by Weldon, Fay
I am sure her house is clean. I am sure there is not a speck of dust anywhere. The cleaner the house the angrier the lady. We are the cleaners. We empty the ashtrays which tomorrow will be filled again. We sweep the floors which tomorrow will be dusty. We cook the food and clean the lavatory pans. We pick up the dirty clothes and wash and iron them. We make the world go round. Someone’s got to do it. When she dies it will be said of her, she was a wonderful wife and mother. She cooked a hundred thousand meals, swept a million floors, washed a billion dishes, went through the cupboards and searched for missing buttons. She muttered, but we will miss her.
Down among the women, we don’t like chaos. We will crawl from our sickbeds to tidy and define. We live at floor level, washing and wiping. If we look upward, it’s not towards the stars or the ineffable, it’s to dust the tops of the windows. We have only ourselves to blame.
‘Yes, God,’ we say, ‘here’s your slippers and your nice hot dinner. In the meantime just feed us, keep us, fetch the coal and say something nice while you’re about it.’
Audrey and Helen share a flat. Audrey doesn’t do housework. She is something of a slut. She will clean if she has to, for the sake of a quiet life, but her heart isn’t in it. Men, observing her domestic habits, feel there is something unnatural here. Women feel the same. They resent her freedom. Such cleaning as she does is man-orientated: when the man drifts away, so does Audrey’s capacity for domestic action. Dirty knickers pile up on the bathroom floor; bread gets cut on the sideboard and the crumbs are left for the mice.
Helen, on the other hand, has a gift for domestic grace. Where she moves, there is beauty. She will put one flower in a jam jar and make the arrangement remarkable; she will open her trunk and bring out embroidered oriental fabrics with which she will cover cushions and make curtains. She will lay a table nicely and fold paper napkins into pretty shapes. The food tastes better.
The arrangement, by which Audrey pays the bills and Helen blesses the flat with her orderly presence, works well enough while, as it were, it is not overlooked.
But now Paul is complaining to Audrey – not without justification – that Helen is exploiting her, and X is complaining because they have to pass through Audrey’s bedroom to reach Helen’s – thus being confronted by what he feels to be the mating of inferiors – and tensions arise. Harsh words are spoken, not to each other, but to mutual friends. Helen says of Audrey, ‘She is a mercenary slut,’ and implies it is Audrey’s lack of breeding that makes her complain that Helen keeps the electric fire on all night, so that X will be able to step out into a warm room.
(Y has entered an art competition. It rather looks as if she might win it. There is a prize of £1,500. X would have liked to compete but clearly can’t enter into direct competition with his wife. She put her entry in without telling him. He is nervous and angry, and only feels at ease and himself when immersed and active in Helen. He does not tell Y where he goes at night: he is angry when questioned. And Y, who feels she has done him a great wrong by entering the competition, does not have the heart to persist in enquiry. At least he comes home in the morning, and has had breakfast, so she does not have to make him coffee and delay starting her work. She has never worked better. He, so far as painting is concerned, is alternately frenetic and apathetic, and accomplishes very little.)
Audrey says of Helen, ‘If she can afford new clothes, she can afford to pay the electricity. Why doesn’t she get a proper job? And he’s a married man, she should think of that.’
All the same, in bed with Paul, listening patiently as he talks, Audrey watches X’s dark figure as he goes through to Helen in the inside room, and she envies. X, she knows, she feels, will not demean himself with words, as Paul does. X belongs to a romantic world; she cannot aspire to it. Audrey was born below stairs with legs, she rightly fears, too short even for Emma-Audrey to be able to climb to more rarefied regions, where Paul cannot pursue her. Yet she longs; she desires; she finds X’s brief disdainful presence by her bed more erotically stimulating than a whole half-hour of Paul’s patient verbal stirring and dextrous manipulations. To be taken, seized and left is all she wants.
Paul finds these midnight intrusions insupportable. He is no painter, no writer, no poet – his pottery is stern and practical; he tries and tries, but cannot achieve more. He makes do with creative diatribes against X’s painting – and affords Y faint praise. He despises and lusts after Helen, and prophesies that she will come to a bad end.
