by Weldon, Fay
Truly, yes, truly delicious. Or at any rate, all right by me. Time was when the children had rickets. More hens in the country now than people. Free-range for the hundreds, or battery for the millions, you make your choice. I know which I make. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her. Give her a packet of frozen fish fingers any day, and a spoonful of instant mashed potato, and a commercial on the telly to tell her it’s good. We swallow the lot, we mothers, and laugh.
Down here among the women, or up, up, up, in the tower blocks; those rearing phalluses of man’s delight.
Down here among the women you don’t get to hear about man maltreated; what you hear about is man seducer, man betrayer, man deserter, man the monster.
What did we hear last week, during our afternoons in the park?
Man leaves his wife, young mother of four. She is waiting to go into hospital for her cancer operation. He returns from a holiday abroad, stays a couple of hours, and leaves for good, saying, by way of explanation, he is tired of being married. He probably is, too.
Man runs off with secretary the day his son brings home his first girlfriend.
Man leaves home while his wife’s in hospital having the baby. She comes home to an empty house and unpaid bills. Yet he visited her in hospital, brought her flowers and grapes… no one can understand it.
Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old.
Yesterday L walked with me. A rich girl, clever, cultivated, desiring to marry M, an equally rich and cultivated person – if married already – much in the public eye. A suitable match for suitable people. How to dispose of the unsuitable wife, but kindly, without hurting her? Without mentioning L’s name? For two whole years, I learn, he professes his love for his wife, whilst making himself as unpleasant to her as he can; finally, in her distress, it is the wife who asks for a divorce. The consummation to be wished. He acts his hurt surprise, his indignation, silent joy mounting in his veins. Rushing to the telephone. She’s asked, she’s asked! At last! Such kindness. Can you imagine such kindness? Yes, truly, they imagine they are kind.
Dear God, preserve us from such love.
Down here among the wage-earners, of course, we don’t have that class of patience. Our love is less lofty. Money and law interfere. Let me quote a poem I know. It is called ‘The Poet to his Wife’.
Money-and-law
Stands at the nursery door.
You married me – what for?
My love was not to get you clothes or bread,
But make more poems in my head.
I’ve fathered children.
God!
Am I to die
To turn them out as fits a mother’s eye?
I wanted mothering and they, this brood
Step in and take my daily food.
Money-and-law
Stands at the nursery door.
Money-and-law, money-and-law
Has the world in its maw.
Well.
Susan sits up in her hospital bed. Her father sends flowers: he’s in the United States discovering more about instant coffee. Susan’s stitches are infected. Movement is painful. Kim is kind but thinks she is fussing. Well, it isn’t his first baby. There was, after all, Scarlet, a full twenty years ago.
Scarlet, they (Kim, Wanda, Scarlet and friends, but not Susan) have decided, may as well stay in the flat with her baby daughter until Susan returns with her son. Susan wants to return now, at once. But Susan is running a slight fever in the evenings. The hospital doesn’t want to take any risks. And the baby is not yet back to its birth-weight. Susan’s breasts are cracked and painful. When the baby sucks, male and searching, tears of pain and humiliation spurt from her eyes.
Susan’s mother, and the ward sister, both say she should persevere in breast feeding for Baby’s Sake. Susan perseveres, pumping her strength into the baby for her own sake, not his. She wants her home back. She wants her breasts back, too, for her own. She doesn’t dare ask Kim on his nightly visit if Wanda visits Scarlet.
She won’t decide on a name for the baby. ‘I’d only thought of girls’ names,’ she says. ‘What’s Scarlet calling hers?’
Kim says he doesn’t know. She doesn’t believe him. Kim’s sleeping on the sofa. She’s not sure she believes that, either. But she must believe it, otherwise she’s mad. Men do not sleep with their daughters, let alone when they’ve had a baby only days previously. Nevertheless, Scarlet is in her, Susan’s, matrimonial bed, and Susan is deeply affronted.
Susan’s baby develops an eye infection. He cries in that corner of the upstairs nursery reserved for infected babies. He with his sticky, pus-clogged eye, another with a dermatitis, another with dysentery; they lie in cots six inches apart. Mother isn’t told. They wipe his eyes before he comes down.
