The President’s Child. Fay Weldon
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of her welcome, never went home to Australia. Sometimes she wondered, had Jason been a girl, whether Harriet would not have taken more interest in her grandchild.
‘Don’t worry,’ Homer would say. ‘We’ve made London our home, so let it be. We’ll build our dynasty downwards; we’ll forget what has gone before. Our past lies in our genes – that should be more than enough.’
Jason, the child of the continents, played happily in Wincaster Row, and wanted no other life.
Jason’s birthday – upstairs, Jason woke and yelled his greeting to the world. It was not his custom to meet the day with quiet murmurs or gentle moans, as did to all accounts the children of Homer and Isabel’s friends; rather, he liked to hail it with a shout of mixed elation and reproach.
Having released, as it were, the pent-up noise and passion of the night, he would then fall back into sleep for some five minutes before waking, permanently, for the second time. This time his yell would demand acknowledgement: it would go on until one or other of his parents appeared in his room.
‘I expect he’ll calm down when he reaches sexual maturity,’ Homer would say, ‘and has something else to do with the night and his energy.’
‘Five minutes’ grace,’ he said this morning, dabbing away at Isabel’s tears.
It was Homer’s turn to see to Jason, but since it was his birthday both parents went. Isabel got out of her side of the bed; Homer got out of his. They pulled on jeans, and T-shirts, and sneakers. The telephone rang. It was one of Isabel’s researchers, apologising for the earliness of the call, asking permission to contact a Norwegian architect breaking a world tour in London that day. Isabel’s anxiety disappeared. The world was back to normal. There were decisions to be made, money to be earned, the world to be mastered.
Homer opened Jason’s door: ‘Pa-ra-pa-ra-pa-ra,’ rattled Jason, firing his new filigreed gun at his parents, machine-gun style. ‘I’m six, I’m nearly seven, I don’t have to go to school today.’
‘Yes, you do,’ they said. Jason yelled and screamed and stamped. His parents reasoned and explained and cajoled.
Homer took Jason to school on Mondays and Wednesdays and collected him on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Isabel took him on Tuesdays and Thursdays and collected him on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Fridays both parents took him and collected him. The routine suited everyone.
Jason rode behind Homer on the bicycle when the weather was fine. Today was a bicycle day. Jason, still tear-stained, turned round to smile at his mother as they rode off. It was the smile of a prince to a courtier, immensely kind and immensely gracious. It was all-forgiving. It was clear to Isabel that he had always meant to go to school.
Isabel returned to the kitchen for coffee. The radio was on. The news had begun. Isabel listened half-professionally, half as an innocent citizen. She knew a sufficient number of journalists, had met enough editors, had worked on the fringes of enough news rooms, to know the processes by which balance was evolved: the half-accidental, half-purposeful ways in which bias was created, and truth, once again, slipped through the fingers and scattered, like a drop of mercury splashing on the floor: elusive in the first place, now gone for ever. Today some things were clear enough.
The long haul up to the American Presidential election had begun. The Primaries were under way. An outsider, the young Senator from Maryland, was looking good for the Democrats. His name was Dandridge Ivel – commonly known as Dandy Ivel. The commentator, speaking over a crackly line, was speculating on the advantages of having youth at the American helm again, harking back to the Kennedy era, and Camelot, and the golden age of the USA, before national shame, depression, monetarist policies, inflation, unemployment and street riots became commonplace topics of conversation. The age before responsibility – the adolescence of a nation. Perhaps the USA could be young and vigorous again, with Dandy Ivel at the helm? The commentator, his enthusiasm bouncing and crackling off some ill-functioning satellite, left no doubt that he was a Dandy Ivel fan.
Isabel sat down. The house was quiet. The big school clock on the kitchen wall ticked with one rhythm: the grandfather clock in the hall, proud amongst the bicycles and coats, ticked with another. The school clock had to be wound, every day; the grandfather clock every eight. It was Isabel’s job to wind the former, because she so easily forgot the latter. Homer never forgot.
She made herself a cup of coffee. Homer limited himself to two cups a day, and never drank the powdered kind. He feared the powdering agent was carcinogenic.
How would she ever live without Homer, who structured her life and surrounded her personality, and had made her lie-about, sleep-around personality into something so sure, so certain? Isabel clutched her arms across her chest. She had a pain. She rocked to and fro.
Of course she had known: she had seen or heard some mention somewhere of Dandy Ivel’s name, and repressed the knowledge. Of course she had woken up afraid; of course she had rung her mother; of course she had wept.
Dandy Ivel, President of the United States.
Once, Isabel thought, I believed that events were haphazard and unrelated. I believed that people could be loved and left, and that happenings receded into the past and were gone, and that only with marriage, or its equivalent, and the birth of children, did the real, memorable, responsible life begin. Now she saw it was not so. Nothing was lost, not even the things you most wanted to lose. All things move towards a certain point in time. Our future is conditioned by our past: all of it, not just the paths we choose, or are proud of.
There was nothing to be done except say nothing, do nothing, hug the knowledge to herself. All would yet be well.
After an earthquake a house changes. Ornaments stand minutely different on the shelves; books lean at delicately altered angles. The lamp hangs quiet again at the end of its cord, but all things have discovered motion: the power to act and upset. The house laughs. You thought I was yours, your friend. You thought you knew me, but see, you don’t. One day I may fall and crush you to death. It seemed to Isabel that the house she loved so much had changed. It mocked her, and laughed.
Isabel went next door to drink her coffee with Maia. Maia had quarrelled with her husband and run out into the street with tears in her eyes and stepped in front of a car, and lost her sight. Nothing is safe. Husbands, tears, cars, eyes. They won’t be sorry; you will.
Maia and Isabel talked, and said nothing very important. During the day Isabel went into her Hello-Goodnight office. Alice, the researcher, had found the Norwegian architect, but it transpired that these days he built underground houses, not solar-powered holiday homes. In consultation with the producer, Andrew Elphick, it was agreed that it would do neither the architect nor the programme any good were he to appear on it.
‘We’re an informative but light-hearted show,’ said Elphick. ‘Our viewers don’t want to switch off Hello-Goodnight and have nuclear nightmares about the end of the world. They’re common enough without us helping. Don’t you agree, Isabel? I don’t mind us being serious about feminism, racism, homosexuality or any of the other social trimmings, but I won’t devalue the currency of the end of the world in a late-night chat show.’
Isabel saw what he meant. So did Alice, who was thirty-two, and had just turned her back on promotion in order to work just one more time, every time, with Elphick, whom she loved. Elphick was tall and broad and sad and clever and had red hair and a boyish smile. He was forty, and married. He was not popular with the camera crews or studio staff, at whom he shouted and raged, as if married to them.
‘Isabel,’ he said to her as she left the room, ‘do you have a social conscience?’
‘Of course,’ she replied, startled.
‘I thought you did,’ he replied. ‘It’s rather like mine. We know where our duty lies. It’s to fiddle as prettily as possible while Rome burns, so that Nero throws us a penny or two.’
He was drinking already. It was his occupation on five days out of seven. On the other two, run-up days and recording days, he kept sober. His face was lined by scars – from going, rumour said, through