Authors: Fay Weldon
The Ted Dreams (16 page)
W
e hope you enjoyed this novella.
The Ted Dreams
is part of the forthcoming
Mischief
collection. In
Mischief
, Fay Weldon selects and introduces her favourite short stories from across her career as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary novelists. Waspish, wise and wickedly witty, this is a collection to treasure forever.
Mischief will be released in February 2015
For an exclusive preview of Fay Weldon’s classic
Growing Rich
, read on or click
here
.
For more information, click one of the links below:
An invitation from the publisher
R
ead on for a preview of
Carmen is sixteen when she catches Bernard Bellamy’s eye. Unfortunately for Carmen, Bernard has just made a deal with the devil: his mortal soul in exchange for the fulfilment of all his desires. And he wants Carmen to be his wife. Carmen is not so easily swayed, but can she resist all the obstacles – and temptations – the devil can throw at her?
Annie, Laura and Carmen, in the week before their exams began, bunked off school and went down to sit on the banks of Sealord Brook – the very same stream which ran through the grounds of Bellamy House Hotel where it was being widened to provide a jet-ski pond – to lick their wounds, lament their fate, and wonder why they were all so suddenly thus afflicted. Down here the great hairy willowherb –
Epilobium hirsutium –
grows, and marsh valerian, and milk parsley, and sometimes – in the month of May — swallowtail butterflies hover and dance. It was a bright, bright afternoon and it was difficult to feel miserable, but they tried.
‘We’re not going to pass,’ said Laura.
‘We’re going to let Mrs Baker down,’ said Annie.
‘We’ll never get out of here,’ said Carmen. ‘We’ll have to take local jobs and marry local boys.’
‘That’s if we’re lucky. Who’s ever going to marry me?’ said Annie, and it was true that in those days, when other girls are at their prettiest, a kind of unbearable plainness suffused her, a muddiness of complexion, a puffiness of skin, a lankness of hair. Or perhaps it was just depression. Carmen and Annie stared at their friend and could see that she was indeed a worry.
‘There’s always someone for everyone,’ said Laura comfortingly.
‘You’re okay,’ said Annie. ‘You’ve got Woodie.’
And so it seemed Laura had, one way or another. Woodie had returned not as suitor but as family friend, to be supportive in the bad times which followed her parents’ separation. He was kind to Audrey, in the lordly charitable way of very young men who cannot understand what all the fuss is about, and brotherly to Laura. He even once persuaded Audrey to go to the cinema with him in spite of the stomach pains which made her think she’d just rather sit at home and suffer. Her doctor, Dr Grafton, the one who sees illness as God’s punishment for lack of serenity, told her the pains were due to stress and she should pull herself together, eat more and cheer up.
‘All I’ve got,’ said Annie, ‘is Count Capinski saying come here my little milkmaid and chasing me round the kitchen.’
‘You’re making it up,’ said Carmen.
‘He did it once,’ said Annie. ‘He did.’
‘Your mother ought to see a counsellor,’ said Carmen.
‘She
is
the counsellor,’ said Annie, and laughed, and looked better at once.
‘We’ll all get jobs and save up so you can have a nose job,’ said Carmen.
‘It’s not how you look that matters in the world,’ said Laura primly, ‘it’s your personality,’ but they all knew it wasn’t so: that was just the kind of thing people told them. Would Prince Charles have married Lady Di if she hadn’t been pretty?
Annie said, ‘The only good thing that happened all last week was that while Count Capinski was having yet another bath – he’s the only one allowed to use all the hot water he wants, because of the dungeon – he had this kind of flash from heaven that a horse called Yellowhammer was going to win the three o’clock at Newmarket. So Mum leapt out of the bath and went to find Dad – she didn’t even wrap herself in a towel – and told him to put a ten-pound bet to win. Dad doesn’t believe in gambling, so I had to go all the way to the betting shop. And Yellowhammer won. And then I had to go all the way back again to pick up the winnings. Two hundred and twenty pounds. They only gave me two. The rest went to the Temple of Healing Light. That’s the Wednesday afternoon do; it’s half-price when the rich pay for the poor. Dad says no one should benefit from gambling.’
‘If the Count can predict the future,’ said Carmen, ‘and if you asked him nicely, would he give us our exam questions? Then at least we’d know what to revise.’
‘I expect he’d want to steal a kiss,’ said Annie. ‘I hate the way he puts things. I’m really glad I didn’t live in the past, if that was what it was all like.’
‘A kiss is a small price to pay,’ said Carmen, ‘for our key to a successful future. Look at it as a mother’s kiss.’ Annie just stared at her, so Carmen said, ‘Well, we’ll all go then, or at any rate we’ll think about it.’
And they put their plan on ice for a whole twenty-four hours.
Now I had checked various Count Capinskis out with the help of the Fenedge Mobile Library, soon to be demobilised, and had indeed traced a fairly nasty specimen of Capinski back to fourteenth-century Cracow. This one seemed to be some kind of early Polish Rasputin, a man alleged to be both a practitioner in the black arts and the Queen’s lover; he had led a general uprising against the King, burned alive a church full of people, and been thrown into a bottle dungeon and left there to languish, since the general belief was that to put a magician to death would merely increase his powers. It is perfectly possible – though not likely – that Mavis had read the same book —
Bad Men in History
— and absorbed its contents unconsciously, as those people are said to do who are regressed by hypnosis into remembering the lives they believe they lived before death. The history books and chronicles used to check out their stories turn out to be the very ones which initiated the fantasy in the first place: what is occurring is a kind of living plagiarism. I do not believe Mavis consciously deceived her family and clients when she spoke with the Count’s voice; nor do I believe he was really in there with her; she just thought and acted as if he was. She and he had been over on occasion to try to heal my legs; she would lay on hands and I would feel the familiar healer’s tingle, and the Count would invoke the Powers of Light in his guttural broken English, but nothing of a healing nature ever actually happened. But Mavis did it out of the goodness of her heart: she came over with the Count several times and didn’t charge a penny for it. And at the time I for one, in spite of the Count’s historic past, had quite grown to trust him. Mavis said he was company for her while Alan was away; Alan said he added class to the Temple of Light; and as for Annie’s allegations, well, girls as plain as Annie are prone to sexual fantasy. And something had to be done. Matters were going from bad to worse. Mrs Baker summoned Annie, Carmen and Laura to her office. Their essays on Lady Macbeth were in front of her.
