Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon Read online

  We tell ourselves ‘money isn’t important’, but it is, it is. We couldn’t afford this, we couldn’t afford that: and our lives and our friendships and our marriages and our children were thereby curtailed, limited.

  And we put up with it. We put up with it because we need the differential: we like to feel superior to our neighbours, and if the penalty is that the man up the road feels superior to us, we’ll put up with it. We like to have kings to worship and admire: we love a bit of gold leaf to ooh and ah at: we don’t mind being poor just so long as there’s someone poorer than us. Snobbish to our bootstraps. We still believe money equates with worth. That the rich are rich by virtue of being intelligent, bright, strong and powerful. And once at the beginning, when the first few coins were exchanged, the first kings decided to mint the stuff, I daresay that was true. Times change, times change; yet habits hold. Money was handed down from father to son; it lost its merit as a token of worth; the idle and nasty could be a great deal more rich than the hardworking and good. Money and intelligence pretty soon had little connection. Money and privilege, every unnatural link. The rich no longer deserve to be rich, or the poor to be poor: there is no merit in having enough money: there is little pleasure in having too little money. Sex is the source of all pleasure, money is the source of all pain.

  Q: You mean lack of money?

  A: I do not. It is this assumption that so hampers our thinking. Because lack of money is bad, we assume money itself is good. It is another example of the Trap of the False Polarity. You might in good time like to write a pop-psychology book under that title? Or perhaps not. We’ll see.

  ‘I most sincerely hope you don’t,’ said Valerie. ‘You are a serious person.’ Hugo stroked the back of her neck with his strong fingers, and she quietened and went on listening.

  Q: Perhaps you are not talking about the pursuit of money, but the pursuit of power? Most people equate money with power, power with money.

  A: What is power? The desire to make other people do what you want? The power of the parent over the child? The tyrant over his subject? The employer over the employed? Take away money and you deprive the unjust of power. The child can have his football boots because the words ‘we can’t afford it’ will be linked to the long-gone and not-lamented past: the tyrant cannot control against the will of the subject because he cannot frighten his people with notions of helplessness and poverty: the employer will have to charm and wheedle his workers if he wants them to work for him: he will have to sing and dance to entertain them: enthuse them with pleasure for their daily toil: they will be paid with the world’s respect, and all around them there will be abundance. We will not be wage slaves any more. We will not need our wages. We may accept them, to oblige: to save another’s face. But that’s all. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no wages, there will be no money.

  Q: Oh come now! Easier said than done.

  A: Not at all; it could be done even here – merely increase the supply of money until it becomes something of little value, as plentiful as grass: let it grow on every street corner, pour from the high street banks: see how little by little it is of less and less value: soon it is only stuff fit to engage the attention of those who love to indulge in the act of recycling: we will probably find that, pulped, bank notes are an excellent media for growing acorns into oaks. My husband Julian and I went on our honeymoon to Yugoslavia – annual inflation ran at 350 per cent. A hyper-inflationary economy. Yet people ate, drank, sang, laughed, rejoiced, loved and were happy. Talked — how they talked! The streets were noisy with greetings, chatter and friendship. It was there my husband and I began to develop our theories, Darcian Monetarism as it came to be called: that the answer to our current economic ills is not to control inflation but to encourage it until we cease to be a money economy altogether.

  Q: Perhaps, being on honeymoon, you wore rose-tinted spectacles?

  A: It is true we had a perfectly wonderful time. As I say, sex is the source of all pleasure, money is the source of all pain.

  At this point the tape clicked to a stop. Neither Hugo nor Valerie attended to it. It had been running on unheard for some time, in any case.

  LOVER AT THE GATE [2]

  Apricot loses one mother and gains another

  ‘You can’t go out like that,’ said Wendy to Apricot when she was four, ‘it’s freezing,’ and little Apricot, in nothing but vest and pants, ran straight out into the street and down the long suburban road to the small playground which a benign council had made for the children in the sharp triangle of land where the railway line intersected the water-purifying plant. Wendy ran after her child but her spiked heels slowed her, so she gave up and came back home and made herself a cup of coffee and read the stories in the back of her magazine. Or perhaps she took a swig of sherry.

