The clones of Joanna May also blamed their nearest and dearest for the accident at Chernobyl, with rather less reason than did their original.
In their case, of course, near did not necessarily or permanently mean dear, and this was either an affliction ironed into their genes, or the common cross of humanity, as may be decided by events. Nor was the tendency to blame irrationally peculiar to these four women, of course: it afflicts all mankind. When the weather is fine on polling day, the sitting government is returned. If the weather is wet, it gets thrown out. And that’s that.
Jane Jarvis listened to the news on the radio and slammed her attic windows shut to keep the radioactivity out. A pity, because it was such a fine spring day, but to keep out the bad you had to keep out the good. Then she returned to the brass bed where her lover lay. It was Saturday, and lunchtime. Presently they’d get out of bed and walk into Soho for something to eat. Her flat was in Central London: she had the whole attic floor of a big house in Harley Street. She could afford it. Such was the reward of beauty, intelligence, education, and the capacity for making decisions others feared to – saying, simply and firmly, ‘this is good but not profitable’ or, ‘this is bad but commercial’, or ‘this is neither good nor profitable’, or, just occasionally, ‘this is both good and commercial’ and having the results bear her out. Tom designed book jackets and lived in half a house in Fulham, and earned a quarter of what she did, for eight times as much work. He would take her out to lunch, so she would have to eat spaghetti, not oysters.
Jane Jarvis was 5 foot 7 inches tall; precise and orderly in mind and body. She measured 36 inches around her chest, 24 inches at the waist and 36 round her hips, as had her original at the same age. Her nose was straight and perfect; her eyes widely spaced: her cheekbones high, her top lip a little short, the bottom lip a little thin: her gaze was direct. To wash her hair she dunked it in a basin of soapy water, rinsed it and towelled it dry. It frizzed out round her head. She belonged to some new, insouciant age. She walked like someone who knew herself to be free. She lived at the top of No. 30 Harley Street. Her original had spent her childhood in No. 34.
‘I want the windows open,’ said Tom, when she got back into bed. ‘I can’t sleep with the windows shut.’
‘I didn’t realize you had come here to sleep,’ she said.
‘Besides which, why bother?’ he asked. ‘If there is radioactivity out there glass isn’t going to stop it.’
‘It will stop alpha rays,’ she said.
‘Smarty pants,’ he said.
‘You can’t bear it if I know things you don’t,’ she said.
A row was approaching through the window: no glass could stop it: the hideous black cloud of the spirit: tumulus and cumulus fighting it out: lightning flashes of dire perception, thunderclaps of rage, hail storms of battering distress; every passion and woe of the past returned to plague the present, bent on turning love to hate. They knew it, Jane and Tom: both looked uneasily out of the window: they could see rooftops and sky: no sign yet of the storm they expected to see, but they knew it was coming, in spite of there, in the real world, a blue sky, a few white clouds. On the bed the grey cat Hattie sensed their unease and stopped purring. Tom put his hand on Jane’s thigh, the better to forget what was going on out there, seen or unseen.
‘I thought you wanted to sleep,’ she said.
‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I live here? Then we could use beds the way other people use them. We wouldn’t have to be in bed in the middle of the day.’
‘I like it like this,’ she said.
‘You don’t love me,’ he said. ‘It’s obvious.’ He removed his hand. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word love,’ he said. ‘You’re over-educated. What do you think I am, some kind of stud?’
