by Fay Weldon
And what are the women doing now but telling? Do they not go fully conscious, hand in hand, where once they only went in dreams; one by one they return to that far back world of matriarchy and of Mother Right, and come back to tell the tale of it. Not so much a hen party, this, more a cosmic conspiracy. If it gets too powerful, delves too deep, the sun itself might go out. Don’t forget your key when you go out, wife—you might not get back in again. He’s serious.
Why hasn’t Paula sealed the hole in the bedroom floor? Because Paula needs to know what’s going on. Paula suspects that her husband Deakey sometimes has it off in the room below with Audrey, the woman next door. Audrey is married to an adulterous husband. For all anyone knows, the condition is catching. Who is to say what goes on when our eyes are closed and we sleep, as Paula would be sleeping now, if it were not that the Great Lasso-er in the sky keeps circling her round her middle and tugging tight, and has woken her. Listen now. Down below.
“That fact is,” bejewelled Rachel is saying, her knees held tight together, “and as Engels was the first to point out, the nuclear family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife. Within the family, man is the bourgeois and the wife the proletariat. I think we could usefully examine the implications.”
Oh Deakey. Deakey and Audrey. If it were true it would be more than mere adultery, it would be Treachery. Paula has said as much to Deakey. Deakey, however, maintains that if there is any treachery it lies in Paula’s own paranoia, albeit made more pronounced than usual by her advanced state of pregnancy. So Deakey and Paula looked up paranoia as it relates to pregnancy in their various books on childbirth and human response and discovered only one mildly related reference, namely that acute womb envy in the male can predispose to destructive promiscuity. “Nonsense!” cried Deakey, dismissing the author as Freudian orientated, and Paula was obliged to agree. Nonsense! All the same, she consulted the midwife, who said she’d never heard of destructive promiscuity but did remark that all men were the same and told a sorry tale of how she once delivered a sixteen-year-old junkie girl of twins. The mother lay on a double bed between two men who, when asked, declined to move over, but lay just where they were while the midwife worked over and round them. “Such a nicely spoken girl, too,” said the midwife. The midwife had taken the twins to hospital, she said, wrapped in her raincoat, but the girl never called to collect them.
What can Paula hear now? Is that Audrey’s voice amongst the others? It is. It is. Why is Audrey here? She doesn’t belong to the group. What is being plotted? A soft little female voice. Audrey’s.
“Deakey said come and I know Paula’s keen so I did, but I mean I like being a woman,” says Audrey. “I mean, what’s wrong with it? I mean, it’s all a bit ridiculous, isn’t it, all this bra-burning and why do they make themselves so plain. Present company excepted, of course. A woman has a duty to make herself look attractive. I’m happy as I am. I love being feminine and looked after by my husband.”
“Adulteress,” cries Paula in her heart. “Hypocrite!”
Whoosh and wheesh and there’s water everywhere and the Abyssinian or wherever bedcover from Liberty’s, with an embroidered Tree of Life upon it, embedded with little pieces of mirror, is not just probably ruined but is rendered cold and uncomfortable to lie upon. What, is Paula now incontinent? Has rage made her thus? Was it like this when she was a little child?
“Little girls don’t wet the bed,” said Paula’s mama, “only nasty little boys.” And she washed and cleaned and ironed on, saying, “I sacrificed everything for you, my Paula—my career, my fame, my fortune—your father didn’t want a working wife and mother, so now I’ll grit my teeth for ever as I smile at you, my little bed-wetting Paula.” Whoosh and wheesh.
“But is the paternalistic society a function of only capitalism, or of civilisation itself?” Dandy is asking, in her blue-chip voice. Everyone hates it when Dandy speaks.
To a butterfly, thinks Paula, a pin must feel like an RSJ. A rolled-steel joist, the kind you support whole houses on, from within.
“Do you mean function or symptom?” snaps Sybil. “Make up your mind. If you’re a revolutionary not a radical, you’re in the wrong group—”
“Oh dear,” simpers Audrey, “oh dear, it’s much too deep for me.”
