‘What was it Belinda used to say?’ he asked Linda one night, as they cuddled on the sofa in front of Fanny and Alexander, while Belinda made faint tap-tap-tapping noises upstairs. ‘The line from Keats. “When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” I think that’s exactly what’s happened. It’s an exact, gruesome description of what’s happened to her. Her brain is still teeming, but she has completely ceased to be.’
So the last time Belinda saw Stefan was at the funeral. It was the last time she had seen anybody except Linda, now she came to think of it. Maggie had been there, with the lumbering sports writer from Viv’s dinner party. Viv had attended, too, and even said a few words in the chapel, which was fitting, since Viv and Mother had always hit it off. She said Mother was a fighter, a trooper, who defied the tides of time. It made her sound like Horatius holding the bridge, not an ungenerous old woman who refused to have crow’s feet. Everyone was terrifically impressed.
As a parting gift to her vain parent, Belinda chose to have an open casket for Mother, to show off the features that had cost so much, and that had finally settled so nicely into a beautiful face. All Mother’s old friends were invited, so they could admire the handiwork for one last time and gnaw the pews with envy. The biggest shock had been seeing Auntie Vanessa, whose naturally ageing features had operated as a kind of Dorian Gray picture for Mother – showing precisely her alternative fate. One need hardly point out, of course, that with all her lines and saggy bits, Auntie Vanessa looked fine.
Meanwhile ‘Age Shall Not Wither Her’ was the chosen epitaph for the headstone, which had the benefit on this occasion of being literally true, and a kind of coded warning to future grave-diggers. Her undertakers agreed. Like the tanner discussed in Hamlet, Mother’s facial construction would last in the ground nine years.
Over tea, Belinda had kept her veils on and watched how Jago made such a strange fuss of Stefan. Linda explained to her that the ‘boys’ had met by chance in Malmö and become firm friends. Aside from that, the funeral was socially a disappointment. Maggie and Viv both kept their distance; Stefan did not comfort her. She rather wished she hadn’t come. But then Stefan chose his moment beautifully and read aloud a haunting poem by his favourite chap Tranströmer.
As always at funerals when people read poems, there was a lot of shrugging and coughing. But Belinda loved it. Her squeeze of congratulation when he resumed his seat was the last time she’d touched him. She’d have squeezed him longer, if she’d known.
And now it was June, Linda was pregnant, and Belinda weighed fourteen stone. She hated all the academic books around her, and longed to write a Verity story, for a bit of excitement. But Linda had started writing them, to general acclaim, so what was the point? The publisher loved all the new developments in Linda’s first draft. As Belinda quickly acknowledged, Linda had combined the original simple tone with a more sophisticated psychological insight – for example, explaining with bold strokes the pain of childhood rejection that drove Verity’s rival Camilla to be so selfish. Linda had also (another bold stroke) killed off Goldenboy, Verity’s number-one pony.
‘You can’t!’ gasped Belinda, as she read it, weeping for the loyal pony, who rolled his eyes just one last time as he lay on his straw and offered a hoof of farewell. The fictional death of Goldenboy was as devastating to Belinda as the real death of her own mother. Tears rained down her cheeks. As always, however, she had to admit that Linda was right. Sentiment and complacency were all that had detained Goldenboy from this, his best ever fictional moment. Why had she never seen it? This horse was born to die! The postbag would be enormous.
Belinda wished she had some magazines to read. All these hours to kill, day after day, while Linda and Stefan assumed she was writing the magnum opus. Perhaps she could take up nail-painting. She wondered what they would think if they knew her favourite pastime was seeing how many pencils she could retain comfortably in the folds of her body and still move from one side of the attic to the other. Her personal best was twenty-two.
Unconditional love was what she had, though. She derived much comfort from that. This might look like a crummy life to anyone who didn’t understand. But it came from, and amounted to, unconditional love. A dozen times a day she reread the poem Stefan had read at the funeral, pondering it. The whole of life and death was in it, in a gloomy Swedish kind of way. And she didn’t mind thinking about death, particularly. Because here was another obstacle (the ultimate one) that Linda had thoughtfully cleared from her path. In the corner was a little box of medical, anaesthetizing stuff – bottles, needles, masks. It was left over from Linda’s days at the hospital, when she was Viv. Belinda gazed at it for hours at a time, thinking about the oblivion it offered.
