Faustine (8 page)

Not that it mattered to me, Jasmine says with a smile she must think is self-deprecating, charmingly humble. I was no Jean Shrimpton even in my heyday.

No, Muriel had been a very attractive woman, and I always told her that if she hadn’t been so done up by Bert’s
infidelities
and sudden disappearances, if she hadn’t had a child to bring up on her own, she’d have met someone far better and married again. But somehow, she never did. And then, just as she was beginning to be free again, when Anna was grown up and beginning to earn a bit and so on …

Jasmine looks at me now. I know she is trying to be kind, she has understood her words are likely to hurt me.

… You came along, she says simply. Obviously there’s no other way to put it. But I know Jasmine is just making trouble – for me and for Muriel – for if Muriel hadn’t loved me with all her heart, why would she have dedicated herself to me in the way she did?

– There was no alternative, Jasmine says. Not enough money for an au pair, seldom enough for a babysitter. She was well and truly trapped, your grandmother, and now she was beginning to feel it. She’d come back from the office, phone me to see if I wanted a drink and by the time I got there, you’d be in the bath and the
TV
Times
would be opened out on the table in Muriel’s little room.

At first we talked about Bert a lot, and then about the world trip we were going to make – the Blue Rinse Brigade, we called ourselves.

And all this while Anna was really digging into her new life. Harry was the kind of man who would put himself out for someone he loved – and he didn’t stop her embarking on her new career. He helped find good typesetters – I remember that because I helped a bit with my typing skills – and he helped her lay out a new magazine. When he wasn’t giving a hand to her very special projects and ventures, all of which he seemed to sympathize with and know something about, he was actually encouraging her to have fun and join in with all the fun that was going on just then – pop concerts in the parks, dancing and listening to music all night long …

I remember, says Jasmine with a thoughtful look, that the favourite song of that summer was ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – I think that was the name. I always thought it was a nasty, wailing sound, but it came out of doors and windows everywhere, like Bob Dylan … and Sergeant Pepper, of course.

And when they weren’t doing any of those things, Harry and Anna were demonstrating in Grosvenor Square against the Vietnam War. It really was as if Harry had supplied a half of herself for Anna that she could never have dreamed was there.

– That’s nice, I say.

– I suppose Muriel envied it, pure and simple, says
Jasmine
after another shrewd look at me to see if I can take what’s coming next. We used to get quite drunk together, you know.

And she told me one night she thought Harry was just about the most fantastic person she’d ever met. His looks, his
charm, his intelligence – I know you think I’m discriminating against women here, for after all, if Muriel had been a man and she’d found herself fancying her son’s daughter, it would have been almost the expected thing to do. For women – well, it just is different, and it hasn’t changed all that much yet, as far as I can see.

– She owned up to this innocent passion on the night the TV went on the blink. We’d been planning to watch a film, an old thriller by Chabrol, I think it was, and of course she was angry and disappointed to miss it.

That was what Muriel was like then, far moodier than she’d ever been like that before. Easily thrown. Irritable. Sometimes we used to joke about it together, and say hello, here comes the menopause.

In fact, Muriel had got very absent-minded and I know the doctor had put her on tranquillizers of some kind.

And Greg, who was her great friend at the Image
Corporation
, even phoned me at home one day and said he was worried Muriel might get the push at work, because she kept writing the same copy over and over again, and the editor – a real bitch, I can tell you – Liddy Wise was her name, was sending it back to Muriel with sarcastic comments like, ‘It can’t always be summer’, when Muriel had written some flowery stuff and it happened to be the autumn issue coming up.

I didn’t think that was the right night to tell Muriel, though, that she might be in trouble at work. I tried to steer her clear of her obsession with Harry. I mean, it was embarrassing: there he was, bringing Anna home every night, and they were making love in her room (it used to be Muriel’s room, being the big double, but when Harry came into her life, Anna asked Muriel to move to the small room, down at the end of the passage, near you). All the same,
she must have heard things … well, you’re grown up now, Ella. You know!

