by Weldon, Fay
‘I daresay,’ says Helen, who has a low opinion of Philip. ‘But would you then want to marry him? If you have to resort to sexual blackmail to get a man to marry you, he is surely not worth marrying.’
On the evening before Audrey’s wedding to Paul, Jocelyn leaves the office early to buy a dress. Her looks have improved. Her legs have lost their hockey nobbles. Her waist is agreeably small. Jocelyn cries at Audrey’s wedding. Partly from envy and partly because the brevity of the ceremony upsets her. She is not upset because Audrey is married in the name of Emma. She thinks such devotion to a man is admirable: she predicts a happy future for them. Everyone does.
When she gets back to her gold-leafed room in the Foreign Office there is a Security reception to see her. Three grey unsmiling men stand beside the dark green tin cupboard in the bathroom. It has been sealed with a blob of red sealing wax the size of a dinner plate, solemnly imprinted with the Foreign Office seal.
‘But there was nothing secret in there,’ says Jocelyn.
‘That is beside the point,’ they say.
Jocelyn loses her job. They are sorry to see her go, for seldom has someone worked so hard for so little money, but the rules are the rules.
Philip, always the gentleman, offers to marry her.
7
Scarlet Shows Off
Byzantia’s first birthday falls on a Sunday. Driven by anger, rather than by family feeling, Scarlet takes her child and once again visits Kim and Susan. She does not telephone first. She wants it to be a nice surprise.
Kim is not at home, and in her heart she is glad. But Susan and Simeon are there, suitably unprotected.
Byzantia is dark, grubby and bright. Scarlet has dressed her in her shabbiest, most-washed clothes. Byzantia dribbles constantly – she is teething – and her nose runs a lot so that there is one sore reddish patch around her mouth, but in spite of all, Byzantia is beautiful. She is walking well, too.
Scarlet is glad to see that Simeon, in her eyes a withdrawn and stodgy child, still only crawls. Byzantia has at least a few words to offer the world. Simeon has no desire to converse with anyone. He likes his meals at precise intervals, and his sleeping times to be regular, and that is the sum of his present desire. If his routine is not strictly kept, he is fretful and troublesome. He does not like strange places. He does not like other people. Thus Simeon holds Susan prisoner. She is resigned to her captivity. She devotes her life to looking after him. If Kim wants to go out she says, ‘You know what he’s like with baby-sitters.’ If Kim wants to make love she says, ‘No, Simeon always wakes up at the wrong moment.’ If Kim wants to hold his baby and bounce him, she says, ‘No. You’ll overexcite him and he’ll be sick.’
Susan is not happy but she has the consolation of feeling she is in the right. It would be difficult to fault her, and she knows it. She keeps the flat beautifully: she dresses neatly; she cooks from a cookery book and not from memory; she keeps strange cats, strange dogs, strange people, strange germs at bay. These days she does not wander in her secret forests, she has forgotten them. She is the chained magpie. ‘Go on out,’ she screams in her soul, and wakes in the night with an angry fluttering of black wings about her.
She doesn’t smile much, and she blinks rather a lot. She knows, but she cannot feel, that Kim has a right to share her child, her bed, her home, her life. She wants to push him out, and would be shocked at the very notion.
Watson and Belcher, Practitioners in Advertising, are prospering, which is as well for Kim, since surely he deserves some pleasure in life. Their offices now occupy six rooms. There is a creative staff of four, led by Kim. He has to work late, and many of his weekends are spent at the office. He refers to his young wife and baby son with affection, and shows photographs of them to his friends in the pub, but rather as if he had to keep reminding himself that they do indeed exist.
He does not send money to Scarlet. He suggested once to Susan that perhaps he should, but she grew pink in the face and said that if there was any money to spare it should surely go into an Education Policy for Simeon. He agreed with her. He is aware that her distrust of him was born when he took Scarlet in and talked to Wanda, and he feels bad about it.
