Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories. Fay Weldon
didn’t seem to matter that she now had secretarial staff and untold wealth from stock—the Dree pill, which she now took herself—was becoming a kind of world staple, like cat’s-eyes in the road, and Oriole owned stock in it—you still found yourself having to do the Christmas cards at the last moment. They were sitting at the dining-room table. ‘You could let yourself off a quarter of them, Oriole,’ Clive said. ‘Since you’re a quarter Jewish you could quarter claim it wasn’t your festival.’ It wasn’t as if the brothers went to church themselves. They went to the midnight service on Christmas Eve to please their parents and that was about it. ‘I suppose I could,’ said Oriole, mildly, and at that point the third cup whistled through the air past her head and broke. The second cup was due back from the menders but hadn’t yet arrived. The area of plaster where the cups hit was ruffled and cracked. The builders would have to be got in yet again. This time no-one moved to sweep the pieces up. Hugh spoke first.
‘So it’s not a question of numbers,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s not that it wants to be three cups and six saucers, because now it’s four cups and six saucers.’
‘And it’s nothing to do with solstice or equinox,’ said Oriole, ‘because the exact solstice is tomorrow. It’s every three calendar months precisely. Make sense of that if you can. Though it could still be a statistical anomaly. Too small a sample.’
They were talking quite calmly.
‘It’s Oriole’s head they go for,’ said Clive. ‘It’s Oriole they’re
angry with. I think she’s got a poltergeist.’
‘People don’t get poltergeists as they get mumps,’ said Oriole.
‘And I’m too old. Blame Sarla if you want to blame anyone.’
But of course he wouldn’t. Sarla was sleeping with Clive. It had been on the cards for a long time. Neither of them showed any signs of moving out. Sarla went on eating in the kitchen, and Oriole went on paying her wages. It was absurd and embarrassing. Oriole had asked Clive if he meant to marry Sarla or if she, Oriole, was meant to go on paying her lawyer’s fees, and Clive had told her not to be jealous and neurotic, of course he wasn’t going to marry Sarla, or live with her, she was not his permanent cup of tea, or he hers, and to suggest they should marry to save money was surely a rather shocking thing. He and Sarla just enjoyed each other. He even said he’d learned the art of non-commitment from Hugh and Oriole, which would have upset and hurt her had she time to be hurt and upset.
‘I think Clive’s right,’ said Hugh. ‘I don’t think Sarla is the neurotic one round here.’
Betrayal! Oriole went to her bedroom and slammed the door. In her absence Sarla swept up the pieces and put them in the bin and joined the brothers for coffee. Oriole could hear them laughing. They were probably smoking more funny cigarettes, to combat the stress of the paranormal-which-could-not-be-denied. Sarla had found a reliable supplier at night school. Hugh came in and comforted her and told her how much he loved her, and said she mustn’t show her jealousy of Sarla, it was demeaning, and she’d rather upset Clive by being so mercenary. He fell asleep. She stayed awake. That was the third time.
Oriole wasn’t daft: she knew the limits of their relationship well enough. She gave Hugh what he needed, money, and he gave her what she needed, endearments. She knew she was an Essex girl made good and the brothers had been good to begin with; and that though both Hugh and she presented themselves to the world as being in love it wasn’t quite that: it just suited them both. If you asked her to choose between her job and Hugh she’d probably choose the job, just as Hugh would choose making lutes rather than her. And what was love anyway? If it existed, it did so in the same way as ghosts existed, an unreasonable anomaly in a reasonable universe. Her mother had loved her father and love it was that killed her. Her grandmother had loved her country, and loved its past, and its music, and even a stupid set of porcelain cups and saucers, far too gaudy and ornate for today’s tastes, enough to risk her life for, and what was her reward? Nothing. One daughter, dead before her time. One negligent granddaughter, and nuns at her graveside. Who will be at mine, wondered Oriole? And then she had to sleep too. She set the alarm for six-thirty.
The second cup came back with another desperate note from the restorer. Oriole had a glass cabinet made for the remaining cups and saucers. They looked better behind panes, and felt safer, and stayed quiet. She put the two extra saucers down for the cat’s milk, in an act of defiance, and noted their continuing existence with surprise. Cats’ saucers usually get trodden on, or fall from slippery hands or are knocked off steps. These ones, she supposed, were just good at survival. And the months went by and somehow they all just believed it wouldn’t happen again, except Sarla, who was clearly sceptical of their claims that the cups were self-motivating, and assumed they got thrown in a family row. And perhaps they did? Perhaps they were all just firmly in denial, as the counsellor at work whom Oriole was required to see every month—firm policy, to remove stress—assumed to be the case.
And then on Oriole’s birthday, her thirty-fourth, a whole year from the first occasion, the fourth cup came rattling out of the cabinet, breaking the glass as it came, nearer her ear than ever. Hugh and Clive insisted on calling their father the Bishop about an exorcist, the fifth cup followed, Oriole capitulated, Sarla refused to come and sweep up, and here Oriole was, sitting on the floor, picking up pieces again, while Clive and Hugh wondered if her quarter Jewishness would stop the normal procedures of the Christian Church.
Sarla, finished with Titania and the ass, deigned to come in to see what was going on. The sixth cup flew through the broken glass and whistled by her head and got the door behind her. Sarla began to shriek and wail. She sank to her knees; she called upon Allah in her extremis. Clive went to put his arms around her.
‘Get me away from here,’ Sarla wailed. ‘Stand not upon the order of our going,’ she wept into his manly jacket shoulder, over and over. ‘Stand not upon the order of our going.’ ‘Pascal’s wager,’ said Hugh to Oriole, ignoring the noise, putting down the phone. ‘Father says remember Pascal’s wager.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Oriole. Sarla stopped being noisy to say, ‘Blaise Pascal, French philosopher, Pascal’s wager. You might as well be a believer. If it’s true and you believe you don’t go to hell. If it isn’t true, there isn’t a hell to go to. You can’t lose.’
Hugh and Clive regarded Sarla with admiration: more, Oriole felt, than they had ever regarded her, Oriole, even on the occasion when she had paid over a cheque for more than a million pounds, to pay for Hugh’s new state-of-the-art workshop. She stood up and went to the phone and dialled 1471 and then 3.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Hugh.
‘I need to speak to your father the Bishop,’ she said. She did. ‘This is Oriole,’ she said, ‘the woman you are glad is not actually your daughter-in-law, but only your son’s partner while he gets through his twenties. It is not my grandmother’s cups you need to send your magicians after, or my grandmother’s ghost, or this house, or the memory of my father who went to prison, it is I who need to exorcise your son. If the ghost of my dead grandmother comes to me slapping me round my ears, sacrificing everything she ever held dear, those bloody cups, why then I need her around. I am not a quarter Jewish, I am wholly Jewish, Jewishness comes through the mother’s side, not the father’s, and I am a direct descendant through the ages back to Israel. And I am not going to let this line stop here, after all that suffering, all that clambering out of horror, generation after generation, not for the sake of a few miserable Elizabethan lutes, some ugly Flemish virginals, or the comfort and convenience of your two idle sons. Call an exorcist around if you want, but I won’t be here to receive them. I am off to find a nice Jewish boy and have a baby.’
She slammed the phone down and went upstairs and emptied the Dree pills down the loo, and took her