His proposal to Audrey still stands, but he does not press it. Why should he? He has, rash fellow, got her a job on a woman’s magazine. She loves it. She is animated, heady with competence. She sneers at the editor, the caption writers, the art directors – alters copy and headlines as she types. She can do better than anyone, she knows. Paul listens and laughs. At the office she is known as Emma. He feels quite safe. In the evenings he teaches her to cook, how to listen to music; he gives her exercises in pornographic writing and marks them out of ten. She models for nude photographs, but finds that this gives her stomach pains. These frighten him; he desists.
One day Emma’s Editor sends a memo round the office saying the magazine is to carry no more fiction. Up and down the corridors there is uproar. The Editor, quite clearly, has misinterpreted the findings of the new Readership Research Department. Will anyone tell him? No, he is too bold and angry a man. He hires in a minute, fires in a second. What’s this? Little Emma? Pattering up to the Editor’s desk, telling him he’s a fool? He smiles, re-instates fiction, and promotes Emma. It’s like a fairy story. Now she’s head of the story section. She takes writers out to lunch. At home, she is found to be intolerable. She talks of nothing but interoffice politics; Helen yawns, X declines to turn up at all. (Y thinks ‘you see, patience and tact has won him back’.) Paul gets fearful headaches from nervous irritation. This is not what he had meant at all.
Paul asks Emma to marry him. Of course, she will wish to stop work. If they are to be together, it must be totally, inseparably, day as well as night.
Emma hesitates. Emma has written home boasting about her new job. She’s making good. Her parents reply with a crude request for £53, money they once had to send to supplement her County Award while she was at college.
Emma agrees to marry Paul. Emma needs shelter. Paul won’t let her send a penny home. Emma, he says, must break off all relationship with her family completely, start life anew. She is only too glad to do so. They will move to the country, to Suffolk (no editors in Suffolk, no lunches, no taxis, no expense accounts, none of the seductions of office life); they will run the pottery business together. Emma’s good at typing and invoicing. She will be very useful. They will live as near to nature as the U.S. Air Bases in the area will allow. She will bake home-made bread, and have a herb garden. He will have a little conservatory for humming-birds – always his ambition. It sounds entrancing. Emma hands in her notice.
It is a Registry Office wedding. Audrey dreamt in her vulgar way of hymns, a choir, white veils and bow ties; Emma knows better. She scoffs and giggles quite openly at the Registrar’s few kind words, as he misguidedly tries to make the ceremony more than a legal transaction. Her mother wanted to come – Paul won’t let her, and Emma is grateful.
Paul’s brother Edward is there – a schoolmaster with bad asthma. He seems to find Paul mildly ridiculous, which upsets Emma. Scarlet is there, her ring finger greener than ever. She carries little Byzantia. Helen comes; so do Jocelyn, and Sylvia and Philip. So does Paul’s first wife. Who asked her? Why, Paul.
On way and another Emma is glad when the day is over, and she can retire to bed with Paul, who celebrates the occasion by making love for an hour and a quarter, timed with his stop watch; including preliminary love play of the duration of, from the first pinch of the ear lobe to the last blow into the nostril, and the final delicate fingerings, an hour and twelve minutes.
Truly he is remarkable.
After a few months of Suffolk life Emma either stops getting stom
ach pains or grows used to them. Presently she stops dreaming of X.
*
Helen cannot afford to keep the flat going, now that Audrey has gone. She confides her troubles to Y, of whom she now sees a lot. She loves to wander in X’s territory when he is not there, to wash his coffee cup, read his letters, hide her head among his clothes, sit in his chair, see his family as he must see them. She loves Y because she is part of X. Sometimes she loves X because he is part of Y. Y seems to her more and more beautiful; a pale, quiet, thin woman with light eyes fringed by lighter lashes, and long thin legs. Her paintings are sad and powerful. Helen wants to smooth Y’s wispy hair out of her eyes, make her cups of tea, help her relax, smile, be happy. Yet when X appears she is in a frenzy of impatience, waiting for him to find some dark place and overwhelm and satiate her.
Y no longer suspects Helen. She believes X has lost interest in Helen, found some other newer light of love, and is now even sorry for her. So she puts up with Helen’s continual presence in her household; Helen talks too much in too naïve a way, Y thinks, but she is useful with the children.
