Death of a She Devil

by Fay Weldon

  The wind’s blowing up. I can hear it even down here in 1HT/2. The light dims and then recovers. Another lightning strike? Black clouds will be massing. A storm is brewing. With any luck it will be like this on my birthday, only colder, and the procession will have to be cancelled. The party will just have to be indoors. Good.

  43

  A Strange Enchantment

  Momus pulls the strings.

  Yah-yah-de-yah-yah, wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h over land and sea. What a blow, in every sense of the word! My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure. Praise be to Momus – I have fallen in love! It was destined. This thing is stronger than the two of us. Our souls are as one. One moment one is alone and sad – the next, love strikes and the world changes. See, how love is eternal, outrunning even death? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dame Ruth Patchett, She Devil. I am in love with your grandson, Tyler Fitch Patchett. And cute, is he cute! Forget your old Bobbo. Wow!

  There have been rumblings on Mount Olympus. Asclepius is in decline and Momus, God of fabrication, has been throwing his weight around; I reckon his eye has fallen on me and mine, just as my eye has fallen on Tyler Fitch Patchett. Or I think this must have been what happened. I go on circling round the High Tower, but my mind, such as it is, this shy, fragile, footling thing, keeps going back to the beautiful but troubled Tyler Finch Patchett, perfection in mind as well as body, and everything shifts and changes. I hear Nat King Cole singing Nature Boy, telling me that wisdom lies in understanding that you must love before you can be loved. Is this my happy end, is my release from purgatory at last in sight? But the song ends unhappily! Is this love to be unrequited? Oh please no, Momus. Please not unrequited again. No, impossible. Only believe: ‘Love is an ever fix’d mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken’.

  By ‘troubled’ I mean that Tyler takes more drink and drugs than friends and family think advisable, and by ‘beautiful’, that he looks rather like the young David Bowie, in his blonde hair, smoky-eyed phase – though alas without the latter’s musical ability or gift for making money. But to be young and beautiful is a great advantage for either gender, however hopeless on the guitar, or with no apparent source of income. If you are familiar with the Tarot pack, see Tyler as the Fool, blithely stepping into the unknown as the sun shines on, blithely unaware of the precipice below.

  It was in Momus’ script that I should first encounter Tyler down at the shop in the village, where in poltergeist mode (I am allowed these few pleasures) I had been spilling lentils and squashing blowflies to annoy Mrs Easton who runs the place, and there was Tyler, sweeping up in the store, busy but unpaid in his obligatory ‘voluntary’ community work! Oh the darling, strange, enchanted boy!

  44

  What Valerie Doesn’t Know

  And the She Devil does. There are no safe spaces.

  But the rate of acceptances had been excellent, thought Valerie. What was the She Devil complaining about? 60 per cent yes, 30 per cent no, 4 per cent will-if-I-can, and 6 per cent had presumably thrown the card and brochure in the bin, should they have one. Many of the institutions and individuals contacted ran paper-free offices so there were no bins. If she’d been able to get the invites out earlier, the take-up rate would have been better still. The She Devil had insisted on using snailmail instead of just pinging the things over electronically, but since she forgot everything anyway Valerie had gone ahead with email for most and left cards for those few who were not familiar with computers. More sensible, surely, to make a list of those few who did not use computers, and reserve the old letterbox method of communication for them. Postage was so expensive! It was extraordinary what the old chose to waste their money on to no apparent purpose. They’d use landlines instead of texting. She did not understand the reluctance of patrons to communicate by phone with some disagreeable person who might batter their eardrums. Texting was safer and somehow nicer. And the party bag offer had worked a treat, in spite of the She Devil’s fury.