And now Deakey can be heard opening the door and saying more coffee anyone? “Paula’s still lying down,” says Deakey. “She went to a relaxation class this evening and it’s exhausted her, ha ha.”
It did. It did. Paula hurried home early from the Clinic, wondering what she would find. But when she passed Audrey’s house, there was Audrey just ordinarily at her kitchen window. She even smiled as Paula went by, waving her wooden spoon. Making jam, her usual strawberry jam no doubt, and that was when Paula suddenly felt exhausted. Paula found Deakey calmly smoking a herbal cigarette in the living room, but such a sense of sudden departure in the air, such a scent of passion spent, that the baby kicked its heels in the pelvic what-have-you as an ostrich might bury its head in the sand, and shock ran through poor paranoid Paula, and she’d never in all her life felt so tired.
Why was Audrey smiling so at her window? Audrey’s adulterous husband was away on business with his PA. Why should Audrey smile? Only one thing can make a betrayed wife smile, and that’s betrayal on her own account.
Why should Deakey be smoking last year’s Christmas-present herbal cigarette at six in the evening, if not to cover something up, fog the scent of betrayal?
“A plot,” cried Paula.
“Paranoia,” cried Deakey. “You insult me!”
“But we always think alike,” pleaded Paula. “You know we do!” and Deakey buried his face in his hands.
“Do men have feelings the same way as women do?” asks Rachel now, down below. “That’s what I always want to know.”
“No,” says Sybil. “They don’t. Oh no! Or if they do, they invalidate them in relation to the degree of their involvement with male institutions. The nicest men will murder, sacrifice, betray, die in the name of patriotism, religion, efficiency, progress and even the Civil Service.” Or that’s what Paula supposes Sybil says. It is usually something like that.
A very small, rare butterfly flutters hopelessly in Paula’s belly: a very large RSJ, one fit to keep up Centrepoint, pins it to the bed.
What I need, thinks Paula presently, is to consult one of the many books on the shelf which will tell me what the symptoms of labour are. Though I’m sure this is far, far worse than labour, which is a perfectly natural process, could possibly be. Paula sits up, falls off the bed, lies where she falls. If she moves, she feels she will do herself an injury. It is not comfortable being eight months plus pregnant at the best of times, as Deakey has lately said to Paula when she gets into bed. He keeps himself carefully and considerately to the far side of it, away from her—why?
“Nursery schools,” says Phyllis. “That’s the answer to all our problems. How I hate and despise Dr. Bowlby and his myth of mother-care! If hell were not a male institution I should wish him there. I suggest we lobby the Council, Monday.”
“For lobby read lob,” mutters Dandy. “A few broken windows should work wonders.”
“We are not an extremist group. Go join the Maoists,” shouts Sybil.
Deakey, where are you, Deakey? No, no, these can’t be contractions. They’re pains. This beautiful red rose opening inside, bursting from bud to bloom, thrusting everything aside to make room for it. Why can’t you be here to admire it?
An ear to the ground. Well, it’s there already. Paula still lies where she fell: the voices from below are louder now.
“Segregated toilets in infant schools,” Phyllis is saying. “That’s where the whole thing starts.”
“Deakey,” Paula had said earlier that evening, finding her husband smoking last year’s herbal cigarette, “Audrey’s been here, with you. You and she are having a sexual relationship.”
“What nonsense,” said Deakey. “Audrey’s at home
making jam. She wouldn’t leave the jam on the cooker to burn. Our marriage is founded on truth. You and I are equal partners in it.”
“You’re laughing at me,” said Paula. “And you know I have no sense of humour.”
“I have enough for both of us,” said Deakey. “That’s why we have this perfect marriage.”
“It’s happened because I’m having the Women’s Lib meeting here tonight,” said Paula. “It’s your revenge. If I cancel it, will you stop seeing Audrey?”
“For one thing,” elaborated Deakey a little later as he washed up the plates after the take-away curry, “I am all for Women’s Liberation. We both agree that women are a persecuted majority. For another, I am not having a sexual relationship with Audrey. She’s half-witted and wouldn’t understand the term. Would you like me to bring your slippers? You must be tired, back from your relaxation class.”
