The President’s Child

THE PRESIDENT’S CHILD

FAY WELDON

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Title Page

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About the Author

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

On Sunday afternoons, when the world pauses and waits for the next great event, when the streets are empty and unnaturally still and the weight of obligation hangs over the land, the residents of Wincaster Row come calling on me. They come out of kindness because I am blind; and out of kindness to them, in the desolation of Sunday afternoon, I gather past and present together and tell them stories.

Today I tell them about Isabel, who fell in love, and in so doing made the whole world falter and take a different turning.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Listen! How the rain blows against the window-pane. Easy to feel, on such a day and in such a place, that great events are nothing to do with us, that we are cut off from sources of worldly energy, that people and politics are entirely separate; that the mainstream of life is, in fact, a long way off.

‘It isn’t so,’ I tell them. ‘Isabel lived next door. The river flows at the end of the garden; what’s more, it’s deep, wide, muddy and tricky: not the tranquil flowing stream you might hope for. Isabel almost drowned!’

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. In the end we will all know more than we did before. Shouldn’t that be enough to base a life upon?

The women of Wincaster Row don’t agree, of course. The pursuit of knowledge clearly isn’t enough for them. They want happiness, love, sex, good dinners, money, consumer durables, admiration, laughing children and goodness knows what else besides. They still live in the real world, and not in their heads.

We are all women today. Oliver the architect from No. 13 couldn’t come, nor Ivor the alcoholic from No. 17. They had domestic commitments. So we have earth-mother Jennifer from No. 9, who is pregnant yet again; and cross Hilary, in serviceable jeans and clumpy boots, from No. 11; and pretty, clever little Hope from No. 25, fidgety for lack of sexual excitement, which she needs, or so Hilary complains, as a heroin addict needs a fix.

There are no even numbers in Wincaster Row. The demolition men got to that side of the street before the conservation society were able to step in – or rather lie down in the path of bulldozers. Hilary still limps, on a wet day, and now, listening to me, she rubs her damaged knee.

‘Is it true about Isabel?’ asks Hilary. ‘Or will you be making it up?’

Hilary, Jennifer and Hope expect truth to be exact and finite. I know it is more like a mountain that has to be scaled. The peak of the mountain pierces the clouds and can only rarely be seen, and has never been reached. And what you see of it, moreover, depends upon the flank of the mountain you stand upon, and how exhausted getting even so far has made you. Virtue lies in looking upwards, toiling upwards, and sometimes joyously leaping from one precarious crag of fact and feeling to the next.

‘More or less true,’ I say.

Isabel was my neighbour. She lived next door, and filled my world with life and energy and bustle. Now the house is empty, and weeds break through the pavings of the front path, where once little Jason, Isabel’s son, played and grizzled and imposed his riotous will upon the world. The gate swings loose and creaks. Estate Agents have planted a ‘For Sale’ sign amongst the weeds: it stands like some kind of enemy tree, unexpectedly sprouted.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. The river’s nearer: it flows just outside the door. Keep the sandbags ready; who knows when the water will rise? Listen! It’s raining harder than ever.

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it was true,’ says Jennifer. ‘Isabel never quite fitted into Wincaster Row.’

‘She was too perfect,’ says Hope, ‘if that’s what you mean. She had it all made, unlike the rest of us. The perfect companionate marriage. The true, the new, the sharing!’

Though some of us think Hope has it all made: unmarried and self-supporting and no children, and not yet thirty, and prone to falling in love, and being fallen in love with: skipping up and down the Row, little and light, and remarking, from time to time, ‘What I don’t understand is, since sex is so nice, why doesn’t everyone do it all the time?’

Wincaster Row is in Camden Town, on the fringes of central London. It is an island of privilege in an underprivileged city sea. In the summer Bach and Vivaldi flow from open windows, over lawns and flowerbeds, keeping at bay the sound of police sirens and ambulance bells. In the winter, although the windows are closed, the sound of alarm comes nearer. A communal garden has been contrived out of dust and rubble. Oliver the architect, and Jennifer, who loves gardens, were instrumental in its creation, and so was Camden Council, which broods over these parts like some sort of touchy, monolithic god.

