by Fay Weldon
Her own vehemence quite startles her. So much could be blamed on Mary Fisher, left in charge of Nicci, just a young girl, and then failing to live up to her responsibilities.
‘Anyway she’s had a boy since,’ says Valerie. ‘Today’s feminist cannot afford to be seen as opposed to family life. Diavolessa, try and understand. Men are no longer the enemy.’
‘That’s news to me,’ says the She Devil, regaining her composure.
‘And it would look so good in the brochure! Age and youth hand in hand leading the Women’s Widdershins Walk! Feminism comes of age, male and female together, forward into the New Age! We can have Fancy Dress (optional) on the invitations.’
‘Are you joking, Valerie?’ asks the She Devil, incredulously. ‘The IGP is a serious organisation. I suppose you’d like me and this alleged grandson, this potentially criminal impostor, to dance around the High Tower wearing crowns and ermine trim. Backwards, if we’re to go widdershins.’ Now, she is even laughing.
‘Wonderful!’ enthuses Valerie. ‘Glorious!’ The She Devil realises that Valerie, like so many of today’s young, has great determination and ambition but absolutely no sense of humour.
As for Valerie, she finally notices that the She Devil is looking at her askance.
‘I can see,’ she says kindly, ‘all this must be rather sudden for you. Supposing we go down to the village and see him in his native habitat. It isn’t far.’
‘Supposing,’ says the She Devil grimly, and then grudgingly, ‘perhaps.’
At least it isn’t a decided ‘no’.
‘Though I quite agree,’ says Valerie unexpectedly. ‘It is a pity Tyler isn’t a girl. I really only like girls. He’s really fit, and I say that even though I’m gay.’
15
Ms Bradshap Is Riled
Real or unreal, the ghost of Mary Fisher scores a little victory.
After speaking to Valerie Ms Bradshap went on into her office, 3HT/12, which looked out on a panorama of dismal rocks and dank seaweed. She hated the room, and today it seemed darker than ever. Ms Bradshap brooded over the She Devil’s shortcomings.
Lady Patchett had blocked all her attempts to switch offices. Ms Bradshap needed one in the Castle Complex where it was light and bright and had a good atmosphere. She could no longer endure the High Tower. It was an unforgivable humiliation to be so denied. Was she not, Flora Bradshap, a founder member, a trustee, in effect High Tower Quartermaster, to borrow a male military term? Quartermistress? The She Devil, CEO and President though she might be, and loved for so long as inspiration and leader, had gone too far.
Months back in July, on Visiting Day, the annual occasion when the High Tower was open to the public, Ms Bradshap’s great-niece Irene had visited her great-aunt in 3HT/12 and commented that it was not only damp and smelled badly of dry rot, but was haunted. Indeed, Irene had had to run out of the room, the atmosphere was so malevolent. Irene, granted, was very new-agey, was hung about with crystal gewgaws and talked of unquiet spirits, so was perhaps not to be taken too seriously.
‘All her crystals clanking as she ran?’ the She Devil had observed rather meanly when told of Irene’s reaction.
Irene had brought her two toddlers with her, boys of two and three who had fussed and cried all the visit through thus upsetting the other guests. Irene had a degree in Industrial History (which the She Devil had derided after Irene used the present tense when talking about the past) and had asked to visit the Lantern Room on the ninth floor which had the most spectacular views and had once housed a historic range of parabolic mirrors. On finding it to be out of bounds she had made quite a noisy and unnecessary scene. The ninth floor was where Bobbo lived and was nursed.
‘I suppose the great-niece thinks I’m keeping him prisoner,’ the She Devil had said in Ms Bradshap’s hearing. ‘Hasn’t she ever heard of Alzheimer’s?’
Well, it had occurred to Ms Bradshap that it might be the case: that the She Devil needed Bobbo’s signature on the frequent forms that came from the Charity Commissioners and so he wasn’t in a care home where he certainly ought to be. Most business these days was conducted by email; only the government sent letters. Bobbo’s signature was always already on such forms as the She Devil put before her.
Emboldened by Irene’s earlier comments on the haunting, Ms Bradshap had told the She Devil that she wanted to change offices.