  That was in the sixties, in the years when it was safe for a small girl child to play unsupervised in a public playground, even in her underwear; all anyone had to fear was that she might catch cold. Those were the days: oh yes, those were the days.

  When Ken got up that afternoon – he hadn’t come home till three in the morning – Wendy said, ‘I’ve really got to go back to work; I’m drinking too much: this life is driving me mad.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your life?’ he asked. ‘You have everything a woman wants. Why don’t you change places with me? Me, I’d love to do nothing.’ And he thrust his banjo into her hands and little Apricot, watching, winced.

  ‘But I can’t play the banjo,’ said Wendy, which irritated Ken even more. He made a gesture: she took it literally. But then all his audiences, these days, were unsatisfactory. He had his own band now; he was trying to make a go of it full-time, and it was difficult. No one wanted to pay for music; the general feeling was that it should flow free from the celestial spheres. Now he was off to a nine p.m. to one a.m. British Legion do: they’d hired a Dixie Band but when it came to it would want Country and Western: six in the band and a twelve pound fee. If you charged Musicians Union rates no one hired you: if you didn’t, your fellow musicians hated you: and to stand up there on a platform for four hours disappointing a room full of people was not his idea of living. He’d given up woodwork, having driven a splinter through his thumbnail. It was too dangerous. His main income came through music. He needed his hands.

  ‘I suppose if I had another baby, Ken,’ said Wendy, ‘that would fill in my days.’ He said he couldn’t afford it. She said she didn’t think money ought to stop people living, actually living: making their lives little when they could be big. But if she couldn’t have another baby the newsagent on the corner wanted someone in the mornings. She said Ken could look after Apricot because he was at home when she was out.

  ‘I’d be asleep,’ Ken said. ‘I don’t think I’m the kind of man who ought to have a working wife.’

  Wendy said, ‘You wouldn’t be, because you never actually married me. We were going to once but when it came to it you didn’t have the money for the licence. You said you’d spent it on a new banjo.’

  Ken said, ‘I had to have a new banjo. Some fool backed over mine in a car park. It was a wonderful instrument. I’ll never get another one like it.’

  She said, ‘More fool you for leaving it in a car park,’ and little Apricot said, ‘Yes, that’s right, Mum. That’s what I think!’

  Ken said, ‘I had to put it down while I put the amp into the van. I forgot it. By the time I went back for it, it was too late. If you’d come out on the gig with me you could have held it for me. But you’re not interested in my work at all. All you want to do is sit home and drink gin.’

  ‘I have Apricot to look after,’ said Wendy. ‘You forget that. You forget everything important, that’s the trouble with you.’ She’d put her finger on it. Sometimes it takes people years.

  ‘Well,’ said Ken, ‘don’t expect me to look after Apricot while you’re at work. I’m a musician, not a father.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Wendy, ‘that’s that,’ and poured herself some sher
ry.

  Rhoda said when she came to tea at the weekend, ‘You only remember what you want to remember, Ken; serve you right. How many gigs have you missed in the last few months?’

  ‘Only one,’ said Ken, ‘and that wasn’t because I forgot it: it was because they’d given me bad directions.’ But he smiled sheepishly and cheered up. Rhoda always cheered him up.

  Rhoda said, ‘What’s that you’re pouring into your cup, Wendy?’

  ‘Whisky,’ said Wendy.

  ‘You have a real drink problem there,’ said Rhoda.

  Wendy sat at home and polished her nails. She listened to the Beatles on the radio; it could only be to annoy Ken. He was out every night and most weekends and if he wasn’t out he was asleep. She told Deval the newsagent all about her problem. His wife had died suddenly a couple of years back. He needed cheering up too. Dev said to Wendy, ‘You don’t need Ken, he’ll never amount to anything: he treats you like shit: what you need is a man like me,’ and Wendy believed him.