Susan can pick out her baby’s cry. It has a different note from the others. In the middle of the night, against all the rules, she hobbles and groans up the stairs to see her baby. She has never wittingly broken a rule in all her life; not even to run in the school corridors, not even to trap and sell for sixpence the miniature frogs, protected by law, which hopped and dived in her antipodean paradise of a back garden.
There is Simeon, segregated, cast out, threatened, eyes closed fast by pus. She clasps him, won’t let him go, backs into a corner with him. Staff come running; they tug, she snaps and bites like a bitch with pups. She is astonished at herself. They think she is mad. So indeed she seems to be. They ring Kim, but he isn’t at home. Wanda is. They tell Susan. They can’t give her tranquillizers, it is too early in the world’s history, so they try phenobarb; they even let her have the baby beside her for the night.
In the morning Kim comes.
‘You shouldn’t get so upset,’ he says. ‘Lots of babies get eye infections.’
‘Take me out of here.’
‘You’re in no state to go, love. You need a rest.’
‘Rest? Here?’
‘Yes. You’re still feverish at night. Sister said so.’
‘Of course I’m feverish at night after what I’ve been through. If I stay, the baby will go blind.’
‘Don’t be so silly. They’re looking after it perfectly well.’
‘He’s not an “it”.’
‘Very well, looking after him perfectly well. Don’t be so irritable. Try and be calm and relaxed. Scarlet is, and look at the trouble she’s in.’
Susan cannot think of anything to say for a while. Presently she does.
‘Perhaps you’d like to keep Scarlet and put me into a home? She might suit you better.’
‘I can hardly turn my daughter out, Susan, can I?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘You are more like your mother than I thought,’ he remarks.
‘And what’s that?’
‘Self-concerned, Susan,’ he says. It is an obvious euphemism.
‘And you’re more like my father,’ she says, ‘than I dreamed. You don’t love me at all. You just use me.’
‘Hush,’ he murmurs – for their voices are raised and other women are looking, as if they did not have enough to stare at already. He had thought Susan so sound, so sweet, so sensible, so pretty. Now here she sits, puffy-eyed, dismal, jealous and complaining. She might almost be Wanda but without, of course, Wanda’s brain. He wonders whether this makes her more or less acceptable, and decides, after all, more. He takes her hand, pats it.
‘You’re a good brave clever girl,’ he says, ‘and I miss you very much. It’s terrible for me at home without you.’
She is mollified.
‘Please let me come home,’ she pleads, ‘Mr Justice can come every day.’
‘Look,’ he says, ‘we get it all free in here. Mr Justice costs money and I have to pay for him looking after Scarlet. We’re a bit tight, you know. I have more dependants than I had before.’
‘I don’t understand you.’ Susan is aghast.
‘I shall have to do something about
supporting Scarlet and Byzantia.’
‘Scarlet and who?’
‘Byzantia. That’s what the baby’s called. I’m sorry, I should have told you before. Terrible name, isn’t it? I stood out against it, but she insisted. She’s a romantic girl.’
Susan buries her head in the pillow. She won’t talk to him. It is all too much. He brings her water, smiles nervously round.
‘You’ll dry my milk up,’ she says presently.
‘You’re a good strong healthy natural girl,’ he says. ‘Nonsense.’
‘I suppose Scarlet just overflows.’
‘She does rather,’ he says.
‘In my bed. Or does she spurt it at the walls? They do in here, showing off. It’s disgusting. Does she have to be in my bed?’
‘Where else can she be?’
‘In her own home.’
‘Who would look after her?’
‘Wanda,’ Susan utters the name with disgust.
‘Wanda’s out teaching all day,’ says Kim.
‘And with you all night?’ Susan is sharp now; her eyes grow smaller in her head. Piggy-eyes, her mother used to call her.
‘You’re mad,’ he says. ‘For God’s sake –’
‘She was there when you rang. You weren’t –’
‘What would you have said if I was!’ He laughs, ha-ha-ha. He looks older and greyer, like every man pursued by nagging and doubting.
