by Fay Weldon
Carmichael took us to a Chinese medicine clinic in Soho for our cure. We were to queue up like anyone else. There was nothing so special about us, and nothing new under the sun. In ten thousand years of treating ailments something like thiswas bound to have come along, said Carmichael, and the cure to be within the encyclopaedic knowledge and tradition of the healers of China.
36
Barley called by Tavington Court just to see how Grace was getting on. It did not occur to him that she might be out: he knew that she was in a relationship with Walter Wells, Lady Juliet had told him as much, and indeed Sir Ron when he finally lunched with him at the Connaught, as if to say ‘now see what you’ve gone and been and done’. He would have liked to have taken a stroll through central London with Doris but these were fewer on the ground than they had been, and perhaps it was just as well, because they could turn out expensive. Doris was up to her eyes in work.
Flora had been offered her job back but refused to take it, and now Doris was up a gum tree, having to run round and do all the dogsbody work herself. All the artists in London wanted to be on the Artsworld Extra show: there was no shortage of willing subjects for the Night In the Life Of slot, painters, sculptors, poets, happy enough to live and work – even, as Doris once bitterly observed, shoot up and shit – with cameras trained upon them, and skilful editing could make all of them look okay, it was the studio guests who were the problem.
Doris needed briefing, and now there was no-one reliable to do it. Astonishing the number of researchers who made a hash of the simple task of asking someone what they thought and passing the answers up the line. There Doris would be, on air, expecting the guests to have one opinion and they’d say the exact opposite, and the blazing public row relied upon would simply never happen. Flora had let her down badly. It was no use Barley saying she had to learn to delegate: who was she meant to delegate to? So no more pleasant walks through London as if there was all the time in the world. There wasn’t.
Perhaps Grace would be up for a stroll. Two years after a divorce, for most people, was surely enough time for any animosity to calm down. Grace had turned out to be less like most people than he supposed. Sometimes he felt he’d been married to a stranger all those years: that she’d deceived him. So of course he’d found himself looking elsewhere, what man wouldn’t, what else did a man want wealth, power and status for, but to have his choice of available women. But he’d never let it damage the marriage: he’d always pulled out if things began to look serious – until Doris. Doris was not to be taken lightly.
There was nothing at the office which required his immediate attention. That in itself was not a cause for concern. It simply suggested he had delegated well. Opera Noughtie had, it was true, gone rather ominously quiet. Lunch with Sir Ron had been relaxed and easy, but these men were trained beguilers: they’d stab you in the back and keep smiling when the knife went in. He’d brought the subject round to Makarov: yes, that had been him in the car: what a coincidence! Lady Juliet was going to Leningrad, and Makarov was helping with a fewarrangements. No, not a holiday, she was going over for the Spick and Span Trust, another of her charities. Spick and Span funded heritage preservation projects – temperature regulation, damp control, that kind of thing – and the Hermitage had just discovered a new batch of art treasures in one of the back rooms on the fourth floor which were badly in need of help. Lady Juliet had actually got a couple of million out of Makarov: ‘These men of steel – or shall we say in this case uranium, ha-ha – are suckers for the arts all over the world. Well, you’d know all about that, Barley!’ Not exactly a prod in the ribs and a ‘you old dog, you’ but getting there. Being married to Grace had never excited envy: being married to Doris did. He hoped to God it would not tell against him in the corridors of power. Who’d have thought the old bat was capable of stirring up so much support: the prison sentence had done it, of course, turned her permanently into a victim, and everyone these days loved a victim, hated a victor.
No need to bring the subject round to Billyboy, Sir Ron had done that for him over grilled Dover sole. So much amazing food on the menu, and so little anyone could eat these days, they agreed. They ate up their broccoli manfully.
‘Billyboy may be going bust,’ said Sir Ron, casually. ‘Overstretched himself. Not so much lewisite about as he thought. A couple of the fifth-division nations have already reneged on the treaty. They’re simply dumping the stuff down the nearest mineshaft and to hell with the water table. Who wouldn’t, if they could get away with it.’