 *

I’m not grown up, I want to cry out. Leave me alone! I don’t want to hear any of this. Muriel loved moving near to me – she told me again and again. But already my heart is sinking. Was she simply repeating, as she did the meaningless copy she had to write on beauty and fashion, the same, unmeant words?

It couldn’t be true.

And now I begin to hate my mother again, for inflicting this pain on her mother and my beloved grandma. I don’t care if Muriel liked Harry a lot. Why shouldn’t she, for God’s sake?

And I say to myself that I will leave the cottage in exactly two minutes, if Jasmine doesn’t tell me where Muriel is now … and how I can find her before my mind is poisoned even further by her old friend.

 *

– I don’t know what happened, Jasmine says. I can’t get to the bottom of it. But something happened the next day that seemed to flip Muriel – you’d almost say she went
temporarily
psychotic, I suppose.

The TV needed to be mended, and as it was the summer holiday break at the day nursery, Muriel took you with her to the TV shop to get it mended.

As I say, I could never piece together what happened. But when she came back from that very ordinary trip, she phoned me. And she sounded madly excited.

‘It’s all within my grasp now, Jasmine,’ she said. ‘And you can join the pension scheme too, if you want to!’

I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about, and said so.

‘It’s just a question of signing a piece of paper,’ Muriel’ said. ‘A hire purchase agreement, a contract, whatever you like to call it. And you can get your youth back. For
twenty-four
years. Not bad, eh?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I said. I must say I was surprised, with a job that consisted in the main of puffing dishonest rejuvenation treatments, wrinkle creams, collagen and all the rest – that Muriel would be taken in by some new pamphlet promising a return to youth and beauty.

But convinced she was. She even said she’d seen herself – can you beat that – on TV, looking as young and lovely as ever she did. I had to burst out laughing. But I was worried, of course, very worried. It’s pretty well known that when you start thinking you’re seeing yourself on TV and the like, you’re in urgent need of psychiatric treatment. She’d be getting coded messages from the traffic lights soon, I thought.

So I was very gentle with her. I came over to the Chelsea flat. I told her she needed a complete break … and I
pretended
I needed one too. Why don’t we go to a health farm together? I said.

 *

I remember the TV shop.

I won’t tell you, Jasmine, what I saw there, because you wouldn’t believe me, anyway.

In the TV shop there were hundreds of TV sets, some small and some enormous, and all with the same cartoon playing – which made me shout out with pleasure. There was Sooty, cavorting a hundredfold across the screens.

I sat on the floor of the shop. I can see and feel the blue pile carpeting, with the dropped staples from invoices and a squashed cigarette butt I tried to pick up and play with, except that a man in a green overall came and swept it away.

Muriel must have gone into the back of the shop, with our small set that she’d lugged all the way in a wheeled shopper. At any rate, when the cartoon was over and I looked round for her, she was nowhere to be seen.

I don’t remember feeling fear – Muriel had brought me up with so much affection that it would no more occur to me that she would walk away and leave me than that my mother would come into my room one night to kiss me goodnight – and I remember crawling into the back section of the shop. I could walk perfectly well by then, and I have no idea why I didn’t want to.

There was Muriel – I saw her almost at once. She was standing talking to a man. That’s all I thought – a man.

He had the set and he was lending Grandma another one, because he led her back into the front store, where the banks of screens were, and he was trying to persuade her to lay out for a bigger one, I think, because he leant down and patted my head as they went past and I heard Muriel say, Yes, that’s my little granddaughter.

As the man walked past, I distinctly saw that he wasn’t wearing socks – only built-up little boots that gave him a funny, strutting air. Being on the floor, I know I saw what his legs were like, between the turn-up of his trouser and the top of his boots. And they were black and shiny, like the coat of a pony or a goat.

