Wicked Women (21 page)

February, and there were only four thousand pounds left of Philly’s legacy. Basil needed better frames for his paintings than his gallery was prepared to provide: anything looks better, sells better, if surrounded by real gold leaf: that had been Olive’s one trick, Basil had said, unfairly used. Nothing to do with talent. Then the roof had to be re-tiled. Rain had leaked down from the ceilings, corrugating the studio walls with lines of damp. The studio was where Basil and Philly slept, in the large brass bed which was there when Philly moved in. They slept surrounded by canvas, rags, easels, paints, brushes: his hand companionable on her thigh. The famous hand: how she loved it! Completed paintings were stacked against the walls. These days Basil painted, to the despair of his gallery, only swirls of grey and black: gold leaf helped, but not enough. Philly could get quite depressed, looking at the swirls. The smell of paint and turps lingered in the studio all night through, although tubes and jars were closed, sealed; she once tried wrapping them in plastic to stop the fumes, but it didn’t help. Sometimes they made her feel quite sick. It was as if morning sickness, which she had not suffered from in early pregnancy, had stored itself up till now, when she had just a few weeks to go.

Basil’s baby! Oh, she was lucky. So was he; he said so, lucky second time round. He’d always wanted a baby: someone to inherit the family’s genes. A pity he had to be away so often now, in Edinburgh, commissioned to paint a mural on a town hall wall. But times were hard: an artist did what he could. If he had to be a man of the people, so he would be. Philly would be okay, polishing and scouring away. When he called on the phone, its ring sounded oddly echoey: his voice would babble, as if he were under water.

Eight and a half months pregnant and who should turn up for tea one day, while Basil was away, but someone who announced herself as Ruthy Franklyn, an old friend of Basil’s. Ruthy just stood on the doorstep, a total stranger, and asked herself in for tea. She was fortyish, smart, small, thin and lively and made Philly feel bulky, stupid and slow. Ruthy wore a silk turban in green and had a yellowy chiffon scarf at her wiry neck. Ruthy owned a small gallery. She’d come to collect an early painting of Basil’s for a show she was mounting. She looked a little death’s headish to Philly, as if the Reaper had come calling. Ruthy drank Earl Grey and took lemon: always a problem to provide. You had to use a teapot, not teabags, and slice the lemon thinly, and serve the whole thing properly.

“Nice rock cakes,” said Ruthy, “if on the crispy side.”

“It’s one of those ovens,” said Philly, “you can never quite get to understand. Always leaping out of control.”

“Serena never had any trouble with it,” said Ruthy. Philly had not quite realised the oven had once been Serena’s. Presumably Serena had slept in the brass bed with Basil. Philly cooked in Serena’s kitchen: slept in Serena’s bed: Philly replaced Serena. Ruthy had slept in the brass bed with Basil too, by all accounts.

“Did you use Serena’s recipe?” asked Ruthy, yellowy teeth scraping away at the hard little cake, which seemed the best Philly could contrive. “She was hopeless at housework but always a wonderful cook. Just generally creative, I suppose.”

“I’m not a very creative person,” said Philly. “But I wish I could make the house look better.”

“It looks perfect to me,” said Ruthy Franklyn, surprised. “You must make Basil very happy. All this and pregnant too! The famous genes will survive. Serena only ever miscarried. Four times in five years. Basil thought she somehow did it on purpose to annoy, but he would, wouldn’t he? Basil likes a woman to be a woman: simple and sweet and fertile; up to her elbows in soap suds. That’s why he likes you so much, no doubt.” And Ruthy laughed. Why does she dislike me so much? wondered Philly. What went on? Ruthy in Basil’s bed while Serena, out in the rain, banged and pummelled at the back door, stuck forever, swelled in the damp.

White snow hit against the portholes and turned bitter black. It was a storm at sea: foam and black water. How could you tell earth from sea, plant from person? Even the baby seemed to be tossing inside her.

“Do you see much of Basil?” asked Philly. “I know you did in the past, but now?”