“I don’t like the way you keep saying ‘I’” said Paula. “It always used to be ‘we.’”
“There are two of you now,” Deakey had said. “It makes all the difference,” and Paula had lumbered up the stairs and started to cry—why is it always Paula who cries, never Deakey?—fallen asleep, woke to what cannot be labour, for in labour one does not have pains, only contractions, all the books agree—and to hear Deakey opening the door to the Liberation Group, including tonight, for no apparent reason, Audrey.
Another red rose bursts into flower. A whole bush of vulgar floribunda blooms inside, forcing even the RSJ to bend and buckle.
“You are more than me, double what you were. I must look after myself,” Deakey said to Paula. Yes he did, and baby buried his ostrich head further in the sand which is now growing these amazing flowers.
Downstairs the ladies’ slips are showing. The slips are made of barbed wire, worn like hair shirts, excoriating—all women have them, apparently, keep them in their bottom drawers, in readiness.
Marta throws her wedding ring across the room. Tomorrow it will slip beneath one damp-raised lino tile and be lost forever. Paula can envisage it.
“Why should I have to come home from work and cook and clean,” cries Marta, “while he sits watching the ads on the telly and says why aren’t you like the one on the screen who’s wiping paint?”
He, he, he.
“The pill made me so depressed I had to have shock treatment,” whispers Phyllis, “and the loop made me flood, all month, and the cap gives me nervous eczema, and he won’t wear anything—what shall I do? If I say no, he’ll be off.”
“Well, we’re Jewish,” murmurs Rachel. “I only had daughters, so he made this other woman pregnant, and you know my youngest son Benjamin—well, he’s hers, not mine. I’ve never told anyone till now.”
“Oh God, oh God,” says Sybil, “I’m not all that pretty, am I? I met this man, I thought it was true love. He took me to his flat, all night we made love, I told him I loved him. He left the room, he said for cigarettes, and when he got back into bed, it was another man. His flatmate. He’d had a good lay, he must have said, and passed the news on. Well, so I am. Who cares?”
“What I want to know,” says Dandy darkly, “is why do they show female orgasm on the media and never male?”
“Women’s Lib, Housebound Wives, Group Therapy, what’s the difference?” says Audrey, bright and trite as ever. “It always sounds the same.”
They go. Paula hears them depart. Doors open and close. There is silence. Then:
“Stay a little, Audrey,” says Deakey. Paula hears. Audrey stays.
“Consider the tapeworm,” Paula hears Deakey saying to Audrey. “Accord it all virtue. A complete set of male and female organs in each of its 50 to 200 proglottides: it spends its entire life copulating in all its sections with itself.” It’s the kind of thing Paula would love Deakey to say to her but, of course, Deakey only says it to Audrey, who doesn’t understand a word of it. “Let me be your tapeworm, Audrey,” says Deakey now.
“Thank you, Deakey, but what would Paula think? What would she say?” asks Audrey.
“Paula is in no position to say anything,” says Deakey. “Paula’s too pregnant to think and asleep upstairs in any case.”
Do they kiss, do they copulate? Does Deakey tie Audrey’s centre even tighter to her cosy fate, wrapping his 200 proglottides around her? Paula scarcely cares.
Pain. Quite definite pain. What is that noise? Is it Paula? A volcano? Addition or subtraction? The beginning of everything, wrenching more matter out of less? Division, multiplication? Strain and push: don’t tear the sheets either, you naughty girl.
Push, rend, slither, pop, baby’s here. Baby cries.
“Dear God, what’s that?” says Deakey.
It’s a boy.
A QUESTION OF TIMING
“HI, IT’S ME,” SAID Philippa.
“Is that you, Philippa?” asked Paul.
“Of course it’s me, Paul,” said Philippa. “Who else says hi, it’s me, in the middle of the night?”
“I’m sorry, Philippa darling,” said Paul. “There’s a kind of delay on the line. I think I spoke before the ‘it’s me’ arrived. And your voice is distorted.”