His secretary, Alison, however, attracts and distracts him from such dismal thoughts. He devotes much of his emotional energy trying to come to intimate terms with her, without Susan’s father knowing. Not so much because Susan is his daughter – Mr Watson has his own fairly public diversion, a pleasant young designer he first took up with in the Ministry of Food when his wife was in New Zealand and can hardly point a censorious finger – but because this Alison of his is over forty and plain, and Kim feels he has a reputation to keep up.
He cannot bear, these days, to be alone, idle or sober for long.
Scarlet drinks the lemon tea which Susan, with barely disguised reluctance, offers her. Byzantia and Simeon sit on the floor and stare at each other.
‘Working weekends, is he?’ says Scarlet. ‘He must be raking it in.’ She’s as crude and brash as she can be.
‘No,’ says Susan firmly. ‘The agency is going through a tricky time. It’s very new, remember.’
‘You understand financial matters, do you?’ says Scarlet, who does, or at any rate could if she put her mind to it, which she won’t. She likes to believe that Susan is not only ill-educated, but stupid. Susan does not reply. Byzantia hits Simeon. Simeon looks bewildered. Susan picks him up protectively.
‘So you called him Simeon, did you,’ remarks Scarlet. ‘Uncle Simeon. Well, it has a dignified ring. They’re just about exactly the same age, aren’t they?’
Byzantia walks over to her mother and holds out her arms to be picked up. Scarlet obliges. Scarlet knows she is behaving badly, but she can’t stop herself. She is almost physically conscious of the knot of resentment in her chest.
‘I see you have a new carpet,’ says Scarlet. ‘Didn’t you like the colour of the other one or something?’
‘No,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel angry. ‘I didn’t.’
‘What did you do with the old one? Give it to the poor?’
‘I gave it to the dustmen, if you want to know.’
‘Can Byzantia have a biscuit or something?’ asks Scarlet.
‘I’d rather she didn’t,’ says Susan coolly. ‘Simeon will see and want one too, and I don’t let him eat between meals.’
Scarlet looks at Simeon with obvious pity.
‘Poor little Simeon,’ she actually says. Susan sits very upright. She is flushed.
‘Actually,’ says Scarlet, ‘I clean a carpet like this every day. I go out cleaning when Wanda comes back from school.’
‘Cleaning other people’s homes must be quite interesting,’ says Susan eventually. She is taken aback. She sees Scarlet as a lifetime’s burden.
‘It isn’t,’ says Scarlet. ‘But what else can I do? There’s no one to help me. I’m quite alone.’
Susan curls Simeon’s hair into a quiff. She smiles at him.
‘Perhaps,’ Susan observes, ‘you should have thought of that before. I mean, what did you expect to happen? If you have an illegitimate child it isn’t easy, is it?’
Scarlet doesn’t reply at first. She too is pink.
‘Tell you what,’ she says eventually. ‘If I came and cleaned for you and my father, you might pay me a shilling or so above market rates.’
‘We have a daily help already,’ says Susan stiffly.
Scarlet laughs.
‘I was only joking,’ she says. But of course she isn’t. She wants nothing for herself. She is anxious for Byzantia. She is always anxious, these days. Anxious when Byzantia cries, when she has a cold in the nose; paralysed with fear if she runs a temperature; nervous of asking Wanda to baby-sit; alarmed by her own irritation with Byzantia’s grizzles, nappies, fads and habits; terrified (though why should she be?) lest Wanda turn her out and she is left homeless and helpless. She does not feel twenty-one, she feels as old and battered as the hills of the moon.
Like Jocelyn, she wants to be married. But she is moved by desperation, not ambition. She wants security and respectability. She wants to be looked after. She is tired of being pitied. She wants her dignity back. But who would want to marry Scarlet? She is a mess; she knows it now. Over-weight, spotty, untidy, angry; there is only one thing to be said for her, and that is her devotion to Byzantia, her burden.
‘If I was pretty and smart,’ she says suddenly, ‘my father would acknowledge me.’
‘He does acknowledge you,’ says Susan, embarrassed. ‘He just can’t afford to keep you. Frankly, I don’t think he sees why he should. Wanda behaved very badly.’
