The Heart of the Country by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online Page B

‘Novel or autobiography?’ and I was at a loss to reply. Not that it mattered; she shook her double chins at me and drifted off, like anyone else. It’s the drugs produce the double chins. But none of my questioners seems to have any teeth. Can this be the result of too much tannin? How bad people are at looking after themselves!
    That was dinner, anyway, on the night of the day Harry Harris left for work, and never came home.

Chomp, Chomp, Grittle-Grax, Gone!
    The fox was out that night. It got Ros’ duckling. Ros lives across the road from me in Wendover Drive. The duckling was a pretty little thing. It had been reared by her two daft hens. One of her kids had found this still warm duck’s egg under a hedge, and since Ros’ hens spent every spring and summer broody, without ever so much as laying an egg in return for their keep, she put the blue egg where a single addled white shop egg had rested for six weeks or so and look, folks, it hatched! How excited we all were! Silly little cheeping, trusting, mismatched creature. Small things please small minds: us, that is, up in the housing estate. Those of us who live off the State get smaller and smaller minds. We don’t take the newspapers, perhaps that’s it. Then the fox got the duckling. Ros’ children cried. So did Teresa, Bess and Edwina. I could have wrung its neck. The duckling’s, not the fox’s. The duckling stirred delight in us, who had no business to be delighted; we, the rejects of the system, the rejects of marriage, the unsupported mothers who live off the State. Cheep, cheep, it went: saved by a miracle, hatched by besotted elderly spinsters, it made us think that nice things still could happen. I don’t blame the fox. It only acted according to its nature. Chomp, chomp, grittle-grax, gone!
    Natalie told me she saw it, or its brother, run across her lawn. After the guests had gone she was putting out the rubbish in her bin – she was like that: never left waste until the morning – when the fox ran across her back lawn. She saw it in the light which shone out from her kitchen. It stopped and stared at her with its red eyes, seeming quite unafraid, and then loped on.
    Foxes have a nasty habit of killing everything in the henhouse and leaving the debris behind and the straw and the walls spattered by blood and feather. They like to kill, not just to eat, or so the story goes. But every creature has its defenders, and I heard someone say on the radio the other day that the fox is not really blood-crazed: it’s just that its instincts can’t cope with walls. In the wild its victims would all have run off before it could get to them. I leave that for you to think about.
    Anyway, the elderly hens couldn’t run off. The fox got them too. The duckling just vanished, but bits of hen were everywhere. Well, they’d done their bit, I suppose. What good’s an old hen that doesn’t lay eggs, any more than a woman too old or too cut about to have children? I was sterilized after Edwina. Stephen thought it a good idea. Three little girls in as many years, after ten years of trying and nothing. Delicious at the time! But where was it going to end? And then, I don’t know, it was as if my non-pregnancy or perpetual pregnancy was the only solder that kept us interested in each other. When I wasn’t in the market for babies and sex was for sex’s sake Stephen just seemed to lose interest. Then I fell in love with Alec, our solicitor, and Stephen acted as if he were Othello and I was Desdemona, only I’d recovered from the strangling and absolutely spoiled the play. And if you ask me it was my hysterectomized state which prevented Alec from taking me seriously. What man wants a woman without a womb, any more than he wants a woman with a womb that age has dried up? It goes against nature.
    Mind you, it was said in my defence at the trial that my hysterectomy had preyed upon my mind. I pleaded guilty but insane and the plea was accepted. I must have been mad.