Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (27 page)

 
          
I
visited Guy and Lorna for Saturday lunch. They had few friends - partners are
easier to acquire than friends, for some people. Guy had an ex-wife to moan
about, which somehow occupied the space most people reserve in their brain for
friendships: and Lorna had a dolefulness which could be mistaken for
unsociability and would put people off. They had each other for company, why
should they bother with the rest of the world? They liked me to come over,
though, to divert them with tales of ridiculous goings-on in filmic places.
Lorna had once had an affair, she confided to me today, with a fellow academic
which had droned on for years - cinema, or a show, dinner, then bed, but as she
pointed out to me the films got worse over the years or seemed to, and the
shows more and more predictable, and in the end even habit was not enough: she
started making excuses, like the flu, for not turning up: he’d have family in
town, whatever, likewise. After a couple of years the weekly intervals became
two, then erratic, then stopped altogether. She still worked with him
occasionally - they were setting up a museum space for a display of
latest ventures in the wonderful world of
crystallography
- there weren’t any really, only better ways of making the
old ventures look pretty - but could hardly imagine, let alone remember, what
she had seen in him. I’d had variations of just such desultory relationships
over the years: I supposed a lot of people got married on the strength of them,
in a might-as-well mood, in which case no wonder a lot of people got divorced.

 
          
*                
*                
*

 
 
          
Lorna
improved as you got to know her better, or so it seemed to me. She talked more
easily. I was touched and pleased by her confidence about the lover. I told her
a little about Harry. We laid the table for lunch in the conservatory at the
back of the house. It was a bright day: there were little yellow crocuses
sticking defiantly out of the lawn: the
Thames
was running full and furiously at the end
of it. The boatmen were out, the pleasure steamers busy, megaphoning away.
Lorna prepared a bleak salad with no dressing and found packets of ham in the
back of the fridge. You can tell a person’s temperament from the state of their
icebox. Lorna had a frugal, saving, but ever hopeful disposition. Little
saucers of congealing stew, a mug of juice from boiled carrots, a third of a
sponge cake: a single old cold
Brussels
sprout - such a waste to throw leftovers
away. I made
a vinaigrette
and she expressed delight
at what it could do for a salad, and I taught her how to make it, but I didn’t
suppose she’d ever turn her hand to it when I was gone. She wouldn’t want to
indulge her senses. She was a brilliant
crystallographer,
I had no doubt; an appreciator of icy delights, not fleshly ones. She served
frozen peas and carrots mixed, without salt or pepper or butter. But it was all
right; I was not there for culinary delights. She was being generous with her
confidences, and indeed her lunch, and it was a real effort for her and I
appreciated it.

 
          
Harry
had gone to have a shave and a haircut somewhere grand in
Mayfair
, and after that he was meeting a sound
engineer in a pub in
Wardour Street
. I’d told him nobody went to pubs any more,
only to clubs. He said how come in that case the pubs were so full? All those
people spilling out on to the sidewalk didn’t look like nobody to him. I said
he knew what I meant and I needed a rest and was going to go visiting family
out in the suburbs. At least now I had one to visit. I loved being able just to
say it.
Family at last.

 
          
‘If
ever I’m going to be out for a couple of hours,’ he said, ‘you make sure you’re
out for at least five. Why’s that?’

 
          
‘What
am I meant to do?’ I asked. ‘Hang round counting the minutes ’til you come
back? Is that what you want me to do? Is that what Holly does?’

 
          
‘Why
do you keep mentioning Holly?’ He looked genuinely puzzled, but men are good at
that. ‘What has she got to do with it?’

 
          
‘I
never mention Holly.’

 
          
‘Yes
you do. You talk about her all the time.’

