by Weldon, Fay
‘Is this – um – just a social visit?’ enquires Susan, with antipodean awkwardness.
‘I have come to visit my father,’ states Scarlet.
‘Yes. Of course. How nice. But do you need anything?’
The question is too enormous for Scarlet to answer; in any case she has another pain and wants to go home; but Belsize Park seems too far away to be reached; and has not her mother sent her here?
The feeling grows that if she goes back home now she will never, ever get away. She continues to sit brightly, tightly upright and begins to dread her father’s return. How can she explain herself to this stranger? If she stops smiling she will cry.
Susan makes a pot of tea, conscious of Scarlet’s need, but praying that Kim will return and make everything all right again. Simeon kicks and she cries out, startled, and nearly drops the kettle. She has a vision of those white pure feet of hers raw, blistered and disfigured for ever. She trembles.
Susan hovers for a moment on the borders of that other terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a casual exception to death, and all cells cancerous except those which the will contrives to keep orderly; where the body is something mysterious in its workings, which swells, bleeds, and bursts at random; where sex is a strange intermittent animal spasm; where men seduce, make pregnant, betray, desert: where laws are harsh and mysterious, and where the woman goes helpless.
Susan, in fact, nearly leaves the girls and comes down here among the women.
She thinks of her mother and survives, hauling herself out of the mire, using a lace doily as a foothold. She lays it on a tray and makes Scarlet lemon tea. There is a fine sweat on Scarlet’s brow. Still she sits upright, tightly smiling.
What are people saying about Scarlet these days? All kinds of things. Byzantia bestows on this former invisible girl the mantle of existence, and thus makes her the easier to snipe at.
‘I do think Scarlet went a bit far,’ Audrey is saying to her potter, Paul, ‘not even knowing who the father is.’ They have gone on from the V. and A. to an anarchist party in Hampstead. There is a sheet hung out of the window saying, ‘Only a sheep would vote’. The party has been going on since the previous night. The host has made beer in the bath. People queue outside the bathroom either to piss or vomit in the toilet, or take more beer from the bath. There is also home-made elderberry wine in the kitchen. At some time during its preparation it was contained in tin buckets, and is now mildly poisonous. A drunken rumour goes round that those who drink it die. No one seems to care; in particular not those who have recently visited the bathroom. Purple-lipped and black-toothed they drink on. Thus, in the vanity of youth, these reckless anarchs of twenty years ago rejoice.
Audrey and her escort prefer to see themselves in the role of spectators. The scene here is too like the home of her childhood, too unlike his, for comfort.
‘I would like to meet this Scarlet,’ he says.
‘She has bad legs,’ says Audrey firmly.
‘Bad in leg means good in bed,’ he persists.
‘She’s hardly in the condition,’ says Audrey.
‘In Poland they mate the cattle twice,’ he says, ‘once for milk and once for meat. It works.’
‘I don’t know what that’s got to do with it.’
‘That proves your ignorance and lack of subtlety.’
So they bicker, but both are aware in their hearts that he knows better than she.
‘I’m going to give her ten shillings a week to help out,’ volunteers Audrey, defiantly. ‘We all are.’
This silences him for a full minute. At the end of this time she is as nervous as once she was when she waited outside the headmaster’s office to receive the cane. She had done a terrible thing. Brave then as now, she had crept into the boys’ toilets to see what they were like and bear the news back to the waiting troupes of little girls. She’d been told on by a little boy. Discovered, Audrey is at her worst. She will lie, renege and squirm to get out of trouble. But undertaking the impossible, Audrey is magnificent.
At last he speaks.
‘You – Audrey undertook to give her ten shillings a week. You – Emma may well wish to change your mind.’
Emma-Audrey is so overwhelmed by the masterful nature of this well-educated, cultivated young man that she betrays Scarlet instantly.
‘I suppose it’s not really doing her a favour,’ she says, with hardly a moment’s pause. ‘She’s got to come to terms with things, hasn’t she?’
‘Better,’ he says, ‘better. More my Emma, less my slum-child Audrey. Terrifying how deprivation fails to toughen, but merely softens. No one so mean as a man born rich; no one so spendthrift as a girl born poor. Helen’s taking you for a ride, too.’