  ‘Can I bring Apricot with me?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dev, ‘a woman shouldn’t start a new relationship with a child hanging around. It isn’t fair to the child.’

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ said Wendy, and left Apricot with Ken.

  Rhoda said to Ken, ‘If you ask me, the girl’s in love with love, not Dev, and she’ll come back. She was like this as a little girl. Looking after stray kittens and then getting bored.’

  Ken took Apricot with him on gigs for a time and quite enjoyed it, but found getting her to school and organizing her clothes and meals onerous. When Wendy’s father died of lung cancer, he asked Rhoda to move in and presently got it together to marry her, thus putting a stop to Wendy’s sudden plan to abandon Dev and move back in with Ken.

  ‘She’s just jealous,’ said Rhoda, comfortably. ‘Take no notice. Older women with younger men never goes down well, except with the parties involved.’

  Wendy and Dev presently parted; Wendy, who by then had a real drink problem, was hired to do a milk delivery round which took her to her own doorstep, and daily contact with Apricot, until Ken put a stop to it. If Rhoda put out a note for half-cream milk, Wendy would deliver full-cream. Ken complained to her employers, and she was put on another round, but kept forgetting the orders and was presently let go.

  And that was how, in a gradual and non-sensational manner, Apricot’s mother became her sister, and her grandmother her mother. Her father at least remained her father.

  Valerie leaps to conclusions

  There is no getting away from it. A study of life, death and marriage certificates show Apricot as the daughter of a certain Wendy Ellis and Wendy herself the legitimate daughter of Bruno and Rhoda Ellis. Ken Smith is named as Apricot’s father and Rhoda Ellis married a Ken Smith in June 1965, Bruno Ellis having died in March of that year. The ages tally. It puts perhaps a kind face on things: but sometimes families do just get into dreadful muddles, with no one doing anything particularly awful. In 1973 Wendy Ellis, poor Wendy, a spinster, died aged thirty-five of liver failure. Livers fail because of cancer, or hepatitis, or drug overdose, but mostly I suppose because they are assailed by alcohol and just can’t cope. And no woman, I daresay, can settle easily to the knowledge that her child’s father has married her own mother: and drink, while ruining livers, certainly eases pain. But I don’t think the readers of Aura will want me to dwell too much on the pain. I try to be unemotional, without much success. Sex renders one tearful, I find.

  A love song on the crackly Holiday Inn radio which the maid always switches on as her final flourish after she’s done the room (Hugo and I go down to the pool and swim and use the sauna while we wait for her to finish) or a pop song on the telly as Hugo and I eat our continental breakfast (orange juice, coffee, a croissant and a Danish each), too languid even to stretch out for the remote control and switch it off – will make tears come to my eyes: move me with the desire to say, You do love me, don’t you! This love will last for ever. This love, lasting forever, makes me immortal. This love replaces death. I don’t say it, of course. I have read too many surveys in Aura – written them indeed – which prove that men feel trapped and uneasy if the word ‘love’ is mentioned, especially in proximity to any other word suggesting permanence. I just roll the phrases round inside my head, smoothing them out, absorbing them back into me, until they’re gone.

  When I heard Eleanor Darcy’s eulogy on Hugo’s tape, I was much moved. Her soft determined voice inspired me: any doubts that remained evaporated: guilt and fear were dispelled, embarrassment fled: my body led me, not my mind. Eleanor Darcy spoke and I left home and hearth to follow my lover.

  ‘Look here,’ Hugo said, ‘surely I had something to do with it?’ and I laughed and said, ‘How could you not? You too heard the tape!’

  Lou has never seen love as a sufficient motive for anyone doing anything, which, when it comes to it, I daresay is why I left. I can trust Hugo not to treat me as I have Ken treat Wendy in Lover at the Gate and, if he did, I would never indulge him as Wendy did Ken. Look where it led! Women do have to fight back. Apart from anything else, I can’t help feeling that if women let men get away with too much bad behaviour, men do not forgive them for the burden of guilt they then have to bear. They feel their shoulders breaking beneath the load. They get out from under.

