She May Not Leave. Fay Weldon
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the stone stairs from the basement are worn down in the middle from the tread of countless servants, up and down, up and down. You’d think their tired breath would haunt the place but it doesn’t seem to. Serena’s mother-in-law died in the room where Serena now has her office but the fact only very occasionally affects her, though she claims her ghost walks on Christmas Eve. That is to say she once saw the old lady cross the passage from spare room to bathroom, and looking twice there was no one there. Her mother-in-law left a benign presence behind her, Serena claims. When I say, ‘But I have seen the ghost of the living Sebastian in his studio,’ she does not want to believe me. She likes to be the only one in touch with the paranormal. She isn’t.
I live in a small farmhouse which has been a dwelling for the last thousand years at least. The hamlet, outside Corsham in Wiltshire, is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Its occupant would have been fairly low down the social scale: a sub-tenant perhaps. Originally it was a single room for family, animals and servants. Then an outside staircase was built and a couple of rooms above. The families moved upstairs, the servants and animals stayed below. Outhouses were built: animals were separated out from servants. The original barn was long ago converted to a dwelling. A studio was built out the back where Sebastian now paints, in ghostly form, and I hope will again, less spectrally.
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, seized by the fear that he will behave like an ageing man after a heart operation, and try to change his life, and the change will include separating out from those that love him. It happened to Serena and it could happen to me. In these wakeful nights the house creaks and groans and sighs, from sheer age or from the spirits of those who went before, including pigs, horses, sheep, servants, forget the masters and mistresses. Oh believe me, we are not alone. The central heating gurgles like a mad thing at night.
But back to the young, the loving, the breeding and the present, that is to say Hattie and Martyn. Martyn, to give him credit, is more conscious of the past than many, if only as a contrast to the benign Utopia he and his friends hope to achieve. Martyn has explained to Hattie, as she sits trapped in her nursing chair (an antique, which Serena bought her as a present) feeding Kitty, that the terrace house they live in – two up, two down – was designed for the wave of Irish navvies brought in to complete the earthworks for the great London stations which served the manufacturing North, the land of his roots. St Pancras, King’s Cross, Euston, Marylebone – every shovelful of earth and rock had to be moved by hand, and now forms Primrose Hill.
Hattie would like to live somewhere larger, even if less historical, but they cannot afford it and in any case, says Martyn, they should be grateful for what they have.
The navvies lived six to a room in what is now home for two grown-ups, one baby and now the maid. There is still an old coal fireplace in the top back bedroom where once, over coals scavenged from the King’s Cross mustering yards, meat and potatoes were cooked. A puny extension for the kitchen and bathroom was built in the 1930s and takes up nearly all the sunless yard. Agnieszka is to have the small back bedroom, next door to the one where currently Martyn, Hattie and Kitty sleep.
There is gas-fired central heating but the gas comes from under the North Sea and no longer from the coal mines. It’s cleaner, but it’s expensive and Martyn and Hattie dread the bills. Though at least everyone on the way from the oil rigs of the north to the man who reads the meter – or rather leaves his card and runs – is decently paid. Or so says Martyn. Martyn’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather fought for this prosperity and justice and achieved it. No one now who can’t afford a lottery ticket!
Martyn has recently been asked by his employers to write two articles explaining to a doubtful public that casinos are a good thing, bringing pleasure to the people, and he has, although he is not quite sure that he agrees. But he bites back argument as he writes. There is, as always, a case for both sides and it is not sensible to overturn too many apple carts in pursuit of a principle, this being a relativist age, and Hattie not earning, and so early in what he hopes eventually to be a parliamentary career.
Morality, as Hattie recently discovered, is a question of what one can afford. She can afford less than Martyn. Even so, putting the comforter in the baby’s mouth, plugging its distress, Hattie feels guilt. Guilt is to the soul as pain is to the body, a warning that harm is being done. Gender comparisons are odious, as Hattie would be the first to point out, but it is perhaps easier for men to override the emotion than it is for women.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have given Hattie permission to go back to work. Along with the child-care comes guilt, in the form of another pair of hands to soothe Kitty’s brow, another voice to lull her to sleep. Bad enough for Hattie to have bred a baby – and guilt is to motherhood as grapes are to wine – now she must worry about how Agnieszka will react to the baby and the baby to Agnieszka and both to Martyn and back again.
Hattie will have to develop the art of diplomacy fast. Wouldn’t it just be easier to put up with the boredom of motherhood and wait for Kitty to grow up? I feel like phoning Hattie and saying ‘Don’t, don’t!’ but I desist. The girl is not cut out for domesticity. But will Agnieszka influence Kitty’s character, mar her development in some way, teach her how to spit out food and use swear words? I am Kitty’s great-grandmother. I worry. The guilt outruns the generations.
Back in the sixties when we were in our early thirties, living round the corner from each other in Caldicott Square, Serena and I passed au pairs around like hot cakes. Nearly all of them were good girls, just a few were very flawed. But they all made their mark. I am sure some traces of various learned characteristics remain in my children, and in Serena’s too, to this day.
Roseanna, Viera, Krysta, Maria, Svea, Raya, Saturday Sarah – all will have had some input into what they became. Ours may have been the predominant influence, but I’m sure my Jamie learned from Viera how to get his way by sulking and from Sarah how to love in vain. It was from Maria that Lallie the flautist learned to despise us all, but from Roseanne how to value and respect fabrics. Lallie may be falling into bed with a lover but she won’t fling her clothes on the floor. She will place them neatly on the back of a chair, or indeed on a clothes rail. She is prepared to spend hours washing by hand, while I just bung things in the washing machine and hope for the best.
In the days of the many au pairs, I was working in the Primrosetti Gallery for a pittance, Serena was beginning to earn well as an advertising person, and George her new husband had just started his antiques shop. Serena and George lived in a big house in Caldicott Square. The girls lived in the basement, for I had no spare room for them, and though the basement was in its raw early-Victorian state, all damp walls and loose plaster, they did not seem to mind.
I have never been jealous of Serena, she is too amiable and generous for that, and takes her own position in the world lightly, thus obviating envy. She is also, frankly, fat and maintains that this is what has enabled her to survive as well as she has in a competitive world. ‘Oh, Serena!’ people say, ‘Sure she seems to have everything: money of her own making, a nice home, an attentive husband, her name in the papers, creativity, reputation, children – but isn’t she fat!’ And they can’t be bothered even to throw the barbs.
Back then in the sixties, working in advertising as she was, weighed daily by an expensive doctor in Harley Street and injected with some terrible substance made of pregnant mare’s urine, or some such, plus a daily dose of a crude amphetamine, Serena was thin and glamorous enough. Then indeed, yes, I was envious. Why is it so easy for her, I’d wonder, so hard for me? But then I’d think, well, my twenties were wildly good for me, in a desperate kind of way; hers, until she