We are not perfect, here in Wincaster Row. We are not entirely rational or entirely noble or entirely forgiving. We have our fears and our angers and our points of obsession, like anyone else. But we are kind to our children, and each other; the struggle for self-improvement is assumed, and with the improvement of the self the improvement of the world. I think we are good people.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Don’t mind the rain. The farmers need it. Pray it isn’t radioactive.

We are not so much the salt of the world – salt is taken for granted these days – as the handful of mixed herbs which makes the meal at all possible. For the most part we are communicators – we teach, or work in television or films or publishing, or are in some way connected with theatre, or think we ought to be. We are social workers and diplomats and civil servants. We aspire to the truth.

We rattle round the mountain a fraction higher than the rest of the world. We are brave if we have to be: we will, if pushed, put public good before private profit. We would even die for a principle, unless it damaged the children.

We crawled up on to this island of civilisation, carried by tides we never quite understood; now we live better than we could ever have expected.

There are others like us all over the world – enclaves of aspiration in New Delhi and Sydney and Helsinki and Houston, and in all the big cities of the world; and little clusters of us in towns and villages everywhere – in Blandford, Dorset, and Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Tashkent, Georgia, our goodwill crossing barriers of language and social organisation; a great upswell of the culture of kindness. We read each other’s books, listen to each other’s poems. On Sunday morning gatherings, at drinks-before-dinner time, in Moscow and Auckland and New York and Oslo and Manila, our children will be misbehaving, and anxious parental eyes will follow their noisy course about the room, wondering where error lies, and why it is that children reflect the parents’ uncertainties, rather than their certainties. Self-doubt defines us, as well as aspiration.

At any gathering in Wincaster Row which included children, Isabel’s Jason would be the noisiest and the roughest and the most disobedient. He was a blond, stocky child, with firm, well-covered limbs, a clear, high complexion and widely spaced, wandering blue eyes, which for a time needed glasses with one lens blacked out, to check the wandering. As a baby he had cried a good deal and slept very little. He was on his feet and breaking things by the time he was a year old and speaking three months later, the better to say no. By the age of two he could tell his letters, but at six was still declining to read. He developed a tearful roar which he would use when thwarted, and a persistent self-pitying grizzle when he was bored or uncomfortable. He demanded, and he received, and was much loved.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Some children are more difficult to rear than others. Those most troublesome young grow up, eventually, to be the most co-operative and benign. That is the wisdom of Wincaster Row. If no one disciplines you, you do it yourself, eventually. Kropotkin said so, long ago.

Isabel and Homer said it to their neighbours, and each other. They shared the penances and triumphs of their beliefs, as they shared their lives, their income and the household chores. Isabel and Homer were partners in a New Marriage, in which all these things were shared, all things discussed. Up and down Wincaster Row we looked to Isabel and Homer to show us how to live, and worried because they didn’t quite seem to belong. He came from America; she from Queensland, Australia.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Rain is an extra hazard to the blind. A stick will tell you where the kerb is, but very little about the depth of the puddle the other side. When it rains, I stay indoors. I have good friends, a solicitous husband, and one of those machines which, if spoken to, will type back a printed version of what was said for the sighted, and a Braille version for the personal use of the operator. Thank God for progress, the silicon chip, and money.

The rain blows harder against the window-pane. Hilary turns on my central heating; it’s mid-summer but it’s cold. Presages of what’s to come! Surely men and women can be friends and lovers too? Be both parents and partners?

