by Fay Weldon
It was hard for either of us to concentrate for long on the peculiar nature of our ageing patterns: or maintain any level of anxiety in relation to them. There was so much good in every day the problem could at best only drift in and out of our minds; and besides, it seemed like bad luck to focus on it too much. If we did nothing it would go away, if it was there in the first place. It was only when someone like Carmichael turned up or Mr Zeigler made some telling remark that we actually did something about it: or half did.
And then my sister Emily turned up, sent on to the studio by Mr Zeigler. Emily, now aged fifty-two, fresh from the Yorkshire moors, smelling of out-of-doors, dogs, husbands and wood fires, horse-faced, long yellow buck teeth, grey-haired, shapeless tweed suit, sensibly shod, with a squirming golden Labrador at her heels. My little sister Emily! The dog ran past me and straight into the studio, sniffing into all corners, inspecting everyone present, puzzled a little by Hashim, who shrank back in alarm at the enquiring cold nose, and finally sniffing out Doris where she stood facing the wall, confined to canvas. He growled and backed off, his hair standing on end, but then quickly turned his attention to the remains of a Hawaiian pizza, still in its box, left over from the night before and on the floor, devouring pineapple chunks and some of the cardboard before realising what it was. Dogs too must live in the real world, and pay attention to matters of the flesh and not the spirit.
‘Why Dorothy,’ said my little sister Emily, ‘what have you been and done? This won’t do. Look at you! You are altogether unGraced!’
38
‘Darling,’ said Doris to Barley, ‘I’m giving you a surprise party for your birthday on Wednesday. Do you think it would be a nice gesture if I invited Grace? Just to show the world we’re friends?’
Barley looked at her cautiously. His birthday was only five days away. They were lying fully dressed on the Giacometti bed at Wild Oats. Ross had driven them down for a tour of inspection. Barley had to agree that the builders had done an amazing job.
‘I just took a firm hand with them,’ said Doris, ‘and then I brought in a team of TV set-designers from work. So now the architects can whistle for their money. TV builders can put up a whole house in a week, did you know that? I don’t know why everyone makes such a fuss. It only gets a temporary licence from the building regs. people, of course, three months or so, but who needs more? We have to live more centrally, this place is way too far from the hub, and the suite in Claridges is quite perfect for everything except big parties. I’m hiring a fleetof cars to bring the guests in from London. Everyone who’s anyone, and I’m sure some of them would be ever so pleased to see dear old Grace. We don’t want bad feeling buzzing around. Not good for karma.’
‘I can see what you mean by a surprise party,’ Barley observed, and she giggled and nudged him like a naughty little girl. ‘And she can bring along that young man of hers, you know, the painter?’
‘Walter Wells,’ said Barley. ‘I don’t know that I’d like that.’ ‘That sounds suspiciously like that old anthropological thing, mate-guarding,’ said Doris, suddenly tearful, ‘and Grace McNab is no longer your wife. I am. That really hurts me. You should be happy to welcome her boyfriend into your life.’ He was always taken by surprise at how vulnerable she was, beneath the brisk, confident shell. And now also at how upsetting he found the thought of Grace in bed with Walter Wells.
‘If it makes you feel more secure, darling, invite away,’ said Barley, nobly. ‘Invite whoever you want.’
Doris had not told Barley about the attempt to hold her to ransom at the studio, and he had not told her about the attempt to run him down. Some things are just too complicated to take in, let alone explain, and their lives were increasingly busy. It was especially good just to lie upon the bed for fifteen minutes and relax. Barley noticed that there was a patch of damp on the newly decorated and star-studded ceiling – the stars in the shape of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio, in honour of the marital bed – but he did not mention this to Doris in case it set off another manic round of refurbishment.
If Opera Noughtie didn’t come through he was finished. There would be no money to start again. None. That is to say noteven taxi money across town. And how would their love stand up to that?
‘I suppose if we have to have Walter Wells we have to ask Grace,’ said Barley. ‘But she might be a bit surprised by some of the changes here.’ ‘It is a surprise party,’ said Doris.
