Fay Weldon - The President’s Child

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.

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.

He slept quietly. He always did. A man with a clear conscience, thought Isabel. Not weltering and hiding deep down somewhere beneath the levels of consciousness – but neatly and tidily, just below the surface, afraid of nothing because he had done no wrong. If Homer slept, what could be amiss?