Carmen ran into Mrs Baker in the street just before Christmas. She did it literally. Her father was teaching her to drive. She put her foot on the accelerator, not the brake, and the car shot forward through the Fenedge Pedestrian Precinct, and she knocked over Mrs Baker, who was dressed as Uncle Holly and collecting money for the Rainforests, or the Mexican Earthquake, I forget which: at any rate some good cause in some distant place. I was sitting watching from the Handicapped Centre, wondering why there was never a collection to provide decent official transport for the handicapped here at home, when I saw Carmen run into her. Or perhaps I overstate it. Mrs Baker was scratched on her leg, but only slightly, and though personally I thought she ought to go to the hospital for a tetanus jab, so rusty was Andy’s car, she and Carmen went together to the Welcome-In to have a cup of coffee and a mince pie. Andy had turned Carmen out of the car and said he’d die rather than let her drive another yard, and would certainly die if she did: she would have to walk home.
‘I told you so,’ said Mrs Baker, not smugly but in some distress, on hearing that Annie was still a housemaid at Bellamy House and had failed to get promotion to kitchen work – ‘She’s just too good at beds,’ said Carmen – and that Laura was not just pregnant but engaged, and Carmen without a job. ‘I told you girls what would happen if you failed your exams.’ But it was strange. Whenever Carmen applied for work, things fell apart. Firms shut up shop as she appeared – Peckhams Poultry had been closed down to clear its premises of salmonella – and personnel officers took against her for no reason.
‘You are aiming too low,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘One look at you, Carmen, and they can tell you’re only going to stay a week or you’re about to plot a takeover, or tell them what to do.’
Mrs Baker asked about boyfriends and Carmen replied as she always did: that she had met the love of her life, a certain Ronnie Cartwright, and was saving herself for him. She even quoted a line about perfect love from Pelleas and Melisande, thinking Mrs Baker at least would understand. But Mrs Baker told me later she felt responsible for filling her girls’ heads with romantic nonsense when all they were ever going to meet were the local boys. She would campaign to take a number of works off the Set Books list forthwith. Let them be realistic about their chances in the world. Mrs Baker bought another mince pie to console herself and while she was at the counter her eye fell on the local newspaper, and a small advert offering a job for a smart junior at Bellamy Airspace. She took the newspaper over to where Carmen sat beneath the dreadful work of local artists, and Carmen finally called Bellamy Airspace from the telephone box outside the Post Office and asked for an interview.
I watched her from my window. I will swear that when she went in she was pretty enough in her swarthy way, but slightly dumpy, and that when she came out she was beautiful, leggy and bosomy, but repeatedly kicking her feet against the wall as if in a temper.
Carmen called Mrs Baker at home that evening to say she’d got the job. She was to be a receptionist. Her new employers were teaching her elocution and the art of flower arrangement. She was to take courses in make-up and massage. The rest of the time she sat and received parcels and smiled and made clients cups of coffee, and was paid double what she would have got at Peckhams Poultry.
‘It sounds,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘as if they are training you to be a geisha girl.’
‘It seems that Sir Bernard Bellamy,’ said Carmen, ‘likes all his female employees to be truly feminine. Just not pregnant,’ she added, remembering Laura.
It was noticeable during the next few months how the luck of Fenedge changed. Peckhams reopened, its salmonella count at last within levels acceptable to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food; the remains of a Roman villa and its splendid tiled floor were discovered not far away, and this attracted visitors with archaeological interests if not much money, so that the many local bed & breakfasts flourished. Sheets which had lain folded in airing cupboards were brought out and aired; egg cups were brought forward from the backs of cupboards, shaken free of dead flies, and washed. Children were made to sit up at table and mind their manners in case paying guests arrived, and they did! Bellamy House brought enough wealthy people into the area to allow a fancy restaurant or so to open up: pubs had themselves refurbished: a Japanese Auto concession was granted to the town, then the launderette bought in a dry-cleaning machine, so you could take your clothes in and collect them on the same day! Hitherto garments had been sent to Kings Lynn and it would be a minimum of five days before they were returned, and the local depot manageress was likely to reject your offering, fingering your cashmere jumper with the egg stain on the front, saying, ‘You don’t want to waste your money getting that dry-cleaned. Wash it at home. It’s perfectly safe.’ And you would and it wouldn’t be. There was to be a new science wing at Fenedge School for Girls; the place was now designated as a Community Resource Centre and attracted extra funding from the Local Education Authority. Evening classes in upholstery and astrology had started up. A scandal involving royalty hit the headlines and the girls involved turned out to be the daughters of a local vicar, so the media turned up en masse and put Fenedge on the map at last. ‘Flirts of Fenedge.’ The City Fathers (City, indeed!) had the War Memorial cleaned up, and the flowerbeds replanted. A bus service finally operated, to link Fenedge and neighbouring villages, and the cinema reopened, with a new Dolby stereo sound system, one of the best in the whole country.
It wasn’t so much that good things happened as that bad things ceased happening. Or perhaps the Devil was looking the other way: was off stirring things up somewhere else. Bad luck for them. Sir Bernard Bellamy was off too; he had diversified into Scandinavian shipping.
Mavis and Alan suggested to Annie that she lived in at Bellamy House: they thought she’d be better placed for promotion.