Homer and Isabel married because Jason was on the way. Isabel told me so, as she told me many private things. She was my good friend. When I first lost my sight it was Isabel who looked after me. My husband, Laurence, had often to be away. He is an investigative reporter: he fills up the back pages of newspapers, and is often away. Isabel guided me through the new, frightening dark, until I became accustomed to it. She was a good guide: she did not, at the time, understand fear; although later she was brought to it. She could not comprehend the terrors of my new place; she skated happily over practical surfaces, warning me of tangible objects – here a chair, there a step – and understandable events – you cannot read the telephone bill, but you can use the telephone to ask how much it is – ignoring the intangible, the horrific and the confusing – the voiceless shriekings and weepings and moanings in my head. There was a kind of obduracy in her that helped me; a startling common sense; a refusal, almost, to believe that going blind was a major event. She was blind to my blindness, in all but a practical sense.

And just as well, for so major an event did the failure of my sight appear, at first, to my husband, so filled were his own eyes with tears of guilt, remorse and pity, that for a time he could scarcely find his own way, let alone mine.

‘For God’s sake, Laurence,’ Isabel would say, ‘go back to the pub –’ and he would stumble back, unshaven and morose, from whence he’d come, leaving Isabel to teach me how to comb my hair by touch and code my clothes, by feel, upon the shelves: and leaving me, of course, bereft of the comfort of Laurence’s presence, however tiresome and maudlin he might be, however given he was to saying, ‘Oh, it is useless, hopeless. It is not just the beginning of the end, it is the end itself. We had better just give up, and die together.’

Now that I can no longer see people I hold memories of their appearance in my mind. They appear on the pale sheet of my memory: black-edged, cut-out figures, clearly defined. Laurence stands looming in a doorway, outlined by the light, blocking it out: sensuous, thick-set and fleshy: facing me, four-square: then he turns his head so that the light catches his face and his eyes are as wide and his cheeks as delicate as a girl’s.

Isabel lies upon a stone slab, hands folded in prayer, like some carved saint who achieved great glory in life and is remembered in death. Light from stained glass windows shines upon her imperfect profile, and glances off her long, broad-hipped body, the breasts unduly flattened after Jason’s birth. Then in my vision she sits up, and turns and smiles at me, and rises and stretches, confident and proud of her body, and saunters off, in so modern and careless a fashion as to put all thoughts of graven knights and saintliness out of my mind.

When she is gone the church is cold and empty and I am left in the dark again.

Isabel’s profile is imperfect because when she was nine she was kicked in the jaw by a horse her mother loved. ‘Don’t fuss,’ said her mother.

The Flying Doctor did, however. Isabel and her mother lived far into the Australian outback and were dependent upon rather makeshift medical arrangements. The doctor flew in, and wired and stitched and re-firmed teeth, and all would have been well had the horse not got her in the jaw a second time, barely a week later.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said her mother, ‘what do you do to that horse?’

Here and now, sisters. Here and now. Build your houses strong and safe, love your children, and die for them if you have to, and try to love your mothers, who didn’t.

‘I patted its rump,’ said Isabel. ‘The way you told me I should.’ But her mother wasn’t listening. She was on the phone, getting a message through to the Flying Doctor. ‘I feel a right Charlie,’ she said.

The wet season was upon Harriet and Isabel by then: the helicopter carrying the Flying Doctor back crash-landed, and the doctor was injured. The yellow mud rose up around: if you went out in the rain your head hurt. The new injuries to Isabel’s jaw got forgotten, one way and another: her chin thereafter protruded too much and her mouth was flattened, and her teeth leaned backward, and joggled together; the doctor lost an eye and a leg. Isabel felt the responsibility of it all, but thereafter, having survived that, dreaded none. And the imperfection of the bottom half of her face, compared to the cool, gracious, wide-eyed perfection of the rest of it, gave her a quirky charm when she was young and a look of intelligence as she grew older. She inspired love as much as lust, in the souls of the young outback boys, who roamed in packs across the desert in that for the most part loveless land.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Rain in London is safe and mild, for anyone, that is, except the blind. It beats upon hard pavements and rolls away down drains. It doesn’t drown the world in yellow mud.