‘It’s not only the damp,’ she said. ‘It’s the atmosphere. I am quite an orderly person and like to keep the seven rainbow marking pencils arranged on my desk in Isaac Newton’s spectrum order, but someone keeps disarranging them when I’m not in the room. I do not believe in ghosts as a rule and am not an impressionable person like my great-niece, but since I keep my door locked I can only conclude that some entity such as a poltergeist is trying to tell me something. I need another office: in the Castle Complex preferably, or somewhere else where I shall not be disturbed.’
The She Devil replied brusquely that she was sorry but there simply wasn’t any ‘somewhere else’ available: it was considered an honour to be allowed to work in the High Tower. She personally did not believe in ghosts any more. In her experience belief in the supernatural was a sign of low intelligence, not enough sleep and a troubled conscience combined. She was sorry Ms Bradshap had found her coloured pens in the wrong order but perhaps in the great scheme of things it didn’t matter very much?
Flora Bradshap backed down and agreed that perhaps she was being foolish: her great-niece was naïve and ignorant and must not come to Visiting Day again having once been crass enough to bring two sons. Poltergeists were in the neurotic head and not a reality, and she understood the privilege of being housed in 3HT/12.
But then Ms Bradshap had no savings and could see that living with Irene and the boys – for there was nowhere else for her to go – might be very difficult.
16
Blood’s Not Always Thicker Than Water
...so the She Devil concludes.
How can Valerie know all this and say all this about a relative I didn’t even know existed? And what has her being a lesbian have to do with anything? Millennials do so like to bring their sexual proclivities into everything. Being a lesbian is not something to be proud of, or ashamed of, merely a rather inconvenient fact of life in the search for a partner, narrowing one’s field of choice.
It’s surreal. Valerie knows what the lad looks like from selfies and sexties. This brave new world keeps coming up and hitting me: slap, slap, slap around the face. And Nicci – still after all these years harbouring grudges against me, training her child to dislike me! That upsets me. Is Valerie so insensitive that she doesn’t understand this?
‘Okay, then.’ Valerie continues to talk to me as if I were a child, not improving my temper.
‘If you won’t do the processing around the High Tower with either of your menfolk, how about this: you and Tyler both set off in opposite directions and then meet in the middle and then stop to greet one another as family?’ Ms Bradshap and Ms Laura, she went on, had seen the provisional ads for the Walk the Other Way brochure and were very excited.
‘Feminists can’t afford to be seen as man haters any more. Feminism is not at odds with happy families, just the old-fashioned traditional unhappy kind. The smiling man, the pretty woman, and a pigeon pair of happy kiddiewinks is out! That’s the way you started out, Diavolessa, and I know it upsets you that the kids ended up with Mary Fisher. I’ve heard you talking about it in your sleep.’
I feel totally traduced. My privacy has been invaded. She’s been listening to me talk in my sleep, she is interfering with my dreams! What else does this girl know, paddling around in the Archives as she does? There are things I would rather were not made public. The reason why Bobbo went to prison: certain things that I did – all justified, but even so. And my kids did not ‘end up’ with that whore Mary Fisher – I gave them to her as an existential act. I realise that I have to be careful. I try not to show my upset.
‘I’m hardly
sure a granny image suits me,’ I say as lightly as I can. ‘I need time to come to terms with this suddenly shifting ground beneath my feet. And the last thing I want is people being sorry for me.’
It does not suit me one bit to have my family back in my life. It was absurd sentimentality on my part to think I did. I prefer the idle mournfulness of missing them to the trouble, bother and confusion of an actual reconciliation. True, I hurt dreadfully when the existential act took place. No one warned me that would happen when I gave my children away. I felt as if I had been deprived of a limb, I remember that: I wailed aloud, as if with a physical pain. But just as a cow will bellow and moo in panic when its calf is taken away for the slaughter, the distress lasts the shortest of times. A new bale of hay drops onto the shed and all is forgotten; the cow chews placidly on. I prefer the melancholy of ‘my children will not talk to me’ to the actuality of some young, selfie-taking, sexting, socially-mediated yob of a grandson who at best disapproves of me, and at worst will tell me he loves me in the hope of an inheritance.