‘You mean there’s no room any more in my bedroom for your office,’ was Annie’s first reaction. ‘That is to say, no room in your office for my bed.’
‘You can’t stay home for ever,’ said Alan, reasonably. ‘You’re a working girl now. If you’d tried harder and passed your exams and gone to college, it would have been different. But no, you wouldn’t listen.’
‘I did so listen,’ said Annie. ‘I listened to Count Capinski, if you remember. It’s all his fault.’
‘Don’t say that name aloud,’ said Alan, alarmed. ‘Don’t even think of him or he might come back.’
Lately Mavis’s reputation had soared, recovering from the initial knock it received when Count Capinski first disappeared. For a time her healing powers had seemed to desert her, but now she was back on course, or said to be. Warts vanished and backache went at the touch of her fingers. As Dr Grafton became increasingly eccentric, not just failing to diagnose cancer until too late — which anyone can do – but refusing to prescribe antibiotics or make home visits, and suggesting to patients that wholemeal bread and meditation would cure heart disease, Mavis’s laying on of hands seemed more and more acceptable. It was true that you had to pay Mavis and you didn’t have to pay Dr Grafton – or only through your taxes — but at least Mavis wasn’t judgemental, and didn’t equate stress-related ailments – which meant everything which could go wrong with body or mind – with personal sin. Mavis was far more likely to tell you that you were a victim of demonic possession, which could hardly be your fault. You’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. So these days she was popular, and was spared much of the putting the living in touch with the dead that she’d been obliged to in the past, if only in order to earn a living. She’d found that exhausting and irritating, if only because the dead had so little of interest to say once they’d been summoned. Now she just laid on hands and felt the healing power channel itself through her, and could see the results.
I had been to Mavis myself, and once again had felt the strange, none-too-pleasant tingling in toes normally unused to sensation. What’s more, she had seemed quite inadvertently to have cured a skin condition on the back of my hand, which had never fully healed since I had an allergic reaction to some kind of drip they gave me in Chicago. Dr Grafton had finally agreed to sending further X-rays and CAT scans to Chicago – one could die while the medical profession sorts its etiquette out: their mistrust of one another is only equalled by their mistrust of their patients – and now they started writing to me again. The backbone bypass had worked, they assured me, it was just that it had instantly blocked; the bypass now needed its own angioplasty: they wanted to fill it with miniature balloons which they’d blow up inside the artery to clear it. They’d lately developed a new and better technique to accomplish this, they said on the phone: why didn’t I come over? ‘We’ll get the blood flowing!’ they said. ‘One way or another, Harriet. We won’t be defeated!’ But there was something in their tone of voice so like Alison’s as she addressed the watery sky and defied God that I was reluctant to accept their offer. I thought I’d just sit there in my window a little longer and observe what was going on, and take time to make up my mind. Perhaps the tingling meant the bypass was clearing the traffic jam in my arteries, of its own accord, without the need for surgical intervention.
But enough of me. There was Annie crying that day into her vegetable soup, feeling abandoned: she mustn’t be forgotten: let’s return to her predicament.
‘She’s crying because she’s tired,’ said Mavis. Mavis had turned vegetarian. ‘She’s a meat eater. Carnivores exhaust themselves with animal passions.’
‘It’s nothing to do with being tired,’ said Annie. ‘It’s relief. I’ve wanted to live in at Bellamy House for ages, but I thought you’d be hurt if I said so. Most people are very nice to me at work, and you get used to the ones that aren’t. Even Mrs Haverill being horrid is okay: at least she’s taking notice of me. Up here it’s all allergies and rheumatics and dead spirits and body bags in the freezer, and everyone trying to be nice when they don’t feel like it, and too busy to care about me one bit.’
‘You’re being unfair,’ said Mavis.
‘Let her say her piece,’ said Alan. ‘She’ll feel better when she has.’
‘Everything I touch up there at Bellamy House is nice,’ said Annie. ‘It’s silky or soft or somehow heavy. Here everything’s scratchy, cheap and tinny.’
‘It’s all good value for money in this house,’ said Alan. ‘Not a penny wasted.’
‘Value for money means ugly,’ said Annie, ‘and the longer I’m up at Bellamy House and not here the less ugly I turn out to be.’
‘You’re not ugly, dear,’ said Mavis. ‘Whatever makes you think a thing like that?’
‘The mirror,’ said Alan, and laughed before he could stop himself. But that was only habit. The fact was that Annie was looking distinctly better. She’d lost weight and her eyes seemed bigger, even quite large and soulful, and she was sometimes able to wash her hair in one of the guest bathrooms if there was time and it was Mrs Haverill’s day off so that it fluffed agreeably around her face instead of lankly hanging. Alan actually apologised for laughing, and it was with the good wishes of her family that Annie packed a trunk, and moved up the hill to be resident staff at Bellamy House. She had a little attic room to herself, and Mrs Haverill let her use up the half-finished circlets of lavender soap from the guest bedrooms, and quite often yesterday’s croissants would be served for breakfast, dunked in milk by the chef and heated up briefly in the oven for the staff.