‘Including Billyboy,’ said Barley. He couldn’t help it. ‘Yes, have to keep a close eye on him if he sets up shop over here,’ agreed Sir Ron, affably. ‘A real charmer, though. Juliet’s had him round to dinner a number of times. You and Dorishave to come round one evening. Though I imagine she’s kept busy at her work. TV wreaks havoc with the social life.’ ‘I heard Billyboy was thinking of going into partnership with Makarov,’ said Barley, pressing home his advantage of not having been asked to dinner recently.
‘My lewisite, your nuclear waste, ha-ha,’ said Sir Ron. ‘Makes sense. But think of the row. The Nimby factor. Not In My Back Yard. Too much time wasted in consultation over here. The French do it better. Si vous voulez drainer ze lake, do you ask ze frogs? Anyone who lives near a nuclear power plant in France gets free electricity. That soon shuts ‘em all up.’
Which was about as much comfort as Barley could get. Now he was disappointed to find from the porter that Grace was out. He was glad to see she’d chosen somewhere sensible to live: somewhere solid and respectable, as befitted someone in her position. He thought of Wild Oats, now no more than a building site, and almost envied her.
Doris had promised the place would be ready for his birthday. He doubted it. He knew builders better than she did, and how the more you pressed the more like quicksilver they became, scattering in all directions. And he’d never known strong-arm tactics to work. Like weighing in Ross every Friday under pain of the sack just made him eat more. People were like that. Sensible people never confronted a builder, they understood that quotation was not an exact science, that client and builder were in this together, sharing the risk. Look beneath the surface and God knew what you’d find. My house and money, your skill and hard labour. Things were done the way they were done for good reason: custom and practice might appear inefficient, stupid and slow but they took into account vagaries of human nature, weather, landscape and dry rot.
As for birthdays, Doris cared about birthdays, he did not. Doris needed presents, money spent, fulsome congratulations on having come into the world, and a whole lot of special attention paid to her. He’d grown out of all that long ago. How old would he be next birthday? Fifty-nine? Intolerable, and best forgotten. Age was bad for business.
‘She’s out with her young man,’ said Mr Zeigler. ‘Not to mention the other one who said he was looking for his mother. Miss McNab doesn’t look or act like anyone’s mother, let me tell you that. In and out of here like yo-yo’s, not to mention the girlfriend. Goes out for ten minutes and comes back with a geezer from abroad with a tiepin. She didn’t look his type to me, but some men prefer a midi skirt to a mini, when all’s said and done.’
Perhaps the change of name had affected her in this way? From Mrs Grace Dorothy Salt, back to Dorothy Grace McNab – Barley had never liked Dorothy so when they’d married she’d taken on Grace at his request – had been too sudden. She was taking up her old self again, being the person she was before she married, and if that person was seventeen, too bad. It was his, Barley’s, fault. He had asked Grace to go back to her original name for no better reason than because Doris wanted her to, and Grace had said yes, it being in her nature as it was not in Doris’s, to do people a service and not a disservice if she possibly could.
Barley asked Mr Zeigler to tell Grace that her former husband had called, and Mr Zeigler said he was not a message service, muttered something about dirty old men, but agreed to do so.
Ross was pa
rked on the other side of the narrow road, against a long stretch of fence, on double yellow lines. The lines, on both sides of the road, ensured that few came down here, except taxis dropping old ladies off, and delivery vans prepared to risk the traffic wardens. Barley emerged from the double doors of Tavington Court, walked down the wide shallow steps, and stood for a moment on the edge of the kerb. A black off-road Jeep came out of nowhere full at him, mounting the kerb at speed. He leapt backwards for his life up the steps; chrome bull-bars skimmed the edge of an Edwardian lamp-post with a screech of impacting metal, and the monster accelerated erratically away. Ross got out of Barley’s own car, red faced. Mr Zeigler came out of the doors. Barley stayed flattened against the brickwork for fifteen seconds or so, shocked.
