Death of a She Devil Read online

  DEATH OF A SHE DEVIL

  Fay Weldon

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About Death of a She Devil

  ‘The women of the world gave up romance, subservience and submission, and once empowered, took to hard work, truth and reality. Much good has it done them.’

  Ruth Patchett, the original She Devil, is now eighty-four and keen to retire. But who can take up her mantle?

  Enter Tyler Patchett, our new kind of heroine and Ruth’s grandson. He’s an ultra-confident, twenty-three-year-old man: beautiful, resentful and unemployed. Tyler won’t be satisfied until he can transition into the ultimate symbol of power and status. A woman.

  In Fay Weldon’s 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She Devil, women fought men for power and won. In 2017, men take a decisive step to get their power back...

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Death of a She Devil

  Part 1: The Past Is Never Over

  Chapter 1: My Children Will Not Speak To Me...

  Chapter 2: Now Let’s Look In On Bobbo...

  Chapter 3: The She Devil Tells Herself Lies

  Chapter 4: According To The Family Therapist

  Chapter 5: Signing-on Day

  Chapter 6: Matilda Likes To Have The Last Word

  Chapter 7: Hooowoo-h, Wooo-h, Wooo-h, I Am The Ghost Of Mary Fisher

  Chapter 8: Valerie Valeria May Be Too Full Of Good Ideas

  Chapter 9: A Life Of Constant, If Misguided, Endeavour

  Chapter 10: A Dream Turned Sour...

  Chapter 11: Actuality Becomes Irrelevant

  Chapter 12: She’s Not To Be Trusted

  Chapter 13: Fear Of The Future

  Chapter 14: The Power Balance Is Altering

  Chapter 15: Ms Bradshap Is Riled

  Chapter 16: Blood’s Not Always Thicker Than Water

  Chapter 17: Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It)

  Chapter 18: Walking The Other Way Walk

  Chapter 19: For The Small-Minded, Small Things Are Important

  Chapter 20: Samantha Stands By Her Man...

  Chapter 21: Surely Someone Else’s Fault?

  Chapter 22: Free At Last

  Chapter 23: ‘There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner There Are Dark Clouds Hurtling Through The Sky...’

  Chapter 24: All Change!

  Chapter 25: Samantha Tries To Make Things Nice

  Chapter 26: A Thoroughly Sensible, Rational Person

  Chapter 27: Valerie Goes To Her First Board Meeting

  Chapter 28: The Servant Of A Strange God

  Chapter 29: Dr Simmins To The Rescue

  Chapter 30: ‘We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident...’

  Chapter 31: Me, Me, What About Me?

  Chapter 32: Alone And Old And Very, Very Cross

  Chapter 33: The She Devil Holds Valerie To Account

  Chapter 34: Rescue Comes From On High

  Chapter 35: The Girl Does Good

  Chapter 36: Mary Fisher Remembers Her Place In Momus’ Script

  Chapter 37: How Miss Swanson Saved Tyler’s Life...

  Chapter 38: No Place Like Home...

  Chapter 39: All You Need Is Hate

  Chapter 40: Portions And Parcels Of The Dreadful Past

  Chapter 41: The Dream Of Steady Promotion

  Chapter 42: The She Devil Doesn’t Like To Make Mistakes

  Chapter 43: A Strange Enchantment

  Chapter 44: What Valerie Doesn’t Know

  Chapter 45: If Only One Had Substance!

  Chapter 46: Nature Knows Best

  Chapter 47: Matilda Eavens Has An Explanation...

  Chapter 48: Poor Nicci, Deprived Of A Mother’s Love

  Chapter 49: Valerie Valeria’s Eye Falls On Tyler

  Chapter 50: Opportunity Knocks

  Chapter 51: At Last! A Close Encounter For Tyler And Valerie

  Chapter 52: Sudden Gusts! Sudden Gusts!

  Chapter 53: Can This Be True Love?

  Chapter 54: Be Afeared Of The Ghost Of Mary Fisher

  Chapter 55: Valerie Just So Happens To Run Into Dr Simmins

  Chapter 56: Depression Is Just Postponed Anger

  Chapter 57: Valerie Ups The Game

  Chapter 58: But What Is This?