  But it was a really good result: the new brochure had worked well; 15 per cent had actually upped their contributions and only 2 per cent had cancelled, possibly reacting to the imagery of the tempest-ridden High Tower now perhaps more obviously phallic than before. There was a fine line to be drawn between what was subliminally suggestive, and what was a turn-off – as some found the bursting spray of the popped champagne bottle held at crotch level by Grand Prix winners. If the new logo was on the right side of that line for all but 2 per cent, this was success indeed. The Women’s Widdershins Walk at the High Tower had managed to slip into the text and was not just going viral online but being entered in a whole lot of diaries. Which was what counted.

  Sometimes Valerie felt she had crossed the world only to find herself back with her complaining mother, or at least with a version of her, and that she was doomed.

  45

  If Only One Had Substance!

  Wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h, and only the occasional wheee-h.

  ‘Somethingsomethingsomething, on thy cold grey rocks, oh sea.’ It’s poetry now, not old songs I hear. Words I learned as a child flutter round my head, ‘portions and parcels of a dreadful past’, as Tennyson would have it. Fluttering like the baby in the womb when its new soul enters in, not that I would know anything about that having chosen not to have a baby myself. Anyway, flutter, flutter. Like ‘birdie, birdie, cheep cheep’, or is it ‘baby, baby, cheep cheep’? It’s no longer clear to me.

  How did the Tennyson go? Primary school, Standard 6. ‘And I would that my tongue could utter’ – oh indeed, would that I had a tongue! – ‘the thoughts that arise in me.’ How does it go on? I try and make the connections, but fail. I have what I can only describe in my present state as the floppiest kind of mind. I have to catch these thoughts as they fly. Never any peace. ‘O why, why must life all labour be?’ No, that’s from The Lotos-Eaters. Other people’s thoughts keep interfering. Bet that was Ms Bradshap, always moaning. No, I remember now, it’s ‘And the stately ships go on, To their haven under the hill, But O for the thoughts of a vanished mind and the sound of a voice that is still.’ Or something.

  That’s a shift: an improvement, a flash of good cheer, a break in the clouds, sunlight. Wooo-h, wooo-h, wheee-h, wooo-h round the High Tower.

  Back to work.

  46

  Nature Knows Best

  Tyler’s eye and Tyler’s I look in both directions.

  Tyler’s wall eye had blighted his childhood, as had his mother’s refusal to have it ‘seen to’. She believed that surgical intervention only ever made matters worse, except when it came to terminating pregnancies or getting thin, when it was a different matter: a belief in which Matilda Eavens the therapist encouraged her.

  ‘Interfere with a wall eye and you’ll get an unsighted eye,’ Matilda would say. ‘Nature knows best.’ She also saw fecundity as sacred, in which understanding she was very much at odds with her Nicci. Matilda was a vegetarian and wore long full skirts and also had two daughters – but of the serious academic kind. She had a large and welcoming bosom and would have made two of Nicci, who after her gastric band surgery had given up dungarees and Dr Martens boots and taken to white blouses and tight black skirts and kitten heels. But Matilda was a good feminist, if rather of the blood-and-soil kind, and the whole family, Nicci, Madison, Mason and little Tyler, went along to family therapy once a week, no matter how the youngsters complained.

  Nicci liked to refer to her son as Cyclops and the childcare and school authorities took to using it too, not unkindly, thus identifying the child and his disability in one go. When Tyler got to sixteen he applied for NHS surgery off his own bat, a procedure for which permission was granted, but not before quite a time had to be spent on legal discussions about parental rights versus the rights of minors. After the procedure life took a turn for the better, if only because Tyler could look others in the eye at last. The girls took to calling him ‘The Experiment’ instead of Cyclops, which was something. Nicci, affronted, di
d not speak to Tyler for months, not that she was home much to do it anyway. The battle between Pro-Lifers and Right to Choosers was savage and ongoing. ‘I can’t see why Mum complains so about our grandmother,’ said Mason to Matilda once. ‘We hardly see Mum from one week to the other. Isn’t she an abandoning narcissistic mother too?’

  ‘That’s quite different,’ said Matilda, but didn’t explain why.