‘I saw that,’ said Mr Zeigler, accusingly. ‘Someone’s got it in for you. You’re mixing with the wrong people.’ He went back inside. Ross held the rear door open for Barley, short of breath and panting, but his colour was returning to normal. Barley got in the back. Ross switched on the engine and drove off.
‘That wasn’t an accident, was it,’ said Barley, presently, from the back.
‘What else can it have been, sir,’ said Ross, surprised. ‘Nasty, but these things happen. Foot on the accelerator not the brake, most likely. Some automatics will do this surge thing when you start them from cold.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Barley. People drove those things because they didn’t have automatic gears, and it certainly hadn’t been starting from cold. Perhaps Doris was right. He needed a younger, fitter man than Ross at his side. You couldn’t just fire people these days. You had to show good reason. Ross had flunked out.‘I always thought,’ said Ross, ‘it might have been something like that with Mrs Grace when she went for Mrs Doris. Easy enough thing to happen. But people will have their pound of flesh.’
Barley wasn’t listening. Accident or otherwise, the happening was bad news. Either God wasn’t on his side, putting him in the way of singular bad luck, or the Russians knew something he didn’t, and were expressing their displeasure. One way or another, he would almost rather it was the latter.
37
The window of the Chinese medicine clinic in Dean Street was dusty, decorated with scarlet paper tigers and cardboard lotus flowers. Tubs of herbs had remained undisturbed for many years, and a notice in French warned against snakebites but proposed a remedy. Many flies had flown into the space and not flown out again. But Carmichael said they’d cured him of his asthma after conventional methods had failed. I had not known that Carmichael had ever suffered from asthma but he assured me he had. I had simply failed to notice. But that was all in the past: he could see now how unhappy I had been with his father and how hard it had been for me to focus on the needs of a growing child. He had his mobile phone with him and kept trying to raise Toby in New Zealand, then calling the telephone company to find out why the call didn’t go through, though Walter pointed out that a mountain in New Zealand might well not have a signal. Carmichael claimed this was blatant anti-antipodeanism on Walter’s part.
Further inside all was neat, clean, sparse and hygienic. Calendars showed laughing children in the New China. Grave-looking young men in white coats weighed and measured out dried herbs, barks and seeds from dispensing units. A supervisor checked their activities. Patients of all races, looking no better and no worse than those who attended my local conventional surgery, received their brown paper bags and went hopefully away.
Walter showed his uneasiness. Like so many men he was not good at letting others know better than he did, medical training or not, and felt his willpower alone should be enough to subdue his body.
‘This is a bad idea,’ he said. ‘Not that I’m not grateful for you showing an interest, Carmichael. But now I come to think of it I had a great-uncle that suffered from premature ageing. It’s probably a mild dose of something like that, and I’ve inherited it. Fluctuation in age is hardly a catching complaint, like the measles. Shall we just give up and forget about it and go home?’
But Carmichael said there were more things in heaven and earth. And then it was time for us to go in, and for Carmichael to go off to the pub to meet his friends and no doubt encourage them to emigrate to Oz. He was like his father in his charm and enthusiasms, and I found myself very pleased with him, and bounced into the consulting room, Walter following stoically behind.
The clinician listened seriously to what I had to say, and put up with Walter’s caveats and interjections, nodding and clucking as if he had heard the tale, if not often at least once before. Carmichael was right: there is nothing new under the sun. He felt our pulses and the glands in our necks: he stared into our eyes, asked questions about our diets, made notes and wroteout a different prescription for each of us. We went away with our brown paper bags of mixed organic substances, which smelt strongly of liquorice. We were to boil up the contents three times on three consecutive days and each time reduce the mixture to a third of its original volume. It did not matter what that volume was to begin with. Then we were each to take a tablespoonful three times a day for three days and we would be cured.
