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The Cloning of Joanna May
A Novel
By Fay Weldon OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1989 Fay Weldon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1267-5
CHAPTER 1
This has been a year of strange events: some wonderful, some terrible.
In the autumn a great wind swept through my garden one night, and toppled two oaks, three maples and a chestnut tree, all top-heavy with wet leaves, rooted in sodden earth. Had the gale come a week later the leaves would have been gone and the trees no doubt survived: a week earlier and the earth would have been dry and the roots steadier, and all would have been well. As it was, the chestnut crashed through the conservatory and set off all the alarms, which joined with the sound of the gale to frighten me out of my wits, so that I would have telephoned Carl, my ex-husband, and forthwith begged for his forgiveness and the restoration of his protection, but as the chestnut had brought down the wires I couldn't. By the morning the wind had died down and I, Joanna May, was my proper self again, or thought I was.
I went out into the garden and studied the sorry fallen giants, their earthy boles pointing unnaturally skyward, their scuttling insect population stricken by sudden cold and light: and wondered if there was any way of yanking them to their feet again, resettling them in the soil, making good what had been spoiled, but Oliver, my gardener and lover, told me there was not. The truth had to be faced—the trees were finished. That was the end of them: now all they could do was slowly die. I found myself weeping and that was very strange, and wonderful.
And that evening when preparing for bed I looked into my mirror and saw the face of an old woman looking back at me, and that was very strange and terrible. I attended to this apparition at once with astringent masks, moisturizing creams and make-up, and by the time Oliver padded into my bedroom on bare young feet with earthy nails, I, Joanna May, looked almost myself again; but there is no avoiding this truth either—that the task of rehabilitation will get more difficult year by year. Most things get easier the more they are done—but not this. The passage of time makes fools of us all.
I said as much to Oliver and he replied, 'Well, you're sixty, and should be used to it by now,' which is easy enough to say when you are twenty-eight, as he was. Personally I had expected to live for ever, frozen in time at the age of, say, thirty. 'I don't mind how old you are,' said Oliver that night, 'let alone how old you look. It's you I love.'
'Love' I could understand, but what did he mean by this 'you'? Small children (so I'm told) start out by confusing 'me' with 'you'. Addressed so frequently as 'you', their clever little minds work out that this must be their name. 'You cold,' they say, shivering, as the wind blows through the window. 'Not you,' comes the response, 'me.' 'Me cold,' says the child, obligingly. Presently the little thing progresses to the gracious 'I am cold.' But is the 'me', the 'I', really the same as that initial 'you' with which we all begin; the sudden bright consciousness of the self as something defined by others? Perhaps we did better in our initial belief, that the shivering cold is jointly experienced, something shared. I wonder.
Well, well, we will see. And as so often happens, the events that ensued ensured that I did see. Any enquiry, however primitive, this 'you' of ours manages to formulate in its mind as to the nature of reality, is met at once by such an eager response from that reality, such a convulsion of events, as to suggest that its only function is to provide us with examples, illustrations, of propositions that occur to the mind. Like Directory Enquiries, existing only to be asked, there to be consulted.
By the end of that year of strange events, I can tell you, when I looked in a mirror, I saw a face that would need a great deal more than a jar of wrinkle-cream and some exfoliator to bring it back to order. I was indeed old. Having children makes you old. It is the price we pay for immortality. God's last laugh, imposing this extra penalty on mankind before he flew off, leaving time the murderer behind, just waiting.
CHAPTER 2
The great October wind frightened Jane Jarvis, aged thirty. It howled and raged outside her attic window, and quivered the panes until one of them actually cracked and shattered; then it swept in and around the room, bringing wet and cold with it. Rain spattered the TV screenplay she was sitting up late to read for Home Box-Office, and the wind somehow pried the sheets loose from their binder and swept them into the air and fluttered them round the room. Jane Jarvis thought the wind was alive: that it was some kind of vengeful spirit: that it whined and whinnied like the ghost of her aborted baby, long ago. She went into her bedroom and shut the door on the wind and the manuscript—not one she would recommend, in any case—and tried to sleep, but could not. She considered the temporary nature of all things, including her own life, and panicked, and rang her live-out lover Tom when she heard the clock strike three to say she'd changed her mind, he could be a live-in lover, they'd have a baby, but no one answered and by the morning prudence and courage had re-established themselves in her head and heart. She tacked strong polythene over the broken window; there would be a long wait for a glazier. The streets of London glittered with slivers of broken glass.
'You don't need me at all,' said Tom. 'You're self-sufficient.'
'I need you for some things,' she said, in the lingering sensuous voice that came so oddly from her rather thin, ladylike lips, 'of course I do. It's just I'd be mad to give all this up.' By which she meant freedom, independence, control over her own life.
