Watching Me, Watching You

FAY WELDON

WATCHING ME, WATCHING YOU

Cover

Title Page

Christmas Tree

Breakages

Alopecia

Man with No Eyes

Holy Stones

Threnody

Angel, All Innocence

Spirit of the House

Watching Me, Watching You

Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child

Weekend

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

Christmas Tree

The last thing Brian did before he came South was to plant out the Christmas Tree for his Mum and Dad. The tree had grown and flourished for years in the sooty square of Bradford backyard where all other growing things failed, except cabbages. Its needles were dark-green, thick and resilient upon the twig, and its branches grew in conventional Christmas Tree shape. Every year one or other of the Smith family would dig it out on Christmas Eve and replant it on Twelfth Night, and every year the tree repaid them by growing thicker, higher and glossier. Soot clearly suited it. So the tree had existed since 1948, when Brian was ten. Now he was twenty-five. It had given him, Brian worked out on that traumatic day, fifteen years’ worth of pleasurable feelings.

‘Never drops a needle on my carpet,’ said his mother with pride, every year. ‘Not like the ones you buy down the market.’

‘They’re dead before they get to you,’ she would explain, every year. ‘They boil the roots, you know. They don’t want them growing, do they? No profit in that.’

Brian was spending a last Christmas with his Mum and Dad before leaving Bradford for good. There seemed no point in staying. His wife Audrey would not have him back, even though his daughter Helen was born that Boxing Day.

‘I told you no and I meant no,’ said Audrey. ‘I told you if you went with that woman you needn’t think you were coming back, and what I say I mean.’

Meaning what was said was a Northern habit, and in retrospect, admirable enough. At the time, however, it had seemed merely drastic. Audrey had shut him, Brian, the hero of his life, out of the cosy warmth of home; left him out in the cold exciting glitter of the unknown world, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. His Mum was allowed to visit the new baby, but not his Dad. Audrey made strange distinctions. ‘Pity it’s not a boy,’ said his Mum, cautiously. ‘It’s a funny-looking little thing. But Helen’s a pretty name and time can work wonders.’

The affair with Carlotta had ended. Brian had written a play for the local theatre — his first. It had transferred to London. Carlotta played the lead. Brian had gone down for rehearsals. Audrey had protested. ‘You’ll sleep with her if you go,’ she said. ‘I know you. Too big for your boots.’

That was another Northern crime, being too big for your boots. Almost as bad as having a swelled head, putting on airs or having eyes bigger than your stomach. Brian slept with Carlotta, and the affair lasted for the run of the play. Four months.

‘That’s the way it goes,’ said Alec, his agent, later to be his friend. ‘When actresses say for life they mean ‘til the end of the run. That’s show biz.’

So Brian, who had believed he was a serious writer, and not in show biz, returned bruised and contrite to Bradford, was thrown out by Audrey, stayed with his parents over Christmas, planted out the Christmas Tree, digging the pit wide and deep, spreading the roots to maximise nourishment and minimise stress — ‘That’s the key to that tree’s success,’ said his Dad, this year as every other, ‘taking care of the roots. Careful!’ — and left, for London, all soft-centred harshness and painful integrity, to slam into the soft cultural underbelly of the South. And so he did.

In the year after he left Audrey Brian wrote two stage plays, one musical, four television plays for the BBC and three letters to Audrey. The applause was deafening and prolonged for everything except the letters, which were met by silence, and the silence hurt him more than the applause cheered him.

Writers tend to undervalue those who praise them, or complain that praise is patronising: whilst at the same time feeling aggrieved if they are not praised. They never win the battle with themselves, which is why, perhaps, they go on writing.

The theme of Brian’s work was adoration, almost reverence, of and for the working classes, and his message a howl of hatred for the middle classes, and his solution violence.

‘Wonderful!’ said Alec. ‘The more you insult them the more they’ll love you.’ And in those cosy pre-OPEC days it seemed uncomfortably true. Though that of course was not why Brian chose such themes. The theme — which was something Alec could not or would not understand — chose him. Looking around his middle-class, cheering audience, Brian suffered.