Then the man had walked on, and he was saying
something
to Muriel, and then suddenly I heard her give a little cry of surprise. It was just a quick flash, but I know I saw it. On every screen in the shop Muriel’s face looked out. But it was Muriel young and beautiful … and although, of course, I’d never known her then, I knew it was my grandma and I shouted out too.

Then the picture came back – an ad, I think it was, for
family cereals round a table with a red-and-white-check cloth.

We went home, and it’s true that my grandmother was holding a piece of paper, and she was laughing happily.

 *

But there is no way I would tell Jasmine this, and risk an offer of psychiatric treatment, which would very likely be her response.

And I say – for my two minute deadline has passed, in my strange reverie of that afternoon with my grandmother – ‘You must tell me. Now. Where is Muriel? Is she here?’

I fall silent, seeing Jasmine rise and leave her chair, and motion me to follow her out of the damp little house and across the green.

Lisa Crane is sitting at the head of a long table. Her blonde hair, in a Twiggy fringe, is crowned with diamonds, and there is more glitter at her neck and wrists. Her dress – she rises from time to time and goes to the door to greet an especially famous or distinguished guest – is short, so short it barely grazes her thighs. Like a snake’s skin, riding loosely on the shoulders as if ready to be sloughed off at a casual twist of the limbs, a resigned shrug of slender shoulders, it too is blazing with sequins and artificial gems, so that Lisa, with her look of costly brevity, could be seen to epitomize the span of a butterfly, or an exotic moth. Her eyes, blue as the glinting stones set in her sheath, seem as carefully positioned as an insect’s markings; they flicker as she looks to either side and down the length of the table, gauging success, and money, and deals.

 *

I am in the video room, as I suppose one would call it, of the old manor, a room given over to the photographic and filmic mementoes of Lisa Crane; and it’s here that I’ve been told to stay until Jasmine finishes ‘some work in the kitchen’. It’s no good being impatient, she tells me. You will soon know everything.

The room is off the hall, with its rich kelims and drawn purple and mauve velvet curtains, and I feel drowsy already, for to be in here is like being lost in the depths of a cave.
There are no windows at all, or if there are, they have for a quarter century been covered with the wall-hangings of Lisa’s long-ago Eastern trips – carpets from Nepal and
Bessarabian
prayer mats – and superimposed on these are gongs and discs of beaten brass, and, of course, the big TV screen for the videos.

There is incense burning here, a reminder of both the Eastern mysticism that Lisa, like so many others then, exploited and then abandoned – and also of the nature of the shrine in which, succumbing to soporific fumes, I see myself as captive votary. And all I can think of, in this abandoned harem where Lisa Crane is both sultana and concubine, where her position of power, and her teasing beauty, seem to contradict each other to the point of making her an impossible anomaly – a monster – is how I can find my grandmother and escape with her. In this house where time is sunk like most of the once-lovely garden in the river that seems to bind us here with its twining loops across the water-meadows, there will never be a chance of finding her or of coming to terms with reality. For already, I am half seduced by Lisa Crane.

The video changes, automatically, and Lisa appears before me again, this time in a caftan of striped silks and gold thread. She is smiling. She is giving an interview, it seems, on some long-forgotten chat show, about her ambitions and aims for the Empire she owns … the Empire of
Communications
, for Lisa has bought into and runs the world’s media.

 *

I doze, and dream of the church where Maureen, not especially devout herself, but conscious of her Irish heritage, used to take me when I was four years old and not long in my new country.

We are kneeling together and a bell rings, like the little
ornamental bell on Muriel’s table in the place I had to leave behind … so far away, as far as heartbreak, in the flat my grandmother ran away from – and then my mother, so I had nowhere to go but the other side of the globe.

The incense is carried past in a swaying censer, by a boy not much older than myself. I stare at him, from low down on the worn hassock where Maureen makes me kneel; but I know nothing of the lives of other children in this so-distant place.

I am lost and I want to go home.