‘If I had any money I would help you out,’ says Y to Helen, ‘but I haven’t. Not unless I win this prize, which isn’t likely.’ But she knows in her heart she will win it.
Helen stays for supper quite often. They all eat black-eyed beans and bacon, talk of art and artists; of teachers at the Slade, Camberwell and the Central. There are lots of friends, there is lots to drink, they make their own beer and wine. They live cheaply but well. They strip the paint off unfashionable furniture and discover the beauties beneath. They are young; there is a duffle-coated resurrection in the air.
Presently, of an evening, X will get up and leave. No one asks where he is going: they know he likes to work at night, anyway. And then when the others go, Helen goes too.
Or sometimes she stays a little longer to comfort Y.
‘You mustn’t worry about it,’ says Helen. ‘It means nothing. It’s you he loves. There is so much in him to give, it’s not surprising he needs more than one woman to keep him going, is it? How can a man like that, a major creative talent, be expected to keep bourgeois rules? It would be death to his painting. You are so lucky to be his wife,’ adds Helen, and Y smiles her tight, small, faded smile and says nothing.
‘You’re all so talented,’ complains Helen. ‘I wish I could do something. I’m a parasite, that’s all. I must have a symbiotic relationship with the great, or die.’
‘The great? X, great?’ Y is amused.
‘Oh yes.’ Helen is quite serious. ‘So are you,’ she adds as an afterthought.
Y denies it. But she looks at her husband a little differently after these talks with Helen, and is even less inclined to challenge him. How can she, so small, so ordinary, so everyday, have the right to the totality of his being? She must be grateful for what he can bestow: she must not feel distress when he seems to need more than she can offer. Sexual jealousy is a mean, horrid, destructive emotion. Helen keeps saying so.
‘If you really love someone,’ Helen keeps saying, ‘you want them to be happy and free.’
And presently Y hasn’t the courage to reply, as once she did, ‘No. I want them to be mine.’ She tries to be generous and noble. X makes love to her as frequently as before, but she feels he is angry – whether with himself or with her she cannot tell.
‘The sensible thing for a wife to do,’ says Helen, ‘is to make it easier for a husband to take his extra-marital pleasures when and where he feels inclined. I mean, what is the real danger for a wife? Not that the husband will be unfaithful, but that he will find love elsewhere. Men don’t leave home for sex, they leave home for love. And we all know that sex denied soon turns into love. A husband’s infidelity should be seen as an enriching of the marriage, and encouraged. He brings something extra home.’
‘Oh, yes,’ says Y, sarcastic, ‘so long as it isn’t V.D.’
‘Penicillin,’ says Helen, ‘will put an end to V.D. once and for all.’
All the same, in spite of the knowledge that Helen is young and foolish, Y is influenced. A letter arrives. Y has won the prize. £1,500. Y hides the letter for days. But it will be announced in the newspapers soon. Y will have to tell him. She waits till he is in a good mood and Helen is out of the house. She has the feeling that Helen’s presence irritates him.
‘I have a present for you,’ she says all at once. ‘I have won that prize, I have the cheque, and I have bought you a studio flat. It is just around the corner.’
‘A flat? What for?’ He is astounded.
‘You might find it easier to work there,’ she says. ‘And models, and girls and things.’ Her tongue can scarcely get round the words, but she manages. ‘Really, you see, I don’t mind. You mustn’t think I do. I’ll go on loving you. It’s just a kind of nervous twitch, really, with you. I know. This sex thing with other women. Well, I mean, it’s you, isn’t it? I married all of you.’
She stops talking. He says nothing. She can’t make out whether he is pleased or angry.
‘It’s a nice flat,’ she says. ‘With a lovely studio stove. A Pither. I’ve polished it up. It’s brass.’
‘It’s good about the prize,’ he says, eventually. She has forgotten all about that part of it.
‘It doesn’t mean much,’ she says. ‘I mean they’ve got no judgement, really, have they? People who give prizes.’
There is silence between them again.
‘Well, thank you very much,’ he says.
‘I won’t go round there,’ she says, ‘ever. It’s your private place.’