Laura and Woodie got married, quietly, because Audrey was back in hospital and it didn’t seem a time for much rejoicing, but there were pretty flowers on the Registrar’s table and she had a new dress, the first for ages. Her father Kim did not come. She sent an invitation to the last address she had for him, the minute she knew her mother would be in hospital for the ceremony, but she didn’t hear back. She expected he had moved house again. She’d been told by friends that Poppy had lost the baby, so her father need never have left home in the first place, but Woodie helped Laura accept the fact that probably her father had really wanted to go, not just had to go. And that yes, perhaps Kim had indeed thought Kubrick the fish more important than his own daughter. An older generation of men could be like that, said Woodie, especially men young in the sixties, whose brains had been addled by hallucinogenic drugs. But Woodie, said Woodie, was a new man and different. He had feelings and could give voice to them. He spoke to Laura seriously on their wedding night. He knew she hadn’t been certain about the wisdom of getting married, but he was convinced they’d done the right thing. He loved her. There wouldn’t be much money, but they’d manage. He would make sure Laura’s life was rewarding and interesting. They would travel – they could always go camping, even to Europe if she wanted. The great thing about being self-employed as he was, or was about to be, was that the harder you worked the more you earned. Well it must be like that, mustn’t it? There was a tremble in his voice and Laura realised that Woodie was as scared of the future as she was, and stopped worrying about whether or not she loved him: it was obvious that she did.
As for Carmen’s household, great things were happening there. Raelene had discovered aerobics and the benefits of a low-fat diet: she could bend to pick up the cat dish and wash it; she remembered to buy worm pills for the dog: she served only boiled vegetables, never fried, and sprinkled ground vitamin and mineral supplements into the muesli. Andy and Stephen grumbled but ate what was put in front of them. Raelene, as she lost weight, jumped up and down from her chair to put things straight and wipe surfaces. She couldn’t abide dirty clothes: the washing machine and dryer rumbled all day long and into the night too. She planted roses in the garden, even making the hole big enough to spread the roots properly, and adding peat and humus into the sandy soil. She chose a Dortmund climber (R. Kordesii) for the north-facing wall (crimson red with a white eye) and rugosas Frau Dagmar Hastrup (pink) and Rosenaie de l’Haij (crimson purple) for the beds in front. Andy, at her request, painted the house, not in colours left over from assorted jobs, but in proper brilliant-white outdoor paint, two coats. Raelene began to answer the phone, instead of just switching it through to the answering machine when it rang, and would even leave Andy a record of calls received and made. She had the van insured and the reverse gear mended, which made proper parking possible. Parking tickets came less frequently.
What brought these changes about? Who’s to say? Families sink and rise again. Aerobics and weight loss helped, as did the fact of Carmen’s being employed, but Stephen’s metamorphosis was probably most responsible. Stephen had pulled himself together, as boys of a certain age sometimes do: he discovered a talent in himself, a capacity for and an interest in science. Dragging a magnet through iron filings had filled him with an enthusiasm for the workings of the natural world. It was his good fortune to have at college an excellent physics teacher whose bad fortune it was to have halitosis so severe that it limited his employment potential. Mr Parker had ended up teaching the dregs of the education system, the unteachables, the alienated, those accustomed to living with smells, their own and others, and rather liking them. Mr Parker’s presentation of the engineering problems posed in the supporting of two female breasts of variable size with fabric and wire in one garment further fired Stephen’s interest. Tests showed him to have an innate mathematical ability, and before long, via a rather morbid interest in nuclear catastrophe, he was absorbed in the rarefied world of particle physics, and destined, the school thought, for Cambridge.
‘We were lucky,’ said Mr Parker to the Headmaster in the corridor. ‘Sheer fluke that we picked him up. I wonder how many children we lose as we nearly lost Stephen – doomed by our low expectations of them?’
‘It wasn’t luck,’ said the Headmaster. ‘The system is devised to pick them out, get them on–’ and he hurried off, opening a window on the way. But Mr Parker was given an A level class to teach the following year, and got three pupils to Oxbridge, so it looked as if his luck had changed too.
The notion of ‘my son the genius’ affected Andy greatly; he had dropped a couple of stone as Raelene stopped frying and now the world seemed full of hope and possibility. He paid his bills, engaged in dialogue with dissatisfied clients, even went over to the Horners and did a couple of days’ work in the garage, free of charge. It was true that in error he switched off the big chest freezer, now placed, for some reason, in the back of the garage (what did such a small family want with so big a freezer?) but luckily Alan noticed and turned the power back on.
One day, just before Laura’s baby was born, Carmen came back home early – she’d been at her Flower Arrangement and Other Office Skills course in Kings Lynn – to find her parents looking through holiday brochures. Raelene leapt up and took Carmen’s coat, brushed it down, and hung it on a padded hanger on the back of the door, and offered her food and drink.
‘There’s a lovely piece of fish for tea,’ she said. ‘Grilled with a squeeze of lemon. Only a hundred and sixty calories for six ounces. In the old days,’ Raelene said, ‘I thought your insides were just a kind of factory: it took in what it needed and chucked the rest away. But apparently the body doesn’t know it’s a factory. It takes what it gets and gobbles the lot, poisons and all. You have to be so careful what you eat, Carmen.’
But Andy said (he did sometimes resist a little), ‘If your dinner’s got your number on it it’s got your number on it, that’s your old dad’s theory, Carmen. My, we are looking remarkable today!’
