Death of a She Devil

by Fay Weldon

  Dr Simmins, satisfied, slipped away. Testosterone had been put back in its rightful place.

  September

  Dr Simmins was happy. Tyler was looking very much like a girl, at least from the back. All the good doctor’s other charges were well and content. Demand for SSRIs had flattened out. Ms Bradshap’s diet kept them healthy no matter how much they all complained, and actually Ms Bradshap, now on 20 mg Seroxat, seemed more open and trusting and less suspicious of what others found normal. She allowed crème brûlée with the breakfast cereal, and apricot jam in the breakfast yoghurt.

  Such a warm Indian summer! The tower seemed to doze in tranquil sunshine. A group of IGP-ers would go down to the little cove at the foot of the High Tower to skinny-dip in the sea, allowing themselves to giggle and laugh and throw their scrawny wrinkled bodies around, careless of observation. They would keep their flip-flops on because the rocks could be sharp. They were surprisingly free with their language, too, fucking this’s and shitting that’s. They were nuns on Prozac, the lot of them. Well, at least these days, thought Dr Simmins, they were happy. Most of them had no children: too busy all their young lives setting the world to rights, more concerned with the future than the present. Perhaps that was what the SSRIs did, disinhibited you, allowed you to live in the present, singing, splashing, swearing. She was doing them a favour.

  It occurred to Dr Simmins that the IGP-ers were not merely just modern nuns on Prozac but like the cloistered sisters in a mediaeval Carmelite convent. Were not all at the High Tower sustained by the asceticism of comparative solitude, manual labour, chastity (at least amongst the older ones) and sisterly charity, hiding themselves away from the temptations of the outside world? Was the High Tower not the modern equivalent to an ancient convent? They might not acknowledge what they were doing, not see themselves as nuns, but they were treading the same human path as those who went before.

  Their Mother Superior was the She Devil. Valerie was an ambitious novice trying to persuade discalced nuns to move from the second to the third order of the Carmelite sisters. She was trying to empower them to become uncloistered and fraternise with like-minded men: to become lay nuns, in other words, not obliged to practise chastity, but to move about the world as normal if virtuous women. In which case, ‘No Blame Attached’ – as the I Ching would say. Valerie was driven not by malice but by history, concluded Dr Simmins. She would have to be forgiven.

  The High Tower itself played a part. Perhaps because it was the place where a small group of Carmelite novices were known to have taken shelter in 1646, escaping from religious persecution. They had come from Brussels and were on their way to the new Chichester Carmel, twenty miles down the road (ironically, as it so happened, on the Manhood Peninsula). Here they were no longer in fear for their lives. Perhaps something of their delight and relief had permeated the walls, and the High Tower looked to repeat its performance.

  Or perhaps the High Tower had aspirations of grandeur; saw itself as the convent of San José in Spain and the She Devil as St Teresa of Avila (comparisons could certainly be made) with her constant self-inflicted pain – ‘I bore these sufferings with great composure, even joy’ – doubts from friends and clerics as to whether the visions were diabolic or divine, the same protracted theological disputations through the night, the agonised self-reproaches and always the pain, the pain: the suffering to be endured – if St Teresa suffered the better to experience God, the She Devil had suffered to achieve the grace that was sexual attractiveness. The one achieved her goal, the other lamentably failed. But running the race is the thing, isn’t it, not the prize? Or so they say.

  Dr Simmins wondered how it was she herself had got so far in her life without bearing any children who would cluster round her bedside when she died. Even old Bobbo had managed a grandson, thanks to Samantha, who may have been supremely idiotic but whose heart was in the right place. Recently, Dr Simmins realised, she was feeling more generously to others than she used to. Was she perhaps overdoing the Prozac?

  She was only sixty-four – perhaps she could computer date? She and Leda got on well but Leda was such a gloomy guts, and when it came to it Dr Simmins did not fancy women. All that love and romance business, long ago, scarcely discovered and then, so early on, out the window! She had taken offence at her own life; sulked and skulked and bitten men’s heads off ever since just in case they turned out to be another Stephen. If only SSRIs had been invented then. She might now be loved and not respected and have a family round her when she died and not a cluster of IGP-ers. Though she was becoming very fond of them.