  When Tyler began to display male traits like smelly feet, clumsy elbows and knees, general knobbliness, a squawky voice, a love of football and making models he was banned from the therapy group for a while. His sisters began to look at him with disdain: they jeered at him on Facebook, laughed at him on Twitter, sexted his rapidly growing parts to their Friends (they had few real friends, he noticed, but did not remark upon the fact, being a kind and generous lad, brimming with empathy and loving them in spite of all). He endured all slights. He could understand why the twins had never wanted a brother, Nicci’s maternal love being in such short supply. And they were not, frankly, very bright. He only wished his parts were more impressive: criticism of them seemed endemic.

  Even though he was never bullied at school – too cheerful and well disposed towards others to present himself as any kind of victim, and, with his eye eventually ‘seen to’, quite impressively good-looking – Tyler suffered from fits of quite unreasonable anxiety. Currently it was because Hermione had suggested he lacked finesse in sexual matters, and he had rather assumed finesse was his compensating strength. He had always felt at a disadvantage amongst his randier, more brutish if better-hung friends. If during the drive home to Sylvan Lodge he seemed withdrawn and quiet – which Hermione took to be jealousy on account of her visiting friend but was not – it was because he did not feel one bit like chattering. He was anxious and offended.

  47

  Matilda Eavens Has An Explanation...

  ...about the Finch Patchett family.

  So where was I? Oh yes, Tyler. Nicci didn’t breastfeed, of course. The nursery fed him on formula in his early days, by means of plastic bottles warmed in the microwave, thus pouring into his little body a large dose of phthalates, the chemical in plastic which, imitating oestrogen, affects male reproductive development, sperm quality and male hormone levels. Phthalate absorption in youth doesn’t make men gay but does make them a little finer-boned, a little less bearded; a little more emotionally sensitive, shall we say, more metrosexual, than they otherwise would be. The rural male is these days different from the city male – the wide open spaces breed men, ‘real men’ – but a plastic feeding bottle can turn the one into the other, from a boy who longs to run round bashing other boys and playing with guns, to one who likes trying on his mother’s jewellery.

  Not that Nicci had much jewellery, she being an old-fashioned feminist, and eschewing personal adornment or anything that could be taken as an attempt to please the male. A string of amber beads, an heirloom from Brenda, her paternal grandmother, was pretty much all she had. Brenda had preferred to live in a hotel than a regular home. Perhaps dislike of housework runs in families. Certainly little Tyler had used the beads as a transitional comfort object, his baby hands clinging to them in desperation night and day.

  It had not helped Tyler in his quest for masculinity that he had twin sisters to contend with. Madison and Mason, nine years older than he, had resented the advent of a little brother from the beginning. Tyler’s father – Gabriel Finch, the actor/plumber/Bronze God – had been the twins’ stepfather for a couple of years, in which time they had been taught by their mother to despise him as a muscle-bound despot. The girls had little enough attention from their working mother as it was. She simply hadn’t had the time to give it to them: her career – the State having declared a job should be thus described and be seen as the pinnacle of female achievement – absorbed all her energies. Breakfast standing up, a frozen TV dinner on the sofa and each other’s company was the best her children, Madison, Mason and little Tyler, had of family life. Mason, aged seven, was to snarkily refer to her mother as ‘our night-time babysitter’.

  The twins had loved and hated Tyler all his life. Like their mother, they would have welcomed a baby girl, but a brother was a different kettle of fish. When he was a baby they played with his little willy, shrieking with pleasure when it reached into the air and sprayed its pee. Madison attempted to give him a blow job when he was five – a disappointing experience for everyone. The two of them admiring him dressed up in his mother’s white shirts, black skirts and kitten heels; having him change into their cast-offs when he was home from school. Tyler did not object. He loved the feel of silks and satins against his skin, the sensation somehow warding off the pins and pricks of outrageous fortune – the way everyone called him Cyclops, when surely he had two eyes not one, even though they stared in different directions, and the liberties the girls took with his willy: why did it seem to them such an object of mirth?