Carmen thought she might one day have to have cosmetic surgery to get the size of her breasts reduced. Clothes did not hang as she liked them to. It was difficult to get going what they called in her Dress Management course ‘a line’. Her figure seemed to be variable, as that of other girls was not. She had plucked up her courage and been to Dr Grafton about the state of her nipples, which kept changing shape, colour and size. Could this be skin cancer? He had been scrupulously correct in his examination, but said they looked perfectly in order to him, quite within the ordinary run of nipple, though Carmen might need to use a suction cap when she had a baby, to give the baby something to get hold of. It had, as it happened, turned out to be a day when the aureole was roseate, very pale pink, and the nipple itself hardly prominent at all. She quite liked them like that.
‘I know they’re in order,’ she said to Dr Grafton, ‘it’s just that they keep changing. They’ll be quite different tomorrow. And yesterday they were brown and tough.’
Dr Grafton thought she might be in the grip of a psychosis – to be obsessed by the state of the nipple surely indicated some overwhelming sexual anxiety? – and offered Carmen counselling, but she declined. She said yes, she did have a boyfriend, his name was Ronnie Cartwright, just to get out of the surgery. But it was a relief to know she didn’t have skin cancer. She hoped he was right: by all accounts Dr Grafton was so often wrong. Perhaps the condition was hereditary? She asked Raelene, who said Carmen was obviously still growing, and she, Raelene, had read an interesting fact in The Independent. (Stephen had started taking The Sun to school every morning to his science class, leaving nothing to read over tea, so Raelene had switched to The Independent.) Apparently, Raelene said, Marks & Spencer affirmed that the female shape altered to suit fashion. Bodies, in fact, grew into what society desired them to be.
‘So?’ asked Carmen.
‘So well I don’t know,’ said Raelene. ‘But life is full of surprises.’
And thus it turned out to be, the day Raelene took Carmen’s coat and hung it up for her – something that had hardly happened since the day Carmen was born, presaging change and indicating guilt.
‘Your dad and I have something to tell you, sweetheart,’ said Raelene as Carmen toyed with her hundred and sixty calories of pure protein. ‘We’re going on a world cruise. We may be gone for quite some time. But if you don’t see the world now, when will you? The things you regret are the things you don’t do, not the things you do do. Right?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Carmen, doubtfully. It’s true to say that no one likes their parents taking off across the world, no matter what they think of those parents. ‘What about Stephen? He’s still at school. Isn’t he too young to leave?’
‘He’s off to Dounreay,’ said Andy. ‘Am I proud of that boy!’ Stephen looked up from a book called The Metaphysics of the Quark and said, ‘Day release from Cambridge next year. Work experience this. Forget fission, this is fusion,’ and went back to his book. ‘So now Stephen’s sorted,’ said Raelene, ‘and finally got his head screwed on the right way, and you’re in full-time work, your dad and I are free. And your Auntie Edna will keep an eye on the pair of you. We’ve put the house up for sale to keep the bank happy. All you have to do is show people round and put them off.’ Carmen thought for a little, then she said, ‘But you haven’t got the money for a cruise.’
‘Oh yes we have,’ said Raelene. ‘Grandma turned out to have quite a bit in her will. What a surprise! Just enough to blow on a really nice year or so in the sun.’
‘I see,’ said Carmen.
‘So that’s settled,’ said Raelene in her new bright manner. ‘I don’t know about not eating pork. Sometimes I really fancy a bacon sandwich.’
Andy said, ‘Speaking for myself, doll, bacon’s an integral part of my life.’ He turned the pages of a brochure. ‘Where’s the nearest port to the Silk Route? Or is that inland?’
Carmen found herself forgotten. She studied her nails. Yesterday they had been oval; today they seemed almond shape. She had gone from a D cup to a B overnight though, which was a relief. Her parents had stopped noticing. Anyone can get used to anything.
The phone rang. Stephen answered it. It was someone called Bernard for Carmen. Carmen took the phone saying she didn’t know anyone called Bernard, and then discovered it was Sir Bernard Bellamy. He wanted her to dine with him that very night. Carmen said she couldn’t, she’d already eaten, but then felt suddenly very hungry – what’s a hundred and sixty calories to a growing, changing girl? – and said okay. He said he’d send his chauffeur.
‘Who was that?’ asked Raelene.
‘Nobody,’ said Carmen shortly. Her breasts felt heavier by the moment. She felt she could never trust anyone again. The world changed too suddenly for her liking. She had survived her childhood by feeling superior to her parents, managed to adjust as they began to occupy the moral high ground: now they were backing out altogether: snatching an already rippling carpet from underneath her feet. She felt like crying.
Andy said, ‘Now don’t you throw yourself away, Car. Looking the way you do these days, you could catch some rich Arab.’
Raelene said, ‘Our Car will marry for love, not money. She’s just waiting for Mr Right to come along.’
Carmen said, for what she feared would be the last time, ‘If you wanted to call me Car, why did you name me Carmen?’
She went to her room and fell asleep, and woke only when Andy banged upon her door and called, ‘Car, it’s your date. Funny kind of minicab.’
And I watched from my window as Carmen came down the path between the rugosas, the pink and the crimson. I noticed people’s legs, particularly, because of the state of my own. Hers were perfect today, lean, long, serviceable. She wore a leather miniskirt at the top of them, covering a tight little bum, just about. My Aunt Michelle called it ‘bum’. I’m sorry. It used to upset my mother if I called it that. ‘What do I call it then?’ I asked once. I knew she didn’t like ‘bottom’, thinking it both imprecise and mealy-mouthed. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said.