As we left, the clinician came out of his surgery and said, ‘Ha! Good to see brother and sister together.’ Which made me think perhaps he had not quite understood our predicament, but Walter had not heard and I did not mention it. ‘More like magic than science,’ he said mistrustfully on the way home, and I shivered. I do not like messing with magic. Perhaps someone had put a curse on us? Who? There was a young girl from Haiti in prison with me, who accused me of staring at her, and poked two fingers at me as if I were the devil and wished misery on me. I had been staring, it is true, if only because she looked so desperate and beautiful, a great knot of glossy black tumbling hair on top of her head with a red ribbon in it, which nobody dared take away in case she bit them, a slender, glossy body and a lovely face. But I didn’t think it was her. She was insane and howled a lot and practised voodoo in her cell. I didn’t think the curses of the insane could make much impact. It could be Doris but she had more obvious ways of expressing her obsession with me, such as trying to seduce Walter. And it would be her instinct to age me, rather than the opposite.
When we got back to the studio, Ethel and a man whom she introduced as Hashim were sitting on the stairs. I was so pleased to see her, to know that she hadn’t been planning to blackmail me – on the contrary, it seemed to have been their impulsive plan to blackmail Doris. I could have told her thiswas not likely to work, but they had found out the hard way. Hashim, whom she seemed to have picked up in the street outside Heals, and taken back to Tavington Court in order to earn some money, turned out to be a security guard at the TV company where Doris worked, and no friend of hers. She was popular with the public, it seemed, but not with colleagues.
Walter was rather shocked to find that Ethel ‘walked the streets’ as he put it, in a rather Victorian way, but I had to explain that in prison one just learns to be practical. After they’ve strip-searched you a couple of times what happens to what part of your body ceases to be disconcerting. Having babies has much the same effect: everything in public view, teams of doctors and nurses, male, female and in-between. What’s the odds thereafter. I was sure Ethel wasn’t going to make a practice of it. She’d had beginners’ luck, as it happened, and found Hashim, who seemed to want to stick, so now she preferred to offer her services for nothing. And in a way it had been my fault – if fault there was. I had lent Ethel the flat but not bothered to ask if she had enough money to buy food or drink, and there was next to nothing in the fridge.
I didn’t ask them what was on the tape. I kind of knew. I also knew that Walter had recovered from whatever vague miasma of longing Doris had cast over him, and which was what had so drawn Barley to her. To be a femme fatale, it seems, a woman doesn’t have to be in the least mysterious, sultry or sleepily exotic: there just has to be a gap between her and nothingness which is greater than it is in most other women. Such creatures do stalk the world and it is one�
�s misfortune to run into them. They know no morality, or only that of self-interest. She had cost me my marriage but given me Walter. Her portrait was finished now, and stood with its face to the wall. The body hadbeen slimmed down satisfactorily, and the Bulgari necklace still glowed from Lady Juliet’s white and perfect bosom. Walter said he was not proud of the work, but neither was he ashamed. He felt at one with Goya. The shifting and loosening of the paint had stilled: Doris kept the face Walter had given her, repaired and steadied with a prophylactic layer of varnish.
Walter had resolved not to tell Doris the portrait was finished until he absolutely had to: she might try to beat him down because the transformation had been too quickly achieved. When people buy a painting they like to feel they are buying a piece of the artist: his genius, his life, his time, his agony. If it’s easy they don’t want to know. Whistler, asked how long it took to paint his mother, replied, ‘a lifetime’. He knew better than to respond in terms of weeks, let alone days. Besides, it was true.
The Manhatt. Gallery had asked Walter to ship over another six canvases, early work if possible, but since most of these canvases had been sold, except a few he could not bring himself to part with, he was now faking his own early style, a process he found fascinating, though from time to time he would mutter ‘puerile’ as he applied his brush.
We boiled up our Chinese distillations over the course of three days and dutifully swallowed the dark and turgid liquid. It made not the slightest difference to anything. I went on looking lovely in the mirror and Walter looked more and more responsible. It may have not been that the medicine was a failure: it might have been that we got the saucepans mixed at some stage, and Walter drank the stuff that was meant for me, and I for him, and one way or another we neutralised the effect. We did the boiling up and reducing over at Tavington Court, so powerful and aromatic were the fumes, and Mr Zeigler came knockingat the door, asking what witches’ cauldron we were brewing up now.