All things new he despised, except our new golden Volvo Estate, the antique dealer's friend, for which he made an exception. We bought that when I was promoted to Copy Group Head at Ogilvie and Mather.
The morning sun shone into Chalcot Crescent, the music of the Sixties came from every radio down the street. The pleasure of it came to me as a shock. I'd had a patchy acquaintance with music to date, loaded by others' disapproval, brought up as a child with the music of the nineteenth century - anything later was seen as vulgar. My grandmother, trained as a concert pianist, played Beethoven and Chopin, and I loved the former for its energy and hated the latter for what seemed to me as a child to be clinky self-pity. Otherwise there was popular music imported from the States by New Zealand radio, but I was discouraged from listening. No-one forbade me: my mother would just switch the radio off for fear my taste would be debased. 'Swing', 'jazz' were as bad as swear words. But my mother owned a wind-up gramophone - someone's cast-off no doubt - and a single record, The Wedding of the Painted Doll, which when I was eight I would play over and over with a thorn needle at the bottom of the garden. Dum-de-dum-de-dum, de dum, de dum - presages, in my pre-pubertal state, of some frivolity yet to come. I got through the whole box of thorn needles, and my secret thus revealed, was frowned upon.
My father, divorced from the mother in the days when divorce was a rare thing, lived in comparative splendour in Coromandel in the North, and owned a library of 78's, and had steel needles, and Mozart was eked out in three minute dollops before some one had to get up and turn the record over. But listening to my father's music seemed a disloyalty to my mother, and I preferred to wander off into the garden and eat apricots.
In the Fi
fties, free at last from maternal control, I listened to the radio non stop, when my schoolmaster husband was out to work - he was a light opera fan and was musical director of the local operatic group in Acton, and I remember dancing round the kitchen with Nicolas, then a very small child, to Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera, in a state of exhilaration, because sometimes a sense of future blessing, an intimation of better things to come, would descend upon the grimness of life in Acton.
Perhaps I caught something of this sense of future from Nicolas himself - because by the Sixties, living in Chalcot Crescent, it was he who took up his guitar and played his new family folk music, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and took to the piano as naturally and easily as his grandmother. Indeed, he gave up the study of philosophy, at which he excelled, for the piano, and now plays at Ronnie Scott's and suchlike. The other day a taxi driver said to me you're not a relative of Nic Weldon the pianist, are you, and I said yes and he offered to let me off my fare.
Nicolas reports that in his teenage he would get up before everyone was awake to practise the piano only to find me already up, writing on the floor, crouched in front of the Pither stove (before central heating) and as he played would be disconcerted to hear me apparently talking to myself non-stop, but actually just reading scripts aloud. He thinks it was in this way that he developed the narrative sense that all good musicians and composers must have.
That always seemed to me one of the qualities that contemporary music has lost - the sense of narrative, of developing and changing mood, until the piece, be it music, art, or literature, comes to its proper conclusion. Twenty years later, in the Somerset years, Ron too was to return to the trumpet, and to play New Orleans jazz in the West Country pubs, and the story of the band's trip abroad is there to be read, more or less, in the novel Leader of the Band. Starlady Sandra, mantrapped by the sax player, leaves her lawyer husband and runs off to France with the leader of the band.
It was a miserable trip, as it happened, and I couldn't think why. But Ron was already in love with the trumpet player's wife, who knew better than me how to tap her foot to the off beat, and who wanted to be a painter, and had no qualms about jazz and its significance or lack of it, though he didn't tell me at the time.
But way back then, in the Sixties, while the good music flowed, I think I was pretty much what Ron wanted, and he me, and we both thought fate had brought us together and between us we could, and would, solve all problems.
All was not simple, of course. Happiness was not unalloyed. Stepchildren were rarer in those days than now: there were few precedents to go by. I was astonished to discover that Karen, then thirteen, resented me. That she would had not occurred to me. But how could she not? I was a newcomer, an upstart. She loved her mother Barbara, Ron's first wife, and she loved his second wife too, Cynthia, but I was a stepmother too far. Cynthia had left in the months before Ron took up with me. The first marriage to Barbara had been brief and impetuous, when he was an art student. The second marriage to Cynthia, a painter too, had been disastrous.
When I arrived, as the third, Karen was living with her mother Barbara and visiting her father at weekends. Cynthia's clothes still hung in the cupboards when I moved in, her plates still stacked the kitchen shelves, her tubes of paint - her cerulean blue, her titanium white - still stood in jars of dried-up turpentine upon the shelf, and Karen mourned her going. Now I had ruthlessly taken Cynthia's place, moved into her very bed and founded a dynasty around it.
I was accustomed to being liked - disapproved of perhaps for the messiness of my ways, both practical and emotional, disconcerting in my inability to conform to the mores of the times - but liked. Forty years on Karen and I get on just fine, indeed with much mutual affection, but it was a long hard road. It took me decades to learn the secret of living peacefully with stepchildren - you must treat them as if they were royalty, and only speak when spoken to. Smile amiably, and try not to catch their eye or draw attention to yourself, and all will be well or at least better.