 
          
‘That
is a complete lie,’ I said. It was too, and we both knew it. Holly was on my
mind, not his. He stomped off about his business and I stomped off about mine.
We each called the other on our mobile phones within the half-hour, though
having some difficulty getting through because of it, to make sure the other
hadn’t taken the tiff seriously. The existence of the mobile has caused a
difficulty in plotting in the drama-adventure category of contemporary film:
trees’ and trees’ worth of storyline once depended on people being out of
contact with one another. Now, though at a physical distance, or in a remote
spot, they can talk to one another nonstop.
Why
didn't they just call the police?
has
been
replaced by
Why didn't he just call her
on his mobile and explain?
But so it goes.

 
          
I
sat and watched the
Thames
flow softly, while we sang our life songs.
Once indeed the river had run softly, spreading itself where it chose: now so
much of it had been confined inside embankments that it ran focused and strong,
and had changed from wandering female into charging male. Guy, who had been in
his room finishing a deposition to his lawyer, came down to join us. His
ex-wife had accused him of sexual abuse of his little son, and he was
understandably upset. His lawyer had been reassuring and said it was a common
charge these days which most judges had the sense to ignore. To thus accuse the
father saved the mother the bother of organizing access days, made her feel
better about initiating divorce, and made an easier explanation to her child in
later years.
Your father was a total
bastard. The Court agreed. There was nothing I could do.

 
          
‘I’m
sure that isn’t true of most mothers,’ I said piously. Guy always made me feel
pious. But like Harry, he would have nothing of soothing palliation. I could
see how distressing the accusation was, and how disturbing to the child even to
be aware of it. So many of the bad TV films I had cut in my time - a couple of
misspent years spent electronically editing tape - had involved some kind of
dysfunctional family, in which the traumas of today were laid at the door of
childhood abuse - wicked stepfathers or fathers. It was as if decades of
subfusc TV drama was necessary to compensate for that one sharp fifties film,
Sybil
, when the damage was done by the
mother, and the daughter took flight into multiple personality. Once that
primal scene was disclosed, the personalities closed up again, and there Sybil
was again, one charming person, healed! Though what was so good about being one
person instead of a number was never made quite plain. I suppose in the fifties
not to know where you had been the night before would be horrendous: nowadays,
at least in the world of pubs and clubs, it wouldn’t be anything out of order.

 
          
I
tried to cheer my cousins up. There is no such thing as a free lunch and Lorna
had trusted me with her confidence, so after Harry I repaid them with lurid
tales of my mother Angel, my father Rufus the artist, and my and their
grandmother, Felicity. I didn’t tell them how Angel died. I did not tell them
how Alison came to be born - they were not particularly interested and it was
not an edifying tale, other than that it demonstrated, to me at least, just how
heroic Felicity was. She was such a survivor, I said, catching piety from Guy.
To which Lorna responded bleakly that she could never understand what that
meant.
Either you
were a survivor or you were dead,
you didn’t have much choice. Sometimes I thought the inside of her head was
rather like the inside of her fridge. Not given to wild statements or random
promises. Mine is either totally empty or crammed with whole sides of smoked
salmon and French cheeses and organic butter and slabs of chocolate. There
seldom seems an in-between state: I don’t know how it happens.

 
          
Lorna
found sufficient curiosity in herself to ask about the person who had first
turned up on her doorstep with news of my existence, and I explained Wendy from
the Aardvark agency. We laughed a little about the name. Guy expressed himself
shocked by the agency’s methods of rooting out information, which in the light
of the Data Protection Act were surely illegal. Lorna said no harm had been
done: Guy said ends never justified means. They even had a sort of quarrel:
their voices rose as if they were children. I almost expected Alison to come
rushing in to tell them to stop it at once. How different life would have been,
I thought, if I had had brothers and sisters, a family home like theirs. I
almost envied them.

 
          
I
was still suffering from Felicity’s sudden attack on me. To be wished out of
existence by one’s flesh and blood is not nice, even if Felicity had
apologized. I felt accursed, unlucky. I was sorry for myself, still all grated
up the wrong way and insecure. Flarry had said perhaps now I understood why he
had felt so bad about the attack from
Buffalo
, and I acknowledged the reproach. To be
told to stay away, you’re not wanted and never have been,
is
horrid.