The hands of the art-installation waterfall clock had moved to six and it was Friday, and time for Ross’s weigh-in, and indeed his, and their fifteen minutes’ rest was over. If Doris had once agreed not to subject Ross to the humiliation of standing on the scales she had forgotten: indeed she had now decided to extend the ceremony to her husband. Drastic weight-gain required drastic action, and she wanted him looking good for his surprise party. He’d fallen in with it because he was feeling bad about the Bulgari necklace which would not be ready in time for the very special event which was his birthday party, and the lack of which she was being so good about.
39
Mary House was in Windsor, on the flight path out of London. It was to this convent that Emily now took her sister Grace, convinced that there was something fishy about Grace’s over literal return to herself-before-marriage. They were to consult their Aunt, the once young and flighty Kathleen McNab, now the nun Mother Cecilia, aged ninety-eight, who could surely distinguish, if anyone could, what was sent by the Devil and what was sent by God.
They stopped at a garden centre, and Grace bought a wicker basket which she filled with flowers and fruit. This she would give to Mother Cecilia. It was over Grace’s arm when she entered the old woman’s cell.
It was Emily’s custom to visit Aunt Cecilia once every six months. More frequent visits were seen as causing altogether too much excitement. As for Grace, she had allowed the exigencies of her own life to erase all but the vaguest remembrance of her aunt’s very existence. The nun in the family had not beenmuch talked about during Grace’s childhood: Kathleen had had a baby by her own uncle when she was eighteen, and how is that to be explained to children? The baby died and Kathleen forsook the world, the flesh and the devil and became Cecilia, Bride of Christ, and a source of vague embarrassment to the family. But Emily was dutiful, and visited, and had for thirty years, and now took Grace along.
‘If you can visit an old nun, why couldn’t you visit me in prison?’ demanded Grace on the way.
‘I daresay it would have been helpful at the time,’ said Emily, ‘but afterwards it would have spoiled our relationship. No-one wants to be seen at their worst. I am sure everyone is at their worst in prison.’
‘There wasn’t much of a relationship anyway,’ said Grace. ‘You wouldn’t speak to me for years.’
‘Well you wouldn’t sell your bloody Rolls-Royces and help us out of trouble after your Barley had got us into it.’ ‘The re-sale price is so bad,’ said Doris, feebly. They bickered as if they were children again. It was quite consoling. But Grace had noticed, or thought she did, as she changed into skirt and blouse to go convent visiting, that her breasts were shrinking into themselves. It was one thing to be seventeen, she thought now in panic, but who wanted to be thirteen again? Or perhaps she was just thinking herself into it. She didn’t feel intellectually thirteen: how could she? She had not forgotten the past, though many had advised her to on her divorce, saying ‘now you must look forwards not backwards’, and decades of experience must always add up to something. But emotionally perhaps she did. It might just have been her sister’s company, of course, and a harking back to the days when they had travelled to convent school together daily, in just such a train as the one which now trundled to Windsor.
‘It was the gesture we wanted,’ said Emily, ‘but you wouldn’t give it. You were besotted by ghastly Barley.’ ‘At least when I was with him I could grow old gracefully,’ said Grace. A group of builders at Paddington, working on the gantries, had looked down and wolf-whistled at her: she
took some comfort from that.
They had left the dog with Walter for the day: he’d had one like it when he was a child, which he remembered with affection. Ethel and Hashim had both gone down to the Job Centre to find jobs, though how she was to explain her absence from the workscene for three years, and he was to explain his sudden departure from the TV company neither was quite sure. Life can get very complicated, both complained; these days there is no avoiding the personal data that follow after you, from exam results to medical records to driving history to credit-rating to criminal penalty: starting afresh in the name of love can be difficult. They refused to take money from Grace. The tiepin was real gold: it would fetch about seventy-five pounds in an emergency.
Mary House Convent, custom built for its purpose in the mid-nineteenth century, was oddly reminiscent of the torpid Tavington Court, for all its vaulted ceilings and wide pale corridors. The smell of boiled cabbage had got into the walls. At least in the mansion block the walls were steeped with the mixed aromas of Marks and Spencer’s microwaveable dishes, or had been until lately, when the fumes of boiled mixed Chinese herbs took over.