‘It’s no life for you here,’ said Isabel’s mother when her daughter was fifteen. ‘Not someone like you. You’d better get out.’

‘Come with me,’ said Isabel. They were all each other had.

‘There’s the horses,’ said Isabel’s mother. ‘I can’t leave them.’

Of course. Isabel had forgotten, momentarily, about her mother having the horses. They weren’t splendid horses; they were rather shaggy, moulting, ailing animals, plagued by a hundred insect pests, who did nothing but stand reproachfully in a field and consume what was left of Isabel’s patrimony, in sacks of feed and vet’s bills. They kicked up dust in the summer, and stirred up mud in the winter.

Isabel’s mother loved them; and Isabel tried to love them for her mother’s sake, and failed. Chatto and Windus and Heinemann and Warburg and Herbert and Jenkins – (Seeker died, of a snake bite). Memories, all, of Isabel’s mother’s past. Isabel’s mother grew up in literary London and was swept out of it and into the outback by Isabel’s father, who farmed and was Australian. Presently he went off to war and never came back, preferring life in a grass hut with a Malaysian girl to life with Isabel’s mother and Isabel. Mother and child stayed where they were, selling off land, thousand acre by thousand acre, until there was nothing left but the wormy wooden house with its rickety balcony, and the six horses in a single field, and the snakes sleeping in the tindery undergrowth, and Isabel’s mother, dusty and yellowy, grown into the landscape.

Where else was she to go, what else was she to do? Pinned down by war, world events, her own stubborn nature, and a baby? When it rained it was as if she called down the heavens to avenge her, and if they drowned her doing it, so be it. Pit-pat, spitter-spat.

‘But what will you do?’ Isabel asked her mother, ‘when I’m gone?’

‘What I’ve always done,’ said her mother. ‘Look at the horizon.’

Isabel thought her mother would be glad when she had gone: that her mother had done her duty by her. That though she, Isabel, felt great intimacy with her mother, her mother did not feel the same for her. The child is accidental to the mother. The mother is integral to the child. It is a painful lesson for the child to learn.

Seeker’s body had gone to the knackers; all except the head, which Isabel’s mother had had stuffed and put in the hall. It rolled glass eyes at Isabel the day she left home, while the flies buzzed about it. Seeker was the horse responsible for Isabel’s lopsided jaw: her mother had wept when he died, swollen horribly.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked Isabel, at the time. She had never known her mother cry before.

‘Everything went wrong,’ said her mother. ‘It was the war. And how could I go back afterwards? Everyone would have said “I told you so". They never wanted me to marry your father. They all said it wouldn’t work.’

‘What everyone?’

‘Everyone,’ said her mother, desolately.

And who indeed was everyone? Harriet’s friends and family had scattered. That was what war did. It took families by the scruff of their neck and shook them and tossed them in the air, and didn’t even bother to see where they fell, as the farm dogs did with rats.

But Isabel’s mother hadn’t been there to see the war, of course. War rolled across far continents, killing everything it touched. Isabel’s mother just sat and gazed at an unchanging, yellow horizon, over which a red sun rose and fell, and the people of her past had atrophied in her mind, set in their condemning ways. Would anyone bother now to say, ‘I told you so'? Of course not. Or was there anyone left to say it? Isabel’s mother could hardly know any more. She never answered letters, and presently they’d stopped coming.

Now she wept over Seeker, who had ruined her daughter’s face; but saved her character.

‘It’s unlucky to be beautiful,’ Harriet said to Isabel, once. ‘If you are, some man just comes along and marries you and stops you making your way in the world.’

The hot sun and the hard rain had turned Harriet’s skin to leather, and stubbornness had set her mouth askew, and her eyes were red-rimmed from staring at the horizon. But once she had been beautiful. Isabel thought she was still beautiful. And so, no doubt, thought Isabel’s father, long ago.