 
          
And
then again trauma is never done. People hand on the damage they’ve had done to
them, these days we all know that. Felicity did what she could, as is God’s
purpose for us, to absorb and incorporate and de-barb her father’s infidelity
(how it all started, after all), her mother’s death, Lois’s cruelty, Anton’s
abominations, the random humiliations and shames she had encountered over the
years as she did what she had to do, but seldom chose to do. But only a saint
could absorb it all: that’s why the world lurches little by little downhill,
bouncing from one evil to the next. Little acts of bitchiness, little shreds of
unreason which hurt others, which you didn’t mean to do but just somehow find
you did, grease the general human slither down into entropy. We are all
alchemists, trying desperately to turn base metal to gold, which can never
quite be done. Felicity managed brilliantly, skittering along the surface of
her life, still at it after all these years. Personally I can’t stand the heat
and so stay out of the kitchen.
Except Krassner seemed to be
dragging me into it, by the scruff of my neck.
I
hurt,
how I hurt! But quite where the hurt was coming from I could not make out. If
your motives are good, surely nothing can go wrong?

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
I don’t
know where the phrase comes from; from which little section of my childhood; it
becomes the kind of luminous chant there always in the back of the mind, an
exhalation, a relief, the recurring echo of some past elation, which serves to
set the present dancing, render it bearable.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
What did
he say? He said my mother was out of her mind, and therefore no-one around her
is to be blamed, because how do you cope with the deranged; they bite the hand
that feeds them, and so if you try to snatch your hand away, how can you help
it? When brains are wired wrong, though the reasoning power’s just fine: when
the emotions are assembled in force but overwhelmed by the priorities of the
frontal lobes where morality is seated (this is
right
and this is
wrong
:
this is
good
and this is
bad
, and I’m the only one in step) all
hell breaks loose. I always thought those lobotomy surgeons in the fifties who
snipped away at random in the frontal lobes where conscience lies -1 had to
edit a trepanning in
Death of a Genius
;
I could only do it Valiumed to my eyebrows, and demanded danger money - were on
to something. If the patient didn’t die at least they ended up happy, being
morality- free. Amazing how
ought
always causes such trouble. Cocaine has the same effect: releasing people from
their sense of duty to truth, to others, to everything. I bet one day they find
the white stuff works on the frontal lobes, and they genetically engineer the
coca plant to make sure it doesn’t. I digress, naturally. This is hard stuff to
face.

 
          
* * *

           
Oh,
the Grand Panjandrum saidl
Felicity is not to be blamed. In 1945 Felicity,
then an entertainer at an American airforce base in
Norfolk
,
England
, got pregnant by one Sergeant Jerry
Salzburger of
Atlanta
,
Georgia
. He married her in a civil ceremony the day
before he was posted back home and she was shipped out later to join him. That
was the GI Bride scheme, in which after World War II the brides and
acknowledged children of American servicemen from all over the world, in a
generous if unexpected gesture, were gathered in. There was no-one to meet
Felicity at the station; indeed, no news of her arrival had gone before, or
else no-one had bothered to open official envelopes. But she had his address,
and enough money for a taxi. The taxi driver propositioned
her,
pregnant as she was, but she said she was to start a new life. He was handsome
and white and stubbly and amiable; this was white trash land. She said no. Begin
as you mean to go on. She found Jerry Salzburger lying drunk on a broken bed
under a filthy blanket in a shack in the middle of a chicken farm. A little boy
of around six - Felicity could tell because his two front teeth were missing,
who said his name was Tommy and his daddy was Jerry and his mummy had left home
- was doing his best to look after fifty Rhode Island Reds. Excellent birds -
superior reds of the old Mohawk line, with perfect head points, lustrous
blood-red quills and beetle green tails, bought from a Mrs Donaldson of Decatur
with Jerry’s demob money, but already too distracted and distressed, moth-
eaten and wormy, to think of laying eggs. Many were practically bald - birds
eat their own feathers to offset nutritional deficiencies. Feather picking can
lead to bleeding, sores, infections or even death. Thus deprived of our needs,
we self-destruct. The smell was terrible.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
Jerry
Salzburger had described himself to Felicity as from an old Lutheran family
settled in
Georgia
two hundred years back and so he might well have been. And he had
described his home as like Scarlett’s
Tara
in
Gone with the Wind
, and she had believed
him, and perhaps it had
been,
a couple of generations
back.
Oh
America
, my new-found land, the
land of dreams, nylons, chewing gum and good cheer.
Well, why wouldn’t he lie? Anton had lied.
She was never to learn. He had married her to do her a favour, thinking he
would never see her again.