‘Why was she there and where were you?’
‘She comes in to give the baby its two-o’clock feed so Scarlet can get some sleep,’ he admits at last. ‘I was at the office waiting for a phone call from your father. Ask him if you don’t believe me.’
‘I believe you all right,’ she says. ‘You’re never at home. It’s just a hotel to you. If you’d been home last Sunday like an ordinary husband all this would never have happened. I suppose Scarlet has a nurse by day.’
‘Yes,’ he says. Silence again. Presently –
‘And there’s no money left for me? Your wife?’
‘What else could I do?’ he asks, piteously enough. ‘One must do what one can.’
‘You’ve managed not to for the last twenty years,’ says Susan.
‘One must face one’s responsibilities.’
‘It’s her responsibility, not ours.’
‘She went out and got herself pregnant the day we got married.’
‘So it’s all my fault?’
‘It’s not a question of fault,’ he says lamely, but he feels yes it is Susan’s fault.
Byzantia is a very pretty baby, with a clear pale skin and well-formed features. His son is a dark-red mottled sticky-eyed lump. He has been having long talks with Wanda. She has provoked him almost to the point of believing the time might be ripe for him to start painting again. But how can he, now he has this influx of dependants? At least Wanda works – he can’t see Susan ever doing anything but sit round waiting to be kept. Poor Susan. He smoothes her hair back from her forehead: it has wrinkles there he never noticed before. She is very tense. He wishes he didn’t have these thoughts about her.
‘Scarlet is part of our lives now,’ he says. ‘We must try and make the best of it, that’s all.’
Nurses erupt from all sides; they move him to one side. It is not within normal visiting hours, so they don’t count him as human. One wheels the baby off; another the locker. Susan watches while her flowers, her breakfast and slices of white bread and butter and raspberry jam disappear. (The hospitals are using up the war-time stocks. Jam is made of turnip pulp, flavouring, cochineal, and – in the popular imagination, at any rate – flecks of wood for raspberry pips.) Other nurses seize Susan’s bed and wheel that off too.
He follows.
‘Where are you taking her?’
‘Ask Sister, please.’ They are firm, brutal and kind all at the same time; armour-bosomed and sexually aware, these smiling girls who watch and observe the processes of motherhood.
He finds Sister in the store room, up a step-ladder investigating a forgotten shelf. She has discovered a false leg lying in the dust; she has not much concentration for Kim. Susan, however, she admits, has a post-puerperal fever.
‘What’s that?’ he asks.
Sister is vague. But Susan is going into the isolation ward. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’ It’s not dangerous, he enquires? Good gracious no, she beams. And she can have the baby with her now, can’t she? Without disturbing the other mothers.
Kim has to be off, back to the office, the three-roomed suite in Mayfair. Susan’s father is away. Kim has to be entire creative and executive departments himself and he is very busy.
But he takes time off to have drinks at lunchtime with his friends in the pub in Oxford Street. Dylan Thomas holds the floor, with a supporting cast of poets. Penguin New Writing is into its fortieth and last edition. The beer is good, if warm; Scotch is back. The Welfare State is being wrought around them. In the Black Horse Kim drinks to celebrate his new fatherhood with friends on the whole rather younger than he is, not long back from the war, duffle-coated, seeking a congenial level – doorman today, BBC producer (radio) tomorrow, who knows? Painters, jazzmen, writers, the first sociologists – the original do-your-own-thing people, widening up the channels of culture for the masses to flow through.
Here Kim is a man of status: he earns enough to buy the drinks, he has two paintings in the Tate, albeit painted twenty years ago, albeit in the basement; now he has a baby. They are pleased for him. It is a time of hope.
Babies are welcome in this still rationed, still unpainted, barely photographed, rarely filmed, but lively world.
Kim is moved to tell them of Scarlet. He confesses to having a grandchild. They think it is a great joke. Why, they did not even know he had a daughter. There are more drinks all round. He understands he can be proud of and not alarmed by his new relatives. At closing time he takes some friends back to meet Scarlet and Byzantia.
