by Fay Weldon
I went back to Chalcot Crescent last year with a film crew - pad, pad, pad, they go, obsessively, in one's footsteps, recreating - but the magic was gone. Just another house. Plain, white-painted in the new style, no paintings, spruce and clean, too narrow, too tall and too many stairs. Could the walls have forgotten us so soon? Yet nothing is ever really over. Shut your eyes and stretch out your hand, and there it will still be: friends, laughter, the music of the Sixties, Sergeant Pepper heard for the first time, Joni Mitchell, veal roasted in lemon, endless bottles of wine, the warmth of the Pither stove, dinner parties, birthday parties, family Christmases, the voices of children, the crying of babies, new goldfish in the pond, the back door that wouldn't open -and all those emotions which surged from room to room, the gestures of love and affection, the wildness of sex, the anxiety of jealousy, the tears, the murmurings - and the sheer work of it all: the taps that in your time you've wiped behind, the surfaces cleaned, the washing baskets filled and emptied, the ironing you haven't done, the sheets folded, the stairs you've climbed, and climbed and climbed again, the domestic running to stand still, that intrepid almost religious female fight against chaos and entropy - it all goes on the same in some other parallel universe. Fifteen years must imprint themselves somewhere, somehow, upon eternity. You can't just shut the door on it and believe you've left it behind.
But of course there's a relief in it too. Too many years in the same place, and awkward events accumulate: there are public scenes you'd rather forget, neighbours who took offence, whispers behind hands, dreadful things the children did - now all left behind. All embarrassments conveniently solved by leaving familiar streets. It was always my mother's way of dealing with difficulties. Pack up and move on. And the house was indeed tall, and my legs were tired from carrying babies and shopping up the narrow stairs, and Ron didn't want the pitter pat of journalists' feet outside the door - Upstairs Downstairs had been screened and they were out in force - and he just wanted out of there. I signed, there was no argument and pretty little discussion.
Mid-sentence, mid-thought, it is true I tend to say anything, sign anything, just to make people go away and let me get on with the next piece of writing. I try not to but I do. And we had nowhere to live, and Ron showed no signs of actually looking for anywhere, though we bought Self Sufficiency, a book about living off the land, and I was busy writing.
Mantrapped! How can I explain to you, in these talkative days, so full of instruction from the wise to the foolish, the recommendations of experts and TV therapists and counsellors, and quizzes as to what makes a good marriage and what doesn't, and the insistence on talking things through, the attraction of the silent, troubled marriages of the day? Man proposed, and man disposed. Or perhaps it was just assumed that after so long, fifteen years, we would just read each other's minds. I fear I read only what I wanted to read.
The shop meanwhile had been sold over Ron's head. The new landlord, who lived above, wanted to charge a full fifty pounds a week rental, instead of the customary ten. Monstrous! And somehow my fault. The whole modern world, with its galloping inflation, its admiration of the trivial (me), its refusal to recognise the true artist (him) was my fault. Eve-like, I accepted blame. And he was quite right: I should not have taken so many taxis. I should have saved money, not spent it, and when the time came there would have been enough in the bank, in cash, for him to buy the shop outright. Everything had to be sold, everything, including the roof over our heads, in particular the roof over our heads, and all my fault. Thunder and lightning crashed around. But I was writing the last pages of Remember Me: yes, yes, I said. Anything. Whatever. The country. Yes.
In the novel, a ghost story, Madeleine the rejected first wife is killed in a car crash but can't die, because she has a child to look after. When, finally, her work done, she is at rest, the eyes consent to close. She is buried. 'Oh my sisters, whispers the memory of Madeleine to still troubled air,'' I wrote, 'and my brothers too, soon you will be dead. Is this the way you want to live? 'Which at least seemed to create some kind of consensus, for or against, because after that there was nothing but the wind to ruffle the grasses, and disturb the little pots of dried flowers on the more recent graves, and whatever trouble there was dispersed, and there was peace.'
