Now it seemed to me that the tides of fortune were in a state of flux, the waters churning and foaming as you can see them do if you take a boat a little way out from shore at just the wrong moment: what a swirling and turmoil there is as the waters going in meet the ones still determined to recede! You have to cling on for dear life.
It was not a good omen for me that the coffin bearers laid down their burden and took me up instead. Wouldn’t it have disconcerted you? Wouldn’t you, in Laura’s phrase, have been spooked?
It was not a good moment for Kim to appear, not good news that he brought: that young Woodie Down and his family had no right, other than custom and practice, to live in Landsfield Crescent. And Poison Poppy was bad news pure and simple.
And yet you can never say, can you, that a pregnancy is bad news, either Poppy’s or Laura’s. Badly timed, disastrous, inconvenient – misconceived, in fact – and adding to both the world’s and the personal burden, as it may well do, still a pregnancy remains good news. You have to cheer the little blighter on, as it digs its teeth in and clings: Well done, you have to say, and mostly feel, to have overcome the million-to-one chance against making it even this far: good on you, mate! Well done! Poppy smirked and Laura tore her hair and waited, seeing that the quality of life she had achieved for Rachel, Caroline and Sara was now in jeopardy, forget Woodie’s and her own. Four? How would she cope? It is of course a generally accepted rule that the simpler organism must be sacrificed to the pleasure and needs of the more complex. How easily Carmen swallowed her oyster, dislodging its little towbar; how easily the rest of us eat a tuna sandwich; with what equanimity do the rich and powerful not live upon the toil of the poor and powerless. Is the horse not shot to save its owner trouble? How blithely an opera house accepts the tax money of those who love pop: for must not the cultured, the sensitive, the responsive take precedence over the philistine? Even a male medical profession accepts, more or less, that the mental health of the mother comes before the life of a foetus (though why this is not extended to fathers too, I cannot imagine, if there is to be any parity of parenting at all).
In the light of all this, if, when Laura said, ‘I’m pregnant,’ Woodie replied, ‘My God, Laura, you can’t be. You have to get rid of it or I quit,’ he must surely be forgiven, though it was a long time before Laura did. Forget the foetus, what about Woodie?
One way or another, considering the pattern of the times, I was not surprised to see, on my way home from the funeral, Carmen and Driver standing outside the greengrocer’s in animated argument. Alison was so surprised she drove into a bollard outside the Post Office, and as I did not have my seat belt on I went headfirst into the windscreen and woke up in the local hospital. It was as well I did because when they X-rayed me for possible concussion they picked up the shadow of a brain tumour: I was flown back forthwith to Chicago, where no one exactly said that neural fibre was regenerating okay but in the wrong place, though I think that was what was happening. They removed the tumour, and I suspect reimplanted some of it in my lower spine because, when I woke after an eight-hour operation, I was on my face and well bandaged across the lower back. I’d asked them just to get on with it all. I no longer wished to be a well-informed patient. I preferred for the time being just to be a martyr to medical science. But this is not my story. I am sorry if it keeps intruding. Let me just say they flew Alison over with me ‘to hold my hand’ − Good God! Energetic old ladies are adored by everyone, it seems. I was, as it happened, glad enough to have her with me, but they weren’t to know that. She is, I suppose, a mother to me, a source of both pleasure and woe: good deeds and bad. She is someone I can blame.
Carmen came to visit me in the Kings Lynn hospital, between the diagnosis of the brain tumour and my transfer to Chicago. I was feeling perfectly well: the tumour, just above the hypothalamus, was causing very little trouble. I asked them to redo the X-rays in case there was some mistake, and they did, but it was no mistake: there it sat in the cerebral cortex – a little knot of neural fibre the size of a marble.
‘Hattie,’ said Carmen, ‘I want to ask you about the soul. Do people have souls?’
Now why does she come and ask me about such a thing? Don’t I have troubles enough of my own? Can’t she see I’m ill? She has a rather foxy look today – her face thinner than usual, the eyes almond-shaped, so large they seem almost wraparound: yet clearly it’s Carmen.
‘I know nothing more than you,’ I said. ‘It’s a word, a concept which sums up a person’s individuality. The bit of them you think would go on after death if there were such a thing as immortality.’
‘Could you lose it, do you think?’
‘How would I know?’ I was beginning to get a headache. It didn’t seem possible that the marble could sit where it was and do no harm at all. ‘I suppose you might very well wear it out during your lifetime. Use it up with bad deeds and selfishness, and then, when the time came, you’d just die.’
‘If somebody offered to buy it, then the only penalty would be blanking out at the end of your life, not hell or anything like that?’ I didn’t think it could be Carmen sitting there. I thought it was probably a nurse after all.
‘But why would anyone want to buy it?’ I asked.
‘Because I am the love of Sir Bernard Bellamy’s life,’ said Carmen, ‘and he’s the one who’s sold his soul to the Devil, and he’s demanding me as his reward. But I don’t fancy him one bit and, fortunately, apparently I can’t be offered without my consent. And if I’d lost my soul I would easily give that consent. As it is, I won’t, no matter what the stick and what the carrot.’
‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Just take advantage of the carrot, while it lasts.’ I noticed that ‘By Courtesy of Sir Bernard Bellamy’ was engraved on the TV set in the corner, and I assumed my mind was rambling.
‘How’s work?’ I asked, always a safe thing to ask.
‘That’s going really well,’ said Carmen or whoever. ‘I’ve been promoted. I’m Staff Rep. on the Board. Peckhams are moving out of oven birds into egg production.’
‘It comes to the same thing in the end,’ I said. ‘You eat them after they’ve grown or before they’ve grown, what’s the difference?’ and with that wet-blanketing remark I lost consciousness.
I do remember Mavis coming to me waving a card – the official announcement of Annie and Tim’s engagement. When the nurse was out of the room she moved my pillows and made me sit up (they like me to lie as flat as possible) while she laid hands on me: thumbs on my temples; little fingers round towards the stem of my neck. She had little white podgy fingers. All Mavis was on the little podgy white side – except for her bright blue pop eyes. She was really pleased about Annie’s engagement.
‘Those girls,’ said Mavis, ‘those friends of Annie’s. The airs and graces they put on. They never thought Annie would be the one to get out into the big time, but I always knew her day would come. That job up at Bellamy House − she was only marking time.’
I felt the familiar tingle; on this occasion it was in my forehead. I hoped she was doing no harm. I busied myself envisaging Tim and Annie: they were on horseback again; they were surrounded by the tens of thousands of sheep; they rose out of a floor of moving, matted, whitish wool.
‘But you promised me you liked sheep,’ Tim was complaining.
‘I do, I do,’ protested Annie. ‘But so many of them! I can take them two at a time, even a dozen at a time, but by the thousand, Tim? And everyone of them alive with God knows what kind of ticks and maggots and worms, judging from the conversation over dinner.’
‘It’s so they don’t get eaten alive,’ said Tim rather crossly, ‘we have the conversations. I expect along with not liking sheep you like rabbits.’
‘Well, yes, I do,’ said Annie apologetically. There should be nothing but truth, after all, between an affianced couple. He pointed out that the rabbits were letting the lifeblood of New Zealand; that ever since Watership Down the public had gone soft on rabbits: these days you had to put down the myxomatosis bug almost in secret.
‘I should think so,’ said Annie. ‘It’s disgusting. They sit by the side of the road oozing pus, half paralysed, half blind.’
‘That’s because they haven’t had a big enough dose,’ said Tim, and laughed, and she thought he was winding her up, but she couldn’t be sure. She knew, because she’d been told so often, that the rabbit and the Labour Government were his family’s historical enemies. The Labour Government had taken away farming subsidies, just at the time the European market had squeezed out its customary antipodean imports, so New Zealand had to sell to Iran and become even more unpopular with the US than ever (the nation had declared itself a non-nuclear zone and backed out of the ANZUS pact) until, fortunately, the Gulf War had rendered Iran a friendly power, it being Iraq’s enemy – my enemy’s enemy being my friend – and now New Zealand was okay again in the family of nations, that is to say, the US, and Anchor butter and Canterbury lamb became the staple diet once again of the British. All this Annie now knew and understood, but still she did not like sheep.
She understood, too, that she’d better keep quiet about Tim having met her laying stair carpet. No one said anything, but she knew if she gave an impression of having come from a County vicarage with bicycles in the hall and dogs sleeping on the smooth lawn, it would go down better with the families thereabouts. There was going to be a helipad built for the wedding, which was to be a big, formal, marquee affair. Annie, it had been decided, was to wear the McLean wedding dress. This had been made in England in 1851, at great expense, for a certain Annie Hardcaster, who was to marry the first Tim McLean in Otago, and shipped out for the wedding. The cost of its making and its shipping had been borne by the McLeans. But the ship carrying the dress had foundered in the South Seas with the loss of many lives. The cargo, however, had been washed up on the islands, some of it still undamaged, and amongst the goods salvaged was the wedding dress. It had reached its destination two years late, by which time the first Annie had died in childbirth, but the dress was in remarkably good condition. It had been worn thereafter by all the McLean brides, or such of them as could get into it. Unfortunately the first Annie McLean, during her short life, though apparently a big strapping girl for her times, came out these days as a size 8–10. The dress was in cream silk, crinoline style and very fancy. They thought it would do just fine for Annie, who had got quite thin.
‘Isn’t it rather yellow by now?’ Annie had asked, but Mrs McLean said no problem: she’d soak it in lemon juice and water and hang it in the sun a little and she’d be apples. And she’d weave Annie a little yellow lace wool jacket − the wool dyed with the yellow liquid that came from boiling up the brown flat pancake lichen that grew on the rocks thereabouts, and then home spun into yarn. The yellow jacket would make the dress seem white by contrast. Annie said she didn’t mind buying her own wedding dress, but Mrs McLean said it was a pity not to get the value of the family heirloom.