Driver got out of the BMW and opened the door for Carmen and Andy said from the step, ‘Evening out with the company chauffeur, I see,’ to which Carmen replied, ‘That’s right, Dad. See you later.’
‘Mind you do,’ said Andy, ‘and not too late at that.’
‘If I’m not old enough to look after myself,’ said Carmen bitterly, ‘why are you two going off round the world?’
She couldn’t get over it. Abandoned! She snivelled in the back of the car and took no notice of the landscape, though it was a particularly beautiful evening, and even the straight green and brown lines of the beet fields seemed luminous as the low sun struck through them. The sun was sinking red and round, behind stark lightning-struck trees, as if in a rather bad painting.
‘Wonderful evening,’ said Driver from the front. ‘Aren’t you thrilled? A date with Sir Bernard. Shouldn’t you have dolled yourself up a bit?’
‘He can take me as he finds me,’ said Carmen. ‘And this is my best skirt.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Driver. ‘I thought perhaps you and I should have a little talk,’ and he drove off the road, bump, bump, bump, into a patch of the old woods, and parked the car beneath a particularly gracious oak tree. Though all this part may have been a dream. A flock of birds, those humble sparrows which are so much everywhere that no one watches out for them, rose at once from the branches and left them in peace. A little table stood beneath the tree, spread with a red check tablecloth. Two chairs faced each other. And there they sat, Driver and she. She had a glass of wine in her hand.
‘Now I’ve given you a little on account,’ said Driver to Carmen then, ‘it’s time you did one or two things for me.’
‘What have you given me on account?’
‘Item, beauty in the eye of the beholder,’ said Driver.
‘I don’t think much of your idea of that,’ she said. ‘It keeps changing.’
‘So does the beholder,’ said Driver. ‘I could give you Beauty itself if you’re not satisfied.’
‘So men would look after me in the street?’ she sneered. ‘They do that already.’
‘That’s just sexiness,’ he said, ‘with a dollop of prettiness. Any young girl has that. As it is, it’s all worry and anxiety: how do you not get pregnant, how do you best use face shaper, did you remember to shave your legs? Are the tops of your arms over-fleshy? It’s too much like hard work getting the right look for the right man at the right moment. But Beauty, the Real Thing, you don’t have to do anything about. You just carry it round inside you: it shines out from the middle, nothing to do with you. Protects and perfects as it works. No one worries about hairy legs, and they won’t be hairy anyway: your body respects the image you and others have of it. Men try to get to the heart of it through you. They have to possess it, they need to own it. It’s like gold: it causes fever.’
‘I don’t want it,’ said Carmen.
‘Don’t try my patience,’ he said. He had high cheek bones. He’d taken off his chauffeur’s cap. His hair was glossy. He stared beyond her as he spoke. She found she was glad she didn’t want him to look at her. The shoulders of his uniform were square and the fabric was figured with something that had the texture of feather but glinted with metal, as if steel wings were folded beneath. She thought perhaps she had fallen asleep in the back of the car: was she not on her way to a date with Sir Bernard Bellamy, which in itself was dreamlike enough? Dreams within dreams within dreams! Where could you stop? She drank some more wine, and she could feel it run down her throat: that was real enough, essential fuel for the fluttering there inside. She wondered exactly where amongst all that palpated flesh her soul could be: and what was the soul? Was it the organising principle that kept the parts working, or just the difference between life and death? And why did Driver want it, anyway? And would it matter if he had it? Perhaps it affected the cosmos and not her, in which case why bother?
I am putting thoughts into Carmen’s mind. All she told Laura, who told me, was that when she took the second sip of wine, she was suddenly conscious of her insides working; she could see herself from the inside out, a collection of organs, throbbing in a not very pleasant but clearly interrelated way, wrapped in skin; she could feel everything her body was doing, from the blood running through her veins into the tips of her toes, to the hairs growing out of her scalp: there was no peace. None of it ever stopped.
Nor would Driver. ‘Beauty keeps you young,’ he said. ‘Next best thing to immortality. The body ages around it, of course, but the thing itself is like a jewel; indestructible. If you have beauty you get to be loved but don’t have to do any loving in return. But the real point about beauty is that it gives you power. Beauty is all the power that women ever have. And power is what women want.’
‘Mrs Baker wouldn’t like to hear you say a thing like that,’ said Carmen. ‘Mrs Baker says you can get where you want, male or female, if you really want it. It’s knowing what you want is the problem.’
Driver laughed in a disagreeable way. Carmen felt he didn’t appreciate Mrs Baker as she did.
‘Without beauty,’ he said, ‘women only have the power men let them have.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Carmen. ‘I promise.’ For he was sparking and smoking a bit, like his own engine, overheated.
‘So what else have you done for me?’
‘Item,’ said Driver, in a lordly way, as if he had the whole world under his thumb. ‘Good luck all round, for you and your friends.’
Carmen pondered this. It was true that her own life was going well; that Laura had given birth to a baby girl with scarcely a spasm of pain (‘My,’ said Nurse Phaby, who had also brought Laura into the world, ‘you are a lucky girl! You certainly don’t take after your mother!’); and that Annie had had the most remarkable stroke of good fortune.