‘What is the matter with you three?’ Mrs Baker demanded. ‘You use family trouble as an excuse for idleness. It’s disgraceful. If you do that now, what chance have you got later on in life, when you have husbands and children? The brightest girls I have, and their heads emptied out of
all sense, all information! You are on the road to self-destruction. If you do not get to college you will be dependent on a man forever, for the wage of an untrained female is never enough to keep her in dignity or comfort. So you will marry, and what is marriage, as George Bernard Shaw said, but legalised slavery? Unpaid work in return for your keep, attended by daily humiliations. Who gets the best piece of steak, the only egg in the fridge? He does! He’s bigger than you and more powerful than you, and he allows you to wheedle and charm a little pleasure from him now and then, and the law offers you a little protection, it’s true, but not much. All you have to bind him with are chains of love and duty, and they’re pretty flimsy, believe you me.
‘And don’t tell me,’ added Mrs Baker, ‘that the world has changed since I was young, for it hasn’t.’
The three girls stared at her, unconvinced. And Mrs Baker looked from one to another of them and picked at the layers of dusty black fabric she wore and said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking if you pass exams you’ll end up like me. I tell you this, you pass exams and end up like me if
you’re lucky.
’
Still they stared.
‘Life is
short
,’
said Mrs Baker, ‘and life is shit,’ and stalked out of the room.
And that clinched it. The next day Annie, Carmen and Laura sat in Mavis’s hall on the row of chairs kept for patients, and waited. On the door handle of the front room hung a notice which said ‘TEMPLE OF HEALING – DO NOT DISTURB’.
‘Fancy having to line up to see my own mother in my own house,’ said Annie.
‘Look at it this way,’ said Carmen. ‘It’s not your mum you have to see, it’s Count Capinski.’
‘I want my mum back,’ said Annie. She was near to tears, and Laura was not happy either.
‘It feels like cheating to me,’ she said. ‘I expect this was what my dad felt like while waiting for an assignation with Poison Poppy.’
The others felt it would be unkind to contradict her.
The Temple door opened and an elderly man with a florid face limped out. He was smiling. ‘She’s a wonder,’ he said to the girls. ‘It’s a miracle. I am completely cured. And that Count is such a gent. He adds real tone to Fenedge. He says you can go in now.’
And in they went and Mavis looked up from the hard chair in which she sat enthroned alone in the room, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you three. What do you want? We’re doing Temple. It’s very tiring,’ and then the Count spoke from her lips: ‘Never too busy for your daughter and her charming friends, dear lady. What can I do for you today? Warts, arthritis, colds in the nose? Puppy fat, a thing of the past! God sends his healing power through me, into this blissful age of plenty.’
‘We just want a little glimpse of the future, Count,’ said Carmen.
‘We want to know what questions will come up in our exams.’
‘The nerve of it!’ said Mavis. ‘That’s cheating.’
‘Nem problemi,’ said the Count, in the same breath, quite crowding out Mavis’s disapproval, and a voice which they recognised as Mrs Quaker’s of the French department referred them to Flaubert and the justification or otherwise of Madame Bovary’s suicide, and Tom Ellis (History) suggested they compare the Corn Law and the Poll Tax riots, and Mrs Baker (English) said forget Banquo and concentrate on Lady Macbeth, and so on throughout the range of their subjects while Carmen took notes.
Now we must remember Mavis had once or twice been to Open Evenings at the school and had encountered most of Annie’s teachers at one time or another, so these revelations, this speaking in the living voice of others, may have been the real thing, a genuine exercise of clairvoyance, or it may have been a mixture of hysteria, exhaustion and mimicry. I will not say malice, for Mavis was not malicious, or only unconsciously so. I cannot answer for the Count. But incarceration in Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century can’t have done much for his temperament.
After some twenty minutes the Count’s voice seemed to run down; like a tape on a sticky spool, it became slower and slower and deeper and deeper and finally stopped, and Mavis slumped over the table. The girls filed out.
‘I wish she were someone else’s mother, not mine,’ said Annie, but Laura and Carmen said they envied anyone whose mother could tell the future: Annie must not look a gift horse in the mouth. They were all elated. It seemed to them they had their ticket to leave, their escape route clean out of Dullsville, Tennessee.
So elated were they, so word-perfect by the end of the week in the questions suggested by their favourite man, the Count, but not so perfect as not to build in sufficient difference of phrase to avoid the charge of cheating, that the night before their first exam – in English Literature – they felt they could well afford to go to the disco.
I know that three girls going to a disco when they shouldn’t is not the stuff of drama in Chicago, USA, but here in Fenedge it is of significance. And perhaps Fenedge is in some way pivotal to the great cosmic conflicts of good and evil — not for nothing did Driver patrol the flatlands in his big black silky car; for all he described himself as Sir Bernard Bellamy’s chauffeur, I reckon that was just a front. A kind of idle occupation, to snaffle a soul or so, while thinking of other things. It is tempting to believe one is always at the heart of things, even in Fenedge, East Anglia, central to the drama – even creating it – when actually one is in all likelihood just some bit part player, at the very edges of the stage. I will be humble.