I was very child-centred in those days, I can see. But I'm glad that even then I gave a mention, although a little grudging, to the brothers. I came to the end of the book, and looked around. I had two children at home, one aged twelve, one aged five, a restless husband, a house to pack up and the new owners were patiently and politely knocking at the door. The contract was signed. There was nothing I could do other than what was under my nose. I packed.
But it was daunting, and a hard winter and the central-heating broke down. Ron was too busy in the shop to help. I noticed he was still buying stock - there was no sign of it closing down - I thought perhaps he could not stand the trauma of leaving. He had been in the house for longer than me, more than twenty years, and I lived in my head and he lived with the aesthetic of made objects: it was easier for me. How could mere things carry so much emotional weight? But they did. And so much of it. Every surface, wall and shelf was covered with treasures, bits and pieces, Georgian chamber pots, Victorian knick-knacks, French pottery brought home from holidays; the cupboards stuffed with raccoon coats -
Edwardian, prime pieces in good condition, only a little moult - rusty tin boxes of assorted buttons, ditto broken jet jewellery, photograph albums of other people's holidays, everyone long since dead. 'Oh my sisters and my brothers too, soon you will be dead. Is this the way you want to live?'
Into crates and boxes went the mad yet wonderful collection of what to Ron represented both his own past and all civilisation, and I did not doubt for one minute but that everything must be looked after and properly packed; newspaper mostly, it being in the days before bubble wrap and foam. And I even gave the furniture one last coat of beeswax before it went to store - the Etruscan olive-wood table, the carving in elm of Edward VII (why? Why?), the carved-oak Jacobean blanket chest, the noble Welsh dresser, the staid Victorian chairs, the doubtful ancient-Egyptian frieze, the gracious bent-wood chairs, the late Victorian lace-covered cushions. And the battered first editions of Somerset Maugham and the complete works of H.G. Wells - and all the books that Ron had ever read or bought. I seldom bought books and still do not: I was too poor until my late twenties to afford them, and after that I had lost the habit. Books were things you wrote, or borrowed from libraries, or found in the post.
And then the artwork. Cynthia's upsetting paintings, down from the racks in a cloud of dust: and then Ron's - rather gloomy, heavy colours; later, when he started painting again and was more miserable, the paintings were to became inordinately cheerful and distinctive - bright colours, fauvist, full of appreciation and generosity of spirit - I notice the same thing in myself; if I am miserable I get really funny: it is the search for balance in all things, no doubt - but then untouched for years (all my fault), finished and unfinished, all the stiff unusable brushes stuck to the bottom of jamjars, the glass now multicoloured, from which the turpentine had evaporated. A couple of Sheila Fell landscapes, the two sandstone Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures I had bought for two hundred pounds from a passing scholar, who told me he had rescued them from Violet Hunt's garden in Camden Hill. Ron kept them as doorstops; only after his death did I feel able to rescue them, set them on marble pedestals and admire them. A massive collection of Ron's 78s - mostly early jazz - and yet more accumulated aspidistra plants. And objets trouvés, pale bits of tortured wood, and mastheads, and copper pans from every century, Victorian lace-trimmed underwear: nothing could be discarded or thrown away. I tugged at string and labelled everything. I bound boxes round and round with sticky tape. I remembered every lesson ever taught me by my mother, who so believed in packing up and moving on, and had thrown so much of my childhood overboard, when we left New Zealand for Britain in 1946. '7 can't go on lugging this stuff round the world for ever
.''
I gave Trisha an easy time, when it came to packing up her lottery-winner's house. I chose an easy way out for her and let her put everything into auction except what was required for her immediate needs.
Making good
Mrs Kovac had had to close the shop for a day, and put off some of her best customers. She'd had to throw out skein after skein of paint-splashed embroidery thread, which was these days hard to come by. That hurt. Her records were gone, her lists of customers: also the names and addresses of former contacts in the people import business. She was not in that business any longer: it had got too dangerous and she had gone straight, but you never knew when you might need to recall favours. She had not wanted to involve the police. Mr Kovac was legally in the country but a man in his position was easy enough to frame. There were informers everywhere you looked, and he had friends who were very sensitive and might get nervous if a police car was seen outside the premises. You sometimes had to pay a heavy price for having a man in your bed.