It really made no difference what they were arguing about. Her reluctance to marry, settle, wash socks, have children – which he saw as just a habit of thought, a pattern of belief, an ongoing fear of change, something more to do with the ascendancy her mind had somehow gained over her body than anything to do with her essential nature; his failure to match his sexual desires to hers, which she registered as a hostile act; his intention to punish and humiliate her for earning more than he did; his fear of giving voice to his feelings; his inability to offer reassurance and comfort; his failure to acknowledge her equal status; her lack of taste, as he saw it; his lack of understanding, as she did. One way or another accusations and insults began to crackle in the air, feelings no longer contained but given voice to. You did this and you said that. Wimp and harpy, bastard, bitch. Unfaithful! Gutter slut and macho pig and the simple, friendly, curing pleasures of desire fulfilled denied – and just as well, perhaps, lest sex itself become the weapon, and then indeed there’d be an end to everything, and neither in their heart wants that. But spite and rage preferred – preferred, that’s the shocking thing, the self-revelation that hurts and wounds – chosen above love and kindness not just by the other but by the self. Not so much the other hurt, humiliated by the other, as the self by the self. The row is with the self, the other stands witness, accepting the bruises: it is some kind of horrid, magic, contrapuntal duet: variations on a theme; how can the unloveable, my self, be loved by you; your fault that it cannot. Projection. Simple! He accuses her of his own deficiencies: he hands them over. She does the same to him. Outrageous! How can I be expected to put up with this? And what is more, and have you forgotten; accept this evidence, accept it or I’ll kill you, that you do not love unloveable me! Unforgivable!
The row is vaporous: it circles blackly, out this window, into that: it never stops; when you make up others begin: their turn next; always someone’s. It feeds on itself, it feeds on you, the more you give in to it, the bigger it grows, the more powerfully it affects your neighbours, down here in the shameful gutter world, up there in the reeling attic sky, breeding every ill that flesh is heir to.
Keep your mouth shut, keep it shut, take a pill to knock you out. How gently, silently, this ire crept, the first cold wet breath through slammed shut windows. You shut the window: I want it open: Why? Because you want it shut, I shut it, knowing you didn’t want it. Why don’t you love me? Why, because I’m unloveable, but not as unloveable as you. And what is radiation compared to this virus already in the bloodstream?
Oh yes, a virus. The row comes like a virus. Unseen, unheard, unknown. It comes in a droplet, through a break in the skin, the brushing of flesh, a flavour in the air, a particle inhaled. Once in the blood it’s there for ever, an infection; a lingering, debilitating disease, flaring up from time to time. Once you’re sensitized, the first time you succumb, there it is, yes, for ever; a spiritual TB, before the development of antibiotics; sometimes it kills, sometimes it doesn’t: it just doesn’t go away; it merely hides to wait its triggering. Can’t wait! AIDS of the spirit.
In the end Jane Jarvis scratched and clawed Tom Jeffrey and he left the house saying he’d rather die than return to face the virago, and they didn’t make it up till Sunday, when they went out to supper and she ordered oysters and he let her pay. He was growing a beard. Lemon juice trickled amongst the black bristle. He had a square jaw and even teeth. He was a good-looking man, a sensitive man, a talented man. One day the world would recognize him. He would make a good father. He wanted to be a father.
Oh yes, indeed a virus, caught somewhere along the way by Jane Jarvis, at Oxford perhaps. He certainly thought that was where she’d picked it up.
It could not be in the genes, could not be in the nature, must be culturally induced, caught. Joanna May suffered a severe attack at the age of sixty, but had not been previously afflicted. Her relationship with Carl had ended with the murder of a third party, true, but that was Carl’s doing and coolly done; no one had ever shouted, screamed or clawed. No, there was this to be said for Joanna and Carl – they never descended hand in hand, step by step, into that shocking desert landscape where the air is rent with whining and spiteful complaint, and the self stands isolated and terrified in all its snarling, scratching fury.
Jane Jarvis said to her Tom as he left, in the rain, ‘With people like you in the world, how can it be anything but doomed. I hope you inhale beta particles and die.’
And this was the man she loved, or tried to love, or hoped to love, and knew if she didn’t love, who else would there be?
Julie Rainer heard on the news that a radioactive cloud hovered over the country, and blamed the Russians, since her husband was away on business as he so often was, and there was no one else to blame. She closed the windows and poured away the milk. She stalked her lonely, perfect, tasteless house and filled in yet another form for yet another adoption agency: checking her lies against a note of previous lies in a booklet kept solely for this purpose. Her husband could not have children: he was infertile. She had spent hours, hours of intensive life with doctors’ fingers and spatulas inside her, investigating, before they turned their attention to him: it was her fate, her destiny, she felt, to have these prying feelers there. She despised herself. She lacked the courage to be artificially inseminated, she lacked the courage to leave her husband, though she did not love him, whatever that meant. She felt she would gain courage in the end: but by then it would be too late to have babies.