But she won’t have a word spoken against Helen, who moves like a grasping goddess through her life. He is put out, this young man with the clear cold blue eyes. She moves to placate him.
When he introduces her as Emma she abandons Audrey – or thinks she does. She joins him in abhorring the wine. He is used to better things, better parties, better orgies. He rips Emma’s peasant blouse a little, thrusts in his hands and disorders her breasts.
‘Do try and look more debauched,’ he implores.
Emma-Audrey does her best.
His ex-wife (news to Emma) turns up later, red-haired and drunk, and makes a scene. He comforts her; assures her of his emotional if not his physical fidelity. Audrey-Emma, outraged, leaves the party with his best friend, an Australian teetotaller (astonishing!) with a very clean white shirt and asthma, a follower of Subud. There is a fearful row. It goes on for weeks. The ex-wife implores Audrey to stop tormenting her ex-husband. Audrey says my name is Emma, and pleads honest debauchery. The best friend sleeps with the ex-wife. Emma ends up in hospital with mysterious stomach pains, with the potter at her bedside – weeping tears of reproach, throwing away her prescribed phenobarb and replacing with herbal tablets given by a friend who as father-of-five is supposed to know all. My name is Audrey, says Emma, and worsens. He, seeing her slipping away, not just into Audrey, but into – he imagines in his conceit – death, offers to live with her.
Emma lies in her hospital bed and considers. Thwack, thwack went the cane in the hand of the tall grey man with flapping trousers; it wasn’t me, Audrey cried, it was someone else: and thwack, thwack, it went again, it wasn’t me who wanted to look, it was someone else. Why won’t you believe me? It’s true. It didn’t hurt in the least, and the honour of his attention was singular. He shoots hares, standing in the field like a scarecrow. Audrey skins and cleans them for him a two shillings a time.
Emma’s life, in fact, is so rich and strange she has no time to think of Scarlet.
Those were the parties.
What is Jocelyn saying about Scarlet, as Philip sits up in bed and drinks the tea that Sylvia brings them?
‘Of course if we give her ten shillings a week she’s got to be honest with us. She’s got to tell us who the father is.’
Jocelyn wears her bra in bed. She doesn’t like the feel of her breasts flopping and bobbing. Neither, come to that, does Philip, but he’s not aware of it yet.
‘I suppose she knows who it is,’ says Philip gloomily. ‘I don’t understand why you bother with her. She doesn’t seem the right kind of friend for you two at all.’
Jocelyn and Sylvia enlist themselves on the side of the virtuous women.
‘We can’t desert her now while she’s in trouble,’ says Jocelyn, ‘that wouldn’t be fair. But she’ll have to stop cheapening herself.’
Sylvia cries herself to sleep that night, but can’t think why, except she would have liked Philip to have persisted in his wooing. She takes up with a Sales Director some fifteen years older than she is. He drinks a lot of gin, and is in the habit of telling her in detail on the way home in his Riley of exactly what he wants to do to her, this way and that, in bed. Thus he expends himself and saves the effort of an actual seduction. Sylvia doesn’t mind. She has a kind, if wispish, nature and
is only too glad to be of service. He goes home happier to his wife. She sleepwalks back to Jocelyn.
Down here among the women, we do a lot of sleepwalking. The only way to get through some days is to suppose one will presently wake up. So says Wanda.
‘They have no style,’ Helen is complaining of her friends and admirers. ‘Especially not Scarlet. It was a bad party, given by no one for nobodies, and now of course she’s pregnant by someone no one’s ever heard of. If one is to be an unmarried mother one should do it with a certain panache, don’t you think?’
She is talking to Y, who is finishing a portrait of Helen. X is out lecturing students. The children ram and batter at the closed door which keeps them out of the studio. They are hungry. It is past teatime. Y ignores them.
‘I don’t think one should be an unmarried mother at all,’ says Y virtuously. ‘Children can’t eat panache.’
‘There’s always National Assistance,’ says Helen. ‘I don’t think women really need men at all. Fathers should be done away with. Men must be entertainment for women, no more’. She knows this will upset Y. She is quite right, it does. ‘Women don’t need men,’ she repeats, ‘not nowadays.’