‘But I’m me. I’m nothing to do with Wanda.’
‘To him you are. You had years when you could have got in touch with him. But coming only when you want something from him …’
‘Please try and explain to him –’ but Scarlet’s voice fades away. She knows it is no use.
‘See him yourself,’ says Susan.
‘No,’ says Scarlet. She has not the heart. Her father, to be frank, frightens and embarrasses her. She is not accustomed to the company of men.
‘Can’t the baby’s father help?’ enquires Susan. Scarlet shakes her head. It has at last occurred to her that from Byzantia’s point of view any father is better than none. She has tried to get in touch with the young man responsible, but he has left his bed-sitting room leaving no address – or at any rate none which is available to sad-voiced females.
She, once so indifferent, now searches Byzantia’s unformed features for traces of this young man; who once took a girl called Scarlet Rider home from a party, spent four hours in bed with her, and then rose, and shaved, and put on a tie, and went to spend Sunday with his fiancée’s parents.
Not that Scarlet wants him now, not really. Scarlet wants no interference. Scarlet will be father and mother both to her incestuous child – for let there be no mistake about it, and to quote her lady analyst years later, Scarlet, all unknowing, wanted her father’s child. And that is why, in this particular version of events, she is bashful of Kim, and is frightened of Wanda, and why she must now quarrel with Susan on anniversaries.
She is hardly being reasonable.
She is causing trouble to everyone.
No one loves her, not even Wanda, who is bored and tired.
Only Byzantia looks at her with pure love in her eyes.
Scarlet snatches up Byzantia and rushes away. Byzantia lets herself be startled and does not complain. Simeon, subjected to similar stress, screams with fright. Scarlet allows herself a second in which she can be seen to sneer. They do not meet again for years.
Down here among the women, there is a sour and grim reality about money as Wanda points out.
So, you choose your degradation, as Scarlet does, and go out scrubbing. So, you lose your purse in Woolworth’s because you want to lose your mother. But you get paid money for scrubbing, and if you leave your purse in Woolworth’s you can’t pay the rent. The bailiffs either come and put you on the streets, or they don’t.
Scarlet worries about money. Scarlet’s fear is that the State will step in and take away Byzantia, her unlawful child. So, it is free-floating anxiety. So, the Council Homes are full of children whom Children’s Officers feel better qualified than any natural mother to care for.
Perhaps they are right, thinks Scarlet, staring with despair at Byzantia, as the child shrieks and stamps with joy upon the floor, and the people in the flat below bang with a broom upon their ceiling, and Scarlet, paralysed with depression, knows that presently she will have to confess to Wanda that it has happened again; and even worse, go down and face them and apologize.
If the people in the flat below complain to the Estate Agents, Scarlet and Byzantia will have to go. There is a ‘no baby’ clause in the lease. And where else will they find to live?
Scarlet comes out in spots.
Wanda had the same concerns years and years ago. They bore her now. She looks at her spotty and apathetic daughter, and laments the waste of her own youth, spent nurturing a child who has grown up no better than she.
‘The thing about having babies,’ she says sourly, ‘is that you can’t. All you ever have is just more people.’ And from the sound of it she doesn’t much like people.
All the same, when Scarlet isn’t looking, Wanda croons to Byzantia, and weaves magic to make her smile, and be content, and good. She is better with Byzantia than Scarlet is; but then of course Byzantia expects more of Scarlet, seeing her mother as an extra limb which will do her bidding, and becoming frustrated and furious when it fails to live up to her expectations, or shows it has a will and purpose of its own.
Wanda earns £10 a week. She worries less about poverty than her daughter, having spent longer with it, and moreover she does not have her daughter’s capacity for running up debts. The rent is £3 5s. 0d. £3 goes on food. Byzantia, one way and another, costs another £1 a week. Other household expenses, including fares, heating, light and hot water come to £4 a week.
Scarlet, working as a cleaner, earns £2 10s. 0d. a week.
