Trouble (24 page)
‘You’re still not really better. You said you’d lost two stone. That’s a worry. You must be almost not there.’
‘I can’t think why. We live on chops, potatoes, and lardy cake.’
‘How horrible.’
‘It helps break the pattern.’
‘You’re not on drugs, Annette?’
‘I’m addicted to Spicer, that’s why Henry and Buttercup tied me to the mast. I am hooked on my own punishment.’
‘Punishment for what, Annette?’
‘For being a victim. Blame the sinned-against for the sin, blame the victim for the crime. See how Spicer blames me! Dear Spicer, please forgive me for the hurt you have done me. Dear Spicer, forgive me for the death of the baby you killed. Spicer, cruel master, let me lick your boots, let me fawn upon you; take me back; if I can’t have your kindness, let me have your cruelty.’
‘Annette, that is disgusting.’
‘I know. I am entropied, degraded. Did my father really believe I aborted the baby? Went off with a lover? Or was that just what my mother said he believed?’
‘Your mother said it.’
‘Then we can discountenance it. She has never forgiven him for his affairs. Neither have I. If he wanted anyone but her, why didn’t he have me? Did you speak to the children?’
‘No.’
‘Please do. Tell them to hang on in there. Say I’ll be in touch very shortly.’
‘Okay. You are getting better, Annette. I can hear it in your voice. How’s the pit?’
‘The shit and the mud seem to be drying up. It would make good fertiliser. But I still can’t find the path out. Any number of false starts, but you keep slipping back and you know Spicer’s roaming up there anyway. Shall I tell you how I got to be in here?’
‘Yes please, Annette.’
‘Well. I got out of hospital and went home and found the photograph of the Doctors Marks and Spicer naked and doing God knows what to each other, in the name of therapy no doubt, and got thrown out. I had the evidence of my own eyes but it still wasn’t good enough. I started walking north. I don’t know why, except the further north you get in this hemisphere the colder it gets, so it seemed a fitting direction. All kinds of people stopped to offer lifts, so I accepted them. Why not? None of them were going far, that was the problem. A woman gave me her jumper, a man gave me sandwiches. Two young people tried to take me to a doctor. I suppose I looked very strange. I shivered a lot. I got as far as the big service station at Watford, where I took the initiative and started hitching. I probably should have just let what happened, happen. A lorry driver picked me up. He was young and goodlooking and had tattoos on his arm. They were brown and bare and muscly. It was kind of domestic in the cab. A rug on the seat; some artificial flowers in a silver vase he’d won in a raffle; a photograph of his mother’s cat stuck in the rearview mirror. He said he’d take me as far as I wanted if I’d have sex with him once every fifty miles, that was his fee for lady hitchhikers. I said yes, okay.’
‘Annette!’
‘Well, why not? He was very warm and soft to the touch. I can’t explain it. Spicer was always so contained and somehow chilly, even in performance. Straight trade seemed better to me. We got fifty miles and stopped in a layby, and another fifty, and another and another, and then he wanted to again after only another five miles, and I said that wasn’t in the deal and began to get angry. Why had he been so precise if he was going to do this? It was dark by then. He left the main road and went off into the countryside, bump, bump along tiny roads, in a temper, and I got frightened, which was stupid because what could he do which he hadn’t done already—but I was passionate in defence of the deal. It is the only way I can describe it. It seemed a matter of life and death to me that he should stick to the bargain and to him that the sex should be more than the bargain.’
‘What a disgusting person,’ said Gilda.
‘No, Gilda, you don’t understand. He wanted me to love him, not just to use him, and he was disappointed.’
‘You are out of your mind. Well, what’s new?’ said Gilda bitterly. ‘There’s such a wonderful smell of rosemary up here. I can see for miles and miles, through the squares of glass in this telephone box. The sky’s like the kind of colour wash they make children do in Rudolph Steiner schools, but latticed. Water colours on wet paper. Susan went to a Steiner school once, till she got so bored I took her out. “Rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savour all the winter long:” That’s just after Exit Pursued By Bear in
The Winter’s Tale.
Jason was in that. He was very good. Even Spicer said so.’
‘English oil of rosemary is infinitely superior to the stuff you get from France or Spain,’ said Gilda, ‘because of the colder climate, but we never bother to produce it here. Quite a marketing problem for the EC. You worked on a programme with me, Annette. Don’t you remember?’
‘Just about. But it isn’t the green-leaved rosemary that grows round here, the stuff you use to get the oil, it’s the silver and gold kind, with little blue flowers, that just grows. Anne of Cleves wore a wreath of it at her wedding. Was she one of the wives who was beheaded or one of the ones who survived?’
‘I’d have to look it up, Annette.’
‘Don’t bother. Anyway, here we were, this truck driver and I, fighting, and he just opened the cab door and pushed me out, all the way down to the ground, and I rolled into this muddy ditch. It was raining. He got out and looked at me down in my ditch and said I was lucky he hadn’t raped me and strangled me, and drove off. I didn’t think I was particularly lucky; I daresay that was what I’d wanted. So there I was in this ditch, exhausted and without my knickers, which can chill you down a lot, and it was raining, and my neck was hurting and bleeding. I found later there was this great cut in it. I had to have a tetanus jab. He shouldn’t have left me there, should he? Do you think he was worse than Spicer, or better?’