“From time to time,” said Ruthy. “But only when he wants something. Right now he wants me to sell an early painting, and his current gallery not to know. Don’t take any of it seriously. I don’t any more. It’s you and the baby he wants,” and Ruthy Franklyn laughed. She went up to the studio, and took the painting she wanted. It was a nude: one of Basil’s very early works: face to the wall for years, its plain wooden frame blackened by smoke. “Since he started swirling the greys and the blacks,” said Ruthy as she left, “he’s hardly sold a thing. Sometimes I think it’s Serena’s curse. I get myself checked over pretty carefully for cancer, I can tell you that. Serena might have been mad but she had a strong personality. She loved Basil. A pity he didn’t love her. But then, he probably can’t love anybody. Not really.” And she looked at Philly with the drop-dead look women sometimes do give pregnant women. You have what I don’t. Die, then!

Ruthy left before the blizzard got worse. Philly felt, and was, alone in the world, and the washing machine, on its fast spin, tipped itself forward on to a loose tile which vibrated and made an echoing sound, worse than the phone, worse than anything she’d ever known, right inside Philly’s head. She thought she’d go deaf. Presently it faded and she could think again. She called Basil at his hotel in Edinburgh but they said there was no guest checked in under that name, and she didn’t have the strength or the will to argue. The walls of the room closed in to encircle her, ridged and streaked; ash filled her nostrils. It was an old tin dustbin she was in, she realised, not the black plastic one she’d somehow envisaged: she was head down in a bin half-filled with water, and what Serena saw, Philly saw, and always would. What Serena heard,
clang, clang,
so would Philly, forever. As for the first wife, so for her successors.

Philly took a couple of packets of firelighters up to the studio, placed them under the brass bed and fired them. The white valance caught; the mattress smouldered and flared; the turpentine went up satisfactorily: so did the paints. The wooden stretchers of a hundred canvases flickered merrily: the canvas itself puckered, blackened, shrivelled to nothing. Gold leaf, Philly discovered, burns in a series of little spurting explosions. When there seemed no possibility of bed or paintings surviving, Philly went downstairs; the fire came with her. Concrete would not burn; the house itself would survive. Philly watched while streaks of fire raced over the tiled floor, feeding themselves on layer after layer of polish: generations’ worth, as woman after woman had tried to erase the gritty, salty patches of grief and anger that past and future met to create.

“Okay, Serena?” she said, leaving by the kitchen door, the one which led out into the alley, and which today opened perfectly easily: the alley where the old tin dustbins stood and the homeless lingered, and the lager louts peed, and Serena had howled and screamed, day after day, night after night, while Basil and Ruthy waited for her to just go away. “Okay now?” she asked.

C
ARRIE CRIED HERSELF TO
sleep, and her grandmother appeared to her in a dream and spoke to her. At least Carrie supposed it to be her grandmother. The apparition, or phantom, or whatever it was, who spoke so lucidly, materialised as a pretty but elderly flat-chested woman with short, brown, carefully waved hair, who wore a straight grey soft dress, which came down to mid-calf level, rather thick stockings, and low-cut shoes with little heels and a strap across the top of the foot.

Carrie worked in the BBC’s Costume Design department and, professional even in her sleep, placed the dress as being late nineteen twenties or possibly early thirties. Carrie estimated her grandmother’s age at around sixty but trying for fifty; an age, at any rate, that predated Carrie’s life on earth.

Her grandmother had died at the age of eighty-two, when Carrie was eleven; and Carrie’s mother, Kate, had not allowed the child to go to the funeral. Carrie remembered being much put out. She liked to be where the action was, just as much as her mother seemed always to like her not to be. Trouble at home was one of the reasons why now, at twenty-six, and five months pregnant, Carrie cried herself to sleep. Carrie’s mother, too, was as good as dead; that is to say Kate had scarcely a word to say to her now that Carrie had gone out and married Clive. Kate threw up her hands in horror and just left her alone to get on with her husband and her pregnancy, and Carrie, to her own surprise, felt the loss. She was the first of her friends to have a baby, and who was there to talk about it with, who knew anything about the subject whatsoever? Carrie, on a good day, was glad about the baby, and on a bad day was scared stiff, and the good days were further in between, and from time to time she could only deduce that she had done the wrong thing. She should never have married Clive, who was not lying in the bed beside her as he ought to be; she should never have gotten pregnant. Now Carrie wept, and slept, and dreamed.