  She’d read in one of her mother’s despised Mary Fisher novels way back – a blue-eyed blonde soldier with cleft chin off to war, kissing a slim doe-eyed beauty with tumbling red hair and the rest – that in order to be loved you had to learn first how to love, and she had never managed. She felt tears welling in her eyes. She hated these ‘if-only’ thoughts. You always ending up a self-pitying wreck, the kind of patient she most abhorred. There’d been all that silly nonsense about the High Tower being haunted by Mary Fisher’s ghost: a patch of good weather had wiped it all away. She should sit in the sun more often. Or take more Vitamin D.

  Or perhaps it was just the old man being dead and buried and safely out of the way that had made the difference. It was true that sometimes she seemed to hear breathing when there was no one else about there to breathe – she’d be sitting quietly in the clinic when the hairs on the back of her neck would stand up for no apparent reason – but whatever it was, it was benign. Now she could hear, drifting out of a clear sky, long ago and far away, a song they’d made her sing at primary school. She hadn’t wanted to sing it at the time. It came true, that was the trouble.

  I lean’d my back against an oak,

  Thinking it was a trusty tree.

  But first it bent and then it broke,

  So did my love prove false to me.

  Of course she had been sulking ever since. Sex didn’t make you miserable and jealous. Love did.

  It was in this soft mood that Dr Simmins was driving the Iron Maiden through St Rumbold’s when she came across the silly carer Samantha whom she had encountered in the bad days of the High Tower, nursing the abominable Bobbo – as he was referred to these days, if at all. Amethyst Builders had now shovelled so much earth on top of him there was no fear he would rise again.

  Samantha was looking slim and smart and pushing a vintage Silver Cross pram and in it was a moon-faced baby. Dr Simmins stopped the car and admired the pram while avoiding any mention of the baby. She preferred not to lie if it was possible. Samantha told her that now she was a mother she wasn’t going back to work. The family had come into money and been able to put in a new kitchen and bathroom and add a conservatory to the back of the house.

  Dr Simmins congratulated her and said she was a very lucky girl, and Samantha said it wasn’t luck, she had earned it. She’d done important work for the She Devil. Dr Simmins expressed polite surprise. Samantha said it was way back in January. The She Devil had asked her to go over to a bank in Switzerland and take a suitcase out of a safe deposit vault.

  ‘And you must have been so pregnant at the time,’ said Dr Simmins, sympathetically.

  That had been the whole point, apparently; no one suspected pregnant girls. She’d gone over as Samantha Patchett, Lady Patchett’s granddaughter, with documents to prove it. She’d brought the old battered suitcase with chrome locks back to the High Tower, crossing Europe by train on the way back. She’d got through customs all right at Harwich. It had been very exciting! She’d peeked into the suitcase on the ferry and it was crammed full of £50 notes and important-looking documents. The suitcase was now down in the Archive Room.

  ‘So you see,’ said Samantha. ‘The dear old gentleman was right all along. There was all that money. To think that no one ever believed him!’ She had gone to put flowers on the grave but you couldn’t quite see exactly where it was any more, there was so much new wet earth over everything.
‘Funny place to work in, that Tower. The vibes always too light or too heavy. Never could make up its mind. Forces clashing, that kind of thing.’

  ‘The ghost of Mary Fisher, I daresay,’ Dr Simmins heard herself saying, ‘flitting to and fro. Certainly didn’t do much for the weather.’ And she drove off.

  An extraordinary thing happened as Dr Simmins did a wheelie at the gates of the High Tower, the better to swing into the courtyard and park. Security would normally come out and drive the car into the garage, the better to record miles driven and so forth – Valerie’s doing: one had to be accountable, apparently, for the sake of the books – but this time they didn’t.

  Where Bobbo’s grave had been, Samantha was quite right, were now just piles of wet earth. A particularly high tide must have managed to lap entirely round the High Tower. Indeed as she looked the tide was creeping round the corner towards her, dragging soil with it as it took its one step back in order to take its two steps forward. She sat in the Iron Maiden and watched, fascinated. The ground seemed to be churning. It was as though dinosaurs were heaving away just below the surface, waiting to break through. It had to be a trick of the light, surely.