There were, of course, compensations. His words upon the page were simple and direct and attractive; and as he was upon the page, so was he in bed. The girls trailed in and out of his flat and wept when it was all, all over, and for the rest of their lives searched his work for their appearance in it, and frequently found themselves, portrayed not unsympathetically.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ said Alec, politely. Alec wore bifocals. He was happily married to a good cook, and a prey to romantic love for inaccessible young girls. He, at least, maintained that he was happily married. His wife had another story.

After the fourth letter, Brian forgot Audrey. He asked his parents down to London for first nights, or the taping of his Plays for Today, and they were pleased enough to stay in the grand hotels he booked them into, and his friends seemed genuinely to like them — ‘What a lucky man you are, Brian, to come from a family like that. Real people!’ — and if his parents went back, shaking their heads over him and his rackety life, as if he were a neighbour’s child and not their own, Brian was not there to see it. They would bring him photographs of Helen, and even a father’s kind eye was obliged to observe that she was a plain and puddingy child, and that made her the easier to ignore.

He worried about himself, all the same. Had he lost his roots, forsaken his origins, worse, joined the middle classes? He had an image of himself as the Christmas Tree back home, dug up and not put back, left in its pot, unwatered, living on borrowed time, on the goodness of the past.

‘Do stop going on,’ said Victoria of the green pubic hair and feather boa. ‘I never knew anyone so guilty as you. Can’t you just stop worrying?’

He couldn’t. Victoria left.

‘But you’ve got it all made,’ said Harriet the theatrical twin, or was it Belinda, they played the silliest games, ‘rich and famous, and the revolution just around the corner, and you won’t even be the first to go, like us; but the last. You good little leftie, you.’

They went, pretty soon, to be cooks on someone’s charter yacht, somewhere in the sun. ‘Perhaps I’m having my cake and eating it too,’ he fretted to Lady Ann Scottwell, who had piano legs but wore the shortest of mini skirts, when a less secure girl would have worn trousers, and they somehow managed to make a plus out of a minus, erotically speaking. ‘You might be a little naive about the revolution,’ she murmured into his chest hair, cautiously. ‘Daddy says it definitely isn’t coming.’

That was 1968 and Daddy, it transpired, knew best.

Things went wrong. ‘Violence, dear boy,’ said Alec, who was going through a camp stage, ‘is definitely unfashionable. There’s too much of it about in real life. If things go on as they are, your entire audience will be legless and armless.’

Brian, who nowadays said in public that Alec, in the great school report of life, got good marks for contracts, but bad marks for integrity, tried to take no notice. But he felt confused, as the world changed about him, and goodies became baddies — from Castro to the IRA to Israel and even cigarette smoking became unfashionable. He drank to clear the confusion.

The BBC actually rejected a script and a stage play at the Aldwych was taken off after two weeks. ‘How about a film?’ asked Alec. ‘Hollywood calls.’

‘Never,’ said Brian.

‘A television series? Good money. Good practice.’ Brian put the phone down.

He knocked down a television producer in an Indian restaurant, appeared in Court, and was given a conditional discharge, but the Evening Standard picked up the story and ran a piece about Brian’s recent succession of creative disasters, and referred to his ‘emotional stalinism’.

‘We’ll sue,’ said Brian to Alec.

‘We won’t,’ said Alec to Brian. ‘We’ll work out what it means and see if it fits.’ Alec was back on the straight and narrow path to glory.

Instead, Brian married Rea, a fragile blonde actress with a passionate nature, who stopped him drinking by sleeping with him only when he was sober. They went back to Bradford in search of Brian’s roots, but found flyovers and bypasses where the red brick back-to-backs of his childhood had been. His parents now lived on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise block. Rea did not like the place at all. Shopping baskets were filled with white sliced bread and Mr Kipling cakes, and mothers slapped their children in the streets, and youths smoked and swore on corners. ‘I think you’d better forget your roots,’ said Rea. She did not want anything to do with Helen, who was still not pretty, in spite of her name.