  His sisters, meanwhile, grew up to be lost to social media, earnest reality-telly fans, were great party-goers but no great shakes at school. They annoyed their mother by keeping their rooms in such a jumble of cosmetics, scents, discarded clothes and soft toys that she could hardly bear to go into them. The twins were strong-willed – so much so that, running to fat in their early years, both girls followed their mother in having gastric bands installed when they were sixteen, and after that moles removed and noses fixed, eyelids raised, lips plumped and so on.

  Their own natural father, a property developer trying to hide their existence from his wife, paid up.

  Like grandmother, one might suppose, like granddaughters. But the girls had been trained to hate and despise the She Devil as the one who had blighted their mother’s life, and by extension theirs, the source of all ills – the abandoning narcissistic mother which I, Matilda Eavens, their family therapist, have so well described in my various books as the ‘loathsome-she-devil archetype’.

  48

  Poor Nicci, Deprived Of A Mother’s Love

  So she takes comfort where she can.

  Wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h! It’s Mary again. Nicci has never had anyone important to her die – though she complained like mad to Matilda her therapist in the weekly sessions that her mother had murdered her guinea pig when she’d burned down the family home in suburban Nightbird Drive. Perhaps that’s why she can so easily shrug off her She Devil mother. But how can you wipe a mother out of your life? How can she make someone not exist who does exist? It baffles me. And someone as real and powerful as her mother Ruth. I suppose Nicci can’t risk meeting the real, living, suffering mother she has. Nicci is determined to be the only one who’s suffering. She feels she has to wreak damage on those around her, jabbing with sharp elbows wherever she goes. She lacked a mother’s love herself, so why should her son fare any better?

  ‘O, well for the fisherman’s boy, that he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad, that he sings in his boat on the bay’ – all that. Tennyson cheers me up. If the ‘O wells’ of the past have morphed into ‘O, well for the gastric band’, so be it. If Nicci and her daughters Madison and Mason (names of non-specific gender, carefully chosen) can skip around instead of lumbering around, good for them. All three have had gastric bands, of course they have. Like mother, like daughters. I would define them as selfie slim, not spiritually slim: it’s not something that involves sacrifice. In my novels the slim girl always got the prize – that is to say, the man – nor was much attention paid to diets other than to get into the wedding dress. But that’s romance for you. ‘But O for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.’ Such agreeable melancholy!

  Both the girls have sharp elbows too, I fear. But then they too have no acquaintance with death, which might yet soften them. I hope so. Tyler is about to lose his grandfather, I think, pretty soon, if the cry of the seagulls is anything to go by. They have fallen rather silent. Timor mortis conturbat a whole lot of creatures, not just ‘me’. Asclepius will lose his power and then
perhaps, Momus willing, I will be set free.

  Poor Nicci always found Tyler too hot to handle. Too hopelessly beautiful from the beginning for her to compete with, and win. She made the most of the wall eye but it wasn’t enough. She just didn’t want him in her life, a constant reminder of every disappointment she’d ever had – more like her own mother than she cared to admit.

  ‘The tender grace of a day that is dead, will never come back to me.’ Oh the grief of it! If only I had eyes I would have tears in them. I’d weep for Nicci and the girls if only because no one else ever will.

  Perhaps the twins will visit their natural father Billy Didcot in his nursing home? He hasn’t long to go, either. He’s the one who owns the house they live in, paid for their surgery, will leave them his fortune – what guilt will do for a man! He’s had a stroke and his wife has died. But the twins don’t know who he is and Nicci has never told them. She wanted them to be immaculately conceived births. She just didn’t like men – though I think her quarrels have been more with women than with men. But it’s so easy to get things wrong.

  I remember now how that Tennyson line goes: ‘Break, break, break on thy cold grey stones, O sea.’ So many broken hearts, let alone broken lives. If only one had substance, what a river one would cry, and even raise the sea level around the High Tower: not global warming doing it, but the tears of men and women lamenting lost love.