As for Valerie, this chit of a girl who turned up out of the blue in response to an advertisement in a newspaper for a ‘good feminist with secretarial and social media skills’, got the job over a hundred and twenty others, mostly because of her looks and youth – how can I have been so naïve? She has wormed her way into my confidence, thinks nothing of eavesdropping on my private thoughts and cynically calls me Diavolessa because she knows my weakness – that I want to be liked. Anger surges up in my gorge. I have a fit of coughing. Valerie runs at me with a glass of water.
‘Oh dear,’ she says, when I’ve recovered. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’m so sorry. I can be very tactless.’
The afternoon is too much for me. I tell Valerie I am going to my room to take a power nap.
I am much beset by difficult memories. I shut my eyes. The older you get the more inviting sleep becomes.
17
Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It)
The ghost of Mary Fisher explains her assignment.
Woo-ooh, woo-ooh, woo-wooh... Me again, the ghost of Mary Fisher, wailing in the wind that swirls round the High Tower. Listen! I am so, so excited about the beautiful but troubled lad who is Tyler Finch Patchett. He has quite re-energised me, you know. He is my step-grandchild. I’ve never had one of those before. I looked after his mother Nicci when the She Devil dumped her kids on me. I packed them off to boarding school and the first thing the girl did was get herself into trouble. She must have had wiles; she certainly didn’t have looks. But love is blind. She went ahead with the pregnancy – love twins – and then vanished from sight. I got the blame, of course. ‘Putting ideas into her head,’ as if I would. If I taught her anything it was that a girl’s best weapon is her virginity. The twins turned out to be, well, dreadful, but Nicci’s son Tyler is a different matter. Not only beautiful in body but in temperament too – generous, open, kind, strong. What a man should be. But he needs direction. He’s so young. I have fallen in love with him. He is Bobbo the Beautiful’s grandson and young and virile, and it shows.
Yes, I am the one who wronged the She Devil. I freely admit it, and perhaps I am being punished for it now. I no longer have a body to go with my spirit. I, Mary Fisher, believer in truth, beauty and romantic love, once stole Tyler’s father Bobbo from the She Devil’s long, overlarge and muscly arms and I am now, it seems, condemned to make amends, poised forever between life and death, circling this dratted High Tower, observing what goes on – the dereliction of the Bobbo whom once I so loved.
But I have faith. In my lifetime I was a romantic novelist and as such was a devotee, with other writers, of The Great Fictional Religion. It is Momus, the God of satire and comedy, whom we worship. Momus, The Great Writer in the Sky. I have faith that Momus, blessed be his name, will decide in his glorious wisdom that the plot has been properly resolved and allow me to get off to heaven where I so obviously belong. This endless fidgety wailing is getting me down. I do not honour it with the word ‘restless’. Fidgety is what it feels like. Irritating.
I think my sin might well have been dying out of turn; I have to come back in one form or another to alter the outcome of the story. Praise be to Momus. If only I had teeth I would be clenching them as I say it, but however: Praise be to Momus.
What I really need is a great storm, a great explosion of lust, rage and finality, but all I can muster is this pathetic little wail – ‘remember me, remember, Mary Fisher dead and gone’. Once I lived here, loved here, conformed the coastline to the sweep I wanted, now at least I haunt here. Better than nothing. I suppose. Is that what I’m meant to feel? Grateful for small mercies?
Up there on Mount Olympus Zeus and Venus still haven’t made peace. The gender war rages there the same as here. Sisyphus still rolls his rocks uphill. Crows still tear at Prometheus’ innards. Momus, a lesser God, I daresay, but one important to me, shelters in the lower foothills of Olympus from whence he directs so many of the plots and plans of mankind. He has no standards. He rejoices as much in the sudden turns and twists of celebrity living as in those of great movements, vital politics. Sometimes I suspect he is not as good a writer as he’s cracked up to be. He’ll do anything for a good headline; if things get too complicated he’s quite capable of cutting the story short with an earthquake, an epidemic, a sudden resignation or even death. Think of Princess Di – of the shock when the narrative stops. Momus was there in that tunnel – a demiurge of a writer, not the true God. But to see the writer of life on earth as a bad writer, a demiurge of a novelist, a Dan Brown not a Dostoevsky, an E.L. James not a Jane Austen, why, this smacks of apostasy – forget it. Heads might roll. Delete, delete. Rewind, as we used to say.