Brian and Rea set up a fashionable home and gave fashionable dinners for writers with international reputations and New York publishers and notable film directors of a non-commercial kind, mostly from Europe, and filled the house with fashionable stripped pine and Victorian biscuit tins — ‘Oh the colours! Those faded reds and crimsons!’ — and Brian, to give himself time to think, wrote a comedy about the upper classes and the encroaching Arabs, which did very well in the West End. ‘Christ, you have sold out,’ wrote Audrey, out of the blue. ‘Making people laugh is a perfectly serious ambition,’ he wrote back. He needed money. Rea was very expensive. He hadn’t realised. She would import Batik silk just to make curtains — the yellows and browns. Ironwork had to be genuine Coalbrookdale: steak had to be fillet: clothes had to be Bonnie Cashin.

‘How about doing the rewrites on a film? Rome, not Hollywood. Money’s fantastic,’ said Alec. ‘All right,’ said Brian.

Brian could not understand why, to his eye, the house looked more and more like an old junk shop, the more Rea spent. And why she spoiled fillet steak with garlic and laughed him out of liking chips. He fell rather suddenly and startlingly out of love with Rea. She bought Christmas Trees without even the pretence of roots — merest branches posing as proper trees — and failed to deal properly with the needles, which of course would fall in profusion, so that he would find them all the year round, in piles of dust in corners and stuck, slant-wise and painful, into the fabric of his clothes. ‘They’ve been dry-cleaned, Brian. Surely my duty to your clothes stops there?’

He felt out of sympathy with her, and rightly critical. She lived on the surface of her life: she lacked complexity. She either laughed at his moods and sensitivities, or, worse, failed to notice them. If he got drunk and hit her — which on one or two lamentable occasions happened, when he was busy rewriting the rewrites, and Rome would ring and the demand would be for this line in and this line out, taking the very last scrap of integrity from the script, and every drop of remaining dignity from himself — if he then lashed out at Rea, he had the impression that it was merely, for her, a scene in a play in which she thought she should never have accepted a part in the first place. He suffered. She would not even wear his black eye boldly, as his mother had worn his father’s, but used make-up to disguise it. Everything, with Rea, was disguise, because there was no real self. She acted. She acted the part of wife, hostess, lover, connoisseur of impossible objects. She even acted being pregnant, but when it came to the point, had abortions, and then made him feel responsible by saying it was his lack of enthusiasm for the baby which induced her to have them. ‘I didn’t want to see you acting mother,’ he said. ‘That’s true enough. At least I know what a real mother is. You don’t. It’s not your fault. You’ve had no mother.’ Rea’s mother had died when she was born. It was a source of some sorrow to her.

Rea had no mother, no roots, no soul. Brian felt it acutely. Times were bad between them.

Brian delivered scripts late, or sloppily written, or not at all. First drafts failed to get to second draft stage. There were arguments about broken contracts. Brian was half-pleased, half-humiliated. There seemed nothing to write about. Nothing, in a changing world, that a writer could put his finger on and cry, stop, that’s it: and hold back the world for a minute or two, to allow it to look at itself.

‘Tax man’s at the door,’ said Alec. And so he was, hammering away. ‘Television series?’

‘Not yet,’ said Brian. ‘Not quite yet.’

Brian found Rea in bed, in his and her bed, with a second-rate cameraman. ‘That’s it,’ said Brian. ‘Out!’ ‘Not on your nelly,’ said Rea. ‘You go, I’ll stay.’

Rea countered, by solicitor’s letter, his accusations of adultery with accusations of mental cruelty, which he could not understand, and physical cruelty, which he could. He let her have everything. ‘You never were quite real to me,’ he said to her, when he called to collect his clothes, in the bold New Year of 1976. ‘You lived in a play.’

‘You wrote it,’ she said, sourly, and slammed the front door after him, and the shock made the brown Christmas Tree, stuck carelessly outside for the dustmen to collect, lose the last of its needles.

He felt the world was ending, in a sour dream. He was nearly forty, and had nothing.

‘Except friends, fans, freedom, a reputation, and a queue of TV producers outside your door,’ said Alec. Brian let one or two of them in. With Rea out of the way he could work properly again. He sent a large sum of money to his parents. They sent it back.

‘We have everything we need,’ they wrote. ‘Our pensions are more than sufficient. You save it for a rainy day. You need it more than we do.’