Annie had actually met the man of her dreams while laying a carpet on the attic stairs of Bellamy House. The top floor had finally been opened for guests, in response to popular demand; forget that the increase in the number of guests strained the hotel’s kitchens and leisure facilities to the very limit of their capacity, that the water supply was barely adequate to reach the remoter bedrooms, and the staff to guest ratio – what Mrs Haverill referred to as the SGR — moved from one to five to one to ten with no concomitant rise in wages. Annie now worked until seven at night, and did up to eight hours further a week on the Cooperative Task Force, or CTF, the function of which was to undertake odd jobs around the place, thus avoiding the necessity of Mrs Haverill taking on extra staff. Carpet-laying was this week’s task. It was Annie’s favourite. She loved the tough resilience of the carpet: the brightness of the nails, the sharp quick bang of hammer on head. She loved getting it right. Everyone else was hopeless at it. She had a mouthful of nails: she knelt on one stair, stretched up to the next, sat back on her heels to survey her work. Someone came up to stand behind her. She assumed it was Eddie, her current CTF colleague. She did not bother to look round.
‘Hand me the other box of tacks,’ she asked, and whoever it was did.
‘I’m going to run out of underfelt,’ she said. ‘There’s another roll in the cleaning cupboard next to the Mozart suite.’ It was fetched. ‘They’re so mean in this place,’ said Annie. ‘They won’t buy proper staircarpet underlay. I think the CTF is a con. Mrs Haverill goes on about us pulling together, but what she means is, we pull, Sir Bernard profits and she’s in love with Sir Bernard. They’re crazy to open up the attic rooms. There are bats up there, and bed bugs in the brass beds. Do you know about bed bugs?’ And she described the dreadful things: how they can wake after a hundred years, desiccated by the decades until they look no more than flakes of paper, to creep in the night towards some sudden new source of warmth and damp – that is to say, some sleeping human being, whose only crime is to be warm and damp. The little piece of paper, turning less paperlike every second, creeps towards its victim, and reaching him, her, jabs with its proboscis, injecting both anaesthetic and anti-coagulant so the flesh doesn’t hurt or bleed, and no alarm is raised; then peacefully it squats and sucks out human blood until it’s no longer papery but bloated, fat and pink. Then, satiated, it crawls away, or scuttles up the curtain, to hide beneath the window pole – oh, bed bugs are cunning! People who’re badly bitten sometimes have to be given blood transfusions. Pity the guests, said Annie, in the newly opened attic floor, of Bellamy House, once Sealord Mansion.
All this Annie spoke, and more. And then she looked up and who was standing staring at her but the man of her dreams, not Eddie, who was short and squat and the stuff of nightmares. (It seemed to be either Sir Bernard or Mrs Haverill’s quite deliberate policy to staff the hotel with the most presentable females available and the least presentable males. Or perhaps it just is, as research will tell us, that pretty women get employed before plain ones, and physical appearance is not so telling a qualification for employment in the male. Perhaps this accounts for the (to the rational) apparently irrational rejoicing of the world when a baby boy appears from out of the womb and not a baby girl: it just doesn’t matter what he looks like, how crooked his nose, how lumpy his figure, how crossed his eyes, how feeble his legs — he will get a job and find a spouse.) The man of Annie’s dreams, the tall dark stranger from overseas whom Count Capinski had once promised her, was broad-shouldered, muscular and well fleshed. He had a square jaw, thick dark hair, bright blue eyes, the look of a man slow to anger, too courteous to complain overmuch; the kind of man, in fact, who illustrates the more romantic stories you still sometimes find in women’s magazines. What is more, he had an unmarried, questioning, questing glance. ‘Let me tell you about the sheep tick one day,’ he said. ‘Or the lifestyle of the liver fluke. Nothing in the world like the liver fluke.’
‘You’re not Eddie,’ was all Annie could say in her dismay, and she spat tacks from her lips as she spoke. He picked them up with strong working fingers, square-nailed. The nails were not manicured and polished as were those of most of the male guests at Bellamy House: they looked, as nails can, well scrubbed but still ingrained with this and that, in spite of all efforts.
‘No, I’m not Eddie,’ he said. ‘I’m a sheep fanner from New Zealand. I have a room up these stairs, and it has a brass bed, so it’s not so much of a buggaroo if I can’t get up them because you’re in the way.’
And he asked her to have a drink with him after supper; there was no one in this back of beyond to talk to, he said, no one to have a decent conversation with him since he’d left his sheep farm in the South Island two weeks back to inspect the roe deer of East Wretham Heath with a view to purchasing. You should never buy, he said, an animal you hadn’t set eyes upon, let alone a hundred of them, any more than you should marry a girl who hadn’t cooked you dinner. A girl who could lay carpet and talk about bed bugs wasn’t your usual run of Pom, said handsome Tim McLean, so would she do him the honour of having a drink? You bet she would! Little Annie Horner, blossoming into if not quite a beauty, at least something near it, at the sight of that jaw, those pillars of legs, the sound of the deep – if slightly nasal, it must be admitted – male voice, and all his attention focused on her. Was that luck, or was that luck, for Carmen’s friend Annie?