  And what the hell was this? Two big ugly-looking pink-faced men in dark suits and ties were walking towards her. Men? An unusual sight around the High Tower, and not the kind to be nuns’ priests – ‘so grette a nekke, and swich a large breest’ as Chaucer put it – who used to accompany nuns when they went on pilgrimage abroad. Rather these were pallid of face, narrow of neck and sloping of shoulder, though with the unmistakeable and disagreeable air of those who come from authority to upset one’s apple cart.

  They approached the car, asked Dr Simmins to get out of it and take her personal belongings with her. She did. They then showed her court documents to the effect that due payments had not been made to a leasing company called Marianne Limousines: the vehicle was being re-possessed.

  They got into the Iron Maiden and drove it away.

  Part 5

  Apotheosis

  Nurse Hopkins Reflects

  Well, that was a turn-up for the books! I can watch things indoors through windows but what goes on underground I have had to deduce. Obviously I haven’t been able to deduce sufficiently well, or this débâcle wouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me. I’ve looked over Ms Belinda’s shoulder while she’s typed up the minutes in her office, 3CC/4 – how annoying these room numbers have been. I hope whoever runs the High Tower next will devise a simpler system. Perhaps even the minutes haven’t been sufficiently informative. Mary Fisher, with all her irritating wooo-h, wooo-hing, did rather better than me when it came to working out what was going on. And the world through Dr Simmins’ eyes turned out to be rather, shall we say, prescription-drug enhanced?

  Since sharing the Treasurer’s job with Ms Sidcup Valerie Valeria has managed to run up bills with local tradespeople over and above annual income to the tune of some £742,000. Believing as she does that the end justifies the means, her end has been the smooth running of the High Tower. And the means? Why, the spending of other people’s money! Marianne Limousines has had to repossess the Iron Maiden, which Valerie had sold to them, leased back then not kept up the payments. Amethyst Builders, Luxuriette, Femina Electrical and so forth have all been driven to litigation. The IGP, far from being wealthy, is struggling to survive. The success of the brochure has been very largely wishful thinking.

  Someone at the Charity Commission has noticed that B. Patchett had suddenly become T. Patchett – changed from a shaky old hand to a bold strong one, very arresting, with swirls and arabesques in purple ink – without due notification. A few major discrepancies were then discovered in the very scatty accounts, and now the Charity Commissioners are asking questions. Ms Sidcup is at death’s door in a hospice, and is in no position to answer them. She was taken poorly very suddenly. They have given the High Tower three months to sort itself out. Valerie says everyone is panicking, three months is more than enough. The gravity of the situation has been kept from the She Devil. The poor old dear deserves at least that.

  I blame my failure to notice what has been happening on the problem I have seeing through masonry walls. Momus should surely find a solution. A rock fall or a landslide, something like that. I need to have a look at Valerie’s accounts, get into the Archives. A prayer to him seems advisable. He has left me in this pickle and so should in all reason oblige. Not that he’s very hot on reason, as we know. But here goes:

  ‘Dear Momus, Great God of Narrative, Teller of Tales, High Lord of Mystery and the Whole Fictional Universe, hear my prayer. Do what is needed at this juncture, hear my prayer. A rock fall perhaps or a landslide to make a hole or two in the basement would help me bring this story to fruition. Hear my prayer. I know you’re busy and beset by your own deadlines but hear my prayer. Your power is undoubted, your blessing on this project most earnestly sought by your humble servant. Just let me fucking see what’s happening! (Delete. Sorry, just slipped out. But I am rather desperate.)’ That should do it. Momus goes for a bit of grovelling. Dodgy bloody shuffler.

  I take it back.

  He’s done it. In his own way, of course, not mine. Nothing dramatic, not an earthquake, a volcano or a rip tide as he sometimes does when approached in prayer – and perhaps just as well for he can be terrifyingly impetuous – but I hear a kind of electronic crackling. Then, when I stare at the stone wall I don’t exactly see through it, but instead a kind of second-hand version of what is going on, I suspect edited at his own caprice, on a porridgey black and white old-fashioned screen. The sound at least comes through clear as anything. Okay. On we go. Thanks be to Momus.