Time was against Julie, as it is against all women, in such gynaecological matters. In the meantime, she loved her animals, who gave her work in the way that babies do: removing dog hairs from a sofa, replacing chewed seat belts, nursing aged cats, cleaning up after kittens, discouraging algae in the fishbowl – these things gave her pleasure, a sense of achievement…
‘You love those animals more than me,’ said Alec, closing his leather briefcase, off again, mini-computer in hand.
‘I expect I do,’ was all she said. She only told lies on forms.
She called up the vet to ask him what to do with the animals in view of the radioactive cloud and he said he doubted they would come to much harm, no one seemed to know how much radiation was about, or indeed what radiation actually was, but it would also do no damage to keep them in, and even perhaps to bath the dogs.
‘But supposing the water’s radioactive?’
He thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met, but over-anxious. He thought her husband neglected her. He had the sense that she waited for her life to take its proper direction, and that also, if she was not careful, she would wait for ever. She was lost: in the wrong place: with the wrong fate: making herself neutral.
‘Shall I come over?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said sadly.
‘It’s a pity your husband’s away at such a time,’ he said. ‘Chernobyl has made everyone nervous, probably more nervous than they need to be.’
‘You can’t see it but it’s always there,’ she said, ‘like my husband. I’ll just call the animals in, shall I?’
‘Good idea,’ he said, and went to deliver a calf which had two heads. These things happen, with or without radiation. The farmer was inclined to blame Chernobyl, all the same, and however irrationally.
Gently, Julie Rainer, aged thirty, 5 foot 7 inches, 36-24-36, wiped the paws of Hilda her grey cat with a damp cloth, but Hilda took offence and scratched her. Julie watched a line of blood ooze along her white inner arm and threw the poor creature – the one she loved – across the room.
‘Bloody animal,’ she shrieked, ‘bloody animal! It’s all Alec’s fault.’ Later of course she stroked and cosseted the cat, who fortunately had not seemed to take deep offence, and then she went out into the night and breathed deeply, to punish herself.
Cliff came home on time and Gina did not realize he’d been drinking until too late.
‘Isn’t it terrible about this thing at Chernobyl?’ she said, when he came in. She was 5 foot 4 inches, 38 around the chest, 28 around the waist and 40 around the hips. Well, she had been seven weeks premature and reared in a less fortunate environment than Joanna May, her original.
‘Don’t give me any of that fancy stuff,’ he said. ‘Where’s dinner?’
‘Not quite ready,’ said Gina. ‘I had to get the kids back home from the park. It was raining; supposing what they say is right: the rain’s radioactive?’
‘I want some straight talking round here,’ he said. ‘Dinner is either ready or is not ready, and if it is not this is what happens,’ and he hit her.
Now, the kind of row that occurred between Gina and Clifford was of a rather different genus than the one that slowly developed between Jane and Tom. It was not a black cloud that little by little took over a clear sky: not a virus sent to blight the life of the potentially happy. No, this was the kind of domestic discontent that runs like gutter sludge through the houses of the depressed and desperate, be they smart new bungalow, palace or slum – and once your children get their feet wet there’s no drying them out. Mothers’ noses get broken, eyes blacked, kidneys damaged, unborn babies killed; the little witnesses have a hard time of it; thwarted in their desire, their passion, to love someone, anyone, who is worthy of their love, they grow up to lay about them likewise. It is never over. Parents must be worthy of their children’s love, and that’s all there is to it. And whoever grows up, properly, finally? Not you, not me, not him, not her.
‘Where’s my dinner?’ he says. He might be four. ‘Not ready,’ she says. She might be six. Wham he goes: he’s all of fourteen.