‘If you ever want to go,’ Linda said solemnly, one night, ‘I’ll help you. There’s no greater love than that, Belinda. No greater love.’
Sometimes she dreamt of Stefan rescuing her from her attic, as if it were a fairy tale. He would climb up the outside wall, and burst in. He would kiss her and wake her from a sleep of years; shake her till the piece of poisoned apple dislodged; shatter the mirror from side to side.
But it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t a princess held in a tower by some magic spell. She was a fat woman in Battersea with no friends who was perfectly at liberty to come downstairs.
Twelve
Maggie rolled her eyes to heaven and said, in her deepest voice, ‘Moscow!’ It felt good. She said it again. ‘Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!’
Leon applauded. ‘That’s very good,’ he said.
Maggie sat down, still studying her text. ‘You don’t think the middle one should be like a question?’ she asked, nibbling her pencil. ‘As if she’s saying “Yes! Moscow!” then has a doubt, “But do I really know what Moscow means? What if I don’t like Moscow when I get there?” and then, “No, Moscow’s fine, I’ll settle for Moscow”?’
‘I think the three howls were better. You can be too complicated, you know.’
‘OK.’
Maggie made a note in the margin of her Three Sisters. The first day of rehearsals was tomorrow. In her experience, it was quite important to decide at this stage whether Irina really, really wanted to go to Moscow, or had already got bored with the idea, and was just saying it.
‘Talking of Moscow, did I tell you I covered the world skateboarding championships in Red Square last summer?’
‘You might have done. I don’t remember.’
Leon shrugged. It was clear that Maggie had not yet learnt to be fascinated by the astonishing global impact of American sports.
‘Well,’ she said, rather unkindly, ‘you won’t be doing that any more.’
‘No.’
‘This is such a sad play,’ she declared, at last.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Leon. ‘They never make it to Moscow.’
‘That’s right.’ Maggie was impressed.
‘Is it far?’
‘Oh. I don’t know.’
‘Is there a train?’
‘I think so.’
‘Why don’t they go, then?’
‘Oh, you know how it is. I remember hearing an interview on Radio 4 with some people in a ticket queue in Leicester Square, once. A man and his wife, hoping to see Cats. The interviewer asked him if he often came to London, and he said proudly, “Twice a year, yes. We take in a show, and have a meal. Quite a ritual.” “Where do you live?” asked the interviewer. And you know what he said? “Wimbledon.”’
You had to hand it to Maggie. Once Leon had turned up on her doorstep from Malmö and uttered those epiphanous (if baffled) words, ‘Hang on, what’s my brother doing here?’, it had taken Maggie just a few minutes to cast Noel from her life. What a heel that man was. He was Leon’s brother? All along he’d known she wasn’t deluded? Maggie opened the front door to find the two men colliding on the step: Leon in a rather fetching fur hat with ear-flaps, holding a presentation pack of gravad lax and an enormous Toblerone; Noel l
ooking shifty in his old leather jacket, with a small ball of string. Sadly, her Shakespearean double-take training let her down once more, but at least she didn’t faint. Instead of crying, ‘Most wonderful!’ at the sight of the Confusingly Similar Brothers, she just summoned up all her non-Shakespearean instincts and spat in Noel’s eye.
‘That’s very good string,’ he told her, as she snatched it and shut the door on him. ‘I can explain all this,’ he continued, through the letterbox. ‘It’s only because you are so fatally insecure that you can’t cope with this without resorting to aggression, Margaret!’
The string found a use quite quickly, as it happened. With Leon’s help, Maggie parcelled up all the insulting presents Noel had given her, and dispatched them to Julia without explanation. She reasoned that a trained psychoanalyst was surely capable of working out the connection between a pound of spuds, a dartboard with no numbers on it (evidently found in a skip), and three sample-size bottles of perfume (evidently Julia’s own free gift with lipsticks, purloined from the bathroom cabinet.)