  Chapter 59: The She Devil Goes To Town

  Chapter 60: I Always Meant Well

  Chapter 61: Meet Your New Sisters

  Chapter 62: A Matter Of Ethics

  Chapter 63: Nurse Samantha Gets In Touch With Tyler

  Chapter 64: Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting-A-Ling-Ling?

  Chapter 65: The She Devil Calls A Meeting

  Chapter 66: O Grave, Where Is Thy Victory?

  Chapter 67: We Are The Ghosts Of Mary Fisher

  Chapter 68: The End Of Bobbo

  Part 2: Altogether Now!

  Chapter 1: Nurse Hopkins

  Chapter 2: Tyler

  Chapter 3: A Board Meeting

  Chapter 4: Valerie

  Chapter 5: Ms Bradshap

  Chapter 6: Valerie Again

  Chapter 7: The She Devil Meets Her Grandson

  Chapter 8: Family Bonding

  Chapter 9: Valerie And Tyler

  Chapter 10: No Walk

  Chapter 11: Bobbo’s Funeral

  Chapter 12: The Party

  Part 3: Tyler In Transition

  Nurse Hopkins

  Tyler

  Part 4: As The Year Rolls On

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  July Again

  August

  September

  Part 5: Apotheosis

  Nurse Hopkins Reflects

  After The Ball Is Over, After The Break Of Morn, After The Dancers’ Leaving...

  The She Devil Comes To A Decision

  The Assumption

  About Fay Weldon

  Also by Fay Weldon

  About The Love & Inheritance Trilogy

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Part 1

  The Past Is Never Over

  1

  My Children Will Not Speak To Me...

  These days, when the She Devil wakes she must remind her-self who she is.

  I am in my eighties now and I see no one fit to follow in my footsteps. Who can be trusted to come after me? My children and my children’s children will not even speak to me. Who will take over when I am gone, will leap out of bed every morning to look after and improve the world? Who will rule in the High Tower?

  But I am Lady Ruth Patchett, the She Devil. I am the one who has dominion over the High Tower and all its satellites. I am President and Chief Executive of the Institute for Gender Parity. Once upon a time Mary Fisher, a wicked purveyor of romantic fiction, a teller of lies, ruled here in the High Tower, but she is well dead and gone. Where once she sipped champagne, lit her scented candles and slept with other women’s husbands, notably mine, now I, Ruth Patchett, She Devil, rule the roost. I am as good as any man, and crow the triumph of the true, the proud, the honest working women of today, the ones that we set free. Gone with the wind are Mary Fisher’s simpering ninnies, raising their doe-eyes in adoration of lusty dinosaur men, and thank the Gods for that – though gone too, come to think of it, are the lusty men. Lusty is so out of fashion.

  But still I wake uneasy in the mornings. And aching too, as one does at eighty-four. All is not well. Is it conscience that troubles me? When I step out upon the ground it seems to tremble – is it that the sea batter
s the rocks on which the High Tower stands, or is it just that my limbs are old? I always did the best I could, surely, within the limits of my own nature. I am without guilt. So why am I so hated? Why do I hate myself?

  Why does no one bring me my coffee? Surely it’s time?

  Morning light seeps round the edges of the blinds. I have work to do. The nation needs me.

  Women need me.

  2

  Now Let’s Look In On Bobbo...

  The She Devil’s husband is ninety-four, bedridden and has Alzheimer’s.

  Ruth keeps the foul-mouthed old goat alive in the Lantern Room of the High Tower, if you ask me just so she can gloat. She’s still his wife but she never visits. To think that I, the ghost of Mary Fisher, weeping and wailing in the wind that blows around the High Tower, was once so in love with this stringy, nasty old jailbird! It’s beyond belief. I catch his thoughts as they fly. They’re more a jumble of bad feelings than thoughts, of course, but let me translate them for you. What’s he muttering now?

  ‘What a fucking fuss about nothing! Any red-blooded man would have done what I did. Why would I stay with Ruth when I could have Mary Fisher? It was a no-brainer. Ruth was the hulk of a wife, an ugly old bat with a wart on her lip. Mary was the slim, tender mistress, the willing bird, eye-candy on the arm. Ruth was a nagging housewife, Mary a romantic novelist, wealthy, earning millions with her stupid novels. Ruth and the kids just sucked money out of my purse. Ruth was grateful when – if – I fucked her, Mary played hard to get. And she said she loved me. What a little bloody liar. Women think men are only interested in sex, but they’re wrong: men want love as well as sex. Of course I went.

