The Ted Dreams by Fay Weldon Page A

ready for sex, but his body was oddly heavy and inert. I thought he’s dead without any real evidence for it and got up and went round to the other side of the bed to see his face, and he was lying there looking just as usual with his eyes open, but I was right; there was no life in him. The eyes were unseeing. His soul, as I’d describe it these days, had left the body. Gone somewhere else: this was the immediate impression, as I voiced it at the time, without thinking, without rationality intervening. He’s left me . Not that he had stopped being, but that he had gone away.
    Ted was dead. I felt quite rational and without emotion. I happened to have the mobile number for old Dr Nevis, our family G.P. so I phoned him, and he said he’d come round at once. I sat by the bed and waited in case Ted woke up, but he didn’t. Dr Nevis came and said, ‘He’s gone.’ I felt like asking him where to, but I didn’t.
    The doctor phoned the ambulance and I gave them directions in a competent and practical way. I knew Ted was dead but modern medicine is such these days that if you get an apparent corpse to a hospital in time even the dead can be brought to life. I was of course in shock. Then I went to wake up the twins but the room they shared was empty: they weren’t home from their party. I checked the answer phone.
    Maude.... We’re sleeping over, Mum.
    Martha.... But we’ll be home early.
    Maude.... To help with the turkey.
    Martha.... I’ll do the bread sauce.
    Maude.... I’ll do the brandy butter.
    Then they clicked into silence.
    Dr Nevis said he was afraid that he had to go, he’d left a small goose in the oven. Then Jill Woodward came in to ‘be with me’. I had to calm her down. We put the turkey in my oven. The ambulance came. I couldn’t find Ted’s mobile with his brothers’ numbers on it so there was no way I could stop them and theirs coming for Christmas dinner. I went with the body to the hospital where Ted was registered DOA, and saw him settled in the morgue. I got home at about midday: the twins were back saying ‘Where is everybody?’ and I had to tell them their father was dead. Jill seemed incapable of saying it. She was busy stripping our bed and putting the sheets into the washing machine at ninety-five degrees.
    The twins are identical: long blonde hair, blue eyes, cherub-mouthed, small, neat and perfectly formed, and cool, very cool. They move as one, think as one, and as far as I can tell feel as one; they absorbed the news thoughtfully, joined their little hands together as they would when shocked and surprised, and wept a single tear each. I didn’t weep or wail or scream either; perhaps they inherited non-affect from me.
    Maude.... Does that mean we won’t be going to St Moritz?
    ‘It does,’ I said. We’d booked to go skiing as a family in the New Year.
    Martha.... That’s all right, Mum. We didn’t really want to go anyway.
    Maude.... We were only doing it for you and Dad.
    The twins were very academically clever, and though I had never had them tested I would imagine they’d come out somewhere low on the autistic scale of non-empathic response, just high enough to give some people the heebie-jeebies.
    I thanked Jill Woodward and said I had to get on. She wept a little more and left, I think very shocked and dismayed, but then so was I: she just showed it more. The twins and I prepared lunch, silently; we basted the turkey, peeled potatoes for seventeen and prepared the gravy.
    Maude.... I’ll do the bread sauce.
    Martha.... I’ll do the cranberry.
    They cleared up as they went along, which was in their nature, being particular and methodical. They put in the extra sleeves of the Edwardian dining room table, laid it beautifully – crackers, Christmas napkins, plastic holly centrepiece – and a place setting for Ted at the end of the table, writing ‘Dad RIP’ on his table mat and going out into the damp garden to find sprigs of holly to make into a wreath to enclose the