Watching Me, Watching You. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ had shared a God, who was bleak, plain, sensible and kind. But now, increasingly, David had his own jealous and punitive God, whom he wooed with ritual and richness, incense and images, dragging a surprised congregation with him. He changed his vestments three times during services, rang little bells to announce the presence of the Lord, swept up and down aisles, and in general seemed not averse to being mistaken for God.

      The water pipes shrieked and groaned as David turned on the tap in the bathroom, but that was due to bad plumbing rather than unnatural causes. She surely could not be held responsible for that, as well.

      When the phenomena — as she thought of them — first started, or rather leapt from the scale of ordinary domestic carelessness to something less explicable and more sinister, she went to the doctor.

      ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘do mumps in adolescence make men infertile?’

      ‘It depends,’ he said, proving nothing. ‘If the gonads are affected it well might. Why?’

      No reason had been found for Deidre’s infertility. It lay, presumably, like so much else, in her mind. She had had her tubes blown, painfully and unforgettably, to facilitate conception, but it had made no difference. For fifteen years twenty-three days of hope had been followed by five days of disappointment, and on her shoulders rested the weight of David’s sorrow, as she, his wife, deprived him of his earthly immortality, his children.

      ‘Of course,’ he said sadly, ‘you are an only child. Only children are often infertile. The sins of the fathers —’ David regarded fecundity as a blessing; the sign of a woman in tune with God’s universe. He had married Deidre, he vaguely let it be known, on the rebound from a young woman who had gone on to have seven children. Seven!

      David’s fertility remained unquestioned and unexamined. A sperm count would surely have proved nothing. His sperm was plentiful and he had no sexual problems that he was aware of. To ejaculate into a test-tube to prove a point smacked uncomfortably of onanism.

      The matter of the mumps came up during the time of Deidre’s menopause, a month or so after her, presumably, last period. David had been in the school sanatorium with mumps: she had heard him saying so to a distraught mother, adding, ‘Oh mumps! Nothing in a boy under fourteen. Be thankful he has them now, not later.’

      So he was aware that mumps were dangerous, and could render a man infertile. And Deidre knew well enough that David had lived in the world of school sanatoria after the age of fourteen, not before. Why had he never mentioned mumps? And while she wondered, and pondered, and hesitated to ask, toothpaste began to ooze from tubes, and rose trees were uprooted in the garden, and his seedlings trampled by unseen boots, and his clothes in the wardrobe tumbled in a pile to the ground, and Deidre stole money to buy mending glue, and finally went to the doctor.

      ‘Most men,’ said the doctor, ‘confuse impotence with infertility and believe that mumps cause the former, not the latter.’

      Back to square one. Perhaps he didn’t know.

      ‘Why have you really come?’ asked the doctor, recently back from a course in patient—doctor relations. Deidre offered him an account of her domestic phenomena, as she had not meant to do. He prescribed Valium and asked her to come back in a week. She did.

      ‘Any better? Does the Valium help?’

      ‘At least when I see things falling, I don’t mind so much.’

      ‘But you still see them falling?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Does your husband see them too?’

      ‘He’s never there when they do.’

      Now what was any thinking doctor to make of that?

      ‘We could try hormone replacement therapy,’ he said.

      ‘No,’ said Deidre. ‘I am what I am.’

      ‘Then what do you want me to do?’

      ‘If I could only feel angry with my husband,’ said Deidre, ‘instead of forever understanding and forgiving him, I might get it to stop. As it is, I am releasing too much kinetic energy.’

      There were patients waiting. They had migraines, eczema and boils. He gave her more Valium, which she did not take.

      Deidre, or some expression of Deidre, went home and churned up the lawn and tore the gate off its hinges. The other Deidre raked and smoothed, resuscitated and blamed a perfectly innocent child for the gate. A child. It would have taken a forty-stone giant to twist the hinges so, but no one stopped, fortunately, to think about that. The child went to bed without supper for swinging on the vicar’s gate.

      The wound on Deidre’s finger gaped open in an unpleasant way. She thought she could see the white bone within the bloodless flesh.

      Deidre went upstairs to the bathroom, where David washed his wife’s blood from his grandmother’s hankie. ‘David,’ said Deidre, ‘perhaps I should have a stitch in my finger?’

      David had the toothmug in his hand. His jaw was open, his eyes wide with shock. He had somehow smeared toothpaste on his black lapel. ‘The toothmug has recently been broken, and very badly mended. No one told me. Did you do it?’

      The toothmug dated from the late eighteenth century and was worn, cracked and chipped, but David loved it. It had been one of the first things to go, and Deidre had not mended it with her usual care, thinking, mistakenly, that one more crack amongst so many would scarcely be noticed.

      ‘I am horrified,’ said David.

      ‘Sorry,’ said Deidre.

      ‘You always break my things, never your own.’

      ‘I thought that when you got married,’ said Deidre, with the carelessness of desperation, for surely now David would start an inspection of his belongings and all would be discovered, ‘things stopped being yours and mine, and became ours.’ ‘Married! You and I have never been married, not in the sight of God, and I thank Him for it.’

      There. He had said what had been unsaid for years, but there was no relief in it, for either of them. There came a crash of breaking china from downstairs. David ran down to the kitchen, where the noise came from, but could see no sign of damage.

      He moved into the living room. Deidre followed, dutifully.

      ‘You’ve shattered my life,’ said David. ‘We have nothing in common. You have been a burden since the beginning. I wanted a happy, warm, loving house. I wanted children.’

      ‘I suppose,’ said Deidre, ‘you’ll be saying next that my not having children is God’s punishment?’

      ‘Yes,’ said David.

      ‘Nothing to do with your mumps?’

      David was silent, taken aback. Out of the corner of her eye Deidre saw the Ming vase move. ‘You’re a sadistic person,’ said David eventually. ‘Even the pains and humiliations of long ago aren’t safe from you. You revive them.’

      ‘You knew all the time,’ said Deidre. ‘You were infertile, not me. You made me take the blame. And it’s too late for me now.’

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