  ‘True, I had to walk out on the kids to do it. Fucking ungrateful brats they turned out to be. But scientists say it’s in a man’s nature to look after women and kids when they’re helpless. As soon as the wife can help herself, and the kids grow older and start answering back, he sods off to spread the selfish gene elsewhere. Quite so. That’s all I did. But you’d have thought from the row that resulted, the bleeding noise and fury, that I’d done something unthinkably, unnaturally wicked. I never got it. I’d certainly done it to the wrong fucking wife and kids, triggered off more than I ever reckoned.

  ‘Look at me now, living out my days between a bed and an armchair, so old I don’t even have the strength to get it up any more. Even Viagra won’t do it, not even Nurse Travers, my hot-tottie little nurse, skirt up to her arse when she bends over. It can’t be me. I reckon it’s Dr Simmins’ pills doing it, murderous old lezzie slag that she is. They’re all trying to finish me off. They won’t succeed. And by the way I don’t have Alzheimer’s. I just pretend for the fucking tests...’

  Yes, that’s Bobbo. Once my true love. Sorry about the language. Oh dear... ‘I lean’d my back against an oak, thinking it was a mighty tree, but first it bent and then it broke, so did my love prove false to me.’

  The past is never over. I am the ghost of Mary Fisher, weeping in the wind.

  3

  The She Devil Tells Herself Lies

  ‘I did the best I could, within the limits of my own nature.’ A likely story!

  It wasn’t as if I hurled Mary Fisher to her death, down to the craggy rocks on which the High Tower stands, battered by the fury of wave and wind. Much as I longed to. Just a little push from me, I thought, and over she’d go, champagne flute in hand, through the open picture window of the Lantern Room, long blonde hair streaming as she fell. That, I thought, would put a stop not just to the romances spewing from her seductive pen, but to the little trill of a voice, half giggle and half erotic gasp, that so enthralled my husband and drove me mad with rage. But I didn’t. I held my hand.

  I did not love Bobbo as she did, I can admit that, but Bobbo was my wedded husband, father of my children, my great achievement, the most precious thing I owned or hoped to own, and Mary Fisher stole him from me. He was my status and my income, the one and only notch on my bedpost. I’m not someone who forgives easily.

  But I didn’t push. I was too cunning. Rather I let a little worm of doubt and dread grow in her silly mind until she realised life was not worth living and only then did she die, slowly and horribly from a cancer that devoured her from within. I allowed her to live that day, as she stood laughing and trilling at the window, but I gave her my children. ‘Where your father goes, you go,’ I said to Nicci and Andy, and left.

  That day I hated Mary Fisher more than I loved my children. But the day passed and I lived to regret what I had done. Too late. And now they will not speak to me, nor will their children.

  Ah, thank God, here’s my coffee. Valerie Valeria, my PA, brings it in. I am early waking, not she late in bringing it. Seven-thirty on the dot. Such a pretty, clever, competent girl, and ambitious too. My shield and support. And she’s brought a red rose in a long-stemmed vase. The world is such a changed place, that a rose can be brought to me in November. The more people moan about carbon footprints, the more they create them.

  4

  According To The Family Therapist

  The She Devil caused a great deal of damage.

  I’m sure women in general have a great deal to be grateful to the She Devil for, equal pay and all that, and as a force in society she is an admirable person and the Queen had good reason to make her a Dame, but she was a bad, bad mother, running out on her children the way she did, dumping them on her husband’s mistress, Mary Fisher of all people.

  If the She Devil’s children won’t speak to her it’s not surprising. What did she think would happen? As so often with these narcissistic mothers – self-absorbed, brittle, easily angered and ‘always right’ – the only thing their children can do is either cut the ties that bind and run, or stay and placate. Anything other than face the anger. Adored by others, hated by her children, Ruth Patchett is typical of the powerful, charismatic, narcissistic mother. And as ever, the therapist, that’s me, is left to pick up the pieces.