‘I do,’ says Y, her large pale eyes unblinking, looking straight at Helen, who doesn’t know whether she is being stared at as something to paint, or – which she would prefer – as a rival female.
‘I would kill myself,’ says Y, ‘if X ever betrayed me with another woman.’
‘How dramatic!’ says Helen, as languid as she can manage, though Y sounds perfectly matter-of-fact. ‘Do you really think a man like him can be expected to live the rest of his life with only the one woman? Surely, if you loved a man properly, you would want him to be happy, in his own way.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ says Y, in whom there is not a small element of Wanda. ‘I would want him to be mine, that’s all.’
There is no doubt now but that she is looking at Helen, into the spirit of Helen. Helen is gratified. She feels they are hardly a match – Y so frail and mousy, she so bold and strong.
‘I would kill myself,’ says Y, ‘and then I would kill the other woman.’
‘In that order?’ enquires Helen pertly.
Y shrugs. Helen is never to forget this conversation, never. At the door the children hammer and yammer. Y does nothing.
‘Poor Scarlet,’ says Helen. ‘I don’t suppose anyone will ever marry her now. She’s rather plain and hasn’t much to offer, except brains, and what man wants a woman with brains? Of course I don’t believe in marriage, so it wouldn’t matter to me, but she does. Not that I’d ever have a child if I really loved a man. Love’s a full-time occupation, don’t you think? And children are so distracting.’
She has to raise her voice to be heard above the din made by Y’s three.
‘And so very unerotic,’ she adds. Y, in a fit of – what, rage, resentment, petulance, foreboding? – hurls a jam-jar of turps at the closed door, but still does not open it.
When X returns he finds Helen in the kitchen cutting jam sandwiches for three washed, brushed, well-behaved children, while Y paints on. He, who is accustomed to saying that the role of the artist is more important than the role of mother, is impressed, and feels a pang of purely bourgeois irritation with his wife. It enables him to kiss Helen in the pantry with a clear conscience, which is what she had in mind. For a girl of twenty-one she is not doing badly.
4
Scarlet is Brought to Bed
The ribbon tightener gets bored and Scarlet gets a backache instead, tedious, frightening and unnatural. She puts her legs back carefully on the couch, and groans. It is apparent now, even to Scarlet, that she is about to have a baby. She is panic-stricken. This was hardly what she had meant to happen. If she had only believed in a Heavenly Father she would have implored him now to take his gift back. As it is she can only mutter, after her earthly mother, oh fuck, oh shit, hell’s teeth.
Scarlet has for some time been considered by her friends as a girl of loose sexual morality. It is not true. Until she went sulking to a party on the day she read in a newspaper of her father’s wedding, actual intercourse had eluded her. Partly because offers were few, partly because those there were she ignored in order to annoy Wanda, who had fought so fiercely for the sexual rights of the rising generation. Who will believe that Scarlet lost her virginity and got pregnant on the same lamentable occasion? When she was, alas, so drunk she can hardly remember the incident at all? To be so pregnant and so unpleasured seems hardly fair.
She calls out for Susan, who, having made tea, is now on the telephone forlornly trying to trace Kim; who has been on the telephone trying to trace Wanda, who is out; who has inefficiently tried to call an ambulance – Scarlet having left her hospital card at home, naturally – and been informed that without the card ambulances can only be summoned by a doctor; who has tried to raise her own doctor, to be met by an answering machine – surely the first in London, and paralysing to the will.
(Susan is having her baby privately, at home, and the doctor, Mr Joseph Justice, is a rich and go-ahead man.)
Now there are messages for help left all over London but still Scarlet lies on Susan’s couch and prepares to give birth. Susan is mismanaging the whole situation disgracefully.
And what will Kim say?
Susan goes to the bookshelves and takes down a book on progressive childbirth. It once belonged to Wanda. It was written in the 1920s and the photographs disturb her. The women look like her mother – the same swoop of hair over the forehead, the same small smile, the same hairless, marble limbs. She has wondered why Kim keeps it, wondered the more at herself for not throwing it away. For Susan does not believe in the written word, she believes in her Mr Joseph Justice. But alas, Mr Joseph Justice has gone fishing or whatever, leaving on an answering machine in his place. She turns to the section marked ‘Deliveries au naturel’ and returns to Scarlet.