She hadn’t wanted to hurt Julia. But on the other hand, short of hiring an assassin, this was the best way of breaking out of therapy that the human mind had yet devised. As a clinger, Julia could give lessons to barnacles. But now, with a single bound, Maggie was free. Free to stop maundering on; free to spend her therapy money on jackets and magazines and catfood; and, most importantly, free to survey the ravaged building site of her psyche and rebuild at her own speed.
And she made very short work of it, in fact. Didn’t even bother with scaffolding. By the time she decided to become an item with the faithful Leon, just three days later, her psyche was virtually ready for carpeting. Fully roofed, it smelt of fresh magnolia emulsion, and was only waiting for the pointing in the chimney-stack to dry. True, Maggie’s psyche was slightly wobbly, and some of the windows didn’t open, but at least it was habitable once more.
‘How can you do this to Julia?’ Noel objected, on the phone.
‘Bugger off,’ said Maggie.
‘Think of yourself, Maggie. You’re not a viable personality! You need us! You need me!’
‘Give your Bombay mix to some other poor sap,’ she pronounced, with dignity, and slammed down the phone. Jettisoning Noel, she felt not only jubilant but intensely theatrical. Were she ever to get the role of Nora in A Doll’s House, she would draw on the emotion she felt right now. How marvellous. Were Ibsen alive today, she felt ‘Give your Bombay mix to some other poor sap’ was exactly the sort of line he would be writing.
‘Linda and Stefan have invited us to dinner tomorrow,’ she told Leon now. It was a rainy Monday, and they had been together nearly three months, living at her flat.
Leon stroked Ariel, while trying to read a sports section. ‘OK.’ He winced, involuntarily, and fingered his hair. ‘Can I watch Wimbledon, if the rain stops?’
‘You don’t like them much, do you? Linda and Stefan?’
‘Well, you can’t help noticing a pattern. Stefan’s first wife is locked up in an institution. His second wife is locked up in the attic. And nobody cares about either of them.’
‘She’s not locked up in the attic. She wants to be up there. Did you know Viv tried to see her the other day, and Belinda told her to fuck off? You surely don’t think any of this was Linda’s idea?’
Leon harumphed. It all seemed pretty obvious to him. As they said in one of his favourite movies, ‘Follow the money.’ Belinda had a wretched, lonely, anonymous existence; Linda posed on magazine covers with her arm round Antonia Fraser. But then he was a very straightforward kind of chap. Malmö had been a perplexing time for him, what with getting the sack for something he hadn’t written. He never understood what had happened there. All he knew was that it was his own fault for deserting his post, that Tanner came out of it with a promotion, and that he still felt sorry for Ingrid.
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it,’ said Maggie, ‘and it seems clear to me that Belinda is the Superego in that house.’
‘The Superego? Maggie, don’t.’ Leon hugged the fluffy racing car and picked at it. ‘You promised. It makes you sound like Noel.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘Dad really did know Bobby Moore, you know. He wasn’t making it up. I met someone once who saw them together in the car park at Anfield.’
‘But I’m not a bit like Noel. He accuses everybody of being mad. I don’t do that.’
‘No.’
‘I observe things, that’s all. And I can’t help seeing that Linda is the Ego, and Ingrid is the Id.’
‘Please don’t!’ Leon put his hands over his ears.
‘Sorry.’ She came and kissed his head, then settled down to read her text again.
‘Do you think it’s supposed to be funny that Irina can’t remember the Italian for “window”?’
‘What does she say exactly?’
Maggie found the place.
‘“And now I can’t even remember the Italian for ‘window’!” The direction says “With tears in her eyes”.’
‘That’s definitely funny.’
‘Good.’
