Fay Weldon - Watching Me, Watching You

‘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.