 *

I open my eyes again. The video has changed. Lisa is in Manhattan, skyscrapers behind her head like a barbaric mega-billion headdress, primitive and barbaric in its
glittering
multi-faceted light.

Lisa is smiling into camera.

To the side of her, as the camera moves back, we see the repeating images, the Warhol look-alikes, the freaks and funnies from his sad circus of urban-deformed. Does Lisa not understand she is one of them too; that to this artist she is a sacred horror, as funny and repellent as the fat lady or the druggy young girl?

No, Lisa cannot realize this. She is money. And there’s nothing pathetic about money.

Or about her beauty, more frozen now and hard, that stares back at her from mirrors in the camped-up studio – and from the likenesses of her, smudged and hasty and priceless, that hang, or lie like discarded dollar bills,
everywhere
you look.

Lisa is worshipped. The mask of Mammon has the
exquisite
features of Helen of Troy.

But Lisa owns the ships and she makes sure they never get destroyed.

 *

On Lisa’s finger, the fourth finger of her left hand, is an amethyst ring.

And I remember … I see a ring, left carelessly, foolishly, in bathrooms and lavatories, at motorway café stopovers.

Muriel saying, Oh damn! We’ll have to go back. I’ve gone and left my ring there.

I’m drying my hands in the bathroom at home.

The ring lies, as it so often does, on the edge of the wash basin, next to a sliver of soap (neither Muriel nor my mother ever remember to buy soap).

The ring could so easily fall … into that little black hole where the water runs down in spirals (the opposite way from my new home, for everything is the other way round there, the world is upside down).

I don’t know what makes me push the ring from its
precarious
resting-place on the grubby enamel ledge.

But I do.

And I hear my own screams as I run to confess my crime to my grandma, who has been away for the first time in my young life, away for so long that I knew in my heart of hearts that she was dead.

I am trying to draw attention to myself – and to punish her too, of course.

Muriel went down a black hole and I sent the amethyst down after her.

Although I know she is back – I can feel her presence in the flat – why, then, hasn’t she come running to look for me?

 *

A man comes in … here I hazily remember a cry of
triumph
and delight as he fishes it out – with a knife, I think.

The ring might have gone right down to the other side of the world, the man says with a funny laugh.

You look beautiful, he says to Muriel. What have you done to yourself?

 *

I can hear those words, spoken all those years ago – perhaps because they frightened me. Like the story my grandma used to read to me – and I would ask for it, but then I would cry and say how much I hated it really – the story of the old woman who goes to market, and on the way back she falls asleep by the side of the road.

 *

Like the old woman, I have been sleeping. But Lisa is still there – in a fashion shot this time – to applause, she is walking round a great hall with tall windows, like a cathedral where on the altar the rich and famous parade their clothes.

Then the picture changes again, and this time I see her hands, clasped with the hands of a dark, tall, handsome man. It’s a TV news of all those years ago, and it announces the marriage of ‘Lisa’, the icon of the day.

And on her finger I see Muriel’s amethyst ring, set, as I so well remember, with seed pearls, in a worn gold setting. There was always something comforting and grandmotherly – Victorian, I suppose I must have meant – about that ring.

 *

In the story, as Muriel reads it to me on a dark evening by the gas log fire in the Chelsea flat, the old woman who has been to market wakes and finds she doesn’t know herself at all.

Don’t tell me any more, I beg Muriel. But something in me knows that the half-naked legs the old woman will see when she wakes are hers really, for all her Lawks a Mercy me, this is none of me!

What happened, Grandma? I say as I make her repeat the words again and again.

Some naughty boys, says Muriel. When the old woman was sleeping there they came along and cut off her skirts – right up to her knee.

 *

I will expand by the end of this year, Lisa is saying to the reverent (male) interviewer, crouching like a schoolboy behind his sheaf of questions for the woman who runs the currencies of communication.

I am going into Asia, says Lisa, ruler of the world!