'You're cold,' he said. 'Cold and over-educated and selfish.'
'Just rational,' she said, but Jane Jarvis was hurt. She took care not to show it. She had her pride. She did not want him; she did not want to lose him. She did not know what she wanted—except her career. Soon, if she played her cards right, she would be head of the London office of HBO.
'Where were you last night at three in the morning?' she asked.
'That has nothing to do with you,' he said. 'How can it?'
The wind lobbed someone else's chimney through the neat suburban roof of the home of Julie Rainer, aged thirty, and spoiled its perfection in many ways, and broke the round fish-bowl in which Samson the goldfish spent his timeless, circling days, and Samson died on the wet thick pile of the carpet. Julie was frightened and wept and in the morning rang the vet and asked him, in her lingering bedroom voice, why she brought death to so many small lives and he said they died in the glare of her perfection; and she puzzled over the answer for days. When he rang her the following week and asked her out to dinner she accepted the invitation. She liked the smell of antiseptic on his fingernails and her husband was away.
The wind not only frightened Gina Herriot and Gina's three children Ben, Sue and Anthony (ages twelve, nine and two) but crashed an oak tree through the bonnet of the car in which they were sleeping. None was hurt, but the frame was bent and the doors were jammed and had to be opened up by the iron claws of the emergency services, as if it were a can of beans and they the can-opener. The car was parked in the road outside the house where the Herriots lived. The children's father, Cliff Herriot, had been drinking, and it was sometimes easier, as Gina explained to the social worker in her gentle, sexy voice and using language of a violence which issued oddly from her rather thin, ladylike lips, to lock him in than lock him out. Gina seldom confided so much of the detail of her situation to anyone, having her pride, indeed too much of it, but the violence of the wind had frightened her, more than her husband ever did. Fortunately the report went missing, since it was made out at the time the contents of all Social Service file cards were being transferred to disc: or perhaps because fate has a propensity to behave in the same way to people of similar nature. Events fall out, this way or that, beyond our apparent control, yet in keeping with our expectations.
Gina was thirty, but born seven weeks prematurely, and this initial misfortune, this first hard, grating sharpening of the knives of fate, echoed like a sound, a siren song, through her life. 'Trust Gina', her neighbours said to each other, 'to be in the car when the tree fell,' but they didn't say it to her face. They feared her calm, quick look of disapproval: she did not like personal comments or appreciate advice. Her nose was broken but she remained chilly in her beauty: like Grace Kelly, they said, in that old film. 'Why doesn't she leave Cliff?' they asked. 'The brute!' But they didn't ask her to her face. Anyway, they knew the answer. She loved him.
As for Alice Morthampton, aged thirty, in the womb a week longer than her mother-apparent had expected, the great wind bypassed her: of course it did. Alice was smiled upon by different stars than were Jane, Julie and Gina. The storm cut a swathe through southern England, passing from east to west, taking in London on its way, but Alice was not in London at the time, but in Liverpool, where she was engaged in a photo session: smart clothes against demolished warehouses.
'Smile, damn you, smile!' Angus the photographer had implored her during the day, but Alice Morthampton would not, saying in her languid, croaking voice that she knew better than he; she had surely been employed to actively not-smile, since that was her speciality. She spent the night in bed with him, however. 'You don't care about me,' he complained. 'You only do this for the sake of your career.' And she sighed and said she wasn't sure why she did it, she certainly didn't enjoy it: her career would get on well enough without him, probably better—and as she felt his assault upon her, as it were, weaken and tremble within her at least had the decency to apologize for her habit of speaking the truth, even when least welcomed, so he felt man enough to continue.
'I love you,' he said.
'Whatever that means,' she said, apparently unmoved by either desire or emotion, or perhaps too proud to show either. The storm caused a short delay on landing at Heathrow the following morning, true: aircraft were slewed across the runways and took time to move: but on the whole the fates were on Alice's side.
Jane, Julie, Gina, Alice: these were the clones of Joanna May.
CHAPTER 3
After Carl may divorced his much-loved wife, Joanna May, for infidelity and had her lover killed, he lived celibate for several years (as did she) concentrating upon his business interests, which were many and various. But nature abhors a vacuum, in particular one to do with sex, and presently a Mr Hughie Scotland, aged forty-five, a TV and newspaper magnate, fleshy, vigorous and wilful, reached for his address book and ran his finger down the M's. Then he called Carl May on his personal number, not even leaving it to his secretary to do. She was crying anyway. His staff often did: tears dropped into the word processors, doing them no good at all. But Hughie Scotland was rich enough not to worry.
'Let me be blunt and to the point,' he said.
'You always are,' said Carl.