“Cut out the crying and the carrying on,” said Carrie’s grandmother, Christabel, or whoever it was. “It’s bad for the baby, and it’s pointless: there’s no grown-up around to hear you and make things better. Worse, you’re one of the grown-ups yourself, not even a child any more. You weep, but now there’s no one to hear, so you weep and weep and weep some more. “When your mother, Kate, made me a grandmother by having you, I can tell you, I wept and wept and wept some more, because the transition of the generations is never properly or finally made. But I was careful not to let David, Kate’s father, your grandfather, know that I was crying, or why, because some things, even in a good sound marriage, are better kept private. Your generation does too much sharing. To share grief is to double grief, not halve it; each spouse likes to believe in the other’s strength, wants the other to stay the grown-up for the moments when he, she, becomes the weeping child again. Childish burdens are to be borne alone, not shared with a husband who himself is worrying because when he combed his hair that morning there was more hair left on his comb than on his head, and that, too, is the beginning of the end for him. And because the fear of growing old masks the real fear, the fear of death, which is as strong and inevitable as death, it is to be faced, not diminished by sharing, washed away by weeping. But you—you cried so long and hard, you forced me out of my grave to rise and speak to you myself. Dead as I am, I reckon I’m still kinder and more responsible than your mother ever is alive.

“Stop crying, Carrie. It’s bad for the baby, which means it’s bad for you, which is why I mention it. If you cry now, out of distrust of the future, regret for the past and fear of death, the baby will be in the habit of crying when it comes out and will give you hell and sleepless nights. I’m thinking of you, not so much of the baby—for there’s another thing you resent: the way people now focus on the bright energy of new life inside you, as if you, the soft surrounding shell, were of no significance at all—that’s the other reason you cry yourself to sleep.”

“You talk very fancy for a ghost,” said Carrie. “Are you just a projection of me telling me about myself, putting into words things I do vaguely feel, or are you
really
my grandmother?”

“Carrie!” said her grandmother. “A terrible name.”

“I never liked it myself,” said Carrie.

She sat up abruptly in bed and the apparition, instead of vanishing, as Carrie had rather hoped it would, sat down in the wicker chair as if to keep things in balance.

“I tried to get the better of the name she christened me,” complained Carrie. “I know what she had in mind for me: she wanted a sporty, woolly-hat sort of daughter with no soul. But I refused to do sports, and I went to Art School and passed my exams and I got my career going, and now I’m having a baby, and I don’t see how we’re going to manage and I’m not sure I want to manage. I can’t give up work. I’m not sure I want to give up work. And we need my salary. You hear such terrible things these days about child care: baby-sitters turn out to be murderers. I have married a man fourteen years older than me with two teenage children, and he says, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll do the baby-sitting,’ but he must be joking. Those kids really hate me.”

“Men are given to wishful thinking, it’s true,” said Carrie’s grandmother. “Not just about baby-sitters but about everything. Your grandfather believed our troubles would be solved when his uncle died and left him his fortune, but his uncle lived to be one hundred and one, and then taxes took it all anyway. But I believed with him, though two minutes’ thought would have told me the prospect of sudden riches was highly unlikely. We had a good strong marriage.”

“And what about all the men I’m never going to meet?” asked Carrie. “I’ve settled too early and too young and how am I going to get out of it?”

The vision quavered and wavered, but it was only the tears in Carrie’s eyes that were doing it.

“I cried a lot, like you, in spite of the good strong marriage,” said Christabel. “And, like you, I always wondered if I had done the right thing, and all my life I waited for the man I really loved to come along. But of course he was there in the bed already. There is no perfect love, there is no perfect man; there is only what you have, there in the bed.”

“There isn’t one in the bed,” observed Carrie, somewhat acidly.

“That’s one of the main reasons I’m in this state now. Clive went to a party. I didn’t feel like going. How could I go? I’ve nothing to wear because my waist is gone. He said he had to go because it was work, not pleasure, so he’d be home before midnight, but now it’s two o’clock and he isn’t home, and I just stayed behind and baby-sat those two monsters created by his first wife, and they made me play Monopoly and fetch the Cokes because I was nearest the kitchen, and who is he with? Where is he? I have married a forty-year-old alcoholic—I don’t care how he denies it—and got myself pregnant, and I wish I were dead. How can the absence of someone you hate so much hurt so much?”