Whether or not Belinda was happy did not much worry Viv any more. She had known for ages what was going on in Armadale Road, and had long since ceased to care. Mrs Holdsworth brought her regular juicy news – about the burgeoning affair between Linda and Stefan, about a holiday in New Zealand the happy couple were planning, about the baby (of course) and the celebrity phone calls. Viv hated to admit it, but she rather approved of the Johanssons’ arrangement. People should do the things they are good at. And, in her opinion, Belinda was good at being selfish and lazy, and letting other people take the strain of the practical stuff.
No, what had sent Viv scurrying up Belinda’s loft-ladder was not sympathy or friendship, but alarm. Because she had just heard from Dermot. Her ghastly lover said he could no longer endure to be silent about the hospital scam. Every morning he woke from dreams of Linda in a surgical mask, advancing with a foot-long syringe, something like an antique enema pipe – and he just couldn’t take it any more. He wanted justice, he said. He would shortly be ‘doing something about it’.
What could Dermot do? He could tell the police, inform the hospital. Either way, Belinda ought to know that Linda was about to be exposed, and very probably arrested. But, of course, Viv’s visit was thwarted by a torrent of Mars bars, and the message did not get through. In fact, the only consequence of her action was that her spy was sacked – Linda guessing, rightly, that Mrs Holdsworth had admitted Viv to the house.
‘I’m going to have to let you go,’ Linda told an affronted Mrs H, on the phone. ‘I can’t possibly put up with disloyalty. Please come to the house tomorrow, and drop off your keys while I’m out.’
Which was how it came about that, on the same rainy Monday, Mrs Holdsworth did a fine and glorious thing. As a parting gesture, she collected up all Linda’s ‘Up the Duff’ columns and delivered them to the attic.
Belinda was lying on her stomach, with her arms at her side, practising her noiseless weeping technique, when Mrs Holdsworth’s head poked through the trap-door. Work-wise, all Belinda had achieved that day was ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’, repeated twenty-eight times. So she had got down on the floor, as usual – to think, and to feel sorry for herself, and to weep secretly for her deceased mum, and to gaze at the box in the corner with all the syringes and things. Objectively speaking, it was indeed the right time for all good men to come to the aid of this party. All Belinda got, however, was Mrs Holdsworth.
‘Mrs Holdsworth?’ said Belinda, rolling over to sit up, and wiping her eyes. ‘Are you OK on that ladder? You don’t fancy a chat, do you? Come on up!’
Mrs Holdsworth pursed her lips and looked around at the piles of dusty books, her employer impersonating a baby seal on an ice floe. ‘Are you fucking having a laugh?’
Belinda thought quickly. ‘It’s just that I’ve been lying here wondering – er, wh
y men have nipples. Any ideas?’
But Mrs Holdsworth merely set down the columns, dismounted the ladder, and left the house for ever. Belinda heard her cough and slam the front door, and the sound of departure made her sad. There was a time when the departure of Mrs Holdsworth would have been like having a nail removed from her head. How strangely life turned out. Recently, Belinda had been remembering the nice man from British Telecom – was his name Graham? Fancy ringing afterwards to check that she was all right. What a nice man. She was wondering if he would fancy a chat about Friends and Family. Ah, yes, friends and family. He might even be able to advise her on how to get some.
‘Give me some days!’ she had said to him. It was hard to believe she had ever felt like that, now that she had day after day after day. At her funeral, to which she had recently devoted much thought, she’d decided to have the congregation sing along to the old Kinks record, where Ray Davies says ‘Thank you for the days’. Linda would understand. Linda was so wise.
Humming and snivelling some more, Belinda gave a cursory glance to the columns, with her own name blazoned across the top and a smiling picture of Linda. Should she read them? Did she have the intellectual energy? Lying there on her chest, she hadn’t really been dwelling on the enigma of the male nipple. Really she had been exploring a dream, a dream she’d first had on meeting Linda; a dream in which she’d been gently placed inside a washing-machine, there to float happily in the soapy, sloppy water, occasionally tapping on the glass as the drum rolled her right and left, left and right. ‘Hello?’ she’d called to Stefan, but he’d been absorbed in his breakfast. ‘Hello?’
She remembered what her husband had said to her at the time. What would happen when the spin cycle started?