The great October wind frightened Jane Jarvis, aged thirty. It howled and raged outside her attic window, and quivered the panes until one of them actually cracked and shattered; then it swept in and around the room, bringing wet and cold with it. Rain spattered the TV screenplay she was sitting up late to read for Home Box-Office, and the wind somehow pried the sheets loose from their binder and swept them into the air and fluttered them round the room. Jane Jarvis thought the wind was alive: that it was some kind of vengeful spirit: that it whined and whinnied like the ghost of her aborted baby, long ago. She went into her bedroom and shut the door on the wind and the manuscript – not one she would recommend, in any case – and tried to sleep, but could not. She considered the temporary nature of all things, including her own life, and panicked, and rang her live-out lover Tom when she heard the clock strike three to say she’d changed her mind, he could be a live-in lover, they’d have a baby, but no one answered and by the morning prudence and courage had re-established themselves in her head and heart. She tacked strong polythene over the broken window; there would be a long wait for a glazier. The streets of London glittered with slivers of broken glass.
‘You don’t need me at all,’ said Tom. ‘You’re self-sufficient.’
‘I need you for some things,’ she said, in the lingering sensuous voice that came so oddly from her rather thin, ladylike lips, ‘of course I do. It’s just I’d be mad to give all this up.’ By which she meant freedom, independence, control over her own life.
‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Cold and over-educated and selfish.’
‘Just rational,’ she said, but Jane Jarvis was hurt. She took care not to show it. She had her pride. She did not want him; she did not want to lose him. She did not know what she wanted – except her career. Soon, if she played her cards right, she would be head of the London office of HBO.
‘Where were you last night at three in the morning?’ she asked.
‘That has nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘How can it?’
The wind lobbed someone else’s chimney through the neat suburban roof of the home of Julie Rainer, aged thirty, and spoiled its perfection in many ways, and broke the round fish-bowl in which Samson the goldfish spent his timeless, circling days, and Samson died on the wet thick pile of the carpet. Julie was frightened and wept and in the morning rang the vet and asked him, in her lingering bedroom voice, why she brought death to so many small lives and he said they died in the glare of her perfection; and she puzzled over the answer for days. When he rang her the following week and asked her out to dinner she accepted the invitation. She liked the smell of antiseptic on his fingernails and her husband was away.
The wind not only frightened Gina Herriot and Gina’s three children Ben, Sue and Anthony (ages twelve, nine and two) but crashed an oak tree through the bonnet of the car in which they were sleeping. None was hurt, but the frame was bent and the doors were jammed and had to be opened up by the iron claws of the emergency services, as if it were a can of beans and they the can-opener. The car was parked in the road outside the house where the Herriots lived. The children’s father, Cliff Herriot, had been drinking, and it was sometimes easier, as Gina explained to the social worker in her gentle, sexy voice and using language of a violence which issued oddly from her rather thin, ladylike lips, to lock him in than lock him out. Gina seldom confided so much of the detail of her situation to anyone, having her pride, indeed too much of it, but the violence of the wind had frightened her, more than her husband ever did. Fortunately the report went missing, since it was made out at the time the contents of all Social Service file cards were being transferred to disc: or perhaps because fate has a propensity to behave in the same way to people of similar nature. Events fall out, this way or that, beyond our apparent control, yet in keeping with our expectations.
Gina was thirty, but born seven weeks prematurely, and this initial misfortune, this first hard, grating sharpening of the knives of fate, echoed like a sound, a siren song, through her life. ‘Trust Gina’, her neighbours said to each other, ‘to be in the car when the tree fell,’ but they didn’t say it to her face. They feared her calm, quick look of disapproval: she did not like personal comments or appreciate advice. Her nose was broken but she remained chilly in her beauty: like Grace Kelly, they said, in that old film. ‘Why doesn’t she leave Cliff?’ they asked. ‘The brute!’ But they didn’t ask her to her face. Anyway, they knew the answer. She loved him.
As for Alice Morthampton, aged thirty, in the womb a week longer than her mother-apparent had expected, the great wind bypassed her: of course it did. Alice was smiled upon by different stars than were Jane, Julie and Gina. The storm cut a swathe through southern England, passing from east to west, taking in London on its way, but Alice was not in London at the time, but in Liverpool, where she was engaged in a photo session: smart clothes against demolished warehouses.
‘Smile, damn you, smile!’ Angus the photographer had implored her during the day, but Alice Morthampton would not, saying in her languid, croaking voice that she knew better than he; she had surely been employed to actively not-smile, since that was her speciality. She spent the night in bed with him, however. ‘You don’t care about me,’ he complained. ‘You only do this for the sake of your career.’ And she sighed and said she wasn’t sure why she did it, she certainly didn’t enjoy it: her career would get on well enough without him, probably better – and as she felt his assault upon her, as it were, weaken and tremble within her at least had the decency to apologize for her habit of speaking the truth, even when least welcomed, so he felt man enough to continue.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Whatever that means,’ she said, apparently unmoved by either desire or emotion, or perhaps too proud to show either. The storm caused a short delay on landing at Heathrow the following morning, true: aircraft were slewed across the runways and took time to move: but on the whole the fates were on Alice’s side.
Jane, Julie, Gina, Alice: these were the clones of Joanna May.