  ‘Wanker, aresehole, scum,’ I feel like saying sometimes under my breath. Foul-mouthed in life, foul-mouthed in death, that’s me. Alarming, how deeply ingrained is this habit of darting ill wishes at animate people and inanimate objects in others, outrunning even death. ‘Look at me,’ one is saying to a recalcitrant universe. ‘Look at me! Still furious but functioning!’ I thought I heard Bobbo’s fading ‘cunt, cunt, cunt!’ as he was sucked up into the infinite, but I may have been mistaken. I digress. Back to doing Momus’ work for him, the blighter.

  The edited scenes on the spectral TV screen:

  Valerie sits at her desk in 3CC/2 when Dr Simmins comes storming in. All around are unopened letters, but also wads of £50 notes.

  Dr Simmins: What is all this, Valerie, what is all this? Have you not been taking your pills?

  Valerie: People have so little understanding of the important things in life, let alone how great minds work. The important thing is to go forward with the plan. Money matters are so trivial!

  Dr Simmins: But all these unopened envelopes – the bills?

  Valerie: I’ve been so busy I’ve hardly been down here. But here (she hands over a few hefty wads): this should cover the Iron Maiden: take this to Marianne Limousines: it will bring us up to date. Tell them they’re lucky I’m not suing. But we must have our Iron Maiden, mustn’t we. You’re free to use it any time, Dr Simmins, without going through Security. Your need is greater than mine. And take this (more money) too for Luxuriette – we have the wedding to think about. But their behaviour has been so reprehensible – there is such a thing as trust! I’ll see to the rest of the bills now I know about them.

  Dr Simmins: So Ms Sidcup lost her grip some time ago?

  Valerie: I will not have Ms Sidcup blamed. She did what she could, poor old dear. I take full responsibility. That’s what I’m like. Stop panicking, Dr Simmins. You have been such a boon to all of us! Perhaps take another pill?

  The scene changes. Valerie is taking the lift down to 1HT/3, the Archive Room. She goes inside and opens the old suitcase with the chrome locks and takes out a big pile of notes – which, however, scarcely diminishes the amount visibly remaining there.

  Valerie (to the world): Enough – and for everyone. Fate is so totally on my side!

  Another scene: The Lantern Room. Tyler, to all effects
Tayla, except he still has his willy, is entwined with Valerie.

  Valerie: Our great day together, Tyler, tomorrow. I so love you. Do you love me?

  Tyler: Of course I do, Val. But couldn’t we just go off to the Bahamas or somewhere? The money’s mine, Grandpa said so.

  Valerie: He was dead when he said it. It might not hold up in a court of law.

  Tyler: But why an actual marriage? It’s so last century. You know what men are like.

  Valerie: You’re a girl. All girls adore weddings. I’m the husband so I’m wearing a penguin suit – ironically. And your dress is fabulous. Stop panicking. And only a couple of weeks to go and you’ll finally be all girl, not four-fifths girl. And we’ll live happily ever after with nothing penetrative to stand in our way. Isn’t that wonderful?

  Tayla (gives up): Yes dear. Yes dear.

  The scene changes. The Lantern Room is being made ready for the wedding, paint brushes wielded, chairs unstacked, bunting pinned up, a wedding cake borne in, glorious wedding hats brought out of retirement. All is completed, the guests (including a scattering of men, one of them being Tom Brightlingsea, at whom the She Devil scowls) are seated. The registrar is Wendy Singh from the local Register Office. Nicola, Matilda and the girls are there in various stages of dress, alarm and disbelief. Enter the wedding couple to the Wedding March. The bride is in virginal white with all the trimmings, the groom in a penguin suit: a very good-looking and happy pair indeed.

  Dr Wendy: Do you take this woman to be your wedded husband?

  Tayla: I do.

  I had a good view of the wedding reception: it was held in the Lantern Room. There was a large window area, so I didn’t have to rely on the screens. Nicci managed a little reunion with the She Devil before Matilda dragged her away in fear of contamination.