‘Annette,’ said Gilda, ‘truck drivers are expected to be brutes. Terrible things happen to girls on the road. That’s why good girls don’t hitch. But Spicer is meant to be civilised, and you are his wife. Spicer is worse than the truck drivers.’
‘But I might have been fighting him in some way I didn’t understand and he did, so what he did was reasonable?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you, Gilda. And I don’t suppose they’re exactly in competition for worst place, anyway. One must just be grateful for not being raped or murdered, physically or spiritually. I’ll have to go soon. There’s someone wanting to use this phone box. How extraordinary! It’s so isolated up here. Moors to the right of you, moors to the left of you, just this footpath and this phone box in the middle of nowhere, and the smell of rosemary. I couldn’t resist calling you. I hope you don’t mind me reversing the charges. I thought we could talk for ever. And now there’s someone else here. Another person. A man. He doesn’t seem threatening. I can go on a little, I guess. I’ll turn my head and pretend I haven’t seen him. Where was I? Another photograph. In the paper the other day. An old atrocity picture, dating back to the forties. The newspaper reprinted it, with apologies to their readers’ sensitivities, in an attempt to explain contemporary times in Yugoslavia. You don’t want to look, you have to. This photograph was of a young man, alive and well and handsome, except he is being held down by three other young men, looking perfectly cheerful, and a fourth is sawing through his neck with an ordinary wood saw. He’s trying to keep his head in its proper position and there’s a look of total surprise on his face—he’s taken aback—’
‘Please don’t, Annette—’
‘I only mention it because Henry and Buttercup observed that people get so civilised they don’t dare do that kind of thing to you physically, they’ll do it to you mentally. We’re all Serbs and Croats and Bosnians at heart. Spicer’s been sawing through the inside of my head, not the outside, that’s all. People like to do to each other the most gruesome thing they can possibly think of. Sawing people’s heads off is quite funny, in its way. Separating the conscious, aware part from the automatically twitching part. There! That’s the way to do it, that’s final, that’s the end of disappointment. Do you a good turn. Spicer hurts me. I twitch. Get to the spinal column, and he can put a stop to all that and feel good again. Only Spicer didn’t quite manage. I’d laid my head on the block but I got it out in time. Hardly his fault at all. My neck’s healed. Are you crying?’
‘Yes. I thought you were out of the pit. You’re not.’
‘You don’t have to get out of it, Gilda. There isn’t any route out. You just clean it up a bit, grow a few flowers and ask everyone in. Gilda, he’s tapping on the glass, he’s getting really angry. I have to go. Oh dear God, it’s Ernie. What is Ernie Gromback doing out there in a suit and tie and shiny shoes? He looks absurd.’
‘Ernie,’ said Annette, six months later. They were picking up the children from school.
‘What is it, my dear?’ said Ernie.
‘Shall we just drive down Bella Crescent, past the house?’
‘Are you sure you want to?’ asked Ernie.
‘Yes, please,’ said Annette. ‘Tell you what, I’ll shut my eyes till we’re there, then I’ll open them for a second, take in what I see, close them again, and you drive like hell out of there.’
‘We don’t want to be late for Susan and Jason,’ said Ernie. ‘We don’t have much time to spare.’
‘You just don’t want me to see Spicer again in case I fancy him,’ said Annette. ‘Fall back under his spell.’
‘You are so right,’ said Ernie Gromback.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Annette. ‘It was in another country, and the Spicer I knew is dead. A simulacrum walks around in his place. How can you love a simulacrum?’
‘A pity about the property though,’ said Ernie. ‘To be cheated out of it like that.’
‘Never mind,’ said Annette, ‘I could put it all into a novel.’
‘Nobody would believe it,’ said Ernie. ‘Don’t even think of it.’
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Annette. ‘Let’s go straight to the school. I don’t want to drive down Bella Crescent, after all. I know what I would see. The house in a kind of seedy disrepair; its porch somehow shrunk in stature; the steps crumbling; two plates outside the door, with a fresh set of bogus initials on them. Spicer looking out of a top window: a kind of poodle for their pleasure, and Marion too perhaps. The windows will be foggy from a haze of incense, marijuana and the quality of the minds within. There will be a trail of trusting people to the door, looking for someone to believe in, anyone: so what if families split, and in the name of love and peace, malice abounds. You wouldn’t want to see that, and neither would I. It might put my blood-pressure up, and that would be bad for our baby. I reckon we’d better forswear the experience, keep what belongs to the past in the past.’
‘I reckon so too,’ said Ernie Gromback, and turned the car, and they went to pick up the children.
‘Ernie,’ said Annette, as they parked the car outside the school gates. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘Anything,’ said Ernie.
‘Take a look at the photograph.’
‘What, again?’
‘Please,’ said Annette. ‘Do you see a bust of Karl Marx in it?’
‘No,’ said Ernie. ‘I don’t.’
‘That’s okay then,’ said Annette.
‘Put it away in case the children see it,’ said Ernie. ‘Let’s try for a little respectability round here. Thank God it’s a polaroid, and already fading.’
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel,
The Fat Woman’s Joke
, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series
Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil
, the film adaption of her 1983 novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Released in the USA under the title
Trouble
Copyright © 1993 by Fay Weldon
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4804-1262-0
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