‘So when is the wedding to be?’ I asked Mavis. I thought I was feeling better, though I quite wanted to lay my head flat. Mavis said it was only an engagement announcement: Annie had said on the phone, laughing, the wedding itself was going to be a big do somewhere between dagging and docking, drenching and dipping, and as soon as she knew she’d send their tickets. And she’d love to send their air fares to Carmen and Laura, but she didn’t like to ask Tim. It was true the McLeans were building a helipad, but there was no money to waste. And I could hear Tim’s voice, the voice of the farmer everywhere, for ever at the mercy of the weather, of the seasons, of the Government, facing the ingratitude of the people (those who grow the food are always disliked by those who eat the food: no one likes to be dependent, and everyone feels the necessities of life should come free), saying to Annie exactly that as the sheep milled around them, their little black eyes gleaming and mutinous –
‘I can’t be expected to ship everyone halfway across the world, Annie. Your parents are one thing, but your friends? Come off it, Annie.’ For what new husband in the world wants to encourage the girlfriends, any more than a new wife likes the friends of the old bachelor days? It’s the same from Anchorage to Antarctica.
Sister came in and shouted at Mavis because I was sitting up, and my headache came back.
Next to visit me, before Sister banned all visitors, was, of course, Poppy. She had such a pretty, vicious, sulky, sexy, endearing little face, I could see why Kim fancied her and women disliked her. (Being in a wheelchair renders one genderless: I hoped I could be neutral in this matter.) She brought black grapes and ate them nearly all every one, and I was glad when she did, because at least when she opened her mouth to pop one in, with her slightly dirty fingers, it stopped her talking. How she talked! She wanted something from me, of course she did. Amazingly, she wanted my approval: me, lying there betwixt concussion and tumour.
First she complained about Kim. He never made any decisions. It was all left to her. He had seduced her when he was in a position of trust and she was only sixteen, which surely proved he was bad through and through; he’d made her pregnant and broken her relationship with her parents, and stolen her childhood from her. If anyone was guilty of child abuse, said Poppy, it was Kim. Then, what’s more, he had lost his job and couldn’t support her properly, and kept moaning on about having had to leave his stupid wife and boring daughter, as if it were her fault. She had turned out to be undergoing a phantom pregnancy, which was hardly surprising, considering the time she was having, and he blamed her more than ever. There was no satisfying him. By that time it was too late for her to go back to school or him to his wife, so here she was, tied to an old man, an ageing hippy, with grey beard and toes so horny they hurt her in bed, and he didn’t wash enough.
I asked her why in this case she was still with Kim and she looked surprised and said after what he’d done to her it was the least he could do to look after her and support her, no matter what. I’ve met many women, especially those from working-class backgrounds, who complain bitterly about their husbands from the day they meet them, forget the day they marry them, as a matter of form, and it has nothing at all to do with whether or not they love them, and I supposed Poppy to be one of these. A young doctor came by, looking for a thermometer, and Poppy kind of curled and unfolded towards him in her yellow dress and smiled in a totally welcoming way and when he’d gone said, ‘Did you see the way he looked at me? The randy pig!’ and went on talking, and I thought perhaps she was something more malevolent after all than the mere product of an environment. And the girls were right to call her Poison Poppy. She’d have lost him his job too if she could have.
She complained that Kim had ruined her life by talking of true love and destiny and that all she’d ended up with was a shabby old car and a little hovel in Kings Lynn, with a man with bad breath who edited guidebooks for a pittance and who had no friends because he was a first-class shit and didn’t deserve any. And now – here seemed to be the crux – Kim didn’t even have the nerve to face his own daughter and reclaim the house which was rightfully hers, Poppy’s, because wasn’t she having his baby, and had I any idea what those houses were going to be worth, because of the new bypass and commercial centre Bellamys were about to build, now they had planning permission from the regional board? She happened to know, being a good friend of one of the planners, but I wasn’t to mention that to a soul. Three curses on my soul if I mentioned it.
Her eyes flashed when she said that. I felt quite endangered: as if I belonged to a species which would be extinct if Poppy had her way.
‘He’s still not going to marry me,’ said Poison Poppy. ‘Even though his wife’s dead. He says it’s because he doesn’t want to upset his precious daughter; now how can that be true? If he loved her so much why did he leave home? He says her problems are his fault. What problems? She’s got a husband, her kids, and she’s living in my house. I’m the one with the problems.’
It was time for my water. I was allowed water but no food, which was why Poppy was welcome to my grapes, and when Sister came in with my measured six ounces, she moved my visitor on. So Poppy left, still complaining, and looking devastatingly pretty. The marble in my brain, under the impact of her curse − because I most certainly intended to let everyone know Landsfield Crescent was to be central to a major land development scheme − or because Mavis had sat me up, shifted a little that night and I was in and out of consciousness and moved very quickly to Chicago.