Flora had a funeral to which everyone came. Ros got probation; I got put in here. Something happened to Arthur, who put on weight and aged ten years between the carnival and the funeral, and lost the knack of pulling women. Or so Ros told me. He tried Ros and she simply laughed. Perhaps his good deed did him no good: made his Dorian Gray picture in the attic grow younger so he had to grow older. Virtue is its own reward, don’t think it isn’t, and sometimes it’s a positive drawback. Anyway, with Arthur less randy Jane was happier. Only when she has him helpless in a wheelchair, after a stroke, will she be truly at ease. Sometimes I understand why it is that some men fear some women so: if women are virtuous, if they insist on being victims, then their misery controls to the grave.
Angus? Angus did not forgive Natalie. He was tired of her, anyway. He’d said she could have the flat free until November, just about getting the timing right. He did not renew the lease, but when he’d calmed down did not deny she’d brought richness and happiness into his life, at least for a while. Jean was rather pleasanter to him, now she was on HRT, or hormone replacement therapy. Her horribleness turned out to be menopausal. Or so he said. Various West Country rings dealing with illicitly imported agricultural chemicals, were uncovered by the police, and the penalties weren’t just fines but prison sentences, so Avon Farmers disappeared only just in time. Arthur started a Garden Centre there instead, where the flowers and shrubs flourished immoderately, and where not a butterfly ever alighted. Something had indeed got into the soil, for good or bad. One of his assistants had a baby born with a crooked leg but that could happen to anyone: there’s an epidemic, remember, of handicapped babies. And another died of cancer, but that was hardly statistically surprising, and in the meantime, how the pot plants in Eddon Gurney bloomed!
In the delicatessen the till pinged almost nonstop and profits grew, against all expectation. With the coming of Jax had come good fortune. The animal was obviously happier in a home where there were no children. Gerard took anti-depressants and lost his social conscience and thereafter sold luxury foods to the non-hungry with equanimity. Pauline took up weight training: an excellent substitute for sexual activity for those whose husbands grow elderly and uninterested too soon for their liking.
Val Bains’ back got permanently better at carnival time. He was in the crowds watching when float no. 62 caught fire. He ran forward to help Bernard unhitch the tractor, and in bending and forgetting released some trapped nerve or other in his spine. He took the job in Street at a firm using the new computer technology; it was exacting work if not well paid. He would drop Sally off at work, and collect her on the way home. She was pleased to have so visible and caring a husband.
Natalie? Well, here’s a turn-up for the books. Natalie stepped into Flora’s shoes, with Bernard in the caravan, up by the tip. He’s ten years younger than she is, but who cares? She had nowhere to go when Angus turned her out of the flat, and she’s always got on well with Bernard and at least didn’t have the children to worry about. Ros went up to see her, not long ago. Natalie said she was happier than she had ever been in all her life. She was properly alive at last, she said, though looking forward to the spring. Winters in a caravan can be trying. No, she didn’t want the children back. What could she offer them? Ros thought perhaps she was on drugs. It was so damp and muddy up by the tip, and Natalie looked so happy without any real reason that Ros could see. But perhaps it’s just sex, sex, sex; you know what Bernard is, forever quenching his moral and mental torment in fleshly pleasures. I hope it is. God knows what will happen to her next: what does happen to the one in three women with children whose marriages end in divorce?
You are right, it’s worrying about that which has driven me into the nuthouse, and right out the other side. I am, alas, sane again. I am, Dr Mempton says, fit to leave. Why is he being so nice to me? What? I can hardly believe him. How many sessions with the psychiatrist does an ordinary patient have? he asks. One a week? One a fortnight? He’s joking. That is a monstrously low figure. Yes, I do realize he’s been coming every day. It did seem strange. I now see it’s bloody irresponsible, if what he’s saying is true.
Love? Me? Who could love me? I make him laugh, Bill Mempton says. When was making someone laugh a recipe for love? This is very, very embarrassing, and not what I had in mind at all. Look at me! Puffy face, puffy hands, twitching. That’s the drugs. I talk too much. I am full of hate and self-pity. He knows that, better than anyone. He’ll be saying next all I need is the love of a good man. My God, he’s said it! Do Them Upstairs go for this sort of thing – doctor-patient romances? I hardly think so! Or is it that they reckon anything is better than the Eddon Method? Those deaths must have shaken management no end!
Not for Sonia Flora’s triumphant puff of smoke, her exaltation: not for Sonia Natalie’s glorious debasement: no, for Sonia comes a proposal of marriage from a good man, who knows her every failing. She can’t accept, of course. Happy endings are not so easy. No. She must get on with changing the world, rescuing the country. There is no time left for frivolity.
Fay Weldon
Mid October 1986
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