“Oh well,” said Philippa, “I suppose it would be since the sound has to travel right across the globe to get to you.”
“The sound waves aren’t travelling across,” said Paul. “They bounce up to a satellite and down again. It’s a shorter distance, if you take the curvature of the earth into account.”
“I take it everything’s okay your end,” said Philippa, “or you wouldn’t be concerned with the curvature of the earth.”
“But why shouldn’t everything be okay?” asked Paul.
“I thought you might be missing me,” said Philippa.
“Of course I’m missing you,” said Paul. Was the pause longer than the distance merited? Either both spoke at once or waited for the other to speak. It was awkward.
“But I expect you’re too busy to miss me,” said Paul, while Philippa said, “Though I expect the children keep you busy enough,” and both remarks sounded insincere to her, each plaiting into the other as they did. Distance made for remoteness, not closeness. Absence, combined with distance, was not the continuation of presence by other means, as she had affectionately and consolingly assured her husband only ten days earlier—it was a kind of blinking out of existence, and all you could do was hope it was a temporary situation. The silence had fallen again. Now neither spoke.
Paul coughed and Philippa had a vision of the sound bursting up and out of the wintry London fog into the night sky, to reach a satellite half-way to the moon before pouring down again here in Auckland, New Zealand, where the sun shone brightly through an ozone-thin sky onto blue, sparkling water. Christmas was nearly upon them. Philippa and Paul had been married for six years and this was the first Christmas they had spent apart.
The hotel where Philippa stayed looked out over a wide harbour: fine lines of white sand marked out a pattern of beaches on its other side: yachts, their coloured sails like halves of party balloons, lost and regained energy, clustered and dispersed in the foreground. Philippa had no idea how that kind of thing—sailing—was done; she had never had any desire to do it, or anything like it. People here seemed to be happy doing outdoor things, but outdoor things made Philippa feel desolate and awkward. She missed her house, her home, her children, Paul. She missed the winter. If the weather was cold you could put on a jersey to keep warm; but if you were hot all you could do was turn up the air-conditioning and contribute another nail in the planet’s coffin. In London, to dislike outdoors was a perfectly natural state of affairs: here in New Zealand it seemed an offence against a hospitable and benign deity. Climate was something to be relished, to be grateful for. To murmur here about loss of ozone and the dangers of sunbathing was simply not in good taste; as mentioning insanity or cancer had not been in her grandmother’s day. Philippa wished she could tell Paul this, but how could she? It would go on too long and words cost money.
Philippa cou
ld hear one of the Boondock Boys moving in the next room. It was something that they were stirring. Four of them lived in a suite with three bathrooms and only just enough space in which to stretch their embryo personalities and their squalor: their blackish shirts, their jewellery, hairsprays, overstretched tights, cigarette papers, bondage gear, the knickers of their groupies which they kept as souvenirs, the instruments which they claimed they never let out of their sight but frequently did. Philippa would somehow have to get them to their photo call by two o’clock. They were pleasant enough lads, not very bright, who felt it commercially prudent to act drunk, high and rude. They made her feel like some solicitous and bourgeois grandmother, not the young whiz kid she’d believed she was.
“So how’s the tour going?” Paul was asking. “Everything okay?” Philippa counted one, two, three, before saying, “It’s a nightmare.” Her mother had once told her it was unwise to let the man in your life know you were having a good time without him. But since Philippa wasn’t having a good time perhaps she should say she was? Was that how it worked?
“Well,” said Paul, “you would take it on, leaving us here to have Christmas alone,” just as Philippa said, “Actually, it’s quite a lark quite a lot of the time, and the weather’s glorious.” It was like being killed by friendly fire.
Paul said, “Tell you what, you speak, and wait, and then I’ll speak.” Except that he went on talking and she thought he’d stopped, so there they were, speaking together again. “I thought it would be ten times easier organising four people than it would be forty. But a pop group and a philharmonic are very different animals. At least classical musicians turn up where and when they say they will. And they can read schedules. They may be elderly and boring, most of them, but at least they’re reliable.”