‘Get the police,’ says Scarlet.
‘The expectant mother often panics,’ reads Susan aloud, ‘and believes the birth more imminent than in fact it is.’
‘Get the neighbours,’ says Scarlet.
‘Have the waters burst?’ enquires Susan.
‘What waters?’ asks Scarlet.
‘The womb is filled with a clear water-like liquid,’ says Susan. ‘Before you can have the baby it all comes out. Has it?’
‘I don’t know,’ mutters Scarlet. ‘I’ve no idea. I went to the toilet and everything seemed very wet but I don’t know. My mother still wets her knickers, perhaps I just take after her.’
Susan winces.
‘It doesn’t sound like the waters,’ says Susan.
‘By the waters of Babylon,’ moans Scarlet, ‘we sat down and wept.’
Susan concludes she is wandering in her mind.
‘Do you have a show?’ she enquires, reading on.
‘What’s that?’ asks Scarlet, who has read nothing about childbirth, believing herself to be so natural, normal, and healthy that the details can hardly concern her. Details are for neurotic and frightened women. It does occur to her now, with a shock that quite stops her feeling pain, that she may be both neurotic and frightened herself. Neurotic to be lying here upon her stepmother’s couch; frightened, not just because it hurts and she has no idea what’s happening to her, but because she has remembered that women do die in childbirth, and that the magic which protects her from disaster has lately shown signs of weakening. It seems quite likely to Scarlet now that Susan will let her die, either from stupidity or from malice.
‘It says here a show,’ says Susan forlornly, ‘but it doesn’t say what a show is.’
‘You are a fool,’ says Scarlet, and Susan feels indignation, until, reading on, she discovers that women in childbirth often show signs of irritation.
The pain in Scarlet’s back evaporates. She feels better, gets up, walks about, announces it was a false alarm.
‘Shall we get a taxi to a hospital?’ asks Susan tentatively.
> ‘No,’ says Scarlet. ‘I’ve never taken a taxi in all my life. I don’t approve of them. I’m perfectly well and healthy.’
‘Perhaps you’d better get home while you can,’ says Susan, with dismal cunning. She, who once felt so possessive of Scarlet, so charitable, so condescending, can now hardly wait to get her out of her territory.
‘Home?’ enquires Scarlet. ‘What home?’ and watches with pleasure the blood surging into Susan’s face. Perhaps Susan is going to cry.
‘When you think of it,’ says Scarlet, ‘this is as much my home as anywhere else. My father’s place.’
‘You are not a child,’ says Susan, made quite sharp by desperation. ‘You ought to have a home of your own by now.’
Scarlet is dejected and deflated by the truth of this observation. She feels very strange in her body, and wants to go to the lavatory.
‘I’ll just go to the loo,’ she says. ‘Then I’ll get the bus home.’
‘Perhaps you should,’ says Susan.
‘You just want me to have it in the street, don’t you?’ complains Scarlet, going into the bathroom, where Susan’s baby’s pretty bath and Susan’s baby’s fragrant toiletries wait for the arrival of their user. Susan waits for retribution. It comes. Scarlet opens the door briefly and remarks, ‘My baby’s going to be bathed in the sink, along with the saucepans. We can’t afford this kind of thing.’
Susan runs headlong into her dark kauri forest but it has shrunk: she is only there five seconds before she is out the other side and into brilliant sunshine again. It is Scarlet’s fault.
Susan is angry.
If Scarlet could only have been humble and grateful, had only asked favours, how happy Susan could have been, sharing baby vests, lending nappies, offering advice, arranging an adoption perhaps – even adopting herself, taking in instead of pushing away her husband’s past – and all out of the public kindness of her heart. But Scarlet won’t accept favours. Scarlet has come claiming her rights, and now Susan feels threatened, and frightened, and unprotected. Susan cries out in her heart against Kim for not being there when she needs him. Yet she dreads his return. She had wished to surprise him with her own generosity and understanding; she sees now that what she will surprise him with is a terrible, hideous encumbrance.