'I'm in a fix,' said Scotland. 'My wife is screaming at me all hours of the day and night—'
'I thought she was in Iceland,' said Carl. Susan Scotland, born in Alabama, had recently been appointed US Lady Ambassador to that chilly, prosperous country.
'She is,' said Scotland. 'I don't mind her screaming in person, but she screams over the international telephone system, and causes me embarrassment, for nothing is private to a man in communications who has enemies; you have no idea the language she uses. I don't want it to get about, for her sake.'
'I have to be at a meeting in ten minutes,' said Carl, 'or I'll have enemies.'
'I'll be brief,' said Scotland. 'I want you to take this bimbo of mine off my hands. These girls topple presidents and bishops, and I don't want this one toppling me; she could be on the phone to the gutter press day and night; she'd upset my wife.'
'Hughie,' said Carl, 'you are the gutter press,' but Hughie took no notice. Susan Scotland's recent distress had been caused by press photographs of her husband and a young woman named Bethany bathing and sporting naked in the waters of a trout farm: they had been published not only in rival newspapers but throughout his own extensive syndicate. 'You'll shit in your own nest for a profit,' she'd wept down the line from Reykjavik, thus shocking and alarming her husband.
'Hughie,' said Carl, 'I don't need a bimbo. I am a serious person. I am not like you: I am not in the habit of splashing about naked in trout tanks.'
Hughie said, 'Carl, those were free-range trout, it was a pool, not a tank, and a hot day, and a man can surely do as he wishes on his own property. You know I've diversified into fish farms? If my wife wants to see more of me let her come back from Iceland.'
'I'm sorry,' said Carl, 'but no. Pay the girl off. Isn't that what people do? What's the worry?'
'You're a dry old stick,' said Hughie, 'and getting worse since your wife left.'
And Carl went to his meeting. But presently he was tempted out to lunch by Hughie: few people can resist the lure of an inside story. Even Carl May could be affected in this way. Hughie, rather disappointingly, chose an obscure restaurant.
'I can cope with governments,' said Hughie, 'and monstrous taxes and creeping socialism but I cannot cope with women. Take this bimbo off my hands. She keeps crying. Why do women spend so much time in tears?'
'Why me?' asked Carl, picking at a lemon sole. He ate little, and drank less. He preferred his fish unfilleted.
'These girls have to move upwards,' said Hughie, 'or they get offended, and that's when the trouble starts. And you have class. I have style but you have class.'
'Me?' asked Carl, surprised. 'Me? Class?'
'How many women have you slept with in your life?' asked Hughie.
'One,' said Carl. 'My wife.'
'That's class,' said Hughie. 'Why don't you leave that fish alone? It comes from the North Sea; it will have died of pollution, caused by your outfall.' Carl May was Chief Executive of Britnuc, a corporation which had become involved with the rehabilitation of the old Magnox nuclear power stations, two of them sited on North Sea shores. 'Freshwater fish are the meat of the future. Do me a favour, I'll do you a favour.'
'What?' asked Carl.
'I'll hold the story on the plutonium leak last March at Britnuc A. No one else has got it.'
'They haven't got it,' said Carl, 'because there wasn't one.'
'The public's too sanguine about nuclear power,' said Hughie. (How was he to know Chernobyl was to blow?) 'They need stirring up. So do you. Bethany's the girl to do it. Those press photos didn't do her justice.'
'I only read the financial papers,' said Carl.
'Out of touch,' said Hughie. 'You don't want to lose your touch. What you need, mate, is a bit of pain to stir things up again. You're slipping.'
It seemed to Carl that he would use less energy obliging Hughie Scotland than disobliging him, and so he agreed to take the girl Bethany on to his personal staff, Scotland paying her wages. The rich stay rich by staying mean. Fish with the bones in cost less than fish with the bones removed.
CHAPTER 4
'I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,' Carl May whispered to himself and sang,
'With vassals and serfs by my si-i-de,
And of all the assembly gathered there
You were the joy and the pri-i-de.'
And well might he sing, and thus, as some months later he stepped from the back of a limousine and his sneakered foot touched conquered ground, while the Thames ran by as busy and significant as the ancient Euphrates.
Bethany Turner stepped out from the other side of the limousine and a different tune ran through her head. 'Shoo fly,' she whispered and hummed, 'shoo fly don't bother me, for I belong to somebody.' And she thought, of course, if she belonged to somebody, that somebody must be Carl May, her rich grey man, but she was wrong. Bethany loved, like a million million other women, someone who existed only in her head, who would never, in all her life, materialize. She loved a phantom, in whose image Carl May stood.
'What are you singing?' she asked Carl.
'Tunes from the dog-house,' he said. 'Tunes from the doghouse, that's all.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Cloning of Joanna May by Fay Weldon. Copyright © 1989 Fay Weldon. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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