In truth, he knows very little of Scarlet. She has hardly said a word to him. She is shy; but she glows at Byzantia – the perfect baby, who only sleeps to wake again and suck, and sucks to sleep again – and looks a good deal better than she usually does. He is pleased, for the moment, at any rate, to own her for a daughter.
During the course of the evening Scarlet’s friends arrive to inspect the baby. It is quite a party.
Jocelyn brings Philip with her. While Jocelyn marvels at Byzantia, Philip says he would be interested in joining Kim’s firm; he sees a great future for himself in advertising, but has failed the intelligence tests set by the personnel departments of the established agencies. ‘More to my credit than otherwise, ha-ha,’ he says. There is a good deal of drunken wincing at this, but Jocelyn does not notice. There are many things Jocelyn does not notice about Philip. Having trodden Sylvia’s sensibilities underfoot, how can she afford to be critical?
Sylvia comes with Philip and Jocelyn – she spends most of her spare time with them, as if there was something to be learned from studying their behaviour.
She lets herself be picked up by an eccentric Scottish Earl (so he says) and be made very drunk. He takes her home to his studio, and there, in a specially constructed and padded box, in an effort to trap the forces of the orgasm, they copulate. Orgasm seems a very rude word to Sylvia, and indeed a rude thing – not that she is sure what it means. The Earl however seems satisfied, and presently rushes naked to his flask of sterile water – specially bought from Boots – to see whether bacteria have now formed. They have. He is overjoyed and kisses Sylvia with a real tenderness, very different from his previous humping fury; she would like to put her arms round him but he rushes off to tell his friends over the telephone that his theory is proved. Life springs from sex, not sex from life. Orgasm is at the heart of all things.
It would scarcely seem suitable, in the circumstances, for Sylvia to be hurt or offended. A scientific discovery has been made. He is a handsome, dramatic man, and she feels honoured that he has sought her out; included her, as it were
, in not only aristocratic but creative circles.
She returns exhausted to Jocelyn – the Earl cannot spare the time from his investigations to drive her home – with instructions to return the following night. And Jocelyn encourages Sylvia to go, although she knows full well this earnest copulater is not a true Earl, but just pretending. She can’t stand the sight of Sylvia, not just now.
Audrey comes to visit Scarlet, too. She admires the baby, cursorily, and talks about herself and her potter. He comes to visit nightly. It seems a good compromise. She is not sure she wants to marry yet. She keeps getting dreadful pains, far far worse, she is sure, than childbirth. Scarlet says in fact childbirth is dead easy, but Audrey isn’t listening.
As for Helen, Helen can’t come to visit Scarlet. Helen loves X. X loves Helen. They lie in the dark cupboard under the stairs where Y can’t find them. The sloping roof has been papered at one stage with a white paper patterned with yellow stars. Helen stares up at it, at the circle made by the light of the torch. The memory remains with her as long as she lives. When she closes her eyes before sleep it is what she sees, and when she wakes, it is to this imprint of colour. Later, she is to buy dress material with yellow stars upon it for her little girl.
Of course Helen can’t come to visit Byzantia. Later, Byzantia is to forget to visit Helen, and Helen dies. Not perhaps that it would have made that much difference. But it might.
Kim has drunk so much he forgets to visit Susan. Susan sits in splendour in the isolation ward. Her baby is beside her. They won’t let her breast-feed the baby now; they bring her a bottle. They make her stay in bed. She feels splendid. When she doesn’t walk her stitches don’t hurt.
Doctors come and stare at her, and ask her how she’s feeling.
‘Fine,’ she says, and they look bemused, and at each other, as they inspect, tap, and medicate. They don’t understand it, and why should they? They have their test-tubes mixed.
In the ward another young woman drifts slowly off towards death, unnoticed. Would Susan mention the error, if she knew? Abandon the comfort and safety of her position? Fortunately, she is not called upon to speak up: she is not told till later. When Kim does not arrive that evening she decides he is angry with her for behaving badly and being jealous, and writes him a sad little letter of apology.