The repair man for the ironing machine had promised to turn up but hadn't. That meant finishing would have to be farmed out, at extra cost. She was tempted to ask Mr Kovac to hurry him up with a hammer over the kneecaps but stayed quiet. This was no time to be stirring up trouble, however aggravated you were. She should certainly not have cut up the black dress and sent it back just because a customer had been rude. There were laws against that kind of thing now and her business-college tutor would have been horrified.
The damage done to the shop had been more than you would have expected from a little thing like Trisha, no matter how angry or drunk. The yuppie she'd sent up the back stairs to collect his repairs might have had something to do with it. She wouldn't be surprised. He was cheating on his wife or partner - that was clear. They'd left a bottle of vodka behind them and the nasty bits of card and debris dope-smokers used for anyone to find. It might not have been dope, of course, there were all kind of unpleasant new drugs out there which you could smoke. Mr Kovac only dealt in the old-fashioned kind which had known results, or so she hoped. These sudden outbreaks of uncontained and irrational violence worried everyone. If Mr Kovac dealt at all, of course. There were other reasons than drugs, these days, for having pockets full of cash. She had stopped bringing girls into the country because the field had become professionalised, and there was no room left for the amateur.
She, Mrs Kovac, had put her past behind her, was a good citizen, paid taxes, did her accounts, had a grant from the Small Business Office, and was doing her best to make it in the new society. Anti-social elements made it difficult, but when did they ever not? The shop needed redecorating anyway.
She called up the Chinese person who'd been after the flat before Trisha Perle had turned up with her grumpy ways, false promises and crude stitching. She'd never seen worse buttonholes. The white races had no idea any more of fine work. They left it all to imported labour. She was gone, leave it at that and put it down to experience. The new girl's name was Anneping Lin. That was pretty. She sounded a nice person. Perhaps they could be friends.
First thing she'd thought, when she saw the damage, was that Mr Kovac would not make too much of a fuss. Men so often did. Mr Kovac had called by around lunchtime, to find the shop closed, the glazier's van taking up his parking space, his wife still working on the damage, he unable to deliver because even after the muddled tickets had been sorted, little bits of glass still had to be vacuumed out of shoulder pads and belts. He had indeed overreacted. He had thrown her teapot through the glass window. The window would have to be replaced yet again, but at least the glass had already been measured up. And he kissed her in apology, which was nice.
Mrs Kovac thought it was wise to suggest the perpetrators had been a couple of tripping youths she had seen hanging round when they closed up the night before. She also let slip that the new tenant had been thrown out for sloppy workmanship and for being on the game. She didn't want Mr Kovac turning up at High View and making trouble. She had a lot of good customers there, and she was more interested in profit than vengeance. She doubted that the same could be said for her husband.
Trying to get out of the city
The cities were falling - only in the country, next to nature, would anyone be safe. Rural fervour swept the land, and our family was not immune to it. We, or at any rate the self-aware middle classes, would live on food from the fields, nettle soup and dried herrings, and be the better for it. We would live next to nature and clasp trees and be restored in spirit and mind. Self-sufficiency was all the rage and John Seymour was its high priest. Hetta Empson went to visit him on the banks of a muddy river and came home to report that she had never been so hungry in all her life. Quarter of a kipper for dinner, she complained, albeit served with ceremony. John did nothing, she complained, while his wives toiled, up to their elbows in mud.