Isabel’s mother wouldn’t talk about Isabel’s father. ‘He did what he wanted,’ was the most she ever said, ‘the way all men do.’

Isabel thought he must have been strong, to have farmed so many acres on his own, and powerful, to rule over it. She thought he must have been one of the natural lords of that land: tall, lean, bronzed, mean, with features sharpened by the hot wind: packs of dogs and horses and lesser men scurrying at their heels. The lesser men were red from Foster’s and rendered stupid, if they hadn’t been to begin with, by the coarseness and ignorance in which they traded. If there was a flower, they trod it underfoot, and laughed. If there was a dog, they kicked it. That was why the dogs snarled and snapped.

She could not see her mother with that kind of man. Her mother saw visions, too, Isabel was sure of it. Her mother saw something of the infinite in the yellow dust, or in the rusty clouds swirling over the flat land, that sometimes illuminated her face and made her sigh with pleasure.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Isabel the little girl. ‘Is there something out there?’

‘Something more than I can tell,’ said Isabel’s mother, averting her eyes from the horizon, scraping away at burnt, thin-bottomed saucepans.

Isabel tore a leg off her favourite doll, smeared it with mutton fat, and gave it to the dogs to chew.

Isabel told me so. She never confessed it to anyone else; not Homer her husband, and certainly not Jason her son. I am blind and can be trusted not to condemn.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Jennifer has made tea. Hilary offers me a plate of biscuits.

‘Chocolate chip a.m.: lemon sandwiches p.m.,’ she says, describing the plate to me.

I take the chocolate chip from nine o’clock. Lemon sandwiches flake all over the carpets, and though the blind can vacuum clean it is not a very efficient process. Hope brought them with her. She should have known better.

I have been blind for two years. I crossed a road without looking. A car hit me behind the knees. I bounced on to its bonnet and off again, cracking my head on the kerb, somewhere to the left of the medulla; in the area which controls the sight. The blow did unspecified damage which means my eyes simply fail to register what they see. The fact intrigues surgeons and eye specialists and indeed psychiatrists, and I am forever up at the hospital while they peer and probe and inject and intrude. They did an operation which left the left side of my right hand insensitive to hot and cold, but achieved nothing except my pain and terror and humiliation. Occasionally some irritable physician will remark, ‘I am sure you could see if you wanted to.’

There are ranks in blindness, of course, like anything else. I, being slightly mysterious in my plight, almost wilful, and my eyes looking pretty much like anyone else’s, come high up on the scale. A noble blindness. To have been born blind, or to have gone blind through illness, ranks lower. A pitiful, punitive blindness. The sense that God afflicts us at our birth because we deserve it is strong. The millions of India live by the notion, after all.

An accident, however! Accidents happen to everyone. They are dramatic and exciting; children love them, and the wearing of the plaster that signifies calamity. I ran into the street because I had had a quarrel with my husband Laurence, and I didn’t see the car coming because I was crying, or perhaps because I didn’t want to.

Listen to the rain against the window! Summer rain. Each drop is a lost human soul, driven by winds it cannot comprehend, trying to get in here where it is safe and warm, where we gather our infirmities together and make the most of what we have. Be grateful for the glass that saves you from the force of such savagery and discontent. Drape it with curtains; polish it on fine days; try not to see too much, but just enough for survival’s sake. Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, or waste too much energy on other people’s woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.

These things Isabel taught me in spite of herself. Little by little, she revealed herself and her story to me. Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Draw the curtain.

2

On Jason’s sixth birthday Isabel woke with the feeling that something was wrong. She was launched suddenly into consciousness, one second lying in dreams, the next starting into alertness. She thought perhaps there was an intruder in the room, but of course there was not. Homer lay beside her as usual on the brass bed, on his side, relaxed and peaceful, legitimate and uxorious, the delicate skin of his eyelids stretched fine over his mildly prominent eyes. His face had the vulnerable, slightly raw look that faces do, which go bespectacled by day and naked by night.