  Every week the little family visits me, Matilda Eavens, for family therapy. Nicola Finch Patchett, the She Devil’s daughter, brings along her three children, the girl twins Madison and Mason, and her boy Tyler. Nicci is a staunch feminist. They have been coming for at least ten years. Nicola likes to get value for money and the sessions are paid for by Nicola’s nameless benefactor, who fathered the twins on her when she was fifteen. (The girl had low self-esteem, which is hardly surprising, considering her background.) I like to think that these family visits give all of them much needed stability.

  The girls, at thirty-two, are inseparable and employed as supervisors at the local call centre. Tyler, at twenty-three, is a beautiful lad, but resentful and unemployed. His mother, who currently works for the Women’s Right to Choose movement, does not suffer fools gladly especially if they are male. All three children have difficulty leaving home.

  I suspect Nicci may have a tendency towards maternal narcissism herself, the condition tending to pass from mother to daughter, as epigenetics tells us these traits often do. I may have no formal training in Freudian analysis but I have read deeply and widely and know enough to guide others through life towards happiness. I charge for my intervention. One has to live.

  So many ghosts, so many unexamined and unexplored traumas in this little family! I am, as it happens, currently writing a book, commissioned by my publisher, entitled The Narcissistic Mother and Her Inheritance. My observation of Nicci and her children’s struggle to get out from under have been most enlightening. Something of this struggle, alas, seems to be manifesting in Tyler’s reluctance to turn up for sessions. Tyler currently has a most unwholesome goth girlfriend, one Hermione. She deals in drugs locally.

  5

  Signing-on Day

  A reality check at the Jobcentre Plus.

  Tyler Finch Patchett looked at himself in the smeary mirror of the men’s toilet of the Shapnett Jobcentre Plus and wondered what he could do to make himself look less beautiful. Since the surgical procedure on his strabismus eye misalignment a y
ear ago his good looks had become something of a problem. He now looked super-normal and not disfigured. Friends, family and teachers no longer called him Cyclops, or (more understandably) Walleye. He’d always had two eyes. Only one of them had wandered, making him look shifty and sly.

  Girls had flocked to him in greater numbers when he had been unsightly, hoping to comfort him before discarding him – or so he was convinced. But the epiphany to male beauty was also beset by problems. Girls preferred men with money over men with looks, men with cars over men who couldn’t even afford driving lessons. HR took one look at his photo, rejected him as a troublesome pretty boy, and took on a pretty girl instead. Girls always won. He had been signing on for ten months: soon he would become long-term unemployed, and the Jobcentre would have even more control over his life. Humiliation after humiliation.

  Tyler’s brow could be seen to be wide and smooth, his bright blue eyes, large and black fringed, to function perfectly normally, his nose to be as straight as David Beckham’s, his mouth as sensuous as Justin Bieber’s, his shoulders broad and well muscled as the young George Clooney, his waist as slender as Bowie’s. Tyler, indeed, was now so gratifyingly good-looking he made women first swoon and then dismiss him as gay, which he was not. Other disadvantages to being a male beauty had become apparent.

  Today Tyler was number eleven in the queue to see his Jobcentre Plus advisor. He would try to divert Miss Swanson’s attention by enthusing about the voluntary work he was doing, sweeping up at Mrs Easton’s store in St Rumbold’s village, but were she to check and find out he hadn’t turned up for his interview at the Brighton Beaux model agency he’d be on course for a sanction. That meant no money for at least two weeks, and that was if his advisor was feeling kind. Possibly three months. That he’d thought twice, fearing for his virtue, and turned back on the step would not be sufficient excuse.

  But something had to be done. Tyler had applied for the job, one of the ten a week job applications he was obliged to make to earn his £57.90 jobseekers’ allowance. He’d actually been called in for an interview, which was good, but the nature of the firm involved, he’d discovered, was not good. This was not likely to weigh upon Miss Swanson’s conscience. Under threat of sanction for breaking his ‘preparedness for work’ contract, she could pressure him until he consented to attend the interview. Pointless for Tyler to argue that the sister agency – Brighton Belles – had been struck from the official situations vacant lists for being gender specific, advertising for bright and beautiful female ‘escorts’ and making no bones about the nature of the work; Brighton Beaux was on the Jobcentre Plus books and that was that. There Tyler would be interviewed, weighed, measured and photographed and with luck end up on a catwalk somewhere. Or more likely be trafficked for the sex trade – being only six feet and not the six feet two male models were expected to be – and so end up a rent boy.