He was hurt, feeling the reproach, and redirected the money to Audrey. She kept it, but sent no thanks.

Brian felt old. The world was full of young men in jeans, and more than a few of them were competent writers, quicker, cheaper, more sober, and harder-working than he, snatching the work from under his nose; and the best and brightest girls behaved as girls never had since the beginning of time, expecting him to make coffee and saying ‘Don’t ring me, I’ll ring you’: and the theatre had lost its shape, and its giants, and the proscenium arch had gone, and everyone ran round pretending the writer was no one special, just someone with a job to do: and a stage play had become just a television play, with a live audience.

Unsatisfactory times. The young women still came. They preferred him, if anything, to their contemporaries. They had a surface politeness. They would ask him what the matter was, on those mornings when he turned his face to the wall, and couldn’t get up, and his phone would ring, and he couldn’t bring himself to answer it. ‘I’ve lost my roots,’ he’d say. They could not of course believe him, and took his mournfulness as a slur upon their sexuality, and an insult to their femininity. But what he said was at last true. He could no longer send down feelers into his past, into the black, crumbling, moving soil of his childhood.

‘Re-pot yourself,’ snapped Alec, who had other stars in his stable now — young men who liked, nostalgically, to dress like Colin Wilson. Alec had never stopped. ‘Find new soil.’

‘I tried with Rea,’ said Brian.

‘Now’s the time to write something really big,’ said Alec. ‘Some spectacular statement, to hit the contemporary button on the head.’

‘It’s been hit so often it’s lost its spring,’ said Brian.

But he thought perhaps Alec was right. And he felt he was resting, not idling. He knew, as he had always known, that the big work was there somewhere, waiting to emerge: the great work, that was to be to Brian Smith and the contemporary world, as Paradise Lost had been to Milton and his world. The master work, the summing up, knotting up, tying up and gift presentation of the human experience that everyone was hoping for, waiting for.

In two acts, of course, with a small cast and a single set to minimise expense, and one good interval to maximise bar and ice-cream sales.

‘Don’t be like that,’ said Alec. ‘Playwrighting is the art of the practical.’

‘One thing you have taught me, Alec,’ said Brian, ‘is that a writer is gigolo to the Muse, not lover.’ Perhaps he should change agents? But death seemed easier.

Brian spent the Christmas of 1978 in Alec’s new home, in Belgravia. One of Alec’s inaccessible young girls had proved accessible, and now Alec lived with her, while Alec’s wife lived with the girl’s former boyfriend. ‘Playing fathers and mothers,’ murmured Brian into his Christmas pudding. ‘Easier than husband and wife.’

But Alec’s girl made a good brandy butter and her father actually worked for the Forestry Commission and the Christmas Tree in the corner had real roots, and was dark green and bouncy, and she planned to keep it in a tub out on the balcony all year, and Brian felt a real surge of affection for both of them, and a conviction that the Western World was not tottering about on its last legs, as everyone kept saying but just, as he was, having a little rest before undergoing a transfiguration into youth, health, vigour and purpose.

Almost as if this welling up of optimism attracted real reason for it, Brian fell in love in the spring of 1979.

He could not recall ever having felt such an emotion before. What he had thought was love, he now realised had been a mixture of lust and anxiety lest the object of his lust should get away, together with a soupçon of practical worry about who was to iron his shirts and wash his socks, seasoned with a pinch of pleasure at having found someone who would listen, with attention and sympathy, to the continuing soap opera of his life. In the heat and glory of his new-found love, and in the renaissance that went with it, in the new awareness of the spiritual content of what goes on, or should go on, between man and woman, he wrote to Rea, and apologised.

Rea wrote a friendly letter back, saying she was pregnant and happy and a lot of their trouble had been his, Brian’s, womb-envy. Having babies, she said, was the real creativity: compared to this the writing of plays and the making of films must seem thin indeed. But the best a man could do.