Twelve very old nuns now inhabited a convent which had once housed a hundred. Only when the last one died would the premises be handed over to the developers. It was a prime building site, with a fine view of Windsor Castle from theempty top floor, for who was there any more to climb the stairs? In the meantime the Order in Rome stood out against any premature leasing out of even part of the premises as school, arts or community centre, as the local planners would have liked. The prayers of the faithful sustained the world, and the old ladies prayed: it was what they did. There was no-one coming up to take their place. These days spiritual girls, the ones in whose nature it was to deny the flesh, turned into anorexics or trained as social workers. They did not go into convents to live the life of prayer. Once the nuns were gone, once such few threads as still bound earth to heaven had finally snapped, the world would go spinning off to hell, and not stay poised just halfway there. Let God, and not the planners, decree when that would be. Or such was the feeling in Rome, though the nuns themselves, in the front line of the struggle between good and evil, seemed more hopeful.
‘Last time I was here,’ said Emily to Grace, ‘she told me there was now more good in the world than bad. The convents had served their purpose. It’s just that where there are angels there are devils as well, and the latter make so much noise the former tend to get overlooked. I’m sure she will be able to help you. She’s a bit ga-ga but not too bad.’
Sister Cecilia sat up in her white-painted bare cell, in a tidy bed, looking out over a walled garden of extreme dullness and wetness. She peered out at them through faded but still acute eyes. She was frail but tough.
‘That’s Emily,’ she said. ‘I recognise Emily. Looks like a horse, always did. But who’s the other one?’
She stared for a time at the basket Grace had over her arm: red Christmas apples, better for decoration than for eating, and the pale unnatural daffodils they manage to get into the shops inearly December. Then she looked up to Grace’s face, and smiled and said, with joy, ‘Why look, it’s Saint Dorothy. She’s carrying her basket. Little Saint Dorothy herself, come to visit me on my deathbed! Shall we pray?’
Of course I am not Saint Dorothy. I am Grace Salt, who was foolish enough to give up her name. I am a middle-aged first wife with a young lover living in physical if not emotional comfort in London at the turn of the twenty-first century. Saint Dorothy was an early Christian Martyr who fell foul of the authorities and lived and died in the first century AD. The story goes that she was visited by two apostate women, but she managed to reconvert them, so the Emperor Diocletian sentenced her to be beheaded. On her way to execution a lawyer called Theophilus mocked her and asked her to send him flowers and fruit from the heavenly garden. Whereupon Dorothy simply turned into a smiling child carrying a basket, and offered him flowers and fruit from its depths. A miracle! Theophilus became a Christian on the spot and the pair of them were both then executed. Of such ironies are myths and legends made.
Saint Dorothy was a favourite of the religious painters – and what painter in the Middle Ages, what interpreter of God’s creation, was allowed not to be religious – if only, I imagine, because a smiling child and a basket of fruit and flowers is such a rewarding subject to paint.
Perhaps I had heard the legend as a child, or seen paintings of Saint Dorothy, or read about her in Little Lives of All the Saints, and forgotten all about it. But after we had prayed to our Maker, the three of us kneeling on the green linoleum floor, declaring our sins and praising the Creation, and asking for our petitions to be granted, and giving thanks to Saint Dorothy, it seemed tome that my blouse was once again having to stretch to cover my chest, and not falling loosely over it. Perhaps it was all in my head, perhaps it was not, how am I to know and does it matter? I was looking down from a different angle.
‘I thought she was meant to be bed-bound,’ said Emily on the way home. ‘She was out of that bed like greased lightning once she’d decided you were Saint Dorothy. She was decidedly more ga-ga this visit than last.’
‘I expect she just thinks she deserves a rest,’ I said. ‘I expect one would, at ninety-eight. Life can be so exhausting.’ ‘Her knees were good, if shrivelled,’ said Emily. ‘In fact they bent a good deal better than mine.’