  I am a self-contained person: neat and elegant: or was until I met Eleanor, who, disgraced, childless, alone, sprawled and wriggled against the shiny black sofa with the big red flowers, and I knew I would rather be her, her life out of control, than me as I was with Lou; a woman whom an editor could describe as ‘the mistress of controlled reportage’.

  ‘Valerie,’ the editor of the Mail on Sunday said to me once, after I had filed a neat and convincing piece on an earthquake – the ground had trembled beneath me in Rome, where Lou was playing with the London Symphonic and a wall had fallen on top of me and trapped me for two hours – ‘you are the mistress of controlled reportage. We can’t run the piece, as it happens. The stock market has collapsed. I hope you didn’t get your hair mussed.’

  I just smiled and said ‘a little’ – but I was hurt. I thought he was laughing at me. I joined the staff of Aura shortly afterwards. ‘Mussed’ is a word so outmoded I’m surprised the God of Media didn’t strike him down on the instant with a thunderbolt. Pre-Hugo, come to think of it, my hair never got mussed. Now I can scarcely get a comb through it in the morning. To each their own earthquake.

  Valerie Jones returns to ask further questions of Eleanor Darcy

  Q: Tell me about your educational background. Were there books in your house? Did your parents encourage you to read?

  A: What you want me to tell you is how I, victim of a class-ridden society, managed to escape the long side streets of the outer suburbs and reach the shores of academia. Well, a few of us manage it. It helps to have a high IQ, though I suspect a talent for mimicry is more useful; being able to adopt at will the tones and attitudes of the educated middle classes. That I have.

  Valerie sat on the sofa. Eleanor sat in a chair. Why, Valerie wondered, did Eleanor share the sofa with Hugo, but not with her?

  First, of course, you have to know what you are: that there is another life, another set of attitudes, other responses out there in the world, which prevent most of us from aspiring to better things. We know what we like, like what we know, unless something quite powerfully intervenes to shake us out of it. The child from the fish and chip shop can only end up running Liberty’s if he has some idea of what Liberty’s is. How very snobbish of you, you will say; why should Liberty’s be seen as superior to a fish and chip shop?

  Q: I wasn’t conscious of accusing you. Aren’t you being a little defensive?

  A: I daresay. I was married to Bernard Parkin for fifteen years, a man who came from the lower middle class, but identified quite violently, for a number of years, with the workers. He would never set foot in Liberty’s, let alone Harrods – those haunts of the rich and the
would-be rich represented for him the scornful laughter of the haves towards the have-nots. While some downright starve, and others scrimp and save to afford the large cod and chips, not the small, a few spend thousands on sunken baths and antique rugs. Poor Bernard. He was a good man.

  Q: Was?

  A: One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same?

  Q: I don’t have an ex-spouse.

  A: No? Well, I daresay you will, from what Mr Vansitart tells me.

  To cover her discomposure, Valerie readjusted the microphone. She was flattered and excited that Hugo had talked of their relationship to Eleanor: offended that her privacy had been thus violated. The pleasurable feeling won.

  You have pushed the microphone out of range. Shall I adjust it? We live in a world of surplus but can’t bring ourselves to believe that we do. We go on behaving and thinking as if there would never, never be enough. Gimme, gimme, gimme! Before someone else gets it. My sunken plastic bath better than your old cast-iron tub. If the poor have their faces ground into a mud made sharp and painful by slivers of diamond and chunks of ruby, whose fault is that? Those who shove their faces into it? – Bernard’s view. The consistency of the mud? — my view. Or that of the poor themselves, for daring to bend their heads and stare?

  Q: You went first to the Faraday Junior School, I believe, an ordinary state school. What were your experiences there?

  A: I understand what you are saying. Badly born, poorly educated as I am, how do I have the nerve to pass comment on the society I live in – let alone marry a professor of economics and co-author with him – the publisher’s term, not mine – a book on Darcian Monetarism?