 
          
She
set to work. She threw a bucket of water over Jerry, who woke up to demand
food. She found eggs and made an omelette but he threw it at her. ‘Damn you to
hell,’ she said, and washed and fed the little boy. She watered and fed the
chickens and moved the ones who couldn’t stand up to a separate hen house, and
cut feverfew and threw it in with them. Some died but some recovered. She
shovelled chicken shit and mended the holes in the wire fence, to keep animal
predators out. She didn’t know what they would be, just that they were bound to
exist. She found Jerry’s shotgun and worked out how to use it. That would keep
the human predators out. She was six months pregnant. It was hot and muggy. On
the first night she made up a bed on the broken verandah and slept there. It
had been a long journey.

 
          
In
the morning he apologized and said he’d never believed the child was his, he’d
married her as a favour,
he
was married already but as
it happened his wife had left him; gone without taking the little boy. Felicity
could stay if she liked. There was nowhere else to go so she stayed. There was
one tap to keep humans and hens watered. Little Tommy helped; he was a valiant
child. They got on well together. She moved into Jerry’s bed. She had been
happy enough there in the past, though she could see the taxi driver might be a
better bet. Angel was born.

 
          
Felicity
wrote a letter to Mrs Donaldson asking her how to keep hens, because Jerry sure
as hell didn’t know, he thought you just owned them and they laid eggs all by
themselves. It hadn’t occurred to him that they needed to be looked after. No
wonder he had taken to drink. Mrs Donaldson replied in detail, advising her to
breed for neck lacing in the females, because that was where the future lay,
but to beware of it in the males: that would lead to a flock with slate in their
neck undercolour; the worst sin in a red breeder.

 
          
The
Salzburger family lived on nothing and the hens lived in splendour. The family
ate fried eggs and baked eggs, scrambled eggs and poached eggs and the hens
lived on scraps from the neighbours bulked up with scratch grains and though
the shells were too thin the hens were content. They
laid
better if the cocks didn’t run with them. Emotionally deprived hens console
themselves laying eggs; every one a sense of achievement. Soon there was enough
money to put in a proper water supply in the hen houses, and after that to mend
the roof, replace the stove, and buy nappies instead of laying the baby on
moss. Moss, like the mosquito, is always plentiful in a hot, damp land. And to
pay for cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women for Jerry, who never grew
out of the habit, for all his Lutheran ancestry.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
If only
Felicity could have settled, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t born to this, but to
London
bohemian life, no matter what the events in
between. She had learned to be grateful but not as grateful as this. She got
the
Rhode
Island
blues and left one day, when Angel was five and Tommy was twelve, and who could
blame her? At least she took the children with her: many don’t. She worked as a
singer and dancer on an old-fashioned riverboat, with its burnished copper
pistons, pumping up, pumping down, and the smell of hot oil everywhere. Up the
Savannah
every night, past the cotton warehouses,
still in use, and back again, on the
Old
Glory's
Moonlight Cruise. When there were private parties she’d dance
topless, or so my mother told me, but Angel’s testimony is not to be relied
upon: her brain was wired wrong.

 
          
It
was at one of these parties that Felicity met Buckley, remembered that she
wasn’t legally married and set out to be his wife. Buckley had a good library
and she wanted to give herself an education: she knew there wouldn’t be much
else to do, once she was rich, except read.