‘Practice,’ I said, and kept my own counsel. ‘A lifetime of it.’ ‘Anyway,’ said Emily, ‘it was absurd of us to imagine you were growing younger. People just don’t do that. You look about thirty to me, which is peculiar enough, but come to think of it mother always looked very young for her age. It’s in the genes, lucky old you.’ ‘Lucky old me,’ I said.
‘I just get to look like a horse, like father,’ she said. ‘When Cecilia was young her teeth weren’t anything to write home about either. I expect it was because she was so plain she went into a convent.’ ‘I expect so,’ I said.
When we got back Walter was looking very young and perturbed and his hair was thick and flowing again and he said he’d had a phone call from Doris and we were both invited to the Manor House for Barley’s sixtieth birthday, and were to bring her painting down with us.
‘She’s got that wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s Barley’s fifty-ninth.’ But I wasn’t going to tell Doris that. One can be altogether too saintly.
40
Wednesday, December 12th 8 a.m.-10a.m. The morning of the party dawned as fine and clear as it could for early December. All over London chauffeurs from the best hire car firms worked out distances and routes for that evening. It was one of the first big parties of the Christmas season. Anyone who mattered was going, if only because rumour had it that Barley Salt had extended himself and was about to go bust. They wanted to be in at the kill; they wanted to know how his new celebrity wife would take it. Many said it served him right, after the way he had behaved to poor Grace. Few had bothered to call her up or ask her round to anything more than a quick lunch in the kitchen, cancelled at the last moment, or a shopping expedition which never quite materialised. But they’d felt for her: they had. It could have been any of them, except they would have got out of the marriage at the first affair. Gone for the money, the alimony, and lived happily ever after: it was just that Grace was so nice she didn’t know how to look after herself and she put up with too much. Which frankly made her rather dull. But dull women can be quite a threat, men seem to rather like them. And therewere few enough unattached men around to spare for a rainy day, everyone knew, without Grace nabbing one. But they felt themselves to be on her side, and Artsworld Extra had made a fool of itself promoting Leadbetter the way it had: Doris was a celebrity but with not quite the right kind of people. There was more to art than faeces, filtered and compacted though they may have been.
There was for example Lady Juliet’s portrait by the young Walter Wells, which hung proudly above her fireplace, looking down at some of the best parties, the ones with the caviar by the bucketf
ul, and Mr Makarov making jokes, and the rather strange-looking Billyboy Justice in tow. The new Salt couple hadn’t been to many of those events, it had been noticed. They’d been paying more attention to each other than either could really afford. But Mr Wells might just be the face of the cultural future, Lady Juliet’s jewels glittered so, and hadn’t Grace actually gone and shacked up with him and lost a lot of weight? While Barley was putting it on.
But here was a surprise birthday party – rather naff, especially since it was Christmas; those with December or early-January birthdays should just shut up about them – but which had brought their student days to mind, and Doris was barely thirty and in TV so couldn’t really be expected to know better. What’s more she had laid on chauffeurs; and they said the refurbished Wild Oats – ridiculous name to change a house to – was a treat to behold, and that’s why they had agreed to go.
Up and down the breakfast and bedside tables of social London the chattering went on. Those who can’t live in a village create their own within the city, like calling to like,cellphones crying out for attention, recreating the gossip of the market-place.
10.20 a.m.
Grace and Walter rise from their tousled bed. They have slept later than they meant.
‘I don’t really think I want to go to the Manor House,’ says Grace. ‘I think Doris wants me there just to gloat. It is morally my house, in spite of what the lawyers said.’ ‘I think you should come,’ says Walter, ‘if only to protect me from her, and because I’d like your life to have started the moment you met me. I want to be sure, the whole world wants to be sure, that you’re no longer pining for Barley.’
He runs all the way down the stairs and up again to fetch the newspaper. He finds he has rather more energy than usual, and puts it down to his having finished and sent off the extra canvases to the Manhatt., just in time. As his spirits lighten, so does his footfall. He quite looks forward to the unveiling of Doris’s portrait this evening and wants Grace by his side. Of course he does.