And oh! my Bobbo was once so beautiful! I try to forget but I can’t. His golden limbs, his golden hair, his smile like Adonis – but that was before the She Devil broke him, had him imprisoned, punished him for the sin of being male, for preferring me to her. I do not think Bobbo will lurk around the High Tower as I do. He is old, old; soon he will be dead and gone – the crows tell me – gone with the wind which circles the High Tower, it will whisk him away to somewhere I can’t follow. When it came to it, he did not love as I did. The truth is, like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, he didn’t give a damn.
All the songs and stories of the past I knew do not go away; they play havoc with my memories. I hear Jerry Lee Lewis and he’s singing, She Still Comes Around (to Love What’s Left of Me). In Bobbo’s mind I became one of the siren women, another of the destroyers. And now the song Delilah comes fluttering in; could I have been a Delilah, lying in wait for decent men? How very unfair. I am Mary Fisher, sweet, beloved and beautiful, the ghost of true love, singing All You Need Is Love, the song of my generation. Love, love, and more love.
I do my best. It is in my nature. I go singing in the rain or howling in the gale. I see what I see. I hear what I hear. Bits and pieces. I’m all ghost, no substance at all.
18
Walking The Other Way Walk
Valerie’s so sharp she almost cuts herself.
I am not in a good mood. I am with young Valerie down in the meeting room, 1HT/2 – a windowless chamber where the howl of the wind cannot be heard – and it is at least warm, and Valerie is still going on about her dratted equinox.
‘Tyler could take Bobbo’s place in the procession, I suppose,’ says Valerie. ‘If his grandpa really is totally troppo, as you say he is.’
What does she mean, ‘as I say’? He most certainly is. Let alone ‘totally troppo’. Which is Australian, I gather, for ‘round the bend’ or whatever one is meant to call the mentally disabled these days. Poor Valerie spent years in Sydney, picking up all kinds of outlandish words and ideas.
‘We’re meant to be working for gender parity,’ she goes on, ‘and surely the odd male turning up in our literature would not go amiss.’
‘We struggle for gender parity,’ I say. ‘To suggest we have achieved it would be dangerous. Don’t ev
en think of it.’
‘I thought you and Tyler could both wear crowns,’ she says next. ‘Be Frosty King and Queen of the Widdershins Winter Wonderland. Do say yes, Diavolessa, it would be such a PR coup, and a hoot too!’
A hoot? I am the She Devil, the liberation feminist queen of all I survey. And this Valerie, this chit of a girl who dares to call herself a feminist, suddenly wants to make a crown for Tyler, descendant of Bobbo, that senile dinosaur, that foul-mouthed bully whom given half a chance she would have made King to my Queen and made us walk widdershins hand in hand round the High Tower. Like the two old people bent double over their walking sticks on the road-crossing signs. Humiliating. Someone needs to take those signs off the streets.
‘The public would so like it,’ she persists. ‘A lovely shot – young and old, heads together: “My favourite grandchild, says the She Devil”, all that.’
‘No way,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry but no way.’ And my face must betray my feelings.
‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘I keep getting this wrong, don’t I!’ She smiles so sweetly that these unsettling emotions swirl away as quickly as they crowded in. One of the penalties of growing old is that paranoiac fears come thick and fast and one has to guard against them. I remember how young she is, how inexperienced, how little she knows for all her PhD from Sydney in Feminism in Development. God knows what they taught her there.
‘You’re young,’ I say, ‘so you will get things wrong. But it doesn’t matter, if you can learn from those older and wiser than yourself that it is a bad idea to be seen as frivolous, lightweight and unimportant. The IGP stands for equality, parity and dignity, not the joys of family life. For heaven’s sake, Valerie, get that into your head.’