A Hard Time to Be a Father. Fay Weldon
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and found Tony in my bedroom and told him to stop messing about and for heaven’s sake somehow get his wife and children back. If he wanted to get out of the business, let him do it with the proper person.
‘Is this what finding a long lost father can do?’ he asked, as he left. ‘And I had such high hopes…’
And all I could do was suppose it was: that, and simply Finland itself.
In the past Finland has always been conquered or annexed or governed by someone else – this vast flat stretch, on top of the world, of islands and forests – but now it has its own identity, its own pride: it looks not to its previous masters, Sweden and Russia, but to itself. How odd, to identify so with a nation! Perhaps it’s hereditary, in the genes: like ending up in the film business. My dad ran off with a Finn: one mustn’t forget that. Perhaps he somehow felt the same connection, and can be forgiven.
And that’s the strange thing that happened to me in Helsinki, last October, and how my life has changed. And I called this story ‘Falling in Love in Helsinki’, not ‘Out of Love’, because although it’s true I fell out of love with Andreas, out of love with love (which is a real blight), somehow I fell into love with life. Or with God, call it what you will, there in that chapel. Whatever, I found myself sufficiently enamoured of just the sheer dignity of creation to realise I shouldn’t offend it the way I had been doing. I think everything’s going to be all right now. I’ll make out. I might even leave the film business altogether. Not go into a convent, or anything so extreme. But I might try politics. It’s what I’m trained for.
As for GUP, the Great Universal Paradox, that’s real enough. What I marvel at now is how happy so many of us manage to be, so much of the time, in spite of it.
‘You are so selfish,’ said Edwina to her mother. Edwina was thirty-one. She hated her name. When she was born her parents had expected a boy: ‘Edwin’ had been ready and waiting. Her father and mother had just added an ‘a’ and thereafter ignored her. Edwina was Hughie and Beverley’s first-born. Father: Hughie, Earl of Cowarth; mother: Beverley, a fortune-hunter from New Zealand. Now, decades into family disapproval, Beverley was sixty-one: Hughie had died mere months ago: Edwina, at thirty-one, had affairs, rode to hounds and drank too much. The family had just about got over the shock of Hughie’s death. Now it was all wills, or rather no wills, and inheritance, or no inheritance, and who got what title: that is to say whatever sad crumbs of comfort spilled out after death could be picked over and scrabbled for. Hughie had been much and genuinely loved.
‘But then,’ Edwina added, ‘I suppose you always were selfish.’
‘What is so selfish?’ asked Beverley, startled, ‘about wanting to live in my own bleeding home?’
‘Because it’s far too big for you now,’ said Georgina. ‘Sell the place and find somewhere small and sensible to live, and divide the money amongst us.’ Georgina had been intended to be George. Another failure. Georgina was thirty. Now she was pregnant and had long blonde curls. That should show her mother a thing or two.
‘Little middle tomboy,’ her mother had once referred to Georgina, dismissively. Or so Georgina had chosen to interpret the remark. Beverley kept her second daughter’s hair really short and occasionally tossed her a gun so she could join in the shoot. How Georgina would cry. So many poor dead birds, falling about her ears! She always wore high heels when she could, even in the country, vulgar or not.
‘If you think that just because Hughie has carked it,’ said Beverley, ‘I have too, you have another think coming!’ ‘We must hear what mother is saying,’ said Davida, the third daughter. (Three daughters. It was beyond a joke, and Hughie had never even laughed in the first place. He knew he had to produce a male heir or the title would go to his brother John.) Davida was twenty-eight. She was a therapist, married to a psychiatrist. Her once bouncy hair had flattened out and grown limp from the strain of wisdom, her bright eyes had turned soulful, her voice gone soft from understanding her own anger and that of others.
Beverley’s answer to the three of them was defiance: she meant to stay at Cowarth Court, on her own, all thirty-one bedrooms of it, three dining halls, two ballrooms, three bathrooms – hopeless, hopeless, only one to every ten bedrooms, but the water supply in these Elizabethan mansions is always tricky, and at least Hughie and Beverley’s en-suite
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