‘How can you?’ she wails; fifteen if she’s a day; and to the neighbours, grown-up at last, ‘I walked into a lamp-post,’ denying truth, so what sort of grown-up is that? And not so different in essence perhaps, just more swift, more desperate, more dangerous than Jane and Tom. Where’s my dinner means did you care for me in my absence, did you notice I was gone, Mum oh Mum, how can I trust you? Not ready means no actually I didn’t, I don’t care about you one bit; wham means I can’t express this sorrow, this grief, this disappointment, in words, you self-righteous bitch, you cow: the wham arrives reinforced by a great communal strength, the sudden surge of the male’s hatred of the female who will not be possessed, will not be owned, will not be all body but will have a soul, and who in the refusing suggests some unattainable, other ideal. And then her tears, her silly tears of resentment mean see I knew you were like this, you’ve proved it again; her loyalty acknowledges that if I am punished it must be my fault, things will get better, you my neighbour can’t possibly understand the complexity, not his fault, mine, I have failed, I have failed – the whole thing’s impossible…
If there’s no one around for Gina, and no one around for Cliff, either will kick the cat. There! Told you after all that I was unloveable. See what you’ve done?
In the next room the children turn up the TV – they’d have done better to stay in the park, in a different kind of fallout. Presently Gina comes in to say, ‘Sorry about the explosion. It’s all over now.’ Except her nose is bleeding, so it clearly isn’t. Why does she tell such lies? Why doesn’t she leave? She doesn’t leave because how can she leave, where can she go, she hasn’t got the courage: one day perhaps she will, she says, leave. But leave what? Who? Herself – that’s what she fails to understand, late with his dinner because Chernobyl exploded. How does she leave herself behind?
He is the product of her imagination taken flesh: she married him to make him flesh, he is what she deserves. She stood there and said, ‘I will, I will!’, knowing his nature, the strength of his backhand, the cheap wine reddy-brown upon his teeth.
Those who have rows are more alive than those who don’t: make better friends, more interesting companions. They may wreak havoc but they understand their imperfections – witness how they project them upon others – they cry to heaven for justice. They believe in it.
Alice had a row with her agent. He was her nearest and dearest. Other men came and went, but he was the voice on the phone, unsweaty, unsmelly, a man firm and strong upon a letterhead.
He rang her to say Kiev was cancelled. She’d been going to do a show there.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You’re doing it on purpose.’
‘Alice, be reasonable,’ he said. ‘How could I make a nuclear power station explode?’
‘You’re using it as an excuse. You didn’t want me to do this show. You don’t want me to represent my country abroad. You want me to do some cheap swimsuit for some cheap mag because there’s more in it for you.’
Alice was 5 foot 8 inches tall, 33 inches around the chest, 22 round the waist and 32 around the hips. She’d spent a week longer in the womb than Jane or Julie, and eight weeks longer than Gina. She exercised and dieted. She was in love with herself: she would stand naked in front of a mirror and run her hands across her body: she would do anything for herself.
‘There’s never anything in it for me,’ he said. ‘Ten per cent! A tip. That’s all it ever is, a tip.’
‘Perhaps it’s time I got a new agent,’ she said.
‘Perhaps it is,’ he said.
There she went again. Prove you love me, before I prove you don’t. Later he called to apologize. She knew he would. He needed her more than she needed him.
Sometimes Alice felt alone in the world. She wished she’d had a sister: all she had for company was her little grey cat, and that was often left for neighbours to feed and so was cantankerous. Nevertheless the penalties of continual companionship, that is to say marriage, seemed too onerous to contemplate. What did she need with a husband in the flesh when her agent on the phone cared so much about her – how she looked, how she felt, where she’d been, what she earned – and all in exchange for a tip. Sex she could take or leave – and often left, for the sake of her looks. Not just because of the necessity of early nights if her eyes were to stay bright and large, but because sex made her screw up her face and that encouraged wrinkles.
One day she might marry, one day. Not yet. One day she might find the courage to marry.
So thought and felt the clones of Joanna May, before they discovered each other and themselves.