There is 25/- a week left over for the three of them, after necessities have been met. This ought to be enough, except that Scarlet, to her mother’s rage, will buy lipstick, cigarettes, toys for Byzantia; and Wanda, to Scarlet’s rage, will buy rum.
Wanda has taken to drink. She has discovered its pleasures late in life. She cannot afford to buy much, but she goes to pubs, leans against bars, and men buy her drinks. She is at her best in pubs. She looks battered, used, available and lively, and in no way a source of reproach, being normally in worse condition than her drinking companions. She builds up quite a pub life. Scarlet is horrified.
‘And you a primary school teacher,’ she says. ‘You’ll lose your job if you’re not careful.’
‘You can be as drunk as you like,’ Wanda claims. ‘What they can’t stand is politics.’ And she adds gloomily, to frighten Scarlet, ‘Wait until they catch up with that.’
She is right. Teachers with communist pasts are suspect. Some have already lost their jobs. Supposing they subvert the children? Or indicate that all might not be well with the world? It is not so much political opinion that is feared, as the spirit of restlessness. No one mocks, in 1951. Stalin is not yet dead.
Wanda is horrified by the way Scarlet goes to parties in a low-cut black sweater and does not return till morning, dusty, tired and bitter.
‘Like a cat on the tiles,’ she complains.
‘I thought you were all for sexual freedom,’ says Scarlet.
‘Not for mothers,’ says Wanda. ‘You’ve had your fling. You should be at home looking after your brat. How can I keep working if I have to get up at two, three, four and five o’clock in the morning?’
It is true. Byzantia has stopped sleeping through the night. She needs entertainment at more frequent intervals than she does food. She will cry as if pierced by a nappy pin or threatened by a rat until the light goes on and a face appears. Then she will giggle, gurgle and rejoice; and only cry again when the face goes away and darkness returns.
‘You grudge me my pleasures,’ says Scarlet. ‘How am I supposed ever to get married if I have to stay at home in this dreary flat? It’s not as if I could ask anyone home. I’d be ashamed.’
‘Pleasure!’ says Wanda, who observes that Scarlet’s all-night absences merely increase her depression.
‘You think sex is dirty and nasty,’ says Scarlet. ‘You try not to but you can’t help it. That’s why you’re always so crude. It isn’t honesty and frankness, it’s sheer terror.’
‘I don’t think sex is dirty and nasty,’ replies Wanda, quick as a flash, ‘I think you are.’
And it is true that Scarlet begins to feel ingrained, though not so much with dirt as with despair. When she’s not thinking she wants a husband, she’s thinking she needs true love.
Alas, neither seems available – she herself is the only thing which is. There are more than enough men to
go to bed with – and each one she hopes, will fall in love with her and save her. She feels she has a great deal to offer. She opens her heart and her soul when she opens her legs; but alas, only the latter are of practical use, and men, she decides in the end – experience reinforcing Wanda’s training – are only interested in practical matters.
‘The awful thing is,’ she says to Helen, who drops by one day to visit, ‘if I was morally corrupt, if I was a calculating person, if I played men like fish on a line, if I had had an abortion instead of Byzantia, if I was cold, hard and unfriendly – then I would be pursued by men.’
‘To be pursued by men,’ says Helen, casting Scarlet down to depths from which it takes her years to emerge, ‘you have to be beautiful.’
Helen is both sorry for and irritated by Scarlet. Helen lines her love-nest with silks and downs, plucks the hairs from her legs one by one, learns poetry like a child, and entertains her lover. Y pays the rent, and never calls.
Scarlet, messing about with old saucepans on an ancient gas stove, serving coffee in cracked mugs, seems to Helen to have abandoned youth, hope and beauty. Scarlet, Helen thinks, can sink no lower. Little does Helen know.
Jocelyn is giving an engagement party. Scarlet is asked. Scarlet assumes she will be able to go because it is on a Sunday evening, which is the day Wanda holds her Divorcées Anonymous meetings. Thus Byzantia can be safely left at home. On Sunday evening she is disconcerted to see Wanda putting on the brooch which is her one concession to dressing up for an outing.
