Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories. Fay Weldon
the crack and the sharp splintery sound you somehow didn’t forget, and the kind of stillness afterwards, as if everything sat extra quiet and wary.
‘That cup can’t have done that by itself,’ said Hugh, the first to speak. ‘Perhaps there was some kind of vibration.’
‘I did just turn the heating up,’ said Oriole. The first instinct, it seemed, was to deny that anything untoward had happened. ‘The plumbers were a nightmare.’
So they had been. A steam shower had struck them as strange and unnecessary, and a Jacuzzi bath for two as insane, and they’d fitted the plumbing in accordance with the adjectives in their heads. Oriole had had to threaten them with court action. There were no pipes running anywhere near the dresser but she didn’t want to think about that. Or that the cup hadn’t slipped and fallen, but had somehow got out of its saucer and hurtled itself across the room in an arc that swooped low past her ear and then rose to a higher point to hit the wall.
‘Could be subsidence,’ said Clive.
‘Could be,’ said Oriole. ‘If so, I’ll sue the surveyors.’
‘She would too,’ said Hugh proudly, and because Oriole was tired went to get a dustpan and brush. Oriole said the cup would have to go to be restored: Hugh thought it was beyond repair, but Oriole pointed out that a set of six Meissen cups and saucers in fine condition—at least to date—was truly rare and valuable and you had to measure them in thousands, not hundreds, of pounds.
‘Nothing should be measured by money,’ said Hugh.
‘I thought your parents were poor,’ said Clive. ‘If as you say your father stole to support the family and keep you in school uniform, shouldn’t he have sold the cups?’
‘They were my grandmother’s,’ said Oriole. ‘All she had of the past. She carried them over the mountains on foot, pregnant with my mother, and kept them safe.’
‘Then that’s understandable,’ said Clive, agreeably. ‘Though I’m afraid your gran had a very Mittel-European taste.’ Hugh said Oriole didn’t much like going into family history, and one way and another in the gentle wrangling the event got lost. It was isolated. Just something that happened. Except Hugh, picking up the pieces, had hurt his finger. Oriole asked Sarla to be careful when she dusted the dresser, and not to get the cups too near to the edge of the shelf in future. Then they forgot about it. There was too much else for everyone to think about.
The second time it happened was at the autumn equinox. They were eating in the dining room. The first cup had come back from the restorers that very day, accompanied by a little note saying what a particularly lovely piece it was and if she was interested in selling the set she knew a buyer who could house it appropriately. More or less suggesting that Oriole wasn’t a responsible owner of valuable antiques. So she and Sarla moved the whole set onto the sideboard in the dining room, being careful to place it safely well back against the wall. They were eating a lentil and carrot bake—Hugh and Clive had lately become vegetarians. That was okay by Oriole. These days she ate more than enough First Class protein on various airlines every week to satisfy her carnivorous needs outside the home. And Sarla bought steak for herself, which she ate in the kitchen. Clive had asked Sarla to join them in the dining room since she was now so much one of the family, but she wouldn’t. She liked to read novels while she ate.
‘Lucky old Sarla,’ Oriole said somewhat bitterly, over the lentil bake. ‘All I ever get time to read is company reports.’ ‘It’s your choosing,’ said Hugh. ‘We’re all free to do as we like in this world. And we are what we choose.’
Sometimes Chinese government officials would speak like that, in riddles, which somehow placed them firmly in occupation of the moral high ground, so if you weren’t careful you ended up giving more than you got.
‘And I’m the one who employs her,’ said Oriole, ‘so I’m the one who ought to ask her to join us at table, not anyone else,’ and there was a shocked silence while the brothers looked at her. ‘You don’t own people because you pay them,’ said Hugh. Tell that to Dree Pharmaceuticals, thought Oriole. ‘It’s just nice to have a woman around at mealtimes,’ said Clive. ‘And you know you’re so often away. Don’t be so dog in the manger, Oriole.’
And she was just thinking she might have been married to both of them, except she only went to bed with one of them, the way they both kept telling her what to say and do, when the second cup took off, a flash of gold glittering in the air, in its unnatural arc, and smashed. This time Oriole spoke first.
‘If that’s the one just back from the restorers I shall scream. Do you know what she charged me? Four hundred and eighty-three pounds.’
‘Oh, money, money, money,’ said Hugh. ‘No wonder things in this house don’t lie quiet.’
He was pale. The wound on his finger hurt quite a lot. It had lately given him septicaemia, and a couple of days in hospital, and Oriole found herself obscurely blamed, for not having just thrown the cup away in the first place but insisted on having it restored. Yet the brothers were the ones who valued the past. Their past, that was the trouble, just not hers.
‘Perhaps this is an earthquake zone,’ said Clive. ‘You do get minor shakes in this part of the country.’
‘A group illusion,’ said Hugh. ‘It must be. And we have been smoking funny cigarettes.’ Well, the brothers had. Oriole didn’t touch the stuff. She was allergic to marijuana: just the whiff of it could give her vertigo. They were careful not to blow smoke in her direction but didn’t offer to stop smoking. It soothed their nerves after a stressful day in the workshop. And it had been rather stressful lately; Sarla had told her in her now almost perfect English, last time Oriole had arrived home from a trip abroad. At a certain stage the wood used in making lutes has to be steam-heated and softened, to be curved into shape, and the damp and the heat would cause the wound to open up again and widen. Clive had tried to take over the process from his brother—that was the point of sharing the workshop, so they could help each other—but he wasn’t good at it. Virginals are foursquare and sharp-angled and straight-sided, nothing more than boxes, really. Clive was too strong and sudden: the wood felt the reproach and cracked and broke. To each brother his skill. And an orchestra called Early Ensemble were to do a major performance of Monteverdi’s l’Incoronazione di Poppea in Athens, and were waiting for delivery, and might start thinking about another, inferior, supplier. It was not the money that mattered, it was the loss to music.
The mended cup had stayed in place. A perfect one had self-destructed. Oriole picked up the pieces.
‘If you’re not careful,’ she said to the five cups and six saucers which remained, ‘I’ll put you in a bank vault to keep you safe, and you’ll never see the light of day again’. And she thought she heard a kind of sighing in the air, and wondered where she had heard it before. Her blind, blank grandmother, not telling day from night, friend from foe, the bad times from the good, not any more, would sometimes sigh like that. She didn’t say this to the brothers. If personalities survived, at what age did you reconstruct? Did you drift round as you departed the world, an old lady with no mind left, but supported in comfort by your granddaughter, or as the young pregnant girl who escaped from Germany, on foot over the Alps into Spain, carrying a bulky paper parcel? When the times were bad as they could be, but at least you had your youth, and a future if only you could secure it? And would her grandmother come back to haunt, or to help? Was she more pleased to have the comfort of the home, at the end, or displeased because Oriole had put her in a convent and failed to visit her enough? The nuns said she wasn’t conscious of the passing of time, and didn’t recognise her, she should not bother, and she hadn’t, and she should have, and it was too late. She almost wished the cup would get her like a slap around the ear, instead of just missing each time. It was odd how accepting you felt at the time these things were happening. Only afterwards did fright set in. That cup too went off to the restorers: you couldn’t let it get away with it, whatever either of the its might be. The brothers put it down to too much dope, and cut down.