Thus retreating, accommodating, placating, she safeguards her marriage. Helen stops complaining about the rent.
Jocelyn is employed! Jocelyn has found a job at last. She is a temporary assistant clerk in a Government Department. She gets only £62.0. a week. She grumbles, although, unlike her friends, she has a private income of her own, the interest on money left her by a grandfather, and expectations of even more.
Jocelyn went to the Marlborough Street Employment Exchange to get the job. There, amongst the kitchen hands and machine sewers, she joined a queue of girl arts graduates. No one wishes to employ them. Why should they? Conceited, self-important girls, with nothing to their credit except a knowledge of Middle English or Diplomatic History, sulking over the filing? Uppity, graceless girls, leaving to get married like anyone else, and in the meantime, troublesome?
Jocelyn’s talents find her out, however. She ends up in a branch of the Foreign Office, still on £62.0. a week, sifting refugee reports, and monitoring radio broadcasts from the Eastern Europe Communist Bloc. She writes papers which are read by Churchill and for which her Department head takes credit. When she is not otherwise occupied she makes tea, and files top-secret documents in the crumbly bathroom where the secret files are kept. (The Department is housed in a Georgian mansion in Central London. A few partitions have been built, but otherwise nothing has been changed, except that the water supply to the bath has been cut off, in case important documents get damaged by steam. In the secret files are kept memos from ambassadors, mostly asking for more sherry, or more blankets, or complaining about Embassy Central Heating; and of course the staff’s hats and coats.)
Sometimes staff are asked to keep to their offices for an hour or so. On one such occasion, peering through the keyhole, Jocelyn sees a group of anonymous and forgettable men, all wearing raincoats although it hasn’t rained for days. Spies, she concludes.
Jocelyn, writing her reports, interprets the truth as her employers would wish. She does not lie, but neither does she tell the truth. Either way, she does not care. She is preoccupied with her inner world.
For Jocelyn wants to be married.
Byzantia, when she reaches nubile age, can be heard to say, ‘I don’t want to get married. Why should I get married? I don’t want to be some man’s wife. Moreover I do not subscribe to these outmoded bourgeois formulae. Children? No, the world’s too terrible a place.’ She means Vi
etnam and so on, brought to her daily on the telly, before which, in the security of her mother’s house, she sits in protein-fed beauty and laments.
But Jocelyn wants to be married. She wants to have a white wedding and a reception with a wedding-cake, local photographers, envious ex-boyfriends, a weeping bustling mother and a hoarse-voiced conscientious father. Her parents are rather elderly. They live in a cosy house in a country town, tend the garden, and already consider Jocelyn off their hands. She would not mind reminding them, in this forcible way, of her existence.
She wants people to say, ‘What a lovely girl. She used to be rather plain, too. Do you remember that hockey phase?’
She wants to ask Miss Bonny to her wedding. She promised herself this when she was fifteen. She wants to have a London flat, to have an account at Harrods, to be known as Mrs. She wants to entertain.
She wants a wedding collection at the office. She wants everyone to know that she, Jocelyn, is truly female, truly feminine, truly desired, is now to be married and complete.
She would like Philip as a husband. He is young, suitable, gentlemanly, of good executive stock, smart appearance, and public school background. (He has his job in advertising. He works for Susan’s father after all; he is junior executive at Watson and Belcher.) She knows she loves Philip because she suffers such anxiety when he stays away from her bed on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. On these nights he sleeps at the flat he shares with two rugger-playing friends. Jocelyn thinks his reluctance to commit himself, on any night other than Saturday, is due to Sylvia’s presence in the flat. She feels she cannot bring the subject up.
‘Perhaps I’ve been foolish,’ she confides to Helen, who is supposed to know about men. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have agreed to sleep with him. Perhaps now he thinks I’m too awful to marry, and wants a virgin bride or something. He lost interest in Sylvia, didn’t he, quickly enough. But then if I hadn’t, he’d just have found someone else. And anyway, if we hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any relationship at all. I mean, we met in bed, if you see what I mean. London is a terrible place. If we lived at home everyone would know exactly what was happening, and he’d have to marry me. Helen, do you think if I had held out he would have asked me to marry him?’