Time was running out. The new owner, a famous banking name, was waiting to move into Chalcot Crescent. Ron thought perhaps we should buy a country rectory to live in - the Church Commissioners were selling them off cheap. We went to see one or two but he did not think they were suitable, on unspecified grounds. I could see his heart was not in it. Perhaps all he wanted was to get away from his analyst, Mrs Warburg, and could see no other way of doing it other than sell the house over his own head, as it were; he said as much, once. Now terror had struck his heart as it had mine - nettles in winter are tough and stringy, Dutch elm disease had swept the Southern counties: the fields, without their tall green hedging, did not look so pretty now. The threat of rationing had gone, the increased price of petrol had not brought the world to an end, the bomb scares were fewer than they had been. Business in the shop was good: perhaps a negative transference to Mrs Warburg had switched to positive, who was to say?
I rang Mrs Warburg once, only once in all those years, and complained and said, 'How can I ever have a conversation with my husband, he only ever talks to you. All things intimate belong to you; I want him to stop.' And she thought a little, and then she said, 'My dear, you will be sorry when he stops,' and it was true, I was.
Homeless! I put down the opening page of Little Sisters - 'We are all within spitting distance of millionaires. Spit away, if that's what you feel like …' and bought us, in haste, and from friends, and without consultation with Ron, because there seemed nothing there to consult with, a small new square modern concrete house, an in-fill between two big houses round the corner in Belsize Park. It was there, and it was somewhere to go, with our suitcases and our minimum of belongings. It had two rooms up and two rooms down and two bathrooms, and was neat and small and trendy, and confirmed Ron's view of me that I had no aesthetic judgement and given a choice would choose a kidney-shaped dressing table over a Queen Anne cabinet any day. 'It will be a pied-a-terre,'' I said boldly, 'because if we are going to live in the country we still both have business in London.' But even I could see he was bound to hate it. It was brand new and had no history. It smelt of the seaside, there being a fan above the cooker which belched out ozone to freshen the air, but was quickly to be taken off the market as a danger to health.
Some twenty years later, after Ron died, it fell to me to pack up Orchardleigh, the Somerset farmhouse we eventually moved to in the August of 1976. Another two decades of accumulation to sort. I found some of the Chalcot Crescent boxes in the barns, still unpacked. I thought everything was done: I stretched up and opened a hatch in the ceiling of the bathroom lobby and a large wicker basket from the holiday camping days - tent, metal tent poles, camp beds, folding chairs, waterproof sheets - disintegrated and tumbled down on top of me in a cloud of reddish powder. Rust and moth had got in to corrupt; and time, the great destroyer, sneered at me. I was cast off the stepladder into a heap on the lino floor and beaten about the head with falling objects. Take that, and that! Let this teach you to value the past! It is over, gone… Something had got into that house. It lurked on a corner of the stairs, hulking, evil, foul and menacing. I dreamt the taps ran blood. Professional cle
aners came: they make all the difference. Whatever it was left its haunt on the stairs and I could go up and down in peace.
These days I have less patience with things. I take them round to the charity shop on the slightest excuse. I try not to accumulate objects and speak harshly about the evils of the consuming society. If I had to pack up all my worldly goods I don't say they'd fit into the back of a car but a couple of vans would do it. I like to be ready to run. It feels safer like that. My archive, the proper sum of me, is contained in the shock-proof, bomb-proof, temperature-controlled vaults of an American university.
When I visit my children I notice they serve dinner off plates that were once mine, on which I served the lemon veal joints from the Elizabeth David French Provincial Cooking recipe, and the glass bowls for the chocolate mousse. We sit upon sofas that once I bought, sleep on mattresses familiar under the weight of flesh and bone, and were not the row of copper saucepans hanging on the wall once a source of anxiety? (Ron found them in a skip back in 1961, and they were never properly tinned.) The pottery vase in which the pot plants sit was once my salad bowl - I remember the very shop where I bought it, in the main street of Cahors, the year Tom was bitten by a viper.
The final decree of my divorce from Ron in May 1994 came through the day he died, and it was unclear whether I was divorced or widowed. It still is not. I remarried a week later: the date had already been set. As I say, you see what's under your nose and go ahead and do it, if you can. Then everyone settles quicker.