Watching Me, Watching You. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ the cross and banks of paper flowers. The Vicar was elderly and dressed in a white gown. Brian heard sound and movement and presently Linda stood beside him, and he felt better, and to the sound of children crying and protesting he and she were married, in God’s sight.

      Outside the church, later, there were many photographs taken. He thought he had never seen so many ugly and misshapen people gathered together in one place. He could not be sure whether this was so, and a phenomenon peculiar to this part of Devon, or whether it was just the sudden contrast to the people of Southern California.

      Various people young and old, men and women, came up to congratulate him, and in the course of brief conversations let it be known that Linda was not a virgin, had had at least two relationships with married men, one abortion, one miscarriage and had married him for his money. Linda did not seem to be popular. He thought perhaps he was dreaming.

      At the reception at the W I Hall, where sherry was served, and also the sausage rolls he had seen on the bed, the Vicar remarked on the cross- and wall-eyes of the Jones boys, and accounted for it by village in-breeding. It’s a genetic weakness, he said. Genetics, he added, bitterly, was a three-syllable word, and words so long were not often heard in these parts.

      Jet lag became more pressing. He had to sleep. He remembered making a speech. Linda put on her going-away clothes and the Rolls took them back to the garage. The dog lay vomiting on the path.

      ‘Now we can,’ said Linda, ‘quick! Before anyone comes home,’ and she pulled him upstairs to the room with the many wallpapers and he removed her clothes except her veil and made love to her. That was what marriage was all about. He thought she probably wasn’t a virgin, but just pretending. He wondered where his silver cuff links were and couldn’t see them. Then he fell asleep. When he woke she was unpacking wedding presents, and singing happily. ‘This is the happiest day of my life! Oh, how I love you!’ said Linda, and gave him a kiss. ‘Look, a toaster, and a lovely casserole with yellow flowers. That’s from Auntie Ann.’

      She had not noticed any lack of sexual enthusiasm in him. Was that innocence, or insensitivity, or cunning? His cuff links were decidedly gone. ‘You must have left them in London,’ said Linda. ‘They’ll turn up.’

      They had been a present from Rea. For some reason he valued them. But Linda dismissed the matter. Now they were married she seemed much more definite. Her eyelids no longer drooped, in modesty and decorum. She looked him straight in the eye, and lied.

      ‘The bill from the caterers hasn’t been paid. Could you possibly give me a cheque? Three hundred pounds.’

      ‘I thought you made the food yourselves.’

      ‘No. It was all bought in. Every scrap.’ She did not seem to mind that the lie was easily detected, nor the amount improbable. She gave him a little kiss on the nose. ‘Husband! Go on, say wife.’

      ‘Wife!’

      ‘Will you come out with us on the Christmas Trees? It would please Dad.’

      And so they did. Dad and the two boys and Brian, after dark on his wedding night, with light snow falling, took shovels and borrowed a neighbour’s van and travelled ten miles inland, on to Forestry Commission land, where the pylons were slung from hill to hill, carrying electricity from the Nuclear Power Station to the good folk of Exeter, and there, beneath the wires, hair crackling and tooth fillings zinging, they pirated Christmas Trees. Good healthy well-shaped trees, three foot high, with a broad spread of vigorous roots. Brian dug, and laughed, and dug some more. It was theft, it was dangerous, there were dog patrols to stop such acts, but he felt, at last, that he was doing something sensible and useful. The Jones family were pleased by the muscle and enthusiasm of their new relative. Father Jones, despite the snow, took off his coat, and carefully laid it down beside where Brian rested, and on impulse Brian felt in the inside pocket, and yes, there were his silver cuff links. He left them where they were, and said nothing. What was there to say?

      He didn’t suppose the dog was trained to cause uproar: no one was clever enough for that: just that when the dog caused uproar, the cover seemed too good to miss. He thought Mrs Jones might well feed it on cascara, just to be on the safe side.

      The hilarity of exhaustion and despair turned sour when they arrived back at the house with some fifty Christmas Trees and unloaded them in the backyard. Mrs Jones had an old tin bath ready outside the back door, filled with boiling water. The brother with the wall-eyes bound the living green of the trees with twine. Mrs Jones dumped the roots in the boiling water, and the cross-eyed brother reloaded them on to the van. Linda stood by and watched the murder. ‘What are you doing? Why?’ he shouted at them, but the wind was strong, and snow flicked off the ground, and the water bubbled, and the stereo in the house was on loud to cover their nefarious deed. Cliff Richard. He thought he could hear the trees screaming as they died. ‘Just boiling them,’ said Linda, surprised.

      ‘But why, why?’

      ‘It’s just what we do.’

      ‘It can’t make any difference to you,’ he cried. ‘No profit lost to you if they grow.’

      ‘People always boil the roots,’ she said, looking at him as if he was daft. ‘It’s the done thing.’

      He could see she took him for a fool, and despised him for it, and had tricked him and trapped him, for all he was bright and old, and she was thick and young.

      He stumbled inside and up to the bedroom and fell asleep and slept, with the smell of boiling tree in his nostrils, and flakes of sausage-roll pastry in the sheets, and woke, with Linda next to him. Her skin was clammy. She wore a cerise nylon nightie, trimmed with fawn nylon lace. He went downstairs to the coin telephone in the hall and rang Alec. ‘I think I’ve found the right place for me,’ he said, and indeed he had. He had bound himself by accident to a monstrous family in a monstrous place and had discovered by accident what he felt to be the truth, long evident, long evaded. It was that human nature was irredeemable. ‘I think I’ll stay down here for a while with my wife,’ he said. My wife! All aspirations and ambition had been burned away: old wounds cauterised with so sudden and horrific a knife as to leave him properly cleansed, and purified. ‘Next to nature,’ said Brian with a dreadful animation rising in him: the writer’s animation; ‘with cows and cider and power lines and kind and honest country folk. I think I could really write down here!’

      ‘Christ!’ said Alec. He seemed to have fewer and fewer words to rub together, as his stable of writers found more and more.

Breakages

       ‘We blossom and flourish As leaves on a tree, And wither and perish But nought changeth thee —’

      sang David’s congregation in its laggardly, quavery voice. Some trick of acoustics made much of what happened in the church audible in the vicarage kitchen, where tonight, as so often, Deidre sat and darned socks and waited for Evensong to end.

      The vicarage, added as a late Victorian afterthought, leaned up against the solidity of the Norman church. The house was large, ramshackle, dark and draughty, and prey to wet rot, dry rot, woodworm and beetle. Here David and Deidre lived. He was a vicar of the established Church; she was his wife. He attended to the spiritual welfare of his parishioners: she presided over the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute and ran the Amateur Dramatic Society. They had been married for twenty-one years. They had no children, which was a source of acute disappointment to them and to Deidre’s mother, and of understandable disappointment to the parish. It is always СКАЧАТЬ