And was that luck, or was that luck, that Laura’s baby Rachel was the most peaceable baby ever, and slept and smiled, and that Woodie, in spite or perhaps because of his youth, doted upon his small family, and that Audrey was in remission and could help Laura with Rachel, so Woodie could make garden sheds in the back garden, dovetailing joints and smoothing edges with such beautiful precision that everyone admired them, although each shed, being a work of art, would take so long to make that few could buy them if they were costed out right. And Laura insisted that Woodie cost them out right, including the cost of labour in the end price. Everyone knew you had to do that. But then one of Woodie’s many aunts died and left him just enough money to see them through the first year, if they were careful. Woodie’s mother was forty-four when he was born, his father sixty-three. Now they lived far away and scarcely impinged upon the young couple’s life: more like distant grandparents than parents, content with a photograph of the baby and a card at Christmas. Was that luck, or was that luck?
But Carmen said to Driver, ‘I don’t know so much. I think we just stopped being unlucky.’
Driver fizzled a bit.
‘Item. I’ve got rid of your parents. They were always going to be an embarrassment.’
‘I love my parents.’
‘Too late,’ said Driver. ‘Many’s the time you’ve wished them dead in your heart. I’m just sending them off on a world cruise, so be grateful to me. No such thing as a free lunch,’ and she was pressed up against an oak tree, pinned against it by his powerful shoulders, and her skirt was up around her waist; well, perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. Annie was convinced for a time that everything Carmen said about Driver was not a sexual fantasy but the opposite, an a-sexual fantasy, the truth being that Carmen was having it off with the chauffeur, who was pimping for his employer and cheating on him. But then Annie went through phases of believing the worst about everyone. Laura was never quite so sure. She was content to believe that Carmen just couldn’t tell dream from reality.
‘Item,’ said Driver, pausing. ‘All this,’ and he put the forest on pause as well, so Carmen could properly appreciate it, or that’s what it seemed he did. The moon had risen, somehow, somewhere, unnoticed, only to be stopped now in its course, so that the forest was motionless and all things natural lost their untidiness, their imperfections, and were sealed into neat and tidy pattern: leaves and branches in a complex black tracery, unshifting, interlaced with silver, bathed in the still moon’s melancholy light. The moon is always melancholy, if you ask me. Very few understand its motions, or care to, other than astronomers or astrologers, and that’s depressing to begin with. Is that a waning or a waxing moon up there? Why is it shining in the dawn sky today, when yesterday you could see it at midnight? Does it matter? Do you care? No. The fact is the moon is all over the place and few of us like it or can be bothered with it. The sun’s uses are at least observable, and what is more you can’t look it in the eye without going blind, so it has your respect, but the moon is both random and useless, like a fragment of torn cartilage in a knee joint, causing trouble. It drags large masses of water after it, or so they say, but who believes that in their hearts? All the moon is fit for is to remind us of our place in the universe; it doesn’t please me to remember how insignificant and short-lived I am. No way. If the moon decides in its whimsical manner to shine in on Landsfield Crescent, I draw the curtains at once. On one occasion Alison got me to the Handicapped Centre so early, in her anxiety to avoid the non-existent traffic jam of the Fenedge rush hour, that the moon was still vast in the dawn sky, and I had to sit in its light, since the County provides no curtains, and, thinking of Carmen, became full of gloomy prognostications as to what would happen to her and hers if she chose to offend Driver.
‘Item,’ said Driver, ‘not only have I already given you many gifts but there are more yet to come. For example,’ he said, ‘if I can stop the moon, I can make a moment last for all eternity. Indeed, I can fast-forward and rewind the world, not just put it on pause. Think what that does for sex.’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Carmen. ‘That is disgusting,’ for Driver either was or wasn’t lunging into her as she leaned against a tree trunk, or else she was sitting ladylike at an ethereal table in a moonlit forest – who could tell? – or was simply sitting in the back of a car, a good girl being driven to a date with a rich man, upset because her parents were leaving home, and was dozing off. Whatever had happened, time had for an instant stopped.
But that’s how it is with demon lovers. It’s all speculation in retrospect and certain uncertainty thereafter – the blood test for the baby never proves anything definite, or, though you use the very latest tissue-typing techniques to prove or disprove paternity, you can be sure the results will get mixed up in the lab, or even just lost – yet they’ll give you a moment of orgasm so piercing it echoes for ever throughout your life. But Carmen had said the wrong thing: denied something she shouldn’t have – the moon recommenced its course through the sky, and the dung beetles busied themselves in the rot, the debris and the detritus of the forest, scuttling here, scuttling there, and now Carmen could see only too well that Driver had stopped in a layby used as a public convenience by the many admirers of the old forest. My grandmother used to tell me that in the eyes of the Maker people are eternity’s dung beetles: their function to scavenge and salvage what is wholesome out of all things disgusting and nasty, but I don’t suppose she knew any better than the next person.
‘Do as I say!’ snapped Driver in a flurry of sparks, as metal feather scraped on metal feather.
‘I’ll do as I please,’ she said.