He read the letter out to Linda, the object of his love. She nodded and smiled. She had long fair hair, and a pink and white complexion and tiny teeth and a little mouth, and a plump bosom and a plump figure all over. Little white hands; tiny feet. She was twenty-two. She was a country girl. Her voice, when she spoke, which she did only when entirely necessary, was faint and frail and female and had a gentle, seductive Devon burr. She was working, when he met her, as a waitress in an hotel in Weston-super-Mare, where Brian and a film crew were filming a chase sequence: a man on water skis being pursued by a beautiful CIA girl in a black wet suit.

Brian had expected, more or less, to bed the wet-suit girl sometime during their stay at the hotel: but when he saw Linda, standing against the window of the breakfast room, the morning sun shining behind her hair, silhouetting her sweet, pensive face, he lost all interest in that petty ordinary ambition. Linda brought him his orange juice, and her eyes were downcast, and he thought this is what women ought to be, and why I have had such trouble with the others: this is how my mother must have looked when she was young. Linda raised her eyes, and there was a look in them which he remembered from the Statue of the Madonna in the classroom where he’d gone for a time, when he was seven, to the Catholic school: it was of understanding, forgiveness and invitation all at once. Blue eyes beneath an alabaster brow, and the ridiculous waitress’s cap narrowing the forehead, as had the Virgin Mary’s wimple. He loved her.

‘Christ!’ said Alec. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

Brian hardly thought Alec was one to talk. ‘Listen,’ said Alec, ‘my Lisa may have been a college girl but at least she was doing English Lit and got a perfectly respectable 2-2. This girl is a waitress!’

It was only a holiday job, in actual fact. Linda’s parents, he had discovered, owned a garage in East Devon and Linda lived at home, helping out.

‘I’m glad she’s a waitress,’ said Brian. ‘I’m finally back where I belong. Amongst real people, who do real things, and live simple, honest hard-working lives.’

‘Christ!’ was all Alec would say.

During that long hot summer Brian wrote a four-part love story for television so full of sensual delights that even enemies and critics were touched, and Alec was silent, and Audrey wrote, out of the blue. ‘My God,’ said Audrey, ‘life was never like that for you and me. Wish it had been. My fault, perhaps. Helen’s training as a nurse. Shouldn’t you be using your television time to protest about low pay instead of all this full-frontal stuff?’

Still, it was better than nothing.

Linda came to live with him in London. She wouldn’t and didn’t sleep with him, though nobody believed it. She was virtuous. Her family didn’t believe it either and cast her off. She spent her time writing letters home on thin blue lined paper with purple violets round the edge. She had unformed, careful writing and her spelling was bad. He found that charming. He still had trouble spelling, himself.

Forgiveness was a long time coming.

‘I’ve let them down,’ she whispered. ‘They trusted me.’

‘Perhaps we ought to be married,’ said Brian, though he’d sworn publicly never to do anything like that again. She considered.

‘I suppose that would be nice,’ said Linda. ‘They’d forgive me, then. Oh, I do so want you to meet them! I miss my mother and my brothers so much.’

They agreed to marry at Christmas. It couldn’t be any earlier because Brian had to go to Los Angeles for three months, to work on a film. A thriller.

He half-wondered whether to take Linda, but she said firmly that she didn’t want to come. ‘I’ll stay home and arrange the wedding,’ she said. ‘Honestly, I’d rather. I don’t really fit in with your smart friends.’

‘That’s what’s so wonderful about you,’ he said. He could see that in Los Angeles, where girls were thin and leggy and bronzed, she might not appear to advantage. She liked to keep out of the sun, because it made her nose peel.

He had thought the wedding would be a Register Office affair, but Linda had set her heart on being married in a white dress with bell sleeves in the village church, and he agreed. ‘It will cost you to do it properly,’ she said, timorously. She had never asked for money before. He gave her a cheque. ‘I haven’t got a bank account,’ she said. ‘If you’re going home,’ he said, ‘your parents can cash it for you.’

‘They don’t have banks,’ she said, and he was surprised. What kind of people were they? ‘It’s only a little garage,’ she apologised.

He was pleased. He thought the peasant soil might be some kind of equivalent to the proletarian earth that afforded his early nourishment. He flew off to LA over the Pole, first class, and did not even try to date the young woman who sat next to him, who wore sneakers and had a little silver snuff box full of vitamin pills and said she was in hospitals. ‘Administration?’ he asked.