Cynthia Pell, my predecessor in Ron's affections, was a painter who now enjoys a posthumous reputation. She was a beautiful, full-bodied, full-lipped girl with dark hair and red cheeks, who had gone completely out of her mind. She was a friend of Sheila Fell, Lowry's protegee, another painter of astonishing talent and beauty whose work is much valued. Pell and Fell, Fell and Pell. Pell painted women in distress, Fell painted landscapes. Both women enjoyed to the full the gifts and pleasures of self-destruction. Cynthia took to the knife and Sheila to the bottle. If I diminish them for the sake of a neat phrase I am sorry, but I know no other way of containing them and their troubles in my head. They were both appallingly self-indulgent and destructive but the times gave them no choice. It was as if, in the Fifties, when their work was mostly done, the talent and impulse to paint and the problem of being female formed some kind of corrosive mixture which scoured their insides out and left them raw and bleeding with rage and misery.
Fell, Pell and Plath. Sylvia Plath was the poetic equivalent, vociferous in her distress. I see all these self-destroyers of the Former Age as sacrificial martyrs to the New Feminism. The artists lead the way. This life is impossible. Cynthia's scratchy, tormented drawings and haunted paintings are so powerful I can scarcely look at them without wanting to throw open the windows and let the sunlight in. Sheila's landscapes, very different, have a swirling intensity, a lustiness about them, but also an anxiety, as if every brush stroke was won with difficulty, and earth and rock were for ever on the verge of flying apart from one another. Evelyn Williams, their contemporary, was another beautiful girl, whose work is now highly sought after, and is hung in the Metropolitan and the Tate. She was not self-destructive, on the contrary; she worked patiently through the decades, with very little acknowledgement until recently, when it has come flooding in. But she had to wait until her seventies to receive it. And her work too is so imbued with tragedy that it can only really be viewed dispassionately from the walls of a great gallery. Get too near and you feel you will never smile again. Yet sometimes when Evie does something cheerful - a child's face or a rising sun - the sense of pleasure left behind is so intense it lingers long after you have left the gallery.
But Cynthia! After leaving the house she shared with Ron, Cynthia lived in a mental hospital for fifteen years, restrained for her own and others' safety, before destroying herself, horribly and graphically, cutting her own throat. I wrote a story about her once, called In a Dustbin, Darkly. She lived for a time in real life, and in the story, in a dustbin down an alleyway at the end of the street, while I chirrupped gaily about the house, and pretended she did not exist. Ron seldom referred to her. I think he simply did not know what to do about her, either, or how to think of her. This is the problem with the truly mad - their terms of reference and yours do not coincide.
If I am to speak for Ron, Cynthia was perhaps the central tragedy in his life, the person and major life-event around which all other things circled. I was only the bit part player in Ron and Cynthia's life, not Cynthia's in mine. I was deluded in thinking otherwise. The clothes of mine I hung in her wardrobe as I elbowed her out of my life, pushing her waisted jacket with the fur collar (did not Trisha wear something like that?) to the back, could not have brought good karma.
Cynthia turned up in the house once and threw Dan, then a baby, across the room. She snatched him out of his crib and threw. I was shocked and alarmed, but she had at least thrown him onto the sofa. She did not wish him real harm. All the same it seemed some terrible visitation: Mrs Rochester from the attic had erupted into my life. There was a terrible and convincing simplicity with which she accused me of being an insensitive woman and an unfit wife. 'You have stopped Ron painting,' she cried aloud. 'What has he done! Marrying a woman like you! An office worker!' She threw a few shoes about and left.
Ron said she would not come again, nor did she. Did he visit her? Sleep with her? I don't know. It became evident to me that 'being a painter' carried far more weight with Ron and his fri
ends than 'being a writer' ever did for me. Writing was something you did, not something you were. The true artist, in the eyes of those talented young people who came out of the Slade, St Martins, Camberwell, in the Forties and Fifties, was bound to be like Van Gogh, mad, bad and tormented. Whereas writing, I would maintain, smiling blandly the while, was if anything restorative; it had a gentle tonic effect. I wrote a story under that name, too, A Gentle Tonic Effect, about a young woman who worked for a nuclear power plant, and whose job it was to maintain that radiation was not harmful at all, but gently beneficial.
The more I suspected myself that what I wrote might be explosive, the more I maintained its harmlessness. I think I was quite wilfully disingenuous. I was known in the beginning to his friends as Ron's port and lemon girl: the amiable barmaid type, the provider of money, the washer of dishes. I did not like to disappoint.
Poor Cynthia, in retrospect! It had been her home, her bed, her cupboards to clean and her stepdaughter, not mine, to care for.
But what real attention did I give her? None. I would drink my morning coffee, made sinfully and wastefully strong -now I was out from under my mother's eye I had a taste for excess - from the little brown coffee cups Cynthia's mother had made as her wedding gift to that happy couple. The Pells were wealthy; Cynthia's mother was artistic and able to afford a kiln. I relished the sense of victory. In the Fifties women were in competition: we had little sense of sisterhood.
So I moved the clothes from her closet, and was glad when Ron took down the painting rack in which both their paintings sat, gathering dust. Friends said - though they seldom mentioned her in my presence - that she painted better than he did. He painted on the backs of her canvases for a while and then gave up altogether.