Be all that as it may, Carmen was not in a good mood when Driver delivered her to the Trocadero, one of the new smartish restaurants recently put up on the outskirts of town, in classic supermarket style – that is to say, having a central roof peak (thatched in this case) and two long low wings on either side, easy to erect, quicker to dismantle. Inside it was all pinks and crimsons, gold mirrors and little shaded lights, to create an effect that was both hygienic and sexy, smart yet intime. It was a favourite place for a rendezvous, for that special occasion, for your son’s twenty-first, for a Golden Wedding, or just to say thank you, according to the ads in the local paper. Wives would have had their hair done for the occasion.
‘Going somewhere special?’ the hair stylist would ask.
‘The Trocadero,’ the client would boast, and out would come the rollers, the tongs, the backcomb. Everyone knew the Trocadero night-to-remember style. How quickly new customs arise! Carmen just thought Sir Bernard was a cheapskate – though later, looking back in a more kindly fashion, she understood he just wanted to be private, not recognised by all and sundry. He stood up as she followed the waiter in. He was not quite as old as she remembered, but almost.
He took her hand in his. It trembled. He drew her to him for an instant. She rolled her eyes to heaven, not caring whether or not he saw. He let her go. They sat down. The napkins were paper, not even linen.
‘Carmen,’ said Sir Bernard, and he smiled his crinkly, bright-eyed, famous smile. ‘Such a lovely name! I’ve become something of an opera-goer myself. Do you love opera?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I was called after Carmen Jones. That’s a musical.’ She had not yet started on her Music & Art Through History, courtesy of Bellamy Airspace.
Carmen bit the heads off langoustines and spat them out. She had no intention of being nice to Sir Bernard. She just wanted dinner. She didn’t see why she couldn’t have the one without the other. She was wearing a T-shirt along with her leather skirt. Unfortunately her breasts were at their most tip-tilted, her nipples at their most prominent, and her hair at its shiniest, and the kind of reddish gold it had recently settled down to being. Her perfect white teeth made a neat clean job of the little cooked creatures’ heads and her lips made a delicate moue as she spat them on to the plate, and Sir Bernard watched entranced and not disgusted. ‘So natural,’ he said. ‘Like the girls I remember when I was a boy. Unspoiled, untamed.’
He talked of love and she talked of Ronnie Cartwright, from which I deduce that her relationship with Driver was indeed purely spiritual, for what was her love for Ronnie but love in the head? Once upon a time his hand had touched her hand, and although that gave great promise of what T. S. Eliot used to call pneumatic bliss (or so my Aunt Nettie told me), that was all.
Sir Bernard talked of concerts and operas, of plays and of having film stars and Nobel Prize winners to dinner, and Carmen said she liked watching television.
He talked of security, of property in her name, of fast cars and furs (furs? He was so old-fashioned!), of her family looked after, of the end of anxiety. She said she wanted to die at thirty. What point in being alive was there after that?
He talked of palazzios and yachts, of holidays abroad, of jet-setting and servants, and she just said, yes, and think of waking up next to you. She was rude, though he still, just about, thought it was charming.
He began to talk about her job at Bellamy Airspace and how her prospects there might improve if she and he were close, and get rather disastrously bad if they were not, and Carmen’s eyes narrowed.
He said now I have tested you and I understand why you are different from other girls. You cannot be bought. You hold yourself dear. You are worth the conquest, worth the prize. Will you marry me, my dear?
At which she rose to her feet and spoke in a very loud voice, so all the women with that day’s hairdos turned their stiff necks, creasing the make-up they had so carefully worked down to neckline level, and their menfolk risked the discomfort of their unaccustomed collar and tie and did the same.
‘Jesus,’ said Carmen, ‘that’s enough of that. My body’s one thing, my life is another. I’m going home.’
‘But what about your flambéed apricots?’ pleaded Sir Bernard, his hand on his love object’s arm, but she shook him off, although the waiter’s face, seen through the brandy flames, which flared and threatened to engulf the Trocadero, looked remarkably like Driver’s own.
‘Feed them to the dogs,’ said Carmen, ‘and marry one of them.’
And she walked out through the smoke and flame. The entire restaurant was evacuated within minutes; refurbishing work took four months, but Carmen had made her point.
The very next day Tim was summoned back to New Zealand by his mother to cope with an outbreak of liver fluke in his twenty thousand-strong flock; and though he and Annie exchanged addresses and promised to write and phone she knew it was too soon for him to leave – one week more and he’d have asked her to go with him. As it was, she was afraid he would forget her. They hadn’t been to bed together. He had wanted to. She had demurred, thinking there was lots of time. And New Zealand was so far away – as far as you can go.
Audrey had a relapse and had to go back to hospital, Baby Rachel got a sticky eye infection and Laura found she was pregnant again and had German measles, and went right off Woodie. And they’d forgotten that the aunt’s legacy would be taxed.
As for Carmen, she got a redundancy notice through the post within the week, and had spent one week under the length of time in continual employment which would have earned her cash compensation. That was the day after she’d waved Raelene and Andy off on their Round-the-World-Cruise. They’d only put the house on the market to keep the bank quiet – but they’d left unpaid debts behind them to the value of the property – in the confident expectation that it wouldn’t sell. But a buyer turned up at once, and the bank threatened to foreclose if the sale didn’t go through.
‘Bad luck,’ said Mr Prior to Carmen. He remembered her as stunning, but this girl was nothing special. He offered her a job at Peckhams Poultry, and she took it. He was rather sorry about it, all the same.