 
          
Buckley
said he would take on the little girl, since she was so pretty, but not the
boy, who did not appeal, so Tommy went back to Jerry, and grew up to be a
wastrel and father William Johnson’s stepdaughter Margaret’s two boys out of
wedlock.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
That
can’t be laid at Felicity’s door: it was in the genes, like the slate
undercolour of the neck feathers in a Rhode Island Red if you get the breeding
wrong. And she did go to the funeral.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
Felicity
shouldn’t have told Angel on the eve of her eighteenth
birthday,
that
what Jerry was accustomed to saying in a drunken rage and then
apologizing for the next day was true: that he wasn’t Angel’s father. Angel’s
real father was a folk singer who played bad guitar and sang out of tune in a
club in
London
’s
Soho
. The
news so upset Angel that something in the brain wiring that had been holding
out gave up and snapped and thereafter there was mayhem in her head, off and
on. To some people a drunken chicken-shit father that you know is better than
one you don’t know and is suddenly thrust upon you. And no-one can even
remember his name, or isn’t telling.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum asks:
Why did
Felicity choose the eve of Angel’s eighteenth birthday to speak the truth?
Answer comes there none, other than that Felicity’s sopping-up project was
nowhere complete, and since there was still evil abounding to be passed on,
that’s what happened. A life spent toiling on a chicken farm is a better
preparation for goodness than singing and dancing topless as a riverboat entertainer,
which can make you kind of careless. And not even on the mighty
Mississippi
, but on the lesser
Savannah
, the latter being to the former in style
and glamour as Foxwoods is to
Las Vegas
. Only later did Felicity learn more
restraint. She reproached herself for ever afterwards, but that does not excuse
her, and she was still calling me from the States to say the time had come for
her to speak the truth: she would not acknowledge that she spoke it more than
enough. Mind you, I daresay Angel
rising
eighteen was
a handful: how do you keep a girl modest and good when your own past is what it
is, and word tends to get about beneath the damp and ghostly fronds of Spanish
moss which festoon the trees hereabouts. In
Rhode Island
everything is clear cut: the dogwood is
bright and clean and white in early spring: but there are always humming birds
to remind you of the South: shiny green above, white chest, green sides and the
male with a ruby red throat. I expect someone, somewhere is breeding them to
make the females as pretty as the males, though it would require ingenuity. If
you can think of it, someone some- where’s doing it, that’s my theory.
More digressions.

 
          
Oh, the Grand Panjandrum said!
That my
mother, as mad as a hatter but nobody knew it then, went off to London on her
eighteenth birthday. She was sent to Europe on vacation with friends but
shipped out mid-National Gallery and never came back, leaving Felicity and
Buckley and Jerry distraught: a thin, wild-eyed, talented, beautiful thing with
pre-Raphaelite hair and a good education, who knew a lot of poetry by heart,
from Whitman to Byron, and had pretensions as a painter. She went in search of
her father. This was in 1964. She just went round the corner from the National
Gallery in
Trafalgar Square
into
Soho
, not far from where I now live, to a club
called the Mandrake.
⁴
Catch
with child a mandrake root
,’ Felicity had once rashly said to Angel,
⁴
and that's where I caught you.'
Angels don’t forget.

 
          
The
club was closed and up for sale, but there was an old caretaker there who
remembered a man who could well have been her father. He played the guitar and
sang folk songs: that was at the time when the V2s were falling in
London
, just before the end of the war, in the
days when people drank whisky or beer, not wine. Artists and writers came to
the club: they played chess. The showgirls from round about would come in to
keep them company. No, he didn’t remember one called Felicity: he reckoned he
would have. Mostly they were called Vera or Anne or Fluffy St George. But he
seemed to remember the folk singer was knifed to death in some incident outside
a pub.
The night after V-E night, Allied Victory in
Europe
night,
8 May, 1945
.
So much for my maternal grandfather.